About the author
No Kind of Dancer
It was Robert Earl Keen who sang, on his debut album No Kind of Dancer, “I tried hard to tell you I was no kind of dancer,” and I have always felt I was no kind of one either. Dance was always the one art form I looked at and thought, “I can’t do that, but wish I could.” Maybe it was inhibition. Maybe it was growing up in Texas as a white kid assuming I wasn’t given a dance gene. But that hasn’t dampene...
Listening Past a Writer's Block
At the end of the summer, an old friend asked about the latest writing venture I was working on. The question was nothing out of the ordinary from this man who, for years, has been one to wave a fan at whatever burning embers he saw in my creative hearth before I ever trusted the heat glowing there. I had no answer. I wasn’t writing and I hadn't for at least a month. After a pretty steady stream of short stories...
Caught and Taught
One of the creative venues in which I dwell is photography. Dare I call myself a photographer? I did until I read a post on Rodney Smith’s blog in which he wonders, “If I am a photographer in the first place (which is extremely questionable with great aspirations, and I know one when I see it, but whether I have achieved the Holy Grail of being a photographer is a whole other matter) . . . ” If Rodney Smith, wh...
The Stomping String Rock of Uncle Daddy
In our over-stimulated, access-to-everything digital universe, seeing a band perform live is an increasingly precious commodity. When Uncle Daddy came through town I knew I was going to get a good show, but what I didn’t see coming was the intimate energy so finely-tuned by such well-versed musicians. Hard to nail down, but hope with a side of southern homefries is one way to describe Los Angeles-based Uncle Daddy...
Good Absences
In the span of a week, two things seemingly in opposition began forcing me to rethink how I interact with technology and how even this medium shapes the way I process information and observations. 1) I picked up a book by Shane Hipps called Flickering Pixels, an exploration of how technology shapes our thinking, our relationships, and our understanding of God. 2) A few days later I was given the latest in techn...
Learning My Voice
Last autumn I presented two projects to a gathering of artists, actors, poets and Nigel, a British theater actor who has worked with the likes of Judi Dench and John Hurt. One project was my first photography installation and the other was an excerpt from a book I am writing. No matter how certain I am that they are worthwhile, I have never been a confident orator of my own creative endeavors. In critique, Nigel, in ...
The Illegitimate Son of God
Every religion needs its leader, and in Owen Egerton’s The Book of Harold: The Illegitimate Son of God, it takes Harold Peeks, the “Most Improved Sales Analyst” for Promit Computers declaring his Messiah-hood at the company’s annual awards banquet to start Haroldism. But it takes a complete economic collapse and the destruction of the American Dream to seal Haroldism’s place as one of the great world relig...
