Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms yearning to breathe free.
Okay, I know it’s Christmas season and we’re supposed to be happy and peaceful and idealistic, listening to carols both solemn and silly, and trying to be all Norman Rockwelly and stuff. Heck, the last thing I’d want to do is bum you out as you deck the malls, looking for the prettiest Victoria’s Secret … Read more
If someone had told me back in 1977 that young men barely past their Clearasil years would be saying “What’s your major” to me at age 40, I‘d have said “No way!” Well…”way!” It was all part of my experience as a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where I took some non-credit courses … Read more
This article appeard in the September 2006 issue of the County of Westmoreland Mac User Group (CowMug) newsletter. Die Nasty. Dream Orphans. Beat My Guest. Highway to Heck. No, these aren’t names of punk rock groups or titles of angst-ridden, teen-penned poems. They’re names of fonts. Four evocatively named fonts that co-exist among the hundreds … Read more
In the early 1960s, The Beatles came off as cute and cheeky, while the Rolling Stones – marketed by manager Andrew Loog Oldham as the anti-Beatles – were seen as snide and snarky. The difference in their personas, real or perceived, is evident in this example of how the two bands expressed their Christmas spirit. … Read more
I’ve stayed in my share of dreary motels, haughty hotels, Socialist-designed apartments with poster-board walls, and even nuclear plant “guest houses” (don’t even ask) in villages with names that lacked vowels, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like Frank Zappa’s 1971 mind-blowing movie, “200 Motels.” But then, I never dropped acid, either. (Becherovka was the … Read more