Tegan Kehoe

In the past month, I've covered jazz past and present at the Yoko Miwa Trio's blog. Here's a sampler of recent posts, click the titles to read the full posts. Reflections on Ken Burns’s JAZZ, Episode 1 After starting to blog for the Yoko Miwa Trio, I felt inspired to learn more about jazz history. I wanted to hear the jazz while I learned about it, so I turned to the documentary  JAZZ , by Ken Burns. In this series of posts, I’ll share my thoughts as I journey through some of the crucial decades in jazz history.... Jazz on the Harbor Unless you only just discovered the Yoko Miwa Trio, you know they’ve won some awards, * but did you know that the performance center they will be playing on Friday, February 15 with special guest  Rebecca Parris  is award-winning, as well? Use Your Smile Mu scles Have you ever wondered about the name of the wine bar where the Yoko Miwa Trio plays Saturdays, and Yoko plays solo piano many Tuesdays? “ Les Zygomates ” (La...

Happy Birthday, Kate! ... Analyzing Happy Birthday, Felicity ! My friend Kate asked me to analyze an American Girls book and point out things that are inaccurate or just plain misleading as a birthday present to her. Because the analysis is a birthday present, I chose a birthday book – Happy Birthday, Felicity! It’s the fourth book in a series following the life of Felicity Merriman, a ten-year old girl in 1770s Virginia. The Felicity books came out in the early 1990s, and while the American Girl empire keeps expanding, Felicity’s stories are one of the ones I remember from my own childhood. Before I begin, I just want to say that there are a lot of great things about the American Girl books, and I don’t mean my criticisms to be a condemnation of the books. Some things are not wrong but oversimplified, and in some cases I would have chosen to simplify them differently or not at all. Some elements of the American Girl books disproportionately represent girls with liv...

Fairly soon, you'll be seeing posts from a new blogging project of mine appearing here. I'm excited to announce that I have been chosen as a writing fellow for Createquity, a blog that describes itself as "a unique virtual think tank exploring the intersection of the arts with a wide range of topics ... a hub for next-generation ideas on the role of the arts in a creative society." Read more here: Announcing the Spring 2013 Createquity Writing Fellows      

Queerly Bookish: Three More Favorite Bookstores As promised, here is the second half of my “favorite bookstores.” Like last time, I chose three of my favorite local bookstores and I will explain why I like these stores and what I think of their queer book sections. I’m picking up where I left off, giving you the stores in ascending order by the Queer Quotient ( see the last post if you don’t know what that is). Read on...  Queerly Bookish is a column I write for Diffuse 5, a Boston-based collection of resources for the LBTQ community. The column presents book reviews and notes on the Boston literary scene, including events, publications, and more.

Parallels to the Past from Needlecraft Magazine Apart from the familiar finds that I described in previous blog posts, and the fashions that are now vintage, the trove of old Needlecraft Magazines that Camille picked up contains some interesting parallels to the past. Since most of the issues we have copies of are from the early 1930’s, the concerns of the Great Depression are readily present. Much of it sounds familiar in our economically aware times – not just the concerns, but the way people turn to home crafts and do-it-yourself projects to save money or just to find new and affordable hobbies. Article from Needlecraft: The Home Arts Magazine, July 1934, page 11. Read more... Museum Textile Services is New England's premier textile conservation studio. I work there as a collections management and textile conservation intern, and contribute to the blog on a semi-regular basis.

The Yoko Miwa Trio With Special Guest Rebecca Parris, Friday 2/15 On Friday, February 15, the Yoko Miwa Trio will play with renowned jazz singer  Rebecca Parris as a special guest at the  Shalin Liu Performance Center  in Rockport, MA. Photo by Susan Wilson Parris has won the Boston Music Awards nine times, and her earthy, grounded sound has captivated audiences from Boston to the Apollo Theater in NYC to the Oslo Jazz Festival. Some have called her “Boston’s First Lady of Jazz.” Read more... I am the blogger for the jazz group the Yoko Miwa Trio.

Queerly Bookish: A Very Queer Book Called Straight Straight: the Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality , by Hanne Blank , is the queerest book I have read in quite some time. Straight describes the history of heterosexuality as a concept in Western thought and in American culture. While there have always been people with different-sex attractions, Blank explains that prior to the nineteenth century, people didn’t think of sexuality in terms of identity: there were only specific behaviors. During the nineteenth century scientific craze for creating taxonomies for everything, and the craze for using the nascent field of modern psychology as a basis for moral and legal judgments, the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were both invented. Read more... Queerly Bookish is a column I write for Diffuse 5, a Boston-based collection of resources for the LBTQ community. The column presents book reviews and notes on the Boston literary scene, including events, publ...