Time away from sports has surprising benefits.

Why the remaining portion of 2020 sans sports might not be a bad thing, rare concert recordings, and The Andy Griffith Show which, too, is afoul of PC culture.

Why the Beatles' worst album is actually pretty great.

A discussion of the Let It Be album and film.

Interviewed about classic old time radio programs like Suspense and X Minus One, plus the Red Sox on the radio over the years, and the Peel sessions of Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division.

Examining the imagistic, musical poetry of Francis Wolff's jazz photography.

On Daniel Defoe, the pandemic within, the pandemic without. "In short, humans freak each other out, and snuff each other out. Plague is a mother of a problem, only compounded by human nature as human nature devolves, which it tends to do in times of pandemic. The sharper-eyed critics were right to term the work a romance, by which they didn’t mean a love story, but an undertaking freighted with one person’s point of view.

A discussion of Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, and his short story, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," on their 100th anniversaries.

What the notable diarist can teach us in our 2020 time of pandemic. "We can compare this attitude to the frivolities of today’s observers—those people who post ceaseless updates about COVID-19, not out of concern, nor to disseminate valuable information, but to satisfy their own internal emptiness. They simply want us to look at them, and so they cloak their intentions in something that seems salutary and humanitarian. These are the same people who routinely tell us how busy they are, but when afforded time in quarantine to do as they wish, do not start the novel, do not plan that new business they are always talking about, don’t read aloud to their kids, do not reconnect with their partner."

The Stranger, "The Waste Land," the diaries, with a Bob Dylan-related stop or two.

Jesus Christ as guy. "I don’t think any great human wants or needs you to worship them. They want you to be a better person through what they can teach you, they want a connection with you based on the truism that you both (hopefully) seek growth, and if they are an artist, they understand it is their work that has eternal life and bolsters your own life in the time you have on this spinning orb."

The Easter Challenge. "When that dreaded life stuff causes us to forfeit crucial parts of our identity, our affections, we are becoming less human, a decidedly anti-Easter theme. What I like about the story of Christ emerging from the cave is that he wasn’t this ghost dude who popped out; he was an intact, resolute, human. Been through some things, certainly, but still human."

Talking about a piece about to be published in the Smart Set on Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, Easter candies, Easter films.

Breaking down and contextualizing "Bring It On Home to Me."

Talking about Miles Davis and the power and need for risk in art.

Piece about Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, and the need for risk in art. "Bitches Brew was a mold-detonator. Recorded between August 19-21 in summer 1969, Davis had a simple directive for producer Teo Macero: Stay the hell out of the way, man, just get down the sound. Don’t talk, don’t offer feedback, let me navigate my lane."

Conversation about pieces on McCoy Tyner and Orson Welles, with a side chat regarding The Rifleman thrown in.

Welles as a (very) young playwright. "Later in the decade, Welles will direct his Voodoo Macbeth, but what a lot of people do not know is that Welles, for all of the (inaccurate) charges against him of cupidity and sloth, was a veritable crusader in the cause of equal rights."

On the departed McCoy Tyner and his post-Coltrane excellence. "Free jazz’s foremost complementary player, Tyner played just as many notes as a human fusillade like Art Tatum did decades before, but unlike the other great maximalists, he played to serve, often by way of foil for Trane’s extreme muscularity."

For a discussion of Tom Brady's departure from New England and some coronavirus tips to extend you life and make you a better person.

Great and oft-innovative films from eighty years ago you might not know about or are worth a well-deserved revisit.

A full meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy forty-five minutes on the subject of the Who's Live at Leeds version of "My Generation."

And also how the author comes to write his fiction.

A piece--which will feature in altered form in Saving Angles: Finding Meaning and Direction in Life's Unlikely Corners--about how the 1980s computer game King's Quest taught a young, would-be author about narrative and imagination. "If I were to use two words to try and encapsulate what it was like for me to grow up, by which I mean, the passions I most often enmeshed myself in — not how much I was loved, or anything like that — I would opt for 'books' and 'woods.'" 

Somebody actually says the truth.