Day Thirty-Five

5/5 (Cinco De Mayo!)

The Book: The Fortress of Solitude

ISBN: 0-375-72488-5

Suggested By: Dan Solomon

Where: Home

When: 7-7:45P

Music: None

Company: The Family

Pages: 225 - 280 (55)

The Lead In: Caught a Ramones quote today, made me happy, because it wasn’t in italics or in quotation marks. “It’s the end, the end of the seventies.” From Rock and Roll Radio I think. Good song. Such a good good band.

The 411 on the 55: Dylan falls into a new crowd at his new school, bunch of white kids. They all become punk rock kids, until Sugar Hill Gang sparks rap. Mingus and he remain close.

Well, dabbling back in punk rock music, Dylan and a group of friends go to a house to get high after a show, they get mugged by an bully that used to torment Dylan when he was a kid. The girl Dylan is after pees her pants, which ends his chances.

Dylan and Mingus seem to be going in different directions. Dylan works all summer to get ready for college. In contrast, Mingus uses the ring to spray paint his mark on the side of a 26 story-high police tower. Mingus is getting into heavier and heavier drugs, while Dylan has taken up reading Hesse. Maybe this is the split of white and black youth in Brooklyn, as the author portrays it? Young they are similar, as they age, they divide?

Today’s reading ends with Dylan buying a bunch of comics off another friend, using part of his college money. His friend, Arthur and Mingus are going to invest in drugs.

Line of the Day: “Brooklyn’s chased you to the ground and nobody’s going to comprehend except that you’re marked, cursed, best avoided.” pg 267

The Fact on the Fiction:  (Shout out to Brandon for pointing this out, nice to see you following the blog!)  “One of the most important figures in twentieth century American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church-- choir and group singing-- and from "hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.” Mingus