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One of the eternal questions in relating to art is how to separate one’s feeling for the art from one’s feelings for the artist. This is not the least bit new; it’s a problem that is probably as old as art itself. There have been so very many artists whose own lives and statements fall well short of the art they produce. I find myself thinking anew, as one of the oldest and yet most irritatingly persistent of hatreds, anti-Semitism, just keeps arising again like the very worst of pennies, of Richard Wagner. You can barely read a biography ofDown the rabbit hole….

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Back, at last, to Leonard Cohen, while it’s still September. This time, we’ll look at “Take This Waltz”. I’ve only heard “Take This Waltz” either on its own or in the context of a Cohen Greatest Hits album, so I didn’t know that it is actually based on a poem by a Spanish poet or that it first appeared on an album comprised entirely of settings of this poet. The album was Poetas en Nueva York, and it was a collaborative project in which a number of artists, Cohen among them, paid tribute to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936). Lorca’s shortDown the rabbit hole….

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  Sam Seaborn: There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry ‘cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber ‘cause we went to the moon. Mallory O’Brian: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars? Sam Seaborn: Yes. Mallory O’Brian: Why? Sam Seaborn: ‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and weDown the rabbit hole….

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I first wrote this post in 2008, back in the days of Byzantium’s Shores. I repost it now on the occasion of Harrison Ford’s 80th birthday.   Sheila waxes poetic on one of my favorite movies, Witness. (Yeah, I didn’t rank it highly enough.) Here’s Sheila: Let’s look at how delicately things are set up in this film – so much so that you don’t notice them. John Book has recovered (somewhat) from his wound and Samuel Lapp takes him on a tour of the farm. He shows him the well. (“It goes … it makes … it goes …” soDown the rabbit hole….

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Continuing our survey of “Conversation songs”, in which the lyrics give us one side of a conversation, we have “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” by Crazy Horse. “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” was written by Danny Whitten, a guitarist and songwriter with the band Crazy Horse before he died of an overdose in 1972. The song is a distillation of all the things a lover might want to say to his partner after their breakup, which to judge by the lyrics, was less than friendly. You can really hear the pain here, really feel it–and it’s notDown the rabbit hole….

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Minimalism is sometimes best, as the world learned four years ago when a poem by a then-six-year-old took the Internet by storm. Behold this bit of poetic genius: “The Tiger”, by a kid named Nael The tiger He destroyed his cage Yes YES The tiger is out That’s even more minimalist than a haiku. Nicely done, Nael! The poem has narrative, and it conveys real emotion just by choosing words precisely (“He destroyed his cage”, rather than “He got out” or “He broke free“), and our narrator’s excitement just by changing case and capitalizing that second “YES”. Nael is a poet for our times,Down the rabbit hole….

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Sheila O’Malley re-shared her post on the anniversary of Roger Ebert’s passing today, and I thought, why not do the same? Here’s what I posted the day he died. I still miss his writing. There’s something about those Chicago newspaper men…. I was trying to figure out something to write on the passing today of Roger Ebert, but nothing was leaping to mind, so I figured I’d just repost my original thoughts, from January 2012, on his book, Life Itself. I have loved and admired Ebert since I was nine, and his output of thoughtful writing even in the faceDown the rabbit hole….

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Way back in prehistory, we–that is, The Wife and I–decided that our love of popcorn needed to be treated more seriously, so we took our leave of the microwave popcorn that had been our main means of popcorn consumption for years and years. So it was that a little more than 12 years ago, we bought a corn popper and returned to the popcorn recipe of yore: corn, oil, salt, and butter. And it was good! Until last year when the bowl for our popper broke. It had been sporting a crack for a while, a crack which slowly lengthenedDown the rabbit hole….