Yearly Archives 2022

“Oh senseless, man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create God by the dozens.” The quote is from the French philosopher and wit Voltaire, poking fun at the universal human penchant to gaze up at the heavens and conjure some supreme creator who waved its hand a few times (because, like us, it has hands) and made everything there is.

Voltaire was right, of course: We are not (yet) God enough to create a worm. (We should note, though, that worms are infinitely more complex than we might think at first glance. Come to think of it, pretty much everything is more complex than we tend to think or tweet self-righteously about at first glance.)

But oh, can our human imagination take us places! It’s one of our more useful, charming, alternately troublesome and transcendent qualities, actually.

Seven more days then unfold almost exactly like the first two, and in nine days I have watched t...

Tommy Prine is sad about something. But it’s not an indulgent, wallowing, “poor me” kind of sadness. What saddens him is just a fact of life, and he knows it has to be that way. He can’t change it, so all he can do is acknowledge it, live with it, accept it for what it is.

Oh, and one more thing: He can write a song.

The tune is “Ships in the Harbor,” and it became the 26-year-old Prine’s debut single when it was released in September, prelude to an album set for release early in the new year.

Part of the song’s brilliance is its simple, sorrowful take on the basic human experience of departure.

Prine distills the sweet sorrow inherent in every departure  with a winsome tone in his voice and guitar, totally devoid of artifice.

All our lives, we wash in and out of others’ lives like the tide, sometimes in with them for just minutes or hours before washing back out to sea for days, months, years, maybe fore...

You’re arguably the greatest musical force in history, and something inside you knows this, feels the weight and the call of it. You seem to have been born hearing the music of the spheres, with the strong determination to transcribe and share it with your fellow humans.

Like most all artists, you suffer various torments related to the struggle of creating something from nothing, to become as a god in wrestling ultimate beauty, harmony, wisdom from the unformed dust of creation.

This noble purpose clashes with the all-too-human vagaries of your personality, some endowed at birth, others formed by a miserable childhood under a highly abusive alcoholic father. He as much as beats music into you, but rather than recoil, you forge music into your own answer, a kind of transcendent revenge in which you explore and expand upon the very depths of disconsolation and tragedy, beauty and triumph.

Widely acclaimed bu...

If you’re the least bit inclined toward metaphor, you know that a reference to pulling weeds in a song or poem is never just about pulling weeds—no matter the triumph you deservedly feel anytime you fill your bucket with them through a long morning stooped over a flowerbed. (In my case, it’s more often a gravel driveway I try to keep from becoming a long rectangular succulent patch, but I know my flowerbed crabgrass, too…)

Weeds being a longstanding interest of mine, both metaphorically and down-there-in-the-dirt (see here), I stumbled accidentally upon Josh Morningstar’s “Pullin’ Weeds” last week with great interest.

About one line into my listen, I knew I’d hit a little jackpot of a song.

A few more lines in, I knew I’d want more of this singer-songwriter who deserves a bigger following than the all-too-common fierce-but-small one he has earned over his still brief career...

There are moments in life that become, unbidden and unexpected, Big Moments, when you drink in something so delicious that it defies easy description but leaves you with a sense of profound contentment, snug down to your bones, with a peace in your heart that, in the biblical phrase, “passeth understanding.”

And so it was with My Guy Kai (already shortened from “Makiah”), my recently minted (4-month-old) grandson, with whom I spent a goodly part of the past few weeks doing what all older folk with a pulse do with very young folk—bouncing him on my knee while making nonsense sounds, singing nonsense songs, breathing deeply while running my nose over his mostly bald head, burrowing kisses down into the folds of what there is of his neck.

Catching and then managing to hold his gaze for precious moments in my lap, eye to eye, grin to grin, a kind of gurglefest of epic satisfaction, writ so large acros...