Category: Uncategorized

The Wife turns…another year older

Lots of people ask if my wife speaks another language besides English. She does – Spanish – but it isn’t used much since almost everything in ESL is taught in English.

It’s always interesting, talking about other people while endeavoring to respect their boundaries. The Wife has never said, “Don’t put my age in your blog.” But I’ve been reluctant to anyway. I have noted that she is younger than I (which is far less revealing than if I were to say that someone was older than I.) One CAN assume she’s over 31 since we’ve been married for over 13 years.

Every year on this date, I write something about her, but I have no idea whether she ever reads it. And I used to TELL her I was writing something.

One of the things I have alluded to is the fact that she is a teacher of English as a Second Language. She works for an entity called BOCES which provides all sorts of training to several school districts in a given area. For five years, she was teaching entirely in two schools in one school district. This year, however, that district decided to hire its own ESL teacher, which means that the Wife had a new assignment, which ended up being three schools in two school districts in two different counties. Suffice to say, taking public transportation for her job has become impossible, unlike mine, which is at one place almost every day.

ESL seems to be misunderstood. Lots of people ask if my wife speaks another language besides English. She does – Spanish – but it isn’t used much since almost everything is taught in English, the lingua franca. It is often assumed that the first language for most of her students is Spanish, when in fact she’s had a lot of kids who speak Urdu (pictured, via Wikipedia) or Chinese.

The Wife went back to school in 1999 and graduated in 2002. Going back to school was scary, I imagine (it was for me!), but she excelled at it.

I suspect that one day she’ll be an administrator – she’s taken subsequent courses to that end – though I suspect she’d miss the day-to-day activity of the classroom.

Well, that’s enough for this year. Happy birthday, dear.

Woody Guthrie would have been 100

The centennial of Woody Guthrie’s birth has turned out to be more significant to me than I would have thought 20 or 30 years ago.


As I have noted, my father was a singer of folk songs when I was growing up in Binghamton, NY. I did not usually know the source of the tunes that he performed, though I have subsequently have been discovered some of this information.

Back around 2002 or 2003, The Wife and I went to see Woody Guthrie’s American Song at Capital Rep Theatre, when this brace of songs, Worried Man and Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way came up. Both of them were in my father’s repertoire, especially the former. This was a couple of years after my father died, and I just lost it. The Car Song was also a Woody tune my dad sang, I’ve come to realize.

Of course, I was a big fan of This Land Is Your Land, mostly the versions by Guthrie’s good friend Pete Seeger. But it wasn’t until later when I learned all those great verses that one didn’t usually hear, such as those about No Trespassing, and the relief office.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, I was probably more a fan of Woody’s son Arlo, of Alice’s Restaurant fame. Woody had died in 1967 and was a remote figure to me.

Woody came alive again for me, though, because of a pair of albums that came out at the end of the last century, Mermaid Avenue, volumes 1 and 2, where Billy Bragg and the band Wilco completed song fragments by Woody. The albums have been re-released with additional material.

The centennial of Woody Guthrie’s birth has turned out to be more significant to me than I would have thought 20 or 30 years ago.

Woody singing:
Jesus Christ
Do Re Mi
This Land Is Your Land

Coverville 884: The Woody Guthrie Cover Story

Michael Eck’s Top 10 Woody Guthrie Collaborations

Woody Guthrie at 100 by Jim Hightower

Woody Guthrie at 100: The Return of a Pariah by Billy Bragg. “Woody Guthrie was shunned by his home state. Now Oklahoma can finally embrace the singer-songwriter’s work.”

Where’s Woody when we need him? He’s right there, inside each of us.

Roger McGuinn is 70

In those early days, the “Beatles were vocal in their support of The Byrds, publicly acknowledging them as creative competitors and naming them as their favorite American group. “


The Byrds, as this video makes clear, were a group of ex-folkies who were under the influence of the Beatles. They took a Bob Dylan song, processed it with a touch of Beach Boys!, which led to a number one single in the US and the UK, Mr. Tambourine Man (listen) in 1965. McGuinn’s “jangly” twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar also is featured on the US #1, Pete Seeger’s take on the book of Ecclesiastes, Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There is a Season) (listen).

As Wikipedia notes, the Byrds “were pivotal in originating the musical styles of folk-rock, psychedelic rock, raga rock, and country-rock. The band underwent several line-up changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member of the group until their disbandment in 1973.” And I followed them through the many sometimes stormy permutations. When David Crosby left the group just before the release of The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968), he was pictured on the album cover as the backside of an equine.

In those early days, the “Beatles were vocal in their support of The Byrds, publicly acknowledging them as creative competitors and naming them as their favorite American group. A number of authors…have noted The Byrds influence on The Beatles’ late 1965 album Rubber Soul, most notably on the songs Nowhere Man and If I Needed Someone (listen), the latter of which utilizes the same guitar riff as The Byrds’ cover of The Bells of Rhymney (listen).”

Other hits by the Byrds – with musical links:
Eight Miles High (1966), one of the first examples of psychedelic rock
Mr. Spaceman (1966)
So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star (1967)
My Back Pages (1967) – another Dylan cover
You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (1968) – from the classic country-rock album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo

And though the group broke up back in 1973, Roger McGuinn has kept busy in the music business, as one can read on his website. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

But my favorite factoid about the leader of the group is this:
James Roger McGuinn (born James Joseph McGuinn III), known professionally as Roger McGuinn…When he originally started with The Byrds, he used the name Jim, which he thought to be too plain. During 1965 McGuinn briefly explored the Subud spiritual association… McGuinn changed his name in 1967 after Subud’s founder Bapak told him it would better “vibrate with the universe.” Bapak sent Jim the letter “R” and asked him to send back ten names starting with that letter. Owing to a fascination with airplanes, gadgets and science fiction, he sent names like “Rocket”, “Retro”, “Ramjet”, and “Roger”, the latter a term used in signaling protocol over two-way radios, military and civil aviation. Roger was the only “real” name in the bunch and Bapak chose it.

Good pick. Happy birthday, Roger McGuinn.

Mary Durkot, R.I.P.

We have to to help each other remove the bindings of our collective grief.

I attended my third funeral of 2012 last week. But let me back up a bit.

Mary Durkot was the mother of one of my oldest friends, as in my friend and I went to kindergarten together. This means I knew Mrs. Durkot – I never referred to her by her first name – for over a half century. She lived in Binghamton, NY, my hometown, all of her 92 years.

One of the last times I saw her was when my daughter was a baby. She took such pleasure in seeing her, as though Lydia were one of her own grandchildren.

On June 30, the day before she passed, all four of her children, along with several of her grandchildren and great grandchildren, spent the day with her, as my friend put it, “laughing and cracking wise.” This was pretty remarkable in that only one of the children live in Binghamton, with the others in Boston, Brooklyn and near Baltimore.

Unsurprisingly, she had arranged and paid for her wake and funeral years earlier; she even picked out the dress she wanted to buried in.

The Wife and I arrived at the funeral home about 5:15 last Thursday evening. My friend did not know I was coming, since I was not 100% sure myself. She seemed shocked, but pleased with my presence. Some of our mutual friends came by, including the sister and the mother of our mutual friend Carol (not to be confused with my wife Carol). At 6:30, there was a prayer service. This was in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and while I had grown up in this Slavic neighborhood, this was likely the first funeral of this style I had attended. A lot of chant, a bit of repetition. I tried to pick up on the sonic rhythm, occasionally successfully.

Friday morning was the brief prayer event at the funeral home, followed by the 2/5s of a mile funeral procession to the church, which we found ourselves part of. More chanting and prayer, followed by a homily that I really liked. The narrative was based on the scripture where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. The priest noted that Jesus did not remove Lazarus’ burial cloth, and that Lazarus was unable to remove it himself. It was up to the others to help Lazarus. In the same manner, we have to to help each other remove the bindings of our collective grief.

During the procession to the cemetery, the hearse broke down! (On Clinton Street, for you Binghamtonians). The procession was scheduled to go past the house on Mygatt Street where Mrs. D lived for many years. The house was sold only last December. The running joke was that, while the house was very nice, the new owners kept the hedges THREE INCHES higher than Mary would have liked. Most of the cars went onto the cemetery, but the pallbearers returned to where the hearse broke down to put the coffin in the back of someone’s pickup truck. It WAS a nice pickup. There are several cellphone pictures of the back of the truck, with the flap down, showing the coffin and a bag of potting soil, to be used for the burial.

Afterwards, The Wife and I were invited to eat a very nice meal at the church with the extended family and then we went our separate ways, though my friend and I tacitly vowed to be more in touch; I hadn’t seen her since July 2011.

I must say that, while I went primarily for my friend, and for her mother’s memory, I also went a bit for myself as well. Celebrating the passing of someone in her tenth decade is a bit more expected – though the passing of a parent is NEVER expected, I’ve found – than the death of a 57-year old. Or a 20-month old.

MOVIE REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

The movie Moonrise Kingdom is really difficult to describe – without revealing too much – except to say that, despite all logic, one starts rooting for the couple.

The Wife and I were in Binghamton, NY for the Olin family reunion, among other things, and we decided to stay at a downtown hotel called the Binghamton Riverfront; nice place. We discovered that there is a two-screen theater called Art Mission less than a half-mile away. It appears to be a refurbished fire or police station, but in fact, it used to be a city mission; thus, its name. There were fewer than 75 seats in the theater. I originally sat in the third row, but found it to be too close; row four was much more comfortable for me visually. The theater was showing the new film by Wes Anderson called Moonrise Kingdom, which was NOT playing at the local Regal or Loew’s.

My spouse wanted to see it because she liked the trailer, which she saw in Albany’s much larger art theater, the Spectrum. I was less interested, because I had only seen one Anderson film that I can recall, The Royal Tenenbaums, and I did not much relate to it. (No, I didn’t see Bottle Rocket or Rushmore or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.) And in the end, I really enjoyed the film, the Wife, not so much.

The movie is about two not especially likable children (newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) who meet strange, and the pursuit of them by the police captain (Bruce Willis), the scoutmaster (Edward Norton), and the girl’s parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand). This takes up the first act, but then things change up. Harvey Keitel and especially Tilda Swinton have roles in the latter part of the film. The movie is really difficult to describe – without revealing too much – except to say that, despite all logic, one starts rooting for the couple, maybe because the adults in their world are so dysfunctional.

Interesting that almost all the analyses, positive (94% at this point) and negative, note that Anderson is doing Anderson again, except that, the good reviews say, THIS time, he’s infused them with some level of whimsy and humanity.

The use of color and art, giving the film a real 1965 look, was quite effective, especially the occasional segments of narration by Bob Balaban, which felt really authentic.

But what I appreciate almost as much is the music. If you grew up with Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, you might have a bit of a flashback. Oddly, all the patrons left after the credits started rolling, which I thought was too bad, for it was a reprise of the music educational record that starts the film.

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