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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
Bob Dylan – Someone You Want To Photograph.
May 24 2016: Happy 75th 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. I don’t remember when what he sang first mattered to me, 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 Michael Gray, mind you, who writes that…
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Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
still we dance – on mother’s day in america
This weekend marks another Mother’s Day without the man who made a mother out of me, the man who loved me so well and for so long. Our girl plans to take time off work to spend the day with me, and we know – but we keep it to ourselves – that looking forward to a special Sunday together will lead to looking back to the way it used to be, to once upon a time when she, her father in tow, set out on the annual quest for a gift for me. Every antique store in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area was their stomping ground as they searched for something bijou, something that would bring whimsy to…
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Belfast, Blogging, Brian Baird, cancer, Education, Fathers and sons, favorite teacher, Memoir, News, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism, Social Media, television, The Diviner, The Forge, The Troubles, Walter Kronkite, Writing
In appreciation of a teacher . . .
Remembering Brian Baird . . . Once upon a time, before news traveled at break-neck speed to our smart phones and our Cable TV networks, we waited for it. We had no choice, and when “the news” came on at teatime, it was a serious affair that demanded our attention. It was rarely, if ever, about a new animal born at the zoo or a celebrity’s wardrobe malfunction. When UTV broadcaster, Brian Baird, entered our living rooms, in black and white, and with poker-faced authority as he told us something new, we took it as gospel. As my brother says, “You could read nothing in that face. It was all in the…
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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 tucked away in the back of my mind I had big plans to escape from Northern Ireland and its greyness. Most of the time, I was bored and with no particular place to go other than the disco on a Saturday night with my best friend. “Little Red Corvette” –…
