By choice I’ve spent most of my life among storytellers. Poets, novelists, playwrights, songwriters, and just sitting around the campfire tellers of tales. I love stories and the people who tell them. Have you ever wondered what might be the oldest story of them all? The one that’s been told longer than any other? One Read More
All posts by jmp
50 Years of Patti Smith
Highly recommend this brief, poignant interview with the artist Patti Smith as she prepares for an anniversary performance in London 50 years after her first appearance in New York City here. She’s covered a lot of ground in her time and produced some amazing work.
Holigaze
This very unusual holiday season has unsettled many a traditional gathering and left a lot of us feeling adrift. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, are all the ornaments of our collective failure as a society, those people seemingly on every corner in town, holding cardboard signs, asking for help, looking with vacant eyes at Read More
How Wide the Divide?
Turn a few sacred cows on their heads. Think about the aphorisms that support our concept of American society. The place where meritocracy determines your fate. Anybody can get ahead, right? The great gift of our free enterprise system. Competition brings out the best in us and the cream rises to the top. If you start Read More
Performance
Dramatists, directors, actors all will tell you the same thing about it: theatre is when strangers come together to share a common experience. What is so unique is the connection between artists and audience. The same could be said of all the performing arts in pre-pandemic times. What about streaming theatre? The various ways the Read More
Paying More and Getting Less
The damage done to the employment prospects of recent college graduates by the pandemic, and the litany of other 21st century disasters that preceded it, is severe. The pain is compounded by the cost of the education they pursued in good faith, only to have far fewer opportunities available to them than their parents’ generation. No Read More
Basic Income
As the pandemic of 2020 rages, a new Administration forms, and Congress lobs partisan volleys back and forth across that ever widening aisle on the Hill, we are at an inflection point of unprecedented gravity. Possibly not since the Civil War has the United States seemed so divided and likely to come apart. If ever Read More
No Kill Meat
Big agriculture feeds the world. The energy industry keeps it lighted, warmed, cooled and mobile. Together they supply our most basic needs. In the process, both of them do tremendous damage to the natural world. The energy required to produce meat, beef, pork, lamb, and poultry, is no small matter. Neither is the havoc wrecked Read More
South of Turtle Island
When I was a young man with a serious interest in the indigenous peoples of North America, the accepted theory of their origins was that they came from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge about 12,500 years ago. Proposed origin dates before that time were dismissed by academics, but gradually we are coming to have Read More