EARTH ~

George Ault, January Full Moon (1941)



The Cleveland, Ohio born painter George Ault (October 11, 1891-December 30, 1948) seemed to have a most excruciating life — born into wealth, with education in London — things began to unravel for the artist after the death of his mother in a mental institution, then each of his three brothers took their lives, two due to personal losses in the stock market crash of 1929. His father gone to cancer, George Ault was without family, penniless, brushes in hand.

By now Ault would be back from Europe living between New Jersey or New York (Woodstock) where he would spend the rest of a reclusive life painting (beautifully), struggling and drinking. His alcoholism became most severe as he almost blinded himself drinking poisonous bathtub gin. His erratic and strange behavior began to keep artist and dealer friends away.

In Woodstock he would turn out many of the paintings that made his reputation, none better than "January Full Moon" with its breath taking face of isolation. To view a clear representation of this painting will send a shiver up your spine, the snow shadows of the moonlight are that clear.

The painter's hardworking second wife Louise Jonas, and her income, kept the couple's heads temporarily above water while living a spartan existence in a tiny Woodstock rental without electricity or indoor plumbing. They would live there ten years, the artist soaked in his obsessive behavior of requiring order in all facets of life. His widow writes, Both studio and house needed to be perfectly clean before he could sit down at his easel. Ault would do the chores himself, Louise recalled, shining the small house each morning to its permanent brilliance before starting to paint. Outside, Ault knelt with grass-shears and trimmed on either side of the path, close and neatly, cutting back the wildness to leave a park-like strip.

Perhaps his finest paintings show his great eye for lighting — night time landscapes and buildings and its light of darkness — Bright Lights at Russell's Corners is a painting to look for.

Whether he took his own life or not, he was known for his night life drinking binges. Some days after Christmas in 1948, broke, no one calling for his paintings, George Ault was found drowned in a Woodstock creek.






George Ault
France 1924

LONGHOUSE! ~

Eero Ruuttila

Today Poems. Longhouse, 2012. First edition. Three color unfolding concertina format with photographs and poems. Noted poet, activist and vegetable farmer shares his outdoor eye to many landscapes with poems and his photographs. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request. $8, unsigned

Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:

Inquiries, please write the Bookshop with thanks

please click on image

EARTH ~

Where the stream overflowed
the long grass
is combed close to the earth


You sing to the bird in me
I sing to the bird in you —
an effort
we love to face
each dawn









Leave me the bread
at least a few slices
leave me your voice
at least a few words
to go with the bread

Snow this morning
when I part the curtains
after getting out of bed
one rib
at a time










Finally
winter is losing its grip —
in my sleep
I hear the pond's spine
cracking

Receiver
hanging off the hook
in a phone booth
hanging off
the earth









Being an insomniac
has made me an expert
in psychological time
the sound of rain
old proverbs

I cry
we all cry
we all cry
because we all die
much like the summer fly









Orange peels —
the shadows of them
as I remember
the shadows of them
curling in childhood

I thought with age
I'd develop a hard shell —
instead I've grown feathers
that are soft and yellow and
prone to falling out









Hammered all night
by the rain —
in the morning
the bicycle is
a shiny stranger

Dogs chase pigs
pigs chase dogs —
the pussy willows
going nowhere
in ecstasy









The stars over the lake
so old and brittle looking —
I stop rowing, rest my back
and think of how soft
my ashes will be

The dog —
i wish i could be that happy
just being let in










Ronald Baatz lives and works
in New York, in the foothills of
the Catskills

Kamini Press
Sweden / Greece
www.kaminipress.com

HERS ~

film © bob arnold

FLOWER SHOW ~

We got out of mud roads, drove south, saw the snow line end 5 miles from home ~ in an hour we were within a day of 69 degrees, no snow, no mud, passersby in summer clothes, a rescued turtle, flowers in a greenhouse waiting

photos © bob arnold
"turtle" © susan arnold

EARTH ~

Such a beautiful guy, Tom Morello, guitar~hero.

No better example than to hear him play with Bruce Springsteen "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (Morello first heard the song on Springsteen's album "Nebraska")
in stadium rock, over the heads of thousands, a political tour de force.


Springsteen is used to playing his own song, but he's never heard it like this, nor has his band, with a vituoso on guitar grinding it low & high like a bulldozer and violin. This is when Morello first put his electric guitar and singing together. And when he personally salutes Tom Joad in words, it's like the book falls open on The Grapes of Wrath.


Tom Morello is family with former President of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta, a Harvard graduate, graduate of Rage Against the Machine, and founder and axis of at least three bands and surmounting. He's one of a rare young breed who can be found playing in stadiums packed to the rafters, coffeehouses, garage setting, small studio, on the streets (Occupy). There's no stopping a lover of music & human rights.

BEAT HOTEL ~

cover photograph:
The poet Abas Amini, 33 year old refugee from Iran has sewn up his eyes, ears
and mouth, and is refusing to eat in protest at the UK's treatment of asylum seekers.
The Home Office refused Abas asylum.
Mr. Amini spent more than six years behind bars, including a year of solitary
confinement, between the ages of 13 and 31. When in jail, he was beaten, sometimes on the
soles of his feet, and suspended off the ground for up to two days. Sometimes he was
subjected to mock executions.
His offences including writing of anti-government poetry, which he would sometimes
read in public, or circulate among his friends, and membership of an underground
communist group.
He was imprisoned for two years for allegedly killing a member of the Iranian
security services, but later cleared by an Iranian judge.

~ from the publisher
photo: Pete Jenkins (28 V 2003)

LAST WORDS


Let me utter my last words
in a taxi cruising slowly through
the beautiful posies of neon signs.
Let someone else die in my room
on the turned mattress
so it doesn't show stains.
Let him savor the smell of it.
The smell of old lemons and let his last
moments be guillotined by badly
played guitars in other rooms.
In readiness I have a shirt with the black
ring scrubbed off the collar and a suit
which was shiny before I sandpapered it.
And now I must find my last words.



Oscar Wilde looked at the wallpaper
and said; "I knew I had to go first."
Goethe screamed, "Let there be light!"
Chekhov said, "How stupid it is for me to die."



What can I say to the taxi driver which is
memorable enough. I cannot think.
I am too overcome by the outrages
perpetrated against me.
Perhaps I should get the taxi driver to cruise
even more slowly so I can pick up
a whore and die in her room
with a beautiful zizzard of neon flashing
through the window.
Let her invent my last words
with all her experience.

please click on image to read


"Sinclair Beiles was born in Kampala Uganda in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents, who moved back to Johannesburg when their son was six years old. He studied at Wits and left the country in the mid-fifties. After time in New Zealand, Spain and Morocco, he moved to Paris, which was the center of international bohemia. He stayed in the notoriously anarchic Beat Hotel on 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, a stone's throw from the river Seine, where at various times, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso had also stayed. Here he worked as chief editor for Olympia Press, brain-child of maverick publisher Maurice Girodias, who not only gave us 'forbidden' erotic pockets but also seminal literary work by trhe likes of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and William Burroughs. Sinclair saw The Naked Lunch through the press, going through the galleys with Burroughs on their arrival from the printers, and later he would persuade Jean Fanchette of Two Cities Press to publish the first anthology of cut-ups containing the work of its four principal technicians: Sinclair Beiles, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, & Brion Gysin. The book was called 'Minutes To Go'. The cut-up was a method later adopted as a helpful adjunct to his song-writing by David Bowie, and Sinclair would also claim that it had spawned Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking, following Sinclair having given the Professor a tour of the hotel, during which Sinclair had pointed out some trays of snipped-up newsprint awaiting assembly and had described to de Bono how thought processes might be changed and paradigms shifted, just by means of a pair of scissors and some transparent tape —
thanks to 'cut-up'."

www.gerardbellaart.com





a little peek into the invaluable Sinclair Beiles
The Idiot's Voice is limited to
36 copies

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

Back Road Chalkie

Mud Season

Enough







photos © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Cheetahs have developed abnormal coils in their sperm as a result of warmer temperatures, affecting the big cat’s ability to reproduce.
Photograph: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

The world's fastest animal, the African cheetah, is losing its ability to reproduce because of climate change, according to Kenyan researchers.

Scientists with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and the Kenya Wildlife Service have discovered that the animal, Acinonyx jubatus, has developed abnormal coils in its sperm as a result of warmer temperatures, affecting the big cat's ability to reproduce. The warmer temperatures are also affecting its feeding habits, they say.

Risky Agwanda, head of mammology section at NMK, said: "Climate change has contributed to defects of the cheetah sperm. Many have abnormal coils, low sperm counts, as well as extremely low testosterone levels. Change in climate has made the survival of the gazelle difficult to survive and as a result, the cheetah has had to switch to other diets, also affecting its ability to reproduce effectively.".

He added that the animal, that can accelerate from 0-100kph in three seconds, has a sperm count 10 times lower than the domestic cat.

"Cheetahs love to prey on Thomson's gazelles, they have a very high protein content compared to other herbivores and the population of the gazelle has been on a rapid decline due to poor climate conditions and human activities.

"We have studied a large number of the cheetahs. As a result, it preys on other herbivores such as the zebra which do not have a high nutritional content. We discovered that the gazelle diet can actually help maintain the good health of the cheetah sperm if the animal has not yet been negatively affected by poor climate," explained Agwanda.

There are currently only 1,000 cheetahs in Kenya according to figures from the Kenya Wildlife Service. In the early 1980s, there were more than 5,000 cheetahs in Kenya.

As gazelle numbers continue to decrease due to drought, conservation efforts of the cheetah could be badly affected. The gazelles are also crossbreeding with other herbivores, reducing their protein content further, Agwanda said.

Scientists have never discovered any reproductive health deficiencies in other big cats, which they say can adapt more to climate change compared to the cheetah.

"The genetic make-up of the animal is more sensitive as compared to the other big cats. The cheetahs have weak genes," said Agwanda.

Mordecai Ogada, a fellow cheetah researcher at the National Museums, says that also another problem threatening the survival of the animal is conflict between humans and wildlife, resulting in damage to to the cheetha's habitat. Ogada added that cheetah numbers have also declined because of poaching for their skin, which fetches a high price on the black market.

Gitonga Njeru guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 March 2012

EARTH ~

TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA



Tsering from Longhouse:




please click on image




~ Books of poems by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa ~


My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2011
In the Absent Everyday, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2005
Rules of the House, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2002
Recurring Gestures, Tangram Press
In Writing the Names, A.bacus, 2000

EARTH ~

It's time to look back at a photograph from last summer's garden ~

In Vermont, we won't see bare feet again for a month or two

It's 5 below this morning

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~







In My Leisure


I like to be alone,
living my life on a blue mountain.
Though the years have bleached my sideburns
all I have is a monk's robe.


I transplant pine seedlings in the rain
and close bamboo doors, shrouded clouds.
Mountain flowers are better than embroidered curtains.
The pine trees in the yard replace silk cloths.


Sitting before the silent, burning incense
I watch the moss thicken on the stone bridge.
Don't ask me why.
I've been out of step with the world since my youth.






A Hermit's Life


Living in seclusion far from the dizzying world,
I loll in the beautiful mountains without a care.
Spring is calmer in the pine grove.
The bamboo gate is closed even in daylight.






Waking From A Nap


The autumn branches are bare, the sunlight weak,
the mountain lonely, the frost flowers clear.
I close the door and drift into a dream
until the squawk of a magpie startles me awake.






Watching the Rain at Hoeduk Inn


The desolate inn is like the cottage in the old town—
no noise, hardly anyone around.
After a nap on the western veranda, on a long spring day,
I rise and watch the light rain tap the pear leaves.






Parody


The money ghost lives in the hands of many men:
wherever it goes, spring comes to their faces.
The monk in the mountains is so far from the world
that he freezes people with his words.






Leisurely Enjoyment


I see the mountain every day, but I'm never satisfied.
I often hear the water, but I'm never full.
My eyes and ears clear by themselves
and leisure matures in the sound and hue.






Instructing Fellow Buddhists after Picking Brackens


We took our baskets to the blue mountain at dawn,
leisurely picked wild greens, and came home.
Would you like to know the importance of what we did?
Only white clouds return with the night birds.






A Casual Line


Rinsed by the rain, the front garden is clean,
and the corridor in which the wind passes is cool as autumn.
The mountain green, sound of water, pines dancing in the wind—
what could disturb my mind?






Wonkam Chungji (1226~1292)


from Because of the Rain, Korean Zen Poems
compiled by Daljin Kim
translated into English by
Won-Chung Kim & Christopher Merrill
(White Pine Press)


photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Lots of old guys still writing poetry. Poetry nobody really wants. Old guys that don't go to the AWP. Guys that write lots about old girlfriends, or roads not taken. Guys hiding half their faces in photographs. Balding guys with hats, caps, scarves, I know. All white guys. They once ruled the roost. Filled anthologies. Not these old guys, they came after the model white guys ruled, and in came ethnic and many colored, and women storming and true. The old guys, the ones that haven't died bad deaths, early deaths, drink and drug deaths, blow-my-head-off deaths, now write some of the softest and maybe even sweetest poems I know. Many being insomniacs, they write these poems when you sleep. If the poems are terrific, it means you are getting something done while you sleep. These old guys will give you their poems. They've about given up, but not quite. Like old birds you can't help but feed them. Talk to one, you'll get a song.


photo © bob arnold

BOOK LOVERS ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/technology/internet-archives-repository-collects-thousands-of-books.html?hp





if he reads the books, holds the books, he's a lover

BACK ROAD FRIEND ~

Back Road Chalkie

(after the return of snow)

photo © bob arnold

MOON ~

Keith Moon at his kit

Most rock drummers, even very good and even time ones, are time keepers. There is a space for a fill or a roll at the end of a musical phrase, but the beat has primacy over the curlicues. In a regular 4/4 bar, the bass drum sounds the first beat, the snare the second, the bass drum again hits the third (often with 2/8 notes at this point), and then the snare hits the bars final beat. This results in the familiar “boom-DA, boom-boom-DA” sound of most rock drumming. A standard-issue drummer, playing along, say, to the Beatles’ “Carry That Weight”, would keep his 4/4 beat steady through the line “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time,” until the natural break, which comes at the end of the phrase, where, just after the word “time,” a wordless, two-beat half-bar readies itself for the repeated chorus. In that half-bar, there might be space for a quick role, or a roll and a triplet, or something fancy with snare and high hat — really any variety of filler. The filler is the fun stuff, and it could be said, without much exaggeration, that nearly all the fun stuff in drumming takes place in those two empty beats between the end of one phrase and the start of another. Ringo Starr, who interpreted his role modestly, does nothing much in that two-beat space: mostly, he provides eight even straight forward 16th notes (da-da-da-da / da-da-da-da). In a good cover version of the song, Phil Collins, a sophisticated drummer who was never a modest performer with Genesis, does a tight role that begins with feather light delicacy on a tomtom and ends more firmly on his snare, before going back to the beat. But the modest and the sophisticated drummer, whatever their stylistic differences, share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat, a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. The difference is just that the sophisticated drummer is much more often in a time-out, and is always busily showing off to the rest of the class while he is there.


Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming, because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff. The first principle of Moon’s drumming was that the drummers do not exist to keep the beat. He did keep the beat, and very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one. Drumming is repetition, as is rock music generally, and Moon clearly found repetition dull. So he played the drums like no one else — and not even like himself. No two bars of Moon’s playing ever sound the same; he is in revolt against consistency. Everyone else in the band gets to improvise, so why should the drummer be nothing more than a condemned metronome? He saw himself as a soloist playing with an ensemble of other soloists. It follows from this that the drummer will be playing a line of music, just as, say, the guitarist does, with undulations and crescendos and leaps. It further follows that the snare drum and the bass drum, traditionally the ball-and-chain of rhythmic imprisonment, are no more interesting than any of the other drums in the kit; and that you will need lots of those other drums. By the mid-1970s, when Moon’s kit was “the biggest in the world,” he had two bass drums, and at least twelve tomtoms, arrayed in stacks like squadrons of spotlights; he looked like a cheerful boy who had built elaborate fortifications for the sole purpose of destroying them. But he needed all those drums, as a flute needs all its stops or a harp its strings, so that his tremendous bubbling cascades, his liquid journeys, could be voiced: he needed not to run out of drums as he ran around them.


Average musical performance, like athletics and viticulture, has probably improved in the last century. Nowadays, more pianists can brilliantly run off some Chopin or Rachminoff in a concert hall, and the guy at the local drum shop is probably technically more adept than Keith Moon was. Youtube, which is a kind of a Special Olympics for showoffs, is full of young men wreaking double-jointed virtuosity on fabulously complex drum kits rigged like artillery ranges. But so what? They can also back flip into their jeans from great heights and parkour across Paris.


Moon disliked drum solos, and did not really perform them; the only one I have seen is atrociously bad, a piece of anti-performance art — Moon sloppy and mindless, apparently drunk or stoned or both, and almost collapsing into the drums while he pounds them like pillows. He may have lacked the control necessary to sustain a long, complex solo; more likely, he needed the kinetic adventures of The Who to provoke him into his own. His merry way of conceding this was his now-famous remark “I’m the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world.”


Keith Moon-style drumming is a lucky combination of the artful and the artless. To begin at the beginning: his drums always sounded good. He hit them nice and hard, and tuned the bigger tomtoms low. (Not for him the little eunuch toms of Kenney Jones, who palely succeeded Moon in The Who, after his death.) He kept his snare pretty “dry.” This isn’t a small thing. The three-piece jazz combo at your local hotel ballroom almost certainly features a “drummer” whose sticks are used so lightly that they barely embarrass the skins, and whose wet, buzzy snare sound like a repeated sneeze. A good dry snare, properly struck, is a bark, a crack, a report. How a drummer hits the snare, and how it sounds, can determine a band’s entire dynamic. Groups like Supertramp and the Eagles seem soft, in large part because the snare is so drippy and mildly used (and not just because elves are apparently squeezing the singers’ testicles.)


There are three great albums by The Who, and these are also the three greatest Moon records: Live at Leeds (1970), a recording of an explosive concert at the University of Leeds on February 14, 1970, and generally considered one of the greatest live albums in rock; Who's Next (1971), the most famous Who album; and Quadrophenia (1973), a kind of successor to Tommy, a rock opera that nostalgically celebrates the sixties mod culture that had provoked and nourished the band in its earlier days. On these are such songs as "Substitute", "My Generation", "Won't Be Fooled Again", "Baba O'Riley", "Bargarin", "The Song Is Over", "The Real Me", "5:15", "Sea and Sand", and "Love Reign O'er Me". There is no great difference between the live concert recordings and the studio songs: all of them are full of improvisation and structured anarchy, fluffs and misses; all of them seem to have the rushed gratitude of something achieved only once. From this exuberance emerges the second great principle of Moon's drumming; namely, that one is always performing, not recording, and that making mistakes is simply part of the locomotion of vitality. In the wonderful song "The Dirty Jobs," on Quadrophenia, you can hear Moon accidentally knock his sticks together three separate times while travelling around the kit. Most drummers would be horrified to be caught out on tape like this.

This vitality allowed Moon to try to shape himself to the changing dynamics of the music, listening as much to the percussive deviations of the bass line as to the steady, obvious line of the lead singer. As a result, it is impossible to separate him from the music that The Who made. The story goes that, in 1968, Jimmy Page wanted John Entwistle on bass and Keith Moon on drums when he formed Led Zeppelin; and, as sensational as this group might have been, it would not have sounded either like Led Zeppelin or like The Who. If Led Zeppelin's drummer, John Bonham, were substituted for Moon on "Won't Get Fooled Again", the song would lose its passionate propulsion, its wild excess; if Moon sat in for Bonham on "Good Times Bad Times", the tight stability of the pieces would instantly evaporate.

john bonham

Bonahm's drumming sounds as if he'd thought about phrasing; he never overreaches, because he seems to have so perfectly measured the relationship between rhythmic deviation. His superb but tightly limited breaks on the snare and his famously rapid double strokes on the bass drum are constantly played against the unvarying solidity of his high hat, which keeps a steady single beat throughout the bars. (In a standard 4/4 bar, the high hat sounds the four whole beats, or perhaps sounds eight beats in eighth notes.) That is "the Bonham sound", heard in the celebrated long solo — one of devilish intricacy — in "Moby Dick", on the live album The Song Remains the Same. Everything is judged, and rightly placed: astonishing order. Moon's drumming, by contrast, is about putting things in the wrong place: the appearance of astonishing disorder. You can copy Bonham exactly; but to copy Moon would be to bottle his energy, which is much harder.

. . .


I often think of Moon and Glenn Gould together, notwithstanding their great differences. Both started performing very young (Moon was seventeen when he began playing with The Who, Gould twenty-two when he made his first great recording of the Goldberg Variations); both were idiosyncratic, revolutionary performers, for whom spontaneity was an important element (for instance, both enjoyed singing and shouting while playing); both had exuberant, pantomimic fantasy lives (Gould wrote about Petula Clark's "Downtown", and appeared on Canadian television in the guise of invented comic personae like Karlheinz Klopweisser and Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, "the dean of British conductors"); both were gregarious yet essentially solitary; neither man practiced much (at least, Gould claimed not to practice, and it is impossible to imagine Moon having the patience or the sobriety to do so); and all their performance tics (Gould hand-washing and coat-wearing and pill-popping hypochondria) have the slightly desperate quality of mania. The performance behind the instrument, however, has the joyous freedom of true escape and self-dissolution: Gould becomes the piano, Moon becomes the drums.

glenn gould

For both Moon and Gould, the performer's life was short; Gould abandoned concert performance at the age of thirty-one; Moon was dead by the age of thirty-two, and had not played well for a long time. He had perhaps five or six really great drumming years, between 1970 and 1976. Throughout this period, Moon was ingesting ludicrous volumes of drink and drugs. In San Francisco, in 1973, he took so many (perhaps to come down from a high, or to deal with pre-concert nerves) that, after slopping his way through several songs, he collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital. When his stomach was pumped, it was found to contain quantities of PCP, described by Fletcher as "a drug used to put agitated monkeys and gorillas to sleep". What magically happened on stage, while Moon was being carted away, was incised on my teenage cerebellum. Pete Townsend asked the crowd if anyone could come up and play the drums. Scot Halpin, a nineteen year-old, and presumably soon to be the most envied teenager in America, got onto the stage, and performed in Moon's place. "Everything was locked into place", Halpin late said of the gargantuan drum kit; "anyplace you could hit there would be something there. All the cymbals overlapped."


Both Moon and Gould were rather delicate, even handsome young men who coarsened with age, and developed a thickness of feature, an almost simian rind. At twenty, Moon was slight and sweet, with a bowl of black hair upended on his head, and dark, dopey eyes, and the arched eyebrows of a clown. By the end of his life, he was puffy, heavy, his features no longer sweetly clownish but slightly villainous — Bill Sikes, played by Moon's drinking friend Oliver Reed — the arched eyebrows now thicker and darker, seemingly painted on, as if he had become a caricature of himself. Friends were shocked by his appearance. He was slower and less inventive, less vital, on the drums; the album Who Are You, his last record, attests to the decline. Perhaps no one was very surprised when he died, from a massive overdose of the drug Heminevrin, a sedative prescribed for alcohol-withdrawal symptoms. "He's gone and done it," Townsend told Roger Daltrey. Thirty-two pills were in his stomach, and the equivalent of a pint of beer in his blood. His girlfriend, who found him, told a coroner's court that she had often seen him pushing pills down his throat, without liquid. Two years later, John Bonham died from asphyxiation, after hours of drinking vodka. And then English drumming went quiet.

JAMES WOOD
from
"The Fun Stuff"

BEST MUSIC WRITING 2011
edited by Alex Ross
Da Capo Press








This piece was first published in The New Yorker.
I would have gladly sent the Birdhouse reader there as a link
except the filthy wealthy ones ask a fee to read at the trough.
As if they haven't soaked enough money from its readers for nearly a century (founded 1925).
So between Sweetheart and I, we typed it up — not all of the fine portrait, but enough to please the drummer in me,
and wanting our drummer son to read, whose grandfather was also a drummer.
Tucked in some photographs and jukebox'd music selections.
I saw The Who perform light years ago in their heyday. Like kids they came on and like kids they wrecked the stage.

SUGAR WOOD ~

OLD TALE



When a child asks,

“When will it snow?”

It should begin






photo & poem
© bob arnold