What brings you to Japan?

My wife got a Fulbright grant to research architecture here. Since I am able to work pretty much anywhere, we decided that moving to Japan would be a nice change of pace (which, we were right!).

Are you going to be permanently bi-continental?

Nope, just for a year. While there will definitely be things I’ll miss, there are certainly some things I’m looking forward to about being back in the U.S. Burritos and more space are at the top of the list.

Tell us about your latest project - travels.

I’ve been really lucky to have had the opportunity to travel a lot in the past couple of years. I felt that if I created something inspired by the trips, my time in these new locations would feel more meaningful to me. So, I created a set of 4 screen prints based on 4 places I’d visited recently. They were really enjoyable to work on, as it really allowed me to think about each place again. I’m considering doing a second set, once I have a few new places stamped in my passport.

I went to Switzerland in late 2006, so that was the first print I did. The second print was Egypt, which I visited last summer. Third was Thailand, which I went to in March. And the fourth print is Japan, which is where I currently am.

Where were these printed/created?

They were created in Tokyo and printed in Seattle. I took a short trip to Seattle a month or so ago, and figured it would be good to do a new print while I was there. That way, I could avoid international shipping charges/hassles and have something new available, since it’s been a while since I’ve released any new prints on my site (ANOTHER benefit of moving back to the U.S.).

For several years you were the art director at Sub Pop; would you ever work in a record label environment again? What are the perks of that kind of gig?

Although Sub Pop was a dream job in many ways, I’m MUCH happier where I’m at now. There are a few perks that I do miss though. The free CDs were nice. My co-workers were terrific. And health insurance certainly doesn’t hurt either. Now that I’m self-employed, I buy my CDs, work alone (which, actually, is INCREDIBLY enjoyable AND preferred), and I’ve quit skateboarding to remedy my lack of health insurance.

In general, how do you come up with concepts for your work?

I typically just think about a given project for a couple of days. Once I come up with an idea which I think might work, I start drawing. If the drawings take shape relatively easy, I’ll stick with it. If it feels forced, I’ll abandon it for something that feels more natural. Most often, if a sketch is forced, the final will be exponentially more forced. It’s best to start with something I’m excited about, as that excitement will typically carry through to the end of a project.

Do you draw freehand and then scan or draw all on the computer?

Most often, I’ll do the drawing with pen and ink. The only times I’ll draw it entirely in the computer is if I want something really clean looking — which doesn’t happen very often at all. Actually drawing something by hand gives the work a warmth that you just don’t get otherwise.

Can you share some quick tips for the DIY screen printer/designer?

Besides practice, practice, practice? Having a strong desire for experimentation is definitely a plus. Just because you haven’t seen somebody else use a certain technique doesn’t mean it won’t be completely successful for you. Try something solidly wrong, as it might lead you down an avenue that is perfectly right.

Last February you did a workshop in Maryland on screen-printing – do you plan on doing more workshops? Where? When?

Every workshop/class/lecture/speaking engagement I’ve done is because someone liked my stuff enough to invite me out to give the workshop/class/lecture/speaking engagement. I don’t currently have anything lined up, though I’ve had discussions with a couple of organizations that will most likely lead to me doing something with them in the future. It’s still a ways off at this point right now as plane tickets to/from Tokyo are a bit of a deal breaker.

Last February you also were part of a huge rock poster art show at the University of Maryland – tell us the fateful tale of a cotton candy forest.

The University of Maryland gave me their large back gallery to use as an installation space. My idea was to do a 3 wall mural and create a forest of cotton candy trees. Little did I know that the slight humidity of the gallery would cause the cotton candy to disintegrate. Fourteen hours of spinning cotton candy had transformed into a horrible pink catastrophe overnight.

With one day before the show was scheduled to open, I had to think of a back-up plan. My initial idea was to find a furry fabric and sew some fuzzy foliage onto the tree shapes I’d created. However, after going to every fabric store within a 30 mile radius and not finding a fabric remotely close to what I had in mind, I knew I’d better come up with a back-up plan for my back-up plan. That’s when I had the idea to create giant paper bags to cover the trees. Once the bags were made, I painted faces on them, creating two armies of giant dueling paper bag puppets. Although the end result was conceptually much different than my initial idea of a forest of fluffy strange trees, I’m really happy with how the paper bags turned out.

What are you working on next?

I recently wrapped up a series of posters for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Target hosts four large celebrations each year, and they commission posters, T-shirts, and commemorative photo frames for each celebration. J. Otto did the series last year, and this year they asked me. It was a lot of fun.

I’m also working on stuff for a couple of upcoming gallery shows, working on a couple of CD packages, doing a new animation for Nickelodeon’s Yo Gabba Gabba T.V. show, and preparing for an upcoming trip to China.

To see more of Jesse LeDoux’s work and to order pieces from his latest collection “Travels” visit his website at www.ledouxville.com.

I asked writers, publishers, booksellers, distributors, teachers, editors, and supporters of independent publishing — some of whom have been featured in this column, some who have not — to provide a list of recommended reads for summer. Their suggestions range from short stories to comic books, from classic fiction to contemporary poetry. There’s a book recommendation for “people who think they’re scared of Shakespeare” and one for people who cook with a cast iron skillet. Other publications feature beautiful illustrations (The Never Mind) and soaring titles (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart). And let’s not forget such vibrant inclusions as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (an audio book read by Henry Rollins and Mark Hamill) and Thank You and You’re Welcome (an “entertaining volume of ‘Kanye-isms’” from the humble pen of Kanye West).

Yes, some of the items on the list are simply meant to inspire lighthearted literary recreation during the summer months. But in keeping with the reverential tone of this column, I’d like to give props to all the great stuff included below that was released by small presses on shoestring budgets. In fact, I encouraged participants to mention their own work — zines or books they’ve written, recent titles they’ve released — in hopes that you’ll seek out these fine publishers and publications, for summer reading and beyond!

So enjoy the selections below, and whether you’re embarking on an epic road trip, taking your lunch break in the park, or floating on a raft in the waters of Fiji whilst drinking a piña colada out of a coconut shell, may you never be without good reading material.

Without further ado, the summer reading list:

David Lasky, Comics Artist and Teacher

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, by Anders Nilsen (Drawn and Quarterly)

Escape From Special, by Miss Lasko-Gross (Fantagraphics)

Happiness? An 826 Seattle Comic Book (826 Seattle) — I edited this.

365 Days, by Julie Doucet (Drawn and Quarterly)

Lone Wolf and Cub, Volume 16: Gateway Into Winter, by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (Dark Horse)

Hunter Clauss, Freelance Journalist and Chicago Public Radio Contributor

Crime, by Alix Lambert

The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore

Y: The Last Man, Volumes 1 – 10, by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm, by Ulrich Haarburste

Fantomas, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

Jocelyn Burrell, Editor, South End Press

Books I truly wish I could read again for the first time:

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, by Frank B. Wilderson (South End Press)

The Collected Stories, Leonard Michaels

Ariel, by Sylvia Plath

Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde

Jonathan Messinger, Co-Owner, featherproof books

The Facts of Winter, by Paul LaFarge

Jamestown, by Matthew Sharpe

Nellcott Is My Darling, by Golda Fried

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet

I Am Death, by Gary Amdahl

Kathryn Lebo, Development Associate, Richard Hugo House

The Real West Marginal Way, Richard Hugo — memoir

The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald — memoir

Set This House in Order, Matt Ruff — fiction

The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook, Sharon Kramis and Julie Kramis Hearne — cookbook

Dog & Me, Kary Wayson — poetry

Kaya Oakes, Writer and Former Senior Editor, Kitchen Sink magazine

Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk — An excellent critical overview of both underground and mainstream comics that will be interesting to both comics addicts and laypeople. Newly out in paperback too, for all of us who are too poor to buy hardcovers.

Catching Tigers in Read Weather, by Andrew Demcak — One of the most powerful, kick-ass books of poetry I’ve read in ages (and I wrote one of his cover blurbs!). It’s from a very cool small press called Three Candles.

Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.W. Nuttall — A fascinating analysis of Shakespeare’s — well, thinking, and not too dense or overly academic. Good for people who think they’re scared of Shakespeare.

Anything from the 33 1/3 series of books about albums — Good for a few hours of informative and entertaining music-related reading.

The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders — Proves that essays can be entertaining. When people talk about nonfiction being dry or dull, this book is a good counteractive weapon.

Liz Mason, Manager, Quimby’s Bookstore

The Bad Lyrics Project, by me: Liz Mason! — I am very proud of this zine. It’s a sociological study of sorts of rock music lyrics. I personally think it’s very funny and entertaining, but then I’m the author!

Caboose #5: The Health and Recreation Issue, also by me: still Liz Mason! — A look at my adventures in the world of both traditional and alternative medicine with my weirdo undiagnosed illness (which has since been diagnosed as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, but I’m doing pretty rockin’, all things considered).

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by Sandra and Matthew Blaksee — This book is authored by a mother-son science writing team. It’s all about maps in the brain and how they’re affected by what goes on around you. Heavy shit, but they make it light and fun.

Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda — What I like about this book is that occasionally the author has some nice spiritual experiences that make the story juicy, but he learns a lot on the way, which makes him seem like a regular person.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach — The same author who wrote Stiff (about human cadavers) and Spook (about the afterlife) tackles sexual physiology in a hilarious and PERSONAL research book chronicling what happens during the ol’ in-and-out.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks — This is read on CD by a full cast, and the cast rocks! Henry Rollins, Carl Reiner, and a bunch of other folks — even Mark Hamill, who is actually really good. The price ($14.99) is about what you’d pay for the book in soft cover, so you might as well get the CD set. Max Brooks, by the way, is Mel Brooks’ son, in case you’re curious. This book is all about the zombie war that came close to eradicating humanity. Very apocalyptic and dark, but totally compelling.

Mairead Case, Managing Editor, Proximity magazine

Awe, by Dorothea Lasky (Wave Books)

Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, by John Darnielle (Continuum)

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, by Johannes Göransson (Apostrophe)

Lust, by Ellen Forney (Fantagraphics)

Kill All Your Darlings, by Luc Sante (Yeti)

Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm, by Ulrich Haarburste (Serapion)

Shoot the Buffalo, by Matt Briggs (Clear Cut)

The Age of Flowers, by Umberto Pasti (Pushkin Modern)

Beauty Talk and Monsters, by Masha Tupitsyn

Any interview Sylvere Lotringer ever did (most on Semiotext(e))

Chronology, by Daniel Birnbaum (Sternberg)

Complete Minimal Poems, by Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling)

Selected Poems, by William Bronk (New Directions)

On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, by Erick

Lyle (Soft Skull)

Dancing After Hours, by Andre Dubus

Cabinet magazine’s Colors column

Marco Kane Braunschweiler, Co-Owner, Golden Age

The Never Mind, by Robin Cameron — A small limited-edition drawing publication with a lot of funny transcriptions of real and fake conversations.

WON magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2, Autumn 2008 — Featuring: Daniel Wang, Will Sweeney, Aaron Rose, Ken Werner, Mårten Lange, The Changes, Nienke Klunder, Robert Cook, Thobias Fäldt, Amanda Maxwell, Linus Bill, Jeremie Egry, Andrew Long, Thomas Baldischwyler, Ben Barretto, Hoger Czukay, Vernon Treweeke, Deanna Templeton, Matt Wolf, Rosemary Scanlon, and Sarah Larnarch.

Wikipedia Reader, by Various Artists — For this project, the publisher asked artists with varying interests to create a thread of linking Wikipedia articles starting with something they found interest in, and continuing to other topics from links within the page. The results are a group of similar or dissimilar topics that are all linked together linearly. This is a really fresh, tasteful book.

Accounting for Dummies, by Somebody — Seriously, this is really good to read.

Kingsboro Press, Volume 1, Issue 3 — Sixty-four pages of Riso printed glory. Features interviews and work with artists like Inka Jarvinen, C.W. Winter, Kim Hiorthoy, Karma International, plus writing from KBoro regulars like Alex Gartenfeld, Yan Yan, and Jonathan Basile.

Martine Syms, Co-Owner, Golden Age

Getting Things Done, by David Allen — For all rippers and rulers.

Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History, by Robin Kinross — I’ve been trying to get through this all year. Maybe now I’ll finally have a chance.

Appendix Appendix, by Stuart Bailey and Ryan Gander — The perfect conceptual art supplement to marathon TV watching (available at Golden Age).

The Kingsboro Press, Issues 1 – 3 — My art/design/culture periodical of choice (available at Golden Age).

Thank You and You’re Welcome, by Kanye West — The man, the performer, and the poet graces us with wise words. I got it for free, but it’s still priceless. I’m trying to find a way to make it required reading for my students this summer.

Richard Nash, Publisher, Soft Skull Press

All About Lulu, by Jonathan Evison (Soft Skull)

Black Flies, by Shannon Burke (Soft Skull)

The Good Fairies of New York, by Martin Millar (Soft Skull)

My Zorba, by Danielle Pafunda (Bloof Books)

The Changeling, by Joy Williams (Fairy Tale Review Press)

Zach Dodson, Co-Owner, featherproof books

Bicycle, by Paul Fattaruso (St. George Press) — This clever little book will make you want to ride your bike all summer long.

This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, by Susannah Felts (featherproof  books) — Our first young adult novel. Set over a dramatic, nostalgia-drenched Nashville summer.

Paper & Carriage, Issue 3 (Green Lantern) — A beautiful letterpress cover and Henry Darger inside! How could you go wrong with this Chicago-based  “slow media” magazine?

The Order of Odd Fish, by James Kennedy (Delacorte) — Reading this debut young adult novel by Chicago author James Kennedy is better than a nuzzle on the nose from Aznath, the Silver Kitten of Deceit!

boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, by Zach Plague (featherproof books) — I uncomfortably recommend my own book to anyone who is listening.

Mule magazine, Issue 5 — It’s mystical!

The Mayor’s Tongue, by Nathaniel Rich (Riverhead) — It starts off with an awkward sex scene. Need I say more?

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, by Jason Brown (Open City) — Save this lachrymose short story collection for a rainy indoor day.

photo credit: yaaaay

1. Once, when I was still a cub, not more than four months old, my father took me to the edge of our pride’s territory, marked by his rank, generously administered urine, and said, “One day, son, you will be King of the Jungle.”

Even then, in my impressionable infancy, I could sense that my father was not well.

We lived in northern Kenya, in the semi-arid scrublands, with acacia plains and rocky hills and a brown river that disappeared and reappeared capriciously. None of us had even seen a jungle, much less fantasized achieving dominion over one. We were like any other pride — the children suckling and playing in the dirt, the women stalking the veldt for clinically depressed zebra too despondent to run away — but my father, his gaze fixed on the faraway mountains, clearly longed for something more.

“King of the Jungle,” he repeated, his eyes strained and yearning, hungry for whatever lay beyond the damp, demarcative grasses where he had relieved himself.

My father was the only male in our pride, a frequent bone of contention between my aunts, who hated him, and my mother, who defended him, albeit halfheartedly and more out of reflexive contrarianism than loyalty. Our family’s sororal bickering was constant, inescapable, but it grew most venomous at dinnertime, when we’d gather around the eviscerated carcass of a dik-dik or impala and my aunts would recall the many suitors who, thanks to the impassioned appeals of my mother, were regrettably spurned in favor of my guileless, freeloading, good-for-nothing father.

“Remember Charles?” Aunt Ruby said during one such dinner. “Healthy head of hair on that one.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Aunt Nyanza concurred. “Charles.”

“Nice, firm flank too,” said Ruby, gnawing on a femur bone. “God, when I think of running my paws through that golden, lustrous mane . . .”

“Shut up,” my mother said. “Shut up.”

My father said that when he met my mother she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and he’d seen quite a few. He’d left his home in the Serengeti in the waning days of the wet season and had wandered for three years in search of a pride of his own, systematically rejected by every female from the Olduvai Gorge to Mount Kilimanjaro due to his laughable appearance and his weak, ineffectual roar. Having never had to hunt his own food before, my father found solitary living exceedingly difficult, and by the time he reached northern Kenya he was bleary-eyed, malarial, and meatless, a staggering skeleton draped with a mangy, slipshod carpet of a hide. When he first saw my mother, standing victoriously, radiantly over a freshly intercepted antelope, his mind raced to think of something clever to say, something charming, that would forever endear him to her heart, but instead he staggered to a stop, let out a pathetic, muffled groan, and passed out, ten meters away from the perplexed, amber-eyed beauty he was certain was his one true love.

When my aunts tell the story, they emphasize their immediate discernment of my father’s uselessness, unburdening themselves of any blame associated with our family’s subsequent, unrelenting misery. He first appeared to them as a sorry, slumped sack of bones dragged by my mother beneath the shade of a fig tree, and when he was deposited at their feet my aunts said, “You expect us to mate with that?” and spit indignantly in the dirt.

“Oh have a heart,” my mother said. “He’s starving. What do you want me to do, leave him to the buzzards?”

“Yes,” said my aunts. “That is one appealing option.”

For a week my mother kept a vigil at my father’s side, talking him through his deliriums and delivering leftovers from the day’s hunt, despite the clamoring protests of my aunts. They warned her that once he regained his strength he’d be rutting them left and right, saddling the pride with all kinds of malformed, plus-or-minus-limbed offspring, but she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, he’s perfectly harmless. When he’s better we’ll send him back to the Serengeti.”

“Should have left him to the buzzards,” said my aunts, shaking their heads, but my father paid them no attention. In his fevered state the only voice he could understand was my mother’s, cool and gentle, like the tributaries of the brown river blessedly trickling across the grateful, sun-parched land.

How my parents fell in love, the narrative of their romance, came to me piecemeal, one anecdote at a time, the facts often disputed voraciously by my aunts, who attribute the whole affair to any number of reason clouding sub-Saharan illnesses. There was the story of my mother dragging my father to the river, her body straining against his, fearing heat stroke, as he mumbled deliriously about every lioness who hadn’t loved him. There was the story of my mother licking my father’s coarse, patchy fur, grooming him, after my aunts’ barrage of mange-related insults reduced him to tears. During this time, other males approached our pride, ones with rippling muscles and luxurious, flowing manes and a minimum amount of parasites, but after every date, every romantic rendezvous in the tall grass, my mother found some irredeemable fault in her latest suitor and drove him away with gnashing teeth and expletive-laced vitriol, much to the displeasure of my aunts.

“What happened to Leon?” said Ruby after one such incident.

“I told him he was arrogant,” said my mother. “He didn’t care for that so he left.”

“I heard you called his mother a cryptosporidic whore,” said Nyanza, “and that you threatened to chew off his testicles.”

My mother thought for a moment.

“That may have been mentioned, yes,” she said.

As this scene played itself out again and again, the handsome gentleman callers sent storming away by my mother’s antagonistic rants, my aunts’ frustrations reached the boiling point.

“What happens when we go into heat,” they lamented, “and the only male for twenty kilometers is that cripple beneath the fig tree?”

“Oh, go hump a donkey,” she’d tell them. “Go screw a jackal.”

For my father, meanwhile, these tumultuous times were the happiest days of his life. Every morning he’d wake to a glorious sunrise, the outstretched shadows of doum palms and thorn trees gradually receding as the sun lifted into the cloudless sky, and there would be my mother, watching over him, the nascent sunlight outlining her features with an otherworldly, angelic glow. He wouldn’t be hungry, his shriveled stomach wrecked by starvation, but he’d eat whatever scraps of antelope or water buck she brought because he wanted to please her, and because she paid him such close attention while he was chewing, as if she half expected him to choke on a vertebra shard and asphyxiate.

photo credit: DavidDennis

As he ate my father would tell my mother about the Serengeti, his home, with its verdant grasslands, its crocodile infested floodplains, its statuesque rock outcroppings standing stoically alone like sentinels, and my mother would listen raptly, transported, for the first time in her life, to a world beyond the urine-soaked boundaries of her family’s territory. My aunts ridiculed him, refused to accept that the Serengeti even existed, but my mother believed in my father’s homeland the way one might believe in heaven – a perfect, magical dream that would be too heartbreaking to conceive of as untrue.

One day, as my father described for my mother in vivid detail the Great Migration, when over a million wildebeest trek two thousand miles clockwise, following the shifting bounties of the rainy seasons, she asked him if he’d like to join her for a walk along the river. Where a month ago there had been nothing but dust and desiccated skeletons was now a muddy, free flowing stream, and as my parents strode along its banks they were both filled with an overwhelming sense of rejuvenation, of lush and fertile possibilities, of the full circumference of the Circle of Life. Neither of them remembers exactly what was said, how the discussion of migrating wildebeest and zebra and Thomson’s gazelle turned to the harbored secrets of their hearts, but what is certain is that, wordlessly, my mother followed my father from the banks, a smile slowly forming on her face, and disappeared into the tall grass, not to reappear until the following morning again painted the dusty valley with light.

Four months later, I was born.

2.

By the time I came into this world the river was gone, as was the romantic idealism of my parents’ courtship. The principal culprits, of course, were my aunts, whose relentless potshots at my father got my mother so worked up she would frequently run into trees while chasing gazelle, saddling her with maddening headaches and, possibly, brain damage, which gave her near constant rants at anyone in close proximity a lurid, surreal quality, like the nonsensical rhetoric of dreams.

My aunts’ misgivings about my father were, for the most part, aesthetic – his lice-ridden fur, his laughable roar, his distinct aroma of sweat and antelope dung due to infrequent bathing – but there were also more serious, pointed complaints, such as the endlessly repeated claim that my father was, for all intents and purposes, useless. My father was a dreamer, not a doer, and often when he was supposed to patrol the outskirts of our territory or chase away carrion from last night’s kill he would instead wander aimlessly along the dry riverbed, contemplating such profundities as the origin of species and the eloquent beauty of the Circle of Life as vultures devoured our lunch with uncontested abandon.

“Look where philosophy’s got us now,” my aunts would say as we gnawed on the bones the vultures had left behind. “If philosophy’s so great, how come philosophy never chased away a buzzard? How come philosophy never caught a gazelle?”

Despite all of this, all the badgering, the name-calling, the cruel, malicious jokes, everything would change, at least temporarily, when my aunts, due to unprovenanced forces beyond their control, went into heat. Several times a year, on no regular cycle or schedule, they would grow uncharacteristically warm and agreeable, withholding their complaints and insults, instead inquiring pleasantly about my father’s wanderings at dinnertime, about the quixotic ruminations of his ever-churning mind. At night, as cicadas chattered from the trees, my aunts would beckon my father into the tall grass, purring insinuating phrases and disappearing behind a curtain of wind-rustled stalks, and then the rustling would intensify, as if the grasses were being throttled by an unseen storm, followed by panting, and growling, and then, suddenly, silence. “What was that?” I asked my mother, but she shrugged me off, said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” and, despite the insistent drone of the cicadas, I could hear her softly weep. The next morning, freshly emerged from the grass, my aunts reverted to their old callousness, their perennial disgust, and it was as if the previous evening never happened, as if it were nothing more than a ponderous midsummer night’s dream.

My half brothers and sisters, born not out of love but of lust, were every bit as vicious and disagreeable as their preternaturally unhappy mothers. Though they were younger and smaller than me they possessed strength in numbers, and therefore had no trouble making my life as miserable as imaginably possible, biting, cursing, dunking me in the newly flowing brown river, all the while parroting every insult they’d heard their mothers sling at my hapless, long suffering father.

As a result, when my own mother gave birth to two baby girls, I was ecstatic, eager to acquire relatives who weren’t genetically preprogrammed to chew on my tail or devour my portion of antelope. My mother, of course, was equally enthused, her old routines of screaming obscenities and running angrily into trees replaced by the simple, unassailable joy of caring for her precious infant daughters. My father, however, became preoccupied, his brow forever furrowed, his solitary walks growing longer and more frequent, until we barely saw him, except at dinnertime, when he would chew on his bone marrow and endure the jeers of my aunts, silent, unflinching, as if he wasn’t even there. He neglected his familial duties, never groomed, never bathed, spent his waking hours pondering some unanswerable question the rest of us could only guess at, but, even though my mother clearly wished he would spend more time with his daughters, would play with them, would remember their names, she was so enwrapped in her own parental duties that she let my father’s distant behavior go, assumed it was a phase, some form of paternal postpartum depression. Thus, despite everything, life was relatively harmonious, until the suitors came.

They came from the south, as my father had, but rather than limping in sickly and skeletally they strode confidently up to our borders, regal, entitled, plying my mother and aunts with artificially sweetened solicitations: “Hey sugar, hey mama, what’s good sweet thing? Where you been all my life?” My aunts, thrilled beyond description to be courted again, offered the opportunity to rid themselves at last of my father, who had brought them only tears, tribulations, and ill-tempered children, immediately swooned, crossed the boundaries marked by my father’s excretions and replied in their sexiest purrs, “Hey big boy, hey stud, hey lover, show me what you got.”

My mother, of course, wanted nothing to do with them. She cursed, bared her teeth, insinuated their ancestral line was composed of baboons and Black-backed jackals, but this made the intruding males only desire her more. “That’s right,” they said. “Keep talking dirty, mama. Just like that.” If my father were anyone else, a normal father, a keeper and protector, a pater familias, the suitors would have been chased from our territory at once, spirited away with flailing paws and gnashing teeth, cast back into the bowels of the Serengeti from whence they came, but I had no such father. Instead, as the suitors paced our borders, murmuring the various graphically specific things they were going to do to my mother the moment she went into heat, my father wandered along the river, abandoning his marital responsibilities, contemplating the mystical, ever-confounding question he could never, for the life of him, answer.

For the next few weeks the suitors were a constant presence at the far borders of our land, all sweet talk and bravado, accepting the gifts of antelope meat giddily offered by my aunts and casting devious stares at my mother as she hunted, roaring suggestively as she pursued her doomed, futilely fleeing herbivores. “Okay mama,” they said. “Gonna give you something good to eat tonight.” Whenever my father was around, which was not often, my mother implored him to get rid of the ungentlemanly callers, to for once in his life perform his expected role in the pride’s explicitly structured hierarchy, but he always mumbled, “Maybe tomorrow,” and walked off toward the river, as far away from his rivals as he could get without completely disappearing from sight.

My aunts, meanwhile, escalated their character assassination of my father to record levels, exhaustively detailing every fault, every misstep, every unforgivable personal shortcoming that made my father a blight on their existence, clamoring for his expulsion, his replacement by the handsome lotharios displaying their physical perfection at the outer reaches of our territory. And even though my mother had aired many of the same complaints, the same indictments, had assailed my father with her fair share of frustrated, hourlong marital rants, she refused to give up on him, to sell him out, compelled by her mystifying love to defend him, unconditionally, even if all of Africa was against her. For her, love was simply a winning argument over logic, a justified absence of reason. Love was nothing more than seeing a miracle when everyone else saw a mistake.

And so the battle lines were drawn: my mother, faithful to the end, fighting tooth and nail on behalf of her ever-wandering, ever-muttering husband, versus my aunts, shrieking for my father’s eternal banishment, sex-starved and drooling over their newly arrived Serengeti Romeos. Dinners, never pleasant or peaceful in the first place, became the favored arena in which the familial war was fought, and it was not uncommon for thirty minutes of no-holds-barred brawling to erupt between the first and second bites of whatever hooved mammal was lying bloody and intestineless before us. The suitors, meanwhile, kept prowling the perimeter, licking their chops over the sleek, sassy females thrown into a furor by their arrival, and after the dust settled and the lionesses licked their wounds and returned to their meal in icy silence, the amorous newcomers would laugh and salivate. “Mmm mmm,” they’d say. “Girls want it bad.” But as long as my mother violently resisted, as long as she preserved my father’s honor with her snarling jaws and powerful forelimbs and unequivocal refusal to surrender, the suitors remained beyond our borders, unwilling to overstep their boundaries, limiting themselves to mere innuendoes of what they would do when they finally crossed that invisible, aromatic line.

Until the hyenas came.

photo credit: appenz

One of my father’s principal responsibilities, the responsibilities he had been grossly neglecting, was to protect the children from hyenas while the females hunted. Although, as lions, we occupied the upper rung of the food chain, the hyena was a perennial nemesis, poaching our kills and disrespecting our borders, and in times of hunger and desperation they were known to go after our defenseless young. My aunts always kept an eye out for hyenas, as they didn’t trust my father’s abilities in the least, but one day a particularly lengthy and strenuous hunt took them far from our pride’s territory and a pack of hyenas slipped in from the south, stealthy and methodical, roving right past the no doubt grinning suitors as they pressed forward in their ravenous quest, while my father, the keeper and protector of the pride, was but a speck in the scavengers’ luminescent-eyed periphery, standing with me at the opposite end of our land and staring at the distant mountains, promising me my jungle kingdom.

When we returned we found my mother with her head in her paws, wailing, beside herself. We found my aunts, glaring at my mother unsympathetically, as if to say, “I told you so.” We found blood, on the grass, in the dirt, smeared on an acacia tree, the narrative of struggle, the artifacts of tragedy. And we found what was left of my young sisters, scattered, unceremoniously, across the dusty ground.

Not a word was spoken. Not an insult or a reproach was volleyed. My mother just sobbed, my aunts glared, and my father, not knowing what else to do, headed for the river, his head bowed, his feet tracking his children’s blood across the dusk-shadowed terrain. Meanwhile, I, I did nothing, did nothing but watch as the suitors arrived, crossing our borders for the first time, whispering, “Hey sugar, hey mama, hey sweet thing,” as they closed in on my surviving family members, what was left of my pride.

3.

After my sisters’ deaths was when my father’s fascination with the jungle grew into an all-encompassing obsession. It was all he talked about, all he thought about, all he dreamed about – his sleep spent exclusively in vivid revelries of lush canopies, chattering primates, insects the size of his paws. He wasn’t sure exactly where the jungle was, had heard it was somewhere to the south, beyond the horizon-obscuring mountains, but he was determined to find out and relentlessly pestered my mother and me with grandiose plans of escape from our stifling scrubland existence, plans that were unfortunately met with little enthusiasm from either party.

“I swear to God,” my mother would say, “if you mention the jungle one more time, I’m going to rip out your vocal cords with my teeth.”

As annoying as our father’s jungle-related ramblings were, both my mother and I recognized that his immersion in a rain-soaked, tree-lined fantasy world was his only means of coping with the profound and humiliating changes that had occurred in his life ever since the hyenas devoured my sisters and cousins and the sleazeball suitors became full-fledged patriarchs of our family. For one, although he was accustomed, by now, to the relentless insults and diatribe of my aunts, my father now had a male chorus of derision to contend with, tenors and baritones in conspiratorial alliance with Ruby’s alto and Nyanza’s soprano, and whereas before he had shrugged off the verbal slings and arrows of my aunts by retreating into his mind, his rich inner life, the post-hyena five part cacophony of defamation and degradation proved too much for his natural defense systems to handle, and it was the rare dinner where my father didn’t convulse in paroxysms of anguish and shame and crawl inside the bone-picked husk of a zebra, as if he could disappear inside its lifeless body, exit his misery in the void that had replaced flesh and blood, heart and soul. Another, even crueler blow to my father was that my mother no longer defended him, no longer bared her teeth and cursed, no longer possessed even a spark of the fire with which she once fought for his honor, holding her tongue instead of lashing out in saliva-soaked monologues, chewing her antelope instead of chomping at her sisters’ faces, and this, more than a thousand slurs from my aunts and uncles, this is what truly devastated him, forced him to retreat into fancies of tropical fruits and sylvan waterfalls and resourceful pygmy tribes every time my mother stood by silently as the pride methodically tore him to pieces.

Still, even though my aunts had assumed my father would leave, that my mother, in her grief and anger, would demand his departure, he remained, my mother refusing to let him go, forever loyal, regardless of the pain and suffering he inflicted daily to her heart. This, of course, aggravated my aunts to no end: “Why is he still here?” they’d say, every time his sorry, slumped shape appeared in the distance, returning from a day’s worth of staring hypnotically at the jungle-hiding mountains, but my mother never had an answer for them. After burying her daughters, she never had an answer for anything. She just sat in the shade of the acacia trees and let the wind speak for her, the rustling of leaves, sounds free of bitterness and hatred, blessedly stripped of all meaning.

Despite the past success of my own, acutely honed strategy of surviving family life, which involved never speaking to my aunts and maintaining, when possible, a distance of no less than a kilometer between myself and their children, the incorporation of the suitors into our pride meant that my days of isolationism were numbered. I was approaching the age when a male typically leaves his birthplace, searching, as my father had, for a pride of his own, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my mother alone with my new, lecherous uncles and their unsavory intentions, and spent my days immovable from my mother’s side, ready to defend her to the death while my father was off somewhere imagining his jungle coronation.

Strangely, my mother, over time, softened her aversion to the suitors, so that, while not welcoming them with outstretched paws, she was able to make it through dinner without biting large chunks of cartilage out of their ears every time they referred to her as “sugar mama” or “sweet flanks.” She appreciated my company, but assured me that my round-the-clock protection was unnecessary: “They won’t do anything,” she’d tell me, as I obsessively monitored their every movement. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

Even more disconcerting was that, due to my blossoming sexual maturation and the absence of any potential leonine mates, my REM sleep became inundated with strange, lurid dreams involving herbivores: frolicking in the grass with antelope, moonlit heart-to-hearts with zebra, forbidden kisses with a reticulated giraffe, her gorgeous eyelashes fluttering, her long, slender neck seductively lowering to reach my awaiting mouth. I mentioned the dreams to no one, not even my mother, but it was apparent to everyone that some repressed inner secret was tormenting me once I began skipping meals, refusing to eat anything with hooves, subsisting only on insects and ostrich and the occasional vulture, mysteriously fallen, dead, from the sky.

I started accompanying my mother and aunts on hunts, and as they pursued their terror-stricken ungulate prey, their victims’ adrenaline fueled limbs succumbing to exhaustion, their bulging eyes seized by fear, I imagined strolling with the doomed impalas and dik-dik along the river, at a reflective, leisurely pace, conversing easily about the approaching wet season, the migratory patterns of flamingos, the incomparable beauty of a heart-stopping north Kenyan sunset. I saw myself nuzzling them, grooming their fur, sharing intimate moments in the tall grasses, and when the animals were finally brought down by my family members, their throats crushed, their carotid arteries severed, I was overcome by despair, sinking into an unshakeable state of lethargy and depression. Eventually I took to joining in the chase, tearing after the terrified beasts myself, and as they blathered and blubbered incoherent prayers for deliverance from death I supplicated them: “Please, don’t run away, I only want to talk to you. My intentions are honorable and pure.” But when I finally caught a gazelle, tackled her to the ground with my powerful forelimbs, my primal conditioning took over, her vain struggles to escape thwarted by my knifelike canines, and when she finally stopped moving, allowing me to gaze for the first time deep into her beautiful, limpid eyes, she was dead, as were my romantic yearnings, freeing me to resume my old eating habits, dream my old dreams, of dusty grasslands and cloudless skies, of acacia trees and faraway mountains, of hunting and feasting, raining and bleeding, of birth, rebirth, and murder.

The day my father left us for good was the hottest day of the year, the sunbaked land cracking in complaint, the brown river reduced to little more than a pathetic, insignificant trickle. I was poised at the edge of our property, surrounded by dust and dying grass, and as wobbly, erratically circling birds fell from the sky and littered the earth with their dehydrated bodies my father gave one of his jungle pep talks, staring off into the distance with his trademark expression of daydreaming, reality-free rapture.

“In the jungle it rains almost every day,” he said. “Plentiful food, plentiful water. Lots of shade. And the diversity! Most diverse ecosystem on the planet.”

No one knew where my father got his information. We guessed half of it was made up, half was gleaned from migrating birds. He could talk about the jungle for hours, if allowed, raving about the plant life, the delicate cycle of death and regeneration, decaying trees sacrificing themselves so that others may thrive, grow to one day reach the towering canopy, but no one permitted him more than five seconds of discursive jungle rambling except me, so I alone was the less-than-enthusiastic sponge for his endless font of knowledge, the unwilling future monarch of his fairy tale kingdom beyond the mountains.

As of late, I had been spending more time with my father, less with my mother, sensing that it was he who most needed protection, needed the love and support my mother could no longer give him. My mother, though she had passionately lobbied for my father’s right to stay after the carnage of the hyenas, had become aloof, arctically unaffectionate, and to any outsider her relationship with my father would have been indiscernible from her relationship with the suitors: reserved, removed, distant. When my father took me on our one-on-one walks to discuss the jungle I found it difficult to follow his obtuse, droning lecture style, his frequent pedagogical digressions, but it wasn’t ultimately important whether I understood the difference between two species of parasitic creepers or comprehended the ecological importance of the termite, all that mattered was that I was there, not interrupting him, not berating him for voicing the one dream he had left.

“In the jungle,” he said, “there are no seasons, no climatic changes. Time itself stops. The entire world is suspended in the beauty and simplicity of now.”

When we walked back to the center of our land, to the sheltering acacia trees where we sought relief from the cruel and unusual punishment of the sun, I immediately sensed that something was amiss, out of place, feeling like a white stork whose jittery behavior signals the coming of a terrible storm. We saw my aunts and two of the suitors, recovering from heat stroke in the shade, but my mother and the other suitor were missing, odd since, in her depression-induced torpor, my mother rarely left the sanctuary of the acacias except to hunt.

“I’m going to check down by the tall grass,” my father said, heading off to the now nearly absent river. “I have something I want to tell her about the perils of deforestation.”

What my father discovered in the tall grass was never entirely clear, but minutes later he came bounding from the thicket in a psychotic rage, hot on the heels of the reappeared suitor, unleashing every last venom-laced barb of vitriol that, until now, he hadn’t had the strength to utter. Not long after my mother emerged, tears streaming down her face, and she could only watch as the other suitors rushed to their compatriot’s aid, forcing my father to the dirt and mauling him with their teeth and claws, my father’s lean, unathletic physique no match for the fierce, rippling muscled triumvirate battering him with bites and blows. I tried to defend my father, charged the suitors with a bloodcurdling battle cry, but my aunts blocked my path, grabbed me by the neck and pinned me to the ground, and I, like my mother, could only be a spectator to the carnage. “He’s had this coming for a long time,” my aunts said, sneering. “Let the big boys sort it out.”

When it was over, my father was still alive but virtually unrecognizable. He staggered to his feet, tottered, then fell again, his coat crimson with blood, his face gashed, an ear missing.

“Come on, darling,” he said to my mother, struggling to find his footing. “We’re going to the jungle.”

My mother turned away. She couldn’t bear to look at him.

“Beautiful birds in the jungle,” he continued, in between expectorations of blood. “Red, gold, green, every color of the rainbow. Brilliant plumage. And the songs – enchanting.”

My mother was sobbing now. She was shivering, on the hottest day of the year, shivering and shaking. She retreated to the tall grass, where her transgressions had transpired, and as my father described the layers of vegetation in the jungle – the emergents, ninety meters tall, the canopy, forty meters, the understory, the forest floor – she disappeared, at first a faint rustling betraying her movements, and then, finally, nothing.

“How about you son?” my father asked me. “King of the Jungle. Lord and Conqueror. Top of the food chain. What do you say?”

What could I say? I knew the story of my father’s emaciated three-year journey from the Serengeti. Traveling with him on his quixotic, head-in-the-clouds quest was tantamount to suicide. What could I possibly say?

When my father realized I was not coming, that my mother was not coming, not joining him in his exodus to paradise, he took a long, final look at our pride, his pride, surveying our family and the sun-cracked landscape with the saddest face I have ever seen, and then turned around and commenced his journey, crossing the edge of our property, the boundaries he himself had laid, toward the distant mountains, toward the homeland he had left to find his one true love. The suitors and my aunts left, not bothering to watch him recede into nothingness, but I stayed, stayed until my father was indistinguishable from a speck in my eye, a windblown piece of dirt, dust, and then I, too, turned away, returned to the safety and sanctuary of the shade. The next day the brown river dried up, disappeared, vanished, and as my father trekked to the glorious, tree-lined, rain-soaked promised land the rest of us were left to wait impotently for the river’s return, for its life-giving waters to rejuvenate the barren, sun-parched scrublands. And yet, we knew it would reappear, somehow sensed that it would not, could not, abandon us, and so we waited, unafraid, waited for the waters to flow from some mystical, faraway source, a gift of nature we could barely even begin to fathom.

This self-evident truth has finally made its way to the news cycle courtesy of Major General Antonio Taguba, who first investigated the Abu Ghraib abuse. In the preface of a Physicians for Human Rights report on the medical conditions of detainees, Taguba writes:

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post gives a refresher on Taguba’s 2004 Abu Ghraib report:

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Taguba’s sentiment jives with this weeks’ Senate investigation that stated the Pentagon demanded harsh interrogation tactics and that Abu Ghraib was the result of a systemic policy of torture demanded by the highest levels of the Administration. (Noted filmmaker Errol Morris makes this exact point in his recent documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, which examines many of the individuals who were involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal, whose actions were dismissed by the Administartion as aberrations.)

The Geneva Conventions are international law, not merely suggestions.Yet the Administration, as it has done with habeas corpus, has treated them as guidelines, as if they were an idealistic, academic exercise the nation is not bound to observe.

If this debate takes the same circuitous route that these things have in the past, Gen. Taguba will be once again dismissed by Bush and the neocon spin-doctors, like many generals who’ve had their decorous service to the country tarnished by Bush and his fellow draft-dodgers. Which would be a travesty, but far from the first.

It must be noted, thankfully, that the Administration does not define the discussion as much as it once did. Could the tide be turning? The LA Times notes that Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, has announced a conference to plan a war crimes trial targeting Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld et al.

Will we ever see Bush be tried? Doubtful of course, if historical examples of the fallout of Presidential malfeasance, such as Iran-Contra, are any indication. All the same, it’s become too easy to be cynical about whether justice will be served for the crimes of the Administration. This country has been run by wanton crooks for the past eight years. McCain and Obama will never call them to account, so the people must. Before only historians remember what they have done, let’s make our voices be heard, and at demand that Bush, Cheney and their Constitution-spurning cronies spend the rest of their days in jail. It may be a fool’s errand, but it’s a righteous one.

But there seems to be a glut of fiction in the market in the past year poking fun at the upper crust, almost as if publishers have been trying to get in their Jay McInerney-throwback titles before it all becomes dated. From Janelle Brown’s Silicon Valley satire, All We Wanted Was Everything to Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions, it seems to be cool as ice cream to play comic blueblood sport. One novel that does it better than the rest is Katie Arnoldi’s The Wentworths.

The Wentworths are a Southern Calfornia family with as many children as Mexican maids. The head of the family is the philandering septuagenarian Gus, who even when he’s feeling his age, manages to coerce his mistress into a little harmless fellatio, even when she’s late to pick up her kid from school. There’s Conrad, a Patrick Bateman-esque womanizer who only invites his girlfriends to dinner when he’s ready to dump them. There’s Norman, who’s so sensitive (read: homosexual) that he can’t leave the house. And there’s Becky, who has her husband Paul so badly browbeaten that he can hardly touch her without her written consent.

The plot goes something like this: when Conrad brings his latest girlfriend Angela home to dinner, the whole family knows the relationship is over. Unfortunately, this time, Conrad has messed with a girl who’s determined to become a Wentworth or kill trying. Once Angela tells Conrad she’s pregnant, a chain of events is set in motion that ultimately wreaks havoc on each and every family member.

The targets of her satire seem somewhat familiar, but Arnoldi’s style of sparse prose is pitch perfect and cuts at the heart of the soullessness of The Wentworths’ motivations without diminishing their ability to redeem themselves. For example, the novel is told from a number of different points of view, all appropriate to the character. Hypersensitive Norman’s first chapter is entitled “I am Norman Wentworth.” Clocking in a curt 255 pages, Arnoldi wastes no time to give this family what’s coming to them. And when the tragicomic ending comes, prepare to be surprised by the surprising amount of sadness you’ll feel for these horrible, horrible Wentworths.

ALBUM REVIEW:

"Doves" mp3

The Black Angels break out of their well-defined sound at points, showing more rhythmic flair than seen on Passover, what was strikingly compelling on that album bears the mark of stasis on Directions to See a Ghost. The band does show some signs of progression — the lyrics are more affecting and personal than on the Vietnam War-themed Passover, and the swaths of far-out psychedelic guitar are applied much more liberally. And considering the disaster that was the hidden acoustic track on Passover, it’s a welcome surprise that they avoid acoustic meanderings here.

Without a doubt, The Black Angels have refined their drunken amalgam of Joy Division and Black Sabbath to a science. But considering how much promise band holds, it’s hard not to want the band to reach outside of its comfort zone more than it does here.

All the same, the band puts on a blistering live set. They’re on tour this summer, visit the band’s website for details.

Part one in a series on net neutrality and how it affects us all. Part two will examine Congress’ take on the issue, as well as the Presidential candidates positions.

As ISP’s quietly begin monitoring and barring certain types of web traffic, and some start to experiment with pay-by-the-bandwidth systems, the net neutrality fracas is going mainstream.

Google has been a strong proponent for net neutrality, as the company has plenty of its own vested interests — they don’t want to pay out of their pockets to have their pages delivered to you quickly. There are plenty of caveats when you align with a huge corporation like Google, but in cases like this it’s useful to have that sort of lobbying and legal power on the side of free speech.

Boing Boing reported this past weekend that Google is developing a net neutrality detector, by which users can find out if their ISP is barring — or slowing down — some of their traffic without telling their consumers, allowing us to be informed customers and citizens.

To date, the debate has remained largely within the realm of tech activists and lawyers. There are plenty of reasons why everyone should care about its implications. It’s instructive to examine, in laymans terms, what exactly net neutrality is and why everyone, from the tech-savvy, at-risk-youth (to paraphrase Dan Savage) to their grandparents should care.

This explanation of “net neutrality 101” from media activist group Save the Internet serves as a useful introduction to the concept:

When we log onto the Internet, we take lots of things for granted. We assume that we’ll be able to access whatever Web site we want, whenever we want to go there. We assume that we can use any feature we like — watching online video, listening to podcasts, searching, emailing, and instant messaging — anytime we choose. We assume that we can attach devices like wireless routers, game controllers, or extra hard drives to make our online experience better.

What makes all these assumptions possible is “Network Neutrality,” the guiding principle that ensures the Internet remains free and unrestricted. Net Neutrality prevents the companies that control the wires bringing you the Internet from discriminating against content based on its ownership or source. But that could all change.

The biggest cable and telephone companies would like to charge money for smooth access to Web sites, speed to run applications, and permission to plug in devices. These network giants believe they should be able to charge Web site operators, application providers, and device manufacturers for the right to use the network. Those who don’t make a deal and pay up will experience discrimination: Their sites won’t load as quickly, their applications and devices won’t work as well. Without legal protection, consumers could find that a network operator has blocked the Web site of a competitor, or slowed it down so much that it’s unusable.

The network owners say they want a “tiered” Internet. If you pay to get in the top tier, your site and your service will run fast. If you don’t, you’ll be in the slow lane.

It’s difficult to get people engaged with this sort of technical, abstract concern, particularly when there are so many other urgent issues requiring attention — the environment, the endless wars on terror. Still, net neutrality is far from a minor issue, and the result of this debate has many implications on our freedom to discuss and pass on this sort of news in accessible way.

For example, consider the media shutdown in Kenya in November. For days, Kenyan bloggers were the only people able to report news and photos from the region. This is a prime example of essential reporting for our era. But in a non-network-neutral environment, this sort of on-the-ground reporting would be demoted in priority to clear up bandwidth for branded advertising ‘experiences’ and big money-funded, social network detritus.

Let’s not let the Internet become the new network TV or Clear Channel’d radio system, where only rich conglomerates can broadcast to the masses, where independent media is run through a strangling bandwidth sieve. It’s far too easy to accept something as being the status quo once it becomes policy — indeed, many scoff at media activists who dare to remind us that the FCC’s stated mission is to protect equal access to the airwaves we own.

It can be hard to get on the soapbox to defend a media largely associated with cheap porn and LOLcats. but let’s not forget this important innovation in egalitarian media must be defended at all costs. Net neutrality is more than confusing tech-speak. It’s a battle for the only vestige of free media. The Internet may be shit, but it’s the only media outlet we still own.

Part one in a series on net neutrality and how it affects us all. Part two will examine Congress’ take on the issue, as well as the Presidential candidates positions.

This particularly callous distinction I’ve ascribed to Mr. Friedman stems from the conflict between my repugnance for his writing and my respect for the Times. Friedman’s position on the Op-Ed board compromises the intellectual integrity of the paper, an embarrassment that the paper can ill afford during the well publicized ‘Death of the Newspaper”. The introduction of blogging into highbrow publications like the Atlantic Monthly is upping the intellectual ante required for staying competitive in the ever-expanding realm of Internet news and opinion.

The Times had good intentions; let’s first consider Mr. Friedman’s rise to prominence.

Thomas Friedman first made a name for himself as a journalist, and not a particularly bad one. His coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre won him his first Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, it was again, his on-the-ground reporting from Jerusalem that earned him his second of three Pulitzers. Building what is an impressive resume, the Times found Friedman worthy of a position as Foreign Affairs columnist. That fateful day, New Years 1995, found the New York Times permanently stained with the ink of a Thomas Friedman’s pen, an ink whose color has also sullied the reputation of the Op-Ed board for 10+ years.

Who could blame the Times? They are a newspaper after all, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist seems a logical candidate for a promotion. Not so. Don’t be deceived by his CV.

Friedman wasted no time in revealing his disastrous formula for ‘success’ as a NYT columnist (At least 3 will appear in any given column):

1