Yours Truly is invited by a filmmaker to hop in front of his camera with mine own to do some landscaped images around the post-industrial disaster that was once Bethlehem Steel.
Pending.
What will be important, he says, are what shoes you're wearing.
Indeed.
And on the personal landscape one knows my feelings about shoes, and the shoes around and about.

∞

Neil Young sings away the negative molecules and suddenly it occurs to YT that really missed is Dragon Boy.

Onwards.

Landscape Love.

Yours Truly indeed loves trads and onesuch is the annual writing, by YT, of The Lore and Allure of Columbus.
For an exciting new twist YT writes the following whilst in the back row of Hallwalls black room - a.k.a. theatre performance claustrophia chamber for the Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core gig for yours truly is a masterful multi-tasker.


Thinking of the nautical, historical, and nonsensical as Larry and team of four others recreate his - and those of free jazzerific others - jolting and multi-layered compositions seems appropriate.
And within the sound waves audience members just in front of my flying little fingers cannot hear a jot of the mad Mac keyboard clicks.
A Triumph.

If YT were to be one of the musicians, and do not all audience members engage in some degree of transference of audio-visual and wishful, she would be the drummer - either one, for there are two.
YT would have no patience to be the sax playing Ochs, but Satoko Fujii, playing keyboard (YT cannot bring herself to ever write the word synthesizer after mourning the loss of vrai drumming in the early 80s and all) and piano is quite electricifying.

So about Columbus.
Like Jesus, he was probably a Libra.
YT has just celebrated another 10/10, and sometimes the birthday falls on this curious U.S. holiday. YT shares 10/10 with my niece, Katharine, ReUse founder Michael Gainer, a former neighbor (Marilyn Rutstein), and others, like the one-year old baby met at this past Saturday's wedding.
And also like YT, he is Italian - whereas YT is that and Polish. A hearty Middling City blend.
Columbus's gig was exploration on a boat and just as the lunar surface was recently crashed into by NASA in a frantic search for the presence of water to replenish what is quickly - astonishingly - dissipating, he was searching for spices, newness, and more land to colonize for grandiose hopes and schemes.

That children are still taught the names of his party's three boats is also astonishing as most people don't know about nutrition, how to properly operate a motor vehicle, how to speak a second language, or how their city/state/federal governments operate, or how to get their complacent asses to a voting booth.

Of course Columbus did not discover the Americas; what he did was colonizing, good self-centered colonizing to the chagrin of tens of thousands of native people.

But less about Columbus and more about YT.

When people discover, like Columbus, that YT loves Westerns they always ask Why.
Like kabuki theatre, a western is a simple scenario: movement across a forbidding terrain, struggle of man v. man/Nature, landscape longshots, the formation of order/civ/towns.
(Larry Ochs, long pause, I'm thinking. One more before we take a short break.)
All musicians take a Short break, no matter the length.

Maybe this is why people dig the Columbus story.
A man and his crew and three boats hit the seas and land upon a place and six hundred and sixty or so years later we still find ourselves squaring against Nature, ourselves, the forces of the universe.

Universal, Particular Love.