Oceanic

The following was a spontaneous reaction to the tragedy of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the loss of Flight 93.

(in progress)

Before the world blows up there’s just one thing I want to say:

I never liked the song “Georgia On My Mind.”

In fact, I can’t stand that song!

Had to get it off my chest.

Also.

“White Bird” by Its a Beautiful Day. Hated it.

I never liked The Rolling Stones. At all.

Also, “The Way We Were”
performed by Streisand was a blight on the music landscape. So were disco BeeGees.

Also:

The Theme From Mash. Godawful.

Hey this feels good.

While I’m listing the songs I hate, I’m making room for the idea that it really is time to abolish nuclear weapons- and I believe it is now possible. It must be.

Boz Scaggs’ “Lido.” I want to scream. But I do feel better.

“Wonderful Tonight” by EC. Oh hell no.

“Bat Out of Hell”- Meatloaf. I may push the button myself. Awful. But I want to live. With all the beautiful bugs and flowers.

“Inagaddadavida” -Glorious. Play it again! Before they drop the Big One.

Essay. Great Wall of Trump

“Parts of Speech: Words TV Memories and Kafka on the special occasion of a presidential address.”

Americans,

…is it a great “Great Wall’? Or The “Great Great Wall’?

Or just a really great, great wall? But why only two “greats”? It should be “The Great Great Great Wall!” Then he could say “the totally Great Great Great Wall” -so its greatness would be completely beyond dispute.

Because someone in the press would certainly write, and a kazillion people would tweet, that the wall is not that great, really. And make the wall look tiny.

The ‘really Great Wall’ line reminds me of when, in early days of TV, the famous Ed Sullivan would open his variety show with a monologue of patter and he would always say “We have a really great ‘shoe’ tonight” -he would elide the syllable of the word ‘show’ and it was a laugh line for impressionists. Not the painters, but the show biz imitators of famous voices. Oh, they don’t do that any more. Ok.

Ed Sullivan was famous for introducing new performers to the American audience. He introduced Elvis on his TV debut, but there was an uproar about his dance moves, his “gyrations”. I know, in America, Land of the Free.

Ed Sullivan also introduced the Beatles but eventually there was an uproar over them too. One of the Beatles noted, correctly, that they were more famous than, well, you know who (Jesus Christ) and again Americans freaked out.

Americans freaked out about the Beatles and built a bonfire of Beatles records and teen magazines and figurines and stuff- an example of freedom of speech. The signs said:”Beatles Go Home!”

Also featured on the Ed Sullivan Show was the mouse puppet Topo Gigio.

Topo would perch on Ed Sullivan’s shoulder and say “Eddie, Keesa me goo’ night!”

Everyone knew those lines from Ed Sullivan , just like SNL today.

So last night, when the president said “we’re going to build a great great wall” he must’ve known it sounded like Ed Sullivan. Which is funny.

And of course there already is a Great Wall, which doesn’t relate to the American imagination at all, so somebody might get confused. And that wall was like China’s Big Dig. It symbolizes a project that takes a long time and a lot of effort and resources. Perhaps a million people dropped dead making that particular wall, they think. Not sure the speech writers really thought this through.

The writer Franz Kafka- not a great American- wrote a story called The Great Wall of China, in which he lays out the tremendous challenge the construction would present. From childhood the workers were indoctrinated, thus:

“I still remember very well how as small children who could hardly walk we stood in our teacher’s little garden and had to construct a sort of wall out of pebbles, and how the teacher gathered up his coat and ran against the wall, naturally making everything collapse, and then scolded us so much for the weakness of our construction that we ran off in all directions howling to our parents. A tiny incident, but an indication of the spirit of the times.”

The work of Franz Kafka can inform in this context, in an era of authoritarian fervor, in which the policy of torture is openly proposed and promoted and promulgated, and incidents of antisemitism in the US are increasing. Though he died in 1924, Kafka’s writings of torture machinery and hunger and desperation and cruel humor prefigured the horrors to come in World War ll, and the Holocaust, and the almost insurmountable challenge to the Human Spirit, if there is such a thing.

…Of course, there is the Great Wall Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown, so if you google the presidential Great Wall you might end up there. You’d get stuck on Yelp again though -which really is the Enemy of the People, in my opinion.

So does a great wall preserve an open society, or just make things impossibly confusing, philosophically? Should the wall last for centuries or merely exist as an idea and a cultural artifact? Should it be visible from space? Does the Wall destroy the freedom it is meant to protect?

We could turn to Jean Paul Sartre- not a great American- whose novel The Wall may inform our current dilemma…

jk 3/1/17

Remembering David Crosby.

The Posse

Or, 13 Views of If I Could Only Remember My Name.

1. There’s an entire room in my psyche devoted to the Remember My Name Sessions, David Crosby’s 1970 solo collaboration with -everyone.
2. Everyone is there. David, Jerry, Neil, Paul Kantner. Rita Coolidge. Captain Manyhands. Graham. The Deja Vus. Mr Barnhard. Joni. John B Sebastian. Everyone. (People that were never there, are there, too.) But Jorma. Grace. Jack. They’re there. Jackson Brown and his gang of Eagles, Desperados. Playing dead on Main St, in a false front western ghost town.
3. It’s The California Posse. A round- up for daguerreotype. They all rode in together, making tremendous clouds of dust and the dust is gold and the saloon door’s open and everyone is high and-
4. did you hear Jerry Garcia’s impromptu pedal steel, stratospheric, nuanced, perfect sublime? Laughing. In the sun.
5. Did you hear John B Sebastian, filling in a spare, pure, resonant four measures of harmonica, on “Deja Vu” bringing it home? He’s there. It takes everything to perform three sliding notes in the right place at the right time.
6. There’s a lot of lift and nuance in those solos. These are pinnacle moments. These are what people take drugs to achieve. High points. Peak experience. To me, these sessions are the unmistakable sublime.
7. Jack Cassady’s ground-of being bass thrumming, vibrating the floor boards. Neil Young’s “Music is Love” backing vocal, straight out of the old hearse and wide across Mill Valley, and the gorgeous reverberation trailing from it.
8. Joni and David singing like angels on a Saturday night, in high spirals, effortlessly inventing every moment.
9. This is the California sound. We own it. I can see Mt Tam from my window. I see it every day. The album must be seen in context, and the context is me. Inside me.
10. So those sessions are ongoing. I can drop in whenever I feel like it. It’s always the middle of the night, the wee hours, when late night radio jocks put a needle in the groove and go for a smoke and it’s just you and this hippie jam thang, with the Crosby/Nash/Jefferson/Dead/ Band of Eagles.
11. Joni reminds us they INVENTED this work. The “singer/ songwriter” didn’t exist before. The songwriter/performers, solo-in-society. Newly minted. Stamped, certified authenticity.
12. David Crosby. His pals. They developed what had never been heard before, nor had even ever been thought of.
13. Who knew 12-string guitars shimmer? Who knew that hand-claps are of equal importance?- they resonate; you hear the room. You can hear the acoustics of the space. It’s so real! Wooden Music, they called it. And Gold Rush. And Canyon. And the Haight. The Haight Fricking Ashbury. When the Beatles got famous- they came here.

Music is love. Oh fuck I’m grieving.

So David, I know where paradise is. You are there.

***

Love me some sepia- toned folkology.

Grateful I grew up in an era with a booming music tradition of traditional music living room hoe down and Irish pub, with a hammering dulcimer and fiddles and whatnot nearly every night of the week.

Music documentaries are the only thing I watch anymore and I’m more likely to play a Beatles tune or a Jackson Browne or a Neil Young tune myself than to play a record. And that brings it full circle. That’s my folk music really.

Beatles are almost folk tunes now. They are so great so folded into culture that even an amateur can rock the shit out of Eight Days A Week or Ticket to Ride right out of the book.

But these come out of the dark cauldron of the folk music and art school weirdness of an earlier era. Old Modes. Church modes. And modes more remote still.

The British Folk are in a zone of their own, and many contended for non-invasive folksiness to no avail. Established Tradition and scorned innovation. Unlimited, within certain limitations.

From beatniks and bongo drums to advanced musicology, most research came from scratchy vinyl borrowed from the public library on the hill by the water tower across the street from the cemetery where the town dignitaries are buried; two hundred years ago they heard some of these airs sung without amplification.

I borrowed the Harry Smith Anthology of Folk Music with that astounding book of notes and its multiple records and loved the Cajun fiddle tune and “Old Blue” and I learned one tune (“Cindy”) on the banjo bought for $60 from Gary Peacock’s musical instrument shop across from Cafe Flor where all the stringband musicians hung out. Straggly- haired post-hippie hangout in the seventies.

I played that thing on the back porch in the Haight, using Pete Seeger’s “How to Play the 5-string Banjo” book. A treasure.

My theory is that my sixties pop composers have launched their pieces into eventual half- remembered folk music as well.

The melodies aboard the Voyager spacecraft are far beyond our heliosphere now. Some far-out being, light-years away, will reverse engineer a Woody Guthrie tune and unlock a key to what, exactly?

Who knows?

Some trite old thing pulled up from the deep well of my being.

The tunes are immortal. That’s what will last. Nothing is ever lost really.

Music making is pre-TV. It’s Neanderthal. It’s the old ways.

The books are written and the music is out there more than ever, the Home Version.

Yes, sometimes you work on a thing for hours and hours and hours. That’s great, too.
These artists were virtuosos in their realm.

I do love that people gathered to learn and cheat and steal and make mistakes. I saw that in the seventies in living rooms etc. – Classical traditions are way too perfectionistic. You need to wail sometimes. Fuck that shit up and then await the perfection of an afternoon when you play it good. It’ll sound like you.

Donovan is a god! True.

“

Wow! So grateful for my filoli membership. Such joy and happiness it brought me on my birth day. The weeping elm I’m hugging in the photo that is my favorite tree in filoli. Two ladies took my photo after they shared this story:
There is a long line cut in the tree, it was done by a disgruntled employee years ago. The tree fought and survived. There friend who had cancer hugged the tree and it healed her. They call it the healing tree, and some of the oldest trees in the country. Made my birth day so special❤️❤️❤️thank you captain, andrea and Rob. Tonight will be dinner at Mathilde’s where we celebrated my 50th. Will be thinking of you all❤️❤️❤️”