The succinct, topical, and obvious choice is Review: Tom Lutz’s Aimlessness. It works just fine. But I am not taken with it. I shall come back to this.
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by Akim Reinhardt
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I don’t know how well Abbas knows me. Of course one can never really know how well someone else knows them. It’s a second degree of mystical confusion flowing the first: how well can you really know anyone else? [here]
How well do I know Abbas? Kinda. But more. Or less. I’m not sure. Over the last decade there have been email exchanges and the roughly biennial meet up for drinks. Our mutual friends have described him to me, and likely me to him.
How well does Abbas know me? Not at all in some ways. Very well in others. As 3QD editor he’s been reading my essays for over a decade. Is that what led him to suggest I review Lutz’s book on aimlessness? Certainly some of my own work here has broached the topic in various ways without ever using the word. There was the three-part essay from 2014 that chronicled my rambling 7,500 mile drive around the United States. And there was the book manuscript that I serialized at 3QD in 2019–2020. Ostensibly about songs that got stuck in my head, it was really about whatever mental and emotional meanderings those songs led my head to follow.
Is this why Abbas, who may or may not really know me, asked if I would like to review Tom Lutz’s new book about aimlessness? Read more »
Two profound horrors have plagued the world in recent times: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency. And after years of dread, their recent decline has brought me a brief respite of peace.
White Americans get a lot of things wrong about race. And not just the relatively small number of blatant white supremacists, or the many millions (
My Jewish maternal grandparents came to America just ahead of WWII. Nearly all of my grandmother’s extended family were wiped out in the Holocaust. Much of my grandfather’s extended family had previously emigrated to Palestine.
People are basically good.
Is there anything more clichéd than some spoiled, petulant celebrity publicly threatening to move to Canada if the candidate they most despise wins an election? These tantrums have at least four problems:
There is a minor American myth about shame and regret. It goes like this.
During the 1990s, the impossibility of a black president was so ingrained in American culture that some people, including many African Americans, jokingly referred to President Bill Clinton as the first “black president.” The threshold Clinton had passed to achieve this honorary moniker? He seemed comfortable around black people. That’s all it took.
Violence : War :: Lies : Mythology
Manhattan always has been and always will be New York City’s geographic and economic center. But if you’re actually from New York, then you’re very likely not from Manhattan. Like me, you’re from one of the outer boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island. And as far as we’re concerned, we’re the real New Yorkers. The natives with roots and connections, and the immigrants who are life-and-death dedicated to making them, not the tourists who come for a weekend or a dozen years before trundling back to America.
I was a minor mess in high school. Had no idea what to do with my curly hair. Unduly influenced by a childhood spent watching late ‘70s television, I stubbornly brushed it to the side in a vain attempt to straighten and shape it into a helmet à la The Six Million Dollar Man or countless B-actors on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. I couldn’t muster any fashion beyond jeans, t-shirts, and Pumas. In the winter I wore a green army coat. In the summer it was shorts and knee high tube socks.
Being a horrible person is all the rage these days. This is, after all, the Age of Trump. But blaming him for it is kinda like blaming raccoons for getting into your garbage after you left the lid off your can. You had to spend a week accumulating all that waste, put it into one huge pile, and then leave it outside over night, unguarded and vulnerable. A lot of time and energy went into creating these delectable circumstances, and now raccoons just bein’ raccoons.
There was this one moment. A sunny June day in Nebraska. No one was around. I dribbled the basketball over the warm blacktop, moving towards a modest hoop erected at the end of a Lutheran church parking lot. I picked up my dribble, took two steps, sprung lightly from my left foot, up and forward, my right arm extending as my hand gracefully served the ball to the white backboard. Its upward angle peaked, bounced softly, and descended back through the netless hoop.
There should be more.
Most people associate the Cold War with several decades of intense political and economic competition between the United States and Soviet Union. A constant back and forth punctuated by dramatic moments such as the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall, the arms race, the space race, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nixon’s visit to China, the Olympic boycotts, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and eventually the collapse of the Soviet system.
I first heard Motörhead in 1988. I was a DJ at