POLITICIANS AND PREACHERS

      new air bellows rock formation

Hearing on the news about Tea Party congressional Mad Hatters angry, irrational, confrotational. An extension of Karl Rove's mind whipped to a froth by Party Philosoph Rush Limbaugh. And they talk about Boner. But they never talk about what these people are doing as strategies. Boner's party out of power is keeping 50% of the vote by saying No. Political rule of thumb: be against something and you have 50% of the vote automatically. It's looking like Boner is hanging onto the 50% in a time when voters are catching on that the Republican Party is a very serious enemy of the working class and the middle class. Well done propaganda trumps knowledge, so knowledge counts for nothing in American politics. In my personal estimation, Gingrich is the most vile elected "representative" I've witnessed in my lifetime. Somebody who points the finger at others over morality, and has none in himself. There is no bottom to how low he is willing to go. One word defines him, like the picture that's worth a thousand words, hypocrite. He has exhibited this definition of himself over the last 30+ years publicly on tv, like he's proud of it.

I can't help but laugh at him divorcing his wife dying of cancer in an Atlanta hospital and marrying a Nordic DC babe to keep his dinger ringing. At the same time he was so self-righteous and indignant about Clinton exercising executive privelege. He is a good example of the saying about pointing the finger, three fingers point back at the one pointing. He isn't daunted that the press is making an issue of his hypocrisy. This is the master propagandist who has orchestrated morons into high public office. He's not interested in substance. Only the glitter pays. He has been the mind of the post-Reagan republican party. There's no chance he'll make president, fortunately, unless by fraud and judicial fiat. He could do that again. 

I understand more every year why Meher Baba recommended to his people that we stay out of politics. I wonder how much it has to do with the karmic burden that goes with it. Like, are W, Rummy, Cheney and Rice karmically responsible for the deaths, misery and crippling injuries of multiple hundreds of thousands of people that result from their decisions? Does Obama and his staff carry a karmic debt over directing a Drone hit of an enemy operative, family and neighbors? I can't see how the Shakespearean ordering of a president assassinated so one can take his place as president can go without some fairly heavy karmic debt. He was eventually defeated by his own lies and went out in infamy. One thing I see in politics is egotism to the Nth degree. That's just the first thing. To survive more than a month in politics, hyprocrisy becomes the mode of operations. It is the rule. The spiritual path in any of the Ways cannot tolerate hypocrisy and strategic lying. Therefore, nobody in politics can be on a spiritual path of any sort, which may be a good thing. Keeps Deistic dogma down. 

There is no way the fundamentalist Baptists of the South and Midwest can benefit from their involvement in politics and political thinking. It will render their words hollow. It will render their faith hollow. It will make them the Hollow Men like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Jerry Fallwell, who fell very well in relation to the others like him, preachers in politics. Pat Robertson never seems to get it when he's laughed at for his public defenses of blockhead dogma. Maybe he's too distracted with his horses and the stables, to get anything much any more. I have a difficult time paying close attention to a millionaire preacher. Like the Lenny Bruce sayin, Never trust a preacher in a three-piece suit. I have seen the truth of that in this conuty. The only preacher I knew of to wear a three-piece suit watched the money plate and milked little old widows for their wills. He was the essence of pretend humility, and grew old with a million lines on his face. My neighbor, Tom Pruitt, called him a "money preacher." In Tom's old-time religion, a money preacher didn't have anything to say that Tom wanted to hear. I'm the same.

Talking with friend Jim Winfield the other day over lunch, we were picturing this time we're in, right now, as a tremendous number of pieces of paper with a different issue written on each one, all the papers in a bowl. Throw the bowlful of papers into the air and the place we are in today is all these papers with an issue written on each one, in the air, floating toward the floor into an arrangement that is yet to be known. That's about the best I can make of threads of influence. It's like that time at the beginning of WW1 when the anarchist bombed the monarch's carriage in Serbia, the spark that started the war. Seems like any time now something like that can happen. Some inexplicable act somewhere by someone unaware of the full implications of the act, and a conflagration is set off.

Americans and Israelis are pretend sccretly bombing Iran right now. Iran doesn't take this sort of thing lying down. The American and Israeli bid to dominate the Islamic world can only fail. Our economic downturn (media for Depression) came from the beginnings of the attempt to dominate the Middle East and the deeper we dive into that quicksand, the quicker we go to the bottom. They're not going to leave Iran alone, and Iran will retaliate. If they're really looking for an endless war, Iran can give it to them.

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A DOG'S LIFE

      apple and wine

Christmas is coming. I just now turned the radio off for playing have yourself a merry merry Chistmas. Some of it might have been curmudgeonism, most of it is weariness of hearing these same old dreary songs every year. The really good ones seldom turn up, like Ralph Stanley's Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. I don't hear it so much, so it's not, as they say in the mountains, boresome. I've always liked Christmas, but was worn out by Christmas music early in life. Maybe it came from watching adults do music at church, prepare for Christmas skits by the kids, all of it empty and without meaning. Of course, it was the savior's birth, though it's not really his birth date, mixed in with Saturnalia, an astrological span of time of festive spirit and giving.

It's somewhat strange that in Christendom, Christmas is the big money spending time of the year, the time of the year that keeps the Economy rolling. Shopping. Now they're shopping all night long at malls that are staying open all night for the people who have to work all the time during the day. Long ago I learned I can't keep up with what is required for Christmas, buying expensive presents for everyone I know, just about. I tend to give more or less symbolic presents now, inexpensive, but nice to have. Like some of my friends are getting Dori Freeman's new album, Porchlight. Her singing is so good and the songs so finely put together, just about everyone I know, who likes music at all, would like Dori's singing. She's from this region of the mountains, and sings her own style that is accessible to the ear mountain music is sometimes not accessible to. Somebody like Marcus Martin is inaccessible to an ear away from the mountains. Dori is of the mountains, but not mountain specific. Her dad is a great musician, and her grandpa on her mother's side is a great musician. She has several uncles who are excellent musicians too. She grew up in a world of mountain musicians playing mountain music. 

That's about it for me and Christmas. I may end up watching football at somebody's house. May not. That's another thing that has estranged Christmas from me, football on tv. Men sit in the living room talking their tv football nickel knowledge. In the kitchen, the women come and go, staying away from the television. Then there's the dog show for anybody not wanting to watch football. Who wants to watch a dog show? It seems to me training dogs to be vain about their appearance like humans is the same as bestiality. Dogs have such intelligence about them in their own dogness, I can't see using that intelligence against them, to turn them into ego-maniacs, the worst thing a human can be. Why do that to a dog? It's the same as doing it to a child. Jon Benet Ramsey comes to mind first thing. Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except in the basement. 

The dogs that have lived here with me along the way, I've allowed their dogness. I didn't try to make them into projections of what I want for myself, how I want to be seen with my beautiful dog. My dogs dragged dead rabbits home and ate them. My dogs found deer corpses hunters left to the night animals after cutting off the head with the antlers for mounting. The dogs brought home deer legs and chewed the flavor off the bones and later use the bones for exercising their teeth evolved for ripping meat, for catching running prey, for defense and offence. I allowed that in my dogs. It means that all through hunting season, outside my door looks like outside a caveman's den. Bones, hide, legs, spines, have even had a few heads. Martha, the dog next door that spends her days here guarding my place, has torn the hair off a hide she drags around and chews on. A deer's foreleg is out there in the rain now. It's gross having deer parts strewn about, but it keeps the dog pacified to have something to chew on. I believe it keeps dog in touch with its own dogness. 

I liked to give a dog a good dog's life. The dogs have evolved as human companions ever since they began to evolve out of untameable wolfness. I look at a dog as needing human companionship, a human to love, a human to protect, a human to be given shelter and fed by. They also have in them a need for the chase, the kill, the taste of blood. Living here where I am with meadow immediately around the house on 3 sides and tremendous acreage across the road of woods. The meadow has rabbits and groundhogs. The woods have everything else. It's where the wild things live, the things a dog is shy of, like bobcats, mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes, copperheads. And it has the smaller critters a dog can chase and sometimes catch and eat.

I was glad to be able to offer my dogs a balanced dog's life. My only regret with all the pets that have lived with me, I didn't know how much they loved me. I knew they loved me, but didn't understand the depth of their love. Growing up in a culture that believed dogs, cats and all the rest of the animals have no soul, it took a lifitime to learn how to communicate with the animals that are only dumb because they can't talk. They taught me they have feelings and thoughts, and they have the capacity to figure things out. I don't mean like figure out math problems, but they learn and they learn fast. My dog Sadie was a groundhog dog. Twice she dragged a dead groundhog to her place under the house. I had to crawl under the house and drag the groundhog out after it had begun to smell and draw flies. She watched me bury both groundhogs. From that day when she killed a groundhog she carried it to a place nearby she knew the ground to be soft. She'd dig a hole with her front feet, push the groundhog into the hole with her nose. Pushed dirt over the groundhog with her nose. She buried all the groundhogs she killed after that.  

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TULPAN THE MOVIE

       kazakhstan's flag

Recently, recently in months, I've been looking back to my initial purpose moving to the mountains in 1976. Then, I had one neighbor up the road, Tom Pruitt. The road was gravel. Meadows on both sides of the roads for grazing cattle. Now a subdivision is up the road and Tom Pruitt's house is empty and gradually becoming a ruin of another time. Then, barns were everywhere in the county. Now you see a barn here and there, very seldom. They've fallen down. I call my time here the Time of the Falling Barns. The wood has given out. The wood that touches the ground has rotted and the wood in the sunlight has dried out until the barns are reduced to their skeletons, their basic structure. The life has gone out of them as the center for farm operations. Barns used now for Christmas tree operations have metal walls and roofs bolted to a cement slab. Churches are now going for that metal building construction with no windows on the cement slab. 



The old churches made of wood that burned wood to keep warm in the winter have largely been abandoned, torn down, replaced by brick structures that are heated by oil, kerosene, propane or electricity, better insulated and cushions on the benches. The changes in the churches happens after the changes have happened in the homes of the members, who get used to central heat, cushions on chairs, gravel or paved parking lots instead of parking on the grass. These changes are the subjects of films all over the world now, people living in the transition from the old ways to the new. Young people listening to pop music, their grandparents still living the old ways, parents living in the new way and thinking in the old way.



So it was in the today's film, TULPAN. It was made on the steppes of Kazakhstan, which is a big country between Russia and India. The steppes are table-top flat as far as you can see in all directions, like that part of the American plains between Texas and North Dakota where it is table-top flat. The land had no trees and wind blowing all the time. The people lived in yurts like in Mongolia. The people looked like a cross between Greeks and Mongols. I suppose they would be called Eurasian people. Originally, all the -stans from Afghanistan east were once Kazakhstan. The land and the people I saw of Kazakhstan showed me the -stans are a westward extension of Mongolia. The Mongols plundered across the -stans, then Kazakhstan, all the way to Persia (Iran) and Turkey, into the Ukraine. Russian director, Tarkowsky, made a film of medieval times, Andrei Rublev, where he depicted the Mongols, also known as Tartars (hence, tartar sauce), killing all the people in a walled city of the Ukraine.



In this movie, Tulpan, it's a very simple story, if it is a story at all. A boy just out of the Russian Navy is staying with his sister who is married to a man who herds sheep and one of camels. The boy is looking for a wife, but the only woman in the area of marrying age doesn't like him and won't marry him. The boy wants to leave, but his sister wants him to stay, he learns some of the work with sheep, stays awhile, then leaves. The only suggestion to where he is going is to the city where he can find a wife and a job. In remotest Kazakhstan we see now these changes that came with electricity. The old people dressing and talking in the old-time ways. The young kids listening to transistor radios and wanting a television. All that is just a racket to the older people.



Looking at the people in this region of the world, hearing their language, seeing how they live, what's important to them, is of interest to me. I've always been curious about other cultures, their ways, how the people act out those ways. In my early years I wanted to know all the different kinds of people in my world. With that curiosity, I managed to meet and become acquainted with people from all over the world, not every place, but all the major reigions. I've known people of all races. Then there came a time I realized this is a world where everybody is motivated by different desires and it gets more and more complex finding out that I'm better off not knowing so many different kinds of people. I came to a place where I have found my own people, and don't care to spend any time away from my own people, who I think of as the people of these mountains where the old people dress like farmers and the kids dress like California surfers.



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THE ROLLING STONES 1978

          the stones

Am watching a video of the Rolling Stones in 1978, Ft Worth, Texas. I suppose it was the tour for the Some Girls album recently released. It got me to thinking now that the Stones are up in years and writing their memoirs, the millions of hours of concert footage the band probably has the rights to for endless releases of Stones concert videos. They are good business people. They know how to work it. I think the Scorcese Stones concert from a few years ago is the finest concert film I've seen of any band or music. Pink Floyd makes a good concert video, but Scorcese did it just right, like it almost wouldn't matter what band it was, the filming of the concert was so good. But using the world's greatest rock n roll band Scorcese can use artful photographing that isn't so obvious when the subject calls for artful camera work as a given.



This concert, Some Girls, is spectacular music. 1978 was when they'd been the hottest band in the land for over a decade. 1978 was also 3 years after punk came along and the music was changing away from the Stones sound. By this time, everybody in the band was an artist and master musician. Keith Richards and Ron Wood lay it to their guitars. It's from the time of the guitar hero. Both these guys gave an exhibit of how incredible electric guitar playing can be. The energy in this show is such that it makes me wonder what they're thinking about the music changing away from them, how they're thinking about dealing with it. Their sound was so fluid it could incorporate any sound they wanted to go with. They were first a blues band. Along the years I was buying their records, early 60s to early 70s, I saw every other album would be a blues album. They'd make a rock album in the vein of what is happening that year in rock, every other year. A rock album and a blues album and a rock album and a blues album. Black and Blue was one of their really super fine blues albums.



Back in that time you liked either the Beatles or the Stones, like they were Pepsi and Coke, Chevy and Ford. To my ear, the Beatles were bubble gum like the Beach Boys. I liked the blues sound in the Stones, preferred bands that leaned toward the blues instead of toward country, like Eric Clapton's bands, Allman Brothers. Neil Young leaned a little too much to country for my ear in that time. Now he just sounds like a whiner. I still like his music though. There's no finer rock album that Neil Young's After The Gold Rush. I never bought a Beatles album and bought every Stones album as they came along. Didn't need to buy Beatles because all my friends had Beatles albums and I heard them at everybody's place I knew. It was a dynamic time in rock. Bob Dylan was the other one whose albums I bought as they came out. Dylan, Stones and Clapton I listened to primarily in that time. Now to see the Stones from that time 33 years later is a wonderful moment. It tells me the music I liked then I continue to appreciate now.



I was telling my friend Lynn Worth, who plays fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass, all very well, and sings, that my years in the mountains listening closely to master musicianship everywhere you turn, hearing what makes an extraordinary fiddler or a fantastic banjo picker, hearing the subtleties in picking, my ear for listening to music has improved mightily. I believe I'm enjoying the musicianship of Richards and Ron Wood like on a new level from what I heard before. I heard them well then, but believe I hear them better now. The Stones still do it for me musically. Even though I liked the Stones a very great deal, I believe the Clash came along and satisfied my ear for rock n roll a little bit better than the Stones did. Perhaps I like them equally. It's like the Clash is the Stones the Next Generation. Joe Strummer's next band after the Clash's junkie drummer fell out and they couldn't find his equal to replace him, the end of the Clash, The Mescaleros made some awfully good albums. Then Joe Strummer died face down on the kitchen table.



I went with punk when it came along as 60s underground rock was becoming establishment and the next generation of auditorium rock, Bon Jovi, Ted Nugent, REO Speedwagon, were coming on doing the same things over and over. Punk was a new sound all the way around and it was a return to the 50s sound. Punk was back to basics. Guitar heroes reached such a place nobody coming along could even think about playing as well as Jimmy Page, ever, let alone be able to play better. They were all so great they put up a wall between them and the next generation. The next generation went back to the three chord method and followed the influence of the Velvet Underground, a band that didn't do guitar hero, a New York band with next to no audience outside New York. Sixties rock took about a decade for it to become mainstream rock. It took punk 25 years to become mainstream. The last half of the 70s now, looking back, was as dynamic a time in rock as the mid 60s when the San Francisco sound was going, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and Holding Co., Jimi Hendrix et al.



In 78 the Stones were really at their apex. Their solution to what to do about punk coming along was to keep on playing the blues and being the Rolling Stones. And they kept on a-keepin on. Now they're 70. People laugh at how unlikely it was for these guys to live so long, considering drugs, etc. A Rolling Stones concert is a major exercise workout for everyone in the band, except Bill Wyman who stands still the whole time. Plus, they have to work out when they're not on tour to keep the muscles flexed. Mick Jagger is making moves at 70 that I sure as hell can't do. He works out. Probably has personal trainers.



Also in 1978 the Stones were the darlings of the Jet Set, partying with international wealth, buying castles in France, and working with the Rolling Stone dedication to their careers that bought them everything they wanted. They seem to have handled unlimited wealth and unlimited fame better than Elvis. It's a tightrope to walk with no safety net and they walked it. When the Jagger and Richards songbook is printed as poems, it will be a major literary event of the year. Also, Mick Jagger's harmonica is the only harmonica in rock that doesn't sound like Bob Dylan's harmonica. I feel fortunate that the Stones and Dylans lives ran through time parallel my life. I've listened to their music from their first recorded songs to the most recent. Half a century.




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