Color-blind art lover, tone-deaf music fan. Author, Instant Karma (2002), H2O (2006), Summertime Jews (2018), The Music Never Died (2024). I live in Takoma Park, MD, and help organizations tell their stories. www.swartzmark.com
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Text

Time as hunger. Time passing and gazing. Time as perseverance. Mountain time. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars. —Anne Carson [Alive On All Channels]
33 notes
·
View notes
Text
0 notes
Text
RHIZOME MAG is rhizome dc's newest publication dedicated to sharing exciting, experimental, boundary-pushing art and writing by anyone who calls the dmv home. They are searching for art, poetry, photography, personal essays, comic strips, favorite rhizome/dmv memories and more! i
0 notes
Text
"Breaking up with yourself, breaking up with the past, breaking up with your body, maybe even (gulp) breaking up with your country"

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - WUMB-FM, Boston, Massachusetts, May 1995
Next week, I'll be catching Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in Denver! It's been far too long since I've seen the duo, and they never disappoint — I'm even bringing my teenage daughter along. Gillian and Dave's latest, Woodlands, is an absolute wonder. Here's what I wrote about it for Aquarium Drunkard's 2024 year in review:
A breakup album — but not in the Blood On The Tracks/Shoot Out The Lights vein, thankfully (though the devastating “What We Had” is a motherfucker in that regard). No, Woodlands is about breaking up with yourself, breaking up with the past, breaking up with your body, maybe even (gulp) breaking up with your country. Strung together with typically timeworn melodies and cut-to-the-quick lyrics, it’s another masterpiece from Welch and Rawlings. I've been prepping for the upcoming show by digging through old rarities and live tapes from G&D — including this great WUMB radio broadcast from way back, almost 30 years ago, before the pair had a record deal, or even any merch to hawk, as they note in the interview. "We've got a mailing list," Gillian admits sheepishly. And she's not talking about e-mail.
Boston, was of course, Gillian and Dave's old Berklee College of Music stomping ground, and indeed, the DJ sounds a little suspicious of these kids' ability to inhabit dusty traditional modes. People were kind of obsessed with "authenticity" back in those days, right? And while occasionally their early stuff came across more as intellectual exercises than songs, Welch and Rawlings have spent the last three decades putting any doubts to rest, writing songs and making records that will stand the test of time.
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
youtube
A chorus, seated on the floor of the Louvre, singing to and with a nursing mother
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
"If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel." --Robert Louis Stevenson, "Crabbed Age and Youth"
0 notes
Video
youtube
The hook sinks in and rips out all the flesh What do you want, now that you'vе lost everything? Dig a hole and crawl inside and die
0 notes
Text
"It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run." --Willa Cather, "Paul's Case" (1905)
0 notes
Text
vimeo
Piano improvisations by W.A.Mathieu
Dance / choreography by Maya M. Carroll.
0 notes
Text
Listen all the way through and be spared one stroke of bad luck this week
0 notes
Video
youtube
Circlesongs - Bobby McFerrin feat. Joey Blake, Dave Worm + Jazzation & F...
0 notes
Text

"After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen."
–Steven Millhauser, from "Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories" Photograph by Samuel Christopher, "Youth & Rebellion"
49 notes
·
View notes
Text

"Jazz is just a reflection of life…. Life is improvised, life is uncertain. It's not solid. It's not permanent. The art I choose disappears after it's played, it goes off into the ether. I love that." --Jerry Granelli
Photo: DL Media
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
youtube
Andy Bey (1939-2025) with his sisters
1 note
·
View note
Text

Triptych /Mixed media on canvas 1987 Julião Sarmento
6 notes
·
View notes