Each year musicians from around the world challenge one another to compose and record an album’s worth of material (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in the month of February (this being a leap year, we get an extra day).  This is not a competition, but rather a community effort to push ourselves into new creative endeavors.  The results of my efforts last year, as well my first untitled (suggestions are welcome!) song on my as yet...

Book 3 of 100 Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore’s slim novel took me two tries. I sat down some number of months ago and read the first eight pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the book’s opening section. It felt too dense and disconnected—I couldn’t find anything to grasp onto to pull myself through. I felt a little bored. I put the book away. When I came back, the first eight pages were still slow, and it...

Book 2 of 100 Kathryn Stockett, The Help I’m happy to report that so far I’m about two-and-a-half times as fast at reading than I am at reviewing. : ) Stockett’s novel chronicles the lives of several southern women in the early 1960’s: Black maids caring for white children and families, as well as a few of the white women who have hired them. Just home from college and swept up by the momentum of the early stirrings of the...

I’ve started a new project of scoring stock footage, which, by the way, is in danger of being made more difficult to obtain through new anti-piracy laws; look into the new PIPA and SOPA laws now put before congress, which though supposedly intended to protect corporations against privacy, will severely limit public access to public domain archival material like that used here. The link below is a short film adapted by me with a...

Book 1 of 100 Karen Russell, Swamplandia! Here’s the truth: It will be impossible for my review of this book to be unbiased in any way because I am just pretty much madly in love with Karen Russell. She’s a magnificent writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her impressive first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like her debut novel, it too is wonderful, and you should certainly check it out if you have not...

A few words on year-end lists:  Those who make them feel important for doing so.

Last March, I began a blog challenge to read 100 books in a year. That year isn't over, but I failed miserably and almost immediately. I made it through approximately five novels before I experienced a series of radical life changes...

he following list represents the highlights of a year of reading.  It includes three novels, two works of creative non-fiction, two books of poetry, one biography, one work of criticism/theory, and one book of photography accompanied by poems. The diversity is unintentional.  Some are recent publications, while others are new discoveries for me...

An incredibly smooth stop motion film created by Steven Briand aka BURAYAN. When I say incredibly smooth, I mean it. It's no easy task to produce stop motion animation with such a seamless quality.

These Frenchies are crazy! Following in the footsteps of Man on Wire, which is on my shortlist of best documentaries, the Skyliners team and filmmaker Sébastien Montaz-Rosset provide us with some vertigo-inducing views in their latest film, I believe I can Fly (flight of the frenchies).