Category: Dispatches

When the internet revolution arrived, music was the canary in the coal mine.  It was the first industry to choke on the digital carbon monoxide.  As soon as masterpieces such as Dark Side of the Moon and Thriller were reduced to binary code, there was trouble inside the mine.  The crisis caught the industry flatfooted. … Read more

In my early twenties I was struck with a feeling of grandiosity that bordered on a messianic complex.  I was living in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in a flophouse with a parade of strangers as roommates.  My room consisted solely of a twin mattress on the floor with a stack of John Steinbeck Penguin Classics… Read more

Bucky Baxter could have stepped out of the pages of a Mark Twain novel, perhaps as a confidence man scalping tickets to a county fair.  Or better yet, he could have jumped off the screen of a Coen brothers film, as a rakish father-figure dispensing advice of doubtful legal provenance.  In real life, he was… Read more