When I heard about Friday's layoffs at the legendary, historic, iconic alt weekly The Village Voice, I Googled "Village Voice + layoffs." It took hours to wade through the links to the myriad past layoffs, firings and resignations at the...

Dr. Hedda Bolgar, an extraordinary psychoanalyst, scholar, teacher, supervisor, lecturer, speaker, author and social justice activist, died peacefully Monday at her Brentwood home.

She was 103. She saw her final patient just a few weeks ago.

Over the course of an 80-year career, Hedda was instrumental in the founding and...

An old farmer's only horse runs away. His neighbors tell him they're sorry he's suffered "such bad luck." "We'll see," the farmer replies. The next day the horse returns -- along with three wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors say. "We'll see," the old man says. The following day, the...

When you reach a certain age and no longer have a job where large numbers of people are incentivized to laugh at your jokes, moments arise when you wonder what you are doing on this planet.
Your very being may even come into question.

Say you've finally...

Twenty years ago, the UK boasted a thriving record-store culture, with over 2200 indie shops and as many as three on a single block in a single small village.

The sad but thoroughly enjoyable documentary Last Shop Standing, directed by Pip Piper and produced and narrated by indie...

My next-door neighbor flagged me down recently to enthuse that the California State Song brought back memories of childhood hikes in the Alps.

I wondered what in the world she was talking about.

Turns out the official Golden State tune isn't the jaunty Al Jolson vehicle "California, Here I...

Listening to him today, even seeing him on YouTube may not be enough to show younger people how intimidating Howlin' Wolf seemed 40 years ago. At six and a half feet tall, he was a colossus of a bluesman, a frighteningly intense force of nature delivering such tales...

The New York Times reported last week that Federal agents arrested SAC honcho/"stock-trading wizard" Michael Steinberg for insider trading and securities fraud. (SAC is the multi-billion dollar hedge fund owned by Steinberg's multi-billionaire mentor Steven A. Cohen.) The story of how Steinberg ended up trading in his cuff...

The abrupt closing last week of the 47-year-old Boston Phoenix was a shock to the alternative weekly ecosystem. It also underscored the divide between struggling big city papers and more viable smaller-market ones.

The Phoenix has for decades been one of the best and most successful alt-weeklies in the county,...

Andrew Oldham's recently-released book Stone Free is, as mentioned here, more a rumination on the art of the hustle than a traditional memoir.

In his earlier volumes Stoned and 2Stoned, the former Stones manager/producer provided a narrative of a career that began a half-century ago when a clueless...

Stone Free, the third volume of Andrew Oldham's autobiographical trilogy (after Stoned and 2Stoned), is a meditation on the art of the hustle, from the man who managed the Rolling Stones and produced their records from 1963-67. Oldham knows whereof he speaks -- he's hustled and/or been hustled...

Accusations that one of the most powerful American Zen Buddhist figures of the past half-century has sexually harassed, groped and bullied hundreds of female students have unleashed outrage in the Buddhist community.

The allegations against 105-year-old Joshu Sasaki Roshi -- contained in an investigative report...

In 1972, I was the singles reviewer for the music trade Record World. It was an awesome job, but someone had to do it.

There were lots of mediocre records to plow through, but what a thrill it was when a clear-cut hit arrived -- like Carly Simon's "You're So...

The NRA enemies list posted here has become a hot media topic as the organization and its executive director Wayne LaPierre leap from self-parody into the realm of the truly demented. The right-wing Murdoch-owned New York Post called LaPierre a "loon" on its front page after...

How can John McCain keep talking his "straight talk" with a straight face?

With Democrats and the media slobbering over the Arizona Senator's sudden menschiness on immigration reform, it's worth revisiting his record-breaking one millionth appearance on a Sunday talk show. In the aftermath of the...

It's been a rough week for self-appointed heroes and the hero-worshippers who love -- or loved -- them.

The clay-footedness began with cycling legend Lance Armstrong's Oprah-orchestrated mea minima culpa, continued with details about celluloid hero Tom Cruise's role in the creepy Church of Scientology (courtesy of Lawrence...

Two days before Christmas and 15 days before Elvis Presley's 78th birthday, the wonderful Wendy Block and I were married by an Elvis impersonator who also moonlights as Santa Claus. (Photos by the estimable Sashi, Wendy's daughter.)

Nope, we didn't elope to the Elvis Wedding Chapel in Vegas....

For this agnostic lapsed vegetarian, the occasional steak dinner is a medium-rare treat, a heavenly pleasure with an aftertaste of remorse about contributing to the slaughter of an animal, even one that's been grass-fed and pampered in a way that would warm the hearts of Portland's most persnickety...

New Year's resolutions are a bitch.

You know you should eat more veggies, exercise regularly and do your bit to reduce suffering in the world. You want to learn Spanish (finally), take that oft-postponed Alaskan cruise and work through your co-dependency issues with Facebook. You're convinced that meditation will...

At holiday dinners, my uncle Marty would extricate himself from a linguistic malapropism with a meta-linguistic malapropism. Sensing he'd made an error but not quite sure what it was, he'd tack a postscript to his story by saying, "Quote me if I'm wrong."

Coming from an undereducated man, this...