• Politics/Culture

    Only Republicans Can Save America Now

    September 26, 2021 - By 

    The temptation is to look away, if just for a while. After all we have been through—fire and flood, pestilence, wars gone wrong, the savage persistence of hunger and homelessness, the slaughter of children in school hallways, the huddled masses repelled at our border, the daily ravings of a would-be dictator who is neither gone nor forgotten—we can be excused for wanting to lose ourselves in the sudden turning of the season and its poems, the music of the heavens, the antics of children and kittens and clouds. The quotidian as succor, relief, our very salvation. But peril lies that…

  • Music - Religion

    Bobby McFerrin May Be the
    Richest Man in the World

    September 19, 2021 - By 

    I have no idea about Bobby McFerrin’s net worth. A quickie Google search tosses out an estimate of $4 million as of 2019. That means he probably won’t have to be busking on street corners to feed himself in his old age, but if even close to accurate, it is certainly no great shakes in the firmament of the uber rich, even within his own rarefied world of popular singers and entertainers. (Bruce Springsteen: $500 million, Jay-Z: $1.4 billion, Tom Hanks: $400 million). But capital comes in many forms, and to survey McFerrin’s life and body of work is to…

  • Film/TV - Music

    Six Magical Sundays: Ahmir Questlove Thompson’s “Summer of Soul”

    September 12, 2021 - By 

    Pretty much from its first moment to last, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Summer of Soul,” a film chronicling six magical Sundays of stirring soul music holding forth as the “Harlem Cultural Festival” at Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park in 1969, shows why it’s been a summer-long rage since its July debut streaming on Hulu and in theaters nationwide. Thompson distilled some 40 hours of meticulously crafted footage shot by a four-camera crew led by the late Hal Tulchin into a 117-minute documentary that includes a laundry list of the greatest soul and gospel acts of the era It all kicks off with 19-year-old…

  • Film/TV - Politics/Culture

    Battling the Apocalypse Blues

    September 5, 2021 - By 

    On the very night that my beloved daughter was taking a red eye flight into New York City to attend a wedding this weekend, residents of that city were drowning in their basement apartments, being evacuated from flooded subways, and getting rescued from car rooftops by emergency responders boating through the streets. All a result of yet more unprecedented extreme weather activity that was dumping more than 3 inches of rain per hour over the city at the storm’s peak. The New York Times reports these additional astonishing figures for what such downpours likely portend for the future: “The strongest…