If you drink orange juice, once you sweat it it’s yours. Oranges really don’t belong to anybody. -Carlos Santana
Category Archives: Blog
The Day Job
This Dilbert cartoon illustrates the value of my services in the day job.
Mark Heard
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:Mark Heard died in 1992 at age 40. He had a minor heart attack on stage at a festival, but finished his set before going to the hospital. A week later he had another heart attack and went into a coma from which he never recovered. He left behind a collection of songs that are startling and heartbreaking in their clarity and insight.Gvien the fact that he died before the internet became commercial, much less before the YouTube age, there’s not a lot of good video of him online. Here’s one of the few somewhat decent (almost) samples: Treasure of the Broken LandA less-than-great, dubbed-from-cassette upload of Look Over Your Shoulder:A 17-song tribute album (Strong Hand of Love) was released in 1994, and another, with those same songs and 17 more (Orphans of God) was release in 1996. It’s a must have. Seriously.
Quotes From Stuff I Like – Mason
The Gospel According to Job, Mike MasonI read this book while writing Escape From Fred, because matters of faith and dealing with what sometimes seems like a precarious or absent diety. A little more serious than others in the quotes series, but some good stuff, as Mason consistently delivers. If you haven’t read it, you must stop what you’re doing right now and read The Mystery of Marriage, even if you’re not married.p. xi. Mercy is the permission to be human.p. xi. Sometimes laying hold of the cross can be comforting; but other times it’s like picking up a snake.p. 36. Real worship has less to do with offering sacrifices than with being a sacrifice ourselves.It is wonderful to be filled with mystical rapture at the thought of Calvary. But more wonderful still, because more worshipful, is the moment when the rough wood touches our flesh and the nail bites.p. 126. Love is the humility in which self becomes subservient to relationship.p. 174. [on dying to self] For the truth is we do not die all at once but little by little, and every time a little part of us is nailed to the cross and dies immediately, the grace of the Lord Jesus flows into that dead part and renews it. This is how we live by grace. The power of grace is activated through the cross. Too many Christians are looking for graceless fix-it solutions to their problems, and to the problems of others as well. We forget that one of the great mysteries of the gospel is that God did not fix us when He saved us. By grace He simply saved us, warts and all.p. 176. Anger at God can be a sign of spiritual growth. It can mean we are outgrowing a concept of God that is no longer adequate for us. It could even be said that our anger is not directed at the living God Himself but at our own idolatrous concept of Him. While we ourselves may not understand this, nevertheless our anger functions to move us closer to God as He really is.p. 273. Faith is the ability to tolerate the intolerable paradox of God’s clear and undisputed title as Lord of the universe in spite of His apparent absence.p. 279. A clean conscience is not one that is without guilt, but one that is without blame. In an honest and healthy conscience, there is always a sense of guilt, but blame is continually being washed away by the blood of Christ.p. 306. What we need to realize is that only as sinners can we be disciples of Jesus. A saint cannot pick up the cross; only a sinner can pick up a cross. This is a profound mystery; but with our saintly selves, with that part of ourselves that has been sanctified and devoted to God, we cannot touch the cross. Only a sinful nature can touch the cross. It has to be flesh against bare wood. Mere spirit will not hold a nail.
Jack Williams
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:In 1996 I was living in Aiken, South Carolina. I heard that there was live acoustic music on Sunday night at a place called The Whiskey Junction on Whiskey Road. I got there early. It was a dive in the back of a convenience store / gas station. The kind of place where the floor, walls, and ceiling are painted black and you read about in the police report every Monday for the devilment that happens in the parking lot on Friday and Saturday night. The crowd looked pretty rough. Tough looking guys in jeans and flannel shirts at the bar. Ropers playing pool. I ordered a Guiness, nodded to the guys at the bar, and retreated to the brightest spot in the room, a back corner table under a Bud Light sign, to read my book. I think it was PJ O’Rourke’s Parliment of Whores.They eyeballed me occasionally, the guy sitting by himself, smoking a pipe, wearing a tweed jacket, drinking a strange black beer and reading. I’m surprised I didn’t get my butt kicked that night. [I became a regular and even played a gig there several months later, but that’s another story.]A few minutes before showtime, a long tall drink of water came in with a guitar and amp and set up. After a quick sound check, he started playing and it didn’t take but a few measures to convince me to close my book and give him my full attention. Great guitar playing, great songwriting, nice voice. I was in the right place.As the set wore on, one detail puzzled me. He would switch from using a pick to fingerpicking without setting the pick down anywhere. It would just disappear and then suddenly reappear, sometimes several times within a song. I was too far back to see what was really going on.After his first break I met him as he left the stage and asked him 3 questions:
- Do you have any CDs? [Answer, yes, but he didn’t bring them in because the Junction isn’t the type of place where people typically crowd around to get CDs. I got a copy of Highway from Back Home, which is no longer available, and Dreams of the Song Dog.]
- What gauge strings do you use. [Answer, if I remember correctly, is ultra light and a good amp setup to give it body.]
- What the heck are you doing with that pick? [Answer, “Feel my finger.” I was skeptical at first. It sounded like some joke. But he held his finger out and I felt it. There big callouses at the joints. He demostrated how he sliped it into the crook of a finger and held it there while fingerpicking. It took me several months, but I eventually learned that little trick.]
During the second break he came back to my table and we hung out for a while, chatting. Nice guy, in case you were wondering.Here are a few selections to give you the feel of his style, one I wish I had the time and dedication to emulate.Morning SunNatural Man
Austin Film Festival
The Austin Film Festival consists of eight days of film screenings and four days of conference sessions. The conference ended yesterday and there’s four more days of screenings left. So far, I’ve seen:
- Serious Moonlight: Meg Ryan, Timothy Hutton, Kristen Bell, Justin Long. Entertaining
- Godspeed: Left halfway through, way too slow, didn’t buy the character motivations
- Simmons on Vinyl: Potts brothers 2nd feature. The first, The Stanton Grave Robbery, was made for $5,000. This one was made for $300. It’s a buy-a-6-pack-and-laugh-at-goofy-stuff kind of movie.
- Tales from the Script: Interviews with dozens of screenwriters. Excellent.
- The Scenesters: Entertaining, but I had to leave halfway through for the Filmmaker Happy Hour.
- Apollo 13: Didn’t really need to see this again, but the Q&A afterward with Ron Howard, Jim Lovell, guys from Mission Control and the screenwriters was a must-see. I got to shake Ron Howard’s hand at the Conferenc Wrap party after.
- Todd P Goes to Austin: I was supposed to see this, but Apollo 13 took longer than I thought, so I missed it.
- The Messenger: Great film. I was supposed to see Earthwork, but when I got out of the last session I discovered my car battery had died and Earthwork started before my car did.
Still left to watch:
Quotes From Stuff I Like – Nash
A few tidbits from Marriage Lines.That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it’s the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.-=-=-=-=-=-Speaking of wisdom and wealth and grace —
As recently I have dared to —
There are lots of people compared to whom
I’d rather not be compared to.
There are people I ought to wish I was;
But under the circumstances,
I prefer to continue my life as me —
For nobody else has Francis-=-=-=-=-=-A prepared postition Man hankers for
Is parallel to and above the floor,
For thither retreating horizontally,
He evades the issues that charge him frontally.-=-=-=-=-=-From: They Won’t Believe On New Year’s Eve, That New Year’s Day Will Come What MayHow do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,
And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.
I didn’t get anything to write this review
Note: Pursuant to FTC 16 CFR Part 255, (more human-friendly info here) I’m happy to tell you that nobody gave me whichever book I’m reviewing, or paid me anything to review it, nor do I have any affliliate links to bookseller websites where I can make money off this review. The plain fact is that I bought this thing myself (probably from Half Price Books or Amazon) and read it for no other reason that it sounded interesting. And then I blogged about it because I’m a complusive writer. I might keep the book, which is OK, since I paid for it, or I might take it to Half Price Books, or I might give it away. Or I might use it to prop up the short leg of my writing desk.Whatever I chose to do, it shouldn’t concern the FTC, so they should just move along. Nothing to see here, folks.
Mose Allison
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:I don’t recall where I first heard Mose Allison. His voice won’t stop the presses, but he’s a killer keyboard plaer and the vibe rules all. Here are a few of my faves.Your Mind is on Vacation
Getting There
Quotes From Stuff I Like – Theroux
Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux
This guy is a great writer. You might have seen the Harrison Ford movie made from his book, Mosquito Coast. The movie was good. The book was better.
p. 4. A large square building with porches like pulled-out bureau drawers.
p. 6. “It’s not rocket surgery.”
p. 11. A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.
p. 25. On the beach everyone is a body.
p. 48. Games are the pastimes of men who cannot bear to be alone, who do not read.
p. 55. Fiction can be an epistle to the living, but more often the things we write, believing they matter, are letters to the dead.
p. 87. Guilt shows clearest on the faces of older people, whose skin is so full of detail.
p. 133. She was in the secrets keeping business, and I was a collector of secrets.
p. 166. She climbed on him and hugged him with all her bones, clinging like a little gecko on a big crumbling tree trunk.
p. 382. You’re a writer. Among other things, that’s a pathological condition.