Daily Blues & Views

 I've never had a nickname.  Although, for a brief period, during my Little League years I was called "greenie" for a time.  That didn't stick into adolescence and adulthood.  There was, however, another brief moment in time when I actually did have a nickname.  Here's the story. At age 20, in my junior year of college, I became obsessed with the Blues.  Blues music, blues history, blues singers, blues records.  It was a perfect unity of aesthetic experience that created this passion.  The first ethnic studies classes offered at UCLA played an important part.  My midterm for what was then called "Negro History" was to write a paper on a topic relevant to the coursework.  I chose the subject of the Blues and how it reflected import events and experiences in African American history and culture.  At the time, the burgeoning folk and rock music scene was also evolving.  Being in Los Angeles helped too.  At a small, now iconic...

 In 1957, when I was ten years old, Disneyland opened to the public.  Living in Southern California at the time, every kid on my street couldn't wait for the opportunity to ride in the jungle boat in Adventureland, drive the Autotopia cars in Tomorrowland, and sit in the stagecoach exploring Frontierland.  Two of my neighborhood friends were among the first to have these experiences.  Their father worked at Technicolor and the first days of Disneyland were reserved for families of those who worked in the movie industry.  They returned from their privileged visit to the Magic Kingdom with home movies to show all the envious kids in the neighborhood.   Shortly after that time, my front yard was transformed into something much better.  Actually it was my entire neighborhood block.  We had Sewerland.  I know it doesn't sound exciting, or even something to praise, but Sewerland was the best thing to happen to 10 year old kids.  Our little pos...

 It's been 58 years since The Doors lit up the summer of 1967 with their classic recording of "Light My Fire." As a young man age 20 in Los Angeles back then, I vividly recall the many times I heard that song on the radio.  That's because there were two versions.  One was about 3 minutes long and fit in perfectly with the Top 40 format  of most LA stations.  There was, however, a longer version that ran about 6 and a half minutes. I was working as a mail clerk for a large corporation that summer and my workmate and I always timed our daily run to the post office to coincide with hearing the long version on station KRLA.  They often announced, " At the top of the hour, the long version of "Light My Fire."   I could already hear the organ introduction in my head.   The Doors hailed from a part of LA where I spent a lot of time.  They have roots that stem from Venice, to the UCLA campus.  The music scene flourished and morphed during those ...

 Sometimes, when I'm trying to get back to sleep on a restless night, I'll think about the street where I grew up.  Though it's changed radically in the last 65  years, the homes on that small block remain the same.  Their appearance, and the people who inhabited them are no longer the same, but as I go up and down the block of this post-war little suburban neighborhood, I can still fill the houses with the names and faces that inhabited them back then.  Of course there were always a couple of homes where I drew a blank.  Either they had no kids or their inhabitants were far more transient than everyone else.   The last time I did this roll call of names and faces, I remembered an older couple, Doris and Henry, whose kids were grown and on their own.  I recalled how they took my sister and me to the circus when I was ab out 8 or 9 years old.  They must have asked our parents and missed taking their own kids on some level.  In any event, ...

 For the last month, I've been teaching a writing class at my local community center.  It occurred to me after meeting many retirees in a Tai Chi class that many of these folks have great stories to tell and that doing so would enhance memory and social interaction.  The later, of course, is vital in these post COVID years.   I've been pleasantly surprised at how this little class is going.  I figured that if  took all the best practices and prompts from my teaching career and offered them in an non-threatening manner, that there would be interest in spending an hour a week meeting and then doing a little homework to rekindle the declining art of "creative writing."  Of course, all writing is creative writing, but people sometimes need permission or at least a vehicle to go ahead and indulge in the practice. At our age, we write to save our lives, literally and figuratively. At our last meeting we read and discussed models where we write about our fami...

 I've been reading Imani Perry's fascinating collection of essays called Black In Blue, which is a brilliant meditation on the color blue in Black culture.  Aside from the many historical references and anthropological connections between the significance of the color blue in African and African American culture, Perry delves into many areas that might not be well known to those outside the culture.  For example, the way we know where the graveyards for many who were enslaved were is through the presence of periwinkles on the ground, planted there.  Former slaves were not allowed to have grave markers (imagine that!) so their descendants marked the sites with blue periwinkles so they could be located and remembered.  Another thwarted attempt to erase the past and strip people of their identity. The book goes into important explanations of blue notes in the development of the blues and jazz music.  But there are other connections present that extend all the...