Reasons to be cheerful, reasons to be sad. Today would have been the 80th birthday of the astonishingly brilliant, visionary artist and graphic designer Barney Bubbles. Bubbles — who was born Co
A very few songwriters have ever as fully inhabited the consciousness of the American mind quite like Merle Haggard. The endless compassion and simmering anger of his greatest songs trace the competin
Let me tell you a story about three renegades and the pact they made eighteen years ago to improve the world. When David Watkins, Robert Farley and Scott Lemieux banded together to create this blog, t
Hello! Got a couple news items for ya, in case you missed them: Over at the New York Times Magazine I wrote about HBO’s highly entertaining “Winning Time,” the ethical dilemma posed by its depic
The brilliant New York-based singer/songwriter Jennifer O’Connor has been authoring tremendous albums of hope and longing for more than twenty years. Her newest release Born at the Disco is a re
Two decades after his toy shop-Bowie breakthrough Streethawk: A Seduction, Dan Bejar remains as protean, ambitious and gloriously distracted as his foundational hero. Over the course of the last twent
Happening now at The Southwest Review: an in-depth conversation I had with historian and novelist Robert McCrum about P.G. Wodehouse’s World War II apostasy. Plus a premiere of a new song from m
It’s Superb Owl weekend, so I am going to indulge myself a bit with a niche post and piggy back off of Erik’s NFL Hall Of Fame musings. It’s a built in feature of Halls Of Fame that