Bobby Fuller Was Right

By the time you read this, I should be out of Twitter purgatory. Maybe, or maybe not. At some point around mid-day on Monday, I stumbled across one of those mealy-mouthed pious platitudinal pontifications that Tucker Carlson (I usually refer to him as Fucker Carload) likes to offer when, like Marco Rubio, he wants to pretend to have a softer and more sensitive side. 

The one yesterday, as I recall, was bemoaning the increasing coarseness deployed in our civic discourse (and parenthetically bemoaning the loss of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem among other things). I steer a wide bow around all of Faux Gnus and just about all of MSNBC for the same reason: too much stridency, too little accuracy involving facts.

To read one of the main arsonists burning down the structure of civil debate in my country lament its passing without any acknowledgment of his (and Hannity, Dobbs, Pirro and whatever other bozos fall out of the Ailes' Clown car) role was too much and my evil twin Skippy seized my keyboard to respond.

Skippy chided Hambone, as I called him, for his soliloquy and suggested it would be more sincere if he weren't still holding the lit Zippo lighter as he was rushing from the burning building. Some gentle, peaceful soul took offense, I assume and reported me. 

Twitter, which has yet to ever direct the removal of a single offensive or derogatory tweet from the Mango Mussolini occupying the White House moved swiftly in my case.I was directed to remove the offending tweet and serve a  twelve-hour timeout which I have done, or am doing, or did. Sure beats pounding rocks in the hot sun.
-bill kenny       

And How Was Your Weekend?

I skipped our holiday lighting of the Norwich City Hall this past Friday evening because I knew there would a lot for folks crammed into the Sangeuedolce Square for the downtown First Friday exhibits and any photos I took would mostly be the backs of other people's heads all of whom would be trying to do what I was trying: to take a picture of City Hall with its holiday lights blazing. 

And the photo that made The Day's front page on Saturday was lovely enough for all of us to enjoy.

Instead, I walked up Lincoln and across Washington (the streets are named for two former Presidents, Mr. Trump, in case you wondered) to Chelsea Parade to grab this shot of the annual Christmas Rose erected between the GAR soldier statue and the flagpole.

I think it helps me get and stay in the holiday mood.
-bill kenny 
 

Some Second Thoughts

In twenty-two days, 2018 comes to an end. I'm not sure I'm fully grasping that realization even as I type that line. This has been another year I've been forced to concede the face in the mirror has aged and that the man behind the face hasn't nearly as many springs left as he thought he had and more on point, has squandered, rather than saved, those moments of meaning he thought would come along again as easily as they did the first time. 

I've actually felt the dullness of the ache in the pit of my stomach and shocked realization of regret that the next time can be the last time always brings with it as a constant companion. Like so many over these past twelve months, I've blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important ones in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. 

This was the year I made a lot of changes and had vowed to sort myself out. And here it is, having nearly run its course and my still-to-do list looks a lot like what it was when I started on it as the year was beginning. 

I'm finding no solace or consolation in that the next year will be over even faster than this one, with, I fear, even less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally and feel like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, as each stride is a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through chilling air I can taste rather than feel. 

The harder I try the farther behind I seem to fall. I started out the year, if I'm lucky, beside you but have spent the year watching you slowly disappear ahead of me, your long and resolute strides taking you over the horizon and when I get to where you were, you're gone with no trace, no track, and no regret. Sic transit humanitas.

This was to be the year we were to do, we were to talk, we were to live large, and to just be. And what happened? We allowed so many others, maybe too many others (who've already given up on their dreams) to creep in as poor players and poison what wells of hope we'd held for ourselves.

Our sense of adventure and excited curiosity has been replaced by dread as the days draw down and this year nears its end. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. But it's what's next that will keep me awake.

-bill kenny

God Is a Concept

I wrote this a long time ago and said then just about all I imagine I will ever have to say on a subject that brings me to tears of anger and sorrow to this very day. Leaving me with little choice but to just say it again.

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since, chronologically, I got here first, you'll have to leave.

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath as President (stop counting on your fingers to figure it out; I'm sixty-six, ok?). Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. 

Little Richard's originals such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and because of that never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but UK rockers had no way of knowing that. 

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world where tub thumpers, literally, who were part of something the British called skiffle, attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted to a large extent and castrated by a swarm of safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age during The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you have my sympathy because you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing, Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part. 

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed when so many others had faded away because they had talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched-we, on other hand, never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be. 

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade. 

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. 

With Lennon's murder, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy his two sons, Julian and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his first spouse now deceased, Cynthia, feel and felt every day of their lives, but most especially today.

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, the husband were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie that Mark David Chapman so completely and brutally ended all those years ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today is a long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny

More of the Same Sad Story

Today is the 77th anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor in whose aftermath the USA redefined itself as a nation and within the world of nations until the attacks of 9/11 to which the former is invariably compared. 

America of 1941, and the world for that matter was very different from our world today and it's with that span of time, I suspect, comes some detachment in looking at that history half a world away for those on the Eastern Seaboard. 

I learned about Pearl Harbor as a child in American History classes, then later at college through my classes and studies and still later when I encountered men (and women) who had served in World War II, and not always on the victorious side. The more I learned, the less I knew which is one of the positive results of education: when you don't know what you don't know, you're at your most dangerous. 

When the last resort, armed force, becomes the first recourse, we all lose. I've never had the chance, yet, to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii (it wasn't the only ship sank and her Sailors weren't the only ones who died), but I'd hope to do so before I pass, as I suspect waiting until afterwards, I wouldn't get quite so much out of it.. 

I wandered across the battlefields of World War II while living in Europe from Normandy, France (where every single bar is called June 6, or at least it seems that way), past the ruins in downtown Frankfurt am Main, (West) Germany, as modern a city as you could otherwise ever imagine. 

I visited Dachau, just outside of Munich, walking through the remainders and reminders of the barracks trying to grasp that people had lived (and died) there. I never got used to the fact that no birds were ever heard at Bergen-Belsen in the Luneberg Heide, one of the Nazi interim equations as they made their Final Solution. It was as if God, Himself, had turned His face from us, ashamed of those who insist and persist in our belief that we are created in His likeness while committing hateful and hurtful acts on one another.

All of those spaces and places are connected as if in a straight line to Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the Rape of Nanking, and a thousand other geographic locales (more than 20 million men (and women) fought in World War II and the death toll of those who were non-combatants may be higher than that number) as some sort of a perverse demonstration that as noble as we can be, the depths of our depravity and indifference towards one another may not yet be fully plumbed.

There has been a lot of darkness and a lot of blood and tears since the last Cautionary Tale we think of as World War II. The rush of all the ensuing years may have served to make us numb to the approaching calamity of what will undoubtedly be the Last World War. We won't have to worry about what lessons we learned, or didn't, as there will be no one left to read anything.
-bill kenny

Just Reverse the Bib

My Thelma and Louise were doing a run to the Ikea in New Haven yesterday leaving yours truly to pad about the house by himself. I like to compare a description of my wanderings to a wonderful turn of phrase John Lennon offered about thoughts, 'meander like a restless wind inside a letter box,' but the truth is I'm more like a bee-bee rolling around in a boxcar. 

I was left to my own devices for lunch (Sigrid had made an extra portion of dinner Tuesday evening for me to have last night under the motto 'Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead') and I had a multigrain roll with swiss cheese for lunch and since I am the dishwasher in my house, to cut myself some slack, I opted to place my roll on a paper plate.

We get those tall stacks of paper plates that seem to be sort of welded together and that you struggle to separate so as to only have one and I discovered in the course of that wrestling match yesterday that being able to determine when I have more than one paper plate is apparently my super-power. 

I surprised (and for a moment, disappointed) myself with that discovery since and let's face it, I'm not ever gonna get all of that 'I Can Tell When I Only Have One Paper Plate' scrawled across the front of a skin-tight shirt tucked into a pair of tights with a cape. Much less wear that outfit in public. As superpowers go, it's kinda meh I admit. But.

On the other hand, until I made my discovery, I'd gone sixty-six and a half years without having any superpowers at all so I guess there's that. Turns out, in the interest of full disclosure, I  don't have that same ability with red Solo cups. In case you were about to ask.
-bill kenny     

First (Friday) Things First

I really enjoyed Saturday’s Winterfest Parade and I hope you did too. Despite the cold and windy snap we had earlier in the week our weather and temperatures Saturday were, I think, perfect for the season. 

Kudos to the parade organizers, Norwich Events! And a hearty (if belated) thank you for your efforts (along with the sponsors and all of the assorted helpers) who enabled our city to remind everyone (again) why Norwich was named Connecticut’s Christmas City all those years ago.

In years past when the afternoon shadows grew long after the parade we’d gather at City Hall but as of last year the annual Lighting of City Hall now kicks off the First Friday Downtown Norwich, and last one for this year, which is the day after tomorrow. 

If history holds true, hundreds (if not more like a thousand or so) of us will fill every place and space surrounding City Hall to enjoy the carols, the skits, the singalongs and (of course) the countdown to, and lighting, of one of the most beautiful public buildings in all of New England.  

From a Light Up City Hall of Years Past

And, while we're downtown Friday, we can now also enjoy an ever-expanding offering of attractions and events to include art gallery openings and shows at downtown theaters the artists and merchants who call downtown home have to offer. First Friday is a catchy title to jot down on the planning calendar and the sights, sounds, moments, and attractions are an invitation and enticement to stop and enjoy downtown delights.

First Friday is organized by the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, and is a cooperative effort between and among galleries, theatres, businesses, civic organizations, and local artists to include painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, culinary experts, authors, and photographers to offer all of us a night they hope we'll long remember (and remind us in perhaps some subtle ways that we can have evenings just like it all the other days of the week that end in ‘y’ whether they’re first or otherwise).

Here’s a (by no means complete) listing of places to visit including Encore Justified, Gallery at the Wauregan Inc., Monocle on Broadway, Norwich Arts Center, The Art House of Norwich, Reliance Health, Inc., NAC Gallery, Bold As Love Artisan Guild, Central Baptist Church, Bully-Busters; Reliance Health Gallery, restaurant, and ArtSpace Norwich. And there’s also a book signing with Lottie B. Scott, author of "Deep South, Deep North, A Family's Journey".

And yet another Light Up Past

If you get hungry or thirsty (or both), First Friday has something for every palette with Billy Wilson's Ageing Still, Craftsman Cliff Roasters, Epicure Brewing, Harp & Dragon, Ice & Fire, La Stella Pizzeria, Mi Casa Mexican Restaurant, Namoo, The Royal Punjabi, These Guys Brewing Co. LLC, and Strange Brew (plus whoever I forgot).

The great thing about community events like these is because so many neighbors and friends work to create them and so many more enjoy them, first they become great memories and then, wonderful traditions we all can share. See you Friday? Of course!

-bill kenny