When we consider regions of the world less “developed” than ours, let’s keep in mind Europe (and its imperialist offspring around the globe, like the United States) were also once Medieval. We, too, were once benighted, ignorant, backwards. Long ago, our civilization preferred the mystical powers of alchemy to the rational comforts of science, the...
My neighbor died after a long illness. Until his last year, when he was incapacitated by infirmities, he’d enjoyed a rich and meaningful life, a full life, creating memories and children, wealth and legacies. When he expired at the home he had occupied for nearly 50 years, he was almost 93. At his funeral, the...
We knew her for a month before she died in a terrible accident, but Chareze Clamor touched us so profoundly that she may have well spent 15-or-more years, a whole doggie life, as part of our family. She was only five-months. A puppy. She weighed maybe seven pounds, much of it hair. A pure Shih-Tzu,...
“I’ll Be Me,” a documentary about music legend Glen Campbell’s decent into Alzheimer’s is a deeply affecting, often painful portrait of an artist slowly going away. Director James Keach successfully tiptoes the line between education and exploitation, between truthfulness and vulgar voyeurism. The film has many of the hallmarks of a stylishly produced “Reality” show — confessional...
The novel “Mortal Coil” is a clever chameleon that passes itself off as, variously, a thriller, a fantasy, a romance. But this splendid book is foremost a work of intensely considered philosophy, a metaphysical exploration of heaven and earth, reality and imagination, humans and angels. The author is Amnon Buchbinder, a Canadian screenwriter, director and...
Sitting on a bench beside a Scottish canal, watching the locks rising and the Lochs glowing he crossed his legs and placed his hands upon worn corduroy wales that had seen much of the civilized world. “It’s a beautiful world,” he said, smiling, an eternal boy peering from behind octogenarian eye-creases. “It’s a beautiful world....
Monday is Memorial Day. Automobile races and ball games happen, sure. But Memorial Day is mostly set aside for solemn remembrance of the brave heroes who lost (gave?) their lives to the United States military so the rest of us can enjoy all the benefits of being citizens of the greatest country on Earth. We...
Didn’t he warn you? Didn’t she scorn you? Hadn’t they found you? Wouldn’t they astound you? You who couldn’t differentiate between abiding love and aberrant hate? Time will obviate the degradation of your sensate mind and accelerate the assignation of honorifics, burrowing within the fissures of tissue held together by gravity. Were you...
The 2015 MK Spring Poetry Festival, April 20-30 Mother protector, father provider. Brother who helped the elderly. Sister who held children when they cried. Potential saints, condemned sinners. The heretic and the ignorant. The past-tense blasphemous visitors gone before He arrived to save them. What of them? All the others. The ones who lived...
Everyone is all upset about the latest killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. This one was caught on video, so it’s going to be a little harder to explain to a jury why the shooting was justified, especially since the dead man was shot in the back as he fled....
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Used traditionally, in most Western music the bass keeps time churning out fat quarter-notes based on the root of a chord. Ba-dum-dum-dum-dum. On his addictive new recording Tines of Change, the visionary master bassist and composer explores his instrument’s under-utilized sonic possibilities. The concatenation of squeaks, grumbles, twitters, growls, whistles, knocks, cries, howls, and, yes, nice...
