There are many days it seems to me music is helpless against the daily worldwide onslaught of human beings acting like cruel demons. Yet the promise of coming together to experience the communion of shared and transporting musicality is certainly not nothing.
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As David Byrne cries in "Born Under Punches": 'I'm catching up with myself!' Below are some things I am catching up on, myself, after recently launching a world premiere in West Virginia's capital city which was fabulous and exhausting to birth.
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Looking back more than fifty years after my first encounter with "100 Years of Solitude," after a bookshelf encounter stirs some strong family memories.
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On the way to a jam in the Appalachian outback, I pass the House of Prayer Full Gospel Church. Wait—are there 'partial gospel' churches out there?
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What does it take to get a book into the world? A little help from St. Joseph the Worker, plus inspiration from an Old World wine vat on a steep Calabrian hillside. That's a good start.
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A StoryIsTheThing Public Service Announcement: It's Booking Day in NYC today! That will mean much malevolence, much media blathering, much of way too much muchness. When you need to tear your eyes from the spectacle, here are four images to ponder.
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I should be meditating. I should be writing a new chapter in my 'sorta memoir.' Or polishing an old one. I should not be eating pretzels & pepper jack cheese after 10 p.m. I should be sleeping. I should not be posting yet another black-and-white Instagram photo ...
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Taking a stroll through some definitive black-and-white moods, from across a couple of states and several states of mind.
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He was a West Virginia coal miner’s son who lost his legs below the knees in a deadly ambush in Vietnam at age 18. What happened next sounds like a movie script. Dave Evans went on to work across the planet, building and fitting prosthetic legs, hands, and arm for thousands of adults and children in conflict zones worldwide. A…
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While "VAN GOGH: The Immersive Experience" wows you with its flash, such as a 7,000-square-foot Immersive Gallery animating his work and a must-experience virtual reality fly-through of Arles, I came away just as intrigued and moved by the more intimate details.
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I claim no grand comprehension of the challenge of life there. But Cuba is … well, Cuba. A confounding, transformative, depressing, challenging, intoxicating place.
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The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?
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'Hey, here you go. What's your name? Where'd you serve?' He nods in thanks. Stuffs the bag into a pocket. Tom. That's his name. He takes off his black knit cap. Syria. Iraq. 'A shell took off part of the top of my head.' I wince. He points to a jagged line. 'The Med Evac was the best. Saved my…
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Let's not talk about the moon anymore, but instead Solzhenitsyn's idea of 'political horror,' how to write a 'sorta memoir,' and breaking up with Twitter until the perp walk.
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When the Opening Day parade for the Cincinnati Reds 2022 season snaked through downtown Cincinnati more was going on than it might at first seem.
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