An uneventful ride from da Bronx through NJ to Scranton-prettty straight line on I-80, a single $1.00 (!!!) toll the entire way, at the PA border. Only one thing caught me eye…ear, really. From the time I got about 50 miles away from the PA border…the end of clear NYC FM reception…there were no AM radio stations to speak of. None. Zero…except one kind of half-crackpot-but-not-in-the-least-hostile Catholic Father Somebody talking about the possibility of homo sapiens neanderthalensis having a soul. He doubted it, and gave lots of reasons why.
Yawn…
Read on.
Anyway, into Scranton. This city used to be a hellhole…early rustbelt. Like 1960s. I still have nightmares about its bus station on late night bus rides. No more…rebuilt, rebuilding, multiracial and pretty well-balanced about it. Working at the Scranton Jazz Festival…a small but well run operation where I usually play with a great PA/NJ-based big band behind the featured artist….Delafayeo Marsalis this time. he is one of the Marsalis jazz clan, and a very good trombonist and musician.The set was great, and well received by the audience…which I would guess was about 90% white and maybe 65% over 50. The only unusual…and quite encouraging…occurrence during the set (which was heavily contemporary New Orleans-influenced) was when we played a piece called “Back To Africa.” Delafayeo is very well spoken and not in he least confrontative…almost professorial…and he prefaced the piece by talking about Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance and the “Back To Africa” movement started by Garvey in the ’20s. The crowd erupted in applause!!! Now remember…we are in the sticks, here. No matter whether PA is red or blue in total vote, take away Philly and maybe Pittsburgh and the results would be way different. But here we were, with a bunch of white people applauding Garvey’s efforts.
Hmmmmm…!!!!
Further:
I often take the pulse of an area by the way I am treated both on the street and in the restaurants and hotels/motels in which I stay. I blend in fairly well…white, middle-aged, sneakers, jeans, t-shirt and unmarked baseball cap most of the time…and I stayed in one of my favorite U.S. hotels, Scranton’s Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel. It’s a place with a real history. Scranton in its boom years was an important stop on the Lackawanna Railroad’s east-west route, all the way I believe from NYC to Chicago and points north as well. The hotel is enormous…old school architecture, too…1908.
When the train traffic began to tank…by the end of the ’50s/beginning of he ’60s, for sure…so did Scranton and so did its major hotel. By 1970 it was a goner, and it sat here decaying for 12 or more years…birds nesting in the halls, etc. In 1983 it was renovated…really well, with great respect for its history…and it seems also to have acted as an anchor for the rebuilding of Scranton. In my 24 or so hours here (and several several other visits over the past few years as well), I have never once been disrespected in any way whatsoever by a single resident of the area, the people who work in the hotel…heavily mixed race and to a person obviously pretty happy with their jobs…and doors seem to be being held at every level of the culture. A nod of the head, a smile and and a real “Good Morning” seems almost de rigeur here.
My point?
Simple.
We ain’t dead yet!!!
Real America…the America that I respect…lives!!!
It’s not being covered by the click bait/watch bait media…they’re too busy hyping whatever “Hottest Thing Ever!!!” bullshit drips out of the ass of the TweetShit machine…but it’s there if you know where to look.
And…with any luck…it will arise and say “Enuf’a this shit!!! Get your piles outta here!!!”
Let us pray it so.
Maybe even by 2020.
Let us pray it so twice!!!
AG
P.S. And…as usual…you can take yer polls and shove ’em up yer tweeter hole.
Thank you and good afternoon.
I’m headed for two of the overall sanest places on earth that I know really well…Delaware Water Gap PA for a recording session…home of the great (and longest continually open in the country) jazz club The Deerhead Inn…and then Ithaca, NY.
Peace.
It’s what’s for dinner.
