Barry Graham's Blog, page 113

I’m rereading Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. An important book, but I quibble with something he says early on:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

I think that’s a shallow reading of The Prince, which, read with Machiavelli’s other work, suggests to me th...

As I fell asleep last night, I heard a desert rainstorm, and there arose a memory-image of another rainstorm, years ago. It was in the mountains, late at night, and the rain was battering a small cabin, as if it were trying to find an entry point or just flatten the wooden structure. Inside it was warm, and in a small bed two sleepy bodies lay wrapped around each other, bare skin glued together by drying semen.

One of those bodies was mine. The other was that of a woman I loved, and who loved...

Statement from Leah-lynn Plante, activist imprisoned for staying silent.

A couple days ago I was talking with the brilliant Phoenix writer, urbanist and architect Taz Loomans, and we discussed whether Paul Penzone has a chance of beating Joe Arpaio in the election for Maricopa County Sheriff.

She was more optimistic than I, and I hope she’s right to be, but I think Arpaio is unbeatable, no matter what happens, because the Joe Arpaio that people vote for has never existed. As I reported in Harper’s Magazine 11 years ago, he has always been a myth. “Sheriff...

Here’s me with Vince Larue at Phoenix Chaos Theory last Friday… showing off a copy of Dark Heat. Photo by Robert Sentinery

Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer writes:

About 15 years ago, when I was abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, a woman came into my formal interview room early in the morning, sat down and burst into tears. This was surprising, considering she was a pretty rough looking woman, with lots of leather, piercings and tattoos. I asked her why she was crying and she said, “Today in service, like every day, we chanted the Zen lineage and it was all men! I feel such pain for all the women left...

I get quite a bit of hate mail. I’m not complaining - I’m grateful that anyone cares enough to write to me, positively or negatively, and I don’t believe either side.

But one of the most common words the haters use for me is “liberal.” (It’s interesting that the word, which means generous, is so often used as a pejorative.) I hope I’m a liberal person - but I am not, and never have been, “a liberal.”

Liberals don’t really oppose an unj...

“Phoenix, AZ - Valley of the Fucking Sun.” This a version of a drawing Vince Larue did for my novel How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? when it was published in French translation in my collection Regarde Les Hommes Mourir.

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With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want… Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold
- Christopher Columbus

Today the U.S. celebrates an inept navigator who thought that San Salvador was Japan and Cuba was China, and who enslaved, mutilated and murdered the natives of the lands his ineptitude took him to.

Also, it’s not true that most people thought the earth was flat in those days.

I think it’s fittin...

In the good company of Daishin Stephenson and Vince Larue, I headed downtown for First Friday. We started at Willo North, where Daishin has four photos hanging in the boutique. It always hosts the most essential shows in town, thanks to the brilliant eyes and mind of its curator, Robrt Pela.

The new show is of work by Carolyn Lavender and Christy Puetz. I had never heard of either of them before, but I was captivated by Puetz’s animal sculptures; their beads and sequins create a startlin...