Michael Lipsey's Blog
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Feb.04.2013
Around 1969 I was working as a set designer and Jim Morrison of the Doors came to see the show. He invited half a dozen of us to come to the San Francisco Film Festival where a short film he had made, about his life as a rock star, was going to be screened. When we arrived, there was a crowd...
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Dec.21.2012
Now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down the blather of the pundits explaining how we got into this pointless mess is ramping up. The best answer, as in many questions, is to be found in the classics, and in this case in Homer. After the Twin Towers fell we were a wounded giant,...
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Dec.18.2012
In the fifties my dad finally finished medical school, his internship and residency, and began making money as a radiologist, after a major career setback called The Great Depression, and my parents bought (with grandma’s money that she held onto through my grandparent’s divorce ((that...
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Dec.14.2012
Everyone is posting about gun control, so I will join the rant. Gun control is the third rail of American politics. Most politicians believe that if they touch it they will die, and they are probably right. Hard to believe that when I was a kid owning a machine gun was a Federal crime that would...
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Dec.05.2012
I heard two stories about miserable parents this weekend. Story one from someone I run into once or twice a year. As long as I’ve known him he has made three arduous annual trips across the country to spend a week with his mother. He lives in a remote area, so he has to drive most of a day...
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Jun.07.2012
My grandparents Anna & Jacob were married July 21, 1914 in New York City. My grandmother had recently arrived from London, where she grew up in terrible Whitechapel poverty and malnutrition. There were long periods when they ate nothing but boiled potatoes. She had only two years in...
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Dec.30.2011
These last days of the year are a good time to recall how much of it you’ve wasted, while neglecting those things you were absolutely determined to do when it began. In a few days we will begin the physical (gorged on sweets), financial (maxed plastic) and spiritual (why am I wasting my so brief...
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Nov.23.2011
This is about my process. I begin with several journals in which I try to capture every possible idea or observation that could become an epigram, essay or a chapter in a book. These are unrelated sketches that I might delete, post, or expand. Or they might become the germ of something...
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Apr.10.2011
Watching a big drug bust downtown from my car. Latino-looking guy in a BMW. A uniform stopped him, but he was immediately surrounded by a phalanx of plainclothes fuzz, one wearing a balaclava. Then another copper arrives with a drug-sniffing mutt, who goes beserk over the car -- in & out all...
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Mar.15.2011
One of the more insane pieces of art I ever made was in Chicago, circa 1966. It was a kind of mask, called “I Swallowed An Electric Motor.” The title was stenciled in large letters around a four foot circle of plywood. The eyes were bare flashing lightbulbs. Crude plywood nose. Big red O of a mouth...
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Feb.28.2011
I try to write 1,000 words a day, and on a good day I might keep ten of them, because most of what I write is distilled to epigrams. In a very productive year I might finish as many as there are days, and including some longer pieces, that would require an output of around 365,000...
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Dec.20.2010
I wrote these two paragraphs over twenty years ago. They are from the rough draft of my book on the plumbing industry. I present them just as I wrote them, imagining what the next two decades might bring.
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I have some business with a professional photo lab. They have...
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Dec.15.2010
Shaking the soft, but not limp hand of a billionaire, my first thought was, “So this is how the hand of a billionaire feels.” A hand capable of doing immense things by means of writing checks. A hand that could casually write a check for more than I will earn in my entire strenuous life. I suppose...
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Nov.02.2010
Up on the ridge with my excellent Austrian walking stick -- it gives a feeling of security on these wet slippery paths. Compensates for a bit of unsteadyness consonant with my age. So many features! The comfortable curved corklike handle, variable length, hardened steel changeable points for...
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About Michael
Michael Lipsey grew up in Chicago, a city that does not like to waste words, and after forty years in California, the Chicago still shows in his writing. He read the Great Books at Shimer College and remains an active observer of intellectual, religious and...
Causes Michael Lipsey Supports
Marin Agricultural Land Trust, Nature Conservancy