1.22.2010 — I know I'm a sucker for contrast: show me the bleakest depths of the dark night of the soul, and then a glimmer of renewal seems twice as profound. If this is a trick, Port of Call New Orleans does it so well I don't mind. 

1.9.2010 — Whatever city you live in, your experience depends entirely on the neighborhood.

1.9.2010 — The crowning irony of "Avatar": as lavish a corporate-funded production as you can imagine, it nonetheless has an anti-corporate sentiment.

1.8.2010 — Took some pics over the holidays with this new iPhone app, "Hipstamatic" that imitates classic plastic film cameras. I like the results.

Pigeons

11.25.2009 — The maligned urban vertebrate known for its smoke-gray feathers and runny white spoor. The habitue of telephone wires. The bird who no one loves enough to cage.

10.25.2009 — Sparrows in the pooled water by the storm wall. Graffiti on the storm wall, the long curved smooth concrete.

Big Basin

9.29.2009 — There's a green empire just 90 minutes drive down the peninsula from San Francisco, in the Santa Cruz mountains. Big Basin is a retreat into the archaic woods.

9.18.2009 — Tonight I will be reading at the Peninsula Literary Series. I'll be releasing a new chapbook, called Satellite Memories.

8.15.2009 — At the reading, Vollmann read an excerpt from the book detailing a dangerous rafting trip down a toxic river on the border, one which migrants have used for crossings and one which many have died in.

8.11.2009 — Listen to this man: he is alive. Got this audio snippet while checking out Venice Beach, where I was last weekend.

7.19.2009 — West's portrayal of LA as a spiritually corrupt wasteland, a place where Western culture has come to die and the frontier spirit of America has reached an endpoint where all it can consume is itself, seems to be a prototype for nearly every portrayal of LA that I can recall.

5.31.2009 — Recently a book came out called "Wired for War" by Pete Singer. I saw Singer on the Daily Show and heard him on NPR and the Commonwealth Club. He's trying to tell the world about the quiet revolution in warfare that has happened during the Iraq War. These aren't the self-directed robots of sci-fi, but remote-controlled robots whose pilots are in some computer room thousands of miles from the site of the conflict. In Las Vegas a few months ago, I turned on the TV and saw on the local station that there was a bomb threat at the Folsom Street Experience. A robot came to scout the area and clear it. I recalled I'd seen bomb-defusing robots before, in a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.