• Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    The Ominous Mystique and Allure of Alleys

    September 28, 2013 - By 

    Every inveterate walker of cities knows the allure of alleys. Dark, narrow and often damp, they tend to house trash bins, rats and worse, exposing the corroded back walls of homes or business establishments whose front entrances gleam with respectability. Alleys are as old as ancient Pompeii and Rome, where they served as servant entrances and thoroughfare for service delivery persons whose presence might upset the careful social mannerisms attendant to the front door. Alleys come alive for me every time I visit a different city and set about the walking that will help orient me to its gridlines, smells…

  • Music

    Hearts Like Wheels: The Melancholy of Linda Ronstadt and Van Morrison

    September 19, 2013 - By 

    I was talking with a friend recently about my previous post on Van Morrison and his mood-laden song, “When the Leaves Come Falling Down.” He was telling me how another Morrison mooder, “Melancholia,” is reportedly Morrison’s only truly autobiographical song and, indeed, also represents my friend’s truest and deepest stance toward life. This surprised me a bit, inasmuch as my friend, whom I’ve known pretty well for most of my adult life, presents a rather relentlessly cheerful public persona, far removed from the dark brooding pathos of “Melancholia.” Yet it also put me on notice, again, of the deep sadness…

  • Fiction - General Nonfiction

    Jagged Trajectory: From Renaissance Glory to Lord of the Flies

    September 15, 2013 - By 

    The older I get, the more sense history makes. All the pieces of humanity’s exceedingly checkered past fall more into place, resulting in both more compassion for what we have come through and alarm for what continues to befall us. More than 500 years after the Renaissance posited that humanity could become a shining beacon of perfectly realized rational values, we lurch from one crisis, one massacre, one civil war, one bellicose despot to the next. One part or other of our world is always threatening to go up in flames even as many of us preoccupy ourselves with whose…

  • Film/TV - Odds & Ends

    An Ode to Golden Gate Fog

    September 11, 2013 - By 

    Fog is rich—in mystery, in metaphor, in intrigue. Fog was noir before noir existed at all. We walk out the door and espy the fog and up comes the collar and the shoulders, and we are set to hunker, hands in pockets and eyes all a-squint. If we’re walking someplace, we’ll be glad when we get there. It can be treacherous, of course. Night or day, if the fog is thick enough, we have no bearings, no guideposts, nowhere to tack. This way, no, maybe that way, oh, maybe no way at all, stuck and aimless. A voice might beckon…

  • Music

    Van Morrison and the
    Deep Wisdom of the Leaves

    September 6, 2013 - By 

    I’ve long felt that fall is fortunate to be so gorgeous, otherwise we would never forgive it for all the grief we feel over summer’s end. Yet deeply interwoven into fall’s beauty is its profound sense of melancholy at time’s passage, all the brightness dimming now as the world inexorably darkens and decay and death spread across the landscape, there for us as reminder, as harbinger, as spur to savor the day. Fall is a time to begin our long hunkering, but the dream of every romantic is to do so with one’s beloved, in a private enclosing world walled…