Jay Wrote

Extrapolations whilst on bourbon expedition. We used web-based home rental system for our distillery and cultural explorations of Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Illinois. We and the “hosts” are all on a first name basis, In fact, the web communicates your lodge-keeper’s first name only. This opportunity for speculation was only tainted by the welcome repair visit of “Jon” in St. Louis. Otherwise what might we make of these fellows? Abdul owned a brick 70s tract house in suburban Louisville. From the voice during a check-in call and the wifi name, which might have been Islamabad but isn’t, and the request to not wear shoes in the home, Abdul lived Pakistan at one time. The house was certainly only used for such short stays. The back lawn was shaggy and contained a sagging trampoline. I wonder what liability insurers think about this accident waiting to happen? It was a very sufficient spacious place to spend a night. Abdul - a doctor who moved his family to a more convenient hom...

Appreciation of Paul Metzger at Khyber Pass. Thursday night, Grand Av.  2 doors east of Snelling, string man Paul Metzger took listeners to extended hikes through instrumental, compositional and cultural landscapes.  It was my first time hearing St. Paul’s Metzger.  The instruments - one a banjo, the other a guitar, had each been crafted to take a set of strings arranged harp-style running off each neck.  A bow.  A perfectly-sized powered speaker.   To  my mind Metzger’s first piece, while unnamed, was a tribute to our host, Emel, owner of the tiny restaurant and artist of wonderful abstract paintings on the walls.  The predominant feeling of the banjo-harp display was eastern - Afghan perhaps, but I am not sure.  Metzger plucked, strummed, hammered, bowed, scraped and pushed out notes by waving the banjo from and back to his chest, stirring bits of echo into the room.  The banjo body subbed nicely as a tabla.   Left ...

Parsing Monk’s Dream (s) and the Vinyl-Digital Divide. This album is embedded in my deepest musical memories. (fn1)  Thelonious Monk’s album was one of four or five my dad purchased in the early 1960s. From our record collection I had few choices.  Most striking visually were the red, really red, records consisting of a series of announcements: “The whippoorwill, the whippoorwill” then the 4 seconds of bird song. “The blue jay, the blue jay.” Five records from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Monk’s Dream , Monk’s Blues and Criss Cross made me a jazz fan for life. I can’t say if these were mono or stereo records. I think we did not get a stereo system until 1968 so my earliest experience was surely of extremely low fidelity. Today I have 2 versions of Monk’s Dream , a 1988 Columbia digitally remastered LP and a 2002 Columbia compact disc with different 24 bit remastering and 4 additional takes of tunes from the original album. This was Thelonious Monk at the peak of his populari...

Morning Moves A shadow dances the foxtrot among this morning's leaves trading and chasing partners,  the erratic monarch and ever-shifting sun king.

It Could Have Happened Like This… December, 1959. Betty and Truman on opposite ends of a lime green polyester couch at a party in The Village, nodding in angular bebop time with an eyes-closed piano player who danced a nervous shuffle in his pork-pie hat. Capote yawned: “Betty my dear, do you think that I should fly to Cannes with Jackie Kennedy? Or take the train to see that bad boy in Kansas?” Behind smudged glasses, his eyes strayed as a muscled boy tangoed an empty tray through the crowd. Betty kicked at him with a red pointy-toed shoe. “Damn it, Truman, first fetch me another drink. Two olives, lime twist and just a rumor of vermouth.” Truman rubbed his sore ankle, rolled off the settee and careened a rolling stumble across the room. Martini in one hand, Old Crow and Lucky Strike in the other, Capote returned, swayed and hiccuped back to her: “Cannes or Kansas, Betty?” Betty sipped in the smoky party, twirled the gla...

  Newcomer We scrambled over micah-flaked white quartz outcrops   that caught streaks of gold from the sun descending from Camel's Hump. Our hilltop playground of low fortresses, whales, dinner tables and dragon spines. Around the dirt road bend and through a lane of aging maples, Mary Azarian, a New Yorker, (so they say) moved to a gray-weathered farmhouse and  my grandma's unneighborly resentments. An Armenian banjo-picker husband augured Goddard College’s as-yet unnamed hippies down Plainfield way.    They didn’t farm the place or  hold down "real" jobs. She tied a red scarf round her billy goat’s neck and claimed she was an artist. The source of aversion was undivulged. Was it rock-ribbed conservatism? Puritan favor for “productive” work?   Depression-era calluses  rubbed into her farmer soul?     Only prejudice, unyielding like the sto...

These, except for an online version of It Could Have Happened Like This,  and Manoomin, are unpublished and I reserve copyright. I wrote as a lawyer, fundraiser, report-maker and supervisor daily for decades.  And a couple of articles, fact sheets, brochures and the like.  (A family member recently found me credited in a manual with information on the rights of Minnesota teens to obtain medical care.  I think that law is mainly unchanged; I hope so, since my last youth law work was in the mid-'90s.) Some great rewards from that work that I'll have to write about some day. But it was not until 2001 that I began to write creatively, just a little therapy piece of 40 pages, after troubles and beauty in Paris. Then I was invited to our friend Betty's 80th birthday with the charge to all being - "Only presents allowed are poetry."  And somehow, very quickly, I t Could Have Happened Like This happened.  Betty loved it. Soon thereafter, I took a cure for ...