“The Ash Grove was a folk music club located at 8162 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California, United States, founded in 1958 by Ed Pearl and named after the Welsh folk song, ‘The Ash Grove.’ In its fifteen years of existence, the Ash Grove altered the music scene in Los Angeles and helped many artists find a West Coast audience. Bob Dylan recalled that, ‘I’d seen posters of folk shows at the Ash Grove and used to dream about playing there.’ The club was a locus of interaction between older folk and blues legends, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Earl Hooker and Muddy Waters, and young artists that produced the ‘Sixties music revolution. Among those Pearl brought to the Ash Grove were Canned Heat, Doc Watson, Pete Seeger, Bill Monroe, June Carter, Johnny Cash, Jose Feliciano,

SoHo, NYC

“… Outside on West Houston Street, the glow of the marquee — ‘Film Forum’ written in curving, blue neon letters — beckons like a spaceship. Upon seeing it, I feel the thrill of catching a movie in an actual cinema: It’s my first visit to Film Forum since it reopened in 2021 following a nearly 13-month closure on account of Covid-19. In the lobby, there’s anticipatory chatter: film students talking into their phones and older Greenwich Village and SoHo locals (like me) discussing the state of the world. The reserved seating system — a measure instigated during the pandemic — ended this month, and the first-come-first-served rule resumed, bringing back with it the kvetching about grabbing a preferred seat. The theater director, filmmaker and painter André Gregory, a devout Film Forum fan, once left sweaters on a pair of chairs while he and his wife, the filmmaker Cindy…

“… I ended up with exactly that, an immaculate gem of a book. The book is called Diamonds are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball and, just as the title suggests, it’s a rich collection of artwork, poetry, and essays on the eternal aura of the game of baseball. It’s a pretty large book, soft-cover but the size of an art book or so-called ‘coffee table’ book (I’ve never owned a coffee table but I’ve got a bunch of these type of books) and it was published by Chronicle Books, a San Francisco-based publisher who seems to produce just about every highly awesome artsy book I come across. … The apparent polar opposite of most of the baseball literature I read which contains lots of stats and objective analysis, this is an aesthetic appraisal of the game’s archetypal and timeless aspects. I’ve been buried in it for the last couple…

“1. One day in early September 1966, the poet Robert Duncan, then 47, was walking to a streetcar stop in San Francisco when lines of verse began drifting to him out of nowhere. He held onto the phrases until he could scribble them down at the stop. The rest of what would become two poems—’Passages’ 28 and 29—occurred ‘in rushes on the streetcar and on the Berkeley bus, me muttering ecstatically. All there by the time I reacht Berkeley.’  These poems would appear toward the end of what may be Duncan’s finest book, Bending the Bow (1968), which was written largely in response to the Vietnam War. He laid out their impetus in a letter to one of his dearest friends, Denise Levertov: he had been dwelling on Victor Hugo’s visionary poem in which the angel Liberty is born from a single feather falling from Satan’s wings as…

This is the 40th anniversary of the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk.” The report was immediately hailed as a “landmark,” blasting the quality of the nation’s public schools. President Reagan wanted the report to endorse school prayer and vouchers. It didn’t. But it castigated the nation’s public schools as failures and complained about their low standards and mediocrity. The report had a dramatic effect. States reacted with commissions and plans to raise standards and toughen tests.

James Harvey, a member of the staff that wrote the report, argues that the misleading rhetoric, diagnosis, and recommendations of the “Nation at Risk” report led to an obsession with test scores, undermined vocational education, and cemented the simplistic mindset that produced “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top,” while ignoring the serious social and economic conditions that hinder children’s lives. Even today’s culture wars targeting the schools can be…

Wisdom of the Questioning Eye: Five books from the 1960s, by found poet Bern Porter – Mark Melnicove. “What to call Bern Porter? Found poet? Visual poet? Mail artist? Book artist? Pop artist? Concrete poet? He was each of these, and he will take his place in the histories of their genres (histories which have only begun to be written). And while it is true that the boundaries of these genres are permeable, allowing one to impregnate another, if we look for Porter’s singular achievement, the one he delved into deeper and with more consistency than his contemporaries, it was as a found poet. As such, he is arguably the most significant found poet of the 20th century, if not all time. Found implies lost. What others discarded he appropriated and claimed its authorship. He combed through trash (often at the post office, after sending off a fresh batch of…

FOX “News” posted a slanderous, absurd, dim-witted article about public schools, based on the complaints of a rightwing fringe group group called “No Left Turn in Education.” This group specializes in scare tactics and has a long list of books that they think should be banned.

In their eyes, educating “the whole child” is a nefarious plot to take away the role of parents. Social and emotional learning—like teaching children to be kind, to be considerate of others, to talk instead of fight—is insidious. No wonder people who watch FOX nonstop turn to homeschooling or religious schools, where their kids will get an inferior education.

FOX reports:

Educators at over 120 districts across the country are implementing a pervasive school curriculum that has been denounced by opponents as an effort to manipulate children’s values and beliefs and replace parents as the primary moral authority in their child’s lives, with many…

“Professor Cuthbert Calculus (French: Professeur Tryphon Tournesol[pʁɔ.fɛ.sœʁ tʁi.fɔ̃ tuʁ.nə.sɔl], meaning ‘Professor TryphonSunflower‘) is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. He is Tintin’s friend, an absent-minded professor and half-deaf physicist, who invents many sophisticated devices used in the series, such as a one-person shark-shaped submarine, the Moon rocket, and an ultrasound weapon. Calculus’s deafness is a frequent source of humour, as he repeats back what he thinks he has heard, usually in the most unlikely words possible. He does not admit to being near-deaf and insists he is only a little hard of hearing in one ear. Calculus first appeared in Red Rackham’s Treasure (more specifically in the newspaper prepublication of 4–5 March 1943), and was the result of Hergé’s long quest to find the archetypal mad scientist or

The Black Panther, Fred Hampton

“… On the night of November 13, 1969, while Hampton was in California, Chicago police officers John J. Gilhooly and Frank G. Rappaport were killed in a gun battle with Panthers; one died the next day. A total of nine police officers were shot. Spurgeon Winter Jr, a 19-year-old Panther, was killed by police. Another Panther, Lawrence S. Bell, was charged with murder. In an unsigned editorial headlined ‘No Quarter for Wild Beasts’, the Chicago Tribune urged that Chicago police officers approaching suspected Panthers ‘should be ordered to be ready to shoot.’ As part of the larger COINTELPRO operation, the FBI was determined to prevent any improvement in the effectiveness of the BPP leadership. The FBI orchestrated an armed raid with the Chicago police and Cook County State’s Attorney on Hampton’s Chicago apartment. … Photographic evidence was presented of ‘bullet holes’ allegedly made by…

Good Morning!

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Marriage is falling in love over and over again – always with the same person.
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“So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground.”
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 75
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This will not be my usual Monday post. My husband and I are celebrating our 40^th wedding anniversary this week.

We only had a one-night honeymoon when we got married, so each year since (except during the Covid lockdown), we’ve taken a few days to go away together, another chapter of our “never-ending” honeymoon.

Most little girls daydream about getting married, and some stage mock weddings with dolls, pets, or friends. I was not one of those little girls. It was never “When I get married” – it was always “If  I ever do get married.”

The one thing I said about a…