• Music

    Brilliant Cover Songs #3: Loredano Oliva’s “Canon in D Major” (for Harmonica)

    November 30, 2024 - By 

    I always keep two questions in mind when I broach the idea of adding to the 600+ posts I’ve navigated through in the nearly 12 years of this blog’s existence. 1) Do I have anything new to say on this topic? 2) If I’m saying something old, can I say it in a new and fresh way? I try to apply those two questions to virtually every creative work I engage with in my life, whether my own or someone else’s. It applies even to the occasional light and frivolous fare that a given mood or energy level will call forth as a…

  • Film/TV - Personal Reflections

    To That Bounding, Swirling Dog in the Park, and Leonardo da Vinci, and
    My Sister Edie

    November 22, 2024 - By 

    A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last. Onwards it goes, resuming its…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #50:
    Parker Millsap’s “Dammit”

    November 10, 2024 - By 

    “It’s hard to see the surface…from the bottom” sings Oklahoma-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Parker Millsap in his fiery “Dammit” anthem that fuses near-despair with a defiant, emphatic hope. As so often happens, I stumbled across the impressive, infectious body of work Millsap has been producing for the better part of a dozen years now while I was looking for something else to complement a few thoughts I was hoping to draw forth to help get myself—and maybe you?—through these next days, weeks, oh hell, let’s say it: years. Four of them. So many feelings sloshing around about that prospect, words pouring…

  • Music - Personal Reflections

    The Bittersweet Nostalgia of Aging Artists and the Songs They Sung Into You

    November 2, 2024 - By 

    Alright, enough, for the moment, of electoral tempests and distempers. The election and the world will be what they will be, chagrined, stupefied or elated as we ourselves may become in observing and then contending with them, as we must. But we need not do so in every waking moment. (Being at the mercy of our night dreams, of course, is another matter.) Whatever happens come Tuesday and its aftermath, we must also make time for music and dancing and loving, for joshing and jiving, for romping through woods and along shores, for piling into cars and buses, subways, trains…