On The Music Box: EarthRites Radio!
Here we are at Friday… Sun is shining and we are about to rush out into the turning world. Beltane is rushing towards us, and life is brimming.
Our Rowan is taking off to Camp Namanu for his counseling gig on Sunday, but on Saturday, his schedule runs like this: 7:30am Dragon Boat Rowing… 12:00pm Comedy Sports… 8:00pm Ballroom Dancing… A very busy fellow.
We have a light offering today, but tasty…
On The Menu:
The Links
Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5.55
Blast From The Past Links: My Ears Are Bleeding…
Two Sufi Parables
Poetry: A Revisit With Allen Ginsberg
Art Evelyn De Morgan…
That should fix you for a couple of days, more coming soon!
Gwyllm
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The Links:
Turning up the heat for the biggest Beltane of them all
Officials: Pet Food Poison May Have Been Intentional
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Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5.55
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I once had the (some would say) dubious pleasure of seeing them on a triple bill: Country Joe & The Fish, Buffalo Springfield, and Blue Cheer. Suffice to say I was not exactly in my right mind as I sped through the evening. My ears hurt the next day….. 8o) It was perhaps the biggest sound I had ever heard up to that point… Blue Cheer was to music what STP was to psychedelics…
Blast From The Past Links: My Ears Are Bleeding…
Blue Cheer will school you and make your ears bleed
Music Preview: Power rock legends Blue Cheer hit the pub — bring earplugs
Concert Review: A wild Monday night with Patty Griffin and Blue Cheer
AN APPRECIATION OF THE BLUE CHEER
THE BLUE CHEER SOUND
“On the surface, Blue Cheer was the epitome of San Francisco psychedelia. The band was named for a brand of LSD and promoted by renowned LSD chemist and former Grateful Dead patron, Owsley Stanley. The band’s sound, however, was something of a departure from the music that had been coming out of the Bay area. Blue Cheer’s three musicians played heavy blues-rock and played it VERY LOUD!”
Tim Hills from “The Many Lives of the Crystal Ballroom”
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Two Sufi Parables… 
The Hunter and the Bird
A hunter once caught a small bird. Master, said the bird, you have eaten many animals bigger than I without assuaging your appetite. How can the flesh of my tiny body satisfy you? If you let me go, I will give you three counsels: one while I am still in your hand, the second when I am on your roof, and the third from the top of a tree. When you have heard all three, you will consider yourself the most fortunate of men. The first counsel is this: Do not believe the foolish pronouncements of others.
The bird flew on to the roof, from where it gave the second counsel, Have no regrets for what is past. Concealed in my body is a precious pearl weighing five ounces. It was yours by right, and now it is gone. Hearing this the man began to bewail his misfortune. Why are you so upset? asked the bird. Did I not say, Have no regrets for what is past? Are you deaf, or did you not understand what I told you? I also said, Do not believe the foolish pronouncements of others. I weigh less than two ounces, so how could I possibly conceal a pearl weighing five?
Coming to his senses, the hunter asked for the third counsel. Seeing how much you heeded the first two, why should I waste the third? replied the bird.
—-
The Cow
Once upon a time there was a cow. In all the world there was no animal which so regularly gave so much milk of such high quality.
People came from far and wide to see this wonder. The cow was extolled by all. Fathers told their children of its dedication to its appointed task. Ministers of religion adjured their flocks to emulate it in their own way. Government officials referred to it as a paragon which right behaviour, planning and thinking could duplicate in the human community. Everyone was, in short, able to benefit from the existence of this wonderful animal.
There was, however, one feature which most people, absorbed as they were by the obvious advantages of the cow, failed to observe. It had a little habit, you see. And this habit was that, as soon as a pail had been filled with its admittedly unparalleled milk it kicked it over.
Adapted from The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi, IV
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Poetry: A Revisit With Allen Ginsberg
Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past–
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos–all these
entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
–We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955