Top Ten Posts Of 2008
I published 205 posts this year. Assuming an average count of 500 words, that's over 100,000. Compiled onto 12-point, 60-character, 5-inch lined, 250-word pages, 2008 would be a 400 long.
With an average readership of a few hundred friends, family and fans a week and nearly no revenue (not counting a few hundred bucks of record sales), I'd like to think it was all worth something. And in perusing the year, I think it was.
Taken en masse, my favorite posts of 2008 continue to track the shift that -- in retrospect, anyway -- the year ...
Underground
Dear Ben,
In just a few weeks, you'll be laying in a hospital bed with a broken jaw. You'll look in the mirror but -- what with those wired teeth and that Elephant Man swelling -- fail to recognize yourself. It's a whole lotta' trauma on account of a girl, and a knuckleheaded football player, and it's gonna' bruise for a long, long time.
One year from now, though, you'll step from the gymnasium stage, stoned and squinty-eyed, with a diploma in your hand, and a duct tape question mark on you maroon cap. Shortly thereafter, you'll be ...
37
Hollywood feeds on its young. To celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth here, then, is not without irony. To be away from home and enduring what is typically the most challenging week of the year only added insult to injury.
I woke, fittingly, to AT&T's oft-heard ringtone, a sound that prompts dozens of my colleagues to reach for their hips simultaneously. It was the first of what would tally to well over one hundred hugely-appreciated email, Facebook and cell phone birthday wishes.
I was groggy and tense from another ...
The Miracle Of Suffering
"I think you're gonna' have to throw up to feel better," he said matter-of-factly.
The morning began at the iTunes music store. Such is my voracious appetite for substantive public radio podcasts that I'd already burned through "This American Life," "Studio 360," and two episodes of "Fresh Air" on my twice-daily, fifteen-minute commute -- and it was only Wednesday.
Browsing the options -- "A Prairie Home Companion," "Bill Moyer's Journal," "Radio Lab" -- left me cold (maybe because two of the three denied my "Mister Rogers & Me" ...
The Itchy & Scratchy Show
I have a small contingency of friends, colleagues and family members who question my rabid over-involvement. The MTV, the blogs, the documentary, the records and shows, marathons and triathlons.
What gives? they ask. Isn't any one of those things enough? What's wrong with you?
I was reminded the other night that there are stages to recovery. I suppose there are at least twelve, but let's call it three: addiction, abstinence, and serenity.
Addiction is obvious: Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming ...
Amazing Grace – MP3
In U2's "Pride (In The Name Of Love)," Bono sings, "Early morning, April 4 / A shot rings out in the Memphis sky."
Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in fact, assassinated at 6:01 pm on April 4, 1968 -- forty years ago this very moment.
Bono has since conceded his mistake, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the lyrics, which he describes as "simple sketches." The singer says he was swayed by Edge and producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who played down the need to develop the lyrics as they thought the impressionistic nature was more ...
Martin Luther King, Jr. On Turning “I” Into “Thou”
Forty years ago tonight, on the balcony of The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.
The following speech, since referred to as "I've Been To The Mountaintop," was delivered April 3, 1968, at the Church of God in Christ Headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. Though King was addressing the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, that night his remarks that evening are more often remembered for their eerie prescience.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its ...
Have You Seen Me Lately?
"So what have you been up to?"
That's young Ryan Vaughn, drummer to half of the bands on the Lower East Side, talking. It's just before seven o'clock on Saturday night. The sun has cast a warm, early-spring urbanglow on Avenue C. Ryan, Tony, Chris and I are sitting at an Italian restaurant across the street from Alphabet Lounge where the guys will perform in a few hours.
His inquiry throws me out of my game for a second. "What have you been up to?" means different things to a 23-year-old single drummer than it does to a 36-year-old ...
Benjamin Braddock, Holden Caulfield & Me
There's a great article in Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue on the making of one of my all-time favorite film's, The Graduate.
Of course, the film, released in 1967, somehow captured the zeitgeist of the late '60s, especially the generation gap between parents weened on Eisenhower-era prosperity and optimism, and their increasingly disillusioned kids; Kennedy had been assassinated, MLK, RFK would soon follow, and Vietnam and Nixon were all just getting good (which is to say, bad).
And of course, the film, an adaptation of Charles Webb's ...
Shaking All The Nonsense Out
It took some convincing to get noted author, activist, singer/songwriter and mystic Bo Lozoff to preside over Abbigail and my wedding ceremony.
In addition to his 200+ days on the road speaking in prisons, schools and churches on behalf of his Human Kindness Organizations' Prison-Ashram Project, Bo co-manages the affairs of his organization with his wife, corresponds with hundreds of prisoners and scholars alike, publishes a monthly newsletter, writes songs and releases records, and somehow finds the time to meditate twice daily and ...
