Okay, I have a long one here, 20 minutes or so of xmas carol songs–I neglected to sing along, so it’s just the piano part.
Then I did two improvs in that same recording session that I’m calling ‘xmas stuff’ & ‘more xmas stuff’.
And the final upload, a left-over from a few days back, totally non-holiday-related.
Enjoy…
Important News (2013Dec09) by Xper Dunn (via StreetArticles)
Monday, December 09, 2013 7:57 PM
If I stop and think about it, I can barely remember what was ‘important’ two weeks ago. There was a government shutdown, a chemical weapon in Syria, a record-breaking typhoon devastated the Philippines, a record-breaking cold snap in the whole western half of our country—there were a lot of things. But whenever something newer comes up, suddenly the disasters and shutdowns are passé and the new ‘News’ is all that matters. It happened with Zimmerman’s third arrest on gun-nut charges, it happened when Miley Cyrus twerked her ass on TV, and it happens when a wife throws her brand-new hubby off a cliff during their honeymoon.
It all changes so fast, so randomly, that when something like Nelson Mandela’s death is reported, it almost hits us in the breadbasket (emotionally speaking). The sudden appearance of a terrible loss like that is out of place in the corn-popping procession of fear-mongering, bear-baiting, and trivia that the News normally shows. And, as happened after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, some conservative politicians were publicly embarrassed by archival videos of remarks they made concerning Mandela before history exalted him to his rightful place among world leaders.
The scariest part is that the President and First Lady, former Pres. and Mrs. Bush, and former Pres. and former Secretary of State Clinton—are all attending Mandela’s memorial in South Africa. And this is at the same time that concerns are being expressed about the ethical vacuum that the great leader left in his wake. It may be a tumultuous ceremony with who knows how many dangers for these American Executives, past and present. If I ran the Secret Service, I’d be sweating bullets over the possibility of some chaos or rioting breaking out.
The ‘next president’ was a concern shared by George Washington—our first president of a free nation—and few precedents were set during his office that might be turned to abuse of power by any subsequent office-holder. To wield power without setting precedents is virtually impossible—and like Washington, Mandela’s journey to leadership was a refining fire that few would afterwards endure. Finding a replacement even half as selfless and visionary will be no easy task.
We see this in the reports of young South Africans for whom Apartheid is a chapter in a history book, not something they truly appreciate—paradoxically, because their parents and grandparents had already gone through the struggle. In making their country free, they have taken the steel out of their children’s lives. This Catch-22 of history always appears, taking the children of the generations that fought in the Revolution, or in WWII, or in ending Apartheid, and making them ignorant of the price of their liberty, because it was there from their first memories—a fact of life.
That is not to say that I would be afraid to walk around in South Africa—they’re bound to be more civilized than the denizens of NYC, or at least more polite. Politically, however, there may be numerous factions who are waiting for their own specific ‘shoe’ to drop—and this time and place could easily become a downpour of shoes. Not the best place, perhaps, for the President of the United States—still, Mandela’s legacy deserves that recognition and more.
It’s difficult to describe my feelings about modern history. Two of the greatest heroes of my lifetime were Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela—both men (and their huge followings) were in a pitched battle with Caucasians like myself, except for the fact that those many Caucasians believed in racism. I’m happy to be on the losing side. I’m sad that I look like those idiots, the White Supremacists and the even-worse closeted bigots who never speak straight about their own hate. I’m relieved that the thrust of history is driving this ignorance from modern cultures. I’m afraid that being pale-skinned makes me part of the problem—even though my sentiments are entirely pro-unity. It’s difficult to describe—especially because my problems pale in comparison with all the non-whites who still face a torrent of bias every day.
In my youth, protestors would see TV cameras and start chanting, “The whole world is watching… The whole world is watching….” And back then it was true—broadcast TV had three major networks and those networks decided what ‘the world’ saw. Protest strategy of the time was targeted towards getting a news camera to show up—that was all that mattered. And if the protestors were lucky, Johnny Carson might make a joke about them in his monologue—which legitimized whatever cause it was as being of national importance. It didn’t seem as strange then as it does now to describe it—it was all part of the culture back then.
Nowadays, the whole world is not ‘watching’, the world is surfing the web and texting on its I-phones. The only unification to be found is the phenomenon of the ‘viral video’—the only trouble with these clips is that they are never of any use or value—other than that they are all something we all agree are delightful distractions. Do not hold your breath waiting for the first viral video about trigonometry or astrophysics.
Will South Africa be able to stick to its founding president’s goals and ideals? Only the people of South Africa can decide—I hope for the best for them—nothing would be more tragic than for Nelson Mandela’s dream to die with him.
Sunday, December 01, 2013 3:32 PM
Well, it’s December, at least—long past the appropriate time to bring up the holiday season, to most marketers. But Xmas is not so easily tamed. We give our thanks in November, we give our presents in December, and we give ourselves new goals at New Year’s, the first day of next year. Xmas is in the middle but gets the lion’s share of the focus—giving things to each other calls to that materialism we all have at least a spark of—but it is an event, and in so many senses, more engaging than the more ritualistic form of the ‘book-ends’ holidays.
So I prefer to keep each event to its place and I never begin to play Xmas carols on the piano (and worse yet, sing) until December 1st. Xmas has pressure enough—and in the nadir of Winter—with the expectations needing filling and the mandatory purchases having unbalanced a recently comfortable account balance.
More’s the pity—the Winter fest of Europe’s ancienter times was a blow-out in every sense of the word—even sometimes electing a ‘governing fool’ who gave orders to the gentry—but always including drinking too much, brawling for no reason, and debauchery among the adults of the community. Even burning down a house or two was considered no great extreme—and the first thing the Reformed Protestant Churches did was outlaw the celebration of Twelfth Night, or Yuletide.
This did not stop people from celebrating—and it’s my guess that the raucous outburst of pent-up tension was the very best way to prepare for the group to live all huddled together, indoors, for most of the winter. Today, with stress an unavoidable fact of life, it makes little sense to have the holidays be filled with guilts and repressions—as it is celebrated by a tremendous number of Americans today. But even that undertow of familial and social demands on the celebrants does not define Xmas (no matter what Chevy Chase would have us believe).
I believe that Xmas has become an emotional refuge, its most important function being to allow us the fantasy, at least for a day or few, of thinking our lives have the same simplicity and cyclic regularity that those pagans once enjoyed. Most rituals have been stripped away from modern life, aside from weddings and birthdays—the number of people with ashes on their brow on Ash Wednesday is so sparse that it can disturb non-Catholics coming upon it the first time that day—they impulsively tell one he or she has a smudge on their forehead.
Those fortunate enough to be raising children focus the entirety of the ‘Season’ to their children’s (hopefully) treasured memories—the things parents hope their children will reproduce with their own families, some day. And no childhood fantasy is so seriously guarded as the ‘belief in Santa Claus’. This dichotomy between kids and adults has its good side, I guess, but I could never see it as different from ‘lying’, so we had no great emphasis on Santa’s reality—the kids are more interested in the presents, anyway.
That it is a stupid idea is confirmed, by my reckoning, by the number of stupid Christmas movies that focus on the maintenance of this myth as a humorous plot point.
Xmas has to do with being in the northern states, Washington to Maine, or thereabouts, and walking through snow to bring your freshly chopped-down pine tree into your living room. Anything else is not a Hollywood-approved location for this coziest of holidays—one can never feel quite as good about oneself as when donating to (or better yet, feeding) the wretched poor when the ground is covered with snow.
New York City has a slightly different take on the season, but is still within prescribed conditions to be a ‘real’ Christmas. It adds a lovely dollop of urbanity—window displays, municipal decorations, office parties (though not as solid a tradition as once was) and seeing the toys in FAO Schwarz’s and the big Xmas Tree in Rockefeller Center, on ones way to Radio City Music Hall for the traditional “Nutcracker” show.
But the full-on, tradition-filled Christmas happens in New England—plenty of indigenous pine trees, a good chance of snow on the ground (before Climate Change, anyway) and tree ornaments that may have passed down through three or four generations. Ordinarily, the head of the clan will have ‘the family’ to their big house and make a short week of the holiday.
I watch nothing but the Hallmark Channel for the whole of December—I can’t get enough of these crazy movies—Elves fall in love with humans; Santa’s son doesn’t want to take over Christmas; a poverty-stricken family somehow find themselves living in a big, beautiful house in a lovely, loving, small town; Santa’s sleigh is stuck in the shop; A reindeer with a fluorescent nose flies at the front of Santa’s team—you know the drill.
However, it isn’t entirely Hallmark’s fault—it was Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” that gave Christmas its wish-fulfillment aspect. It was his idea that the ‘Christmas Spirit’ was a mandatory giver of grace to even the most twisted misanthrope. The idea that hard-nosed business-people were a blight on society wasn’t new, but the ludicrous suggestion that they can be convinced to open their hearts one day a year… —all Dickens.
And now Hallmark channel has evolved into a cornucopia of sappy, sentimental hogwash, non-stop for 25 full days of nothing but Xmas movies. I am fascinated by their transmutation of human ritual into wish-fulfillment fantasies and Cinderella-type romances. There’s plenty of sneaky elves doing magic and smirking behind a corner at the surprised humans—there are plenty of BFFs that make seemingly trivial remarks that resonate with the movie’s plot-line (or it’s title—which in some cases is the movie in a nutshell, for example: “Snow Globe”).
But sometimes I catch them in a new bit of blasphemy—this year (unless I didn’t notice in previous years) was the use of the tag-line, ‘Hallmark, the Heart of Joy’! Can you imagine? “Joy: def. Intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness”. In a religious context (if I may suggest that Xmas has a religious context) ‘joyfulness’ is the ecstasy felt by those who worship the newborn son of God. I’m sure Hallmark was just looking for a generic word, like ‘tinsel’ or ‘stocking’, to suggest Xmas without confining their audience to any specific religion—but in my opinion, ‘Joy’ can be seen as overstepping by sensitive folks like me.
Besides, Joy is pretty strong language, especially when describing the most shamelessly sugary genre of cinema in the world today. Maybe ‘Hallmark, the Heart of Sweet’ ? If you want to see something crazy, check out the Xmas Movies listing of your current cable provider, TV, Hulu, or Netflix—thousands of these films—and Hallmark makes five or ten new ones every year, just to cement their place at the forefront of kitsch. So I guess it’s what you call a ‘guilty pleasure’ for me to watch these movies on Hallmark channel for hours on end. I don’t approve of Hallmark’s immersion in the treacle of holiday sentiment—far from it.
Hallmark has a much older claim than computers to destroying our literate holiday traditions—the whole point of a card, back when, was that you made it yourself—put some thought and feeling into it. Lots of people still do that, but very few Americans—‘we care enough to send the very best’, as Hallmark once drummed into our ears, back when they were merely a greeting card company. All the little notes and present tags and letters from old friends—they are nowhere to be seen in modern American Xmases.
So I lie in bed and allow the false joy of Hallmark channel to wash over me. I wonder about the kids of today—how much of their holiday season is torn from their focus on the gadgets they all have now? How many kids get sleds for Xmas, compared to how many get the latest gaming consoles or handheld electronics? And I wonder at the power of my conditioning as a child, that even now as an atheist of decades, I still think Xmas has great value and should be treasured for whatever few truly human exchanges of love and joy (and presents) it still engenders, in spite of the tinsel.
There seems to be a rise in mental issues that may or may not be part of the dip in our economy. After all, if you take someone’s livelihood away and practically guarantee that he or she won’t be able to find a new job, ‘reactive behavior’ occurs—you can call it insanity if you want, or call it desperation, or cognitive dysfunction, or even maybe hunger and shame.
Suddenly ‘life on the street’ gets a little more crowded, a little more dangerous—people with poor coping skills feel pressure, newly homeless are still reeling from the collapse of their lives, families, self-worth… As for me, besides the terror at the thought I could someday end up there (!) I see it as a scary sci-fi story—the rich people have hacked the system, disenfranchised much of the majority’s (the Saps’) democratic, legislative machinery of redress and reform, and have settled in for a long era of sucking our blood, like tics, and laughing down at us from their penthouses.
Having had Arnold Schwarzenegger serve as Governor of the State of California, it is difficult to imagine his sui generis Action-Hero-role swooping in and kicking ass and blowing up bad guys—when Ahnold is blatantly a part of the current system—a system that is proof against any uprising of the heroic or the violent. When your enemy is the system, you are facing down the heavily armed, the decidedly uninterested, and the pitiful few whose life is nearly as bad as one’s own.
Even some of the worst-off, the real ‘nose-divers’—they want nothing so much as a chance to buy back into the system that brought them where they are—on the street. And for many people, there seems little difference between business and gambling—both want something from you, both offer you future advantages that may or may not happen, depending on how honest the table is—and the luck of the draw.
But what does business offer during these hard, hard times? A virtual guarantee that the game is rigged, that the fat cats make the big dough and all us little people just keep on working, and taking it, without much to show for it. But let’s not be silly—in a world where our banking and finance industry big-shots are convicted felons, how can we possibly maintain our hope that the dice aren’t loaded in Vegas and ACNJ?
A fascinating field for debate–can civilization contain the animal within all of us? Do we want it to? If so, how much containment is enough? How much is too much? Should society try to accommodate our animal-humanity, or repress it? Can we, as a group, or even I, as an individual, ever match up our late-night resolutions with our early-morning excuses?
If everyone is at some level of mental health, how far should we go to splice that psyche onto a digital world of yes and no answers? Are people called ‘sane’, such as you or me, only to say that we are somewhat less crazy than the institutionalized crazies? We all live inside our heads–society lives outside of everyone’s heads–can we ever synchronize the two or are we doomed to mob-mentality forever?
Fascism? Not at all–I believe the problem is less amenable to brute force than it may seem–the biggest question is how aware people are of the various attempts at all those things that are currently underway–we use iconic words like liberty and freedom to represent the value of each individual life and heart. Nonetheless, we have a criminal/justice/penal system to exert constraints against anyone getting too ‘free’. We have ‘social services’ which imply that even the poorest soul will be kept from harm. Nonetheless we write budgets that curtail those services at the very time when their need for expenditures increases and unemployment is high.
We aren’t talking about ‘two steps forward, one step back’, we’re talking about two steps in every direction. People love being ‘hooked up’ to the world on the internet, but they don’t want anyone to peek at their private business as it streams to every hub across the globe. People will endure personal searches to get on a plane, but they don’t want their freedoms impinged upon by setting up DWI roadblocks in their neighborhood.
To me, it’s a matter of facing facts–you can’t have a globalized ‘community’ without its mandatory troublemakers (every community has them) not to mention Big Bro checking out our keystrokes–but digital surveillance doesn’t actually focus on an individual, it just monitors all traffic for key words and phrases. We like being able to track our car when someone rips it off, but we don’t want the police to be able to track it. We like to check out of a store where the counter-person just aims a laser gun at the RFID tag, instead of using a brain that may or may not be there–but we don’t want that data to be used for inventory, marketing, sales projections, etc.
We don’t even have a clear demarcation line between what is our behavior (our private business) and what breadcrumbs we leave as consumers (corporate research)! There’s a lady’s family that has been fighting to take the patent for her cancer-cell genes away from a pharma-R&D corporation and return them to the deceased’s family’s possession–but it’s all new law. People don’t notice what a brouhaha goes on in civil courts for all these new legal issues raised by new technology, particularly in biology and surveillance. The faster they drop in our laps, the more new law is required to control all the new abuses all this tech progress makes possible!
And, as someone (finally) began pointing out, our legislation has no ‘housekeeping’ function–we never repeal outdated laws–which in some cases can be a good or a bad thing. I don’t have a solution–but I know it’s a problem, and I know no one is talking about it.
New South Wales Art Gallery – night
I was born in ‘56, so I was a seven-year-old in 2nd grade, when we all got marched out to the classroom they crammed all of us kids into—the staff had a TV set up (no small doings in ’63) so we could all watch news coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination. That was my first sense of a world outside of my neighborhood, my first sense of witnessing a change in our civilization—and it wasn’t the Zapruder tape of the actual event—it was Walter Cronkite talking into the camera. I, of course, was ever afterward to take as gospel anything sent my way by the medium of network news which was, itself, just a-borning.
TV reporters such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley were well-respected and almost universally trusted, and they did things differently back then. For instance, whenever you were about to see something amusing, something not strictly newsworthy, the on-camera reporter would make a prolonged point about the following images being just that—amusing, but not strictly newsworthy. Back then, the TV news broadcasts were the networks’ way of fulfilling the FCC requirement that public airwaves be used in the public’s interest. The whole arrangement was new enough that network heads weren’t about to mess with the almost-PBS-type tenets of the news-reporting broadcasts.
One can see that is quite a distance from what we have now—news as consumer product—and the effects are also visible in this last week’s reportage. Everyone was focused on the ‘anniversary’ of the assassination, which amounted to little more than a re-airing of the incessant, traumatized broadcasts of the news reports of that awful day and a liberal slathering of Zapruder psych-trauma footage in an almost music-video-like strobing. But what I couldn’t help notice was that there was no reporting for those couple-or-three days of intensive ‘JFK’.
Apparently, taking a five-minute slot at the top of the hour was sufficient to deliver what the cable-news channels ordinarily spend 24 solid hours dispensing. I wonder exactly what they left out?
I’m just joking—you and I know exactly what was left out—the political tennis match, of which these channels have become the ball, was deemed skip-able for a few days. Also, we weren’t all being distracted by fervid speculation upon the possibility that a news-event-in-progress will go this way or that way. These things waste the time of busy people and fill the time of idlers—that TV news has been forced to accept the yoke of commercialism is a very sad loss for we of the TV generation. I stop in with Gwen Ifill or BBC World News, and I skim the NY Times most days. I only watch CNN and MSNBC as comfort food, when I’m just tired and want to know what’s up, out in the world.
And it’s too bad that I had to witness this epiphany while being bummed out about the ‘50th anniversary of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination’ being all over TV all weekend—no one of us who saw it live really wants to dwell on it any more than we have to—plus it constantly reminds me I’m fifty-seven, and that’s no help to me, I don’t know about other people. But I took away an important proof: even the Cable News channels know that their programs are a waste of time—and that will help me save some of my own.
I’ve been playing Bach for several decades (make that trying to play Bach) and sometimes, just to keep things fresh, I start at the end of the book and play each dance in reverse order. I still repeat the minuet after its middle part–but otherwise I go from last dance to first dance. Anyhow…
Click to watch YouTube Video
Click to watch YouTube Video
Click to watch YouTube Video
When the Cold War ended and people started tearing down the Berlin Wall in 1989, it wasn’t just the end of a war, it was the end of a way of life. And those of us who were born near its beginning were cut adrift in a world that no longer made sense.
In my day, we knew who the enemy was—it was the United Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, the place that is known today as about ten different countries, including Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (or whatever, and however many, new countries Czechoslovakia is now), and most of Eastern Europe. We thought of them as the Commies.
Boy, did we hate the Commies! They outlawed religion. They kept the few Jews that survived WWII from leaving the Soviet Union, so they couldn’t go live in the new Israel. (Or NYC, which had a larger Jewish population than Israel—and still does, for all I know.). They outlawed any literature and music from the West (we used to be ‘the West’—that is, the NATO countries and their satellite nations). Trade with ‘The Free World’ was prohibited. Free speech and free assembly were prohibited. The only reason we went to the Moon was because the Russkies (another word for Commies) put a satellite in Earth orbit first—and scared us to death with visions of them raining nuclear missiles down from the sky. Then VP Lyndon Johnson was quoted saying ‘we cannot allow the communists to take the high ground of space’.
We had our favorite Soviet artists, like Solzhenitsyn the writer and Shostakovich the composer—and we admired them not just for their talents or artistry, but for the harassment they endured under the Soviet’s cultural restrictions. We ridiculed the Russkies in our media—Boris and Natasha (of ‘The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’ fame) were generic caricatures of inept Soviet spies who couldn’t even catch “moose and squirrel”. As a child, I also went through atom bomb defense drills at school—they had all us kids go into the hallway, huddle down facing the walls and cover our heads with our hands. I remember also being informed that I should never look directly at an atomic blast because it would cause permanent blindness. No one said anything about how blindness would be the least of a person’s problems if they were close enough to look directly at a nuclear explosion.
But, there were upsides to the Cold War, too. Companies’ employment practices couldn’t be made too draconian without being accused of the same kind of autocratic invasion of human rights that the Commies were guilty of. Our freedoms of speech and of assembly were more jealously guarded because it was one of the things that made us the ‘good guys’.
Religion was kept in perspective as well—we could see that no hand of God was destroying the Godless Commies, so we couldn’t say religion was fact, as some evangelists try to do today—but we also recognized it as an important personal freedom. It was relegated to the background in practical terms—no one took seriously the fission between science and the Bible—science was science and religion was religion.
And civil rights got a huge boost from the Cold War—as soon as the Commies began to deride our ‘Free Country’ for being racist and quite unequal, the civil rights groups, the feminist groups, they all had to be taken seriously—they had become part of the Cold War, not as an enemy but as a necessity.
Information was free then—as it had always been. Scientists took collaboration to be such a serious mandate for scientific progress that the idea of owning information had a Commie feel to it. And that was leading edge scientific research—nowadays we can accept the idea of information ownership because our ‘information’ consists of reality-show-videos, music-videos, online gaming shortcuts—and other such frippery. The sharing of information between two scientists, in today’s terms, would be up against a mountain of Non-Disclosure Agreements and a mob of lawyers. The people who own things have gathered information unto themselves—and now the great scientific minds of the World are kept locked away by these Fat Cats so that they may profit from whatever genius those thinkers possess.
I admit, it was a simpler time. Back then, the idea of riding in a jumbo jet was new and modern—steering them into the WTC Towers wasn’t something anyone thought about until much later—and even then, in 2001, most of us were shocked by that particular idea. I read the “Tom Swift, Jr.” adventure series when I was little—that was science fiction about jumbo planes and undersea construction, all dumbed down to the level of grade school reading. But I loved them.
Later on, I began to read the late Tom Clancy—along with several million other people—his novels were very satisfying. The only evil in the world was the Communist Bloc—and U.S. soldiers never did anything wrong. As long as Jack Ryan defused the bomb in time, the world remained free from the threat of Soviet Dominion! In Clancy’s last real best-selling thriller, “Executive Orders”, he has cobbled together enough serendipity to land Jack Ryan in the White House (Someone steers a jetliner into the Capitol Building during a State of the Union address.) yet still leaves his character enough running room to fight bad guys hand-to-hand before it’s all over. And when it was over, it was over—that book was published in 1996.
Clancy would write several other popular novels that would concentrate on the technology of modern warfare, mostly starring the sons (and daughters) of the main characters used throughout the books of his glory days. Many movies were made of his books–and his later post-Cold War writings were almost as prodigious, inspiring the TV series “Tom Clancy’s Net Force” and video-games from “Red Storm Entertainment”. He died in October of this year, 2013.
Not only had we become used to the two-dimensional configuration of our civilization, us vs. them, but at its farthest, most extreme remnants, it became codified in entertainments, from “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming” (1966) until the movie version of “The Hunt for Red October” (1990)—we enjoyed the melancholy status quo of two peoples separated by ideologies, who were always seen by each other as far too human when encountered face-to-face.
We had yet to encounter a world in which terrorism was the new paradigm—I’ve always been very upset about our country’s reaction to 9/11—the fear that we allowed into our life-styles and our laws—was by far the greater attack—and we fell before it. Nowadays I could start a riot simply by walking away from a backpack in a crowded place. And yet we have more fatalities accounted for by random shootings this past decade, not to mention the home-grown terrorist Americans that bombed Oklahoma City. We have more fatalities accounted for by soldiers’ suicides than those who have fallen in action!
Clearly, something’s amiss. We must put away our fear. And we must put away our pride. We have to take stock of ourselves, individually, and as a society, and we have to start figuring out sensible plans for moving forward.
The biggest storm in recorded history hit the Philippines a few days ago—and the consensus is that climate change is about as ‘real’ as it gets. The lying bastards who have knowingly obfuscated this issue for decades to get their almighty, god-damned dollar are not pooh-poohing Global Warming anymore—the smart ones are investing in the ocean-walling business—every big city in the world is near the shore of some ocean, and that’s a lot of massive berms and boundary wetlands.
The Chinese are learning what we learned—go overboard on the cheap, dirty energy, and the cities become murky fogbanks of lung-glue, and cancers break out all over. The Chinese will be easier to reason with—their advisors need only point out their windows, or at American newspaper headlines—the results of fifty years of greedy, sloppy energy-production are manifesting globally, in historically bad weather and bad crops. The planet is physically changing—and not in a good way. Between resource-rape and over-population, we’re headed for a bumpy ride these next ten, twenty years.
Tea-partiers trumpeting their petulant ignorance are not to be blamed—no journalist with any wits would waste time on Sarah Palin and that bunch. It is the Koch brothers, a notably personal aberration comprised of twin nut-jobs, who deserve the blame for inciting the stupidest demographic we have, and more than them—it is the cold, shark-like predations of all corporations, in their present configuration. The laws governing corporations in the USA read like an instruction manual for destroying the human race—and they must be changed.
We can never go back to the fairy-tale of “Moose and Squirrel” vs. “Boris and Natasha”—we know all too well now that our greatest dangers lie within ourselves and within our society. As a people, we don’t take enough responsibility—we don’t have more than a quarter of eligible voters voting in any election—and you can imagine how many informed voters that comes to. Not a lot. You know who comes out—the yahoos. They may be dumb, but they’re smart enough to win elections—simply by showing up.
I don’t know—I’m not expecting to see too many more decades—I ain’t dying, but I ain’t young, neither. My only concern is the kids, trying to make a good life for themselves in this junk-heap of a civilization we’ve become. Whenever I try to imagine a lifetime starting from now, I just get very tired. Can you imagine? It was hard enough starting in the 1950s—starting in the twenty-first century seems like something I wouldn’t enjoy—luckily, my opinion isn’t what matters.
There are some things I’m sure of. Money is a problem. Ignorance is a problem. Fertility is a problem. And, of course, Peace is a problem. There are organizations which, no matter how fine someone slices it, exist for the sole purpose of keeping the truth from being shared. Likewise, there are PR firms and propaganda departments that exist for the sole purpose of telling us lies, or at least, well-spun truths. Education will never work well until we recognize it as an ongoing thing—most especially now, when technology changes the marketplace, and the jobs market, so quickly.
Public schools that don’t graduate literate students are not acceptable—how is that even possible? It’s possible because even very good, dedicated people are powerless against politics—and politics is rife in public education now. Maybe that’s because parents started trying to get their kids educated ‘with conditions’. The differently-abled are well-deserving of any assistance that can be devised. But the differently-‘faithed’ are a different story—we need to tell those parents to cowboy up and teach that junk at home, where it belongs.
We can see the way the debate is formed by the media—what’s important is pre-decided—all that’s left is the arguing, which the media facilitate the best they can. And we all have fun, arguing over stuff, discussing stuff, criticizing stuff. We can see that many important things are left out of modern news reporting—things that don’t have high visibility yet have immense importance—these issues are ignored entirely. Think to yourself—aren’t there things you think about, that you never hear about in the news? And aren’t some of those things kinda important?
Ahh, like The Beatles, I miss being “Back In The USSR”.
Monday, November 11, 2013 5:58 PM
Marconi at his desk
WIKI: [“They All Laughed” is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, written for the 1937 film Shall We Dance where it was introduced by Ginger Rogers as part of a song and dance routine with Fred Astaire.]
Lyrics Excerpt:
“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus /When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother/ When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi, wireless was a phony / It’s the same old cry
They all laughed at Rockefeller Center / Now they’re fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin
They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his chocolate bar
Ford and his Lizzie kept the laughers busy
That’s how people are…”
True that, as the kids might say. That’s how people are. Why is doing something new such a big deal? Why is it that people go crazy whenever a person tries to stop an old mistake, or make something new that makes things better?
You’d think we’d have gotten over it by now—or at least learned not to be panicked by the new. When astronomers said the Sun didn’t go around the Earth, I could see why some of them could have been burned at the stake—it was a long time ago, and who really knew anything, right? But then they used that information, along with telling time, and a compass, to navigate out of sight of shore.
Did the big bosses at the Vatican say sorry? Well, yes, they did. But it was just a year or two ago—like, six centuries too late for those crispy scientists-on-a-stick—o, well! Then there was slavery. It’s eerie how the Spielberg film, “Lincoln”, showed legislators in Congress debating whether slavery should be forbidden—very similar to the same scenes in old movies, and in modern movies and now on CSPAN (et.al.) right up to the latest news-cycle—like recently, when the government shut down for two weeks because they were against something new, I was watching CNN, CSPAN, and the PBS-related news-programs. At times, these days when I have too much time all the time, I’ll have to sometimes check myself, and differentiate the ‘current events’—extended TV show and any of the fictional entertainment I might be channel-surfing past.
We watch “Lincoln” and we think to ourselves, well, of course they’re going to prohibit owning people—but that’s only because we know how it ends. At the time, those conservative yahoos truly argued, with straight faces, against the criminalization of their presumption of superiority. The more frightened they were at the thought of changing the status of the African-Americans from chattel to citizenry, the harder they argued to keep things as they were. One might speculate that having a vehement opponent—which righteousness is prone to be—the conservatives’ fear of the unknown may have been brought to the level of panic by the addition of the sense that they were being rushed into something. Either way, there is neither any change in a conservative’s feeling of being rushed nor in his, or her, belief that all change is a bad thing.
I was young enough to be surprised about the male uproar over women’s lib, as it was labeled in my day—I thought, here we’re well into the fight for racial equality—most intelligent people have come to feel uncomfortable with showing themselves to be bigots in public—and yet the simple commutative principal that I’d used to equate accepting the equality of African-Americans with our own mothers and sisters—and daughters—being given that same equality before the law—and, rightfully, in our hearts—this ‘elephant in the room’ of mine was invisible to many men. And it was easy to see why—they were terrified—they’d seen too much Donna Reed as children—and someone was trying to shut down all the Stepford Wives, leaving them with a bunch of chores they didn’t know how to do—and that part was just scratching the surface.
Shunning had thrived in the later centuries, under its new guise of ‘propriety’. The World Wars that take up the first half of the twentieth century kept everyone’s face in the dirt. But once we woke up to the 1950s, women had both served in an official capacity—nurses and WACS and WAFS, etc.—and in bomber-manufacturing, etc., at home—the majority of them weren’t about to object to the dream of keeping a nice big house while the man did all the paid work. But indoor plumbing, a modern range-oven, washer-dryer, vacuum, station wagon to the market—all such activities had reached a tipping point.
We had reached a civilization milestone—a woman no longer required the full twenty-four hours of each day to do the once-gargantuan task of doing all that stuff without appliances, or hot and cold running water. It passed by with little fanfare—no doubt most men suspected their ‘homemakers’ weren’t really ‘working’, you know, like they were—and saw no great change being implied. Big mistake. Women work very hard—in my experience most women work harder than most men. Once they could reach the end of the work before the end of the day, they didn’t stop working. The just started working on new things, new ideas—and you know, I’m sure, how that kind of nonsense ends up, right? Yeah, next thing you know, they’re saying, “Hey, we didn’t care when we were too busy to listen to your bull, but now that we have the leisure to consider your verbal nonsense, you’re starting to piss us off.”
Now, I saw this coming a mile away—I just couldn’t believe the conservative line on women’s lib—bunch of Bible stuff and a dash of reductionist sociology, et Voila! Nothing. What can one say? Am I going to walk up to my mother and tell her she doesn’t deserve as much respect as I do? In what universe?
It’s a constant drum-beat throughout history—Monotheism is an abomination—kill the Pharaoh! Christianity is wrong—kill the Christians! The Christians are in charge—kill the non-Christians! Alchemy is witchcraft—kill the chemists! Astronomy is sacrilege—kill the mathematicians! And—you know—I just wanted to pause here, and consider that there has been a major change—we don’t just kill people in bunches any more—well, most of us, most of the time, anyway.
And so the new fashion is to ridicule discoverers and inventors and explorers or scientists in general. We’d still kill you for some atrocities—like if you were gay or transvestite or Jewish or Gypsy… ..well, anyway, a lot of murders go unsolved, even today when every drama show is a training tape for the police academy—so you can imagine how easy it was for the sociopaths to prey on the outcasts in earlier times, up to say, the 1950s and 60s.
After that, the FBI started using new evidence collected through science—and now it’s like a science fiction movie what the police go through at, say, a murder scene. But we still haven’t changed anything about our prisons—there was a time of optimism, when Robert Redford played a new prison warden (with a heart, of course) and they took to re-naming prisons as ‘rehabilitation centers’, but there is no significant change in the way we punish criminals—except they have to do their time without a cigarette nowadays.
I don’t know nothing about criminology—all I know is no one changes anything about prisons—and I’m pretty sure we have found better ways to deal with criminals by, what’s it today? –2013, yeah—well into the twenty-first century and we still put people in cages—that’s just wrong. We’re not even trying, on that one.
But aside from prison and the grave, ridicule can still do harm to people that are only trying to make things better. Those germ guys—Lister and Pasteur, the established medical community gave them both a very hard time. Did they spend years afterwards, giving speeches of apologies—no, that doesn’t happen. The ridicule—always—the sincere retraction and apology—only spoken of, never witnessed, to my knowledge.
Who else—O, yeah—the whole electricity crowd—people refused to believe Bell when he first demonstrated it in public—not everybody, just the you-know-whos. And Marconi’s wireless radio, O—and I almost left out the big dog, T.A. Edison—let’s tick’em off, shall we? 1st Electrical Turbine, 1st Light Bulb, 1st to offer Electricity to Homes as a Public Utility, 1st Audio Recording, 1st Record-Player, 1st Motion Picture—and those are just the highlights—and that’s not mentioning the many developments of these basic inventions throughout his many years of experimentation. Now Edison, as you may imagine, was found to be difficult to laugh off—sure, one could grumble about ‘new-fangled’-this and high-falutin’-that—but at the same time, you can see where you’re going, indoors, in the dead of night; there was no open flame in every room any longer—and no need for candles and oil lamps. And one could listen to a symphony play Beethoven, right in their own parlor—it sounded a little more professional than the family’s traditional caterwaul. Edison was like Euclid that way—like him or not, he’s hard to argue with.
So I’m learning all this stuff in elementary school, and even then I noticed that any big advance in civilization involved someone being given a very hard time, ranging from laughed-out-of-town to burnt-at-the-stake. And I see it on TV—African-Americans in the southern states standing up to people that would do anything to keep those protestors relegated to second-class citizenship. And I thought to myself, hey, it’s Galileo and Louis Pasteur all over again—can’t they see they’re trying to hold back civilization’s natural impetus towards making us a better people, a fairer people, a kinder people? And after the race riots, the news showed the Viet Nam war—people killing and dying—I think that must be a bad scene in real life—I didn’t even like seeing it on TV.
Conservatives—are they the natural result of an evolutionary process that makes most of the herd dislike change, while only a few will go rogue and strike out after something different? Is that why they’re so politically powerful—because at heart most people don’t want change of any kind? Is that why rabble-rousers have to do so much rousing? Is that why every great person will eventually find themselves wondering if they’re crazy? And, if so, is that the corollary to all crazy people thinking they make perfect sense?
All good questions, but I digress. I had a point to make here—I’m almost certain of it. ‘sfunny how you get an idea about something big-ish like ‘social progress’ and no matter where you turn, you’re always getting caught up in details that don’t even make sense after a while? Well, this is one of those—sorry.
I really enjoyed that PBS part 1 of 2 Kennedy; American Experience—hope I remember to watch the end tomorrow night. O, and here’s a video of just me and another video of me playing some Bach:
Hello, you lucky people.
I finally have some postable Bach (not that it’s great–or even good) that is about as good as I get.
Please don’t feel bad if you don’t watch the whole thing–I get tired as I go along, so the mistakes and flubs become worse and more frequent as the video goes on….
I’m also very pleased with my Improv today–I didn’t really play the whole thing straight through as shown here–it was all in one recording, but there were three places where I played freestyle–and I didn’t have the patience for separate videos, so they’re all bunched into this one video. As always, I hope you enjoy it…
[Improv – Sweets to the Suites (2013Nov08)]
[J.S. Bach – selections from three (3) French Suites (2013Nov08)]
I’ve just been catching up to myself–all recordings from the past eight days have now been processed:
Hope you enjoy….
Wrote another poem today:
Poem (?)
Argffth! Spttoo-o-o-o-o-o-o! Yaughck!
Augh, I can’t.. Hack-Hack-spurtle..I can’t Breath! cough
cough
cough
Where’re the others?
O my god (cough)
What happened?!
-by XD
And then my lovely Claire came home (with a whopper jr w/cheese–the bestest) and I played for her–It came out kinda romantic, so I named it after those Spanish-language soap-operas they call ‘Novelos’:
Improv – Novelo
…As you can see, today’s graphics theme is ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’, a old, brief fad in architecture. I couldn’t say what connection to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” there is, if any–I always figured the Beatles did Strawberry Fields for the same reason the Kinks did “Ducks On The Wall”–because it was something their parents liked, and they hated.
All these pictures are examples–I guy named Walpole got rich from writing Halloween stories, and this was his dream house style–I read about in a post I shared earlier today (You can go on my Facebook page and find the one called simply ‘Halloween’) and I Googled images of the style…
so, here’s a few more:
Okay, two new improvs and a look at some of the artwork contained in my video uploads:
GRAPHICS:
Back in the I-beginning, museum sites had no restrictions on downloading graphics of their paintings, sculpture, etc.
Back then, it took minutes for a hi-res graphic to download off a phone jack ISP, but I knew that someday the doors would all be locked–so I downloaded graphics like an obsession. Nowadays, security on graphic image files is pretty tight. It’s all ‘information’ now, and information is ‘owned’ now, too. But I don’t commercialize my sites, so nobody looks too closely. Also, there are special programs like that of the Rejksmuseum in Netherlands, which allows a user to download graphics of their masterworks for non-commercial use. I still grab stuff off the Google-Image search, but I have to be more careful about snagging something off of those new ‘graphics by fee’ sites–one of them threatened me with legal action a few weeks ago!
Anyhow–here’s some of my latest ‘artwork’ in service to my YouTube channel uploads, and the original files I used for graphics backgrounds. You’ll notice that I over-lighten or over-darken these paintings to make my Text stand out and be legible.
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_01_Art-HorseLexington-1968-Good
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_02_200_Currier_&_Ives_Ready_For_The_Signal
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_03_No_Known_Restrictions_Horse_Racing,_Currier_&_Ives_Lithograph_1890
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_04_Trotting_Cracks_on_the_snow
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_05_english_hunt_fence
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_06_Hunter
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_(CreditsCARD)
20131019XD-Improv-GYup_(TitlesCARD)
20131019XD-Improv-HYup_(CreditsCARD)
20131019XD-Improv-HYup_(TitlesCARD)
20131022XD-FitzWllmVrgnlBk_XV_Robin(TitlesCARD)
20131022XD-FitzWllmVrgnlBk_XVIII_BarafostusDream(TitlesCARD)
20131022XD-FzwlmVrgnl_17thCenturyEnglishMusic_01
20131022XD-FzwlmVrgnl_17thCenturyEnglishMusic_02
20131022XD-FzwlmVrgnl_17thCenturyEnglishMusic_Barfastus_s_Dream_01
20131022XD-FzwlmVrgnl_17thCenturyEnglishMusic_Barfastus_s_Dream_02_Baschenis_Musical_Instruments
20131024XD-Improv-Factory(TitlesCARD)
20131024XD-Improv-PrototypeX(CreditsCARD)
20131024XD-Improv-PrototypeX(TitlesCARD)
20131026XD-Improv-AdAstra(CreditsCARD)
20131026XD-Improv-AdAstra(TitlesCARD)
20131026XD-Improv-Aspere(CreditsCARD)
20131026XD-Improv-Aspere(TitlesCARD)
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Art-Nouveau_interieur_anoniem_1890-1910
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Delftsche Slaolie-Jan_Toorop_1894
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Het_stadhuis_op_de_Dam_in_Amsterdam-Gerrit_Adriaensz-Berckheyde_1672
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Portret_van_een_vrouw_tussen_bloemen-Eva_Watson-Schütze_ca_1910
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Seated Cupid-Etienne-Maurice_Falconet_1757
201320811XD-PreRaphWomen_GoldenTrio
20131026XD-Rijksmuseum_MyStud_Mantelpiece_w_relief_of_Paris_n_Oenone-Jan_Baptist_Xavery_1739
The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book was published in England in the 17th Century.
The virginal was a small clavier, so quiet it could only be heard in a small parlor in absolute silence. I guess it was of a piece with the way gentleladies were expected to behave in the old days. The music, which has much more life to it than I’ve been able to express herein, is nonetheless very sleep-friendly. One can only imagine what those people would have made of a heavy metal concert….
Robin, etc.
Haydn’s Sonata No. 25 in E-flat
Improv – Fun for Friday
Thursday, October 17, 2013 5:52 PM
Aaah! What a difference a day makes. The happy couple, off in Cancun, are not here anymore and, while we miss them, it sure is quiet around here with just Spencer and the Wonder Dog (and Bear and I). Politically, the fiscal disaster has been averted but perhaps more importantly, the Tea Partiers’ disastrous tactics have been roundly condemned in poll after poll. You won’t be able to tell from listening to them because one of their hallmarks is to talk ‘through’ realities and ‘preach’ their crazy gospel at the same time. Then there’s the great time I had recording videos yesterday (please feel free to give’em a listen on YouTube) and the fact that I thought I was out of tobacco, but then found a whole tin I’d forgotten about—so my ‘next day rush’ order for more will not be a marathon nic-fit. Add a hot cup of coffee and the day couldn’t be better.
The greatest new thing (as Rachel Maddow would say) is Peapod. It may not be available in your area, but they have me for a new customer. Peapod is a website that lets you shop in the Shop&Go online and have your groceries delivered the next day! I’ve just tried it out, I ordered cookies and cheese and cereal and lots of other stuff and the next day, Poof!, there it was at the door. This may seem silly to a lot of people, but I no longer have a car. And even if I had a car, it’s difficult for me to go and drive and shop and bag and lift and load and carry and put away.
Up until now I’ve been relying on Claire to do all the shopping—but now I can have anything I want, no muss, no fuss. It’s so luxurious I haven’t gone on Peapod a second time yet—I’m still enjoying the pleasure of having stuff delivered. It always bothered me—I mean, a lot of places deliver stuff—pizza, Chinese food, UPS, Amazon-dot-com—but nobody ever delivers what I want most—food and drinks, fresh produce, bread, and sundries.
And they used to. I remember our old house in Katonah had a boarded up rectangle in the kitchen wall—and the same on the outside wall of the house. Someone explained that that was once the ‘grocer’s pantry’. The delivery boy would deliver groceries to this over-sized cupboard without having to ring the bell or be let inside. Likewise, the cook could then unload the grocer’s pantry from inside the kitchen. Back before the Model T, delivery boys and messenger boys were everywhere—better for them to run back and forth than the customers.
But it’s been decades now since the internet first started casting about for a cost-effective technique for online grocery shopping and delivery—and Peapod is the first successful prototype of this concept. I’m very excited.
When I was a boy, one of my favorite books was “My Big Ball Of String”, written and illustrated by Marion Holland, 1958. A boy gets a cold and has to stay in bed. To satisfy his needs without getting out of bed, he begins to tie a string to the light switch, and then the doorknob, and pretty soon he’s got zip-lines and pulleys and his room looks like a giant spider web. I was enchanted by this vision of remote control.
Ever since the Internet arrived, I’ve been searching for new ways to do anything I want from inside my home. And Peapod is my newest ‘string’.
Yay!
p.s. check out my movie reviews at StreetArticles.com
Seven (7) Solid 60’s Covers
(click here)
Peapod Comes
(Click here)
Tip The Driver
(Click here)
Keep Trucking On
(Click here)
Get back to me on that.
Augmentation, but In a Bad Way
2nd consecutive rant–I can do this all winter….
Our President can’t reason with unreasonable people.
My most recent rant–enjoy!
Just a few notes: I made up ‘Wulfric the Bad’–as far as I know, there’s no actual person with that name–Boston, on the other hand, is an actual place, but also the name of my niece’s daughter. The rest is pretty self-explanatory…
I saw Michelle Bachmann interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN this morning. She didn’t answer any of his questions. He pressed and pressed for a simple yes or no on any of his several reasonable questions. She talked around him, over him, under him, throwing out Tea-Party talking points as she evaded the subject Wolf was trying to talk about. She contradicted him with a bunch of spurious poll numbers and misinformation to which Wolf could only respond, “Where are you getting this information?” (Which she claimed she had ‘back at her office’).
We have seen Bachmann and other Tea-Party stalwarts take their cues from Palin’s VP-run playbook whenever they are faced with serious disagreement. It is transparently the behavior of someone trying to evade the plain truth by becoming hysterical over left-field distractions and quoting patently imaginary facts and figures—they even rewrite history to push their ignorant (and obviously paid-for) agenda.
In the old days we described this behavior as ‘squirming’ and ‘bold-faced lying’. But today it is viewed by many people as ‘Tea-Party politics’—as if, when red-necks get up on their haunches and shout their frustration at a complicated and pluralist world, they are permitted to be completely nonsensical and wildly untruthful. I think it has something to do with their response to this, which is to charge that everyone else is lying. They even pose as martyrs to ‘gotcha’-journalism (translation: any reasonable questions posed in front of a camera).
But I’m not mad at these poor souls—they are deluded, misguided, and given far more attention and legitimacy than is healthy for the uneducated. I’m mad at us—how did we allow stupidity to become a valid political platform? When did we drop any minimum intelligence limit for people who have a national microphone before them?
President Obama made an address later on this afternoon, in which he pointed out that the House of Representatives has a solemn duty—political kamikaze tactics may be all the House GOP members are interested in, but they have actual responsibilities as well. That they ignore those responsibilities is just another maddening symptom of this new class of politician, the ‘stubborn simpleton’ (Yes, I’m referring to Ted Cruz). The fact that experienced, older GOP members are nearly as dismayed as the Democrats at the irrational and irresponsible behavior of the Tea-Partyers says a great deal about just how far from sanity these people have gone (and taken the rest of us with them).
I’m glad Obama has put his foot down—negotiating with such cretins does nothing to appease them—and nothing anyone else can say can convince them that they are in the wrong—about anything. That’s the surest sign of their mental imbalance—their refusal to face reality.
The only thing worse? That these troublemakers are expected to be re-elected by their constituencies! When seniors don’t get their Social Security allowance, when soldiers in the field don’t get a paycheck to send to their families, when no one can get a loan for the foreseeable future—will those people really re-affirm their faith in this group? I would do more than merely vote for a Democrat—I’d have them charged with high treason.
They are threatening to break the world, to destroy the United States of America, to ruin everyone’s day for years to come—how can anyone see them as responsible office-holders and elected officials?
Thursday, September 26, 2013 1:58 PM
Everybody loves a bitch. The Stones had a big hit in “Bitch” (Sticky Fingers 1971) I think, in large part, because we kids loved to sing along. And it’s just a fun word to say—“bitch, bitch, bitch.” We love them. We go crazy over them—especially the mega-bitch. A mega-bitch is a completely evil, incredibly hot woman, such as Shannon Doherty’s role as Brenda Walsh in the series “Beverly Hills, 90210” (1990). Women are drawn to a bitchy character because she is self-determined and adversarial; men are fascinated by a bitchy character because no matter how evil her mind, heart, or voice—she’s still a woman, and men, by and large, want women.
I’d venture a guess that the proliferation of old witches and crones in our folk stories were a product of male story-tellers who were more comfortable with a bitchy character bereft of any hint of fecundity—but I’m no archeological psychologist, I just know myself.
I’ve just had a rather embarrassing email exchange with a writer friend, whose first serialized on-line novel I’d found instantly engaging and compelling. Some poor schlub’s horror-of-a-girlfriend character was a constant spur to my interest. But when she debuted her new novel’s first chapter, set in a sort of antebellum Edwardian atmosphere, I instantly attacked her for it, saying the whole thing was worthless, a pile of junk. (Jumping the gun is a favorite hobby of mine.)
But when, at her urging, I went back and re-read the chapter, I suddenly found, by focusing on it better, that it was a well-paced, tightly written piece of fiction—so, feeling like a jackass, I sent her my apologies. I was confused—it was well written, yet it repelled me at first—and even having found that it was good, I still lacked any inclination to read more.
But this morning it came to me. There was no bitch. Moreover, there wasn’t a bad-guy or an evil influence in sight. When I had my health, and was a terrible bookworm, I would casually allow myself (and the author) the first 150 pages as a ‘gimme’. I’d had plenty of experience with writers with a slow burn—and they were often the best, if I could ride out the slow start.
Now I have a more modern sensibility—I need a quick fix. I need coercion, I need conflict, I need me a bitch. I truly miss those good old days when I could re-read Robin Hood in that wonderfully drowsy ‘dear reader’ kind of style; I could re-read the Iliad and be charmed by the interplay of human drama and Jovian fate and the symbolism and the repeated phrases that made it as much a chant as a story. I read everything and anything—and fast—I averaged 1.3 books a day—unless they were little things of 300 pages or less. Before I lost my health, I got to where I preferred only 700+ page-books, like King, Follett, Clancy, and Ian Banks. Anything less than that frustrated me—I would hardly get comfortable in the writer’s world when I would find myself reading the exit sign: “The End”.
But today, I mostly do TV. When I do commit to a book, I start reading like I always used to—but then I quickly find my neck aching, or my eyesight blurring, or just a mental inability to follow along as I read. I put it down, wait an hour, try again. In the last half of the book I will become transfixed, and I’ll wonder why I don’t still do this all the time. But the next day, after I finish the book, I’ll have blurry vision most of the day, and little aches and pains and spasms from holding open the heavy book and from focusing my eyesight (through magnifying glasses) on the page for hours at a time.
So, long story short, I don’t read much anymore. When I do, I get impatient of any settling-in type beginnings and intolerant of any slack in a storyline. I prefer to be left wondering to being given more than I need. I’m become the same audience as the illiterate—just show me eye-candy with music, please.
And the end result is a media with a narrow range, stories that introduce conflict from the first sentence and keep it hot right until the big car crash (with explosion) at the end. All the best told stories are the opposite, they build and build a world around you, inserting conflicts at strategic points, adding detail and suspense and character development with the tidal flow of their story’s pace—only with such subtle storytelling can an artist ever build up to a tidal wave far more awesome than a mere car crash—but without the leeway to do this, merely good writers can outperform the great writers, making wam-bam-thank you-ma’am plotlines the industry’s default quality.
Fortunately, the treasure house of the past is still easily accessible to anyone with a library card. But be careful to read the book before you see the movie. I had read “The Lord Of The Rings” three times before Peter Jackson got his green light—so the freeze-dried husk of the CGI version will never mar my memories of the happiness I felt marching along with the Fellowship through Tolkien’s worlds. Or stalking Clancy’s cold-war villains from one end of the Earth to another. Or shivering from my immersion in the horror of King’s nightmare town, Kerry, Maine. How I wish I could still spend whole days there, day after day.
But this isn’t about me. My writer friend has brought into focus a dilemma that all modern writers face—subtle writing is to small audiences as simple writing is to big audiences (and big money). And I’m not suggesting that today’s writer has to ‘dumb-down’ their writing to be popular—I’m saying that the leeway enjoyed by earlier writers has contracted to a fine point—a tightrope that must be walked. Mass audiences actually require intelligence in their entertainment—but it must be a carefully monitored dose, administered with precise timing and dosage, from moment to moment in their favorite tales.
Stephen Spielberg cracked this code, creating movies that blew us away, while not insulting our intelligence. The use of levity is essential is his formula, but he also kept the mayhem and the fear going at all times.
And perhaps most restrictive of all, today’s popular stories must start with high drama—either dread, rage, sublime ecstasy, or just plain explosions. My writer friend, in beginning with a busy, happy family scene, had failed to grasp me by the throat—but was that her failing, or mine?
“Green Leaves Of Summer”
and “Happy Heart”
“Green Leaves Of Summer”
(From the Batjac Production “The Alamo”. A United Artists Release.)
Music: Dmitri Tiomkin
© 1960 Leo Feist Inc.,
Batjac Productions, (NOTE: this was John Wayne’s own Prod. Co.)
and Erosa Music Publishing Corp.
Lyrics: Paul Francis Webster
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group,
GUY WEBSTER/WEBSTER MUSIC
——————————————
“Happy Heart”
by James Last and Jackie Rae
© 1969 Panorama Song, GmbH, Hamburg, Germany (West Germany, at the time)
USA & Canada Rights – Miller Music Corporation
——————————————
{From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia}
“Happy Heart” is a song written by James Last and Jackie Rae.
The song was recorded by both Petula Clark and Andy Williams and released as a single for each at the same time in 1969. “Happy Heart” reached #12 on the Easy Listening chart and #62 in the UK for Clark, while Williams went to #22 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100, #19 in the UK, and spent two weeks at #1 on the Easy Listening chart.
Clark was reportedly dismayed when Williams was a guest star on her second TV special, with the plan to perform the song they were both launching as a single. In Australia both Clark’s and Williams versions charted both peaking at #22.
It was notably used on the soundtrack accompanying the British film Shallow Grave (1994), starring Ewan MacGregor and Christopher Eccleston, and directed by Danny Boyle. The female impersonator Holly Woodlawn lip-synced to the Clark version in the 1998 Tommy O’Haver film Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.
*****
PLEASE NOTE: for the Graphic Background on the Titles and Credits:
Proletariërs aller landen verenigt U
(Factory workers stand strong united.)
by Jan de Waardt, (1900)
courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Netherlands
The great engine behind capitalism and the free market is supposed to be competition. But I wonder what competition is still happening just now as we head towards the winter of 2013-2014. Small towns from coast to coast have lost their competitions with Wal-Mart and its ilk—towns where people once supported each other saw themselves put out of business as they put their neighbor out of business, both of them saving money by shopping at a big store chain, and both eventually left bankrupt, homeless, and worse.
Perhaps there is some friendly competition going on between the CEOs of those few giant corporations—not as interesting as a game of golf, perhaps, but something that keeps their egos pumping. But outside that, all the competing is over. Multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporations—petroleum giants, pharmaceutical giants, entertainment media giants, etc.—may see themselves in competition with each other, at least in the minds of the top management and board-members. But today’s major players in our global marketplace are so beribboned with both vertical and horizontal diversification, so invested in the overall stability of the global economy, and required to have such cold-blooded, implacable ambition—those people expend their energies on office politics, influence peddling, and investment poaching to an extent that leaves most of the ‘competition’ in their own heads—and, more importantly, without any effect on the regular people.
The regular people, the lower-income-to-high-middle-class income, the hoi polloi, the little people—call them what you will—they be us. We no longer compete in meaningful ways. Our children can study until they’re blue in the brain—there’s still a chance we won’t be able to foot the bill for Harvard or Princeton—and that our children may not be among the select few who win the scholarships that may or may not make an ivy-league degree affordable. So we no longer have any significant competition in scholarship—excepting those rare scholarships and grants. The vast majority, however, see college costs recede further and further from reality—and that’s only to get a bachelor’s degree—the post-graduate world is a maze of student loans, part-time jobs, and constant struggle to achieve what comes to the families-of-wealth’s kids as a gift.
Want to start a coffee shop? Starbucks has you beat. A book store? Amazon’s already there. A hardware store? –Home Depot is already there. A restaurant? Well, they were never great investments to begin with—and all but the hoity-toity-est can’t compete with the prices at Outback, Red Lobster, or Appleby’s. Drug store chains make the town pharmacists redundant. And at this point, if any kind of small business isn’t doing business inside a mall or some other high-foot-traffic area, they will shrivel on the vine.
Can boutique, community-conscious shops get by? Yes, but there had better be at least one necessity being sold there, or their solvency will fade with the novelty of their existence. And this is all beside the point that, if you were to come up with some tremendous new thing that drew crowds of shoppers, it would be imitated, mass-produced, and available at the mall within a single fiscal period.
When Europeans first began emigrating to the New World, competition was everywhere, businesses were fighting right and left in a world of disparate, mom-and-pop farms, shops, transport, communication and services. This rising of the dough of Capitalism had plenty of yeast, and the chaos of the free market made commerce an almost Brownian-motion pattern of new, starting, growing, dying, and expanding ventures. The passage of centuries has brought all that to a stagnant precipitate of big corporations and huge personal fortunes—the reaction has reached equilibrium.
Obama says there are not enough ladders to prosperity anymore—and I agree with that—but I see it as the obvious end result of free-for-all capitalism, as it went from land invasion (or pioneering, as some call it) to industrial revolution, to urban-centric economies and the world of modern business. The land has been parceled out, competition in industry ended in one or two giants controlling the field or product, and chain stores and the internet have destroyed entrepreneurship as we once understood it.
Now that those currents of history and development and growth and consolidation have slowed to a molasses-like oozing that allows new business only sparingly—and with few of those making the grade. Even the once famously individualistic business of digital software has become a two-sided struggle between two giants which become less distinct from each other the longer they compete for the bigger half of the pie.
Even businesses that have just been created, such as private space-based technology companies and genome-research firms are so complex and expensive that they hardly lend themselves to small business start-ups—they all come as off-shoots of one or more already-large-and-successful multinational corporations.
In short, ‘competition’ is disappearing just as quickly as our environmental stability. Even pro sports—the very embodiment of competition—have become as much businesses as teams-in-competition. And with the loss of that beating heart, the tension of competition, the thrill of the contest, Capitalism becomes just another word for Oligarchy—a set-in-stone society of the super-wealthy and their seven billion servants.
America’s growth into the greatest super-power in history was possible partly due to the fact that we could start from a tabula-rasa continent. Our government wasn’t an amalgam of centuries of war and despotism—it was something we could design with an 18th century understanding of ourselves. Our societies didn’t have millennia of embedded classes, castes, lordship and slavery—we could invent a new society that had a more modern populism as its defining characteristic. And with the industrial revolution coming fast on the heels of our wars for independence and unity, we found it much easier to embrace the quickening tempo of a civilization on the cusp of modernity.
But now America’s arcane, baroque-filigreed legislation, our corporate culture become more a thing of inertia than healthy growth, and our fairly complete distribution over every square inch of habitable real estate—have all brought us to a situation wherein we see ourselves as we used to be, while the truth eludes us. America’s culture is still younger than Europe’s, but it is no longer ‘young’.
Our best years may still lie ahead, as a nation, but our easy-going, whimsical days are over—from here on out, we must (like all the other nations) approach change slowly and with more forethought than Americans are generally comfortable with. And most importantly, we must reexamine Capitalism in the era of Corporate Consolidation, a Capitalism without significant Competition as its driving force.
We do have stress, of course. There is plenty of stress, everywhere you go. But stress is just fear of being fired, it isn’t true competition. Instead of struggling and working harder, we hunch into our cubicles and try not to think about being downsized, or being rendered obsolete by technology. Indeed, the worst symptom of our present culture’s dysfunction is the fact that working harder, working faster, making an effort of any kind, no longer has any relevance to our incomes, or to our success in the business world.
The ceramic stylings of our good friend, Mrs. Nancy Holmes!
“Look at yourself. If you had a sense of humor, You would laugh to beat the band.
Look at yourself. Do you still believe the rumor That romance is simply grand?
Since you took it right on the chin, You have lost that bright toothpaste grin.
My mental state is all a jumble. I sit around and sadly mumble.
Refrain: Fools rush in, so here I am, Very glad to be unhappy.
I can’t win, but here I am, More than glad to be unhappy.
Unrequited love’s a bore, And I’ve got it pretty bad.
But for someone you adore, It’s a pleasure to be sad.
Like a straying baby lamb With no mammy and no pappy,
I’m so unhappy, but oh, so glad.”
-Lyrics by Lorenz Hart
Nowadays, there is some shame attached to ‘unrequited love’. Where it once masqueraded as a possibly noble state, i.e. Platonic love, it is today more closely associated with stalking.
Many of the love songs of the twentieth century describe stalking behavior as a normal recourse for a person ‘in love’. Now, when someone says they’d ‘climb the highest mountain and swim the widest sea’, they’re as likely as not to have the cops called on’em.
In Lou Christie’s “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” (lyrics by Tony Romeo) the singer threatens to :
“try every trick in the book
With every step that you take, everywhere that you look
Just look and you’ll find
I’ll try to get to your soul, I’ll try to get to your mind
I’m gonna make you mine
I know I’ll never give up, I’m at the end of my rope
From the morning till supper time, you’ll find
I’ll be waiting in line, I’ll be waiting in line..”
But my favorite part is when he sings:
“I’ll be a hard-lovin’, pushin’ kind of individual
Knockin’ night and day at your door
You’ll have to turn me away like an indestructible force..”
Now this song was a hit in 1969 and had no angry cards and letters coming in from either boys or girls who found it offensive—this was a normal lyric for the love songs of the time. Lou Christie, himself, was considered a creative and cultured musician, hailed by John Lennon as an original songwriter and artist.
Two of Christie’s songs are even based on Classical themes—
his “Rhapsody In The Rain” was based on Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HatwnJH9De4
and Lou Christie’s “Painter” borrowed another melody from classical music – this time from Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVRvuExNv9M
But then, Lou Christie’s first hit, his big break (written in partnership with Ms. Twyla Herbert) came up with one of the most chauvinistic lyrics ever written :
Lou Christie – “Lightnin’ Strikes”
(Song by Lou Christie and Twyla Herbert)
“Listen to me, baby, you gotta understand
You’re old enough to know the makings of a man
Listen to me, baby, it’s hard to settle down
Am I asking too much for you to stick around
Every boy wants a girl He can trust to the very end
Baby, that’s you Won’t you wait
[but ’til then
When I see lips beggin’ to be kissed
I can’t stop I can’t stop myself
Nature’s takin’ over my one-track mind]
Believe it or not, you’re in my heart all the time
All the girls are sayin’ that you’ll end up a fool
For the time being, baby, live by my rules
When I settle down I want one baby on my mind
Forgive and forget And I’ll make up for all lost time
[If she’s put together fine And she’s readin’ my mind
I can’t stop I can’t stop myself]
There’s a chapel in the pines Waiting for us around the bend
Picture in your mind Love forever,
[but ’til then
If she gives me a sign That she wants to make time
I can’t stop I can’t stop myself]
Lightning is striking again Lightning is striking again
And again and again and again Lightning is striking again
And again and again and again..”
I feel this song gives a very apt description of the cognitive dissonance suffered by teens and young adults of both sexes during the 1960s—much as it had been for centuries. This ‘good’ girls and ‘bad’ girls dichotomy offered no mathematics to explain how a young man could have as many sex partners as his young and ‘uncontrollable’ hormones drove him to, and still have a ‘pool’ of good, chaste girls standing by for a wedding at some future date.
We are left with two possibilities—all girls were ‘bad’, but discretely so, and shed that persona when some ‘spent’ boy finally proffered a diamond ring—or—all boys sowed a great deal less Wild Oats than they advertised.
Sarcasm aside, it was a clenched society that was quick to damn a woman for being indiscrete, and to forgive a man for not controlling his impulses, and to accept fairy-tale-like absurdities as the status quo. For a man to say he would ‘Lose his mind’ over his affection for a woman was considered very romantic, sort of congratulating and condemning the woman simultaneously for her ability to make a man ‘lose control’.
There are so many differences in our modern thinking, it’s hard to know where to start.
First, there’s the assumption that a man can’t be held responsible for sexual predation if he’s been overly excited by a woman. Today we call that date-rape—and I’ll tell you why. It would be pretty tough to look the other way when a man gets angry enough to blow up a building—and in modern society, if you have anger issues, you will be offered counseling—but men are still held to account for their behavior.
Second, the whole ‘get married and have kids’ thing has no place in today’s love song lyrics—Beyoncé’s “Put A Ring On It” gets close, but it’s also a sassy goof, aimed at boys with both jealousy issues and commitment issues. Once the oldie “You’re Havin’ My Baby” left the charts, the mechanics of Chapel Bells and Gold Rings and side-by-side burial plots became taboo in poetic longing and love lyrics.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, few of today’s women would consider marriage their primary goal. Few of today’s women would consider their lives ruined by losing their virginity—on the contrary, it seems the beginning of adult life for most American women, rather than the end. And in this new societal view, “My Girl” becomes overly possessive; “Only You” is too obsessive; and “Blue Moon” comes off as just needy. Still, Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With” takes the new view a little too far—fidelity of some sort is still considered the polite thing—at least in women’s minds.
The exaggerated nature of love lyrics has become overt—the old songs can still be enjoyed as the passions and urges going on in a lover’s mind, just so long as no one mistakes those hyperbolic pronouncements for healthy feelings.
Rap has similar Un-PC lyrics—but the street has become a two-way. Women have embraced their objectification, not as ‘the way of things’, but as ‘the way of men’, or rather the foolishness that goes on in a man’s mind. Further, some female vocalists have turned that meme against us, pointing out how easily men can be manipulated.
Empowerment of women has driven the young male vocalists to an excess of barbarism—not as a cage for women, but as a display of maleness. The ‘bitches and hos’ lyrics are defiant, not insulting—as seen in the fact that women have themselves embraced those terms, just as African Americans have embraced the n-word as something they share with each other.
The grit of reality abides—the above comments are observations on the art of song lyrics, not on daily life. Prejudice and exclusion persist—but the popular music of our times proclaims the end of these old biases, in times to come.
Here are two pieces from Edward MacDowell’s “New England Idylls”
Click here to Listen
And here are two new improvs of mine from this weekend:
Click here to Hear
Click to Hear, Here
And here is the lovely picture of our library (that once was a garage) from July of 2006:
(And which is used for the above video ‘titles & credits’ background)
Hoping you all enjoy……
I can’t believe tomorrow is September! Things get old FAST these days!
Here’s an oldie:
John Jay High School – June 1973
Reflections – Volume XIV
Page 25 (Art – Richard Hesse)
with Sue Koponen, Richard Hess and Karen DuBuque.
“Stormhalls”
Falcons wing ‘cross rainbow snow
Pine trees iced white while northwinds blow
Northwind take me high
And carry me
To stormhalls in the sky
Seagulls floating on the breeze
Over trees, across the seas
Of whiteness on the ground
Whisper to me
Of stormhalls in the sky.
I only bring up that old poem to show the source of this Improv’s title:
Click here for Video
And now we have something really old:
Click to Play
XperDunn plays Piano
August 30th, 2013
J. Fischer & Bro. [110 West 40th Street / New York, N.Y.]
Piano Classics Volume I
Early Italian Piano Music
of the Seventeenth Century
{For Late Intermediate and Early Advanced Grades}
Collected by Brian Shaw
Reciting from: Fischer Edition No. 8400
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(01) Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) Minuetto
(02) Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) Air
(03) Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) Gavotte
(04) Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) Air (from Toccata)
(05) Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644) Corrente
(06) Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) Allegro
(07) Domenico Zipoli (1686-Unknown) Sarabande
—Well, gotta run! (I’m not getting any younger…)
XperDunn plays Piano
August 27th, 2013
Improv – Shangri – La
Well, I think this is my best effort on these favorites from my “Complete Carpenters” for solo piano and voice book–these are the treacliest and most banal of their repertoire–only a real sap has any chance of enjoying those 4 recordings of their repertoire (which fortunately includes me). I defy you to sit through all four–it can’t be done.
XperDunn plays Piano
August 27th, 2013
4 Covers of ‘Hits by The Carpenters’:
(1.) “(They Long To Be) Close To You”
(2.) “Rainy Days and Mondays”
(3.) “Yesterday Once More”
(4.) “Sing”
“(They Long To Be) Close To You” (2013Aug27)
Words by Hal David. Music by Burt Bacharach
“(They Long to Be) Close to You” is a popular song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The version recorded by The Carpenters, which became a hit in 1970, is the best known.
In 1970, it was released by Karen and Richard Carpenter on their album Close to You, and it became their breakthrough hit. The song stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks.
With “(They Long to Be) Close to You”, The Carpenters earned a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus in 1971. It became the first of three Grammy Awards they would win during their careers.
(c) 1963 by U.S. Songs Inc, USA
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“Rainy Days and Mondays” (2013Aug27)
Words by Paul Williams. Music by Roger Nichols.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Rainy Days and Mondays” is a 1971 song by The Carpenters that went to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and it was the duo’s fourth #1 song on the Adult Contemporary singles chart. However, the song failed to chart in the United Kingdom until it went to #63 in a reissue there in 1993. “Rainy Days and Mondays was certified Gold by the RIAA.
The song was composed in 1971 by then fairly unknown composers Roger Nichols and Paul Williams. It was released as the first track on the album Carpenters. The B-side on the single is “Saturday”.
(c) 1970 by Almo Music Corp., USA
“Yesterday Once More” (2013Aug27)
Words by John Bettis
Music by Richard Carpenter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Yesterday Once More”, written by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis, is a hit song by The Carpenters from their 1973 album Now & Then. Composed in the key of E, “Yesterday Once More” features a long middle section, consisting of eight covers of 1960s tunes incorporated into a faux oldies radio program. The work takes up the entire side B of the album.
The single version of the song peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart becoming their 5th number two hit and making them the act with the second most number two hits on the chart behind only Madonna. The song also peaked at number 1 on the easy listening chart, becoming their eighth number 1 on that chart in four years.
It is the Carpenters’ biggest-selling record worldwide and their best-selling single in the UK, peaking at number 2. Richard Carpenter admitted on a Japanese documentary that it is his favorite of all the songs he’s written. He has performed an instrumental version at concerts. According to Cash Box, on June 2, 1973, “Yesterday Once More” was the highest-debuting single at No. 71. By August 4, it had reached No. 1.
(c) 1973 by Almo Music Corporation / Hammer and Nails Music, USA
“Sing” (2013Aug27)
Words & Music by Joe Raposo.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Sing” is a popular song created for Sesame Street that gained popularity when performed by The Carpenters, who made it a #3 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1973.
“Sing” was written by Joe Raposo, the staff songwriter for the popular children’s TV show Sesame Street. In its initial appearance, the song was sung by adult human cast member, and Muppets, including Big Bird. “The Kids” sang “Sing” for The Sesame Street Book & Record, a recording re-released on the 2003 Songs from the Street CD set.
Karen and Richard Carpenter heard the song for the first time as guests on ABC television special Robert Young with the Young in 1973. The Carpenters loved the song and said in retrospect that they knew it would “be a hit”. Their associates thought they were “nuts”.
The song acted as their debut single from the LP album Now & Then, released in 1973. “Sing” reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number-one on the easy listening chart, and it became the group’s seventh gold single.
Their recording of the song was produced and arranged by Richard Carpenter, and engineered by Ray Gerhardt. The lead vocal was sung by Karen Carpenter, with backing vocals by Karen and Richard Carpenter and the Jimmy Joyce Children’s Choir. Keyboards were by Richard Carpenter, bass by Joe Osborn, drums by Karen Carpenter, and recorders by Tom Scott. In 1974, while touring Japan, The Carpenters recorded their first live album in Osaka.
The album contained a new version of “Sing” with the children’s chorus sung by the Kyoto Children’s Choir. The song is featured on the album Live in Japan which was recorded in June 1974 and released in Japan only on March 7, 1975. This album has since been released on CD and is available as an import.
(c) 1971 by Jonico Music Corp., USA
All Rights Reserved
International Copyright Secured
————————————————-
All the above has been cut and pasted
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Once again, many thanks to my cousin, Lisa, for the use of her photo of their 2006 Meridian-408 Motoryacht.
Can it be true? Has it come to this? It was bad enough when ambitious, young entertainers could no longer dream of the day they’d be a guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”. Now the newspaper industry is dying—soon no one will be able to dream of someday being “in the headlines”! These social lynchpins connected us to each other, just as Sunday once brought communities together each week. People don’t ‘gather’ anymore. Well, sometimes they do, but it’s called “Occupy” Wall St., or wherever they happen to be gathering.
Summer campgrounds once gave us mini-communities, in which vacationing families would see each other as neighbors for the duration of the vacation—comments about how the kids have grown, or a new baby, or the latest Coleman camping accessory—even when we went away from our communities, we just formed new, temporary ones with whoever was at the same campground. No theme parks. No Hyatts. Just a bare patch of dirt in the woods, ready for tent-staking, and a lakeside beach for relaxing, while the kids ran themselves to exhaustion….
Where else have we stopped connecting with each other? Everywhere except the internet. But people give the Web too much credit—I bet a lot of people who are separated from each other find that ‘skyping’ is just as distant and unsatisfactory as a phone call used to be—communication, but no warmth, no flesh.
One of the things that contributes to culture shock when visiting some other countries is the total absence of internet access—and sometimes even electricity. It’s funny to think that in many communities around the world, people still are born, live their lives and die without ever using electricity. I suppose the Amish might understand, but I’d be at a total loss in such a place.
As time passes, I seem to focus more on the things that are leaving, or already gone, than the things that are new. Take ‘Skyping’ as an example—I have no desire to Skype somebody—but in my twenties, I would have lunged at that. Much of new technology guarantees two things: (1) Something a bit more charmingly civilized will be lost. And (2) Our remove from our forebears (and from the present Third World cultures) gets wider and wider.
Think of this modern rash of ‘school shootings’—could we, back when we were students, have gotten away with anything like that? No, we were living in each other’s laps, compared to the way families live today. And obesity—that was a practical impossibility back in, say, the 1950’s—daily life simply required more movement and activity than is needed today.
That is not to say that all that communing was always a good thing—there were lynch mobs, riots, secret brotherhoods, lots of bad things—but a total lack of any ‘mingling’ in our daily lives is such a departure from our heritage. Is community activity a necessary part of a happy culture? Have we lost in Civilization what we gained in Progress?
I am, perhaps, more attuned to this, due to my shut-in-like lifestyle—most folks my age are still interacting with society a lot more than I do. But I can see in young people (including our own) a tendency towards solitary activity—even when communing with each other, they commune online. I think flash mobs are in some ways a result of the lack of actual connection between an online group of friends—they organize a brief meeting and an organized interaction, then all walk away like nothing happened. But, that may be the only time something actually happens in their lives, sans keyboard and mouse.
It worries me.
A Song,
An Improv,
& An “Are You Dunn?” Addendum….
click to Play my YouTube Video
XperDunn plays Piano
August 25th, 2013
Cover of the Carpenters’ single, “Goodbye to Love”.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[“Goodbye to Love” : Single by The Carpenters from the album “A Song for You”, Released on June 19, 1972, Label A&M #1367 / Writer(s) Richard Carpenter; John Bettis / Producer Jack Daugherty
“Goodbye to Love” is a song composed by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis. It was released by The Carpenters in 1972. On the “Close to You: Remembering The Carpenters” documentary, Tony Peluso stated that this was one of the first, if not the first, love ballads to have a fuzz guitar solo.
While visiting London, he saw a 1940 Bing Crosby film called “Rhythm on the River”. Richard Carpenter noticed that the characters kept referring to the struggling songwriter’s greatest composition, “Goodbye to Love”. He says, ‘You never hear it in the movie, they just keep referring to it,’ and he immediately envisioned the tune and lyrics starting with:
I’ll say goodbye to love
No one ever cared if I should live or die.
Time and time again the chance for
Love has passed me by…
He said that while the melody in his head kept going, the lyrics stopped “because I’m not a lyricist”. He completed the rest of his arrangement upon his return to the USA.]
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click to Play my YouTube Video
XperDunn plays Piano
August 25th, 2013
Improv – Goobers
(music fades out instead of ending–the result of a dead battery-sorry.)
Start and End Cards source: http://www.winslowhomer.org/hound-and-hunter.jsp
Homer’s watercolor sketch for Hound and Hunter showed, lying behind the boy, a rifle that the artist later painted out. When this final canvas was exhibited in 1892, its subject was condemned as a cruel sport then practiced in the Adirondacks. Some viewers believed the youth was drowning the deer to save ammunition. The artist curtly responded, “The critics may think that that deer is alive but he is not—otherwise the boat and man would be knocked high and dry.”
To clarify that the stag is already dead and no longer struggling, however, Homer did repaint the churning water to hide more of the animal. The hunter, therefore, simply ties up a heavy load, calling off the hound so it will not jump into the boat and swamp it.
Homer once asked a museum curator:
“Did you notice the boy’s hands—all sunburnt; the wrists somewhat sunburnt, but not as brown as his hands; and the bit of forearm where his sleeve is pulled back not sunburnt at all? I spent more than a week painting those hands.”
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Sunday, August 25, 2013 4:06 PM
“Are You Done?” (Cont’d):
I am aware that the previous ‘essay’ (if I may use that word) was both ludicrous and without any substantive ideas for moving forward. I think one point I attempted to make is that People have to wake up to the very powerful forces being arrayed against them at present. And that civil-rights-oriented and community-activity-oriented crowd-sourcing is a very promising new tool that we can either use or have used against us—our choice.
The other point, the main idea I wished to illustrate, was that individuals are wooed by many associations and organizations, including political parties, multi-national corporate giants, and banks—and that the only organization intended for our own self-interest, the federal government, being so wrapped up by capitalized and specialized interests, has ceased to perform that function. And that leaves us with only two choices.
We either have to wrest control of our government back towards the protection of civil rights and the providing of social services, or we have to find some way to sidestep those ‘clogged arteries’ and create an organization outside of government. I had intended to mention, further, that such an organization, by virtue of the digital revolution, and what may be called the enhanced social conscience of our society here at the start of century twenty-one, would operate so much more efficiently, cost-effectively, and speedily that the existing government would be pulled along in its wake, so to speak.
Why do I see this issue in this way? That’s easy—because we have already learned that Authority is not a ‘God-given’ right, such as monarchs used to claim; neither is Authority a prerogative of the wealthy, such as the wealthy have been used to claiming; nor is dogma an Authority, as religious extremists persist in insisting. Authority is a necessary evil, plain and simple—someone has to be in charge to enable groups to create something greater than what they could do as a disorganized group of individuals.
And that greater creation, or ‘progress’, if you will, is always a source of Power to those in authority. Power is an addictive drug which no human has ever been immune to—thus authority inevitably changes its goal from a common good to an entitled elite who skim the cream of organized effort and (usually) begin to work counter to the original common good.
We have attempted, by democracy, by socialism, and by communism, to create a more perfect organization, to put in place checks and balances which restrain, as much as possible, the natural tendency towards corruption in authority, including favoritism, and elitism—but all have been overwhelmed by the constant pressure of those natural human drives. Unfortunately, authority has to reside with someone—so I won’t bother trying to invent a new system that partitions or restrains authority from abuse—it’s like trying to lift yourself by your own bootstraps.
And this is why I have no suggestions as to how to fix ourselves—human society has built-in structural flaws that prevent us from Utopia. The only thing we can hope for is that the Elite become ashamed enough of all the starvation and poverty that they eventually find a way to accommodate the millions of losers in the great game of capitalism. Or, for the truly optimistic, we can hope that our global society matures into something less of a dog pile than it’s always been, and is now. If I had a religion, that would be it—people starting to work just as hard to cooperate with each other as they do now to compete with each other.
Saturday, August 24, 2013 6:13 PM
Are you the final result? Are you as good as you get? Have you decided your days of self-improvement are over? I ask myself such questions all the time. And I think about my community that way, and my country, and my children’s futures. I doubt any of us has set our goal towards giving our kids exactly what we were given, no more and no less. Most of us, nearly all of us, want to offer our children something more, something better.
And I doubt any of us are completely satisfied with the various modes of commuter transportation—or our taxes, or our laws—really nothing has been made perfect. None of us take what we are here, now, as the best thing we can be—and all of us are actively striving towards betterment, not just of ourselves, but of our town, our state, our nation, and our world.
We want enough food, we want enough shelter, electricity, heat, medicine, and internet access for everybody. And that’s not all—we want the food to be better, healthier, tastier, etc. We want better homes and gardens, smaller bills, more say, and less restriction. But we want more freedom, too. We want more money, more government services, better schools. We want, we want, we want.
We all want, in our different ways—when we could be getting a lot more by wanting together. If people were more organized, things would be more efficient—but organization doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Organization requires leadership and leadership has power and power corrupts. That is why every historical effort to become organized has devolved into a power struggle between the manifest will of the people and the whims of the corrupted powerful.
Our democracy has never been a perfect thing—far from it. Its ability to protect us from ourselves has eroded over centuries of legislative conjuring and barefaced lobbying by business leaders. The land of opportunity has become a land of liberty, at least in comparison with some other places—that is, the freedom is still there, but the opportunities have started drying up. The unsettled lands have shrunk to virtual zero; the untapped resources are no longer possible wherever one takes a pick-axe to the soil, or a saw to the forest. We aren’t building many new dams along rivers these days, and for many reasons… indeed, most changes to existing dams are meant to make them less of a boundary to spawning fish and other life cycles.
So our ‘democracy’, in its present form, has become a rigged game being run by the majority shareholders of the capitalist system—if we wish to defend ourselves, we will require an organization that sidesteps our election system and our legislature. We will have to find a way for democracy to survive in a ‘land without opportunities’. Organization will be required—but how to make an organization that isn’t as dangerous as the one we now have?
Perhaps that is the real meaning of the famous quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Perhaps Thomas Jefferson meant that Liberty is always at risk, that we must scrap our government, our legislation, our entire national organization every couple of decades. Perhaps Jefferson saw the inevitable creep that would begin to gnaw on the boundaries of our liberty from the first day of our new government.
And perhaps that is the true reason for the Second Amendment—we were supposed to use it long ago, to overthrow the government before our government became too strong for even armed state militias to resist. We missed our chance—now the second amendment is just an historical novelty, a tattered rationale to support the firearms industry.
The American Dream, just like the USA itself, was founded on a well-spring of opportunity and untapped riches. Our present government, like modern capitalism, are both the unsatisfactory results of those initiatives when continued on into a period of shrinking opportunities and riches. We must organize. We must find a way to crowd-source our own destinies, before Sony and Pfizer, et al., figure out how to crowd-source us into a shiny new, digital thralldom.
If, like me, you feel that you’re not quite done yet, consider the difference between struggling for your own interests as an individual and struggling for change as an organized group. If the idea of public-service-oriented crowd-sourcing doesn’t scare the pants off most of today’s politicians, it’s only because they haven’t the vision to see how powerful such an initiative may someday be.
There are many organizations—tennis players’ organizations, advertising industry organizations, chess clubs, and such—an infinity of affinities, if you will. There are many corporations—and as capitalism-based organizations (with the rights of a person, no less) they have a great deal of power and influence. We have political parties which are supposed to be organizations to represent the opinions and interests of the populace, but which have drifted farther and farther away from that role, and closer and closer to becoming a rubber stamp for the interests of the biggest check-writers.
Henrietta and Dwarf by Anthony van Dyck
But there is no organization in defense of ordinary people. Many organizations will tell you they are exactly that, but all will be wrong to the extent that nothing exists without the influence of money—and each of those organizations will have specific interests they are ‘for’ or ‘against’.
Charles I with M de St Antoine (1633) by Anthony van Dyck
I’m talking about a ‘People’ lobby. Its mission would be to confront and conflict with the business lobbyists, the religious activists, and any raise in the cost of living. It would ceaselessly push for a higher minimum wage, no matter what that wage is. It would hunt down and prosecute any big corporation that is milking the government of billions of dollars as part of its daily operation—and the Humanity lobby would call for audits of every single government contract, investigate all hints of improper influence and the least sign of selling favors.
In short, it would be the most hated organization the world has ever seen. The Humanity lobby would refuse to recognize borders and work on behalf of all people, people living in all countries, and people working for all companies. It would fund its own news service, with an eye towards ecological risks, inhumane employment standards, slave wages, and corruption and influence across the globe. Only one catch—every twenty years we have to take the leaders of that organization out to the back wall and shoot’em.
The Real Mother Goose is one of the larger collections of rhymes for children. It has wonderful pen and watercolor illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright. This book was originaly published in 1916.
Click here for Amazon mp3 page;
Well, I saw “Lovelace” on VOD yesterday (a biopic of the famous star of “Deep Throat”, the first porn film to be shown in major cinemas). As you may imagine, her life was no bed of roses–nor did the men in her life ever give me cause to be proud of my gender–at least insofar as they were portrayed in the movie. But let’s face it, the 1970s was a golden time for male narcissist psychopaths–women still felt un-empowered, but the women’s lib movement gave all the male bullies an excuse to batter and disparage their ever-so-lucky girlfriends and wives.
So, for me, the movie had a stench about it (which is, I guess, a testament to the filmmakers) which was the aroma of self-serving, lazy men of the seventies abusing their responsibilities whenever they conflicted with their sexual appetites. It was also, as you may imagine, the magical land of non-enforced child support–long before ‘deadbeat dad’ legislation was ever dreamed of. I think the worst circumstances created by that decade’s ignorant blindness was the plight of a teenage girl who has to choose between her hateful father and the dangerous boyfriend. Lots of girls got themselves involved with execrable boyfriends who were, in their minds, at least a change from the ignorant hatred and violence of their fathers’ or step-fathers’ home life.
As an accurate depiction of just how ugly 1970s society had been, this movie gets five stars–but it doesn’t do enough to show how Lovelace’s suffering was of a piece with all the women of her time, from teenage girls to mature housewives–all of them still subject to the ugly laughter that was the misogynists’ hunting horn. You know, back when we could all laugh at the idea of women being the equal of men, ha ha.
I must confess, I have never seen the movie which made her famous–I’ve never been comfortable with porn, it’s not my bag. I think it’s because no matter how well the women in them act out male fantasies, I can still see the humanity behind their masks.
So, Great Movie! But, not so great for me, personally… It’s one redeeming feature was the soundtrack, which I paused at, during the ‘credits scroll’, to write down a list of the mp3s I didn’t already have.
Some of these songs I already owned, through my continuing quest for the most overpoweringly nostalgic playlist of all time (for people my age, that is). But I’m weak on the ‘soul’ music song titles, of which there are several used in the film.
The great BJ Thomas’s “Fooled Around And Fell In Love”, and the even greater Billie Holiday’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” are both missing from my list, but are on the soundtrack CD, which I discovered in my search for the URLs to purchase each mp3 on my list from Amazon.com
The soundtrack album is also available–which contains songs not on this list, or performed by different musicians. Nevertheless, having gone to the trouble, I produce them here for your perusal:
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“Lovelace” Movie Soundtrack Album {** indicates song on soundtrack album}
** “Gimme Little Sign” – Brenton Wood
“Rockin’ Boogie” – (recd by Sammy Price)
** “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” – Gladys Knight and the Pips
“Out All Night” – Everybody Else
“Get Ready” – (recd by The Temps)
“Where We Belong” – (recd by Passion Pit)
“Time For The Gallery” – (NOTE: recd by Ochre/Alb: ‘Early Learning’)
** “Spirit In The Sky” – Norman Greenbaum
** “Funky Funky Way of Makin Love” – John Ellison and the Soul Brothers
** “If You Ain’t Getting Your Thing” – L. J. Waiters and Electrifiers
NOTE: the above mp3 for sale ONLY as part of the “Lovelace” soundtrack album (which has all these songs and more)
** “Shotgun Shuffle” – KC and the Sunshine Band
** “Oh How I Love It” – The People’s Choice
** “Keep On Trucking” – Eddie Kendricks
“Your Mama Wants Ya Back” – Betty Davis
“Panhandle Stomp” – Satin and Heartaches (recd by Billy Briggs):
click for Wiki page of “Lovelace”
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Saturday, August 17, 2013 11:19 PM
It’s difficult to say how I feel tonight. It was such a beautiful day. Just perfect, with the sun shining and a few little clouds just there for ornamentation. And our yard looked like a store that had had its walls removed. All our tag sale stuff was on rows of tables and some on the ground, upon tarps. The clothes had a little hanging area with all the sizes marked on the different stacks of shirts and pants. People came early and stayed late. I stayed out of the whole process—if they asked me, we’d never sell a thing—or I’d give it away.
British Museum
But our lovely Jessy made a nice wad towards her big wedding in the fall (the preparations have gone on for months—damn all those ‘bride-zilla’ TV shows). I’m to be fitted for a tux—Spencer, too. Looking forward to seeing him in a suit almost makes up for having to rent and wear a tux, myself—besides; I have to give the bride away.
Guggenheim Museum
But the down-side is that, as summer reaches its full glory, its end draws inevitably near. The way the weeks slip by for me, it’ll seem like no time at all until the wedding, the end of the year holidays—and there I am, in the dead of winter. Optimism, as you can see, is my forte.
But tomorrow, whatever’s not sold gets carted off to good-will or wherever. They’re even selling my Buick Le Sabre 2000 (with the HUD {heads-up display} and the genuine leather seats) because we don’t want to get it fixed ourselves. After a day of motor-heads discussing this and that beneath the hood, the upshot was the battery would be charged overnight, and an attempt to start it will be made in the morning.
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
I’m glad to see it go—it looks so beautiful in the driveway (I’ve always liked that car) and it’s painful to see it just rust out there. Besides, my driver’s license has lapsed, a couple of years back, and the car was always being borrowed, as unused vehicles often are—the only thing ‘mine’ about it is the insurance and registration (all the responsibility and cost, and none of the driving).
H-O Trains at the Museum
I’ve no doubt someone will decide to take it off our hands and, if necessary, tow it away. I used it like the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena—except for other people driving it, it’s practically mint. But, of course, there were the other people, so it’s just ‘in pretty good shape’ for a 13-year-old Buick. Old-people stuff is the pits—you know, if you have to stop driving as a young person, it’s a matter of ‘how long until I can drive again?’—but for me, it’s ‘my driving days are over’.
Porsche Museum
But it was just great to have both kids (only they’re not kids anymore) and Claire and I, and our neighbors, Harlan and Sherryl, just hanging out in the front yard all day. Some people came to say ‘hi’ more than to shop, so we had several ‘how long’s it been?’- type encounters throughout the day. O—and Claire’s mom brought by her blondie brownies (OMG—she’s hard to beat, baking-wise).
Spencer’s old Legos were all gathered in one spot, about ten big bags full and several large boxes besides—a veritable leaf-pile’s worth of Legos. I wish we could say that lots of little kids had fun with them throughout the day but the truth is someone came by very early and bought the whole pile—o, well. Toys go fast at tag sales.
Milwaukee Art Museum
Now all the unsold stuff is under tarps, awaiting day two of the monster tag sale. The funniest part about it is Jessy—she would be right at home in a middle-eastern bazaar, dickering and schmoozing, glad-handing and organizing—she’s amazing. She could command troops, I think, if the conditions ever arose.
Natural History Museum London
Every once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of something, like my marimbas, drumsticks, and ukulele, or my oil-skin jacket, or my serape—and I would just bite my tongue. After all, I couldn’t say I’d used any one of those things in a long time—or anticipated using them anytime soon—but they’re just the kinds of things I feel possessive about. So, in my head, I let it all go. I’ve found that if such things are sold without me seeing them go, I never miss them—so I just pretend I don’t see them.
I’ve always had a knack for extrapolation—I often see the elbow heading for the juice glass in time to move the glass—but I am, sadly, best at the bad extrapolations—for instance, I can see where this could easily be the last time, or at best, the last time for a long while, that the four of us will be sharing the house and seeing each other every day. It’s so nice, I can’t bear the thought of it ending.
So fires and floods, coast to coast, and I don’t care. I live here and here is very nice right now—I feel bad for the troubles of others, but I’m not going to dwell on the news from far away, especially bad news from far away (is there any other kind?)
kscvc atlantis
I’m enjoying re-reading the works of Ian Banks, one of my top sci-fi writers, ever. I’m having so much fun with music I have to keep telling myself to back up my recordings, for safety, but I’m too busy making new ones and, somehow, that seems more important. And I’ve come to accept that my writing will never be in the form of a book, will never be popular reading, and will, therefore, never make me a penny—nothing new there, except for the end of the fantasy that it would ever change.
Museum of Science and Industry
I am consoled by the freedom I feel now, writing whatever I feel like writing, not worrying about my interface with the real world. God, do I have a shitty interface with the real world—I am flush with all kinds of wonders and conceits that have no practical value—but my ability to meet people, converse with people, convince people, or ‘close’ on people is pitifully weak, damn near non-existent. I have spent too much of my life in situations where my optimistically existential world-view is never challenged.
New South Wales Art Gallery – night
I’ve become so comfortable in my sectarianism that I’m liable to say all kinds of impolite things that I should keep to myself when in the company of faith-based society—which is still most of society—and which will be a long time changing, in that respect. If I had stayed in the mix, held a job, interacted with other people all day, I would have never had the chance to become so impatient with everyday phrases like, ‘I’ll pray for you’; ‘It’s God’s will’; or ‘They’re still watching us from heaven’—you know the sort of thing.
British Museum
I can watch “Saved By An Angel”—but for me, it’s a comedy. I can watch Hallmark movies—firstly, because I love the corn, the really tall corn—but secondly, because they make serious movies about God and Santa Claus, which is kind of where I am with the whole thing.
Photographers’ Gallery, London
Come to think of it, when people of faith watch Hallmark TV-movies, do they see the ‘God’ ones as real and the ‘Santa’ movies as a silly kid’s fantasy? How could that fail to cause cognitive dissonance? I think the execs over at Hallmark are invested in faith-based and fantasy-based messages—after all, they are the folks who made holiday cards and gift cards and get-well cards absolute necessities of our society. Even after the Roman Catholic Church had removed St. Valentine’s Day from the church calendar, the folks at Hallmark were still interested. How could they resist? A holiday that pretty much mandates a greeting card, or a handful, even?—Hallmark bravely said, ‘No, St. Valentine stays’!
The point is, whenever that kind of loose talk about the spiritual world gets bandied about, I say nothing. But I’m still feeling something—I just know that no good can come from criticizing someone else’s belief system—but I still have all kinds of comments just begging to be let loose. I get frustrated and impatient in such company and I soon reach a point where I have to walk away.
gallery
There are some mental gymnastics involved with being a secular humanist—one must keep in mind that religion is still very much a real thing for the other people, one learns some very subtle responses to ‘I’ll pray for you’, etc., and one inevitably edits the subject out of any discussion about other things—because it’s a big thing to most people, and the original subject would be forgotten in the ensuing argument over God.
Louvre at Dusk
I already had some limitations, back in my normal days—I had no patience with bigotry or sexism and I would never just let it slide. It’s surprising how strong the reaction is from people who aren’t used to being called on their ignorance—it should be as obvious to them as it is to me that reactions that strong are born of defensiveness—that they know in their hearts they are wrong and are just mad at me because I ruined the ‘fun’.
Field Museum of Natural History
So, lots of arguments at work, or in a bar—and this was before I went from agnostic to full-on anti-religious. I hurt myself with this behavior—a more stable person would roll with the waves and let things slide—but I have been neglected, misunderstood, and even hated in my life—I did not like it and I can’t stand to see it happen to others.
I used to do crystal meth—I just couldn’t believe the change it made in me—I would snort some speed and the next thing you know I’m introducing myself to strangers, having conversations with people, enjoying being in a crowded bar or at a party. Those were the days—but they weren’t me, not really. Only under the influence of a strong drug could I act like other people and be comfortable with a social scene. But the supply dried up, and suddenly everyone was selling coke—that was the end of my enjoying being in crowds…
Main Display Tile View
Follow up:
The Tag Sale was just as good on the second day, Sunday. Someone actually got the Buick started, and promptly bought it and drove it away.
It’s Wednesday now and most of the leftover stuff has been carted off to charities or the junkyard.
The yard is mostly a lawn again. Jessie made a big pile of dough. Everybody’s happy. I’m still reading (same author, different book). Claire’s gone off to her literary ladies gathering. Spencer just picked some cukes and a little basil from the backyard garden—cukes taste delicious. Every summer we get both our own garden’s produce and the subscription Claire has to an organic farm that brings in a mixed crate-full each week.
Summer is so good—we really ought to make it longer.
Gallery Cité
XperDunn plays Piano on August 15th, 2013 Improv – Concord Grapes: NOTE: ‘Grapes’ graphic downloaded from https://www.facebook.com/oldmosswoman on 08/15/2013
Improv – Concord Grapes (2013Aug15)
I fell asleep watching “The Big Wedding” last night, so I watched the end this morning. Great movie, BTW. Then I noticed that the End Credits music was a jazzy, personalized, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” by a familiar-sounding female vocalist. So I waited for the music credits at the end (as I usually do) and saw that I was right–it was one of the cast singing, Christine Ebersole. I had never enjoyed “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” quite so much before, and she inspired me to do my own improv on the tune. While looking her up online, I found her husband’s, William J. Moloney’s, artwork, so I snagged it for my the Title screen of my video…
Improv – “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (2013Aug15)
Improv – “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (2013Aug15)
NOTE: Christine Ebersole, winner of the 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, gave her all (talents-wise, that is) for her latest movie, “The Big Wedding”–during the end credits, Christine Ebersole (who plays ‘Muffin’ in the
film) sings her jazzy rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, which inspired me to fiddle with it too…
In looking her up I learned she is married to William J. Moloney, a graphic artist–so I stole one of his collage images for the Titles and Credits cards! See the actual work of William J. Moloney [including Collage: “Love’s Oasis”]
at williamjmoloneyDOTcom.
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XperDunn plays Piano August 15th, 2013 – Three (3) by George and Ira Gershwin- “Embraceable You” “A Foggy Day” & “I’ve Got A Crush On You”:
“Embraceable You”/”A Foggy Day”/”I’ve Got A Crush On You”
XperDunn plays Piano
August 15th, 2013
Three (3) by George and Ira Gershwin:
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“Embraceable You” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin
[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Embraceable You” is a popular song, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The song was originally written in 1928 for an unpublished operetta named East is West. It was eventually published in 1930 and included in the Broadway musical Girl Crazy. where it was performed by Ginger Rogers in a song and dance routine choreographed by Fred Astaire. Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005.]
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“A Foggy Day” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
[“A Foggy Day” is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress. It was originally titled “A Foggy Day (In London Town)”, and is often still referred to as such. {I have mislabeled it here on the video, as }”A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, a romantic British popular song written in 1939 with lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and music by Manning Sherwin. {Sorry for the confusion!}
Berkeley Square is a large leafy square in Mayfair, an expensive part of London. The Ritz Hotel referred to is also in Mayfair. With its sweet, wistful song the European Robin is a likely source of the legendary Nightingale, as birds, stimulated by the street lights, can often be heard singing in cities during the night.]
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“I’ve Got A Crush On You” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
[“I’ve Got a Crush on You” is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It is unique among Gershwin compositions in that it was used for two different Broadway productions, Treasure Girl (1928), and Strike Up the Band (1930).]
Okay, I’ve used more artwork graphics from Rijksmuseum [The Museum of the Netherlands – in Amsterdam] to serve as background for my start and end cards in all three of these videos. I guess the 3 ‘Standards’ are passably done, though I’ll have to keep my day job.
The Carpenters covers are disappointing, as always–I’ve tried to get a good ‘take’ off of these favorites of mine from their LP repertoire many times–and the piano accompaniment couldn’t be simpler–I’ll guess I’ll just have to try yet again, someday soon.
My improv for today, like many of my recent improvs, kinda got away from me–I don’t know what that’s about–I can’t seem to settle into a groove. But try, try again, and all that….
XperDunn plays Piano
August 5th, 2013
Three (3) Standard Songs
XperDunn plays Piano
August 5th, 2013
Four (4) Songs of The Carpenters (2013Aug03)
That’s all ’til next time. G’night, kids!
I’ll tell you what the f***k it is—it’s the goddam Obama-haters. The one thing we, as Americans, have always done is to accept the elected president and treat him with the respect deserved by the office, regardless of our feelings for the person elected. I’ll grant you, we had a lot of fun sniping at Bush 2.0 because he didn’t have the greatest command of grammar, English, arithmetic, or public speaking—but we never expressed the violence implied by the vitriol of the ‘I hate Obama’ party.
Even when it became crystal clear a few months into the occupation of Iraq that there were never any WMDs and that the whole war was a ‘pet project’ of Dubya’s and his cronies’, when he committed our troops to an unnecessary invasion, did we ever question his citizenship, or his faith, or his intentions. Even when there were a lot of outstanding questions about his win over Gore in 2000, once the FL supreme court ruled and Bush was inaugurated—no one ever trashed his character or swore to fight his every single piece of legislation in Congress, or block his every single Presidential appointee, or call for outright violence against his person.
Only the Obama-haters have ever so ruthlessly disgraced this country with their obviously racist fury. I would give them the benefit of the doubt if their objections and allegations remained respectful of this country and the office of the Presidency. But they made history with their disrespect.
No one, before Obama, had ever been called ‘Liar!’ in the middle of his state of the union address—and by a member of congress, no less. This congress is set to make history over the next few months as the most useless, do-nothing, back-biting bunch of bulls**t-artists this country has ever seen.
A record low in the number of bills passed. And the Republican party, i.e. the people who brought you the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, just days before Obama would become president-elect, could hardly wait for him to take the oath, so they could start blaming him for their greed and corruption—and the millions of Americans who lost their jobs under Bush’s watch.
Legislation that was copied word for word from earlier, Republican conceptions was nevertheless voted down by that party’s office-holders, especially the health care bill they so loudly declaim is unconstitutional.
All of this unprecedented rage and stubborn, irresponsible behavior in elected officials is proof, to me, that we are not talking politics here—we are talking racism, pure and simple, and I think the whole conservative camp in this country should be ashamed of their childish and ignorant behavior. That’s what the f**k it is. Prove me wrong, you tea-party clowns and closeted sex criminals and corrupt, fat, toxic bunch of fools.
I mean, Jeez! You people took what was potentially the proudest moment in our nation’s history—proof that the American ideal of equality was real, Not just a bunch of bulls**t, and you ruined it by publicly and strenuously screaming your heads off about our President being this, not being that, putting obstacles in front of every single move he tried to make.
And let’s get this straight—this was not tit-for-tat. President Obama has done his damnedest to try and get this country out of the ditch the Republicans abandoned it in, to end the useless wars the Republicans got us into, to get services for the troops who were wounded, or the families of the dead, to improve our infrastructure, our educational system, and a whole lot more. Every day that man gets up, rubs his eyes and says, ‘Well, let’s keep trying, let’s get to work.’ And every damned day the Republicans greet him with catcalls and obfuscation and dithering over nits.
The Republicans have spent nearly eight years straight now, working their hardest to ruin this nation. They call it politics—I call it treason.
I remember listening on the radio to the Fifth Dimension singing “Aquarius (Let The Sun Shine)” as a boy—it was about astrology, of course, but in the middle of the ‘race to the moon’ aspect of the Cold War, I had no scruple against star-gazing of any type. I loved space, and still do—and I’ve read far more than my share of Science Fiction novels. In the category ‘hard’ sci-fi, I make bold to claim I’ve read it all, from 1965 to today. That may not be literally true, but it conveys my sense of it, anyhow.
And that song was so trippy, talking about ‘Ages’ and generations and people as a whole—as if we were a big tribe, which, in that sense, we were—and are. But now I also hear in those lyrics the inclinations towards excessive trust in, and faith in, anyone with a spiel—as long as it was outwardly non-conformist, people were ready to turn to anything new—even Jones of Jonestown, and Manson of California, and cults like the Branch Davidians in Waco and the ‘Moonies’, who spread their ‘fundraising’ from coast to coast.
With the tunes taken from “Hair”, the 1967 Broadway musical, the Fifth Dimension created a medley of two songs, and their recording of “Aquarius (Let The Sun Shine)” was a number one hit in the US in 1969 for six weeks—the same year I watched on TV as Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon. Between “Hair” and Hippies, LSD and pot, astrology and space exploration, 1969 gave me a satisfying sense that life was about reaching new frontiers, going higher and faster. And while I had my age as an excuse, there were many grown-up, so-called adults who had the same nebulous sense of go, go, go—which is why we cancelled the Apollo program as soon as we realized we had neglected to plan what we would do with the Moon, or on the Moon, once we had made it there.
And from there, the whole ‘go, go, go’ thing perverted its course, from actual achievement to mere business success, which pursuit has, ever since, bred the vipers now feeding so greedily at the breast of the good ol’ USA. There are no challenges greater than becoming fat with money, power, privilege, and influence—or so we, as a society, seem to perceive it. We see news items that speak of progress in the march towards ‘eternal health’—a way to live forever—without the slightest mention of how one would spend one’s eternity of days or justify one’s place in the breadline.
And this wasn’t done to us by the government. We did this to ourselves. Every time big corporations have shaved a piece off of our workplace quality of life, our importance to that business as the engine of its goals (and our right to form Unions), or our very rights to express ourselves as individuals and maintain the same privacy we are due as taxpayers—every time we let one of these go past, we have traded our dignity for mere job security. Well, we can see where all that job security went—away, that’s where it went. Now they can make whatever draconian workplace policies they like—and slash your salary, too—without a one of us not being too scared of being unemployed to say, ‘boo’ about it.
I’ve seen it happen many times—we all have. The company starts to post notices about some new policy, like ‘clocking in and out’ or some such. Now, you don’t much care for that—seems like you’ve been trusted up until now to give the company your hard work for your salary, without being ‘time checkpoint-ed’. It’s a little insulting, really. You don’t like it—you’re pretty put out about it. Plus, everyone knows that people ask their work friends to cover for them when they need to get around a time clock, anyhow—which turns what was a natural flexibility of the workplace into a criminal conspiracy. But no one else seems to think that it’s worth quitting over (of course, if everyone acted in concert, it would only be a ‘threat of quitting’—an entirely different thing that doesn’t guarantee being fired, like standing alone would).
So, I had to ask myself every time, ‘Do I want to go job-hunting and lose my steady paycheck, just for the principle of the thing—which no one else deems worthy of being championed?’ I didn’t always give in, but sometimes I did—it’s not my responsibility to be perfectly politic when no one else wants to bother. But the unwillingness of the others to go against the established authority, even when it exceeds its rightful scope, is definitely the majority opinion of the employed. Frustratingly, that is the opposite attitude from one that could prevent such fiat-creep.
And the worst of all are the self-righteous: ‘I have to take care of my children, wife, sick mother—Nothing is more important than that.’ But that rational only justifies effort, not complacency. Putting our families first is a point of pride for us—I was not aware that it is also an acceptable excuse to be a rug for our employers to walk on.
Then they bring up the axiom, ‘never quit a job before you have a job’. That is a hard one to counter, I’ll grant you. But if one is serious about one’s dignity and self-worth—and that of others, especially one’s co-workers, as well—a way can be found to bring collective action against management. But people are too ‘sophisticated’ these days to act as a group—it’s all ‘I’ll do my thing, you do your thing’—I confess, it is a favorite of mine too. We have no defense against this war of attrition that has degraded the American workplace and the American worker.
But, now that the quality of the jobs available to Americans is little better than the quality of jobs illegal aliens hold, I expect there will be discord. It will be aimless, angry discord—and stands every chance of making things worse instead of better. But it’s only a matter of time before the number of people in the streets, cold, hungry, and desperate, will so outnumber the ten or twenty people who still live a comfortable life that those ‘one percent-ers’ will feel trapped in their own apartments. I exaggerate to illustrate my point, but you see it nonetheless, I trust.
Most people are happy being led—and those who are happy leading are only too happy to oblige. Neither group wants to hear any guff about fairness and dignity—business is business, right? Well, no, actually. ‘Business’ is a polite label for the chaos of capitalism. Nobody planned to create Microsoft. The guy who invented Google probably just woke up from a nap one day and decided to make an online search engine service available to everyone on the web. Most chemical discoveries, like x-ray photography and penicillin, were discovered by accident. Businesses use mathematics—but only when they want to—the rest of the time, they just argue among themselves. That’s what corporate lawyers and public exchanges are for—to facilitate the arguing.
These corporations appear to be made of people, but they are actually autonomous engines with greed-guidance systems that tear through the fabric of whatever humanity they come upon in their quest for the ownership of everything. The list of jobs that they are creating includes multimillion-dollar annual salaried jobs for top managers, slavery-like child labor jobs in underdeveloped countries, and humiliating, depersonalized, underpaid jobs to people who earned (and had to pay for) college degrees to prove they were smart enough to be trusted with a workstation cubicle.
And all the words spewed out of the modern media, out from our speaker systems into our ears—an unending caravan of trite, pompous, self-contradictory, spun, stretched, and sibilanced word salad as random as that heard in any psych ward, only perhaps crazier for being such a near-miss impersonation of measured wisdom.
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize a con—just a little widening of the eyes will usually suffice. And I think that’s where Roosevelt’s ‘the only thing to fear is, fear itself’ comes into play. Our world has become so anarchic, so full of blind inertias, so destructive of old ways and old things—that most of us want to just keep our heads down and carry on. But that is the wrong way to fix our problems. The best way to fix a problem is to take a good, honest look at it—and at ourselves, while we’re at it.
How Do I Spell Successes? With Six Esses!
In other words: these six (6) song titles all start with ‘S’:
XperDunn plays Piano Covers on July 27th, 2013
Six Song Covers Starting With ‘S’
(“Love is Lovelier”) “The Second Time Around”
“The Shadow Of Your Smile”
“Shangri La”
“Siboney”
“Softly, As I Leave You”
“Stairway To The Stars”
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“The Second Time Around” is a song with words by Sammy Cahn and music by Jimmy Van Heusen. It was introduced in the 1960 film High Time, sung by Bing Crosby with Henry Mancini conducting his orchestra, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Its theme is captured by its first two lines:
Love is lovelier the second time around,
Still wonderful with both feet on the ground.
It is especially associated with Frank Sinatra, who released multiple recordings of the ballad.
Jane Morgan sang the song on a 1961 episode of The Jack Benny Program.
==========================================
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“The Shadow of Your Smile”, also known as “Love Theme from The Sandpiper”, is a popular song. The music was written by Johnny Mandel with the lyrics written by Paul Francis Webster.
The song was introduced in the 1965 film The Sandpiper, with a trumpet solo by Jack Sheldon and later became a minor hit for Tony Bennett (Johnny Mandel arranged and conducted his version as well).
It won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
==========================================
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Shangri-La”
The ‘finale’ song from ‘Shangri-La’, a 1956 musical with a book and lyrics by James Hilton, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee and music by Harry Warren. Based on Hilton’s classic 1933 novel “Lost Horizon”
==========================================
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Siboney” (Canto Siboney) is a 1929 classic Cuban song by Ernesto Lecuona. The music is in cut time, originally written in C major.
The lyrics were reportedly written by Lecuona while away from Cuba and is about the homesickness he is experiencing (Siboney is also a town in Cuba, and can also refer to Cuba in general)
==========================================
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Softly, as I Leave You” is a popular Italian song composed by Giorgio Calabrese and Tony De Vita (1932–1998), translated into English by Hal Shaper.
It was originally an Italian success by Mina, at the Sanremo Music Festival, entitled “Piano” (“Softly”). Mina published a recording of the song first as a single in 1960 and later as well on an EP and on three LPs.
The English songwriter Hal Shaper noticed the song and in November 1961 wrote English lyrics to the melody, calling it “Softly, as I Leave You.” The best known versions are those by Matt Monro (#10 on the British charts in 1962) and Frank Sinatra (#27 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #4 on the adult contemporary chart in 1964).
The Sinatra family announced Frank’s death on May 14, 1998 by placing an announcement on their website that was accompanied by a recording of the singer’s version of the song.
==========================================
“Stairway To The Stars” -from the United Artists Motion Picture “SOME LIKE IT HOT”-original song 1935 lyrics by Mitchell Parish, music by Matt Malneck and Frank Signorelli. Glenn Miller’s version has alternate lyrics.
Long ago, in a decade far, far away, my friend Randy owned a big spread up in the Vermont hills–a beautiful idyll with meadows and wood-trails and ponds and streams. Randy made his own pond (and stocked it) but still, he had a pond. On one visit, I designed and built a footbridge over his stream–my one and only engineering project.
rough sketch 1 for Directions Map
I was already losing focus, losing fine motor control in my drawings, and suffering from chronic fatigue, etc. So I would make short visits up there to build bridges and draw flyers, but then I went home and only heard about the huge galas that followed my visits. Randy described one gathering where my footbridge was the access to all the big tents and lean-tos. The bridge was such a big hit that someone eventually drove a car over it. To their surprise, the bridge was unfazed by an automobiles weight. Soon they were all driving back and forth over the bridge–until some wiseguy decided to ‘push the envelope’ and drive a big pick-up across. My bridge was fazed, and no one would ever again build a usable bridge over that stream.
rough sketch 2 for Directions Map
The Annual Pig Roasts were huge affairs. The police citations from previous fests were nailed up on a wall of honor–no party ever got cited less than three times. It was a three-day event–people would caravan in with huge RVs, tent cities, and a host of less-easily described people and living quarters. But the only way to get all those people together was to send out invitations–which was where I came in. The first flyer had a sort of ‘last supper’ drawing of a bunch of cartoon pigs seated at a long table, drinking and eating–the best drawing of all but, unfortunately, one for which I have lost all the art and flyers.
The next year, I would be unable to draw as well, and Randy had to settle for two pigs toasting with beer mugs. The year after that, Randy had to settle for re-using the same art, and just updating the words. This was one of the hardest periods for me–I was becoming a shell of my former self and still believed that I just wasn’t getting enough rest–and it hurt me to have to say ‘no’ when people asked me to draw–they couldn’t understand that my ability had simply dried up and blown away, and neither could I.
If you’ve never drawn a map of directions to a party, be advised that it isn’t as easy as it looks–fortunately (from my POV at that time) a map done properly once need never be drawn again.
final drawing for Directions Map:
There were early sessions between Randy and I as he explained what he wanted the picture to look like…
early sketch 1 ‘party pig’
…and I drew rough sketches to see if we were talking about the same thing.
After fixing upon the figures, we then discussed the ‘scene’:
rough sketch – left-side ‘toasting pig’:
rough sketch – left-side ‘toasting pig’:
toasting pigs
final art
Randy was very kind, always offering to put me and Claire and kids in his House (which he designed and built himself!–the only permanent structure with utilities and running water). Alas, we were raising young kids and I was falling apart inside, so we never did get to see the roasts. (I had been to the very first one, but had spent the two days in bed, sick and exhausted.) Still, they were wonders of the art of hospitality and it’s a shame Randy doesn’t live there any more.
randy’s Invite & Thank You:
Randy has been writing poetry lately, under the URL cloudfactor5.wordpress, and very good poetry, IMHO. You can judge for yourselves at: cloudfactor5
more art to come…..
Activity Daisy (w/out ‘activities’)
activity daisy
Activity Daisy (with ‘activities’)
This is one of my many illustrations for “Teachers Update”, a newsletter for teachers K-3, which was published in 1988 – 1989.
Click to Watch ‘Wing Nut’
Click to watch “Help Me Rhonda”
Click to watch ‘Woo Hoo!’
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 10:47 PM
Feeling kind of strange tonight. It doesn’t help that I’ve just watched the PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery “Endeavour” episode with an early serial killer case. It’s even spookier that it’s set in the seventies, in and around Oxford, in England—I’m fairly certain that ‘Masterpiece Mystery’ is just the American product-label for some extremely fine BBC programming in ‘Criminal Procedurals’ that is worlds ahead of our L&O:SVU ghoulishness.
Nor does it help that the Dragon Lady landed a few shots, much as I tried to appear as if I were laughing her off, and now I’m a tetch anxious—it is so easy to be wiped away from the Internet. Cancel my WordPress account and I lose an immeasurable amount of uploaded artistic expression—just because I’ve decorated them with various images that pop up in Google Image search—it’s not as if I try to sell anything, or even ‘build a following’ (which seems to be the current coin of the online-realm). And you won’t find my images altered to try and hide their source—if I was a real pirate, I could ‘wash’ all my downloads through various graphics programs I have and make them all indiscernible as to their original appearance—to human eyes, or to computer analysis.
But I would be as likely to expect to be arrested for hanging a magazine illustration on my living room wall, as to be called to account for my sharing of images that I find on Google Image search. There are methods available to prevent unlicensed downloads—the museum sites and the art sites use them all the time. If the Dragon Lady wants to hang fire, allowing her graphics to show up in a public search (no doubt in hopes of trademark exposure and attention) without any safeguards against casual use, that’s her business decision. I shouldn’t worry—such as her will probably grate on the nerves of her WordPress contact as much as she grated on mine.
But I’ve been clouding up recently—I’ve just completed reading the ‘Century Series’ (or is it ‘Trilogy’?) by Ken Follett, which begins at the turn of the 19th century and through the two World Wars—an epic involving Americans, British, Russians, and Germans—with interconnections of characters, generational sagas of ‘houses’,etc. and so forth. And I’ve just this very day finished re-reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Years”, a sweeping story centered on the English, but affected by the same historic changes and struggles. Add to those the watching of “Downton Abbey”, the newly-ressurected “Upstairs Downstairs”, and “Selfridges”… well, you can see that I’m just one more English-accented, historic dram-edy on VOD away from thinking myself more a member of the Bloomsbury Group than a suburban New Yorker of the 21st Century.
photo-shopped image of original scan
And here’s the most awful part. These people—Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Selfridge—they are all antique subjects for the historian, yet their works speak of a sea change in the story of humanity (not including Selfridge, who was more an engine of that sea change). They decried the end of the placid, changeless life of pre-industrial times whilst giving in to all its modern temptations—democracy, socialism, the rise of wealth, the end of many jobs that were always done by the peasants, the lower class, whatever label they’ve had put upon them by the comfortably powerful.
Steam-engine trains didn’t just change the world’s transportation, they destroyed every form of travel that had preceded them. They made a whole amalgam of Inns and Coaches and Retinues (and horses, lots and lots of horses!) obsolete. Everyone whose trade was involved in those earlier modes had to find something new, or starve. And choo-choos were just the very beginning—in a relatively short amount of time, steam was replaced by diesels, dynamos, and daredevil flyers—people who actually flew!
Then, as all this industrial explosion is going on, weapons increased their killing range and power by orders of magnitude, the comfortable little wars that were a kind of habit to Europeans became WWI—an endless slaughter, as militarists came to terms with the obsolescence of valor, of honor, and of the reality of modern weapons as instruments of mass slaughter.
So the society of the Old World is atomized, replaced with anarchy, socialism, communism, and capitalism—the myths and legends of old begin to pale in contrast to the reality of automobiles, manned flight, electricity, factories, nuclear power—the traditions of generations were swept aside with an almost violent speed—the rate-of-change in a hitherto changeless world. They thought they were going mad sometimes—and so they were. They were changing themselves into a civilized society of nominal justice and equality—a complete reversal of the previous millennia of mankind as the only-slightly more intelligent animal over all the other animals.
Now, this line I’ve drawn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an arbitrary one, with respect to my point—mankind began to abandon its happiness with that first crop of domestic grain, the baby-steps of our evolution towards ‘us’. There is some evidence of a schism in those earliest times—some ‘tree-huggers’ of the early sapiens opposed the greedy, twisted practice of raising a crop, storing a crop, and (with all this food lying around) maintaining an army with the surplus of grain. The ‘conservative’ pro-nature group felt that this new invention, ‘cities’, was an evil thing—but the other side had the army, so….
Our first steps out of our hunter-gatherer forebears’ cycles of natural, wild life were also the origins of crime—for the first time we weren’t entirely absorbed in foraging—and we proceeded to think up ways of taking control of that surplus, those original ‘assets’, by hook, crook, or bull-puckey.
And every step since that first one has been down the artificial, technology road, further and further away from the mindless bliss of wandering the fields and woods. But technology is a tough nut to crack—those first thirty-thousand years were a slow climb up to the cusp of industrialization. And when those early-twentieth century artists expressed their views of the world, they were by and large unanimous in perceiving it as a whirlwind of change, confusion, and the ugliness of human brutality once it had obtained steel industries and scientific laboratories to draw upon.
So, naturally, I thought of how it parallels our own age—how we see lifestyles and employments evaporate as digital technology begins to replace our minds, just as industrial technology once replaced our muscles. And, like it or not, we should not be surprised to see societal changes that exceed our imaginations, to go with all these practical changes. When a human worker becomes an option, rather than a necessity, how can we be expected to stick to the traditional notions of a middle-class employee or small business owner? Even now, after less than a full decade of enforced idleness, my ego struggles to justify my integrity, my place in the community. Someday soon it will become ludicrous to think of doing some average job, staying employed and solvent for a lifetime—while the world becomes a laser-guided starship of machines and processors and AIs.
We are removing our own necessity—the ultimate end of technological development is the automation of everything. We will need some new way to live as a community, as a nation, as people. We will have to see socialism as our friend, not our enemy. We will have to take that ‘I don’t take charity’ chip off our shoulders and start adjusting to a life without challenges other than those we set for ourselves. And we will somehow (don’t ask me!) have to end the competition of capitalism in favor of cooperationalism, if that’s a real word. Otherwise, the end of all our grand and mighty progress will just be a reset, back to primitivism—with one difference: our poisoned planet will not support us as it did when we were nearer to the other animals.
XperDunn plays Piano
July 16th, 2013
Cover: “There’s a Kind of Hush” (All Over The World Tonight)
“There’s a Kind of Hush” is a popular song written by Les Reed and Geoff Stephens which was a hit in 1967 for Herman’s Hermits and again in 1976 for the Carpenters.
[NOTE: The video says July 14th, but this was recorded on July 16th, 2013]
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 5:12 PM
I’ve just finished re-reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Years” and I’m feeling extremely introspective all of a sudden—I wonder why that is? The novel is considered by many to be the crown jewel of her entire opus—and I am certainly not someone who would argue with that—it is a great favorite of mine, as are all of her strange novels, essays—and her biographies!
One is a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog, Flush; another is a biography of a creature named Orlando, who lives for centuries and changes sex every time he/she has a fainting spell. But then there is a biography of Roger Eliot Fry (Dec. 14th, 1866 to Sept. 9th, 1934)—a contemporary of Woolf’s and a member of the Bloomsbury Group—which took his sudden death at a young age very much to heart and decided amongst themselves to intrust Virginia with the task of writing his biography. Fry (an English artist and critic who established his reputation as a scholar of ‘Old Masters’ and was an advocate of then-modern trends in French painting, giving it the name ‘Post-Impressionism’) was Woolf’s only non-fiction book. I confess, I haven’t read this biography—or at least I can’t remember reading it, which comes to the same thing.
The incredible thing about Virginia Woolf is that she successfully dodges all the tripwires of convention and grammar and—while never officially breaking any rules for writing—manages to put down words in the same way that our interior voices do. There is a kind of doom to it—the message seems to be ‘if you want to fully know yourself, be prepared for existentialism’. Self-regard, the hard, ‘objective-ish’ kind (for true objectivity about ourselves is impossible) is a cold end to a lonely journey. Our minds are not such clockworks as we should like to think them; our verbal communications are not so efficient as we would like to think them; our understanding of each other is a worn patch-work of superficial observations, constantly being interrupted by our self-regard.
Such (partial) truisms are hard won—many levels of self-deception must be breached to even approach such understanding of oneself. Most people have the sense not to go there—but a brutalized and repressed mentality such as the young Virginia Woolf’s is driven by her need to get at the Truth, with that capital ‘T’. Those who should have protected her have attacked her—those who should have been minding her were unconcerned for her—when everything a child has learned is put at odds against a cruel reality, the search for meaning becomes a compulsion.
Ms. Woolf’s self-awareness was not an achievement per se, it was more like a scar left on her soul by a horrid family. We can comfortably (from seventy-five years after the publication of “The Years”) look back at her amazing artistry as a wordsmith and as an observer of the human race, the community, the family, and the pageant of time’s passing. But she, like Van Gogh, is one of those artists whose tormented life gave rise to supernatural efforts of artistry, yet display through those artistic expressions that horror of real life, that despair over true love and goodness.
I was impressed, as a young man, reading this giant of a novel—as sharp and quick as a dagger, as broad and open as the heavens. As a fifty-seven year-old I can barely enjoy the reading while the knowledge of her suffering hangs so opaquely above every page.
3 Gnossiennes by Erik Satie
Here are some song covers with lots of pretty pictures to look at:
XperDunn plays Piano July 7th, 2013
Three (3) Song Covers : “I Think We’re Alone Now” “If I Fell” “Kansas City”
XperDunn plays Piano July 7th, 2013 Improv – Starship Blues
XperDunn plays Piano July 7th, 2013 Improv – Sabbos Goy
XperDunn plays Piano July 6th, 2013 Improv – Wing Dang It
A lot of people seem to think the American Dream is a success story. But I’ve never seen it that way. To me, the American Dream is not very different from Martin Luther King’s— “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” For me, it is important to note the difference between our nation’s spirit and its reality. There is hatred, fear, poverty, greed, and disillusion in our everyday lives—and my American Dream is that we fight these evils on a daily basis, pushing back against ignorance, defying bigotry, helping those who can’t help themselves, and always seeking a better life. Not a life full of cash and comfort and security, but a life full of care, understanding, and happiness.
During the age of Alchemy it was both a precaution and a tradition to keep one’s knowledge a precious secret, not to be shared. But modern progress didn’t start until we began to see knowledge as a legacy that scientists leave to humanity. The free exchange of ideas was the highest ethical position for a long time—during the Cold War there were scientists on both sides who got into trouble with their governments because they felt an obligation to share scientific knowledge with the whole world. These people faced firing squads or worse because their ethics wouldn’t allow them to keep information and research secret from ‘the enemy’. They felt that freedom of speech implied the freedom to speak the truth, to share scientific knowledge with everyone.
But the stranglehold on information was never fully realized by National Security policies—it required Money to suppress researchers’ and experimenters’ scruples against secrecy—the dread NDA, the Non-Disclosure Agreement, placed a lien on one’s livelihood as hostage against their openness and honesty. Nowadays we see Corporate culture holding their cards so close to their chests that we are deprived of medical safety, nutritional data, and side-effects, both medical and industrial. The corporations want to be more than ‘people’—they want to be people who can sue their whistleblowers for informing the public of information we are morally entitled to. If someone tells on me, I can’t sue—then again, I don’t ask people to sign any agreements before becoming friends of theirs.
Thus, I see in this instance another point at which Capitalism has encroached on human rights. Capitalism started out as freedom—doing business with anyone, for any product or service, regardless of their ‘station’ in society, was a guarantee to the middle class their trade could not be restricted. But centuries of lobbying and influence have carved out a ‘favored status’ for the biggest corporations that no individual American would ever dare to ask for. Capitalism has turned and bit the hand that fed it. And we all watch helplessly now as it begins gnawing on our collective elbow-joints on its way towards devouring our freedom and equality entirely.
So sadly I celebrate our day of independence from oppression by our former monarchial government—while asking myself how we can ever free ourselves from the oppression of the almighty Buck.
I Insist On Having A Dragon To Kill by XperDunn (2013July03).
via I Insist On Having A Dragon To Kill by XperDunn (2013July03).
I’ve been looking over my juvenalia lately (my high school poems, that is) and I found this one written to my (or I should say Our) late friend, Carol Rosenberg. You’ll notice it’s a gift poem, not a love poem–we were friends and it was her birthday and I was writing poetry about anything I could think of, trying to learn all the classical forms, and trying to sound like a grown-up, and this was the sort of thing that came from me at that time.
The Sun
(crossed out)
AKA – Birthday Acrostic to C.R. (Which just happens to be a sonnet)
(crossed out)
AKA –
Sonnet Acrostic in Honor of Carol’s Birthday
Chariot bright with the gift of day
After the roots of night are broke
Run with my shackles and debts away.
Open the door with a savior’s stroke,
Letting loose the white unicorns which, released,
Run ‘cross the dome with majestic mirth
Over blue plains where the stars increased
Since the emerald birth of the buxom Earth.
Even Diana must fall to your power
No star can but falter and fade and dim.
Beneath the gray tomb of the dark’s dread tower,
E’en though I can’t see your sharp eye or gold rim,
Remembering, I can hear wealth where you’ve run,
Glittering, burning, my jewel, the Sun.
(NOTE: If you forget what an acrostic is, it means that the first letters of all the lines spell out CAROLROSENBERG.)
Sonnet to the Dawn in Summer
The Sun hurls out in surprising showers
Woven bolts dyed in fiery tints
Which unrolled as the rippling cloths of Dawn
And turn the clouds’ boiling, pearly towers
Into heaps of coal through which the sky glints
As Venus is ambushed and, shuddering, is gone.
All the Giants of Earth wash their faces with splashes
Of the fiery streams from the chariot bright
And laugh like mountains to greet the morning
While their eyes mirror back the blood-rubied flashes
Or monstrously blink at the early sight
Whose flare of of the hot noonday Sun is a warning—
For though the Dawn’s music is pleasing to hear
The summer-day’s fire can blister and sear.
[I signed this ‘CJAD’, my invented name, Christopher Jonathan Abraham Dunn. I was born and christened Christopher Dunn. At some time in grade school I asked my mom why I was the only one without a middle name and she said, “I thought your first name was long enough. But, if you want to, you can pick your own middle name.”
What she didn’t realize was that I was applying for my social security card—which I then signed Christopher Jonathan Dunn (and that is still the Social Security Card in my wallet). But for taxes, phone listings and legal contracts, I am ‘Christopher Dunn’, my Birth Certificate name.
Not long afterward I was Confirmed as a young Catholic, which sacrament requires the choosing of a saint’s name as my Confirmation Name. I was a big Lincoln fan and I said ‘Abraham’. The nun told me I was supposed to pick a saint from the New Testament, but I insisted he was in the Bible. She had a hurried conference with a priest and finally turned to me and said, “Abraham is acceptable.”]
Thus, in High School, when I was feeling fancy and eccentric, I would introduce myself as Christopher Jonathan Abraham Dunn and I would initial my poems and drawings with ‘CJAD’.]
Golly-gee, but we like to quibble, don’t we? Just as the gutting of the Voter Rights Act’s oversight-powers was explained with talking points, without any analysis of the true issue, i.e. racial bigotry, so also did the recent ruling in favor of LGBT marriage (and inclusion, by inference) fail to address the true issue—religion.
We have, as a society, matured to the point of being less-than-serious about notions of hellfire, angels, effective prayer, and stoning (as a religious duty). While we remain polite and non-judgmental when confronted with fundamentalists who appear to be truly convinced of the reality of a God with whom all people are in daily contact—and are beholden to, in both deed and intention—we grow more and more to hear them as neurotics who are blind to a particular compulsion towards irrationality—like arachnophobics, you know?
While Faith remains a serious subject, it is nonetheless a good working definition of psychosis—to believe without evidence, to imagine what is not palpable to any of our senses, such as imaginary friends—it is only by the ancient roots of the major faiths and the immediate parental influence to adopt these fantasies that keeps us from laughing at how truly bizarre their cosmologies are, when compared to scientific evidence.
Let me stop here, now that I’ve used the word ‘science’. I can hear all the debating points racing through the heads of any evangelical who might read this. Let me just say that Science is not a religion, it is a tool. We use this tool for many things in our modern lives—we board jetliners; we get boob jobs; we use skin lotion and SPF protection; we make phone calls; we wear polyester blends. Some of us send robots to Mars, some of us dig up evidence of the Earth’s past, and even the evidence of people who lived before monotheism existed. You can quibble about biological points (like evolution) all you want; you can question the wisdom of using science (a far more attractive debate than the present debate—pitting faith and science against each other) but in the end, we use science because it works—and nothing can be done about that. It’s pitiful, really. With the medical advances made since Moses’ day, the infant mortality rate is way, way down—to the point where many of the zealots questioning Science would have died at birth, if not for the usefulness of modern science.
And let me just clean up a few loose ends: yes, no one knows anything about the why and how of Creation—even the Big Bang theory doesn’t explain where ‘everything’ came from, to begin with. So, yes, there was a creator—whether it was a being or a piece of energy—nobody knows; why someone or something would choose to create a universe—nobody knows. But Science gives us a hint.
In its discovery of the nature of our solar system, our cosmos, and all the billions of other galaxies and nebulae, Science shows that the God who supposedly spoke with Abraham, Moses, or Joshua didn’t know any more about Astronomy than those ancient people did. Thus we must entertain the idea that the God that spoke with such prophets was speaking from inside their brains. Science helps us here, as well—the perception of voices and visions is a natural part of the human condition—especially under duress, such as during a long fast, or the prolonged oxygen-deprivation of a smoke-house, or incense smoke.
Thus we find—those of us prepared to be sensible about things—that the science indicates religion was born from one-part magical thinking and one-part manipulation of groups through claiming spiritual authority. That second part was addressed by Karl Marx in his Das Kapital, and produced the phrase ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. It still works today for many church leaders and hypocritical power-brokers—they perpetuate the myth that there is some sort of reason why the few are wealthy and the rest of us have to live on their leavings, working for their benefit, until we die.
By now, we’ve reached an even deeper level, where our society is a fragile, complex creation that must be lubed and fueled constantly—and any upset to the rich and powerful is seen, locally, as a ruined economy. In other words, we’ve created a civilization that can get by without cooperation from a few malcontents, that can get by while still firing millions of people, for years at a time—all as long as the cowed and silent keep worrying about their kids, about their elders’ medical care, and about keeping their homes.
So, don’t be misled by my jocular tone—these problems are not simple, nor are their solutions clear. Our society’s weaknesses are as much a part of our lives as its strengths—that is why ‘violent overthrow’ never accomplishes anything better than before the old leaders toppled. We cannot say, “This is bad. That is bad. It must stop immediately!” Absolutism is a great way to draw the lines of battle, even if it does cover up the heart of the problem.
We have to look for small incremental changes that trend towards a more perfect society. We have to bring our socio-political involvement up by an exponential rise—the bait-and-switch razzle-dazzle of the Media is trying to entertain us, not inform us—and certainly not educate us. We must take our political involvement away from mass media and network it as individuals, keeping open minds and searching for compromises that we can all live with.
And such an enlightened constituency would be big trouble for the Powers That Be—hence the constant mass media razzle-dazzle. However, an ‘enlightened constituency’ never even pops up, as a subject for discussion—we are all too busy playing the Media game, taking our debating prompts from their sound-bites and photo-ops. They pick sides and we jump to do likewise, approaching each issue from the same perspective we bring to our professional sporting events—when most major issues are more complex than the media ever even hints at.
The far-Right are disputing our society’s inclusion of the LGBT population as equally human, and they always boil down the reasons to Religion. Which is strange, when you think about it—I’ve read the bible—nobody gets stoned by Jesus because they went ‘against God and nature’. The only impetus for making this a religious issue is that homosexuality, as evil, has been in the cannons of the major faiths, put there by church ‘leaders’ with a bit of a self-identity problem. As children, anything of a sexual nature evinces the response ‘eew!’, whether hetero or homo, and these childish reactions have come to be established church dogma without, as I said, any direct instructions in either Bible on the evil of non-hetero impulses.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that we began a conversation about what was okay to ‘talk about’ so, in a way, even heterosexuality was considered ‘evil’ up until that time. It couldn’t be mentioned at a party, it couldn’t be debated by politicians, and it couldn’t be covered in school. The 1960s were the first time Americans recognized that teaching children about the biological facts of reproduction, birth-control, family planning, and disease might be worthwhile. Before then, it was very little different from the 19th century’s Victorian-era hypocrisies and ignorance.
At the same time, those rigid conventions disguised a society of misogyny, domestic child-abuse, racism, and an unstated, classist view of women, poor people, non-white people, non-Christian people, and the rich and powerful. So the LGBT community shouldn’t feel too badly towards their hetero brethren and sistren—we haven’t been out of the closet all that long, ourselves. Thus, that whole ‘spiritual purity’ business is somewhat be-smeared, and that was before all the priests got busted for buggery.
Another problem between the gays and the far-Right is the whole ‘division of church and state’ issue. The Neo-Cons, the Tea Party, whatever you call these yahoos, have actual been bending this rule all along—and recognition of gays is a repair of that leak in our national ideals. The Evangelists don’t disapprove of LGBT citizens as dangerous, they disapprove of LGBT citizens as ‘against God and nature’.
And I’d like to nip that ‘against nature’ business in the bud, right now. Naturalists and zoologists have documented many examples of homosexuality across the entire range of the class mammalia. As with tool-using and intoxication, our animal friends are similar to us in this way as well—so to describe it as ‘against nature’ is ‘against common-sense’.
No, their objections are religious in origin. “It goes against God” is their problem—and an especially knotty one, since there are no ‘Thou shalt not’s in the New Testament specifically against LGBT lifestyles. On the contrary, Jesus, as portrayed in the bible, is all about inclusion, tolerance, and love—the only thing that seems to upset him is money-changers. I wonder why we don’t have long debates about money being evil?—Christ didn’t seem too keen on it—But not a word about persecuting Gay people. I wonder why?
No, the ‘sin of homosexual behavior’ is dogma, not faith. It is something the CEOs of the churches included out of ignorance and fear. They could change their position on it. And they will. Acceptance of gay pastors and priests is already happening, and the new Roman Pope, Francis I, seems to see the writing on the wall, as well—and the Catholics could use all the good press they can manage, right now.
But for the present, that land-that-time-forgot, below the Mason-Dixon line, is still trying to tell folks that both archeology and evolution are delusions of satanic origin, that Science can’t have everything its own way (although it can and does—even against the scientists’ preferences) and that heterosexual, missionary-position-only reproduction is the only acceptable sexual activity. Now, these are wacky positions to take on issues which the vast majority of human beings have already become comfortable with on a secular level.
That vast majority is not atheists, either—it is the vast majority of modern day people who keep their religion for its benefits, not for its intellectual shackles. They believe in love, charity, forgiveness, and mercy—but they don’t believe in fairy tales. They believe that there probably is a life after death, but they don’t believe they will be judged by a St. Peter’s Basilica fresco that Michelangelo painted. They are, bluntly stated, the ones with some common sense.
But our nation’s guarantee of Religious Freedom forbids any attack on the beliefs of the fundamentalists—and I would be the last person to attack them—I envy those simple enough to truly believe the whole story. They know a happiness that is out of reach for atheists like me. And don’t assume I see myself as smarter than the fundamentalists —I am only less credulous. They have obviously used a great deal of brain power to keep alive the tatters of old-time religion—and they shouldn’t be counted out yet, by any stretch. It wasn’t all that long ago that pagans like me were ostracized and persecuted nearly as bad as Jewish people.
Ah, the good old days, when strangely dressed Arabs’ religions were beneath our contempt. Now a small group of them are a threat to world peace and unity. The extremist Muslim suicide-bomber is an iconic image in our current culture. Yet nobody characterizes the shootings of abortion clinic doctors as the acts of extremist Christians—nobody calls the DHS on those people.
The Protestants had a good thing going here in the USA. For most of the last two centuries of our country, while we espoused religious freedom, we actually had persecution of Jews (and Atheists). And our legislation has a particularly Calvinist bent to it—as if Protestants’ religious convictions had somehow innocently crept into the halls of power and leadership. Imagine.
But the civil rights of our LGBT citizens have brought into question a long-established, dogmatic rule—that homosexuality is a mental disease, a perversion of all that is good and sweet. There are still ‘clinics’ that offer a ‘cure’. Ha.
No, the big shots have had their diversion tactics reduced by one—support of LGBT civil rights is nearly unanimous in this country which, in this age, cannot be said about almost anything else! They’ll get by—they still have plenty of paper tigers plastered all over the media—people are still a long way from recognizing how wholly, how boldly they’ve been played. What was that rule-of-thumb? The bigger the lie, the easier to believe—yeah, that’s the one. Hitler’s fav, I believe.
There’s an old bumper sticker that read: Hire a teenager, while they still know everything! —not so funny when you use ‘priest’ instead of ‘teenager’, though, is it? So, next time you’re tempted to watch MSNBC or FOX, or even CNN, when you think the story will support your ‘team’ in the politics-olympics, save yourself the agita, and read a book instead.
(The illustrations for this essay were provided BY: Wikipedia.com and BY:
the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, from their collection of the works of Sir Anthony Van-Dyck (March 22 1599–December 11 1641))
NOTE: The Netherlands’ world-reknowned Rijksmuseum opened a new website, Rijksstudio, which allows downloading of hi-def images of the over 125,000 masterpieces in their museum’s collection–and provides software that allows art students to design their own projects using the museum’s digital-graphics resources. To join the fun, goto : https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en
XperDunn plays Piano
June 21st, 2013
Improv – Aeneid
(The Aeneid: a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil (circa 25 BC) that tells the legend of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy and became the prime ancestor of the Romans.)
The title card uses, as background, a portrait of Madame de Talleyrand, AKA Madame Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (Noël Catherine Verlée, 1761–1835), later Princesse de Bénévent
The Painting can be seen on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and it was done by Baron François Gérard (French, Rome 1770–1837 Paris):
Gérard, a student of David, was first painter to the empress Joséphine while the sitter, born Catherine Verlée, was one of the celebrated beauties of her time. She seduced her first husband, George Francis Grand, in one of a series of liaisons that culminated in her becoming the wife of the statesman Talleyrand. However by the time this portrait was painted, about 1805, he had tired of her frivolity, and the couple had separated. Thus the picture not a pendant to either of the portraits of Talleyrand (by Gérard and by Prud’hon) that hang nearby.
Madame Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (Noël Catherine Verlée, 1761–1835), later Princesse de Bénévent – Painted by Baron François Gérard (French, Rome 1770–1837 Paris)
Thursday, June 20, 2013 11:31 PM –I was just watching Brokaw being interviewed by Stewart’s summer stand-in, John Oliver, and they touched on the subject of ‘speed’. Speed has always been an important economic factor, used in business projections, rates of manufacture, etc. When I first saw an office, speed was measured in words-typed-per-minute on an IBM Selectric. The Selectric and the even more fantastic Selectric II, were thrumming Omphalos in the city’s flow of memos, contracts, orders, invoices, et alia that were carried to and fro, up and down the town by an army of delivery-messengers.
There is a period of time that must pass, as the spoken words of an executive, taken down by a secretary as dictation (using Gregg shorthand, mostly) to be typed (with carbon copy) and handed to a receptionist—where it was picked up by the afore-summoned messenger, walked across town, delivered to another’s receptionist, who then opens it and brings it in to the opposite executive of this trans-communication, whatever it may be. This period of time is often called lag time.
And life, back then, had plenty of lag time—at least, as compared with today. Take phone calls, for example—if I were expecting an important phone call (and this may seem counter-intuitive to our young ‘text’-zombies) I had to stay off of the phone. If someone else called during that time I had to say, “I’m waiting for an important call—I have to hang up—I’ll call you back later!” Plus, I had to remain in or near the room with ‘the phone’ in it. Two phones? Don’t be ridiculous—that would be like owning three TV sets!
Anyhow, so there I’d be, stuck in that one room or area, hoping no one else called me while the ‘important caller’ was trying to reach me. But when it rang, I had to answer the phone to find out who was calling. And if I forgot to ask for the callback number, I would never again be able to reach that person—unless they called me again, later on. The other alternative was to look up the person in a gigantic book that listed everybody, alphabetically by last name! That was the world of telephones in the 1950s, -60s, & -70s.
Star-six-nine finally allowed people to return missed phone calls, and now there are only blocked-numbers that can’t be gotten back to. But many people don’t pick up ‘blocked’ numbers—such callers are usually telemarketers and survey-takers, or worse yet, bill collectors—so, to a certain degree, the ball has been put in even their courts, when it comes to ‘reaching out’ to people.
But the telephone is just an example—messengers would be replaced by fax machines, which would be replaced (by and large) by the mighty email. The adding machine would become an antique practically overnight, as would pads of light green ‘ledger paper’, No.2 pencils, and even the poor, little newcomer, White-Out—a truly remarkable invention that allowed an IBM Selectric to be correctable—just a few years before the mighty Selectrics themselves were consigned to history.
Even in the 1980s & -90s there was lag-time in the minicomputers—they took their sweet time sorting files, displaying words on screen, and printing took forever. I could start a program running on one terminal and start a printing program on another, and I could sit back while they did these jobs at an unbelievably slow pace. I would wander into other people’s offices and see if anyone else was having a problem with the computer—which they frequently were. And I felt like I really had a handle on that whole ‘sys-admin’ thing. Then the PCs came, and by the late eighties, the screen displays were screamingly scrolling, faster than the eye could follow; the ink-jet printers were changing the printing game from characters-per-second to pages-per-minute; and the Intel Processors were sorting and querying in moments rather than hours.
Suddenly, I had no free time, no lag-time, and no wait-time. The problem with that is people need to have a rhythm in their labors. They need to cycle through effort and relaxation, effort and relaxation. We didn’t need to be aware of it before because life was once a slower, more hands-on process. Optical cable makes business capable of being a literally light-speed process—and corporations, which have displayed an almost Cruella-DeVille-like, over-the-top misanthropy lately, seem to think that its employees should try to keep pace with the digital comms. This is patently madness.
We share the blame—we have welcomed digital speed into our lifestyles in the areas of DVRs, VODs, sports broadcasting, news reporting, music downloads, weather and traffic updates, catalog-shopping (under its new name, e-commerce) and filing tax returns. We ask the car-voice what our GPS coordinates are every few minutes—imagine the hours spent in woods or the open sea, back when latitude and longitude were calculated by hand. And let us not overlook the Massively Multi-Player Online Gaming industry, and its many satellites.
We talk about a ‘paperless’ office—but most of the paper has already been done away with. Before the Internet, a book was always required. If you knew nothing about a subject, you looked it up in the encyclopedia, or the dictionary. If you needed to navigate, you needed a chart and an almanac, a tide chart, trigonometry tables—you needed paper to do the things we do inside our PCs, I-phones, and GPS-es today. The aforementioned phone books were massive—and only updated once a year—but that was tons of paper every year, tons thrown out, and new tons printed—just like newspapers (remember newspapers?) If you worked in architecture or construction, you needed Moody’s Guide to materials and market prices to calculate a building bid. If you needed auto parts, you had to look them up in the auto parts handbook, which printed the part number of every part, for every year model, of every vehicle. No trade was without its own unique reference works—and the Reference section of a library was not-for-borrowing, because these histories and guides and tables and listings were vital to everyone—but only to look up something—which is why it was OK not to lend them out.
So we feel the pull of the light-speed undertow (if you will) just as strongly as the corporations’ top-management—but only as far as the technology promotes obsessive-compulsive behavior. Corporations must begin to consider the necessity of humane treatment of employees, highest to lowest, one and all.
Galaxy ARP274
Back in the day, the issue of coffee in the office was debatable—until someone publicized a study that showed an increase in productivity in office-workers who were allowed to drink coffee while they worked. From that day on, there were no limits to coffee, as far as top management was concerned. Years later, another study showed that the cost of providing free coffee to employees was much higher than any increase in productivity could ever pay for—and the party was over. Coffee remained permissible, but strictly BYOC. This period also saw the birth of a new industry—gourmet coffee-terias such as Starbucks, etc. This was where the top execs had their coffee fetched from—and such ‘coffee-havens’ eventually gathered a huge following of neurotic laptop-users, as their online access went from onboard-modem to bluetooth hot-spots, thus making any shop into an Internet-café.
There have been a lot of very drastic, very sudden changes in the developed world—and the rest of the world. We’ve seen things change so completely that many people are feeling overwhelmed by it. The ability to remain consistently solvent requires a greater and greater struggle. The ability to fight back against the tides of corporate lobbying, fundamentalism, and economically-based social hierarchies is hard to summon up—particularly after a hard day of being screwed over by the Man, on unpaid overtime, no less.
Suicides are way up in the armed services, I’m sad to say. Most Americans are raised to be civil, caring people in a modern-day world that encourages self-awareness and morality. You take that teenager, stick a rifle in his hands, and ship him (or her) halfway round the world to shoot at enemies who stand in the midst of their innocent civilians—which gets pretty darn tricky, as if old school War wasn’t bad enough—and you’re going to see a lot of mental upset. By making our world a better society, we make war that much more offensive to the human consciences of our children. We set them up for Trauma—but what alternative is there, other than ending war?
Suicides among teens are way up, too. But I know why this is. It’s because they see the same world that you and I see, but from the perspective of someone trapped in a low-income region, with low-income region-type schools and low-income region-type economic and artistic opportunities, i.e. none to speak of.
So it seems we have paradoxical results—our modern world is trying to discover medical techniques that may make us eternal—while an increasing number of our children and young adults are choosing to shorten their time in this life. Business is ongoing in its quest for non-stop commerce—while their employees are being ground down by their miserly fear of spreading the wealth, even a little, itty, bit. And, under these conditions, they have the gall to ask for more speed, more intensity.
You can’t ask a math student to solve a trigonometry problem when you haven’t bothered to make time for that student to be taught the six or seven years of preparatory math leading up to ‘trig’. Likewise, you can’t stress the hell out of a grown-up person, and expect that person to always be moving forward. If you don’t already know, let me inform you that an employee who sees him or her-self as moving forward is the best employee to have. They make a connection between their job and their career, perhaps even their dreams—they enjoy it more and they do the job with incredible focus.
Resentful, bitter, anxious—these more common types of employee create faster turnover, they drag down the company’s goodwill, they can even be so sloppy as to cause the business a severe financial blow. And, yes, of course, you can fire them—but it’s really too late by then. These are the kinds of employees who make it their ‘job’ to do as little work as possible. These employees will not get along with each other—and gossip and office politics will consume 95% percent of their attention, eventually.
So corporations might want to consider something they’ve never had to do before—treat their employees to some break-time, or an occasional activity (nothing too pricey, of course—these are corporations we’re talking about). But consider—when talking about job-creation, our leaders of government and industry are always talking about the need to transition to newer, hi-tech-ier jobs, so that people can fill the jobs that aren’t being filled because of lack of qualified applicants. Well, how about some education requirements for modern-day businesses? Oughtn’t they expand their HR departments to include ergonomics, daycare sourcing, and help with health-insurance paperwork? There are plenty of studies showing the cost of these ‘details’, in days of work missed and in decreased productivity, far exceed the cost of helping employees with these ‘tar-pits’ of the single-parent household, and of traditional families as well.
Does America intend to continue on this way? We are ranked lowest in number of paid holidays of any nation, highest in average hours per week, and stingiest in terms of company benefits. The land of the free is now the land of the wage-slave. And, while I can’t help laughing at Groucho Marx’s line, in the Marx Brothers’ first feature, “The Cocoanuts” (1929), when his hotel staff are demanding their wages and he says, “You don’t want to be wage-slaves, do you?—Well, you know what makes a wage-slave, don’tcha—Wages!”, I nonetheless feel that it is a perfect term of description for the average American worker’s job. For 99% of us, ‘freedom is just a dream some of us had’—the conditions of a low-pay, no-benefit, full-time job, never mind more than one job, make impossible any chance to work on something on one’s own time. And that ensures an inability for self-improvement, whether career-wise, scholastic, artistic or what-have-you.
My dad used to have a tool-bench in our cellar—in his leisure time he would make things, like the camping trailer he made for our annual summer camping trips. He had lots of free time—and he worked in an ad agency on Madison Avenue! Check out his modern-day counterpart ad exec—bet the guy or gal hasn’t even the time to answer any of their three cell phones. No one has time for that sort of thing anymore—and it is leaching the culture out of this country like bleach on a tie-dyed T.
Liberal Arts programs are being erased from schools’ budgets like they were insubstantial frills, rather than the heart of our society. We are moving faster, we are de-funding anything that isn’t part of an engineering degree, or law school, or med school, we are working ourselves harder and longer, we are being paid less (if adjusted for COL index) and our bosses decided we weren’t worth the health insurance sometime a decade or two ago. It’s a harder, faster, money-centric, zero-sum game. Not only are we wasting our own lives with all this rushing around, but we are using the frantic pace to excuse the now total disconnect between humanity and capitalism.
We have lost the sense of nonsense that should present when we say things like, “We can’t afford to make industries stop their polluting of the air and water.” And now we are expected to swallow this whopper: “Sometimes, even with both parents holding multiple jobs, they still can’t make ends meet.” Say what now? When will this madness end?
“Cute” and Three (3) More Songs
click for Songs
Click for Improv
Click for Improv
Here’s the paperwork on all the Songs in that first video:
“Cute” and Three(3) More Songs (2013June16)
Xper Dunn plays Piano
June 16th, 2013
“Cute” & 3 more songs
‘Cute’
Music by Neal Hefti
Words by Stanley Styne
[ (c) 1958 by Intl. Korwin Corp. ]
Sheet Music / Score Source:
Hal Leonard Piano/Vocal/Guitar Series
“More Top Jazz Standards”
[All rights reserved by: Hal Leonard Publishing Co.]
****
‘Ma Cherie Amour’
Words and Music by
Stevie Wonder, Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby
[ (c) 1968 by Jobete Music. Black Bull Music. and Sawandi Music]
‘Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars’ (“Corcovado”)
English Words by Gene Lees
Original Words and Music by
Antonio Carlos Jobim
[ (c) 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim ]
‘People Got To Be Free’
Words and Music by
Felix Cavaliere and Edward Brigati, Jr.
[ (c) 1968 (renewed 1996) by EMI Jemaxal Music and Delicious Apple Music ]
Sheet Music / Score Sources:
Cherry Lane Music Company
“Great Songs Of The Sixties”
[distributed by Hal Leonard Corp.]
All images are from the Paintings of:
Jacques-Louis David;
French: (Aug. 30th, 1748-Dec. 29th, 1825)
[an influential French painter
in the Neoclassical style
and Napoleon Buonaparte’s
portrait-painter]
(c) MMXIII by Christopher Dunn
We were so suave, so debonair, so silly….
We were so young, back then. Aww.
Anyway, A lot of rain last week, so all my improvs (Jessy and I are considering a change–from ‘Improvs’ –which I’m sick to death of– to “Piano Arguments” which, Jessy informs me, is what ‘piano arrangements’ appears as, to the dyslexic.)
Again, so all my recent Piano Arguments have ‘storm’ in the title, except for ‘Deep Thoughts’ (which, I know, is Jack Handy’s bailiwick–but it’s just the one piece, and it really wants to be called ‘Deep Thoughts’). Nevertheless, it does contain the word Deep–and like the Brit Pop Singer, Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep”–it suggests the briny deep. And everyone knows that a storm in lower Manhattan may be very destructive, but it beats the hell out of being caught in the middle of the Long Island Sound during the same storm….
With a little boogie in it…
With a little ray of sunshine in it
With a huff (small Italian car)…
with deepest regrets
So, hoping for a dry spell–weather-wise, that is–and looking forward to next time…
Are We Asking The Right Questions?
We ought to remember to ask our own questions, even though news-reporting has traditionally done this for us, when journalism had high standards and ethics. On today’s Info-tainment news, the interviewer is prevented from asking certain questions by his or her restrictions, handed down by the media-owners…
We must re-learn journalism for ourselves, and begin to ask our own questions–the ones that the ‘News’ pretends aren’t there.
Wednesday, June 05, 2013 11:11 PM
Who cares if I miss the Daily Show (I do, unfortunately) but then anything hanging out in the strange time-window of 11PM has got to expect losses from burn-outs like me who can’t keep track of time—especially later in the evening.
Norton 360 kept me off my PC all day—and it wore me out, forcing me to make a back-up profile excluding unwanted folders and file-types from my Norton Online Back-Up (I’ve been on the brink for a long time.. ..I knew it would it would have all kinds of details and mouse-clicking—and that stuff needs a lot of focus from me these days.) But now I am among the proud the few the people who pay good money to have their personal files backed-up into the sky, or on a cloud, or who-the-hell-knows-where. And Norton goes whole hog—promising to keep actual hard media (Blue-Ray DVD, to be specific) backups of all the stuff I’m always so worried about keeping up-to-date on my own DVD Back- Ups.
I can just imagine. World War Z comes, my PC’s fried—even Norton’s ‘cloud’ is attacked—but, never fear, once the world is put back on a civilized keel, I’m secure in the knowledge that my family photo albums survived in some Symantec Vault high in the Rockies…
Well, it’s all over and the truth is I feel good about knowing all my stuff is safe now, even if I never finish making my own back-up hardcopies on DVD. Plus, I had been getting all kinds of weird incompletions in my optimizations, and red status lights all over—nothing disastrous but still, I was on notice that something was less than perfect inside my computer, and that it could be the digital death of me at any moment. But now, everything is in the green, all the scans come out clean, all the optimizations complete without incident—I love a clean PC.
Saturday, June 08, 2013 12:25 AM
I’ve been eating all too well lately—tonight was corn soup with sour cream and creamed-spinach crepes, last night was the most incredible meal—simple cod, small potatoes (with the skins still on them) and fresh corn-on-the-cob, ummm… and that’s not unusual—all my meals are top-chef quality. At first, long ago, Claire was self-doubting about her cooking, and didn’t do too well. But eventually she went from that to a good cook, and from that to a gourmet chef—but now she’s in some mega-level where everything she touches is turned into the best food I’ve ever tasted—day after day after day. It’s just incredible!
And that’s not all I have to be happy about. Spencer’s home and I get to see him and talk with him every day. He fixed my computer yesterday! It was making a big noise for years—but he just opened it up, found a wire that was being nicked by the cooling-fan blades as they spun, and just shifted the wire out of contact. I’m a little embarrassed—this must be the first PC I’ve ever owned that I didn’t take apart and put together myself—I’d never even opened it up and looked inside. So, now, the noisy PC is the silent PC—something I didn’t know I was missing, it had been so long.
Spencer is the greatest. I couldn’t have asked for a better kid, or better kids, for that matter—I’m always bragging about my kids and then I have to stop and add something so that I’m not singling one of them out. They’re both great. But Spencer is the greatest boy and Jessy is the greatest girl, so it’s really a different greatness in either case. Okay, enough. O, my kids are great. Okay.
And the doctor and the dentist and the transplant center are all done with me for a good while, and I’m fit as a fiddle and ready for love. I’m reading a book I like. I’m especially excited about some of my recent piano recordings—both the improvs and the sight-reading—I’ve had a few good ones lately, and that always perks me up. I had such a great time watching Bruce Willis in his latest Die Hard movie—just can’t get enough—Bruce is my favorite, the coolest of the cool. And a new Superman is coming out soon, and a new Star Trek just released recently—they will all end up on my cable-movie-menu sooner or later.
O, and I figured out how to revive my Nano, and I bought a slew of old mp3s (well, the mp3s aren’t old, but you know what I mean) so now I can walk around with more classical, popular, and self-performed music than I ever accrued on a shelf of vinyl, a rack of cassettes, or a stack of CDs. Those golden oldies have a surprising power of recall—I think only our sense of smell is better at triggering memories long buried than old songs from our younger days. So, I’m spoiled for choice—one good thing about it not being the sixties anymore is I can buy Bach’s complete works for nine bucks—same with Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Brahms—it’s a classic-buff’s-holiday at Amazon’s Downloadable-mp3 Store. And the oldies, like BeeGees or Donovan or someone—you don’t have to buy the whole album anymore—you can buy the tracks you love and leave behind the tracks that used to be annoying ‘spacers’ between the good stuff. It’s like heaven. Most people into music these days have no idea what it was like in the stone age—finding out how many LPs could be stacked on a particular Turntable before they started to slide around on top of each other.
My life couldn’t be better—which is strange. I’m so used to being a sourpuss that I have no idea how to deal with this paradise I find myself in.
I had to get all publicly-respectable-like to visit the transplant clinic for my check-up, so I’m not looking as scruffy as usual in these videos:
XperDunn plays Piano on June 6th, 2013 – Piano Improv – ‘Self-Portrait’
Here’s one of my favorite Cole Porter songs…
XperDunn plays Piano
June 6th, 2013
“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Cole Porter
Well, here’s hoping you enjoy hearing these as much as I did playing them.
‘From This Moment On’
Words and Music by
Cole Porter
June 4th, 2013
My Visit To Dr. Stauber’s
[Today’s Backgrounds are using the Maxwell Parrish work, “Evening Shadows”]
Friday, May 31, 2013 11:53 PM
Running outta cigs. Back hurts in a hundred different places. Tired. Anxious. Not my best moment. Could be worse—I could be in Oklahoma, where the wind comes screaming down and rips your house out of its foundation and relocates it two miles south of where it stood. Some Musical that would make—
“O, what a beautiful morning,
O what a beautiful day.
I’ve got this wonderful feeling
My neighborhood’s blowing my way….”
I shouldn’t joke—there are people in danger even now, especially in Moore. There sure are a lot of natural disasters—Volcanos erupting—Ice Caps melting—Earthquakes and Tsunamis—Tornados—Wind storms—Hurricanes and Coastal flooding—Islands being evacuated due to the rising sea-level—Droughts…and they say a big Cicada army is due this year or next.
Of course, Mom Nature has her helpers—she didn’t melt those caps and raise CO2 levels all by herself. Our pesticides are killing the bees. Our junk is creating floating islands that choke the ocean—when the trawlers aren’t overfishing it, that is. Big Agra is trying to replace real food with mutant vegetables, irradiated seeds, and cows on steroids. The junk we inhale, ingest or drink is so full of impurities that kids are showing increased asthma and allergies. And the families living near power lines are sprouting cysts from every square inch of skin. It’s a travesty.
But none of that is important. Only money is important. It will remain the most important thing in the world until it can no longer buy what doesn’t exist—meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans, potable water and breathable air.
But, as long as I’ve got your attention, check this out:
and here’s another–I left in some of the talking at the beginning, so I called it:
XperDunn plays Piano
May 30th, 2013
Selections from J.S. Bach’s
Keyboard Partitas
– end of D Maj & start of the E Min (2013May30)
This and thousands of other artworks are newly available for free download and non-commercial use–through the courtesy of The Nederland’s Rijkemuseum-site
XperDunn plays Piano
May 29th, 2013
My Piano Cover of
“Begin The Beguine” by Cole Porter (1935)
And one more Cole Porter tune:
So what are we dedicating in memory today? Fallen fighters, great men and women who make the ultimate sacrifice—and all those whose sacrifice is drawn out over a long life of ‘walking wounded’ through their days—and all soldiers, really, it seems (now that we’ve accepted Post-Trauma-Stress as a disorder, rather than a sign either of cowardice or of a non-battle-related psychosis) we should be laying wreaths at the graves of their innocence and peace of mind, amputated forever from all who see combat, even if they returned to us apparently unscathed by bullets or shrapnel.
And how could they not? Many third-world places ‘live’ in PTSD, their society is arranged around PTSD—as would yours if you had to physically scramble for the bits of food that represent either starvation or survival for your entire family—every day, and hiding from bands of mercenaries (or in some cases, the US military).
We are raised to be civilized in most of our country—with growing areas of unrest due to economic hardship of a depth and duration not seen since the 1930s. Perhaps we are wrong to do so. Perhaps we should raise our kids as the Spartans did, preparing them for war from the moment of their birth. Or we could just enlist recruits from those areas of our nation which see conditions not unlike the third-world.
Whatever we do, it will still be nothing compared to the firefights and kill-zones our children encounter when sent to the Middle East (or elsewhere) as soldiers—if our children fight, all our tenderest, most loving hugs and kisses will be wasted. Worse, we provide them with a past the memory of which is part of the torture of seeing combat—the tremendous contrast, the overwhelming urge to return to the land of the ‘living’, makes their nightmare worse.
Are we to remember the victories they fought and died for? What did we win in Iraq? Nothing worth Americans’ lives and blood. What are we still trying to win in Afghanistan? Our enemy, Bin Laden, was living in the country next door—the war in Afghanistan made it easier to muster up a helicopter night raid into Pakistan to kill Osama. Have we freed the Iraqis and the Afghans? Not really—they have their own way of freeing themselves and we seem to be in the way.
So I think it is just and proper that we remember, on Memorial Day, that our fighting men and women do their duty, same as the Light Brigade, and we should be serious about sending them in harm’s way. They will fight and die and bleed, and they will always win (a real plus, as armies go) whether they are sent on a fool’s errand or in defense of our freedom. So perhaps, more importantly, we should remember the next time we go to war, as we do today, that it is no small thing to send crowds of our best young people into an orgy of violence.
Osama Bin Laden proved this to us—he relied upon our willy-nilly response to the 9/11 debacle to trick us into spending rivers of cash to ‘close the barn door’, if you will. This, with a little help from greedy Americans, caused our economic implosion five years ago. We beat the Soviets the same way (which makes it even more galling) by scaring them into outspending their means on the ‘war-tech race’ that ended the Cold War—and the Soviet Union.
So we look with pride on the heroes in uniform today and yesterday, particularly those who never came home, and we feel the security they provide to this entire country—and we steel ourselves for the future. For only by keeping our military out of questionable conflicts can we solemnize our responsibility to make sure their blood isn’t ever on our own hands.
XperDunn plays piano covers of Six Jazz Tunes
XperDunn plays piano covers of Six Jazz Tunes
May 26th, 2013 Here they are individually:
(Pardon this re-post from a year ago–I posted it before I acquired all my new friends and followers.)
(c) April 2013 Xper Dunn
I would also like to point out the ‘Christopher Dunn’ StreetArticles.com site contains 70 essays/articles on a wide range of current events, scientific and artistic developments, and popular culture. It would be nice if a few people read some of them before they are rendered moot by the passing of time.
And there is one more thing I wished to point out:
If you read one of my posts, on this site or my others, please remember to click ‘like’ or make a ‘comment’–anything at all that lets me know I’m not talking to an ’empty room’. I’d be so appreciative….
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 8:52 PM
(paintings by Correggio)
I’ve been stumped for writings lately—maybe I’ve finally run dry of grumpy-old-man-op-ed essays—who knows? I’d actually like that, I think… I only write those things because I want to expel the bile that festers at my brain when I see intentional stupidity and intentional harm. I’m no cynic—the people that own everything are intentionally making our lives worse—intentionally widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
What’s worse is, we help them do this—every time we take a paycheck to look away—supporting a family is no excuse, it only makes it worse, since we are destroying the society they will inherit, while we collaborate in the name of ‘supporting them’. What is the answer? When an entire town is centered around a military complex, what do we do with those townspeople when The Base gets abandoned due to budget cuts? Do we keep it open for the sake of the town? That only sounds correct to the townspeople, god bless’em. Does the government simply walk away, and leave the gutted town to turn ghost in their wake? That sounds wrong to everybody. So, we see at once that simple solutions are not to be had. What do we do?
Do we go out and protest in public? To me, that always seemed like giving too much power to the opponent—telling them to act, instead of us acting on our own initiative—though I suppose the media attention (if you could catch it, and for as long as it lasts) would be valuable. We’d have to come off as the ‘good guys’ on camera, though—and pissed-off people rarely look like ‘good guys’, at first glance.
Sensible people might point out an obvious solution—enact a program of decommissioning an entire ‘economic zone’, not just the Base it once supported. Find (or Found) businesses that are a good match with the town’s focal skill sets. In areas where closing the Base means total evacuation (say mid-desert, like) then enact a program to place the townspeople in other towns still operating as theirs once did. It would still be a breakup of the community, but it doesn’t have to be an economic disaster as well. Letting a whole town full of people go dead broke will cost a lot more, in the long run, than helping them transition to new homes and new jobs.
But all you sensible people out there know the chances of that course of action—none to little. So let’s think about political solutions that approximate the sensible solution. The last two days in Oklahoma have seen recording-breaking tornados (in both size and wind-speed) that devastated communities in Tornado Alley. So we liberals may enjoy the very bleak comfort of saying ‘I told you so’ to the climate-change-deniers, but down in Okie country the praying has been non-stop—the people there have put their faith in the lord—and so cannot be harmed. That explains why they would choose live in an area called ‘Tornado Alley’.
I just know we could be doing all of this stuff so much better if there were better people in politics—but I’m damned if I’m gonna spend time with those nut-jobs. That’s why we need young people in politics—we used to insist on old people because our elders tended to know more than the rest of us. I’m getting into ‘old guy’ territory myself these days—and I can assure you, the people my age and older are as likely to be swamped by the Future Shock Wave that is remaking the globe as they are to have depths of wisdom–which applied to an earlier, pre-internet age—and so may no longer have any relevance to our present times, anyhow!
Only the young guys and gals can even appreciate these new fulcrums of power, and the consequences of blindly trying to do business in the past. Plus, younger men and women are less ‘free for the purchasing’ than old cronies whose lives have always been defined by business. Today’s global business is a threat to humanity—soon, a tiny group of uber-bankers will own the entire world—and us with it, since we’ll all need to make a living.
In the old days, when America and Big Business were synonymous, the famously quoted ‘business of America—was Business’. But that is no longer true. The business of International Mega-Corporations is ‘Business’—the business of we Americans has become ‘fighting a rearguard action against global corporate culture in an attempt to resume control of our own government’. That’s the new business of America.
I’m tired of being proud of my country—it’s that right-or-wrong business—there is so much wrong with our society, our industry, our quality of life, and our Freedom from Fear—and then up pops these Tea Party people-Doh! You know, if the Cold War was still ongoing, I’d be sure that the Tea Party was a fifth-column action to make a nonsense-of-shouting out of what were once the Founding Documents, to turn Freedom of Expression on its head by using it as a shield against those who accuse them of hate-speech—and using Freedom of Religion to suggest that it implies their particular faith is the Default Faith for the whole country.
Their ignorance is epic—but that’s OK, cuz they don’t hold much stock in all the edjicashun nonsense, no how. They are a tremendous threat to our nation. They are the pawns of folks like the Koch Bros. and they even act against their own self-interest—when that runs counter to whatever mind-boink of a narrative cheerleaders like Sarah Palin are feeding them through the mass media they all despise so indignantly—it’s pure stupid, and hold the rest, out there in Tea Party land.
So I’ll be happy to be proud of my country when we start taking it back from the private interests of the super wealthy. I think we should start by refusing to respond to any TV or internet advertising—let’s all agree that we’ll only vote for a candidate when someone we trust gives that candidate a good reference. We should all unite in refusing any electioneering from anyone we don’t know and respect. Word of mouth will be the only criteria that we will base our decision on. And we disqualify all of the incumbents just to make it a clean start. (If we lose a good congressperson, we’ll come to re-elect that person, in time—but we must sand the floor before we slap on the new paint.)
A total re-boot of federal representation via word-of-mouth may result in something more democratic than the moneychangers we endure today—but even if it doesn’t work, they’ll do no less than the last decade of blockage -and- it’ll keep the crooks busy enough to slow their insatiable greed.
Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!
Chant it with me now—
Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!
I was rummaging around in my old Youtube Channel ‘xperdunn’ uploads and I came across this interesting span of days’ works:
“Who Needs To Dream” by Barry Manilow (2010Oct13)
XperDunn plays Piano
Oct 13th, 2010
Selections from “The Joan Baez Songbook” – Part 1
XperDunn plays Piano
November 1st, 2010
Selections from “The Joan Baez Songbook” – Part 2
XperDunn plays Piano
November 1st, 2010
Selections from “The Joan Baez Songbook” – Part 3
XperDunn plays Piano
November 1st, 2010
“Two Improvs -Ocean Waves & Pageant Procession”
XperDunn plays Piano
October 16th, 2010
XperDunn plays Piano
May 7th, 2013
The History Of Popular Songs – Episode Five
Improv – She Enters The Saloon (2013May05)
XperDunn plays Piano
May 5th, 2013
Improv – She Enters The Saloon
[from The FitzWilliam Virginal] – (2013May05)
“Woods So Wilde” & “O Mistris Myne” by Wyllyam Byrde
XperDunn plays Piano
May 5th, 2013
from The FitzWilliam Virginal:
Two Works by William Byrd–
“Woods So Wilde”
&
“O Mistris Myne”
“Whiter Shade Of Pale” (cover) & tribute/Improv (2013May04)
XperDunn plays Piano
May 4th, 2013
“Whiter Shade Of Pale” (cover) & tribute/Improv
XperDunn plays Piano
May 3rd, 2013
The History Of Popular Songs – Episode Four
(covers of “Sweet Baby James”, “White Room”, and “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”)
XperDunn plays Piano
April 30th, 2013
The History Of Popular Songs – Episode Three
For Your Love, Love Is All Around, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, He Ain’t Heavy, and more!
