There is a crisis at the southern border of the United States. There has been one sprawling back decades. It is a humanitarian crisis. Almost everyone agrees on that point if not with the addendum “and national security.” Yet while the current administration ponders perplexingly inhuman solutions to human problems, and other politicos spin their wheels, I the ordinary civilian cannot understand why we are not meeting this crisis in the exact same way we have met it before.
It was in our face the entire time. Colin Kaepernick on a knee. Silent, he fixed his eyes on the American flag as the national anthem played. Millions of U.S. citizen eyeballs stared back at him, many indignant. It was an old dance, a dramatic reenactment of an ancient stalemate. Kaepernick certainly isn’t the first prophet calling an idolatrous nation to repentance for generational sins. As the cacophony builds around his catalytic act, will America still be able to hear the call? Continue reading
I have lived through 10 presidential elections, five as an eligible voter, but this year is the first I sat before a TV on that night. Like a lot of people, I watched islands of blue floating in seas of red in Michigan and Wisconsin. I went to bed in resignation. I woke up to a battlefront I had not heard articulated so pointedly since I was a minor: the country versus the city. Rural America had voted for an aberrant candidate. That angle dominated the Wednesday morning news coverage and knocked my thoughts back to my home town. It is just one of millions of rural American voices, but its story has something to contribute to the thousands of explanations for the election of Donald Trump.
For the past four years, Daniel Markham has been establishing himself as a serious artist in DFW. Disintegrator is the third of a trio of albums in that span and another stone Markham has laid in a musical career that continues to impress. It validates Markham’s status as an excellent songwriter and serves as a marker of a promising trajectory.
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We now have a coda for a band we knew for not quite a decade. Alejandra Deheza is alone at its helm, her friend, muse and collaborator of nine years, Benjamin Curtis, having died at the age of 35. The band’s final chapter, SVIIB, is both a diary and eulogy of love. Continue reading
