The Origins of Jass

Christianity and its human vessel were created for a reason.  Who knew that evil, the serpent, the Devil would coexist with God and attempt to fleece man?  If we read the Bible it is all there, but Bible reading is passe.  God is passe.  We as a nation have little way to discern right and wrong, honesty, and deceit, or good and evil.  This is the way the Devil wants it.  How are we to know the difference?  If critical thinking is the only process upon which is relied to makes decisions, especially moral decisions, than what assures us we have made the correct choice?  The answer is God has provided us with a system, a human system which is intertwined with creative and artistic sensibility.  It is an engine, a machine of emotional feelings, instincts, and reactions.  These perceptions and thus reactions are physiological, biological, and organic.  They originate in the processes of the body and are a core part or should be of our human existence.  The trouble is the human race as a whole has been lead away from our consciences for a reason.  If we have no gut reaction upon which to rely than Donald Trump and his administration can lie directly to our faces like Big Brother.  That is what Big Brother is, a falsification of reality to suit the "party."  Why was it banging around in my brain today that Communism all ready has overtaken the American political process.  It is a simple paradigm.  Agree with  "The Party," and your needs will be met.  "The Party."  All you have to do is agree with the  predominant social and political rhetoric, and the socialist system will provide for your needs.  "The Party."  Truth no longer is a matter of importance.  Justice, honesty, and good no longer play a part in human existence.  The reason is simple, and the the reason simply is because it is much simpler only to seek to gain and spend.  If the core of your existence only is to pillage, imperialize, collect, and spend than life is simple.  There is no need for intelligence, thinking, philosophizing, or creativity.  Only we seek to conquer and put heads on stakes as a symbol of our championship.  Life is simple.  Seek and conquer.  Do not think.  Do not create.  Do not quest for beauty, serenity, and spiritual fulfillment.  When are needs are met, then we stare directly into the void, the abyss, the darkness.  Then it is required with our human mind and souls a way to fill this void with human ingenuity, accomplishment, and good.  This is not about what I wished to write today, but my mind is clouded.  Anyone who doubt climate change or global warming only has to walk outside.  Our scorched earth means it is difficult to exist outside without pain and suffering, like the pain and suffering of being forced to pick cotton against your will.  As I have been studying the history of Jazz and necessarily the other forms of indigenous American music, several things have come to light.  One is I would be inclined to call Jazz America's finest folk music.  In a simple definition, folk music means music championed by the folks, folks being not academic or highly educated scholars of music.  Surely we are aware that the human mind is capable of genius in all people, because our founding fathers recognized the need to state such in our Constitution.  All men are created equal.  It is a simple sentence, and life in America would be simpler today if this sentence were reiterated more often.  Jazz was music created by the folks, so my premise largely is correct.  Jazz is America's greatest folk music, but then I must include and consider the other forms of America's great musics, Country, Bluegrass, and what has been considered Folk music for years, the protest music of our Civil Rights Movement.  Is jazz better than these?  I say emphatically, "No."  That would be short-sighted and callow.  The power and integrity of Bluegrass is irrefutable, but this form of American music largely is undefined and thus recognized until much later than its true origins.  Bill Monroe, while credited with creating Bluegrass, is not its father just as W.C. Handy is not the Father of the Blues.  As I watched Wynton Marsalis describe the blues in his recent YouTube tutorial, I was surprised when he cited W.C. Handy as the "Father of the Blues."  Few American including myself know anything about this man, except that he wrote the song, "Saint Louis Blues" which later was morphed into the "Saint Louis Blues March" played by Glenn Miller's band.  Let's qualify.  The first designation in American music history is the difference between composed music, music that is planned and written down on paper, and music which is created, learned and purveyed by an aural tradition.  "By ear."  Let me say that again.  "By ear."  No music.  Nothing written down on paper.  Learned by hearing with the ears, mind, body, and soul.  It is possible to hear with the human skin, and easily this is explained by unborn babies being educated before they develop ears.  The skin, the largest human organ, may be the best hearing device the human being possesses.  Before our corrupt and "Party-lining" medical establishement saw fit, "Otoacoustic" meant this specifically, hearing with the skin.  It stands to reason understanding that feeling or tactile sensations simply are waves understood by the dermis.  Without delving into human anatomy, American music must be classified this way, and it makes the understanding of American music history easier.  Louis Armstrong at first did not read music, he played what he heard, knew, and developed in his own mind and soul.  This is an extraordinary concept, and that which makes this man so notable in American musical evolution.  The majority of what Louis Armstrong performed did not come off a page.   It came out of his soul largely through his ears and mind.  The same is true of blues music, except in the case of the Father of the Blues, a title bestowed upon himself not unlike "The Creator of Jazz," Jelly Roll Morton.  In trying to understand this complicated and diverse chronology of musical evolution in America, qualifying the difference between "composed" music and music in the "aural" tradition is key.  W.C. Handy has been cast "The Father of the Blues" only because he may have been the first to write it down on paper, or less effectively dilute it into something that can be understood by the masses.  This is a twelve bar form with a chord progression of the tonic, subdominant, and dominant which move in logical and cadential way providing a convenient song form for blues performers.  This rather simplistic form, which often is cited as the definition of the blues, is far from its true definition.  While W.C. Handy was authoratative about the blues and its origins, I feel it is inappropriate to bestow this title upon him.  It is an academic accolade, and that is America's tradition.  W.C. Handy certainly provided no semen for the inception of the resulting organic entity of the Blues.  Instead he may be considered a scholar of the Blues.  Because you are the first to document an art form on paper such as Gunther Schuller did for African tribal drumming does not mean you are its father.  This is a ludicrous title.  As America rethinks her African roots and its improper diversions, this is one.  W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton are designated such, because they saw fit to write down their findings.  In the case of Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe accolades should be attributed to him for his pioneering effort at transcribing the aural polyphony of the New Orleans horn section in Early or Hot Jazz.  He was the first to write down the organic counterpoint between trumpet, clarinet, and trombone in early New Orleans jazz bands.  Mr. Marsalis effectively describes how the Blues and the fervor of worship in the black church combine in a swinging of traditional Sousa marches.  These marches, which have been well-studied, are complete and musical entities comparable to European orchestral forms.  They effectively pioneer a more American form of musical expression integrating customs and traditions of a relatively pioneering new nation.  The combining of these elements, slave traditions, worship, Sporting Houses, Blues, Ragtime, and Minstrel Shows resulted in a new form of American music, Jass.  When the "ass" in Jass became recognized and was deemed profane, easily the term was sanitized as "Jazz." 

Covid Shutdown via Food Poisoning

Every article I read on wikipedia concerning infections of any kind, fungal, bacterial, and viral start the same way.  "Infections are on the rise."  They are becoming more and more prevalent, and they are becoming resistant to traditional antibiotic therapies.  That means medications once which were effective in treating infections no longer are.  My gut instinct tells me one thing.  If the same crooked pharmaceutical companies which are hawking addictive opiates are making our over-the-counter medications, it stands to reason that not only are we being duped into addiction, we are being duped into purchasing phony, ineffective, over-the-counter drugs.  I have used every over-the-counter fungal medication, and none of them are working.  I don't think it is because the fungus suddenly has grown wings and has become super fungus.  I think it is because the stuff that is in these medications is a ruse.  The quality of alcohol in America suffers from the same consequences.  Instead of using high quality natural resources, pure cane sugar and naturally grown corn, distilleries are using GMO seeds purchased from Monsanto.  Yuck.  Cheap whiskey.  It's no wonder that fungal infections in human beings are on the rise.  Candida feeds on sugar, and alcohol mainly is sugar.  We are being poisoned. 

Radio History

It amazingly is good news S.C.O.T.U.S. is doing the right thing.  P.O.T.U.S. on the other hand...  His evening news hour television ad's for his re-election ominously wreak of Big Brother.  Their tone is dark, foreboding, and a bit dictatorial.  For any millennial who has not read George Orwell's novel, "19984,"  2020 has become the year of reckoning.  We anticipated 2012, a date indigenous America cultures adopted as the end of the world, with angst, but 2012 came and went.  It took six years for the real drama to unfold.  It is here now, 2020.  Luckily and amazingly the Supreme Court of the United States is doing the right thing.  Like most republicans they probably feel like they are on a sinking ship.  Although these rulings today are important for the future of our country, what I wanted to address was the short comings of the compact disc.  As I type this word on my Querty keyboard, I wondered what was the difference between the word "disc" and disk.  Evidently a new word was coined which denotes specifically a compact disc digital recording vessel.  Physically it qualifies as a "disk," but when audio media is associated creating a vessel for the playback of audio, words or music, it becomes "disc."  Minidisc.  So be it.  In the last few evenings while I have been archiving cassette tapes I recorded while working on a doctorate in composition at OSU, I realized while enjoying the integrity of these mostly concert performances that a CD, a compact disc, isn't the best vessel for listening to recorded media.  For me having worked on cruise ships for over a decade, CD's were indispensable.  The reasons are obvious to the consumer.  First they are much smaller and less heavy than LP's.  Second the audio encoded on them should be professionally rendered.  That means low or no noise and excellent sound quality.  What we all have discovered is that in the music business it is a crap shoot.  For classical enthusiasts specific orchestras, conductors, and therefore discs constitute the most desirable music listening experiences.  For example Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra will yield a satisfying listening experience.  Let me clarify.  As I study the Ken Burns series "Jazz" I am formulating hypothesis in my mind about the origins of American music.  I have no aspiration that eventually I will be able to teach a music history class at the collegiate level.  That is not an unreasonable vocational prospectus.  I am not falling for that bait again, the possibility of finding a college teaching job.  Mildly I chased that snipe in my twenties, and I won't waste my time on it again.  What I do is for my own well being, and like many business merchants I met while living in Columbia, South Carolina I would like to be more familiar with my own nation's lineage.  It is not an easy affair just understanding America's own music history.  This is what Ken Burns attempted and accomplished with his video series.  Not only is the history of jazz deciphered, music created mostly by African-Americans, but country music has been addressed and its substantial influences on cultural America.  What is startling to me is the line of demarcation between them.  It is like the same types of civil evolution were occurring simultaneously, one in the white world and one in the black world.  Wow!  That is segregation whether it was intended to be that or not.  It just happened that way.  I have studied jazz history before and learned most of what I know from George William Knowles.  Bubba with his stubborness openly voiced his opposition to "singers" and "guitar players."  I carried his sentiment with me most of the rest of my life.  I even carried it up to Cowtown, where it influenced my responses during my General Exams.  When asked to lay out a timeline for the history of jazz in America, I excluded vocalists.  It was not until twenty-five years later I realized the importance of jazz singing and its affect upon the musical development of North America.  Everything I am learning, and there is a lot of it, is a valid metaphor for American life.  Most of it has been shelved, rendered defunct, or openly rejected as the authentic roots of American life.  Consider that jazz music is the least popular musical form in America.  There are reasons for all of it, and I am trying to get to the bottom.  Meanwhile Rahsaan Roland Kirk is playing in the background.  Here is a jazz musician as I understand it that was blind and played many instruments, notably a straight alto saxophone.  He was an eclectic performer of the Avant-garde, the most current style of jazz still unrecognized as America's most distinct art form.  I mean all of jazz, but during its century long evolution there were many chapters which easily define North America's struggle to become an upstanding nation.  The definition of "upstanding" is subjective, and America's history is pitted with cultural and racial wounds.  There is no way to quantify "upstanding" without spirituality.  As such God and religion were a crucial part of America's doctrines.  That has been lost today, and sorely we are in need of the second coming of Jesus Christ.  America has been erroneously defined in terms of monetary profits.  Who has the most wins, but in the substantial tradition of the building of America from the ground up from the toil and sweat of pioneering land workers this does not fly.  If Donald Trump was forced to create his own existence with no money to spend on products, could he succeed?  Could he build shelter, grow food, and make medicine?  That is the question that will remain no matter how much money is amassed in Grand Caymen and Swiss banks.  At some point the value of this money will dissipate.  It all ready has, because when the federal government needs money merely they print it.  What value has this paper?  The true value of American money is being able to back it with goods and services, and that is not cable television and wireless internet.  The value system of America is has become so skewed we have no idea of what is important to human life.  Take for example the compact disc.  Here is a digital product which costs pennies to manufacture, and in the long run it has proven to be worth little more.  CDs still have value, but their influence upon American culture have been limited.  Why?  The answer is because they are not a tangible human creation.  They are, but when defined in terms of a human result dropping a plastic disc into a a mechanism with a laser that reads zeros and ones...  Well that is not very human.  The ultimate reality and demise of compact discs lies in this mechanism.  In my home CD and DVDs skip.  The vibration in the air created by low-flying aircraft and rumbling freight trains makes the music and video skip.  CDs in my household have lost value as play back sources.  Instead they have become archival sitting on a shelf preserving America's important and great artistic music.  The irony has become that only now have I realized this shortcoming.  Futilely while trying to keep these discs from skipping, I have realized that a CD, a simple serial list of music to be played in a chosen order, is not natural.  Instead A and B "sides" of an album or cassette provide a better stage for the presentation of entertainment.  Always there is an Act l and Act ll.  In classical orchestral music often there are movements, sections of music, that differintiate from one another.  It is not usual to have a sequential list of music played, unless the curator is extremely skilled at how to pick a set.  Picking a set is akin to programming a list of music that has a natural ebb and flow, tension and release, and variety of content.  In most liklihood this has been lost.  The place to turn for guidance is radio, and radio in America is a shadow of its former self.  Something that was integral to the building of America now is an aging unused dinosaur replaced with the accessibility and low cost of internet streaming.  The audio quality is nowhere near the same in internet streaming.  This was the beauty of radio that both FM and AM sound quality lost nothing in its transmission.  The warmth, beauty, and sonic quality of the original music was  preserved and broadcast to the listerners just like a live performance.  Live performance is a thing of the past especially now that Covid 19 has reared its ugly head.  The absence of radio, real radio from America, leaves an unfillable hole in our cultural heritage.  It is worthy that the internet has attempted to fill this void, and I am grateful, but America's golden years of radio, television, and music are gone.  Their history is there for our own enlightenment. 

The Return of the Humanities

There is some tangible reason, why I am waiting to do wiring repair in our second attic.  Our attic ventilation fan burned out a long time ago, and when I smelled the burning we called the fire department.  This man in full fire fighting gear crawled into the small opening above our staircase into this attic and pulled the burning culprit from its metal frame before it burned down our house.  The registered temperature was 450 degrees.  Although I was not here the replacement of this fan and its sibling was a big deal.  The electrical company had to call the roofing company which in turn had to oversee the installation of new housings in our roof.  It has been a nightmare, because their roof was a substandard product anyway.  Always we have had leaks especially around the chimney.  Not long ago we had the entire situation remedied.  We got a new roof from a quality company.  They repositioned some of the bathroom outlet pipes to make sealing the chimney easier.  (By the way I am having to wear plastic protective eye protection to keep the microdust out of my contact lenses in the second story bedroom.)  There is a low pressure trough at Wilmington over the Atlantic Ocean near the mouth of the Cape Fear River.  They are saying it might become a tropical storm.  It is there because Fort Bragg is sending munitions to Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point on route to the Middle East.  That is why it is hot and humid.  That is why black microdust is flowing through my bedroom walls.  Again I would ask, "Why is the United States military in the Middle East?"  The longest war in the history of North America, and no one knows why.  Most of these military personnel will vote for Trump and Pence, that is if we judge from the signs in their yards.  As Commander in Chief he is keeping their plates full, their not working wives, and their many kids.  Expensive homes in our neighborhood on a working man's salary with no college degree.  I guess you would vote for this man too for what he is providing you.  In Plandemic.com, the movie, Judy states that Covid 19 in the lungs looks exactly like COPD.  They can't tell the difference.  If Covid 19 is listed as the diagnosis in comes the money.  I am beginning to think that it may not be a virus per say.  I am beginning to think it is just toxins in our air.  A virus is a convenient solution, especially if a certain doctor owns the patents to the drug needed for an antidote.  I am just happy to be recovering from several years of severe illness with no health insurance.  Also I am happy to be rediscovering music I encountered working on my DMA in music composition at Ohio State University.  I went to Cowtown in 1991 and stayed in Columbus for ten years.  It was the most fruitful and enjoyable musical tenure in my life after a few years of incubation.  The initiation period was not pleasant getting used to the Midwest.  They did not like Southerners.  After acclimating finally and finding a worthy companion I settled into a productive musical groove producing over ten CD's worth of original material.  It took Jeff Lorber forty years to receive his Grammy.  It will take that long for my material to come to fruition.  I have faith in it and patience.  I have nothing else to do.  While I am being lead back into the trap of doing music for a living, its great reward and spiritual healing, I am will not fall for that gag again.  The wonderful feeling and happiness of music, the community, the spirituality, the emotional fulfillment it can provide, also it can take away quickly and brutally.  Anything that you come to love, want, and appreciate, it will be attempted to take away from you.  This is how humanity works, and it is unfortunate.  This is the human species at work, Donald Trump, manipulators with no moral compass, no understanding of God, and not Christian ethos.  It is frightening staring the devil in the face.  Certainly it is frightening knowing that evil has overtaken North America, our country.  No one is looking out for you.  While Black Lives Matter is busy pulling down confederate monuments, we should be remembering the Holocaust in full detail.  The monuments are not there to remind us of our oppression, they are there to remind us of our freedom from the existence of this oppression.  As such they should be retooled as subservient, compliant, defeated fascists put in their places by the love, not the wrath of God.  It is appropriate that America is getting face lift, and we need it.  It is and has been a stinking, rotting, cesspool of recurrent racism propagated by ignorant, zealot, small-minded humans.  This is what Americans need to understand on a daily basis.  As a musician I tend to sway toward artistry, but in all honesty if monuments should be placed around the country who should they be?  Why war heroes?  I must pause for a moment to answer my first question.  Why am I delaying the electrical work in our second attic?  The answer is because there is too much static electricity in our home for me to be crawling around on my belly in the dark unwrapping wires that have been taped for fifty-seven years.  I must find the correct circuit breaker, turn it off, test the live current, and connect new wires to the cluster.  Pass.  Pass.  Pass for the moment.  I do not need an invisible menace threatening my life, one of which I have no control, and one that is in the hands of CSX.  It can wait for the moment.  The answer to whose statues should be placed around America?  George Gershwin of course.  John Coltrane.  Duke Ellington.  Louis Armstrong.  Ben Franklin.  Why does America ignore and scorn those responsible for her own cultural development?  It is beyond comprehension.  War heros.  While freeing slaves was a watershed event in American history, it is understandable that this violent and malevolent event should not be a metaphor for America.  It was a beginning.  What transpired as a result, in light of continual resentment and resistance from the American south, should be the legacy and the future of our nation.  These things of integrity, the humanities which influence our cultural existences are what are important to the human race. 

The GE Genocide

CSX is back at it, unabated, uninhibited, and scorching our earth like the spewing dragon it is.  After a brief and needed respite from heavy railroading  shareholders must be paid.  Wall Street.  The Stock Market.  Pay shareholders.  Shareholders.  Who is important in America?  Shareholders?  Make money for shareholders.  Who does the work?  My ears once again are screaming, tinnitus in my left ear.  I can feel my heart beat heavy in my head.  The infrasound is rampant.  The evening news stated it was a violent Fourth of July weekend.  In Charlotte alone there were forty gunshots victims in area emergency rooms.  There is nowhere to escape.  As General Electric saw fit near Columbine High School there were three moly mines.  Their great plan was boring a great tunnel underneath the mountains, the Continental Divide no less, and building a slow-moving conveyor belt to move the material to its refinery.  Low frequency AC drives power this conveyor, and the electrical processing equipment to power the drives also is under the ground.  Is this a novel idea like the novel Coronavirus?  Novel is not the appropriate term.  Ask the residents of Taos, New Mexico in their fifteen years of misery who was responsible for their "hum?"  Conspiracy theories abounded.  Aliens.  The DOD.  The Pentagon.  NORAD.  Eventually the determination was "mining equipment."  It was GE, and it was their invention of a miles long conveyor belt underneath the ground which caused the hum.  More specifically the hum is caused by processed electricity, alternating current manipulated by a computer with its frequency lowered into the infrasonic range.  The electricity, which is processed in inverters, hums feverishly as it is contained and and released.  If it were freed in all of its glory in high volume and at higher frequencies like more traditional forms of alternating current it would not complain, but the demons, caged, penned, contained scream as they exit the vessel.  They hum.  All of the electricity, volumes of it, undulating, pulsating, vibrating, pent up and nozzled out in so few cycles per second.  It contests.  It complains.  It says, "This is not right!"  The same processing equipment is on CSX diesel electric locomotives.  The SD-40-2 is the biggest culprit.  It hums and probably was the biggest hummer in history.  It's too bad nobody got off.  Instead we suffer.  With the GEVOlution of GE the humming is not as prevalent, but it still is there.  The EPA did require Tier 4 standards, so the GEVO was born.  The problem is when carbon emissions are lessened other emissions rise.  What could be more important than carbon emissions, for instance electromagnetic emissions?  While I am not knowledgeable about radio transmitters, I am certain that alternating current, AC power circulating in wound coils through a stater, rotating, pulling a magnet would qualify as a source of electromagnetic energy.  Fully I understand as I was taught by a physicist on the Serenade of the Seas, that electromagnetism is a duality.  There is electricity and there is magnetism.  They exist on perpendicular poles.  Heat and vibration are their byproducts.  Electricity, alternating current and magnetism producing heat and vibration.  That does not sound like an appealing scenario.  While an AC drive technically may not qualify as a low frequency radio wave transmitter, I think it is.  The effects it wreaks on our environment are substantial.  Sound waves at low frequency from a constantly turning prime mover, about 1050 rpm, producing a 17 Hz infrasound wave.  Is that right?  Add to it this.  What is the effect?  A violent Fourth of July weekend and for no apparent reason. 

The Donald's Friends.

Here it is the first week of July, 2020, and the day after the American national holiday, The Fourth of July.  It was a difficult weekend.  Unsurprisingly it is scorching hot.  CSX chose to contribute to the Fourth of July festivities by manufacturing a large percentage of this heat.  For citizens of America it was not helpful.  When I began paying attention to CSX twenty-three years ago, its parent was John Snow.  Briefly Mr. Snow was appointed the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington, DC, but that did not last.  CSX-T was his creation.  It is a railroad conglomerate which merged the Chesapeake Bay system with Seaboard Coastline.  In short it gobbled up rights to the east coast north/south rail corridor which runs parallel to Interstate 95.  This best can be understood if one thinks about the "Juice Train," Tropicana's shining animal which transports freshly picked Florida oranges to its processing facility in New Jersey.  Once it ran four times a week, and it was easy to spot.  It was a dedicated train with only refrigerated railroad cars carrying the bountiful harvest of freshly grown Florida oranges.  Is it ironic that their processing facility is in New Jersey?  There are Youtube videos showing the actual journey through the eyes of a train engineer.  I have no beef with Tropicana, but a continually running freight train which dominates the eastern seaboard of the United States...  That is something to which to pay attention.  Add Amtrack passenger trains, which in most probability have been lessened because of the Covid 19 outbreak and CSX normal freight operations.  The reason why America does not have a high speed rail passenger network, is because this nearly century old rail infrastructure is owned and controlled by CSX.  John Snow long ago passed the torch and sold his creation for great profit.  Recently Hunter Harrison, a Canadian railroad magnate was brought in further to monetize CSX earnings.  Evidently his track record at reforming Canadian railroads was substantial enough to merit his lucrative contract.  Stock prices soared, CSX futures, and the company made a lot of money from the sale of their stocks.  All of this came from the hiring of Hunter Harrison.  Ironically he died on the job.  While his methodology of "Precision Railroading" did get transplanted to CSX and America, his ace in the hole was short lived.  Now a majority stake in CSX is owned by a Hedge Fund, the same high risk financial instrument which brought down Wall Street in the financial crisis of 2008.  Hedge Funds are not good things for the country.  They are get rich quick schemes for their owners.  They pool mortgages and sell them to investors.  It all began when past president Bill Clinton ran under a campaign slogan, "I feel everyone should be able to own their own home."  Rapidly not vetted high risk loans were divvied out to everyone who decided they could and should own a $250,000.00 house.  One Wall Street physician saw fit to read these mortgages and discovered that over time most of the owners of these mortgages would default and be forced into bankruptcy. Written into the risky loans were provisions that would hike the payments after a certain number of years unbeknownst to their holders.  Their payments doubled and tripled, and many were forced into foreclosure.  Happy times.  Still these Hedge Funds are operating with impunity.  Certainly a Hedge Fund owner is qualified to oversee the operations of one of the nation's larges Class A railroads.  Their offering for the national holiday celebrating the freedom of the colonies from oppressive British rule is railroading in full force.  Why not?  Affluent people visit their beach properties on weekends and holidays.  No ones hangs around Fayettenam.  Certainly it felt like that a virtual ghost town of eerie, foreboding, evil intent.  Oh, that was our President spewing lies, inciting racial rhetoric, and otherwise sealing the fate of his re-election campaign in the fall.  My question is:  Why did CSX choose to use the holiday weekend for itself?  Not unlike Christmas several years ago when for two weeks straight the Milan Yard on North Street was host to two idling Dash 8 locomotives.  Merry Christmas to you!  Shall we assemble a bevy of diesel transfer trucks, park them in the same lot, and let them run unabated to cool their drivers?  "My what a conscientious effort." Let's only think about our own well-being.  On the 4th magically both ES44ACH locomotives were perched running in a high notch at the CSX Milan Yard.  Glory.  It sure was hot this past weekend.  I wonder why?  Is it because vegetable oil likes its heat?  Of course that is more important than celebrating American independence.  Perhaps CSX feels this is what independence is, the freedom to use our country's ammenities for its own monetary profit.  Surely as American citizens were are to believe that somehow this revenue makes its way back into our American economy?  I think not.  Like the rest of it it is distrubuted to Donald's friends. 

In the Heat of the Moment

It is the 4th of July and all is quiet on the Van Story front.  I am sure it the hottest day of the year thus far.  We have had nineties in the past few week, and it has been oppressive outside.  No moving air and unpleasant.  You could manage.  CSX has been active this entire week earning their revenue servicing the Cargill vegetable oil plant on the Cape Fear River.  It would seem they have a dedicated mule on steroids, an ES44ACH which does the dirty work for the second largest privately-owned company in America.  I don't have a beef with Cargill.  They are not owned by a Mexican conglomerate like DAK Americas.  The trouble is making vegetable oil requires HEAT.  I remember reading that hot temperatures outside make their life easier either for transporting the finished oil or heating the soybeans in the vats.  I started driving around that plant a few years ago just to see what the process was.  They were so paranoid they erected a fence and gate enclosing a public road which went through their plant.  I really was trainspotting, something a handful of hobbyists do.  After they built the subdivision across the street and adjacent to the CSX mainline railroad tracks, CSX also came in and built a chain link fence to keep playing children off of their tracks.  I am positive that when the realtor sold these homes there was no mention made of the train activity.  There is a long line of trees meant to disguise the Cargill siding.  Since then they have cleaned up the tracks and put new ballast down.  The other subdivision along the Cape Fear River flooded recently without a hurricane.  Several years ago there was a televised City Council meeting where builders were petitioning the city to grant permits to build this subdivision.  I am positive no mention was made of potential flooding in a watershed area, the Cape Fear River basin.  I am positive those people living in the subdivision of Monclair were not aware that the Aberdeen & Rockfish tracks ran through their neighborhood.  Perhaps they did.  It only was when hazardous material tank cars showed up and were left sitting there that there became an issue.  Usually the EPA or some regulatory agency polices this activity.  Change gears.  When they showed Mount Rushmore last night on the evening news, I almost felt sick to my stomach.  It was startling how inappropriate this monument is.  There is a reckoning happening, and I agree with it.  The rich white men took this county for themselves.  They took it from native Americans killing many of them and their families.  It seems to me that the conquering European white man is on the decline.  The roots of America are not in Europe, although its influence is welcome.  If America had to fight a Revolutionary War to free themselves from an oppressive British rule, then one would think they would embrace the knowledge and wisdom of the Native American.  Could Christopher Columbus have survived without the friendship of Native Americans?  The reason why white supremacists only can recognize a colorless palette, a bland, tepid, soulless pile of dough, is beyond me.  It must be they are intimidated and frightened by color.  We'll call it, "Afraid of the Dark."  Trump supporters are, "Afraid of the Dark!"  Seeing these clearly European faces on a mountain in the Dakotas....  it was unsettling.  It felt like they sailed over, set up shop, and gave nary a thought for those who all ready lived here.  Heathens I believe they would call them, because they wore animal skins and rode horses.  Many Americans, including Texas ranchers, enjoy this lifestyle, the Western lifestyle.  Leather, wood, Colt .45's, and lassos.  I myself find it an appropriate model for quality living.  Why pollute the air with carbon emissions if you could just ride an indigenous animal?  The names come flooding in.  Nelson Rockafeller.  Andrew Carnagie.  J.P. Morgan.  What would have America been without them, but also what would have America been without African-Americans?  Is it possible jazz could have been born without blacks?  According to Ken Burns the academy, or music teachers and scholars in the east, readily were anticipating the new American music.  It did come, but it came in an oblique direction. Is it coincidental that Aaron Copland and Charles Ives often are cited as America's purest composers, artists who studied the American landscape and created a musical voice for our country.  I love "Appalachian Spring," and I listen to it often, but that is not the only voice of America. On the opposite end of the continuum is Charles Ives, and insurance salesman who adopted the ideals of the Second Viennese School.  There are not many mainstream Americans who choose this aesthetic to represent their country.  Why?  We must ask the "Russian Five."  The man of Russia was Petyr Tchaikovsky and appropriately so.  He is one of my favorite composers, because he is so prolific.  There is so much work, and all of it is exemplary.  Several years ago the Fayetteville Symphony, under the direction of Farad Fakouri, played this work in its entireity outside at Festial Park for the Fourth of July celebration.  There were cannons provided by Fort Bragg, real howitzers which were brought in to augment the performance.  It was very moving, because in Tchaikovsky's writing one can hear logic and beauty.  There is no nebulous finger wiggling.  There is no fodder.  Staunchly he understands form and content in music, and you can hear it unfold in a great exposition of human expression.  Isn't it ironic that America uses a piece of music by a Russian composer to represent it patriotism?  Not really.  America has been unusually fertile soil for freedom and creativity.  That has changed, and now we are in a trench, a white, tepid, soulless ball of dough which has no yeast.  It may rise a little, enogh to get an erection for a few minutes, but it will not sustain.  Sustenence is created by soul which is created by spirituality.  America has implemented an "erradicate God" campaign, and now there is nowhere to go except down.  Many people are realizing this.   America has begun the process of reclaiming herself in spite of the white rulers.  It is disappointing that heterosexuality took a hit in the process. 

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. 

The French, Russian and Newest American Revolution

When I find a small pocket of lucidity, usually lying in the bed trying to go to sleep or shortly after waking up, my life is transformed from a humid, dark, depression to a normal, thinking, problem-solving life.  This is the thought I had this morning in a brief five minute two step of my synapses.  We received a debit card today from some financial institution.  It purported to be my mother's stimulus payment, and after a little scrutiny indeed it turned out to be just that but in plastic form.  Has anyone heard about this method of payment from the Treasury?  I called the number, input the necessary information, created a PIN, and she had $1,200.00.  Why the debit card from an unknown financial institution?  The answer please Chuck Woolery.  The answer is Washington does not have the money.  They Bob Doled it out all ready, thusly my mother received her stimulus money from a federal loan.  It is borrowed money.  So I ask myself again this.  Why would an American president knowing that America is twenty trillion dollars in debt and knowing that stagnant wages will not allow the middle and lower classes to be able to pay more taxes knowingly cut tax revenue?  Washington needs money.  They need money for things like stimulus checks, Social Security, Medicare, the Pentagon, and the rest of the federal government.  Washington needs money adequately to run the country.  That is their job.  Congress, the White House, and their supporting agencies are a public business owned by the American people chartered to manage America.  It is a moot point that they are elected by  or rather chosen by common citizens.  This is the way the Constitution is written, and two hundred and fifty years later America attempts to abide by its doctrine.  Our country has strayed far from the Constitution's principles.  I ask again, when Washington so direly needs money to function, why would a sitting president cut tax revenue by twelve percent?  Because the common people in common jobs and with common wages have no ability to increase revenue, wouldn't the obvious focus of income for Washington be the affluent and the corporations?  I'll ask the question one more time.  If I hear the anecdote again that President Trump hates the post office, because he thinks its Amazon's whore, then he deserves to be shackled, publicly branded, and left in the public square.  One more time, SHOUTING, if our president had not cut corporate taxes from thirty-five percent to twenty-three percent then Washington would be taking thirty-five percent of Jeff Bezo's income.  This is why we have taxes.  Taxes from the public and largely from the rich and corporate America must pay for our government.  Before Ronald Reagan became president, the tax rate for the rich was seventy percent.  Seventy percent of the income from the upper class was allocated to Washington to manage America.  Ronnie changed that, and the Eighties began.  Many people I know loathe Reaganomics.  They are staunch opponents of Trickle Down Economics.  My experience during the Eighties was that culture was at an all time high point.  Film, music, art, and commerce were at a pinnacle in America.  It was a beautiful decade, even if it was one of excess.  Films were epic and masterful.  Music was inspiring and human.  Commerce, business for the common people was flowing.  These were small businesses.  Fashion, clothing, jewelry, appliances and more were innovative and useful.  It was an artistic time, and beauty was key.  Fully I understand things cannot be beautiful forever, because what goes up must come down.  Now we are down, and mostly it is because America has no money.  The money we have isn't worth much, because we don't have much.  America has been feigning making money from Wall Street moving money around mostly in illegal ways.  Hedge funds, misleading mortgages, cheap money, and greed lead Washington into the hole.  In the hole they will remain as the guard changes.  The guard are the same people as the people making the mistakes on Wall Street.  This was the choice of our Elector College.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over two million votes, and she should be president.  Somehow our Electoral College, appointed representatives by the guard, the same people in Washington and corporate America, squeezed the Donald into the presidency.  Fully I believe they were bribed.  We do not know who these electors are.  They are appointed by local politicians, friends of friends, of friends of the president.  It was a bigger ruse than Al Gore losing to W. in the Florida court system.  We all know it.  The American president should be elected by the people.  The Republicans have spent their entire tenure finding ways to manipulate the constitution in their favor instead of managing America.  Managing America is a boring job.  It does not exist in country clubs, expensive restaurants, and brothels.  It is an office job, but we have turned it into something else.  This president has turned it into television.  President Trump gave corporate America twelve percent of Washington's operating budget, because they asked.  For whom is he working, when America is twenty trillion dollars in debt and the Treasury does not have enough money to finish the stimulus checks?  What kind of president would do such a thing?  "Hey Donald, here is twelve percent  to help run America.  We know you need it and a lot more.  Instead of looking for money for America, working for America, and investing in Americans, the Donald is loyal to the mob. 

Joe Biden's Return

No one is reading my posts anyway.  I use this writing venue as a way to maintain my sanity in an insane world.  My mother recently has had a roller coaster ride of medical issues including an L3 compression fracture of her back.  We have been at doctor's appointments for the last months, and consequently I have no musical expression.  The only expression I have is of survival.  I feel no blues, no gospel optimism, or any clever or sophisticated jazz.  I am waiting for the musical expression to come to me, and it hasn't.  Evidently there isn't any.  Instead it is extreme meteorological low pressure, excessive rainfall, stagnant airflow, and humidity.  It is hell.  Try to get musical vibration going during these conditions is next to impossible.  Why?  The answer is, which easily could and will be disputed by our ignorant president seeing as everything that is not in his interest is a scam, a hoax, or fake news, musical expression largely which should be driven by emotional expression is communicated through and by air.  Air you say?  Thusly, in the words of Alton Brown.  Thusly.  Thusly music must have air to exist.  Scientifically it cannot exist in a vacuum.  No air, no music.  At the moment we are low on air, thus low pressure.  A low pressure cell is a weather front which has little air pressure.  Its essence is its lack of air.  Where is this air?  Our government, President Obama to be exact, suggested we have a CO2 tax.  This is an emissions tax.  Because President Trump has removed the majority of federal governmental oversight by not funding necessary agencies and leaving integral leadership positions vacant, a void of responsibility has been created.  During his three and a half years of presidency, more harm has been done to America than easily can be traced.  We are seeing the results of this irresponsibility during the Covid 19 pandemic.  Other than the depressing, misleading, and corrupt new reporting on television evening news, many things have corrected themselves during the "Shutter at Home" event.  Bicycle shops have flourished.  People have been more communal and active with their immediate families.  A fair amount of bullshit has been sifted out of our lives.  Back to music.  Music is communication, and it is necessary because in this Age of Information, we have little information.  We have sound bytes.  We have video.  We have tweets, posts, user groups, and instagram, but what we don't have is communication of enlightening nature.  Once our public schools, colleges, and universities were the hub of this kind of communication.  That has been changed, and now the iPhone has taken this role.  Contrast and compare the information on your iPhone with the information contained in a human group.  The difference is cyber life verses real life.  For several decades I have known this would be America's juncture.  Human evolution would either go back to the humanities or choose to live in cyber space for the next few centuries.  Perhaps cyberspace has been interesting enough until now.  Now the internet is wrought with misinformation, misleading propaganda, and utter decisive, politically motivated slander.  Not only that it has sapped the economic potential of many once viable industries which provided income to millions of people.  To mention a few, the music industry, retail, and pornography have been rendered mostly impotent by a T3 line.  That is pretty powerful and not really fair.  Who decided that pornography should be free to the consumer?  That is not very economically wise.  Who decided American popular music should no longer have monetary value?  Who decided the grassroots infrastructure of American life no longer was relevant?  When the world begins to fail and the computer systems are rendered inoperative, growing a vegetable, finding clean naturally occurring water, and breathing clean air will take precedence over anything.  Still our President lives much of his live in a gold gilded castle in Florida.  He does not understand that when Jesus returns to Earth for his second coming, those who have accepted him dead and alive will be transported to a new planet of His making, and the rest will be left to die horrible deaths on the deteriorating Earth.  This is not so far in our distant future.  What does this have to do with music?  The death of the Earth and the human race all ready has begun, and again we are seeing it now.  Simple remedies could save us now, but the small group of autocratic power players who hold most of the purse strings have proven to be deluded, demented, and self centered.  They are not capable in any way shape or form of leading the United States or her people.  In essence we are in the midst of a lame duct Congress and Presidency, and in historical fashion they are reaching their hands into the cookie jar and taking the last Oreo before departing Washington.  It is our responsibility to choose a new leadership in November, one capable of understanding reality and who cares about the people who have built and inhabit America.  Wish us luck. 

American Extremism by Jerry Springer

This is a time when I feel like not thinking.  It also is a time when I feel like not making music.  There are times I have found that resist exertion of positive energy.  These are times when, as Jesus did, you sleep.  In the lion's den you sleep.  In the midst of a fictitious or real disease pandemic you sleep.  Conscious logical thought often is punished in American society.  For example Global Warming has been miscast a hoax.  One only has to live in the American South to know full well that it is not.  Thirty years ago it was not one hundred degrees during our summers.  It was temperate, and there were seasons.  That has changed, and there is no question that excessive heat from man-made pollution has plagued America.  It has been proven in the last two months with air quality improving seventy percent during the Covid lock down.  It also has been the coolest spring in a decade.  Global Warming is no hoax, whether it is called that or Climate Change.  I have no choice but to acknowledge reality, because I am hard wired to ignore untruth.  We must live in truth, because denial causes depression.  Even when the situation is dire, salvation only can be found through enlightenment.  In our situation we are beset with misinformation, propaganda, and downright evil.  It is difficult to know what to believe.  I have with the help of instincts, emotions which react to truth or deception, come to some conclusions about Covid 19.  They are opinion and opinion only.  I am too fatigued to spend much time on something that should not be happening.  We all have enough on our plates to keep us busy for two more lifetimes.  I stopped listening to Trump over a year ago when it became clear he was delusional, senile, and self centered.  Why would anyone listen to such a president?  Government in America is not prime time television like he would like to believe.  As such trying to separate fictional comedy from our own survival has become difficult enough.  His presidency is a global disgrace.  Accompanying it is the failure of the millennial generation to accept responsibility for the planet earth.  As I shopped at the grocery store today I was beset with iPhone addicted youth donning no PPE and unable to accept the reality of a global health crisis whether it is real or fictitious.  It was a personal assault to me to be around such people, people who were not concerned with the well being of their community.  Their aesthetic is egocentric and selfish as is our president.  The "C" in community has lost its meaning, and the Covid 19 in an abstract way is helping.  We have had a grassroots revival of American ideals, and it is steeped in family.  Families when not burdened with chasing the dollar find other more enriching things to fill their time.  America should have been doing these things all along, but somewhere our economy failed us.  Minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, and the prices of every commodity including insurance, health care, education, and transit have escalated.  It is not an accident, and the lower and middle classes have sunken to a new found low in recent American history.  The rich have and still do continue to get richer.  With the onset of Covid 19 unemployment a revolution is at hand.  American will not tolerate an oppressive government who will not allow them to earn a necessary wage in a free market socioeconomic system.  This is a step toward Communism, and America has been drawing closer and closer since Donald Trump has become the American dictator.  It is frightening.  In terms the reality of Covid 19, there is so much heresy and hearsay floating around how can anyone know what is true?  What we can agree upon is the first time in our lifetimes that the major television news networks have joined forces to pitch a scenario that may not be truthful.  Most American would agree that what we have been witnessing is a scripted event conceived and implemented by politics.  Because the television networks are complicit we are wise to from now on question each and everything they report.  Why is the governor of New York a spokesperson for this event?  It says to me that the mob is behind it, and these small people desire to be celebrities.  Again this is a metaphor from our president and his misguided leadership.  What leadership he has provided, like cruise ship music, is an example of the wrong kinds of things.  Cruise ship music teaches musicians to play the wrong way, in the ephemeral words of saxophonist Marcus Sholar.  It teaches you how NOT to swing.  What Donald Trump has done to this country is monumental, and perhaps he is happy being the only recent president to incite chaos in society.  Often I wonder how our local meteorologist can report the weekly forecast with a straight face.  He is wrong one hundred percent of the time, and still he tells us with authority each evening his opinion of the upcoming weather.  Perhaps his forecast is the appropriate one, and Global Warming promptly adds fifteen degrees to his prediction.  This often is the case, although he usually is correct about the cold winter blasts that follow the jet stream.  Some parts of mother nature cannot be manipulated.  As for Covid 19 I think there is no doubt that it is a real virus, a virus naturally occurring in animals, and this version of it was manipulated in a lab from SARS in the last ten years.  It either escaped on its own by mistake, or was administered to distinct predetermined locations in an attempt to ethnically cleanse or influence the upcoming presidential election.  It is no coincidence that the African American and Latino populations were effected more.  If an inference can be made, it would be these populations are more susceptible for cultural reasons whether they be health related, monetary, or political.  It easily could be surmised with no conspiratorial influences that the sick and elderly were targeted for extermination.  How else can the outbreaks be explained?  A global vaccine to solve such a far reaching pandemic is fools gold and should be excluded from conscious contemplation.  No person, board of directors, corporation, or politicians should profit from Covid 19.  Instead the perpetrators of the pandemic should be publicly executed.  The fates of both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, gruesome, brutal, and public executions are the appropriate punishment for a lost regime.  It only took time for this extremism to come to fruition in American politics. 

F.

Here's my synopsis.  Any entity, institution, or individual who suggests America's educational systems should not teach in the Autumn quarter, semester, or school year simply is attempting to deny students their right to education.  Since George W. Bush American government fueled by the corporate lobby have tried to suppress education in America.  No Child Left Behind did more harm than good, and the level of public education today is a fraction of what it once was.  Kids are stupid, and it is our fault.  To be blunt and conspiratorial F. is a Nazi.  I can see Adolph sitting behind him smiling.  The sadistic general punishing America, deluded and narcissistic cackling into his toasty oats, injecting methamphetamine, and scratching his itchy genitals.  Subject America, this America to a round of vaccinations instituted by Big Brother?  Instead of ethnic cleansing with a manipulated SARS virus deployed from low flying aircraft, lets inject everyone Jim Jones style, pile them in a mass grave, and celebrate at Mar a Lago.  F. should disappear. 

Communist America

What would most Americans consider freedom?  I have a renewed perspective of freedom in America, and ironically it consists of breaking the norms which have been cemented in our family.  Family upbringing is a necessary and integral part of who you become, but also it can be an albatross.  If success was a part of your family tree, then family can provide invaluable opportunities in American society.  I was fortunate enough to have had this privilege.  (I would like to mention also the snooping aircraft that now is flying outside my home)  A new U.S. Army defense contract provides our fleet of expensive and high tech helicopters at Simmons Army Air Base with a new surveillance package.  It includes infrared surveillance, cell phone monitoring, and acoustical targeting.  Evidently Uncle Sam seems to think my Covid 19 response is exemplary, because he keeps watching and listening.  I also will take this time to say hello to the Ravensberg family, who recently moved back to town.  He is an army intelligence, and from his peculiar behavior I think he may think I am quite intelligent, although I have not been able to get my summer garden planted.  He watches me frequently, and because he seems not to be going to work has a lot of time on his hands.  It seems to be a not gender specific family.  At times it is annoying, having someone in your personal space.  It works both way.  Does his scrutiny infringe upon my personal freedom?  I think not, because when I choose to cook dinner I can shed the norms of society and fix whatever I please.  Most nights it is appreciably better than restaurant food.  Anything freshly bought and cooked is more nutritious and more free of viral infestation.  It is possible to contract severe illness from purchased food, as America has experienced with romaine lettuce.  All kinds of bacteria lurk in the ground in soil, on foliage, and the hands of transporters.  If normal precautions are taken food born illness can be prevented.  Illness spewed from a low flying Cessna aircraft or carried across thousands of miles from low frequency sound waves is a more recent concern.  We have been diligent following the guidelines of our state.  I wear a mask and gloves when shopping and am careful to distance myself from others.  This feels like a breech of my freedom as does a curfew, the lack of availability of certain groceries, and the incessant and repetitive drone of Coronavirus newspeak.  With my renewed perspective of American freedom has come a new perspective of myself.  To work a job one must yield.  Your behavior is determined by your profession and its requirements.  Rarely is one able to be themselves  on the job.  We all are actors, and the more successful actors excel and climb the social ladder.  I didn't learn this until later in life, which battle to choose and which battles to let settle into the ground.  We have a fair amount of freedom in America.  It has been proven by the lax enforcement of Covid protocols.  Where I live you can get away with most anything except propositioning a prostitute on a street corner.  For some reason conservative leadership round these here parts seems to think this is a primordial sin, when in fact it could be considered the oldest profession.  I see nothing wrong with prostitution, only how it implemented, mishandled, and corrupted.  In other nations it is legal, regulated, and monitored.  In America the ruling faction wants all of the pie, therefore we cannot allow prostitution.  The government wants a piece of everything, and this has become the norm during the Trump presidency.  I never have experienced it before.  Empty cabinet positions, non functioning agencies and departments, and the conscious abandonment of oversight.  For three years America has run amuck, and the results are tangible.  It is frightening.  While the  pandemic has been a challenge, it seems par for the course during this particular presidency.  Only was I trying to discern which party was responsible for the premise.  At first I thought it was the democrats, until I saw President Trump's television commercial during the nightly national news.  It was startling.  Before the Covid 19 crisis has been resolved, our president is touting his administration's success with its handling like it had been preplanned.  Two specific sound bytes were troubling.  They were two different governors thanking the president for his response.  They were spliced together in a way that may have misrepresented their true meaning.  The commercial was more like a film trailer, which had been prepared months ago.  During this outbreak of disease it became apparent to me that no one is at the wheel of this country.  We seem to have a delusional and out of touch president who is enamored with the communist rule of Kim Jong-un.  I could only ask myself who would vote for such a man, unless they want a communist regime in place in America?  The Cold War is alive and well again, and America's eternal battle against the Commies or the Reds is at play again.  In this case the parties in play are disguised, misrepresented, and covert.  Communism already has found its way into American government, and unless voting citizens feel strongly enough about America's freedom it will take hold and grow.  What will happen in the coming months will be a taste of that new life.