I’m slowly flipping through Tim Ferris’s Tools of Titans and a couple of academic books, so I think it’s time for my annual tally: Books read in 2016: 156 Comics and graphic novels included in reading total: 30 Books of poetry included in reading total: 2 Books reread included in reading total: 2 Academic & […]
I’m currently halfway through Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void and not likely to finish it before 2015 is over. For the 7th year in a row, here’s my breakdown of books read over the past year: Books read in 2015: 162 Comics and graphic novels included in reading total: 28 Books of poetry included […]
I’m loving one of the recent 33 1/3 books (the 100th volume?!) focusing on Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. I distinctly remember buying the album just as I began flirting with my own sense of musical interest. My friend down the street would regularly play the record when we were hanging out, while a separate group would […]
I Last night Ally and I made the trek to Boulder to see the Brad Mehldau trio perform. I’d seen Mehldau a couple of times back in LA (he’s even released an album titled after my favorite venue). I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that the show was Mehldau performing as part of a […]
I was sitting on the deck of a pirate ship in a non-descript office building in San Francisco celebrating the nuptials of my close friends from earlier in the day when a voice next to me said, “I heard you like Kanye West.” I knew it was bait. And I took it. An hour later […]
My article, “Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy: Kanye West and the Lessons of Participatory Culture,” is now available in the most recent issue of Radical Teacher. It can be read here. Here’s an abstract: This article builds off of the author’s classroom experience as a high school teacher in South Central Los Angeles and looks at […]
Over the weekend I watch the extended music-video-quasi-art-thing Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. I would argue it’s one of those three nouns: a performance. And while I think Jay Z has been making strong efforts at pushing himself and the hip-hop genre into loftier domains, I think Picasso Baby is representative of what’s wrong […]
I’ve been struggling trying to figure out how to talk about Pussy Riot with my fellow educators. Even that sentence sends a bristle down my spine – how many people have already stopped reading because of the name? And isn’t that the point of naming a band something like Pussy Riot or Fucked Up or […]
It started innocently enough. It started like this: Scrounging around the hipster fodder of Pitchfork, I read about and streamed a new track by an unknown singer. Intrigued, I did a quick Google search. I read an article that described the outsider artist that only left me with more questions. I picked up my phone […]
Over the past week, along with an abundance of holiday shopping, I purchased the updated anthology of Underworld’s selected hits and rarities. It was with nostalgia that the opening arpeggiated notes of “Rez” kicked in that I remembered the way the band seeped into my consciousness. It was the Golden Age of Napster and it […]