Under a Black Rainbow

This argument of the cold digital screen vs. the warm analog page? It's bullshit. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Both have the potential to be educators and truth-tellers; both also have the potential to be flat-out liars to you.  I've experienced a few things this week that have lit up a few of my synapses. It's not often that something makes me sit up and take stock of my own position on a subject, but this week it's happened twice.  The first came in video meme form; a comparison of the money spent trying to help clean up the island of Maui vs. that spent on the defense of Ukraine. It was...a heavy-handed and inaccurate argument, that somehow we were spending more on a foreign country (Ukraine) as opposed to spending less on a state of our own union (Hawaii) that had just experienced some pretty severe natural trauma.  The final conclusion showed an ashen version of Maui from last week versus the video of some totally nice freeway somewhere in Europe (a...

  I truly recognized it today for the first time, this pattern of the last few months. Not that I didn't see it happening physically, only that I didn't see it for it what it was until now.  I've been angry about my writer's block and my reader's block. These are two things I used to take a great deal of enjoyment in doing. I've had to pivot my creative output into other avenues because my old stand-bys are on indefinite leave. Part of me hates this because it's the longest blockage I've had since I actively started focusing on my writing some 20+ years ago. The other part of me hates it because I can almost taste the potential stories on the tip of my mind's tongue. Frustratingly out of reach.  My music block is another one that's been really tough to grapple with these days. I've got some gigs coming up thankfully, which has lit a fire under my ass to really get back into it, but it's been an uphill battle.  You might be wondering where...

The house is emptier this weekend. We got the basement storage area cleared out; closets fully emptied of holiday dinnerware and old luggage, bedroom sets deconstructed into their base parts with box springs and mattresses wrapped up in plastic. The digital piano picked up and given a home with friends. We're closer to emptying this place, closer to closing its doors to us forever.  The sun was out today, shining bright in between weird bouts of microbursts all weekend long. The high window in the foyer soaked up so much of that brightness it was hard not to get caught up in the angles of the moment, the lines of the hallway reaching up into the vaulted ceilings, framing the sunlit vision in a perfect moment.  The house felt vibrant, alive. I wonder how much anthropomorphism I'm projecting onto things right now with the majority of my days and evenings spent in so much solitude.  I feel like I could walk this house blind-folded all these years on, like I know the entirety...

What started out as something I believed to be a minor experience exploded into a full on thing, which tends to happen when I latch on to a new passion.  And it's not that putting a record collection together is a new thing for me; I sold (most of) my entire collection of nearly 5,000 records back in 2009 in order to move to San Francisco for grad school. And I gotta tell ya, that was the dumbest thing I ever did. Not because of how much some of those records are worth now, but because of how much it would cost me to put some of those records back into my collection. Some of my favorite albums (particularly those by the People Under the Stairs and Massive Attack's "100th Window") are now very nearly cost-prohibitive as to be almost unattainable.  So I've started over. Not quite from scratch as I kept about 50 or 60 records back; the important ones I didn't want to part with for one reason or another. But my approach to buying is different than it us...

Back in the early 2000's, I began a love affair with vinyl and DJing and turntables and gigs in dark, nasty venues and big, loud clubs. And I enjoyed the hell out of it, collecting over 5,000 records during my 9 years pre-San Francisco doing it. It took me several weeks to get rid of all of my records before moving to the west coast, and it's a decision I still regret today. Not so much because of the financial value of the records, but instead for their sentimental value and their playability. Because of the hours I spent looking for those records, both online and in person at record stores that no longer exist here in Kansas City. And it's weird to think all four of those places are gone now, having been replaced by newer upstarts and used bookstore bins. And this past weekend, I went record shopping with my friend Shannon. I kept a few records from my old collection - some original Miles Davis, some old punk records, some picture discs that go for entirely too ...