We wake up, move through the day and different ideas come at us from different directions. Sometimes they seem to form a meaningful pattern – sometimes it’s just an abstract tapestry.
Here’s a few threads I’d like to remember from Wednesday, December 28, 2011.
When I worked at The Gazette Newspapers my friend Amy Bentley-Smith gave me a Flaming Lips EP for Christmas one year (somewhere around 2003 or ’04) and introduced me to an incredible band lead by an artist named Wayne Coyne, who is now on my list of favorite artists.
I don’t know how I had missed them up until Amy gave me the Fight Test EP, but these things happen. In the grand scheme of things I am forever indebted for to Amy for this introduction…
Any way, today I read the following little article in the Huffington Post, which included this video of the Flaming Lips’ wonderful and strange version of I Am The Walrus:
The Flaming Lips take one of The Beatles’ strangest songs to an even stranger place in a cover video for “I Am the Walrus,” recorded at the Pink Floor Studio in Oklahoma City. This is actually one of the band’s more normal efforts in a year that saw them constantly outdoing themselves in weirdness — the list includes: three new songs housed in gummy fetuses, a six-hour-long song followed by a 24-hour-long song encased in skulls, not to mention the never-ending bizarro Christmas station, Atlas Eets Christmas, we can’t stop listening to — maybe they’re going for mind control here?
Until then, watch Wayne Coyne sing into a pink plastic circle and make you wonder whether this song was written with the express purpose of having The Flaming Lips cover it 44 years later.
Tonight I find myself wanting to watch this video over and over again…
They Kill Their Own
Meanwhile, over on my Facebook page for onehumanbeing, where I’ve been posting a “Today’s Image” every day since September 19th, I choose this image to post for today:
Today’s Image – “They Kill Their Own” – 35″ x 25″ – acrylic latex, plastic flag, collage on silkscreen – 1991 [ In the collection of Denis LaRoche ]
This is a painting I did in 1991, around the time of the first Gulf War. I do not like war, neither have I ever participated in war, but this painting was about more than just war itself.
In the news everyday was stories of drive-bys, high school shootings, postal workers on a rampage, road rages and freeway shootings, police shootings and cop killers, capital punishment and the drug war, the war industry and the war machines – missiles, bombs, knives, guns, dynamite – death, death and more death.
It seemed to me that we Americans just like killing each other (and anyone else).
I wish it wasn’t so, but it sure seems that way. It was that way in 1991 when I painted this and it’s still true today.
So, after posting this painting as “Today’s Image” I read the following articles, which put into words what I wanted to say with this painting:
If the Tea Party actually gave a damn about what the Founding Fathers said, they’d be screaming at the top of their lungs about getting rid of the most pernicious threat to our liberty and solvency that ever existed: our military. Forget about the two to six trillion dollar cost of the Iraq war (upwards of $100K per household — how many solar panels could you buy with that?). Read the words of James Madison:
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Debt, taxes… sounds like it’s from a Tea Party manifesto, right?
And again from Madison:
“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
It is this tyranny that we now face. Consider this piece from this week’s Businessweek that Gingrich and many of the other Republican candidates have no interest in upholding Supreme Court rulings that they disagree with.
What is going on here? How are Tea Partiers and other “conservatives” able to defend rampant military spending but still decry taxes and debt — when feckless military spending ($700 Billion annually and growing) is what brought us to this overtaxed and indebted state. Why would they rather spend money on the apparatus of killing than on health care for the uninsured or food for the hungry? How are they able to ignore the teachings of their own heroes?
I was recently illuminated in this department by reading an amazing book by Bob Altemeyer titled The Authoritarians. He explains how there is a segment of the population that is willing to believe, and more importantly act, on whatever information their authorities tell them. These proto-fascists operate in a toxic mix of fear and self-righteousness, and have highly compartmentalized brains, so they are able to spurn science (like the belief in evolution or global climate disruption) and cherry pick their beliefs based on the half-baked nonsense their leaders tell them. Circumspection is for ninnies. They are right, and they are afraid, and the solution to everything is more violence and suppression, whether it be prisons, anti-immigrant legislation, more guns, more wars, or curtailing our rights to speech, privacy, or assembly.
What might a rational response be to the horrors of the Iraq war, a war that probably gave me (and everyone else in the world) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder even though I was always at least four thousand miles away? I would like to suggest it might be the draft — no exceptions. No standing armies — they are the seeds of tyranny, just like our Founding Fathers said they were. And no more wars fought by the poor and the dispossessed. Every healthy adult man and woman should be required to fight in any future conflict that some megalomaniac president wants to start… and we’ll see how far she (or he) gets. Unless there’s a better reason than the lies behind the Iraq war (falsified WMDs and al Qaida connections), I won’t be going. But I won’t be quiet about it, either.
By Frank Schaeffer – New York Times best-selling author
Every single one of the sops Newt Gingrich is throwing the far right has been scripted for him by generations of far right so-called Reconstructionist “thinkers” and far right Roman Catholic ideologues that have been pushing the religious community — and America — steadily in the direction of overthrowing democracy and replacing it with some version of an Americanized theocracy.
Newt Gingrich has been making a series of outrageous statements in ascending rhetorical volume as a means to throw the religious right scraps of validation that he is “one of us.” What Gingrich has done is to sign on to the extremist Dominionist/Roman Catholic agenda. Since I used to be a leader and the son of a leader on the Religious Right (in the 1970s and 80s) what Gingrich is saying invokes a bad case of déjà vu for me
What he’s really doing is sending signals to 3 overlapping constituencies that now control the Republican Party: The “Pro-Israel” Lobby; The Reconstructionist/Dominionist Lobby and The Conservative Roman Catholic Lobby. We’ll look at these groups and their influence one at a time.
The Gingrich Context
Wanting to outdo the rest of the Republican field on support for the hardliners in the State of Israel Gingrich told America that the Palestinian people are really a fiction an “invented people,” illegitimate and don’t actually exist.
Not wanting to let the far right down on his purity when it comes to abortion politics, Gingrich corrected himself on when “life begins” and got his “position” in line with the American Roman Catholic bishops and declared that when he said it “begins” with the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterine wall, what he really meant was that it begins with fertilization, thus putting himself squarely in the corner with the extremist bishops who would like to lump the pill in with abortion as a means that “destroys a life.”
So much for the separation of powers let alone the separation of church and state. And now Gingrich wants to further expand protection for religion and its meddling in politics saying that as president he’d roll back, examine and generally bulk up the rights of believers — rather, the rights of far right believers — to flout the law when it comes to gay rights, abortion, stem cell research and so on.
I know it’s so much better of a story when things have a point, but sometimes that’s the way it is – loose threads of thoughts and a human being looking to find some meaning in them.
Interpretation (of I Am The Walrus from Wikipedia)
Although it has been reported that Lennon wrote “I am the Walrus” to confuse those who tried to interpret his songs, there have been many attempts to analyse the meaning of the lyrics.[16][17]
Seen in the Magical Mystery Tour film singing the song, Lennon, apparently, is the walrus; on the track-list of the accompanying soundtrack EP/LP however, underneath “I Am the Walrus” are printed the words ‘ “No you’re not!” said Little Nicola’ (in the film, Nicola is a little girl who keeps contradicting everything the other characters say). Lennon returned to the subject in the lyrics of three of his subsequent songs: in the 1968 Beatles song “Glass Onion” he sings “now here’s another clue for you all — the walrus was Paul”, [18]; in the third verse of “Come Together” he sings the line “he bag production, he got walrus gumboot”, and in his 1970 solo song “God“, admits “I was the walrus, but now I’m John.”
Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, claims to be the ‘Eggman’ mentioned in the song’s lyric. Burdon was known as ‘Eggs’ to his friends, the nickname originating from his fondness for breaking eggs over naked women’s bodies. Burdon’s biography mentions such an affair taking place in the presence of John Lennon, who shouted “Go on, go get it, Eggman…”[19]
P.P.S. Paul McCartney and I have the same birthday – June 18th – so maybe I am the walrus – I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together…
I love the ecstatic humanity expressed in this video, and it contains many of my hopes for 2010…
Do You Realize – that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize – we’re floating in space
Do You Realize – that happiness makes you cry
Do You Realize – that everyone you know someday will die
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes – let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun don’-go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round
Do You Realize – that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize…
Lyrics from “Do You Realize” by The Flaming Lips
Don’t wait for tomorrow to appreciate and support those you love today. Let them know you realize… and remember – You have the most beautiful face!
The Once In A Blue Moon New Year’s Eve Party – 2009 into 2010
We spent the last hours of 2009 with some good friends at our The Once In A Blue Moon New Year’s Eve Party.
We talked, ate and drank, counted down til Midnight, had the iTunes playing a New Year’s Eve party playlist, cheered with Champagne, ate sauerkraut for good luck and everyone went home safely with a commemorative button in the early morning hours…
Here’s a small selection of photos… A few friends that arrived just before midnight or later didn’t make it into our photos from the night (we set the camera down somewhere and forgot about it…)
We finally fell asleep around 3:30-4:00 in the morning and didn’t wake until noon.
Our dogs, Moseley and Suki, had a great time too and have spent the whole day today sleeping… just the thing to do on New Year’s Day.
Thank you to all that attended our party, we were honored that you choose to spend New Year’s Eve with us!
2009 – Hope, Change and Let Them Eat Cake
I read a bunch of good articles today that did a fine job of reflecting on the sorry state of affairs that we call the first decade of the new millennium… here’s a few of them:
A few weeks ago, Newsweek produced a video, which condensed the major news events of the past decade into one seven-minute mashup video. This interested me! So, I merrily sat down at my desk, queued it up, and prepared to watch it unfold. At the time, I thought: “Oh, this will be fun.”
It was not fun. Not at all. You know what? This past decade was pretty terrible!
…What we had in the 2000s was far, far worse than a “Big Zero.” The last ten years have been so miserable for the United States that a “Big Zero” would be an immeasurable improvement compared to what we got. If we could freeze time and move the country back to January 1999 it would be like hitting the jackpot! With all its squandered wealth, wasted lives, despoiled environment, growing inequality, and a Supreme Court stacked to favor corporate power, a “Big Zero” is a distant, unattainable goal.
Revenge fantasies are durable, reliable entertainments because they allow us to experience actions that aren’t allowed in real life, and that most of us wouldn’t truly want to experience even if given the chance. That would be fine if we were just talking about pop culture. But during the 2000s, the revenge fantasy escaped the realm of fiction. It came to dominate our politics and — for a while — overturned centuries of established U.S. policy and tradition toward prisoners.
…Which brings me to Decembuary 0. This should take the place of the traditional January 1st, and act as a sort of transitional day between the years. This way, you can feel awful and disgusting and piss away your day watching TV in the same pants you’ve been wearing for the past 36 hours without feeling like the new year is getting off to an discouraging start.
