Steven Taylor Hungry Blues Poetry Project New Years Marathon from Thelma Blitz on Vimeo.

If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).

"I guess if we ignore it, it'll probably go away" by like_shipwrecks (Nicole).

This is Nicole. She is one of the many talented photographers whose work I follow on flickr.

The same night that the country voted for a Black president, majorities of voters voted against gay families and the rights of gay people in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas.

Nicole is angry and so am I.

We are PEOPLE. We are not an alien race. We are not a cult. We are people, with lives, jobs, families, and feelings. We are constructive members of society and to deny us of rights that all PEOPLE should have is just WRONG.

Voting against us is not going to make us or the issues disappear. We’re not giving up. We’re fighting back. We aren’t going anywhere.

We didn’t vote away racism and we didn’t vote away other bigotry and inequality, and these votes against GLBT people were one of this Election Day’s ugliest demonstrations of what we have not yet overcome.

In California it’s been saddening to also see another demonstration of what we have not yet overcome as some protesting the bigotry of Proposition 8 have been directing their anger at Black Californians. The thinking and behavior is racist—and it’s wrong-headed to target a particular group as responsible for the fearfulness of a cross-section of the electorate.

My friend Adina pointed out that whether you’re talking about the possible inappropriate participation of the Mormon Church in political organizing for Prop 8 or the possible votes of some Black voters for Prop 8, the fight really lies elsewhere.

But let’s be real here—there was 49% turnout in San Francisco County and 55% turnout in Alameda which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. There was 59% turnout in San Mateo county. If we the supporters of marriage rights for all had done a better job of helping our neighbors and friends to vote, the result would have gone the other way. The result was in many respects a failure of execution. I care much less about yelling at Mormons and much more about turning out allies and persuading people on the fence about justice for all.

This is precisely how Obama won out over the fearfulness that could have prevented many more people from voting for him. We need to help the people who want to support us to follow through and we need to reach out to the people we can influence. That kind of reaching out is infectious and is what will win the day. It will win elections—but more importantly it will win us the community we need to move forward as a society.

I’ve seen the robins
Perched in barren treetops
They’re watchin’ last-ditch racists marching across the floor
Just like peace signs that melted in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow

Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire

I immediately hear Billy Holiday:

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

I wouldn’t necessarily think I should share this association as something for public consideration, except that I am also remembering something I first learned about on David Neiwert’s blog: the military has become infested with Neo-Nazis.

According to a devastating Southern Poverty Law Center report (echoed in the New York Times), it’s happening at an alarming rate. And it’s happening because of the way the military is being handled at the very top:

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel — a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division — large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.Neo-Nazis “stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they’re inside, and they are hard-core,” Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” he added. “That’s a problem.”The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.”Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture,” Fain said. “We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes.”

The problem, as the report explains, is the extreme pressure military recruiters are now under to fill their recruitment quotas:

Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members,” said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.”Last year, for the first time, they didn’t make their recruiting goals. They don’t want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. “Only two have been discharged,” he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states — Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. “They’re communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military,” Barfield said. “Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq.”

Okay, now back to Billy Holiday.The “sudden smell of burning flesh” ought to be as evocative of lynching as the nooses in Jena, LA. Lynching, after all, is extra-judicial execution of an accused person, usually Black, and it often involved burning the victims and otherwise mutilating them. Lynching does not need to involve a noose at all. In some cases, the lynch rope was only a means of displaying an already dead body. A google images search on “lynching” will get you a number of infamous photos of burning or burnt Black bodies (I’m not linking them).I am not claiming that LaVena Johnson was lynched. But indications that someone attempted to set her body on fire should raise our suspicion levels about the nature of this crime, just as we would be further alarmed if there had been a noose involved.Should I be connecting the dots this way? I don’t know, but it is a possibility that will beg investigation until the military stops stonewalling LaVena Johnson’s father and makes a commitment to uncover the truth and seek justice.Back to David Neiwert:

To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn’t hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.The larger political question, however, is a matter of accountability — the avoidance of which has proven to be the Bush administration’s most remarkable skill. Yet at some point, both the public and the military are going to have to ask: What is this administration doing to our armed forces?

“The Old Stamping Ground” (1937)

Personnel:

Willie “The Lion” Smith - piano

Frankie Newton - trumpet

Buster Bailey - clarinet

Pete Brown - alto sax

Jimmy McLin - guitar

John Kirby - bass

O’Neal Spencer - drums, vocal

It was the first time I’d gotten into music like this. I think it was around my sophomore year in high school that I hit my saturation point with the Beatles. I never stopped liking them, but I moved on. In high school and college, I found Neil Young, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Greatful Dead, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Parliament/Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus—to name just some, at random . . .

After my dad passed away in 1997, I took it to a new level with Frankie Newton. I compensated for the fact that he only has about 50 recorded songs by collecting recordings by everyone he associated with. For several years, I immersed myself in Newton’s musical milieu, high art, pre-Bop Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the earlier stuff from the 1920s, the foundations.

After a while, the Jazz obsession mellowed. Maybe around 2000, I started actively listening again to music from the second half of the 20th century and to current 21st century stuff.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all come back around to the Beatles. With the help of YouTube, my 4-year-old has been doing with the Beatels what I did starting in around 5th grade. The favorite record for some time has been Let It Be. I am sure we have watched each song played on the rooftop of Apple Records at least 100 times. It’s a good thing the Beatles are so damn good, cause otherwise I’d be going out of mind.

Anyway, I’m telling you all of this to try to explain what it was like to hear this John Lennon outtake from 1968. I love the rooftop performance of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And I’ve always thought that John makes the song with the song fragment he weaves into Paul’s bluesy love song. What I didn’t know until earlier tonight was that John had recorded “Everyone” separately. From what I could read online, there are a couple of versions out there. So far, I’ve just found this one. It’s rough around the edges, the Julia-like guitar part doesn’t seem totally worked out—and it is beautiful. John really gets me at the end. After the circular lyrics, delivered over repetitive guitar picking, he trails off with that “everybody got the wrong time, everybody got the wrong time . . .”

Really, he said that. Article at the link says more than 25,000 FEMA trailers are still in service in Mississippi.

Judge give me life this mornin’ down on Parchman Farm (2x)
I wouldn’t hate it so bad, but I left my wife in mourn

Oh, goodbye wife, all you have done gone (2x)
But I hope some day, you will hear my lonesome song

Oh listen you men, I don’t mean no harm (2x)
If you wanna do good, you better stay off old Parchman Farm

We got to work in the mornin’, just at dawn of day (2x)
Just at the settin’ of the sun, that’s when the work is done

I’m down on Parchman Farm, but I sho’ wanna go back home (2x)
But I hope some day I will overcome