AS USUAL KRUGMAN SCORES AGAIN

Here.

IT WAS A GREAT NIGHT (AND FOLLOWING MORNING)

Wish you could have been there (the release party for BELL ENGINE's first CD ROOMS, the band my oldest son Miles plays bass in). Two great hard charging sets, a packed house (restaurant bar actually) and lots of dancing, shouting, whistling and other energetic expressions of appreciation.

I tried both taking photos and filming it on my phone, but it was the first time I experimented with that and the results weren't too good [and I couldn't figure out how to get the tape onto the blog anyway].

Best thing is to check out their CD at either CD Baby (where mine, LOST ANGELS, also with my son Miles on bass, is also available) or download songs—if only one to find out if you dig them, I suggest making it "Soul Breaker," the song Miles wrote and the band's singer John sings, with harmonizing from the other singer in the band Lisa (both write the songs too except for this one)] from iTunes or Spotify.

I'll try to find the links tomorrow and insert them in this post [just did], but it was a late night and an early morning [went to see my daughter Caitlin sing a with a chorus and do a solo for an Easter season cantata at a Sunday service for three churches—I think the choruses were combined as well—in a very beautiful old Episcopalian church in Sheffield, Massachusetts with Tiffany stained glass windows, and despite fighting a cold her voice awed me with its angelic purity as it always does when I hear her sing, and I'm not just being a proud father—because as anyone who knows me knows, I don't hold back on critical opinions about people's creative work—her voice was simply the purest and most effortlessly conveyed among many in that chorus, and for that matter that I hear on recordings] so I'm heading to bed.

IF YOU'RE IN THE BERKSHIRES THIS WEEKEND

The band my older son is in—BELL ENGINE—is having a release party and gig to celebrate their first CD (ROOMS) at The Brickhouse in Housatonic tonight at 8PM. Details here.

'NUFF SAID

LAST NIGHT (HANGING LOOSE READING

So, a lot of good poetry read last night in Brooklyn. And a lot of old friends and folks I knew back when. Good to see Harvey Shapiro still at it and pushing ninety, and Jack Anderson and Hettie Jones still going strong. I can't mention everyone (and apologies to those I don't) but Gerald Fleming read a poem that brought the reality of female "adulterers" experiencing execution by stoning that was as powerful as anything I've read or heard on that subject. And Dick Lourie used his poetry chops to explicate from his alter ego's musician chops an alternative reading of what the "delta blues" mean, while Chuck Watchel used his novelist's skills to evoke a dead friend's presence in a way that had me present in the scene he made real.

Donna Brook read a poem that metaphorically and literally captured the sense of loss so many felt at poet Paul Violi's passing. Terence Winch read poems that displayed his unique wit and insight in ways few poets can match and none can surpass. There was lots of laughs, not just for some of Terry's lines, but for Ed Friedman's riff imagining some of the poets present in more surreal drag than anything on "reality" (or "surreality") TV, and Charles North, Larry Zirlin and Bill Zavatsky, among others, got the audience laughing as well. Though none got more laughs than Bob Hershon, and well deserved.

I hope we see some of the work that came out of the reading in future issues of HANGING LOOSE (and wasn't already published there in past issues). In the meantime the 100th issue, now available and the point of the reading, contains some of the poems read last night as well as a variety of others. But what I'm most grateful for in HANGING LOOSE 100 is a long interview with the late Paul Violi, a poet many of us loved and miss. Check it out.

HANGING LOOSE READING TONIGHT @ BROOKLYN CENTRAL LIBERARY

I should have posted about this sooner. But tonight, at 7PM, to celebrate the 100th issue of HANGING LOOSE magazine and HANGING LOOSE books, I will be reading along with these poets and writers, all of them unique and worth hearing:
Harvey Shapiro, Kimiko Hahn, Elizabeth Swados, Jayne Cortez, Charles North, Jack Anderson, Joan Larkin, William Corbett, Mark Pawlak, Tony Towle, Donna Brook, Dick Lourie, Gerald Fleming, Keith Taylor, Indran Amirthanayagam, Hettie Jones, Terence Winch, Michael Cirelli, Gary Lenhart, Steven Schrader, Joel Lewis, Joanna Fuhrman, Sharon Mesmer, D. Nurkse, Ed Friedman, Chuck Wachtel, Larry Zirlin, Mark Statman, Christien Gholson, Ron Overton, Jeni Olin, Bill Zavatsky, Marie Harris, and Robert Hershon.

BUT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT GOOGLE

That too is an exaggeration, after all I've been doing this blog for several years now. But still. Good used to be so cool [I meant, of course, to type Google used to be cool, but figured I'd leave it just to show that over two years since the brain surgery I still struggle on a regular basis to type what I mean, redoing typos and out and out weird mistakes more odd than that one, at least I got the first three letters correct so you can see why the typing part of my brain might have typed "Good" instead of what the creating part of my brain was telling my fingers to type: "Google"]. You could look something up and find it pretty quickly and know that everyone else would find it in the same way. Then they changed (was it just last year?) the algorithms so that if you and someone who doesn't share your web surfing history look up the same thing you'll both get different listings and the order they're in etc.

Now they went and changed all the pages I use, to write my blog and add or change things. Today I tried to add a link to an old friend's blog, the novelist and critic William McPherson's McPherson's Lament. But the window you make changes on for my list of blogs and sites I dig (to the right) had been redesigned and kept telling me to correct errors on the form, but as far I can see there are no errors, it's all exactly as it was when I added the last entry (another friend's blog, the writer Elaine Durbach's Trying To Be Cool blog, worth checking out) without any problems.

Wassup Google? You never hear the old adage: If it ain't broke don't fix it?