My Mom, Glam Icon
Fashion is not about design, it’s about emotion, said couturier Alber Elbaz, and that’s certainly been true in my personal experience. My emotional relationship with fashion began at about age one, the earliest I was able to trundle around our tiny Park Slope apartment and pull open the door of my mother’s closet. It was a place of […]
Two Poems by Laurie Soriano
Laurie Soriano is unique, in my experience: a lawyer who writes poetry, the literary equivalent of a mythical unicorn. True, the best legal writing can be poetry; parts of the California Code meet that high bar, but practicing lawyers barely ever do. “I have written poetry since I was a child, and I also am a lawyer,” Soriano says in trademark […]
Africa’s Legal Beat
Native drums have long been associated with Africa’s cultural roots, integral to the daily life and rituals of many communities. Its influence has spread worldwide, providing the launchpad for a multitude of music styles, among them jazz and rock and roll, all of which is widely recognized. Less known is the disruptive effect of colonial drumming […]
Fearless
I recently read in a recruitment post: “We want someone who is fearless.” A rather unusual job requirement, it left me intrigued as to what it suggested about the employer and potential employee. What does it mean to be fearless? In aggregate, is it a good thing? Or really not so much? At its most […]
Learning to Admire Allah (courtesy of Wikipedia)
Although I’m not quite conventionally religious, I do believe in a higher power: God as a force of nature. And I’m deeply fascinated by theology, and the sectarian cultural behaviors. I was born a Roman Catholic, which as a young child growing up in the USA had little meaning for me beyond amazing architecture, lovely hymnals and dazzling new […]
Presidents by State
Could the fact that he was born in Queens be a kingmaker for Donald Trump? Or that Hillary lives in Chappaqua boost her chances to reign over the U.S.? While more U.S. presidents have been born in Virginia, at eight (which includes the unelected John Taylor, a veep who served out Millard Fillmore’s term), when […]
The Outlaw Hillary Clinton
I’ve made my peace with Hillary Clinton. Initially, I was outraged over the use of a private email server to conduct government business. But my opinion of her improved in inverse proportion to the revulsion that resulted from continued exposure to Donald Trump. Compared to him, she started looking good, then great, and ultimately heroic. As […]
Interviewed by Paula in Billboard
Conjuring faraway worlds and the forces of nature, composer Sarah Schachner’s evocative score for ‘Call of Duty Infinite Warfare’ will explode your idea of what videogame music sounds like. Click here to read the interview and listen to tracks.
David Bowie, Beat by Beat
By yardsticks like Dylan goes electric, David does disco was an unqualified hit, as seen on the Serious Moonlight tour, Philadelphia, July ’83. Flashy, buoyant and brash, it was somewhere between doo-wop and punk, and like all things Bowie, ahead of the beat.
Giuliani: Muslims Ready for Their Coppola Close-Up
Speaking on “Morning Joe,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a case for Muslims being in a situation not unlike that in which Italian Americans found themselves in the heyday of the mafia. Giuliani vociferously defended “the majority of Muslims” as outstanding citizens, but stuck to his premise that they are a community where the […]