Rage

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Forgive the late entry today. I was busy with the day job. I had the pleasure of meeting Betsy Brown last week. She’s a real poet, and I tried to get her to stay for another glass of wine and recite a bit for me, but she had to go. She graciously sent this along … Read more

Whistle While You Work

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It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think. First, no one expects Spin to be … Read more

The Best of the Best

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It would be a bit silly to come near the end of this month of poems without hearing a bit from the Bard. Here is Sonnet 116; a little bit from Antony and Cleopatra that once struck me hard; and the famous speech from Henry V that lent title to a damn good book about … Read more

Maybe This Year It's Not A Tease

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It’s not really a surprise to me, but Jacque Jones has quietly become a better player –certainly a better hitter, and I’d argue a better all-around player– than Torii Hunter. Jones is as competitive and driven as Hunter is easy going, and he works as hard as anybody on the team to get better. He … Read more

It's My Ball, And The Game is Over!

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You know it’s a slow week in news when the journalists are arguing amongst themselves about the cheekiness of interns. But that should not distract us from slightly less yawn-inducing progress of the Ship of State in its inexorable approach to the iceberg of international irrelevance. The good senator and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole writes … Read more

Sentience and sensuality

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This one was suggested by a friend of mine who happens to be a Catholic priest. It seems at first a bit voluptuous for a priest’s taste, but as a friend once said, “They can think about it, they just can’t do it.” But, come down to the last stanzas and see the reconciliation of … Read more

I Know I'm Not Fooling Anyone

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I’ve gone by a lot of different names over the years, every one of them, I’m sure, transparently phoney. I now recognize that I was laboring under some fairly serious delusions, and harbored the misguided notion that these names I’d choose –and choose carefully, I might add– demonstrated a certain flair. What they actually were, … Read more

Granted, It's The Royals…

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…and a 2-1 victory against the Royals should probably go in the loss column, but what the hell, we’ll take it. Don’t knock yourselves out trying to score a few runs for your pitchers, though, fellas. Didn’t you pretty much know that two runs was all it was going to take tonight? I did, right … Read more

Serve the Masses, Live with the Rich

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One of our favorite media writers is Stephanie Zecharek over at Salon. Years ago, she impressed us by seeing the future. In 1999, she griped about the sorry state of American music magazines—particularly Rolling Stone and Spin and similar titles—and predicted a successful English colonization of same. In the years since then, that is precisely … Read more