• Music

    Brilliant Songs #28:
    Mike Batt’s “Market Day in Guernica”

    April 30, 2022 - By 

    Eighty-five years ago this past week, April 26, 1937, was a market day in Guernica, Spain. It was a Monday, when farmers from the surrounding countryside would bring their crops into the town square to sell to residents and others who flowed in from surrounding towns in the autonomous Basque Country. The Spanish Civil War was raging at the time, pitting the Republican government against General Francisco Franco’s rebel Nationalist faction and fascist allies Germany and Italy. Guernica, with a population of some 5,000, had not been a center of combat, but it stood some 30 kilometers east of Bilbao,…

  • Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    Elie Weisel and Volodymyr Zelensky’s Unanswered Questions

    April 23, 2022 - By 

    “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” —Joseph Conrad *** Last week while reading through the latest reports of Russia’s continuing atrocities against Ukraine, I found myself suddenly bursting with indignation, yelling at my laptop as if I were 10 years old and made aware for the first time that the world can be a horrible place in which horrible things happen to undeserving people. Many nations of the world are ‘doing something.’ Many things, actually, costing many dollars. But a powerful and potentially world-altering question lurks under…

  • Poetry by Andrew Hidas - Religion

    Resurrection for Non-Christians: A Poem

    April 16, 2022 - By 

                   RESURRECTION FOR NON-CHRISTIANS                                   By Andrew Hidas Stay with me now, you non-Christians (of which I am one). The hard believers will insist there’s nothing for you here, Irredeemable heathens that you persist in Being. But believe not, I say, in those believers, their binaries Blinding them to nuance, context, symbol, the Dusky liminal depths of myth more real than reality. Resurrection is yours, too, for the taking. You need not wear a cross on your chest,…

  • Plays

    Three Ages, One Disparate Self: Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women”

    April 10, 2022 - By 

    Near the end of Edward Albee’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Three Tall Women,” two of them, cryptically named “A” and “C,” finally profess their general dislike for each other. (“B,” the third woman, fills the Switzerland role of studied neutrality.) Though not particularly surprising given the multiple barbs and eyerolls A and C have been sending each other’s way, it is a sad interchange for any reader or viewer who has followed their interaction through the play’s two acts. That’s because A and C are the same person at different stages of life. (B is part of the mix, too; more…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #27:
    Joanna Newsom’s “Baby Birch”

    April 3, 2022 - By 

    Sometimes, all we want and need is a short declarative bellow hooked into something hummable and danceable. “I wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-a-anddd!” “I can’t get noooo….satisfack-shun!” “I seeee the ba-ad moon a-risin’!” Other times, we slow the pace, lower the volume and still ourselves for a close listen to a story as it unspools from the mind and imagination of a singing poet as she frames a multi-layered tale across time, space and memory. Her songs consistently beg big questions but just as consistently refuse the beggar, short-circuiting our Need to Know… At 40 years old, the nearly unclassifiable Joanna…