Every year a bill is introduced at the RI General Assembly to legalize recreational use of cannabis, regulating and taxing it similarly to alcohol. The state legalized medical marijuana in 2006 and decriminalized possession of small quantities for personal use in 2013, but that was the last major change in the law. More than two […]
I think we are all saddened and upset about what is happening in Houston. The worst rainstorm in US history. Houston will be years in recovery and we can only hope that the numbers of people who died in the floods remains fairly small. But I am also thinking about how the ruling […]
Music fans from throughout the state recently turned on their cars to find Christian rock exuding from their speakers unexpectedly. Even for the conscientious listeners of WBRU, who’d known for weeks that a seismic shift in local broadcast was coming, having your tuned radio suddenly spit out the Christian rock reality when you turn the […]
RIP, BRU There is sadness at Casa Diablo over the demise of the legendary WBRU. And it is indeed the end of the line for one of Little Rhody’s signature stations, which from the late 1960s through the 1980s was the hippest station in the state, featuring an array of music that was not pre-programmed […]
(Originally published December 23, 2008; this is re-published here as a sidebar to my review of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht performed by Burbage Theatre: motifri.com/galileo-burbage-2017 ) Pope Benedict XVI in a speech Sunday praised Galileo as a man of faith whose legacy could help bridge the gap between religion and science. Pope John Paul II […]
At 11:59pm on August 31, 2017, Providence’s media landscape will change forever: 95.5 WBRU, Brown University’s radio station that was for over 40 years a haven for alternative rock and local music, sold their FM signal to the Educational Media Foundation’s Christian music radio service K-Love. When the news of the impending sale got out […]
Is RI Senator Jack Reed working with Kim Jong-un of North Korea? “The only thing Senator Reed and His Sublime Supremacy of Divine Divinity have in common is that they both think President Trump is crazy. This does not imply an alliance,” is what an attractive spokesperson for Jong-un might have said, if he let […]
It has been exactly one year since I wrote my piece “Walking While Black.” Yesterday I watched the Unite the Alt-Right rally on a live Facebook feed and saw a car plow through a crowd of anti-protestors. America is at odds with herself over Colin Kaepernick not being signed to an NFL team over his silent […]
Fools Rush In “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” – Mark Twain Samuel Clemens’ wise observation seems applicable to both our President Macho Man and North Korean dictator or Supreme Being of the Gods and Marvel Comics or whatever he calls himself, Kim Jong-un, as they puff […]
At this point in your life (ie, sentient enough to pick up a Motif) you’ve heard a joke about hipster kids and their expensive coffee, artsy style and love of underground music. A common part of that joke is the young, white rich kids moving into neighborhoods whose culture tends to lean more toward black […]