“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Full story »

There has been much discussion of this very question this past week, since suddenly it looks as if there will be a referendum on the issue of Scottish independence in Scotland in 2014. Actually, there’s a whole lot going on surrounding this referendum, including whether there might be a similar one elsewhere in the UK on whether the rest of the UK actually wants Scotland to leave—according to a recent poll in The Telegraph, a higher percentage of English respondents want Scotland to leave than do Scots. Alex Salmond, who heads up the Scottish Nationalist Party that currently runs the Scottish Parliament, had better be careful about getting what you wish for.

All this started when Cameron called Salmond’s bluff by suggesting that the referendum be held sooner rather than later, and that perhaps it wasn’t entirely up to the Scottish Parliament on the timing of this in the first place—it actually required the approval of the British Parliament. Full story »

#22: The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson; photographs by Nick Kelsh (1996)

It isn’t often that I get to read someone else’s love letters. But read Rachel Carson’s work and you’ll see that’s just what she’s writing. She writes of the sea with a profound, abiding love.

When I spent time with Carson along the edge of the sea a few weeks ago in Maine, I came across references to a Carson book I’d not heard of before. I had already added one extra Carson book to my reading list, and worried about the possible tangent a second might take me on, but in the end, her work resonated with me too strongly to pass it up. The title was too alluring to pass up: The Sense of Wonder. Full story »

I first visited Nashville, Tennessee this past summer as part of a Midwest road trip with my brother, Dan. We visited the city in mid-August when the near-100-degree temperatures and humidity index left us wandering the streets dressed in shorts, flip flops and sweat.

This week, the city prepared a more mild climate for another round of siblings to come through. My sister and I arrived from St. Louis just in time to enjoy a sushi dinner, check-in rush hour at a motel-style Best Western (equipped with an already-intoxicated bachelor party to greet us) and an evening walk through downtown. We visited Nashville for one day on this road trip and managed to see most of its highlights. Full story »

I mentioned that 2011 was a great year for music in part 1, right? Well, the sheer number of Gold LPs (awarded for outstanding merit) should serve to illustrate the point a bit. So let’s get to it.

First, let me disqualify a CD.

Paul Lewis: Bag Of Rain
If my objectivity is clouded by close personal relationships, it’s absolutely obliterated by great self-interest. And since I was fortunate enough to contribute lyrics for two of the tracks on Bag of Rain, I’m not even going to pretend that I’m being critical. I can say, however, that Paul is an outstanding tunesmith and an even better singer – I’ve been saying he has one of the best voices in the business since the first time I saw him perform in the late 1980s. These qualities have only improved with time. “Platform of Our Lives,” for instance, displays a rare emotional vulnerability, and Paul the singer understands when to coat a tune in velvet and when to stomp the accelerator. Full story »