Category: Reviews

When NBC presented the mini-series The 60s a few years back, it was preceded by several months of hype. According to the ad masters, this was going to be the definitive story of the sixties, as an important a movie for us boomers as Gone With the Wind had been for my grandparents’ generation or From Here To Eternity had been for those who’d reached maturity under the cloud of the second world war.

While the ad campaign, which began airing during the summer re-run season (the show ran in January), was certainly deserving of an Emmy, the movie itself was nothing but typical movie-of-the-week fare that could have aptly been called A Very Brady Sixties. Even though there were many historical nuances that I was surprised to see that the producers got right, there was just as much that was very wrong. The caricatures of hippies and student radicals looked as if they came right off the set of the old Dragnet series and the movie seemed to reflect anti-drug and pro-nuclear family values that were the antithesis of much that the decade represented.

If I were to describe Black Ice and Banana Peels in one sentence, it would be this: It thoroughly explores the kaleidoscope of tricks that the mind plays on us. These are the real mind games, and this book helps us recognize them.

Black Ice & Banana Peels is not only intellectually stimulating, but it also provides practical ways to beat the mind at its own games. You discover early on that Mr. Bender has a knack for understanding and explaining mental processes and states of mind.

“Blue Mother EarthAn Obsession With Time”

A CD by Nick ShiresGabriel Publications Ltd. reviewed by Christine Hall

Putting together a good meditation CD must be a thankless task for an accomplished musician. To begin with, the artist must write and perform music that is designed to not only soothe the soul, but which can unobtrusively remain in the background during a meditation session. At the same time, the compositions should be texturally rich and filled with complex passages. Most of all, the music on such a CD must avoid any comparison with Muzak, otherwise known as elevator music. This is much like the task that faces a composer of soundtracks for motion pictures, except that here it’s the listener’s soul and emotions that are being enhanced, rather than an on-screen love scene or action sequence. This is exactly the job that British musician and composer Nick Shires has undertaken for his CD Blue Mother Earth, An Obsession With Time. The twelve tunes contained on this disc are symphonic meditations on twelve separate one word themes, like “Awakening,” “Joy,” and “Achievement.” Although each track neatly fits into the overall theme of the album, each is also complete unto itself, and Shires deftly avoids any pretentious or oversimplified Yanni-esque influences that have become much too common in the world of “New Age” music.

On a spring morning in 1999, a delivery van rattled down the long driveway to Joseph Jenkins’ country home in Pennsylvania to deliver a manila envelope. Inside the envelope was an official looking legal document and another envelope, this one white and letter-sized. The legal document was from a group of lawyers in Montana, informing him that his Great Aunt Lucille Boggs had died on April 26. Following her instructions, they were forwarding the enclosed envelope to him, which contained a letter from Aunt Lucy, along with a check for $10,000.

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“Big things come in small packages.” Like most clichés, we’ve heard this phrase so many times that it’s lost its impact, if not it’s meaning. Clichés are like that, which is why we’re supposed to avoid them when writing. We’re not supposed to write phrases like ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

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We’ve made death a scarier subject than it should be. We celebrate youth, the beginning of life, throughout our culture, yet we deny and turn away from the end of life. We don’t make it easy for those we love when they are dying, for we bring them our fear and send them to the next world with the understanding that whatever is awaiting will be awful – or worse. Ironically, we’ve made dying a fate worse than death.

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In the days since 911 we've seen a rather curious emergence of patriotism in the most unexpected places. Visits to Pagan web sites, usually bastions of anti-patriotism, offer bumper stickers and decals of the American flag emblazoned with the caption “Goddess Bless America.” In concert, Crosby, Stills & Nash, once the defacto harmonizers of anti-war sentiment, extol praises to these great United States. Even Gary Trudeau has claimed in his comic strip, “Doonesbury,” that the terrorist attacks have given the flag and patriotism back to liberal, ACLU loving, Americans. The creed of both the hippie freaks and the right wing militia types, “I love my country but fear my government,” seems to have been replaced with, “Praise Bush and launch the cruise missiles.”

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Several years back I was talking to an Indo-American guru, or teacher, who confided in me that he believed that only people who'd spent past lives in India would stay devoted to any sort of advanced yogic practice. Otherwise, he said, they'd find it too weird and different from their American cultural indoctrination and would be unable to make the leap in consciousness necessary for the hard work involved in practices such as Kriya yoga.

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