Into the Void

Letter to a Brit friend.

Are you interested in history and culture? Did you know that in the US we spell things like theater instead of theatre and color instead of colour because 19th century teacher and journalist Noah Webster wanted to create an American identity? He wrote a dictionary with his own spellings and pronunciations. Pretty silly if you ask me.

The US hasn’t really been a great place to live in many years. The switch from a manufacturing economy in the ’70s and ’80s to a service economy was a disaster.

There’s a rock song by Bob Seger called “Making Thunderbirds” that sums it up. Mind you, by the time I was in high school we were having gas crises. Gas guzzlers were a wasteful thing of the past. How the hell did SUVs get so popular? Did people really forget or is this some sick societal denial?

Makin’ Thunderbirds
Words and music by Bob Seger.
The big line moved one mile an hour
So loud it really hurt
The big line moved so loud
It really hurt
Back in ‘55
We were makin’ Thunderbirds

We filled conveyors
We met production
Foremen didn’t waste words
We met production
Foremen didn’t waste words
We were young and proud
We were makin’ Thunderbirds

We were makin’ Thunderbirds
We were makin’ Thunderbirds
They were long and low and sleek and fast
They were all you ever heard
Back in ‘55
We were makin’ Thunderbirds

Now the years have flown and the plants have changed
And you’re lucky if you work
The big line moves but you’re lucky if you work
Back in ‘55
We were makin’ Thunderbirds

We were makin’ Thunderbirds
We were makin’ Thunderbirds
They were long and low and sleek and fast
They were classic in a word
Back in ‘55
We were makin’ Thunderbirds
We were young and proud
We were makin’ Thunderbirds
We were young and sure
We were makin’ Thunderbirds

A free market economy doesn’t work because capitalism works to enrich itself, not to bring the American Dream to its workers. Trickle-down economics is the theory that if you give money to big corporations, that they will share the prosperity with their workers. In practice, this has worked to create a huge gap where there used to be a middle class.

The American Dream means getting lots of possessions. Start with a house. The powers-that-be wanted so desperately to keep the American Dream alive that they loosened requirements to buy a house. People bought, thinking that their salaries would increase. Salaries have been stagnant, there have been mass foreclosures, investors started pulling out of the U.S.. You know the rest. If there’s a worldwide recession, it is totally because of stupid foreign policy on the part of our government.

Oh, sorry about Bush. How can 59 million people be so damn stupid?

Don’t get me started on the ugly fact that the American Dream is financed by foreign investors, not by our employers. We are a black hole that sucks in products from around the world. Cash, dollar bills, are essentially an I.O.U. from the Federal Reserve Bank, a symbol of the Fed’s huge debt. They have no intrinsic value, so when international trust in the U.S. is broken, dollars suddenly aren’t so popular. Heh, don’t get me started.

It’s complicated. I could go on for hours. Are you bored? When I was a kid, engineers were quite prosperous. My husband and I are *both* engineers, but we can’t afford the kind of house I grew up in. That’s how much it has changed.

The guys who write the news are in the upper class. The lower class is invisible to them. Insignificant. Our best newspaper, the New York Times, is a bastion of the status quo.

“My morals got me on my knees…”

Yes indeed, morals must be a terrible thing. I wouldn’t know.

>:-)

Caught this song on an SNL rerun last night and looked for it on Youtube Mobile. Went searching for an rstp streaming video player for my Samsung Blackjack and wound up surfing the web for hours, finally quitting after running an internet speed test that says my phone is faster than DSL. Gotta love ADHD.

IE doesn’t seem to know what to do with the YouTube mobile video either. What, don’t I have Real installed???? Ok, installed Real and it seems I need a 3gp plugin. Actually what I need is a phone that supports streaming media.

Anyway, the song (and the singer) is hot. I may have to buy the CD.

The Hindu Goddess Sita made her animated film debut in a wonderful movie called Sita Sings the Blues. Sita premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival a few days ago.

“Pushpakha”
by Nina Paley

Sita Sings the Blues was created by animator Nina Paley, who you might remember from her animated IMAX feature, Pandorama. All I’ve seen of Sita is the preview on archive.org, embedded later in this post, and it really captured my imagination.

Sita is great, like those wild Bollywood movies they show on Namaste America. Singing, dancing, love lost, singing and dancing, love regained, and more singing and dancing. It’s delightfully melodramatic. The Goddess’ story is interspersed with an autobiographical storyline from Ms. Paley’s own life. The movie is narrated by three sock puppets. Errr, that should say shadow puppets.

The music in the preview sounds like a cross between Timothy Leary’s White Birds Sing (Beyond Life) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin IV), however Sita Sings the Blues uses the music of Roaring 20’s era songstress Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s (and Nina’s) feelings.

Edit:
That didn’t sound quite right. I like White Birds Sing and Four Sticks, but I realized later that other folks might not. The music was raucous and fun. Unlike the Indian engineers and professors I’ve met… What, do they only let the boring people come here? Maybe the US is a kind of exile.

Here’s the trailer from archive.org.

By way of Idol Chatter.

Another edit:
When I wrote this article WikiPedia had nothing about the movie Sita Sings the Blues. After I added an item to the Sita disabiguation page, an article on Sita Sings the Blues showed up. Magically. How did we live without the interNets?

Of course the soul is energy. The body - the vessel we live in - runs on electrochemical reactions that have EM fields around them just like any other electrical conductor does. Halo, aura, nimbus.

“The Egyptians recognized many degrees of immortality. The Ren and the Sekem and the Khu are relatively immortal, but still subject to injury. The other souls who survive physical death are much more precariously situated. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If humans and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy’s nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.”
– William S. Burroughs & Material, Soul Killer from the Seven Souls CD.

Any day that starts with an email from someone named “Bad Alice” simply has to be a great day!

Bad Alice is the acoustic duo formed by Suzy Johnston (author of The Naked Bird Watcher - the positive account of developing and learning to manage a serious psychiatric disorder that included depression, psychosis and self-harm)

Leslie interjects: The other half of the duo is Lindsay Robertson. So far as I can tell, she is horribly normal except when she gets a hold of a box of crayons.

The CD by Bad Alice is now available.

Titled ‘Walk in my Shoes’ it is a further positive and reflective message on mental illness, self-harm and the issues that face the young of today.

The CD is available on the Bad Alice website where individual tracks can also be downloaded. http://www.badalicemusic.com

The hope is that the music will help people to feel less isolated and offer reassurance that they can get through this. It is also meant to raise further awareness, understanding and - hey - people might even like the songs!

Cheers,

Bad Alice
http://www.badalicemusic.com/
http://www.thecairn.com/

Excellent CD. It’s only number two in my 6-disc changer, but Bad Alice would have to play tuned chain saws to get ahead of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters - classic Jazz Fusion c. 1972.

I hope to get to Scotland on my next trip to Liverpool. If luck is with me, Bad Alice will have a gig when I’m there.

Suzy’s mum Jean is a great mum, I’m told, and a very cool lady. She even wrote her own book, To Walk on Eggshells, about her experiences helping her daughter navigate the dire straits of the mental health system in the UK. Family involvement is a big positive in handling bipolar disorder effectively.

The CD costs £6.50 postpaid in the UK. Not sure about the rest of the world, but it’s also available as mp3s. Buy it with PayPal and download it on the spot.

Technorati: bad+alice suzy+johnston indie depression psychosis self+harm The+Naked+Bird+Watcher mp3

Rethinking personal evolution.

Post-modernism is about creating a synthesis encompassing, integrating, and synergizing the existing, mutually exclusive domains of religion and science. A new spiritual paradigm, if you like buzz-words. Most of us have evolved far beyond the pre-industrial, that is, agrarian, monotheistic religions. Blind faith stopped being relevant before WWII, so you practically have to drop out of modern society to avoid moving to the next level. But don’t tell the poor devils unless you want a bloody Crusade right here in the US.

The atheists would claim that we have a god-shaped hole in our heads that we must fill with something, and this may be true. Now all the geeks don’t know what to do with this need for spirituality - or even exactly what it is that they’re needing!

KW has some great ideas, but he expressed an opinion in an interview that evolution is a sudden transformation rather than a process of gradual adaptation to the environment. I don’t agree that intermediate, incomplete forms are necessarily incompatible with survival. The universe doesn’t need miracles, *we* do.

To me, this idea that the Universe will bring you whatever you want if you are spiritual sounds a whole lot like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you work hard enough or if you believe hard enough, God will grant you grace. And all of your basest desires.

Look around you. There are a very few beacons shining above a sea of ignorance. Check out SoundsTrue. There are some excellent materials there - you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In my opinion, we will achieve enlightenment only when humanity physically evolves enough to provide us with appropriate organs for it. I’m just burning karma until then.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: post-modernism protestant+work+ethic blind+faith atheist transformation law+of+attraction burning+karma sea+of+ignorance spiritual monotheism pre-industrial darwin

My take on the sixties:

I was born in 1957, 12 years after WWII The Big One ended. The Korean conflict came between the two events. As far as I can tell, I’m being labeled “Baby Boomer” only so that folks my age will fund the real boomers greedy retirement plans. Even as we speak, they are quietly moving their funds are from investments that have become UNSAFE due to their profit-taking. They don’t leave their money in the stock market as they get older. My group still does, and it will be disastrous. Stock Market “adjustments” are seen as inevitable, but when there is an adjustment it means that somebody is taking somebody else’s money. Who do you suppose it is? The poor? Not bloody likely. I used to think the stock market was a gamble. Now I realize that the game is fixed.

Many of these boomers were, as young adults, the hippies about which my friends speak so glowingly. The hippies headed for the hills when things got tough. Most of what you read about the culture of the ’60s was invented by students at Ivy League colleges who never knew the difficulties of living off handouts in the city. Free love was a farce - it wasn’t anything near free for the women - or girls - who got pregnant.

The Beatles brought a small vision of the world to public view, but they weren’t at the forefront. Not EVEN. They were Pop Icons at the tail end of the whole mess. The whole hippie thing had become a farce by the time the Beatles rolled out Sergeant Pepper’s.

So as a kid I heard many Great Ideas from my friends’ older, college-age siblings. Age of Aquarius, be-ins, freedom, evolution, revolution. But I watched the body counts in Viet Nam rise night after night on TV. I saw minorities fighting to be recognized not even as equals but as human beings. I saw the cops beating Blacks and college students and pretty much anyone they didn’t like the looks of to a pulp out in the streets. I lived in the aftermath of three assassinations. The Great Ideas vanished into thin air, leaving my generation with an intellectual wasteland.

The media doesn’t let that kind of information interfere with big business these days. There was even a ban on showing the rows of coffins from the Afghanistan and Iraq dead. I would watch that. Someone has to bear witness.

I suppose I should get more proactive. I’m too easy to silence, I’m mentally ill. I can be taken against my will into a hospital, drugged, zapped, whatever. Just say the word “anosognosia.” There are no political prisoners, no prisoners of conscience, only mental patients. My only recourse is to donate to the charities that are doing the real work. I don’t fool myself into thinking that throwing money at the problems will fix them. Money only generates more money - if the problems were solved, the charities would be out of business. I can only hope that they help a little bit.

Duck and cover, they told us as children. There was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by the hatred of my elders for folks just like us on the other side of the world. In the ’80s they told us to dig a hole in the backyard, lie down in it and cover yourself over if there’s a nuclear strike - dig your own goddam grave. “With enough shovels” was the slogan. This stupidity was successfully imitated in the aftermath of 9-11 Homeland Security told us to seal off a room with plastic and duct tape to protect ourselves from terrorists. I don’t think it will protect you, but it will definitely keep the smell down. Fear is a great strategy for controlling the populace.

I sat at work one night at 12 or 14 years old with a gun on the desk in front of me and the simple instructions: “If any <n -words> try to break in, shoot ‘em.” Camden was burning just a few blocks away. It was happening in cities across the country, the black people were looking for a better life. The owner left me to mind the store. The only <n -word> who showed up was a business associate that I’d known since I was a baby. He sat with me until the boss got back then ripped him a new asshole for leaving me there alone.

“Backlash, Backlash, Who do you think I am? You raise my taxes, freeze my wages, And send my son to Viet Nam. You gimme Second-class houses, And second-class schools, Do you think all colored people are just Second-class fools? Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues, yes I am.” – Langston Hughes, Nina Simone “Backlash Blues”

Backlash Blues didn’t get much airplay when it would have mattered. Now it’s used in a Lexus commercial to sell luxury automobiles. Langston Hughes would have seen the irony of it. A better life, indeed. I’m not sure whether a commercial with a good-looking African-American man grooving on the blues is supposed to be targeted for African-Americans. It motivated me to run out and get some Nina Simone CDs. I don’t want an SUV, thankyouverymuch.

So when I was a kid the air was bad, the rivers were full of poisons, raw sewage, and rotting fish. The Potomac river, backdrop to so many National Monuments, was so polluted that if you fell in the cops would take you off to the hospital. Rivers caught fire, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Our food was full of pesticides. The drug companies gave pregnant women Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide. Every species was manifesting serious anomalies from teratogens in the environment. EVERY species. Much later, William S. Burroughs drew attention to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with typical brutal honesty in an interview in 1986 in which he said, “Let me ask you one question, Doctor: You want your daughter born with two cunts?” He was referring to a condition known as “uterus didelphys.” Being born with two vaginas is also a side effect of maternal DES use.

The erstwhile hippies didn’t notice. If they did, they didn’t give a rat’s ass.

The Space Program, it turned out, wasn’t about our destiny among the stars. It was a non-war strategy for beating the Russians by outdoing them technologically. Reagan continued the strategy with space weapons programs in the ’80s. “Star Wars” was all about bankrupting “The Evil Empire” as he called the U.S.S.R..

Reagan also invented “trickle-down economics” which, as far as I can tell, involved giving all the money to the wealthy and the large corporations so that they can piss on the workers.

My generation lost hope long before Reagan came along. We smoked pot and listened to music. At the tail end of the boom, we were overcrowded everywhere we went and there were few jobs. On top of that, periodically there were gas crises with far-reaching economic effects, including stagflation. Stagflation is the situation I quoted above, where prices increase but salary doesn’t. More and more, we either lived at home until we were 30, in roachtraps in the city, or in group houses with four or more people. We were occasionally chased out of town with new zoning laws by the former hippies, but that’s another story for another day.

The American Dream has always been about taking care of the kids born right after WWII The Big One. It was used, along with religion, for keeping us quiet and obedient, at least until we figured out that it was all a big scam.

Suddenly the ’60s have become this Utopia. They are being totally rewritten. It’s very hip these days to pine for a Golden Age that never was, whether you pine for the ’60’s or for the post-war enthusiasm of our grandparents generation or for a mythical pre-industrial garden.

Maya, the world of illusion. Insanity is being able to see through the illusion. Insanity is rejecting the false values of your elders. So they tell us. It’s up to us to keep looking for the truth no matter how much they tell us to turn back to a glorious past that never was.

Technorati: politics music Nina+Simone The+Sixties baby+boomers hippies

Music Download: Red Bird & the Meatheads

Got an mp3 in an email from a friend the other day. As you can see above, Windows Media Player made an excellent visualization for the song, which is called Red Bird & the Meatheads.

it is about my birds. he would like me to tell you that the goofy voices are his singing what the birds yak. he does a good job. i am serious when i tell you that any resemblance to a parody of bob dylan is unintentional. it is magic, this song. i really believe that. he did it in twenty minutes & i– & this is me, remember, hyper-critical & knowledgeable about every perfect thing– i have rarely heard anything this accomplished done in even twenty hours or twenty days. me, i am yakking myself too much, so i will just send the mp3.

he would like me to tell you it is called “red bird & the meatheads.”

Technorati: music, mp3

According to an article in May 23, 2007 N.Y. Times, there will be a series of free folk festivals on Governor’s Island in July. Folk singer-songwriter Harry Chapin of “Cat’s Cradle” fame will be reanimated for the occasion.

Thanks to Ted for the hard copy.

FilmSpot: Ozzy Osbourne

I bit the head off a live bat the other night. It was like eating a Crunchie wrapped in chamois leather.
– Ozzy Osbourne