Random Notes

So here’s a little bit of Pepperland, read on the evening of February 3, 2010 in Chicago at the Reading Under the Influence monthly session at the Sheffield.  If you’re anywhere close to Chicago, you oughta go sometime. Pepperland is set in Chicago during the winter of 1974 and it’s about the intersection of rock […]

The Story of the Outta State Plates It was at a church picnic in the summer of 1965, on a foggy Sunday afternoon in the Haight district of San Francisco (Our Lady of the Perpetual Groove) that young guitarist, French horn player and theatre professional Giles Colahan and his friend from art school, trombonist, guitarist, […]

(Since this post, which was written in January 2010,  Pepperland, you’ll be happy to know, is now finished.  It rocks. Release date: May 21, 2013.) So the review copy of Barry Wightman’s still unfinished novel of the intersection of rock ‘n roll, technology and love, Pepperland, showed up on my groaningly chaotic desk, tossed there […]

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead Aristotle, in the Poetics, said that the worst kind of plot was the episodic—the kind where not much happens, it’s just one damn thing after another.  I frankly don’t agree with the ancient Greek and am just fine with episodic plots (isn’t that the way life really is?) and I […]

Jesus, you’re such a sap. So said an old buddy, whose opinion I hold in very high esteem, when I confessed that a new Christmassy tune and video by songwriter Ray Davies (you know, the Kinks, Swinging London, Lola and all that), Postcard from London (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZbLHTmmPGY) makes me tear up every time I watch it.  […]