Posts: 55

1. 

   Pixar's Little Tramp

   01.Jul.08, 12:28 EDT
   
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   Here's my antidote for junk kid culture: good kid culture. Your daughter zoning out on preteen Disney musicals? Rent Help! and A Hard Day's Night. Hyper-driven, commercial-laden Nick programming driving you nuts? Throw Modern Times in the DVD player. Cries for Happy Meals driving you crazy? Go out for sushi. My son hasn't kicked his Hannah Montana crush or Power Rangers habit, but he knows the words to a dozen Beatles songs and loves Charlie Chaplin. And his favorite breakfast is a tin of surimi from the local Latin takeout restaurant: inch-long eels smothered in olive oil and peppers and garlic.
   
   I'm not bragging about my five-year-old's sophisticated taste. Okay, I am bragging -- but I'm making a point too. A huge part of a parent's job is to curate and expose him to culture. For me, it's so much fun singing "Ticket to Ride" with Cole, I can't even call it a job.
   
   Of course, as long as Pixar's around, you can trust your offspring with at least some of today's pop culture. With Wall-E, the kings of animation have hit the ball way out of the park.
   

   Anthropomorphic robots are a staple of cartoons and sci-fi; Robots and The Iron Giant are also excellent kiddie flicks. But rarely has a nuts-and-bolts character had the vaudevillian soul of Wall-E. He looks more than a little like E.T., and he serves a similar function: as an emissary from another planet (which in this case used to be our planet) who reminds us humans of the humanity we've lost in ourselves (ditto Iron Giant).
   
   With his sad eyes, forlorn shabby appearance, and slapstick pratfalls, Wall-E also draws a lot on Chaplin. Like the Little Tramp, he will do just about anything for love. In Eve, he finds a va-va-voom modern girlfriend.
   
   But Wall-E is no mere sentimental cartoon: It's a pointed apocalpytic parable. Wall-E and his pet cockroach seem to be the sole inhabitants of an environmentally blighted Earth. Fat, lazy humans with their greed and consumerism have buried the planet in trash and then fled. It's An Inconvenient Truth come to cartoon life.
   
   Despite my opening graf, I'm not really a total snob. I like a lot of kid's movies -- better than most adult ones. We have a running joke in our house that we haven't seen a new film that doesn't feature a talking animal in years. And I don't really mind.
   
   Wall-E is quite simply one of the best. It's definitely up there with Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Bambi. The landscapes and artistic direction in the film are stunning, their towering bleakness lightened with comic touches, like the robot's collection of found objects (a Rubik's cube, lighters, a tape of Hello, Dolly! that provides the film's unlikely soundtrack and romantic analogy). New York Times critic A.O. Scott called the first 40 minutes a "cinematic poem," and that's not wrong. Wall-E is the antidote. And the fact that millions are taking it in makes me feel more hopeful than ever about November 4.

2. 

   On Bob Dylan's Arm

   27.Jun.08, 12:04 EDT
   
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   Suze Rotolo is perhaps the most famous arm charm in rock’n’roll, quite literally. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she clutches the singer’s side as they make their way down a wintry West Village street in 1963. Rotolo was 19 at the time, and the girlfriend of the 22-year-old artist who was just beginning to be recognized as a colossal folk and rock talent. Talk about pressure.
   
   Before and after that photo, of course, Rotolo had a life story of her own, as she tells in A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway). She was a red diaper baby, the daughter of communist Italian-Americans, who became an artist. She was a beautiful, intelligent New York City girl, whose political, intellectual, urban upbringing probably seemed exotic to the exile from small-town Minnesota. One gets the sense from this memoir that Rotolo was and is very much her own woman – albeit a fragile young person with a difficult home life, who probably tended to break “just like a little girl.”
   
   Freewheelin’ is by no means a tell-all. In fact, the author tells very little of the personal details of her relationship with Robert Zimmerman (she does reveal that not even she knew his real name and identity until a news story revealed it). Neither rancor nor a great deal of sentimentality drive the narrative. Four decades later, she is eminently respectful of the four-year love affair and her ex’s privacy – that tactfulness, so refreshing in the age of endless celebrity dish, itself speaks volumes about both Rotolo and Dylan.
   
   Freewheelin’ is most interesting as a document of Downtown New York during the folk boom and the birth of ‘60s counterculture. Mostly, Rotolo pays tribute to the incredible talent pool that was her community, people like Sylvia and Ian Tyson, Dave Von Ronk, and Janet Kerr. I absolutely eat up books like these, documents of bohemian places and times – god, it must have been fabulous to live there and then, I sigh as I turn their pages (even as an equally happening scene may be unfolding outside my window).
   
   Rotolo also captures the souring of the hippie experience – the good trip gone bad. Unsurprisingly, her relationship with Dylan collapses under the weight of their greatly changed lives, as his fame mounts. She is stalked, her apartment burns, and she has the kind of nervous collapse that so many people, living on the edge in pursuit of a dream, had at that time.
   
   The book falls apart a bit too; it’s unclear what Rotolo’s point is, as she grasps for a special light to shed on a much-illuminated era. Still, she has a vivid, clear way of describing her memories that’s enchanting; you can see how a guy would fall for her. “We were full of truths and enthusiasms, non sequiturs, stories, insights, pronouncements, resentments, and of course poetry, prose, and song,’’ she writes.
   
   The Freewheelin’ photo is a portrait of youth in love, two people sheltering in each other’s arms on a cold city street. Rotolo is no mere ornament – and unlike the usual rocker arm candy, her body is completely covered in a bulky winter coat (she told the New York Times she felt like an Italian sausage). Still, she’s the full-maned bohemienne giving flesh to the skinny bard’s songs. An emancipated woman living with her lover – Rotolo was the embodiment of freewheelin’. Her memoir reveals that she was more than just a symbol, though, that she had her own life and stories to tell.
   
   

3. 

   Happy Anniversary nyc boi!

   24.Jun.08, 13:48 EDT
   
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   Social networking sites work counter to that old Groucho Marx/Woody Allen joke, about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member. The Internet is all about context. You are who you friend. MOLI and Facebook are both supposed to be havens from MySpace, for “grownups” who think MySpace is for teenagers. But SNSes only succeed if they have that critical mass of users who attract other users. They’re like giant high school cliques; people only want to hang out in the ones where the people they want to hang out with are.
   
   In his "Wk 52 -- self-ish" blog post for MOLI, the poet Mike Tyler discusses his own reasons for blogging much better than I do:  “I like Moli because it is new and growing and I like things at the beginnings like Silent Movies, and Early Rock ‘n Roll (when the electric guitar was just invented), and any kind of stuff that is going on before grown-ups find it and begin their jihad. (Look out for the word-ish, ‘monetize.’)”
   
   Tyler has been posting one blog a week under the profile name nyc boi for one year, every Sunday morning – hence the blog name, sunday am. I first met Mike when he was a poet hanging out at spaces like the Nuyorican Poets Café and ABC No Rio back in the early '90s, and made him the lead subject of a story I wrote for The Village Voice in '91: "Café Society." We’ve been friends since, and when he found out I was hired by MOLI some 52 weeks ago, he decided to make it a place to hang his own words.
   
   sunday am can be a tough, trippy, tripping, hilarious, profound read. Mike has always been a philosopher as well as a writer, and sometimes you have to follow his punning neologisms – words like “somethinc,” “humane bean” -- back to their etymological source (Mike’s brain) to make sense of him. I always find the investigation worth the wade.
   
   In "self-ish," Tyler – who made a name/spectacle of himself as a globetrotting performance poet back when spoken word was the MTV rage – in typical Tyler fashion, finds he has no lessons to share from his first year in a new medium: “I’ve had words of wisdom about blogging, before I did it, and now that I’ve done it, I have not one jot (whutz a jot?) more than I started.”
   
   But of course, Mike does have something profound to say about blogging, and it has to do with landing where your feet find themselves – monetizers beware and be damned. Like Juliana Luecking, Donnell Alexander, Wendy Case, Natasha Bright, Jana Martin, Jeanne Fury, Cathay Che, Audra Hodges, Neal Pollack, Martin Johnson, Richard Pachter, Rob Levine, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Rebecca Wakefield, Erika Schickel, and [your name here], nyc boi is the kind of person I want to hang out with, virtually or otherwise. As long as they’re here, I’ll be here.
   
   

4. 

   Hialeah Punks for Hope

   20.Jun.08, 13:48 EDT
   
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   New York, London, LA, Athens, San Francisco, Detroit, DC, Hialeah. Among the cities that can be name-checked in a punk-rock roll call, South Florida’s heavily Cuban American municipality is generally pretty low on the list. Hia-fucking-leah – as it’s lovingly known on a popular Miami T-shirt – is known more for being the birthplace of the 1970s proto-disco Miami sound (K.C. and the Sunshine Band, etc.) and chongas than for wearers of Mohawks and chanters of “hey-ho, let’s go.”
   
   The band Guajiro is out to change that. Thursday night, opening for a sold-out Rancid concert at Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution, the four-piece played a vigorous bilingual set in which they name-checked Hialeah on the song “Mulatona.” They also debuted the new band Final Reformation – Guajiro minus singer Willy Lopez plus singer Joe Koontz from Against All Authority.
   
   But most notably, they led the moshpit through a chant of their new single “Olé (Latinos for Hope)” (being released by I Scream Records on June 24). The anthem turns a futbol chant into an endorsement for Barack Obama, and translates Obama’s catchphrase “Yes We Can” into the riff “Si Se Puede.”
   
   Guajiro has made a powerful, will.i.am-style video for Oléthat mixes shots of the presidential candidate with video of Guajiro’s sweaty members -- Lopez, Jorges Gonzalez Graupera, David Santos, and Dougla' MacKinnon.
   
   Lots of musicians, of course, are getting on the Obama train; some Latin stars already recorded a video for him. But the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t usually get a lot of love from South Florida’s conservative exile community; in fact, today, some of Elian Gonzalez’s relatives (oh God, here they go again!) are holding a press conference against the senator because he has advisors who didn’t believe the boy was brought here by dolphins to be safe from Fidel.
   
   “Tonight it’s about hope,” Lopez told the crowd Thursday night. It’s hard to say whether the stylized youths got it – I did see one kid in an Obama T-shirt, but unfortunately, so many of these third-generation punk fans follow the fashion of the Exploited, but not the politics of the Clash. Rocking for voting is a gutsy move for some Hialeah punks. Olé!
   
   

5. 

   Why We Need Newspapers

   17.Jun.08, 11:35 EDT
   
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   On Sunday, my local newspaper, The Miami Herald, was one of several around the country to run the first installment of “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law,” an intensive, global investigation of the U.S.’s treatment of detainees in military bases since 9/11. The story, written by Tom Lasseter for the chain that owns the Herald, McClatchy, was everything the world desperately needs from the fourth estate: A thoroughly documented, unrelenting prying open of doors the government has done its best to keep shut (frequently by invoking “patriotism”). The series, which continues all week, reveals how many of the detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, how they were often beaten, how some died in custody, and how the accumulation of American atrocities on these people has turned the prison camp at Guantanamo not into a terrorism containing instrument, but a place that breeds terrorists.
   
   Monday, day two of the series, the Herald announced that due to the continuing collapse of the newspaper industry, 17 percent of its staff will be eliminated through buyouts, attrition, or layoffs. McClatchy, in general, is cutting back its payroll by 1,400 employees, or 10 percent.
   
   It’s the best of times, and the worst of times.
   
   The Herald, like many papers, has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to keeping up with changing technology. Case in point: You can’t read articles more than two weeks old on its website, without registering for a special archive service and paying for them. There must be hundreds of articles on, say, Britney Spears in the Herald database, but you will only find the latest news in a Google search of her name. Talk about missed opportunities for easy hits.
   
   The Gitmo investigation, however, shows McClatchy (the nation's third-largest newspaper chain) making smart use of the web’s multimedia and extended database capabilities.  Lasseter interviewed 66 former detainees. You can see many of their pictures in the online version of the story, along with video interviews; handy hyperlinks in the text will take you right to them. There are PDFs of documents used during the investigation, a la the Smoking Gun. There are maps of where detainees are from. And there’s a place to leave comments (though I think this part of the story should have been played up better online).
   
   The investigation, so far at least, is a riveting must-read – and has been the talk of other news outlets. Coming on the heels of last week’s Supreme Court decision overthrowing the illegal detention of many of these prisoners, the timing couldn’t have been better – except for that little layoff announcement.
   
   MOLI  View contributing editor Rob Levine has done a great job of repeatedly drawing attention to the tremendous existential crisis facing journalism in this country; so has our colleague Richard Pachter. Normally, I would leave this discussion in their capable digits. But this time, the timing of the Guantanamo series and the layoffs is too egregious – and personal. After spending six great years as the paper’s pop music critic, I left the Herald a year ago, in part because I saw the writing on the wall in terms of the future of print journalism, and had a chance to get some Internet experience under my belt (thank you MOLI!). I have tremendous respect for the journalists I left behind. The Herald is far from perfect,  but the newspaper has broken some major stories for the community just in the seven years since I have lived here – perhaps most significantly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House of Lies series on how developers and politicians were taking off with millions intended for public housing. Another realtor just last week went to jail, thanks to that exposé.
   
   I’m sure Lasseter is not in danger of being laid off right now. In fact, they should just hand the guy a Pulitzer this minute and forget the wait. But I’m also sure some people I know and respect will no longer be keeping an eye on the bad guys – whether in city government or local bands – as the Herald cuts are made manifest in the next month. And that hurts. All of us.
   
   

6. 

   Pictures of Patti

   12.Jun.08, 15:50 EDT
   
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   There’s perhaps no more famous and fruitful collaboration between a rock musician and photographer than the long friendship between Patti Smith and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Roommates in New York in the '70s, a period fascinatingly chronicled in Mapplethorpe: A Biography, by Patricia Morrisroe, they both were transgressive pioneers: she as one of the poetess founders of punk, he as a portraitist of gay America. He shot the iconic black and white image of her for the cover of her debut Horses, an album that launched a million musical careers. If you ever get a chance to see Sandy Daley's obscure 1971 film, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, don't miss it. Smith's rambling narration -- while, yes, Robert has his nipple pierced -- in her thick New Jersey accent is off the wall and hilarious.
   
   With her walleye, long tangled locks -- no gray-hiding hair dye for this artiste -- and Giacometti face, Smith has been a visual muse for many photographers since, including REM's Michael Stipe. For the last decade or so, the singer has been working with fashion shutterbug Stephen Sebring. His documentary about her, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is scheduled for September release by Palm Pictures, it was announced yesterday. New Yorkers get a first peek at it at the Film Forum, August 6 to 19.
   
   According to the press release, Dream of Life "is a plunge into the philosophy and artistry of this complicated, charismatic personality. Sebring captures Smith, who narrates the film, through her spoken words, performances, lyrics, paintings and photographs." The movie also features Phillip Glass and Sam Shepard (another legendary '70s collaborator of Smith's).
   
   Rizzoli will publish a companion book in August, which will include Polaroids taken by Smith. In addition, she and Sebring are releasing on their new PASK label The Coral Sea, a live CD she recorded with My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields -- along with photographers and playwrights, Smith has excellent taste in guitarists (Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, etc.).
   
   There's no artist who has been singularly more inspiring to me as a woman than Patti. That said, I find the sometimes reverential attitude of and towards her work since the early '90s can get a tad annoying. Smith has always prided herself on her sense of humor, citing Johnny Carson as a major inspiration. I hope Dream of Life has some of the wackiness that makes Daley's movie a classic. Whatever: The world could always use more Patti Smith, now maybe more than ever.

   
   

7. 

   Michael Carlebach's Miami

   10.Jun.08, 12:05 EDT
   
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   Miami is a photojournalist’s dream. The abundant subtropical sun is god’s little lightbox, and there’s always a rich pageant of subjects: landscapes, characters, news stories, even cute animals.
   
   Michael Carlebach is an excellent study of character. Miccosukee Indians bathing,  a snake-oily condo salesman, a freshly mugged guy in a bar, and Jackie Gleason all find themselves pinned to the wall in his black-and-white portraiture show Witness: South Florida, at the Miami Center for the Photographic Arts.
   
   Featuring a profusion of sun-kissed and party-weary South Floridians with furry mustaches, Witness is as much a time capsule as a document of a region. Some of the photos remind me of what Iggy Pop once said to me, about when he first discovered Coconut Grove in the ’70s: "I spent a night or two as the couch guest of a young neo-hippie, in a house that had roof tiles and stucco, and the cement was cracking and lizards and snakes were coming and going and vines were in the kitchen. The inside was going out and the outside was going in. I thought, `This is the place for me.'"
   
   People talk nostalgically about Miami before Gloria, before Madonna, before Andrew and Wilma (all those dramatic divas). But aside from a TK Records greatest hits album, nothing has conveyed to me this unique time and place in American history as well as Carlebach’s photos.
   
   These aren’t the glamour shots of the future Ocean Drive, though there is a little Miami Vice in them. Shooting regular folks in their homes and habitats, Carlebach is Miami’s Weegee. Other photos capture the quiet intellect of a city generally considered obsessed with appearances: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Tenneessee Williams stand alongside shots of a Mariel boatlift refugee and of a pregnant woman and her boyfriend – the “boyfriend” looking so much like a woman, you have to take the caption’s word for it.
   
   Health demands led Carlebach from South Florida a couple years ago (he needs to stay near the North Carolina institute that gave him two new lungs). At Witness’s opening Saturday, he spoke of how he missed the crazy visual stimulation of Miami. Lots of other photographers were there to see these quintessential documents of the Magic City; many of them are Carlebach’s old students at the University of Miami and current employees of The Miami Herald. As happens at any gathering of journalists these days, there was glum talk about the change in times, outmoded technologies, decaying economies.
   
   Along with informing us of the present, journalism is the future documentation of the past. Maybe, we need it now more than ever.
   
   The Miami Center for the Photographic Arts is in the Borders Picture Framing Shop at 1601 SW 1st Street, Miami, 305-659-9575.
   
   

8. 

   The Art of Noise

   05.Jun.08, 11:56 EDT
   
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   Robert Longo, Untitled (Men in the Cities), 1980, Holzer Family Collection, New York. Photo courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
   
   The Down Home Southernaires were playing their hearts out in the middle of the exhibit room at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Hipsters and swells, there for the opening of Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock n Roll Since 1967, walked around the group, staring and smiling. To actually hear the Southernaires’ psychedelic indie swamp boogie, you had to don one of the headphones hanging on the soundproof plexiglass box inside which the band was playing. The musicians were pictures at an exhibition, a natural-history museum diorama sprung to silent life, Art Rock Exhibit A of a show that seemed to ask, What is the connection, or disconnect, between visual and audio stimulation?
   
   Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), by Rirkrit Tiravanija, is the attention-getting centerpiece of this remarkably cool gathering of album art (Funkadelic head case Pedro Bell), photographs (uber-underground Richard Kern), videos (Robert Longo, Red Krayola), photomontages (punk feminist pioneer Linder – how f-ing cool is that?!), artifacts (lots of Throbbing Gristle; cool factor to the infinity degree), drawings (Rita Ackerman, Yoshitomo Nara), sculptures, and whatnot. The show originated at MOCA in Chicago, whose Dominic Molon curated it; it opened in Miami on May 29 and runs through September 7. Did I mention it’s really, really cool?
   
   

   Christian Marclay, David Bowie (from the series "Body Mix"), 1991. © C. Marclay. Courtesy of Christian Marclay and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

   
   The exhibit title is misleading: Sympathy digs a lot deeper than anything as obvious as a giant lips logo. The array of film, art, and video taps into more of a Gen X demo than a boomer one. The Andy Warhol-assembled Velvet Underground is the aesthetic jumping-off point for what is essentially a survey of three decades of subcultural pioneers, with lots of contemporary pieces. As the Throbbing Gristle flyers and Christian Marclay installations show, sound and vision have a history of feeding each other – these are people who see industrial refuse as musical instruments and vinyl records as found artwork.
   
   A lot of attention has been paid of late to Miami’s vibrant visual arts scene. But as Sympathy for the Devil proves, where there’s art, there’s usually noise – the Down Home Southernaires are the tip of a growing musical iceberg providing a soundtrack for Hernan Bas, Naomi Fischer, Jose Bedia, etc. Perhaps, the MOCA show will serve as a sort of inspirational mecca for cross-disciplinary creative types in what DHS calls the Black Magic City. Any artist can book time in Tiravanija’s Petri-dish rehearsal studio, and the museum is hosting a battle of the band series beginning June 24.
   
   The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL. For information, please call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org. Museum hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm; Sunday noon – 5 pm, and last Friday of each month from 7 – 10 pm. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents/City employees, and children under 12; $5 non-members; $3 seniors and students with ID.

9. 

   A Busker on Broadway

   29.May.08, 11:28 EDT
   
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   Stew looks sardonically out at the audience in New York's Belasco Theater from his vantage point at center stage. Sometimes, as he narrates the action of Passing Strange, the show he wrote with Heidi Rodewald, which just won two Obies and is nominated for seven Tonies, he sets his heavy black glasses on top of his head and pauses with lips pressed tight, emphasizing a particular absurdity – of a character, the plot, the whole situation of being a longtime outsider artist finally let in. It’s a healthily skeptical narrative device that intellectually keeps this smart, funny play from becoming what it has actually become: a Broadway musical. “Can you believe it?” the gesture says. Well, yes.
   
   Passing Strange, which moved from the Public Theatre to the Belasco February 8, is the story of that skeptical artiste as a young man. The Youth, played with just the right mix of wide-eyed gawkish disdain by Daniel Brecker, escapes the phony palm-tree-studded life of growing up black and middle class in LA by following his muse to Amsterdam and Berlin, where he falls in with hippies, anarchists, and performance artists. Stew thanks GW Bush for the show’s inspiration. “When I found out that he had never been to Europe in his youth (or in his adulthood until he became prez!!!) I immediately knew I wanted to write a play about a kid who wanted to go to Europe,” he writes on the show’s website. “That fact about Bush said a lot to me about America's lack of interest in anything foreign except that which it can exploit (always to exploit – never to learn from).”
   
   In the show, Stew, who with Rodewald had a band called the Negro Project for a decade, is just as critical of Euro bohos’ curious interest in and ignorance of his background as he is of American close-mindedness. In order not to get evicted as a pop capitalist pig, the Youth winds up playing the skin card, pretending to have been a kind of Crip to his communal flat-mates – who lap up his gangsta art. “No one in this play knows what it’s like to sell a dime in South Central,” Stew drily states to the Belasco crowd, making fun of what must have been his own adolescent shuck and jive – and raising a red flag for any minstrel tendencies in this current song and dance.
   
   Years ago I recall seeing Stew busking in the Astor Place subway station; I’d like to say I recognized his Elvis Costelloish genius back then, but I’d be lying. I’m definitely rooting for him Tony night, June 15. He’s the lucky, worthy struggling artist who has finally hit the lottery – bravo for his capitalist pop!
   
   Passing Strange will perform Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays - Saturdays at 8 pm; Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.; and Sundays at 3 p.m. at the Belasco Theatre (111 West 44th Street) on Broadway. Tickets are priced $111.50 - $66.50 - $36.50 - $26.50, and are available through Tele-charge at www.TeleCharge.com, or by calling 212-239-6200.
   
   For additional information onPassing Strange, visit www.PassingStrangeOnBroadway.com.
   

10. 

    MOLI's Cowboy Blogger

    27.May.08, 13:00 EDT
    
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    Phil Martin is one of the best things to happen to this website. The Brady, Texas-based musician, poet, retired professor, and all-around pontificator is MOLI’s most prolific blogger. At his Campo Madrone profile he has 19 different tabs, including the D&E Ranch, featuring the prose of his alterego Cletus Duhon, and the Border, photographic and writerly snapshots of life where Mexico meets Texas. As if that weren’t enough, Phil has also launched a profile for the Cowboy Chautauqua Company, a performing troupe of cowboy singers and poets. You can read more of his poems there, and hear some great Americana anthems, like Andy Wilkinson’s "I’ll Be Better Than This," which Phil says was inspired by something he said.
    
    I’ve never met Phil, though I try to keep up with the emails he sends me through MOLI – man, I envy his verbosity and quick wit! Unlike some of us, Phil isn’t paid to blog. He just has a passion for writing, and he’s found us to be a good site to air out his bounteous ink, so to speak.
    
    After a decade hiatus, Phil is trying to revive the CCC. You can book one, two, four, or a whole posse of poets, writers, songsmiths. It’s great to experience Martin’s original American voice virtually wherever you are – but I’d love to see him and his friends in person. Judging by the Campo Madrone blogs, it would be a pointed, philosophic, hilarious, and poignant night of songs, jokes, and running commentary. Like an old campfire gathering – one where W. is likely to get roasted on a long pointed stick and someone gets messy confessional.
    
    The Chautauqua is based on an historic form of popular culture, pre-Internet, even pre-the chitlin circuit: “Chautauquas were a big part of the American entertainment scene during the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries,” Phil writes in one posting. “They died out mostly because of the invention of motion pictures and radios . . . but they thrived for nearly half a century.  Describing what they did isn't easy because a wide disparity of styles and formats existed among them.  But a national circuit developed, one where traveling troupes of entertainers came through small towns across America on a regular basis.  These shows were in part educational, aimed at bringing the thriving culture of the cities to the rural parts of the country.”
    
    Brady is a long way from my perch in Miami Beach, but I feel like I’ve gotten to know Phil in the past year. (His wife, Evelyn [nice name], makes the amazing Lathers del Corazon handmade soaps and lotions, which I highly recommend.) I’m not just saying this as some sort of MOLI promotion, but getting to find a voice like his – or really, I should say voices, since he writes in so many personae -- is what makes me believe in the use of a social networking site, or the Internet in general. Call it digital chautauqua. Make sure to send him an email – and be ready for a new pen pal.