You Must Do The Thing You Think You Cannot Do

You gain strength,
courage and confidence
by every experience
in which you really stop
to look fear in the face.
You are able to say to yourself,
I have lived through this horror.
I can take the next thing
that comes along.
You must do the thing
you think you cannot do.
―--Eleanor Roosevelt

Zomney Apocalypse

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don't need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes,
short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone,
but the threat lives on.
--Max Brooks
The Zombie Survival Guide


Cranberries: Zombie

Uncle Neil And The Excitement Gang

Neil Young: Austin City Limits Music Festival...10/13/12

I pictured myself
in a Denver bar
that night,
with all the gang,
and in their eyes
I would be strange
and ragged
and like the Prophet
who has walked
across the land
to bring the dark Word,
and the only Word
I had was 'Wow!
--Jack Kerouac
On the Road

ELEVEN ALBUMS BY NEIL YOUNG

Sandy

HURRICANE SANDY

Sandy
the aurora
is rising
behind us
the pier lights
our carnival life
on the water
forever

--Bruce Sprinsteen

These Times We're Living In

Kate Wolf

with Nina Gerber

These Times We're Living In

KFTY Studios, Santa Rosa, CA

mid-1980's



if I could I'd tell you now
there are no roads that do not bend
the days like flowers bloom and fade
and they do not come again
we've only got these times we're living in
we've only got these times we're living in

Blue Again Like Morning

from Grayfolded


Grateful Dead: 10/17--19/74

Here I came
to the very edge
where nothing at all
needs saying...
and every day
on the balcony
of the sea
wings open
fire is born
and everything
is blue again
like morning.
--Pablo Neruda

Whatcha Gonna Do?

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction and generously rewarded, will toil the artists.
The result will be great art;
for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time.
And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship beauty.
--Jack London

Los Gatos Locos

Emmylou and Megatron

Frank Sinatra: Too Marvelous For Words


Peewee

Frank Sinatra: You Make Me Feel So Young


Sandy

Frank Sinatra: I've Got The World On A String


Ramblin' Jack

Frank Sinatra: The Best Is Yet To Come


The Wild Bunch

The only
escape
from the
miseries
of life
are music
and cats.

--Albert Schweitzer

Time (The Revelator)

Warren Haynes
Time (the Revelator)
Port Chester, N.Y.
10/11/12







darling remember when you come to me
that I’m the pretender
I’m not what I’m supposed to be
but who could know if I’m a traitor?
time's the revelator

they caught the katy and left me a mule to ride
the fortune lady came along she walked beside
but every word seemed to date her
time's the revelator

up in the morning up and on the line
I drive into Corning and all the spindles whine
and every day is getting straighter
time's the revelator

leaving the valley is fucking out of sight
I’ll go back to Cali where I can sleep out every night
and watch the waves and move the fader
queen of fakes and imitators
time's the revelator

--Gillian Welch

Caledonia

Dougie Maclean
Caledonia
March & Rally for Scottish Independence
Edinburgh, Scotland
9/22/12

This is my country,
The land that begat me,
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who toil here
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh
And bone of my bone.
--Sir Alexander Gray

But Now I Try To Be Amused

"Elmo" Costello: A Monster Went And Ate My Red 2

Whatever the cost

of our libraries,

the price is cheap

compared to that

of an ignorant nation.

―--Walter Cronkite

It Droppeth As The Gentle Rain From Heaven

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
--William Shakespeare


Tracy Chapman: Let It Rain

SANDY SEZ
FIREWORKS ARE HAILING
OVER LITTLE EDEN TONIGHT.
JAPAN CAT NETWORK
CAN USE YOUR HELP.





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

Spacious Reveries

Eagle Nebula

Grateful Dead: Dark Star 12/6/73


The Witch's Broom

Grateful Dead: Dark Star 12/31/78


Pleiades

Grateful Dead: Dark Star 7/12/90


dying star in Eskimo Nebula

I hope
your rambles
have been sweet,
and your reveries
spacious.

--Emily Dickinson

The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem

The Story of The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem
2005
55 minutes


A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the Land of Faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
And she is still there, busied with a dance
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.
--W.B. Yeats

Eye Of The Sparrow

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
--Noam Chomsky

Mitt Romney Style

Now I will tell you the answer to my question.
It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others.
We are interested solely
in power, pure power.
What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means. It is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution. One makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
--George Orwell
1984

CAN YOU PASS THE NORMALCY TEST?

Rockers Dub

Augustus Pablo: Rockers Dub

Behind all seen things
lies something vaster.
Everything is but a path,
a portal or a window
opening on something
other than itself.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand, and Stars



007

Showdown At Big Sky

Robbie Robertson

Showdown at Big Sky





An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.
--Richard Louv
Last Child in the Woods

Neil Young @ Global Citizen Festival

Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse

Global Citizen Festival
New York City, NY
9/29/12

Love and Only Love
Powderfinger
Born In Ontario
Walk Like A Giant
The Needle and The Damage Done
Twisted Road
Fuckin' Up
Rockin' In The Free World *


* w/ The Foo Fighters,
Dan Auerbach and K'NAAN




THIS IS EARTH. ISN'T IT HOT?
--PARIS HILTON

It's Not Easy Being Green

Big Bird
It's Not Easy Being Green
Jim Henson Memorial
5/21/90







it's not that easy being green
having to spend each day the color of the leaves
when I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold
or something much more colorful like that

it's not easy being green
it seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
and people tend to pass you over 'cause you're
not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
or stars in the sky

but green's the color of spring
and green can be cool and friendly-like
and green can be big like an ocean, or important
like a mountain, or tall like a tree

when green is all there is to be
it could make you wonder why, but why wonder why
I am green and it'll do fine, it's beautiful
and I think it's what I want to be

912 Greens

Ramblin' Jack Elliott
912 Greens





did you ever stand and shiver
just because you were looking at a river?