I write at www.thepaltrysum.com
So here is the deal, I went to sleep some time in the early 2000’s, distanced myself from everyone I knew in the gay scene – from my male gay friends, and our nights split between lesbian bars and gay clubs with unlikely and descriptive names (careful not to out myself here!), from my girlfriends, […]
MoreI guess the last thing you might expect me to be listening to is Kendrick Lamar, yet here I am. I was listening to Astral Weeks, as usual for this kind of disaffected day, whilst reading Lester Bang’s equally inspired piece on Van Morrison’s greatest work. Like Lester I get drawn back to it, something […]
MoreIt is one of those days. Miles Davis playing some reedy notes, wailing at me, phone calls going wrong, people calling me old, or commenting on the fact I have an accent, or reading about anti Asian sentiment in my beloved San Francisco. I appear to have irritated the Boy somehow, and he is staring […]
MoreI wonder if trees have memories, if rocks and mountains record life as it passes them by? I wonder if the stones and the mud and the dust and the flowers, if the eagles and the vultures remember us? I wonder if some nameless face in a gas station ever thinks about that woman who […]
MoreSince I spent a day on the road in my memories, driving through the mid west in a broke-down camper, with my family intact, and still some bones of a dream unbroken, there is nothing else to play the night out. Rhiannon Giddens is the founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of the most […]
MoreWe stayed at the motel that night, and the night after. I slept through the night, curled next to Billy, the kids sharing a bed, got up, had another shower. And another. And another. I turned on the TV and put up with the glares and watched travel channel mindlessness, pawn shops, hot rods, Guy […]
MoreI don’t like Tom Waits, I can’t stand Nick Cave unless you get me high enough to tolerate the Birthday Party, I don’t enjoy Mark Lanegan, and I never really fell in love with Rowland S Howard. I will listen to the White Stripes as long as we are on a freeway, but not otherwise, […]
MoreAs you go down from my beloved Medora, it becomes quickly apparent that the painted rocks, the hilly landscape of the little town where Teddy Roosevelt tried to make a success of ranching, is not going to last. This is not Montana with it’s skies and Rocky Mountain passes, and huckleberry bushes, this is not […]
MoreI’m on a real Miles Davis kick right now. I haven’t been so excited about things I haven’t heard before since, well Marquee Moon was heading home for the record store in a white plastic bag with the infinitely talented Tom Verlaine on the front cover looking like Keith Richards junkier brother. I never understood […]
MoreEvening “wellness checks” happen every night, staff basically come round and check that you and everyone else in the shelter are still alive. Whoever is on duty makes sure you are ok, then off they go. I make sure I am still in my day clothes, have a mask handy, and don’t leave them waiting. […]
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