2025 is a new year and I am excited to bring some new content to my website. Last year I started blogging again – writing about topics like my family, the myths and stories they told, art, music and travel. I hope to write in more detail about all of these topics and expand into ideas about the environment, art and culture.
While in town for a few weeks to play guitar in 1958, Allsup met Buddy Holly at Norman Petty's legendary studio in Clovis, N.M. He played guitar on about 10 of Holly's songs (he can't remember the exact number), including the classic "It's So Easy." A lost coin toss kept Allsup off the plane that rook Holly's life in 1959. It's a moment that has been portrayed on stage in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story and on film in La Bamba.
“A friend of mine told me that was the Florida in me coming out … coming from two places, sort of Florida and Georgia. There were a lot of straight roads in Florida. I always wanted to get myself a big truck and just whistle right down the Sunshine State Parkway, just double-clutching my way.” This article originally appeared Sept. 30, 2010, on darrenwhitecreative.com
I bring up these old memories because even in liberal Hollywood, cowboys are cool again. Yellowstone – a TV show I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing – has reinvigorated America's fascination with ranch life. Beyonce posed wearing a cowboy hat astride a horse on her latest album cover, Cowboy Carter. It seems America’s Culture War has returned to an old battlefield – the idea of the cowboy.
There’s not much chance to turn around until you reach Cedar Key, which looks exactly as you might imagine it: Everything built out of that dark, weathered wood. You see kids with coolers selling various morsels like oysters and clams on the side of the road. You drive on bridges running over muddy shoals. This article first appeared on darrenwhitecreative.com on Feb. 11, 2013.
They were not mythologized like the Western cowboys or the Irish and Italian immigrants of the Northeast. And yet the modern stories of struggle that the 2017 film The Florida Project are based on seem to echo Priscilla, Ida and Louvenia’s story. We all come from somewhere, some from wealth and some from poverty. Some from sickness and some from health. I come from these women and I come from this story.
I watched Yacht Rock: A Documentary on Max this weekend, and I thought it would make for a good opportunity to reflect on this odd little subgenre that has become its own cottage industry over the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a certain type of bouncy, smooth adult contemporary music popular in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is the music that filled radio airwaves right after Motown’s classic era ended and right before MTV changed image-making in music forever.
How can one of the biggest media markets in the nation produce such ineffectual, booster-happy journalism? How can a city with limitless financial resources fail to build anything beautiful in brick-and-mortar? How can a place that hosts concerts daily fail to capture the national imagination with any consistency?
In Kurt Vonnegut’s book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character addresses a convention of science fiction writers. He’s drunk. He thanks them for understanding that “… life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last billions of years.” This article first appeared on darrenwhitecreative.com, Aug. 10, 2012.
For me, the answer is easy – I don’t have any other marketable skills. I am unfit for manual labor (tried that), my math skills are remedial (that means bad) and I’m too honest for sales (didn’t get past the interview). Writing keeps the lights on, even if they aren’t burning brightly.
As I was eating two tacos and a bag of store-bought chips – which cost me, all told, about $22 – from a food truck with an absolutely horrible name, it occurred to me that I cannot remember the last time I had a good meal from a food truck.
Japandroids released their fourth and final record, Fate & Alcohol, last week and so it seems like a good time to write about this band, the emotions their music stirred in listeners and who at least one of those listeners was.
Some say history repeats itself. Calvin Allen doesn't mind. This article appeared in the July 2007 issue of Parker County Today.
A year after their guitar player was shot to death, a Weatherford metal band perseveres. This article appeared in the October 2009 issue of Parker County Today.
Top-to-bottom management of magazine process including content creation, design, proofing and strategy since 2020.
My dad turns 74 March 27. He’s been there for me during some tough times, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else as my dad. When they make the movie on my life, he’ll play himself as far as I’m concerned.
The California institution worked with Stamats and D. White & Co. to bring a 75-year story to life – and connect its strategic dots to the big picture.
“Florida without agriculture! Without tomatoes, beans, peppers, eggplant, peas, squash; without its golden-headed glory of citrus!” – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
What looks like a weakness at first glance may be your brand’s hidden strength – if you can articulate its benefits with vision
The San Juan Islands – far from being the tropical isles the name might describe, this archipelago in the northwest corner of Washington state is a long way from Florida – real-life Free Willy country.
