Just like a lot of us, 2021 was a down year for me. Health issues, hand surgery that kept me from taking advantage of spring gardening, a mountain bike crash later in the summer that sidelined me for 6 weeks, and the continuing shit-show of covid was plenty enough to make the last 12 months …
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Here it Goes! My Jazz LPs from A to Z, brought to you by Covid19 social distancing
Like a whole lot of folks, I've been rocking the social distancing to keep from getting Covid19 Today is Day 14 of my self-imposed stay at home/social distancing. In the past two weeks I've left the house once (except for dog walks) and talked to four people in person who were not my wife. This …
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Why Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is as Country as Country Gets
As I write this Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" continues to sit atop the Billboard Hot 100. Its removal from the top of Billboard's country chart well over a month ago sparked a fierce debate about who has the power to define genre and, inevitably, how genre definitions are inextricably linked with race. The …
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The world doesn’t need any more John Coltrane reissues. There, I said it. Here’s why.
A couple of weeks ago an email appeared in my inbox from the good folks at Universal Music Group, inviting me to download a sampler from a new 5 CD/8 LP box set that contains all the recordings John Coltrane made for Prestige in 1958. Here's a screen shot of part of that email: Minutes …
10 Lessons from Seeing Samuel Delany this Week
This week I had the pleasure of seeing Samuel Delany give the annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lecture at Duke University. Every year the lecture is given by someone who has made important contributions to queer studies/theory. Instead of a lecture, he was interviewed by Duke professor Pete Sigal. In his opening questions, Sigal emphasized Delany's …
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The Importance of Speculative Fiction and How It Implores Us to Create a Leftist, Anti-Capitalist Future
Over the last 18 months or so I've been reading a ton of near-future dystopian speculative fiction. This week I finished Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Water Knife (I hope there's a movie adaptation of it coming soon) and I am itching to read the second installment of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy. I've also recently read …
Give the Drummer Some: How the Right’s Fixation on Nathan Phillips’s Drum Reflects White America’s Fear of the Drum
Ever since the video of the group of Covington High School boys surrounding Native American activist Nathan Phillips and---depending on your interpretation---either harassed him or defended themselves (count me among those who understand it to be the former), there has been a massive national conversation addressing numerous issues that speak to our cultural and political …
If I Could Only Keep 30 Books
So Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and her Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is blowing up on my social media feeds lately. Why? Because I am a book person: I own lots of books, I buy lots of books, I read lots of books, I work in book publishing, and …
2018: My Year of Musical Self-Care
"Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere, Self care, I'm treating me right." —Mac Miller As I write this on Christmas Eve, the Dow Jones just closed over 600 points down, hundreds of thousands of government workers are out of a job and going without pay, and the folks in California who lost everything …
This Album is Brought to You By Colonialism!
I've been thinning out my L.P. collection of late, and this little beauty came up as a candidate for the great purge of 2018. I ended up deciding to part with it because it's not in great shape, the music is just kind of so so, and the cover isn't quite cheesy enough. The music …
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Outside-Inside-Out 