November Notes
Just got back from several successful dates with Casey Neill. Casey writes some great songs and is a true trooper as far as the road goes. Check out his site at: http://www.caseyneill.org/ I’ve known him for a long time and watched his work progress form those early Olympia days to these days of overdue recognition. It was a treat to share the stage!
Also did some dates on my own. A couple of house concerts and so on. House concerts rule! They are the only true people’s alternative to the Clear Channel controlled venue circuit. And a damn fine way to actually meet the people you perform for. I can’t recommend them enough.
Coming up is a benefit for the Catholic Seamen’s Club – no I’m not converting, I have no deity to convert to. But these are the Catholic Workers and you won’t find any more dedicated folks around. Father Tony Haycock is the guy – he sees to it that the illegal and Homeland Insecurity suspicious foreign sailors can call home to their relatives. More often than not the US authorities won’t allow them on land and so they have no way contact loved ones. Years ago Tony got kicked out of South Africa for teaching the natives to read. The gall of some people…
Then John Ross is in town. John’s a gas – he’s an old beatnik and real hands-on social activist. He says he was the first person arrested for resisting the Vietnam war, which may be true, I don’t know. But he has consistently been one of the best and most dependable journalists reporting on events in Mexico particularly the Zapatistas. And he was a human shield in Iraq. He’ll be at my house for a few days… I sing a few songs at his gig at Elliot Bay and then he and I do a coffeehouse thing. Poetry and song, what could be better!
Then there’s a couple of gigs in the San Juan islands. Always good to get up there, shake the cobwebs out. Then… Katy and I are going down to San Francisco to house sit for a couple of weeks, over the holidays. A fine time to be there. I’ll have a few gigs to do to tide me over and a whole bunch of people to see. And I still have to get my ticket for England in January.
Where does all the money go? Oh that’s right, there’s a war going on…
Speaking of which, there are renewed rattlings for a draft. That seems to happen every few months. Fat chance on it – a draft would democratize the carnage and spell the end of things. There would be almost immediate uprisings all overt the place. Which is just what we need, so maybe it’s a good idea. In fact it is a good idea! When we had a draft during the Vietnam days everybody was at risk. Well, everybody except the rich kids with their influential parents, but then that’s always the case. But for the rest of us, no one could hide. So we had to choose – do something or get body bagged. And there’s no better way to create a real relationship between the soldiers and the peace movement than to draft the demonstrators. So yeah, let’s do it.
I went into the bank the other day – to deal with my millions – and was immediately struck by how much it now looks like a jail. They had installed new partitions around the manager’s desks, Plexiglas and wood, up to about the level of your head, so now you can’t really get to anyone, not personally. Everyone is locked off.. And there I am trying to talk to a teller through inch thick Plexiglas, with an overhead camera watching all my movements, along with a smaller and probably more selective camera right there at the counter in front of me, and – the real clincher – a finger print ink pad. So I say, “Looks like I’m going to jail.” She says, what? I repeat and she looks at me like she feels sorry for me because I’m going to jail, like maybe I got caught shoplifting or something. “No,” I say, “check out the cameras and the partitions and the finger print ink. We are all going to jail. This looks like a jail in here. And this little camera is warm,” I add putting my hand on the heated device on the counter, a little rounded dome thing with a lens inside. “It’s doing its job,” she says. “What job,” I ask. “Fighting crime.” Oh, of course, how could I be so stupid.
What crime is that, I ask, playing dumber. “There’s a lot of identity theft out there,” she says. Identity theft? That wouldn’t happened if we all weren’t digitizing ourselves. She goes blank. Blank at the bank. I say something about how the real crimes are official and legal and that all this surveillance is just a cash cow for somebody and that we are fast becoming a totally incarcerated society. We are all going to jail. She doesn’t understand.
I said America has killed somewhere around 600,000 people in Iraq, did you hear about that? That’s a real crime. …no... “Have you ever heard of depleted uranium?” Her face blanks out a little bit more… “What’s that?” I explain about the remains of the nuclear arsenal process and how they use that extremely dangerous stuff to build armor plating for tanks, and bullets for guns, and missile tips, and how everybody who goes over to Iraq is exposed to it, and that the Iraqi people themselves are saturated, and that the body count is horrendous, and that its a much greater crime than anything that these ridiculous cameras are supposed to protect us from. She stares at me from a long way off. “Look it up,” I say, “depleted uranium.” “Have a nice day,” she says.
And I probably did.
But I have vowed to myself and others to never let an opportunity go by to get in my licks. And neither should you. When they show you the latest surveillance gear and tell you how it will make everything safer, tell them something to put it in perspective. When you call up the phone company and they say that “this call may be monitored for purposes of quality control” tell them that its a lie and that you very much object to being recorded. Don’t let them get away with playing dumb.
By the way, the regional manager of my bank drives a Hummer. I can’t wait to talk to him about it…
Also did some dates on my own. A couple of house concerts and so on. House concerts rule! They are the only true people’s alternative to the Clear Channel controlled venue circuit. And a damn fine way to actually meet the people you perform for. I can’t recommend them enough.
Coming up is a benefit for the Catholic Seamen’s Club – no I’m not converting, I have no deity to convert to. But these are the Catholic Workers and you won’t find any more dedicated folks around. Father Tony Haycock is the guy – he sees to it that the illegal and Homeland Insecurity suspicious foreign sailors can call home to their relatives. More often than not the US authorities won’t allow them on land and so they have no way contact loved ones. Years ago Tony got kicked out of South Africa for teaching the natives to read. The gall of some people…
Then John Ross is in town. John’s a gas – he’s an old beatnik and real hands-on social activist. He says he was the first person arrested for resisting the Vietnam war, which may be true, I don’t know. But he has consistently been one of the best and most dependable journalists reporting on events in Mexico particularly the Zapatistas. And he was a human shield in Iraq. He’ll be at my house for a few days… I sing a few songs at his gig at Elliot Bay and then he and I do a coffeehouse thing. Poetry and song, what could be better!
Then there’s a couple of gigs in the San Juan islands. Always good to get up there, shake the cobwebs out. Then… Katy and I are going down to San Francisco to house sit for a couple of weeks, over the holidays. A fine time to be there. I’ll have a few gigs to do to tide me over and a whole bunch of people to see. And I still have to get my ticket for England in January.
Where does all the money go? Oh that’s right, there’s a war going on…
Speaking of which, there are renewed rattlings for a draft. That seems to happen every few months. Fat chance on it – a draft would democratize the carnage and spell the end of things. There would be almost immediate uprisings all overt the place. Which is just what we need, so maybe it’s a good idea. In fact it is a good idea! When we had a draft during the Vietnam days everybody was at risk. Well, everybody except the rich kids with their influential parents, but then that’s always the case. But for the rest of us, no one could hide. So we had to choose – do something or get body bagged. And there’s no better way to create a real relationship between the soldiers and the peace movement than to draft the demonstrators. So yeah, let’s do it.
I went into the bank the other day – to deal with my millions – and was immediately struck by how much it now looks like a jail. They had installed new partitions around the manager’s desks, Plexiglas and wood, up to about the level of your head, so now you can’t really get to anyone, not personally. Everyone is locked off.. And there I am trying to talk to a teller through inch thick Plexiglas, with an overhead camera watching all my movements, along with a smaller and probably more selective camera right there at the counter in front of me, and – the real clincher – a finger print ink pad. So I say, “Looks like I’m going to jail.” She says, what? I repeat and she looks at me like she feels sorry for me because I’m going to jail, like maybe I got caught shoplifting or something. “No,” I say, “check out the cameras and the partitions and the finger print ink. We are all going to jail. This looks like a jail in here. And this little camera is warm,” I add putting my hand on the heated device on the counter, a little rounded dome thing with a lens inside. “It’s doing its job,” she says. “What job,” I ask. “Fighting crime.” Oh, of course, how could I be so stupid.
What crime is that, I ask, playing dumber. “There’s a lot of identity theft out there,” she says. Identity theft? That wouldn’t happened if we all weren’t digitizing ourselves. She goes blank. Blank at the bank. I say something about how the real crimes are official and legal and that all this surveillance is just a cash cow for somebody and that we are fast becoming a totally incarcerated society. We are all going to jail. She doesn’t understand.
I said America has killed somewhere around 600,000 people in Iraq, did you hear about that? That’s a real crime. …no... “Have you ever heard of depleted uranium?” Her face blanks out a little bit more… “What’s that?” I explain about the remains of the nuclear arsenal process and how they use that extremely dangerous stuff to build armor plating for tanks, and bullets for guns, and missile tips, and how everybody who goes over to Iraq is exposed to it, and that the Iraqi people themselves are saturated, and that the body count is horrendous, and that its a much greater crime than anything that these ridiculous cameras are supposed to protect us from. She stares at me from a long way off. “Look it up,” I say, “depleted uranium.” “Have a nice day,” she says.
And I probably did.
But I have vowed to myself and others to never let an opportunity go by to get in my licks. And neither should you. When they show you the latest surveillance gear and tell you how it will make everything safer, tell them something to put it in perspective. When you call up the phone company and they say that “this call may be monitored for purposes of quality control” tell them that its a lie and that you very much object to being recorded. Don’t let them get away with playing dumb.
By the way, the regional manager of my bank drives a Hummer. I can’t wait to talk to him about it…
posted by Jim Page at 6:41 PM
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