Figures!!!

You Are Fozzie Bear

"Wocka! Wocka!" You're the life of the party, and you love making people crack up. If only your routine didn't always bomb! You may find more groans than laughs, but always keep the jokes coming.

The Muppet Personality Test

I always wanted to be Kermit. I guess it's still not easy being green.

Coupla Other Things

Far out! I'll post on my findings! We'd all like to be Kermit but others are truly Fozzies and we do need Animals.


Laissez les bon temps rouler. Got the Jelly Roll, Preservation Hall, Satchmo and Marsalis boys playin' all day long!

Good News, Great News

CBS is reporting a poll showing Bush's approval rating at 34% and Cheney's at 18%. That means statistically that not only does every Democrat hate the president but just about half of Republicans!!! I don't know the quantum physics to figure out just why Cheney hasn't been arrested for his performance as Veep. John Nance Gardner said that the vice presidency wasn't worth a bucket of warm piss and yet here Cheney has done more to tarnish the image of this office since ol' Spiro thirty-three years ago. And to think, he's the first sitting vice president to shoot anyone since Aaron Burr...

My friend Tony Holt (where's the blog, dude?) panicked and thought that Bruce was knocking off an album of Bob Seeger covers!!! That would be pretty funny, but in all actuality, I really like Bob from Detroit. He's got a great voice, some great albums and a new one with a possible tour due by this summer! I'm just hoping for more than a single-date obligatory Bay Area performance.

Is the United States ready for a third party to motivate the majority of American voters and steer the nation away from the two dinosaurs? What would a viable third party's platform consist of? The Greens are too liberal for mainstream, libertarians too unrealistic in their foreign policy and anything Pat Buchanan's a part of smells of religio-fascism. Regarding a progressive movement, what should a "liberal" political party shoot for on:

immigration
national security
taxes
military and military spending
international relations
federalism
abortion
campaign finance reform
term limits
education
health care

As I stew on these issues, I would really like to hear others' on this as well. It's time that people got moving and took action.

The End Is Near?

A conservative newsblog claiming that Cheney's leaving after the 2006 midterms! Don't get your hopes up; if this is even remotely true, there's a catch: this is Rove's way of vetting the GOP candidate for 2008, who would actually be eligible for serving TWO FULL TERMS all the way through 2017. That would make my son high school age before this troll left office, derailed another Middle Eastern country, armed North Korea, ended Social Security and gave the leftovers to wealthy people, issued a fatwa against all non-reactionary-knee jerk-freak out-conservatives, declared war on California, exiled free thinkers and helped orchestrate terrorist attacks just before every election while organizing a massive jailbreak for all of those who will hopefully serve time after being bought off by Jack Abramoff. I don't have enough foul language in my vocabulary to describe the contempt I have for the forty-third president and his administration; I truly believe he will go down in history as the worst president this nation has seen. He's divisive, wasteful, he failed to serve the needs of the people, violated the Constitution in several ways and created enough political tension to bring about an end to politics as we know it.

All of this reads like the Springsteen message boards since the release of the the news that Bruce will be making a Pete Seeger cover album. Die-hard fans have railed on The Boss for myriad reasons: Pete Seeger's music "sucks", he's not writing his own material, he's too liberal, he should keep politics out of music, it's not the E Street, blah blah blah. Naysayers be silent! The man's an artist, not an organ-grinder; he's going to do what he wants. Don't kill the messiah, find a new one if you don't like what he's done. All I think is that if the man took Steinbeck/John Ford dialogue and turned it into smashing political commentary ten years ago, then he'll weave some magic with straight-forward folk; he's already pushed the boundaries of "folk" storytelling anyways, have patience that something cool will come of this. In our political climate, don't tell me that Bruce couldn't do something cool with "Turn Turn Turn" and yes, I know the lyrics are from Ecclesiastes 3, the song nonetheless is Seeger's as he assembled the piece as we know it. Bruce has covered Woody Guthrie and even Dylan; hell, he's close enough that he could put out a record of cover versions of his own songs and I'd buy it. If anyone knows Pete Seeger's music, he or she would know that such radically liberal music of a half-century ago during the McCarthy era the the birth of the modern civil rights movement has much much relavance in today's world. I'm interested.

Great News

Backstreets has officially reported that later this Spring, Bruce Springsteen will release an album of Pete Seeger covers. What an incredible opportunity to see a revitalization of a true music icon's legacy in a time that truly mirrored that of his greatest work. The McCarty era has its parallels with the current times and yet the Bush monarchy is truly a time that I never hope is repeated. Springsteen will, without a doubt, cover each song faithfully and yet make the tunes meatier and edgier; his covers of classic populist musicians such as Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash have spot-on shown how real rock and roll is the voice of the people. A tour is to follow and it will indeed be a cherry on top of the year I had last year.

Derek Trucks's new album is making great waves in the music world. Songlines has shocked a lot of people and delighted fans eagerly awaiting his first album of new material in four years. It's amazing, even as some of the songs have been altered from their live trappings. My favorite song is The Sky, the album's finale and the most beautiful song on the record.

Iraq headed toward a Civil War? Who would have called it? This administration can only be held responsible for its actions and its actions truly must maintain the "Pottery Barn" principal that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell stated; Bush broke it; we'll pay for it. Three years and countless deaths later, an enraged eastern neighbor arming the insurgency and building its own nuclear program, democratic nightmares in the Palestinian region with the legitimization of Hamas and an what exists is a Middle East that is rife for a regional war. This time, however, the "sick man" is the United States as this nation can not endure another mutli-year military engagement nor will any other nation most likely stand up and stick its neck out to do the same. George Bush has created an anti-western, anti-colonial quagmire that historians will analyze with regret and remorse remembering how just ignorant, duped and outright stupid the American voting populace truly was in the first decade of the twenty-first century. God help us; obviously your self-proclaimed chosen American son hasn't done anything worth while.

Synchronicity

Iraq is splintering.

The Bush Administration is showing itself to be a true house of cards.

The Middle East is erupting in pent-up anti-Western anger.

Athletes from around the world are competing for once-in-a-lifetime dreams that no American seems to be watching.

Amateur karaoke talents are competing for the nation's greatest karaoke competition that Americans are watching.

The Derek Trucks Band continues to win over critics and audiences wherever it performs.

And my son continues to experience joy as he learns new words and sounds of his favorite animals.


On a previous post, someone asked for my two cents regarding religion and the public square. A tough one as my political and religious experiences and beliefs have evolved over the last decade, though they have ultimately remained intact. Religion plays a central role in most people's lives in this country and yet the nation is rent over the role religion should play. Are we, as conservatives, to promote the culture, teachings and belief system found in the Bible? Are we, as liberals, to push for a nation whose culture values and includes people of all backgrounds, faiths and politics?
As one who claims to be a Christian, I am appalled by what I see as the shameless use of religion as a divisive tool used by groups, mainly conservative, for their own gain. Wide-ranging "religous" issues such as prayer in school, gay marriage, the teaching of evolution, the "breakdown of family values", Hollywood and drug use are constant bogeymen presented during election years and yet seem to truly be demagogic points thrown about by the Right that immediately lose focus the second votes are counted. Many "religious" people vocal in this country are predominantly Christian as the Jewish vote or Muslim vote or ______ vote are chronically marginalized as not representing "American" values. With this, I believe, religious voters miss the mark with their religious political activity. Their goal of a "Christian nation" can not nor should not be brought about using the political system. The purpose of the political system is for disparate groups to fight for their needs and wants to be represented in government and not the forcing of a religious movement or set of beliefs on an entire nation. If Christians wish to see Christian values be "re-adopted" by a "lost" nation, their efforts are for naught. Christians are free to evangelize and prostelytize to the best of their abilities and convert and help evolve a cultural ethic based on their beliefs; using the government to push upon a people a singular group's beliefs is the misuse of religion. The inane "WWJD" movement from the beginning of the decade did little to convert the non-believer nor truly even change the mindset of the devout; What would Jesus do? In the political realm, that is like asking what Caligula would do at pottery barn. Non sequitor? Definitely. Democracy is a concept so modern, so western and so far removed from the understanding of someone who lived two thousand years ago on the other side of the world. Besides, what would Jesus care about democracy? A church can not function with democratic ideals if its basic tenets are to remain intact. Therefore, people voting "as Jesus would" should either reject or somehow evolve their world view. If trying to capture Jesus's politics and then representing them to one's best at the poll's, there are countless yet important questions one would need to address: would Jesus vote for someone who claims to follow him and yet carry out policies that ultimately reject them? Would Jesus vote for a candidate that uses the military to kill countless people for the best interests of a nation? Would Jesus support the idea that business is infallible and the strongest entity on earth and therefore deserves the greatest amount of protection even over the needs of its poorest citizens? Would Jesus vote for a candidate that serves the wealthy or serves the poor? Would Jesus wish to use politics and the system to unite people or divide them? Would Jesus wish to see wealthy people use their wealth to help others or keep themselves wealthy at the expense of everyone and everything else? Ultimately, we need to all identify our "god" or "gods" in order to figure out what we'd like to see happen using the political system. Methinks the majority of Christians have unconsciously replaced Jesus with Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States, who deftly laid out in the 1920s the same identical platform that most conservative "religious" Americans push for today: "The business of America IS business." "He who builds a factory builds a temple; he who works there worships there." "The love of money is the root of all evil." Oops, sorry, that last quote comes from Trotsky or Castro or some other non-white anti-American person who is probably from the Middle East.

Ramble on, eh?

Frey But Not Clinton?

I'm finding myself increasingly amused with the "scandal" involving author James Frey of Million Little Pieces and his being pilloried by the self-proclaimed-Abraxas Oprah for his "fudging" of facts and other things that he claimed were real but had actually been created. I have never read Frey. I have no plans on reading Frey. I have, however, read countless memoires as well as autobiographies and other "based on a true story"-type writings that have served each to tell a particular tale. We're finding that Mr. Frey has taken certain liberties with the facts, which I am still puzzled as to why a man who wrote a book becomes a pariah while a man who runs a country doing the same thing gets prayed for at my old church in Fresno. The politics of memory is a growing field of study within history as the topic serves as a fascinating and as-yet untapped source for inquiry: just what do we write down and why? Can motive be determined from an outside source? Just when does perspective become more than just that and serve as bias or prejudice or propaganda (even for the self)? The biggest book prior to Frey's supposedly well-written tome is My Life by the 42nd and now dearly-missed president William Jefferson Clinton, ne Blythe. As the former president's life can be more easily fact-checked and therefore verfied, how do "we" know that what Bill recorded as his version of the past is actually the accurate past or his memory of it? In the truest post-post-modernist sense, how can ANYTHING be considered (not true but) factually correct? We'll argue "truth" later because, as we know, something does not need to be necessarily factually correct to be true, but because filters, perspectives and biases change over time, how can anything written down about something in the past be considered genuine? At thirty-two, I can write about my first love and yet, what might that say about my current status based on, say, a diary of the same person ten years ago? I'll tell you that in ten years from now, my interpretation on that same person will be even more different than it is now than it was ten years ago then from the time I actually loved her. The point of all of this is this: just how valid can first-person experience be, especially when the elements of time and motive are weighed? My brother is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the politics of memory in the Reconstruction-era South; already he should be able to crank out a second paper analyzing the Bush Administration's actions by comparing fact and "truth".
I hereby promise that I will never encourage my son to tell "the truth" when confronted with a possible consequence but strictly a recreation of prior events based on his singular and fallible perspective and memory, with omission of all spin, bias and judgment as possible. I'm in for a long haul.

Tonight, as well as tomorrow night, I'm off to catch the Derek Trucks Band. I love this band in the exact opposite way I love Springsteen; I want little to no information regarding setlists, gossip, status or anything else about this band. The DTB remain the one, last mystical experience I have in my life. I want to see the band, I want to experience the music and the experience of seeing them, I want to see the guys that I happen to know from that amazing summer of 2000 and catch up and then I want to leave them without trying to understand or contextualize anything. My catching this band will move into the double digits after this weekend and I can close my eyes and describe an earth-shattering experience from each performance. The most recent being a year ago tomorrow was the band's performance of Greensleeves, in which I can still remember seeing people inexperienced with this band with mouths agape, heads shaking in disbelief, long-time followers dancing and obeying and myself standing still against a pulsating rhythmic beat from the keys, drums and bass, wondering just how in the hell a group of young men could create a sound that can truly not be described by words. I wish for just one little treat like this at every performance; I get shaken to my knees every time. The next two nights will probably not be much different. Report upon return.

The New Nixon?

George Bush's approval ratings are the lowest for any president (since polling taken) in his sixth year of the presidency excepting Richard Milhous Nixon. This is nothing for the White House to be celebrating as Nixon's sixth year would see him resign in order to avoid being effectively removed from the Oval Office. His state of disunion last week painted a president on the ropes, throwing out one last trick up his sleeve (how soon did it take him to throw out 9/11? seven minutes, that's how short) and then run out of steam. "This nation is addicted to oil" and then the very next day comfort Big Oil by stating that his speech shouldn't be taken seriously. A minute and a half was dedicated to the victims of Katrina, the greatest single event that killed more people in this country (to my knowledge), even more than Pearl Harbor, more than 9/11 and more than any other natural disaster, save the Florida vote of 2000. How many more people need to realize that the president pays lip service and then takes takes takes? Not too much uproar about his 2007 budget that is forcing Congress to raise the ceiling on the nation's debt (yep, $8.11 trillion, estimated), giving the military $439 billion, failing to include Afghanistan and Iraq, slashing federal education dollars and programs and a $56 billion cut to Medicare and the people who were already screwed by Congress's drug program. All of this under the guise of "compassionate conservatism" which to be sounds more like "bait-and-switch" fascism. For the love of God, at least Hitler provided general services such as education, housing and retirement services to his people. Bush has the propaganda and the build-up of the military; the only thing he's lacking is a concern for the people he's in charge of.

Would love to know the private spat between McCain and Obama.

Think good thoughts for Lefty Brown as his 'blog took a dump over the weekend.

Check out Steve's blog. He's actually remembered how to type and as usual, he's witty as hell.

Caught McCoy Tyner again this last weekend. His quintet consisted of Eric Harland on drums, Charnett Moffett on bass, Ravi Coltrane on tenor and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes. Either Tyner was tired at the end of this two-week stint or I'm seeing the decline of one of jazz's greatest pianists. The last two years, I've seen a tired and weary Tyner with a lineup that smoked. Coltrane was light and passive (any other cocky horn player would literally blow him off the stage) but a Hutcherson on fire and a rhyhtm section that was worth the entire price of admission. Imagine a bass solo with bow that sounds like Van Halen pull-off riffing; intense. Sold-out crowd and I had to sit in the very back which made for some sound issues. That, and the band only played sixty-five minutes and I was overall torn over the performance. Legendary jazzmen, hit and miss show. Looking to catch the Derek Trucks Band twice this weekend and over my Spring Break, the Christian McBride band. Derek's band is possibly the most amazing band out there; I experience nirvana nearly every time I see them. Can "legendary" be used to describe a band that's only been playing together for seven years and the leader isn't even thirty? I can. McBride and his band also smoke; I caught them last year and remember being dazzled with the straight-ahead neoclassical hard bop that rocked.

On a personal note, my wife and I continue to be amazed at the development of my son and his ability to learn new words. Dog, cat, meow, moon, "moo", cow, mama, dadda, elmo, ooh-ooh-ooh (monkey sounds), oh-uh!, more, car, giraffe, that, no, bye-bye, nana and a variant of grandpa fly out of my son's mouth at will. I thought I heard BRUUUUCCCCEEEEEE! but I think I may have been projecting...