Consortium of Seven: Year 4

 You can fine all episodes to date at the Facebook Page :Freedom Island -- modern suspense"

A piece in the Washington Post over the weekend explored the topic of the links between music and memory. Headlined “Why music causes memories to flood back,” it explored the brain chemistry of memory and how music is processed by the brain, which was interesting. And it echoed, in part, another Post piece from a few years ago about a study that noted that the music that is most affecting to most of us is the music of our youths, generally the years from about 14 to about 30.  Geez. Instead of a study, they could have just asked me. I’ve spent a good portion of the free time in my life pondering the connections between music and memory, and I’ve spent a good portion of that invested free time pondering the music that was around me from the time I was, oh, 10 to the time I was 25. (That doesn’t quite fit the parameters of 14 to 30, but it’s close enough, I think.)  And there are many, many records that pull me back to certain times and places, bringing back memories – goo...

sun·dry /ˈsəndrē/ Learn to pronounce noun plural noun :  sundries various items not important enough to be mentioned individually. "a drugstore selling magazines, newspapers, and sundries" Noticing your weak areas  is not comfortable. It is disorienting though instructive. It is necessary and needn't be dramatic.  I've spent a good deal of time looking at my weaknesses over the past two years, especially in regards to how I've parented and how I teach. The point of living past middle age is to gain in wisdom, which won't happen if we don't take the time for self reflection. I've seen areas of life where I tend to have a victim mentality, a sure sign that I create my own drama in that realm. There is nothing like teaching, as a career, that makes you very aware of drama. You will never be on top of your workload in this field. You will never be able to make everyone happy in this field, and you won't even be able to figure out your own thinking a lo...

The 25th February 1862 holds the dubious honour of being the date the US Bureau of Engraving & Printing was formed by Congress to print & issue paper currency in the USA. Let that sink in. They did it on purpose. Someone thought it’d be a good idea & for the time, it probably made sense. But they surely couldn’t have known how things would end up. Maybe early capitalists from every country would have been excited about the state of the world right now but like many others, I just feel that the capitalists we’ve got these days have taken it too far. Let’s face it, for the majority of citizens & as experiments go, it’s a ghastly failure.  A blog about money in art could take another form of course, however the price of works, the awfulness of the corporate art world & the concept of art as commodity are the subjects of blogs I’m unlikely to ever write. It’s all simply too depressing, depraved & disgusting. & utterly meaningless. There are no pockets in a s...

    Another busy week, with more things backing up as I've not made the time for them. Time's buzzing past in a blur.       Among the many, many cuts made to operations following the regime change at Warner Bros. Discovery is one where another of the bodies - in this instance a programming change - is only now just falling at Turner Classic Movies. A virtual bloodbath of firings happened late last year, among them it turns out was Millie De Chirico. De Chirico had overseen TCM Underground since 2007, curating a mix of cult classics and often underseen films in the wee hours of Saturday or Sunday morning. The spot had been developed and launched by Eric Weber in 2006, in part as an attempt to expand the TCM brand, which had skewed ever-older and stuffier, aiming to attract younger and fringier viewers. Initially it was hosted by Rob Zombie, in a nod to classic tv horror hosts, but before long it let the host aspect fold. Still, it was quietly cu...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Big snowstorms here in the United States with a lot of people with no power and it's, well, it's going to be 80 here in Virgina today.  (But a high of 45 on Saturday!  Yeesh.). So settle down if you can, get some cocoa and let's look at what I've found recently. _____________________________________ I missed Castle Rock  in its original run on Hulu back in 2018-2019, which is a little weird because I'm a big Stephen King fan who usually sees the major adaptations*.  But I heard enough interesting things about it and it's insanely good cast (seriously, Melanie Lynskey, Tim Robbins, Jane Levy, Lizzy Caplan and Bill Skarsgård, among many others?) that it was always in the back of my mind.  So when I ran across this at my local shop (and for frankly a really cheap price) I took a chance on it.  And c'mon, Sissy Spacek is in this.  If anyone else has earned a chance to take a second try at King (in apparently a very dif...

A couple of weeks ago, I put up Part 1 of this three-part series , which took a close look at an old mystery by S. S. Van Dine called The Henson Murder Case. The version I was enjoying was in an anthology of early 20th century mysteries, and there were annotations. One of these side notes explained that the passage below contained a reference to a once-scandalous roman à clef, which is a fancy French way of saying a novel so closely based on real people that everyone knows who they are. "I'm attending a levee which Mr. Markham is holding over a corpse and I want something rather spiffy. Is it warm enough for a silk suit?. . .And a lavender tie, by all means." "I trust you won't also wear your green carnation," grumbled Markham.  "Tut! Tut!' Vance chided him. "You've been reading Mr. Hichens. Such heresy in a district attorney! Anyway, you know I never wear boutonnieres. The decoration has fallen into disrepute. The only remaining devotees ...

Well, not to complain too much – I’m upright – but I’ve had better Mondays: A sinus infection came crashing down on me over the weekend. It snowed lightly overnight, which is no big deal, but it’s a reminder that we’re supposed to get somewhere between twelve and twenty inches from a storm between Tuesday and Thursday this week. And I am utterly bereft of ideas to fill this space today.  So I’m going to rely on a method I used fairly often during the fifteen years I wrote a music blog. I’m going to open my iTunes stash and click randomly five times to see what we get. (My iTunes has about 2,500 tracks in it as opposed to the main music library, which comes in at about 88.000 tracks.)  So here goes: First of all, we get “The Unknown Solider,” a vaguely anti-war record that was a No. 39 hit for the Doors in 1968. Our second stop is Boz Scagg’s “I’ll Be Long Gone,” a track from Scagg’s first solo album, released in 1969. We move on to an instrumental version of the tune “Mr. ...

Field trip! Key West Florida.   Sorry my camera didn’t capture the gorgeous color of the ocean; there were amazing depths of blue and green out there.  Starting from our arrival, and here we go... We paid for a tram type conveyance that didn't quite work out. But the trip was so much fun. Great food, sights, and atmosphere. This is where our journey on foot began. Blisters for proof. Bandaids didn't work because I'd applied suncreen earlier and they came right off... poor me. This reminded of the Oyl family home. If you’re a Popeye fan you know… The side of a cute and very old open air corner shop. The king of chocolate covered key lime ice cream bars walks his dog. Rum and Hemingway go together like  2nd best Painkiller I've ever had, And great food.  I do have a thing for tiny porches way high up! I love this green house, all shady and interesting. Like some of the people I met in Key West… And look at this pink beauty. So many beautiful buildings in Key West ...