Sunday Morning Review, March 2, 2025

Hi there! Since this is my first entry on the Beehiiv platform (I’m letting my Substack iteration go dormant and will delete it at some point), I thought I’d try to get in the habit of making this a weekly newsletter, covering whatever I’ve been thinking about, doing, reading, listening to, experiencing, etc. over the previous week. This is my first such entry and a possible template for future entries.  

Here's an index to this post, so you can read as much or as little as you want of it:

•  Item 1: Situations at Hand. The horrific mess we’re all witnessing.

• Item 2: Item of the Week. Nice talk about tasty food.

• Item 3: Cemetery stuff.

• Item 4: A book I read, a documentary I watched.

• Item 5: Mystical dice telling me to listen to albums.

• Item 6: Bob-a-Thon. Many thoughts about listening to Bob Dylan’s albums in chronological order.

• Item 7: Writing Elsewhere. A handy guide to where my writing has been featured elsewhere recently.  

Item #1: Situations at Hand

As I said in another context this week, I’m going address the elephant in the room, which is that we are currently living through an awful timeline, politically and socially. Each week since January 20 has presented a fresh new set of horrors as the Musk/Trump team gleefully stomp through everything in sight, with toady J.D. Vance and the usual brigade of idiotic sycophants cheering them on.

This week may have been the worst so far. We got relatively minor aggravations such as Elon Musk proclaiming at the first cabinet meeting that Trump has assembled the best cabinet in U.S. presidential history, which simply indicates that Musk knows nothing of Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, just to note one cabinet that was better than this current shitshow. But we also had to endure Trump and Vance attempting to humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting in the Oval Office. In the end, Trump and Vance embarrassed themselves but, by extension, they brought humiliation on the U.S. as well.

It might not be much fun for me to write, and you to read, about these things, but I’m going to write about them anyway, because I feel like I need to be a witness to all of this, and to figure out what role I should be playing in resisting it.

At the same time, I take inspiration from “Situations at Hand”, which is my favorite song by Minutemen, or at least my favorite Minutemen song not released on their epic Double Nickels on the Dime album (it appears on their final studio LP, 3-Way Tie (For Last)). The complete lyrics to “Situations at Hand”, written by Mike Watt and Kira Roessler, are:

“There are still lofty dreams/Meagre desires and still silliness.”

I believe this to be true: those of us who are deeply opposed to the Musk/Trump regime need to find ways, big and small, to resist and to fight back. But we also need to bear in mind that taking delight in love, art, music, anything really…is a form of resistance. Joy is a form of resistance, and it might give us the strength to work our way through this.

So, with that said, here are some items that brought me joy this week.

Item #2: Item of the Week!

I am not a serious foodie, but I did have two great culinary experiences this week that are well-worth mentioning. On Friday night, Donna, Chris and I ordered from Food for the Soul, a soul food restaurant in Pottstown, the next town up from us. Donna got fish and macaroni and cheese, I ordered ham with mac and cheese, and Chris got wings. Everything was delicious. Food for the Soul doesn’t appear to have its own website but if you search on their name and Pottstown you’ll find them. Highly recommended to people in our area.

Then yesterday morning, I finally visited Down North Pizza’s website and ordered a Roc the Mic pizza and a cucumber mint lemonade.

The origin story of Down North is not a typical pizza place story, but it is nicely summed up in this blurb on the inside of cover of We the Pizza, a memoir/recipe book written by founder Muhammad Abdul-Hadi with recipes by chef Michael Carter:

“Philly born and bred entrepreneur Muhammad Abdul-Hadi created and launched Down North Pizza with the mission to reduce recidivism rates in North Philly and serve up the most insanely delicious food while doing it.”

As it happens, Down North is just about a mile down Lehigh Avenue from Laurel Hill Cemetery, so after my tour yesterday, I picked up the pizza and brought it home. It was every bit as delicious as it looks. It’s an intense pizza: a little bit goes a long way, and as of this writing, there is still pizza left to tackle.

Item #3: History/Cemetery Matters

As you may know, since 2013, I have been a certified volunteer tour guide at Laurel Hill Cemetery in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia. Something happened this week that has never happened before: within a seven-day period, I gave two different thematic tours.

First, I led my “Presidential Connections” last Sunday. There are no presidents buried at Laurel Hill but there are probably hundreds of people who were connected to one or more presidents. I highlight a few of them on this tour.

I haven’t done the presidents tour in several years and, given the current situation, maybe this wasn’t the year to bring it back. Despite that, I had five or six people on the tour, including my fellow tour guide and Laurel Hill podcaster, Joe Lex. The tour group was enthusiastic, which always make for a fun experience.

As for me, I was happiest to impart new (to me) information about Henry Gilpin, who served as attorney general for Martin Van Buren. Having visited Van Buren’s gravesite on January 31 (my 16^th presidential gravesite), I was happy to let the tour group know that I have recently learned that Martin Van Buren blew off the inauguration of his successor, William Henry Harrison.

Instead, Van Buren was spending time at the Washington D.C. home of…you guessed it, Laurel Hill Cemetery’s own Henry Gilpin. In doing this, Van Buren avoided spending two hours sitting in miserably cold weather listening to Harrison’s interminable speech. A speech so long in such frozen conditions, that Harrison came down with a bad cold and died about a month later (though, to be fair, there isn’t necessarily proof that Harrison’s inaugural speech was directly responsible for his illness).

The second tour was yesterday (Saturday) my “Heavenly Intonations” music-themed tour. For whatever reason—these things happen sometimes—I only had one guest for the tour, but she was happy and engaged to be at Laurel Hill and we both had a great tour experience. I think other tour guides would agree that it’s a confidence booster to know that you’re able to successfully conduct tours in both one-on-one and large group settings.

Item #3: Recent Reading, Movies, TV, etc.

• All The Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley. I gave Donna this memoir for Christmas and read it almost as soon as she finished it. It’s the story of how Bringley worked through grief while working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a lovely meditation on how art can connect us to our own lives outside of museum walls. I’m looking forward to carrying it with me next time we’re at the Met.

• Vinyl Nation is a documentary about record collectors, that I watched after reading this interview with Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler, the film’s producers, on the I Have That on Vinyl website (more on it below). If you’re a record collector, you’ll love this film. What I like best about it is that it presents a wide range of music lovers rhapsodizing about their favorite records. Vinyl Nation is informative and fun and will make you feel like more/less of a record collecting geek, depending on which way you want to feel.

Item #5: The Mystical Dice of Musical Destiny (and Other Current Musical Fascinations)

Candy & the Kisses/Scepter Records. The Mystical Dice beseeched me to spin a 2021 compilation album, Candy & the Kisses: The Scepter Sessions, and I was happy to do so. I bought this collection, on the Sundazed label, purely because I liked the album cover, at Record Connection, a store I visit now and again in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, early last year. Candy & the Kisses were a mid-1960s girl group who scored a regional hit in Philadelphia with “The 81” on the Cameo Parkway label. If you listen to “The 81”, you will hear what I am certain is the inspiration for that killer guitar riff that opens my favorite Prince song, “Kiss”.

After that hit, Candy & the Kisses recorded a bunch of songs for Scepter, a hot label whose roster included the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick. Some were released as singles, some remained unissued. Most of their recordings were issued on this collection, which is a whole lot of fun.

Candy & the Kisses has also led me down a Scepter Records rabbit hole. When I emerge from it, I may have more to say.

New Morning—Bob Dylan. The dice instructed me to listen to Dylan’s New Morning album, so I did while taking the first walk I’ve done in a while. But I’ll save my thoughts on it for when it comes up in my Yearlong Bob-a-Thon (see below).

Item #6: Bob-a-Thon

I am working my way through Bob Dylan’s albums in chronological order this year, but for the last few weeks I’ve been stuck, not on a specific album, but on Dylan’s collected output in 1965, the year I was born (in between two Dylan classics). This is the basic chronology:

• Jan. 13-15, 1965: Dylan records Bringing It All Back Home.

• April 1965: Dylan releases Bringing It All Back Home.

• June 2, 1965: I am born.

• June 16-August 4, 1965: Dylan records Highway 61 Revisited.

• July 20, 1965: Dylan releases “Like a Rolling Stone” single.

• August 30, 1965: Dylan releases Highway 61 Revisited.

• September 7, 1965: Dylan releases “Positively 4^th Street” single.

• November 30, 1965: Dylan records “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” single.

• December 21, 1965: Dylan releases “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” single.

If Dylan had saved up all the songs he recorded in 1965 and released them as a double album at the end of that year, it would be revered as the greatest double album ever made. But 1965 was no time for Dylan to be saving stuff. He had to get it out there into the world.

I’m happy about that. I like the idea of being born in the middle of this huge burst of Bob Dylan’s creativity.

Now that we’re entering the era in which I am alive, I am realizing that part of the reason I’m doing this—besides a desire to listen to his albums in order—is to see how Dylan’s music bobs and weaves its way through my life and the connections that I might find along the way.

This was driven home to me when I was reading about the cover art for Bringing It All Back Home. The cover photo was taken by Daniel Kramer and features Dylan and Sally Grossman (his manager Albert’s wife) surrounded by various record albums and other objects.

What I did not know is that in an alternate photo not used for the cover, a copy of the I Ching can be seen at Dylan’s feet. This would be the edition of the I Ching translated from Chinese to German by someone with my name, Richard Wilhelm. The same book that certain fly-by-night self-publishing companies sincerely believe that I am the author of, as they still leave me voice mails telling me they want to help me get “my” book, I Ching, into Barnes & Noble bookstores.

Also, the same book from which you can draw a relatively straight line to Carl Jung to the Police’s Synchronicity album to Repo Man’s “plate of shrimp” scene to my own fascination with life’s little plates o’ shrimp.

It’s all connected, folks. And it’s all connected in the book laying hidden at Bob Dylan’s feet on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home.

Item #7: Writing Elsewhere

After another hiatus, I have returned to writing record reviews and occasional retrospective feature stories for the PopMatters website. I didn’t have any pieces published in the last week, but there are links to my recent reviews:

• Circa Waves Contemplate 'Death & Love' on Dazzling LP. Circa Waves are a BritPop band and Death & Love, Pt. 1 is a worthy addition to their decade-long discography.

• The Altons Explore and Discover ‘Heartache in Room 14. Los Angeles band delivers a great album of soul duets inspired by classic Motown and Stax records.

In addition to resuming PopMatters writing, I’ve written two essays for a new website called I Have That on Vinyl. Click on these links to read my work if you’d like, but I’d encourage the record collectors among you to poke around the website. It is already filled with excellent articles and interviews.

•  The Mystical Dice of Random Musical Destiny. An explanation of the eponymous dice and thoughts on my scoliosis workout soundtrack of 1981.

•  The Brief But Memorable Adventures of Bob and Me. A story about the records that Bob, my BFF for six months, and I obsessed over.

 That’s it for this week’s review. Thanks for your support!