A recent study maintains that empathy has declined in young Americans over the last thirty years. My own unscientific observations tell me that us Americans as a whole don't seem to give a damn about our fellow citizens as much as we used to. Iraq and Afghanistan --...

"Disgusting!" said my father.

"Revolting!" seconded my mother.

"Tuli!" explained I.

I was 12-years old and it was the beginning of 1967's Summer of Love. When you're born strange and the largest mass bohemian movement in human history invites itself into your consciousness, you set a place for it at...

Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again. Was he right?

One of the quiet gems of 2009 was an album originally produced by Bob Dylan in 1973. Other than his own work under the pseudonymous Jack Frost, it's the only album Dylan ever produced. It's not,...

Jim Dickinson is a musician's musician, one of the well-kept secrets of rock 'n' roll. His chair has swiveled from producer to sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Ry Cooder, and the Rolling Stones, Big Star, the Replacements, and Mudhoney. Inside the ubiquitous Memphis maverick lives a honky-tonk lounge pianist...

Remember Peter Lemongello, Zamfir, Boxcar Willie, Slim Whitman? They were all musical artists who were known in the 1970s and '80s for selling their albums on late-night television. (Willie Nelson was briefly a member of that club at the behest of the Internal Revenue Service.) Will Dailey is a...

My favorite singer of 2008 has been dead for almost 16 years, yet "new" recordings by her continue to be released. For the second year running, a new Karen Dalton record is my choice for The Album of the Year.

I've never much believed in the artificial man-made time...

Ed Sanders' language advances in a direction of production which probably isn't even guessed at...That is, it takes the earth to make a feather fall.

- Charles Olson, 1964

They'd privatize your assholes if they could get away with it!

- Ed Sanders, 2007

There is a giant in...

When is film art? The question might be better phrased as "When is ANYTHING art"? But I've specifically pondered this film-as-art quandary. It's kept me up at nights, leaving me wide awake at daybreak, munching Xanax and counting sheep, masturbating furiously, draining sour mash whiskey bottles, red-eyed and...

John Stewart -- singer, songwriter, guitarist, artist, husband, father, grandfather, Californian, American -- was scheduled to perform at McCabe's in Santa Monica on Saturday, February 2. He missed the gig, but he had a good excuse. Stewart suffered a sudden stroke at the age of 68 and died on January...

War is a four-letter word with only three letters. The inability of the human race to stop waging this obscenity can't be blamed on artists. If all humans were artists, at worst we'd endure mindless competition, catty egotists, pretentious performance and overpriced chachkies. Yes, Hitler dabbled in watercolors and was...

I'm dying.

After consulting numerous websites, I've self-diagnosed myself with the eleventeenth variety of terminal cancer that's afflicted me ever since I could first Google disease in 1999. I don't know how long I've got, so if this column seems rushed, it's because I'm typing as fast as I...

"This film is dedicated to Hope."

Thus reads the opening epigraph in Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Strange Culture that opens the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this Friday, June 15th in New York. It's a lovely sentiment for our era of unremitting pessimism. When one realizes that Hope...

Before the laughter, there's a moment after a joke has been told when the listener understands or "gets" the joke. It's an instant but a glorious one. It has the same effect on brain chemistry as being in love. Liberating. Cerebral and physical. A supreme and sublime rush.

A handful...

For Stew Albert 1939-2006

We've had a year to ask:
"What do we do without Stew?"
When the shit hit the fan
He knew what to do

Talmudic scholar and acidhead Miss Manners
Gentle Brooklyn baritone searching for bottom line truth
...

A cell of Huffington Post bloggers are reportedly sharing a stage this Friday, March 16th with two Islamic and two white supremacist terrorists, an anonymous Department of Homeland Security spokesperson alleged today.

The bloggers - whose credits range from Talladega Nights to the New Yorker magazine to The Simpsons...

A week has passed since Annie Coulter uttered her latest cluster bomb of a soundbite. Like cluster bombs, a hollow shell drops from Annie's drawn, wrinkled mouth and thousands of bomblets explode in the liberal media in response.

As a veteran teaser, I recognize an ancient shtick when I...

I'm sitting in an epic traffic jam on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood on early evening October 31st, 2006 as George W. Bush staggers in front of my car, accompanied by Harry Potter and Paris Hilton. I slam on my brakes to keep from mowing them down, as tempting...

For thirty years, the word 'hippie' has evoked derision and bad jokes. Punk rockers cynically conflated hippies with coke-snorting record executives or mindless flower children. On the other side of the divide but equally clueless, the Right Wing blamed hippies for the demise of a morally perfect America that never...

Ever since Jim Morrison cancelled his subscription to the resurrection in 1971, the Lizard King phenom has raged on. If you saw the Doors live, then you - like the little girls in "Back Door Man" - understand. Almost 14-years old on January 24th, 1969, I saw the Doors perform...

Singer/songwriter/artist Daniel Johnston is somewhere between two and three hundred pounds. A mop of gray hair crowns his face. Like many mentally ill people, his eyes reflexively veer away when one looks at him. He alternates between a cigarette and a straw, sucking on the gas station speedball of Kool...