I’m Hearing Voices!

John Fraim I’ve come to believe the way forward for the modern novel is through the creation of new narrative techniques rather than the structural forms of screenplay as Hollywood would have writers believe. Experiments in voice and narrator were at the heart of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Michael Ondaatje’s Collected […]

Lord Huron

One of the strangest and most unique bands is the American indie folk band Lord Huron based in Los Angeles. Founded by Ben Schneider, the name of the band is a tribute to Lake Huron where the Michigan native spent many of his summers growing up where he spent evenings at the lake playing music around […]

Letter to a Critic

“Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and cool prose. Writing in ‘methods’ or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice.’ The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort […]

Mac 13 and 19

John Fraim One never knows how much they’re connected to the digital world until needs like updating an old computer come along.  Living in the Bay Area since the mid-70s, I’d been involved in some way with Apple Computers I lived in Berkeley in the 80s and attended meetings of the Berkeley Apple or Mac […]

The Kels / St. Patricks Day / 2021

(Excuse all the table talk but this is how I heard the music that night … my stepson Drew’s 38th birthday with his beautiful wife Kelly. Getting us out for live music for the first time in a long tine in the Covid era) John Fraim I watched the Grammy Awards this year. Saw Billie […]

Bedroom Studio

Billie Eilish just won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Record of the Year “Everything I Wanted.” It was a repeat of last year when she sweep the major categories. The music of Eilish first gained attention in 2015 when she uploaded the song “Ocean Eyes” to SoundCloud. The song was written and produced by […]

Hollywood’s Most Hauntingly Gorgeous Film Score

Love Theme from Spartacus Written my Alex North for the film Spartacus Memory by John Fraim Tonight on Bay Area jazz radio KCSM, they played jazz saxophist Regina Carter’s interpretation of “Love Theme from Spartacus.” In my mind, it is one of the most gorgeous theme songs ever attached to a Hollywood movie. The piece was […]

The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916

William Irwin Thompson Preface “We know from our literary histories that there was a movement called the Irish Literary Renaissance, and that Yeats was at its head. We know from our political histories that there is now a Republic of Ireland because of a nationalistic movement that, militarily, began with the insurrection of Easter Week, […]

Written Matter

Andrew McLuhan (Revelore Press, Seattle, 2021) Review by John Fraim The book Written Matter by Andrew McLuhan is a book of 28 short poems written between October 15 and December 31, 2021. As Andrew notes in a post to me, “the title is meant to suggest alchemy, transformation, for thoughts in the mind become written, become matter.” […]