I’ve taken to starting the day with a brief lyric from our storied past. (Mostly a two-storied past. We haven’t lived in a lot of high-rises in our time.) For some reason, this morning a particular song of Matt’s popped up, and I found myself humming along to this stanza from Natural Laws:
What’s that they’ve written all
up and down the wall?
Something about suction and my face.
I don’t know what they mean
or why it’s illustrated in green; is it
some tasteless reference to my
love for you?
Some people recite Shakespeare; others read Supreme Court decisions to their children. Me? My tiny mind focuses on the familiar, and there are few things more familiar to me than the boatload of crazy-ass songs I’ve been living with for the past three decades. Lots of material there – probably a couple hundred songs, poorly recorded on cassette 4-track decks or something meaner, all demos. The copyright folks down at the Library of Congress must think we’re a couple of crazy motherfucking crackers, though I’m sure most of the cassette collections we’ve sent to them as deposit copies have long since turned to dust. (They do digital file uploads now, of course.)
Matt’s always been a very prolific crackpot. Myself? Less so, though my cumulative output over the years is less well-documented. Matt recorded practically from the very beginning of his songwriting days, whereas many of my songs floated around in my head and never got much farther (nor, frankly, deserved to). To this day, Matt writes about six or seven songs to my one. Not sure how he does it with that day job of his – tramping around the wilderness, feeding beavers, chasing falcons, snapping photos of butterflies, etc. My songwriting habits are pretty bad. Sometimes on a weekend I’ll pick up a guitar and play the same chords I always play, except in a different order. (One of these days I’m going to run out of orders.)
Of course, there’s always the piano. But most of my composing happens in the old brain case. If I don’t get a song in my head first, it doesn’t usually go anywhere. Sometimes I fram on the keys, record a snippet on my phone, and build it out from there, but usually not. Hey … whatever works, right? So long as you and the brick walls listen, we’ll keep tossing it out there. That’s how we roll.
Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North’s leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our joint exercises with Seoul, which amounts to a massive mock-invasion of North Korea. Given our troubled history with Pyongyang (and the memory of a war that cost 3 million Korean lives), you might think we would try to err on the side of diplomacy. North Korea wants direct bilateral talks with us because we are their principal adversary. They are not a direct threat to us, but they can do a lot of damage to Seoul, so for the sake of all those people we should ratchet down this conflict now.
So here I am, strumming the old D-1, grinding my fingers to a raw nub. I don’t use a flat pick. Nor any other kind of pick, actually. I just strum the strings with my thumb, forefinger and middle finger, mostly, and dud them out with the heel of my palm. It’s a cheap bastardization of that Joni Mitchell / Neil Young technique – pretty much the only method of playing six-string that I ever bothered to learn. Limited, yes, but when I play something in three, it’s pretty much useless, so I end up strumming like my fingers were a pick. (And by the time I’m finished, they pretty much WILL be a pick.)
Things are more complicated on the right. The Republican races inspire a mixture of joy and dread. The possibility of a Trump presidency is not something I want to contemplate. That said, I couldn’t stifle a chortle of joy to see the institutional G.O.P. leadership get what they so richly deserve. After decades of stoking the most virulent reactionary sentiments imaginable, they are reaping a bitter harvest in Trump. They are watching him win primary after primary, and resolve to stop him at any cost. Then they look at second place and see someone they perhaps despise even more than Trump – Ted Cruz. Best of all, every vessel the neocons chose to carry their message forward has hit a wall, trounced by a man who calls the Iraq war “a big fat mistake”, who says he will protect Social Security, and who sees Planned Parenthood as a valuable asset on some level. Heresy!
Put The Phone Down – Matt and I start out with a song about a leprechaun, then go south from there, believe it or not. We talk about Scalia, song poem anthologies, and Matt’s experiences in the field.
All that said, Obama’s natural inclination will be to offer an olive-branch appointment, something like the one he trial-ballooned this week, namely the Republican governor of Nevada. Seriously … what is it with this president’s Pangloss-like insistence on attempting to curry favor with the Republicans? Hasn’t he been burned enough times in the last seven years? He’s like freaking Charlie Brown trying to kick the football again. Earth to Obama: they hate everything you want to do … doesn’t matter what it is. Best to nominate someone that might energize the Democratic base for the upcoming election; make the point that the election is, in substantial measure, about this issue. It’s about a lot of things, but the Supreme Court is a biggie.
Anyway, some of you may recall our Journey to the Center of the Earth a few years back. For highlights, just look back a few years in this very blog. (If you find it buried in the madness, let me know. I can’t freaking find it for the life of me.) Well, we have had indications that the Morlocks are planning some kind of attack. How do we know? For one thing, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an electronic earthquake monitor built into his water works, and it has been turning out some disturbing data … data that suggest a veritable army of Morlocks digging their way to the surface. Either that or someone is fracking in the neighborhood. We’re opting for the far more likely Morlock scenario.
Obama hasn’t gone that far, but with all that’s at stake on the Korean peninsula, it is reckless merely to follow the same path as even some of your more sane predecessors in office. It’s late in the game, but a real effort should be made to defuse this confrontation before someone makes a mistake. Mistakes in Korea can cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a very short time; no policy of either containment or rollback is worth that level of risk.
Not much we can do except continue working on our music. Yes, music comes first around here – ask anybody. We’re currently producing a few more songs for the podcast, a couple of which may make it on to a collection at some point. It’s kind of the same process we’ve been going through for the past few years – write and track about a half dozen songs, throw them up onto the Web, then do it again. That’s how