• 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…

  • Philosophy - Politics/Culture

    “Character Is Destiny”—Or Is It? Unpacking Donald Trump’s Extraordinary Hold on His Followers

    October 25, 2024 - By 

    Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus penned a line, “Ethos anthropoi daimon,” which most translators and the popular world of pithy, poetic phrasemakers have settled on meaning, “Character is destiny.” It’s a compact framing of what may be the most important truism applied to human beings and the struggles they endure to lead a meaningful and worthy life. To wit: Above all and in the end, a person’s character will hold sway in how they conduct themselves and how they affect other people through the course of their lives. Recently it occurred to me that the phrase…

  • Film/TV

    “Will & Harper” & the Long Road of “Transitioning” To a True Self

    October 19, 2024 - By 

    We Americans are suckers for buddy road trips. Two young-ish guys, a guy and a gal, two gals, it matters not. Fill up a suitcase, an ice chest and the gas tank, take the top down if you can, plop into the car, and tool on down the highway, stopping where and when you please, keeping the trigger finger in your brain always cocked for adventure. It’s a vast and gorgeous country, after all, and most of the people in it are right nice when you get out and meet them face to face. Road trips are a fine way…