excerpt from “Turquoise Days”, Echo and the Bunnymen, Heaven Up Here, 1981.
“In 1981, music magazine the NME described the album as darker and more passionate than 1980’s Crocodiles. The Record Mirror also said that the band sang the blues and devoted themselves to existential sadness. They went on to note that the album offered ‘an anatomy of melancholy, resplendent with the glamour of doom’ ”
featuring Model: Lena Curland
The Full Flower Moon of May
18 May 2019
Stonington Borough, CT USA
Allow me to explain the legend of Chicken Charlie’s Rock. As you may have gathered, my daughter Marley has nothing to do with the tale, paths with Charlie having crossed nearly two lifetimes ago from her vantage point.
Marley in front of Chicken Charlie’s Rock, ’09
She simply accompanied me on a trip down memory lane. (Her sister Jules, aka Green Machine, was back at grandma’s house, glued to the weather forecast praying for snow).
Jules aka Green Machine frolicking in the snow, ’09
Naturally, the trip included a handful of slow laps around the same parking lot where my grandfather first let me drive. I was twelve, thirteen tops. Having just turned thirteen, Marley got her turn at the wheel, the same as I did–no gas, permitted only to ease a foot off the brake pedal, achieving no more speed than cruising on idle would allow. Still, I imagine it to have been as exhilarating for her as it was for me, sitting beside my grandfather in my mother’s newly acquired used car.
Chicken Charlie’s Rock started out simply as The Rock, a massive granite protrusion that I have since come to recognize as endemic to the New England landscape. Our rock sat in the woods just behind the Village Green Apartments where my sister and I moved with our mother the year our parents split up. In time, Kim found her set of friends and got on with her thing. And I found my set of friends, Gary C. principal among them. We spent the vast majority of our spare time exploring the woods, at first on foot, then by bicycle. Eventually, we acquired motorized transportation allowing us to explore the far reaches of the woods by dirt bike, a string of secluded waterfalls leading the way to an abandoned rock quarry. The details of our gas-powered antics will have to wait for a future installment of my tales of a kid from Connecticut, making his way in the world.
The Rock played a central role as home base for our activities during breaks from school. We waged one-pump BB-gun wars on and around the rock (thankfully, no one shot their eye out). We built forts. Debriefed atop the rock upon successful completion of our daily excursions, conjured future plans sitting in full survey of the entire universe as far as any of us was concerned. We formed and strengthened bonds on that rock, tested allegiances. Through thick and thin, we grew up together.
Last and most certainly not least, I had my first kiss on the rock. We can debate whether woman or man is capable of achieving perfection. Whether any of us would know how to conduct ourselves if perfection were to show up one day and plop down in front of us. Still, I am eternally grateful to have borne witness to the tender beginnings of what I imagined at the time to be as near to perfection as might ever exist–Andrea P.
Andrea was outgoing, energetic, athletic. She would hang with us most every day, doing anything we could do and then some, though we never lost sight of the prospect that Andrea was separate from us. She was GLORIOUS–outgoing, energetic and all that jazz, and glorious to boot.
I can still picture her–even brown skin with deep set eyes like she was imagining things bigger than the rest of us were capable of comprehending and a mouth that made you wonder why lips were ever used for anything other than kissing. It would be years before I’d get another glimpse at perfection, that shift in perspective that occurs when you meet someone so far removed in thinking, in examining the world from anyone you’ve encountered, who inspires you to be more than you might have known achievable without the benefit of her outlook.
Even Andrea can’t claim responsibility for the naming of Chicken Charlie’s Rock. Charlie was a kid who moved to Village Green a couple of years into the rest of us having settled in the neighborhood. He earned the Chicken part on account of his run–stiff and upright, a cardboard cutout of a kid pushing like a sheet of plywood against a determined wind. A thick mop of rust colored hair stood on end, flopping in rhythm with the breeze to form the crowned comb atop a rooster’s head. This coupled with an innate chicken-shit demeanor and Charlie couldn’t hope to escape the nickname.
One summer, we found ourselves in possession of a length of sturdy rope. We tugged on it, swung on it, bound and tied various things with it, Chicken Charlie included if memory serves. Gary and I eventually got the notion to drop the length of rope down the face of the rock and scale the damn thing. This was well before rock climbing was popularized as sport, housed in purpose-built gyms. Instead, we climbed to achieve the pinnacle of adventure for boys growing up in Village Green.
For reasons I can’t remember, Chicken Charlie accompanied us on our maiden voyage, our trusty rope securely in place. But, being Chicken Charlie, he couldn’t be convinced to venture a climb. After several successful roundtrips apiece, Gary and I headed down the face for lunch. When we stepped outside again, we were met by a high-pitched screeching. We took off in the direction the woods where we found Charlie dangling from the length of rope having steeled his nerves to attempt the climb in private, free from jeers over his upright, stiff, plywood way of doing things.
Whether midway up or midway down the face, only Charlie can say for certain. But there he was, clinging for dear life, screaming at the top of his lungs for somebody to save him. We sprang into action. I took my place as spotter at the base of the rock should Charlie lose his grip and fall the rest of the way to the ground while Gary sprinted around to the summit then scaled down the face and escorted Charlie to safety–all in a day’s work for a couple of boy adventurers. And that’s how The Rock came to be known as Chicken Charlie’s Rock.
Everything changed after school resumed that fall. Andrea advanced to junior high leaving us to toil another year steeped in our elementary school, king of the hill, BB-gun warrior nonsense. She and her family moved out of state within the ensuing year. Gary’s parents found more spacious digs to accommodate their brood a couple of streets over, within the same neighborhood. But that quashed nearly all activity around the rock as the center of our daily adventures. Chicken Charlie eventually disappeared too. I can’t tell you with any certainty what any of us did the next summer. Some things together, many other things apart from one another. Junior high and high school eventually exposing us to our respective, separate new worlds. But that summer forged bonds that have persisted to this day.
I have limited interest to unearth what became of Chicken Charlie. But look who I found via Facebook–Andrea P. decades removed from those days on The Rock but little worse for the wear. And still Glorious. (Images used with permission.)
“I won’t share you
I won’t share you
With the drive
The ambition
And the zeal I feel
This is my time
As the note I wrote
Was read, she said
Has the Perrier gone
Straight to my head
Or is life plainly sick and cruel, instead?
“YES!”
No – no – no – no – no – no
I won’t share you
I won’t share you
With the drive
And the dreams inside
This is my time
Life tends to come and go
Well, that’s OK
Just as long as you know
Life tends to come and go
Well, that’s OK
Just as long as you know
I won’t share you
I won’t share you
With the drive
And the dreams inside
This is my time
This is my time”
featuring Model: Morgan Vail
Branford House, Avery Point, Connecticut
shot on Ilford Delta 400 Pro 35 mm film with Minolta x700 camera
lyrics for “I Won’t Share You” by The Smiths, from “Strangeways, Here We Come” (1987)
inspired by the news report from Rolling Stone Magazine, 12 May 2019, that Morrissey had performed “I Won’t Share You” for the first time ever, because “the group broke up before they had a chance to tour it…” https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/morrissey-i-wont-share-you-broadway-834482/
An international day to celebrate the life and work of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, held each year on 14th May, the anniversary of the date when Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at 92Y The Poetry Center, New York in 1953.
“International Dylan Thomas Day gives us a chance each year to celebrate Dylan Thomas’s achievements. There is still the enthusiasm for a national day to mark my grandfather’s life and legacy and we want to keep May 14th as a prominent date on the literary calendar.
Dylan Thomas’s writing has travelled through time – it is as relevant today in our troubled times as when it was written sixty-five years ago. It continues to travel across the globe reaching new audiences everyday. His poetry lives on.
We invite you to tell us about how you are going to mark the day and encourage you, wholeheartedly, to get involved and to love the words.” — Hannah Ellis, Granddaughter of Dylan Thomas https://www.discoverdylanthomas.com/news-events/international-dylan-thomas-day
The photographer Rollie McKenna was at this 92Y reading of Under Milk Wood, to photograph Dylan Thomas, and she writes this in her autobiography, Rollie McKenna: A Life in Photography (Knopf, 1991),
“Dylan Thomas’s career didn’t truly take off until he ‘hit’ the United States. Readings at the Poetry Center and tours throughout the country where–in his own words–he ‘boomed and fiddled while home was burning,’ all but devoured him. The money he made, so necessary to support his family, passed through his fingers like water. The praise, so addictive, was fleeting. Still, he wanted to read again to his vastly appreciative American audiences and, above all, to write the final ending to his play for voices, Under Milk Wood.
Frenetic reading tours, sycophant-laden parties and late-night bar-hopping exhausted him, and just an hour before rehearsing the actors for the first New York performance of Under Milk Wood, Dylan was in particularly bad shape. On arriving at the Poetry Center, he vomited, declared that he could not possibly go on and collapsed in the green room. After half an hour, he was shaken awake. Pulling himself together, he directed for an astonishing three hours, urging the actors over and over: ‘Love the words. Love the words!’ I was so dumbfounded by his recovery that I almost forgot to shoot.
When the night of May 14, 1953, arrived, the theater was packed. The audience, silent at first, then tittering, finally exploded into laughter on realizing that this was no highbrow affair but a loving, ribald tribute to a village. Dylan took fifteen curtain calls as tears slipped down his face.” https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/17/books/pictures-from-a-life.html
I am a New Yorker dazed by the desert sun. I am a wanderer without a home. My
friend tells me, “Everyone who ends up in the desert is running from something.”
Bicycle On A Hillside
I see palm trees taller than houses, parking lots touched by the bloody candy rays
of perfect sunsets.
Liquor Store Parking Lot
People are abducted by aliens that bless them with vision, discarded toys and
boomboxes fill a village that lays in pieces like wreckage from nuclear fall-out.
Postcard From California
Razor wire fences cover ancient land that cannot be tamed or constrained. You
think there is no life in the sands and canyons, but it is everywhere, gathering
precious raindrops and holding them until flowers explode like a plague of beauty.
Las Palmas
The West and all its openness startles me awake. My eyes are steeped in tantalizing
technicolor. My heart beats faster for all the running. Away from, towards,
directions out here mean less, geological time makes dust of us all.
Splash
I paint my dreams and write postcards to people I have loved and lost to death.
Every new dusty bright day I teach myself to hope again.
__
Paintings and Text and Photographs by Royal Young
At twenty-nine years old, painter/writer Royal Young’s debut solo show “LUSH DOOM” premiered at Figureworks Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2015.
Young’s work has been called “Titillating,” by the New York Post, “Bold, fast and explosive with hyper saturated colors…a sense of American dreaming,” by New York Magazine, and “Creative, tumultuous,” by Honeysuckle Magazine.
Leaving Manhattan behind for the mystery of the desert is exhilarating.
Visitor
Growing up in a 1990’s downtown New York that was vibrantly full of character and danger inspired me from a young age.
Skull
Now, I no longer feel the gritty, creative thrum from the sidewalks of my childhood which have been scrubbed clean and developed into condos, bank branches and chain stores.
Raven
I seek new vistas and bring my vivid Pop Art neon dream style to the iconic beauty of Arizona’s landscapes, wildlife and desert mystery.
Couch
Text and Paintings by Royal Young
At twenty-nine years old, painter/writer Royal Young’s debut solo show “LUSH DOOM” premiered at Figureworks Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2015.
Young’s work has been called “Titillating,” by the New York Post, “Bold, fast and explosive with hyper saturated colors…a sense of American dreaming,” by New York Magazine, and “Creative, tumultuous,” by Honeysuckle Magazine.
In 2019, the full Moon of March rises on the same day as the vernal equinox—marking the start of spring!
March also brings the final supermoon of 2019.
The March full Moon is particularly special because it reaches its peak on the same day as the spring equinox, on March 20, 2019. The last time the full Moon and the spring equinox coincided this closely (4 hours apart) was in March 2000, but the last time they occurred on the same date was on March 20, 1981!
Traditionally, the Moon we see in March is called the Full Worm Moon. At this time of the year, the ground begins to soften enough for earthworm casts to reappear, inviting robins and birds to feed—a true sign of spring. Roots start to push their way up through the soil, and the Earth experiences a re-birth as it awakens from its winter slumber.
This full Moon is also a supermoon, meaning the Moon will be nearly at its closest to Earth for the month of March. It’s the year’s third (and final) of three straight full supermoons. This means that the Moon may “appear” brighter and bigger than normal, provided the night sky is clear and dark.
—excerpt from the Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and later released posthumously under her real name.
featuring Model: Jane Anderson
Photograph by Michelle Gemma
The panic will pass
And the smell of the fields
Put your faith
Set sail
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and