The Discipline of the Rhythm Section

I played a gig this past weekend, and what transpired was what I expected.  It was not upsetting, because I expected it.  I knew ahead of time what was going to happen, so I prepared for it.  What was this scenario?  It was one I have known about for a long time, and that is because to be a skilled and competent musician one must know something about musical styles.  When I was working on a masters degree at USC Columbia there was a course offered titled "Jazz Styles."  Styles of music are passe today, because the newer generation of Americans are lucky to understand or recognize one.  That style is "pop," and I have railed about it before.  Okay.  I know what it is and how limited it is.  That is why I refuse to recognize it in my own playing.  I will not play pop, ever.  The physicality of pop for the piano is as inane as Mike Pence.  It is not worthy of a speck of dust.  That is its value.  Pop aside, what actually happened on my gig that I expected and entailed controversy?  It was simple.  The styles of music we attempted to pull off failed for the most part, and it was obvious.  They styles or instrumental songs we chose to play did not relate, because the rhythm structure beneath them was not accurate.  I'm sorry to say but music is specific.  If you want music to communicate effectively it must be accurate.  It must portray something accurately that you have picked.  What did we try?  We tried Bossa Nova.  We tried Swing, and we tried Funk.  That is three styles of music which all are different from each other.  They have different rhythmic structures, patterns, which must be actualized for the music to translate its intent or mood.  They failed.  Why did they fail?  They answer is because the bottom of the band was incorrect.  What do I mean by the bottom?  The bottom of the band, in the words of Miles Davis, are the bass and drums.  I am not saying we did not have competent musicians.  We did, but they failed at defining the styles of music we attempted to play.  They were Bossa Nova, Swing, and Funk.  What could be so different about these styles of music.  It is relatively simple.  The bass line of each style must be correct.  Where the beat falls has to be correct, and there must be accurate time.  It cannot rush or drag, and it must strive to be consistent.  It did not swing, because the "feel" of the bass's quarter notes was incorrect.  That is the spacing and length of these notes was wrong, the emphasis was off, and time was not consistent.  How is swing achieved?  The easiest way is by feeling.  If you know and understand the "feeling" of swing music, the way it makes you feel, then you can create that feeling emotionally with your heart, soul, and mind and it dictates your technical performance.  Your playing is driven by a feeling that shows and tells you how to play the notes.  It is that simple.  If you don't possess the feeling, that thing, that swing, you won't and can't swing.  You can fake it.  In swing there is happiness and joy, there is freedom and opportunity, and there is emancipation.  Not everyone can conquer this requirement.  What was the other style that failed?  It was Bossa Nova.  Bossa Nova also has a feeling, and it is different than what most Americans are capable of understanding.  Bossa Nova's origins are in Brazil, a South American country which prides itself with sensuality.  It is intimate, romantic, and expressive.  It is not aggressive, it is passive.  It has a clave, a rhythic pattern that must be accurate.  Because Bossa Nova's origins are on the nylon stringed guitar, its style must be realized by the other instruments with a canny understanding of how to create this feeling.  The bass again is important, specific, and simplistic.  It must adhere to a simple pattern of good time which provides a foundation for the music resting above it.  It takes maturity to play such music, and not bullshit suffices.  The beat in Bossa Nova is wide and relaxed.  That two failures to launch.  How difficult can they be?  The third style of music which faltered was Funk.  Bootsy Collins says it easily.  "You play the "one."  One.  You play on "one."  Play on beat one, and that is it.  Everything else is just filler.  The bass player must be disciplined enough to put beat one in the right place at the right time so the rest of the music and circulate around it.  Beat one.  That's it.  We failed on all three fronts, and it is frustrating.  Is it because the bass player is not capable of playing these requirements, or is it because he doesn't want to? 

The Most Offensive Mask of History

Although my mind is tired and my noise cancelling headphones are giving a temper tantrum, I have to do something.  It is late into the morning, but my soul is no where near satisfied, even with some libation.  The sounds of Max Roach, an Afro-Cuban collaboration, are echoing in my ears pleasantly.  My eyes are tried and dried out, my back is sore, and I am tired from playing a gig this weekend.  My soul is no where near satisfied, because of the onslaught of negative, hypocritical, deceptive news slung in our faces on the evening news.  What was the banal seemingly harmless lead story?  Vice President Mike Pence for the first time in history dons a mask and suggests it is a good idea to wear one.  Mark this day, June 28, 2020, in history.  Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States who previously, stubbornly, and vindictively has refused to wear a protective mask during the Covid 19 outbreak, after a massive resurgence of new cases puts on a mask, heads out the door, and like the biggest hypocrite in recent American political history NOW flops his stance.  Faggot.  It is infuriating hypocrites, men who know nothing, do nothing, and feign credibility.  What other word can I muster to describe such an offensive, zealot, harmful elected leader.  The tally is running, and while his tepid, weak, and ineffective presence has not approached the war crimes of our president, attempted genocide of the American people, he is close.  How is it possible that toddlers have been elected to lead our country?  Is it because they can be manipulated?  Is it because they form no opinion?  They are moot?  I never have been so insulted, like a nerd in chess club who suddenly decides he wants and it is appropriate to be the quarter back, like someone told him to wear the mask.  They told him.  He couldn't figure it out for himself.  The Vice President of the United States has not paid attention enough to have a grasp of the task assigned to him by our President.  Head the Covid 19 task force?  Collect milk money during recess?  Deliver newspapers on his bicycle?  Shake the pee pee off his weiner after urinating?  What surrealistic altered reality is transpiring in the Trump Cabinet?  It is unbelievable, like there are no real consequences to his lack of responsibility.  There is only one conclusion, and that conclusion is the American populace is under attack from its own elected officials.  Mass genocide has been attempted from biological attack, from policy suggestions, and from inciting, slanderous, racist rhetoric purposely meant to divide the American people.  Never in our current history has America seen such an underhanded, sideways, oblique attack on our sensibilities.  It is so out of the park that only satan, the devil, beelzebub could muster such a strategy.  From left field.  Out of nowhere.  There is only one conclusion, and that conclusion is that Donald Trump must be removed from office and tried, convicted, and punished for treason against our republic.  There is no other recourse.  He has been impeached.  He was found guilty, and our Senate lead by the most prominent self proclaimed traitor of all time, Mitch McConnell decided he will stay.  There could be no worse state of affairs in America to wake each day and face this milieu.  Monica Lewinsky was one thing, blowjobs in the White House, but an all out assault on the American people, the loss of freedoms, civil liberties, livelihoods, and the rest.  It is unprecedented, and Max Roach riffs on.  My headphones complain as the strains of avant garde saxophone waft in my dead ears, dead from the image of Mike Pence wearing a fucking mask. 

The Aberdeen and Snotfish Chailway

Truly it is amazing how much your protocol is affected by your local environment.  When the Aberdeen and Rockfish "shortline" railroad is servicing the DAK Americas plant on Cedar Creek Rd, my productivity becomes limited.  Probably in response to a handful of letters to the editor I have penned to our local Fayetteville Observer, now the A&R is shunting freight cars from Russell Street to Glensford Ave.  Perhaps this is a blessing, because their daily switching of freight in the Norfolk Southern yard is shared with both them and CSX.  As I dully have mentioned previously, three railroads operating in downtown Fayetteville is too much.  Business owners and patrons of businesses would agree.  It is ludicrous really.  Leaving a baseball game and walking back to your car you must stop for a local freight consist.  Again perhaps the A&R assembling trains behind Berean Church and Christian Academy is a blessing.  What!?  That is even more ludicrous.  Ludicrous is a shortline railroad based in Aberdeen, North Carolina, which makes it money from contracts in Fayetteville.  The majority of their earnings occur when their railroad activity is functioning in someone else's city.  That is Donald Trump convenient.  The origins of the A&R are a great success story in the railroad industry.  They laid down tracks in the great pine forests of the sandhills, felled the trees, and provided raw materials to the United States Navy.  Pine sap for turpentine.  When their great pillage was complete, venture capitalists appeared and turned the vast expanses of lowland into the Pinehurst golf resort.  Let's hear it for creative business thinking.  Now that the turpentine industry has subsided, the A&R focus on other contracts which seem to be mostly in Fayetteville.  The story goes they sneaked over to Fayetteville in the middle of the night and build a crossover across the mainline railroad tracks.  Now their access to the downtown yard and potential future businesses was sealed.  A century later still the Aberdeen and Rockfish is making their money by operating largely in Cumberland County.  This activity has escalated during the Trump presidency has all rail activity.  The EPA is a shell agency that was instructed to do nothing.  They did not police the Chemours plant providing tainted drinking water to Wilmington.  They have not monitored the overall health of the Cape Fear River Basin.  They have not kept track of rampant low frequency noise pollution created by the railroads.  If you can't see it, it isn't there.  I know better, and when the A&R is busy making their money, my productivity is limited.  Why?  Who knew they had a small freight yard in close proximity to Cross Creek Mall.  During the Covid 19 crisis they parked hazardous material tank cars next to Montclaire Elementary School.  Even if they were empty, we all know that fumes from chemicals mixed with air are more dangerous and potentially lethal to human beings in case of an incident.  What kind of incident could there be?  A spark of some kind and two apartment complexes, several churches, and a Christian Academy would burn into oblivion.  The EPA did nothing.  Wednesdays and Thursdays are a drag in Fayetteville.  The military machine and the industrial complex tool on, and it is the dominant force.  You cannot ignore it.  I spend my days trying to get around its influence.  Plastic is the one commodity that is ruining our planet.  It is in the oceans.  It is everywhere, and DAK Americas owned by a MEXICAN conglomerate manufactures plastic from polyester resin on Cedar Creek Rd.  Evidently the Aberdeen and Rockfish supply the raw materials and deliver their product.  All three railroads share this responsibility.  CSX has been delivering the goods like they did today.  Four o'clock and those rebuilt GP-38-3 AC locomotives, a newer version of a previously only direct current locomotive, shutter into service.  Our dinner time is destroyed.  Diesel knock for hours.  Who decided this was the appropriate time to switch freight cars to this plant?  Dinnertime?  Why no normal working hours?  Fayetteville is the only city in North Carolina which gets hotter after the sun sets, because this is when the trains begin to run.  It gets hotter after the sun goes down.  Operating under the veil of darkness is a cheap device.  What is even cheaper is suggesting that any diesel electric freight locomotive is green in any way.  They are not.  They are one of the major contributors to global warming.  Watch any Captain Justice train video on Youtube, and you will see the intense vapor streams of pollutants pouring out of a locomotive smoke stacks.  It is surreal.  Heat.  Intense heat.  No one cares, because the big corporate lobby has been at work for decades forging their path.  No regulation for the railroads.  Cha ching.  Paid.  U.S. lawmakers.  A country club membership.  Gifts.  Travel.  So here I sit feeling the effects of a disruptive, polluting, invasive oppresion that is created by a company which resides in Aberdeen and does its dirty work in our town.  Ain't that the shit? 

The Great Musical Reveal

At lot has happened in the last few months.  I have a new protocol.  I have chapters or episodes of productivity, which are not really chosen by me.  I go with the flow, and I have learned to be able to put one thing down and shift gears.  Consequently one of these surges of productivity closes itself to me before I am able to reap the entire benefit.  I have to set it on the shelf, change gears, and do something else.  Usually I don't miss it for a few months, and then the distant memory of that very rewarding thing creeps back, and I realize I no longer have it.  Perhaps I do, because I did the work and experienced the gain, but it was put on the shelf so suddenly like the closing of a chapter in a book, I lose it.  I feel in inexorable feeling of loss realizing that what I worked for and achieved had to be stymied.  Possibly this is the true feeling of love, of Romeo and Juliette, of loving and losing.  If you don't lose it perhaps you never know you really loved it at all.  Recently when I realize I have sacrificed something of great personal reward to me, I do my best to find it again.  There have been several chapters in my life which have been lost, and I have a yearning feeling of disappointment.  They are few, and they don't mean that much.  If push comes to shove, then I remember the one thing for which I sincerely am disappointed.  That faint, not important, memory is that I missed the tangible and long term opportunity to guide young people in their education of music.  I was primed, and I had studied.  I was at the top of my form, and fate decided, or rather my own personal inability to understand politics decided I was not to fit into mainstream academic American university.  This unbeknownst to most is the Graceland of teaching.  It is that not because it is the pinnacle of substance, integrity, honesty, and artistry, but because it is the white man's creation of this utopia.  It serves itself rather than serving humanity and their humanities.  It is okay I missed this boat, because I realized it was not necessary for your success.  In many ways it is and was necessary for your financial sustenance.  I don't miss teaching that much, but as I see the world unfold around me today with its hypocritical, fraudulent, lies, I pine for a time when I was at my prime and would have been able to guide young lives in the field of music creating a better world.  I also miss swimming, becoming a competent basketball player, and playing jazz with a peer group.  I feel uneasy about composing, because there are tangible forces which affect your ability to do such.  Composing is reliant upon hearing and your ears, and as such our environment can quash one's ability to compose.  I all ready experienced this in the city of Columbus, Ohio, a city rife with rail noise.  When I discovered these machines were hindering my ability to be able to do my job, I changed gears.  I put composing on a shelf and closed this chapter, until later I was able to pick it up at the appropriate time.  Ironically the environment for this was being trapped in a tin can floating in the middle of an ocean.  There was no more appropriate venue for creating music.  I was lucky that I was ready for it.  I hope I will be ready for the next chapters when they reveal themselves to me. 

The Illustrious Mr. Jobs

In another era it was Mr. Tibbs, "Virgil Tibbs."  ("Bond, James Bond.")  Sydney Poitier, America's first professionally recognized African-American actor, portrayed Virgil Tibbs, a police detective not unlike Santiago Tiago Vega in the current Showtime series "Penny Dreadful:  City of Angels."  Both series, "In the Heat of the Night" and "Penny Dreadful," culturally are relevant.  "In the Heat of the Night" began as a film and later was developed into a television series ironically starring Archie Bunker, America's most famous prime time racist played by Carroll O'Conner.  All of this valid and effective cultural commentary pioneered by Norman Lear has been overshadowed by a newly conceived and implemented pop culture forged by the tech companies.  All of it is based upon one simple postulate, relatively young and undeveloped publicly accessible wireless technology.  Publicly accessible wireless technology began with Bill Clinton.  He alone decided the future fate of the American economy.  Was he successful?  Was cluttering the world's airwaves with excessive electromagnetic energy necessary?  The world has used this, varying frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum since the inception of radio.  It has been done carefully and prudently and in moderation.  Space communications utilize microwaves.  Ultra violet and infrared as well as X rays and gamma radiation all are examples of differing frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Always its use has been conservative and careful to ensure the health and well being of the human species.  Evidently Mr. Clinton and the rest have a death wish for the planet and our earth is in the throes of demise.  If something is not done our deaths will be ugly.  They will not be out of the ordinary, because the normal culprits will be responsible.  These culprits like depicted in H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" will be simple.  They will be bacteria, fungi, cancer, viruses and all of the related issues in response to excessive heat and humidity.  Perhaps this is the goal.  Another clever and entertaining film entertains the notion of extraterrestrials colonizing the earth, building a heat producing and carbon excreting mechanism, and preparing our earth for their eventual inhabitation.  Of course they require a warmer environment than our earth provides.  There are a handful of interests that could benefit from a warmer earth.  America has lost sight of any of them, because we have been saturated with a disease pandemic.  That was convenient.  The Russian Investigation?  Putin desires a warmer planet and melting ice caps, so the shipping lane across the northern Arctic will open.  Those ice breakers are an expensive commodity.  All ready it has happened.  Energy companies benefit from warmer temperatures, because human beings cannot tolerate extreme heat.  We must pay for air conditioning.  In the film "Logan's Run" a dome has been built enclosing our living space, and citizens have a finite life expectancy.  At a particular point in their lives they must go to Carousel to be exterminated in a dramatic spectacle of sport.  Most of these scenarios have been thought of, but we are too busy absorbing the products of publicly accessible wireless communication.  I will admit owning a wireless portable computer is enticing.  It is a tricorder and a communicator in one.  This all ready has been thought of, but the technology was not available.  "Beam me up, Scotty."  What am I getting at?  Obviously I am not a huge fan of the wireless technology.  All you really need is a T3 line in your home and a routing box.  We are paying for the freedom to be able to dance around with our devices in our hands or laps.  Portable.  I don't have trouble sitting at my computer desk or in a comfortable chair while working on the computer.  I never wanted a smart phone.  The display is too damn small for me to be able to see it.  I don't need this frustration.  Back in the day if you had a two bits you could make a call from a weather proof and sound resistant phone booth.  If you were drunk and rowdy you could try to cram as many as your fraternity buddies into it as possible.  I miss those phone booths, although perpetually they smelled like wino piss.  Usually the listing you needed was ripped out of the onboard phone book.  I would not trust my home's security to an "app."  I don't use apps.  I use applications, programs created for the personal computer or PC meant to accomplish complex and creative things.  Pop culture, our newly created pop culture, uses publicly accessible wireless technology to entertain gullible minds.  How about an app that keeps track of all of your financial transactions and tells you which are suspect?  With bitcoin, Paypal, and Apple pay it could be difficult to keep track of your impulse buys.  Tina Fey promotes this.  Use your convenient plastic card to buy all you need without a care in the world.  Who cares if you have the money?  These things are not about which I wanted to pontificate.  Instead I wanted to expound on America's "Extremism."  There was a FB post recently that was humorous but true.  When told they would no longer be able to own slaves, America went to war.  We didn't negotiate the issue.  We didn't discuss it.  It was "All or Nothing at All."  Why was this?  The simple answer is to be able to discuss anything including Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, or police brutality one is required to possess knowledge.  If you have not read, studied, or formed an opinion based upon reflection of events, history, and information you are not able to discuss.  You only will get angry. feel persecuted and threatened, and possibly respond violently to a threat upon your livelihood.  This is the way our Confederacy responded, and that FB post was accurate.  Why must everything be so extreme?  Why cannot their be peaceful protests?  The answer to that also is simple.  Do accomplish such a goal demands intellectual stability over emotional angst.  Human beings in most situations are better guided by their minds than their feelings.  When feelings become the center of our decisions, people get hurt.  It is a difficult issue, because our feelings are what make us feel human.  Without emotion life is empty.  Emotion provides us with love, fulfillment, happiness, grief, and inspiration.  Without these things life can feel meaningless, so a balance must be achieved.  The Extremism that has overtaken America is a result of ignorance, an ignorance championed by our public system of education.  We threw our populace under the bus, Rosa Park's bus, when Washington gave up on public education.  Once public education was the hub of American life.  Our entire lives circulated around our school, our teachers, our activities, and our childrens' achievements in preparation for working lives.  This was a time when the American economy still supported our traditional way of life.  All of that has changed, and our economy has become one of technology.  Everything in our lives circulates around publicaly accessible wireless technology.  For me America's traditional offerings are more valuable and more substantial.  Why would I use an iPhone to film a movie when the results are so limited.  Yes, traditional means at one time were more expensive.  Do be able to make a motion picture required a myriad of skilled laborers, equipment, and knowledge.  Cameras, dollies, cranes, microphones, lighting and sets were necessary.  Certainly we see the difference between this old school process and what "Render Man" provides.  "Ah "Render Man."  "Ah, Bach," as Radar would say on the television sitcom M*A*S*H.  What is Renderman?  Renderman was a computer application or program created by Mr. Jobs, which allowed film to be synthesized with digital rendering to create what appears to be reality.   Computer evolution became powerful enough to process billions of pixels of video quickly enough to appear to be real.  On the dark web Japanese game designers vocally professed that blurring the line between fiction and reality was their goal.  Let the Extremism begin.  Out youth's minds began to be filled with inflamatory images of fiction depicted as reality.  It should be of no surprise when maladjusted and discontent teenagers living near underground Molybdenum processing equipment blow their fuses and wreak havoc on Columbine High School.  Mental health is the same as it always has been in America.  We just have been all brainwashed into believing in iPhone fiction.  To be continued.

The Second Million Man March

When I do something as simple as sitting in my bedroom and tapping on the laptop keyboard, a QWERTY keyboard by the way, always there is some force which I am forced to overcome.  While on the surface it may not seem like a middle-aged white man could experience true racial strife, because as it were WE are deemed "White Privilege;"  Where I live racial tension is rife all the time.  Like most parts of America you are best to keep an eye over your shoulder.  It is prudent living.  Crime, violent crime has escalated during the Trump presidency, if you can call it that.  I chose to give The Donald the benefit of the doubt.  I thought maybe his ill found humor, which it turns out is just smug narcissism, might suggest he has some wisdom.  It turns out I was wrong in a big way.  He had no plan.  He had no qualifications for being our American president, and conversely he has brought America down to levels not experienced in recent decades.  With W. there was massive corruption including the rise of a tyrannical vice president who with the help of Donald Rumsfeld chose to decimate an entire country which has yet to recover.  This grievous error in judgement created America's greatest foreign terrorist group, ISIS or ISIL, who claimed all of America's abandoned military equipment and waged holy hell on our nation consequently.  All they ever wanted was for America to get out of the Middle East, their territory.  That is all Osama Bin Laden wanted, and yet still we have failed to do it.  That oil is just too tempting.  It has become the longest war and still we do not know for what we are fighting.  It turns out to be that oil, which we have failed to seize and poppy plants for the Sackler Family pharmacy.  They have been brought out, but Dick Cheney still remains America's most potent war criminal.  History forgets quickly in an age of Big Brother, a social media conglomerate who know also control television.  We have witnessed it for the first time in a planned, executed, and mostly fraudulent campaign of fear.  Fully I believe Fauchi is behind it.  The democrats are benefiting from our president's inability to do his job.  Never has he been capable merely playing golf, watching television, and tweeting in an unprecedented display of ridiculous self absorption.  His presidency will culminate in a million man march on the Capital demanding his removal from office forcibly.  This is the reason why he has fortified our White House exactly the way Bill Mayer worried.  Even if he is defeated by Joe Biden in the November election, Mayer speculates he will not vacate the presidency voluntarily.  He will formulate another conspiracy penned by Bill Barr and the rest of his cronies and try to remain in power.  Black people are intuitive enough to understand that he will need some urging to leave.  It is happening now.  What they really are saying in addition to "Black Lives matter," is Donald Trump needs to be removed from office.  He all ready was found guilty of treasonous acts, and yet his Republicans cohorts felt it in their best interest to keep him the leader of the club.  Mitch is a disgrace.  It is amazing that these men have not been targets of attempted assassination.  I do not say that lightly.  In any other era of volatile American history, a more urgent message would have been sent to Washington, DC.  It is in the works.  This is not what I wanted to pontificate.  For some reason it does not surprise me this behavior.  Fully I have expected a tyrannous domination of America by the Trump White House.  It has been happening slowly over time, but the groundwork has been laid.  In a surreal image of deja vu, the Civil Rights Movement of America has been rekindled.  It is welcomed and necessary.  Still these things are not what I wanted to pontificate.  What I want to confront are the other attacks upon America.  As a middle-aged white man today I newly have been cast as America's enemy.  Powerful white men as it were.  I am not powerful.  I find myself to be very normal.  I have ceased to whore around, mainly because it is not readily available in America.  Also it is humiliating and debasing.  The world's oldest profession, a profession which provides love, companionship, and sexual gratification to lonely people, is deemed a mortal sin.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As I shop in our fair town during these tense times, I see people, mostly mothers trying their best to save face.  Everyone is trying so hard to be the American normal, married with children.  It has become so difficult.  Not only has our system of public education been debased and embarrassing, now our children do not know what gender they are.  There are bigger fish to fry in America, and we have been duped.  While our millennial generation has become addicted to iPhones and social media, and has been led to believe that God did not choose their sex, fascists have begun to take over America.  It is evident everyday.  The latest figure was how much billionaires have made during the Fauci-created pandemic.  Fully I believe monetary reward is what he seeks through patents on personally owned vaccinations.  America, whomever we have become through this Fascist movement, has been trying to kill us for a long time now.  Polluted air, polluted water, and carcinogens created from aberrant electromagnetic energy are enough to stymie a nation.  We all ready are reeling from these hindrances.  Now we have to worry about a government-created biological weapon engineered in a laboratory.  For years I have been complaining about low-flying small aircraft, and finally it dawned on me that there is no more efficient method of delivering such a weapon.  It would be like crop dusting, but they are dusting us with infectious disease.  If I took a pot shot as one of the low-flying planes rest assured audio surveillance sensors would record and track my shot.  Authorities would arrive at my house in a matter of minutes handcuffing me and taking me to jail.  Do I have the right to defend myself against such an invading enemy, and if so how?  Do I need to purchase a RPG?  The most basic functions of human life have been assaulted and are being assaulted on a daily basis.  The one thing the human race needs to excel and prosper is our environment.  We need our air, because this air and the stage contained within it is the platform for our existence.  At the moment our environment and air have been commandeered by industrialized America including our military.  No longer can we act, dance, and perform in the human condition, because the stage upon which we are supposed to create has been sacrificed for monetary gain for a handful of tyrannical, fascist, and self-defeating few.  It is the responsibility of Christians to save ourselves from such evil.  If violence is required than a second "Million Man March" to Washington, DC is the precursor.