You may celebrate or bemoan our nation’s 250th birthday as you feel fit, but I will observe it as I have every 4th of July since 2009 by treating myself and college friends to molassoburgers torched off my Plum Island grill.
Admittedly, my annual gatherings do not compare to the Tea Party or Battle of Bunker Hill, but we have wolfed down these Caribbean-laced burgers with grave risk to ourselves.
Oh, the ingredients are safe enough, adding soy sauce, grated Vidalia, and Montreal steak seasoning. Never any cheese, but the taste will blend nicely with your favorite barbeque sauce.
No, my guests risk nothing when they dine at my table. Not unless they forget to leave their cellphones at home or in their cars, and I hear a ringtone. That’s when I do my Mount St. Helens immountaination, and fireworks become redundant.
The risk to eating burgers here in the UST, as you all know, is that Democrats are determined to outlaw beef and take away our burgers. And a Democrat was in the White House for 12 of the 17 years since I’ve been flipping my culinary creation. These are times that try burger-buffs’ souls.
Must be that, as we all keep hearing, they’re spending all their time taking away guns and air-conditioners, and burgers are next. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never had a gun or air-conditioner, but the hysterical warnings date way back, so they must be true.
That aside, you may have noticed the word “observe” rather than “celebrate” to express my attitude toward the milestone anniversary.
Once upon an attention span, I celebrated America despite my awareness of some national flaws. Even in my anti-war protesting youth, we saw progress: Civil Rights acts, Title IX, withdrawal from Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, the EPA, Affirmative Action, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In my twenties I travelled in 49 states, and still intend to see Hawai’i as soon as I learn to swim. Lived in six of them, including three state capitals. American literature, history, and geography were my majors and minors, undergrad and grad. “All three form one subject,” as I told my own students for another 20 years.
For the Bicentennial I was at the re-enactment at Concord’s “rude bridge.” Back then it was all celebration, and a Republican president was cheered by a New England crowd who would never vote for him as if to agree, yes, “our long national nightmare is over.”
The historic Colonial Inn that evening teemed with good cheer. Even the debates such as I had with a Republican contingent from Connecticut were all laughs. Next day when the editor of the long-gone Salem Gazette read my report, he asked if I was a reporter or a stand-up comic.
Since 2009, I’ve had a column every Presidents’ Day, including upbeat features on those we overlook: Monroe, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, and “A tiff for Taft.” A few years ago, I spent considerable time and effort pestering the Boston Red Sox and WEEI to air the National Anthem before games, which they now do.
For all that, please consider that I have not just celebrated patriotism but participated in it all of my life before faulting me for, as the expression goes, taking a knee on this one.
But I will observe it. In fact, I’m already observing it.
After the cage fight desecration of the White House, I stopped using “USA” and began referring to this country as “UST.” Yes, I know it was removed from the Kennedy Center, but the stain and stench are still there.
As are the vain and vulgar prospects of a $250 bill, an arch, an addition to Mt. Rushmore, and numerous bridges, tunnels, and other places stained with the foul name itself.
Not as a liberal, not as a Massachusetts boy, not as someone involved in the arts, but simply as one who pays attention, how can I possibly celebrate the national transition from USA to UST?
No, nay, never! But my friends and I will enjoy the molassoburgers while cracking jokes about people who believe that Democrats are coming to take them away.
-808-
Shoebox, Plum Island, Mass., site of the annual Mplassoburger Bash since 2009. Painting by Angela Anderson.
As did many other readers of The Townie, a local, online platform, I reveled in the upbeat catalog of Newburyport’s treasures and attractions offered last week by one John Stephen Kelley.*
Reminds me why I washed ashore here in 1982 after a Prodigal Son stint on the other side of the Mississippi. By birth a Lawrence boy, my paternal grandparents were born in Newburyport, and all of their grandparents settled here with an early wave of Irish immigrants. Prominent family names on the trunk of my genealogical tree include Creeden, Kelleher, and Page. Not sure which one lived in the gray house next to Leary’s liquor store, as I knew her only as “Aunt Alice” when my grandmother took me on visits.
During seven years out west, I picked up a taste for busking. In the late-70s, many American cities were re-vitalizing downtowns with historic preservation. I’d never make a living at it, but having done well as a flautist in Denver’s Larimer Square, all I wanted was to live in or near a small city, preferably historic with a pedestrian mall, a square, wide side-walks, benches. One or two days a week was all I needed.
Could say that Newburyport played for me as much as I for it. Surrounding bricks serve as well as Colorado’s Red Rocks as a sound-system. Guitarist John Tavano soon told me that when the wind was right, I could be heard on the Boardwalk. Not bad for someone who never used an amplifier. Yet more: sharp acoustics don’t just project sound, but allow the musician to go easier on the instrument which then allows for more clarity, both in precision and style.
For a wind-musician it also means the ability to play more than half an hour without being taken out of there in an ambulance.
Surprisingly, I had the city to myself for a few years before the harper showed up. We soon coordinated our schedules. He-turned-she graced downtown with music both original and Celtic from about 1988 until passing away two years ago. In the meantime, however, numerous street-performers–jugglers and magicians as well as musicians–have entertained in downtown Newburyport. As we said of Larimer Square in Denver, we are vibrant!
A few more quirky, independent, and locally engaging treasures I’ll add to Kelly’s recent celebration of the city:
Dyno Records all this year is celebrating its 50th anniversary just a couple doors down from The Grog now in its 55th year. Turn right and just up State is the Screening Room now in its 44th. Turn left and you’ll find the Tannery with Jabberwocky Bookshop in its 54th, Cafe Chococoa, and numerous arts studios. Along with performances and exhibits at the Firehouse, the Maritime Museum, the Museum of Old Newbury, Maudsley Park, and elsewhere, all have served as essential contributors to the city’s more than generous arts scene.
For full disclosure, I’ve been a projectionist at the Screening Room since 1998. For a busker, a day-job has to be a night-job. And for fuller disclosure for what’s next, I’ve been writing guest columns in the Daily News since 1983.
Essential to the life of any city is its newspaper, and the Daily News is to be credited for including As I See It on its opinion page. If we consider the feature by itself, it is much like The Townie except not limited to local topics. Out of necessity, an opinion page is obligated to point out things wrong or about to go wrong in the locality and make it open to honest debate. Both forums do this, and it is yet another blessing for Newburyport that there are two forums that make the debate open to any citizen wanting to join.
This brings me to the one and only unfortunate response to Kelley’s otherwise widely praised piece. From none other than the mayor who was intending to praise it, but who, in his characteristically clumsy way, revealed an intent to disparage his critics as well.
Soon after The Townie published it, Mayor Reardon’s post on Facebook read: “Finally, a piece worth reading in the Townie.” Within a couple of hours, someone must have told him he sounded like a long-lost son of Donald Trump, and he removed the word “finally,” but the screenshot and the insinuation aimed at all of us who have contributed to the forum remain.
That would include thoughtful analysis by folks with expertise in water quality, education, infrastructure, and development, including both present and former councilors debating both sides of controversies. Does Reardon not know that debate is the lifeblood of self-rule? Or does he think that “self” means himself, never to be questioned?
Count me with Kelley and all others who sing Newburyport’s praises. The city has been more than good to me.
But count me in opposition to anyone who thinks that smiling for photo-ops is all that’s needed to add to that beauty while tying tourniquets around those hoping to protect and enhance it.
As soon as I heard him say that his friend had sixteen twelve-string guitars, I put the 0 on the end of 16 for 160 and added two more 16s, aka 32, and had the sum of 192 strings.
I could have given that answer in less time than it takes to multiply the 6 by 2 and carry the one, etcetera, all on paper. And in far less time than I’d have needed to do it the familiar way in my head, carrying numbers and trying to keep the columns straight below the drawn line.
Had he said the 16 instruments were worth an average of $743 apiece, I’d have found a pen and paper and done it the usual way.
Now and then we hear complaints about what is called “new math,” or “common core,” new ways of teaching math, simple arithmetic really, in elementary schools. Naturally, we have a tendency to ask and perhaps object: What’s wrong with the “old” way?
Often, the issue devolves into a debate to decide which is better, and as seems unavoidable these days, it becomes a standoff between two sides unwilling to budge. For the most part, parents who want education left as they themselves experienced it, and young teachers convinced that “new” methods represent the future.
This is all for naught because the mistake is thinking that it is a debate at all.
Done on paper, the new way appears to have more steps and take more time, while t he old way is obviously quicker and seemingly simpler, even with the carry-overs. This is why opponents of the “new” math always never use numbers with more than two-digits in the pictures, memes, and videos they post on social media. The small numbers allow them to exaggerate the amount of work involved–and add several curved arrows making it appear hopelessly convoluted and confusing.
Use larger numbers, and the difference becomes slight while the confusion disappears. Here’s an example using just one three-digit number:
Old: Underneath 543 x 4, you write 2, carry 1, write 7, carry 1, write 21. Result: 2,172
New: Underneath 543 x 4, you write 2000, then 160, then 12, after which you add the three numbers. Result: 2,172
Common Core: Change to 550 x 4 for 2200, then subtract 7 x 4 (28) for 2,172.
In what is called “new,” you can see the extra step: “Old” is straight multiplication of a three-digit number; “new” is three multiplications turned into one addition. No question but that “old” is more efficient if you have paper and something with which to write.
Now, try doing that in your head the first way, and the carry-overs blur your process, forcing you to stop and restart. The second will give you the answer with relative ease, at least for numbers that aren’t too long. Depends on one’s ability to remember. Multiplications and divisions of three, four, or even five digit numbers by any single digit should not be difficult. Beyond that, I’m sure that I, too, would rely on the old method–even if it meant waiting until I parked my car, finished the dishes, or got out of the shower.
Problem in this debate, which at times waxes indignant and sarcastic, is how misleading the labels “new” and “old” are. Are we unthinkingly turning this into yet another front of what we call “the culture wars”? If we are to be honest, it is the same math, as the identical results prove. Explain both, and I bet more school children–and adults–would find both easier to grasp.
Numerous other tricks anyone can play in the numbers game are loosely called “common core.” This is best understood as rounding out the numbers for the process, and then restoring the rough edge at the end. Or you can break a number into single-digit denominators for two or three simple calculations easily combined, instead of one that is difficult.
Can you divide 6,795 by 45 in your head? No, neither than I, not until I break 45 into 9 and 5. Now it becomes easy to divide by 9, making it 755, then by 5 for 151. And I can tell you that in half the time it took to type that sentence.
Can you multiply 131 by 18? Maybe in time with considerable effort and concentration. Why not 131 by 20? Now you just put a 0 after 131 and double it for 2,620. Then you simply subtract two 131s, aka 262, from 2,620. Shouldn’t take long to figure 2,358 out of that.
Many numbers–those high prime numbers, will defy the tricks. If the division above was 6,795 by 47, or the multiplication was 131 by 181, I’d find a pen and paper. I recall using a ladder to pick the apples at the top of MacIntosh trees, but I stayed on the ground to pick the branches within my reach. No one in the harvest thought we should either always or never use a ladder.
We all agree that mathematics, unlike other educational subjects including most sciences, is always exact. The expression which holds that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is true for many other things. But the math in that adage stops at the word “sum,” which cannot be altered, improvised, or changed in any way.
Ways of reaching a sum, however, are many. What is happening in elementary school math classes should not be a debate or a one-way-only showdown. Each way offers a useful option to fit an occasion.
-806-
As with statistics, another numbers game, there’s always a way to favor any side of the debate.
After the first of Golden Calf’s two impeachments, Maine Sen. Susan Collins was asked why she voted to acquit despite her harsh criticism of his attempt to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine. She chuckled in response:
Oh, I think he’s learned his lesson!
Never had I heard or read so stupid a statement by a public official, past or present. If I may provide some context here: My dad was a political junkie, so I grew up in a household that took in five newspapers each day. I heard all the conventions and debates. That drew me into history, and I’ve been an avid reader of American history all my life.
This I know: Even the nonstop, mind-numbingly stupid statements of the American Golden Calf itself–windmills, sharks, Clorox, raking forests, water bombs, “beautiful coal,” “eating their pets,” will it ever end?–do not match the profound stupidity of Collins’ answer.
You may prefer the softer word, “gullible.” If so, then she was hiding behind gullibility, as the Calf continued to insult those who criticized it at all. How is that “learning” anything?
Collins was taken off the hook two weeks ago by Marco Rubio who defended the Calf’s ridiculous and vulgar cage fight by calling it “a vision.” Stupid, yes, but not enough, so Rubio blathered on, comparing it to JFK’s “vision” of landing a man on the Moon.
Keep in mind that Rubio is the one and only member of the Golden Calf Administration that critics–such as the analysts on MS Now–call “the adult in the room.” At the Calf’s bizarre press conference last week, Rubio stood for over an hour looking like a man taken hostage behind the gilded con-artist who has openly ridiculed him as “Little Marco.” No matter the past insults, the “adult in the room” now compares a cage fight to a Moon landing.*
Apparently, Collins felt the loss. Not to be outdone, she quickly put in her bid to regain her claim to the most stupid statement ever made by a politician in DC by telling reporters that she does “not regret” her vote to appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. As always, she seamlessly switched to the other side of her mouth to express “disappointment” that he–as everyone not named Susan Collins fully expected–helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
With or without Collins’ characteristic double-talk, I’m still measuring which of last week’s gems should now hold the title of Stupidest Statement Ever Made By an Elected Official. Perhaps Rubio and Collins could face off in a cage fight.
-805-
*To be fair, the insults regarding Rubio’s size were slight compared to the Calf calling the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Boeing) “ugly.” No matter, as Cruz, who grumbled at the time, now parrots the MAGA mantra of “greatest president in our lifetime” (some say “American history,” but the absurdity is just as glaring). If I was a reporter in DC, more than anything else I’d like to remind Cruz of that before asking: “Senator Cruz, does the word ‘manhood’ ring a bell?”
Two items in the news last week deserve as much if not more attention than the ongoing, relentlessly sensational circus that dominates the headlines–and has, according to a headline on the cover of Harper’s July issue, “exhausted America” as it “turns 250.”
The second, “And the Award for Stupid Goes to…,” will be posted tomorrow. Here’s the first:
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s called him a liar, I was reminded of the young boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who burst the bubble of royal fraud simply by saying the truth aloud for all to hear. It worked in Hans Christian Andersen’s fictional kingdom because people were willing to see what was right in front of them. Even if they might be deluded for a time by pageantry, the voice of truth, so long as just one was willing to speak it, could not be denied.
Compare that to a far larger nation with countless sources of news–and of speculation and entertainment that pose as news–and you find many people in bubbles of their own choice, and many more paying no attention at all. Andersen’s king could have been wearing a hazmat suit for all they care. Or Meloni could’ve called President Golden Calf a convicted rapist, and they still wouldn’t care. I can say that with certainty because he is, and they don’t.
Some will blame their “news” sources, usually Fox Nonsense. Granted, Fox does not report many stories that show America’s Golden Calf in a bad light. His family profiting off stocks in drone manufacturing, for instance, purchased just before the announcement of his war on Iran. His blocking of an international bridge funded entirely by Canada from Ontario into Detroit because one of his millionaire donors owns the overburdened toll bridge that will lose revenue, for another.
And that’s just a hint of a list that must now be the length of both bridges combined. Point is that, if you bring such things up in a conversation, viewers of Fox and other MAGA echo chambers haven’t heard of them. Therefore, their knee-jerk response: “Fake news!”
Or, the report will be twisted to either discredit or demean those critical of Calf. Meloni is a right-winger, after all, so Fox may feel obligated to account for her. Notice that he claimed she “begged” for a photo with him. Notice, too, that she is a young, attractive woman. Prediction: if Calf responds to Meloni’s claim that he lied, he’ll claim that she wanted more than a photo with him. Nor should we be surprised if he calls her “piggy,” describes her as “nasty,” and says she “has blood coming out of her ears or wherever.”
As we all know, Golden Calf has been doing this repeatedly to young and middle-aged professional women for all of the eleven years he has been on our national stage. Even Fox viewers know that much, and they cheer him on. Worse yet, both sides of the informational divide combined are outnumbered by those who pay no attention to what determines how things are–only to then gripe about how things are.
Rather than an adult version of the boy in Andersen’s story and those who heeded him, America is a land of Rip Van Winkles, sleeping through a revolution. Giorgia Meloni, after perhaps a momentary shock, is but a whisper; our deafness a shout.
As Harper’s interior headline for the July cover story put it, “Happy Fucking Birthday.”
If there were earlier signs, I either missed or dismissed them.
Like last summer when she rode away on her new 10-speed for the first time without me. Nothing to worry about, just a spin up and down island roads on an overcast, quiet weekday. “Be careful,” I want to call after her, but I don’t want to echo the 1950s—or sound old, as Rachel puts such reflexive, canned advice.
To her it is no big deal, just a bike ride in the neighborhood, and so I let pass a vague feeling that something is either lost or gained and return to a manuscript that today I cannot recall. Even subtle indications should jolt the parent who can only wonder where and how time fled. Last Christmas when I mentioned renewing her subscription to the children’s magazine, World, she asked, “Dad, please change it to National Geographic.”
Rationalizing that Rachel has inherited this passion for travel, I fail to hear her request as a rite of passage toward adulthood, much less womanhood. So it is for the parent who measures more in miles than in months, whose tuition is more in tolls than in texts.
Then there are signs that every parent seeks to suppress, usually with rising voice and blood pressure. Since she was four, Rachel and her summertime cronies have often accompanied me on nights that I perform on Market Square. When little, they were quite willing to dance, enhancing my tips—which later melted into ice cream. But when not-so-little they went off on their own, and some nights I’d be left waiting, my bag packed, my foot tapping to something other than a jig.
Can you blame me? Attractive girls—in part because they have switched to frozen yogurt for their treats—they pay careful attention to their hair and clothes; and though each is intelligent and thoughtful, their behavior together is expressed more in musical than in mathematical terms: One plus one is always greater than two.
Put it this way: They think it’s a joke when they quip, “Cheese makes the world go ’round.” But there’s something in their punch line that floors me:
Cheese makes mice go around; mice make cats go around; cats make dogs go around; dogs make boys go around; boys make girls go around; girls make love go around; and love makes…
Finish the last verse yourself; it’s the third-to-last that I’m not ready to let go too far around.
Go ahead and blame me. I can be overly guarded, such as when the two returned to Plum Island not with Anna’s mother as planned, but with a handsome young man I had never seen, all of them in bathing suits ready to romp in the surf. Never mind “old,” it was ancestral rage that I hid before Anna introduced him as a cousin visiting from out of town.
A few weeks later, we go out of town to tour Canada’s Maritimes. On our last night, leaving a restaurant with little daylight left, we find a campground along the high, rocky coast of Fundy Bay. Reaching for the tent, I hear her say, “I’ll do this. Sit down and have a beer.”
Many people may be appalled by the idea of a 12-year-old telling anyone to have a beer. I am not one of them. Still, I can’t quite believe my ears. During the two weeks, we pitched tent just three times, opting more often for bed & breakfasts. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’ve watched you. Now I’m doing it. Take this chair and have a beer.”
So I enjoy the view with a bottle of Moosehead. Only in time does it dawn on me that her offer, while sincere and considerate, was in effect a tactful version of “Get the hell out of my way!” In both the immediate and life-long sense.
Days later back home, Rachel begins reminding me that her birthday, less than a month away, will make her a teenager. But I resist, claiming that the words “thirteen” and “fourteen” were first used by mistake and are now used only in bad habit. “Three-ten” and “four-ten,” I correct, telling her she must wait two more years.
She challenges me with my own dictionary—a sure sign of outrage, as how many teenagers would ever use one of those? “Right there between ‘thirsty’ and ‘thirty’! ‘Thirteen’!”
Caught I am—between an adjective I can’t escape and a state of mind lost too many years ago. Still, I pretend to miss every possible sign:
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
-803-
*From Once Upon an Attention Span, a collection of my columns over four decades. This is one of eight about road trips with my daughter in the 80s and 90s.
Must admit that when AI is used for political purposes, my mood verges on murderous, but this is innocent enough. The likenesses are spot on for 1991, although I know the photo she used for me, and I would not have been wearing that sweater on a summer trip. I do recall her rainbow socks. Can’t really tell if this image puts us in front of or behind the windshield, which makes the car seem more like a Jeep than a 1984 Renault Encore hatchback which did have a green exterior and a patterned cloth interior.
Thanks to my picture appearing on the local newspaper’s opinion page a few hundred times these past 43 years, I gain comments from complete strangers in public places.
Mostly quick compliments or criticisms, both welcome. It’s the only job I know where success is measured as much in opposition as in approval.
Mostly I enjoy it. Still hear the cracking voice of the fellow who cautiously approached me a dozen years ago in the produce section at Market Basket, before asking: “Was that you who wrote about Cleveland?”
My usual response is, “Depends on what you have in mind,” but this fellow was so shy, I had to play it straight:
“Yes. The Rock Hall, the Lakefront, the architecture, Great Lakes Brew Pub, live music in public parks, dates to catch the Red Sox and Celtics…”
“I’m from Cleveland,” he managed to say, “that’s the first time I ever read anything good about my home town.”*
Lately, I have nothing good to say about the Archival Center at the Newburyport Public Library, but I am being asked why it is back in the news. My guess: Two recent letters nicely summed up by their headlines:
“When stewardship fails” (May 13) by Walt Thompson and “Archival Center is a shell of what it used to be” (May 18) by Ghlee Woodworth.
Full disclosure: Both writers are my friends, and we three were among the petitioners to the Newburyport City Council to investigate City Hall’s role in the disastrous moves that erased the Archival Center’s volunteer program and railroaded the regionally acclaimed archivist out of her position.
To their letters, I’ll add my own, “McCauley threw open the windows” (May 13), a tribute to the former councillor upon hearing of his untimely passing. In it, I describe the moment when Jim McCauley took on the leading role of making the library investigation happen.
What prompted my two friends to write about the formerly-renowned Archival Center? Not sure, but from what I’ve read and heard, the list of complaints from researchers and historians who thought they could access it as readily as in the past, has been growing.
Complaints are now finding their way to the NPL Board of Directors, which always includes new members who likely find that serving the mayor who appoints them and doing the right thing is a bit like joining the Trump Administration.
Problem is that the incomptent mayor managed to dodge all accountability for the destruction of the Archival Center despite the findings of the investigation that, in the words of one local historian, should have been “a career ending document” for him.
Instead, City Council President Rip Van Cameron stalled the investigation six months, long enough for Chief of Staff Andrew Levine to find a new job. Simultaneously, as if by pure coincidence, Director of Human Resources Donna Drelick was not renewed. Since the investigator’s report was as damning to both as it was to the mayor, coincidence allowed him to dodge responsibility. With two villains gone, all he had to do was what he does best, keep smiling for cameras.
This brings me to the question being put to me since my last column, “Crimes-R-Us and other musical acts”: For all of the ridicule I hurl at Republicans in Washington DC, why am I not at Newburyport’s weekly Saturday rallies on High Street?
I’m honestly torn. Among the many issues noted on their signs is the censorship of books. Where were the people holding those signs during the prolonged destruction of NPL? If they can see it in Florida and Tennessee, why the blind eye to State Street?
Did those now holding signs citing the 2019 Mueller Report pay any attention to the equally damning 2025 report on the Newburyport Public Library? Does the bumper sticker now read “Think Globally, Ignore Locally”?
Some hid behind pathetic excuses for complacency such as, “There’s a lot we don’t know.” (So why weren’t they asking?) Even subsequent first-hand reports of a toxic work environment in the Clerk’s Office, its members unanimously, urgently appealing to the City Council for intervention, did not stop many of Newburyport’s weekend sign-holders from endorsing the smiling mayor’s re-election.
And, oh, how they love those photo-ops with him in City Hall.
Apologies to most folks at the Saturday rallies, but there are at least a dozen among you I want to have nothing in common with. If, on any given Saturday, you happen to join the weekly rally in Ipswich instead, I’ll gladly answer any question or criticism of this.
Thanks to my picture, I’ll be easy to find. No matter if I have no idea who you are.
-802-
*The Cleveland column, May 2014:
Pitching a Rock and Roll Trip
Want a get-away that rocks?
Consider the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. A towering glass pyramid with long corridors giving it the shape of an electric guitar, the building by itself is worth the trip.
For the other kind of rock, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is nearby with the dinosaur skeletons you may recall from Calvin & Hobbes.
Cleveland?
If you’re a sports fan, check your teams’ schedules for road games against the Indians, Cavaliers, and Browns. No disrespect intended, but tickets for all three are easy to get these days.
If it’s baseball, you’ll enjoy one of the first retro ballparks built in the 1990s. If football, you’ll be two doors down from the Rock Hall along the city’s gorgeous new Lakefront Park.
Door between opens to the Great Lakes Science Museum, itself an architectural treat, which anticipates the Rock Hall with an acoustic exhibit at the entry facing it:
Whisper into a wall on one side of the lobby and a friend 200 feet away leaning into the opposite wall will hear you. Kids test and re-test this as avidly they wear headphones next door.
Many Rock Hall exhibits have them for visitors to hear no end of recordings. Couldn’t help but notice: Boys all play air guitar; girls all sing air microphone.
One vast underground floor offers memorabilia from countless rockers—and from the hotbeds of Memphis, Liverpool, Seattle, and more. Most prominent are Black musicians from the South who started it all.
Most illuminating item is the hotel stationary with Jimi Hendrix’s draft of a song under the title, “Purple Haze, Jesus Saves.” A swirling script to kiss the sky.
Most sobering are shards of Otis Redding’s wrecked airplane, and most amusing is The Who’s garb on headless mannequins on a stage replete with instruments, amps, and mikes.
Most astonishing is the exclusion of Jethro Tull, but most satisfying is hearing them piped to the height of the pyramid while admiring the playful, life-size re-creation of Pink Floyd’s Wall.
Upper levels also include tributes to Chess and Sun Records, to Les Paul, and a studio for Sirius Radio with glass walls, DJ smiling at my thumbs up for “Aqualung.”
Films ranging from Video Killed the Radio Star to Help! play at small screening rooms.
A two-day bargain pass and a café with dozens of tables and spectacular views of Lake Erie and an always architecturally fascinating downtown help you take it all in.
Cleveland?
The claim of “Birthplace of Rock & Roll” owes to DJ Alan Freed before he became famous in NYC. In 1951 a station with a dwindling audience asked him to turn his classical show over to the emerging “race music.”
Already a fan, Freed, who was Jewish, was game to desegregate radio in pre-MLK America. For his show’s name, he picked a recurring lyric. When one exec worried over the euphemism (“…all night long”), Freed was matter-of-factly persuasive:
“Anyone who would object to that won’t know it.”
Publicly, he claimed it suggested “the rolling, surging beat of the music.” Either way “rock and roll” went from compound verb to proper (while still improper) noun, “The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Hour.” Soon it named the whole genre.
His “Moondog Coronation Ball” in 1952 is Cleveland’s claim to the first rock and roll concert. All of which begins the history available at the Rock Hall. No matter that Freed was forced to drop the name “Moondog” in New York City when sued by a popular street-musician known by that name.
Legalities aside, what is music tourism without a brewpub? Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Company—with German cuisine that never disappoints—is opposite a downtown park that’s often the weekend site of an outdoor market with live music.
Which always rocks in Cleveland.
-30-
To prove that I have attended Newburyport’s rallies in the past, here I am interviewing Tito of N-port’s Theater In The Open. Photo by Richard Lodge.Again in Newburyport. Where’s Waldo? About four or five protesters from the left with the shades and beret. Photo by Walt Thompson.
This happens to be the Newburyport Daily News‘ opinion page on Martin Luther King Day, 2025. The pic was taken by the late and very much missed Tom Epstein, better known as King Richard at the Renaissance Faire of that name, circa 2006, making me the only opinion page columnist in history to have his thumbnail pic taken by a king.
May have happened when I was 26, but I was too young to realize it. Still in grad school, I joined a ten-day field trip with five other students and a professor of sociology from South Dakota State University to the Pine Ridge Reservation, just four years after the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement that dominated national news in the spring of 1973. On our last night there, I stepped out of a van in the parking lot of a high school football field and walked toward a pow-wow already in progress.
Felt it before I saw it, mostly in my collar bones. Gave me momentary pause, but I gave little thought to why the drummers’ beat would penetrate me, much less to what it meant. Of course I knew that the Lakota Sioux attached spiritual beliefs and obligations to all their gatherings, all native tribes do, but all I wanted was to get closer to the dancers circling the drummers in their ceremonial native garb.
My heart may have skipped a beat, but my knees did not wobble, and I charged ahead.
Today, I’m reminded of it as hints of summer finally break through the overcast of May, and I begin to consider the books I’ll be bringing to the beach just a ten-minute walk away. Former English teacher that I am, I long ago made it a rule to include classics that somehow slipped past me or that, more likely, I artfully dodged on my way to the degrees that allowed me to stand in front of classes and make occasional references to the very works I had skipped.
Most have been works long out of print, lost to public memory, and weeded out of American public libraries to make ever more room for Danielle Steele and Barbara Cartland, but others are still well-known of if not much read, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, and Heart of Darkness.
This year’s choice put me back in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, back in 2012, the last time it happened as I looked at the opened pages of a book hand-printed and colorfully illustrated some fifty years before Gutenberg’s Bible came off the press. But first things first.
The 90s were my most musical years. Yes, I spent a lot of time busking through the 80s, and the mostly-free summer schedule of an adjunct college teacher allowed for it. But I was writing at least as much until 1994 when I let my twice-a-month output for the local paper’s opinion pages drop to a handful-a-year.
By 1996 I was full of jigs and reels, laments and aires, and started to add Baroque prestos, allegros, and andantes. Did fairly well until I went for the biggest prize of all, the opening melody of J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.
If you know the piece, please don’t think I ever thought I could duplicate it. As with a few movements from the Brandenburgs, I was hoping for no more than an opening melody that I could use as a launching pad for improvisational riffs. But I wanted to get all of it, which took me through measures with sudden octave jumps that can turn playing a wind instrument into an athletic event.
First dozen measures contained a few incidental notes. That took some time and effort, which is to say I played through about a dozen times, non-stop, until I started hitting those notes without having to think of them. Then came the octave-jumps. Luckily, I live alone, so there was no one else to suffer through at least fifty attempts.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and, admittedly to my own surprise, nailed them. However, on that first successful pass, as I continued playing the relatively easy measures that followed, it happened. Not the first time my fingers shook out of control. But the first time that I felt the literal truth of a prayer: “Lord, I am not worthy…”
Unless you are or were Catholic, you likely will not get the reference, but it opens the line in the Catholic Mass that leads to the sacrament of Communion:
Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Say but the word, and my soul shall be healed.
Yes, I’m a long-lapsed Catholic who hadn’t said those words since the Beach Boys sang “Two Girls for Every Boy.” And it is far more likely that the last several times I said them were not during Mass, but in the playground or with friends after school to suggest that one of us was “not worthy” of any girl no matter how much they outnumbered us. Our elementary school class was 34 girls and 17 boys, so the Beach Boys were on to us, and their song was our anthem.
Because those opening five words could be applied to anything, we got more mileage out of that line than any other. In card games, if we could surprise an opponent with a winning card, we might say, “Sorry, Bill, but you are not worthy to make your bid.” In a Little League Baseball game, I took a throw from an outfielder and put a tag on a runner, a good Catholic friend of mine, trying to stretch a double into a triple, telling him while leaning down: “Nice hit, Marty, but you are not worthy to be on third base!”
Ten years passed after my grueling session with Bach before it happened again.
I’m no student of architecture, but I appreciate the best of it and will go out of my way to see it. That includes taking my out-of-town visitors a half-an-hour inland to see the library designed by Louis Kahn at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. The elegant, subtle curves of the brick exterior would be missed by anyone going in or out in a hurry, but once you step in…
On my first visit, I must have taken at least a second step inside before looking up and seeing what loomed over the lobby, the gaping concrete openings, perfect circles where you expect right angles–even though I had seen it in My Architect, his son’s 2003 documentary film, and on the USPS’ commemorative 37-cent first-class stamp issued in 2001.
My knees wobbled for the first time since my high school principal busted me for smoking cigarettes during recess. I had to grab a nearby railing as all four walls filled my ears: “You are not worthy…” Fortunately, as loud as it was in my head, I did not say it aloud, but as I recall, it took awhile to explain my temporary paralysis to my non-Catholic friend.
He laughed at the joke. After all those times I treated the line as a joke, I started thinking the joke was on me.
Two years later, I was in Chicago’s Institute of Art, awe-struck before a doorway in between two of America’s most iconic paintings: American Gothic on one wall, Nighthawks on the other.
Spent a while standing back from both as one field trip of excited elementary schoolers after another would flock to Gothic, pointing and chattering, as well as posing and mugging in attempts to imitate what they saw on the canvas. All the while, Nighthawks drew no attention from anybody.
Finally started through the door into the room of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, braced to see anything by Van Gogh or Gaugin–or “Van Go and Go-Again” as we liked to say back at Salem State. A few by each, as well as by Manet, Monet, Muney, Minuet, and Menopause, did not disappoint, but before I saw any, I was face-to-face with Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte.
Reproduced on the pages of every high school and college textbook used to teach art, and often making cameos in pop culture, it is better known as Sunday in the Park, the title of a 1984 musical based on it. I’ve see the painting as often as I’ve seen reproductions of Starry Night, but that doesn’t prepare you for the experience of seeing the genuine article, walking toward it, and then stopping as your knees begin to wobble. Easy to say that this is due to the size of the canvas, at least 20 times the size of any page in the largest formatted coffee-table books.
Might have more to do with the effect of pointillism, Seurat’s method of rendering subjects with small dots rather than with strokes. As I entered the room, it came more into focus, but halfway there, it started going back out. Could say I was stopped by the painting itself, but I distinctly recall thinking that I could walk right into it and mingle with the people out for a stroll or having a picnic on La Grande Jatte.
Then the voice: “Lord, I am not worthy…”
Many people have told me and many writers have written of this or a very similar experience upon first viewing nature’s treasures, though never in the terms of the Catholic Mass. I, too, have been awe-struck at my first sight of the Grand Canyon, Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier, the Badlands, bluffs of the Mississippi, and the summit of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin which so intimidated Henry Thoreau that he did not complete his climb. Neither did I.
But as natural places, I’m already under their roof, worthy or not. My hesitancy is in the presumption that I might partake of artistic treasures, that I might play and improvise on a Bach melody, walk into a Seurat painting, peruse books in Louis Kahn’s library, examine a Gutenberg Bible, an original Shakespeare Folio, and a six-century-old first edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Also known as the Ellesmere Chaucer, the memory of it recalls my long-running if intermittent history of unworthiness. Like many teachers who admit to having “Imposter Syndrome,” perhaps I can be pegged with “Unworthy Syndrome.” Today it is triggered by a suggestion made in a book about Herman Melville that I reviewed in my last blog: That Melville modeled the novel Confidence Man after the Canterbury Tales.
At the Huntington, it is open to a middle page, under glass to one side of the Gutenberg Bible, with the Shakespeare Folio on the other side. May have been the effect of all three, but the artwork in the margins of the Ellesmere Chaucer was especially dazzling. For me, the glass was unnecessary, as I stood there thinking, “Lord, I am not worthy to turn those pages.”*
And so the Canterbury Tales, of which I read just one while in high school only after being told it was R-rated, is the book atop my summer reading list. Until then, I wonder if Melville also wrote Confidence Man in the same farmhouse room where he wrote Moby-Dick. His window offers a majestic view of Mt. Greylock that stops visitors to Arrowhead Farm in Massachusetts’ Berkshires as soon as they see it from behind Melville’s chair facing his desk.
If Melville created the white whale to tell us that megalomania and vengeance, both personified by Ahab, are “not worthy” to control or decide anything, perhaps he was interpreting his view out the window.
Yes, the echo rings loudly across America in 2026. But while a structure for cage fights is being erected on the White House lawn, who could possibly be unworthy of anything?
*For a look at all three, go to the Huntington website, and in the search engine, enter, one at a time, Ellesmere Chaucer, Gutenberg Bible, and Shakespeare First Folio:
Call it derivative. I prefer the term “speculative,” but you can speculate about anyone without relying on a source. Not only is Melvill true to a source, it offers its speculation as a source for novels and short stories that have been read, analyzed, taught, studied, and referenced for a century and a half and counting.
From Argentinian novelist Roderigo Fresan in 2022, Melvill was not translated into English until 2024 and is just now making the rounds of Herman Melville and Moby-Dick fan pages on social media.
The title character is not the writer we know, but his father Allan who went mad, was kept tied to bed, and died when Herman was just 12–and who spelled the family name without the final e, soon added by his widow either to improve the flourish of her signature (her reason) or to confuse her husband’s and now her creditors (circumstantial evidence).
That much we know. Speculation begins when Fresan puts an attentive young Herman bedside, listening to his father’s wild tales of his “Grand Tour” of European courts and markets dealing in silk and textiles with a mystical partner named Nico C. All this to establish the likely impressions left upon the imaginative boy.
And this is where Fresan ups the ante. Other derivative novels are narrated by other characters to tell: a parallel story, Ahab’s Wife (1999); a backstory, Finn (2008); the same story, James (2024); or an adapted story, this year’s Call Me Ishmaelle. Fresan’s Melvill suggests where the characters and plots of most of Herman Melville’s fiction and poetry originated.
Quite a trip to see how seamlessly and plausibly Moby-Dick, Confidence Man, Pierre, Israel Potter, and Billy Budd fit the narrative. Even Nico C. anticipates Herman’s friendship with Nat H. (“Nathaniel Hawthorne to all of you”), and the connection of the wary, cerebral older man’s “Wakefield” to the admiring, dynamic young man’s “Bartleby” is worth the effort.
Effort it is in the first of Melvill‘s three sections. The narrator is Herman at the end of his own life, posing as a 12-year-old son, recounting his father’s “Great White Delirium” with a constant barrage of parenthetical clarifications. If that’s not enough, the footnotes outnumber the pages with a parallel account of how his father’s raving echoed throughout his own life, his relationships with his suicidal sons, his writings, his reactions to critics.
Anyone who has read Moby-Dick with any honest attention will realize by page five or footnote four that the format parodies the book that intersperses a novel about a whaling voyage with a manual on the whaling industry while adding barrels of philosophical and historical seasoning. As the older narrator says in a footnote:
A new style for beginning to write things, yes. A style that I want to be mine for the things I end up writing. A style that no longer runs through what is written but through how it is written. The present of a style that might be the style of the future, knowing that all style is but the result of new language being added to an old expression. Or vice-versa.
Footnotes disappear in the second of the three sections, “Glaciology, or the Transparency of Ice.” In it we hear Allan Melvill in an uninterrupted rhapsody. May take some effort to keep reminding yourself that you are not listening to any of the narrators of Herman’s novels, especially Ishmael in his “Cetology” and “The Whiteness of the Whale.” And on the subject of human fascination with ghosts and vampires who:
…are not supernatural or impossible beings but, actually the most natural constructs of human fear… Oh, it’s touching: the invocations of all those instruction manuals for ways to destroy us that you all have invented in order to tolerate just sensing our presence and to convince yourselves that you can expel us at will from your parties… But I fear it’s not and won’t be like that, O fearful humans. Ours is the real party and you haven’t been invited.
That’s one of several passages that classify Melvill as a “Gothic novel,” and Fresan includes as many references to Melville’s Gothic parody, Pierre, that the critics took all too literally, as to Moby-Dick. The most references, however, are made to Bartleby’s mantra, “I would prefer not to,” which Fresan suggests is an answer to Hamlet’s existential question. If so, Bartleby was Melville’s response to those who condemned Pierre as vile, and called him mad.
For all that, I favor the claim–again having to remind myself that this is not the voice of Herman Melville, but of an actor so skilled that he is nailing the literary voice–that the form, if not the content, of Confidence Man was inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
…a stranger coming aboard, in Mississippi, on April Fool’s Day, to make everyone feel guilty for their capacity and need to be deceived, changing masks, again and again, but leaving the mystery of the true face beneath all of them unresolved and offering the warning that “after pouring over the best novels professing to portray human nature, the studious youth will still run the risk of being too often at fault upon actually entering the world.”
That’s from the third section after the father has died, and the son, nearing the end of his own life, assumes the narrative, connecting all kinds of dots between what he had heard and what he would write. At which point, I remind myself that some of what I’m reading really is Herman Melville.
Even the acknowledgements do not escape Melvillean treatment, as Fresan names every influence major and minor, from Coen Brothers’ films to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, from a critical essay by John Updike to a song by Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”–along with reappearing, lengthy footnotes such as the one quoting Dylan’s praise of Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize lecture.*
A quote from Dylan’s “Key West” is among the extracts placed on the front pages of Melvill, a la the many placed before Moby-Dick:
That’s my story, but not where it ends.
Derivative? Yes, but Melvill creates much more than it derives from the lives of Allan Melvill and Herman Melville. And suggested possibilities seem endless: Did you ever consider, for instance, that Melville used the word “extract” rather than “epigraph” because it suggested the scents of spices and perfumes still be offloaded at all American ports in his time?
A friend posts a meme with the photos of Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and the Mob Boss now posing as president of the United States.
Text tells of a drunk, a drug addict, and a puppy killer (before she flew her luxury jet out of favor) reporting to a 34-count convicted felon named in the Epstein files more often than all twelve apostles combined are mentioned in all four gospels combined in a book that he has never read but nonetheless sells for $59.99 a pop–or up to $1,000 if you want his signature on it–all of them printed in Hangzhou, China.
While taking this all in, I happen to be listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers, among the most galvanizing–and frequently played–counter-culture albums of the Sixties. Between the force of Grace Slick’s voice and the sight of the four assholes in the meme, something clicks. In my typically sardonic mood, I comment that, if the four assholes were a rock-and-roll band, their name would be Crimes-R-Us.
Unfortunately, the idea sticks in my head like a worm in the brain of America’s number one health official, and I’m compelled to report what such a group would look and sound like.
Mob Boss, of course, will insist on being frontman and lead singer. Since his speech often tends toward singsong, and since he can’t focus on a coherent thought such as a song requires, he would simply bloviate as he always does while the others make noise with various instruments for accompaniment.
Take, for instance, the tangential rhapsody when he went behind the mic to address the bombing of Iran and comment on the first casualties: Within seconds he wandered into a few minutes of praising the beautiful drapes which he himself choose, golden drapes, I love gold, so beautiful, like the ballroom soon to be built, the likes of which the world has never seen, picked them myself, more beautiful than in any palace in Europe, everybody says so, make your head spin…
RFK Jr. would be hidden away behind the drums using bones from some roadkill in lieu of sticks and ordered to remain silent because he has the voice of a frog that just swallowed another frog. Hegseth would be off to the side with a tuba because the bell holds enough bourbon to fill a toilet bowl.
With the advantage of always being in costume, Noem would be prominent near Mob Boss at center stage, preferably behind a keyboard so she can face the audience and display what she obviously likes to display.
However, now that she has been banished from the national stage, who knows where she’ll take her cosplay and display? Perhaps a solo act alluringly called “Kristi and The Girls.” Or she could team up with fellow reject Pam Bondi as a duet called the “Screeching Sisters of Damnation” with hits like “Sex Jet” and “What about the Dow?”
We could do this with the rest of the berserkers still in the crime syndicate now posing as the Executive Branch of America’s federal government. Dr. Oz, Cash Patel, Laura Loomer, and Tulsi Gabbard could form a band called “Strangers on the Right” and sing “Hang on Loopy,” “We Do It His Way,” and “ICE Coming to Take You Away Ha-Haaaa.”
Put J.D. Vance, Karoline Leavitt, and Steve Miller in a trio, and they would be called “The Draculas.” Their album would be “Hate Thy Neighbor” with a cover picture of all three holding crosses in hands outstretched toward the camera. Instead of songs, there would be twenty minutes of hissing on both sides, one titled “Biden Did It,” the other “You Are A Stupid Person.”
If Elon Musk is willing to return, he and Steve Bannon could tour as the “Far-Righteous Brothers.” Their album would be “You’ve Lost that Fascist Feeling,” and they would have huge hits with “Chain, Chain, Chainsaw” and “Apartheid the Beautiful.”
Apparently friendless in Mob Boss’s fruitcake cabinet, Marco Rubio would be a solo artist with hits such as “Great Hillbilly Pretender” and “Where Have You Gone, Neville Chamberlain?”
Congressional Republicans who have allowed Mob Boss and both his crime families to wreak havoc with America’s government and Americans’ lives could easily get in on the fun. They would sport names such as “The Yesmen,” “Cowards-R-Us,” and “The Grateful Headnodders.”
Albums such as “Thoughts and Prayers,” “More Thoughts and Prayers,” “Yet More Thoughts and Prayers,” etc. would feature songs such as, “Don’t Worry, Be Quiet,” “Goosestep through the Tulips,” and “Spine Free.”
Soloists would include Susan Collins singing “Both Sides of My Mouth Now,” Ted Cruz on “Fly, Fly Away,” Lindsey Graham on “Karma Chameleon,” Jim Jordan on “YMCA,” and Mike Johnson on “It’s My Party and I’ll Lie if I Want to.” As a duet, senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville could sing “We Left Our Brains in Alabama.”
Not to be left out, Republican governors could form the “States’ Rights Choral.” Soloists would be Florida’s DeSantis and Texas’ Abbott taking turns on songs such as “Invade Minnesota,” “Threaten California,” and “Don’t Tread on Us, Tread on Them.”
And all rise for the Supreme Court Sextet sure to top the charts with sentimental favorites such as “Uncle Thomas’ RV,” “Give Me Money,” “Stand By Your Convicted Felon,” and “What’s It All About, Jim Crow?”
For an idea of how all of this might sound, all you need to do is eat a lot of beans, drink some beer, and then sit down and listen to the blasts of your own posterior trumpet.
Mouth of the River 