If you’re an artist, or have an artistic impulse, or care deeply about art, you probably experience the kind of quiet despair that I find in many of my jazz musician friends, my poet friends, my painter friends, and frequently from myself. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to be part of a culture that finds the work that...
Explain if you’re able to a little girl no older than you were when you discovered that pets don’t live forever (or grandmas, or daddies) that no one will die tonight in this speeding metal tube filled with people who don’t look or smell or sound like her family but who, like her family, have...
Have some more. Gluttony will make you too big to fail. Do not despise the two-faced charlatan. Business is business. He who has a wife is rich. He who has many wives is very rich. It is easier to take offense than to listen carefully. It is more difficult to forgive than to be wounded....
To not be the object of scorn, Ensuring that like the wren flitting from branch to bush one never stays still enough To be hit squarely Where it hurts forever. That, of all things, is the vaunted ideal Professed in halls of academia and glossy sheaves of luridly illustrated imagery. Experience tells us so. But...
Should the gratuity be fifteen or twenty per cent? And does the fixation on such matters say something Deeply troubling About the man who would care to cogitate The difference in dollars, paper money, symbolic trinkets — when, in a hospital and upon A battlefield, and in a classroom filled with yearning minds, and somewhere...
Would it be a sin to call him what he is? The misanthropy ooozes from his soul Like churro grease from the pores on your nose after a day Spent at the carnival, where Nineteen bucks will get you a $1.49 plush toy and an affirmation of your manhood. You can smell the bitterness, just...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
