Dateline: Kerrville, Texas

May 31, 2012 - Dateline: Kerrville, Texas.  Nearly a month later, the trip fraught with...complication. I left Anchorage May 2nd, but the day before I found my tire flat - nail puncture.  Replacing it the next day, the jack collapsed as i had the tire off and, stepping back from the falling car, I stepped on my prescription glasses... It was an auspicious beginning for the trip.... Trouble in downtown Anchorage on the way out led to an additional $1,000 out of pocket.... for car fixes.  As i mentioned in the May 3rd entry, the trip was glorious, but fast. Before I knew it I was streaking through North Dakota on a rendezvous with the River City Eatery and a great night of music and conversation. From there it was to San Antonio, Texas for a week with my Reclaiming Futures friends, and a spontaneous concert in the Hotel there before returning to pick up my car in Minnesota and for back to back dates in Delft, Minnesota (thanks Bruce Boldt) and St. Cloud (thanks Jeff Poster and everyone in the family. Heading to the east coast after that I sensed trouble outside of Madison on the 14th of May... an overheating engine (the car does have 150,000 miles on it....) and trouble.

 

I was able to nurse the car to Chicago and, on the recommendation of friends Jeff Becker and Jodi Kessler, I got the car into Chicago Car Care (I swear by these lovely yarmulke wearing geniuses!) and rented a car for the Northeast part of the trip.  Failed radiator, body damage, air conditioning out - this trip was not the great money-making follow-up to last Winter's tour...   Did I mention the failed computer hard drive and the lost I Phone in Delft?? Thought not.  But then I was East - Morrisville at the Bees Knees where I was invited to perform with the Celebration of Expressive Arts (CEA) in the Fall, then New Bedford to help on Justice issues after spending the night in Burlington with long-time friend Ken Schatz. After New Bedford, it was New London, the Long Island Ferry and then Greg and Megan Roth in Nassau County for our fundraiser for Hands Up for Kidz.  A great outdoor afternoon had by all.

By then the trip was winding down.  An evening with long-time friend and Croatian recording artist Nenad Bach was a needed wind down from the whole trip and, for some reason, it just felt everything was going to work out - new phone, new computer, sort of new car...  I finished the tour in Burlington, VT. I won't say anything nice about Radio Bean, where I played, except that I was pleased that friends were able to show up for the event. And then, as quickly, I was back on the road in the rental - heading for Chicago and the next phase of the trip...

Since then I've been back to Minneapolis and St. Cloud - visiting relatives and friends and catching a Twins game:

May 31, 2012.jpg

Before heading south to Texas and Kerrville. Reached Austin last night where I thank Paul Schomer and his sister for putting me up for the night. Now, a few more car repairs under my belt, I am ready for renewal.... 

Just a quick note

May 3, 2012 - Just a quick note as I am on the road heading to my gig at River City Eatery in Windom, Minnesota. At Toad River in British Columbia, taking a short break.  The drive down has been replete with wildlife and night scenes - Northern Lights, the Moon, Venus on the horizon, Jupiter up high and in the distance the Midnight Sun....  Black bear, caribou, deer and hawks, coyote and birds, birds, birds... The world is beautiful.... Back to the road.  Check out the gigs list for the upcoming shows this month!


Buddy Tabor

February 6, 2012 - Last night, perhaps around 8 PM, Buddy Tabor quietly passed away. A singer/songwriter with a direct link to the soul.  Alternately irreverent and loving, apolitical and revolutionary, album after album cut through to your heart and your head in simple tones and a gravel voice. Weary without giving in, spiritual without putting it on. Aware. Conscious. The words of a poet, the soul of a dreamer, the hands of a housepainter. Buddy Tabor was complex in his thoughts, simple in how he executed them. His body of work pearls worth holding and remembering, just as he is.

He came to stay at my house in late October and early November last year.  He told me that his oncologist had told him that, if he liked smoking, it wouldn't hurt to keep it up. Buddy's way of saying the gig was up... but he kept playing.  He'd wake up early and play a guitar of mine I'd bought in Mexico - in a town where he had bought one, built by the same man that had built mine - Digging deep for one more song, one more sound, one more expression of a life with an expiration date that was nearing.

He left in early November. The place was spotless. We hugged and said goodbye after I offered him the house again. "I don't think I'll be coming back up" he said, "but thank you." It was the last time I saw him.

We'd had a falling out at one point --neither of us fully sure why - and the years had calcified us a bit.  But I always got a card at Christmas, in his wife Jeannette's hand, from both of them, and I listened to his music still.  When I heard he was sick and in Anchorage, I got a hold of him and suggested we get together. I'm glad we did. We reaffirmed our friendship and talked late into the night a few times, as we had done in the past, though I was in and out those days.  And, when he hesitantly asked me about staying at my place, I immediately said "yes" regretting that I had not offered it first. It was an easy "thank you" for years of knowing each other.

I first met Buddy in the mid-Eighties. I picked him up hitchhiking in Juneau and took him to Douglas.  I was a kid really - a bit scared living in a new city without a clue of what a future might look like - torn between politics and music.  Buddy even then, now more than 25 years ago, had a wizened edge that echoed Townes Van Zandt. He had a cassette tape with a hand printed cover that he might have given me or I might have bought that showed me the magic touch of a musician who was "doing it" - making music.

Our paths crossed from time to time after that. Usually in Juneau at first and then later other places as my own music began to grow. He offered comments and suggestions on my work, I complimented his, and we played a number of shows together starting in the late Nineties and ending around 2006 soon after we had played Folsom Prison.

I can't say much now about all that drove us apart. Though I recall it, its not important. It was just dumb. Stupid that we hadn't played together more. Stupid that we hadn't railed against the system late into the night, like we once had. Just plain dumb.

Why do we do it? Plant our foolish flags of pride in the sand? Damn our present over a past that is, quite literally, done? It is what we do though. And for me it has meant one less friend I might have known that much better. One more nearly-missed farewell.

So farewell Buddy.  Just one more gig to play - and its bound to last forever.          

On the streets of Cairo

January 29, 2012 - A Muezzin's call and beeping horns compete for attention on the streets of Cairo... A haunting sound that called into the streets thousands of Egyptians... Determined marchers slowly filled the squares and the bridges- from all corners of Cairo, from the neighborhoods or homes of those who were martyred, all heading to Tahrir again.  It is a year since the revolution and the revolutionaries have surprised themselves.  In commemorations that many believed would be celebratory acknowledgements of Mubarak's fall, the seeds of discontent have sprouted. And the harvest may well be a renewed revolution.  As people gathered on the 25th and then the 27th and 28th the cries were the same: down with the military, return our revolution... and no more of the past. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, desperately trying to drown out the cries in Tahrir on Friday by turning up their sound system with music and Quranic prayer were denounced as the country edges closer to a new moment in history.

Here in the Mideast and North Africa, history is unfolding. The revolution in Libya trembles, the Syrian regime struggles, the Arab League balances authoritarianism with reform... And all seems to cry "What will our future be?" Populations are growing here. Religious belief the opiate of those who are denied education or opportunity. This is a tinderbox of extremism that need not ever be lit.  Throughout the world desperate despots cling to power - their political position more important than whatever claim of intent drove them to take power.  For in the end so many have only one aim: their own gain.

We have made governance a contest and office a prize. We have lost sight of the purpose, which is to govern, to provide, to make this crazy assemblage of millions of people here and millions there function together. We hide behind nation and religion when we fail, instead of accepting that our path has not worked. We forget to change, to assert, to try something different.  We objectify those who care or who oppose us and we minimize them. We no longer see them as human, we see them as obstacles.  And then there is reaction and death.

There is a better way.  

None of us here are quite sure how this mass of citizens - angered by blocked streets and security crackdowns  - rediscovered this revolution, but they have.  Headlines in the English language dailies speak of it everyday - and sense its momentum.  The SCAF have disappeared from the airwaves and the streets and a tension seems to underscore everything... anticipation in part, fear in part. There is something in the air...  At first I wrote it off as the wishful thinking of friends, but now I have seen it for myself. And I wonder how it will turn out, half hoping I could be here to see that next step. But I leave tomorrow.

Yesterday one friend, Ahmed, said to me "It is a miracle - millions on the street in a city of millions and no police or military to be seen - and yet no crime!"  I warn him that this might be a prelude, a ruse, a hope by the SCAF that by being absent crime will erupt and the people will turn on the revolution.  But we talk about motivation and action and I learn that these revolutionaries have learned from their mistakes.

They are honing their demands - making them clear and simple, they are calculating their marches so as not to disrupt traffic and commerce too much, they are steady and calm and tolerate the Parliament, but do not cede that it was their power that brought that Parliament into being... It is as though there are two tracks - one, shaped by the SCAF that attempts to slightly remold the existing structure to pacify the rage that led to the overthrow of Mubarak one year ago February 11, and one that is demanding a free Egypt and goes forward now without regard to the efforts of the SCAF. They have learned that when one side plays this as a game, the other must rewrite the rules. And they are becoming very, very good at this rewriting...

Late evenings give way to magic... a poet, Mustapha, chants in classical Arabic and we are mesmerized by his hands, his eyes, his voice.  Passion for politics gives way to ribald joking only to snap back with the mention of a Salafi or the Brotherhood or the latest Coptic killing.... The smoky haze of Cairo obscures nothing. Inhaled it gives clarity, expelled it is the scent of change.

Car alarms

January 25, 2012 - Car alarms and the odd cacophony of horns wake me like a distant atonal symphony - backed by the haunting refrain of the muezzin calling believers to mid-morning prayers, voices below in the street talk in high-pitched Arabic, and the quiet thud, thud, thud of a tennis game echo from the courts nearby. The Revolution's Anniversary dawns in Cairo. 

I'd stepped off the plane two days before to the burnt smell of Cairo's air - caused by the torching of rice patties and the burning of coal. Its a smell that I will forever connect to that first visit some four months before, when this was new to me and the task daunting.  I arrived on the day of the first sitting of a nearly fairly elected Parliament or People's House.  Each member of the 508 person body took their oath to the constitution - though some Salafis added a line to their oath that said they swore it as long as it did not contradict the Word of God... A move that led to outrage and declamation from the more secular and liberal members of the body. Speeches honoring the martyrs of the last twelve months - over 800 dead over 6000 injured were contrasted with thank you telegrams to their executioners... the contradictions were manifest, but the promise still real.

Today its estimated that as many as a million people will attend events in Tahrir Square, on one hand celibrating the change to a new government, an overthrow of an old regime and the promise of a new beginning.  While still others will March for the unfulfilled promise of those first heady days of January 2011.  When anything seemed possible - even the imagining of a new, free future.

But power intervenes.  And personality ends u facing personality, party against party as those that once marched hand-in-hand (or as they say here: "on one hand") find themselves at odds - struggling.  So how did it all turn out after the House elections? The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and its allies gained roughly 47% of the vote. Their once allies and now adversaries on the Islamic front, the Salafi Nour Party and its allies came in second with as many as 29% of the vote. They were followed by a virtual tie between the Egyptian Bloc and the old Wafd Parties - the liberal stalwarts of this election - each with about 10% of the number.  The remainder of the seats fell to Islamic and revolutionary parties that split their votes and consequently their power in the first breath of an election. As many as 13 parties will be represented in the new Parliament: a prescription for inaction and chaos that serves the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) well.

About three weeks ago, as almost a metaphor for the liberals loss of hope, Jimmy Carter came to town to pronounce all is well in Egypt. His comments were perceived by many here as a thinly veiled bid to preserve his Camp David Accords from the potential rise of Islamic forces in the nation.  He exacted promises from the parties and in the end wrote a report and held a press conference where he legitimized for all the false claim of Tantawi, the head of the SCAF, that the photos of the women stripped and dragged through Tahir square was a fabrication. For those of us who saw the videorather than just the photo, it was a shocking travesty of leadership to hear this former Nobel Peace Prize winner say this.... For the Egyptian liberals who not only witnessed it, but who documented reliably over 500 cases of fraud and as many as 900 violations of election law, it was unconscionable.

The process of a revolution does not happen over night.  In Libya yesterday remnants of Gaddafi's old regime have fought back. In Afghanistan, the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban has ended in a stalemate of civil war and suicide bombing. In the United States, we fell into Civil War some 85 years after our Revolution and change is still a struggle.  In Egypt this Revolution or what Thomas Friedman has called an "uprising" is far from consolidated and very, very fragile. The military carefully steps forward trying to control its economic clout and preserve its members from prosecution. The play the Muslim Brotherhood off against others with a promise of power - for the MB have thirsted to rule for a long time - while at the same time ensuring fraud holds them in check by elevating their rivals the Salafis... Sidelining the liberals who would prosecute these so-called "heroes of the revolution" for their crimes against their people, their 12,000 political prisoners still held and their still extant emergency detention law.

And so today while some celebrate a Revolution others call for its completion and even some for its renewal. It is an auspicious day here, and the future can be found in Tahrir Square.  But will we see it?

State College

December 3, 2011 - In State College there is a mural on a wall on Hiester Street.  Past greats, legends that have made this sports city a Mecca for college sports, images all found in "Inspiration", the work of artist Michael Pilato.  Where Jerry Sandusky once sat, here near the center toward the bottom of the mural, you now see a chair, empty except for a blue ribbon memorializing victims of pedophilia. It wasn't an easy decision, but one that had to be made. This blog has other references to those abused - a link below and in the links section to Karen Holt - but a link is rarely enough for a voice silenced by abuse.

Wrapped in the mountains of Pennsylvania, snuggled into the hills waiting for the coming winter, State College sits centrally in Pennsylvania and for much of the past month has been at the epicenter of sports talk.  One by one new revelations in other places slip out. Syracuse? Maybe. And where next?

It wasn't the scandal that had brought me there - though I seem to have a knack for finding myself in the midst of it. I'd come to State College to play a House Concert, hosted by my Kerrville friend Laurel Zydney, her husband Andrew and son Ben (my roadie for the show).  It was a soothing night, though the trauma was ever-present in conversations. Tired from too much travel, I was able to sit on a stool in their living room with thirty or so guests in attendance and together we embarked on a bit of a journey - reflection, humor, and a touch of sadness.  All taking us away form the reality of their past month. In the end the conversations - during the show, the breaks, and after - snaked into the late evening and early morning hours ending with a reconnect to an old Alaskan friend Michael Pelikan.  It is the nature of these evenings to remember the connections between each of us. And so it was with this night and has been with the others on this tour.  It soothes me, these moments of grace. These connections across distance, time and place.

I'm on the road again today after a brief stop in Kansas City and tonight it will be New York and more connections.  For now that is enough.


Kansas City

December 1, 2011 - I talked to a taxi driver from Iran last night.  Zoroastrian, he left in 1977. I said "Before the revolution there?" He answered, "We do not call it that"...  We drove from a bar here in Kansas City back to our hotel after an electrifying conversation with a bartender named Bo who gave our cynical view of America a hip-check of youthful enthusiasm.  We adjusted our thoughts accordingly and wondered if an American politics was still possible.

And, in that taxi, that guy's enthusiasm still seemed with us. Sitting twenty minutes in the cab after we had arrived at our destination, we were caught in a new conversation that always ended with a question: "Okay, good night.... But let me ask you one more thing..." he'd say.  My friend Randy and I would try and answer - not always from the same perspective - and that question would become another dialogue... a hopefulness for the Mid East, for America, for a future for his three daughters.  We parted ways with Sy, gripped by possibility.

Across the sea in Egypt a violent week had given way to peaceful elections that stunned even the Egyptians.  No one killed in the first of many stages... Millions voting in lines snaking back as much as three kilometers. Banter and dialogue among those who opposed each other not about hate or anger, but about pure politics and a process few had ever imagined they would see.  Was there vote buying and fraud?  Yes. Ballot irregularities and administrative failures? Of course.  But the papers are reporting them and the voters are documenting them in an unprecedented outpouring of hand held recordings and videos posted all over social networking sites and in the media.  It is in many way s a transparent election that, because it is drawn out, will likely end up more poorly than expected for those caught cheating. This is a people that will not quietly accept documented manipulation after waiting so long. I have faith in this outcome... I believe, in the end, the average Egyptian will be heard - regardless of the type of government they choose. 

Here in Kansas City the world suddenly feels possible again.