It's May Day - International Workers' Day

Today is May Day, also known as International Workers' Day.  Celebrate labor.  Celebrate workers' rights.  Celebrate international efforts to create safe working conditions, living wages, and solidarity among the rank and file.  Reinvigorate the Occupy movement so that Americans will never, ever forget how the gamblers on Wall Street gambled with our economy and came up craps, and shrugged, like their anthropomorphic icon, Atlas.  So, celebrate the hybrid socialist programs that saved our automobile and finance industries.  Celebrate Barack Obama, a champion of labor despite the grueling adversity he faces from the right wing of Congress.  Celebrate American workers.  Celebrate those who produce and do not take.  Embrace this elegant statement:  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  Karl Marx

Zero 7 - The Garden - Full Album - a Masterpiece

Zero 7 - Seeing Things (Such a thing as a perfect instrumental)

Eating the poison cows of the Sun God

"I killed my dinner with a rock, hit him in the face, taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do." Joanna Newsom. When I was faced with what I was doing I simply had to quit eating animals of any kind, and that knowlege, though attenuating harm, has made me touch upon madness.

Steven Wilson - Porcupine Tree - Sentimental

FDR's Insight in Troubled Times

"The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have too much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have too little." If civilation is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships -- the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work in the same world, at peace."

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (Strange Parallel)

Jesse Welles - The Poor

Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Live)

Spring 2025 Out Back and the Clusters of Love

Hunter S. Thompson Nailed It

"Every man is the sum total of his reaction to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your persepective." Hunter S. Thompson

Nashville Bar Association Oral History | Lionel Barrett | September 19, 2023

My mentor, Lionel R. Barrett, Jr., Attorney. We tried two death penalty cases together: State v. Donald Givens, and State v. Millard Curnutt.

Noir Desir - Le vent nous portera

The Tin Drum - Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum)

The Hair Dresser's Husband - Danse de Jean Rochefort dans Le mari de la coiffeuse

The story a woman who is terrified of time.

Alex G - Sarah

Mitsune - Roku Go (Live on KEXP)

Porcupine Tree - Anesthetize (from Anesthetize Live in Tilburg)

Elephant Revival - Petals

Calistan

Elephant Revival Performs "Birds and Stars" with The Colorado Symphony

Dinosauria We - Charles Bukowski

The Lillelid Murders and Appalachian American Ennui (Exactly 28 Years Ago - April 6, 1997)

NPR did a piece called "This I Believe" a few years back.  Listeners were invited to recite their core beliefs about anything they chose; love, life, children, work, recovery, and the like.  The encapsulations were recorded for all of posterity.   I remember posting my own account, which dealt with my recovery, as they say, from the ravages of drugs and alcohol.  I wrote that "I believe that there was hope in the passing air of a free fall."  I was wrong.  There isn't.

Anyway, selected entries were broadcast by NPR.  I had heard a range of "beliefs" during the programmings.  All were positive and full of "hope" of some kind of another.  However, Newt Gingrich was invited to recite his core feelings.  I was startled to hear his opening statement:  "I believe the world is a dangerous place."  Newt, who is dangerous in and of himself, then expounded well upon his radical thesis.  It got my attention.  It was the truth.  From the God-damnedest people of all we oftentimes hear the truth.  I've learned this the hard way.

April 6 is the anniversary of the Lillelid murders. 

The world is a very dangerous place indeed.  Apparently Vidar Lillelid either did not know this, consciously chose to ignore it, or, more likely, had fallen under the influence of a very recent indoctrination from the Jehovah's Witness Church.  Vidar and his wife, Delfina, and their two children Tabatha and Peter, were en route from a Jehovah's Witness convention in upper east Tennessee when they opted to stop at the rest area,  accessible from the southbound lane of Interstate 81, near Exit 36.

Vidar was inebriated with the dogma that had been broadcast to and absorbed by the sheepish congregants at the Jehoviah Witness convention.  So, when he saw a group of teenagers, who appeared "lost" in their Gothic appearances and sullen countenances, he foolishly opted to "witness to them," and in so doing put his family in mortal danger.  He ignored the safety of his family by approaching six strangers who appeared, as Newt Gingrich would agree, to be "dangerous."  His sense of judgment had been impaired through the dangerous amalgam created when the weak minded, sheepish congregants are drawn into the vortex of  a powerful cult, such as Jehoviah's Witness.

These possible converts ended up kidnapping Vidar Lillelid and his family in order to steal their van so they could continue on their ill-conceived exodus from Appalachia to Mexico.

 The six youths fled from eastern Kentucky, where they had been indoctrinated with fatuous Biblical chapter and verse from time immemorial.  Which was, in fact, the enabling force-field behind their flight from Appalachian Ennui.

Little blond Tabitha was shot behind the ear.  Peter was shot in the face.  Delfina was shot multiple times after witnessing the murders of her husband and daughter, and assassination attempt of her baby boy, and then run over with an automobile, pictured aft. I have the exhibits in bankers box and within my cranium. Corrupt Judge James E. Beckner and a "hand selected" group of incompetent lawyers then massacred due process of law, otherwise available to these lost souls from Eastern Kentucky, two of whom were teenagers. See, Jason Blake Bryant v. State of Tennessee, No. E2002-00907-CCA-R3-PC (Tenn. Crim. App 2002).
This may seem sexist, even misogynistic, but I hold firm to the belief that the man is primarily responsible for the safety of his family.  Vidar Lillelid failed in his duty to protect his family.  His sense of discretion had been fatally retarded by the cult of religious fanaticism at a coalition of Jehovah's Witness followers.  "The world is a dangerous place."  It is indeed.

This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Neural Flora Neural Fauna - Spring 2025

The bumble bees have been flirting with me in succession on my front porch again. The annual spring tease. I look them straight into their black faces, invisible black eyes. These reconnaisaance missions are becoming predictable. The lead bee enters my intimate space, but does offend, and probably doesn't know that the landing area on my hands has been pre-approved since five or six springs ago. They charge within a foot of me and see I do not flinch, then retreat, which signals the next in queue to do the same, but it's never the same. Ever. I saw one take a hovering shit yesterday. They have faces stained with mustardy Springtime circumstance. They make their way into the house. I quit caring long ago. Wherever they ingress is their business, not mine. Porchwise, the succssion continues with one after another observing me. They know how to look into my face like they might actually like me and then bore holes in my deck.

Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion..." - Live at Bonnaroo

Gregory Alan Isakov - Before the Sun (Official Lyric Video)

Gregory Alan Isakov - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)