Happy New Year!
Never hurts to look back - or does it? I don't think I reviewed Moon Traveller Herald 2019 - at least not in general. But here is a look of some of the posts during some of the months of a year when Corona Virus hit the world, and slowed much to a halt.
January
In January got a call one day to go to City Hall for a meeting on a neighborhood project. I am opposed to greater density in the city. That doesnt come out to clearly in my speech here. Ill prepared when fame came. A little more clarity in an interview I did with the Boston Globe on the topic of zoning.Recalled days with Sunnyland Slim, and the time he opened with the art school shites called the Talking Heads, er, Hands.
It was late for a year in review, but in January also ran a review of Space in 2019. Unfortunately, there wasn't much follow up on topic in 2020. Well, not cohesive coverage. Just little blips on the radar screen of my mind here and there. Poetry sort of appeared on the site in the same manner now and then.
February
Went back into the time tunnel to hear WFOX AM (Milwaukee) in April 1957 thanks to WMBR. Deep shit.
April
Lee Konitz passed at 92. It became a cherished occasion to review his work with Kerouac and other beats. Although the brutal coronavirus caught up with him, Konitz was truly a survivor, one who followed his own beacon across a cavalcade of styles of jazz.
May
Another passing immortal. The savagely spiritualistic piano monster Little Richard. His 16 Greatest Hits was in my collection when I had a small one, when I knew what I had very close & dearly. Had summer job at SCJs where paired as a painter with schoolmate Jim Chones, and one day he asked what kind of music I liked. I said: "Little Richard." & Jim said: "I hear he's a punk." Woh, hmmm-at that point I'd never seen Richard-only heard records. Got to see him the next year at Summerfest. Woh! What more can one say? Click to find out.
June
It's one of my pretensions: I am fascinated by fluid dynamics. I feel with no evidence that I could have mastered the subject if I hadn't fell so incredibly for Bob Dylan's poetics. PBS ran a show this year on Ted Fujita and his research into tornadoes and I ended up watching it multiple times, trying to learn more. Fujita's work had other interest beyond the base science (and its usefulness in bringing significantly more dependability to commercial air travel). He had honed a unique approach to problem solving. These days, with my work on technical assessment for Progressive Gauge, that is of special interest, so I put a lot of effort to learning about this as best as I could. Note> This post appeared on the Progressive Gauge blog as Fujita – Watcher of the air waves.
July
Peter Green died at 73. I count him as a giant of the Blues. Certainly, among people from across the Atlantic, he was one of the bravest and brightest to contribute to the Blues. Go on Great Guitar Marauder, cross the Wide River.
Reading James Caroll’s The City Below for the Mission Hill Book Club and it brought up a lot of the mood of when I first got to Boston. Looking back in my morgue files – I thought I’d trot out a piece from my days writing for the BU News. This is news analysis. The editors would wrestle with my stories til nearly dawn, trying to turn them into news. Then, say, well, slap a 'news analysis' tag on it. Which was okay with me ...
In the mid-60s the people in power knew that the schools would have to be integrated. But there were plenty of opportunistic politicians around who smelled votes in the issue. People like Hicks, John Kerrigan, Paul Ellison, built careers on delaying the implementation of busing. They needn't cater to the black voter because they were elected citywide and the Irish vote ruled over all. They did a pretty good job since it was almost 10 years before the busing began. But that's when the shit hit the fan. The poor whites of the city had their hopes blown up by their leaders, who maybe thought they could kid them along forever. No such luck.
October
As he had in many of the last four years, Donald Trump moved deeper into my head in Oct 2020. His debates, like everything else about him, were beyond the pale. Set me to screaming like a wife battering husband, and wishing him on his way to hell. I prayed- God answered. Trump is out.
November
Did I mention this was a time of Covid-19? Talk about dark. I decided to pull together some drawings. Like so many other crimson-blooded Boomers, I had begun friending, tweeting and Instagram posting, and re-writing headlines as they should have first been writ. Eventually, I put my jokes into the beaks of Blue and Red. My two birds. It's a PDF. There was more. A little bit of this. A little bit of that. Woo-oh-oh-no. Trump yanked the sick spirit of 2020 forward, led a charge at the Capitol, and vied 'til the very day of Jan 20th at noon when a Democrat again took helm.
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