Of knives and other sharp items

Water in Lake Erie recedes. Giving away ground. As well the declining corporate music business , and it's bosom friend in the soft entertainment industry , your basic dead tree and typeset companions in the publishing fields of books , slick magazines , tabloids , and the doubtful American daily newspaper are going the way of the model t ford. And this is the dire news that is never really told by the twin industries that spin their fortunes from nickels , dimes , and bold faced lies. Fiscal bad news is perceived as not fit to print , lest it mess up the hair of it's financial agents and investors , or wake up further the smoldering public sentiment for fairness and honesty in reporting which is immediate , free , and far more interesting to consume today in the streaming on line sphere that many of our lives are lived within today.///////// Suffering double digit fiscal erosion every year the recorded music end of the entertainment industry is in a free fall. Technological savvy Internet users and a diminishing market are the one - two combination that stagger the kneecaps , causing audible knocking under it's hood and the dead timber bunch sent head over heals to oblivion and beyond. All right, I did not go for the obvious play on words , dead timbre , though I sneak it in 'hear' for my own amusement. As for the temporary reprieve granted the contemporary version of the daily newspaper , most will be but a printed dead tree memories in the scant space of a few years to come. It is an impossible task to read the local version of newspaper mediocrity , the plain dealer , and derive anything of intellectual value or stimulation . No candor , wit , or objectivity spring forth from the keypads of it's " writers" , these days. A dumbed down amateur air seems to be the flavor of it's style book , the lack of any in depth reporting is painfully obvious , daily, weekly , and monthly , year in year out. I do like the editorial cartoonist who works on the p.d. op-ed page , Egan the fishing and racetrack writer on the sports page as well, Photographer Lynne Ischaey , and some others employed are talented in the limited aesthetic fashion of news gathering and it's dissemination conspired by the business and political goals of the cleveland plain dealer and it's companion lower tier newspapers that dot the print journalism landscape of a USA today universe. Even if you posses meager artistic talents , as most of us do, you are apt never to have a means of using them to anywhere near potential while employed by a contemporary news or media concern such as the Cleveland plain dealer. Pathetic. The syndicated news efforts are far better than the locally gathered variety. I prefer to read quality 'stringers' such as Christopher Maag , write about Cleveland , Ohio news via the pages of The New York Times , than the Cleveland plain dealer version. In the New York Times a higher level of authentic news and opine appear in a news article , and a better " style book" demands better writing and reporting of news. On the positive side , today's online edition of the plain dealer featured a one minute streaming video news clip of chef Michael Symon's coronation as iron chef. A tip of the high white hat to Michael , and in the realm of Cleveland plain dealer front pages news for the past two days which I did not read , proved all I needed to view and understand of this culinary circus event. Perfect! This clip from the plain dealer online version is a good example of why modern streaming news is today's authentic news , and these clips will only get shorter and more pared down as the attention spans and demands upon future humans space available within their collective minds is an issue to chew upon. Minimal perfection of the light weight news of the passing hour , minute , second , fractional seconds. With the advent of the hand held video and photography devices , add stroke of a keypad , upload and bingo instant news. The textual efforts in the online plain dealer proved succinct but unreadable as news , so minute in content or news value as if to make television news appear to contain more viable content. A universal law should exist prohibiting the use of the words television and news in the same sentence . Yet the plain dealer online " breaking news" reads as if the news offered was compressed and composed for the eyes of a third grade child. Leaving the classified ads section as the only reason to purchase the plain dealer and I would have nothing to do with the p.d. at all if it were not for this advertising section . Far better to spend the extra .075 cents daily and buy the New York Times . Possessing a nose for news and a more discerning pall ate , the New York Times , International Herald Tribune , or any other well written and edited newspaper left standing in the world today printed in the English language is more to my taste . The New York Times , though not without many faults and biases , provides a more discerning and erudite printed news flavor , and is closer in aroma and strength to the coffee I imbibe every morning . Few and far between these days these newspapers of worthy note , and the p.d. is merely a near extinct old species fish , washing up on a dying lakes shore in a diminishing market of readers and consumers , and now is forced to compete a little leaner every year in terms of it's new hires , and looks to it's corpulent staff of writers for meat and is given cheap hamburger in it's printed place. The politics of this newspaper are well documented by my old Friend Roldo Bartimole in his well written , Point Of View columns over the past forty years , and it is due to Roldo's fine and dogged efforts to keep the politics and goals of the "pee dee " as actual news and under public scrutiny that I have an appreciation for the low aims and skulduggery that the current plain dealer represents in Cleveland , Ohio. ///////// File transfers and digital downloads are the death knoll for the recorded music business , or a return to it's budget origins . What once was a physical salable product in the form of a vinyl record album , compact disc , or magnetic tape of recorded music is now a .99 cent musical download and the equivalent of a Internet jukebox that allows the dollar to spit back to the user a metaphorical penny to be chalked up against the .098 cents due for the tune purchased and downloaded. The recorded music industry started over a century ago , selling single tune cylinder recordings and then .78 r.p.m. recorded discs for dimes to dollars, and this same music business in one hundred years time has returned to it's low rent origins in a modern 21st century market that demands custom designed immediate gratification via it's fickle custom blending digital consumers. ///////////////////// Factor in the effects of the hyperbole merchants employed by these industries in public relations , advertising , and the business of ballyhoo, vitriol , and blather created by the newspaper and entertainment industries . No wonder today's critical , picky youngsters will have nothing much to do with this coven of bad actors and professional liars. Witching hour approaches for these flawed and vulnerable industries and those employed by them. Heads are rolling wholesale , and add to this fray a National writer's strike , and let those left standing sort events out. The media ship is lilting in it's traditional safe harbor waters , and taking on water fast. The propaganda newspaper merchants and electrical entertainment peddlers will be moving in together on some low rent flop where their .99 cent and .50 cent products will die a lonely corporate death. Good riddance! BOOK SELLING TIME! Ernest Hemingway FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS . First American edition. Eleven eleven is the chosen day to celebrate Veteran's Day in the United States Of America. I am old enough to remember the hoards of street seller's with pin on red poppies for sale , to benefit the less than fortunate homeless or otherwise suffering veterans of previous American wars , and all news sources that disclose that a significant number of homeless men in these United States of America today are veterans of the Vietnam War. As a nation we treat our pets better than our less than fortunate veterans and homeless human beings. Many others homeless in America are either mentally ill , handicapped or crippled in some fashion. Find space in your life for these fallen fellow humans. The season is upon us to find space in our collective and individual hearts for others not as fortunate. Spend some of our most precious commodity , time , in your busy life to help provide some basic needs and attention to one who is less fortunate. Take a tip from my pal John , who sent me a pair of boat sized tennis shoes for my old baseball pal James to wear. A random act of kindness , that will be appreciated by this still worthy human life that deserves better than he receives , and does not complain . You will not have to look far these days. Poverty is a scourge upon this land , and the mounting fiscal woes that foreclosures and a society that chooses to live in great collective denial,debt , and fiscal peril occurs will certainly produce more casualties , not to mention the impending shake out in the entertainment and dead tree industries. We here at Old Erie Street Bookstore soldier on selling books the best we can in a world market where demand is far out stripped by supply , and the pressure price wise is downward not up. A second hand player in the entertainment and dead tree industry , I give book selling another decade or so prior to it's extinction, save some unique printed items that might appeal to antiquarians and art mavens. The Hemingway offered is without a dust jacket and not a top collector's grade edition , though I expect it has good value based on the prices of comparable new volumes of fiction or literature today. That we will sell this volume prior to the Year's impending calendar end is likely. Be the first on your block to take a Ernest Hemingway first edition as your office party or retirement gift for than newly unemployed person in the entertainment or news industry.////////// Culinary Bites! My old pal and original skillet man Slim , who burns porcine hash and slings root beverages at his public chowhouse and science project down Kentucky way , aptly named SLIM'S, and just a tad North of the queen city of the South and I both agreed , Michael Symon is the new iron chef. News only because we both figured it out well before it was filmed ,Slim and I both concurred at the announcement of the series some months back that Michael was to win.Results are in and no place to place a bet! Sounds like a new sports book with all the odds and evens factored in , should be established for the outcome of future culinary match ups for those who wish to wager on such competitions.Make note , I only mention this culinary crowning of the victor in the name of a sports championship coming to Cleveland. Cleveland beats New Orleans in the culinary world series . " Hey Rube!". " That's Entertainment".

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Driving 45rpm in a 78rpm zone

Another strange day on the coastal boondocks hard upon the south shore of Lake Erie.

An old graduate of Cleveland's bad boy high school, Thomas Edison, Lester Russaw now aged seventy-four, who says he performed as a young man with a musical group known as The Coronets, who in 1953 recorded a rhythm and blues song NADINE, the writing credit assigned to a later payola scandalized Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, and released by Chess records of Chicago, Illinois, reaching number three on the national Rhythm and Blues Billboard charts.

You can bet that the Chess brothers Leonard and Phil made a lot of money on this record and that Russow and his band mates did not.

Alan Freed made a lot of money as well. Larry Russow was not as fortunate and was pulled over by Wickliffe, Ohio police for driving 50 mph in the fast lane of Interstate 90, just a shuffling away in his silver 2007 Chrysler Sebring, after committing the crime of robbing a near bye bank of $9,203 dollars.

Russaw receives $360.00 in Social security a month and was behind in his bills.

Afro- American men and women musicians in 1950's America were the true pioneers of the nascent original rock and roll music which was often purchased cheap by record industry heavies, and I mean heavies in the b- movie sense , and then repackaged and sold cross over to Caucasian audiences.

Really folks, Elvis Presley would not have enjoyed musical success without the influences of the Afro - American musicians Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Willie Mae “Big Mamma" Thornton.

Arthur Crudup became so fed up with not receiving his musical royalties that he ceased recording it, turning instead to bootlegging whiskey, and working as a laborer instead of suffering the emasculation and misery of being robbed by the criminal music industry.

The remnants of this same music industry today are dying a slow fiscal death and I do not feel even an iota of sympathy for this bunch of corporate pirates that walked all over and then penalized men like Arthur Crudup and many other vulnerable artists of all colors and stripes of their purse by patently refusing to pay royalties on their recorded or penned music.

Lester Russaw had no right to rob a bank, brandishing a firearm while committing a robbery is truly a crime and he should be punished accordingly. Though the white collar gangsters that ran the music business in 1950's America were criminals also, and hired plenty of gun packing, knee breaking “muscle”, when they felt it necessary to enforce any business pursuits or royalty claims that went contrary to their selfish monetary policies. It appears that the wake that is left in the water by such fraudulent and nasty business is still being felt today some fifty plus years later.

Examine the HBO series THE SOPRANOES and the character" Hesh”, for a cleaned up read on this moral dilemma.

Fountain pen?

Pistola?

Sometimes it is pretty difficult to tell one robber from the other robber, though Lester Russaw should have known better than to be caught driving 45rpm in a 78rpm zone.

Book selling Time!

Not quite a bestseller but perhaps the very book that Lester Russaw should have consulted before leaving home the other day, Gunnar Karlsson's scarce 1987 publication, A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL METHOD: THEORETICAL FOUNDATION AND EMPIRICAL APPLICATION IN THE FIELD OF DECISION MAKING AND CHOICE.

In keeping with the rather odd account of Mister Russaw's less than fortunate choice we offer the following new title for your reading pleasure.

I am not positive that anyone could find pleasure in reading this title, though if you can or know someone who has have please send have them a review or synopsis to this site ,d I will provide a free book of my choice postpaid.

By the way… “could somebody tell me what diddy wah diddy means?"

For my Father who actually taught at Thomas Edison High School in pre World War Two Cleveland, Ohio and who had the wisdom to refer to Thomas Edison High School as a “bad boys school," and scare the bejabbers out of me as a youth.

Thanks to John and Kim, Goodnight and hats off to Hank Thompson, and Willie “Willie Tee" Turbinton, both superb musical talents who recently have passed away.

They will be missed!

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