The challenges to Enlightenment Humanism come from all sides. In the U.S., on the Right, a fundamentalist rejection of modernity has led to an increasing, unreasoned disbelief in the scientific method and the process of rational inference from its results. It rejects any conception of the human without GOD, even as it rationalizes varied forms […]
CineFile – The Film Music of John Barry
John Barry, who died last week at the age of 77, was one of the greatest and most successful scorers ever of film scores. His twelve James Bond soundtracks are just an easy highlight, with memorable, moving scores ranging from Midnight Cowboy to Out of Africa. One could take the scores omitted from a greatest […]
Eating Poetry (XXXI) – Neruda’s Memoirs
Maureen Doallas, a friend of this blog – of many blogs, writers, and artists – proof positive that Twitter and Facebook are a benefaction, and a blogger herself at Writing Without Paper, is among her varied talents also a poet, whose collection Neruda’s Memoirs, if not written, at least published on paper, is just out […]
Jazz Is: 26 – Happy Birthday, Stan Getz
Today is the birthday of Stan Getz, great saxophonist of the lineage of Lester Young and known as “the sound” for that sweet and mellow tone, gone now nearly twenty years. Here he plays “Out of Nowhere” in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1960, with Jan Johansson on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Ed Thigpen on […]
CineFile – Five Easy Pieces
It isn’t the most famous scene in the film – that would be holding the chicken between her knees – but it is the film’s most emotionally naked, its thematic center. As Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea reveals himself to his stricken, speechless father, played by William Challee, whose apparently compassionate face bears, in its unresponsive […]