The Newell Post

We say that Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer.

We had already gotten into the summer spirit when I was a kid. Our baseball gloves were well oiled; our baseball bats were taped and ready for swinging for the fences in PS 125, where we played softball.

Sometimes we would sneak in a catch between lunch and returning to class at Blessed Sacrament School. It was always hot by the afternoon regardless of whether the windows were wide opened and the shades fully drawn to permit the modest breezes’ entry.

I remember always being thirsty at these times and staring at the vase on the bookcase next to my seat filled with flowers and water wondering if it would be ok to drink that water. Such was my thirst.

But then our teacher, Sister Margaret sensing our condition, would allow us to get a drink of water from the fountain outside our classroom. Ah, relief at last.

We had the summer spirit and eagerly scratched off the days in our mental calendar, marking our progress to summer vacation. Was there anything better than summer vacation?

Finally, the last day of school arrived, and then summer began.

It didn’t begin on Memorial Day.

It didn’t begin on the Summer Solstice.

It began on the last day of school.

Sadly, the children of Uvalde, Texas, will not experience the joy of the last day of school.

Far too many will never return to school again.

Far too many families will be reminded of their terrible loss every day of their lives, especially every time the last day of school approaches.

I have tried to be non-political on my blog for quite a while. I sought to be entertaining rather than confrontational. But yet another mass murder of our innocents has provoked my silence to be eschewed, and I will write what I feel.

I advise you to quit reading this and delete it from your browser if my attack on the WRONG will offend you.

Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, is the leader of the WRONG.

His solution to ending school violence is to eliminate doors. And put guns on campus.

As I type, it appears that the guns on campus that this school had apparently waited for others to show before they confronted the assassin. But all the facts have not been learned or revealed.

Back in 2017, on the day after the Parkland massacre of our innocents, I was volunteering at a cancer organization. It was my first day doing so, and I was stuffing envelopes with another senior citizen, a woman.

In the course of completing our task, I merely observed that what happened yesterday in Parkland was a tragedy.

Her reply, I’ll never forget it because it sent shivers up my spine. “I just worry about the Second Amendment.”

The WRONG has been telling us for years that the Second Amendment guarantees that every American has the right to own automatic weapons with no restrictions. So, an 18-year-old can purchase two guns that each are 40 percent more deadly than the rifles carried by our soldiers in Viet Nam.

40 percent more lethal!

I get that the WRONG didn’t like that a black family inhabited the White House.

I know they couldn’t tolerate a woman living there as anything other than First Lady.

I get they don’t support any social programs that bailout individuals over banks and automakers.

But can the WRONG be so wrong about guns?

I guess we know they can.

It’s despicable that a PAC and its donors have that much control over Senators so that they ignore the cries of children and parents. We don’t want to politicize this tragic event, the WRONG proclaims even as they attack others for voicing their pleas for common-sense gun control and show up at the NRA convention three hundred miles away from the blood-stained classrooms of Uvalde.

Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day and was initiated by several states that encouraged the decorating of cemeteries where our fallen heroes were laid to rest.

It then became Memorial Day, and we now celebrate and remember the sacrifice that our veterans have made for our freedom and way of life.

I don’t think their children should be put in harm’s way to protect the right of gun owners to own their guns.

The Democrats don’t have the stones to demand a ban on all guns. They are willing to compromise on banning some guns or at least restricting their ready availability. Sure, we’ll let you have your weapons of mass destruction, but you will have to submit to a background check.

But the WRONG won’t even accept that.

It’s a bit ironic that only last week, W made a gaff about illegally invading a country. He meant to say Ukraine but said Iraq.

W was looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Baghdad when they were in Texas all along.

When will the WRONG get it right?

It rarely isn’t summer in Florida. At least, in terms of New York weather, It rarely isn’t summer in Florida.

With that in mind, it’s not to issue my Summer Playlist 2022.

As indicated in a previous blog entry, this year, I will forego the listing of single songs that have long enkindled in me the thoughts, sounds, and even smells of summer. Instead, I will focus on the albums of my summer youth.

Particularly the late 60s and early 70s, as this was the era when so much great music was readily available, and I had the cash to buy it.

It should come as no surprise that my summer playlist should include a few soundtracks. The late 60s and early 70s provided quite a few seminal films containing exquisite music.

Therefore, the first album on my list is the Soundtrack to 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Containing only snippets of a few examples of classical music, this Soundtrack was an essential component of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece.

It was not unusual for a few friends and me to be found in our friend PJ’s basement, huddled around a black and white tv tuned to a station offering no television signal at all. The static we stared into resembled cosmic space and the billions of stars represented by the seemingly millions of flashing white dots. It was interesting to learn later that this static we were so enthralled to stare into was, in fact, actual cosmic noise. Perhaps a hint of the remnants of the Big Bang.

It was 1969, after all.

I always considered the Beatles to be classical musicians in that their music was not constrained by time. It was as relevant this year as it had been five or sixty years ago.

So, on my Summer Playlist, I have included Revolver and Let It Be. Additionally, I listened to Yesterday and Today, an album only issued in America.

Then there is The Byrds.

The first time I heard the opening to their version of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tamborine Man, I was a fan. In fact, one of the first albums I bought when I finally had a stereo was The Byrds Greatest Hits. I then purchased all the albums in their catalog and still listen to their music today, summertime or not.

But each summer had Notorious Byrd Brothers, Turn Turn Turn, Fifth Dimension, and Younger Than Yesterday stacked on my To Listen To pile, ready for my auditory pleasure.

Blind Faith came out with Blind Faith, a classic album with no follow-up material. Combining Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood Blind Faith mesmerized me in the summer of 69, but it had you yearning for more. Nevertheless, it is on my list.

But even before Blind Faith, Crosby Stills and Nash issued their first album. So many of us played this album on and on, it’s a wonder we didn’t damage our needle or wear a hole into the vinyl. If this album isn’t on your playlist, I think you have some explaining to do.

CSN and sometimes Y came out with a new album each successive summer, including DejaVu and Four Way Street.

Iron Butterfly gave us In-A-Gadda-Davida. The thing you have to remember was this era provided not only a deluge of music to select but also cheap music to select. It was not unusual to purchase an entire album because you liked one of the songs included.

There was only one song on this album that I ever listened to, In-A-Gadda-Davida. Remember that this song was over 17 minutes long, so I never felt that I hadn’t received good value for my purchase. Besides, it is one of the classic songs of a classic generation.

When I was in high school, I became a fan of the Grass Roots. So, I purchased Golden Grass, a greatest hits album that occupied much of my time in the summer of 69.

New Years Eve 1969 came, and I found myself ensconced in Times Square with my friends PJ and Lou. Gratefully, these were the days that did not require the wearing of adult diapers in order to take part in the festivities.

The only trepidation we had concerned the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, whose union members threatened a New Year’s Day strike.

We were able to get home by subway in, all things considered, pretty good shape for a New Years Eve. Waiting for our Pelham Bay connection for ten minutes gave us pause to worry, but worries were put aside as our subway approached the station.

So, 1970 brought in yet another year of fantastic, classical rock and roll music.

Another soundtrack made my list.

That summer, we went to see Easy Rider in the Circle Theatre in The Bronx on Hugh Grant Circle. The storyline was current for the day as it employed two necessary ingredients to hold our attention: anti Establishment behavior and great music.

Never before and probably never since have audiences been enthralled with two drug dealers. I believe it had something to do with hearing Born To Be Wild, Wasn’t Born To Follow, and If Six Were Nine.

If not the lifestyle, the music kept me tuned in (or was I tuned out?) the rest of that summer.

In addition to Easy Rider, the three-record set of Woodstock arrived at Sam Goodies and EJ Korvettes, and those of us, who had missed the event of the century, were at least able to re-live the experience sans the mud and porta-potties.

Neal Young had joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash and first appeared with them at Woodstock. Just around the same time that Woodstock arrived, so too did Deja Vu, the second album issued by CSN and now CSNY.

The Soundtrack of a generation continued.

I also was fond of an older Rolling Stones album. Issued in 1967 as a companion to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request, offered their own sampling from the psychodelicatessan.

Time never seems to go that fast when you are young and in school. However, my junior year in college, which began in September of 1970, seemed to dispose of me abruptly into the summer of 1971 and the approaching of the end of my formal education.

Fortunately, I had some excellent music to soften the blow.

CSNY gave us a live two-disc album, Four Way Street.

Jethro Tull sprung Aqualung on us in all its midlevel splendor.

I was introduced to Procol Harem’s, A Salty Dog, on the evening we returned from our three-day stay on Hot Dog Beach in the Hamptons. The echo of “Three Days Man” from David Crosby’s admiration of the endurance of the Woodstock attendees still brings back a life-changing weekend.

Rod Steward rasped Every Picture Tells A Story, and, even without knowing her, we all fell in love with Maggie Mae.

Traffic had me listening to John Barleycorn Must die, Cat Stevens gave us Teaser, and The Firecat and Peace Train became one of my anthems.

Then there was Melanie.

Melanie was the Ethel Merman of folk.

She needed no sound system to deliver her lessons and commentary on the day. Candles In The Rain inspired me to see her perform in Central Park.

In those days, Schaeffer Beer sponsored fantastic concerts and ridiculously low prices. For a buck, you could sit in the cheap seats. A buck and a half got you right in front of the stage. If funds were low, you could sit outside the Wollman Rink and hear the concert for free.

When Melanie appeared, a building on the west side would have its top floors lighting arranged to form a big M. Melanie had a great publicist.

And so, the summers of my college years came to an end, but the music continued to mesmerize and delight.

The Moody Blues, Carly Simeon, James Taylor, Don Mclean, and others would continue to inspire and entertain me.

Listening to this music then and now is like reading a great book. Whether the words are sung or read, if they are artfully presented, they brush our souls much as they alter our minds.

It’s always summer in Florida, and it may not be too early where you are to start thinking about your summer playlist.

Another weekend has come, and so much has happened since I last shared a post…none of which I will write about today.

I continue to hope to amuse rather than hope to persuade.

There are so many persuasive opportunities, fake or true that you don’t need to rely on me.

I have stayed away from Twitter for over two weeks, just as I have avoided Facebook.

I still go on Facebook to check in with family pages from time to time, but I rarely look at anything else. My posts on The Newell Posts are automatically shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

I also have a site on Ning that I rarely use, but I may be sending an invitation out to friends and family as a Facebook alternative.

But my active social media days are few and maybe coming to an end. It’s just evolving that way.

Nevertheless, I continue with the blog, if only for myself.

I was looking at Apple Watches today and will probably buy one. The technology is impressive, especially regarding health issues. You can see your blood oxygen level, and cardio information, and if you fall and don’t swipe your watch, a 911 call gets made on your behalf.

When I first started writing this blog nearly ten years ago, such things never were a concern, but here I am nearing 72 in 22 and fifty years out of college, and suddenly, falling is a big deal and something to worry about. And I don’t even drink that much anymore.

So, here I am, a budding septuagenarian, retired, living in Florida, flying back and forth to New York to see our children and grandson, worried about my blood oxygen levels and EKG and falling, and making sure I am taking all my medications at the day and time prescribed by my medical team and enduring all the side effects of each and damn happy about all of it.

So, in the immortal words of Alfred E. Newman, “What Me Worry?”

The trouble with having all your music on your mobile is that you tend to create playlists.

Of course, the technology at our fingertips enables and promotes the freewheeling creation of a collection of songs that we wish to hear. We had to rely on the long-playing record or LP in the past.

An LP required us to listen to, say, side A all the way through, and then we would flip it over and listen to side B. 

There are no sides on a playlist, although you can shuffle the order just to add a little surprise to your listening pleasure.

But in listening to disjointed songs rather than Sides A and B, we sacrifice the one thing our playlists can provide.

Context.

Listening to With A Little Help From My Friends loses some of its power when listened to outside the continuity of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. A Day In A Life would merely be interesting outside the world view of Sgt. Pepper’s.

Imagine listening to Nights Of White Satin without reference to Days Of Future Passed?

The other thing that playlists and digital music in general also have taken from us is album art.

Their Satanic Majesties Request remains a great album even squeezed by the digitization of its songs, but what good is a picture of this album shrunken to unrecognizability without that little plastic plate that was inserted over the picture on the album that changes the images depending on how you hold the album,

Sadly, this no longer had been included on later distributions of the LP, but I have the original safely ensconced in a frame in my den.

The point is creating playlists, while enjoyable, is like taking your favorite verses from a poem or scenes from a movie and leaving the rest behind. 

So, this summer, I am once again going to create my summer playlist, but it will consist of albums that one day provided my summertime listening pleasure. (I will still listen to my old summer playlist consisting of singles as I never had albums for most of the entries.). 

Some of my selections may actually have been released before the summer in which I savored them, but that happens when you finally have the money to buy an album rather than a 45.

Of course, there will be many that were new releases the particular summer they caught my attention, but I never could be accused of being timely or ahead of the curve when it came to the arts. I did tend to catch up, though.

Here’s hoping you may think about your own summer album playlist.

In the fall of 1971, I took a course at St. John’s entitled Technology and Culture.

I never took a better course, either in grad school or law school.

It was a colloquium, which meant the class members took turns leading the discussion of the readings for that day.

There were a series of scholarly articles and books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Everything we read had to do with technology and the impact it has had on our culture.

Our professor began the class by stating that Americans’ response to technology has been both ambivalent and ambiguous. At the time, I don’t think I was alone in wondering what he meant and whether he was going to tell us.

He never did tell us but left it to us to discover.

One of the first books we read was Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

This was published in 1964 and contained the hook phrase, “The medium is the message.”

Not wishing to explore McLuhan’s theory in total, I only want to point out one concept he popularised. That is the notion of the Global Village.

Basically, the world’s shrinking due to our technology in communications and travel would create a village atmosphere where we would know more about each other, thereby creating a world view for Earth’s inhabitants.

After an exhaustive discussion of this concept and the book in general, our professor summed up the thoughts expressed and asked, “Does it follow that because we can learn more about each other that we’ll actually like each other?”

Ambivalent and ambiguous indeed.

In 1971 (and indeed 1964), there was no internet, no personal computer, and no smartphone. The IBM 360 computer occupied an entire room in our data processing center in Lorrilard Corp, where I worked as a mail clerk.

The notion of a handheld computer was as futuristic a notion as a Dick Tracy wrist radio which later in the early 60s morphed into a wrist TV.

The only technology that was a daily experience for us was television and radio. Of course, there were movies which we frequented less often than these. In terms of the information, we relied on TV and radio news and the newspapers.

Despite political preferences for what newspaper you read, there was little concern with fake news either in print or electronic broadcast.

So, fast forward to the third decade of the twenty-first century ( almost typed “of the Rosary”), and it’s hard to rely on any of our technology.

Between spam emails and phone calls, and even texts, I spend as much time deleting and blocking as I do utilize my phone for its intended purpose.

Ambiguous and ambivalent still/

But of course, there is Wordle!

Before I joined Facebook, I was on Ning.

Like Facebook, I could share stories and pictures with the people I invited to my page; it never took off for me. I still have a Ning presence and sign in about as much as I now sign into Facebook. Which is to say, rarely.

I soon realized that many of my family and friends were already on Facebook, so I joined the club.

It was great. I communicated with family all over the country and even connected with cousins and friends in Ireland, England, and Germany.

When I posted an entry from my blog, I had readers in Asia, Europe, Australia, and Canada. In fact, one of my blogs was titled, They Read Me In Ukraine.

I wasn’t concerned with getting hacked or being sent fake news articles back then.

Facebook was still a friendly environment.

Then hatred and racism led me to limit who and what I allowed on my page.

Eventually, I would just give up, and while I still have a technical presence on Facebook, I rarely visit my page anymore.

The few times I go on Facebook, I visit a couple of family groups that we started a few years ago.

But the truth is I miss it.

Instead of being a benign form of global communication Facebook and the internet itself have become dangerous highways supporting hackers and those who would steal our identity and money. It seems every week a new scam appears on our screens.

When I was at universities that were implementing new information systems, I used to say that this would be known as the dark days of information technology. Back in the late 90s, as we struggled to prepare against Y2K, these cumbersome new systems were a challenge to set up and nearly impossible to retrieve valuable data once they were online.

Now we no longer just worry about the complexity of systems but more so about their vulnerability. They represent a portal not only to legitimate users but to scammers and cheaters, and thieves, not to mention terrorists.

I wish I could just go back to when I was gleefully checking Facebook on my phone twenty or so times a day to see if any of my FB friends were out there. It was an instantaneous and cheap form of global communication.

Facebook did, in fact, create the Global Village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan.

Unfortunately, many creeps were inhabiting our village.

True Seinfeld fanatics are well familiar with the foibles of the Mohel.

Perhaps eccentricities would be a more accurate description than foibles? In any event, one of my favorite Seinfeld scenes is when Elaine has the temerity to place her wine glass precipitously close to the edge of a coffee table.

This prompts the Mohel to go into a rant about broken glass burrowing deep into the pile of the carpet only to rise up and kill someone months later.

I confess that I possess this same paranoia and frequently lecture any of my family members who dare to test gravity and my patience by placing any object, a glass, a phone an iPad. It doesn’t matter but I react by getting out of my chair (which often isn’t easy and, in truth, may. be more dangerous to me than a misplaced glass.) to rescue the phone, iPad or whatever before it crashes down to Earth.

When things are on the edge, so am I.

Of course, I am often guilty of playing free and loose with phones, iPads and the occasional glass of beer and have even gone over the edge at times. Nothing has crashed down but there have been times when my phone has pierced the seal of the coffee table edge and a portion of it was hanging freely in space with no visible means of support save the remaining part of the phone safely ensconced on the table.

Though no harm occurred to my phone, my psyche was frazzled for a moment and for the rest of the day, I was indeed…

Living On The Edge.

So far, 2022 has not inspired me to write.

So far, 2022 is indistinguishable from 2021, which was, in turn, indistinguishable from 2020.

I am tempted, therefore, to recycle some of my gems from the two preceding years. Ok, so you might say I didn’t really have too many gems worthy of recycling from the recent past.

That never stopped me before.

Throwing caution to the wind, I will try to be original this morning and write something new.

The NFL’s regular season ended last week, though if you are a New York fan, as I am, the season ended shortly after Labor Day.

Today begins Wild Card Weekend, which holds absolutely no interest for me. By now, I am usually so engrossed in counting the days to Pitchers and Catchers reporting to Spring Training. This year offers no such release from the grab of the NFL as millionaires and billionaires are pissing each other off rather than coming to an agreement as to cut the pie and divvy out the slices consisting of billions of fan-paid dollars.

So, I will be watching football today.

I will also be ranting (to myself in the loneliness of my Florida den while my children watch elsewhere.) about how gamblers have infiltrated the NFL (and every professional sport), which, ironically, makes me think that the MLB Players Association is correct. They should get every dollar they can from the money-grubbing owners who profit from the players’ bodies. There’s a word for that that I just can’t call to mind.

And so the rant begins.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Founding Fathers.

We used to refer to the Constitution as a Bundle Of Compromises.

The most notable (and despicable) was the three-fifths compromise.

You see, the slave states wanted to count the slaves as residents to increase their representation in the House of Representatives. The free states didn’t want to count the slaves towards determining the number of representatives. Therefore, only three-fifths of a state’s slave population was factored into the representation formula.

But there was an even more critical compromise that has screwed us over for years. Small states, or states with a limited population, didn’t want to get dictated to by the bigger states. Therefore, the upper house AKA, the Senate, has equal representation consisting of two Senators from every state.

That is why Kentucky, West Virginia, and other states that have opted to buy into disinformation, anti-intellectualism, anti-Science can muck up the works preventing any serious progress.

Still, compromise is often the only remedy to stagnation.

But we may need help in the form of inspiration from Kentucky’s famous son, Henry Clay, AKA, The Great Compromiser.

Clay showed that compromise was not rocket science and that taking two steps forward and one step back is better than standing still.

Ah well, that was another century and another country.

Today is January 6th.

As Catholic kids growing up in the Broxn and attending Blessed Sacrament Catholic School, it was always referred to as the Feast of The Epiphany. It was sometimes called Little Christmas as a recognition of the Three Wisemen bringing gifts to the infant Jesus.

I never understood what that had to do with an Epiphany.

Later, I understood it to mean that on this day Magi or Three Kins recognised the manifestatation of Jesus being God and the Messiah.

The ultimate AHA moment.

We now speak of epiphanies as revelations of another sort.

I had an epiphany when I was finishing my second year in college that I had to read books and attend class. Epiphanies aren’t always timely.

My second epiphany just occurred as I was typing this post.

I was about to write about the insurection of last year and the threat to American Democracy but I deleted everything I wrote.

You don’t need me to remind you what happened.

You don’t need me to suggest a viewpoint that might differ with yours.

I had another AHA moment and simly deleted my polemic as a fruitless endeavor to prove a point.

The point is already there for the viewing so do with it as you will.

We are at the peak of the nostalgia season.

We had our rendezvous with The Ghosts Of Christmas Past and will soon embark on our year-end Auld Lang Syne, reviewing where we’ve been and wondering where the new year will take us.

It’s incredible to think that 2021 is ending much as 2020 began.

Here we were not long before Thanksgiving, thinking that this holiday season would be a joyous return to a more familiar Christmas where our biggest challenge was deciding what to give the kids, what to give your spouse, and how many other gifts will you need.

Even then, when Covid was still in our rearview mirrors, we all knew Amazon was going to make our decisions easier than traipsing through a mall.

But then, all of a sudden, as the night before Christmas drew near, who should appear but another Greek variant to spread fear in lieu of cheer.

Vaccinated and boosted, we, nonetheless, altered our plans as friends and family members developed symptoms and when a positive attitude had to be avoided at all costs.

Oh Holy Night surrendered to Omicron.

This is where I wax nostalgic.

I want to go back.

I want to go back to Christmas 1960.

We didn’t have Amazon, but we did have Macy’s in Parkchester.

We didn’t have a color TV or YouTube, but we saw all the Christmas Specials that one day would be classics.

I got a set of Lionel Trains.

I got a Kodak Fiesta camera with a built-in flash and a roll of black and white film.

Bing sang White Christmas.

Johnny Mathis sang Sleigh Ride.

Nat sang The Christmas Song.

They were all played on our HiFi (Who had a stereo in 1960?)

Yeah, I was ten, and I remember what I want to remember, which means I probably am filtering out many unpleasant things. But, there is one thing to be sure, it was a simpler time where our only threat was dealt with by putting our head under our desk when the siren wailed as we practiced for H Bombs hitting The Bronx.

It’s easy wanting to turn the clock back to a simpler time, but the reality is we really don’t want to.

Reality is only a state of mind that we choose to ignore. We let other people tell us how bad things are even when they don’t know we exist. We were all inconvenienced by this new variant, and I pray that it remains only an inconvenience for us all.

When I think about Going Back, I always try to remember that the medicine of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has enabled me to remain to ponder the joys and mysteries of life and that my successful remission should not be wasted by any negativity that gets flung my way.

So, when the ball falls ushering in 2022, I will remain optimistic about the future even while I honor the past.

I’ll be watching the Honeymooners!