“Tell-Tale Signs”

July 31, 2008 1 Comment

My son and I will head up the New York State Thruway in a few weeks to Saratoga Springs — for a concert featuring Bob Dylan and the Levon Helm Band! As we bow our heads and tip our hats while passing Woodstock and Saugerties, I bet we will be listening to Dylan and the Band — and wishing we didn’t have to wait until October for the newest installment in the Bootleg Series, “Tell-Tale Signs.”

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Here’s the very interesting and already somewhat controversial (three versions of “Mississippi!” and didn’t they already release the “unreleased” songs “Series of Dreams” and “Dignity?”) set list for the upcoming three-disk album:

Bob Dylan – Tell Tale Signs – The Bootleg Series Vol. 8

Disc One
“Mississippi” – (Unreleased, Time Out Of Mind)
“Most of the Time” – (Alternate version, Oh Mercy)
“Dignity” – (Piano demo, Oh Mercy)
“Someday Baby” – (Alternate version, Modern Times)
“Red River Shore” – (Unreleased, Time Out Of Mind)
“Tell ‘Ole Bill” – (Alternate version, North Country Soundtrack)
“Born in Time” – (Unreleased, Oh Mercy)
“Can’t Wait” – (Alternate version, Time Out Of Mind)
“Everything is Broken” – (Alternate version, Oh Mercy)
“Dreamin’ of You” – (Unreleased, Time Out Of Mind)
“Huck’s Tune” – (Lucky You soundtrack)
“Marching to the City” – (Unreleased, Time Out Of Mind)
“High Water (For Charley Patton)” – (Live, Niagara, 2003)

Disc Two
“Mississippi” – (Unreleased version #2, Time Out Of Mind)
“32-20 Blues” – (Unreleased, World Gone Wrong)
“Series of Dreams” – (Unreleased, Oh Mercy)
“God Knows” – (Unreleased, Oh Mercy)
“Can’t Escape From You” – (Unreleased, December 2005)
“Dignity” – (Unreleased, Oh Mercy)
“Ring Them Bells” – (Live at the Supper Club, 1993)
“Cocaine Blues” – (Live, Vienna, Virginia, 1997)
“Ain’t Talkin’” – (Alternate version, Modern Times)
“The Girl On The Greenbriar Shore” – (Live, 1992)
“Lonesome Day Blues” – (Live, Sunrise, Florida, 2002)
“Miss the Mississippi” – (Unreleased, 1992)
“The Lonesome River” – (Clinch Mountain Country)
“‘Cross The Green Mountain” – (Gods And Generals Soundtrack)

Disc Three (Deluxe Set Only)
“Duncan And Brady” – (Unreleased, 1992)
“Cold Irons Bound” – (Live, Bonnaroo, June 2004)
“Mississippi” – (Unreleased version #3, Time Out Of Mind)
“Most Of The Time” – (Alternate version #2, Oh Mercy)
“Ring Them Bells” – (Alternate version, Oh Mercy)
“Things Have Changed” – (Live, Portland, Oregon, 2000)
“Red River Shore” – (Unreleased version #2, Time Out Of Mind)
“Born In Time” – (Unreleased version #2, Oh Mercy)
“Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” – (Live, London, England, 2000)
“Marchin’ To The City” – (Unreleased version #2, Time Out Of Mind)
“Can’t Wait” – (Alternate version #2, Time Out Of Mind)
“Mary And The Soldier” – (Unreleased, World Gone Wrong)

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Pete Seeger keeps on singing

July 31, 2008 Leave a comment

I’ve written about my encounters with Pete Seeger. Here’s some good news: The 89-year-old icon is putting out at album — titled, appropriately, “At 89.”

Here’s an article from Billboard magazine:

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Folk legend Pete Seeger will release his first new album of studio recordings in five years this fall. The 32-track “At 89,” a nod to Seeger’s age, is due Sept. 30 via Appleseed Recordings.

According to a spokesperson, the material ranges from new takes on old favorites, vintage songs that have never appeared on an album and short banjo, guitar and recorder pieces.

Seeger will play a handful of shows through the end of the year, including his annual Seeger and Guthrie Thanksgiving concert on Nov. 29 at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Asked earlier this year by Billboard what his legacy will be, Seeger replied, “My family will remember me, and a few others. I’m one of a lot of songwriters. There’ll be more important things to think about. Mostly I’d urge people, don’t make heroes out of anybody. I’ve made a huge number of mistakes with my family, in singing and in politics, all sorts. So don’t copy what I’ve done. Please, make your own mistakes. Don’t make my mistakes over again.”

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The death of Emmett Till

July 31, 2008 6 Comments

Friend and fellow writer Chuck Pizar offers this comment on “A look of agony,” the latest essay in my series titled “Man Has Premonition of Own Death.”

“Maybe we need to look death straight in the eye.” That is exactly what Emmett Till’s mother thought. More precisely, she wanted the country to look hate-fueled murder in the eye when she had her teenage son’s body tour the country in the state his murderers left it in.

Who was Emmett Till? What is Chuck referring to when he talks about how Emmett’s mother’s decision to let the world see what had been done to his son?

Here’s a photo of Emmett Till when he was 14 years old:

Here’s a photo of 14-year-old Emmett Till in his casket after he was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955:

The murder of Emmett Till and his mother’s decision to let the world see what hateful bigots had done to her son galvanized the civil-rights movement.

Here’s a link to Bob Dylan singing his early protest song “The Ballad of Emmett Till”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBsGQ_c6x7w

And here’s a good synopsis of Emmett Till’s story (a summary of the “American Experience” documentary about the pivotal episode in the civil rights movement):

In August of 1955, one year and three months after Brown v. Board of Education, a fourteen-year-old black boy unschooled in the racial customs of the South traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives. With adolescent bravado, he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. This inadvertent violation of a sacred code of the South cost him his life. Two white men dragged Till from his bed in the dead of night, beat him, and shot him through the head. Three days later his mangled body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. It was Emmett Till’s first visit to the South. Eight days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, where the town line was marked with a sign reading, “Money — a good place to raise a boy,” Emmett Till was dead.If not for one extraordinary decision of Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, the story may have ended there. At the urging of civil rights leaders, Mamie Till decided to leave the casket open at her son’s funeral. She told the mortician not to “fix” her son’s face. The world would see what had been done to him. Tens of thousands of people viewed Emmett Till’s body, which was on display in a Chicago church for four long days. Gruesome photos of his maimed and distorted face flooded the national and international press. America was shocked out of comfortable complacency, and the Till case became international news.

Two days after Till’s death, Carolyn Bryant’s husband and another white man were arrested and charged with his murder. During the trial the following month, the courthouse became a microcosm of race relations: black observers packed into the segregated balcony seats as the defendants’ families joked openly with prosecutors and jurors on the floor below. The courtroom took on a carnival atmosphere as snacks and soft drinks were distributed to white observers. Outside, the international press jockeyed for photographs and interviews that captured the ways of the American South.

Till’s uncle identified the assailants in court — the first time a black person had testified against a white in Mississippi, and perhaps in the South. He was forced to leave town. After a five-day trial that made an open mockery of the possibility of justice, the defendants were acquitted. The Bryants celebrated, on camera, with a smile and an embrace.

The federal government’s failure to intercede in the Till case led blacks and whites to realize that if change were to come, they would have to do it themselves. The murder of Emmett Till was a watershed in the development of the nascent movement for civil rights. Some historians describe it as the real spark that ignited broad-based support for the movement.

Three months and three days after Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

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A look of agony

July 29, 2008 1 Comment

This is the latest in a series of essays titled “Man has premonition of own death”

I’ve yet to see a dead person as nature intended, pre-embalming, before the sewn lips and eyelids, before the makeup, before the pink powder and blush, before the hairdye to touch up the hair, before the mortician entwines the fingers and rests the deceased’s hands properly and prissily open their chest.

I really don’t mind the thought of embalming and making the dead as pretty as possible before they embark on their final voyage. I avoid wakes whenever possible anyway, but if I have to go, I’d rather go to a wake where the body is not yet smelling and decomposing and gruesome.

I’ve seen autopsy photos. I know people often die with their eyes open and their eyes stay open until someone gently shuts them. I don’t know the science of this, but I gather that the eyelids of the dead tend to pop back open after you close them, hence the old practice of placing heavy coins upon the eyes. Nowadays, I gather, the eyes are sewn or glued. And so the dead look like they’re sleeping, although if you look closely you soon realize that it’s a weird, disconcerting sleep, the deepest sleep, the sleep from which we do not stir, the sleep in which the eyes never move and twitch, in which there is no dreaming soul behind the eyes.

Emily Dickinson writes:

I like a look of Agony, Because I know it’s true — Men do not sham Convulsion, Nor simulate, a Throe — The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death — Impossible to feign The Beads upon the Forehead By homely Anguish strung

Dylan sings: “Everybody’s wearing a disguise/To hide what they got left behind their eyes.” Maybe the morticians in our midst should consider this: Maybe you should not staple or sew or glue shot the eyes of the deceased. Warn us beforehand, if you like, so the more timid among us will not faint upon the sight, but leave the eyelids open. Let us see the blank expression, that infinite emptiness, that obvious lack of life, that look that looks to be very much like fright.

Maybe we need to look death straight in the eye. Maybe it would be good for us. Or maybe what gets us through life is managing to look the other way when Mister Death beckons with his bony finger.

 

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Bringing it all back home

July 28, 2008 Leave a comment

The editors of the quarterly magazine published by the Yonkers Historical Society asked if they could reprint my essay “City of Gracious Living” in an upcoming issue of their quarterly journal! It will probably appear in the winter issue. If you’re interested in reading more about my old hometown, here’s a link to the Yonkers Historical Society’s Web site: http://www.yonkershistory.org/

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Like father, like daughter

July 28, 2008 1 Comment

Well, sort of. Emily DiGiovanni’s a writer and a reader, just like her father. But the scope of her talents far exceeds mine, which probably has something to do with genetics and evolution (with a sprinkle of creationism and a pinch of chaos theory!). Emily’s a writer, just like her father (although her father writes prose and she writes poetry). But she’s also an excellent photographer, artist  and film maker. Her radar and sonar are tuned to detect even the faintest signals of beauty, which she decodes into remarkable images and sounds.

This link to identity theory, the excellent online literary magazine, will take you to a profile of Emily DiGiovanni, with her own thoughts on her poetry as well as samples of her work: www.identitytheory.com/featauth/emily_digiovanni.php

Finally, a visual treat. Here are three of her photos. In order: The Eclipse, The Pearl and Interplay.

The Eclipse

The Eclipse

 

The Pearl

The Pearl

Interplay

Interplay

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The new Elvis

July 28, 2008 Leave a comment

Thank God he didn’t become that, hanging out at his Jersey Shore mansion eating banana-with-peanut butter sandwiches and shooting out his television sets and making bad beach movies. But when I was 17 years old and saw unknown Bruce Springsteen in Niagara Falls playing on his first-ever tour of college campuses with his E Street Band, it rang true when his performance reached a fever pitch — I think maybe they were playing “Rosalita” — and this skinny, scraggly bearded, Jersey Shore hipster named Bruce ripped off his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with glittery script that read ELVIS.

Rising star Bruce Springsteen

Rising star Bruce Springsteen

The great Bruce Springsteen performed last night at Giants Stadium. Click on this link: http://mycentraljersey.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

Then click on SPRINGSTEEN. You’ll find an article about the concert and three video clips from last night’s show, with Bruce and the Band performing “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” “Lonesome Day” and “Radio Nowhere.”

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Elementary…

July 27, 2008 Leave a comment

My son just got back a month-long study abroad adventure, mostly in London (with excursions to Paris and Amsterdam). I’m sure I’ll never hear a true and thorough account of what he did while he was there, but I do know that while in London he visited Baker Street and went to a cheesy tourist shop and bought me a deerstalker cap of the sort made famous by Baker Street’s most famous resident, the consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes.  Here’s a photo of Mr. Holmes, portrayed by Basil Rathbone, wearing his distinctive cap:

I think it’s safe to assume that a similar portrait of me wearing my personal deerstalker cap will not be appearing on this Web site anytime soon. What’s more, when I die, if anyone decides to bury me wearing my personal deerstalker cap, I will come back to haunt them like I’m their own personal Hound of the Baskerville.

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Grave situations

July 25, 2008 Leave a comment

 

This is the latest in a series of essays titled “Man Has Premonition of Own Death.”

 

Just read a book called “The American Resting Place: Four hundred years of history through our cemeteries,” written by Marilyn Yalom with photos by Reid S. Yalom. It got me thinking about my two favorite cemeteries.

 One is Sleepy Hollow in Tarrytown, New York, near the Tappan Zee, where Washington Irving’s famous “Legend” takes place and the writer himself is buried. The other is Oakland in my old hometown of Yonkers, New York, where my grandparents are buried as well as various others in the Nash and Crooks families (on my mother’s side).

 The book also got me thinking about Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, where my father and his parents, my Italian grandparents, occupy shelves in sprawling, chapel-like mausoleum with stained glass windows and creepy piped-in music.

My father now resides in a place with a foyer that looks like Liberace's living room.

My father now resides in a place with a foyer that looks like Liberace's living room.

 
As it turns out, my father and his parents share space at Ferncliff with the following people who also went there for their final and eternal rest: 

 

 Harold Arlen, who wrote “Over the Rainbow”

Novelist James Baldwin

Composer Bella Bartok

Actor Yul Brynner (cremated at Ferncliff)

Tom Carvel, founder of Carvel Ice Cream (which started, of course, in Yonkers).

Actress Joan Crawford

DJ and “Father of Rock ‘n’ Roll” Alan Freed

Judy Garland

Muppets creator Jim Henson

Blues singer Alberta Hunter

Composer Jerome Kern

Black radical activist Malcolm X

John Lennon (cremated at Ferncliff).

Jazz great Thelonius Monk

Christopher Reeve (cremated at Ferncliff).

Nelson Rockefeller

“Sherlock Holmes’’ actor Basil Rathbone.

Athlete, singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson.

Broadway restaurateur “Toots” Shor

Literary critic Lionel Trilling

Ed Sullivan (yes, of the “Ed Sullivan Show”)

 

My father detested John Lennon and Malcolm X. He would have dismissed Monk’s music as “noise.” But he would have been thrilled to share a graveyard with Basil Rathbone – he loved those old “Sherlock Holmes” movies with Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as loyal Watson, and one of my good memories of my father is watching television with him on rainy weekends when Yankees games got canceled and the local station would show old Sherlock Homes, Charlie Chan and Bowery Boys movies.

Here’s a link to the Ferncliff Cemetery’s creepy Web site: www.ferncliff.com

 

 

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Avoiding the void

July 21, 2008 2 Comments

This is the latest in a series of essays titled “Man has premonition of own death”

I’m hearing – in my head – the Beatles, and John Lennon’s singing “Tomorrow Never Knows” from “Revolver,” with Ringo’s underrated and relentless drumming on that song, and Lennon singing “It is not dying…It is not dying….Lay down all thoughts….Surrender to the void.” Everywhere the void. I sent the section called Beautiful Corpse to several writer friends and asked what they thought. With one, sadly, it resonated all too well. “You got me at a sort bad time with this,’ my friend replied, explaining that an ex-spouse was “not doing too well. I mean, not too well at all, although I’m still superstitious enough to think that if I say it aloud it will be true, so I will try to do my part and not say it.” “I have been crying all day, so you can guess. It seems we’re at the age when if we’re not dying ourselves, everyone we know is. And that really sucks, and yes you captured it here.” “And you’re right: when you’re young you can talk about it with a glibness that…well, let’s just say, I have never been freaked out by Halloween and this year, after the death of my father this summer, I am horribly freaked out when I see those plastic bloody hands reaching out of the plastic graves on people’s lawns.” “And when I read my own glib writing…I think, how could I have been so stupid? So, write on. You’re on to something.” So right now I’m thinking about my writer friend and I’m picturing a thousand lawns and two thousand bloody hands and three thousand sad songs and four thousand tombstones and five thousand graves and six thousand funeral trains and for some reason I see people dancing and swaying and playing horns on their way to a cemetery in New Orleans and I’ve a vision of a dead body laid on its back on a smooth flat rock and the rock is slightly atilt and it’s facing a churning ocean and birds circle overhead and there is no beach – it’s a rocky shore – and the wind picks up and the birds circle higher and soar and glide, and the surf gets rougher and the crash of the waves gets louder, and waves hit rocks and the foam sprays the flat rock, which gets wet and slippery, and then there’s a huge wave and that wave envelops the rock, and then the dead body is gone and the flat rock’s empty, and I hear John Lennon singing “Lay down all thoughts…Relax and float downstream….It is not dying…” We can hope. We can hope that there’s something more to the void than just a void.

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