For this latest spooky October post, I’ve grown a little bit impatient with the month and I want to cut to the chase. Here’s a nice little primer on the Celtic roots of the Halloween holiday and its evolution through the ages to the seemingly silly, scary celebration we know today.

Do the souls of the dead roam free during this time of the year? Are the ghosts friendly? What should I do as someone who lives on a former plantation just off the Trail of Tears in the South?

This video illuminates the evolution of the Roman Catholic Church in its relationship to the frustrating tradition of Samhain in the weird, old magickal world.

The story ultimately comes home to America where our current holiday finds youngsters and adults embracing both the macabre and the sexy. This piece even gets into the arson-crazed Detroit “Devil’s Night” bombings that I grew up with in the Motor City. Halloween is the one night of the year when many revelers feel comfortable to don the guise of a grizzled zombie or a blood-drenched monster. It’s also the one night of the year when men and women alike find it to be entirely appropriate to don costumes that amount to very little clothing at all. Halloween highlights both America’s denial of death along with its repression of sex — it’s no coincidence that our audio visual culture is driven by pornography and our national economy is driven by an abstract murder machine that we refer to as “defense.”

Let’s hope we find some answers here…

Stay Awake!

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Van Morrison joined the British Invasion with Them until he left the band to meet Dylan and the folk rock revolution head-on with his first great masterpiece, Astral Weeks.

Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say about this epic, emotive music:

Van Morrison never sounded more warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, than on his enigmatically beautiful solo debut. Fresh off the success of “Brown Eyed Girl” and newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., he explored the physical and dramatic range of his voice during extended poetic-scat singing, and set hallucinatory reveries on his native Belfast to wandering Celtic-R&B melodies. The crowning touch was the superior jazz quintet convened by producer Lewis Merenstein to color the mists and shadows. Bassist Richard Davis later said that Morrison never told the musicians what he wanted from them or what the lyrics meant. Maybe he didn’t know how to. He was going deep inside himself, without a net or fear.

This is big-heart music for the thinking person — a masterpiece of lyrical inspiration and musical improvisation. Van’s use of his own repetitive voicing as a percussion instrument speaks to the poetic underpinnings of his songwriting in the Celtic, spiritual traditions where he has continued to root his mature music. This is deep, dark sound. It’s also ecstatic, mystical music — Morrison reveals himself to be a rock shaman par excellence within the tracks of this album’s lustrous, longing message.

Here is the album in its entirety:

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