I came to extreme poverty late in life, and did very badly at it. I should have done some kind of crime. But what kind? That’s what I couldn’t figure out. What kind of crime can you actually do, if you aren’t a lawyer and don’t understand computers?

There were certainly plenty of people who could have offered me some advice on the matter. We were living on a boat, moored in a skuzzy little harbor full of small-time criminals. The one guy who went off to a job every day was a figure of awe and mockery, a freak. Everybody else scavenged or stole to buy their booze and weed. (more…)

He may be dead now, I don’t know. He should have been dead long ago, but these early boomers, born in California, have many lives. From some angles, Alex’s life was clear proof of what spoiled, invincible brats they were, the ungrateful beneficiaries of hippie primogeniture.

I remember him sitting in the little room his wife had assigned him in their hilltop mansion, his “study.” What Alex studied, mainly, was how to get more crack and get more blowjobs from prostitutes on his nightly forays into West Oakland. (more…)

“If you’re going to talk truthfully about the world, you might as well start with the bottom line: killing people in your way.” Listen to the first episode of our new eXiled Radio hosted by John Dolan. In this premiere, Dolan strolls around the 20th century’s great killing fields with Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare.

Produced and mixed by Matt Payne.

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Robert Creeley: Great Poet or One-Eyed Interspecies Plagiarist?

Here are two pieces of twentieth-century verse. One has been called “…the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem” of the 1960s; the other is from a long-forgotten collection of comic newspaper verse. One was written in 1954, the other almost four decades earlier. (more…)

That was how he died, Professor Robert Beloof, my first mentor: crushed by a hippie van.

In Portland, yet. It was a ridiculous way to die, and Beloof was, let’s face it, a ridiculous man. But it was also a very uncanny, fey manner of death for a Berkeley professor made and broken by the hippie era. You almost want to say something pompous, like “We were all run over by that VW van,” carve that on the headstone of the whole place. (more…)

Christopher Hitchens is out to save America. He’s brought the cross of St. George-Orwell, that is-along on the crusade. He’s everywhere in the American media lately, lending his accent and vast self-importance to the cause of Freedom.

You might wonder why imports like Hitchens are center-stage in the U.S. these days. You’d think a country of 300 million could find somebody to make a coherent case for the war in Iraq. But you’d be wrong. Ever hear ‘em try? Bush sounds like an Okie fruit picker on glue; Cheney mumbles like a hanging judge at the end of a long day; and Rove, their PR chief, won’t talk on mic because he knows he’d come across like the scoutmaster trying to explain why he had to share a tent with your son. We’re hopeless. (more…)

Three men convicted of producing the class B controlled drug opium were each jailed… In each man’s case Judge McDonald took two years’ jail as the starting point for sentence.

It takes radio signals more than a decade to reach this offworld colony. (Something about the speed of light.) So, having lived through the eighties at Reagan’s ground zero, I get to live through them again out here. The worst of all Reagan’s horrors, the Drug War, is just hitting its stride here, even as it’s losing steam back in Vampire Central. Back there, even bloodsucking monsters like Henry Hyde are deciding they might have been a bit excessive in mandating the death penalty for anyone caught with a quarter-gram of powder. Hyde got a cameo role in Traffic and, like any red-blooded American, changed his convictions instantly in exchange for a bit part, a moment being petted poolside by a bevy of Malibu Stacies. A repellent tableau, certainly; but if that’s all it takes, why not find a bit part for every Republican drug warrior? Have Soros fund huge fake Hollywood parties for every slavering Phalangist in DC! Rent a few blondes, a cheesy Elks Hall, deck it out with limos and fake cameras! Stage an entire fake Academy Awards ceremony at which Hyde, Jesse Helms and Ashcroft are the leading contenders for Best Actor, nominated for their role in dueling anti-DEA epics! Let them make tearful acceptance speeches that go on for hours, if only they’ll stop sending harmless nerds to a lifetime as the maytag of D Block. (more…)