I’m not the only one who can’t believe Don’s gone. Don Taube — some call him Captain Don — was a fixture in our seaport neighborhood. He lived on a ship in the harbor. He drank tea and talked and checked his email at Fresh Salt, our local bar. (He loved the cookies, too.) He [...]
Author Archive
On aging
The week my older daughter became a teenager, the Consulate of the Principality of Monaco called to say she’d won a round-trip flight there, three nights in a four-star hotel. These things would surprise me more if I hadn’t lived with her for the last thirteen years. This is new territory, and I’ve been dreading it for at [...]
Song of the summer
Click here to download “Wham City” by Dan Deacon. Or click here to listen to it in two parts on his MySpace page. You can also click here to buy Dan Deacon’s Spiderman of the Rings. Once you’ve listened to “Wham City” at least once (all 12 minutes of it!), but preferably more than once, come back [...]
Montreal honeymoon trail
Just one week after several Whatsiters attended an intimate wedding on the oxygen-deprived shores of Lake Tahoe (for TGW commenters Bacon and Andrea), a number of us converged again on the banks of the St. Lawrence, in Montreal, for wedding number two: this time for the nuptials of TGW’s beloved Dr. Cedric Cedarbrook and his man G-Lock. Although this [...]
On seizing the Thursday
Okay, I’ll bite. My new left shoulder. Sounding my barbaric yawp since 1970.
Bang a gong
This summer’s free music pickings seem unusually slim, but two downtown shows this weekend drew large, eclectic, enthusiastic crowds. Friday night the rain held off long enough for Animal Collective to squeeze out their set at the South Street Seaport. Setting their tribal-o-meter somewhere between Navajo night chant and Dub, Avey and Panda and friends [...]
Book talk
Do you remember the first book you ever owned? The first one you ever loved? The first one that really knocked you on your ass? I remember loving Bartholomew and the Oobleck, one of the slightly more serious — and wordy — Dr. Seuss stories. I loved Sherlock Holmes. I loved The Hobbit so much [...]
Do it clean
The worst job I ever worked involved scientists, shit, an incinerator, and dead bodies. Lots and lots of bodies. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I went to college in a state that was less than friendly to labor unions, and as a result, students worked most jobs at the university — not just typical [...]
Accidents
1. The jogger A little over a week ago, my younger brother, a marathoner who lives in Arizona with his wife and two kids, was taking a routine morning run with friends when a car slammed into him from behind at about 60 mph. Knocked clean out of his shoes, one leg broken near the [...]
Downtown scenes
How do you get from here … … to here? If you’ve listened to WFMU over the last few years, chances are you’ve heard Jeffrey Lewis‘s 9-minute-long track “A History of Punk Rock on New York’s Lower East Side, 1950-1975,” which he classifies as a “lecture in rhyme.” (Click here to download via FMU’s On the Download.) Lewis, who [...]
