I’ve been meaning to mention for ages now that I have a poem in the latest issue of the Chicago poetry journal After Hours … and I’ll be reading it in public this Friday night.
I’ve always been really bad about actually submitting my poems for publication — I always think, here I am fussing around […]

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I’m pretty geeked about the current Kids in the Hall tour, and the fact that I actually have a ticket in hand for their May 29 show at the Chicago Theatre. I’ve never gotten to see them live before, because on their previous trips to Chicago I was always performing with the Neo-Futurists or something […]

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In case you haven’t seen any of these yet, my pals at Schadenfreude (who I love despite the fact that they terrify me sometimes) are doing a good job of capturing the current logic of the Hillary campaign in video.

 
These are turning up all over Greater Blogistania and one of the other installments in […]

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Well, the Andy White show I posted about last Sunday was lovely. It was a shockingly intimate setting, a cozy and beautifully decorated back room at the Celtic Knot where Andy played for a group of about 20 of us, and he was just as charming and entertaining as any Andy fan would expect.
He […]

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Tonight, Sunday evening March 30th, one of my favorite less-well-known-than-he-ought-to-be performers is playing a no-cover live gig up in Evanston.
If you aren’t familiar with him — and most people I know aren’t — the best way I can describe Andy White is to say that if Jonathan Richman had been born an Irishman, he might […]

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It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these little Chicago roundups, but there are so many head-splittingly good things going on this week that it seems like a dandy time to reinstate the tradition.
• First up, this weekend is the opening of the brand-new Theater Oobleck show Spukt, written by the mercurial Dave Buchen. […]

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I’m a little behind the times with this, but I wanted to offer some belated shoutings-out and linkback lurve to my fellow participants from The Nod this past Wednesday evening.
Don Hall and Joe Janes did a great job of hosting the evening, making everyone feel welcome and creating the opportunity for the gaggle to mingle […]

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Next Wednesday, September 19, I’m going to be participating in a way-fun event called The Nod, in which some of Chicago’s best bloggers will be reading posts from their blogs live at the Uptown Writer’s Space.
And for some reason they’ve asked me to be on the bill, as well. Possibly to make the rest of […]

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General Petraeus says that “victory” in Iraq will require 9-10 more years. I’m trying to imagine how ten more years of bloody occupation can possibly work out to a victory. More on that subject here.

A bill has been introduced in Venezuela to restrict baby names to a list of 100 approved choices. “The bill’s ambition, […]

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Proving that the Republican Party truly is just one big puppet show:

 
… I can’t find it now, but I swear that at some point in the 24 hours after the Craig story broke, there was a headline referring to him as “Toilet Sex Senator.”
And of course my first thought was that The Toilet Sex […]

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If you’re here in Chicago and looking for something fun to do tomorrow evening, I’ll be participating in an award ceremony and “gentle roast” (in the words of Live Bait Theater) for those stalwarts of the Chicago solo performance scene — and my fellow Pansy Kings — David Kodeski and Edward Thomas-Herrera.
The ceremony is […]

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I think I must have died and gone to David Bowie video heaven.
Prior to discovering the other videos in this post on YouTube, I had seen the clip of Bowie performing “Young Americans” on the Dick Cavett show in December of 1974, because it’s on the Best of Bowie DVD set. (I missed seeing […]

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I found an old posting I made to the Planet-Earthlings Yahoo Group several years ago, back when the group was new and we were talking about favorite videos from the New Wave era. Most of the ones I wrote about are up on YouTube, so I figured I’d work my way through ‘em till I’ve […]

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Time to haul out a real classic.
It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t around, and tuned in to the new music scene, just how electrifying this video was in the first few years of the 1980s, when you’d catch it on the scattershot music video shows that existed before MTV. I still think of […]

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