About the author
How We Don't Talk About Musicians: The Irrational Is Essential
The irrational is essential. Save for those atop the food chain, being a musician anywhere means hustlin' for life, with little job security or even business model. I suspect that after a few years of making a living as an average musician, you realize that your dreams really are your anchors. Clark: "You have to have a bit of delusion to you, because I think being a musician is a crazy decision. There's no guarantee...
Face to Face
I heard the story on the radio a few weeks ago as I dashed around town running errands and hoping a Verizon tech could resurrect my Blackberry. NPR’s All Things Considered was reporting on the resolution of a forty-five year old case in Alabama. I turned up my car radio as Debbie Elliot reported that former Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler had pled guilty to second degree manslaughter for fatally shooti...
Getting Out and Staying Out
If you were moved by Josh Cacpardo's June article, Cruel and Usual, about the challenges faced by individuals re-entering society after incarceration, NPR's All Things Considered has a great story about how Mark Goldsmith, a retired cosmetics executive is helping young inmates at Rikers Island through his non-profit "Getting Out and Staying Out." "You have to understand that these young men have never talked to a s...
Back on Murder: a Review
In a New York Times Magazine profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman in late 2008, Hoffman offered insight into his standards for his own art concluding that “when subtlety is lost, I get upset.” I’ve embraced Hoffman’s sentiment as it aptly describes my own tastes in cocktails, food, humor (OK, sometimes there are exceptions), and novels. I find subtlety difficult to achieve in my own work and sadly, nuance fin...
The Dangerous Bold
"n. the lucky fascination felt when a typo immeasurably improves a sentence you wrote, singed by the underlying recognition that the book of your life is credited to you but is not in your handwriting, which nevertheless appears in trace passages of many other lives." Emphasis added. From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows....
The Pizza That Ought To Be
Atlanta likes to think of itself as the New York City of the South—or rather, as a southern alternative to New York. Unfortunately, outside of the southeastern United States, Atlanta doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as New York. When global cities or cities of influence are rattled off by tastemakers, Atlanta simply doesn’t rank with New York, Chicago, San Francisco. This is especially obvious in the...
Knitting in Spite of Myself
Confession: I’ve recently found myself to be a knitter. Somewhat alarmingly, I might add. Knitting. I admit to enjoying it. I particularly enjoy observing reactions to my newfound hobby. Often, people try to guess what I’m doing (“Is that crochet?”) or share childhood memories of a mother or grandmother knitting. Sometimes, people gently (or not) mock my old-fashioned choice of hobby. In eac...
