This website was hacked in late March 2022 and its entire contents dumped. Maybe they did me a favor? But there was a backup. Just not a very recent one. As you can tell. It …
IMAGINE: The Elephant Party and the Donkey Party have split and broken up. The new Goat Party has won a landslide victory and I, its standard bearer, am installed in the White House. Following my …
IMAGINE: The Elephant Party and the Donkey Party have split and broken up. The new Goat Party has won a landslide victory and I, its standard bearer, am installed in the White House. Following my …
Is Vasco Núñez de Balboa a role model for our children? An SF school and street are named after a slave-trading conquistador who helped wipe out a native population BY TOM GALLAGHER – December 15, …
The Sexism Spectrum By Toni Mester Why do women have to be groped or raped before male dominance is recognized as systematic oppression? Because sexism spans a wide spectrum of behaviors, many of which are …
IMAGINE: The Elephant Party and the Donkey Party have split and broken up. The new Goat Party has won a landslide victory and I, its standard bearer, am installed in the White House. Following my …
On April 22, 2012, people gathered all across the nation (plus groups in Spain, Costa Rica, and Kazakhstan) to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in the same key (D) and at the same time (noon Pacific, 1 pm Mountain, 2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern). Hali Hammer created and organized the project, and received 32 videos for the montage you see here. For full performances of the groups and other information and background about Sing Out for Earth Day, visit this link on the Occupella website:http://www.occupella.org/drupal/?q=sing-out-for-earth-day-videos.. July 14th was the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth.
I’m proud to have had a small hand in the project, being one of the singers on stage in San Francisco, contributing a few seconds of video, and lending minor technical advice to Hali Hammer, who did all the heavy lifting with the production both of the event and of the video.
Occupella — www.occupella.org — was founded by six women who are veterans of the folk song movement. Here I am on the left holding a sign; seated with the guitar is Hali Hammer, one of Occupella’s founders, and the organizer and producer of this year’s international Earth Day sing-out (see separate posts). Occupella sings on street corners, in front of banks, and (in the wet season) in BART stations. Most of its repertoire consists of familiar tunes with updated topical words. There’s no rehearsals, and the chorus consists of whoever shows up at the moment. Occupella organizers bring song books, like the one I’m holding, so that anyone can join in on the spot. Occasionally, Occupella founders perform in staged settings, for senior groups, folk song festivals, or events, but the most fun for me is singing on the street and in BART stations. Some BART stations have great acoustics, like singing in the shower. The musical quality of Occupella performances may not be up to the standards of classical choruses, but the fun quotient is unbeatable. I always feel energized after a performance. I also enjoy groups that bring high musical standards to renditions of the protest music of 30 or 80 years ago, but I know that if the writers of most of that music were alive and here today, they’d be singing on the streets with groups like Occupella. The calendar of Occupella performances is on the website, occupella.org. If you get a chance and are nearby, come out and have fun with us.
Two years after my retirement as CEO of LifeRing, the organization invited me to speak at its annual meeting in San Francisco on May 12. As is obvious to readers of this website, one of my influences in the past year has been the Occupy movement. My talk is a blend of my experience and reading in addiction recovery with the inspiration of the Occupy movement. The text of my talk is in the PDF, attached here. Comments are welcome.
A few members of the La Peña Community Chorus and members of other Bay Area choruses joined together on the main stage of Earth Day in San Francisco on Sunday April 22 to sing “This Land is Your Land” simultaneously with similar groups in a number of other cities and countries. This very short video (48 seconds) taken from the back row onstage carries the first verse or so, and is spiced up with still pix taken around the plaza during the Earth Day Festival. It was a fun event that deserved a bigger crowd participating.
The La Peña Community Chorus of Berkeley recorded these two pieces as a message of support for the people of Aysén, Chile, who have since the beginning of this year been in a state of confrontation with the central government. Lichi Fuentes, co-director of the chorus, and a native of Chile, organized the performance. I sing as part of the bass section of the chorus, but I’m not in this video because I’m behind the camera. Probably just as well from the musical standpoint …
The first song, Tu Cantar, has been called the unofficial anthem of Latin America. My translation:
If your voice is yearning for release
And you want your passion to be seen
If your heart is burning up with love
And you can’t keep from bursting into song
Chorus:
The song you sing will carry in the breeze
One day all ears will hear your melody
When you see how trees come into life
When you see the light die in the sea
Then you’ll know how far you have to walk
From where you are to join the human race
[Chorus]
If you feel it’s not within your heart
To give some help to those who are in need
If your eyes can’t shed a hearfelt tear
You need to love yourself a little more.
[Chorus]
The second is Canción con Todos – Song With Everybody. Translation by an anonymous member of the chorus.
I go out walking through the cosmic waist of the south.
I tread on the greenest part of the wind and of the light.
I feel, as I walk, all of America’s skin in my skin
And a river flows through my blood to end in my voice.
Sun of high Peru, face of Bolivia, tin and solitude,
A green Brazil kisses my Chile of copper and minerals.
I rise from the south, towards the soul of the entire Americas
Purest root of a call destined to grow and explode.
All of the voices, all of them! All of the hands, all of them!
All of the blood can become a song in the wind.
Sing with me, sing! Panamerican brother/sister
Free your hope with a call in your voice.
With my family background of resistance and survival in Nazi Germany, I sometimes forget how many other dictatorships there have been and are, and how many other families resist and survive, or not. A poignant testimony to the sufferings of the Argentinian people under the dictatorship there comes in a song by Victor Heredia, Ojos de Cielo — Eyes Like the Sky. He wrote it in memory of his sister who was disappeared by the dictatorship. We sing it in the La Peña Community Chorus in Berkeley, of which I am a member. I don’t have a recording of the chorus’ performance, but I did have the good fortune to record a live solo performance by one of the chorus’ directors, Lichi Fuentes, a native of Chile. Here it is:
The recording was made in the hall on the spur of the moment with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10 on a tripod with a ball head. The translation in the video is mine.
In October 2010, I had the honor to present a lecture on addiction at a psychiatric hospital in Victoria BC. The 8 a.m. “Grand Rounds” lecture arose out of my work on addiction in connection with LifeRing Secular Recovery. That chapter of my life story remains to be written. My hosts, the able LifeRing Canada organization headquartered in Victoria, arranged to have the lecture videotaped and in due course posted it on YouTube. Here it is.
I’ll be presenting a talk on approximately this same subject to a non-medical audience at the LifeRing annual meeting in San Francisco May 12, 2012. For details and for more about LifeRing, go to the lifering.org website.
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