Category: Uncategorized
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A Missive on Choice and Control
Remove the beam from your own eye … Matthew 7:5 Oh, yes: the Creator of the Universe has a sense of humor. There is no need for sitcoms or daytime talk shows in the heavenly realms because, well … … we exist. We — humans, that is — spend an extraordinary amount of time, pointing […]
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Rejection Regeneration 1: Jerry’s Secret
Jerry had been excited about traveling from the created moon out behind Titan, where his family had lived since his great-grandmother had been a baby. He’d never been away from there, not even outside the atmospheric dome to visit Titan or one of the floating cities high in Saturn’s atmosphere. To have been hired on […]
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Don’t Feed the Reaper
He snorted with disgust as he wiped crumbs from his lower jaw. His robes fluttered and clung below what pushed forward like a middle-aged paunch. He looked into his own eyes, a reflection in the hallway mirror of one more house, one more appointment to take the hand of someone on their way to eternity. […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Twenty
It’s the 20th day and alas, we’ve reached the end of the road. For now. We’ve done jazz, gospel, industrial, instrumental, and more, which makes it difficult to come to the penultimate of such a journey. However, I think I have to give it to two of the greatest musicians of this or any other […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Nineteen
I’ll have to stick with the ‘80s for today and yes, I’m doing it … It’s the 19th day of the series, so what better day to talk about Paul Hardcastle and his runaway hit, ‘19’? Please note that the video might not play, depending on your settings, because it comes with a viewing warning. […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Eighteen
Figured I’d take it down a notch since we’re fast approaching the end of this 20-day musical journey. There was a late-70s(?) band called Japan, who were part of the UK androgynous New Romantic era sound. Lead singer David Sylvian went on to his own solo career and in the early 1980s, had several albums. […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Seventeen
Another group emerging from the industrial landscape of music is Laibach. They weren’t just identified as an industrial band, but were also labeled as neo-classical and were part of the then-emergent New Slovenian Art, a political-cultural movement. Two of the founding members of Laibach were in the Yugoslavian Army; their works have been said to […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Sixteen
Speaking of the 1980s, one can’t leave out industrial music. I don’t know what it was about the sound, but it grabbed me hard in my radio station days. I started my shows with Antagonism by Skinny Puppy nearly every week as I recall. What it was about them, specifically, I can’t tell you. I […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Fifteen
One name that emerged from Yellow Magic Orchestra in my musical archive is Ryuichi Sakamoto. I think of him like an Andy Warhol of music; he has many songs with one-word titles that sweep across the acoustic canvas like Mr. Warhol’s works — unique, quirky, and at times creepy — sweep across the painted canvas. […]
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Must Be the Music: Day Fourteen
Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ came out in the early 1980s, but for me, the future arrived in 1978. To be an ‘urban’ R&B radio station, WDAS-FM out of Philadelphia was more progressive back then; I didn’t realize it until other stations, like WRTI-FM, which had been a major source of jazz, turned elsewhere with its sound. […]
A New Bloom 