Urban Honking

You know what else is great about my job? The fact that teaching actually teaches people stuff. It’s incredible! We’re at Day 15 in my pop music class and the students, who began the semester with basically zero knowledge of specific styles and cultural histories, are now hearing stuff and confidently being all “oh yeah […]

I am sitting alone at a bar in the town adjacent to the giant school where I teach. The bar is filled with students. It is 8:15 p.m. on a Wednesday night. The bar is playing an odd mix of music I can’t quite nail down. Lorde, “Africa” by Toto, Postal Service, Depeche Mode, a […]

My husband has gotten really into bird watching since he dropped out of his PhD program. In many ways once he dropped out he became again the man I fell in love with, the goofy ding dong singing and dancing in the kitchen, pulling pranks, identifying interests and pursuing them, all the things that, for […]

OHHHHH SHIT Tl;dr: Passengers is bad This movie has such a great concept, yet I think never have I seen a work of art so stunningly betray the promise of its premise. You’d have to work so incredibly hard to make sure that every single interesting aspect of your premise was carefully not explored in […]

Twenty years ago, in Plazm issue #9, we invited the Guerrilla Girls to do the inside front cover. They provided this nifty educational ad about Newt Gingrich. Back then Newt was Speaker of the House in the mid 1990s. When he was elected he came up with the slick marketing term “Contract with America.” In […]

I finally got a chance to see Gimme Danger—the Stooges documentary by Jim Jarmusch. I can’t specifically recall the first time I heard the Stooges. I came of age on the punk rock that was inspired by them. But somehow it seems like they have always been in my subconscious—a kind of visceral, kinetic energy waiting […]

Since Alexander Hamilton didn’t have access to email, I went ahead and sent this letter to all the electors via this site: Ask The Electors. Also submitted it to the Electoral College Petition folks.

Re: Meg’s comment—definitely ask me questions about those readings, if you want! I’m not exactly an expert, but I have been reading and working with these (and other similar) texts for several years and I’ll likely have at least some thoughts to respond with, and maybe other readers will too. If I have an answer, […]

Like many of you, I have spent this week feeling a mixture of fear, nausea, and shock. Now there is someone at the upper echelons of government whose stated views about everyone that is not a white Christian male—not to mention our planet earth—is disdain. I’ve had a hard time knowing the best way to respond. […]

I remember the first time I met Chloe Eudaly in her small store just north of Hawthorne Blvd. on 37th Avenue, a few blocks from my house. I was already a lover of ‘zines and printed matter of all kinds. PLAZM was a few years old by then, we started in 1991, I think the first Reading Frenzy location opened in 1994. […]