What's Going On:

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Recent Posts

Not What I Expected

I’m a big fan of “Not What I Expected.” I like it when people fold, spindle, and mutilate musical things in an interesting way, to render them more interesting to contemporary ears. Jazz players often get ahold of seemingly mundane pop tunes and take them up a notch.

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In Which We Explain Democracy. Oh Boy!

I’m going to post an excerpt of an essay I wrote 14 years ago or so. It was about how my children ended up performing music as a duo. My older son was around sixteen at the time. The younger one was only nine. As it turns out,

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The 97.5 Percent Solution

So, I bought this thing. I’m not sure why. I haven’t played one for twenty years, and truth be told, I can’t even remember which end you’re supposed to blow in. So what do I want with a guitarra? Well, it’s like this: I don’t miss my old

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The Art, Trade, and Mystery of a College Education

I’ve been thinking about indentured servitude. Never fear. Not as a current career choice, but as a concept. Here’s a pretty chaste description of indentured servitude from a chatbot: Indentured servitude is a form of labor where a person signs a contract to work for another for a

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Bring Back the Ephemeral

If you don’t recognize the name, Brian Eno was one of the original members of Roxy Music. They were pioneers in what I call Art School Rock. Eno drifted away from Roxy Music after a couple of records, and set up shop as a deep thinker about shallow

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Greatest Hits

Bits of my life pulled out and flung on the Internet floor

What It’s Like in Hallowell, Maine

We’re weird. We get cabin fever in the fall. We’re supposed to wait until we’ve been mewed up in our mountain bolthole for four months

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1960s

The Varykino Gambit

Ever watch Dr. Zhivago? It’s a David Lean movie. Made all sorts of money. It’s a tale from Russia, with love. The love part was

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Sagas and Compilations