To thine own self be true

Bogdanovich, 82.
Director of several good films and one of my absolute favorites about the 1950s–The Last Picture Show.

Interesting, realistic coming-of-age story within a 1950s small-town America context.

Glorious Hank Williams background music.

Very impressive cinematography and use of the black and white medium.

Many strong performances by a well-chosen cast, especially by Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson.

Memorable scenes that have become classics.

And, steering all–the spot-on direction of Peter Bogdanovich.

“And the rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there”

(The Second Amendment has always favored yahoo insurrectionists. Has always been open to misinterpretation.)

Birthday signs waiting to greet him when he goes outside:

“O frabjous joy. Callooh, Callay!”

My father was a soldier then
And times were very hard
When I was young.”
-Eric Burdon

Thinking back yesterday to winters of olde, how bone-chilling, skin-freezing cold they’ve always been at their worst, epitomized by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Thinking back to walking to and from school and, remarkably, after school, delivering newspapers in the dark on two very long blocks intersected by three avenues for five years.

Walking across a very long open field toward north for three years in high school. Once, even crashing my feet through shoreline ice on the Assiniboine River (like the man in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”) in grade 11. And yes, there are many other winter’s tales reminding me of Robert Service’s and Dylan Thomas’s poems.

At 72 now, these long, frozen winters of our discontent have become more impossible, threatening (Alberta’s flimsy power grid) and crueller than ever. 

Here is a poem I wrote recalling starting my paper route in the dead of winter in grade 5. Day 1 on a frigid Arctic day like today here in Edmo.

“Feb-uary made me shiver                                                                                                                 With every paper I delivered.                                                                                                         Bad news on the doorstep.                                                                                                                   I couldn’t take one more step.”                                                                                                           –Don McLean (“American Pie”)

Re. Jan. 6 insurrection:
“Look at all these people fighting for me!”

He reportedly “gleefully” watched “pressing rewind” on his PVR.

How much more of a smoking gun does the U.S. need to lay treason charges against him for what Biden describes as Trump’s “singular responsibility”?

If Garland does not become more engaged on the bleeding obvious after today, Biden should remove him and replace him with a wiser, fearless, responsible, moral man–Garland’s teacher: Lawrence Tribe.

Parents who consciously and actively prevent their children from being vaccinated and then the child dies from Covid are committing murder.
There is no way to sugar-coat this blatant dumb-ass crime.

Equally reprehensible, letting the infected-through-negligence kid go out to infect other kids and adults.

We are seeing a major breakdown of community and civilized society and the rise of mass criminality (more obviously perhaps, in the very divided U.S.).

(In response to someone else’s highly-organized schematic schema he sent me)

I usually get twitchy with this many ‘neat’ categories. Something relative to Blake’s I must create my own system or be a slave to another man’s, has something to do with the above certainly.

There were bits and pieces that resonated like self-actualization’s rise (in the ’70s, Maslow-vian influence) and the conformity of the late 40s, ’50s pretty much, and the first half of the ’60s. The Beats in the late ’40s/early ’50s and the ’60s hippies reflected that, plus ’60s music and movies hugely.

People looking for spiritual awareness and direction goes back to the mid/late ’60s. You still find the guru stuff around, but as Joseph Campbell pointed out North Americans have tended to ‘do spirituality’ on their own. (Even The Beatles walked away from Maharishi.) The limits of any/only one practice or inflection as Aldous Huxley pointed out. (He, incidentally, favored a blend of East-West approaches for one’s own consciousness development.)

Re. heroes–in America, they started being killed off with presidents: Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy; then ‘dangerous’ types like MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, then more ‘innocent, harmless’ notables like Lennon. (In the UK, George, forgodsake, which shortened his life.)

For too long in the States, there hasn’t been full/true equality continuing up to the GOPs shutting down black votes. The “entitlement” mentioned in the Wiki piece has been around despite the 2007-8 stock market failure so the US has been extending the poor base at the expense of Musks, Gateses, and crooks like Trump. If only there hadn’t been a Trump to foment the massive unrest of the new millennium! Anyway here here we are with the massive US deconstruction/complete meltdown and a dumb-ass, hard-core orney base (doesn’t that say something about human nature?) that wants the Civil War again complete with Rambo guns.

Canada has been lucky with most people having access to prosperity and economic improvement until the pandemic started. We don’t have a 1/3 nutso ready-to-use-arms population, a stupidly-misread Second Amendment, and something like a 1/10th disenchanted black base.

Here, we do have a bigoted, drunken sailor spending as a PM, but he gives out taxpayer money whenever there’s a problem. But, with billions more to be paid to natives and climate crisis hitting home, we seem to be in more peril up here of late. Suddenly a hospital system crisis and governments everywhere shown to be weak or feckless in multiple, continuous unstructured situations.

Our lives and family’s remain our own personal responsibility, which is still ground-zero, existentially speaking.

For instance, I did not wait for Kenney’s promised rapid tests, I bought ’em for my family from a company. They came early, were here as things got worse, and are still on the ready. Surety. Definitiveness. No pie-in-the-sky reliance on a horribly limited, dumb-ass, corrupt politician. I have something rather than absolutely nothing like too many people who lucked out from believing or trusting an egotistical, ignorant politician.

So, yeah, I’m still in the autonomous frame of mind I and Booi used to teach in the AC seminars back at Scona in the heyday. “The readiness is all.” “To thine own self be true.”
Self (and family first, then all else follows naturally….)

I will add that I felt I was covering Big Lit stuff in gr. 12 with you guys back in the ’90s: Hamlet or Lear, Ran, Gatsby, Kane, 1984, Strangelove. It was always gratifying to see the hungry, thirsty minds like you and James who soaked these up.

Huge perspectives. Massive patterns of dualistic views. Core human behavior/nature stuff. Recurring themes. Examples of openings to salvation, escapes, copings and the like. Great art. Masters. Major consciousness in the context of the best and fullest version of public education.

Going back, ’60s consciousness for me started with the music, the likes of Dylan, Cohen, The Beatles…. But ’twas my olde u education/course that really accelerated with my interest in Ideas and Patterns that have continued….The main blog is really “the novel” I meant to write. It is me, my consciousness and study of it, personally as well as socially to some extent.

Back then, I also recall I did sometimes teach Auden’s poems about Time and Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”. More consciousness, but pretty basic. Process. Time. The passing of time in human life and consciousness. Process and Time passing give us the purpose and means for understanding our lives and social contexts. Ideas emerge from whatever possible reflection.

And, yes, Virginia, there are Patterns, even glimmers of awareness that also emerge.
Common sense (remember that?) and personal experience factor in, too, in this process.
But deeper down, the built-in restlessness and maybe a lifelong curiosity and desire to know more that helps one cope, make sense of, understand, and appreciate.

Edmonton Journal headline:
No EI for Unvaxxed Who Lose Jobs
(Fair and just for many reasons.)

EJ quote from Alice Yang, a gr. 12 student who organized a Chinese rally at the Legislature, protesting against Kenney’s thoughtless, completely gratuitous “bat soup” accusation :
“‘I’m sorry if you are offended’ isn’t an apology. It doesn’t recognize the effects of [Kenney’s] words and the issues with what he said.”                                                                      (She’s right. Kenney’s response was really a slither sideways in an obscure Calgary Chinese newspaper.)

They were in great form, as was the band. Good representative song choices.

In January 1971, there were 2 folk clubs in downtown Edmonton. One Sunday evening, we went to the open stage and I played a few songs. They were sufficiently impressed to invite me back the following week to do a set. During the break, a guy came up to me and requested “Sweet Baby James” and I said “No-o-o.” In fact, I have never mastered a JT song though I came close with “Coppermine” around 1990. His first album remains a big fav with its many classic set pieces. Not surprising he was one of the first to be recorded on The Beatles’ Apple record label. There is obviously only one JT; he is totally unique and uncopiable.

About one year later at a number of winter university gatherings, one would hear Carole’s hot Tapestry album on turntables with songs like “It’s Too Late”, “So Far Away”, “You’ve Got a Friend” (released previously on 45 rpm by friend JT), and “I Feel the Earth Move”. Carole has never equalled that run since then, but that’s fine. She had proved herself a major songwriter at the famous NY Brill Bldg. long before 1970 with teen hits like “It Might as Well Rain Until September”, “The Locomotion”, and “Up on the Roof”.
Incidentally, I did better with Carole, learning “It’s Too Late”; sometimes a song’s relevance makes it worth the mastery.

I have kept in touch with JT more than Carole, notably around 1990 with his memorable Never Die Young and New Moon Shine albums and live videos. But where have the years gone since then? So it was great to see and hear them together again tonight. Their music resonated big time at two key times in my life. I’m glad their band was intact and happy to remember these two special influences all over again.

especially in Arctic weather.

Basic for backyard sparrows, chickadees, blue jays, and squirrels.