"Creating People On Whom Nothing is Lost" - An educator and writer in Colorado offers insight and perspective on education, parenting, politics, pop culture, and contemporary American life.
Disclaimer - The views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
Like many people, whenever we travel and explore a new town or region, the local independent bookstore is mandatory destination. There is nothing better during a leisurely stroll through an unfamiliar neighborhood than to happen across a quaint, cozy, comforting bookstore. I'm not sure what it is for bookies that makes walking into a bookstore feel like coming home, but I always relish those first few steps inside the door. What displays are front and center? Which books have the curators deftly placed to invite a glance, a perusal, a skimming of pages?
Living in Denver for many years, we were blessed with a truly legendary indie store, The Tattered Cover. It's an impressive institution that can hang with the best of the big indie stores known nationally, like Powells in Portland, The Strand in New York City, City Lights in San Francisco, and of course Shakespeare & Co in Paris.
Some smaller but well-known indie stores I've had the pleasure of visiting include Books are Magic in Brooklyn and the wonderful Left Bank Books in my beloved St. Louis. Some spots on my wish list included Parnassus Books in Nashville and Painted Porch in Austin.
That praise comes from none other than Garth Brooks, one of the greatest songwriters and performers in music history. And he's talking about "America Pie," the richly textured tale from Don McClean about "the day the music died." And the song is undoubtedly one of the most well known in the history of American music. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who, if prompted, could not finish the refrain of the song:
"Bye, bye, Miss American Pie; drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry; them good ol' boys drinkin' whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die."
McClean recently "took the stage to sing the song with another artist," something he has done only twice in fifty-five years. And Guitar Player magazine caught up with the legendary singer who revealed some interesting facts and insight into the song.
Don McLean scored more than a hit when he composed “American Pie,” the tune he released as a single in 1971. He also created an iconic cut that has continued to resonate with the public some 55 years later. Generations since its original release, “American Pie” is an anthem known and loved by members of every generation.
The tune offers a kaleidoscopic ride through the social unrest and changes brought about in 1960s America. McLean was famously reluctant to discuss the song’s enigmatic lyrics for years, preferring to let its mystery endure. But even while he kept mum about the meaning behind its words, “American Pie” remained the centerpiece of his live performances, a showstopper that got everyone in the venue singing along.
Despite the song’s popularity — second only to that of his 1972 hit "Vincent" — McLean never sang it with another artist until his 1997 performance with country artist Garth Brooks. At the time, Brooks was at his peak, with Diamond-certified albums like No Fences (1990) and Ropin' the Wind (1991), playing major stadium tours, and holding a record-setting Central Park concert in 1997. Which is why singer Jessie Murph’s show on September 27 was such a big deal.
The rising star used her sold-out show at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium as an opportunity to bring out McLean for a rare performance of “American Pie,” making her only the second artist in 55 years to perform the tune with him.
The 20-year-old singer/songwriter wrote in her Instagram Stories, “I have so much gratitude in my heart today. Last night was so magical and incredible and sparkling, I feel like the luckiest girl on earth.”
And, you may not be aware (I wasn't) that a documentary was released about the song back in 2022. It's an homage to the song, of course, an exploration of the lyrics and story behind the stories. And it is a testament to the career of Don McClean, who had one other widely known song with the elegiac Vincent, released in 1971.
Few songs are so easily identifiable and singable as:
Indigenous artist, activist, spoken word performer, and punk rock front man for his band Dead Pioneers,Gregg Deal is impressive. He's a big deal. And, if you're in or around Los Angeles in the next month, you owe to yourself to stop by the Adler Smith Gallery in Santa Monica for the latest installation of Gregg's unique, and uniquely powerful, art exhibit "The Others."
If you've followed this blog or my writing with Westword Magazinein Denver, you know I am a huge fan of Deal and have covered the band Dead Pioneers several times in the past year. And I will continue to follow the band as they work on their third album for Hassle Records, following a strong response to the second LP Post-American and a string of live shows in promotion that included opening for Pearl Jam and touring Europe with punk legends Pennywise and Propagandhi.
But today on Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking about Deal's visual art and his series "The Others" which first caught my attention years ago before I met him or the band had formed. The series is a powerful statement about Native American stereotypes, white supremacy, cultural appropriation, and the power of punk rock. In the series, Deal has taken offensive "cowboy and indian" comics from the 1940s and reappropriated them with a reversal that features the Natives winning. Each of the image's speech bubbles features punk rock lyrics that resonated with Gregg from his youth.
In Deal’s own punk way, The Others points to an ongoing struggle for liberation from white settler-colonialism and violence. For The Others series, Deal appropriates individual panels of comic book illustrations from the 1940’s and 1950’s, changing out the dialogue of each speech balloon with lyrics from late 20th century punk rock music—bands such as Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Marginal Man, and Operation Ivy (I’d recommend exploring some of the musical inspiration on your way to, or while viewing the work). Grit is apparent in Deal’s delivery. Stencils, aerosol, and hand-painted words appeal to a non-conformist sensibility, enhancing the overall subversive message.
I can still recall reading a review of a new and intriguing thriller called The DaVinci Code from a relatively unknown writer, Dan Brown. I'm fairly sure the review was on Salon.com, and I was curious enough to check out what became a true publishing and mass media phenomenon.
Now, Dan Brown and his alter-ego - globe trotting Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon - are back for another smart thriller exploring history and mystery. I say "smart," and that may leave many readers rolling their eyes, to be sure. For, Brown has been widely criticized for his literary style, or perhaps lack of it. He is truly a great storyteller even though he's not a great writer, per se. But the "smart" descriptor has to do with his topic matter -- history, language, symbols, secret societies, religious texts and iconography. And, of course, the power of the written word.
You will find many astonishing sentences in “The Secret of Secrets,” Dan Brown’s latest TED-Talk travelogue thriller. One that caught my eye arrives early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 7: “The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly 20,000 books a year and generates over $5 billion in annual gross revenues.” This is a purely factual — and, as far as I can determine, accurate — statement, and therefore a particular kind of Dan Brown sentence.
Of course there are other varieties, including ones that start with a breathless adverb (“impossibly,” “remarkably,” “conveniently”); ones that burst into excited italics; ones that are entirely in italics. Brown is above all an action writer, and his hero, Robert Langdon, is continually in hot pursuit of whoever is hotly pursuing him, whether in Florence, Rome, Barcelona or some other popular tourist destination. The nearly 700 pages of “The Secret of Secrets” zigzag across a hectic day, mostly in Prague, during which guns are fired, locks picked, hidden passageways discovered and shocking revelations delivered on the run. The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose.
But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel. Since Langdon is, by profession, a professor (of symbology, at Harvard, in case you need reminding), his adventures are punctuated, or you might say padded, with brief lectures on a great many topics in history, science, philosophy and real estate.
Sometimes you don't even know you were missing something in your life until you find it, ... or perhaps it finds you. That's how I felt the first time I heard the jazz trio from Manchester known as GoGo Penguin. The song was GGP's "Hopopono":
I had the pleasure of catching the innovative and highly entertaining trio on their North American tour when they stopped by Boulder Theater on November 5. I was surprised to hear it was the third time the group has played there, and the 90-minute set did not disappoint. Touring in support of the new album Necessary Fictions, the guys played pretty much non-stop, offering many new selections from the release to a nearly packed house.
GoGo Penguin have already given us one album, Everything Is Going To Be OK (XXIM, 2023), following the departure of their original drummer Rob Turner and the arrival of Jon Scott. With its tendency to introspection, ‘Everything’ marked a successful new start for the trio of Scott, pianist Chris Illingworth and bassist Nick Blacka.
After touring the album worldwide, the three of them considered their musical direction anew. Illingworth and Blacka re-equipped their studio in Manchester and started jamming. Scott joined them after a few weeks and throughout 2024 the three took their time to work on new pieces. Necessary Fictions is the result, which sees them invent their version of GoGo Penguin.
The sound is recognisable, of course: strong piano lines, powerful bass and novel drum parts. However, their new album dives headfirst into adventure. Illingworth has been exploring synthesizers and uses them brilliantly, while Blacka and Scott are in top form.
From the opening track Umbra, it’s clear that the sheer joy of playing is renewed, and with that the emotion and all the fantastic builds and crescendos that make their tracks hard to resist. Fallowfield Loops follows on seamlessly. Vintage GoGo Penguin, rock solid.
Years ago, when my children were still young, but old enough to watch and appreciate movies and television from my youth -- say films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- my wife and I introduced them to one of TV's longest-running and most endearing sitcoms, M*A*S*H.
And they loved it, just as we did and knew they would.
Truly one of the most significant and impactful television sitcoms in history, it streams on Hulu, and my wife and I still tune in and watch a couple episodes a week. The show is every bit as good as it ever was. For a show centered on a group of army doctors and nurses during the Korean War, the entertainment value is actually quite an interesting study. M*A*S*H is hilarious and poignant, heartwarming and heartbreaking, deeply thoughtful and wildly wacky, honestly insightful on the human condition and hilariously honest about everyday life.
This week, esteemed linguist and social commentator John McWhorter published a piece in the New York Times about 10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch. Surprisingly, he didn't include MASH, though he conceded his actual list is much longer than ten, and his commentary led me to pondering just how it is that MASH still "Holds Up Fifty Years Later":
Few, if any, sitcoms that began more than half a century ago can claim to be as great as M*A*S*H was. Despite airing throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, and centering on a war that began and ended approximately 70 years ago, in many ways, it feels like a timeless show. It was a TV version of the 1970 Robert Altman movie of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of a 1968 novel called MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. That novel was based on the real-life experience of former military surgeon turned author Hiester Richard Hornberger Jr. during his time spent serving in the Korean War, and so both the movie and the TV show center on a group of doctors and other medical staff in South Korea, with M*A*S*H's cast shown to work at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea. As striking and effective as the movie can be, the TV show takes what works about the film and makes it even better. It's a little less abrasive and crude, given it was broadcast on television, and features new takes on the characters that make them more sympathetic and endearing. Beyond the character development, the TV version of M*A*S*H also shines for its expert balance of comedy and drama, its bold anti-war themes, and its willingness to experiment with the TV format. Not every aspect has aged perfectly, but the vast majority of the time, M*A*S*H.
"I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."
It was 70 years ago on October 7, that Allen Ginsberg "Howl-ed" for the first time. The poetry reading at 6 Gallery is a monumental moment in American lit, and it was recreated fictionally in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Rexroth, Snyder and others met for a reading that in many ways kicked off the Beat Generation.
Beat scholar David Wills recently published a book about that historic evening, and to promote the book and the evening, he recounted the history in a cool piece for Quillette: "A Subterranean Celebration: How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture."
On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was only his second poetry reading and he had little reason to feel it would be successful, yet a year later he was a minor celebrity and two years after that he and his Beat Generation friends were a national obsession—loved, loathed, imitated, and parodied. That reading started the San Francisco Renaissance, too, and helped to turn the Bay Area into a literary centre. It would not be long before the Beats spawned the beatniks, who arguably became the hippies.
It can be tempting to look back at events of great historical importance and feel that they were somehow inevitable, and yet that is not true of the 6 Gallery reading. In fact, its success was wildly improbable. The poets on stage that night were mostly unknown and untested. They read difficult work that should have had very limited appeal. Nor was the gallery itself a venue one would associate with era-defining moments. And while the city held some appeal as a place for the visual arts, it did not have a great literary history.
The 6 Gallery opened in October 1954 and was named for the fact that it had six founders: five young painter friends from near Los Angeles who had teamed up with one of their teachers at the California School of Fine Arts: a poet called Jack Spicer. In their final year of studies, they decided they wanted a place to display their work and Spicer encouraged them, suggesting that they expand the gallery’s function to include not just visual art but poetry. This was not as revolutionary as it perhaps sounds. Prior to the 6 Gallery, the building at 3119 Fillmore had been home to King Ubu, which was also an art gallery that one artist recalled was “primarily devoted to poetry reading.”
David Wills is a fascinating individual and a true scholar of the Beat Generation. His book about the night will undoubtedly enlighten and entertain even the most knowledgeable and passionate of Beat fans.
I've been hearing that since at least the early 90s when I was living the twenty-something expat life, teaching English in Southeast Asia. The late '80s had definitely put the spotlight on the economies of the East, with Japan bursting ahead technologically and buying up huge amounts of American real estate. Granted, that run became stagnant just as the Sleeping Giant began to wake.
Washington Post writer Fareed Zakaria has always had his finger on the pulse of emerging political and economic issues, and he made a statement with his book The Post-American World, which wasn't as much about the waning of the United States as it was "the rise of the rest."
Xi is building the future while Trump pushes tariffs and fights the woke wars.
For about a decade, the United States has been comforted by the notion that China had lost its way. After 35 years of astonishing growth, Beijing stumbled internally and abroad. Its leaders cracked down on some of the country’s most innovative sectors, from technology to education, driving entrepreneurs into exile or silence. Its “wolf warrior” diplomacy alienated its neighbors from India to Australia to Vietnam.
That era is over. China’s leaders have corrected their course.
Last month, while President Donald Trump accused nations at the U.N. General Assembly of being hopeless failures and harangued the United Nations for not hiring him to renovate its headquarters decades ago, President Xi Jinping put forward a Global Governance Initiative, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding. He proposed strengthening the multilateral system along a series of dimensions, positioning Beijing as the constructive, agenda-setting superpower.
There's really no other way to explain what Bari Weiss has accomplished in the past four years since very publicly resigning her (relatively new) position as an editor for the New York Times. The DIY ethic and fiercely independent spirit with which she launched The Free Pressand rode it to a practical coup in the corporate news world is about the most punk-ass thing we've seen in media in a long time.
With the recent announcement from Paramount that Weiss has been named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the frenzied rumblings of the journalism world have been trying to figure out just how the forty-one-year-old writer stormed the gates of the Fourth Estate and won.
Since its founding in 2021, The Free Press has amassed more than 1.5 million readers and $15 million in annual subscription revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances. In an interview, Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, called CBS’s acquisition of The Free Press a “strong recognition that we’re in a new generation of media now.”
“What is undeniable is The Free Press built a new media business in a time when everybody thinks the news is dying as a business — and got it to a place of flourishing in a space of three years,” he said.
It's rare that disruptors are so effective so quickly in challenging institutions like the media. When The Free Press first came on my radar, I immediately thought of Arianna Huffington and the Huff Post. However, Huffington had quite a different starting point, obviously, with significant advantages over Weiss in terms of establishing a name and a news site. And, to be honest, I was never a fan of Huffington and her site which I believe took advantage of writers and certainly exploited many of them, making an obscene amount of money while paying virtually no one for the content.
Weiss deserves props for taking what amounts to a newsletter on the emerging platform Substack and turning it into a thriving news site which clearly filled a niche and a gap in the world of online freelance journalism. And with a prolific publishing schedule and podcast, she definitely put in the time and the effort to quickly build and grow her own unique platform. This was nothing short of pure DIY hustle, and Weiss carved out a market where none had existed.
Granted, as impressive as Bari Weiss' success with The Free Press is, the new leadership gig with CBS News is drawing serious scrutiny and criticism, and it undoubtedly should. Weiss is definitely a skilled writer, editor, journalist, and entrepreneur, but nothing in her career yet truly qualifies her to head one of the major news and media organizations in the world. And, while her greeting letter to her new team was certainly appropriate with many valid positions, her continued connection to The Free Press and its incorporation into the Paramount/CBS orbit is rather suspect.
While The Free Press is in many ways a fresh and valued voice in the media landscape, it is by no means an unbiased, non-partisan, "fair & balanced" news site. The same goes for Weiss herself. And it's entirely fair for anyone to have and promote their ideas, perspectives, angles, preferences, and attitudes. In fact, that is the job of commentary writers, the side of journalism from which Weiss comes.
So, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes next for Weiss and The Free Press. It's definitely been a raucous and impressive ride so far.
According to Outside Magazine, the legendary rock climber and free soloist Alex Honnold is going to free solo climb Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan, and once the tallest in the world.
Alex Honnold—yes, Mr. Free Solo himself—will star in a two-hour live TV show on Netflix in 2026, during which he will scale the tallest skyscraper in Taiwan (gulp) without any safety ropes. Yep, Honnold will go buildering on a very tall building on live TV, and he will do it while adhering to the risky climbing style that made him famous. According to a news release published by Netflix, the ordeal will be titled Skyscraper Live, and it will be staged on a building called Taipei 101, which stands 1,667 feet fall and has 101 floors. In the release, Brandon Riegg, the vice president of nonfiction series and sports at Netflix, called the whole thing an “adrenaline inducing spectacle that you can’t look away from.”
For those of you who don't know, Alex Honnold is an incredibly famous rock climber who climbed the infamous El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. It was one of the most incredible feats of athletic skill and human endurance that anyone ever imagined. The feat was captured on film in the documentary Free Solo, which went on to win the Academy Award.
In the recent passing of "the Sundance Kid," accolades for a legendary career have offered a wide array of choices for some of Redford's greatest roles. From The Sting to The Way We Were to The Candidate to The Natural, I have many favorites. But in the early '90s a seemingly obscure little spy film - a light thriller - came out that featured a pretty stellar cast, and it's one of my most favorite Redford pics. The film, of course, is Sneakers, and it not often mentioned, but also not unappreciated in the Redford pantheon.
Redford’s ability to mix Hollywood charisma with human vulnerability drives Sneakers. After its place setting opening, Sneakers follows Martin’s team as they’re coerced by what appear to be NSA agents into stealing a secret codebreaking device from a brilliant mathematician (Donal Logue, back when he could be cast against type). Along with help from Martin’s sometime girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell), the team attempts their goal by duping a gullible scientist (Stephen Tobolowsky), getting pulled further into post-Cold War intrigue and coming face-to-face with a surprising mastermind (Ben Kingsley).
At the time, some viewers complained that Sneakers failed to challenge Redford, that it just asked him to repeat beats from his ’70s paranoid movies. However, with two decades of age on him, Redford was even more equipped to balance his charisma with humanity. As thrillers of the era grew more slick, with big stakes and fancy technology—Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible, The Long Kiss Goodnight—Redford’s ability to ground Bishop and his wacky pals made Sneakers stand out all the more.
Sneakers never stops insisting that Martin has remarkable hacking skills, that he’s fundamentally a good man against powerful forces. And Redford can embody those admirable traits. But throughout the film, Redford finds ways to keep Martin human: the way his shoulders slightly drop when Liz reminds Martin that he messed up her relationship, the tightening in his jaw as Martin waits to learn if his friends will take on a risky job that would clear his record, the slight lean back when Martin realizes the mastermind’s identity.
As Sneakers repeatedly shows, Robert Redford was a movie star, remarkably handsome and blessed with endless charisma. But by pairing him with oddball character actors and having him play a real person in a heightened story, Sneakers also proves that Redford was a proper actor, able to remain a human being, even when idolized on screen.
Whether he's playing a beach bum in the Elmore Leonard-inspired The Big Bounce from 2004 or playing along with buddy Vince Vaughn in the huge hit Wedding Crashers, Wilson seems to always being playing his stock "awh shucks character," and yet the charm never fails to make me smile.
With his most recent role playing a washed-out professional golfer, he entertains with a limited comedy series The Guardian is calling "the Ted Lasso of golf."
I’ve never met a golfer in real life. I’ve always assumed I’m the wrong demographic – perhaps in terms of age, or class or at least tax bracket – or perhaps my lack of athleticism is so aggressive that it has prevented me from becoming friends with anyone with even the mildest sporting proclivity for all my life. Instead, I have essentially taken Mark Twain’s word for it that golf is a good walk spoiled, and gone about my days.
Now, however, I think golf may be the spoiler of a good new comedy drama. Stick, it’s called – a deadening name – and it stars Owen Wilson as washed-up golf pro Pryce Cahill. He had a televised meltdown during a tournament at the peak of his career (“He triple-bogeyed his entire life”) and is now reduced to selling golf kit, giving lessons to rich old ladies and hustling for cash in bars. He is also going through a divorce, and still living in the former marital home that his wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) – with whom he is still on good terms, bound as they are by a shared sorrow – now wants them to sell.
A golf course can make "fore" some great comedy going back to such classics as Caddyshack and Tin Cup, and while the mentor-prodigy can be a tired and cliched formula, Stick manages to stay fresh and clever and ultimately entertaining, especially with a great turn from Marc Maron as the wise, loyal, and sardonically jaded sidekick.
