Joni Mitchell - Little Green (Live NYC 1967)

I was actually playing Laura Nyro songs on YouTube when this showed up in the right column. I love Joni, so I clicked on it. I narrowed my eyes when the entrance to the Cafe au Go Go appeared, and then, sure enough, Joni enters wearing that silk outfit. This is the last thing that I ever expected to see again. 

I was there, probably this very night. 

This was a Monday at the Go Go. Monday was Pot-Luck, "Jam Night," something like that. The acts were blends of different bands, famous people trying out side projects, acts that some A&R man wanted to showcase (like Joni at this time). One Monday I saw a brand-new four-piece version of Blood, Sweat and Tears (no horns). One Monday there was a long jam featuring Eric Clapton and Frank Zappa, backed by half of the Muddy Waters band. That kind of thing. 

And this night, the first act was Joni, introduced as a "new sensation" or something. She walked in and took over the space. Charisma for days. She did a few songs, and that was it. I think that she also sang "Chelsea Morning." We were knocked out cold. 

This is a very nice surprise. My memory of that show is very clear, but I never, ever expected to see a good video of it in 2021. Amazing. That's fifty-four years ago. 

The Tucker Story

The way that a child forms a memory is very different than the mechanism used by an adult. This is especially true of children before the age of reason, usually considered to be six or seven years old. Things are still a bit sketchy for children who have not yet reached puberty. What is your earliest memory? 

The Tucker automobile was sold in very limited numbers in only one year:1948. Those few hundred cars may have been the only production run. They were for sale in New York City in plenty of time for a doctor to buy one and use it to drive the newborn me home from the hospital. A short hop from Long Island City to a neighborhood near the border between Queens and Nassau Counties. That is the narrative that I recall from my early childhood. 

The car did not belong to our family doctor. Another doctor, a friend of his, was going in our direction and offered to drive us home. My family lived at the time in a very working class neighborhood on the Queens side, but it was a very convenient stop for someone who was probably going to the "Five Towns" area of Nassau. Five Towns, I forget any of the individual towns, was an up-scale place, suitable for a doctor working in New York City. 

I remember my father talking to other adults at some kind of function about the ride in the Tucker. I recall the subject coming up more than once. He was an engineer, and Tuckers were fascinating beasts for engineers. If you had actually ridden in one, other engineers would be interested to hear about it. I also believe that I recall my parents talking to our doctor about it on subsequent office visits. I was a first-born child, and we tend to observe the adults closely. 

Memory is a tricky thing, however, and as time passes, memories get shifted around in the brain, moved to different storage spaces, ignored for long periods of time, and possibly somewhat scrambled. I have always thought of myself as having been brought home from the hospital in a Tucker, but there is no evidence of this. Any other potential witnesses are dead, most are long dead. There were no photographs. I formed the memories because it was always presented as being something very special. It would be special, because Tuckers were very rare birds. 

Was I brought home in a Tucker? I think that the odds are good. The Tucker did not have a long commercial life. 1948 and gone. They go for a fortune now at those rare car auctions. But there is no need to stretch facts to accept the possibility that it happened just like that. They were for sale before I was born; part of the production run was sold in New York City; why shouldn't a doctor offer a ride to a nice young couple and their newborn? It would have been a matter of blocks out of his way. 

So I'm going with the Tucker story. I should put it on my resume. It sounds classy, doesn't it? 

 

Rod Bernard & Clifton Chenier - My Jolie Blonde

There are hundreds of versions of this song. This one has a nice feel to it. 

Cassandra Or Jeremiah?

 

I often refer to myself as a Cassandra. The term is generally meant to be a person who takes a dark view of things, someone who expects the worst. I may have been giving myself too much credit.

The original Cassandra was a woman in Greek mythology. She found great favor, as Earth women often did, with the God Apollo, and he rewarded her with the gift of prophecy. As the story goes, she cheated on Apollo, and as punishment for her infidelity he left her with the gift of prophecy but made it so that no one ever believed her. He must have really liked the woman. I would expect an egotist like Apollo to dish out a more severe punishment than that.

As a result, being “a Cassandra” doesn't mean that you're constantly being a buzz-kill by bringing bad news. Whatever news you're bringing, bad or good, no one is going to believe you.

Another God-infected person from very roughly the same period in history is the Jewish prophet Jeremiah. He was alive during the seventh and sixth centuries before the modern era. “A Jeremiah” is a person who is very pessimistic, who is always saying that something terrible is going to happen. Jeremiah was famous for taking a dark view of the present and tending to foresee terrible calamities in the future.

The sources that I checked were silent concerning Jeremiah's lifetime batting average, but he did often hit awful predictions out of the park. Like predicting the Babylonian captivity, and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. And, like I said, he was consistently negative in his outlook.

My big Oxford makes very slight difference between the two as terms applied to people today. A Cassandra is “a person who prophesies disaster,” while a Jeremiah is “a person who complains continually and foretells disaster.”

The notes do include mention of the the fact that the important aspect of Cassandra's fate was that she was disbelieved. It seems odd, therefore, to define the condition as consistently negative. For writers of dictionaries, usage trumps historical accuracy.

There are no real notes for a Jeremiah, only that the etymology is the Jewish scriptures. I like that they add “complains continually.” This too was probably added to the meaning by usage over the centuries.

I am sufficiently negative to wear either description, but I'm leaning towards accepting the title of Jeremiah because of the complaining. Oye, vey ist mir, can I complain!

Sinnerman

Now this is a wonderful little miracle of a whole 'nuther type. It turns out that in the music world there are many, many ways to skin a cat. 

Astrud Gilberto - It Might as Well Be Spring

What a wonderful little miracle of a song this is! Rogers and Hammerstein wrote the song for the show, State Fair (1962). Many of these show tunes are shockingly good. Get the right musicians to sing and play them and they become special. 

1984/ 1Q84: A Warning From A Japanese Author

 Haruki Murakami has been a favorite author of mine for more than ten years. I've read almost all of his work, at least almost all of it that has been translated into English. I haven't found any of it difficult, although some people complain. There are often parallel stories, and many of his novels and stories include magical realism. In truth, any author that we could name would leave some people to complain. Readers bring different agendas to the process. Anyway, I love Murakami.

There remained one prominent novel that I had not read: 1Q84 (2009, English translation Knopf, 2011). It was the shear enormity of it that drove me off. The book comes to about 1,000 pages. I finally decided to take the plunge recently after spending months reading, more like studying, a couple of huge history books. I was reading both of those for the second time, because they were so dense with details and they involved fascinating subject matter. After that, I thought that I was ready for a big dose of fiction. Time to tackle 1Q84. I'm very glad that I did.

I just now came across a passage that could have been written as a warning to Americans, especially this year. This is an adult man describing the plot of 1984 (George Orwell, 1949) to a precocious teenage girl:

"They rewrite history.

"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime. Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.” (Quotation marks in the original. This is that rare bird, a Japanese novel written in the third-person.)

Isn't this exactly what our, what shall I call them, our leaders, are doing to us now? And haven't they been doing it to us for some time? They are rewriting history.

There is a powerful movement alive now in America to whitewash Slavery in its entirety. The 1619 Project is condemned as a hoax. They are trying to rewrite that history. “Americans were kind to their slaves!” “The slaves were happy!” “Slavery was not going to last more than another ten years anyway!” “The Civil War (aka, the War of Northern Aggression) had nothing to do with slavery.” Those are lies, and they are revisionist history at its most insidious.

No one recalls being taught in school that America flat-out stole half of Mexico by force of arms. Having trouble remembering about that one? The Marines remember it well. “From the halls of Montezuma . . .” Google “map mexico 1830.” Then Google “the mexican american war.” That was 1846 to 1848, and we stole all of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada, and parts of the states of Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. There are many examples of our bloody history that we prefer to ignore now, or to lie them away altogether.

Young people today have no idea that fairly recently everyone was entitled to free health insurance with almost every job; that all health care was non-profit, including health insurance; that every state had universities that were either free or ridiculously cheap; that rents and food were cheap; that jobs were easily available.

Republicans are the chief offenders here, but everyone with any power or authority in America is involved. That insurrectionist invasion of the Capitol Building in January either did not happen, or they were just a bunch of tourists. Rewriting history, to cheat us of our collective memory, to deny us the basic facts about our own individual and collective pasts, has become one of the main tools in the ongoing effort to remove any semblance of democracy from American life and replace it with some kind of authoritarian oligarchy wearing a democracy mask.