Joan Baez – Little Home In The Valley

This photograph showed up on Substack on Sunday. Of an exhausted Ukrainian soldier sleeping in a trench with his companion. Harshness and tenderness in one heartbreaking frame. He is so young, so bruised and muddy. The cat holding on to his shirt with that single paw. There are tears to be shed for this pair of soldier-friends. They should be home, not out where people are trying to kill them. May God please damn all to hell the men who make wars.

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I have been so glad that our troubadours are raising their voices against Cluck’s depredations. In the Twin Cities on No Kings 3 there were musicians Tom Morello, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and Maggie Rogers. Music has such power. It slices right past any defenses or cynicism we might be holding up to shield ourselves and hits us where it sticks. Baez and Rogers singing The Times They Are A-Changing was a linear connection, a passing of torches.

There are many American men and women who have been on the right side of change and history, but none more consistently than Joan Baez. Her life and her music are well embedded in my DNA … CRISPR-ed in by time and circumstance.

Colours, by Joan Baez

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How fragile we all really are
Like straws of glass
In a windy field
We feel so strong
So confident
When standing on our own
Admiring of ourselves
Our beauty and the distance we have come
When suddenly a wayward wind
Breaks off a piece of us
And sends it tumbling to the earth

It’s when we soften, when we flex
And bend before the gale
That we survive
And when the wind dies down
We spring up
Wiser, stronger, taller than before
Ready now to leap another hurdle in the row
That circumstance has left there in our way

We can’t complain that life is not the way we wish
It’s not a promise
Of a road, a list of happy guarantees
Life is life
No more, no less
Perhaps it could be looked at
As a set of chances
To attain a goal, a happiness
And if we reach one, why, let out that joy
Crack open that champagne that you’ve saved
And celebrate your little victory
Before the day is done.

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Little Victories, by Bob Seger

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To me there are few pleasures in this world better than sitting down to a steaming bowl of soup. Not just any old slop, mind you, but something warm and liquid and composed mostly of umami. And if one lives long enough a list of favorites begins to arise. One of my own faves I first encountered at the chain of restaurants called Olive Garden. Its name? Zuppa Toscana. It knocked me off my chair.

Such flavor, such delicacy … even a bouquet! I gobbled it up and immediately ordered a refill, which I have been doing ever since when offered the opportunity. Like last evening at a local restaurant. Last night’s version was good, but not quite up to the original.

But here comes the good part. At least a couple of decades ago I ran across a bootleg recipe that promised exactly the same flavors as those of the Olive Garden version. It lived up to that promise and has done so every time I make it. So anyone with the recipe in their hand has a power that can only be granted by the gods – and now, standing in for them, me. Click on the link and be empowered, but don’t stint. Use a good grade of sausage and you can’t go wrong. Zuppa Toscana. You got it.

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I’ve been “in crush” many times, but almost none of the women involved ever knew it. I was repeatedly the classic hopeless admirer from afar, pining away in a hut, clad in sackcloth. Names like Margie, Judy, Ferol, and Ingrid still have a place in memory even though there is nothing real to go with them, only what I imagined way back when.

One of my inamorata was Joan Baez. When she walked out on the stage of Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota in 1964, long hair, long dress, barefoot, guitar in hand … well, she had me at first pluck. The madonna of folk music had added yet another disciple to her already long list.

I confess that my infatuation crumbled away when she wed David Harris, and the albums that I still listen to are all from the earlier period of her career. I felt abandoned when she married, I always hoped she’d wait for me.

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Old Blue, by Joan Baez

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Plaisir d’Amour, by Joan Baez

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I mentioned the name “Ingrid”above, and feel the need to flesh that out a bit. In 1943 the movie For Whom The Bell Tolls came out, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. I was only three years old at the time, so I didn’t get to check it out until much later, when it was shown at a cinema art house near the University of Minnesota. The movie was a fair one, with much Hemingway-esque dialogue and a bridge being blown up and all, but it was Ms. Bergman who captured my adolescent heart.

So much so that I bought and treasured the soundtrack for the film, primarily because the cover art on the album was the close-up at left.

Now at the time I saw the movie I was nineteen, and Ingrid was in her mid-forties. This would have made this February-December romance a bit of a challenge to pull off, and even I had to admit it. Especially since the woman I was infatuated with was Bergman as she had been in 1943. But when you are living in complete unreality … well … all things are possible.

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Farewell, Angelina, by Joan Baez

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DISGRACE

Nicholas Kristof has nailed it in an op/ed piece in the NY Times. The damage that Cluck is doing right now as I type this and later as you read it, is monstrous. When we throw our allies under the bus and get into bed to spoon with Putin the Poisoner, what can people think of us Americans?

I really feel for the Europeans. They have always known they couldn’t trust Putin, a vicious bully, torturer, and murderer. But now our shambling dotard of a president has revealed that they can’t trust us, either. Revealed it both to Europe and also to any American who still remembers the meaning of words like loyalty, honor, and decency.

And who remembers why countries banded together in NATO in the first place. It wasn’t because of the Nazis, they were already beaten. It was because of the threats coming from the former Soviet Union under Stalin and his autocratic successors. Which includes … guess who? … Vladimir Putin.

Where are the Republican patriots? Have they forgotten how to tell friends from enemies? How can they let this debauched troll presently at the head of our government have his way? How can they continue to be Cluck’s enablers in such a sickening betrayal?

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda genius, had one honest moment when he admitted back in yet another terrible time:

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

Goebbels was talking about the ordinary German citizen. Cluck is counting on ordinary American citizens to believe his lies, and I believe that he will be proven wrong in his assumptions. But at what cost?

A shameful moment in time. Our president has disgraced us.

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The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem, by Joni Mitchell

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