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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.
"If I Could Hold
The Thought Of You"
'Poet, Help My Heart'
"If I Could Hold The Thought Of You" is a song that arose from writing
a pair of screenplays about the self-named Billy Bonney (later named
' "Billy the Kid' ") and Paulita Maxwell, daughter of the one-time largest
land-owner in the United States and its Territories, Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell (a fur-trapping friend of Kit Carson's). The screenplays are titled
'Billy and Paulita: The Lincoln County War" and "Billy and Paulita: The Long Road Home". Their actions span 1877 into 1881 in New Mexico Territory as that sprawl of frontier is the setting for constant conflict,
nobility, and treachery.
Billy and Paulita are each exceptional, driven to somehow stand out, whether as warrior or artist, and their coming together is something even more substantial. In the song "If I Could Hold ..." from June 1881, Billy, then 21 and escaped from hanging in the town of Lincoln, tries to express how
much Paulita, the child of theirs she carries, and their refuge in Fort Sumner mean to him. Billy has been an essential orphan in "this old Wild West" since age 14, when his mother, a laundry-owner fond of Sir Walter Scott, died of tuberculosis. He's braved every test decided by courage and resourcefulness. Paulita watched as her father's millions acres were lost to dealings of the Santa Fé Ring. You can see he wit and passion and inviolability in her eyes. I love these two and their struggles.
I love too the intensity and lyricism that Kidd and Morikeba give to this track.The Thought Of You" is a song that arose from writing
Mohammad Iqbal is a giant of writing and statesmanship whose history I got to know through working with Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and his son, Ustad Shafqat, and Glenn Spearman and Dhyani Dharma to produce an album that they made as a group named Urna (the Urdu word for flight)
in 1995 at Sharkbite Studio in West Oakland, California. The album became
titled Journey To The Beloved. It remains unreleased.
Urna and the Journey were my springboards into Iqbal. Born in 1877 and deceased in 1938, Iqbal is complement to Bergson, Einstein and Yeats. His
Message from the East, circa 1922, answers Goethe's Divan for Hafiz, the 14th-century Sufi poet, a book that the German man of letters, concerned like Iqbal with many aspects of science and of being, published around 1822. We can learn a lot from relations between Iqbal, Goethe, and Hafiz.
Iqbal guides the former mujihadi, Ahmed, in my play "We Are Rainbows
Dancing before Mountains Explode". Ahmed's fire, intelligence, sincerity, sense of humor, and idealism owe to my impressions of Ustad Shafqat Ali
Khan, one who's become, I think, an artist comparable to his father.
'Poet, Help My Heart' is Ahmed's appeal to resolve the knots of love rubbing and roiling between him and DurgaKali.
"How many guys are playing on this one?" David Farrell asked as we listened to my mastering of this track last month. "One. Again," I said.
David is a five-time Grammy-winner for his engineering. He's worked on over 700 albums. His "salt of the earth" (John Snyder) is 180 degrees opposed to flattery. He said about Hamid on this track, however: "Keeping that many parts of a drum-set in the same tone is very difficult.... He's
like an orchestra!"
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