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Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words

In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.

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Colored in Black and The Blues

The history of the African-American experience in America is one of a human rage colored in Black and The Blues. 

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Soul of Tone Stratocaster Chronicles

If you’re a fan of The Blues, there are two books that must be found on your bookshelf.  The first is Tom Wheeler’s excellent book — “The Soul of Tone” — that celebrates 60 years of Fender Amps.

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American Idol Tune Dropping and Tone Deafness

I am a big fan of American Idol, but I cannot get over the fact that so few of the contestants that make it to Hollywood can carry a tune and how so many contestants — and fans! — are tone deaf.

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Men in Pastels

I’ll admit it: I look good in soft pink and powder blue and creamy yellow — it must be my pasty-white Nebraska skin that reflects those colors back into the world that makes me look truly alive instead of ghostly-dead. When I grew up in Nebraska, men who wore pink or pastels or creams were men who were secure in their sexuality and unafraid of being stereotyped by other straight men and women as “on-the-fence” or “in-the-opposite-mix.” Growing up in Nebraska you didn’t have many Gay people who were “out” because it was dangerous to do so back then.

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