I’m still grinning after reading random lines of Gary Snyder in the Poetry Room at City Lights last night. In a world quickly moving toward e-readers and cell phone novels, it was reassuring to drift among stacks of books and pick up volumes on impulse, graze a few graphs and move on. Wallace Stevens. Hart Crane. Denise Levertov. Lao Tzu. I could almost feel Ferlinghetti’s hot, beat breath on the back of my neck as the smell of yellow pages filled the room and the floorboards creaked beneath me.
Author: Bob Benz
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Buddy blows away the windy city
Lara and I just returned from another pilgrimage to Chicago to see Buddy Guy at his Legends club. Incredible. Every time I see him I’m astounded by his showmanship, and when he’s on his home turf, all hell breaks loose.
It was mind-numbingly cold, so frigid it took our breath away when we stepped out of the hotel. We went over to a sushi place before the show, where we met Mike, one of Buddy’s disciples. It was Mike who instigated our first pilgrimage to see Buddy, and he secured our tickets for this show.
When we got to Legends, the place was packed, and Buddy blew the doors off it. He rolled off one searing guitar solo after another and spent a lot of time moving through the crowd, going up to the bar, even wandering back into the bathroom. The crowd loved it. We loved it. And I think that’s the best Buddy Guy show I’ve ever seen. He was wailing.I posted a few photos here on my Flickr account.
I can’t explain why exactly, but I recently read “The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star.” Ostensibly, I did it to see what it would be like to read a book on the Kindle reader. I guess I chose it for the same reason people read stories about Britney Spears and then whine about the media being filled with such crap.
Nikki Sixx, the bassist and songwriter for M??tley Cr?