Ernest Rhodes: too many walk when they were taught how to fly

I take Ernest for granted. When I want to have an intelligent conversation at work, I turn to him. He never disappoints. Some of the most helpful conversations I’ve had about Music (heck – about Much More than Music) I’ve had with him. If I could designate a Music Guru for myself, that Guru would be Ernie.

How so?

Does one have to explain why one designates someone as one’s guru?

No. I willingly offer my services as a peripheral disciple.

Doing a lot less to prove that I am talented

I remember the 1st time I saw Ernest perform live. And I remember the 2nd time I danced to him. It’s high time there’s been a 3rd time for me… which will coincide with the Transistor CD release party scheduled for March 13th at Sauce.

Ernest Rhodes is worth far more than being taken-for-granted by Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Midwest. He’s a Wise Guy. He’s a Poet. He’s a Musician. He Inspires.

He is Aware and Awake.

LISTEN UP.

Ernest’s and Justin Staggs’ Transistor video is fantastic. And fucking awesome.

WATCH IT.

The Transistor CD release date in Minneapolis is February 23rd. Keep an eye on ernestrhodes.com for downloading info – or trot to Electric Fetus, Cheapo, Mindstate Distribution or Fifth Element to buy it in the flesh.

Give me all you can
I can handle it

Coffee Koan

Though I got rid of my car years ago, occassionally I experience an uncontrollable urge to buy crappy coffee from gas stations. As I sip the nondescript liquid, I have visions of driving across the prairie with a full tank of gas, singing along to Buffy Sainte-Marie's "I'm Gonna Be A Country Girl Again."

The rain is falling lightly on the buildings and the cars
I've said goodbye to city friends, department stores and bars
The lights of town are at my back, my heart is full of stars
And I'm going to be a country girl again.

Does this vision mean that I (A) need a car in my life again, (B) need a vacation, (C) need to switch back to tea, or (D) have really awesome taste in music?

Man Made Gods: RIP Michael Jackson. Forgive Us, For We Know Not What We Do

Fourth grade. Middle of Winter. Northwestern Minnesota

Still dark outside. Everyone rumbles in. Moon boots yanked off. The prettiest girl takes off her snowflake pompom stocking cap, her permed hair sweaty from the cold and warmth. The cutest boy takes off his puffy red ski jacket, his t-shirt staticy from the dry wind. The poorest boy goes to his desk in the same clothes he’s worn all week with no space age Tropicana juice sack or pudding snack or Doritos in his lunch bag. (i shouldn’t be noticing them but that is all i do... notice them). I’m quiet, wondering if I look ugly or pretty today. I’m in love with a number of these boys and I don’t think they know. I don’t think they notice. Maybe today he will say something unrelated to “pass my paper forward.”

As though the holy spirit passed through the room, a murmur begins about One Man. The popular girls are brazen, loud, and flirtatious about Him. The boys only have loud and large good to say about Him. The quieter ones agree. Twenty-four of them, give or take a few million, one of Him. He is the most beautiful man alive. He is awesome, totally rad. He’s a CARD: cool awesome radical dude. The girls are in love. The boys are in love. Everyone saw Him last night. One of the cute boys has learned His dance. Someone else still wears one, only one, glove. It was only last night that they saw Him and it was totally rad. He is a really good singer and dancer. The cute boy has taken his moon boots off and is in his stockings on the polished wood floor. Middle of winter. He continues his moonbootless walk.

He’s really really cute. He’s really really good. Everyone in unison. The quieter ones agree. All sing His praise. Someone important notices I’m stupefied, just watching, just noticing. Someone important turns to me and asks, “Don’t you think He’s awesome? Isn’t He really cute? Isn’t Michael Jackson rad?”

Michael Jackson? Who in the world is Michael Jackson?

My brain shoots a feverish light as everyone turns to listen to what the important person has to ask and what the quiet girl has to say. A small silence enters, swinging of heads, focus of eyes, hush from exhalation of breath. Somewhere in their childhood wisdom they know, or have heard somewhere, maybe out in the woods, that Still Waters Run Deep, and they kind of want to know what I will say. I snap myself into a strong decision.

Do I think michael jackson is awesome?

“No. I don’t like him. I think he’s dumb.”

Unison exhale inhale. They might gang up on me and moon walk me into the floor. Half the boys’ mouths hang open in shock. Half the girls sneer and one asks me again to make sure they’ve heard right. They chant the routine, “oh my gods” and “I think he’s awesome.” “Oh my God! Did you hear that? She doesn’t like Michael Jackson.”

Their worship and heretical remarks rise to feverish pitch again until the bell rings. Somewhere in the confusion, another girl, semi-popular, semi-quiet, stands near me and says, “I don’t like him either,” mostly to me in support, partly to the class, but they are still in the convulsions of the original shock and working back to their high-pitched praise. They don’t really care what she thinks.

A pleasant, heady turmoil slices through my brain.

One: My announcement gave me two minutes of infamy in a fourth grade classroom. I was the center of attention. The feeling of eyes and emotions focused on me, my words and emotions, sent my heart screaming for more… more of that undivided attention.

Two: I had made it through that episode without having to give any particulars to back up my opinion, an opinion I was now quite proud of and cherished for years to come, even after I knew I had to change my mind about the possible Extreme talents of michael jackson.

Three: I had no idea in heaven, earth, or hell, who they were worshipping. I was glad I had made it through that episode without having to explain any of this, not having to remind them why I didn’t know who he was. I was glad they were too in love with him to pick at my reasons for not loving him. My response had been too much of a rush for me, and them. I didn’t want to explain it away.

I didn’t know who Michael Jackson was because they had something I didn’t. This was 1984, February 29. Do you remember the Grammys when he made a grand appearance? It was channel 11 up in Northwestern MN 8pm CT (???). I don’t remember because we had no TV. I didn’t have a TV. Not for the previous six years. Not for the next twenty years.
And counting.
And counting.

postscript> and then when he burned his hair during the making of a commercial, enmasse they ripped down posters, tossed out albums, said he was stupid, dumb, and meant nothing to them. The god making process come full circle. Offer up another burnt offering to our sacrificial lamb.

RIP Michael Jackson. Forgive us, for we know not what we do.



(((Christine Vyrnon © 2009
... written in 2002, while in the throes of leaving Jesus... an unpublished attempt to understand how we make our own gods, and why we sacrifice these man made gods. further editing may ensue)))

Leonard Cohen All The Way From China

As I speak, the Author of the title of this blog is down the street, on stage, letting it all hang out... and I'm not there to grovel.

Leonard Cohen is in town. I belong to the Leonard Cohen cult.

Some people prefer the Tom Waits cult. Or the Johnny Cash cult. Or the Kurt Cobain cult. Or the Lou Reed cult. Or the Tupac cult. Someday there will be a Randy Travis cult. (o you laugh now... but he who laughs first laughs laughs)

I first learned of Leonard when I belonged to the Jesus cult. I also had recently joined the Nina Simone cult. I'm still a card-carrying member of the Nina Simone cult. The Jesus cult is doing just fine without me.

So my Jesus posse at the time cultishly listened to Jeff Buckley, and being that Jesus people always like to find semi-secular songs that have a semi-christian message to them, we added Cohen's "Hallelujah" to our basement jamming repertoire. Go figure.

At the same time Nina's version of "Suzanne" entered my consciousness. And the rest is herstory.

After I left the Jesus cult, I couldn't get enough of Leonard Cohen as a writer. The friend with whom I briefly started a band (whatever came of 'the zen molesters'?) lent me his copy of "Beautiful Losers" and I never gave it back. He never gave me a copy of the songs we recorded.

Touche.

I read "Strange Music" in place of my Bible. I burned "Suzanne" onto every mix I made for ever lover, friend, sibling who would take a mix from me.

And you know that she's half crazy/but that's why you want to be there.

I posted lyrics to "Hallelujah" above my toilet.

She's touched your perfect body with her mind.

I sometimes forget it's there, but guys who have to stand and take a piss see it. Leonard Cohen would be proud to know that someone occassionally reads his lyrics while taking a piss...

There was a time you let me know

what's really going on below

but now you never show it to me, do you?

I remember when I moved in you,

and the holy dove was moving too,

and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!

Jesus .... Eat Your Heart Out!

Bill Holm Uncaged

Bill Holm died this week. Years ago I wrote my first fan letter ever to him… and never sent it. While an undergrad, I attended Bill’s reading-recital. A big burly guy of Icelandic heritage from rural Minnesota, Bill wrote tender and caustic poetry about a landscape for which I refused to be homesick. He read a few concise words about the tundra and then meandered over to the piano to play precise Brahms.

The tundra poetry didn’t choke me up, but the music did.

I don’t think he cared whether or not we liked the music. The music was for him. The words were for us.

At the time I struggled to find a balance between music and writing. Until Bill, I didn’t know that writers could be musicians and musicians could be writers.

I had led a charmed and harsh prairie farm house life to a soundtrack of my sister's piano: Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Rachmaninoff. We were an unsettled family of musicians pulling the grass apart/ to place our fingers on God’s heart (Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence 201-202).

Underneath aborted fan mail to male writers with rural souls is my mother’s mantra: “Write what you know. Write what you know. Write what you know.”

What do I know? It’s just as difficult to find antonyms to music as to write synonyms for what I think I know.

Is writing about the logical loop of thoughts on a page or the pressure of the pen in a hand that cramps? Is piano music about concise precision or the bounce of the keys under the fingers, the bounce of sound in a house in the middle of nowhere? Is singing about vocal emotional prowess or the resonance of the sound vibrating through a living breathing body? Is all art, sound, word about manipulating the emotions of others or jolting and soothing one’s own psyche?

I quit caring about small rural life. I suppress dreadfully poignant bullshit observations of what it means to grow up rural. Leaving rural life boils down to understanding what a caged wild animal must endure. I was on the verge of caged animal madness when I saw Bill Holm. His music calmed me.

Now I cage the music.

I live on a concrete island surrounded by a river of rumbling cars, as close to the heart of a City as I can stomach. Yet every day I look west and see a mirage of wheat and corn and grass and snow.

I know out in Bill Holm’s landscape there will always be a window open to a room with a piano… a concert of Chopin for an audience of combines and cows.





Bill Holm's Website

Finding Satori, Bypassing Diva-hood

Some people get high on airplane glue, on laundry detergent- complicated stuff. My satori is this: the zen experience of spreading butter. You can look. The knife disappears. The bread disappears. The butter disappears. What remains is the repeated gesture of the hand… a movement. And space. It is emptiness.

-Gorodish (Richard Bohringer)
DIVA (1982)
___________________
In the middle of Gorodish’s blue loft is a giant jigsaw puzzle derived from Hokusai’s The Great Wave. The surrealism of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s movie masterpiece became apparent when I realized that the mounds of jigsaw pieces for the king-bed sized puzzle would never fit in the notebook sized box at Gorodish’s feet.

Puzzles have long been one of my own satori: a form of meditation, creativity, and path to enlightenment. Once the puzzle is completed, you destroy and restore it to its original chaos in a box.

Like a pre-determined, modernized sand mandala, jigsaw puzzles take shape in order to be destroyed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Consider our world of cameras. How does the act of recording and immediately revisiting static moments take us away from being eternally Present? How does the study of non-attachment and photography collide? How often do we, in our everyday life, photograph mandalas of sand: relationships, dogmas, art, words?

Arguably, graffiti and tagging are industrial versions of sand mandalas. Stenciled works of art and free hand tags often disappear overnight under whitewash and graffiti fighting technology. Once the ownership realm detects a "defacement of property" the grim beauty inevitably disappears. What are my motives behind photographing temporary urban art? What is gained, and what is lost, in the act of photographing graffiti?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In college, artist friends turned an old building scheduled for demolition into a work of temporary landscape art. They brought the outside inside. They hung tree branch mobiles in the halls. They turned found-items from the attic into sculptures. They encouraged brave students on a well-behaved campus to scribble permanent marker ideas on crumbling plaster. The building became a haven of risk and rebelliousness. Knowing full well that whatever beauty, décor and drama we brought to the structure would be destroyed by the wrecking ball, we blossomed during the doomed building's swan song.

Though I remember the picture and words I drew, I don’t have the need to repeat them here. It was a cathartic expression of non-attachment and non-permanence.

Occasionally I wallow in the glow of canonized art on museum walls and relax into the shadows of architectural enlightenment. Nevertheless, I developed an undeniable thirst for the un-recordable, a fascination with art that invites destruction, whether the walls of rotting buildings or private, non-recorded concerts.

While I attempt to digest the complexities of the Situationists and satori, in honor of bypassing my own diva-hood, I write on digital walls as a personal practice of non-attachment.
_____________________________
Words of the Diva (Wilhemina Wiggen Fernandez) at the press conference regarding her unwillingness to be recorded: I sing out of passion. And I can’t sing alone. I need my public. A concert is a privileged moment for the artist and the audience. Music: it comes and it goes. Don’t try to keep it.
....
Journalist: So you are against making art a business?

Diva: Not at all, but business should adapt to art, not the other way around.

Tough-Love & Fair Warnings: Playing Devil's Advocate

Fair Warning: I’m about to use swear words.

DILLINGER FOUR!!! FUCK YEAH!!!

Seasonal laryngitis kept me from interviewing anyone at Minneapolis' nonpartisan “Liberty Parade” Rally yesterday. * In lieu of silence, I’d like to digitally scream, “Dillinger Four Fucking Rocks!”

D4= Putting the “F” Back in “Art”: a favorite of mine from their “Situationist Comedy” Album

“Forgive me
For a second I thought we were eye to eye
My mistake
I shouldn’t have faked it
And now it’s cheers to a waste of time
I don’t remember asking your permission
To have my own goddamn opinion
And if this is how it goes
At all of your shows
Please point me to the exit
What a circus of clowns we are
Politicians could learn some tricks here
It’s hard to see past all the stars
Please point me to the beer
This routine’s back on the rise
Drop a name and cut it down to size
Check out my new dance
I call it THE WALK AWAY”

Fair Warning: I’m about to quote Joni Mitchell.

“I look at love from both sides now.” The same with politics. I've been on both sides. I love and respect people on both sides. I have my preferences, but I’m not blind to the common ground both parties share.

And guess what is located on the common-ground real-estate of both parties?

They both share the same porta-potty.

Fair Warning: I feel obliged to ream Democrats a new one, all in the name of tough-love.

The Democrats, for whom I more-or-less bat, are well on their way of not taking the Republicans seriously. They are so gung-ho about how McCain has shot himself in the foot with the Palin VP pick, that they are in danger of being blinded by the rather large splinter in their own eye.

How so?

AGEISM: DON’T GO THERE!!!! Rise above. Democrats are doing themselves no favors by pointing and laughing at how old John McCain is. I know it is the wave of the future for the young to belittle the old, but with so many baby boomers headed toward healthy, productive later years, if the democrats make too big a deal out of McCain’s age, this might turn off a lot of his peers.

I’ve seen men drop dead at the age of 40. I’ve also seen women in their intellectual prime in their 70’s and 80’s.

From what I can tell, there is NO evidence that McCain does not have his wits, and health, about him. His age is a concern, but it should not be the primary focus. If anything, the age-ist rhetoric coming from the Democrats might alienate quite a few voters.

HYPOCRITICAL SEXISM: I know Palin is hard-core pro-life. The Republicans will love this. True, it is a bit hypocritical for her to be pro-life, yet pro-choice about family and career. Meanwhile, just as Hillary supporters watched sexism come out of the woodwork from followers of both parties, I suspect that we will continue to see sexism… from both parties. Democrats still have a thing or two to learn about their own double standards. The less sexist rhetoric coming from the democrats, the better.

And for every Democrat who claims they are not sexist, I’d like to suggest that EVERYONE is sexist… and racist… and hypocritical… to some degree. Me included. Once we stop examining our thoughts and actions, once we start taking the easy road of Goodie-Two-Shoes, and slap the Label Of Enlightenment on our foreheads, the sooner we’re going to fall flat on our faces.

Though the Republicans may have their work cut out for them on the feminist and racial front, this does NOT mean that the Democrats are home free.

INEXPERIENCE: For the next 2 months, the Democrats and Republicans will be playing a game of Hot Potato on this issue. Both sides have reason to squirm. It could be a toss-up.

DEMOCRATS are SMART/ REPUBLICANS are STUPID Argument: This, imo, is one of the most embarrassing arguments used by the Democrats. Guess what? The Republicans say, and believe, the same thing about Democrats. I know there are statistics out there that show that Democrats hold more and higher degrees than Republicans. I’m not aware of any statistics which compare their IQs. Though Republicans may openly cling to Creationism, this does not make them stupid.

FYI Aside to fellow atheists: calling ppl who are creationists STUPID does not help our cause either.
****************************

Who has more to loose in this election? Debatable. The Republicans are being forced to soften their image. Nothing wrong with that. If Democrats continue to suggest it is mere pandering to the middle (which both sides do, btw), they just MIGHT find out how apropos the following oldey, but a goodey, is: Pride Goes Before The Fall.

Fair Warning?
May the best team win.

And if all else fails, ask yourself: "WWD4D?"

*Apologies for all subjects of the pictures who I did not get names from. If this is a problem, please let me know. Also, the drumset accompanying the D4 lyrics... is NOT their drumset. My camera was on strike for their set.