Open Up Your Fists

Daisy, give yourself away

Look up at the rain

The beautiful display

Of power and surrender

Giving us today

When she gives herself away

Rain, another rainy day

It comes up from the ocean

To give herself away

She comes down easy

On rich and debt the same

When she gives herself away

Let it go

Daisy let it go

Open up your fists

This fallen world

Doesn't hold your interest

Doesn't hold your soul

Daisy let it go

Pain, give yourself a name

Call yourself contrition

Avarice or blame

Giving isn't easy

And neither is the rain

When she gives herself away

Daisy, why another day

Why another sunrise

Who will take the blame

For all redemptive motion

And every rainy day

When he gives himself away

Let it go...

One Less Thing

One Thing More

By Matthew Perryman Jones & Neilson Hubbard

What really matters
When it's all been said
And don't know what we've done
Climbing the ladder
With a tighter fist
Looking out for number one
I will not let you drag me down

Maybe it's all not enough
I think we're feeling the weight of a broken love
We're stuck on a stage of parading lust
It seems it's always only one thing more
It's always only one thing more

What's in the mirror
Are there tired eyes
Lookin' back for something new
Is it any clearer
Does the loneliness of ambition bother you
I will not let you drag me down

Nobody calls you by your name
Your hand's on the mouth of fear
All that you build will fall in flame
I will not let you drag me down
Seems it's always only one thing more
It's always only one thing more
Maybe it's all not enough
Maybe it's all too much
Maybe it's never enough
Seems it's always only one thing more
It's always only one thing more

Winter

"Before it Breaks" - Brandi Carlile

Around here it's the hardest time of year.
And waking up, the days are even gone.
Will the collar on my coat,
Lord help me kill off the cold?
Will the raindrops sting my eyes or keep them closed?

but I'm feeling no pain
only the lonely
and my quietest friend
Have I the moonlight?
Have I let you in?
Say it ain't so,
say I'm happy again.

Say it's over.
Say I'm dreaming.
Say I'm better than you left me.

Say you're sorry.

I can take it.

Say you'll wait.
Say you won't.
Say you love me.
Say you don't.
I can make my own mistakes.
Let it bend before it breaks.

I'm alright, don't I always seem to be?
aren't I swinging on the stars?
Don't I wear em' on my sleeves?
But when you're looking for a crossroads,
it happens every day.
And whichever way you turn,
I'm gonna turn the other way.

And say it's over.
Say I'm dreaming.
Say I'm better than you left me.
Say you're sorry.
I can take it.
Say you'll wait.
Say you won't.
Say you love me.
Say you don't.
I can make my own mistakes.
Learn to let it bend before it breaks.

photos from Oconomowoc, WI

2 Songs for November

I'm going to see some friends from out of state
The very trip that you were supposed to take a while ago
But it fell through
Like all of you
Like all of you

Thought I'd make the drive but a free plane ride is in
the air
And just like that my fear of it disappeared
Like all of you
Like all of you

And I look high and low for yesterday
High and low for you and I
High and low

Once I can see straight I might move somewhere cold
Seattle or the bay area, to see your ghost
What's left of you
What's left of you

And I look high and low for yesterday
High and low for you and I
High and low

Found a letter from a man I might have met, addressed
to you
And I'll steal the words he ended with:
I miss you
And I do
Miss you
And I do

High and low for yesterday
High and low for you and I
High and low

- Greg Laswell - "High and Low"

---------------------------------------------

Take your time coming home.
Hear the wheels as they roll.
Let your lungs fill up with smoke.
Forgive everyone.

She is here and now she is gone
We had plans, we can't help but make love.

It's a beautiful thing when we you love somebody,
And I love somebody.
Yeah I love somebody.

Take your time coming home.
Hear the wheels as they roll.
Let your lungs fill with smoke.
Forgive everyone.
I don't think I'd been misled,
it was a rocknroll band,
I'm still standing,
Take your time coming home.

See, of everyone who called,
Very few said "We believe in you."
The overwhelming choice said
I'm just a boy inside a voice
and if that's true, if that's true, if that's true,
then what the fuck have I been doing the last six years?
How did I end up here?
How did I find love and conquer all my fears?
See, I made it out.
Out from under the sun.
And the truth is that I feel better because I've forgiven everyone.

Now I'm not scared
of a song
or the states,
or the stages.
I'm not scared.
I've got friends,
took my call,
came courageous.
Now I feel like I am home.

One more thing, I keep having this dream
where I'm standing on a mountain
Looking out, on the street
I can hear kids in low-income housing singing
"We're through with causing a scene"
I don't know what it means
But I too, I'm through with causing a scene.

She is here and now I think she's ready to go.
For every love that's lost I heard a new one comes.

So come on with me, sing along with me,
Let the wind catch your feet.
If you love somebody,
you'd better let them know.

Take your time coming home.

- fun. - "Take Your Time Coming Home"

Oh Autumn...

The heart is a lonely thing to lose in the dead of night
The heart is a sad thing to lose in the throws of a fight
The heart is the match to the fire
And the embers of desire, to keep it burning

I am a shell of the manner and the means
Mine is a story of nothing as it seems
But when we have come this far
And still don't know who we are, does it keep burning?

When it's over, and you see it with your eyes
Would you rather have the truth or a lie?

I call for angels to breathe holy on this rust
I call the snakes to come and slowly from the brush
I need a massive overhaul
A revival to fall, to keep it burning

The heart is a costly thing to sell in the prime of the years
And my heart is thinly veiled in the usual fears
The heart is the dream, and the kiss
That there could be more than this, to keep it burning.

- Caedmon's Call

Some connected thoughts at 2am

...These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

- Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (Mar.4, 1865)

“The love for equals is a human thing – of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing – the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing – to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints. And then there is the love for the enemy – love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world."
- Frederick Buechner

If that's all that you will be
Then you'll be a waste of time
You've dreamed a thousand dreams
None seem to stick in your mind

Two points for honesty
It must make you sad to know that
Nobody cares at all

I want to be where I've never been before
I want to be there and then I'd understand
Know I'm right and do it right
Could I get to be like that
How to know what I don't know
Nothing more to gain

Will I get better or stay the same?
I find I always move too slowly
Can't lift a finger
Can't change my mind
I never knew till someone told me that

If that's all that you will be
Then you'll be a waste of time
You've dreamed a thousand dreams
None seem to stick in your mind

Two points for honesty
It must make you sad to know that
Nobody cares at all

And all the people who've seen it all before
And all the people who already understand
Know they're right
and done it right
Could I get to be like that?
I don't know and I don't know
It's harder everyday

Can't lift a finger
Can't hurt a fly
I find I always move too slowly
One thing's for certain
I'm insecure
I never knew till someone told me that

If that's all that you will be
Then you'll be a waste of time
You've dreamed a thousand dreams
None seem to stick in your mind

Two points for honesty
It must make you sad to know that
Nobody cares at all
Nobody cares at all
They never cared at all
   - guster

if work permits

So the wind that blows across your room
Carried cheap perfume onto your dresser
It rained for jewelry and for credit cards
Two tickets to a film I don't remember
One day you'll kiss your rabbits nose, pick up the phone
To find I've been turned over
And you'll grab that piece of gold
Only to find that the smell has taken over
Now all the things you had, they aren't the same...
As what you hold

I'm standing in a room,
It's filled with older folks pleading "baby listen"
And I scream as loud as anyone,
But when asked to make a point I tend to whisper
Now highways turn to tidal waves
They're asking me to export all of your insecurities
But that wind that blows across your room
It's gonna set the sails, and send me back to you

Sometimes, when sailors are sailing
They think twice, about where they're anchoring
And I think, I could make better use of my time on land
I'll drink less
'cause lord knows I could use a warm kiss
Instead of a cold goodbye
I'm writing the folks back home to tell them
"Hey I'm doing alright"

It's a shame what your father did to your brothers head
He smashed it with a telephone
And your mother got scared and locked the door
You were only four, but lord you remember it
So now you're scared of love
I'm here to tell you love just ain't some blood on the receiver
Love is speaking in code
It's an inside joke
Love is coming home

And if she seems as lonely as me.....
Let her sink.
Let her sink.
Let her

[the format]

Unacceptable.

This post is going to be a collection of this month's stories of gross persecution of homosexuals. This all started this week with Sally Kern and her statements this week. Regardless of your stance on homosexuality, these positions & actions in the following media items are unacceptable and terrifying. The following stories are the end result of legislators like Kern that would move us to a fundamentalist-fascist theocracy. You see it with Ultra Orthodox Jews, with Islamo-fascist Muslims, and many theocrats in America would move us in this direction. I can't get over how disgusting this type of religious bastardization is. We're sadly almost desensitized to statements like Kern's when coming from fundamentalist pastors like Falwell, Swaggert, Dobson, or Hagee but that has to stop and it must be taken seriously because real life people are listening to them and it is bleeding into real life action. Thanks to Kern we can hear what some of the people we've elected to be our voice actually believe. Oklahoma and the rest of America regardless of your stance should send a message to Kern and others like her and remove her from office. This is unacceptable.

In your government:


[please forgive the cheesy photo slideshow attached to the video and just listen to the audio]

In a private address to supporters, Oklahoma State Representative, Sally Kern talks about how 'The Gays' are indoctrinating our children at age two, and are "the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam." Oh and also gayness is a cancer that spreads just like life-threatening toe cancer.

Kern also has advocated as a Rep in the past for an advisory board to ban books in school libraries that teach other faiths, are positive towards homosexuality, or teach evolution and the scientific method. Nice. Crazy-Ass Kern is Texas university-educated and married to a Baptist minister in OK City. Go figure. Terrorism is alive and well in Oklahoma and this time it's not in the form of an explosion at a government building but in the rhetoric of one of its own governors.

"Every thinking citizen of this country should write to Rep. Chris Benge, Speaker of the House for the Oklahoma House of Representatives asking for censure of this terrorist. Free speech is not a license to incite hate and violence, and sadly that is what this ugly oration is all about. Today, in regions all over this country where ignorant people actually accept these stupid lies as having some basis in fact, school-aged boys and girls who may appear a little more feminine or masculine than Sally thinks is appropriate are going to be terrorized by peers who listen to this crap because their parents listen to this crap. And that's just for starters. This type of terrorism is the genesis of all hate crimes from name calling to murder.

George Bush may have had one thing right. The war on terror begins at home. But instead of profiling innocent Americans simply because of their ethnic background, maybe we should start profiling elected officials who make speeches without any academic or factual merit as a means to exploit and manipulate their uneducated constituents. If Oklahoma is where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, perhaps a big gust will sweep Sally Kern out of office and to a place where she can no longer promote hate, violence and bigotry." -kirk snyder

Full Transcript & Speech: http://www.equalrightsproject.com/

EMAIL: sallykern@okhouse.gov

Abroad:





http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7290330.stm
http://www.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/middle.east/blog/2008/03/gay-iranian-man-pleads-for-asylum.html

An 19-year old Iranian who dared identify as gay nervously awaits a court ruling that he says could lead to his execution. “Mehdi” was studying English in Britain, when he says he learned his boyfriend back in Tehran had been arrested, charged with sodomy and hanged in 2006. But before the boyfriend was killed, Mehdi says, authorities forced his partner to name past lovers.

Days later, Mehdi’s family claims, Iranian police showed up at their Tehran family home with an arrest warrant. In an asylum claim submitted to Britain’s Home Office, Medhi said if he returns to Iran, he too would be executed.

Britain’s Home Office didn’t buy it. It turned him down – then Mehdi fled for Canada before British officials could deport him to Tehran. But he was stopped by border police in Germany and sent to the Netherlands.

He now sits in a Dutch detention center, where he waits for a judge to decide whether to grant him asylum, or carry out a British extradition request to send him to the U.K.

The British Home Office says it does not believe that homosexuals in Iran are routinely persecuted purely because of their sexuality.

Human rights groups say otherwise, citing that Iran's record is particularly shocking, having executed possibly thousands of gay men since the Islamic revolution. And in these cases Iranian controlled media reports fabricate official charges to reduce any public sympathy for the accused or to mask the killings.

In your backyard:

Nathan Feldman, 30, said Slavic protesters have shoved him and spit on him at gay-pride events. Feldman said he lost his job at a jewelry store after a Ukrainian co-worker discovered he was gay and lied to get him fired. That wasn't all. A vandal scrawled graffiti on a trash dumpster outside his apartment: "Nathan Feldman, Die for AIDS."

Satender Singh, 26, One punch was all it took. One punch to forever divide. One punch to kill a young man.

On a hot summer afternoon along a placid lakefront in the Sacramento suburbs, Satender Singh had come with a group of fellow Fijians to celebrate his promotion at an AT&T call center. Three married couples and Singh, a lighthearted 26-year-old, drank and hooted and danced a crazy conga line to East Indian music.

An innocent outing? Not in the eyes of the Russian family a few picnic tables away.

Andrey Vusik, 29, fresh from morning church services with his young children in tow, stared with disgust as Singh danced and hugged the other men while their wives giggled. To the Russian, Singh seemed rude and inappropriate, a gay man putting on an outrageous public display.

Angry stares led to an afternoon of traded insults. As the long day slid toward dusk, the tall Russian immigrant approached with a friend to demand an apology. Singh refused. Vusik threw a single punch.

Singh's head smacked into a concrete walkway. The joyful young man with the musical laugh died four days later of brain injuries.

Now, half a year after that angry Sunday afternoon at Lake Natoma, 15 miles east of the state Capitol, the case remains anything but resolved.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in a newspaper opinion piece that "radical fundamentalists" have pinned a bull's-eye on the gay community. "Tragically now, the threat of violence has become reality, as manifested in this murder."

A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report said many of the region's most vocal Slavic activists are followers of an international anti-gay group called Watchmen on the Walls. Formed just a few years ago, the group has established a potent presence among Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. and abroad.

Using battle-tinged rhetoric, the Watchmen have called for evangelicals to step aggressively into the political realm to fight what they see as a gay agenda threatening the traditional family.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hate16mar16,0,1929221.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23oxnard.html

Larry (Lawrence King), 15, had said publicly that he was gay, classmates said, enduring harassment from a group of schoolmates, including the 14-year-old boy, Brandon, charged in his death. Larry asked Brandon to be his valentine and the following day the 14-yr-old came to school and shot Larry in the head.

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex,” the Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church told the crowd as he stood in front of a large photograph of the victim. “Larry was a masterpiece.”

'Why we can't wait'

Your vote this year has the power to save lives and will affect millions of homosexual people in this country. This is why the Matthew Shepard Act matters, and why a position against it as a Christian is not just debatable but unconscionable...

Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people.
All violent crimes are reprehensible, but hate crimes require additional emphasis in the justice system because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. A violent hate crime is intended to "send a message" that an individual and "their kind" will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected. Our justice system should then be able to "send a message" right back that there are not "less than human" unprotected members of society.

The Supreme Court ruled that, "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest." And stated that, "When the core of a person's identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people."

If that all seems too heady, here's the more practical component. Hate crime legislation gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in crime investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue, and allow courts to consider and present motive in cases in which it previously went unheard. It supports appeals from cases dismissed due to local bias or foul-play. There are countless cases of crimes against individuals dismissed or lessened due to bias. Take the Jena 6 story right now. Without hate crime legislation, it is often harder for victims to have recourse when justice isn't served. This is not only sensible but completely necessary and it should undoubtedly apply to sexual orientation considering that 20% of hate crimes apply to it.

The church is moving forward in many of the arenas in which it has exercised poor judgment. The Catholic church recently unveiled its list of "social" sins declaring that the individual not only sins against him/herself but also systemically against portions of society in a globalized world. Even the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention recently stated that on Global Warming that if it didn't change its stance that it would be disregarded as "uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed johnny-come-lately's just as it had during segregation and slavery and that the poor would be the first to suffer. But despite all of this understanding of implication, nearly everyone, even progressive Christian ethics groups like Sojourners are steering clear of "the gay issue" in America. Why? Why can Christian America love anyone except for their gay neighbor (or mexican one for that matter). Why do Christians in America so hate gays? Christians have to step up on this even if they don't agree with homosexuals. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, demands care for the "other," and declares the ramifications for those who don't. Regardless of an individual's views on the issues, the church has to be out front on human rights abuses. Are murder, violence and abuse ever acceptable toward anyone? Even more fundamental: Is Love Conditional? These shouldn't be a question the church is allowing to go unanswered. You can't play neutral on this one and come out clean.

"I join the oppressors of those I choose to ignore,
and that's not just murder,
it's suicide."

- derek webb

a must see film on the issue: http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org

love for jenny lewis

Well you praise him
Then you thank him
'Til you reach the by-and-by
Then you kiss his lips
He forgives you for it
He forgives you for all you've done
But not me
I'm still angry

What have I done?
Why am I always missing
The big guns?

First I'll build a sword
Get some words to explain
It's a plan, brother, at least
And I'll pretend that everybody here wants peace

Have mercy, have mercy
Have mercy on me
Cause we're tired and lonely
And we're bloody

What have we done?
Why are we still running from our own failing bodies?
The big guns...

Sing mercy, sing mercy
Sing mercy on me
Let's pretend that everybody here wants peace

What have we done?
Why are we still chasing our own tails?
The big guns...

[jenny lewis]

ignorance is oppression

I don’t know the suffering of people outside my front door
I join the oppressors of those who i choose to ignore
I’m trading comfort for human life
and that’s not just murder it’s suicide
this too shall be made right

-derek webb



the new post secret is out. danica, I want to borrow it.

Loving a person just the way they are, it's no small thing
It takes some time to see things through
Sometimes things change, sometimes we're waiting
We need grace either way

Hold on to me
I'll hold on to you
Let's find out the beauty of seeing things through

There's a lot of pain in reaching out and trying
It's a vulnerable place to be
Love and pride can't occupy the same spaces baby
Only one makes you free

Hold on to me
I'll hold on to you
Let's find out the beauty of seeing things through

If we go looking for offense
We're going to find it
If we go looking for real love
We're going to find it

Loving a person just the way they are, that's no small thing
That's the whole thing
Loving me just the way I am, it's no small thing
It takes some time

[sara groves]

Is it any wonder?

"What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?...Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press they bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin. Be thou in us and we in thee that thou may be a woundless one at last."
[Godric - Frederick Buechner]
------------------------------------------

"for 27 years I've been trying
to believe and confide in
different people I found

some of them got closer than others
and some wouldn't even bother
and then you came around

I didn't really know what to call you
you didn't know me at all
but I was happy to explain

I never really knew how to move you
so I tried to intrude through
the little holes in your veins
and I saw you

but that's not an invitation!
that's all I get
if this is communication
I disconnect
I've seen you, I know you, but I don't know
how to connect
so I disconnect

you always seem to know where to find me
and I'm still here behind you
in the corner of your eye

I'll never really learn how to love you
but I know that I love you
through the hole in the sky
where I see you

and that's not an invitation!
that's all I get
if this is communication
I disconnect
I've seen you, I know you
but I don't know
how to connect
so I disconnect

well, this is an invitation!
it's not a threat
if you want communication
that's what you get
I'm talking and talking
but I don't know
how to connect

and I hold
a record for being patient
with your kind of hesitation"
[the cardigans]
------------------------------------------

I always thought that I knew
I'd always have the right to
Be living in the kingdom of the good and true
And so on
But now I think I was wrong
And you were laughing along
And now I look a fool for thinking you were on, my side

Is it any wonder that I'm tired?
Is it any wonder that I feel uptight?
Is it any wonder I don't know what's right?

Sometimes
It's hard to know where I stand
It's hard to know where I am
Or maybe it's a puzzle I don't understand
Sometimes
I get the feeling that I'm
Stranded in the wrong time
Where love is just a lyric in children's rhyme, a soundbite

Is it any wonder that I'm tired?
Is it any wonder that I feel uptight?
Is it any wonder I don't know what's right?
Oh these days
After all the misery made
Is it any wonder that I feel afraid?
Is it any wonder that I feel betrayed?

Nothing left beside this old cathedral
Just the sad lonely spires
How do you make it right?

Oh but you try
Is it any wonder that I'm tired?
Is it any wonder that I feel uptight?
Is it any wonder I don't know what's right?
Oh these days
After all the misery made
Is it any wonder that I feel afraid?
Is it any wonder that I feel betrayed?
[keane]
------------------------------------------

I do not love you the way I did when we met
There are secrets and arguments that I haven't finished yet
It's only that grace has outlived our regrets
We're still here
There are times meant for breaking
And words to ignore
And a bent to our souls
When our skin is at war
If leaving were freedom
Well, we'd both walk right out of that door
But maybe we can stay
[jars]

(Love is not love, until you give it away.)

"I like the sweet life and the silence but it's the storm that I believe in."

"Though He slay me, I will hope in Him."
- [Job 13:15a]

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

- [John Donne, "Holy Sonnet XIV"]

-----------------------------------------------

"oh it's healing - bang bang bang
I can hear your cannons call
you've been aiming at my land
your hungry hammer is falling

and if you want me I'm your country

I'm an angel bored like hell
and you're a devil meaning well
you steal my lines and you strike me dumb
come raise your flag upon me

and if you want me I'm your country
if you win me I'm forever - oh yeah!

'cause you're the storm that I've been needing
and all this peace has been deceiving
I like the sweet life and the silence
but it's the storm that I believe in

come and conquer and drop your bombs
cross my borders and kill the calm
bear your fangs and burn my wings
I hear bullets singing

and if you want me I'm your country
if you win me I'm forever - oh yeah!

'cause you're the storm that I've been needing
and all this peace has been deceiving
I need some wind to get me sailing
so it's the storm that I believe in

you fill my heart, you keep me breathing
'cause you're the storm that I believe in"

- [The Cardigans, "You're the Storm"]

On fall and falling

October thoughts...
selections from annie dillard, frederick buechner, björk, sufjan and andrew peterson:

"The gnawed mock-orange hedge and cherry tree leaves, they are uncurling now, limp and bluish, on the top of this desk. They didn't escape, but their time was almost up anyway. Already outside a corky ring of tissue is thickening around the base of each leaf stem, strangling each leaf one by one. The summer is old. A gritty, colorless dust cakes the melons and squashes, and worms fatten within on the bright, sweet flesh. The world is festering with suppurating sores. Where is the good, whole fruit? The world "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain." I've been there, seen it, done it, I suddenly think, and the world is old, a hungry old man, fatigued and broken past mending. Have I walked too much, aged beyond my years? I see the copperhead shining new on a rock altar over a fetid pool where a forest should grow. I see the knob-footed killdeer, the tattered butterflies and birds, the snapping turtle festooned with black leeches. There are the flies that make a wound, the flies that find a wound, and a hungry world that won't wait till I'm decently dead.

"In nature," wrote Huston Smith, " the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be." I learn this lesson in a new way every day. It must be, I think tonight, that in a certain sense only the newborn in this world are whole, that as adults we are expected to be, and necessarily, somewhat nibbled. It's par for the course. Physical wholeness is not something we have barring accident; it is itself accidental, an accident of infancy, like a baby's fontanel or the egg-tooth on a hatchling. Are the five-foot silver eels that migrate as adults across meadows by night actually scarred with the bill marks of herons, flayed by the sharp teeth of bass? I think of the beautiful sharks I saw from a shore, hefted and held aloft in a light-shot wave. Were those sharks sliced with scars, were there mites in their hides and worms in their hearts? Did the mockingbird that plunged from the rooftop, folding its wings, bear in its buoyant quills a host of sucking lice? Is our birthright and heritage to be, like Jacob's cattle on which the life of a nation was founded, "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted" not with the spangling marks of a grace like beauty rained down from eternity, but with the blotched assaults and quarryings of time? "We are all of us clocks," says Eddington, "whose faces tell the passing years." The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole.

Through the window over my desk comes a drone, drone, drone, the weary winding of cicadas' horns. If I were blasted by a meteorite, I think, I could call it blind chance and die cursing. But we live creatures are eating each other, who have done us no harm. We're all in this Mason jar together, snapping at anything that moves. If the pneumococcus bacteria had flourished more vitally, if it had colonized my other lung successfully, living and being fruitful after its created kind, then I would have died my death, and my last ludicrous work would have been an Easter egg, an Easter egg painted with beaver and deer, an Easter egg that was actually in face, even as I painted it and the creatures burgeoned in my lung, fertilized. It is ridiculous. What happened to manna? Why doesn't everything eat manna, into what rare air did the manna dissolve that we harry the free live things, each other?

An Eskimo shaman said, " Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that men's food consists entirely of souls." Did he say it to the harmless man who gave him tuberculosis, or to the one who gave him tar paper and sugar for wolfskin and seal? I wonder how many bites I have taken, parasite and predator, from family and friends; I wonder how long I will be permitted the luxury of this relative solitude. Out here on the rocks the people don't mean to grapple, to crush and starve and betray, but with all the goodwill in the world, we do, there's no other way. We want it; we take it out of each other's hides; we chew the bitter skins the rest of our lives.

But now, although we hear the buzz in our ears and the crashing of jaws at our heels, we can look around as those who are nibbled but unbroken, from the shimmering vantage of the living. Here may not be the cleanest, newest, place, but that clean timeless place that vaults on either side of this one is no place at all. "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." There are no more chilling, invigorating words than these of Christ's, "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead."

...That the world is old and frayed is no surprise; that the world could ever become new and whole beyond uncertainty was, and is such a surprise that I find myself referring all subsequent kinds of knowledge to it... I still now and will tomorrow steer by what happened that day, when some undeniably new spirit roared down the air, bowled me over, and turned on the lights. I stood on grass like air, air like lightning coursed in my blood, floated my bones, swam in my teeth. I've been there, seen it, been done by it. I know what happened to the cedar tree, I saw the cells in the cedar tree pulse charged like wings beating praise.

...I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, "Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way."

[annie dillard - exerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]

"What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?... Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding."

[frederick buechner - exerpt from Godric]

"I’ve seen it all, I have seen the trees,
I’ve seen the willow leaves dancing in the breeze
I’ve seen a man killed by his best friend,
And lives that were over before they were spent.
I’ve seen what I was - I know what I’ll be
I’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!

You haven’t seen elephants, kings or Peru!
I’m happy to say I had better to do
What about China? Have you seen the Great Wall?
All walls are great, if the roof doesn’t fall!

And the man you will marry?
The home you will share?
To be honest, I really don’t care…

You’ve never been to Niagara Falls?
I have seen water, its water, that’s all…
The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State?
My pulse was as high on my very first date!
Your grandson’s hand as he plays with your hair?
To be honest, I really don’t care…

I’ve seen it all, I’ve seen the dark
I’ve seen the brightness in one little spark.
I’ve seen what I chose and I’ve seen what I need,
And that is enough, to want more would be greed.
I’ve seen what I was and I know what I’ll be
I’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!

You’ve seen it all and all you have seen
You can always review on your own little screen
The light and the dark, the big and the small
Just keep in mind - you need no more at all
You’ve seen what you were and know what you’ll be
You’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!"

[björk]

"Everything You are
Is everything we have
You're the only good thing
A sun came
Burned our faces round
Burned our faces red
You are still the rage, a rock
From the enemy
There is still a house, a cage
For the enemy
When my friends turned out, I found out
There is still a Lord
But I never felt so lonely
A sun came"

[sufjan stevens]

"But here we toil and we till the hard earth, where even the warm times with friend and kin are lonely because we know they won't last long enough to quiet the ache. Our sadness points to Home the way hunger points to the feast, the way the light of the cratered moon is always facing the sun, always pointing to where the dawn will come like a pillar of fire when this rock we walk on turns again to burning day. All over the quiet plains and the cold stone cities full of dying and shame the promise is not drowned out by the weeping; it is declared by it."

[andrew peterson]

*paintings by kathleen earthrowl

Music is good news breaking through the pavement.

an incredible article on music, truth, the word, and change.
follow closely or you'll miss it.


REVELATIONS

by DAVID DARK

article from Oxford American

Email this story to a friend

What exactly are we hoping for when we download an iTune? What sense of expectation do we bring to the table when we pay money to watch somebody belt out a chorus in a darkened room?

There's something so commonplace about our taking in of music that we tend to forget about the remarkable degree of faith, hope, and love involved. What I think we're looking for is a good word to take the edge off. We're daring to believe that reality might unfurl before us by way of other human voices. We might even believe a soothsayer or shaman is about to show up among people like us. We're experimenting with an Amen.

In a rather revelatory chapter of Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan tells, as a young man, of finding one Thelonious Monk sitting alone at the Blue Note with a large, half-consumed sandwich on top of his piano ("in his own dynamic universe even when he dawdled around," according to Dylan). When the young singer mentions that he plays folk music up the street, Monk responds as if commenting on the weather: "We all play folk music."

Folk. Now there's a good word. It manages to lift a burden somehow. Folk is just folks trying to tell other folks what's happening in their heads as they try to remember or forget stories or feelings; folk is trying to tell truthfully what happened by telling it a little slant. What isn't folk?

A folk song, after all, is not an edict from on high, but often a disruptively truthful word about the way things are. It expands the sphere of sanity little by little, and it breaks into monopolies on truth. It opens the doors of perception. Will we settle for anything less than that? Do we want to be changed? Do we want release?

I like to tell my students that anything they find in their literature textbooks should be viewed as no more or less highfalutin' than a trucker writing words of love or loss on a napkin at a Waffle House. There are no complete strangers. Everyone's invited. Everyone's allowed.

As a form of testimony, folk music speaks from outside the flow of power. It will always have a certain democratic heft in its appeal to observable reality, and it is insistently by, of, and for the people. It's this very rock & roll presumptuousness concerning people passing information and illumination to other people that brings us toward a term gospel: truthful (and therefore good) news that demands disclosure; human expressions worth sharing.

You can call it a jazz sensibility as well (or blues or spiritual), and perhaps labels such as these will always be with us as a kind of cataloguing to help us find what we're looking for. But "gospel" of some sort is probably always the point. We're on the prowl for inspiration. We don't journey toward live performances or buy box-sets in an entirely disinterested or detached state. We want a shot of something "bloodier than blood" (in Wilco's memorable phrase), something extra-authentic, something to prick our nerves and rattle our brains.

In an effort to ascribe a solidarity between the Presbyterian Ishmael and the cannibalistic Queequeg of Moby Dick, Melville described humanity as a "multiple pilgrim species." Nothing is doctrinaire or religious (in the worst sense) in Melville's characterization of our journey, but, on the other hand, nobody gets to be viewed (or views himself) as unsacred or merely secular. We're all involved in worship of one kind or another; we're all on a pilgrimage. A revelatory word can come from any quarter, believer and unbeliever alike. No hierarchy here. No official word. Only testimonies.

And to borrow a little from Chuck D of Public Enemy, folk music (in the broad, Thelonious Monk sense) is the people's CNN. In the predominantly oral societies of ancient times (Roman-occupied, first-century Palestine, for instance), it was often believed that words were infused with mystical powers. But speaking truthfully, prophetically, or in an inspired fashion wasn't something just anyone could do; only priests, prophets on the payroll, cronies, and other professional religious figures were permitted to make sure the right speech got spoken.

To get a better hold of the sociological significance of gospel, we might echo the befuddled and frustrated testimony of Flannery O'Connor's philosophizing serial killer, the Misfit, in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find": "Jesus thrown everything off balance." The Misfit winces at the mention of a savior who single handedly brought up the net value of human beings for every culture that takes him seriously, and he sees how rumors of the Nazarene's notions mess with what passes as normal and, in the Misfit's view, disturb a man's confidence. He figures that if Jesus were the real deal, there's nothing to do but drop everything and follow him. And if he weren't? No pleasure but meanness.

To the Misfit, Jesus' gospel isn't just another peaceful easy feeling or just a decent sentiment; the good news is a question mark against whatever we erect as an absolute. Like a chain reaction (or a slow train coming), gospel is a different sort of social imagination moving through history, breaking the pavement of the status quo of countless cultures beyond the Middle East, even searing the conscience of a slave-holding culture that believed itself to have the definitive word on how to read that thick, black, leather-bound book.

So gospel is multi-partisan. Properly understood, gospel makes equal-opportunity pilgrims of males, females, Jews, Greeks, slaves, and the legally free. Nobody owns the copyright on the good, truthful Word. No label can contain the reach of the people's good news. In this sense, gospel is a wider ranging broadcast than we tend to imagine. Perhaps inevitably, the term would eventually be used for advertising purposes (or to categorize music that contains the right number of obvious Biblical references and clichés), but that doesn't mean we have to define it so rigidly. The Biblical witness is a little muddier than the "spirituality" market allows. When we think of the Bible as "religion" or "spirituality," we're letting ourselves be misled if we think primarily of consistently "uplifting" verses or devotional thoughts inscribed on greeting cards or written in tracts. And gospel, in the deepest sense, can't exactly stay out of politics, as the saying goes, because news bears witness. Gospel speaks truth to power brokers and commodifiers.

With the power of Herod, Pilate, Jim Crow, and Pharaoh somehow relativized, a "democratic dignity" (Melville's phrase) is now attributed to every human voice (peasants, outcasts, cast-offs, the least of these), and every kind of redemption song can break through and multiply. These songs can mark a day of judgment for every death-dealing abstraction, con-game, or unjust ruler on the scene. Folk music is an entering into a communal awareness, a partaking of the mother wit that resists the despair of having nothing to say. Folk is born beneath the radar where most executives and profiteers who wouldn't think to pay any mind. But for anyone looking hard, the avenues of communication (of fear, worry, hope, and forecasts) are expanded into a great wide open.

At this point, we might invoke the figure of Johnny Cash who purposefully sought to channel, in his words, "voices that were ignored or even suppressed in the entertainment media, not to mention the political and educational establishments." That's a vocation, for sure, but we wouldn't think to reduce the witness of Cash to the merely "spiritual" any more than we'd characterize William Blake's vision as either religious or political. The dichotomies don't fly when we're dealing with a human heart in conflict with itself. (That would be every human heart, by the way.) Dylan once recalled that experiencing "I Walk the Line" for the first time was like hearing a voice calling out, "What are you doing there, boy?" The authoritative dissent and the truth-telling power of those about to rock & roll will know no convenient divisions, and the powers that be are put on high alert. A change is going to come.

Admittedly, the connotations contained within the category of "religion" are perhaps inevitably held in contempt by honest people. There's an understandable aversion to allowing our love of good music to get contaminated by anything that approaches such talk. The illness that informs the boastfully "religious" is well-epitomized in Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry who, we're told, "got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason." There's a lot of that going around these days. And to say the least, the distinguishing feature of the self-described religious doesn't appear to be integrity. This gospel seems to have as much to do with Jesus' first-century gospel as a Dodge Dakota does with the Crow Creek Dakota tribe.

But are we clearing up matters with a term like secular? Do Cash and Al Green and Martin Luther King and John Brown self-consciously add a little spirituality to their otherwise secular careers? The labels won't testify. They don't describe what's going on, and gospel won't suffer proprietorship.

In the music most affiliated with the term gospel, "some of these days" is the operative phrase because the words witness to an earthbound hope that is neither "pie in the sky" or merely "life after death." You can hear it in Sam Cooke and throughout the Goodbye, Babylon box-set. Packaged in a wooden box and framed in cotton, Goodbye, Babylon includes everything from Sister Terrell to Hank Williams to the Reverend J.M. Gates's "Death Might Be Your Santa Claus." With one hundred thirty-five songs (1902-1960) and twenty-five sermons (1926-1941), the collection calls into question whatever we mean by "secular" and deconstructs our cataloguing impulse. There is a train and a river and a light coming down. "Some of these days" characterizes an age to come that will further sanctify an already sacramental present. The tension between what is and what ought to be drives the growls against hypocrisy and the satirization of the self-satisfied and uptight. If there's a justice that will still all lying tongues and days when the dead and the rubbed out will return to tell a story or two, all speech is up for grabs. Folk makes louder and livelier expression permissible and appropriate, a way of staring down madness with mirth. There is no terrain outside folk's jurisdiction, no subject that's inappropriate or irrelevant to the stories and sayings and lamentations.

There is music out there, selling by the truckload, and it has the same effect on the human heart as undersized shoes had on women's feet in ancient China. When music is untruthful, the songs are largely void of investigative power, only desensitizing, never urging us to look a little harder at other people's faces or our own. Such sounds don't invite real listening. And then there's folk, a more reliable witness to what's going on than most journalism, demanding to be inherited, committed to memory, sung around a fire, whenever we hear the music. Folk isn't so arrogant as to view itself as a No Spin Zone, because folk music understands that to spin is human. And those who think they're without spin are only too quick to cast the first stone. Folk music is a little more modest in its goals, but folk will try to tell truth as well as it can, even among the slow to believe.

Folk invites our consent. And if we're willing, the music will become a part of the way we see, chastening and invigorating our way of looking at the world. The music is good news. Folk is people talking.

David Dark lives in Nashville and is the author of The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea and Everyday Apocalypse. Favorite lyric: "You try to love her, but you're so contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary." -Elvis Costello

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
In David's article, among other things coming across bloodier than blood, I hear the same voice speaking as the Czech revolutionary, Vaclav Havel, did when he said,

"We had our parallel society. And in that parallel society, we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems, until we knew the truth so well that we could go out into the streets... and say, "We don't believe your lies anymore!" And [the whole thing] had to fall."

Let it come.

Redemption comes in strange places

I was doing some work today for Blood:Water, a few things specifically for Sara Groves and facilitating B:W support on her tour. I thought I'd use her album as the soundtrack. The subjects of the lyrics were mirroring my present situation in all my thoughts, hopes and fears a little too closely. Let's continue: The week before I picked back up with two books that I had unfortunately only sporadically been reading for pleasure and study, and to which I was quite grateful to return. Subsequently, the points in the book that I had reached were not only speaking of the very things that were distressing me at the time, but one even contained a passage quoting the other despite their being very different types of books whose contents wouldn't seem likely to cross. Furthermore, at the time I was at a church-related retreat and the content of the preacher's sermons was for a large part following along simultaneously with my reading, possibly even ripped directly out of the pages of the chapter in one of the books.

Life's like this sometimes, the work of the Spirit I suppose. I've experienced this eerie wonder in times past, usually with welcomed surprise and excitement, but this time something's amiss. It's almost a resentfulness toward God's lack of subtlety. It's funny really, we all pray so demandingly for God to give us clarity as we stumble along in the dark, I basically receive nothing much short of a voice from the burning bush, and my pride runs so deep that I'm actually bitter about it! I'd shout, "Unbelievable!" if I didn't know myself too well. This is the face of insanity. In contrast it's the sanity-restoring voice of the Gospel, which declares that even as Christians we still need God's grace to allow us to accept his good gifts because truth be told we don't want them. We'd rather do it ourselves.


and here's why her album is brilliant to me:

"When It Was Over"

When it was over and they could talk about it
She said there's just one thing I have got to know
What in that moment when you were running so hard and fast
Made you stop and turn for home
He said I always knew you loved me even though I'd broken your heart
I always knew there'd be a place for me to make a brand new start

Oh love wash over a multitude of things
Love wash over a multitude of things
Love wash over a multitude of things
Make us whole

When it was over and they could talk about it
They were sitting on the couch
She said what on earth made you stay here
When you finally figured out what I was all about
He said I always knew you'd do the right thing
Even though it might take some time
She said, Yeah, I felt that and that's probably what saved my life

Oh love wash over a multitude of things
Love wash over a multitude of things
Love wash over a multitude of things
Make us whole

There is a love that never fails
There is a healing that always prevails
There is a hope that whispers a vow
A promise to stay while we're working it out
So come with your love and wash over us

"Loving a Person"

Loving a person just the way they are, it's no small thing
It takes some time to see things through
Sometimes things change, sometimes we're waiting
We need grace either way

Hold on to me
I'll hold on to you
Let's find out the beauty of seeing things through

There's a lot of pain in reaching out and trying
It's a vulnerable place to be
Love and pride can't occupy the same spaces baby
Only one makes you free

Hold on to me
I'll hold on to you
Let's find out the beauty of seeing things through

If we go looking for offense
We're going to find it
If we go looking for real love
We're going to find it

Loving a person just the way they are, that's no small thing
That's the whole thing
Loving me just the way I am, it's no small thing
Takes some time, Takes some time, Takes some time

"Add to the Beauty"

We come with beautiful secrets
We come with purposes written on our hearts, written on our souls
We come to every new morning
With possibilities only we can hold, that only we can hold

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are

And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
I want to shine with the light
That's burning up inside

It comes in small inspirations
It brings redemption to life and work
To our lives and our work

It comes in loving community
It comes in helping a soul find it's worth

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are

And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
I want to shine with the light
That's burning up inside

This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful
This is grace, an invitation

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out our best

And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
I want to shine with the light
That's burning up inside

"It's Going To Be Alright"

I can tell by your eyes that you're not getting any sleep
And you try to rise above it, but feel you're sinking in too deep
Oh, oh I believe, I believe that

It's going to be alright
It's going to be alright

I believe you'll outlive this pain in you heart
And you'll gain such a strength from what is tearing you apart
Oh, oh I believe I believe that

It's going to be alright
It's going to be alright

When some time has past us, and the story if retold
It will mirror the strength and the courage in your soul
Oh, oh, I believe I believe,

I did not come here to offer you clichÈ's
I will not pretend to know of all your pain
Just when you cannot, then I will hold out faith, for you

It's going to be alright
It's going to be alright
We're going to be alright
It's going to be alright
I believe
I believe you're going to be alright
I believe I'm going to be alright
I believe we're going to be alright

I can tell by your eyes that you're not getting any sleep
And you try to rise above it, but feel you're sinking in too deep
But I believe
Cast your cares on me

"Something Changed"

Something changed inside me broke wide open all spilled out
Till I had no doubt that something changed

Never would have believed it till I felt it in my own heart
In the deepest part the healing came

Something so amazing in a heart so dark and dim
When a wall falls down and the light comes in

And I cannot make it
And I cannot fake it
And I can't afford it
But it's mine

[all songs by sara groves from the album, add to the beauty]

Back By Popular Demand

EGO TRIPPIN'

Here's a little segment I like to call...

Kanye West On:

Kanye on Humility and Accolades

"After I finished with 'Jesus Walks' two weeks later I walk around with it and you can't tell me it's not hot. f#@$ you and your stupid ass ratings. Anybody who gives my album less than a perfect score is lowering the integrity of their own magazine. So either be a part of history or become it."

"I’m rappin’ now. Anybody who ain’t respecting me as an artist right now, might as well just bash their heads into the wall just for being stupid. I say, just kill yourself ‘cuz if not, it’s gonna kill you for how much you about to hear me."

"I do not apologize to Dick Clark or the AMAs because you should not have had me perform and have me nominated for so many awards but not have an award," he said. "I'm one of those guys that's like all new artists, `Oh, I just believe that everything is on the up-and-up' and now I see with some of those other awards shows that it's not."

"I feel I was definitely robbed, I was the best new artist this year, so get that other bullshit out of here (referring to Gretchen Wilson). I don't know if I'll be back at this award show next year."

"I still think I am the greatest." - Accepting the Billboard Music Award for Artist of the Year.

"I Make black history every day, I don't need a month." - Brand New , 2005
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SANTA MONICA, California — So what if the Grammy nominations haven't been announced? Kanye West is enraged anyway.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1517545/20051206/index.jhtml?headlines=true

"College Dropout Kanye Tells High School Students Not To Follow In His Footsteps"), the rapper spouted to MTV News backstage about predictions he'd heard that his Late Registration LP would be a likely contender for Album of the Year — but wouldn't win because of West's tendency to run his mouth (particularly his comment that "George Bush doesn't care about black people").

"If I don't win Album of the Year, I'm gonna really have a problem with that," said West. "I can never talk myself out of [winning], you know why? Because I put in the work. I don't care if I jumped up and down right now on the couch like Tom Cruise. I don't care what I do, I don't care how much I stunt — you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it. So I don't wanna hear all of that politically correct stuff. You put the camera in front of me, I'm gonna tell you like this. I worked hard to get here. I put my love, I put my heart, I put my money [into Late Registration]. I'm $600,000 in the hole right now on that album and you tell me about being politically incorrect?

"People love these songs," he continued. "You talk to somebody whose grandmother just died and listens to 'Roses,' and you tell me about being politically incorrect. I'm talking about history. I never got five mics [top rating] in The Source, I never got five stars from Vibe. They said it's not a classic. So 'Jesus Walks' is not a classic? 'Roses' is not a classic? 'Gold Digger' wasn't song of the year? 'Oh, but Kanye, you can't say that.' Why? Who are you? I don't know you."

West mocked artists who "love everybody except themselves," calling it "cliché media training." He also made it clear he's not planning to shut up anytime soon.

"I said I was the face of the Grammys last year. I'm 10 times that [this year]," West said. "Get your cameras ready. Two things: Do not let me get up on that stage and do not let me get up on that stage. Either way, we going crazy!"

The Grammy nominees will be announced on Thursday, and the ceremony is scheduled for February 8 in Los Angeles.

Last fall, West attacked the American Music Awards backstage at the event after losing Best New Artist to Gretchen Wilson. That tantrum made West a focus at the Grammys in February, where he was the leading nominee (with 10) and won three awards, including Best Rap Album for The College Dropout and Best Rap Song for "Jesus Walks" (see "Kanye Steals The Show, But Ray Dominates Grammy Winners' Circle"). In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, critic Robert Hilburn wrote that the Recording Academy, which organizes the Grammys and is considered by some to be late in recognizing new artists, could reclaim credibility this year by giving West the Album of the Year. There was no mention of West's rants.

Also on Monday, West revealed the next single from Late Registration will be "Touch the Sky," which in some ways is a response to his critics.

"'Touch the Sky' is what my life is about, it's what this year's been about," he said. "To anyone that feels like something is so far away, [the song is] just the concept of actually being able to leap above the environment that you're in. All the naysayers and the haters and people say, 'You'll never make it that far, you'll never make it out of this town, we'll call you,' and all those things, and finally you get the opportunity to touch the sky. That's what this year's about, so no matter what they give to me or try to take from me, there's nothing you can take from me. We've already touched the sky.

"With or without any accolades, whatever it is, the fact that people listen to this music and it's connected with people, the fact that you see fans crying in the audience — you can't tell me anything after that because there's so many places and establishments where people are out of touch," he continued. "When someone hears your song and cries, then you're in touch and that's what matters. At that point, you feel like you've touched the sky."

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"No disrespect, but I feel that I should win. The hardest part is that me and Mariah are up there together because our votes could cancel each other out," he said. "I need to use the Jedi mind trick, you know, when you're eating a sandwich and someone says, 'Yo, I'm hungry,' and you say, 'Well, I would give you the other half, but then I would still be hungry, so why not just let me eat?' So Mariah, let me get some and we can celebrate together.

"There's people that think I don't have respect for the Grammys, but in fact I have total respect for them," he added. "In fact I used the Grammys as the muse for my album. [Producer] Jon Brion and I were in the studio saying, 'We're making the Album of the Year!' "

"I've been here two years in a row, and if I don't win it's fixin' to be a problem."

"In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts," he says. "You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?"

West also says his hit song "Gold Digger" was the best song last year and that it should have been nominated for the Grammy's best rap song category: "That's a gimme Grammy."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/24/people.kanyewest.ap/index.html

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/9183008/kanye_west_world/?rnd=
1139615290900&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040

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Kayne on AIDS

"I would rather take that chance because it's important for my people. The concept of AIDS alone - my parents always told me, who are activists - that it's a man-made disease in the first place that 'tha man' placed in Africa just like crack was placed in the black community to break up the Black Panther party."

"So if there's anything that I can do to somehow continue that fight for equality, injustice, for a better way for my people, being that I am an African-American, then I got to do what I can do." - Kanye at Live8

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Kanye on Katrina Relief

After admitting that he went shopping before donating, but that "my business manager is looking into how much he can give."

Kanye followed with: "I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, 'They're looting.' You see a white family, it says, 'They're looking for food.' And, you know, it's been five days waiting for federal help because most of the people are black."

While allowing that, "the Red Cross is doing everything they can," West _ who delivered an emotional outburst at the American Music Awards after he was snubbed for an award _ declared that government authorities are intentionally dragging their feet on aid to the Gulf Coast. Without getting specific, he added, "They've given them (the National Guard) permission to go down and shoot us."

After he stated, "George Bush doesn't care about black people"

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Kanye on other humanitarian crises

"Good Morning, this ain't Vietnam, still
People lose hands, legs, arms, fo' real
Little was known on Sierra Leone
And how it connect to the diamonds we own
When I speak of diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin 'bout the ones that be glowin
I'm talkin 'bout Roc-a-Fella, my home
My chain, this ain't conflict diamonds
Is they Jacob? Don't lie to me, man
[...]
People askin me is I'm gon' give my chain back
That'll be the same day I give the game back"

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Kanye on Christianity

We rappers is role models, we rap we don't think
I ain't here to argue about his facial features
Or here to convert atheists into believers
I'm just trying to say the way school need teachers
The way Kathy Lee needed Regis that's the way I need Jesus
- excerpt from "Jesus Walks"

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'I SHOULD BE IN THE BIBLE'

Cocky rap star, Kanye West, is calling for a revised edition of THE BIBLE, because he thinks he should be a character in it.

The JESUS WALKS hitmaker, who picked up three Grammy Awards last night (08FEB06), feels sure he'd be "a griot" (West African storyteller) in a modern Bible.

He says, "I bring up historical subjects in a way that makes kids want to learn about them. I'm an inspirational speaker.

"I changed the sound of music more than one time... For all those reasons, I'd be a part of the Bible. I'm definitely in the history books already."

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Just for fun (Miscellaneous Kanye Quotes):

"That's one of the best things that can happen to a rapper - to almost die. TUPAC, 50 CENT and now me." - KANYE WEST remembers how a near-fatal car crash helped launch his career.

"Please don't download, because I want to get a pool in my second home."

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bonus feature:
Kanye's Momma on Kanye

"I am a fan of 50 Cent, Ludacris, Eminem. I even like Chingy. But I really haven't been as impressed by their lyrics as I am by Kanye's. I mean, Kanye has a way of putting a unique twist to things. [On 'Through the Wire'] he doesn't say, 'Thank God I ain't too cool for the safety belt.' He says, 'Thank God I ain't too cool for the safe belt.' I just think it's so brilliant."

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In conclusion:

"Kanye West courts controversy by dressing up as Jesus. Who does he think he is....

...Bono? - Stephen Colbert