All Good Things....

The Vivid Air has been on an unplanned and unannounced hiatus for most of this summer so far, which to the shock and consternation of well bred and educated people everywhere has actually been noted by a select few in the blogosphere (possibly including refugees from brother Rick's Right Wing Nuthouse.com, whose site meter climbs steadily toward one million visitors).

Before the sabbatical ends, I'd like to present some links to the web work that has occupied much of my time this summer.

The last few years have seen a rebirth of the amateur performing career that I had put on a much longer hiatus some decades ago. Abetted by the free resources afforded by the web (including blogspot.com and YouTube), I've been at work promoting both my group and an upcoming event that we appear at yearly.

The group is called The Chilly Winds, taking its name from a song by balladeer John Stewart, who co-wrote the song (with the late John Phillips, founder of folk-rock icons The Mams and the Papas) when he was a member of the Kingston Trio. Stewart has enjoyed a rich and critically acclaimed solo career, having released over forty solo albums and CDs, but has had only a few limited brushes with widespread commercial success. Stewart continues to soldier on, however, his releases always garnering critical enthusiasm and occasional Grammy nominations. (Stewart's most recent effort, The Day The River Sang on Appleseed Records, has been hailed as one of the best folk albums of the year to date. It is available through many sites, including Amazon).

The Chilly Winds group performs the music of the pop-folk revival of the late Fifties through mid-Sixties (also know to purists with a sense of irony as The Great Folk Scare). It's just for fun and for the joy of making music in an ensemble, as I hope our home page demonstrates:

The Chilly Winds Home Page

The links on that page to the performance videos are also accessible directly through YouTube at:

Chilly Winds Videos


Our next performance will be at a delightful folk festival outside of Colorado Springs in late August, for which I've designed this home page:

The Mountain Music Festival Home Page

We'll be moving in pretty heady company. Bob Haworth, Michael Johnson, and Mark Pearson are all long-established professionals in this branch of the folk world, as the audio and video files attest.

But I actually can chew gum and walk simultaneously, and as the eclectic nature of Moran minds is always in evidence (as with brother Terry moving from attack drones in Iraq controlled from Nevada to an interview with Kiera Knightley on Nightline, or Rick posting about the Middle East one day and Gettysburg, Custer, or the Chicago White Sox the next), I expect that my rants and ruminations on other topics will return to the blogosphere shortly. How ever has it survived without them? (insert smiley here, for those who need them.)