Forgiveness…

C.G. Jung brings an interesting question to the surface about forgiveness. My take: The fact we tend to overlook aspects of this blessed gift (forgiveness) by way of looking outward toward others where judgment takes place first-“then maybe”- forgiveness; this should indicate we have a few things worth looking into. This all conveniently takes place by leaning outside the subjective experiences for the most part. This seems to me to be the easier softer way for us humans to deal with our own inner turmoil and demons. Look outward; point, and respond to others and their behaviour. This gives us the illusion it’s not us, but them. The very twist in this subjective-objective trickery turns on us and bits us in the ass because we never allow the truth about ourselves to enter into the equation; let alone forgive ourselves, or anyone else for that matter. If we can’t forgive ourselves, how can we forgive anyone else? The quote comes from Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections) and is worth making sure what you’re reading “is” what Jung has written…We can sometimes read words and not see the author’s intent; our imagination can play tricks on us, and that sometimes is the problem with excerpts, and especially with this particular subject matter…

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

James 1:22-26
“But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does. If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.”

Ornette Coleman…

I just found out today Ornette Coleman died three days ago, my condolences go out to his family and anyone here on my FB that my have been close to him: Ira Sullivan, Liebs, Frank Tusa, Richie, Richard, Tony, Fred, Chris… I’m not sure who of you may have either worked or hung with him in the early years, so if any of you did, I am sorry for your loss, and for the loss to the rest of the planet. This man was one of the very few of his kind, and history will remember him in that way without a doubt…John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sam Rivers, Ornette, these men took Jazz to places Jazz didn’t even see coming..

The piece Id like to post is close to my heart. It deals with his writing; his Idea. We all know him as the revolutionary giant of a saxophone player that he was, but I hear his pencil set to paper giving birth to ides that were both beautiful, abstract, and always passionate…”Dedication To Poets & Writers” was just that, a dedication to poets & writers…God has one amazing saxophone section in His band now…Peace.

Ornette Coleman – Dedication To Poets & Writers
Ornette Coleman – Alto Saxophone
David Izenzon – Bass
Charles Moffett – Drums
Selwart Clarke – Violin
Nathan Goldstein – Violin
Julien Barber – Viola
Kermit Moore – Cello

Art: Yes to the gold and the mud

I have been in the arts most all my life…I don’t know of one artists worth their salt that hasn’t had to view this world with painful honesty as to both what they saw outside themselves, and from within…Naturally all great Musicians, Writers, and Poets take this infliction and make their choice as to what to do with these painful, and or joyful perspectives: weather to then turn around and paint a picture that resonates the beauty that has been magnified by this very pain, (and or joyful view), or paint a picture of the pain itself in it’s harsh actuality . The outcome of these decisions could be what makes a  Kahlil Gibran, or a Franz Kafka. The ONE THING for me is that the artist always be honest whether he or she offends or uplifts, brings joy or sadness, anger or tranquility to his or her audience…That, and to be authentic in nature…Hermann Hesse says it quite well…Hesse cuts right to the bone here, and the artist is the recipient of the slice in my view, he is directing this to himself as well…The Artists has to walk into the storm if he or she are to be effective and true to their own nature as Artists…

Hermann Hesse

“There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”
Hermann Hesse

Industry processing everything…!

The reason I post so much of Wendell Berry’s (AKA, The Angry Farmer) work, is his poetry, novels, and philosophical works are all about activism, ecology, industrialization, and humanity in general, (not intellectual masturbation). The fact that industrialization has made it so humanity can really no longer get along within this paradigm of polarization, war driven economy, and consumerism, that it has embraced this potentially fatal new world order that has been prepared for us, (out of a subconscious desperation) and is about to have the very lifeblood that keeps us breathing cut off somewhere along the line, perhaps very soon. I believe this to be taking place as we speak.

I would think, all this would give way to a more serious examination by the masses, as to just how this is all taking place, and why, and for that we have to turn to people who are qualified to speak on these matters with some level of expertise, and humanitarian intentions, which in this day and age is very hard to find. So writers like Berry, Zinn, Hedges, Chomsky as hard on the eyes and ears as they can be need a hearing, if we are to get any prospective on other than the prospective of “Pac Man” and his insatiable appetite …

We have been dumbed down and uneducated by propaganda doled out by the Industrial Royals to the point we no longer see the forest through the trees. It seems as long as enough of us are feed well, fat, and living a good life, the hell with the rest, (its a numbers game) the problem with that is “we” also will be a part of “the rest” here very soon if “we” don’t look closely to the last 60 years or so, and see the patterns being implemented right under our noses by “The Royals”…

Berry breaks this down piece by piece in all his work, he shows how allowing this to continue “will” sever the very thread that ties us to something that makes humanity so very special, Love, Community, Benevolence, &c. and is now degrading bit by bit, and encouraging humanity to devolve into something far worse than any of the other creatures occupying this planet, BY FAR, in terms of destroying the very mother that gave birth to us (Earth), not to mention pissing all over the gift God provided.

Yet because Berry isn’t a shiny, hip, pop BS artist, nor is he concerned with any of that whatsoever, his huge, eloquent body of work goes somewhat unread by mainstream students today, even though Yale, Harvard, and every other major university nearly begs for his presents at their conferences…Just another example of a culture trained by its masters to always look to the shiny object dangling from the string held by the hypnotists, hired by the deformed leeches feeding on the populous…SMH..!

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”
― Wendell Berry

Ira Sullivan…

Photos just don’t get any better than this…! I have known this man (Ira on the far right) since I was a sixteen year old street kid with a saxophone hanging off my shoulder knocking on his front door when he lived right across the street from a graveyard in Dania Florida, (his front door literally faced the graveyard which was about 100 feet away, if that…lol…) he answered the door and spent at least an hour with me, and told me to go home and practice, he’s been my friend ever since…For all of us young musicians (back in the day) that were friends with Ira, know Ira had a huge influence on all of us who came in contact with this him…He’s a Jazz legend because he blew through Chicago, and New York City with Red Rodney (Charlie Parker’s trumpet player) back in the 50, and 60’s like a Be-Bop hurricane leaving nothing but blown down Jazz clubs in its wake, and has played with every Jazz Great on the planet …Not to mention Ira was playing both Trumpet and Saxophone with equal genius, and I never use that word genius loosely, but with Ira, it rolls of the pen like warm butter…He also was nominated for several academy awards, the last one he lost to John Coltrane…So this photo just warms my heart to no end…Its Perfect…! Thats Jimmy Heath (played with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy, &c.) and Ray Drummond (played with Freddie Hubbard, Pharoah Sanders, Art Farmer &c.)…So you’re looking into a wealth of Jazz history in one photograph, these guys were major contributors to weaving Jazz into the American cultural landscape that spread all throughout the planet, and that’s not an over statement by any means…What a great shot…!

Augustine of Hippo

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
Augustine of Hippo

Mans need to feed…

I look back in history and I see mans propensities as to his constant need for ownership and control over everything within the grasp of his greedy, dirty little hands play itself out in everyday life, but the industrialization of “everything” the last hundred years ( extorting the land, farming, the Arts, even to our relationships with one another &c.) through mass hypnosis and propaganda amaze me; swallowed up everything in sight leaving behind a trail of bodily waists and broken dreams emanating from the veracious unfettered appetites of the few to both maintain and continue to procure more food for themselves to binge on, like the obese “Apes” that they are, is just gone to a level that is overwhelming to both the planet, and the creatures that occupy this beautiful and perfect ecosystem.

 

This corporate/governmental collaboration that both perpetuates and inspires this insidious, destructive appetite, through propaganda, invites us in for this feast, knowing “they” will only be feeding us the dirty little crumbs as “they” ingest the feast. This appetite can’t be satisfied with any amount of the flesh or spirit that they consume. They must be extremely vigilant in continuing to re-educate the masses to conform to any changes they may need to implement in order to keep their food supply available for ingestion. They have indeed manufactured a social, economic, and artistic prefabricated BOX that robs both men and woman of their capacity to live well, see clearly, and embrace life on life’s natural terms; they have taken away the natural flow that filters life through this magnificent ecological system that turns decay into new life &c., and have held it hostage as a means to an end…” unprecedented consolidation of wealth for the few operates on all levels of life whether it is in the material realm, the artistic or spiritual realms. This economic power base cultivates all the industrial complexes as it sees fit, and is tapping directly into the very center of nature, life, and man, and extracting the very lifeblood out of our existence through entertaining us, and brainwashing us to death.

 

Sounds too dramatic? I think not! This progression of man’s nasty, foul, out-of-control appetites, in general, distorts the very nature of what was created as a natural landscape to serve the needs of all the creatures that live here. This violent intervention over these last 100 years by this parasitic infestation of the one percent does great harm, and it doesn’t feel anyone’s pain other than the pain of its own loss that may occur if the rape doesn’t continue at its planned pace to ensure the bottom line, “the almighty quarterly report”! This false reflection of what we embrace as progress has made monkeys out of us all, and is destroying the very planet we live on right before our very eyes. And the insanity of it all is it’s all being done with our consent, by the mere fact we have, (because they allow us to have), the rent paid, food on the table, (for most of us anyway), 100 TV stations to keep us entertained, beer, and if that fails to keep us content we can go the doctor and get a prescription for something to adjust our brain chemistry to accommodate our new man-made synthetic environment.

 

It’s getting to look more and more like a Franz Kafka novel. Our oceans acidic levels are rising to alarming numbers, waste and chemical pollution in just the last 50 years are like something from an x rated science fiction movie, “x” just by way of not wanting to scare our children half to death from them witnessing the reality of how things really are and will be for them after we leave them with this byproduct of both extravagant human consumption, and our very bad decision to trust the industrial culture that is being led by the Billy goats and Apes that are controlling the course of our destiny to fulfill the needs of theirs and our insatiable appetites.

 

Rivers, lakes, even our underground water supply is now being affected. The air quality is just unbelievable in most of our major cities around the world, China has the common sense to promote their city populations to wear masks to keep the public health expense bearable … fluoridated drinking water, REALLY! … Farming, and ranching practices, well lets not even go there.

Wendell Berry: “The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants. To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also against those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”

 

We are all complicit in this erosion of the world around us, even though it’s much easier to point the finger at the “one percent” even though they very well should be pointed to! we do buy all the crap they sell us and do drive all the smog-producing cars and vans that are causing all the health problems for ourselves and our kids, and we do also go along with the programs laid out to us, by the Billy goats that hold title to this planet and the creatures in it…So I guess we are as much to blame as the “one percent” …OK…Maybe that’s a stretch, but you get my meaning.

Another quote:

 

“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”

Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

Wendell Berry

“But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the vitues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.”
Wendell Berry
painting…by, Jen adam mothers morning

Howard Zinn…Nothing new under the sun…

Before quoting Howard Zinn … I’m thinking back to the history books we had pushed on us in the late 50’s and 60’s and 70’s when I was in school. I have to shake my head in amazement at all the propaganda that they were spoon feeding us each and every day between the A bomb drills at school, and the blackout drills after dark. The public was in a general state of fear for the most part, but there was reason for concern, as to who was the real boogie man, thats up top you to decide, I have my own thoughts on the matter..But now, with all the information we have access to on the internet today, I can’t see how the reality of “business as usual” isn’t as plain as the nose on our proverbial faces…Look back, WW2, detention camps for Japanese, Germans, and Italians were in effect and utilized, the japanese taking the brunt of that…1970 war on drugs=the industrial prison complex which is now the largest prison population on planet earth, housing a huge population of blacks, browns, and the poor…its the old school rule, keep enough of the population feed, entertained (and now, on pharmaceuticals) with 500 channels just a click away, and you can do just about anything you want to, to whatever people you want to do it too, and no one will even give it a second thought…Were sedated, entertained, and can feed ourselves for the most part, so whats the fuss? The fuss is now very myopic our culture has become as to the awareness of our neighbors, and what has been going on, and still is going on in terms of the people that have been, and are still being sold down the river …Can’t help but wonder what all those empty FEMA camps around the country are really for, look real close at the history of man, one never knows whos next on the list, might just be us..Now that would get our attention…!

Howard Zinn… “Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

The industrialization of Jazz…?.

This hits home for me, I was a 15 year old kid taking the subway to all the village jazz clubs to hear guys like Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, The Gil Evans band, and everyone else that came to town, the music was alive and organic, and screamed with fire…Then production companies like CTI records, and the rest of the new order came along and slowly watered the music down to sell records, and 10 years later, Lollipop Jazz was born, and most all the great jazz clubs slowly disappeared into the yesteryear…Many famous Jazz artists became employed by major universities who in turn taught students what to play, the licks of all the great players, that did have their own voice, creating parrots instead of artists, in turn, those artists trained the public to hear what they were doing as “the real deal” …Gotta shake my head, industrialized Jazz,. Like farming, like community, like fashion, food supply, land developing, and world domination wasn’t enough! that had to mess with the Jazz ! Oh no, ! say it ain’t so…And now its excepted, packaged, and spoon fed to the masses like politics….Money is made by the production companies, and the production companies are in charge of the artistic content these days, and the artists think their in charge of the content by way of long term brain washing…The music didn’t die, but it is in a deep deep coma!…I’ve played with some great musicians at loft sessions, late night sets at friends gigs, and so on, back in the 70’s, they don’t do it that much anymore, this country has sold its artists out to corporate control at every turn over the last 40 years, slowly and methodically…If only young artists knew the intensity, and passion that was here before the production companies took over creative control they would be marching at the Lincoln Memorial as we speak, holding up saxophones and trombones, and guitars high in the air, and demanding freedom for quarter notes and pentatonic scales to be freely placed where the artists deems fit, and not where the production companies direct the artists to place them without their knowledge of the manipulation that is taking place as the artists thinks he or she is doing the creating … Of course, this an overview, and a vast generalization which I am taking the liberty to enjoy, and exceptions to this subjective observation are taken into account…