Passing Behind Our Backs
Edward Curtin
I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew, or to be more accurate, in ways I didn’t reflect upon except in superficial ways.
He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes, uncanny dribbling, and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form.
The captain and point-guard of the Boston Celtics from 1950-1963, Cousy led the Celtics to six NBA titles, made thirteen all-star teams, and changed professional basketball from a stodgy, boring, and slow game into a fast-paced spectacle, entertainment as much as sport.
He was a wizard with a basketball and set the stage for Guy Rodgers, “Pistol Pete” Maravich, Bob Dylan, Magic Johnson, and Steve Nash, among other tricksters, modern Hermes.
Over the years I have written a great deal on a very wide-range of topics, but it wasn’t until a friend from high school recently sent me Gary Pomeranz’s fascinating book, The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, that something clicked for me.
A few weeks previously, as the weather had turned spring-like, I had started to shoot hoops at our basket in the driveway.
The warm air, the feel of a loose flowing freedom as I dribbled and shot, brought me back to the days when I spent so many hours playing in the Bronx schoolyards of my youth, perfecting my skills in what I can only call a fanatical way. Rushing to the schoolyard after school and on Saturday mornings to be the first there, to command the court, to compete with the older guys and beat their asses.
Traveling around the city’s best basketball neighborhoods to play and make my mark. The endless hours in gyms. The search for perfection. The adrenaline rush, the thrill, the joy of the perfect pass, the sweet swish of the net from a shot you had practiced a thousand times. From the age of eleven until twenty-three, basketball was central to my life and identity. It was my passion.
It was during these recent days shooting around that I started to have almost nightly dreams of my younger years, playing basketball in high school and then in college on a Division I scholarship. They were very vivid dreams, and at the time, I didn’t understand why I was having them. And they were starting to annoy me, as persistent and weird dreams can do. Begone, dread spirits! Yet I knew they were telling me to heed their tales told when no one was looking, only this dreamer in the night.
While this was happening, I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and his recent release of “Murder Most Foul,” his powerful song about the assassination of President Kennedy, wherein he brilliantly accuses elements within the US government and intelligence forces of killing the president in cold blood, while framing Lee Harvey Oswald for the deed.
I had written about Dylan before, loved his music, and found him an intriguing if enigmatic character, a Houdini of song.
“Murder Most Foul” seemed to burst out of Dylan after decades of avoiding straight-forward political themes. It struck me that with this song he had ripped off the masks he had been wearing for decades, as if he were Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey, shrugging off his beggar’s rags and announcing to the suitors of his wife Penelope that the gig was up and they were going down.
It seemed to me that Dylan was coming full-circle, as if he were coming home to take revenge on the killers who had scarred his youth, as they did mine and so many others’. “Like a musician, like a harper, when/ with quiet hand upon his instrument,” Odysseus lets the arrow sing, Dylan reaches back to sing:
The day they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done
Slowly it dawned on me that everyone’s life has a shape, as if it were a drawing or story or song. And that if we pay close attention and see through all the snares and temptations meant to divert us from our true paths, we will find our beginnings in our ends and without directions we will find our way home.
It is very hard to explain to someone who didn’t know you once upon a time long before you met, how important certain activities were to you, what they meant and still mean in the deepest recesses of your psyche. How they shaped you, or better still, how you used them to bend your life when you strung your bow so effortlessly to hit the target that you aimed for. Or thought you were aiming for.
My life in basketball shaped the man that I became, but my wife only knows the aftermath since she met me when I had taken a long twenty-five-year vacation from basketball.
Like Cousy, sitting and talking with Pomeranz, or Dylan sharpening his arrows and letting them fly in his new song False Prophet, I could say:
You don’t know me darlin’ – you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no False Prophet – I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
While I am half-way through reading the Cousy book, I get its drift, where it’s heading. In conversations with Pomeranz, he is hoping to be inspired to understand the journey that has left him, an old man, frightened, alone, and approaching death in a large house in Worcester, Massachusetts, trying to understand, not only his fraught relationship with his black Celtic teammate, Bill Russell, but what his life has been all about, the court wizardry and cheers, the years on the road, the applause and awards, the championships and the price they exacted. He went to the basketball wars and won, came home, but now wonders what home really means.
Unlike Odysseus, he only has ghosts to slay. His wife is dead, and no suitors occupy the great house of shades. There is no one to kill except his regrets.
My friend, Wayne, who sent me the book, spent three years in high school with me studying Greek, and over the course of those years, we translated Homer’s The Odyssey line by line. We were also basketball teammates.
Odysseus, of course, was the ultimate trickster, the man of many wiles and disguises, what the nymph Calypso, who held Odysseus captive for seven years on her island Ogygia, called “a rascal.”
Like Houdini, Odysseus was able to escape this phantom island with the help of the messenger and trickster Hermes.
Like Cousy, Odysseus was the Houdini of the ancient world, the hero who could escape any trap and thread an arrow through the smallest space to defeat the enemy. Cousy’s fierceness on the court is legendary; his poker face hid the killer instinct, like Odysseus with his wily habit of standing with downcast eyes to disguise his intent. Cousy could thread a pass between an opponent’s eyes without them blinking. They often never knew what hit them.
I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan’s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his memory of hearing the news of the death of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. Maravich was Cousy’s heir, and the bloodline connects to Dylan also, a Houdini with words. It was January 5, 1988:
My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz.
He was something to see – mop of brown hair, floppy socks – the holy terror of the basketball world – high flyin’ – magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket –
dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind.
Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete’s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen.
The news of one creative spirit’s death gave birth to another creative spirit’s gift to life. (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father’s death.)
It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them …. The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there’s no end to things.”
No one wants to end, to fade away. To not be recognized. To die and be forgotten. To fail to make their mark. Not Dylan, Cousy, Maravich, me, nor you. We all wish to become who we feel we were meant to be. To fulfil the creative dreams we had when young and not to waste our lives in trivial pursuits. Years pass and people often ask with Dylan in “Shooting Star”:
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
I keep thinking: who is you for you? For me?
When I was a young boy, I wanted to stand out, to be exceptional, to be one-of-a-kind, an individual. Basketball became my obsession and Bob Cousy my idol. I wanted to be a shooting star, a dribbling star, a passing star. I watched him on television, studying him. His every move inspired me to imitate it.
I would spend hours every day practicing behind the back passes, first right-handed, then left, against the wall where I had marked an x in chalk. I worked on my peripheral vision, so I could see the whole court and control the show.
In the hidden recesses of my basement, I used tape to mark spots on the floor where I spent hour after hour dribbling behind my back, first this way and then that, past imaginary opponents. I made dribbling glasses with black tape out of my mother’s old sunglasses.
Worked on circling the ball behind my back either way. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I devoted myself to perfecting my basketball skills as a point guard. Being like Bob Cousy. Being the one whose magic feats were the talk of the town the following day.
One day, I met and talked with Paul Newman on the street after high school basketball practice. When I was leaving, he called me Fast Eddie, which to my mind added to the mystique I felt as a trickster on the hardwood.
I felt fast and loose like Paul’s character Eddie Felson in The Hustler when he was on a roll with his cue stick, “You don’t have to look, you just Know. You make shots that nobody has ever made before. I can play that game the way…. Nobody’s ever played it before.”
That was my goal and the impetus behind my fanatical devotion to practice. I loved it, there was joy in it, but there was also a driven quality to my quest.
For whom? Only you?
I was easily bored by conventional life and conventional basketball. But the conventional world surrounded me. It was in school, church, the way people talked and walked; it seemed like people were straight-jacketed, which they were. Blake’s mind-forged manacles. I sensed people were dissemblers, and that lies were the essence of social life.
Nowhere was this truer than on the basketball court in high school and college where the coaches had their systems and their rules and discouraged innovation, as if it would reveal them to be artists in disguise, weird, less-than-manly men who couldn’t run a tight ship.
They always rewarded those who obeyed them and kept within the strict rules of the system. Creativity frightened them. The old ways sufficed. It was just like society, and though Cousy had broken through and been idolized for doing so, he had retired from the Celtics in the spring of 1963, while the high school and college programs were stuck in the past.
I felt imprisoned. I wanted to bust out and play free. Be free. It was like the classics that I studied in school: the lesson was always that the exploits you read about were things of the past, and now we were civilized gentlemen who must learn the rules of the game and play by them. Tradition. But the rules were suffocating me.
The rules of the game had almost brought the world to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The rules of the game had created a system of war and racism that was badly broken, resulting in the savage killing not only a President who had undergone a radical spiritual conversion toward peace-making, but four little black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday September 15, 1963, a year to the day after I started college with my trivial young man’s dreams of being the Cousy of college hoops.
The rules of the game would soon be violated by Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, when he would shock Pete Seeger and others with his song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a radical break with strictly political songs in favor of pure dazzling poetry in song. That was a Cousy moment, poetry in motion, Houdini out of the locked box, dancing “beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.”
Bob Dylan, whose life and career follows Odysseus’ trajectory, ended his 2017 Nobel Award Lecture with the first line of the Odyssey: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”
My friend Wayne and I, together with all our high school classmates, had memorized those lines in Greek. They were ingrained in us for life, as they have been for Dylan.
But tell what story? For whom? Only you?
Dylan has told so many. Here’s one I have for you, one you never heard. Here are the opening lines; let’s call it Book I, not that a Goddess intervened, but it was, in Odysseus’ words, the beginning of the end of my “clean-cut game.”
A month after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I played my first college basketball game. In those days, all freshman were required by the rules of the game to play one year of freshman basketball before playing varsity. This was the day I had been waiting for since the sixth grade when my dedication to basketball began.
My blood was flowing fast, I had no fear, and was ready to use all the skills I had spent years honing. The stands were packed. My proud family sat a few rows up behind our bench, my parents and four of my sisters, two of whom were quite young at eight and eleven years old.
The game was close, back and forth it went. With about a minute and a half left, we were leading by two points. The other coach called a time out with the ball in their possession.
In the huddle, our coach assigned me to guard the opponent’s best player, a six-foot-four inch jumping jack who was highly acclaimed and a very good player by the name of Albie Grant. I was five-foot-eleven, and beside my offensive skills, was a tough and tenacious very well-conditioned defender who took pride in sticking to an opponent like glue.
They threw the ball in and screened for Grant. He got the ball and I got in his face. He went up for a jump shot from about 20 feet out, and since I was not going to block his shot, I did what all good defenders do, I got my hand in front of his eyes. But he made the shot anyway, and the referee called a shooting foul on me. But I never touched him. It was a terrible call, but I could do nothing about it.
Behind my back, I could hear my coach cursing me out with every name in the book – you fucking bastard, you shit, etc. He could be heard throughout the arena. The crowd went silent. He kept cursing me out and my already sweaty, red face must have turned purple. I felt on fire. He took me out of the game, a game I had played throughout. He kept cursing at me.
I sat away from him on the bench and he came down and stood over me, calling me every name in his limited vocabulary, you fucking this, you fucking that. I looked at him in rage.
The game continued. Grant made the free throw and we lost by one point.
As we walked off the court to the locker room door at the end, he kept screaming invective at me. I could feel my rage swelling. My family was descending from the stands and could hear it all. I noticed others staring in disbelief.
To say it was humiliating barely captures what it felt like, but just as I played the game fiercely, I was not one to take such abuse. But I kept telling myself to control myself. It was the coach who was making a fool of himself.
Then, when we entered the locker room, he let loose at me again, you fucking idiot, you fucking bastard….when I snapped and grabbed him by his shirt and tie, my hands around his neck, I threw him up against the wall and let him have it, screaming that I’d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again.
All hell broke loose as people were pulling me off him, and my father, who was outside the locker room, came rushing in to intervene.
Years of passionate dedication to becoming the best basketball player I could, came to this. I had reacted in fury to being humiliated “in my own house” in front of my family.
I think now of Odysseus when he stood on the broad door sill and killed AntÍnoös, the worst of the suitors of his wife, Penelope. “Odysseus’ arrow hit him under the chin/ and punched up to the feathers through his throat.”
How dare he take revenge and defend his honor, came the shouts from the easily offended but secretly guilty. The other suitors screamed at him: “Foul! To shoot at a man! That was your last shot.”
It wasn’t mine, but that is the rest of the story. My craft changed in the following years. I no longer tried to imitate other tricksters like Bob Cousy or Bob Dylan. They have their own tales to tell and dwell upon. Their words are not mine.
Now I play with words in my own way.
But like Bob Dylan, “I return once again to Homer who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’
Our stories often happen behind our backs where we can’t see them. Telling them is the trick. You need to turn around and see what’s behind you to pass them around.
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As I’ve written before, and am apt never to tire of saying, when one starts a Curtinesque story, one is never quite sure where one is going and how things will end. One can be fairly certain that one will be different at the journey’s end: changes may be subtle, they may be remarkable. Whatever the degree of change, one will be grateful for the transformations–as Odysseus was grateful to hear the sirens’ songs: though they tempted him with destruction, he learned what he could bear.
In this life-excerpt, Curtin opens the curtain on his own early struggle–which is everyone’s struggle–to be someone, not to fade, to be recognized for one’s skill, one’s talent, one’s decency, physical prowess, mental acuity. In his earlier days (and daze) Ed’s passion to excel turned on a spinning basketball–passed behind his back, passed unerringly, like his hero Bob Cousy could pass it round the court and thru the hoops over and over and over and under.
As Ed contemplates those early years, he also gleans how those years have shaped him–how early years shape us all–and how early cords and chords discords connect to later ones; how early heroes like Cousy shine in other heroes’ eyes–Odysseus, J.F.K., Bob Dylan…a chorus of heroes singing us home and singing us on.
Thanks, Ed! Fine piloting!
To topically update the famous film caveat of the Great and Powerful Oz, at least just this once: “Pay no attention to the Ed “behind the Curtin”!
Sorry, dont know much about basket, but instead I will give you what I think is the best Bob D. song, and keep my self short and go for the song.
Forever young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frj2CLGldC4
Nothing more to add.
peace
howl at the moon….brush teeth, bound through the snow, but picture it all from far faraway, distantly related, feeling the bond tickle the essence of the choral chords. If not, I guess it would only be, bordering on chasing your tail around.
DOES IT MAKE A SOUND?
“Then, when we entered the locker room, he let loose at me again, you fucking idiot, you fucking bastard….when I snapped and grabbed him by his shirt and tie, my hands around his neck, I threw him up against the wall and let him have it, screaming that I’d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again…….”
In just seconds a coach, mentor, or parent are capable of annihilating a child’s passion derived from the satisfaction in achieving a skill. There must be endless circumstances where natural proficiencies are stomped-out and not nurtured. Genius, which could benefit the entire world often never surfaces because of a series of unfortunate events halting its development.
With more than seven billion humans on this planet “luck” takes precedence over skill. Being special is
NOT enough when so many other factors must simultaneously exist to guarantee success. There’s
something to the maxim: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
A commenter below in this thread talks about “mithering,” and the need to get off it (does sound a bit self-righteous, tho, and slams Off-G while at it with sour tones and frowning) plus admonishes that we should just go ahead and celebrate, or something–so my apologies up front for this.
Plus what’s “behind me” is actually what I’m having some difficulty with. A moment ago I wouldn’t have believed people in general would allow, as with today’s news, new employment ops for snitches in Ohio to help undercover agents in bars and restaurants etc. keep track of social violations, or mandated aps that track your every contact possibility, or that the state can “legally” vaccinate anybody it wishes, or that suddenly “the one indispensable nation” and “the exceptional nation” (whoa! Barack! such rhetoric!) would and could turn into Nazi Germany just like that with Lockdown Iteration #2 on its way with a “second wave” in the fall! (Would this second wave be called Form Covid-19
b
, I wonder). But there it is! right behind me by Jorge! And right in front of me, gob-smacking me for all it’s worth!
Anyway, I thought the following quite interesting in case you missed it. Apparently in the thousands over this past weekend people took to the beaches, and by Jorge they weren’t all that fussy about “social distancing science” and “masks” and such! Do we have an emergency here?
This piece from ZH (yeah yeah ZH can be odious all right) includes many interesting photo shots, including “bumper tables,” in case you haven’t seen that yet. (Remember bumper cars? What fun as a kid! Same concept and now you can actually get your bumper table going in combat with other customers while you eat!*)
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/shocking-crowds-flock-ocean-city-maryland-ignoring-social-distancing
*Trying not “to mither” here.
In NL barbers are obliged to wear face masks. All barbers that I could see from the street (quite a few) did it in the week of re-opening their shops. This weekend I looked again. Not one of them was wearing the mask.
And this is only week 2 since barbers re-opened.
In Portugal both the barber and the customer have to wear face masks, and this is zealously enforced. I went for a haircut today, and had to partially remove my mask five times, which most likely defeats the purpose. Interestingly, in restaurants only the waiters have to wear masks, but if there were a way to eat with a mask on probably they would make it mandatory.
“Interestingly, in restaurants only the waiters have to wear masks, but if there were a way to eat with a mask on probably they would make it mandatory.”
That’s E~Z. Just make all restaurants world-wide have mandatory liquid alternative versions of every menu choice, and special single use masks with sealed straw attachments at the entry. PROBLEM SOLVED! And since this is so Global, get China to mass produce and ship them everywhere. Just not from Wuhan, please.
And now for something completely different (yet more on topic, in some deference to the memoirist)….
When (and if ) The (aka “My”) Lakers resume play (they say without fans in attendance) this “season” … will they be wearing masks?
That would be suggestive of cultic Hardwood Houdinism. At least whenever revisited by Posterity, if out of proper context.
I’m not yet prepared for everything. Like the C&W song croons, “I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there”.
But just not surprised by anything.
The fine commentarians here have ably exercised our imaginations (for starters!) and not a few have excelled in thinking outside the box (and even the hardwood arena).
But we mark off boundaries reflexively, we extrapolate possibilities for this “damned elusive” virus within sociologically well-set parameters.
And just that is, all alone, therapeutic, quite like this memoir.
Now, for all those who are constrained by events to think more and more like Philip K. Dick, their court (for one) could suddenly expand well beyond 98 feet of old school Boston parquet: Celtic Cousy leprechauns notwithstanding, the vast flotilla that has been “sheltering in place” -all along- sky-bound, above us, could suddenly turn off all their otherworld cloaking devices, only to reveal a ceiling of “wall to wall” Mother Starships. A Convention of them….
Just think! It would all start to make sense. (Even, this piney memoir by Mr. Curtin.)
Watch out though. The Angletonian CIA just loves to draw us into that “best of all possible worlds” ( best for them, anyway, infinite outer space best fits their agendas about us, anyways!). It’s the ideal expansion of their Angletonian “Wilderness of Mirrors” stratagems. Why just divide and conquer, when you can atomize……. Intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, spatially, and all across the board….
Hmm?
…..which is why I love and value Terra Firma more and more, with each passing hour. And, especially ~ its Maker.
Funny how that works.
Give me my Distributist “1 Acre” and a milk cow, GKC!
I’m headed Home. Where the Heart IS!
~~~~~~~~£4£&$4$
BTL (of the Starships, anyway)
“They seek him here.
They seek him there.
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in Heaven?
Or is he in Hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel!”
~~~Leslie Howard, as the eponymous role in the film: “The Scarlet Pimpernel”
~~~~
“The Universe is a labyrinth with a Heart at it’s centre.”
~~~Father Brown, in a story by GKChesterton
Some observations from the workplace
1. Today I had a meeting for teaching purposes with 2 other teachers: a pediatrician (P) and a statistician (S). And since P and I are every workday in the hospital, I convinced S (who lives 2 blocks away from the hospital, yet hasn’t been in hospital since 13 March) that she should also come to the hospital. Nothing to worry, free coffee, no Covid case in weeks and that it would be nice to see each other again… Success! Or so I thought, because P mailed us yesterday that he didn’t like the prospect of meeting in the hospital since teaching was not directly patient related, and that we needed to social distance because of safety for the patient… And so S self-isolated again and we had this horrible videoconferencing this morning instead. And I just thought: ‘why are we so ‘well-behaved’? – especially in P’s case: if one group of patients is absolutely safe for not getting Covid, it’s kids! And so this pediatrician is likely afraid having of social contact and used patients’ safety as excuse for not meeting us in person.
2. And I met a PhD student (face to face) who has been working mostly in hospital since day 1 as she doesn’t see the point for not coming to work. Today she brought self-made mouth masks (mouth masks are obligatory to be worn from next week in public transport) and she asked me if I wanted one. – And I politely thanked and said that I would not commute by public transport precisely because of this mouth mask wearing rule. But since the PhD student does commute by train (she has no car), I asked her if she would like to stay home next week onwards and that we could always discuss things over the phone. And she said: ‘No’ and although she did’t see the point of wearing the mask, she didn’t care either.
3. And I saw the plan of the head of my department X, who made a scheme of who can come to work and who can’t from next week onwards in order to stay within the 1.5 meter rule. And it basically comes down to the point that the work force is cut in half. And so that is terrible for X I would think, but he probably has figured out that toeing the government’s line is free money. And since X considers himself ‘socialist’ he sees no problem with a strong government who take over the independence of workers who want to work.
4. And I spoke to Z (in a another dreadful videoconference) about the plans of X. And she said that the rules from X were not precise enough and that she decided to stay home also after next week, in order to not run the risk to pass colleagues at a distance that is less than 1.5 meters. And I wanted to ask (but didn’t dare due to the bluntness of the question): ‘do you really mean that? Or do you just hate your work?’ – And I suspect it is the latter…
And so these examples show 4 causes of why people social distance. They either have an obsessive compulsive disorder (ad 1), don’t feel the need to rebel and just comply (ad 2), see an opportunity that is in their ‘interest’, or so they think (ad 3), or hate their work and prefer anything (even videoconferencing) instead of returning to ‘normal’ (ad 4).
And if you know the causes, you can think of the treatment. And I think that for all 4 causes the treatment is the same: exposure therapy, either directly or by example. Don’t videoconference (ad 1), don’t commute by public transport or commute without a mask (ad 2), go to work no matter what the scheme says (ad 3) and make work into something that can be fun (ad 4).
I am constantly working on all these 4 issues which feels good as it gives my work (in contrast to pre-Covid on
many issues) purpose.
What if you have no job, or a job in which it is not possible to return to normal? – Then you still can give your life extra purpose by giving ‘the bad’ example.
I have one colleague, he is from Saudi Arabia, doesn’t speak Dutch, hardly speaks English, looks very exotic (and is a very nice guy), who constantly does everything wrong in supermarkets, streets, shops, etc, and where if the ad 1-4 people get angry with him answers in funny English: I don’t speak Dutch, I am from Saudi Arabia. And he gets away with everything.
You only need a spark to start a blaze.
In my experience (US) people are mostly “putting up with” and “going along with” the rules without serious convictions that any of it is actually serious or meaningful. In the early stages two months ago I thought this meant it would soon pass. I suppose now that conformity, herd conformity, is the reason that even a mob could develop, as I read today, to drag a woman out of a supermarket because she was not wearing a mask. That is, the politics is defined by a faux self-righteousness. We’d better be “lookin’ good here” is a political stance (versus anything principled, as based on a constitution), to replace meaningful political action, and this now goes back clear to the falsities of George W, which only became worse in subsequent years to the point we now have no effective people’s political system left.
I spoke with several neighbors the other day and offered to shake hands with the male of the group, to which he refused (although offering me a fist bump–he violated but couldn’t quite go all the way to a handshake). Meanwhile, we did not have masks and were in ordinary proximity and obviously not worried about infection. In stores I see employees with masks dragging down below their noses. Social distancing and masks are not taking place in laundromats. Obedience is half-hearted and schmoozed pretty much at this point, seems to me.
Then I met “Martin” the other day sprawled on the steps of my medical facility. I couldn’t go in because there was one customer inside already 20 feet away from when I opened the door, so I backed out and talked to Martin. “Spare change between bro’s?” he asked. Turned out he is homeless. “But I have a plastic sheet for when it rains.” His life is walking up and down about a forty mile stretch of highway, with his favorite stop-off points. He told me we need four things as a foundation: education, housing, food, job. He is intelligent, lively, spirited, and cheerful. So I gave him some money and we shook hands. This was my first real handshake in two months and it felt very good. Martin is of that body of skeptics who brings my respect.
These sorts of behaviors in the workplace would drive me crazy. People need to stay out of other people’s business.
I like your analytical approach.
I’ve never understood the Americans bigging up pathetic games like basketball and baseball.
These are just games for little girls, exactly like netball and rounders.
Why can’t these fairies play proper men’s games, like rugby or cricket?
That’s what I want to know.
Excuse me: I played Rugby at the first western U.S. high school that had it, 1960s, and it’s a great game.
But Basketball 🏀 is a religion.
Phil Jackson wrote a book about that, “Sacred Hoops”.
But that’s OK if you can’t tell the difference. I took a lot of shots to the head, too.
As a wing.
“Passing the buck behind our backs” , would have been a better title for this fluff piece?
This article struck me as an Onion like spoof aimed at its readers? Comparing a guy who played basketball for a living with one of the mythical sackers of Troy and a 20th century American folk singer, song writer with limited appeal , just seems laughable . But then I’d just read the article on the dismal state of education these days?
Well, I liked the story.
And who cares to whom a person wants to compare himself with?
Some authors compare people with a summer’s day and get away it.
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/18
And the reverence for Bob D, The Dylan.
Really a generational thing.
Aye, culture was created, even culture running counter to culture.
Not saying ye aulde Bob was a black magician, but the effect he had
on his loved ones was dark. Dark as in narcissistic total cunt dark.
Total and utter cunt but still more agreeable than todays
wannabee topdog suave manager political types.
Then again, the bar is set so very low.
What is our treshold?
I don’t know Mr Curtin. I wonder if you maybe do Dylan a disservice?
I rather consider “Murder Most Foul” to be a metaphor for the death of the American Dream.
I sincerely hope “Murder Most Foul” is not “a metaphor for the death of the American Dream.” This, because the object of Bob Dylan’s “murder” is portrayed as someone or something eminently worthy of life. Whereas the American Dream, besides being a sham from the start, was always based on the spoils of US plunder of the Third World trickling down to give Americans a sense of affluence. As such, it deserved to be murdered.
The “American Dream” may be a sham in your eyes Howard, and it’s certainly an illusion in my eyes, but not in the eyes of millions of Americans.
I still feel that “Murder Most Foul” might be a contemporary metaphor for the “death” of this illusion.
Too true, but I think he was referring to the other one, that dream of “one who tried”: MLK and his “I have a dream today.” March on Washington, August 1963.
And he went on, “…and it is deeply rooted in the American Dream.”
You now might need to call it “The Other American Dream”!
Wouldn’t hurt.
Yet both exist. The standard one, the majority dream, has always been a Halloween Nightmare on Elm Street. In better clothes than Freddy Kruger, that’s all.
But as long as there is a Dreamer there will be a dream.
I give Dylan props for keeping The Eternal Flame of JFK alive, and agliw, a bit more, with his newest release, despite a STILL growing industry to daily snuff out that candle. Just when the murderers, 55 years later! think they can finally retire him, the memory of JFK comes bursting through their deep six.
Has there been ANYONE, since the Original Conspiracy Throry about Jesus Christ, who has drawn more millions, billions, of “government money” as in the persecutions in Ancient Rome, than JFK has drawn from this age’s mobs, to murder him and coverup the aftermath anew each day?!
That’s very interesting company.
~~~~
“Communism is a judgement on our failure to make democracy real, and to follow through on the revolutions we initiated.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice, and not turned into a bastion of conservatism, especially one which defends unjust privileges.”
-Reinhold Niebuhr
Cf. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Murder most foul. The Phoenix Program was just that, and so much more.
A perpetuum mobile, gift that keeps on giving.
Blood for the blood gods, skulls for the skull throne.
(Programmed To Kill, by the late Dave McGowan)
What’s up with the Zimmerman these days, doing ads on TV for “Watson” of IBM. Aslouch on a couch, talking with his Madison Avenue shades on to AI? I think they aired one during the Super Bowl. As if he’s gotta be pimpin’?
Let’s be clear: “Watson” is named after Thomas Watson of 1930s IBM when he worked for the 3rd Reich, and International Business Machines got a lucrative contract from Hitler and Co. to make numbered punch cards to tabulate the populations under their control/occupation. A #6 card was for Jews, and was an unequivocal Death Card.
It’s not surprising he would be the 1st folksinger to get the Nobel Prize…
Michael Parenti wrote a great piece, available at his site, “The Nobel Peace Prize for War” and makes a point of some of the shocking recipients, Kissinger, Begin, Obama and many others far worse, even. Since the Prize is a gift from Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune in armaments of explosive ordnance, probably not all that counter-intuitive…
Parenti really has an eyebrow-raiser of info about the Dalai Lama, whose brothers are in close cahoots with the CIA!
A lot of fans called out Dylan when he switched his acoustic guitar for an electric and left his folk roots, early ’60s, not unlike the Beatles morphed into a Space Oddity after Rubber Soul. (And the same year they got hooked up in our nearby Laguna Beach CA. by that Pied Piper of hallucinogens, CIA agent Timothy Leary, at Mystic Arts, Pacific Coast Highway, therein a little known history of John Lennon stopping by one day in his Paisley Bentley, for his 1st hit it appears~ I have actually had long talks with a friend of Klaus Voorhees -the cover artist for Revolver LP from Lennon’s Germany early years- and who was a fixture there, back in the day; all that fascinating tale is covered in Nick Schou’s 2010 chronicle: “ORANGE SUNSHINE: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World”… notwithstanding that the origins of LSD were in Nazi labs, and imported by CIA and all that curious –and overlapping!– crowd …. sheeesh.)
They called him out for guitar changes, but not for pimping ads for IBM and an AI named after Nazi enabler, “Watson” ?!?
Wow. You start connecting the dots. Scary. Sounds almost like the whole legend is some black op. Or converted into one.
Or, if you start connecting dots, the ink starts to run, bleeds in overlap into a black grid.
In any case, I was first drawn to start my own efforts in song, after hearing Odetta sing “Pastures of Plenty” by Woody Guthrie, and even more so, “A Long Time Gone” by Dylan on the early sixties album, “Odetta Sings Dylan”.
She’s so powerful that way, I still get chills 50 years later, just thinking about that voice, in my inner ear.
She recorded it before Dylan changed guitars. She plays unbelievable acoustic, trained as an opera star turned folksinger, with Bill Lee, Spike’s father, on bass. Easy to find at YouTube, though incredibly neglected now, if hit-wise is any clue, even though she was the star of The March on Washington 1963 around the time of its release.
12 years ago I was up late writing, December 2, when the news popped up on the screen that she had just passed. I was moved as always with news about her and wrote a eulogy then, that was posted at opednews.com “Odetta Sings Her First Song, From Way Up Above Us.”
It got the most hits of anything I had coined, as far as I know. Just a brief paean.
I saw her interviewed on PBS by Tavis Smiley, and I was shocked then by their tone of voice when the name “Dylan” came up, especially since she does so much time with his oeuvre, and made it hers. Just a real bad vibe, like “persona non grata” between the lines, or vibes.
I don’t claim to get it all, all of that!
Just sayin’…
Universal basic income is on the way. This is the final attack on small business creating complete dependency.
In the Democratic states they have rigged the unemployment compensation so that it is 30% more than people were making at work – so they won’t want to go back to work. After the election the Democrats are planning to convert it to a UBI.
The money creators can contract the money supply at will and cause depressions. That happened in 1920, 1929 and its happening now. In 1920 was about crushing farmers, 1929 was about crushing industrialists and this one is about crushing small business.
It’s not that they can’t print all the money they want – they can. They just don’t want you to have it. It’s a power grab.
I could have told Jeffrey Epstein he was a dead man once they passed FASAB 56 because the government can launder anything it likes.
These and other gems from Catherine Austin Fitts and John Titus.
https://youtu.be/P_IjP0pYWhc
If it is UBI, then those concerned can work in order to gain money on top of UBI. In which case they still have an incentive to work.
What distinguishes UBI from conventional social security is that is it universal or unconditional – ie everyone gets it – and that it is basic – ie you can earn on top of it, without losing any of it.
If these conditions are not met, then it is merely conventional welfare, with all of the problems of administrative costs and of thresholds that that implies.
I am not a proponent of UBI – or of any other cargo cult 😀
All very entertaining but…something else was happening at that time.
In 1961 it was JFK in his inaugural address who raised up the Prussian principle of the state when he lectured, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
By 1996 Time magazine could state that, “Democracy is in the worst interest of national goals. The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management.”
The same year Johns Hopkins university stated that since the 1960s the American economy had grown massively but workers’ real disposable income had not… “Indeed, after inflation was factored in, purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was only 8 percent greater than for a single working man in 1905.” (Fat and Mean, David M. Gordon, 1996)
Real education was restricted to less than 20 per cent of the population, coinciding with a dramatic concentration of wealth. U.S. educationalists had used China since the 1910s as a guinea pig to update the Prussian system of education-as-social-control. Then they brought it home to America, along with the Dangan,” a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing every student’s intimate life history from birth through school and onwards”.
China, like Germany and Russia was just a laboratory for major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.
Where did we go to since the 1960s? “All have been indoctrinated to believe that the American experiment that promised ordinary people sovereignty over their own lives was wrongheaded. Schools and the media reinforce the idea that ordinary people are too stupid to look out for themselves… or make decisions, even intimate ones like how to raise their own children.
Thus has the Protestant reformation, whose brightest product was America, been thrown on the scrapheap because if there is any bedrock… it was Luther’s declaration, “every man his own priest”. ” — John Taylor Gatto
And it’s all over now, baby blue
https://youtu.be/8_5h0aO8ZaE
Utter cobblers. For most of the 20th century China was riven by civil wars, war-lord rule, Japanese occupation and genocide, more civil war, land reform, social upheaval, Western blockades and subversion continuing to today, and more civil strife in the Cultural Revolution. Then the greatest economic and social leap in history. ALL, for good and bad, accomplished by the Chinese people, NOT Rockefellers or any other Western ubermenschen. If you are your own ‘priest’ I’d bet it is Elmer Gantry.
The original wave of self-analysis of the so-called ‘holocaust’ (the *real* holocaust was the judaic- muslim/jewish/modern christian- industrial scale slavery of black Africans) by jews after WW2 concluded that the jewish response to the rise of the nazis had been the same type of self-deluding ‘liberal’ dribble seen in the article above, rather than a sane program of analysis that actually took the threat seriosuly, and generated proper action and opposition.
Off-guardian seems determined to lull you all to sleep while ‘wave 2’ of the SARS2 false-flag is readied for the end of Summer.
There is nothing clever or worthwhile is pseudo-intellectual, typical NYT, verbal diarreha. This style of awful writing fills the magazines of America read by the dim-witted chattering classes. Here’s a clue for the clueless. Wanna read some *real* ‘big brained’ writing. Well every novel from the 19th century is out of copyright so try some of the true literally giants. The Russian authors are a good beginning.
Meanwhile, on Zerohedge, in the comment section, you can watch the deep state ultra-zionists lay down the predictive propaganda for what comes in Autumn. You know, stuff that matters in these desperate times, unlike the self indulgent crap off-guardian now seems to be peddling.
There are a handul of comment figures on Zero Hedge whose comment history over the years is remarkable. Notably, when the scandal of Boeing’s dreadful aircraft software was hitting, the same posters went to bat for Boeing big time, constantly calling claims of software problems a ‘conspiracy’ theory from ill-informed idiots. This gave away their direct connection to the military industrial complex in the USA, for weeks later it was universally accepted that the computer software was responsible for all the crashes.
But organised deep state propagandists use vast numbers of propaganda tactics, including those labelled as ‘preaching to the choir’ (ie., telling *you* what you want to hear and already know, so you’ll trust the source later – think Tony Benn in Britain or Chomsky in the USA).
One form of propaganda is distraction propaganda. usually leaning heavily on the pseudo-intellectual. This is especially popular in the USA, the home of the pseudo-intellectual.
Logically we should be either laser focused on the emerging horrors today, or utterly give up, ignore the greater world, and fall back on our own little world to gain what pleasures we can in our last days. There is no valuable third alternative.
PS the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of many times the Earth just avoided nuclear war. Cuba was, in reality, full of state-of-the-art Russian nukes already. It is amazing from a stats POV just how many times we were one person’s bad choice away from a nuclear conflict. A suspicious person would see a hidden hand in all this since the maths just doesn’t add up.
I don’t believe in nonsense like gods, or heaven/hell, yet at the same time the evidence I have witnessed across a lifetime tells me that strange sh-t does exist. I have no doubt Tony Blair willingly integrated with a demonic soul when quite young- people who ignore the significance of the Blair Demon Eye posters (the age old legend is that we must invite true evil to cross the ‘threshold) are fools. Great Evil is anti-life, but wants suffering first on the way to extinction.
If you do not seek clarity at this time, then do something worthwhile with you life rather than hopelessly mithering about the current situation. Be smart or be happy (some can do both- most cannot). The monsters are laying down the path to a much worse version of the current false flag, and that is all off-guardian should be focusing on. Nothing else (of an oppositional nature) matters.
Sunset… Strongly agree with some of the things you’ve said, both here, and in other comments you’ve made, but, to be fair, the last two + months at OffGuardian has been almost wall to wall articles on the panicdemic virus.
Lately I’ve come to the conclusion, like you, that there’ll be a second wave – with a lot more deaths this time. And the measures taken next time will be even more draconian than now.
And almost certainly snuff out all genuine resistance to the agenda being rolled out. And yeah, you’re right, they are monsters.
Good luck with your life.
I wouldn’t buy into the fear porn of sunset (what’s in a name…)
And in terms of prediction of what is going to happen: it’s difficult to say, especially because it concerns the future.
Thanks Willem. I appreciate your recent comments also, and, yes, I know, you’re more at the ‘coalface’ so to speak than nearly all of us here. Mentally these are very challenging times for many millions of people.
Hope your week is okay✌️
The future is seldom what it’s made out to be… but when YOU are the glitch in the matrix… it seems obvious in retrospect.
Terrible tails of terror in the time of plague fatigue
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/ZofFQQoDoqYT/
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/DkNYbFJKDPpX/
https://www.youtube.com/user/gcelente
https://www.youtube.com/user/GregVegas5909
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/msOrGRqxxZ7S/
It’s all about trying to take our knowledge and justifiable suspicions deep down the rabbit hole. If they can drag enough of us down there, it’s easy for them to cause mayhem and wreck our discussions.
Mithering is hard to shake….but through positive thinking… still hard to beat.
Good point about the Tony Blair evil eye. This is not just daft nonsense the eyes really are the windows to the soul and reveal negative qualities like cruelty, sarcasm, sociopathy etc. Gretchen Whitmer also definitely has it, in spite of her sexuality.
another version of propaganda & reverse psychology brilliant pr & marketing fro idiot to buy into, the med company and eton orintary parasite politckian piolcvatical class use in debate session in posh school
example
I don’t believe in nonsense like gods, or heaven/hell, yet at the same time the evidence I have witnessed across a lifetime tells me that strange sh-t does exist. I have no doubt Tony Blair willingly integrated with a demonic soul when quite young- people who ignore the significance of the Blair Demon Eye posters
then he she use zero hedge like a source of real information and the comment section is years in front, what crap !! the idiot behind zero hedge isnt informed nor in the know clue less about the basic’s. he fit the regurgitate agenda he she sshit shine sunset storm mentions
sshit shine sunset storm also remind us that there is a second wave coming using biblical non speak the source of this information is event 201 stimulation mentions this and as sshit shine sunset wont tell you it from that, as she/he dont believe in magic or anything
there is also a second part to the ritual and ti does fall in October as the 1st part was done in april may actually beltain and 322 march 22, nothing new really Cv act was signed to law march 23 they dont pick dates out of no where .strategically masters chess player we are the pawns and maximum impact is what they want. muzzles and lete gloves 2.2 6 feet apart sosicla distancing, classic hypnosim trick you would see in a Wednesday night in bognor butklins where the hypsotic pulls someone out the audience makes rthem wear what ever this time its the world and they responded in unison.
#
hopefully you can see it and stay alert and not buy in tot here fear as that it self is a hugley prized energy source!
as he she sunset storm does not believe in demons god etc then lets say the bad people want to reduce the world OK and this is not new intel though.
the original wave of self-analysis of the so-called ‘holocaust’ (the *real* holocaust was the judaic- muslim/jewish/modern christian- industrial scale slavery of black Africans) by jews after WW2
for further information check out Michael A. Hoffman II, his work Soviet Jews Judaism Discovered Talmud, Kabbalah, Israel, Palestine (Region), ADL, slavery
His work on psycho drama and how the Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare work his sources are great as well.
That who your got your intel but mix it in with your version of propaganda ZERO HEDGE KICKBACKS
Yaaaaawwwn. There’s enough here to keep Pseud’s Corner in bilge for the next 5 years and as for Zimmerman and his garbled disjointed dissonant muse musing…where was he when the JFK RFK MLK Malcolm X etc etc etc murders “most foul” were actually done, when the Lucky Larry Silver$teen towers were pulverized, when the Palestininas were being genocided (still are) to make way for imported khazars? He sure wasn’t on the front line leading the peasants’ revolt singing anything other than non sequitors or flinging molotovs.
Aint gonna work on maggot$ farm no more, no way bob.
“Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully”
zio bob aint talking about the ziotards
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/bob-dylans-embrace-israels-war-crimes
nevermind what’s behind you – who’s this coming out f the fridge?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1264648526719565824
Let me guess… Its gotta be Matt Lucas. Correct?
Oh, and the Cuban Missile Crisis? I was 15 in 1962. Everyone was taken in. The churches were packed, millions on their knees praying to the god(s) but on reflection was it not all just pure theatre. My first degree was in Structural Engineering so I knew as the first tower in NYC seemed to fall down that it was a piss take (it was well over a dozen years till someone pointed out to me that it looked like they blew away. So as one realises it is really all just theatre, from Dealey Plaza to WTC to Salisbury to this bizarre locking -up of several billion people.
To be a leader you have to well, eh, lead. What more fun for Kennedy and Khrushchev to stage the CMC and remind everyone just how important they are and have a good laugh at just how stupid/terrified their populations were. It is certainly something I would consider doing.
Paul – I was 10 years old when the Cuban missile crisis took place and can quite vividly remember the times. You comment (“Everyone was taken in”) – please share your evidence or sources for why you think the missile crisis was simply – “theatre” – if you would since I’ve lived and read plenty to think otherwise.
Your suggestion that Dealey Plaza (the JFK assassination) was also theatre is also a bit of a head scratcher I must say. Especially having watched the “theatrical” bone chilling “sequels” to that “production” unfold with such regularity in the form of the very public assassinations of MalcolmX, MLK and RFK all with five years of JFK. Arguably the entire top tier of progressive leadership in the nation publicly murdered within 5 years of each other.
One would think that given the plot lines common to these “theatre” productions (9/11 & Salisbury included) – some discussion of who might be the “writers & directors” would be a bit more useful and more productive to understanding our collective dilemma than simply suggesting – (“it is really all just theatre.”)
TL;DR This guy used to play basketball and likes Dylan.
It’s odd that you mention Paul Newman in an article mainly about Dylan. I recall Paul’s role in “The Long Hot Summer” where he played a drifter and I linked him with the Dylan persona.
Incidentally – when is Bob going to release Chronicles Vol 2? (Or is “Vol 1” just one of his little jokes?)
I was born a nerd. The only language I’ve ever had any interest in was mathematics. All I did in my teens and 20’s was work on increasingly difficult problems in Physics. Absolutely no cheering crowds encouraging me on.
My day job (late 60’s) was modelling the UK’s future motorway network so looking up to 40 years ahead. From an entropic point of view I was unable to make the UK economy “work” much past 2010. Was it important? My boss thought the 2010’s might be “a bit tricky” (1960’s British understatement for horrendous). Who should I tell? I gave a bit of thought to self-immolation (becoming quite fashionable due to the Vietnam war) but with no close family or friends I didn’t really count as I would be written off as just a lonely nerd!
As a total outsider it didn’t take me more than a few years to realise that the world that appeared to exist is no more than a social construct and is only brought into being by speaking about it. Again no more cheering crowds to encourage me on.
So by 2001 do you think I was expecting some sort of false flag to allow the US into the ME? In the words of the bard “do you have to ask me that?” And now that fusion hasn’t worked out and “they” have tried to run the economy on debt rather than energy for the last dozen years and are about to fail spectacularly what on earth to do? Well crash the whole thing, blame it on the flu and have a world wide reset, with just the one government/currency?
The 2020’s look a bit tricky to me.
mileswmathis.com/dylan.pdf
Another Side of Bobby …
‘I am not askin’ you to say words like ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ / … I’m just breathin’ to myself, pretendin’ not that I don’t know”
It Ain’t Me Babe… Like complete unknown…
“The interview is supposed to have lasted 90 min, only about 10 were included in the CBS show 60 Minutes broadcast 6 December 2004. Another 10 min are circulating among collectors.”
https://alldylan.com/bob-dylan-the-classic-60-minutes-interview-with-ed-bradley-19-november-2004-video/
EB: Why do you still do it? Why are you still out here?
BD: Well, it goes back to that destiny thing. I made a bargain with it, you know, long time
ago. And I’m holding up my end…
EB: What was your bargain?
BD: …to get where I am now.
EB: Should I ask who you made that bargain with?
BD: [laughs] With the chief commander.
EB: On this earth?
BD: [laughs] In this earth and in the world we can’t see.
no diss intended but
zimmerman is just a bad act
a talmoodick twatter
a tavistock office project
if he had any power
he aint got the power anymore
a desiccated ghoul
a golem waiting in line
for satans calling
a tool a liar an actor
burn baby burn
It was Bob’s birthday yesterday 24th May, born in Diluth 1941, that makes him 736 according to Neil Ferguson
Here’s a birthday tribute courtesy of Steve Forbert & Co, live streamed at 1.0am today in UK
Meanwhile I’m off to find what’s behind me
Enjoy
Perfect!
The ancient Maya ballgame called pitz was part of Maya political, religious, and social life. Played with a rubber ball ranging in size from that of a softball to a soccer ball, players would attempt to bounce the ball without using their hands through stone hoops attached to the sides of the ball court.
I have always like Bob Dylan’s music. Just listened to Murder most foul it is quite long. Maybe I will try to listen again without anticipating it. There is much he could have said about John Kennedy . He portrayed him self as a family man while being a notorious womaniser some say also gay. He was elected with the help of the MOB. Then he got his brother Robert to go after the MOB. Was it all for show. Did it cost both of them there lives.
Bob Dylan wrote some great songs
only a pawn in the game
With God on our side
and many more
“Only a Pawn In Their Game” was covered recently by, of all people, Morrissey. I think that release fell foul of the PC crowd who reckoned that the lyric attempts to excuse the white killer. A perfect example of how identity politics obscures the whole point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdU8Hj-jm28 where Gary Pomeranz talks
Basketball, invented by the freemason James Naismith at McGill University where Ewen Cameron later ran his MK Ultra experiments and from where Zbigniew Brzezinski and Justin Trudeau graduated. It’s not the only US sport to bear a masonic stamp – baseball is played on a diamond and American football on a gridiron (see the name of the inn where modern masonry was supposedly formed).
“he brilliantly accuses elements within the US government and intelligence forces”.
Really? He accuses no-one. The listener can walk away from the song thinking it refers to the Mafia or anti-Castro Cubans if he wants. He manages to name check Stevie Nicks but not Allen Dulles.
Kobe Bryant – Larry Gaiters
I agree. I like Dylan’s music but never saw him as being one who shoved his head above the parapet, unlike Kit Knightly, the author of this piece.
His idol was Dylan Thomas, from whom he took his name. Dylan Thomas was a gifted and melodious poet who wrote some magical words but he too never got seriously political. Perhaps “The hand that signed the paper” comes nearest. Even that fails to name anybody specifically.
They could have learnt something from the young Percy Bysshe Shelley who had no compunction in naming Lords Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth in “The Mask of Anarchy” shortly after the Peterloo Massacre and calling Castlereagh an ‘oppressor’ and ‘tyrant’ in “Lines written during the Castlereagh administration”.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
A rousing call at the end of the Mask of Anarchy. Thanks for reminding us Nick.
It’s a bit ambiguous on re-reading my above comment. I did not mean that Kit Knightly sees Bob Dylan as “one who shoved his head above the parapet” but that Kit Knightly is not afraid to do so himself.
So what was the freemasonry in the foundation of the USA?
Is freemason a meaning in and of itself fixed, defined and by association with acclaimed ‘ill-doers’?
There is a science and a narrative.
The narrative mind is mythic, and at its best creates story as the reflection of qualities of being – set in the frame of unfolding meanings – lived out and shared in – but framed in mortal forms that fade or pass or are betrayed by false calls or evil fates. The identity in narrative is the ‘me and mine’ of judgement seeking validation – and when denied, vindication.
We can so set our heart on an image of fulfilment that it becomes a reality of itself – to which our world of actual relations becomes a pale or unworthy copy; a fallen nature, a world gone wrong. That it was never true is lost to the identity gotten from its loss or denial.
The one that got away becomes the ‘golden age’ that all progress seeks to relive. But every grasp in form is left hollow. The fulfilment of the story is the waking of the playwright or scriptmaker, from its casting out – for whoever anyone is, in and of their own being – you made who they are for you. No one in the dream but is in the mind of the dreamer. Who or what then is awake? Recognising and loving self in other, and other in self, is not so much behind the scenes, as a timelessness within the seems of time and story. A seamless life set in rich patterning of diversity, interaction and exchange, perfectly balanced and yet always moving into and out of balance. Zero-point as the one in the many – where the many express and embody the one – excepting to an inertial fulcrum set in polarised exception of self-specialness. By which we are deceived as is our wont.
Science – in the sense I am using it here, is the uncovering of Reality from the narrative illusions by which a cast seems locked down and masks set such that loss of face is loss of control to a chaos that would break all logic and reason by which a mind of constancy and predictability holds order to be.
The recognition of patterns of constancy and ratios of relation that allow predictable and reliable structures of thought and endeavour is the recognition of archetype and architecture as embodied forms of energetic harmonies or principle that stand true as expressions of innate integrity – rather than as attempt to get or get back a lost or denied sense of self in image or form. ‘Behold I make all things new!’, is neither regressive or progressive but centred presence that draws from past and future in creation, and is available to innocent perception.
But the conservation of a closed or locked down system will become reactively regressive to change and set the polarity for progressive rebellion, that merely changes the distribution of energy in the system as if to make new. The Emperor’s new clothes can as well apply to a mass sacrifice in collectivism. The lock-in to a set of clothes is operating a fear of ‘nakedness’ not of the body but of a sense of lack, inadequacy, illegitimacy, or worth.
Yet the simple truth – recognised at heart is freeing!
We are not the whole in our persona – or even in a collective persona but in direct resonant alignment with the Creative – which is already moving or being as the uncarved block or qualities from which spontaneous patterns emerge and arise as expressions of life – and which are truly addressed and appreciate in the heart and not in the grasp of the attempt to possess, patent and control or mine as proprietary rights set over those of others.
Setting the intent is a valid step – and this must be actioned to be realised. You can dream forever of excelling in or becoming one with a desired outcome – but without actioning, the intent is simply to persist in dreaming that can become a block to action, such as to set avoidance of life in change and challenge from a fear of reliving humiliation, powerlessness or hateful rage. But the imaged outcome is not really a final solution – but a stepping stone within our own process of self-knowledge and integration – even if seeming to lead away from integration as a segregative sense of power, set in control, or dominion. The idea that desire is to be extinguished is not the idea of a true fulfilment – but the mistaken identification in perfection of imaged form – into which life seems to violate as conflict, threat, challenge and change. To seek the unchanging in form, is to seek death.
The movement to power is not wrong, but its identification in form is a limited and limiting story of disempowerment that literally masks over, locks down and dies in a rigor mortis of functional irrelevance. The movement to love is not wrong, but the coveting of others or world, is only increased by the attempt to possess and control, such as to hollow out and isolate. Without the movement of love, the parody of its mimicry reveals lifeless and grotesque, an underlying shame, its virtue signalling was set to hide.
the antibacterial coverings reveal the contagion locked in.
Check your pants! Good underwear is not for the purpose of noticing throughout your day – and so you may not realise that anti-microbial underwear has been given you as a built in extra. There is much that has unfolded out of ideas given currency that then becomes a ‘normal. ‘Gain of function’ has a destructive undertow.
There is a bandwagon effect of aligning in the current trend for acceptance, funding, or even survival in one form or another. It doesn’t mean anyone actually believes it – but that they believe that believing it will serve their perceived self interest and so it is an extension of the belief they are threatened and must mask or hide in defences that contain the threat implicitly.
And so there is much attention given to the attempt to set the current trend, and present it for acceptance, in terms of survival in one form or another, because this is where the residual money, funding, leverage etc is to be found in the frame of a contracting or dying system. And this is where ‘creatives’ (sic) are pawned to PR as the use of symbols drawn from life and associated with fulfilled dreams or averted nightmares – as intended deceit by which to WANT what the lie is perceived to offer, above a real relationship. Passing behind our backs.
Why then surprise at the collective ongoing development of a mind-spin that has lost all sense of real relationship? Because it takes two to tango – and They cannot persist in doing to you – if you no longer join the dance – because withdrawing from the ‘Caesar’ of coercion and deceit is releasing energy in structure, to patterning in the movement of life felt, lived and known as shared – even amidst the drama of a death mask to Home as a coffin’ death of screen shared isolation.
If we do not move with what is still alive and true of its moment regardless its seeming insignificance to the Drama! – than we are choosing Drama! from within its dictate.
If your part is given you to play out, the way you be it is your freedom. To set impossible goals is to set up for failure by design – behind your own back. But to imagine or expect only in terms of a current mindset is to stamp the boot of a past on the present, such that no presence can expand as OUR future potentials realised.
let the dead bury the dead – is choose to align in the living – and check that what is running past you is not behind your back but accepted for your own reasons given acceptance in the heart.
Yin-Yang symbol offers the recognition that polarity is a fractal within a wholeness whose circumference is infinite in degree – not bounded in space and time. Surfing the balance points within the current or the momentum of movement is a gift to receive and share on. There is no scale of measurement for being yourself – excepting you set it on life and others and live your result in the measure of your giving. Others DON’T have to wake up or else! Nor do we have to use this to pass a need for fulfilment on OUR terms behind our own backs.
Revisit the terms and conditions. Contracts and contractions, operate as rigged templates in substitution for the law of the heart. The heart will not be denied excepting by consent. The script you run is the purpose you accept true in your heart. But are we listening there when fear SHOUTS the call to war?
There is a dynamic of peace to the channeling of life in basketball, mathematics or song. The ‘zone’ is unconflicted – yet everything is happening all at once! When the inner and the outer are one, thy whole body is full of light! There is nothing more fulfilling than being yourself – with everything happening all at once.
I cant speak to the WANT of a masking deceit as locked down ‘survival’ excepting to trust that when anyone gets what they need from the choice they have made, they are free to choose again. And abilities learned under threat and fear become of service to a more truly aligned presence.
Just one thing about ‘Murder most foul’ lyrics: Dylan says ‘if you want to remember you better write down the names’, meaning that you have to focus on the long list of artists names to find what this song is about, and in this list there are all the great american musicians apart for The Who and The Queen, wich are British and out of the context (the Beatles too, but it seems they are more an historical reference). The Who recall the World Health Organization as The Queen is a reminder for the Corona (crown) virus.
Excellent observation. It’s a fascinating song. Could the relevance of The Beatles be in the particular song Dylan references ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’?
Oh, and another thought. The Queen song quoted in Murder Most Foul is Another One Bites the Dust, and Freddie Mercury died as a result of a virus – HIV/Aids.
I’ve never heard of Curtin but it was good to hear someone talk about murder most foul like he’d really listened to it.” It burst out” he says,yes it sounds spontaneous and unrevised. To my mind Dylan’s never pointed the finger more accurately. For recreation I read a lot of the reviews of the song and no one got it or with an eye on future work prospects looked no further into it than listing the songs and artists mentioned. Have they never heard of the three wounds to Hiram Abiff ,the three bums who did it. How come he watched the Zapruder film 33 times? Why did they blow out the brains of the king on the altar of the rising sun like a human sacrifice?Three shots from the sixth floor, thirty six hours past judgement day? It all adds up to a bit more than arithmetic to me. Why am I reminded of the video Kennedy,the Sacrificed King by a notorious “conspiracy theorist”? Nothing is revealed,or is it?
Oh there’s a lot more in ‘Murder most foul’. Just to say one: if you count the lines of text, line 33 is the line on where he is talking’ about masons: ‘Stack up the bricks, pour the cement’.
I didn’t notice that one, let’s hear some more.
What a story Edward. Thanks for sharing
O/T Guardian Fails segment should be a pinned thread so that new visitors can understand why it’s a no-read — and if you do scan the site, to not forget the sunglasses from They Live.
After all, the first steps of critical thinking are as frightening as they are exhilarating. Helping people is like taking them horse riding on a mountain pass. It’s bloody nerve wracking and they’ll scream all the way – which is why we so rarely do it and often give up.
It does hurt people to encounter information that destroys their world view – and we should acknowledge that. I was reminded of this while listening to Norman Dodd talk about the Reece Committee, in which Congress tried to expose the activities of the Rockefeller and Carnegie family foundations.
One of Dodd’s assistants was the lawyer Kathryn Casey. As a legal analyst on the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, she read the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment as a result of which she had a mental breakdown, which Dodd describes here: https://youtu.be/GgL8rqqddAU?t=1961
What Kathryn Casey read from the minutes is here Norman Dodd, G. Edward Griffin, interview date 1982: Reece Cmte., Central Bank Cartel, Foundations: https://youtu.be/GgL8rqqddAU?t=1428 Norman Dodd paraphrases the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment that so upset Kathryn Casey:
“Is there any means known more effective than war assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire nation?”, the board members of the Carnegie Endowment ask each other in 1908. They conclude, “no more effective means other than ware is known to humanity”… “How do we involve the United States in a war?“, they asked in 1909. “We must control the State Department. We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.”
When WWI has begun, the Carnegie Endowment minutes note they sent a telegram to President Wilson beseeching him to see that the war does not end too quickly.
Once the war is over their interest shifts to the issue of stopping life reverting to how it was before the U.S. entered the war in 1919. “To prevent a reversion we must control education in the United States“. They approach the much larger Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that domestic education be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and international education be handled by the Carnegie Endowment.
In the late 1920s the Carnegie Endowment grants the AHA $400,000 for a study of U.S. history “in a manner which points to what this country can look forward to in the future”. That becomes a seven-volume study, the last of which states: “the future of this country belongs to collectivism administered with characteristic American efficiency“.
More here: https://moneycircus.blogspot.com/2020/05/bespoke-history-scripted-news-say-it.html
We learn, we live, we Love and then we die.
Twas ever thus, unless we make it otherwise.
Thank you Edward.
Nice writing. I liked your tie-ins with Dylan and Homer. Soulful and Cousy was magic.
Ones favorite story about Bob Dylan– by his own account– was this.
“Dylan said about his girlfriend Suze’s [Rotolo] mother: “Mary, though, who worked as a translator for medical journals, wasn’t having it. Mary lived on the top floor of an apartment building on Sheridan Square and treated me like I had the clap. If she would have had her way, the cops would have locked me up. Suze’s mom was a small feisty woman-volatile with black eyes like twin coals that could burn a hole through you, was very protective. Always make you feel like you did something wrong. She thought I had a nameless way of life and would never be able to support anybody, but I think it went much deeper than that. I think I just came in at a bad time. She glared at me, cigarette in her mouth. She was always trying to goad me into some kind of argument. My presence was so displeasing to her, but it’s not like I’d caused any trouble in her life. It wasn’t me who was responsible for the loss of Suze’s father or anything. Once I said to her that I didn’t think she was being fair. She stared squarely into my eyes like she was staring at some distant, visible object and said to me, ‘Do me a favor, don’t think when I’m around.’ Suze would tell me later that she didn’t mean it. She did mean it, though. She did everything in her power to keep us apart, but we went on seeing each other anyway.”
I loved Dylan’s account of how he made the infamous “Self Portrait”. It went something like, “I just threw everything at the wall. And I took the stuff that stuck and put it in. And then I gathered up the stuff that didn’t stick and put that in too!”
One has to wonder if this is truly auto-biographical or some kind of sociological experiment. A couple things suggest ambiguity: the emphasis on recent dreams and, most of all, the description of the writer’s family at the basketball game. Four of his sisters were in attendance: one aged 8, the other aged 11. What about the two sisters not identified? Were they still in the process of acquiring an age? Were they yet to be born twins? This is intriguing.
Added note: I should have re-read the entire article herein. I first read it in Global Research, then on Mr Curtin’s website; but the thing with the two sisters has now been corrected. Sorry about the mix-up.
Thanks Edward.