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Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

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Growing Up in 70s Television: The Addictive Glory of Marshall, Schwartz, Larson, and Slade

The 1970s in the United States, as seen through the innocent, yet perceptive eyes of a child, was a period marked by profound cultural, political, and religious shifts. The 1970s were a decade where the vibrant promises of the 60s’ counterculture movements began to clash with the realities of ongoing political strife and societal change. The Vietnam War lingered in the background, its echoes felt in living rooms across the nation, while the Watergate scandal shook the foundations of public trust in government. Amidst this backdrop, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and a burgeoning environmental consciousness were reshaping the American social landscape.

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Opera in Mainstream American Culture

With our ASL Opera project picking up steam, I was curious to know just how the “High Art” of Opera has influenced mainstream American culture over the last 50 years or so, and I was surprised to learn, via ChatGPT-4 AI, just how deeply many of the most famous Opera melodies made their way into our shared childhoods and our culturally maintained totems of relevance!

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Seven Seconds in Jersey City is a Lifetime Too Long

My ophthalmologist is always excitable. She enjoys life. She’s an excellent MD. She knows I’m a writer, and a Script Doctor, and she makes bumping into her at her office to pick up my contact lens order, a real delight!

My doctor is also a Jersey City girl, born-and-bred, and she’s tough, and smart, and she knows the city well; and my doctor implored me to watch the new Netflix Seven Seconds cable series because it was about the city in which we spin.

She told me Seven Seconds was dark, and ugly, and that “bad people live here in Jersey City” — but my doctor loved the series, and she binge-watched all 10 one-hour episodes in a single sitting! She went on to tell me I had to watch it too, and that she would be testing me on what happened in the story the next time I sat with her for my annual eye examination. I took her up on her offer — and challenge! — because I had no other choice!

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Reconstruing a Culture: A Reckoning for Retro TV

There was a time in the monument of America — during the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s — when you could have a life, make a career, and be somebody, just by hosting or appearing on, a broadcast television game show or talk show.

Since we now live in the perpetual machine of “everything old is new again” — we can dive back in time, and watch all the old television shows of our youth, now digitized, and Closed Captioned, and made publicly palatable for our short mindsets by removing most of the modern commercials in favor of the old, embedded soap pitches.

Buzzr is one of my favorite retro channels, and orange seems to be the “color of nostalgia” (and 1970s sexiness!) in the logos of these channels of recondition.

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