Liner Notes - Hesitation Blues

There are so many loudmouth, liar and bully politicians around the western world. Power seems to attract them like moths to fire or like flies to dog-doo. In business, finance, and high tech, there are so many nutcases - albethey occasionally intelligent and hardworking - who are also the top dogs

Why so?

It is probably so because, lacking empathy and compassion, these folks can move fast, go far and break stuff... our stuff... totally sans souci.

Their "edge" is that they behave without any of the social and civilizational inhibitions that most people feel when faced with the unethical, the immoral or the illegal. The liars and thugs are impulsive and they never feel the need to look in the rear view mirror. That kind of what-me-worry attitude can bring individual material rewards for two dimensional peeps. And it makes nervous wrecks out of the rest of us.

The two dimensional peeps are attracted to more than just power and control. It's also the theater. It's also the show. They live in a world of TV wrestling and Captain America Marvel Comic Book movies. The two dimensional cartoon types boast and abuse and act as if born to rule, born to conquer and born to dominate. They distort reality as though they are always right. Even when they are usually wrong.

And utterly bonkers.

I've run into folks like that in my decades long practice of law. Some were opposing counsel. Egads, some were judges and law professors! Some were opposing counsels' clients.

Not my clients, however. Since I was old enough to realize that life is short and life is terminal, I've tried to make it my business to choose who I work for. That might be the minimum any of us can do - withhold our services - when what we really ought to do requires more courage than we have and more years in prison than we are inclined to sacrifice.

Certainly, the professional classes - lawyers, engineers, computer geeks, scientists, administrators, technicians and others - have at least that vestigial free will to simply say 'no.' We have the vestigial free will to resist serving or being employed by power and wealth when the power and wealth are evil. For sure, all of us professionals are the ones who make the whole freaking system work. For sure, by withholding our labor and services - a kind of professional strike, if you will - the lawyers, engineers, computer geeks and scientists have as much power to arrest as to accelerate the out-of-control locomotive. Even if only minimally. Even if only symbolically. Of course, that exercise of free will comes at a personal price. But such does everything truly worth doing.

For now, however, we still have the freedom to write and speak what we think. For now, we still have the power to write and speak what we've come to understand - even if only a few read and listen and converse - so that others, like-minded, won't feel so completely alone. Alone, as the loudmouths, liars and bullies intend us to be. Or so it seems.

My conjecture is that the political, economic and military abusers - all psychopaths to one degree or another - naturally evolve as "leaders" because the rest of us, honestly speaking, are nagged by rational and persistent self-doubt.

Those who believe their own propaganda, or who, at least, seem to believe it, can twist and contort and distort reality with a straight face. The rest of us, constrained by conscience, who are at least dimly aware of history, who are minimally sensible of the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong… we cannot even imagine doing what our "leaders" do.

Thus are state terrorism, famine and genocide narrated as the victims' just deserts.

Thus are inflationary tariffs and lay-offs mislabeled as freedom for those who must scrape and scrabble for a living.

Thus is war equated with Nobel Peace Prizes; economic coercion equated with economic freedom.

Thus are governments overthrown and societies destabilized and all equated with the spread of democracy.

Those of us who are "normal" (whoever and whatever that might be), are encumbered with the very human trait of incertitude. We "normies" are never really sure. With personal experience as our guide, our incertitude is certainly legitimate. Thus, we might defer to those who seem to be utterly and fearlessly self-confident... precisely because we are not. And besides, they are dangerous and we are not. Or are we?

Burdened with fear, uncertainty, doubt and all of the heavy economic fetters of economic serfdom, we’re not sure what to do, and we hesitate.

We get the Hesitation Blues.

The Hesitation Blues is keyed in A minor. I finger-picked it on my Gibson SJ200 acoustic with AR Rare strings. Originally, I wanted to record this playing my 50+ year old Yamaha FG 300 "red label" acoustic guitar because it has good jangle. The Yamaha looks and feels like a 3/4 size Hummingbird with a narrower fingerboard. It has good jangle because the delaminating pick guard buzzes against the wood, the bridge is loose and the Martin silk & steel strings set the bridge to rattling like a tambourine! Yeah - that vintage amateur bluesy soundscape of sawdust, cigarette butts, sweat, spilled beer, yakkety yak and peanut shells! Not exactly the Vienna Opera, but, you know, whatever.

Anyway. The old Yamaha didn't cut it. My Gibson has a very fine Fishman pickup tucked inside the sound box. With the Yamaha, however, I needed to insert an old Dean Markley pickup into the hole. The Dean Markley uses an aluminum-nickel-cobalt coil. The pickup is almost as old as the guitar. Or me! The magnet that converts the physical string vibrations to electrical impulses has likely degaussed over time and it barely picked up the motion of the strings. Due to age, the felt rim has hardened (which is kind of how I feel sometimes!). As a result, the Dean Markley pickup kept popping out of the sound hole and plopping inside the body of the guitar. Not good. Not good.

So. Back to the Gibson SJ200 jumbo acoustic!

Nobody knows exactly who composed Hesitation Blues, but a lot of people claimed they did. It's been covered by nearly every blues musician from Lead Belly to Jelly Role Morton to Janis Joplin to Hot Tuna. Whether it's a song of love or of street-walkers or of life's tribulations is debatable. But I won't go there. The song has lyrics, but the lyrics change - as does everything else - depending on who performs it.

With a song like this you have great license to bend and twist it as you like. Like the headpiece photograph at the top of this post.

Playing the Hesitation Blues is not reserved to virtuosos. To slightly paraphrase the words of John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful: “There's thirteen hundred and fifty two guitar pickers in Nashville; And any one of them can play this song twice as better than I will."

So, with great inartistic license and humility, I concocted something of my own with bits and pieces assembled from everywhere. I plugged in some of my own riffs and added snippets of what I might have heard elsewhere. It's not polished and not really true to the original, but neither are Nature, Life, and Evolution.

Like all blues, this is supposed to be something you can hum or tap your feet to. Feel free to do either. No one's watching... other than Big Brother, the many intelligence gathering agencies who monitor you to keep you free (ahem), and all the Big Tech companies who value your privacy. They value your privacy because your privacy (as marketed by them to others) is, indeed, very, very valuable (ahem ahem).

The recording is imperfect. I thought about doing various things to "heal" the blemishes and the notes that got clipped outside the recording range; but then... naaah, why bother? Hesitation Blues is a jug band blues standard best performed live. As such, it's better au naturel than something finely crafted as a studio production. I did add just a touch of reverb in Audacity, however, to round out the notes.

Below are two recordings. One is a .wav file and the other is in the .mpv format. Click and play whichever one suits you best.

.Wav File - Hesitation Blues

.Mpv File - Hesitation Blues

Leave a comment

Liner Notes:

It has taken me much longer to prepare this post than I ever thought it would. The lyrics took several months to write. So did thinking about whether and how to record it.

At first, I thought I would lay the voice track down over percussion. Then I would add instrumental flourishes. But it ended up too busy and inauthentic. I also considered curbing the background hiss so it would be less audible. In the end, however, I thought that the hiss is appropriately stressful and emblematic of our times. So I left it in.

This is a fairly rudimentary recording, technically speaking. I recorded the voice track with Audacity, an open source audio recording and editing app. The microphone is a decades-old unidirectional Realistic Cardioid Dynamic No. 33-1073A once sold by Radio Shack. The mike itself has a 1/4 inch banana plug that I had to convert to fit the more slender input jack of my Puget Systems computer box.

Years and years and years ago, when I had hair and I fooled around in a high school rock band, I had a Sennheiser performance quality mic plugged into a PA system with dual columnar speakers, a König & Meyer 210/2 boom stand, and an Echolette two box four-speaker stack with a 100 watt tube amp which was about 3/4 the height of the "wall of sound" Marshall guitar amps of that era. I still have the boom stand, but nothing else (not even most of the hair).

There is a contemporary backdrop to this song.

The NATO war on Russia continues, and continues to escalate.

The Israeli War on Gaza approaches its first anniversary.

The impending western war on China continues to gather like storm clouds.

And, in case you had not heard, there's a U.S. presidential election just around the corner.

As I was working on this post, the 26 year old American citizen, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was killed by the Israeli Defense Force in the West Bank of Palestine on September 6th during an anti-occupation protest. Israel's investigators say that her death was an accident. I don't believe it. She was killed by a single shot to the head at 'Kent State range' like the four dead in Ohio. Head shots, under these circumstances, are rather precise and well-aimed and intentional. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi attended high school in West Seattle and she was a graduate of the University of Washington, just a mile or two from where I live. I might have crossed paths with her now and again, who knows.

If the rifle and bullet used to kill Ms. Eygi was not made in America, the policy that enabled her death certainly was. The Congressional Representative from my district, Pramila Jayapal shed a political tear and extended her condolences to the deceased woman's family, as did Senator Patty Murray. Both Ms. Jayapal and Ms. Murray consider themselves "progressives." They routinely criticize the war mongers. As often as not, they still vote to fund them.

In 2003, another young American woman and a graduate of Washington's Evergreen College - 23 year old Rachel Corrie - was crushed to death by an armored Israeli bulldozer in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip while protesting Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses. There was the usual wailing and teeth-gnashing and the politicos promised 'change.' But nothing did. It rarely does except in those exceptional circumstances of the French Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution. And, even then, as Zhou Enlai once said, it's just "too soon to tell."

Anyway.

As I was crafting the lyrics, I was thinking about young idealists like Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi and Rachel Corrie and countless others all across the world and all across time, and I realized that I once was one, too, and, perhaps still am. Or not. Who knows. I might be more like Shakespeare's Hamlet who knows that something is truly rotten in the State of Denmark, but he just cannot... or lacks the resolve... to do anything about it. So he doesn't. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 non-combatants have been killed in Gaza during the last year. Our tax dollars at work.

There were more murders in my part of the City of Seattle. Another weekend, another shooting. Another building burned down. More stores were broken into and robbed. More cars stolen. In the nearby suburb of Kent, on August 22nd, a 56 year old bicyclist was attacked and beaten by a group of juveniles. He later died from his injuries. This sounds like a Clockwork Orange dystopia or a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world.

The violence has become rather commonplace. I differ from most Seattle residents, however, who blame "the guns" for the violence. I blame the perpetrators. I also blame ourselves. I especially blame our political class, our cultural leaders, our media morons and our legal system. People learn in school, but, mostly, they learn by imitating the behavior of others. Proverbially, the fish rots from the head. We cannot be surprised that young people of our society lie, cheat and steal when they see politicians, Wall Street financiers, professional athletes, plutocrats, entertainers, doctors, and lawyers lie, cheat and steal. We inhabit a nation-state that, historically, was incubated in theft and violence. It continues its theft and violence everywhere, at home and around the globe, all the time, as a matter of state policy, in the most blatantly hypocritical acts of criminality, all gilded with glorious and insincere pronouncements in support of democracy, freedom and personal liberties.

Speaking of glorious and insincere pronouncements in support of democracy, freedom and personal liberties...

I worked on this song instead of watching the latest 'debate' between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris. I am being bombarded by text messages and aggressive political messaging. One candidate is a natural born dummy and the other is a ventriloquist's dummy. One candidate unequivocally supports Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and will give Israel any weapon system it wants. The other candidate (mildly) chides Israel (but will continue arming it), and supports a "cease fire" (likely after most Palestinians are dead). One candidate supports more war against Russia in Ukraine. The other supports war against China. One, Mr. Trump, yearns for a 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" America that never was. The other, Ms. Harris, promises HOPE and JOY as though her candidacy micro-doses psychedelic mushrooms, Ketamine and Ecstasy tablets.

One presidential candidate would steer the Titanic Ship of State full speed ahead into another iceberg. The other presidential candidate would sail the Titanic Ship of State full speed astern into the iceberg.

I am disgusted by the carnival. The mere act of "voting" has become a talisman for a democracy that simply isn't.

Am I depressed, you ask? Cynical? Suicidal? Not at all. Age really is a great liberator. After all, after a certain point in your life, what can they do to you other than advance your personal Doomsday Clock by just a few minutes.

I have simply become more realistic. Ergo, the introduction to this song without music.

Wow, that was a long way around to get to the beginning, wasn't it?

Actually, the long way around is the only pathway to the beginning.

So here’s the song in .wav format and also in .MP3 depending on what your reading device uses. I wanted to use .ogg, an Open Source format, but Substack can’t read it.

Sweden Isn’t Shangri-la .wav

Sweden Isn’t Shangri-la .MP3

For those who like to read along as they listen, I also have posted the lyrics below:

Sweden Isn't Shangri-la 

Well, Sweden isn't Shangri-la
And Finland isn't Heaven;
And Canada's just the northernmost 
colonial possession.

We're far too old and have no skills
that anybody needs.
New Zealand doesn't want more sheep;
Can you read Hindi or Chinese?

 So here we'll work, retire and die
enserfed to capitalism;
Until, one day, they start a war of
nuclear cataclysm.

What lessons did we learn in school?
From compromised confabulators?
Consume 
Conform 
Obey 
Comply;
That made us all collaborators

in the wars and propaganda
and the genocided dead.
We practiced seeing nothing; 
We turned our eyes, buried our heads.

Micro-causes, pronoun wars,
worrying who gets elected;
None of it meant a blessed thing,
just got us all distracted.

Voting is nice,
But just illusory pablum,
If two parties decide
The only folks you can choose from.

A land not brave, 
A home not free;
A mirage for all
in non-democracy.

We have freedom of Speech,
But we can't hear what's been censored
In the media owned
By the point-one-percenters.

Turns out the Bill of Rights
Was just a piece of paper,
Ignored and discarded
like outhouse butt wiper.

Why did it take so long to learn
That we were just trained poodles?
That Uncle Sugar's not so sweet,
and society is feudal?

Shattered illusions
Jury-rigged finance;
Would life really have been better
in King Louis Macron's France?

It's easier to quit,
and for quitters to leave,
than it is to resist
those who lie and deceive.

But, Sweden isn't Shangri-la
And Finland isn't heaven;
And Canada's just the northernmost 
colonial possession.

The investments we saved,
for our old golden years;
won't ever be enough,
and we'll be left in arrears.

We were bombarded all day
by marketing banter,
Vaccines and polemics and
A complete lack of candor.

But...

There are no planets we can move to;
We cannot live on Mars or Venus;
There is no implant that can save us,
And no cure-all intravenous.

Grab the bull by the horns, 
Best live Life like a sport;
Best to die on your feet,
Not on life support.

Petitioning and marching,
No, none of that stuff works;
But age sets us free,
Age's one and only perk.

Skip the letters to Congress
that nobody reads;
Talk direct to your friends
and to Gen Y & Z.

The essence of wisdom
is to teach what we've learned;
To share our experiences,
so that others won't get burned.

There is no better place to go.

There are no legislative fixes.

Because Sweden isn't Shangri-la
And Finland isn't heaven;
And Canada's just the northernmost 
colonial possession.

* * * * *

Leave a comment

Liner Notes

I have read recent comments by Antony Blinken in conversation with Mitt Romney. Apparently, the two of them agree: social media is to blame for Israel's bad PR in conducting its campaign of extermination against Palestinians. Both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Romney are a couple of schmoes, if you ask me.

I am not surprised by the scapegoating.

The wheels are falling off the post-WWII political-economic world order. Those who for decades have been at the steering wheel are feeling insecure and believe that they need to crack down before everything collapses. They feel the need to crack down on how people talk, how they communicate and, mostly, how they think. Because, as in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, if you can control the language and the vocabulary, then you can control the narrative.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. 2+2 = 5.

So, Mr. Blinken, this first song in the musical interlude is for you - Springtime for Palestine.

Well, not really. You're going to have to find someone else to serenade you!

Rather, this song is for the Palestinian people and, in particular, for the residents of Gaza who have borne the brunt of Israels' recent pogroms.

I first thought that I would call this song From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must be Free. Just this last April, the House of Representatives, in a "bipartisan" resolution approved by a vote of 377 to 44, decreed that this phrase is "anti-Semitic." The phrase has literally disappeared from the interlocked western news media. Such is what happens when all of the news outlets - print, electronic, cinematic and digital - are controlled by a small and extremely wealthy clique.

The words "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must be Free" are not anti-Semitic, they are not anti-Israel, and they are not derogatory. It is an aspirational statement no different than Martin Luther King’s oratory. He also went to the mountain and saw a vision of what could be and insight into what has been. They killed him for that insight, of course.

I know that there are other, far better, far more polished songs out there concerning Gaza and the Palestinians. Some of them are also titled, From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must be Free. For no other reason than that, I will keep the alternative name for my song, Springtime for Palestine. Eventually, the schmoes in Congress will probably seek to ban that phrase, as well. In that vein, the "Antisemitism Awareness Act" (approved by this same House of Representatives by a vote of 320 to 91) would require the U.S. Department of Education to adopt a definition of "antisemitism" that includes drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazi Germany, among other supposedly false assertions.

Were it not so disgusting, this would be amusing to watch. Craven politicians of both parties (Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump included) stumble over themselves as they compete for campaign dollars from the Israel lobby and its affiliated super-wealthy donors. Equally disgusting are the elite university presidents and trustees who genuflect to this same collective Moloch that demands the sacrifice of the younger generation for the preservation of the political-economic status quo.

Meanwhile, as I galumph across the disingenuous sentiments of the Congress's bipartisan resolutions, I have no qualms about criticizing Israel or drawing stark comparisons with its totalitarian antecedents. Israel's policies - including 'collective punishment,' mass ‘preventative’ detention, ethnic cleansing and forced emigration - do, indeed, mirror those of Nazi Germany and also the earlier pogroms of Central and Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, Mr. Netanyahu's forebears (and my own) bore the brunt of these atrocities. Nevertheless, the current Israeli government seems to have learned nothing from these historical persecutions except how to persecute others.

Israel claims to be "the Jewish State," by which it has assumed the right to speak for all Jews everywhere.

But I wasn't asked.

I do not consent.

I reject the chutzpah for trying to patent the right to speak for my conscience. To my observation, there isn't very much of a Jewish ethos at all in the self-proclaimed Jewish State except for the most superficial observance of meaningless customs, cultural hang-overs from the shtetl, and shibboleths from the western imperial playbook.

Israel was established in 1948 as a coda to the Second World War. It was created from the "outside" by the "great powers" of Europe and the United States, rather like the arbitrary manner that they carved up eastern Europe into various artificial nation states at the end of World War I.1 The "great powers" of Europe and the United States repeatedly have done the exact same thing to the peoples of Africa and South America and Asia: they divide the population along religious or ethnic lines; they create statelets and class structures that must have Western military and economic support to survive; and they never consult the local inhabitants about their wish to be just left alone.

When the Western condominium of Europe and the U.S. created a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine, they absolved themselves of their own sins of omission and commission. In the process, they compounded, rather than rectified, the tragedy of the Holocaust: Palestine was already inhabited.

But this type of colonial mindset was nothing new. In similar fashion, North and South America were already occupied by original Americans before their lands, too, were sliced and diced, surveyed, sold, depopulated and colonized by Europeans.

Modern Israel was, indeed, a Euro-American colony. Since its inception, however, it has sought to slip its patrons' leash. Unfortunately, Israel endeavored less to be "free" of the colonial yoke than to become a colonizer itself. This, after all, is what the United States did when it broke away from the British Empire in 1776. Indeed, the State of Israel treats its 'native peoples' (the Palestinians) the same way that the United States wiped out most of the American Indians and forced the survivors onto reservations. It's the same way Australia sought to exterminate its aboriginal peoples. It's the same way Belgium tried to colonize and depopulate the Congo. It's the same way the English colonized Ireland. It's the same way the French colonized North Africa. It’s the way the Germans crushed the Herero in its Southwest African colony now known as Namibia. It's the same way the U.S. and all of Europe have tried to divvy up and exploit China from the 18th Century to the current day.

We know what happens next: politicians like Joe Biden and Donald Trump will cry crocodile tears. Old Joe will mumble something incomprehensible about Iceland and the Mauritians, and wring his hands. Old Don will bloviate about something equally incomprehensible about making America and Israel great again. The EU will moan and groan and then look away, as it has always done.

The feckless leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the various emirs will twiddle their royal thumbs and stay in their foxholes. Egypt's Mr. Sisi (who is, apparently, 'elected' for life) will turn somersaults to retain his grip on power without antagonizing the American hegemon. Lots of folks will talk while the killing continues.

Meanwhile, the world's presidents and prime ministers will propose one or more duplicitous 'solutions,' such as the creation of a multi-national 'peace-keeping' force; the extension to Gaza of the "Palestinian Authority" as frontman for an expanded Israeli occupation; the further reduction and enclosure of Palestinian lands; the creation of new and more congested concentration camps; and the implementation of a series of "ceasefires" that the West and Israel will not abide by. There will also ensue a) an unrelenting propaganda campaign to re-rewrite history and, b) a shadow war of retribution and assassination such has already been going on for years between Israel and Iran.

Still, we can thank the Palestinians, at the cost of their own lives, for galvanizing and redirecting our attention away from a lot of trivial pursuits. For too long, we have all had a brass ring in our noses by dint of which we were led down the cul de sacs of energy-dissipating micro-causes and meaningless crusades. Now, at least, some of the students on our college campuses have finally awoken to the fact that they, and we, have been intentionally pwned and politically castrated.

They who are protesting about Gaza and American complicity are now engaged in one of the more important issues of our time. The State has coordinated all its might to bludgeon their resistance, just like it did to their grand-parents during the anti-Vietnam War movement, just like it did to those at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

It would be funny were it not criminal.

In Seattle, where I live, you can't get a police officer to respond quickly (if at all) to any crime short of serial ax murders, first degree pronoun abuse or failure to provide narcotics on demand. In the year 2020, a cadre of self-proclaimed "anarchists" (the true motivating force behind which has never really been ascertained) occupied several Seattle blocks for three weeks and the Mayor indulged them by temporarily closing the nearest police station. Climate activists have blocked freeways. They have glued themselves to museum art. Such stunts were met with the most tender police ministrations.

Not so the pro-Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrations on America's university campuses. They were suppressed with a heavy hand, the truncheon and an iron heel. Rather like the way Israel treats the Palestinians all the time.

Censorship is nothing new in the United States. It's as American as apple pie. From the perspective of the ruling class, the First Amendment is just a historical curiosity, anyway. The State has never taken freedom of speech that seriously when it comes to core political-economic interests.

Decades ago, comedian Lenny Bruce was criminally prosecuted for 'obscenity.' Later, comedian George Carlin was persecuted for his "Seven Dirty Words" skit. Irish novelist James Joyce's novel Ulysses was banned because it was deemed 'pornographic.' In 1918, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debbs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sedition for having uttered these word in public in opposition to the U.S. entering into World War I:

The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

War-mongers always wrap themselves in the flag. They wave the bloody shirt of imaginary acts of heroism past. They claim the support of God while acting godlessly. Just this weekend, Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky stated that "God... wears a chevron with a Ukrainian flag on his shoulder!"

Wow. That is one twisted metaphor.

Ukraine, however, is not alone in claiming the brand sponsorship of the Almighty. Zionists maintain that Greater Israel is God's plan. The United States claimed its "Manifest Destiny" to expand westward from the ocean to the sea and absorb the entire North American continent. I suppose that soon I will hear that God shops at Amazon Prime, wears Nikes and eats Wheaties for breakfast.

But I digress. These are supposed to be liner notes to some songs.

Springtime for Palestine is keyed in A minor. I composed it on my Gibson SJ200 acoustic with AR Rare strings. I typically use Martins and I am not yet used to the AR strings. They have a very clean sound, but they also feel like I am fingering suspension bridge cables.

There are imperfections in the recording. I thought about doing various things to "heal" the blemishes, but then thought better of it. "Folk music" is better au naturel than churned out as a canned studio production. I did add just a touch of reverb in Audacity, however, to round out the tone.

The song calls out for lyrics, but I haven't written any. You can write or sing some, if you like, in Arabic, Hebrew, French, Italian or Greek - or all of these languages, alternating one language per verse, one verse after another. Or send a digital recording to add as a parallel track.

I hear the singing, but I don't yet hear the words. Much like the world's reaction to what is happening in Palestine.

* * *

Springtime for Julian Assange is track two of this intermezzo. It's a double entendre, of course. I mean the best of the season and also the message that Mr. Assange should be 'sprung,' that is' released from prison.

The U.K. has imprisoned Julian Assange for years at the behest of the United States which seeks to extradite him. The whole extradition process could just be an Anglo-American farce, of course. The proceeding just drags on while Mr. Assange - who in my opinion didn't do anything criminal in the first place, except to publish the truth - languishes in one of the U.K.'s maximum security prisons wasting away with the passage of time. So much for the ‘rule of law.’

That is probably the point. They intend not so much to "punish" Mr. Assange, but to toy with him. Like a medieval prisoner gibbeted so as to rot slowly in public, his torment is intended as a warning to ordinary folks to shut up, tow the line and do as we're told. Otherwise, you, too, could be imprisoned. Or gibbeted. Or suicided.

This song is keyed in A♭ minor. It's a quicker tempo precisely to inspire an individual who probably is in need of a lot of inspiration right now. As all political prisoners must feel.

Again, I played the Gibson SJ200 with the AR Rare strings that sound good, but that are hell on my fingers. Feel free to suggest a percussion track or other accompaniment.

Springtime for Julian Assange is a little rough around the edges. I'll let Taylor Swift smooth them out.

* * * * *

Share Hippomuse

Leave a comment

LINER NOTES

It's too hot to have opinions.

It hit 90° F last weekend (32.22 C), which is uncomfortable for Seattle. It's been much hotter elsewhere: in Seville, Spain, the temperature reached 40° C (104° F); parts of Southern Italy have hit 45° C (113° F ); Sanbao township in Xinjiang Province in Northern China recorded 52.2° C last weekend (126° F). Phoenix, Arizona today is 43° C (109° F).

Summer reminds me of Italy where I lived six years in Naples as a kid. In my recollection, I spent every summer weekend at Bacoli Beach in the Miliscola region on the Tyrrhenian Sea about 20 kilometers drive from Naples. I can still smell the dank and slippery bathhouse there: rubber flip-slops, half-dry swimsuits, olive oil and tomato pizza slices, breezy salt air, wet concrete in the shower room. I can feel myself, 8 years old, traversing the shallows barefoot and bareheaded sloshing through knee-high water on rippled light brown sand.

Naples was a very poor city when I lived there in the late '50s through the early 1960s. But it was very picturesque. From our apartment on the bluffs of Via Manzoni, we looked straight out over the bay and downtown. We looked down at the Castel dell'Ovo, the old fortification built by 12th Century Normans that juts out into the Bay of Naples and where Virgil allegedly buried a magic golden egg whose shell supports the castle and the city. Across the bay, over the old castle, we had an unobstructed view of Vesuvius. Sometimes, Vesuvius gave off a puff of steam. The whole area is volcanically active. The Campi Flegrei, the Phlegraean Fields, consists of many caldera that, altogether, are deemed a super-volcano. One day, so they say, it will all erupt again.

Naples was a musical city. Everyone, poor and rich alike, sang. They sang at all hours, at home and at work. Opera was the folk music of the people. The wealthier folk dressed up and sat in the loges. The mass of the population sat in the lower level cheap seats. They came as they were in everyday work clothes. They did not come to be seen; they came to listen. Occasionally, fearlessly, they interrupted and reproached the musicians and singers mid-performance -- even demonstrating for them (to cheers, whistles or hissing) how the music should be performed. This was their music! They demanded that it be played as it ought to be played! Arguments ensued. There was singing from the stage and counter-singing from the audience. They shouted from the gallery to the box seats to the orchestra pit to the stage. Musicians and performers argued and shouted back and argued among themselves. The orchestra director shook his baton and gestured and yelled back at the audience. Emotions got hot. It was participatory culture, very democratic, very noisy. Then they reached a consensus. Everyone applauded. The show went on. A good time was had by all.

My father loved opera and popular Italian music, but he couldn't sing or play anything. He said that he had been standing next to an ammo dump that exploded during World War II. Since then, he said, he couldn't hold a tune due to the tinnitus in his ears. Instead, he bought 33 rpm vinyl records. One day at the Naples flea market, he bought an old Victrola wind up gramophone. But he over-cranked the spring and it broke. After that, I would stand on a small footstool, put a record on the platter, drop the steel needle and spin the record by hand. I put my head directly into the brass bell of the gramophone to listen to Verdi and Rossini and Nilla Pizzi and Domenico Modugno.

So when I was a kid growing up in Naples, I was inspired to make music. The next door neighbor owned an upright piano. She offered to give me lessons at $5/hour.

The first time I sat down at the neighbor's piano, my parents came to watch. I sat on the wood bench, my feet not quite reaching the marble floor. Then, excitedly, I pounded the keys as hard as I could. "What is that?!" my father anxiously wanted to know. I was composing, I explained. It was a song about thunder and lightening!

Thus ended the piano lessons.

However, my father then brought home an electric Farfisa Pianorgan. It had 34 keys on the right and bass/chord buttons on the left. It actually had an electric bellows that blew air over metal reeds. It sounded asthmatic, a little like an accordion, but in the shape of a small combo organ. It had a couple of great features in my father's mind, however. It was quiet. And it had an "off" button.

I never did learn how to play the piano although, some day, I will. In school, I studied a bit how to play the viola and the trumpet and then the French horn. By the time I was a teenager, the French horn was definitely "out" and guitars were a thing. Electric bands were in vogue from California to Nashville to London. The music scene was still pretty democratic, not commercialized and packaged as it is today. Everybody played something and everyone imagined himself performing on stage. Everyone was a rebel, or so we imagined ourselves. My brother had a cheap Kent label electric guitar and soon I had my own off-label, generic sunburst semi-acoustic. Of course, it was a piece of junk and I don't remember what happened to it. But I continued to play the guitar, trading up and sideways, buying and selling new and used instruments. If the guitar wasn't a piano, at least it was portable (I could and did take it with me to college). Plus, unlike a piano, your fingers press on the strings of a guitar and you can bend them. Woo-hoo!

It's hot in Seattle. We cook outdoors all summer. This first song is The Barbecue Blues. It's just a 12 bar composition in E minor of finger-picked tropes and fret board doodles meant to loosen the left hand.

The second song is an original from another season and another time. I call it Popsicle, after my father, because it's quiet!

I finger-pick these two songs on a Gibson SJ-200 acoustic guitar with standard tuning and Martin Acoustic SP Phosphor Bronze (light) strings. The guitar has an interior Fishman Humbucker pickup that feeds through the output jack hidden in the bottom strap button. I recorded these pieces straight to Audacity on my desktop computer. Audacity is an open source software platform for audio recording and editing. I have not applied any special effects to these songs. I recorded them straight from start to finish. That preserves the blems, fat finger mis-picks and spontaneous flourishes that might happen intentionally (or by accident). Recorded in one shot, these are more like live performances, unpolished and personal.

If ever I played these in Naples, I expect the audience would remonstrate with me how they should be played better.

Liner Notes

I composed Tree for Two in G Major around 1999. It was recorded ten years later on a Sony Linear PCM-10 and performed as a single recording in 2019 without editing out any rough spots. It has been lightly modulated using Audacity, open source, cross-platform, audio software. The song is finger-picked on a Gibson SJ-200 acoustic guitar with standard tuning and Martin Acoustic SP Phosphor Bronze (light) strings. The song plays either as a guitar solo, or as a duet for cello and guitar, or piano and guitar.

Tree for Two is named for a very large oak tree that grows in the park a few blocks away. The park used to be under water. About a hundred years ago, the area was known as Wolf Bay. After the construction of the Government Locks that connect Lake Washington to Puget Sound, the water level of Lake Washington fell. The park now lies on fill and land left when the water level fell. To this day, however, the reclaimed land remains slightly boggy. The water table is close to the surface of the parkland. The Lake must feel grumpy at having been dispossessed of its own, so it seems, and you often get the sense that the Lake, sooner or later, will take it back.

The oak tree is majestic and rises sixty to seventy feet tall. The tree has a very broad canopy and its branches are thick. Its trunk is massive. Like many oaks, this one stands by itself. Its roots have created a large, circular island of ground risen up all around its base, about 7 feet high and 75 feet around. All manner of birds fly past: eagles, crows, Steller’s blue jays, harbor gulls, heron, cormorants, geese, hawks. Kids and dogs run past heading for the dock and the swimming beach at the Lake. At night, after the Park is closed, there are coyote.

There is plenty of room for two or three or more sitting beneath the oak tree. You can watch from there. You can play songs. You can see the Lake and Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains. For me, it's primarily a tree for two. It's a space apart from everything else.