The Desert is an Ocean
Keeler, California, is a town of six residents, two of whom are brothers
‘A car lay on its back outside, tires upward like the arms and legs of a helpless baby or a flipped-over armadillo’
Crazy Jay is a sweetheart, but don’t let him lock you up in that jail
It was a cold day, but heat never really leaves the desert. The sun is always there to lick you, to make you sweat. Even in the desert night you feel it, the urge to sweat. The brothers were beet-red and angry. “I liked it because it was quiet down here,” one brother told me. “I’ll tell you something, though. The arsenic will eat your silverware, turns metal into white dust.” The windchimes were screaming. The second brother turned to the first, away from me, and added, “Tell that girl she’s got a Borg implant.”
The ride home I felt feverish, worried I’d swallowed remnants of arsenic while sipping from their coffee cans. A part of me worried that there really was an implant in my head — that the second brother was some kind of a desert oracle. That he had seen a falsity, a deficiency in me. That it took living in the middle of nowhere and drinking arsenic to see the inside of a city slicker’s skull. I …
Critic's Corner
Illinoise
Sufjan Stevens is an indie musician best known for his low-key song “Mystery of Love,” which was featured in the film Call Me by Your Name — a gay romance set in Italy, based on a novel by André Aciman. This is why it was so strange to hear that Stevens’s album Illinois had become the basis for a Broadway musical titled Illinoise (with an “e” at the end). “A Sufjan Stevens Broadway musical” hardly seemed like a natural fit for Stevens’s understated style or likely to attract the kinds of people who typically enjoy musicals.
Illinois, the record, was part of a project that Sufjan did where he set out to write an album about all 50 states. He only ended up doing two: one for his home state of Michigan and one for neighboring Illinois. After seeing Illinoise, the musical, twice, I can confidently say that it is the best …
Election Fraud is as American as Apple Pie
Ballot-stuffing, other forms of cheating, lying, and chicanery, are all part of the traditions of our grand old democracy
Elections are games with rules, and rules are made to be broken
Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it, or a Russian agent
“Down in Starr County, we throw out every third Republican vote.” The time was the 1970s, and the speaker was a slight acquaintance of my father who at the time was an assistant attorney general assigned to the state highway department. The visitor to our house in Austin laughed as he recounted how the all-Democratic vote-counters in Starr County would pass around ballots: “This one looks illegible to me. What do you think?”
Texans had long known that Starr County and other South Texas counties along the Rio Grande border between the US and Mexico were notorious for their electoral corruption. Since the early twentieth century, these Hispanic-majority counties had been run by Democratic bosses, both Anglos and elite Hispanics. While black Texans were prevented from voting under Jim Crow, Mexican-Americans in some counties both served in office and voted. But of fear or gratitude to the ruling local …
