Subway Song, Interrupted

Ascending
From
Subway
To
Street,
I’m
Always
Confused—

I don’t live in New York. I use the subway when I visit, so I keep a stack of partially used MetroCards on my desk in Seattle. When I first traveled to New York, I used subway tokens. Those are useless now, but I still keep a dish filled with those eccentric coins. Today, I counted my MetroCards. There are fifty-three. For years, I’ve tried to remember to bring them when I travel to NYC. But what’s the use? I will always forget. So what should I do with these cards? Maybe I’ll mail one each to fifty-three friends who live in NYC. I’ll write them a note: “I love you, dear friend. I love you inside and in between the boroughs. These MetroCards are a mystery. Use them. Unmask them. Interrogate them. Be thorough.” Or maybe I should send all fifty-three to the visiting poet who met her future husband on the F Train. “Really?” New Yorkers ask (surprised by their city) when I repeat that story. “Yes,” I say. “She met him on the subway when she asked him for directions.” Is that a miracle? Maybe. But, hell, I know a guy—a lifelong New Yorker—who lost his virginity as he was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Is that a miracle? He says, “Effing A, it was a miracle, all thirty-three seconds of it.”

—Descending
From
Street
To
Subway,
I’m
Always
Confused.


SHERMAN ALEXIE

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/poetry/alexie_s/subway_page.shtml

Judy Collins at The Sage 9th Feb 2010

Definition of a true class act
JUDY COLLINS
The Sage Gateshead

FOLK music legend Judy Collins gave a stunning demonstration of vocal precision and stagecraft for her appreciative Tyneside audience. Excavating a back catalogue stretching back half a century, Collins proved that a quality artist can brush away the years in performance.

Opening with her hit versions of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now and Ian Tyson’s Someday Soon, the US folk queen never put a foot wrong during a 90 minute show studded with standout moments, performing highly complex songs with ease and grace. Early folk favourites like Golden Apples of the Sun and Maid of Constant Sorrow sat easily with sensitive readings of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne or Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns.

Accompanied by a 12-string acoustic guitar and a piano player, Collins evoked memories of her radio producer father with Lorenz and Hart’s Where or When, while Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Danny Boy, during which she coaxed the audience to sing, were unexpected delights.

Vocal highlights included her self-penned Since You’ve Asked, Anathea (which inspired Bob Dylan’s Seven Curses) and a memorable reading of Jimmy Webb’s Paul Gauguin in the South Seas.

It may be a cliche, but Judy Collins is the living definition of a class act.

TERRY KELLY

WOMEN IN MUSIC #42

FRIDAY NIGHT (SHORT JEWISH) BOY COOL #45

Let America be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Langston Hughes

I Know A Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Robert Creeley

ygUDuh by ee cummings

ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan

ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged

yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn

LISN bud LISN

dem
gud
am

lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin

duhSIVILEYEzum

ee cummings

Robert Crumb Draws The Blues

http://www.crumbproducts.com/

Bob with the President

Changin' - close up version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6l6TdPn5Wg

Dennis Wilson Documentary Feb 26th BBC4

A new 60 minute documentary film on the life of Dennis Wilson has been created for the BBC4 Legends series. The film titled Dennis Wilson – The Real Beach Boy will premiere in the UK on Friday, February 26th at 9 p.m.. The documentary features previously unseen footage and rare archival materials. New interview segments with David Marks, Al Jardine, Blondie Chaplin, Michael Wilson, Carl B. Wilson, Gregg Jakobson, Ed Roach, John Hanlon, Jeffrey Foskett, Tom Murphy, Ron Swallow, Jo Ann Marks, Taylor Hawkins, Mike Kowalski, Jon Stebbins and others give the film a fresh perspective on Dennis’ life and legacy.

The documentary is produced by Lime Pictures of Liverpool in association with Dusty Slider films and BBC Wales. Matt O’Casey is credited as director and co-producer, executive producers are Tony Wood and Paul Bullock, Jon Stebbins is the film’s U.S. producer, and Howie Edelson is program consultant. The documentary is narrated by noted British DJ Mark Radcliffe who is also a drummer and a longtime fan of Dennis Wilson.

http://thejonstebbins.com/dwdocumentary.html

Salinger's Letters

JD Salinger’s letters reveal caustic opinions on people and his work

James Bone in New York

A newly released cache of letters by J.D. Salinger sheds fresh light on how he went from a celebrated young author who dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to a recluse raging at the “big shitty world”.

The 11 letters were written by Salinger to Michael Mitchell, the commercial artist and his former neighbour, who designed the cover of The Catcher in the Rye. The letters show that Salinger maintained a stringent writing discipline for decades after his last published story in 1965, working at his desk from 6am to noon, and had at least two “scripts”, or books, he had been “picking at for years” before his death last month.

“The reason that these letters are especially good is that they are written from a literary artist to a visual artist,” said Declan Kiely, a curator at the Morgan Library in New York, which is preparing to put them on public view for the first time next week. “So they talk about what it is to struggle as an artist — to struggle with creativity.”

The first letter was written from London on May 22, 1951, just as Salinger, then 32, was about to publish The Catcher in the Rye. He was escorted around town by his British publisher Hamish Hamilton, whom he describes as an excellent host but a “professional get-together boy”.

He went to see Olivier and his wife Leigh in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and was invited afterwards to dine at their house in Chelsea, which he described as a “very posh evening”. In another letter written in 1983, Salinger compared Olivier unfavourably as an actor with John Wayne in The Shootist.

Salinger withdrew from public life in 1953 to a 90-acre (36ha) property in New Hampshire. In one letter, dated December 30, 1983, he rails at “some English prick” who has been commissioned to write a biography of him — a reference to Ian Hamilton, the British author of In Search of J.D. Salinger, with whom he fought a long legal battle. Perhaps his most revealing comment comes on April 6, 1985, when he laments that his life was not really “tellable in any of the normal ways that friends tell each other how things are going”.

The letters end in 1993 with him curtly rebuffing a request from Mr Mitchell to autograph a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Mr Mitchell apparently sold the letters to a dealer soon afterwards and they found their way to the collector Carter Burden. His widow donated them to the Morgan Library, which kept them sealed until after the author’s death.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7025743.ece

Da plays Neil

A one-day Rustfest, celebrating the music of Neil Young, in aid of Demelza Hospice Care for Children. Headlined by the mighty Laurel Canyon Band, also on the bill are Don't Spook The Horse (acoustic) and a host of NYAS, UK Shore and Rustlist musicians and singers, plus special guests.
We'll be glad y'all came down...

Saturday, February 20, 2010
Time: 2:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: The Rifleman, Sevenoaks, Kent, England

Last night's set list

At the Irish Centre, Leeds to an audience c200 (a first!): -

Long May You Run
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Mind Your Own Business

Left the stage with the crowd howling for more.

A Change is Gonna Come

New Donald Fagen Album Only Light Years Away!

After Steely Dan tour, Donald Fagen eyes another solo album next year
By John Soeder, The Plain Dealer
November 09, 2009, 3:30PM

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are showcasing their back catalog on tour. For its upcoming two-night stand at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron, Steely Dan will perform two of its classic albums from start to finish: “Aja” (1977) on Monday, Nov. 16, and “The Royal Scam” (1976) on Tuesday, Nov. 17.

Band co-founders Donald Fagen (vocals, keyboards) and Walter Becker (guitar) aren’t just living in the past, though.

“Walter and I keep tossing around ideas for another Steely Dan album, but there’s nothing set yet,” Fagen said during a recent phone interview.

Up next for him: another solo project.

“I have a bunch of songs that I’m set to record sometime in the spring,” Fagen said.

No, his next solo outing won’t pick up where his “Nightfly” trilogy (including 1982’s “The Nightfly,” 1993’s “Kamakiriad” and 2006’s “Morph the Cat”) left off.

“I’m really glad I’m through with that,” Fagen said.

“It was something I was sort of compelled to do, and I think I took that as far as it could go.

“This will be something lighter, just a one-off.”

http://www.cleveland.com/popmusic/index.ssf/2009/11/after_steely_dan_tour_donald_f.html

Ron Sexsmith - LIVE!!!!

Cameron Hotel 1991


This Is How I Know

Former Glory

To Ramona

Ring Them Bells

One Last Round

Beefsteak Mine

Timothy McSweeney RIP

Dave Eggers on the Real Timothy McSweeney.

Back in 1998, for a journal I was planning to put out, I started collecting fiction, essays and experiments that couldn't find a publisher elsewhere. Because the journal consisted of work that didn't fit in mainstream publishing, I decided to name the journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Here's why:

My mother's maiden name was McSweeney. She grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, one of five children, the daughter of an obstetrician, Daniel McSweeney, and his wife Adelaide Mary McSweeney.

Much later, my mother married John Eggers and they moved to suburban Chicago. When I was about eight, I started getting strange mail addressed to both me and my mother. These were usually notes written on pamphlets and other sorts of mail that required no postage. The messages were confusing, but generally seemed to be written by a man named Timothy McSweeney, who thought he was related to my mother, and who was hoping to visit soon. Sometimes Timothy would include train schedules and other plans. Sometimes they included drawings and diagrams. Usually the letters had a sense of urgency, as if after many years of searching for his relatives, he had found my mother and me, and wanted to reconnect as soon as possible.

I was intrigued by the letters so much that I kept them in a drawer in my room, wondering if Timothy was actually related to us. My mother dismissed the letters as those of a confused or disturbed man who she had never met. When a new letter would arrive, she would hand it to me, usually without reading it. I would pore over it for clues, and then would add it to the stack.

We didn't know if he was real—if there was a real person named Timothy—but in any case the name Timothy McSweeney came to hold an aura of mystery. He was an enigma, a man looking for a home, producing writing that was cryptic and full of longing.

So many years later, when I was conceiving a name for this literary journal, the name Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern occurred to me. It made sense on many levels. I was able to honor my Irish side of the family and also allude to this mysterious man and the sense of possibility and even wonder he'd brought to our suburban home.

A few years after the quarterly began, we took on an intern named Ross McSweeney. Ross and I got to talking, and he mentioned that his family, too, was from Boston. I joked that we were probably related somehow, and he told me that he was the nephew of Timothy McSweeney. The real Timothy McSweeney.

Ross and I, with the help of Ross's father David—Timothy's brother— pieced it together. And this is probably what happened:

One day in Boston in 1943, my grandfather Daniel McSweeney delivered a baby. This baby was put up for adoption, and was adopted by another McSweeney family. He and David were raised in a loving family, and Timothy eventually went to the Massachusetts School of Art and later received an MFA from Rutgers University. After graduating, he taught studio art at Rutgers for a time.

But mental illness overtook him, and he struggled with alcoholism. He was hospitalized many times. Eventually he was put in the care of an institution for mental health, where he remained safe and received treatment. It was from this institution that he began to send letters. According to his brother David, he would search through city and state records, find names, and write to the people he found.

Presumably, he saw my grandfather's name on his birth certificate and came to think Daniel McSweeney might have been his father, not simply the delivering obstetrician. And thus he sought out the children of Daniel McSweeney.

Ross, David and I figured all this out in 2000, and it was then that they informed me that Timothy was still alive. He had remained under doctors' care all these years, and the McSweeney family visited him regularly.

Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy's background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word. Since 2000 we've implicitly dedicated all issues to the real Timothy.

— Dave Eggers

http://mcsweeneys.net/2010/2/5mcsweeneys.html
http://mcsweeneys.net/



McSweeney's began as a small collection of work rejected by other magazines, but it soon began to publish pieces primarily written for the journal, and to attract some of the finest writers in the country. Contributors to Best of McSweeney's, Volume One include Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold, A. M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Amanda Davis, George Saunders, Paul Collins, and William Vollmann, as well as many talented newcomers. Stories included here have been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories.

Déjà vu

Another snowy evening in York - last night's set list: -

Oh Lonesome Me
Tell Me Why
I Believe In You
Down By The River

Older than the President

WOMEN IN MUSIC #41

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #44

Of course, a true FNB's response should always be "Garner", when faced with the question: "McQueen or Garner?"