THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

The past few weeks of my life have featured four major pursuits: *the start of my Summer semester of classes (two online classes, so it's not like I'm really "teaching" as I understand the concept in either theory or practice) *golf (still shitty and consistently inconsistent play, but slightly less shitty, so...progress?!?) *show binges ( Legion , Westworld , Patrick Melrose , Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Arrested Development , Tabula Rasa , and the CNN documentary  1968 , among others) *a shit-ton of Blue Öyster Cult Blue Öyster Cult captivated me as a kid with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," as I'm sure it did with many Americans in that summer of 1976. (Stephen King's use of BÖC in The Stand helped to cement the song into my personal musical firmament, too.) However, aside from "Burnin' For You" and "Godzilla," I knew next to nothing about the band or their catalog, aside from the fact that a guy named Buck Dharma (

In the music industry, “A&R” stands for “Artists and repertoire,” which is the process / art / science of connecting performers with material. Not all songwriters are magnetic entertainers, and not all artists can generate material that matches their abilities, so the work of A&R men – and they were and are almost always men, of course – is essential to enrich all parties. Would Elvis have exploded so brilliantly without the work of songwriting teams like Leiber & Stoller providing him with hit after hit? Did the Motown machine match the Holland-Dozier-Holland catalog with the perfect vehicles like the Supremes and the Four Tops, to keep the Motor City metaphor rolling down the highway? While there are plenty of examples in the ‘50s and ‘60s of the A&R assembly line churning out gems with maximum efficiency, it’s always fun to look a little later in rock history to find great examples of A&R diamonds, where all boats are lifted by a rising tide. When I was a kid,

A couple days ago, I was playing Scrabble on my app, and when I finished my current games, the app asked if I would like to play a game with a random person on FB. Usually, this offer comes with offers to play with people that are on my Facebook friends list, but not this time. "Huh," I thought, and moved on with my life, while the curious question of the missing friends stayed percolating in the back of my brain. The next day, I checked into Facebook to find that all my friends, accumulated over years of activity, were now gone. In addition, all the links I had posted, to YouTube videos and web sites and this very blog, were gone as well (which meant that quite a few of my posts now made even less sense than they did before, with the context of a link now vanished; I deleted everything I could find in 2018, but didn't have the strength to go back any further). Finally, my cover photo was blank, leaving my profile photo to stare up into nothingness, an ironic commentary