COLUMNS

ON THE ROAD #21 - 2007 (Amsterdam)

2007-12-27T20:17:35Z

On The Road #21

Happy Holidays, everybody! I'm thinking of so many people at this time of year that I can't begin to start calling names, but special thoughts & prayers go out to my daughters Sunny and Celia and my granddaughter Beyonce in Detroit. And Happy Birthday memories of my idol and mentor, the great poet Charles Olson, born this day in 1910. And all the great New Orleans musicians born at holiday time, like Professor Longhair, Art Neville, George Porter Jr and Kermit Ruffins, to name just a handful. Where y'at, George?

ON THE ROAD #20 - 2007 (Amsterdam)

2007-12-17T12:42:07Z

On The Road #20

Dear Friends,

There have been many good things happening for me in the past month and I've been scrambling to keep up with them in daily life, let alone keep up my reporting in this space, but now I'm finally beginning to catch up with myself.

I started writing On The Road, my Travelogue at TravelPod.com, in the Spring of 2006 when my original website at this address was invaded by viruses and crashed. I never did complete the Summer of 2006 travelogue and I haven't reported for the Summer 2007 log or the Fall 2007 travelogue since the end of August.

ON THE ROAD #19 - 2007 (Amsterdam)

2007-11-14T01:00:00Z

On The Road #19

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where I'm writing from the Radio Free Amsterdam studios at Singel 10, inside & underneath the Hempshopper store in the new Green Light District just west of Centraal Station.

Resting up from all my recent travels started just this morning and will continue through the winter, interrupted (so far) only by the forthcoming flurry of Cannabis Cup activities here in Amsterdam next week and a quick trip to England December 5th to interview for a BBC film project on the year 1968.

ON THE ROAD #18 - 2006 (California)

2006-06-26T18:20:48Z

On The Road #18

(Aboard the Starlight Limited, California, July 26, 2006) — I didn’t even intend to visit New Orleans on this trip. I had a pre-paid fragment of an airline ticket from Newark to New Orleans left over from my round trip passage from New Orleans to Amsterdam which had been altered to allow me to attend the ComFest in Columbus OH, and I had meant to take the train from Baltimore to New York for $50, cash in my ticket to NOLA, get into Louis Armstrong International Airport at 9:30 am, catch a bus into town and hop on the City of New Orleans train for Memphis at 1:45 pm the same day.

ON THE ROAD #17 - 2006 (Amsterdam)

2006-05-28T17:27:11Z

On The Road #17

(The Dolphins, Amsterdam, May 8, 2006)—I left New Orleans for The Netherlands two months ago, but the sights and sounds of the devastated Crescent City continue to reverberate in my heart and my brain.

Recently I’ve been stuck on a particular phrase I saw in the New Orleans Times-Picayune early in January when Mike Cowan, Co-Chair of the New Orleans Human Relations Commission, was quoted as saying:

ON THE ROAD #16 - 2006 (New Orleans)

2006-02-25T18:43:12Z

On The Road #16

(Mardi Gras in New Orleans, February 25, 2006)—The first thing about Mardi Gras is that it’s nothing like what they show on television. Looking at a bunch of drunken idiots from suburbs all over America showing their tits on Bourbon Street and taking that for Mardi Gras is like watching a sporting contest on TV being broadcast from the concession stand. The people are there at the appointed venue, but what they’re doing has nothing at all to do with what’s going on in the game down on the field.

ON THE ROAD #15 - 2006 (Oxford)

2006-02-07T04:43:12Z

On The Road #15

(Oxford, Mississippi, February 6, 2006) Christmas in New Orleans was a sobering experience. I came back from Amsterdam after Thanksgiving to help marry my dear friends Chad Henson & Allison Borders in Oxford, visit my daughter Sunny and her daughter Beyonce in Detroit and spend the holidays with my daughter Celia in the Crescent City, and now I was right there in the middle of the wreckage.

ON THE ROAD #14 - 2006 (New Orleans)

2006-01-20T12:10:21Z

On The Road #14

[Note: This column is written for the website to bridge the months between the end of April 2005 and the end of January 2006 when I resumed writing the column for the Little Rock Free Press.]

(Oxford MS, January 29, 2006)—It’s been a long time since your correspondent has filed a report from On The Road—since I wrote from New Orleans in late April, as a matter of fact. It was a hard year for your correspondent in 2005, so probably the less said about it the better, but if I don’t write it all down now I’ll never remember what happened.

ON THE ROAD #13 - 2005 (New Orleans)

2005-04-28T22:22:10Z

(New Orleans, April 28, 2005) It was a beautiful thing to be back in the Crescent City for the first week of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which is the closest music lovers can come in the flesh to actually living in the mental world of music which we usually inhabit. During JazzFest there's incredibly great music everywhere one turns on 12 stages at the Fairgrounds for seven long days and in all the bars, nightclubs, concert halls and unusual venues in the city every blessed night for two entire weeks, and everything but the music seems to fade into insignificance as long as JazzFest lasts.

ON THE ROAD #12 - 2005 (Detroit)

2005-04-14T20:20:53Z

Dedicated to the memory of Robert Creeley

(Detroit, April 14, 2005) Springtime in Michigan can be a delicious thing when the weather breaks and the sun comes out and life begins again after another long and strenuous winter. The Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, Opening Day at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the chance to meet and eat with old friends and comrades of all stripes, plenty of quality time with my loved ones it's great to be alive!