I don’t quite know where to begin with yesterday’s blog – Icy Blaze. A friend of mine works at a school, a tough school where kids are so often left behind by our increasingly elite upper crust (and the teachers of these tough schools left behind as well, and their administrators and their shrinking budgets.) [...]

This is a quote from one of my favorite websites — Today In Literature — it’s worth reading twice (it took me two readings to sort through it clearly — worth it, though…) Charlotte Brontë was born on this day in 1816. In 1837, as she approached twenty-one, Brontë wrote to poet laureate Robert Southey [...]

Go back to the Sphinx, please, or to Babylon where it was sorted out quite plainly with the perfect of the mummy, wrapped museum linen still, still preserved on Eighty-Fifth and Fifth, a glorious Rembrandt still, still life still gleaming, beautiful in leathery limbs of Midas gold and granite pure redeeming us from all this [...]

You are the royal we to the left of Mohammed and the right of queen bee. The diamonds in the grass makes an effort to be a carpet for you because like a cat most of us rest in your lap. Nothing important exists outside you. The UN would be smart to be run by [...]

I’m nearing the end of this Numb3rs experiment and there will be more episodes to come, given that I’m doing a few more shows this year, but it’s now time to turn back to my first loves: poetry and the projects that come from my heart – “The Yellow Kite” and “GrassRoots.” I keep recircling [...]

So, yes, I’m about to embark on some new projects. A children’s film heading into preproduction, next year a feature to be shot in Seattle. A novel that now moves to the next place. I need to go out into the world more than I have and I’m scared. Is it about dealing with all [...]

It’s early in the morning. Still dark. I have been in a kind of swamp, I suppose. And there’s the word “I” twice in one sentence. Why am I doing this blog? Primarily self indulgence as some have accused? No, I don’t believe so, despite the evidence — but today I move into terrain that [...]

He strides in w/a deep blue canvas bag over his Hemingway shoulder, thoroughly muscled. My age. And when the black (jovial) male nurse calls us pre-ops I overhear that he came by cab and has no relatives to contact. He moves better than the rest of us, the bile of fear rising in my throat [...]

The flickering morning bus to my right (passing the Rite-Aid at Beverly and La Cienega) proclaims from her metal flanks that the joyful black boy billboard prince wants a bajillion McDonald’s McNuggets. And a head turns. I spot it (the guy in the Caddy in front of me, dawn sun across his retrogressive bow just [...]

The Enron in my face is unmistakable for I have borrowed millions against the accounts of my father, secreting them in the hope chest of my parents’ wedding dreams: a large pine box affair with a red heart painted on the upside-down lid. Though we kept the creditors at bay for generations by appearing to [...]