“Toca toca toca… Goooooooal!” “Gee Bob I think you’re getting the swing of it!” Bruce Chatwin, in Songlines, describes a theory held by some anthropologists that Aboriginal songs sung in the Australian outback— and which, for their sacred cultural role, few westerners have been privileged enough to hear—are a map. A set of directions for day-long Walkabouts that preserve historically…

“Thus, as Adam Smith argued in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, the individual must phrase his own concerns and feelings and interests in such a way as to make these maximally usable by the others as a source of appropriate involvement; and this major obligation of the individual qua interactant is balanced by his right to expect that others…

The other night at a meet and greet of writers, over wine, cheese, and a post-institutional marching (sic) band, I was comparing travel notes with a woman about Eastern Europe before the change. She told me how her hosts in East Germany (a country at the time) had procured each of the tiles on the walls of their one bathroom…

Last night watching the world cup match between England and Nigeria, we wondered about how it was that suspense persists even in slow motion replays. The play is shown from different angles and each and every time it almost seems as if it could come out differently this time…. When we’re presented with movement, we take it in as an…

What does a brand brand? A product, a service? Or an expectation—a guarantee perhaps? Brands allow us to expect from the future more of what we experienced in the past. They represent continuity and consistency over time. That’s why we trust them. Brands help us to filter out the signal from the cacophony of noise that clamors for our attention.…

Flipping through photos Have you ever noticed as you’re flipping through photos that there are those people who seem to produce the most consistent face every time? a beaming smile, a grin, perhaps a face made over and over again? Some of these people are photogenic. They earn that accolade from their talent for producing consistent results when captured on…

“Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.” Jean Baudrillard

This is a test, nothing more, nothing less.

The Shoreline Amphitheater billoboard by the freeway is advertising this upcoming show: Poison/Cinderella. I wonder if opening bands are chosen for the fit of their names.