It’s Matt Grimm Day at S&R and we’re celebrating music with a social conscience. Join us? We love great bands and artists of all stripes around here, but by now it’s probably no secret that we’re champions of the overlooked genius. I don’t know. Maybe I’m projecting because I think more people ought to pay attention to me and as
Read moreKeating was an icon of the Old Testament morality that defines American culture. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real
Read moreJim Hellwig’s appearance on RAW was electric, but he was clearly not in good shape. I’m stunned. Jim Hellwig, who starred as The Ultimate Warrior for the WWF (now WWE) in the late ’80s and early ’90s, is dead at 54. The timing is remarkable. After years of tension with the WWE, they recently mended fences and on Saturday night
Read moreOur own poetic voices are the product of the voices of our heroes. Guess who mine are. Here in NaPoWriMo 2014, we’re encouraging everyone to write poetry every freakin’ day. As I said last week, write like nobody’s reading. In my case, I’m not doing new writing so much as I am reflecting on writing and thinking about the times
Read moreYou know how schools sometimes have assemblies where outside speakers or entertainers put on a show for an hour? Right. Well, when I was in first grade my school, Wallburg Elementary in sleepy little Wallburg, NC, had a musician come in. I don’t remember much about the show, except for this one thing. He said he was going to do
Read moreUS sports leagues reward inferior teams and routinely deny their best teams the championship. Richard Allen Smith and I have argued from time to time about the merits of the BCS vs. the NCAA basketball tournament. Rich defends the BCS, while I point out its unfairness and corruption. He argues that the BCS does (did) a good job at getting
Read moreNo one could possibly be THE voice of Gen X, but Cobain was certainly A voice of my generation. In their seminal 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, published in 1993, Neil Howe and William Strauss argued that the only thing Generation Xers really agreed on was that there was no such thing as Generation X. Given the inherent irony
Read moreNo, Virginia. Intolerance of intolerance isn’t the same as intolerance of human beings. When it became public that recently appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich had donated to the controversial anti-gay rights Prop 8 initiative in California back in 2008, things – as we used to say back home – blowed up. Rarebit yanked an app from the Mozilla marketplace and
Read moreNational Poetry Writing Month begins today. Will you write 30 poems in 30 days? Well, no. I won’t, not me personally. I retired from writing poetry a couple years ago. But before I did I wrote four books and am currently looking to publish them, so I definitely salute the annual celebration of the art. Here at S&R we have
Read moreIt was 20 years ago today in Boulder, CO. Do you remember where you were on April 1, 1994? I do. I was sitting at a computer in an apartment at the corner of Colorado and Foothills in Boulder, launching this really new thing called a “Web site.” Today there are over 932 million of them (and counting) in the
Read moreLast.FM tells us who we listen to the most. Isn’t that what “favorite” means? We all have our favorite bands. Most of us probably have a lot of favorite bands, in fact, and if you’re like me, that honor has probably been held by different artists throughout your life. My first favorite, back when I was in junior high, was
Read moreLullaby Pit, one of the world’s oldest Web sites, marks its 20th anniversary today. As of this moment, there are more than 930 million Web sites in the world, and we’re projected to hit a billion by the end of the year. 20 years ago today, though, there were roughly 2,000. 20 years ago today – that would have been
Read moreIt was March 31, 1994, and I was preparing to do something that very few people had ever done before. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll tell you about it.
Read moreI’ve done a bit of updating to my photo site of late – new shots and a new logo, for starters. Photography has become sort of my alpha passion since I bought my first camera some 19 months ago, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come in a short time. I still have a lot to learn, but I’m loving
Read moreThird place was always the smart bet for a team in transition; Torres and Eto’o are well past the point where they can contribute to an elite side ALERT: If you’re a big Fernando Torres fan, you probably shouldn’t read any further. For Chelsea Nation, today was disappointing. [sigh] The thing is, while I have enjoyed how well the Blues
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