I usually post music on Mondays, but today is a special occasion. One month ago today, I posted a philosophical piece on trust, based on the concept of four plus one. Today is the plus one of that timeline.
This original song is a culmination of a common theme in my music of angelic comfort and misplaced trust, from the triumphalist pop musings of To Make You Free to the dark tragedy of Breakdown.
I hope you enjoy and share In the Shadow of the Tree.
When I discussed the Hero archetype earlier, I pointed out that this character is the hub at the center of a wheel of other characters. In fact, in more subtle stories with lots of characters, that’s the best way to identify the Hero: figure out who has relationships to all the other characters.
As the hub at the center of a web of relationships, the Hero can often seem hollowed out, having little character himself or herself. I would assert that this is because we are meant to project ourselves into the Hero to learn how to negotiate our own relationships with the real-world characters in our lives.
But, some fictional Heroes do seem to have individual character. Perhaps not early in the story, but as the story develops the Hero can often develop a rough and tragic character from the trials of the adventure.
What’s going on here?
Get this: The worst spy in the history of British intelligence is assigned to investigate the execution of Agent MacGuffin.
What is it? A silly, GWOT-era comedy-action feature film drawing on classic spy dramas like James Bond, The Avengers, The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, Get Smart, Derek Flint, The Man From UNCLE, and I Spy. The comedic hooks are corny name puns and playing on early 21st century cultural tropes the way campy 60s era spy parodies (like Austin Powers) played on mod and flower-child culture.
Get this: Shakespeare’s beloved character as the focus of a drama incorporating all three of the classic plays in which he appears.
What is it? An eight-episode special television event based on the Falstaff plays of William Shakespeare. The two halves would be derived from Henry IV parts one and two (which run about 3 hours each on stage) while scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor would be incorporated into both seasons as an over-arcing story for comic relief.
I have often complained about unscientific categories holding back science, for example the idiotic categorization of planets by the IAU and the continued failure to properly use SI units.
Now, I want to tackle a bad legacy in archaeology: the term “Stone Age.” We break up early human prehistory into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic (or the Epipaleothic in some circles), and Neolithic based on the use of stone tools—and, later, farming. But, this is a poor system based on an observational bias called the Streetlight Effect.
The Streetlight Effect is named for an old joke about a guy found searching for his keys at night under a street light. The person finding him asks where he last knew he had the keys. The guy says, “Over there on the other side of the street, but the light is better over here.”
The term “Stone Age” is derived from the fact that stone tools survive better than tools created from other materials. If some creature makes a tool from plant fibers or bone, these tools are far less likely to present in the fossil record than stone tools. It’s on the “dark side” of the archeological street.
The world is entering an era of instability. For many years, people have complained of a crisis of leadership in the world.
There is no crisis of leadership in the world, because there really is no such thing as leadership. What we have is a crisis of followership.
I’ve posted some rough songs lately for Music Monday. A song about suicide, a song about depravation, a song about anger and revenge, a song about murder.
Today, I attempt to make up for this long stretch of tragedy with a soft jazz tune on acoustic guitar, a poetic Sunday afternoon road trip around small town America.
I hope you enjoy Ration.
