The 27 Club.

I remember where I was when Kurt Cobain died. I remember feeling my generation had lost an important voice. I remember the knot in my stomach for days. I remember going on the air that night (I was DJing then) and announcing his apparent suicide. I remember trying to conjure something authentic, hopeful, some tangible words of comfort. I loved Nirvana. Prayed for Kurt all the time. But that was years ago and time makes you forget. And then today, Amy Winehouse's death was announced and the memories came back around.

The 27 club. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain and now Amy Winehouse. The Doors frontman predicted it..."it's better to burn out then to fade away."

Today, with the news of a mass shooting in Norway, a car bombing there, trains derailing-32 dead in China, and Miss Winehouse's death heavy on my heart, I walked around New Orleans. I sulked through the D-Day exhibit, saw the worst of what men can do to each other, the death machines, the violated children, the death count unimaginable. I heard the tales of the heroes, the good guys, the liberators...I am thankful for their sacrifice but war stains everyone, scars nations for generations.

Child victim of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The war ended, but the wounds remain.

Later I saw the homeless as they slept under the interstate, as they lined up for a free meal, as they sat, staring blankly into the gray fog of despair and I teared up. I always tear up. I mean I can be in the middle of a crowd and see suffering and I'm choking back the tears.

Then I hear this man yelling at his son, his 4 year old son. And he says. Shut the hell up motherf*&%er" and I'm reeling from the blow of it, from the hate everywhere.

92 people dead in Norway. Some as young as 16, dead! And they are saying this sociopath was a "christian".

Anders Behring Breivik, the 32 year old shooter. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian.

While other "christians" are saying "good riddance" to Amy Winehouse, saying she got what she deserved, just like there were those that reveled in Cobain's suicide, and the rock stars before him. Calling it the judgement of God.

Well I'm tired. I'm tired of apologizing for Christians. I'm tired of people saying they are Christians and using the cross as a blunt instrument. I am tired of the violence. I am tired of the hate. I am tired of the children taking the brunt of our wrath, growing up in a vacuum of lovelessness and then putting guns in their mouths, needles in their arms. I am tired.

I love Jesus. He is wonderful beyond wonder. I believe with all my heart He is the way to the Father. But it's getting harder to be comfortable with being called a Christian.

C'mon church! Love! Love like He loved you. Love without fear, without reservation, with reckless abandon. Take the 163 million orphans and the millions of widows into your hearts and homes. Rescue the oppressed, the 27 million enslaved. Divest yourself from the treasures of this world, invest yourself into the souls of men. It's been 2000 years since Christ showed us how, showed us what love looks like. Since He traded the glory of heaven's throne for a bloody cross, the royal diadem for a crown of thorns, the company of worshiping angels for the taunts and curses of hell's wretched host.

Sorry for the sermon, like I said, I'm tired.

The Rich Eat Gold While The Poor Eat Dirt.

Haiti's per capita income is around 1,100 dollars US. Same as this Louis Vuitton iPhone case...

And this bagel...

...created by Executive Chef Frank Tujague for New York’s Westin Hotel. The bagel is topped with white truffle cream cheese and goji berry infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves.

And that's just Haiti.... who grows dearer my heart everyday.

Then of course there is the unfathomable, unconscionable statistic, that every year 14 million children die from starvation.

Only made more perverse by the fact that while those children starve, restaurant patrons can purchase the curry dish below for the bargain basement price of 3200 dollars.

The curry dish was made as some sort of twisted tribute to the DVD release of Slumdog Millionaire, a movie that featured prominently the trafficking of slum dwelling children. Bombay Brassiere "packed this curry platter full of the most expensive ingredients they could find. Devon crab and white truffle and a half tomato filled with Beluga caviar and dressed with gold leaf are just the start of this lavish dish. A Scottish lobster, also coated with gold, four abalone and four shelled and hollowed quails’ eggs filled with even more caviar round out the dish."

Or this 4,200 dollar pizza...

The 12 inch pizza pie is "densely packed with an assortment of some of the world’s most expensive food ingredients, such as lobster marinated in cognac, caviar soaked in champagne, sunblush tomato sauce, Scottish smoked salmon, venison medallions, prosciutto, and vintage balsamic vinegar. In addition to all these fine ingredients, it’s topped with a significant amount of edible 24-carat gold flakes."

(This is where a string of gratuitous invectives would be if my conscience would allow.) Gold, on the food, to eat. GOLD. ON THE FOOD. TO EAT!!!! Of all the elitist- rub starvation in the nose of the poor- acts of mind numbing, soul crushing callousness. They're eating GOLD!!!!

God save us.

Or if you prefer fresh fruit and have 6,100 to 23,000 dollars burning a hole in your $675 (three times the per capita income of the Congo) Renna USA Zip around Wallet you can purchase either of the following...

Then of course there is Almas Caviar...

...at 25,000 dollars a kilo in a 24 Karat gold tin. Or the most expensive food, that is more expensive per ounce than the ever so delicious gold, an Italian White Alba Truffle....

...a little over 160,000 dollars US. For one. One truffle. Dug up by a pig. 24 Karat gold flakes are extra.

So, let's recap. In a world where 14 million children die every year from starvation the discriminating taste bud can breakfast on eleven hundred dollar bagels, smeared with 25,000 dollar caviar, with a side of 23,000 dollar cantaloupe, and wash it down with Kopi Luwak the most expensive coffee in the world, made from coffee beans eaten, partly digested and then excreted by the Common palm civet, a weasel-like animal. 600 dollars a pound, or 50 dollars a cup.

But for those of us with duller palates... the country where all-you-can-eat buffets litter the suburban sprawl like Coors cans after a NASCAR Race. Americans spend 174 billion dollars a year on obesity related health care. That's 174 billion dollars annually, not on treatment for malnutrition due to under eating, but 174 billion dollars because we eat TOO MUCH.

We Americans also waste an astounding amount of food — 96.4 billion pounds- an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption. According to a New York Times story, "The Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people." Or the entire nation of Haiti, twice over.

And then there is this. MLE, or the Major League (of) Eating is the world body that oversees all professional eating contests. According to their website: "[t]he organization, which developed competitive eating and includes the sport's governing body, the International Federation of Competitive Eating, helps sponsors to develop, publicize and execute world-class eating events in all variety of food disciplines. MLE-sanctioned eating contests provide dramatic audience entertainment and offer an unparalleled platform for media exposure.....MLE promotions generate more than a billion consumer impressions worldwide each year."

WHAT!!! There are enough leisure class sheeple watching sanctioned gluttony that it merits its own organization, let alone one of this size!

I really need to get on a plane to Haiti before I have a coronary.

Dear MLE, it's fans, sponsors, contestants, and anybody who thinks this is OK, REALLY?!?!? You live in a world where every day 38 thousand children die from starvation. That's one every 2 seconds. Thought you might like to know that while you are making a mockery of them they don't know it, they're not watching you eat 60 hot dogs in twelve minutes, they're too busy dying!!!

Here's one of the MLE's star "athletes" Takeru Kobayashi:

I especially like the way he is carried around like royalty. But what really sums it up for me, the whole attitude and perversity of it, is the "consumer impression" left by someone under the video:

"Lol, put a starving kid from Somalia in that contest."

This is where I would normally quote scripture, grow increasingly sanctimonious, and reach a screaming fevered pitch perched precariously atop my little soapbox. But this should suffice.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — "It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau."

"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat dirt three times a day," Dumas said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, thinner than the 6 pounds, 3 ounces he weighed at birth." --from the Associated Press

Shame on us.

Nothing Shocking, Nothing Sacred.

Very little shocks us. Fed a steady diet of blood-lust and sex over a lifetime we have disconnected with horror and perversion. A child was raped by his HIV infected father may get our attention, but no sooner has the headline faded from sight that it fades from memory too. Of course it is a defense mechanism, a heart can only stand so much heartache, even on behalf of others.

Sacred And Profane Love by Tiziano Vicellio (Titian). Painted at the age of 25, it symbolized the eternal nature of God's love and the ephemeral loves of earth.

On the same token, nothing is sacred. We ritualistically desecrate everything from the sacrament of marriage to the sanctity of life. But again, the psychology of it is not complex, it is the way fallen creatures find comfort, devaluing others to raise our sense of self worth, lowering everyone to one great coterie of the profane.

So it should not have shocked me today when an off-color remark was spoken to elicit laughter from a third party to the situation I found myself in. A simple process was taking way too long and the person said "This is taking so long the nails in Christ's wrists are rusting."

I wanted to scream, "That's the love of my life you're talking about!!" But I said nothing. If the man knew Jesus, loved Jesus he would not have said it, anymore than he could have been so cruel and callous about his daughter or wife or mother, anyone he adored, anyone he held sacred.

Stop the friggin' planet....I want off.

Invisible Keepsakes.

***Warning***

This is the blog where I geek out about:

But before I bore you, there is a particular phenomena occurring in those giant retail bookstores that I find most depressing. It is the encroachment into and onto the sovereign shelf space known unilaterally as: Poetry Section.

Really?

To the left it's the African-American Literature section compromised mostly of Harlequinesque paperbacks and on the right the Western section, both whose ranks are apparently bulging with readership as they strangle poor poetry out of its pitiful existence.

"Nobody writes bigger than Frank Roderus." Apparently Mr. Roderus gets paid by the page.

But the enemies from without are much less insidious, much less subtle than the enemy within. For within the very ranks of poetry books themselves come other cumbersome beasts. The bloated poetry anthology, the poetry writing and reading guides (for dummies), the little faux-gilded gift books of poetry, and of course the banal and bland critical essays.

I don't mean to be callous, but is Poetry on the top of the average "dummy's" to-do list?

And if that is not enough, the Classics section, which has apparently been relegated nameless, sulks alongside the few remaining slender volumes of poetry, banished from the school reading lists, into oblivion; The Iliad, Ulysses, most of Shakespeare's plays, gathering dust a few feet from Bukowski and Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson, her poems unpublished until her death, live on, for now...

Of course among the other poetry survivors are the recent Poet Laureates, hanging on by the skin of their Chardonnay stained teeth, and any famous actor with a rhyming dictionary and a penchant for catharsis, and any singer or musician with a surplus of lyrics. There will always be the annotated Poe's Raven in a cool teen goth friendly font collectors edition and the obligatory Beat poets with their calculated decadence, bankable rebellion.

"Beat Poets" is not an invitation to cause bodily harm to a bard. Above, one of the aforementioned little faux-gilded gift books of poetry.

Thomas, Cummings, Hughes; they soldier bravely on. But fallen is Miss Brooks and noble Hopkins, even the every man's friend Frost has gotten the cold shoulder, living out his life in ignominy on the bargain table between last year's calender of crazy (with a backward z) cats and a hip-hopped up cookbook called "Grillin' and Chillin'."

Party's over, Mr. Frost.

Of course near the registers there are still the packs of refrigerator magnets that offer the midnight snacker the convenience of pouring out their unrequited longings on the fridge front, that is as long as the heart's vocabulary is less than 500 words + punctuation.

It's as if, like Ogden Nash said, "Poets aren't very useful. Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful." But great poets are very produceful! Wallace Stevens defends the poet, calls him the "Priest of the invisible." Dylan Thomas said the poet reveals that "your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

Dylan Thomas in the "Poet's Pose". Ever lingering, ever pensive, ever pale.

Matthew Arnold described great poetry as "the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things." Of it Keats proclaimed "Poetry should surprise—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." Shelly echoes this in A Defence of Poetry (1840). "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

Perennial lingerer? Pensive? Pale? Yep. Percy Blythe Shelley passes the poet test.

Carl Sandburg in Poetry Considered waxes poetic about, well, poetry. "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

No disrespect to the venerable Mr. Sandburg, but this may in fact be where rainbows come from.

On writing poetry Emily Dickinson said "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." And "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting," is how Robert Frost defines it. He says "A poem begins with a lump in the throat." And I suppose, if it's a good poem, ends with a lump in ours.

Savagechickens.com is so awesome I just can't stand it.

Certainly poetry can be priggish, ostentatious, condescending and esoteric. But great poems are written in the universal language in which Christopher Fry says "man explores his own amazement." T.S Eliot wrote, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." And though great poems need not be simple, they need not be complex for their own sake. They need only be the "best words saying the very best things" as Coleridge pleaded.

Poetry then, in the simplest definition is, as Thomas Gray said, "the thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." "It is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words," according to the poet of the path less traveled. Gwendolyn Brooks condensed it to this: "Poetry is life distilled."

Ms. Brooks caught in the very act! And failing gloriously the poet's test! Her poem "The Bean Eaters" is one of my favorites, one I wish I'd written.

Perhaps though the English poet Robert Browning best puts his finger on the eternal nature of the poem, poetry writing and the spiritual kinship it engenders, as we, made in our Creator's image, imitate God, "the perfect poet, Who in His person acts His own creations."

Sigh....

This is the gospel I want to live...

And the one I live mostly...

The Soundtrack Of A Day.

Today a woman of eighty said to me, " Everything is always changing. The world moves so fast. I am left behind."



Maybe it is just the way my soul is attenuated, maybe it was the frail if not fearful timbre of her voice, maybe it was all the recent end-of-the-world gum-flapping, but her words followed me as I worked. Their seed slowly seeping into my sub-conscious. My mind's radio re-tuned to the all-pop-dirges-all-the-time station. It played...

Miracle Legion - The Backyard

Think it was the hottest day of the year
Even still we started fires with the ember
Sweetest Sadie held on to her memories
the world was so big and I was so small
and your voice was always the loudest of all

Yesterday we cut down the apple tree
cracking wood made my little heart tremble
I wish I didn't have to try so hard
but little boys gotta lot to remember
the world was so big and I was so small
and your voice was always the loudest of all

I loved the days I spent with you
And I still have all you could offer
the backyard looks so empty now
then I think of her, I think of her
the world was so big and I was so small
and your voice was always the loudest...


The recent tribute album to Mark Mulcahy, Miracle Legion's front-man, to help with the expenses after his wife's death. I cannot hear this song with out thinking of her. Something, some melancholy twinge in all his songs predicted the sorrow of her death. Dinosaur Jr. covers "The Backyard" on the album.

Track two was The Weepies "World Spins Madly On"...

Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you'd gone
and let the world spin madly on
Everything that I said I'd do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on...

...The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on


Deb Talan and Steve Tannen are The Weepies. Their music has been described as "subtly intoxicating folk-pop".

When I was younger it was a doe-eyed sense of adventure that pulled me from between the sheets each new morning, and as I became aware of the suffering of the world it was the inner rage to right the wrongs of injustice. But some-days the dull grind of disappointment creeps in. The world spins along at this break neck speed and all our best intentions fly right off, spinning into infinity.

Then a down tempo country-fried version of R.E.M.'s "You Are The Everything" by the band Redbird played in the little radio in my head ...

Sometimes I feel like I can't even sing
I'm very scared for this world
I'm very scared for me
Eviscerate your memory
Here's a scene
You're in the back seat laying down
The windows wrap around
To sound of the travel and the engine
All you hear is time stand still in travel
And feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn't end
But slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you've ever seen
And they're there for you
For you alone you are the everything
I think about this world a lot and I cry
I've seen the films and the eyes...

R.E.M circa 1980 something...

Later, after work, the weight of it all. The helplessness at not being able to stop the onslaught of injustice, the every-always feeling of futility that finally reaches its terminal velocity. I drove around for an hour, mind reeling, heart crushing, speaking, then screaming my mantra into the dirty little temple of my jeep. "It's not OK. It's not OK!!" Over and over and over again. The days headlines like a ticker tape in my minds eye. My thoughts turning over and over again to the children being brutalized, to the chasm between the rich first world and the unimaginable poverty of countries like Zimbabwe where the average per capita income is 200 dollars a year, or the price of a North Face jacket, or a pair of Citizen's For Humanity jeans, or one of many Coach wallets.

There was just no consoling me, the darling Spirit tried, but I resisted. Why do I always resist? Perhaps it is wanting to own my discontent, to prove that I am worthy to bear the burden of another's sorrow? Back to the couch where I crash these days. I tried to find sleep but instead found myself, or that is the ghost of myself, wandering through the halls of memory. Conversations with the skeletal remains of other former phantom selves, wanton little bastards, full of ambition and selfish pride. Not me anymore I muttered under my breath but there is no denying the common lineage. So I lay there, teeth-gritted-fist-clenched-eyes-watering-heart-sobbing. When I get like this I can't even pray.

All the while, for the first time today, my mind's radio is silent, except for a low hum, a faraway buzzing, and a sensation like the halo effect around a light in a fog. I put on some music. The only thing I can stomach is what suits my mood, depressed as hell. Radiohead's "Gagging Order" from the Com Lag album, "Exit Does Not Exist" a Modest Mouse cover by Sun Kil Moon, and The National's "About Today".

Mark Kozelek, formerly of Red House Painters, who now uses the moniker Sun Kil Moon

But it's like drowning on dry land. I try something less dark. The familiar favorites. Blitzen Trapper's "Wild Mountain Nation", "Crossing Muddy Water" by Counting Crows, The White Stripes "My Doorbell". All the songs that feel like flying. But I do not find my wings. The melancholy returns like a cancer. But not really like a cancer at all. Anymore than tinfoil is silver or a light bulb is the sun.

Jack and Meg White of the insurmountable White Stripes.

So I decide to put on some gospel. Try to decompress into His heart. Wrap myself in His tenderness and try to make sense of it all.

Mute Math's "You Are Mine"

Everyone has their obsession
Consuming thoughts, consuming time
They hold high their prized posession
That defines the meaning of their lives
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine, oh mine
You are mine
There are objects of affection
That can mesmerize the soul
There is always one addiction
That just cannot be controlled
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine, oh mine
You are mine

Mutemath, just plain raucous live.

John Mark McMillan's "How He Loves Us". When his voice breaks in the last verse my eyes swell up every time. This song as much as any, brings me back to the Father's heart.

He is jealous for me
Love's like a hurricane, I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great your affections are for me.
Oh, how He loves us so
Oh, how He loves us
How He loves us so.
So we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes
If grace is an ocean we're all sinking
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest
I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way
That he loves us,
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves
Well, I thought about You the day Stephen died and You met me between my breaking
I know that I still love You, God, despite the agony
...they want to tell me You're cruel
But if Stephen could sing, he'd say it's not true, cause...[voice breaks]...
Cause He loves us,
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves

John Mark McMillan performing his song "How He Loves". Many of the versions of the song change the lyric "sloppy wet kiss" to the sanitized "unforeseen kiss" robbing the line of it's power and intimacy.

And my heart's prayer tonight, from the David Crowder Band, "Deliver Me".

Deliver me out of the sadness
Deliver me from all the madness
Deliver me courage to guide me
Deliver me Your strength inside me
All of my life
I've been in hiding
Wishing there was someone just like You
Now that You're here
Now that I've found You
I know that You're the One to pull me through
Deliver me loving and caring
Deliver me giving and sharing
Deliver me this cross that I'm bearing
Oh, deliver me
Jesus, Jesus how I trust You
How I've proved You over and over
Jesus, Jesus precious Jesus
Deliver me
Come and pull me through
Come pull me through

On most days I am so thankful that in this big world of screaming chaos Your voice cuts through Jesus, the still small voice of Your Spirit. And in a world that is spinning madly on out of control You are unchanging, You are permanence, the rock on which I stand. And when I am sad for this world, when I am sad for me, You are my joy, You are my rest. Your love is the song of my heart, the soundtrack of my days. But on a day like today, when it all gets a little much...

Sing over your child Father. Sing over us all. Sing, for our hearts are broken. Sing. For we have lost our way.

God Hates Fags?

So if I were to say, " My friend, Tom, loves kittens, especially kittens with mittens. Oh, how Tom is smitten with mitten-clad kittens." Then based on that statement you might assume several things. 1. That I know Tom and Tom has told me of His special love. 2. That I have it on good authority from a trusted source, i.e. the personal journals of Tom or the officially sanctioned biography of Tom, that he loves them kittens in mittens. Or 3. That I am completely deluded, and that I made the whole thing up.




Fred Phelps of the now infamous Westboro Baptist Church has claimed to speak for God for some time now.

Mr. Phelps and a few of his friends.

And not that I want to add any credibility to this man or give yet another platform for his message, but I do want to set a few things straight. God does Hate. Scripture spells it out. God, who is love, also hates. So, in the name of fairness let us find out what or who God hates. Not my words mind you, nor Mr. Phelps, but only the things that God says He hates:

1. The worship of, the sacrifice to (especially of children), and the building of, idols.




2. Divorce, although He allows for it.

3. He hates men who love violence and cover their cloaks in violence. I'm guessing that's a euphemism for bloodshed.

4. He abhors pride and the work of prideful hands, especially, but not limited to, palatial estates celebrating ones own greatness.

5. He hates an unjust scale. Assuming that means corruption, bribery, theft, and extortion.




6. God also despises those who have been put in charge of protecting His children but have been derelict in their duty.

7. He hates religious sacrament done without love and humble service.

8. He hates wickedness, lawlessness, and of course, the tried and true standard, the object of His relentless rage, sin.

But what about the sinners?? What about them fags? Them fallen soldiers??




Any mention in scripture of his animosity toward them? Doesn't God's unfettered, incomprehensible and insatiable hate foment at their very existence??




Hmmmmm.... Apparently not. Apparently, while we were all yet sinners, He sent His Son, Jesus, to make a way for us to come back to Him. To replace the Hate he has for our sin with the love He has for His son. What I'm saying here folks is this, God don't hate fags.

Now. Mr. Phelps. You are full of Satan. You are the spawn of Satan. He is the father of lies and you are full of lies. You prove you are your father Satan's child by those lies. And the hate you are so fond to claim as righteous indignation born of God is merely a pathetic veil that doesn't even begin to mask your Satanic pedigree, your Satanic progeny, and your continuing Satanic legacy.

Mr. Phelps. God loves fags, God even loves you. But shut the Hell up!