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editor
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 Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 2:50 pm Post subject: The Ramblin', Gamblin' '60s |
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WELCOME!
The Ramblin', Gamblin' '60s:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Paperback
By California Dreamer Joan Didion
| Quote: | | January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past. A woman in Hollywood staged an all-night sit-in on the hood of her car to prevent repossession by a finance company. A seventy-year-old penisoner drove his station wagon at five miles an hour past three Gardena poker parlors and emptied three pistols and a twelve-gauge shotgun through their windows, wounding twenty-nine people. "Many young women become prostitutes just to have enough money to play cards," he explained in a note. Mrs. Nick Adams said that she was "not surprised" to hear her husband announce his divorce plans on the Les Crane show, and, farther north, a sixteen-year-old jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived. (From Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream at pgs. 19-20) |
About the title piece:
| Quote: | | "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder. That was why the piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads...I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point. (A Preface, pgs. xiii-xiv) |
Here's perhaps why diligent pal Didion might have felt such disorder:
| Quote: | "She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned," says the friend of her mother's who brought her to Otto's.
"Only Sally and Anne," Susan says.
"What about Lia?" her mother's friend prompts.
"Lia," Susan says, "is not in High Kindergarten."
Sue Ann's three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. "You'll fry like rice," she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann's macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn't notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.
1967
(Closing paragraphs of Slouching Towards Bethlehem at p. 128) |
A musical take on the Yeats poem:
| Quote: | Night Ride Home
CD Audio
Featuring Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
Joni Mitchell's musical tribute to the Yeats' poem of 1920,
The Second Coming
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Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2874#2874
Last edited by editor on Sun Jun 28, 2009 3:08 pm; edited 8 times in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:50 am Post subject: |
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The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Audio CD
Featuring Bob Dylan's Dream
A young Judy Collins gives it a
try at Youtube.com
| Quote: | Bob Dylan's Dream
While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.
With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon,
Where we together weathered many a storm,
Laughin' and singin' till the early hours of the morn.
By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung,
Our words were told, our songs were sung,
Where we longed for nothin' and were quite satisfied
Talkin' and a-jokin' about the world outside.
With haunted hearts through the heat and cold,
We never thought we could ever get old.
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one.
As easy it was to tell black from white,
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right.
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split.
How many a year has passed and gone,
And many a gamble has been lost and won,
And many a road taken by many a friend,
And each one I've never seen again.
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room again.
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2996#2996
Last edited by editor on Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:42 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 4:20 pm Post subject: |
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Arlo Guthrie (now in his ramblin', gamblin' 60s):
LIVE
Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie
Together in Concert (1975)
Audio Cassette
COMING SOON to Audio CD
Featuring Arlo on the Jimmie Rogers classic,
My Mother, the Queen of My Heart
A grey, even hairier Arlo 30+ years later on Youtube.com.
| Quote: | | "There is no gap in the two generations of singers heard on this record. Rather, the music and songs express a continuity of understanding and a reflection of the world as it is and has been. The audience at these concerts- those who were lucky enough to get tickets- spanned several generations: grandfathers and grandmothers with their grandchildren, workers and students, young and old. A New York reviewer perhaps best summed up when he wrote,"It is another time, but the need for the Seegers and Guthries of whatever generation remains." -- Harold Leventhal, sometime manager of Pete, Arlo and Woody. (From Rising Son Records[) |
| Quote: | Mother, The Queen of My Heart
By Jimmie Rogers and 'Slim' Hoyt Bryant
I had a home down in Texas
Down where the bluebonnets grew
I had the kindest old mother
How happy we were, just we two
Then one day the angels called her
It's a debt that we all have to pay
She called me close to her bedside
These last few words to say
Son, don't start drinkin' and gamblin'
Promise you'll always go straight
Ten years have passed since that parting
That promise I broke I must say
I started in gambling for pastime
At last I was just like them all
I bet my clothes and my money
Not dreaming that I'd ever fall
One night I bet all my money
Nothing was left to be seen
And all that I needed to beat them
Was one card, and that was the queen
The cards were dealt all round the table
Each one took a card in the draw
And I drew the one that would beat them
I turned it and here's what I saw
I saw my mother's picture
And somehow she seemed to say
"Son, you have broken your promise"
So I tossed the cards all away
The winnings I gave to the newsboy
I knew I was wrong from the start
And I'll never forget my promise
To my mother, the queen of my heart |
| Quote: | Roving Gambler
*By Cisco Houston
I am a roving gambler, I gamble all around
Whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay my money down.
I've gambled down in Washington, I've gambled over in Spain
I'm goin' down to Georgia to gamble my last game.
I had not been in Washington not many more weeks than three
When I fell in love with a pretty little gal, she fell in love with me.
She took me to her parlor, she cooled me with her fan
She whispered low in her mother's ear, "I love that gambling man."
"Oh daughter, Oh dear daughter, how can you treat me so?
To leave your dear old mother, and with a gambler go?"
"Oh mother, Oh dear mother, you know I love you well
But the love I have for this gambling man, no human tongue can tell."
"I would not marry a farmer, he's always in the dirt
The man I want is a gambling man who wears a silken shirt."
"I would not marry a railroad man, I'll tell you the reason why
I never knew a railroad man wouldn't tell his wife a lie."
"I would not marry a cowboy, he's always in the rain
The man I want is a gambling man who wears a golden chain."
"I hear that train a-coming, it's a-coming 'round the curve
A-whistling and a-blowing and a-straining every nerve"
"Oh mother, Oh dear mother, I'll tell you if I can
If you ever see me back again, it'll be with that gambling man." |
| Quote: | | *Note: "The Roving Gambler" had been a favorite in Minneapolis's Dinkytown folk-song circles since the late-1950's. (An 18-year-old Bob Dylan sang a version into a tape-recorder at his friend Karen Wallace's apartment in May 1960.) It was first recorded commercially, as far as anyone knows, in 1930, by a popular cowboy singer, Carson Robinson. Woody Guthrie's sidekick Cisco Houston also sang it, as did the Stanley Brothers, as did, years later, Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, Frankie Laine ("High Noon," "Rawhide"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the actor Robert Mitchum, and Arlo Guthrie, among dozens of others. Alan Lomax included a transcription of "The Roving Gambler" in his definitive 1960 collection, Folk Songs of North America. And by then the song was enjoying another sort of revival in the American mass market. Tennessee Ernie Ford, of "Sixteen Tons" fame, hit the middle of the pop charts with his "Roving Gambler" in 1956. Two years later, the rock 'n' rolling Everly Brothers included a slow, reflective version on an acoustic album of old standards called Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. And in early 1961, the commercially-successful mainstream folk performers The Brothers Four, second in renown only to the Kingston Trio, released a new album with yet another version of "The Roving Gambler," this one arranged by the group's bass player Bob Flick. (From The Roving Gambler at Scenic Newport by Sean Wilentz at bobdylan.com Sept. 14/07) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2999#2999
Last edited by editor on Sun Jun 28, 2009 3:21 pm; edited 5 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:09 pm Post subject: |
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The White Album
Essays by Joan Didion
Paperback
| Quote: | | I did meet one of the principals in another Los Angeles County murder trial during those years: Linda Kasabian, star witness for the prosecution in what was commonly known as the Manson Trial. I once asked Linda what she thought about the apparently chance sequence of events which had brought her first to the Spahn Movie Ranch and then to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women on charges, later dropped, of murdering Sharon Tate Polanski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. "Everything was to teach me something," Linda said. Linda did not believe that chance was without pattern. Linda operated on what I later recognized as dice theory, and so, during the years I am talking about, did I. (-- p. 18) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4060#4060
Last edited by editor on Sun Jun 28, 2009 3:10 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:44 pm Post subject: |
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The Best of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem
Audio CD
Featuring The Moonshiner
Sing along with the boys at YouTube.com
| Quote: | Moonshiner
I've been a moonshiner for many a year,
I spent all me money on whiskey and beer.
I'll go to some hollow and I set up me still
and I'll make you a gallon fer a ten shillin bill.
I'm a rambler I'm a gambler
I'm a long ways from home.
And if you don't like me well leave me alone.
I'll eat when I'm hungry and I'll drink when I'm dry,
And if moonshine don't kill me I'll live till I die.
I'll go to some hollow in this count-er-ey,
Ten gallons of wash I can go on a spree.
No women to follow the world is all mine,
And I love none so well as I love the moonshine.
I'm a rambler I'm a gambler
I'm a long ways from home.
And if you don't like me well leave me alone.
I'll eat when I'm hungry and I'll drink when I'm dry,
And if moonshine don't kill me I'll live till I die.
O Moonshine dear Moonshine oh how I love thee,
Ya kill me ol' father but ar' ya try me.
Oh bless all moonshiners and bless all moonshine,
Oh it's breath smells as sweet as the dew on the vine
I'm a rambler I'm a gambler
I'm a long ways from home.
And if you don't like me well leave me alone.
I'll eat when I'm hungry and I'll drink when I'm dry,
And if moonshine don't kill me I'll live till I die. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4192#4192 |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 3:12 pm Post subject: |
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From the Big Apple:
The Mayor of MacDougal Street
A Memoir
Hardcover
By Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald
| Quote: | | Clarence (part owner of the Gaslight cafe) was one of the most extraordinary figures to come onto that scene. He had been quite prominent in the Truman administration, as well as becoming a self-made millionaire three times and each time losing it all. He was a gambler and knew how to take his losses with a smile. God, that man was a great poker player! There were regular games all the time, and one night I was bumped out early on -- I was clearly in a different league from the guys he liked to play with -- and Clarence let me kibitz his hand. I sat there and watched him fold hands that I would have held onto for dear life. Once he threw away a straight! And he was right every goddamn time. He had come from a completely different world, and suddenly was just picked up and dumped on MacDougal Street, in the middle of this kind of nonstop carnival, and he dealt with that situation as though he had created it. That man had more capacity for enjoyment than anyone I have ever known; he could have found something amusing about Hell. (-- pgs. 154-155) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4424#4424 |
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