Chris King

        When I saw the advertisement for a frog jumping contest, I knew I had to be there, but I did not know what to expect. I could not help but anthropomorphize the event in my mind, picturing two frogs alerted to jump from a still position, with the distance of their […]

        I suspect I am not alone among people who make things out of words in being challenged by the present moment in our national life. I have little to contribute to the awareness of what is going on nationally, and I readily appreciate how much time it takes simply to follow […]

      The 50th anniversary of the first public screening of Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws will be celebrated on June 20, 2025. For many, this anniversary will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the police […]

        June poses something of a lull for the Major League Baseball fan. The excitement of Spring Training and opening day have faded. It is not yet the All-Star break. You can see trends and contenders developing, but every pennant is still up for grabs and the various leaderboards will be disrupted […]

      Peck of Dirt just played a record release show of a unique kind. The band previously had released a record of the same material—also titled “Peck of Dirt”—eighteen years ago, so a baby born on that release date was graduating from high school when the second version of new recordings was released […]

        It was the first time I heard a bosun’s whistle while lying on a rack aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. After we had been called to attention by the sharp sound of the whistle, it was our captain speaking—the commanding officer of the USS Saipan. Much to my surprise, he was […]

        April 5 is a date to conjure with for fans of R.E.M., the post-punk pioneers from Athens, Georgia (fronted by Michael Stipe, a military child who attended high school in Collinsville, Illinois, and moved to the University of Georgia from Granite City, of all places). On that date in 1980, the […]

      Before the president of the United States began publicly musing about developing the Gaza Strip into a hip resort town, a sort of Las Vegas in the Middle East, I could claim only one small gift of second sight. I was driving west on Highway 40 in St. Louis one day in […]

        Pete Hegseth, the United States’ new secretary of defense, was still in elementary school when the Soviet Union crumbled. Unlike people born after 1991, he must have some memory of the Cold War and the demonization of Russians by the American government, especially our military. But when he graduated from Princeton […]

      When newly sworn U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced—approvingly—that the president of El Salvador had volunteered to accept United States prisoners (including U.S. citizens) for custody in Salvadoran jails for a vendor’s fee, it triggered memories from a far distant time for El Salvador, the United States, and prisons. It was […]

      With the increasing ubiquity of streaming media and those platforms’ strategies for cross-promotion, it becomes easier and easier to make new discoveries of old films and shows. That is how I recently discovered Sasquatch, a documentary series released on Hulu in 2021. Sasquatch follows a journalist as he follows the trail of […]

      My gal pal has a type. Not a type she prefers, but rather a type that prefers her. Her appeal to this type of guy is so reliable that when she sees a man of this type—most often, these days, in a grocery store—she begins to prepare herself for the eventual approach. […]

        It was mid-afternoon on Thanksgiving day. We were leaving one holiday party for other holiday parties where we did not want to be late. Since what we saw somewhat defies belief, let the record reflect we had been drinking only water and taking no drugs. We were driving north in somewhat […]

        On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele (who died on January 16 at age 88) and his comical alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. It is sure to be a night of fun […]

      Long before Jazz St. Louis was a mainstream arts organization in a branded arts district with its own performance space named after some of our most important local philanthropists, it was a phantom of the heart. It felt more like some scrappy club than a not-for-profit corporation. When I was introduced to […]

      Flea Bodine was a very particular type of rock musician, almost only found playing bass guitar, which would become Flea’s instrument, or rhythm guitar. This is the musician who is drafted into a band in need of a particular instrument that is not especially difficult to learn and who then learns that […]

      It is often said that when an elder dies a library burns down. It could also be said that when a tavern keeper dies a tavern burns down. So many moments of fellowship, of shared music and drinks, that would have happened now will never happen—they vanished before they could exist. Jacobsmeyers […]

        When I prepared my reading for the farewell poetry performance at the Way Out Club in July of 2021, I pulled only from my chapbook Shape of a Man because it occurred to me that Bob Putnam, co-owner of the club, was perhaps the first man I ever knew. I was old enough […]

      I suspect any serious lover of music has a mental checklist of musical artists who deserve a much larger audience than they have garnered. Neko Case—who will begin her next tour in St. Louis at The Sheldon on September 18—stands near the top of my list. I first heard her as a […]

      Being too cool for the Los Angeles rock band the Eagles was enshrined in the Coen Brothers’ classic film The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude (Jeff Bridges) has been doped by a pornographer and brained in the forehead with a coffee mug by the Malibu Police chief, yet he still retains the […]

      While I would not want to imply that he who dies with the most news obituaries wins, you have to hand it to Kinky Friedman, whose death was reported by both The New York Times and Rolling Stone. For a songwriter, musician, and writer in the United States, that is a one-two punch anyone […]

    Matthew Korbfort called me when he was still Matthew Stenfort. I answered the phone in mild amazement. Matthew was in his early twenties and, like everyone his age I knew, he never called anyone. He had never called me. If he was not so young, I would have been full of dread that […]

        The passing of the poet, translator, editor, and literary force Jerome Rothenberg on April 21, 2024, at age 92 merits a scholarly news obituary that probes his transformative contributions to world literature. This is not that. These are the notes of a rabid fan, virtual mentee, long-distance collaborator, and sad mourner […]

        On a website since removed from public view, Art Garfunkel mapped with approximate dates the path he walked from his apartment on the Upper East side of Manhattan to Oregon, dating his walk across parts of Pennsylvania as April 1984. That means the following incident would have transpired in April 1984, […]

      Carl Marsh’s path to seeing his deconstructions of five R.E.M. songs performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at the Stifel Theatre on Friday, April 5 began in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Someone he knew was arranging a 1950s-themed party in the early 1970s, and they had a small budget—a beer […]

    I knew some cool dads when I was raising my daughter in St. Louis County near the beginning of this century. One dad—he worked in food distribution—started taking his child to rock concerts just before I did. He gave me the heads up that I would like the music much more than I […]

        I hear that Marcel Proust’s hero is plummeted into the past after eating a wafer whose French name sounds like my cousin Madeline, the wife of an Italian butcher in Jerseyville, Illinois. It is going to be music, not cookies, for my plunges into the past. I recently listened to Richard […]

  Is there any reason to update what your heart holds dear? Chuck Reinhart posed that question in a nostalgic song he titled after a grocery store of his childhood, Midget’s. No one knows the music of Chuck Reinhart, except his friends, like me, and a few people who have attended open mic nights in […]

        Christopher Stark’s world premiere of “Cocci di tempo” (which he translates from Italian as “Shards of time”) on Saturday, October 28 at Washington University’s 560 Music Center was a collaboration between the composer and 48 St. Stephen, the piano-violin duet who brought it to life. Stark, who teaches composition in WashU’s […]

I am among the hopeless and deluded dreamers David Clewell believed in, and so I choose to believe that there is a starship in the sky that touches down and takes away great poets who were perhaps not as widely celebrated on Earth as their work deserved.