Music

Sustainable Solidarity: Now Appearing in Wisconsin

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Remember those long, long, Reagan-Bush years? For me, one toxic byproduct of that time was a continual sense of rage and despair. My pattern at the time was this: flash of outrage, flurry of activity, desperate waiting, defeat, despair. Repeat until burnout. Since then, I’ve thought long and hard about an activism that continues past fury to true solidarity with the power to inspire and sustain over the long haul. And I recently had a chance to experience this at the Solidarity Singalong in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Sacred Snapshots Brings a Justice-Seeking Connection to the Holy

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On Saturday, April 21, Sacred Snapshots, a day-long Sampler for the Spirit, will invite participants to experience the divine, celebrate spiritual practices from a range of religions and traditions at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) Whether exploring religion in pop culture, engaging 12-step spirituality, or experiencing Hindu ritual, attendees will create a multi-religious, multicultural and international community for one day. Rumi wrote that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and at Sacred Snapshots, you will have the chance to try at least a dozen. When I heard about Saturday’s event, I was curious if Sacred Snapshots could deliver a hospitable space for those who belong to a congregation and those who do not to come together and experiment in spiritual practices new to both of them. After talking with the event organizers and looking at the web site, I realized the diversity of the presenters and traditions appearing in the Sacred Snapshots line-up provided an opportunity to dabble in something I have heard of or experience something I never knew existed from a location or community with which I’ve never had contact. There is so much to explore and to taste (and I do mean taste – there is a Flavors of Faith workshop that delves into the relationship between food and religious life.)
Curious?

Culture

The Imperatives of Whitney Houston

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I still sometimes dance in the car while waiting at a red light. However, back in the day, when I had less sense than I have now, I would throw the car in park, jump out and dance in the street. When Whitney Houston sang “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”, the joy, the exuberance, the hope, the possibility was too much to contain inside the car. The imperative: turn the volume up, put the car in park, jump out and dance. Celebrate life.

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Soup & Bread: The Church of The Hideout Cookbook

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Sometimes even an atheist needs a community soup kitchen. This winter, I will probably need one, and so will many many of my fellow Americans. This winter, when the thin veil of November leaves has finally come down in Chicago, the sand is banked on the beaches against the lake shore wind and the dark comes early, I will be happy for a bowl of soup and a place to eat it where I feel welcome. Like so many this year, for me the recession is grinding down hard, and the things that held me together are beginning to fray, just a little and at the edges, but still, the possibility of coming unraveled hangs over all endeavors while the nights get colder. Like the people occupying parks the whole country over, I am running out of faith in governments and institutions to provide a little grace and shelter while we all wait out the economic troubles we’ve got to endure.

Culture

Portrait of the Polymath as an Old Man

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In my childhood, I wanted to know everything about everything, which I called “being a polymath”, because polymath was such an impressive word. I read omnivorously, and remembered almost all of what I had read. I was the star of my high school’s Reach For the Top team (short version: a Canadian high school Jeopardy). I knew all the songs on the top 30, every week, and could identify them from the first notes, to the amazement of my parents to whom all rock and roll sounded pretty much the same. Two long-remembered dreams from my childhood encapsulate this obsession.

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Jesse Rifkin: Real "Bad Jew"

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I’m a bad Jew,” a friend said, grinning ear to ear and then biting into a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich. Even looking back on the Jewish gangsters of the 1920’s, socialist Jews of the 1930’s, hippies of the ’60’s and punks of the ’80’s, seldom has being a “bad Jew” seemed so trendy. Time and time again, American Jews simultaneously act and critique their own actions, rigidly adhere to ancient precepts and then question them. As a community, we create the counter thesis to our own tradition through rebellion, with the rebellion itself long since becoming a tradition. The problem is that “bad Jews” don’t always play their part so well.

Culture

Business Class Refugees: Kartick & Gotam

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Who are these guys? Whatever are “business class refugees”? And, most of all, why should I care?You should care because this album, Business Class Refugees, is a new and extraordinary music, created internationally, in ways that simply haven’t been possible till now. It comes out thirty years after “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” the pioneering Byrne / Eno collaboration which used electronic ambience, and world music behind sampled vocal tracks, but assembled painfully in the studio through analog trial and error. Kartick and Gotam, known as K&G, also weave a beating net of electronic ambience, but overlay it with a stunning selection of Indian and south Asian musicians as foreground.