Joan Baez Again

It’s been almost exactly one year since my first love letter to Joan Baez appeared at the Pondering Pig. Now Hector at The Walrus Speaks has put up another Joan Baez video, this time of Diamonds and Rust, her sweet and heartfelt ode to Mr. Dylan and to lost-love nostalgia in general. And I find I have a few more heartfelt thoughts about that key figure and soul sister of my generation.

But you’re probably getting bored listening to me go on and on about Joan Baez. Why doesn’t he write about somebody with blond hair, like Shakira? Or Christina Aguilera. Now they’ve got blond hair! That Joan Baez, her hair is as gray as the Pondering Pig’s! Grayer even! And I’ve never seen her even try to belly dance.

Actually, it would be interesting to ponder the current music scene and report back to other graysnout pigs such as myself. But I am the least likely of pigs to take on such a task. I don’t even own a television set, so how could I watch the MTV awards?

Show your support! Take up a collection so the Pig can properly ponder Shakira! You’ll be amazed at my unexpected insights.

Actually, I am maybe a little too puritanical to really get into Shakira and her contemps. All that blatant on stage sex kind of embarrasses me. Makes me feel like I shouldn’t be in looking at this private moment.

Joanie took a different route. In her rise to showbiz success she portrayed herself as an enemy of violence, as a friend of farmworkers, as someone who might show up at anti-war demonstrations and peace marches and just sing for free. In fact, not only did she portray herself that way, she actually WAS that way. What a publicity coup!

She was more, well, more Sixties. Just the music. Just the achingly pure voice. Just the one guitar. No bullshit please. There is more to sing about in this life than my hot blood and my breaking heart.

Actually, when I think of Joan Baez, I get a lump in my throat. It’s weird, I know. Maybe you have to be from my time and place. For instance, I will never never forget the day in November 1978 when San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone and our outspoken gay rights Supervisor Harvey Milk were both shot down in San Francisco’s City Hall by a bitter and hate wracked man whose name will never again be spoken by this pig. Shot down in cold blood just ten days after news had broken about the massacre at Jonestown. Ten days after our own little homegrown cult, the People’s Temple, took the Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Cam, our graphics artist at work, listened to the radio while she worked, so she heard the news first. We all stood around her radio to hear Supervisor Dianne Feinstein speak over the air. “”Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot . . . and killed. The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

I stood numb on the 1 California bus all the way home. Staring out at the streets of my gone gray city, smelling the dirty overcoat of the Chinese guy standing next to me, looking blankly at the elderly black lady with her Bible in her hand — just like the woman who used to collect down at Seventeenth and Geary for the Jim Jones People’s Temple. The one who was probably lying dead in a morgue in Guyana right now. No weight has ever lain heavier on my shoulders. My city, my city, my broken city of sorrow and death.

At home that evening, Patrushka and I and our seven year old daughter Hannah watched the little black and white TV in mourning. Patrushka was ready to give birth so we weren’t standing with the candlelit crowds in the Civic Center. We just sat in our darkened living room on Seventeenth Avenue feeling that stunned and dark feeling. What more evil could happen to hope? (John Lennon’s assassination was still a year away.)

KGO-TV’s camera swept across the 25,000 grief strained faces, gay and straight, black, white and Asian, there to hold up their little candles, to listen to forgotten heartfelt, extemporized speeches, to be together, who knew why? Because the rolling sky was on fire.

What I can never forget was the moment Joan Baez came out of the crowd, tuned up, and, standing on the City Hall steps, began to sing “Amazing Grace.” And through that little portable TV speaker on Seventeenth Avenue we heard again her blessed angel voice of hope and healing and truth. I grabbed on and held tight. I guess it wasn’t much in the great scheme of things, but at that moment, it felt like a whole lot. What I heard was – ‘the light’s not out yet, the light’s not all the way out.’

God bless you forever for that, Joanie.

Patrushka gave birth to our daughter Kirstie the next day. She came out screaming. Full of hope. And ready for joy.

Thanks to Uncle Donald’s Castro Street for the vigil photo. His site is worth visiting if you remember or would like to know more.

The Myths I Live By

Hey, you should see my mailbox! I’m overwhelmed with letters saying the world would be a better place if only I would write more about beach parties, Gidget and Moondoggie.

I, too, am craving more sights of that cute brown-eyed blonde in her itchy bitchy teenie weeny yellow polka dot bikini and all those buff actor studs who knew how to surf before there were wet suits.

But, before we open the gates to Jollity Farm, I have a few words to say about ‘Myth’ with a capital M. As an beatnik hippie English major at San Francisco State, I read a lot about it. A Myth is neither a computer game nor just a story that isn’t true, as many people think. Not to put too fine a point to it, myths are stories we need to believe in order to arrange our lives into a meaningful pattern.

So that our lives will make sense to ourselves.

I write about my personal myth from time to time, as I have fashioned it over the years. Seeking for meaning in my early years, hanging out with Gidget and Moondoggie, struggling to raise a family in the middle years as a world-famous lecturer on ginseng root, now a rootless wanderer wintering in Antwerp, and, of course, I’m a pig. My Patrushka, as you know, also looms large. The possibility of true love forever is a major strand of my myth.

Another myth I have glommed onto is the one about my homeland, America. Land of the Brave and Home of the Free. I speak without irony. America, crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. America, the apple of the world’s eye where reign Liberty and Justice for all.
In my mythic America there could never be a story myth about about how Roosevelt or some other president authorized torture camps to extract information from enemy prisoners. Americans would never do that. That’s what the Nazis and the Japs did (forgive me, my Japanese readers, I’m using the words of my childhood myth-making time). In fact, it would be the most unAmerican thing I could think of.

All you Native Americans please shut up about our nineteenth century policies of genocide. All you Afro-American readers please be quiet about one hundred years of segregation by government policy. And I would prefer it if you wouldn’t mention the thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans who sat out WWII in concentration camps.

They don’t fit my myth, which I sometimes have to hold on to for dear life. If I begin to believe that the American government, by policy, has authorized torture as a method to gain information from terrorists, I have two choices. One, I can let my myth crumble and rebuild it with another myth about an America where all that stuff about Honor and Justice is bullshit. A lot of people do that.

Or I can start screaming LET’S FIND OUT! IS IT REALLY TRUE? IF IT IS, THEN BRING THOSE BASTARDS DOWN! Light the freedom torch again! Bring out the evidence. Let’s start the hearings. Because I need my Myth of America. And I’ll fight for it.

Sweet Sir Galahad

I’ve been visiting The Walrus Speaks lately, a prolific and entertaining blog dedicated to the Beatles mainly but with lots of side glances into other Sixties/Seventies rock. The other day I mentioned I thought the most beautiful and touching song to come out of the Sixties was Joan Baez’s Sweet Sir Galahad, written about her sister Mimi’s ascent from grief to life after her husband Richard was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966.

I just was visiting there tonight and discovered Hector has put up a clip of Joanie herself singing Sweet Sir Galahad at Woodstock. Having grown up with that voice at my ear through every important event of my young life – well, tears welled up in these old eyes to see her young again and her voice in its prime, and that song once more…

Give your self a treat. Head over to Dedicated to the Pondering Pig—Sweet Sir Galahad

 

Hey Man, You’re Torturing Me

Look, I don’t want to believe that my Christian brother George W. Bush has approved the use of torture on terrorists in captivity at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else. I want to believe he, at least mentally, wears his “WWJD” bracelet and refers to it when he needs to make a decision.

“Let’s see. Would Jesus approve of people torturing people? No matter how noble the motive? No, I guess not.

“OK – you can’t do it. Sorry, Mr. Rumsfeld, find another way to get the information.”

The trouble is it doesn’t much matter what I want to believe. What matters is to find out, once and for all, whether our government, for the first time in history, has made torturing prisoners a matter of policy. The administration denies it right and left. Yet their interrogation methods remain so secret a prisoner can’t even tell his lawyer what they did to him. And maybe it’s true that, in another example, those soldiers at Abu Gharib just decided on their own to torture prisoners. And maybe it’s true that Rumsfeld knew nothing about it.

But those questions won’t go away. Once they’ve started they have to be answered.

But we Americans won’t talk about it. It’s too horrible. How many times did you hear the torture issue come up in pre-election arguing? I never did. Peter Steinfels, writing in the New York Times last Saturday, suggests torture “is such a stain on personal and national character that nothing but appalling photographs could have forced the subject to the fore.”

That’s why I am a little upbeat about the suit a group of American lawyers (the Center for Constitutional Rights) filed in Germany yesterday. They asked the German government to investigate Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and George Tenet, the former director of the CIA. Investigate them for “suspected war crimes stemming from the treatment of prisoners in military jails in Iraq and Cuba.” German law allows for prosecuting war criminals no matter who they work for.

Hey, Greatest Generation, how would you feel about Germany prosecuting the USA’s ex-Secretary of Defense for war crimes? I’m with you – I would hate it.

To me, that’s the point. We’ve got to get this out in the open air. Rub our noses in it. I refuse to believe the American people have become so decadent that they will just yawn and change the channel if it turns out to be true (I know this sounds incredibly naive) that Americans have been torturing their enemies.

Labels: Simple Justice

When All Things Work Together For Good

That renowned theologian, The Pondering Pig, has decided the world needs more bashing of spurious inspirational verses. For instance, here’s a little verse I came across the other day…

Good when He gives, supremely good;
Nor less when He denies:
Afflictions, from His sovereign hand,
Are blessings in disguise.

I know I should just smile gamely and move on. But I can’t. Who wrote this? How can they believe something like that about God?

Let us consider one of my favorite Old Testament heroes, Job. Was Job blessed when God allowed Satan to kill his family and make his skin burst out with boils in a wager to see if Job’s love might falter?

“Oh, thank you God for this honor! Boils and pustules and my wife and family dead in a catastrophe and I’m sleeping in a garbage heap. I’ll just bet this is a blessing in disguise. In fact, I’ve got a feeling this is all going to work together for good!”

No, Job didn’t just smile gamely and move on. He was screaming! He was demanding an audience with the Supreme Being.

“You’ve got some explaining to do, Mr. Supreme Being!”

To me, Job was a real man. None of this “Oh dear. Well, if God has given me cancer he must have a divine reason…” He was going to fight it out to the end.

I prefer the fundamental perspective, as I learned it in YWAM. God doesn’t cause suffering nor want us to suffer so that we’ll be blessed. No, sometimes we suffer because of our own stupid choices. Sometimes we suffer because of someone else’s stupid or evil choices. Sometimes it’s the Evil One out sneaking around making our lives suck. And sometimes it’s germs, which have their own agenda and are no friend of ours.

My Mom, God bless her, when she got feeling down, would say “Well, all things work together for good.” She wasn’t quoting from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul has some serious qualifiers to his little overworked phrase. No, Mom truly believed that

1. God is good,
2. God is love,
3. He is the source of everything, and therefore
4. Evil cannot really exist. It must be an illusion. It was her philosophy, absorbed from all the Unity and Science of Mind books she used to read. Evil is an illusion.

I think Mom was either way deeper than I am or else she had the facts wrong. The reason I’m not totally sure is that Mom was a spiritual heavyweight. She directly changed people’s lives for the better. The power of prayer was never in better hands. She led a quiet and dedicated life. But, for instance, she impacted the lives of both my wives hugely. And is probably the reason my two wives (one is my ex of course) are such good friends today. She taught them both about the power of forgiveness and the power of prayer.

But for me, I gotta stand with the facts. As I see them. I know we evangelical Christians are supposed to say, “Oh, well that’s what the Bible says. End of argument” But I can’t do that. Maybe it’s because I was agnostic most of my life and had to think things out for myself.

For instance, Rwanda…

Beginning on April 6, 1994, and for the next hundred days, up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes, with as many as 10,000 killed each day.

Was this horror an illusion? Was this butchery a blessing in disguise? Are all the dead smiling down from Heaven and did the survivors really learn a lot because of how they butchered or how they suffered?

I believe, I KNOW, evil is alive and well in this world and, if you just sit back and go with the flow, your life ain’t going to get better and better. You’ve got to be prepared to do some serious kicking, like Job did.

I do, however, stand with the apostle Paul’s idea. He said, “All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose”. In my experience, people who have a tight relationship with God have a completely different take on the world. Like my Mom, reality filters into their hearts and minds differently. And if you are “called according to His purpose”, then your perspective on affliction and suffering is going to change considerable. The goal becomes, not to feel good, but to accomplish his purpose.

I think Paul meant loving the hurting ones, and feeding them, and drying their tears, and spreading the Good News about Jesus to everyone who hasn’t heard it yet. And healing the sick and busting the little girls out of the brothels and smashing the bastards who put them there.

And teaching kids how to play basketball or throw a frisbee so it goes where they want it to. And working to stop torture and bringing torturers to justice. Even if the orders came from the highest levels. And not be scared. And never stop.

I want to be like that.

William Blake’s illustration of Job’s Evil Dream from AllPosters.com

Labels: Christianity, Simple Justice

Come Visit Patrushka’s New Photoblog

My Patrushka just doesn’t get enough exposure here at the Pigsty. So we’ve started a new photoblog just for her pics. Could you drop by and check it out please? And leave a comment? I especially need to know if you you have to wait a long time to get on to her site, or if there are problems with the comment system – that kind of thing. Especially if you use a dial-up connection. Here’s the link: Patrushka’s View

Labels: Won’t Fit In Box

Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you know what’s better about today? I don’t have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there’s not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac’s thirty axioms for modern prose. They’re pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You’ll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn’t say we don’t need to understand grammar or syntax – but don’t let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack’s list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I’m part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I’m a pig. It’s hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack’s axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I’m heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you’re done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you’ll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn’t know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn’t very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote ‘spelling’ in the margin they really meant “Why can’t you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They’re nice! They smell good! No – you’re sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you’re going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what’s this? Horrors! Slang! You’ve used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don’t you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure…Tsk tsk tsk..”

And on and on. Next I was accused of ‘rambling’. What’s wrong with ‘rambling’ anyway? I’ve spent my life rambling round this country, and I’ve met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say – I love it! That’s the whole idea.

Don’t know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you’d be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I’m still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he’ll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”

Lindy-Hopping To Glory

With apologies to my dial-up readers, I just have to post one more quick video clip. It’s got everything pig pals commented on yesterday after the Anita post. Great jitterbugging, the export of American culture worldwide, the gutsy spirit of the “greatest generation”, and a time when the whole world, with the possible exception of the Third Reich, believed the Americans were the good guys. This is good stuff, folks. It’s from a 1944 film called “The Canterville Ghost” and I just have to see the whole movie…

The Canterville Ghost (1944) — Jitterbug / Woogie Boogie

Labels: Music, Won’t Fit In Box

Quadrophenia Meets Anita O’Day

I think, because I sometimes write about Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead and Codfish On Top, people assume I’m an old rocker. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s over for me. I just don’t get excited by that backbeat anymore. Sometimes I still put on my all-time favorite rock album – Quadrophenia – but I never get through more than a couple of cuts.

I just don’t feel the rage. It’s not that I don’t still relate to Jimmy, the protagonist of The Who’s great rock opera. That double LP and that movie just nailed the essential emotion of my early life – a buried, raging, primal scream spread over layers of confusion, and fried eggs that made me sick in the morning. I will always be grateful to Roger Daltrey for Love, Reign O’er Me and actually recording, for the first time, what that primal scream sounded like. I remember all too vividly how it felt to be young – but now, I tend to prefer a little joy in my life. Like Anita O’Day!

Everyone who knows about Anita please raise their hands. After all, it’s not like she’s not one of the immortals. She’s often notched just below Ella Fitzgerald on the jazz singer hit parade because of her amazing technical mastery of scat singing, but she wasn’t so chummy with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. And someone once described her as having “a raspy little voice.” Ella got more respect. Anita herself said her big early influence was the Forties comedienne Martha Raye. How can you say things like and expect to displace Ella as Frank Sinatra’s consort on the pop singer’s Olympus? But, you know, I don’t usually sit by my speakers worrying about someone’s vocal quality or pointing out the cool way they hit that trill just before A flat. (I can just hear my Patrushka saying, ‘You do too!’)

Anita for me is one of the great purveyors of musical joy and delight. She the man, so to speak. When I’m feelin a little low, I can depend on the Forties Anita to get me smiling again.

Here she is in 1941 with Gene Krupa’s band singing a bit of her first big hit, Let Me Off Uptown.

You can get it at Itunes for 99 cents.

And here she is twenty years later at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. The Fifties Anita. Wow! And that hat!

Anita O’Day – Tea for Two

If you want to see her today, don’t look in the graveyard, because she’s in the studio working. In fact she put out a CD last year to celebrate her 86th birthday. (It’s not very good, really – but amazing she had the chutzpah.)

Anita’s been creeping up on me for the last week or so. I keep going back to her music for infusions of joy and high spirits and delight. I think I’m going to add her to my personal pantheon of great chick singers: Janis Joplin, Maxine Sullivan, Billie Holiday, Lesley Gore (just kidding – but the kid had her moments). Each one had a completely unique and divinely inspired spirit.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered I still like The Beatles. Oh, and The Cure. And Brian Wilson. And Dusty Springfield (how could I have forgotten Dusty – she belongs in that pantheon too). And Neil Young. And The Kinks. And The Pretenders. And Lesley Gore. Even Codfish On Top. Hey – I’ve got to go rock out.

Labels: Anita O’Day, Music

What Does A Pig Ponder?

Exactly my question. I decided to find out – and I spent much of yesterday going through porcine perturbations for nearly a year, assigning categories to every post. It’s not like I write about root beer or something. I kept coming up with categories like ‘Stupid Evil’ and ‘Pigs Go Mad’. So now I know what I write about, and I’m foolish or vain enough to think you might enjoy rummaging through the back files too – at least if you’re mad too to know more beatniks, hippies, Laurel and Hardy, and a pondering pig’s perturbations. There they are – over in the sidebar. Have fun, and let me know if you find any mistakes.