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Perfect Moments: “I Shot ‘im, Paw.”
The house in which The Missus and I live now is over twenty years old, as is our immediate neighborhood. But the area in general has only recently started to get built up. Real honest-to-gods wildlife, not yet squeezed out by housing and new roads, can still be spotted here and there — foxes, a [...]
Real-Life Dialogue: Wardrobe Culling Edition
[The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. He has stayed home from work on this day to prepare a guest bedroom for painting. In this guest bedroom is a closet, and in the closet are His clothes. All of them. Woven shirts, knit shirts, jeans, suits, ties, socks, underwear, shoes... It's not a [...]
Midweek Music Break: Switched-On Bach
If not for 1968′s Switched-On Bach, I’m not sure I’d ever have paid much attention to classical music. I don’t know why I bought the album, unless in fascination with the sheer weirdness of the concept. As far as I knew then, no one within shouting distance of my life listened to classical music. I didn’t read [...]
Midweek Music Break: Jazzy Joni
Joni Mitchell, or so I thought around the time I first heard of her, epitomized the sweet-and-fragile visuals of hippie-folk culture. (With her long straight blonde hair, oh-so-slender frame and a voice to match, with her acoustic guitar and simple attire, she seemed a Mary Travers wannabe — maybe her gawky delicate second or third cousin, who [...]
Happy Birthday, the Erstwhile “Music” Television
MTV turned 30 years old at a minute past midnight today. After a voiceover saying,”Ladies and gentlemen: rock and roll!” and some promotional pieces, they overturned the music business with their very first video: The Buggles, and “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Lyrics: Video Killed the Radio Star (The Buggles) I heard you on the [...]
What’s in a Song/Midweek Music Break: “Blue Skies”
Few people remember the short-lived 1926 musical Betsy anymore, although its music and lyrics came from powerhouse songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. There’s a reason few people remember it: Rodgers and Hart had written nothing memorable for it. (A Hart-related site calls it “a beautifully mounted mess, top-heavy with ensemble numbers in the [...]
Higher Mathematics (Department of Personal Chronology)
Too many years ago now to count, I once calculated my personal “magic number.” It was pretty stupid: all I did was gather my birthdate, my phone number, my address, my ZIP code, my Social Security Number — any numbers I could think of which applied to me — and added up all their digits. [...]
The Shock of What You Already Know
For one reason or another, while sort of spiraling down the drain toward the end of this draft of Seems to Fit, I’ve been thinking some about Merry-Go-Round. Don’t fret if you don’t recognize the title Merry-Go-Round. This was the novel I wrote back in 2007-08, and apparently last mentioned here at RAMH in a [...]
Midweek Music Break: Wynton Marsalis’s Classical Trumpet
[Below, click Play button to begin Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I - Allegro (Haydn) . While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:20 long.] [Audio clip: view full post to listen] These days the man concentrates, as far as I [...]
From the Dark Side
I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago. An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch [...]
