If you follow Boston politics at all, you may have seen recent items that Josh Kraft is planning to run for Mayor against Michelle Wu in 2025. The Boston Globe in particular has been pumping up this candidacy. This despite the fact that Josh Kraft has never lived in Boston (though an LLC recently purchased a home in the North End where he claims to be living, though he hasn’t sold his home in Brookline, so it looks like more of a pied à terre situation to me).
Went to Philadelphia last weekend to reconnect with some college friends I hadn’t seen in decades, and thence to NYC to see my elder daughter’s capstone performance for her masters degree!
I can’t really put into words the joy that seeing my college friends brought me, but it was a lot. As when I see my high school friends, there’s something incredibly powerful about seeing people who knew you when you were unformed and making lots of mistakes and still like you anyway.
I recently found myself with an hour to kill before catching a train, so I went to the public library to read graphic novels, which I assume is what everyone does in such a situation.
I was intrigued by Archie Comics: Big Ethel Energy, so I picked it up and read the first volume.
As a writer and a writing teacher, I’m interested in how language changes, and now I’m old enough to have witnessed it happening in real time. (Like how the “finta” of my youth became “finna”!)
I’ve started carving out a new way to think about my writing. I’d like to share it with you, not because I think you should do what I’m doing, but to let you know that you can.
I’ve written a lot of noir in the last ten years. Enter the Bluebird, The Long Detention, How I Found Her, Legacy, and even Shelter in Place I think qualify. Well, they qualify under my definition of noir, which is a work of art in which the protagonist strains to follow a moral code in a world whose institutions are hopelessly corrupt.
Kind of a twist on the found footage genre, since it’s ostensibly a “lost” tape of the last broadcast (see what I did there?) of a national late night TV show.
I was looking over my recent Bandcamp purchases and noticed that most of them happen to be bands with women singers. I didn’t set out to do this as some kind of project—it just so happened that these were the bands I was most interested in supporting. Maybe because women have been historically represented not only in the genres I like most (punk, power pop, garage rock, metal) but also in my own music collection? In any case, it makes a nice theme to tie together a post about some great music I’ve bought on Bandcamp! Buy tomorrow, May 3, and the artists will get an even bigger cut of the purchase price!
Felt the urge to listen to Husker Du’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories the other day, and since this album has been characterized as a battle between the band’s two songwriters (Mould in the grips of untreated depression, Hart in the grips of heroin addiction), I though it would be fun to actually rate the songs and call a winner.
Did you see the NXIVM documentary? The one where Mark looks like an asshole who doesn’t know he’s an asshole? JK—that’s all of them. Anyway, for those who haven’t watched, all the NXIVM documentaries detail how this pervert/grifter/malignant narcissist Keith Rainere cribbed a bunch of stuff from Scientology and started a self-help cult. It wound up with abuse and sex trafficking and Keith sleeping with every woman he could get into a room alone with.