moon traveller herald

On this day in 1900, engineer John Luther "Casey" Jones of the Illinois Central Railroad died in a train wreck near Vaughan, Miss., after staying at the controls in a successful effort to save the passengers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Jones http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/73/CaseyJonesStamp.png/220px-CaseyJonesStamp.png

More than a few players couch there work in a mystic veil. Sonny Rollins is more than open, however He does not mind calling out influences, even the off-beat and patently indecipherable ones. If as a lad in St.Thomas he saw a film where a Danish opera singer sang Amor [or something like that], and he was able to repurpose that general modus as St Thomas, he can talk about it. He is known for a certain type of improvisation in concert where he quotes from far and wide.. riffing like a mocking bird, but finding new things in all the music that is out there. To me this is a real essence of most creative processes. Rollins recently played Symphony Hall in Boston, and spoke on Christopher Lydon’s radio show. That conversation is available as a podcast MP3. Yippie-Aye-Oh-Kay-Yeah. Was reading newish Kerouac book today, Book of Sketches. He writes: Be like Bird, find y.self little story tunes too string yr complexities along a well known line... Related Sonny Rollins on OpenSource - Podca...

Don't like to repeat myself. But my old Radio blog is like unreadable. Because it accepted keyboard specialties of Microsoft and then, in a new rev, crashed on them, populating stories with ?s where ' or -- outta be. So I redid this one, anyway, offering it up here, yet again. Flash - It is summer, the evening, and the tickets are going on sale for the Milwaukee premier of Fellini’s Satyricon. The film: Much anticipated. Maestro Fellini has promised to visit our planet, as if it were an alien one, by going back to the time before Christendom. I for one cannot remember the world too well in the time before Fellini’s Satyricon. It has been with me since I first heard the music of this film – Fred’s friendly sound genius Nina Rota at hand using BBC-style colonial world field recordings Gamelan and such -- to help conjure the dream. Exposition - It was a much anticipated film not movie, says I. Movie was an American thing. Our invention. But Fellini was the great film artist...

Windows software developers can be forgiven if they don’t take too much interest in the wacky machinations of the technology business. But we thought we would note a recent business deal that may indicate where Microsoft is ultimately headed, and which, though not accomplished, is a good sign for Windows developers. Last week, Microsoft passed on the opportunity to buy DoubleClick, the major force in placing Internet banner ads. Rumors had Microsoft behind the scenes bidding for DoubleClick ahead of Google’s eventual $3.1-billion move. There seems little question that Microsoft’s interest pushed the price of DoubleClick up, far past the price paid earlier this year in the more touted Google buy of YouTube. The latest deal shows that Google’s business, for all the buzz about its Ajax software and nifty productivity suites, is the advertising business. There was fear here that Microsoft would enter that same advertising business in a big way with the DoubleClick purchase, in order to cou...

There is a new installation in the Chinese galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. The review that ran in yesterday’s Times struck me. Because, well the writer boiled down the poetry of the Chinese, pretty simply and pretty aptly. As often as not the mood is regret. If only we could have the old ways back. Or, I miss my distant friends so much. Or, all things die and so must I. So it may be hard to believe a great body of art can be built on something so simple, but it is true. It is about parting, goodbyes, leaving the city to go for the sylvan idyll. But there it is, and it is a tune the Irish know too. And one I have settled into more than not. I was reading this on April 13, the famous commemoration day of me leaving New York City in 1973. In fact I was reading it in at bar in Hingham – the then new town home of my parents that I first came to when I came to Boston. At the Snug at 5 oclock time when the just-off-work postal workers on Friday were flirting with...

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...

Saw All through the night. At the brattle theatre in Cambridge. A unique Bogart movie – quite humorous. He plays the New York tough maybe for the last time. He is a star. This is after Casablanca. But it is a warners bros b. helping the war effort Jackie Gleason and Phil silvers and William Demarest in the most expansive film role I have seen him play. More than a passing nod to Damon Runyon. It was about a .. well not a gangster .. a gambler. Who investigates a murder of a local baker. There is a dame involved. He gets pinned with a murder which leads him to uncover a secret ring of Nazis. He disrupts their plot to blow up a battleship in New York harbor. It’s always stayed with me. It starts with the simple act of a murder of a cheesecake baker [by no less than Peter Lorrie, under employ of no less than Conrad Veidt]. Has a plot. But more than that it has characters. Takes place in a single day and night. All through the night an apt title. Great black and white. Getting toward the ...