Dick Edelstein is a US born Irish citizen living in Barcelona for the past 40 years. He contributes essays, reviews and articles to journals and websites in Ireland and the UK and regularly reviews collections by emerging Irish poets in the Dublin Review of Books. In his early career, he worked on the Seattle docks as a grain inspector and at Boeing as a tooling inspector. In San Francisco he worked on the docks as a longshoreman and shipscaler, and as a construction laborer, machinist, and electronic technician, ending that phase of his career working as a maintenance mechanic at ITT Continental Baking, sometimes known as the Twinkie factory, in a handsome Mission-style red brick building on San Francisco’s Bryant Street, opposite the old Hamm’s brewery. Email: dickedelstein [at] gmail.com
by Dick Edelstein When an overdose of reading the news causes the horrors of today’s global politics to hit my psyche like a flurry of blows in a boxing ring, attending a poetry event can remind me of the value of life’s small pleasures and reaffirm my faith in the good intentions of at least…
by Dick Edelstein After creating for a party a playlist of old R&B tracks recently, I was struck by the optimistic mood of so many of the songs that I had selected, by how their hopeful or celebratory moods contrasted with the tone of much of our current popular music, songs that frequently rely on…
by Dick Edelstein On account of the mood of economic restraint that looms over opera productions, preventing Barcelona’s Liceu from programming as many operas per season as it did just a couple of decades ago, each season now more often includes other orchestral works that feature singing, dance or theatre. And this effort, born of…
by Dick Edelstein According to today’s newspaper, Spain is expected to lose some 30% of its population over the next 75 years, based on current birth rate projections, a loss of over eight million inhabitants—too great to cover through the influx of migration (La Vanguardia, 17 May). And what about other European countries? The study…
by Dick Edelstein The visit by Pope Francis to Ireland in 2018 as part of the World Meeting of Families was important since it was the first one since the historic visit by Pope John Paul II in 1979, an event that drew around one and a quarter million people to a mass in Dublin’s…
by Dick Edelstein Following the opening night performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Barcelona last month, I left the Gran Teatre del Liceu harboring the thought that this revolutionary setting was a slick riposte to the existential challenge of malevolent Trumpian ideology, a notion that could have motivated theatre director Romeo Castellucci’s approach to staging Mozart’s…
by Dick Edelstein A message from Spotify on my phone this morning announced that jazz singer Sheila Jordan had just dropped a track from her forthcoming album. A musician of very long experience among the inner circle of bebop jazz stars—iconic players, most of whom are no longer with us—she is an iconic figure herself,…
by Dick Edelstein A number of books published in Ireland in the past few years relate to the centenaries of the First World War and the fight for Irish independence. Apart from being an opportunity to sell books, the conjuncture afforded readers an opportunity to reflect while delving into a receding page of history. Mary…
by Dick Edelstein Irish poet Geraldine Mitchell begins her new collection as she means to go on, choosing as an epigraph an untitled, haiku-like poem in an exalted tone: a blackbird knaps the flint of my heart, sparks fly Written in a non-classical style, the epigraph is a signpost indicating the celebratory mood prevailing in…
by Dick Edelstein Catalan jazzman Ignasi Terraza and his trio lit up Barcelona with eight sets in October at Jamboree, a cutting edge Gothic Quarter club in the neoclassically-styled Plaça Reial, once an historic crossroads of the Camino de Santiago with the Roman Via Augusta, now a nexus of Barcelona night life and the local…
by Dick Edelstein Although jazz pianist, composer, arranger and lyricist Billy Strayhorn died in 1967 at the age of 51, his obscure life has since then become much better known than it was during his lifetime. His songs remain popular, and his reputation has continued to grow. Strayhorn shares credit for many jazz tunes he…
by Dick Edelstein Ireland has produced a number of prominent scientists despite being a small nation, but if you ask an average citizen about John Stewart Bell, one of the top Irish scientists of all time, you are likely to draw a quizzical look. That is mainly because the area of Bell’s important contribution, quantum…
by Dick Edelstein By the time I got to high school, the humanities were seen as a kind of side dish in the educational meal. This was largely due to the exigencies of the space race and an inclination on the part of American society to acquiesce to the suppression of critical thought in the…
by Dick Edelstein I got an incredible break when I was thirteen. We moved to Seattle and I entered public school in the sixth grade, after five years of Catholic education. The impact of the change in fortune was all the greater since I had no particular expectations, a good example of the principle that…
by Dick Edelstein In Barcelona the daily scramble to deliver children to school results in terrible congestion in the upper part of the city, where the more economically privileged send their children. Watching this phenomenon brings back my own school days, when the most embarrassing thing any of us could imagine was being dropped off…
by Dick Edelstein On 4 October 1957, in my mind’s eye, I was playing alone in the back yard when the radio in the breezeway broadcast a special news bulletin that changed my life. We had moved from Chicago to Minneapolis in 1951 and my parents had bought a recently built house on a dead-end…
by Dick Edelstein Namwali Serpell’s article in the New York Review of Books about the life of Sun Ra was aggregated here in 3 Quarks Daily in July 2020. It was a real treat to read it, and it led me to a chain of memories about Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. In the…
by Dick Edelstein In this last of four essays on historical memory, I consider some of the guises under which this topic arises in Spain, the conflicts that exist between the need to remember and the need to forget, and those that crop up when different groups appeal to the right to remember. I previously…
by Dick Edelstein The notion of historical memory has to do with the ways in which social groups and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events. This is the third in a series of four articles on this topic. The first two can be found here. In the first I…
by Dick Edelstein This is the second of three articles on the theme of historical memory. The first, which can be found here, deals with issues related to archival data on casualties and victims in the Spanish Civil War. In the present article, I discuss the activities of a movement to redress the exclusion of…