Camping Mid =1924=

"It reminded me of getting directions in London."

Kate Swytak,
Premier Historical Costumiere of California.

Lou Reed "...And all the politicians making crazy sounds..."

1973 he recorded it and in '74 when it came out, Lou Reed stunned the world with his album "Rock and Roll Animal."
The whole world is trying to relive MY youth, it really does not seem any different. Everyone wants to be the hippy, the loose kid---the creative one, the one who would go on camping trips and ignore the world out in in the green leaves of nature.

Was it the times, or is it the music the perpetuates this ? We are on a carousel that has become so entrancing we refuse to get off. It has become more it is obsession for many. The fascination with the past as escapism has been a human trait since time really began. It is the storytelling that fascinates and when a time is discovered that has a boiling point of human creativity and indulgences, a tendency is for a group to then gather to perpetuate the later interpretations of what that real past becomes and will stand for people and history books of the future. These persons sooner or later become academics on the subjects, if they stay with them and become reliable interpreters.
In this fashion history DOES actually change and is altered in later reality---but it is all the set-up of man to alter what was into what we now think was and then later: go on to profess what we say really IS the new interpretation of what we feel was the actuality of those now quite gone and irretrievable times.

This is a mind-game man plays.

This is our all-too-engaging
kaleidoscope of tiny baubles, shards of twisted wire and broken glass
that life's picture is presented in front of the individual
who has just began
peeping into the system.

The baubles right there at Lou Reed's neck...

"The Gold Rush" =1925/1942=

This is the complete movie re-released in 1942 with voice overs instead of the old-style cards to read between scenes.
The Music from this release is Chaplin himself.
See it: Just 72 minutes and it is in total.

Exquisite!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3261704630520195961

Today is a very eventful day: It is John McCain's 72nd birthday as well as the day he has announced Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential running mate. This trumps the Democrats in so many ways Palin is very much her own self-starter and has become a state Governor directly from a start as a worker that worked with her hands and in just a few years. Her FIFTH child was born in April this year and he has Down's Syndrome. She is much more than most would have expected as a person.

The game for President changes in yet another most fascinating way.

On a lighter note and to recall, Charlie Chaplin's great 1925 film, "The Gold Rush" is set in Alaska, although standing as 1897--1898.

Up To Alaska !

August 28th, 1963

45 years to the day and our Democratic President Elect accepts the nomination for President of the United States. Mister Barack Obama now just may wear the tail-coat.

Next Week I will be writing about John McCain who wants to perpetuate a war in Iraq that needed to stop a few years ago.

"Gelb Rot Blau" Wassily Kandinsky=1925=

Joe Biden Runs the Game Show

Today I will be very brief, at least with this entry.

Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's Vice President nominee stood in front of the Denver, Colorado Convention last night and said, "Barack Obama will deliver that change."
The crowd jumped to their feet holding signs that said the chant that rose from the crowd as well as Biden: "McCain is for the same."
This has now become the mantra with a slant rhyme of the Democratic Party.

I felt as though it could have been Bob Barker and an overexcited audience on "The Price Is Right."
Odd, even Joe's gray hair is just right...

Entitlement=Boredom=Lethargy

Long ago a friend asked me why Buddhism attracted me so much, as if the main focus being: "Existence is sorrow," then why I felt life was worth living and why suicide was not my easier and more pragmatic choice.
I thought and have thought about this very basic cornerstone of Zen thought. What did make me have drive to live?
My very first cogitation was that the fight must go on and that watching those with little to create and nothing to say in life, to me, was worse than a decided life that is taken by itself. Apathy creates nothing--it actually creates a vacuum effect of good and charitable feelings and actions. Nothing is done, things go unfixed and people begin to surmise that the inaction as hate and division.
Even the philanthropic and best of the idle rich can make visual and lifestyle statements that can be taken as good for society or not, but there is also a third interpretation: a festering apathy and inaction that makes culture step back and incrementally regress to a strange recreation of what we imagine was a lazy, easier and better time.

We fool no one except ourselves.

A Porch All About Art

Life needs to be fun and have expression. Art allows this in many ways that average people overlook. They can of course wear clothes that express their inner yearnings, but also the places that one is seen in have a great expressive part that many do not use the plastic qualities as they could be.
My porch is not exactly like this 1921 tree-house perched addition to life---but it does come across as being just as expressive and involved in personal "art."

If you're one of the millions of people who have to work two or even three jobs just to keep from being evicted from a run down rental apartment or flea-bag motel room or feed your family, your perspective is different from Obama and McCain. How is it we can step over the homeless and working poor without a second thought, yet it's a national crisis when Ed McMahon's multi-million dollar mansion is threatened? I think BOTH candidates are elitist and out of touch with working class concerns. When was the last time these millionaires neglected getting medical care because they couldn't afford health care insurance?
How many people DREAM they were making payments on their OWN house?

The American government is out of touch and for the working class.
The American dream is out of reach.

Ghosts have been beating on my pots & pans in my kitchen this has happened now 3 evenings in a row--the ghosts also like to wiggle my bed just before I get ready to rest at night and before a nap.
The persons of the past are everywhere and can be seen sometimes from the corner of your eye and fleetingly and just for a moment...

Diving Right Into Life

We are at the beginning of something very new. It is a way of living that will scare and harm many because of its cruelty. It is the months to come. We diving into the cold and depths of the winter soon to be here. Prices have risen the highest in 25 years and the young have never experienced what is to come. I fear for many of them, especially because the youth of much of America has so very little motivation and drive.
It seems the chicest is to be a total "dud"and just get by never gaining life-skills and really just never amounting to much of anything at all. I really can not imagine anyone choosing that for a future. Partying and having sex every so often.

The days must blur together after a week or two.

Obama is a LightWorker - an Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being

Obama is a LightWorker - an Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy ...

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Mark Mortford ("Is Obama an enlightened being?" San Francisco Chronicle June 6, 2008).

We Need Some Happiness

Here we are nearing the end of summer 2008. America and the world sorely deserves some true happiness. Seems everyone is cutting back and entrenching into their homes and are becoming a lot more close the the neighborhoods that those homes are in. Prices are on every one's minds and many are just whistling a happy tune and moving on--I suppose this is actually my bottom line also: to keep your chin up and just get through the tough times. Let's recall the old songs: "We're in the Money," "Putting On the Ritz'" and the like, maybe the spirited tunes can actually be catching and our moods CAN be elevated in these trying seasons to come.
"Putting On the Ritz" --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFabjc6mFk4

Loius Armstrong at His Height =1925=

He was with his Hot Five.
He was not only Hot, he was the happiness of his time and 20th Century music could never have happened like it did without his powerful influence.

Listen to this one an Absolutely INCREDIBLE video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhEnpEfT3j4&feature=related

NOT to be Missed !

=1925= "Let's Play..."

Musick is not given to the Idle, but they must reach it with the Hand of Industry, by putting in Practice the Works and Inventions of skilful Artists; for meerly to Speak and Sing are of nature, and this double use of the Articulate Voice the rudest of Swains of all Nations do make; but to Speak well, and Sing well, are of Art.

John Playford=1654=

+Cabaret Voltaire=1916= Restored Exterior=Zurich+

Again, the Heat of What Will Be

Above is the map of who read the blog last week--impressive!

Ah, the news, telling us that heating oil will be up in price by about 31% and natural gas will be up by 22%. This is akin to so much of what will be in the winter to come. We really can not have much more in the infrastructure of North Carolina energy; we do not have enough wind, water is scarce as the Catawba River is stressed from the drought we have weathered for over a year. Nuclear power is saturated here, so we have that and natural gas. News is that electric prices will rise a good margin also. Here comes a rude awakening to 2009 and the beginning of the end of our Decade of Chaos.
Otherwise, on a totally opposite tangent--but related, we are having a steady soaking rain with no wind and temperatures are not to rise about the high 70's.
Go figure, this city is often so contrary !

1925=2009

January 2009 has the very same calendar as 1925 as do also the other months of 2009.
It is an exact calendar year
just like 1925.

By all means you can check by corresponding the opposite picture here at the blog to a
2009 January calendar (2009 calendars are easy to find in section-end areas of any phone book).

I shall print up some "period"
calendars for 1925 with appropriate
pictures for each month,
autos, soap ads,
smiling pretty girls with hats--
and give them as this year's Xmas prezzies...

What a novel Idea !

Shirley Temple "Goodbye Yankee--Goodbye Rebel"

This old Shirley Temple video clip is just PRECIOUS !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-66PJNQYkg

Enjoy !

Two Red-Headed Woodpeckers

I watched two very patient and quiet woodpeckers peruse the wood of two different telephone poles--one rather new and one as old as this house or very close, certainly no younger than 1930. I tried to will the woodpeckers to the older of the poles because the arsenic in the wood I am hoping would be less potent if they were to peck and come in contact with the element.
The toxic nature of man and our modern world seems to be on every one's minds and recycling has come to, at last, make economic as well as environmental sense.
The red-headed woodpecker being an endangered species in Canada and a threatened species in many states in USA.
I am happy to have seen these two, and actually hear one peck at the old, more gnarled telephone pole of 78 years ago.

=1911= "New York" by George Bellows

The busy streets of New York City very close to 98 years ago. Charlotte has a 'distant mirror' of this happening in the streets and many corners can remind one of this scene.

George Bellows Quotes

"The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust..." "The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful."

=1911= "Street Noises Invade the House" by Umberto Boccioni

Building Mural =1913= George Bellows "Cliff Dwellers"

It is a wonderful thing about summer. After so many days well above the average for temperatures we will enjoy two or three days that might not ever get above 90 ! Everyone is excited about the weekend being less humid and much less hot. By the way, yet another glitch in my living at the house: the gas furnace/heater needs a real overhaul at the burner. The technician who was here yesterday could not keep the pilot light burning. The museum I live in has its repair issues!

=1945= Hiroshima, Japan Aftermath of Bombing

A panorama of the devastated city.
By the end of 1945 upwards of 140,000 had died.

The world would never again be
the innocent place it was before--and many of the people on these projects and flights with atom bombs were born in the 1920s.

Hiroshima Day 2008

No one has mentioned that today in 1945 America dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. This was followed three days later by a larger one dropped on Nagasaki.
It is a sad day for me in so many ways--I have very conflicting feelings about the death, the destruction, but he ensuing victory and the end of WW II--a mix of good and bad, a real example of the dichotomy of life and its demands.
2008 and we have a spoof entry into the race for President by Paris Hilton...she states that she wants to paint the White House pink. Argentina has a Casa Rosado: Pink House.
Maybe the Dadaist side of life can show its hilarious face for us this coming November....one Never really knows.

=1930= Street Car Operators

This group portrait is of a few of Charlotte's fleet of streetcar operators in the year 1930. The trolleys came right to the corner of my house, at what was old Central Avenue at its intersection with North Cecil crossing East 7th Street.

=1929= Map of Charlotte

I discovered this 1929 map of the city a good while ago at a book store and made sure that I purchased it--and for only $1.00 !
On the front is penciled: "1927-'28."

It is just center city, but the best thing is that my address is easily located and this map adds to the other historical references I have added to my earlier entries.

=The World in 1925=

We would drive over to the filling station and buy about 75 cents of gasoline and we could go for a picnic. This clickable (makes ultra-large) picture is a dynamite example and shows what stations were like in the mid 1920's , and even Charlotte is known to get that much snow every so often!

August Heat

We are now at the days when summer will be hot with very few exceptions and temperatures are close o body temperature and thus it is uncomfortable at almost any move more than the minimum. I have asked a bit of help getting my apartment more organized and unpacked. As I have been sick a good bit since my move and dizzy spells are a constant reminder that my health can be fragile and I just can not do what I could when I was much younger. In many ways this has been a very sad mood week for me. My father's birthday July 22nd, the 27th being the anniversary of my mother (died 1976) and dad's wedding in 1956 and then my own birthday on the 30th. A lot of family memories, and there was only the three of us, rushed into my head and most are not the easiest thoughts to deal with. Life has changed so much in thirty or so years--a third of a century has past.
2008 is a tough time to live through and the dislocation of society makes me not very optimistic that our future will be any better at all. Shaw said "...youth is wasted on the young," and I do hope so much for the younger of this world and America. Apathy is often the norm, seems so few want to get involved in life and it is too easy to just walk away with crossed arms in disgust.
I would rather more for the youth of the world;
I can not motivate any more than I am now because so few are courageous to listen and act in any way at all. Many just do nothing. It is like an incurable social depression that our country is going through.
This is ourselves that we face, not just the young--because it is the confusing and chaotic world that we created that we are passing on to them.
We can only blame ourselves.