Concert: Three Girls And Their Buddy at Woodland Park Zoo - Emmy Lou Harris, Shawn Calvin, Patty Griffin, and Buddy Miller

It's kind of strange going to a show in your own neighborhood--and a show that starts at 6:00, at that. Most shows I go to you're still waiting for the first band three hours later.

Last night's show by “Three Girls and Their Buddy” was a powerful but mellow night of melody and harmony by four roots stars. They are all accomplished singer-songwriters who play in each other's bands, sing each other's songs, and produce and play on each other's albums. They all mostly have new albums with new songs, and played some of those along with old tunes, and some wonderful covers of various artists (including The Beatles, and Gram Parsons, Emmy Lou's boyfriend in the 60s). My favorite tunes were from Buddy Miller’s recent record with Julie Miller, "Written in Chalk,” in particular the song "Gasoline and Matches." But every single one hit it out of the park more than once, and variously supported each other on guitar, bass, hand percussion and harmony.

For a little over two hours they took turns singing lead and telling a few stories. Buddy's were probably the best, and he put in a few digs against Tacoma, where he lived for a couple of years...and spent much of the rest of the night apologizing. Sort of.

They all sounded good, and it was an inspiring show. It was wonderful to see Buddy Miller back and joking. Earlier in the year, he had a heart attack after one of their shows and was forced to drop off the tour.

Patty Griffin said "I'm 45 years old and I've written two love songs in my life," before singing "Heavenly Day," from her album, "Children Running Through." Emmy Lou Harris, now a 62 year old grandmother, admitted that her mother still insists she wear a bike helmet.

It was like being at a friends house, listening to four people play.

Here is an amateur video from a performance in Colorado two weeks ago:

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Michael Jackson moonwalk video clips

This is an awesome compilation of Michael Jackson moonwalk video clips--this is prime MJ moonwalking...and a clip of his leaning phase...

Poem: The facts of life, 3

You don't shop
For a cop.
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Poem and painting: Bernie Madoff, on ice for 150 years

Like many Ponzi schemes, Bernard Madoff's plan was to get back on top and go legit, but he had to return to the cookie jar over and over and over again to keep the foundering enterprise afloat one more month, and when he got ahead of it, he'd ease back into the crowd like a victorious and undetected pickpocket, but it ended more like a drunken hit and run driver racing away from the bloody scene until he piles into a wall that seems to jump out from nowhere and, bad luck for him--he survives the wall.
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Ex-Senator John Edwards back on the griddle, starring in a sex tape

By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor



You'd think the recent disgrace of Governor Mark Sanford and Senator John Ensign's sex scandals might take some of the heat off John Edwards. At the moment, it seems to have ratcheted up the scrutiny, since the Edwards case goes much deeper--involving paternity, a dying wife, and possible payoffs.

Andrew Young, one of ex-Senator John Edwards's closest aides, is writing a book in which he says Edwards told him he “would be taken care of for life” if he would say that he fathered the baby of Edwards’s girlfriend, Rielle Hunter. The aide (who is not the former ambassador), sold the book to St. Martin’s Press last week. In his proposal, Young says Edwards begged him to confess to fathering the baby.


Hunter and Edwards on the campaign trail

“You know how much I love you," Edwards told Young. "You know I’d walk off a cliff for you, and I know you’d walk off a cliff for me. ” Parts of this story were leaked by someone at the publisher to both the NY Times and the NY Daily News last weekend.


Rielle and baby

In the meantime, feds are looking at whether to prosecute John Edwards if it turns out campaign funds were funneled as hush money to Rielle Hunter or Andrew Young. In 2007, you may recall, Young's attorney said his client was the father just before the Iowa caucus season.

The biggest bombshell appeared in a New York Times article today: Young’s proposal states he was writing the book because he had become disillusioned with the Senator's recklessness after finding a sex tape starring John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. It should be a good one--how many sex tapes are actually filmed by a cinematographer?! How long can it be before the tape appears on the Internet, if it's not out there already? As for Edwards's relationship with his wife--as she said, "it's complicated."
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Digital art: Michael Jackson

click to enlarge

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This will not turn out well for us - the first flesh-eating robots

New Scientist has a fascinating piece this week about flesh eating robots. Somehow it seems like this won't turn out well for us. . .read the article here.

James Auger worked with long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau to build five domestic robots. Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room. But the robots also have a taste for flesh. They can gain energy by chomping on flies and mice, an idea inspired by researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab, UK, who built a fly-powered robot and have also suggested that marine robots could feed on plankton.

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Chiet Seattle's speech, like it or not

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor
And sometime Seattle/Pac. NW stringer

Some of Chief Seattle's speeches and quotes are controversial--not due to their content (but that too), but because scholars and others (mainly conservatives, and gun nuts[1], ) believe the Chief's speeches were enhanced in the 60's by environmentalists, and others for their own nefarious purposes. [2] Certainly no one thought much of them before the 60's, when the words suddenly chimed with the times.

Chief Seattle's Reply

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? That idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and
experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider
your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.

This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.

If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. I do not know. Our ways are different than yours.

The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps because the red man is a savage and does not understand. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insects wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand.

The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night ? I am red man and do not understand.

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a mid-day rain, or scented by the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breaths. Like a man dying for many days is numb to the stench.

But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh.

And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadows flowers. So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I'll make one condition, the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and I do not understand any other way.

I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts ? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may discover one day - our God is the same God. You may think you know that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.

The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket ? Gone. Where is the eagle ? Gone. The end of living and beginning of survival.

-- Chief Sealth (Seattle)





[1] I go back and forth on the phrase gun nuts. My tendency is to include everyone who owns any weapon more powerful than a squirt gun or whipped cream dispenser.

[2] From the Wikipedia: Even the date and location of the speech has been disputed, but the most common version is that on March 11, 1854, Sealth gave a speech at a large outdoor gathering in Seattle. The meeting had been called by Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens to discuss the surrender or sale of native land to white settlers. Doc Maynard introduced Stevens, who then briefly explained his mission, which was already well understood by all present.
Seattle then rose to speak. He rested his hand upon the head of the much smaller Stevens, and declaimed with great dignity for an extended period. No one alive today knows what he said; he spoke in the Lushootseed language, and someone translated his words into Chinook jargon, and a third person translated that into English.
Some years later, Dr. Henry A. Smith wrote down an English version of the speech, based on Smith's notes. It was a flowery text in which Sealth purportedly thanked the white people for their generosity, demanded that any treaty guarantee access to Native burial grounds, and made a contrast between the God of the white people and that of his own. Smith noted that he had recorded "...but a fragment of his [Sealth's] speech". Recent scholarship questions the authenticity of Smith's supposed translation.
In 1891, Frederick James Grant's History of Seattle, Washington reprinted Smith's version. In 1929, Clarence B. Bagley's History of King County, Washington reprinted Grant's version with some additions. In 1931, John M. Rich reprinted the Bagley version in Chief Seattle's Unanswered Challenge. In the 1960s, articles by William Arrowsmith and the growth of environmentalism revived interest in Sealth's speech. Ted Perry introduced anachronistic material, such as shooting buffalo from trains, into a new version for a movie called Home, produced for the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Radio and Television Commission.The movie sunk without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version is the most widely known. Albert Furtwangler analyzes the evolution of Sealth's speech in Answering Chief Seattle (1997).

The speech attributed to Sealth, as re-written by others, has been widely cited as "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values", but there is little evidence that he actually spoke it. A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Sealth to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is considered by some historians as "an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination".
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Poem: The islands from eight miles high

Beneath a cerulean blue chiseled frieze,
The islands recede into the sea
Or settle to the sea floor

Like an archipelago of Atlantises.
Islands come and go,
Bobbing up and bobbing down

Like corks lost in the ocean,
Drifting the seven seas
Threading through seven continents

And millions of other islands and straits.
They sail along, cresting the waves
Beneath gathering clouds

And flocks of birds
Circumnavigating the globe,
Shuttling from landfall to landfall.
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The Needle - a poem by Ken Kesey he claimed was Robert Service's

Cover of the last supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog - click to enlarge

Ken Kesey contributed this poem (among his other curious contributions) to The Last Whole Earth Catalog and supplement.

I read The Needle when it was first published, attributed to Robert Service. It was undoubtedly written by Ken Kesey (maybe in conjunction with Ken Babbs).


Ken Kesey, back then


The Needle
by "Robert Service" but probably by Ken Kesey

First, brothers and sisters and spirits of our sphere,
I wish to make one thing perfectly clear;
During these last ten turnings of a year
I have been
Jacked-up, jerked-off, brought down, strung-out,
And I've
Holed up, come on, cooled off and hung out,
And I've
Rushed and flashed and flushed and twitched
And I've
Sniveled and snorted and bellowed and bitched
And I've
Been spaced out atoms in the heartless void
And a slightly-plotted tightly-knotted paranoid,
I've watched friends grin goodby as I spiraled down the drain?
I've had doctors shake their fingers at the fungus on my brain;
And I have called, friends and doctors, oh I have roared out my soul
From the compass busting bottom of the false magnetic pole,
But it was a place beyond friends or medicine's reach--
A senseless 3-D cry from a binary breach--
And the heartless void can listen but doesn't seem to care
And my call was never answered until the needle turned to prayer.
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The Michael Jackson story (and many others) summed up by Stereotypist

No one explains who did this in the first place, but you can find it here: http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/131545.html
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Poem: Peacekeeper

By Jack Brummet

1
The hawk on a high wall
Is hardened in wickedness

2
A roiling thunderstorm clears the air
Like Wyatt Earp's peacekeeper

3
A bad beginning can be overcome,
But a good end lasts forever
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[2008, revised 2009. This originally appeared in the little magazine Shorts]