Video – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2026-03-062026-03-07 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.

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

Claustbrophobic

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

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

Obscure Exposures

Reminiscences regarding reissues by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.

2022-04-122025-08-23 by David Hughes

I’m Dreaming of a White Bicycle

While searching for half-remembered short films on the theme of public restrooms last month (see In the Can), I ran across a parody of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” posted last fall as a commentary on the trans* bathroom con-troversy.

The performer, Christopher Trautman, explains:

This song was recorded in North Carolina. The only State in the United States that passed a law specifically directing that the restroom you use must be based on the junk you possess. It was later repealed after a national embarrassment campaign [led] by Comedy Central where they opened a food truck called Bone Brothers Barbecue in downtown Raleigh and discriminated against everybody who they determined to be gay… which was everybody.

That barbecue pi—er—bit, which aired on The Daily Show in 2016, was by Roy Wood Jr., assisted by Jordan Klepper. It’s hilarious and is, mm…, cued up below.

2022-03-222025-03-08 by David Hughes

In the Can

Public toilet, Yoyogi Fukamachi Small Park, Tokyo

My introduction to the public restroom would have been in kindergarten, 1960–61. There were issues.

2021-08-062024-03-26 by David Hughes

Friendship Band

Last time, I said I planned to toot the horn of a new songwriter (relatively speaking), but I will toot my own—and that of my wife Andrea Carney—along the way.

2020-08-082025-08-03 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 5: The People’s Panopticon

Yesterday my brother Richard remarked in our weekly transpacific Skype chat, that the cell phone camera has changed everything, from unmasked undistanced kids walking down a hallway in Georgia (I hadn’t yet seen it; he’s on Bangkok time) to gals getting their nails done getting zip-tied on the blacktop near my neighborhood.

2020-07-112025-08-03 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 4: Time/Travel

This fourth edition of Everybody Dance Now involves travel in space and time, beginning with a short from Arizona filmmaker and photographer Harrison J. Bahe of Navajo Joe Films. “Xibalba” comes from the soundtrack of The Fountain (2006) composed by Clint Mansell, which also accompanies Bahe’s film. Xibalba is the Mayan underworld, which figures in The Fountain, a once-and-future picture that weaves together Mayan and Hebrew mythology, featuring a Spanish conquistador astoundingly being recognized by a native priest as the First Father, the life source.¹

2020-04-272025-08-03 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 3: Listen to Your Heart

It’s been a year since the last edition of Everybody Dance Now. Today we look at some movement-and-music videos as well as several music promos that feature choreography and companies.

2019-07-022025-08-10 by David Hughes

Stonewall, the Great Gay Migration and the Monumental Divide

Last Wednesday I watched a somewhat slimmed-down version of the new documentary Lavender Scare, based on the 2004 (!) book of the same name by David K. Johnson.² In the film Meryl Streep’s narration explains how the influx of homosexuals from rural to urban regions began in the 1930s, the start of the Great Gay Migration³:

Washington was a boom town. The government was creating thousands of new jobs to combat the Great Depression. Many of the young men and women who came for those jobs were homosexuals. They grabbed the chance to experience a new level of acceptance and friendship in a big city far from home.

I was reminded of a recent essay, “Forget Stonewall,” in the May/June edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review, by Yasmin Nair who reminds readers that the source of that influx still exists.