I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but I do remember just wearing that record out after landing upon it in my early 20s. I then kept the album it was on close by my turntable through that tumultuous decade of struggles and thrashings for identity, vocation, love, the meaning of life and my place in the world.

Kristofferson died this week at a much older age (88) than he had anticipated reaching in his younger years. He was a gifted man in multiple ways—artistic, intellectual, physical—but none of those gifts allowed for escape from the struggle to discover and give form to his life’s work.

In his case, that struggle included climbing out from under a domineering father who leaned on him to pursue a military career and later on, at least an equally domineering drinking habit that nearly derailed his very life through the 1960s-’70s.

Kristoff...

A rarity here, I know, but I’m none too sure I can say much more about this poem that isn’t stark raving obvious and powerful already in its scorching, emphatic admonition to just get the hell out of the way of the life you have lived and come to rest in it. (But that doesn’t mean I won’t try…)

But…wow!

Actually, Dorianne Laux (pronounced “Low”) starts with a “Pow!” in her first two-word declarative sentence that runs us pretty much head-first into the poem’s meaning, message and takeaway: “Regret nothing.”

She doesn’t plunk an exclamation point on the end of it because she doesn’t have to. The line’s brevity and conviction speak for themselves, as both first and last words on a timeless human conundrum.

Any given particularities of regret pale in comparison to just how universally it curls its knobby gnarled fingers around that hollow tree at the base of our gut.

But that’s just the beginning of this comp...

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”
—From Friedrich Nietzsche‘s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1883)

The older I get and the more I am able to look back on history writ large, and the more I see that the age-old tussle between form and chaos, chaos and form, will be with us till the very end of time. (Although the question of whether there will ever be an end to time is itself a tussle among physicists that will likely be with us till, you guessed it, the end of time…) (If it ever arrives…)

Which reminds me anew of Kurt Vonnegut’s resounding shrug from “Slaughterhouse Five”:

“And so it goes…”.

The famously epigrammatic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche bathes the chaos within ourselves in the twinkling light of a “dancing star” in the quote above...

I’d been watching and listening for a good mesmerizing minute to the second selection in this “Brilliant Cover Songs” series when I tapped the pause button and went back to the beginning to confirm what had suddenly dawned on me just the moment before: Were these guys really creating this seeming symphony of sound without employing any instrument other than their gloriously blended human voices?

Sure enough—the four members of the Dallas-based “Kings Return” only sound like they have the backing of multiple instruments and/or a robust choir as they create a lush musical soundscape powered only by voices that traverse multiple musical genres and what musical cognoscenti call “sonic timbre,” and I call just plain dazzling.

Kings Return is comprised of classically trained musicians whose beginnings trace back to 2016...

Full disclosure: I about cried when I came across the video interviews discussed in this post, a few precious tidbits of which I will share with you below. My near-tears were not from joy, though there was some of that, too.

Mostly, the little emotional roiling going on inside me in the moments after discovering the Mike Wallace interviews of more than 60 years ago was from sheer amazement.

Amazement that within my own lifetime, there was a time when serious discussion on matters of deep philosophical, legal, political, religious and cultural importance was presented on prime time television. Not near midnight, the time slot for today’s night owls to prowl the smart but comedy-based interview shows that cast more of an ironic, sometimes slashing eye on the affairs of the day rather than the sober back-and-forth discussion in which Wallace and his guests engaged.

Not during the dinner-time news hour in 35-s...