A day after theocracy replaced democracy in America. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, thrilled the inaugural audience by twice sieg heiling after his speech. Joy enraptures the true believers, while the fallen moan their present fate.
There is a need for concern.
Trump won the election by more than a million votes, as Democratic voters abandoned Kamela Harris for her vague message, support of the Hamas genocide, and the fact that most American males will not vote for a woman.
It was no landslide, except in the Electoral College, a unique institution dating back to slavery days and slanted for the GOP thank to an aggressive campaign to gerrymand the congressional districts in their favor of a return to God.
Elon Musk responded to criticism by the media. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Most of my Jewish friends voted for Trump, provong that some German Jews vote for Hitler.
A photgrapher friend texted that he couldn’t beleive how much the religous right hates transgender people.
I wasn’t. I had lived in the 1960s. By 1968 I was twisted, more a sexual adventurer than a queer, but I never accepted gay-bashing. Just recently a longtime Jewish friend of mine was arguing with his twelve year-old daugther that he didn’t hate gays.
“I have gay friends.”
“But you said if he touched you, you would punch him.” She was more than mad. It wasn’t my place to interfere with a discourse betwen a parent and a child, but I knew him well and said, “First, I know you almost fifty years. I’ve never seen you throw a punch. Secondly I do hate gays. I don’t mind you lying to yourself or me, but don’t lie to your daughter. It will bite you in your ass. Lastly don’t fuck with a trannie. They will fuck you up.”
The infamous John Spacely according to Wikipedia
feld LA to the East Village where his drug addiction got to the point where he was unable to work. He then returned to his life of hustling, focusing on the St. Mark’s Place, where he became a popular street personality. Around this time, he got in an altercation with a drag queen, who along with some others attacked Spacely with chains, injuring his eye. After this incident, Spacely most often wore an eye patch over his damaged eye, because he did not have enough money to have the surgery needed to correct the eye.
“Never fuck with a drag queen.”
Elon Musk should take heed.
He is a big guy, but a drag queen will beat a man senseless with her high heel. I’ve seen Kathoeys do it in Thailand. I cheered them on. Sie gesund, transfroys. ie Yiddish for trans woman.
Americans don’t have money. They have credit card debt. – James Steele – Fugitive
Americans are $1.8 trillion dollars in debt to banks. If there are lucky. The average credit card interest rate in America is 24.26% after the fourth straight monthly decrease in the wake of recent Federal Reserve rate cuts. Mostly spend on what they don’t need or accumulating interest rates. Deconsume, children, and otherwise wait for International Write-Off Day. Realize you own nothing, but your debt which averages $6000 per Americans. Young, old, and dead.
I have no credit cards. I haven’t for sixteen years. I have nothing to show for that time, except well-fed families in Thailand. Cash is freedom. Fuck cryto-currency. Just another scam by the wealthy scum.
“When your cab driver tells you about stocks, it’s time to get out of the market. ” JP Morgan. American Monopolist.
An amazing passage from Willa Cather’s WHEN I KNEW CRANE about he meeting him several times in Omaha 1894.
Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a moment, I was with Mr. Crane.
The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was eleven o’clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white, western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.
ps I was there 100%. Great writing is not a mini-series.
From 2011
In the summer of 1993 Tall Meg and I drove from LA to New York in her 1966 Studebaker Lark. Tall Meg was in love with a man in New York and I was returning to no one. She was in a hurry, but had never made the cross-country trip, so we abandoned the Interstate and headed into the desert. The first night I erred thinking that there were plenty of motel rooms in Monument Valley, Arizona. We arrived at dusk to discover the two motels were sold out. That evening Tall Meg and I crashed in the car parked off the road leading to Colorado. Both of us were too tired to travel any farther. She had the only blanket.
“At least the seats fold down.” The night was lit by the cosmos. Kerouac and Cassidy might have traveled down this road in ON THE ROAD.
“Don’t say anything.” Tall Meg was pissed at me. It was cold in the high plains. Cars passed every few minutes. I stepped outside and stared at the billions of stars clustered in the sky. I had never seen so many. Tall Meg joined me.
“A lot of stars.” She was still angry at me, but her eyes shined with the heaven.
In the morning we continued on our way. People were happy to see her car. They beeped their horns and children waved at the vision of America.
“What is it?” Most asked at the car stations. Tall Meg told them everything about her car. They waved good-bye and we entered the Rockies, stopping the night at a small hotel in Leadville, the highest city in the USA. We struggled to sleep in the high altitude. My lungs struggled to get my breath. Both of us woke at dawn. The road was downhill from Leadville. By the end of the day we would be in the plains. I stopped at a mountain stream that would become the Arkansas River and thought about swimming until Tall Meg pointing out that the crystal water which would was laden with the poisonous aftermath of gold mine owned by the Newmont Corporation.
“It’s dead.”
“And been dead for a long time.”
Tall Meg and I left the river and I have thought about that sign on the Arkansas since then.
There were few clear streams left in America and the mining entity known as Newmont has moved much of its operations overseas. Last week the Peru government yielded to demands of local residents to stop the development of a massive gold pit in the Cajamarca region some 3700 meters above sea level. Residents had set up roadblocks to prevent any attempt by Newmont to drain glacier-fed lakes to support their mining operation. Newmont had proposed another set of negotiations, dangling the prospect of jobs before the locals. Such promises have been offered before to the people in Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana and Peru with success. Newmont produced 5.4 million ounces of gold last year. With gold at an all-time high Newmont is the most successful gold mining operation in the world, however the locals living in the shadow of their mines have complained about deadly pollution and the failure to provide well-paid jobs to the community.
Newmont has been ignored these protests with the help of the government who are in the pocket of the mining giant. They have escaped audits for taxes and evaded royalty payment thanks to a legion of politicians, bankers and lawyers on the take. Managers are adept at short-changing workers overtime in foreign countries and contributed to the danger of mining by avoiding adherence to safety regulations. The CIA has repeatedly acted in favor of Newmont to the detriment of the workers and local communities.
All that glitters might be gold, but that gold is not for everyone.
James Brown sang those words to the entire nation.
Even the KKK heard, but back in the 1960s not everyone was listening to the singer of PLEASE PLEASE ME, since black music was broadcasted on the far ends of the AM radio spectrum. In Boston at night in my bed I twisted the knob of my Japanese radio beyond WMEX and Arnie Ginsberg to find a universe of music unknown to Top Forty radio. Station WILD. Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Booker T, Tina Turner, and James Brown. Civil rights meant freedom for Soul. Blacks were welcome on TV. Ed Sullivan even on May 1, 1966. No one was ready for James Brown on WHERE THE ACTION IS singing PAPA’S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG.
His mad feet swiveling across the stage killed my waltz lessons for good. My mother called it devil music and I became a dancing fiend. As a thirteen year-old on the border of fourteen, I knew dancing like James Brown, girls would go crazy and I practiced to perfect his split.
Drop dead with your balls to the floor and then up again.
A miracle if you survived the first attempt.
I bought black shiny pointed shoes. Just like James. A suit too. Black. My mother had hopes for my avocation to the priesthood, until she spotted the Cuban heels.
“You’re bound for hell.”
All I wanted to be was James Brown’s Wonderbread double. My older brother thought I was crazy.
“You’re never going sweat like him.”
James Brown poured a typhoon of sweat night after night after night, because the Godfather of Soul was the hardest working showman in the world and he was more than that too.
The feet skating was a specialty. Not everyonecould perform the crazy feet. Gorls certainly couldn’t in high heels. At least none of the white girls at the Surf Nantasket. He was a star.
But not to everyone.
Back in 1988 a feminist said that someone who hit his wife after huffing crack in his private bathroom and led the police on a Macon County car chase didn’t deserve any accolades.
No one is 100% saint and JB didn’t get Rodney King beating for that regrettable episode. He served three years for the crime and his life was much bigger than one mistake. There might have been a few more, butI wasn’t throwing stones.
April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King had been shot by an unknown assassin. James Brown had been scheduled to play the Boston Garden. The frightened city officials considered cancelling the concert. The performer convinced them to televise the concert. Before the first song he dramatically appealed for the city to remain calm. Roxbury and Blue Hill Ave didn’t go up in flames and the next day James Brown flew to DC to preach peace in the nation’s #1 Chocolate City.
That show might have been broadcast in black and white, yet proved Poppa Peacemaker was one color.
“It’s the night train.”
Agent 00SOUL played the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival to thousands of hippies waiting for Led Zeppelin. My brother and I were two of them. Nipsy Russell primed the crowd with the dirtiest comedy routine this side of Moms Mabely and the master blasted the long-haired audience out of their seat with a two-hour performance. There were few sights uglier than hippies trying to dance to soul. Mr. Dynamite showed them the way. By the way Led Zeppelin sucked.
“I feel good.”
What about Maceo Parker’s JB horn section?
Tight. Everyone loved James.
Richard Nixon invited him to the White House in 1972.
“I don’t care about your past.”
James liked playing live.
In 1974 he appeared at Boston’s Sugar Shack, a pimp club. I was the only longhair at the bar. Wearing my black suit and pointy boots. The stylish procurers welcomed a fellow fan with open bottles of champagne. I didn’t attempt any splits and neither did the Godfather of Soul.
Certainly not during IT’S A MAN WORLD.
We called out for PLEASE PLEASE ME as an encore and James Brown didn’t disappoint us. He went down on his knees a dozen times with his MC putting the spangled cloak over his shoulders. Helped to his feet the show appeared over, the Godfather was a big tease and loved the applause.
From everyone.
“Ain’t no drag, poppa’s got a brand new bag.”
Wowing the Studio 54 disco crowd or inflaming a New Wave audience with soul the Mudd Club in 1978. Africa Bambatta spun SEX MACHINE thereafter to set the dancers’ feet on fire.
“I don’t know karate, but I know crazor.”
In 1979 I was working at a rock disco. Hurrah’s on West 62nd Street. The main bouncer was Jack Flood, an old Harlem gangster. The ex-heavyweight from Seattle drove a Lincoln and had hands the size of catcher mitts. The first time we met, Jack flicked his middle finger into my palm. An old homo sign.
This coming from a man who fought a six-round exhibition with Joe Louis in 1950.
“I lost every round.”
We were friends. Jack and me. One night three Puerto Ricans tried to bust into the club. I punched their leader in the mouth. Jack laughed saying, “That was a love tap. Here’s how you KO someone.”
His punch paralyzed my shoulder for an hour.
After midnight I went upstairs to have a drink and came down with a cognac and coke for Jack only to find him and his nephew Marvin being stabbed by the PRs. They had come back with friends and knives. One slashed at me. Jack stopped him with a left and then pulled out a revolver. One shot into the ceiling. The PRs fled and Jack gave me his piece. He was bleeding in the chest. So was Marvin.
“Shoot ‘em.”
I ran outside and pointed the gun at the attackers.
I was no killer.
Two shots in the air.
They jumped into a taxi and disappeared with the cops in pursuit.
“You done good. Get rid of the gun.”
I went to the roof and dropped the revolver into an airshaft.
Jack stayed in the hospital a week. No charges were pressed. The police detective showed Jack’s record. Long is not the word. When he got out of the hospital, I told him James Brown was playing at the Lone Star Cafe.
“James Brown. I know him.”
I got tickets and Jack drove us downtown in the Lincoln. He didn’t stop for lights and when he overshot the club Jack backed up on 5th Avenue against traffic without looking in his mirror. He parked the black car before a fire hydrant and we strolled to the door. The place was packed, but we noticed the bouncers weren’t taking tickets and inside we gathered tickets and sold them outside for $10 each.
We split $1000.
James and the fourteen JBs band members of soul bliss crammed onto a East Village kitchen-sized stage. No splits.
Afterwards Jack took me upstairs to the dressing room.
James greeted him, “It’s the Seattle Slaughter.”
I shook the master’s hand and Jack brought me out of the dressing room before I blubbered too much praise to the Godfather of Soul.
High point in my life along with shaking hands with Muhammad Ali and RFK and never paying taxes.
Jack and I hung out a lot and one night we were watching the 1st Roberto Duran/Sugar Ray Leonard fight. We had bet Duran and won about 2Cs each. As we were celebrating he tapped my shoulder.
“Turn around and tell me if you recognize anyone.”
I did.
It was the PR who had stabbed Jack.
“I got some business to do. Nothing to do with you.”
Jack and Marvin vanished with the PR.
Didn’t come back to the bar either.
That was New York 1979 and it was the end of an era. Jack Flood stayed up in Harlem. Marvin was shot dead in a basement. I moved to Paris.
Soul was dying and somehow people stopped listening by 1980. Disco didn’t like live music, but James Brown kept it up and in 1982 he appeared in Hamburg Germany in front of 200 people. I was with a black pimp called Cali Swenson.
Almost as tough as Jack Flood.
Same show.
Knocked me dead and everyone else and within the year he appeared in ROCKY IV singing LIVING IN AMERICA and he never went out of style again. Everyone wanted to be James. Rev. Al Sharpton even Condeleeza Rice.
Same hair, n’est pas?
“Get up of that thing and relieve that pressure.”
But on Xmas the godfather left the show and I’m listening to HOT PANTS 1971.
“Smokin’.”
I ain’t crying because James wasn’t about the blues. He went out a showman.
