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Using Online Charity Auctions to Buydown Broken Dreams

In my work as a script doctor at ScriptProfessor.com — I meet a lot of people with varying talent — the saddest stories belong to the abandoned and the broken-hearted, those who wished upon a star and fell back to earth without touching the moon, and melted.  Showbiz tends to call those burnt souls “star fuckers” because they’ll do anything and everything to be noticed — let alone produced — while the kinder among us tend to label them “fame whores.” I just choose to try to have empathy for their plight as I work with them, but there’s also a certain queasiness involved as one feels like a dancing minstrel playing a part for money that will never be seen nor heard — all in the discriminatory want to try to help make someone’s script better for a fee.

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John Prine and Angel From Montgomery in Performance

One of the most beautiful, but tragically haunting, songs ever written is John Prine’s — Angel From Montgomery — because it is steeped with a bitter love-gone-lost yearning that is universal, irrevocable, and palpable.  The song is simple but harshly complex.  You can play the song with four guitar chords — G, C, D and F — but there’s nothing easy about the joyous melody that leaps from those four chords.

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Bryan Adams and the Summer of '69 Sexual Position

Filed under the category of TMI — Too Much Information — is rocker Bryan Adam’s recent revelation that his teen anthem, “Summer of ’69” isn’t a nostalgic look back at a quiet, more romantic time in his life, but rather an ode to honor the “69” sexual position.

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Glee? Karaoke!

I have done my best to avoid the television show “Glee” because I wasn’t interested in anything high school or Madonna or Britney.

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My Aeroplane Over the Sea Obsession

There was a period of time in my childhood when I listened to Led Zeppelin IV just about once every two weeks — every time I mowed the lawn. There was something compelling about the album that got me really moving, and of which I never tired. A great album is like that — you can listen to it multiple times and not get bored with it.  For me, that album now is the brilliant “The Aeroplane Over The Sea,” by the now disbanded Neutral Milk Hotel. For the last few months or so I have been listening to this brilliant record just about every day, whether on the way to my office or on my way home from the office. I stopped listening to it at the office because one of my co-workers had told me that he found it to be too depressing to hear in the morning.

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Sean Costello: The Wailing Willow

Sean Costello was a Wailing Willow.  He started playing a professional Blues guitar at age 14 and by 2008 he was dead of an overdose on the eve of his 29th birthday.  On 10/10/10 in Atlanta, Georgia, there is a fundraiser — in Sean’s name — to help raise money for continued research into the depression and bipolarism that killed him.

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DR Strings Pure Blues 11-50 Review

I live and love The Blues from the great State of New Jersey, and I confess that in the past, I have not been so kind to DR Strings — made right here in the Garden State in Emerson!  I previously recanted my sad ways, and today, I am delighted to tell you I have finally found The Perfect Blues Guitar string for my ’57 Les Paul:  The “Pure Nickle, Round Wound, DR Pure Blues 11-50.”  I like these strings so much that I plan to use them on all my guitars.

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