Certain tunes lodge in your brain from your earliest years. Depending on your age, you might have heard it on your mom’s “hi-fi,” your older sibling’s music app, or your third grade music education class (“Stand beside her, and guide her…”) before you got back to the business at hand of phonics instruction and the multiplication tables. It’s not much different than certain words or phrases that get imprinted on your brain for better and for worse early in life, words carrying their own music as they do. (“You DID it, yayyy!!”; “Stop that THIS MINUTE!”) An old friend of…
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When I returned to gym work a few months ago after an extended hiatus dating from the pandemic era that saw me get creative in doing all such exercise outdoors, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before in Gym Culture, Male Locker Room Division. On pretty much every visit since my return, I observe young men from perhaps 16-22 or so stroll up to the nearest mirror, roll up their sleeves or take off their shirt, and proceed to flex their muscles and preen for several minutes at a time, striking various poses while slowly completing a few 360-degree pirouettes. Sometimes…
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So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador. And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them. What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for…
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Irish poet Seamus Heaney made a previous appearance on this page more than five years ago with his poem, “Doubletake” So here we will engage in our own doubletake of enjoying another of Heaney’s gems, this one from a series of eight 14-line sonnets that he dedicated to his mother under the heading, “Clearances.” The series appeared in his 1998 collection, “Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996.” Since the sonnets are all printed consecutively, they have no separate title, and are known only by their number and first line. Thus the odd-looking headline atop this post and the poem below, with only…
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So I got Chappell Roan in front of me for the very first time when I decided to follow an impulse to check out the fashion getups at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards show. One never knows what might appear there as “clothes,” however scanty, billowing, or seemingly fitted for extraterrestrial giants they might be. Landing on the page, I beheld Ms. Roan’s utterly ridiculous looking “gown” (THIS IS THE GRAMMYS, after all!), which the “New York Times” described thusly: “Ms. Roan arrived in a burgundy, opaque chiffon cape, a custom design by Mugler, that perfectly matched the color of her…
