brooding ’bout stuff
Billy Idol has a new music video. And four dates in Vegas.
At the Chelsea. In October.
I remember first hearing Idol’s band Generation X on Rodney Bingenheimer’s show on KROQ. I thought the song was titled “Wild Dove.” Rather, it was the dub side to their second single, “Wild Youth.” It sounded so mysterious, this up-paced power-pop tune pulled apart.
Continue reading “Idol not Idle”
Saturday night, the Fall of Kabul, the Choppers of Cong, the mendacity of “Why didn’t we see this coming?” All I can think about is a poem I heard by chance on KPFK seventeen or eighteen years ago. Haunted then as I am now, remembering little, I wrote to the writer, Los Angeles poet Jan Wesley, asking for a copy.
Continue reading “Delightfully Brutal”
Last time, I said I planned to toot the horn of a new songwriter (relatively speaking), but I will toot my own—and that of my wife Andrea Carney—along the way.
Continue reading “Friendship Band”
Before I start tooting the horn of current songwriters—and shortly I will profile the thoughtful Dan Wriggins of Friendship—let me toot my own. Over the last six months my musical partner Rob Berg and I have released eighteen songs, ten of which never were issued before (unless you received a few as a homemade Christmas gift in 1987).
Continue reading “Bachelors In the Land of Nod”
This fifth in a series of portraits of Rudy Perez is akin to the third: an anatomy of a performance. For background on the dancer-choreographer Ruth St. Denis and her consort Ted Shawn, see Egyptian Deities and Jacob’s Pillow from Portrait of Rudy Perez 4.
Continue reading “Portrait of Rudy Perez 5: Anatomy of a Performance 2”
CNN News Item, May 10, 2021: According to the Gun Violence Archive, at least 117 people were killed and 303 wounded in shootings across the country over 72 hours this past weekend.
Continue reading “420 Shot in 72 Hours: BFD”
I’m not a fan of royalty by any means. But being interested in design I was struck by Elizabeth II’s face mask, pictured above, prior to the funeral of her consort Philip.
Continue reading “Modes of Mourning”
It was awful. Dissatisfied with the HVAC system in our home I turned to NextDoor, the online neighborhood forum that can provide useful references. I somehow seem to have opted out of its daily or weekly digests but located my login only to be greeted with a missing person notice, a couple of blocks away.
Continue reading “Missing/Inaction”
I was annoyed Tuesday when the Biden-Harris tribute to the 400,000 fallen included that old, mm…, warhorse “Amazing Grace.” I muttered to my wife Andrea Carney, “Well, as long as they don’t trot out ‘Hallelujah’…,” which of course they did. “Amazing Grace” showed up time and again during the inaugural spectacle.
Continue reading “The Old Normal”
I do what I do because
that’s what I do, and if
I didn’t do it who would?
— Rudy Perez
In talking with Rudy Perez about his career’s performances over the last nine months (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I noticed how many took place in art spaces. Of course, by the time I met Rudy in 1980, performances—dance and otherwise—were often hosted by galleries—large and small, for-profit and non. What follows are reminiscences of such productions during the years before I left Los Angeles for Denver in 2005, including bits from our conversations earlier this month.
Continue reading “Portrait of Rudy Perez 4: Lingering in Spaces”