By Wayne Allensworth Some thoughts prompted by viewing the movie The Sound of Freedom… Observing post-American life is something like watching a train wreck. Some of you may remember those disaster movies of the 1970s — Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and on and on. Disaster movies and horror films. There was the giant-critters-will-eat-you genre — think Jaws — and...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
By Wayne Allensworth It’s easy to push the proverbial “panic button” these days. Just turn on your TV, scan the “news” on the Internet, or watch any popular movie released in recent years, or decades for that matter. Take TV, for example, beginning with something as seemingly innocuous as The Weather Channel. From what I can gather from a quick web search, The Weather Channel was launched in 1982...
By Wayne Allensworth We are strangers in our strange-and-getting-stranger land. Alienation? That’s not quite what I’m thinking of, though what we see seems alien to any sane mind. The country is, in fact, largely unrecognizable, though flashes of our past appear occasionally in our collective line of sight. Landmarks remain, but they are glimpses of an exhibit at a museum. Unlike Moses, we are...
By Wayne Allensworth Eva Cassidy may be the best singer many of you have never heard of, and she may become the best singer you have ever heard. She died too soon in 1996 at age 33 of melanoma. I was living in the DC area at the time, and Eva frequently performed in clubs around town, but I learned of her too late, after she had passed away. She had just begun to attract attention, and her...
By Wayne Allensworth I sometimes hear sane people comment that our “clown world” reality seems like a bad dream. True enough. Then they return to scrolling on their iphones and generally going about the empty business that constitutes so much of post-modern life. I’ve tried to put my finger on the surreal quality that permeates our daily lives, but it is as elusive as trying to catch a cloud. In...
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By Wayne Allensworth Yevgeny Prigozhin (english.nv.ua) In my recent article on the “coup” that wasn’t in Russia, I raised the question of what the popular reaction to Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s aborted “March for Justice” might be; i.e., would the crisis this past weekend undermine Putin’s poll numbers, for instance? And what would the incident do to Prigozhin’s poll ratings? Possibly, I wrote, the...
by Wayne Allensworth Christina’s World (Andrew Wyeth) Once upon a time in a world that seems like a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a creative writing piece inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s painting. I was 13 or so, and the paper was for an English class. The teacher liked it and read it aloud to her classes. I can’t remember what I wrote, but that painting made quite an impression on the young me...
By Wayne Allensworth Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin (ideapod.com) Here’s a preliminary take on the events in Russia this past weekend: Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Putin crony from St. Petersburg who heads the Wagner Group mercenary organization, after claiming that regular Russian army units had opened fire on Wagner camps in the war zone, announced that he was organizing a column of Wagner...
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