"Among my friends," Garduño tells poet Verónica Volkow, who wrote the introduction, "word started getting around -- it was a joke -- that if someone wanted to get pregnant, she had to pose for one of Flor Garduño's photographs ... one of the models got pregnant, even though she was using birth control." Still another woman saw Garduño's lush black-and-white images and "a short time later she also got pregnant," the photographer says.

It's hardly surprising. There is an unmistakable air of fecundity about Garduño's work and it goes beyond matters of reproduction. Here are pictures with ideas attached -- thinking, breathing, feeling photographs. Garduño's strong, evocative symbolism and her poetic sensibility coupled with a flawless sense of composition make these sensuous, often ethereal images the sort of pictures you can look at over and over; these are photographs worthy of staring at, then closing your eyes and remembering. The funny thing is -- given that many of the photos are nudes -- when you do stare, you find that you're not looking where you might expect to.

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Hogin expressed her outrage by drawing pictures of the woods with the tires, garbage and barrels scattered about, often giving the drawings to her fourth-grade teacher. "It was sort of an infantile form of protest," she says. It also was, and continues to be, an organizing metaphor for her life.

The pictures Hogin makes today -- startling, provocative, elegant (she calls them "parodies of opulence") oil paintings, some as large as 8 by 10 feet -- still focus on the environment, and on a variety of other cultural and political issues that are both pressing and controversial, which makes her work especially relevant right now. Given the powerful connection between the topics she takes up in her art and the current American dynamic -- not just between humans and a disappearing natural world, but between average folks and the corporate world, the ruling elite of capitalism -- what Hogin's doing, or attempting to do, is both important and, in many ways, amazing.

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Good news: At least one of us has managed to pull it off. In her third book, "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," Sarah Vowell does a bang-up job of being a good American without being a terrible bore. A solid thinker with a warm heart and a smart mouth, she loves the U.S. in much the same way that one loves one's family (or perhaps a favorite flea-bitten old dog) -- acutely aware of its many shortcomings, but true-blue to the end. "My ideal picture of citizenship," Vowell writes, "will always be an argument, not a sing-along."

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So she wrote a book herself. The publication of "I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One," coauthored with Pamela D. Blair, led to media attention. Later, five months prior to the 9/11 attacks, Noel was asked to join the 48-member Family Support Team of the National Air Disaster Alliance.

When the planes were hijacked on 9/11, Noel was away from her Milwaukee home, in Chicago on business. "The first call I made was to find out if we were needed, and if so, where," she says. "Because of the inability to fly from one place to another, they took people [on the NADA support team] who could get there by car.

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And yet, there is always more -- flashbacks, confessions, photos -- for those whose appetite for the past might never be satisfied.

Most recently, the era is plumbed in "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead," a 600-page memoir by the band's publicist, Dennis McNally. In truth, it's not just about the '60s -- the book hits 1970 about midway and continues on through half of the '90s. And McNally does not throw avid fans of the band, or the '60s, a mere bone. His history of the quintessential psychedelic band, and the strangely intoxicating waves it made, is an entertaining, picaresque, and exhaustive contribution to pop culture anthropology.

Of course McNally, a long-time Deadhead whose first book was "Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America," might be expected to write the ultimate Dead tome. With a doctorate in American history under his belt, he signed on as the band's official historian in 1980 and has been the Dead's publicist since 1984. As a result, he's had extraordinary access for decades -- to band members, crew, staff and hangers-on.

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I first learned of the cracker test when I was 13. A sophisticated, and platonic, friend of mine -- a worldly woman of 16 -- had carnal cravings for a skinny, scraggly-haired drummer with bad teeth. I questioned her taste in men. She admitted that to some he might not be the most appealing of characters, but he did have that certain something, she insisted, that had nothing to do with looks. "I sure wouldn't push him out of bed for eating crackers" she said from the bottom of her heart, or maybe lower.

Implicit in the cracker test concept is that there are other people who, while you may find them fetching, you don't find so intoxicatingly fetching that you would let them remain in your bed if they chose to consume Wheat Thins while between your sheets, or wherever. In such a case, cracker consumption would be what's called a deal breaker.

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In essays and interviews, "Zig Zag Zen" looks at the intersection of Buddhism and mind-altering substances over the past 35 years or so, taking into account "moral, ethical, doctrinal, and transcendental considerations." The book's more than two dozen contributors and interview subjects range from writer and ordained Zen priest Peter Matthiessen and Esalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy to one-time Timothy Leary cohort and author of "Be Here Now" Ram Dass and Richard Baker Roshi, founder of the Tassajara Zen Monastery. It's a unique, intelligently compiled collection -- part history, part philosophy, part inquiry -- that sometimes succeeds at the precarious sport of discussing the spiritual quest and its fulfillment.

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This is especially true, of course, during meals.

Thrice daily here at my new "home" my new friends and I assemble in our intime dining room (officially known as Food Services Unit, Room B-7). Within its glowing, brushed-concrete walls, we celebrate gracious living, watched over by uniformed personnel who are attentive to our every need (and slightest move).

Here at the facility, each meal begins when "guests" walk in single file to the "dining room." To put myself in a mood of pleasant anticipation, I like to think of this procession as a parade, an opportunity to smile, wave, imagine the rousing chorus of a brass band. Attempting to implement this approach led to a brief spate of solitary confinement (for my own safety), but I'm sure it will yield a far more pleasant result for those on the "outside." Consider adopting this new tradition when family and friends join you for a July 4th gala at your home. Pass out small flags (available at your local dime store or crafts shop) and, especially if children are present, kazoos are certainly in order (again a well-stocked variety store is a good source for these, but they should be collected before the meal is served). In here we find that a "flag" made from a single sheet of "TP" taped to a pencil and a piece of cellophane held against a comb (wash it first!) are the perfect accessories for our "meal march."

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When the name Lord Buckley is mentioned, it gets one of two standard responses. The less common is a gleam in the eye, a signal from another member of the secret order of Buckley devotees, often followed by a fevered account of first hearing his Lordship and perhaps an imitation of his loopy lingo, maybe a passage from "The Nazz," his most famous monologue -- a retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth in hipster patois ("He was a carpenter kitty ..."). The more frequent response is, "Lord Buckley -- who's he?" It's that reaction that makes the existence of Trager's book and the attention it's getting -- it will be featured on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday, June 28 -- slightly miraculous. Because while the members of the secret Buckley cult have always thought that their guru deserved to become less of a secret, that such a thing might actually come to pass, especially 42 years after Buckley's death at age 54 in November of 1960, seemed unlikely at best, which is why the first chapter of "Dig Infinity!" is called "Lord Who?"

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After midnight one evening in the early 1970s, I was standing in the Pagoda Palace Theater on Washington Square in San Francisco. At the time, the theater ran Chinese movies during the day and then, at midnight, the Chinese audience streamed out and in came a multicolored, unruly herd of glitter- and feather-bedecked hippies reeking of pot and patchouli oil. (It's a cliché now, but those were indeed the pervasive aromas.) Onstage, penises and breasts bounced around wantonly. There was dancing, there was singing, everybody was loaded on some sort of mind-altering substance, and unbridled sexual outrageousness spilled out into an audience that could be described as enthusiastic only if you're into extreme understatement.

The glorious Cockettes, the florid and fluorescent LSD-fueled drag review that briefly lit up San Francisco, and excited the media as far away as Paris, 30 some years ago were onstage performing one of their live shows. It might have been "Journey to the Center of Uranus" or "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma" or any number of other wacky, apolitical extravaganzas -- Rodgers & Hammerstein gone terribly, terribly wrong. Whatever it was, it looked like Kabuki collaboratively produced by Busby Berkeley, Dr. Seuss and Federico Fellini, generously seasoned with Carmen Miranda. As John Waters has described the scene, "It was complete sexual anarchy, which is always a wonderful thing."

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The book is a pleasantly droll travelogue and reading it may have an unexpected effect, even for those who haven't inhaled wacky tabacky in decades. After disappearing into a cloud of pot tales for 286 pages, one feels an unmistakable craving -- much the same way you work up a powerful thirst after watching a movie in which the characters are constantly sipping martinis, or get hungry after paging through a favorite cookbook.

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-- New York Times, May 30, 2002

MEMO

FROM: Joseph Cammel, Director of Marketing and Public Relations

TO: Quick Test 5 Marketing Team

RE: Launch of Nico Water & creation of new products

First: You rock. Why? Because getting Nico Water mentioned in the first paragraph of a New York Times piece rocks. Do we care that the article got a little whiney and bogged down in details? No, we do not. Most people are only going to read the first two paragraphs anyway. Important fact: Nico Water name appears seven times in the article. You are branding monsters. (Jan, be sure to send the Times gal a case of Nico. Make it two, in case she likes to share.)

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Tour manager Bob Sterne should get a bucketful of those medals. "Neil's come to me," Sterne tells McDonough, "and said, 'Go get all the set lists and throw 'em in the trash can' -- and he said this to me fifteen minutes before the show. He's not just talking about the band's set list, he's talking about the lighting guys, the sound guys -- every single list in the building." Young's longtime cohort and producer, the late David Briggs, said, "It's not fun at all working for Neil -- fun's not part of the deal -- but it's very fulfilling."

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Meeting with arms dealers in Ljubljana's cafes and bars, Krafft made arrangements to borrow Kalashnikovs and AK-47s ("the little black dress of the military industrial complex," he calls the assault rifles) so that he could use them to make plaster slip-molds. He then created meticulously accurate castings of the guns in white porcelain and painted the weapons with flowers, text and other decoration in the traditional delftware blue. The resulting collection of lethal but dainty satire became part of a body of work that provoked Mark Del Vecchio, author of "Postmodern Ceramics," to declare Krafft "one of the USA's most seditious artists [who] plays difficult, uneasy games with content and culture."

At 54, the seditious artist -- also a celebrated painter, writer and scalawag -- has expanded his fine-china arsenal to include Thompson assault rifles, Uzi and Intratech machine pistols, Beretta and Smith & Wesson pistols, 50mm machine gun rounds, switchblade knives and hand grenades. His intention, he says, is to produce "life-size ceramic weaponry so gorgeous and patently functionless that it will bedazzle and confound everyone who sees it."

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You follow your flushed, jabbering colleague around a rocky outcropping, and there, vividly etched on a granite monolith, is a towering reproduction of Macauley Culkin in "Home Alone," hands to face, mouth agape; or maybe it's one of Francis Bacon's shrieking pope paintings or Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

You don't recognize any of these startling cultural icons from the distant past; you don't know who made them, or what they symbolize. Hell, you don't even know that they're cultural icons, but the whole scene briefly scares the bejesus out of you. Then, like Howard Carter stumbling on the tomb of Tutankhamen, you experience a serious rush of exhilaration, aggravated by a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, as you realize that you've just chanced on a history-making breakthrough, a discovery of earthshaking significance.

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Whatever you do, resist the temptation to read the short captions that appear opposite the book's splendid dirty pictures or you'll run into something like this, accompanying a French etching of a woman examining a man's genitals with eyeglasses: "Woman examining man's genitals with eyeglasses."

Such curator-speak declarations won't enrich your experience of the book, but they will remind you of my friend Anne's story of traveling around Europe with a companion she later dubbed Jonathan, Master of the Obvious. Jonathan, M.O., was given to pulling up in front of, say, Notre Dame Cathedral and brightly announcing, "That is a big church!" Or looking down from the uppermost platform of the Eiffel Tower and exclaiming, "This thing is tall!" Jonathan, M.O., survived the trip, but just barely.

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Lee doesn't have the narrative chops of Rayner, who also wrote the novel "The Cloud Sketcher," but Lee's subject, the insatiably ambitious quack known as the "goat gland doctor," who claimed he could restore sexual prowess to impotent men, takes the Most Bent Personality trophy. It's a tough call, though -- Hartzell was a kaleidoscopic sociopath of no small accomplishment. Both men were preternaturally buoyant, apparently put on earth to prove that you can't keep a bad man down. Either would have felt at home in Enron's executive meetings.

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Late Thursday Salon spoke to Kristen Schurr, a member of the New York-based group Direct Action for Justice in Palestine, on one of her two cellphones just a few hours after she'd entered the church. Schurr, 33, described her group's repeated attempts to enter the church during the standoff. Activists who didn't make it in Thursday were arrested, she said.

As with everything else in the conflict, Israelis and Palestinians disagree over the situation inside the church. The Israelis say that in addition to Palestinian security personnel, church guards, civilians, peace activists and clergymen, there are gunmen and militants who are wanted by Israel in prior terror attacks. The militants, the Israelis claim, are holding at least some of the others hostage. The Palestinians deny that there are any hostages, and have proposed ending the siege by having the militants wanted by Israel brought to Jericho for trial. But Schurr, a dedicated pro-Palestinian activist, even denies there are any militants.

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Which brings us, several decades later, to "The Osbournes," a TV family of daunting popularity that features drug-addled dinosaur rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his real-life wife, son and daughter. They go about their daily business before cameras, flipping each other off and peppering their conversations with the F-word. Much to the satisfaction of MTV, every obscenity, drug reference and unadorned outburst of intrafamilial angst brings more viewers, making the weekly Ozzyfest the second most popular show on cable (wrestling is first) and a favorite of President Bush.

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Of course, if by the time Franken made his torture joke, the audience was not prepared to laugh, it is hard to blame the messenger. There can't be many Americans left, and certainly not in the National Press Club, who aren't familiar with Franken's brand of humor -- a bent variation of straight-faced speechifying in which politicians, pundits and untouchable topics get tossed and gored like runners on the streets of Pamplona.

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