From Salon de la Guerre’s 2018 album, Yipano.
Posted in Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Funny Drunk, Music, piano, Salon De La Guerre, Yipano | Leave a Comment »
You put the juice on the table
You put the spoon deep
In the soup
You watch a sun that’s been angry all day
Put its anger to bed,
In the purple sea.
Peace:
It’s a different kind of struggle
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You say it’s more than a rose
Four thousand years ago
They pierced your nose
You were ready to marry
That’s how the Bible story goes
And now the father Abe
Don’t know what to do
The bride’s got a nose ring
And also a tattoo
The dreams of the fathers
No longer within
The values they taught
Just a picture on skin
A memory for those
Whose values will never win
The minute you met her
On the gypsum colored street
You’d lost favor in gold
Lost the flavor in meat
You saw she had a ring
And you know he had one too
The father loves your woman, son
But he gave her to you
To pass his ideals
to his blood in the sand
And then far away he flies
Not knowing where they land
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Remember, Republicans: Some lie you heard or repeated in church last week about Donald Trump’s fake victory in 2020 is almost certainly going to inspire the next Timothy McVeigh. I hope it doesn’t, but if it does, and people die, including children, ask if it had anything to do with your cowardice, ignorance and pride, or your inability to separate morals from identity (and your always amazing inability to know the difference).
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »
It’s a week of false equivalencies: When right-wing rioters infiltrated the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election results, and Main Street conservatives at home said it was no big deal because Black Lives Matter protests last summer led to looting and rioting in American cities. We should remember that BLM was fighting against racism. Its doctrine was not violence. There are plenty of videos showing activists condemning the looting. The movement in essence asked that the Constitution to live up to its promise.
Right-wingers, on the other hand, were trying to destroy the Constitution by overturning a fair election. Very different.
But there are practical reasons for these false equivalencies: If you can brand your opponents as baby killers, looters and rioters, you no longer have accountability for anything you do. You’ve given yourself permission and broad template for any moral transgression that suits you, including death threats against public servants, violence against public health defenders, libeling of rape victims, … for your past support for illegal foreign invasions, torture, and now, evidently, even against treason against the U.S. and its form of government. Conservatives do not care about baby killing (see Sandy Hook) or civil disorder (see the Bundy standoff). They do, however, like the power those words give them to pursue their selfish interests. It’s a gateway drug to the sociopathy they refer to as freedom.
Posted in Guns, Politics | Tagged Capitol, Congress, Donald Trump, riot, sedition | Leave a Comment »
Could it be that you’ve started to build most of your belief systems around every utterance of a cult leader, a man who just tried to overthrow the U.S. government, a man accused by 26 women of sexual assault, because most of your other beliefs up until now turned out to be too fragile and poorly thought out to hold onto in the first place? You’re starting to fit the model of the people who joined the NXIVM group a little too closely.
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Thoughts on Ted Cruz’s attempt to protest the certification of electoral college votes that would put Joe Biden in the White House, using a specious argument that since Republicans don’t believe in the truth of the votes, there must be an alternate reality:
There is no third option when you’re pitting truth against non-truth, Ted Cruz. There is no compromise value between a fact and a lie. Those trying to fix reality to incorporate their lies are living in their own hell and asking us to burn with them.
Posted in Politics | Tagged electoral college, Joe Biden, presidential election, Ted Cruz | Leave a Comment »
Salon de la Guerre’s 25th album, Bring An Open Mind to a Broken Heart, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and other platforms where music is still sold.
The project started as an experiment–to see if I could use country music instruments to play microtonal music. In other words, I wanted to meld Gram Parsons and Harry Partch. I even bought a lap steel guitar to try out my hypothesis that something new and wonderful might result.
As I progressed, I learned a couple of things: One, instruments associated with country music such as the banjo and lap steel guitar can hurt your ears if sampled and played in rapid succession. And then I was reminded of a golden rule of music, which is that you shouldn’t let a bunch of fuzzy sound effects get in the way of a good song.
The result is an album of arty country experiments sitting jeek by chowl with a number of more conventional country numbers and lap steel performances. It’s not exactly what I’d intended, but I still think a lot of it came out sounding fresh and new. I hope you agree.
As always, the album was composed, produced, arranged and performed by yours truly. That’s me playing the lap steel guitar, banjo, acoustic guitar and keyboard, while Apple GarageBand’s software provides string, bass and drum backup.
The cover art work was created by my longtime friend Corey B. Sanders.
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged banjo, Bring an Open Mind to a Broken Heart, country music, Gram Parsons, Harry Partch, lap steel guitar, microtonal, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
You hold up the window to capture sky
You hold it to capture blue
It’s somebody else’s morning there
And it’s getting ahead of you
The night still moans her labor
As she put in her e-string
Her menopause is moody
And her bones are brittle things
And her calories she’s counting
And she does another plank
And the morning is a picture
That you keep inside a tank
And you’re going to finish that novel
But the words just won’t come out
It’s about a boxer who’s beaten
They knocked his molars out
And you could either take the stimulants
Or hear that country song
You know when you take either
That you’ll feel just how you want before long
She said when the old song touched her heart
She felt again like a child
And it made me smile to set her free
And see her feet turn wild
Cause the purest love I can think of:
When we set each other free
And each of us ask the hardest question:
“Will I ever come back to me?”
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Poetry, Will I Ever Come Back To Me? | 2 Comments »
My head and pencil neck
Hang longingly over the
Syringe-like highway dividing lines
Speeding past; morphine
Nightmares; an ominous windshield
I’ve been wearing black
Socks in the morning
The coffee I cuddled
In my tonsils
Gropes around
Like the failure of alcohol
I’m going on furlough up north
Up away from pedestrians
And pederasts,
Just above the street corner
Cymbal music, a cut
Above the freon suffocation
To the fake pastoral fields
Away from my siblings
Away from the church
To the fake pastoral fences
In a car with a passenger
I don’t know
Away to anywhere
I took the white hot pills
To ensure that before I reached
My destination I would not fall
Asleep on the road, killing us both
But this time they made
Me ache; as my foot
Dips into the combustion
I squeeze my eyes
I’m awake and more in pain
And acutely aware
That I’m as fragile as glass.
–Eric Rasmussen, 1990
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Caffeine Headache, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
Beauty is Imperfection 