Saturday Night Soup for the Soul (22)

aving reached the crossroad of personal revelations (this shall be revealed in due time, but not this week) , I continued south into central Oregon. Rimse the raindrops From your head Wipe your eyes Go back to bed In the morning Skies will clear And I'll be here I turned off the highway onto a cratered one lane road leading into a place called Twickenham to reshoot some pictures that I took, and then accidently destroyed four years ago. A fellow blogger hunted down my phone number (a very resourceful bugger he is) and called me. During the conversation he asked "Why did you drive where you did? ". There were reasons for each stop -- all esoteric, and I suppose, on some level, deeply and primally spiritual. But Twickenham itself, those were for a special project I am working on titled "Get Back to Let It Be...Dissected". This prototype is an example of something I need to recreate from my Twickenham Pictures. Why Twickenham and the Beatles? A couple of weeks ago, I posted this vid. IT was filmed at Twickenham. England of course, and not Oregon. What I am working on is both a research work, and my look at the entire history of western culture, centering on the decade of the 1960's and one month in extreme detail, January of 1969. Here is something else from that month. Any way...this is all another project that is only hinted at by me in this blog. It will eventually be a separate web site once i start work on it again. The deaths of my sister and my mother is what interrupted it. Next week I'll continue this journey with pictures form the John Day National Monument -- Painted Hills. In the mean time, I am switching this blog to SUMMER HOURS which means I will be outside being active most nights, and therefore online much less than I have been, until September. I will still post -- just not as often. If you want to contact me and I appear to have vanished a bit, feel free to email me, or even call me (hey, one of you figured out my phone number, so it obviously can be done). See the sunlight Break the ice For the birds of paradise Listen to the song they sing Awakening This Road Trip Diary be continued next week... 1. Section 43 is from San Francisco band Country Joe and the Fish's 1967 LP Electronic Music for the Mind and Body. I have mixed memories of this music from different periods of my life. Memories of listening to this at a school Psychologists home in junior high at 3:00 in the morning on a weekend all nighter where I, along with six or seven other students, were the subject of her doctorate thesis. We were a group of kids with extremely high IQ’s (“Group Four”), who had all given a big “F**k You” to conventional social norms and mores, and charted an highly individualistic path in life. She wanted to know what made us tick, I suppose. The control group had all the jocks and cheerleaders in it, who the psychologist told us, were absolutely BORING. Her name was Marilyn Hinkle Myers. She had a big influence on my life. I believe we may have smoked pot out there once, at her house, after we were in high school. She loved kids and was a jewel of a human being. This music also brings me memories of a leather bar in Seattle on First Avenue that I used to wander into occasionally when I came out of the closet (again) in the mid to late 1970’s. I remember it playing among the smoke and pool tables and cycle parts strung up on the wall and the “trick or treat” leather and levi men gawking at one another. It is music for ancient, wandering, and forever restless souls. 2. Mahler's Sympnony Number One -- Movement Three is one of the all time stunning first symphonies. Gustav Mahler is the bridge from the order and tradition of the 19th century to the wild chaos and vibrancy of the 20th century music. His first symphony only hints at this to us, but in it’s day, it was very controversial and hated by many. Particularly this movement bothered contemporary audiences. It begins with a sad minor key version of “Frère Jacques” which forms the basis of a lumbering melancholic funeral march; and then it picks up, transforming itself into a half Austrian, half Klezmer (Jewish Dance Music) like music, eventually becoming dance-band music one might hear in some beer hall. Parody, double and triple meaning, sudden and odd tempo and orchestration transformations...none of it “made sense” to the audiences. Mahler does not “make sense”. He just is – his music is all about the journey. Without Mahler, there could have been no Shostakovich. About the vulgarbeer hall music Mahler leaves no doubt: “With parody” he writes at the top of the page, just as the drum and cymbal join in for the dance. 3. Rinse The Raindrops is by Paul McCartney from his Driving Rain CD. It is a repeated musical mantra, and is all about "Awakings". I am about to force myself into such an awaking. All of this makes it's way into this week's soup. You can get your bowl of Saturday Night Soul for the Soul by clicking the jukebox.