Self-Absorbed Boomer

Pierce Turner: "Ball and Chain (Snakes and Ladders)"

2012-01-27T00:34:00.002-05:00

Pierce Turner was one half of Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, the house band at the Bells of Hell from sometime in 1977 to 1978. The band was just the two of them: Pierce played Moog; Larry Kirwan played guitar while using a pedal to strike a drum; and both sang. Their repertoire included some original songs ("Absolutely and Completely", "Father Reilly Says Goodbye", "The Girl Next Door"), arrangements of traditional Irish songs ("Free Born Man of the Traveling People"; a version of the rebel song "The Foggy Dew" ending in Moog pyrotechnics), and covers ("Death of a Clown", "Lola"--they were great Kinks fans--and the New Riders' "Panama Red", which, to their chagrin, a certified public accountant named Stu would frequently and loudly request).

Toward the end of their time at the Bells, they were producing more original material. They added a bassist and a full-time drummer, and changed their name to The Major Thinkers. As such, their music evolved into a kind of post-disco electronica with new wave overtones, done very well. (I still have an unscratched Major Thinkers twelve inch disc.) You can hear them here.

Today, Larry fronts Black 47, and Pierce is a solo artist. His latest is in the clip above (thanks to odriscl for the clip and to Bells/Lion's Head friend Cheryl Floyd for the link) and, in my opinion, shows him still at the top of his game.

Goodbye, Joe Paterno

2012-01-22T17:28:00.000-05:00

Miamiherald.com

I don't think Joe Paterno, who died today at 85, will have the fate Shakespeare's Antony described in Juluis Caesar, Act 3, scene ii: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones". The evil of which Paterno was accused so near the end of his life was a sin of omission, but one that may have had very bad consequences. Fellow blogger Mark Koltko-Rivera, writing at the time the scandal had just broken and before Paterno was fired as Penn State's football coach, made a case, on both consequentialist and deontological (if, indeed, there is a real difference between the two) grounds, for firing Paterno immediately, thereby denying him a "last hurrah" at the Nittany Lions' then forthcoming end-of-season game.

Joe Paterno was a native of my now beloved adopted home, Brooklyn. He coached at a university near where my mother was born and raised and where I was born, whose teams I rooted for whenever they weren't playing against Florida or Florida State. I believed, and still believe, in his reputation as a good coach, not only in the sense of being a winning coach, but one who inspired respect and love from his players while instilling or reinforcing in them ideals of good conduct and devotion to learning, as well as to football. I don't think this reputation will "be interred with [his] bones", nor should it. The "evil" will also be remembered, and should serve to caution others who find themselves in a situation similar to that in which Paterno found himself when confronted with the information he was given.

Louis Prima, "Just a Gigolo"

2012-01-19T00:53:00.001-05:00

This was a favorite of Nick Tosches. I remember his repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, cajoling Delbert McClinton to do it at the Lone Star Cafe. The sound and video quality on this vintage clip, courtesy of Glauco Malagoli, isn't the greatest, but Louis Prima's talent shines through. Keely Smith sings and acts wonderfully. Nick also gets a credit on the clip.

Lion's Head lament: Liam Clancy singing "Dirty Old Town"; Lucian Truscott on looking back.

2012-01-16T09:28:00.001-05:00

In the continuing e-mail discussion of the history of the Lion's Head hosted by Dermot McEvoy, who is writing a book about it, Lucian K. Truscott IV made this observation:

I’ve been thinking about this, and I guess every generation goes through this same sort of geezer stage, when there are fewer and fewer people around who remember the good old…or bad old…days. It’s the natural order of things.

I remember one Saturday years and years ago, back in the late 80’s, after I had moved out of New York. I was back for a couple of days staying with a friend in the Village, and I was walking down Bedford Street, or one of those nice little streets over there west of 7th Avenue, and I saw this young woman walking down the street toward me. She was in her early 20’s, and dressed real cool, and she was gorgeous, and she was going somewhere important to do something important, almost bent forward with the energy of youth and Great Expectations. It came to me that she was exactly like the young women I lusted after when I was her age. We were all gorgeous and dressed real cool and headed someplace fast to see someone important or do something important, filled with Great Expectations that would come true, damn it, or we would die tryin’. All of a sudden I realized that we had been replaced. That the little studio apartments all around me were no longer filled with my friends and acquaintances, but hers. The street was hers now. The energy was hers. The important people she was going to see were her important people, not mine, and the important things she was going to do were different than our important things. The only things that remained pretty much the same were the street and her gorgeousness and Great Expectations.

Dermot replied that this made him think of the song "Dirty Old Town", as done by another, now deceased, Head regular, Liam Clancy, and gave a link to the YouTube clip above. This song was a favorite of another now departed Head stalwart, Dennis Duggan.

Dermot is quoted in this New York Observer article about the changes that have been wrought on Greenwich Village and New York City at large.

From the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

2012-01-15T23:54:00.000-05:00

The Rev. John Patrick McGinty quoted portions this paragraph of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter in his homily this morning at Grace Church, Brooklyn:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

You may reasonably ask, may everyone decide what laws are just and which unjust? Everyone will, but we can hope that, as was the case with those who opposed the Jim Crow laws, those whose decisions are right will in the end prevail.

Austin Lounge Lizards, "Gingrich the Newt"

2012-01-14T10:10:00.002-05:00

Arthur Boehm's posting of this Gingrich campaign ad made me remember the Austin Lounge Lizards' song from the 1990s, performed a cappella (I wonder if Newt also objects to Italian?) in the clip above. The video is a bit, uh, psychedelic, but the sound is comme il doit être.

Downtown Manhattan: a financial triangle.

2012-01-11T00:16:00.004-05:00

The building with the curvilinear facade at the left is 200 West Street, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs (Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, 2009). The two buildings to the right, of similar design, are Three and Four World Financial Center, the headquarters of American Express and Merrill Lynch (now a subsidiary of Bank of America), respectively (both by César Pelli & Associates; both completed 1986). In the background, the new One World Trade Center (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP; completion anticipated 2013) is rising.

This photo of one of the principal nerve centers of finance capitalism was taken from the Irish Hunger Memorial.

Be Good Tanyas

2012-01-05T00:38:00.001-05:00

In response to my Country and Northern post, Sheryl Robinson, better known to Fray veterans as Dawn Coyote, asked why I hadn't mentioned the Be Good Tanyas. My first thought was that I don't think of them as "country", but, as I noted at the close of my post, it's a thin line between "country" and "folk". I do like this Vancouver based group of three women, shown in the clip above--the only one I can find that shows them in live performance--doing "Scattered Leaves", a song I hadn't heard before, with bass and drum backing. I like them despite Frazey Ford's singing, as a critic once wrote of Natalie Merchant, "in English as if she'd grown up speaking some Polynesian language."

Here they do "Oh, Susannah", probably as classic a "country" song as there is.

For a more contemporary country sound, here they do Townes van Zandt's "Waitin' Around to Die."

They do blues, too. Here's their cover of Josh White's (or is it their cover of Dylan's cover) of "In My Time of Dying."

New Year's shout-outs.

2012-01-03T01:02:00.005-05:00

Skaket Beach, Cape Cod Bay, morning, January 2, 2012

Last year, Blogger started telling me what are my most popular posts. Leading the pack is Grace Slick at seventy; so, leading my shout-out list is Michael Simmons, who sent me the lovely pic of septuagenarian Grace that led to the post. Second on my hit parade has been Pierre Bonnard, "Late Interiors", at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; so, a salute to Mark Crawford for inspiring me to take an interest in that painter's work, and to the Met for mounting a great show. Other posts that have drawn lots of visits include Jazz and the visual arts, featuring a painting by Mike Sorgatz, and Gabriel Fauré, Le Jardin de Dolly, another post that attempts to draw a parallel between painting and music, for which I can thank WQXR, New York's classical music station.

I'll give special mention to John "Homer Fink" Loscalzo, publisher of Brooklyn Bugle, which re-publishes many of my posts, and Brooklyn Heights Blog, which is my alternative forum for writing about matters of local interest. One of my most popular posts is Do you curate? If so, you rate?, which was inspired by my BHB colleague Heather Quinlan. I also tip my hat to Eliot Wagner for introducing me to new musicians and groups about which I've posted.

Finally, as always, thanks to my loyal readers--you know who you are--and to my wife and daughter.

New Year's Greetings from Cape Cod

2012-01-01T17:01:00.007-05:00

I'd been to Cape Cod once before. In 1988, I was asked to speak at the fall meeting of the Insurance Accounting and Statistical Association in Hyannis in November. It was held in a Holiday Inn that was undergoing off-season renovations, and new carpet was being put down in the hall outside my room, so I was inhaling carpet glue fumes as I put the finishing touches on my speech. My company's CFO and I decided to venture out for dinner one evening, and got caught in the season's first snowstorm. So, when friends invited my wife, daughter, and me to join them for New Year's at their house in Orleans (see photo above), I was skeptical. The drive up was through fog and rain, which inensified my doubts. However, New Year's Day dawned bright and clear, and after breakfast we drove to Nauset Beach, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Cape Cod Peninsula.

We weren't the only people out enjoying the beach.

Some were enjoying it with gusto.

There were seals with their heads out of water, but too distant to get a good photo.

Here is a very gnarly piece of driftwood.

These are dunes above the beach.

The dunes are a nesting place for threatened seabirds.

Behind the dunes is the Orleans Town Inlet.

On the shore of the Inlet, I found this water dwelling snail and its track. These snails prey on oysters, drilling through their shells to eat them.

A gull paddles across the surface of the Inlet.

High-flying cirrus clouds betoken another change in the weather.

I'm delaying posting my usual New Year's shout-outs until we return home. Happy New Year!

Moynihan Station: a new entrance to New York City

2011-12-30T10:20:00.001-05:00

During my childhood I had one encounter with the old Penn Station in New York City; it was, and I mean this without irony, awesome. The design, by McKim, Meade & White, was based on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Its destruction in 1963 gave life to the historic preservation movement in the City and elsewhere, and led to the enactment of the City's Landmarks Preservation Law, which became a model for similar laws in other cities. It also fostered the growth of organizations like the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

There is a plan, now partly funded, to restore at least some of the former splendor of Penn Station as a gateway to the City. This is to use presently unused space in the existing Farley Post Office Building, a massive neoclassical structure that stands above the tracks leading into Penn Station, to create a new passenger concourse and boarding area. This would be called "Moynihan Station" in honor of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who proposed and worked to secure funding for it. A New York University film student, Mitchell Goulding, became interested in Moynihan Station and visited the Landmarks Conservancy, where he gathered the material for the video above. As a railfan, and particularly a Pennsylvania Railroad enthusiast, I appreciate his inclusion of shots of GG1 electric locomotives, which the Pennsy used on passenger trains between New York and Washington and west to Harrisburg, as well as of a K-4 steam locomotive in the autumn of its years, having been displaced by diesels for mainline passenger service, pulling what appears to be a commuter train, probably in New Jersey.

Thirty second poem.

2011-12-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

Goodnight
Brooklyn Heights
Home to Auden, Hart
Crane, Mailer,
and me. Cognac getting
low. No choice
but bed.

Sting, "There is no Rose of Such Virtue"

2011-12-23T11:09:00.001-05:00

One of the songs associated with the Advent season and Christmas that I've come to appreciate later in life is "There is no Rose of Such Virtue", also known by the title Rosa Mystica. Here it is sung by Sting, also playing oud, and with choral and orchestral accompaniment, at Durham Cathedral, England, in September 2009. Clip thanks to Aliceclypsis.

Matisyahu, "Miracle"

2011-12-20T09:06:00.001-05:00

It's a hip-hop ice-capade, and jolly fun.

Country & Northern

2011-12-18T00:17:00.000-05:00

A few days ago a friend, whose judgment I respect, posted this on Facebook:

I am more than a little bit tired of Canadian pop stars because they are seriously wack. When was the last time Canada sent us a decent musical artist???? Think back. WAY back. It was Corey Hart or maybe early Bryan Adams. Everything since then? WACK.

I could've responded with Arcade Fire as a counter-example, but instead chose Kathleen Edwards doing her hockey song, "You Get the Glory, I Make the Dough." My friend's response was:

And Claude Scales, in the time that I've known you I've found that you have SUPERB taste in music, but this Kathleen Edwards? She lost me at the "I'm a Ford Tempo, you're a Ma[s]erati..." No. Just, no. I'm a purist; I like my country music sung by folks below the Mason Dixon line.

Well, being an Air Force brat, I spent much of my childhood and youth below the Mason Dixon line, but my earliest memories of country music were from the radio at my grandmother's in Pennsylvania, or on the road across Ohio on the way to my father's family home in Indiana.

And, yes, as I learned later in life, there was country music north of the border as well. One of the most admired country music stars of the 1950s and '60s, Hank Snow, was born and raised in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Geologically speaking Nova Scotia is part of Appalachia; it would seem to be culturally as well.

The clip above (thanks to PeterRabbit59) shows Hank, with the Rainbow Ranch Boys, doing "I'm Moving On." You do have to endure a lengthy introduction by a guy from Arkansas who admits to having been influenced by Hank (and who, near the beginning of his talk, seems inexplicably to refer to Hank as a "lady"; well, he does wear a pink Nudie suit).

I can't give up on Ottawa's favorite daughter, Kathleen Edwards, either. Here she is (courtesy of building55), doing what I think is a first-rate country-rock song, "Change the Sheets," at Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansett, Long Island, July 17, 2010.

k.d. lang (she spells her name in all lowercase) is from the high plains of eastern Alberta, and her songs sound as expansive as that wide-open country. Listen to "Big, Big Love," courtesy of TheLangChannel.

I could go on, but I'll close with "Early Morning Rain," a song that touches on many country music themes: getting drunk, riding freight trains, longing for an absent lover. It's performed here by Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker, who begin with some talk about the breakup of their long marriage and musical partnership, which hasn't affected their friendship or ability to sing together. They're joined on the last verse by the song's author, Gordon Lightfoot (forgive me, Lester Bangs). Ian and Sylvia, and Lightfoot, are usually classified as "folk" musicians, but, heck, it's a fine line.

I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
Got on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, “Come back some other day
You sound like a hillbilly
We want folk singers here”

--Bob Dylan, "Talkin' New York"

More morning walk photos: focus on maritime heritage.

2011-12-13T11:27:00.002-05:00

This photo is from a walk a couple of weeks ago. It shows the small tanker Commencement taking on bunkers from the barge Double Skin 32, brought to her side by the tug Oyster Creek. Commencement is docked at Port Authority Brooklyn Pier 7, near the foot of Atlantic Avenue. In recent years, it received ships carrying bagged cocoa beans, but it is now leased by a beer distributor which doesn't, to my knowledge, take cargo from ships there. It does serve as an occasional dock for ships, like Commencement, taking on fuel or perhaps just needing a parking space between charters. I took the photo from Pier 6, which is now part of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

This photo, and the rest on this post, is from my walk this past Saturday. This was taken at the Atlantic Avenue entrance to Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park.

After walking the edges of Pier 6, I took the path northward that leads to Pier 1. On the landward side of the path, near Pier 5, which is being made into athletic fields, I saw these bollards, forlorn reminders of when the pier was an active dock.

This is the ruin of Pier 4, which once received barges carrying freight cars from the railroad terminals in New Jersey.

The skeleton of the cargo shed on Pier 2 remains. It will be re-covered to house indoor athletic facilities.

The East River is actually a tidal strait that connects two arms of the Atlantic Ocean: New York Harbor and Long Island Sound. The tide was low during my Saturday walk. I believe that the greenish strip of rocks in the middle of this photo marks the normal high to low tide variance, while the grayish strip to its right marks the extent of two recent unusually high tides: one during Hurricane Irene, and the other a more recent "king tide", when the moon's and sun's gravitational pulls were combined.

The tops of these pilings were barely above water during Hurricane Irene and the "king tide." While most of Pier 1 was made into parkland, the deck of the southernmost portion was stripped off to expose the pilings, which provide a habitat for marine life and resting places for sea birds. The buff masts and spars towering over the white motor yacht on the Manhattan side of the East River belong to the bark Peking, part of the South Street Seaport Museum's collection of historic ships and boats.

Saturday was the date for SantaCon NYC, and a crowd of hipsters in Santa garb thronged South Street Seaport's Pier 17.

Lionel Train display at New York City Transit Museum Annex, Grand Central Terminal

2011-12-11T13:06:00.000-05:00

The first Christmas I can remember--I think I was three--was when I was given a Lionel train set. It's still at my parents' house in Tampa, packed away. My daughter, now eighteen, wants it someday. She'll get it.

Every year the Transit Museum's Gallery Annex and Store at Grand Central Terminal has an elaborate Lionel layout on display during the holiday season. The clip above, which I made this past Thursday, shows this year's version. It features a mock downtown Manhattan, complete with Brooklyn Bridge, as well as some rural, mountainous territory.

There are also static displays of historic Lionel trains along the walls of the gallery. The steam (top) and electric (bottom) trains shown in the photo above probably were made in the 1920s or '30s.

iPod Log 6

2011-12-06T23:24:00.004-05:00

I haven't done one of these for a couple of years. These are the pieces of music I heard on my morning walk from my apartment to Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and back, yesterday morning. I've included photos of what I was seeing while listening to each piece. Where I've been able to find them, I've included links to video clips in the text.

Jimmy Cliff, "The Harder They Come." The title song from Cliff's 1972 movie makes a teriffic starter for my morning jaunt, and sustains me through 35 push-ups.

Siegel-Schwall Band, "Leavin'." Siegel-Schwall was one of the many electric blues bands formed in the late 1960s. There's no video of "Leavin'", but here's Corky Siegel doing solo harp and vocal at the Ladder House, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, on February 20, 2009.

Tom Rush, "Statesboro Blues." Tom Rush is one of my favorites of the generation of folkies that came to prominence in the middle 1960s. On one of his early albums he does an excellent cover of Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues". There's no video of Rush doing this song, but there is of him singing his own "No Regrets".

Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot."

At the break of day,
You can hear old Hannah say,
Gimme a pigfoot, and a bottle of beer...

Bessie Smith is regarded perhaps second only to Robert Johnson as an influence on the development of the blues as a musical style. There's no video of "Gimme a Pigfoot," but here she is doing "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out."

Scott Joplin, "Sunflower Slow Drag", by the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, Gunther Schuller, conductor. My iPod reaches back further in the history of American popular music for an orchestral arrangement of a Scott Joplin rag. Here's a piano roll version of the same tune.

George Gershwin, "Piano Concerto in F, Movement III", by Gary Burton and Makoto Ozone. This comes from the album Virtuosi (Concord 2105-2), on which Burton (vibes) and Ozone (piano) do pieces ranging from Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) to Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) to Gershwin (1898-1937) to Jorge Cardoso (b. 1945), and an original piece by Ozone. There's no video of them doing Gershwin, but here's their take on Scarlatti's Sonata in E (K20). Here's the Gershwin with full orchestra and piano (NHK Symphony, Marek Janowski conducting; Peter Jablonski, piano).

The Dovells, "You Can't Sit Down." You may have noticed that my iPod has, so far, followed a more or less sensible progression, from reggae to late '60s electric blues to mid-60s acoustic folkie blues to 1920s jazzy blues to ragtime to jazz influenced classical music. Now we have an abrupt shift to mid-'60s Philly R&B. I first heard this song when I was with the Robinson High debate team at a tournament at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Some of my teammates and I were having burgers and milkshakes at the student union cafe, which had a jukebox and dance floor, when the song came on. A couple who looked like they stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration of typical American youth--he with a perfectly coiffed ducktail and pegged khakis, she with a tartan skirt and saddle Oxfords with bobby sox--took the floor and danced very energetically, twirling vigorously, and he once lifting her by the waist and swinging her overhead. This song is notable for its perhaps earliest uses of "hippie" and "hip hop" in american pop culture parlance.

Terry Allen, "Truckload of Art."

Yes, an important art work was thrown burning to the ground,
Tragically landing in the weeds,
And the smoke could be seen for miles around,
But nobody knows what it means.

From '60s Philly R&B we go to 1979 Texas tongue-in-cheek country. Apologies to Kei Andersen, Mark Crawford, Mike Sorgatz, and any other artist friends who may be offended by this.

Fleetwood Mac, "One Together." This is a cut (of which, unfortunately, there's no video) from Kiln House, one of my favorite albums despite its less than enthusiastic critical reception. One Rolling Stone writer characterized it as "Buddy Holly obsessed"; in my opinion, to paraphrase Yellowman, Buddy Holly is a nice obsession.

Reyes to Marlins

2011-12-05T23:34:00.000-05:00

Huffington Post

I can't say I was surprised. Like so many things concerning the Mets, I have mixed feelings about this. He's a great player when he's not on the DL, though sometimes inclined to surprising lapses in judgment, both on defense and on the basepaths. Since he's staying in the NL East, I'll get lots of chances to test the curse of the ex-Met theory.

The Corries, "Flower of Scotland": happy St. Andrew's Day

2011-11-29T23:55:00.002-05:00

During the summer of 1975, after driving down from Ullapool, taking the ferry from the Kyle of Localsh to Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye (there was no bridge until 1995), and spending a long day touring around Skye, I checked into a hotel at Portree, had dinner, and retired at about 9:55. At 10:00, I was on the verge of sleep when the public bar downstairs closed, and the local people who had spent the evening there came out, gathered in the parking lot not far from my window, and sang "Flower of Scotland" in lovely, ale-and-whiskey-aided harmony. The version in the clip above, thanks to Iain40, is of the Corries doing the song, probably during that same year, in a fairly intimate setting in front of a fire that may account for the hazy quality of the video.

November 30 is the feast day of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland.

"O come, o come Emmanuel"

2011-11-27T13:27:00.000-05:00

Today marks the start of the season of Advent, and the beginning of a liturgical new year. Veni Emmanuel, typically sung at the beginning of Advent, is a hymn that has always sent shivers down my spine, even though I sometimes do a Spoonerism in the first verse, changing "that mourns in lonely exile" to "that lorns in moanly exile" (which actually sort of makes sense). In the clip above, thanks to Ikje86, it's sung by the choir of St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

Your correspondent suffers an identity crisis, of sorts.

2011-11-26T22:41:00.001-05:00

My wife is a genealogy buff, and has made enthusiastic use of the resources of ancestry.com. For the past month or so, she's been doing research on her mother's family. Her mom was the daughter of Newfoundlanders who emigrated to the North Shore of Massachusetts early in the past century, along with many who came to work in the fisheries at Gloucester or the General Electric plant at Lynn--"the G.E.", as my wife always calls it.

Recently, though, following a visit to my mother's home in Florida, she turned her attention to my family tree. Thanks to her initial research, I can now add Tennessee, birthplace of my great grandmother Sarah Napier Scales, to the list of states in which I have ancestral roots. The others are Indiana (birthplace of my father and his parents), Pennsylvania (birthplace of my mother, her mother, and her mother's parents), California (birthplace of my maternal grandfather), Illinois and Missouri (birthplaces of my maternal grandfather's father and mother, respectively).

What's caused the identity crisis is that her research also showed that my paternal grandfather's name was Claude Marion Scales, not Claude Moreland Scales. I've always given my full name, when asked, as Claude Moreland Scales, III.* Indeed, that's what's on my birth certificate, which identifies my dad as Claude Moreland Scales, Jr., the name he always, to my knowledge, used. But if Grand-dad, a kindly man whose only words I can recall, probably from the last time I saw him when I was about twelve, were, "That boy's growin' like a weed", had Marion as his middle name, then dad wasn't a "Jr." and I'm a "Jr." not a "III." Not that I'm planning to go to court and have this rectified; it would only cause bureaucratic angst arising from the fact that my now deceased father and I are both military veterans and my still living mother receives survivor's benefits in his name, and so on. Anyway, I've been "III" for over 65 years now, so it's become one of those mistakes that, because of the passage of time, is cured. Still, it's a bit troubling to know I was sailing under false colors all those years.
__________

*Having a Roman three at the end of my name has sometimes caused confusion to mechanical scanners. Devices that read addresses sometimes pick it up as my surname, turning the second two characters to the lower-case "i"; thus "Iii." I once received a letter from a company that offered, for some money, to give me the history of the Iii family, along with an illustration of its coat of arms. I was strongly tempted to send my check.

And now, it's almost Black Friday, time to "Deck Us All..."

2011-11-24T21:26:00.008-05:00

The [in?]famous "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie" from Walt Kelley's Pogo; thanks to derdingle.

A Thanksgiving dance with Little Eva

2011-11-22T20:59:00.001-05:00

Little Eva, best remembered for "The Loco-Motion", here does a number appropriate to the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanks to nyrainbow5 for the clip, from a performance on Shindig! on March 3, 1965.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all.

For fans of fog and fall foliage.

2011-11-14T23:37:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday morning a low cloudbank blanketed New York City as I went out for my morning walk. Above is Manhattan as seen from Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park. The rays of the rising sun reflect from the lower parts of the buildings.

Brooklyn Bridge, as seen from the crest of the ridge on Pier 1.

Brilliant red leaves adorn this tree--pin oak or maple?

In the distance is the tower of the former fireboat station at Fulton Ferry, now home to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory.

Walking back along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, I noticed that the fog had lowered, and that a reflection from a skyscraper was cast on a patch of the East River.