Blue Monday, JJ Cale edition

"What rhymes with 'mitch?'"

Very nice.

Where the blues became rock

Oh man, looking forward to seeing this.

Much of the film is pervaded by a similar “sense of loss for a time and a place,” as Mr. Siegel put it. With the exception of the guitarist Buddy Guy and the drummer Sam Lay, who appears in a poignant scene at Muddy Waters’s house, where Mr. Lay and other members of the Waters group rehearsed, the musicians who originated the electrified Chicago blues style are gone. An interview in the film with the guitarist Hubert Sumlin, a breathing tube in his nose, is the last he gave before he died in 2011.

Even the “white boys” are themselves now in their 70s, and the clubs in which they were tutored — juke joints with names like Pepper’s Lounge, Theresa’s, Silvio’s, the Blue Flame, Curly’s and the Checkerboard — are now just memories. In one scene, the harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite stands at the empty lot that used to be Rose & Kelly’s Blue Lounge and talks about learning licks from Big Walter Horton out in the alleyway between sets.

In the film, Mr. Siegel tells of accompanying Howlin’ Wolf for a two-week engagement in Greenwich Village. Every morning, he recalls, “the Wolf,” who stood 6 foot 6 and onstage projected a gruff, even fearsome, persona, would gently knock on his hotel room door and the two would wander the streets of New York for hours at a time, talking.

“It was wonderful, but I didn’t really know how wonderful it was back then,” Mr. Siegel said in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. “I was essentially a teenager, just riding that wave, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ ” 

Cruel but apparently not unusual

TNC has been on fire of late, and I think he gets this exactly right.  In addition to Weiner acting unbelievably and repeatedly foolishly, his treatment of his wife makes me cringe.

There is something else at work here also -- a lack of compassion. Here is where I differ with many of my liberal and libertarian friends. I believe that how you treat people matters. It is folly to embarrass your pregnant wife before an entire nation. To do the same thing again is cruelty. And there is the promise of more to come. One argument holds that what happens between Weiner and his wife is between them. I agree with this argument. But cruelty is not abolished by the phrase "consenting adults." And the fact that the immoral is not, and should not be, illegal does not make morality meaningless. Huma Abedin has one choice. We have another. The choice should be made by voters -- there should be no sense that if not for the powerful editorial pages Weiner would have won. As a city we deserve to see who we are, and what we actually care about.

And that's why Nancy Pelosi wasted no time in condemning her former congressional colleague.  We don't need anyone trying to break up the GOP's monopoly on dickish behavior towards women.

What Huma chooses to do is entirely up to her.  But we don't have to watch.

Blue Monday, Jimmy Rogers & James Cotton edition

"That was me 35 years ago"

Wow.



A remarkable 17 minutes.

Blue Monday, John Lee Hooker edition

The right to "stand your ground"

Apparently, some have that right more than others.

Police in Sanford, meanwhile, said they will return the Kel-Tec 9mm pistol used to kill Trayvon Martin to George Zimmerman.

My heart goes out to the Martin family.

By any measure, it's been a tough few weeks for the rights of African Americans in this country.

Hot, humid...tearing me apart