By Wayne Allensworth In his magisterial books The Master and His Emissary and the two volume The Matter with Things, the brilliant polymath Iain McGilchrist argues for a world that comes into being via an interactive process between embodied consciousness and the Other—what’s out there, or, as the case may be, others, other people. He believes that relationships precede the relata. I’ll be...
By Wayne Allensworth Over the Rainbow…Everybody remembers Judy Garland singing that lovely song in The Wizard of Oz. The song was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg specifically for Judy to sing in the movie. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. After Toto snaps at Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), Judy as Dorothy wonders if there is any place where there is no trouble. There must...
By Wayne Allensworth Some thoughts prompted by viewing the movie The Sound of Freedom… Observing post-American life is something like watching a train wreck. Some of you may remember those disaster movies of the 1970s — Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and on and on. Disaster movies and horror films. There was the giant-critters-will-eat-you genre — think Jaws — and...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
By Wayne Allensworth It’s easy to push the proverbial “panic button” these days. Just turn on your TV, scan the “news” on the Internet, or watch any popular movie released in recent years, or decades for that matter. Take TV, for example, beginning with something as seemingly innocuous as The Weather Channel. From what I can gather from a quick web search, The Weather Channel was launched in 1982...
By Wayne Allensworth We are strangers in our strange-and-getting-stranger land. Alienation? That’s not quite what I’m thinking of, though what we see seems alien to any sane mind. The country is, in fact, largely unrecognizable, though flashes of our past appear occasionally in our collective line of sight. Landmarks remain, but they are glimpses of an exhibit at a museum. Unlike Moses, we are...
By Wayne Allensworth Eva Cassidy may be the best singer many of you have never heard of, and she may become the best singer you have ever heard. She died too soon in 1996 at age 33 of melanoma. I was living in the DC area at the time, and Eva frequently performed in clubs around town, but I learned of her too late, after she had passed away. She had just begun to attract attention, and her...
By Wayne Allensworth I sometimes hear sane people comment that our “clown world” reality seems like a bad dream. True enough. Then they return to scrolling on their iphones and generally going about the empty business that constitutes so much of post-modern life. I’ve tried to put my finger on the surreal quality that permeates our daily lives, but it is as elusive as trying to catch a cloud. In...
By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American) If you want to know why the California Supreme Court’s ruling in 1972 that temporarily stopped the death penalty was such a disaster not only for crime victims but also for justice itself, the state’s Second District Court of Appeal has provided some insight. The court has freed Leslie Van Houten, who murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on August 9, 1969...
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