Interior layout’s done, I’ve seen a mockup of the beautiful cover Heather Balchunas is doing for me. I’m very excited to share this object with you! I am planning to have copies with me when I read at the North Quabban Garlic and Arts Festival later this month, and following that, you’ll be able to order it online from this site (the price will be ten bucks) or if you see me around and about, I will likely have copies to sell with me.
I’m resisting making an ebook, for probably silly reasons, but that’s how I’m going to roll here. I much prefer physical media anyway. I think there’s something powerful about being able to hold an object in your hands, and to feel a connection to the maker of said object through the thing itself.
The book itself will contain 10 short pieces — three poems and seven stories — all on some point in a spectrum between nonfiction and fantasy. It comes out to 60 pages total, not counting the cover. My last bit of work to do before committing it to print is to make a copyright page, and that should happen in the next couple of days, I think.
And then it’s off to the printer. And then, if all goes well, you can get yours from me!
this is an early draft of the cover, printed out and “filed.” Photo by me, artwork by Heather.
It’s that quiet time when nothing is really happening, but the whole world seems to be full of a kind of denied anticipation/dread of what comes next. We’re just under two weeks out from a delayed American Labor Day — this year it lands on the last day it can mathematically be, September 7th. It feels like we’re getting an extra week of “summer.”
Kids are waiting for school to start. The produce section at the local grocery store is still full of stone fruit and tons of obviously-local leafy greens, but the greens are a little bit leggy and the peaches are taking on that late-season sweetness that I wait for the whole year, even though it means they’re about to disappear from the farm stands.
I still haven’t seen any Hallowe’en candy® or heard anyone mention Pumpkin Spiced Everything®. That will all magically appear on September 8th, and at that point, we’ll all start wearing our fall colors and anticipatorally bringing along a sweater, just in case.
Some years, I’ve even noticed that the weather will change, as if on cue. These long-but-shortening Summer days will be and feel of the season almost past, and then that one week the feeling in the air will be different. The air will be noticeably cooler, you’ll take note of a few harbinger trees which are starting to take on their fall colors. City streets will be busier, the highways less so.
And then at the end of the month there’ll come an entire week of rain every day, and on the other side of that, those just-in-case sweaters will come out of our bags and get pulled over our shoulders. It’s all downhill from then on.
–
Speaking of downhill,
AI slop, obvi.
–
Speaking of downhill, the American Empire looks to be toast. Stinky Don and his Stupid Minions are making every destructive wrong decision they can come up with, and it’s costing us in every corner of the world. The economy is still appearing to hold up, though not well, but all of the underpinnings are being eaten away at a precipitous clip. (How are those “strategic reserves” hanging in, Donny boy?)
The cracks are beginning to appear domestically, but on the international stage, things are much worse, as evinced by the fact that we’ve just learned that 15 US military bases around the Persian Gulf have been completely obliterated. We are not welcome there. Even the Saudis aren’t defending us, having restricted access to their airspace to US armed forces in response to ongoing attacks from Iran (on US bases on Saudi soil, and due to Irans rising power.)
We continue to burn through our allyships and Pumpkinhead is trying hard to align the US with rogue pariah nations who have the authoritarian leadership style he obviously wants to instill here at home. He is more unpopular with the electorate here than he was after the January 6th, 2021 riot in DC. None of this is sustainable. If he somehow manages to eke out a win* in the midterms, I can’t imagine how this country will ever recover. Our only hope is to check his power now. A shortfall, no matter how compromised the election might be, will only encourage these morons to push all of their terrible policies into overdrive.
As it is, some revision of the world order is in progress, and this country is going to have to face up to its new reality. I hope we can find some way to minimize the damage being done, but I’m not hopeful.
–
It’s a beautiful, bright morning, I’m working on the blog I enjoy writing, I have my second cup of coffee here on the desk sitting on one of my old COVID masks which I now use as a coaster. I love my home and I’m not willing to be chased out of it.
The other night, I woke up from a dream about Netanyahu callling the Palestinians Ameleks, and how that was a justifucation for destroying them. I did something I almost never do, and came into my office, got on my computer and searched the term “Amelek.” Here’s what I learned:
The Torah and the Old Testament say that when the people of Israel were walking through the desert to return to their own land after being delivered from slavery in Egypt, they were attacked by the Ameleks. This act made the Ameleks the enemies of God, in the eyes of the Hebrews. But then, they thought that God himself had created the Ameleks to cause the Hebrews misery. It’s all very confusing and contradictory, but that’s how they thought.
In the Bible/Torah, it says if Moses kept his staff held high while the battle continued, the Israelites would win. If he let it drop, the Ameleks would win. Aaron and Tur helped Moses keep his staff high. This is not in any way superstition or homoerotic symbolism. Get your minds out of the gutter, heathens.
The Ameleks were a nomadic people who mostly lived in and around Canaan, which is in the southern part of modern-day Israel. They had moved into the area because of the void left by the Hebrew tribes being enslaved in Egypt.
“Amelek” is what Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have called the Palestinians. The Israelis think the Palestinians are the enemies of God. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Palestinians can’t be the Ameleks, because, over the course of generations, thousands of years ago, the Hebrews wiped out all the Ameleks.
Somehow we need to turn away from the path we’re trundling down as a species. We’re fixin to kill the world and ourselves with it if we don’t straighten up. The ideals and morals of the ruling class of this time are bereft of value and actively destructive. We have to change course.
And patterning behavior after tribal disputes from thousands of years ago doesn’t seem like a very good way to conduct ourselves. Especially when those tribal disputes ended with the death of an entire people.
Please consider liking and commenting on this post. Subscribe if you can – it costs you nothing and helps this site thrive!Also, do be a dear and share this post with those you know who might appreciate it!
I’m working my way through the Jethro Tull catalogue, one record at a time in chronological order. This Was was a shock to me, because it sounded like a different band entirely. All they changed, on the most physical level, was to switch out their guitar player. On a policy level, Tull became Ian Anderson’s baby. That narrowing and defining of leadership led to a huge expansion of the band’s artistic territory.
I can’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Mick Abrahams left Jethro Tull under a cloud. In the context of the band, he needed to be saged out of the space. Not to keep anyone in suspense or anything, but they 100% accomplished their goal. MA is pretty much a footnote in the Tull story, an early fork in the road. They become Tull as we know them on Stand Up.
In fact, by the third song on side one, the Brubeck-inspired “Bouree,” we’re already so far beyond the blues rock of what’s-‘is-name that the clock can never be turned back, and it becomes completely unfair of me to link everything that happens here to that guy.
But even though a listener who only had This Was as a reference point would feel his absence throughout, one would also hear the future. A great future. This album led to Benefit, and Benefit led to Aqualung, and everything that followed.
And Mick Abrahams could never have been the guitarist for Stand Up or any record that was made by Jethro Tull afterward. Martin Barre blows him out of the water, all while acknowledging that Ian Anderson is the boss. Where Abrahams wrote about half of the previous record, all of the songs here are Anderson’s, and collectively an upgrade from what had come before.
That’s Martin Barre in the middle, making eye contact with you. Hi, Martin! Photo of my copy of Stand Up by me.
While the Ghost of Mick hangs over this record, by the end of it, the listener is only looking forward, not backward. The band virtually never went back to the blues rock well from which This Was sprang.
And that’s what I like most about that time in rock music, bands grew and developed. Each new album was a chapter in the larger story arc. Taking a big chance such as completely redefining a band’s approach could be either a horrible disappointment or a thrilling expansion of what a band could be. It may be true that in most cases it would be the former, but in this case, it’s absolutely the latter.
So many bands went through these changes around that time. Yes booted Peter Banks in favor of Steve Howe. Genesis lost Anthony Phillips but added Steve Hackett and got Phil Collins in the bargain. In the larger context, the music was changing, but this round of changes seems to have codified things in such a way that they began to become stagnant. Less than a decade later, all of these revisions up in quality became an unassailable status quo which necessitated a revolution.
From this decades-later standpoint, one can see that things were both gained and lost amidst all the changes… as they always are.
Here’s to change. We all need it, from time to time.
Please consider liking and commenting on this post. Subscribe if you can – it costs you nothing and helps this site thrive!Also, do be a dear and share this post with those you know who might appreciate it!
I feel like I have an obligation to dig into this whole Graham Platner debacle, considering how enthusiastic I’ve been about him.
I had thought to write a bit about a Jethro Tull album for this week, but I’ve trashed that post. I might write about it again at some point, since I am interested in the evolution of that band over its many decades of existence. Every band is a story, and Jethro Tull has fascinated me for years. This observation idea of mine is a chance for a deeper dive and I will definitely take that opportunity.
–
But what I feel like I have an obligation to dig into right now is the whole Graham Platner debacle. Regular readers of this blog (if such a beast exists outside of my imagination) will remember that I have posted about that dude with enthusiasm on more than one occasion.
And then this week we learned that he probably is the horrible person the oppo researchers have so wanted him to be this whole time. Yes, most likely he’s a rapist. I’ll tell you straight up. I’ve been made aware of the incident’s particulars and it really does seem like he’s done a terrible thing, dehumanized a woman, and lived in denial of that fact for years – denied it so hard he thought he could deny it right into a seat in the US Senate.
And until the facts of this case surfaced, I was absolutely on his side, even though there were a few other rumblings in the oppositional noise to suggest that he had this tendency. Because that’s the nature of elections in this country. Throw dirt at your opponent and hope some of it sticks. In this case, it really did, like a fork in a roast turkey. Goddammit.
–
I’ve been listening to The Pretty Reckless a lot lately. They’re a fabulously arty punk/rock/pop band with a decidedly modern flair. Taylor Momsen is blowing my mind, tbh. At different times, they’ve tickled my particularly generation jones ear with a redolence of Gun Club, Zep, Kelly Clarkson (this is a compliment, goddammit,) X, mid-seventies Floyd, and Jobriath. In short, they’re brilliant. The cover art for this new album, Dear God pt. 1, is spectacular. I have the indie-variant vinyl, which is, I think, the proper format for this album.
–
But the thing with this whole Platner situation is that… Platner constantly said to his audience, “This is not about me, it’s about YOU!” and the fact is, that is the way every US pol should think. One of the things that really made Platner click with people is that he understood that money being the biggest influence in our politics these days needs to end. I think he also campaigned on the terminality of the cult of personality. We should vote for the politicians who say and feel like they will follow through with policies that will help working people.
I think I need to reiterate, at this point, that Graham Platner is not an acceptable or viable candidate. He has **** of his own that he needs to deal with now. And seeking the approval of the public while he goes through this is… anathema.
But whoever replaces him on the ticket should reflect the values of the voters who supported Platner. The next candidate should:
work to abolish ice
address the corruption on the supreme court and in the federal government generally
fight for medicare for all
campaign for a living wage and affordable housing
strongly oppose the Israeli genocide against Palestinians and Lebanon
And the same for all forever wars.
In short, he campaigned as a representative of working Americans. That needs to not be lost, and the next person who takes up the mantle of Democratic nominee for that senate seat should have the same positions.
–
We’re about to start our third heat wave in as many weeks here. That seems to be going on in a lot of places. The planet’s clearly out of whack, due to stupid human activity. I’ve been hearing that we’ve crossed the line, and that no matter what we do, we’re about to face climate disaster. And yet we’re in the middle east fighting for oil and against human decency. It all makes me wonder if humanity can survive its own greed and thickheadedness. I don’t have an answer for you about this. Time will tell, if there’s anyone to listen.
–
The best things about Summer are home grown tomatoes and ice cream. I wish you plenty of both!
Some of Karen’s tomato haul from last year. Photo by me.
Please consider liking and commenting on this post. Subscribe if you can – it costs you nothing and helps this site thrive – and share this post with those you know who might appreciate it.
Broadcast From the Brain Radio 