When we eat the rich, let’s start with the music moguls. Clear Channel Communications, with 1,200 radio stations, controls 10 percent of the American market and over 50 percent of the nation’s major pop music stations. As if that’s not monopoly enough, the company’s concert network dominates the United States’ rock and pop touring business. […]
L.D. Russell
Posted inNews
Death, Be Not Proud
I was already in mourning when I saw the twin Trade Towers fall. My heart’s been bruised ever since February, when I lost my hero, Dale Earnhardt. All those thousands of deaths in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks took my grief to a level deeper than I could ever have fathomed. God knows that morning […]
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An unfinished race
Ever since the dark suicidal days of my mid-20s, I’ve been fascinated by the moment of death. What’s it like in that final moment before we leave this mortal coil: awful agony or sweet release? That may strike you as weird, even pathological, but I suspect I’m not the only one who ponders the more […]
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Brain fires
Duke University has recently given me two major headaches. The first came on last month while I was strapped and encased in an MRI scanner, having the insides of my brain “photographed” while viewing images of human carnage: war casualties, close-ups of tumors and burns, the bloody, bludgeoned faces of accident victims. I had all-too-innocently […]
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Jr. James and the Late Guitar
From the first funkified lick of Jr. James and the Late Guitar’s new CD, you’re transported to church the way it really ought to be. The opener, “American Dream,” is a musical indictment of our Bush-wacked nation’s communal sins, greed and avarice, and–like any soulful gospel sermon–it calls you to task even as it makes […]
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One More River to Cross
Last Saturday, as more than 60 hikers re-enacted John Lawson and Enoe Will’s 1701 trek across the Carolinas, they learned a significant lesson in North Carolina history, about how our checkered past impinges on the present. According to its co-sponsors, the Trading Path Preservation and Eno River Association, the hike was both a celebration of […]
Posted inArt
Benares Tales
To read Peggy Payne’s Sister India is to take a harrowing trip down the narrow, winding lanes of the holy city of Benares, India, and to be transported along the dark and treacherous backroads of memory. The Chapel Hill novelist tells a story of the clash of cultures, black and white, American and Indian, Hindu […]
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The Mythology of Flesh
Those who say that poetry is dead should have a word of prayer with Tarheel Renaissance man Keith Flynn. Winner of numerous poetry awards, founder and managing editor of the Asheville Poetry Review, author of three volumes of verse, and lead-singer and lyricist for widely acclaimed heavy-metal band, Crystal Zoo, Flynn is doing his part […]
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A village reborn
One recent morning, as I stepped onto a footbridge, a huge tree trunk carved flat on its upper side and laid across a shallow stream slipping into the nearby Eno River, I heard drums playing and the voices of women raised in joyful song. Pillars of smoke rose from inside the Occaneechi Village, just off […]
Posted inGuides
A Leaf, a bell, a stone
Partly by happy accident, partly by sad choice, I live in a monastery. No, I’m not a monk–far from it–but I have found a home in an apartment adjacent to a Buddhist temple, or zendo. Summer before last, fresh from a marriage that had served my mate and me well but finally outlived its usefulness, […]