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The highlight of my 2007 year had to be our 2 week family vacation in England this past July. We stayed in the same seaside town of Deal in Kent where my family had lived 35 years ago when my father took a sabbatical leave from teaching. We’ve been back to visit a few [...]

Matt Phelan, the illustrator for the recent Newbery award winning children’s book “The Higher Power of Lucky” happens to be a friend of ours. As you may have seen on the news, there has been an uproar over the author’s use of the word “scrotum” within the the first few paragraphs of the story. I [...]

I just finished Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds. It’s an easy and entertaining read about the period in music that probably defines my musical “coming of age” – the years 1978-1984. I’ll date myself here by saying that by 1984 I’d already been in a “cover” band playing Blondie, Ramones and [...]

It is with great confidence that I can relate the following facts about this book:
1. It will be a lighthearted and amusing read for both young and old.
2. It will make a fine “bathroom reader” for indoor or outdoor use.
3. It contains at least 700 hobo names (plus a few more).
4. It is in [...]

Warning – the following may contain movie spoilers.
We went to see the new version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” the other weekend and since we recently read the book to my 6 year old (and re-watched the original movie version starring Gene Wilder), I thought I might weigh-in on the new movie. Here it [...]

I know it’s been out a few years already, but I’ve just now read Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in two short bursts a few months apart. The memoir is interesting, entertaining and quirky—maybe a bit overly clever at some points for using some page formatting and writing gimmicks but still a [...]

If you’re a musician (or not) who has spent any time in a recording studio (or not), you’ll be rolling on the floor laughing at the tales of Mixerman.
Taken from the online bulletin board postings of the mysterious Mixerman (real identity unknown), we’re treated to the ins and outs of a major label recording session [...]

I followed up England’s Dreaming with a slim volume by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa is an account of Hawthorne’s time spent caring for his five year old son Julian while his wife was away visiting her mother in Boston. The book is taken from Hawthorne’s American Notebooks and [...]

I’ve just finished England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. It took me a year but in the end I enjoyed it. It’s the story of Malcolm McLaren, punk rock’s beginnings, and the creation of the Sex Pistols—along with a heavy dose of history regarding England’s culture, politics and mood in the late 1970’s. Highly recommended.