May the Goddess Guard Him; May He Find His Way to the Summerlands; May His Friends and Family Know Peace

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
-- Gil Scott-Heron

Picture found here.

Find the Summerlands, Brian Jacques

May the Goddess guard him. May he find his way to the Summerlands. May his friends and family know peace.

So sorry to hear that Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall Series, has died.

Set at the pastoral Redwall Abbey in the misty English past, the books are written for children 8 and up. They center on the triumph of good over evil — specifically the hard-won victories of the abbey’s resident mice, badgers and squirrels over the marauding rats, weasels and stoats that perennially threaten their peaceable kingdom.

There are quests and riddles; cunning treachery and chivalric derring-do; and, in a feature that became a hallmark of the entire series, groaning boards spread with sumptuous feasts, lovingly described.

Redwall is a big favorite of G/Son's. It might seem odd for a Witch to introduce her grandson to a series of books set in an abbey, but the Redwall books (and the related series of animated movies) are never overtly religious, just overtly good, while being honest with kids about things like evil and death and struggle. And the female characters are kick-ass. The descriptions of the feasts at Redwall are written by a man who loved the Earth and its bounty and who would, I think, have agreed that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals of the Goddess. Son says that, no matter how large the meal, if he asks G/Son, "So, is THIS a feast?" G/Son always says, "No," because the meal isn't a proper Redwall feast.

Fare You Well Across the Veils

The Pagan who taught many of us to do Real Magic has sailed into the West.

May the Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

WaPo Reports:

Stewart L. Udall, an Arizona congressman who was secretary of the interior under presidents Kennedy and Johnson and continued to be one of the nation's strongest advocates for the environment, died Saturday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 90.

He was a renowned figure in the environmental movement and was one of the prime movers behind many major conservation acts, including the Water Quality, Wilderness and Endangered Species acts of the 1960s.

Wikipedia reminds us that:

In October 1972, Udall published a seminal article in The Atlantic Monthly, called "Too many cars, too little oil. [It advanced a]n argument for the proposition that 'less is more'" that foresaw problems with US transportation and energy policy and competition with emerging markets for scarce resources

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

J.D. Salinger, who, in the quote below, explained existence better than anyone else, ever, has gone to the Summerlands.


"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean. ~J.D. Salinger, "Teddy," 1954

It's been a long, hard January.

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

Howard Zinn has gone to the Summerlands.

Reading his book was an education and a revelation for me.

Picture found here.

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

It was a long, rough, day for civil rights:

NEW YORK -- Percy Sutton, the pioneering civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X before launching successful careers as a political power broker and media mogul, has died. He was 89. Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment Saturday when reached by phone at her New York City home.

The son of a former slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist's family for decades.

and

South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus has died. He was 85. Brutus' publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, says the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist who was jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. His activism led Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Exiled from South Africa in 1966, Brutus later moved to the United States and taught literature and African studies at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Over the years, he wrote more than a dozen collections of poetry, including two while imprisoned. He is survived by a wife, eight children and many other relatives.

He wrote:

No Banyan, Only

The quiet wisdom of the body’s peace:
Carnality, in this our carnal world, is all
Bamboo and iron having sealed
Our mundane eyes to views of time and peace.
Now I am strong as stones or trees are strong,
Insensible, or ignorant with vibrant life;
Streams or the air may wash or pass me by
My mind breathes quiet, lying yours along.
(Upon what meat is this man fed
That he is grown so great?
Diet of eloquent delectable accolades
Warm, soft, kindly, sweet and red.)

Under no banyan tree I strip no onion skin
To find a néant kernel at the still center:
“A little winter love in a dark corner?”
No, Love (for Chrissake, no) no love, no sin.

Sublunary no more, yet more acutely mundane
now
Man’s fingers claw the cosmos in gestures of
despair,
Our souls, since Hersey, seek the helix of
unknowing
Save mine, you-saved, now leafing like a bough.

Breaking through theory-thickets I thrust
To this one corpus, one more self
That gives Content and content to an earth
Littered and sterile with ideas and rust.

Let alphabetic electrons bloat on Freudian
excrement,

Picture found here.

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

LA Weekly notes the sad death of Edward Woodward, star of cult TV shows The Equalizer (US) and Callan (UK), and, more crucially, the 1973 film version of The Wicker Man.

The film was remade in 2006 by Neil LaBute (starring Nicolas Cage) as a hysterically misogynistic flop, [Well, the movie was a hysterically (to coin a phrase) misogynistic flop, Cage was just a bad actor with a piss-poor script] but the original was a brilliant, moody little movie featuring Woodward as a repressed Scottish cop who gets called to investigate the death of a young girl in a remote island and ends up discovering a bizarre local pagan cult led by Christopher Lee in drag. Its soundtrack, written by Paul Giovanni and performed by Magnet, has had a huge influence on folk revival, freak-folk, and darkwave bands (and what other movie can you name that impressed both Pulp and Iron Maiden?).

As The Wild Hunt notes, a Wicker Man sequel is in the works.