Since this series, Toxic by Vice Magazine’s Thomas Morton, has made it all the way to CNN, and I can’t get the original embed to work here, I’ll post the CNN version with links to VBS.tv’s part two and three. Even though this was first published about a month ago,… Read full post »

 

 News sources are reporting

a verdict in the Mehserle trial has been reached

and will be announced at 4:00 pm today.

 

No changes or disruptions to BART and other forms of

public transportation

have been announced and it is not… Read full post »

 

 

you don’t want a friend

at your side at ball games

cheering for the losing team

        no matter who they are.

you want someone to wear

your jersey, sing your

songs and clap at the same moment… Read full post »

 

 

_{Attorney for the plaintiffs, Mr. Boies speaks to someone outside the courtroom on June 16, 2010.(photo by doloresflores_d)}

 

On June 16 Wendi and I are able to sit in the first overflow room primarily due to strawberries. The benches of onlookers have already been fille… Read full post »

 

 

I was shot at once.

In the 1990’s I taught English at a Korean University, and during their winter break I took a three-month trip to Southeast Asia. In Cambodia I observed people walking through the markets with AK-47 assault rifles and… Read full post »

 

Favorite word – jouissance.

Least favorite word – crusader. (considering some of the medieval crusaders were cannibals, for example.)

Turn Ons – stars on a clear summer night, alpine flowers, someone playing guitar in a foreign country on new year’s eve, notes on a p… Read full post »

 

 

 

 Yesterday my friend Wendi was speaking about the way primitive cultures used to have ceremonies where they danced, inhaled from pipes, and found ways to take the edge off of ordinary community life. And right around the corner we ran into the Howard (How Weird!) Str… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

 I come from a land of tragedy called Afghanistan. —Malalai Joya

The truth is like the sun: when it comes up nobody can block it out or hide it.

—Afghan proverb

 

 

Imagine yourself twenty-five, female, the youngest member… Read full post »

 

 

I thought I would never see my children again except through thick glass.

--Daniel Ellsberg

 

I wasn’t expecting, when I went to an early screening of the new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America, to see a white… Read full post »

 

 

I can't even paraphrase this.  It’s that good. 

 

 

Note: I'm posting a link here to Malusinka’s article because, as someone who spent considerable time living in Haiti, she also has some very interesting things to say about the sit… Read full post »

If Katie Couric asked me,“what do you read?” [on opensalon] I might be tempted to stumble, and say defensively, “all of them.” Although it would not be (quite) true.

I wasn’t going to make a list of “favorites” for the year because I knew I couldn’t inc… Read full post »

 

   _{(Credit to www.armscontrolcenter.org)}

 

 

 “Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

--Haruki Murakami

 

 Two years ago next month I started writing letters on salon, which evolved, a… Read full post »

 

In October, 2007, I moved to San Francisco and discovered, in my neighborhood, a local literary festival called Litquake.  The event I stumbled on was the litcrawl where, in over two dozen venues along Valencia, Guerrero in the mission, poets, memoirists, playwrig/… Read full post »

 

 

 

I found the above song on YouTube, a song written by Joe Hill for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. I remember reading that Hillary Clinton when she was feeling frustrated and stunted by her role as first lady in the 1990’s would have conversations with… Read full post »

 

  

you start small

chipping away at civic pride

cutting into budgets to schools, to children and teachers;

erecting gaudy monuments to fire fighters who

died September 11

(but forgetting to insure the ones who showed up that day to help

but weren’t offici… Read full post »

(or Obama Remark on Black Scholar’s Arrest Angers Cops)

 

cops were mad when one of their own

a good guy in blue who took the mad professor

down

for yelling when they wanted to

arrest him for breaking into his

own home

and the man who was… Read full post »

July sixth, my birthday, I share with Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and with George W. Bush.

I mention this because on April 16^th of this year, I met the bodhisattva, Josie Ortez, also known as Sepha or dakinidancer. Over drinks I told her that she had been one… Read full post »

 

 

At 13 I became a lesbian. Not by experience or lifestyle, but by reputation.

To give a little background, as a child I tried nearly every kind of school that we could find. My religious parents wanted their kids to go to private, religious schools although… Read full post »

 

In 1997 I visited Burma (now Myanmar) as a backpacker. I had three weeks to travel from Rangoon (now Yangon) to Mandalay and further north. I traveled there because of friend of mine recommended it and he drew me a somewhat off the beaten track map of where to… Read full post »

 

          I learned from my great aunt JoAnn that despite what girls are told, being good and beautiful is not what it takes to win you a spot as the most loved.

Well into her seventies, my great aunt could become teary eyed and bitter over… Read full post »

1. I once lived in a brothel for ten weeks.

 

2. My grandmother once checked herself into a hospital carrying a grocery bag full of clothing. She told the admitting nurse that she was homeless because she hoped to receive free medical treatment.

 

3. My… Read full post »

 

 

I know I’m running a little late on Dorinda’s open call for Open Salon interviews, but I chose to interview William Morley after reading his recent post about how after a difficult breakup, his Facebook status updates became his chief mode of creativity while living and teac/… Read full post »

*spoiler alert*

Every year filmmakers save occasionally their best, but more frequently their most pretentious, most expensive, and occasionally their most tone-deaf films just in time to gather an armload of awards, and this year is no different. But I’m going to have to vote for The Reader as… Read full post »

 

 

 

Her socks didn’t match.

You could tell because she was wearing a skirt; each calf was a different shade of green. And she wasn’t all clean. Not in that punkish way. She didn’t even look like a girl who listened to music, and she looked at you/… Read full post »