The Discovery Channel is running a documentary tonight about the 1981 lynching of Michael A. Donald in Mobile, AL.

(Mobile is my home town, where my mom and dad still live. I didn’t like living in Mobile, but just because of its suburban ickiness—I didn’t know I had other reasons to get out of there, like a disturbingly recent history of Klan violence.)

Michael Donald was a 19-year old African American who ended up the random recipient—and medium—of the Klan’s usual message of murder and hate. Two Klansmen beat Michael Donald, slit his . . .

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The colors don’t come through as well as I’d like from a cell-phone pic, but, in person, I was blown away.

Can you see the hair-thin lightning bolts?

I was in Phoenix last week at a conference in a resort, and I saw the painting you see here hanging on the wall. It was a ritzy place in the middle of the desert, on Gila River Indian Community land, where members of the Pima and Maricopa tribes live. So the decor and design was Native American, . . .

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As anybody reading this has almost certainly already heard, yesterday saw the largest act of gun violence in modern U.S. history.

Also called the “deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history” (modern or otherwise), Virginia Tech has now joined the ranks of many other America college, high school, and grade school campuses ravaged by mass murder.

There’s nothing really to say about it, surely not on a blog posted for fun by a crowd of non-journalists, but I’m going to briefly go against my better judgment.

The Twin Cities’ Star Tribune ran . . .

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I don’t know if I could call it a “date” per se, but he was there, I was there, there were candles on the table and pasta on plates.

Well, to be fair, there were about seven other people and I may not have been sitting the furthest away from him, but it was close. He had come to our school to speak, and as a recent member of the Forum Planning Committee, I snuck in on the pre-lecture dinner reservation. It would be an exaggeration to say that he and I had a conversation that night, but he did . . .

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Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a . . .

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