Guernica

The Family Dolls, Featuring Charlie, Leslie, & More

(01/27/2017)

Leslie had one of those big tooth smiles that makes you want to find a van and coax her in and drive her to the end of the earth and stay there with her.

She was attracted to smart bad-boy types, maybe because her father had some bad boy (alcoholic, divorced mom and remarried), maybe because living in the suburbs was like breathing in a plastic bag, maybe because being middle class in 1965 meant having to deal with the Vietnam War, how wrong it was, and how she and every other middle-class kid was culpable. She had an older brother who’d already served time in the brig; he wouldn’t fight. …


Art & History: And why it’s ok to play with Manson Family Paper Dolls.

(11/01/2016)

I have not been good. I have stumbled into this life with the blessing of God, and rolled through 100,000 years of all the disappointments of my millions of mothers and fathers. I have lived as a cruel, selfish killer among my brothers and sisters. I have hurt those I love and been hurt by them. I have sought the destruction of strangers as casually as I glance to the sky, and have found that even the saints are devils, that cognizance itself is contradiction, hypocrisy, and that we are all liars, all the time. And I have learned, of course, that this isn’t the whole truth. …