Archival Charmers (A Thanksgiving Playlist from Scott Spencer)

Ok, here’s what we have: an amazing amalgam of poetry and music from Mark  (caged by rain, etc.), a moody groove Celeste sent my way four years ago, a current fav — funny with a nice beat — the best drug song ever (dig the drum on knock me clear out), and Levon’s daughter Amy Helm, who I am always pushing on folks, though maybe she’s old news to you, which would be great…

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Pro Love

Corinne Bailey Rae’s husband Jason Rae died in his sleep, his breathing suppressed by an accidental overdose of methadone.  It’s difficult to listen to her singing “I’d Do it All Again” and not imagine you are hearing a woman coming to terms with the death of her lover.

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The Heart of the Matter

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild, Macmillan, 2016.

How is it that after so many years and so many wars and so many revolutions, counter-revolutions, assassinations, genocides, and betrayals, the Spanish Civil War continues to capture the imagination of idealists  and romantics?

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Endangered Species

It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside after butchering his doe. Yet the main thing about today, beyond the appalling weather, my rancid mutt, my worries for the environment, and the anniversary of the birth of the Infant Jesus is that I finished reading a great novel and I am surging with energy and feeling the aesthetic thrill of having experienced something original and important.

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R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: “Low Country Blues” & “The Artist”

In 1965, three friends and I walked into a Chicago bar dressed in jeans and work shirts, sporting the hairdos of the time — the kind you had to pat into place because no comb can make its way through. We were going to a legendary blues bar at 47th and Indiana, in a solidly African-American section of the city; it was late and the street was mostly shuttered for the night — maybe a check-cashing place and a chicken shack were open, besides our destination, Theresa’s, the dimly-lit club where Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were appearing.

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From Hunger

David Shields, Reality Hunger, Knoph.

Nothing lasts forever. After several decades of dire warnings about its frailty, what if the novel — long the linchpin of print culture — has finally died? It can happen; one day, it will happen.

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