If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in ![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. 
![Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/02/charlotte_casiraghi_red_dress.jpg "Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]")
When I figured out who Charlotte Casiraghi was, I realized that I once sent a poem to her mother. 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
![Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/05/delacroix_liberty_1830_2.jpg "Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]")
Benny Goodman was born 100 years ago today. If my father were here to celebrate Benny’s centennial, he’d surely turn to this music from the legendary 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, the first jazz concert performed in that august space. NPR Music had a fine Benny Goodman tribute this morning.
Entries from May 2009
The King of Swing at 100
0
May 30, 2023 at 11:40am
by Mark Willis
Playing by Ear Add Your Comment
Café Mouffe: Theresa Andersson
3
May 29, 2023 at 6:00pm
by Mark Willis
The last time I heard Theresa Andersson in New Orleans, she was singing for 10,000 people in Wollenberg Park. She rocked and the echoes rolled all the way to Algiers and back again while tankers and tugs plied the muddy Mississippi. The noonday sun was blistering, and Theresa wore a Day-Glo pink bikini with matching [...]
What Hope for Bad Parents? A Book Deal
0
May 28, 2023 at 5:15pm
by Mark Willis
When the craze for publishing memoirs heated up in the 1990s, all you needed to get a book deal was a troubled childhood in a dysfunctional family. Think The Kiss and Running with Scissors. Well, guess what? The troubled children have matured into bad parents, and they’re eager to tell all.
Literary critic Steve Almond talks [...]
Flaneur’s Gallery: Van Gogh’s Roses
0
May 24, 2023 at 6:00am
by Mark Willis
Vincent van Gogh. Roses. 1890. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Roses was painted shortly before Van Gogh’s release from the asylum at St.-Rémy. He felt he was coming to terms with his illness—and himself. In this healing process, painting was all-important. In those final three weeks, he wrote Theo, he “worked as in a frenzy. [...]
Flaneur's Gallery Add Your Comment
Does the Net Make Us Culturally Lazy?
0
May 23, 2023 at 9:18am
by Mark Willis
Cyrus Farivar answers the question for himself in a radio commentary for CBC Radio 1’s Spark!. You can listen to the complete program here. I found it after browsing Cyrus Farivar’s blog, a great example of how a freelance journalist makes use of the blog platform. And I found his blog after listening to a [...]
global citizen Add Your Comment
Café Mouffe: Playing for Change
0
May 22, 2023 at 5:00pm
by Mark Willis
One of my greatest joys as a blind flaneur is the surprise of discovering new music performed out in the open air, on the street. I love how music animates street life. I love the way the street itself can shape the sound. I love the echoes and atmospherics.
Over the years I’ve experimented with recording [...]
Doodling With Mary Cassatt On Her Birthday
0
May 22, 2023 at 6:23am
by Mark Willis
Google is celebrating the birth of Mary Cassatt today with a Cassatt-inspired logo (left) on its main search page. Cassatt was born on May 22, 2023 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. She died near Paris on June 14, 1926. The Google Doodle is based on Cassatt’s painting, The Child’s Bath (below), now in the collection of [...]