The View from Above (and Down in the Groove)

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There’s the thought, maybe I should grow out of my MacGowan loving phase anyway… for my own good.  Grow up, as my brother tells me sometimes.

This is about living, and open mic nights, and playing “Rainy Night in Soho.” Not knowing when the song will end, or what lies next…

Wednesday night, after changing mom for the second time, always a protest, an insult, a scoff, a sarcasm, “you’re such a prince…” huff, a mumble as I leave her room, I got down to the open mic night.  It’s a straight shot down the road.  I’ve had one beer.  Have eaten earlier.  It’s a straight shot, except for two corners close to the house, streets for driving 25 mph, quiet.  I’m not even going to play anything.  But I’ll bring the guitar, putting it in the back corner of the large banquet room of Bridie Manor overlooking the wide churning Oswego river, dark in the night like motor oil reflecting the streetlamps of the bridge.

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Mass Rape (& Obliviousness)

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It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.

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To Be A Giraffe

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1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.

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A Palestinian Gandhi (Redux)

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Back in 2002, First published this interview with Mubarak Awad who’s long made the case to Palestinians for nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. He remains committed to his ethic and his NGO, “Nonviolence International,” is still engaged (though the Israelis exiled him to America in the course of the first intifada). Awad may not be an ace prophet – his prescriptions for elections in Gaza seem almost quaint now but his moral imagination is undeniable. Let’s hope he and his kind help write the future of Palestine…

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The Revenging Angels of Our Nature

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I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”

Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse.  As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime.  “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

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Planet X

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..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.

..There’s morning cigarettes.

..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream

..Pearls and scars

..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.

..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.

..There’s no need to rebuild anything.

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The terrible option

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My brother Frank

If you’ve known someone who died by their own hand, you walk around for the rest of your life with a question mark so real, you can see it with your eyes and feel it on your skin.  Why?  What drove them to do it?  Even though people commit suicide all the time, no one wants to confront that darkness or our resentment that they have left us with the terrible knowledge that death is not just a reality, it’s an option.

I’ve known several people who have taken their own lives, but the two I miss most dearly are my brother, Frank, and my friend the folksinger, Phil Ochs.  They were very different people, and their suicides were very different.

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The Burial (For Real)

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After another senseless act of violence, the family of Clyzayvion “Ty” Landfair—a 17 year old student at Holmes County Central High School, in Lexington, MS—has started a Go Fund Me page to cover the expenses of his funeral.

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Jumpin’ Johnnie: The Posthumous Interview

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I dreamed I saw Johnnie Green (the NBA veteran who started out with the Knicks, and died last week) last night, alive as you or me.

Dreamer: Man, could you leap! Miss the bus to Heaven, you can get there on your own. Like Gus Johnson told Sports Illustrated about his storied leaping ability: “I just say ‘legs, jump,’ and they say ‘How high, Boss?’” I first saw you play against Walter Bellamy in 1957 when you were a senior at Michigan State, and Big Bells was just a soph at Indiana.

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The Most Interesting

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After Marilyn told Adele that she and Grif were packing winter clothes for the Buddhist retreat in New Mexico, Adele asked me if New Mexico wasn’t hot.

“They have mountains,” I said, “and mountains have snow.”
“Do all mountains have snow?”
“Come to think of it, why should any mountains have snow? Aren’t they closer to the sun? Shouldn’t deserts have the snow?”
“When you’re at the café, ask Fran.”

Besides being an licensed electrician, free jazz musician on instruments of his own creation, reader of the most daunting Oulipo works, and maker of art postcards based on mathematical calculations that he sends family, friends, waitresses, and people he meets in cafes. (I have three), Fran is the kind of guy you can ask about mountains and snow. He was answering my question through improvisations on planetary rotation, wind direction, reflection of light, absorption of heat, when I noticed a dark-haired, 60ish woman at the next table, who had been making notes in a spiral bound pad, turn more and more toward us.

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Table Music (Kierra Sheard; The Band; Lillie Mae; Tony Joe White; Smokey Robinson; JB, Bobby Bland & BB King; Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins; Sugar Blue; Playboi Carti; JUL; St. Etienne; Obrafour)

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I’ve been stuck on Kierra Sheard’s duets lately. There are wonderful ones with Jekalyn Carr (on Sheard’s last album), with Tasha Cobb, and a couple with Sheard’s mother Karen Clark (of the Clark Sisters). One of those Mother-and-Daughter ones has an indelible moment where Karen gently induces her pregnant daughter not to go full-on. (The tale of what once happened to “Gimme Shelter’s” Merry Clayton shadows her maternal attentiveness.) What comes next here is great from the jump (catch the guy who starts hopping on one leg pretty early on) but it gets transcendent when Ms. Sheard and her chorus lock on their truth: “He’s holding me up!!!”

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Archival Charmers (A Thanksgiving Playlist from Scott Spencer)

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Ok, here’s what we have: an amazing amalgam of poetry and music from Mark  (caged by rain, etc.), a moody groove Celeste sent my way four years ago, a current fav — funny with a nice beat — the best drug song ever (dig the drum on knock me clear out), and Levon’s daughter Amy Helm, who I am always pushing on folks, though maybe she’s old news to you, which would be great…

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Betrayal

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When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.

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Narcissus in Gaza

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A view from one of London’s wisest …

The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.

In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.

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November’s Children

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This past week, we’ve received a master class in the difference between polling and voting. There’s an enormous difference between an easy answer to a poll question, and the private choice in the stillness of a voting booth. And what we’ve witnessed is that when it comes to pulling the lever or marking the circle, Democrats are victorious in, at times, astonishing places and in astonishing ways. And MAGA Republicans are enduring so much … losing.

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