Overheard at Booth 2: Notes on The Needles

Found this in a notebook for when I was writing "Moth and Rust"

I had noted that it might be included in "Warren Peace" but perhaps I should just keep it for the other.

2013-0228

THE NEEDLES

- punked out versions of the Beatles catalog

- re-doing all albums

o Interjecting … The Needles

o Beat the Needles

o The Needles’ Second Helping

o Something Gnu

o The Needles 69

o Red Rubber Soul

o Oscillator

o Sgt Punkers Lowly Farts Club … Banned

o The Needles (The White-Out Album)

The Needles started as a punk send-up.  Their name derived – from various interviews – a euphemism for heroin addiction, their penises, their sharp wit, their intelligence, but as they continued their career in remaking each Beatles album in their own punk image, they began to have more of a social conscience. 

This became truly apparent on “Run for Your Life” in which they changed the point-of-view from a spurned lover to that of a corporate CEO.   Their re-working of the song came in the wake of what became known as the Dayton Massacre, in which the bodies of six striking workers were found dead in an alleyway.  The official report declared that the workers had been drunk, disorderly, and offended the wrong type of person; however, the obvious lack of thorough police investigation, as well as eyewitness reports stating that the killers appeared to be professional hit men, led everyone to believe that their employer had paid to have them killed.

The CEO denied the allegations as slanderous, and after a few days, the story died … due to lack of public interest.   However, The Needles, when describing their parody of the song, mentioned Thomas Leighton by name as the narrator, leading the CEO to sue them for libel.   The case was eventually settled and for an undisclosed sum.

Overread at the Counter: From the Vagrancy and Poor Relief Act of 1572

All fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of the realm or towards any other honourable personage of greater degree ... which ... shall wander abroad and have not license of two justices of the peace ... shall be judged rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.
-- The Vagrancy and Poor Relief Act of 1572

Found this on a website called SCA Minstrel Homepage located here:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/minstrel.html

Looks like a page where they collect and present old English and Scottish ballads.  God bless 'em!   Doing the good work that I would love to do but am so too lazy to do.  

But the phrase above, from what appears to be a dissertation of some sort, is a wonderful wonderful summary of the times (at least, of my somewhat romantic notion of the times) - we think of the Middle Ages as either knights and maidens running around doing heroic things or else we think of dark dungeons where evil slaves to the Church study ways of driving nails into Jewish scrotums, but really the times were just like our times - a bunch of people making laws upon laws to try to stem the problem of traffic and commerce!

This phrase is obviously all about funneling the "alternative worker" (who is not a prositute) into recordable (and thus taxable) service, and at the same time trying to ensure that the commercial lanes are cleared of traffic.

This is the SAME type of law just passed in cities like Portland Oregon that make panhandlers move back off the sidewalk and into the doorways.    That law is designed to help the tourists get to the shops so they won't have to step over the bodies, and thus be forced to see a real part of Americana.

Same law, 500 years ago.   Fascinating!

Plus the fact what I really love is it lawfully defines musicians as ruffians.  And we think rock and rollers and hip hop artists are badapples!   Man, these guys 500 years ago were rocking the house and fightin' the powers that BE . . . or, whether, the powers that WUZ BE.








[side note: The above quote, and a link to the entire paper, is also found as the storyboard backing to "Ode to My Guitar" on Warren Peace, the 2011 album by the alternative Americana duo S and M.

Overheard at Booth One: Failure of the Dream of Canaan

Reading this book the other day, by this new author called Sylan Hutsell, book called Failure of the Dream of Canaan, it's kind of like told in reverse order, like going backward,this old woman from this time going back theough history to the time where the Canaanite woman begs Jesus to Heal her daughter, you know? But I don't know, it just made me feel kind of weird, you know, because at the end it's almost like she made it seem somehow wrong, as though it like happened, but shouldn't have. All I can say is it just left you with a really weird feeling, you know?

On an iPad screen, left on at Table 3: "Psalm 27 from Warren Peace"

The Story: Warren Peace finds this poem on a blog:

Looking for America

I’ve come to look for America
but I can’t find her anywhere.

I looked on her front porch,
but the boards were rotted through,
I looked in her back yards
but the grass was overgrown,
I drove past her wheat fields,
but they’d all been left unplowed,
just wooden signs that stretched to the sky
standing by the roadside, saying
Zoned for Commercial or Residential
Please Call.

I went looking in the factories,
but the factories were all closed down,
just workers stripping windows and
cleaning the bricks,
and putting in the studs to
build condominium walls.
I went looking in the train stations,
but America was not there,
just some ragged Army jackets
that she’d left behind as blankets
of the veterans who sleep there.

I went looking on the coasts
out on the Gulf seas,
but all the shrimp boats were pulled in
and the nets were hanging empty.
I went looking in the forests
but all the trees were burning,
from casually tossed off cigarettes
that touched the tinder into flames.

I went driving down the highways,
across the mid and coast to coast,
thought I’d find her in a diner
over scrambled eggs and toast,
but the coffee there was bitter
and the pancakes were too dry,
and America hadn’t even left a tip
for the waitress with the swollen eye.

I went looking for America
but America had left town,
she’d pulled the blinds on the shop windows
after the Main Street had all closed down.

I stood on the flat mountain top
that had been stripped off for coal,
and looked across the painted desert
at the city in the sooty fold,
I knew I’d never find America
in the shadows of the scrapers of the sky,
because she’d sold off every lease
to any foreigner who’d buy,
and those left to die in the alleyways
from drugs smuggled in cracks
across borders from lands of distant suns,
America had long since romanticized
her Tin Pan Alley Slums.

But all that’s left of America now,
are just a handful of American tunes,
some scattered fragments of melodies
of songs no longer sung.

I went looking for America
But couldn’t find her anywhere,
just a ragged tri-colored blanket

she’d left draped across an
old wooden rocking chair
that stands upon that front porch
with the boards all rotted through.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warren thinks of his grandmother, living all alone in a house built against an old historic lighthouse on the coast of Maine. She’s lived there alone for the last fifteen years, with only her last surviving son, his uncle, looking in on her intermittently.

She is old now: decrepit, and blind. Every phone call ends with her rage against a God who took away two of her three sons. "A mother is supposed to go before her children. How can I love a God who did this to me?"

Warren would like to think that it is out of respect for his grandmother that he doesn't try to reassure her, but he knows that it really is because he doesn't have anything that he could say that would make her feel any differently, or any better.

Mark Twain's The War Prayer

As I study the Holy Bible and try my best to get into a closer walk with Jesus Christ, the more dissatisfied I become. With so many things. Not the least of those things: these wars. These bloody endless wars that we Americans allow to continue and we don't even think about most days. We just let our government take our brothers and sisters and cousins and turn them into killing machines. We make commercials that show a man sending a drone plane to blow up a mountain, and he still makes it home in time for supper.




And our chuches keep telling us to write prayer cards in support of these soldiers that we are allowing to be abused - by our government. And never ONCE a prayer for our enemies, as God Himself commanded us to pray. I tried to find words for these feelings, some way to express it, and by some miracle, I found some human words written over a century ago, by none other than a writer who no American can deny is THE pre-eminent American Man of Letters. None other than Mark Twain, who, in this short passage, spoke not only for his time, for the time before, but was so prescient that he could not have known that he was writing for America of today.




Read on, my friends:



































The War Prayer




Dictated by Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens] in 1904 in advance of his death in 1910.




During his writing career, he had criticized perhaps every type of person or institution either living or dead. But this piece was just a little too hot for his family to tolerate. Since they believed the short narrative would be regarded as sacrilege, they urged him not to publish it. However, Sam was to have the last word, and even the word after that. Having directed it to be published after his death, he said,




"I have told the truth in that... and only dead men can tell the truth in this world."
- William H. Huff








The War Prayer
by Mark Twain




It was a time of great exulting and excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest depths of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast doubt upon its righteousness straight way got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.




Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! – then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:




"God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"




Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –







An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"




The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:




"I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!"







The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.




"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.




"You have heard your servant's prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor – and also you in your hearts – fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!




"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."




[After a pause.] "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."




It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.




******************************

Alvarez

Hey, whoever played at open mic night last night, you left this guitar . . . .

My Barista says she liked your songs. She especially remembers one called "Greatest Things" she said it was "Sweetly cool."

You may want to come back for both your guitar - and her phone number.

Overheard at Booth 5: The Death of Memory

Templeton is saying, "It's a really disturbing trend, and for me it started even twenty-twentyfive years ago when I read an article that said that all the McDonald's workers were no longer reading anything on the cash register, because there were no words - there were only little pictures of the Big Mac, the fries, the drink, all that. And I thought to myself then, dang, there's the end of literacy: McDonald's just killed it."

And Howerton continues, "Totally true, and it has gotten worse, I mean, my kids, they can't cognate a coherent thought, I swear, the other day, my daughter was 'like, yeah, well, we had a good time at the mall, and it was like, so funny, this thing, like, we just laughed SO HARD, because Kayley, she like - oh here!' and she showed me the pic on her phone that she took of her friend wearing a giant styrofoam hat. I mean, she couldn't EXPLAIN the scenario to me, she could only SHOW me from the picture that she took."

Templeton agrees, "Yes, yes. Something is definitely lost here. Some sort of cognitive abilities. The ability to make coherent connections. Which is strange, because I've always felt that all this technology, designed to keep us all together, really is isolating us. I mean, if we can't describe a situation to each other in words - such as 'my friend tried on this silly hat and we laughed ourselves silly' then we really have a problem!"

Howerton says, "I showed my kids the movie Fahrenheit 451 the other day, because you know, they need it for school and they won't read the book, and in the movie everyone was losing their ability to form memories, real long-term memories, which was a side effect from not being able to read. I remember thinking that the book had so much more depth than the movie, which was odd. But then it hit me that when the movie was made, it was made for audiences who were more literate. When that movie came out, more than likely most everyone who went to see it had already read the book. Now we make movies so that we won't have to read."

Templeton says, "I read the other day that there is more information now out there than there ever was, and I think the article stated that the average man in the 19th Century had about as much information over the course of a lifetime than would fill one issue of the New York Times cover to cover. Granted, that of course isn't talking anything about intelligence or reasoning capacity; it was talking purely about amount of information that they had access to. So I've come to this conclusion: there's too much information out there. Too much. There's so much that we can no longer even BEGIN to dive into the overwhelming mass of information that is pounding us. We're tuning out. Just like the people in Fahrenheit 451 - only instead of being starved for reading, we've got so much that we just refuse to read. Taking pictures is so much easier. We don't have to think, or even form memories. We just keep them stored on our memory cards!"

Howerton says, "Kinda makes me afraid we won't remember this conversation!"

Templeton says, "What makes me sad is that if this were ever written down and put on a blog somewhere, no one would ever read it. It would simply be one insignificant drop of water in an ocean of immeasurable absurdities."

Overheard at Booth 3: September 12, Ten Years After

Niall Carter: Good lord, is this day going to become yet one more nationalistic holiday? I mean, for real! Come on! In my neighborhood the flags put in front yards on Labor Day were left up until yesterday.

Well, I didn't call in any talk shows but where was I ten years ago when I heard the news? I was riding in a cab through the streets of Chicago when it came over the radio, and the cabbie was Pakistani and he said to me, "Oh [expletive] mistor, yoo are not going to go crazy and not tip me now, are you?"

Now, ten years after (great band, by the way) have a song that's 40 years old that is still as valid today as it was back then. Only this time we've got TWO wars dragging on endlessly and killing the economy, and back then it was only a pee-poor backwoods jungle, wheras these two are in areas that are economically strategically extremely important. and that oughta tell ya - while that one might have been for some provinical idealism, these two are more about money than they ever were about revenge!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzrUqAtUcpU

Overheard at Booth 5: Time Magazine April 2011 issue

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2065289,00.html


So, are you talking about the article about the guy who's saying there's no hell?
Well, if there's no hell, then why are the Christians trying to scare it out of all of us?
Do they just need this imaginary punishment to try to make us be "good" or their concept of good?

Hold on, I'll try to get to your questions . . .

Left at the Counter

With a note written on the inside:

Read this again with new eyes.

Remember that you don't have to burn words in order to destroy them.