Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang. -- Philip K. Dick
PATRICK J. KIGER
I'm also a frequent blogger for the AARP website, where I write about subjects ranging from politics and pop culture to the backstories
of intriguing recently-dead people. In the latter capacity, my subjects have included Edsel designer Roy Brown, sitar
virtuoso Ravi Shankar, Etch-A-Sketch inventor Andre Cassagnes, George "Shadow" Morton (producer of the Shangri-La's "Leader
of the Pack"), enigmatic songwriting genius ("Along Comes Mary") Tandyn Almer, Marilyn Monroe paramour Hal Schaefer, and Willard
Conrow, who took the very cool photograph at left.
Most of his zillions of fans probably think of sci-fi visionary author Philip K. Dick as a trippy, amphetamine-fueled Berkeley hipster.
But the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and Man in the High Castle actually spent the last decade
of a member of a condominium association and shopping at Trader Joe's in uber-conservative Orange County, CA. Here's my article from Orange Coast magazine on the enigmatic PKD.
Coal companies' practice of mountaintop removal threatens to turn rural Kentucky into a wasteland. That's why environmental activists
are making the sites into an unlikely sort of tourist attraction. Read my article "Unnatural Wonders," from Mother Jones magazine.
In 1949, W. Somerset Maugham wrote an essay in which pondered whether Dostoevsky or El Greco was the greater artistic genius. I wonder
how he would react to a Rolling Stone cover proclaiming The Genius of Eminem. Read more meditations upon our contemporary culture's
grade inflation in "The Golden Age of Mediocrity," from the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
Mix a lonely candy heiress, a charming--albeit tacky-- lothario, a somewhat creepy butler and a stable of expensive race horses, and
what do you get? The mystery of the disappearance of Helen Brach. Read my investigative article "The Horse Lady Vanishes," from
GQ magazine.
READ MY ARTICLES
On that occasion, Messier had on a shrimp-colored open-necked shirt under his charcoal gray suit. But that affront to taste was just
one sign that yet another outsider had gone Hollywood.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell
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Journalist, author, blogger, web content producer, autodidact, fly on the wall, contrarian futurist, compulsive iconoclast, snarky
pop culture pontificator
If you need proof that Bank of America is hep, two of the bank's managers once serenaded a meeting with a cover of U2's tortured lost-love
lament "One," recast as an upbeat ode to merger integration and affinity-card branding. Read more bizarre tales of corporate rock in
my article for Workforce Management magazine.