A note from “Kamala Harris for President” among my emails this morning, under the subject line: “Is there ANYTHING we can say?”

“We are writing to ask—humbly—if there is anything at all we can say to convince you to make one more contribution to Kamala Harris’s campaign before our final FEC deadline ends. Please give us a chance to try: What if we told you that as you read this, we are getting outspent and attacked in several key battleground states? What if we told you that if we were able to increase our budget by just a bit, we’d be able to reach and turn out a lot of persuadable Democrats who don’t vote frequently—and that that could be the margin of victory?”

Another a couple of hours later from Hakeem Jeffries:

“I need to pull back the curtain and explain where things stand right now: There are 33 Red-to-Blue seats that Democrats are poised to win in November. Let me be clear:

– These 33 dist...

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...