A Blog By Any Other Name

it's about crochet ..... it's about writing ....

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Location: California

Part of me is a wife and mom, part of me is a writer and poet and part of me is still a kid in jeans tooling around in my VW Beetle listening to Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, James Taylor ... and The Beatles ...

Monday, September 23, 2013

Celebrate the right to read



Friday, September 06, 2013

Turn the radio on ...

I have been sorting through file drawers
pulling out folders of forgotten papers
and I came across an old article from the Los Angeles Times.
It's from 1996.
My son was 18 then, my daughter was 12.
Reading the article again, 
made a mother of teenagers remember being a teenager.
It was about ... the music.  The music that spoke to "us."
The music that now speaks to "them."

I wanted to post the article here,
but that is actually frowned upon.
Thanks to the Internet,
I did not have to cross that line.
The article lives on; its words still speak the truth.
by Bob Baker

This is just a piece ...

   "I thought about what '64 was really like for teenagers,
   and it dawned on me that one of the most glorius things
   about it was cluelessness of the adut world.
   You had AM radio and - very rarely - 
   some information on the album liner notes,
   and that was it.
   Nobody wrote about it.
   You stumbled into other bands;
   you bought an album because of the way somebody
   on the cover looked.

   Each time you pulled a record out of its sleeve
   and put it on your turntable
   (and put a quarter on the record player's arm
   to compensate for having an old needle),
   you had a complete and total escape.
   You were safe,
   free to discover the music on you own terms."

 I remember holding the transistor radio that I received
when I graduated from grade school in my hand
as I walked the two or three blocks to the shopping center.
It was the beginning of my time
and I was finding the music that spoke to that time.

I remember one song vividly.
The song?  "Fingertips" by Little Stevie Wonder
Now, there is a YouTube video

And it was only the beginning ...

My transistor radio looked a lot like this.




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