Freddy’s Feed and Read

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September 15, 2010 · Posted in Commentary · Comments Off on Freddy’s Feed and Read 

By Leslie Evans

Mark Watkins, the last owner of Freddy's Feed and Read, 1998

 

This is about a place I never saw, and which has been gone for twelve years. Even longer ago, back in my Marxist days, in New York in the early seventies I was editor of a monthly magazine called the International Socialist Review. In 1973 we claimed a circulation of 6,851, a bit less than half from subscriptions and the rest listed as dealers and counter sales. The truth about this last is that almost all of the bundles went to branches of the Socialist Workers Party around the country and very few to bookstores. Now and then I would go downstairs in the party’s Manhattan headquarters, where Flax Hermes, the blond athletic business manager, would show me the order lists. Among the handful of nonparty orders one stood out. It was called Freddy’s Feed and Read. The name was odd enough but it was located in the unlikely town of Missoula, Montana. Read more

ABBEY ROAD: Some Good Memories

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September 5, 2010 · Posted in Commentary · Comments Off on ABBEY ROAD: Some Good Memories 

By LIONEL ROLFE

The Abbey Road EMI Studio in London, no doubt the most famous recording studio in the world, has been in the news a lot recently, so I thought I would wait for a few weeks to pass so I could tell my memories of the place without the contamination of trendiness.

I spent some time at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios in the early ’70s because my uncle, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, also known in England as Lord Yehudi Menuhin, was recording there. I’m sure he had been making recordings there probably since the ’30s. I think Yehudi by far had the biggest catalog in the EMI catalog, and many of them had been recorded there. Read more

Honey Talks About Robert Louis Stevenson

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September 1, 2010 · Posted in Notes from Above Ground · Comments Off on Honey Talks About Robert Louis Stevenson 

NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND

By Honey van Blossom

(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)

Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.

I rode the Hurricane and Logger’s Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn’t have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear. Read more