loy bones

(photos courtesy of bob schmidt)


roy michaels died a couple weeks ago and there was a memorial service for him here in town last week, celebrating his life and his music. he played with catmother and the all night newsboys band back in the sixties (you can read his full bio on his website at myspace.com/loybonestheband) and played with all kinds of folks like guitarist amos garrett, maria muldaur, stephen stills, richie furay, and great speckled bird. you can check out the catmother band publicity photo over here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwilsonphoto/226916697/. the band shared the same manager as jimi hendrix whom they toured the u.s. and europe with. they released four lp's on polydor, jimi produced the first called 'the street giveth ... and the street taketh away'.


he played the haam benefit at heb and down on guadeloupe the last couple years with his sideman, bob schmidt, "doppler bob", on slide and dobro, who will be playing with us on tuesday at a haam benefit show down on w. slaughter and singing a couple songs of roy's, in his honor, and to thank haam for helping him in his struggle with cancer in the last year. join us for lunch down there, have a sub sandwich (have you had one? i havent, will have to finally try one next week!)

winter soldier, pt 2

so mercury is retrograde again, my site went down temporarily and communication is... underground. it seems to swim backwards in the sky at times of retrograde, much like movement forward, as though standing still. but its not, and the movement is just deeper and harder to detect. that's what my friend judith used to say.

the pre release song will be up shortly, fyi. you can check out the austinmusicdownload.com site or minstrelsdaughter.blogspot.com in the coming week for it.



http://www.youtube.com/v/C0YFaLN_LFs&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/8DeszyFWL_g&hl=en&fs=1

if people dont vote in a trick election, or enlist to do rich men's dirty work, or allow their children to be recruited by the us army to do it, well, you do the math. maybe we'd pay artists instead? and there'd be a whole lot less karma cleanup for all of us. i am no less guilty than these.

have you read rilke's book of hours, love poems to god? there's one:

my voice grew in two directions
and became a scenting and a cry;
one will prepare the distances,
and the other must be face and blessedness
and angel of my loneliness.

may both voices accompany me
when I am scattered again in city and fear.
they will serve me in the fury of our time
and help me to make a place for you
wherever you need to be.

winter soldier

http://www.youtube.com/v/-iTdxBECos8&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Y6iLoXIpJFQ&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/y_cjkWevHNM&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ymd2KiP-PqY&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Clq4Z3Qc2jo&hl=en&fs=1

so you thought war was a patriot's act? who could blame you? unless of course, you go on thinking it. well just to cheer you up, here's some democracy from leonard:

democracy music video on youtube

and mick put it this way, in sweet neo con:

you call yourself a christian
i think that you're a hypocrite
you say you are a patriot
i think that you're a crock of shit

and listen, I love gasoline
i drink it every day
but it's getting very pricey
and who is going to pay

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con.... Yeah

it's liberty for all
cause democracy's our style
unless you are against us
then it's prison without trial

but one thing that is certain
life is good at haliburton
if you're really so astute
you should invest at brown & root.... Yeah

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con
if you turn out right
i'll eat my hat tonight

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah....

it's getting very scary
yes, I'm frightened out of my wits
there's bombers in my bedroom
yeah and it's giving me the shits

we must have loads more bases
to protect us from our foes
who needs these foolish friendships
we're going it alone

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con
where's the money gone
in the pentagon

yeah ha ha ha
yeah, well, well

mckinney, baldwin, nader and paul

ok, so maybe youre not so into ms mckinney, have you heard of baldwin? me neither. heres biden riffing about the other candidate for president:

http://www.youtube.com/v/955Y3NJTRIE&hl=en&fs=1

alls im sayin is, theres one more month or so before the voting. how do you counteract so much mind control and dollarsense? thats, sense made by dollars, paid for by the Campaign to Elect Who We Can Buy.

voice mail

kennedy/nixon debate

i was working on a track for the record today and didnt hear the phone ring, but i got a message later from a college student who was supposed to be at a friday night party but didnt get there because there was a crowd on campus watching the "presidential debate" in the common room, and they stopped to listen. i had heard yesterday on my way home from teaching a class listening to kut radio that the "president" had arranged a conversation with obama and mccain, regarding the "financial situation". ?? really? why those two? why not other candidates as well? have the elections already happened and i hadnt heard? i suppose the ratings are already in and its a shoe-in? why hold the elections? and the two fellows "put aside" their bipartisanships and got on with talking about the "financial". anyway, here in the caller's words (excluding some color which some folks wont read as feeling or emphasis or emotion, which is what it is) is what was left on my message machine:

"just watching the presidential debates....man! it's all a game, its so depressing. dear god! you know, they're like debating back and forth, back and forth, and obama's saying,'yeah, man, we've gotta get in there, we gotta kill the taliban, we should never have taken our eyes off of afghanistan to go into iraq, blah blah blah, we gotta kill osama bin laden, we gotta find that ...., we gotta take him down!' while, um, while other [dude] mccain is saying 'no, man, we have to get to iraq, we have to kill THOSE ....., i mean come on, let's prioritize here!' anyway, it's all a game, what are they talking about ALLIES, allies for our country? what does our country STAND for anyway? who cares who our allies are? and can i ask you something? um, no matter which president we get, will it change anything in our own lives? do WE actually matter? do ANY of us in this country, actually matter. or is it just the silly little game that we play in middle school and high school, except on a bigger scale with a huge budget, dealing with international affairs with countries they know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about. but they think they have the right to mess around in their political games? it's so, it's just ... insane, i've - i don't understand. i don't understand, how'm i supposed to vote? how'm i supposed to vote for obama? i don't understand how i'm gonna do it. im so sad, i haven't even been able to register to vote, i don't know what to do. anyway, i had to leave, i could only take, i guess i was there, from .. for (looking at watch).. oh my god! i guess i was there for an hour and twenty minutes, i don't know how that happened. but it was painful. it just got to a place where i was like, allies? ALLIES? allies for our country? allies for our country which is about, WHAT? killing osama? (sad laugh) obama, osama, whatever, ok. anyway, love you, call me back, bye."

i couldnt have said it that well so im quoting again. i think its the heart of the matter, when a college student is thunderstruck by the horror show of the political circus prior to voting for the first time and particularly wondering if anyone gets heard. its a big deal. this isnt someone who was raised to have a particular view or other, just their own.

on the other hand, i was hugely influenced by the political climate in my own household, and the country at large, but at that time, when it most impressed me, i saw real passion, and engagement, because the ones i was watching knew they could make a difference and that their voices were being heard in an unprecedented way. not so now. i remembered being at the caucus back in march for the primaries and how several people voting differently from their counterparts (read race, demographic, etc) actually looked scared.

my view of watching the news is that it is a narcotic i dont happen to cotton to. its an inoculation against freedom to listen to the drooling drivel of that great tv show called THE NEWS. who's damn news? not mine. i dont actually believe i have to choose between two idiots arguing over what's the better political choice of targets. i dont actually think i need to vote for warmongers, no matter if theyre dressed up to appear like The Great New Hope or The Hip Conservative with a Spitfire Gal Running Mate. boring. sounds like another episode of law & order to me, with even better ratings. i wish this whole country would wake up and no one would attend the polls and see who gets voted in then, even if theyve already engraved the name on the new presidential door plaque, in bronze, to match the doorknob.

check out the little web site: http://www.bloggingthedebates.com, interesting discussions over there. just so's you know, there are alternatives to curly and moe dancing around like bloodthirsty bears on the abc/nbc/cbs affiliates.

we agree

it's my late grandfather tom's birthday, exactly a hundred years ago today. so, of course, some oliver wendell holmes:


"Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of it's hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps it's youth,
So far as i know, but a tree and truth."

but i'm quoting again, yes. the title refers to a posting on the daily paul page today.

the anti-mccain campaign, or how i stopped smoking and drinking and shooting at things and learned to love the world think tank

here, in it's entirety, is eve ensler's quote, for those who didnt click-thru yestididy, it's worth reprinting. three mules for sister sarah! (great movie, btw) and i quote


Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Vday site