Blog: Despite the Times

10. Jennifer O'Connor " The Color and the Light " Red Panda Somewhere near the intersection of Hope Sandoval and Lucinda Williams lives the music of Jennifer O'Connor. 9. Cat Power " The Greatest " Matador Records From the as yet unreleased album of the same name. Chan Marshall recorded the album in Memphis with local session players. The result recalls Dusty Springfield's classic album recorded in the same city. [...]

I am back from Cambodia, so I guess that means writing about music again. While sites like Pitchfork Media and CokemachineGlow , in addition to nearly every music/mp3 blog, have offerred their take on the best albums or singles of the year I will follow suit... because really, who loves lists more than me (answer: no one - at least no one who should really be spending the bulk of their free time with their wife and child or busy learning medicine). I decided to rank songs, not singles, because I often find at this stage of [...]

Well, I'm in Bangkok. I can't even start to try to explain this place. It's absurd beyond most methods of description. So I will concentrate this post on my final days in Cambodia and get back to Bangkok once it sets in. My time in Cambodia was clearly time well spent. The experience at the hospital and out in the community will clearly stay with me forever. It's my sincere hope to make it back there again in the near (or distant) future, but next time with Shannon. While I could attempt to tug at your hearstrings with [...]

Hello all. Let me once again thank all of you for the nice emails I have been receiving. The pace is glacial in the internet world over here, so I apologize for not returning so many of your emails. Waiting five minutes for my email account to open is maddening enough. Let me also give a big shout out to my comments writers namely Nilbog (Chris D), Mike O., and Cliff. Chris, your commentaries have grown both in length and depth over the month. And no, there was no happy ending to my massage. [...]

Greetings. Well, my evening out with the crew on Wedensday (see previous post) was a fairly sedate affair. No tales of ribaldry to report. What was interesting about the night however was that as I walked to the bar after parking my bicycle I encoutered none of the usual harassment from the street kids begging. What's with that? Well, in the great tradition of shielding monarchs and VIPs from the reality of poverty, all the street kids were rounded up and trucked out of town to some sort of camp. You see, the Prime Minister was coming to [...]

Happy Wednesday from Siem Reap I have been quite busy here, thus the lack of recent posts. Many of the Cambodian doctors are receiving their pediatric advance life support class taught by a bunch of Australian docs and so the foreigners are having to work double time. So I am in the outpatient department with my Australian counterpart Lee who speaks fluent Khmer (her parents escaped the Khmer Rouge in the 70's) and my buddy Marvin. Marvin is 70 and the son of Polish immigrants who grew up in NYC but has been for as a pediatrician for [...]