The formerly barefoot child

Seeing that many visits come to such a discombobulated website whose visual look you began hating 10 minutes after it was last rush completed is just soul-destroying. After experimenting with some new looks, I realized that the reason the kids were still barefoot was precisely because I don't have enough time for this, so I grabbed the templates from nigelparry.net and switched out the header. I'll pass it off as branding if anyone asks.

The new site isn't finished, but I'm past caring about things like that and there's already a ton of new content that hasn't been available on this site before, including press appearances and interviews, so here's the preview: [link removed as you're already in the new site.]

I was going to wait until the site was more complete for launch but a book a friend in New York gave me came back to mind today, and opened my eyes to all the life flowing by undocumented. The book was by Studs Terkel, the legendary American cultural anthropologist/documentarian who spent his life interviewing the people who populate the streets of America.

Terkel was on John Stewart's Daily Show last night, and the two echoes collided with a blog entry I was rereading while reworking the site, the first entry in the Monkey Times blog. Towards the end of the entry, I was reminiscing about the good old days of A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and how good it is to be able to look back at your life through a document like that, as well as share it on the Internet. And I need to get back to that.

When I did the math, over a million people had read A Personal Diary a few years ago, which helps you remember not to underestimate the Internet as a communication medium.

I miss writing, and I'm in the perfect place for it. Harlem, where I live, is pretty funny, New York as a whole is a blast, so it's time to get back to that place of writing about what's around. The Monkey Times blog, in particular, is where that's going to take place.








more from this section

• A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)

• Contact from Suha Arafat (Friday, March 21st, 2008)

• Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites (Sunday, July 9th, 2006)

• Little Shop of Horrors (Wednesday, June 7th, 2006)

• Return of the Monkey King (Thursday, June 1st, 2006)

• Curiosity and the Cat (Friday, May 26th, 2006)

• The Children of the Shoemaker have Sandals (Thursday, April 6th, 2006)

• Finding an Apartment in New York City (Sunday, August 7th, 2005)

• A Letter from the Editor (Saturday, July 23rd, 2005)