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Empty Space

 There is an empty space on the wall between two pieces of Michael's art.  Missing in action, is a pictorial representation of  Michael's courtship, the wooing of his girlfriend, soon to be wife, Julie, in that great long ago.  On a two foot square piece of wood is all, or at least many, of the tea bags that the new lovers drank together during that breathless period of weightlessness as they focused their efforts onto a coming life together, complete with kids and two careers.  The painting is a bright coagulation of oranges, yellows and reds, given relief by the dried tea bags of new love.  It is one of my favorite creations of his.  The work captures, via distillation, the essence of what new love can be like, and then in hindsight what is lost as time leaves that moment behind.  Bittersweet, although overused as an adjective, is an entirely accurate description for how I feel contemplating that newly blank space.
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Freakwater

So much music is manufactured today, sounding slick and mirror like.  Shiny beats and creamy confections are the norm.  Freakwater is the opposite.  The band, fronted by Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean specialize in a form of country music that reflects the Appalachian roots of the genre without being remotely slavish.  Their dissonant vocal harmonies are bracing and jagged, ominous, even when the lyrics might dictate otherwise.  It  is a great effect. Freakwater's muse lies deep in the hollows of  the Appalachian Mountains, along mountain streams and in the run down lives of the dispossessed.   Songs of heartbreak, love, and destruction walk into the light still trailing dark shadows of sadness and desperation.  It's a living, I suppose, but a tough one.  Backed by perennial bassist David Wayne Gay and a shifty cloudbank of musicians, Irwin and Bean produced some great music during the bands initial run from 1989 to 2006.  From 2006 until 2013 the band went on hiatus, after whi
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