Archive for May 2010
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Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" voted #1 song by (who else?) Rolling Stone.
Here's an article about the Top 5 songs on the list of 500
And the entry on Dylan (from CBS.com):
No. 1: "Like a Rolling Stone," by Bob Dylan
"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" - of its revolutionary design and execution - or of the young man, just turned 24, who created it.
Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
The most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is how unprecedented it was: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice, the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.
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"It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (Dec. 24, 1967)
Check out this stellar interpretation of "It Don't Come Easy," by Ringo Starr.
Great art doesn't need a lot of fancy equipment. Just heart, and soul, and skill.
Click here for the song.
Are we going to let the corporations kill the planet's oceans?
circa 10:53 am (PDT): Conclusion of Obama's Press Conference on the Oil Spill
Obama: (paraphrase) This is what I wake up to and what I go to bed thinking about.
I think everypody understands that when we foul the environment, that has concrete implications for us and for future generations.
Obama then told a story of his daughter, Malia, asking, "have you plugged the hole yet, daddy?"
Obama: "I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred"
"How are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have?"
"When big crises happen, it forces us to do some soul-searching."
Obama then said we all have to be part of this soul-searching process, but in the meantime, it's his job to get it fixed.
"I take responsibility."
"It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down."
10:44 am (PDT): Obama breaks down peak oil, concluding: "We can
see what's on the horizon, and it's a problem, if we don't start
changing how we operate."
10:37 am (PDT): Watching Obama's press conference. God bless Helen Thomas.
"And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis."
--Tim Wise, on white privilege in the Tea Party
Here's a link to an article, "Examining our place and role on earth," from the Guelph Mercury newspaper in Ontario. The reporter came to see Drew's evening presentation in Guelph, one of the stops on Drew's Canada Tour in March.
Excerpt:
"Recently I saw American poet Drew Dellinger speak in Guelph. His poetry combines cosmology and ecology in a way that forces us to wake up to the environmental destruction we have created. His work is influenced by writers like Berry. The story of the universe, Dellinger tells, has been understood in a physical, scientific approach with little relevance placed on any sacred meaning to the wondrous magnificence of the universe unfolding. Our story, he says, is one of human supremacy that separates us from each other and the other species on the planet. This story has allowed us to dominate and control nature because we see this as our human right that deems us superior. It is these beliefs that have created the current ecological crisis."
"The earth community is a wilderness community that will not be bargained with; nor will it simply be studied or examined or made an object of any kind; nor will it be domesticated or trivialized as a setting for vacation indulgence, except under duress and by oppressions which it cannot escape. When this does take place in an abusive way, a vengenace awaits the human, for when the other living species are violated so extensively, the human itself is imperiled."
--THOMAS BERRY (The Dream of the Earth, p. 2)
Photo: Bret Webster
"A mind persuaded that is lives among things that, like words, are essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence."
--George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (1910)
Drew in Orillia, Ontario. (Photo: Laura-May Culver)
Here's a blog entry from Laura-May Culver: (Original post here.)
Drew Dellinger Thanks Canada During his Planetize the Movement Canada Tour, March 2010
During his ‘13 gigs in 7 days’ Canada Tour, Drew Dellinger enthusiastically thanked Canada and Canadians for their historical and present day role in the Justice Movement.
At the Orillia, Ontario event, Drew passionately read the beginning of Martin Luther King Jr.’s first CBC Massey lecture from the posthumous book collection The Trumpet of Conscience.
Drew proceeded to weave this into a personal address to Canada:
“I want to join with Dr. King in thanking Canada for being a beacon of freedom and justice at a time when the United States was living under a regime of systemic racial tyranny. And so, it is a part of that progressive justice tradition that I think Canada has exemplified; in some ways much more than the United States.
And so I want to thank you for that. And I believe Canada has a significant role to play as we build a planetary community, to put justice at the center; and it is based on ecological sustainability. So, Canada has a role to play. We all have a role to play. So, let’s Planetize the Movement".
Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy refers to Drew Dellinger as ‘a national treasure…’ and after a unique 7 day-13 event- Canadian PTM immersion, I can confidently state that Drew Dellinger is a North American treasure as well.
Check out the powerful and important works of Drew Dellinger, including his poetry book 'love letter to the milky way' at www.drewdellinger.org and www.planetizethemovement.org
--Laura-May
www.theredtelephonebooth.com
Martin Luther King Jr.:
Along with the scientific and technological revolution, we have also witnessed a world-wide freedom revolution over the last few decades….In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a significant part of world development.
We live in a day, said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “when civilization is shifting its basic outlook; a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed.” What we are seeing now is a freedom explosion, the realization of “an idea whose time has come,” to use Victor Hugo’s phrase. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses….All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave….For several centuries the direction of history flowed from the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in “conquests” of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is moving West. The earth is being redistributed. Yes, we are “shifting our basic outlooks.”
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"Chapter V: Where Are We Going," pp.169-70, from Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, (1967)
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