Browse Topics
Counterculture
Killing Time
I was in a state of denial, of course, not only about the future, but also about the present. For there were many days I didn’t write in my journal, or even look for ways to better my family’s economic picture. I simply did nothing. Looking back from a distance of decades, I wish I’d been more aware that we are given a certain unknown number of days in our short lives.
November 2006
Songs Of Experience
Patti Smith’s Journey From Rock Singer To Mother To Radical Icon
When it comes down to it, my personal identity, how I perceive myself as a human being, doesn’t have anything to do with how other people view me. I hope I’m seen as a good person, but I’m not like Judy Garland: I don’t need the applause. When I perform and the people are happy to see me, it’s a moving experience. Performing is a privilege. I always try to give it my all, no matter what the situation, no matter what kind of shit-hole I’m playing in. But I don’t count on it to reaffirm who I am. I don’t feel lost if I don’t have it.
July 2005
Possessions
Walking around the block after sunset in pj’s and bathrobe, hoarding corks in a million-dollar house, trading wedding crystal for a minitoilet
June 2005
The Good Life Revisited
For reasons I will never know for certain, my ex-husband and I were among the few people to whom Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the back-to-the-land bible Living the Good Life, decided to sell part of their Maine farm.
January 2005
The Experiment
At first it was just another dream that floated out of the sixties, a time of many dreams. There were dreams of peace, of social justice, of people working together and living together and sleeping together and getting high together and making music together. Our particular dream was to move to the country and produce radio.
July 2004
Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War
An Interview With Howard Zinn
We’re fooling ourselves if we think that, because we don’t have a totalitarian system or a military dictatorship, we have a real democracy with free elections. How hypocritical it is of the United States to demand that other countries have free elections, when we ourselves have elections that are not free.
July 2004
Weapons In The War For Human Kindness
Why David Budbill Sits On A Mountaintop And Writes Poems
Leading up to the war, I doubted the value of anything but antiwar poetry. I thought all my nature poems were . . . well, stupid. But the moment the antiwar movement failed and the bombing began, I knew how important poems about birds and trees and loneliness and sex and food and joy were. I knew those little poems were weapons in the war for human kindness.
March 2004
My Green Mountain
Something has always attracted me to the underdog, and it’s hard to think of an enterprise with worse odds of survival than a raggedy-ass hippie paper in a largely redneck Western county. We were up against a reactionary, well-established, deep-pocketed competitor who could afford to wait us out.
January 2004
Idealism
Ghosts of plantation-owner ancestors, sainthood abandoned, a long red scar
December 2003
