A song from nearly 50 years ago meshes well with LA in the 21st Century.
"And the state of our nation is... greatness or…
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“The weight of this sad time we must obey. / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” — Lear
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“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
A Wicker Basket
Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter—
Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—
So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know—
Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz—
And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on—
There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it—
Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it
in my wicker basket.
— BY ROBERT CREELEY
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Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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Black Burgers Matter
Just found out about this amazing new restaurant called “Amplifying Black Voices” where you can buy non-racist hamburgers and anti-fascist milkshakes. pic.twitter.com/0JA1mELnYg
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) July 1, 2020
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Thanks, Gerard.
Is it because I’m housebound with a broken toe? Is it because I grew up listening to EJ in the Seventies? Was it the vacation I took in LA last year (working vacation, mind you)?
Seems to be some dust in here, and getting in my eyes.
Unadorned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UroApoVbKn0
That song will always live within me. Ironically, it was probably only a couple of years ago that I finally knew what some of the lyrics are.
God bless the internet. That was marvelous. Do people still watch TV?
Regarding the lyric comment, frequently I search for the real words to songs I grew up with.
Lay me down in sheets of linnen.
Never would have figured tjat one out.
Now try Benny and the Jets
Got me all misty, too. Good lord, I know every landmark in that video, and I’ve visited most of them at one time or other. Los. Fucking. Angeles. Hate this goddam place. Except I love it. We love to hate it and we hate to love it. But dammit, I am an Angelino. It is my city, my culture, my America. And yeah, it’s gone down hill, and it ain’t the LA I fell in love with anymore. But I’m a curmudgeonly old bastard now, myself. Still my city.
JWM
That was a piece of work, brother.
And as jwm noted above we are formed by our surroundings and adapt to the where and the what we are immersed in. By doing that we take on the flavor and texture of the meat, we feel the bones, and share the pain of our (OUR) place. As a kid I used to think doing that was peculiar to the Appalachian South since that was my place and my people made sure those origins were known to all within earshot; we were a tribe connected as much to the soil and air as to the family tree and all it’s roots. But it wasn’t just my circle that felt that way, we’re all like that and some of the connections are sweet, some are bitter, some are both.
Rob Ziobro, That’s the line I looked up, because I never could tell what he sang.
Again, you never disappoint. Thank you
A million people, a million stories, all unique.