moon traveller herald

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, and he had a love for the low culture of movies, and this could be viewed as a movie. And I would be there firstly if I could, in this case, making the 25-mile drive to the big city of Milwaukee in Dad’s Buick Wildcat. Awaited, Satyricon was, as film, the form, was in its flower; as a Hemingway novel was awaited in the 20s, a play by Williams in the 50s, or like a Dylan record still some...

To Jim Haas: Looking at this picture of Big Jay McNeely ignites a flying moon traveller firecracker in my brain.  There is this place there - where a legendary rhythm & blues saxman is wailing and honking forever.  My brother Michael and I saw Jay at the Night Stage club in Cambridge in the early 1980s, and it was a gas -  A funny thing though – it was all incendiary. But I cant, when I sit down and try, remember all that much. Anyway here goes…What I remember was we won tickets to see him. I'd been studying blues like a mad monk, and had to know more and more. Had seen Cleanhead Vinson, for example, who'd recently thanks to Harry Duncan's brilliant slate making, had gigged with Sunnyland. This honking sax-oriented feverish R&B was part  of Sunnyland's area of interest – back in the days, days with JT Brown, Jump Jackson, Oiver Alcorn. Was glad to win the tickets. Also knew him as composer of I Know There Is Something on Your Mind*  – a killer track r...

Before the moon, before Projects Gemini and Apollo, Armstrong was already a famed test pilot. His coolness when a prototype model LEM blew up [he ejected from the Lunar Landing Test Vehicle (LLTV) with not much time to spare] was part of his legend.There are arguments as to how the accident occurs - I defy you looking at the video to place yourself in his shoes - as it turns out the test pilot lot is a snipey one - it goes with the territory - to argue about what could have been differently - chewing on the cud of catastrophe, ultimately, to gain insight that might save your own behind one day.  

Every once and a while is time to remember why this site is called Moon Traveller Herald. It is a nod to the first lunar landing. It occurred on July 20, 1969, and for me, there are things that happened before and things that happened later, but that moment was the great pivot point of the modern world as it was a certain apex of technology. Hasn't really been surpassed, has it? Those days brought pictures not just of the moon, but of earth as seen from the moon. And that has been a repeating theme of Moon Traveller Herald – to look at things as at the remove of the moon. ~~~~~ Steady, skilled experience – cool, calm, collected, focused and dedicated was Neil Armstrong. Everything seemed to put him on path to being the first man on the moon, a trip that itself has some major tension. How did he get there? *He built models. Bigger and bigger, as  a boy. He had his pilot's license before he was 16, before he had a driver's license.  May have once damaged plane on powe...

Moving, yknow. What can I throw away? So many books. Some never opened, I admit. Here's this Calvin and Hobbes book (Yukon Ho!) Well maybe I will just look at it a bit before I dumpster it. What I will find is what I forgot - Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes was the greatest daily comic of my era. First things first: There is Peanuts, right? Which was totally transmogrifying great. I give Bill the nod because his drawings are just incredible, especially in their frame by frame motion, which is essential to comics. I am not faulting Charles Schultz, and you have to give him a big plus for doing it over many many more years that Watterson. But, well, got that out of the way… here goes…. It's a lot more than just drawings that make Calvin and Hobbes so great. There is his Mittiesque imagination. Which allows him to conflate anything into an oversized adventure. There is the perfect confection that is this world. That is betrayed deftly every time we see a glimpse of Hob...

Every once and a while - really very rarely - we get to see the other Hobbes - Hobbes as stuffed toy animal. This only goes to re-enforce the fact that power of imagination - the power of Calvin's imagination - is total. Greatest force in this universe. In another quick frame we are comfortably (with marshmallows in hot chocolate, even!) back in the operative dream of life. - Jack Vaughan on The Art of Bill Watterson post 1 of the series post 2 of the series post 3 of the series

Seemingly a chameleon concealed, changing colors; a nature documentary reeling in his young mind. In fact, it's Calvin hiding hind the sofa only to be found out, retrieved, snagged to clean his mess. A Mittyesque scene of youthful hiding. - Jack Vaughan on The Art of Bill Watterson post 1 of the series post 2 of the series post 3 of the series