I just finished teaching a 6-week poetry workshop at Grandview, a local small high school, under the auspices of Arts @ Large. We wrapped up on Friday with a public performance of student work during Gallery Night. We had six Grandview students perform, another two attend in support, with others represented in absentia by their […]

I just saw my son and a couple of his friends off to school. They had stayed up all night at our house to finish a video project due in their Spanish class today. They’re headed out now in Angelo’s car, but not before they spent several minutes trying to get to the door locks […]

We’ve split up. It’s been coming since last spring — longer even, although I know she would adamantly disagree. Spring is just a marker, a moment when it became clear to me we were growing in different directions, mutually exclusive ones. My trajectory took me off the map we had been following altogether, right over […]

I got really sick on Saturday night. I had been having this weird dry cough for a couple days but didn’t think anything of it until I was flat on my back Saturday, so feverish I could hardly move my arms or legs. My lungs became so painful that trying breathe became an exercise in […]

Below is a description of the 12-hour narrative performance I’m doing on Wednesday as part of the “12/12/12 Show.” We’ve been getting a lot of press for this excitingly odd, once-in-a-lifetime show featuring 12 12-hour performances by 12 artists/artist collaboratives on December 12, 2012. The show runs continuously from 12 noon to 12 midnight at […]

I get excited by Mondays. I guess it’s because I’m a planner, a list-maker, a schemer, and nothing speaks to the possibility of fulfillment like a Monday morning. The whole week stretches out before me like a hilly country road, potholed by meetings and appointments but open and wide, ready to be traveled. I work […]

Climate change: Of course it’s here. I’ve felt it coming for years, knowing so clearly since I was a teenager that our way of life was unsustainable. It’s just been a matter of when we would collectively begin to notice, what kind of vocabulary we would develop around it. Now even mainstream US politicians are […]

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who were at Amanda Palmer’s show at Turner Hall last night and people who weren’t. I’m sorry if you’re in the latter group. As a consolation, you should check out her new album, Theatre Is Evil. Amanda Palmer is a singer-pianist and the voice of […]

I woke up this morning with a most elaborate earworm wiggling around my head: the “Ode to Joy,” the final, choral movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, his last complete symphony. It’s a segmented worm, for sure, a work that twists and squirms through some seriously rich musical loam over the course of its 10- to […]

I had to go out of town this past week for my uncle’s funeral. It’s two buses from here to South Beloit, Illinois, requiring a transfer in Madison. Add in a city bus ride to and from the downtown Milwaukee station and I rode six buses in two days. I saw a lot of people […]