Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

 Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah.  That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that."   With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning.  And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time.   I understand a lot about this caged and managed river.  Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read.  That's not a genre I usually read. ...

And then we reach 1980.  It's been a decade since they broke up, and as the decade progressed there were more and more opportunities for them to collaborate.  Ringo seemed to be the impetus for a lot of those collaborations including at least 3 songs that would've been released on his Stop And Smell The Roses release had Mark David Chapman not chosen to close off this chapter by murdering John Lennon .   With the exception of the songs from McCartney II, the albums these songs were pulled from were released after Lennon's death ( Somewhere in England  in May, Ringo's Stop And Smell the Roses in October, and Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984).   Lennon was clearly settling into a new happy direction in his life and writing beautiful and personal songs that further highlight the tragedy of his death.  John Lennon had always been the most direct and upfront in his songs, and the songs on Milk and Honey , with about half being Yoko Ono...

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi...