Errabundis

Errabundis Cover

If you haven’t already read Errabundis by Carol Budinger, I hope you will consider giving it a go.  It is beautiful, original and very satisfying.  It is also a deeply refreshing counterbalance to the wallow-in-meanness themes that pervade much current epic fantasy.

Errabundis is a love story on personal, social and cosmic levels.  In the face of great peril, through their care and kindness, the core characters discover who they truly are and that what they do matters.  Their actions not only save their world, but also change the underpinnings of all existence for the better.  A fine, timely and comforting work.

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The Errabundis website

The Tunnel

The Tunnel

The big and small screens currently offer lots of opportunities to appreciate “good sociopaths”. Perhaps because, lacking typical human responses, sociopaths appear driven by artificial programming – and at a cultural level there may be a growing intuition that we will soon be obliged to make room in our world for non-human intelligence. But whatever drives the fascination, “The Tunnel” introduces into the pantheon of highly entertaining fictional good sociopaths a marvelous young French woman named Elise. And part of her charm is her conscious decision to embrace habits of behavior that are beneficial to society. So much so that she has become a police sergeant in the precinct of Calais.

Her foil is an all too human English inspector named Karl whose blunders of love and embarrassed kindness slowly rub off on Elise. And she, so desirous of doing right no matter the cost to herself, awakens in Karl a fierceness that has enough momentum to push him over the edge into heroic action when an opportunity to “get it right this time” comes along.

There are two seasons. Best if you can binge watch. Much of it is full of villainous mayhem that provides the sometimes unlikely pretext for Karl and Elise to show each other how to become their better selves. I don’t think it will spoil the fun if I mention that one of the amazing things the story brings into the light is the paradoxical idea that wholeness may not be possible, but loss can offer a glimpse of what wholeness might be like. The last few minutes of the last episode are some of the most beautiful, moving and memorable I’ve ever experienced.


A later thought (September 2018): This is, of course, just my two cents…there is a Season 3, but I strongly discouraging anyone from watching it. The creative team said all they had to say in the first two seasons. And sadly, to put it another way, they had nothing to say in the third season except nonsense. I wish I could un-see it.

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8mm Ideas – Small Works of Wonder

8mm Workspace

For many happy years, Molly and Ryan were my neighbors. To give you a sense of their style, a while back they brought home a beautiful, petite and anxious rescue dog named Stella. One of my fondest memories of the trio is seeing them at a distance walking together in the neighborhood. Something unexpected would happen and Stella would bark. Always, Molly and Ryan’s response was the same. They would lean down and say something gentle to their small friend, and all would be well. If called upon to draw an image of patience and kindness a tableau of the three of them in silhouette would be what I’d try to sketch.

Molly is an artist whose work can be seen at Molly C. Meng. I’m especially a fan of her cards. I suppose greeting cards is the conventional name for what I’m talking about, but I don’t think that really works in Molly’s case since she is a purveyor of sly entertainment – of complex ideas expressed in compact images.

In the 60s Marshall McLuhan proposed that the way that an idea is expressed conveys a message that is more significant than the content of the idea. In other words, I might employ a Google search to learn the answer to a particular question. And though the answer I obtain might seem important to me in the moment, what’s more important is the implications for my life of the fact that I can secure answers in that way. The implications for my life is the message, but I can only receive that message if I look beyond the immediate answer I receive and contemplate how my life is changed by being able to secure answers in that way.

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