Call Any Vegetable

A few recent snapshots... Our garden plot @ one week. From the left-lettuces & chard, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, beans, corn, brussels sprouts, kale, and pumpkins. For now!

Pepper(Sweet yellow-we still need jalapeno and habanero!)

Lettuces

Oh, and that's a 1948 Ford Tractor. Just to mix it up. I took this while up at my friend's land in Bonny Doon last week. We were hanging around up there before the Dead show.

Call Any Vegetable - Frank Zappa

Once More, With Feeling

I posted this before he WON. It's back again because I like it. And him. So, anyone out there that is angry over the mere possibility of health care for all citizens can bite my substantial ass. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, buzz killers. That is all.

Inca Roads - Frank Zappa

Warm & Fuzzy

Zappa family~April 1979
Up front: Dweezil, Gail with Ahmet on her lap, and Moon
Frank looks on, smoking. (Ah, the '70's)

Discuss amongst yourselves...

Peaches en regalia - Frank Zappa

For Nancy

"Dweezil's the MAN "

Wells Fargo Center Santa Rosa, Ca 3-7-2009
1. Cletus Awreetus Awrightus
2. Inca Roads
3. Village Of The Sun
4. Echidna's Arf
5. Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?
6. Billy The Mountain
7. Flakes
8. Broken Hearts Are For Assholes
9. Bamboozled By Love
10. King Kong - Band Solos
11. Lumpy Gravy
12. G-Spot Tornado
13. Why Dontcha Do Me Right
14. Penguin In Bondage
15. Willy The Pimp.... With Scott Thunes (Frank Zappa alumnus!) On Bass !!!
16. Outside Now (This was stunningly beautiful.)
17. Peaches En Regalia
18. Illinois Enema Bandit
ENCORE:
19. The Torture Never Stops

Here's a 1980 video of "Outside Now"

Sun Village To You

Dweezil and friends tore the top of my head off. That feels just fine!

Village of the Sun - Frank Zappa

Zoot Allures

And besides that, Happy Fuckin' New Year! I mean it.

My beloved and I are off on a musical adventure of humongous proportion. A lifetime ago, I always saw live music on New Year's Eve. It was always the same band, and it never, ever got old. I'm going all Archie Bunker here, but those were the days.

These days, we stay home and celebrate. We made an exception this New Year's Eve. Going to see Frank Zappa's son Dweezil play his dad's music. I last saw Frank in Santa Cruz in 1984. This will be something special, no doubt. Everything I have read and heard about Zappa Plays Zappa
confirms that Dweezil has worked really hard to be true to his father's compositions. Which will be cathartic as hell for those of us who still miss Frank's voice in this world. He was sort of like a musical George Carlin. Unafraid, brilliant, and funny. (Sigh)

After Dweezil, Les Claypool takes the stage.My son turned me onto Primus in the early 90's. Les Claypool at midnight! You just know that will be bizarre. We haven't been so brazen in a long time, and we need to blow out our geezer exhaust pipes. Now if we can just stay awake past 11:00 p.m. Not like the old daze, when there were various chemical enhancements!

We welcome the New Year this year in a way we have not for quite some time.

Cheers!

Zoot Allures - Frank Zappa

Directly From My Heart To You

I have been receiving 'Barlow Letters' by email for about ten years now. Barlow was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead for most of the band's existence. He has led an incredible life, and is impossible to pigeon-hole. Today I received the JPEG below attached to his latest screed about last night's debate and John McCain. I proudly share it here, for your perusal. The man gets it said like nobody else.

'We'd Rather Rim Meatloaf. Seriously' (Snap!)

Ten years ago when I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School, I was on a panel with Senator Ted Kennedy and my tragically late sidekick John Kennedy, Jr. The focus of our discussion was determining when the Internet would likely have the pivotal role in shaping a presidential campaign that television had assumed in the 1960 election of their brother and father. Oddly, for a couple of guys who were deeply suspicious of Cyberspace, they both thought this would happen much sooner than I did, possibly as early as 2000. I said it would be a decade at least. It has now been a decade. And this will now be that election.

Among the many lines of division at contest here - between the 50's and the 60's, between football and frisbee, between a high regard for education and a contempt for it, between weed and whiskey, between Monotheism and Pantheism, between love and fear, between greed and responsibility - is the contest between the highly cybergenic Obama and the apoplectic old race-bating, fraudulently heroic, tail-hook gunning, womanizing, pathologically gambling, unindicted Keating 5 co-conspirator who is literally treasonous enough to possibly entrust the American republic during its darkest hour to a woman who has great legs and cheekbones, combined SAT scores lower than either one of mine, and who, with her "First Dude" were helping lead, until recently, the Alaskan Independence Party, a powerful pro-secession movement. (Imagine Lincoln choosing Jefferson Davis as his first running mate and you get the idea.)

McCain, that disgraceful curdle-brain, that grimacing little tantrum of spoiled Naval nepotism whose greatest military accomplishment (if you don't count crashing three multi-million jets while on joyrides, and contributing to a deck fire that almost sank the Forrestal} was getting in getting shot down and breaking under torture, spent the first part of the debate whining about Obama's low blows and then informed the women and children of America that his opponent had promoted an Illinois law that now legally requires doctors to refuse medical treatment to any child who somehow survives an abortion attempt. Given the abortion methods I'm familiar with, I'm inclined to think such a child would also survive the flame-throwers they'd be using against him toward the end of the movie.

But among his other qualifications for being a 21st Century President , Senator McCain remains proud that, like both Bushes before him, he is computer-illiterate and that he makes his wife Cindy deal with all that.

I thought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made me ashamed to be a Republican. But McCain and Palin have pretty well completed the job.

However, since God is merciful, McCain probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's watching the campaign on television where he's presented with an edit of reality that is far less damning to him and his campaign than the one I've been watching on the Internet. John McCain is blessed indeed to be spared the online version of himself.

On the Internet, he would see the "people's edits" immediately, like the YouTube condensation of all 3143 of his eye-blinks during last night's debate into a thirty second segment, or the highlighting of his reference to Obama's "eloquence" in a fashion that left no doubt that this was his painfully polite euphemism for the vile effluent one can squeeze out of an fast-talking sack of lying shit when he talks about the "health" - a word McCain enclosed in finger quotes - of the baby murdering "mother", who is unable to accept that a child is the natural punishment for her coozing around in fornication, which is pretty much all these black Muslim terrorist baby mamas do, if you know what I mean.

If he watched the much more elaborate coverage of the campaign on the Internet, even McCain would have to be in awe of the fact that Senator Obama has shown almost superhuman dignity, humor (as opposed to sarcasm), and that quality that Hemingway defined as courage, "grace under pressure" even while being carpet-bombed, first by the Clintons and now the McCain/Palin Golem, with six months of sucker punches, lies, trivialities, the guilt of distant or even non-existent associations (often involving black people behaving ungracefully), and now, finally, the direct incitement of murderous intent in crowds spiked with many people who are insane with racial hatred, well-armed, and trained by their government in the accurate use of long-range weapons.

He would have seen the look of enlightened acceptance on Obama's face tonight when McCain fiercely declared his pride in the people who attended his rallies, including, presumably, the ones who shout "kill him" and "off with his head." As he pronounced his appreciation for these unmasked Klansmen, someone like me who doesn't have an abused wife he can use as a computer interface could, with a slight enhancement of certain frequencies, make clearly audible the dry, cold wind that was whistling through McCain's dentures.

At this point, I must pause and ask any other digeratum who zoomed into the Senator's forehead pulse at such moments: Who do you want answering the phone at 3:00 am in the White House: someone with unassailable poise and courage or someone whose rage-readiness and blood pressure make him a fine candidate to pop a valve, thus creating the scenario in which the more blink-resistant President Palin returns the call at 3:45 am?

Who do you want salvaging the economy, someone who believes that if the government is going to recover what Bush's and McCain's cronies looted from the public treasury, the very rich will have to pay some taxes, or someone who believes that we can spend extravagantly on war, greed, weapon systems we don't need, and subsidies for our friends, while taxing only the middle class and the poor?

Finally, if McCain were watch this on the Internet, he would have known better than to make a certain Joe the Plumber the unanimous winner of tonight's debate. Apparently, Senator McCain caught a short network soundbyte of Senator Obama's exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher in Ohio last week. Whatever it was, it allowed McCain to think he could get away with claiming that Senator Obama would deny Joe the fruits of the American Dream, since Joe would have to give his money to Senator Obama who would then "spread the wealth around" presumably to other people of his own shiftless kind. Kind of like Washington Hussein Stalin.

However, if you click on the link I've attached to Joe Wurzelbacker's name above, you will see the full 6 minute discourse between Obama and the supposed target of his communist exploitation, as McCain characterized the hapless Joe.

In fact, what you will see will make you proud to be an American.

You will see a presidential candidate stop and take the time to explain more and in more respectful detail about his tax program to a single plumber from Ohio than McCain has ever explained anything - besides misrepresentations of Obama's resume - to the entire American public during the length of this campaign.

(Thanks to McCain, we know more about Obama's perfidious porkpie of a 3 mil planetarium projector - which McCain still thinks is an overhead slide projector - than we know about McCain's entire economic recovery plan. And certainly more that the payments and favors he took from Charles Keating to keep the regulators off Keating's Arizona S and L which, by some estimates exceeded $3 million and kept them at bay just long enough for the Lincoln Savings and Loan to eat the life savings of many retired investors before requiring the Federal Government to bail it out with $3 billion.)

But I digress. I come to praise Obama, not bury McCain (who is doing a fine job already). Anyway, If you watch the whole "Joe the Plumber" segment, you will see Mr. Wurzelbacker listening skeptically but with equal respect to Obama and providing his own knowledgeable addenda. It is the kind of conversation you can't imagine a president being willing or able to have with a citizen in public. This president will, and in so doing, he will encourage the existence the citizens as worthy of that critical role as Mr. Wurzelbacker appears to be.

Unless, of course, one of those supporters in whom Senator McCain takes such pride leaves one of those rallies just amped enough by their "tough" campaign style, a pint of Jim Beam, a terror of terrorists, and his abusive daddy's fury at all things brown that he'll haul out his "Elk-erator": that .270 Weatherby Magnum which, when he's using his own hand-loaded rounds with the 130 grain bullets and the extended casing length generates a 3200 fps muzzle velocity quite sufficient to drop a trophy bull at 400 yards, or, for that matter, to blow ol' Hussein Obama's nappy smart-ass head right off his skinny-ass Armani-wearin' body.

If that moment comes, hope will really die in America, I think, and hope for America will die in the rest of the world.

But right now hope is alive and well and winning. While fear, hate-mongering, and war-lust look moribund, querulous, profoundly mean-spirited, and almost blind with blinking.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America," a book more timely now that when he wrote it in 1835, "America is great because she is good. If she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great." This is the moment when we get to choose which she will be. Watch the whole YouTube exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber and you will know that we are still good.

Then watch the clip on the Internet from four days ago when a Christian pastor named Arnold Conrad opened a McCain/Palin rally with this little invocation that fails to inspire a thoughtful patriot or a true Christian or anyone like me with a degree in comparative religion, but which was, nonetheless, well-received by the crowd and the principal speakers. Rev. Conrad said, "There are millions of people around this world praying to their God -- whether it's Hindu [not a God], Buddha [also not a God], Allah [Arabic for God] -- that [Obama] wins for a variety of reasons. And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because, if that happens, they're going to think that their God is bigger than you." Then you see how fragile and stupid our goodness has become.

Personally, I pray to God and Allah and Atman and Jaweh and the Great Spirit and the Holy Who Knows and whatever else you want to call That For Which All Names and Assumptions Fall Short that goodness will survive this moment and that, in 30 years, we will look back on the next three weeks and know that, at a dark time, the American people, sick of fear, war, greed, bigotry, torture, wastefulness, and a diseased fixation on the past, rose up and voted for hope and love and the future. They voted for Barack Hussein Obama and Joe the Plumber's true American dream. Which started to become real for the first time.

And nobody got shot except maybe the very, very few who had it coming. Most of who are presently in the mountains of Afghanistan getting in the American heroin crop.

(Feel free to pass this on. I can't claim that it is the voice of my better angels. Fortunately, Senator Obama's seem to him so well in hand that I can be allowed a measure of anger and spite. And I swear to God, McCain has been acting like a man who really needs a little of that whup-ass he was gon' put on that Obama last night.)

Trouble Every Day

The 935 Lies Of George W. Bush

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.

Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.

Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.

After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?

Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance.

It has to do with matters of scale. It has to do with audacity, with sheer recklessness, with BushCo's stunning contempt for all national and international law and historic precedent and human decency. It is the sense that, at bare minimum, the most significant lies told by previous administrations were, by and large, not massive, calculated stabs to the very heart and infrastructure of the entire nation. They were not designed, as Bush's clearly were, specifically to pervert the entire American experiment, to violently shift us from peace-promoting and defense-oriented protector to an arrogant, insular, pre-emptive attacker, widely loathed and mistrusted worldwide.

See, BushCo rewrote the formulas. From WMD to tax cuts, AmeriCorp to Iraq, this administration has officially reset the bar to an all-time low as to what's possible for a truly dreadful, inept president to get away with without some sort of significant repercussion, impeachment, numerous lightning bolts raining down on his soft little monkey skull. Sure, it took leveraging America's most brutal and heartbreaking tragedy in a generation to pull it off, but does the fact the administration exploited 9/11 like a pedophile exploits a child take anything away from the astonishing depth of the abuse?

But maybe you still argue that, even at a whopping 935 calculated lies told specifically to lead us into a bogus war, it makes no difference. Maybe you argue that a lie is a lie and Bush is no better or worse than Clinton or Reagan and here is a giant cocktail of jaded, raging apathy. Let's all chug it together, shall we?

Fine. If it's a fact that all presidents lie anyway, if there's little we can do to stop them, then let us put forth a new hope. Let us now wish for the next president to lie just as passionately, as powerfully, as strategically as BushCo, and get away with it just as extraordinarily.

But let's make one significant change. Let's urge the new president to lie, well, in the other direction, to lie not in the service of horrific war or in the name of powermongering or so as to line the pockets of corporate cronies, or even to cover up stupid personal behavior, but rather in the name of sliding through an agenda of — oh my God can you believe I'm going to say it? Peace, nonviolence, international respect, humanitarianism, sex positivism, religious tolerance, progressive education. I know. Crazy.

Yes. Give us now a president who lies, calculatedly and strategically, straight in the face of the hard right neocons and the evangelicals and the corporate cretins. Let his or her army of lies lull these groups into a false sense of complacency and/or utter soul-deadening fear so they will keep their mouths shut while the rest of us get some real work done.

"As an angry, well-armed God is my witness, I will never push through a national handgun ban," would be a good lie for this new president, thus shutting up the NRA and assuaging the bogus American cowboy mythology, as his army of crazy hippies do the exact opposite and quietly work to make the nation safer and more humane. The horror! The outcry! Whatever.

Or how about this: "All foreign religions clearly hate and wish harm upon America, and therefore it shall be the policy of this administration to never, under any circumstances, attempt to understand other beliefs, to open our schools and textbooks to include honest religious information, or generally reeducate the absolutist, Christian-drunk American populace." And then begin a quiet, subversive national program to revolutionize the spiritual IQ of upcoming generations. The terrible lie!

"America must remain aggressive and antagonistic to all questionable nations who do not cower properly to our demands. We shall close our borders and police the Internet and maintain nasty vigilance on all citizens at all times. This is the only way to true national security." What's the direct opposite of such a promise? Do it, prez!

"And finally, I shall never abolish the death penalty, legalize marijuana, approve gay marriage, promote honest sex education for teens, honor habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention, or eliminate the insidious farm subsidy program. We shall never stop lying about ethanol or offer solar subsidies for every household in America. Our direct ties to horribly misogynistic, terrorist-supporting Saudi Arabian power regimes shall remain deeply corruptive and powerful forevermore."

Go ahead, Mr. or Mrs. Next President. Lie your tail off if you must. But this time, let's try to make it a real party.

He rules. Amid all the phony election year bickering, I think it's important to remember what's at stake this time around, and the issue most of us agree on. That is that the last seven- years (feels like decades) have destroyed a great deal, and we have to insure that the republicans are not given another chance to fuck up the world. Although the democratic candidates will never be all things to all people (not even close), we have to stop the madness.

Peter Max 2007

Here is a close-up of the banner on stage, taken by my Aiko brother's wonder-son. The performer is Essra Mohawk, who had the good fortune to play music with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in the late 1960's.