By joshuacitrak, on February 23rd, 2010 |  i love frequent Atlantic contributor Sandra Tsing Loh. She has the uncanny ability to nail, succinctly, the slices of the pie that make up our culture. This is from her “Classed Dismissed” piece:
It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a “hard, gemlike flame,” which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—has become commodified. Fairly harmless is the $4 venti soy latte purchased amid Starbucks’s track lighting, Nina Simone crooning, and a story about Costa Rican beans that have sailed around the world just to see YOU! It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression. In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do. It’s why so many bohemians flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland, where left-leaning citizens pride themselves on their uniform, monotonously progressive culture—the Zipcars, the organic gardens, the funky graphic-novel stores, and the thriving alternative-music scene. (In the meantime, I’ve also noticed that Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white.)
By joshuacitrak, on February 18th, 2010 | We would hike up Telegraph Hill all the way to Coit Tower. We’d go past the parking lot to where you see the sweep of the Bay laid out and people clogging up the panorama posing for pictures.
We’d climb over the concrete barrier that kept the tourists from falling off the cliff while they posed, slide down through the succulents and scrub and pine tree roots there to keep the dirt from eroding away scoot down on our butts right to the edge of the cliff. There was a wire fence there, stretched and loose and then the city just dropped off two hundred feet. Once down there we’d smoke and share a tall beer and look out over the Bay at all that was ours. Tourists and their languages and stupid questions and ugly clothes stayed safe and boring up above us. All they did was show up where the icon on their colorful, cartoony map said to, not knowing why, but making sure to take plenty of photos should they figure it out some day before they die.
When we were done we’d toss the beer can over the edge of the cliff and strain to hear it hit so far below.
By joshuacitrak, on February 3rd, 2010 | Right now I’m reading a double economic doozy, Raj Patel’s “The Value of Nothing” and David Walker’s “Comeback America.” For all our pomp, wealth and ego we’ve allowed our leaders to guide us into an economic minefield…and they don’t have a map or the brains to get us out.
The economy that’s been cultivated by the financial wizards isn’t one of long-term sustainability.
1. It’s exhausting the common American Consumer on the “hedonistic treadmill”
2. Growth is measured purely by GDP and not by the incomes of working people.
We need to reassess real value to our commodities and stop allowing elected officials to enable the folks who’s best interest is served by addictive, unquestioned, over-consumption to dictate market trends and by proxy, our lives.
By joshuacitrak, on January 30th, 2010 | Hit the jump to hear me and Teresa K. Miller on the Deviant Ninja show this morning.
It was my first live interview and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Teresa wasn’t feeling well, so if it sounds like I’m dominating the conversation, it’s because every time a question went out, she’d give me a look like, “please answer that while I cough.” The computer or something was down at the station — we were expecting a music break or two in the interview — so sometimes you hear me or Teresa filling up dead air while in the background Deviant Ninja is hammering away at the keyboard far from her mic. We also wandered through a bunch of topics — some planned, others not — including whether or not it is a faux pas to use the word “retard” in describing people who don’t spay or neuter their pets.
By joshuacitrak, on January 25th, 2010 | This Saturaday (12/30) @9AM you can hear Teresa Miller and myself on 87.9 FM here in the city (Pirate Cat Radio)
we’ll rep the Grotto, slouch and whatever else comes to our early morning hangover clouded minds.
By joshuacitrak, on January 20th, 2010 | Hit the jump to see the good doctor, Raj Patel author of two best selling, hard hitting, socially conscious books, “Stuffed and Starved” and “The Value of Nothing” interviewed on the Report.
By joshuacitrak, on December 21st, 2009 | Quiet Lightning is a monthly submission-based reading series here in the City. QL’s next reading is on January 25th and they’re now taking submissions for it.
5-8 minutes. What are you waiting for?
By admin, on December 15th, 2009 | I keep on waiting for it to happen. For inspiration to hit. I walk around during the day and think how great it’s going to be when I make it. When everything I type is pure gold and the agents and marketers and editors fall over themselves to get to me. It’s going to be so awesome to be a best seller and say to people, ha! I told you!
Inspiration is going to come like Jesus and it’ll solve everything.
I don’t know what kind of book it will be. But when inspiration hits, I’m open to anything. Crime fiction. Poetry. Memoir. What does it matter? It’ll be brilliant because it was inspired by inspiration. It’ll cross boundaries and borders and genres.
I’m not really worried that I haven’t written much up to this point. I haven’t had the inspiration to, duh. Plus, you can’t really practice for it. That’s the awesome thing about inspiration; it does all that kind of stuff for you. That’s how it works.
So for now, I wait. What else can I do? Until inspiration hits, I’ll just continue thinking about how great it’ll be when it does.
By joshuacitrak, on December 11th, 2009 | The beat cop leans down to the driver’s side window of the squad car. The noise coming off of Market Street is making it hard to hear what the two in the black and white are saying.
“What’s that again?” the beat cop asks, putting an elbow on the door and sticking his head in.
Nothing. They’re saying nothing. The one in the passenger seat just has a mouthful of something from a yellow wax wrapper.
The roller is parked the wrong way up the street. Traffic slows to curl around the ass end of the car. Staccato calls come through the radio. The cop in the driver’s seat looks up from his clipboard, turns it down. The passenger nods and sidearms the empty wrapper out the window, into the street.
A wrapper. A gust of wind catches it and it’s gone until it gets caught under the tread of the Number Seven bus headed uptown. A wrapper. Just another piece of garbage on the street. Like the plastic bags, cigarette butts, bus transfers, beer cans that litter the city. All they need is the wind blowing towards the Bay to come alive and get gone. The garbage. A lot like the people down here. People who drift along with the wind from Eddy to Sixth to Market to wherever it dies down or swirls and collects in the urine stained juts of buildings.
And then he comes along.
The beat cop straightens up, puts his hands in his jacket. The left side of his face tingles from the hot air blasting out of the vents in the squad car. He watches a cleaning crew from the peep club halfway up the block dump their mop water into the gutter. The chemical musk of pine cleaner hitches onto the cold breeze and hooks his nose a few seconds later. It’s been forever since he could clean his own toilet without a degenerate scene flashing through his mind: a dark booth, some faceless guy in mid jerk while a glittered ass sways to a beat.
Now they’re saying something.
The beat cop looks down at them through the grimy windshield. They’re pointing. Then he remembers the guy he’d left propped up on the fire hydrant. Just a piece of humanity pooling in the doorway of the art supply store. The three of them watch this guy’s head dip, his body sags like an accordion and just kind of slides off the hydrant in slow motion, folding himself shut neatly on the sidewalk. This guy doesn’t even wake up.
“You gonna cuff him or what?” the cop in the passenger seat asks.
“We ain’t takin’ him nowhere ‘til he is,” the driver says. “Junkie or no.”
The beat cop doesn’t say anything, just feels the wind swirl. What’s the sense in handcuffing him when he’s just going to blow away down the street with the rest of the trash?
By joshuacitrak, on November 9th, 2009 | found this little tid-bit on Keith Peters blog. basically it breaks down how to convert your Kindle purchased ebooks to other open source file extensions which would allow your book to be viewed on non-Kindle readers, such as the iPhone or your laptop.
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