Ornithology
I’m early on reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (900 pages, journey of a thousand miles), a fact I’m sharing...
The Rising of the Moon
And so it begins. My new book — Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow’s Moon — appears tomorrow,...
South America Stole Our Name #2
Randy Newman has a new album out, Dark Matter, his first in nine years. One cut that especially struck...
Nina Simone and the Inexplicable Grammy
On last night’s show I played the title cut from Nina Simone’s debut album, Little Girl Blue (1958). It’s...
The Old/New Weird America
Penny Lane’s mind-rearranging documentary NUTS! — about goat-testicles titan Dr. John Brinkley, the ur-Trump of 1930 — started...
On Ignorance
Night before last I dreamt about the (noxious, worm-eaten) electoral college. Specifically I was protesting that Hillary Clinton,...
Regarding the Worst Thing That’s Happened in This Country Since, Perhaps Including, the Civil War
The thing I’ll remember most about election night is that little bar graph the NYT had been running...
Too Hip for the Room
At the end of the last post I referred to Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, and once he’s onstage...
Smokin’ Peggy Lee
Late in her life I saw Peggy Lee perform at a club in New York. She was chair-bound,...
Try a Little Tenderness or I’ll Kill You
Toward the end of the show last night I went into a death spiral with Spotify and so...