The Say Hey Kid has left the building. By the time I was born, in 1959, Willie Mays was already a superstar. By the time I started high school he was headed into retirement. I never got to see him play, in person or on television, but his name was known to me from infancy. Not only was he right up there with baseball’s all-time greats—Ruth, Robinson, Aaron, Mantle, Williams, DiMaggio, Clemente—he was more than that. The esteem he commanded was on a par with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR. He was an American hero of the sort we no longer see, perhaps of the sort we are no longer capable of producing.

I have been remiss, Gentle Reader(s). I have neglected these pages for way too long, having been distracted by a variety of other pursuits and Matters of Grave Import. I beg your forgiveness. As much as I'd like to pin responsibility for this grievous oversight on someone else, I must admit that I have no one to blame but myself. So, whoever you are, wherever you are—if you are—please accept my apologies.   Hello? Anyone out there??

Ahh, the good old days, Gentle Reader(s). Does anybody out there remember the good old days? Like… I dunno… last week, or five years ago, or 20 years ago? Back when we were allegedly ‘GREAT,’ whatever the fuck that means. How about the pre-cell phone era? The pre-smart phone era? The pre-social media era? Or—cranking up the Way-Wayback Machine—the pre-intrawebs era? Kinda hard to believe that such innocent times actually existed, but indeed they did.

Well, for better or worse, I remember those hoary days of yore. I remember them pretty well, actually, considering all the drugs I did in the ‘70s. Or perhaps it was the ‘80s? Or maybe it was last week? Hell, I don’t know…...

It is rare indeed, Gentle Reader(s), for Your Humble Narrator to weigh in on matters regarding Sport (or Sports, as we colonials tend to call it), but the FIFA World Cup is an exceptional phenomenon—a uniquely global quadrennial event with an international following like no other. Having become a fan of the English Premiere League over the past several years (Liverpool is my team—one guess as to the reason why) I have found myself swept up in the fervor, getting up early to watch 8:00 AM games and trying to figure out which teams I favor. 

Greetings once again, Gentle Reader(s), in this, the fall/winter of our discontent. Of my discontent at least. It doth boggle the brain most verily, but a cursory examination of the record indicates that it has been 5—count ‘em, FIVE years—since my last New Orleans Report. How is this possible? Is some sort of discombobulation betwixt and between Time and Space to blame? Or have I just been Goofing Off? Tough call. Well, whatever the explanation, I am here to rectify matters and provide the update that all of you… some of you?… one or two of you?… have been waiting for, lo these many years.   No need to thank me. Not yet, anyway.  

If you're like me (and, for your sake, I sincerely pray that you're not) you just cain't git yourself too much Kate. There is No Such Thing as too much Kate! And towards that end, I am passing along the link to an excellent hour-long documentary on my favorite BBC Channel, Radio Four. Hosted by NPR music critic Ann Powers, this feature is sort of a feminist bookend to my admittedly dude-ish perspective as a besotted Kate fan from the U.S. side of the Pond. I was very pleased to see that that post (July 26, of this year) got a lot of readership with folks clicking in from South Africa, Sweden, the U.K., Hong Kong, India and beyond. Your kind attentions are greatly appreciated, whoever and wherever you may be.

Some Thoughts on the Passing of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II   Well, first of all, I never met her. Never even came close, so far as I'm aware. If she was ever in line next to me at Whole Foods or if we were ever waiting for a flight in the same gate at the Albuquerque Sunport it managed to escape my notice. I detected no scrums of corgi dogs tearing about, no Gentlemen At Arms whispering into their lapels. She liked to keep things pretty low key, it is said, like not sporting the crown or waving a scepter about unless circumstance specifically called for it.    As has been pointed out in these pages on prior occasion(s), I am an unreconstructed and unrepentant Anglophile. I cannot say with any specificity quite how this came to be, but at some point—far, far back in my days as a wee lad in New Orleans—something about our cousins across the pond tweaked my fancy. The most likely scenario is that it began with the Beatles, of whom I became enamored while still in my grade school years.

I can’t be any more precise about the date other than it was probably late 1981 or early 1982. I do remember the place, though: Budget Tapes & Records in Albuquerque. I was 21 or 22 at the time and I’d been working in record stores for a couple of years. There were two Budget stores in Albuquerque: One right across the street from the University of New Mexico at the corner of Central and Harvard, and the other one way the hell up in the Heights in a strip mall at the intersection of Eubank and Candelaria.   By all rights, the store across from UNM should have been the hip one, what with its built in collegiate clientele, but it was an aggressively uncool establishment. The store was company-owned and its inventory was therefore restricted to whatever bland swill was available via the Budget corporate order book from the Budget corporate warehouse in some corporate business park somewhere. Very dull, milquetoasty and mainstreamy stuff: Styx, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Heart, Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie, the Oak Ridge Boys, Huey Lewis & the News—whatever musical plaque was clogging up the Billboard charts at the moment. I worked at Budget with the Goof and together the two of us waged a subtle insurgency against the middlebrow aesthetics of the place, bringing in our own records from home—ones that Budget would never stock—and playing cassettes of our own original recordings when management wasn’t on hand to shut us down.   The NE Heights Budget store was locally owned and the owners, while not musical aesthetes by any stretch, were cooler than the corporate bollards at the Central Avenue location. The Heights store was free to stock the racks from whatever distributors it saw fit and therefore had access to a wide selection of esoteric material and hard-to-find imports. That said, most of the specialty stuff they stocked was metal (Anvil, Dokken, Iron Maiden, the Scorpions, Ynge Malmsteen—pick your Poison) but not exclusively. Eventually, my refined sensibilities could abide the Central Avenue store no longer and I started working at the Heights location exclusively, even though it was a long haul from my student ghetto apartment. There was an Arthur Murray Dance Studio next door and we took special orders from the slinky, heavily made-up girls that worked there. Budget Tapes & Records has long been consigned to the shitecan of history, but the Arthur Murray studio still abides. Go figure.   Gentle Reader(s), I can feel you out there thinking, ‘All of this is more than adequately fascinating, Humble Narrator, but get to the goddam point already.’ Patience, patience—I’m getting there.

It's a jarring thing: You go to sleep in one world and wake up in another.   Not that we didn't see this coming, but the actual arrival of the Supreme Court's decision striking down Roe v. Wade landed like a neutron bomb in the sociopolitical life of this fraught union. In the course of two days the court has struck down longstanding limitations on guns in public places and ensured that American women born after 1973 will have fewer rights than their mothers did. All this even as the mind-boggling spectacle of the January 6 congressional hearings has unfolded, laying bare the moral corruption and insanity of the 45th president and his cabal of misfits, nut jobs and sycophants. This is an extraordinary time in the history of this nation and concerns about the future of democracy in America seem more real and pressing than ever. Not moving forward is one thing, but going hard in reverse is another altogether.