Archives
- 09-01-2008
- Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues by Jim Chaffee
- Name of a Flower by Sonia Ramos Rossi
- 08-01-2008
- Sunny Tells Me a Story by Robert Levin
- Breakable Bayonets, Made in China by Tom Bradley
- 03-01-2008
- Report from Brazil: Can they spin it? by Dani Nedal
- 01-01-2008
- Photographic Essay: Communal Bathing by Jim Chaffee
- 12-01-2007
- Reading Comprehension Quiz by the editors
- 08-01-2007
- Unabashed editorial with no partisan prejudice by Jim Chaffee
- 07-01-2007
- Science in Contemporary Fiction: Variations on a Theme of Richard Powers by Jim Chaffee
- 06-01-2007
- Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s by Robert Levin
- 04-01-2007
- Introduction to Joseph Hoepner's A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam by Jim Chaffee
- A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam by Joesph Hoepner
- 02-01-2007
- Thoughts on the Spanish Civil War by Sandra Ramos Rossi
- 01-01-2007
- Pop Quiz on US History by The Editors
- 10-01-2006
- New Vistas in Rottenness by Patrick Gaffey
- 07-01-2006
- Number 99 by Sonia Ramos Rossi
- 04-01-2006
- NSA Station Hospital, Da Nang: A Personal History by Jim Chaffee
- Full SAD Archive
- Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues
- By Jim Chaffee. Gilbert Ryle nailed Cartesian dualism by killing the ghost in the machine. Now someone named Carl Zimmer wants to use noise in the machine to kill a straw man standing in for genetic determinism. This mushy-headed blather arises as an attempt to simulate science-talk to people inured to comic book encapsulation of the most complex ideas. Who knows what the author intended to convey, or why, but the premise demands deconstruction like Lon Cheney Junior demanded a dew claw. more...
- Name of a Flower
- By Sonia Ramos Rossi. The bar in Madrid's gay area was full of smoke and young, pretty lesbians dancing salsa with each other, petite and sun-tanned. I pulled up a high stool at the counter, ordered a Martini and had a look around. To my right a tall, slim, middle aged lady was drinking Baileys on ice, chatting with the bar staff. She looked a little out of place there, I mean she was neither a young pretty lesbian, nor one of the older type of 'guy that understands' who tend to hang out in this place. She did fit another type who normally go there, though; she was a transsexual. more...
- Breakable Bayonets, Made in China
- By Tom Bradley. Try to get a typical Red Chinese lumpen-prole to sit down with you and share a few minutes of pleasantly goose-bumped thermonuclear war paranoia. He’ll first look puzzled, then think about it for half a second. And then he’ll say there are so many of his people around that lots of them are bound to survive even the biggest holocaust Bush can provoke. So, there’s no need to fret. And his lack of a silly grin when he says this cannot be ascribed to the legendary inscrutability of the yellow face. He’s not joking. more...
- Sunny Tells Me a Story
- By Robert Levin. We're in my living room, taking a break on the second day of an interview I'm doing with him for Jazz & Pop—and smoking the amazing bush he's always holding—when Sunny says, "Bobby, I never told you this, but for a while there were people trying to kill me." more...
- Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s
- By Robert Levin. Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play - with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume - four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began - or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method. more...
- Introduction to Joseph Hoepner's A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam
- By Jim Chaffee. In early 1969, Bob Garrison, a good friend from USNH Yokosuka, Japan, and I worked together in Receiving I, the triage unit for NSA Station Hospital in Danang. We'd been in triage for over a year and were damned salty, as the expression goes, so when Bob told me that a Navy corpsman who had come in wounded was really fucked up, I knew the guy must have been bad. Bob also remarked he'd arrived on a Huey gunship, uncommon for a medevac. more...
- A Grunt Corpsman's Memories Of Vietnam
- By Joseph Hoepner. These memories begin New Year's Eve, 31 December, 1968. I'd arrived in Vietnam earlier in the month, assigned as a hospital corpsman with the 3rd Platoon of Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. On the job less than a month, this day I would become senior corpsman with the platoon. more...
- NSA Station Hospital, Da Nang: A Personal History
- By Jim Chaffee. In May, 1999, as I sat drinking in the colonial style bar of the Furama Hotel on the beach next to the site of the old China Beach USO, a loud and boorish former Army nurse anesthetist, claiming to have served with an Army hospital in the Central Highlands, yammered in my face. more...