Happy Samhain to All, And To All A Good Fright!

A bright and blessed Samhain to my brother and sister Pagans and Witches, and a nice fun Halloween to everybody else...

And Happy Birthday to my darling nieceling Shannie (who as a little girl thought that people dressed up every year in honor of her natal day, and who's to say they didn't)!

I will spend the night as I always do, just quietly at home with Jim, and whoever else wishes to drop by. I do a little ritual just to set the table, as it were, then kick back. The menu is usually pork with home-fried potatoes and chopped onions, all nice and brown, an apple turnover or soda bread or a scone, a hunk of Cheddar and some apple cider. The guests seem to like it.

This year, sadly, I also expect two of my best friends in the whole world: David Walley, who died in 2006, and Susie Donoghue, who died in March.

And since this is the Celtic New Year's Eve, and time to consider and take stock, I want to thank you all for making Blogspot so much fun for me this past year. Let's keep it going.

So, leave something out for your own guests, and put a candle in the window and let it burn till dawn, so they know where to come, and have a lovely and blessed New Year.

It's Just A Shot Away...Well, A Click Away...

Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore" is available NOW!!!!!

You can order it by name or by author on Lulu right now, at the link below.


Just as a reminder, in case anyone doesn't know, or has forgotten, or hasn't heard:


TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP DEAD…

The Rock & Roll Murders: The Rennie Stride Mysteries...by Patricia Morrison


Sex, drugs, rock&roll—and murder. A slightly different side of the Sixties.

She's a newspaper reporter whose beat is rock, not a detective, and her best-friend sidekick is a blond bisexual superstar chick singer, not a cop, but murder rocks their world, following them through the heart of the Sixties, from Haight-Ashbury to the Hollywood Hills, from the East Village to Abbey Road....

Seamlessly blending the fictional with the real: the stars, the bands, the music, all the excitement of the most incredible decade of the last century...

Full of rockworld dish and attitude, created by someone who was not only there for it but who made some of it happen herself, and who actually remembers it...

And with murder to sit in and jam.

It is a time when things are happening that have never happened before...when artists like Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger are doing stuff onstage that people never dreamed of when listening to Perry Como...when rock is the hottest thing on the planet and the people who make it their life and love and work are the coolest people you could ever hope to meet.

The time when it was all NEW: the music, the hair, the clothes, the drugs, the sex, the politics, the revolution in society that stopped a war and changed the world.
A time often imitated, always envied by those not lucky enough to have been there for it, certainly never surpassed...

Over the course of the series, which will run from 1964 to around 1972, smart, tough, pretty rock writer/social commentator/amateur crime-solver RENNIE STRIDE will move back and forth between San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London.

Everywhere she goes, it's the heart of rock and roll: classic scenes like Woodstock, Monterey Pop, the Fillmores East and West, the San Francisco ballrooms, the Greenwich Village rock and folk clubs, LA's Whisky A Go-Go and Troubadour, England's tiny blues dens and huge pop festivals.

As notorious for her affinity for and proximity to foul play—the "rock albatross", as she only half-jokingly calls herself, a murder magnet always around for, or connected to, a string of music-biz murders and counterculture crimes—as she is famous for her journalistic talent and style and personal dash, Rennie is not only a hip rockworld Miss Marple but the friend of dozens of other Sixties movers and shakers, real and fictional: musicians, painters, photographers, clothes designers, record company execs, other writers.
(And the lover of some of the rock deities who are making musical history.)

First up:

Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore...

It's March 1966 in San Francisco. Not quite yet the Summer of Love.

Instead, it's the Springtime of Murder. When up-and-coming rock singer Prax McKenna is busted for being at two murder scenes, one of which takes place at that temple of rock, the newly opened Fillmore Auditorium, her best friend, newspaper reporter Rennie Stride, resolves to find the real killer and spring Prax from the slammer. What nobody expects, least of all Rennie, is what happens next...


Patricia Morrison is a retired rock critic and editor, the author of The Keltiad science-fantasy series and "Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison", and was married to rock star Jim Morrison.


Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore is available NOW from lulu.com

http://www.lulu.com/content/1164503

The Kids Are NOT All Right...

This man is a god who walks among us...

American kids, dumber than dirt

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 24, 2007


I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

Dictionary Blues

I see where some dictionary "experts" or other are caving to Illiterate Nation, like the craven nebbishes they are, and I am NOT a happy camper.

To wit: they seem to think, if I can call it thinking, that allowing "vocal chords" (as opposed to "vocal cords"), "baited breath" (e-e-e-w-w-w! It's "bated", as in "abated", nothing fishy about it) and "free reign" (not "rein") is just peachy keen and hunky dory. They claim that because almost 50% of American English speakers use the incorrect variants, it's all a part of language drift, and we should embrace the inevitable.

NEVER. GONNA. HAPPEN. Hold that line, my comrades!

Even as I type this appalling news, Conanne the Grammarian is suiting up: she is belting on her terrible swift sword Strunknwhite the Punisher, saddling her fiery steed Litotes and getting ready to charge. Are you with her?

Done, Done and Done!

"Ungrateful Dead" went off to Lulu today! And by the purest chance (truly!), it also happens to be Aeron's birthday. There's a nice symmetrical portentousness in that, I think.

Now I just have to get a sample book back from Lulu, approve it (and try not to tinker with it any more...step AWAY from the laptop...), hit the PRINT button and it's a book. I'll give you all the details as I get them from Bianquita, Goddess of Lulu (Mary's wondrous niece, who published Mary's book "Figures of Echo" and now is doing this one).

The cover looks great: my friend Andrew did a spectacular job on it, and I'll try to post it here if I can figure out how...

But yes. Done.