talking turkey

Hello from Syracuse NY, I'm up here now in my hometown after a day in NYC back from Switzerland. I'm visiting for a few days here with my wife Caroline as the guest of my folks for the traditional family Thanksgiving get-together, made somewhat bittersweet by the fact of my parents' imminent move to Riverside California to be near my oldest sister Laurie and her husband Ezra (and my hipster nephew skaterboy Max). So the old house is now semi-stripped of furniture, with moving vans coming back and forth, and my sister Bonnie (the fantastic painter behind the cover of my Operators are Standing By album) and I are rummaging through scrapbooks of memorabilia, mainly faded photos,through a glass darkly... a shock to confront one's various selves, or various elves, frozen forever smiling, lost in the immense jumble heap of the past. These early photos bring something of a frisson, a shock of recognition, of happy/sad times long gone , I'm reminded of Chris Marker's brilliant, brillig and slithy tothed film La Jetee...also The Smith's "Back to the Old House" ("there's too much memories..."), Dylan's "My Back Pages" comes to mind as well...

more later, meanwhile, we have another winner, Nom De Plume correctly identified "Though Not a Word Was Spoken" as the instrumental album referred to in my last blog as being by The Voices of Walter Schumann-- but he failed to identify the main vocalist, 'twas Marni Nixon, Audrey Hepburn's dubbed-in singing voice in the film of "My Fair Lady"...so as a consolation prize Nom receives a copy of the previous edition of Improve the Shining Hour, which is now a collector's item, replaced by the new Evolver/Rykodisc reissue.


Happy Thanksgiving.

Gary