Bound By The Beauty/Not Fade Away(Reprise)

Close and faithful readers may remember this post, sort of.  It first appeared on Sept. 23, 2012 in slightly different form, but with a whole different list of songs.  It's one of my favorites, if I'm allowed to say that, and I'm right back in that same place now, so, rather than re-inventing the wheel, I'm riding it again.

I remember it like it was yesterday:  I was taking a test in Miss McDonald's (poor, tragic Libby) fifth-grade class when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I sat bolt upright, put down my pencil and looked around the room at my classmates, my teacher, the desks, chairs, blackboard, the clock,  and thought "Holy shit" (or something like it--I used bad words even then)-- "I'm in fifth grade already;  I'm ten years old!"  My near-constant awareness of and absorption in the passage of time, how fleeting is our--and all our loved ones' --time here,  an awareness which had likely always been there, but subliminal, was now right at the front of my brain, where it has remained to this moment.

I've had a love/hate relationship with Autumn all of my life, an ambivalence which is directly related to the above anecdote, I'm sure.  On the one hand, here in New England, at least, it's the most dazzlingly glorious time of year; on the other, it's a harbinger of the cold and death soon to follow.  The trees blaze with vivid reds, yellows, golds and that peculiar  hue which is green-going-to-yellow, itself a return, as Frost noted so brilliantly in "Nothing Gold Can Stay," which begins  with "Nature's first green is gold...."  And the sky: is it just my imagination, or is it actually a deeper blue than at any other time of the year?  Late-blooming flowers, fire-red sumacs, even the dun-colored grasses in meadows contribute to the almost overwhelming ecstatic riot of sensory stimulation all around us.  You can practically hear the color.

For about two weeks.  Then it all changes again.  The first colors to go are the birds. Those  we've been feeding all summer long, particularly the finches, my favorites because they're most colorful, are suddenly ravenous.  The feeders need re-filling constantly, it seems, as the gold, red, and olive green creatures fatten themselves for their arduous flight south.  One day, it dawns on us that they've vanished, just like that: "See ya next year, maybe." That happened this past Thursday.  The leaves, meanwhile, have continued their inexorable, biologically-driven march to brown and crispy.  One night there's a wind-driven rainstorm and the next day they, too, are suddenly gone.  We are left bereft of vibrancy, resigned to subdued hues of brown, black, gray and white, of tree and chickadee, stone and snow, broken occasionally by a splash of evergreen or flash of blue jay.

For me, ever since at least the age of 10, this annual demonstration of death, albeit temporary, puts me in mind of the inevitability of real and permanent death.  Every goddam year is a metaphor for every other goddam year, right up to the end. It's sorta like having a full-scale map of the world.

Poets, writers, thinkers of every stripe have dealt with this down through the ages, of course.  The whole dying-and-rising god thing which has been the basis of so many religions arises (yes, I saw that) from this cycle.  If the earth is reborn, why not we?  Keats, in To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness..."), concentrates on the beauty and bounty of early autumn, while Shelley, his friend and contemporary focuses on the other end of the season in  "Autumn: A Dirge ("The warm sun is failing, the/bleak wind is wailing.");  Andrew Marvell in To His Coy Mistress ("But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near," and Billy Collins in, ironically, "On Turning Ten," ("This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself") have obviously felt it too.  We all must; I'm curious at what age it really strikes each of us, this awareness, this knowledge.  Why are we the only species, so far as we know, which is aware of our mortality?  Wouldn't it be better to have no knowledge it was gonna come?  Just live your life, find your acorns, eat your grass, your plankton, synthesize your photos, and then BAM, it's done.  No dread, no sadness or longing, just the fact, which was there all along, unbeknownst.

Here are some songs to celebrate the beauty and mourn the fading:


All This Useless Beauty                                            June Tabor
Beauty                                                                        Linda Thompson
The Beauty Of The Days Gone By                            Van Morrison
The Beauty Of The Rain                                            Dar Williams
Bird Of Beauty                                                           Stevie Wonder
Bound By The Beauty                                                Jane Siberry
Came So Far For Beauty                                            Jennifer Warnes
Chi-Wahwah Beauty                                                  Ottmar Liebert
For The Beauty Of The Earth                                     Paul Winter Consort
For The Beauty Of Wynona                                       Daniel Lanois
Hesitating Beauty                                                       Billy Bragg/Wilco
Temporary Beauty                                                      Graham Parker
Thing Of Beauty                                                         Hothouse Flowers
Ugly Beauty                                                                Friends Of Dean Martinez
Daylight Fading                                                          Counting Crows
Fading Away                                                               James Taylor
Fading Memory                                                          Eilen Jewell
Don't Fade Away                                                        Dead Can Dance
Don't fade Away                                                         Milla
Don't Fade Away                                                        Willie Nelson
Don't Fade On Me                                                      Tom Petty
Fade Away                                                                  Ernest Ranglin
Fade Into Light                                                           Boz Scaggs
Fade To Black                                                             Dire Straits
Fadeaway                                                                    The BoDeans
Not Fade Away                                                            James Taylor
Not Fade Away                                                            Stones


Noon till two on Tuesday, 91.5 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs.  See ya there?

Is it a coincidence that we refer to Adam and Eve's transgression as "the Fall?"  That's why we're mortal and know it.  Damn.

"Oh, How We Danced..."

I first heard that song, with an appended parenthetical to the title ("...Anniversary Song") on a Jim Capaldi album in 1972.  The credited composers were Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin, but it turns out that they adapted the tune from an apparently quite famous Romanian composition, Waves Of The Danube, and Jolson wrote new lyrics, the first line of which is "Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed."

Yesterday I went to a 40th Anniversary celebration for two good friends whose wedding I was an usher in, one my friend of longest duration (Alice once had a young woman write in a composition about her "longest boyfriend;" we assumed that she, too, was referring to duration of the relationship, but I guess you never know...).  To protect their identities I'll call them "Roberta (Bert)" and "Eric." Surviving 40 years of marriage is pretty mind-blowing, even if you're not married to Bert for that time; turns out Eric is superhuman. Anyway, it's kind of shocking to have contemporaries celebrating a 40th, given that I'm barely over 40 myself; some sort of time warp somewhere, I guess.

I looked up the socially-dictated, or accepted, traditional 40th anniversary gift, and found that it's ruby.  So I wore a ruby-colored shirt to the festivities but, me being me and trying to force my proclivities and obsessions on others, I also put together a CD of all of the songs in my collection whose title contained the word "ruby" or "rubies."  Turned out that I thought it was a great collection of songs, so I've decided to build the bulk of Tuesday's show around it.  And by the way, when I told Eric that the traditional 40th thing was Ruby, he said "I thought it was Prozac."  I told him I was pretty sure that that was for each of the first 39 years.

This week's show, though, will be--and I cast no aspersions here-- like a marsupial's penis: two-pronged (you could look it up...!).  For on Saturday night I worked at a Billy Bragg concert at The Opera House in Bellows Falls, VT., and it was fabulous.  I know, I should have written something before the show, to entice folks to go, but Mr. Bragg doesn't need that: the place was just 20 tickets shy of being sold out.  Bragg is a committed Lefty, an often brilliant (and frequently very touching) songwriter, has something of a signature guitar sound, is very well-read and learned, and tells great stories.  In fact, at one point near the end of the show, someone yelled out a request; Mr. Bragg, in as gentle a refusal as I believe I've ever heard, said "Well now, you see, madam, all you need to remember is the title: I, however, have to remember the title, the chords, the key, all of the lyrics, and the usual 5 minute bullshit introduction I probably used to give it."  How do you not love that?

So, sort of two disparate playlists this week, perhaps linked by the fact that, as Bragg sings, "There is power in a union:"

Ruby                                                                         Dave Rawlings Machine
Ruby                                                                         Ray Charles
Ruby's Arms                                                             Tom Waits
Ruby's Eyes                                                              Tommy Emmanuel
Ruby Baby                                                                Donald Fagen
Ruby Dear                                                                 Talking Heads
Ruby Heart                                                                The Guggenheim Grotto
Ruby Lane                                                                 Milla
Ruby Lee                                                                   Joe Cocker
Ruby On The Morning                                              Brewer And Shipley
Ruby Sees All                                                            Cake
Ruby Tuesday                                                            Dual Sessions
Ruby Tuesday                                                            Melanie
Ruby Tuesday                                                            Rolling Septuagenarians
See Ruby Fall                                                             Johnny Cash
Rubylove                                                                    Cat Stevens
Rubies & Diamonds                                                   Carla Olson & Mick Taylor
Ruby, My Dear                                                           Thelonius Monk & John Coltrane
Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town                       Cake
Oh How We Danced (Anniversary Song)                  Jim Capaldi
Anniversary                                                                Graham Parker
Anniversary                                                                Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance
Greetings To The New Brunette                                 Billy Bragg
Ideology
Levi Stubbs' Tears
Must I Paint You A Picture
A New England
She's Got A New Spell
There is Power In A Union
Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards                       Billy Bragg

Yeah, three "Ruby Tuesday"'s but they're wicked different, so I'm playin' 'em all.

Tuesday, noon till two, the same old place, or the old Same Place, for you Nick Dangerists:
 91.5 FM, wool.fm.   And here's to the next 40!   

To Be Or Not To Be--Richard Cory

I haven't weighed in on much of anything, lately; the thing I most want to address, Robin Williams's suicide, may be passe already (what a world, what a world, 24/7 news cycles, beheadings, and all), but I feel a need to speak up for and defend depressives, given that I've already acknowledged belonging to that group in previous posts.

Edwin Arlington Robinson saw it this way:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Corey, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Bob Dylan once put it another way:  "Don't go mistaking Paradise/For that home across the road."   Shakespeare said "The eyes are the window to your soul,"  and The Hollies encouraged us to "Look through any window (yeah)," but our own myopia may be keeping us from seeing what's really inside.

I'm here to say that one can never, ever know what another's life is like.  We may look in and see "riches" and "success," but what needs consideration are (is?) the demons within.

Depression is a terrible disease with which to contend.  Its symptoms and effects are often not readily apparent, and it's not something with which we all have to live, which I think may inhibit understanding of the disease.  Everyone, I daresay, is familiar with with situational depression, which is, I think, more correctly called "disappointment."  Who hasn't had to cope with bad grades, or relationships gone awry, or jobs that don't work out, or that we don't get in the first place?  Things don't go right for us, we have disappointments, we may sit with them for a while, but we cope, and we move on.

Clinical depression (or what I like to call "My Depression") is a whole 'nother beast.  Circumstances don't matter, fame and fortune don't matter:  what matters is the inner demons, the inner voices, that tell you that you fall short, that you're not good enough, that, no matter what the outer world sees, the inner world will never, ever, be satisfied.  And that, my friends, is what I'm pretty sure Robin Williams was dealing with, as was the fictional Richard Cory, as are many of your friends, loved ones, and acquaintances,  whether it's apparent or not.  Riches, adulation, what is commonly thought of as "Success" are of no consequence.  All of those are conquered, drowned out by the Inner Voice, which in many cases cannot be mollified:  "our own worst enemy" is not an idle phrase.

Is this me condoning suicide?  Not really.  Is this me understanding the circumstances that might lead one to take its own life?  Yeah, pretty sure that's it.  Judge not, et cetera: as I have asserted here before, we all do what we have to to "make it through this life, if (we) can."  And if we can't, others need to understand and make room for that decision.  We're all going to the same place, anyway, whether we kill ourselves by rope, or by gun, or by booze or tobacco or other lifestyle choices, or by genetic fortune.  As Ben Sidran says "See ya' on the other side."  He was referring to an album (What, now?),  but it's all the same.

So, am I gonna play something relevant to this post on my show this week?  Nah--that'd be quite a bummer n'est-ce pas?  I found a great Van bootleg from 1984 at Turn It Up last week, so I'm'a play that.  It includes Dweller On The Threshold;  I think that Mr. Morrison had something spiritual in mind, but for me it's a secular fact: we're all "dwellers on the threshold;"  what lies on the other side is the mystery, and the adventure.

So, these songs this week, from Van Morrison:

Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart
Dweller On The Threshold
Vanlose Stairway
It's All In The Game
She Gives Me Religion
Help Me
Beautiful Vision
Northern Muse (Solid Ground)
Bright Side Of The Road
Celtic Ray
Higher Than The World
River Of Time
The Street Only Knew Your Name
Cry For Home
Haunts Of Ancient Peace
Cleaning Windows
Summertime In England
Full Force Gale

Also, Joe Sample died today, so I'm gonna play a few Crusaders songs, like "Hard Times," "Keep That Same Old Feeling," "It Happens Every Day," and Carole King's "So Far Away," among, possibly, others.  See you Tuesday, maybe, from noon till two on WOOL FM, 91.5, or wool.fm on the webs.

"Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory:" maybe not so much....

Emmet Till: Death Do Us Part

My last post was greeted with some praise and approbation for its purported positive nature and tone.  That surprised me some, as I had seen it as pretty neutral but, hey, I'll take approval anytime.  Maybe, though, it was just because it wasn't "negative" or "depressing" or snarky, as so many of my things are seen to be.  Seems to me that it's actually been a while since I've put one of those out there:  Well, as they used to say in the intro to the old TV Western "Tonto and Companion" (revisionism hard at work, there)  "Return with us now, to those thrilling days of yesteryear...."

I've had this thing percolating for a couple of weeks, the show ready to go for a while, so maybe that's part of it, but I'm just, frankly, sick to death of the topic, which is, basically, shame.  I'm ashamed that I'm sitting here at my computer, writing some stupid and ineffectual white liberal words at a safe distance, rather than standing in NYC or Ferguson, MO, or any of dozens of places, shoulder-to-shoulder, showing solidarity with the black community (which is to say, really, just the human community), showing my outrage and sympathy at the racism that still pervades and permeates and poisons this otherwise pretty good country in which I live.  I'm ashamed of being an American (this sort of racism is pretty much foreign to the rest of the developed world), ashamed of being white, ashamed of being human, for Chrissakes. Why is it that, through sheer accident of birth, I can feel (mostly) safe, secure, protected by those who are supposed to provide such protection, while other people, different from me only by virtue of their pigmentation, must fear those whose job is, nominally, to protect and serve?  Why must some of my fellow countrymen consider every minute detail of their behavior or presentation every time they come into contact with a white person, especially a cop?  How can this be true still, in 2014, if Darwin was right?  Can't really see much racial-tolerance-evolution in my lifetime, can you?  Have you heard that more money has been raised for the defense of the white cop who shot unarmed, hands-in-the-air Michael Brown six times, than for Brown's funeral and family?  Really, what can anyone even say about this whole situation?

Gary Larson (of the late, lamented comic "The Far Side")  had a typically brilliant cartoon years ago, called something like "What dogs hear,"  which showed a person talking lovingly to a dog, whose name was Ginger, saying the usual stuff we all say to our dogs, talking to them like they are people and understand our every word:  What the dog heard was "Blah, blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah...."  That's what this feels like to me.  It's the same old shit, over and over and over again (Dave Clark Five).  So I guess all I wanna say, inarticulately and inelegantly and assuredly ineffectually, is "What is wrong with us?"  Read about Emmett Till, read (again and again) Toni Morrison's masterpiece Song Of Solomon, which gives an amazing  perspective on the issue of what blacks, from way before and, sickeningly, way after Emmett Till, in a purportedly post-racist America, must face, and how young black men, in particular, must learn to cope with a world which privileged whites--which is to say, for the most part, whites--never know.  And, really, just listen to Mavis Staples and The Staple Singers' entire body of work, which addresses that life and that perspective in a singular and beautiful and incredibly inspiring, loving, understanding way.  While The Staples alone are enough, here are the songs I'm playing this week:

Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)                            Marvin Gaye
Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)           The Temptations
Get Up, Stand Up                                                                    Bob Marley & The Wailers
Here I Stand Before Me                                                          Crash Test Dummies
I Ain't Gonna Stand For It                                                       Stevie Wonder
I Can't Stand It                                                                         Maria Muldaur
I Can't Stand Up Alone                                                            Jesse Winchester
I Stand Accused                                                                       King Curtis
Running To Stand Still                                                            U2
Stand                                                                                        The Bees
Living For The City                                                                 Stevie Wonder
The Ghetto                                                                               Donny Hathaway
Why Can't We Be Friends                                                        War
I'll Take You There                                                                   The Staple Singers
Stand                                                                                         R.E.M.
Stand                                                                                         Sly & The Family Stone
Stand Amazed                                                                           John Martyn
Stand And Be Counted                                                             Crosby, Stills, Nash&Young
Stand And Fight                                                                        James Taylor
Stand Back                                                                                The Allman Brothers Band
Stand By Me                                                                              John Lennon
Stand Up                                                                                    Bim Skala Bim
Stand Up                                                                                    Bobby Womack
Stand Up (And Be Strong)                                                        Keb' Mo'
Train In Vain (Stand By Me)                                                     The Clash
Standing In My Shoes                                                                Leo Kottke
United We Stand                                                                        Brotherhood Of Man
We Stand Together                                                                     Harper
Slippin' Into Darkness                                                                War
The World Is A Ghetto                                                               War
Touch A Hand (Make A Friend)                                                 The Staple Singers

Hope to see you Tuesday, noon till two, on Wool FM, 91.5, or wool.fm on the webs.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts...?"  I don't think any of us really does.

One (More)'s Too Many, And A Hundred's (Maybe) Not Enough

That awkward titular phrase (he said "tit")  has been bastardized from a famous (at least for me) quote from Ray Milland's character in The Lost Weekend.  Milland plays an alcoholic in the film, and he was referring to a drink when he uttered the line.  I'm thinking about birthdays.

I've got one coming soon, you see--actually on the day of my show this week, for the first time, so I'm definitely gonna make it there on Tuesday, goddammit.  And I'm writing about it for the same reason I laugh first, loudest and longest at anything I say that I think may be somewhat amusing: if I don't do it, maybe nobody else will, to paraphrase Dr. John.  And while I may marvel at the fact that I'm sixty one (looks less scary to write it out rather than using numerals), and bemoan the fact that that's my real age, I sure hope there'll be plenty more birthdays comin'.

As any of you who've known me for a while, or have read several of these posts, knows, I've been cursed with a heightened sense of the passage of time throughout my life.  From about the time I really understood that the rest of you are gonna die (still don't believe that'll happen to me), I've been freaked by the fleeting nature of life.  Curiously, though, as I've aged I've become less so:  I miss the slowed pace and seemingly endless days of childhood, true, but now, somewhere on the downslope of where my abilities really start to diminish: strength, stamina, mental acuity, ability to control drooling and other bodily fluid losses, before I start to lose my hair (What?  No, I think you're mistaken about that....),  I seem to be becoming more sanguine about the passage of time, about inevitability.  I've been blessed all my life by family, friends, loved ones, general life circumstances, am maybe even more so now, if that's possible, and so I'm just kinda rolling with it.  With the help of Depends (a trademarked product of Kimberly- Clark), even the actual golden part of the so-called Golden Years can be something to look forward to--or at least not something to be dreaded, as it used to be.

So here's to us all: I hope we can all enjoy the ride!

This week's playlist:

Caravan                                                                            Van Morrison
Birthday                                                                            Fabs
Birthday Boy                                                                    Ween
The Birthday Present II                                                    Loudon Wainwright
Birth Of The Blues                                                           Ray Charles
Listen To The Lion                                                          Van Morrison
Sweet And Shiny Eyes                                                     Bonnie Raitt
Have A Good Time                                                          Paul Simon
Born In Captivity                                                             Alpha Band
Born Alone                                                                       Wilco
Born At The Right Time                                                  Paul Simon
Born Secular                                                                    Jenny Lewis/Watson Twins
I Was Born                                                                       Natalie Merchant
Head Full Of Doubt/Road Full Of Promise                    The Avett Brothers
All The Years                                                                   Beach House
On Saturday Afternoons In 1963                                     Rickie Lee Jones
Can't Outrun The Years                                                    Danny O'Keefe
Golden Years                                                                    David Bowie
As The Years Go Passing By                                           David Bromberg Band
Woman Of 1000 Years                                                     Fleetwood Mac
Worrisome Years                                                              Greg Brown
How Many More Years                                                    Howlin' Wolf
Come Up The Years                                                         Jefferson Airplane
Can't Turn Back The Years                                              John Martyn
For A Thousand Years                                                     Marc Johnson
Here We Are In The Years                                               Neil Young
Still Crazy After All These Years                                    Paul Simon
Reelin' In The Years                                                         Steely Dan
Losing All The Years                                                       Seatrain
Wasted Years                                                                    Van Morrison

Some of these songs obviously aren't, strictly speaking, about birthdays, or years, or that sort of thing.  Listen To The Lion, for example, has no apparent connection, except for the fact that I'm a Leo, and it's by Van, and The Avett Bros. thing gives a glimpse into my worldview/thought process; also, I don't hope, or expect, to live for a thousand years, but the Fleetwood Mac song (from the Danny Kirwan-led incarnation of that band) is simply gorgeous.  Anyway, c'mon along on Tuesday from noon till two on 91.5 FM, or wool.fm.  We're all in this together, after all.

The Law Of Gravity Should Be Repealed!

Anyone who knows me well will appreciate how ridiculous it is for me to be writing a piece about flying:  never been in an airplane, hope never to be.  I dream of flying occasionally, but it's never in a plane; it's always by dint of flapping arms. Since we went to the moon last week (in this space, at least), though, I thought we'd get just a little closer to terra-firma-- but SLOWLY, ssslooowly.  I don't know if you've noticed it, but airplanes have been having an increasingly difficult time staying in the air.

It's not always their fault, I get that:  bombs, birds, and Russian anti-aircraft missiles--to name just a few things-- all can have their effect on a craft's ability to stay aloft.  And I get all of the stats about the safety of flight in general, and certainly when compared with travel by car; nevertheless, it's been a bad few weeks for airplanes, and gravity's winning.

But ever since Daedalus handed Icarus his lovely wings, since Newton got bonked on the noggin by Granny Smith, we've known that if it goes up it's comin' down.  The best we can hope is to have some modicum of control over the descent, which come to think of it is probably a pretty good metaphor for the trip through life in general.  I guess it's been on my mind more because the usual all-too-human combination of hubris, stupidity and mistake leads to horrifying events like the removal from the sky of the Malaysian Airlines plane we could find.  And the fact that Jake leaves next week for 10 days in Israel via El Al airlines to the LZ known as Tel Aviv airport.  Oy Vey.

So thinking of flight and planes and stuff led me to this playlist:

Airplane                                                                          Rusted Root
Airplaneshadows                                                            Kiln
Blues From An Airplane                                                Jefferson Airplane
Fat Angel                                                                        Jefferson Airplane
Aeroplane                                                                       Red Hot Chili Peppers
Jet Plane                                                                         Johnny "Guitar" Watson
Leaving On A Jet Plane                                                 John Denver
Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair                                        Richard & Linda Thompson
Planes & Satellites                                                         Sonia Dada
Steam Powered Aereo Plane                                          John Hartford
Terraplane Blues                                                            Rory Block
Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)                          Arlo Guthrie
Jet                                                                                   McCartney/Wings
Jet Airliner                                                                      Paul Pena
Come Fly With Me                                                         Frank Sinatra
Expecting To Fly                                                            Buffalo Springfield
Fear With Flying                                                            Loudon Wainwright
Fly                                                                                  Nick Drake
Fly                                                                                  Steve Winwood
Fly Away                                                                        Brother Jack McDuff
Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)                                 Marvin gaye
Flyin' Shoes                                                                    Townes Van Zandt
Flying                                                                             The Beatles
Flying                                                                             The Faces
Flying                                                                             Michael Nesmith
Flying High                                                                    Country Joe & The Fish
Flying Home                                                                   Duke Robillard & Herb Ellis
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong                                   Buffalo Springfield
Learning To Fly                                                              Pink Floyd

Join me, woncha, on Tuesday from noon till two on WOOL FM, 91.5 or wool.fm?  It could be fun.

Just happened to hear on VT Public Radio the other day about a controversy about noise at Burlington Int'l Airport.  Residents of a nearby neighborhood complained about the noise, it turned out that noise did in fact exceed allowable limits.  Fortunately, they were able to reach a fair and equitable solution to the issue:  the airport bought an entire neighborhood in order to level it.  If a jet flies over a razed neighborhood, does it exceed allowable noise levels...?

One Small Step

Sunday, July 20, 2014 marked the 45th anniversary of humans first setting foot on an orb floating in space other than Earth, at least so far as we know.  On that July afternoon (Earth time), Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon and spoke one of the best-known (mis) quotes, I think, in human history (excepting, perhaps, McCartney's wrongly-quoted line from "Live And Let Die"), "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for Mankind."

And the jury's still out, I think, on whether or not this was a good thing.  The US is, of course, the only country to have landed men there (six times between 1969 and 1972), but we haven't done it since, which is really somewhat surprising.  I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson, the new, black, Carl Sagan, on NPR as I was brush-hogging my little section of Earth yesterday, and he said he was 10 years old for that first landing, and figured that it would be a pretty regular occurrence after that, at least a monthly thing.

Why did we stop so completely?  Some blame staggering costs; the money that would otherwise be spent on such an ambitious Space Program would be far better spent on terrestrial projects.  As a staunch stay-at-home Yankee, I heartily endorse that position, but wonder why, then, we aren't in fact spending that money on those in need.  Others blame lack of political will, which kind of goes hand-in-hand with the financial piece, I'm sure. Still others say that we don't have the ability to plan and see through such long-term projects;  on the face of it that seems odd: if we could do it back then, why would we have lost the ability?  But, then, given the frenetic, decreased-attention-span, 140 characters-at a-time-society (is this a hyphen-heavy post, or what?) we've become, maybe that's true.  And of course there are people who insist that we've never really done it at all, that those "landings" all took place on Hollywood soundstages.  Whatever the reason, we've certainly folded the lunar tent; it's not unlikely that the next person on the moon will be Chinese.  And some people believe that it's too late anyway, that our ever having gone there has screwed the moon up, that the moon we used to know is no longer.

In 1977, I did my first stint as an Acworth resident, for about 8 months.  I rented a little timber-framed house on Rte. 123A, really quite a charming place for the most part.  During that time I subscribed to (or "took," as old-timers would say) The Keene Sentinel, an afternoon daily newspaper.  My paper"boy" was himself an old Yankee, in his seventies, who drove a battered old Jeep Cherokee.  One evening, after getting home from work, I walked down the driveway to see if the paper had arrived, at just the time he pulled up to the delivery tube.  There was a nearly-full moon that evening, with a large ring around it, which everyone I knew knew meant rain coming soon. We shot the breeze for a few minutes, the paperoldtimer and I, and eventually talk came around to that celestial sight and its forecasting properties.  His view?  "Yep, time was you could tell the weather from a ring around the moon like that, but ever since we went there, you can't tell nuthin' from it."  As my favorite plumber is fond of saying, "Shit luck beats science every time."

Below you'll find a real writer's take on the above anecdote.  It's a poem from Alice B. Fogel's collection titled Elemental:

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear 

 

It’s hard to tell

that the face of the moon

is as much like a man’s

as god’s.  Out yonder,

in the world without us,

who’s to say? –

Either we get in the way,

or things make use of us.

Half-way around the globe

from where they started,

the static sound of starlings

echoes off the barn roof.

Spiders weave in the spokes

of wheels, and stars

circle unsuspecting suns.

Little do we know,

the world has a talent

for making itself at home.

Meanwhile, we paint our self-

portraits on everything

imaginable, then hold

them up like mirrors.

Our mercurial brushes

grow longer, our skills

more acute.  Dust clouds

the vision, tinder

to the eye.  So we burn

trees to save the forests, burn

air to fly afar.  We do, we say.

We can. The time

is close at hand.  Time was

(said a man)

you could tell the weather from the moon.

That was before another

broke the quicksilver distance

and walked all over it.

Now you can’t tell a thing.

So there'll be lots of "moon" songs this week, although they barely scratch the surface of possibilities from my collection.  Herewith, what I think is my favorite playlist in my 4 year DJ career:

Bad Moon Rising                                                 Creedence Clearwater Revival

Banjo Moon                                                         Greg Brown

Beautiful Moons                                                   Benny Green

Billboard On The Moon (Live)                              Dirk Hamilton

Blue Moon                                                            Dylan

Black Moon                                                          Wilco

Blue Moon                                                            Beck

Bringing Down The Moon                                    John Stewart

Cajun Moon                                                         J.J. Cale

Calling The Moon                                                Dar Williams

Casablanca Moonlight                                         Michael Nesmith

Child Of The Moon                                              Rolling Septuagenarians

Circus On The Moon                                           Bruce Hornsby

Clocks And Spoons                                             John Prine

Shoot The Moonlight Out                                    Garland Jeffreys

Man On The Moon                                              R.E.M.

Armstrong                                                            John Stewart

Drunk On The Moon                                           Tom Waits

Every Inch A Moon                                              Dirk Hamilton

Drawing Down The Moon                                    Steve Tibbets

Eldorado To The Moon                                        Michael Nesmith

Fly Me To The Moon                                            Bobby Womack

Goodnight Moon                                                  Shivaree

Grapefruit Moon                                                  Tom Waits

Hey You (Looking At The Moon)                         Graham Nash

Here Comes The Moon                                       George Harrison

How High The Moon                                            Emmylou Harris

It's Only A Paper Moon                                        Barney Kessel/Stephane Grappelli

Kiko And The Lavender Moon                             Los Lobos

Moonage Daydream                                            David Bowie

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress                            Charlie Haden/ Pat Metheny

Pink Moon                                                           Nick Drake

Sun Loves Moon                                                 Nick Robertson

Once In A Blue Moon                                          Van Morrison

Moonlight Sonata                                                Ludwig Van Beethoven

I'm sure I've left out some of your favorites but, basically, tough shit-- so I sure hope you'll tune in Tuesday, from noon till two on Wool FM, 91.5, or wool.fm on the webs.

A couple more things:  Charlie Haden and Bobby Womack both recently passed, so their songs are both doing double-duty, as songs for the theme and as tributes.

And I saw a bumper sticker yesterday in Alstead on a truck with Vermont plates that said "Guns Don't Kill People:Abortion Clinics Do."  I was impressed by that. In 7 short words,  2 assertions, both of which I vehemently disagree with.  A-plus for conciseness, at least....