It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

It's been amusing and somewhat confounding to watch the reactions of how people (even me to myself), especially progressives like us, feel about this major upsurge, or discovery if you'd like, of the power of protest.

From the woman's march in DC to the massive turnouts at the airports this past weekend in solidarity with the detainees who held after little fascist boy Drumpf's autocratic decree, there's been an undeniable new-found spirit of protest.

I've had mixed feelings about it. Mostly have leaned toward cynicism, primarily since the election night results were followed by relentless protest in front of Drumpf Towers and all over the country which seemed to be Hillary-dominated (in coverage anyway). Any whiff of Hillary support/DNC maneoverings gets me pissed off and discouraged about the chances of a necessary revolution by the 99% coalescing against the hijacking of society by the 1% and the merciless grinder of unbridled capitalism of which they wield.

There’s lots of cognitive dissonance about everything right now, it seems. No doubt much of it stems from a feckless, lapdog media and the rapid fire, integrate lying of Drumpflethinskin. The far Left thinks it’s a front to shepherd the lemmings back into the “veal pen” of Democratic party politics. The far Right of course are their typically demented selves, calling this weekend’s amazing show of solidarity for immigrants (including a cab strike in NYC by the mostly Muslim and Sikh drivers union who upon hearing the news of the protest refused to pick up passengers from the airport) a ploy by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yet, I think one has to feel, as a "progressive" as it is defined by the community here at C99, meaning one who knows our radical and subversive history as told by Howard Zinn as opposed to Neoliberal, think tank, corporate marketers, "brand"-obsessed, Protectorates of their Rich Donors lip service to it, that all major societal progress, from child labor laws and the 8 hour work day only one hundred years ago to the civil rights and Gay rights movements securing rights for the oppressed, has come only when we've gotten in the streets and scared the powers that be.

To wit, both marches/rallies I’ve attended these past two weekends, which I was informed about by some staunch Bernie or Bust supporters, proved to be much less about $hills than they were about a recognizable solidarity against a fascist encroachment on basic civility and human rights (nonwithstanding the fact that Obama engaged in similar transgressions, of course, but with such a more likeable face and little coverage in the media, so all is forgiven, right?), and a gathering acknowledgment that the Dem Party is not the oppositional force it was once thought to be. The smaller rally this past weekend (though big for locals) resembled a family day out, held outside a museum, where lots of strollers, young families and cardboard signs could be seen. We got there late. But a friend told me that by far the biggest applause line of the day was when a local activist said that this was the result of the Democratic Party’s failings and how we need to change course politically. That was encouraging.

We'll see (and should keep our eyes peeled)...

Back home Sunday night we were cleaning out things making more room (which always seems to be the case lately) and came upon some activist flyers, magazines, etc. There I found a marked-up issue of Brooklyn Rail, a really cool slightly highbrow arts and culture magazine distributed for free in bookstores, galleries, etc (during Occupy they had some wonderful pieces about the movement). I’m not at all really an art gallery person but I’ve found the writing, political discourse and cultural discovery to be edifying any time I’ve come across this publication.

It was creased over to a page of an excellent interview with an author named Sarah Lewis, and it has stayed with me for these past couple of years. I was really struck by the back and forth in which they broached the nature of the human spirit in transforming failure into art, and the transformative effects of sound and pictures to “ignite these inner shifts that have led to some of our most impactful social movements.”

Here are some excerpts:

Lewis: The question of how an ordinary person becomes someone remarkable is precisely the reason that I not only wrote the book, but decided to reference my grandfather in the first essay, “Archer’s Paradox.” I noticed when I was very young that there was a paradox he had to wrestle with, the different lives he had lived and how difficult they all were. I remember he was telling me that in the 11th grade he was expelled from high school for asking where African Americans were in history books. The teacher told him that African Americans had done nothing to merit inclusion, so stop asking. He was expelled. His pride was so wounded that he never went back. That difficult circumstance created a fire in him that launched his career as an artist. It just occurred to me that we often don’t discuss this paradox enough in our everyday discourse.
… Sometimes you have to suffer before you get to realize what you really want to do in life. Because of that desire you may be given strength to get to a place of bliss, full of paradoxes and adversaries, yet you don’t think of them as burdens.

Rail: Well, one way of addressing that feeling of underestimation is what Ben Saunders, the legendary explorer did—I mean he framed his report card from when he was 13 above his desk at home that reads, “Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile.”

Lewis: That’s it, yes. What did that do for him? Ben became the first person in the world to trek to the North Pole and back, solo and on foot, South Pole and back, solo and on foot. What shifted in Ben when he saw that report card? That is the same question I asked myself when I saw Dr. Martin Luther King received Cs on his report card in an oratory class in seminary and then went on to awaken our nation with the power of his spoken truth.

Rail: Not to mention his speech impediment.

Lewis: Right. We don’t usually associate such an impediment, a failing of that degree, with Dr. King. But he did manage to overcome his tic—a speech hiccup. As he told his friend Harry Belafonte, “Once I’d made my peace with death, I could make my peace with all else.” I think that we rob ourselves of the guidepost that we need to understand the true nature of becoming by not acknowledging the challenges people go through. It’s the fuller nature of becoming that leads to the journeys of endurance.

Rail: And how that leads to the chrysalis nature of becoming is impossible to describe. How Abraham Lincoln, for instance, in seeing Carlton Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite Valley’s granite cliffs, was inspired by the natural beauty that resulted in the signing of legislation in 1864.

Lewis: Which led to the founding of the National Park Service. I couldn’t believe when I found that reference. We’re often inspired by these moments of aesthetic force, which is a catalyst for some of the profound changes in our lives, more than we would admit, when we surrender ourselves to the power of the beauty of nature or a work of art that may evoke some deeper sources within ourselves. This is why I wrote what Aristotle said, “Reason alone is not enough to make men good,” or women good, it’s whatever frees you from the relative reality around you, be it music, as it happened to Charles Black, who heard the genius coming out of Louis Armstrong’s horn in 1931 when he was just a freshman in college; he knew immediately that segregation must be wrong. This of course led to his prominent role as a lawyer in the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

Rail: That’s really not that different from your grandfather, asking why African Americans are not in the history book.

Lewis: You’re right. And that’s why I loved that my grandfather chose the arts as a way to express what had been denied to him as a form of education—seeing the full embrace of American life. He chose the arts because, I believe, he knew and anticipated, by playing bass often as a backup for Count Basie and Duke Ellington, that the arts could impact us with a unique force. There is a power to the arts that we often deny, and it’s important as we consider what a life of service is about. We often forget that the arts can allow us to have a contributory life because they ignite these inner shifts that have led to some of our most impactful social movements.

(emphasis mine)

I love the idea of epiphany, upon hearing Louis Armstrong’s coronet, knowing crystal clear at your core in that moment, that segregation was wrong and needed to be fought, and then actually going to fight it at the highest level and winning.

We're here to inspire one another. Keep the antenna up, folks. Develop the eye and ear to see that the truth of art and music is everywhere, waiting to channel those dormant inner truths within us into a full blossom of the higher evolved self, capable of transforming the world.

#ReasonsToProtest
The DNC were caught rigging their primaries against the only candidate capable of winning. pic.twitter.com/cRk9nc9Rlq

— Polly Tickal (@PollyTickal) January 30, 2017

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

(I was mesmerized by this album since I first heard it as a mischievous, alternately joyous and brooding 12-13 yr old looking inward to negotiate the rocky terrain of adolescence, exactly at the time of being transferred out of public and into an out-of-town Catholic school, where a bursting libido was only exacerbated by the revelatory dress code requiring the girls to be in dresses. "Dogs" really hit me hard. Its masterful musical and lyrical exploration of the how the treadmill of the business world and the coldness of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism turns people into animals. It left an indelible impression on me, and still ranks as one of my all-time, singular, favorite pieces of music).

So, what's going on with you?

iPad Reading List:

Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
Frederick Douglass, "John Brown"
Herbert Spencer, "Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects"
Jack London, "The Strength of the Strong"
(all downloaded for free at the iTunes store)

for fun:

Joe Perry with David Ritz, "Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith"

Butternut Squash Soup

roast halves of butternut squash in oven.
sauté onions, carrots and celery in pot.
when golden brown, add squash to pot.
add dash of cinnamon, lesser dash of cloves.
add water or chicken broth, bring to a boil.
puree until smooth.
(for creamier, add soy or whole milk)

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger