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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Bird at 100

It is eerily fitting that last Saturday’s centennial of modern jazz genius Charlie Parker’s birth should have fallen in the midst of a global pandemic.…

RNC: None Shall Sleep

Across four nights, the televised program of the Republican National Convention had all the drama of an interminable student piano recital in which one put-upon…

Torch Songs for Joe

Politically packaged, extended-play infomercials (i.e., conventions) make abundant use of music. Partly this has to do with the necessity of cleansing the palate and the…

Celebration of Change

Raving about Joe: What if grandad showed up at a rave? You’d probably be smart to dip out of the nearest exit and find your…

Porgy & Bess in the Time of BLM

Last Friday night while protesters were being shoved into unmarked vans in Portland by federal paramilitaries, PBS broadcast George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in its Great Performances…

Hamilton Comes Home

While a White Man President raved in front of dead White Man Presidents in South Dakota, a couple of those same stone faces were re-animated…

Morricone: Maestro of Music & Image

Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after…

The War On Kitsch

With all the talk of meddling in U. S. elections and bounties on U.S. soldiers, it’s no small wonder that a Russian named Berlin can…

Dams Be Gone

Somewhere in my mother’s photo albums is a picture taken by my father of the teenage me standing on a viewing platform above the Dry…

Dams for the Breaching

The Lockdown has sparked a renaissance in correspondence. I’ve been exchanging postcards with my mother and letters with my youngest nephew. Emails have gotten longer,…

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