Ten Years Ago Today

My brother and I experienced the coolest graduation present I could ever have been given. Just recently having returned home from UCSB, I was given a party by my parents. One of my presents was a gift certificate to Ticketmaster by my cousins Lisa and Rod. Rod, ten years older than me, and I are huge music buffs. We've seen several shows together and this year, he gave us $50. My brother and I then traveled to the TM outlet the day before the Allman Brothers Band played the Concord Pavilion, the coolest little shed in the world. The morning we showed up, the venue opened up the pit for sale. We scored in the pit. The day of the show, Eric and I were able to cut out of work early and make our way to the pavilion. Tickets in hand, we were excited about seeing the band. I had seen them two years prior and become a die-hard ABB fan. My brother listened to them but had yet to see them. As we walked into the venue a half hour before Booker T and the MGs were to open up, we handed our tickets to the usher at the last row of seats who then guided us to the usher at the pit. The person shone his/her (can't remember) flashlight on our seat, then directed the light to the entire pavilion, and told us that everyone here that night would want the seats we had. We were then ushered to our chairs which happened to be front row, dead center. Eric and I looked at each other in disbelief but since the tickets didn't lie and no one else seemed to want to take our seats, we opted to sit in them. I was able to rest my sweatshirt next to the monitors. How cool is that? This old venue (before its 1996 remodel) was the most intimate of sheds. Absolutely no barrier or space between front row and performer. I rested my arms at times on the amp cables and the monitors themselves.
Booker and the boys came out and just tore it up with their r&b classic sound. Even the ABB members watched from the wings. The band played an hour. When it came time for soundcheck, I noticed a man who was tuning Dickey Betts' guitars and I saw that one of them was a red Gibson ES-335, a beauty of a guitar. It wasn't until the band started that the guitar tech was Dickey himself, who had recently cut his waist-long hair and shaved his handlebar mustache.
The band ripped through two and a half hours of classic material. Eric and I went nuts as the band played just about all one could ask for. At one point in the show, Warren Haynes threw his guitar pick right at me and I dropped it!!! It was never recovered, but the band played "Jessica" as the jamming vehicle. Incorporation Mountain Jam as a tease and pegging fifteen minutes, I was in heaven. As the band cleared the stage for its obligatory encore return, drummer Butch Trucks handed each of his sticks to my brother and myself. Still have 'em. The band closed with Whipping Post, we left the parking lot shaking from excitement and it was this concert that truly does belong in my top-10 all time experiences. I've gone on to see them nearly twenty times in three states and the Allman Brothers Band still to this day remain my favorite band (Bruce counts as performer).

Date I've seen them:

5/29/93
6/30/95
8/6/96
8/23/96
9/26/97
7/30/99
8/3/99
8/11/01
8/12/01
6/10/02
6/11/02
6/12/02
9/5/03
3/20/04
5/7/05


How's that? I'd tell you venues, cites and other concert related experiences except I'm the only one who reads this thing.

The Great And Powerful Oz Has Spoken!

Tonight's speech by President Bush trying to convince the nation that Iraq is a flying success was another effort to lie and confuse Americans. As Bush's approval ratings are plummeting, the president decided to travel to Ft. Bragg and deliver a cheerleader talk. He came across, even before he delivered it, as a whiney dork who has to convince, by hook or by crook, people to like him. As I read of the upcoming speech, I told my wife that no matter what, the president has failed. People in November (supposedly, at least what the pollsters found) didn't want to "change horses midstream." Now, it appears that they're second-guessing themselves (damn, I feel good about myself. Don't you, Chris?) but Colin Powell's Pottery Barn Doctrine has unfortunately rung true: "You break it, you bought it." If we have a president coming on television saying, in essence, "c'mon, guys, please listen and follow me!" then we already have a populace that will never change its mind. Bush's cocksure attitude for the last four years (and hopefully all of his ^*&)&$ "political capital" has been spent) has come to backfire on him. Last I remember, it was two years ago May that a particular banner "Mission Accomplished" waved behind a president who claimed a resounding victory in Iraq. Tonight, Bush was telling Americans that success was being made but the road ahead is long. Either you lied to us or you lied to yourself, Uncurious George. Either way, you've irreparably damaged the image and reputation of the United States. ABC News' debriefing discussion among its anchors even stated that the sole round of applause given to Bush after he stated that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the [see May 1, 2003 quote], was prompted by White House staffers placed "strategically" in the front row for the speech. The only thing that I agree with Bush on is the fact that since we're in the damn country and we fucked it up this badly, we've got to at least assemble it in some half-baked fashion.
What killed me the most was the number of times (FIVE) that Bush attempted to connect the Iraq war to the "war on terror" or 9/11. I believe that with this speech, Bush has proven himself to be more delusional than Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra; The CIA has categorically denied any connection between 9/11 and Iraq, all declassified intelligence points to the same conclusion, no WMD's were found in Iraq (proving Bush's original claims to war as downright falsifications), and with declassified British intelligence memos painting the Bush administration (Cheney, Condi, Rummy) as pure ideologues who were cooking the books to make the Iraq war look like a last-ditch effort instead of the first idea that George Bush had (H.W. that is; can't forget 1991), we have a president who is truly worthy of impeachment. Write your representative or Senator; write letters to the editor; tell your neighbors - President George W. Bush is a war criminal and has wrought more international harm than good with his failed idea to topple a government without proof, reason, or postwar planning. Bush's true reason was stated loudly and clearly in 2001, if I recall: "After all, he's the guy (Saddam Hussein) that tried to kill my dad." Lynch him. Please, folks that supported this straw man, listen to Tho Who and don't get fooled again. Once, shame on me. Twice, well, now you're the idiot.

On a happier note, I traversed a long distance to the closest real record store yesterday and found me a couple of gems. One's old and rare, another brand-spanking new. Both of them are from "minor" artists (we can debate this) but both cuts are fun and will receive quite a bit of play: First up, Huey Lewis and the News' "Live at 25" a new album celebrating the silver anniversary of this very cool Bay Area band. Check my blog from last October when I saw them in concert. Just a blast. All the classics, including my all-time fave of theirs, "Power of Love." Secondly, a greatest hits of sorts, a 1979 release "Havin' a Party with Southside Johnny" by the man and the Asbury Jukes. Great bar band Philly soul/r&b stuff. Most was written by Bruce Springsteen and Little Steven and it's great party music. Can't wait to blast 'em this Fourth of July. On a small Bruce-related note, I threw in his 2000 MSG dvd and my little ten-month hold son sat there riveted during "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" and watched a very cool song. See, start 'em young and you got 'em for life. Isn't that Philip Morris' motto?

My Goals In Life

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breated easier because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

More Musings

Gone for three weeks, I'm happily back from wrapping up finals and a great week in Philadelphia visiting my brother and his family. Saw Independence Hall (for the second time), Camden's great aquarium, drove to the Jersey shore and put my son's feet in the Atlantic Ocean and traveled to see Walt Whitman's home and his resting place. Wonderful time. On with the news:

The Bushies are finally getting their comeuppance regarding the shoddy job done in Iraq. This in no way is a reflection on the men and women ordered there; this is strictly a top-down failure of historic importance. The majority of Allies now favor China as a world leader over the U.S., the overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of everything Bush is doing in the White House, and the Downing Street Memo continues to not go away. If you love your country, if you wish to see people of conscience and patriotism take action, then please join in signing circulating calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Never in my lifetime has such an atrosity (lying to go to war, lying to the American public, carrying out war crimes and attemping to cover everything up in the media) been enacted by a president. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and all of the miserable bastards are culpable; they need to be removed from power.

Karl Rove yesterday called "liberals" (such a farce in what that word means versus how it's used) weak on the war on terror. Whenever under the gun, change the subject, control the lexicon of the topic, and fire a cheap shot. People call Rove a genius, he is. So was Hitler.

Welp, Bush is snubbing the United Nations' 60th anniversary celebration. Now, the organization needs some major reworking. So does this country. However, snubbing the organization whose actions were actually working in the nation that your policies have now undermined does little to build credibility in the eyes of the world that your intentions were pure.

Raise your glasses and drink a pint to Bert and Ernie, who, while being gay liberal urbanite east-coast elite blue-state in-touch-with their-feelings communists, won't be cut from the federal budget. Maybe, just maybe the majority of Congress realized that PBS doesn't hate the United States. What I've seen PBS hate is narrow-mindedness, ignorance, demagoguery and intolerance. Call me a hater, too. Oh, and while drinking a pint, please drink some of this www.yardsbrewing.com. It's absolutely wonderful. And try to get it in your neck of the woods. When a beer tastes great after the sixth one, you know it's good! Chris, you'd really dig this stuff.

Everyone, you're going to love this: A conservative organization calling itself Human Events, assembled a committee to "formulate a list of the most dangerous books of the past two centuries" (SF Chron, June 12, 2005, page C3). Phyllis Schlafly's on the committe; what does that tell you? Here's the list of the top ten and others in the top 20:

1. The Communist Manifesto (okay, see #6 and see who actually read these things!)
2. Mein Kampf. (Okay, I'll give 'em this one, but who wouldn't?)
3. Quotations From Chairman Mao (notice nothing from Napoleon, the czars or the State Dept.?)
4. The Kinsey Report (the Kinsey Report??!!! People masturbating and having sex. Stop the ride, I want off here. God forbid we act like the creatures that we are. Hands above the desktop at all times).
5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey (when education serves as the basis for a free people and independent-thinking minds act for themselves then you know it's written by Satan himself).
6. Das Kapital
7. The Feminine Mystique. (Yep, the book that reveals the myth of women's happiness living lives heaped on them by those in power. And yet women are the devil. Why am I surprised? They've always been the devil in Western society).
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy (Comte) (A. People must have heard of and read the book for it to be influential B. Because the concept of relativity and non-absolutism challenges the powers that be, it must be bad.)
9. Beyond Good and Evil (Gotta throw Nietzsche in there because anyone who...ah, screw it.)
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes. (I would love to read this group's revisionist version of the Depression with Hoover's economic policies carried out. Volunteerism? The only thing that people would volunteer to do is let other Americans starve and die.

Others in the top 20 (put your seat belts on):
The Origin of the Species (honorable mention)
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margeret Mead (I'm familiar with this book from college. Anything that shows how societies don't keep their women virginal until they're 50 must be evil).
The Population Bomb - discussion of runaway pop. growth (no birth control! Yikes!)
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (damn these Scottish free-thinking lower-case l liberals who try to define western civilization and freedom with actual democracy and freedom!)
Silent Spring (of course, crucify the tree-huggers)
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader. (You got it; Nader is the antichrist)

According to the article, Freud, Simone de Beauvoir and I think the cast of Sesame Street are also on the list. "Teacher, how do you spell fascism?" "Easy. Shut up and do as I say."

Okay - some nice aphorisms to remind myself that not everyone's out to get me:

Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. - Voltaire

No umbrella, getting soaked, I'll just use the rain as my umbrella. -Zen monk Daito

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. -Winston Churchill

More to come...

Musings

Wrapping up this last week of school and enjoying the rush of beginnings and ends, I feel I need to reflect upon a couple of things. I watch so many young men and women move through classes like cattle, I often wonder whether my presence in their lives is even making an impact on them. I do believe that what I do is not only valid but vital, but there are those times when I do wonder whether that 92 percent should really be a 93 or whether anyone in just seventy-two hours will give a crap. Many colleagues and friends are transferring high schools to the new one opening up on the other side of town. Partly I envy them, as I would like to be a part of a team that feels valuable, and partly I wouldn't be them for all the money in the world. The Titanic had big dreams and looked to a long life as a good thing, one thought. Regardless, I will be missing a lot of people as they move and while that's life, sometimes change isn't easy. Many leaving will be my lunch group with whom I spend three out of five days with. I wish them the best.
I had an amazing night with my son. Mommy was at a work-related dinner (she's just pulling in now and it's 10:20), so we played, he ate, we talked with the neighbors and then after a bath, it was bedtime. My son's favorite song is a Muppet song and I sing it to him to calm him down. It works like clockwork and tonight was no different. After he went down and I cleaned up, it's been a great Newsweek on Deep Throat and this week's New Yorker.

While I was feeding my son I caught a clip of the news about a Christian Phone Company. I wish I remember the name, but the company's initials are AET. Anyway, this company's telemarketers attack their competition, the big companies, as sinful, evil, tools of Satan, promoting pornography and homosexuality and unGodly. The CEO of the company, in the interview, sat in front of a large bulletin board picture (like one we'd see in a church bulletin or above the door of Sunday School) of a newly-signed customer, the owner of the business, and Jesus, all together in this three way group-grope that signified the bringing about of the rapture through the success of this phone company. I'm changing topics before I resort to profanity, but c'mon...

Oh, but that's not all! There's a "born again Christian" who's been reading his OT (that's the Old Testament for you sons o' bitches mother-loving cd pirating speeding pornographing sinning cussing cheating lying coveting non-fucking Democrats out there) and believes that God has shown him where to dig for oil in Israel. He's backed by Christian groups and believes that God won't fail him. I'm not making this up; NPR this morning and a story in Newsweek this week has this dude, who, in all fairness honestly believes that God is pointing him the way to ungodly amounts of oil which will do nothing but make him rich in the eyes of the world even though Jesus says that the root of all evil is money and that pride was the downfall of Satan. I said this months before, but where are the people who believe that God has called them to lay their lives down to feed the hungry, help Africa, teach our children, stop "nucular" proliferation, promote acceptance and love and peace? I know what's happened to many of them, they've been killed. When people try protecting nature because it's what God wants them to do, they're labeled as granola-eating Birkenstock-wearing hippie freaks. Any time a southerner with a plan to exploit the working class and make riches for him does it in the name of either capitalism or Christianity (which are synonymous in the Texas versions of Webster's), they're considered good Americans?

God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson. Now you've joined Joltin' Joe. You seduced me, too. I just hope that Mel will be okay.

Not in the Right

Reading Pat Buchanan's op-ed piece in today's SF Chron, you'd think that Mark Felt rammed an airplane into the Pentagon, based on the former Nixon speechwriter's reaction to the revealing of Deep Throat last week. Pat, never one to mince words (white Americans need to breed at the rate of non-whites in order to keep the race competitive) continues to spew his reactionary, caustic vitriol in any direction, which, of course, is at everything, considering that he's so far right, he'll hit everyone from George Bush to Hitler. Nixon as a hero, "ending a war with honor" (Vietnam, which, well, I'm not going to touch this) to Linda Tripp as one with "moral courage." Isn't wiretapping illegal? I dunno, either I could ask Linda or G. Gordon Liddy, someone who also used to work for Nixon.
"After 1964, Nixon led his party back to victory after victory, culminating in the 49-state landslide victory of 1972." Victory isn't winning when you play on people's fears and ignore the basic civil rights denied to ethnic minorities and women (see Richard Nixon, Southern Strategy) or remember your history to see how Nixon did all he could to rig the election.
I personally see a man with little to no objectivity (as well, honestly, as relevance to today's political culture) being taken seriously in an age when people are not heroes (unless you're 21, blonde, female and attacked by non-white people you've just declared war on using cooked evidence) but people with agendas (we all have them, just like ol' Pat). To think that the GOP or the Nixonites have the moral high ground on this one is an absolute joke. But, I must remember that the Bushies also claimed to have the high ground until November 3, 2004, when it just didn't matter any more.

The governor of Texas yesterday signed an anti-abortion bill on the campus of a private Christian school. I can't remember who said it (and I just read the damned thing, too) but why do we place all of our faith into people who do not have faith in people? This Texan just holed himself up in a symbolic Alamo (like the Branch Davidians) and is waiting for the "Mexicans" to begin firing. This isn't political grandstanding? Cowtowing to the religious right? Thomas Jefferson just did a backflip in his grave.

Frist and the reactionary right in the Senate are doing all they can to stonewall a bill expanding the ability to research using stem cell material. I'm just as terrified as the next person about playing God, designer kids and creating the uberman, but banning al forms of research because it's the destruction of life? Five bucks says Rick Santorum (c'mon Steve and Chris, here's one for the Santorum!!!) will try passing a bill banning masturbation. It's the destruction of life-giving material, right?

What Makes the News

Checking out this morning's Sunday Chronicle, here's what I know:

Amnesty International makes a semantic gaffe (the "gulag" comment) and yet Arlen Specter is leading the charge to see just how badly things have been going and how poorly the non-POWs have been treated.

Bolton fired a U.N. dipolmat who pushed for a diplomatic settling of the WMD issue in Iraq in 2002 which allowed an easier claim for the use of unnecessary war by the U.S.

Donald Rumsfeld states that he's concerned with how much China spends on defense. $78 billion in the last year of given statistics. That matches with $420 billion by the U.S., not including the war on "terror" (whatever that's beginning to mean now). Now, let's break that down per capita and, well, you get it too, don't you?

Even Britain is claiming that Bush is cheap when it comes to giving money to Africa. Now we have to even be called out by our only ally?

Scientists have definitively discovered the "gay gene" in flies that many have believed for years to have existed. By genetically altering a specific gene in flies, scientists have been able to get female flies to carry out actions normally carried out by "straight" males and vice versa. Actually, what the scientists didn't state in their report is that they still hold the flies accountable for their actions because the flies are supposed to know how to behave and therefore are to be punished by a giant scientist who hates the flies that act against how he feels by him smiting them with a large flyswatter. However, the scientists did report that the one flyswatting scientist loved those flies with all of his heart so much that he even gave his only begotton pet fly to die in order for all flies to make it to that big cobweb in the sky.

Running for our lives out on them ... (pt. 2)

Look to your right. Visit my friend Chris' blog, check out the cool stuff he's rapping about, and then give him props for all of the great links on his page. Here's a guy who, in our little nebulous world of naval-gazing chit-chat, does a service to us by linking all of the great liberal-minded progressive-thinking God-fearing earth-loving peace-nikking Allman-cheering comic-geeking websites and 'blogs for us to create our own world wide universes. I love this guy. Talking to him on the phone today for a mere eight minutes made me miss him, love him all over again, want to buy him a beer or seven, and I hope that everyone (all two of us) who read this site have come to appreciate the human being that Chris Brown is. On the backstreets until the end, mon frere.