A succession of varied tangents arising from Whitman’s poetry, taking us to Godspell, dynamic education (which includes destroying your teacher), a Greek castration myth, and a Zen fable, which leads into songs by Dylan and Louis Barabas and the Bedlam Six. We bring in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Book of Job, Jesus vs. the do-gooders, and the cowards rushing around the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno (see picture), who were, as Whitman says, “virtuous out of conformity or fear”. Randy Newman comments on following the flag, and Sly and the Family Stone share Whitman’s love for “everyday people”. You are invited to attend.
Whitman reminds us that we are on “a perpetual journey”, and he comes with us as far as he can, then sends us off on our adventure. We look, this evening under lamplight, at various angles of life as journey, with Andy Stewart, Stevie Wonder, Broceliande, Ray Davies, Béla Fleck, Jefferson Airplane, String Driven Thing, and talk from Joseph Campbell and RLA’s CD Journey through the Seasons. You are invited to attend.
You are invited to attend The Athena Connection, looking at what it means to be a Mentor, passing on to others the spirit of Athena, goddess of weaving and tactics (and tact). What do we do with Athena’s inspiration? – dance with it, or deny it, like Arachne, that spiderwoman. We take a few breaks along the way for music by the Greek dance band Athena, some Dylan, some Rolling Stones, also Malcolm Guite and a Scottish weavers’ song, and another dose of Walt Whitman, leading to the “unnameable ardors of my breast” with Mozart’s Queen of the Night.
You are invited to attend this week’s show, exploring tongue twisters, lies, truths, and other games of language. There’s a story here too, both literally and mythically true. And a great variety of music: Danny Kaye, Fraggle Rock, Gilbert & Sullivan, Leonard Cohen, Bruckner motet, Bob Dylan, CBS Jubilees, Simon & Garfunkel, Miles Davis from India.
Though disrupted by a sniffly, coldy voice, RLA substitutes for his intended show this triad of three relatively long pieces this week: Carnival of the Animals, with comic verses by Ogden Nash, spoken by Noel Coward; the Firesign Theater’s “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him”; and an alternate version of “Desolation Row”. You’re invited to attend.
Walt Whitman comes to us “disorderly fleshly and sensual … eating drinking and breeding”, with many other interesting and outrageous assertions this week: “copulation is no more rank to me than death is”, or “the scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”, and the sumptuous new word “omnifutuant” – tune in to find out what this word means. And it’s all supported with music from the Waterboys, Russian Orthodox liturgy, John Lennon, Lou Reed, the Four Clefs, the Kinks, and Leonard Cohen. You’re invited to attend.
First telephone connections, with Lou Reed, The Band, Dr Hook, then spending time with Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving” and finally Walt Whitman and our connections expanding “much farther, and then farther and farther”. You are invited to attend.
Adam connected to God
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You are invited to our exploration of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese approach to life and art especially suited to this time of the year. We have music from Japan, America (Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, and more), Britain (inc. a tribute to Jack Bruce), poetry from Ryokan, William Carlos Williams, Rumi, and Stevenson, RLA’s Autumn meditation from Journey through the Seasons, and finally a famous passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: a lonely woman’s fantasy about romping naked in the water with twenty-eight men, of whom “the homeliest of them is beautiful to her”.
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Journey through the Seasons
Here is an old 209Radio show, about Winter – that stage of the Cyclical Journey.
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Here is an archived Evening under Lamplight show from February, 2009, with a forty-minute reading of Joyce Carol Oates’ wonderful story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Attend to the story as a kind of modern version of Little Red Riding Hood – with a modern-day wolf who apparently is out to destroy the girl, but perhaps, on another level, he is leading her out from the Wasteland of her vapid suburban world into the sublime possibilities waiting for her, “the vast, sunlit reaches” of a new land.
