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...

 The school board in Mc Minn, Tennessee had it again.  It has proven a simple principle when you try to ban a book with little reason or rhyme.  Oh they have their reasons, of course.  They find it too objectionable because it contains a few 4 letter words like damn and one of the characters (all are depicted as mice or cats) appears to be nude.   The principle they so ignorantly underscored is that when you try to ban a book,especially from young people, you ensure that it will be a best-seller.  That's why Maus , Art Spigelman's brilliant graphic novel about his parents Holocaust experience in Auchwitz has hit the number one slot on Amazon sales currently.  The book is used in curriculum from grade 8 through 12.  It pulls no punches; it is accurate history and it's relevance couldn't be more well-timed these days. Of course, this noble school board probably does not see the irony in banning a book about the Holocaust.  In their drive ...

  When you don't look back for 50 years,      there is a way to find the land of childhood, It floats among the islands of first impression,     bordered by fear and fairness. The street names have not changed,      some still bring a smile or a laugh. Some project faces and obsolete words.      the air is there with some of the same trees very few businesses and the landscape      altered by multitudes. My father's Maple tree is long gone,      the lawn he patrolled has turned to concrete Nobody plays baseball on the field that was     the street.   No cherry tree to snag a pop fly before I did. All those Saturday mornings      made little difference, except the one where I found toilet paper in the trees and bushes and the morning my transistor radio warned about      the Gulf  of Tonkin.

 Many former teachers like me think about how they would have done if the pandemic had come earlier than it did.  Would we have adjusted to virtual learning even though it is the antithesis of what we believe is necessary to educate a person.  Many of us made the lively face-to-face discussion a regular part of our classrooms.  To continue in a virtual world, with 1/3 of our students missing every day would surely have been difficult.  If nothing else, the pandemic has shown us that students need daily interaction with people in person to thrive. In thinking back over my career, I marvel at the technological changes that have occurred within the last 50  years.  Most notably the impact of computers and the availability of audiovisual materials.  I vividly recall how difficult it sometimes was to show a film or play a piece of music for students.  Not so much physically doing it, but rather getting it.  Today, a teacher can go to Youtube ...

 Woody Guthrie has a Facebook page.  Figures, he's not the only cultural icon who has not been with us for over 50 years that makes a presence on Facebook.   The posts on that page are made by the official Woody Guthrie Publishing Company.  As is often the case, today's post is right on the money. It's no surprise that this song written so many years ago, fits in perfectly with the theme of fragile democracy that is so poignant of this January 6th date commemorating the first anniversary of Trump's attempted coup. The visual images of this day in 2022 are just as striking as last year at this time.  The Speaker of the House makes a speech and only 2 Republicans are present.  A house divided in the flesh.  The fact that both Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, the former Vice President are sitting amidst empty chairs states the case. The Republican Party is out to lunch in every sense of the phrase.   If Woody Guthrie is a national tr...