Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

You can get anything you want... Today's soundtrack: Billy Cobham, Kongsberg Jazz Festival, Norway 1974 and Billy Cobham, Leverkusener Jazztage, 2016 I was introduced to Arlo Guthrie at a folk festival at Great Woods in 1989. He was the headliner for the evening and asked everyone who had been sitting in seats all day under the shed, to trade places with everyone who had spent the whole day outside in the grass on the hill. Who couldn't love such a mischievous wonderful soul?  I had, of course, read Woody Guthrie's autobiography, so I had a sense of Arlo's lineage, but I don't think I had heard anything like "Alice's Restaurant" or the "The Motorcycle Song" ever before. Later, when I had a folk and blues show on the radio in college, playing "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" in its 18 minute and 34 second entirety was a fairly regular occurrence. Later, I discovered the movie and I loved basking in the unabashed sentimentality of i...

Bringing the Love Today's soundtrack: Marcus Miller, Jazz San Javier, 2019 Today I sat in on a webinar given by artist, Tran Vu put on by Assets 4 Artists. She was giving a talk about resiliency in a time of crisis. For me, the biggest message was one of kindness to the self. That this is a traumatic time and there are so many things conspiring against anything resembling a sense of balance or normalcy, so we have to allow that amidst all the things we should, could, or ought to be doing, there also needs to be space where those things are not done. She shared an image of a straight line reaching a destination, and then the same drawing with a squiggly random line and talked about how our paths to a destination are rarely a simple path. I've been feeling a little overwhelmed. I have so many tasks, so many things needing my immediate attention. I am able to give little spurts of attention, but when I actually am able to devote my full attention, it is a surprisingly satisfying, ...

The Blue Spider Plant Today's soundtrack: King Crimson 9/29/82 Munich, Germany It is funny how memory works, how you can remember some things so precisely, and other things just slip away into an irretrievable void, like a a dream. The other day, I woke from a frightening dream where, as a consequence of something I did, a woman died. And then in a panic of poor judgement and bad choices, I decided to bury her in the sand. No sooner had I finished that miserable work, the woman started to move. She was still alive. Then, in a reawakening of ethics and responsibility, I helped dig her back out and called 911 for help. I don't remember what it was I did that caused the sequence of events to happen, and I don't recall anything after that, the only reason I remember this much at all is that I woke enough to type a few notes into my phone, which has replaced my bedside dream book. Saw this guy on Dry Hill few days ago. This morning, my poem was about the intersection of memory a...