Journalist, author, blogger, web content producer, autodidact, fly on the wall, contrarian futurist, compulsive iconoclast, snarky
pop culture pontificator
Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang. -- Philip K. Dick
Buy OOPS (Co-authored by Martin J. Smith)
I also blog about pop culture subjects ranging from
Clint Eastwood's movies and Stieg Larsson's Millenium trillogy
to my intense aversion to Led Zep's "Stairway to Heaven" for SecondAct.com, a new website about midlife reinvention.
You may not recognize me, though. My editor insisted on using an old picture of me with a ponytail, because I'm smiling in it.
Here's my piece on conspiracy theories throughout American history, from the colonists who thought King George III might be the Antichrist
to the Truthers and Birthers, from the National Geographic Channel website. Here also is another piece I did on
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 Orange Coast magazine story
on the ever 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..
You'd never realize it now, but back in the day, I was a crime reporter, covering high-profile murder cases.
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 article "The Horse Lady Vanishes," from GQ magazine.
If you need proof that B of A 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 about the puzzling
phenomena of corporate rock in my article
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. --an excerpt from my article "Chew, Spit,
Repeat," from the Los Angeles Times Magazine
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell
