in memory of a great and inspirational man.

today is the anniversary of the assassination of the reverend martin luther king, jr, MLK. i prefer to reflect on his life rather than his sad demise; but thanks to this classic u2 song, i will never, ever forget what happened early morning, april 4.

like any human being, MLK had his flaws, but i wonder why our society fixated on his misdeeds. when you think of all the good MLK did in his brief life, who really cares whether he had affairs? i’m beginning to think that so many people in power think that to be an option; i don’t agree, obviously. i think we expect our heroes to be made of something out of a storybook: but these leaders are, inevitably, flesh and blood. i suspect that if any of us were judged under a microscope, we would all be found wanting in some way.

the bigger question i think people ought to ask themselves, though, is what have i done for the world? i struggle with this question daily. one day, i was actually upset about my answer. people like MLK inspired me as a child to do something important for humanity. MLK helped african-americans and other people of color make important gains toward achieving their proper, equal place in american society. i do not believe i have ever done anything as critical.

some people just try to make it through the day. others are looking toward the weekend, the future, the promised time when they can achieve a measure of happiness. me, i want to do something good for the world. and i just wasn’t seeing how i was getting there as a stay-at-home mom. BC came up to me as i sat, slumped. what’s wrong, mom? she asked. i no longer hide my moods from my daughter; she knows me as a whole person as well as her mom.

well honey, i replied, when i was your age, i thought i was going to do something important to help people in the world. and i just don’t see how i’m accomplishing that at all right now.

BC, thoughtful 40-year-old-in-a-12-year-old-suit, breathed in for a second. then, she replied: you’re raising julian and me to be good people. isn’t that enough? i smiled and hugged her hard.  perhaps it is, i mused to myself.

so i now have a dream. maybe it isn’t as lofty as MLK’s. maybe it will be far-reaching, maybe not. it is certainly inspired by the man.

and hopefully, it will be fulfilled through my children.

from the end of the world to your town!

i remember when elton john’s captain fantastic and the brown dirt cowboy album came out. i was 10 years old, and i was completely enthralled by this pudgy, bespectacled spectacle. BTD had bought this one (apparently, a lot of people did — it debuted at number one on the billboard pop albums chart, the first album ever to do that.), along with a few others, and i somehow glommed onto this one. the album cover seemed to me to be as complex as sgt pepper‘s; and there were not one, but two inserts, one with lyrics and the other with all sorts of photos and pictures and minutae. i must have looked at those things for hours, as if i would somehow find some clues to the missing holy grail.

(lest the pinball fan in me forget that there also was the captain fantastic pinball machine:)

but the best part for me, of course, was the album itself.  my favorite elton john album, of course, remains tumbleweed connection; but captain fantastic follows, a close second. it’s the last time you hear the original elton john band together (playing at their peak) until the too low for zero album in 1983. the album is a sort of untintentional concept piece: an early history of the struggle of john and taupin to find their way into music business success. they struggle with love, loss, hunger, and the choices they must make to be successful. they even struggle with writing and rejection, something i always have found endearing. someone saved my life tonight, the story of john’s escape from near-marriage in 1969, was the only single and is, unquestionably, the jewel in the crown of the work.

but i have always adored the first track. i’d listen to captain fantastic and the brown dirt cowboy,  imagining the young john and taupin, like two guys in a western, as they start to forge a path toward fame and fortune. while recognizing that they’re both wet behind the ears, they are excited by the promise of their future.  they are anxious about the troubles ahead.   should they stay where they are? should they pursue their heartfelt destiny? it’s a tough call, and it won’t be easy: from here on, sonny sonny sonny, it’s a long, lonely climb.

knowing the path the john’s career and life have taken makes this song, 35 years later, that much more poignant. and yet now, many years on, with the realization that john made it through so much adversity, this song becomes ever sweeter, as we know all the angst of these two young lads pays off ultimately in a sweet, happy, and creative life.

since 1920, sistahs unite! vote on!

is it just me, or does it seem like america has become even more openly hostile to women these days? between all the anti-choice legislative nightmares brewing and even oddly-misogynistic attitudes in journalistic pieces, it’s apparently becoming more acceptable to knock down women. (and gays. and jews. and minorities. and basically anyone out there who isn’t one of the wildly-oppressed, white male species. oh, boo effing hoo, boys.  ) methinks for that years, people were shamed into trying to be less racist, and unfortunately, shaming doesn’t work. (of course, with some of these folks, i wonder whether education will work, either.)

so it is with some trepidation that i ponder our current state of affairs.  i fear that neither diversity of population or of thought is appreciated in the policy circles of the current powers that be. the damage that may occur in our society as a result is stunning.  for somehow, it is becoming more acceptable to force a woman to complete an unplanned pregnancy. and when that baby is born, will these same people be there to raise it, shelter it, pay for it? of course not. somehow, pregnancy has become a punishment of sorts — and it doesn’t matter whether the woman became pregnant simply because she was sexually active or because she was raped. her life is worth less than the burgeoning life inside of her.  the policy decisions surrounding abortion rights are being made by people who not only do not care about the rights of women, but who feel that society must use certain tools to punish them, even in cases when the pregnancy is not the woman’s fault.

and where the hell are the men in these situations? women do not conceive immaculately.

roe versus wade is the law. and now that plenty of states, including my own, are making it absurdly difficult to provide safe, legal abortions to those who choose to have them, i fear for a lot of female citizens, women who may die because of someone else’s misogynistic belief system. hey — don’t want an abortion? don’t have one!

so i’m hoping a lot of people out there — men and women alike — see the writing on the wall… i’m hoping they get involved in policy discussions. i’m hoping they get active in the issues.

and i’m really hoping that they vote.

i need it now.

in two days, i have another birthday coming. and as the years go by, one thing becomes increasingly apparent: above all, i need strength. i need muscle strength to support my bionic bones. i need mental strength to tackle the new math that my kids continue to share with me. and above all, i need emotional strength for all the weird spitballs and curveballs that life throws me. we red sea pedestrians pray for strength each week; and while it didn’t make any sense to me when i was young (and bored, as i have never been a huge organized religion fan), i get it now. i need to be tough for the (hopefully) long haul.

i’m a little chagrined to point out that, in the very early ’80s,  i didn’t have the strength of mind to know the difference between the alarm and U2 for a year or two (the unforgettable fire changed all that, though, have no fear.) the alarm burst onto the scene with their huge single the stand; as a stupid american, i could not tell the difference between a seemingly-political welsh band and a seemingly-political irish band. u2 went the distance and continues to produce sometimes derivative and sometimes amazing stuff. sadly, the alarm only lasted for about a decade, first as a mod group and then ultimately as the incarnation we all knew and loved.

i remember the alarm playing on the patio at the university of miami somewhere in the 1983 or ’84 corridor. it was a little surreal — there i was with my best pal murph and a handful of people. and right in front of me — the alarm! i was wondering why the place wasn’t packed. i didn’t realize at that time that miami was not exactly the epicenter of alternative music fandom, at least not 1980s alternative.  but it was a little odd to be that close to a band who had hit records. they were certainly a fun live band.

anyway, years went by; and after one last gasp of a hit, they were done.

i guess one needs a special, superhuman level of strength to survive in the music industry.  if i can get at least half of that sort of resilience in me, i think i’ll make it through algebra the second time around.

it’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s a HAIR BAND!

yeah, i know. i usually loathe these sorts of things. i am not exactly a fan of ’80s hair bands or The Power Ballads That Made Them Famous. but i loved this song back in the day, and i was thrilled to see it on youtube. at the time, i didn’t know much about the band giuffria, but i have since learned they were actually a DC-based outfit. all i knew was that the guy in the video played two keyboards, side-by-side, without looking; and i thought that was cool. i also thought the lead singer, david glen eisley, had an amazing set of pipes.  and it probably helped that, at the time, i felt very isolated from all my friends who were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from me, cooling my heels in miami.

check out the video. ah, the days when all you needed in a video was a wind machine and the hair to blow through it… and men comfortable enough to wear white polka-dotted spandex. (for the record, i have never been courageous enough to wear polka-dotted spandex.) you’ll see loads of big-haired women — none with boob jobs. if this were made nowadays, i don’t think you’d see a natural pair in the bunch. but here, the only thing big was the hair.

anyway, february is american heart month. don’t let your heart call you back with bad news. start doing those things you ought to be doing with diet and exercise. i know i’m trying. cos now that i’ve found call to your heart after losing it for about 25 years, there’s no way i’m going anywhere if i can help it.

…and don’t be a bully.

a few weeks ago, i crushed on the housemartins. this week, i am crushing on a former member of that band, norman cook, aka fatboy slim.  while an old friend of housemartins’ leader paul heaton, cook eventually left to go do the type of music he truly loved — a mish-mosh of danceable sampling. i was never a huge fan of sampling — i always thought it was the lazy person’s way to music. but then, when i heard what fatboy slim did, i was hooked. (in fact, one of my fondest memories is of my then-two-year-old daughter dancing around the family room to praise you.)

in don’t let the man get you down, cook samples an old hippie anthem, signs by the five man electrical band.

anyone a little older than i am (or my age with older siblings) can remember that song and how it talks of society’s push to make us all conform. just that first line in don’t let the man get you down is enough to make a person feel a little hippy-righteous. and now, it’s danceable. what could be better? sure, the video is a bit creepy; but it could have been creepier… it could have featured christopher walken.

oh wait — he did that a different time, didn’t he…

anyway, at this juncture, the man is getting me down. the house just passed a bill that is so riddled with insanity, i just don’t know what to think. instead of tackling the real 800 pound gorillas of defense or entitlement programs, the cowardly republicans picked on basically everything and everyone else. one congressman was unhappy that planned parenthood provides abortions as part of their services  (not with federal funds, mind you — they do all sorts of counseling and other stuff with federal funds, but they are not allowed by law to provide abortions using federal money), so he put in a provision to eliminate ALL federal funding from that specific organization, legislating his own personal vendetta.  (and for you folks out there who think that funds can end up providing abortions anyway, they don’t. they can’t. and established and above-the-board organizations like PP know better than to even try something like that for fear of losing their needed funding.)

oh, and instead of discussing  and debating the clean air act, the republicans have taken passive-aggressive behavior to new levels, slashing the EPA and it’s ability to regulate dangerous air pollution in this same legislation. no, it’s too difficult to talk about clean air — which by the way has provided a great return on investment — $4 to $8 in economic benefits for every $1 spent on compliance, according to the non-partisan U.S. Office of Management and Budget. not sure what these folks have against clean air, but this is not the legislative vehicle from which to essentially create such a huge policy decision without any conversation.

let’s see… defunding PBS? WTF did Big Bird ever do to you, GOP folks? do you have any idea how valuable a resource PBS is and has been to our nation? one of the rare safe places for my kids to watch TV without getting bombarded by half-hour-long cartoons which serve only as infomercials for some toy. i adore american masters, i adore american experience, i adore my eastenders, i adore so very much about my local PBS station! nature, science, news, art, history — it’s all here at PBS. i cannot begin to tell you how much i have learned all my life thanks to PBS. and you’re taking this away?

other highlights, according to the washington post:

If enacted as is, the GOP plan would eliminate numerous programs, including the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs the AmeriCorps program, and it would terminate federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It would cut $600 million from border security and immigration programs. It would eliminate nearly $80 million for the District and slash funding for the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay.

so let me get this straight: we’re against fostering community service. we’re against border security and immigration programs that work with the people who are trying to get in here legally. oh, we know you hate the District and its denizens (oh, and btw: fuck you back for doing this when we truly have taxation without representation.) and what do you have against the crabs you love to eat from the chesapeake? i’m so very, very confused about the messages you people are sending.

but you’re terrified of the giant and true drivers of the federal deficit — medicaid, medicare, defense, social security. oh, and why would that be? oh, well, those are thornier problems that require actual intellect and serious thought, something you apparently are incapable of accomplishing. and something which can’t easily be explained to your constituency in a solid, 30-second sound bite. so instead, you pick on all these other items, showing your constituents that you have the courage of your convictions and the balls to carry it out. only what you’re doing sounds to me a lot like what we moms call bullying. you’re feeling afraid of something or someone bigger than you, so instead, you’re taking it out on weaker things. someone ought to give you people a time-out.

what you’re doing isn’t going to mean diddly-squat in the big budgetary picture, but it sure is going to screw your constituents down the road. (look up pyrrhic victory.) and you will eventually get that long-deserved time-out.

so yes, the man has gotten me down a bit this past week. but i’ll be damned if i stay down.

happy valentine’s day! here’s something bad…

okay, so it isn’t bad. it’s supergroup bad company, with free’s paul rodgers and simon kirke; mott the hoople’s mick ralph; and king crimson’s boz burrell. none are probably household names to anyone now except for possibly paul rodgers, whose distinctive vocal delivery makes him one of the people on my top ten people i wish i could sing like list. but together, they made it quite big in the ’70s under the management of zeppelin’s infamous peter grant. i suspect a monotone singer whose material included yankee doodle would probably succeed with peter grant, but as these guys were pretty amazing, it’s no wonder, at least not to me.

anyway, i thought of many sappy songs i love. i thought of all sorts of videos with cute kitties and hearts and flowers. i vetoed them all. so if bad company’s not your cup of romantic tea, i’m sorry. i’m sure some easy listening station is playing celine dion right now.

go for it.

no, not that john edwards.

back in 1971, things were looking grim on the american homefront. the vietnam war was still raging; citizens, particularly the young, were feeling restless and anxious about a world in which they believed was dangerous and in which they were essentially voiceless. remember, back then, you couldn’t vote until you were 21; and yet lots of 18 year olds were being shipped off to fight a war they thought was pointless.  jonathan edwards added his thoughts to the landscape via this wonderful protest song, sunshine.

recent events in egypt have made me think about this song anew. the people are speaking out against a government which they believe is not democratic. i believe that people have the right to determine their own government; i always thought that was what we were taught in school. you know, the whole american revolution thing, right? dropping tea into the harbor? making our own rules?  i mean, as the scholar jeff spicoli once explained:

and yet some on the right — those who champion folks like the modern-day tea party and who claim to love america more than you and i do — are demonizing the protesters.

beck seems to believe that the entire middle east is going to blow.  his inflammatory talk doesn’t give us any ideas as to how to make things better. and frankly, i think he’s played fast and loose with a lot of his so-called data. i find it confusing as well that he seems to not support people forming their own governments. are we happy when religious zealots form a government and rule a nation? no, we are not. but who are we, as america, to tell another nation who should run it and how it should be run? boy, we were so successful putting people into power (iran and egypt, i’m looking at you, among others too numerous to count) that i think we ought to rethink our strategy a bit here.

do i have the answers? of course not. i wish for peace every day; and i wish for people to be free the world over. and i will continue to monitor the events as they unfold.

but i can’t help but hear edwards refrain as i watch the news.

How much does it cost, I’ll buy it
The time is all we’ve lost, I’ll try it
But he can’t even run his own life
I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine, Sunshine

vive le guilty pleasure monday!

for a long while, i tried to make mondays a little more bearable (or awful, depending on your perspective) by sharing one of the songs i adore, a song which could result in ridicule from some of my cooler friends. i wrote about quite a few. and then, i hit a mental snag. did anyone enjoy these things? was i getting bored writing them? am i all out of songs to crow about?

but now, i’m back, and what a good place to be, starting back up again with the housemartins’ most well-known song (well, at least in the US, anyway), happy hour. i have to give paul heaton props; it isn’t every day you end up with a band which sports songs mixing christianity with marxism. but he managed to pull it off for a few years in the 1980s until the band disbanded (and heaton became part of the beautiful south.) another famous alum of the band, norman cook, became more famous later on as fatboy slim.

for reasons i’ll never remember, i always think of an old officemate when i hear happy hour. i don’t think i ever shared an office with anyone so happily before or since. our office had once been a high-level company person’s secure area, complete with some sort of security system at the door (which had been dismantled by the time we rolled in.) i believe my officemate put a defunct nation’s flag over his desk — or was it on the floor as a rug? i don’t remember. but we have always shared the same love of 80′s music as well as all things relatively quirky. i remember when i discovered some 80′s alternative music channel and used to play it all the time, ad infinitem. every time i started it up, it played the same bunch of songs, over and over. but i was so desperate to hear stuff that i played it constantly. and he didn’t mind. (or at least, he never said.)  (this was the mid-90s, you must know, so this was a big deal to find this mini internet pirate radio.) in fact, he was the most tolerant colleague ever. he didn’t care when i went on a jag playing kyle’s mom’s a bitch (NSFW, even though it was SFW in my old office environs. it was a different world back then, kids.) and best of all, when i had hideous morning sickness while (secretly at the time) pregnant with BC, he never said boo when i ended up under my desk, laying on the floor, praying for death.  as a single guy at the time, he probably had no idea what the hell was wrong with me; but in true male fashion, he just let me be until i came up for air.

so i’ll revive my old GPM feature with a hat off to one of my favorite ’80s loving pals. hoping every hour is happy hour for him.

…because freddy mercury should be singing bohemian rhapsody and not elton john or axel rose.

if ignorance is a pet peeve of mine, then you can bet that ignorance about HIV and AIDS goes far, far beyond mere annoyance in my book. as i have known plenty of people who lived and died from the HIV virus — and I have a friend who continues to live with AIDS, probably far beyond what doctors predicted — i have been gobsmacked by the stupidity people have shown toward those with HIV, as if you might catch it by simply breathing the same air.  in the old office where i used to get my monthly IVIG, i had less fear about being around AIDS patients than i did with someone with something actually infectious. it wasn’t like i was going to be having sex while getting my IV — not that i could even figure out how if i even wanted to, of course. (and i’m quite sure none of those patients were interested in me, anyway.)

i can’t believe we’ve hit world aids day 2010 and there still isn’t a cure. there are a lot of advances, thanks to groups like amfAR. still, funding is an issue — i know, where isn’t funding an issue these days. and you might wonder why i care about this disease; i don’t exactly fit the profile of someone who might be engaging in behaviors that might lead to trouble (although no one is ever truly perfectly immune from anything, i believe.) i guess somewhere in the back of my bear-brain, i know that i have a condition where so little is known. there’s no primary immunodeficiency day out there; we don’t have celebrities talking about what it’s like to have a crap immune system. but i feel a kinship with HIV/AIDS folks — they, too, have crap immune systems. theirs is an acquired situation, whereas mine was something i was simply born with (apparently.)

maybe it’s a slightly selfish thing — i figure that maybe, if someone out there figures out how to help those folks, that maybe someday, that research will possibly benefit my children and grandchildren. after all, someone’s going to get my genes.

so i hope you’ll join me in commemorating world aids day 2010. i hope i see a day in my lifetime when they no longer have this commemoration because the disease has a remedy.

and then maybe, we won’t lose people like freddy mercury just because he loved often but possibly not always so well.