CHANGES

sophia in the window

 

Every day I see something on Facebook of somebody wanting change. Seldom does anyone name the change they want, only change. When they do state what changes they want, they're at odds with changes somebody else wants. So many different changes perpetually dissatisfied Americans want, put them all together and the result is chaos, what we already have. I saw a good meme of the appearance of several ventriloquist dummies sitting in a theater. The caption said these are liberals waiting to be told what to think. I thought it would be more to the point if they were in a coffee shop. I've stopped going to any coffee shop from refusal to watch my language for superficial reasons. They want changes in other people, never themselves. I hear John Lennon singing, If you want to change the world, change your mind instead, from the Beatles' song, Revolution. In the time it was new, early 70s, every band was required by social trends to have a song about revolution on a new album that year. Lennon was essentially saying to the pretend call for revolution, bullshit. The song was dismissed by many trend-marionettes as the Beatles sold out.

 

 

It brings to mind in the late 60s a year every band was required to have a song on the new album about Jesus or risk the publicity of so-called Christians burning their records on tv so-called news. The Rolling Stones, like the Beatles later, met the trend requirement with a song, I don't want to talk about Jesus, I just want to see his face. These were the only words to the song, in my imperfect memory, repeated over and over. I thought it clever of the Stones to meet the requirement, yet in a way that says it is bullshit. It doesn't matter if Jagger wanted to see the face of Jesus or not. I thought it a masterful way, as with the Beatles in Revolution, to concede to a social trend and call it nonsense in the concession. The period called the Sixties, 1965-1975, was, indeed, a kind of revolution. It revolutionized the possibilities of an electric guitar. Since then, the length of a guy's hair is a matter of choice. Before, all males were required to be barber shop shorn. Optional long hair did away with barber shops like amazon did away with bookstores. I see redneck guys going to beauty shops for hair cuts. I go to the Cutting Corner to get my hair "done" by Crystal's friend, Morgan, who has a new baby, Emma.  

 

 

Through the years before the hair length revolution, I never liked it that there was no way around a barber's shearing, marching as to war. It was objectionable to a born pacifist. I don't know if mother set me in the pacifist way as a baby from fear during WW2 or if it's from past life experience. Going by where I suspect last lifetime might have been, I can see how that person would return at odds with war and its glorification. If mother inspired pacifism, it was not by intent. It was likely through fear the great motivator. If she had a hand in it. It doesn't matter where it came from, it's that deep. If what I thought mattered beyond myself, the change I would want for "the world" would be no more war. What a radical change it would be. The Arts would flourish unimaginably like entertainment flourishes in a martial society. The human as an individual might have value. Being, itself, might have value. A change I'd like to see and believe will see over several hundred years would be regarding all life forms people, the same as us, just living in different forms. Let them be, let them live as who they are. Learn to communicate with them wordlessly, a language course in school, the inter-species language of silence. Best-selling books, Conversations With Birds At The Feeder. 

 

 

It is fantasy to think I could make a difference that mattered toward no more war. In such light, it is absurd to waste thought time on the matter. Another way of looking at it, change your mind instead, I can bring it home and say I want no more war in my world.  No silent, unsettled disagreements that linger, no arguments with vehemence, no settling scores mentally, no more wars in my mind when somebody pisses me off severely. That's a big one. The trick: don't set somebody up to piss me off. Easy. I can't give any sound advice to myself on the matter. A decade ago I fell into a mental rage that lasted a year, until realizing, finally, the other had done me tremendous service, on a platter with a smile service, and it took a year to see it. One of them times I have a sit-down with self and talk about being a little slow catching on. Could it happen again? Yes. But it is worth being aware of, reminding self when needed, war does not cease outside self before it ceases inside self. Keeps me reminded that war ends inside self first or not at all.  

photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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THANKFUL FOR ROCK N ROLL

It's been a fun day and I've really done nothing. Started the day when the mail brought the dvd of a movie made in 1978, BLANK GENERATION, starring then-current punk rocker Richard Hell. The film was an effort to make a somewhat avant-garde film of the day, the time of Andy Warhol films, Nick Roeg's PERFORMANCE, that had Mick Jagger in it and was pretty good. It was a time when all that went before was regarded "irrelevant" and some artists were seeking relevance in "youthsploitation" film making. This one was like a European attempt to make a film using a New York punker. The film had a French element, not only in the lead actress being French, but it had a French quality in the making, in how it looked, in how it progressed. It had an avant-garde German sense too, influence of Fassbinder, director Ulli Lommel being German and associated with Fassbinder. And there was plenty of Andy Warhol influence. He included Warhol for a short scene. Italian director Antonioni attempted an American avant-garde film in the time of protest and hippies, Zabriskie Point. The film missed the target. I suspect Antonioni was interpreting American youth from a European intellectual perspective, which doesn't apply in America. As in Lommel's film, I felt the European intellectual director was only able to see the emptiness in American youth. They don't have enough American experience to understand American motivations, especially in the young. I felt like Ulli Lommel found in Richard Hell's song, The Blank Generation, his own interpretation of what he saw of the American young in New York. His approach to Hell's character, Billy, was to point out his blankness by way of Lommel's take on the meaning of blank; uncommitted, indifferent, short attention span, impetuous, nobody home.

Though it had the quality of a homemade movie and a script not even thought out, it had a charm about it, a freshness, even today, thirty-five years later, that held my interest. The more I place it in its context of the day, the more interesting it becomes. I see Warhol films of the time, John Waters films of the time, Nick Roeg's films of the time, Jim Jarmusch; Blank Generation is coming to me more and more as a French/German attempt to make an American punk film. It's a stretch imagining a German intellectual filmmaker having a punk attitude. He didn't. Yet he made a punk film. He did that very well. Making a film without a plot was new in that time. Today, it seems like plot is a thing of the past. Melody has gone out of rock. Rage Against the Machine from the 1990s flew in the face of melody. The film without a plot seemed perhaps more contemporary now than it might have then. Warhol was a "pioneer" in that regard. Boring was avant-garde in that time, too. Films had avoided boredom before. It was the time of Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater. Their Paradise Now can be seen on YouTube. And it was the time of Andre Gregory, best known in My Dinner With Andre, where the conversation is around that time in New York's avant-garde. Looking at Blank Generation in its context, it becomes more interesting. I'm re-seeing it in my mind's eye without any memory of a time in the film that didn't hold my interest. I don't want to see it again soon, would rather digest what I saw first time around. I remember thinking when it was over that this is a film that would reward a second viewing, going into it knowing what to expect and paying more attention to photography, which was often extraordinary without trying to be. First time, I paid attention to the characters. Next time I'll see more. I believe another viewing is in order, though not soon. I'll wait months, until the images have left my head and I don't remember more than a brief slide show of still scenes.

the rolling stones

All the rest of the day I've been playing the Rolling Stones' album Black & Blue, 1976, Ron Wood's first album with the Stones. I play it over and over. I gets louder and louder. Hand Of Fate is playing now. I had most of their albums on LPs that don't get played anymore. I don't want to replace all my Stones albums on cd, so I only have on cd a few I really love. I bought Stripped on cd, live, very small venue, very bluesy. Later, I bought their first album, also very bluesy. Black & Blue has that emphasis on blues the Stones do so well. It's been in my mind for a few years, remembering how well it satisfied my liking for Stones music. Their blues is the aspect of the Stones that turns me on. It's the core of their sound. Mick Jagger is one of the poets in rock. His song on this album, Memory Motel, is beautiful songwriting. I hear the Stones best when I put their stardom out of my mind and hear a bunch of guys making music. Ron Wood's lead guitar is just right for the Stones. I saw him and Keith Richards in a brief interview where Keith was asked which of them was the best. He said, Ron would say he's the best, though neither one of us is very good, but put us together and nobody can beat us. He did not exaggerate. In the time of Sixties rock, the Rolling Stones hard rocking was It for me. Their live album, Get Yer YaYa's Out, my neighbors heard far more than they ever wanted to. The Stones were my Little Richard of the Sixties. It started with their first hit, Time Is On My Side. I've always associated it with James Brown's first hit, Try Me.

In this time of the life, I'm enjoying looking over the music I've loved along the way. It's a great variety that includes Baaba Maal of Senegal and Five Finger Death Punch. Rock n roll has been the thread that ran through all the experiences of my life from its beginning unto my end. Bob Dylan was in there since his beginning. I loved his acoustic sound and loved it even better when he went to rock. He transformed rock when he plugged in. His readiness to change kept him fluid. His willingness to step outside the mainstream, whichever one he's in at the moment, came to his most recent five albums, my favorite of the whole progression of his music. I felt like he came into what he'd been working toward. I'm glad Dylan and the Stones are making music into their seventies. Before their generation, only black musicians were appreciated into their old age. Rock n roll is a very strong interest in my life, not to play it, but to appreciate an art form with what seems like an infinite range of what can be done with it. It absorbs every music that gets near it, adds a new sound, constantly changing, every generation making big changes. I remember someone I knew who was a Sixties rock old hippie, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Neil Young. When his boy was of an age that he was hearing his own music, he found some late Seventies punk, Adam and the Ants, Devo, and dad said, in my hearing, "That's not music! The Beatles are music!" It threw me back to jr high listening to early Elvis, being told from on high, "That's not music! Glenn Miller's music!" I said to peer speaking to his child, "Did you hear yourself?" He had heard himself very well. I just shook my head. Whatever. I saw Frank Sinatra in concert, 1988, and enjoyed it. I was so drunk I saw two of him through the whole show, unable to pull the images together into one. I say I saw Sinatra twice.

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THE ROLLING STONES AND JEAN-LUC GODARD

brian jones, keith richards, mick jagger

Today's movie was by Jean-Luc Godard, Sympathy For The Devil, the Rolling Stones in a recording studio like they're working toward recording it. Sort of. But that wasn't what they were doing. They were hanging about with headphones on noodling with parts of the song. Keith Richards sometimes was playing a bass and sometimes rhythm, playing chords and short runs from the song. Brian Jones playing rhythm with headphones on. Charlie Watts played complex rhythms on drums from the song. I watched anticipating Mick Jagger singing the beginning over and over in slightly different ways was working toward a recording session toward the end. It felt like it was creeping toward pulling the different parts together. That would be the American way, but not the Jean-Luc Godard way. In the Godard way, we have a parallel story / non-story going on in a junk yard next to the Thames in London near a bridge, crumpled car bodies stacked all around. Some black men passing assault rifles around, one reading some pages from Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice, posing as black panthers, talking revolution. Somebody goes about the city with a spray can writing things like CINEMARXISM and FREUDEMOCRACY on walls in the city. In the junk yard spraying cars with names, STOKELY, MALCOLM. A black man talking revolution to two young black women reporters pretending to write what he was saying, standing around posing. A jet plane flies over low as on its way to a runway from time to time. Scenes of old men buying books in a small used book store, paying for them with a Nazi salute. And more scenes in the recording studio, Keith sitting on the floor, picking some simple riff on his guitar, Bill Wyman shaking a percussion gourd-like thing with pellets against Charlie Watts' drum rhythms. 

keith richards

The recording studio had vertical square panels on wheels to make portable walls. Mick Jagger sang "please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and fame," several times as though looking for just the right way. The band stood around playing small parts of the song. One time the band was sitting around in a sort-of circle getting ready to play, waiting for Keith and Mick, who were talking, though we couldn't hear what they were saying. We just watched them talk with the band waiting. In the studio the band never completed a playing of the song and never performed the anticipated recording of it. It amounted to watching the band hanging in the studio during what appears to be a recording session. Outside at the junkyard, talk of revolution, reading revolutionary writings by black panthers, passing assault rifles from black man to black man. There is purportedly some revolution action, perceived danger, going on off stage. The junkyard scene is like a stage setup. The studio scene with the band is also like a stage setup. The small bookstore, too, was like a stage setup. Old white men and Nazi salutes. The film was made in 1970. It was a time of black panthers carrying guns in Los Angeles, black panthers writing from prison, Pop culture had revolution in the air. All the bands recorded their mandatory revolution song. The Stones never pretended revolution, though gave it the nod. Revolution was in the air, but really no more than a pop culture trend for a year. Paris had its 1968 revolt the same year Godard made this film. 

the revolution outside

Antonioni's film, Zabriski Point, was another European film interpreting American and English pop music revolution. It seemed to me at the time the European directors were looking to see if the American pop revolution might succeed like in France. They didn't know FBI was in charge. As with the Occupy movement now, protests and demonstrations made headlines then, and that was as far as it went. Once it was on tv, it's purpose was fulfilled. It was comic today, 45 years later, to see the black actors strut like black panthers on stage, talking revolution without conviction, posing. This is the great Godard quality, the people posing. They gave the film a John Waters quality, whose Pink Flamingos was new a couple years later, using people who are not actors to play the roles, read a paragraph from Soul On Ice. In the bookstore a guy dressed in purple walks back and forth reading from a book about revolution. The one with the spray can writing words on walls, cars and sidewalks, MAO, STALIN. That part was European. I especially was struck that a film made in London, in English, by a French director, had that French je ne sais quoi. Night before last I saw a French film made by a Polish director that did not have je ne sais quoi. Like the French film made by English director Joseph Losey did not have it either. And tonight an English film by a French director with je ne sais quoi. I felt like Godard was juxtaposing inside, recording studio playing Sympathy For The Devil over and over, and outside, black men in revolt. 

the graffiti artist

I felt about Godard's interest in the Stones that he was making a film that showed the Rolling Stones in a recording studio situation, having short jams, little more than sitting and standing around with nothing to do, passing the time while the film crew ran the cameras, aware the young of the world wanted to see the Rolling Stones. He recorded them just to see them, the Rolling Stones in person, casual, not in concert, not recording, just interacting with each other somewhat, keeping a rhythm going throughout. They never broke out into making music; they just kept a rhythm generating throughout the filming sessions. In hindsight, I'm suspecting they had a contractual agreement such that if they played a full song, it would have cost the film studio more than their budget would allow. They were often picking guitars with simple runs, no Rolling Stones licks. It was low key, little more than hanging in the studio while the film crew took footage of the guys in the band sitting around, standing around, smoking cigarettes, Brian Jones was living in the time of the filming. The netflix sleeve dated the film 1968. A copyright notice at the end of the film said 1970. Jones died in 1969, so I have to go with 1968 the year of the filming, or maybe release. That makes it the year of the French 1968 revolt that actually changed something. The Stones were the band of the moment that year. It was the year lsd swept across the nation. Godard's film is little more than just video footage of the Rolling Stones with nothing to do, posing. Racial tension and Sympathy For The Devil. Rich white guys in the studio singing about wealth and fame, black guys in the junkyard talking revolution. 

the movie poster

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THE BOYCOTT OF ONE

vladimir tatlin

In the Sixties I became politically engaged, not as an activist, rather a hoarder of opinions with a few friends who objected to the perpetual war our government was creating. I was fired up with opinions I thought had foundation and meaning. Went to the 1968 march on the Pentagon over the Vietnam war. It was a big crowd, a couple hundred thousand, spirited speakers like Norman Mailer, Dr Spock among others. Peter, Paul and Mary sang Blowin In The Wind. It was a time of much anti-war pop songs by Bob Dylan and everybody else. Dylan, of course, was not there. The Fugs were there playing on a portable stage in the Pentagon parking lot their anti-war anthem, Kill For Peace. I loved hearing them do that song. I felt like I had arrived at an important place. The energy of the event felt important. I returned home believing I had done something worth while. Next day I looked at the Washington Post, New York Times, AP, and all reported the same story, none of which happened. Everything written was false. It puzzled me that the press got it so wrong when they were all there in the privileged area in front of the stage. How could they miss it? Time, Newsweek and US World all told the same story as the newspapers reported, none of which happened. It was frustrating because I had been there, had seen what it was and could see not one word in the national news was true. I felt quite strange. Here were six "legitimate" witnesses, witnesses that would stand in court. I knew they were all lying, but what could I say? I felt without recourse. I saw very clearly the different organs of corporate press were in league with each other. A few days later the Village Voice came in the mail, which I'm glad I subscribed to then. Nat Hentoff wrote the article in the Voice as one who had been there. He reported that LBJ held a press conference before the event where he told the reporters what to report. Obedient corporate yes-men they reported as told, except Hentoff who reported the press conference as well.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

That day I wrote off the corporate press as a source for information. I'm recalling Gore Vidal's reasoning for why he said we have no history. History is written from diaries, letters, journals and memoirs, all of which are self serving, and newspaper articles, which we all know are not true. Hence, we have no history. Reading the corporate press accounts I was thinking school kids doing research papers in the future will cite these articles and draw their conclusions based on a presidential lie that became fact in the press. The part that ate at me the most was that all but one reported the lie under their own names as witnesses who had been there. Norman Mailer happened to be at the press conference too, and he reported the press conference in his book, The Armies Of The Night. Mailer's account accorded with Hentoff's. That same day I lost my virginity to the corporate press, I gained a respect for Nat Hentoff that is with me to this day. One reporter told it as it happened. I see that Rupert Murdoch now owns Village Voice, so it has no more credibility. In its time the Voice was one of the rare credible papers in the country. It was also the day I looked my own absence of any kind of power as citizen in the eye and dropped political engagement from my mind, from my life. Not many years ago some people here were getting together to demonstrate about the proposed location of a prison in the next county. I was asked to join. I said the only things I have ever seen come of demonstrations was people getting beat up by cops and the hassle of arrest. Like the Rolling Stones song, "I think I'll go down to the demonstration and get my fair share of abuse." I made it clear I have no confidence in demonstrations and could not participate. They were successful. I congratulated them, feeling they deserved it, and apologized for my vote of no confidence. I had resolved myself to zero political involvement and held to it.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

I had learned that I have no voice as a citizen. I learned, too, I have no recourse. I don't see any point in going up against the Death Star for any reason. People with power hold it jealously. I don't want their power. They are going to do what they do and I am going to take it. However, I do have a key in my pocket. I learned seven or eight years ago that Coca Cola Corp was hiring death squads in Columbia to kill union activists and their families. What can I do about it? I quit buying Coke. I can't stop them from doing what they do, but I don't have to do my part to support it. Even if they only get a dollar a year from me, that's more than I'm willing to give. They can't force me to drink Coca-Cola. When I have a soft drink, it's DrPepper. It's probably owned by Coca-Cola Corp. I don't like what Walmart does to communities, to American economy, Asian sweatshops, especially how it treats its employees. I don't go to Walmart except in emergency that so seldom happens I've not been inside one in awhile. My money is my energy and I don't like giving my energy to a corporation that I don't like all the way around. The boycott of one. I like the maxim, never buy anything advertised on tv. I grew up in a church culture where the attitude was if you don't approve of something you have responsibility to browbeat people who are doing whatever it is. It was an unspoken belief that when the preacher's wife disapproves, you better cut it out. It ripples out from churches into the society that we're automatically expected to yield to disapproval. I bought it, of course, at the time, and later learned my way out of that mind. Political correctness is a new form of ruling by disapproval. Adhere to this list of rules and you're cool. If you don't you're not cool. I don't talk back to that thinking, because the people doing it are only disappointing me with their own limitations. But my attitude toward it is I am not cool, have never been cool and cool is not an ambition. Huffing disapproval is not cool either.

 

vladimir tatlin

 

The boycott of one is my own personal form of civil disobedience. I learned before high school that I would never work for a corporation. I have only worked for individuals with small businesses. In the ten years I painted houses, I worked for the house owner who hired me. My attitude with every one was that if we are not friends when job is done, I've failed. I never dripped paint on screens, no drips on decks or rocks or ferns or anything. And cleaned up after myself. I got paid satisfactorily well and had good associations with the people I worked for. I worked alone, because I did not want anybody else doing the work in my name. I never used a roller or spray. Brush only. Walls, everything, except ceiling, though I have painted ceilings by brush. I hated a roller. They splattered and left an ugly texture in the paint. I preferred the texture of a brush, the flow. It was a time in the life when I liked using tools with the least number of parts. An axe was great. Handle and blade. After a few years on the farm fixing broken machinery, the only tools I carried into the field with the tractor was an adjustable wrench and a big screwdriver. Whatever went wrong, I could either fix it with these tools or get it back to the barn where I kept the tools. It was a sign of how much I'd learned in a few years, a kind of report card the first time I went out without the toolbox, just two tools. I never took to power tools. I liked learning to put fence posts in the ground so they'll never wiggle, and stretch the barbed wire so it would stay tight for several years. There are tricks to these skills that need to be learned. I wanted to learn the old ways of farming, liking that my learning was not to make a living at, but to understand by experience. I learned to make a split-rail fence from cutting down the tree, splitting it into rails with an axe, a sledgehammer and two wedges, to putting up the fence. I loved learning something that was totally of the past. It was my link to old-time mountain culture I had the good fortune to see the tail end of and learn farming skills directly from someone of that time. I love it that my knowledge is useless. The interest was not motivated by wanting to be in the past, but for my own historical, cultural curiosity toward appreciating more fully the mountain people.

 

vladimir tatlin himself

 

 

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SNOW ON DONKEY EARS

 

jenny's icicles

 

It's a foot of snow outside. Walking in it, it doesn't feel like it's an inch deep. The snow is dry and powdery. It offers no resistance. It's a beautiful, pure snow. I don't go out in it except to feed the donkeys and the birds. The snow was not the problem outdoors. It's the cold that bites. I button my jacket at the neck and still the snow finds a way to crawl down the back of my neck. My first impulse seeing the icicles over Jenny's eyes was to break them off, but I knew she would not like me reaching my hand toward her eye. She wouldn't like that at all. She didn't seem to be bothered by them, so I left them alone. We humans are fussy. The animals are not. I didn't get the impression that Jenny minded having a minor glacier between her eyes. I took hay to them twice. Didn't want the portion they couldn't eat right away to be snowed on all day. Took more carrots to Jenny the second time. She's become so jealous of the carrots that she pushes Jack away from me and the calf knows by now to stay away from Jenny at carrot time. I don't know what to do to teach her sharing, so I don't do anything. It's their natures that they understand better than I do. I don't want to train them to human ways of thinking. So Jenny has become the carrot hog. I make it a point to hand carrot to Jack over to the side away from Jenny. I throw one to the calf, but today with a foot of snow, the carrot would have gone to the bottom of the snow and the calf would not have found it. Jenny's mood this morning was gentle. I had the feeling she was too cold to act up. Jack was the usual Jack. He's easy going with reggae playing in ear plugs, going along with few necessities, a good-natured donkey all the time. Jack's humility is remarkable. 

 

jenny's whiskers



 

I took camera on the afternoon feeding run and walked around behind the house to get some pictures of the creek that runs through here, Spring Lizard Creek, with the rocks in it piled high with snow. In front around the birdfeeders, snowbirds were hopping about looking for something to eat. I took two big paper cups of sunflower seeds and threw one in the direction of one birdfeeder and the other at the other feeder. Thirty or so snowbirds were out there. The birdfeeder serves one at a time. On days like today when the birds are desperately hungry, I spread the seeds over the ground so they can all eat at once. The birds, too, have their comical interactive behavior. Jack had been having a drink of water when I went out this morning. It was one of those moments that I regretted not having the camera set on video and ready. He came running and the snow flying in small clouds from his hooves, and him braying. He was on me before I could even lift the camera to start pushing buttons. I let the thinking about the camera go, and watched him bray while he ran in the snow. It was too beautiful not to watch. He came up to me braying, his pink tongue flat in his mouth. Jenny let out some squeals meant to be brays. I don't think Jenny gets it yet that a bray takes a full physical commitment. It's not just mouth and throat. It is the whole body. Jack looks like he's in a trance when he brays. He has to twist is neck just right. Once the bray starts, it's like it takes a life of its own and won't set him free until he sang every verse. She'll figure it out. I'm more convinced daily that Jenny is pregnant. The baby already has its name, Sherpa. Jenny keeps her ears back while she's eating, very jealous about her food. But that's only at the beginning. Later, after everybody's hunger from the night is satisfied and they're munching because that's what they do, Jenny shows no jealousy.

 

jenny, calf and jack

  

Jack has his ears back in this picture, though it's because the calf's head and ears are so close he doesn't want them touching. Jenny's left ear she holds back tight to keep from connecting with the calf's ear, again, not wanting to touch. I see more and more subtle behavior the closer I study donkeys. I mourn for all the donkeys down through time that have been hit and yelled at because humans didn't have what it took to notice they are sentient beings. I'm sure, however, that many people who dealt with donkeys learned their ways and appreciated them. Not all men are cement heads, but enough are that a cement headed nature appears to be a side-effect of testosterone poisoning. It pains me to see guys of my generation become cement heads in their later years. I've felt the cultural tug to go that direction, but refuse to go. I will not do that. It's my inspiration for going to rock concerts in my later years and mixing with hundreds of "the kids these days," to keep myself reminded that old-man thinking is bullshit. It's cultural. It's not natural. Like racism, it's learned. I stay out of that mind. Its easy to generalize about the kids these days; television, computers, cell phones, facebook, twitter, google. Seen from the inside, it's quite another story. I know several kids these days. A couple of them got PhDs from Berkeley. I couldn't even fantasize being accepted at Berkeley. And one of them I've known since she was a baby. The kids these days I know, a fairly random sampling, are brilliant people, conscientious people, given a few exceptions. Also, none of the kids these days I know suffer from Affluenza. They're only different from the kids of my days because the culture today is different from what it was then. School isn't much different, but everything else is. Our politicians don't support education because an educated public costs more to manipulate. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina relies on ignorance. He's not going to do anything for education, like the other remote-control robots.

 

frosty donkey jack

 

A Rolling Stones song is in my head, Beast of Burden. I took a break and went to YouTube to review the words. They're funny. It is Jack's song to Jenny. He's had enough, and he is spilling to her his issues; Am I not hard enough, am I not tough enough, am I not rich enough? In the song, he's frustrated because nothing he does can please his woman. Mick Jagger writes a song of simple lyrics, though they have their something special that makes them Rolling Stones songs. Beast of Burden is simple, simple lyrics, but they tell a living story. Tumbling Dice, Brown Sugar, Wild Horses. Jack is Jenny's beast of burden. I'd better not tell him. He knows it too well. I suppose this is Jack's fate to have a woman he can never be good enough for. I don't believe it will always be that way. She keeps her ears back much of the time when he's nearby. It's her body language for, Don't do what you're thinking. Jack says, What am I thinking? I didn't think nothin Baby. Jenny says, I know you better than you think I do. Jack, at the same time, is Mr Cool. He knows he's Mr Cool and it doesn't rock his self-esteem at all that Jenny doesn't get it. He'd just like her to settle down and let him hump her all the time. Since she won't let him do that, he hangs around close enough to smell her. She likes having him around, though it would be better if he could let her rest. Yet, she likes the attention. Over a period of time they'll fall in tune with each other's rhythms and flow together. She would not be his pick, and he would not be her pick. But they're beasts of burden. They're subject to the luck of the draw. Seems like they're flowing together very well by now. Jack is not as demanding as he once was, and Jenny is not as aloof to him now as she used to be. Where one is, the other is close by.     

    

 

jenny says

she's satisfied with jack

 

*

 

IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT

Hearing the Psychedelic Furs. I've not listened to enough music lately. The Psychedelic Furs is a band that has satisfied my ear for a long time. Having 2 of their cds, often when I want to hear some music and don't know what, the Psychedelic Furs is the answer. I see they have a website and they're still touring. They played in Charlotte 5 nights ago. I'd have gone to that concert if I'd known about it ahead of time. That would have been a good one to drive a hundred miles to. They're grown up now, 2 decades after, but I imagine their musicianship is that much better and their performance of the music is too. I don't usually listen to music when I write, because the music takes me over completely and all I can do is listen. The reason I've not been listening to music much is it takes me over completely. Before I put on a Patti Smith album or Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry, Jane's Addiction, The Clash, Generation X, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Angelique Kidjo, SE Rogie, Alternate Roots, Aerosmith, Skeeter & the Skidmarks, Ralph Stanley, Whitetop Mountain Band, to name a few that take me over unmercifully, allowing no wandering of mind, before I put them on I have to have enough time to listen to the album all the way through. SE Rogie coming to mind makes me want to hear him. Beautiful lilting palm wine music with acoustic guitar and singing from Sierra Leone.

s e rogie

The world has so much beautiful music in it, it's hopeless to want to hear it all. I've tried to hear it all, at least a general sampling, but it can't be done. I start listening to North African Rai and can't go on from there for a long time. Or start listening to Islamic sitar music from India. That's it. And then there is what happens when the Rolling Stones come on. I'm all ears. No matter what song by them, it has my full attention. On cd, the only Stones albums I have are the one live at very small clubs, Stripped, where they play almost unplugged greatest hits, blues songs, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and their first album that has I'm a King Bee on it. I tend to like everything by the Stones. Their first album continues, after all the great ones like Black & Blue, Exile on Main St, to be the one I return to. Just now found a website that plays the entire album, youtube, so it is playing now as I write. Didn't intend to do that, but am in a Stones bluesy mood. Velvet Underground had a similar groove as early Stones. Stones went to the big auditorium sound, not hardly by choice. There was no auditorium on earth big enough not to sell out immediately for Stones tickets. I never saw a Stones concert. It seemed too much to me like going to Woodstock to go to a place so big the band is the size of vertical ants on the stage, like seeing them from a plane. I like to be able to see that it is human beings on the stage. I don't like to be so close that I see how dirty they are. Too close, they're just people, like us, not big stars, not a fantasy of what a rock star oughta be. It's just dirty, sweaty, stoned American and English young'uns looking to meet some chicks and make some money.

rolling stones

Jagger is singing I'm a King Bee. It takes me back to the Fifties, high school, hearing Slim Harpo singing it on the black stations in Kansas City and Wichita, stations I listened to as much as the white stations. That's where I heard Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Etta James, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. Some of them were played on the white station, but when I listened to both, I heard the best of the new music twice as much. The white station would be where I'd hear Marty Robbins' Singin the Blues. Ray Charles singing Lonely Avenue was incredible. What'd I Say was stellar, like the Stones' Satisfaction a few years later. This Rolling Stones blues and r&b album takes me back to the music like this I heard on the black stations in the Fifties. That's where the music was played that I loved. Didn't have to listen to Paul Anka on that station. They played Mickey and Sylvia. Everything they played was something I wanted to hear. I'm hearing why the great blues guitar pickers, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry were impressed by what they heard when Keith Richards was making music with them. On the Stones concert video Martin Scorsese made, Shine A Light, Richards and Buddy Guy get to going on a guitar duet, whatever they call it when they play in perfect sync. They tore the place up. In an interview clip shown in the film, somebody was interviewing Richards and Ron Wood together. Asked which of them was the best guitar player, Richards said (I paraphrase), We're both just ordinary guitar players, but together, nobody can beat us.

dionysius and the satyr

 

 

I've let the Stones album play again, and again. It takes me to my very own foundation in music. The beginnings of rock n roll occurred with the Penguins' Earth Angel, the Coasters' Searchin, Bill Haley & the Comets' Shake Rattle and Roll, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Chuck Berry's Maybelline, Bo Diddley's Bo Diddley, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel, Jerry Lee's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, then the whole body of work by Chuck Berry and Little Richard throughout my Jr Hi and High School, the years when a kid really needs his own music. I had the super good fortune to see both Alan Freed Rock N Roll Shows. I think the years were 58 and 59. They were fabulous for a high school kid who by then had a head totally involved in rock n roll. Rock n roll was my escape fantasy. At one of the shows, Fats Domino played his set and filled out the time of two players who'd missed the show, Jerry Lee one of them, Screamin Jay Hawkins the other, from probably being too drunk and whatever else. Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the girl group I loved the very most, the Chantels, were there. I heard the Chantels sing their two hits, Maybe and Every Night, from twenty or so feet away in adoration. I was like a Catholic boy kneeling before statues of saints aching his heart out to be a real boy. Chuck Berry played at both the shows. After work, walking to the bus stop to go home from work the day of the second Rock N Roll Show, a gold 57 Cadillac with venetian blinds in the back window, mudflaps and a license tag that said, C BERRY, passed by so close I could have reached out and touched it if I'd seen it in time. Flipped me out. I had all his 45s to that date. The show was that night. Larry Williams fell off his upright piano attempting to dance on top of it drunk. I loved seeing Mickey and Sylvia sing Love Is Strange.

 

 

chuck berry

 

This music from the Rolling Stones' first album brought that period of music back to life for me. I was a hung-up Fifties lonely teenager listening to Dion and the Belmonts sing about it. Oh Susie Q, baby I love you. Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou I loved as much as any Little Richard song. Little Richard stood out for me way beyond everybody else. Bob Dylan took care of that zone for me next. I'm goin to tell you a story 'bout Mary Lou, she's the kind of a woman make a fool of you...She took the keys to my Cadillac car, she jumped in my kitty and she drove a-far. Learned many years later, his band, The Hawks, evolved into Dylan's band, The Band. I guess it's all right to call Elvis the king of rock and roll, but for that title, I'd have to go with Bo Diddley. I'd give it to Little Richard if he hadn't had so many facelifts. He's the undisputed queen of rock and roll. I say Bo Diddley because the Sixties bands leaned more toward the Little Richard and Chuck Berry sound, except the Velvet Underground that came after the Bo Diddley and the Buddy Holly sound. Punk that started in 75 went with the Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly sound funneled through the Velvet Underground. A very large portion of the rock ever since has been of the Bo Diddley sound, a tight, quick beat. His influence in rock is every bit as direct as Chuck Berrry's and Little Richard's. I had the good fortune to see Bo Diddley at Ziggy's ten or more years ago, when he was 74. He gave an all-out concert, and it was, indeed, Bo Diddley his very self. It was thrilling for me, loving his music my entire music-listening life, Bo Diddley playing all those songs that are standards in the jukebox of my mind. The Bo Diddley beat is in me as much as Carlos Santana's guitar. Ron Wood made a live album with Bo Diddley in concert at a small New York venue in 1988, Live At The Ritz, dynamite rock and roll.   

 

 

ron wood and bo diddley

 

 

 

*

 

A GHOST VOICE

cat on a log

I walk slumped forward with head down on the way to the car. I feel the way I walk and it's like you see in newsreels of people down and out as far as down and out gets. Cannot hold the head up, living in the mind so deeply that visuals are shut out. Just look at the ground where you're walking. Sometimes I feel like I'm walking like old Chinese people I see in movies, walking in what looks like a kind of short-paced shuffle compared to our American long-gait way of walking. That's how I feel I walk now. Head down, shuffling along, uninterested in anything outside my head, my head dwelling in what I want that I can't have, like my closest friend back.

The netflix film for the day was Shine A Light, the Scorcese film of a Rolling Stones concert at the Beacon Theater in NY, 2008. With Tapo on my lap, it carried me out of my mind. I've loved the Stones since the first song I heard by them, Time Is On My Side. It had the same affect on me as the first time I heard James Brown's, Try Me, and Slim Harpo's King Bee. I lost touch with the Stones' new music over the last 30 years or so, since about the time of Some Girls. Most of the songs they played were familiar. My musical interests changed. When punk started in 75, it took my attention away from what they now call classic rock, which they didn't even play it on the radio in its day. But every time I hear something by the Stones, I listen with satisfaction.

It was the distraction I needed. I was constantly fascinated by what an abstract guitarist Keith Richard has become. He seemed to me to be doing something with his guitar like Monk did with a piano, looking for the chords and notes to play around the melody in a way that carries the melody by suggestion. I was thinking of Mick Jones of the Clash andTom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, how they took guitar playing to total abstraction. No melody, just sounds that can be made with electric guitar strings never heard before. Morello is more like a gymnast with a guitar than a picker. Richard is a picker. He and Ron Wood have played together so many years they've become one. The whole band. They work together perfectly from 50 years experience. Early on in the show, Keith Richard stepped up to the mic after a song. He said to the audience, "It's great to see everybody. It's great to see anybody." He's not much to look at, but his pickin makes up for it.

One moment in it I'll never forget. The Stones had Buddy Guy, blues singer and guitar picker, for a guest on one song. Guy and Richard played in and out of each other, Ron Wood in there jamming with them, Jagger wailing blues harp. They came into an incredible, very intimate jam of master guitarists / master musicians, nobody outdoing anybody, because they're all the best, and they took it all the way. The song over, Keith Richard took his guitar off and handed it to Buddy Guy saying, "It's yours," and Buddy walked off stage with it, meaning, I imagine, Richard gave it to him in memory of the jam. I'd guess from the looks of the guitar that it once belonged to somebody they both respect. Ron Wood looked at the guitar in Buddy's hand, recognizing it with a look of approval that said something like, Keith would do that. Charlie Watts, the drummer, looked on in visible approval too. Every one of the musicians fell into a zone during their jam only musicians know about and they sailed. It had the energy of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie together. I'll watch that jam again before it goes to the mailbox in the morning. It was a jam I believe every musician would appreciate, even ones that don't like rock or blues. It transcended genre and became universal.

You know what I know that I'm avoiding going into missing TarBaby like I did the day after Jr's funeral, went off completely away from it to give it a rest. After the BROC meeting yesterday, I was talking with Gary Joines in the parking lot before we went to the cars. I said at one point, I have so many people I love on the other side it makes me anxious to go over there. He said in his Gary Joines straight face when he has something to say that's not in fun, "Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?" I had never seen it like that. It fell into the drawer in my head of sayings I'll never forget. I saw what I already knew about Gary, that it has to be way high up there before it's over his head. He plays fiddle and bass in the band at the Jubilee.

I just now heard a faint "Mao," and ran to open the door, turned on the light and no one was there. I tell myself it was my own breathing. Today I was out in the meadow behind the house looking through the row of rhododendron along the fence, a place I didn't look yesterday. Twice out in the meadow I heard a faint Mao come from the direction of the house. I go look under the house and call his name, including El Gato, and nothing came back. I find myself looking for him all day. When I'm not searching with my eyes I'm searching in my mind. I want to allow for hope and don't dare.

Talked with a few people I know today and they told me their similar experiences, losing cats and small dogs to coyotes and neighbor dogs close to the house, and their grief. Every one of them recommended I cry as much as I feel like. It was comforting because I saw that these are just 4 people I talked with. It probably includes almost everybody else. I wasn't singled out. In this case, I don't think it's so much that misery loves company as misery loving understanding. The Regular Baptists showed me a man crying is nothing to be ashamed of or even think about. I've seen every one of the preachers cry openly at the pulpit as if they were at home--they were at home. During foot washings everyone cries. It's what we do in sorrow and joy when it's past containing.

I feel like the tears in grief are attempts to hang on to the beloved. I believe that's what I do. This morning I woke feeling good and then felt guilty for feeling good. I think that's when I got it that I'm using the sorrow of the grief to hold on to an illusory tether, pulling him back before he goes completely out of sight. It was the shock that knocked me down. It challenged everything I believed I understood about death and dying. It showed me my mind might think it gets it, but my heart does not. I've become so tender hearted in my old age I'm like a child too young to be taught that it's not ok to feel what I feel. I don't mind. I like it.