CHIGAGO, IL-

I have this one friend who is a political mover and shaker. Her name is Jen Nix, and she has done some really cool things that those of us who spend much of our time either hiding in a quiet room trying to write fiction (or changing diapers and organizing playdates) don’t spend a lot of time doing, i.e. putting out political bestsellers like George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, writing for and co-founding progressive blogs, chastising Michael Moore and other big name lefty types for publishing their progressive books with big corporate publishers and ultimately making money for Right wing corporations, drawing the attention of not only the alternative media but also the very corporate media she was lambasting and getting invited to Judith Regan’s office…

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Can I just say now that spoken word poet Rich Ferguson is a great inspiration? Recently I wrote a rebellious poem-essay that I read at the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and got freaky nervous because Ferguson showed up. OK, I would have been nervous anyway, but he was there looking like a poet gunslinger… (more…)

Los Angeles, CA-

I’m nervous about this post.  I’m worried that because of its subject matter and the nasty habit we all have of interpreting things differently than they were meant, I will come across as being a racist.  I would say I am not, but that seems pretty much pointless, so I will just write what I am going to write and we’ll see where we end up. (more…)

PARIS-

The Olympic Flame passed me by, and I didn’t even see it.

I was waiting outside Stade Charléty, not far from Paris’ Chinatown section in the 13th.

As the Olympic torch makes its second-ever global tour of the world before the Beijing Games this August, it swooped into Paris on a cold April day.

Already plagued by protests, starting with its lighting ceremony on Mount Olympus a few weeks ago, the Olympic Torch Relay (OTR) ran into continual hassles along its Parisian stretch, which caused organizers to stash the torch in a bus and keep it rolling through the city, the flame sadly reduced to a few licks of fire in specially-designed lanterns.

At Stade Charléty it seemed like the cop to spectator ratio was about 1:1. (more…)

SAN ANTONIO, TX-

1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana

Louis Eugene Walcott was born on May 11, 1933, in the Depression-era Bronx.

Around the same time, a preacher in Detroit named Wallace Fard Muhammad disappeared.

This is significant.

A white man by some accounts and Arab by others, Wallace Fard Muhammad was a salesman. Peddling raincoats door-to-door afforded him just the right opportunity to evangelize.

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CHICAGO, IL -

I admit that the set up is pretty dramatic:

A man stands motionless on a street corner in single-digit morning temperatures holding onto a sign that simultaneously calls the mayor of Chicago a dictator while asking a certain FBI agent to stop raping his wife. (more…)

ARUSHA-

Hemingway wrote a short story called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

He barely mentions the mountain.

The story mostly revolves around human beings dealing with human problems.

The mountain, as the reader learns at the end of the story, is something more than just rock and snow.

It is life and death, the only two things every human being on the planet has in common.

The lovely Isabelle and I will climb the mountain in a couple days, leaving from its base at the Machame Gate on the morning of January 19th, and hopefully returning after a successful summit on the 24th.

Over the last four months that we have spent in Africa, I have spoken often of life and death.

Africa seems to bring that out. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

There’s the old Mahatma Gandhi quote: “You must be the change that you want to see in the world.”

You see it on bumper stickers. You see it on peace signs. It seems simple enough, but naturally, it’s harder than it sounds.

It can be difficult, for instance, to determine exactly what changes to make in the first place. It can be hard to know where to begin.

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By R Kent

ARUSHA-

The United Nations is a great idea.

In theory.

It’s the “in practice” part that messes everything up.

Here in Arusha, the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a good example.

The Tribunal, in existence since 1996, has been plagued by slow trials that take years to finish, and as a result, has a paltry number of convictions to its credit.

Defense lawyers routinely cry foul, accusing the ICTR of being a puppet of the government of Rwanda, as well as a tool for rich western nations to purge themselves of guilt over having not reacted when the genocide was taking place.

Resources are scanty.

Employees scrape for scrap paper and work on computers that would look more comfortable in a previous century.

Interns, like the lovely Isabelle, arrive fresh and ready for work, only to discover the team they’re assigned to is on a three-week mission in Rwanda. (more…)

SARANAC LAKE, NY-

I should have known this might happen.

I should have known those blissful days might end and nameless evenings of camp fires and star gazing would give way to a time with harsher edges. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

I played hooky from work today to support the striking writers.

It made perfect sense.

Besides being a writer myself, I’m also a teacher (the California Federation of Teachers supports the strikers).

That meant I had to ditch the classroom to support my brethren.

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THE DEEP SOUTH-

“You’ll love it,” said Simi so we went.

Past all the hand scribbled signs warning “NO EYE CONTACT” into the bowels of the dank dark building, crumbling brownstone and scrub buckets of dry ice strewn across checkerboard floors.

The freight elevator appeared through the fog, its iron maw gasping with a great and clanging racket to receive.

“Love it,” I sighed.

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PHILADELPHIA, PA-

Welcome to the first installment of my first interview on TheNervousBreakdown.com.

I was inspired by Kaytie M. Lee’s interview of NOMAD, the graffiti artist, and by B. Francis Smith’s interview of David Breithaupt, Kurt Vonnegut’s pen pal.

I wanted to post an interview, but I had no idea whom to interview . . . until I thought about what has consistently interested me the most: the intersection of sexuality, law and culture.

In fact, all facets of sex and sexuality have interested me as long as I can remember. In the early ’80s, my folks let me take Dr. Ruth’s books from the library, something that other young grammar-school children weren’t doing.

Throughout three academic degrees, this intersection has regularly been my focus: mating and dating rituals, gender identity, sexual harassment laws, pornography regulation, obscenity laws, feminism, polyamory, rights for same-sex couples, sex work, and plenty more.

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SAN DIEGO, CA-

Those few little fires I wrote about on Sunday night have multiplied and grown and ravaged somewhere over 300 square miles of land and over 1000 homes throughout Southern California.

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THE BIBLE BELT-

One night on the smoking porch at the psych hospital Danny flicked his Winston into the sticker bushes and rolled his eyes.

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