What’s worth talking about these days? What makes sense, what’s a waste of time, what can make a difference or have an effect, what constitutes indifference or actively hiding from the situation?
Everybody has an opinion, but opinions don’t make change.
I have no answers and wouldn’t want to pretend to. We’re far enough up shit’s creek to spot its source, but I don’t see a paddle handy at the moment. Hope that I do some day.
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I may have mentioned our good luck in running across a couple of remarkable music programs online from the radio station KDHX in St. Louis – especially “Music from the Hills,” hosted by John Uhlemann on Sundays, 5-7 p.m. E.T., covering music from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Wonderful stuff and brilliant commentary by John, he has visited just about every country whose music he presents.
Well, last week I tuned in and the program wasn’t there. Basically, the whole station wasn’t there, just feeding through crap pop from, I suppose, there archives, with no hosting.
With some effort we tracked down the problem, which is that the station’s CEO and board had fired all the volunteer DJs and claim not the have the funds to staff the production end.
The uproar form the fans has been huge, and the incompetence of those “in charge” remarkable, even for these days. We’re hoping that something sane is figured out soon.
This reminds me of what happened to WXPN, the UPenn station, in I think the late ’80s or early ’90s. /formerly student run, at that point it had been taken over by former students and have perhaps the most free form programming I’ve ever run across, where the DJs played whatever the hell they wanted at the moment, so you might [and I did] hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. But they got in a tangle with the FCC for letting little kids say obscene words on-air through the phone line. Penn’s response was to have the station taken over by an outside outfit that trashed the whole idea of what the station had been about – making it more popular, as far as number of listeners went – and introducing a major afternoon show of singer/songwriters [still running] that I found about as entertaining as a toothache.
By the sheer accident of whatever happened to be playing at the moment, I learned a hell of a lot from the old XPN, nothing much since, except that Johnny Meister still runs the Blues Show every Saturday evening, as he has for the past 40+ years.
One song, “Numberless are the sands on the seashore,” would pop up at odd times, taken form a collection called The Real Bahamas. As a result, I bought the collection, which decades later someone called “the greatest album ever made.” That’s a bit expansive, but I just might agree. And “Numberless are the sands on the seashore” is still may favorite track, unlike quite anything else, complex construction of interweaving spoken and sung religious chanting, as beautiful as a wildflower bouquet where you can’t identify any single flower.
As this week’s gift I’d hoped to upload the cut of ‘Numberless,” but good old WordPress doesn’t allow it. Well, nobody reads this anyway.
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Just wondering: Is there bird flu over the cuckoo’s nest?
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Coming soon to Amazon, a short-story collection called Farewell My Zombie, published by folks including Paradox Pollack and his brother Jackrabbit, both fellow ruminators on this list, along with a few of their friends whom I don’t know personally.
The collection includes two of my stories, which I was delighted to have them accept, also ones by Paradox, Jackrabbit and others in the collective. I’ll say more when I get the official release date.
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Some terms and their unlikely companions:
- I can act in an uncouth way, but I can no longer behave with couth, which once meant good manners but sounds like an unpalatable substance that’s fallen off the dinner table.
- If I am ruthless, I am acting without ruth, a former term for compassion. But shouldn’t compassion be called gladys?
- On a church organ I can hear a trumpet voluntary, but I have never heard a deliberate trumpet involuntary.
- I have been taken aback, but never taken afront – though I have been affronted.
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Just read that David Hogg – spokesperson for gun control and survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida – has been elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.
While our creaky, anachronistic two-party system is much to blame for the rancid descent into political absurdity in the US, we’re stuck with it for the near future. The Dems haven’t been able to figure how to fight against the current chaos, but more folks like Hogg could help pull in young voters and show what real progress might look like.
As for the two-party system: There is no one perfect way for “the other side” to respond, because people’s takes on politics, as in other human areas, are not simple reflections in a mirror held by the opposition. They are individual and scattered to the winds. “Independents” can’t even vote in PA primaries.
OK, no more political crap here. The rest gets flushed into our leach field.
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If you have any old car tires to dispose of, send them to France. I understand that they have issued a call for tires to burn at their eternal street protests.
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There’s been talk of late of using lucid dreams – those in which we’re aware of being in a dream – to perform tasks while we sleep.
What a ghastly idea. Don’t we perform enough useless tasks while awake? Leave our dreams he hell alone.
lickhaven 