moon traveller herald

I recall a teaching sister telling my girlfriend in high school that I “wasn’t actually smart,” that I was just well read. It was true that I read a lot and remembered much of it. I wasn’t all that glad for her to share this diagnosis. But I’ve always taken it that she didn’t want this boy and that girl to get too fast and tight too soon, if ever, and this could hold the horses, and I didn’t take it too badly.   I know it sent my paramour to noodling. This old vignette surfaces amid the flotsam of the day as I pick through one of those NYT “The Lives they lived” Obits – this for Clifton Fadiman (well after the fact, you see, I found The New York Times Magazine for Jan. 2, 2000, as we rummaged through my brother’s car on its way to junking). Fadiman was moderator of “Information Please”, editor for Book of Month Club, Britannica,   and so on back in the old days. They said he read all the time. And he honed a precise memory too.   This was the kind of king of er...

By the time he died in 1995, Sunnyland Slim’s life-long efforts as a performer, gregarious ambassador, and keeper of the blues flame had made him the patriarch of  Chicago  blues. His star rests largely on his early recordings and to an even greater extent his later performances. This collection seeks to broaden the view of Sunnyland, featuring his work at sessions held in  Boston  in 1979 when Sunnyland Slim [born Albert Luandrew] was 72. In some blues histories, the Mississippi-born pianist will be remembered as the man who brought Muddy Waters to the attention of Leonard and Phil Chess at Aristocrat Records in  Chicago  in 1947. In Slim’s telling: “I got Muddy off the truck.” [Waters was delivering Venetian blinds when his relatives got Slim’s call for the Aristocrat sessions.] For reasons hard to identify, Sunnyland did not continue to record as a leader for the Chess brothers after his 1947 and 1948 sessions with Waters - after Aristocrat be...

Source: NewYorker Two years in... this fellow Trump continues to threaten an insurrection. But I think he is just a front man with no more skin in the game than his name on a sign at a golf course. Win or lose, he has a gig for life not. Meanwhile, no one wants to maintain the status quo more than the Republican elite - who were joyous in their years out of the White House and are very happy to be In the peanut gallery by day (throwing spit balls) and The hen house by night (taking the money and running). Putting reporters in a pen, and encouraging the audience to heckle them? This is hypocrisy and dementia, America, wearing a brown shirt and pushing handicapped people down the stairs. Trump

  Good fortune to be together with Dave Murray, Al Smiley, Jeff DeMark and Jim Haas in SF last week. Sunday morning, Some of us played some music  Sunday morning. Good fortune, indeed.