1. As I've written all week long, Debbie and I are being cautious at this stage of the pandemic and spending most of our time at home. For the first couple of days of this lying low, after we returned home from Eugene, I was unusually unmotivated, even listless. I might have been tired from driving from Eugene to Kellogg and might have been feeling a depletion of adrenaline after so many days of seeing treasured friends and getting out and about quite a bit in Eugene.
Today, though, I returned to creating the kind of day I made happen a lot early in the pandemic. Back then, I had decided that I was going to make the most of staying close to home by reading books, watching movies, Zooming, attending Bill Davies' weekly concerts online, listening to Billy Collins' online poetry readings, messing around in the kitchen and cooking food I enjoy, taking in sports on television whenever they were available, and keeping myself stimulated and eager to figure out ways to be invigorated inside the house.
Today's full day of stimulation and invigoration began, once I wrote a blog post and solved today's Wordle.
I finished reading Jess Walter's novel, The Cold Million. In the end, I experienced this story as secondarily about the labor strife in Spokane and primarily as a coming of age story about the book's central character, Rye. Moreover, it became a story, to me, about the powerful impact of reading. Rye's maturity, his sense of himself, his sharpening ability to critically examine his world, his brother, and himself is pushed forward by his reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I'll leave it that, unexplained, in case you read The Cold Millions. I'll just say that I found it satisfying that Jess Walter deepened the development of Jess's character by exploring how War and Peace was not merely entertaining him, but was getting inside him, helping him see his world more clearly and fully, and helping his moral development. It's no surprise that I would focus so keenly on this aspect of the story. It brought to life exactly what I find the most valuable in reading fiction. I enjoyed that The Cold Million was, in part, a work of fiction exploring the power of fiction itself.
2. I gave my head some time to clear after I finished The Cold Million and looked at the current offerings on the Criterion Channel. Right now, the channel is featuring a collection of New York stories and I decided to watch a 65 minute work of docufiction, On the Bowery, directed by Lionel Rogosin, released in 1956.
It's a dreary slice of life study of two dissipated men living on the Bowery in Manhattan that documents life in dive bars, flop houses, a mission, and on the street in the Bowery. If this was such a dispiriting portrait of alcoholism and poverty, why did I watch it all the way through? The film's photography kept me watching. It's shot in black and white and while the subject matter is not beautiful, the quality of the film's pictures is beautiful. I used to enjoy doing street photography, always hoping to snap a picture of a memorable face or a vivid street scene. On the Bowery presents the viewer with a steady stream of unforgettable and masterfully shot street photographs, all in black and white. I might go back and watch this film again, and, yes, feel the depression of the movie's story and subject matter again, but take in its superb photography.
3. As happy as I was to finish reading a book for the first time since late summer and as happy as I was to be a subscriber to the Criterion Channel and have access to On the Bowery, the best part of my day got underway at 8 p.m. and lasted until 11 p.m.
Eugene's low-powered, non-profit, listener supported radio station, KEPW-FM streams its programming online simultaneously with broadcasting it. KEPW stands for K Eugene Peace Works and if you'd like to listen to programs looking at the world from a peace and justice point of view, this would be the place to go. You'll find it here: www.kepw.org
I tune in online to KEPW at 8 p.m. Thursday to listen to Daniel McKay's hour long program devoted to Bob Dylan called, Hard Rain and Slow Trains: Bob Dylan and Fellow Travelers. At the end of this post, I'll put up a link that will take you to an archive of Daniel's shows.
I met Daniel several years ago when we both taught English at Lane Community College. I soon learned that Daniel has devoted much of his intellectual energy to the life, music, films, books, and thinking of Bob Dylan and his Thursday night hour long program brings Daniel's love of all things Bob Dylan to life.
Tonight, his show focused on one Dylan song, "The Times They are A-Changin'". Daniel played different versions of Dylan performing the song and also played several different artists, ranging from Me First and the Gimme Gimmes to Nina Simone, from Mountain to the gospel singers, The Brothers and Sisters of LA and many others performing their cover versions of "The Times They are A-Changin'". In addition, Daniel put the song in the context of the musical traditions Dylan drew upon when he wrote the song and offered verse by verse analysis of how the song works.
It was a stimulating and very enjoyable hour.
Jeff Harrison and I have been friends since September of 1986 when he started his graduation work at the University of Oregon.
Over the years, Jeff and I have gone to countless live music concerts together. We've been to shows put on in Oakland, Portland, and Eugene by the Grateful Dead, Zero, Nine Days Wonder, Little Women, Richard Thompson, The Floydian Slips, to name some of them, and, most recently, in May of 2019, we saw Neil Young in Eugene.
Like Daniel, Jeff has devoted a great deal of his time and energy to the world of Bob Dylan. He offers a Bob Dylan literature course at LCC.
Jeff has also been devoted over the years to the vast universe of the Grateful Dead and to jam band and other forms of music related to the Dead.
His two hour show, Deadish, is a weekly dive into this world.
One of Jeff's favorite bands (and one of my favorites, too) is Zero. Zero is going to play in Eugene on Feb. 5, 2022 at the WOW Hall and so tonight he focused most of his show on recordings of Zero playing at WOW Hall in the late 80s and early 90s.
So Jeff did what I enjoy the most and what he can do because KEPW-FM is such a non-commercial station.
In the first hour he started playing Zero and, if I remember correctly, just four or five tunes covered the whole hour as Zero put on a stunning display of virtuosity and versatility, drawing upon their roots in jazz, rock, blues, and even some boogie woogie (and maybe more) as they jammed away, transporting me not only back in time to all those Zero shows in Eugene, but also moving me in a spiritual way the way their jams build and build, combining lyrical and romantic sounds with jazzy bluesy jams and sometimes moving into passages of sonic rock and roll.
Jeff played a part of a January 27, 1967 show from the Avalon Ballroom to open the second hour and closed his show with more of the divine sounds of Zero.
If you'd like to hear Jeff's show, go to kepw.org and click on Listen Now in the green rectangle. A grid of past shows will pop up. Scroll down this grid until you come to Deadish and you'll see a small rectangle to the right that says Play. Jeff's Jan 27th show will be available to play until Feb 8th.
Right under Deadish, you'll see Daniel McCay's show, Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan and Fellow Travelers and you'll see the "play" rectangle to the immediate right. It, too, will be available until Feb 8th.
But! Wait!
There's more!
Daniel McCay stores all of his Dylan shows in one place and if you'd like to play past shows you can.
All you have to do is go to https://player.whooshkaa.com/shows/hard-rain-and-slow-trains-bob-dylan-and-fellow-travelers and you'll find over 150 of Daniel's episodes!
If you can't click on the URL I provided for Daniel's archive, just copy and paste it into your browser.
The URL also appears on the show's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/RainTrains
No comments:
Post a Comment