Colin Fleming
official author site
News
Op-ed in the New York Daily News
07.23.2021
Piece on the Cleveland baseball team's new moniker and our play-it-safe-and-push-crap-forward culture.
New JazzTimes feature
07.20.2021
On the great recordings bassist Scott LaFaro made apart from the Bill Evans Trio.
Downtown with Rich Kimball
07.20.2021
Talking about the Babe Ruth piece, Laurel and Hardy's Blotto, a cool animated pilot for adults that wasn't picked up, Orson Welles, and radio horror.
Sports essay about Babe Ruth and his underrated brains
07.15.2021
Piece in The Smart Set on the greatest--and smartest--season a baseball player has ever had.
Some new fiction
07.14.2021
The latest issue of Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature contains a recent short story called "Captains' Practice."
Downtown with Rich Kimball radio segment
07.13.2021
Talking about the Grateful Dead's Skull Fuck LP, least favorite sports, 1975's The Big Sleep, Johnny Dollar, writing tips
Downtown with Rich Kimball radio appearance
07.06.2021
Covering The Golden Girls, a five-part Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episode, Dave Kingman, Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert, and double play combos.
Downtown with Rich Kimball radio appearance
06.29.2021
Talking about the Grateful Dead's "Uncle John's Band," the Band's Moondog Matinee, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the most all-American baseball seasons by player and team, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."
Downtown with Rich Kimball radio appearance
06.22.2021
A conversation about giving up alcohol five years ago, 12 Angry Men, a filmed performance by Cream in 1968, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and the fiction of Daniil Kharms.
Essay in The Smart Set
06.17.2021
A piece on the BBC's 1970 ecological feminist horror film, Robin Redbreast. "Pastoral horror is a distinctly English, Irish, and Scottish phenomenon. There’s a transposition at work, where those hauntings we usually associate with ancient castles and aged horrors take a kind of field trip, and steep into the earth, accrete into trees, are gathered up in the brush alongside what ought to be the peaceful rill."
Op-ed in the New York Daily News
06.15.2021
The significance of Negro League stats officially becoming a part of MLB history. "What matters is that Josh Gibson, and so many amazing players like him — and the average players, the less-than-average players — feel real. Venerated as special, as more skilled than at this craft than you, me, and all of our friends, in all probability, who played ball at whatever level we played it."
Half hour radio interview
06.15.2021
Talking about the Grateful Dead's "Box of Rain," the Beatles' first BBC session from March 1962, Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, and the Hall of Fame career of catcher Gary Carter.
New Haven Review essay made available at their website
06.12.2021
The good folks at the New Haven Review have put up a personal essay in full called "A Carrot for Dennis." (Scroll down to Issue 024 to download the issue and access the Pdf--the essay starts on page 92.) The piece is in Glue God: Essays (and Tips) for Repairing a Broken Self. "When you walk on the sides of roads most people do not walk on, to get to a place you must get to—because of who you are, what you have been through, what you are ghting for and to be—you learn what place really means, better than any master vacationer, visitor, or even lifelong resident, ever could."
Jam-packed half hour radio interview
06.08.2021
Downtown with Rich Kimball appearance
06.01.2021
Discussing a couple recent JazzTimes features, the late Paul Soles (the voice of Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), Sam Cooke's 1963 "dark night of the soul" concept album, and 1949's The Set-Up with Robert Ryan, one of our finest sports movies and a tutorial in Aristotle's concept of unity of time, place, action.
Charlie Christian feature in JazzTimes
05.26.2021
Jazz's greatest bootleg and the guitarist's role in helping to invent bebop after hours at Minton's in NYC. "There’s a somatic quality to that tone, and an annunciatory one, a Klaxon horn of sustained notes spreading from top to bottom in the listener. But the sheen and viscosity is even more notable, as if honey has been drizzled over the inside of an abalone shell."
Interview smörgåsbord
05.25.2021
Weighing in on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the Grateful Dead's "Ripple," the 1958 Boris Karloff film, The Haunted Strangler, and Carlton Fisk's elite performance level as a catcher in his forties.
New feature in JazzTimes
05.12.2021
On Eric Dolphy's solo bass clarinet version of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child." "His attack is all swoops, dives, and bench-pressing of geological plates, as if coming from inside the earth and then pushing against a canopy of stars, before raining back down in droplets of indigo and liquefied rubber. You’re not going to find a more demanding piece, but he underpins this dialogic wonder, as Holiday did, with the blues. It is a blues both ancient and modern, incorporating ageless rhythms of Africa with the Mondrian-like coloristic staccato of the city. At some intervals you might think of it as sci-fi, and then—two clicks of Dolphy’s tongue later—as a hymn that has enfolded the earth since long before we got here."
New personal essay in the spring-summer 2021 issue of Salmagundi
05.07.2021
A piece called "You're Up, You're Down, You're Up," about a man trying to keep himself alive and going by running up and down the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument. "It is interesting the diametrically opposed way two people can look at the same thing and both retain a degree of correctness. As I climb now I think of how the Monument might be viewed as a death box. Not that anyone has died in it during my climbing career, but people do pass out, ambulances are summoned, and of course nearly everyone stops to rest two, three, four times before reaching the top a single time, bending over and sucking wind, looking at the person they are with as though they want to crack a joke, then focusing back on the task of catching their breath."