Observation. Awareness. Picking up on context clues. These are essential skills for any person, but especially those who identify as artists.
One day, I’ll be able to tell you how important Gordon, the debut album from Barenaked Ladies, is to me. Fifteen tracks, just under an hour long, the soundtrack to so many essential memories. It wasn’t the first album of theirs that I owned. Like most Americans, I learned of the band from their 1998 […]
A perfect Friday: sunny skies, warmer than 30 degrees Fahrenheit. (This is one word that I say more than spell, so that first H tricked me. I then spent a few minutes on the Wikipedia entry for the measurement and the man who defined it. Of course there’s only one question any sane person would […]
What is an annual retrospective “best-of” list other than an attempt to remember great things about the preceding year? It’s an effort to document the creative endeavors that mattered to us, a commitment to remembering that, in the midst of everything, there are things worth remembering. I asked recently in the RBP Discord, “Asking for […]
As a teenager living in northern Delaware, I yearned for blue skies. Their presence outside my bedroom window was a delight, signifying possibility for all good things. Their absence didn’t guarantee disaster, but I had little hope for a good day when I saw no blue through the blinds. I recognize that this reliance on […]
[I]n reading about Skylab, I am more fascinated by the experience of the human beings who lived there for weeks. The design principles that focused on habitability; the demands on their time by Mission Control; eating and showering more than 200 miles above the Earth. When I get overwhelmed packing for a vacation, I remind myself, “I can buy whatever I need when I’m there.” That is literally impossible in Earth’s orbit.
I guess it is important to recognize what those in power wrestle with, and how their opinions shape their actions. But I am more concerned with the repercussions of those actions, and the state of Louisiana is emblematic of the duality of this country.
Santa Claus and polar bears leading troops, clad in red and white, from Atlanta toward their enemies in Purchase, NY. Soldiers of sweetness wearing blue marching under the banners of The Pepsi Generation. “We shall fight them in the fountains, we shall fight them on the endcaps, we shall fight them at the backyard summer cookouts.” No blood spilt – just gallons of high fructose corn syrup turning battlefields and waterways sticky and brown.
After his exposure, Hofmann was “affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated[-]like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”
To quote Kurt Vonnegut: “When I was a boy…all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.”