moon traveller herald

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. The punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut paints a picture where all humans face the fate of Native peoples run over by a colonizing power, in this case the power is technology, you have little but leisure time, your caught in a dream of 1984 with less harsh edges. He was something of a technical writer when he composed Player Piano [alternatively titled "Utopia."  [a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion.  Reading' And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut a Life" by Charles J Shields page 97 vonnegut is working at General Electric in Schenectady the job he got th...

 A rewrite My Secret Museum of Cybernetics i. Intellectual pretensions were welcome around my house growing up in Racine. I got a job at an after-school job at the library, and found  a book for every imagining I might have. At the point where Bob Dylan and Summer of Love mysticism was passing cars and rockets in my personal hit parade, I chanced upon the notion of feedback. It had a scientific aspect and a musical aspect [the latter in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and Canned Heat]. I was assigned to write a thesis that could serve as an essay for college admission. So I had a mind to study. With Bronski's Science and Human Values in hand I began a piece on The Humanization of Science, in part a Renaissance study. In part a look at the history of alchemy. I'd often begin at the beginning of things and hardly get any further. At the same time I found out about Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon - about cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics, closely...

@JackIVaughan: Silk corn husk Ruby corn beads Sprout from the earth Send message to heaven http://t.co/S496B3m8QT Reading Player Piano. And remembering the factory cybernetic. When I worked the Paste Wax line at Johnson's, we placed the lids on the cans (two of us) by hand. It could well have been the oldest line in the old factory. With so much cybernation around, it seemed primitive - something that could be automated. And I would look at the other lines (the Jubilee line with its ear shattering glass jostling was adjacent) and wonder how. Earl, the engineer, I remember him now in crew cut, white short sleeve shirt, tie, glasses and pocket protector, would come by and eye the process as well. When I worked the line. The day Pedro did not come back from lunch. To come. When I worked the line: they would pump-in Muzak. Then by syndicated radio. Once a week, in some alternating pattern related to pay day: "Whstle While you Work." One day, another s...

While the pictures from our New Years Poesy Party is developing down there at the drug store, I am going to partially recollect things from the blog from the year in non-chronological ordeal. In January I summoned a drawing memory brief of Soulville, the place on Main St., between the Rialto (where I saw King Kong vs. Godzilla) and the barber shop (where I saw George Wallace get a haircut). On the left was Jack, on the right was Norman. Norman on the right hipped me to blues . L to R: Jack, Norman. In February I ventured West. Good idea as the snow was piling ever higher in the East. T'wern't long after the passing of Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks. There in the sybaritic city by the bay, Jeff DeMark sang his ode to Ernie Banks , "Does that sound like work to you?" On same trip me and the boys had a night on the town. We didnt dance, you know, but the bluegrass dancers of the evening did make an impression, of which I am still mindful. "Did you see that ...

Kurt Vonnegut died, a few weeks after he absorbed injuries to the brain in a fall. For me he is up there with Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Pynchon as a great American writer of my life time. He looked something like Mark Twain and he filled the role manfully during his life here on terra firma, until he died, at 84. You have to think a defining event for Vonnegut was the Bombing of Dresden .. a great historical event but seldom noted. As a POW, he happened to be in Dresden when the Allies firebombed it toward the end of World War II. A lot of our fathers were maimed in some way or another by the WWII experience. Like Joseph Heller, Vonnegut steadily wrote, and finally snuck up on this subject. He wrote about it most especially in Slaughter-House Five [assumedly the name of the underground meat locker he as a POW was working in making vitamin supplements for his captors when the British and the Americans deliberately created a firestorm upon the city]. He was a master of the e...

Was in the symphony one day – many rainy years ago -- and Beethoven’s message was just crystalline to me. Me, Shroud Jr. Like a telegraph message through the foam of time – Beethoven heard the birds, the guns, he was losing his hearing. He was writing it down. Sending it out. Shroud Jr. was pickin up on it. On April day in 2000, in Boston, they again put the needle in the groove, the cannon of orchestra salvoed, and the pensioners, Brahmin and punters heard the master voice. He said ‘I was alive on the Earth and here is what it was like.’ Beethoven world’s is somewhat like Mars to us now. Or we are Mars, I don’t know. The message I was heard was as if from space, or, I thought, this would be a worthile message to send spaceward in case the planet needs to be reconstructed from a few small existent artifacts. Like sea monkeys from sponge grindings. Carl Sagan set up some of these notions with his Voyager record . Mozart’s brain Listening has attuned Shroud the Latter. For years, drive t...

The passing of blues guitar great Hubert Sumlin has brought forward many tributes. One thing that comes across is that he was kind, sweet, and a unique player, to which I can attest. When the blues came first my way via a Boston visit by Sunnyland Slim and Paul DeMark, I soon met Hubert. When I was a kid of 16 I had a 45 of Killing Floor/Going Down Slow so I knew his playing – if not his name - from early on. Later, in the 1980s he was, together with Sunnyland Slim, Louisiana Red and Sam Burckhardt (see picture above of him and Hubert) a house guest, especially quiet and thoughtful of others. When Slim and Paul arrived in Boston 1979 the talk soon turned to Hubert. It was Paul who told me he was Howlin Wolf's guitar player and that said a lot. The first day Sunnyland and Paul DeMark were in town the first thing they wanted to do was hook up with Hubert Sumlin. How did we find people in those days? It's hard now to imagine. There was a grapevine, not a cellular phone network. ...

By the time he died in 1995, Sunnyland Slim’s life-long efforts as a performer, gregarious ambassador, and keeper of the blues flame had made him the patriarch of  Chicago  blues. His star rests largely on his early recordings and to an even greater extent his later performances. This collection seeks to broaden the view of Sunnyland, featuring his work at sessions held in  Boston  in 1979 when Sunnyland Slim [born Albert Luandrew] was 72. In some blues histories, the Mississippi-born pianist will be remembered as the man who brought Muddy Waters to the attention of Leonard and Phil Chess at Aristocrat Records in  Chicago  in 1947. In Slim’s telling: “I got Muddy off the truck.” [Waters was delivering Venetian blinds when his relatives got Slim’s call for the Aristocrat sessions.] For reasons hard to identify, Sunnyland did not continue to record as a leader for the Chess brothers after his 1947 and 1948 sessions with Waters - after Aristocrat be...

First heard the Paul Butterfield blues band early in the summer of love 1967. We lent the record among our crew. For us they were something of a sleeper among the tremendous abundance of creative bands at the time. Certainly different in that they were closer to the roots of street expression - more so than some of the crimson and chiffon butterfly "psychedelicists" that were about. That year I caught on to Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, the Dirty Blues Band and the Butterfield Blues Band, whose lead guitar player, Mike Bloomfield, was a very big notch above anyone else on an instrument that was coming to define the era. He was the first rock guitar hero, ahead of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and held the mantle, Mickey, at least for a while. When I re-imagined Black Orpheus ( itself a reimagining of Orpheus in the underground) I imagined Mike Bloomfield as the Pan-like protagonist, probably having learned by then that his guitar was the transcendental and evocative...

Cecelia and I were lucky enough to see Bob Dylan at BU's Agganis Arena last week. We grew up in different places but we both grew up liking Bob Dylan. We met at BU. So it was right and just. And I will try to properly recall thin's here. (Above you see him playing at Tony Bennett's 90th birthday late last year but, if you can imagine the band outfits as white, you get the same picture we saw, at least on the slow crooner numbers.) Mavis Staples opened the show and her voice is still strong. I'd be wrong not to mention. She put out a pretty good vibe that had optimism and resistance in it. Very useful this particular week. For his part, which was the big part, Bob is really a trip, and I think he has a bit of the put-on thing going on sometimes, but it seems like good fun mostly. I think he tries in his Neverending Tour to recreate the feel of some show somewhere in some Neverland place. I know parts of it made me recall when we saw him at Worcester's War ...

Recently looking at some writing by Charles Simic on the poetry of the blues. Simic is a very lyrical, imagistic and accomplished poet, who also writes criticism. His steady stream of work has always impressed me, especially the reimaging work on the life of artist Joseph Cornell that he produced in 1992 [“Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell [NYR Book]. The pieces recently read were selections from Simic’s “The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays And Memoirs” [U of Mich Press, 1994]. As Blues Poetry has at times been focused on my blog, I thought I’d riff a bit on it. The blues belongs to a specific time, place and people but it in turn transcends those limits, writes Simic. He continues: “The secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude.” And yes, it was that odd key that first captured my imagination, I’d agree. It conjured up a world that could address one’s most elemental feeling – loneliness, let’s say. “Lyric poetry has no closer relation ...