I am a reader. I come from a family where, had a giant peeled the walls back from our home, the four of us would have appeared in the living room, curled up on chairs and sofas, each with a book perched in front of us. We wouldn’t have looked up. My love of reading …
Braise. It is one of those words, like velvet, that just sounds good to say. It rolls off the tongue and calls to mind warmth, comfort; a battered, stained orange Le Creuset pot lazily bubbling away, sending out delicious smells throughout the house. A very close friend of mine sent me a picture of a …
Ban Izakaya is a few blocks away from the Yutenji station. As you get close, you get a portent of what is to come. Groups of red-faced girls stagger arm-in-arm, weaving down the side-walk, enveloped of peals of laughter; to the right, a young couple are flat-out unconscious (Is she aspirating?) on a square of …
Back in 2003, I released a Mix CD called YEAR OF THE GUN. It collected some of the biggest “Gun Tunes” cut in Jamaica in the early to mid 1990s. It was a controversial CD and a lot of folks got angry that I was making a tribute to music that celebrated such violent content. …
In the early 2000s my wife and I lived at the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street in Manhattan. It was an odd-shaped, triangular building, wide at the windows over-looking Canal and tapering down to just a few feet at the rear. We sat above a Blimpies (for those that don’t know, Blimpies was …
Happy New Years to each and everyone. 2019! Such a futuristic sounding date. In 1976, I imagined a much more futurey future — space stations, teleportation, laser guns, cancer cures, world peace. Aside from the smart phone, the internet and the fact that you can now purchase perhaps 10,000 varieties of potato chips, that future …
