Happy Anniversary to Us!

24 June 1970


Married on Midsummer Day...like Aragorn and Arwen...


I used to think it was a Muse
I wanted
Then you came along
& you are not the inspiration
but the deed itself
I've fucked straw in my time
& thought it gold
But you I put on like a jewel
I wear you like a rose
---JDM, 1970




(c) Patricia Morrison

No Tents Allowed

"We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity," Mr Sarkozy told the special session in Versailles.

"That is not the idea that the French republic has of women's dignity.

"The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic," the French president said.


Voila un vrai homme et un brave aussi! Good for you, Sarko! It's about time someone took a firm stand against the creeping Islamization of the West.

Islamic clerics do not agree on the Koran-mandated necessity of the burqa or the niqab (a burqa is the full-length body covering with a mesh screen over the eyes, a niqab is the black full-length enveloping veil with slits for the eyes...), and even the hijab (scarf head covering) may not necessarily be required.

Muslim men require their women to cover themselves with sheets because they (the men) cannot master their own "impure" desires and thoughts, and so they insist that their women control their thoughts FOR them by removing the "temptation".

Hey, it's not the fault of women if Muslim men are a pack of juvenile lust-crazed horndogs who can't keep their minds out of their pants (or hers) every time they see a woman. How insulting is that, to both men AND women?

Grow up, guys, and join the 21st century. Show some REAL respect for women, because otherwise why should women show respect for you?

It continually confounds me that Muslims move to the West for a "better life" or whatever the hell, presumably one involving more personal freedoms, and then they get their knickers in a twist because the West won't accommodate their medieval and inhumane culture. You can't have it both ways, people! YOU must accommodate yourselves and your beliefs to US. Otherwise go back to the desert.

I believe with every fiber of my being that any so-called "religion" that allows women to be stoned to death for being out in public without a male companion, to be the victims of "honor" killings, to be kept illiterate and immured indoors, to be divorced at will, is no religion at all. And certainly not one that pleases Allah, or whoever.

That's not a religion. That's male medieval control freaks with their heads in an 8th-century tent and their souls stuffed up a camel's anus.

An Iranian woman writer (exiled) pointed out the other day that it really didn't matter WHO was the president of Iran, because she would still be subject to all the anti-woman laws regardless of who was in office, that Mousavi was cut from the same bolt of "religious" cloth as Ahmadinejad. She could still be stoned, imprisoned, killed, veiled, kept from living a normal life, all in the name of Allah.

Well, I think Allah really hates this. At least, if he's a good god, he SHOULD hate it. And if he doesn't, what woman would want to worship him? I hope he strikes them down harshly, these sour-faced mullahs and all who cleave to them and their vile teachings..

In fact...wasn't Allah originally female? Al-Lat, the (female) Sun? A GODDESS??? I do believe I read that somewhere. It's probably not true, but it's nice to think that perhaps SHE will finally take vengeance and obtain justice for Her murdered and mutilated daughters.

Sumer Has I-Cumen In, Lhude Sing Goddamm

Happy Solstice! I HATE summer, but I'm happy because now the days are getting short gain, and WINTER is on the way! Yay!

Rock On, Axeman!

June 17, 2009

Bob Bogle of The Ventures Dies at 75

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — Bob Bogle, the lead guitarist and co-founder of the rock band The Ventures, known for 1960s instrumental hits like “Walk, Don’t Run,” “Perfidia” and the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” died Sunday. He was 75.

Don Wilson, the band’s other founder, told The News Tribune of Tacoma that Mr. Bogle had become ill over the weekend.

The Ventures sold millions of albums and heavily influenced other rock guitarists. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. The hall’s Web site hailed The Ventures as “the most successful instrumental combo in rock and roll history.”

“Walk, Don’t Run,” written and first performed by Johnny Smith in 1955, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart for The Ventures in 1960; a revised version, “Walk, Don’t Run ’64,” reached No. 8 in 1964.

The band’s instrumental version of “Perfidia,” a much-covered song by the Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez, was also a hit in 1960. (Charlie Parker, Mel Tormé, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole and Linda Ronstadt, among others, have also recorded versions of it.)

The Ventures scored yet another hit in 1969 with their cover of the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” the long-running police detective show that had its premiere in 1968.

The band got its start in 1958 in Tacoma. Mr. Bogle initially played lead and bass and Mr. Wilson played rhythm guitar. They were soon joined by Nokie Edwards, another guitarist, and the drummer Howie Johnson, later replaced by Mel Taylor.

“Our aspirations were to pick up nothing heavier than a guitar,” Mr. Wilson said last year. “But it just mushroomed into something where we became internationally known.”

The Ventures were particularly popular in Japan, where Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bogle played as a duo during their first tour in 1962 because the promoter couldn’t afford to pay the other two band members.

The two Americans made such an impression, Mr. Wilson recalled last year, that when the band came back in 1964, “there were 6,000 people at the airport.” He said he didn’t realize at first that the Japanese fans were there to see The Ventures.


Turk's hero. Sad. I remember hearing them back in the day, when I was in high school, and buying the singles 'cause I was so impressed with the sound. You couldn't dance to some of their stuff, at least not easily, though we did anyway, but DAMN it was fine to listen to. That lead riff from "Pipeline" is one of my all-time faves, right up there with the "Layla" riff. Well played, sir!

It's Published!!

"California Screamin': Murder at Monterey Pop"...Now available on Lulu: 5724397 item number

It'll take a while (few days? couple weeks?) for it to be available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble...but it's done and it's up!

I'm honestly not sure what the price is...Lulu has a new pricing system that drove us crazy...but it's certainly not more than the price of the first one, and as usual Amazon has a discount on it.

So there it is, and huge props and thanks to James Allen Davis for his production work and to Andrew Przybyszewski for the beautiful cover artwork and design.

I'd be grateful for any reviews, of course, at Lulu and Amazon...

And now on to Book 3! And 4! And more!

Dancin' in the Ruins

I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to end up. (Don't worry; nothing wrong and I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon...I actually enjoy considering this stuff, and updating/revising my will, to change who gets what, is one of my fun things to do when I'm bored. And I don't find it morbid in the slightest.)

Cremated, of course. But not stuck in some dreary suburban mausoleum. I'd like to be (mostly) scattered around amongst some of my favorite places. It would be incumbent upon my friends to get me there, natch, and several have already kindly volunteered: a real Magical Mystery Tour. Or Tragical History Tour.

ANYway.

Glastonbury Tor would be nice. Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland. The Rock of Cashel, Ireland. The rocks at a certain beach in Malibu and the top of a certain hill in Ojai. Jim's grave, of COURSE. And also nearby, so I can protect him.

But perhaps most of me wants to end up in St. Bonaventure Cemetery, Allegany, New York. It's this terrific old cemetery, on the hill behind where my old dorm used to be, with the same gorgeous view of mountains and campus I had from my dorm-room window, and I really think I could get into being there forever. Maybe actually on the site of the old dorm, maybe just scattered on the top of the hill, maybe a little niche for an urn and a plaque with some words; haven't decided, though I suppose I should look into it. There's also a clearing on the side of a mountain overlooking the whole scene, called the Heart, 'cause it's heart-shaped; might be nice to be there too.

If I had an epitaph, though, I think it would be this:


"It doesn't matter if we turn to dust
Turn and turn and turn we must
I guess I'll see us dancin' in the ruins tonight
Dancin' in the ruins
Yes, I'll see us dancin' in the ruins tonight"


Because we would be, you know. Dancing. Us. That night and all nights.

And it seems just about right. So remember, please.

Blunder on the Right

From the NYTimes: this guy is an amazing commentator...




June 2, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Howls of a Fading Species

By BOB HERBERT



One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.


It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.


Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.


It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.


The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.


Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.


Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!


Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.


Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”


Never a peep did you hear.


Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?


We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”

Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.


Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.


The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?


It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.


Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.



Me again. I wish this column could be nailed to the doors, nay, the FOREHEADS, of everyone who espouses this kind of toxicity.

It seems Darwinianly fitting that the Nazgul Trio of Limbaugh, Gingrich and Rove should be unhealthy, pasty, disgusting-looking creatures whose outsides are just as nasty as their insides: outer ugliness matching inner ugliness.

I can't really add anything to what Mr. Herbert has so brilliantly said, except to note with pleasure and hopefulness that these are the outcries of a dying breed, going kicking and screaming into rightful extinction and still never realizing how truly dead they are, and have always, indeed, been.