Culture vulture

Wit and wisdom of Culture Vulture
Every year at this time, wise, kindly old Uncle Culture Vulture reflects upon the year that is drawing to a close and reviews the columns he has written over the past 12 months to see what bits of genuine wisdom or laughable presumption can be collected to summarize the profile of the year just passed. Here for your pleasure and edification are the phrases and insights that illuminated 2006.

“You don’t always have to explain everything or know why or how it’s happening. Sometimes you just have to accept on faith that you’re allowed to experience a moment of joy and peace despite everything else that’s going on in the world."—The lovely I. Daphne St. Brie (1-19-06)

Culture Vulture has a recurring fantasy that someday the polarity of our government will reverse itself, and all the collective resources currently being expended on environmental destruction and punitive violence will be redirected to ecological enhancement and rehabilitative healing. (2-2-06)

If all drugs were made pure, legal and reasonably priced, and every citizen was fully informed about the possible deleterious results of their use, I believe Darwinism and/or the grace of God would take care of the rest. (3-16-06)

If you have any doubt about the vileness rampant in the current administration, the fact that it is imprisoning a 78-year-old woman for expressing her political views ought to open your eyes. (5-11-06)

And so we contemplate the spider, a passive predator that waits for her prey to come to her, and the vulture, an opportunistic scavenger who must actively hunt for prey that is beyond all hope of escape. (7-6-06)

Watching a panel of non- or semi-comedians take humorous potshots at each other to raise money for a friend’s medical bills is a way of attaining living proof that, while not all people are created equally funny, the vast majority of people are created equally funny looking. (8-3-06)

We’re not here to get caught up in judging superficial appearances. Lithe young bodies are all well and good, especially when they’re smiling and dancing and giving each other hugs and not marching off to war to be blown to bits, but our concern here is music. (8-31-06)

Spending a year creating essentially private music that comes and goes like a breeze ruffling the leaves of the camphor trees along Eighth Street may not be the ideal career arc for a band bent on attaining mass popularity, but for a group of musicians for whom the creation of previously unheard, never-to-be-repeated sounds is a worthwhile end in itself, said year is an elongated, multifaceted moment composed of all the instants when we looked up in mutual recognition of a particularly euphonious or otherwise interesting passage. (10-26-06)

A wedding is so much more than just the formal joining of one couple; it is a binding together of all the worldly forces that create the family histories that shape our individual lives and guide us to our friendships and influence our relationships with everyone we encounter. (11-23-06)

Personally, I’m sure that God, if he exists, wants us all to be happy, productive and compassionately helpful to one another. (12-7-06)