April 13, 2010 archive

Last week I started a weekly social diary at Firefly-Dreaming. For most of my life Tuesdays were made more interesting by a tradition at what was once a great radio station, WNEW-FM. A station that introduced progressive rock to New York City, changed a generation from pop singles to album oriented and in maturity deserved the slogan “Where Rock Lives.” The tradition that people from other cities probably remember from other stations was called “Two for Tuesday.”I was wondering if anyone would be interested in participating here. This week’s is a little personal and a little political.  

Did you ever get the feeling that if there was one place on earth to be, that you had picked that place? Did you ever really blow it?

Welcome to a second installment of Two For Tuesday. The first went back in time to Glam Rock and this one progresses to a updated version of Folk Rock. As I mentioned all these diaries will be about the nostalgia of WNEW-FM, where rock once lived in NYC.

Today a memory of someone who woke me up for many years, morning Deejay Dave Herman who was greatly responsible for launching Bruce Springsteen in the Big Apple. Here in NYC we were a bit backwards in the Bruce Springsteen department. He did not become “the Boss” here until his third album “Born to Run.” Across the river in New Jersey by the third album everyone either went to high school with Bruce, dated his sister or had seen him ten times in the Stone Pony but New Yorkers were a little slow on the uptake. So Dave Herman, who was also the father of the dreaded midnight oldie began a morning tradition called “Bruce Juice.”

And on that note, I have a “Wow I should have had a V-8 story,” or the ultimate “Oh boy did I blow it.” It was the somewhere in the mid seventies and I was a huge Springsteen fan. Much because of the urging of Bruce himself I also became a fan of Southside Johnny. So when Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes went on sale at the Capital Theatre I got two tickets. I was looking forward to the show but something came up, a chance to work another concert in Manhattan. I can’t even remember what the other show is now but the choice seemed easy, see one band and get a paycheck or drive all the way out to the Soviet Union to see another and get stinking drunk. So I gave the Southside ticket to my brother and he went with my buddy Guy while I worked whatever.  

Sometime early the next morning when my load out ended I drove home to the Bronx for a nightcap at the Green Isle Pup. It was know as the place on Bainbridge Ave. “where good friends meet” and sure enough there was my brother and Guy. I asked about Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and was surprised to hear both of them say “the show wasn’t that good.” I did not know that they were just trying to put off my pain and suffering. So with very little talk about their concert and a whole lot of talk about my concert we did the cycle and headed home to bed. For you nonprofessionals, the cycle is when the patron buys three and the bartender buys one.  

When the alarm clock went off in the morning, as always it was Dave Herman and he said something like this;

Wow that had to be the greatest concert of all time. Last night Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes were scheduled to rock the Capital Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. But there was a surprise appearance. Joining the Jukes on the stage was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Such is life. Below the fold, a little Two for Tuesday Bruce Juice!  

Open Thread

Bewitched was an extremely popular TeeVee show, beginning in the early 1960s.  It starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, the witch who fell in love with a mortal, Dick York as Darrin, the mortal who in turn fell in love with her, and the great actress Agnes Moorehead as Endora, Samantha’s mum.

Endora did not like Darrin very much.  She did not like mortals very much, and I think that that was part of the success of the show.  There was some tension there.

The supporting actors were pretty good, too, for such a silly show.  Agnes Kravets would always see them doing magick, but her husband, Abner, always just missed it, and thought that Agnes was daft.

do just not understand how our monetary system works.  And this is the reason they don’t understand how we’re being stolen from.  

We have to start from a common understanding if we are to have a meaningful conversation with other American People.  This grew out of a misunderstanding I had with my dad, tonight, out of an idea he had, that, without this understanding, he could not possibly understand what I was getting at, relative to non-corporatist ideas that there is infinite wealth chasing limited resources.

This series of videos leads you through, step by step, how the wealthy, in essence, create wealth, how they use this wealth, to translate into power, and how this power actually leads to a completely unlevel playing field.  

It does not matter how much WORK you do; because work only imperfectly translates into wealth, in our monetary system.  If you believe that America is, for example, exceptional, one idea of how this exceptionalism works is that, for instance, by “hard work”, you can rise above the flock.  Why this is relative, and why this doesn’t work, mystifies people, because they don’t really understand a system that is not backed by something.  They can’t possibly imagine a system backed by NOTHING.

They should watch these videos, one by one.

Youtube has recently changed it’s default embed format.

The older format had a default video embed width of, in most cases, 425 pixels.

The new format, which you now get when you grab “embed” code from a youtube page, has a default width of in most cases 640 pixels, and in some cases even wider, up to about 960 pixels.

If you just copy and paste video embed code from the youtube site to DD, you WILL break the page here.

Youtubes wider than 500 pixels are too wide for the essay column on the pages at DD, and it breaks the sidebars by ‘pushing’ them out to the right to accommodate a youtube wider than the banner at the top which is the width of the essay column.

When you embed a youtube it will be a lot easier on this site, and on your eyes and everyone elses, if you resize it to a something like 500 pixels wide. (see example below)

The DD banner at the top is 580 pixels wide, so you can easily see what will happen to the pages here if you post a youtube wider than that.