• Film/TV - Music

    Documentary Two-Fer: The Musical Odysseys of Leonard Cohen and Jason Isbell

    One an observant, mystically inclined Jew, born to wealthy, pedigreed parents outside Montreal, a poet by training and temperament, handsome, charismatic and refined, who drifts down to New York City in his early 30s to shore up a wobbly career by throwing himself into songwriting. The other from rural Alabama, the son of uncultured, unmoneyed teenage parents whose loud and bitter fighting drives the pudgy and awkward boy to his room, where he teaches himself electric guitar in order to drown out the noise and his own rage and sorrow. One born in 1934, full of questions, indignation and ardor…

  • Religion - Visual Arts

    To Look, To See, To Linger, To Love

    A few years ago, I was writing a script and coordinating with a production company to create a short video with narration and music. Part of my task was to amass a large cache of photos, each of which could match relevant parts of the narration. The protocol in such projects is to give the editor far more photos than he or she will need, and I dutifully performed that function to what I thought was completion. So I was rather taken aback when the editor complained the next week that he didn’t have nearly enough photos to finish the…

  • Film/TV - Music

    Quirky Movie Lover’s Delight: John Carney’s Hybrid Musical, “Once”

    A busker is wailing his heart out to an audience of absolutely no one as drivers and pedestrians go about their business on a Dublin sidewalk. His brow furrowed and throat straining, he espies a stoop-shouldered addict, cigarette dangling from his lips, stumbling out from a little alleyway where he has just relieved himself against a graffiti-laden wall. Still wailing (“…the healing has begun…”), the busker keeps a wary eye out for the addict, who is milling about in front of the busker’s open guitar case pretending to enjoy the music. As the addict stoops to ostensibly tie his sneakers, the…

  • Nature - Personal Reflections - Photography

    Bodies in Motion: A Meditation

    Sometimes, in the diffused light of dawn or dusk, or on foggy streets where almost indiscernible shapes begin to reveal themselves as a human being or two in motion, I will peer a little closer, catch a certain swing of arm, quickened cadence, bounce of head or forward bend and know instantly, “There’s Gene!” (Or Karen or Kate or Kelly.) Our bodies in motion are akin to signatures, indelible gestures that mark and follow us throughout life. All our intimates (excepting the visually impaired) can spot us from the proverbial mile away. But those signatures do share something profound in…

  • Film/TV - Religion

    The Tragicomedy of “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”

    Many critics are lumping Adamma Ebo’s “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” into the comedy genre, and suggest the movie should have stuck to its lane in drawing laughs at the hypocrisy and thinly disguised greed on display with a certain kind of evangelical megachurch pastor who at best has his hands in your pocket and at worst isn’t looking only for money when he’s fishing around in there. Yes, there are plenty of cringey laughs at the usual sendups of avaricious preachers in expensive suits and palatial homes pounding away at a “prosperity gospel” that reserves most all the…