Longer Is Better: Prog Rock, Jams, and Rock Concertos

This is Harley Lond’s curated guide to long-form musical performances (excluding classical and jazz) released over a span of some 75 years. This list is coordinated to an Amazon Playlist, which can be found here. Included are some 72 songs offering 12 hours of listening enjoyment … to blow your mind.

1952

1962

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1976

1986

2002

2004

 


Posted on December 9, 2025
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Harley’s Trader Joe’s Thai Noodle Rice Soup

 

My mother came from that long line of Jewish cooks who were never satisfied with a printed recipe; she was always potchkeing around with the ingredients, be it from a Jewish cookbook or an LA Times Food Section recipe. She’d add a little bit here, a little bit there. This was also true for leftovers; we might come home from a restaurant with a plate of leftover Fettuccine Alfredo, and, sure enough, for dinner the next night, we were presented with a modified Italian pasta dish she had potchked with. (Any recipe was fair game for being potchked with — except for anything by Julia Child, who was an original potchkeier.)

And a lot of time, a potchked recipe just couldn’t be duplicated: so much depended on the potchked feeling at the time of cooking. A case in point: mom’s chopped chicken liver recipe could never, ever be duplicated. Even working off a hand-written copy of her recipe, no one’s chopped chicken liver could ever come near hers.  (How much salt? How much pepper? Just a bissel.)

Well, I inherited the potchke gene and regularly deviate from a recipe by increasing or substituting ingredients. I’ve always found a recipe I liked and then changed it to suit my tastes. And, sometimes, I’d even create a new recipe from my potchkeing around.

Despite battling cancer and fighting off Trump era ennui, I found the time to create this wonderful mixed-genre noodle soup:

Ingredients:

Two cups Trader Joe’s Low-Sodium Chicken Broth

One Knorr’s Chicken Bouillon Cube

One bag Trader Joe’s Thai Wheat Noodles

One egg, beaten lightly

One cup cooked Calrose rice

Green onions, chopped

Salt, pepper to taste

Preparation:

In a two-quart pot, bring the chicken broth to a slight boil and add in the bouillon cube. When the cube dissolves, add in the rice; continue a gentle boil for about one minute. Add in the egg and swirl it around with a fork until the egg is completely cooked. Break up the Thai Wheat Noodles and add them to the pot; continue with a gentle boil for one or two minutes or until the noodles are heated. Toss in green onions to taste.

If you want a thicker broth, let the liquid boil for an additional minute or two,

Serve and enjoy.

You can now experiment with additional ingredients: stir-fried chicken bits, steamed carrots, peas, broccoli, mushrooms, tofu, etc.

 


Posted on December 9, 2025
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To Jimmy Kimmel: Lenny Bruce died for your “sins”

o Jimmy Kimmel: Lenny Bruce died for your "sins"


Posted on September 17, 2025
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Tanks for the Memories

German tanks invade Poland, 1939

Soviet tanks invade Budapest, Hungary, November 1956

Pinochet tanks invade Santiago, Chile, September 1973

Chinese tanks invade Tiananmen Square, June 1989

Trump tanks invade Washington, DC, August 2025


Posted on August 22, 2025
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My Journey With Our Complicated, Dysfunctional Health Care System

I’ve been fighting bladder tumors on and off for seven years now and, until recently, had beaten them back. In September, 2025, my urologist found a polyp in my bladder and scheduled a TURBT, which is a same-day in-and-out Bladder Tumor Removal Surgery. In November I had his procedure and this time, however, the tumor was malignant, and I was to be referred to an oncologist.

The urologist dropped the ball and delayed my referral to an oncologist. The New Year came and went and in early January I had an attack of sciatica that knocked me out — so much so that I was taken to the hospital by ambulance. While there — for more than a week — I was stuck and pricked and prodded by Torquemadas with medical degrees — and an MRI to assess the damage to my back revealed some bad news about the bladder tumor — it was not just a “polyp gone bad” but it was a mass that had obstructed the ureter in my right kidney, partially blocking flow into the bladder — basically, renal failure. So the nephrologist performed a nephrostomy (basically, a tube inserted into the kidney and out the side of my back into a bag to drain the kidney).

I’ve seen so many specialists and doctors and nurses and been to urgent care so many times now that my head is spinning. I’ve been battling cancer on two fronts: the disease itself and a bureaucratic health care system.

It started right off when my medical group took weeks to approve visits with specialists (urology, oncology) and then set up a PET scan (which pinpointed the spread of the cancer); then more weeks to approve the chemotherapy. The miscues with doctors and nurses are legion. When I requested a blood pressure monitor, I instead was offered a cane. I was diagnosed with anemia (no big deal) during my hospital stay in January yet I was never told about the condition until mid-April — and not by my primary care physician but by my oncologist. My medical group said they would provide me with information on how best to handle anemia (pills, nutrition) but they ended up offering me a class on diabetes. When it came time to have the catheter tube in my kidney replaced (every ninety days, although my urologist didn’t inform me of that, I found out from another source), the hospital ended up giving me the wrong bag and tubing, which leaked the very next day; my urologist replaced it with the right bag and tubing (that set-up also leaked but that’s not the doctor’s fault). The dressing around my catheter needs to be changed every couple of weeks but the home nurses that visited me to make the change invariably caused me so much pain that I had to go to urgent care. Sometimes I feel like the Lenny Bruce of healthdom.

I’ve been through two cycles of chemotherapy so far and fortunately the side effects have been minimal — no hair loss, very minor nausea, just some fatigue and occasional dizziness. The only problem was a rash and swelling in my right leg, and the pain got so bad that I had to go to urgent care. The doctor there ordered an ultrasound to rule out a blood clot — but ordered the ultrasound for the LEFT leg! I straightened that one out (no blood clot in the right leg). I’ve spent so many hours in waiting rooms and hospitals and urgent care that I feel incredibly worn out. And I’m constantly in pain.

But I’m pushing ahead. Trying to get the mental energy to continue my infamous “Letter from LA” (which will now be “Letter from LAncaster” — there’s a lot of irony going on around here). I’ve been thinking a lot about time/memory/entropy (“The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli), the beauty inherent in things (“The Voice of Things” by Francis Ponge) and committed myself to the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” one of the most stunningly beautiful works of prose I’ve ever read.

Happy summer.


Posted on June 1, 2025
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