Yearly Archives 2015

New Jersey Governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie, hewing close to his party’s line on the Charleston atrocity:

“Laws can’t change this. Only the goodwill and the love of the American people can let those folks know that that act was unacceptable, disgraceful, and that we need to do more to show that we love each other.”

From Rand Paul:
“There’s a sickness in our country, but it’s not going to be solved by our government.”

Carly Fiorina:
“We ought not to start immediately rushing to policy prescriptions or engaging in the blame game.”

No, oppressive laws or “policy prescriptions” from an overreaching “socialist” government can never change anything.

Of course, there was that tiny matter of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

And the Supreme Court, those “big government” meddlers, deciding in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) to ban segregation in public schools.

The Civil Rights ...

This season of commencement speeches and their exhortations to live your dreams, follow your bliss, etc. is usually accompanied by jaundiced responses from newspaper columnists about how tiresome it is to hear commencement speeches and their exhortations to live your dreams, follow your bliss, etc.

Granted, we have heard these messages of hope and idealism a time or two before. But I would ask these columnists what general theme they would propose commencement speakers embrace instead. Maybe something along the lines of:

“Lower your expectations! Dampen your hopes, scuttle your dreams, it’s just a bunch of hooey, you won’t even be able to change yourself, much less the world, give it up before you even start! Just say ‘No!’ to life!”

I suspect that message wouldn’t cause graduates to launch their mortarboards joyfully into the air or parents with moist eyes to look with gladdened hearts upon their ...

Experienced the most curious juxtaposition of “movies” the other day. In the morning, a phone camera video of a white police officer with his knee in the back of a prone African-American teenage girl in a bikini. As two boys run toward the scene in what looks to be an almost instinctual gesture in defense of the girl, the officer pulls his gun from his holster and runs them off before going back to subjugating the girl, who is lying face down on the grass, her hands cuffed behind her.

No great production values and short duration, but a scene of undeniable impact.

In the evening, home with the daughter, I suggested we consider renting a movie. She immediately piped up, “Have you seen Selma? I’d see it again!” She had watched it in her history class.

I hadn’t seen Selma, one of countless movies that make it onto my loosely held list that never quite make it off that list before their very exist...

Part I of this two-part post about the tremendous difference a given artist’s interpretation can make on the experience of music examined the Bob Dylan song, “One Too Many Mornings,” and how its mournful, lonely qualities were finally teased out most hauntingly and fittingly, given the lyrics, by Jerry Jeff Walker. It was as if Walker’s own history, psyche and voice quality made him the perfect purveyor of the song, kindly delivered to him by Dylan, whose own solo version was quite creditable itself, but who later veered off into rocked up, full band versions that didn’t match the song’s lonesome wail.

Here, we will examine the opposite phenomenon of an original song and artist who were interpreted, wait, let’s make that “misinterpreted,” by another (very talented) artist who, given her particular gifts and sensibilities, should probably have steered clear of this song...

Music lyrics, like the Bible, like poetry, are subject to all manner of interpretation. They’re comprised of words, God bless ’em, and to the everlasting intrigue and contentiousness of humankind, words can have nearly infinite shades, contexts and emphases as they are filtered through each individual person’s consciousness.

And you at least double the intrigue when you add a singer’s and arranger’s musical interpretations to the words on a lyric sheet. This is when hearing the same song from different artists can be a vastly different experience.

I think it’s safe to say that our natural bias in music is to prefer songs as we originally heard them, from the first singer to give them expression...