» Preview Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s “Handel Arias” on Amazon
Other music for your own private AWOL: Hank Levine’s “Image, Part One” as the on-ramp to summer seasides you never saw in a California that never existed; Del Reeves, your fellow road-tripper; Carla Bozulich’s “Steal Away,” the curtained loft you’ve always wanted to rent just for disappearing to when work deadlines loom; Jose Gonzalez, perhaps the only person in the world when he plays “Hand On Your Heart.”
» Hear Hank Levine and the Orchestra on Soul Sides
» Hear Del Reeves at Big Rock Candy Mountain
» Hear Carla Bozulich on Honey, Where You Been So Long?
» Hear Jose Gonzalez on rbally
After last night’s fireworks, from the top of an apartment building in Brooklyn, once the finale’s explosions stopped, there was the oddest chord in the air. We thought someone had brought an organ up to the roof. But it was the combined notes of a thousand cars and boats blaring their horns.
We walked to the subway and passed 18 nationalities of families who’d spent too much money on whirly-noisemakers for their kids. I was trying to remember all the different types of explosions we’d seen but got stuck on “Firecracker Catalogue,” a list of exquisitely named fireworks (Bomb of Heaven Singing, Jumbo Christmas Missile, Pink Carnation Dynamite) I half-remembered from Jay Hopler’s new book Green Squall, which is its own sort of explosion, especially if you read his poem “Of Passion And Seductive Trees” out loud.
What excitement Hopler draws from reading firecrackers accurately named, Airto Moreira draws from me.
» Hear Airto Moreira on Bumrocks