The Latest Excerpt from "Barack W. Bush: The Prisoner of Kennebunkport"

"It's soooo quiet in K-port during the winter. Most of the time it's just me and the Secret Service detail, so I have plenty of time to write songs, not that anyone else is likely to hear them anytime soon, least of all darling Condi. Appointing her as Secretary of State was my half-bro's one smart move as President. And don't you believe that Sweet Jesus demeanor of his. He's been pronging Condi all but senseless for years. Am I jealous? Does the Pope smoke dope? Not this one, he's a Nazi, but maybe the last one? Or perhaps the one before that, you know, the one who had a boyfriend in the Milan Opera? But I digress. As you can see, Condi has the last word in the song I wrote this morning, while I was way under the influence of the favorite herb of one or another Pope:

Al Qaeda says
Al Qaeda says
Al Qaeda says
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas

Israeli army says
Israeli army says
Israeli army says
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas

Jimmy Carter says
Jimmy Carter says
Jimmy Carter says
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas
More hummos for Hamas

Condi Rice says
Condi Rice says
Condi Rice says
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas
No hummos for Hamas"

Song: "Love's Deep Mineshaft"

Over the past several weeks John Stanford and I have recorded two songs. The first recording is a garage rock arrangement of "Let's Eat Some Time, Baby" (see the April 1st posting for lyrics). The second recording is a country arrangement of "Love's Deep Mineshift" (which I wrote in 1977). On both songs John created the drum and bass tracks in Cubase. "Let's Eat Some Time, Baby" also has a Farfisa organ track created in Cubase. On top of this we overdubbed John's guitar and tambourine tracks and my vocal and (on "Love's Deep Mineshaft") harmonica tracks.

Love’s Deep Mineshaft

When I grow up I’m gonna be a conjure man
And I’m gonna roam around with a big old rattlesnake in my hand
When I was a boy I used to sing this flippant tune
Now my dream has come true and I can work that hoodoo
And honey I’m coming after you

All the world’s a stage you’ve been through too many times before
Look up at the sky and it will soon be time to open the floor
Open the floor

And when you fall down love’s deep mineshaft
You will sit and watch the orb explode
Yes when you fall down love’s deep mineshaft
You just might find yourself a heart of gold
A heart of gold

When I grow up I’m gonna be a conjure man
And I’m gonna roam around with a big old rattlesnake in my hand

More from "Barack W. Bush: The Prisoner of Kennebunkport"

If this is your first encounter with Barack W. Bush, you may want to first look at the April 11th posting on this blog and then come back here to read the following tiny excerpt:

"Don't you wonder what kind of a world this is going to be to raise children in now that Oprah Winfrey has bought the Church of Scientology and renamed it the Church of Oprahtology? And she has even changed the name of the E-Meter to the O-Meter. But what isn't yet public knowledge is that she has had herself artificially inseminated with L. Ron Hubbard's frozen sperm and is about to give birth to the Antichrist, which will go by the name of T. Cruise Winfrey."

An Imaginary Headline

This has been such a strange presidential primary campaign. One might almost expect something along the lines of:

OBAMA THROWS LIKE A GIRL

Hillary Clinton was quoted today as saying: "When I was ten years old, every night after dinner my father took me out into the backyard, and he taught me how to throw a curveball, a cut slider, and a change up. But now I've got to tell you one thing: Barack Obama throws like a girl."

Cherry Blossoms and Tolstoy

While out running in Tompkins Square Park this morning I noticed the first of the cherry blossoms tentatively bursting out. This is about a week to ten day earlier than normal, attributable no doubt to our warm and rainy winter. And having just finished reading two thick biographies -- of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and of Iris Murdoch by Peter Conradi -- followed by a quick palate cleanser -- Dark Voyage, the only Alan Furst novel I hadn't read -- the arrival of the cherry blossoms struck me as the perfect time of year to begin reading War and Peace.

A Conditional Enterprise

I have decided to write "Barack W. Bush: The Prisoner of Kennebunkport" only if Barack Obama wins the presidential election. For background on Barack W. Bush, see my blog postings of February 29 and March 26, 2008.

If Barack Obama does win the election the book may begin something like this:

"Cocaine is the drug of choice of bores of all ages, and that applies in spades (sorry Barry) to my two presidential half-sibs. Mama Babs was beside herself with anger when I screened footage of George W. and Barry engaging in a snortathon in George W.'s box during a Texas Rangers game. It was real cinema verite, with shaky camera work, which was perhaps the result of all of the 'shrooms I had ingested before the game. And while we're on the topic of 'shrooms, I might add that 41's giggling fit while watching the snortathon footage gave me a pretty good idea of who raided my 'shroom stash last week."

"Yo": My Contribution to the Hip Hop Genre

I'm very fond of hip hop, especially the gangsta variety. In listening to hip hop recordings I can't but notice the similarity in cadence to nursery rhymes, although hip hop is usually a touch more staccato than your average nursery rhyme. I've blended the two forms in my short composition "Yo":

hippity hop
to the chop shop
to grandma's house
we go

YO!!!

gonna waste that ho
gonna steal her crack
gonna stuff her corpse
in a gunny sack...

"Variant Traversals": A New Fictional Character

I don't yet know anything about this new character except for the following speech out of his or her mouth:

“When I say I think of my life as one of Y-1 variant traversals of N+/-X dimensional space, with differential probabilities for four values of Y, what exactly am I saying? That if this world doesn’t exist, if we are all merely something approximating characters in the bad dream of a demiurge such as might be hypothesized by a second century Gnostic, then we set Y to equal one with a five percent probability. That if this world is an Existentialist wasteland in which the current life being lived is all that will ever exist, then we set Y to equal two with a ten percent probability. That if this world is part of a JudeoChristoIslamic universe consisting of this life followed by an afterlife spent in some kind of Heaven or Hell or Purgatory, then we set Y to equal three with a one-thousandth of one percent probability. And that if the current lifetime on this world is one of many lifetimes on many worlds that some version of the core “I” will experience over many millennia, then we set Y to equal an integer between 4 and Y-1 with an 84 and 999/1000th percent probability. The assigned probabilities are my best guesses. Yours no doubt would likely be at least somewhat different. For the moment we will ignore more complex solutions in which the value of Y is either less than one or fractional.”

Two Versions of an Epitaph

The U.S. has been inundated with a huge amount of extremely bad poetry for a very long time. In 1975, four years after I wrote "Let's Eat Some Time, Baby" (see yesterday's posting), I wrote an epitaph in the form of an epigram for the delusional would-be poets of the hippie generation who thought ingesting chemicals would help them to write great poetry. "Young Dylan" is, of course, Bob Dylan (whose songs I greatly admire), and "Prelude" refers to the William Wordsworth poem of that title:

Epitaph for a Generation of Counterculture Poetasters

While zonked on cocaine, acid, meth and quaalude,
Young Dylan’s heirs sat down to write their Prelude.

Recently I revised this poem to extend the epitaph backwards in time in order to bring under its umbrella the lousy poets of the Beat Generation, who in a very real sense jump-started this deluge of crummy poetry. However, I want to point out that a number of excellent poets are sometimes or often classified as "Beat Poets" (Diane DiPrima, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, among others). This epitaph is not intended to include them. Also note that, if you haven't already guessed, "Old Dylan" is Dylan Thomas, whose poetry I adore.

Epitaph For Two Generations Of Counterculture Poetasters

While zonked on cocaine, acid, meth and quaalude,
Old Dylan’s heirs sat down to write their Prelude.

Let's Eat Some Time, Baby

April Fools Day is perhaps the most appropriate time to post my oldest extant piece of writing. I composed the song "Let's Eat Some Time, Baby" in July 1971 while I was living on SE Stark St. in Portland, Oregon. The song satirizes the "we'll all find Enlightenment via chemicals" mindset that was so prevalent in America in the late 60s and early 70s. It was to be part of the repertoire of an early 70s band called Random Variables that was to have made its mark in the wake of the great LSD resurgence I predicted would take place in the summer of 1973. But alas the suits in the music business gave us disco instead. So much for my predictive powers as a futurist! But I still think it's a kick-ass song:

Let’s Eat Some Time, Baby

Let’s eat some time baby
Eat out your conscious mind
Let’s eat some time now now now honeychild
You’ll never know just what you might find
Don’t be afraid that you can’t do it
There is really nothing to it
Just eat some time girl and bend your mind
Turn it right into the loving kind

Well they’re tripping in Austin, in Denver and on the Bayou
In Tucson and Ann Arbor and in New York City too
Oh yeah from Boston to L.A.
Everybody’s tripping a-U.S.A.

As I was motorvating into my brain
I dropped mescaleen and I smoked ibogaine
My head spun round
My body slumped down
And that’s when I heard that buzzing sound
Mescaleen, why can’t you be true
Oh Mescaleen, why can’t you be true
You done started back doing those things you used to do

So let’s trip again like we did last summer
Let’s trip again like we did last year
Do you remember when we really blew our brains out?
Let’s trip again, tripping time is here

Let’s eat some time baby
Come with me and melt away
Let’s eat some time baby
Hurry, hurry, let’s do it today
Don’t be afraid that you can’t do it
There is really nothing to it
Just eat some time girl and bend your mind
Twist it right into the loving kind