Daily Blues & Views

  Horse and Train c 2022 Bruce L. Greene                                                                          Horse and Train The image is powerful.   In its simplicity is an astonishing complexity.   It held me much as Pecola Breedlove from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was frozen looking at a black cat with blue eyes.   But this was no animal.   It was a painting. In fact a fairly famous painting entitled Horse and Train.   The work of Canadian artist Alex Colville, Horse and Train has rightfully earned it’s reputation as “the Mona Lisa of Hamilton, Ontario where it resides.    I was not in an art gallery, much less in Canada.   I first saw the painting in the small box of a cubicle in the counselor’s office of El ...

 The Beatles sang of "places I'll remember all my lifetime..." and that holds true for most of us.  What about people?  People you remember, though you did not know them well.  People who have been living in the back roads of your brain that somehow hung around for decades.   In a way, we all collect people.  Some are friends.  Some were friends, however briefly.  The other day, I read on a Facebook page for members who attended the high school I went to that a woman from my graduation year had passed on.  The name stuck in my mind blinking as familiar.  Within seconds a picture appeared of a teenager with braces on her teeth.  Where had this been for the last 5 decades?   In thinking about my last two years of college I recalled a half dozen people I called friends but I never saw again since I once roamed the UCLA campus in the late 1960s.  There was Susie, a rather youthful Raggedy Annie, with curly auburn hai...

 Ask someone who was the first person inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  See if they don't tell you it was Elvis Presley. Not a bad guess, but it's not correct.  But then you knew it was Chuck Berry, right? Chuck Berry was an American original who had his pulse squarely on the postwar teen culture developing in the mid-1950s.  His ability to write lyrics that those kids could relate to combined with his blues guitar background and guitar creativity was just the ticket.  Berry became an overnight sensation, whose music would remain internationally popular for decades.  In fact, it may well be popular in interstellar cultures because it was sent into outer space on the Voyager mission to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond.  As an artifact of the diverse cultures on planet Earth, a gold copy of "Johnny B Goode" was included in the items blasted into space. But Berry's life in music was filled with interactions and experiences with some of the music ind...