Todays charity shop womblin gleaned two classics at 30p each, sold!

Imagine if, when we were kids, there was a store in our town or in our neighborhood that carried an amazing variety of music, many times more than at any music store, about 98% of music you might want to hear.  But the kicker is, its not a store, they give it away for free like a library.  And more, you don’t have to go there, its available to you at home.

I worry about pop and counter-culture music today, but isn’t it certain that this will help music?  All the classics are avaiable to everyone with internet, for free.

I love The Beatles.  John, Paul, George and Ringo are synonymous with great music, rock and roll culture, youth, peace, and love.  They arrived on the scene, fresh-faced.  They grew as we (the culture of the ‘60’s) grew.  They broke up, sadly, at the dawn of a new decade.  The Beatles were the ‘60’s, from the first “One, two, three, foh!” as Paul sings urgently that “she was just 17” when he saw her “standing there”, looking “way beyond compare”, to the dissonant climactic orchestral and piano finale of Sergeant Pepper’s A Day in the Life, to the medley from Abbey Road (“And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love, you make”); all that, and everything in between, accomplished in a mere 8 years.

Every Beatles fan has his or her favorite Beatle, Beatles songs, albums and probably even eras.  In my unscientific way, I’ve determined there are three distinct Beatle eras, though I can easily be persuaded that the number is four (okay, maybe five).  I wonder if any psychology graduate student ever attempted to correlate personality traits from standardized personality inventories with Beatles’ songs, albums or eras.  It would be an interesting study.

The first era has to begin with Please Please Me (recorded in only 12 hours).  Here are the youthful innocents (not really so innocent according to biographers, as they had spent time playing long nights in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, the red light district).  Conclude that first era, perhaps, with Hard Day’s Night.  The middle era reveals the lads from Liverpool becoming more confident and assertive, more experimental and more studio-savvy with Rubber Soul and Revolver.  The middle era culminates magnificently with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the greatest record of all time according to Rolling Stone magazine).  Then, for me anyway, things really get interesting.  I think of the third era as the holy trinity: The White Album, Let It Be and Abbey Road.  Now the band are growing up, are in their late 20’s, and, sadly, are dealing with the weightier emotions borne of grown up experiences, like the death of their manager, deaths of family, friends and peers, mismanagement at Apple Corp., money problems, drug problems, rivalries, jealousies, distractions, new loves (Linda, Patti and Yoko) and ultimately, breaking up.

5 or 6 years ago, through the wonder of the Internet, I found a website where I could download (apparently legally, and for a small charge) hours and hours of unreleased Beatles outtakes, demos, and studio bits.  The beautiful result … they sound terrible; just awful; beyond awful; awful “way beyond compare”.  And I love that!  I love that the band, THAT band, can sound like a parade of braying donkeys; like a carnival of angry cats.  What I take from these dissonant, discordant, disharmonious gems is the insight that making amazing music for posterity is a process, and that any creative endeavor must also be a process.  Almost no one gets it right the first time.  And it all starts with an idea, or sometimes it just starts with a start; a kernel, a rough nugget, shaped, polished, filtered, looped, dubbed, overlaid, played backward, sped up, or slowed down.

Without question The Beatles were individually, and as a group, great musicians, singers and songwriters.  They had a magical chemistry and unparalleled charisma.  They came along at a time when the perfect storm of television and mass communication to a worldwide audience was burgeoning.  They came at a time when their message of peace and love resonated with a mass audience and was needed.  They also had classically trained George Martin to produce their records, and the deep pocket resources of EMI (their recording company). But they had more than that.  They also had certain “experiences” that shaped their creative ideas and output; letting them see things from very different perspectives.  I’m talking about drugs, of course; pot, LSD, and reportedly more (for John).  I’m convinced their well-documented experimentation was in pursuit of art and craft, and not the nihilistic tune in, turn on and drop out escapism advocated by Timothy Leary.  I’m convinced that drug experimentation for The Beatles was about innovation, not about making a radical counter-cultural statement.  I don’t believe they were all that radical or counter-cultural.  Their message was always peace and love, through words and music.  I do believe they experimented, with drugs and other things, because they sought to have experiences that might lead them to make their music creatively different, if not downright great.

They were innovators, almost always original, and never derivative, as was true of many other bands of the time.  They managed to avoid being categorized, catalogued and pigeon-holed.  I think that’s one reason why they endure.  So often they made a record and made it their own by taking advantage of whatever happened to be available to them, using any and all resources creatively; unique instruments in unique ways; sound clips of animals, traffic, and laughter.  Sure, now, looking back, we can say it’s easy and that anyone can take bits, pieces and fragments of tape, cut them up, throw them in the air, let them fall to the floor, and then reassemble the pieces at random, or play songs or bits backward or faster or slower.  But the fact is, they thought of it, they did it first, and they risked themselves doing it.  I think there is a lot to be learned about that; about being creative; about taking chances.  “Well, just jump in” my good friend once told me, and “Flow with the river” another said.  You never quite know where the river will take you.  This realization has freed me to take creative chances and in so doing to quiet the noise of the ego critic that lives within.

I like to paint in my garage in the summer when the days are sunny and warm.  I like the door open and the natural light of a long summer day streaming in.  I almost never start out with much, if anything, in the way of a concept.  How can I?  I have no formal art training of any kind.  But I have learned, when painting, to take the pressure from myself and just jump in, giving myself permission to throw, slap, drip, dash and brush paint (or glue, or caulk, or putty, or tape or whatever) onto a canvas, this way and that, in odd assortments of colors and textures, brushing in what must seem like random (and maybe occasionally inspired) ways without the filter of critical thought.  I challenge myself to be spontaneous, to act before my conscious mind is able to judge my actions and put on the brakes.  And I keep working at it, sometimes over-working the canvas and ruining the thing, but that’s okay.  The point is, I am painting.  And if there should be something of a finished product that surprises, delights or moves me, or someone else, then that is a welcome result.  Almost invariably, there is a welcome result.  And if I look at the finished painting long enough, deeply enough, all the different ways, rotating the canvas on one side after another, again and again and again, then, if I am open to the possibilities, I will see something amazing, something magical appear that wasn’t evident at first glance.  I don’t know how or why this is so, but I do know I am not the only one this happens to.  On more than one occasion I have introduced a friend to painting, out there in the garage, and watched with pleasure as he or she, who never painted before, created something valuable and meaningful.  I think that’s a good lesson.  Anyone, with a little bit of inspiration, and the courage to jump in, can create something worthwhile.

So, “in the end”, I love The Beatles because, when no one was listening, they could sound terrible.  That tells me they are, after all, only human, just like the rest of us, and that inspires me.

I like most of the pics on this spot, a nice combination of the abstract and erotic. <a href=”http://darkmindbrightfuture.tumblr.com/” target=”_blank”>via</a>
<a href=”http://wheelsontoast.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/darkmind.jpg”><img title=”darkmind” src=”http://wheelsontoast.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/darkmind.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”1000″ /></a>

I like most of the pics on this spot, a nice combination of the abstract and erotic. via

I’ve lusted after a Deus cafe racer for many a year but after delving deeper into this company/movement they really seem to have a finger in most of the pies that occupy my waking free time, art, surfing, track bikes and motorcycles. Sometimes two at the same time, see the surf bike below.

Another trailer for the Happenings DVD

more coming soon we hear!!!

Recently I’ve said, in one of my Sunday evening sermon/discussions, that this generation may be the most spiritually minded group of people to come along in years. This is what the so-called experts are telling us anyway.

In that Sunday evening sermon/discussion I also tried to get my church to understand that as a culture we are witnessing a huge shift in thinking patterns—the worldview is changing. My point was that it may be one of the most powerful opportunities in recent history for Authentic Christianity to make a difference in people’s lives.

As we move from a Modern world into what many are calling a Post-Modern world, there is a wide scale rejection of the values many of us have come to take for granted. For example:

• The acquisition of knowledge. It has been viewed as the savior of the human race. Now, it is not necessarily all that good, especially if it is not accompanied by ethical behavior.
• Advancing technology. For a time our ability to harness the power of nature made us feel invincible. God became unnecessary. The view now is that while it may offer some hope for what ails the human family it also presents us with the possibility of extinction.
• The accumulation of wealth. For generations this has been our defining value. Many, however, are waking up to the truth. As an end in and of itself accumulating wealth is a mirage—it may keep us busy but it never fully satisfies our souls. In the meantime we discover that we’ve wasted our life chasing a vapor and that we may have even become an unknowing co-conspirator in the exploitation of people and the environment. (How can Chrysler, Ford, GM, and the others keep prices on SUVs so low? Strategically locating plants in developing nations where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are non-existent is at least part of the answer. The quality of the water supply nourishing the villages surrounding these plants is not a corporate value.)

These are the foundational values that Modernity offered. These are the values that under-girded much of the 20th century–the most violent and inhumane century ever witnessed by humanity. These are the values that are too often endorsed and embraced by Institutional Christianity. These are also the values that are experiencing a whole-scale rejection from sensitive, ethical, thinking people.

As these values are rejected, the form of Christianity that is directly tied to them is being rejected as well.

Those who study these things tell us that this generation values authenticity more than anything. Is it any wonder that there is a huge skepticism toward Institutionalized Christianity? The obsession with money so prevalent among evangelicals has revealed exactly what this generation is NOT looking for: the insincere and even fraudulent pursuit of material things at the expense of people and the environment. When major corporations exude these values and engage in this behavior it is almost expected; when Institutional Christianity does likewise in makes most people want to puke.

The values being embraced by our culture include the humane, compassionate, and ethical treatment of all living things as well as the environment. Some may scoff at this as empty-headed liberalism. My sermon/discussion brought a sharp and public rebuke from one of the key leaders in this congregation. However, in my judgment  the values being embraced by this generation are more biblical than the rank consumerism of previous ones. Go re-read your Bible from “Genesis to the Maps,” look for discussions about the stewardship expected of humanity with regard to all of God’s creation, and then tell us what you think.

Regardless of where we come out on this discussion “politically,” we cannot and should not deny the obvious: the shift in thinking is presenting an opportunity, an opening, for disciples of Jesus Christ. The question is will the Institutional Church respond with more of the same or will it divorce itself from Modernity and offer our culture what it is so desperately seeking—Authentic Christianity.

I just finished reading James Michener’s “The Drifters”. This is not one of his best works, but does engage one to think about the preponderance of the underclass in a society as wealthy and upscale as the United States. Michener follows six youth in the late 1960’s as they drift  from their comfortable homes to wander aimlessly through Europe and North Africa. They have completely thrown off the values and morals of their parent’s generation as they involve themselves with drugs, sexual freedom and the music of their own generation. They shun all convention, honor and respect as they search for, what they believe to be enlightenment, in unenlightened places. Comparisons are made to other generations as far removed as the 1300’s when the Children’s Crusade captured the youth of that time. This Crusade sent them on a trek across Europe into  North Africa and into the hands of those who would sell them into prostitution and slavery. Most did not live past their teens. One surmises that each generation of youth has a certain segment that is prone to wander in this same way seeking a different standard than the generation before. Most of these wandering periods are destructive and not much of real enlightenment is ever found. A few survive these pilgrimages and are able to piece together into a constructive form the bits of wisdom and experience they encounter. Most don’t. Some succumb to early death while others become derelicts and other forms of the underclass that we see wandering aimlessly and frequenting the Rescue Missions of our cities. Indeed something to think about as the culture that grew out of the 60’s continues to consume our youth in very negative and heart wrenching ways.

Vancouver, and the Games.

Vancouver, the city of contrast. Incredibly natural beauty juxtaposed with cold concrete urban development. Oceans and mountains and rush hour traffic. Vast wealth, home of the elite. Beggars, vagabonds, the hurting and hungry.

I have an incredible love for Vancouver. I remember spending a couple weeks of my summer here. In awe, awe of the city, the culture, the ocean, the food, the people, the mountains. I grew up in Calgary Alberta, a wonderful up bringing with incredible parents that truly gave me everything they could. Though coming to Vancouver at 16 was like reaching the Promised Land. Something I only dreamed about. I’m not saying that I hated Calgary, and I’m not saying there is anything wrong with the city its self.

Alberta was so familiar, one summer here. And I was in love. I think that Vancouver to me was the metaphor of an alternate life style. That there was more to life than doing well in school, going to university, getting a sweet job, and hot wife, buy a house, reproduce. Die. Nothing is wrong with those things. My friends please take no offensive; I’m just saying that my cultural understanding of ‘coming of age’ was so narrow it left me so hungry for more.

So back to the city of contrasts, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses my first summer here. We spent a lot of time walking around downtown my first time here. And I was shocked. Shocked how few people made eye contact with each other. How many beggars in went ignored on the streets, that a city of so much wealth, resource, and beauty could be so cold and ashamed of if its own people.

I moved here roughly five years ago at the age of 19, Joining a Christian Missions movement I believed in “changing the world”. 5 years later. Have I changed Vancouver? I personally feel 5 years later tired, burnt, jaded, and a lot less hopeful. I teach young people the nature of Urban Missions work is how one engages with and builds community. Some how I still hold the principles that I’ve been trained to teach but yet I feel very cynical. I don’t have a diagnosis for these feelings. Maybe my hopes and expectations were to high, or maybe I Just don’t get enough Sun light this time of year.

February 2010, I am conflicted. I personally, don’t know how I feel about the Olympics. All of my neighbours in this city have a different opinion. Some love it. Some Hate it and will launch a brick at Quatchie if he walks by. I looked up the Olympics on Wikipedia, the games were started as an attempt to promote world peace. The Games are the dream of nations coming together celebrating peace and unity through competition. How much of that is what the games are about today? Dare I say 2%? Is that too generous? Have the Olympics become the most expensive two month advertisement for Travel Vancouver? Is it all about the corporations sponsoring? (Volunteers have to cover the nike symbol on their shows at events because they are not an official sponsor. Who cares?)

How can we spend billions of dollars when Haiti lives in ruins? I feel the games are a festival to the Elite. Seriously, the world peace inspiring sporting events are far beyond what the disenfranchised even myself can dream of affording. People have rented out there apartments for Tens of Thousands of Dollars a week during the games.

(To help Haiti go here)

Are the games evil? No. They themselves can’t be. They are just sports, but what about us, the consumers? How are we responsible? Have we fueled this beast that many are ready to protest? Is it our fault that the Games gentrify our marginalized? Have we allowed vast injustice? Can we do me more.

I moved to this city because I believe there are enough radical thinkers here. I believe there are Radical thinkers here who are passionate about community and justice. That we could come together and care for our poor. We can use our incredible resources and do something with it.

What will the world say when the look at this city over the next two weeks? Will the see our natural beauty like cover up on a scared face? Or will they see a city leading our culture into a better way to live?

My prayer for myself and this city right now; is that we may walk in integrity.

Lord. Make me a man of integrity. A man that loves mercy, does justly and walks humbly with you.

http://www.hopeinshadows.com/

Concepts like post-marxism and identity politics, their proponents and their relationship to political struggles from the 1980s to the present day are mainstays of any explicitly socialist blog seeking to gain a greater understanding where we’re at and what is to be done.

At one extreme there are the membership-based socialist parties which largely propose the continuation of things we revolutionaries and socialists have been doing since time began. At the other extreme there are the high-falutin’ philosophers like Negri or Critchley.

Everyone who reads that sort of stuff will be familiar with the anecdote about Negri, walking past workers on strike and complaining that they were behind the times, that their sort of activity was outdated and actually held back the socialist agenda.

I say this by way of explaining that the philosophers often try very hard to convey that their work is new, is surpassing outdated formulae and practices – though mostly it passes unread by the vast majority of activists, and littles comes of it before the next totem-destroying book arrives fresh from the academy. In the case of Laclau and Mouffe, as has been discussed on this blog, ‘identity’ was the Big Idea.

With the working class looking rather unreliable as the means to overthrow capitalism, something else was needed. Interestingly, while most of us tend to look to the 1980s as the big decade for the ascendancy of this style of politics, it wasn’t the first time it had been tried. In fact it goes all the way back to the 1960s, as I was surprised to discover. The following was written in 1966 by Tom Haydn of the American SDS:

“[T]raditional Left expectation of irreconcilable and clashing class interests has been defied…It appears that the American elite has discovered a long term way to cushion the contradictions of our society. [We must] oppose American barbarism with new structures and opposing identities. These are created by people whose need to understand their society and govern their own existence has somehow not been cancelled by the psychological damage they have received.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the Mai 1968 student movement, has said something similar in his book, Obsolete Communism:

“The student, at least, in the modern system of higher education, still preserves a considerable degree of personal freedom, if he chooses to exercise it. He does not have to earn his own living, his studies do not occupy all his time and he has no foreman at his back. He rarely has a wife and children to feed. He can, if he so chooses, take extreme political positions without any personal danger…the ensuing struggle is especially threatening to the authorities as the student population keeps going up by leaps and bounds.”

With the failure of the student movement of the 1960s, other identities were floated, so that by the 1980s a veritable coalition of excluded groups could gather plenty of people. Whether single mothers, or women generally, ethnic minorities or homosexuals, the idea was that since these groups were most persecuted, they had most to gain by a change and thus the greatest revolutionary potential, though the term revolution was also changed, moving away from grabbing state power and executing the counter-revolutionaries to something more sociable.

Actually, reading over the pronouncements of such leaders with the benefit of hindsight, the corruption of the student struggle – once the palpable threat of general strike and a genuine political threat to capitalism had been suppressed, as it was in France – should have been easy to foretell. Cohn-Bendit again:

“Factory work, trade union ‘militancy’, verbose party programmes, and the sad, colourless life of their elders are subjects only for [the young workers'] sarcasm and contempt. The same sort of disdain is the reason why so many students have taken a radical stand…”

“In our case we exploited student insecurity and disgust with life in an alienated world where human relationships are so much merchandise to be used, bought and sold in the marketplace.”

At the last, when the movement was defeated, what remained was simply a protest against the specific values then dominant through the liberal democratic form which western capitalism takes. The defeat of the movement is not simultaneous with the defeat of the Nanterre students, nor the failure of the French General Strike. As the situation across Western Europe suggests, the 1970s saw escalating battles between the ruling and ruled. It was a long defeat.

By the end of it, however, modern liberal democracy had been largely anaesthetized to the effects of the social revolution – elements of which, particularly individualism and an alienation-countering way to ‘fulfillment’, were incorporated enthusiastically into a resurgent capitalism. This is illustrated by Slavoj Zizek to great effect in his book Violence (pp18-19) when discussing the two faces of the highest modern businessmen:

“Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation…Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude…After all, what is the point of their success, if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes business worthwhile.”

That capitalism could assimilate this rebellion was a consequence of a wrong political strategy, but it also an acknowledgment that identity politics cannot be revolutionary on its own. Not to say that the entire movement of the 1960s is easily dismissed. It is not. E.P. Thompson in his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski derided the “posters of Che Guevara, juxtaposed against mini-skirts, ‘Mao tunics’, and military leather jackets” that “decorated the most modish swinging boutiques in the King’s Road or Royal Leamington Spa” but he also defended the movement:

“And yet there are other, and more hopeful, ways of seeing that experience: the challenge to Gaullism, the great strikes in the French motor industry, the first large cracks in the massive, ritualized traditionalism both of French academic institutions and of the routinized politics and routinized ideology of the PCF. [...] What was remarkable in the German youth movement was not its impulsive form and its lack of bearings, but that these children of Hitler’s legionairies had taken to the streets, and in this affirmative way, at all.”

Rather what I am giving is just a warning against, for example, dealing with inequality in the identity-focussed, individualist manner that Harriet Harman recent did, without its class-based content.

In the1960s, the creation of a popular counter-culture only vaguely associated with the serious and revolutionary demands of a large section of the population, and even of the student movement, was simply the waves that denoted the earthquake. Yet the earthquake passed, eventually, and the waves were all that remained. On one of those waves came the seeds of identity particularism fruited by the trees of Haydn, Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke and the others – and they took root all over the place in the context of a working class in retreat.

So the identities of the excluded, rather than becoming better integrated into the wider socialist programme – the leadership of which had failed to take proper account of them – instead became a political regression, a means to replace class and explain the defeat. Which brought things full circle to Tom Haydn, who, as outlined above, imagined the particularism of students precisely in response to the long-term quiescence of the working class (and, I would add, his failure to see how that quiescence could be integrated with Marxist theory).

From there it is only a short-hop to some types of post-marxism, which I shall engage with in Part 2 as regards Goran Therborn and the conclusions of Slavoj Zizek’s books, In Defense of Lost Causes and First as Tragedy.

For more predictions, please visit www.williamstickevers.com

U.S. Society: Middle Class; Counter Culture Movement

• Many of the ideals and values embodied in the mid-sixties counter culture movement will make a major a revival and begin to take hold in mainstream society by the summer of 2010. (January 4, 2010)
• The inequality of wealth in the United States , between the declining middle class and the wealthy (top 1%) will soar to unprecedented levels, as the market forces of the Great Recession continue the growing and corrosive gap between the rich and the poor. (November 29, 2009

My brother sent me this obit of George Leonard from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18leonard1.html?emc=eta1). The name wasn’t familiar to me, and as I read it I was amazed to see how much we owe him.

George Leonard, Voice of ’60s Counterculture, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: January 18, 2010

George Leonard, a former journalist who foresaw the countercultural tides of the 1960s, then dived into them when he helped define the human potential movement at its de facto headquarters, the Esalen Institute, died on Jan. 6 at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 86.

The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, said his wife, Annie Styron Leonard.

Mr. Leonard, as an editor and writer at Look magazine, was one of the first journalists to predict the tumult and idealism of the ’60s when he wrote a January 1961 cover article called “Youth of the Sixties: The Explosive Generation.” A year later he predicted, accurately, that the youth movements would first manifest themselves in California.

At the same time, he found himself wanting to become a part of the changes he had foretold. Shedding the conventions of objectivity in his reporting, he became a voice for an emerging new consciousness.

In 1965 Mr. Leonard met Michael Murphy, a co-founder of Esalen, in San Francisco, where Esalen was opening a learning center. Soon Mr. Leonard was visiting Esalen’s main campus, a seaside complex in the redwood-studded area of central California known as Big Sur.

“Explosion, catharsis, adventure” were the words Mr. Leonard used to describe his first impressions in an interview with U.S. News & World Report in 1992.

He went on to become the president of the institute’s trustees for many years and an important figure in expanding its concerns to include issues of social justice.

It is hard to overstate the romance Esalen held for Beat Generation heroes like Jack Kerouac, who embraced it, or for spiritual seekers who followed. Wedged between surf and mountains three hours south of San Francisco, Esalen began as a laboratory for new thought, from Timothy Leary’s psychedelics to Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology toJoan Baez’s folk music.

“A Cape Canaveral of inner space” was a common description.

Esalen was one of many schools for self-discovery that would lead to the New Age movement and influence the many yoga and meditation centers that dot the American landscape today, all promoting a belief that human abilities are expandable.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, chairman of Rice University’s department of religious studies and author of “Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religions,” said in an interview that the human potential movement that was significantly shaped by Esalen was more intellectually grounded than the hippie culture of a few years later. Dr. Kripal called Esalen “a high-end movement that helped generate the counterculture.”

Mr. Leonard added a moral edge to the Esalen Institute’s teachings with his commitment to social justice. He began pressing his concerns in his first meeting with Mr. Murphy on Feb. 2, 1965 — a date Mr. Leonard recalled as a watershed moment in his life. As Dr. Kripal described the scene in his book, the two men talked until dawn, writing ideas on pieces of paper as fast as they occurred.

In the course of their conversation, the two men came up with a term to crystallize their ideas: human potential movement. The first two words most likely came from a 1960 speech by Aldous Huxley heard by Richard Price, the other founder of Esalen. Mr. Leonard suggested adding the word “movement” largely because of his fierce support of civil rights.

Because of this contribution and many others, Dr. Kripal calls Mr. Leonard Esalen’s third founder.

Mr. Leonard led many Esalen workshops, including one on how to approach life like a samurai warrior. Another forced participants to confront their own racism. He wrote “Education and Ecstasy” (1968), which became one of the first popular manifestos of the human potential movement.

He also helped start an exchange program with the Soviet Union that included a visit by a future Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, in 1989. In an interview, Mr. Murphy said that Mr. Leonard, who wrote 13 books, became “the philosopher of the movement.”

George Burr Leonard was born on Aug. 9, 1923, in Macon, Ga. His father was an insurance executive. George built an electric motor when he was 8, collected more than 100 live snakes a few years later and read voluminously. At 16, he had his own swing band. After a year at Georgia Tech, he flew a fighter in World War II.

He graduated in 1948 from the University of North Carolina with a degree in English, joined the Air Force and became an intelligence officer. He joined Look as an editor in 1953 and was assigned to San Francisco in 1962. There, people kept saying to him, “You have to meet Michael Murphy,” Mr. Leonard’s wife said in an interview.

When the men finally met, Dr. Kripal said, Mr. Leonard talked about seeing racial cruelty while growing up in the South; in one instance he came upon a black man chained in a town square. He told how as a reporter he had covered the civil rights protests in Selma, Ala.

At 47, Mr. Leonard started practicing the martial art of aikido, achieving a fifth-degree black belt. He had part ownership of an aikido school and developed several self-help programs that apply the discipline’s techniques to real-life situations. Some of his 13 books described these methods.

Mr. Leonard’s marriages to Emma Jane Clifton and Lillie Pitts ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Annie Styron, an artist, he is survived by three daughters, Emily Fraim, Burr Leonard and Mimi Fleischman; two brothers, Edward and Wesley; and six grandchildren.

Esalen’s history is a mélange of seemingly unrelated events, people and principles: the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the cultural critic Susan Sontag, sensory awareness experiments, the nuclear war theorist Herman Kahn. Mr. Leonard said the unifying principle was, essentially, joy.

“How can we speak of joy on this dark and suffering planet?” he wrote in an early statement of Esalen’s purpose. “How can we speak of anything else? We have heard enough of despair.”

The last couple of years have been some dark times for this dude, but this is still one of the raddest pieces of skating ever.

I decided to have a go at my useless local authority again. Basically the problem is that the obnoxious, incompetent fuckwits will do anything but provide us with a service. Check this link out.

This time I decided that it was the public that are at fault for being so complacent. After all, we pay the council for a service and they don’t provide it. Logically, then, the solution should be to stop paying them until they do provide that service.

Not that my comments in this week’s local press will make the damnedest bit of difference. People have short memories, and once the ice has cleared from the streets they’ll happily go back to bending over and getting shafted up the arse again, like the subservients they clearly are. (Dunfermline Press article).

Boycott The Council Tax – media underground.

This guy has style in and out of the water. Watch this cool little film about him here. I love the guy in the car park saying ‘he’s got on a fuckin blanket, a witches hat and some boots on, at the beach!’ funny.

Please read this – I didn’t write it – read past the “teaser” article in the beginning, and read the whole essay – and think about it, carefully …. It is NOT for any one religion, but it is for all people who walk a path of Light and Spirit.

Garden of Eden Discovered!

It’s time to take peaceful action in our lives, making changes here and there, when we realize the inequalities in our own lives and how they affect others – and how we can peacefully refuse to participate in the ‘machines’ of various harmful systems and institutions of the world, one step at a time.  It is a peaceful “call to action”  :)

Here in Steveston we are making efforts to connect with each other.

Women Artists and men who support them are invited to visit SBArt and join in the conversation with women artists of Steveston and beyond, in dialogue with each other on topics of Art, Art in Steveston, Art in Community and Professional and Emerging Artists actively pursuing their artmaking in Steveston and Beyond.

Why the emphasis on Steveston? Because this is where we live!

I want to mention that the forum~chat room is for building up, encouraging, ushering on, positivity, imaginative dreaming, learning, mentoring and extending beyond ourselves to connect with each other, to listen and respect civil rules of conversation with one another, done all in a good spirit of building up community in Steveston.

If you feel inclined to join in the conversation log in and create a profile. I invite you to set a icon that represents you don’t be anonymous unless you can’t help it. If you choose to be anon then be open to evolving into a living breathing person with a profile in good time who wants to engage in conversation and connect.

Welcome and let’s start chatting!

by Donald B. MacGowan

Charming Pahoa Town Maintains Its Eclectic Mix of Western and neo-Victorian Architecture Graphic, Puna Hawaii: Graphic from Photo by Donald B MacGowan

There are many wondrous, enigmatic and fascinating attractions on the Big Island of Hawaii, some better known than others, many out of the way and generally off the beaten track.  Tour Guide Hawaii has produced an encyclopedic collection of the most up-to-date information, presented as short GPS-cued videos, in an app downloadable to iPhone and iPod Touch that covers the entire Big Island, highlighting the popular and the uncrowded, the famous and the secluded, the adventurous and the relaxing.

Pahoa Town

Pahoa Shopping District, Puna Hawaii: Photo by Donald B MacGowan

YEEEEEHAW! Wild, untamed and even a bit unruly, Pahoa Town, with it’s false-front, western-style buildings and raised wooden sidewalks, looks more like it belongs in Wyoming than Hawai’i. But Wild West isn’t the only subculture evident here…tie-dye banners and the general “flower-power” ambiance some businesses and citizens lend Pahoa give it a decidedly “’60’s” feel.

The residents of Pahoa tend to be individualists, socially liberal, embracing of alternative culture; there are most certainly a lot more musicians, artists and poets in Puna than accountants, insurance agents and attorneys.

The muddy footprint may well be the defining image many tourists have of Pahoa, one of the Rainiest Towns in America: Photo by Donald B MacGowan

Pahoa started off as a rough and tumble sawmill town, then became the center of the sugar industry.  A crossroad on the old island railroads, trade and commerce flourished in Pahoa at the turn of the 20^th century. An agricultural center today, the papaya, commercial flower and visitor industries drive Pahoa’s economy.

Downtown Pahoa Main Street, Puna Hawaii: Photo by Donald B MacGowan

Downtown Pahoa still shows off her history, with lovely turn-of-the century western and neo-Victorian architecture, false-front stores and wooden sidewalks, but with its own distinctive, Hawaii-style, panache.

Puna Tree Tunnels Just Outside Pahoa Town, Hawaii: Photo by Donald B MacGowgan

Pahoa is the also gateway to the Puna District. Beautiful, mysterious, untraveled and undiscovered by the herds of tourists, Puna District has so far managed to avoid overcrowding. Not on the usual tour bus routes, it’s like a step back to a simpler, less harried time.

It has been said of Pahoa that if it weren’t for counter-cultural influences, it would have no cultural influences at all. This is a bit unfair, but the people of Pahoa are proud of their independent ways and lifestyle. The charm and allure of this way of living is evident when you consider that the region around Pahoa is the fastest growing portion of the island.

Pahoa is an interesting and charming, eclectic mix of Neo-Victorian and Western Architecture, Puna Hawaii: Photo by Donald B. MacGowan

To see the new iPhone/iPod Touch App, please visit http://www.tourguidehawaii.com/iphone.html. The best of Tour Guide Hawaii’s free content about traveling to, and exploring, the Big island, can be found here. For more information on traveling to Hawaii in general and on touring the Big Island in particular, please also visit www.tourguidehawaii.com and www.tourguidehawaii.blogspot.com.

Pahoa Town Community Bulletin Board, Puna Hawaii: Photo by Donald B MacGowan

At Tour Guide our goal is to insure you have the most fun, most interesting and enjoyable vacation here in Hawaii–that you are provided with all the information you need to decide where to go and what to see, and that you are not burdened with out-dated or incorrect information.

For independent reviews of our product, written by some of our legions of satisfied customers, please check this out.

The Sidewalks of Pahoa, Puna Hawaii: Photo by Donald B MacGowan

All media copyright 2009 by Donald B. MacGowan. All rights reserved.

…guess which is which?

Its a blast from the past but I can still spend hours on Vice Magazines Do’s and Don’t section. Waste a few hours of your life here.

I don’t know if you really do.

Seriously.  I bet you don’t.  You say you wanna live by the Spirit, but you are to busy on facebook or writing a blog.

You say you wanna love people, but you love honking your horn when the car in front of you won’t drive out into the intersection for a left turn.

Or you just have to write that person a bad review, or argue with that teacher, or you just gotta complain about that Barista that was rude to you.

Okay.  I have probably been guilty of doing all those things in some fashion.  Except the last one. I don’t drink coffee.

But in my life I hear the phrase “let’s be like Jesus.” or “what would Jesus do.” or ” I wanna be just like Jesus.”

How often though do we meet people really trying to live like Jesus?

If we met someone walking around Phoenix, or New York, or wherever, and he had twelve dudes with him that he was pouring into, we would think that dude is crazy and those dudes are crazy for following him.

If we met someone that walked around and said I trust God to provide all my needs therefore I don’t own a home, or stay in one place(unless God was telling them different), we would also think that person is crazy.

If we met someone who was always seeking God, and hung out with prostitutes, gays, drug addicts and telemarketers, we would not join his cause, no matter how much truth he spoke.

Actually some of us would.

But quite often when I challenge people to live how Jesus lived or how the early Christians did, I get a response like that was a different culture.  Or things are different now.

Yeah things are different.  There are more sinners in the world.

That just means we should (as Christians) live seemingly even more righteous.

We don’t live counter-culturally.  We want a big or decent sized house.  We want a family.  We want to live out where no one else is.  We want to draw closer to God without interacting with others.  We make practical choices rather than spirit led choices.  We want to be get a high paying job.

So do you really wanna be like Jesus? I mean really?  Then why aren’t we living like He did? Because it’s too crazy? Or because he’s God and we’re not? Those are stupid answers.

This blog doesn’t go out to everyone.  I am constantly meeting true disciples of Christ who do live counter culturally.   And I love it.  They are some of the most inspiring people in the world.  And it’s the kind of counter culture that serves and loves the current culture.  I love that.  I love true disciples.  Let’s eat with prostitutes.  Let’s eat with liars and fakes and haters and posers.  Let’s really live like Jesus. Not just in theory.  But in practice.