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  • New Piece in Storyscape Journal

    “Your writing is boring. Why don’t you write fiction?” That’s an exact quote from my daughter the other night. Well, kid, occasionally I do bust out the lies and make up a story. This one is about a nice enough kid getting hustled by a “song poem” company, one of those creepy joints that promises…

  • Deep Cuts: Road Songs

    The road trip is an American institution. Nothing expresses the size and variety of these United States like crossing them on the highway: deserts, mountains, forests, plains, swamps, cities, Wal-Marts — you name it, we have it. So it’s no surprise that songs about the road abound. Some are classic rock staples (“Thunder Road,” “Highway…

  • 173. Telling Myself It’s Not As Hard, Hard, Hard As It Seems

    The sun wasn’t up when we loaded into Jody’s Cordoba. My motorcycle was hitched to the back bumper, riding on a fifty dollar trailer made from angle iron and the rear axle of an old pickup truck. For my part, the trunk was jammed with a tool box, duffel bag, typewriter, two guitars, and a…

  • From The Stacks: Darts-Everyone Plays Darts

    Darts was a seventies fifties revival band of the sort that was popular in the eighties and nineties. I’ll wait here while you do the math on that.

  • WIM Meets Clear Nude Magazine

    This is a cool one. Clear Nude is a new magazine focused on nude photography. For their second issue I did a little write up on the infamous “naked lady” cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. Both online and print editions are available. There’s no free ride on this one, but not only do you…

  • From The Stacks: Roxy Music – Country Life

    Roxy Music’s fourth LP, 1974’s Country Life, is the Mona Lisa of controversial album covers. Oh, there are more famous banned sleeves, more explicit, more surreal, but sexier? Not to my eye.

  • Deep Cuts: California Songs

    Whether the leaves are brown and the skies are gray, you want to go back go back go back there, or you wish the women in your life all could be from there, California has been song fodder for years. But this is Deep Cuts, so we’ll skip the easy tracks and pony up some…

  • This Week On Paste: Big Daddy IPA

    Let the “Who’s Your Daddy” jokes commence! This week I review Speakeasy’s Big Daddy IPA. Will I call it big poppa? Read for yourself: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/05/speakeasy-big-daddy-ipa-review.html

  • 172. Maybe He’s Caught in the Mood

    That was it. Jody said, “I don’t care what you do, I’m moving to California,” and I dropped everything. Everything. I quit art school to save money. I quit Starship Records and took a job waiting tables to make more money. I sold some of my crap, packed some of it into my parents’ basement,…

  • April’s Picks: May 2014

    After a brief break in April, April is back. Yep, our friend April has a killer May playlist for you. Ready? Let’s get to it: