Seattle Jim Page

I Am A Light Bulb

2010-01-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

I am a lightbulb. A self aware lightbulb. I am lit when I am born and I go out when I die. The light switch may be shower or faster depending on circumstances but that’s the general idea. As a self aware lightbulb I get more and more convinced of myself the longer I last. I learn about my lightbulbness through history lessons and civics classes at lightbulb school. I learn that I am an American lightbulb of the majority white light male variety and that I have certain privileges associated with that. Because I was made in the same shop as some of my elder bulbs I look like them and I come to see myself as part of the family. I develop family loyalties.

The longer I last before my filaments give out the more attached I become to my self definitions. I see myself as the culmination of thousand of years of historical lightbulb generations and I really feel my weight. I am important. Sometimes I think that something as important as I am can’t just quit so I look around for a way to salvage my self. What would I do without me?

Extra-natural theorists tell me that there is an after glow for bulbs like me. They say that under certain circumstances and after a certain exemplary lifetime I may continue on to another sphere of existence. I like this idea because it gives me more time to be with myself.

The nuts and bolds crowd tell me that I am only made of wire and glass and when I go out that’s it. This is disturbing to me because I don’t like the idea of seeing myself when I’m burnt out. I imagine sitting next to my lifeless bulb self for eternity. All that darkness. The first idea is better so I go for that one. There are some unscrupulous characters who pretend to have some secret knowledge and they try to frighten me with stories of bad places and after burnout miseries. They say that they can help me to stay in the good graces of the Great Candelabra so that I will more likely be recycled. I don’t know what to think, but just to play it safe I do the behaviors and tithe.

The realists say I’m being silly and the extra-naturalists say okay, but what if I’m wrong? Better to be on the safe side. So I walk the fence. I “keep an open mind.” Then one day I have a vision, a dream. And in that dream a magical electrician speaks to me and he makes a lot of sense. This is what he says.

First of all he says that being alive as a self awareness is like being a focused point of light. There has to be something to focus that light through, he says, and in my case its’ my lightbulb self. Before that self came into being the light was diffuse. Then he asks me if I can remember anything from before I was born. I say no and he says that’s because I didn’t exist. The “I” that he is referring to is the focus point that I call “me.” Through years of life as a fully operating focus point lightbulb I get used to myself and seriously define myself as a Subject. I won’t take no for an answer, I am Somebody, damn it! Then he says that at the moment of death the light doesn’t just go out it loses its focus point and goes diffuse again. This is because the wire and glass that is my physical bulbness craps out. There is no “me” to survive afterwards in any definition because “I” was the focus and that’s all gone now.

“What about my light,” I say, almost pleading for immortality?

He smiles and says, “It’s diffuse, gone like smoke.”

Then he tells me to imagine a glass of water and an eye dropper. He tells me to imagine putting the eye dropper in the glass and sucking up a little. Then squeeze until one drop hangs above the glass. “That’s you,” he says, “an individual. Now squeeze some more until that individual drop falls into the glass.” I see it in my mind. “It’s still there,” he says, “but you will never find it again. You can take another drop out of the glass but it will never be the same one.”

“I guess I’ll find out when I die,” I say and he says, “No you won’t. There will be no you to do the finding out. That’s the hardest part of this whole thing. But it’s very democratic. It happens the same way to everybody.”

I must have looked disappointed or something because put his hand on shoulder and said, “But there is an after life.”

“There is?”

“Of course. Just like Martin Luther King Jr’s afterlife is happening today. And Beethoven’s afterlife happens in the symphony halls. It’s what the world does with you after you’re gone.”

“Then some people don’t get one. Everybody can’t be famous. Most of us are anonymous.”

Again he smiled. “Everybody leaves and impression, everybody is essential. Beethoven wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans without an audience. And Martin Luther King Jr had to have all those people to march with and come hear him speak. Don’t fooled by spectacle.”

I had a realization, and then I woke up.
.

This Is Not the Original Starbucks

2010-01-18T22:26:00.000-08:00

If There Is A God How Come We Don’t All Know About It?

2010-01-16T21:01:00.000-08:00

The question in the title is simple and obvious but it doesn’t seem to get dealt with very much, at least not out in the open. Think about it: a one true deity (or 40, or 50 of them, depending on your version), all powerful, all knowing, always there at all times. Creator and destroyer, best friend and worst enemy. With a plan and a morality and a penal code for breaking commandments. The original source and the final destination. Wouldn’t we all know about it? Wouldn’t we all get born knowing? In the real world everybody knows about the wind, and the rain, and the sunset. It’s just there. Wouldn’t we also know about god? We all know that it hurts to get hit with a brick. Wouldn’t we also know about a great supernatural personality hovering right there over our shoulders?

Why do we have to be convinced? And why do those who are already convinced have to re-convince themselves over and over again? Are they afraid they’ll forget? Why is the most dangerous tool in the devil’s arsenal The Doubt? Isn’t the doubt just the first foot in the door to discovery? Wouldn’t we still have small pox if somebody didn’t doubt that it was incurable? Wouldn’t we still have slavery if some people hadn’t doubted that it was the natural order of things? And am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that Christians take credit for abolition when the institution itself was biblically sanctioned? Isn’t it almost impossibly crazy that slavery is both scripturally endorsed and condemned? Can you really have it both ways if you believe strongly enough?

Mother Teresa explained in diary how her purpose in Calcutta was to harvest souls for Jesus. She wasn’t there to heal the sick, or to alleviate their suffering. She didn’t even give people any pain medication. All they had was aspirin. And it wasn’t for of lack funds - when she got sick she got heart surgery and a pace maker. But treatment for the poor of Calcutta was never her intension. She was harvesting souls. And for that to happen people had to die first. That’s why she baptized them at the last minute. But again, if there is only one true story, one true god, why the baptism? What are they baptizing you away from? What other story are they protecting you from?

In the Bible, in Luke 19:27, King James version, Jesus is quoted as saying, “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” Is this really the Prince Of Peace? Damn! You could use a quote like that to do all sorts of damage. Columbus, the Inquisition, Salem. And you could truly say that you were a follower of Jesus. Yes you could! Pat Robertson is not a fake Christian, he is true to the fold. As was Jerry Falwell. You can wring your hands and ask for clarity, you can blame it on the translation, but the fact remains: these are the words that are attributed to the Lamb Of God in the book which was written by the Hand Of The Almighty. Scary, isn’t it?

I’ve been doing a lot of digging into this stuff over the past few years, as you can probably tell. I was raised agnostic and quite naturally became atheist over time. Anything else is embarrassing. It’s like walking through a smoky hall of mirrors, a land that is reflective of our own real world but does not actually connect to it. It informs the opinions and values of many of our fellow travelers but does not ever truly affect either the outcome or the beginnings of our situational existence. As far as I can tell religion by itself amounts to almost nothing. People gaze into the interior of colored Easter eggs and see angels. That’s fine. But when religion partners with politics, when it gets in bed with the State with all of its police, courts, armies, and so on – all of its thug force - now it becomes dangerous. Now we have the Dark Ages.

Billy Graham was the official State Magician of America for years. He ministered to several successive administrations. Whenever there was a war he was in the White House on his knees with the President praying for the success of the bombing raids. He had weekly lunches with Ronald Regan, talking about the end times, looking for signs in Middle Eastern affairs that would signal the approach of Armageddon. A nuclear war, they knew – and they said as much – would be good for god’s plan. It would bring on the Second Coming. Why was Billy Graham not publicly denounced as a dangerous psychopath? Is religion really that strong?

I think I might have an insight. I remember reading about a photographer back in the 1800s who traveled extensively throughout the West taking pictures. Sometimes it got dangerous. When they asked him how he kept safe he told then that if he found himself surrounded by hostiles he would play crazy and they would let him alone. There seems to be a universal human taboo against hurting crazy people. I used it myself once in New York City, 40 years ago. It was just instinct. I was surrounded by young toughs on a deserted street with no help in sight. One of them had a knife, I had nothing. So I played crazy, it felt like the right thing to do and it was. After a short harassment they left me alone. Is this what religion does? Do we tolerate madmen and obvious charlatans because they have faith? Do we feel sorry for them the way that we feel sorry for people with mental disabilities? Is it a no-go area like making fun of retarded people? It certainly seems so. When a devout person makes an obviously stupid faith-based comment most people get a little quieter and change the subject. Do the faithful do this on purpose?

Again, I am suggesting that religion itself is nothing, and nothing to worry about. It is the political power that counts. And I think that for the purposes of overall progress and the advancement of the human condition it is correct, at least at this point, to continue to use tolerance in the presence of such belief. But we must we very careful about where to draw the line. Religion should under no circumstances be allowed to infiltrate into our national affairs. They should stop swearing in Presidents on the Bible, they should stop opening congressional sessions with prayer, and they should take all magical references off of our money and documents. The State, if nothing else, must be atheist. In over 200 years we have elected no one other than male Christians. We finally have a black man in the White House, and that’s good. Some day a woman. Maybe some day a Buddhist, a Jew, a Hindu, even (gasp) a Muslem. Some day a lesbian, some day an openly gay man. And some day, some day an atheist.

A parting shot: One day about 20 years ago I stopped to get gas a local convenience store. A banjo player friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in ages suddenly stepped out of a blu van on the other side of the pump. He was wearing grease stained overalls and his hands were real dirty. Donny,” I said, “I haven’t seen you in ages, how are you? What you been doing?” “I just finished putting a new transmission in that van. I’ve been taking care of those two wonderful men,” he said, motioning toward the two figures in the van. “They are so wonderful! They don’t use money. They live entirely on faith!” “Donny,” I said, “you just did hours of work for them for nothing. At an auto shop it would have cost real money. They don’t live on faith – they live on labor like everybody else.” He looked at me like I just didn’t understand. And I still don’t

It’s like coming out of the cave after a long winter. There are still shadows everywhere, long solid arcs of darkness obscuring the countryside. We hear sounds but we can’t see what they are. We imagine things. We are prey to the carnivores. We stick close to the fire, we are afraid of the dark. But the sun is rising now and the day is getting light. The shadows are receding and the sounds are only the falling leaves or running squirrels. Disease is no longer demon possession, witch doctors are obsolete. We know that we are not the center of the universe, that there is no malevolent intelligence directing the floods and the earthquakes. We can take these ancient weights off of our shoulders and stand up straight. What a relief

Nickelsville, and the Ugly Underbelly Of Seattle

2009-07-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

Seattle was always a pretty good town, but it’s got a mean streak. Just ask the Wobblies, they’ll tell you. Or anybody who was here during the WTO. Or anybody these days in Nickelsville.

Seattle was a little salt water town when I got here, small and friendly. You could talk to almost anybody. I always sat down at the front of the bus and talked with the driver. You could spend an hour buying a tube of toothpaste in the drug store, telling stories, where you’re from, about the weather, anything. I once walked into KING TV and told them that I had a song they should put on the news and they did. It was human back then.

But there was always a group of people who wanted more. They wanted to be like New York, or Los Angeles. They wanted to be “something,” to have penthouses and limousines. They wanted Seattle to be on the map. Well, they got their wish. And they got all the arrogance and stupidity, the swagger and pomp that comes with it. New money is real full of itself. New money sticks out its chest and pushes people out of the way to get there first. New money thinks it deserves it.

Balzac once said, “behind every great fortune is a crime.” I think he was right. I’m not saying that everyone who is well off is a criminal, but I am saying that this is a criminal system and behind the boardroom doors are some real shady characters doing some real shady deals. Massive accumulations of money have to come from somewhere; somebody has to get along with less so that someone else can have more. It’s just common sense: There are four people in a life boat with four gallons of fresh water. The successful capitalist will gather up most of it, say three of those gallons. On TV and the game shows it looks like a winner, but in that life boat it just looks like greed.

So, on to Nickelsville…. We all know that poverty is an issue mostly of irritation as far as the media is concerned. In the depths of the system it serves a useful purpose, keeping wages down with a surplus labor pool willing to work for almost anything, and sending a fear through the private lives of those who might want to be socially inventive. “Better finish school or you could wind up like that!” But for the most part it’s just a nuisance. Who are these people and how dare they take up space in my clean city! I paid for it goddamnit! Get ‘em the hell out of here.

The Times ran a story a few days ago about Nickelsville being forced yet again to relocate, this time to a park. Same old same old. But the reader comments were really scary. And I can’t be the only one who finds it this way. Here’s an example: Some guy who calls himself “The Truncheon” said: “Time for the cops to unsheath their truncheons and get these bums ‘moved on’... to involuntary institutionalisation at De-Tox facilities, work-camps, or insane-asylums.” Someone called “tsgt” said: “Time for ICE and the SWAT teams to get THEIR truncheons out to clean up and DEPORT the illegals and their so-called ‘gangs’ (barbarian invaders).” I’m not making any of this up. “Vitamin G” said: “tsgt.. yeah, suppose your right on this one... maybe we can figure out how to make biodiesel with them... gotta have plenty of booze running through their pipes..” “Magog”says: “They should be sent to work camps and forced to earn their keep. All them jobs we give illegals can be theirs. they can shift though garbage all day sorting class items form plastic items and paper items. Minimum stay five years to make sure they sober up and learn to work for a living and stop asking people to pay their way.”

Now, aside from the obvious lack of viable mentalities in these folks there seems to be a truly nasty mean streak. I mean, these posters are actually suggesting things that would have been normal in the early days of the Reich. So I jumped in with my own two cents. I called myself “SongTool.” I don’t have my posting anymore – it was deleted by the moderator – but I can tell you generally that I referenced the postings above – especially the one from The Truncheon and I made a direct comparison to the early Nazi rantings. I was pretty clear. Now, above each posting is a link that says “log in to report abuse.” I assume that Mister The Truncheon reported me. Here’s his follow up after I was deleted:

“I see ‘song fool's’ pandering comments have been removed. Personally, even 'tho I was attacked, I don't see exactly why, other than being compared to a NAZI.

”That term and comparison get thrown around A LOT these days. The NAZI's were SO BAD that there is really no comparison at all. There is a BIG difference between stating a desire for, and solutions to, basic law and order requirements for society, and a genocidally brutal and sadistic police state.

”Read your history... also read some history about how civilizations rot and fall in part because of the breakdown of the rule of law, and the cancerous growth of anarchy in all it's guises.”

(Pandering? How did he come up with that…) The Truncheon makes the usual right winger’s leap – ignoring the fact that the regime started out small, with grotesque calls for the systematic bothering and eventual eradication of undesirables. First they talked about it, then they did it. In fact, an international precedent was set after the fall of Germany that to propagate genocide, in all of its forms and stages, was to be considered a crime against humanity. It was part of the Nuremburg Principles.

I wish I knew who these people were – The Truncheon, tsgt, Magog. But they remain nameless and hidden. And I would like to ask the moderator, or whoever it was who deleted my post, how it is that pointing out the historical similarities of somebody’s publicly expressed ideas to the ideas of fascism is somehow worse than calling for “the cops to unsheath their truncheons and get these bums ‘moved on’... to involuntary institutionalization…” I am not calling for the beating of homeless people – The Truncheon is!

The Truncheon – come out, come out wherever you are. You and your friends – come out and say these things in public. Let’s have a public conversation. Let’s have a round table discussion in front of an audience. I think that would be good. Not a debate, just a talk. How about it?

Goodbye Joe

2009-07-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

Sad news: Joe Paquin has passed away, June 30th 2009. I got the email from TJ Politzer, old friend and mutual musician. Not much I can say, at least not any better than this – ripped off from the web site Marinlocalmusic.com:

“Our dear friend, Joe Paquin, lost his 6 year battle with cancer yesterday, June 30th 2009. At his side were fellow SunDogs Tom Rigney(Flambeaux) & Jimmy Hobson. Just Sunday he said "The Death Card was a tough one, but I revel in the Mystery of it all," showing his true bravery and continued curiosity for life and it's many faces. A Vietman Veteran, A Peace Activist, A husband, A father, A friend, and A great musician, Joe is survived by his wife Nancie, son Luke of the band Hot Hot Heat, and the many musical brothers & sisters he touched along the way. Joe was a resident of the town of Fillmore in Central California, and formerly called Marin County his home for over 10 years.”

Here’s the web site itself: http://marinlocalmusic.com/content/tribute-sundog-joe-paquin-1947-2009

Everybody was on Joe’s side, how could you not be. That we had him with us as long as we did to inspire and to uplift with music humor and plain humanity is something to be thankful for.

Thanks Joe.

Joe Paquin

2009-06-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

Speaking of great players… Let me introduce you to Joe Paquin. I’ve known Joe for a long time. He used to be in a Northwest hippie/country band back in the early seventies, I think they were called Swift Current. I played their breaks back then, along with everybody else’s, but never really hung out with them. Fast forward to the mid eighties and Joe’s playing with a California band called the Sundogs. He’s writing songs, playing electric guitar and washboard. My old friend TJ Politzer was also in that band and that’s how I got to be there. They a blending of Cajun, R&B, Funk, and straight ahead Rock and Roll. They were good. Anyway, I liked Joe’s song writing and we hung out a few times, even drinking a little red wine once to see if we could collaborate. We collaborated on the bottle but not much else happened.

Then time went by and Joe got sick. Stage four colon cancer, not a good thing. But Joe was a Marine in Vietnam and he’s hard to kill. He doesn’t lie down and give up when you tell him to. Besides, one of our mutual friends works at Genentech, a genetic research company just south of SF. Now, we all know people who make the sign of the cross at the mere mention of genetic research – all they can see if Frankenstein and the end of the world. Global mutations, creeping humanoid sludge and all that sci fi stuff. The truth is that Helga, that’s the friend’s name, goes to work every day thinking that this might be the day when they make that breakthrough and find the cure for cancer or aids or Hep C. No cures yet but there have been improvements. And Joe has become almost a poster child for the new medications. His attitude never goes cold and his will to survive is solid. Every time I see him he’s got something new.

A year or so ago I added one of Joe’s songs to my repertoire, a tune called Pray For Peace. It’s a great song, about a Vietnam vet who drinks all the time and prays for piece while he’s at it. I could never write a song like that because I didn’t have that experience, but Joe did and he lets me sing it. Thanks.

There’s another one I’m going to learn called Little Winnebago. It’s the only song I’ve ever heard that takes a positive view of people who travel in motor homes. It’s easy to trash them, and to trash the whole culture for that matter – it’s like trashing trailer parks and working class lifestyles in general - but if you spent 40 years working for some company and finally got to retire with a little money put away, you might just want to see the country in style. And you might just have earned it too.

So here’s a little You Tube clip to give you some idea. Go check him out, see him do a gig. You won’t be disappointed.

Pray For Peace

Just A Kid

Time In San Francisco

2009-06-12T22:53:00.000-07:00

I’m in San Francisco right now – have been for over a week and will be until the 21st. I love it here, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. I grew up down in Cupertino, so this is my old stomping grounds. I graduated high school in 1967, the Summer Of the Big Buzz, and flew right into the waiting arms of Augustus Stanley Owsley The Third! My brain cracked like an over excited light bulb, and I almost drowned in the stained glass worlds of extra dimensional holographic lucidities. It was the time of the home coming napalm terrors, with me and my childhood friends running in cosmic circles around and from the police, in all their many forms. Nothing was ever the same after that. I can go back there in a flash just by going to Golden gate Park.

I’m house sitting here for my friends Richard and Helga who are in Europe on Holidays. I have a few gigs around the area, making a little money so I don’t have to eat off of other people’s plates in the cafes. I played in Fairfax and San Anselmo, Santa Cruz and Pescadero. Soon I do a barbecue in Santa Clara and an Irish bar in san Francisco. Then a gig at winery in Murphy, in Sierra foothills. I drive back up north after that, stopping to see my dad in Medford.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet but I need to connect with Michael O Connelly, in Santa Cruz. He’s calling himself Michael O these days and plays with a harmonica player named Virgil Slaughter. (why can’t I have a name like that? What’s with this “Jim Page” nonsense? Why not Homer Destroyer, or William the Decimater?) Anyway, his gigs don’t seem to correspond with my empty spaces. Here’s a little You Tube thing to give you an idea. I go back 42 years with Michael O, and that kind of time doesn’t slide by easily. That carries some weight.

He and I were part of an amazing and magical scene down in Los Gatos in the late 60s. It was me, Michael O Connelly, Chris Ramey, Billy Dean, and Pat Simmons – it was unknown and invisible to anybody who wasn’t in the loop but it made a big impression on me. I left on New Years Day, 1970 – hit the hitch hiker’s road to New York City. The scene went on without me and people went their separate ways. Pat Simmons went on to form the Doobie Brothers. Chris Ramey became the greatest bar singer around, and had the drinking capacity to prove it. Billy Dean died while playing a three day biker party, the way I heard it. And O Connelly moved off into the distance, living in Central America for a while, and later on winding up in Amsterdam with one of life’s habits. Ramey’s dead now too, he passed on about 4 years ago, so there’s not many of us left. Just Pat, Michael and me. Michael was old friends with Robert Hunter, of Grateful Dead fame, and Ramey was one of the original Pranksters, so that’s how that circle goes. Life goes on and there are too many stories to ever all get told. Maybe some of them will leak out from time to time. Maybe I can help in the process.

Anyway, I promised to myself that I would get this blog thing going again. And I promised my writer friend Danny Morrison that I would practice. So here goes.

Nickelsville, the play

2009-01-06T11:58:00.000-08:00

Some friends and I got talking not too long ago and we agreed that it was time to do something. Time to push the arts in a little more constructive direction. So we started a little group called Parsnip – don’t ask and I won’t have to make something up… We started having meetings and decided that our first project will be a play about Nickelsville, the Seattle homeless village named after the mayor, Greg Nickels. It’s pretty exciting. Here’s brief outline that I wrote up. I’ll post more later.

Nickelsville - the play

A concept overview

This is a play about the self-governing homeless village called Nickelsville, a very real community named after the mayor of Seattle, WA, and not unlike the Hoovervilles of the 1930s. It will tell the story of the vision and the building of the village, its struggle to survive, its locations and relocations. Why it is necessary, and why it will not go away until certain societal fundamentals are addressed. The story will be presented on stage by actors and by some of the homeless themselves. The through-line idea is to blur the division between the audience and the story in such a way as to make the reality of Nickelsville undeniable. The audience will feel themselves as residents, or at least see the residents as relatives.

The creation is in the tradition and spirit of Theater Of the Oppressed, theatrical method based on the theories of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and further refined by Augusto Boal, also of Brazil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Oppressed To quote from Wikipedia: “This method uses theater as a means of knowledge and transformation... The public becomes active, so that the ‘spect-actors’ explore, show, analyze and transform the reality in which they are living.” Therefore, the Nickelsville production is envisioned as a vehicle to inspire people to engage in the process of change, to realize that the choice between stagnation and movement is theirs to make. It is not the purpose or the responsibility of the play to make up people’s minds for them, or to direct their thinking – but it is hoped that people will see Nickelsville and the condition of the homeless in Seattle, and in America, in a context that was previously unavailable to them. In other words, it will go behind the two dimensional media bite to reveal the humanity.

The idea of the Nickelsville play has received the enthusiastic support of Tim Harris of Real Change News, Bob Barnes of Seattle Labor Chorus, and the residents of Nickelsville itself.

Concept ideas include giant headlines from Seattle newspapers about Nickelsville projected onto the wall. Participants planted in the audience who will rise from time to time and correct the story on stage. Special name-tagged seating reserved in the front row for Mayor and Mrs Nickels. The residents of Nickelsville include women and teenagers, poor whites, Indians, blacks, and several active members of Veterans For Peace. VFP, Seattle Chapter 92, is the sponsor of the village. In the end it is hoped that this production will serve to open a venue for understanding that didn’t exist before. And that understanding will lead to action.

Snow On My Neck

2008-12-19T10:09:00.001-08:00

We don’t get much snow here but when we do everything shuts down. It happens like this: first we get First Alert Storm Warnings. That puts everybody on edge – there’s a run on batteries, canned goods, fire wood and thermal underwear. People watch and wait. Then the snow begins to fall – gradual, fluffy white pillows floating in the air, easily landing on the cars. Only a little but it's enough. First Alert becomes Extreme Weather Conditions and people start to panic. They hallucinate tundra and polar ice caps. They hear strange sounds and imagine saber tooth tigers on the prowl, long jawed prehistoric hunters waiting to feed. People have to make it home before they freeze to death on those dangerous streets, or they slip on the ice and lie there broken, and the tigers get them. It’s a scary picture no matter how you look at it.

The schools close. Businesses close early or don’t open at all. The buses put on chains. People slide around in their cars and hit telephone poles, garbage cans and each other. Some people think that the best way to handle slippery roads is to accelerate, spin those wheels, hit the gas. Some people stay home and bar their doors so the snow won’t come inside and get them. It’s howling out there, there must be wolves.

Seattle. It’s a funny town. Starbucks lives here. I just read a great book about them called “Starbucked.” I don’t remember the author’s name but it's current, came out in 2008, and it’s a good read. Some magazine – maybe Consumer Reports – apparently said that McDonald’s coffee was better than Starbucks. That was in the book. I hope it’s true. If I were Howard Schultz I would be embarrassed. But I suppose he can afford to take it with a grain of caffeinated salt. The company has a nickname now – Charbucks. Some people say they over roast. Hmm

So here I sit, updating my blog and my MySpace page. I’ve been doing a lot of booking. Things look good. Trouble is, I can’t play the guitar. I have herniated disc in my neck and its pinching the nerve that goes all the way down my right arm. My little finger is half asleep and I can’t grip the flat pick. Sometimes my left arm gets weak too. It’s getting better slowly, but too slowly for me. I have two gigs after Christmas, on the 26th and 27th. If things don’t improve I’ll have to cancel them. I’ve already run out of money. Damn.

Maybe this is god’s retribution for my last posting. I wouldn’t be surprised. If the Bible is any indication that guy’s a real ass hole. But personally I think it goes back to a case of bad whip lash that I had about ten years ago. That accident kept me in bad shape for a month. I kept playing and everything but I basically had to hold my head up with my neck muscles –and that thing’s heavy. So I think that’s where the weakness came from, and then I moved wrong, or something – and here I am, floating in useless abandon.

In all reality though, on a scale from one to ten this is about a three. So I’ll just have to keep calm, do my therapies and wait. The real pisser is that I was planning to serenade the Mayor on Sunday. That’s a day and a half away. It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow, get high winds, and a lot more freezing. And I can’t put a guitar strap around my neck. The mayor may get a reprieve. Oh well. Soon…….

Christmas Time Has Come Again

2008-12-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

Christmas time, that wonderfully contradictory season full of children, shopping, advertising, family gatherings, family dislocations, obligations to love people you barely know, to give gifts to people you can’t stand, to pretend to be pleased, to honor the mythological birth of a mythological man/god – also the season of loneliness and suicide, freezing in homeless camps and doorways, looking in from the outside. Jews and Buddhists don’t care about it, and neither do Hindus, and god has yet to strike them down for doing other things while the holy birthday goes by. Me, my parents were agnostics and I became an atheist, so I view it through an historical and sociological lens. Or at least I try to.

I remember being in grade school and having the teacher ask everyone in the class which church they went to with their families. I was about 8 years old and got real self conscious when it came to my turn. Everybody else was quick to name and locate their worship centers, but I just played dumb – “that new one down the road,” I stammered, unable in the face of peer pressure to tell the truth, that we never had and never would go to church. I used to be reflexively anti religious, taking a high ground of sorts. Now I try to see it as one of those human definition things, one of those things that will fall away in time. I have a hunch that most people who go to church, or synagogues or temples don’t believe in that stuff, or at least have serious doubts. But religion is necessary as a tool to be able to relate to Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen, and to be a good member in the local civic club. It looks good on your resume and can make it hard on you if its not there in the story hey write about you in the paper. You won’t et elected without it. So people pretend.

Atheism is hugely misunderstood, and often intentionally so. I’m not there on Sunday morning to put money in the collection plate and they hold it against me. But it’s really pretty simple. It’s just a statement of disbelief. Some people say it’s a religion itself, but that’s silly. An atheist is simply saying, “there’s no post office over there,” while other people say there is. The only way to know for sure of course is to go over there and take a look. If there is a post office then the atheist is wrong and should admit it, but if there isn’t then the other people should admit their mistake. The trouble with religion and gods, however, is their vague undefinability, their mercurial slipperiness. It’s entirely possible for there to be a miniature blue rhinoceros behind the television set. Unlikely, but possible. The only way to know for sure is to go take a look. Chances are you won’t find one, only some dust and a lost sock. But the believer, the Rhinocerino, will tell you that it moved when you went to look and it’s back now – it hides, it plays games with you, it is only available if you believe. Or it’s not really a blue rhinoceros anyway, that’s just one of its physical references – it’s really all things at all times. And so the story gets watery, all argument fails, logic goes out the window, and we had better change the subject.

(If Jesus was the son of god, and Mary was the mother of god, then Jesus was his own father)

Here’s a good one that I read recently: if god is all powerful, can he make a boulder that’s too heavy for him to lift? If he can’t lift it then he’s not all powerful, and if he can’t make it then he’s not all powerful either. Personally, I don’t think there ever was a miniature blue rhinoceros behind the TV and almost everybody knows it. (And I don’t capitalize the word “god” because there are so many of them. And why would it be necessary for a one true god to command that you have no other gods? And what would he be jealous of? And when he said, “let there be light,” who was he talking to? Etc, etc…)

Back to Jesus’ birthday. Ahem. I was sitting in a café one day about 20 years ago waiting for my lunch and looking at the table top add for Kirin Beer. The add explained that the Kirin was a magical flying lion that appeared to coincide with miracles, such as the birth of Confucius, who was born of a virgin. That’s what it said. I nearly fell out of my chair. Born of a virgin? I thought only Jesus did that. Then I remembered all the Greek gods that I learned about in high school, deities who came down to earth and fornicated with humans, producing dozens of half gods. So it looked like Jesus was just one of a long string of these characters. That makes sense. And a friend of mine once pointed out that Jesus couldn’t have been born in late December because of the new born lambs, but rather the Christians just took the pagan ceremonies of solstice and renamed them, taking credit in the name of their god for the natural turning of the seasons. Well done.

So here we are, the lights are on every where, carolers caroling, department store Santas laughing, storewide sales in full swing, inventories doubled in time for the rush – and a strange population of stern faced believers daring you to laugh. Funny, isn’t it?

I have a modest proposal, and it goes like this. My friend Stan Burris said nothing will ever change about poverty and homelessness until people see the woman with the shopping cart as their mother, until they see the guy in the sleeping bag as themselves. He’s right. Do we need deities and mythological beasts to treat each other as relatives? Do we need the threat of eternal damnation to lift our downtrodden fellows out of their predicaments? Do we really need Jesus to understand that there’s no sense in having government in the first place if it doesn’t see to the needs of all of us, that it’s criminal for the police to roust homeless people from their meager comforts, and that greed is not a commendable value system? Isn’t it obvious?

So this Christmas give the gift that keeps on giving. Let’s put those mythologies away, turn on the lights, stop being afraid of the dark, clean our windows, get new glasses, talk to each other without magical mediators, take charge of our present tense, make demands for the future, and actually recreate the world in the image of our better expectations. We can do it. We have nothing to lose but our demons.

Narrowly missing the end times

2008-11-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

I remember watching Sarah Palin at the during the debates on TV. We had gone to a sports bar because, you know, they have a dozen TVs all with huge screens, and all on all the time. Why they call them sports bars instead of TV bars is beyond me, but anyway…… Sarah looked as dumb as a stump and Joe Biden seemed gracious, like a grandfather humoring one of his granddaughter’s thick headed friends. After it was over I found myself in the men’s room next to a 30 something fellow who was saying to his friend, “She impressed me. She seemed kinda smart.” There was silence, so I said, “She’s a creationist, isn’t she?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s not smart.” “Yes it is.” “No it’s not.” “Yes it is. It’s emotional intelligence,” he said and walked out of the room, thereby having the last word. Emotional Intelligence? That’s a new one on me. Sarah Palin, being a Creationist, doesn’t believe in dinosaurs – she thinks the earth was created whole cloth about 6,000 years ago, including all the fossil evidence. No dinosaurs, no Pleistocene era, no evolution. No DNA evidence. No science. If this is emotional intelligence then she is emotionally stupid.

Damn………….. That was a close one, wasn’t it? We could’ve gone down the Holy Toilet with that one. But we were saved by our evolved frontal lobe! I was on stage when it happened. I had been invited to an election night jam session – a whole bunch of players getting on and off stage while the results were displayed behind us on a big screen hooked up to CNN on the internet. I had just finished my second song – Petroleum Bonaparte – when the crowd began cheering wildly. I thought, Jeeze thanks, I didn’t know you liked me that much – then I realized they were all looking over my shoulder, and I turned around to see “Obama elected president” running across the bottom of the big screen. All I could do was sit and watch. Moved to tears, as I thought of all those generations of Black people neutered and stolen, all those years of Martin Luther King and the anti Klan rallies, the fire hoses and police dogs, the promise but never fulfillment of emancipation. All of it. And now, America has elected its first Black president, and I had lived to see it. At long last, I am no longer ashamed of my passport.

Now we go forward. Maybe now we can find the inspiration and creativity to do the work. And what a blast! Wouldn’t it be great to travel in a touring theater troupe performing for loggers and steel workers? To get to sing to truckers and their friends at the places where they rest between drives? To be encouraged to write and sing of the great human progress we are capable of? But I am ahead of myself……….. Things are to early yet. Too soon to tell. Still, I believe that Americans are a good people, capable of great generosity and laughter, great leaps of invention. I think we can be better than we have been. We have been held hostage by a cabal of nitwits. Finally we can break free. And as we struggle out of our idiot shackles maybe we can realistically discuss what is to be done with the availability of power, how power should not be given to stupid nasty people. Bush used to blow up frogs when he was a kid. No power for him. Palin doesn’t believe in dinosaurs, no power for her. Maybe we can put them all in a nice pastel-colored room with soft walls and regular meals. They can listen to music and watch the Cartoon Channel on television, and no one will contradict them when they say crazy things about Muslim-headed demons coming to blow us all up, or the wonderful golden places that we can go when we surrender ourselves to The One True God. And they will have pillows, great scented pillows – pillows with radios in them, tuned to the subliminal Prozac that exists in-between stations. The static songs of the Bliss Angels, lulling them to an eternal floating dream, almost asleep but awake enough to have deep personal relationships with their hallucinations.

So let’s talk about religion for a minute. I saw Religulous last night, the Bill Maher movie. It was wonderful, I recommend it! Talking snakes and virgin births. Comic book heroes and invisible police departments, really crazy stuff. I was raised agnostic so I was spared a lot of indelible training, the fear implants that make it so hard to see straight. My only criticism of the movie is that he didn’t give credit to religious evolution. Just as the Catholic Workers are the hands-on almost humanist branch of that faith, so there is now the Mormon Workers. And if you check out the Buddhist press you will see the feminist movement asking why there’s so much patriarchy. I guess what I’m saying is that eventually religion will disappear as we are more allowed to present atheism in the public sphere – and intelligent alternative to magical thinking – and as the religionists themselves are allowed to break through the confines and narrowness of their theologies.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m looking forward to getting some work done and making some much needed progress. I’m getting pretty busy on the musical front – booked all the way into the spring. Hoping to go to China in the summer! That would be interesting!! Got to write more songs and play more guitar. The rain helps, and it’s raining now. Good old rain. Everything becomes a mysterious secret when it rains.

Finally the Rain and Billy Hults

2008-10-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like the weather is finally starting to turn here. There’s a coolness, even a bight. And it’s raining, the wonderful clear water that makes this place what it is. It’s about time!

I’ve basically dropped out of the Buskers’ Guild down at the Market. Haven’t been to a meeting in ages and didn’t play the festival. Jim Hinde was the guy who really held that thing together and made the festival work. With Jim Hinde passed away and Niceol Blue living in Ireland things have really taken on a different color. So I just went on to other things. Sometimes I think about it, sometimes I think it would be fun to go down there and play for a while on those old sidewalks. But mostly I don’t.

I’m excited about my UK tour for next February. It’ll be a double bill tour with Scott Law. (http://www.scottlawmusic.com/) Scott and I have known each other for years and have played together quite a lot. He’s one of the best all around musicians I know, and he’s no bullshit when it comes to ego and baggage. There is none. It’ll be great to travel with him. Last week we recorded a couple of songs on his home studio unit so the agent has something to promo with. Scott lives in Portland and I always love going there so it was no trouble to get me down. And I got to see some old friends – Tye North, who I met when he played bass with Leftover Salmon. And his father Roger North, who I have known since the old Holy Model Rounder days when he was their drummer. I remember that he made his own drum kit – they curved out at the bottom, turned toward the audience – the idea being that it help carry the sound to the crowd. Don’t know what happened with the idea, if it ever caught on. These days Roger plays with the wonderful Freak Mountain Ramblers (http://www.freakmountain.com/) – you can catch them in and around Portland if you look. They are well worth your time.

The sad news was that while I was reconnecting with Roger he told me that Billy Hults was sick, cancer. And that there was to be a benefit gig for him the following night at the White Eagle. Again, it was a no-brainer that I would stay an extra day to play a song or two and see Billy. If you don’t know, Billy is a great washboard player, an associate of the Holy Model Rounders, and an all around great guy. He was also instrumental in getting Bud Clark elected mayor of Portland way back in the 80s. Bud is the guy who you can still see “exposing himself to art” in that wonderful museum poster from those days. He was a bar owner and a real populist. The day after he won the election he held a press conference at Baloney Joe’s, a cheap eats café on the east end of the Burnside Bridge that catered to transients. It was a great move on Bud’s part – it brought the whole poverty issue out into the open and made it all right to be poor. How times have changed…

Anyway, as sad as it may turn out to be in the long run – it’s always too early to tell in these things – the benefit was a wonderful event! A great crowd and a great lineup of talent. Freak Mountain, Billy Kennedy, Artis, RB, Baby Gramps, Me, Shoehorn, Lewi Longmire, James Low, Spud Siegel, and others who I missed because I got lost on the way over. It reminded us all of what great, great music we have had all these years in the Northwest. I’m sure hat every region has its gems, but this place is extraordinary.

Here's Billy playing with the Rounders some time in the 70s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqcKfeVWIzs

S0………. Now it’s raining and I have a cold. Ain’t that great? And where is Nickelsville? The great tent city named after Seattle’s mayor – the guy who is definitely not Bud Clark. Where are they headed? We are standing on the edge of the 21st century cliff. Where they go, we go.

More later.

How the War Came Home To St Paul

2008-10-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

this is how the war came home
to St Paul Minnesota
Republican National Convention
two thousand and eight
they built a fence to protect the government
from its own people
they put free speech in a cage
and made it a ward of the state

they put spies and infiltrators
on everybody’s trail
so before it even got started
there were people in jail

this is how the war came home
to America
with vice grips on your eyes and ears
no deviations allowed
they rounded up the journalists
took ‘em all away in plastic hand cuffs
disappeared them in behind
a tear gas cloud

they had everyone afraid of the riot police
and the power they flaunt
they had abuse insurance
they could do whatever they want

this is how the war came home
to the presidential elections
they ran an iron candidate
who would lay down the law
with a fundamentalist ridin shot gun
she believed that this was god’s war
and they ran that ticket
like a shock and awe

they arrested 800 people
and they put them in the jail down town
they said you want to exercise democracy
we’re gonna bring the hammer down

this is how the war came home
this is how the war came home

there was Carlos Arredondo
with his flag draped coffin
and the boots that his dead son used to wear
Cindy Sheehan who camped across from
Bush’s Texas ranch
she spent a month down there
there were thousands who marched against
any kind of war
democracy was dying
and that’s what this was for

inside the convention center
where the spectacle was king
it was immaculate choreography
the next best thing to god
and they cheered and swooned
in a patriot’s euphoria
till someone interrupted
and screamed “this is a fraud”

it was the women of Code Pink
and the veterans of Iraq
and were evicted
but everyone knew they would be back

this is how the war came home
to roost
a new geography
in our landscape divide
this is how the war came home
yes it did
we are all collateral damage now
there is no place to hide

and the Mississippi river flowed
and the flags and the guns were shining bright
the sun went down in my American sky
and we were headed into midnight
and I got myself to thinking
some day its gonna all come clear
it don’t matter so much what they do in there
as it matters what we do out here

Elections Comin Up

2008-10-08T23:01:00.000-07:00

I really want to love my country and I keep thinking that I might be able to some day. If we can just get past this dark ages period that we seem to be stuck in. I mean, here we are, one the world’s most advanced industrialized nations and most of the people actually believe that the planet earth is only 6 thousand years old. People actually believe that some sort of enormous invisible male entity runs everything. I don’t take drugs but I’m beginning to think I should.

Me, I’m one of those annoying non believers. I question things and don’t trust answers that don’t make sense to my own thinking. I’m no fun at prayer meetings. My parents each had a parent of their own, or close relative who was a religious fanatic and they were so turned off by the idea of a meddling deity that they raised their kids – me and my brother – as agnostics. Which was a polite way of saying atheists. And I am forever grateful. I don’t have years of inbred guilt to unravel, or implanted fears about things that go bump I the night. But I am in the minority.

Take the elections for example. It should be a no brainer to vote for Obama, it’s the only thing that makes sense. A victory in that direction might allow me to love my country, and that would be a good thing. But on the other side of the room is an old guy with a big PTSD chip on his shoulder. And that’s bad enough – but his running mate, the would-be future VP Sarah Palin – now there’s a piece of work. Sarah Palin not only believes that the earth is only 6 thousand years old, and that all this trouble started from an encounter with two naked people and a talking snake, but she also believes that god wants America to occupy Iraq and invade anybody else who gets in the way of divine design. Forget about the body counts, this is God’s Will. Damn, Sarah, that’s some deep thinkin’, gosh darn it. If things were right she would never have passed the mental competency test to be allowed to speak before a television audience, let alone run for office. But if course things aren’t right, are they? And by the way, ever notice how so many of these thimble wits don’t seem to ever be able to pronounce the victim country’s name correctly? In my day it was “Veet-Naam” – now it’s “Eye-Rack” and “Eye-Ran.” Ever notice how those same people never say “Eyes-Real?” Funny, isn’t it?

Anyway, we seem to be at this real cartoon crossroads. Reality versus the Stuper Bowl. On the one hand we could have the first Black president in history, a person who inspires positive thinking – or on the other hand we could get some old iron man and just build a whole bunch of camps and seal off the borders and blow everything up. Seems simple to me. (And don’t even mention Ralph Nader. If I hear about him one more time pretending to be the only real truth teller I’m going for my air sick bag. This is way too serious to push your own ego. Whatever real grass roots struggles everybody’s been involved in will still be there and old Ralphie ain’t gonna get elected anyway and everybody knows it so stop bullshitting around and wasting votes) I think the choice is clear. But what do I know…

June

2008-06-08T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am in awe of people like Tim Harris, who updates his blog almost daily. How dose he do it? Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe "he" is actually a committee of writers and idea people who get paid to sit around in a well-stocked office space in the new greatness of downtown Seattle and collectively create the output of "Timothy Harris, editor in chief of Real Change News." That must be how it is. I’m not lazy – "he" just doesn’t exist.

Or does he.... http://apesmaslament.blogspot.com/

I am in Portland right now, at the Pharmacy Coffeehouse – bad music and free wi-fi. Used to be open 24 hours now they close at one am. Fine with me. It’s been raining for days and will probably continue to do so. I love rain so that’s also fine with me. But there’s a lot of homeless people here and they often have a hard time getting in out of the rain. Rain isn’t friendly when it hurts like that. It’s a lonely splash in the face. Car horns laugh at you, sorority girls make you feel unclean, and the flaunting wallets of the parasitic over-class are like criminal fingers at your throat. It’s a mean world out there when you live in the margins.

Still Portland is a good town and I’ve always liked it here. In many ways it seems to be smart where Seattle is just plain stupid. We’re staying at a friend’s house near the city center – a great big place over a hundred years old on a tree lined street. Across the way is an apartment building for low income people. My friend tells me that every neighborhood in Portland has to have a low income housing unit. They also tell me about a group called City Works (or something like that…) which is basically just a bunch of citizens – and they go around putting in benches where they see a need. Benches! And the city is not taking them away. They have been painting intersections. Imagine that, painted intersections and benches. No wonder Utah Phillips played in Portland every year for the Sisters Of the Road benefit concert and not in Seattle.

Check out Sisters Of the Road Café: http://www.sistersoftheroadcafe.org/
And while you’re at it check out Dignity Village: http://www.dignityvillage.org/content/
And then try to imagine Mayor Greg Nickles showing his over-fed face in either one of those places.

Greg Nickles. Sitting out on a West Seattle pier with a fishing pole and getting it all tangled up the blades of Paul Allen’s own private sub marine. Paul Allen.

In the great playbook of my mind I would like to get my hands on Paul Allen. I would physically knot his collar and hand him over to the angry friends of the disappeared. They might take him into some concrete peoples’ courtroom somewhere where justice would be done. That would serve him right. That pathetic over-moneyed creep has no idea what happens on the other end of his self-serving behavior. And that is the classic definition of a sociopath. Or he knows but he doesn’t care, and that’s the classic definition of an asshole. But of course it’s not just Paul doing all this, he can’t get away with it all by himself. No – he’s got thousands of happy drooling Seattlites cheer leading him on. And a clone army of Fortune 500 wannabees carving their own troughs through the human landscape.

I think that in a few years you could fly up and look back at Seattle and you would see the city-built profile of Paul Allen’s face. He is that egotistical, and they love his money that much. What a sight that would be, how embarrassing for the great ancestors of this place. What once gave us the Wobblies and the Great General Strike now gives us high rise condo/bank/shopping combinations and goon squads of SS troopers whose sole mission is to search and destroy the camps of the homeless. What an expensive mess.

So…………. This is now Saturday and tomorrow there is a camp-out in front of City Hall to try yet again to push the issue and draw attention to the crisis in humanity that we call one of America’s Most Livable Cities. All sorts of people will go out there and sleep over night in tents or just on the ground in sleeping bags. There is an assumption that people in Seattle are capable of absorbing what they see. That they can appreciate social contradictions. Personally I have my doubts. A lot of people seem to think with their wallets these days, and their wallets are in their back pockets where they sit on them. You can draw your own conclusion on that.

There is a famous picture from the end of World War II in Germany. The allies have just liberated the camps and have been horrified at what they found. So many bodies. The "Good Germans" in the village claimed to know nothing about it. Of course. The bodies had to be disposed of, so the soldiers gave the villagers shovels and ordered them to get to work. It’s an amazing picture. You can see the looks on the faces of the Good Germans as they work to bury the bodies that they knew nothing about. That is a future that we can avoid if we want to. But we have to want to real hard.

So please………. Stay on top of the situation. Go here: http://www.realchangenews.org/index.html

Don’t wind up in that picture.

Hello Dalai

2008-04-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama

One of the most famous quotes from the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is "I am a simple Buddhist Monk – no more no less." How do you address such an extraordinary disconnect? The Dalai Lama was in adopted into theocratic royalty and raised as such. He had an entire country under his feet and now presides over a "government in exile." He has never had to worry about health care or rent and it is impossible for him to lose his job. He will never wind up in Tent City. He has more privilege than you or I could imagine. What’s wrong with this picture?

Many of my otherwise intelligent friends have been dazzled by the glamour of this whole thing. I wound up in an argument and was challenged to write an "Open Letter To The Dalai Lama." So here it is.

Dear Tenzin Gyatso,

There are some serious allegations that you need to address. Since you are coming to my town soon and will no doubt stay in the best accommodations and will be hosted by all of the highest dignitaries, given a key to the city, featured on the front pages of the papers, featured on all TV news programs, and so on, I think you owe it to us to be clear on these things.

1. Old Tibet was a feudal theocracy under the tight control of you and your monks. Your former privilege is legendary. Is this what you would like to see reinstated?

2. In the old country punishments for legal infractions included the gouging out of eyes and the severing of limbs. How do you see this form of justice operating in today’s world?

3. The monks routinely took nine year old boys into the monasteries for ritual sex and other exploitations. We call this child abuse. What do you call it?

4. Ritual drums were made of human skulls. Do they sound better than wooden or clay drums?

5. When the old order was overthrown people found the remains of children who had been buried alive in the foundations of the monasteries. That’s why they blown up. Was this over reacting?

6. What is the difference between you and other deposed monarchs?

7. Do you still get money from the CIA?

There’s more but this will do for a start. To my knowledge you have never addressed any of this in public and I can’t for the life of me understand why so many people think you’re so wonderful. Perhaps you will enlighten me.

Seven questions, we will wait for seven answers.

WTO Anniversary

2007-12-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

We had our little WTO celebration last weekend and I have a confession to make. I’m tired of overstuffed white people with college degrees sitting on stage interpreting my experiences for me. Especially overstuffed white people with college degrees and books to sell. I don’t want to mention any names but David Korten was there as a keynote speaker, along with Garry Owens, one of the early members of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. Owens was great, he was grounded and engaged and spoke from hands-on experience. I still maintain that the Black Panther Party was one of the most constructive political formations of 20th century America. Good choice for a speaker, Owens never talked down to us or made any sweeping predictions for the future of humanity. In fact, he was quite humble, deferring to the younger generations.

Korten on the other hand… Maybe it’s just me, but this extra intellectual interpretive nonsense gives me indigestion, especially when they’re wrong. I was there. For me the event taught us two major lessons: first, that when organized and committed, people can accomplish almost anything. With a little luck thrown in of course. Second, that the martial forces of the State don’t play games, they are dead serious about keeping things the way they are and will not let a few broken bones and blood puddles get in the way. Added to that, of course, should be the message that if we are ever to be taken seriously by world history, and if we ever seriously expect to achieve anything concrete, then we need to be prepared to respond. Like they say, "be as non-violent as possible." But Korten’s take was all roses and Ghandi, which is fine I suppose… But then he started talking about the World Bank demos in DC that happened a few months later and he said something that completely mystified me – he said that the police basically helped the demonstrators by blocking off all the streets. I know he was being funny in some ways but jeeze…….. I was there and I know that the Washington DC cops arrested over 600 people before the demos even started. They drove around town with photos taken in Seattle and arrested anybody whose picture matched. Cooperation? Also, the talks weren’t shut down. Lots of cops, lots of jails, lots of repression, little success. Korten said nothing about this. To listen to him it would seem that things had gone on in a continuous forward motion until "We the People" took over the world and ran the bastards out. I don’t think it happened like that.

My favorite DC memory is from the last day when we were all marching in a spontaneous formation and found ourselves corralled by the cops into a canyon of buildings. No way out in any direction. And suddenly a whole lot of people who had been janitors and bus drivers and off duty office workers only seconds before were talking fistfuls of plastic handcuffs out of their pockets and heading into the crowd. I managed to slip out between two distracted motorcycle cops.

So who is this guy? A self-described "author, lecturer, engaged citizen," he’s a Stanford educated Air Force vet with an interest in business. A "green capitalist," I would call him. Sound muddy? It is.

This is from "Civilizing Societies" – "Then, a mere 2.6 million years ago, quite near the end of our 15 billion year story, there came the most extraordinary achievement of all, the creation of a being with capacities far beyond those of any creature that had come before it to reflect on its own consciousness, to experience with awe the beauty and mystery of creation, to articulate, communicate and share learning, to reshape the material world to its own ends, and to anticipate and intentionally choose its own future. It was the living spirit's most daring experiment -- and a stunning cooperative achievement."

Okay, let’s check out a few phrases here. Let’s start with "the creation of a being." Not the evolution, but the creation. Which mean that there’s a creator somewhere. "…the living spirit's most daring experiment…" Huh? "…a stunning cooperative achievement." Now I’m lost. Those of us with a non-creationist worldview will have trouble with some of this.

He has a number of "affiliations" on his web site. Most of us call them links. Anyway, one of them is something called "The Club Of Rome." Described as a "global think tank" its own web site proclaims "The Club of Rome’s mission is to act as a global catalyst of change that is free of any political, ideological or business interest." That, as we know, is complete nonsense. You can no more struggle apolitically in the political world than you can swim in the water without getting wet. In my experience when people talk like they that they are usually trying to convince me of their radical credentials while trying to keep the status quo in place. It’s a conservative stance. But I could be wrong. It’s happened before…

Anyway, it was a great gathering once things broke up for a general milling and workshops. The guy from the Backbone Campaign was there – a wonderful idea to give a stylized backbone award to any politician who displays, well, backbone. When he wasn’t leading a workshop on the possible methods of holding the government accountable he was serving beers from a micro keg. An open stage was supposed to be happening in a while but I had things to do and had to leave.

I am proud to be from Seattle where the streets rose up in defiance on that great day. I am proud to be allied with a history that includes the general strike of 1919. I believe in these streets and in that history. And I think that the historical knowledge of the people who have the experience of struggle will out play the book sales every time.

WTO Anniversary and The Movie

2007-11-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

November 30th is the 8th anniversary of the great 1999 WTO Seattle uprising. The date will be observed collectively here through activist gatherings and forums, and singularly through the memories of the thousands of innocent bystanders who were bothered by the events of that week. A lot of people just had their holiday shopping interrupted, no big deal. Others had their work days truncated when they couldn’t get downtown or back home. And still others were personally assaulted Kristallnacht-style when Seattle’s Finest shot gas canisters into beauty parlors on Capitol Hill, and randomly arrested people waiting at bus stops. I personally watched an 80 year old woman get jabbed in the shoulder by a huge automaton with no badge number. Dangerous times.

The thing to remember is that this goes back to the Ollie North trials of 1980-something. You remember Oliver North, right? He was the Great Patriot who channeled funds from the sale of cocaine to pay for munitions to arm the Contras in Central America. Lots of misery everywhere – now he’s a “best selling author.” Ain’t it great? They don’t call it the “Criminal Justice System” for nothing… Anyway, one day during the trial it accidentally came out that Ollie and his friends had a contingency plan drawn up and ready just in case things got rough on a national scale. The plan called for a) the declaration of a state of emergency and suspension of the constitution, b) the rounding up of political dissidents, c) placing those dissidents in disused military bases, d) doing all of this under the umbrella of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The folks who gave us New Orleans… Anyway, this was revealed and then quickly shoved under the carpet, to be dealt with later, in committee…

Well, all those years later the WTO thing happened and guess what? Clinton was coming to town so the Mayor decided to get tough. He a) declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution – its was now illegal to wear an anti WTO button or to publicly present any counter-political position in downtown Seattle, b) arrested over 600 dissidents, c) put them in the Sand Point Naval Air Station, a disused military base, which was also a d) FEMA base. Creepy…

So now Hollywood has decided to make a movie about all this. The filming has all been done and it’s now in post production. There’s some big names in it, but I’m not a movie guy so I don’t know who they are. I myself however have a bit part, probably, maybe. See, they put the call out for extras for a particular scene – the one where the activist crowd is marching from the labor rally and some of them split off to go join the blockaders in the intersections. “Official Labor” didn’t want anybody to split ranks and make them look bad. Its that same old story. Anyway, the movie people did a deal that if you came down as an extra – they wanted real activists who had been there – and you signed a release form, then your pay would go to Pepper Spray Productions (http://peppersp.server312.com/), a very cool Seattle-based activist film group. Extras don’t get much, only a hundred dollars or so, but it was a great way to raise money for good work. So there I was, with my guitar over my shoulder in a soft case, marching through the rain with the labor people and then breaking off with a bunch of others to go into the fray. I don’t know if it made it past the cutting room floor but if it did this will be my first Hollywood film! Maybe I’ll get an Oscar for “Best Supporting Extra With A Guitar Case In A Crowd Scene.”

In the meantime, while we wait for reality to reveal itself from these murky doings, I thought I would post this little piece that I wrote a couple of months after the Great Events of 1999.

----------------------

If I had a hammer
I’d hammer in the mornin’
I’d hammer in the evenin’
all over this town

November 30th, gray cloud morning in the city, business almost as usual. Almost.

There used to be low income housing there, where the Convention Center is now. Rooms and hallways full of life. Then the bill of sale and the eviction notices. The wrecking ball and the construction companies. And there it is, all shiny and new, a place for The Wallet to do business in. I remember when they wanted to expand it later and that meant another demolition, and Operation Homestead jumped in to make a scene and try to save it. A bunch of people broke in with crowbars and the cops had to drag them out to arrest them. It hit all the TV, and people were temporarily aware of their problems. Then baseball took over and life went on. The Wallet was back in control.

Now here it is not so many years later and more buildings have been torn down, and it seems like there’s no place to go anymore without money. They even made a law so you can’t sit down if you need to. Took the benches away at the bus stops. They don’t want anybody just being there without contributing to the economy. It’s the Big Business, Box Office, CEO Capital Of the Western World. And now the World Trade Organization comes to town. Perfect timing.

The Wallet is in a hurry these days. It’s expanding real fast, doing deals all over the world, sending in the troops when things don’t go right. Usually of course it’s in somebody else’s country, someplace where they just don’t get it and they think they can look a gift horse in the mouth. Usually these people are darker than the average of the Proper Wallet Followers, or they at least speak another language. Almost always they just don’t seem to have a proper appreciation of the good that The Wallet can do them. Foreigners, fucking foreigners. So who would’ve thought...

Who would’ve thought that a bunch of averages, children of suburbia, could cause so much trouble. It’s probably a lack of discipline, said the radio therapists, too much freedom. They’re just whiners, said the talk show jocks, give ‘em a haircut and put ‘em to work, that’ll straighten ‘em out. But there they were, all locked down in these incredibly dangerous positions right in the middle of the intersections and holding their physical bodies in the way of Commerce. There were a lot of them and they were real organized too. The Wallet had to wince at that one.

If I had a gas mask
I’d wear it in the mornin’
I’d wear it in the evenin’
all over this town

Johnny Law was there with all of his clone-like relatives. There must’ve been a thousand of them. City, county, state, federal. FBI, CIA, Secret Service. Even the elite Delta Force who specialize in storming airports and neutralizing Jihad fundamentalists. Most of them you could spot right away, all dressed up like sci-fi-spectaculars with shiny alien heads and dangerous looking weapons. But some were invisible and only showed up when they popped out of the crowd to pick off some passerby. Otherwise normal looking hangers around with radios in their ears. The whole world had an attitude that day.

That was the day, November 30th, that the clouds came down to attack, storming through the streets like a blitzkrieg. Not the friendly water clouds that usually live in these parts, but the angry chemical clouds of armored discipline. Mountains of tear gas, great cumulous eruptions of laboratory vapor that burned your lungs and made your eyes go blind. And the rage, the mechanical madness, like the indiscriminate lunging of pathological guard dogs.

Madelein Albright was fuming, locked helplessly in her hotel room, held hostage by a city full of ruffians. She could bomb the shit out of Eastern Europe, no problem, but she couldn’t get out the door in Seattle. Big Bill was coming to town that night, under cover of darkness, and this nonsense would have to stop. She was beginning to think of herself as Atilla The Madelein. She made a few phone calls and screamed at a few lap dogs and arrangements were made for all hell to break loose. And it did.

And so it was that in the echoing canyons of these Starbucks streets an incredible Fourth Of July reality battered around between the buildings. Concussion grenades rattled the fragile valuables while hundreds of people ran for their lives. Plastic pellets and rubber bullets bounced off of Christmas lights, the big friendly bear at the FAO Schwarz got one right in the nose. The ATMs shuddered and the lattès hid and everything was just a little too loud. A Tear gas canister fired from one those hand held cannons that the cops used ricocheted off the sidewalk and broke the window at the Sea First Bank. Oopse. A curfew was imposed and all downtown was declared a free fire zone. Possession of a gas mask, a sign, a thought in your head or a word in your mouth was reason enough, and six hundred people were arrested and taken away to the FEMA Base at the Sand Point Naval Air Station. Order was being restored.

And somehow in the middle of all of this they said it was all because of those Anarchists From Eugene (AFE). With a totally straight face, they said that if it wasn’t for them none of this would have happened. That the police showed great restraint and that all anyone really wanted was to just get along. On the TV news Jean Ennerson, that great over-decorated anchor-thing, assured us that the city was our friend. Something had gone wrong but it would be fixed. In the meantime we should stay indoors.

Next day, all day, the battle went on. It’s a wonder nobody was killed, but plenty were wounded and damaged. There were rumors that the cops used nerve gas. You heard stories of beatings in jail. And the second night was the bad one on Capital Hill, when they rampaged through the neighborhoods gassing people and assaulting them as they came out of the restaurants. Then somebody gave the order somewhere and things backed off when the third day came. There was going to be a lot of explaining to do.

Next week the police chief resigned, saying he was going to anyway, and everybody started shuffling things around. The mayor said he would get to the bottom of it. They appointed an ex-banking executive to head the investigation. They said it could take months.

Toogood in Seattle

2007-11-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

It’s starting to get cold around here, in good old Seattle. The rain’s been holding off, which the meteorological conspiricists will say must lead to a long and dangerous winter. Maybe so, who am I to say? I know some people who want to reintroduce the Woolly Mammoth to North America. They say that will help sort things out. They’re probably right.

There are a few names that need to be mentioned after that last tour in Ireland. Most notably, of course, is Niceol Blue - http://www.myspace.com/niceolblue She was a Seattle busker for several years and two time chair of our Pike Market Performers’ Guild. Niceol now lives in Ireland with her girlfriend Orla McGovern. I always think that people with last names like McGovern should go into high level politics, but Orla is an actor. (I say “actor” and not “actress” because the first word has no gender assigned to it while the second one can only be female) Music and acting, a good combination I say. They moved over sometime in late August. Now they are looking to buy a house – hopefully in or near Galway. The four of us – me, Katy, Orla, and Niceol – tripped around a bit and did a few gigs. Niceol is really good, so watch for her. And Orla knows my old buddy Jack Lynch, another actor. Small world.

Another name is Jimmy Cullen, a fine singer and song writer form Gory. Jimmy booked me into the wine bar in his town and then traveled to play at a couple of other gigs as well. He’s got a great song called “The Realistic Love Song” in which he sings that he won’t climb high mountains or swim the ocean for his love but he will promise to lift the toilet seat. Check him out: http://www.myspace.com/jimicullen

And there was another Jimmy at the Stables in Mullingar. Jimmy Broder. He was great! But he has no web site at all so you’ll have to go there to see him. It’s worth it.

All in all the gigs were good and the weather certainly held out for them. I think it only rained once. But I was pretty fried by the time it was over – all that driving and paying attention. I don’t have to pay attention when I play – that’s the easy part. It’s the getting there and keeping everything straight. The flight back home was interesting – we got bumped in Philly in exchange for a night’s lodging, free meals and a round trip anywhere the airline flies. Good deal if you ask me.

By the way, I just discovered that one of my favorite local writers has a blog where he archives all his stuff. This is good news. His name is Wes Browning and usually I have to read him in Real Change, where he has a regular column. And if I miss an issue I’m screwed. But now I can read everything. Check him out: http://www.drwesb.blogspot.com/

So that’s all for now – I have to get back to playing the Toogood guitar. I think I’m possessed…

Dublin and a New Guitar

2007-10-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

I really have to keep this up better. More than a month has gone by since I last posted and I believe I was saying the same thing back then: “I gotta get better at this...” Oh well, if you don’t mind neither do I.

Early October finds me in Dublin, Ireland – bright sunny skies and a chill in the breeze. What a wonderful city! Oh, its only a ghost of its former self in a some ways – those great underwater days and nights of nonstop music, endless banter, volumes of rain, clouds of whatever, taxis and buses, dark allies and bright lighted hallways. It was a time to remember and some of us did. But those days have gone now, replaced by a higher standard of living and an opulence that sometimes looks like home and sometimes juts looks like better health care. People need health care so this is good. And Ireland now gets to be on the world stage as an equal, not just a dumping ground for leftover industrial waste. Good.

Anyway...... I have a new guitar – a Triple 0 size, rose wood backs and sides, mahogany neck, and spruce top. Made by the great English luthier Chris Toogood. I think I wrote about him before – but just to cap it off, Chris contacted me last year sometime to offer to build me a guitar san a endorsement. I, of course, was hesitant (“what if I don’t like it?”) and put it off for a bit. But we met up in England last January and he showed me one that he had built for himself . I was beautiful. But in some ways more importantly, we hit it off personally, we became friends. So, I agreed and I sent him some ideas and requirements. Well, just last week I flew over with Katy (the better half of my brain...) to play at Chris’ wedding and to be presented with the guitar. His bride to be – now his wife – is named Chriss (two S’s) so that made things all the more interesting and natural. The wedding was sweet and informal. The guitar... How do I say? It is extraordinary. It’s probably the loudest acoustic I have ever played – and it’s a smaller body than I’m used to. It has great sustain and an enormous amount of punch. Although being basically unadorned it is beautiful – great rounded lines with an extra large sound hole. In short, I am thrilled. I was so confident on the way over that I didn’t bring my work guitar and I’m glad I didn’t. It will now be my privilege to be getting used to it. Check out his web site for more info and for some photos: MySpace.com Toogoodguitars

We went out to see Andy Irvine last night at Whelan’s. In case you don’t know Andy was a founding member of Planxty and has continued to be a great and solid force in the folk scene over here – and around the world. The show he did was a benefit for the Irish Huntington’s Disease Society, and Woody Guthrie tribute. Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of his death from Huntington’s Disease. It was wonderful – a very moving night. Andy was on stage for more than two hours and most of that time was spent telling stories of Woody’s life. Andy used no notes, except for some lyric sheets to refer to – he freely admitted that most of the Guthrie songs had passed out of his repertoire years ago. The stories were told in a conversational style and after a while gathered a weight that was awesome. And the songs were played with grace and beauty. It was a great night. Thanks Andy.

I’ll sign off for now. Gotta get up early to start the tour. See ya soon...

Late August

2007-08-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

August is winding down, September is looming. Summer seems so short sometimes. I guess that’s what happens when you get busy…

My last UK visit was wonderful! No pie, mash and liquor this time, no jellied eels, no haggis for that matter! But it was a whirl wind trip with all the highlights in the right places. First, of course, there was the weather… I’m getting a reputation for this sort of thing: Jim Page arrives and the weather goes haywire. It went like this: my plane was cancelled out of Washington DC so I got to spend about 11 hours in that lovely airport, walking around, reading newspapers, staring into space, and napping on the comfortable airport seats. So instead of arriving in London in the evening I got there the next morning. That’s okay, its easier to get around in the daylight. I was going to stay with a new friend – the wonderful singer and song writer Alastair Artingstall. He had given me directions via the subway and I was half way there when my connection at Kings Cross was cancelled due to flooding. I had not been outside since I landed so I had no idea what the sky looked like. I was real tired and real jet lagged but, okay, I would have to change my train plans. No problem. I was passing through a hallway when the water burst in through the lower levels on both walls, spewing like a fountain in front of me. A lady slipped and fell and the cops came running. “This station is closed – everybody out!” The only way out was through the fountaining water so I rolled my suitcase and guitar through the water and up the stairs and on to the next line. I arrived in Alastair’s part of town about an hour later than I would have but at least I was there. The sun was out and the birds were chirping. It was a beautiful day! Everything had happened while I was underground. London had gotten roughly two months worth of rain in a few hours. Half the country was flooded.

Alastair met me at his flat. He is one of that rare breed of human who trusts and opens to other fellow travelers. A long time musician, sound engineer and tour manager, Alastair is used to the road and knows exactly what its like to be jet lagged and in need of a bed. No need to explain, no need to be social. There’s your room, see you tomorrow. Over the course of my stay I got to know him fairly well and I have the utmost respect for his talents and personality. Thank you Alastair for being who you are. I went to sleep and stayed that way for 16 hours…

Next morning was the rental car and the manic drive to Trowbridge. I was doing 90 at times, passing everything that was passable. I had bought a cell phone earlier on the way to the car place and was able to call ahead so that they wouldn’t worry. I was due on at 2:45 but they wanted me there at 1. I arrived at 2:15 – plenty of time for me as I don’t really warm up. So there I was on stage in the big tent with a severe time lag and a total absence of any sort of self consciousness. All of which made for a good performance. My buddies the Be Good Tanyas were due to play that evening so I hung around. They’re wonderful singers and I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance.

Next day I was on stage again with Roy Bailey. We sat down and traded songs. What a treat that was! Roy is a wonderful singer and song collector, one of the real ones. Again, I can’t recommend him highly enough. I got to know him through a series of circumstances where he began singing a couple of my songs. So when I was over last January we met up and have become friends. What a singer! He sent me a recording of “Collateral Damage” that he did – himself and Martin Simpson on second guitar. It made me cry it was so good. I almost had to stop singing it myself. Then of course I came back to my senses… After our stage gig I hung around and played in the Trowbridge mud for the rest of the day (remember the downpour) and finally got back to the hotel where there was a disco going on right under my room. Lucky me.

Next day was a slam drive to Liverpool. Liverpool! One of the world’s greatest cities! Home of the Beatles, of course, and I had my picture taken next to the John Lennon statue. We would have been friends, John and I, if circumstances had allowed. I could have saved him some time in his quest for anonymity but alas it was not to be. Anyway, the gig was on the third floor of an art gallery and what a wonderful gig it was! Bruce Scott, a very fine Irish a cappella singer and song writer did an opening set. Masterful work.

Next day I was on the road early for a punishing drive all the way down to Eastbourne, south of London. It’s a really beautiful town, the kind you want to stay in. The gig was in a theater and it was nearly a packed house. Wonderful evening, thank you Eastbourne!

Then back to London to the Green Note. This is a real small venue but one that everybody likes to play. It’s just a real sweet space. A little vegetarian restaurant and bar with a music stage. Alastair came down for that one. Also my agent Mike Cole, a man of many hats. Pie, mash and liquor…

Next day was hang around London day. And later on I got together with my old buddy Kevin Wyatt-Lown, his wife Maggie and their daughter Charlotte. Kevin and I have been talking about doing some business together. There are some knots to work out on my end. I hope it happens to everybody’s satisfaction. Patience.

My flight out was at 6:45 the next morning and the only way to do that was to get to Heathrow the night before and spend the night, which I did. Little did I know that that particular part of the airport has no benches and no seats without arms, which means that there is no way to sleep except sitting up and crinking your neck or laying on the floor. I laid on the floor for a couple of hours. I love floors! The flight took me to Copenhagen and then to Seattle. The layover in Copenhagen was 6 hours. The Danes are more attuned to relaxation and so I was able to find a recliner chair and get a few hours of sleep. By the time I got to Seattle I was as close to comatose as I’ve been since the last time.

Now I’m gearing up for the next time. More soon…

DR Griffin, et al

2007-07-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

For the last few days I have been in a running email conversation with a fellow named Richard Curtis. Richard is the guy with the enormously broad shoulders who I mentioned in my previous post about Griffin and the 9-11 stuff. Richard said that someone had turned him on to my reference to him here and he thought to write me because, obviously, I just didn’t understand all the arguments. I wrote back that I had been paying attention to all this stuff from day one and why do you guys always assume that if someone doesn’t agree they just don’t have all the facts? We went back and forth for several days, me saying that the Griffin meeting at Town Hall was like going to a Scientology church, him calling me an asshole, me saying that I would not have a theologian do my thinking for me, him calling me an asshole and a jerk, me saying that he was the first to use such language, and so on. Richard Curtis is apparently a heavy weight in the local 9-11 Truth movement. In an op-ed that he wrote for the Seattle Post Intelligencer he is listed as “an adjunct professor of philosophy at Seattle University and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.” So I went to check out “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” and there was quite a list of them. 140 of them, I think. I began to read their credentials. I have to admit that I stopped after a while – there were 20 who were directly involved in theology and religion and about 7 who were not. This disturbs me. With all due respect, and with no insult intended, religion and theology are based on belief, and belief should have no part in something like this. If a person believes that 9-11 was an inside job then they can certainly build a case to prove it. Or at least to prove to the satisfaction of someone else who has already made up their mind. It should be noted that Seattle University is a religious school.

So why do these people always assume that disagreement can only be due to insufficient evidence? And why is it not alarming – or at least paralytically funny – that David Ray Griffin was giving a sermon the day after his lecture at Town Hall? I think its funny. By the way, one of Griffin's big blows that night was the part where the passenger on the doomed airplane called his mother and identified himself as “Mark Bingham.” The point, of course, was that if this had been the real Mark Bingahm he would never have said it like that. He would have just said < "Mom, this is Mark." Everybody applauded. Score for Griffin! But I found this recently from an online blog:

- Obviously DRG didn't take the time to research Mark's mom, Alice Hoagland, and her explanation on the Discovery Channel documentary "The Flight That Fought Back" or try to interview her himself. DRG and the 911 "researchers" never want to dig any further, because it might spoil their wild inferences and implications. ... This is the explanation the mom gave on "The Flight That Fought Back": "Mark's Mom: Once in a while he would say that. He would call up, and he was, he was a young businessman, and used to, used to introduce himself on the phone as Mark Bingham, and he was trying to be, uh, strong, and level-headed, and, and strictly business. "Mom, this is Mark Bingham".
texasjack 06.02.07 - 10:15 pm

No great shakes, but jeeze, Griffin could have at least looked into interviews that the guy’s mother made. The thing about theology is that once the error is revealed it still doesn’t matter. It's like Galileo and the Center Of the Universe. The church just reinterprets itself. Readily available photographs of airplane wreckage at the Pentagon don’t matter. Eyewitnesses don’t matter. It’s the belief that counts. If it was a missile that hit the Pentagon instead of an airplane then where the heck are all those passengers? Out in Area 51 somewhere? This is downright silly.

Anyway, not to beat a dead horse but this is my last email to Richard Curtis. It explains my position on the whole thing. His response to it was that this was the sort of letter he was expecting from me the first time – reasoned, calm, etc. I don’t even know this guy and he’s correcting my writing style and giving me grades. I’m sure he’s a nice fellow…

......

Richard,

Manachem Begin had a tactic that he used called Provoke and Respond. Its typical playground bully stuff. I bother you long enough until you punch me and then I can really beat the crap out of you and take everything you've got and call it self defense. Israel has been doing that to the Palestinians for years. The cops do it to the Blacks in the inner city, red necks do it to Indians, it's the bully. There is a law at the foundation of our country that said if a land was maintained by the people living on it then it was there's - unless they attacked, in which case the land could be taken. So we always made sure that we were attacked. Its useful to be the victim. Bush knows this, as does Cheney and all the rest. To assume that because these people went into high gear immediately after the 9-11 attacks is proof that they orchestrated these attacks themselves is not very smart. It ignores an entire field of activity which is at the core of our country's behavior. Provoke and respond. They didn't have to do it themselves. All they had to do was keep pushing until somebody pushed back. They had their intelligence people watching Bin Laden and all the others and they knew something was coming. It was in their best interest to allow it so they never really worked much to head it off. And when it did come all those plans that had been fine tuned over the years were set in place.

To assume and insist that the attacks were an inside job is one of the worst kinds of distraction. It keeps everybody from looking at what the US is actually doing by bothering all these people and stirring up all these conflicts. It gets us off the hook. And it insults the intelligence of the victims who retaliate - who methodically over a period of years lay their plans, gather their tools, and go to work when we are looking the other way. The best way for me to attack you by surprise is for me to convince you that I am stupid, too stupid to be dangerous. As long as you feel superior I have the advantage.

The US as it exists today is a sociopath with a loaded gun. We have to take the gun out of its hands and get it into therapy. We have no right to tell its victims how to respond, nor to demand that they all be the romantically beautiful victims that we would like them to be. Some of them are religious fanatics with visions of theocratic grandeur. But this has been coming for a long time. Have you read Ward Churchill's piece? He was right on the money. And like I said, that's the thing that needs to be said. Nobody cares if you stand out on the street and scream that 9-11 was an inside job. Nothing will happen. The cops won't come and nobody will get mad. But if you start to explain and to say in clear and concise language that the events of that day were in fact the logical and inevitable response to years of official bullying you will get beat up, harassed, lose your job, and so on. Because that's the thing that can't be said but must be said. That is the elephant in the living room.

Cheney is just a bit player in history. Bush is just the weak son of a dysfunctional father. At our time in history the world has come in anonymous disguise to slap us in the face and its about time. My first thought when I saw those towers burning on TV was "What took you so long?" And that's the real thing.

So you can keep doing what you're doing, I don't care. I think Griffin is a fraud and I think most of the people who go to these events are deluded. And I think that the longer we spend spinning our wheels in the safe but romantic confines of these Hollywood-like convolutions the longer we will put off doing what needs to be done. You are doing exactly what they want you to do - paying attention to something that doesn't matter and wasting energy on buffoonery.

So I'm done. It's been an interesting exchange. See ya later,

Jim Page

Harmony Festival

2007-06-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

San Francisco, city of fog and overlooks. The Embarcadero. Coyt Tower. The 60s. All I have to do is go to Golden Gate Park and look at the cypress and eucalyptus tress and I can get an acid flash back. Those were the days…

I have a few days off before I get going again. Actually, I had a few days off. I’m heading out tomorrow for Ukiah and the famous Raven John’s Ukiah House Concert. Last time I was there I found a dying black widow spider on the front porch. Dying of natural causes probably. I had forgotten how beautiful they are. And sinister too, I suppose, considering their toxicity. Which, by the way, is one of the best arguments against Intelligent Design. The strength of the neurotoxins that a black widow spider has in its body is completely beyond anything it would ever need. God is an over builder I suppose…

Anyway, last weekend was the Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa. And I have to give grateful thanks to Kym Trippsmith for hounding those folks for the last couple of years to finally get me on the bill. It’s a pretty cool event but suffers from what one regular described as an “identity crisis.” Is it a music festival? A new age technology convention? A healing arts gathering? Well, I guess it was all three. And that’s fine. My only complaint was that it seemed to be trying to put as much as possible into as limited a space as they could. Way too much going on too close together. It went like this…

I had a great set on Saturday morning on the main stage. Great gear, good engineers, everything perfect. Doug Green, from up in Humboldt, was the emcee. I had 45 minutes and it was all filmed by 5-camera shoot. Real high-end stuff. Then we just wandered around for a while, trying to stay out of the sun and drinking a lot of water. Checking out the booths. One of them was selling kitchen gear that’s made from recycled chopsticks. Very cool. Anyway, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! was scheduled to do a short thing on the main stage and then an extended talk in one of the buildings. We’ve known each other for a number of years and I always like seeing her. She’s one of my heroes. So I stood by the stage ramp and caught her eye when she was done. Only time for a quick hello – she was being whisked off to the hall for her longer talk. I headed that was too.

Amy can always bring things down to the ground. And that’s a great talent. Without criticizing anybody’s communal behavior she can lead the discussion to the more serious issues of the day and lead us all to understanding that there are social powers that we have access to. And that’s what she did, to a standing ovation. Then people lined up to get their books signed – part of her visit was a book tour. I figured the only way I’d get to say hello would be to get in line so that’s what I did. Twice I was asked by “handlers” if I had a book to sign and I said no. Finally I got up there and we had a little chat. She asked if I was singing so she could see me and I said yes, at 7:45 in the Earthdance Dome. She said she would try to make it. And she did.

Now, the Earthdance Dome is geodesic construction that serves as a perfect sound funnel to capture all of the extraneous outside noises – including the massive bleed form the main stage – and focus it directly onto the performance spot. It was an accidental masterpiece. I know it wasn’t done on purpose. But if you wanted to it would have taken ages of experimental designs and configurations to come up with such a perfect sound lens. So there I am, trying to keep on track with whatever song I’m singing in spite of the overwhelming drum beats and bass throbs that wallow around me. And in comes Amy Goodman. Of course, when you sit in the audience its not that bad – because this was a sound focus, a lens that channeled it all to the performer spot, leaving the audience fairly well out of the loop. It was a form of torture, so to speak. She stayed for a while and then had to go and I carried on and nobody noticed much except that I screwed up a couple of verses. Wouldn’t you?

The next day, Sunday, I played at the Dome again. This time I figured I’d make some changes. I sat down. I had the monitors arranged so that they came at me from an angle. I had them turned up read loud. I hyper focused. This time everything went fine – no screw-ups, I kept all the songs on course. But I got a headache because of the monitor volume and – because nobody could really hear what was going on from outside the dome, it all being saturated in cacophonic ambiance, hardly anybody came in. Oh well. Joanne Rand was there – great to see her. Julia Butterfly showed up outside but didn’t come in.

So we wandered off into the falling dusk and spent the rest of the evening randomly sampling. You might want to check it out next year. They had some pretty good acts. Taj Mahal was there. Amy Goodman. Rickie Lee Jones. Brian (!) Wilson. And, of course, all the healing techno alternatives. Thanks Harmony, thanks Kym. Maybe see you next year….

David Ray Griffin and the Politics Of Mental Instability

2007-05-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine had a couple of extra tickets to see David Ray Griffin at Town Hall last Friday and he asked if I wanted to go. Sure, I said, why not. I’d love to see what all this is about. And that’s the story of this post.

In case you don’t know, Griffin is the author of a bunch of books, a couple of which are about 9-11. His theory is that 9-11 was an “inside job” and he is a leading light among what’s known as “conspiracy theorists.” My friend and I have and ongoing argument about this. He insists that certain factions of the government planned the whole thing and I insist that no, we were attacked, though we did have it coming. At times our argument has become heated and I have told him to stop sending me things about it in emails and so on. We remain friends – I give guitar lessons to his sons, and he is one of the best and most constant activists I know in the Seattle area. He is a Catholic Worker, and those folks are the real thing – you won’t find any more dedicated and hard working bunch. But there is a bit of “Catholic Supremacy” that runs through his thinking sometimes. The first thing he will point out about certain people is that they are Catholic – and he will overlook a lot of baggage if the faith is involved. So when he had first told me about Griffin a couple of years ago he was quick to point out that he is a Catholic theologian, a recommendation that doesn’t really do much for me. Griffin’s book had received mixed reviews, achieving a kind of cult following in certain circles and being laughed at in others. I sent my friend a few critical articles from the web, to which he never responded. There’s that blind eye again. So I let it drop. But here was a free ticket. I couldn’t turn it down…

We met at a downtown restaurant – he and I, plus a priest and mutual friend from Belfast. Drinking was almost mandatory so I had a few glasses of wine. Mistake number one. We drove up to Town Hall and went in. I perused the literature tables in the lobby, only some of which were familiar to me. Quite a few of them were of the Black Helicopter type – Idaho Survivalist stuff. $30 DVDs about Freemasonry and so on. After a while we took our seats and I began to struggle to stay awake. It was hot up there and the wine was taking its toll. The MC was a very strange tall man with abnormally broad shoulders, wearing a dark suit that looked like curtains. He introduced Professor Griffin and the audience gave him a hero’s welcome. I was ready to be intrigued.

Griffin’s new book is called “Debunking the 9-11 Debunkers.” There was a lot of ground to cover and I expected blazing arguments. Instead, Griffin proceeded to read from a prepared speech – and he’s not a very good reader. If he made a mistake he would start at the beginning of the same sentence and read it again. Real dry stuff. And his counter arguments seemed to be innuendo and sarcasm. Three times he mentioned a passport that had flown out of one of the airplanes – everybody laughed at this but he never used for anything. Everybody just seemed to know what he meant and it was accepted as a great hammer blow for the truth. At another time, as proof of the growing acceptance of his Truth Movement – and proof of the intelligence of his scholarship – he listed off a number of groups that had joined the fight. Groups like “Architects For 9-11 Truth” and “Scholars For 9-11 Truth.” Okay, I thought, anyone can make up a name – who are these people? He never said. He just kept reading.

I can’t say that I recall any great moments, because there were none. One of Griffin’s most serious critiques had come from Popular Mechanics, who had written a book debunking the conspiracy theorists, a lot of it being about him. I never read the book but I did read the transcript of their interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! They made sense to me and I thought they did a good job of straightening out some of the real curvy logic that Griffin uses. So the professor addressed them in Town Hall and I was expecting fireworks. No such luck. The best he could come up with was who owns the magazine – guilt by association. Nothing to do with the arguments. I could use the same logic on myself and say that I can’t write decent political songs because I play a Martin and the Martin company is very conservative. I’ll have to stop buying my own records.

I really wanted to take a nap but my friend was sitting right next to me and I’m told that I snore. Our buddy from Belfast was sitting on the other side of me, however, and he had nodded off several times. When the lecture was over everybody stood up to give Griffin an ovation. I stood up also, mainly to get the circulation going again in my feet, but also to be polite. Then the Belfast man and I went downstairs for some water. The air was hot up there (!). After a few minutes I went back up and sat in the rear. The Belfast man stayed downstairs by the water cooler. It was time for questions and answers. The questions had been written out and the strange man with the broad shoulders was reading them. To answer one of the questions Professor Griffin went on about how Christians in particular should be concerned with stuff because Christianity was by nature and anti imperialist religion because Jesus had agitated against the Roman state, and on and on, and I began to think, well now wait a minute - are Christians better than everybody else? I don’t have a deity – what about me? Then the professor began to spin his wheels and he said, “I’ve been biding my time trying to remember what the question was but I can’t do it. What was the question?” Everybody laughed but not the way that you would like them to. The MC said that Professor Griffin would be delivering the sermon at such and such a church on the following day and I got up and went downstairs for the last time. My Belfast friend was still sitting by the drinking fountain, talking with a custodian who was marveling that they could get so many people out for something like this. In all positive generosity he was saying that it was a good sign because at least people were distrusting the government. I agreed, with reservations. Our friend with the tickets came down and we went out for a late drink.

We had a pleasant after lecture evening, pretty much staying off the topic of David Ray Griffin. Alcohol and agitation can lead to hangovers. But the next day I got an email from my friend suggesting that perhaps I was having trouble accepting Griffin’s arguments and should give them a chance. I wrote back assuring him that we were still friends but making a couple of points: One - there are no theories of any kind - from Big Foot to the World Jewish Conspiracy - that are not supported by "reputable experts." Two - I have never met a religious person of any persuasion who was not aware that their particular version of reality was the best. Three - religion is predicated on the acceptance of the mysterious as proof of a greater design and therefore should be kept as far away as possible from the science of investigation. And I meant it.

And yes, we are still friends.

But really, do we have to suffer through the whimsies of soft skulled speculations just to be nice to each other? Shouldn’t we call bullshit when we see it? I think that there is a strange kind of America First thing going on here - the US is so great and powerful that no one could attack it except itself. And also a boring old magical “man behind the curtain” scenario. Like wishing for a good movie version where everything gets to be really exciting with lots of James Bond intrigues and maybe even some flying saucers. I know its boring, and maybe even a little depressing to think that the great Land of John Wayne could be brought to its knees by a handful of Arabs with hand held weapons, but you know…. History doesn’t play favorites. And even the gods have to get real sometimes.

Back In Seattle Again

2007-05-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

Back in Seattle again… Warm weather and lots of green. Sometimes I remember why I love this place. Everything is alive. I had a very successful east coast trip and now it’s time to dig my heels in again. We at the Pike Market Performers’ Guild need to really get on the ball about this years’ Busker Festival - time’s a-wastin’ and there’s never enough hours in the day when you start to fall behind. We need to get those artwork entries and those applications out. Damn… It’s already May!

We may have another stage this year. I would like that. One of the restaurants at the Market is talking about having a beer garden on festival day and that would mean setting up a stage right there. It would have to have sound reinforcement, of course. The amazing thing is that we have become such a welcomed addition to the city that local businesses fell like taking advantage and joining in. Good news all around.

And speaking of good news, the Great Mystery Project is nearing completion and may actually be able to declare itself by name before too long. It involves recording studios and old friends, new music and ancient ritual rhythms. I will say no more. It will not be ready for Folklife but soon after. Once again I am going cross eyed at the computer getting all these parts together. Good thing I already wear glasses.

And while we’re on the subject, Jerry Falwell just died. What can I say? I listened to Ron Reagan on KIRO today, a local talk radio station. He was so vague and kid glove about everything. “You should be nice to people right after they’ve died,” he kept saying. And I kept wondering why. They weren’t nice to Sadam Hussein after he died. I mean – he’s dead, he’s not going to be bothered by what you say. So let’s be real: Falwell gave us the Moral Majority, those shiny white shock troops for Jesus who laid out such a great and detailed plan for the future of these late great United States. He helped elect some of our most virulent politicians. He helped to make women’s clinics the dangerous places that they are today. He blamed women, gays, and liberals for the attacks of 9-1. He was not a constructive personality in the world and he had a lot of political power to do things with. Maybe we’re better off without him and we should say so.

Reagan talked to a local Seattle area Falwell supporter, a “Reverend SoAndSo” from Renton. The reverend liked to talk about how Jerry was so adamant about getting America back to its faith based roots. Back to the Christian principles that America was founded on, he said. Wow – I don’t remember learning about that in school. In fact, I remember learning that one of the things that set this country apart from so many others is that we do not have a religious involvement in our governmental affairs. Separation of church and state and all that stuff. I think I remember it right. But Reagan never challenged him on any of it. He was too busy being nice.

(While you’re being nice and playing your violins they are reorganizing their power base. The engines of the coup are never idle. Death creates a vacuum and if you don’t shine the light it will be filled by invisible minions. The kind that bite you in the neck while you’re bending down to kiss your children.)

Oh well, time goes on and the calendars just keep changing. These eternal deities just don’t last. Remember the story about Galileo? That’s one of my favorites. Galileo suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe. That really pissed off the church who had him arrested and put in confinement. He was finally pardoned sometime in the late 20th century. No sense in rushing into things. It was a very threatening thing to say because this planet earth is where we humans live. And if the earth is not the center of the universe then we humans are not the center either and that might mean that we are not made in the image of god. I mean, if everything revolves around the deity then it only makes sense that everything would also revolve around the deity’s mirror, right? Humans, who are that mirror, would be right in the center of it, with all the universe revolving around our collective head. But if that’s not the case then it might mean that we are not made in the image of god after all but are only some overly imaginative primate species with a need to be needed. And that would mean that god was most likely made in the image of humans. And that’s depressing if you’re a big wig in one of god’s many earthly empires.

The empires are shrinking, and that’s the good news.

Manhattan

2007-05-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

37 years ago I arrived in Manhattan wearing a fleece lined army surplus flight jacket with a broken zipper, held together with two ropes. I had a back pack and about 75 cents in my pocket. I was twenty years old. I had hitch hiked across country from California with my buddy Scot Simbulan, whom I have not seen since. I remember that I didn’t bring my guitar because I figured everybody would be so good that there would be no room for me. What I found was that Greenwich Village had moved on. What was left was a handful collection of real people and a whole lot of posers waiting to be discovered by TV. But I was in the Village and this was Manhattan and there couldn’t be anything closer to heaven in my book.

Manhattan! That’s where we are now, up at 113th and Riverside Drive, staying with my buddy Mark. He’s a multi instrumentalist and a gas to hang out with. We only have a few days here so it’ll be fast. Last night we played at a book store around the corner from his house, a small but appreciative crowd. Today we’ll just wander around and check out the sights – and for me that means the neighborhoods and the benches. And the smell of the place – a mixture of pizza and concrete. Makes me hungry. Tomorrow morning I’ll get up around 6 am and head downtown to be at the Firehouse Station where they broadcast Democracy Now! Years ago Amy Goodman gave me an open invitation to drop by any time I was in the city and this will be the second time I took her up on it.

I picked up two books last night. “The Mayor Of MacDougle Street – a memoir” by Dave Van Ronk, and “Garcia – A Signpost To A New Space” which is Jerry Garcia interviews. To my thinking they are kindred spirits. Van Ronk was the big great hearted lord of the east coast folk scene – mentoring everybody from Bob Dylan to Joni Mitchell – and Garcia was the folk saturated mandolin/jazz/rock guitar player of the Grateful Dead who carried all that wonderful old folk music with him into the late 20th century. Two generous giants from the same ocean of soul. I would have loved to hear them play together. Maybe they did.

Anyway, I’m going to put this up so that people don’t think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth. I’m off to Berea, Ohio in a couple of days and will finally make it home next week. See you down the road.

Borat - A Slight Return

2007-04-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess there’s either not a lot of people who read this blog/journal thing or else not many people want to hear a bout Borat anymore. Can’t say as I blame them. I mean, you hear one toilet joke you’ve heard ‘em all.

I’ve been looking into this. A lot people who I expected better things from have come out in favor of the B Movie. (That’s what I‘ll call Borat – it seems to fit…) I spent a while digging around out there in Google Land – and there’s quite a bit of good critique, so I’m not alone after all. And I’ve watched a few of the You Tube pieces – Borat and Ali G. You know the ones – Pat Robertson, Northern Ireland, sitting around with the scientists, learning to play football. I think he’s lazy. If nothing much interesting happens right away the shit and porn jokes kick in. That stuff hasn’t been funny since I was in junior high school. It not original, it’s not insightful, it’s not clever, and it’s boring. Boring. Is that where “Borat” comes from?

But back to the main subjects from last time. 1. Exploiting the Romanians. 2. Impersonating a Kazak, with all the anti-Islamic and Russo-bashing that it may entail. I’ve noticed that most people don’t answer those questions, they ignore them. So once again:

1. Is it okay to trick poor people? Put words in their mouths, stories around their lives, turn them into rapists, abortionists, and prostitutes? Would you do that in Appalachia? Would you do that to people who live close enough to matter? Would you do that to people who have enough political clout to fight back? How about going into Dignity Village in Portland? Or Tent City? Would that be okay?

2. Is it okay to impersonate a drunken Indian? To put on face paint and feathers and dance around with a bottle of fortified wine in your hand? Would you tell me that it was a tool to expose racism and that you chose that nationality because it was obscure? And when somebody from that nationality got mad at you would you say that they don’t have a sense of humor?

Would you expect me to swallow all this?

Okay… My buddy Tim says, “Anyone who can get people to mime horns and ‘chant throw the Jew down the well’ while in character as something as absurd as Borat is a fucking genius.” Really? A genius for that? Anybody could do that, and what did you learn that you didn’t already know? That some people are racists? Duh. Isn’t it just a tool to make you feel a better about yourself because at least you’re not as stupid as those people? Is this all we settle for? Is this the best we can expect? How sad.

Personally I can’t keep my attention on fecal humor and porn jokes for very long. They repeat, there’s not much there. And I feel insulted that I was considered to be worth only that much. And I am amazed that so many people think it’s deep. It’s not. Unless you mean deep pockets, because that’s what this is all about. Money, and lots of it.

I think we deserve better than a B Movie and I think we’ll get it. It’ll take some work but I’m willing to wait.

Borat

2007-04-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one who didn’t like “Borat?” You know, that wildly successful comedy that’s supposed to make you urinate on yourself because you laugh so hard. That’s what it said on the DVD box. So what happened to me? Everybody else seemed to enjoy it. One of my friends, a fellow who I usually associate with intelligence and an adult grasp of complexities, thought it was the funniest movie he’d ever seen. I worry about him now. So, is it just me? Do I have personal problems? Am I too PC? Do I just not have a sense of humor? Am I on drugs? Should I be? Bear with me for a while as I try to formulate my argument. Maybe it’ll make sense, and maybe you’ll have to call out the loony brigade. We’ll see how this goes…

In case you don’t know, Borat is a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British born Jewish comedian, and a Cambridge graduate no less. I say “no less” because Cambridge is a class act, like Harvard only older. It’s not just your neighborhood community college. Anyway, in the movie the character Borat comes from Kazakhstan, but not just anywhere in Kazakhstan – he comes from a dirt poor village where nobody speaks English and everybody happily has sex with Borat’s sister, or any available barn animals. There’s a town rapist. People have donkies in their kitchens. Its kind of like an over-thinned gene pool, a brood group of morons. The trouble is, for me anyway, they are people of an officially hate-able nationality. You know – Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan - all those “-stan” countries that the US likes to mess around with. Its so much easier to mess with them when they’re inferior. You can laugh at them while you steal their oil. Uh-oh, I’m showing my PC. Sorry.

Anyway, that would all be well and good except that they weren’t actors and they weren’t Kazakh and they had no idea what Borat was up to. Nobody told them that they were going to be rapists and barn animal sexualizers. That came out later when Hollywood put stories around them so that we would all piss our pants. Now, my friend tells me to just lighten up about that, everybody knew it wasn’t real, it was too preposterous. And besides, they got paid. Yeah, but that’s not the point. Some people have a deep running morality that won’t allow for that sort of thing, even if it’s fake. And you really should ask them first. That was a mistake. Now the whole town is suing Borat.

Ha! There, I laughed. That felt better.

Now to get back to my friend who used to be smart… He likes the way Borat goes through the movie pretending to be a backward bumpkin from Kazakhstan making a documentary on the US and A. That’s the way he gets real people to do real things and expose themselves. Like the holy rollers in the church who talk in tongues and pray for him. Or the drunken frat kids who talk drunken frat talk. Well, yes, he does get them to do that, but so what? None of them do anything you haven’t seen before, and none of them are as stupid as Borat, the guy from the little village in Kazakhstan. That’s the through line. That’s the center of the whole movie – the incredibly racist, misogynist, stupid, fucked up, sexually egotistical, moron from the dirt poor mud streets of one of the “-stan” countries. And the really messed up thing about it is that Borat - Sacha Baron Cohen – isn’t from there at all. He’s Jewish. He’s from England. He graduated from Cambridge. So this is just the same tired old story – Mister Privilege making nasty fun of the people in the tenements.

This is where they tell me to “lighten up” again, I’m just not seeing the humor. But I am seeing it, I just don’t think its funny. I think its mean. When Redd Fox made fun of working class Black people you had to let it go because he was Black. He had that right. When Lilly Tomlin takes on women, well, she has that experience. But this guy? I want to ask him, why don’t you play a Jewish character? That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Some dumb guy from a backward, inbred Hebrew community out in the sticks somewhere where they all have sex with animals and nobody has any brains. That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, I don’t mind being in a minority if it means that I don’t have to laugh at bad humor. I learned a long time ago that it takes guts and intelligence to aim at the powerful, to construct a humor that deflates class pomposity and reveals the tiny underbelly of the big thieves. Some of them are your bosses and landlords and they might get mad. But its cowardly and small to make fun of the powerless. They are your tenants and day laborers and all they can do is complain, while everybody pisses their pants laughing. But things are different if you’re the court jester. When you go to the king’s hall you want to have your comedy aimed in the right direction. You want the butt of those jokes to be in line with the Man’s agenda. That’s a kind of humor that panders, that’s the comedy of complicity. And that’s not funny.

But maybe I just need to lighten up.

After the Moisture Festival

2007-04-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

This was the last night of the Moisture Festival. Seattle’s own. And wasn’t it wonderful. You got more for your money than anywhere else in town. Clowns, jugglers, magicians, singers, dancers, aerialists, mimes, sword swallowers, people who sawed other people in half, people who made city sounds with their mouths, someone who blew real good soap bubbles, someone who plays real good spoons, a chorus line of dancing posterior bares, a can-can troupe, a great ensemble orchestra to follow your every whim, and an emcee who sometimes wore an antenna and spoke in circles and sometimes wore sequins and played country guitar. Maybe you had to be there but damn, it was something. It’ll happen again.

It all takes place at the Hale’s Palladium on Leary Way, just outside of Fremont, on the way to Ballard. I don’t know how many people it holds. 200, maybe. It’s packed all the time and it goes on for three weeks. It’s great because it shows you the wonders to be achieved by ordinary people. This is not Ringling Brothers. This does not have a seven figure budget and corporate sponsorship. The sponsors are all local and the budget might actually be hundreds of dollars. I never asked. But I do know that the performers all do it for the love of it, and that’s deeper than any Wall Street marquee.

It’s real important to understand that we – ordinary people, all of us – we are the masters of our craft. And our craft involves laughter and awe, fumble and stutter, the daring intoxication of high wire tom foolery and the sublime floatation of dancing on feathers. And it’s we – the ordinary people, who can do it the best because we can drop that fumble and laugh, and everyone laughs with us. If you don’t see that you can do it then you won’t try. We have to try.

It all started in the rain soaked past of Seattle’s invisible music scene. Way back in those days of broken cars and low rent. The early 70s. It was a sidewalk town back then, with lots of buses and tree lined back streets. And music. Lots of music. You never would have heard about it if you weren’t there. There was no music press and you couldn’t get famous unless you left. But it was magic.

I got here in 71 and broke right into it. The last folk club closed and I started carving out a reality in the anything-goes world of the already happening night life. And the day time life too – the campus and the streets. But the rock clubs were happening at night and the music was good. Bands like Butter Fat and The Doily Brothers. Mojo Hand and Lance Romance. Anyway, in 74 along comes Rose and The Dirt Boys – they’re out of Oklahoma and they just moved right in and made themselves at home. You could do that here in those days, it was that generous. Well, one of the brains of the dirt boys was Ron Bailey, or RB as they called him. A compact little Scotts Okie with a great voice and an unstoppable mind for invention he began collecting talented friends. He became kind of a magnet around which a lot of interesting people revolved. When The Dirt Boys broke up RB went on to the Dynamic Logs – a band that was larger or smaller depending on the circumstances. And that’s when things began to get real theatrical.

Anyway, making long stories shorter… Ducaniveaux was born somewhere in there, involving strange shadowy figures in Spain and Paris and New York, and they all started going to the Country Fair. So did a lot of jugglers and magicians and dancers and singers and all the rest. The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Tom Noddy, Faith Petric. So It was a natural progression if you look at it that way. It just had to happen. And where else could it have been?

The first Moisture Festival happened in a tent in a vacant lot in Fremont. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how well they did. But the next year, at the Hale’s Palladium, I played at it and that was it, I was hooked. So, you have to go to it next year. It’ll happen again, probably in the same place around the same time of year. Check out the web site: http://www.moisturefestival.com/ It’ll lift your spirits. And that’s no mean feat.

Fremont and The Other Big S

2007-03-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess its obvious by now that Howard Schultz hasn’t taken my advice and the Big S is still pretending to be Original down at the Market. Still no bulletin boards, still no public toilets. And Bruce Springsteen has yet to play out in front. It’s a shame really, we would have enjoyed it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, money doesn’t get to be that great by being modest. Or truthful. So we will have to resort to other measures…

Seattle has become a big bag of money, a transplant of armored cars instead of the footed people who once dwelled here. The history of this place is problematic, as is the history of all the world I suppose. A people living unsuspecting lives one day encountering another people with intrusive agendas. Property is created out of the commons, laws are passed, deeds are written and recorded. A city is born. And the heroes of that city are the ones who made the first roads, built the first fences, crafted the first charters delineating the borders between legal and illegal, engineered the first court systems, erected the first jails, and put the first prisoners in them. Bankers, real estate speculators - the ones who held the money in their hands like a policeman’s baton and used it to sweep aside everyone who just didn’t get it. This was progress, goddammit! This was theirs now, said the money/batons, and they would use the argument of split lips and broken heads, leg irons and lynching parties. It’s not an argument that makes or accepts sense, depending as it does on thug muscle and ferocity. The mouth vs. the fist. Not always a fair fight.

I won’t say I’ve given up on Seattle but I will say that I am disappointed. Seattle seems to have rolled over on its back like a dog looking for treats, kicking its legs in the air, lolling its tongue to one side, exposing its underbelly, and saying “give me money and I’m yours.” As a city it doesn’t seem to care how many people are bothered by its greed and avarice. It will make the biggest fool of itself so as not to insult Big Money – Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Howard Schultz, Suzie Burke.

Suzie… The last straw for me was Fremont. Suzie’s dad owned the trail along the water there. The Burke-Gilman Trail. It was a soft and rustling strip of land along the canal where the boats went by to get in or out of the Sound. There were a few elderly buildings, boat works and outfitters, and a line of trees where the birds would roost to have lunch. It was slow and humane. When the old man died and Susie got a hold of it – wham! - all hell broke loose. Spring-loaded psycho-developers bounded out of their boxes, rubbing their hands and slopping their drool, and in a matter of minutes the entire canal along the Fremont side was built with stalagmites. Multi story buildings with the kind of pastel sterility that only 21st century Corporate America is capable of. And that was the end of the canal. Not in the reality of no more water and no more boats, but in the way that the people who lived and loved and roomed there could no longer call that vista their own. If our lives can be partly defined by what we see and what we are surrounded by then all of their lives were changed, and through no design of their own. Now there was something in the way, a blindfold on the horizon.

Now, I’m not into stopping the time clock or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not some brittle old character shaking his cane at the wheels of progress – no, I understand that things move on. But I think they should move with more of a collective consciousness. Not for the gratification and whimsy of a small group of rich folks but for the good of us all. Or, more accurately (and this is where I could get into trouble) for the good of “the people.” Yes, there is such a thing as the people. And if we would stop playing stupid we could figure out who they are. They sure ain’t Suzie Burke.

Ever stand on the hill in Fremont and look down at the water? I have, a thousand times. Imaging you were raised there. Maybe born and raised there. Watching the boats go by and the rain come down on that wonderful canal - that’s your world out there. Now, somebody has just built a wall – a wall that generates big income for people who already have more than you do – all along that water so that you can’t see it any more. They have built a wall across the face of your world. Did anybody ask you? How can they do this? They can do it because they “own it.”

Ownership by the few at the expense of the many. That’s problematic.

I had an interesting conversation in Portadown one night about ten years ago. That’s a town in Northern Ireland. (This will make sense in a bit, hold on…) I had played a folk club and was staying at somebody’s house. My host and I were relaxing with a drink or two. It had been explained to me a few days earlier up in Derry that the war was over, the Irish had won, and that all that was left to do was the paper work. Britain was leaving. It would take time, but they were on the way out. Well, my host that night in Portadown was the son of an RUC officer. That’s the police force up there, not well loved by the Catholic Irish, often accused of favoritism to Protestant loyalists. It had been scary for him to know that his father was out on patrol in a unit so hated by half of the population. Now maybe he could relax a bit. Anyway, we talked about the future, and my friend asked me, “Do you think democracy would work here? Do you have democracy in your country?”

I was taken aback at first. After all, its supposed to be universally known that America is the fountain of democracy and for him to even ask such a question should have been, well, out of the question. But ask it he did and I had to answer. So I thought for a moment and I said, “Yes, we do have democracy but we need to define it. They tell us in school that democracy is ‘one man one vote,’ but that’s not quite right. Really its one vote per social power unite. And you have to decide what the social power unite is. In America it’s the dollar. So our democracy is one vote per dollar. And that’s why Bill Gates will always have more votes than I will. Until we change things.”

I don’t remember what we talked about after that. We had a few more drinks and went to sleep. But I think that’s pretty close. One vote per social power unite. Until we change things. Look out Suzie. Look out Bill. Inequality has to be maintained by force. And forced maintenance gets you into trouble. The gears wear down, the straps and leg irons get weak. Walls start to crack. If you leave a jail alone long enough the weather itself will do the job. Nature breaks the bank.

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. They say it like it means something, like they’re proud of it. But it doesn’t matter how long it took to build. Who cares? What’s important is that Rome didn’t fall in day. That’s the point. Because we will last longer than their new Rome and we will help to dismantle it. And we will clear away the obstacles and make way for the vision of the people. And we will learn to dance. And we will watch those boats go by again.

Mister Clean and the Big S

2007-03-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

I wish I was a clean as Bruce Springsteen. But I’m not. What can I say…. I come from the old days. I don’t squeak when I walk and I tend to knock things over when I first come into a room. Ask anybody who knows me, I leave a trail of stains behind. But Bruce is immaculate. That’s what they said on the AOL start page today – “what’s so different about Bruce Springsteen?” I didn’t know there was anything different but I thought I’d go check it out to see, and sure enough there he was, Mister Clean. “No drug busts and no bad hair days ever.” Well, I have to admit that I never did much with drugs, they always kinda scared me – I did acid, smoked a bunch a pot, did some speed – that’s about it. But I’ve had a lot of bad hair days. In fact, I have not been to a barber since 1965. I cut my hair myself, using a pair of regular scissors and a car mirror. I don’t even wet it down first. “So how do you get the back?” you might ask. Easy – just walk around for the next few days with a pair of scissors in your pocket and when somebody says, “jeeze, what happened to back of your head” whip out the scissors and say, “I don’t know, can you fix it for me?” I’ve been doing it that way for years. But then I don’t have a reputation to uphold or a house in Bel Air. And I don’t charge a hundred dollars a seat for people to come see me.

What did you say? That’s right, a hundred dollars a seat for Big Bruce. And that was when he was doing his Pete Seeger tribute tour. I’ll bet Pete was thrilled about that part, being an old communist and all. I mean, if you take the ideology to heart and really sing those songs, knowing what they stand for, and if you charge a hundred dollars a seat, then that must mean that the working class has made such great strides that the average Joe and Josephine can easily afford it! Plus parking, plus a baby sitter, plus dinner, plus everything else. Probably works out to about two hundred and that’s just for one person. So if you add a friend or a spouse then its three, or four. Damn! We won that revolution and didn’t even know it. Thanks, Bruce. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be waging the class war.

And speaking of class war did you see where Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has sent around an in-house memo bemoaning the loss of the “Starbucks Experience?” I’m not sure what that experience is – you’d have to ask people who go there regularly. I’m sure they all have their own versions. To some it would be aromatic low fat double soy decaf lattes, extra hot. To others it would be huge plastic bags full of disposable cups being hoisted into green rubbish bins by uniformed baristas. To me it is often the endless crowds of lemming-like touristas pilgrimaging to the “Original Starbucks” down at the Pike Place Market. They spend thousands of dollars a day getting their super gulp sized drinks and having their pictures taken, with glue sniffing grins on their faces, in front of that wonderful corporate sign.

Now, I put “Original Starbucks” in quotes because its just not true. And they know it. Starbucks knows it. They’re playing a little trick on you, probably their way of showing their love and gratitude for all the years of excessive cash flow that comes with being a truly addictive experience. Just ask William Burroughs. Oh that’s right, he’s dead. Anyway, when the Big S started out in 1971 they were just a little roaster and baggie seller operating out of a storefront just outside the Market. Not in it. I know this because I got a little suspicious and did some digging. I went into the basement of the Suzzallo Library where they keep the old copies of the City Directories – the business records for Seattle. I checked for the address of the current “Original S” and found that it was listed as vacant in 1977. How is that possible? How could they have started in the same location that they were not in? Does this make sense? Is this Houdini marketing? Maybe I was missing something. Well, in fact I was. A friend who works in an historical society explained it to me. They are taking advantage of a loophole that says if you close Business A but take the original business license with you to open Business B then you can claim that Business B is in fact the original business. Its really just the license that you’re referring to. Pretty slick, huh?

So Mister Moneybuckets made a plastic plaque to hang in the window that said “Original Starbucks” and he made a brass obelisk to put on the floor inside that said the same thing and they put it into all the tourist guide books and on the official Seattle web site and in all the airplane magazines and all over the world. And humans, being the Pavlovian herd animals that they are, came by the tour bus load and lined up for hours to have some of that original greatness rub off on them. They take cell phone pictures and movies. They rub up against the building itself and their faces blush at the proximity of orgasmic monetary success which is, of course, the essence of the real Starbucks Experience. Money. And lots of it.

But somehow the “experience” has become watered down for Howard. You see, he’s not from these parts. He’s a New Yorker, which is neither here nor nearby but rather three thousand miles and, in his case, a million wallets away. Howard came into the scene late – sometime in the eighties – and he offered his services as a magician to the little coffee company. I will make you famous, he said, and drew out a money colored wand, flicking his wrist with a crackle of lightning and a distant sound of cash register thunder. And presto! There they were, Starbucks the Great, the world famous and world renowned, global purveyor of all thing caffeinated. And more – T-shirts, caps, umbrellas, cups and saucers, coffee makers, books, and of course, music. Music. Of course! The percolation of syncopation, the constant inescapable tunings of wake-up-and-hit-the-groove-day-with-a-latte melodies. Their own label featuring the big names – Ray Charles, Bob Dylan. I mean, why settle for one fortune when you can have two? I wish I’d thought of that.

But I though of something else. How about this… Hey Howard. Maybe what’s missing in the “experience” is a little honesty. I know you got a loophole going and its all legally copasetic and all that, but you know and we know and everybody else knows that that ain’t the original café so why not come clean? Why not do a little twelve step apologetics and admit to the whole world that you’ve been having us on? Maybe give a little of that extra money back. Maybe put a few mil into low income housing or something.

Or how about this… You confess to everybody that you’ve been lying, right? And then to make amends, first you put up public bulletin boards in all the Starbucks stores. I mean, what’s a coffeehouse without a bulletin board? Then you let the employees choose their own music. Maybe they want to play something from some other labels. Then you let them do gigs in the stores – you know, open mics, punk folk, that sort of thing. Then you open the rest rooms up for everybody. No more keys! And finally, finally…

You get Bruce Springsteen to do a free solo acoustic noon time gig right outside the store in the Pike Place Market with his guitar case open and a drunk leaning up against the window ready to pass out. We’ll make sure he’s got a permit so everything will be legal. And that’ll put you on the map again. What do you say?

The Celebrity Weapon

2007-02-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

Joe Hill was the closest thing to a people’s troubadour that I can think of. He was a member of the Industrial Workers Of the World – the Wobblies – and he wrote and sang songs that the workers could use as weapons in their strikes and organizing efforts. Many of those songs are still sung today. He was executed by firing squad in Utah in 1919. The state said he killed somebody but most everybody else figured is was a frame-up. They had to stop him, those songs of his just caused too much trouble.

Now, suppose somebody wanted to engineer a self-policing society where no one would ever get that far in the first place - by using some sort of mechanism whereby success led to failure, tricking people into feeding the hand that bites, so to speak. What would that look like? Well, it might look very much like our modern celebrity system. Let’s just tilt things a little bit and look at them that way for a while and see what happens when celebrity becomes a weapon…

Eugene Debs, probably the most honorable man ever to run for President – and from prison, at that – said, “When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” Now, that’s a good attitude to have. Prince, on the other hand – the artist formerly known as *@! – said “pop life, everybody can’t be on top.” See the difference? Prince was, of course, putting himself up there on the top and singing down to us commoners, saying it’s okay, we can’t all be great like him. But hey, love me, I’m your pop star. That’s why I don’t own any Prince records.

Now, everybody knows that in order to have an effect as an artist you need to achieve a certain level of visibility. A certain stature. So what they did (“they” being the architect generals of the music industry) was to invade, colonize, and in fact own that level of artistic existence. To get there you have to go through them. Most people approach them asking for approval: “Please make me a star, oh great ones.” If the applicant is willing and the raw putty of their talent is moldable something might happen and a one-hit wonder may be born. But sometimes an independent figure appears, gathering meat and muscle on their own road, owing to none. This one has to be cut off at the pass: a billionaire steps into the road, with an enormous Congratulations! and a fat wad of cash and says something like, “You made it, welcome to the Wonder Dome,” and shoves the cash wad directly into the applicant’s mouth. Hard to sing straight with a mouth full of money.

Oh, I can hear it already, “Come on Page, that’s a bit of stretch.” Yeah, well, I told you we were going to tilt things for a while. We’re almost done… Not everybody gets caught, but enough do to make it pay for the money-bag bankers of music row. And enough to warp a lot of the young impressionables who watch those award ceremonies, seeing all those glittering gold trinkets and flash bulbs, those rock stars and heart throbs.

And that’s the end of any future Joe Hill. That does it more effectively than any firing squad. Because once he’s got that medal, once he’s joined that club, once he’s made that pact with that billionaire, its all over, the system owns him. Or her. Or it. And that’s the way it’s done. As long as “they” own the terms of success, the puppet is King.

But so far they don’t own the street. Whose streets? Our streets, that’s whose! And success out there is measured in interpersonal immediacy, with no middle man. Like the whispered rumblings of a mass movement about to happen, a million unencumbered tongues sing us into the 21st century. We should listen.

Airplanes and Cameras

2007-02-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

“Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties.” - from an article called ‘Dead End’ by Edward N. Luttwak, in Harper’s Magazine, Feb 2007.

I figure that speaks for a lot of us, doesn’t it? “Low tolerance for casualties,” indeed. There oughtta be a way to get those desk-bellied bureaucrats to do their own fighting. Like they say, maybe if they had to fight we wouldn’t have these wars. But that’s turning the world right side up and that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. It’ll get done but not right away. Give it time.

I just got back from the UK. I think the travel took about 30 hours. It was a long one! First of all, I was staying on the opposite side of London from the airport and it was an 8:30 flight. That meant that I had to take the first subway train which was at 5:30. And, because the house where I was staying was a good twenty minute walk from the station – without any luggage – I wanted to leave at a quarter to 5 at the latest just to be sure. And that meant that I had to be up at 4. But of course I couldn’t sleep so I was up at 3. For some stupid reason I thought the subway ride would take about 40 minutes. Uh-uh, it was almost an hour and a half. I was sweating buckets. And then I was told that I couldn’t carry my guitar on board. What?! I would have to check it! Okay, I said, I’ll check the guitar to Amsterdam – my first leg – and the suitcase all the way to Seattle. Can’t do that, they said, the system won’t allow it. There’s that system thing again – more tenacious than the cockroach. Okay, so I checked them both to Amsterdam. Which meant that I had to go through passport check and customs in the Netherlands, only to turn around and go through passport and customs again to board a flight for Washington, DC. And here’s the fun part. Everybody getting on that plane to DC was interviewed. I thought it was because I had made a snide comment about the “no outside water bottles” ruling, but no – everybody was singled out and questioned by anal security officers before being allowed into the loading area. There were three podiums and three questioners. Mine was seriously over pronouncing her words and I over pronounced right back. I though maybe that was her language. I stood on one side of the podium while she stood on the other. The questions were all the usual that you’ve heard for years – did you pack your bags yourself, and so on. After a few of these I just answered them all at once. I don’t know what she thought of me but she let me go through.

Landing in DC - “Our Nation’s Capitol” as we laughingly refer to it – was actually pretty painless. The passport guy made a joke about my name – “anybody ever mistake you for Jimmy Page?” Which allowed me to say, “I wish his banker would.” Which allowed him to think I was okay and I just sailed on through. Then I had three hours to wait before the final airless dose to Seattle. Like Ramblin’ Jack says, “Why do they call them airplanes? There’s no air in them.” True enough. Or food. Maybe a few peantuts or a rigid bag a pretzels. The good thing was that the cold I had picked up and attributed to the London breeding ward of the Underground had pretty much disappeared. Probably passed it onto into the stream of that greater disease factory, the winged aviation ward. The ward giveth and the ward taketh away. After 5 hours of semi sentient submergence and claustrophobial fidget we landed safe but dehydrated in Seattle. My friend Janet met me at the baggage thing – I refuse to call it a carousel, carousels are fun and filled with children, these things lose your luggage. Jim was outside in the car but hade to circle around because of our national paranoiadal security fetish. People who constantly move are good. People who stop moving are up to something. Then they very kindly brought me to my little house in the trees where we did a quick check to see if the lights were still on and then I was left to my own befuddling devices.

That was last night. A long time ago. I am in a cotton layered tunnel and I will stay here until I catch up with myself. I will happily bump into things and will feel no real need to make sense. There will be plenty of time for that.

Oh, one more. England is famous for camera surveillance. There are cameras all over the place, four or five of them at a time on the same stand. They say that the average Brit gets photographed 400 times in the course of a day. What do they do with all that? Anyway, they’ve been using cameras at the intersections to catch bad drivers – speeding, running red lights, that sort of thing. We’re starting to do that here too. Really annoying. Well, some people have been vandalizing the cameras, spraying paint over the lenses and so on. So what are they doing about it? They are installing new cameras to catch the vandals who wreck the other cameras. And the news casters reported it all with a straight face. Good for them!

Last Day In London

2007-02-05T05:47:00.001-08:00

Last day in London. Prowling around downtown, in and out of the Underground. That great stale-aired disease factory that I love so much. I can smell 200 years worth of working humanity in that thing. The longest escalators in the world, the grittiest cave-born winds, the endless rattlings of the disappearing rails – gone worm-like into the distance. How many people take this thing to work every day? How many lives have come and gone in here? It gave me a cold yesterday, slammed right into my forehead - I sniffle and cough my way around now – but I have to go down there again. It knows my name and it will not let me rest…

It has been a great honour to get to know the Cole family. East Londoners. Pie, mash and liquor. Michael Cole has been my agent on this trip and his 26 year old son Justin has been the driver. And what a driver he is! If you see him coming you better pull aside. I have been staying at Mike’s daughter Vicky’s place, in her son’s room. Her husband Alex is the guy who met me when I first arrived way back then. They have two children, both boys. I sleep in the older brother’s bed room. The younger has a heart condition. How sad to see a beautiful baby and to know that his heart is damaged and that ten years ago he wouldn’t have lived even this long. Maybe in ten years time they will know how to fix him for real. You have to think like that. These are good people.

I played up in Devon at the Otterton Mill, a great and wonderful place attached to a mill that is actually a thousand years old. Put that in your “Original Starbucks!” The sound engineer was a guy named Ian Briggs. He’s a real good blues harmonica player and he invited us to his gig the next night in Bristol. He’s a got a band called The Supervampers. I had the night off so it seemed like a logical thing to do. That’s when my cold started to hit but I went for it anyway. I like Bristol. It’s got a real good feel to it. College town, lots of art. I did a couple of songs and felt kind of silly after what that band does. I mean all I have is an acoustic guitar… Anyway, next day was Trowbridge at the Arc Theater. Real good room, great sound, lights, the whole nine yards. I’ll be playing the Trowbridge Festival this summer so it was good to get to be in the town. Good show.

Last night was the last gig. The Plough. Awesome gig. A real English folk club. We don’t have anything like that in the states, at least not that I’ve ever seen. In the late 70s and early 80s I used to play quite a lot of them. They are a great example. As the featured performer I do 2 sets, usually 45 minutes each. Each set has a couple of warm up acts and those are local players and singers. What a great idea to give your community artists the chance to perform before an audience like that. And what an audience! Generous in their attention, more than willing to go in any direction you want to take them. A good way to end my trip.

So tomorrow I have to get up before dawn even thinks about cracking. My plane leaves at 8:20 and the first underground from Vicky’s neck of the woods leave at 5:30. That’s the one I’ll be on. Sounds like fun. Anybody want to come with me?

London Town

2007-01-31T07:04:00.000-08:00

I know I was going to be keeping this thing more up to date than I am. No excuses, but things do get out of hand sometimes. Life takes over and reality retaliates. I just checked back on myself and the last entry was Christmas time. That was quite a while ago. Damn. Jesus just keeps getting born, doesn’t he? Then they raise him up and kill him again. Then the stone gets rolled away and there he his playing in a rock band wearing a stylized loin cloth from one of those Paris design firms. I sure wouldn’t want to be his manager…

So here I am in London, just off of Oxford Street, working away in an Internet café. I know I should have a lap top of my own. Hell, I should have my own air plane. But I like these places – they have great high speed connections, they’re cheap, and you get to sit next to African students writing home to wherever it is they come from about whatever it is they are doing here. And since the English have been slowing but surely doing away with all that smoking that they used to do (and everybody else who was in the same room with them) its a whole lot easier to move around and get sociable.

I’ve been here for about a week and a half now. When I arrived I brought the weather with me from Seattle – the great lingering Siberian freeze that shut down almost everything. Also the wind storm that put the lights out. The day after I got off the plane a wind storm hit with 100 mile an hour winds and that ain’t no joke. The BBC did a projection using 50,000 computerized graphs to show what global warming is likely to do and it ain’t pretty. Still, ole terminally positive me, I figure we’ll just struggle our way through it like we have everything else. I just don’t figure we’re done for and I’m not ready to throw in the towel until the mastodon is at the door its great jousting tusks are rending through the wood frames right into my intestinal fortitude…

The gigs have been going well. All except the one that was canceled, though I guess that one was spotless. Hard to make a mistake when you’re not even there. I’ve got four more to do and I hope to run out of CDs by the time I get to the end. I also hope to get home with enough money to pay the rent, which will be late. And maybe to turn on whatever utility may have been turned off. I love the city but they have a way of disconnecting things when they don’t get their money. And I left on a shoe string….

But things are looking up. I am already booked fort next summer’s Trowbridge Festival and I may even have a line a good Irish agent. I’d love to get the whole thing going on a better level. There’s also a BBC Radio 2 guy named Mike Harding who really likes my stuff. He’s been threatening interview me but nothing has happened so far. If it does though it could be just the kick that I need.

Anyway………… I type with two fingers so it takes me a bit longer than the other people in here. They are all clattering away like a team of literate insects, happily writing great vast multiplicities into the cybersphere. Me, I just slam those keys like I mean it. And I do, but I have to go off to the train station for tonight’s gig. I’ll get back again to you later.

Christmas Day

2006-12-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day

So I had my little conversation with bank district manager. He has a face like plaster, never smiles, never changes. Eyes like marbles. Mister Stiff. Is that your Hummer out back I asked. Yes. Does it make you feel like your part of the war effort? Like you’re driving through Baghdad liberating the ungrateful Iraqis? Mister Stone Face stared at me. Is there something wrong with my car? Yes, I said, it’s a military vehicle that you drive through my civilian neighborhood; and furthermore, there are twice as many cameras in here as there were last years, there are new dividing walls around the desks so that it looks like a police booking station, there’s a camera right here staring at my face, and there’s a fingerprint ink pad; and the district manager drives a Hummer. Yes, I would say there’s something wrong with your car. This whole place is turning into a fortress. Mister Stone Face never blinked. I was cashing a check. How would like your cash? In cash, I say. Without changing a molecule of his personality he counted out three twenties and a few ones. Thanks, I said and walked out.

Now when he sees me he moves away. There’s a young woman teller there who when things are not too busy will have a conversation with me. She had never heard of depleted uranium. She has now…

It’s been too long since I’ve written in this thing. I don’t think I can fill in everything but I’ll skim around. We had a snow storm – well, in Seattle terms. Shut everything down for a day or so. A lot of ice everywhere. Too many hills, the buses couldn’t run. I had a dentist appointment and had to go downtown, which was fairly easy but by the time I was headed back it getting real cold in the shadows of late afternoon. My bus took me half way and then stopped. The driver put everybody off and told us to cross the street over there and there’ll be shuttle. A frozen man on the other side where we were supposed to wait said that he had been there for two and a half hours and nothing had come. I walked the rest of the way.

The neighbor’s pipes burst, which is on the same line as ours. The whole thing had to be dug up and wee had no water for a couple of days. Then the wind storm hit with gusts up to seventy miles an hour. Sounded like low flying planes. We have a lot of big trees around. Luckily nothing hit our house but we all lost power and a lot of trees went down all over town. Big ones crashing into houses and across the roads. A big tree by the bank fell over onto a car and crushed it. It wasn’t the Hummer. That’s a shame.

This is Christmas day and things are just getting back to normal for the weather. Cold but not freezing. Seattle weather. I just booked my ticket for England. I’m flying out in three weeks. I really excited about this trip. I haven’t been there in ages. I like the agent a lot. I think this might be a turning point into better working times. That would be great.

I’ll fill in more soon….

November Notes

2006-11-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

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…

Back Home Again

2006-10-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Just got back from tour and it was a good one! I started out in Taipei, Taiwan with the Migrations Music Festival. A lot of really good international acts from places like Hungary and Japan, Crete, India. I got to jam with a classical Chinese lute player. Most of my stage sets were paired with a poet named Yongfeng. Although I don’t understand the language – he speaks and write in Mandarin – I trust his poetry because of my interactions with him on a personal level. And he has translated a few of his pieces for me. He writes about the farmers and the economics of their lives in the face of the WTO. Yongfeng was instrumental in stopping a dam project that would have flooded the homes and fields of thousands of people in and around Meinong, a village in the countryside. Anyway, the way we did it on stage was that he would describe the story line of the song I was going to sing and then he would read a poem. Then I would sing my song. Back and forth like that. It’s a little disconcerting at first – you don’t have the luxury of building up a flow – but it works and its an honor to be enfolded into another culture’s language like that.

The festival took place at a park in Taipei, in a large amphitheater. Christoph was the sound engineer so the sound was good. Christoph is from Germany and we have worked together several times. He does most of the sound for the festival projects that these people put on – “these people” being the production company in Taiwan. They are called Trees Music and if anybody is the head of it that person would be Shefong. And she is one smart organizer. Shefong believes that a festival should not just have music and entertainment for people but also cross cultural intelligence, political contents and so on. And so there was the other half of the festival that took place at the Culture Park a few blocks away in a converted brewery. There were music workshops, and also films. While I was waiting to do my own workshop I walked in on a screening of footage from Iraq. The woman who was hosting it was from Japan – that is a different language and so she spoke mostly in English which was lucky for me. I stood in the back as the renegade Yank and saw her explain what should be obvious to everybody by now: the insurgents come from the victims. America blows up a bunch of families and the relatives get mad. Anything unclear about that?

I wish our festivals were more like the one in Taiwan. I think that over time they will be.

My last gig there was in a town called Chiayi, in the Experimental Theater. Again I shared the stage with Yongfeng. Afterwards we all went out to eat traditional Taiwan food – which means lots of it. I flew out the next day.

Slamming into San Francisco with one day to stumble around in a lag state and then hooking up with Citizens Band for our west coast tour. Citizens band is from Olympia and they are Grace, Harry, Jim, and Eliza. We started in San Luis Obispo at a party for Harry’s mother’s 80th birthday. It was at the library and there were tons of people there. Then we went up to San Francisco where our original gig had been cancelled due to personal difficulties on the promoter’s end. At the last minute we had been able to substutu5te a house concert at Faith Petric’s place. Thank you Faith! Then up to Ukiah for another house concert at the home of John McCowen. That was one of the best house concerts ever.

And if you don’t know… A house concert is just what it sounds like, a concert in somebody’s house. No middle, no music business. No Clear Channel. And most of the time no sound system. They are the best of all possible worlds. Anyway…

Next stop was Muddy’s Hot Cup in Arcata, up in Humboldt County. That was a coffee house, and a good one too. We set up the sound gear but didn’t use it. It put too much distance between the performer and the audience. In my experience there is a size component, a line you cross where a sound system is necessary on the larger end and a determent on the smaller. Muddy’s was right in the middle and we decided to go acoustic. Good call.

Out next morning early for a trip up to Oregon and a place called Takilma. If you look at the map and follow the road that goes from Crescent City, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon, you will see a town right in between them called Cave Junction. Takilma is just off the road from that. It’s too small to make it on the map. But its huge in other ways. Takilma was founded as an alternative community in 1970 or there abouts and now thrives as one the best and most constructive intentional communities I have been to. They have their own radio station with internet broadcasting and their own school and community center. We played in the Dome School, which really isn’t a dome anymore, but the people came out and we put on a good show for them. Next morning Harry and I went on the radio to play live on Space Man’s show. Then we went over to Patrick’s place to see the photo’s that his uncle had taken all those years ago of the jazz greats – Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Billie Holiday, and on and on. Great photographs, real important historical stuff. And for me there were his 75 Lightnin’ Hopkins records, all the great big vinyl things like the ones I used to carry under my shirt as a teenager riding back from the far flung record stores trying to build up my collection when most people had never even heard of Lightnin’. All in all it was wonderful morning.

The last gig was up in Corvallis at a coffee house called The Interzone. Again no sound system, though this room was a bit weird. Something about the geometry of the place made it swallow certain frequencies so that even thought it was small you had to sing and play louder than you thought you should. But sing and play we did! With a great improvisational rip at the end of it.

So I’m home now, taking it slow for a day or so before getting back to work. And looking forward to more gigs and more travel.

On tour with Citizens Band

2006-10-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's getting late... It's Wednesday night, October 4th and I have a plane to catch at 4 AM. I'm going to Taipei in Taiwan. I will be there for about 6 days and will do 3 concerts in connection with the Migrations Music Festival. Then I will fly back to san Francisco to join up with Citizens Band from Olympia and together we will tour up the coast to finally return to Seattle on or about the 21st. So here's the west coast dates. I know that my main web site is quite often horrendously out of date, that's why I started this. I hope to have the problem fixed soon but in the mean time this is where you'll find out more about what's going on. I also have a MySpace page, by the way. And there's a calendar on that.

So without further ado, here's the itinerary:

October 14 - San Luis Obispo Public Library, 955 Palm Street, SLO CA, 6 - 10 PM Free admission This is a 80th birthday bash for Harry's mother Lynne Levine (Harry plays in the band) and a benefit for Code Pink (Lynne is a member)

October 15th – Station 40, 3030 16th Street at Mission, San Francisco, CA, 7 PM, $5 - $10

October 16th - Ukiah house concert, 6 PM potluck, 7 PM music, call (707) 462-3210 for details and reservations

October 17th - Muddy's Hot Cup, 1603 G Street, Arcata, CA, 7 PM, phone (707) 825-6833

October 18th - Takilma Community Building/Dome School, 9367 Takilma Road, cave Junction, OR, phone (541) 592-2915, 7 PM

October 19th - The Interzone, 1563 NW Monroe Street, Corvallis, OR, phone (541) 754-5965, 8 PM

October 20th - TBA

Who pays for this war?

2006-09-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

who pays for this war
does everybody pay for this war
old money family designs
private schools and blood lines
do they pay for this war
how about the corporate execs
and their banker buddies cuttin’ the checks
do they pay for this war

who pays for this war
do the rich people pay for this war
Donald Trump and his confidantes
eatin’ in the thousand dollar restaurants
do they pay for this war
palace suite in the big hotel
how about Halliburton and Bechtel
do they pay for this war

who pays for this war
do the generals pay for this war
spit-polished brass-jockey climbin’ the ranks
Colin Powell and Tommy Franks
do they pay for this war
logical players in the Great Game
career movers stakin’ their claims
do they pay for this war

who pays for this war
I’ll tell you who pays for this war
some homeless Vietnam vet
when they cut off the social safety net
to pay for this war
some single mother in welfare duress
when they tell her she’s just gonna have to do with less
to pay for this war
some teenage innocent who joined in the fight
gonna have nightmares now for the rest of his life
to pay for this war
and a whole lot of people way over there
who got caught in the cross hairs
to pay for this war
that’s who pays for this war

so don’t give me that hypocracy
about makin’ the world safe for democracy
white bread money and brown blood soup
ain’t it always the same that way
the people without any power have to die
for the people with the big powerful lie

Back To Sunny Weather

2006-09-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

We’re back to sunny weather again. I don’t know what’s up with that but its enjoyable while its here. People say things like, “this isn’t normal for Seattle.” But if I’ve learned anything in the 35 years I’ve been here its that there is no “normal” weather. I remember in the old days if it started raining hard I would just stand under a doorway overhang and wait for it to pass. It always did. And I recall the Satsop Rock Festival way back in 71 or 72 when I was on stage for over an hour because one of the sound companies was on strike – nobody could plug in any instruments but the microphones worked. Anyway, it was raining and people were all wet and covered with mud. And from the stage I could see that the clouds were broken and that the break was coming our way. It was way off behind the audience. So I got everybody singing “stop the rain, stop the rain,” and we all kept it up until that break came overhead and the rain stopped. For years I was remembered as the guy with the magical powers who made the sun come out. I think that’s how religions are started.

Jim Hinde’s son Nate got clobbered down in Pioneer Square last Friday night. After the bars closed, making it actually Saturday morning. He was there with his buddies just doing what young buddies do. Tons of people milling around, drink, smoke, whatever. One of them winds up on the pavement stones being pummeled by a stranger and Nate jumps in to break it up. Somebody comes in from the side with an iron bar or a pipe or a set of brass knuckles and Nate winds up in the hospital with a caved in face. Brain surgery to take the bone fragments out, reconstructive surgery to give him his shape back. He’s out now. Stitches on his head like Karloff in that big monster suit.

What’s going on anyway?

I guess I’m one of those people who don’t allow for the random theory of human events. Things happen for a reason and I don’t mean like god or karma or any of that. I mean that with all the ugly muscle posturing that my country is doing these days it only makes sense that there would be more of this down on the ground. Ever see a Hummer go by? Arrogant, aren’t they? Militaristic. Costs a fortune of stolen money to own one. I walked up to a guy driving one last summer – it was bright yellow and he was going through the Market where the traffic is real slow. I caught his eye. “Kinda like driving your wallet, isn’t it?” He didn’t respond.

It seems to me that if you engineer a system to tempt everybody with the glitter and flash of the fast cars and the fast money and the fast sex, and then only let a few of us actually get it, you’re going to have trouble. Mean, angry chips on disillusioned shoulders. Nothing more dangerous than a dead ender with nothing to look forward to and a feeling that he’s been lied to. And that the liar is laughing at him. It’s enough to make you just want to go out and break a few heads. That’s what the Army does.

Or you could get smart, put some thinking into that rage. And that’s a whole other paradigm that I think we’ll get to before too long. We have to, there’s no other way.

I’m reading Danny Morrison’s book “Then the Walls Came Down.” It’s his prison letters from inside Long Kesh. Its wonderful, they’re so human and full of life. Danny’s Northern Irish, Belfast, and I know him from the old days. He was publicity director for Sinn Fein and spent five years at her majesty’s pleasure for republican activities, from 1990 to 1995. He’s an author now with several titles to his credit. We recently reconnected via the internet. I sent him a few CDs and he sent me some books. I like knowing people who have accomplished things in their lives. In some ways I think the world is like a workshop, its just that we don’t all have access to all the tools. That has to be addressed.

Rain Again

2006-09-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

rain again
not the torrents of Midwest drenchings
but the simple seepage, from cloud mist to ground soak
- grayness hunkers over the far mountains
and the winds blow wet with distance
this is the real autumn of the upper wet left coast

this good seeping rain
that feeds all our roots
and washes the residual grudge
from yesterday’s bad start

in days to come
there will be storm clouds of weather
against the gray mountains
there will be white snows on sunset peaks
in days to come
there will be long, deep and interminable darknesses
bringing all the shadows of emotion
in days to come
we will hunker down and get real close
riding on the bare back the beast itself
in days to come
it will rise
and we will also rise
and we will dare
and we will be face to face
and we may win
and we may not
but we will
and we will again
in days to come

After the busker fest

2006-09-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

9-20-2006

Seattle has returned to its roots. The weather comes down low and hugs the ground, soft gray rolling wetness covers everything with a sheen that glistens into itself. Its not exactly raining and its too slow and gentle for drizzle. I call it seeping. The sky seeps on a day like this. Magic.

Well, it took me a couple of days to recover form the festival. It was a good burn. I had to be there at 7 in the morning to start setting up and I had things going the night before so I didn't get to bed until 1 am. I set the alarm for 5 but of course sleep wouldn't come for long and I kept waking up all night. I was excited. So I got up at 4, made the coffee, fixed the breakfast, checked on the weather, and got ready for the day. I had packed up the car the night before so all I really had to do was get in and drive.

I had two of the hats - the big ones that Niceol had made for the first festival five years ago. She made them out of plastic buckets and covered them with black duct tape, fixing brims onto them also with tape. They look like enormous top hats and they're supposed to be set up in front of each stage. Jim Hinde had the other one.

I had one of the dry erase boards for announcing the acts. I had the fabric to hang behind the south stage, plus the fasteners to hang it with. I had the table cloth for the merchandise table. I had a rug for the north stage where I would be sharing MC duties. I had my guitar (duh) and CDs. And I had coats and hats and my boots in case it got real rainy.

Things actually went quite smoothly. We all know how to do it now - how to set up the canopies, outline the stages, set the sound. It's an established event and the city has embraced it. The official starting time was 11 but there were some acts that started early. I had my digital camera and ran around all day taking pictures of everything. I would introduce someone on the north stage, go out in front and take a few shots, and then run down to the middle or Post Alley stage and shoot, and then down to the south stage and shoot, and then head back to emcee the act off stage and the next one on. As I had had only about 2 and a half hours sleep the night before it was a good idea to keep moving so I wouldn't pass out.

Jim Hinde had set up his sound system and his son Nate ran it most of the time. Jim and I shared emcee duties. Every stage had at least two people at it. My set was at 3:00 and I was ready - floating in that sleep deprivation space where everything is artistic and there are no mistakes. My buddy Joe Martin came down and played harmonica with me on three songs. The sets were 25 minutes long so I only had 5 songs all together. Joe is a social worker and one of the founders of the Pike Market Clinic. It only seems right that a festival celebrating the Market and the return of Seattle to itself would have Joe there. People seemed to like what we did - we finished with an improv piece about the festival and Seattle. Niceol was there with her parents who, she says, are religious conservatives - though I think her language might be stronger. They liked some of my stuff, not all of it. Which is normal.

We had good crowds all day and no complaints. Breaking down at the end was a little sad but welcome as well. It meant that I would soon be able to go to sleep. Of course that was not to happen right away as Jim and friends had arranged for us all to go out to dinner near their house - which is on the other side of town from mine. That meant loading the gear, then unloading it at their place, then going to the cafe, then waiting to get in, then ordering, eating, paying, going back to their place, and me driving back to mine. By the time I lay down I was really too tired to sleep and I tossed around all night.

But damn! What a gas. Anybody reading this who does street performing, if you want to come down and be a part of it next year, just remember: next year it will be September 16th. Go to the Guild site http://pikemarketbuskers.org/ and get an application. They should be on line by April or May. You have to actually be a street performer - this is not a showcase for up and coming bands. But do apply and do come to the festival. And hey, come down early at 7 am - we could use the help.

Echoes Of Dawn

2006-09-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

September 16th

Dawn slips in and starts making noise pretty early these days. No use trying to sleep once you've decided not to anymore so I get up. This house sits on a ravine where a street should be, at least on paper. Squirrels, rats, possum, lots a birds. Sometimes they sound pretty big, like a bear or something, an animal truck on fur wheels driving around on the roof. It rains sometimes when I'm sleeping so I don't hear it but I wake up to the wet and the glisten of fresh wet.

There's a a community radio conference in town today. I'm doing a panel on the importance of community radio to the independent musician. Duh. As if that even needs to be addressed. Sometimes I think these things are put together like a weekend with the family - a reason for everybody to hang out. Anyway, it'll be interesting. There's three of us on the panel: me, a rapper named Silver Shadow, and a jazz singer named Datri Bean. It'll be worth it just to meet them: different circles, different songs. Then later on Amy Goodman shows up and dose a talk at Town Hall. I've known Amy for a number of years now and have dropped in on her New York studio. She plays my music from time to time. I'm not scheduled to play anything at her gig tonight bu you never know. She might make a request so I'll have my guitar just in case. The organizers have decided that they don't want another "white male" with a guitar so I don't think anybody's doing anything. But if Amy makes a request, then... You get the picture.

Gotta get my ticket to Taipei today. They'll reimburse me on the other side when I get there. It'll cost about $850. I was going to give that money to FASTRAX for CD manufacture but I'll have to put that off. Money. Isn't it great? It's an historical (hysterical) social agreement that people kill each other for. One of these days we'll change our minds and send those bankers packing. Until then, hey buddy, can you spare a eight hundred and fifty dollars?

Did a little digging last night to see how Ward Churchill is doing. Ward's the UC Boulder prof who got in all that trouble for saying the obvious: that there were reasons why those people flew those airplanes into the Trade Towers. He used the term "little Eichmanns," assuming that everybody knew who Eichmann was. They didn't of course, and everybody got mad. The right wingers wanted his head on a platter. Still do. I've known Ward for 20 years. I played at his wedding. And just to make things simple: all Eichmann ever did was sign the papers to put the Jews on the railroad trains. Period. Bureaucracy. That's all. A system wherein everybody can say, "I didn't do it." "This is just my job." That was just his job. So if you want to find out what's going on with Ward check out this link: http://www.wardchurchill.net/ And for god's sake, think for yourself....

Gotta get going. Try to get some more CDs from the manufacturer. Spread them around at the conference. Sell some tomorrow at the Busker Festival. Come on down - it'll be a blast!

Crunch Time

2006-09-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

September 15th

Friday.... The Busker festival is only two days away. This is the crunch. I am waiting minute by minute for a call from the radio station that we might get to go on air and do a little promo. After all this is the only city with an official Buskers' Week and also the only city with a festival run by the buskers themselves. We'll all meet down there at 7 am on Sunday and start to put things together. Two sound stages and one acoustic. 39 acts. There's a 350 pound planter that needs to be moved for the acoustic stage - I'm sitting that one out as I almost threw my back out on it last year. Sound systems need to be set up for the other two stages - north and south.. Canopies, merchandise tables, benches for the audience. Each stage has two emcees. I'll tade off on the north stage with Jim Hinde, Lance Tigner and Niceol Blue are doing the acoustic Post Alley Stage, and Emery Carl and one other (don't know who) are doing the south stage. This is the fifth annual so I expect a good turnout. It's free and everyone seems to enjoy it.

The weather around here is starting to turn, with gray clouds coming in and hanging around all day, and a good watery breeze chilling the early morning. The ocean is just a stone's throw away and that's part of the beauty of this place. That great big salt water sound that comes down through all the islands and lazily washes up to the piers. The mountains off to the west with the ocean behind them. It's getting dark earlier every day it seems and pretty soon it'll be wood burning time and dark at 5 o'clock. It'll stay that way for ages and then sometime next year it'll break, and a brand new flower will emerge from the wood pile. And it will be spring again.

So I have to be ready for the radio today, it may and may not happen. Everything else that can be done has been done. PSAs, posters, mailing lists. Crossing our fingers and rolling with it. Hope it doesn't rain.

My set it on the north stage at 3. Joe Martin is going to come down with his sons John and Brendan. I give them guitar lessons every week or so. Joe's an old friend, a social worker and founder of the Pike Market Clinic. He's Boston Irish, plays the harmonica and knows a million rebel songs. I asked him to bring his harps. If he's coming down anyway maybe he'd want to jump up on stage with me and play a few tunes. He has agreed.

I don't have a deity but if I did I'd pray for good weather.

Nothin Much To Say

2006-09-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

September 8

Sometimes there's nothing much to say so you don't say much. That's okay, isn't it? I saw Bob Dylan on TV last night doing an iPod commercial. He was sitting on a stool wearing that strange Zorro suit that he likes and singing a blues song, solo acoustic. Right there off to the side, in front, and at times almost on top of him, was a liquid and lithesome raven-haired beauty undulating in dusky sexual trance dance and holding an iPod, it's white mellenial wiring glowing up to her ears. It was very strange. I wish I could have seen the Victoria's Secret commercial that he did last year. Way to go Bob. The Times They Have A-Changed.

Saw some soldiers going through the Pike Market this afternoon. They all seemed to be in their thirties. I wanted to go up to them and say, "You don't have to go. We will help you if you refuse. Just say no." But in these times that's probably a federal offence, like interfering with a police officer only more so. I saw one blond haired thirty something woman hoot and give a big wave and say, "You guys are the best! Love you!" I wondered what they were actually doing that made them so good. Sitting at a desk in Fort Lewis? I don't think its smart to jump to rapid fire conclusions like that.

Artis and I went around to a few businesses today at the Market getting some last minute sponsorships for the festival. It's happening next weekend on the 17th. Buskers' Week starts on Monday. Seattle is the only city in the country that has a Buskers' Week. How about that! Eat that one, Paul Allen! Emery carl - the skinny tall man who balances guitars on his chin while doing hoola hoops, yeah that guy - and myself, and Artis are going to go around town that week and play at different places, pass pout flyers, do a signboard thing. I think that Buskers' week is something to be proud of, and so is the festival. And so is the fact that we have done so much with what we had.

Speaking of Paul Allen.... No, I'd rather not. I'll let this go for now. Sometimes there's just not much to say.

Summer slows down

2006-09-05T23:55:00.000-07:00

September 5

Bonnie Raitt was in town last Sunday. Its always good to see her - she's so normal. She's a great singer and fabulous slide guitar player - her band kicks real serious stuff and she has a wonderful connection with the audience. But she's normal. Get her off stage and she's normal - just someone you could hang out with. I've known her since about 1979 when she came up to me while I was writing a letter outside a studio complex in LA. I think it was called The Crossroads Of the World, or something like that, and there was a statue with no arms, and I was writing about how that statue would probably like it if his body was finished, when a pretty red haired woman came right up and sat down and said, "Hi, I'm Bonnie Raitt. I'm a fan." There were some tapes of me floating around and she got a hold of one. I barely knew who she was so I probably changed the subject or said thank you, its been too long to remember. But we've know each other since then. She's a great writer too. She's all around smart and talented. And she works all the time. That woman is not lazy!

I had comp tickets and back stage passes so I asked Niceol Blue if she would want to go. Niceol is part of our Buskers' Guild. She was the chair for two years running. She said yes, of course, but could she bring her girlfriend Orla. Fine with me but I only had one extra ticket. Not to worry, Orla assured me, she had good luck with this sort of thing most of the time. I won't go into details but it was all good to go all the way through. And we all got to hang out later on with Bonnie after the show. Joel Tepp was there too. Joel played in Bonnie's band ages ago and also played with Little Feat. He's a wonderful musician and a great guy. And he just lives up the street from me... So we made a commitment to play some tunes together and see what happens. Could be good.

Busker Fest is coming up on the 17th. And I'm on the festival committee so this is crunch time. I can only imagine what its like to put together a larger festival like Bumbershoot or Folklife. This thing is tiny and it still takes the wind out of you. Check out the link: http://pikemarketbuskers.org/ Click on the "festival" tab on the left hand side. And come on down if you can, its a blast! Today we got all the show odors on the stages correct so that the program can be printed. I have a logo to get ready for the Swingside Cafe. Actually, Brad's Swingside Cafe - I should say it correctly. More about that later. People who sponsor stages and so on get special mentions and I have some tasks to perform in that regard. I also have been doing a bit of the publicity work. We may get some TV, its hard to tell with those folks. Also radio. All the press releases are out.

Before I forget, somebody put up a song of mine on YouTube. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." It's pretty cool. I can barely watch it because I have a modem but if you have cable or whatever you won't have any problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slt0Iq72MY8

I'm going back to Taiwan and I'm really excited about that! I was there for a festival last December and now the same people are putting on another festival in Taipei in October. It's very interesting to be there - the people are wonderful. And its such a liberating experience to be in a place where they don't even use an alphabet you can recognize! All you can do is laugh. It challenges your trust in humanity. I'll write more on this later. Right now I have to sleep... I'm cleaning out the garage and that, let me tell you, is a major excavation.

August 26

2006-08-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

I am not responsible

it was somewhere back in the depths of things
that someone said to someone else
“you can do that for me,
I’ll put you in charge”

and a secret was born
like a small invisible signal,
an engine of hidden
agendas

“I’ll put you in charge”
- and all that it leads to -
“I’m only doing my job”
“that’s not my department”

the Nuremberg Hiding Place

hot metal blisters will rain on Bagdad
and nobody will say
“it was my fault”

everyone will say
“they made me do it”

dead smoldering bodies
that somebody else killed

how do you bring somebody else to justice?
when you put them on trial how do you question them?
do you ask them if somebody else was there
on the night of the murder?
the defense will say it wasn’t my client it was somebody else
and the jury will find the defendant innocent
by reason of somebody else

like slippery shimmers,
the mirror mirage,
reality runs through
your fingers

and all you’ve got left
is somebody else

nobody did anything

relax
close your eyes
you’re getting sleepy

repeat after me,
“I am not responsible”

“I am not responsible”

August 18

2006-08-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

August 18

Not as frequent as I'd like but its better than the way it used to be. I would do a journal entry and let it sit for six months. The Veterans For Peace (VFP) national convention was real good. I was only there for two days, and I kick myself for that. I missed the AWOL who turned himself in at a press conference. He had been interrogating people in Iraq with dogs and just couldn't take it anymore. So he disappeared and kept on the run for about a year, finally decided to go public. I guess he was surrounded by a cordon of VFP folks - Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vietnam vets, you name it. There's even a WWII vet there. That happened on Friday. I showed up on Saturday and spent the whole day. I know a lot of people from over the years and many of them showed up. S Brian Willson was there - that's not a spelling mistake and he was not in the Beach Boys. He's one of the most serious and dedicated people I know. Here's his web site: http://www.brianwillson.com/ Brian lost part of both of legs when a weapons train ran over him in Concord, California. He was sitting on the track to protest and perhaps to interrupt the shipments of white phosphorous to Central America. The train was speeding up when it hit him. Now he uses artificial legs and rides a bicycle that you power with your arms. He rode up to Seattle from Eugene!

Saturday night VFP gave a lifetime achievement award to Abe Osherov, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Abe is another amazing man - he's 90 something years old and shows no signs of slowing down or mellowing out. And he never loses sight. It was a wonderful thing to see him on the stage with 19 and 20 year old Iraq Veterans Against the War - a cross generational movement.

I played a few songs just as dinner was being served and I might as well not have been there at all. Its an old musician's rule: never play when dinner is being served. I wouldn't listen either. Actually, Jim Hinde played right after me and was fairly well received. His songs are slower. And I think people were eating by then... But the best part of my set was just as I was getting ready Shep Gurwits comes up and says, "hey, remember me?" Jesus! Shep Gurwitz - I hadn't seen him in at least 10 years. Shep is Lew Gurwitz's brother. Lew was a lawyer working on the Peltier case way back in those days. I knew Lew from a million different realities in a million different places from Boston to Standing Rock to Rapid River. He died of a heart attack some years ago. But Shep is still there and damn, it was great to see him. After a while we went outside and I sang him a bunch of songs from the old days and a few from the new. It was a warm night, I was singing with my eyes closed and I felt someone else sit down with us on the low wall in front of the building. When I opened my eyes I saw an intense young man 20 years old or so. Shep says he's an Iraq vet and he needs someone to talk to. Shep says he'll talk to him - "I was a paratrooper, you can't scare me" he says. The young man asks me if I have any songs for a returning soldier. So I sang Head Full Of Pictures. I think he liked it. He thanked me and left.

Next morning a bunch of us went up to the Canadian border at Blaine - the Peace Arch. There's a park there and you can walk on over to the Canada side or they can walk over to the US. We had a picnic. There were us Yankees from down south and there were some draft resistors from the Vietnam days who came by to say hello. And some Canadians who made it clear that they were ready to accept resistors again when the need arises. And it already has. The Pentagon - that paragon of morality and intelligence - has estimated that are currently 40,000 deserters. People who I talked to said well, if the Pentagon says that then you can pretty much double it and be closer to the truth. 80,000 deserters. That's a good sign. We need that. And they need us. So I ate a little food and sang a few songs. There were a bunch of speakers and a labor choir from Vancouver. After a while we all had to leave - to catch planes and head back home. Shep was there but I didn't see him afterwards. We're talking now through the emails.

Next day, Monday, the 14th, was Guild festival committee meeting - getting things ready for the busker fest in September. Jim had the T shirts together. There were questions about awnings and stage platforms, all the usual. There was an unfortunate blow up and Artis left the meeting, later vowing to resign from the Guild, resign from Real Change, leave Seattle, not perform at the festival. Just a whole bunch of stuff. It remains to be seen how serious he is about all that. Seattle - especially busking Seattle - would be much poorer without him.

I just heard from Mikael Wiehe in Sweden - one of my favorite singers. I had sent him my latest CD, Head Full Of Pictures. In his email he said that he liked it the best of any I had sent. And that it gave him ideas, which is "the best I can say a bout a CD." Well, his music gives me ideas too so maybe I know what he means.

August 8

2006-08-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night, August 8, 2006... These days pile up like lumber. Living in a bad house, waiting for it to fall down. I just read a story from the LA Times this morning about how the US soldiers who raped that 14 year old Iraqi girl went back out and cooked up chicken wings after killing her family. Kind of makes you numb...How do you respond as an artist? Most of the time we are told that politics and art don't mix. It's easy to believe – convenient in fact - because then you never have to risk losing an audience or a gig. Or getting punched in the nose. But it’s a lame excuse and doesn’t hold any water. Supporting the status quo and keeping your mouth shut in dreadful times is just like working for The Man. You might as well be on the payroll.

I remember years ago in Ireland when Christy Moore was doing the Moving Hearts - 1980, 81. Those were sharp contested days – things were heating up in the North. And the Hearts were a very political band. They played every Tuesday and Wednesday at the Baggett Inn (The Maggot Bin) in Dublin and the houses were always packed – people turned away at the door. I did a lot of gigs with them. One night I was sitting with a famous traditional singer and I asked her what she thought of the band. She said she didn’t like them, and when I asked her why she said, “Politics and music don’t mix.” I looked around and the room was completely full. Obviously politics and music were mixing very well that night…

I think the trick is to politicize the culture, rather than to dig into the deep trough of left wing ghetto art. I don’t really trust people who only do political songs – because we don’t only lead political lives. We play games and tell stories, we laugh and dance, we make love and argue, we travel and meet strange and wonderful people. To become a strenuous brick of nerves over it all doesn’t really help. Rather than stress about how to get more people to go to the Radical Utopian EcoFest maybe it would make more sense to infiltrate the greater culture at large. Every festival should have thought music.

Thought music.

This week is the national convention of Veterans For Peace, of which I am an associate member. They are a great group! Jim Hinde and I are singing at the banquet dinner on Saturday night. Jim’s a combat Navy vet. I call myself a “civilian veteran of the Vietnam War.” I was on the ground running scared, changing my name, heading for the east coast. Wars do that to people – everything gets warped. So Saturday is the dinner, then on Sunday I travel with a bunch of people up to the Peace Arch at the Canadian border. We walk to the border and meet with a bunch of draft resisters from the Vietnam days and we have a picnic. What a wonderful idea.

August 5, 2006

2006-08-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Seafair Weekend, lots of noise. The big bad Blue Angels doing their dangerous acrobatics over the houses. Slamming audio-cacophonic hydroplain races on the lake. Lots of drinking, lots of trash, lots of traffic. Why do people go to this stuff? If I had PTSD I'd be hiding under the bed. It's like a great big recruiting display for the overstimulated youths.

Oh well. There are more important things to do. There's a film crew in town doing a documentary on busking. I'm the guy who made it legal back in '74 so they want to talk to me. I'm also a founding member of the Pike Market performers' Guild (PMPG), along with Artis and Jim Hinde. So they want to talk to all of us. Briggs, Lance Tigner, Twister Thomas. We all sat out on the sun baked concrete beside the too expensive French restaurant and had conversations with the cameras. It was a blast. Niceol is in Ireland so she wasn't there. Emery was at a funeral. Dave was nowhere to be seen.

I was hesitant at first - movie people from "down there" coming to my town. But they turned out to be real cool. Real nice people with good ideas. There's more to come tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

Here we go...

2006-07-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

July 25, 2006

This is my first blog and my first blog posting. I knew I had to get something going or the brickbats would never cease. "Hey, what's up with your site? Are you for real or what?" So this will be where the "journal" stuff goes. It's easy, even a moron can handle it.

Did a gig in Twisp last weekend, Saturday the 22nd. The Merc Playhouse. My old friends Bill Davie and Sue Misao. Sue put it on - did the promo, secured the date. She works at the local paper. Bill ran the sound. John Weeks came by and played fiddle on the last few songs. It was real good.

Sue does a column at the Methow Valley News - find it under "Valley Life" - http://www.methowvalleynews.com/ Bill does radio at KOZI - here's his blog: http://lakesidelounge.blogspot.com/

Back in Seattle now for a bit. Got a gig this coming weekend at Brad's Swingside Cafe with Jim Hinde. Jim's a real good songwriter guy. Vietnam vet. http://www.jimhinde.com/ We'll be playing in the back patio starting around 7. It's a great place for a show if you're wandering around the Fremont district in Seattle.

Also a few Busker Festival meetings this week. That's right - the Busker Festival. The 5th Annual! Damn, how did we do that...?

So I gotta run now but I'll keep this up. Here's a good web site for anybody's who's a little worn out with celebrity. It's called "The Gone-Eliminate Bono Campaign." Good for a laugh.

http://www.eliminatebono.com/index2.html