New Civilization News: The Great American Songbook    
 The Great American Songbook15 comments
picture21 Jul 2007 @ 11:21, by Richard Carlson

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time---that is the basic message.

---Pema Chodron

Awakened, I hear the one true thing---
black rain on the roof of Fukakusa temple.

---Dogen

I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.

---David Ignatow

On the set of Shall We Dance, 1936, are dance director Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire, director Mark Sandrich, Ginger Rogers, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin and musical director Nathaniel Shilkret.

Saturday morning, and I'm delighted to read the cover story of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review. Garrison Keillor writing about George Gershwin. I've neglected to report how wonderful I thought Garrison was in the Robert Altman movie about his radio show. I had put off seeing it because Prairie Home Companion can get too cute at times, and I thought a cast of Kline and Streep and Tomlin and Harrelson might be too great a temptation in that direction. And I've heard Keillor personally is pretty aloof and out there, in his own world...so I thought probably this movie is going to be painful.

Besides, for those of us who grew up in front of a huge radio that was bigger than we were---with glowing, radiating tubes in the back that looked like a Flash Gordon outer space city---how many times had we gone to the movies to see an adaptation of a favorite radio show? Yuck! How many were any good? The Shadow? The Lone Ranger? The Fat Man? Arthur Godfrey? A wonderful voice comes out of that dumb guy? Most were about as flat as a Lux radio version of a movie.

But, except when Meryl Streep tries to loosen him up a little, Garrison Keillor is wonderful in the movie. In fact, he makes great fun of himself as someone totally out in his own world. And he nails radio when he tells Lindsay Lohan---who also is wonderful---that nothing ever ends in radio, nobody gets old, nobody ever dies.

But of course the kind of music on the show---oh god, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly singing Bad Jokes is worth the price of admission...and by the way, The Behind-The-Scenes feature on the DVD may be better than the movie---I say, the music ain't exactly Tin Pan Alley. Tin pans galore, but we don't hear In The Still Of The Night. So why does anyone think Garrison Keillor should be reviewing a new book by Wilfred Sheed about Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen, and Kern?

It's probably because, like me, Garrison grew up in the '40s and listening to radio, so what has come to be known as The Great American Songbook is imprinted in our neurons. If we're walking through Central Park with a girl, and Dancing In The Dark begins to play, we may have to turn our walk into a dance that will be legend in the minds of anyone who sees us. Those songs do that to people. They still do it...maybe more than ever. Many rock singers just have to try an album...like jazz players want that one with strings. Opera singers too...and while it used to be horrible to sit through, some of them are starting to get it. I heard Renee Fleming sing You've Changed the other day...and I had to nudge Billie Holiday over in my mind to make room for her.

So Garrison, like Guy Noir, has blues in the night in his sinews. He can set 'em up, Joe, with the rest of us. The rest of us who have heard a tune on the juke box...a tune so devastating there was nothing more to do but get up off the stool, reel toward the door, and out into the lonely night. Maybe she'll be there.

THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT
With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty.
By Wilfrid Sheed.
Illustrated. 335 pp. Random House. $29.95.

July 22, 2007
Here to Stay
By GARRISON KEILLOR

Way back in the ’20s, with the advent of radio came an intimate style of singing that addressed a single listener in the dark, and with it a style of song, syncopated, swinging, capable of verbal play and subtle tones and colors. American vernacular poetry. It shoved out the stale cream-puff operettas of Herbert and Friml and the madcap yowza-yowza-yowza vaudeville revue and took over the Broadway theater and the movies and reigned supreme until Fred and Frank and Bing got too old to be romantic and then rock ’n’ roll came in. That period, embalmed as the Golden Age of American Song, has been saluted and high-faluted in books and wept over repeatedly, but “The House That George Built” is a big rich stew of an homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again.

Wilfrid Sheed’s jazzy prose is a joy to read. It goes catapulting along, digressing like mad, never pedantic, a little frantic, which is just right: the jazz song, like all true art, is a flight from depression, indifference, the cold blank stare, the earnest clammy touch. Sheed lopes along through decades of pop, bowing to Berlin (whose lyrics seem “not so much brilliant as inevitable”) and upholding some neglected masters (Richard Whiting and Harry Warren), throwing some cold water (Richard Rodgers had a “fatal taste for comfort music”), naming classics — Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and of course “Stardust” and “Here’s That Rainy Day” and Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” (“I would instantly vote this the most beautiful song ever written, except for this one problem of the words ... grandiose piffle”). About Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” he writes: “The chief musical gift the non-Caucasian world had to offer back then was a variety of exotic beats, and Cole would use these as a semisecret weapon to provide the kicker in his songs, in the form of vivid bass lines that worked like pistons under the melody.” He loves the music elaborately while tossing off dollops of gossip about the canoodling of the masters, Porter’s flamboyant gayness, the drinking, the meanness of Johnny Mercer when drunk and how a few lines of a song could soften him, Jimmy Van Heusen’s roistering with Frank Sinatra, “whose singing seemed to get wiser as his life got sillier and more childish,” so you get an idea where their blues came from.

George Gershwin is the main man, though Sheed traces the jazz song back to 1914 and Kern’s “They Didn’t Believe Me” (“And when I told them how beautiful you are, they didn’t believe me”), not some jiggly novelty tune but elegant, swingy, “a perfect loosey-goosey, syncopate-me-if-you-care, a relaxed and smiling American asterisk-jazz song.” Gershwin is the president of the fraternity, the all-American golden boy, hyperactive, booming with self-confidence, who went up to Harlem to learn from James P. Johnson and Willie (the Lion) Smith and whose ascent was swift (“no songwriter ever wasted less time reaching his prime”) and who, when he reached the top, was openhearted and went out of his way to praise and encourage his brethren.

Sheed gives a nod to the beautiful myth of a music made by Jews who’d been to Harlem, Jews with the blues, one oppressed people listening to another, the blacks using the Hebrew Bible as their text, but in the end he acknowledges that “music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time.” And those geniuses included Midwesterners who learned how to outslick the slickers, like Fred Astaire of Omaha: “Fred had uniquely mastered the art of swinging tastefully, without entirely tipping over into the down and dirty. He could be hot and cool at the same time.” And there was Cole Porter of Peru (pronounced PEA-ru), Ind., who wrote jazz songs, and smart patter songs, and was also “a sentimental country boy who can tug on your heartstrings without any tricks at all.” And Hoagland Carmichael of Bloomington, Ind. “Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it. ... What had dislocated him the most was the arrival of jazz, which had sneaked into rock-ribbed Indiana by way of the great music river, the Mississippi, and which would hit young Hoagland with the force of a religious conversion.”

The music was nothing if not memorable, so it was spread by “the average absent-minded whistlers and hummers” — “If you knew the music, you whistled it, as if all the backed-up melody in your head was forcing its way out through your mouth like steam from a kettle ... respectable bankers and businessmen in stark colors and homburg hats whistling their way to work like newsboys or Walt Disney’s dwarves.” And it was composed by men who tended toward glumness. “Over the Rainbow” was written by the bipolar Harold Arlen — “Arlen’s manic side may have been almost as necessary to his compositions as his gloomy one, simply because it gave him the heart to write in the first place. In other words, he had to feel that good to tell you how bad he felt; if he felt any worse, he couldn’t have written at all, even sadly. And when, for reasons beyond his control, he couldn’t write any more anyway, the depression that had been waiting to happen became quite suicidal.”

Sheed is in peak form, and the book just gets better and better. You start to hear ghosts talking and they’re funny ghosts, not stuffed shirts. “Like most of his colleagues, only a little more so, Irving always needed someone else to tell him when he was good. Witness the famous instance when he almost discarded that most palpable of hits ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ because his secretary didn’t like it, and perhaps more seriously, because Richard Rodgers didn’t light up when he first heard it. A more confident man might have realized that Richard Rodgers never lit up over anything and that he was hearing this new song under the worst possible conditions: Irving was playing it himself. And Irving’s pianism was so primitive that Hoagy Carmichael once said that it had given him the heart to go on, on the grounds that ‘if the best in the business is that bad, there’s hope for all of us.’ ” (Berlin also discarded “How Deep Is the Ocean” for a while.)

Sheed is so engaging, he can be forgiven a sour note: “By 1945, the kids had seized control. ... And just like that, the magical coincidence of quality and popularity was over, the music in the public square was nowhere near the best music anymore.” Not true, so not true. “Never apologize for a song that sells a million copies,” Berlin said, which covers the Beatles very nicely, and Paul Simon and Springsteen, and a hundred others, and so does Jerome Kern’s advice: “Stay uncommercial. There’s a lot of money in it.” Meaning: throw away the formula, break the mold, be surprising. By the early ’50s, pop music was run by hacks, and bright young talents walked in and drove them away. George would have approved.

Garrison Keillor is the author of “Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel,” to be published in September.

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15 comments

22 Jul 2007 @ 15:39 by quinty : A wonderful
entry Richard, which brings all that magic to life.

Our mutual friend Don sent out this interesting opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal. Did you see it? There's an enormous amount of energy in the grassroots, which you can feel after being away from the country for awhile. Do the gatekeepers, mostly corporations, keep all this original creativity submerged? (Corporate America being cautious and profit driven.) Or has there been an actual diminishment of new and original expression in the US? Has the larger electronic culture squelched the grassroots? Or is it all still there, in garages and livingrooms and small neighborhood clubs?

LEISURE & ARTS (Wall Street Journal)

The Impoverishment of American Culture

And the need for better art education.

BY DANA GIOIA

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and "American Idol" finalists they can name. Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors and composers they can name. I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement. I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show, I saw--along with comedians, popular singers and movie stars--classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman and James Baldwin on general-interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American--because the culture considered them important. Today no working-class kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.
When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book or a new vote? Don't get me wrong. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing--it puts a price on everything. The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong enough to counterbalance this commercialization of cultural values, our educational system. Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed cannot be left entirely to the marketplace--but made mandatory and freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to re-establish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.

There is no better place to start this rapprochement than in arts education. How do we explain to the larger society the benefits of this civic investment when they have been convinced that the purpose of arts education is to produce more artists, which is hardly a compelling argument to the average taxpayer?

We need to create a new national consensus. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

This is not happening now in American schools. What are we to make of a public education system whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent entry-level workers? The situation is a cultural and educational disaster, but it also has huge and alarming economic consequences. If the U.S. is to compete effectively with the rest of the world in the new global marketplace, it is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined industrial base. To compete successfully, this country needs creativity, ingenuity and innovation.

It is hard to see those qualities thriving in a nation whose educational system ranks at the bottom of the developed world and has mostly eliminated the arts from the curriculum. Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. And that is exactly what is happening--not just in the media, but in our schools and civic life.

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure--humor, thrills, emotional titillation or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenging us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out--to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world--equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being--simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens, enlarges, refines and restores our humanity.

Mr. Gioia is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. This article is a condensed version of his June 17 commencement address at Stanford University.  



22 Jul 2007 @ 18:38 by jazzolog : Murdoch Will Roll Over In His Grave
when he sees articles like this...and not everyone, including him, even knows he's dead yet. He'll put a stop to it because it hearkens to a time when government support was available to artists in the US. Here we have the first civilization in the history of humanity without a humanities and arts position in the equivalent of the ruler's cabinet. Are you a painter these days? Design for the corporate waiting room...or maybe the executive toilet. There's your market. Unless you're an old, dead master and then maybe you'll end up in the private collection at one of the summer houses.

I learned about most of those guys up there in public elementary school, but there's little of that going on today. Teachers teach to the test under the threat of federal funding loss. Think that's a joke? Public schools in the 3rd notch of the bible belt are going bankruptcy belly up and private creationist schools are blasting into rapture...with vouchers at taxpayer expense. The idea was to provide an informed electorate at the voting booth. Dumbed down without art is just what the globalists and libertarians are praying for---oops, let's not go too far: what they're aiming their custom-made shotguns at. A handmade shotgun to your physical specifications? Now, there's art!  



22 Jul 2007 @ 18:45 by jmarc : Jazzolog Blues and Murdoch
Makes me think of well, jazz, blues and Australia, which makes me think of New Zealand, and in a stream of conciousness, this {LINK:http://www.coolblue.co.nz/|COOL BLUE}, my first choice in blues jazz and old American classics, on the net.

Enjoy.

Having a good summer, I hope?  



23 Jul 2007 @ 00:03 by Quinty @72.195.137.102 : Yes,
and I once heard that the city of Vienna, Austria, annually spends more on its opera than the entire United States annually budgets for all the arts.

Murdoch is dead alright. Watch him on television sometime: a veritable case of the man with the golden touch who doesn't know he has petrified into solid rock. He has about as much soul as a block of dry concrete.

"Tax and spend" liberals want money to go into education. A waste: unless of course the money is used for giddy purposes. Like bringing Christ into the lives of the tots who will go off to war when they grow up: jihad will still be with us then, of course. Who knows, by that time we may even be fighting the Muslim hordes on the streets of Detroit. While preparing to take them on in Washington. Unless the Rapture or Armageddon comes first. Nothing to laugh at, since there are very important and powerful people in Washington who believe all this stuff.

Studies show a majority of Americans don't even know who their rep is in Congress. Or how long a US Senator is elected for. Or the names of both their senators.  



23 Jul 2007 @ 18:28 by b : Haha Quinty
You're right. As far as it goes people don't eve know who they, we, are. Mot can't even acknowledge that we are human beings living on Earth. That a hman being is a composite of body, mind, spirit. That if there is God there is only one God. God who created the universe. The rest of all religions are dogma and doctrine. There are feel good rituals. Taking a good bm is one of them.
All of this society will come right to the end and then there won't be anymore.
Get your share of cookies now because they won't even be on the shelves when you want them.  



25 Jul 2007 @ 16:58 by a-d : Ever wondered where
all this shit you mention here above, originates from, Quinty? try these and read them well and read them ALL!... You'll see the Events in our World from a Watch Tower that will stunn you ( unless you already know this all, that is. )

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Kabbalah/Sabbatai_Zevi.htm
[ http://www.kheper.net/topics/Kabbalah/Donmeh.htm ]
[ http://www.rense.com/general66/sabb.htm ]
[ http://www.jewishracism.com/ ]

NONE of these guys was gifted with a healthy psyche. None! When it was more profitable -somehow- to be a Muslim, then Muslims they all were. Whenbeing a Roman Catholic gained more respect, then Catholics they were. Etc etc. when no "religious" affiliation had anything to give, so speak, the guys still in the organisations were chased and murdered right an' left together with the Populace who were the Body of these Churches/Religions!... We are still doing this very thing while at the same time giving out Nobel Prizes and (other ) Awards for this n that to Individual's of Extra Ordinary Contributions the The Arts (& "sciences")!
Is this a behaviour of healthy people????

The MESSIANIC IDEA these sick men some centuries ago in Turkey came up with says that the WORSE one can be, the better: one HAS to be as BAD/EVIL as ever POSSIBLE because that is what God WANTS and then HE will send the Armageddon and the MESSIAH will arrive in that wake and now ALL will be good!... provided one was evil and destructive enough!
Now to Heaven they all will arise to the Tunes of Strauss, Schubert, Bethooven and maybe some Vivaldi, in a Rapture of joyful laughter how doing EVIL to their fellow humans while supporting the Arts "bought" them a Place in Heaven!
Beats me!

"....I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.

---David Ignatow "
If only this would gain more respect and be practiced more, we all would be better off!  



29 Jul 2007 @ 17:28 by vaxen : BooHoo!
Against Presidential Tyranny

By Tim Wingate


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Oh Creator of equal people endowed with unalienable Rights, Hear our plea!


We have suffered under a long train of abuses and usurpations that evinces a design to reduce us under absolute Despotism.


Those that were instituted to make those Rights secure no longer derive their just powers from the consent of the equal people, but by threat of violence against them.


In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned the Usurper and his minions for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated Petition have been answered only by repeated injury.


A President, whose administration is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to govern a free people.


We ask that you justly uphold your Laws of Nature and Be not mocked but do unto him as he has done unto others.


May he reap a bitter harvest of his abuses!


May he collect the wages of his transgressions!


May the shed blood of the innocents he has injured be as an abomination upon his head!


Upon your Providence we have firm reliance, and ask you to Protect us, our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor!

May it be So!

===

When you realize just who ''G'D' is then the above will be seen as just so much beggary. Tinsel on the tree of life. Life goes on and will and you must know who is in charge of it all. YOU are! So weep, laugh, fill your hearts with the simple joy of living. Life is simple. Education is a process, self engeandered, and does not come from the 'outside.' Outside and inside are one so...how could it?

"Shaken, not stirred..." JB  



30 Jul 2007 @ 21:41 by vaxen : Tikkun Ha Olam
Tikkunim (Repairs)
(Meditations on the Raising of the Sparks)

by the Baal Shem Tov

All that a man has - his employees, his animals, his tools - all conceal sparks that belong to the roots of his soul and wish to be raised by him to their Origin.

The Baal Shem Tov


Tikkunim For Your Employees
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you also
speak to their muscles and minds.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them,
envision it rising up to its Source.


Tikkunim For Your Animals
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you speak to their animal hearts.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them,
envision it rising up to its Source.


Tikkunim For Your Tools
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you speak to their steel and stone.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them, envision it rising up to its Source.

Notzetzot=Sparks Or(AUR)=Light
Tikkun=Repair from the intransitive verb Litaken (To repair)  



30 Jul 2007 @ 23:58 by Quinty @72.195.137.102 : Vax -
I guess you're not a Capitalist.

No self respecting Capitalist would ever be concerned with the holy spark within his tools, employees, or the natural world outside he greedily exploits.

It just ain't done.

That's a beautiful prayer, though, or admonition. Or whatever it is.....  



31 Jul 2007 @ 02:55 by a-d : For all Self respecting TRUE
CAPITALISTS to consider,ponder & think of ALL the LIES DECEPTIVE "DEFINITIONS" etc after some interest-arousing reading: [ http://www.rense.com/general77/howill.htm ]
Could it be that Communism as used by the Big Controllers of us, Slaves in/of ALL Capitalist Nations, is not at all what true Communism is -can be used as -when some ETHICAL PRINCIPLES are put into the word -instead of removed from it.
The Communism in USSR was INDEED NOTHING BUT CAPITALISM FOR THE TOP GUYS THERE and for NOBODY ELSE!.... IS Capitalism in the USA -officially still today- FOR guys like Joe Doe -and dare I guess- you, Quinty???????

"Where Has All True Culture Gone/Long Time Pa-a-s-s-i-n-g-g ?
Where Has All True Culture Gone/Long Time Agoooo? /Gone /To Soldiers/Graveyards etc Ev'ryone/ When Will They Ever Learn?/When Will They Eeeever Learn?"
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg8Db7VNgL0 ]

Yes,Vax, the Prayer is very beautiful and thought provoking. I can see the VALIDITY in and of it!/Yours; Shekinah Le Olam : )  



31 Jul 2007 @ 03:23 by vaxen : Nope...
not a capitalist. Though I have sold in the open markets of the middle east and europe. Now...swimming in the Absu of it all. Thanks quinty.

The BeShT (Baal Shem Tov/Master of the good name) has always been one of my favorite people. I'm more Lurianically quivered, though. Rabbi Yitzhak Luria and Abraham Abu Lafia as well as many other Kabbalists were my guides early on. And, of course, I studied at the Machon Le Kabbalah on Mount Tzion so...it's in my blood though I don't practice the rites of Yahadut anymore.

No need...though I miss the beauty and pagentry of the Hassidic way. I was a Breshlaver Hassid. Studied with Rav Gedalia Koenig whilst there. Studied with lots of others, too, all famous...most dead now.

So much for my life of searching out the secrets of the universe. How capital...ever hear of Bulawayo jazz?

http://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/tracey06.shtml

!ke e: Ixarra IIke/"diverse people unite"

http://www.info.gov.za/images/symbols/coatofarms100.gif | http://www.cdroots.com/st-tracey-032.jpg  



11 Aug 2007 @ 12:22 by jazzolog : If You've Seen "Once" Only Once
A small Irish film, entitled "Once," is making it out of the city art houses and into the sticks currently, so it's in Athens. This is the kind of movie you want to find out a lot about afterwards...like, who thought it up, and do these people really know each other, and have they performed together before this? I'll leave you to have that fun for yourself if you get a chance to see it soon. One thing I will say is how amazed I was to go to Amazon and discover the soundtrack CD is currently featured as a best seller. Same thing at Tower where it is No. 2 right now. I suppose a lot of us just want to know what the heck they're saying in some of those lyrics. (Yes, it is "this sinking boat and point it home.") Others are wondering about the final moments in the scene on the cliffs, pictured here. They were wondering at the Yahoo Movies Message Board, where I was able to provide an answer~~~

Translation Please!
Reviewer James Berardinelli: There is a moment when the man asks her whether she loves her husband. She responds, "No. I love you." However, her response is in unsubtitled Czech, so the man does not understand her - nor do audience members who don't know the language.
http://www.reelviews.net/movies/o/once.html

http://www.reelingreviews.com/oncepic.jpg  



11 Aug 2007 @ 15:48 by vaxen : As in...
most things "Irish." You mean she doesn't tell him in Gaelic but in Czech? Typical.

"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?": -- Adolf Hitler - (1889-1945) Source: quoted in Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74.

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How the Democrats Blew It in Only 8 Months

By Alexander Cockburn

The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18157.htm

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"Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units." -- Carl Gustav Jung - (1875-1961) Source: The Undiscovered Self, 1957

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hina’s “Nuclear Option” is real

By Paul Craig Roberts

08/11/07 "ICH' -- -- Twenty-four hours after I reported China’s announcement that China, not the Federal Reserve, controls US interest rates by its decision to purchase, hold, or dump US Treasury bonds, the news of the announcement appeared in sanitized and unthreatening form in a few US news sources.

The Washington Post found an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin to provide reassurances that it was “not really a credible threat” that China would intervene in currency or bond markets in any way that could hurt the dollar’s value or raise US interest rates, because China would hurt its own pocketbook by such actions.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, just back from Beijing, where he gave China orders to raise the value of the Chinese yuan “without delay,” dismissed the Chinese announcement as “frankly absurd.”

Both the professor and the Treasury Secretary are greatly mistaken.

First, understand that the announcement was not made by a minister or vice minister of the government. The Chinese government is inclined to have important announcements come from research organizations that work closely with the government. This announcement came from two such organizations. A high official of the Development Research Center, an organization with cabinet rank, let it be known that US financial stability was too dependent on China’s financing of US red ink for the US to be giving China orders. An official at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences pointed out that the reserve currency status of the US dollar was dependent on China’s good will as America’s lender.

What the two officials said is completely true. It is something that some of us have known for a long time. What is different is that China publicly called attention to Washington’s dependence on China’s good will. By doing so, China signaled that it was not going to be bullied or pushed around.

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What is heating up our planet?
If you didn't know what caused the Dust Bowl and is heating up our planet now is EMR (Electromagnetic radiation). Half a million watt transmitters in AM radio stations basically fried the atmosphere with EMR at a sensitive wavelength. This blocked cloud formation. Now AM stations are limited to 50,000 watts.

Of course now days they totally ignore things like HAARP which is a 3 billion watt array and has anyone even totaled up how many watts all those cell phone towers put out? Don't forget to add in all the watts of wifi wireless internet services and home routers and cards. Also add in military and civilian radar systems and radio systems. Also microwave transmitters.

Standard wifi (wireless internet) cards transmit at the same frequency as your microwave oven. If your near a wifi tranmitter its the same as standing next to a running microwave all day long. How would that be on your health? Using a 2.4GHz phone is the same as sticking your head in a microwave oven. EMR causes DNA strands to break.

All of that adds up to a massive amount of Electromagnetic pollution that didn't even exist in the 19th century before radios were first invented.

EMR is also put out by power lines and is the dirty secret the utilities don't want you to know. They talk about magnetic fields all day long, but if you mentioned EMR they freak out.

Zenia

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Have a happy weekend, jazzolog, et al, and don't swill too much Irish whiskey for it might turn to Czech., bitters in thy belly.

Ceade Mille Failte! (Need a trance-lation on that?)

;)  



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