Nearby Café Home > Food and Travel > Island Living
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“Joan,” I asked my friend as we walked the streets of Madrid on an early evening in late winter, “why does it say ‘ONCE’ on all the kiosks here?” Joan stopped to look at me. “‘Once’? It says ‘Once’ on a kiosk?” “Not just one kiosk, Joan,” I told him. It says ‘ONCE’ on every […] Once again, year’s-end reminiscing has me dipping into the archives to see what I was thinking way back when. Here’s a piece I wrote twenty years ago, and published in the November 1978 issue of the North Shore Press, a brief and ill-fated experiment in alternative journalism here on the island. Has anything much changed […] Your encounter with nicotine, and your indoctrination into the culture of nicotine addiction, began the moment you flew the gestational coop; you were birthed into a world of cigarette smoke, cigarette smokers, and cigarette merchandising. However long thereafter you picked up your first coffin nail, you’d not only been exposed to endless cubic yards of second-hand smoke, but to years of omnipresent, incessant pro-smoking propaganda. Don’t think for a minute that the decision to light up was entirely your own. […] Yet if something we’d agree to call community results from the Internet and the Web and their evolution, I don’t expect it to be a tribal form of community — people bonded for life, living side by side, intimately involved, standing back to back permanently against their enemies. I predict it’ll be more like the looser connectedness that the agora encourages, a varied mix of people coming from all over, a context for the barter and exchange of goods, ideas, skills, energies. […] I meet far too may people who just can’t be bothered to vote; and I, in turn, can’t be bothered with them, can’t take seriously their complaints about the status quo. Participatory democracy is not a spectator sport. They’re choosing to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. For me, voting is not just a right but a privilege, an obligation, an imperative. […] I’m trying to describe a theater of teaching and learning that had enormous impact on me and in some important ways shaped my own sense of the dramaturgy of the classroom. I internalized that version of the classroom as theater just before a series of major stylistic changes in education began — changes that generated new kinds of teachers and students as well. […] “Does the once-victim interrupt himself and leave at his own stop? Or does the man finally exhaust his anger, let it go after all those years, maybe even take the other to dinner — in order to ask him, over coffee and pie, ‘How did we come to this? What system has put us at each other’s throats?'” […] Remember this: You are an animal. You have always been an animal. You will remain an animal. You will die an animal. Driving a car, reading Kant, talking on your cellular phone, you did not depart the animal kingdom. Consider the alternatives: vegetable, mineral. Why not be what you are, delightedly, without reservation? […] The impact of the music called jazz on artists in all media, on those committed to the exercise of creative intelligence in all its manifestations, and on the average citizen, has yet to be thoroughly annotated, much less examined in depth. Perhaps the time has come for us to begin to bear witness to what this music and the everyday people who make it have meant in all our lives over the course of this century. […] |