Self-Absorbed Boomer

"[A] delightfully named blog", (Sewell Chan, New York Times). "[R]elentlessly eclectic", (Gary, Iowa City). Taxing your attention span since 2005.

Sunday, December 29, 2024

Rest in Peace, President Carter

I can't think of words more eloquent to mark our nation's great loss than those of Robert Reich , who served in President Carter...

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Bing Crosby - Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) (Visualizer)

This isn't the same Bing Crosby rendition of Adeste Fideles my parents had on a Christmas album of his from the early 1950s, but it'...

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

"I grow old ... I grow old ..."

"I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." When I was in high school and first read this couplet from T.S. Eliot's (ph...

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

Donnacha Dennehy's "Land of Winter: I. December" by Alarm Will Sound

Thanks to the Irish Arts Center I've become aware of the composer Donnacha Dennehy and of his suite Land of Winter, the title of wh...

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Marshall Chapman sings Waylon Jennings' "You Asked Me To" with James Burton on guitar.

James Burton , 85, has played guitar with an impressive list of country and rock stars, including Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lew...

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

A tour of Dr. Konstantin Frank's vineyards and winery, followed by a paired tasting.

What is now New York State has produced wine since the 17th century , when Dutch and Huguenot settlers began making it in the Hudson Valley...

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Box of Rain (2013 Remaster); remembering Phil Lesh (1940-2024)

Sometime in the mid to late '70s -- why this sticks in my mind I don't know -- I saw a large piece of graffiti, simply "PHIL LE...

Monday, October 21, 2024

Goodbye, Mets.

I'll say the obvious comforting thing: they did better than expected. They started inauspiciously . At the time I noted that the pundit...

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Kris Kristofferson, 1936-2024

Kris Kristofferson, songwriter, singer, and actor, died yesterday at 88. I put "songwriter" before "singer" because th...

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's "Salon des Refusés" Exhibition features works by Andrea Biggs

The photo above is of our friend and neighbor Andrea Biggs with three of her recent paintings. Top to bottom they are: "Burst of Ene...

Saturday, September 07, 2024

How 'bout those Mets?

The 2024 season started badly for the Mets. At the time, I noted that "most pundits" predicted they would finish fourth in the...

Sunday, September 01, 2024

Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid"

English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg , along with Mike Merenda and Ruthy Ungar (banjo, fiddle, and vocals), Dar Williams (guitar and...

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Willie Mays, 1931-2024

In the summer of 1954 I was eight years old, and my parents and I returned from a three year sojourn in England, where my father, a U.S. Air...

Sunday, June 02, 2024

Peter Myers, Octogenarian

The photo above is of three stalwarts of the Bells of Hell , a Greenwich Village pub that served as my second home from the summer of 1977 u...

Tuesday, May 07, 2024

The "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus

Today is the 200th anniversary of the first public performance of Beethoven's Ninth, or "Choral" Symphony. It was unique in it...

Saturday, May 04, 2024

Frank Stella, 1936-2024

Frank Stella, an American artist whose works included painting, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture , died today at his home in Greenw...

Friday, May 03, 2024

Of Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young

Tom Rush has been a favorite singer of mine since I first heard him in the spring of 1968 on Boston's WBCN , which had recently a dopt...

Monday, April 22, 2024

"Spring Breeze" by Yuxian Deng, performed by the Joshua Guitar Band

A treat for Earth Day:

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Why is a widely used app named for a tenth century Scandinavian king?

Your smartphone, like mine, likely has the logo at left on it somewhere. I knew that "Bluetooth" was the name given to an ancient ...

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Mets swept at home in season opening series

The Mets were swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in their season opening three game series at Citi Field. The last time the Mets began a seaso...

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Pierce Turner, "Hail Glorious St Patrick"

Pierce Turner is an old friend from my days in the late '70s when I was a regular at a Greenwich Village club, the Bells of Hell , whe...

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Flaco the Owl, 2010-2024

Flaco ("skinny" in Spanish, though he appeared anything but), a Eurasian eagle owl, was hatched in a sanctuary in North Carolina i...

Friday, January 19, 2024

Peter Schickele ("PDQ Bach"), 1935-2024

Peter Schickele, who died Tuesday at 88 , was a serious composer of " more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber w...

Sunday, January 07, 2024

Thomas Curtiss, Jr., 1941-2023

The photo is of one of the the last times Tom Curtiss and I were together, some years ago, when he and his husband, Charles Neeley, visited ...

Friday, December 22, 2023

"Angels We Have Heard On High" by the Portland Choir and Orchestra

This is one of my favorite carols, in part because of how "the 'o' of 'Gloria' is fluidly sustained through 16 notes of...

Friday, December 08, 2023

Andy Irvine's "Never Tire of the Road," a tribute to Woody Guthrie

I've been neglecting the blog lately. It's a combination of work (yes, I still do that), helping to keep the Brooklyn Heights Blog ...

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Queen Claude and Anne Boleyn

In my post about the global art market I noted that my given name, Claude, is gender neutral in French. Today, thanks to Tina Brown's ...

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris. "Hickory Wind"

The clip above is from Dj Pj-roc Reacts , a hip-hop Dj's exploration and appreciation of country music. It includes audio, with photo m...

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Does being romanticized in a 1960s or '70s pop song spell present day disaster for a city?

I wonder how many of my fellow Baby Boomers, on hearing of the dreadful earthquake that struck southern Morocco, had this 1969 Crosby, Sti...

Saturday, September 02, 2023

Secrets of the global art market, revealed through family drama.

The painting above, Caravaggio's "The Lute Player," circa 1596 (image: Caravaggio, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons), no...

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About Me

: I was born in 1946 in a city renowned in Vaudeville humor, Altoona Pennsylvania. My dad was in the military, so we moved many times in my childhood. We lived in rural England from the time I was five until I was eight, and I began my formal education in a county council school, where my being American is likely all that saved me from having my bottom caned. When I was eleven my father retired from the Air Force, and we settled in Tampa. I graduated from the University of South Florida (1967) and Harvard Law School (1970). Since then, apart from two years' active Army duty, I have lived in New York City; and have lived in the Borough of Brooklyn since 1983. In 1991 I married Martha Foley, an historian and archivist. We are proud of our daughter, Elizabeth, and our granddaughter, Ada, who also live in Brooklyn.

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