News

Todd Alan returns to music with Earth Changes

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CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. – Earth Changes, the new album by musician Todd Alan, includes a dire warning in his song “We Can Unite.”

“It really is so simple, the end of the road is near,” Alan sings as his plaintive, John Denver-ish tenor meanders over his mellow banjo playing. “The way we’ve run our politics, we’ll just increase the fear, and fear will breed more violence. The killing will go on until some really foolish man ignites the atom bomb.”

Alan obviously penned the song while watching the news crawl on CNN one recent night, right? Er, no. The singer/guitarist/banjoist recorded the 10 songs of Earth Changes in 2006.

News

Artist Gabrielle Tesfaye channels spirits, ancestors for new film

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CHIANG MAI, Thailand — From the early 1600s to the mid-1800s, living African slaves would sometimes be thrown overboard from slave ships sailing the Middle Passage, as the transatlantic voyage of the slave trade was called. If the slave ships faced water shortages or any kidnapped Africans came down with a disease, slaves could be tossed overboard, sometimes chained together en masse. “So many bodies of dead or dying Africans were jettisoned into the ocean that sharks regularly followed the slave ships on their westward journey,” according to that encyclopedia entry. In the new film The Water Will Carry Us Home by multidisciplinary artist Gabrielle Tesfaye, those ships are followed by a very different entity: Yemaya, the Yoruba orisha of the sea and the mother of all life. “There are many stories within African spirituality of water spirits following the slave ships, Mami Wata, the presence of Yemaya,” Tesfaye said in an email interview from her home in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

News

Dragons, giants, and dwarves: Didrik saga translated into English

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CUMBRIA, England — For Didrik of Bern, battling a queen who shape-shifts into a dragon, dueling with giants who wield iron bars, fighting alongside the son of Weland the smith, and hanging out with Attila the Hun were all in a day’s work. The exploits of King Didrik, a legendary, heroic, but not always victorious warrior, were told in the Middle Ages in Germanic regions and Scandinavia. The saga of Didrik (also called Dietrich in German or Thidrek in Old Norse) was written down in Norway in the 13th century, and a Swedish version was written around 1500. For years the only English version was a 1988 translation of the Old Norse text by E. R. Haymes, titled The Saga of Thidrek of Bern. That book is out of print, and copies on Amazon run from $369 to $2,034.

Culture

Tarot roundup: manga, Greek gods, Alice, and TV

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Zeus, Dr. Who, Alice in Wonderland, Medusa, those Sex and the City gals, and manga-influenced art are featured in new tarot decks. Here’s a look. Mystical Manga Tarot
Barbara Moore, illustrated by Rann, 78 cards, 175-page book (Llewellyn). Barbara Moore calls herself a “tarot shaman” and says she uses the cards to explore “the magic and mystery of everyday life.”

She’s also the co-creator, with various artists, of Tarot in Wonderland, Cats Inspirational Oracle Cards, Earth Wisdom Oracle, the Gilded Tarot, Hip Witch Tarot Kit, Steampunk Tarot, the Vampire Tarot of Eternal Night, and other decks. “A shaman is someone who, among other things, travels to worlds in non-ordinary reality to search for wisdom and guidance,” Moore writes on her website.

News

Documentary film depicts binding ritual on Trump, NRA

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WASHINGTON — In a modest apartment, David Salisbury leads seven of his fellow Witches in a ritual around a small table as documentary filmmaker Patrick J. Foust records the ceremony. This ritual, however, is quite different from the placid dumb supper held by Salisbury and friends that Foust had captured the previous Samhain. The table is covered with not only branches, tealight candles, an athame, and a small cauldron sitting atop a disc-shaped pentacle, but also a five-dollar bill painted red — to symbolize blood — and a piece of paper with the huge block letters “NRA.”

The voice of Salisbury, who is one of the leaders of Firefly House, is more strident, too: “Hone in on our intention. This tragedy of rampant gun violence, murder, mass killings – all these terrible, painful things that we are seeking to stop, to put an end to this night . .