5.55… A Smaller Entry….

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

Meet the witches of Issaquah

Plants with Soul

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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 @ MySpace

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

CAUCASIAN POWER BLUES:

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.

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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 Jalalu’ddin 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