To thine own self be true

with drone-owners ignoring restrictions where city buildings are or where aircraft fly, with drivers ignoring distraction bylaws, with driverless auto-cars hitting the roads, with marijuana being legalized and police having no master plan for dealing with driving under pot influence or kids and others losing it when they’re legally stoned, a hard rain’s gonna fall, as Bob Dylan once predicted, but a much weirder, more self-destructive one than he originally predicted. We are seeing the imploding of democracy via too much individual freedom, feckless governments sanctioning of irresponsibility and lawlessness, and runaway technology (“If it can be done, it must be ok, right?”)

at Butchart Gardens, Victoria. Hard to fully live without regular doses of natural beauty.

…………………………………………….

Quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright:

“I attend the greatest of all churches. I put a capital N on Nature and call it my church.”

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

“Nature is my manifestation of God.”

“Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.”

“I go to Nature every day for inspiration in a day’s work.”

RD with Wendy Jervis, a gr. 12 student with a good voice; she sang backups

I would work mostly with teachers from 1975 to 2002, but this was a rare concert featuring nothing but Dylan songs, played with student musicians.

was Richard Goldstein’s 1969 anthology, the first ever done of 1950-1960s rop/rock song lyrics.

Table of Contents above. Many inspired choices including:

“In My Life”–Beatles

“Elusive Butterfly”–Bob Lind

“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”–Bob Dylan

“Suzanne”–Leonard Cohen

“Desolation Row”–Bob Dylan

“Dress Rehearsal Rag”–Leonard Cohen

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”–Bob Dylan

“Crucifixion”–Phil Ochs (the most neglected and forgotten of the great 60’s folk writers)

“The Sound of Silence”–Simon & Garfunkle

“Horse Latitudes”–The Doors

These are all lyrics I would have typed up and mimeographed on class handouts that year.

Notes: Already in 1969, Dylan had established himself as The One whom everyone idolized and respected for his writing and imagery. Still active in live performances and recordings these days, Dylan remains The King of Twentieth Century Song Lyrics as well as The Supreme Poet of Folk and Folk-Rock.

On a personal note, I remember doing a winter, 1968 concert mostly of his material at a Silver Heights, Wpg. church with my folk trio which my school friends still remember. Later in 1978, I would do a concert of Dylan’s tunes at McNally High School in Edmonton with three students: a girl singer, a bass player, and a drummer, me on rhythm guitar.(see previous entry above)

Legendary, iconic Bob Dylan’s winning the Nobel Prize. So well-deserved. Nice timing.
My personal musical hero of the ’60s.

In my first year of teaching senior high English (1972-73), I created an option course on The Poetry of Folk. Dylan’s work was the main part of the course with representation of other folky poets such as Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. Kids were knocked out by Dylan, in particular. Many of them in the Grand Centre/Cold Lake area had not heard of him. There was no denying–when his lyrics were printed out–that his songs up to John Wesley Harding were poetry presented in musical song form. One other interesting thing I remember from the course was comparing Paul Simon’s writings about Time  (‘A Hazy Shade of Winter”) with W.H. Auden’s poems about Time (“As I Walked Out One Evening”).

(ps. “deserts” is correctly spelled in the title context)

“Freedom is from within.”
–Frank Lloyd Wright

“I have to protect myself from the toxicity of this culture.”
–Kate Braverman

“Everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.”
–Viktor Frankl

“I dwell in possibility.”
–Emily Dickinson

“Language is the soul’s ozone layer.”
–Sven Birkerts

“You can never step in the same river twice.”
–Heraclitus

“Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”
–Jean Anouilh

“To refuse The Call means stagnation.”
–Joseph Campbell

“There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.”
–Henry Moore

“The strongest principle of growth lies with human choice.”
–George Eliot

“So true inner peace occurs when one is no longer perpetually restless inside and when one no longer feels the deep, inner, lifelong aloneness anymore.”
–Richard Davies

“Many people would rather die than think and many of them do.”
–Bertrand Russell

“The proper study of mankind is books.”
–Aldous Huxley

“Civilization is an exercise in self-restraint.”
–W.B. Yeats

“Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind….the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is unnaturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”
–Virginia Woolf

“The limits of language stand for the limits of my world.”
–Ludwig Wittegenstein

I find it truly amazing that people can occasionally be civil or empathetic, put aside differences, not be always complaining, remain in touch over long periods of time, laugh at, appreciate or value the same things, actually sympathize, and develop loyal long-term friendships, marriages, and alliances. All those and the beauties of Nature and occasional authentic Love. Now, isn’t that all truly amazing?

Just in time for Halloween: no coincidence. The Clown madness, violence, and chaos vs. little kids planning to dress up in cutesy costumes.

No doubt that kids and innocence continue to be the last endangereds as North America and the world continues on its spiralling, senseless, violent deconstruction. (I wouldn’t be surprised if malevolent Santas will be next to threaten Christmas’s peace, civility, and childhood dreams.)

No wonder kids aren’t allowed to be latchkey kids or to play out freely, unsupervised anymore. Maybe what has been seen as limiting is a best practice in our brave new, mad, chaotic, loose-screw Western world.

–Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved, 1934

in our society today. The destruction of anything resembling authority, stability, and permanence. Reducing the external world to the world I want, which won’t upset me (trigger warnings), which conforms to whatever flag I wish to invent or wave. The drift and intent of a lot of this stuff is more about chaos and total distraction than with some kind of meaningful freedom and purpose with any common sense or utilitarianism at all.

And free speech is only reserved for anyone who is non-white and, non-Christian, or non-heterosexual male. In short, freedoms such as freedom of speech are the exclusive domain and privilege of anyone who doesn’t fit into these three categories. We are witnessing the effects and consequences of the wilful complete abandonment of order, authority, and common sense. Indeed, the focus and driving force is ‘Viva la difference’ regardless of numbers and practicality. People have confuted and distracted themselves out of anything that a significant majority anywhere can support or believe in. The crazies (Trump, Clinton) and the shallow selfie-coverboy facemen (Trudeau) have taken over the ‘shows’ on both sides of the border.

Much like theater which has been given completely over to ‘shows’, we lack the old classic theatre and serious plays (for thinking, rational, serious-minded people) today. Theatre and life today are totally about frivolity and the latest agenda-ed whim of whatever small numbers of intolerant reverse-discriminators. These rare perilous times, indeed, and tough for any of the older principled types out there trying to fight for a modicum of common sense, fairness, and true equality. In a subversive cultural sleight-of-hand aided by technology and media, they have become ‘The Enemy’ of the burgeoning mobs, not the nutcases.