The world is turning ...

I often wondered if Neil Young took the title of this album from Nevil Shute's 1957 book, set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. This album has the same post-apocalyptic feeling as Neil and friends got high on "honey slides" and sang of lost friends, loves and an impending sense of doom, as evoked in his "Revolution Blues" which notes his brief association with Charles Manson, which he mentions in his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace.

Neil opts for a casual tone in his book, moving back and forth in time in his first effort at penning his thoughts in prose. He notes that it was his father, a Canadian journalist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, who told him to write each day, so what you get is a journal of moments arrived at in a haphazard way befitting his nature. I've been sharing passages with my son, who has become a big Neil Young fan himself, grooving out to his hardest stuff with Crazy Horse, like Arc-Weld. I particularly enjoy the passages where Neil talks about his relationships with his two sons.

Most critics point to Tonight's the Night, which directly followed the loss of two of his closest friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, as his darkest and most inward focused album, but there is something even more haunting about On the Beach, with its wider array of acoustic instruments lurking in the background, as Neil digs into his soul to find the words to express his confusion with the times and his stormy relationship with Carrie Snodgress.

Like so many "hippies," Neil was watching that feeling that propelled the 60s fade away and a new era being born in the Age of Nixon. He was uncomfortable with his growing celebrity and the types of persons that came into his circle. You can imagine him and his closest friends around a fire on Topanga Beach playing these songs into the early morning hours.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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