It was a pretty good year in music. A handful of artists produced absolutely fabulous CDs and a lot more managed releases ranging from “worth the money” to “are you sure that shouldn’t be rated a little higher”? Here’s the format. Instead of the tedious task of actually ranking CDs – a torture I used to inflict on myself every
Read moreFinding and buying music used to be a lot simpler process. You could sample new stuff by turning on this thing called a “radio,” and when you heard something you liked you could go purchase it at this other thing called a “record store.” It wasn’t a perfect system, of course. Sometimes the great song on the radio was the
Read moreGood morning, and welcome to this week’s edition of Saturday Video Roundup. I’m your host, Katie Couric. You might remember last week, when we presented some talented teens laying the smack down on the Electone. Well, JS O’Brien one of my colleagues who shall remain nameless wasn’t all that impressed. He comes from a pretty serious music background, I think,
Read moreNot long ago I was bitching about how utterly banal I think a lot of contemporary poetry is. Shortly thereafter I got a note from scrogue JS O’Brien saying he thought I might appreciate a poet he knew a little about, Brigit Pegeen Kelly. So I hit my Internets and tracked her down. The first poem of hers that I
Read moreWe live in an unfortunate age artistically. There is more freedom than ever, more tools for creation, more outlets to publish and display, but we have largely used this freedom to fetishize banality. The great leveling, as it were – everybody is an artist, everything is poetry. When I entered my Master’s program at Iowa State the prof who would
Read moreI’m not a political poet. Not for the most part, anyway. I certainly never wanted to be one, and I had been writing for a number of years before this finally happened: I don’t want to say too much for fear of being misconstrued or maybe for fear of being understood all too clearly so here’s your warning – flowers
Read moreI’m a poet. Whether I’m a good one or a bad one is, I suppose, open to debate. But the fundamental fact of my life and career is that the business activities that define my professional existence these days are Plan C, at best. If the world worked the way I wish it did, I’d make my living writing, publishing
Read moreWe went to see Once yesterday, and I came to an annoying realization. First off, let’s get this out of the way: go see this movie right now. I guess it’s a musical, in that a huge portion of the film is conducted in song and that the music is essentially integrated into the narrative. The story is at once
Read moreOne of the reasons our mission here at S&R is as broad as it is – our writers address cultural forms like literature and popular music as well as the hardball political issues that directly shape our public lives – emerges in part from my own feeling that too much politics is tough on the soul. It’s necessary, of course,
Read moreI’ve known Jim Booth since August of 1975, when I walked into my freshman English class at Ledford High School and ran headlong into a teacher one of my friends had advised me to avoid (that’s the problem with being 14 – you don’t yet know that your friends are idiots). Booth was different – aggressively different – from any
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lullaby pit 