The loss of Prince has been a hard one for me to process today… feels a bit like Belushi felt… or Lennon… like a kick to the gut… he wasn’t friend or family, but the effect he had on me over the course of his unmatched career was profound… for my tastes, he was the most talented multi-instrumentalist in the history of recorded music… piano, drums or guitar…. virtuosity… …and that’s before you even look […]
Born Ian Fraser Kilmister in Staffordshire, England in 1945… as legend has it, the nickname Lemmy originates from his fondness for the phrase “lemme borrow a fiver” back in his earlier days as a starving musician. Kilmister founded Motörhead in 1975 and was 35 years old before achieving any sort of notoriety… from that point on however, Lemmy’s journey was steadfast and true, 22 studio albums since 1977’s self-titled debut winding all the way to the latest, Bad Magic released just this year back in August, exactly 4 months before his death. […]
Feeling nostalgic already towards the loss of Grantland, unceremoniously shuttered the other day with just a brief statement from the ESPN (Disney) network;
We have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact. […]
If a butterfly flaps its wings in Cupertino… It’s not often that someone you’ve never met dies and you can’t help but think how profoundly different your own life would be had that person never lived… but that’s the case for me today with the passing of Steve Jobs. I look back on my own journey with gratitude for having found myself in San Francisco’s Bay Area in the late 80’s stationed there as a […]
Soon I will be debuting a new category on this weblog entitled Patron Saints. Contained within it will be long-form posts concentrating on specific people… artists, musicians, cultural figures… creators that have influenced my own life and work both with their art as well as their inspiration. Harvey Pekar will be among those biographies. For the uninitiated, Harvey Pekar was an American comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical […]
Born in the one and only Dodge City, Kansas in 1936, Dennis Hopper was one of those actors that was in so many of my favorite movies. By all accounts, Hopper was tough to work with… a fierce temper, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, left a wide trail of ex-wives and pissed off colleagues… but at the end of the day, an actor is remembered by the world at large for his work on film… […]
Sideways Smiley Face (1982-2010) Sideways Smiley Face died on March 14, 2010, surrounded by his loved ones. The cause of death was over-use. Born on a Computer Science online bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Face devoted his life to pointing out that the previous sentence was meant to be funny. He also gained worldwide recognition for his tireless efforts as a glib substitute for the words “I’m amused”. His other interests included frowning […]