Among the books I bought on a recent visit to Borders was The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg.

Post 500! "Street Life" by Randy Crawford

Used to great effect in Jackie Brown.

Borders Hilo: The Last Month

Borders Books in Hilo will close 21 August. I'll try to document its last month of operation, and share some memories.

31 July update: The headline from today's Hawaii Tribune-Herald:

Walgreens May Move Into Border's [sic] Building

An excerpt:

Walgreens, a nationwide drugstore chain that arrived in Hawaii in 2007, is planning its first Big Island store, a Hawaii County administrator has confirmed.

"It's You", Stevie Wonder-Dionne Warwick Duet

Even a minor Stevie Wonder song is better than most songs by most artists. This one, a duet with Dionne Warwick, is lovely.

The Case for Rail

in the August issue of The American Conservative:

The Case for Rail
For half a century, Washington has subsidized road socialism and stranded us all.

William S. Lind: What’s so conservative about federal highways?

Glen Bottoms: Keeping costs under control

Christopher B. Leinberger: Private development can fund public infrastructure.

John Norquist: Why cities still matter

John Robert Smith: Saving downtowns

Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?

asks Kunstler.

The reality I spend these days rambling the river with is the reality of a nation riding a great wave of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming vampire nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all be wishing desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow and the kindly touch of a loving hand and the dim memory of what it was like to care about anything or anyone.

Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss... and decided that we liked what we saw in there.

Bret Easton Ellis on "Tavis Smiley"

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201006/20100629_ellis.html?vid=1534066991#video