made this ecard today using a joke Sonja and i have:

or something like that. Bi11 sent me this a while ago for consideration. Putting it up now to get that started:

oh, and my song Jesus is now available on AmieStreet. It’s still free as of this writing.

In the next vid, Farrakhan discusses Obama and the powers behind the presidency. Aside from a few rhetorical excesses, i think he hits on the truth:

Just came across this passage from the gnostic Gospel of Philip in Pagel’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent:

The following song began in a dream a couple years ago. It had nothing to do with politics, much less John McCain, but was sung by a carpenter friend of mine upon learning that Madonna intended to divorce him. At that time it was just the chorus:

It was one of those luminous moments in dreams that leave an imprint, a vague sense of imperative. I woke up, figured out the chords and recorded it.

Not long after that, from the chorus emerged a first verse, which both falsified the origin of the chorus while making plain the sense of the words:

There it sat for a couple years… till this past month, with the election nearing its end, and the historical writing appearing on the wall. Real songs have that same quality as dreams and ideas: they emerge of themselves. I generally feel the presence of a song before it happens. The last verse, concerning Mr. McCain, was no different. For months I’d felt the carpenter’s song was done. Another verse had seemed impossible, given the fact that these were supposed to have been the final words of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it was my Catholic upbringing, but likening anything else to that experience seemed wrong.

Then I started to understand McCain in an analogous way which snapped me out of religious fascination and into an awareness of the general quality of the feeling described in the song.

According to CNN, some historians still hold out hope that Bush will be redeemed by history, as were Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman. Presumably by a good washing in the memory hole, which strips away all specifics, leaving us with a fictional remembrance of a time that never was. Rather than incompetent, as he is now typically viewed, Bush could come to seem merely “unlucky.”

It’s fascinating, if you think that incompetent was itself a euphemism for evil.

For FEAR OF KNOWING DAY this year I’ve composed a contemplative, meandering, essay obliquely on the subject of art, illness, impotence and blogging, to accompany the release of an album i’ve been working on (with a little help from my friends), titled, “get well soon”.

You might consider the following a meditation on the image of the serpent and the apple, depicted below. Adam and Eve do not become fully human until they eat of the apple. Likewise, the young prince who travels westward to Egypt does not fall asleep to his mission until he has eaten the food of the locals. The apple, then, is a narcotic which causes us to forget who we are. In knowing each other, Eve and Adam discover the difference between Good and Evil and lose the perfect innocence of their former life - a loss which brings them all manner of suffering and death. Accordingly, the fear of knowing is uniquely great, to those having been so conditioned.

The most salient point of the Fear of Knowing is its ubiquity, at least as far as I am concerned. It’s not, that is, merely a cultural defect that I mean to point to, but a personal defect that I mean to bring to light. It is the illness of our times and of myself.

As previously described, the Fear of Knowing is expressed in the image of Hamlet’s Dilemma… such is a personal expression. More generally, Hamlet’s Dilemma can be seen in Jeffserson’s Sense of Duty: the Duty, that is, to make revolution in the face of tyranny. This duty, when experienced by some significant - which is to say, effective - group within a population has been termed The Spirit of ‘76. Fear of Knowing is a fear of that Spirit, for the Spirit of Liberation promises to destroy the world. Use only in cases of emergency… which Jefferson rather idealistically imagined occurring once every couple generations.

This is the Change we can believe in, and it is striking to reckon how cosmetic such change has become. One of the great flaws in the original essence of America seems poised on the verge of symbolic repair: a Black man might be president. Yet the legal fabric of the Republic is threadbare where it is not in tatters. Likewise, we are as a culture able to access information and interrelate on a scale that seems virtually unlimited, yet our discussions achieve remarkably less than they promise. It’s a pattern that seems endemic to an imperial democracy: universal suffrage requires universal mental control, assisted by technological manipulation of the vote.

All of this conspires in creating a sense of profound dysfunction, of permanent frustration that is too frightening to recognize. We become ghost dancers at best, responding to the march of historical inevitability with a warrior’s sense of style. We take the moral high ground: not as an improved vantage point for attack, but as a refuge. A shelter from the storm.

It is a phantom immortality, but what is the proper response to knowing that your goodness is insubstantial? Despair, certainly. But then what?

Blogdrama, for so many of us. Athenians all, Socrates and his jury. Worry not, for you send me to a far better place. Be cheerful with your executioner, but do not throw yourself upon his blade.

Shot at 2008-09-11

Hi Bi11: sorry to have been such an infrequent visitor here. I’m thinking of closing down the blog, or rather, moving our discussion to a new blog… but I haven’t built that blog yet. I’m working on a Fear of Knowing Day post. In the meantime, here’s an invitation to the album release party:

Take a moment to sign it…

GET WELL SOON is now available for free download at Aimestreet.com. It’s free at the moment, anyway. The more it’s downloaded, the more it will cost, up to a limit of 98¢ per track. So go download it for free.

You can listen without downloading, but for the most part the album is gapless, and the flow gets a little interrupted waiting for the next track to buffer.

I’ve finally finished the master, and have created some prototypes. The real release is set for Fear of Knowing Day, 9/11/08.

sorry for the glacial pace lately. i’m tied up at work, so to speak. been wanting to write a post titled:

for once, religion could do some good in this country.

in case you haven’t seen this…

Since Sonja’s return form Ecuador we’ve been working on some new songs. Here’s one…