Tomorrow is New Years Day, and after that, I will be a Natural Resource Specialist for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. A new year, not only a new job, but for the first time since College, a completely new field, well within the Masters of Public Administration I am working towards, but still completely new for me.

So, with a lump in my throat for the old, and barley containable excitement for the coming new, I sing that most wonderful of New Years Songs;

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again

Altogether shout it now
There’s no one
Who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again

Your cares and troubles are gone
There’ll be no more from now on
From now on …

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So, Let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again!!!

A peaceful and joyous 2014 to you all.

To find the lost
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoners
To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among brothers
To make music in the heart.

-An unattributed Quaker

The Green Family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, has asked the US Supreme Court to grant them ‘conscience protection,’ exempting them from their obligations under the Affordable Care Act. They claim that their religious convictions don’t allow them to cover employees’ birth control…

One of the advantages the United States has traditionaly had over Europe is a very mobile population. With no passports between states, people can move to where the opportunity is, and sometimes do with very dramatic results (think the ’49 gold-rush, the current oil rush going to North Dakota, or the flood of workers getting temporary work rebuilding after Sandy). With Europe opening its internal borders, this advantage has been somewhat blunted (but only somewhat, there is a very large matter of scale).

The ACA, by removing preexisting conditions, is removing a strong incentive for many people to stay in their jobs. As our economy improves, and as we see more jobs available, do you anticipate a more mobile workforce?

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.

But then the remarkable thing happens. You look to the hills, between the blowing fog and sun, and you realize that there is more color than ever. Burgundies, reds, greens, golds, yellows greys and browns, all previously hidden under what announced itself as the color of fall. All just waiting to be seen.

The result is that this morning shown down on the (for now) beautiful desolation of early winter’s greys and muted reds of the hillside brought to a full stop by a band of bright orange defiantly holding on the the last breath of fall.

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.