Remember when Big Chief Warren appeared on television in 2020 broadcasting from a Springfield classroom where the letter blocks on the shelf behind her spelled out the acronym for the racist hate-group Black Lives Matter? I'm sure that was merely a coincidence.
My wanderings over the past week have brought me to the campus of Hampshire College. Here's Johnson Library, a really cool place.
In fact "a really cool place" is a phrase you often heard about Hampshire College in general over the past half-century. But lately, not so much, at least when it comes to finances. Hampshire appears to be hobbled by a life or death fiscal crisis as the college president and several board members have abruptly resigned.
However, as I traversed the gorgeous Hampshire campus, hands-down the prettiest of the Five College system, I could detect no sense of impending doom. This sign announcing a pro-abortion conference, however, may be one small symptom of what has gone wrong.
Like a lot of Liberal Arts schools, Hampshire's once famously free style has been choked by political correctness. Good grief, even their gym has a pro-abortion sign overhead!
For some reason, people appear to be reluctant to spend over $50,000 per year to be turned into an unemployable social justice warrior so buried in debt you have decades of monthly bills as big as a mortgage payment - except you don't have a house. Hampshire's problems are just the symptoms of a wider crisis in higher education, which is that colleges today have become absurdly expensive, indoctrinate more than educate and do a poor job of preparing students for productive lives.
Only when this changes will students once again be willing to go to college in sufficient numbers to sustain small colleges like Hampshire. Right now, the smartest kids are avoiding college altogether and just plunging into whatever interests them, learning their field from the bottom up. Such people do not remain on the bottom for very long, and they by-pass all the leftist hooey and ruinous expense of what passes for a college education today.
Hampshire may be fading, but already gone is the Northampton Faces, a Valley commercial fixture since its origins decades ago in Amherst. The day after they closed, a mysterious wreath appeared in their doorway.
Lo and behold, it was a sympathy wreath from Packards, the bar around the corner.
Northampton's downtown business environment is the most cut-throat in the Valley, as merchants compete for dominance in our area's most successful downtown market. But bonds of friendship still form across the business district, and whenever a member goes down, the whole commercial community is saddened.
On a happier note, UMass had their literary bake sale, where students make funny and punny spoofs of famous books. This is so corny I had to laugh.
Never has a chocolate cake looked less appetizing.
Meanwhile, I was in arty mode this weekend as I attended an opening at the Oxbow Gallery on Pleasant Street in Hamp.
There was a good crowd.
I was never previously aware of the joint, but I'll be back.
The gallery undoubtedly gets its name from the nearby Oxbow section of the Connecticut River, which was painted by Thomas Cole in 1836 and entitled, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Learn all about this Pioneer Valley masterpiece in the video below.
The best way to save your photographs for posterity is to digitalize them. While paper fades and gets lost or destroyed, once digtalized your photos become immortal. As an added bonus, everyone can copy them, further insuring their survival. Anyway, I decided to put a few up for your perusal, in no particular order and for no particular reason other than I thought they might be somewhat interesting or at least entertainingly weird.
My mother and her brother in 1944.
Me at the age of three with a bow tie predating both George Will, Tucker Carlson and David Starr.
My father smoking outside The Tavern in Westfield shortly before his death in 2007.
Me putting a magic spell on Monique's garden around 1999.
Boston Mayor Ray Flynn and Mitch Ogulewicz.
Doyle the Twig Painter in 2002.
Northampton's Packards in the year 2000.
Springfield art show with a portrait of Keith Sikes and a girl with a gun.
Shirtless, stoned and speechifying at my International Headquarters in Amherst in 2003.
Jay Libardi in 1985.
Wilted rose from Jay Libardi's casket, 1994.
Eulogy for Garcia by Ken Kesey
Hey, Jerry - what's happening? I caught your funeral. Weird.
Big Steve was good. And Grisman. Sweet sounds.
But what really stood out - stands out - is the thundering silence,
the lack, the absence of that golden Garcia lead line,
of that familiar slick lick with the uptwist at the end,
that merry snake twining through the woodpile, flickering
in and out of the loosely stacked chords -
a wriggling mystery, bright and slick as fire - suddenly gone.
And the silence left in its wake was - is - positively ear-splitting.
I remember standing out in the pearly early dawn
after the Muir Beach Acid Test, leaning on the top rail
of a driftwood fence with you and Lesh and Babbs,
watching the world light up, talking about our glorious future.
The gig had been semi-successful,
and the air was full of exulted fantasies.
Babbs whacks Phil on the back. "Just like the big time, huh Phil?"
"It is! It is the big time! Why, we could cut
a chart-busting record to-fucking-morrow!"
"Yeah right," you said,(holding up that digitally challenged hand
the way you did when you wanted to call attention to the truth
or the lack thereof) "--and a year from tomorrow we'll be
recording a "Things Go Better With Coke" commercial!"
You could be a sharp-tongued popper-of-balloons
when you were so inclined, you know. A real bastard.
You were the sworn enemy of hot air and commercials,
however righteous the cause or lucrative the product.
Nobody ever heard you use that microphone as a pulpit.
No anti-war rants, no hymns to peace.
No odes to the trees and All Things Organic.
No ego-deaths or born-againnesses.
No devils denounced no gurus glorified.
No dogmatic howlings that I ever caught wind of.
In fact, your steadfast denial of dogma
was as close as you ever came to having a creed.
And to the very end, Old Timer, you were true to that creed.
No commercials. No trendy spins. No bayings of belief.
And if you did have any dogma you surely kept it tied up
under the back porch where a smelly old hound belongs.
I guess that's what I mean about a loud silence.
Like Michaelangelo said about sculpting,
"The statue exists inside the block of marble,
all you have to do is chip away the stone you don't need."
You were always chipping away at the superficial.
It was the false notes you didn't play
that kept that lead line so golden pure.
It was the words you didn't sing.
So this is what we are left with, Jerry:
This Golden Silence.
It rings on and on without any hint of let up - on and on.
And I expect it will still be ringing years from now.
Because you're still not playing falsely.
Because you're still not singing "Things Go Better With Coke."
