Category: creativity
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Buffalo Flower Laura Burnhenn
My sister Lauren graciously gave Tara and I tickets to William Fitzsimmons last night for Christmas and we discovered the wonderful, moving protest songs of Laura Burnhenn. She played Buffalo Flower for us last night and I don’t think any song in my life — any hymn, any protest song, anything I’ve written only for…
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Punk folk — what is it?
I recently sent the following picture to Kyle and Doug Welch as well as Mark 9: You read that right. The name of this band we met in Salem, Massachusetts during Uncon 2016 is: Scrummy the Dirtbag & his shitty kids Now. Turns out that the lead man “Scrummy” is an economist by day. Kiel…
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Myth Stories Map: Queens Museum Exhibit on American Folklore
As a student of American myths, American folklore, American tall tales and American legends, I loved this myth stories map from the Queens Museum: There’s a great piece over at Slate on the map. They say: This map, by social realist artist William Gropper, was created to showcase the diversity of national myths and folk stories…
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Harry Rides THE DANGER
Around this time of year some five years ago, I rode some carnival rides with a kid named Harry: He’s a pretty particular kid with a set way of doing everything: …and if you watch his arms on this kiddie coaster, you can see that he gets excited. REALLY excited. And he expresses his…
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Artistic Resistance :: Reflections
IN Aids to Reflection, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says the following (he often enjoyed employing the use of all-caps): READER!—You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which…
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Saturn by Sleeping at Last
It’s very, very rare that a songwriter can stare into the abyss with a great nihilistic plunge and emerge on the other side breathing and alive as Chesterton and David Bentley Hart alike would have us do: to celebrate the mystical minimum of all that is, but the band SLEEPING AT LAST did just that in their…
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Why Tara and I Quit Social Media. All Of It.
Starting this month, Tara and I quit social media. All of it. Deleted about ten years of followers on Twitter accidentally — that kind of kicked it off. Then I deleted about 25k in Reddit karma. Nothing to brag about, but certainly not an insubstantial amount either. She got rid of Instagram and Facebook. I…
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Sitting at the Feet of Diabetic Art
Right now, as you read this, a black market thrives and it’s not a black market of diabetic art. They don’t trade guns or bombs or sex slaves or heroin. The Type One DiabetesBlack Market vs. Diabetic Art They trade one another test strips for insulin, sensors for infusion sets, diabetic to diabetic. They do…
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5 Reasons I Failed Kickstarter
We have several trite truisms for moments like these — you live and you learn; if you fall down, pick yourself back up again; if life gives you lemons then make lemonade — but seldom do these account for a strong internal compass. Recently, I decided to try my hand at Kickstarter with one of the strangest…
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Neurotic Pleasure and Religious Pain
Resentment is bittersweet. If we did not cherish it, we would let it go. What sort of rewards do we get from our resentment? Why do we keep score? First, it makes us feel superior to the person we resent. Also, it gives us an excuse for indulging in exquisite plots for revenge such as…
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10000 hours rule : is it false?
10000 hours rule from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers was scientifically proven to be false people say and then they point to a study that actually bolsters all of the chapters of Outliers that surround the 10000 hours rule. I’ve seen links to four articles just this week that did just that: tried to prove Gladwell wrong…