Poetic pragmatism, neo-transcendentalism, bikes, burritos, basketball.
If you haven’t read David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon, you should. It’s humble and real and warm, and truly great. It’s also very difficult to read. After his suicide, it’s impossible not to hear the echoes of Wallace’s internal conversation, the darkness and doubt and obsessive thoughts that he clearly struggled to [...]
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Before he created Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels used to send jokes to Woody Allen ... A sample: He was obsessed with the notion that, somewhere in the world, there is a person having exactly the same thought he was at exactly the same moment. He decided to call that person, but the line was [...]
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Friday usually means Stevie Wonder, but today it’s Panda Bear and Atlas Sound, a guy from Deerhunter. I have been playing the 1s and 0s out of their new thing. Warning: It’s going to give you a craving to drink a milkshake with equal parts Beach Boys, organs of the Motown variety, and Animal Collective [...]
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Baseball great Rickey Henderson recently gave the Hall of Fame induction speech to end all induction speeches. He was a larger-than-life figure in my childhood, and he had a personality to match, often referring to himself in the third person. For example, “There are pieces of this puzzle that Rickey is still working out,” in [...]
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Dateline: A Mexican discotheque in the early 1970s. “Rickey [Henderson] had a pair of heels on that were about four inches high. Everything was fine until these people came in yelling that they had guns. Then they started shooting” ... Henderson ducked under a table as gunfire strafed the room. When the shooting ended, Henderson [...]
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Stop whatever you’re doing and watch this. It’s called “Windowdipper,” and it’s by Jib Kidder, aka Sean Schuster-Craig. I remember Sean describing his music as something like minimalist crunk, or Dirty South boogie, or Memphis dirty go-go, or something, but you really have to see this to get it. Sean, if you read this, remind [...]
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Great design hits you on many levels. During our staff meeting today, Nick gave a nice example of the way it can hit the subconscious: When you shut the door of a luxury car, like a BMW, it feels different. And this feeling may not even register in the conscious mind, but I think it [...]
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“The name just popped into my head one day ... I just don’t feel like I had a past, and I couldn’t relate to anything other than what I was doing at the present time. And, it didn’t really matter to me what I said. Still doesn’t, really.”
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My pal Greg Gardner is working on some night moves called Secret Seven Records. A few months ago, he released some friendly sounds by Mt. Egypt, and now he’s getting ready to drop some more home cooking: The Two Sides of Tim Cohen. It’s a solo album by a local rapscallion named Tim Cohen, formerly [...]
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Zack Greinke’s lockdown pitching during the bottom of the fourth inning of tonight’s All-Star game made me wonder: When was the last time a Royal looked great in an All-Star game? Of course Bo Jackson’s epic home run to lead off the 1989 All-Star game comes to mind. Royals Review helpfully offers a brief history [...]
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My name is Doug LeMoine. I work both on, and for, the Internet. You can find more about me in the About Me page that I wrote about me.
