FEBRUARY 24, 2005 || 5:22 pm

Don’t want no mansion rock
Those doors is always locked
And when you reach to ring the bell
Unleashing frigid chimes from hell
Hope to hear an utterance new
Desperate for a morsel true
Aching with those memories old
Before your dreams were tagged & sold
No one lives within the walls
Only gold bricks in the halls
The landlord escaped
Clutching keys
Empty, beaten
And towards the sea
Remember how perfect he looked?
Remember the pillars she shook?
Remember the day the colors shifted?
Remember the night the veil was lifted?

Of course you do
That’s why you’re here
Whispering truth in the devil’s ear
But, that’s no good
That won’t save
There’s a cut
There’s a shave
There’s a mountain turned to dust
Open fields where horses rust
Some gnash & cry & call it wrong
Of course, they’re right
But nothing is forever

Let the digging commence
And holler loud when you find some treasure

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FEBRUARY 23, 2005 || 12:52 pm

2005 started very slowly for me. Visiting relatives gave me a holiday gift I didn't really want -- a head cold -- and just when I thought I had it licked, someone at work brought in a bug and I relapsed. I think I'm on the road to recovery at this point, though I'm not sure. But I'm tired of allowing illness to dictate my schedule, so I'm crossing my fingers and jumping back into things.

I know Kristine McKenna has waxed poetic over Bob Dylan's Chronicles elsewhere on this Web site, and I want to second her endorsement. Unless it's a newspaper or magazine (ie., something with pretty pictures), I'm not much of a reader these days, but I made an exception recently for this acclaimed autobio. Bob's voice in this tome is half Rod Serling, half carnival barker, half J. Peterman from Seinfeld -- and entirely fascinating. One of the things I find most fascinating about the coverage of this book is the praise reviewers have lavished on Dylan's memory and eye for detail -- in a narrative that basically starts with our hero feeding Columbia's P/R man a truckload of tall tales... Dylan has been on my mind of late as I try to boil his work down to a single CD of "essentials" for a youngster in need of a primer. There's no way to do it without leaving off at least a half-dozen masterpieces.

Rather quiet of late on the rare record front. As I sometimes do with pricey purchases, I've arranged to pay in installments for a few things, and I'm at the point where I'm making the final payments on a number of items and waiting for the postman to deliver 'em. The running theme for the first two months of the year: '60s beat LPs from South Africa and obscure '60s singles from around the globe. If all goes well, I'll score some Peruvian 45s tonight!

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January 18, 2005 || 5:28 pm

In a black and white administration, where’s Condi on brown?

It’s the day after the Martin Luther King holiday, and I’m wondering what kind of dream hovers over the reflecting pool.

In today’s confirmation hearings, soon-to-be Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made a Machiavellian tongue slip that will rightfully prove a nuisance. She referred to the South Asian tsunami as an “opportunity” that showed the U.S.’s magnanimity in dealing with disaster. California Senator Barbara Boxer was quick to call her on it before posing some tough questions about Rice’s truthfulness in selling the war in Iraq. Rice’s choice of words was probably insensitive at worst, but it’s telling with regard to her record with people of color the world over. “Opportunity” would seem to highlight once and for all the role of brown pawns in this administration’s global game—it’s a shame if a few thousand of them have to die, but what we’re most concerned with is that, at the end of the day, they don’t put a stink on Old Glory. Me, I’d love to pin the tsunami (as have some nuts-or-not) on a handful of hawks testing nukes in the Indian Ocean—wouldn’t put it past them—but as it stands, Condi and her crew have enough Iraqi blood on their hands to raise a few race questions. Now I hear they’re sniffing for military targets in Iran, and again, poor Arabs will just have to take it on the chin when the warheads go astray.

Now I love the idea of a black woman as our nation’s top diplomat, but I think Rice has a lot to answer for from minority communities. I don’t want to hear you-can-do-it-too ratings grabs from status quo mouthpieces like Oprah. I want to hear from black and brown leaders in town halls and classrooms across the land. What kind of civil rights apply to dead people? With over 100,000 civilian souls liberated in this white man’s war, Dr. King is surely rolling over. What are those above ground saying? It can’t all be good.

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DECEMBER 1, 2004 || 1:15 pm

Tempted as I am to use this blog to vent over the Presidential election, I'll instead weigh in on another topic of debate: the Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs list. In a list this long, there are plenty of potential disagreements, so I'll just look at the top and bottom picks and offer stray thoughts on overrated/underrated discs...

I won't question the #1 position of "Like A Rolling Stone," the greatest song on what may be the greatest rock album of all. But if you're a Dylan lover, I think a case can be made for The Byrds cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man" as equally worthy (certainly good enough for the Top 10). Similarly, while I'm hard pressed to question the wonderful "Hey Jude," what made The Beatles "The Beatles" was Beatlemania, and what sparked Beatlemania was "I Want To Hold Your Hand." And any Top 10 HAS to have The King; Rolling Stone's top Presley vote-getter was "Hound Dog," though I think "That's All Right" would do just as well. Let's make some space for "Born To Run," too, while we're at it. Slightly overrated in my book: "What's Going On" (great song, great album, but pick a track that better shows what put Motown on the map, like The Miracles' "Shop Around."). And we need to drop "Satisfaction" a few rungs down from its #2 spot.

Yep, that fuzz anthem wouldn't make it higher than #20 or 30 on my list. Again, a great song, but killer riffs were all over the place in 1965, and bands like The Beatles, The Yardbirds, or The Kinks could churn them out just as well as The Stones back then. For me, the ultimate Rolling Stones track is "Brown Sugar," wildly underrated at #490. Sex, controversy, a catchy hook, and a minimalist riff ONLY Keith could have dreamed up. Also seriously underrated: the epochal "The Twist" (#451), and THE definitive Smiths song, "How Soon Is Now?" (#486).

Let the arguments commence...

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November 22, 2004 || 5:22 pm

Since when has it become a crime to fool all of the people all of the time? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. But I do know this: you cannot tap dance your way around a problem without making a bunch of clickety-clackety sounds. You must look an issue straight in the eye and say, “I will not become a slave to your devilish charms.”

I stopped wearing cologne once I realized that it causes one to say a lot of stupid shit. Example: I once doused myself in Brut by Faberge and went down to the post office. As I was waiting in line, I whispered to the woman in front of me that I was a musical genius and would like to party with her Rick James-style. I woke up several hours later in a holding tank downtown. All I’m saying is that you gotta be one suave mother to get away with all the shit that wearing cologne makes you say.

Ice Cream Is Illegal…would be the headline that you would read on the day the world went mad.

Who’s ready to go toe to toe with destiny? I can say this: I’ve been in training for months and I know where the bodies are buried. All you need to do is give me all (most) of your money.

That is all.

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October 29, 2004 || 9:50 am

I recently made a big mistake. I watched a militant group in Iraq behead American civil engineer Jack Hensley. The video was available on the Internet, and I watched it with full knowledge of what I was getting into. As someone who pays attention to foreign affairs and the situation in Iraq in particular, I guess I thought the experience would give me some special insight into the “reality on the ground” or something. I think morbid curiosity factored in as well. I soon realized what a stupid and selfish thing it was to do.

Selfish because I immediately had the feeling of having invaded someone’s privacy -- both Hensley’s and his family’s. Crossing the divide between life and death is an intimate thing. I had no business being there. I had no right to use the Hensleys’ grief and horror to whatever ends I thought warranted such a careless act of voyeurism. Stupid because of the emotional mark it left on me. The act itself was unspeakable, a prolonged effort the brutality of which it’s hard to fathom. If the visual wasn’t bad enough, the audio was worse -- and I wouldn’t want to describe either. Beyond the obvious shock and disgust, I felt a paralyzing sadness. Here was a man who not only suffered pain and death for someone else’s cause; he spent his final moments colliding with a burst of evil rarely seen or imagined.

For the next three hours I wondered if I would be permanently scarred. I sought counsel from some of my friends at work, feeling a need to confess what I’d done. No one I encountered voiced the slightest inclination to see what I’d seen, and I hope it stays that way as innocents continue to be abducted in Iraq.

One thing the video didn’t instill in me is feeling that our country’s “war on terror,” as it’s being carried out, is somehow justified by the actions of this extremist minority, whose moral bearings should be seen as far too misaligned to be allowed to guide the policies of a supposedly enlightened nation. Violence begets violence, and neither Allah nor George Bush’s Almighty is taking into account the sharpness of the knife used to carry it out. If an Iraqi innocent is struck in the woods by a cruise missile, and nobody’s around with a video camera, does the Iraqi still suffer?

The other night I was watching The Road To Perdition, one of the better gangster dramas of the last 30 years or so. There’s a scene in an empty crypt with mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) and disinherited henchman Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks). Sullivan vows revenge for the murder of his family, to which Rooney replies poignantly, “There are only murderers in this room.”

The same could be said about the theater of war.

Today, with his government explicitly refusing to bow to terror, Japanese civilian Shosei Koda faces certain execution at the hands of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s militants, the same ones responsible for Jack Hensley’s death. Interestingly, Zarqawi’s group has changed its name from “One God and Jihad” to “Al Quaeda in Mesopotamia.” Sounds to me like our administration’s raise-the-stakes response on an unrelated front has indeed ratcheted up the branding effort for the world’s most, dare I say, respected name in terror.

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