I never met J.D. Salinger. 
     I don’t really know a damn thing about him that would give me the right to stand up and eulogize the man and I’m okay with that. All I really know about Salinger is what I have read from him…. Or more accurately, all I really know about him is what I have felt about what I have read from him. And what I have felt leaves me now with a strangely beautiful sense of loss and gratitude in the wake of his passing. 
     I can’t pay homage to the man without feeling a bit “phony” but I can honor the literary evidence, that part of the man’s character and soul that lives with us still, without any experience of the vessel it was originally packaged in or the personality that he projected. And as I celebrate the love I have of the love he had for his brilliant, lonely characters, I also respect the fact that he had absolutely no desire whatsoever to know what I think about his work or what it meant to me growing up.
     I’m not saying I wouldn’t have liked to meet him. I’m a writer for Christ’s sake! I grew up in my dad’s bookstore surrounded by Salinger’s work and his legendary mythos, of course I wanted to meet him, but by the time I was old enough to read his work and understand it (circa 1977) it was already a well-established fact that if J.D. had anything to do with it, I would never come within a hundred miles of him. Nor would anyone who came along with another heartfelt profession of commiseration with Holden Caulfield, or yet another well-meaning inquiry about “the real Glass family”.  

As we watch the climate talks in Copenhagen continue toward their conclusion, many of us are left wondering if there is any legitimate potential for a real solution to the global climate crisis (or any global crisis for that matter) to be found in the process of international deal-making. Political debate and international diplomacy are, by their very natures, focused on the establishment of positions and the art of compromise, and as one of the more popular protest signs carried in the Copenhagen crowd so poignantly reminded us: “Nature Does Not Compromise”. As in, perhaps we’ll find a workable political solution for greenhouse gas emissions standards that all the nations of the world can happily agree to and we may establish a sizeable global fund for mitigating the damage to “at risk” societies and financing the implementation of new environmental technologies in developing nations; we might even get the whole of human civilization to give itself one giant collective hug. And yet the planet may not find our cuddly compromises the least bit convincing, and may in fact drop a hurricane on our heads or unleash a drought on our crops and a famine on our families and be done with us altogether.

Illustration by Peter Karpick

God bless term limits…. After suffering through eight long years of incomprehensibly disastrous leadership by George W. and his bloodthirsty hoard of flying monkeys, it’s hard to believe that we’ve finally made it to a point where we can see a glimmer of political light at the end of the deep, dark tunnel that the regime has bored through our frontal lobes. Of course, we still don’t know for certain whether that glimmering light is the glow of a new day dawning or the diesel-fired headlamps of an oncoming republican campaign bus, but we do know that even a head-on collision with the Straight Talk Express is likely to be far less disastrous than the global carnage we’ve seen as the result of eight years of “Compassionate Conservatism”. At the very least, soon we won’t have to care about anything George W. Bush says or does ever again and that gives us all something remarkable to celebrate. Then we, as a culture, can do what we do best… we can relegate him to the historical obscurity that he so richly deserves and ignore him until he dies and is resurrected as a Republican Saint. Perchance then to be lifted out of our willful forgetfulness just long enough to honor our solemn vow to one day urinate upon his grave.

Photography by Árni Torfason

Forget partying like a rock star…get your ass to Iceland where rock stars go for lessons in serious excess at the Iceland Airwaves music festival. What began in an airplane hangar nine years ago as a poorly funded underground showcase event for local DJs has metamorphosed into one of the coolest international music festivals this side of the Arctic Circle. Each year, during the third week of October, bands and fans, DJs and dance crowds, press and promoters from across Europe, the US, and Canada, migrate en masse, like so many music-obsessed party puffins, to join their Icelandic counterparts in the city of Reykjavik, which hosts the hell-bent four-day extravaganza. With more than 140 bands and DJs expected to play at ten official show venues and fourteen or so unofficial ones, this year’s event guarantees nonstop all-night show hopping punctuated with the kind of compulsory communal substance abuse one would expect from any civilization that goes from the never-ending daylight of summer to the winter’s endless months of perpetual night, with only art, music, sex, and alcohol to stave off the madness. (Give up on sleep altogether and get over to a neighborhood bar to see how the locals do their best late-night hardcore gettin’ down.) The musical mayhem culminates with the Blue Lagoon after-party, wherein a caravan of buses hauls the festival’s survivors sixty miles out to the country’s most famous geothermal spa and deposits the delirious revelers in the silica-rich waters for a serious detox. You gotta’ love this country. What other music festival offers you the opportunity to rock yourself half to death and still return home spa-fresh with silky smooth skin?