http://www.ojaiorange.com Lukenbach, Texas: The romance of this place was in my mind as soon as I heard Waylon Jennings singing the eponymous song and my plans to visit have endured ever since. Its hardly a place at all, being merely a collection of ramshackle, wooden shanties clustered around a post office (1849) which now serves a general store offering everything from T-shirts for lady bikers and Stetson hats to guitar-shaped flyswatters. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/091110.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/091110.php YEAR AFTER YEAR, the most attractive magazine to be found is not a magazine at all but the super-sized Taschen book catalog, a giant folio of eye-catching pictures and irresistible text about everything from Michelangelo’s life and works to Japanese cinema, from prefab houses to wearable artifacts. Normally, if you’re on a modest budget, you might wince at the elevated prices of these volumes   ($1000 for a Christo and Jeanne-Claude retrospective, $2000 for Dennis Hopper’s 1960 photographs) but the images shown are so huge, so memorable and so abundant, that just owning the catalog (free) is like having a  mini art collection. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/090410.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/090410.php “The most interesting things in life come looking for you rather than the other way around” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness in Monitor on Psychology magazine. IT’S ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL the way that the U.S. keeps more people in prison than almost any other civilized country. “Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country” says the Economist, reporting that proportionately this country incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan.  One in 400 Americans were in jail in 1970, now the figure is one in 100 with the number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups having increased 14-fold since 1980. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/082810.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/082810.php IT’S SAFE TO GUESS that the general public never hears about what really goes on in our hallowed halls of congress—the wasted time, the hypocrisies, the idiocies, the basic indifference to and contempt for the ordinary people that these inflated, god-like humans display. Some hint of it is displayed in George Packer’s piece, The Empty Chamber, in last week’s New Yorker http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/082110.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/082110.php The cold war is over and we’re still acting as if America has to protect everybody in the world. The average American has no sympathy for keeping 15,000 marines in Okinawa 65 years after the war ended” --Congressman Barney Frank. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/081410.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/081410.php “Google just makes things seem very easy. People don’t realize how difficult it is to make (the search rankings) happen”. --Shivnath Babu, a computer science professor at Duke University. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/080710.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/080710.php “It’s hard to escape comparing the US attitude to the Viet Cong with their attitude to the Taliban. In both cases, the US is supporting a corrupt and incompetent government that is at worst hated, and at best ignored, by the majority of the population” --letter in the Guardian http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/071710.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/071710.php A FOND FAREWELL to my old friend Tuli Kupferberg (September 28, 1923 – July 12, 2010), musician, poet, philosopher, anarchist and underground icon even before there was an underground. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/072410.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/072410.php “Everybody knows that you lose one IQ point for every year you spend in southern California.." “Not so, it’s more like ten points” -- two of my anonymous bicoastal friends http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/071710.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/071710.php (From the Archives) June 2, 2007: THE WILCOCK WEB: South Africa, scene of the 2010 World Cup, is thinking of changing its laws to allow prostitution and drinking in public after noticing the popularity of both at the 2006 WC in Germany (where there are 400,000 legal prostitutes) http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/071010.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/071010.php The Village Voice has been reprinting, on its blog, some of the more than five hundred columns I wrote for the paper in the 1950s. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/070310.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/070310.php “There’s nothing quite like putting the whole family into the car and hitting the open road, leaving your worries behind, driving mile after carefree mile, sometimes getting as many as three carefree miles before everybody in the car hates everybody else and gunfire breaks out in the back seat” —Dave Barry on The Folly of Family Vacations http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/062610.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/062610.php “My take is that you cannot speak the truth about as many things as I do without incurring the wrath of some people who vow every year not to vote for me”—Bill Maher, answering Kay Richmond’s question about why he’s been nominated 19 times for an Emmy but has never won http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/061910.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/061910.php IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, Im returning to New York (coffee anyone?) for the first time in years. My presence is to help with the launch of The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol which, some readers may recall, was part-serialized on this site a couple of years ago. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/061210.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/061210.php   ...REPRINTING timeless columns http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/060510.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/060510.php THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL business book is still selling hundreds of thousands of copies a year and recently became a big hit as an iPhone app. IT will be republished next year to mark its 75th anniversary. Maybe the success of How to Win Friends and Influence People is due to its popularity among all the folk (30m so far) who didn’t buy it just for business but because they thought it could improve their lives. http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/052910.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/052910.php “When I was in college it was understood that argument ad Hitlerum was no argument at all. In other words, any time you resorted to comparison to Hitler, or otherwise brought Hitler into the discussion, everyone knew you had run out of anything useful to say and the conversation moved on. I wish more people in the U.S. had the benefit of that sort of education.” — letter from Erin Miles, Oakland, CA, in Extra http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/052210.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/052210.php “American is perilously close to the return of a 21st century McCarthyism…Step forward President-Elect Liz Cheney, the old fool’s elder daughter… in six or ten years’ time Liz Cheney, now still only 43, will no longer be a soccer mom; what could be more natural than a run for the White House?” — Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/051410.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/051410.php “American is perilously close to the return of a 21st century McCarthyism…Step forward President-Elect Liz Cheney, the old fool’s elder daughter… in six or ten years’ time Liz Cheney, now still only 43, will no longer be a soccer mom; what could be more natural than a run for the White House?” — Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/050810.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/050810.php “Russia now supplies 40% of the EU’s imported gas and we have allowed Russia to divide EU member states over energy policy. (Its) aim is clearly to increase European dependence on its gas supplies…and there is opposition to the creation of a single European policy that would enable Brussels to speak with one strong voice. Dealing with Russia has probably been the biggest failure in the attempt to make a common European foreign policy.” — veteran former British minister Chris Patten in The New York Review of Books http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2010/050110.php http://www.ojaiorange.com/column/2009/050110.php