November 2006

« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »

Song du Jour: "Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards"

Billy Bragg, "Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards."

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying
Over luxury's disappointment
So he walks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That the Third World is just around the corner
In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle
In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer
Mixing Pop and Politics he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where the van is waiting
I'm looking for the Great Leap Forwards
Jumble sales are organised and pamphlets have been posted
Even after closing time there's still parties to be hosted
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the sleepers
While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards
One leap forward, two leaps back
Will politics get me the sack?
here comes the future and you can't run from it
If you've got a blacklist I want to be on it
It's a mighty long way down rock 'n roll
From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole
If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman
In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune
But this is reality so give me some room
So join the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just a T-shirt away
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 22, 2006 1:56 AM | Comments (1)

 

Song du Jour: "Feliz Navidad"

Jose Feliciano, "Feliz Navidad."

Two weeks before Christmas a couple years ago, my daughter and I walked into a diner in Palo Alto, California. Two Chinese women were behind the counter, giddily running their own business. We got our sandwiches and sat down to munch.

The place was half-full, a Sunday morning. I was in a good mood -- our first semester at the adult playground that is Stanford University was over, and now there was a lull in the action as we got ready to go home for Christmas -- so I went about doing what I do best when I'm in a good mood: embarrass my daughter.

"Feliz Navidad" came on over the speakers and I started shimmying in my seat, munching potato chips, and snapping my fingers like Minnie the Mooch. My daughter rolled her eyes and told me to stop.

I was about to, but then I felt a tap on the shoulder of my jean jacket. I turned to find a senior citizen babe with white hair and a powder-blue sweater holding her hand out to me. "May I have this dance?," she said.

I'd noticed her when we'd walked in. She was alone at a table with an address book, stamps, Christmas cards, and envelopes strewn out before her.

I took her up on her offer. Twirled her. Dipped her. Sang the song. The Chinese women clapped and laughed. My daughter was mortified but extremely entertained. When the song finished, we politely thanked each other for the dance. I finished my lunch, she went back to her Christmas cards, and we said goodbye.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 21, 2006 8:56 AM | Comments (1)

 

Song du Jour: "What's A Broken Heart?"

Patty Loveless, "What's A Broken Heart?"

Great question. For the answer, we go to my heart-doc sister, who writes:

A thrombus forms in the proximal most portion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Once the artery is completely occluded, blood flow to the distal vessel is compromised. In minutes the adjacent myocardium is rendered first ischemic, then necrotic. If blood flow is not quickly restored, the ischemic myocardial cells become electrically unstable often resulting in the lethal arrhythmia, ventricular fibrillation.

Mary Norine Walsh, MD
Director, CHF and Nuclear Cardiology
The Care Group, LLC
St Vincent Hospital
Indianapolis

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 20, 2006 8:50 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!"

ABBA, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!"

A few years ago I visited a hermitage in the mountains overlooking Big Sur, California. More serious pilgrims than I milled about, bussing dishes from their cabins and then, with nary a glance towards the outsiders, returned to their silence retreat, away from the rest of humanity and its gray noise.

I went into the bookstore, browsed, and grabbed a couple titles that looked interesting, including David Steindel-Rast and Sharon Lebell's Music Of Silence, a paean to the grounding that meditation and solitude bring. In the introduction, Kathleen Norris writes:

"I once met a woman who said she didn't like the island of Kauai, surely one of the most spectacular islands on the face of the earth, because, as she put it, 'there weren't enough places to shop.' Music Of Silence challenges us to recognize the poverty of our affluence in the face of God's overflowing generosity and accept that so much of what we take for granted, even the ordinary rhythm of day and night, has something to say to us. It has nothing to do with shopping. It speaks to silence, not noise. Its power is revealed not in money or consumption, but in the unseen, steady growth of seeds into grasses, plants, trees. It is the voice of nature. God's creation, which remains when the electric power has failed and it is too dark to read."

I brought my books to the check-out counter, where a young monk stood. The place was almost perfectly still; only a few other quiet souls loitered, with only their thoughts to keep them company. The young monk greeted me warmly, looked at my books, then touched his finger his to lips as he moved to the cash register. He was so thoughtful and peaceful that it almost startled me when he said, "Will you please hold on for one moment?"

He disappeared into the back room and was gone for a long time. I was excited. He obviously had seen something in my books or me that inspired special attention; a particularly revelatory author or collection, perhaps, that would unlock the secrets of the universe for me: We've been waiting for you, brother.

When he returned, there was an old monk accompanying him. The old monk smiled and nodded at me. Then he moved to the cash register and said to the young monk, "First you press the 'cash' button, and then hit the 'return,' like this."

I thought about that story yesterday, while waiting for my wife's aunt to visit. She's a nun from Iowa, and she and her longtime nun companion had spent the day shopping. When they got to our house, the shopping nun-aunt couldn't wait to show us what she'd bought.

Turns out she's a lot like my eight-year-old daughter, for whom I bought a dress earlier in the day. She flipped over it, but 20 minutes later she was asking for something else that cost money -- I can't remember exactly what at the moment, because they all blur together -- and I lectured about being in the moment, being thankful for what you have, and not always wanting for the next big thing, because it creates an emptiness in you that you can never fill.

Basically, I told her to knock it off with the gimmes or else.

She was quiet for 15 minutes. Finally, she came up to me. Sheepishly.

"Dad?"

Yeah?

"I was born with the gimmes."

I laughed and picked her up and kissed her all over her face until she laughed and I thought about all the great songs that begin or end with "I want" or "Give me" or "Gimme" and said to her, "Aren't we all, baby?"

Aren't we all.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 19, 2006 2:32 PM | Comments (5)

 

Song du Jour: "Secret Garden"

Bruce Springsteen, "Secret Garden."
The best white blues singer of them all singing the worst colorblind blues of them all: the "there's-no-figuring-out-women-who-won't-let-you-in-and-it's-no-fun-trying-anymore" blues.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 18, 2006 12:44 AM | Comments (1)

 

Yes

Yes, yes, yes.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 17, 2006 8:05 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "Trouble In Mind"

Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, etc., "Trouble In Mind."

Pop culture as horse race and game of musical chairs. One day you're up, the next day you're down the stretch they come. One day you're a hottie, the next a not-so-muchie. One day you're snorting coke off a stripper's tit, the next you're trying to remember what her tattoo said. One day you're the main Heather, the next you're on the outside looking in at rock 'n' roll high school. One day you're...

You get the idea. Talkin' the blues, and not the genre. I have heard the blues played by oud players, garage bands, bagpipe corps., funk lovers, folk bleeders, technorats, ambient angels, jazz messengers, and Play Stations. The blues is ageless, timeless: You know it when you hear it. Someone somewhere is always playing the blues, and there is great solace in that, for to acknowledge the inherent sorrow in living is to spit in the face of the wagging tails and happy faces that surround us, and to truly live out what the Buddhists talk about -- that sorrow is the main event in this thing called life, and that any joy we happen to happen upon is pure guava.

Moreover, the promise of the blues "lifting" is what keeps us going, and listening: I've got 20 different versions of "Trouble In Mind" on my iPod -- instrumentals, slide-guitar-fueled monsters, harp-shaped hymns, stripped-down toss-offs, big-band epics, B-3 Hammond organ-painted masterpieces, and almost any else you can imagine. No two are alike, and not one of the mind-troubled singers -- Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, or John Langford --sings it the same way. But every time I hear the line, "But I won't be blue always/I know the sun is gonna shine in my back door one day," I get a little faith; a little internal sunshine of the spotted mind.

To that end, the blues is god's bitch-slap that lets everyone concerned know, unconditionally, that, as the Flaming Lips so sunnily put it, "everyone you know will die." One way or another, they all fade away. Friends, lovers, relatives, pets, dreams. Each loss chips away at your heart and makes it hurt and heal and hurt all over again, all of which makes it stronger and more tender and fuller, and that, baby brother, is the blues.

The good news is that while people and relationships do not survive, places do, and no matter how many Hard Rocks or Gameworks or Hooters blot the landscape, there are hallowed grounds to be had in America -- the Haight-Ashburys and Asbury Parks and Uptowns and the West Bank of Minneapolis, which brings us here today, and which I rarely type out without affixing the word "storied" to it: The storied West Bank of Minneapolis.

"The blues is emotional, raw music that gets you in the gut. Primal rhythms. It shakes you up, it can make you get out of your head and get you into a more physical space," says Cyn Collins, author of the newly published West Bank Boogie: Forty Years of Music, Mayhem and Memories (Triangle Park Creative). "It can be sorrowful music, but it can make you feel uplifted, or one with a bunch of people. There's community in the sharing of sorrow and joy together."

West Bank Boogie is the first-ever document of the amorphous music scene that has thrived in places like Palmer's, the (currently shuttered) Viking Bar, and the 400 Bar while other Minnesota music scenes got almost famous. It's a wonderful read, with testimonials from suck folk and blues royalty as Willie Murphy, Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, Tony Glover, Pop Wagner, Mary DuShane, John Beach, and Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson.

Plenty of other musics have infused the West Bank, including reggae and other red stripes of world rhythms, and rock 'n' roll, which has historically been about seizing the day, being all that you can be, living each moment like it was your last. But the blues is something else. The blues is kicking back and giving up to some extent.

In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously defined the five stages of grief as 1) Denial and Isolation; 2) Anger; 3) Bargaining with God to take the hurt of the loss away; 4) Depression; and 5) Acceptance. The blues is straight up number five, which is at the heart of West Bank Boogie, and at the heart of the comfort that comes from the sound of another human being slogging through similar travails.

A human being like Dave Ray, who died a few years ago when I was out of town. I wanted to hear his voice the night of his funeral, but I didn't have any of his records with me, so I called his cell phone, which hadn't been disconnected yet. His voice came on the line. He was so alive. He told me to leave a message, so I did.

Publication party for West Bank Boogie takes place Wednesday, Nov. 22, at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. Storytelling session with local music historian Red Nelson begins at 7 p.m.; music starts at 8 p.m. with Bill Hinkley & Judy Larson, followed by Koerner & Glover and Willie Murphy.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 17, 2006 12:07 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "Who's Your Baby Now?"

John Swardson, "Who's Your Baby Now?"

I only heard this once, live, and I'm not even sure this is the title, but it's with me a week later. Swardson is the son of the great writer/thinker/crank Roger Swardson, who died three Thanksgiving mornings ago. That loss, all loss, is in John's voice on this one, a song-question to an ex, posed in a way only song-questions can be.

That's because song-questions are wholly illogical and ill-advised, posed as they are to phantoms-demons of the mind and heart. Rosanne Cash asked her invisible ex-would-be-suitor, "Who does your past belong to tonight?" Karen Casey simply blurted to the universe, "Where are you tonight, I wonder?" Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg gave it up to their ghosts, "Do you ever think of me my darling, as you sail that ocean blue?" Liz Phair cried, "Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?" Peter Perrett pined, "Sometimes I think of you, out there in the night/Roaming the empty streets, looking for your life."

With a low growl that suggests cigarettes not pillow mints; curiousity not jealousy, Swardson imagines the unimaginable and asks the unanswerable, though it's clear he wants anything but the whole truth. Do you call someone else "baby?" Do you do what we did? Do you use the same lines on him you did on me? Do you rest your head on his chest? Who does your past belong to tonight?

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 16, 2006 8:04 AM | Comments (0)

 

From The Land Of Sky Blue Waters

In every menage-a-trois, no matter how much love and understanding there is going in...

... someone always get hurt.

Photos of the Mad Ripple, the Hamm's Bear, and Alicia Corbett from The River Of Hope fundraiser (Grumpy's NE, 11/14/06) by Tony Zaccardi.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 15, 2006 1:20 PM | Comments (2)

 

Song du Jour: "We're All In Love"

The New York Dolls, "We're All In Love."

Get this. David Johansen made like Jonathan Livingston Seagull on stage in Minneapolis a couple hours ago, spreading his wings over his flock, urging everyone to sing along, "We're all in looooove."

Meaning what, exactly? Winter Of Love '06? Why not? It could happen: There are good hippie bands springing up everywhere like wild dandelions -- here, it's Wookiefoot and God Johnson and Mad Love -- except that they're not hippies; their hybrids, funk and soul and reggae and house as much as jam-band jive. There's good punk bands sprouting up, too -- The Falls, The Hard Left, and Elephine, whose singer/guitarist, Mayda Miller (of the late, great Sugar Divas), is as exciting a new talent as I've seen on the Entry stage in ages -- except they're hybrids, too.

The thing is, punk and hippie was like America and Iraq at one point. Or like mods and rockers, or hip-hoppers against the world. Now they all listen to, and play, a lot of the same music. I'm just saying that it's noteworthy when the oldest living punk is singing "We're all in love," and the youngest earth-and-ocean optimists are singing, "mad love," all of which suggests boundaries melting away before our ears.

How's the song go?

"There was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air."

Yeah. Something like that.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 15, 2006 2:11 AM | Comments (2)

 

Song du Jour: "Wolf Like Me"

TV On The Radio, "Wolf Like Me."

Flying
by Mary Oliver

Sometimes,
on a plane,
you see a stranger.
He is so beautiful!
His nose
going down in the
old Greek way,
or his smile
a wild
Mexican fiesta.
You want to say:
do you know
how beautiful you are?
You leap up
into the aisle,
you can't let him go
until he has touched you
shyly, until you have rubbed him
oh, lightly,
like a coin
you find on earth somewhere
shining and unexpected and,
without thinking,
reach for.
You stand there
shaken
by the strangeness,
the splash of his touch.
When he's gone
you stare like an animal into
the blinding clouds
with the snapped chain of your life,
the life you know:
the deeply affectionate earth,
the familiar landscapes
slowly turning
thousands of feet below.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 14, 2006 8:59 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "One Of Us"

Joan Osborne, "One Of Us."

One Of Us

(winter 2003, unpublished)

By Jim Walsh

My friend Kate has been fixated on Prince's version of Joan Osborne's hit "One Of Us" for the past month. She heard it playing at a party on a mix tape in January, then a few days later she heard Osborne's version over the phone while ordering take-out. Even if you don't normally believe in stuff like cosmic coincidence, you have to admit that that's a pretty odd back-to-back, given that the song is eight years old and well past its prime payola powers.

She's written about the song on her blog, and about how playing it on guitar recently brought her to tears: "I just lost it... I was thinking about the Golden Rule, the family of humanity, and the message of Jesus: love each other (OK, I was thinking about war, too.) I get terribly sentimental thinking about brotherly love."

She also wrote about it in her Valentine's Day piece for City Pages about love songs for people who aren't in love, concluding: "God is not some guy in heaven. God is sitting next to you on the bus. God is lonely. Love God."

Friday night in her apartment, Kate and I and her friend Kim stayed up until about 4 a.m. playing songs on Kate's boom box. I opted for some Charles Wright, Only Ones, a doo-wop compilation, and Sinead O'Connor's "Hold Back The Night"; Kate was all about Badfinger and Eddie Money and Prince's version of "One Of Us" off of Emancipation.

We sat there, them smoking cigarettes and drinking beers, me blissfully abuzz from the meditation session my friend Julianna had talked me through earlier in the night, as Prince's guitar chugged through the room like a serpent of peace looking for somewhere to land. Kate grabbed her acoustic, figured out the chords and riffed along; we all nodded as Prince's echoed screams of "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah -- what if God was one of us?" drifted out the open window into the Hollywood hills.

I held forth on the column I wrote about "One Of Us" when it came out, and about the first time I heard it: Pulling over to the side of the road, not believing what I was hearing -- a song about God that wasn't asking anyone to "believe" or "join" anything, just the sly and pop-superficial suggestion that we're all God and that we should all treat each other as such. I told those guys about the first time I saw Prince do it one late night at Paisley Park, and about the weird conversation he and I had afterwards. I went to bed around 4:00, just before a small earthquake hit Los Angeles.

The next morning, Kate and I went to a coffee shop to get breakfast before going to our friend Craig's son Louis's basketball game. The line of groovy see-and-be-scene hipsters at the coffee shop was too long, so we split. On our way out, we passed the L.A. Times single-copy sales box and saw the headline about the club-goers that were killed in Rhode Island. We bought the paper and as Kate drove I read more out loud -- about fire, terrorism, war, competitive prayer��"before we headed into the grocery store to get coffee.

We hadn't been at the pastry counter for 30 seconds when Kate stopped in her tracks and said, "Listen." Sure enough, from the store speakers, it was "One Of Us."

I told her the song was following her. I wondered if maybe culture, despite itself, despite its corporate or otherwise roots, actually decides what humanity needs when the shit really starts to fly, and that that's why the song is burbling up in the collective unconsciousness now. She didn't buy it, but agreed when I said that it's amazing when even a nothing band like the Hooters (whose Eric Bazilian wrote "One Of Us") can have a semi-profound impact on the world.

As we drove to the game, I looked out the window and thought about the song -- a pop-rock incantation that slouches towards the Buddhist greeting "Namaste" ("I bow to the divinity in you") -- as people of all races went about their day. At a stoplight, an unhinged-looking dude walked in front of the windshield wearing a T-shirt that read, "Jesus Is Not A Religion."

We went to the game, Louis played great, and I didn't think about "One Of Us" again. The weekend concluded with more music and songs and on Sunday my wife Jean and the kids picked me up at the San Jose airport and there were many hugs and kisses and it was wonderful to be back home, but I also had the sort of hung-over restlessness that comes from visiting such an artistic never-neverland and returning to the bubble of student and family life.

Monday morning, I drove my daughter to pre-school and headed to the car wash. My longing started to dissipate when, driving along El Camino Real in Palo Alto, I spotted a homeless man pushing a shopping cart with a cardboard sign that read, "Smile! It Could Be Worse."

I pulled into the car wash and cleaned out my unglamorous station wagon of kid garbage. After paying at the register, I sat down and opened my book. An old black man, an employee of the car wash, walked by. I made eye contact with him, smiled and wished him good morning.

"How are you, young man?," he said, his bluesman's face crinkled with calm.

"Very good, thanks," I said, not lying. "How are you?"

He said he was the same. Then he asked me if I thought we were finally going to get some rain, which made me think about the Tom Waits song that goes, "All over the world strangers talk only about the weather/All over the world it's the same."

We chatted a little more and he walked away and I went back to my book. I was reading about an Irish jockey and hard times when I heard a far-off something that made me look up from the page. Cutting through the noise of whirring traffic and sucking vacuums and spraying hoses was, tinkling just above the fray, a piano melody line.

I ignored it, because the book was good and the volume was low. Besides, it couldn't be. Just my imagination. It was a canned cookie cutter instrumental, after all. Impossible. I mean, of all the songs that I would just happen to happen to hear in the first quiet moment I'd had in two days... I went back to my book.

I read the same paragraph twice. I couldn't concentrate, because the song wouldn't let me. The faintest of guitar solos interrupted my communion with the jockey. I looked up. I closed my book. I thought to myself, like Norah Jones said the night before at the Grammys, "This is insane."

I put my book down, stood up, and went to find the source of the music. I crept about six feet, eyes down, ear cocked, until I came to a small white speaker covered with clear plastic. It was attached to the roof of the car wash. There was morning dew on it. I touched it.

I stood listening, and for a minute or so I still wasn't sure. It was the weakest pulse of an arrangement, no verve whatsoever, but then the guitar rose up out of the Muzakian molasses to play the melody of the lyrics: "If God had a face/What would he look like?/And would you want to see?"

It was following me, and I knew why immediately. It was telling me to tell whoever might be listening that even though it's off the charts, even though it's off every known radar that measures a song's worth, that it still has something to say, and that I should do what I can to pass it on.

I pulled out of the parking lot and the old man was strolling by on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. I rolled down the window and we said the same thing at the same time: "Have a great day." We gave each other the thumbs-up, and as the "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahs" helicoptered through my mind, I stopped at the light and looked at him in the rear view mirror.

He was looking up at the sky.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 13, 2006 12:31 AM | Comments (1)

 

Song du Jour: "Mr. Mean"

Mad Love, "Mr. Mean" (live at the Cabooze, 11/10/06)

News From The Front

I know I can be prone to bullshit, but it felt like God damn New Orleans out there tonight. Which makes me wonder: If Minneapolis was like New Orleans on the first Friday after the legendary midterm elections of 2006, what in Allah's name was it like in New Orleans tonight?

Happy days are here again.

Roll out the barrel.

Ooh La La.

Etc.

Or maybe it was just us. Maybe the only real party people are the boys and girls in Minnesota, who elected the first Muslim to Congress this week, and who ever since have been hearing from friends from all over the world, asking us about what it's like where we live.

Good question. Here's my blurry late-night post-bar snapshot (add your own in the comments section below if so moved. Let us know what the mood was where you live last night. Were people celebrating? Cautiously optimistic? Dancing? Drinking? V-Day kissing in the streets? Do tell):

After hanging with my family and friends at a cool new coffee shop by my house, I went to the Uptown Bar to see Umbrella Bed, a sardonic big-ska-band I used to go see at the Turf Club (my neighbor Matt plays trombone). They were fun, and everybody was in the mood to dance, or skank, and so they did, with something like wild abandon. It was plain to see that people were shaking off six years of dust; ding-dong the witch is dead, and all that.

Then I moved to the Cabooze, where this great soul-hippie-funk band, Mad Love, played one of their first-ever shows. The grooves were liquid, the songs' lyrics were blueswoman bad-ass frank and hippie-chick all-loving, and the three female singers were so serpentine, powerful, sensual, sexy, and smart, that if Prince was still talent-prowling the clubs he'd have one of his vampires descend and he'd already be off concocting Vanity '06 or some shit -- though from the looks of things they're too tough, too self-contained, and too sexy-confident, to be bothered with some smart guy's advice.

(Did I mention sexy? Dude, it wasn't just me: The four young fellas standing next to me were ready to become the three Sirens' love slaves on the spot. I talked them down, but I left early, and for all I know they got backstage and they may be Mad Love-slave roadkill by now.)

I ran into Carrie and those cats from the Hug Brigade at the gig. They told me about how they spent the day hugging outside the polling places on election day, and how tired they got from hugging all these people who said they really needed hugs. She said there are Hug Brigade chapters springing up in cities all over the Midwest. Their next gig is at the Metrodome on Sunday, where they'll be hugging people before the Vikings-Packers game.

I got all Go Ask Dad on them and told them to be careful, because there's still a lot of angry people out there, and football fans who've lost a big game can be some of the meanest creatures on earth.

So be kind, everyone. Here's to the losers. See ya at the New York Dolls.

Hug,
Jim

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 11, 2006 2:01 AM | Comments (2)

 

Song du Jour: "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?"

Tony Blair/The Clash, "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?"
words fail... other than "Joe Strummer is cackling in his grave."

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 10, 2006 2:56 PM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "End of the Highway, Rumsfeld"

Mark Olson, "End Of The Highway, Rumsfeld" (from Political Manifest).

Thanks to photographer extraordinaire Steve Cohen for the request.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 9, 2006 8:46 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "You Can't Love What You Don't Understand"

IV Thieves, "You Can't Love What You Don't Understand."

These Brits are in town at the Entry tonight, and this is but one of my faves from their new one If We Can't Escape My Pretty. It's been on constant back-to-back rotation with the Stone Roses' "I Want To Be Adored," and the two are somehow symbiotic: both rave it up with glittery guitars and symphonic melodies that spin philosophical gold out heartache straw -- the idea that no matter how close you get to your lover, you can never get close enough, never fully get inside each others' skin, and, so, you'll always be alone. There's great freedom in that, but also, obviously, great yearning. Depends on the day/hour/minute.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 8, 2006 9:24 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "Before The Deluge"

Jackson Browne, "Before The Deluge."

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature

While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each others heart for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain

And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in the moment they were swept before the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
By and by--
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused

By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
By and by--
When the light thats lost within us reaches the sky

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 7, 2006 1:00 AM | Comments (2)

 

Song du Jour: "President Kennedy"

Son House, "President Kennedy"

The other day my sister was Googling for a photo of Barack Obama. Around page three, she came across the photograph that accompanies this essay -- of a seventysomething redheaded woman in a blue sweater at a rally of some sort, in full-on cheerleader/suffragette mode with fists blazing, looking for a fight.

That's our mother. I took the picture last April, when Obama was in St. Louis Park, stumping for Amy Klobuchar. I posted it here on my blog, and it came up during my sister's search for Obama, which is only fitting -- that an Internet search for a compassionate, questioning, God-loving, fiercely independent spirit would produce a photograph of Ann Hanna Walsh.

I grew up in Minneapolis, in a politically and spiritually "house divided," as my father likes to call it. He is a Republican devil's advocate. She is a Democrat dragon. Our dinner table was an Irish-Catholic fight club every night, with the six kids riding shotgun with mom against the bemused wise man, and the lot of us bellied up to the idea trough, shouting to be heard. I was a middle kid, a peacemaker with more volume than stamina, so after awhile I'd go to my room and listen to music and write -- not to be heard, but so I could hear myself.

Not much has changed: Dad's still Satan, Mom's still a saint, I'm a little of both, and we're all still alive, unlike a lot of people my and my parents' age and younger, and certainly unlike all those poor kids who got sent to fight a rich man's war.

That photo is why, with gun to head, I still describe myself as a Minnesota Democrat. Not because of its history in farms and labor and the working class, or its politicians of yore, or even because of the fact that, when I met Walter and Joan Mondale at the dog park a few weeks ago and suggested that the looming change that is so clearly afoot will rise in part yet again from the belly of the beast, from the wallflowers-until-pushed-by-the-bullies of Minnesota, the former vice president of the United States nodded and said, "It's a very unique state."

Sure. But mostly it's because of what that photo captures -- my mother's good heart, and her spirit. She had surgery on both knees this summer. Got knocked down but she got up again, and now she is hobbling to church and the ballot box and wherever else she can get around to. She is one tough cookie. She is the Fighting Irish leprechaun in a golf pullover. And something else.

On Halloween, I helped a friend erect tombstones on the front lawn of her house. Her husband made them, but he died a year ago in June, and I was honored to screw them together and put them up, until the young widow shooed me away due to my lack of tombstone placement expertise. Before I left, I told her my favorite marker is the one for Jon Doe, whose epitaph reads, "Always be kind."

She said that that describes her husband in a nutshell, and I would say it also describes so many people she and I know. Decent folks who know that it is imperative to be kind to each other, simply because nobody knows the trouble I've seen or what fresh hell any of us are going through at any given moment.

Be kind.

Which echoes all sorts of artists and spiritualists, including Dr. Bob, the New Orleans folk artist whose "Be Nice Or Leave" beauties have been springing up in all sorts of bars and homes in New Orleans.

It seems simple-minded to have to remind ourselves to be kind to each other, but that is where we find ourselves today. And I know where I got my not-perfect-but-trying kindness from. I suppose I could trace it to my Democratic DNA, which theoretically is about the kindness of strangers, the golden rule, love thy neighbor, look out for each other, help the needy, etc.

DFL? Nah: AHW. But it's alright, ma. I'm only a bleeding heart liberal, just like you.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 6, 2006 9:07 AM | Comments (1)

 

Song du Jour: "1812 Overture"

Tchaikovsky, "1812 Overture."

Poem For My Space Friends

remember, remember
the seventh of november
register and vote
throw the bullies out
unless, of course
you enjoy being called
the iPod-MySpace-YouTube generation
lost
and
incapable
of creating any real change
nevermind
a
revolution
like i did
i mean,
why don't all
you all
who talk to thousands of people
(sorry, "friends"
sorry, friends)
all over the world
everyday
in the blink
of a keyboard
show
the rest us
what
you've
learned?

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 5, 2006 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"

Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" (originally from Bringing It All Back Home, currently being performed by Dylan on stages all across North America).

At the end of our little hootenanny at Java Jack's last night, Stook! came up and played his tune "A Song Is Mo' Than A Song" (from Soundtrack To My Minneapolis), which reminds all believers and good listeners that they're not crazy for falling so heels-over-head deeply for this heroin-communion we call music. That is to say that...

A song explains yourself to yourself and to others, when even you or others don't have words or a clue.

A song bonds you with hot-gun glue to those who aren't around anymore.

A song is everything, and nothing, and everything in between.

A song can change your outlook, your mood, your clothes, your partners, your mind, the oil in your car.

A song can save your life, and whenever I read someone like Craig Finn or Bruce Springsteen talking about how music saved their lives, I know exactly what they mean: not in the angel-Clarence-on-the-bridge way, but in the gimme-strength-where-would-I-be-without-you? way.

A song can make you believe in magic, people, places, things, ghosts, yourself.

A song can make you or break you and make you say hell ya everytime to the one that goes, "ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?"

A song can make you feel less alone, despite the whole "you come in alone, you go out alone" thing, and it can make you feel less lonely, and it can make you feel like you vant to be alone.

A song, like this one, written and recorded in 1965, can make you believe in prophets of change, and, given the way things are going, can make you wonder why the lyrics to it won't be plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country for the next three days:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 4, 2006 9:46 AM | Comments (1)

 

Must See Video

Must See Video

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 2, 2006 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

 

Song du Jour: "Jonny's Song"

Diablo Cody, "Jonny's Song"

Jonny's Song (to be sung to the tune of "Your Song.")

It's a little bit funny
This feeling within
My overactive Bartholin's glands
Have soaked me to the skin
I don't have much money-ey
'Cause we're total spendthrifts
I'm pretty sure we drank it all
In some stale-smelling pit

If I was a sculptor
But then again, no
I'm not into sculptures
Except that one in the video for "Hello"
Lionel Richie came out looking
Like a black Ron Perlman
That blind girl couldn't sculpt for shit
Except for the Jheri Curl, man

Chorus
I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind
That I put down in prose
How sorry I am
That our savings went up my nose

I'm totally kidding!
I'M TOTALLY KIDDING!
I'm just giving you static
(And I also gave you HPV
Don't worry--most men are asymptomatic)

Love,
Brookie

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 1, 2006 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

 

Which Is Stronger?

Life has:
movement
sight
touch
sound
smell
feeling
taste
hunch.

Death has:
silence.

Which is stronger?
Life.

by Sophie Keller, age 7

Posted by Jim Walsh at November 1, 2006 8:46 AM | Comments (3)

 

« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »