August has been hard. The worst month in a couple of years. So, after the symphonies to women in countries where they are of no more value than a goat and treated even worse. I wrote a gentle lovely little piece.
I hope it reaches you with love and peace. Oddly enough, it was difficult to compose and to play nonetheless as a moment of tranquility. we need that, even in the midst of war or as the object of hate and derision, we need a sense of peace to keep our sanity. Here’s to sanity! And really, I do wish Peace to all who take the time to listen. Maybe read my published poetry here. there’s a lot. I love. I just love. Even in darkness there is love.
High Lonesome Sound of A Bad Son Trying to Be a Good Son
This is a simple yet complicated hillbilly kind of thing, High Lonesome if you will. I was surprised to find few knew the history of poetry, narrative, stories, singing around a fire, or just the singing that overlaps and develops through repitition and changes in pitch and range. As an overeducated redneck who frequelty seems to say, “look, I have over 600 published works and taught master classes in poetry during Pablo Neruda Literature Conference”; and sometimes I feel bad saying it. I feel like I am putting the other person down when all I want is to say speak freely, please, I starve for articstic conversation, for knowledge and exchange of experiment of idea and method. Some of us write and publish in the same style to the moment of death. I change stylyes and technique as a way of keeping from off the cliiff’s edge. So, this said, I am limiting to whom it is sent but am posting to FB anyway. If you have a pulse and there is venom within it please stay away. This ballad is in as ancient a style as I can possible reference. There is no older way of history, of religion, of sharing our lives than in those songs and stories we tell with FRIENDS. Back when life was different it was one of the favorite things a group of us would do which was to sit out at night with weed and a jug of Mountain Red Burgandy, and make up songs or expand with new lyrics our favorite Dylan or Young. It was a way of communication, and it was for me a way of developing poetry which I would later publish. Today we think of High Lonesome as a strictly Appalacahian thing with our Scotland and Nordic heritage in the hills. I like to sing it all the time. So, lately I have been recording them. Hate or love, or indifference, it’s cool. Everyone has a theory and each of us has a “thing”. It is just that for me I find this thing limitless and am at my struggling happiest when taking on new projects in the Arts and different forms of music. Yesterday I spent 20 hours on Klaus Schulze inspired Dark Side of the Moog, Michael Shrieve type drums, I was mad with intensity as I tried to get the changes because the style was out side my range. Today, was a hard day of too much money had to be spent, mine, credit, family, and it really tore me up. The loneliness of devotion is often tossed off as being weak in faith. OK, fine. But we all have feelings and if we do not have feelings then I guess we are dead. This High Lonseome ballad in three parts is all me cause no one will endeavor such a horrid act as collaboration with me. The horror is that I understand. This song is about prayer, devotion and love. 3 things surely to scare away any art and Catholic friends who remain. PLease if you dig on American music going back to first man and woman relating their day over a steak mammoth and fern grill, then you’ll know what I am doing. I feel bad gogn to such length to explain a work in progress, but I change styles on things so often it confuses people and they become agitated. I have changed my publishing poetic style 3 times since I was 16 when I first began publishing, each change came about from discussions and criticisms from my editors and regular ol’ life changes. Yesterday I spent 20 hours on a Klaus Schulze and Michael Shrieve style of early techno using Logic Pro X, an Akai MPD32 and my midi grand piano.
It was fun but wow was that taxing trying to maintain straight chord changes and beat progressions. I am a modern classical composer in the world of Arve Part, Reich, Cage, the evil Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Krautrock of course. Yet still in the classical range and as a pianist the setting it all up into various instrumentations for a symphony is an amazing and tedious experience I recommend to any and all who love the challenges our world of art offers each day. I live in praise of THE Buddha and his Saints as Mahayana Buddhism is a religion and I was devoted for all my life up until 6 or 7 years ago when I had THE Jesus Christ experience of being spoken to from the Cross. It was strange and unexpected. I knew in that momen, a Saul to Paul type scene, that Christ was hurt as I hated him and his religions so much, but the more I returned to my youthful studies in Alan Watts and his gang of world religion to Lacan and his gang of Post Freudians I began to understand exactly what was happening and it relates to Thomas Merton. That’s all. For anyone bold enough to try to make it through my often turgid prose and even more thick music, I thank you. As a Poet, my primary source of Being, it is an adventure that language turns into clouds and waves, earth blooming and earth dying, so when I go into the unknown I expect people to express some pretty serious hatreds, yet all I hope is that we love.
Final version Prayer to Saints Stephen and Barthalamew
This is about the Saints Stephan, skinned; and Barthalamew, stoned to death to speaking of our Christ. This is dedicated to the forced maiming of women in Islamic nations. Women are not slaves, they are not propety, they are not to be vaginally muttilated so they do not enjoy sex. What kind of scared ass wimp does this? What insanity propels a people into such destruction of the opposite sex? From this we see Besh, or Isis, committing unspeakable acts whcih in turn inspires other insecure men to do the same. Be secure, but they are not, they know the women would run in a second if given the chance. But then some, when interviewed will say the rules from completely covering them in 100 plus degree heat and cutting out the labia is fine. This is what occurs in mass psychology, the mass psychology of fascism in the shape of Islam. Good people, stand up and speak against the horrors. Putin smiles with an obviously sexually confused mullah as they agree ‘yah it’s cool to maim women, whatever.’
The things going through my head I can’t post here, I’d be deleted for speaking my mind against these actions.
Prayer Song to St. Stephen and St. Barthalamew
Symphony #6 For the Tortured and Ruined Women of Africa to India by the hand and hate in Islam today. It breaks my heart, we are all to blame, we are each one of us with an able hand.
What is left but to kill, to kidnap, to rape, to destroy, to sell in an open slave market, to strangle a daughter for shaming by marryin the wrong man, to throw acid at school shilren out for an ed…
Symphony #6 For the Tortured and Ruined Women of Africa to India by the hand and hate in Islam today. It breaks my heart, we are all to blame, we are each one of us wiht an able hand.
What is left but to kill, to kidnap, to rape, to destroy, to sell in an open slave market, to strangle a daughter for shaming by marryin the wrong man, to throw acid at school shilren out for an ed…
Symphony #6 For the Tortured and Ruined Women of Africa to India by the hand and hate in Islam today. It breaks my heart, we are all to blame, we are each one of us with an able hand.
This is a symphony that has been rolling around in my head for a week or so ever since I read the story about the woman going back to Pakistaniniillyanybody land to be with her husband. Some paternal relative, as in her father or his, strangled her to death as an ‘honor’ killing. It raised a lot of violent thoughts in me. Such brutality, such crazed ignorance and hatred for humankind. What environment is so horrid that killing is the better of living and talking it out or just going ahead and killing the woman, maybe rape her in between so she can get an extra stoning or public hanging like they do off the back of car hauling trucks. These people. God is there to hold the hand of the condemned, or maybe not, maybe it is just an evil, cruel, hatelful, soulless, no ethic what soever other than to kill. “What is your ethic?” To Kill. “OK, bye bye” .
To get it off my chest I labored for a night and a day on the concerto #10 or #9. I had to write and play the pain away. It hurt so much. I thought of all the little girls in Africa, the women in Saudi Arabia beheaded because their husband cheated, the women of all the -stans and India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the southern Phillipene islands, all hijacked and mentally vanquished to death worship, the waiting to force death upon another. Why? It ruins me. Why?
So I wrote Symphony #6 which had been my intention all along, but as I moved through the notes I came to understand why a concerto. I needed something visceral and murderous, dangerous, harsh, violent to cleanse my own soul, to pray and beg God please please pelase not slaughter the women of Afric and Middle East and Central Asia, but they are just prayer flags on a mountiantiop. Cauthet in the wind, maybe catching God on a good day or not.
So i worked on these fthree Asian instruments to get a Silk Road feel to the music, even thogh it was a dirge, It just had to hapen someway. How How can I feel hate? Should i? God commands our love. So I have love and try, pray that they may wake up to their sins nd sin no more. Christ did give us Hope so I hold on. I know some poor girl is being pelted by rocks and acid thrown at her this very moment as she walks that perilous, but still happy child kind of way we were on our way to school. I loved walking to school. All breezy, waving hello, if I was sad or contemplative just look at the trees, the lawns, the flash of cars on Chamblee Tucker Road. But no one wanted to hurt me…..much. At least I arrived and made it home alive without my face disfigured, my body broken, to find I was sold into sex slave as a 8 or 9 year old to a 55 year old man, a death sentence in itself. It’s al they know , all they can hang onto, if if is a girl get her to school, try to see her educated before the men in the family do something horrid, cruel beyond sin, down down down into the lake of ice with Satan’s wings ever chilling the air as he chews more destroyed souls and stares skyward to a light he will never again see. I imagine them here, with the worst, the cannibals, the child killers, they must serve and serve for all time till the end of time and Christ gives them relief into a lake of fire to burn out into nothingness. This is how I felt. how I feel when I imagine the sufffering and fear these women must endure. For it is to come, there is no exit, it awaits and sharpens it’s teeth, let’s the nails grow long so as to punish with deep wounds. This is our world. Not only will we see polar bears, narwhales, elephants, tigers, cheethas, lions, coral and seahorses extinct in our lifetime but what if we see the women of the near east gone, gone, gone. I guess then the sulphur and tar scented men can have their man boy love heaven on earth and some stupid punishment by having sex with only virgins. It is crazy. It is in every way insanity. This is our world. Thank you WWI for your idiot French and British Maps. Thank you England for the years of slavery. The Bedoin, the Shi’a, the whatever who knows, they are murdering Catholics as well. What will be left? Will we ever say to the house of Saud that we know it is them. We know they are behind it all. Thtey send radical imams to friehdly, peace loving people, rape them and their land and leave them as terror driven and lost thier minds. We are a part but we are not all. We have bllood on our hnds for sure. How do you fight a people whose life is so bad that they want to die, they want you to kill them in combat. They want to come home after a bad day planting poppies and land mines to beat and kill their wives. Look. we have it pretty good. For the Catholic Faithful say your rosary abd Jesus prayers throughout the day, do not give up, God, His angels and saints will hear, the compassionate heart of Mary will be awakened. I hope. I pray. And so I write music to life and to move our hearts into a shattion of belieff, into a place of hope faith and love Please. Love the ONE and the MANY. We are all God’s children.
Concerto #5 (Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lady of Guadalupe, Lydia, Phoebe,Tabitha)
This is the fourth version of a choral piece originally titled Haunted.
Took about 24 hours. I was never happy with the vocals, not the meaning so much but my abilities. The idea was a Mahleresque double symphony focused on the children of war, of what can we do because we are not doing much in the rescue of kidnapped, maimed or killed young women in Africa and across the middle east into Pakistan and India. But I was uncomfortable calling it a symphony because there is a programmatic atmosphere to it such that it felt more like the last moments of a haunted dream, seems forever, 80 minutes or so and I eliminated the vocals because they kept sounding processed rather than the measures of a Southern voice beaten and rejuvinated, then beaten up again. So, here we have it. A feeling of failing to protect young women in 1/3rd of the world. We measure the progress and enlightenment of a nation based on equality to the point that it is not even a subject. So much of the world is fighting to move forward against all opposition, while others are completely unevolved or are slipping backwards to the detriment of woman and the general good of the land. I know equality goes against Old Testament, Koran, Confucianism/Taoism, and does rest in my faith in humanity. If we say someone is just kinda equal, sort of equal, not equal, then we begin the landslide of being property, to the living hell of Gog and Magog (Revelations version of warring states, not Genesis or Ezekial where identity is person and place) whereas it exists in much of the middle East and Africa where slavery is either legal or wears the mask of indentured servitude. And for me, this is how music speaks. We remain God’s children, servants and emissaries, but we also seek equality for all in a democratic republic or social democracy. If we allow ourselves to descriminate against woman, to hold her down, then where does it stop? Biblically we have Mary Mother of Jesus Lord, Mary Magdalene, Lydia, Tabitha and Phoebe who each have necessary roles of moving the faith forward. Deacons. No Mother, No Son. Virgin of Guadalupe because she is our Lady of the Western Hemisphere. In Korea when it was Buddhist they had the first female ruler, the Great Queen Seonduk. Then Confucianism came in a few hundred years later and pushed woman back down, but the oikos (homelife in Greek) belongs to woman. There is much to argue here, so I simply present it as a musical work, a concerto to woman. She’s only had the vote for a hundred years now in America. Who are we, where are we going? I hope to being better human beings. But I worry. There will There will be plenty who find this adn my thoughts all wrong, violently wrong, and all I can say is turn the page.
New World Trio: For Pope Francis
I apologize that Soundcloud no longer allows actual embedding of the songs as they are directed to the SoundCloud site. Good thing is that SC does not hassle you and has no charges. But I really hate what they did to the way we can hear or present our music.
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