Archives
- 06-01-2010
- The Rant of a Hypothetical Slave by Pavel Kravchenko
- 05-01-2010
- Night of the Living Dead: The Party of Palin by Jim Chaffee by Jim Chaffee
- 02-01-2010
- Fear of Merging: A Christmas Tale by Jim Chaffee
- 09-15-2009
- Notes From a Season at the Center of the Universe: Cecil Taylor at the Take 3 by Robert Levin
- 08-01-2009
- Plausible Undeniability by Gil A. Waters
- 05-01-2009
- Meaning and Almostness by Jim Chaffee
- 04-01-2009
- Kalari Payat by Gitanjali Kolanad
- 03-01-2009
- The Ekonomics of Fantasyland by Jim Chaffee
- 10-01-2008
- Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan by Tom Bradley
- 09-01-2008
- Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues by Jim Chaffee
- Name of a Flower by Sonia Ramos Rossi
- 08-01-2008
- Sunny Tells Me a Story by Robert Levin
- Breakable Bayonets, Made in China by Tom Bradley
- 03-01-2008
- Report from Brazil: Can they spin it? by Dani Nedal
- 01-01-2008
- Photographic Essay: Communal Bathing by Jim Chaffee
- 12-01-2007
- Reading Comprehension Quiz by the editors
- 08-01-2007
- Unabashed editorial with no partisan prejudice by Jim Chaffee
- 07-01-2007
- Science in Contemporary Fiction: Variations on a Theme of Richard Powers by Jim Chaffee
- 06-01-2007
- Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s by Robert Levin
- 04-01-2007
- Introduction to Joseph Hoepner's A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam by Jim Chaffee
- A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam by Joesph Hoepner
- 02-01-2007
- Thoughts on the Spanish Civil War by Sandra Ramos Rossi
- 01-01-2007
- Pop Quiz on US History by The Editors
- 10-01-2006
- New Vistas in Rottenness by Patrick Gaffey
- 07-01-2006
- Number 99 by Sonia Ramos Rossi
- 04-01-2006
- NSA Station Hospital, Da Nang: A Personal History by Jim Chaffee
- Full SAD Archive
- The Rant of a Hypothetical Slave
- By Pavel Kravchenko. So who is crazier, one who does not see the walls of his cell or the one who sees the walls but hears footsteps outside that are not there? What is more important, happiness or search? more...
- Night of the Living Dead: The Party of Palin
- By Jim Chaffee. Ever wonder why the scariest caricature of the living dead is a smiling Dick Cheney? Believe me, that is more than a freakish coincidence of genetics. more...
- Fear of Merging: A Christmas Tale
- By Jim Chaffee. I suppose a more apposite memory would be the six or seven inch, finger-thick, brown ascaris wriggling from the anus of a young Marine. Extend the memory to a vision from the Pink Eiga of Japanese film directed by someone like Mitsuru Meike with perhaps the lovely Rinako Hirasawa sucking the worm from the young man's butt-hole more...
- Notes From a Season at the Center of the Universe: Cecil Taylor at the Take 3
- By Robert Levin. In late 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3, a coffee house on Bleecker Street. It's right next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I'd thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column—something about how this new comic exploited his appearance to good advantage.) more...
- Meaning and Almostness
- By Jim Chaffee. Essence and existence. For certain believers in God and such, essence precedes existence. For some unbelievers, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, the statement is reversed. Neither of these notions is anything more than a repetition of the point they are attempting to drive home, however, and as far as existential dilemmas go, the God-no God question is at best meaningless and really a yawner. Besides which all the arguments end in begging.
- Consider instead a chilling ontological-epistemological cocktail with the potential for profound existential hangover. more...
- Kalari Payat
- By Gitanjali Kolanad. The young lithe bodies with long muscles under dark skin glistening with oil and sweat crouch and kick and leap, taking inspiration from the movement of elephant, lion, horse, snake. The actions are low to the ground, curving, punctuated by sudden high twirling jumps, just like the Malayalam script, all curves interrupted only rarely by a straight line. more...
- Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan
- By Tom Bradley. I teach conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets.
- Ever since I first reluctantly mounted the bamboo podium, back in the days when this was the richest country in the world, my campus has been under occupation by platoons of boys who call themselves "cheerleaders." Seeming to grow like bunions out of the karate and judo teams, they’re too bristly to get laid, so they scream and march a lot, and flail their arms around. They’re seminarians of a sort, practicing to be full-blown Hirohito worshipers like those I saw officiating at the Feast of the Transfiguration in A-Bomb Park. more...
- Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues
- By Jim Chaffee. Gilbert Ryle nailed Cartesian dualism by killing the ghost in the machine. Now someone named Carl Zimmer wants to use noise in the machine to kill a straw man standing in for genetic determinism. This mushy-headed blather arises as an attempt to simulate science-talk to people inured to comic book encapsulation of the most complex ideas. Who knows what the author intended to convey, or why, but the premise demands deconstruction like Lon Cheney Junior demanded a dew claw. more...
- Name of a Flower
- By Sonia Ramos Rossi. The bar in Madrid's gay area was full of smoke and young, pretty lesbians dancing salsa with each other, petite and sun-tanned. I pulled up a high stool at the counter, ordered a Martini and had a look around. To my right a tall, slim, middle aged lady was drinking Baileys on ice, chatting with the bar staff. She looked a little out of place there, I mean she was neither a young pretty lesbian, nor one of the older type of 'guy that understands' who tend to hang out in this place. She did fit another type who normally go there, though; she was a transsexual. more...
- Breakable Bayonets, Made in China
- By Tom Bradley. Try to get a typical Red Chinese lumpen-prole to sit down with you and share a few minutes of pleasantly goose-bumped thermonuclear war paranoia. He’ll first look puzzled, then think about it for half a second. And then he’ll say there are so many of his people around that lots of them are bound to survive even the biggest holocaust Bush can provoke. So, there’s no need to fret. And his lack of a silly grin when he says this cannot be ascribed to the legendary inscrutability of the yellow face. He’s not joking. more...
- Sunny Tells Me a Story
- By Robert Levin. We're in my living room, taking a break on the second day of an interview I'm doing with him for Jazz & Pop—and smoking the amazing bush he's always holding—when Sunny says, "Bobby, I never told you this, but for a while there were people trying to kill me." more...
- Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s
- By Robert Levin. Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play - with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume - four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began - or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method. more...
- Introduction to Joseph Hoepner's A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam
- By Jim Chaffee. In early 1969, Bob Garrison, a good friend from USNH Yokosuka, Japan, and I worked together in Receiving I, the triage unit for NSA Station Hospital in Danang. We'd been in triage for over a year and were damned salty, as the expression goes, so when Bob told me that a Navy corpsman who had come in wounded was really fucked up, I knew the guy must have been bad. Bob also remarked he'd arrived on a Huey gunship, uncommon for a medevac. more...
- A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam
- By Joseph Hoepner. These memories begin New Year's Eve, 31 December, 1968. I'd arrived in Vietnam earlier in the month, assigned as a hospital corpsman with the 3rd Platoon of Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. On the job less than a month, this day I would become senior corpsman with the platoon. more...
- NSA Station Hospital, Da Nang: A Personal History
- By Jim Chaffee. In May, 1999, as I sat drinking in the colonial style bar of the Furama Hotel on the beach next to the site of the old China Beach USO, a loud and boorish former Army nurse anesthetist, claiming to have served with an Army hospital in the Central Highlands, yammered in my face. more...