Black Lamb

Family unfriendly

A neighborhood without kids isn't normal.

October 1st, 2011

BY GREG ROBERTS

Our first mistake was moving into a neighborhood where families are anomalies. This university crowd is mostly childless, and some are downright hostile to the rugrat stage of hominid evolution. Most of us moved here decades ago, arrogant dickbrains from back East, raring to show the rest of the town that we were Beethoven or Twain or Margaret Mead reincarnated. Sickening egotists all. How many Edward Abbey impersonators do you know? Over the years I’ve met 500 of them in my front yard, just by being out there watering the spiderworts and lewisii. One of these guys was devoting his life to removing all place names on the map with the word “squaw” in them. He started a non-profit thing of some sort and probably received a grant. Not a very good Abbey impersonator, he seemed unaware of the author’s salty references to all the races.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Family Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

Eighth Anniversary Issue

We are the Franklin Party of 1847.

January 1st, 2011

BY GREG ROBERTS

These past eight years have seen an enormous effort from the human work force. Billions of people toiled like termites in a million strange tasks from tapping rubber to launching satellites and designing dildoes.

But when you really think about it, hardly any progress was made over those years. Oh sure, the latest laptop computers are as thin as fruit leather and baseball caps now contain little lightbulbs in their bills, but there have been no big breakthroughs, industrial or philosophical. As for myself, I saw an Agami heron and added it to my life list of birds, and I learned to smoke fish properly with just the right brine. And just this year I learned that you can use paint thinner more than once, by letting the paint pigment settle to the bottom of a jar and pouring off the clear spirits. Other than that, the eight years have gone by with little to show, like a goofy dream.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Eighth Anniversary Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

A decent man

Betrayal in Wisconsin

July 1st, 2010

BY GREG ROBERTS

I like reading books that no one has heard of. The 1950 memoirs of Valentin R. Garfias, Garf From Mexico, was limited to 2,000 copies, one of which was discarded by Cal State University, Hayward, ending up at the Salvation Army store. An excellent read — and if you do read it, you are in the dozens, like Spix macaws.

Isaac Stephenson’s autobiography is easier to obtain — there were three copies available on eBay the last time I checked — but there is a good chance I’m the only person on earth reading it right now. That makes me Martha, the 1914 passenger pigeon.

Is it an important work? Very important. Obscurity means nothing. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat languished for more than a century before it was rediscovered. And what about Moby-Dick? So there.

Isaac Stephenson’s remarkable life conveys a clear message to us: people living in the mid-1800s were amazingly resourceful, resilient, and self-reliant, and we need to be more like them. We are malnourished slugs, slaves to larger machines, and mentally torpid as well, the light bulb in our brain flickering like a feeble firefly.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Book Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

Slave children at dawn

If you're Superman, you just might make the minimum wage.

May 1st, 2007

BY GREG ROBERTS

Thank you, Mr. Dickens, for having alerted us to the appalling scourge of child labor. Your good work helped end the abomination of children picking rags and bones from the banks of the Thames, or walking the filthy streets with a bucket, collecting feces for the tanneries.

What’s that, I spoke too soon? You say the slavery continues? Quite so, governor —thousands of children are slouching through the snow and rain, hard-pressed and sleep-deprived, scrounging for coolie wages.

They are newsboys. They ride their bicycles through the dark streets at four a.m., when the methamphetamine addict is still tacking out at 3,000 rpms, when the angry drunk is pulling the tab on his fourteenth beer, when vicious dogs are at the peak of paranoia.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Roberts | Link to this Entry

It’s all true

April 1st, 2007

BY GREG ROBERTS

Everything you’ve ever heard about marriage is true — the wonderful and the grotesque. The wedding itself is always a perfectly joyful event. As a violin player in my mothy tuxedo, a bottle of Argyle chardonnay pulsing through my fingertips, I’ve witnessed countless weddings, and each was a creation of beauty and goodness.
Then, tragically, this happy union is threated by the smallest, most insidious attacks — little arguments about money or dirty dishes — things that can destroy the marriage like microscopic spirochetes that insert themselves into the brains of giants and kill them.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Marriage Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

Wal-Mart to the rescue

Marching gratefully, and greenly, into the future

March 1st, 2007

BY GREG ROBERTS

Under a spreading chesnut tree the village smithy stood. Thank goodness the unproductive lout is now gone, or we’d all be in the poorhouse.

Imagine it’s the year 1814 and you are a gravedigger who needs a new shovel. You ask the blacksmith to pound one out for you, which he does, in about six hours, and charges you three bucks. You earn a buck a grave, and you’re averaging one per day, so that means three days work to buy the shovel. And Longfellow is looking back fondly at this miserable economy? It’s fond, alright, in the ancient meaning of the word: idiotic.

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Category: Roberts | Link to this Entry

Unhand that bottle!

November 1st, 2006

BY GREG ROBERTS

We have proof — undeniable proof, vast warehouses of proof, limitless citadels of it — that people are unthinking ignoramuses. So here’s one more fagot on the fire: the ignorant but ubiquitous belief that alcohol is bad.

True, drunks pull guns and drive cars that kill peope, but remember this: if it weren’t for alcohol, there wouldn’t be a country to pull a gun or drive a car in.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Smoking & Drinking Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

Golden age redux

March 1st, 2006

BY GREG ROBERTS

What’s that you say — you don’t have TV? You think it’s a waste of time? Well, I can go you one better. I haven’t been in a goddamn library in six years. They are an even bigger waste. The time spent walking around the Sydney Sheldon novels, Deepak Chopra mind rot, and the ten-year-old Lonely Planet guides to Big Sur and Nepal can now be spent watching television and bettering oneself.

But you have to do TV right. The person who wastes every night watching bad movies is no better than the reader who burns through a hundred Perry Mason mysteries. They should both be sterilized before they spawn more of their ilk.

To do TV the right way you have to sign up for the big package: a hundred or more channels, including foreign languages, panel discussions, college lectures, string quartets, and nature shows about turtles nesting on the beaches of Costa Rica. The cost is ridiculously low, about seventy dollars a month. How many new books could you buy with that much money, two?

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Television Issue, Roberts, Television | Link to this Entry

Keep Christmas like Cratchit or die!

December 1st, 2004

BY GREG ROBERTS

We sat in the airport lounge and ordered two seven-dollar draft beers. “I’ll be glad when this whole Christmas thing is over,” Dick said. “So senseless. I’m drained by all the fuss.”

“But Nat King Cole ways ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year,’” I told him. “Don’t fight it. Enjoy the celebration.”

“No, I can’t. I hate being forced to buy someone a goddamn electric fruit leather maker because it’s the only thing they don’t have.”

“You poor bastard, you’re doomed to live in a rich country where you’re overwhelmed with goodies. Instead of the fruit leather machine, maybe you should buy lobsters or a bottle of Armagnac. Nobody has Armagnac.”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Christmas Issue, Roberts | Link to this Entry

A global embarrassment

September 1st, 2003

BY GREG ROBERTS

The film industry has been a global embarrassment for such a long time, it leaves me with one wish: I hope it gets even worse, until it reaches the final degree of worthlessness, at which stage I can forget about it completely, the way I’ve dismissed popular music.

What thrill of freedom will be mine, and soon, too, judging from the quality of recent films. Bin Ladin is right — this stuff is real crap. Watching modern movies makes one a dirty little peasant child digging through the vast garbage dump of Guatemala City, occasionally, rarely, finding a piece of string or a bone with some tissue left on it, just enough to keep him slogging on.

The cardboard characters, the lousy scripts, the moralizing that is so heavy-handed you feel like a stockyard calf getting hit straight between the eyes with a sledge hammer, and the perpetrators — people such as Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte — not only get rich, they get respect for their shameless dreck.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Movie Issue, Movies, Roberts | Link to this Entry