For a young female songwriter, treading the folk-bluegrass line can be tricky. Tip too far toward the sensitive folkie side and you might get tossed altogether into the “women’s music” ghetto. But sing or play with too much of a twang and you can be relegated to the stodgy “pickin’” circuit, where politics lean to … Read more
“The music is a mix between old skool hip-hop and northern soul and going for a dynamic feel like a double dutch team.” That’s how Go! Team leader Ian Parton described his band’s sound in a recruitment ad a few years ago, but he was probably forced to be brief. Actually, it’s something of a … Read more
I’ve always liked to talk to people, especially strangers. I also like to drive the roads outside the commercial net of the interstates, the state highways and neglected county roads that still take you right into towns that can feel either forsaken or impossibly wholesome, and sometimes both at the same time. On such … Read more
Fall is the transition time for outdoor sports, and, for semi-serious cross-country skiers, it’s time to strap on the old roller skis. Even the most accomplished skiers, however, who roller ski through all the dry seasons, can’t escape the fact that it’s a little bit ridiculous using ski poles with no snow on the ground. … Read more
If, in the past few weeks, you’ve encountered a super-strange message in your fortune cookie at a local Chinese restaurant (like A skyscraper can fall just by looking at it. Yet ‘War is over if you want It.’ or Think of something you understand until you no longer understand it. Or, simply, Wait.), then you … Read more
Sitting on my desk is the final “absolute, no kidding, no extensions possible” request for my submission to the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1981 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report. After twenty-five years, Harvard wants an accounting of what I have done with my life. I ignored the three or four previous requests because I had trials … Read more
It’s time to take that other monthly business more seriously. Yeah, I know this is the November issue. But, gentle readers, I am speaking to you from the recent past of October third! Boooooooo! I am the ghost of October third! And where I’m coming from, it’s still National Breast Cancer Awareness month. So let’s … Read more
Every year there’s a ritual in my house: My wife gathers all of her Jane Austen novels from the bookshelf and reads them in chronological order. Once that liturgy is complete, she devours all five hours of the landmark BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, or Bridget Jones’s Diary, the Laurence Olivier Pride, Bride and … Read more
Not so long ago, if you heard “wipe” used as a noun, you probably thought of a baby’s bottom. That was in the late nineties, when baby wipes made up eighty-two percent of the “wipe market.” Now, of course, you can buy disposable cloths soaked in just about any kind of fluid and stuffed into … Read more
Not long after the new Design Collective boutique opened in Uptown, its display window featured a two-tiered, amphibious-looking skirt whose ruffles, shaped with wires, were so impressive they stopped a passerby in her tracks. “It makes me think of a nudibranch,” explained Barrett Johanneson, months later, as he fished the skirt out of the trunk … Read more