The Death Of The West?

Download: "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" by Bob Dylan *

"Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college." ... Story continues here: Tea Party Lights Fuse For Rebellion On Right (NY Times)

"No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Texas on February 18th" ... Story continues here: The Axis Of The Obsessed And Deranged (NY Times)

* Witmark demo version

Nietzsche Family Circus #5

Quote Of The Week

"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."

The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

Goodbye Wild, Wild World

Dale Hawkins

Rest In Peace

"Delmar Allen "Dale" Hawkins, originally from Goldmine, in Richland Parish, recorded his first hit in the KWKH Radio studios in downtown Shreveport in 1956 with then-15-year-old guitarist James Burton, who later went on to perform and record with Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, John Denver and Jerry Lee Lewis." ... Story continues here: Rockabilly Icon Dale Hawkins Dead Of Cancer (Shreveport Times)

Quote Of The Week

"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy."

Ode To Spring

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can't.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can't stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can't take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I'll take a dozen of the lilies.
I'm standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

"Damn The Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead!"

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2010

Quote Of The Week

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."

45 Revolutions: The Scenery

Short-lived UK mod band The Scenery featured Ian Hunter (Mott The Hoople), Miller Anderson (The Voice*, Paper Blitz Tissue), Dave Dufort (East Of Eden, Angel Witch), Dante Smith, and John Vernon Smith. Their stomping, freakbeat floor-shaker "Thread Of Time" was recorded in 1967 at Regent Sound — with drummer John Banks from The Merseybeats subbing for Vernon Smith at the session — and released on France's Impact label as the b-side to "To Make A Man Cry." (The 45 was also released in Japan via Columbia Records.)

Download: "Thread Of Time"

* The Voice, who released the monster "Train To Disaster," are
rumored to have been the house band for The Process Church,
the infamous cult led by Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston.

Lovesong

The Kingdoms Of Experience

Dig: "Abandoned Love" live @ The Other End, NYC

Download: "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" by John Martyn

Download: "Positively 4th Street" by Paul Westerberg

Download: "Gates Of Eden" by Marc Carroll

Buy: Bob Dylan Revisited (book)

Quote Of The Week

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."