I’m driving to Albany tonight for a John Mellencamp concert. He’s on tour. A little bit older and a little more grizzly. And his voice has a raspy ring to it. I know someone else who fits this description. One difference, though, is the one I know doesn’t go on tour or sing, even though he wishes otherwise.

If you don’t like rock and roll, well you don’t like rock and roll. I still do. Back in the 1950s when it came on the scene, it gave me and my friends permission to dance to a different beat as well as punctured the smug and suffocating conformity of that decade. And the performers – and they performed – were multi-racial and mainly, but not exclusively, male – Elvis but also Chuck, Jerry Lee Louis but also Little Richard, Bill Haley but also Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly but also Ray Charles, Carl Perkins but also Fats Domino, Bobby Darin but also Lloyd Price, Brenda Lee but also Tina Turner.

The songs of Etta James and Big Mama Thornton regretfully, but not surprisingly, never reached our ears in a small town in Maine.

Much more could be said by others who have far more extensive knowledge of R&R than I do. All I can say is that these bold and brash musical artists dared to go where others feared to tread and in doing so tipped the world of a lot of us upside down.

If you can open this, it’s worth reading. To think that Henry Kissinger is considered a venerable statesman only reminds us that the powerful take care of their own. To think that an architect of dastardly war crimes is venerated by so many is revealing and maddening as well as depressing. Kissinger is a low life and he bloodily earned the moniker.

If the “left” is to remain a serviceable category of analysis and struggle, it needs lots of updating. The composition, politics, organizational forms, breadth and depth, and challenges of the contemporary left are quite different from its forebear in the last half of the 20th century.

Sitting in Rough Draft in Kingston NY with a cold Pilsner sitting in front of me. Every year on this day I come here in the early am and lift my glass to my two fallen friends who died in Vietnam fighting a war that was the doing of the war makers in Washington and the money bags in corporate suites. Past time to turn swords into ploughshares.

Westkill Brewing, tucked comfortably in the Catskill Mountains, makes a pilsner that sits at the top of my beer world. It’s so good that it brings to mind the folk wisdom of my unforgettable old friend, Timmy Plummer, who told me, “Living at the bottom of a beer barrel now and then has its merits.”