How lucky we are to know GREAT COMPANY!
Above, I'm a happy fella with Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul in Little Haiti, Miami, January of 2023. after Maryse and I brought computers and JAMBARS for students in Haiti. Photo by Maryse.
Mme. Franck Paul, Maryse's aunt, now 87, is founder and Principal of College Canapé-Vert in Port-au-Prince. Click to visit our Partners in education at stickingupforchildren.com. Again, many are those who do good ... without an iota of A.I.!
Leftward, lights are strung about a Live Oak in New Orleans City Park by a Park volunteer, Christmas-time of 2022. We make these freely adorned lights Symbol for the TRACK-A-DAY feature that's staring on July 30. 2023. Over 100 songs and poems for music have come to me since 1988. What better can I do than give back from the brilliance that partner musicians have delivered?
First track offered on the Sticking Up For Children (SUFC, don't-cha-know?) Jukebox is "Bobee (What A Spirit Walks That Way)" from Roger Lewis' album ALRIGHT!. We start with three excerpts from Roger, Herlin Riley and Kirk Joseph of the Rivers Answer Moons band and then. come Wednesday July 2, "Bobee ..." with Herlin and me on vocals.
Happy as we may be to enjoy great families and friends, wherever we live, we know by now, July of 2023, that we, the working-class and middle-class people of the world, are under Global
Attack. Those Corporations that lack conscience (the 100 Strategic Partners of the World Economic Forum for prime examples) have embarked from 9/11/01 into " 'COVID-19' " forward
on programs to use Big Lies and 21st-century technologies (technologies that are our classes' inventions) to reduce our freedoms more into mass enslavement or mass 'Sudden Death Syndrome'. Our genius, however, rebels and re-arises with irresistible compassion and creativity. My pieces in the Flipping the Script blog over on the WeAreRevolutions website and pieces on the Stands the Human Being blog and Substack are offerings that combine with many, many--millions unto billions--who REALLY 'Improve' humanity through their insights and resistance.
ALBUMS. Three from I/R Records are among the top 25 Jazz albums charted by Roots Music
ReportS for the year 2022. Listen on Bandcamp and Download in full fidelity there.
The World Economic Forum and its 100 Strategic
Partners among especially exploitative Corporations of the Neo-Colonial world are waging a War Against Humanity that has accelerated over the past four years under covers of " 'COVID' " and " 'Climate Change' ". Call it the WEF WAH for short.
The series of WEF Files profiles, offered here through my Stands the Human Being blog and Substack presents leading Agenda Contributors to the WEF as extremely driven and energetic individuals ... who have become pathological imbeciles in their services to the WEF's global Techno-Fascism, the WEF's 21st-century 'New World Order' of enslavement by Banks of the Northern Hemisphere.
Among the profiled are J. Michael Evans of Ali Baba (and once of Goldman Sachs), Helen Hai of Binance and the United Nations, and more obvious subjects such as Bill Gates, Chrystia Freeland, and Justin Trudeau.
"Prosecute 'Em!", cataloging crimes against masses of
humans during our " 'COVID-19' " era, is part of my
'Stands the Human Being' blog and Substack.
You are one / Light among / Many Lights, / Ever-changing, / Invaluable, / And meant to shine / Ev'ry moment of our lives.
Great Company
Big Title
Glenn Spearman, Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, and Dhyani Dharma in a triptych by Aristide Phillips for his
video of URNA's third track for the album Journey To The Beloved, "Raga Puriya Kalyan / Solitude".
Melissa Gregoy Rue, Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, Don Paul, Alex de Grassim Rick G. Nelson and Dave Rue
at one session for soundtracking two of Melissa's films, Marigny Recording Studio, New Orleans, June 2018.
A combination of images in tribute to my longtime neighbor and regular benefactor, 2019, on the
occasion of Lawrence's publishing a novel at age 100!
Two from Ohio: Ric Sayre....
And David Meggyesy.
Celia ('Woman with Big Hands') in Nicaragua, 1987.
Hortencia in Brasil.
Ustad Salamat
The exhibition perplexed Salamat.
We’d gone to the DeYonge Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for show titled something like ‘Great American Portraits: From the Colonial to the Modern’. Or ‘America’s Gentry: The Landed and the Larded at Rest and at Play’ … Something like that.
The show was assuredly extensive. It filled rooms with scenes of estates’ owners and their horses. Breeches and riding-crops. Ladies and their daughters posed in ruffles and on settees with the subdued vitality of
waxen wreathes. Fox-hunts and hounds and more gentlemen behatted
on steeds. Statues made their advent with more established prosperity.
Pages from the Declaration of Independence and then the Bill of Rights.
Gilbert Stuart, Reynolds, Chapman, … Smoke clears after the British
sack Washington to reveal more Parlors of Alabama, Virginia, and the Poconos, Colonels and Merchants and their highly coiffed wives and nobly
poised sons in backgrounds of purple, pink and pastel….
Within the ninth-or-so such Room Salamat looked at me. He of the Punjab, the northern Sub-Continent—India and then Pakistan—was then
60. He was about five-foot six. He was brown and rounded face was often
a reflection of light. His dark eyes were deep and quick to register nuances.
Salamat and his older brother Nazakat had been dual prodigies, celebrated
in Delhi and Lahore. Satjiyat Ray had chosen Salamat to be voice of “The Music Room” when the singer was 22. Over the past two decades the honorific of Ustad for this artist was universal and he was huzzahed with
honors across Europe. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was his nephew and pupil.
By 1995, Salamat’s voice and artistry were richer and more expressive,
more capable of startling profundity in the Alap and marathon runs in
the Tintal, than ever.
“Where are the musicians?” Salamat asked in this our ninth-or-so Room
of expensive portraits.
His own family and its Shem Gerasi tradition dated from the court of Akbar the Great in the early 17th century.
“Ah, my friend, “ I said, smiling. “You can’t expect that here.”