I lived in a studio on the Upper East Side, a couple of blocks off the river. I put my pay from my part-time secretary job into envelopes for the rent, food, utilities, student loans, dog food. Anything left over I used to buy beer and cigarettes. I played my saxophone on the streets to […]
Her name was Arline. She was my father’s mother. She died in 1949 when my father was 16. We knew very little about her growing up. In the early 1980’s, after my grandfather died, a letter arrived at the house from my father’s aunt Marie who was six years younger than her sister. My parents were […]
A Japanese poet once wrote that there is no utility in metaphor, that in the modern world the only valuable expression is of words that are specific to one thing. This is language as the table of existential elements: when used precisely, words make an objective reality that we can use to breach the gaps between […]
via columnfivemedia.com A gross simplification, I know. But look at this infographic showing the shift in consumer spending over the past 100 years. We used to spend most of our money on food. We spent almost nothing on transportation. Today, our two biggest expenses are transportation and housing. Food, which has moved from a farming-model to […]
“At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all purposes for which they keep themselves alive — social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed consciousness itself — becomes void, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which in late capitalism is taking […]
Try to describe something that you have witnessed. Supply only spare details and be brief. Try to tell an experience that caught you in an instance, that was outside of the normal flow of a day because of some quality that was especially human. What does it mean, to try to call something “human?” You […]