"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.
Wandering into the Allicar Art Gallery on the CSU campus in Fort Collins, I ran across a pretty cool painting of Wayne Thiebaud's, and it reminded me of how much I enjoy this artist's work. Thiebaud's work in a variety of media, using vibrant colors to depict simple objects from everyday life, is not only visually appealing but also symbolically or metaphorically engaging as a reminder of the art and beauty that is always around us.
Clearly associated with the Pop Art movement, Thiebaud was not only prolific but widely influential in contemporary pop art. But as WashPost art critic Philip Kennicott observes in this cool profile from 2012, "Wayne Thiebaud’s artistic eye was so much keener than pop art confections." Honestly, until I read Kennicott's piece, I couldn't fully articulate why Thiebaud's work is so appealing and also important. But I was struck by his observation that:
We need art because we are not particularly good at looking at the world. We see things all the time, yet when some truth finally registers in the mind, we say, “I see,” as if our eyes were closed before this epiphany.
My definition of bliss is a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie, a cup of dark roast coffee with heavy cream, and a cool piano jazz trio in the background.
But while the pie is mostly a seasonal thing and the jazz is simple ambiance, the coffee is a non-negotiable. That's true for millions of Americans who relish and even rely on a daily cuppa joe. In fact, it's the one thing that, according to a recent piece in The Atlantic, consumers seem unwilling to give up, even as price shocks, trade wars, and industry changes are making the ubiquitous beverage a more complicated choice.
Coffee is in trouble. Even before the United States imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazil and 20 percent on Vietnam—which together produce more than half of the world’s coffee beans—other challenges, including climate-change-related fires, flooding, and droughts, had already forced up coffee prices globally. Today, all told, coffee in the U.S. is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was a year ago. Futures for arabica coffee—the beans most people in the world drink—have increased by almost a dollar since July. And prices may well go up further: Tariffs have “destabilized an already volatile market,” Sara Morrocchi, the CEO of the coffee consultancy Vuna, told me. This is a problem for the millions of people who grow and sell coffee around the world. It is also a problem for the people who rely on coffee for their base executive functioning—such a problem that Congress recently introduced a bipartisan bill to specifically protect coffee from Trump’s tariffs.
The reporting on the coffee crisis has been growing in recent years, but it has picked up considerably since April with the imposition of tariffs on a product that simply isn't grown in the United States. And the idea that Congress comes together in a bipartisan bill to exempt coffee from tariffs gives you an idea of just how sacred that beautifully bitter beverage truly is.
Thursday is a day of infinite possibilities, and it has long been my favorite day of the week.
Now, obviously, people will reasonably argue that a workday, a school day, cannot be as great as a weekend. Even Friday has to be better because while it's a work/school day for most people, it's also the kickoff to the weekend. Friday night is always a party, and for good reason.
But hear me out.
If you are having a busy week with a lot on your plate, then a Thursday offers the chance to get good work done, and you still have a day to finish up before the weekend. So Thursdays can be very productive -- no sense of panic because there is still time in the week.
On the other hand, if you are having a miserable week that seems like it will never end. If it's the kind of day that has been Tuesday three days in a row, then Thursday offers some relief. When you wake up on Thursday, you realize, "Ok, I just have to get through today and then tomorrow is Friday." And Fridays are always awesome because nothing has to be done on Fridays -- whatever is left over can be pushed to Monday.
We all know Mondays are the absolute worst, and Thursday is the furthest thing from Monday. And let's face it, while Fridays are great, and Saturdays are pure joy, there is always the creeping feeling that Monday is coming soon. As wonderful as Sundays can be, there is an impending gloom over getting up Monday morning.
But none of that anxiety messes with a Thursday. On Thursday, the long dreary week is beginning to fade in the rearview mirror, and the glorious weekend is just peeking over the horizon.
So, enjoy your Thursday, arguably the best day of the week.
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.
