moon traveller herald

The biggest thing that ever happened on the Moon from my point of view happened some time ago – I was a lad – when Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and then others, walked upon it. Looking up at that thing in the sky – whew – made you forget the problems at your feet. We as a culture aint goin back any time soon – unless the Chinese or Indians really surprise – and there is not much news about our nearby satellite of love.  So it is nice to pick up this week's Science Times, and find an nice little omnibus about recent Moon stuff. Some of the science that is being done today around the moon is discussed. The story goes sideways at first with some guff about the Super Moo n-  rare instances when the orb appears 10 or so % larger (happened 3 times this year) – but then it gets to its work which is to show that lunar studies are really abuzz. A lot of this is based on studies/research that considers the moon's origins. The consensus there is that these origins are cataclys...

News has been called the first take of history. But what about when the first take does a double take? When the news guys regurgitate history? "A War Is Long Over But Many Still Seek To Learn Its Lessons" in Tuesday's Times (9-9-2014) does a bit of such regurgitation - discussing the 100th anniversary World War I and the general torpor that finds many thinking people today finding similarities between the global Risk game today and then. Figuring in the story is Margaret MacMillan, author of "The War That Ended Peace". She comments that were now living in a much more complicated world than that of the predecessor Cold War period "with low-level conflicts that never seem to conclude and the sense of things ending somehow, of a great period of transition." Like Linus discussing the great pumpkin, this newsreader screams "THAT'S IT" To me this feeling of conclusion, transition and sconflict is a big part of the essential concoction t...

The Big Psychedelic Broadcast - We went down to see the big boat off/the crowd called for [Reinaldo] to sing/I've got laryngitis he said, the fop/but [Kitty Carlyle] did her thing/she sang to the urchins she sang to the rich/ the boat ramp ganging way/[Alan Jones] he intones some beauteous Florentine balladry/ some get on the ship to sail the big sea to the chords of Gloria in the exalt sea. The ship the Collussus was powered by radio. In the hole a mighty dynamo. Starry was the machinery - Tesla-like the broadcast signal & great - Kitty looked upon "an ingenious channel for transforming heat from missive transmission" as described by the gushing Capt Engenue. "Scarcely humming but ever audible." thought Adams Ginsberg.  Aye, Captain. The wheel "one could almost pray to." (pictured: The Big Broadcast of 1938) 

Fug You. by Ed Sanders P 300 -327 Described here are themes that relate to his musical view, as the 60s wind down. In the studio doing a whole LP side with a single flow without separations. The dread specter had a musical correlative in the form of the eerie theremins of the BeachBoy's Good Vibrations and Krysztof Komeda's Rosemary's Baby * The 60s winding down meant he was tired of public exorcisms, he was almost in Valerie (SCUM Manifesto) Solanas' cross hairs, and the poetry was to the amp in the largely humming feedback mix. The 60s winding down meant that quietude was forlorn and foreign. A change was going to come. Mainly, after a significant sojourn in the belly of the Tate-LaBianca murders, it was to expand on Investigative Poetry, but also it was to tinker with electronics for accompanying the bard. Thus the Electronic Bard System (EBS). ~~~~~~~~~ *Mia Farrow beats Mo Tucker to market by a year.

Happy 107th, Mule!

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...