Music – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2026-03-062026-03-15 by David Hughes

Ars Protestationis

Last month I spent two weeks in the Twin Cities, my annual sojourn to my wife Andrea Carney, who lives in Eagan, a suburb of Saint Paul. We didn’t visit memorials to the recently fallen, although we did drive past the Whipple Building where ICE jails abductees (on the way to celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary). Local network newscasts continue to cover roundups and reactions. We learned ICE was moving to the ’burbs, but we hadn’t seen that there. Nonetheless, we counseled our Filipina daughter-in-law to carry her passport.

I didn’t take in any live music while I was in Eagan, but I’ve been thinking it’s time to share a few songs sung in resistance to ICE as well as that exhibited in Gaza and the West Bank.

I just missed a January 30 appearance at Minneapolis’s historic club First Avenue by Tom Morello (ex Rage Against the Machine) and others. as a benefit for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Morello was joined by Rise Against, Al Di Meola (!), Ike Reilly, and a (Very Special Guest), documented below. The “boo”s you’ll hear are an indication of the political persuasion of many in Morello’s audience.

While The Boss’s sentiment is pretty pedestrian, he does pay tribute to the fact that, following the earlier killings of Philando Castile and George Floyd, “a city aflame” in 2016 and 2020 now “fought fire and ice,” pun intended.

2025-11-222025-11-25 by David Hughes

Et tu, Virtute.

Yesterday the fitness instructor for our apartment building said she’d grown weary of the Spotify playlist she’d cued up for the past few sessions. Nominally “Tom Petty,” the list, liberally, blared hits from the likes of Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other mainstream popsters. When she asked for suggestions of a new list, I hesitated, but then figured The Weakerthans might be a good segue. And I was right.

Spotify’s algorithm for Petty calculated that Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” belonged in the same batch as “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” my favorite Petty tune.¹ To my surprise, during the half dozen Weakerthans songs to which we stretched (our strength-building having been performed during the first, mm…, stretch): no such mismatched filler. Further surprise came when the playlist contained not one but both of the band’s two songs sung from the point of view of a cat.

2025-06-232025-07-05 by David Hughes

Oh, Equality, up yours!

—with apologies to Poly Styrene

Eleven years ago, the Against Equality (AE) collective published a compilation of its three anthologies, critical of myopic topics of “gay pride.”² As writers for AE note in the collection’s introduction, the day before SCOTUS trashed the Defense of Marriage Act (the ban on gay marriage signed by Bill Clinton) and California’s Prop 8 (the people’s ban on gay marriage), in 2013, the Justices had trashed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

2025-04-132025-09-16 by David Hughes

Hey Judas

With some liturgical precision, YouTube pushed my way the following video featuring musician Murray Head, hosted by David Frost on November 15, 1969.³ Head had taken the role of Judas Iscariot on the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who already had gotten their pop cantata-turned-musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat under their belt. On Frost’s show Head saunters in sporting a svelte swimmer’s physique not quite concealed beneath a sheer chiffon chemise. There’s an unsettling tension between surface and substance in this presentation: muted tones in living color, crosses replaced by jagged Y’s forming an ebony crown of thorns.

In Superstar, Judas famously takes lead billing over Jesus (in order of appearance) in a retelling of the Passion, casting Christ as man and superman. In the opera Judas begins and ends—here, beyond the grave—as the conscience of the incautious up-and-comer Jesus.

2025-01-192025-07-08 by David Hughes

Heavy Inauguration Rotation

A few days ago, while cleaning up dead links on this blog, I ran across something included in my 2019 post Vaneigem and Bubblegum, which discusses matters musical, political, and spiritual. “Art on 45” is the lead track on a 1982 vinyl 12” EP called Art • Dream • Dominion by The Royal Family and the Poor. It appears to take its name from Stars on 45, a Dutch act that legitimized what had been a bootleg: a stringing together of popular songs to a disco beat.

2025-01-172025-03-03 by David Hughes

Sor Juana: Inquisitional minds want to know

I have Octavio Paz’s acclaimed biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on my shelves, but I never read it. I saw the 1990 film adaptation—if one can compress a 547-page tome into a 105-minute film.⁴ The IMDB précis is precise:

A 17th-century Mexican nun defies expectations, becoming a renowned intellectual and writer during the Spanish Inquisition. Her progressive ideas attract unwanted attention, forcing her to seek protection from an influential ally.

2025-01-072025-07-04 by David Hughes

Claustbrophobic

I came to this late. A wonder of sound + vision.

2024-09-252025-06-29 by David Hughes

The Wind and the Fury

Danish Language Lobby Poster for Wild Is the Wind

A look at Wild Is the Wind, the film and its theme song.

2024-05-272026-02-05 by David Hughes

Obscure Exposures

Reminiscences regarding reissues by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.

2023-09-302024-04-07 by David Hughes

Meeting the Master, Rudy Perez 1929–2023

As of six months ago, “Meeting the Master” might evoke the histrionic single by Michigander rock band Greta Van Fleet. It’s not unlike Medium Medium’s “Guru Maharaj Ji” from four decades before, which I’ve described as “either a snide putdown, or a pedestrian description, of the teacher-student dynamic.” I added: New York Times’ Robert Palmer writes that the song “manages to be understanding and wryly humorous.” (The epitome of this polarity might be The Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie,” written by John Lennon about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)

Last month I wrote to my filmmaker friend Albert Gasser about

all the gurus I’ve “followed,” secular and non-, among them César Chávez (UFW), Arthur Janov (Primal Therapy), Rudy Perez (dance performance), Charles Cameron [literary and spiritual mentor], Tarkovsky (you introduced me to him), Roman Catholicism, Robert Adams (Advaita Vedanta), Lowell May (IWW), Guy McPherson (abrupt climate change).

To that list I would add my wife Andrea Carney, whose writings salt-and-pepper this blog. And from the New World and Old World respectively, Ricardo Reyes (art and culture) and Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (compassion on a tightrope). And my spiritual mentors Milania Henley and Rev. Bruce MacKenzie. And to that original list I added, to Albert, “If I spouted the party line, I hope usually it was for a brief while. But oh, what I learned.”

Rudy Perez died yesterday morning after a severe asthma attack that took him to the ICU. A year ago I had my first such attack, mild by comparison, but scary enough for an ER session, and as the doctor told me, “You can deal with a lot of things, but not being able to breathe…?”