Newtopia | Issue #2 - August 2002

As a young child in the 1970s, I was fortunate to live through the heyday of bathroom graffiti. The notion that "paranoia strikes deep" and that "the man" might take me away if I stepped out of line was well-known to me long before I ever heard the Buffalo Springfield classic "For What It's Worth." While the dictums of 19th century English Romantics, such as Blake's, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," and Keats's "Beauty is Truth and Truth, Beauty," were already old hat by the time I entered Mr. Trollinger's high school English class.

In the 1850's Mormon missionaries enticed us all the way across the Atlantic from the coal mines of Sheffield, England, only to kick us almost immediately out of their territorially omnipotent church, and drive us naked into the wilderness. We howled at the moon and subsisted like Neanderthals and interbred for two generations, or maybe three (amid such genealogical chaos, spouses and spawn are difficult to differentiate), self-creating in a literal sense.

It's natural that the youth culture will also change. Generation X has finally got its shit together and become their parents with nose rings and a bag of grass. And the frosted hair, breast implants and cell phones of marketing construct generation Y seems empty and irrelevant as the Oscars.

I took one of those online political tests recently. They are designed to categorize a person politically by helping determine which party they most align with, based on a series of questions (as if we all must align with one at all). I found the test inconclusive.

My father has been dying for over four years now. I had always conceived of dying as a rapid process. Uncle Cleo had cancer and he was dead within six months. My grandmother got a blockage in her small intestine and died of pneumonia within two weeks. However, my father, who was always a very methodical man, is insisting on taking his time.

Cinema Shrink's August Recommendations

Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border

I once knew this woman named Eva who had been Ken Kesey's mistress for a while.

Editor-in-Chief Charles Shaw tries to make sense of a senseless world and provide a blueprint for tomorrow.

4. A Consuming Question
5. Infidels Have More Fun

An alternative to the life you've been dreaming, the ideas you've been drinking, and the rhetoric you've been eating.

4. A Sign of the Times
5. Hotmail and Nicotine

The current state of affairs in sex, relationships, and sexuality from a global, political and cultural perspective. All things cold, detached, multi-partnered and hedonistic.

Newtopia associate editor Greg Everett's unfiltered column. It's a little dirty and doesn't always taste too good, but it's real and it keeps you alive.