It's the Christian season of Lent and for most people this means putting on the dour face.  Indeed, the Episcopalian service for Morning Prayer in Lent speaks of those things (see quote below).  But it can also be a season of great joy as one strips off the grime of the preceding year and once again turns around (metanoia) to face the future with a clean face.

For the first time since a child, I gave up something for Lent ... drinking!  Yes, a six-week break from martinis!  And yes, I have to admit it was as much to take a break from drinking as anything theological.

The other night, as Bryan and I were talking at Pangea (there, another plug for my favorite restaurant), the subject of AIDS in Africa came up.  And specifically the cost of drugs there and what we could do about it.  Could we indeed turn around the stance of drug companies?  Perhaps not.  In my opinion (and, like Dennis Miller, I'm constantly commenting), all we can really do is stand up and be counted.  We still have much to learn from Dr. King and the Mahatma.

Jane Hudson, who with her husband, Jeff Hudson, had two incredible bands in the late 70s and beyond (the Rentals and Jeff + Jane) is now a professor in Boston.  As part of her seminar, she maintains a weblog which is a catch-all for all sorts of interesting things.  Here's what she had to say about it:

“It’s odd to think of it out in the world, but Yahoo seems to be offering it as one of the links in a Jane Hudson search.  The class is Second Year Graduate Seminar for the Tufts/Museum School Master of Fine Arts Program.  We have a degree-granting relationship with [them].

“This is a cross-disciplinary group, artists from a variety of media including, painting, sculpture, performance, film, video, photography, and a mixture of media in installation works.  So the site is eclectic, reflecting class-specific issues as well as a range of information available on the web and through e-mail sources.  It is a weblog, a site which is updated frequently, by me, with references from students.”

Books:  Check out Elijah's Mantle, the latest in the series of JourneyBooks put out by my bosses, Church Publishing.  This one was edited by Johnny Ross.  From the back cover:

[It] is the story of Harold T. Lewis’s lifelong love affair with the Episcopal Church beginning with growing up in a strict, black, High Church parish in Brooklyn during the waning “glory days of Anglo-Catholic triumphalism....”  But as he embarks upon the priesthood and encounters racism, discord, and controversy in the church of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Lewis realizes how handily the Christian formation of his youth—considered obsolete by some—has prepared him for every modern challenge.

John Fahey, a ground-breaking guitarist whose influence spread from the folk underground to the fringes of avant-garde rock, died on Thursday, February 22 at a hospital in Salem, Oregon.  He was sixty-one and had been in ill health for several years.

He presaged a D.I.Y movement that wouldn’t flower for decades by putting $300 worth of his minimum-wage earnings on the line to start his own label, Takoma Records, a veritable clearinghouse of “uncommercial” guitar talent, releasing albums by Leo Kottke and Peter Lang and helping nurture the talent of the young George Winston.

Forced to sell Takoma’s assets to Chrysalis Records in the mid-Seventies, he retreated from the music business and fell into deep emotional and financial distress.  Subsisting on sales of musical rarities – including his own – he was missing in action for more than a decade until an early-Nineties boom of interest.

Fahey roared through the late Nineties, undeterred by his battles with diabetes (from alcoholism) and Epstein-Barre Disease and using his Revenant label as a launching point for several volumes of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, as well as his own new recordings – one of which was finished shortly before his death.
 Redacted from an obituary by David Sprague in Rolling Stone (February 24, 2001)

If you'd like to see some great old pictures of New York, check out the Berenice Abbott exhibit.

On Saturday night, March 24, Bryan and I caught the HBO adaptation of WIT (the adaptation of the play written by and starring Emma Thompson).  It was more moving than we thought it would be.

And Bryan continues putting pictures up on the web.  Check them out and encourage him to continue by going to the Yahoo web site that supports them.

On Tuesday, March 27, Bryan and I had a very nice dinner with Tony Jewiss+ at the Indian restaurant Haveli, at 100 Second Avenue.  It is a somewhat upscale restaurant with a full bar and featuring selections from all areas of India.  Try this one before bothering with the lesser ones on Sixth Street.

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and mourning.  Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord, your God.”