Videos: Religion, Chaos, Indiana, Lincoln, Politics

 Some videos I think are worth sharing.

 I suspect people today have even less of an idea what Lincoln said at Gettysburg:

 

Ian Hunter interviewed - a singer/writer almost forgotten and ought not be:

 Indiana's punk and new wave women:

Immigrant's speech:
 

 

Questions about slavery:

 Greatest speech ever made?

 Chaos in New York:

 Defence of Christianity:

 Foreign affairs:

Explaining Indiana:

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Philosophy For You - American Pragmatism & Political Theory in Science Fiction

 A William James review:

 

 Project Hail Mary's most dangerous idea (which reminds of how often science fiction puts down the debates and human rights in favor of the swashbuckling hero.)

 

Then read Trump flouts lower court rulings in unprecedented display of executive power:

“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.” 

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5/3: Church, Blogging, A Nap, Music, A Drive, and A Playlist

 The title sums up my day. Lioturgy, reading my email and writing a few blog posts, a nap for two hours around 6 PM thinking I would just call it day, a trip to the convenience store for Coke Zero, and a drive through Muncie. All was quiet in town. We have gotten too old for being out at 10 PM.

All-Music Guide let loose a review of Aerosmith's Rocks: 

Few albums have been so appropriately named as Aerosmith's 1976 classic Rocks. Despite hard drug use escalating among bandmembers, Aerosmith produced a superb follow-up to their masterwork Toys in the Attic, nearly topping it in the process. Many Aero fans will point to Toys as the band's quintessential album (it contained two radio/concert standards after all, "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion"), but out of all their albums, Rocks did the best job of capturing Aerosmith at their most raw and rocking....

I saw Aerosmith once in concert (they used to be a staple in Indianapolis), but never bought any of their albums. TJ was quite the fan, though. What they did after regrouping pretty much sucks.

 Pitchfork reviewed Fanny's Fanny Hill. This was a band that I had of over the years, never heard, never saw an album, but found in my sixties on YouTube. They were a great band. 

But of course, all of it is true: Fanny deserve to be celebrated because they did what no other women had done before them; they deserve to be celebrated because they made great music; they made great music that’s inseparable from their experience as outsiders, as subjects of harassment and underestimation, as artists dreaming of something better. Even if just briefly, they made that dream real—it led them to their “sorority” in the Hollywood Hills and the album that bears its name: a radical act of sisterhood and creative freedom smuggled inside a classic rock’n’roll dream. 

The review does not mention this song, a cover of my favorite Cream song, and it is so impressive catching something that was not in the original.

The review does mention this song:

 

I also created a playlist for  J and T2, Big Voiced Brit Singers For Your Listening Pleasure:
    

 

 

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A Very Short Poltical Post

 American Library Association most challenged books of 2025 (NPR) lists several books of which I do not know the author or the work.  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is the only book I have read, and although I know the name of Malinda Lo, I have read none of her books. They mostly seem to be Young Adults books about sexual orientation. Considering all the emotional turmoil of adolescence and the suicide rates of those with doubts about their sexual orientation, positive examples of gay life seem like a good idea. Which may be why they are banned - better to torment the tormented. As for A Clockwork Orange, I can't recall exactly when I did read that novel, but I am certain I was under 22, and it was a book I bought at a used bookstore (I may have had it for years before reading).

Trump Called It ‘White Genocide.’ Now the White People Are Flocking Home: another Trump fraud exposed.

Epistemic Breakdown (Sheila Kennedy)

Epistemic breakdown is a fancy way of saying “destruction of a shared reality.” As a recent essay pointed out, that destruction is politically useful.

We’ve just seen an example in the administration’s propaganda about the murder of Renee Good. “Don’t believe your lying eyes”– believe the “revised” reality we offer instead. But that example is a small part of a sustained assault.

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Muncie & Indianapolis Art News

 Just a bit of FYI for any local readers.

Muncie Public Art Directory 

Muncie Arts and Culture Council's Post 

Muncie Arts and Culture Council  

Muncie Makers Market 

Watercolor classes at Maring-Hunt Library 

Join  MPL and the BSU Art education students for a step by step lesson in watercolor painting.  A fun watercolor workshop in the Maring-Hunt Gardens. At the end you will have a one of a kind watercolor painting to take home! 

Muncie Public Art Directory 

The Harrison Center 

Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi)  

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A Grab Bag: Making Music in Indiana! Hooser Filmmakers! Bob Dylan! Unreliable Narrators! American Short Stories!

I put together this post on February 3, meaning to do more with what I had found on these sites. Work, illness, recuperation kept me from doing more. I added some brief notes today.

Want to write a movie and want to see real scripts. Rian Johnson has posted his at rcjohnso / scripts.

 Why Bob Dylan’s COVID-Era Album Was the Real Nobel Lecture 

“Murder Most Foul” is, first, the story of a killing, which Dylan depicts as an execution, and, then, a catalog of the plangent reverberations for a nation—­as he later sings—­in “slow decay.” Dallas strictly speaking was dark when Kennedy arrived, rainy and gray, and from the outset Dylan embeds the assassination inside prior American cataclysmic cruxes: Native American ethnocide (referencing the Oglala Lakota saying, “a good day to die”) and Pearl Harbor, via Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. But 1941 was also the year Dylan was born, and his song is just as cannily personal as it is historical. His memoir Chronicles recounts his mother’s avid response to a Kennedy campaign visit to Hibbing, Minnesota, six months after Dylan left for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “He gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope,” Dylan wrote. “I wish I could have seen him.” Kennedy also figured into one of Dylan’s first public controversies when, on December 13, 1963, he ruffled his Emergency Civil Liberties Committee hosts in New York after they bestowed upon him their annual Tom Paine Award—­for civil rights efforts—­by remarking that “I saw some of myself” in Lee Harvey Oswald. More recently, Dylan included paintings of Oswald and Jack Ruby in his “Revisionist Art” series (2011-­2012), both modeled after reconfigured Life magazine covers. On his twenty-­first-­century albums, “Love And Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest, Dylan circulated several conspicuously political songs, among them “High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Cry a While,” “Sugar Baby,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Scarlet Town,” “Tin Angel,” and “Tempest.” During an interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem, he might jest, “You know, everybody makes a big deal about the sixties. The sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the sixties? No. But I own the sixties—­who’s going to argue with me?” Still, on “Murder Most Foul” Dylan thwarts readymade nostalgia, an easy revisiting of the storybook sixties and his golden “spokesman” moment. Instead, mixing and juxtaposing voices, lingos, and tones, he traces the decline of America over the trajectory of his own lifetime through the kaleidoscope of the Kennedy assassination. 

  hoodox Hoosier documentaries that inspire. 

Hoodox is a nonprofit organization on a mission to support and share stories that connect Hoosiers, spark conversations, and inspire positive change in Indiana.

We believe Indiana’s future can be bright, and that amplifying true stories told by and for Hoosiers is one of the most powerful ways to help us get there. 

 The Musical Family Tree - Indiana bands

The Musical Family Tree archive was started in 2004 and serves as a crowd sourced archive of the Indiana music scene with a focus on the late 1970s through the 2010s. The MFT archive contains 1,720 musical artists and 22,311 recordings, almost none of which are found on traditional streaming services. Please explore the archive and contact us at team@musicalfamilytree.org with any questions.  

(Muncie bands - most of whose names I do not recognize, but Faith Band goes unmentioned. Indianapolis bands - too many to look through - but looking through the listing by name, I found my favorite Indy band from the early Eighties: The Future! No entries for Anderson. No Pedlar?)

Can you make a 5-minute film for $5,000?  (Mirror Indy)

Now, Hoodox has created a new opportunity for Indiana filmmakers, in partnership with Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana and Heartland Film. LIFT will give five filmmakers $5,000 awards to help them create short nonfiction films “to raise the spirit of Indiana,” Walls said. The films will premiere at the 2026 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July.

“But a big part of this program is also the mentorship opportunities. We don’t want to just throw out an application and then give five filmmakers $5,000 and hope that it all works out,” Walls said. “We want the entire process, starting with the application, to be an opportunity for filmmakers to learn and grow.”

Adriane Leigh on Why We Are Living in the Age of the Unreliable Narrator (Crime Reads)

Social media encourages us to experience our lives not as they happen, but as they will be presented. Moments are filtered through the lens of potential content. Emotions are evaluated for shareability. Experiences are edited into arcs: struggle → insight → growth. In this environment, the self becomes a story rather than a state. And stories demand consistency.

The problem is that real people are not consistent. We contradict ourselves. We regress. We behave badly for reasons that aren’t flattering. We want things we’re not proud of. But social media trains us to hide these fractures, to smooth them over, to rewrite ourselves in real time.

Over time, this produces a subtle psychological shift. We don’t just lie to others—we start editing our own memory. We remember the version of events that performed best. We forget the parts that didn’t fit the narrative. Like classic unreliable narrators, we come to believe our own omissions.

“A National Art Form”: John Stauffer on Rediscovering the 19th-Century American Short Story, from Poe to Wharton  (Library of America)

LOA: The short story emerged as a distinctive American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its rise and development?

JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement. Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form.”

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A Quick Dip

 Yesterday, it was to the dentist and Walmart, and then the remainder was trying to stop hurting.

I think I got about 4 hours of sleep all told.

Today was moving slowly in the morning; it was gloomy and cold, and the group session, and then back here, where I started revving after 5 pm. Submissions were made, and a revision started. I put off other blog posts.

I meant to have photos, but I cannot figure out how to get them from the camera to the computer.

Maybe tomorrow.

Liturgy in the morning? Doesn't look likely.

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