Hello world!

This place, New Orleans, along the muddy water that drains our heartland, serves up all forms of variety with such joy and sass that everyone says hello, everyone is smiling and there’s a dance in every step. What an absolute joy to be here away from the contention and the outrage of polemics.

Oh, the music, the great swelling song of America, ever new, ever the same, roots reaching into the rich black soil of the continent, drawing its sustenance from deep wells of human misery and pain, yet spring out now and blooming in the warm summer air with a blossoms of freedom that are triumphant and rhythmic and happy and fun!

Troy singer/songwriter Jack Casey has released a new album of music featuring original and traditional ballads.

Out of the Bavarian Alps, through lush farmland, past villages with dark onion-domed steeples and over turgid rivers we shot on our sleek train.

Jack with Pluto the party-crasher and Karen Hedges at her retirement party in Anaheim. Karen spent 32 years heading Disneyland’s horticulture operation. She’s retired now to paint and travel. A storybook ending, happily ever after.

Nearly two hundred films were aired in a variety of venues in the little mountain town of Park City, Utah – the library, the high school, the old Egyptian Theater – and tickets were tough to get. While many of the films were mundane and immature, glorifying subjects near and dear to the radical left, films like “Lovelace” and “Dirty Wars” put aside bias and struck into the humanity of their subjects, revealing prejudices and ugly projections of our culture that objectify human beings and by abusing them seek to purge or neutralize some notion of evil.

There’s an odd, high-pitched keening when the celebs arrive. Lights go on and the crowd shoves forward to get a glimpse, maybe a touch or a smile or — mirabile dictu! — an autograph! On the runway a few “chosen ones” duck away and dash into the theater. Ah, Sundance!

Jack Casey speaks to WNYT News Channel 13 about his novel, A Parliament of Fowls.

Jack Casey will speak at the Albany Public Library, in the large auditorium of the main branch, from 12:15 p.m. until 1:30 p.m. The topic will be his novel, The Trial of Bat Shea.

Jack Casey appeared as a guest on A Small American City podcast in an intimate one-hour conversation with author Duncan Crary.