The Front Porch
The experience of living in modern times is defined by the pace of change being faster than human beings can process in the moment. While we are looking in one place, the reality that we took for granted a little bit to the left or the right has become unrecognizable. In fact, too many things are changing at rates too various for us to take them in all at once, let alone to imagine how all these changes going on around us might all fit together. We search for familiar landmarks like statues, hills, or streams to guide us, and when we find that they are still the same we breathe a sigh of relief, even though everything around them has changed, and continues changing.
One of the main differences between human beings and dogs and horses is that we live inside of notions of the past, the present, and the future. My dog knows the difference between day and night, but she has no idea whether I’ve been gone for …
Critic's Corner
Joni Mitchell and Neil Young Are Back on Spotify
In January 2022, Neil Young left the crappy streaming service Spotify for two reasons. First, because of its despicable music-destroying streaming quality, and second, because the platform hosted Joe Rogan's podcast, which Young believed had spread misinformation during the pandemic. Joni Mitchell, Neil’s longtime friend, followed suit, departing the platform soon after he did. Now, both singers have abandoned their vows and returned to Spotify, somewhat unexpectedly.
Neil explained that because Rogan’s podcast had since been added to Amazon and iTunes, “I cannot just leave Apple and Amazon, like I did with Spotify, because my music would have very little streaming outlet to music lovers at all, so I have returned to Spotify.” While Joni Mitchell hasn't said much about the situation, we can assume she is rejoining the platform for …
Frontier Justice
You can’t train a squirrel to be a seeing-eye dog
The German love for beer kept them from being Democrats
That wife of his believed ‘every goddam word’ of the Bible
The first and only time I ever saw a squirrel without a tail was at the home of Edmond Decatur Harrison, the county judge of Blanco County, Texas. In the 1950s, before my brother and I were born, my father, fresh out of law school, had been elected county attorney in the thinly populated hills west of Austin. My parents, both natives of Austin, had moved back to the state capital in the sixties when my father got a position on the staff of the attorney general of Texas. But our family frequently visited Judge Harrison and his wife in Blanco.
In the sixties and seventies most of the folks in the county and the surrounding Texas Hill Country were descendants of the original German settlers who had arrived in the 1840s and 1850s. Persecuted by the Confederates during the Civil War and Reconstruction because of the antislavery, pro-Union sentiments that many of the immigrants shared, and harassed again during …
