Music "Don't forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life yes, you're older now and you're a clever swine but they were the only ones who ever stood by you" -- Morrissey

I'm going to talk about heroes and I'm going to talk about Tiger Woods, but I want you to know that at no point has Tiger Woods ever been my hero. In a very specific way he has been a role model, but I a...   More

Music A gypsy read my palm today in Sag Harbor, New York (where you can neither get a Screen Actors Guild card nor can you eat a tasty Indian spinach dish—in case you were wondering.). She was reading my fate line when she said, "Your purpose is your home." Then she looked up into my eyes and said, as if she just realized it herself, "You're always going home."
Which, I guess, is a nice way of sayi...   More

Music I drove from Portland to San Francisco last week and picked up some drifters along the way. I'm generally trying to assume that people are good and that they're not, for example, planning on slipping my money clip into one of their pockets when I drop them off at their destination. Certainly, I improved my odds at having a more refined drifter by ordering direct from the drifter emporium at Craigs...   More

Music Last fall I went to see a lecture by the artist Ryan Pierce at Portland State University. He paints landscapes depicting a post-industrial society after some unnamed breakdown or catastrophe. The paintings are not grotesque or disturbing. They're serene. They are usually just quiet depictions of some obsolete technology which nature has overrun. In his lecture he said something that was initially ...   More

Music If you're looking for a fun game to play—and keep in mind that everything I think of as "fun" most people consider depressing, and vice versa—I suggest something I call "Speaking the Subtext." All you have to do is watch an advertisement—commercial, movie trailer, billboard—where someone is using cultural shorthand to elicit emotions, and identify what that shorthand is and say it as plai...   More

Music Elizabeth Taylor died this week at the age of 79. The New York Times published her obituary, which was written by a man named Mel Gussow.    More

Music The most helpful advice I've heard about show business and the people in power of that business is this: "No one is ever going to give you anything until you make money for them." Which is not only true, but sort of trumps any other complaint, argument, or grievance you might want to make about how you're currently being treated in the music business. Music venues, promoters, bookers and managers ...   More

Music I got an email last week from Casey, the music editor at Willamette Week. The subject line was "One more run at a weekly column?" The content of the email was, in its entirety, "what you think"-- lowercase, no punctuation. (Editors, in their spare time, I think, get a small thrill from not following proper grammar rules in emails, much like newscasters relish the freedom to curse in front of their...   More

Music Leonard Cohen takes one more lap.

I saw Leonard Cohen two years ago in Baltimore, at what I thought would be my last opportunity. He played in an outside pavilion in a miserable cold rain, but onstage he radiated all the warmth of the center of the Earth. He took his hat off after every song and embraced the applause like a man who would never hear another clap again. What Leonard ...   More

Music I saw Leonard Cohen two years ago in Baltimore, at what I thought would be my last opportunity. He played in an outside pavilion in a miserable cold rain, but onstage he radiated all the warmth of the ...   More