Just a nother thought...

Give Peace a Chance

2011-07-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe my problem is with the word, “peace.” I hear that word and I hear “boooring,” I hear status quo, I hear don’t make any waves. Shhh can we get some peace and quiet around here, someones trying to rest.

I totally admire the conference but personally I think war vs. peace is a faulty question? To fight or not to fight? No, for me it’s who will you fight for? Will you fight for the man who has no arms? Will you fight for equality?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SN7Pko_jCM

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” ~Fight Club

Marginalized globally by an income gap that is growing exponentially and people are pissed.

The mission as I see it is not to preach peace to the marginalized it’s to redirect their angst. To convince the Catholics and Protestants that their enemies are not in pubs but in banks. To convince our disenchanted suburban youth that brand names are false and hollow idols. To convince the quiet sheep that earnest expression is “the strong life,” and that living your principles is a life in the “extremis.” Passion in your principles, love making, dancing, and debates, will be the enemy of Ennui.

My Creepy Basement

2011-04-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

I want to inspire a mutual smile
Traversing all potential joy.

I pledge to muster the courage to open that creepy basement door,
to descend the quiet lack of light.

Hands shutter as I open the box;
Heart flutters as I feel for the switch.

There, I'm touching it, illumination is imminent!

But wait, before I flip the switch, I take pause…

No light, no sound, who would of thunk it,
No fright to be found.

I see my dark basement in a new light.
By Embracing the darkness I've eliminated the shadows.

Upon ascension I will exalt with fearlessness!
First though, I have a corner to explore.

A forrest fire is started by a spark.

2011-02-10T04:47:00.000-08:00

The camels carrying thugs wielding clubs running over Blackberry wielding protesters in Tahrir Square are a ballyhooed symbol of this clash of civilizations, but it’s the elephant in the square that has sparked the kindling. Kindling (made up of small sticks and twigs) would be the massive multitude of instances in Egypt where women are oppressed. It’s the mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, who are giving these young men the hutzpah to poke a hole in their damned dam.

The only stat we need is the following:
(According to the World Health Organization in 2008, an estimated 91.1% of Egypt’s girls and women have suffered female genital mutilation).

I Will to Oneness Ascend.

2010-06-29T23:36:00.000-07:00

I find myself having more visceral experiences in the presence of beauty. The revelation for me has been that the experience of beauty cannot be passive; now when I come across a flawless flower, I walk up to it, touch it, smell it, contemplate it; I consider the harmonious symmetry of it’s seed carrying ovaries; I focus on the contrast of its color with the dark dirt it blossomed from, I consider the ephemeral nature of it’s against-all-odds existence and in doing so, consider mine;
I wonder if the honey-stuffed bumble bee that prances up and down it’s prickly pedals made a consciences choice to climb this particular flower, and I wonder if it was a similar bee that carried this plant’s pollen here, from some other place. What will it feel like I wonder, if I am stung...if only I am stung.

So now, if by happenstance I find myself under a white flowering dogwood tree
and drips of spring mist
drop on my tilted-back forehead...I will feel the urge to
drop to my knees, spread open my chest, and let some tears of joy
drop onto the leaves of grass below.
I will to oneness ascend.

dancing under moon on a rainy day

2010-05-27T16:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R42C6xhNvLI&feature=related

This is the Van Morrison performance we experienced at Jazz Fest. Notice Van solo on this harmonica (one of five instruments he played) with the effusive energy of an indomitable 25-year-old, and the joyful hard-living blues of a mortal 65-year-old rocker (how can a man be so ugly and so suave at the same time, he’s like a musical Bukowski); notice the misty moondance rain frame the painted yellow sun in the background; notice the black dapper suits and the gold microphone on a gold stand emblazoned with a gold “VM;” and oh yea, notice the damn good musicianship, the likes of which spanned jazz, blues, rock, reggae, Latin, Irish folk, and more. What you won’t notice is the wide weird range of fans, including the two toddlers next to me that ran around in circles and let it all seep in.

The Gospel Tent

2010-05-05T21:53:00.000-07:00

by the way, it happend, beyond my wildest expectations. I heard Aaron Neville's voice sweetening the air from afar and I pushed in close to the Gospel tent until I witnessed him overseeing our festing congregation. The song was Amazing Grace but I've heard that song before and this was something else, this was a communal uplifting in harmony...this was Mr. Neville handing out wings to all of us, so that we can forever fly in a flock above the pain.

The echo of his last note lingered like a lover's tear that refuses to let go of the eye and slowly drips away.

"Whooooow...ahhhh...whoooow!!!" Just as a flock of birds turn in knowing unison, our shared silence turned into a primal uproar as five hundred pairs of hands reached out to whatever Aaron was giving. And yes, Aaron was reaching back.

When it was over, Two middle aged woman in front of me turned around with tears in their eyes, and I think we almost hugged. But instead we stared at each other. And as I write this now, I can still see their wet joyful eyes; a shared stare so strong that it goes on.

Plagiarism R us

2010-04-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

The following is my response to this program:
http://www.radioopensource.org/david-shields-reality-hunger-kicking-ass-and-dropping-names/

A man named Robert Ross was speaking with Oscar Wilde one day and Wilde was complaining that a well-known novel had been borrowed from an idea of his, Ross countered that Wilde was himself a ‘fearless literary thief.’ ‘My dear Robbie,” Wilde drawled in answer, ‘when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.’

A similar sentiment was voiced by Mark Twain in a letter to Helen Keller after she had been accused of plagiarism as a child (I have a feeling I will appropriate these words myself someday if accused):

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did.”

“To think of these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn’t sleep for blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and they don’t know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop! Oh, dam—

But you finish it dear, I am running short of vocabulary today.”

GO TWAIN!

Aristotle begins his “Poetics:”

“Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.”

So, I think we can all agree that imitation is good. I push back however in another respect. I fear that in Mr. Shield’s zeal to “dissolve genres” he’s gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater. And by baby I mean, Plot.

I imagine that Aristotle might respond to Mr. Shield with a passage from Poetics:

“Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.”

“The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of agents mainly with a view to the action.”

Grandmaster Flash collected samples of catchy hooks from multiple songs and made it into one song, and Hip Hop was born. I applaud Mr. Shields for embracing that essence. At the end of this interview when talking about the future of writing he even says, “Bring the Pain” – which is the title to a song by Method Man.

Methinks Aristotle would gently remind Mr. Shields to bring the plot first.

Principles r us

2010-03-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

THE FOLLOWING IS IN RESPONSE TO THIS PROGRAM
http://www.radioopensource.org/nell-painters-history-of-white-people-its-coming-to-an-end/

A sparkling conversation. It strikes me that most of the conversations Ms. Painter will have on her book tour will be to describe her book, but it might be said that in the big picture she wrote the book so as to stimulate the kind of conversation that happened here.

Ah yes, in the billion words that Mr. Emerson wrote through his life, some fallibility can be culled, I have no doubt. But RWE was about principles, and his principles are the letters I subscribe to, not the parsing of random speeches.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE”
-Emerson “The Oversoul”

Mr. Painter describes RWE as the “embodiment of the American Renaissance,” but I feel that puts him in a box. My Emerson is an embodiment of the American identity born through a specific principle. The principle that W.E.B. Du Bois quotes in chapter III of The Souls of Black Folk.

“By Every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

The same identity-through-principle that Ellison’s Invisible Man grasps on to at the end of the book: “and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I no longer had to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and the Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”

The same identity that James Baldwin’s African American protagonist comes to embrace at the end of his trip to Europe and his story What it Means to Be an American. “It is the day he realized that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself—for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself—for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands.”

It’s same identity and principle that even the fallible Booker T. Washington pinned his hopes on in Up From Slavery: “This country demands that every race shall measure itself by the American standard.”

But here is my revelation even in writing this blog, Mr. Washington isn’t just talking about the black race rising up to the “American standard,” he’s also talking about the white race coming down off it’s perch to the “American standard” – and thus to the American principle; American identity; equality. But hold your horses! We’re not come’n down quietly!

“Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an unmovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”
- James Baldwin

Ms Painter tells us “anybody can be racialized,” and thats a vital message, although it only tells half the story. Where do we go from there? We know what to avoid, but what to embrace? PRINCIPLES! Anybody can also be principlized! How do I know? Ralph Waldo Emerson told me so!

On Transience

2010-02-26T15:58:00.000-08:00

A short essay by that dude of all dude's, Sigmund Frued

http://www.freuds-requiem.com/transience.html

"But did I dispute the pessimistic poet's view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth. Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of enjoyment."

Is there a God

2010-01-27T16:32:00.001-08:00

Yesterday in my first visit to the MET, I experienced for the first time, the works of El Greco. In his painting View of Toledo I found more truth about the nature of the universe than a scientific photograph of that city could give me. The gallery label read: “it seeks to portray the essence of the city rather than to document its actual appearance. In Aristotelean terms, it substitutes poetic for historic truth.”

What’s the endgame of the truth you seek? What are your principles and do you strive to wear them or embody them? Mrs. Goldstein trusts her own rapture when it comes to Love because the endgame of her marriage has turned out well. Helen Keller was religious and her endgame was to change countless lives. Bill gates is an atheist and his endgame has been to change countless lives.

It’s like the Beatles song says, “Whatever gets you through the night.” Whatever it takes to get you through that darkness, just be ready for the Rosy-fingered Dawn of Homer – and of the good.

So that is the proposition I bring to the betting parlor of Pascal. I will strive to live up to dawn of my principles, and if it turns out – even though I passed on worshiping the big guy – there is a man upstairs, my wager is he will nice enough to let me duck under the velvet rope.

http://www.radioopensource.org/erica-hirshlers-biography-of-a-masterpiece/

2010-01-27T16:31:00.001-08:00

I see the burgeoning independence of femininity in the face of futility…just as I see here:

http://www.allpaintings.org/d/54618-1/Edgar+Degas+-+The+Duchess+di+Montajesi+with+Her+Daughters.jpg

I also notice that the vases are much bigger than the girls…I sense those vases taking precedence in this household…these ornaments so priceless are give license to say more than the adolescents in the room, I suspect.

And the dresses of these prim and proper white girls all match a whiteness that bonds them in blandness. Ironically the head of this household could surely go on for hours about the vibrant colors of their rug, but the style of their offsping will most assuredly stay beneath the rug…emotions in this painting are kept as close to the vest as the motionless hands of the girls.

Now that I’ve looked at the painting, I will listen to the interview and post later on. Thank you, Christopher Lydon, as always. Lots of Love. We especially need the arts as an antidote of beauty during this oppression of carnage.

Pops

2010-01-27T16:30:00.001-08:00

“Mayann told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley and the two guys killed each other. It was the Fourth of July, a big holiday in New Orleans, when almost anything can happen.”

Personally, I see Mr. Monk through the prism of race relations, and I see Mr. Armstrong through the prism of The Big Easy…New Orleans.

Of course Louis had his own genius but it was the meshing of his with the genius of that adolescent city by the bayou that forged his icon. In the same way the genius of Helen Keller needed the genius of Anne Sullivan to create an alchemy of transcendence.

In Jamaica I made a nine mile pilgrimage up a mountain to view the vista from Bob Marley’s birthplace, then to his home in the mercurial streets of Kingston, and finally I stood in the waveless serene shores of the island’s sea…only then did I sense the roots of the Mr. Marley’s genius.

Satchmo’s genius percolated in the Petri dish of Storyville, a red-light district whose motto was “Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.)”

“There were all kinds of thrills for me in Storyville. On every corner I could hear music. And such good music! The music I wanted to hear. It was worth my salary – the little I did get [delivering hard coal] – just to go into Storyville. It seemed as though the bands were shooting at each other with those riffs.”

Besides Storyville from what I can tell, there are at least two other important influences in his life, one is the Second Line, and the other is strong women. The Second Line developed his chops, the women his empathy and fortitude.

After one particular Second Line funeral: “They patted us on the back and just wouldn’t let us alone. They hired us several times afterward. After all, we proved to them that any learned musician can read music, but they can’t all swing.”

The strong women were his wife, sister, grandmother, greatgrandmother, and his mother Mayann: “She was glad to say hello to everybody and she always held her head up. She never envied anybody. I guess I must have inherited this trait from Mayann.”

You mentioned in this hour that Armstrong’s mother was a prostitute. I don’t think that can be understated. And for a time, Louie was a reluctant pimp. Louis was from such a poor part of town, Liberty and Perdido, that he was looked down on at the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. Later on when he was sent as a boy – to be the man – and take care of his sick mother, he rode his first bus and found out he had to sit in the back because he was black. Only years later when he arrived in Chicago did he know that as a musician he had finally arrived…and that’s only because King Oliver told him he would have a room with “a private bath.”

This is the man who took nothing for granted in life, not a meal, not a bath, not a breath…It’s all a blessing to Pops. And that makes Pops a blessing to all of us. The lesson of Louie Armstrong that I take with me through life is to take nothing for granted, not even joy.

A response to A Woman

2010-01-27T16:29:00.001-08:00

“A woman”…I have a memory I cherish of a waterfall in Jamaica. It’s not a waterfall someone busses you in to look at, it’s one that zig zags flat down the mountain, enough so that you can walk the whole way through the water. It takes a few hours.

My cousin and my best friend and I began our decent at the top of this mountain in Negril…a wild sanctuary of green lush grass and welcoming trees. In the middle lies a wooden makeshift bar with a whole lotta rum at the ready. Mostly I recall the sound of perpetual thunder… which was actually the forever roaring water flowing down the mountain right close. The contrast of that rumble of rapids with the moneyless serenity of wild green vegetation at the summit was spiritual I tell you!

At the top is where we met our guide, a dreadlocked soulful Rasta named…I can’t remember his damn name but he was soulful. On the way down the falls, another random Rasta pops out to offer some ganja which you smoke thank you, and thus the decent becomes uplifting…the glare of the river-froth dances with darting sun rays that hover and bounce off edges of rocks on all sides. Thousands of tons of water gush down and rage alive in your ear. Shared knowing smiles from your loved ones and new ones – the Rasta – steal the show. To boot we’re talking cold crisp invigorating rapids lapping at your hips, up your bare skin…egging you on and holding you down. I honestly don’t have any memories of us reaching the bottom of this mountain.

“A woman,” I tell you my story to get to that line – your passion eggs you on and holds you down. That journey for us down that waterfall was of course not about getting to the bottom. The only moments I remember my heart racing in those rapids were with shared stares from afar…connections amidst the chaos.

I hear your story and I sense you and the object of your affection pushing on, the way we all must. But I also feel your heat as you report to us the gushing water around your hips and the hot rays wetting your eyes.

So please don’t fret about where your going. In time you will only recall the rapids. Of course, I do understand you have to get to the bottom of the mountain before nightfall…which looms. Yet it is not dark yet.

Orhan Pamuk and his Museum

2010-01-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

I dated a woman recently whose job it was to design museums, which of course struck me as a very cool job. Along with her exquisite taste (helps with the job) she was witty, insightful, and attractive, and my only thought was – how am I not gonna screw this up.

After a few dates though, I was looking for a way out, my romantic notions were deflated – of both her and her vocation. First of all, it turns out that not every museum is like the MET, there is a huge mass of niche museums large and small that are put together for reasons other than the greater good; reasons such as propaganda, politics, and conceit, much of it put together by people in expensive suits with a price in mind throughout.

Then there was her exquisite taste I spoke of earlier, it had quickly become oppressive. She was sending every glass of wine back if it didn’t meet her standards, and she would have major dialogues with the waiter about the particular ingredients of a dish – yet she was pleasant with the server mind you. Food, music, theater, all of it had to pass muster with the curating in her mind’s museum.

I realized this woman was my Gilbert Osmond, from “A Portrait of a Lady,” who is described in the book as “thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship.”

Speaking to Madame Merle about the collection of art in his home: “I don’t object to showing my things – when people are not idiots.” Merle responds: “you do it delightfully. As cicerone [tour guide] of your museum you appear to particular advantage.”

Isabel stayed enchanted with her cicerone longer than I…she married hers. Only later does she realize her error: “Osmonds’ beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.” “Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in the bank of flowers.”

Yes, novels can be like a museum, but what kind of museum and what is the ultimate ideal that drives it’s content and curation? Are they Osmond museums and novels or are they Isabel?

“He had his ideal, just as she had tried to have hers; only it was strange that people should seek for justice in such different quarters.” ———– “Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment. But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated attitude.”

Monk and Jazz

2010-01-27T16:27:00.001-08:00

“So a lot of critics didn’t like me back then—still don’t today—because they saw me as an arrogant little nigger. Maybe I was, I don’t know, but I do know that I wasn’t going to have to write about them. Anyway, Max and Monk felt like that, and J.J. and Bud Powell, too. So that’s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music.” – Miles

When I think of my favorite Jazz – and especially when I think of Monk – it’s through the prism of race relations. Emasculating bigotry and the consequential “double consciousness,” permeated both the playing of, and listening to, this American art.

For Monk, there was even a third consciousness, that of a man possessed. “he was a great put-on artist, too, and that’s the way he kept people off him, by acting crazy like he did.” – Miles

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

Monk takes Emerson’s words to heart. So much so that he refuses to conform to even his African American contemporaries. One can imagine Monk quoting Shakespeare:

“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control
Or useful serving-man and instrument”

Miles gushes over Monk in his autobiography, but he also recounts the legendary controversy over his asking Monk to lay out and not play behind him on the album they did together. Because “Monk never did know how to play behind a horn player.”

What I read into the controversy is that Monk did not want to be secondary to Miles…nor should he be…nor will he be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBP9tYncw8E

Great interview, and I love the insight about Monk influencing the sounds of the album “Money Jungle.”

Heart vs. Head

2010-01-27T16:25:00.001-08:00

I’ve seen the following quote attributed to Abigail Adams:

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

If she indeed said it, I’m sure it was inspired by her husband’s rival/friend, Thomas Jefferson.

Maybe the best critique of Jefferson’s contradictory nature came from Thomas Jefferson himself, in his “Head vs. Heart” love letter to Maria Cosway.

http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/documents/frame_ih198172.htm

At one point his heart tells his head:

“When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their controul. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”

Could it be that in the cohabitation of our new country, Hamilton was the head and Jefferson the heart? And could it be that Jefferson’s rationalization for keeping slaves came from his head, and writing the words, “all men are created equal,” came from his heart?

And could it be that 2009 will go down as the year the world waited out a Battle Royale between the Head and Heart in the “divided empire” of Barack Obama’s mind?

2010-01-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

head

My history of hip-hop

2009-03-11T15:42:00.001-07:00

I’ll give you my -50-cent - worth on the subject. The poetry of hip-hop comes derives from a distinct mood.

“Moods are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.”
-Ludwig van Beethoven

The mood of hip hop poetry is the mood of “Fight the Power” from the group Public Enemy:

It’s about the invisible man expressing himself out loud. Don’t need no expensive instruments or equipment, just a street corner and some balls.

But I think we should revisit your man Albert Murray’s main theory about the blues. Murray taught us that the blues lyrics may be negative (just as hip hop lyrics are), but the secret of the music lies in the affirmative nature of the beat and rhythm.

It was that sanguine brotherly rhythm that kept those people sane in the cotton fields and it’s the ass/fist shaking rhythm that kept the hopeless inner-city youth from complete nihilism. To dance is to live.

I think there are a lot of connections to be made here with Barack Obama. I think I’ve heard you say, Chris, that the music most important to us is what we hear as a young teenager (13 or 14). Well Obama was born in 61, and hip-hop took off in the mid seventies, so there you go. And I can see it in him. Miles said in his bio: “For me, music and life are all about style.” Obama has a hip-hop style: fist pumps, those handshake/half hugs, and the strut.

The last thing you said to me on the phone is “what’s the connection.” My humble feeling is it is not a coincidence that Barack has materialized as the tipping point in the hip-hop arch. Hip-hop was a reaction to malaise in the post 60’s civil rights movement. Half of the delay was the backlash to all that progressiveness and half was just letting some of those policies come to bear. Barack Obama is both the end and the fruition of Hip Hop, as we knew it. Its remnants will now be powerful but disparate – like modern jazz.

But most of all, Chris, as you know, Barack Obama has rhythm in his speech, in his cadence.

Just so you know, my favorite little know fact about Hip Hop is that it has it’s roots in Jamaica. There was a whole genre down there of djs like Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby improvising rhymes over dub versions of records – remixing. One of those guys, Kool Herc, brought that shit up to the Bronx and the rest is history.

(Incidentally, Lee “Scratch” Perry stayed in Jamaica and discovered a guy by the name of Bob Marley).

So yea, current guys are Kanye West and NAS (whose recent track was “Hip Hop is Dead” and who is a rival of Jay Z).
But my guys are Biggie Smalls and Dr. Dre:

But the man who has the biggest street cred of them all is Jay Z. He the most popular among black people. He made his money as his own businessman i.e. w/o the white man. I’ve met many black guys who can recite his rhymes till the cows come home.

And one more thing. There is a huge connection between Hip-Hop and Jazz that I want to point out. In rapping it’s called “freestyle” It’s where they improvise the rhymes on the spot. Only the best can do it, and that is how they get their cred.

an ode to saloon players

2009-02-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

The first impression I had as I listened to Dave McKenna's music was of intimacy. There is unhurriedness in Dave’s sound, sprinkled with gaiety - even the somber songs like Danny Boy. I’m sure part of what I’m hearing in these recordings is a reflection of his friendship with Chris, but mostly it must be the music of the man, cultivated from those glamorous saloons where he honed his craft.

When asked about his next gig in NYC, Dave described it as “A good barroom, an honest barroom, the kind of place I like.” When I heard Dave utter these words, I knew all I needed to know about the man.

A friend of mine who is an accomplished New England folk singer has played the same old wooden tavern every Thursday and Sunday night for 25 years. I asked him once the same question Chris asks Dave about people talking during his set. He told me that he looks at every night as a challenge to make them stop talking and listen. And I thought, what a fulfilling feeling it must be for him – and Dave – to hold court on those special nights. A disparate smattering of private confabs huddled over tiny cocktail lined tables transforms almost hypnotically into a gleeful communal submission.

I thought of Dave last night as I sat in the old divey Cantab Lounge in Cambridge MA. It was way past midnight and the Tuesday night bluegrass band were still putting their hearts into their fiddles – or maybe they were pulling the fiddles out of their hearts – but now it was the end of the night and the guys on stage outnumbered the crowd. For the last song one guy took the lead and sang as soulful a sad country song as I’ve ever heard in my presence. At one point I thought why is he giving so much when there is only a few of us listening. And then I though maybe it’s precisely because there is a few of us listening.

And then I thought of Dave McKenna – a man I never had the pleasure to see – and all those intimate evenings he must of presided over throughout the years, recorded by nothing but the few appreciative souls in attendance.

I have no doubt that Dave McKenna was a good jazzman, an honest jazzman, the kind of jazzman I like.

New Orleans

2009-01-21T22:59:00.000-08:00

I lived in French Quarter for almost a year. $450.00 for a dilapidated one bedroom apt. I had no TV because it seemed ridiculous to watch TV when just out my window was a ticking clockwork of ravenous human drama. Don’t need no stink’n network stories when Storyville is around the corner.

Ahh Storyville, where the gutter met the glitz. To me that is what makes New Orleans unique, it’s a witches brew in the bayou, of high and low brow. You can taste the concoction when they blow those low-down blues through shiny high-and-mighty French horns. And Second-line drums lay the beat for unspeakable acts above on Spanish wrought-iron balconies. Alas, not nearly enough of those acts happened in my humble abode, but just to backup my theme here, my place was only a block away from the mansion that Nicholas Cage lives in today. The Vieux carre is a commune of the high-life. In this town, even the prostitutes eat exquisitely. When people meet you, they don’t ask what you do for work, they inquire as to your tastes. Culture pervades.

“There were all kinds of thrills for me in Storyville. On every corner I could hear music. And such a good music! The music I wanted to hear! It was worth my salary – the little I did get – just to go into Storyville. It seemed as though all the bands were shooting at each other with those hot riffs. And that man Joe Oliver! My, my, that man kept me spellbound with that horn of his…Storyville!”
-Louis Armstrong “SATCHMO My life in New Orleans”

Even more than Congo Square, the story of Storyville is the story of New Orleans. People confronted with Faustian deals on every corner. A den of sin and pleasure, and each soul playing out individual dramas of indulgence and will. Heaven and hell may be different places but it turns out the soundtrack is the same.

The locals say that New Orleans is the most northern Caribbean Island because it is surrounded by water on three sides. New Orleans is not part of Louisiana, (although Louisiana and it’s Cajun influence is part of the New Orleans). It has it’s own etiquette, and it has it’s own heroes. The aforementioned King Oliver, but also Buddy Bolden, Buck Johnson, Professor Longhair, Jelly Roll Morton, and (still kicking ass today) Kermit Ruffins.

Thank you for this program and the incite into the Diaspora. We could talk about this for weeks. I had the pleasure of visiting Brazil during Carnival and I will always remember those drums – the beat of which echoes of eons. It’s as if the African Rhythm is a bush and each one of these locations of the Diaspora (Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, New Orleans, ext) have carved out their own image in that bush.

In New Orleans they are still carving, and I can’t wait to go down there and dance to the new beat.

My Obama moment

2008-12-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

For me the Obama moment happened November 5th, the day after the day. I came across a black man from Ghana in a mostly white upscale restaurant in Boston. He was giddy like so many of us, but what sticks with me is his constant refrains that fine day: “what a country, what a country!" His tone was not what a country you have, it was what a country – we have. All at once I realized (and I said as much to him) that the United States belongs not to me as an “American” but to the world as a beacon. This gentleman reminded me that America is in truth an idea…an idea that copyright lawyers cannot co-opt and minuteman militiamen cannot put borders around. And its this idea (not the man) that engenders hope in this “moment” for Ghanaians and the rest, the expression of which is not new…it only shines anew.

What a country, what a country.

bloggers are writers too

2008-12-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on the ROS site:

My own little quibble for the sake of quibbling is with Moody’s defense of novels vs. blogging. For the most part bloggers are not would-be novelists, although a would-be novelist may very be a blogger. Blogging is value-added to expression. Blogging is more about the writer than the reader. It’s about standing tall on the hill and howling. Novels are about leaning your back on the soft part of the bark, with only a sliver of shade and the brim of your hat coming between you and that horizon…or with time.
Cuz – time - is the dividing line between the two.
Blogging is about running along side the train, trying to keep in step (even as the trains become faster) and yelling random urgent earnest thoughts to the occupants inside - just in case you never see them again. Novels are about Thoreau hearing the train rumble from afar – through the rustling of old chestnuts and the plopping of hungry fish – and longing for some connection with those departing passengers.

http://www.radioopensource.org/in-the-obama-moment-rick-moody-2/

MLK

2008-11-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8

This is only a minute long and you MUST watch this. He knows he is a dead man walking and he is gunned down the next day. But follow his eyes and you will see that these are not words coming from the flesh...you are witnessing a spirit incarnate. And the next day that spirit spreads out from Memphis and permeates our collective consciousness. Tell me you didn't feel it on Tuesday.

2008-10-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

3. Barack Obama: “He will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black.” “He will change race relations.”

I find this view very narrow. Barack Obama’s transformative effect is because he’s black - and it doesn’t matter. The whole of Mr. Obama’s movement is the idea that we are transcending categories…that is the change. To say that youth are enthused with this candidate because they want to eradicate the race problem – severely sells the youth short. By and large the youth have already moved on…pass the race problem. They are enthused with Barack because Barack is enthused, and in the words of my man Emerson:

“Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson -Man the Reformer

IN RESPONSE:
# thomas Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

brother nother from another mother,

I was just passing through, I happened to glance at your post, especially the last point. you wrote,

““He will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black.” I find this view very narrow. Barack Obama’s transformative effect is because he’s black - and it doesn’t matter. The whole of Mr. Obama’s movement is the idea that we are transcending categories…that is the change.”

I certainly share your general view that the transformation that Obama represents transcends the issue of race but nevertheless, brother O will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black. This sentiment comes from a young person (25 yrs) from my narrow perch in Fairburn, GA outside the perimeter of Atlanta.

With all due respect there is no issue as deeply painful for black folk and wounding for white folk (see Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound) as race. It more than simply a ‘problem’ that can simply be ‘passed’ by the young or any other people by a transcendence of categories.

Obama does transcend categories out of both expediency and idealism but I would imagine he is also well aware of the transformative effect he, as a black man, would have simply as the resident-n-chief in the White House.

The larger question for me in this issue of race in the national narrative as a southern white pastor in a largely black middle class suburban area is how does this race present an opportunity, if obama is elected, to not merely see it as a transcendence of categories on the way to just all getting along, but an opportunity to be truthful in our discourse about the brokenness in the narrative which must be acknowledged, confronted, and reconciled if the common good which looms radiantly on our horizon towards which we all yearn is to have any integrity at all. To do less than this would be to dawdle in illusion when the reality could be so much more beautiful.

IN RESPONSE TO THOMAS:

Ahh brother Thomas, I’m more than pleased to get your view from that sunny perch in GA. Yes you’ve set me straight to an extent. Obama will have a transformative effect on race. My reactionary reaction was a fear that the acknowledging this point could take away from the content of his credentials – in the same way that affirmative action is disparaged (even when the person was not a product of affirmative action).

The example I hold up is Jackie Robinson. He had a transformative effect on the game but would anyone say he wasn’t qualified? In fact, he was the best player on the field. And that’s what it took to finally break the color line…the best player by far. It could never have been an average black baseball player breaking that barrier. And it’s the same with brother O, he is sooo good that even the prejudiced in our society are forced to stand back…stand back in the way the white Civil War troops stood back as the 54th marched first into Fort Wagner.

You write: “but an opportunity to be truthful in our discourse about the brokenness in the narrative which must be acknowledged, confronted, and reconciled if the common good which looms radiantly on our horizon towards which we all yearn is to have any integrity at all.”

Thank you for the beautiful sentiment, Thomas. With every individual water cooler conversation struck up about brother O, we get closer to that elusive summit where your horizon of common good will stretch out and envelope us – even the most disillusioned of us.

“To do less than this would be to dawdle in illusion when the reality could be so much more beautiful.”
-thomas

“the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from “Illusions.”
http://www.emersoncentral.com/illusions.htm

It warmer in the inside.

2008-10-26T09:36:00.002-07:00

Chris says at the end: “Talk back about your own style of looking at art.”

I spontaneously attended the Madonna concert the other night. A friend offered an extra free ticket an hour before the show. My calculation was: Straight guys don’t attend Madonna concerts (at least they don’t brag about it) vs. Madonna is an iconic figure, she was my first crush, and she kicks ass.

So the show got going and so did my body. I couldn’t have stopped dancing and moving my body for anything – and we were way up in the balcony. I bring this episode up because at one point during the show I looked around and gasped at how many motionless bodies surrounded me, staring awe like at Madonna. I was sad for them, they were missing out on her true art – bring’n the dance…the party…the swing.

I was reminded of this when John Maeda spoke of the passive nature of looking at things.

People can be so reluctant to engage. But art is a two-way street.

The greatest architecture is not great because it’s pretty, it’s great when you walk, work, live, or pray IN it. The way the sun is directed in like a vital piece of furniture, or the way the stairs fantastically wiggle up, or the way that the hallways force people to run into each other.

Yet, the architecture tours still pass by with camera-toting people, outside looking in – outside looking in.

That famous Obama poster

2008-10-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

When I experience the Obama poster the first thing I see is a smile. It’s very subtle, but it’s a self-assured smile – can you picture a Stalin smile? I also see cool – because if Obams is anything, he is cool - did you catch the cool way he sat on the stool during the town hall debate? This poster could be a close up of that.

Of course he’s looking up and to his left.

But what I find most interesting is the color scheme. Half red and half blue – I get it, red and blue states. The red is not satire though, it’s sincere, and it’s meant to convey that he has some Ronald Reagan in him – see the stark red tie.

The blue though is the most interesting. The blue on his face is nuanced, it’s in different shades – just like Obama himself.

Empire

2008-10-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately Christopher Lydon was right. He has explored the theme of empire – and it’s demise – for some time now, to the chagrin of many – “why you try’n to rock the boat, man.”

Turns out he wasn’t trying to rock it, he was just duly reporting on the gaping hole of gushing water he witnessed with his keen eye.

Our country will now pick a new captain, and the question is, will it be one who pushes on full-steam ahead, with the notion that our ship wields the brightest beacon and fiercest vessel…to the very end bye God? Or will it be the captain that acknowledges our leak, who changes course, even (dare I say) asks for help.

Listening to Mr. Bogle decry the speculators, I’m reminded again how much Wall Street has come to resemble Vegas minus the etiquette and the hair gel. The fact is any investor in Wall Street is a speculator/gambler and just like in Vegas some of these guys don’t know their limits (especially when they are playing with house money).

I’m serious here, my contention is that Vegas has come to terms with it’s excess and does not pretend to be something it’s not. I’ve recently been doing some video work at Putnam Investments (I needs the money too, man) and every time I walk into that huge building in the financial district I’m in awe at the monstrosity of bullshit.

We set up the camera as these fund managers in expensive suits spew high-falutin’ financial lingo at the camera. The more complicated they can make it sound the more likely the naïve investor will fork over their money to the “expert.”

One of my many jobs was taking bets for an offshore gambling operation in Jamaica. One of the first things I learned was that the more complicated the bet (i.e. teases, parlays, action reverse/bird cage) the better the odds were for the bookie.

So that’s why Mr. Bogle’s take on the ownership society hit home with me. In the words of that natural investor Thoreau, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.”

(Although his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson replied: “one ‘Simplify’ would have been sufficient.”)

Anna rocks

2008-10-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

“A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”
-Frederick Douglass

Anna Deavere Smith is obviously an astute listener, and in my book that automatically makes her worth listening to.

What a wonderful thing, to contemplate grace. The first thing that pops in my head about grace is a lack of a “woe is me” quotient. It’s about starting from the idea that we all suffer…and moving from there, as opposed to having all roads lead to a rational for lamentation.

It’s the wide grin and sweet cackle of a Desmond Tutu; it’s the pink blush of my mom’s cheek when complimented on her new hairdo; it’s the do hoohoo woowoowoo wat…of a Lady Ella scat.

It’s difficult to define the word “grace,” when words have so little to do with it.

“When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.”
-Chief Aupumut, Mohican. 1725

Exceptionalism?

2008-10-26T09:29:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia:

American exceptionalism (cf. “exceptionalism”) refers to the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations.

I know one way we differ:

Is there another developed nation this close to having a black president? Mandela was president of South Africa but “my friends” the proof is in the pudding, American exceptionalism is real – when it’s not co-opted by the right (like patriotism and the flag has been in the past).

My playful prism is sports analogies. When I think of the great coaches and teams, I think of ones who excel at mid-game adjustments. Coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is renown for this.

So my hope lies in America’s capacity to make the adjustments. Sure we slide down the same slippery slopes as so many nations before us. But we make the necessary adjustments - so as to keep our eyes on the prize.

As they say, It’s not how you fall down, but how you get up, that matters. Mr. Obama makes me want to get the hell up and unite…with gusto!

Shame?

2008-10-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

“The only shame is to have none”
-Blaise Pascal

American Exceptionalism, you ask. To me it means that this great nation has come closest to realizing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea:

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

I apply his idea to jazz and I think of that solo tonal breath, at once oppressed and liberated, stepping out of hardened gut…into sparkling brass…and out to three four. One two three four.

I suspect that many people focus on attaining the last part of Emerson’s line, “the independence of solitude.” But keeping “in the midst of the crowd” is just as important, and it is my humble feeling that that is where we have lost our way. Sure the “crowd” can mean conformity, and that is what I believe the first Americans were liberating themselves from. But! The crowd = community as well. And when we belong to a community (as Bernard Lown so eloquently explained) we serve something bigger than ourselves. When we get too far away from that community it now strikes me that we lose our capacity for shame.

The fact is I know more than one person who has stopped paying their mortgage (while still collecting rent from tenets) comfortably resigned to the fact that they will have bad credit for around five years or so. They have no shame in this. They didn’t even know who they were paying that money to, it’s not a person, it’s a derivative of a derivative…it’s paper, it’s shit. If that 250 grand was from their local bank, from the banker they see at church and their kid’s school, I bet my friends would more reluctant to stop paying their mortgage.

Many of these houses were investments for these people, they were gonna flip them and get a big payday. Just like the Wall Street sleaze that were investing in stocks with money they had freak’n borrowed – BORROWED! From retirement funds of retirees they will never see.

Now the boat rocks.

“And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who live more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”
-Oscar Wilde

Where is the bottom, they cry with their pubescent countenance? I chide them from below - first come to terms with shame, and then we’ll take it from there.

http://www.poetry-online.org/wilde_the_ballad_of_reading_goal

Forgiving is liberating

2008-07-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I told my mom I forgive her.

I discovered in the last month how vulnerable I can be. I spent a good part of my life judging my mother for the ramifications of her vulnerability (for both of us) in years past.

Not until I was brought to my knees by the manipulation of my own vulnerability (something that I seemed to invite) was I ever able to appreciate what her own trauma must have been.

When you are a willing party to your own destruction, you self-hate, and worst of all, you lose self-esteem.

But my mom's ultimate lesson was to be a survivor, and not just to survive, but to prosper with compassion.

As they say, "it's not how you fall down, but how you get up."

So yesterday I told my mom I understand, I finally have empathy for what she went through...what we went through.

One simple sentence over the phone, and it felt like our relationship changed forever.

Thank you

2008-07-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

For all the retort. I use a formal word to represent the fundamental substance all your listening and feed-back provided to me recently. I've always prided myself as a good listener, and the last month I feel like I've been cashing in on some of that compassionate capital.

Sometimes your words ignited a rush of thoughts or emotion that released me from my former constricted attention, and often your tangible availability echoed to me like sounding board, a persistent refrain of calm. But always your words unfolded into an umbrella, one that emboldened me with the initiative to look forward...rolling and riding on a cushion of cheddar, a cheese that resists my hedonistic and clumsy chops, yet all the same, lines my back.

A hug is worth a thousand words.

2008-01-09T12:28:00.000-08:00

My friend Allyson and I drove to N.H. to see Senator Obama make his victory/concession speech - I wanted to get a sense of the man outside of that box we call TV. I came away with the realization that this is not a Barack Obama candidacy this is a Barack/Michelle candidacy.

Both Allyson and I were awestruck by the grace and power of Michelle She literally glided across that stage. When Barack came out and stood with his arms raised in unison to ours, Michelle came up to his side and wrapped her arms around his waist as his stayed extended out to us…as if we were connecting to Michelle through the body of Barack. All of us unified in that moment of shared intimacy – an all-inclusive intimacy that knows no bounds.

I thought of the words about his wife from his Iowa victory speech:

“I think it makes sense for me to thank the love of my life, the rock of the Obama family, the closer on the campaign trail.”

And I realized he meant every word, he truly loves Michelle (and needs her) and wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a leader that knew how to love a person, not just a people (and thus power)? Can it be any other way?

Beyond that, I came away feeling better about America with the realization that woman are finally moving onto their half of this yin and yang scale. Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton are claiming their rightful role in the self-determination of political life - not just family life.

Which brings me to the website Open Democracy, I was first attracted to the 50.50 initiative because as they write:

“a global debate without the female half of humanity is neither global nor democratic.”

There are a number of great podcasts and articles created by woman. One of the podcasts that stood out for me is “empowering women in the middle east” where a woman named Hibaaq Osman stresses that “dignity” is the key. And at one point she asks what is the difference between the fundamentalist in her country forcing her to wear a headscarf and the French government forbidding her to wear one?

It is striking that with all the rhetoric the Bush administration spouts about bringing Democracy to the Middle East, we never hear them stress gender equality.

Forget the Bushies anyway…the enlightenment of gender equality will not come from rhetoric, only example…and the more Michelle, Elizabeth, and Hillary shine, the more the woman of the middle east will see the light…and follow it.

Harold Bloom, Emerson, me, and Whitman.

2007-12-25T23:07:00.000-08:00

Something that cannot be denied about Bloom – he is enthusiastic in his intellectual convictions.

Of course Emerson was of the opinion that ““Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

Which enthusiastically leads me to my favorite Whitman excerpt from Songs of Myself:

“Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of
every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me,
shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.”

Tryin' to feel the transcendence

2007-12-20T23:56:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Cornel West talks about the crisis of meaning in the post-modernity age:

“The capitalist market is just so powerful that people are looking for forms of transcendence that have to do with something far removed from time and space.”

My humble reply to Professor West is that people will that transcendence when they are far removed from their self.

I guess the Buddhists would say that I’m co-opting their ideas but whatever, I believe we find transcendence through humility.

To be humble means striving to appreciate the context of nature.

To be humble is to know temperance, to shed desires, and to view your will power as a gift of honor to yourself.

To be humble is to listen.

To be humble means having the courage to be vulnerable - the capacity to be loved will by your reward.

Ohhh, the transcendent gift of love! Who better to describe it then ol’ Ralph in his essay “Love.”

“a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.”

Emerson writing about love reminded me that I recently read the lyrics to all the songs on Bob Dylan’s latest album (put out last year), “Modern Times.” I was amazed that almost all of the songs dealt with romantic love. All along the way, Dylan has explored the human condition, and after everything, he chooses to wrestle with Eros. Bob Dylan makes a final push for transcendence - in love.

“We learn to live and then we forgive
 O’r the road we’re bound to go
 More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
 That keep us so tightly bound
 You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
 And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.”

I'm American, right?

2007-12-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

A post I wrote on a Open Source thread about Ha Jin's new novel.

Even the most stalwart patriotic American will be quick to talk up their heritage at a dinner party. Even big bad Bill O’Reilly brags about his Irish roots at every turn.

Yes, a Chinese immigrant knows only a Chinese experience and the same goes for a Brazilian immigrant; their culture is ingrained – and that’s beautiful, and vital.

American culture is bland. But maybe it needs to be. It functions well as a mediator in our hodgepodge of tastes. It provides the grease, the fast food (and we all need to eat food fast sometimes) until we have time to eat the delectable cuisine of our choosing.

America is an idea. The American experience is about joining hands – strange hands - with that idea in mind.

To mine the ultimate American metaphor, baseball: On the World Champion Boston Red Sox, Dice K was a vital player. He is a Japanese immigrant (lacking even the English language) who joined hands (and exchanged bows) with Dominican Immigrants and Southern transplants, and they thrived.

Watching scenes from the locker room celebration after they accomplished their common goal, one never saw such merriment. There was no limiting dialogue to be had, only laughing, and hugging, and crying, and wide limitless smiles - smiles born from an American experience.

“I CAN’T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING CARE OF ME ALL OF THESE YEARS.”

2007-11-25T21:34:00.000-08:00

Those were the last words he spoke to his wife before he died. And those were the words his wife related to me during a haircut recently, a couple of days before Thanksgiving.

I had just sat down in the barber’s chair, fading into a benign hypnotism of vanity and small talk, when an older woman walked in - thus raising the population of the shop from 2 to 3.

Like any barber who seeks to pass the time, mine can be a master at meaningless chitchat;
and along those lines, she nonchalantly asked the lady how her husband was doing.

“Oh, he died last week.”

It was like a bomb dropped on the easy dynamics of this quiet shop - the next thirty minutes were not going to be easy for me; I couldn’t just stick my head in a magazine and lose the time.

He was her life companion, she confided in us
as she saddled up to the empty adjacent chair…"and now he is gone."
Suffering to the end, he had gallantly emerged from his prolonged silent pain
only to express a few earnest words
of thanks to his wife,
for a shared life.

Now she sits here waiting for her turn in the chair;
Turns out, even devastated people need someone to cut their hair.

At first something deep inside of me resented her for putting this on us. Yet picking the less uncomfortable option, I engaged her and asked her about her plight.

But then something funny happened…after a few minutes of discussing the vastness of her loss,
I felt a lifting of some veil...liberation from a barrier;
increasingly I was gaining a new intimacy with these two souls.

Turns out, this is not her burden solely, a common enemy unites us. This/the/a conversation about death always lies under the surface, simmering...try as we might to hold a lid over the popping pot.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the makings of a good Thanksgiving dinner, and the more we talked about our favorite sides, ingredients, preparation, and presentation, the more it seemed to be the only thing worth talking about.

The newly widowed woman began to light up somewhat, as she cheerfully recalled the family meals she had pridefully prepared in the past - something I can only imagine factored into her husbands eternal words of gratitude.

On the way out, I met her eyes and said goodbye.
On the way home, I decided I must learn to cook.

Those Two Couples at the Next Table Over

2007-11-18T18:15:00.000-08:00

Cursory smiles and generous giggles
Extend the time.
It’s enough to look up
And prick my finger with the dispassion.

I stretch out the sensation of that touch like fresh hard pizza dough,
But the bombastic voices call last call, and call it again, and again;
Should I shrug or or should I chug?
First I want to drip these tears into a souvenir glass.

A poem

2007-11-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

Here was my weak stab at writing a poem about all these people who were for this war - and now I’m not so sure what they’re for. I wrote this on the Banality of Evil thread:

EXECUTION

Don’t waste time looking back right? We are where we are and we have to deal with it.
Gross mistakes have been made but lets move on, our very survival depends on it.

It’s interesting that that stratagy works out so well for you.

It is a dilemma I deal with for sure - rehash the past, confront the demons, risk ruining the present, disrupting the future.

You trump me with you compassion.

Do you feel my forced silence?

As the rug bubbles up and the threads stretch thin, I ask questions quickly, quietly, not at all.

In my hung over haze I wonder what I’m after, consequences, repercussions, accountability, guilt, apologies, self congratulations, lessons learned, redemption…

I want you to want to tell me the answer.

You have moved on to another question

Don’t let me let you do this

There are disabled veterans around the corner...

2007-11-12T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is a post I wrote for this ROS show.

Last Friday, I had a scheduled appointment for something minor, at the VA hospital in Jamaica Plain, MA. This was my second time and again I felt transformed somehow. I suggest anyone reading this, visit their local VA hospital at least once and just walk around a little. Go have lunch in the cafeteria, (anyone is welcome, there is no checking in at the front desk) talk with an employee or patient - or don’t talk, just observe - be humbled.

One thing you might notice is that it’s quiet. You don’t see much small talk with the patients, maybe some with the staff, but even that is subtle – It seems there is just too much to say, to actually speak.

The old men sit or stroll with a deep harnessed dignity. I found myself wondering what keeps some of these men going, many were alone and obviously in slow pain. Then I thought that these men must know the value of life better than anyone; Every day they can go on, is a day they can honor those fallen who gave their life – for life.

In my imagination, these old veterans would be treated with more reverence than your average patient in your average hospital - but that speaks to just one more instance of the folly of war - romanticized.

But oh - there was one magical moment. I was sitting there on one of the steel chairs waiting, when a lone decrepit veteran started to shuffle slowly by with a worn-out walker. The little wheels were broken, so every step he took made an extended scratching sound as it slid across the floor. At first the prolonged screech was abrasive but I decided to embrace it and it quickly became a kind of music. Everything this old man had been up to this point seemed to be getting projected through this walking instrument - like that old homeless trumpet player I would hear blow on Decatur Street in New Orleans. If his walker was fixed, he would have been invisible to be, but now he existed – big time.

Now get this, as I’m observing this man, I hear the echo of a saxophone bellow down the halls – I thought I was daydreaming or something. Well, it turns out the VA hires (or they volunteer) an old time jazz band to play in the lobby of the hospital. I swear I heard the music in that old man’s walker before that band started up, but I guess it could be the other way. Either way, the two sounds harmonized and it lifted my spirits and it was sweet and it was deep.

Before I left, I walked over to the landing and looked down on the lobby with the band playing and the veterans waiting – and waiting. It was not your typical jazz show, to be sure. The listeners – and players, were expressionless, reflective, and in some way peaceful.

So please take a stroll through your local VA hospital – and listen for the music.
http://www1.va.gov/directory/guide/home.asp

Sonny Rollins improvised a few days after 9/11

2007-11-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following about the concert. During the interview with Sonny on ROS, they read part of this on the air. After hearing it, Sonny said he liked what "my friend" wrote.

So now I can always say that Sonny Rollins considers me a friend. I subsequently had the honor of meeting him after a show, and I can only say that he might be a true saint!

As my self-reflective consciousness kicked back in, I realized I was far out - of my seat…with my upper body bent forward on the balls of my feet. Somehow I was keeping balance as my arms stretched up and away…grasping for an acknowledgement of my solidarity. We were a congregation that night, lost in praise for a wordless sermon…ephemeral shrills and high-pitched hoots were our response - to his call.

The particular call we were responding to was an improvised solo at the end of the song, “Why was I born.” The date was significant, September 15, 2001. Sonny Rollins stood before us looking both delicate and sturdy…as his solo climaxed with a succession of short ebullient bursts of sounds…defiant sounds…sounds that grabbed you by the collar in a paternal way and said snap out of it and start living again! A shared cathartic hysteria ensued.

Four days earlier, Sonny had been startled in his apartment as he heard the first plane crash into the World Trade Center, just blocks away. The power in his place went out and the police rescued Sonny (and his sax!) live on CNN.

So it be…Lucille, his wife of 48 years, and obviously a perceptive soul, convinced Sonny that the show must go on. He could still feel the dust in his lungs.

To share a Sonny solo is to share in a tour de force. For me they unfold like a contemplative walk through a familiar neighborhood…a journey that evokes a variety of impressions; from childhood memories induced by some old swingset, to larger questions about society brought on by the homeless. Even on this meaningful night (maybe because of this meaningful night) Sonny’s solos referenced lighthearted melodies such as “Oh Susanna” and the “Jeopardy” theme.

Sonny’s sax is not as much an instrument as it is an extension - of the man himself. The man himself is serene…he has nothing left to prove, and so much more to give. At some point years ago, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins decided to jam with the better angles of his nature…and he’s been blowing hard ever since. Blow baby blow!

Mailer: The Old Man in the Sea.

2007-11-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

When I think of the man Mailer or Hemmingway the man, a song comes to mind that I heard belted out from a burly dreadlocked Jamaican on a beach in Negril.

“Please don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.”

These are strong men who are in touch with their feminine side. In touch in a way that says I lust for life, the whole of it, and the whole of it means embracing vulnerability and encompassing beauty and if you have a problem with that say it to my face!

A few weeks ago I was sauntering through Hemmingway’s house in Key West Florida. Hemingway and his house have nothing to prove; their foundation is concrete, enabling them to venture to be tender.

Cats abound, the ancestor’s of the cats who were Hemmingway’s true friends, 50 of them prance and linger throughout with a reserved pugnacity. As you make your way along the wide halls and multitude of glassless windows, there is seemingly more sunlight inside the house than out; all of it emanating a boundless warmth. Walking down the back stairs you descend into his luscious garden and eventually come across a subtle drinking trough for the cats. Turns out this trough was once the urinal at “Sloppy Joes,” the bar he drank in almost every day. Legend has it he said he deserved the damm thing after all the money he had poured down it (I’m inclined to think he felt a curious intimacy to it as well). So one day he dragged it home from the bar and planted it pristinely amidst his flowers.

Even today, in the context of his sun-drenched garden, the toilet reflects an ivory luster from its worn-in porcelain. It has a history; it’s experience (no matter how coarse) complements the fleeting radiance of near-by buds. The garden is whole.

Norman Mailer died today

2007-11-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

ROS did a show on Mailer a while back and I wrote a little about him:

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
-Oscar Wilde

For me, all of Mailer’s moves coalesce into a lived life of art. Guys like him and Hemingway, and even Muhammad Ali, were all carrying on a tradition of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life. Yet if the coin is the Aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde is on one side, then our American men of men are certainly on the other. In the same way that Wilde’s homosexual flamboyancy expressed his individualism to those Victorians, our American machos expressed their individualism by flamboyantly displaying their masculinity.

Our man Whitman might be the tie that binds here -

WHEN I PERUSE THE CONQUER’D FAME

“When I peruse the conquer’d fame of heroes and the victories
of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,
Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great
house,
But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was
with them,
How together through life, through dangers, odium, un-
changing, long and long,
Through youth and through middle and old age, how un-
faltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the bitter-
est envy.”:

This I believe

2007-11-10T10:13:00.000-08:00

Radio Open Source did an hour on the well know NPR series "This I Believe." This was what I was believing at the time:

My reasoning tells me the trick is to strike a delicate balance between ambition and contentment. Ambition and contentment, I dangle between these two like a trapezes artist with tired arms - this is my destiny - this I believe.

I also believe the act of kissing your lovers lips and face should be improvised like a jazz solo; I believe Satchmo’s solos on the trumpet are a manifestation of his all encompassing smile; and the most precious smiles happen in moments of wordless chuckles that linger after a shared laugh among friends and family.

I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson when he writes, man “cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

(As a side note, I believe our Concord sage would have done well to eliminate the limiting pronouns “man” and “he” from those beautiful words).

The playwright August Wilson said the five themes that run through all his plays are honor, love, beauty, betrayal, and duty. This is what I believe about those themes:

love is an earnest exchange of vulnerability; honor is a gift a person gives to themself; beauty floats somewhere between Bridget Bardot and the sun drenched Fall foliage of Vermont; betrayal is that menacing noise outside my window, but it’s also the darkness inside my basement; duty is my humble payment to the piper.