THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

One of the joys of teaching for almost 19 years is that I've build up quite a wardrobe. But as I'm teaching more online classes, and as I'm getting older and fatter, there's just no need or possibility for some of the stuff I've accumulated, as I don't have the face time with students that I had a decade ago. So last night, I pulled out all my pants and sweaters and shirts and suits and stuff to make some "should-I-stay-or-should-I-go" piles. And while I didn't discard as much as I thought I might, there was still a sizable swell of clothing to be worn by me nevermore. The worst of it was coming to the understanding that squeezing into good-looking yet ill-fitting pants did no one any favors. And the worst of that was saying goodbye to some long-treasured items, such as the Todd Oldham glow-in-the-dark vinyl pants pictured above. I bought them on a Chicago trip in the late '90s, when I had a head of long and flowing hair as well as a stron...

When I am hip-deep in the History of Rock & Roll, I always say that the Seventies – specifically, around ’71 to ’76 – is my favorite period, for two major reasons. The first is the depth and expanse of creative expression in any number of subgenres, from country-rock to psychedelic funk to the beginning thrusts of disco, that surpassed nearly any other epoch you’d care to examine. The second is that the aforementioned creative expression, at many points, was just fucking weird. Like, “could only happen in that time” weird. Capes. Crocheted shorts. Yeti-like facial hair. Singer-songwriter suicide notes that received saturation airplay. Did I mention capes? So it makes perfect sense that, during this brief window of WTF, that two figures from a Sixties pop band would rebrand themselves, recalibrate their musical and artistic attack, and renew the askew in an otherwise earnest and anguished rock and roll landscape. Flo & Eddie are Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, originally...

For years, I joked about it in my Intro Psych classes. “In Trump’s America, anything is possible,” I said in my best impression of a gravelly voice of doom, and it nearly always got a few smatterings of cheap laughter, the currency of community college instructors everywhere. But the more I would run through the content, from discussions of intrapersonal intelligence to an examination of motivational needs such as the need for power, the validity of Trump the President started to, well, trump the validity of Trump the Reality TV Star or Trump the Ill-Suited Billionaire. Just last week, I told one of my night classes to get used to the words “President Donald Trump,” poorly straddling the expanse of my conscious denial of the possibility with a deeper evidence-based understanding of what was about to happen. And now, here we are. It’s really the uncertainty that gnaws. Not so much for the nearly 47% of Americans (shades of Mitt ’12) that didn’t vote at all, caught at that grim ...