July 20, 2012-–
NEW YORK, N.Y.—Went vinyl digging in the rain at Bleecker Street Records and other ports of call before tonight’s Curtis Mayfield Tribute Concert at the Lincoln Center Festival.
Can’t wait to wrap the turntable around the double LP “Super Funk 2” with tracks like “Jelly Roll” by the Granby Street Development and “Monkey In a Sack” by Lil’ Buck & the Top Cats. While scouring the Bleecker basement (with a fat grey cat working the floor), the warm sound of Mayfield’s guitar—one that so perfectly complemented his falsetto—-washed over the room. I bought The Impressions “Check Out Your Mind!” for a new friend.
In a 1993 [...]
July 19, 2012—
HANNIBAL, Mo.—-The sleepy but spunky Hannibal, Missouri was built on escapism. Situated on the west bank of the Mississippi River along majestic limestone bluffs and caves, the town’s endless gateways caught the imagination of a young Samuel Clemens. Freight trains still run by the Mississippi River and Bear Creek and they, too have always been on their way to someplace bigger.
Like Dubuque.
On this humid Sunday evening in mid-July, Danville Dans assistant coach Trevor Hall would rather be anywhere than the historic Clemens Stadium on the south edge of [...]
July 10, 2012—
FORT WAYNE. Ind..—-A road trip down the historic Lincoln Highway always takes you back in time.
America’s first coast-to-coast highway connected Times Square in New York City with the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco’s Lincoln Park. The Lincoln Highway (Route 30) rolls through downtown Fort Wayne and will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2013.
While cruising in the way-back machine I ran into former Chicago Cub-Minnesota Twins Jacques Jones in Fort Wayne. This was the same player who befuddled Cubs fans in 2006 and 2007 but I miss him from today’s [...]
Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey and his kids in NY subway (Courtesy of R.A. Dickey)
May 29, 2012—
The honest sports memoir floats in rarefied air.
The majority of sports remembrances flutter and roll like tumbleweed into a moonstruck horizon. But New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey has written “Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest For Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (Blue Rider Press, $26.95), one of the most soul-searching memoirs of any recent genre’.
Robert Allen “R.A.” Dickey was born in 1974 in Nashville, Tenn., where he still lives with [...]
April 30, 2012—-
Club Deuce doesn’t really belong on South Beach. But then neither do I. Club Deuce does not have an ocean front view and I look like the back end of a Greyhound heading to Key Largo.
I was at Club Deuce a couple weeks ago after a Cubs-Marlins game and stared out the front window painted with a pair of dancing skeletons.
A tiny all-night outdoor sandwich shop was across the street from Club Deuce. It was next door to a late night tattoo parlor. The Club Deuce is not in the rarefied air of the beautiful people at the Clevelander or the European edge of the News Cafe.
My friend John Hughes lived in South Beach in the 1980s [...]
Feb. 14, 2012
VALPARAISO, Chile—-There is a love of stuff and stuff of love. This was found to be true on my recent visit to “La Sebastiana,” the playful house of Chilean poet and writer Pablo Neruda.
The Nobel Prize winning author died in the autumn of 1973 and his five-story home which overlooks the Pacific Ocean has turned into a highly stimulating museum. “La Sebastiana” gets its name from Sebastian Collado, a Spaniard who built the home as a place to live after his children were married. One vision was to construct the third floor as a bird cage. Collado died before his dream was realized. Life can turn that way.
A mutual poet friend connected [...]
National Organization Announces Ten Most Endangered Roadside Places
Jan. 4. 2012
The first steps I took in 2012 were up a steep hill off of Bay Shore Drive in Door County. That’s better than starting the year by going downhill.
The Northern Wisconsin wind slapped my face around like a pimp as I took a gentle curve to the Church Hill Inn in Sister Bay. I was heading to Ephraim. I felt old. I had booked myself into the frilly bed and breakfast because it was walking distance from the Sister Bay Bowl and supper club.
I love the concept of a supper club and bowling alley in one space. I love going to a summer destination in the dead of winter. And the fact that Whiskey Ditch was playing for free sealed the deal. What a [...]
December 19, 2011—
The writing was on the wall.
I would no longer be sending Christmas cards after 2011.
For the past several years I’ve purchased a couple of boxes of “holiday” cards from Chicago Lights at Fourth Presbyterian Church in downtown Chicago. It is a non-profit organization that opens doors to individuals and families who face challenges of aging, poverty and access to education and health care.
The cards were cute, witty and always warm.
They were designed and illustrated by children from Chicago.
Dec. 11, 2011—-
The most memorable place I’ve had sex is atop Mount Tamalpais, overlooking the East Bay in Marin County, Calif.
Like all magical moments, it wasn’t supposed to happen.
The weathered coastal mountain peaks at 2,500 feet. We drove about three-quarters of the way up Mount Tam and parked at a scenic turnaround. We hiked the rest of the way.
We sat down to rest on a grassy slope. She rolled out a blue and white blanket for a picnic. The blanket matched the azure skies, a contrast to the fog we saw over San Francisco. We talked about poetry, free birds and the songs of Greg Brown. We tried to scare each other with rumors about the late [...]
Nov. 29, 2011—
November in Chicago brings me down, down, down. Lower than Herman Cain’s pants.
Its been that way since I was a teenager. I remember getting up at seven on a mid-November Saturday morning and walking in a dark drizzle to take SAT tests at Naperville Central High School to gain entrance in a college I would never attend. I was too sleepy and confused to take a test. I felt like I was going fishing.
I’ve since tried to travel to sunnier climates in November. Several years ago I salvaged a tricked out tiki bar and had it restored with ambient red lights and bright bamboo to cheer me up on dark November days.
My turntable always [...]
October 11, 2011—
The heart hangs like a thick branch of a cypress tree
over a wake in the narrow Mobile River.
Looking at the water and the sky
like the space between now and then.
*
Did you see the turkey vulture?
Flying over the side of the freedom highway. Look!
Maybe you were sleeping to a Mavis Staples lullaby
as I drove off into another day.
*
My father always said to stay cool.
He has the warmest of souls
He now sleeps and rests a trembling arm
And unforgiving legs that showed me the way.
*
Decency is the tributary into a sea of understanding.
He [...]
Oct. 3, 2011—
Travel is a stream of consciousness thing.
That’s what I was doing late Friday night when I was sitting alone at the Terrace Bar at Pioneer Place in downtown St. Cloud, Minn. Nightdreaming.
The bartender asked me if I had seen “The King.”
Well, of course I have been to Memphis. But he was referring to the monster porcelain floor urinal on the second floor of the former Elks Club, 22 5th Ave. South not far from the Mississippi River.
I normally don’t hang out at urinals. The only memorable urinal I have seen is the rock waterfall urinal accented by clamshell sinks at the technicolor Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif. That [...]
Sept. 19, 2011—
The guy down at the middle of the bar told his friend how he didn’t do anything this summer. I overheard it because the bar is as small as a penny in a fountain.
I asked Jackie for a bar napkin. It was interesting that in a season as compacted as summer in Chicago you can’t do anything.
Bar napkins are good for three things: wiping up junk, drying tears and aborbing thoughts. With a borrowed blue pen I jotted down some of the things I hadn’t done this summer:
Missed seeing the Cubs win much. Did not go to the historic Centennial Beach in Naperville, nor did I see Russell Crowe swim at ‘The Beach’ when he was living in the [...]
Bad to the bone. Talkzone: Blues & Baseball With George Thorogood
August 17, 2011—
DES MOINES, Ia.—-If it had been up to me I would have carved Southern Belle-isious chef Paula Deen out of a block of butter at the Iowa State Fair.
But like an ambitious diet, or big workout program it wasn’t meant to be.
I was invited to be a ringer in Monday’s “Battle of the Butter,” held daily on the fairgrounds in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the fair’s fabled butter cow.
I absolutely love the Iowa State Fair, which runs through Aug. 21. I love pork chops on a stick, red velvet funnel cake and the smell of livestock. I attended the “Nostalgic Comfort Food” competition sponsored by the Brass Armadillo Antique [...]
August 4, 2011—
I’m sure you have a ritual, too.
Maybe it is a weekly yoga class or a spot near the foggy window of a neighborhood bar. Maybe you carry your laptop to a favorite coffee shop where you add a daring dash of cinnamon to your java.
Perhaps you check blog posts every night at 11.
One of my rituals was to stop by the Borders book store every Sunday in suburban Oak Brook outside of Chicago, The visit became part of my drive from the city to visit my elderly parents. I would collect my thoughts, comb through the music—this Borders had a great buyer who stocked the hard-to-find Skeletons from Springfield, Mo.—and I’d get lost in the travel [...]
July 22, 2011—
For me, the notion of bird watching was as impossible as marathon running.
Or playing golf.
But last spring I was standing in the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge near Pascagoula, Miss. looking at birds. For a long time. I did not have binoculars or a pith helmet. I was not on a writing assignment. I was on vacation with my girl friend. She wandered off as she was known to do. I can still see the intensity of her blue eyes attached to the skies in the distance.
i found a veranda near a marsh surrounded by wet pine savanna and pine scrub. It was late morning and puffy clouds rolled across the horizon like boxcars. [...]
July 4, 2011-
The essence of music is deep and free. Like sprinkles of dust underneath blasted firecrackers and cherry bombs there is a distant salsa beat.
An old blue bicycle takes you to a group of men in Humboldt Park on the west side of Chicago. They are across the way from the 16-inch softball players with the sweeping uppercut swings and the pregnant woman with a light white smock snapping in a gentle breeze.
It sounds like the old bicycle needs oil.
The men are huddled under a tree that shades them from a bright blue sky. No barbecue, no beer; just their drums, congas and heart beats. No tip jars.
Just commitment, a promise to keep [...]
It was his first Buffett concert, he squirted me with that gun.
June 26, 2011—
Children have the best dreams. They are pure and sometimes scary and what these visions lack in ambition they make up through innocence.
A Jimmy Buffett concert brings out the child in everyone—-if you are a willing participant.
Buffett is not for everyone. He is proud to play the role of jester, and his crowd is often an intoxicated court. He will never be Pitchfork-approved, but I argue music is a random adventure. Sometimes you eat steak, other times chicken, maybe pasta, or Thai. Some nights I like to hear Jimmy Buffett. Other nights I prefer Curtis [...]
