John

I remember John

Almost as a dream

After all the years past

His lightness of being

Now a low fog

That drifts close to my shore

Whispering

What if

2008 By David Jacobi

Neil Young

The first new Neil Young album I purchased was Rust Never Sleeps, acoustic on side one and electric on side two. It was love at first spin. That summer he immediately became one of my favorite musicians, and I began buying his previous albums. The way he could alternate between a tender acoustic ballad and a scorching electric rocker was amazing to my teenage ears. Soon I was spending hours listening to After The Gold Rush, Harvest, On The Beach, the harrowing, dark Tonight’s The Night, and Zuma, to name my favorites. I bought all of the other earlier albums, too, sometimes two or three at a time. I felt like I had discovered a gold mine of great music that wouldn’t end. And then came Re-ac-tor, his 1981 release. A Synclavier? Jokey choruses, stammering singing and silly lyrics? What was going on here? Maybe this was just something he had to get out of his system. The next one will find him back in fine form, I thought, until Trans came out in 1982. Again, some of it was okay, but he went crazy with a vocoder, like a kid with a new toy. One album review I remember from the time likened his vocals to a singing microwave. When you have Crazy Horse as a backing band and put out something like this, well, what is there to say? Next up was Everybody’s Rockin’, a rockabilly album, and that was followed by a country album. None of them to me were bad, just not what I was expecting after the joy of listening to his backlog. I can’t help but applaud when an artist trys a new direction, but that doesn’t mean fans will follow. As the years went by I kept my eye on what he was up to, and I still buy the occasional album. I consider myself a fan, but not like that teenager who first discovered him years ago.

The Roundup

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“Claiming inspiration from “old-school American values mixed with a little punk-rock idealism,” Mike Brodie, aka The Polaroid Kidd, hopped trains across the U.S. for seven years, documenting his friends, lovers, and travels with a Polaroid and a 35-millimeter camera and amassing a critically acclaimed body of images.” His own site is static and he has supposedly given up photography.

Maps of War “was created to help people understand current events, as seen on TV and in our newspaper headlines, as being one small chapter in the much bigger and longer story of human history. Each map is well-researched and based in fact, and none of the work is meant to be biased or political. No spin or opinion, just fact-based conclusions about the history of war.”

Raise “is an online gift card marketplace where you can sell gift cards for cash or buy discount gift cards to all your favorite brands.”

August Ambiance

Having lived in Iowa my entire life, seeing vast acres of corn and bean fields became commonplace even as a child. As a city boy I was used to driving around the crops to get to other places, but now that we moved to the country we live in the crops. We are surrounded by a swaying wall of corn on all sides of our property, a living seven foot high privacy fence. We can only see from ground level the tree tops of our two neighbors a quarter mile away to the east and west. Living on two acres in the middle of a vast cornfield tends to turn the eyes up or down. Up, one studies and admires the clouds and the big blue sky they float through, and down are the wildflowers, flowering weeds, dragonflies, butterflies and toads. To find them all in one spot we walk out to the ten foot wide ditch that separates our front yard from the gravel road. We decided not to mow the ditch to see what would come up, which most of our neighbors do as well. There are a wide variety of grasses, flowers and weeds that I have not taken the time to try to identify yet but we do recognize Daylillies, Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed and lilac scattered throughout. The toads are most vociferous after a rain and if water is left in the ditch. They vary in color from browns to greens, but always with some bumps and intricate patterns on their skin. They seem unconcerned when picked up, and many times will not even hop away when set back down. The rabbits have multiplied as usual, which keeps the two dogs busy chasing them back into the corn when they see them. Come dusk the lighting bugs begin flying and blinking by the thousands, making for a wonderful glowing show while the robins chirp and chatter as they sing down the sun.