BAND LOGO: Stray Cats singer / guitarist Brian Setzer sings at Pacific Amphitheater, Tuesday Night.///
////ADDITIONAL INFO//// 02_straycats.0723.ks – shot 07/22/08 – Ken Steinhardt The Orange County Register.

Happy Birthday Brian Setzer! In the early 1980s, the Stray Cats front man stood up in the moshpit of the punk rock/new wave revolution and daringly waved a big, greasy flag for rockabilly. Back when I was a teenage punk rocker, this guy opened up the world of rockabilly and roots music and spurred my desire to play in a band. Setzer captured the imagination of the freshman class of the emerging MTV generation with his peroxide pompadour, pleated baggies, patent leather Creepers, and his 1959 Gretsch guitar strapped over his leather clad shoulder. He’s never been content to play niche music — always turning to innovation. So grateful for what Stray Cats music meant to me and my friends. All the best.

Happy birthday wishes to the late, great Carl Perkins, writer of classic rockabilly hits: “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” and “Honey, Don’t.” Killer lyrics: “You can burn my house / Steal my car / Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar / Well do anything that you want to do / But uh-uh, honey lay off of my blue suede shoes.” Nothing more needs to be said to state his place in rock ‘n’ roll history than Paul McCartney’s remark that “if there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.” Happy Birthday, Carl.

For the rock n rollers, skeptics, searchers, saints and sinners, NBC nailed the greatest story ever told. He is risen! What a spectacle. Thank you John Legend, Brandon V. Dixon, Alice Cooper, Sara Bareilles, and the rest of the mohawked and tattooed cast.  #JesusChristSuperstarLive

“Holy Saturday is the day we celebrate the silence of the tomb. The silence of loss. The silence of absence. The silence of graves that our love ones lay in. It’s not a fun holiday. But it’s a true one. And maybe that truth will set us free. Because the truth of loss helps us embrace the freedom of life… however fleeting it is.” –Scott Erickson

Check out Scott’s Stations of the Cross HERE

Faith-based films. (Edel Rodriguez / For the Times)

By Justin Chang

My reservations have little to do with standard criticisms like awkward performances or clunky production values — venial sins, surely, for new filmmakers trying to find their way. What rankles about a cinematic sermon like “Letters to God” or a morally offensive wartime drama like “Little Boy” isn’t the mediocrity of the craft; it’s the calculation inherent in the enterprise. There’s a smug complacency with which these movies preach a message ostensibly meant to set the world passionately ablaze.
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Paul (James Faulkner), left, reminds Luke (Jim Caviezel) that love is the only way in “Paul, Apostle of Christ.” Photo by Mark Cassar, courtesy of CTMG

By Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service

In the film, Luke (Caviezel) meets with Paul (James Faulkner) in prison to record his dramatic conversion and other reflections into what would become the Book of Acts.

Meantime, the early church struggles against persecution by the Roman government — and how to respond to it. “Christ called us to care for the world, not rule it,” one character protests when others discuss breaking into the prison to free Paul and overthrow the government.

“At this moment in our culture and in our world I think we really are starting to doubt this idea of grace and mercy and forgiveness and love, and Paul’s story is such a strong example of just the enormity of God’s grace and love, and I think it’s something that’s so needed right now,” writer-director Andrew Hyatt said.

Hyatt said he hoped the film would help viewers see biblical figures like Paul as real people, “not beautiful statues with halos on their heads” and books like Acts and Paul’s letters as “lived experience,” not something that came from a “preachy, heady space.”

Read entire column HERE

For those who observe, have a blessed Good Friday. Elvis Costello has been an essential troubadour in my life’s soundtrack. Every Good Friday, I ponder his lyrics: “How deep is the red our redeemer bled / The debt of our sins to settle? How deep is the red? How deep is the red? How deep is the red our redeemer bled?” While Costello’s not particularly religious, he asks the probing questions of an artist with a deep soul. #elviscostello