Posts published in February 2016

“Wanna meet some pretty ladies today, mister?” I turn to see a brown-skinned woman with a leathery Zoltec face. She should be singing ancient lullabies to dozing grandchildren about to be sacrificed to the Sun, around a slow crackling fire. Instead she’s outside Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino touting two-for-one drink coupons for a strip club/money laundering scheme called Twin Peeks.

February marks the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it also is the anniversary of two other notable moments in the history of courts and the service of justice. In the first…

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.