Sprung a Leak Everywhere

Welcome back. Is it just me, or has the entire planet somehow begun to spring more leaks than a dialysis patient strapped to a bed of nails? I needed to vent today on some current situations, and so I hit the keyboard this morning.

BP put a Tom Terrific cap on the hole at the bottom of the sea. Maybe it will hold, maybe it won't, but the just fired CEO will get something like a million dollars per year from an executive pension, plus all his stock options. Screw the pooch and get a fat reward for your failure. It's good to be CEO with an airtight corporate contract.

Still hot and hopeless for most people here in California's Central Valley. The unemployment now staggers along in Bakersfield/Delano at just under 16%, according the last BLS statisitics. Double-digit unemployment figures suck, but when when you add four of the bottom five lowest median income averages found in California coming from Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties into the hose you get a dead zone that makes the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf Of Mexico look like they are teaming with life again. Way too few jobs, and those available do not pay much in these parts.

I have often wondered why people in this area of California continue to take such brutal economic beatings, and never challenge those who rule the range. A report very recently from the Brookings Institute clarified matters for me. In ranking education for the top 100 metropolitan markets in America, Bakersfield finished dead last at numero 100. Fresno came in at #95, with Modesto at #97 and Stockton at #99.  There are precious few Masters and Doctorate people frequenting the old San Joaquin Valley these days. Hard to vote to force a change when you cannot read the ballot.   

One place in the USA where cushy still finds a home happens to be in the very place most Americans hate the most, our nation's Capitol. The Washington D.C. area booms happily along with heaps of industry and corporate investments blocking out all the whining noise from the rest of the country. The Washington Post spent over two years investigating Top Secret in America. The reporters uncovered a huge chunk of our tax dollars this decade created nearly one million Top Secret clearances from over 1,900 private companies that are now needed to spy on everyone here and everyone around the world for our safety.

I am actually surprised there has not been a million man/woman march on Washington D.C. just to fill out government job applications these past two years. But, of course, working stiffs could never get Top Secret clearances to ever work in all these great jobs that still have lots of openings, but working stiffs can do the census leg work for chump change on a temporary contracting basis. The Washington Post describes how these very elite eavesdropping workers all live in beautifully exclusive Maryland and Virginia suburbs and send their little boys and girls to best possible private schools who train them to be future spies and make large sums of money off all those little fees, assessments and taxes from the 98% of the human pool without a Top Secret clearance.

Maybe you groove on having these government people intercepting your computer keystrokes, your phone conversations and tracking your every movement throughout each and every day via GPS, Google and various cellular phone applications. You and I paid for it, we just don't get much benefit from it.

Oh, did I hear you say something about protecting all the teaming jobless and uninsured in this country from the nefarious foreign folks who kneel on a cloth each day at the appointed time and bow to the East in prayer with hopes of annihilating  all western infidels? Is that what we the people of the United Plutocratic States of America shiver in fear from these days?

Truly, I am much more concerned with young, illiterate and armed Billy Joe, Miguel, Duwann and Ashanti looking for a score in my neighborhood  than I am from all the people in the Middle East and Asia these days who have a grudge with our government's foreign policy. Does anyone really buy an Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq preemptive strike on the United States? Could any dirty bomb do more harm to this country than what British Petroleum has caused since April?  So why do we spend trillions we no longer have on spy versus spy games that resolve nothing?

I thought the Washington Post three-part series on Top Secret in America would have long legs and would be in the news for months, but with the very recent WikiLeaks.org  release of over 90,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan the Washington Post story just disappears into the shadows, just like their just reported spies do. I know our government is all up in arms over this brazen public display of classified documents, which gives readers the inside look at how we prosecute war currently. In all honesty, though, who can be surprised at this juncture about anything we do anywhere on earth after so much deserved negative publicity from Iraq, Afghanistan and every place where we set up a secret prison to interrogate enemy combatants over these many recent years.

The war leaks uncover just more secret society wormwood beneath the shiny veneer on the decks of our teetering Ship of State. Everyone now shouts about the deficit and our incomprehensible national debt, but still refuses to address the rot. Most of the world's economic deterioration stems from rewarding a tiny percentage of the population while exploiting the desperate multitudes who try to survive day to day. The conservative mantra of tax cuts as an economic salvation only helps those with luxury suites, never those in steerage or business class. I hardly think you argue for much in the way of tax increases if all the money not already destined for Social Security and Medicare ends up funding a bigger secret government military machine and subsidizing cartels in food, energy, telecommunications and finance.

Thomas Jefferson argued for a self sufficient agrarian society where the citizens farmed and sustained themselves while bartering for services with goods they produced. Alexander Hamilton argued for mercantilism, a heavy dose of nationalism based on trade barriers and bullion, which needed banks, currency and an investor class to fuel speculation for profits. Jefferson died penniless, and farmers are nearly extinct in America today. Hamilton was shot to death by the country's first gun toting Vice-President, Aaron Burr, in the famous duel of 1804. Hamilton's vision is the battered rough framework of our economy today, even immersed in the quasi-globalist corporate culture of aristocratic self interest. 

Here is an interesting statistic: since 2001 over 13 million Americans have filed for bankruptcy. That averages out to more than 1.45 million people going bust each year this decade.  How bad is it today? The cumulative mortgage debt is now twice as high as the total net worth of all housing in the USA. Banks now own more of the housing market in this country than all the individuals in the nation do.  The biggest joke on the American public is the stock market. Today 83% of all stocks are owned by 1% of the population. One last fact for you: the average federal government employee now earns 60% more than the average worker in the private sector.

I remember a vivid scene from James Cameron's epic film, Titanic, where the great vessel raises its bow to the dark star-filled frozen sky as the stern sinks into waters. The economic imbalance today feels every bit as skewed as that boat before the ultimate fall.

Seven Years This Seventh Month

The seventh month of the year pulls into time's station today. I melted down last month with a "June Swoon." "June Swoon" comes from an ancient baseball sports writer's tag the San Francisco Giants wore proudly for many years in the 1960s and early 1970s. The team always started out each season with great promise and lots of Ws. By the end of every May the Giants always seemed to be bona fide contenders to win the pennant. Then June came around to suck the life out of the Giants' baseballs, and some hated rival always seemed to come out on top by October.

Anyway, my blog faded and folded for the month of June. No excuses, really, just the swoon over life in America these days. My wife and I ditched our television satellite service last year, which brought some sanity back to my head for awhile. I did not miss the big sporting spectacles nearly as much I thought I would, and the calm from not seeing endlessly repeated commercials, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and every other overpaid mouthpiece all-dolled-up and angry as hell about everything truly refreshed my spirits.

I experienced a calmness while reading some of the horrific headlines of violent confrontations coming from the US-Mexico border, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq, Africa and Southeast Asia. Yes, it bugged my peace vibe, but I had a new zen about me from my courageous and thoughtful stance against corporate media, and could now refrain from launching into terrible tirades about the stupidity of war and premature death. 

The usual political divisive wrangling of the Right-Left Death Match 2010 became boring and increasingly meaningless in my new found net-only plug-in world. Rants against our President and his response to fiscal crises, or the health care reform initiative, made no impact on my serenity. Even the many food recalls from tainted livestock and produce, along with the growing number of stories on our nearly used up last line of anti-biotic defense against new and more virulent bacteria did not dispel my fresh new sunny disposition.    

Yes, I was good through May. The oil bursting on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in April would be contained by the corporate crooks with big damage, but not total devastation damage to the region and beyond.

I was a little saddened to see Dennis Hopper die right before Memorial Day, but actually found a zany bit of humor in his passing. By then the oil rupture had surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst oceanic oil spill on record. (Does spill sound right to you? Spill always implies tipping a tea cup to me. This was no spill.) Kevin Costner was on hand that week to deliver a new technology and save the day. I had to chuckle, maybe just a bit nervously, that Waterworld had come full circle here in 2010 in a cosmic joke kind of way with the Deacon sailing off into the sunset on his broken down tanker, Valdez, while our futuristic Hollywood hero saves the day. Into June the nervous chuckle was gone, and although Kevin's considerable efforts have made a small difference in the Gulf waters, the flood of oil continues at an astonishing high death rate for life in that large body of salt water. 

As June days ticked away my calm began to recede much like the oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico's waters, I began to ponder that it has been a full seven years since moving from Sacramento, and my reason for being in this city now rests in a little wall niche on the Panorama Bluffs. My beautiful wife, who dutifully joined me on my elder care road, these past several months has been cursed with some allergic reaction to something we eat. She has gone through three doctors an over the course of three months trying to find the culprit for the digestive disorders and hives she now endures. She has had every test the mind can conceive, but no answers.

For several years we have read and followed the food stories in this country. We have substantially altered the types of foods we eat  in response to these articles on food. Less meat, more vegetables, very few processed foods. We have not had ground beef in nearly four years. We don't even say the word burger any more. I digest food much more easily than I used to, and I have none of those Tums bouts of acid-reflex or heartburn any longer. My wife has hives, and they do not seem to want to go away no matter what plain basic ingredients we use and what major food groups we avoid.

Both of us do realize we live in the very worst area when it comes to air pollution. More harmful particulates sit on this city than on any other in America. The actual worst oil disaster in terms of volume of oil "spilled" happened in Kern County one century ago. This was the Lakeview Oil Gusher out between Taft and Maricopa of 1910. The Gulf hemorrhage is about half way to the Taft Disaster. Much of the southwest portion of Kern County was literally soaked in oil. Much of those chemicals I am sure still sit in that large stretch of scrub and dirt that make up the extreme southwest quadrant of Kern County.

Knowing where we are both locally and nationally, and now fully realizing what lurks just below and just above the surface here in my current habitat, dissolved the last vestige of my calm about a week ago. So here we are starting the seventh month on the anniversary week of seven full years in Bakersfield just as agitated as ever. So much so, that I went out two days ago and purchased a converter box and antennae for my television set. I guess I missed the serenity of the constant lies that can only be gained through television commercials.      

Exiled in May

Exile On Main Street is all the music news that fits during this month of May 2010. When it was originally issued it ushered an end to a third chapter in the Rolling Stones volatile and continuing book of life and song. 

When I think back forty plus years, I remember my first girlfriend really hating the Rolling Stones. She hankered for The Bob and all those folk tunes and artists that were beginning to fade in the last years of the 1960s. Simon and Garfunkel were her last refuge at the time, although the Jefferson Airplane's softer moments offered her some solace if the right smoke could be produced.

When she and I first hooked up in 1967 The Bob was recovering from the mysterious accident, and folk was for that-moment-in-evolution a combination of rock being exploited for all it was worth with a 12-string ring on an augmented chord in nearly every recording studio. She dug The Bob from the days of Freewheelin' to Another Side. For all the great sounds of The Byrds and Arthur Lee's Love your ears bled from the way-too-many manufactured stringed-clones in the pop universe at the time. Folk-rock was so pervasive even a sideman like the young Glen Campbell could  walk from the set of Shindig to record Mr. 12 String Guitar for World Pacific Records with all the hits of the day covered in breathtaking mono. It could have been a Sears exclusive.

In the early 1960s mainstream pop music was a lot like most of the mainstream pop music of today, but instead of American Idol it was Teen Idol time. Elvis was Hollywood, and reigned over the Fabians, Bobby Rydells, Neil Sedakas, Wayne Newtons on the male side of the platter while Lesley Gore and big-hair-bouffant girls from the stables of Phil Spector and Shadow Morton with names like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las dug out their flip-sided claims with  those Supremes' girls of Motown to balance the airwaves.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1964, along with the other British Invaders, wiped away most of those manufactured idols of  the early Sixties with a new raw attack that owed their sound to the rock and blues artists of the 1950s. But, by 1967 most American pop radio music was coming from Detroit at the hit house of Berry Gordy's Motown Records, and the West Coast with the bands that populated the Bay Area and Los Angeles. From across the water in England, an American in London, Jimi Hendrix, along with Cream now captured youthful imaginations. The Rolling Stones had suddenly become a faded page from their own Yesterdays' Papers song, just like so many of the first wave of British Invasion acts, while the Beatles soared on with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Rolling Stones anti-Beatles stance had worn thin with the public by 1967. Tunes like Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl alienated nearly all of the girls I knew during that period, and the move to a more psychedelic sonic ornamentation on records like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty's Request left "all the young dudes" baffled and put-off.

Most kids in the US had no idea at the time of the travails the collective individual Stones were having in England. The British authorities had begun to crackdown on the pesky drugs of choice for 1960s youth. As the Summer of Love shone on London, Los Angeles and San Francisco with emerging new bands like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, the Stones were being hauled into jail as examples to impressionable teens that cannabis intake would not be tolerated. As a historical piece of minutiae, Donovan was the first to get busted in Britain, but the Stones got all the headlines and much of the blame. In 1967 my girlfriend did not care, maybe they would just go away.

It seems odd today that the band stood on the brink as 1968 came around. They could not tour due to legal issues and seemed on the verge of collapse. Their rivals, The Beatles, had given up touring and were a studio and marketing machine during the last years of the Decade of Change. Both groups, for very differing reasons, brought in new management in 1967 to help deal with all the unpleasant shit- the business end of the music business.

Andrew Loog Oldham got the boot first as the Rolling Stones manager in 1966, and then in 1967 as their record producer. Their Satanic Majesty's Request was self produced by the band with less than desired sales results. Allen Klein picked up the manager mantle and Jimmy Miller would become the band's producer beginning with Beggar's Banquet. 

When Exile on Main Street first saw the record bins on May 12, 1972 most every guy I knew dug the record for the obvious collection of strong songs included on the two long playing vinyl records. It was not The White Album, however a lot of critics in their reviews that spring and summer referred back to The Beatles ultimate release in some effort to compare breadth, and to maintain some media chatter of interconnectedness between the two iconic British rock bands. Tremendous songs from Tumbling Dice to Soul Survivor are sprinkled liberally on every side. Resignation found its way on many of the tracks, but with a fierce determination and swagger to counter weigh against the permeating doubts of dislocation. 

The inclusion of what sounded like rough takes and unfinished mixes, particularly on Side 3 between Happy and Let It Loose took the steam out of the record for a lot my buddies and party-mates. Several girlfriends in my frenetic 1972 just did not groove to Turd On The Run, although they loved to "scrape the shit right off your shoes" in harmony when Sweet Virginia found its way on any sound system. The Stones were now so entrenched in the culture of the world after the success of the previous three classics, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers that ladies just gave the band's audacity and overt sexual stance a grudging pass. They were just, well, The Stones.

 In the blinding speed that passes/passed for pop culture history, when this record found its first needle in 1972 Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison had all arrived and passed away from the first point in time that the Rolling Stones stood in the mouth of pop music oblivion in 1967. The Stones had lost Brian Jones to a murky death at his own home over this period, and the Beatles were no more. Cream was now a historical footnote, and three bands removed from Eric Clapton and his growing addiction.  Jimmy Miller would produce only one more Rolling Stones album. The young guitar virtuoso, Mick Taylor, who had quickly replaced Brian Jones in 1969, had just two records left with the band before moving on to obscurity.  Young girls bopping with the young boys in 1972 to Let It Loose and Stop Breaking Down had no clue who did Under My Thumb, and did not care.

The band plays on with various bass players, keyboardists and their 1975 found Rolling Stone guitarist, Ron Wood, all these years after the May 12 1972 release. They discovered a new, inventive and very sympathetic producer, Don Was, to keep their tracks fresh sounding, if not quite as shocking in this age of 24/7 pornography. There are a truckload of great tunes they have produced since these fellows were caught in Exile on the European continent almost forty years ago sweating out the music amid the basement steam and drug use.

The best parts and the worst parts of this newly polished and reissued with obligatory-bonus-track-material gemstone hears the band capture so viscerally our beauty and flaws here in the west. We can be beautiful, profane, scarred, passionate, brutal, forgiving and resilient all in the moment of life. These characteristics define our humanity, and maybe this was some crowning achievement to squeeze that truth out and  Shine A Light for the rest of us to embrace, and be okay knowing it is just who we are- imperfect one and all. It was never a concept album, but over all these years really became one.

If you've never owned the LP, or the Cassette, or the CD of this album do yourself a favor and get the new spit-shined grooves on CD. Listen to the whole damn thing a few times to get the context. Find a copy of Melvin Van Peebles' movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to view while listening to the album, then kickback and discover the spirit of the 1970s, which seems a lot like today.

Thanks for stopping by and for the read.

 

Montana Smokes Pot Dispensaries

It wasn't a major story, but in this day of really high unemployment, crippling government budgets with falling  revenues amid no-tax conservative calls for less government interference and regulation I find the recent firebombings of two medical marijuana dispensaries in Billings, Montana ironic.  ABC News has the story.

Apparently two young men couldn't take having pot dispensaries in beautiful downtown Billings. "Not in our town" was spray painted on one of the burned dispensaries, and video cameras caught part of the action.
Priceless.

Frank Zappa did a song with his early 1970s assembled Mothers Of Invention on the album Over-nite Sensation called Moving To Montana. Based on news events this week Montana will join Arizona as places I will avoid doing recreation and retirement in. Not that the fine government officials in both state care.


In California, where huge state budget deficits are now just part of everyday living along with some of the highest unemployment figures in the nation, marijuana gets tossed around as a cure-all for budget and headache relief for battered citizens and legislators alike.  There will a ballot measure this November in California to vote on decriminalizing the persistent and resilient plant. Sales of cannabis would not be fully legalized, but local governments in the state could opt to allow through local ordinances commercial distribution, and collect tax money and/or regulation fees from the enterprises dispensing the weed.

Since this proposal makes so much sense it will never pass. Watch for tons of "reefer madness" advertisements in the golden state starting late this summer. The usual lobby of big entrenched business concerns in alcohol, drugs and tobacco along with major insurance companies will flood the airwaves with killer weed messages if poll numbers indicate passage might be even remotely possible. 

Long ago on a progressive college campus in a galaxy far away, I sat with my girlfriend and smoked my first joint among some college student friends while listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Harmonica and guitars never sounded so sweet. All that teen hormonal angst evaporated in a small cloud of burnt green buds. All those evil weed horror messages in high-school class rooms became the subject of immediate laughter and derision.  I would never listen to people who did not have first hand experiences on subject matters open to discussion and debate ever again.

A decade after my first close encounter of a really good kind with the herb,  NORML  had grown from its inception in 1970 to be quite a political force and offered up ballot measures in California to legalize marijuana. I remember a large event NORML put together in San Francisco at the end of the Seventies decade. The Democratic Whip of the California state legislature, and soon to be Speaker, Willie Brown, spoke eloquently and passionately to the assembled pro-pot throng about the necessity to legalize marijuana. Moby Grape performed a dynamic set to the large crowd who set off to get stoned knowing the drug of choice was going to be legalized that fall. The measure was crushed. I'm sure most of the crowd who had gathered that day were also crushed to learn there is a big state called California beyond the progressive little border of liberalism by the Bay.

More than thirty years later the state is far more conservative than it was at the end of the 1970s. People don't torch marijuana dispensaries here yet, but local law enforcement officials continue to make medical marijuana a very dicey way to do business. Common sense might force a person to think a major change in all our government drug policies might be in order, but no evidence can be found that sense or sanity exists in California, or in the rest of the country today.

As I type this sentence I listen to East-West and smile at the brilliance of Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop. That tightly rolled relief of angst may elude the ballot box in California and be the cause of hysteria in Montana, but escape into a righteous attitude might  just be a good sound system with the right tune in mind.

Thanks for visiting.

Mothers Day Observed

Mothers Day.  The holiday came about in this country on the eve of the Great War in 1914 to commemorate the memory of a woman, and her Mother Work Day Clubs, which had served to ease the suffering of the poor, and then the combat victims of both sides in the Civil War.

The last one I celebrated with my mom was sixteen years ago, and she was bed ridden with only two months to live. Not that we knew, because the oncologist was "vigorously attacking the problem" he continually assured us all. So much for those plans of mice and doctors.

I never had much luck around Mothers Day. I remember one occasion right before the official holiday. I had packed for the four hour drive from the Bay only to have a lady run a stop sign and broadside the car I was driving on the way to the Nimitz Freeway. The lady was not insured. It was an ugly scene in the neighborhood right off Cedar Street in Berkeley with many of the inhabitants coming to the rescue of the woman who had run the stop sign to offer support with baseball bats in hand. Fortunately, it was a busy, what-other-kind-is-there-in-Berkeley, intersection with plenty of people stopping and offering business cards to me if I needed a witness and to keep a semblance of peace until a police car arrived. What saved me that Saturday afternoon was the sheer size of the automobile I sat in.

I kept the car for a few more years, but it was never the same. Prior to the ill timed broadside it had been a magnificent Pontiac Star Chief Executive model from the mid-sixties when "wide tracks" and GM ruled the world's car business. Like so many of those giant V-8 steel-tonnage transports, this model's parts could be swapped, if necessary, with many other like-sized GM model car parts. No Star Chief Executive model doors available in the wrecking yards at a decent price? How about a door from this Buick, Oldsmobile or other Pontiac model for you? A fine can of spray paint to match that color and you're golden. No, it was never the same.  

I never did make it down for that Mothers Day, which did not sit well with the parental units who must have thought this was a simple ruse to avoid the long drive. The small gift I had picked up north to hand deliver in person got to the recipient far too late to make any amends.

Other years, other tales of ineptitude surrounding the holiday ensued. The time when the kids, with my ex-wife and I, went down for the Mothers Day right after my mom had been diagnosed with arrhythmia. She had just announced her retirement from the teaching ranks after 25 years of devoted service, but had been feeling tired that last semester. She had finally gone to the doctor about the condition and got the news, along with the paddle-shock treatment to get the ticker back in rhythm. On the day we arrived the heart had resumed its irregular jazz meter, which really annoyed her. It did not help that my ex had the strange habit of nap-crashing in bed for much of the daylight hours for every visit we would make to see my parents. I don't think I've ever seen my mom and dad so glad to see us leave than that Mothers Day afternoon.

This holiday has never been a picnic for my beautiful wife of these past fifteen years. Being a step in charge of children not biologically yours is no prize on a holiday like this one. No matter what your tutelage skill level, or the many years of parental confidences shared with the kids in your charge, or the great family spirit that enshrouds your domicile Mothers Day is just going to ultimately disappoint too many deserving ladies.

Very seldom is the stepmother a  mom in language, even though each is a mom everyday in action. Steps, as general rule, get called by their first name, particularly so as the years roll by. The calls from those little people in the photos on the walls and mantles who now have some wrinkles of their own come late on days like this one, if they come at all. Some steps are luckier than others, and might get some FTD arrangement on their doorstep a day or two before, or maybe a candy-gram from the Mongo or Mongitte of their past life. Bravo!

What I have discovered over my time on the planet is that there are many thankless jobs in this world, but being a step parent has got to be the toughest of all the thankless occupations. Those who go and grow through the process are tough, kind, loving and that one person you want most in life to have your back, because they will get the job done without consideration of reward.

I am the most fortunate of men to have such a person by my side. The love of my life has always been a step ahead of the curve, a step above the base and common, a step first to both comfort and help those in most need on this earth, and she remains in step with me however odd my irregular path curves to accommodate a curiosity of interest.
  
We now share a home with three furry felines, and one goofy looking canine who is in this world without any of those teeth that bear his specie's name. The dog just went through surgery to repair a dislocated knee-cap, and is the luckiest pooch in the Western Hemisphere to have the mom he now has. That he faithfully adores her, follows her every movement when she is home and dotes each afternoon/evening by the window at the front door waiting for her return proves he does have some sense.  More than I can say most days about some grown men in the family.

Happy Mothers Day to all women, but especially to my wonder woman, Vicky. If you've ever been in any relationship for any length of time you have been a mom. This is your day, you earned it, so make sure you enjoy it.