I first met the celebrated American composer Steven Stucky not in Ithaca, where we have both lived for the past twenty years, but in Los Angeles on February 26, 1995. I arrived in Ithaca later that year; Steve had taken up what proved to be a more than three-decade-long post as professor of music at Cornell back in 1980 after doing his doctorate in composition at the university in the 1970s.
Posts published in “Essays”
Protests against Monsanto’s Roundup, with its poisonous, weed-killing glyphosate, have spread around the globe. An arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a probable cause of cancer in 2015. California’s Environmental Protection Agency…
Walking upriver a piece, beyond the forks where the sun bakes the gravel bar and pepperwoods shadow the Indian trail, eventually Ed Sniece's place comes into view. If the valley fog has lifted its cloak.…
Reveling in the fantastic news that Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by a landslide, my eyes were drawn to an article in the New York Times with the headline As Bernie Sanders Makes History, Jews Wonder What It Means. Stop wondering already. It means he won the New Hampshire Primary. It means he kicked Hillary’s tuckus. It means he espouses what most Americans want: truly affordable healthcare, raising taxes on the rich, rebuilding America’s infrastructure, ending massive fraudulent banking Ponzi schemes masquerading as our economy, and getting corporate money out of politics.
Unseasonably warm breezes carry the humid effects of the Pacific El Nino across Mexico and from the Gulf up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys to our niche in the southern Indiana hills. The bank thermometer…
I’ve never understood people’s fascination with pharmaceutical drugs. I’ve been prescribed narcotic pain meds, and found their effects nearly as unpleasant as the pain they were meant to relieve. The only pharmaceutical drug I ever…
I was very excited about the inaugural gig of my new band, Flawless Waffle. It was a sort of fortuitous accident that we'd arrived at the point of playing out, as I'd never really had those…
The first reaction, from she who is closest to me, when I brought her the news as she knelt on the black cloth cover through whose agency we are trying to turn our small, once…