We’re constantly reminded of the relevance of new-school comics. We recently revisited Joe Sacco’s Palestine to recall the frustration and horrors of daily life in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied Territories, never mind the Israeli invasion. Why we Americans don’t have more sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians is…

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Here, in the New Year, is our year-end list of joyful (and not so) readings, books that kept us from losing our heads while everyone around us was keeping theirs. It first appeared in the Inland Empire Weekly. No pretensions to a “Best Of 2008″ list here. We read dozens of…

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Despite those who think the boat will right itself in 2009, the guys who saw the iceberg early continue to think the ship is sinking. Columnist, professor of economics and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman:

The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around…

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The struggle this English major goes through to understand the current financial mess received some help Sunday when the New York Times published this excellent piece from Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. The two-part explanation of how the economic world has changed and what should be done about it rang true…

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In the future, nostalgia will continue to be hip. Witness Marc Ribot’s latest collective (don’t call it a “project”) Ceramic Dog. It opens with a charged version of the Doors’ “Break On Through,” finds inspiration in the decades-gone downtown New York music scene and, at different times, recalls Zappa, Lou…

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I first saw Freddie Hubbard in 1970 shortly after the release of Red Clay. The band, though not quite as stellar as on the recording (if memory serves and it doesn’t always) did include saxophonist Joe Henderson and Ron Carter playing electric bass and the show, beyond Hubbard’s usual brashness,…

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Yeah, yeah, it’s a long wandering mess that seems to change focus as much as a bifocaled grandmother. But my cover story on greed and Americans’ changing views of capitalism in the January 1 issue of the Inland Empire Weekly , meant to be a (favorable) review of four recent books on…

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MTV’s long-running reality show The Real World tosses a group of contrasting strangers together and then steps back to watch what happens. Natsuo Kirino’s novel Real World throws a killer into the lives of four young Japanese women and does pretty much the same. It’s not only the circumstances that make…

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Life under military rule is an absurd mix of the comic and the tragic. Cartoonist DeLisle, whose previous books document trips to North Korea and China, spent 14 months in Burma—now the self-proclaimed Myanmar– beginning in 2005. This simply drawn memoir accounts his days there while traveling with his wife,…

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Listening through the two-CDs in Bill Frisell’s History, Mystery is much like going through the dozen panels of cartoon artist R Crumb’s “A Short History of America.” In a dozen wordless panels, Crumb takes us through an untouched pastoral setting which gives give way to a single rail line, then a…

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