I’ve always liked Ellen Barkin. What can I say? She’s a croaky, hot, tough, New York broad. Perhaps the last. My liking — which, yes, when I have confessed it has been openly mocked to my face — is today validated with a New York Times Magazine profile as she prepares to take the stage in The Normal Heart. They say about her, “Her raspy voice hasn’t changed through the years. She still sounds as if she just woke up, or just had sex, or maybe a whiskey.”

Same thing like I said.

I’m not very enamored of most websites about diabetes. They seem too clinical or … what’s the word? Happy all the time about the condition. However, there is a site I am recommending called A Sweet Life. It’s run by a woman named Jessica Apple and it includes a lot of recipes and the normal things one would hope to find at such a site. It also has some articles and features about the emotional and quirky aspects of diabetes and living as a diabetic. I hope you’ll check it out.

Sharp review of Steve Earle’s album I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive at a sharp web site called Tincanland with lots of literate and intelligent takes on interesting music. Go here to enjoy.

I am a huge Steve Earle fan. His music is well written, intelligent, funny and touching. Now so is his prose. He is the author of I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, a novel about Doc Ebersole, who was Hank Williams’ doctor. The book title, for those unfamiliar, is the same as a Hank song.

Here’s a talk in Publisher’s Weekly with the man about his book, his former habit, abortion, Michael Ondaatje, Buddy Bolden, and the big difference between a comma and a period.

Here are links to two wonderful and heartfelt music and video tributes to Russell Dunn featuring songs he wrote and sang posted on YouTube. (Click More for live links.)

Enjoy!

Russell M. Dunn – It’s In The Eyes

Russell “Rusty” Dunn, lead singer of Rusty Dunn and the Gunns. 1958-2011

There is a time, after the death of a close, loved person, when the logistics of their passing, and the somber, assumed tone of relating their leaving leaves us, and we want to find a way to embrace who they were to us when they lived. This is that time now for Russ. Enthusiastic, silly, serious, goofy, sloughing off the details of someone’s despair while fully understanding its impact, creatively aware and awake and alive always, cool to the point of dismissive in the midst of greatest turmoil, always forward looking, and glad to be in the fight. And he was more to each, and to each of us those are personal and kept close.

There are services for Russ in Katonah, NY on Saturday, and a memorial gathering/party for him in Bisbee on Sunday. He leaves beloved and departs with each of us knowing more and feeling better for having known him.

After battling the effects of a brain aneurysm that left him in a coma for eight days, Russell Dunn died at approximately 4:15 p.m. in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

As he expressly wished, the previous day Russ was disconnected from life support and moved to a hospice facility, where he died with family members and several of his children by his side. Russ will be flown to New York and buried next to his father.

Russ was deeply loved and will be truly missed by everyone who knew him in his adopted home of Bisbee, and beyond.

My friend Russ suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm on Monday, four days after his 53rd birthday. He’s at Barrows Neurological Institute in Phoenix. His family – his mother, brother, son Evan and son Dallas – are at his side.

I saw him in Tucson on Tuesday. He was in a coma and remains in one.

An operation on Wednesday cleared a brain clot and cleaned the aneurysm as best as was possible. All that is left now is to wait to see what, if any, neurological function returns. All our hopes and prayers are with him.

The first review for Bad Day for the Home Team is posted on amazon.com. The reviewer, ReadersFavorite.com, gave the book five out of five stars and I’m most thrilled that the reviewer said, “You could not help liking Sam.” For me that’s the ultimate compliment because Sam is a man who killed forty people. I’m hopeful this review will help boost readership for this challenging but rewarding novel about a man who shoots a bunch of people in Arizona (hmmmm) and how society tries to figure out why he did it. (Again, hmmmmm.).

…Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson, along with Mr. McCarthy, who rarely does interviews, agreed to meet at the offices of HBO in New York to talk about the film (which has its premiere on Saturday), the play and working with one another. The three collaborators had lunch and after the dishes were cleared away, David Carr hosted a chat that veered into philosophy and some very big themes but had laughs too, not unlike the movie itself. Excerpts of that conversation follow…