Urban Honking

At this very moment, here is the most exciting thing about being in NYC. holy crap, street jazz

Marie and I are exploring downtown. I photograph a man wearing a period sheriff’s costume, and holding a shotgun. We turn away; the gun goes off. We duck and cover. The last time I heard a gun so intimately, the ex-drug dealer on my block was killed. The cowboy is theatrically reenacting a duel. We […]

Greetings from 1852. I am dialing up on a dinosauric Hewlett Packard from my mother’s home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the place where I grew up and the place I do not call home. I flew to Denver from Portland, and flew here from Denver, in a scaryass Fantasy Island/Fla. Everglades plane, which greatly increased the […]

Bread was invented millions of years ago by neanderthals or something. Somebody had the idea to crush wheat up and mix it with other stuff and accidentally burn it in a fire, a fire started by lightning and tyrannosaurus rexes, and then magically there was bread. And the bread was good. In a game of […]

The callouses were never like they are now, even at my brow-furrowest simulacrum of Satoko Fujii—pouncing keys and chord clusters, aspiring to atones—as pianist/bellwether in the Ghosts of Women Who Haunt Cliffs. I have liberated something like 3000 CDs from their jewel cases, for stacking and stowing and shipping in brown packages: to show for […]

Who knows how to throw a party? Our house. Thanks to 300 people for leaving beer cans in our backyard in an organized pile. Thanks to the neighbors for not calling the cops ’til 4:30 am. Thanks to Shayla and Funk and Blaker for DJing and Libretto for MCing and Scream Club for dancing and […]

My brain is still operating at amputee mode; I’ll mine deeper when I have cavernous hours in Wyoming to reboot. Last night, I was describing Cheyenne to some friends, that we regularly hosted high school parties at abandoned nuclear missile silos in the plains’ empty guts; I spent at least three months of 11th grade […]

The masses will be glad to know that after three columns, one nasty beef with Davey D, and countless offers for reconstructive “surgery,” Dan “Oklahoma” Savage has retired his post as hip-hop scribe. Even better news: his replacement, Larry Mizell Jr, is doing all right by the Fresh Coast.

Hilary Duff—scrubbed junior miss for upper-middle-class white America—ranks in the lower eighth percentile of likeable teen queens throughout history, somewhere after the properer cousin of Patty Duke, and a sliver above the chortling best friend off Blossom. (This is due in part to her regular character, Lizzie McGuire. Lizzie’s sole life-dilemma is her clumsiness, a […]

My desk is no longer my desk; during this transformation, underneath towering stacks of Atreyu samplers and Ottmar Liebert CD-Rs, I discovered: * a piece of masking tape inscribed with the words “JOE GROSS,” in my handwriting * photo of Hutch Harris reading the first issue of the Mercury, accompanied by a note: “Dear Julianne: […]