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465

#FridayReads, Dec. 28–“My Friend Dahmer” & “The Fifth Woman,” a Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

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#FridayReads, Dec. 28–My Friend Dahmer, a graphic art memoir by Derf Backderf. A powerful book of comic art filled with distressing and dramatic aspects of Jeffrey Dahmer’s adolescence in a suburb near Akron, Ohio, where the future serial killer went to high school with the author. Published by the estimable Abrams Comic Art imprint.

Just finishing the pulsating police procedural The Fifth Woman, a Wallander novel by the Swedish mystery master Henning Mankell. This is the fifth of Mankell’s books I’ve read in the past couple months, and I’ve found each one more compelling and engrossing than the last. As in all the Wallander books, the diabolical plot is gripping, but it is the humanity of the police officers that pulls the reader through the yarn.

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Spirited NYC Demonstration Supporting First Nations Rights & #IdleNoMore

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Saturday Morning Update: Below I’d written about indie journalist Matt H., of Stopmotionsolo who was livestreamning yesterday’s #idleNoMoreRally. Here’s his comprehensive report on the demo, with good pictures and video, including a brief interview he did with me. Viewing that footage, which can be viewed via this link, I realize now how cold I had become after hours outside, as my speaking on camera seems to have been slurred by my cold lips.
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A hunger strike in Canada by First Nations leader Chief Theresa Spence in Attawapiskat, a scandalously impoverished native village in far northern Ontario began 18 days ago, but the issues of indigenous peoples’ rights and environmental justice that it’s stirring up are now spreading throughout the continent, and across the continental border, into New York City where I live. This afternoon I participated in a rally organized by native Americans of NY State in support of and in solidarity with Chief Spence. As shown in the photos below, they brought placards proclaiming their support for her, and for her opposition to the onerous new Canadian law, Bill C-45. It was promoted by the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and passed by the Canadian senate on December 14. A few days earlier Chief Spence began her hunger strike and asked Harper to meet with her and other First Nations leaders before the law is implemented. She is determined to explain her objections to the law and talk with him directly about the issues currently facing her people and many native groups. He has refused thus far and his government ministers have mostly been trying to ignore her. The rising crescendo of vigorous protests all across Canada, and in NYC today, are being mounted daily to show Harper he cannot hide from this selfless leader. Here is an up-to-the-moment report on Day 18 of her hunger strike at a link from CTV.

For about an hour in today’s freezing temperatures amid bright cold sunshine the spirited crowd of well over 100 people chanted, struck drums, sang, and danced in a circle around the central fountain in the center of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. During the rally I met a young journalist who was livestreaming the event. He interviewed me briefly, giving me the chance to tell him how the opposition to Bill C-45 had been building in Canada for months, and that it has now found a powerful catalyst in Chief Spence and her hunger strike. This indie journalist goes by the handle Mr Solo; streams at www.stopmotionsolo.tv; and tweets at @Stopmotionsolo. He gave his audience my name and that of this blog, so I hope that his viewers will find this post through the Internet and social networking. I also made audio and video of the demo, and will try to get some of that up as soon as I’m able.

I hope you can catch the spirit of the event from my pictures and a scan of the flyer handed out during the rally. To amplify all this, if you’re on Twitter please note that the hashtag #IdleNoMore has been trending all over North America this week, so please use it if you tweet on this topic. I also met Kevin Tarrant, Deputy Director of American Indian Community House in NYC. I told him that I thought he and his group  had done a great job of representing the issues from Canada, right down to the copy on their signs, not typical in a demonstration crossing borders like this one. He explained that they had read carefully on the Idle No More website and taken their cues from it. But of course, Kevin and his group really have no border separating them from Chief Spence, with whom they share bond and blood. He was pleased when I told him and a few of his fellow drummers and chanters that word of the rally was already traveling across the continent as I’d tweeted during the demo to an activist friend in Vancouver, British Columbia, Cameron Bode, known on Twitter as @vanboders. Here are Idle No More’s social addresses and connections:

Web: idlenomore1blogspot.com    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IdleNoMoreCommunity?fref=ts  Twitter: https://twitter.com/IdleNoMore


Click through to see all pictures.

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Readings From Rust Belt Chic, Jan. 3, at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

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Happy to share the above tweet, and expand upon it. Next Thursday, January 3, 2013, at Public Assembly, 70 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, near the Bedford Street station stop of the ‘L’ train in Williamsburg, a posse of Clevelanders, some transplanted to NYC, and others just visiting, will read from Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. I will be presenting my contribution to the book, “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” a personal essay on a venerable bluesman I followed avidly the years I lived in Cleveland. I hope to see you there!

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Our Holiday Soundtrack–Ralph Vaughan Williams and Bob Dylan with Friends

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Last night in my household we listened to music from several old LPs featuring folk songs, folk themes, and original music for chamber groups and orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), the English composer whose work I’ve listened to since I was a student at Franconia College, a student at Franconia College, when a professor there, Bill Congdon, turned me on to his music. Appropriate to the season, we heard RVW’s arrangements of “Wassail Song,” and similar songs. Not carols, exactly, but old folk songs of the season. I’m Jewish and so don’t observe Christmas, but I do love this music without reservations. RVW was part of a worldwide interest in folk idioms that also engaged many of his musical forebears and contemporaries in other countries–like Smetana and Dvorak in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Sibelius in Finland; and Aaron Copland in the States. Like Alan Lomax in the U.S. in later decades, RVW took early recording equipment in to the field and had nonprofessional musicians sing and play songs for him, also making notes of what he was told. It should be said, that Vaughan Williams didn’t just take folk themes and rework them–he was also a bold, original composer with an edge, exhibited in such works as his modernist Fourth and Sixth symphonies.

Famously, RWV arranged and reworked “Greensleeves,” as a song, and as a suite for orchestra, and many lesser known songs with names like “The Captain’s Apprentice,” “The Lark in the Morning,” “Bushes and Briars, and “The Unquiet Grave.” His output was vast and in the years when vinyl was still the dominant music medium I bought a lot of it. When I visited London for the first time, in 1980, I bought secondhand albums, releases that were never even brought out in the U.S., such as EMI’s boxed set of his nine symphonies and other orchestral music, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The album covers still bear the name of the dealer where I found them, Harold Moores Records. The records I bought there all evidently came from a public or college library, because inside I found little index cards, which had noted each time a patron or student had checked out the item. On “English Folk Songs, Arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with the Purcell Singers conducted by Imogen Holst” a tiny, spidery hand had recorded each of the 13 times the album  was requested and played between 1963-78.  A scant 13 plays in 15 years? The album was in great shape when I brought it back home, and still is. Checking the Internet, I see that Harold Moores Records is still in business on Great Marlborough Street in London.

This afternoon, we made a change of pace and have been listening to a magnificent live album, “Bob Dylan–The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration,” the Madison Square tribute concert staged in 1992 to commemorate Dylan’s first recordings. This is a 3-LP six-sided banquet that features guest performances of 28 Dylan songs by–brace yourself, in order–John Mellencamp; Stevie Wonder; Eddie Vedder; Lou Reed; Tracy Chapman; Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash; Willie Nelson; Kris Kristofferson; Johnny Winter; Ron Wood; Richie Havens; the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem; Mary Chapin-Carpenter, Rosanne Cash, and Shawn Colvin; Neil Young; Chrissie Hynde; Eric Clapton; the O’Jays; The Band; George Harrison; Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers; and Roger McGuinn. The house band was Booker T & the MGs, while Al Kooper makes a key appearance on Mellencamp’s rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Toward the end, Dylan steps on stage at the Garden to play 4 songs, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Girl of the North Country,” and “My Back Pages and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” with McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty, and Neil. I bought my copy about 15 years ago, again secondhand, and it still sounds great, as day has slipped on toward night.

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Celebrating the Holidays with the Singing Roches

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The night before the tragedy in Newtown, CT, I attended a special holiday concert put on by Suzzy and Maggie Roche with their extended musical family. It was a wonderful show, full of humor, uplifting sentiment, and infectious music. Sadly, the next morning as I downloaded photos from my camera and prepared to write a blog post about the show, news of the Newtown shootings began to emerge. I put the idea aside, my heart just wasn’t in it, especially after I learned that a former colleague’s 6-year old son was among the dead. Tonight, with Christmas Eve day ticking on toward midnight, even while another violent outburst of deadly gunfire was reported today, near Rochester, NY, I’ve decided to finally share my pictures and make this into a bit of a Christmas post.

I’ve written about the Roches a number of times over the past several months. First, Kyle and Ewan and I had fun at Terre Roche’s Sunset Singing Circle in Battery Park in June. This public sing-a-long was held at the tip of lower Manhattan, facing New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. I also wrote about sister Suzzy’s splendid mother-daughter novel, Wayward Saints,  a tragi-comic tale of rock n’ roll, family, and second chances in life. I posted next when Terre published a NY Times Op-Ed on what she dubbed the new busking in the music biz, with emerging mechanisms to seek funding for support of recording such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Finally, last summer Suzzy led a Bryant Park reading room discussion on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, which Kyle and I greatly enjoyed, and which I wrote about, as well.

They are clearly a very talented family, and I’m a fan. What’s more, they don’t just rest on their laurels for things they did back in the day (with Maggie) as The Roches, with such great compositions as “Hammond Song,” with its theremin-like lead instrument and great harmonizing of all three voices. It’s still a beautiful song, and deserves a fresh listen, if you haven’t heard it recently, or ever. That’s why I was eager to attend Suzzy and Maggie’s Dec. 13 program, what they called a “holiday-ish concert,” which was also going to include their brother, David, with his daughter, Oona; Suzzy’s daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche (whose father is Loudon Wainwright III, composer of the the classic, “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”); and singer songwriter, Julie Gold, best known for her song “From a Distance,” which Bette Midler recorded and made famous as a Grammy Song of the Year in 1991. It promised to be quite a program, and the event didn’t disappoint, at all.

I had never heard Maggie before this occasion, and it was interesting to hear her voice mix with that of Suzzy, with it a bit lower in register by comparison. They did “Hammond Song,” with Lucy taking the part that would’ve earlier been sung by Terre. Lucy also sang the title song from her latest album, “There’s a Last Time for Everything.” That wordplay is found in much of the Roches’ writing, with humor in their lyrics and a kind of plain-spoken matter-of-factness that I found refreshing. It doesn’t at first seem artistic, and the lack of artifice is welcome; what it is, is real. Scan the first verse of their song, “We,” their opening number on this program, credited to all three of the sisters, which they wrote in 1979:

We are Maggie and Terre and Suzzy/Maggie and Terre and Suzzy Roche/we don’t give out our ages/and we don’t give out our phone numbers/give out our phone numbers/sometimes our voices give out/but not our ages and our phone numbers

The night ended with them inviting anyone in the audience who wanted to sing in the last few carols to join them at the front of the church. A lively group assembled around them and the evening ended with a great, joyous sing-a-long. I’m glad I could be there, and finally post this little essay on the concert, notwithstanding the terrible tragedies that have intervened. I hope the photographs below give you a full sense of this special program. Please click here to see all photos.

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Windy Hudson River Bike Ride Photos

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I shared a couple of these photos on Instagram earlier, but here are two others. They were all taken on a break during a very windy bike ride this past Saturday. Standing on a bluff above the Hudson River as as an intense, dramatic sunset glowed across the whole skyline, I am in upper Manhattan at about 165th Street, looking south down the river back toward the city. Though I’ve often ridden in strong wind along the Hudson, the gusts usually come from one direction. Saturday, they swirled and came from all points of the compass.

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Sure Sign the NRA is Losing Some of its GOP Base

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It’s not surprising that the NY Daily News would show disapproval of Wayne LaPierre’s toxic pro-gun rant yesterday, as shown below, since it occasionally tends more moderate than far-right:

but it is surprising that the Murdoch-owned NY Post ran with this cover on today’s paper:

It is true that Murdoch recently tweeted somewhat favorably about gun control, but the Post has for so long been a bastion of extreme right-wing positions it is striking they would take this tone against the NRA. It shows, I believe, how much the political climate on gun control has changed in the past eight days, and how far the image of LaPierre and his extremist organization have fallen, since the murders in Newtown, and Lapierre’s so-called press conference, where he appeared unhinged and took no questions from the reporters summoned to the briefing.

Thanks to David Taintor of TPM, who shared these covers earlier in my Twitter feed.

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Alexander Moulton, 1920-2012, Innovative Bicycle Designer

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Although Englishman Alexander Moulton (pictured here) was trained as an automotive engineer his most lasting professional contribution was as the designer of the first mini-bicycle, the forerunner of today’s folding bikes. The fascinating NY Times obituary details the moment when

“Moulton began toying with a small-wheel design for an adult bicycle in the late 1950s. His interest was partly spurred by gasoline rationing in Britain during the Suez crisis, which began when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, an act that threatened to halt oil shipments to Western Europe from the Persian Gulf.

But the design was also fostered by his own engineer’s determination to make things better: ‘The Moulton bicycle was born out of my resolve to challenge and improve upon the classic bicycle,’ he said.

His idea was to create a more efficient, all-purpose vehicle, suitable for errands and commuting at least as much as for recreation. He wanted it to have substantial carrying capacity, to be maneuverable in traffic, to roll smoothly and to be pedaled easily.

He came up with a bike with wheels 16 inches in diameter, high-pressure tires for minimum rolling resistance, front and rear rubber suspension systems for smooth riding on potholed or cobblestoned roads, and a step-through frame (that is, without the top tube of the traditional diamond-shaped frame) for easy dismounting (and more suitable for women wearing skirts). The small wheels left plenty of room for carrying briefcases, shopping bags or overnight luggage. The early bikes could easily be taken apart for convenient stowing, though they were not really foldable; still, the small-wheel collapsible bikes of today owe a debt to the original Moulton. ([The Moulton company] now makes foldable bikes itself.)”

I’ve owned mini- and collapsible bikes and didn’t know who’d invented them.  They are great city errand-running bikes. I also love the fact that they were invented as a response to a fuel crisis. Thank you, Alexander Moulton!