“Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.” ― Walker Percy

Roughly six months ago my wife Maria and I received a fateful knock upon the door. Sadly, it wasn’t a stately raven but merely our landlord, though she did come bearing portentious news.  Because she and her husband couldn’t figure out any other way to separate their baby from their dog, they were not going to renew our lease so that they could have our apartment in addition to theirs, thereby solving this critical issue.

Now if it were me I would have bought one of those wooden separators you put up between rooms but that’s just because I don’t have the extra cash to take on the expense of another entire apartment to solve a trivial problem.

At any rate, with that knock our fates were sealed.  After much discussion we decided that what we really should do was to buy a place. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea but as it turns out buying a place in New York is, well, hard. After much searching we found a co-op in our price range that Tom Hanks’ character in the Money Pit might have run screaming from. We put in an offer immediately and it was accepted but the buiding’s paperwork was not in order.  In fact it was out of order. (more…)

“A man without a mustache is a man without a soul” – Confucius

I’m writing this from an apartment in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, which at one time was a rough neighborhood but is now so gentrified that there’s a barber shop down the street called the Stachehouse that specializes exclusively in mustaches.

From the window display I see that they are fluent in more than 70 styles of mustache including classics like the Chevron, Fu Manchu, Pencil, Walrus and Handlebar but also more adventurous options like the Dreadnought, Hussite, Blunderbuss and, my personal favorite, the Tiny Dancer.

You can also bring in your own custom mustache designs of course and nothing is too outlandish providing, and they’re careful to make this clear, that you have the facial hair to back it up.  They will under no circumstances help you cheat nature with mustache implants and are insulted that you would even ask. (more…)

It was mid-August and I had just come through another exhilarating but exhausting Thirsty Ears Festival but couldn’t rest just yet as Maria and I were putting our condo on the market and I had to spend the Monday after the fest cleaning and schlepping.

I wore old jeans and my most comfortable T-shirt for this task and didn’t bother to change when I went to WFMT later in the afternoon for a meeting and so it was a fun irony that I was wearing my WFMT shirt as I was told that Relevant Tones had been canceled and apparently had been canceled for some time and I was one of the last people to know.

My feelings about this have been complex.  I got into radio by accident in 2006.  I was giving a talk at the Chicago Cultural Center and someone came up to me afterward and said that I should be in radio.  I was like yeah that sounds great and he said, no I run a radio station and I’m offering you a show. (more…)

“Looking at a Zhou Brothers painting is like drinking water from a well. The well is deep, as deep and true as human experience itself.”

I walked into the Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood for the first time a little more than six years ago for what I thought would be a routine gig evening but that instead led to lasting inspiration.

ACM was performing in one of their galleries as part of an open studio event and I was running late because I had hit an incredible traffic jam on the way down, apparently caused not by any external factor but instead by a kind of collective stupidity, a powerful will-to-delay that would not be ignored.

So I was flustered and annoyed and completely oblivious of my surroundings when I walked in the front door and started looking around for the elevator, and I looked up and saw this gigantic painting that caused me to stop in my tracks and forget all of the petty things I had just been thinking about a certain timid driver behind the wheel of a vehicle laughably named Intrepid. (more…)

“What the colonizers desire and replicate is gritty New York without the grit. Punk and jazz and poetry without the enlivening shock of unpredictability,” Jeremiah Moss in Vanishing New York

It’s amazing what can happen when you walk into a bookstore.  A couple of months ago I had an appointment in Union Square in Manhattan and because the subway unexpectedly functioned not well but perfectly adequately, which is a minor miracle and frankly a bit of a surprise, I arrived twenty minutes early and decided to while away the extra minutes in the Strand bookstore.

I thought I’d see if I could pick up the new Jonathan Lethem or perhaps this satirical science fiction book from 1936, War With the Newts by Karel Capek that I had read about in the Review of Books the previous weekend, but the fiction section at the store was jammed with tourists so, somewhat ironically, I found myself in the New York section, which was empty, where a book called Vanishing New York immediately called to me.

I bought the book and started reading it on the trip back home.  The author is Jeremiah Moss and his book is a neighborhood by neighborhood chronicle of independently owned businesses: music venues, bars, restaurants, cafés and shops, that have been forced to close because of high rents and that have been replaced by chain stores. (more…)

“Somewhere a hill blossoms in green and gold. And there are dreams all that your heart can hold” ― Maurice Jarre

I rarely ever play piano gigs anymore but I took on a ton this summer because, inspired by Paul Manafort, I’m saving up for a new python-skin jacket and so I was driving to one of these gigs or racing really as I only had an hour to get from downtown Chicago to Lakeview in rush hour traffic or not so much racing really as sitting immobile in traffic cursing everyone around me though mentally because I had my windows down and the last thing I needed was a confrontation and who knows who has a gun these days and I flashed back to my first gig in Chicago. (more…)

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” ― Yoda

I’ve spent my entire life in the arts in one way or another, mostly by writing music and producing concerts but I also run an arts organization in which capacity I am frequently asked to justify our work as artists in terms of economic benefits like jobs created.  I tend to bristle at this kind of thinking because for one thing it’s obvious that the arts sector creates jobs.  I mean what sector doesn’t?

Literally everything we humans do creates jobs. From watching television, to drinking beer, to shooting off guns in the woods, to shooting guns at your television while drinking beer in the woods, (just to name a few of my favorites,)  there simply isn’t a human activity that doesn’t create jobs.  And yet artists are asked to justify our existence based on how many jobs we create?  It’s a stupid and insulting thing to ask us to do and it’s misses the entire point.  To reduce art and the people who make it to jobs created is so woefully off base that I don’t even know where to begin. (more…)

I’ve finally gotten around to reading some of Richard Hell’s essays and I have to say that he’s a hell of a writer, ha.  Sorry, I couldn’t help it but I promise not to make it worse by asking you to excuse the pun because, well, it’s not a pun.

Anyway, one of the interesting things about Richard Hell is that he started out as a poet but started the Voidoids because as he says, “it sounds obnoxious but I wanted to influence the culture and there’s maybe two poets per generation who get to do that.”

This is interesting to me because my contention lo these many years has been the opposite, that we can change the culture over time so that it is more conducive to the creation and appreciation of things like poetry and, oh I don’t know, let’s say contemporary classical music. (more…)

Spring is the time for snow, rain, miserable cold and a complete lack of sun, or so it seems this year. It’s also the time for renewal in every culture of the world, some kind of cynical hope that things are actually getting better despite the fact that there’s snow in April which just shouldn’t happen.

Speaking of hope, in Greek mythology humans were created by the Titans, those forebears of Zeus and the gang who are still mainly archetypal but are just starting to exhibit anthropomorphic characteristics like, well, stupidity.  I’m thinking especially of Epimetheus, the Titan charged with handing out positive traits to animals and humans alike.

His name means afterthought and he’s portrayed as a sort of Harpo Marx-esque bumbler who can’t do anything right, isn’t funny and can’t even play the harp.  Just the person, or immortal, to entrust with such a task!   So of course he screws it up.  He goes around handing out positive traits to the animals, you know, things like having a warm pelt, the ability to chew a cud and I don’t know, lightfootedness or something. (more…)

I’m sitting at the international terminal at JFK whiling away the time with a newspaper and, so far at least, all of the articles that aren’t about Trump are about the Oscars, which is sort of like our national divide in miniature isn’t it?

I’m at the international terminal because I like to come here to watch people happily reunite to remind me that love actually exists. No, that’s a movie, plus I’m in the departures terminal and though I’m sure the people around me love someone, they’re mercifully not showing it at the moment though many of them are watching videos on their phones with the sound on and no earbuds.

Which is just rude.  How can you find love if you don’t even respect the people around you?  I mean do you really think I want to hear Love Actually? And why are you watching a Christmas movie in March?  Oh wait, it’s not Love Actually, it’s that other one with Hugh Grant where he owns a bookstore and meets that famous film star Julia Roberts. Notting Hill, that’s it. (more…)