Marvin Gaye Still Matters

Marvin Gaye's timeless, soul-stirring, intuitively brilliant opus, "What's Going On?" is what's happening now. From the tragically beautiful  "Mercy Mercy Me" to the dark & brooding, "Save the Children" (which includes the penetrating lines, "Who really cares to save a world in despair? There'll come a time, when the world won't be singin'..Flowers won't grow, bells won't be ringin'..."), you have to agree that this classic recording is still relevant for the simple fact that we still have not learned from our mistakes. Listening to it now can be quite chilling, like an eerie warning from some soul-powered time machine. In 2003, the album was ranked # 6 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. Personally, I would rank it #2 after Bob Marley's, "Rastaman Vibration". 

Check out this live performance--Marvin was in the zone in this one!






 Also check out What's Going On (40th Anniversary Edition) which was recently released.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Hell and High Water

                                         Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
                                          Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
                                       Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry
                                                            The affliction nor the fear
                                       --from Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear

Anyone who pays attention to the news has to wonder: What the hell is going on with our planet—and with us?

A number of events are happening simultaneously. Here are a few:-

(1) Fukushima- It’s getting worse with no light at the end of the tunnel, according to the reports I’ve read. It was reported yesterday that there is now widespread internal radioactive contamination among Japanese citizens around Fukushima and the radioactivity is spreading outwards--Two whales caught some 650 kilometers from the melting reactors have shown intense radiation. Even plutonium, the deadliest substance known to Mankind, has been found very far from the site. Radiation from Fukushima has long since been detected throughout the northern hemisphere & no one knows what the effects will be. To top it off, the entire nation of Japan sits on a wide range of fault lines so the situation remains perilous.

(2) Los Alamos:  Massive Wildfire + Radioactive Material = No Time To Even Think.

If this massive fire heads towards the national laboratory that was at the core of the program that built the Atomic Bomb - where significant quantities of stored radioactive material are still present—there is no telling what the potential for radioactive fallout to spread throughout North America (and beyond) will be.

(3) Nebraska:  The flooding Missouri River continues to threaten at least two nuclear reactors.

So far it is not clear whether the nuclear operators can protect them, and what will happen if they can’t.

(4) Texas – Drought and wildfires have lead to the decision by the US Department of Agriculture to declare the entire state of Texas a natural disaster.

(5) Oceans are Dying - An international panel of marine experts warns in a new report that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.

(6) Arctic Meltdown - the latest scientific data on the rate of Arctic warming show dramatic levels of melting and sea level rise occurring far faster than previous estimates.

(7) East African Catastrophe - The United Nations stated yesterday that 9 million people need humanitarian assistance in the drought-hit countries of the Horn of Africa.

Scientists are predicting more extreme weather events as a result of human-induced climate change. Are we are reaping what we have sewn? Who's to blame? Don't think so hard—it’s us, for the most part. It is really heart-breaking to see children especially suffering from our collective stupidity. Regardless of this, the major polluters have so far failed to act with any sense of urgency--it's business as usual. The burning of fossil fuels continues unabated. To aggravate matters, there’s now a mad scramble for the untapped oil beneath the melted polar ice caps. These fuckers have no shame & could care less if the whole fabric of life crashes and burns.

Many people choose to live in La-La Land hoping that things will just get fixed "by others". They close their eyes to the facts until shit hits the fan in their own backyards. One Senator (Sen. Michael Jungbauer ) the other day even rejected that global warming is happening and called climate science dubious. Disturbingly, huge segments of the US population are still very, very unenlightened to what's going on. They will get more agitated by the Casey Anthony murder trial than by our imploding ecosystem. They aren't totally to blame as the corporate media intentionally filters out news stories that are critical of the military-industrial complex. But in the age of the Internet, (and bookstores & libraries!), there is no excuse for staying in the dark. It's suicidal to be so damn ignorant. The Earth as we know it is dying & few are aware of the critical stage we're in at this time...

We have to save her....

OneLove

:::MME:::

One of a Kind: Remembering Michael Jackson

I believe that there are some souls that are too sensitive for the harshness of this world. They move to another rhythm, have a higher sensitivity to subtleties than most which I believe contributes to their unusually high capacity for creativity, intuition & innovation. Quite often, they come across as eccentric & are easily misjudged. Michael Jackson seems to have been one of those sensitive souls judging from his music & public appearances only. MJ will always be for me that hard-working 9 year old kid from Indiana who stunned the world with his gifts.This playlist highlights my personal favorites which I am sure will bring back some fond memories for many of you.


RIP brother.


OneLove


:::MME:::

End of the Line

I once read somewhere that human beings are the worst thing that has ever happened to planet Earth. I don't take such an extreme view, but you have to admit that collectively, we have trashed the place. Yesterday it was reported that the world's oceans are facing an extinction crisis as the result of our negligence, greed & ignorance. A preliminary report from an international panel of marine experts said that the condition of the world's seas was worsening more quickly than had been predicted. The world's oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory. Check out the disturbing facts here. 


We still have time to turn this around, but more people need to be informed of the facts before it's too late.


OneLove


:::MME:::

Musings

(making connections)

The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap.
-Adrienne Rich

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength never power. Above all to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget"
-Arundhati Roy

"Someone
made me more alive,
more human;
I repay that gift
by making more alive
someone else".
-Dennis Brutus

"The world economy is the most efficient expression of organized crime. The international bodies that control currency, trade, and credit practice international terrorism against poor countries, and against the poor of all countries, with a cold-blooded professionalism that would make the best of the bomb throwers blush."
-Eduardo Galeano

"To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves"
-Carrie Chapman Catt (US suffragette)

"There are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about.. things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight"
-Phillip Pullman

"Writing must teach man soberness: to be awake"
-Zbignew Herbert

"The intellectual responsibility of the writer as moral agent is obvious: to try to find out and tell the truth as best one can about matters of human significance to the right audience."
-Stanley Cohen, States of Denial

"Is this why the more I know the louder I lament?"
-Mahmoud Darwish

"The power of the dominant order is not just economic but intellectual-lying in the realm of beliefs"
-Pierre Bourdieu

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose".
-Tony Judt

"Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance".
-Mahmoud Darwish

"The markets have ruled for a third of a century but it has all ended in tears... Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crises is a great failure of the market system"
-Robert Skidelsky

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power".
-Howard Zinn, US Historian and Author

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things"
-Tom Waits

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life"
-Rachel Carson

"To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards to deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death".
-Jules Henry, Culture against Man

"accuracy is essential/ we must not be wrong/
even by a single one /we are despite everything/the guardians of our brothers/ignorance about those who have disappeared/ undermines the reality of the world"
-Zbigniew Herbert

"Climate change is not a future problem for wise statesmen to patiently work to avert. It's a right now, present tense, capital-E Emergency."
-Bill McKibben

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... ."
-Michael Lerner

"The government has thus been remade in the image of the business firm. And in this way, it has become subject to all of the administrative and organizational pathologies that bring large businesses to grief. It has come to absorb every great innovation in corporate mismanagement, deception, market manipulation and fraud of the past forty years"
-James K Galbraith, The Predator State

"Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead to freedom or constitute a proof for its existence"
-Hannah Arendt

"The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield. I believe that we can be compatriots of many different kinds of people, even though they are born far from our own lands and in other places and in other times".
-Eduardo Galeano

"The consuming life is a life of rapid learning- and swift forgetting"
-Zygmunt Bauman

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist"
-Kenneth Boulding

"The powers that be, bent on inculcating narrow-gauged formulas about the necessities of human nature and human society- on the acceptance of which the continuation of their hegemony depends- must always vilify those purveying a more sanguine message".
-Martin Duberman, writing about Paul Robeson


OneLove

:::MME:::

MME's Jam of the Day

Beautifully human-Jill Scott

Jill Scott Hear My Call HD from Devin Hampton on Vimeo.



This is one of my favorite tracks from Jill Scott's latest masterpiece, "The Light of the Sun". This is grown folks music & a sonic feminist manifesto to boot! This particular cut goes deep as Jill Scott recently went through a disappointing divorce & a short-lived relationship afterwards that produced a child. So when you hear her lament, "God, please hear my call / I am afraid for me......Love has burned me raw / I need your healing," she is revealing some painful stuff backed by swelling strings and warm piano chords. Her repeating of "please" with a different inflection every time is one of the most open-hearted supplications I've heard in non-gospel music since Lenny Williams' " 'Cause I Love You".  Absorb & reflect....



OneLove

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: Denise Levertov's "What Were They Like?"

This poem by Denise Levertov gets us to think of the victims of war in quite a personal & painfully human way. The probing questions that open it & the equally impactful responses encapsulate the horror and the tragic waste of a civilization. Substitute "Vietnam" with "Afghanistan" or "Iraq" (& increasingly now, "Libya"). Imperial power has no vision which is why all empires turn to dust. It is poets like Levertov who give voice to the anguished & help us along to become more fully human ourselves even as the hubris of empire thunders & claps away.....

(1) Did the people of Vietnam use lanterns of stone?
(2) Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds?
(3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
(4) Did they use bone and ivory, and silver, for ornament?
(5) Had they an epic poem?
(6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing?



Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.


Who can say? It is silent now.
 
- Denise Levertov

OneLove

:::MME:::

Kingdom Within

Reggie B- The Kingdom by EddieRockers

God/Allah/Krishna/Buddha/Yahweh are all names given to an inexplicable force & mystery Mankind has always been in awe of. Whether one believes in God or not, one cannot look up into the cosmos and not wonder why he/she exists at all. Science explains much, but falls short of explaining most of what baffles us existentially. Our tendency is to look outwards for clues/answers, but mystics/poets from the various faith traditions point in another direction . Their collective wisdom reveal that the truth is within. In the Gospel According to Luke, for example, the Pharisees ask Jesus when the Kingdom of God is coming. He answers them , "The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you." In the Dhammapada (a collection of the oral teachings of the Buddha) the Buddha says, "The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart." This wisdom stretches far back to the ancient Egyptians who conceived that Man was the microcosm of the universe – the macrocosm. This is the reason for their saying, "know thyself". Spiritually this meant that within Man is the divine essence of the Creator and the Heavens, & this finds expression in their teaching: "The kingdom of heaven is within you; and whosoever shall know himself shall find it". The following are some of the teachings, proverbs and maxims translated from the hieroglyphs of the tombs of Luxor and Karnak in Egypt:

-Listen to your conviction, even if they seem absurd to your reason. 

-Know the world in yourself. Never look for yourself in the world, for this would be to project your illusion 

-In every vital activity it is the path that matters.
-The nut doesn't reveal the tree it contains.
-Envious greed must govern to possess and ambition must possess to govern.
-Qualities of a moral order are measured by deeds
-Our senses serve to affirm, not to know.
-A house has the character of the man who lives in it.
-Routine and prejudice distort vision. Each man thinks his own horizon is the limit of the world.
-Growth in consciousness doesn't depend on the will of the intellect or its possibilities but on the intensity of the inner urge.
-Always watch and follow nature.
-The key to all problems is the problem of consciousness.
-Man must learn to increase his sense of responsibility and of the fact that everything he does will have its consequences.
-Seek peacefully, you will find.
-Knowledge is not necessarily wisdom.
-By knowing one reaches belief. By doing one gains conviction. When you know, dare.
-Altruism is the mark of a superior being.
-The seed cannot sprout upwards without simultaneously sending roots into the ground.
-Man, know thyself ... and thou shalt know the gods.
-The body is the house of God. That is why it is said, "Man know thyself."
-People bring about their own undoing through their tongues.
-Every man is rich in excuses to safeguard his prejudices, his instincts, and his opinions.
-For every joy there is a price to be paid. 

(Source:)

Be Guided.....

:::MME:::

Caliban's Redemption

(to be)

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me 

(lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me an image of myself...

Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,

..and I know myself as well.

-Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's "The Tempest"

OneLove

:::MME::: 

MME's Jam of the Day

Love Has Found Its Way by MixmasterE

One of the best Lovers-Rock jams of all time! Originally done by the late great Dennis Brown, this buttery-smooth version over spare arrangements by the heir to the Lovers-Rock throne, Maxi Priest, is the best I've ever heard. Although this cut is way too short, you can still feel its power & honesty. Check out the original here.


OneLove


:::MME:::

Danger: Truth at Work

The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has usurped power in his acting as an outlaw government. It is the courage, at last, to face honestly the truth and the reality of what we are doing in the world, and act responsibly to change it.
-Daniel Ellsberg

After looking at this very important documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America, it was not hard to see the parallels between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq. The same bullshit that was fed to the public then is the same bullshit that continues to feed the public now. The explosive truth of Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers which led to the downfall of President Nixon and hastened the end of the Vietnam War, seems eerily similar to Julian Assange/Bradley Manning's release of sensitive diplomatic cables which has embarassed the US internationally. What has changed since the Pentagon Papers is the tragic corporatization of the media & the subsequent abandonment  of  journalistic quality and ethics. The enduring value of Ellsberg's relentless truth-telling is one that has been lost to us for a while: Questioning the  pronouncements of our leaders.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Our Human Story

This is a very good presentation of our origins. Having read quite a number of books/articles on this subject from the likes of Richard Leakey, John Henrik Clarke, Margaret Mead, Stephen Jay Gould, Cheikh Antta Diop, Yosef Ben-Jochannan & Ivan Van Sertima, it's quite a thrill to see this information hitting the mainstream in video form. National Geographic magazine had a cover story on the first humans a few years ago & the BBC network presented a fascinating look at human origins/evolution in The Incredible Journey which is featured below, & the evidence is fast becoming incontrovertible: Modern humans emanated from Africa, migrated & mutated to form the various peoples we see today. Fundamentally, we owe a tremendous debt to the cunning & intelligence of the first humans who managed to side-step a host of mortal dangers which has allowed us to be here today. As the legendary Peter Tosh once sang, "No matter where you come from...No mind your complexion...No mind denomination....You're an African".


OneLove

:::MME:::

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

MorpheusSpeaks by MixmasterE

This classic film (The Matrix)  posed the probing question:  How do you know whether the things you perceive are real or just an illusion? In truth, we don't, but we all like to believe that we perceive is real as it is rather comforting & secure & keeps us from discomforting thoughts that suggest otherwise.  If there is anything that one can take away from the great Socrates, it is this: Always have a doubt.......It's strangely liberating though the answers seldom come as fast as we'd like. Better still to live in a discomforting truth than in the bliss of ignorance.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook : Pablo Neruda's "Leaning into the Afternoons"

Pablo Neruda died on Sept. 23, 1973 at the age of 69 just days after a CIA-backed coup that toppled democratically-elected President Salvadore Allende. Doubts still surround the cause of his death--officially reported as prostrate cancer--as Neruda was quite forceful in his criticisms of the murderous, US-backed Pinochet regime. Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years before his death, his international fame shed an embarrassing light on the new dictatorship which has led many to believe that he was killed to silence his criticism. Today the Chilean government initiated an investigation on whether Augusto Pinochet's regime murdered Neruda after it seized power. It would not be surprising if it is discovered that he was deliberately snuffed out like many other critics of the military regime, and this would be an overdue dose of poetic justice which we all should applaud.


For those who cannot make out the words of the poem in this beautiful video tribute to Neruda, here it is:

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

More Neruda here.....

OneLove

:::MME:::