America’s Tour de Corn
Just a Girl on a Bike, peddling through Iowa.
Isn’t Iowa supposed to be flat?
RAGBRAI isn’t the least bit Scottish.
On days like this, they say “the air is close.” We had been biking since 5:30 AM. To begin riding any later would have been suicidal, as the midday heat bordered 100 degrees and headwinds blew air of 70 percent humidity from the sweating Iowa corn.
All day long, ambulances sirened by us in the passing lane as my fellow cyclists succumbed to the infernal afternoon, battling against 57 miles with 3,600 feet of elevation gain. But I found it hard to stop pedaling. Without the lick of breeze created by my pace, my own burning sweat would flood my eyes. When finally, at 2:30 PM, we got to the middle-school sports field that was to be our campground, we dumped our bags in the shadeless grass and deferred setting up our tents to a darker, cooler hour. Tomorrow promised much of the same.
Even with AC, the scene inside the middle school was alarmingly dismal. Bodies strewn about the hallways …
The Man in the White Hoodie
Bob Dylan wows them in Nashville.
Does he even know where he is?
A long black cloud is coming down.
No one can rightly claim to have much of a clue as to what goes on inside Bob Dylan’s head these days. The man is 85 years old, and somehow still going strong on whatever old bluesman concoction they feed him — likely a mixture of potlikker, microgreens, ginger root, and pussy juice — before setting off for the next stop on his Never Ending Tour. But is he ever really here? One imagines that the world outside his windows exists mostly in counterpoint to the umbilical safety of his tour bus, where he listens to scratchy old country and blues records until showtime. Maybe he hears a high ghostly sound that might illuminate the mystery. Or maybe he walks around Nashville and eats hot chicken. No one really has a clue what he does, which is the way he likes to keep things.
A white hoodie shadows Dylan’s face such that only his mouth and his chin take a definite form. He looks like a …
Art is Dead in Frisco
The freewheeling spirit of Jack London, the Beats, and the Grateful Dead has departed from these shores.
Autistic tech barons and fentanyl addicts have snuffed out the glories of City Lights.
Except of course for spoken-word “poetry,” which must be cleansed of all potentially offending words and is subject to a strict 3-minute time limit.
Will Elon’s robots write poems about electric sheep? It’s doubtful.
In a recent article for the San Francisco Examiner, the free thrice-a-week newspaper, critic Max Blue argued that art was dying in SF. That news should have come as no surprise to readers and citizens from Pacific Heights to the Mission District. After all, the city itself is dying from the inside out. Nothing short of an economic miracle can save it, though Mayor Daniel Lurie is trying by making it a kind of free-for-all zone where cannabis dispensaries can legally sell food and alcohol along with weed. Year-round, chefs concoct new and exotic dishes to lure gourmets to tables, and bartenders invent cocktails to vie with the pisco sour, which Peruvians brought here when they came to prospect for gold.
Ever since the Gold Rush, the mega-event that put San Francisco on the map of the world, citizens here have never been reluctant to consume anything they can pour down their throats, insert …
