Sam Rocha
That, more or less, is what’s on the ledger for today. I’m hoping to have the tracks we recorded on Saturday mastered and uploaded by tomorrow or the next. Stay tuned! Read more
That, more or less, is what’s on the ledger for today. I’m hoping to have the tracks we recorded on Saturday mastered and uploaded by tomorrow or the next. Stay tuned! Read more
Today I’ll begin recording the summer-long Upi Dupi La La Sessions with my good friend and percussionist/saxophonist, Walter Gershon. I’ll do a demo of rhythm and blues covers (for getting work at bars and coffee shops), then Walter and I will do a few tracks of free improvisation. Everything we record will be up for free download, so stay tuned. Read more
Twitter has become a lovely garden of interesting things for me to read. I’ve had to weed it a bit, and could still weed it some more, but it’s getting pretty reliable: just enough news to not live under a rock and, best of all, a few choice specimens to harvest and eat — immediately. Between other things — seeing if we can buy a house or not, shameless self-promotion, e-mail correspondence, eating Doritos, writing a letter, drinking sweet tea,... Read more
Look, as far as Christopher Hitchens goes… He was a dishonest person. A dishonest writer. Interested in self-promotion, in self-congratulation. That is what his work is about. His mode is self-promotion and his theme is self-congratulation and I think that is all there is to his writing. Of course he was very smart — it’s no compliment to call a writer smart, you have to be smart to be a writer. It’s like saying a carpenter is good with her... Read more
Contending Modernities is a weblog hosted by Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and affiliated with Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, housed in their Berkley Center for Religion Peace and World Affairs. I just published my first piece for them: “Beneath the Healthcare Wars: Difficult questions about living and dying.” It was stimulated by the FUS healthcare story, but goes in a different, more fundamental direction. Thanks for reading; sharing is much appreciated; sorry about all the links. Read more
My alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, has been in the news lately. They’ve been skewered and adulated by the two, predictable sides of every news story for discontinuing their student healthcare coverage. Their main published reason for doing so is out of concern for participating “in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.” However, in the same week, FUS honored former CIA Director (during the Bush... Read more
Why I Still Write Poetry by Charles Simic, New York Review of Books. The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion by Alan Johnson, World Affairs. Archive of Hemingway’s Newspaper Reporting Reveals Novelist in the Making by Kate Rix, Open Culture (with several fascinating links to intriguing primary texts). Short Cuts (or, as @sarahemilyduff put it: what Aristotle and a goat in a suit have to do with the assassination of JFK) by Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books. Read more
Link: Here is a reprise story/comment (with some, but not enough, editing) on the FUS student healthcare story at the National Catholic Register. Read more
Reminder: Sam Bennett will be playing tonight (with yours truly on drums) at 4055 North College Ave, Indianapolis. The show is free/donation. I’d love to see some of you there. Warning: there may be hipsters present. Read more
Link: This article is about my alma mater (Franciscan University of Steubenville) and their dissenting decision to stop the student requirement to carry health insurance, which will not carry a student healthcare option. I added a comment to it too. Read more
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