Today is the seventieth birthday of my father, Julian James Lynch George. Happy Birthday, Dad. I wish I could be with you today. You don’t mind if I post these photos, do you…?
Inspiring Quote About Inspiration
When asked if he wrote to a regular schedule, or just when he was struck by inspiration, Somerset Maugham answered, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” Clever man. If you sit around waiting for inspiration to strike before you begin writing, guess what? Inspiration will toddle off and do something else. …
Welcome Back, Jazz Times
Nice surprise waiting for me at home yesterday afternoon – a copy of Jazz Times was delivered in the mail, with none other than my man Joe Lovano on the cover. The magazine had ceased production earlier this year and at the time there was much mourning and chin-scratching in the jazz blogosphere about the financial viability of small-interest publications …
Back to School
My friend Tim wondered yesterday whether the Facebook servers would be able to cope with the massive surge of back-to-school photographs that would be uploaded in the forthcoming days. So I’m ignoring FB and posting mine here. Goofiness, ahoy. And no, this post has nothing to do with writing, or reading, or publishing, or music, or any of the things …
Feeling Stupid?
I am. Having read a rave review in Gary Giddins’s excellent book Natural Selection, I bought a copy of Grown Up All Wrong by Robert Christgau, who is the senior music critic at the Village Voice. This is a collection of some of his pieces over the past several years. I am thoroughly enjoying it, although I am not familiar …
Are We Fair, or Just Selfish?
In his excellent book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky writes about the Ultimatum game, a well-known experiment in behavioral economics. This is how it works. Two people are given ten dollars to share between them. One person gets to decide what the split will be; the other’s only power is either to accept or reject the proposed deal. If he …
Two Jazz Greats Gone
Yesterday was a rough day. Every year Jazz Times has a “goodbye” issue where it celebrates the lives of the jazz musicians who have passed in the previous year. It’s always sobering reading, as the number of true greats still with us slowly diminishes. A couple of weeks ago we lost George Russell,little-known outside the music world, but an incredibly …
What Being a Dad is All About
Some people scoffed when I put up this post about building a lego Star Destroyer with my eight year-old son, Hallam. “How hard can it be?” more than one person wondered. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present video evidence of exactly what is involved. There’s several hours of my life I’m never going to get back… (By the way, I suggest …
Cheer Up
Because what, really, can beat singing chickens?
A Sense of Place: Where to Write?
I have already written about the need for routine when it comes to writing. Equally important, for me anyway, is where I write. I know people who can dash off stuff in trains, waiting rooms, and especially in coffee shops. This always baffles me. Perhaps I’m just too nosy, or feckless, but I am unable to concentrate on what I’m …