Quote Of The Week

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Favorite Buildings

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Briefly, A Candle

Drifting through the day and the night he does his best to propel the monsters from his head. 'Space is the place' is the chant, but he knows not how to achieve such a feat of transport. He takes another sip of his brandy.

The candle burns out, and out he walks into the rain and all that lie ahead.

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

The Truth

"There is something very wonderful about music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do; it speaks through our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up, it puts noble feelings in us, it can make us cringe; and it can melt us to tears; and yet we have no idea how. It is a language by itself..."

Quote Of The Week

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

A.I.T.A. Hall Of Fame: The Hawks

In the early 1960s Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins recruited an all-Canadian lineup of musicians to be their backing band, The Hawks: guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson. In late 1963, the band split with Hawkins and began touring under the name Levon & The Hawks, and later as The Canadian Squires, before changing back to The Hawks. The band briefly contemplated the name The Crackers(!), but settled on The Band and began their ascent to stardom as Bob Dylan's live backing band, later recording a string of classic albums on their own, as well as collaborating with Dylan on the legendary Basement Tapes.

Download: "Leave Me Alone" by The Canadian Squires

Download: "He Don't Love You..." by The Hawks

Buy: The Best Of Ronnie Hawkins

The Bridge

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

'And The Days Are Just Not Enough'

And the days are just not enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
   Not shaking the grass.

Honor

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Quote Of The Week

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

56 Years Ago Today...

After a reported 18 shots of whiskey, the great Welsh author/poet Dylan Thomas stumbled out of the White Horse Tavern in the West Village and collapsed to the street. From there he was taken to the Chelsea Hotel, fell into a coma, and was taken to Saint Vincent's Hospital where he promptly died. Echoing his own famous words, he definitely didn't "go gentle into that good night."

Dig: Dylan Thomas' page on Poets.orgBuy: The Poems Of Dylan Thomas (book & CD)Buy: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog

To Be Alive

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but...

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Since 1947

All photos © 2009 Chris Arnade
(Except Montero's sign © 2009 Lee Greenfeld)

Rolling Thunder Detour

Bob Dylan & Allen Ginsberg

(Jack Kerouac's grave, 11/3/75)

Download: "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry"
(Live at Madison Square Garden, New York City, 1975)

Photo by Ken Regan

Quote Of The Week

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

Theme In Yellow

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

Nothing Left Inside

Charles "Biscuits" Montgomery

Rest In Peace

"Legendary hard rock drummer Chuck Biscuits, whose lengthy résumé included stints in such flagship underground acts as Black Flag and Social Distortion, died Saturday after a prolonged battle with throat cancer. He was 44." ... Story continues here: Chuck Biscuits: 1965-2009 (JG2 Land)

A.I.T.A. is happy to announce that Chuck's death was apparently an elaborate hoax. The MP3s will remain posted to now honor, rather than eulogize, the great drummer.

Download: "What Can You Believe" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

Download: "Yes, I know" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

Download: "My War" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

The Deuce

Dig: Forgotten NY Neighborhoods

Buy: Tales Of Times Square: Expanded Edition

Buy: Ghosts Of 42nd Street

Goin' In Style

He stares at the large, pock-marked container, filled with wooden debris, broken glass and discarded love. Its exterior is decorated with tribal names and symbols, old and new; familiar and foreign. The clashing colors tantalize. He leans in to touch — the silver is tacky and sticks to the tips of his increasingly sweaty fingers. He feels... Fucked-up inside. Knees shake and a twisting anticipation cramps his stomach; disorienting, yet soothing. He breaths deep the smell of burnt rags, dust, and drying paint. His mouth goes dry and bitter; eyes cloud. The past flashes, hard... Pain... Joy... Love lost... Coming back... Goin' back?

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Quote Of The Week

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Favorite Buildings

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Another Brother Gone

James "Dash" Costello
9/7/69 - 10/16/09
Rest In Peace
Recalling the good times, like singing "Summer Wind" at the top of our lungs in some dive bar in the city... Hanging out on the streets of upper Manhattan — or in the 14th Street tunnel — when we should've been in class... Goodbye, my friend.

Photo property of CHINO BYI

Quote Of The Week

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

Destruction

I come and go — the Demon tags along,
hanging around me like the air I breath;
each time I swallow he fills my burning lungs
with sinful cravings never satisfied.

Sometimes (for he knows my love of Art)
he visits in a seductive woman's form
and with the specious alibis of despair
inures my lips for squalid appetites.

Thereby he leads me out of God's regard,
spent and gasping — out to where the vast
barrens of Boredom stretch infinitely,

and here he hurls into my startled face
the open wounds, the rags they have soaked through,
and all Destruction's bloody bag of tricks!

Like A Snake Calling On The Phone

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." [from Being And Nothingness]

Nothing Means Nothing Anymore

Brendan Mullen
Rest In Peace
"Brendan Mullen, the founder of the Masque punk rock club in Hollywood that helped launch that vibrantly anarchic music scene on the West Coast in the late 1970s, died Monday after suffering a massive stroke two days earlier. He was 60." ... Story continues here: Local Punk Champion, Masque Founder Dies (LA Times)

Buy: Live At The Masque: Volume One (CD)
Buy: Live At The Masque: Nightmare In Punk Alley (book)
Buy: We Got The Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story Of L.A. Punk
Read: Brendan Mullen (Swindle Magazine profile)

Quote Of The Week

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

The Days In-between

Download: "The Great Train Robbery" by The Little Boys Blue
Download: "Night Train" by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames
Download: "The Trains" by The Nashville Ramblers
Download: "The Train Kept A Rollin'" by The Dogs
Download: "Two Trains Runnin'"* by Bob Dylan
Download: "Stop That Train" by Keith & Tex
Download: "Trains" by The Vapors
Buy: Steel Drivin' Man

* Live at the Finjan Club, 1962

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.