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Dispatch from the Diaspora, Hank Thompson, Lou Reed, Seamus Heaney, Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash, Kevin Rowland, Dolores O'Riordan, Christy Moore, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Trouble Songs
Good Trouble – in the Back Seat with Stuart Bailie.
Far away from Belfast, Stuart Bailie and I find ourselves in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in Los Gatos, California. A perfect place to ponder politics, protest, and punk rock, it’s where John Steinbeck penned his angriest book, the soundtrack of America’s Great Depression and Tom Joad’s California. By any other name, The Grapes of Wrath is a punk anthem fulfilling the writer’s goal “to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.” It is a call to outrage, to make “good trouble” – the kind that might redeem the very soul of a country, resonant and recognizable in the soundtrack of Northern Ireland since 1968. That soundtrack is Trouble…
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Aging, Art, Bob Dylan, Daniel Kramer, Dispatch from the Diaspora, It's Not Dark Yet, Michael Gray, Photography, Positively 4th Street, Street Legal, Tangled up in Blue, Where Are You Tonight? Subterranean Homesick Blues
Happy Birthday Bob Dylan – Never Say Goodbye.
May 24 2019: Happy 78th Birthday Bob Dylan Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades. When was it when a Dylan song first mattered to me? I can’t be sure, yet I can’t remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue. In 1979, my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics who might consider themselves more qualified than I to measure the success of a Dylan song. (Not…
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About my hair. Seriously.
It was with a mix of delight and anxiety that I read in today’s Guardian that the perm is making a comeback. You read that right. Hair-rising news that takes me back to that day a few years ago when a middle-aged bald man reached across an impressive stretch of time and distance to announce on my Facebook page, “Hey!” “HEY!!!” “Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Indeed you did. Relentlessly. And, it was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC,…
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Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You
commencement exercises
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong… nothing At my daughter’s high school graduation, the Senior class filed into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). A perfectly hip processional, it was one of her father’s favorite songs, five minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. I had never been so…
