AN IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY COMPELS ME to be this bold. To come right out and ask you, someone I may have never met, to give me, a total stranger, not one but two gifts this holiday season. And I can’t even lie and tell you that it’ll be that easy for you to give them. Sorry to…
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KELI LOOKED AROUND HER, and in turning felt the sticky skin on the inside of her elbows peel away from the sides of her calves. That alone made it feel as though she’d sat an entire day sulking, her arms wrapped around her legs. But in reality only a half hour had passed since this…
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JOAN MARIE SCELP STARR CARTWRIGHT LAURIA (b.1929, d.2012), my mother, was a jazz singer. As you might expect though, other people knew more about that part of her life than might an adolescent boy – I wasn’t old enough to see her perform in the bars and night clubs of the small, Eastern Ohio town…
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THE AMERICAN THESAURUS of Slang may one day be the last place you’ll find diner talk, a rich and colorful dialect soon to be as extinct as Aramaic. Adam and Eve on a raft—wreck ’em (an order for two scrambled eggs on toast); massacre the eggs, spoil ’em, wreck ’em (scramble the eggs); flop ’em,…
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JAMES FRANK STARR served aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard. That was an aircraft carrier that sailed in the Navy’s Pacific fleet from late World War II through the Vietnam War. My father, along with the plastic replica of his ship that I assembled as a boy, are the closest I ever got to military…
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COULD THIS BE a Golden Age for content creators? Has the Internet, not to mention the enhanced interconnectivity created by social media, expanded our opportunities? Many of my fellow writers, and designers, and various other creative people, now smack in the middle of this industry in transition, don’t necessarily see it that way. To the…
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SHARING SCHMARING. According to certain creative directors I’ve heard from, you may be shooting yourselves in the foot, you who’ve bought into the content marketing movement. In their opinion, its tenet of freely disseminating business insights is not only an unsustainable business model, but it’s also contributing to widespread job losses every day. I wrote extensively…
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EARLIER TODAY I returned to my home in Dallas after visiting family, traveling on Amtrak’s Heartland Express, a line that in about four hours crosses the prairie that flattens out between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Fort Worth, Texas. I took advantage of the peace and quiet, spending the majority of my time writing, but along the way…
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NOT EVERYONE IS ALL that crazy about the big changes in marketing that social media hath wrought. I’m referring to certain individuals in my tribe, the “creatives,” who are going through a kind of evolution of their own as they figure out how to respond to this changing landscape. More specifically, they question the validity of…
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MUSICIAN FRIENDS WILL BE quite impressed when you sprinkle into the conversation a little lyrical lingo from their universe, and one of my favorite old books, the American Thesaurus of Slang, is just the place to find it. Jazz slang, and where I heard it first My own introduction to that world came at a…
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