pt at large

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

Dr. Wendy Walsh psychologist Saturday, April 25 on CNN at about 2:45 PM In a weekly segment hosted by CNN anchor Frederica Whitfield.

Whitfield asks Walsh to respond to a viewer question. "We are a couple living in a small apartment. How can we maintain distance and avoid conflict in our small space?"

Dr. Wendy Walsh’s Answer

“There are two kinds of distance,” she says,”physical distance and emotional distance.”

“When emotions are running high we should not judge our partners by their coping ability. With this kind of stress, everyone has a certain neuro-chemistry that wires them to respond in a certain way when dealing with stress. So don’t go into this thinking I’m going to leave this person because they cannot endure the stress. Instead focus on forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.”

“Ask yourself every day what can I do to catch them doing something good and verbalize that. Because you want to water what you want to grow. Otherwise it inspires criticism and when you complement your partner it reminds your brain of why you fell in love with him/her in the first place.”

“Regarding physical distance, you need to talk about this especially in a small apartment. This is your corner, this is my corner, during these hours. Let’s make a game strategy for this team. Always think about it In times of conflict. If this relationship wins, then you both win.”

Walsh's advice about emotional distance can apply to everyone in the house/apartment. Making a team effort could quite possibly keep the team in the winning column by the time the period of isolation is over.

PS April 8, 2020 Corona Disease Guidance from City of Boston

WWOZ FM: Jazz and Heritage Festival Savior Part 2

April 25, 2020

More great responses from WWOZ radio hosts. Their answers lead to travels down memory lane.

Email to Brice White, DJ of Block Party

Brice, I'm loving listening to Jazz Festing in Place up here in the Boston area, just became a member of WWOZ last night.
Great opening Cajun song tonite, My Far Away Pal? on Crazy Cajun label.
(could not find) so the question...is there going be a set list of your show
tonight.
I tried checking "Last 100 songs" no luck but I sure do love listening to
New Orleans music, the original melting pot of American music.

From a fellow sheltering in place citizen:)

Two hours later...

Thanks for listening and supporting! Normally I post my playlist. I'll look for a way to do it since things are different now and I prerecorded. That track was My Far Away Cow by Abel on Crazy Cajun, it was a Dan Penn tune!

Take care!

Brice

 

Two hours later...

THIS started out as a thank you note until i got down the Dan Penn rabbit hole after reading your reply.

Thank you, Brice!
That was the most unusual Cajun song I ever heard so wanted to track it down and you did it with attribution to the writer as well.
RE playlist, I don’t want to give you more work to do, you’re doing enough to supply us with vintage music from your own collection . I appreciate you’re curating from your stacks of 45 rpms at home, possibly a silver lining to organize them, likely would never have happened in normal times.

I haven’t seen a 45 rpm for ages but that’s where I got my introduction to rock n roll…at Sammy Vincent’s in Pittsfield MA. That was the place to go for a bunch of us high schoolers after school. We were allowed to thumb through the disks in two large bins, take one out and play it on one of several small turntables and buy the ones we liked. Lots of cross pollination as we listened to choices we made. We knew about Elvis but it might have been the first time i heard “Tutti Fruiti”  and  then “Be Bop A Lula” by Gene Vincent.

While writing this, I discovered that the ‘fight song’ the high school football captain sang to an auditorium full of teenagers was actually a lift from Lionel Hampton’s Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop…  thus ”Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop, Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop, we’re gonna win this game tomorrow!” So it’s only taken me 50 years and a pandemic to suss this out!

WWOZ is coming to the rescue by re-imagining how to host Jazz Fest. I spent most of my afternoon looking our the window and playing Festing in Place. I’ve sent a blog post to my friends encouraging them to tune in. Who knows, they might be dancing around their kitchen tables just like me by the time Festing in Place is over.

I got a response to a query to WWOZ yesterday from Dave Akers, way cool.  I became a dues paying member as I was listening to my first day of Festing in Place. WWOZ is the best!

Keep on keepin’ on!
Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

PS
This link has the Dan Abel 1966 song on it. Upon second listen, it’s a double entendre isn’t it, I don’t believe he’s talkin’ about Bossy the cow... , this was an eye opener and written by a guy from Alabama…love the line "since that day there’s been an extra large Milky Way"
https://www.discogs.com/Abel-My-Far-Away-Cow/release/8745805

and this site sold the 45rpm that has that song in your pile of 45 rpms for $206 in 2012!
https://www.popsike.com/DAN-PENN-ABEL-CRAZY-CAJUN-45-MY-FAR-AWAY-COW/260924418779.html

MORE!
I just discovered this guy Dan Penn is a major hit machine! I was gobsmacked to see the list of his songs familiar to anyone who has listened to radio for the past 50 years, hits recorded by luminaries from several genres.
https://www.tablyrics.com/artist-dan-penn-chords-lyrics
Serious credentials! this list is crazy good! 117 songs composed!

Dan Penn's Lyrics & Chords from the same site.
Wallace Daniel Pennington (16 November 1941 -) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and sometime guitar player who co-wrote many soul hits of the 1960s including "Dark End of the Street" & "Do Right Woman" (with Chips Moman) and "Out of Left Field" & "Cry Like A Baby" (with Spooner Oldham). Penn has also produced hits such as "The Letter" by The Box Tops, amongst others. Though he is considered to be one of the great white soul singers, Penn has a meagre recorded output, preferring the relative anonymity of songwriting & producing.

Finally this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Penn

You are making the most out of a crisis by giving your audience the gift of your personal vault of 45 rpms!

Thanks again!
PT

 

 

 

 

WWOZ FM: Jazz and Heritage Festival Savior Part 1

April 24, 2020

To: <[email protected]>

In Boston (Watertown to be precise), loving listening to Jazzfesting In Place, brilliant gift to music lovers worldwide. If there was ever a time I needed it, this is the time, a respite from important news I need to know but… I need  music to balance frame of mind and remind me of the palliative pleasure of listening to music in times when i can’t leave the house in the time of stay at home mandate, let alone listen to it and support it in live performances..or to go out dancing. As much as I dearly miss all this I value my life and the lives of those I walk by even more.
Sooo, i hope you can answer this question.

Listening to a Patricia Boutté backed by Paul Longstreth funky rolling classic New Orleans take on a traditional song as I write this and I am  boogying along in my chair in front of my desktop.
QUESTION what was the title of this song Patricia sang just before her “Bourbon Street Parade”?

Many many thanks from a grateful listener
Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
PS
have visited New Orleans and SW Louisiana for years, one muddy weekend at Jazz Fest as well.
Just contributed to WWOZ at Saxophone level $100. I am right on key with y’all:)

April 25, 2020

Paul - thanks for reaching out!  And for your very generous support.  It's because of music lovers like you that we can keep doing what we do!

 

The Tricia Boutte cover song you're looking for was "Dreamland," originally a classic 1966 reggae track by Bunny Wailer, but now given a New Orleans feel.  Her version of the track is on a CD called "Oh New Orleans Here I Come."   It was a great set, wasn't it? 

 

I hope you can keep listening, and that you stay safe

 

Dave A

Dave Ankers

Director of Content

WWOZ 90.7 FM New Orleans and wwoz.org

April 25, 2020

Hey Dave!

Thanks for your reply, another reason to love WWOZ. 

 

There are no known counterparts anywhere in the world to New Orleans music, food, people, and radio stations. Anyone with a beating heart will tell you that after a visit to New Orleans where you keep your eyes and ears open, talk to folks on the street cars, get used to being called “Baby” by  women and men who you’ve known all of ten seconds, smell the food, and feel a vibe that hums just at the bottom threshold of hearing and resonates in your heart like a tuning fork every time i visit. My Lafayette friends took me to the Krewe du Vieux parade into Frenchmen Street in 2019. I still have an Abita Beer bottlecap with image of Brett Kavanaugh inside w caption “I still like beer.” You get the picture.

 

I tuned in during Tricia Boutées set.

"Hey Siri, What’s the name of this song, I asked.She was stumped. I suppose i shoulda known better than to ask.

Trust me, after watching a few hours of news, I am so ready to tune in to Jazzfest in Place, a brilliant idea. You rose from the debris to stage Mardi Gras in 2005. You figured out a way to gift it to the world this week during the time of the virus.

 

It appears that you all dove into the archives of thousands of performances and cherry picked the ones that would give us the medicine we need in the time of the virus. What a mammoth undertaking. In truth, you could probably thrown darts at the list and come up with winners because the depth of New Orleans talent is deeper than Stellwagon Bank off the shores of Boston. And bravo that you pick New Orleans musicians and singers not headliners from ‘out of town’. I’m throwing a bouquet to Boutée and Thomas and Cleary and Barker and Ball and Richard and the Nevilles, each and every one will make my stay in place at home life richer not to mention give me a workout. You ever see a man second lining around his kitchen table? No? Well, you ain’t been lookin at me. Parasol and all, baby.

 

It is a pleasure to support a station so tuned in to the psyches of of New Orleans and New Orleanians at heart.

 

Thanks again, Dave. I’ll be listening.  Next to a face mask and washing my hands, this is the best way to stay safe, sound, and find joy at the same time. No small accomplishment.

 

2010 - my first Jazz Fest. I haven’t been the same man since.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2010/05/the-41st-annual-new-orleans-jazz-and-heritage-festival-part-2.html

 

Thanks again, Dave

Onward…with a beat!

 

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

"Jazz Festing in Place" April 23 – 26 and April 30 – May 3

A BRILLIANT WORK AROUND...NEW ORLEANS FIGURES OUT HOW TO KEEP ITS CROWN JEWEL SHINING IN THE TIME OF A PANDEMIC!

"Jazz Festing in Place" April 23 – 26 and April 30 – May 3

With over 130 festivals a year in New Orleans, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is the colossus of them all - "One of the world's greatest cultural celebrations. The annual springtime event spanning 10 days, with thousands of musicians playing on 12 stages and attracts almost 500,000 culture-crazed fans from around the world."

What does Jazz Fest mean to New Orleans? In 2001, favorite son Louis Armstrong's 100th birthday, 650,000 people packed the 145 acre Fair Grounds Race for one weekend of the celebration of music and culture.

In 2006, the festival was held 6 months after Katrina devastated the city. No Jazz Fest? No way! Tradition holds New Orleans together like a roux holds together gumbo.

A plague in 2020? Jazz Fest was cancelled. But...

WWOZ FM, the umbilical cord to New Orleans music on the air waves, created Jazz Festing In Place, two weekends of curated performances from way back. Put a camp chair in your living room, soak some red beans, boil the rice, put on your dance shoes when the spirit moves you. Jazz Festing In Place happens in the exact hours the two weekend festival would have gone down. Hallelujah.

Friday, April 24 4 PM...at home

After a few hours of counter-balancing the voices of CNN and Fox News, I was worn down.

Chloroquine may or may not be a palliative to treat Covid-19.  But music...oh baby, in a nanosecond, my psyche is on a chariot ride to exuberant cosmic heights. Jazz Festing Online is on the radio runway. Fasten safety belt. In seconds, I'm lifting off, circling the earth in my own Jazzfest skywriter.

I'm flying on Air WWOZ and Jazz Festing In Place...Online!

https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/

New Orleans' bid to keep the juice of Jazz Fest, the most enduring gift that city gives to its residents and people from all over the world, is alive and well.

This is the lineup that was to be...

https://www.neworleans.com/event/new-orleans-jazz-%26-heritage-festival-(cancelled)/3197/ (lists big name artists; for my money, the scores of local bands/musicians that play are why I came in 2010).

This is the brilliant Plan B, cherry picked rock the house performances from as far back as 1977, online and in the same time slots as they would have been at the Fairgrounds Race Track. New Orleans is arguably the well from which American music was drawn. The set that closed Friday's Festing In Place was Fats Domino's  2001 performance. The Fat Man from the Lower 9th ward was in great form.

https://www.wwoz.org/640011-jazz-festing-place-cubes

Reproducing the energy of Jazz Fest on the radio is a daunting task but these performances taped live, dang, you can hear the crowd's unabashed shouts and cheers to performers on the outdoor stages. The energy came in waves from people in camp chairs, or sprawled on blankets, umbrellas popped up to ward off rain or the beating sun. From the heavens, it must look like a carpet of mushrooms topped with rainbow sprinkles.

Jazz Fest has always been an interactive experience. Now we just recreate it virtually, listening in our living rooms, kitchens and porches as we shelter in place. Interactive with distance!

Today, late Friday, I tuned in to listen to Patricia Boutté, backed by Paul Longstreth, with a funky rolling classic New Orleans take on a traditional song as I write this and boogying along right in my chair in front of my desktop. Boutté follows with the ultra classic "Bourbon Street Parade" written by drummer Paul Barbarin in 1949.  Followed by her cover of  "Going to the Mardi Gras" , originally recorded by Professor Longhair in 1959, a monumental figure in New Orleans history. By the way, here's his recording of "Tipitina," whose rolling rumba style is so totally New Orleans.

NOTE: Reason I love WWOZ: Siri couldn't figure out the name of Patricia Boutée's first song so I shot an email to the station. A few  hours later..."The Tricia Boutte cover song you're looking for was "Dreamland," originally a classic 1966 reggae track by Bunny Wailer, but now given a New Orleans feel.  Her version of the track is on a CD called "Oh New Orleans Here I Come."   It was a great set, wasn't it?" From Dave Ankers, Director of Content, WWOZ 90.7 FM New Orleans and wwoz.org  

How cool was that!

Boutée's rambunctious energy is followed by Kenny Neal's slow groove "How Time Slips Away," recorded at 2018 Jazz Fest. It is so eerily perfect for life in the time of pandemic. Time is indeed slipping away, but not in a way we ever imagined.

Friday's Jazz Festing in Place ends with Irma Thomas, The Soul Queen of New Orleans, 2006 set. It was the first Jazz fest since Katrina ruined New Orleans in August 2005. The city still smelled like mud that day. Irma kicked it off with my favorite, "It's Raining In My Heart." New Orleans audiences, especially at Jazz Fest, take it as an obligation to shout out to the singers. Irma stokes that fire, calls out, "We're still here!" You can imagine the response.

By this time her set closes, I'm dancing in the kitchen, grateful for the gift of music and its power to heal. An odd piece of synchronicity. Katrina's shadow still hovered over New Orleans, bruised and perhaps broken and caked with mud, in 2006.

The Covid-19 virus is killing us in 2020. We're in a mandate to stay home. Unprecedented. A nightmare with a death toll. On that day in April, Irma delivered the sermon, a lesson in survival and resilience and succor. New Orleans needed it then. We can use that same sermon today.

"Put your handkerchiefs in the air," she shouts, a signal she's ending her show and the day at the mandatory 7 PM closing time.

Here comes "Iko Iko." You know damn well the crowd was shakin' what the maker gave 'em and second lining on what is left of the grass on the infield of the New Orleans Fairground and Racetrack. New Orleans survived Katrina. Covid-19 is another order of magnitude.

 

"March the Ninth Twenty Twenty" : A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, Italy

March 23, 2020

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

A day in the midst of a pandemic...
A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, trans. by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford

From Edizione Black Coffee written in Italian *
https://lithub.com/march-the-ninth-twenty-twenty/

Published on March 23, the poem

The poet's sentiment resonated with me. I spent time in Rome in June 2018 and in Rome, Castelfiorentino, Florence, Siena, and Bologna in 2019. I've walked the streets, been seduced by the architecture, colors, cobbled streets, sounds the expressive Italian language, a linguistic Tarantella echoing in my ears. I swear I've been on the same street as the photo accompanying Mariangela's poem. I worry about the health of the people I met in my hotel, restaurants  and shops I visited.

The poem speaks truth across continents and oceans. It was true for Mariangela Gualtieri the day she wrote it. It is true for me as I read it.

The poet's two words "I think" in the final stanza, are aspirational. It remains to be seen if, in the words of the poet, "Our hand will be more delicate in the doing of life now that we know how sad it is to stand one meter apart."

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

I’m telling you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt it
that it was too furious,
our frenzy. Being inside of things.
Outside of our selves.
Squeeze every hour – make it yield.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
We needed to do it together.
Slow down the race.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human force
that could hold us back.

And since this
was for all of us a tacit wish
like an unconscious will –
perhaps our species has obeyed
loosened the bonds that protect
our seed. Opened
the innermost cracks
and let it in.
Perhaps this is why there was a leap
in the species – from the bat to us.
Something in us wanted to be opened.
Perhaps, I don’t know.

Now we are at home.

It is extraordinary what is happening.
And there is gold, I believe, in this strange time.
Perhaps there are gifts.
Nuggets of gold for us. If we help one another.
There is a very strong call
of the species now and as a species
we must each see ourselves. A common fate
holds us here. We knew it. But not well enough.
Either all of us, or no one.

The earth is powerful. Truly alive
I feel it thinking a thought
that we do not know.
And with what’s happening now? Let us consider
whether the earth is not what’s moving.
Whether the law that rules
the entire universe, whether what’s happening, I wonder,
isn’t the full expression of that law
that governs us too – just like
every star – every particle of the cosmos.

Whether the dark matter was this
being bound together in an ardor
for life, with the sweep of death that comes
to rebalance every species.
Keep it within its dimensions, in its place,
going in the right direction. It is not us
who made heaven.

An imposing voice, without words
tells us to stay home now, like children
who are in trouble and don’t know why,
and won’t get kisses, won’t be hugged.
Each within a suspension
that takes us back, perhaps to the slowness
of ancient ancestors, of mothers.

Look more at the sky,
daub a dead man ochre. Bake bread
for the first time. Look intently at a face. Sing
a child softly to sleep. For the first time
hold someone else’s hand tight
feel the strength of the agreement. That we are together.
A single organism. The whole species
we carry within us. We are saving it inside us.

To that grasp of a palm
in another person’s palm
to that simple act that we are now forbidden –
we will return with expanded awareness.
We’ll be here, more attentive, I think. Our hand
will be more delicate in the doing of life.
Now that we know how sad it is
to stand one meter apart.

My friends at La Dispenza del Podere in Rome

Bologna - Centro Storico

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

Gambit - Subscribe for New Orleans Food, Culture, and Life

"Would you email me quote about what Gambit means to you?" publisher Jeanne Foster asked me after I subscribed recently (her email under the story).

The Gambit provides exactly what it promises - news, events calendar, film, music, food, drink, lifestyle, design/decor, free  and fun stuff, info for tickets to just about everything going on in the city (during the pandemic hardly anything).

My response...

Hello Jeanne, 

In response to your request, I started sending you a quote about what the Gambit means to me and this is what happened as I thought about it.

Especially now, I want to feel the energy of New Orleans and its people.

In 2008, I asked a girlfriend, born and raised in Baton Rouge, to take me there for a long weekend. “Honey, if we go, we’re not going for a few days, we’re going for two weeks!” Sort of like the analog to Me and Bobby McGee but instead of singing every song that we knew to that trucker, she took me to every good place that she knew from Tipitina’s to a favorite restaurant in Lake Charles to Phil Brady’s and her sisters' homes in Baton Rouge to the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette and the reknowned Whiskey River Landing (that sadly closed in August 2018) in Henderson. I've written about all of these places.

“I haven’t been the same man since,” I’ve joked with her. It’s no understatement. That the trip changed the course of my life (subject for another story). I’ve visited NOLA and SW Louisiana scores of time since then. 

I’ve seen the struggle New Orleans has been going through since the storm. I have a sense of what is  being lost as New Orleans gets to its new normal. The forces of the tourist industry aiming to make New Orleans a tourist destination and the struggle of neighborhoods like the Marigny and Tremé losing the battle with gentrification and resulting dislocation of generations of the people who represent the core of New Orleans spirit, have consequences.

So what keeps holding it together? Music and everything associated with it, musicians, second lines, the recharging value until recently of Satchmo Summerfest (that I’ve witnessed several times) and French Quarter Festival (which i have not witnessed…yet) and the street performers and buskers of just about every type that are like cultural musical fairy dust sprinkled over street corners in the  French Quarter day and night. And in spite of the harshness of trying to make a living with limited resources, the unfailing open hearted friendliness of everyday people I encounter on street trolleys, casual conversations with taxi drivers or hotel workers or on street  corners in the French Quarter or buskers on Frenchmen Street, represent New Orleans in style and substance.

What else? The still strong bond that keep families together through thick and thin, held together by food, music, love, and fish fries and crawfish boils in back yards or sidewalks that have been going on for as long as anyone can remember. All of it is elusive to define but like the smell of frying catfish and wafts of aromatic smoke from the grill and the smell of your clothes after you’ve spent a few hours hanging out on a stoop or your camp chair or maybe even the couch that someone drug out of their living room and plunked on the sidewalk for the occasion...that's the spirit of New Orleans

My friends from Lafayette took me to the Krewe de Vieux Mardi Gras parade in the French Quarter in 2019, the most recent visit. I don't have to tell you about the wonderfully outrageous creative decidedly non politically correct satire - and the throws to match - floating around the corner and on to Frenchmen Street.

Full of contradictions, New Orleans has the nation’s highest official poverty rate (18.6%) among the 50 largest metropolitan areas  according to the 2017 census. Admittedly I see only part of the city and base everything I’m saying on my limited experience. What if it were possible to determine richness in terms of spirit or attitude or determination to keep on keeping on despite income? I don’t know. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about it to diminish its effect on New Orleanians. I guess what I’m thinking is that there’s a difference between poverty in dollars and poverty in spirit.

The New Orleans in my limited experience is rich in spirit.

I never tire of telling friends about New Orleans and SW Louisiana.

Jeanne this was my first impression of New Orleans on our trip August 6, 2008

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2008/08/bourbon-street-to-jackson-square-the-many-faces-of-new-orleans-french-quarter.html

I intended to send you a short response to why I read Gambit. Not possible. Every time I read that story in the link, I get a  flashback to a memory impressed like a watermark on my Yankee psyche. It makes me happy, no small achievement these days, and pine for the day I can return.

Writing this response was great therapy in this time of pandemic, staying indoors as per the state orders didn’t mean i was prohibited from takin’ ride down to New Orleans. 

Be safe

My heart goes out to Louisianans suffering from COVID-19

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

xxxxx

           Dear Gambit Community,

I wanted to send a note, thanking you for becoming a Gambit Community Member and  /or Adopting-a-Small Business.  My inbox is always open to your ideas on what you would like to see in Gambit (in print and online), I take your feedback to heart.

 

GAMBIT has been a staple in many New Orleanians’ lives for almost 40 years, and I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to work alongside talented journalists, creative designers and brilliant marketing professionals to bring journalism and entertainment news to our readers for more than 18 of those years.

 

This month we are trying to reach 1,000 new members, please help us share this campaign on social media and invite your friends and family to support local journalism too.

 

Also, if you would like to email me a quote on what Gambit means to you, I would love to publish it in an upcoming edition.

 

Thank you again for your support and stay safe,

 

 Jeanne

Jeanne Exnicios Foster

Publisher

Gambit 

xxxx

RESPONDING TO THIS REQUEST below, this my mini campaign to support New Orleans by suggesting you get a splash of New Orleans goings on  and support journalism in the time of pandemic. Journalism was on shaky ground even before the pandemic. If you'd like to support one of the main outlets trumpeting the range of the city's goings on and the spirit infused in it, consider signing up to become a Community Reader for $5.00/month. That's what I did.

What Day Is It?

It's taken me three weeks to get used to feeling unmoored to daily schedule. I have to check my iPhone to figure out what day of the week it is. I can tell if it's day or night, refine that to morning or afternoon by looking outside. I need a schedule or I feel like I'm trying to hold water in my hands. I tune into Governor Andrew "FDR" Cuomo every morning for a dose of facts from a man with command of them, a sense of empathy aimed at New Yorkers, the elderly, the entire medical community, neighboring Governors of New Jersey and Connecticut,  the Federal government when applicable, and clearly separates the facts from his opinion. The whole country tunes in for his daily fireside chat.

I need a sense of structure and routine each day to counter a world out of control just outside my door...so, I ...

• play whatever appeals to me from a pile of CDs I haven't listened to in ages... classical (Claude Debussy's "Images 1894, Series I, II),Glenn Gould's "Back Goldberg Variations" recorded in 1955); Jazz (The Modern Jazz Quartet (Lonely Woman 1987), Bill Evans "Conversations With Myself" 1963); Django Reinhart (Jazz Masters 38); Opera (Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheoghiu "Duets and Arias").

• reconcile months and months of my checkbook

• finish at least one household task on my long to do list

• look out the window

• let a day go by doing not much of anything

• improvise the day's meals with an ever diminishing supply of food in cupboard, fridge and freezer

• learn how to order groceries online (still feels so strange)

• get lost in youtube rabbit holes

• download Zoom to talk with a bunch of friends, make sure i shave and have a decent backdrop for the session

• wash my hands

• worry about running out of toilet paper

• get over feeling like a Martian on the rare times I go to the market and wear my mask

• steer clear of others in the one way aisles in the market

• obsessively worry about how to wipe down every damn thing from the grocery store

• have a staging area just inside the door before taking anything inside

• appreciate silence

• take a walk every night around midnight

MIDNIGHT RAMBLES: Not a sound outside, nothing, no cars, no people, the silence is unsettling and eerie.

 

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Pandemic: You Gotta Have Heart

April 5, 2020

As far back as The Plague of 1348, art was created in some form or another to counter grim reality.  Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, with ten stories that ranged from witty to bawdy,during the plague in Italy. Any way to keep the plague at bay. Today we're emailing friends, long lost or near and dear. It's diversion, but more important, it's gathering our friends around a figurative communal campfire.

In the Art vs Virus department, my neighbors are putting up a fight. As the song goes, "You Gotta Have Heart."

They're displaying teddy bears and rainbows in their windows. We need to be amused, consoled, but more than anything, feel a sense of community.  Just the search for something to display made me feel good...ended up hanging Mardi Gras beads on my front porch and displaying a goofy puppet of Santa Claus in the front window. I was in my '"we're all in this together" mode.

Taking a page from Boston's Sidewalk Sam of yore, my neighbor ordered a bucket of chalk and drew radiant rainbow hearts on every section. Aside from a trip to the grocery or drug store, a walk around the neighborhood is one of our only options in the Stay Home reality. That sidewalk was the show for several days. It took two days of rain to erase the chalk. The joy I felt after seeing of those knockout colors and the memory of watching her create the mini masterpiece with her son? It's still there.

Break out the chalk...

   

With a little help from her son...

   

and teaching moments..."I need the yellow chalk now, can you find a piece?"
 

my neighbor lights up the sidewalk...

Use what makes you feel good...for me, Mardi Gras beads I've collected from numerous Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans and Lafayette and a "throw" from (Krewe de Vieux) 2019 Mardi Gras parade on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans; and a goofy puppet of Santa Claus!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Venus and Trump

During my midnight rambles up the hills in my neighborhood, I walk right up the middle of Palfrey Street.  The Stay at home mandate = no cars = less pollution overhead. Watertown is right under jet flyway routes leaving Logan Airport. Not now.

I have never seen Venus this bright in the evening sky.

Why such a clear sky?

The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe shed light on the subject.  Virus or no virus, we’re all in it together as far as the environment is concerned.

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Boston Globe Editorial: April 8, 2020

Trump’s team finds new ways to harm our health

Polluters already were enjoying a reduction in enforcement, but the administration keeps on giving. Lawmakers should keep pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency.

Even as the White House bungles its response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration is endangering public health in other ways — by eliminating or undermining protection of our air and water.

It’s bad enough that this is happening during a pandemic outbreak of a respiratory illness, given that air pollution worsens lung disease in general and appears to be having the same effect with COVID-19. But the effects of various rollbacks in pollution standards could linger long after this crisis subsides.

During his time in office, Trump has ransacked the environment so vigorously that advisory boards appointed by his own administration have criticized the administration’s disregard for scientific evidence in its approach to regulating pollution. Last week, the White House finalized a plan to cut vehicle gas-mileage requirements to a degree that was even more extreme than the deregulation sought by several automakers. And yet Trump and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, keep finding new ways to give industry a pass when it comes to contaminating the environment.

On March 26, the EPA announced that it will refrain from requiring companies, including oil refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities, to monitor and report their discharges of hazardous material if those companies can show that the coronavirus got in the way of such work. As a result, companies that were already enjoying a reduction in the enforcement of pollution rules under Trump now have a new excuse for avoiding responsible stewardship of the air and water. The public is left to hope and pray that companies don’t exploit this moment and instead continue to uphold their obligations to avoid poisoning communities.

Companies that release hazardous pollutants may be keeping many employees home to slow the spread of the virus. But if the facilities are still staffed enough to operate as normal with employees on production lines — as many power plants and petrochemical facilities are — they should be able to keep looking for leaks, testing emissions, and reporting discharges, says Eric Schaeffer, who formerly directed civil enforcement at the EPA and now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

Schaeffer argues that the EPA didn’t have to deviate so far from the process it usually follows when natural disasters or pipeline breaks force companies out of compliance with environmental rules: The agency writes specific, short-term waivers. But this EPA didn’t put a time limit on its COVID-19 policy. Companies are instead urged to “return to compliance as quickly as possible.”

Perhaps it seems there’s some margin for environmental error now, with overall air pollution way down as stay-at-home advisories keep people out of their cars. But that’s not true for the employees and neighbors of big industrial facilities. “If you’re living next to a smelter, or a metal-finishing operation, or a refinery, it’s business as usual for them. They could be putting out stuff that’s pretty nasty,” Schaeffer says. And those toxins are very likely to go undetected if the companies stop monitoring what they’re putting into the air and water. “The problem with most pollutants is that they don’t have color, they don’t have taste, they don’t have sound,” he says.

To put it another way: If industrial facilities can’t say whether they’re operating safely, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to operate at all.

RELATED: Editorial: Don't let Trump poison the air

Overturning some of Trump’s most damaging environmental policies, especially ones related to global warming, will require voters to throw him out of office. But it’s still worth trying to persuade the administration to rethink the pollution-monitoring holiday and other unhealthy policies it’s formulating. Six senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, asked the EPA last week to halt “several proposals that would likely have a negative impact on air quality and public health.” These proposals cover, among other things, the allowable amounts of mercury, methane, and coal ash in the environment.

Such requests could make a difference, even now.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, the EPA was in a hurry to sharply reduce the influence of public-health studies on environmental regulations. Wheeler has been claiming, disingenuously, that epidemiological research is insufficiently transparent unless its raw data, including individual medical records, are publicly released. Wheeler and his Republican allies know full well that releasing such data could be unethical or illegal, and their real goal is to discredit the studies.

In March, the EPA opened up a relatively brief 30-day window for public comment on this insidious proposal; nearly 24,000 comments have come in. But in light of the disruption caused by COVID-19, critics asked for more time to respond and the EPA extended the comment period to May. Anyone concerned about the intimate connection between the environment and our health should be sure to weigh in.

In the meantime, Congress should keep the heat on the EPA to continue enforcing the nation’s pollution rules amid the pandemic. Public health depends on it.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. /iPhone 11 Pro

Hilary Sallick Poetry: Asking The Form

 Hilary Sallick’s web site is one of the cleanest, most seamless, easily navigated, and transparently spirited that I have seen in a long time. Then there’s the matter of content, graphic and literary, and how it is demonstrated.  In her new collection, Asking The Form, her concept of using audio clips to read her poems embedded in the site is brilliant. How often do you get a sense of content and the author in the same moment? The result makes an indelible impression that, like the puffy parachutes of a milkweed pod, can float in your memory for a languorously long time.

The photographs of her on the site evoke an image, a notion, of the woman behind the stanzas, from whom the words were created, formed, rewritten, reformed and finally hammered into print. A friend recommended her previous collection, Winter Roses, a collection of poems and  vignettes that capture mystery and wonder. Most are constructed like an artist's still life, a moment in time to be savored. It's unusual for vignettes to be included in a work of poetry but Sallick's vignettes have the same balance of opacity and specificity as her poems.

The three poems from her new collection, Asking The Form, are reproduced on her web site, with the benefit of her reading them aloud. Her poetry is more about flow, mood, and reflective observation than meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure.

Writers like Sallick elevate events so ordinary in our own lives that we don't register them. After reading Winter Roses, I was more conscious of the mini dramas occurring all around me, in the street, cafés, and subways. For Sallick, they are her palette. The colors she chooses give us a glimmer of the woman forging the words.

The book cover, Paul Cézanne's portrait of Gustave Geffroy, a subject of one of her poems, is a metaphor for her own style. As in Cézanne's portrait, the viewer/reader is left to fill in unfinished or suggested elements with their own experience.

As a teacher, artist, poet, woman, human being with the antennae to absorb her surroundings, she transforms uniquely personal experience into moments that readers can relate to, and feel resonate internally like a tuning fork, with moments we’ve experienced ourselves.

Such is poetry, the compact art form that, in a few stanzas, can illuminate, resonate, uplift, affirm, and manage to be mysterious and comprehensible all in the same layered moment.