Self-Absorbed Boomer reaches the four year mark.

The fifth anniversary is usually reckoned the first biggie, but I can't resist giving the fourth a bit of fanfare.

Thanks to my Site Meter, I've learned a lot about who's visiting my blog, and why. Relax. I can't, in most cases, identify specific visitors, unless you're using a server at work, like one regular reader who works for a local college. When I get a hit from that college's server, I'm pretty sure it's him. If you're reading me from home, and use, say (as I do), Verizon as your ISP, your IP address will vary depending on which of your ISP's local servers your traffic is being routed through at the time. I can "tag" you if I send you a link to S-AB by e-mail and you follow it back; if you have, for example, a Road Runner address, and I see a hit referred from Road Runner at your location, I'll be reasonably certain it's you. But, unless you have your own dedicated server, I won't be able to use the IP address to identify future visits from you.

I've learned from my Site Meter that upwards of ninety per cent of hits on my blog (of which I'm averaging just over 1,000 per month now) result from web searches for things other than my blog or me. Some of these are just for concatenations of words that occur randomly in different posts (Google will aggregate these); my favorite, to date, being "married Nashville women wanted for casual sex". A fair number are for terms or phrases incorporating the word "boomer". For a while, I was getting a lot of hits from India, where apparently there was some kind of on-line game going called "Play Ben Ten Boomer". "Self-absorbed" is also an attractor: I get lots of visits off searches like "how to deal with self-absorbed husband" (no, it wasn't my wife). Most of these searches, however, are for topics about which I've posted. The two most popular, over time, have been subjects on which I've unwittingly become something of a web authority.

The first of these is the Eisenhower Lock, which is part of the St. Lawrence Seaway system, which allows ships of considerable size to transit from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The Lock is located about two miles from my in-laws' house in Massena, New York, and, being a ship buff, I almost always visit it when we visit them. I've posted about it here, here, and here. The other is a train we sometimes ride when going to visit my in-laws, Amtrak's Adirondack, about which I've posted here and here.

I'll conclude by commending to you some posts I've made over the years that I think deserve your attention, if you haven't already seen them. In the area of political economy, I recommend Is corporate greenery undemocratic?. For literature, please look at Riding the train with Fred Exley. For music, check out Marshall Chapman can't be like other girls. For visual arts, please see Pierre Bonnard, "Late Interiors", at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Finally, for local color, take a look at The Bells of Hell and The walk home through Red Hook.

I promise that, during year five, I'll do my best to merit your continued attention. I also welcome suggestions for improvement.

"Abundance", BWAC outdoor sculpture show.

The 27th annual Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition ("BWAC") outdoor sculpture show is set up in Empire/Fulton Ferry State Park and adjoining Brooklyn Bridge Park, along the waterfront in DUMBO, and will be on view through September 5. Here are some of the works on display:

"Dodecaps", by Bernard Klevickas.

Untitled, by Nova Mihai Popa.

"Windwave", by Maximilian Pelzmann (contrast this with my nighttime image of the same sculpture).

"Mirror Mobile", by Summer Yates.

"Recurrence", by The Friendship Project Collaborative Group (Corrina Sephora Mensoff, Terri Dilling, Susan Ker-Seymer, Alison Weldon, Amandine Drouet, and Mary McCarthy).

For images of works in last year's show, click here.

Bruntlett's unassisted triple play: at least the Mets find interesting ways to lose.

Addendum: Today I'm reminded of what Greg Prince, co-author of Faith and Fear in Flushing, wrote some time back: "Being a Mets fan is recognizing reality and accepting that sometimes things are too funny to be sad and sometimes too sad to be funny." (Quoted in John Koblin, "The Anti-Homers", New York Observer, July 20, 2009).

Update: Twiffer, evidently wanting to steer me to the "too funny to be sad" side, sent me a link to this Onion article. Like all good satire, it empearls a grain of truth. (Indeed, I wish someone could tag the Wilpons out.) The Mets did dutifully lose to the Marlins last night (Pelfrey had one of his too-frequent misadvetures; can anyone tell me who is on the Mets' starting rotation now?).

Today, the Mets rose from the dead to trounce the Marlins 10-3, courtesy of not-so-bad pitching by Redding (Pelfrey + Redding: there's 2/5 of the rotation) and good pitching by the bullpen; lots of offense; and lousy fielding by the Marlins. But, while you're on that link, scroll down (and down, and down) through the Mets' D.L. It sorta looks like the casualty roster from Antietam.

Update-update: at least the Cyclones haven't imploded. Yet.

Your correspondent finds, to his great surprise, that he's a really cool guy.

Today's New York Times fashion section includes an article by Guy Trebay that starts with this welcome (to me, at least, if not to Robin Lester, who tipped me off to it) news:

This summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.

In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.

For anyone too young, or un-steeped in American pop culture, to remember The Honeymooners, here's a photo of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, intrepid Brooklyn bus driver, thrusting his ample belly forward. Compare this to the photo of myself at the top of this post. It's not a stretch to say that I have a "Kramden."

Of course, Trebay notes that the hipster's Kramden is "developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch"; nevertheless, I submit that mine has entirely been the product of a period in which I have been Young At Heart (for some odd reason, my wife persists in using the archaic locution "immature").

To top things off, I later got drawn into one of those virally multiplying Facebook quizzes, this one seeking to determine "[w]hich Last Exit [a bar I have actually visited twice] patron are you?" The answer I got was "The Hipster":

What's up with crazy yourself, hep-cat?! Nice shirt... oh, I get it. You're not REALLY a trucker named Randy. You got that at Beacon's closet. Well, congrats you Brooklyn dwelling recreant. You're the kind of customer that is nice, polite, easy on the eye and an excellent tipper. It's okay that the credit card you're using is under you dad's name- we know where that money is coming from. You like to drop by on Friday nights and come in sometimes on Monday for Pub Quiz with your workmates from Google. It's cool. Just don't get too drunk and vomit in the bathroom - that's when you cease to be pleasant. Until then, cheers!

Not too bad a description, I submit, except for the bits about dad's credit card and working for Google. I haven't been in for Pub Quiz yet, but it sounds like something I should check out.

I'll confess, I did have to be a bit creative in answering some of the quiz questions. For example, the multiple choices for "What do you order to drink?" didn't include "craft-brewed ale, e.g. Six Point Brownstone or Dogfish Head IPA", so I had to make do with the closest substitute: "PBR and a shot of Jack." Of course, a couple rounds of that would put my aging liver on the ropes, but never mind. Tomorrow, I shall wake with a new mantra: "I'm cool, I'm no fool, get used to it!"

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I have an IMDb page?

Elaine Comparone and Queen's Chamber Band play José Bernardo's "Echoes from a Distant Land."

Several evenings ago, I had the pleasure of dining with Elaine Comparone at Bar Pitti, where she hosted a birthday dinner for an old friend of my wife's and mine. I knew Elaine by reputation as one of the greatest of contemporary harpsichordists, and had heard recordings of her work, including Bach with Pluck. I asked about videos of her performances, and she recommended the clip above, in which she plays, with the Queen's Chamber Band (consisting of Marsha Heller, English horn; Robert Zubrycki, violin; Lori Miller, violin; Veronica Salas, viola; Peter Seidenberg, cello; and Tomoya Aomori, bass), "Echoes from a Distant Land", by the Cuban-American composer José Bernardo.


Here's an Italian baroque piece, Scarlatti's Sonata in D minor, K. 517, performed by Elaine solo on her 2-manual harpsichord built in 1968 by William Dowd.

Must there be a worm in every Mets apple?

I've given up watching Mets games this season, so as to maintain "my spiritual well-being, the stability of which [I am here borrowing from my erstwhile drinking companion Nick Tosches] has not commonly been likened to a large rock." Still, I can't avoid hearing the score the next morning as WQXR does its best to rouse me. Last night, I checked it on line, and was amused to see Mets 9, Cardinals 0. Amused, not delighted, because by now it's clear there's no hope. My first thought was, "Who pitched?" I clicked for the game report, and saw the win credited to Figueroa. Strange, I thought, for a reliever to win a lopsided shutout. Could all of the scoring have happened in the last three innings? Then I looked at the narrative. Sure enough, Nieves, the starter, was pulled in the second inning with what was declared a season-ending hamstring tear. (What is it with the Mets and hamstrings? My memory of Mets hamstring woes goes back to Keith Hernandez, and extends through Vince Coleman, Ricky Henderson, and Jose Reyes. Having a pitcher felled by a hammy is a new one, though.) Tonight, they're being trounced by the Padres.

Meanwhile, my fall-back (and wife's favorite) team, the Red Sox, have gone into the sort of mid-season swoon that characterized their long stay in baseball purgatory pre-2004, and have lost their first game to the loathsome Yanks, who now look unstoppable.

Wake me when it's over.

A customized classic Mini in DUMBO.

This classic Austin or Morris Mini (the Mini was made under both of the most popular marques of the British Motor Corporation), apparently a Mark II (1967-70) from the appearance of its grille, was parked on Water Street in DUMBO a few days ago. This one, which was made for the British market with right-hand drive, has been customized as a rally car by removing the roof, covering part of the back, and putting on a plexiglass racing windscreeen. Indeed, a decal on that windscreen shows this car to have been an entry in the London to Brighton run.

Cat and chamber orchestra: a Lithuanian diversion.

In the clip above (courtesy of sanmartinfields) you can see and hear a one movement concerto performed by the Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra and composed and conducted by Mindaugas Piečaitis to accompany the piano improvisations of a very clever cat named Nora, whose image at the keyboard is projected above the orchestra as she performs for an apparently appreciative audience of fellow felines. You can read more about this project at the CATcerto website.

Thanks to Geoff Abrams for the link.

Encouraging words on the way to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Seen on the top step leading from Cadman Plaza East/Washington Street to the Brooklyn Bridge walkway this morning.

Gail Collins nails the New York Senate.

In her continuing New York Times dialogue with David Brooks, Ms. Collins has this to say:

[Y]ou can’t run a big, complicated country without parties. And if you want to run it with any degree of efficiency, those parties have to have enough cohesion to be able to force people to vote with the group even when they aren’t happy about it. Otherwise, you have little tiny clumps going this way and that, holding the whole process for ransom. And before you know it, you’re Italy. Or the New York State Senate, which is basically Italy minus all the charming people, beautiful scenery and good food.

Frank McCourt: goodbye to an old friend.

"Old friend" may be a strong claim. I haven't seen or spoken to Frank, other than on a couple of isolated occasions such as the memorial party for our common friend Dennis Duggan, since he became famous as a writer and television commentator. Back in the day, though, we spent some hours talking on adjacent barstools at the Bells of Hell and the Lion's Head. I heard many of the stories that later were told in Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and Teacher Man in the course of those conversations.

The Frank McCourt anecdote I have to offer, however, comes from a public event--a memorial concert for Tommy Clancy of the Clancy Brothers--at which he emceed and told the following joke:

How do you tell an Irishman from an Englishman? It's in how they propose marriage. An Englishman says, "Dahling, I love you. Will you marry me?" But an Irishman says, "Mary, how would you like to be buried with my people?"

I pray this will be the last of the "goodbye" posts I must write for a while.

Update: Here's the New York Times obituary.

Second update: In yesterday's Times, Eric Konigsberg quotes one of Frank's former students as comparing him to Lou Reed.

"And that's the way it is ...."

Will anyone say it with such assurance again? Goodbye, Walter.

Image: O'Halloran/Library of Congress [VIA PINGNEWS].

Update: Television critic Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times has this to say:

Network news anchors still aim for that mix of eloquence and authority that Cronkite embodied, but they compete, at a disadvantage, with the noise of an ascendant punditocracy and the mountain-from-molehill nattering of cable news organizations that live on crises -- it's not the old voice of reassuring honesty that they cultivate, but one of perpetual anxiety. There are many more rooms in the mansion that is television news nowadays, but they have grown proportionately smaller; they are no longer fit for giants.

Thanks to Ben Whitford in Slate for the link.

Second update: Here's an appreciation of Cronkite by Verlyn Klinkenborg in yesterday's New York Times.

Manohla Dargis on Harry Potter yields a magnificent Alan Rickman simile.

In her review of the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in today's New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes:

[T]he sensational Alan Rickman ... invests his character, Prof. Severus Snape, with much-needed ambiguity, drawing each word out with exquisite luxury, bringing to mind a buzzard lazily pulling at entrails ...."

Charlie Gracie redux: "Butterfly" (1957)

Back in April, I posted a video I made of Charlie Gracie doing a song called "I'm All Right" at the Roots of American Music Festival at Lincoln Center in the summer of 2007. As I noted in the text accompanying that clip, Gracie was the first to record a song I heard many times when I was in sixth grade (1957-58) in a cover version by Andy Williams, "Butterfly". The clip above shows Gracie singing that song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957.

Today I received a comment on my earlier post from Gracie's son, Charlie Gracie Jr., who said:

Yes, my dad had the original rock n roll version of BUTTERFLY--which went to #1 on Billboard in the spring of 1957. Andy Williams' cover also went to #1--so this was a monster hit. My dad was and is--Philly's very first rock n roll star... was the first hit artist on the Cameo-Parkway label based in Philly. Dad was also the first solo U.S. rock star to tour the United Kingdom--after Haley's Comets. He's been playing there almost everyear since--and will go there this fall too--including shows in Ireland!

Dad is currently working on a new cd with Graham Nash, Al Kooper, Peter Noone, Keb Mo, Albert Lee and Dennis Diken--several artists he inspired early on. Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Ray Davies and the late George Harrison were also fans. Paul did a cover of my dad's second biggest hit: FABULOUS in 2000. It went to #16 nationally for dad in 1957. He had 5 Top 30 hits in England--including Wandering Eyes, I Love You So Much It Hurts and Cool Baby. He made his first record in 1951 when he was just 15 on the Cadillac Label out of NY. Dad got his start on the Paul Whiteman radio/tv show. Dad's release of BOOGIE WOOGIE BLUES in 1951, is considered one of first rock n roll songs ever released by a white artist--even though the term hadn't officially been coined yet.

Still, Charlie Gracie was making records in a rockabilly vein 3-years before Elvis, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis had even stepped into a recording studio! PBS aired a documentary on my dad in 2007: CHARLIE GRACIE: FABULOUS! which is still available at www.oldies.com as well as his Best of Charlie Gracie cd--containing all his original chart hits.

Thanks, Charlie Jr. I'm looking forward to hearing your dad's new CD.

An almost-perfect baseball night.

The Mets are breaking my heart yet again, but tonight they gave me a nice tease. Jeff Francouer proved to be an impact player in his first at-bat as a Met, driving in two runs. Although four runs in total off of eleven hits isn't especially efficient, four runs proved enough, as the Reds scored un oeuf thanks to a characteristically good performance by Santana and flawless relief by Feliciano and Rodriguez, as well as error-less defense.

Meanwhile, the Yanks get taken down a peg by Los Angeles de Anaheim, and the Red Sox regain undisputed first place in the Short-Attention-Span League East. The only downer, from my viewpoint, is the Rays' loss to Oakland.

Update: The "little tease" has now been extended. Meanwhile, another Red Sox win and Yanks loss puts the Bronx Bullies further behind.

Aerospace socialism.

Back in the day, Ed Koch was a congressman representing the district on Manhattan's East Side that had been John Lindsay's before he became mayor. During Koch's congressional incumbency he coined the term "aerospace socialism" to describe the regime governing military procurement in this country: the all-too-cozy relationship among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and the congressional committees charged with oversight of the defense budget.

Unfortunately, that regime is still alive and well, as this article from today's Washington Post attests. The F-22 fighter program started, perhaps characteristically, with what the prime contractor and the Pentagon knew was a lowball cost estimate intended to make it palatable to Congress, as one former defense procurement official admits, adding that he's not proud of his role in this. An aircraft designer, Pierre Sprey, is quoted as saying the F-22 program was deliberately made "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof." In addition:

Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey -- now a prominent critic of the plane -- said that by the time skeptics "could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' " revenues.

Most troubling is the statement of former Pentagon weapons testing expert Thomas Christie that the F-22's enormous costs have caused the Air Force to ignore the rest of its arsenal, putting it on a course of "what we used to call unilateral disarmament."

Update: Obama says he'll veto an appropriations bill if it includes funding for F-22s beyond what the Defense department wants.

7.21 update: Responding to the President's veto threat, the Senate today voted to strip additional F-22 funding from the defense appropriations bill.

One of the "best and the brightest" is gone.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Robert S. McNamara, who died today at 93, may, in President Kennedy's estimation, have been the brightest of them all. He came to public service, as JFK's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, from the presidency of Ford Motor Company, where he and his fellow "whiz kids" succeeded with a new toolkit of statistical techniques that refined the earlier, blunter techniques of Fordism and Taylorism. He brought that toolkit to Defense, and to the conduct of the war in Vietnam, where the emphasis on statistics was reflected in the periodic "body count" reports. His decisions led to the death or maiming of many thousands, both American and Vietnamese.

He later acknowledged that "we were wrong" (he never said "I was"), in the apology shown in the video clip above.

Goh Nakamura performs Simon and Garfunkel's "America"

Last year I marked the Fourth here by posting a clip of Paul Simon singing "American Tune", which, I noted, had a melody that stems from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and which Bach got from an earlier work by Hassler (a factoid that has led many a web searcher to my blog). This year I'm captivated by the clip above of San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura performing on the street for a lunchtime crowd, doing "America", a song from Simon and Garfunkel's 1967 Bookends album.


Have a joyous Fourth.

Yanks sweep Mets at Citi.

Yuck. An all too familiar story: Mets outhit the opposition, but bring in fewer runs. History is made: Mariano Rivera gets his 500th save and his first-ever in the majors RBI, and Chien-Ming Wang his first win since George W. Bush was in the White House.

Hard to believe, but the Mets, now at .500, are still a viable post-season proposition. Nevertheless, I'm going to sulk for a while.

Cheery update: As this Brooklyn Paper story tells, my beloved Brooklyn Cyclones are off to a good start, and Mets starter Oliver Perez had an impressive rehab performance with the 'Clones at Keyspan Park yesterday.

@Twif: Thanks. At least your team has a perfect record against the Bronx Bullies going into the all-star break.

Gehry eclipses Gilbert on the Brooklyn Bridge

June 7, 2008. On a hazy summer morning, Cass Gilbert's magnificent Woolworth Building, near the 95th anniversary of its completion, can be seen at the left of this photo taken near the center of the Brooklyn Bridge.

January 6, 2009. On a chilly, overcast winter morning, the view from near the same spot has changed, as Forest City Ratner's luxury Frank Gehry designed Beekman Tower is rising, has begun to block the view of the Woolworth Building, and a construction crane slashes across the upper part of the tower. Not long after this picture was made, Forest City announced that, because of the financial crisis, it intended to truncate the Beekman Tower at about the level it had then reached, rather than building it to its planned seventy six stories. This would have preserved at least part of the view of the Woolworth Building from the Bridge.

June 24, 2009. According to a recent New York Magazine article by Justin Davidson on Gehry,

For a while, it seemed as though [Beekman Tower], too, would add to the architect’s miseries. Ratner halted construction halfway up and toyed with the idea of saving money by leaving it stunted. Eventually, he extracted concessions from the construction unions, and the tower resumed its upward march. The result will be an ordinary structure in a shiny dress.

Nevertheless, the website Lower Manhattan.info, reporting on "daily activities" and updated to June 16, 2009, says "Superstructure erection is on hold; the building is now 41 stories tall". The photo above, taken this morning, shows it at forty one stories; the top of the Woolworth Building's tower still peeks over its top.

Update: The eclipse is now complete (see photo below taken on September 1, 2009):

Straight talk on Iran.

Steve Kornacki has an excellent column in PolitickerNY about why President Obama is right not to utter red-meat rhetoric concerning events in Iran, and why John McCain and some of his Republican colleagues are wrong

The question isn't whether having the CIA, back in 1953 and largely at the behest of the British, put into action a coup d'état against the premiership of Mohammed Mossadegh was a good thing (I believe it wasn't), or whether Mossadegh, had he not been deposed, would have brought Iran into alliance with the Soviet Union (I think he would have gladly taken aid, military and otherwise, from the U.S.S.R., and would have proclaimed Iran "non-aligned", which, in practice, would have meant voting with the Sovs in the U.N. most of the time; in other words, much like India in the 1950s and '60s). It isn't even whether he would, bribed sufficiently, have allowed the Russkies their wet dream of a warm water naval port, right on the Straits of Hormuz.

No matter what geopolitical horror scenes you can imagine, retrospectively, from not overthrowing Mossadegh, the present reality is that even those Iranians who are protesting against the election results remember this episode of Western interference in their politics ruefully. So, right or wrong, the U.S. is constrained in the appeals it can now make. Appeals to basic human rights concerns; yes. Appeals to "democracy" (whether or not you dispute Mossadegh's status, at the time he was deposed, as "democratically elected") may ring hollow, and will, no doubt, be used by those in power to discredit the source by recalling the anti-Mossadegh coup.

Image courtesy of Tehran24.

If Charles Darwin had a Facebook page...

...might it look like this?

The page was developed by Heather Snyder and Anna Heran, of the staff of the Lloyd Library and Museum, Cincinnati, in consultation with Nik Money, professor of biology at Miami University and a Lloyd board member. Just like a real Facebook page, it will be updated from time to time by the addition of new friends and comments.

Thanks to Anna Heran for posting the link, as well as a press release, on the Archives & Archivists listserv maintained by the Society of American Archivists, and to my wife for forwarding it to me.

Happy Bloomsday.

I read Portrait of the Artist as a freshman college English assignment, and found it an interesting, if challenging, contrast to the fiction, mostly Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis, I'd been reading at the time. I didn't return to Joyce until my thirties, when, on the recommendation of a friend, I read Dubliners. I liked the stories, especially "The Dead", very much. It wasn't until I was in my forties, though, that I tackled Ulysses, although I'd seen Joseph Strick's and Fred Haines' excellent 1967 movie adaptation while in law school (and heard the conclusion of Molly Bloom's soliloquy recited by "Ralph Spoilsport" on Firesign Theater's How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All? many times after that).

Ulysses was tough going for me. I read it in small chunks, mostly while commuting on the subway. The "nighttown" sequence was particularly difficult. Once I got through it, though, I was glad I'd made the effort. It helped to make more enjoyable my visit to Dublin several years later. There's a nice appreciation of the book by Colum McCann in today's New York Times, in which he tells how it helped him to understand his deceased grandfather, a man of Joyce's time and, in his younger days, of the Dublin of Ulysses.

As for me, if I may be excused, I'm off to search for Gerty MacDowell.

(Joyce image courtesy of Hell's Kitchen.)

News from Tehran

Thanks to friend Geoff for sending me a link to Tehran24, which provides photos (the image above is taken from the site), video and text concerning events there. A post from Sunday, June 14, says the site has been "banned in Iran by government since three hours ago"; however, it is apparently still operating, as new posts went up yesterday.

Here's a clip, also taken from the site, of a street protest in Tehran two days ago (video by amirpix):

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Thanks, though, to GimpelTheFool for this excellent poem, posted "in memory of BotFer Claude Scales":

Barrow Street

I will die having walked
down Barrow Street
in New York's light
amidst the smell of coffee
roasting in the morning
past the Paris Bistro
with its red awning

having walked past
Cherry Lane where the
theatre was, and at
its corner, a restaurant
where they served your
vegetables in oval dishes,
Portugese family-style

having walked with salt
on my lips from a breeze
off the Hudson just
a few blocks away,
where liners and warships
made common progress
to their piers uptown.

When I do kick the bucket, I want my surviving friends to throw a big party, and someone has to sing this:

The Mets are messin' with my mind.

At the end of April, I was ready to give up on them. Then May brought good play and fortune, and I was beguiled. By the end of the month, the local baseball pundits were praising their resilience, noting their ability to beat good teams even with players like Delgado and Reyes sidelined by injuries. But June brought something that rhymes with it, and it ain't moon or tune. My wife, the Red Sox fan, knows all about it. The June swoon. It started with their getting swept in Pittsburgh by a below .500 team. Now they've moved on to Washington, to play the worst team in the National League. Last night, I checked in and saw a one-all tie going into the bottom of the ninth. I just knew what was going to happen: the Nats would score and bye-bye. So, I averted my eyes, and didn't check again for about twenty minutes. To my delight, I found that David Wright had scored two runs in the top of the tenth, and Rodriguez had notched another save. Tonight, however, the Mets have returned to swoonland, with Maine, who I now fear may be next to join a D.L. that looks like the aftermath of Chateau-Thierry, yielding seven earned runs.

I take some comfort in the Rays, who also have had a spate of injuries, having beaten the Yankees, and that the opening of the Brooklyn Cyclones' season is less than two weeks away

Update: Sunday brought a 7-0 win, and so a successful series against the floundering Nats. Next up, though, are arch-nemesis and division leading Phils, followed by the hated and now hot Yanks. Reasons for hope: Ryan Church is back in the lineup and got two hits last night, and Livian Hernandez has been awesome in his past two outings.

Goodbye, Koko Taylor

The drumbeat of losses from the music world continues with the death, at 80, of Koko Taylor, who reigned for many years as queen of Chicago blues. Thanks to Kevin of The Woodshed for alerting me to her passing.

I'm shocked, shocked!

Downright flabbergasted by the result of this Gallup poll.

Marshall Chapman, live in Louisville.

Marshall Chapman and I go back a ways. Our encounters have been few but fun, certainly for me and I hope for her. She gives great hug. So I've awaited eagerly a video of her in performance that I could share with, as Marshall would say, y'all. Now, through Facebook, she's provided me with the YouTube clip above, which shows her onstage with Tim Krekel at an event called Bobbie Watson's Dance or Die, at the Vernon Club in Louisville last Saturday.

This is a long clip that begins at a mild roar, but builds steadily in tempo and intensity. As Marshall says, "View to end or you'll miss some ass-shaking, kissing, and even a little poetry reading!" And, I'll add, how many rock songs feature a hot trombone solo?

P.S. Be sure to check out Marshall's website, and her articles in Garden & Gun magazine, of which she's a contributing editor.

Sad addendum: Less than a month after this event, Tim Krekel died.

There's a story here, somewhere.

Plymouth Street, Brooklyn.

Municipal Building, Manhattan.