David Samuels

No one can rightly claim to have much of a clue as to what goes on inside Bob Dylan’s head these days. The man is 85 years old, and somehow still going strong on whatever old bluesman concoction they feed him — likely a mixture of potlikker, microgreens, ginger root, and pussy juice — before … Continue Reading

Music lives inside our heads. That’s not entirely true, though. The music we live by is the creation of individual songwriters and musicians, who hear what we hear, but in a different way, and then they give it back to us, through the channels of their own mastery, and of their own particular … Continue Reading

There are many American dreams, of which the Golden Pineapple is one. As its name suggests, the Golden Pineapple — known upon its market debut as the Del Monte Gold — was distinguished by its Technicolor golden hue, as well as by its sweetness, the product of an ideal brix-to-acid ratio, and an … Continue Reading

The bar at the end of the world is a real place, that much I’m sure of. As one infinitesimally minor node in a myriad of conscious, thinking beings, connected to each other in real-time through smartphones and other mirror-like devices, my rule of thumb is that everything I can imagine is real — … Continue Reading

A dark sun waits at the desert’s edge. The Sphere’s pictures on its outer skin are visible from miles away, that’s how clear and perfect they are, how good the resolution is. As you approach, it’s like sitting before a giant digital snow-globe, 16,000 pixels by 16,000 pixels, which is far higher … Continue Reading

The angel that watches over Evan Dando from heaven has been doing a bang-up job for the past thirty years or so. Dando remains the dream boyfriend who would rather be playing his guitar and doing drugs than cuddle up. He is the Bertie Wooster of ’90s rock stars, with his happy dolphin smile and … Continue Reading

The routing of the soothsayers and magicians who have lately been haunting our county is clearly an occasion for rejoicing. No more will upright citizens wake up in the morning to find their chickens missing, or to find bags of chicken bones behind their barns; nor will they find their donkey’s … Continue Reading

You can smell what’s coming. It isn’t good, what they’re cooking up. It’s been almost a decade now, so we already know the drill: Keep quiet, do what you’re told, don’t think wrong thoughts, and make yourself as small as possible, in the hopes of maybe becoming invisible. This is plainly no recipe … Continue Reading

Great artists talk directly to God. Sometimes, more often than not, they do it only once. Maybe a handful of times, at best. Why God chooses some people to talk to and not others is a mystery that other artists love to savor and ponder and get jealous about, which is a solid reason to prefer the … Continue Reading

The Greyhound bus ride from New York to Memphis takes 24 hours, so you may as well do something pretty with your time, like getting drunk before noon off a liter of J&B or tagging the initials "Nc" on the window or checking your blood pressure at the drugstore next to a transfer station. Or you … Continue Reading

Picking glitter off the carpet of the Ace Hotel in Seattle in the dog days of August is the reward I get for leaving home and venturing into the great beyond. Every year, at around this time, I descend from my farmstead in order to report on what remains of the America I once loved, and still have … Continue Reading

There was once a boy who fell to earth. He was delicate and small, his hair was blond, his face was smudged, and he was born nowhere — but he had an unusual talent for writing songs that remind listeners of the Beatles, with lyrics that were a strange combination of puns and jokes and pure misery. … Continue Reading

Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s … Continue Reading

The legendary American con man Titanic Thompson once said that “In every bet there’s a fool and thief.” Thompson’s refusal to be a fool, the role for which he had seemingly been destined from birth, helped make him one of America’s greatest heroes of the 1920s, the age when the American hero was … Continue Reading