Young peripatetic artist-intellectual, son of Hawaiian activist musician and stepson of a country songwriting legend, who grew up in Hawaii and Bakersfield travels to Austin to get into music and independent filmmaking but arrives with credit card debt and has to start temping immediately. Stumbles into a career in nonprofit administration. Tries to start a hip hop youth center with a friend from work. Helps organize a seven hour hip hop jam in an East Austin park. Falls in and out of like-plus with a fellow temp worker, falls madly in love with a sexy bright-eyed social worker. Road trips around Central Texas. Finds his long lost stepfather in dire straits in a trailer park outside of Page Arizona after a long journey driving west, reading from the world’s religious traditions and journaling.

Defines progress. Charts the genealogy of the western idea of progress through ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the early Christian Church, Renaissance Humanism, and the Enlightenment. Defines peak anthropocene. Examines the demise of progress in the waning years of peak anthropocene. Predicts depopulation and the decline of large scale organized human organization in the context of resource depletion in a ravaged biosphere. Published January 2024.

A Policy History of Standards-Based Education in America is a narrative history of the development of standards-based education in the United States over the last several decades, from the perspective of anarchist cultural studies. There have been other books on the evolution of federal education policy, but few have struck the right balance between describing how it actually happened while still providing a theoretical framework, and none have kept the focus specifically on standards-based education. These related books have also rightly noted the great diversity of players, factions, interest groups, and organizations that helped move federal education policy from “equity,” to “excellence,” to “accountability” over the last four decades. This book argues that big business was the primary empirical driver behind standards-based education and «global economic competitiveness» was the primary ideological driver. Finally, the book concludes by interrogating the implicit claims embedded within global competitiveness ideology; that the present international economy will continue as it has indefinitely, which is mathematically impossible. Unless things change quickly, this planet is heading toward economic, environmental, and geostrategic shocks of the very first order of magnitude. An eco-pedagogy for anarchist bioregions might be part of the solution.

Hawaii, which I love dearly, has never been able to keep me. As a young man, I wandered the world looking for love, adventure, art and ideas, an incorrigible vagabond, a budding artist-intellectual. First love found and first love lost: everything changed and nothing changed: “a passage with no return through a world whose meaning is elsewhere.”

Their marriage was a clash of cultures and world views: a white American vagabond artist-intellectual husband and a native-born Chinese corporate attorney wife. He was a bohemian with the heart of a bourgeois and she was a bourgeois with the heart of a bohemian. In the overlap, they found something splendidly blended, a deep karmic connection. But it was never easy. Half-way through a trip around the world, he stopped to take a job teaching composition at a university in Phnom Penh. After he settled into the beguiling, tragic and enigmatic culture of Cambodia, these two highly verbal people began a densely packed email correspondence, both struggling mightily to keep their unlikely love alive. Finally, he demanded a divorce. By the time he returned home to Hawaii, he was having second thoughts. Little by little, he wooed her. They would give it one last try.

A divorced couple has one last torrid affair in Saigon, as Luke monitors rapidly escalating events in native Hawaiian affairs back home.