I feel no shame in admitting I was mesmerized by Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Show vol. 3, which I saw on Amazon Prime, and where I devoured her combination performance-piece-infomercial-erotic-underwear-fashion-show, and which democratically offered something for every clothing size.

Are you aware that very word of any language you hear is nearly permanently imprinted on your brain with zero loss?

Dressed as he was in indifference to the winter weather and current trends, the Latino youth still looked stunning. I stood in a subway car, gazing at his gleaming black hair cut Caesar-style, combed forward at the front and sides.

As usual I find myself revising my prejudices, if only for the purpose of forming new ones. Way back when—say, during the heyday of the French nouvelle vague—I was wont to spout a compare-and-contrast monologue linking storytelling to language.

L’Etoile Bleue, a bordello in the old part of Tours, isn’t what it used to be. Its ground floor dance hall, behind which soldiers, farmers, or the bourgeoisie once picked their girls through a one-way mirror, now houses the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

America. One year after 9/11

What do you like about America now?

…I like the new bruised America, because it’s now a more emotive America, a more transparent America.

Language is created and controlled by convention, determined by poststructuralists and semoticians to have an arbitrary relationship to time and matter and manipulated by political and social forces.

About the Me-Too Movement…

TK…

Sex Prudery

Essay to come….

Amy Winehouse

TK

I’m sitting in Bangkok’s airport, about to board a plane to my wildest destination yet: My sister’s wedding back home in Santa Cruz. What will I find in America after two years of constant travel?

CNN’s Shameful use of Marilyn Monroe

Andy Warhol and the Art of Betrayal

TK

Dinner with Michel Houellebecq in New York’s East Village and what it did to my future.