When someone asks if “that is your blue Prius parked outside?” it’s rarely good news. You know, if you hear them calling a license plate number out over a loudspeaker in a store or an airport or a dentist office, it’s not like the Pick 6. You don’t want the number to be yours. You’re […]
Getting the Axe
I now own an axe. As of yesterday. Yep. And I’m not talking about an electric guitar like the one Kerry King (Slayer) uses. I’m talking about an actual axe, i.e. blade and shaft, i.e. this baby. Sarah gave it to me for my birthday. It’s an awesome gift, one I was certainly not expecting. […]
Oh Me Oh Vinyl
I’ve just released my new album on vinyl, so I wanted to put down a quick word on the medium. We have a record player. (It looks more or less like this.) We bought it for cheap (so can you), and apart from having to throw $9 and a screwdriver at it to change the […]
Small Town. Big Venue.
A quick one today for the road back from the Gila Wilderness was a long one, and I need to work on other things. But while it’s fresh in my head, I wanted to sound a virtual trumpet call in praise of the venue I played at this weekend: The Buckhorn Saloon and Opera House, […]
Blue Moon My Ass
Like the vast majority of you, assuming I know my readers, which one must assume when one writes, I’ve been pretty taken by this recent full moon. Living out here in the desert–as I do, though many of you don’t, again assuming a certain reader knowledge–without a whole lot of light or noise pollution (apart […]
Of Squirrels and Men
One of the brilliant developments we parents undergo is how we learn to identify the sounds our children make, learn to recognize their cries or laughter in a crowd of crying or laughing children, learn to hear only their voice over the radio or record player. It’s a bit like the penguins recognizing their mate […]
What would Odysseus Do?
It’s been a summer of returns. We’ve just come back from Corsica. See above. We left Santa Fe a month ago, first for NY, to Sarah’s childhood home. See below. (That’s a horse Jackson made with his grandpa. Oddly, that horse kind of resembles the boy, no?) Then we went back to Tralonca (more on […]
Humbled
I have a handful of linguistic pet peeves (see this earlier blog or this one). One of them that I’ve yet to mention here is the use of the world “humbled” by actors, or anyone for that matter, accepting a big award. Receiving an award is not, in my humble opinion, an inherently humbling endeavor. […]
A Family of Musicians
Probably not the most representative shot from where I’ve been, still telling its own right. I’ve been in Toronto for this thing called the Folk Alliance—four days of music and panels on music in a downtown hotel. We were in a musical bubble. But outside that bubble, it’s all hockey up there, even in the […]
100 Skies. Day 101. Hmm.
The day dawned this morning as it did yesterday. We (and I’m speaking broadly here) rotated around at the same pace and in the same direction. Eventually, our little plot in New Mexico approached an angle with the sun whereby the clouds above went pink and the trees beside went gold. And then up came […]