Afternoon Playlist

Office Hours.  Blech.  Cue shuffle.  Roll, baby.  Roll.  Lyrics are straight and true, so let’s hear it for poets with guitars, chanting things up like Hosea and Amos.  Whoot.

Makes concentrating on student papers, however, a bit more of a challenge.

Money Quote: “The cauliflower ears, the crocodile tears, hearts too hard for breaking / Hobble down to your undertow / The lunatic fringe by the quackery /  Miracle sludge from the factory / come to trouble the waters / angels and otters / psychosomatics cleaning their attics / they learn grace is the smell of rain.”

From Hell To Breakfast Christmas Edition: Musical Review With Recipe. Bruce Cockburn's "Christmas" and Orange Muffins

Updated on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 2:17PM by Otter

If you said to me, "Otter, we are going to shipwreck you on a desert island where it is always Christmas and never winter, and you get only one Christmas CD and one thing to eat," the choice would be fairly clear.

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A Look Back: Christianity, Satire, and Irony in America in the 1980's

Really, so long as there is a “Christian” subculture, Christian moralizing will always be incredibly thin. To fence oneself off from a culture is to give up the right to speak to it. You have to see clearly what you’re talking about, not as an outsider, but as a citizen, committed to its well-being.

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From Hell To Breakfast: Musical Review With Recipe: Rolling Thunder Revue & Turkey Gumbo

Consider a Lethal Dose

Folk rock dips its ladle into American roots, blues, jazz, and rock, but it’s something much greater than the sum of its parts.

Like gumbo.

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From Hell To Breakfast: Musical Review, With Recipe: Raising Sand & Spinach Madeline

On those occassions when you feel like your raw intelligence is that of a postage stamp compared to your kids, friends, enemies, and other people whom you suspect of having more money, better breath, and better sex than you have, you might consider popping in the unlikely CD Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss. 

Be sure the CD player is on shuffle. This CD is rigged to make the most of Plant's subtle, crooner-ish, bluesy, been-to-hell-and-left-my-soul-there voice and Allison Krauss's unearthly I-was-born-old harmonies. Consequently some of the songs feel a little long unless you're crazy about roots music meeting the blues and smooching them. (I happen to be.) It will help not to know what's coming up. 

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