One of the pictures has the sky in the background, with nothing to suggest it is in the middle of a town, let alone The City.  Like most good art, the piece takes you out of time and place.  Once you crest that hill, you see the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp beside the Golden Door of Ellis Island.  The ancient lands and storied pomp of Europe left behind… except that in this case, you are standing on some of that very land, itself a recent immigrant from when the memorial was built in 2002.

There seems to be a weird disconnect today. Many on my Facebook friends-list are spending the evening listening to the Velvet Underground, while posting professionally written tributes to Lou Reed that basically read like that old joke. “There was this band; you have not heard of them, but they were influential to a lot of musicians you have heard.”

That’s not the half of it. A young Czech dissident was visiting the United States when he ran across Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. He brought the music home, and bootleg copies became the soundtrack of Prague Spring. Later, much later, after the rebellion was destroyed by Soviet tanks he laid the groundwork and tried again, borrowing the name from the Velvet Underground for the Velvet Revolution.

Vaclav Havel is said to have once told Lou Reed “I am President because of you.”

That’s the nature of art. Not that it influences other artists in a vacuum but that it influences the world in sometimes unimaginable ways. I doubt that Lou Reed had any idea that what he was doing would be highly relevant in Czechoslovakia in 1968, much less in 1986, but it was.

That’s the promise of art. Art matters because it has an impact that reaches beyond even the artist’s own vivid imagination.

That being said, if you read many of the tributes tonight, you will find that he was “influential to a lot of musicians that you have actually heard about.”

Dad has some good things to say about it, but Facebook won’t let me really link to it, assuming I am only trying to link to where the Velvet Revolution and my family intersect. The link is good, but I encourage you to check out Dad’s post on Facebook as well.

Velvet Revolution

Velvet Revolution Category

Doc. Pomus wrote an amazing number of songs. You know some of them, even if you don’t know he wrote them. He got into music after polio took both his legs as a child. He became a blues singer, and then started writing songs when record labels saw no future in blues for a white, Jewish man in crunches.

At his wedding, he told his wife that she shroud go dance with people, after all, it was her wedding. He went on to joke that she was coming home with him anyway, so who she danced with didn’t really matter.

Years later, he co-wrote “Save the Last Dance for Me” on the back of one of his old wedding invitations.

1) A busker singing “Folsom Prison Blues” in an over-the-top Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” accent (“I stabbed a man in Port Royal, just to watch him die”).

2) A running fight between Peter Pan and Captain Hook down 4th Aventine, that ended with Tinkerbell being stabbed to death in front of the Avenue Bar. The crowd started madly clapping, bringing Tinkerbell back to life.

Last night there was a full halo around the moon. It won’t be long until streetlights create orange spires that reach to the sky.

On nights like that, I want to put different color gels on all the light, and see if we can fill the night sky with streaks of yellows, golds, golds, greens, and if we can get a bright enough light, purples.