moon traveller herald

This was a mog page but mog went away so here i have inserted YouTube links - WALLSTREET PART OF TOWN – Ry Cooder - Does Ry Cooder get revenge on Stones’ theft of Honkytonk womae here? Who knows? He shows what he can do with a rock riff that will kill. It is a tribute to the Wall Street Occupiers (seems like ancient history, but was just a mere year ago). From a concept album. But this is beyond concept.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMT1SQA7dBE -NORTH SIDE GAL – J.D. McPhersen – He is a reformed punk I hear tell. I dig the sound cause, well it brings back Little Richard. I understand they did this all analog. There truly is something about the sound, it is of the studio era of 1948 – 1960 –when the art was high. By the way, I am from the North Side, myself.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZGn4LncY0g - COME ON BACK JESUS – Willie Nelson. A take on the world gone mad. It’s getting real hairy.  Time...

When I was a managing editor on a monthly in the 1980s I had folders for every month. I embellished this one for Christmas. It shows the advent month coming full speed from off stage and emblematic train going round the tree [or tries to show said]. That train is coming! Happy Christmas, happy world! - J.V. Just a panthering train cross the swells of the carpet Through oriental valleys and their piled paisley sockets Through skyscraper wrappings the apple spanked harlotty papers and things to returnto your feet. - Christmas Locomotive , 1967 Note: Traveller visitors will notice a few broken links.  I thought the Web was forever. Have back up for those pics and stories, but good luck finding them, Jack.

Bill Belichick is respected, not loved, in my neck of the woods. I know it is different elsewhere. Far and wide he is loathed. He is depressively catatonic in most press conferences, and his conspiracy to surreptitiously video the New York Jets has definitely gone down on his permanent record. But even his critics give him great measure as a football coach. Here I agree. I’d say I have never seen a coach so able to prepare his team for games yet at the same time be so able to adjust at half time to whatever the opposition had going for them. [As I kid I grew up on Lombardi – I just don’t remember that many games when they didn’t dominate from the start. Mind may play tricks.] In David Halberstam, Belichick met a well versed and able biographer. A bit slow and turgid and perfunctory at times, but most of the artifice was used to gain good narrative. Halberstam’s “The Education of aCoach” gives you a great view on the inner game of football, where scouts roam from game to game,...

Christmas 1972 When i lived in new york poor as a mouse door i would go on fifth avenue shopping the windows but i  got a white knit hat  for my sister at abraham-strauss then there at scrbiners or coulda been doubledays and it was on about christmas i saw danny kaye brilliant, welcome, witty, immortal, adored by the store help i crossed ore a portal walter mitty in dream trance in life's dance a corker a short time new yorker. would catch the train outta there but carry sprite danny sprite danny and the hat for my sister in  a place in my memory. until this very moment when here it is look here and you stand in front of me. -Jack Vaughan

Thanks to the WayBack Machine, this was rescued from the Netherweb. Originally appeared on the Proud Truth Electric Web Site Jamboree. Let's go back before 2004.... One thing I may never forget is the first episode of the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless aims a death ray of some sort at Earth. It is this event that leads Flash to venture into space to counter Ming's death ray. And, pulling from a trove of newsreel footage, the serial directors showed the x-ray results: tidal waves in Samoa, earthquake in China, catastrophe in general. When I feel bad, and feel the world seems in a tangle too, how often we feel it is Ming and his cosmic death ray disrupting our natural order. When president's totter and the car won't start, we wonder if Ming is at work. Clinton's and Wall Street's (not to mention the Mets') August 1998 troubles seemed to a part of a confluence. And we note that on August 27, 1998, according to Stanford and other researchers, w...

Thanks to the WayBack Machine, this was rescued from the Netherweb. Originally appeared on the Proud Truth Electric Web Site Jamboree.  Early 2001. Dolly and Porter, George and Tammy, John Prine and Connie Smith (and John Prine and Dolores Keane and John Prine and Melba Montgomery) -- the lovebird duet is a one of the war horses of the county genre, and John Prine has breathed new life in the old beast in his recent outing with a host of partners. It's called In Spite of Ourselves. The CD is minus a Prine penning, except for one, but is nonetheless noteworthy. The selections are various and often touching. And the pairings are complementary pretty much across the board. This marks a welcome return to the scene for Prine, who has recently battled illness. Although his throat was effected, his voice is like a shingled house a little more weathered now. Til a TearBecomes a Rose, When Two Worlds Collide, Milwaukee Here I Come, Back Street Affair, these are featured num...

Thanks to the WayBack Machine, this was rescued from the Netherweb. Originally appeared on the Proud Truth Electric Web Site Jamboree. Before 2005.  Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Deser t takes us to the hermetic wasteland of St Anthony and company and thus sets us about visiting a mess of caves of grasshopper-eating enlightenment-bent monks. Perfect reading for Sunday, on the porch, after church. If you don't visualize yourself there, maybe better pass on tome. The text is drawn from the Verba Senorium, as found in Migne's Latin Patrology. Monk himself Merton may never have found a better song to sing. His poesy, prose and journals of the '60s probed in enclosing spirals the monastic state, the enlightened state, and the violent state. The Nothingness hotly pursued by the early Christian mystics of North Africa, as found in early Christian texts, is a flute for Tom to play. "The Fathers [of the Desert] were humble and silent men, and did not...

Two space probes known as Ebb and Flow, respectively, are due to crash onto the dark side of the moon. Why? Because NASA don't want thesethings to just fall anywhere - most especially to randomly kerplunk where astronaut Neil Armstrong trod. As before in the history of western man the motto is ‘Let’s send our debris to the dark side.’ Background is the two spacecraft were launched in September of 2011 - they entered the lunar orbit earlier this year. Correlating data from the two objects, researchers were able to measure variations in the moon's gravitational field.   Understanding the gravity helps to discern the composition of the moon and in turn it cosmological history. But our probes are running out of fuel. Look out, Dale here comes Ebb and Flow .

[For Barney Beal.] After long listening on blues, there eased up on me a slightly sorcerous curiosity about some of the places the music found on its way. On or off the beaten track as one would construe it is Louisville. Thoughts on which I share with you here.  Not too widely known is it that it was a hot bed once of Jug Band music. There is hardly a music that surreally sounds more like the lost track of a silent movie. Which offers strains of swirling basic American tributaries. Few musics more so that for the cost of closing your eyes can take you back in time. While New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis were the milestone towns on the rivers of jazz, blues and rock n roll, there were others, Louisville among them. On the Ohio River in the 1920s, it was for a time the center of the Jug Band music sound. Minstrel shows and string bands roamed the nation in the 19th century, sometimes selling magical elixirs and snake oil. This was songster music, predating the appearance of bl...

yknow sometimes in the midnight  hours my heart full of tears i  get to thinking so many years i   called my god on high he heard my  feeble cry milk and local honey by  and by

Stingray - I remember Dr. Stienle Shroudette would pass us on Main St as I was taken to school in the morning. His Stingray was blue - six lights on behind.  At various times other he owned an Avanti and a Mercedes. His ethos was sporty and precise. He was going to work in the Great Tower of Science.In the morning we’d drive down Main Street. From 3 Mile Drive to Point Blank. Dr Shroudette in his Vette would pass us – the smallest semblance of a wave once - and we would thereafter tail him. Dr Stienle Shroud in his blue Corvette motoring down to the laboratory. Where they tested and researched.  Within the Shroud chemical tower complex, the test tubes were vast, it was a tv studio too, for Shroudette did our town's Saturday morning science show. Inside, Shroud orchestrated a flow of chemical elements. I'd watch the show in my sweatshirt with te Dr Shroudette patch symbol from a brown bottled Elliptictine ersatz drink. I imagined in the array of glass tubing a palace of...