Did I tell you I spent a summer at Boston University ‘studying’ Journalism?
Perhaps that’s too strong a word though my professor was an actual practicing Journalist and I learned a lot from him, maybe more than he realized at the time since I was by all outward appearances a slacker who spent my days playing Dungeons and Dragons and my nights at Franken’Furters drinking every beer known in the world alphabetically and watching silent movies.
It was there I picked up my first stalker, a guy who had a 500 page manuscript of the Doctor meeting every other science fictional character ever which he would shove under my door in under door shovable installments with a yellow post-it that had a crudely drawn cartoon bomb pasted on top.
I was nice to him, once…, well actually continuously, because I’d really read them and then return them sans post-it by leaving them stuck to my dorm room door while I was in fact about as far away as the T would take me.
Unlike my stalker I had friends, wierd friends, but friends and on a day that was not the 4th of July we went down to the Esplanade to watch the Pops do a recycle.
I suppose it was the weather but our evening was hardly better. We were able to park ourselves in the front row and could barely see the Shell. The fireworks mere thumps and splashes of light in the fog. It wasn’t actually raining but we were happy enough to duck into a pizza joint near Copley where I heard this song for the first time and knew that Disco was dead Jim dead.
Oh, 1812. Well Journalism is just the first draft of History and I was never an English major, no market for it.
I still have somewhere in my dusty vault Antal Doráti’s 1954 Mercury recording with the overdubbed West Point cannon and satanically reversed Yale Carillon. Other than the thumps it’s hard to point out why it’s a 4th of July staple. The piece is even internally inconsistent, La Marseillaise was banned in 1805 (for those of you who consider time stamps important) and there was no ‘official’ Russian anthem until 1815. This is the kind of trivia that makes you a Cliff Clavin Jeopardy wiz so pay attention.
It was personally conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891 at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York City.
So this is how sausage is made-
Wars on the other hand…
Asia is huge and to think you can take out a whole people by merely conquering a few cities is folly.
They live here. Eventually you will go away,
Napoleon wasted his entire Army and Empire on that. I was a History Major and those who do not remember are condemned to repeat.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun Act 1, scene 3
Obligatories and news below.
