Bostworld

I tend to steer clear of downtown Phoenix these days. It seems every time I venture down there, I discover another of my old favorites consigned to the scrap heap or worse, a target for “renovation.” The cheerfully run-down squalorous downtown Phoenix of my childhood is all but gone, a victim of the kind of […]

Several years ago, I submitted a travel article about northern Arizona to an auto club magazine where a friend of mine worked as an editor. But before I could complete the second draft, I realized I didn’t actually WANT people traveling into my state! After some soul-searching, I graciously withdrew my submission. It’s a pretty […]

I decided to start Bostworld about two years ago. Following the example of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders and the rest of the lifehackers, a took a quick personal inventory, and realized how unhappy I was to be making no effort whatsoever to move forward my long held, but long put-off desire to pursue the art […]

Tempe was still a pretty sleepy town when I moved there in 1985. It hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I first started visiting its head shops and record stores in my mid-teens. A block east of my house, downtown Mill Avenue was still “home to little more than biker bars, tattoo parlors, […]

One of the topics that came up during my conversation with Russ Shaw a couple months back was his work with the Phoenix pirate station, KDIL. I never heard the station myself; by the time I learned about it, I was in my late teens and the broadcasts had all but stopped. But the older […]

Back in the days before media saturation, folks relied on their own resources in order to amuse themselves. You could find people clustered under awnings, along roadsides and behind bus stations — notebooks in their laps, ball-point pens at the ready — all chuckling to themselves over their latest doodle or humorous cartoon. I miss […]

I recently had the pleasure of contributing to the 365 Days Project, hosted on the WFMU site. Despite the hate mail I received from a certain camp who felt I offered too little respect to my subject, the experience was otherwise benign. Bostworld gained no surge in hit counts for my effort; in fact, I’ll […]