Month: July 2016

Small Town audio

110928

Welcome to the audio edition of my latest book.

Read by Mike Chamberlain • 13 hrs. • Unabridged • © 2016

Although Woodstock, New York, is best known for the festival of the same name that occurred in 1969–actually held in Bethel almost 60 miles away–the town has long been an enclave for creative types, musicians in particular, starting in the post-war years. This book focuses on the adventurous climate of the sixties and seventies, when artists like Bob Dylan, The Band, and Van Morrison ran wild among its rural confines. While one can’t deny the clarity of narrator Mike Chamberlain’s voice, its blaring cadences seem better suited to a more in-your-face audio topic than this subtle ode to a rustic hamlet whose name will always be symbolic of a mellower place and time. J.S.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2016]

Gone

P1080583

Today I walked again where once I walked a dog:

I walked a winding path imprinted in my head,

past tumbled trunks on mashed and matted leaves,

by river running over rocks,

with no black dog ahead, no loyal boy,

now dead ten years, not here,

yet I am here, the path the same.

 

The dog I hardly know in memory,

a dog replaced as all dogs are.

I know I loved him, that is all;

I know I held him as he breathed last heaving breaths.

 

All this comes back, with smells of smoke and fall

and red leaves dropping

as I return to rooms where women died,

to men left womanless and lost,

last breaths and sounds of time,

the presence of the absence,

not-thereness now of women and of dogs,

their ghosts still moving in my mind.

dupont circle, 7 am

IMG_0717

How odd to be in Washington –

the embassies across the street, the flapping flags –

and find it’s not like House of Cards at all,

but just a town with cars and clouds

and people grabbing coffee on their way to work.

 

No sacred monsters on the hotel’s TV screen,

no Underwoods or Douglas Stampers here:

just psychopathic Donald on the breakfast news,

the demiurge for all the nation’s noxious fears.

Curious Arts, July 24th

A reprise of my British Library onstage conversation with legendary DANNY FIELDS (below) at Pylewell Park, Sunday 24th July. Danny will once again be reminiscing brilliantly about Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Nico, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and, of course, the RAMONES, the band he managed in their greatest years…

IMG_0648