Tag Archives: John Lennon

Consider the Lilies

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My friends are no doubt a scrappy bunch. It’s no big surprise that guys like Jon and Adam and–holy shit–Skip, are pissed off and ready to burn a few barns down, so to speak. I don’t think I need to look up a bunch of fancy references to convince anyone that things are dire, dire, dire. The college students I went hiking with yesterday afternoon will have to live what, like 20,0000 years to pay off the stupid shell-game debt they supposedly owe. Some guy on Adam’s page was trying to convince me the whole business is thus because we never pay our bills. Bullshit. It’s like this because a buncha paranoid Fascist clowns have set up a little magick trick to try and convince us they have some legitimate claim to all the cheese. THEY DO NOT!!!

So there’s a fight working alright, and I’ve been in it since I was a potential in my Granddad’s genetic line. But I recently noticed–this is so weird–we’re all fighting the wrong guy, and he is us. If we collapse our little bubble here in our little gob of the quantum foam, we’re all screwed; not just us little guys. And we really do have enough guys to kick their Fascist asses on the way down. But guess what, we’ve all got it wrong!

Like it or not we’re all in this together. We’re each and every one of us as fucked up as the Devil!!! Shit he may have been the only sane one all along–but now I’m just picking at scales. Sorry. Didn’t meant to. Ahem. Point is some of us are fucked up differently than others. It doesn’t matter. That crackhead? Fuck-ed. The cop beating him down? Fuck-ed. Dominique Kahn-Strauss? Fuck-ed. Who else? The Pope? Me? You? Yeah, you’re starting to anticipate if not grok me.

I’m a tool. Sometimes I’m also a dick and an asshole. That’s another matter–I’m happy about being a tool.

A while ago I came back to Colorado from a trip back to Cleveland for the great John Covert’s 95th birthday party. The moment I returned to my adopted home town, every television set in the danged known Universe began to trumpet the imminent falling of the sky, talking heads of every political stripe and linguistic camp bewailing the unavoidable collapse of the American dollar and the entire foundation of all civilization along with it. I found myself with time on my hands, so I started tinkering with this blog as nothing more than an outlet for some frustrations, and a place to sling a bit of my ordinary schtick, mainly just at myself, assuming I’d be the only one reading. I played around on Facebook a little meaning nothing more than to hunt down a few friends from the distant past. That’s what FB is for, right? A series of rapidly developing events took place and I soon found myself in the position I mean to describe right now, as best as I am able.

I guess I can’t recall the first moment I was told I could write. It hasn’t really mattered til recently–everyone knows writing is one of those career choices pursued by quixotic artsy-fartsy types that were willing to sacrifice creature comforts on the off chance someone might give a shit, and that the big bucks might roll in, easy-pleasy. Like hitting the lottery or breaking into the billboard charts with your high-school garage band, right? Besides, writers as a breed must, by necessity, possess a form of self-deluded arrogance that they have things to say of such verity and import that people will be compelled to actually pay money to subject themselves to the grief of listening to the blather produced in the effort to be a big deal. It was never like that. I just wanted something to fill the time that wouldn’t dissolve my brains like the all to comfortable slide into awareness of regularly scheduled TV programming was beginning to do.

Somewhere in the midst of Facebooking about how we need a new econo-political paradigm it became apparent that bitching about this need had long been a habit of mine, as well as of many of my friends. I’ve always been a pretty good bitcher, too, in fact, when I entered the foundationless world of a self-employed remodeler it was a sense of the futility of bellyaching about how paint companies were managed. My brother and I had enough faith in our pooled abilities to believe we could do things better than the people running outfits for which we had worked to strike under our own banner. The key words in this were and remain “faith” and “believe”.

So it occurred to me that if I really believe my own drivel, I ought to live it out.

Well that was an eye-opener. Very little pursuit of that idea led me to examine just what I actually believe, which turns out to be quite a bit, and quite at odds with the established order of things. I started, as is my wont, to contemplate God, and the deeper nature of things. I thought about how this transposes to something manageable in this “real” world. We have to work at a job, right? We have to round up bacon we can trade for goods, services, support for our children, and so on. But wait a minute–20 years of self-employment, and I was broke, money-wise, and most of my relationships were broke in some sense as well, though in most instances I couldn’t tell how, or how to fix it. Seemed the thing I was best at doing was bitching. Where’s the fun in that?

But I do believe in God, right, even though I’ve managed to get myself thrown out of both Christian churches and sorta like devil-worshiping occult groups because my notions of God are…unconventional. Enough so I’m usually inclined to put quotation marks around “God” when I type the word, and to feel compelled to issue tedious disclaimers about how I differ from the general milieu of thinkers on the matter.

An experiment in ontological ideoplasticity.

This whole thing is about stuff I believe. I’m kinda stuck at that level, since there’s not much I know. Some of what I believe has to do with what other folks believe, so I’ll be pretty much doing what a lot of other folks do, in a lot of ways. In some

Whoa!!! Blah Blah F-ing Blah.

Mt 6

25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

My apologies to any devil-worshiping freaks I may have just offended. You’re wrong, anyhow–that’s for another moment. Point is–and I’m no ordinary Christian–this is stuff we all learned from the cradle. I’ll be using Christian doctrinal talking points throughout this whole conversation because that’s where I learned this shit. It’s also where I learned it was all crap.

I’ve had a real hard time with this one, cause by now I can usually say, “The point is….” Right now I still can’t do that. The whole collection of thoughts in my head begins to ooze its way into the point when I come at it this way. Bear with a little, OK?

Christians say they believe the book that stuff up the page a little came from is the sacrosanct Word of God, equated with the Logos–God on paper, if you will. With apologies to those real Christian human beings in the world, Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit!!!!! If you shitheels really believed one word of the shit in that book, this conversation would be intrinsically inconceivable. See that at the end of that last sentence? PERIOD.

On the other hand, I believe the Bible to be a beautiful collection of fine literature, some of which may be divinely inspired. We have all these cultural heroes, like Gandhi whom I linked to on FB earlier, Jesus, John Lennon ferchristsake. We pay a bunch of lip service out to them then grab a beer and flick on some stupid nonsense on TV, or punch a child, or throw rocks at a cop, or bust a protester. Fuck that, I decided I believe it. Whatever it is.

You may have noticed me carrying on about a new paradigm, money’s a bad metaphor, we’re all in this together, &c., &c. All that is real, real important to what this is about, but OMG kids! This was a bitch to get off. I’ll be hanging flesh on it all as I go, but be patient. what ended up here just now was way different than what I’d meant to do. A writer has to possess a pretty ridiculous quantity of arrogance in the first place, just to have the motivation to sit here pouring all of it out. I mean, I think this tripe I’m typing is valuable enough, and that you all will want to see it–need to see it–to occupy me at 3:30 in the fucking morning. Even worse, here and round about, (get wit’ me on Facebook, if you came from somewhere else), I’ll be arguing with Hegel, Gandhi, Paul the fuckin’ Apostle. Can you believe it? Whatever, I believe the finer points from all those guys. I’ll explain everything.

This hasn’t been the clarification I’d promised to put up, but it defines some of the questions, I guess. You can have it.

Now don’t forget. A little review: It’s All Bullshit!!!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Richard Brautigan was my favorite Beatle

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Richard Brautigan recorded on Apple RecordsYou know you’re a Post- Baby Boomer when you had to learn that Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was not an Elton John song. I remember being told by a nanny that you liked either the Monkeys or the Beatles. They broke up before I began listening to pop music. John became an activist, Paul was determined to return to commercial sounds, and George and Ringo faded to slackerdom, having ever only composed While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Octopus’s Garden between them, so I thought. I knew only the Beatles Red and White anthologies.

Barbara Bach and Got My Heart Set on You redeemed Ringo Starr fairly enough, and later I came to appreciate George Harrison. Actually later I heard Ravi Shankar liken Harrison’s exertions on the sitar to a monkey handling a violin, and we come full circle.

But before that was Handmade Films, Harrison’s project to finance Monty Python adventures, and something I’ve just come upon, recordings of my favorite post-beat writer Richard Brautigan. Someone at Apple Records, and I like to imagine it was George, approached RB about putting his poems on vinyl. Someone in the production process knew what to add to the poetry to please his fans. The tracks recorded Brautigan taking off his clothes, answering the phone, and brushing his teeth. I knew of the recordings, I didn’t know it was on Apple.

I came upon Richard Brautigan late too. In 1986 I read The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, and was pleased enough to imagine one day meeting him. It wasn’t until I was standing in the reference shelves of Penrose Library several years later, that I read a jacket liner which referenced Brautigan in the past tense. I was profoundly shattered that he lived no more, and I am still confused that a voice so lyrically optimistic could choose to commit suicide. I collected all his books but eventually lost a curiosity to read them.

Brautigan wrote: “All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”

He took his life two years before I encountered The Confederate General and Trout Fishing. There is something uniformly post-mortem about my generation.

Richard Brautigan is considered a beat writer, although he came on the scene a decade later. Which oddly leads me to mention my favorite of his, The Abortion.

The Beatles were counter-revolutionary

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It sounds sexy, like “counter-culture.” But counter-revolutionaries were the Tsarist forces, or Loyalists in our hemisphere, who countered the revolutionary surges of the masses. The Beatles expressed themselves as being against the war, and Lennon ultimately gave the peace movement its anthem. But in 1968, when the Beatles were preaching peace and non-violence, Mick Jaggar was marching at the front of the student riots in London. Which actions ultimately closed down the Vietnam War? Was it Haight-Ashbury or the Left Bank? Was it Woodstock or American GIs finally fragging their officers? If you wonder why today’s pop icons say only what’s approved . . .
FLIP YOUR WIG game pieces George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

Songs banned by Clear Channel radio stations

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As part of the project to mirror web resource material that the media would otherwise hope to bury, here is the list of music recordings which Clear Channel banned from the airwaves of its enormous network of radio stations. On the heels of 9/11, Clear Channel asserted these songs had “questionable content.”

Drowning Pool “Bodies”
Mudvayne “Death Blooms”
Megadeth “Dread and the Fugitive,” “Sweating Bullets”
Saliva “Click Click Boom”
P.O.D. “Boom”
Metallica “Seek and Destroy,” “Harvester or Sorrow,” “Enter Sandman,”
“Fade to Black”
All Rage Against The Machine songs
Nine Inch Nails “Head Like a Hole”
Godsmack “Bad Religion”
Tool “Intolerance”
Soundgarden “Blow Up the Outside World”
AC/DC “Shot Down in Flames,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Dirty Deeds”
“Highway to Hell,” “Safe in New York City,” “TNT,” “Hell’s Bells”
Black Sabbath “War Pigs,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Suicide Solution”
Dio “Holy Diver”
Steve Miller “Jet Airliner”
Van Halen “Jump”
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Killer Queen”
Pat Benatar “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Love is a Battlefield”
Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party”
REM “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”
Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll”
Pink Floyd “Run Like Hell,” “Mother”
Savage Garden “Crash and Burn”
Dave Matthews Band “Crash Into Me”
Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”
Pretenders “My City Was Gone”
Alanis Morissette “Ironic”
Barenaked Ladies “Falling for the First Time”
Fuel “Bad Day”
John Parr “St. Elmo’s Fire”
Peter Gabriel “When You’re Falling”
Kansas “Dust in the Wind”
Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven”
The Beatles “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”
“Ticket To Ride,” “Obla Di, Obla Da”
Bob Dylan/Guns N Roses “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Arthur Brown “Fire”
Blue Oyster Cult “Burnin’ For You”
Paul McCartney and Wings “Live and Let Die”
Jimmy Hendrix “Hey Joe”
Jackson Brown “Doctor My Eyes”
John Mellencamp “Crumbling Down.” “I’m On Fire”
U2 “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
Boston “Smokin”
Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young”
Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”
Steam “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey”
Drifters “On Broadway”
Shelly Fabares “Johnny Angel”
Los Bravos “Black is Black”
Peter and Gordon “I Go To Pieces,” “A World Without Love”
Elvis “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”
Zombies “She’s Not There”
Elton John “Benny & The Jets,” “Daniel,” “Rocket Man”
Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire”
Santana “Evil Ways”
Louis Armstrong “What A Wonderful World”
Youngbloods “Get Together”
Ad Libs “The Boy from New York City”
Peter Paul and Mary “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”
Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday”
Simon And Garfunkel “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Happenings “See You in Septemeber”
Carole King “I Feel the Earth Move”
Yager and Evans “In the Year 2525”
Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky”
Brooklyn Bridge “Worst That Could Happen”
Three Degrees “When Will I See You Again”
Cat Stevens “Peace Train,” “Morning Has Broken”
Jan and Dean “Dead Man’s Curve”
Martha & the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run”
Martha and the Vandellas/Van Halen “Dancing in the Streets”
Hollies “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
San Cooke Herman Hermits, “Wonder World”
Petula Clark “A Sign of the Times”
Don McLean “American Pie”
J. Frank Wilson “Last Kiss”
Buddy Holly and the Crickets “That’ll Be the Day”
John Lennon “Imagine”
Bobby Darin “Mack the Knife”
The Clash “Rock the Casbah”
Surfaris “Wipeout”
Blood Sweat and Tears “And When I Die”
Dave Clark Five “Bits and Pieces”
Tramps “Disco Inferno”
Paper Lace “The Night Chicago Died”
Frank Sinatra “New York, New York”
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Travelin’ Band”
The Gap Band “You Dropped a Bomb On Me”
Alien Ant Farm “Smooth Criminal”
3 Doors Down “Duck and Run”
The Doors “The End”
Third Eye Blind “Jumper”
Neil Diamond “America”
Lenny Kravitz “Fly Away”
Tom Petty “Free Fallin'”
Bruce Springsteen “I’m On Fire,” “Goin’ Down”
Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight”
Alice in Chains “Rooster,” “Sea of Sorrow,” “Down in a Hole,”
“Them Bone”
Beastie Boys “Sure Shot,” “Sabotage”
The Cult “Fire Woman”
Everclear “Santa Monica”
Filter “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
Korn “Falling Away From Me”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Aeroplane,” “Under the Bridge”
Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
System of a Down “Chop Suey!”
Skeeter Davis “End of the World”
Rickey Nelson “Travelin’ Man”
Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her”
Animals “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
Fontella Bass “Rescue Me”
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels “Devil with the Blue Dress”
James Taylor “Fire and Rain”
Edwin Starr/Bruce Springstein “War”
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Tuesday’s Gone”
Limp Bizkit “Break Stuff”
Green Day “Brain Stew”
Temple of the Dog “Say Hello to Heaven”
Sugar Ray “Fly”
Local H “Bound for the Floor”
Slipknot “Left Behind, Wait and Bleed”
Bush “Speed Kills”
311 “Down”
Stone Temple Pilots “Big Bang Baby,” “Dead and Bloated”
Soundgarden “Fell on Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun”