the rix mix

I don't know if Carrie likes Laura, but this is  one of my fave "being alive" songs. for her recent birthday.

Labels: birthday, music, video

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, April 1967 speech.

Labels: birthday, holidays, human rights

Martin of Tours and the Beggar by El Greco. The story is that Martin, a low-ranking officer in the Roman cavalry, gave half his ample cloak to a beggar. The beggar is, of course, Jesus. They all are. The lesson is that there's enough to share, & no one need freeze or go hungry. Today is his day, the day the first Armistice was signed in 1918, stopping World War I. I knew that growing up, but not the connection to Martin of Tours, Martinmas.

Although having a day to honor veterans is right, I wish we had established a separate day for them & kept Armistice Day, which was about the end of a war & the establishment of peace. A day devoted to peace. Rarely see the word "peace" in print anymore, why is that? I was born on Armistice Day. It was changed a few years later. "Ami" in my mother's maiden name Amidon has meant peace or a quality of peace all the way back into proto-Indo-European language. God's joke on a hot-tempered child whose growth spurt screeched to a halt at 5'6", but endowed with a scorpio's penchant for creative, patient revenge. Oh yeah, in case I inherited the gift of blarney from the Irish side, I was given a stutter that didn't subside to a controllable level until I was in my Twenties. You have to learn to write poems, kid.

Signing a truce is not the same as making peace. It's better than fighting, but it does not reconcile. Nations make & observe truces, as do families  & individuals, but use them to avoid getting to the heart of the matter.

 Rules for 21st Century War  

 Prevent a free press from learning the truth & it won't need to be censored for trying to report the truth.  

Never reveal who is getting rich from a war. 

The true costs of a war are so mind-boggling high that hardly anyone finds them believable. Don't worry about it. 

When stirring up the populace for a war, in no case predict & include the costs of the aftermath of a war, which are paid for by citizens for 100 years after the war in the form of medical care & survivor's benefits. As of March 2013, two children of Civil War veterans were still receiving very modest annual payments.  

Ship bodies of fallen soldiers home quietly & quickly disperse them across the country. Hide the most grievously injured.  

 Call veterans "heroes" but keep them so patriotically stirred up by slights both real & imagined that they'll cheer cuts to social service programs without noticing  vets & the V.A. are getting screwed too. The vets of WWI & WWII didn't fall for this scam. Know your history. 

Labels: birthday, holidays

Wagner is often enough a young person's classical  music obsession, which is outgrown. I didn't develop  an appreciation for Wagner - to the extent I do appreciate him -  until I was past fifty years old & force-feeding myself opera. I began to enjoy his opera   as background music. I enjoy the instrumental sections, like the Prelude to "Das Rheingold", often cited as examples of early "minimalism."

Labels: birthday, music, video

to my friend Carrie in L.A.   It'll get better. Just stay active & believe what my therapist told me: "You always find ways of making yourself felt. That doesn't have to change."

Also to poet Penny Harter.  Penny, along with her husband, the late great Bill Higginson, had a brief  but significant & altogether good influence on my poems when I was young & rebellious.  & a belated H.B. to my friend Gina up the street.

Labels: birthday

I know four Pisces women with birthdays today. Know only one of them well, a woman I have  loved since we met 35 years ago, & she knows it.  She was with the man then she's still with now. They eventually got married, bought a fixer up house, now have a son around 20, a fine musician so I hear. They are a couple I described as deciding to "grow up for each other." It was certainly something they didn't have to do at the time, 25 years ago, but they saw their chance to have a home & jumped at it.   I've never written a poem about her. Written a couple for her. Got her card in the mail a day late, she'll think I've forgotten (which I haven't in years), but it will arrive tomorrow with today's postmark.

I pulled yesterday's poem, "A Common Egret,"  out of a 2005 blog post. It was probably written in the late 90's when I was spending a lot of time on the Raritan Bay shore & at Sandy Hook, & I tinkered with it for a few years. It is not to my mind a successful poem. It would read well in public from a podium, & has the kind of twisty "dismount" at the end I seem to be good at doing - getting out of poem. But it is a contrived poem & I labor to follow what I want from it more than what the poem might have wanted. Can hardly blame a poet for desiring  to celebrate a white egret, quite common in our marshes now, much more  than when I was a child. As development continued unabated along the Jersey shore - the Barnegat Bay "lagoon" communities so badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy -  industry was withdrawing from northern Jersey marshes & wildlife sanctuaries were established from the Meadowlands a short distance from NYC to Delaware Bay, so I suppose the egrets found safer, stable  breeding habitats. They fly in  from the marshes & islands of Arthur Kill - the waterway between Jersey & Staten Island -  & fish at ponds in local parks around here, but they are not comfortable being too close to humans. They can't keep an eye on us & concentrate on fishing at the same time.

Labels: about writing, birthday

I thought she was old over 45 years ago.
 I liked many of her songs; still, there was something odd in that era about a post-30 woman singing poppy songs with manic choruses, chastely wiggling  on TV for audiences of screaming kids mainly in the 10-13 year old range. Petula herself had been a child celebrity in England, & had hits in both England & France during the Fifties. But her career wasn't in very good shape when "Downtown" was released & became a worldwide hit, part of the "British Invasion" in America.  My favorite Pet Clark song is "Call Me, " like so many of her hits composed for her by Tony Hatch, but never released by her  as a single.

Labels: birthday, music, video

Labels: birthday, boardwalks, jersey shore, postcard, weather

John Lennon's birthday & people are posting grim songs from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Mother, I Found Out, God, Isolation. I bought the record within days of its release. Admired its brutal honesty, thought John's singing was his best ever,  considered Phil Spector's production perfect for the project, appreciated the stripped down instrumentation  Oh yes, it is a "great" album. But I have never really liked it.  I just didn't care about John Lennon's psychic agonies. I didn't have the kind of emotional investment in The Beatles  or the band's dissolution that carried me over to a plodding song like "Mother" with its then-fashionable primal screaming. I loved Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere & After the Goldrush,  plenty of pain on those records with Neil not even bothering to clearly articulate, as John did, what exactly was causing it all.  In fact, in 1970 rock was starting to loosen its grip on me,  I was exploring other kinds of music, & for the nest  five years only a handful of rock albums made a strong impression on me.  The one with perhaps the most impact was Lenny Kaye's Nuggets, a two disk compilation of Sixties one hit wonders, proto-punkers, & 45 rpm psychedelic weirdness.

Labels: birthday, music

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice." Theodore Parker, 1853

I doubt the abolitionist preacher Parker would have cared that Dr. King distilled his unwieldy statement to the succinct "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  & did so without attribution. *  It's this quote from Dr. King that I most often use to defend him from appropriation by the Christian right. Dr. King moved Parker's idea from the pulpit into action.

Dr, King was only 39 years-old when he was murdered on April 4, 1968. He was only 26 when he was drawn into leading the Montgomery  Bus Boycott, riding the arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice,  Beginning in the Jim Crow, violent American South, he was on way to becoming a world citizen.  Great world citizens are not uncommon,  are a diverse group of individuals: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Danny Kaye,  Audrey Hepburn, Stephen Hawking, Bob Marley, Pope John Paul II & names we will never know.

We can't  be certain where Dr. King would have landed on the matter of abortion. If he became against, the issue never would never have been separated, as it is now, from  the well-being  of infants, children, & families.   But I am quite certain he would have continued to follow the arc that bends toward justice, & that it would have eventually brought him to an endorsement of marriage equality.  In 1968 we were still a decade from the suggestion even surfacing in mainstream media (as a novelty)  & another decade away the beginnings of public acceptance. Even now it would not have been Dr. King's paramount concern, within  the broad context of justice & human rights.

*It came out in the 1980s that Dr, King;s doctorate dissertation for Boston College also included unattributed portions, but the reviewing panel concluded acting upon the incidents of plagiarism  would  "serve no purpose." Had those passages been caught at the time, it's likely the dissertations  would not have been rejected outright but returned for correction,  But by then, Dr, King was on to more important matters in Alabama. He was applying his theological ideas to real world situations.

Labels: birthday, holidays, justice, Mahalo

It's very gratifying on my birthday to receive not only birthday greetings, but to have among those greetings expressions of respect  from people  I consider my peers (or betters) as a poet, blogger, &  DJ-on-hiatus still involved in excavating forgotten & obscure recorded music.

It's a strange thing about some people who disrespect you, that they think you don't realize you're being disrespected. Perhaps they don't comprehend how they're disrespecting you, which is giving them the benefit of the doubt. You can dislike someone without disrespecting them. But it's hypocritical to pretend you like someone you disrespect.

I seem to be attracted to serious people with a capacity for silliness. I don't mind brooders so long as they snap out of it occasionally. I have an unusual number of Scorpio acquaintances.  But one of the most "Scorpio" people I know is a Sagittarius.   I suppose an astrologer could explain that person; I might or might not buy the explanation.

My most Scorpio attribute is a typical one: I place a  high value on loyalty. This isn't just a matter of ego-stroking. The world is a very harsh & ugly place more than sometimes, everyone f*cks-up somewhere. One catches the occasional glimpse of something pure, transcendental, in the most unexpected place, & it's wonderful, & then it's gone, & one's heart breaks a little. If this happens to you, then there's good chance you & I will  get along, & a very good chance  each others' imperfections won't get in the way.

Labels: birthday

This song often tempted me to adopt it as an opening theme for my late night WFMU shows, the ones that ran to 2 or 3 am. But I rarely felt like an Ole Night Owl at the start of the programs (although I usually did by the end), & I didn't want to telegraph the same mood every week. Even when I used music by Nino Rota from "The Clowns," which I did for years,  the mood depended upon where I chose to cue up the record.

Labels: birthday, music, WFMU

My birthday.

I'm grateful for having been born on Armistice Day - now Veterans Day. As a kid, I had the day off  from school, or one close to it. Birthdays were celebrated modestly in my family, & always the same for everyone: ice cream & cake for dessert after supper, the happy birthday song, a few presents.

When I got older I began considering the influence the day had on me, Armistice Day (to the old folks), Veterans Day, Feast of St. Martin,  & the  season - late fall. Thinking about these things influenced how the day affected me.  The day always seemed  larger than me. It isn't  really my day. I share it.

Martin of Tours is very interesting character. The two legends associated with him are wonderful. But as Bishop of Tours he was harsh to pagans. Yet he went up against an emperor in an unsuccessful attempt to save the lives of some people accused of heresy, although he opposed their beliefs  - the first Christians known to have been executed on that charge.  Martin may have recognized the terrible precedent. He seems to have been a man of monastic temperament obliged to accept positions of leadership & authority, not an  unusual situation in the history of Christianity.  As a kid, I knew nothing of Martin or Martinmas.

My birthday poem.

Labels: birthday, growing up, holidays, religion