2010: Year in Review

This was an unsettling year, not just for me, of course, but for anyone concerned about the state of the arts and politics at the federal and civic level. Throughout 2010, my creative output was scattershot at best, waylaid by a seemingly never-ending series of personal and professional setbacks, many of which I wrote about [...]

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner, Scrooge, signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead [...]

A Literary Guide to Christmas: ‘Riots’ by Charles Bukowski

The new genre novel that I am working on is — not surprisingly to regular readers of mine — suffused with the spirit and sometimes the literal words of the late unoffcial poet laurate of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski. This morning (at 3:16 in the ayem to be precise) while reading a collection of Bukowski [...]

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

[Originally published at 8763 Wonderland, 12/22/05] It was three days before Christmas and Trace felt a black depression coming on. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “There wasn’t enough left of her to put in a shoe box.” “Providing it’s a child’s-size shoe box,” Wellbeck confirmed. The Public Information Officer for the L.A. County Coroner’s Office offered [...]

Trace and the Christmas Shoppers

                 [Originally published at 8763 Wonderland, December 12, 2005, and Flaker HQ, 2005] It was a dry and crisp Saturday afternoon with fifteen days remaining on the calendar before Christmas. Trace never paid much attention to calendars except for their usefulness in plotting a magazine deadline. There was a time when he always had a [...]