Something/Someone Old

I thought I'd send a post-mortem shout-out to Hilly Krystal.

It's been my impression, growing ever stronger in this ugly age, that we have paid too little attention to the people who create the venues for good things to happen. You notice the act. You don't notice the stage. That's the way it should be--assuming a working civilization.

You only start noticing the stage--or the record label, or the club, or the festival, or the gallery, or the publisher, or the theater, or the production company--when it's no longer there. Hell, it could just be a restaurant, where the owner feeds local musicians in exchange for them playing some blues:

That goes for the organizers of political events too. You don't notice--much--the coffeehouse where you're having the discussion or the park where you have the protest. That doesn't hold true for persistent protests, like Standing Rock or Occupy (at that point, the ground of the protest is a second home, because you're living there). But otherwise, people's attention tends to fall on what's happening, not where or how. It rarely ever falls on the people who organized the event.

That's all to the good, except that it presumes a working civilization, where you don't have to cherish and protect those spaces from the constant danger of oblivion--if one space does go under, another will arise. That's the theory, anyway.

Well, I think that was a miscalculation, and I'd like to send a shout-out to Hilly Krystal, who simply opened his NYC club--by all accounts, a pretty ratty place which neither killed its roaches nor, generally, paid its bills--to original acts. He gave musicians a place to play their own work. He gave them a chance. It was as simple as that.

He ended up with the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, the Police, and many others getting their start in his club. Established talent like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop played there too. And I just found out that the Beastie Boys played a show there in 1981!

So here's to Hilly Krystal, who dedicated a large part of forty years of his life to providing venues for musicians to play--from his founding of the Rheingold Music Festival in 1966 up to the closing of CBGB in 2006.

Here's the Talking Heads, at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, honoring Hilly Krystal. Their tribute begins at 6:57.

"Hilly is the reason that we're here, that the Ramones are here, that Blondie is here. He kept us alive."

Something New

I know I just inundated y'all with blues last week, but I ran across this and couldn't believe it. Blues seems to attract musical prodigies. This kid has supposedly been playing with this band since he was nine. This was recorded in 2011, at the Riverfront Blues Festival. I guess 2011 isn't *that* new (usually I only go back to 2014) but this one was too good to miss.

This is Joshua King and the James Cotton Band, singing the Muddy Waters blues.

Something Borrowed

Something I didn't know: apparently William Shakespeare, er, borrowed the plot for his play The Comedy of Errors.

The plot of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors was taken from the play The Menaechmi, written by the ancient Roman dramatist, Plautus. At the time of writing the play (earlier than 1594), Shakespeare did not have access to a translated copy of The Menaechmi -- the first being published in 1595, so he probably read the text in its original Latin. In The Comedy of Errors, the main plot is very similar to the work of Plautus, but Shakespeare deviates from his source by adding a second set of twins, and excluding three of the main characters. Shakespeare keeps the Menaechmi, Mulier , Messenio , Erotium , and Medicus, and renames them Antipholi, Adriana, Dromio, the Courtesan, Dr. Pinch, respectively. Of course, it is Shakespeare's additions and embellishments that make The Comedy of Errors so memorable.

Of course!

Actually, I haven't read Plautus' original, so I wouldn't know. Maybe Shakespeare's additional levels of farce and his turn of phrase are what make it a good play. But apparently The Menaechmi was Plautus' most celebrated play, so I do wonder if perhaps it had some merit previously.

I guess ultimately it's proof that farce based on mistaken identity just doesn't get old.

Something Blue

Today's Something Blue is Ardea herodias, the great blue heron.

It's the largest of the North American herons, large wader birds that frequent, well, wet places. They don't seem particular: saltwater or fresh, beach, river, marsh, swamp, pond, creek--anything will do!

Perhaps this flexibility is part of why they have such a large habitat:

The purple area represents year-round habitat.

An assortment of cool facts about them:

Thanks to specially shaped neck vertebrae, Great Blue Herons can quickly strike prey at a distance.

Great Blue Herons have specialized feathers on their chest that continually grow and fray. The herons comb this “powder down” with a fringed claw on their middle toes, using the down like a washcloth to remove fish slime and other oils from their feathers as they preen. Applying the powder to their underparts protects their feathers against the slime and oils of swamps.

Great Blue Herons can hunt day and night thanks to a high percentage of rod-type photoreceptors in their eyes that improve their night vision.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Great_Blue_Heron/lifehistory

They are beautiful:

They are also stone-cold killers. That beak is nothing to mess around with! They like fish, of course,

But they don't object to other prey,

even mammals!

I once had this brought home to me viscerally, in my last house, when a great blue heron landed on the roof. We had a beautiful screen porch room off the back of the house, which was in a little copse of trees, making it seem like we were isolated in a forest. I went out to the screen room one day, and looked up--into the eyes of a great blue heron, looking down.

I'd never looked at a great blue heron from that angle before.

That's quite an angle from which to observe a great blue heron.

It's an angle that inculcates respect, and that's all I'll say about it.

How are you all today?

UPDATE: I have been diagnosed with pneumonia, so I won't be around much for this week or the next. I just came on to let y'all know--and saw that Ursula Le Guin had died. A great woman and thinker, though she wouldn't like to be called so.