CULTURAL ANALYSTS

PHIL ROCKSTROH ARTICLES ON HAND

Featuring the art of Angie Rockstroh

Phil and his special muse, Angie

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist, and philosopher bard, living in New York City. He may be contacted by email . Some of the anthology below is currently deployed at a fraternal site, SWANS.COM, but is reproduced here in an effort to help maximize exposure to Phil's original commentary as well as the work of other talented writers at SWANS.COM itself.

LEVEES MADE OF LIES—Rage, Grief, and the Chimera of the American Dream An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water, sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off, incurred by the deluge, will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt, denial, and despair. [9.15.05]

AMERICA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING .. A CONVERSATION ABOUT CULTURE —Part 2 of an exchange to be remembered. By Phil Rockstroh & John Steppling. A freewheeling, often exhilarating exchange between two highly perceptive and iconoclastic observers of America's contemporary predicament...Read at your own risk. [8.3.05]

AMERICA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING Part 1 of a freewheeling, nothing-is-sacred conversation on modern culture between John Steppling and our resident monologuist.

BABY GEORGE INTHE LAND OF THE BUBBLE PEOPLE "In the early 1970s, when George W. Bush was shirking his National Guard duties in Alabama, state Republican Party insiders tagged him with the moniker, “The Texas Soufflé,” due to his habitual arrogance, ceaseless indulgence in braggadocio, and preening sense of privilege and entitlement..." so begins the latest dispatch by Rockstroh on Dubya's improbable career, to the chagrin of his gilded coterie...

MEDICATING THE DEAD A passionate salvo against the cynical medicalization of politics and the persistent, malignant form of historical "innocence" the nation has long labored under...to the grief of multitudes at home and abroad.

THE WORK OF ANGELA TYLER-ROCKSTROH

Angie, whose roots, like Phil's, are in the South, has produced a number of eloquent collages to accompany Phil's essays. These pictures vividly capture the current situation in America. In the near future we hope to start a section on political artists featuring selections such as the ones we showcase below. To see any picture in an enlarged version, simply click on it.

OLDER ARTICLES ON FILE AT SWANS.COM

RUNNING ON FUMES—A JOURNEY TO THE END OF EMPIRE Rising gasoline prices terrify Americans because they threaten our sustaining, cultural illusion of our freedom of mobility...a commercial canard that has turned millions into corporate slaves. Our masters have the mobility -- we have a long commute. How, in any way, shape, or form, are American freeways free? Thus begins Phil Rockstroh inquiry into the banal insanity of our individualized transportation system and other empire dysfunctions...

ON ATTENDANCE OF A FUNERAL IN THE RURAL SOUTH EMPIRE, JESUS AND THE DEATH GENE Ruminations by the author on his journey South and inevitable immersion in a culture that packs as much beauty as ugliness, and which seems to sink, ever deeper into the folds of today's corporate-induced squalor.

OF UBERCULTURE AND THE RIVER "We were primed for proto-fascism by our reflexive consumerism and relentlessness ignorance: As the years trundled on, our customized vans would become Mini Vans that would morph into SUVs and Humvees. It was all about comfort, the illusion of control, and insularity, even then. All about, our right to the pursuit of numbness. We were fledgling Weimar Republicans, clad in faded, frayed bell-bottom jeans." Proto-fascism may indeed have arrived, judging from the multiplying symbols, as the surrender of privacy and actual independence continues to gain momentum in all spheres of American life, always in the name of security, convenience, and necessity.

LOVE, WORK, AND DEATH IN AN AGE OF CARELESSNESS Selfishness is the unacknowledged bastard religion of America, suggests the author, a vice so pervasive as to be almost invisible to most citizens of this smug, benighted and profoundly manipulated republic...What to do? His denunciation packs lyrical precision. "[I]t's high time we confronted the (mundane but deadly) sin of obliviousness of the larger world beyond one's immediate needs, concerns, and compulsions-- the outright careless disregard of anything on earth that does not serve the selfish, short-term needs of a culture overrun by overgrown infant tyrants dropped from the toxic womb of corporate capitalism..."

AT SWANS.COM: SOME CALL IT FREEDOM BUT IT SMELLS LIKE DEATH "We Americans love our freedom; apparently though the freedom to revel in acts of mass murder ranks high upon our list of national pleasures. Nothing new and surprising here, folks: From Wounded Knee to Fallujah, genocide has always been our favorite blood sport. As proof of this, one simply needs to consider the impressive body count of Iraqis that we've rung-up in only two short years of our freedom fructifying crusade in their country."

OF MARGARET MITCHELL, BLIND WILLIE McTELL, WONDER BREAD, NEW YORK CITY REAL ESTATE, AND THE ROAD TO PROTO-FASCISM "The Manhattan neighborhood where I reside, the East Village, is a misnomer...its name was created by real estate hustlers...who, acting on the presumption that the marketing of the area, located north of Houston Street and east of Second Avenue, known previously as the northern section of The Lower East Side, or The Alphabets -- or just simply DON'T GO THERE ..."

THE GHOST IN THE HOLOGRAM --A CONVERSATION AT THE SWANS CAFE...JOE BAGEANT, PHIL ROCKSTROH, & JOHN STEPPLING Three keen observers of the current situation engage in a no-holds-barred dissection of what ails the nation...and the world. No small topic, that.