One of these days I'm going in there.
3 hours ago
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” —Oscar Wilde
Throwing Back to 1983: Culture Club
Culture Club got so popular so fast that I needed to rouse myself from my summer of 2016 grim languor and actually do research. Billboard charts show that, yes, these guys were the first band since the Beatles to chart with 4 songs at once. No wonder it's all a blur.
"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" was the first charting single off Culture Club's debut album Kissing to be Clever (1982), then they followed quickly with Colour B…
Playing The Trump Card: Election 2016
During the long, exhausting year leading up to Election 2012, I was on a mission. I read laws, bills and policy. Every week I read dozens of articles from a variety of news sources ranging from The American Conservative to extremist blogs -- painful, those blogs. I read the CVs and profiles of candidates and justices and reviewed their voting records. I watched CSPAN, CNN, FOX and The Daily Show . I wrote a dozen essays on a variety of hot button…
Throwing Back to 1984: Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper arrived on the scene with all the gentle politeness of a flash flood. One day she was just suddenly everywhere, blowing up MTV with "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," the first single off her first record, She's So Unusual . Cute as a button with that unruly mop top of streaky orange hair, Cyndi's synth pop, throaty voice and blended motif of punk and old Hollywood glam appealed to just about everybody. Style meant a lot …
Throwing Back to 1983: Duran Duran
Where were you when music changed your life?I was in my room in our pink ranch house, listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 on my boom box radio, which is a very, very old sentence to say. Along with the TV shows Dance Fever and Solid Gold , Casey Kasem was expanding my musical range beyond that of my parents' influence. Not to imply that my parents have poor taste. Quite the opposite. My parents crush it for sorting out the best mu…
Throwing Back to 1985: A-ha
I was 15 when "Take On Me" hit the American airwaves, along with a killer video that made this Norwegian pop song into an instant classic. It was one of two singles off A-ha's first record, Hunting High and Low , but most people are hard pressed to name the other one.
"Take On Me" is a sonic transport 30 years back in time to the spectacular corn & cheese laden decade of roller skates, legwarmers and big hair. Anchore…
Peerless Life in Allston Rock City
Allston is a thickly settled multi-generational, multi-cultural Boston neighborhood off the Mass Pike. It's a student ghetto, situated on the 57 and 66 bus routes, and the B train from Boston College to Boston University to Kenmore (Red Sox territory), and onward into Park Street, where you can change trains and get pretty much anywhere you want to go. Lower Allston, or "LA" so dubbed by its genial citizenry, is a
comparatively qu…
Ode To Star Market (2002)
This was a poem that I wrote in 2002 about the insanity that is the Porter Square shopping center parking lot. It's chaos all the time. The poem, such as it is (I'm no poet) had an original title of Ode to Star Market (How I Did Not Get Sushi Last Night And Made This Up In The Car On The Way Home). Ode To Porter Square Star Market Star sells sushi a la carte, that's why I'm bound to go there Otherwise I stay away from Supermarket Ni…
Straddling the Great Digital Divide
What I love most about being a true blue Gen X'er is our passage from analog to digital. There's something comforting in the shared experience of taking a flying leap together across a great technological chasm. From Etch-A-Sketch to iPad, from wall-tethered telephones to iPhones. Technology moved fast during our lifetime. We climbed the mountain, we surfed the wave, we sped along the information superhighway with all the windows open. …
Trigger Warning: F*cking Guns
In the wake of yet another senseless mass shooting, social media has erupted in the expected din, self-righteous advocates on both sides of a hot button issue feverishly posting their little hearts out. It's a futile loudness war fought online with Tweets and memes and platitudes flying high, nobody winning and nobody backing down. Candlelight vigils, thoughts and prayers. Fuck the candles. Ban the guns.
This time it's Joey who's got jury duty
♯
Joey was already gone when I woke up. Jury duty -- that shit starts early. He brought a book. It's Mel Torme's tell-all, The Other Side of the Rainbow: Behind the Scenes on the Judy Garland Television Series. Because of course it is. I got him that book from someone online. It's actually an old library book, so at first he thought we had to return it to the library.
"You mean I get to keep this?" Yeah, baby! It's your…
It's A Miracle: Boy George. Cyndi Lauper, and Remembering an Old Friend
Pam had an extra ticket to see Cyndi Lauper and Boy George at the Wang Theatre. Guess who got to go? ME. That kind of thing never happens to me. Thanks, Pammeke! And thanks, person-who-couldn't-make-it-whose-seat-I-took!
First of all, I love The Wang. It's one of those right proper old art deco theatres. You know, decked out with red velvet and gold trim, ceiling paintings, sculptural detail and fancy chandeliers. It opened in the 1920s …
Welcome to Allston
This is a building you see as you enter Allston coming off the Mass Pike.
The windows have been closed up for years, and murals painted in.
The sky looked so clear, the building stood out like a mirage.
The top right triptych depicts Mr. Butch. More on Mr. Butch at some other time. All the feelz.
Well, what a week.
Yesterday, your outpouring of well-wishes
for my 46th trip around the sun? Astonishing it is anew, how did I cross
paths with so many rare and wonderful people? Plus my husband Joe Kowalski ?
Honestly guys? That's why I'm making a video blog about him-- because
he's somethin' else, man, and I have the best seat in the house and I
just wanna share that with you. Plus family, which I'm more grateful for
as the years go by …
Dirty Sweet 'N You're My Girl (Eulogy For An Awesome Chick)
Genine was a high school friend. Brief, bright and deep, that was our love, from about mid-freshmen year to the summer of junior year. I wish I could find my goddamn yearbook so I could see what we wrote into the blurbs on each others' pages at graduation. Was it "remember when we..." and was it promises to keep in better touch? It's things like that you grasp for, when you find out a one-time friend is gone.
Reflections? Me, my turn? Oh, um...where to start...
Feels at once, somehow, like a slog of marathon and a brief page flip. Let's sum up: 2015 was a rebuilding year.
I've learned what an incredible man my husband Joe Kowalski really is, and I've learned how lucky I am that so, so many of you are truly real friends. I can't begin to even express...what can I even say, you guys rallied and saved my life. That's real.
I've learned about mental illness and self-respect.
2016&#…
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