Culture Vulture
Putting the Me in Media. …Or is it the I?
This is a personal magazine project from the editor of North Bay Bohemian, Pacific Sun, Healdsburg Tribune, Boheme Magazine, Explore Magazine, and other publications. Basically, you could say…
I’ve got issues.
-
Wake Up and Smell National Coffee Day
Americans consume 491 million cups of coffee every day, and a disproportionate amount of that is due to me. Had the National Coffee Association, who conducted the survey, called me, I might’ve helped get that number to a cool half billion. I’m one of the 65% of Americans who drink coffee every day, not because…
-
The Lunar Codex, Or…
Lunacy Codified as a Dick Pic? Like any artist, notions of posterity occasionally creep into my consciousness: Will my work outlive me, or will I outlive my work? Right now, me and my work are neck and neck, though I sometimes suspect my work is killing me (though the result, I suppose, would be a…
-
Talk is Cheap… And I Like It
Check, check… Is this thing on? And… we’re back! One of the pleasures of being a local media gadfly is getting down with O.P.P. — Other People’s Podcasts — yeah, you know me. Daedalus Howell | Story Desk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Here…
-
Meanwhile…At the Story Desk
“Pffft,” you say. “WTF’S a ‘story desk?’” Well, it’s like the news desk at a newspaper but instead of, say, covering the Man Bites Dog beat, it’s all about the seamy underbelly of storytelling and why it matters (beyond fun and profit). Story is the currency of our times. Story shapes our culture, story drives…
-
Second Brain
This was originally written for the March 2023 edition of Philosophy Notes, the newsletter of the Marin Philosophical Society. There’s a continuum that flows like so: data to information to knowledge to wisdom. Age, I believe, is supposed to support that trajectory. And if not age, at least time. In my case, it’s been neither. …
-
The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn: It’s Not Over Yet
“The darkest hour is just before dawn.” Like many Gen Xers, I was introduced to this concept in a Mamas and Papas lyric crackling away on an FM station on a Volvo car radio. It was the ’70s, and the aftermath of Watergate and the war in Viet Nam hung pungently in the air like…
-
Writing in Cafes: From Christine’s Cafe to Cafe Nuvo
Remember writing in cafes? My own obsession began with Christine’s Cafe in Petaluma in the mid-’80s but quickly metastasized into San Anselmo’s Cafe Nuvo and finally into San Francisco’s North Beach. This is where my cohorts and I vainly searched for traces of the Beats, who, by the early ’90s, were so heavily productized and marketed…
-
Nietzsche Is Peachy
-
Beers for Fears