Precious Versions of Personal Hell’s

Lifeblood of Poetry and Passion Good morning from San Diego. Will report there is some fog out my eighth floor window at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. The heatwave seems to be over. National Weather Service is expecting another record setting week ahead. Welcome to life between the heatwaves. My barber on Melrose in Hollywood expects […]

Slimeballing, Suckerpunching Misdirection Games

The Butt of a Bad Joke Jack Welsh coined the phrase “shareholder value.” Two pieces of the puzzle tilted in capitals favor from this four decade ago event. First, was an emphasis upon the share price. The second was the compensation packages for management. Washington was not an innocent bystander. Tax cuts, trade policy, regulation […]

Mental Rattlesnakes and Ego Implants

“I go see Keaton in a comedy and I end up in a shoot out with my immortality…”

Lord of the Styles

This moment’s style and fashion is so obvious. House of Cards has it, Veep deploys it, and Silicon Valley is based upon it. Lenny Bruce skewered the sacred by roasting it atop the fires of the profane hypocrisy’s he alone seemed capable of speaking about. And for each act taking one tack there […]

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow…

You say you want a revolution The long term fallout to the disaster known as the global financial crisis is playing out on the right sided spectrum of the political scene. Economic anxiety translates into a turbulent, unpredictable, heated voiced, violence prone mob rule. Let’s go first to a little nugget from Andrew Sullivan. (for […]

Voluptuous Economics and Stingy Sweethearts

MONDRAGON Corporation is a business-based socioeconomic initiative with deep roots in the Basque Country… Fosters participation and the involvement of people in the management, profits and ownership of their companies, developing a shared project which unites social, business and personal progress. From Mondragon’s website If the Best is Yet Come, Exactly What was All of […]

Market Testing Narrative Or How I Celebrated My Vegetative State of Mind

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data New York Times May 6, 2013 Front Page (Below the Fold) Time heals all things. Yesterday while flying back from Seattle I choked down this front pager from the NYT on the notion of using data before the making of a script into a […]

The Truth of the Thing

“I asked Norman Mailer which of the other art forms he thought being a novelist was closest to. “Acting,” he said. Under the Influence, Andrew O’Hagen. April 27, 2013 Financial Times Following the River, Guided by the Light WHAT WE USE Most of us are familiar with the list of elements that the novelist utilizes […]

When Comedy Goes for Help

Today I’ll harvest sage wisdom from two comic minds. One is a silent clown, the second a gypsy magician. The silent act has spent much of the past few decades doing cabaret inEuropewhen he wasn’t doing odd arena style opening work for major musical acts. The magician by contrast has played everything from children’s […]

Resisting Change

Things change whether we want them to or not. I recall that turning twenty-one could not come fast enough and that sixty is coming up too quick. What’s that about? Winter is too long, the weekend too short. Curiosities perhaps or a clue to something else going on. Giving our attention to change around […]