“Who you think is the most successful artist of our times?” Ken asked.

“By what standard?” I said.

“Everything,” he answered. “Not just hit records or sales or critical praise. Career satisfaction, respect, longevity.  Somebody who fame hasn’t made too crazy to enjoy the ride.”

“McCartney?” I guess.

“I’m thinking our era is more MTV and on.”

“Hmm….”

“Besides — John, Yoko, Linda, Heather. Drugs,” Ken said, shaking his head. “‘Say, Say, Say’….”

“Oh, yeah,” I told him, singing the hook to McCartney’s ‘82 duet with Michael Jackson. “Who then?”

“I’ve been thinking lately…,” Ken told me, looking a bit like Droopy, that sleepy dog from the old cartoons.  I thought he had nodded off but then he spoke again. “Probably Al Yankovic.”

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I went to the rally, camera in hand, expecting to see the joyous faces of those who had been so worried while the SCOTUS decisions were being awaited. What I saw and heard was not a photo op: men and women, cautiously joyful, wandering through occasional bursts of enthusiasm. There was introspection, wonder, maybe even shell-shock. I went to the rally with a need for solidarity, feeling relief more than anything but the mood at the New York “victory” rally was like the tenuous ripples of a child stepping into a still lake. The water feels good, but what lies beneath? Was it trepidation or the cynicism often attributed to New Yorkers? Realism or pessimism?

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We’ve all been where Sally was on “The Quality of Mercy,” last week’s episode of Mad Men, but not all of us have Glen. When she jumps up and yells for him to help her from the other room, where he’s gone with the pretty blonde, we’re thinking, or I was thinking, “He’s hooking up, he’s going to be pissed, he’s not going to come through.” Or: he’s going to want Sally – that’s what’s going to happen – she’s going to have to repay him. But what does Glen show us? That’s he’s the only virtuous man – the only non-man child – on the show. And possibly on the earth.

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JK: When did you first go to the Taksim Square? What did you see?

GK: The events started not in Taksim Square but in the neighboring Gezi Park on May 28. As construction was continuing on a project to create a pedestrian area around the park, activist groups were upset by trees being cut down and removed. Four sycamores were destroyed and uprooted by a backhoe, and the first to notice were members of Taksim Solidarity. They’re a group of urban activists who since 2011 have been fighting the government’s attempt to raze the park and resurrect the 19th Century Ottoman-era Artillery Barracks which had been there.

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The national press has duly documented this most recent drama, how Governor Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Financial Manager to studiously go through the city’s books and find a way to stave off bankruptcy. Orr is like some old man in a ramshackle rooming house desperately digging through every drawer to find change for the fare as the sound of the last bus barreling down the street shakes the whole stucture. It isn’t pretty.

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In 1976, Fleetwood Mac were poised for an ignominious demise. Their latest album—the first to feature the brilliant but mercurial duo of Lindsey Buckingham and vocalist Stevie Nicks—had failed to gain much traction out of the gate, and as the band prepared to sequester themselves in a studio in Saulsalito to record the follow-up, a cavalcade of spectacular disasters gathered on the horizon.

First, there was the in-fighting. Although Stevie and Lindsey were a couple when they had joined the band a year prior, by the Bicentennial, a bitter split saw the former lovers reduced to incessant volleys of petty and venomous attacks on one another. Meanwhile, Christine and John McVie were in the process of divorcing and drummer Mick Fleetwood, unbeknownst to the others, stood on verge of losing his own marriage when his wife back in England approached her tolerance for playing second fiddle to his band.

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Technically, they never left. They are just prone to slipping off the cultural radar for years at a time. Regardless, they are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their smash hit, Last Splash.

As monster reissues like this tend to do, the release is a reminder of how young music can make you feel but also how old you’ve become. I have spent the last two decades with this record, but three years stick out among them all: 1993, 2003 and 2013. In that time I’ve seen a beautifully weird record go platinum and dodged bandleader Kim Deal not once, but twice.

1993: I am the only person on earth who discovers the Melvins by hearing them on the radio. I’m not talking hip college stations. I mean professional radio, here.

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On the night it happened, my partner of sixteen years, Tony, and I were up the street having dinner with a friend. After dinner, we wandered over to a neighborhood gay bar for a quick drink. We then left our friend and walked arm-in-arm, arriving back home around midnight. The same time that Mark Carson was being assaulted and fatally shot just a few yards away.

He had been followed for several blocks by a man taunting him, yelling out “faggot” and “What are you, a gay wrestler?” When they reached the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, his attacker spat out his final threat, “Do you want to die here?” before shooting Mark in the face with a .38 caliber gun. Mark Carson’s body lay dead just a couple blocks from the Stonewall Bar, the birthplace of the gay rights movement.

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After a four-year battle, my mother succumbed to cancer when I was 16 years old; she was 49. I was on my own and immediately assumed the role of an adult. No siblings, no father, and relatives that have probably all drank themselves to death by now. Suffice it to say that losing both my mother and grandmother to a lengthy and horrible disease affected how I perceive my life and the world around me. For instance, I decided to never have children since I couldn’t be sure whether or not I would pass this disease on to my own child. Secondly, we were poor, and my mother’s death plunged me into a peripheral existence -- always one step away from poverty. Thankfully, I am now an expert at negotiating a downwardly mobile lifestyle.

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Hillary Clinton has just made her first public appearances since resigning as Secretary of State, and I am enthusiastic about her presumed candidacy; it’s making me dream of Iowa. I long to go there to work on electing the first woman president.

I watched Barack Obama there last November at the final stop of his final campaign, just before midnight on the chilly evening before election day in Des Moines, the crowd of 20,000 strong doing call and response along with our president. “Fired up!” “Ready to go!”

This is not post-racial America, despite what some would try and have us believe. This is still racist that-nigger-messed-up-the-country America and I am crying from true joy to think that 20,000 mostly white folks are out there in Iowa — in Iowa! — for our president. For Barack Obama. For a black man. A black man! (I don’t believe that Iowans are any more likely to be racist than the rest of us, but the heartland of America is not the first place that jumps to mind when I think of racial progress.)

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Yet, when I was offered a chance to write a script, I said yes. Of course I did. It was 1999, a period in which the narrowing window of “independent film” (scare quotes necessary to indicate I mean not truly independent cinema, but rather corporately-funded inexpensive movies) allowed the possibility of making literate adult dramas. Harvey and Bob Weinstein still ran Miramax, and the other studios—Sony, Paramount, even Warner Brothers as well as 20^th Century Fox—had classics divisions. It seemed non-suicidal to attempt an adaptation of a difficult novel, an ambitious book that was, nevertheless at its core, a love story. I adored the novel, but my reasons for taking it on as a screenplay were fundamentally mercenary. As old, then, as the profession itself.

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This five-story teleportation device is an exhibit at the New Museum called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.” Ignore the subtitle. It’s from a Sonic Youth album that doesn’t appear in the show and was, in fact, released in 1994. Though, I’ve read some pretty baroque interpretations of why it fits with such a close textual analysis they veer on New Criticism.

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I’ll never forget the moment when, after fishing blindly in this box of a thousand dead memories, I pulled out a work of art.  It had not been intended as one; it was just a snapshot.  But it was aesthetically bewitched.  The time it took for a shutter to open and close in, oh, I don’t know—a sheared-off sliver of one second in Depression-struck 1932?—was the exact amount of time it took the eye to remake it. A picture of a picture, this time taken by the beholder.

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Recently a piece in the New Republic appeared that lamented the current state of the essay. In an article that was both right on and full of blind spots, Adam Kirch wrote that even though it seems like we’re living in a “golden age” of the essay, these essays are not really "Essays." He invoked Montaigne as the sort of ideal and “modern inventor” of the personal essay, and focused on contemporary writers David Sedaris, Davy Rothbart, Sloane Crosley, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose work has “little in common with what was once meant by that term.”

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I nodded in silent greeting. Perhaps she assessed me, too, with my hippie-long hair tied in a ponytail, no make-up, T-shirt, and jeans. Just another random student worker. An English major, she might have thought, or something in the hard sciences.

We were alone on a long ride along the 34 floors of the state capitol building.

She glanced at me, her eyes troubled, her expression grim. “David Duke wants me to go to his office,” she said.

For those who aren’t familiar with that name, or whose recollections are vague, David Duke became nationally famous after running for Louisiana’s governor in 1991. He had a documented past of carrying books and posters bearing Nazi swastikas while a student at Louisiana State University, served as the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and was the founding president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

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That was just the first time my congested nasal passages threatened to sideline a highly anticipated getaway. Now we’re about to take a big trip at the beginning of March, and I absolutely cannot be ailing. Not this time.

I have never been accused of being a hypochondriac or germaphobe. I have always freely shared water and food, hugged and kissed friends and relatives with abandon, and wrapped my palms around dirty subway handrails when there was no room to sit. That is, until the beginning of this year. 2013 began with flu running wild through New York, and I suddenly transformed into a Purell-toting member of the Howie Mandel-Woody Allen club, where our motto is, keep away from me you germ-infested person.

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