"Thanksgiving is a special night"

Be patient - the comm is annoying but short!

Oh happy day!

oh oh oh

Over @ The Altered Page

Seth included a snap of a corner of a shelf in Art, my studio. . .

click on either of the images above to go to 

this Sunday's post @ the Altered Page for the Big Picture!

espresso and existential doubt

"In the bohemian pockets of most major cities and college towns around the country in the 1950s, coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outposts of intellectual and sensual dissent: the Blind Lemon in Berkeley, the House of Seven Sorrows in Dallas, the Green Spider in Denver, the Gas House in Los Angeles, the Laughing Buddha in St. Louis, the Drinking Gourd in San Francisco. "You could walk from New York to California by just stepping from one coffeehouse to another without touching ground," Oscar Brand joked. Their allure was conspicuously counter-American at a high point in the United States' world prominence - espresso and existential doubt, no cocktails, no glitz, an appealing combination to postwar college students seeking their own generational identity. The original sound of the milieu was jazz, a music recently abandoned by the mainstream American public. As folk surfaced, it spread into the coffeehouses; earthy, unpackaged, economical, and cool, it fit naturally with the Middle Eastern sweets and the cigarettes. In Cambridge, the center of artistic radicalism around Boston since James Russell Lowell wrote The Bigelow Papers in the 1840s, the first European-style coffeehouse opened in 1955; run single-handedly by its owner Tulla Cook, the Coffee Grinder was a dim, unadorned place, no larger than a living room, on Mt. Auburn Street, a block from Harvard Square. There were no performers, just Tulla's AM radio. At the coffeehouses that opened after it, the Cafe Yana, the Salamander, the Golden Vanity, the Unicorn, and Club 47 - music soon predominated. "One night I walked past the Cafe Yana and heard this jazz coming out and went inside - the room was full of conga drums," recalled guitarist Peter Rowan, who grew up in rural Massachusetts and visited Cambridge as a teenager. "Harvard Square was jazz music. It was mostly college people, and they were talking about William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, or trying to. It was turtlenecks and skinny girls. It was very Beat Generation. The next week I walked past and looked in the window, and some girl was playing the guitar, and there were fifty guys in tweed jackets smoking pipes sitting on the floor, and I said, 'Well, this is different.' " If the young scholars of Harvard Square were seeking something anti-intellectual as a respite from or a challenge to academic authority, they could no longer presume to find it in jazz, which had grown in esteem to be regarded as a highly advanced, serious music. In folk, however, Cambridge intellectuals could find all the anti-intellectualism they wanted.

Joan, Debbie, Betsy, and their friends spent nearly every night in the coffeehouses, soaking up the atmosphere and becoming familiar with the music and the Harvard boys. "If you were cool, that's what you did," Betsy recalled. "The best guys were there - that was the 'in' scene.""

From Positively 4th Street
The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, 

Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña

by David Hajdu, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY 2001

Got to be a better life than what you got planned

Bangles (again) - cover Hazy Shade of Winter, Less Than Zero

This Little Bird

There's a little bird that somebody sends
Down to the earth to live on the wind.
Borne on the wind and he sleeps on the wind
This little bird that somebody sends.

He's light and fragile and feathered sky blue,
So thin and graceful the sun shines through.
This little bird who lives on the wind,
This little bird that somebody sends.

He flies so high up in the sky
Out of reach of human eye.
And the only time that he touches the ground
Is when that little bird
Is when that little bird
Is when that little bird dies.

Every other day of the week is fine

Weatherproofing

The Groupon Guide to: Weatherproofing

With winter looming, families everywhere have begun the arduous process of tightly sealing their homes to save on heating costs. What are some tips for weatherproofing your domicile?

Windows: If you plan to keep windows closed all winter, try covering them with plastic wrap and sealing them with tape. Keep a bat trapped underneath the plastic, because his frantic flapping will generate body heat and flap away chilly breezes. Replace bat weekly.
Pipes: Frozen pipes can generate plumbing problems or even burst and result in flooding. Hardware salesmen might recommend an expensive indoor flamethrower, but, for a cheap eco-friendly solution, try gently warming your pipes with your tongue.
Doors: Doors are just burglar-sized windows. Protect your home from clime and crime by removing them from the hinges and tightly packing the doorway with an upright inflatable raft. Impress your neighbors by writing "Welcome!" on the bottom and, because the raft can't be budged for them to enter, "Sorry."

Rockaway Bees +

Rockaway Taco, A Selby Film from the selby on Vimeo.