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2012 Hits Of

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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...

Happy Christmas 2012

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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.

The Edjubication of a Coach

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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

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

Ming the Merciless aims a death ray of some sort at Earth

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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...

In Spite of Ourselves

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...

Wisdom of Desert

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...