Blog
Search the blog archives:
Vigilantes are US
The urbanist Jane Jacobs celebrated the city’s “organized complexity.” She rhapsodized over “the daily ballet of Hudson Street”—her home in Greenwich Village (The Death and Life of Great American Cities,1961).
For Jacobs, her competitor Louis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938) offered merely “a morbid and biased catalog of ills” (Death and Life, 20). Mumford’s solution, the Garden City, promoted flight to the suburbs that was enabled top-down: by President Eisenhower’s interstates and by Robert Moses’s parkways.
What made the city’s chaos livable for Jacobs came bottom-up: “eyes on the street.” Density on urban streets promises safety.
Improvisation’s Invisible Design: On Not Swallowing Chaos Whole
I count 99% Invisible among my favorite podcasts. Sold with his warm, infectious voice, Roman Mars’s central idea, summed up recently in the “Brilliantly Boring” episode, is that “a hallmark of great design is that you don't notice it.” I think the same can be said of improvisation’s often exquisite formal dance. Improvisers claim loudly that they are just making things up, chaotically going in many directions discursively. A closer look, however, shows that amidst the chaos, formal design emerges.
The Treachery of Images, or: Trump’s New Replacement Theory
We are drowning in images and overrun by brands. While the electorate cried out to know Kamala Harris and the policies she would pursue, what she gave us was an image: the prosecutor who would know how to handle felons (like Trump). It was a great brand, but the suit lacked stuffing. Her prosecutor image had history but lacked future: what policies would she stuff into her presidency? Trump responded with an image: Biden-Harris’s treasonously high egg prices. Trump’s image was powerful enough to efface the fact that his promised tariff policy would make the price of eggs stink to high heaven.
Sometimes images lack stuffing, and sometimes images hide stuffing to come.
Selling Spontaneity
You may associate spontaneity with jazz or comic improv. But the direct, all-embracing experience that spontaneity promises has been deployed to sell blue jeans, one of America’s gifts to popular culture.
Jeans were born as long-wearing workpants. J. W. Davis, inventor of the five-pocket, riveted blue jeans, sold them at his dry goods store in Reno, Nevada. They were meant for the mining community (note the pickax in the patent application). Unable to afford the patent office fee, Davis approached Levi Strauss, his denim cloth wholesaler in San Francisco. In return for half interest, Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant born in Bavaria, funded the patent. Improved by human artifice — rivets — the original jeans were anything but natural.
My Conversation with Alice Waters and Davia Nelson
Davia Nelson’s oral history work and Alice Waters’s restaurant career dovetails with my interest in improv. We are all winging it. In this interview, Alice, Davia, and I wing it for the famed North Beach bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, where Allen Ginsberg read a draft of his great improvisation, Howl, in 1955.
“What to Fight For”: The Way Forward
On Election Day I flew up to New York City to celebrate with friends the Harris victory I had begun to think was certain. On the plane I explored what Kamala Harris’s campaign, win or lose, got right, how she addressed something that we desperately need, a rebirth of community.
Apparently, that idea wasn’t right enough for the electorate. But, however wrong I was about the election, I finished this piece mostly unchanged to put a pin in the idea. While the pundits explain what went wrong and the Democrats indulge in their traditional circular firing squad, it’s worthwhile to mark what Harris got right.
A Deeper Dive on Tribalism: On the Eve of the 2024 U.S. Election
Political discourse now echoes the darkest moments before the Civil War. If we haven’t seen an event on the Senate floor like the 1856 caning of Charles Sumner, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, the January 6th perpetrators did far worse in order to get into the Senate Chamber.
Call it Trump Derangement Syndrome if you must but count me among the less surprised at the caning of Mookie Betts in the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Yankees fan Austin Capobianco grabbed Betts’s glove with both hands and pulled the ball out. Capobianco’s friend, John Peter, grabbed Betts’s non-glove hand.
Sign of the times? You bet.
Dionysus-in-Chief: A Deeper Dive into Trickster
“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” So said Donald J. Trump to his Chief of Staff John Kelly. If reelected, he may not find such generals at the Pentagon. But he has them lined up to staff the Oval Office and much of the federal government, many of them Trump-pardoned convicted felons, a plan laid out in Project 2025.
This time the velociraptors will know how to turn the door handles.
Is Trump Weaving Rambling, or Unraveling?
Wee Willie Keeler’s legendary hitting streak of 44 games (1894) was not broken until Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game streak 44 years later. Keeler’s secret for his mastery of hitting? “Keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't.” The first part is sometimes quoted as: “keep your eye on the ball.”
The art of persuasion follows half of Keeler’s advice. Yes, to persuade your audience you must keep your eye clear and on the ball. You must know what the goal of your persuading is, what you want your audience to do. But persuasion flips the second half of Wee Willie’s script. In any kind of communication, however informal, you've got first to hit them where they are. You've got to know your audience, what their assumptions are and what their knowledge of issues is.
Immigration and Contingency: Choose Your Own Adventure
Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Called branching-path narratives or gamebooks, these were meant for readers ages 9–12. They are improvisations in which the reader determines what happens next. They sold more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998, when they were superseded by electronic games. They still sell a million copies annually.
We think of ourselves as possessing an authentic identity which shapes the choices we make. The Choose books acknowledge that we possess multiple selves, each authentic in their own way, in the moment that they possess us.
The War Between The Opportunity Economy and The Prosperity Gospel
The Prosperity Gospel is a fast-growing theologically conservative movement frequently associated with Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, and charismatic Christianity. Wanna know why evangelicals support Trump? Look to The Prosperity Gospel. Also known as the Health and Wealth Gospel, it promises believers the ability to transcend poverty and/or illness through devotion and positive confession. What Trump and the evangelicals share, their hands perpetually out, is the grift, the hustle.
What I Learned Leaving the Ivory Tower
What always made me uncomfortable about my obsession with improv was that it seemed so ivory tower, just part of the worlds of ideas and of the arts. Fuzzy headed? Maybe. Yes, I loved ideas and the arts but was I living in a cloud?
Then I saw Trump come down the golden escalator and give that free-associative rant about American carnage. I knew instantly that the ivory tower had been broached by political realities. To my surprise, what had long seemed stuck in the clouds also had a role—albeit, a dark role—in the political world down below. What had seemed only an idle, artsy fascination now clearly had political consequence. It could affect our daily lives and political realities. And it did.
James Hillman on Show Business Ethics
In “On Show-Business Ethics” (Philosophical Intimations, Uniform Edition), archetypal psychologist James Hillman offers a prophetic understanding of what drives Trump’s power with this base. Writing in 1988, the Reagan era, Hillman points out that, replacing morality as we know it—you know, right and wrong—show biz ethics has instead taken over the agora and the forum, the marketplace and the body politic. In show biz ethics, it is not the rightness or wrongness of action but strictly the question, does it work?
When the Joker’s Jokes Don’t Land
“Trump lost the debate because of his performance, or lack thereof,” Republican consultant Dennis Lennox argues. He adds, “That’s what happens when you wing it.”
Yet, Trump’s ability to wing it, to give the impression of making things up as he goes along, has long served him well. It has again and again helped to persuade his followers that he was trustworthy and authoritative. How? By conveying that, unlike other pols, he wasn’t reading his handlers’ script. He wasn’t basing his thoughts on a white paper written by some empty-suit, east-coast elite. No, what he offered came straight from the gut, so trust him….
Free Form vs. Rulebound: How Fair Needs Foul
My interest in behavior that is impromptu and free form means that strict, rulebound social behavior interests me almost as much. Even more interesting is when the two come together, fighting for dominance: will the perfect rightness or the just-as-perfect disruption of perfection win the day?
So Leonard Cohen thought, too. In “Anthem” on the 1992 album The Future he sings, "Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in."
“I Know Donald Trump’s Type”
So says the prosecutor regarding the convicted felon.
I know his type too, his archetype: Trickster.
Katrina Five Ways
An essay originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of The Kenyon Review, reposted here in recognition of the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
On my first trip back, I found New Orleans unspeakably lonely. The devastation wrought by the levee breaks went on and on, block after block in Lakeview (where I grew up), Mid-City (where my mother lived), the Lower Ninth Ward, and St. Bernard Parish—areas once shimmering with funky life, now lifeless and forlorn. Everywhere dump trucks trolled—FEMA paid by the load. Men with masks directed traffic, sometimes in Hazmat gear. I passed huge dumping areas piling ever higher, flooded cars, blocks and blocks boarded up. I faced one surprise detour after another. Refrigerators taped shut against their stench littered the sidewalks. Many trees and all the grass were dead—drowned. Everywhere I looked for the high-water line— sometimes inches, sometimes feet, sometimes over my head. Gray dust covered everything. It was like being in an old sepia photograph, but with blue sky.
Improv and the Problem of Free Will
Within a week, six friends sent me this brilliant New Yorker cartoon. Clearly my branding is set in stone. Randy, the improv guy.
I may be set but the cartoon’s humor gets some of its impact from its flexibility. Look at it through Randy’s lens and it morphs.
The cartoon’s premise: the Lord is worried that free will might engender improv. Ha! Ha! The hidden premise: fostering free will is improv’s far more likely result. Anxiety about the loss of free will has long plagued mankind...
Race and the Politics of Joy
Kamala’s sudden transformation from a — let’s admit it — somewhat disappointing vice president to a presidential candidate fully self-possessed displays all the marks of her African heritage. It is perfectly in tune with the Black Joy movement.
Of course the transition would look effortless, a sign of its deep authenticity. Like 8-year-old Louis at the Iroquois Theater, like Robert Johnson at the crossroads, Kamala has been touched by Eshu. With a laugh at once warm and cool — blessed by itutu — she rebuilds the Obama and Biden coalitions, and then some. Kamala’s community puts aside Trump’s fear mongering, embracing generosity and joy.
Villains and Heroes
America lost a villain last week, Lieutenant William Calley, the only soldier convicted for the worse known atrocity in the Viet Nam war, the massacre at My Lai (pronounced mee LYE; the Vietnamese call the village Sơn Mỹ).
Yet for some he was a hero. For many in a divided America, he was the hero celebrated in the 1971 spoken word recording, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.”