Hank William tombstone at the Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Steve Beard.

By Steve Beard

The sun was bright and unforgiving as I paid my respects at the gravesite of Hank Williams on a bluff in Montgomery, Alabama. A cowboy hat would have helped. The heat was a far cry from the dreary night of January 1, 1953, when much of the South was covered in snow and ice at the time of the country music star’s untimely death in the back seat of his 1952 baby blue Cadillac on the way to a concert up north. He was 29 years old.

“Praise the Lord – I Saw the Light” is etched in the massive marble gravestone with rays of light descending from the heavens, splicing right through his legendary name. The column is crowned with musical notes. Below, the base of the monument is adorned by a dozen titles of his boxcar worth of hits such as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Lovesick Blues,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive.” Hank didn’t just tug at your heartstrings, he yanked them. Yanked hard. Dejection, cheating, and loneliness.

He also wrote loads of gospel songs. “I Saw the Light” was the most famous. No one mistook Hank for a saint, but his fans could relate to his message about one glad morning – someday in the future – when the old will be made new and there will be no more tears or toil. Situated above his first name, there is relatively understated bronze portrait of Hank playing the guitar with his leg propped up on a bar stool. The lyrics echoed through my mind.

I wandered so aimless, life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear savior in
Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night
Praise the Lord, I saw the light Continue reading →

Pretty stoked to be in Hawaii on Duke Kahanamoku’s 131st birthday. It would be have been a great gift to him to know that Carissa Moore won the first gold medal in surfing at the Tokyo Olympics. She did Hawaiians proud. “Stopped by to share my leis with Duke to honor our father of modern day surfing and the ambassador of Aloha 🌺 Surfing wouldn’t be what it is today without him and all those who have come before,” she wrote on Instagram.

Duke’s love of the ocean — manifest through his Olympic gold medals in swimming and pioneering expertise in surfing — has been a total inspiration and has only deepened my love for Hawaii and the values of Aloha. Happy birthday Duke! Mahalo.

Many years ago when high school life was simple and zesty in the early 1980s, I was more than mildly obsessed with an Orange County rockabilly band called the Red Devils. My friend Jonny Ray slapped a blonde doghouse bass while his brother Dave Lee shredded a Gretsch Silver Jet and Scottie Campbell beat the drums. In the center of the stage was siren who shipwrecked the hearts of many young fans. Emy Lee had a voice that was created to shake rafters. Regrettably, the memory of that foursome’s time on the stage is only preserved via a few YouTube videos.

Through the miracle of technology, I was blasted back to yesteryear last Sunday afternoon when I was able to see Emy Lee perform online with fabulous musicians such as Kid Ramos (Fabulous Thunderbirds) and John Bazz (Blasters). Spectacular. One of the strange and wonderful sensations of life is being able to close your eyes and find yourself transported through well-preserved vocals and piping hot music. The brief set with selections from legends such as Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Wanda Jackson, and Janis Martin went by with the speed of a bullet train but brought a truckload of satisfaction.

The Los Angeles Times once described Emy Lee as a “magnetic singer” and the OC Weekly referred to her as “Ava Gardner in cowboy boots.” In her brilliant essay in John Doe’s book, “More Fun in the New World,” Maria McKee of Lone Justice fame described Emy Lee as “a gorgeous Puerto Rican girl dressed in perfect 1950s clothes” who “played a Charlie Christian guitar” and was being compared to Patsy Cline. It was all truth. Decades later, I can’t be more grateful for  Stellar Shows and Concerts as well as Campus JAX in Newport Beach for my nostalgic Sunday afternoon Zoom call to less complicated days.

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd confer with John Lee Hooker on set of the Blues Brothers.

Twenty years after his death, it is an exceptional day to remember John Lee Hooker, a blues guitar legend and King of the Boogie (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001). For fans like me, he first emerged on to my radar because of his appearance in the 1980 movie “Blues Brothers” with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.

In respectful memory, enjoy a few excerpts from Charles Shaar Murray’s “Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century” in 2000.

• “Slouched in his chair and protected by his shades, Hooker works through his tales of lust and anger, sorrow and loneliness, regret and despair. They call certain kinds of blues ‘low down,’ and sometimes what is meant by that is a social judgment on certain sorts of Continue reading →

Rosary beads and Bible belonging to Mary, Queen of Scots, pictured at Arundel Castle in January 1968. Authorities recently announced the rosary’s theft from the English stronghold. (RDImages / Epics / Getty Images)

By Nora McGreevy, Smithsonianmag.com

Thieves snuck in through a window at Arundel Castle, a 1,000-year-old palace in West Sussex, England, on Friday night, smashing a glass cabinet and—in a matter of minutes—making off with a trove of gold and silver items worth more than $1.4 million, per a Sussex Police report.

Alarms sounded on the premises around 10:30 p.m., alerting authorities, who arrived on the scene after the perpetrators had fled, reports BBC News. Police discovered the likely getaway car—set on fire and abandoned in a nearby town—and an empty display case that once held artifacts including a gold rosary owned by Mary Stuart, otherwise known as Mary, Queen of Scots.

Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble. Credit…Tony Luong for The New York Times

By Ruth Graham,  New York Times  

BOSTON — Before she entered the Daughters of St. Paul convent in 2010, Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble read a biography of the order’s founder, an Italian priest who was born in the 1880s. He kept a ceramic skull on his desk, as a reminder of the inevitability of death. Sister Aletheia, a punk fan as a teenager, thought the morbid curio was “super punk rock,” she recalled recently. She thought vaguely about acquiring a skull for herself someday.

These days, Sister Aletheia has no shortage of skulls. People send her skull mugs and skull rosaries in the mail, and share photos of their skull tattoos. A ceramic skull from a Halloween store sits on her desk. Her Twitter name includes a skull and crossbones emoji.

That is because since 2017, she has made it her mission to revive the practice of memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning “Remember your death.” The concept is to intentionally think about your own death every day, as a means of appreciating the present and focusing on the future. It can seem radical in an era in which death — until very recently — has become easy to ignore.

“My life is going to end, and I have a limited amount of time,” Sister Aletheia said. “We naturally tend to think of our lives as kind of continuing and continuing.” Continue reading →

Nick Cave (2012) by Bleddyn Butcher

In The Red Hand File, punk rock legend Nick Cave, answers questions from fans. What follows is an inquiry from Peter from Hanover, Canada. What follows is Cave’s response.

My question is about how you perceive the utility of suffering. What is the value of suffering to us as individuals, and to us as a species as we go through our life carrying suffering around, like some mind-numbing, soul crushing weight?

Dear Peter: What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices – we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.

In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately we reduce the world’s net suffering, and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.

To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world’s suffering. Most sin is simply one person’s suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.

The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.

Love, Nick