“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...

You know what makes me happy? That “Happy,” the 48th “Brilliant Song” in this series, has garnered 239,107 comments since it landed on You Tube a decade ago. Along with: 1.3 billion (that’s “billion”-with-a-“b”) views and 8.7 million thumbs-up. (Though for context: the all-time leading You Tube video through early August is “Baby Shark,” a children’s song-and-dance from South Korea at 14.9 billion views since 2016.)

But “billion” is a most hefty number indeed, reflected in a recent comment on top of the “Happy” pile, which exclaims, “WE STEALING THE MOON WITH THIS ONE.”

And so we are with that felicitous phrase that nonetheless implies larceny of something—human happiness— that should perhaps be regarded as a birthright to at least some degree, yes?

Like Bobby McFerrin long before him, Pharrell Williams does something both remarkably simple and ultimately profound: He writes and sings in praise of pure...

Has there been a stranger, more cataclysmic turn of events in recent American history than what we have been witnessing since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump just six dizzying weeks ago? It brings to mind the quote of unknown origin but frequently misattributed to Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

The failed assassination, remarkable for many reasons including that it is almost completely out of the news now, marked the beginning of multiple events that have changed virtually every dynamic of the 2024 presidential race. Until then, the campaign had resembled a competition between severely out-of-tune orchestras under the unsteady batons of two aged, punch-drunk men, all of it witnessed by long-suffering patrons wondering whether they shouldn’t just go home and cancel what remained of their season tickets.

Then the shooting, followed in qui...