johnwardleighton

WHITE NOISE

2006-08-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

WHITE NOISE

The fans hum in the background
my sound track plays mostly in my head.
This poem has survived my news surf attack
I don't know where my thoughts were
but they are gone and are never coming back.
Memory and great lines seem to be enemies
scrawled on cafe napkins
without a nagging spell checker
like debris on violent and rough seas.
Upside down and sideways
I seem to always forget my poem book
these days
and am reduced to fevered
lines
from borrowed pen
and the waitress's bemused smile
as she waits for me to return it then.
She doesn't know that her fanny
is the cause of my temporary insanity.
She retrieves her pen and then jiggles and wiggles
away
unaware that she has definitely made my day.
The sun cleaves a bright white line
across my desk
as the pictures on my mental screen digress
to thoughts of time and rhyme.
The sound track degraded with
advertising clap trap
now it's gone
there is another voice
playing the keyboard
and echoing to the humming
in my ears.
The morning sun is heating up the studio
my just washed armpits are beginning to sweat
the fans doing little except blowing the hot air around.
Surreal is the sight and sound and smell
I'm here but then again I'm not
Is this just now, or some other special kind of hell?
I need to find a quiet place of choice
and escape the sight and sound of all the
pervasive and surrounding
white noise.
To escape to my dreams and fantasy
and escape the reality that's me
to sing with someone else's voice
that would be my hide and seek choice
to flee this mental grey
and live to fight another day.
The thump and hum from outside my window
unmufflered Harleys on the go
strangers on their way to who know where
and I don't much care
if they ever get there.
Damn, I make a killer coffee
and have passed though the stage of feeling somewhat ill
now I feel like me
singing in my own voice
I've turned the gain up
on me
and am no longer captive
to the surrounding
white noise.

JWL

Copyright John-Ward Leighton
19 August 2006
All rights reserved

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

2006-08-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

Musings, 08:12 hrs. PDT/GMT-8, 18 August 2006, Friday, epoch studio, 13.5` C sunny and cool

I'm trying to think of an illustrated poem for this space today. I'll post it later when I get my head straight. I've had another three days of self imposed isolation and aside from "HI how are yas?" in the hallway on my way for a dump or wash up my only source of contact has been this computer and the internet. I've tried to watch some TV but everything is in re run mode so not much to interest me there.

The corporate media is going ga ga over the Jon Benet Ramsey case once again. I wonder how many more headlines that poor little girl and her family are going to generate. The family should get a kick back from the advertisers for all the tooth paste, baby diapers, and maxi pads these headlines have sold. I see the Mom has died from cervical cancer and the Dad looks twenty years older than his stated age. It must be hell to really never be able to have any closure from a tragedy like that. Of course when you lose a child there never is any "closure". You get on with your life but there is always the feeling of deep sadness that something or someone is missing. To be constantly hassled by the media picking the scabs off your wounded psyche must be a another form of torture that only adds to the pain.

There is a morbid sort of fascination with celebrity death, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe et al. It might not be the dog days of summer but the TV programing sure is, ha ha.

Ciao, JWL

WANDERING

2006-08-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

WANDERING

This old rambling man
is trying to see over the next hill
if he can.
Sipping coffee
he remembers in the cold light of dawn
other days and other ways.
The sound track envelops him
with drum beats
and visions of belly dancers
in smokey Egyptian cafes.
Half stoned
the waking dream unfolds.
The sound becomes so loud it quacks.
His mumbled conversation
makes no sense.
His head explodes in technicolor
tambourines and jumping coins
he feels the stirring in his loins,
she smiles and shakes a hip
at his nervous smile
and the sweat on his lip.
Embarrassed by the obvious symbol of his need
he is a fool, a horny fool indeed.
Stumbling into the dawn
his need and she are gone.
That empty empty feeling
of being slightly off balance and reeling.
The dry taste in his mouth
her scent still on his hands and in his nose
her woman's taste and the faint smell of a rose.
He walks the Cairo street in the early dawn
with a silly grin on his face and his money gone.
Today a million miles away
he looks at the early morning studio jumble
by he light of an early sun
he knows he should be humble.
The fates have spared him from a youth of squandering
his gifts left in an anonymous crotch in Cairo
while
wandering.

JWL

Copyright John-Ward Leighton
17 August 2006
All rights reserved

CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE

2006-08-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Crawling from the wreckage

A year after Hurricane Katrina, half the population has yet to return to New Orleans. But in the mouldering decay, musicians are still trying to keep the city's cultural heart beating. Special report by Carl Wilkinson

Sunday August 13, 2006
The Observer

The music lives on ... a parader plays his horn in the Satchmo Summerfest Second Line Parade in New Orleans. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

In Dr Michael White's ruined house in the Gentilly district of New Orleans a cross hangs over where his bed used to be and a photocopied picture of local clarinettist George Lewis is tacked to the peeling wallpaper. Twelve months after Hurricane Katrina threw his life into turmoil, White stands amid rubble, a blank expression on his face, one hand massaging his scalp for comfort and the other clutching his car keys - his car has become a sort of home to him now. 'You see that look of conviction in his eyes?' he asks, nodding at the picture of Lewis. 'That's serious. Everything else was destroyed, but this was the only thing to survive other than the cross.'

White is a professor of African-American culture at Xavier University, as well as an acclaimed clarinettist himself, and he says he believes in God. 'But I also believe that there is something very spiritual about New Orleans and the New Orleans music tradition. When I see that picture it's almost a symbol of strength to keep you going. The spirit is very strong, it's meant to give me hope.'

Before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on 29 August last year, overwhelming the city's inadequate and ill-maintained flood defences, White's brick bungalow beside the London Avenue Canal was a museum of jazz; a shrine to the great American artform to which New Orleans helped to give birth. His house contained thousands of books, many containing messages to White from their authors; on 7ft high home-made shelving units were thousands of CDs, tapes, records and videos, many of them rare and irreplaceable. In a small shed beside the house were shelves upon shelves of vintage clarinets - more than 50 of them, dating back to the 1890s - in their midnight blue velvet-lined cases; many had been played by some of the world's greatest musicians.

Today, the library is a pitiful papier mache mound that has to be clambered over in order to reach the room that was once White's office. Many of the CDs and records were dashed to pieces, others have been taken away for cleaning. The shelves of clarinets have become a morgue for rotten instruments, which sit mournfully, rusting in their coffin-like cases. 'It's very difficult. I wake every day in disbelief. I have nightmares, reliving the experience of just being inundated. I had so much stuff it would have been impossible to save everything, but I wish I had one more hour. I keep thinking about that imaginary hour. If I'd had that one extra hour - what I could have saved ...'

In the living room, sprayed with bleach to kill off the worst of the mould, there is an old sign left from a lecture White, now 51, gave in a New Orleans hotel. It reads: The Jazz Recital Has Been Moved to Arcadia. White looks at it a long time then steps outside to catch his breath.

Katrina claimed more than 1,800 lives, flooded 80 per cent of the city, displaced around half a million people and led to a disaster zone being declared which covered roughly the size of the United Kingdom. But New Orleans had problems even before the hurricane hit. Many saw the slow death of the local culture and music as inevitable and felt that the city had long since forgotten to care about its heritage. Big business ruled and developers hungrily eyed tracts of real estate.

At the street level, however, music was still the lifeblood of the city, because it provided a source of income and escape. 'Music was a way out, man,' says Juvenile, the biggest rapper to come out of a city that may have been built on jazz but now listens to hip hop. We are in his hotel suite on the 42nd floor of the Sheraton on Canal Street discussing his latest album, Reality Check, which includes a couple of angry Katrina-related songs. The Sports Channel is on at full blast in the background and we're tucking into a traditional New Orleans dish of spicy boiled crawfish and crabs. Juve has just finished a large, sweet smelling blunt and is in reflective mood. From here we can see the full extent of New Orleans. There are hundreds of splashes of blue - not swimming pools, but tarpaulins securing damaged roofs. He points at a dun-coloured block of housing: the Magnolia, one of the city's notorious projects in which he grew up.

'It was either sports or music. A very few get out other ways. It's unexplainable. It's like a trap, man. A lot of these people never left the city before this hurricane. The big thing that people say is, "They got us trapped." No job, no income, no place to stay. Trapped.'

Following the storm it would be hard to say that music is in rude health, even in its rawest form, but look hard enough and the spirit of what everyone here calls 'the real New Orleans' is still intact. 'I defy you to spend a day in this city without hearing live music,' says Ben Jaffe, whose parents founded the French Quarter jazz venue Preservation Hall in 1961. He now plays bass with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. 'You can't walk down the street without hearing live music.' He's right. Even with 50 per cent of the population absent, much of the city a ghost town where even the 24-hour diners close at lunchtime because they've run out of food or staff and neighbourhoods are mouldering and decaying, music is everywhere, be it hip hop, bounce, brass bands or traditional jazz.

On Canal Street outside the looted Footlocker at midnight we find Da Truth Brass Band - a scratch band of teenagers playing their hearts out for tips. Their instruments are battered and patched, their clothes the uniform of the street - baggy sportswear - but the music is raw, powerful and infectious. Passers-by stop to dance. The street swells with people; the air is close and humid.

Down on Frenchmen Street, a strip just outside the French Quarter packed with jazz bars such as Snug Harbour, Blue Nile and Spotted Cat, traditional New Orleans jazz can still be found. The street fulfils the role Bourbon Street inside the Quarter once played. Big names such as trumpeters Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield, pianist Allen Toussaint and singer Irma Thomas still play and command decent audiences, but it's not what it was. On some nights the street is eerily quiet where once you would have been hard pressed to move without fighting your way through revellers.

By contrast, Bourbon Street is now a tacky blur of frat-boys and strip bars that attract the tourists and their all-important dollars but has been leeched of its heritage beyond the architecture. While many visitors still flock here for its famously louche attitudes towards street drinking and partying, spending their evenings stumbling from one bar to the next clutching Hurricane cocktails and pretending to live out the Mardi Gras experience, this is no longer the real New Orleans. It's a theme park. The real New Orleans is elsewhere.

One of the main issues facing the city's musicians is housing. Before Katrina, there were around 3,000 professional musicians working in New Orleans. Today that is down to 1,000. With little housing available and what there is being let at vastly inflated prices, musicians are struggling to return. Ben Jaffe set up the New Orleans Musicians' Hurricane Relief Fund to help musicians put a roof over their heads and some money in their pockets. But it is not unusual for musicians to drive eight hours from Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta - or wherever else they may be now based - to play gigs in New Orleans.

Jaffe's fund is just one of a number of organisations trying to get the city back on its feet. The Musicians' Clinic was founded in 1998 to provide healthcare for the city's musicians, most of whom live below the federal poverty level. Today it's a lifeline for many sick and displaced musicians. 'This is the birthplace of American music, and yet so many of our musicians are dying of preventative diseases and they're dying in poverty,' explains Bethany Bultman, a volunteer with the clinic who has been working flat out since Katrina, raising funds, finding musicians and organising help. 'These are people esteemed all over the world and yet as a city we're not taking care of them. We've had several musicians drop dead from stress-related heart disease or strokes. There was a 30-year-old bluesman playing long hours for tips in Jackson Square. He dropped dead. When you lose everything you've worked your whole life for ... well, it's hard.'

Like many in the city, Bultman is highly critical of the government's response to Katrina. 'I think we have a President who would love to make New Orleans a Republican city [it is currently a Democrat city within a Republican state], to take away the African-American population and replace it with golf courses and high-rise condos for people from Michigan and Wisconsin and turn this city into Las Vegas South. I see New Orleans as this amazing Caribbean island that got dry-docked here. I'm not that crazy about the French, but I wish they'd find a mistake in the Louisiana Purchase and buy us back.'

In the Upper Ninth Ward, one of the worst-hit areas of the city, volunteers are building homes on an empty lot. The streets, littered with debris, are eerily quiet, but on the eight-acre site a team of volunteers from across the US are busy hammering, sawing and breaking ground. Here they are building 75 new homes as part of a Musicians' Village venture organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity and supported by Harry Connick Jr and Branford Marsalis. The plan for the village was formulated before Katrina - many of the problems being addressed today are not new ones, just thrown into sharp relief by the storm - but its purpose is now more urgent than ever.

One of the first musicians to receive the keys to his new home in the Musicians' Village on 1 June (the official start of the hurricane season) was Fredy Omar. Originally from Honduras, Omar has lived in New Orleans for 13 years. He plays a combination of salsa, merengue, cha cha and Latin jazz, and has a large following in the city. 'I'm a New Orleanian and I love this city,' he told me in May, standing outside the foundations of what would become his new home. 'This village is a great opportunity for me. There is going to be a centre for music right across from my house and I'm going to have all these resources. Hopefully I can bring part of my cultural background to this community.'

Not everyone is so positive. At street level many in the city believe that the levees were blown up in order to flood the poor (black) areas, thus saving the rich (white) areas such as the French Quarter, to which visitors flock generating much of the city's $4bn tourist income. Such conspiracy theories are nowhere more powerfully felt than in the projects and poor black neighbourhoods where tourists never stray.

Local rapper 5th Ward Weebie took me to visit his 'hood. I had hoped to meet him in Houston the week before, but he had refused, stating pointedly that he was not from Houston and was not a refugee. He represents Nola - New Orleans, Louisiana.

En route we pull into a service station so Weebie can pick up a new cap. In the parking lot guys hustle, selling knock-off DVDs from the back of their cars. Inside, Weebie picks out a Nola cap with 'Katrina' embroidered on the side and gets his 'Weebie discount'. In the display cases around us, beside the baggy vests and bootleg Lacoste T-shirts, there are small portable weighing scales for drug dealers, handcuffs and lighters. We couldn't have come here before Katrina and even now, without Weebie in his new Jaguar and box fresh clothes, it would be dangerous. As we near Weebie's street a car full of kids fake a drive-by shooting on us, leaping from their car and laughing at our obvious fear before greeting an incredulous Weebie with elaborate handshakes.

On Dumaine Street outside Weebie's former home, a child plays with a toy gun while his 26-year-old father, Gu, smokes a spliff and tells me of his drug-selling activities. 'Shit, I ain't gonna evacuate,' he tells me when I ask about Katrina. 'When the hurricane hits, that's when we do our best business.' Crackheads from miles around come out of the woodwork to get a hit that will see them through the storm. This is street life, New Orleans style. 'Shit, you had to travel with two Glocks on you in this hood,' says Gu, aggressively, jabbing a finger at me and spitting in the gutter. 'One ain't gonna do shit.' It was only once the water started to rise that he headed for the Superdome. Everyone in the city has a Katrina story, but here the sheer anger at their treatment at the hands of the authorities, which for so long ignored the city's festering problems, is palpable. 'I was in the Superdome and all that shit you heard was true,' says Gu. 'They was giving us boiling water in there. Man, ice was like diamonds.'

Here on the street, the hurricane hasn't dampened the need for music. Katrina has focused Weebie's enthusiasm. Until recently he produced only good-time block party tracks - simple beats, simple lyrics. Today he feels politicised and has produced music such as his 'Da Katrina Song', which rails against the treatment many in the city received.

A couple of days after meeting Weebie, I drive uptown to see Hilton, a member of the secretive Hard Head Hunter Mardi Gras Indians. Unique to New Orleans, the Indians meld African American and Native American culture. Their dancing is frenetic and infectious as they move to a heavy, steady beat and sing, following their leader's calls. Their costumes are even more arresting. Each year, each member of a group must sew a new costume, from scratch. Costumes often cost thousands of dollars - a major investment when you consider these are truck drivers, policemen, former drug dealers, students - and are brightly coloured and covered in beads and feathers.

At Hilton's house we watch his 'masking' - the process of dressing and preparing. The costume is heavy and sweat bubbles up on his brow as he pulls on his horse hair wig and embroidered jacket. The following day the Hard Head Hunter Indians are having a secret parade. It will be 'the real New Orleans', he promises. We're given rudimentary directions and agree to see them there.

Getting a cab to the parade the following day is practically impossible. Our first driver, when asked to take us to the St Bernard Project in Gentilly where the parade begins, orders us out. 'I don't go to the projects. Get out of my fucking cab. Now.' The second driver teases us all the way. 'Well, I'll look out for you boys on the news later. Anyone I should inform when you get shot?'

Beside the ruined and barricaded project, a carnival atmosphere, barbecues and beer, is building. Over on the central reservation of St Bernard Avenue two young men sit on wild-looking ponies, eyeing the crowd, their baggy jeans and oversize vests oddly incongruous with their equestrian posture. We begin to march, through the derelict project then slowly up Paris Avenue, climbing towards the centre of town, which looms on the horizon, the great mushroom of the Superdome and the high-rise hotels. Around us are tatty shotgun houses ringed with tell-tale watermarks.

We're in a very different New Orleans now. Here the music is for the people, and it is raw, passionate and vital. Like any good tourist, I'm wearing a T-shirt that reads 'Nola' and several women come up to dance and compliment me on the sentiment. There's a sense of defiance and pride here; of celebration. As we climb away from the damaged shotgun houses towards the central business district the geography that was so crucial in dictating who survived and who suffered becomes clearer. At an underpass I remember from the news nine months earlier, where bodies had been floating by a barely visible stop sign, there is a cacophony of trumpets and tubas as the parade comes to a climax.

'One of the most magical things about New Orleans,' Dr White said to me, 'is that we like to transform life into other realities by making different or unusual blendings of things. Jazz exults both the collective and the individual at the same time. The essence of New Orleans culture for me is that we transform reality so that people are free here to develop their individual characteristics. We transform everything to give it new life and meaning. We transform food, music, humour, ways of walking, language. All of that is part of the folklore here.'

That evening, we run into Phil Frazier from the ReBirth Brass Band. He's wandering down the street, his tuba over his shoulder. It would be an odd sight anywhere else, but here it seems perfectly natural. The ReBirth in many ways are the sound of New Orleans now; they mix brass band music with the infectious rhythms and refrains of the local hip hop sound, bounce. It has made them famous to the point where they can no longer rehearse, Phil tells me. Word always gets out and the band is quickly swamped by fans keen to party.

Phil is on his way to a friend's birthday party where ReBirth is playing and he invites us along. In a ruined neighbourhood that looks like it has been bombed there is a small, corner bar with no windows. Everyone's here: young and old, black and white. The atmosphere is friendly and accepting. A couple of old guys sit on plastic chairs outside. Inside they're playing pounding bounce. A Juvenile track comes on, he's shouting 'Back tha ass up' and vast women are doing just that, their gold teeth glinting under the disco lights as they booty shake and drop to the floor in time to the music. Then the music's cut and in troop ReBirth with their trumpets, trombones and tuba. They're all a bit wobbly from the celebrations and launch into a brass-bounce crossover that is hardly their best work, but has the crowd screaming in delight.

Outside, with our ears ringing after the set, Phil is on a high. He's about to jump in his car and head on to the next gig. 'Man, no place like Nawlins!' he says raising his voice and sweeping his hands about at the silent ruined neighbourhood and corner bar where the party's still pounding away. 'Katrina didn't do shit to this city.'

· For more related interviews, audio and pictures see www.observer.co.uk/omm/neworleans. Musicians' charities: Habitat For Humanity (www.habitat-nola.org); New Orleans Musicians' Hurricane Relief Fund (www.nomhrf.org); Musicians' Clinic (www.savenolamusic.org)

IN THE EARLY A.M.

2006-08-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

IN THE EARLY A,M,

Early in the a.m.
those nights when you can't sleep
you read or write
and fill your sound track with jazz.
its too dark out there
ride your bike.
Distant sirens speak of other's distress
and you wonder if they will survive the mess.
I sit warm in my seat
and surf the net
fishing for my mind.
The DJ at WWOZ
lists the players
and greets the sun
in New Orleans.
I wait patiently for the inspiration
that comes from a good coffee
and good music
this kid is nice but
I wish he would just shut up
and play the music.
There that's better.
I have my morning sneeze
and from the prison of my body
escape to the playground of my mind.
To all the prisoners everywhere
there is no there, there.
I lost my shooter glasses
seventy bucks
down the drain
and you know you'll never see them
again.
From pop to dixieland
and Bessie Smith
fronting up the band.
Long gone in human time
but its like I'm in the club
on someone else's dime
having a drink
and keeping time.
Bags died just last year
a couple of months before
Katrina's drive by
in New Orleans.
That master from MJQ
once sat at a table
with me and my second
at a long gone
Lucy's jazz workshop
down in tourist tickey tacky now
Gastown.
All genuine native artifacts
made in China
and dim witted tourists
cameras poised
waiting for the steam clock
to fart its jet of steam
and go Toooot!
The second was seventeen
on her second date with
much too old for her me.
She was much impressed
and bought an album the next day
for us to take down and have Bags
autograph it.
How much water under the bridge
in the intervening years.
Memory is tricky
and things were not that good
or that bad.
WWOZ is back to yap yap
with the play bills for the clubs
playing jazz in New Orleans
and then back to Louis
and a weather report
84`F and high humidity
showers and thunder storms.
Charlie Parker "Bird" plays
and as the graffiti
says
"Bird Lives"
bebop, to swing, to slide,
Dixieland,
back to the blues
and around we go again
here in the
the early a.m.

JWL

Copyright John-Ward Leighton
16 August 2006
All rights reserved

SMALL CHANGE

2006-08-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

SMALL CHANGE

Robert Johnson on the sound track
been dead seventy years or so
he ain't never coming back.
This poem is in trouble at it's birth
Sometimes
I think the ink
is more than its worth.
There was something
inherently dirty about the nineteen thirties
even if it was my first four birthdays.
Those boys riding the rails
had more to worry about
than the dirt under their nails.
It was a time of rising racism and fascism
mush like today.
We thought we'd killed the beast
but it didn't go away.
Today's war criminals stride respected in our midst.
Was it the posturing and neat uniforms
that we missed?
Our leaders will protect us
at least that's what they say
but shit keeps happening anyway, every day.
They, like us, have no idea how it goes
and cannot predict what will happen
ten minutes from now one inch from their nose.
Sometimes they need to be reminded
that no matter how they wisely nod
that they are only human beings
and not the universal voice of God.
For all their flatulent flapdoddle
they are in reality a pretty limp wet noodles.
Its not all that strange
in the light of all their lies
and bluster
as human beings
they cannot pass muster
and are really
quite
small change.

JWL

Thoughts on the end of the second world war.
and the rebirth of fascism.

Copyright John-Ward Leighton
15 August 2006
All rights reserved

View FROM BEIRUT

2006-08-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

American Bigotry: Love Jews, Hate Arabs __________ Robert Fisk: London's "Terror Scare": The View from Lebanon
The Real Reason

the British Should be Frightened

So, the arrested men are Muslims

Now isn't that interesting?

This means that many of them

- or their families -

originally come from south-west Asia

and the Mideast, from the area that

encompasses Afghanistan,

Iraq, "Palestine" and Lebanon

When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television.

There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house--just as they vibrated across all of Beirut--as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: "Terror Plot". Terror what, I asked myself?

And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force--the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him--had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.

I'm sure our readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects--or "British-born Muslims" as the BBC defined them in its special form of "soft" racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?)--are still in custody in a couple of weeks' time.

And I'm sure it's quite by chance that the lads in blue chose Thursday--with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara's shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak--to save the world.

After all, it's scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armored vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day--again quite by chance, of course--that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair's intended invasion of Iraq.

So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting "Islamic fascism".

There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror--although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.

And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people--and the American people--from "Islamic terror", we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers--some of them sadistic women--at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo.

Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence which may--and probably will--be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and "Palestine" and Iraq and Afghanistan. And this we will not do.

I would, frankly, love to have Paul Stephenson out in Beirut to counter a little terror in my part of the world--Hizbollah terror and Israeli terror.

But this, of course, is something that Paul and his lads don't have the spittle for.

It's one thing to sound off about the alleged iniquities of alleged suspects of an alleged plot to create alleged terror--quite another to deal with the causes of that terror and to do so in the face of great danger.

I was amused to see that Bush--just before my electricity was cut off again--still mendaciously tells us that the "terrorists" hate us because of "our freedoms".

Not because we support the Israelis who have massacred refugee columns, fired into Red Cross ambulances and slaughtered more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians--here indeed are crimes for Paul Stephenson to investigate--but because they hate our "freedoms".

And I notice with despair that our journalists again suck on the hind tit of authority, quoting endless (and anonymous) "security sources" without once challenging their information or the timing of Paul's "terror plot" discoveries or the nature of the details--somehow, "fizzy drinks bottles" doesn't quite work for me.

Nor the reasons why, if this whole panjandrum is correct, anyone would want to carry out such atrocities.

We are told that the arrested men are Muslims. Now isn't that interesting? Muslims. This means that many of them--or their families--originally come from south-west Asia and the Middle East, from the area that encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq, "Palestine" and Lebanon.

In the old days, chaps like Paul used to pull out a map when faced with folk of different origins or religion or indeed different names.

Indeed, if Paul Stephenson takes a school atlas, he'll notice that there are an awful lot of violent problems and injustice and suffering and--a speciality, it seems, of the Metropolitan Police--of death in the area from which the families of these "Muslims" come.

Could there be a connection, I wonder? Dare we look for a motive for the crime, or rather the "alleged crime"?

The Met used to be pretty good at looking for motives. But not, of course, in the "war on terror", where--if he really searched for real motives--my favorite policeman would swiftly be back on the beat as Constable Paul Stephenson.

Take yesterday morning. On day 31 of the Israeli version of the "war on terror"--a conflict to which Paul and the lads in blue apparently subscribe by proxy--an Israeli aircraft blew up the only remaining bridge to the Syrian frontier in northern Lebanon, in the mountainous and beautiful Akka district above the Mediterranean.

With their usual sensitivity, the pilots who bombed the bridge--no terrorists they, mark you--chose to destroy the bridge when ordinary cars were crossing. So they massacred the 12 civilians who happened to be on the bridge.

In the real world, we call that a war crime. Indeed, it's a crime worthy of the attention of Paul and his lads. But alas, Stephenson's job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened.

Personally, I'm all for arresting criminals, be they of the "Islamic fascist" variety or the Bin Laden variety or the Israeli variety--their warriors of the air really should be arrested next time they drop into Heathrow--or the American variety (Abu Ghraib cum laude) and indeed of the kind that blow out the brains of Tube train passengers.

But I don't think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order.

He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice. And I have to say, watching his performance before the next power cut last night, I thought he was doing a pretty good job for his masters.

Robert Fisk/Counterpunch

posted Monday, 14 August 2006
tags: robert fisk israel lebanon uk terror scare propaganda

NET NEUTRALITY

2006-08-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

Musings, 10:11 hrs. PDT/GMT-7, 14 August 2006, Monday, epoch studio, 20`C sunny and warm

Spent three hours last night tracking down the bill before the US Senate, bill 5252 sponsored by Senator Stevens (R) Alaska. It indeed would strike down "Net neutrality" in favor of allowing the tele communication and cable companies to impede, censor and limit access to the net.

This bill would address the concerns of the large media companies who have seen their ability to manufacture consent diminished by the proliferation of blogs and web sites that tell the other side of the story.

This is a back door way of limiting our freedom of speech by limiting who will hear or read our opinions. Freedom of Speech means nothing if no one else can listen unless the subject is approved or censored by the state or some transnational corporation.

We have already seen and attack on our ability to communicate in private when the telecommunication companies readily turn our phone records over to law enforcement and the National Security Agency without oversight of the courts. They have seen the way China does it and like what they see, and of course the trans national corporation sees another way to extort more money from an already very profitable system.

I will give you the URL of a pdf that details the particulars of the bill before the Senate. For those of you in Canada remember that the National Alliance of Business wants to "harmonize" the laws of the USA and Canada in the interest of trade. Should that happen that Senate law would become the law in Canada.

Ciao, JWL

2006-08-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

AN IMAGE OR A POEM WAITING FOR ME

2006-08-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

Musings, 07:52 hrs. PDT/GMT-7, 13 August 2006, Sunday, epoch studio, 14.5`C sunny and cool

Coffee is on and so is CBC1 turned down really low and I'm only half listening. Air travel is in chaos and one wonders if this is also an objective of the the terrorist networks. The security of these groups seems to be pretty loose on the level of a teen age street gang and with heightened sensitivity to what would have previously would have seemed to be teenage bravado is leading to charges under the new draconian security laws. This is a necessary bit of overkill because really, the authorities cannot afford to be wrong and allow one of the terrorist atrocities come to fruition.

The most unfortunate side effect is the lessening of civil rights and the need of the state to have its nose in everybody's business in the name of protecting us from the terrorist bogeyman. I would remind everyone that perfect security is a jail where your right to move around freely or speak freely or associate freely is severely restricted. Who will be the next enemy? Who will choose the next enemy? It could easily be you or I, after all we are more different than the same and it is no accident of rhetoric to easily become the "other".

If we are insensitive to others pain because of our need for gain we will reap the harvest of hate.
Perhaps it is time to examine our lifestyles and question our mindless pursuit of material possessions and the latest and greatest toys. I'm sitting in a studio filled with still working but for one reason or another are obsolescent. I have five dead cell phones that for one reason or another have become redundant. I'm reluctant to just throw them in the trash because I know they are full of toxic chemicals that would be released into either the atmosphere or the water table.

I have managed to re cycle several computers although I have one that would still be quite useful but it needs a new mother board and power supply. I'm reluctant to get rid of it because it has a crossover ability to deal with things like three inch floppies and zip cards. It will also allow me to make DVDs and CDs. There is one more piece of equipment that has finally come down in price and will allow me to make CDs and DVDs of my old analog vinyl and the video tapes. The quality on these old formats is pretty crappy but its the only record that we have.

I often question why at this point in my life I would be so interested in preserving my past? I know that in the greater scheme of things that my life is pretty small change. Really, my history is of interest to a limited amount of people. I have not done anything heroic or for that matter useful.
I have merely survived in a world full of peril in a very privileged segment of the world. Perhaps there is a lesson in that but for the world of me I don't know what it is.

I have just finished my coffee and look over at my unmade bed and perhaps to dream, I see my cameras loaded and ready to go and know there is an image or a poem out there waiting for me.

Ciao, JWL

WRONG WAR, WRONG PLACE

2006-08-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

There is an ongoing discussion about our deployment to Afghanistan as casualties mount.

We are in a war, Canadians don't flinch and run. Our soldiers will do as they are ordered and I can understand our military's enthusiasm for the job after years of criminal neglect by the government and by extension the Canadian public. However, the wisdom of our deployment escapes me. What in real terms is the benefit to Canada for this exercise of Empire?

I'm entirely unconvinced that there is any benefit either for us or the Afghan people. Remember in this game of real politic the home team is the Taliban. Our soldiers are needed at home in the coming confrontations over our claims to ownership of our North not off playing deadly silly bitch with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is nice that our soldiers are getting their career tickets punched by participating in a war, but its the wrong war in the wrong place.

JWL

HOAX

2006-08-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

Musings, 04:21 hrs. PDT/GMT-7, 12 August 2006, Saturday, epoch studio, 14.4`C cloudy

I'm eating barbecued crow right now. I got suckered into a panic by someone on the blog city
talk circuit called "Horse's Mouth". The URL looked authentic until I started to investigate it a little further and found it was an elaborate hoax. There is no bill before the Senate and upon reading the text I noticed that there was no web address for the so called petition. Thank you AG for the heads up. And about my original informant, his information came from the other end of the horse.

Sorry people about alarming you for a non existent peril to our internet. Heaven knows there is enough spin and BS on the ordinary news of the day and hopefully we are all aware that things ain't like they seem to be. I hope there is no one else in my circle of readers who took the message at face value and sent off a blizzard of e mails like I did.

I'll be posting this retraction on my three Blog sites and hopefully we can put out this brush fire of mis information. Again Sorry about that!

JWL

FIERY TOAD

2006-06-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

Musings, 11:03 hrs. PDT, 23 June 2006, Friday, epoch studio, 17.8`C sunny and cool

ODE TO A FIERY TOAD

We're going for a ride on the fiery toad,
because my blog-city has imploded.
And my daily journal is no where
and its enough to make you tear out your hair.

I'll be accused of many crimes
chief among them lousy rhymes
but I will ride the fiery toad
because my blog-city has imploded.

But my feet smell and my nose runs
and my ass blows smoke rings like the guns.
Its what you get for talking to geeks
those grungy little number freaks.

All night long on the internet
and you know how boring that can get.
Doing nothing useful it was time for sleep
and into my little trundle bed I did creep.

I felt like I'd been fucked but not kissed
and I rolled around like a bum
who'd been shit at and hit
and shot at and missed.

So this is the first entry at the fiery toad
and I'll see if I can goad
poet Billy the soldier dude
into writing something equally rude.

JWL

GOOD BYE ITS BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU

2006-06-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

Musings, 07:39 hrs. PDT, 23 June 2006, Friday, epoch studio, 12`C sunny

Well, my regular blog site on Blog-city is refusing me access. I've talked to the techies at Shaw and with Blog-city and numerous wing nuts on the internet and it appears that I'm the only one who can't get access. Go figure?

I started this one in 03 and went to Blog-city because there was little or no feedback on this site. I'll try this for awhile but it doesn't appear to be what I'm looking for. I'll miss my my mates from the blog-o-sphere but such is the world of blogging.

Ciao, JWL

Sarari post

2006-06-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

Just getting new page ready.

Blog-city blues

2006-06-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

For some hopelessly technical reason I can't get to my regular blog. I'm being blocked by the dreaded "can't connect to server signal although it appears I'm the only one who can't connect. Techies on three continent cannot tell me why.
JWL

CASUALTY LISTS

2006-01-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

Musings, 03:28 hrs. PST, 25 January 2006, Wednesday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 4.8`C partly cloudy

We were talking about swimming, I not sure how the conversation got around to that but it aroused a memory from my childhood.

We got talking about how we learned to swim and I recalled that I learned at Lake Winnipeg in the summer of 1942. My Dad had been commissioned at the outbreak of the war and, being too old to go overseas, was training officer cadets at the University of Manitoba. One of the young men he was training was from a well placed Winnipeg family who had a summer cottage at the lake and his family generously allowed us to spend the summer there.

Now I may have this wrong about the name but I think the young man's name was Duncan Duncan. It sticks in my mind but remember I was only six years old at the time. Anyway he used to come out to the lake on weekends and stay in the cottage with my mother and my brother and me. He was a sailing enthusiast and was on the water in his boat most of the weekends when he wasn't teaching me and my brother to swim.

Now Lake Winnipeg is a shallow lake with sandbars in the middle of the lake from the runoff of the Red river and can be a tricky place to sail. Duncan had taken me out on his boat and we ran aground out in the middle of the lake about a mile from shore, The boat capsized and I got caught under the sail. Duncan dove under and fished me out and then being an extremely strong swimmer escorted me back to shore alternating me swimming and then I would put my hands on his shoulders and he would tow me for awhile and when I had caught my breath let me swim on my own.

I remember how calm and unruffled he was and he deposited me on the beach and then swam back out and retrieved his boat. When the story was related to my Dad, he said that Duncan was going to need those qualities in the fight ahead. Duncan was posted overseas
as a second Lt. and joined The Royal Winnipeg Rifles in the third Canadian Infantry Division
for the landing in Normandy.

Unfortunately Duncan was killed by a sniper's bullet on D day +2. When the news got back to us my Mom came out to the farm were I was boarding and told me. By this time I was somewhat used to getting those type of messages when friends of my Dad were killed or wounded but for me Duncan was very special and I still tear up when I think about it. Duncan was an only child as I recall and his family published a book of his childhood pictures and letters. We had the book for years and it was one of my favorite possessions but was one of the things we lost in the forty eight Fraser valley floods.

Duncan, you are still in my heart, I wouldn't be on this mortal coil if it wasn't for your heroism.
Now sixty four years later I can still conger up your face and remember how much fun we had that summer.

Ciao, JWL

ACID BELCHES

2006-01-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

ACID BELCHES

The hot gas rises in my throat
and i release a belch
like the bleat of a goat.
The wages of sin
coffee on an empty stomach.
The bums in my doorway
the constant whine
of spare change
has my shorts in a knot.
Why are they here,
is there a sign over my head
saying, "See this sucker
for drug money?"
I'm tempted to kick ass
most of them are able bodied
but addicted, and stupid.
Jobs go begging
jobs even they could do
a small amount of sweat
but the whine
I'm hungry
spare change
is all I get.
Perhaps
this is the origin
of an acid stomach.
Whose children are these
washed up at my door
the product of random fuck
with a stupid whore?
One wonders if any
are worth saving?
Or are they just the visual
evidence
of misplaced random incidents?
Time to put my laundry in
and think about
my stomach's
sin.
And re run the gauntlet
of hoochie coochers
and spare change moochers.
Another pill to
squelch
yet another
boiling
acid belch.

JWL

The devine right of kings

2006-01-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

ZNet | Repression

Rollback to 1214 AD

by Nick Turse; TomDispatch; January 07, 2006

[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt: What we were dealing with in Washington was a virtual cult of the presidency and that its believers were more fervent than any religious fundamentalists in their focus on the quite un-Christian attribute of total earthly power. Their urge to create a President accountable to no one, overseen by no one, and restricted by no other force in his will to act was amply demonstrated in a simple bill-signing at the White House last Friday. It was then that George Bush inked the Defense Appropriations bill containing Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment (vigorously opposed by the President and the Vice President), which was meant to close various loopholes in prohibitions on torture. The President, according to Charley Savage of the Boston Globe, issued a "signing statement" -- "an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law" -- in which he "quietly reserved the right to bypass the [McCain] law under his powers as commander in chief." So much for the ability of Congress to legislate, if the President can simply declare anything it passes whatever he decides it should be. ("A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.")

Nick Turse shines a new light on the Bush administration's cult of presidential power by showing just how far back its adherents would roll our constitutional and legal system -- back to the Middle Ages and the rule of kings.]

What might happen to an "often cruel and treacherous" national leader who "ignored and contravened the traditional" norms at home and waged "expensive wars abroad [that] were unsuccessful"?

On June 15, 1215, just such a leader arrived at Runnymede, England and --under pressure from rebellious barons angered by his ruinous foreign wars and the fact that "to finance them he had charged excessively for royal justice, sold church offices, levied heavy aids," and appointed "advisers from outside the baronial ranks"-- placed his seal on the Magna Carta. The document, which was finalized on June 19th, primarily guaranteed church rights and baronial privileges, while barring the king from exploiting feudal custom. While it may have been of limited importance to King John or his rebel nobles (as one scholar notes, "It was doomed to failure. Magna Carta lasted less than three months"), the document had a lasting impact on the rest of us, providing the very basis for the Anglo-American legal tradition.

Over the years, the Magna Carta came to be interpreted as a document that forbade taxation without representation and guaranteed trial by jury. In the U.S., it is seen as providing a basis for the 5th Amendment to the Bill of Rights that holds: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." (The Magna Carta states: "No Freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned... but by lawful Judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land.") While many progressive and democratic understandings of the document, popular from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, have now been dismissed as misinterpretations, the Magna Carta has one absolutely significant feature. As the website of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) notes, "When King John confirmed Magna Carta with his seal, he was acknowledging the now firmly embedded concept that no man -- not even the king -- is above the law."

Fast forward 561 years. Says NARA, "In 1776, the Founding Fathers searched for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King George III and the English Parliament." They found it in the Magna Carta. Fast forward another 230 years. Their war for independence long since over, Britain's former rebel colonies begin the new year of 2006 on a precipice. During the previous 365 days, they saw, among other shocking displays, their Vice President publicly campaign against Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment and, as such, essentially offer his support for illegal torture. Then, following a failed attempt by the President to quash a New York Times story on the National Security Agency (which the paper had already suppressed for a year), the people also found out that their President had ordered unlawful spying on American citizens.

After the latter scandal became public, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (who, in 2002 as White House counsel, penned a memo advising the President on how to circumvent the 1996 War Crimes Act) claimed that George Bush had the right to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without prior or retroactive -- within 72 hours-- court approval) due to his "inherent authority as commander in chief under the Constitution." This, despite the fact that in 2004 Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the court, insisted, "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Bush himself then came out swinging, claiming that he had no need for the courts since he acted as his own agency of oversight, and his acts were legal because he "swore to uphold the laws."

The President's threatened veto of the McCain anti-torture amendment, the Vice-President's pro-torture campaign, the President's illegal spying, which he proudly claimed he had re-authorized many times over, his attempt to squelch the free press (which Thomas Jefferson once called "the only security of all" and about which he stated, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter"), and his own and the Attorney General's defense of all of the above, are not only the latest examples of the administration's quest to shred the U.S. Constitution and expand already vast presidential powers past anything conceivably envisioned by the founders of the United States, but also a direct attempt to overturn nearly 800 years of Anglo-American legal precedent. In other words, the administration has launched nothing short of a bid to invalidate the guiding precepts of what the U.S. government acknowledges to be the Ur document that inspired and provided precedent for America's founders to issue their Declaration of Independence in 1776: the Magna Carta.

In 1957, the American Bar Association erected a monument at Runnymede to "acknowledg[e] the debt American law and constitutionalism" owed to the Magna Carta. Today, the defining tenet of the American legal system is in jeopardy as the Bush administration has attempted to roll back the clock to the 13th century. Such a gambit seeks to do nothing short of shatter and effectively bury the framework for the Anglo-American legal tradition by transforming the chief executive into an unchecked despot and so plunging us into a pre-1215 world. The implications are dire. As Harold Hongju Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, observed, "If the president has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

During the birth of the United States, John Adams -- who also proclaimed that Britain's rule under which "The Law, and the Fact, are both to be decided by the same single Judge" was "directly repugnant to the Great Charter [Magna Carta] itself" -- wrote of "a government of laws and not of men." During the Watergate crisis (to hop a couple of centuries) and just after he was fired by a President who wanted to shield his criminal acts by citing the doctrine of executive privilege, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox warned, "Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people." Just 33 years later, the question again begs answer -- is this to be a nation of laws or of men? Is this to be a nation that recognizes nearly 800 years of Anglo-American legal precedent in which even the nation's chief executive is subject to the rule of law, or one that allows that leader to assume the unchecked rights of a sovereign during the Middle Ages? Are we willing to accept the Bush administration's latest rollback campaign and reset the calendar to 1214?

Nick Turse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. If you have whistles to blow or muck you think Nick should rake, send your insider information to fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.]

THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM

2006-01-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM

Our senses are stunned by the
constant artillery barrage of useless information.
Like mud being thrown against a fence
some sticks and some doesn't.
The overload masks the intention
to produce confusion
and not wisdom.
Its like having and obnoxious
car salesman
selling an obvious lemon
his voice
forever dinning in our brains.
Our leadership is in the hands
of those who would sell us
overpriced toothpaste
making claims no self respecting liar
would ever make.
Then there are the pundits
viewing with alarm
telling us the sky is falling
from so many directions
that none of it is believable.

Confusion, illusion, loud bangs in the night
the magic show wends it's insidious
and ignorant way
into our psyches
to become our tribal myth.
The lie about who we are
facing down the truth
that we are all human
and deserve love and
a place at the table.
We say we are bored
with the faces of starving and dying children
and quickly change the channel
to some bogus smash and crash
the evil reflection of our lack conscience.
But it was that little voice inside our heads
telling us that we were wrong.
We know what the right thing is to do
but hide behind
our inaction with
the politics of boredom.

JWL

Yawn, I've runned out of gas

2006-01-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

Musings, 19:14 hrs. PST, 1 January 2006, Sunday, epoch studio and The Annex, 6.9`C raining

Not much on today, some boring NFL football and TV was it's usual banal self so got in a fair amount of sack time. Went out at first light and shot my traditional two roll record of the store fronts on Granville. i deviated from the practice in the past of only using the 24 mm lens and spiced it up using the 50-135 mm zoom to give this years effort a slightly different look.

Dropped into the Lens and Shutter in the Pacific Center mall and saw old friend Jeff and bought three rolls of Neopan 1600. It started to spit rain when I excited the mall and the Gallery cafe at the VAG was closed so took it home and had a bowl of soup and some cheese and crackers and then crashed up until a few minutes ago. Jasna bought back my umbrella and promised my "Intersections" disk for Tuesday afternoon at 13:30 hrs.

Have to finish the President's report and the agenda for the AGM plus the minutes for the previous AGM if I can remember the Date, time, place. I recall a meeting consisting of two, Barrie being in Mexico, Horst resigning, and Bill missing in action. The two attending were myself and Jim Britton.

We now have myself, Jim, Jasna, Timothy, Barrie, Lorne, and a new member Rob, plus exhibitors Ken and Elizabeth. I estimate that in the new year we will have to attract at least twenty new members or double that amount of exhibitors to break even on the rent, either that or make a lot of sales of the work that is exhibited for the gallery cut of 25%.

We will be approving the next years schedule of shows and posting them on the web site with the time and date for submissions for each show. I'm thinking of opening an ANNEX blog with pictures of each show and a running commentary of other galleries when they run photographic work This will be in the form of a motion which I will make at the AGM so the membership can have a run at it. I want the action to be shared with the members and exhibitors so anyone can post their pictures, perhaps limited to five per month at the blog site, a sort of ex-official free for all with only members being able to post blogs and pictures.

Its amazing how many cockamamie ideas I can come up with, the devil makes mischief with idle brains,
ha ha

Ciao. JWL

OH WHAT A LUCKY MAN HE WAS

2006-01-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

Musings, 18:38 hrs. PST, 31 December 2005, Saturday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 7`C cloudy intermittent rain.

I'm a lucky man to have lived in the times I've lived in. Sure there have been setbacks and mistakes along the way but if it was to end in the next ten minutes I would have no complaints.

I awake every morning eager for the day. I'm like that little kid who was impatient to get my breakfast and be off to school. The truth is that as a kid I enjoyed our family's gypsy lifestyle. We were never in any place long enough to make enemies or for that matter friends. We were that rare bird of paradise "the new kids".

The three of us had to rely on each other because our parents were moving so fast we were just so much baggage. It taught us all to be self reliant and able to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances. There was a certain self confident bravado that sometimes put people off but both Bob and I were pretty fair athletes so people didn't mess with us. Little sister Charlotte growing up with two older brothers could also hold her own.

In fact my self image was so tied to being an athlete that when my knees blew up in my mid thirties and my Dad died I went into a four year depression masked by a severe alcohol problem.

I came out of it about three years after tanking my military career and first marriage, possibly the dumbest thing I ever did. I had an eight year common law relationship with a young woman that went sideways when she left after realizing that I was not about to marry her or have any more children.

Then a ten year bout of depression during which I finally gave up alcohol in the first four years and took another six years to dry out.

Then one morning I had an epiphany and realized that I had come to love my depression. I then took control and started myself on the road back to happiness by first obeying the Lord of Small Tasks by getting out of bed in the morning, making my bed, shaving and washing up, working out, then breakfast and a coffee, wash my dishes, write three pages in my journal, clean up my crib and by noon have the sense that I had accomplished something. But, most of all make a conscious choice every day to be happy no matter what else was going on.

Since then I have survived major abdominal surgery and two bouts of cancer by taking on every challenge as the happy warrior.

Life has been good for me this year and I recognize just how lucky we are to be where we are. Even though the old year is going out in a torrential downpour we have been blessed in this little corner compared to the rest of the world.

Let's hope the new year is as good in the rest of the world as ours was in the old year.

I'm going out at first light to photograph Granville street from the bridge to Georgia street like I have for the last ten years.

Happy New Year!

JWL

OH WHAT A LUCKY MAN HE WAS

2006-01-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

THE NUTCRACKER

2005-12-31T05:46:00.000-08:00

Musings, 22:40 hrs. PST, 30 December 2005, Friday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 6.7`C raining like hell

Tonight was magic. Jasna and I went and saw "The Nutcracker" at the Queen E and the performance was first class. The Vancouver Symphony as always, I'm stuck for a superlative here, beyond excellent. The two companies out did themselves and the dancing was magic. Suffice it to say this will become my Xmas tradition from now on.
Ballet Alberta and Ballet British Columbia made this a night to remember.

My companion for the evening was stunning and the evening almost dreamlike. She refused a cab and I lent her my umbrella because for some reason she wanted to walk home. We have a date to view more ballet evenings. it's nice to have a friend who likes the same thing as you do.

I have the urge to write tonight subject as yet undiscovered, perhaps the year in review or some such nonsense. I have been sticking pretty close to home lately except for Xmas day and tonight have not left the studio except for a coffee and when Johnny "de" visited.
A lot of crash time which is normal at the time when our daylight days are so short. I tend to get turned around sleeping in the day and awake and working in the night. Go figure?

Do you ever get the feeling like your senses are being overwhelmed? That surreal feeling that something is happening that you have absolutely no control over? All systems on full alert, the fight or flight impulse front and center.

All the empty shop doorways are filled with the homeless and misery is etched on their tired and dirty faces. We are told that they want to be this way, that somehow they deserve their fate because they are weak. In a lifeboat full of supplies and lots of space we hammer on their fingers and say there is no room. Their misery is not what it says about them but what it says about us.

I feel guilty about my cup of hot chocolate and my bulging belly but giving it away and making me like them is hardly help. I'll believe in what these lying politicians are saying when our streets are not littered with the drug addicted, the insane, and the homeless poor and empty doorways cease to be their crash pad.

Ciao, JWL

DREAMSCAPE

2005-12-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

DREAMSCAPE

My collar lies warm around my neck
and my just shaved face
tingles from the after shave.
I feel human and alive
and am
no man's slave.
I'm adrift on my sound track
around the world
and all the way back.
My muse showers kisses
onto the page
and I'm free to love
like a bird freed from its cage.
I pause and crack
ancient knuckles
but my nineteen year old mind
doesn't care
for the snap crackle and pop
and directs my hands to the keyboard
to get it to stop.
I pause again and rub the hands
to warm them with her love
that fits us like a body
that fits us
like a glove.
Her fingers cool against my face
and back again to the keys
they seem to know the place
in the perfect dream
it's as if they could see
the words flashing onto the screen.
Its what is now
not what has been.
The sound track speaks
sweet poetry in my ears
and my shoulders relax in
the surrender of pleasure.
Like a lover scratches your itch
in moments far beyond treasure.
Her thigh against my face
I can hear her heart race
and her wetness
summons me to combat
to attack
until my defeat
and soft cries in the night
then black velvet sleep.
Her scent is in my nose
it is remembered
as is the scent of a rose
and that hot scent
of squandered sex.
This is the promise of dreams
the truly great escape
my muse and I
flying locked together
in the sensuous eternal
dreamscape.

JWL

FILM NOTES

2005-12-30T11:56:00.000-08:00

Musings, 08:24 hrs. PST, 29 December 2005, Friday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 7.2`C raining

Treated myself by buying the VHS version of the ten episodes of "Band of Brothers" then sat down and watched them end to end. A very gripping story of a very famous unit.

Just a little niggling note on some of the details. I noticed that when the machine gunners were cocking the gun, .30 cal. Browning, they were doing it overhand which would have cost them a thumb if the gun cooked off which they are inclined to do after a belt of rapid fire. No where did I notice a barrel bag, spare barrel, being carried by the #2 on the gun. The extra barrel is quite necessary because a gun being fired at a high and constant rate needs a cool barrel to be even minimally accurate. Also I noticed that the gunners were opening the receiver to load the gun which is not necessary you just feed the new belt through the left side of the gun give it a good yank and cock the action twice and you are away.

One of the scenes of the tanks coming to the rescue of the paratroopers show a crew commander on the back deck manning the AA .50 cal.. First of all, he would very likely be jerked off the tank when the turret traversed and have his head almost yanked off by his connection to the radio and intercom.
That is assuming that he survived the rather accurate fire from German snipers. By that time most of the crews would have been quite aware that they had to stay buttoned up as the German snipers took quite a toll of crew commanders who had their heads stuck out of the turrets.

The 3.2 rocket launcher was quite ineffective against the armor on the SP guns and the Mk.5 Panzer
only being able to knock them out with a shot to the undercarriage or from behind. Also the Shermans with the short barreled 75 mm could only be effective against the German armor at very close distances. Our main advantage was air superiority, the Americans were rather more effective at using their air power in coordination with their ground troops. Between that and the advantage of numbers and material once we, the Allies, got moving we overcame the superiority of the German weapons.

Ciao, JWL

TRYING TO UNDERSTAND INFINITY

2005-12-29T11:27:00.000-08:00

Musings, 10:29 hrs. PST, 29 December 2005, Thursday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 4.9`C light rain.

This is a little writing exercise where write down each thought as it goes through my mind provided the driver is not speeding. ha ha

LEVELS

How do I feel?
What do I see?
What am I hearing?
How does my inside influence my words?

I feel fine, OK, so so, awful sick,
pick one.
This book between my thumb and hand.
The TV blares on about art
Warhol, De Konig, Polluck,
Miles, Dizzy, Satchmo, Cohen.
How do i feel about that?
Who wants to know?

My life, this journey through time
so many levels, seeing, hearing , farting.
I can smell my teeth, my armpits, my feet.
The disembodied voices harangue me from little
boxes and flickering screens.
What does it mean and how does it feel?
My crossed leg has gone to sleep
and a small burp escapes my lips.
How do I feel about that and why are there
always more questions than answers?
Hypnotic, in voices loud and misunderstood,
turning my mind loose on to this page.
What are these chicken scratches on the paper?
Now another question
What side of the page?
Do I write on the front or the back?
Which is the front?
Which is the back?
How far is up?
Can up ever be down?
How far is down?
I grapple with infinity
can right ever be wrong?
Is it the singer
or is it the song?
The charging buffalo, large, ignorant steaks
galloping to be skinned for teepee walls.
What reality is there
three floors up from the street
lit by throw away lamps?
The sound pounds on my eardrums
and my face itches.
My toque warms my almost bald head and
I scratch my chin and the back of my head.
The sound of my TV quacks against my ears
and the adult warnings
mistakenly plays twice.
I pause now to round up
my head from where it has wandered.
The TV ads hammer at my intelligence
seeking to take me down to
dumb and dumber.
To resist is to
separate what you see
and hear
from what you feel.
Loud bronx cheers
resound
as my fingers grope for
the mute button

JWL

SPIN

2005-12-28T15:15:00.000-08:00

A Political Debate On Stress Disorder
As Claims Rise, VA Takes Stock

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; A01

The spiraling cost of post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans has triggered a politically charged debate and ignited fears that the government is trying to limit expensive benefits for emotionally scarred troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the past five years, the number of veterans receiving compensation for the disorder commonly called PTSD has grown nearly seven times as fast as the number receiving benefits for disabilities in general, according to a report this year by the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs. A total of 215,871 veterans received PTSD benefit payments last year at a cost of $4.3 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 1999 -- a jump of more than 150 percent.

Experts say the sharp increase does not begin to factor in the potential impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because the increase is largely the result of Vietnam War vets seeking treatment decades after their combat experiences. Facing a budget crunch, experts within and outside the Veterans Affairs Department are raising concerns about fraudulent claims, wondering whether the structure of government benefits discourages healing, and even questioning the utility and objectivity of the diagnosis itself.

"On the one hand, it is good that people are reaching out for help," said Jeff Schrade, communications director for the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. "At the same time, as more people reach out for help, it squeezes the budget further."

Among the issues being discussed, he said, was whether veterans who show signs of recovery should continue to receive disability compensation: "Whether anyone has the political courage to cut them off -- I don't know that Congress has that will, but we'll see."

Much of the debate is taking place out of public sight, including an internal VA meeting in Philadelphia this month. The department has also been in negotiations with the Institute of Medicine over a review of the "utility and objectiveness" of PTSD diagnostic criteria and the validity of screening techniques, a process that could have profound implications for returning soldiers.

The growing national debate over the Iraq war has changed the nature of the discussion over PTSD, some participants said. "It has become a pro-war-versus-antiwar issue," said one VA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because politics is not supposed to enter the debate. "If we show that PTSD is prevalent and severe, that becomes one more little reason we should stop waging war. If, on the other hand, PTSD rates are low . . . that is convenient for the Bush administration."

As to whether budget issues and politics are playing a role in the agency's review of PTSD diagnosis and treatment, VA spokesman Scott Hogenson said: "The debate is over how to provide the best medical services possible for veterans."

People with PTSD have paralyzing memories of traumatic episodes they experienced or witnessed, a range of emotional problems, and significant impairments in day-to-day functioning. Underlying the political and budget issues, many experts acknowledged, is a broader scientific debate over how best to diagnose trauma-related pathology, what the goal of treatment should be -- even what constitutes trauma.

Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally argues that the diagnosis equates sexual abuse, car accidents and concentration camps, when they are entirely different experiences: A PTSD diagnosis has become "a way of moral claims-making," he said. "To underscore the reprehensibility of the perpetrator, we say someone has been through a traumatic event."

Chris Frueh, director of the VA clinic in Charleston, S.C., said the department's disability system encourages some veterans to exaggerate symptoms and prolong problems in order to maintain eligibility for benefits.

"We have young men and women coming back from Iraq who are having PTSD and getting the message that this is a disorder they can't be treated for, and they will have to be on disability for the rest of their lives," said Frueh, a professor of public psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. "My concern about the policies is that they create perverse incentives to stay ill. It is very tough to get better when you are trying to demonstrate how ill you are."

Most veterans whom Frueh treats for PTSD are seeking disability compensation, he said. Veterans Affairs uses a sliding scale; veterans who are granted 100 percent disability status receive payments starting at around $2,300 a month. The VA inspector general's report found that benefit payments varied widely in states and said that was because VA centers in some states are more likely to grant veterans 100 percent disability.

Psychiatrist Sally Satel, who is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said an underground network advises veterans where to go for the best chance of being declared disabled. The institute organized a recent meeting to discuss PTSD among veterans.

Once veterans are declared disabled, they retain that status indefinitely, Frueh and Satel said. The system creates an adversarial relationship between doctors and patients, in which veterans sometimes take legal action if doctors decline to diagnose PTSD, Frueh said. The clinician added that some patients who really need help never get it because they are unwilling to undergo the lengthy process of qualifying for disability benefits, which often requires them to repeatedly revisit the painful episodes they experienced.

The concern by Frueh and Satel about overdiagnosis and fraud -- what researchers call "false positives" -- has drawn the ire of veterans groups and many other mental health experts.

A far bigger problem is the many veterans who seek help but do not get it or who never seek help, a number of experts said. Studies have shown that large numbers of veterans with PTSD never seek treatment, possibly because of the stigma surrounding mental illness.

"There are periodic false positives, but there are also a lot of false negatives out there," said Terence M. Keane, one of the nation's best-known PTSD researchers, who cited a 1988 study on the numbers of veterans who do not get treatment. "Less than one-fourth of people with combat-related PTSD have used VA-related services."

Larry Scott, who runs the clearinghouse http://www.vawatchdog.org/ , said conservative groups are trying to cut VA disability programs by unfairly comparing them to welfare.

Compensating people for disabilities is a cost of war, he said: "Veterans benefits are like workmen's comp. You went to war. You were injured. Either your body or your mind was injured, and that prevents you from doing certain duties and you are compensated for that."

Scott said Veterans Affairs' objectives were made clear in the department's request to the Institute of Medicine for a $1.3 million study to review how PTSD is diagnosed and treated. Among other things, the department asked the institute -- a branch of the National Academies chartered by Congress to advise the government on science policy -- to review the American Psychiatric Association's criteria for diagnosing PTSD. Effectively, Scott said, Veterans Affairs was trying to get one scientific organization to second-guess another.

PTSD experts summoned to Philadelphia for the two-day internal "expert panel" meeting were asked to discuss "evidence regarding validity, reliability, and feasibility" of the department's PTSD assessment and treatment practices, according to an e-mail invitation obtained by The Washington Post. The goal, the e-mail added, is "to improve clinical exams used to help determine benefit payments for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"What they are trying to do is figure out a way not to diagnose vets with PTSD," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans advocacy group. "It's like telling a patient with cancer, 'if we tell you, you don't have cancer, then you won't suffer from cancer.' "

Hogenson, the VA spokesman, said the department is not seeking to overturn the established psychiatric criteria for diagnosing PTSD.

"We are reviewing the utility and the objectivity of the criteria . . . and are commenting on the screening instruments used by VA," he said. "We want to make sure what we do for screening comports with the latest information out there."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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RANDOM TRAJECTORY

2005-12-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

Musings, 08:10 hrs. PST, 28 December 2005, Wednesday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 6.5`C raining

This is a little writing exercise where I just write down the first thing that comes to mind, it is unedited and I will post the edited version later today or some time tonight.

RANDOM TRAJECTORY

It is a long way from A to B
from sky to sea
and to be
or not to be.
Sitting here in the dark
awaiting the song of the lark
to sing it's song in time
and leave me scrambling for the rhyme.
The wistful background piano
the smash and crash of espresso machine
the merry laugh of the local soprano
all too familiar we will never pass this way again.
The composer a long time dead
his raw emotions playing in my head.
I've caught the wave this time around
and Tea Girl has come along
we may never touch
but both will know the song.

This tome in the rough
and looking at the page
is not enough.
I lost my pen in the alley
but had a spare
so the lines march across the page
like soldiers on the advance
on flickering film we see them in baggy pants
helmets tilted with forty mile stares
rifles clutched
as tanks bounce firing shot
and someone's house smolders in the ruin.
This is not where I was going
when I started with this poem.
Miles on the sound track
has brought me
from that nightmare with eyes wide open
a mental journey from hell and back
to wander in the jungle of inspiration.

The pen hesitates above the page
and feeling nothing
listens and watches the assembled crowd.
Anybody's head in the storm.
The cars hiss by on the street
and my ears ring from the ultra sound signals
the burglar alarms sing.
The accessory de jour
large colored umbrellas
and hacking winter cough
hands jammed in pockets
and hats pulled down over their ears.
The trash is out and the studio has lost that rancid smell
I should sweep and mop but what the hell
breakfast has to wait
on Barrie just back from Mexico.

I can't believe what I am seeing
dressed for the rain to the waist
with combat shorts and barefoot sandals.
His mother sure dressed him funny.
Woman in flasher rain coat with dripping umbrella
and open toed pumps
one wonders what job she is going to.
Then those dressed for the day looking like
they just rolled out of bed
dripping with rain
they proclaim
long winded complicated drinks
to the smiling staff
one doesn't know whether
to cry or to laugh
or simply let it die
having to choose between cakes or pie
grist for this poets pen
this poem is winding down
it's muzzle velocity lost in a
random trajectory.

JWL

CHEER UP, YOU'RE STILL STANDING

2005-12-28T06:47:00.000-08:00

Musings, 22:08 hrs. PST, 27 December 2005, Tuesday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 6.5`C partly cloudy

The old tum, much abused by Xmas excess, is rebelling with a queasy feeling and mild acid belches and no, you are not going to sleep. I've placated it somewhat with an acid reducer pill and some hot chocolate. I sit here in front of the tyrant dropping the odd fragrant rose and trying to type with one hand while I hold my nose.

Some good old bebop on the sound track, remembering that I was there when it was new. Noticing typos in the header that had us almost into the next millennium. Thank the gods for my right side brain and spell checker or I would look the right moron.

Should surf the news channels and see if there is anything to get me fired up. I'm amazed with the outrage about the latest shoot out in Toronto the good. There is an ultimate size a city can be before the crowding leads to this sort of mindless violence. Human beings are territorial animals and the contest for space and recognition often leads to this sort of thing. Couple this with the relative ease with which guns can be illegally imported from the biggest gun store in the world and there you have it.

Of course the government will band aid the problem with legislation aimed at totally disarming the society and confiscating legal firearms. This will in no way quell the gun crime in that the types who perpetrate these crimes have no intention of obeying the law anyway, Ditto, long prison sentences, that approach hasn't worked in the USA and it won't work here. Until the underlying social problems are dealt with I doubt that we will see any significant decrease in these sort of crimes.

Our inadvertent solution in times past was to go to war and put all our potential young gunman into uniform. We haven't been able to do that since the Korean War
and coupled with an immigration policy which brings in people to fill the quotas in our underclass and then you have this explosive mix. Add a permissive drug problem light the fuse and wait.

Ahhh, if only I was king. ha ha

Ciao, JWL

ELEVEN YEARS ON

2005-12-27T08:28:00.000-08:00

Musings, 07:43 hrs. PST, 27 December 2005, Tuesday, epoch studio and The ANNEX, 10.5`C raining and dark

Al Gordon arrived out of the blue, down from Summerland to visit his Mom who lives in North Vancouver. We had a fantastic afternoon and it was really good to see him. He is looking good and we had a great visit.

I gave him a hug when we parted and he said, "You know I hate hugs." and I said, "Thats why I did it." and we both laughed and went on our way.

Eleven years have passed since we last have a lunch together and the time has passed as quickly as a blink. It made me think that even if I have many years in my future my demise is approaching at light speed.

That is the problem with consciousness, the more aware we are of a particular reality the quicker it recedes into the past. Our lives will still inhabit the time we are alloted but the modern need for more speed, that greedy search for yet more sensations plus our fatal inability to correctly assess the cause and effect of our actions speed us into the chaos of the unknown future.

I've made promises to myself I know I can't possibly keep. There is not enough time to do all the things I want to do. I know in my heart of hearts I still have things to give that are useful and positive but my reach will always exceed my grasp.

I know that I will disappoint some much as I disappoint myself but you can't please everyone all the time.

In my head there is this boy who would stand and watch and listen and try to figure it all out. The boy with very little confidence, in need of constant reassurance.

There is also that mean person who has no patience with the weakness in himself or weakness in others. Standards are a pointed stick that we poke ourselves in the eye with.

Ciao

My previous Blog site is blocked

2005-12-27T04:47:00.000-08:00

Musings, 04:51 hrs. PST, 27 December 2005, Tuesday, epoch studio, 7.5`C raining

Hi gang,

You will have noticed a difference in the URL. I"m currently for some unknown reason blocked from accessing the Blog-city site from this Shaw connection. Of course it's always a mystery when something that has worked for months suddenly crashes with no explanation. Very frustrating.

Everyone not on this connection can access so the irony is that all my mailing list except the 3 others on this connection can access my site. What a pain in the butt.

Let me know if you receive this.
JWL