I don’t know why I’ve been watching as much TV news coverage of the Republican Party contest for the presidential nomination. I avoid Fox, but even on CNN and MSNBC and what we used to call the “network news” the reporting is staggeringly shallow. All the talk today, and this…
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Here’s a memory painting of a night scene at the movies on Central Street in Lowell: “The Strand” by Richard Marion (c) 2012 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net Here’s a link to Nancye Tuttle’s museum exhibition brochure about the movie theaters in Lowell. Her 1993 exhibit was called “Picture It: Lowell Goes to the…
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With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a…
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My brother Richard often stops by my home to drop off an interesting item he has found along the way in his travels, often a photocopy of a news article or a brochure that is not to be missed. Yesterday, he unfolded a large piece of paper that turned out…
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We called those round things records when I was growing up. For Christmas, I was the lucky recipient of a TEAC CD Recorder with Turntable/Cassette Player. A nice machine. I thought it would be fun to make my own discs of select LPs and cassette tapes that have been mothballed…
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Dick’s post about changes in journalism applies in many respects to what has been happening in the publishing sector (books and magazine and e-pubs) since the 1960s, when the mimeograph machine made it easier to mass-produce written material. Remember those school test papers in faint purple ink? Editors, writers, and…
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Read Rita Savard’s fine article about typewriters in our culture and, specifically, Jack Kerouac’s typewriter at the National Park’s Mogan Cultural Center museum exhibit about the immigrant history of Lowell. Filmmakers were in the city yesterday documenting the old Underwood typewriter on display with one of Kerouac’s backpacks on the…
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From truth-out.org, I picked up news that Bill Moyers has a new TV program. He keeps coming back, I think, because nobody else has figured out how to do the kinds of shows he is so well known for, mixing high-minded thinking, compassionate political ideas, and entertaining broadcast methods. Read…
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“Tan Mill” by Richard Marion (c) 2012 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net
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An old friend of mine last night sent a message on Facebook saying she recently had heard the brilliant filmmaker Ken Burns speak in Brattleboro, Vermont, which got me thinking about my first encounter with Burns. My recollection is that I saw his documentary about the Statue of Liberty that was broadcast in 1985…
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