I wish I had time for this to be a proper and thorough-going appreciation for Dan Bejar (New Pornographers, Swan Lake, Hello Blue Roses) and his solo outfit, Destroyer, which E. Tan and I saw at Bowery Ballroom a couple weeks ago.
Alas, this being the end of the semester I’m afraid you’ll get little more […]
I miss Hart Crane this spring.
It’s not that I’m a particular fan of his poetry: sometimes I’m tempted to paraphrase Doctorow on Poe and call him our “best bad poet.” But for several spring semesters in a row I’ve included parts of The Bridge in my Writing New York class, and this year, for a […]
Or a few questions, at least. I’m curious about how you read (or hear) this song, performed last year by a 60-year-old singer generally regarded as the godmother of punk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjmsyhgotWY
If you don’t know the song, check out the lyrics here. It closes out side one of the 1978 album Easter, which also included the top […]
Part 1. Did anyone else see this piece in the NYRB a couple weeks ago? I thought it did a fantastic job parsing the Clintons’ double-tongued approach to Obama and race, the issue that more than anything has turned me from a one-time defender of the Clintons into someone who’d only be able to vote […]
The mud-colored water of Silver Creek — The Creek, though we pronounced it “crick” — would turn your tightie-whities red, the color of Arizona red rocks, the color of pueblo clay. Stains that would never remove. And so you’d score points with your mother if you took them off and left them somewhere else while […]