Why Taxi Driver Still Endures
Sean MurphyBesides being a masterpiece, Taxi Driver endures in part because the conditions that inspired it endure. Not many critics would name it as the best American movie, and it probably…
Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone: First Reading, Revisited
Four years ago today. Thanks again to the Jasmine Café (RIP). Kudos to Reston legend Robert E. Simon (RIP) for showing up. Love to all my friends and family who came…
10 for NYC by 10, on 9/11
New York City would be unimaginable without jazz, and vice versa. Here then is a tribute for --and by-- several musicians who help define and celebrate the cultural mecca of…
On Loving & Losing Man’s Best Friends
i. Schnauzers look at you. I mean they really look at you. Not through you, only people do that. If dogs, in general, are correctly credited for living entirely in…
The Death of an Indestructible Dog: What Quinzy Taught Me (Revisited)
Portrait of the artist as a young pup. Wait, did I say artist? I meant barbarian. No, that's neither fair nor accurate. It's difficult with Quinzy-- he was many things,…
Washing Dishes as Antidote for Apathy
Tom Sietsema, the excellent food critic for The Washington Post, wrote a fantastic piece about dishwashers (in general) and his experience, as a dishwasher, on 8/7/17. I highly recommend this piece…
July 28, 1979: The Long Way Home (Revisited)
If I ever need to check myself and consider what a privileged life I've led, I simply need to recall that moving across town in the summer of '79 was…
July 20, 1969 or, One Small Step for Man’s Mind
Listen: there are people who actually believe that the moon landing never happened. Lots of people. Not that it didn’t happen, necessarily, but that it was an elaborate, carefully staged…
Memorial Day: A Poem
Unanticipated clouds advance, shifting the weight of the world—or at least the measured objectives of so many compulsory affairs—nonplussed after all this time by their capacity to inspire, interrupt, or…
Every Day is Mother’s Day
I’m fortunate, in a sense, to be the type of person that gets more sentimental about the times I read a certain book or heard a particular album than I…