Summer backs off. A huge rain woke me up the other night. The ground re-greens. It’s twilight on water season. I slowly turn my attention back to indoor work, recording music.
But first I have to go to New Zealand and Australia real quick. If you read this and live there, please don’t miss these shows. It’s been so fun rehearsing loudly with Black Belt Eagle Scout. More chaos in music please.
Last newsletter I wrote a bit about fires and brutal human industrial scale world-destroying. I auctioned off some old t-shirts to send toward Potlatch Fund. It went really well! Thanks to PreAtomic Records in Corvallis, OR for being the high bidder on both shirts. We sent $688.50 to the charity. Far out.
Unfortunately it didn’t solve everything. Industrialists with daddy issues still flail around loudly devouring the whole place.
Here’s a killer excerpt from the Ghost Forest by Greg King:
These ruthless men and their forebears carried to this bountiful but fragile world a severe imbalance, insecurities so deeply wrought that they would learn to justify, indeed celebrate, the wreckage left in the wake of their rapid industrial expansion. From some deep and malign well they embraced riches and power, status and admiration, somehow unable to see or to care about the cataclysms and suffering they caused. They revered false idols of success achieved through violence and theft and cloaked their misdeeds in a fictitious benevolence. Their worlds coalesced as an inexorable heat that within a single generation would despoil the San Fransisco Bay region. These men had many equals around the country and through the world. Today we face an abyss of their making, a juggernaut full-steam ahead and professionally managed by their ideological progeny, who remain dedicated to the cause, whatever that may be.
Still, we’ll keep trying, right? I feel very dedicated as well, dedicated to protecting the places and beings I notice are imperiled, doing everything with kindness and honesty, increasing my knowledge, opening doors for myself and everyone else.
Does my uneasy relationship with “being political” in this art project read to you as uneasy? Does it feel natural? It’s all political is the thing. There’s no reality outside of this one where we smash and suffer and mend and laugh. Making songs and pictures and words and burn piles and garbage, doing it all in the spirit of truth and generosity is a quiet activism. It’s not enough, but it’s what I’m doing now and I won’t stop.
Today there’s a recording for paying subscribers. It’s a voice memo writing demo of a new song right as it got written:
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