There Are Little Kingdoms
It was deadening winter, one of those feeble afternoons with coal smoke for light, but I found myself in reliably cheerful form. I floated above it all, pleasantly distanced, though the streets were as dumb-witted as always that day, and the talkshops were a babble of...
The Nineties
The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can't read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in '62 and...
Damned If I Do
The Fix Douglas Langley owned a little sandwich shop at the intersection of Fourteenth and T streets in the District. Beside his shop was a seldom-used alley and above his shop lived a man by the name of Sherman Olney, whom Douglas had seen beaten to near extinction...
Beats Out Here
Only in recent years did I realise how close the relationship between the genres of trip hop, instrumental hip hop, etc, is to the jazz world that (kind of) spawned it. And more and more artists are gleefully straddling that divide, like Makaya McCraven, Sam Gendel,...
The Trees
Granny C always looked a little sad. And why not? Wheat was her son. Charlene hated the woman nearly as much as she hated Wheat, but never showed it; she was an old woman, and in the South you respect your elders. Her four grandchildren, three years to ten, looked...