When I heard that my friend Rod Powell passed away, I couldn’t help thinking of when we met.
I was still in high school, driving a ‘58 Chevy pickup with a busted gas gauge. Ran out on 28th Street, a couple blocks from Mitchell. Didn’t know what was going on up ahead, but I could hear it!
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You had to love my late brother, Unkle Pat. (Everybody called him that including our mother. And that’s his spelling, not mine.) Anyway, he got arrested a lot.
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I finished “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron, in 2019 and my best advice to aspiring artists would be to take what is usable and leave the rest. According to many well-respected humans from the past, such as Siddhartha Gautama and Walt Whitman, this is always a good approach. Each of us has a creative process and our own systems of belief. Art is a craft and to create, we must invite the creativity to flow through us.
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We never get tired of hearing that we turned you on to something cool. A restaurant, a band, a movie, a book, an event. Whatever. It never gets old.
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The greatest movie ever, you ask? Surely this is satire. It would be blasphemy to think that a dumb comedy could ever be spoken of in the same breath as Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, or even The Godfather, as the jewels of American Cinema.
Well listen up movie snobs, as I introduce it to those who haven’t yet been seduced by its charms, and then compare and contrast it with these other seemingly dissimilar movies.
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When anything changes in my house, it’s usually the Queen’s doing. She’s found some crock or something at an estate sale that now resides on the countertop filled with wooden spoons. But somehow, it clashed with the old coffeemaker, so here’s the new coffeemaker. Like that. Shut up and drink your coffee!
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Are you a glass half full, or a glass half empty kind of person? We’ve all heard those kinds of questions about one’s “outlook”.
A little self-reflection never hurts, right? But I think there’s more to it than that.
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When you put your thoughts and words out there on a regular basis, folks come to expect an opinion on everything that comes up. While I generally have strong ideas on a lot of subjects, sometimes I’m torn. The hard issues are hard for everybody and I’m no exception.
And since I’ve been pretty vocal about schools on multiple occasions, I’m repeatedly asked about the latest controversy.
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You Write WHERE?
David Mamet’s collection of essays entitled WRITING IN RESTAURANTS inspired me to write just about everywhere. Like the pervert-preacher in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, I’ve written on rooftops, I’ve written in bus stations, I’ve written in brothels.
In the interest of full disclosure: Mamet argues that radio is a great training ground for writers, so, perhaps he is not to be trusted.
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