So Renee Good is dead, Venezuela is under American occupation for who knows how long, United States Coast Guard boats are seizing oil tankers flying Russian flags on international waters , and on Friday, the president of the United States told a meeting of skeptical oil and gas executives whom he’s trying to convince to return to Venezuela that he also covets ownership and occupation of Greenland. About which he mused, “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”…
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From the final minutes of Friday night’s “Washington Week in Review” broadcast and podcast on PBS, with host Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of “The Atlantic” magazine, and Thomas Friedman, “New York Times” columnist for global affairs. Goldberg: “Do you think Trump would actually go to war with Venezuela in 2026?” Friedman: “I would rule out nothing, Jeff.” *** From Friedman’s column in the “Times” mere hours later, after United States forces had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a 2 a.m. raid and flown them to New York, where they will likely stand trial on “narco terrorism conspiracy”…
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For many of the January 1st’s of this blog’s existence I offered up a New Year’s Day song or poem or song-and-poem that I thought might engender a few moments of repose, hope, gladness and gratitude for the life before us, in all its sometimes complicated-as-hell feeling states. But in reviewing my previous new year’s posts yesterday, I discovered, with no small degree of dismay, that the past two January 1st’s have been unaccountably and inexplicably quiet, dark, unexpressed, unlit. Oh, dear……My very very verrrrry bad! Lord knows I need me some of that repose, hope, gladness and gratitude after…
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“Why JEFF BECK is UNCOPYABLE” goes the title of a video discussion from three years ago that has garnered 2.9 million views and 11,271 comments for all-purpose music pro Rick Beato’s You Tube channel. Beato, a musician, producer, sound engineer and educator with a graduate degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, came to that conclusion over years of listening to Beck play but never quite being able to figure out how he produces the sounds that come from his guitar. “No one sounds like Jeff Beck and no one could sound like Jeff Beck,” he says. “He plays the…
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Some films catch you right up and hold you close from the opening scenes in a kind of intimate, magic-of-the-movies sense, the outside world gone gently incommunicado as you settle into something resembling a trance state, putty in the hands of the film’s creative team and the alternate—or in some cases, more real than “real”— universe they are bringing to life in front of you. Director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” based on the 2011 novella of the same title by Denis Johnson, is one such film. For his third feature film, Bentley offers up an intensely personal portrait of one…
