Noteworthy entries.

The Dialogue Continues . . .

Today I decided to play the album Chicago V while working.  That album includes a two-part song called "Dialogue."  I remember this song well, including all the lyrics.  That's because I sing one of the lead voices of this song (along with Charles Glenn) with a band I formed with Charles Glenn back in the late 1970's. We were an 7-piece jazz-rock band that performed many types of music, including the music of Chicago, including "Dialogue."

"Ego" in 1975.: Tom O'Brien (bass), Tom Atkinson (woodwinds), Erich Vieth (guitar), Mike L'Ecuyer (keyboards), Sharon Schutte (vocalist), Charles Glenn (percussion and vocalist), Mark Harmon (trumpet), Ron Weaver (trumpet) and Mike Harty (trombone).

---- As I heard this tune today, it very much brought me back to the happy times of playing with such an extraordinary group of good friends.  It also struck me how little things have changed.  It also haunts me that the vocal part of the song that I sang in our performances (sung by Terri Kath on the album) is an extraordinary challenge.  I very much meant those opening words as an 18-year old young man and they resonate with me today. 

Continue ReadingThe Dialogue Continues . . .

A Matter of Legitimacy

Barack Obama had to be delegitimized. In the brawl over the last eight years, perhaps they succeeded on a level not intended. They did not, I think, manage to delegitimize President Obama. Rather, they fulfilled one of Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical dictums and managed to delegitimize the idea of governance.

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The body as the yardstick for meaning

Mark Johnson (of "Metaphors we live By," written with George Lakoff) gave this excellent talk destroying the notion that meaning is something ethereal and disembodied. Instead, the body is the yardstick for meaning. This talk turns much of traditional epistemology upside down. Johnson opens the talk with a Billy Collins talk titled "Purity."

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