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...

Firstly, thanks for all the well-wishes last week and interest in/feedback about a C99 gathering. It’s sometimes surreal to be in these shoes at this point of my life, having a son and another baby on the way, as a first-time father past the half century mark. But it’s here and I have to deal with it. With respect to being here as much as I'd like, that fact of life has put great limitations on such interaction. At some point I'm going to have to go on hiatus for a while. In the meantime, I hope that some of us will indeed have the chance to meet in person. My apologies for not getting back to all of you from last week.

It was a hellacious week, last. The misery that came was certainly accelerated by the relentless, oppressive heatwave that gripped us to the point of malfunction. But what finally did it was the realization that the gears of my earning power seemed to be having sand thrown into them. By the end of the week I felt pummeled.

So I need to get some of it off of my chest. It's about being sick of what I refer to as, corporate cocksucker culture (hat tip to George Carlin for his venomous takedowns of such folks, as he called them). Corporate Cocksuckerism has a nice NYC/Carlin-esque ring to it, don't you think? Maybe Dore feels the same. He's from Chicago, where I'd bet the expletive similarly gets a lot of play.

Last Tuesday, I had been expecting an answer from a client about a gig two days from then. Spent much of that morning fretting in anticipation of a before-noon, promised response from said corporate client. As that promised time was expiring, I suddenly had a baby that wouldn’t nap - until finally he did, but only on my shoulder. We wound up lying on the couch, with me holding him in an awkward position that permitted him to sleep, but not so much for me (that's parenting in a nutshell, I guess).

For context, I received the initial request via a phone call on Friday night, from a woman saying she wants to hire us for a yacht cruise around Manhattan. Corporate parties are how we make our money. Live music clubs are going by the wayside and not known for the kind of pay one can live on anymore. And as we all know so well here where we pay attention, we live in a day and age in which banks and corporations have been praised for their “savvy” business practices, as our former Neoliberal librul president admitted. We know that what he wasn't saying, was the fact that they have been permitted to construct a monopoly on pillaging and hoarding money through conspiratorial criminality, by having the laws written to favor and exonerate them as such by their beholden puppets in Congress. But like all greed heads, they always cross over the line. Corporate culture has also reduced the work force into internship slaves and low wage serfs, which helps their quarterly profit margins and the ratio of pay from CEO to employee of about 300 to 1. Having to deal with the world of such people and their conditions is a horrible Catch-22, if you want to work. To help my sanity in such a world, I rarely ever show up to one of these “events” (corporate lingo) without wearing a political t-shirt that says something about socialism, the 99% or corporate welfare. If it doesn't at least make them pause that some people are on to them, it at least (most times) allows me to connect with like-minded folks who may also be working there, who perhaps otherwise would not have known they had a friendly comrade.

The would be client says the boat will take off from a dock on the West side and will be a party involving big name companies and that the boat will leave around 3 in the afternoon or so, and be back around 9. But then says they’ll “want us for 3 or 4 hours.” I ask if she’ll want us to play that long, and think to myself it won’t matter anyway, we’ll be stuck on a boat, no matter how nice it is. I’ll have to speak to my partner to come up with a price, I tell her, and will get back to you asap, probably within an hour or so. So I write up a detailed email and send it to her right away. My partner follows up with another short one the next day saying he could answer any questions as I would be away for the weekend.

We don’t hear from her the entire weekend, and then into Monday. So naturally we think the gig is off.

But in the late afternoon Monday, almost three days after not hearing from them, I get a cheery call from another woman who says she works with the first. Stunningly, she’s acting as if the whole thing was a done deal. She starts by giving me the whole red-carpet, “do you have everything you need?” malarkey, and then we go over details as they pertain to load-in, floor space on the yacht, electrical power, type of crowd, etc.

The whole time I’m kind of taken off guard, and mention that we hadn’t heard from them after an email was sent Friday night and assumed the gig was off. I’m confounded by this sudden turn of events, to say the least. But also am aware of the disgusting sense of entitlement folks of both the people putting these parties together, and the CEO’s who surround themselves with slavish sycophants who are their Yes Men. I’ve been around so many of their “events” to know the characteristics.

“The ‘real people’ park over there; you can park over that way,” was a statement that slipped out from an “event planner” I encountered recently, on a job at a high end country club in Connecticut. This mentality completely infiltrates the people throwing and coordinating these parties: concerning everything, from where you are permitted to go, to which entrance and exit to take, etc. I'm not stating they’re all like that. But many are. However, what is present at every one of these is this undercurrent that no matter how talented, artistic or dignified you may be, you are still seen as a peon in the end, hired for the whims of very rich people, a play thing for their distracted amusement, those terminally bored by anything not exclusively involving their own class.

Did I tell you how much I loathe corporate cocksucker culture?

So, the “event planner” waits until the end to make a counter offer, and I say I have to speak with my partner. And most pressingly, I tell her, I’m not even sure if we can corral all the members for a second time. Tell her I’ll get back to her asap.

After an hour I get confirmation from the five people involved on my end and I’m ready to give her our compromised price. When I call the number a man picks up and says she’s not there, but that you can call her office number. It’s close to 6 by now or after and of course there’s an automated answering machine message. I text the original cell phone number back and he gives what he says is her cell phone number (oooh..kay, I though this was that). She doesn’t pick up and I wind up leaving her a detailed message. After an hour or so goes by I text her to ask for confirmation of my message. She writes back to say she can’t sign off on anything and will check with the CEO in the morning. Fair enough.

As I was saying near the start almost the entire morning had passed, and by 11:00 I'm concerned. So I text her asking if she had gotten confirmation. No answer. Two hours later and I’m not sure if I should further bring the price down to her counter offer (the difference of which was only $250, a fraction of the total). Instead my partner suggests we remind her of the dilemma we’re in, with the uncertainty she is imposing on us, and that we’ll be on the hook to pay our folks, who have now been asked twice to commit this gig.

Within seconds I get this:

Unfortunately we cannot move forward at this time. Hopefully we can work together in the future

"Cannot move forward, at this time?" What kind of cheap, insincere, curt, corporate-speak, platitude bullshit is this? Purposefully practiced to say nothing, while lacking all decency in acknowledging the entire process that took place on our side and the lack of clarity the entire way on their part, and conducted with the supremest arrogance. The absence of a period, at the end of her text, for some reason infuriated me even more. As if she could barely be bothered to answer at all, and just flicked off something to get me off her back.

Carlin nailed this soft language thing that had begun to envelop American corporate culture years ago. It's way worse now:

When I was a little kid, if I got sick they wanted me to go to the hospital and see a doctor. Now they want me to go to a health maintenance organization, or a wellness center, to consult a health-care delivery professional.

Poor people used to live in slums. Now the economically-disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. And they're broke! They're broke!

They don't have a negative cash-flow position.
They're fuckin’ broke!

'Cause a lot of them were fired. You know, fired: management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area, so many people are no longer viable members of the workforce.

Corporate cocksuckerism explained:

Smug, greedy, well-fed, white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.

The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore they neutralize people. Or they ‘de-populate’ the area.
The government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation.
The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call sunshine units.
Israeli murderers are called commandos. Arab commandos are called terrorists.
Contra killers are called freedom fighters.
Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part of it to us, do they?

(emphasis mine)

Carlin on "soft language"

By the end of this corporate fuckaround, my music partner and I had gone though two rounds, including the previous 24 hours before, scrambling to assemble everything in place to do the gig - only to be callously reneged upon. At the forefront of my mind when it was over, were cans of cold beer in the fridge, a staple for this time of year. In the end I not only resisted the urge to gulp down Pilsner for a while, but instead upped the ante with some self-flagellation by jumping into the fire of actually cook a meal for the two of us, an activity I summarily avoid during heatwaves. Sometimes you just find yourself compelled to plunge deeper; it must be some of that latent, punitive Catholicism still hanging around. By 8:30 I was so exhausted, on less than 5 hours of sleep, that I felt myself being called toward bed. I pulled up a collection of Walt Whitman essays (some which are lovely depictions of city life in New York in the 1870's), which were downloaded for free on the Ipad, and drifted away.

Then at the end of the week, we found ourselves being summoned by club management at the place where we've been the house band for almost 13 years, for a conference call. They are considering some changes in scheduling, due to receipts not justifying the slow nights, which may mean going dark for a few days a week. I hope and think we'll be alright. But there are some changes coming down the pike.

It was a sobering week.

New York City has seen dramatic changes in the past two decades, especially with respect to the reduction of places dedicated to the arts for the 99%, whether it's independent bookstores, community centers, live music venues, or record shops. Decimated. In its place we've had to stand by infuriated, watching a continual slew of boutique shopping, high rise luxury apartments, exclusive penthouse rooftop garden clubs and high end hotels encroaching on our communities.

There aren't very many affordable, welcoming, genuine live music clubs left in the city. Places with doormen who have ear pieces, with roped partitions, carpeting, and security checks, are not my idea of fun or being conducive to the environment I want to interact with. All is a fraudulent veneer of feeling "safe," homogenization, and the marketing of self-aggrandizement. All is monopoly. All is game of power to the money shifters. We're indoctrinated to be in thrall to the rich, conditioned by advertising to be satisfied chasing cheap imitations of their empty status show while we "brand" ourselves, upon which social media has set up the architecture for it to all flow seamlessly, with a purposely misguiding infrastructure that props up and rewards self-importance and individuality, from which there it's easy to convince the gullible that the details of one's perfunctory life on Farcebook are news. From there it's not long before the addicted user can no longer decipher between what is consequential and what is farce. "Did you see what Karen made for dessert last night?" Like a computer, we only have limited brain space too. I'm purposefully off of FB for years now because I don't want to have that kind of stuff lodged in my brain, because it does stay there.

Music will never disappear, neither will the arts. But when it can't breathe in public, because its practitioners can not survive on the paltry crumbs being offered by business people, when it is not revered enough to be thought of as a portal through which society is inspired to become better, instead of being defined by commodification and reduced to the lowest common denominator - there won't be enough gadgets one can download from the "app" menu of one's "smart" phone to cover up the essential truth. Which is that human beings will always seek to gather, are intrinsically social and communal. They need the power of the arts to help dream and imagine, and without that interaction, life becomes increasingly more difficult.

Corporate cocksuckerism is at every level of society, and throughout the music world too. The outdoor ampitheater at which I'll be seeing Tom Petty tomorrow night had a very unpleasant surprise in store for its customers, I found out in January. Was all ready to go down to their box office to buy them, knowing how these scumbag ticket agencies work, when I was told I had to buy them online.

Apparently they have contracted with a "ticket agency" to issue all their tickets. Now, how hard can this be, in a day and age in which everything is digitized and easily automated? In a world without Corporate Cocksuckerism, issuing tickets would be the most nominal of costs onto the customer. But no, it's just another in a thousand paper cuts designed to bleed the working and middle class, while the Fine Print culture takes another hunk out of our savings.

Remember Ticketron, and Pearl Jam's valiant attempt to take them on in the late 90's? Seems almost quaint now: a conscientious band willing to take a financial hit for taking on a monolith. Now we have Live Nation, the king leech monopoly of the music industry, the current overlords of almost all concert-going, with tentacles reaching into almost all the avenues for a recording artists to make money. Nobody's willing to take these bastards on. Because we're all afraid to drop even further into the Pit.

Apparently the Forest Hills Stadium outsourced its ticket handling to a thug of a company that charged almost a 20% fee. Conniving leeches. Lying in waiting, ready to prey upon those who simply want to go to see a show. And to top it off, they're fucking paperless! I don't even physically have the tickets in my hand. No choice. If you want to go the show there's only one way: pay these bloodsucking middlemen who do absolutely nothing, or don't go to the show. "O'er the Land of the Fee, and the Home of the Slave," for sure. You all remember how to sing along, right? If you don't, you will soon. There's mandatory participation that you put your hand over you heart, recite and sing along, at all of our sports stadiums, and even some political events, in these Fascist States of America in 2017.

As Supreme Court Justice Brandeis famously said, "We must make our choice: we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Because we've been trained not to know our history, we keep doing the same thing. Monopolies and the banks were the greatest threat he warned, when he wrote "Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It" in the decade before the stock market crash of 1929. It's where we are again.

"How Amazon Crushes Local Economies & Gets Tax Breaks To Do It"

After such a week, it was a good thing the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail was sitting stacked next to the door of PS 1 MOMA, waiting to be plucked. I did and was glad to have my spirit engaged by another dissenter.

The publisher's message on the first page inside, talked about the sanctity of the arts to be subversive, amidst and against the commodification of all life. Talked about the year 1964 as being the one in which the American Dream died (which made me think of Hunter Thompson's absorption into this theory for the rest of his life after that decade), then continued:

(1964) was also the same year that Herbert Marcuse’s classic book One-Dimensional Man was published, which everyone I know has read; the impact it has had on resistance to pervasive, one-dimensional thinking and the blasé, conformist tendencies cunningly supported by existing structures—those false needs manufactured by an advanced industrial society—is enormous. We’re reminded that false needs are a form of bureaucratic control, which can lead to excessively impersonal, dehumanizing effects on individual freedom, especially among the younger generation, simply because they’re considered the desirable target of consuming culture. David Foster Wallace said it beautifully in one interview:

“For young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture. There’s a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtues of being grown-up, having a family, and being a responsible citizen, but there’s also the sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites; because when I’m a corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish, self-centered, and want to have fun all the time [it’s] the best way to sell you things … and the point that emerges from that is, I think, one more example of the American economic and cultural systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving, [but] do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping us help each other know how to live, and to be happy.”

The question remains what and how will we undertake efforts to generate and cultivate more pockets of counter-culture that represent the alternative, unorthodox, non-conformist, and dissenting voices of artistic bohemians, writers, artists, workers, however which way they manifest, be it a work of art, an essay, a poem, a play, a music or dance performance, or a free-publication such as the Brooklyn Rail, the Miami Rail, or the Third Rail? In spite of the increasing complexity of an ever-growing technological and social media landscape, which has immense powers of seduction, the resistance to globalization by the force of imagination is urgently critical. This is one of the chief reasons why the field of visual arts has reached its massive scale of universal popularity, and will continue to increase in proportion to the concurrent rise of technological dominance. Art, while understood by many as a commodity, also has the power to be a regenerative framework, to be subversive, and to alter meanings. And all artists—at least those I’ve encountered—seem to share one common goal: to make art as lucid and honest self-expression in order to stimulate response from others. No artist ever feels content with art solely as occupation, provider of economic comfort, and means of livelihood. No artist feels worthy of merit without critical and thoughtful responses about his or her work. How can the writing of art and of the humanities be nourished and supported so that the potentials of each field of discipline can be fully explored and blossom?

The worlds of art and business are as compatible as jogging while smoking.

It's just like the business world. As everybody knows by now, all businessmen are completely full of shit. Just the worst kind of lowlife, criminal cocksuckers you could ever want to run into: a fucking piece-of-shit businessman.

And the proof of it is: they don't even trust each other. They don't trust one another.
When a businessman sits down to negotiate a deal, the first thing he does is to automatically assume that the other guy is a complete lying prick, who's trying to fuck him out of his money. So he's got to do everything he can, to fuck the other guy a little bit faster and a little bit harder.
And he’s got to do it with a big smile on his face. You know that big bullshit businessman smile.

Dear George. The Great Sage. "He was just here a minute ago..." was what all he wanted as his epitaph. He pushed all sacred cows over the cliff, and did it in public, to live audiences. A model citizen, I'd say. Society depends on people like him if we are ever to evolve.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers "Damn The Torpedoes"

Reading/Browsing List:
"Confessions of An Economic Hitman" John Perkins
"Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" Richard Clarke
"The Iron Heel" Jack London

Vegan Sausage and Broccoli over Quinoa
Boil water, two to one with quinoa, and cook for 15 minutes.

In pan, sautée thinly sliced onions til carmelized, then add sliced sausage and then broccoli. Near the end toss in some garlic scapes.

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