Clinton, Illinois is best known for a lake where scores of people from Central Illinois escape the summer heat and humidity. The town is located in the middle of the corn fields, west of Lincoln and South of the Twin Cities, an area not known…
I’ve been fortunate never to have experienced the crippling effects of chronic depression, although I know many people who have; of course I’ve had my share of despair where the world seemed to spin out of control and even sleep, if it could be had,…
(The first two posts in this series are here and here.) “Officially, one may not use anything that looks like a stamp but is not. Since the use of this sheet requires one to tear up the regulations, I consider this an inverse book and…
I see the kid just as the dog and I exit a brief bit of shade on our late-August walk. His brown eyes look me over, and there’s no one around, really. He’s like 8, 9 — 10 years old, maybe; and fitted out in…
This has been a tough year. I’ve already been to four funerals thus far and I’m still in August. Three of the four were expected. The most recent, however, was a surprise. I walked into the gym where I’ve worked out five days a week…
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared October 7, 2011.
I have lots of magazines lying around. They come in the mail, which is delivered by a woman in a tan Plymouth. I always wave at her, if I’m outside. Keep up the good work, Mail Lady!
My family and friends give me magazine subscriptions as gifts. It’s great. They know I am poor and shiftless and sit around gnawing on raw turnips etc. and would otherwise never encounter such.
One of these gift subscriptions is to The New Yorker. I don’t know if you’ve ever read The New Yorker, but it’s a pretty big deal. They’ve been around for a while. Keep up the good work, TNY!
I used to live in New York City about a million years ago, so I know a little something about the place. For a while there, I was a New Yorker, although I was usually on the brink of homelessness.
My friends who’d grown up in New York City thought I was fascinating. Not because of any talent I possessed, and certainly not because I had a clue about what I was doing there in the great metropolis.
I was a curiosity, a person of interest, simply because I was from the South, and not just the South, but Mississippi.
Although the Cubs had taken the Division Title in 2003 and their pitching staff had an average age of 26, there were signs of a greater fall on the horizon: it was the beginning of the End of the Era of the Giants of Baseball…
I missed it. I’m an area resident and one of many fans of the English band Mumford & Sons who were clamoring for tickets to the “Gentlemen of the Road Fest” held Aug. 18, in an unlikely locale: Dixon, Ill, pop. 15,773, home to one of the state’s biggest medium security prisons and birthplace of President Ronald Reagan.
With a towering statue of Chief Black Hawk overlooking the city and river, it’s also the spot where, in 1832, President Abraham Lincoln met up with the Illinois militia at Fort Dixon to fight in the bloody Black Hawk War.
But M&S— whose “gentleman” tour included Gogol Bordello, Dawes, Abigail Washburn and other acts— had no say on this particular tour date. Dixon officials entered and won a National Trust Main Street contest to host a “major band tour of historic towns.” (No doubt it was a welcome bit of news amid a bad municipal run: the town’s Comptroller/Treasurer, Rita Crundwell, was indicted by the feds in April for allegedly embezzling $30 to 53 million from town coffers.)
Still, they threw out the welcome mat and let the music play for Dixon, which celebrated the event with storefront murals to greet the 15,000 fans who showed and nearly doubled the town’s population.
The Grammy-winning Mumford & Sons, whose newest record, Babel, is set for release next month, are an unplugged musical and lyrical tour de force, employing acoustic instruments, mostly, to deliver body blows of resonant sound, introspection and prescient honesty.
They rose to prominence from the “west London Folk Scene” that also cultivated such like-minded bands as “Noah and the Whale.” But when M&S played with Bob Dylan at the 2010 Grammys, the world too was finally able to make the musical connection, as that first network appearance pushed sales of its debut “Sigh No More” and thrusted M&S to major global headliner.
Augusta National Golf Club just admitted two female women into its ranks. But why are so many people hailing it as a victory for women? Did women and the so-called Women’s Movement really need authentication by an effete old boy’s network of stodgy businessmen? On…
This post first appeared April 4, 2008.
(photo credit: obLiterated)
Yesterday evening I saw a Chrysler convertible fly by on Carondolet Street with a human-sized Tweety Bird stuffed animal in the backseat. To say it was a giant Tweety would understate the case given the small stature of the Tweety Bird cartoon character to begin with, and proportionally, Tweety’s head, when scaled up like that, is like half a dozen or more human heads. So there Tweety sat in the middle of the backseat, giant head looming there. But as the car sped past, a large–not Tweety big, but bigger than a baby–Teddy Bear rolled off the trunk, flying off and finally bouncing to a stop in the middle of the street. I pulled over. Four, five cars passed, each in turn avoiding the Teddy Bear. I grabbed the Teddy Bear and found it looked almost new, not dirty at all, though it seemed to have some sort of voicemaker inside that wasn’t working or needed a new battery, but all in all, a fine Teddy Bear. It would’ve been wasteful to just leave the Teddy Bear to become just more trash at the side of the road, and certainly a child somewhere would love to have it. It wasn’t the sort of stuffed animal my daughter would like, but I took it with me, figuring I’d include it in our next Bridge House donation.
My road to Damascus, my conversion from Saul-to-Paul didn’t come with a flash of light: it came in bits and pieces over two years, and it would take the 2003 and 2004 to bring me to my greater understanding. I hadn’t been paying much attention…
Today India celebrates 65 years of Independence from British rule. I left the subcontinent 27 years ago—hard to believe that I’ve been away for almost half of free India. This past weekend I met a friend from Bombay (Mumbai now) whom I hadn’t seen in…