Saturday, October 17, 2015

Mets vs. Cubs: is it 1969 again?

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The Mets didn't play the Cubs in the 1969 National League Championship Series; that lot fell to the Atlanta Braves, then in the NL Wes...
Wednesday, October 14, 2015

TBT: Frankie Ford, "Sea Cruise".

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Vincent Francis Guzzo, Jr., better known as Frankie Ford , died September 29 at the age of 76. He was long active in the New Orleans R...
Wednesday, October 07, 2015

TBT: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Autumn in New York."

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"Autumn in New York" , a song that seems to epitomize the word "wistful", has been a favorite of mine since childhood....
Sunday, October 04, 2015

The Cosmic American Music Festival at the Derry Down.

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I first heard of the Derry Down in 1966, when I was friends with some fellow University of South Florida students who were from Winter Hav...
Thursday, October 01, 2015

TBT: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless."

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Jerry Lee Lewis turned eighty on Tuesday. This is testimony to the wonders of medical science, or divine grace, or both. It reminds me of ...
Monday, September 28, 2015

The Mets face a dilemma.

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It has little to do with Matt Harvey's (photo) pitch or inning count. It has to do with whether to go all out to win their remaining r...
Sunday, September 27, 2015

Winter Haven, Florida revisited after 48 years.

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Winter Haven is a small city--population about 36,000--in central Florida. It's a little south and west of Orlando, east of Tampa, an...
Wednesday, September 23, 2015

TBT: Leonard Cohen, "Bird on a Wire."

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Leonard Cohen, the Bard of Montreal, turned 81 this week. He is a poet, songwriter, singer, and novelist ( Beautiful Losers ). I first kne...

Yogi Berra, 1925-2015

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While he'll always, and rightly, mostly be remembered as a Yankee. the photo shows him as I like to remember him, as one of my beloved...
Wednesday, September 16, 2015

TBT: Gram Parsons, with Emmylou Harris, "We'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning."

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I'm off to the Cosmic American Music Festival in Winter Haven, Florida this weekend. Winter Haven was the home town of the late Gram P...
Wednesday, September 09, 2015

TBT: Frank Sinatra, "September Song."

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Yes, it's that month of cooling temperatures. We had a couple of days this week that saw thermometers registering in the low 90s, but ...
Monday, September 07, 2015

Clothes in pop music, part 2, the Sixties.

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Just over a year ago, inspired by Moira Redmond's Clothes in Books , I posted "Clothes in pop music, part 1, 1955-63" . Sin...
Sunday, September 06, 2015

Some scenes from Cape Cod

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The Bourne Bridge, our entryway to the Cape. There are two other bridges that cross the Cape Cod Canal onto the Cape proper. To the north ...
Friday, September 04, 2015

Michael Davitt, a forgotten hero. Remember him this Labor Day.

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For Labor Day, in celebration of my newly found Irish heritage , I'm posting a song by Patrick Street, with a vocal by Andy Irvine, ab...
Thursday, September 03, 2015

Self-Absorbed Boomer celebrates a decade of taxing attention spans.

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I missed it. Last Sunday, August 30, was the tenth anniversary of the birth of Self-Absorbed Boomer . Much has gone down, and much has cha...

TBT: Chuck Berry, "School Days."

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Not only is this week's TBT by the same artist--but what an artist!--as last week's, but it's the same song. Well, at least, t...
Sunday, August 30, 2015

Happy 70th, Van Morrison!

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It's been almost exactly 48 years since I sat in Hazen's sandwich shop on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, heard "Brown Eyed...
Wednesday, August 26, 2015

TBT: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go."

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I'll be riding along in my (rental) automobile soon, so this by, in my opinion, the greatest rocker of all, was on my mind, despite my...
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Grammar snobbery is the sort of thing up with which I will not put. Well, not too much.

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There's a story, possibly spurious, that Winston Churchill was handed a draft of something he'd written; on it, an editor had writ...
Thursday, August 20, 2015

TBT: Jimmy Dorsey, "So Rare."

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"So Rare" was written in 1937 and recorded and released that year by two big bands, Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra ...
Sunday, August 16, 2015

Party on a tanker? Yes, if it's PortSide NY's Mary A. Whalen.

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A week ago PortSide New York , headed by my friend Carolina Salguera, played host to a weekend long festival aboard their historic coastal...