Monkey Catching the Moon
Ekaku Hakuin (Japanese, 1685 – 1768)
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Unreal and Real Announcements . . .
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be part of Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau for 2024 and 2025. And we’re booking ahead now! If you or someone you know are in Washington State and represent a library, middle or high school, museum, historical society, community center, civic or any other nonprofit organization, I can be booked for a 60-90 minute presentation through Humanities Washington…for no fee, they cover it!
Just hit that HUMANITIES WASHINGTON SPEAKERS BUREAU link above for my page (don’t let that big bad coyote scare you), say s’wonderful! and then navigate to “Host a Speaker” in the left hand column…that’ll get the booking process started.
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Or reach out to me HERE, and I’ll walk you through the process.
But what’s it all about? Kirkus Reviews had this to say about my newest book, Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love: “…a thoughtful examination of shared attributes of Tricksters across genres, time periods, and cultures, from the Native American coyote and Zulu weasel to “The Fool” in King Lear and Bugs Bunny. Though the book’s firm command of the scholarly literature surrounding Tricksters will appeal to academics, its approachable…jovial, writing style will also appealto a wide audience.” And Tricking Power has won a 2023 Silver EVVY Award and Bronze Indie Award!
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Out of Elvis’s 31 movie roles, Harum Scarum is ranked 28th by The Wrap.com. It’s “…a film which lets lots of white people play Arab roles (yikes) and romanticizes harems (double yikes), to the point that a little kid sings a song about how she dreams of being a glamorous, beautiful slave (all the yikes in the world).” We’ve come so far in recognizing equality and respect among genders. We still have so far to go. I hope you like the nonetheless cool photo, taken in Memphis in ’14.
Elvis was a unique talent and a unique personality in unique circumstances. Baz Luhrmann’s film “Elvis” knocks on that door, and it’s fabulous, his best. Regardless of whichever facts may have been modified in the interest of cinema narrative, the movie speaks the truth about how capitalist exploitation derails talent. Catch this heartfelt, incisive, and dazzling portrait of the artist as a young man (Elvis died at 42) when and where you can.
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…is another matter entirely. Anyone even skimming psychedelic British pop of the sixties knows “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The song was Number One for six weeks in the summer of ’67, no easy feat amid the flood of talent making records that year. And it owes melodic debt to J.S. Bach’s “Air” from Suite No 3 in D (Air on a G String) and Percy Sledge’s 1966 “When A Man Loves A Woman.”
The legend* is that the famous lines “’16 vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast’ were written by Keith Reid, who had been struck by overhearing Guy Stevens, a nightclub disc jockey [and legendary producer], telling a woman at an all-night drug-fuelled party: ‘You’ve just turned a whiter shade of pale’. Stevens also came up with the group’s name Procol Harum, a mis-spelling of the Latin phrase Procul Harun (roughly meaning “far beyond these things”), which was also the pedigree name of his friend’s cat. Another explanation is that it was a corruption of Procellarum, a vast ocean on the Moon.
But I leave you with the title cut from their successful sophomore album, [and may you] Shine On Brightly, recorded when Robin Trower was still in the band …I highly recommend that LP as well as “A Salty Dog” should you choose to delve into this eclectic, melodic, and heady band. *The Sydney Morning Herald’s obituary of Gary Brooker (1945-2022)
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If not, ya gotta click here! If you do, email me a picture of you holding it, your mailing address, and your permission to use the picture (for a collage of you fine folks), and I’ll send you a free signed copy of my first Trickster book, Disruptive Play. The books are companions that play well together. Send your pic to contact@shepherdsiegel.com, or…
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