I’ve been podcasting for two years, exploring nearly 100 subjects in movies, television, and music. Returning to these works, I’m asking what they teach us about living today.
This time, an unlikely combination takes me from the friendship in the motion picture “Scarecrow” to the sensational, sexy, style of singer Tom Jones’s and the musical-poetic social commentary of Gil Scott-Heron. What connects them is a willingness to let another person change the way we see.
In “Scarecrow”, a hardened man gradually becomes capable of caring for someone whose vulnerability he initially finds difficult to understand. On the television musical variety show, “This Is Tom Jones”, I see a commanding performer inviting artists from different musical worlds onto his stage, where mutual respect makes the encounter exciting. Singer-songwriter-social commentator, Gil Scott-Heron reached me, a boy growing up in a segregated Southern California community, with accounts of hardship that my surroundings had given me little opportunity to understand. Friendship, performance, and poetry each opened a door.
I think about those doors today, when so much of what reaches us confirms what we already believe. We can select our company, our entertainment, and our sources of information until unfamiliar experiences scarcely enter the room. These three podcasts remind me how much that costs us. The tough man discovers a capacity for tenderness; the accomplished singer finds exhilaration in sharing the spotlight; the listener encounters suffering that a comfortable neighborhood can conceal. Their circumstances differ, but together they challenge the assumption that we grow stronger by remaining untouched by others.
We might begin by hearing someone out, welcoming an unfamiliar voice, or staying beside a friend when companionship becomes responsibility. Looking back over sixty years of movies, television, and music, I’m struck by how often the stories that endure return us to this ordinary, demanding work of “making room for one another.”
Listen to the three podcasts:
Movie: Scarecrows and Car Washes
https://rss.com/podcasts/razorsink/1446685
https://www.jonathanferrini.com/p/scarecrows-and-car-washes
Television: “This Is Tom Jones”
https://rss.com/podcasts/razorsink/1661295
https://www.jonathanferrini.com/p/this-is-tom-jones
Music: Rediscovering Gil Scott-Heron
https://rss.com/podcasts/razorsink/1446729
https://www.jonathanferrini.com/p/rediscovering-gil-scott-heron
Explore two years and 95 podcasts reflecting on sixty years of film, television, and music at “Razor’s Ink Podcast”,
https://www.jonathanferrini.com
