The Bandit Joaquin

Dave Stamey

The Bandit Joaquin

Cowboy Poetry Gathering
Heber City, UT.
2008

The Messenger

Ray Wylie Hubbard : The Messenger


Therefore, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a Young Poet

Playing With Fire

Rolling Stones: Play With Fire



I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.
--Pablo Neruda



Thumper

I Dream A Highway

Gillian Welch: I Dream a Highway


I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and rest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

John he's kicking out the footlights
The Grand Ole Opry's got a brand new band
Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand
I dream a highway back to you

I think I'll move down into Memphis
And thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue
I lie and wait until the wagons come
And dream a highway back to you

The getaway kicking up cinders
An empty wagon full of rattling bones
Moon in the mirror on a three-hour jones
I dream a highway back to you

Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vison come arrest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram
I send a letter, don't know who I am
I dream a highway back to you

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you

I wish you knew me, Jack of Diamonds
Fire-riding and wheeling when I lead 'em up
Drank whiskey with my water, sugar with my tea
My sails in rags with the staggers and the jags
I dream a highway back to you

Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Now give me some of what you're having
I'll take you as a viper into my head
A knife into my bed, arsenic when I'm fed
I dream a highway back to you

Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you

Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you

Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you

Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you
I dream a highway back to you.

What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last years lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you

Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you

I dream a highway back to you
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you

--Gillian Welch

Seastones/Fallout Forecast

Ned Lagin : Seastones


Ned Lagin – piano, percussion, computers, synthesizers, keyboards
Phil Lesh – bass
Jerry Garcia – electric guitar, vocals
David Crosby – vocals, 12-string guitar
Grace Slick – vocals
David Freiberg – vocals
Mickey Hart – gongs
Spencer Dryden – cymbals

Fukushima Live Cam 2/26/12 11:00-12:00 (4X speed)



Mary had a little lamb
its fleece electrostatic
and everywhere Mary went
the lights became erratic
--David Foster Wallace

The Old Laughing Lady

Neil Young
The Old Laughing Lady
Glasgow, Scotland
4/1/76

Plane Wreck At Los Gatos

Cisco Houston: Deportee

Bruce Springsteen: Deportee

Joan Baez: Deportee



the crops are all in
and the peaches are rotting
the oranges piled
in their creosote dumps
they're flying 'em back
to the Mexican border
to pay all their money
to wade back again

goodbye to my Juan
goodbye Rosalita
adios mis amigos
Jesus y Maria
you won't have a name
when you ride the big airplane
all they will call you will be "deportees"

my father's own father, he waded that river
they took all the money he made in his life
my brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
and they rode the truck till they took down and died

some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted
our work contract's out and we have to move on
six hundred miles to that Mexican border
they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves

we died in your hills, we died in your deserts
we died in your valleys and died on your plains
we died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes
both sides of the river, we died just the same

the sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
a fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills
who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
the radio says, "they are just deportees"

is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
to fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
and be called by no name except "deportees"?

--Woody Guthrie
Deportee

Ash Wednesday

Tom Russell/Gretchen Peters: Ash Wednesday


Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow,
For there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.


II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.


III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling,
Beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.


IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile


V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.


VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain,
Spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

--T.S. Eliot

Fat Tuesday

Tommy Malone
Fat Tuesday
Norfolk, CT.
6/17/11

Mardi Gras has come to town
time to lay your burden down
how fat can a Tuesday get?
boy, you ain't seen nothing yet

In My Mind I Can't Study War No More

Billy Bragg
Save the Country
Chapel Hill, N.C.
11/1/08



i got fury
in my soul
fury's gonna take me
to the glory goal
in my mind
i can't study war
no more




Laura Nyro: Save the Country

Thelma Houston: Save the Country

the Fifth Dimension: Save the Country

Outtakes (1975)

Bob Dylan
outtakes from Renaldo and Clara
November/December 1975





A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
It Ain't Me Babe
Knocking on Heaven's Door
It Takes a Lot to Laugh
Romance in Durango
One More Cup of Coffee
Sara
Never Let Me Go
Just Like a Woman
Knocking on Heaven's Door

Here Today

Laurie Lewis
Here Today
Berkeley, CA.
11/22/09

we're here today and then we're gone
this life will end just like a song
we only have this little time
so come and let our voices twine

Another Time's Forgotten Space

Grateful Dead: 1/22/78

Grateful Dead: 10/12/84

Grateful Dead: 12/31/84

Grateful Dead: 9/7/85

Grateful Dead: 10/9/89


They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
--Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tsunami Tsurprise

The Space Cossacks: Tsunami Tsurprise




YOU DON"T NEED A WEATHERMAN...

...TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS
but here is next week's West Coast jet stream forecast just in case.

Talking Heads: Air


This situation at the plant is far beyond anyone's control at this point.
All we can control, is how we react. The time for some type of emtombment has long passed, as the fuel is now estimated to be 30-40 feet below the plant. Everything TEPCO has tried to do to decrease the temp in reactor 2 in the past few days, including injecting boron to stop fission and dumping tons of water on the reactors is having no effect. Recent news coming out of the Fukushima plant and surrounding areas such as Xe detection and cesium levels, indicate the situation may be deteriorating quickly. Be prepared for possible out-of-control fission and subsequent large release of high radiation which will be carried directly from Japan to the west coast of the US and Canada.



STRONTIUM: It sits in your bones, it sits in my bones/and it will still be there long after we are gone, strontium/I wonder whose idea it was/Was it the government? Was it the Christian Scientists? Sometimes I wonder about them, strontium/Don't worry on getting drafted, don't worry on world war three/Everything that you're afraid of/is inside you already.
--Emily XYZ

Larry The Liquidator

O beautiful
for Cayman Isles
for dividends from Bain
and Swiss accounts
sealed good and tight
and carried interest gains
America! America!
God shed His wealth on me
and feed my soul
with tax loopholes
for me and my trustee

If A Tree Falls

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination - an imagination
that is outside of capitalism as well as communism.
An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment.
To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest?
Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?
--Arundhati Roy


Bruce Cockburn: Strange Waters

Bruce Cockburn: Radium Rain

Beyond Here Be Dragons

There is a great loneliness of spirit today. We’re trying to live, we’re trying to cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn’t matter,
that there is no real hope for enough change, that the environment and human experience is deteriorating so rapidly and increasingly and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today.
This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we’re yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive.
When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror,
with all kinds of distraction – with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect and to go away.
We’ve been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what’s taking place, the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, the unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities. And as we open to the pain of that, there’s a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that it becomes a strength, a power to respond. There is the possibility that the energy that has been bound in the repression of it can now flow through us and energize us, make us clearer, more alive, more passionate, committed, courageous, determined people.
--John Robbins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How do you get a nun pregnant?
A: Dress her up as an altar boy.

Throwing Starfish

While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. there were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, "It makes a difference for this one."
I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish.
--Loren Eiseley
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Green Party of the United States

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Firesign Theater : Everything You Know Is Wrong...this side

Firesign Theater: Everything You Know Is Wrong ...the other side


A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
--Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Tear Jerkers

Gordon Lightfoot: The Last Time I Saw Her Face

Chieftains w/ Van Morrison: Carrickfergus

Tammy Wynette: Another Lonely Song

George Jones: He Stopped Loving Her Today

Ray Charles: I Can't Stop Loving You

Blaze Foley: If I Could Only Fly


When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall
be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.
It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
--Mark Twain

Gimme Shelter

Playing For Change
Gimme Shelter

Half of all taxpayers will get less than $100 from the Bush tax cut. Those who make more than $1 million a year will get an average cut of $92,000. That may average out to $1,100, but it ain't going to the average family. As The New Yorker recently noted, if Bill Gates walked into a soup kitchen serving 60 bums, the average worth of the people in that room would be $1 billion each. But it would still be Bill Gates and 60 bums.
---Molly Ivins in 2003

Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

Railroad Bills

Joan Baez: Railroad Bill

Etta Baker/Taj Mahal: Railroad Bill

Gillian Welch/David Rawlings: Railroad Bill

Hobart Smith: Railroad Bill




Railroad Bill said that before he died
He would build a railroad for the bums to ride
Ride on, Railroad Bill

Fairewinds Fukushima Update

Fairewinds : Triple Meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Update 2/2/12


Day 333 Radiation Fallout Forecast

If the corporations have their way,
the Earth will be killed,
and that's in your lifetime.
It's revolting to me that students are being trained to work in corporations.
It's obscene to me that the corporations are running the world.
We've got to get cross.
Anger is an appropriate emotion.
--Helen Caldicott
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
more good work from Fairewinds
as well as some recent disquieting developments that
may not make it onto your local news



The Green Party of the United States

Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning

Bert Jansch
Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning
Windows Art Centre
Bath, UK
9/25/99


O'er the Lonely Mountains Bristol, UK 11/6/91

Rolling Thunder

Bob Dylan
and Rolling Thunder Revue
Fort Collins, CO.
5/23/76


A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
Blowing in the Wind*
Railroad Boy*
Deportee*
I Pity the Poor Immigrant*
Shelter from the Storm
Maggie's Farm
One Too Many Mornings
Mozambique
Idiot Wind
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (end credits)

* with Joan Baez

Another Day In America

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laurie Anderson: Another Day in America

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the
epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
--Charles Dickens
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------