Read the words. Listen to the words. Watch them sung. Then ask yourself what have — or did — we become? Ask why nearly every major news organization can’t bring itself to equate waterboarding with “torture” when, in fact, the United States executed World War II enemies for the same practice? Maybe Jonathan Mann’s song, […]
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I can find just about anything at my neighborhood Safeway grocery. That was my reaction while perusing its modest books section for the first time. Romance novels pack the shelves, though some titles hawk a niche form of lust. Romance novels apparently have sub-genres, including what I cynically classify as the rich-dominating-studs-knock-me-up category. Take these […]
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Reading about this descent into sexting hell reminds of simpler times. Never thought I’d get nostalgic for mooning, the worst offense involving nakedness from my school days. One of my younger brothers was suspended for a week from junior high for flashing his bare butt at a girl during phys ed class. He claimed she […]
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Cracked Window celebrated its one-year anniversary today without fanfare. That’s because I stayed away from the keyboard and enjoyed the outdoors on a beautiful spring day in Portland. It was my first nothing-but-shorts-and-tee-shirt day of 2009. Random projects, including installing two trellises on the fence two years after I bought them, were too much to […]
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In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands.
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Never has apocalypse looked so beautiful. That was my first thought today upon seeing four photographs from a 1970 French nuclear test. Then I thought of my childhood and pilot friend, whose Army adventures included flying helicopters to a radiated and cratered South Pacific atoll to help repair what an atomic bomb had wrought. Then […]
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Last night during a concert of earnest and ethereal harmonies, I struggled to keep another sound at bay. Pressed against the stage at the Crystal Ballroom, five feet from Fleet Foxes‘ lead singer Robin Pecknold and bathed in his melodic voice, I occasionally heard in my head not him but the quavering wail of a […]
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When I say “album,” some young people look as if I’ve uttered a foreign word. Thus this headline touting the top 25 theme or concept albums caught my eye. Cohesiveness in these works is lost in today’s random-shuffle world. My favorite (not that I’ve heard them all) is Sufjan Stevens‘ Illinoise. His “John Wayne Gacey, […]
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I won’t chide myself anymore for my swearing, which in my fifties has become more profane and repetitive when I’m alone and less frequent when around others. That’s because an article in a scientific journal describes profanity as ubiquitous and a “natural part of speech development.” Guess I’m off the hook.
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I’ve entered a different world. Not the present one that’s changed so much, seemingly overnight. No, it’s one of many that famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick created. Although others have long extolled him to me, I haven’t ventured into Dick’s genre for years. (I’m not counting science- fiction movies, including some based on his […]
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Growing up on a lake in Florida in the 1960s, I got to know the family next door. It took awhile, maybe because a vacant lot studded with orange trees separated our houses. Three generations under the same roof, they mainly spoke Italian, making them exotic curiosities.
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