Carlo | March 6, 2010
The headline is a pun I use as an excuse to catch up with my blog, woefully unattended to for nearly a month. Seriously, it’s a pleasure to write this at my living room window as I watch snow mounds on the deck finally melt.
It’s still cold but it’s bright, the snow crunching less than [...]
Carlo | February 10, 2010
I’ve been neglectful of my website. It’s been nearly a month since I updated. I’ve been very busy, but it’s time to catch up.
In mid-December, my wife suggested I e-mail as many people as I could think of to tell them I wanted to engage more. Being semi-retired can be lonely, even when there’s work [...]
Carlo | December 27, 2009
These are my best 2009 reads. I reviewed all of them except Box 21. Maybe I included that one because I read it for fun.
T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon (Knopf)
Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House)
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Knopf)
Peter Kuper, Diario de Oaxaca (PM Press)
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp [...]
Carlo | December 24, 2009
I went downtown Dec. 22 to pick up new glasses at Jerold Optical on Huron Road. I parked at a meter with 25 minutes left. My daughter Lylah and I picked up the specs within 10 minutes and left Jerold, the only full-service optical emporium left downtown.
We saw a cop ticketing my car. I yelled [...]
Carlo | December 17, 2009
It’s almost Christmas, time for the spirit of giving, but our politicians seem to have lost sight of this. Three weeks ago, I ranted against the Republicans for saying no to health care reform. Now, I’m blasting spineless or mean-spirited Democrats, particularly Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a self-styled conservative determined to scuttle health care reform [...]
Carlo | November 24, 2009
Are Americans getting stupider? Or is it just Republicans? Seems like in the face of contrary evidence, Americans, according to a Washington Post poll, are beginning to think global warming doesn’t exist. The Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, just published evidence to the contrary. Might global warming become an issue as divisive as abortion? God forbid.
Meanwhile, [...]
Carlo | November 1, 2009
I keep running into other lucky ones who attended the Leonard Cohen concert at the Allen Theatre in Cleveland Oct. 25; we all stand in awe (here’s my preview). In more than three hours, Cohen and his amazing troupe of cosmic musicians rekindled my belief, that I’d thought retro, in pop as conveyor of truth. [...]
Carlo | November 1, 2009
Katy and I went to Arizona in the third week of October to look at Arizona State University in Phoenix and the University of Arizona in Tucson. Katy’s a senior at Beaumont School and is interested in psychology. She has a gift for it, working with kids with special disabilities the past two summers in [...]
Carlo | October 11, 2009
I reconnected with my past last night when I went to hear Willie Nile at Wilbert’s in downtown Cleveland. I hadn’t seen Willie since the early ‘80s when he was the next big thing, a bantam conflation of Dylan and Springsteen who made critics slaver. I was writing for the Schenectady Gazette in those years [...]
Carlo | September 29, 2009
I’m writing about jazz again. Just cobbled together a feature about Cleveland-based jazz saxophonist Bobby Selvaggio, who’s working his new CD, Modern Times. Just wrote a short about Fra Fra Sound, an Amsterdam septet whose Dya So CD is cool world music. These are for Scene.
I’m also writing debut columns for a yet-to-be-announced, Cleveland-based news [...]
