I have never been a Led Zeppelin fan. Taste in music, taste in art has nothing to do with reason. It comes down to serendipity, the genre’s of music that one is exposed to by accident of your time and place in this world. That’s all. There’s no independent baseline of measure, when it…
I watched the Grammy’s Award Show. I am an “old guy” so I knew in advance most of the show content would be barely understood. Music is the voice of a generation. Several generations and more have come into being since mine was up and coming. The Boomer generation was the one born right…
This morning’s New York Times report on the war in Ukraine is a meditation upon the logic of war. “Stand with you, period” President Biden, in a passionate speech from Warsaw on Saturday, proclaimed the West’s complete support for Ukraine. “We stand with you, period,” Biden said. “Not doing enough” The next day, Ukraine’s…
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel….
It is Friday morning. After rising, switching on the iphone, a text message was waiting. A friend asked if I could meet him at Limestone Coffee Shop at 7. I had ten minutes. I pressed ahead with the bowl of cheerios, grabbed my coat and was out the door. Arriving at the coffee shop…
Mariupol They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap…
Shaking inwardly again this morning. I planned to write only about Rock N Roll. After I write what I have to say about that, — more is to be said about the war in Ukraine. Hold On, I’m Comin’ By Sam and Dave Now don’t you ever be sad Lean on me when times…
Thought written, represented is a passage through evil, …the most profound way of avoiding radical evil… the stoppage of representation and questioning. -excerpt, New Forms of Revolt by Julia Kristeva, pp 9 The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Saturday morning comes with brilliant sunlight and cold. The cold is reminder that winter…
War is the ultimate atrocity, the heart of evil. War is the failure of civilized life, when the bonds of “common sense” between us break, the rage of the petulant child erupting in irrational destruction. This morning I awakened to read the story of the Perebyinis family in the New York Times. War in…
Yesterday was moving day. I pitched in, doing what I could to assist my daughter and her partner in their move from Wheaton to Deerfield. Moving is a many day’s long process, culminating with moving day. Boxes packed with household items moved to the center of each room. On moving day, the movers arrive…
