The only sounds I hear while standing at the foot of the silos is the whip and whoosh of occasional traffic on W.Va. 2, a trail mix of various birds charting out their personal space in song, and now and again the wind whistling through the portals of these abandoned legacies of a pre-industrial rural heartland.
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From where I recline in my living room right now in the West Virginia exurbs, I hear the tree frogs rasp outside on a starry night, clinging to the scaly bark and branches of sycamore, pine, and maple trees on our property. Time to think of something other than the news ...
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About the night I never slept with Allen Ginsberg and the interview, song and music video this yielded after our encounter deep in the West Virginia hills in 1983.
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“You know ... ” the doctor says, leaning to speak into the young man’s ear as the song proceeds. “The bodhran was first used by Irish clans as a battle drum. It gave a steady rhythm for Celtic warriors facing conflicts. Warrior time.”
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Looking this way and that, high and low, up and down and all around on a recent walkabout in downtown Cincinnati: A Photo Essay
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"Let the boys have the damn song." How "Over the Rainbow" almost didn't make the cut for "The Wizard of Oz." A look back at a "sacred" song in the American canon, on the occasion of a down-and-dirty music video version by the boys.
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Here's a conversation with God about the whole idea of God. Raising the possibility that everywhere you turn can be an occasion for exclamations of 'Lo and behold ...'
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What do you get when you mix a relentless avatar of sustained outrage with epic bad actors in pursuit of money over lives? An American journalism hero in West Virginia, is who.
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Who, pray tell, / was Mr. Brainwash? / Did Andy Warhol know? / These questions / agitate my head, as / my light goes red to green ...
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Lakes and oceans talk to us in a language we don't understand with our cognition, but with our bodies. To be more specific, with our very cells. You might say it is the soothing language of negative ions. Here, try it ...
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What does it take to get a book into the world? A little help from St. Joseph the Worker, plus inspiration from an Old World wine vat on a steep Calabrian hillside. That's a good start.
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It is a forgetting, for one. / Dissolution into physical bliss, / which, as the head is so troubled, / so often, feels like a blessing ...
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Still fun after all these years. On my timeline this morning, Facebook surfaced an offbeat video I did with my brother and a friend, from an encounter we had in 2013 with the truly cool, interactive video installation 'Text Rain.'
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Sometimes, in order to self-soothe, I make short, odd videos. Or 'alt-videos,' as I describe this one below in the end credits, with footage from wanderings from nuclear power plants to Lake Erie last week.
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I am walking past the multi-culti shops and through the lively streets of Ann Arbor after dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, living the good life. What's that flyer say? 'Open Mic Poetry'? And it's tonight?!
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