Making stories with and for the people.
If you haven’t already heard the news, WMBR is in the thick of The Once a Year, 7 Day Fund Drive. This is one of gifts you can choose when you donate (and I hope you will!) Just what you need to keep spinning your 45’s. Read all about it, and find your way into contributing at wmbr.org. You have until end of day Tues, 11/7. I’m so grateful for you! ❤️
Temps dropping in PNW (where I’m posting from) & where Dave is joining the margin. Bex Burch is taking us out today with…well…what you are listening to now. 🗣️ @wmbrfm #listenersview 🙌🏼
Most of my commuter listeners seem to be riding 128, north of Boston. That’s where Joe is, approaching exit 24 (I think that’s what he wrote), coasting northward with Pink Floyd, “If.” 1970. It’s all very lovely. ❤️ @wmbrfm #listenersview
William is one of many who gives props to Telly Savalas who covered Bread today in the margin. Pondering…if…? Telly, that is, with others singing, speaking, kazooing. #listenersview @wmbrfm besides acting, Savalas released 5 albums and placed 21st in the 1992 World Series of Poker. Anyhow. William recommends reading this book. #listenersview @wmbrfm
Gracie takes a break from cleaning the studio, moved by a Peter Green riff coming through the speakers, pulled from faraway Fleetwood Mac live @ the Boston Tea Party, 1970. The club was @ 53 Berkeley St in the South End from 1967-1971. Everybody played there. The first broadcast of the legendary WBCN originated in a back room. #listenersview @wmbrfm
Paul’s here again, saying his wildflowers are looking fine. I say “Yes!” with Jonah Jones singing to us…”St James Infirmary”. “Give me 6, 6 crapshooting pall bearers & let a chorus girl sing me a song..,put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head so we can raise Hallelujah as we go along…” #listenersview
More trees & clouds & sky…always present floating above Paul who goes up & down that ladder to prime shingles or scrape down rows of the clapboards. Then comes the color. Lucille Clifton reads her poem “Lucy”. And thank you all for mourning my maple. #listenersview
War Machine listens a lot with me & everybody else via these mysterious airwaves. They write “It may not be what I`m looking at in traffic now, but I`ll be there in 15 minutes: the turn heading into either purchase street, I93 or the airport. Took this for my friend this morning, too nice to not share.”#listenersview Did you know there’s an instrument called a “sympathetic mail violin?” Nicolas Bras is playing it right now in the margin. 🏄
Another Jill shot. She texts “I’m sorry about your maple. And thank you for Miriam Burton. She brought “Rites of Passage”. #listenersview 💃
The moon coming ‘round my maple, once upon a time. #listenersview
Today’s story is my neighbor’s old maple tree. Very healthy & happy, reaching into the sky…my day & night companion. He was afraid it’d fall on his house, and a tree service was happy to agree & make money taking it down. SO, beloved listeners far & wide are sending consolation shots. Doug knew this one when she was a full beech, and once it was cut, the artist Fermin Castro made a look out lady. Doug texts “The piece is called We Are Still Listening, and is over near Sullivan Square on Pearl Street. Pity about the maple.” Diane Krall sings “walk on by” #listenersview nersview
A boy is learning to build yachts & fix them. His father, John, waits for him to finish his lessons for the day. Texts me “lab fees are expensive.” The mysterious Male Instrumenty with “Non camera, Dziadowski Blues" #listenersview 🌊 steady as she goes, my friends! ❤️
Sydney operates an online bookstore. 🤓 #listenersview 🫨 El Negro Aquilino plays Media Granaina /half grain (on his beautiful flamenco saxophone) My view I will not show, but tell you I am driving around the blistering streets of @philadelphia 💯🥵 dreams of my next swim. And always, of you in the margin. ❤️
True love in the Margin. 🙏🏼 Jake and silver Apples “love fingers” serenade #listenersview @wmbrfm
Another from Seattle, and beautiful song from Jolie Holland. Haunted Mountain. #listenersview @wmbrfm
Dave & I share ❤️ for @wallofsoundrecords . Best music store I know. Highly curated, really passionate & knowledgeable owners. #listenersview w #maliobomsawen making music with Theophile Panadis 🔥🎻☄️@wmbrfm
Me in the margin w Sinead singing “lay me down darling.” I got lost looking for Rob & Lukey. Cut across some back yards, keeping an ear out for barking dogs. There were none. Down a steep & muddy bank to an actual trail. 10 mins walking, it turned and…a sign! Another bit of distance across a bridge, mosquitoes feasting, and there they were, straight in front of me. Rest beautiful ones. “There is no light without shadow, no shadow without light.” Now, to swim. So much love. @wmbrfm #listenersview
Joe in the forever Margin walks around the pond w Jane Lancaster singing about her chicken & other things a cappella❤️ #listenersview @wmbrfm
“I’m carving a spoon in the margin” sez @dapippin #listenersview ⛵️💨 @wmbrfm And he adds “…with a knife I got from Waldron Island when I lived out in the Salish Sea (Garrison Bay, SJI). Thanks, Sue!” I say Thanks Dave! Magic! Brigid Mae Powers sings about (being) “On the Ground”
December 16, 2022. A night walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Deb catches me passing across the edge of a light circle into darkness. A beautiful Masary Studio’s Solstice production leading us into these most mysterious days of winter.
This image brings me back to the early pandemic, riding across the city for hours on my bicycle. I spent a lot of time in cemeteries. In fact, I volunteered for a time as a Findagrave.com sleuth. Strangers would sent me a request to look for a long dead relative. I’d jump on my bike and be off with my maps of Forest Hills, Cedar Grove, or Mount Hope….send them pictures of what I found. If I found. lt can be quite difficult to find a grave.
I hesitated to tell anyone about these excursions. It seemed strange, and I couldn’t explain what compelled me. My time in cemeteries, in the midst of a pandemic, brought home the temporal nature of names and epitaphs carved into headstones, of memory, of whatever significance any of us may have in our lifetime. DNA is passed along, yet still, few are remembered by their grandchild’s children.
I ponder further in an essay, Toward a New Poetics of Journalism, commissioned by Nieman’s Journalism Lab.
In 125 years, when someone comes looking for us, what will they find? The hardscape — granite monuments, bridges, even mountains and rivers – eventually dissolve or give way to something unrecognizable, unverifiable. Journalists as anthropologists, social scientists, forensic experts — as with poets — leave a discoverable trace for those wanting to understand where they’ve come from. Let’s be generous with what we leave for them.
Find the full piece here.
Meantime, send me your musings, and join me In the Margin of the Other.
Support for Margin Media is provided by the Red Elm Tree Foundation, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Inc., the Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation