Michael Haskins

The “Defibulators” band’s name was misspelled for their first gig and the misspelling has stuck for the country band from Brooklyn. As the band...

I do have a half-finished, fictionalized work that shrinks with each honest edit. It is so difficult for me to write that I will call my next book a work of “friction.” The first story involves a protagonist named Blu Yunger, a dead buzzard and a Pogo stick modified for military use. The title is Screwed, Blu’ed and Tattooed. Then there’s the one about the worm farm . . .

Some songs are bilingual, some are straight English, some are straight Spanish. It really depends on when the song was written, how it was written, and what it talks about. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore nowadays, our best performance so far was in Canada where nobody spoke Spanish and everybody was singing our songs.

Photographer C.J. Groth said she “threw caution to the wind” when she left Illinois to experience Key West for a year. That was 1990...

“But the thing that really convinced me was one photograph,” he said. “It was a group shot and in it was the image of a small African-American girl, dressed in the fashion from the early days of the firehouse. She wasn’t there. How’d she show up in the photo?”