November 9, 2015
Enough Beauty to Ruin Your Day: From Ella to Dilla
Technically, I don’t understand jazz. Emotionally, I feel the power of Louis Armstrong, Wayne Shorter, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Brian Blade, Miles Davis, and others. I do not […]
November 1, 2015
A Resident Ghost of Spain: On Camarón
Somehow, you can live in a place for months and fail to meet a resident ghost. After five months in Granada, Spain in 2003, I was well-acquainted with Lorca. I’d […]
October 30, 2015
On Flamenco: Ellison, Lorca, and Me
“Cante Flamenco, or cante hondo [sic] (deep song, as the purer, less florid form is called) is a unique blending of Eastern and Western modes and as such it often […]
October 22, 2015
1,369 Light Bulbs, or, How to Write in a Basement
Ralph Ellison wrote the first page of Invisible Man while staying at a friend’s farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. He had been to the farm before, and upon his first visit […]
October 14, 2015
The Literal Underground: On Bernie’s Hip Hop Night
In Columbus, our underground hip hop night was literally underground. Bernie’s Distillery sat below North High Street, accessible through a black staircase that carried you down 10 feet, past a […]
September 30, 2015
One Book at a Time
I’m not sure what felt better, successfully defending my dissertation, or returning 120 books to the library and being able to see the floor of my office again. My bookcases […]
September 30, 2015
Gods on Earth: Sports Heroes and Human Limits
Apparently, running a four minute mile is still pretty hard. The other day I ran a mile as fast as I could in order to find my baseline. I won’t […]
September 28, 2015
“What You Know, You Know”: Re-Reading Othello
As a man, Iago is a house of mirrors. At bottom, his desire, if it can be called that, is to be at the center, to be powerful even if […]
September 25, 2015
Is Paris Still Paris?
“In a beautiful turn of phrase, Hugo von Hofmannsthal called [this city] ‘a landscape built of pure life.’ And at work in the attraction it exercises on people is the […]
September 11, 2015
Septembers
I think my hip hop band, The Wick, had a rehearsal the evening of September 11, 2001. I know I had British Literature with Dr. Summers. We had planned on […]
August 25, 2015
Sugimoto’s Movie Theaters
“Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer: “You get a shining screen.” […] One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village […]
August 14, 2015
Rap Athenas: From Juvenile’s “Ha” to A$AP Rocky’s “Peso”
There are two hip hop videos that remind me of the birth of Athena. The goddess leaped out, full-grown and armor-clad, from Zeus’s skull. It is an unexpected ending to […]