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``We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.'' -George Orwell A
Little Road Lore PAUL GOES TO PLEASANTVILLE So there I was, on tour in the East Made my way to Westchester County, NY 6 a.m. early mornin rise, as I do drive up the road (as I tend to do when I wake up early on tour ...go aimlessly driving , hunting for the wild coffee house) to... Pleasantville (!) , this time Find a coffee house coincidentally named “Dragonfly” I’m sitting outside in the relative early morning cold reading the New York Post (what else?...the Times? ...pleeeeeze!!!...) Page Six I read, and I quote:
MOON IN MIAMI Who-aaaaa ... jesusmaryandjoseph!!! I’m (we’re) surrounded by insane people everywhere I start lookin around the early a.m. street at the people walkin around and I wonder... ‘what’s she do?’ ‘what’s he thinkin of right now?’ but, back to my espresso I’m sittin there, sippin’, smokin’ and reading when a cop cruises slowly by in his ... cruiser (what else?) I figure he’s lending a benevolent eye to the SUV illegally parked by a suburban in front of the coffeehouse to go and get her mornin’ drug leaving her baby in the car...!! The cruiser cruises on and I’m back to my Post A few minutes later the cruiser comes by again and stops right in front of me... I hold out my hands to be cuffed and smile.. “Aren’t you ... ???” the officer utters “Shhhhh,” I respond ... “don’t tell anyone.” “I saw you in Central Park when I was a kid,” he goes “And you lived, apparently,” I answer. “Did you have a good time?” I ask “Oh yeah.” he smiles. “What’re you doin’
here?” Then, curiously, we get into a long discussion of life and politics and cops and music and government and pensions and rock stars and Catholic school where we both went... “Y’know, I went to Catholic boarding school
for, like, twelve or thirteen years, was an altar boy and
everything...” “And now, in light of the current church pedophile scandals, I’m gettin’ to wonderin’, to maybe worrying... In all my years in the Church, I was never once
abused by any priest or brother...” “Well maybe a few nuns and their rulers...”I append...and continue... “And so I’m maybe gettin’ a bit of an inferiority complex here... ‘What was wrong with me?’ I ask ‘Was I ugly, awkward, too ungainly?’ Jeez...” He laughs... [One general life rule, though broken often by me: Do Not Fuck with Nuns, Hell’s Angels or Cops”] “Hillary lives right up the road,” he says. “And what an asshole! Makes us ferry her around in some big van the county had to buy just for her. Want to see her place?” “Sure,” I say, ever the ‘good cop’ groupie He the ‘rockstarstruck’ good cop I don’t want to give his name out, as I’m pretty sure it was some kind of violation of something or other Violation Sidebar: ...sort of like my eighth grade Christian Brothers teacher, Brother Gary, who gave us the Catholic Church’s condemned list of books and movies and said, “I’m sure there are some things on this list that you are going to want to look into as you get into high school and college.” Thank dog for my Catholic, Christian Brothers education really quite an enlightened bunch, here in California at least education through fear, though an implied and benevolent fear, and relatively easy to deal with if you had half a brain in your body
Anyway, this officer, he was an early mornin pleasure to talk to and the ride was amusing That’s what I really like about coffeehouses and bars and the like [I mean, I’m not really even that fond of espresso and vodka is not really THAT good a drug just a mild pleasant buzz, for a brief moment in time I couldn’t imagine drinking it all day] I’m just particularly fond of the human interactions that go on in such places much akin to what is really valuable about churches and Masonic lodges and dancehalls and societies and clubs and all >>> the people you can meet there one of the most ‘civilized’ benefits of modern ‘civilization’ from my perspective, one of the true heights of civilization, if you will It’s not political power nor wealth nor bigger bombs nor more of this nor more of that just citizens conversing in the palazzo coming up with IDEAS !!!!! So I get in the car and cruise Pleasantville with him for a while, talkin & watchin As we get close to Hillary’s he gets a little cold feet and says, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t get too close. Get me in trouble if we cruise her unnecessarily.” No big deal for me I’m checking out his in-car computer and he gets a vandalism call we go by some store where some teenagers had broken off a car aerial and other somesuch suburban crime wave he tells the guy “well what d’ya expect...leavin’ the car out there all night for all to see” ... in Pleasantville, no less and we drive on he’s 51 I’m 61 he has the gray hair mine only thinning so far pretty much still the ‘blond godddddd’ ;- ) go figure probably because my manager (Michael) takes so much of the heat [Everybody should have a manager! Makes life so much more ... manageable] Anyway back to my ‘tale’ I always get along with most good policemen for some reason might be the glasses or my Buddha-like equanimity (...right, Jorma?) with a few exceptions like Dallas, late sixties, where about ten 9-foot-tall policemen call me back up to the empty arena after a show where I excoriated them publicly and on-stage during our show for not letting people dance and for being unnecessarily rough “You guys were complete assholes.” I hurl out at them “You’ll never work in this town again!” they inveigh “Yeah, well who would ever want to work in this town again. Next time we’ll just play out in a field outside your pathetic city limits...What a bunch of assholes you were to those innocent people. Someone should say it to you...fuck you!!!” I mean I shoulda been killed right then and there again...the glasses? ‘You can’t hit a kid with glasses,’ I was always told in school I always say, ‘If I had been born anywhere else but in San Francisco, I would a-been executed by now...’ or in New Orleans - same time period. We check into a Bourbon Street hotel and I’m carrying one of those SouthEastAsian, graduated panflute-windpipe type instruments I’m holding it like a machine gun though, on my hip, as we check in just to be arrogant, I imagine (as Darby Slick accused the Airplane of seeming, in his book “poster boys for self-esteem” he railed) Later the police check us out and come a knockin’ coincidentally we had been ‘abusing’ our nitrous oxide tank which we carried with us on the road in those halcyon days (it was relatively legal then), and even had it registered in it’s own room. I mean ... who wants a bunch of nitrous huffers in YOUR room late at night, hungering for ‘transport’ when you want to go to bed ...with whomever. So the tank had it’s own room and Bill, our road manager, had rigged an octopus of tubes from the regulator, each with a suicide switch that shut off when you lessened your grip on it, under the influence, as it were - just so people wouldn’t get querulous about THE tube...we had eight tubes - No Waiting! In a fortunate bit of random timing, I had just exited the room by climbing out the window and up to the next story of the hotel, like Spiderman, up the filigreed artistic balcony metal work on the outside of the hotel. When the police broke in, looking for the machine gun, all they found was the tank, a little marijuana ( a major crime in New Orleans at that time) and Jack, ever the last one at the party in those days, if ya know what I mean, Irishman that he is. So he gets busted and gets - guess who- for his defense lawyer in New Orleans...??? Jim Garrison! This part of the story gets long and will be filled out some other day in my “Tales From The Mothership” For now, suffice it to say that the judge in New Orleans wanted to sentence Jack to the maximum, which was pretty maximum in those days - 10 years or something. Garrison waited until the judge was out of town on his vacation and then manipulated the New Orleans Parish legal machinery to get Jack into court on the quick and have the charges reduced to somehow virtually getting Jack off with probation. I mean Jack was literally sitting by the phone in San Francisco for weeks just waiting for Garrison’s call, at which time he would hurriedly board a redeye to N.O. and hustle right into court As they were exiting the courtroom after the legal goings-on, the judge who had belatedly heard of Garrison’s maneuvers and had rushed back to town to try and stop him and make Jack an ‘object lesson,’ came running up the courthouse hall screaming something to the effect of “Garrison, you asshole! What have you done to me now?!?!” Jack was ‘saved’ once again But back to MY story: PAUL GOES INTO THE PIT OF HELL So, on this last tour I get to ride in the police car OOOOOH AND also, when I did the Ground Zero show at the Tribeca Blues bar - old bluesman that I am - me and my son Alexander were treated to a ride in a NYFD fire engine ‘cause we were celebrating and hopefully helping with the return of life to the Tribeca area and supporting the firemen and police and medical people who gave so much at that horrible time [the ride in the engine was a first for me] We go down to the real Ground Zero at the World Trade Center site (another ‘violation’ of some sort, I’m sure) down into the very pit which I was a bit leery of at first but it proved to be an enlightening and thought provoking ride beyond mere words, at the moment Freedom At Point Zero “Rock & Roll isn’t over” ________________________________________________________________________ OK >>> to the next front I’m seeking ideas from you from far and near I’m writing this song called, for the moment, “Teaching The Computers To Dream” and the song seems to be going beyond its initial premise and becoming something else [see current ‘state of the song’ text below] nevertheless I’m seeking your thoughts on what we might be ‘teaching’ computers to do , be, act like a hundred years from today should we all survive the current insanities “TEACHING THE
COMPUTERS TO
DREAM” I stood
on the
Mountain “COME
TO THE
EDGE, SHE
SAID. “I
AM AFRAID,”
I
SAID. “COME
ANYWAY,”
SHE SAID. AND
I DID. AND
SHE PUSHED. AND
I FLEW I
DIDN’T FALL
AS I
EXPECTED TO THROUGH
THE AIR... THROUGH
ALL ___ THE SKY. WE
FLEW !
SHE
& I NOW
HEAR THIS NOW
HEAR THIS ON
THE THRESHOLD
OF FIRE AT
THE DAWN
OF THE
CENTURY I
DARE YOU
TO CARE I
DARE YOU
TO RISK YOUR
LIFE I
DARE YOU
TO BELIEVE IN
ALL THE
THINGS THAT
YOU LEARNED
IN CHILDHOOD
THAT WERE RIGHT I
DARE YOU
TO BELIEVE I
DARE YOU
TO CARE and
I’m TEACHING THE COMPUTERS
TO DREAM TEACHING THE COMPUTERS
IMAGINATION TEACHING
MY COMPUTERS TO
DREAM TEACHING OUR COMPUTERS
TO DREAM
HERE’S _______ TO
THE FUTURE
HERE’S TO LIFE
& OUR CHILDREN
LIFT A
GLASS TO
TOMORROW
HERE’S _______ TO THE
FUTURE Verse
2: LIFE
& LOVE IT’S
LIKE I’M
A PARTISAN
BACK IN
1943 PARACHUTING
INTO NAZI
GERMANY WITH
JUST A
BOOK & A
GUN AND A RADIO OO OH OO
OH
OO OHH
OO....... [Piercing the Reich ... !!!] ON
THE THRESHOLD
OF FIRE AT
THE DAWN
OF THE
CENTURY LET’S
GO ____ TWICE AS FAST MAKE
IT LAST
TWICE AS
LONG LET’S
BURN____ TWICE
AS BRIGHT (LY) SOUNDS
LIKE A
LOVE SONG INTO
THE OCEANIC
WEST INTO
HOMERIC ATMOSPHERES IT’S
THEN THAT
I POSSESS THE
SKY BY
THE DAWN’S
EARLY LIGHT TEACHING THE COMPUTERS
TO DREAM TEACHING THE COMPUTERS
ORGANIC FRICTION TEACHING THE COMPUTERS
TO SCREAM
IN MARY
MAGDALENE-LIKE ABANDON
HERE’S _______ TO
THE FUTURE
HERE’S TO LIFE
& OUR [ALL OUR]
CHILDREN
LIFT A
GLASS TO
TOMORROW
HERE’S _______ TO THE
FUTURE So, that’s the song as of now What I want from you is your ideas of where computers will be/should be/could be in a hundred years What will we be teaching them What will they be teaching us Will there be full frontal nudity tho isn’t that getting a bit old, at least here in SF “Friction makes sparks, sparks make fire Fire makes heat and the heat will endure” You know in the searching days of the sixties the one thing I liked about my brief infatuation with coke was ... the friction not the drug (eventually an I.Q. test - if you’re still doing it, you fail) not the high (jangly, irritating, mouthy) BUT THE FRICTION, the hit the disturbance of elements (and nasal passages) Let you know that you’re alive give some indication of consciousness of ‘other’ as well as ‘self’ Many things get down to friction, don’t they Nowadays I can be exhilarated simply by the fume of a Lucifer - the traditional wooden match a hint of sulfur of hell?... hell spelled backwards is LLEH (Lex Luthor’s Ecological Heaven?) (Louie Louie’s Excellent Helper?) I enjoy and savor the ‘hit’ on my physical body or a simple shot of vodka the Lauren Bacall method straight up no fruit no vegetables no umbrellas right to the point no waiting Friction >>> fucking, backrubs, making love, kissing, stroking, beer, tobacco, cheddar cheese, crab and shellfish, honey, pineapple, salt, sugar, espresso, marijuana, vodka, et al., wind, sea, sun and air, rain, thunder and lightning, raging rivers and ocean waves >>> All potentially toxic substances and all the natural world, the space-time motherfucking continuum It’s a Savage Universe out there LIFE! “I want more life, Fucker,” ___ Roy to his maker, in Bladerunner, & Paul to God tho, in reality, when I was laying, possibly dying, on at least two different hospital deathbeds I was totally unfazed and did enjoyably anticipate the ‘possibilities’ the voyage the edge the concept of the edge the pale beyond the pale Go figure Vaya, Paul San Francisco Calling Little Dragon Publishing © 2002 ... more later
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