guiding spirit

Throughout these excursions, he attempted to stay true to the band’s initial guiding spirit: “The major factor with the Grateful Dead doing what they did and what we’re trying to do still is the Group Mind. When nobody’s really there, there’s only the music. It’s not as if we’re playing the music … the music is playing us.”

That was part of the guiding spirit that made Warped a summer fixture for 25 years.

But Chuck was the guiding spirit of the project, which began with stories exposing financial irregularities at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the Grammys, under its all-powerful CEO, C. Michael Greene — among them its spending less than 10% of the millions of dollars donated to a Grammy charity on its stated purpose of providing assistance to indigent and ailing musicians.

Musk has truculently flouted regulatory standards of all varieties as the guiding spirit of companies such as Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX — keeping factories open despite pandemic shutdown orders, allegedly committing securities fraud by issuing misleading tweets about his investment plans and ignoring government safety recommendations for self-driving automotive technologies.

HBO’s “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God,” currently streaming on Max, is an empathetic if deeply troubling immersion into Love Has Won, whose self-appointed leader, Amy Carlson, created a cosmology built on lots of booze and drugs, conspiracy theories and the guiding spirit of Robin Williams.