Welcome to the year Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down replicants in the film Blade Runner, which was released in 1982. It is fun to compare a futurist vision to reality, once we get there and look back. Remember the Voight-Kampff test in the film, which identifies replicants as non-human because their empathy is off? […]
Where the hell is a semiotician when you need one? The self-appointed critics of late-stage capitalism? My family received the gift of axe-throwing at Christmas, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee it was satisfying. But what does it mean? Throwing axes for fun and profit was the invention of a Toronto bartender […]
If you hate New Year’s resolutions, blame the Babylonians. Allegedly, they are the ones who got us started on this whole season of self-reflection and renewal 4,000 years ago, although their resolutions took place in mid-March and focused on making promises to pagan gods, returning borrowed items to regular humans, and paying off debts. The […]
It was New Year’s Eve and not everyone wanted to play a board game. Not that the inevitable unpleasantness was the same every time we played. Things had evolved over the years, taken the shape of current relationships and power struggles within the immediate family. In the early days I equated board with bored—how many […]
At the close of 2018, I am almost finished reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a book of “autotheory” that defies conventions and genre and meditates on what it means to create family, love, and a life beyond heteronormative blueprints. On this Friday evening, as I read, I hear distant waves crashing into the surf, my sleeping […]
A state highway in the south, two hours before dawn, the children asleep. Our headlights side-eye the ghostly-ghastly trees. There is the danger of deer. Making lists, to stay awake: The 400 names for types of forests. This one, which crowds the road through logging country, is called The Survivors Rallied. The Big Thicket, though […]
While some look forward to the New Year to make resolutions, say good riddance to 2018, or to clink glasses full of bubbly while wearing something sleek or sequined, I am looking forward to 2019 because a slew of landmark films, literature, songbooks, and art will enter the public domain. Such classic media will be […]
Here it sits, the haggis, like some offal thing washed up from a distant land. Which it is, of course—a mix of chopped lamb’s liver, beef, oatmeal, suet, onion, bread crumbs, buttermilk, salt, pepper, and ground cloves, in a “beef or fibrous casing,” shipped frozen from the shores of south Florida. My in-laws, who immigrated […]
It is not a newsflash that Twitter, and the world more generally, can be a toxic place for women, especially women of color. Yet, when Amnesty International released its Troll Patrol Report on Tuesday, December 18, what many women already knew was confirmed by the extensive year-long study the human rights organization conducted in partnership […]
What would make up for 35 years of dentists and mechanics chortling over my last name? I want to be fair and rational about this, so I suggest we just dig up John Hughes and use his thigh bone to beat out the tempo to the song for National Lampoon’s Vacation on his skull. Hughes, […]