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Ali – you shook up our world. No mercy.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see. It’s the summer of 1987. I have no job and no clue where I’m headed other than toward some vague notion of America. I arrived at Kennedy airport, complete with big hair and a backpack full of nothing useful except a Sony Walkman…
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"Let's Go Crazy", "Little Red Corvette", American Dream, Antrim, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Dispatches from the Diaspora, In Memoriam, Northern Ireland, Prince, Soundtracks of our Lives
‘you need a love that’s gonna last . . .’
Little red Corvette Baby you’re much too fast Little red Corvette You need a love that’s gonna last. I first paid attention to Prince and the Revolution when I was about twenty years old, and “Little Red Corvette” was getting regular airplay on Radio One. It was the eighties. I had big hair, big enough to be in The Revolution, and…
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Act Two, After death of a spouse, Art, Awesome Women, Death and dying, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Love, Marriage, Memoir, Music, Rites of passage, saying goodbye, Scaffolding, Seamus Heaney
perfecting a marriage
Laurie Anderson tells this story about the day she married her best friend, Lou Reed: It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. “There are so many things I’ve never done that I wanted to do,” I said. “Like what?” “You know, I…
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Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Cadillac Ranch, Coming of age, Drive All Night, The Price You Pay, The River, The River Tour 2016
“And that’s the river . . .”
I bought Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17, and I played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, introduced me to The Boss sensing perhaps that his plainspoken poetry would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. He knew I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper – most likely he hadn’t either – …
