1) On the joys of traveling in the United States To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the climate and geography change with every state line. These are indeed things that cannot be learned from…
From the outset, the “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast was meant to give me the occasional pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore my other interests. My five favorite music-themed Deviate episodes are outlined below. Though later seasons of my podcast have episodes riffing on bands like Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Iron…
An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums.
In light of the (now possibly passé) “OK Boomer” meme bouncing around the internet in recent weeks, I’ve seen a number of social-media references to a 2017 Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope,” which contained this startlingly relevant (for me, at least) piece of cover art containing pop-culture…
Of all the times I’ve been name-checked in the Washington Post, the most counterintuitive occasion came last month, when it appeared in an obituary for Bushwick Bill, the one-eyed, 3’8″ gangsta-rapper most notable for his work with the Geto Boys. Specifically, the obit alluded to my 2016 book The Geto Boys, which was part of…
Cannery Row has been one of my favorite books ever since I first read it as a teenager. John Steinbeck’s gentle depiction of Depression-era ne’er-do-wells in Monterey, California doesn’t typically appear on lists of great American novels (and Steinbeck himself is better known for works like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of…
One of the writing projects I’ve been working on this winter is Last Nine, a coming-of-age screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for more than a decade now. Built around a single incident I remember from my high school Spanish class when I was 17 years old, Last Nine tells the story of a teenager…
Exactly twenty years ago I was entering my fourth month of living as an expatriate English teacher in Pusan (a.k.a. Busan) South Korea. This was my first experience of living in another country, and those first few months were difficult — partly because of culture shock, partly because of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-life mid-twenties crisis, and partly because…
A 2021 podcast-interview episode about this essay is online here. Twenty-five years ago my friend Liesl made me an audiocassette mixtape called Rondo Rolf. I haven’t owned a functioning tape player for more than a decade, yet I can’t bring myself to throw Rondo Rolf out, since that would be akin to, say, burning a treasured scrapbook…
For the past 25 years I’ve regarded July of 1991 as being significant for two reasons. First, it was the month I chopped off the “mullet” hairstyle I’d been wearing since 1986 and began to grow out what might be termed “grunge hair.” And, just as significantly, it was the month I attended the first Lollapalooza festival when…
Cultural criticism: Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single “Gangster of Love.” The racial implications weren’t so simple.
