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Midweek Music Break: Hayes Carll, “Another Like You”
Thanks to all the new(ish) music I’ve been listening to over the last couple years, I’ve found myself a fan of a genre I didn’t even know existed. It’s sort of a loose super-genre, actually: Americana or “roots music,” incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk, country/western, blues, rock… The instrumentation and arrangement lean acoustic-wards, and often [...]
It’s Right in Front of You
[Image: unretouched photograph of an anamorphically-painted building interior, by French artist George Rousse; I found it here. As suggested at that site, be sure to see the video about Rousse's "Durham (NC) project." And while you're at it, check out the similar but sometimes entire city-sized work of Swiss artist Felice Varini. I couldn't decide which artist's work to [...]
Book Review: Who Hates Whom, by Bob Harris
My latest review is up at The Book Book. This time around, it’s a non-fiction title, Who Hates Whom. (Subtitle: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide.) In brief, it’s a good overview of world “trouble spots” — where they are, how they became troublesome in the first place, [...]
The World Turned Inside-Out
Just saw this on the BBC’s YouTube channel. Sobering, exciting, fascinating… and sobering. The economic progress of 200 countries over the course of 200 years — demonstrated and discussed in a four-minute video: As always with simple presentations of complex issues, especially statistics, there’s such a thing as reading too much into this. Politicians and [...]
They Never Stop at Just Books
From in the fairy tale asylum: Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. (Heinrich Heine) It’s Banned Books Week. Have you clung to a banned book recently? Have you reviewed one?
Book Review: War, by Sebastian Junger
Habitués of Running After My Hat know, I think, that I resist the intrusion of politics into my posts here. And although I’ve never been tested on this, I’m pretty sure that’s one area in which I would likely resort to editing (or outright banning) comments of certain kinds. If you’re after debate, even of [...]
Looking Glass
This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts). [...]
The Real January 20, 2009 Post
In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously. It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether [...]
Happy Birthday, Mr. Milton
Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much. Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained [...]
Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In
My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog… My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political… Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about [...]
