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.
Reading John Sinclair
A new collection on Bandcamp. Seven poems by John, read by me, and four excerpts from "It Must Be Love (Word Passed Down ...)" with Kidd Jordan and Morikeba Kouyaté.
Just before Christmas a half-year ago—December 22, 2020—John Sinclair and I Zoom-recorded an exchange for his Show on Radio Free Amsterdam. John offered the opportunity to talk about my then-new album of tracks from six prior albums, The Time We Have (Meld #1)--the first of many Melds, I hope. I wanted to read poems by John on his show. I wanted to sample and highlight the quality and range of John’s poetry over its span of more than 60 years--because, I think, his poetry
is great in itself and because it provides an invaluable and incisive panoply of leading lights from its times. You can go direct to a great
cataloging of John's books and albums on a web-page of Radio Free Amsterdam. You can also head on over to the phenomenal riches laid out for listeners and readers at John's main Bandcamp page.
Offbeat Magazine of New Orleans kindly printed notice of what became two episodes of 'The John Sinclair Show' on Radio Free Amsterdam. You can link to the two shows here.
John, as you can hear in our talk on Bandcamp, has worked at being a poet since age 16 in Flint, Michigan. He was into Charles Olson and Charlie Patton at the same time, even then. He's always sought to apprehend and advance the boldest, most free and exacting expressions of our culture. He's always been about “further!”
Decades in Detroit, New Orleans, Amsterdam ... Championing both Archie Shepp and the MC5, co-founding the White Panther Party and taking the 10-year bid for two joints ... the spirit of radical and dare-to-do compassion that directly inspirited John Lennon's voice ... and keeping on-keeping on wherever his unending tour has touched base
among friends and the young and here-to-live-and-learn.
Check out, please, the tremendous ASSEMBLY of books and albums of that John has readly for the world, this year in which he turns 80.
The poems of John's below come from those I read last December 22. You can catch the whole line of them through Bandcamp and click to them individually, too. Reading John Sinclair!
1. ‘Good-bye, Hound-Dog Taylor'
Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett) at the
1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival, photo by Doug Fulton.
5. John digs into the Library at the University of Michigan at Flint, 1957, age 16 ... "These two guys [Charles Olson, Robert Creeley] shaped how I think and write."
7. ‘Love
8. "Tell us about the process, John ..." " ... Sometimes it's a gift of God that comes down perfect. Sometimes you have to work at it. [John laughs like a rippling creek] Every poet knows that."
John performs his 'Homage to John Coltrane" in the second Poetry Ball at Chuck Perkins' Café Istanbul
in New Orleans, February 2013. Video by Paul Punzo. See Byron Coley's tribute.
Again, see much more from John on this page of the Radio Free Amsterdam website. Again, check out the riches to be navigated from his main Bandcamp page.
Lagniappe: four excerpts from my poem about John and about another
inspiring friend, Chuck Kinder: 'It Must Be Love (Word Passed Down Through
Forbidden Radio)'.
10. 'The voices beside your pillow / Friends sharing secrets past midnight / ...
11. 'What is this America / ... Horns of devotees that shower us
with blessings / ...'
12. 'John brought ... Chuck brought ...'
13. 'What is that sound abideth night? ... Like a bell. Like a knife. Like Gods' own bells.... It must be love / ...'
