Not too many people know

that MLK was nearly killed previously by a demented woman in Harlem who stabbed him close to the heart as he was reading, leaving a cross-like mark which he saw every day subsequently when he got un/dressed. The tip of the knife just stopped beside his aorta which would have caused him to bleed to death otherwise.

Just one of many interesting aspects of his (final) “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, 1968, 50 years ago. If you like King, his voice, and what he stood for, you can’t get much better or more intimate than the amazing Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Essential (15 CD) boxset (Hachette Audio) The 16 hours of 24 Landmark Speeches and Sermons are all there! Great listening by the legend who still lives and inspires globally today.

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A Memorable ’60s Songwriter:

(from the excellent 3 CD Rhino boxset: The Look of Love–The Burt Bacharach Collection)

Burt Bacharach, along with his lyricist Hal David.
So many memorable hits including:

The Story of My Life
Magic Moments
Please Stay
Tower of Strength
Baby It’s You
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
Make It Easy on Yourself
Only Love Can Break a Heart
Don’t Make Me Over
Blue on Blue
True Love Never Runs Smooth
Reach Out for Me
Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa
Anyone Who Had a Heart
A House Is Not a Home
Wives and Lovers
Wishin’ and Hopin’
Walk on By
There’s Always Something There to Remind Me
What the World Needs Now Is Love
Trains and Boats and Planes
What’s New Pussycat?
My Little Red Book
Here I Am
Alfie
The Windows of the World
I Say a Little Prayer
Casino Royale
The Look of Love
Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
This Guy’s in Love with You
Promises, Promises
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head
Everybody’s Out of Town
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
(They Long to Be) Close to You
One Less Bell to Answer
Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)
That’s What Friends Are For

And he/they worked with all these recording artists:
Marty Robbins
Perri Como
Gene McDaniels
The Drifters
The Shirelles
Gene Pitney
Dionne Warwick
Bobby Vinton
Brook Benton
Dusty Springfield
Bobby Goldsborough
Tony Orlando
Jackie DeShannon
Trini Lopez
Cilla Black
Rick Nelson
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
B.J. Thomas
The Carpenters
The 5th Dimension
Christopher Cross
Dionne & Friends
Elvis Costello

Some kind of track record, eh?

The boxset is highly recommended. Most of the songs are sung by the original artists with some covers done at the same time as original artists’ versions. Dionne and Gene Pitney got to sing most of the originals. Also included are some duds including one by Richard Chamberlain aka TV’s Dr. Kildare. N.B. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” did not get used in the movie of the same name.

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So Much for a Dumb Provincial Slogan

“Remember to breathe” will bite the dust when the pot law comes in this summer. How ironic that Alberta air will be everywhere polluted with pot smoke which is offensive or problematic to breathe for most people.

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My musical listening preferences these daze

remain classical and jazz. Comparatively speaking, these two genres are at the bottom of whatever numbers for listeners and purchasers of genre product, with jazz being even lower than classical.Something like 1% in recent articles I’ve been reading. Often, these genre listeners have been described as being more educated and intelligent. Jazz seems to draw a lot of older white male listeners in particular.

For structure, beauty, and the sublime, nothing beats classical music. For spontaneity, freedom of expression, and individual freedom within a group, nothing beats jazz. There are many other reasons to listen to these two genres.

Jazz I have long enjoyed going back to my teens. Classical was an acquired taste, but watching all the summer concerts of Edmonton’s symphony along with performances by Tafelmusik made a convert beginning in the 1990s when I was still in my 40s.
It is now very hard to imagine my daily life without exposure to these two genres that most people in society know nothing about and would never choose to listen to. Why follow the herd, in any case?

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As DJT is put in restraints and led away,

you can be sure he’ll still be raving, “NO COLLUSION! NO OBSTRUCTION!”

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Another Sublime Day

My bucket list shrinks again after this significant purchase. Much audial pleasure awaits and beckons. 142 CDs of Bach played on original instruments (including all keyboards on harpsichord, not piano, as Bach intended and actually played).

(Live your dreams in the here-and-now. Don’t let price tags deter you. There is much more important stuff than mere filthy lucre and making/saving a pile.)

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A Classy Lady Passes

Barbara Bush, wife and mother to American presidents, one of the great women of American history, will be hugely missed. She had so-o much more class and decency than DJT. A true lady from another time, she exemplified a presidential matriarch more than any other in historical memory. She raised awareness and funds for many notable causes including family literacy. The book cover pictured here (photo credit: Carol T. Powers) was for a delightful illustrated book (William Morrow, 1990) by Mildred Kerr Bush, which I heartily recommend. Mrs. Bush loved dogs and it was a clever stroke to combine her love of animals with literacy.

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Henry Fonda as Clarence Darrow

An excellent one-man show, based on Irving Stone’s biography Clarence Darrow for the Defence, preserved on Kino video from 74. Fonda holds viewer attention for 84 memorable minutes as America’s most famous lawyer who fearlessly was involved in many famous cases including Loeb and Leopold and the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The play covering the 1800s and 1900s featured many famous speeches and quotes by Darrow and you see him addressing defendants, judges, his wives, and juries, as well as musing aloud his deeper and funnier introspections.

The late great John Houseman directed the play on Broadway and advised Fonda on this project. It is flawlessly written and acted. The best (spoiler) moment comes at the end of the play while Darrow is defending the aforementioned college-boy-killers, and he makes a case for mercy as an advance over the harder Old Testament justice which prevailed in courts during his career at the time. He feels strongly that there is no humanitarian point in exacerbating violence by killing with court verdicts.

Highly recommended for its perspectives on justice and insights into racial justice, in particular. A memorable filmization of a great man on the American courts history.

Also recommended: Fonda’s other great performances about justice in Twelve Angry Men and The Grapes of Wrath.

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Synchronicity Monday

Travelling to dentist in Edmonton Monday. How many people have the Burt Bacharach CD boxset? Anyway, Bobby Vinton’s “Blue on Blue” comes on as I’m listening in the van, which I ultimately play a couple of times. An olde favorite.

How many people who played “Blue on Blue” yesterday somewhere in the world happen to be watching Jeanne Moos on CNN? She’s talking about Comey and how he wanted to blend in with the drapes at the White House when Trump called him across the floor. She picks up on something he had previously said of not wanting to be noticed and called forth by Trump in a truly awkward social moment.

Of all the choices, Moos might have made yesterday, she decides to play an excerpt from “Blue on Blue”, of all the million possible songs with the color blue mentioned. True, she and I probably lived through the same era of pop music, but what are the odds that I, of all people yesterday in a far away place, would listen to that song Monday morning and that she would decide to use an excerpt from later in her humor spot later that day on CNN, which I just happened to tune into just then?

Synchronicity has happened to me and others I know from time to time. It is always an uncanny random overlapping moment. I can remember saying a word in conversation and two seconds later someone on tv happens to say the same word, as if we’ve been occupying the same place, time, and context.

Like so many people, I know that these connections are random and coincidental, but always there is a sense that someone or something has telegraphed a connection that I’m conscious of, though not understanding fully if it was intended for consciousness, if it means anything or if it suggests something larger and scriptedly or fatedly at work behind the flow of the day.

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Conversationally Speaking

“Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.”
–Isabel Allende

“It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact wth the tingling currents of thought.”
–Agnes Repplier

“Ah, good conversation–there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
–Edith Wharton

“The only proper intoxication is conversation.”
–Oscar Wilde

“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
–Rebecca West

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