brooding ’bout stuff
By now viewers of MSNBC surely are familiar with reporter Adam Klasfeld who currently is attending the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. You may not know that Klasfeld holds a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Rutgers and studied in London with Richard Digby Day (who “is credited with discovering actors Ralph Fiennes and Hugh Grant”1). Klasfeld is the author of a number of plays as well as artistic director of the theater company One Armed Man.2
Continue reading “Exhuming Joe Hill”
It’s been three months since I’ve posted here. My wife Andrea Carney and I have separated; she’s in Minnesota near her son Alex and his family while I remain in Denver, moving next month from Central Park to the neighborhood named after Sloan’s Lake, the city’s largest body of water, at its western border. Like many places here, its working-class roots show while the peroxide of gentrification blandly bleaches.1 Gentrification can be seen as rejuvenation, giving youth to the old. But it’s a kind of death.
Continue reading “Deaths”
Colorado Public Radio (CPR) reported ten days ago that the U.S. Department of Justice “has complained that Colorado violates federal law by not providing adequate services to transition people with physical disabilities out of nursing homes and back into the community.” It was the following statistic, however, that startled me: “From 2013 to 2019, only 269 Coloradans with physical disabilities transitioned from nursing facilities to the community, according to a multi-year review by the Justice Department.” That’s less than forty people a year and a little more than one per the 231 facilities in the state over those seven years.1 The implication is that nursing homes are warehousing people.
I know from personal experience that this is a reasonable conclusion, but the problem is more complicated than it sounds. Nursing homes are one part of a system full of holes.
Continue reading “Nursing Holes”
Years ago I was told by my parents that I had a Wobbly in my lineage on my father’s side. I asked them to write down what they remembered about him but never followed up. Until recently.
Continue reading “My Old Kentucky Home: Edgar, Willis and Green”
On August 30, 2006, I received a “don’t break the chain” email from a relative, apparently by mistake. Appropriately it had no subject line because it had no substance. Nevertheless its sentimentalism compelled my response. I offer this as a snapshot in time with which to compare the present discourse.
Continue reading “False Flags”
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”
I’ve been distracted lately by food videos sent my way by YouTube. A week ago America’s Test Kitchen posted Our Top Rated Hot Sauce.1 At about the same time I was reintroduced to the first hot sauce I ever used on a regular basis.
Continue reading “Picx Picx: Greñudo’s Favorite Hot Sauce”
My brother’s gemology webinar last month caused me to reflect on my time as a “gemstone journalist,” which I haven’t really written about in this venue. See what you think. Continue reading “Diamonds in the Mine: An Exploration of Humanitarian Gemology”
Comment by David Hughes: The present pandemic has inspired many performing artists: locked down, they are reinventing old works and coming up with new ones. A century ago in 1914, labor bard Joe Hill did the same from his own lockdown—a Salt Lake City jail—lifting lines from “The Internationale” and composing new ones like these from “Workers of the World, Awaken”:
If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains;
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still. Continue reading “For a Clinic Without Supervisors”
The coronavirus has moved systemic racism into public discussion once again. To people who’ve been tracking health in this country, none of this comes as a surprise. The greatest health care system the world has ever known is not accessible to all, and there are a lot of efforts to keep it that way. Continue reading “The Racist Boss, The Child-Molesting Priest”