Follow @immunetoboredom on Twitter or check back here for updates throughout the festival. Share this widely if you please. The Big Ears Festival in Knoxville is, for me, the singular music event of the year. Four days jam packed with more music than you can shake a stick at, and way more than you can hope […]
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The first in a series of preview posts for Big Ears 2018. Share this widely if you please. Last year, somebody that looks like me called Big Ears “the best festival pound-for-pound in the United States”. It was a lush feast, damn near too much for any human to absorb in a four-day stretch.1In fact, it […]
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Summer of 2017 found me reading voraciously around considerations of race – whatever that might really be – and the legacy of America’s original sin. I have been increasingly fascinated by the Civil War and both its pre- and after-maths over the past ten years or so. A few years back, an up and coming […]
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Keep your distance Keep your distance When I feel you close to me What can I do but fall Keep your distance Keep your distance With us it must be all or none at all* First, I just need you to know. It’s not you. It’s me. Through all this time, you never wavered. Your […]
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At this point, just about everyone has at least heard of Ta-Nehisi Coates. His second book, Between the World and Me, won the 2015 National Book Award. Written as a letter to his teen-aged son, BTWAM has sold 1.5 million copies in 19 languages. He won a MacArthur “genius” award. His writing drew comparison to James Baldwin from no […]
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Exposition. Rising action. Resolution. That’s the standard structure of the 3-act arc in theatre, movies, opera, lit, &c. Between each act, there is the interlude known as entr’acte (in Italian, intermezzo; en Espanol, intermedio). It’s a time to hit the head, grab a bag of kettle corn. Or maybe just sit and reflect. It’s not often that we […]
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Woke up this morning, poured a cuppa, and opened the facebook machine. Right there at the top, a photo of the Fox Theater marquee touting the 70th birthday celebration for Colonel Bruce Hampton, Ret. Made me happy to know that so many amazing people -musicians and fans – had filled the Fabulous Fox to honor […]
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This morning, The Bitter Southerner began their annual membership drive. I command you to click through and offer whatever support you can. Most of you know that for most of June, 2014, I was in a hospital bed, laid up like a beached whale and experiencing the most delightful and disturbing episodes of hallucination and dementia. And […]
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My Dearest Stanwyck, I sit down in near exhaustion to write these few lines in between the grueling marches of the Knoxville Big Ears campaign. My weary feet cover many miles each day so as to position myself advantageously in front of the august purveyors of the Euterpean muse, many of whom invoke Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, […]
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It’s not hard to find examples of politicians exploiting tragedy for cheap emotional gain. But it’s hard to imagine a more cynical episode than the stunt trump pulled last night during his congressional address. On January 28, just a week into the trump reign, our Commander in Chief green lighted a military raid in Yemen. […]
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