ROCK N ROLL RAMBLE

pink floyd

I haven't listened to much music recently. Earlier in the day I was at football with Justin and Melvin. We'd smoke and drink in the mancave and return to the tv, back and forth, listening to the radio in the mancave. Most often we listen to the race or the game on the radio. Today, the Cowboys walked all over the Colts. In the mancave the radio was on a station that plays "oldies" of pop metal from 60s to 90s. We heard Pink Floyd's Money, the Stones' Paint it Black. The dj said Keith Richards turned 71 this week and picked this song to illustrate Richards' artistry with an electric guitar. Justin and Melvin returned to the tv and I stayed with the radio. Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself. I was thinking I wished they would play something with a punk jam to it, then they played Billy Idol. Just right. He did vocals for one of my favorite punk bands, Generation X. Dancing With Myself was the time of his transition from the London punk scene, which was over, to American pop. He injected a little bit of punk into American pop metal at the time. I sat listening to familiar rock from the past, songs I never paid attention to, but heard because they were in the air. Mostly it was post-Sixties metal heavy with lead guitar, a direction I did not follow in rock. About the time of the transition from Sixties to post-Sixties, I never took to nearly all of it. A bit too corporate pop. Punk started up in the mid Seventies and my rock n roll attention went with punk. The Clash, Joy Division, Nina Hagen, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, to name a few. I was listening to the rock I never paid attention to, hearing why, thinking I want to put on the Clash live when I get home, have a good jam. Listen to it like watching a movie, sit back and let it roll. 

mick jones and joe strummer, the clash

By the time I made it home, everything had changed. I seldom play music while writing; it pulls my attention and won't let it go. Tonight I wanted to hear music. I said to self, I'm not listening to music enough. I went searching through the classical collection for something to fill the air. Stopped looking when I came to pianist Murray Perahia playing Brahms intermezzo solo and one long quartet with the Amadeus Quartet. Perahia's piano puts me in bliss. Brahms does too. Together, the music is divine. Automatically, I wanted to hear Alban Berg Quartet play Dvorak, but wouldn't do it. I've fallen into a Dvorak rut where once I hear him I don't want to hear anything else. This is what happens when I read Tolstoy. I'm at home. Tolstoy speaks to my soul, as does Brahms. Murray Perahia is tickling the ivories like the master he is. I can't imagine the millions of hours of practice behind what I'm hearing. The same applies to the violin, viola and cello. Something with this degree of skill and artistry is out of this world, quite literally. Musically, I'm somebody, who, when asked what kind of music I like, is stumped. I don't know what to say. Can't say everything, because I don't like everything. Should I give the long list of what I like and listen to, or the shorter list of what I don't listen to? What is called for is a word or a short phrase, certainly not a list. I don't know what to say. 

murray perahia 

One day someone I knew then, some years ago, dropped by with a friend I didn't know. I happened to be playing a Chuck Berry album because I'd been reading his autobiography he wrote in prison. The guy I didn't know said, I see you're into oldies. I was older than his parents. I thought: What? But couldn't say anything. Uh, yeah. Whatever. I thought about warping his mind forever by putting on the Murderdolls. But chose to let him believe his generalization. I had a hard time with one thing I'm listening to being the only thing I listen to. It told me he is into one kind of music. Didn't ask what it was. Didn't want to hear him say Poco. I'm remembering my friend Jim Rhodes I used to ride to Boone with weekly for Edgar Cayce meetings. When rock n roll was new, I was the first year that could stand to hear it. The kids one year older than me and beyond could never develop an ear for rock. Jim was a few years older and had never listened to anything but big band music, cotillion dance music, which he loved. He asked me one time to bring a tape of something I listen to in the car so he could hear what it was. I took a cassette of Hole's Live Through This. It was new then and it was in my truck. I told him to push the off button as soon as he can't take any more, I'm not pushing it on you, only answering your question. It didn't last ten seconds and he never wanted to hear anything else. Even among people I know who listen to rock, very few can listen to what I like. Neither Justin nor Melvin like what I listen to. Not so much that it's extreme, because it's not. I haven't listened to radio pop since the Sixties when non-corporate music went underground. 

courtney love, hole

I'm inclined toward artistry with the guitar. I don't mean flourishes, but a new, original sound. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, my guitar hero. I don't know many people who can take more than half a minute of Rage Against the Machine. But that's not my concern. My only concern is that I like them. I will sit down over the next day or two and give myself a good Rage concert. The first time I heard them, I didn't get it. Then I got it. I feel like a great good fortune in my life was being just the right age, 13, to start listening to rock n roll when Shake Rattle and Roll, Maybellene, Long Tall Sally, Bo Diddley all came on at close to the same time. One at a time, the pop radio station played a new rock n roll song. I've thought it a blessed aspect of my life, chose to follow it all the way along, see where it goes. It's been a half century and a decade of a wonderful music. It has a way of absorbing every other music it touches or that touches it. An Australian rock band of Aborigines, Yothu Yindi, uses traditional instruments with electric guitars, keyboard and drums. They're quite good. I love how rock n roll came from the wedding of Anglo music and music from Africa. James Brown and Otis Redding did a tour of Africa and turned people all over Africa on to a new electric sound from America that evolved into a new kind of dance club music mixed with traditional musics all over the continent. Now African music is coming back to us and getting woven into rock n roll again.   

zack de la rocha and tom morello, rage against the machine

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CELEBRITY ROLE MODELS

andy warhol

Earlier, I watched a half hour talk by young actor Jack Gleeson of some pop tv show I've never heard of and don't want to see. He spoke to the Oxford Union about celebrity, this new role in life he fell into unawares. He was insightful. He spoke as himself and as celebrity. He analyzed what celebrity means in our society, role models largely, though he hesitated to see himself as a role model, when all he's wanted to do was to be an actor. Of course, he wanted celebrity status too, but had no idea what he was getting into when the role of celebrity came to him. I felt like he fell short of what he wanted to say. He lost himself in the forest of his mind and research, a talk written in another place and time, the night before, possibly in a hotel room, where one follows mind in one context, then at the place he's meant to give his presentation, it's an entirely different context from the one he'd projected for himself in the writing. I sat through the whole half hour of his talk. It held my attention. Not long after, I saw where Pope Francis ordered the distribution of 400 sleeping bags with papal insignia to the homeless of Rome. Swiss guard and volunteers distributed them, driving around the city in a van looking for people to give the sleeping bags to. I thought, a conscious role model gesture from a celebrity using his celebrity status to call attention to the people who need help. I admired him again. At first, I thought it a bit corporate having Vatican insignia on them, then rethought: the people who receive these sleeping bags will prize them as personal gifts from il papa, holy sleeping bags. 

These are humble people, more than likely all of them Roman Catholic, who hold il papa the highest. It's a refreshing bit of news. His celebrity status is a role model for many, and some of them will repeat the gesture in different cities of the Western world. He encourages people who pay attention to him to be kind to the poor, to see that poverty is a miserable existence. He has already reformed the Catholic church with his own humility. He has a charisma no other pope or public religious figure in my lifetime has had. He extends himself to the poor, not the rich. Kinda upside down and backwards in the world as it is today. I wonder if he might be a light in the darkness. I don't know if any popes in the past have had his compassion. It seems both odd and necessary that a celebrity religious figure who cares for the poor would be in ascendance in this dark time for a world of people living in spiritual poverty. America that calls itself a Christian country hates the poor. The poor are not beloved in Europe either. In a time when only celebrities have voices, it's refreshing to have a papal celebrity who wants to live the teachings of his Master. Like Bob Marley, he's too popular to assassinate. It's fun to know that he is burning the American so-called Christians a blister. They have him identified as Satan in human form. Help the poor? Satanism. Half a century ago, it would have been communism. Enabling the good-for-nothings. Get a job. Great idea. Know anyplace that's hiring somebody who needs mental health care? Get them off the streets, put them in prison where they're abused and given AIDS, often end up in solitary for inability to contain emotions. I hear Fifties comedian Dave Gardner in my head saying, When a man's down, kick him. 

andy warhol

The few times I've seen American Idol, I've been in awe seeing these young people so desperately appealing for celebrity status and a chance to be rich, wanting to be a product, the next Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. Listening to Jack Gleeson talk about role models, I was recalling the time when I was taken with pop star celebrities for role models. Bob Dylan was a good role model for me. He went his own way, struck out in a new direction several times. Pete Seeger wanted Dylan to be the one to take folk music mainstream and Dylan went electric with rock. I think I've used Dylan for a model in my readiness to change my art form from time to time. When what I'm doing gets boring, I change and do something else. I knew intuitively in childhood that my life would be one of many big changes. I've made it a point to be open to the changes and to flow with them. Dylan has been an encouragement to honor my own changes. A guiding light in that way. A celebrity role model. Henry Miller, too, was a celebrity role model. I liked Miller's moral code, his willingness to let go and see what comes next, his writing most of all, his engagement with the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. I learned from Miller that the people immediately around me in my world are every bit as important as celebrities. It's been among the most valuable learnings of my life. It has opened the door to a lot of people I might not otherwise have appreciated. I learned from Miller that interesting people are everywhere around. Nobody is writing their biographies, but they all have unwritten biographies. I learned much appreciation of others from Henry Miller, as well as appreciation of solitude. It's an interesting subject, the influence of celebrities as role models. It's something I never think about. I can't help but think it would be a horror to be a celebrity. I'm happy on Waterfall Road pursuing my own interests. 

andy warhol

About the most foolishly flattered I'd ever been was when I was asked for an autograph taken for Mick Jagger. The kid was so disappointed when his star sighting turned out to be a dud. I laughed in embarrassment, embarrassed because I was so flattered. I'm laughing that same laugh right now. This would have been 1967 or 8. Now I'd do good to be taken for Walter Brennan. Even then, I didn't look any more like Mick Jagger than Willie Nelson. I think of the Rolling Stone song, Star, that's what you are. One of the great songs about celebrity status. And another Stones lyric, it's the singer not the song. In the old-time way, it was the song, not the singer. Now it's the other way around. It's another time, another experience, another cosmology. I've seen the celebrities of my past fade into history, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis. A few years ago in the grocery store a girl at the register had a name that was a Chuck Berry song. I mentioned the Chuck Berry song. She said, Who's Chuck Berry? I knew then I was in another time zone. Our celebrities change so fast and the role model they manifested is in new faces and names, new ones for each generation. They make us think we're cool for being aware of them. I find in this time of the life when I hear the Rolling Stones as a band of musicians making music, I hear the music better than I ever did when I was listening to stars. Baby Vada, 3, already is enchanted with Elsa, the princess in the children's movie, Frozen. Crystal took her to see the ice show in Greensboro, Frozen on Ice. Elsa waved to the audience in Vada's direction and made Vada's show, "Elsa waved at me!" Vada has an Elsa dress she dresses up in and runs around the house a princess. 

andy warhol by andy warhol

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THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

Are you ready for Christmas? I hear this in town when I see someone I know. I never know what to say. I tend to say, I'm ready for it to be over. That's not totally true. I like the gift-giving part, the Saturnalia of it, the friendly spirit in the air. At the same time, the marketing aspect of Christmas is severely tiresome, yet is connected directly with gift-giving, what I think of as the best part. We have a list of traditions around Christmas. The so-called Christians harp about keeping Christ in Christmas, no more Xmas, and attempt to bring everybody down with other traditional beliefs about the time of year, like visiting with friends and family, good cheer, buying presents for kids, family and friends. Don't forget about Jesus born in a stable without a doctor. Don't forget Santa, a pagan spirit who delivers toys to boys and girls. Don't forget to buy a present for the dog. And don't forget Christmas trees that poison mountain spring water, the eastern half of the continent's water supply, which, by now, is nothing with the fracking coming in behind the poisoning to destroy the mountains as water source. Too bad about water. Too bad about native trout. Too bad about life. I like the spirit of people getting together to laugh and be light-hearted. At the same time I want to buy something for everyone I care about, I don't want to. I dislike long-faced religionists wanting to shut everybody down; it's about Jesus. Being happy is about Jesus. So many opposites clash in this time of contradictory messages from all 360 directions, it leaves me confused. If I commit to one tradition, the people of other traditions tell me I'm wrong. So I, like everyone around me, embrace them all without worrying about it. It's Christmas, an all-inclusive fun time of year. 

I have to say I have the good fortune of happy Christmases growing up. It meant seeing grandma and grandpa, cousins, aunts and uncles, and lots of presents. My personal associations with Christmas are happy. I was past 30 before I realized some other people have a difficult time with Christmas. I knew a woman who would fall into depression at Christmas. Her parents were drunks who hated each other and made Christmas miserable with their drinking and fighting. This came up one Christmas, I'm thinking 1974. A half a dozen of us friends got together to have a Christmas amongst ourselves. By the end of our gift-exchange and party, Joanne spoke up in tears saying this was the best Christmas of her life. I thought she was exaggerating until she explained. Turns out, it was her first Christmas. Her parents did not observe Christmas, except to get drunk and yell at each other, while she cried in her room. Other kids got presents, she got nothing. Out on her own, she never paid attention to Christmas, it depressed her so much. Later, I saw a statistic that said about half the population fell into depression for individual reasons at this time of year. It came to me out of the blue. I'd never entertained the thought that Christmas could be a sad time. My friend Jr Maxwell had a half-brother thirty years older, who killed himself and his wife on Christmas eve, 1945, leaving a four-month old baby an orphan. Jr was 23 that Christmas. The shock wave caused him a divorce from his first wife, the one he could have lived with so well. It knocked him off his track. He took Christmas for just another day, a day other people get excited about.

I hear preachers admonish the flocks for thinking materially on Christmas, for distraction from the despair of guilt that Jesus shed his blood for your sins. And the television telling them to spend all they have and max all their credit cards to buy more, you never have enough. Honey, I'd sure love to have that gold T-bird for Christmas. The Bank sends hundreds of billions of our dollars to Swiss and Cayman Island tax-free accounts. And what do we get? A year of paying on the credit card and a year of landfill stuff. This is the material side. There is no spiritual side to Christmas anymore. It's been so ruined by dogma, by business, by misinterpretation, by advertising, yet it still has some life in it. I like to be with my friends who have kids on Christmas day. I love for the kids to show me their new toys. One year, I gave Justin a big package of AA batteries. Santa always brought him something really neat that required batteries minus the batteries. Daddy wasn't driving to town Christmas morning to buy batteries. Some kids have good times all day, some do not, some have the whole spectrum in one day. Getting down to the day itself, 25 on the calendar, Christmas is a uniquely individual experience. So much anticipation is packed into the day that the day itself feels like it's missing what it's supposed to be, whichever on a checklist of options. I find the option of Christmas that appeals to me, personally, individually, is the happy spirit of the time. People get together to visit. See somebody at the grocery store, stop and have a brief conversation in good cheer. Paying for gas, a brief moment of good cheer, not saying Merry Christmas all the time, just visiting in a friendly way. It's this spirit I have come to value about Christmas. 

I can't afford to buy a whole mess of stuff to distribute to people that don't want it, so I eliminate that part of it. I will not have a Christmas tree. Christmas music is ok, once. The best ones seldom get heard, like Ralph Stanley's Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. And that's a good thing. It doesn't get worn out that way like Bing Crosby's White Christmas. It's a beautiful song, but I've heard it so much it's boring. Two aspects of a multi-faceted holy day, the holy and the secular. All kinds of theories going around concerning what Christmas really is, all of them advertising themselves with profit in mind. Herein is why I choose to step back from Christmas as anything but a genuinely high-spirited time, accepting its balance as a low-spirited time for some. I will not have my head infected with a television telling me every minute to spend more money I don't have to spend. I don't accept the frustration. I give token presents and a loving spirit. It's all I can afford. I can't afford to feed a house full of people. I don't accept that there is a given rule I'm to follow for Christmas. Visiting with my friends who have kids is what I do on Christmas day, and watch football on several channels, clicking from one to another when a commercial starts, making the rounds. I call it surrealist tv. It cracks up both Justin and Melvin when I break out laughing during a Viagra commercial. If you have an erection lasting more than eight hours call your doctor. The symbolism is hilarious. It's a comedy that even Jon Stewart can't make funnier. We visit in this time by watching television together. My Christmas will be seeing baby Vada, Crystal, Justin and lots of football. It's all in the spirit of the day.      

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THE LAND OF FORBIDDEN WORDS

Have been questioning what to write about. Don't want to bring readers down by being honest and don't want to misrepresent my meaning by pretending to be up when I'm not. My being, from blood vessels to aura, rejects s'posed-to for s'posed-to sake. Comes under grandmother saying, "What will people think?" I want to ask her what people? Everybody will think what they think and it will be about themselves, not me, whatever it is they think. I'm torn between two worlds, one going out and one coming in. The one going out is familiar, the one coming in is not. The police brutality I've been seeing lately disturbs me. It's only new because cellphones with video cameras are new recording the brutality that has always been going on. Ask anyone black. Since the "patriot act," we-the-people is a concept of the past. We the people have no recourse with "law enforcement" invasions or executions. White people subject to police brutality are enraged, while the black people know to take it as the way things are. I did not realize that black people were in the cops' cross-hairs to the degree they are. Every day an unarmed black man, woman or child is killed. He had a gun. I was afraid for my life. Meaning: it was a nigger. That's all the evidence needed to clear the cop of "wrong-doing." It's looking like our judicial system is dead set on eliminating the black people by way of prison or killing. 

Sometimes when I read Cornell West or hear him in an interview, he surprises me, but never shocks me. I did not understand, before the Ferguson, Missouri, murders, how consciously black people are targeted by "law enforcement." That cops kill is now policy. The closest to punishment they're given is a paid vacation--lay low a few weeks until the press forgets about it. White corporate media looks the other way, white people pay it no mind. In the world of white people, black people don't figure at all, except it's unacceptable in white middle class circles to say nigger. Not that black people matter to them. It's a code indicating status. It's about self and has nothing to do with black people. Cornell West surprises me when he reveals what black people are thinking. It's not shocking, because it's what an oppressed people would be thinking. White people keeping black people down is denied in white circles and a way of life in black circles. Black people, rightfully for self-preservation, know to keep their thinking to their own circles. Thus stretching the racial divide even wider. This just one of the many divisions widening in our time. I saw a video clip today from a courtroom where a black woman was in the witness stand talking to and about the cop that shot her granddaughter in the head while sleeping, after breaking into her house, and wrongfully accusing her of resisting the thug invasion. My heart wrung dry for the woman wailing openly in public with a courtroom full of white people looking at her, the stone faces of statues. Totally indifferent. But nobody will say nigger. That's disrespectful. 

If you want to know what the cops are thinking, listen to Rush Limbaugh. Angry. Angry cause the enwords are living on welfare white folks are paying into. Yer taxes is going to pay enwords not to work, make em lazier'n ever. I was thinking in the UK they have a law about hate speech in media, so Rupert Murdoch crossed the sea where corporate control wants hate media. Keeps the masses divided, keeps them hating each other while they all get fleeced. The cops there kill very few. I won't venture that the Brits are less racist than Americans, but they are much less violent about it. Also, they're not a gun culture. I don't want to play the game of one place is better or worse than another. Though we live in the most violent culture on earth, I am able to live my life in peace, except for the violence that comes through the news. I saw a preview, a trailer, of a movie a few days ago with a title I made it a point not to notice, guns pointing, guns shooting, guns threatening, gunshots echoing. Fast forward. I do like the occasional men-with-guns movie, but only as a genre, now and then. The little tv I see a week, Sunday afternoon races, football, basketball, baseball, golf, commercials, does something to my head, especially the commercials, the interruptions by commercials. I see them, but turn them off in my head, a fiction I like to believe for self-justification. After seeing a Burger King commercial, driving through town, seeing the Burger King building, the commercial gives it something of a golden glow. It bothers me to see the fakery of corporate media creating a fake world that gives propaganda reality. "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Spoken by William Casey, 1981, CIA director. Their program is accomplished. We are there. 

I've been snapping in my mind today at people who want everything to be sweet and lovely, blue skies every day, the bluebird of happiness flying by, perish a negative thought. Positive thinking is only half of it. I'm laughing at self thinking of the Carter Family, Keep On The Sunny Side, and Jimmy Martin's Sunny Side of the Mountain, how I love these songs for their meaning, understanding the sunny side of the mountain is where things grow best. I tell myself to forget about cops killing black people, and white people now too. The only thing it tells me is the police hate us. We read that loud and clear. And they don't like the hate that's coming back at them. Makes them hate us all the more. Justice isn't even a word anymore. I tell myself to quit thinking about such as this. And I do. Yet it lurks in the back of my mind when I'm acting like it's not there. I tell myself it's not my concern, I'm neither black nor a cop. However, what it tells me is when they decide to put me in the cross-hairs, I have no recourse either. To ignore this is to ignore police state. What else can I do? They have the guns and the law literally on their side. In this time, I am a criminal just by being a citizen. I think it's called fascism, another word it's not polite to use in public. The other F-word. This is the north side of the mountain, the part that's in the shade when the sunny side of the mountain is in full sun and I'm thinking it's wonderful. It is. And it's also the other. It's both. It's the yin and yang, balance. Though I like the peace where I am, I still live in this landscape of commerce and state that I live in. It's the broader landscape. I cannot deny it. Have no reason to deny it. The sunny side has no meaning without the dark side. The dark side has no meaning without the sunny side. Sorrow for my black brothers and sisters overwhelms me in a time when this understanding of the racist nature of the justice system is new to me. I knew it was racist before, but not like what I see now. Even the pope can't do anything about it. All I know to do is not be part of the problem. I can't change the justice system. It's the world I live in. I don't have to be of it. I continue to go my own way. 

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