I started the blog to showcase occasional short-form writing and apolitical content—photo essays, music fandom, film reviews—which would make up the beauty portion of this page, as opposed to the truth face (writing about politics and history). At times, burned out on the perpetual ugliness of America’s political scene, I considered making this blog predominantly cultural in nature.
But major events kept calling, and I found that apolitical pieces generally don’t drive much traffic. Thanks in large part to political writing, Truth and Beauty recently passed one million pageviews.
Five of the top six drivers of traffic were “178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than Donald Trump (even on her worst day),” “The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust,” “Ten reasons Barack Obama is (clearly) the best president in my lifetime,” “Anatomy of a Man-made Disaster: 370 ways Donald Trump failed to protect us from the coronavirus,” and “Romney-Ryan's Road to Perdition.”
“Romney-Ryan’s Road to Perdition” was one in a series of election-year pieces I wrote which contrasted the major party candidates’ policies and demolished the absurd talking point—pushed by Ralph Nader and other charlatans—that presidential elections weren’t that consequential because “the parties are the same.” “Perdition” showed the human stakes of the 2012 presidential election by comparing the public record of first-term president Barack Obama with the policy platform of candidate Mitt Romney, a former moderate who had lurched to the right to cater to the base of the Republican Party he hoped to lead.
“Anatomy of a Man-made Disaster” provided a detailed timeline of the U.S. federal government’s astonishingly incompetent response to COVID-19. This lengthy feature covered the Trump administration’s public health actions (and inactions) from January of 2017 until the end of March, 2020. The timeline grew as I continued to document Trump’s COVID failures in real time. Throughout 2020, different versions of “Anatomy” were picked up by Salon, RawStory, AlterNet, and BuzzFlash. The most recent timeline—covering the entire Trump presidency, based on what was known as of May 2021—can be found here.
“Ten reasons Barack Obama is (clearly) the best president in my lifetime” was a 2017 policy analysis of some of the major ways Obama had improved American life. It covered the night-and-day economic turnaround from when he took office until he left, the monumental achievement of the Affordable Care Act, his raft of measures to counter economic inequality, and his stellar environmental legacy.
“The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust” praised Bernie Sanders while highlighting the danger posed by his most extreme and misinformed followers, who threatened to withhold their votes from the Democratic ticket in the general election if primary voters chose Hillary Clinton over Sanders. Posted in January of 2016 (10 months before Donald Trump’s shock election) and read by over 100,000 people, this feature discussed the near-certainty that Clinton would win the Democratic primary, the fact that Clinton and Bernie Sanders had voted together 93% of the time in the Senate, and the reality that the irrational hostility of many Sanders supporters toward Clinton could help put a Republican in the White House, with disastrous effects on every progressive priority under the sun.
This article pissed off a lot of people on the daydream left, but it was quite prescient. Thanks to Russia’s exploitation of this divide (using 50,000 Twitter accounts to attack Clinton and promote Green Party candidate/Putin dinner guest Jill Stein) and the media manipulations of Julian Assange, who strategically leaked Clinton campaign emails (stolen by Russian intelligence hackers) in the decisive final weeks of the 2016 campaign, America’s left was fractured just enough for Trump to squeak by with a dubious electoral college victory.
Fittingly, Truth and Beauty’s highest-traffic piece was the most important. Posted ten days before the 2016 presidential election, “176 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)” clocked in at over 330,000 hits. Based on a Bernie Sanders statement that “on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day,” the piece contrasted Clinton and Trump’s temperaments, governing experience, and policy agendas. Weeks before the 2016 election, Hillary famously said “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” She was not exaggerating. If someone wanted to write an alternative history novel of how much better off the U.S. would have been under a Clinton presidency, this piece would be a good place to start.
The top-traffic beauty post, and the 5th highest overall, is “Great Guitar Solos, #2: Frank Zappa.” I’ve been a fan of guitar solos for 35-40 years and a practitioner since the early ’90s, so I felt this was a topic I could bring passion to. After beginning the series with a post about the little-known but remarkable Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel, I moved on to Zappa because I’m a hardcore Frankophile and because many people have no idea just how skilled and original his stylings were. This post really took off, so I did two more articles about Zappa’s guitar mastery—“Shut Up ‘N Play Yer Guitar - The Six-String Wizardry of Frank Zappa, Part II” and “Great Guitar Solos, #11: Frank Zappa’s ‘Zoot Allures.’”
I also celebrated the two big rock guitarists of the ’80s, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen.
On the 23rd anniversary of Vaughan’s untimely death, I posted “The Second Coming: Stevie Ray Vaughan,” a lengthy account of his last concert (which I was blessed to witness) and the ways this show influenced my playing as a then-budding electric blues guitarist. I used the phrase “the second coming” because in my opinion Vaughan was (and still is) the only rock/blues guitarist who reached levels of expression and emotional intensity comparable to Jimi Hendrix. His performance that night was mind-blowing, the experience was mystical, his guitar essence lodged into my soul and stayed there ever after. This is one of the most personal pieces I’ve written, my inner child taking the reins while the world-weary social critic stands off to the side.
I have never incorporated Eddie Van Halen’s highly technical playing into my guitar voice, but I’ve always loved it as a fan, so I wrote the tribute piece “Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Fair Warning’: an appreciation” to coincide with Van Halen’s 59th birthday in 2014. There were four members in the original/the true/the only Van Halen, but Eddie owned this down-and-dirty hard rock album, which had no radio-ready hits or frivolous party tunes. The creative tension between Van Halen and front man David Lee Roth fueled an anger and a drive in the guitarist that generated restlessly inventive playing and legions of pale imitators.
“A look back at ‘Strange Fruit’ on the 100th anniversary of Billie Holiday’s birth” (2015) chronicled the creation of (and public response to) Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a timeless and sublime song about lynching in the South which was too much truth for many (white) people to handle in World War II-era America.
Less historically-freighted, but viewed by just as many people, was “Random San Francisco,” one of many photo essays I did about the picturesque city by the bay. Inspired by a workshop colleague’s photography posts, I culled through thousands of photos I’d taken around the city to create a visual walking tour, aiming to capture San Francisco’s spirit and aesthetic for people who’d never been there. Another popular essay, based on a weekday afternoon’s worth of snaps, was “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” which got exposure from the “Lost San Francisco” Facebook page.
Some pieces don’t get the love they deserve because social media page curators don’t think the article will draw eyeballs or because article links don’t jive with Facebook’s profit-driven algorithms, which favor dumbed-down content (memes, videos) that keeps viewers on the platform so that the social media giant can leech out advertising dollars. I’ve had many such articles since I was first published online in 2003, but five stand out from Truth and Beauty.
On the Sunday night-into-Monday morning of January 6-7, 2013, my friend Tom committed suicide. I wrote a post detailing things I’d enjoyed about Tom and our relationship, and later took a camera—with the approval of the others present—to his funeral service, where his ashes were spread on the glistening water by the Golden Gate Bridge. Tom’s parents couldn’t be at the service, so “Gone but not Forgotten” was a window into their only child’s final journey they otherwise wouldn’t have had. It serves as a record anytime Tom’s parents or close friends want to be transported back to that day, that moment, and it was a tribute I’d be happy to get on my death.
“Truth is in the eye of the interpreter: a review of ‘Room 237,’” discusses a 2013 documentary which explored theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” I spent a lot of time on this post. I re-watched “The Shining” (including multiple DVD extras), took notes, and read a bunch of online articles with different interpretations of the film. I even consulted a book which pulled many of the theories together. I then decoded this mass of research, as if trying to piece together a challenging puzzle…all while not really knowing what the endlessly clever Kubrick had intended with his shocking imagery.
Another film review I remain close to is “There must be something in the water: the magic of ‘Muscle Shoals.’” The documentary about a tiny Alabama town that produced some of the best R & B ever heard (with integrated bands, in the early ’60s) has a special place in my heart. My love for “Muscle Shoals” comes through in this post, which is longer than most of my movie reviews, filled with historical context and embedded videos of timeless tracks.
The “Muscle Shoals” review was of a piece with the civil rights writing I’ve done, best exemplified by “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Road to the Mountaintop,” an ode to one of my personal heroes. “Mountaintop” provides a history of the speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the night before he was assassinated, in which he finished by saying that he’d “seen the Promised Land” but “I may not get there with you” thanks to the forces of hate who opposed integration. Prior to writing the piece, I’d visited the site of the assassination, the Lorraine Motel, so I included a few photos along with my impressions of being in that horrible (and yet sacred) location.
There was poetic beauty in King’s speech, a poignancy to the visit, but ultimately the experience was weighted down with the unpleasant truth that a man of vision, hope, and unity was felled by the forces of reaction, and that those same forces control the Republican Party 53 years later in the person of Donald Trump and his thousands of disciples in state, federal, and local governments across the country.
Which leads to my last undersung article, “Charles Bukowski’s apocalyptic vision: ‘Dinosauria, We.” Published in 1992, toward the end of Bukowski’s life, the poem “Dinosauria, We” offers an unflinchingly bleak—yet at times all-too-realistic—glimpse at the human costs of America’s
predatory capitalism and an apocalyptic vision of a future following nuclear war. Framing the poem is the prediction that human beings will ultimately go the way of the dinosaurs. But humans won’t die from an asteroid; the species will destroy itself.
Nuclear war (or a nuclear “accident”) may not come to pass, but the human race will continue to experience a host of self-inflicted horrors. In the nine years since Truth and Beauty came to life, human-induced climate change has marched forward with a grim finality (July, 2021 was the hottest month recorded), the world has been disabled by a pandemic fueled by demagogues and hundreds of millions of primitive people who reject science, and authoritarianism has been on the rise, including in America—land of an attempted coup and a vast array of Banana Republican voter-suppression laws. Even as technology hurtles forward, human beings are really making a mess down here on planet earth.
One thing I have control over is this page. I have plenty of ideas to explore beauty—music features, loads of digital photos which could become narratives, perhaps some standup clips that deserve a shoutout—but the perilous state of the world may dictate that I pour more of my energy into truth.
The future remains to be written. Stay tuned.
(And thank you for reading).
