I’m Going to See Pavement

I guess the only way for me to stom­ach the Mann Music Cen­ter’s out­ra­geous ser­vice charges is to buy a tick­et from a friend.

I don’t get out to shows much these days, but this should feel like jump­ing into a hot tub time machine back to my Philly music scene hey­day, cir­ca 2003. Expect to see famil­iar faces!

I’m on Vacation

Gorg­ing myself on Car­oli­na BBQ and seafood. Enjoy­ing the beau­ti­ful weath­er and water. Savor­ing every moment with my family. 

Down­side? Pret­ty much burned to a crisp. I’m not the life­guard and farm­hand I used to be. Times like this make me wish I worked outside!

A Word on Urban Redevelopment

It’s not a social good in and of itself. 

I also won­der if folks who are all devel­op­ment uber alles still con­cern them­selves with things like “sus­tain­abil­i­ty,” which seems to be a watch­word among the gen­tri­fy­ing classes.

The knee-jerk reac­tion to build things like music venues in blight­ed areas is tan­ta­mount to “drill, baby, drill.” Do you real­ly want to be asso­ci­at­ed with that?

A Thank You to Readers

I’ve been butcher­ing this blog in one form or anoth­er since about 2003. My pas­sion for it has fluc­tu­at­ed over time, rang­ing from those heady days when I’d try my best to write about pol­i­tics, or when I ditched that and wrote about movies for a time, or when I just got caught up in the notion of need­ing a blog for some­thing as elu­sive as “per­son­al brand­ing.” I feel like I’m still recov­er­ing from that last one.

In the past week I’ve got­ten three com­pli­ments from folks who check in here from time to time and I have to say that’s immense­ly mean­ing­ful to me. I can’t tell you how reward­ing it is to know that even in an age where we’re just zip­ping one-lin­ers at each oth­er, some folks will take the time to read a para­graph or two. I nev­er ful­ly appre­ci­at­ed actu­al­ly engag­ing an audi­ence in that way until blog­ging became passe. Thanks again for reading!