Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum every hour as the thaw…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette tapes with labels like “Bucknell, 1971”, Stanford 1973”; “Fillmore East 1970.” Of an evening he would navigate through these hundreds of cassettes…
Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” was released 50 years ago this coming Monday: August 17, 1959. That was ten years after, and ten degrees cooler, than the little big band of Miles’ “Birth of the…
"I hate traveling and explorers." —Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) * * * We curse the journey in order to praise the destination more fully. Already in 1778 Boswell related that Dr. Johnson detected a…
There is that old cliché of travel: that it allows the traveller another perspective on the place left behind, the one he may or may not return to. With the rise of the internet and…
It may be that the interest in and affection for life in the old East Germany is a result of the current German “crisis” — the climbing unemployment, the catastrophic shape of the pension system,…
I took the prescription sleeping pills before take-off but slept only in the thinnest intervals, perhaps one hour out of eight. This was to prove of some difficulty on my first day in Berlin, since…