062710

The disease of modern character is specialization.

--Wendell Berry

*Hair*

My brother and I went to see Hair on Broadway. Wow! What a show. I have never actually seen a Broadway show of it; the closest I got was a production at my college. Having been raised on the music from Hair, to me it was like a soundtrack to my life. I've sung the songs so many times they're like old hat. There was a couple of things that changed for this production: Claude plays a guy from Queens who's fixated on England, and Claude does go to an induction center, and so he is in fact the one who dies. The show is that much more powerful because of it.

It was all there, a fellow discussing the very racy Sodomy, a woman discussing the state of the air, the group singing about 256 Viet Cong captured, etc.

"I'm a colored spade,

a nigger, a black nigger.

A jungle bunny, jigaboo, coon,

pickaninny, mau mau.

Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima,

Little Black Sambo,

cotton pickin', swamp guinea,

Junk man, shoeshine boy.

Elevator operator, table cleaner at Horn & Hardart,

slave, voodoo zombie,

Ubangi lipped, flat nose,

tap dancin', resident of Harlem.

And president of

The United States of Love.

President of

The United States of Love."

"Ain't got no home. (So)

Ain't got no shoes. (Poor)

Ain't got no money. (Honey)

Ain't got no class. (Common)

Ain't got no scarf. (Hot)

Ain't got no gloves. (Cold)

Ain't got no bed. (Beat)

Ain't got no pot. (Busted)

Ain't got no faith. (Catholic)"

"I got crazy ways, daughter,

I got million-dollar charm, cousin,

I got headaches and toothaches

and bad times too like you.

I got my hair.

I got my head.

I got my brains.

I got my ears.

I got my eyes.

I got my nose.

I got my mouth.

I got my teeth.

I got my tongue.

I got my chin.

I got my neck.

I got my tits.

I got my heart.

I got my soul.

I got my back.

I got my ass.

I got my arms.

I got my hands.

I got my fingers.

Got my legs,

I got my feet,

I got my toes,

I got my liver,

Got my blood,

I got my guts (I got my guts),

I got my muscles (muscles),

I got life (life),

Life (life),

Life (life),

LIFE!"

"She asks me why

I'm just a hairy guy.

I'm hairy noon and night,

hair that's a fright.

I'm hairy high and low,

don't ask me why.

(Don't know.)

It's not for lack of bread

like the Grateful Dead, darling.

Gimme head with hair,

long beautiful hair,

shining, gleaming,

streaming, flaxen, waxen.

Give me down to there hair,

shoulder length or longer.

Here baby, there mama,

Everywhere, daddy daddy,

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair,

flow it, show it,

long as God can grow it, my hair."

"Ripped open by metal explosion.

Caught in barbed wire,

fireball, bullet shock.

Bayonet electricity,

shrapnel, throbbing meat,

electronic data processing,

black uniforms, bare feet, carbines.

Mail-order rifles shoot the muscles.

256 Viet Cong captured. 256 Viet Cong captured."

*Quotations*

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

--Blaise Pascal

We grew a hundred years older in a single hour.

--Anna Akhmatova

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles.

--Charles Chaplin

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

--Lillian Hellman

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

--Nietzsche

The meaning of a myth resounds in its evoked associations, and if the scholar is to become aware of these, he must allow their counterparts to arise within himself from those regions of his nature he still shares with early man.

--Joseph Campbell

We are now confident that electric and magnetic phenomena are attributable to the ether, and we are perhaps justified in saying that the effects of static electricity are effects of ether in motion.

--Nikola Tesla

The trick is to enjoy life. Don't wish away your days, waiting for better ones ahead. The grand and the simple. They are equally wonderful.

--Marjorie Pay Hinckley

I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others.

--Stephen Dunn

The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a 'good murder'; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes, break on their editions.

--Pete Hamill

Peace love and ATOM jazz

062010

Do you know what it's like not to be able to walk anywhere? To have to get out a wheelchair if I want to go? I have secondary progressive MS, so mostly I feel my ability escaping from me daily. I am tired, I'm sick of having to accommodate the MS on a daily basis, I'm plastered. Life is tough when you feel your days escaping every minute you're alive. I hope I have someone to love. That's the only thing I care about.

--Facebook status update

*Poem*

Thorn in the Side

What happened to you?

Last I remember

we met for drinks and

I had not a clue

that you thought ill

of me. What happened

between that night,

when you were very

welcome to email

correspondence with

me, and today when I

email you and you act

as if I have no right

to reach out to you,

as if my overture were

completely unwelcome,

as if you would rather

not that I even exist?

Maybe you fell prey

to that former friend

Kate and began believing

her lies, maybe it's

just you never thought

of me as disabled and

the idea was too much

to bear, or maybe it's

what I've always thought:

you are godless

in the worst of ways,

and I was just one more

thorn in your side.

*China*

I met a woman once on an overnight train, and I can't remember her name. We hit it off; I woke up and there she was. She invited me back to her gift shop; we were in Changsha. The fact that this woman even owned a gift shop was remarkable. She was in her young 20s. After I'd seen her gift shop, and met her brother, also in his late teens/early 20s, we decided to go to a nearby guest house, where I found suitable accommodations. The parents of the two of them were nowhere to be found; I found they strongly disliked speaking of their parents. When I say this lady and I hit it off, I mean to say we spent every minute that I was in Changsha together. It was just romantic enough for me to enjoy.

I kissed her one night; that's what I remember. I kissed her and she was taken by surprise. I didn't mean anything by it; I was just doing what came naturally to me. When I went to leave in the next few days, I found my lady friend was extremely antagonistic to my continuing on my journey. "Did you mean it when you kissed me?" she asked. That was a thorny question. Did I mean it? To be sure, in the moment that I kissed her, I felt what I was doing was right. Did I mean I wanted to stay there with her? In my traveling mode, I couldn't imagine staying in one place more than a few days.

I've often thought of this lady over the past couple of decades. She meant for me to remember her. She sent me one letter with photos and a note. The note was unfortunately dense, and I couldn't see my way to translating it. The photos I still have, though. They make up for me the world as I knew it once, well-traveled and fancy free; one wrong choice I made, among many wrong choices, was to marry the woman I did. Where would I be now if I'd chosen to hang around the mainland? I can only hope my life would have turned out better; I am far too lonely for this to be the cosmos' plan for me.

*Quotations*

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

--Kahlil Gibran

The major contribution of Protestant thought to the knowledge of mankind is its massive proof that God is a bore.

--Henry Louis Mencken

Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it--and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist--is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me."

--Bill Hicks

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!"

--Bill Bradley

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then--one day--you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then--one day--you step off a curb at sixty-seventh Street, and BANG, you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

--Dennis Leary

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.

--Annie Dillard

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

--Margaret Atwood

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams--daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.

--L Frank Baum

To see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

--William Blake

I imagine therefore I belong and am free.

--Lawrence Durrel

*Music*

#%%&*! Smilers, Aimee Mann. This is exactly the record Aimee-Mann fans would love. It's got all the hallmarks which make Ms Mann's music comforting and in the groove. The instrumentation is rich, though I would say not any more rich than her old music. The writing is strong, as in the opener: "You've got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway." This music is exactly what one would expect from Mann, and it remains to be seen: does it have the lasting power of her older work, such as Bachelor No. 2? The signs are good in the affirmative.

So Runs the World Away, Josh Ritter. This latest work from Ritter is especially unpredictable. While it sticks to its folk/country roots ("Folk Bloodbath" features stories and characters from folk/country's long history), this record nevertheless finds itself all over the map. It contains some material which will take me some time to absorb, but I'll be smiling the whole time.

Peace love and ATOM jazz

061310

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

--Andre Maurois

*Jobim*

Waters of March

by Antonio Jobim

A stick, a stone,

It's the end of the road,

It's the rest of a stump,

It's a little alone.

It's a sliver of glass,

It is life, it's the sun,

It is night, it is death,

It's a trap, it's a gun.

The oak when it blooms,

A fox in the brush,

A knot in the wood,

The song of a thrush.

The wood of the wind,

A cliff, a fall,

A scratch, a lump,

It is nothing at all.

It's the wind blowing free,

It's the end of the slope,

It's a beam, it's a void,

It's a hunch, it's a hope.

And the river bank talks

of the waters of March,

It's the end of the strain,

The joy in your heart.

The foot, the ground,

The flesh and the bone,

The beat of the road,

A slingshot's stone.

A fish, a flash,

A silvery glow,

A fight, a bet,

The range of a bow.

The bed of the well,

The end of the line,

The dismay in the face,

It's a loss, it's a find.

A spear, a spike,

A point, a nail,

A drip, a drop,

The end of the tale.

A truckload of bricks

in the soft morning light,

The shot of a gun

in the dead of the night.

A mile, a must,

A thrust, a bump,

It's a girl, it's a rhyme,

It's a cold, it's the mumps.

The plan of the house,

The body in bed,

And the car that got stuck,

It's the mud, it's the mud.

Afloat, adrift,

A flight, a wing,

A hawk, a quail,

The promise of spring.

And the riverbank talks

of the waters of March,

It's the promise of life

It's the joy in your heart.

A stick, a stone,

It's the end of the road

It's the rest of a stump,

It's a little alone.

A snake, a stick,

It is John, it is Joe,

It's a thorn in your hand

and a cut in your toe.

A point, a grain,

A bee, a bite,

A blink, a buzzard,

A sudden stroke of night.

A pin, a needle,

A sting, a pain,

A snail, a riddle,

A wasp, a stain.

A pass in the mountains,

A horse and a mule,

In the distance the shelves

rode three shadows of blue.

And the riverbank talks

of the waters of March,

It's the promise of life

in your heart, in your heart.

A stick, a stone,

The end of the road,

The rest of a stump,

A lonesome road.

A sliver of glass,

A life, the sun,

A knife, a death,

The end of the run.

And the riverbank talks

of the waters of March,

It's the end of all strain,

It's the joy in your heart.

*Music*

Mr Jurek sure has a way of extolling Joe Henry. By Thom Jurek:

"Blood from Stars is the album Joe Henry's been getting at since Scar. He's worked with jazz musicians often, but he's never made a record that employs the form so prominently. His band includes Marc Ribot, Patrick Warren, Jay Bellerose, David Pilch, and now his son Levon on saxophones and clarinet, as well as vibist Keefus Ciancia. Engineer Ryan Freeland is as important as the players: he managed to give this record its strange yet welcoming sound. It begins with the short "Prelude," played by Jason Moran. It introduces all the characters here, with a note or two here, a chord flourish there. Some are immediately identifiable; others you've never met before and perhaps hope never to. Henry's love of traditional jazz has blossomed--the album sprawls over history, genre, and song forms, but there is no consciously retro aspect in its presentation and it is not a jazz album. Many of these songs are based on the blues (and even folk-blues); some are standards-style pop; some walk out the jazz of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Kansas City from the early 20th century; some even rock--a little. Many are dressed in horn arrangements and offbeat sounds that seem to enter in from the rafters. They drift in and out and are allowed to play a part in the songs. Who cannot relate to the swinging blues (à la "St. James Infirmary") led by piano, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and a minimal trap kit? The music seems to come from antiquity in "The Man I Keep Hid," but Henry's voice is right firmly in the historical present: his protagonist voices his desires and how they are thwarted--usually by himself--as horns, organs, piano, and rhythm section swell and offer the chaos just under the surface of the singer's voice.

""Channel" follows it, a love song about disorder that is played as anything but. Henry's character asks simple questions that offer significant difficulties in his inner world, but he embraces them: "I want my story straight/But all the others bend/From wondrous to strange/To beauty at the end...." It's a haunting melody that would be--if we had them anymore--a parlor song. Both songs reflect something lost and hidden in the wires and satellites of modern life: that individuals--no matter how lost, determined, angry, displaced, hopeful, or praying for redemption at any cost--still have human voices that speak, at least on the inside, constantly. Musical traditions bend and blend into and through one another and are painted by the sounds Freeland allowed to enter from the ghosts in the walls, the ceilings, or up from the floorboards. "Death to the Storm" reveals this better than just about any track here, a simple blues with Ribot's electric guitar weaving through Henry's lines and phrases about characters--including the protagonist, who could have come from Steinbeck, Dos Passos, or O'Connor. "Bellwether"--another early 20th century jazz-blues--is a modern tale of Sisyphus. He's climbing a hill, digging a well, changing his name, leaving his shame, etc., until the story gets better. Ultimately, Blood from Stars is the most sophisticated, redemptive, and romantic album Henry's cut; the love songs are simply raggedly breathtaking. It reflects an America that wasn't so much lost as consciously wiped away near the end of the 20th century. Its remnants still live, however, in the shadows of memory, and in the broken-hearted ghosts that continue to haunt its landscape and atmosphere, and sometimes even its people. Henry welcomes them, lending his voice to theirs in all of these songs."

*Quotations*

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

--Andre Maurois

Until the Women's Movement, it was commonplace to be told by an editor that he'd like to publish more of my poems, but he'd already published one by a woman that month. This attitude was the rule rather than the exception, until the mid-sixties. The highest compliment was to be told, 'You write like a man.'

--Maxine Kumin

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

--George Orwell

"On with the dance; let joy be unconfined," is my motto, whether there's a dance to dance or any joy to unconfine.

--Samuel Clemens

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

--EO Wilson

Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single

outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling

and shouting within you. If you do not hear this cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out.

--Nikos Kazantzakis

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

--Richard Strauss

Practice love first on animals; they are more sensitive.

--George Gurdjieff

If there is any single factor that makes for success in living, it is the ability to draw dividends from defeat.

--William Marston

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall--think of it, _always_.

--Gandhi

Peace love and ATOM jazz

060610

At some point about 10 years ago, my life became on glaring display for all to see. There is no moment I'm not conscious of the MS, I'm not aware of its terrible effects on me, that I don't feel like a very raw nerve. My life is an open book, and my doctors and specialists all know only too well about it. I cannot hide, I cannot turn my gaze, I cannot run. This is the cold, hard fact of what my life gave me.

--Facebook status update

_____

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering.

--Ben Okri

*Lord's-Jester*

One thing I'd like to mention is this: I've, as a certified Professional Perfumer, been invited to participate in The Mystery Of Musk project. I'm pretty sure no one has ideas about what other's are coming up with; we don't actually have much to go on. We've got that word "mystery" and that's about it. So I made a complete perfume, Dionysus (17 notes altogether), as I have a sense that others don't quite know what to do with my perfume--is this scent impossibly intense or is that just me? The perfume is riffs on ambergris and Africa stone in the base, along with five others--including cognac, as we're talking about the god of wine. In the heart I added jonquil as I think it has an intimate aroma. Now we get to lining up recipients of these samples and one final winner.

I want to mention that this title I've acquired, Professional Perfumer, is the furthest I can travel along natural-perfume lines. There is no title "master perfumer," and if anyone tries to tell you different, tell them they're full of crap. In the old days, people got away with calling themselves Master Perfumer, but that's just a big gray area; you can call yourselves "master" anything. My experience is that people who would call themselves "masters" have a whole lot to make up for. This is a lifelong endeavor; there is no point at which one says, "Okay, I've learned enough." No--constant innovation and forever making brand new batches of perfume. Barreling down the freeway of forever-new ideas.

As I've gotten used to my perfumes, I find layering them, or at least two different places on my body, is best. There are certain combinations I like: Demeter on the hands and Heracles on the face, Ares on the bottom and Ares/Zephyr on top, Zephyr on bottom and Selene on top, etc. I haven't yet found two compliments, though I think Demeter and Zephyr would be the ticket. Each one by itself is plenty redolent enough, but I like to add to the mystery. It goes back to my days living with a host of fragrances. It horrifies me to think back and remember those were all _synthetic_! It's been a long strange trip, all toward getting the title of Professional Perfumer. Worlds I've traveled to get where I am. I wouldn't change a speck of it.

*Taiwan*

The first person who taught me the importance of the tea ceremony was my first (and only) girlfriend. She casually took me to a place in northern Taipei; little did she know, she was busy convincing to spend a life with fine tea. Now, to be clear, there is nothing about the tea ceremony that's similar to western tea-making. This is done on a tea tray with a hole in the middle.

1. You warm the cups with hot water.

2. Then you add tea to the teapot. "Half full" is what I always heard.

3. You add a small amount of water to the tea. You then take that water and heat the pots and cups. (There is a theme of keeping the cups warm.)

4. Then you add the full amount of water. Traditionally, there is a cup just for smelling, then you dump the tea into the cup.

5. Repeat as many times as you see fit.

Good oolong (oolong is used for the above ceremony) can be steeped at least eight times before giving up the ghost. The stuff we get around here can only be steeped about two or three times. I get my tea now from Holy Mountain Trading Company. I am very pleased to have this addiction.

*Quotations*

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering.

--Ben Okri

Poetry is based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness.

--May Swenson

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.

--John F Kennedy

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.

--Marie Stopes

What was whispered to the rose to break it open last night was whispered to my heart.

--Rumi

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

--Charles de Lint

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

--Anatole France

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

--Christina Baldwin

Right now we're stading at a massive point of rebirth.

--Lars Ulrich

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

--Rachel Carson

*Music*

Liberation 06.10

1. Freeway, Aimee Mann

2. To a Hammer, Erin McKeown

3. Long Way Home/Rain on the Court, Tina Dico

4. Long Shadows, Josh Ritter

5. Gunnin', Sean Hayes

6. Corrido por Buddy, Jolie Holland

7. Light of the Morning, Band of Skulls

8. Windowsill, Arcade Fire

9. Great Beyond, Aimee Mann

10. Birds and Bees, Ben Lee

11. Cold Enough to Cross, Joe Henry

12. (Put the Fun Back in) the Funeral, Erin McKeown

13. The Curse, Josh Ritter

14. When We Fall In, Sean Hayes

15. Ballantines (with Sean Hayes), Aimee Mann

16. All I See, Tina Dico

17. Mexico City, Jolie Holland

18. Truce, Joe Henry

19. Orbital, Josh Ritter

20. Seamless, Erin McKeown

21. Powerful Stuff, Sean Hayes

22. Lullaby, Aimee Mann

Peace love and ATOM jazz