Sunday, October 19, 2003
Who I've been listening to:
The Slackers -- they are just wonderful (sounds a bit like dipping into old style reggae) and they are so respectful
and completely sincere about it ...
The Festival of the Desert I'm ashamed to say I've had this for months. I just broke it open a few days ago and it is the best (though strangest) live record I think I've heard.
The track by Blackfire, a Native American group, is profoundly heartfelt and just foggin rawks -- "What Do You See" -- It may make you believe in the power again.
I've been playing that one quite a bit over the past few days, sometimes my core goes wobbly from the sound of raspy chanting. Just a bunch of red punks, they must be.
Blackfire, those wonderful beings swept through the edges of the territory where I live, and performed one night at Feather Falls Casino in Oroville, smack in the old goldfields, a land visited also in those distant fevered days by Cecil John Rhodes himself.
Did you ever suspect he had come here to California -- the English colonialist set his own foot here -- Cecil John Rhodes -- propelled in part by his dreams to reclaim America for the English empire? The man for whom Rhodesia was named, and who also is remembered by his name affixed to the scholastic honorarium bestowed upon only of the greatest of scholars, those known now as Rhodes Scholars.
Well, he did. He wasn't just shaping South Africa, he was here, too, on a brief tourist stopover, an outing to sift through the Sierra Nevada slopes for diamonds pried from the mother's bones. He bought a diamond mine or two, of course, while passing through the way some might buy a tourist curio. His mine, but one that helped dribble funds into the DeBeers company coffers, was one of many near a place called Whiskey Flats, a camp that eventually became a town where today too many of the framed wooden houses are painted with cheap barn paint, a dusty red, a particular hue that when the sun hits just right and if you know anything of history or even something of events in the here and now, it's a color that can easily remind anyone of a wash of dried blood -- it's a town known as Cherokee.
¶ 10/19/2003 09:19:00 AM
The Slackers -- they are just wonderful (sounds a bit like dipping into old style reggae) and they are so respectful
and completely sincere about it ...
The Festival of the Desert I'm ashamed to say I've had this for months. I just broke it open a few days ago and it is the best (though strangest) live record I think I've heard.
The track by Blackfire, a Native American group, is profoundly heartfelt and just foggin rawks -- "What Do You See" -- It may make you believe in the power again.
I've been playing that one quite a bit over the past few days, sometimes my core goes wobbly from the sound of raspy chanting. Just a bunch of red punks, they must be.
Blackfire, those wonderful beings swept through the edges of the territory where I live, and performed one night at Feather Falls Casino in Oroville, smack in the old goldfields, a land visited also in those distant fevered days by Cecil John Rhodes himself.
Did you ever suspect he had come here to California -- the English colonialist set his own foot here -- Cecil John Rhodes -- propelled in part by his dreams to reclaim America for the English empire? The man for whom Rhodesia was named, and who also is remembered by his name affixed to the scholastic honorarium bestowed upon only of the greatest of scholars, those known now as Rhodes Scholars.
Well, he did. He wasn't just shaping South Africa, he was here, too, on a brief tourist stopover, an outing to sift through the Sierra Nevada slopes for diamonds pried from the mother's bones. He bought a diamond mine or two, of course, while passing through the way some might buy a tourist curio. His mine, but one that helped dribble funds into the DeBeers company coffers, was one of many near a place called Whiskey Flats, a camp that eventually became a town where today too many of the framed wooden houses are painted with cheap barn paint, a dusty red, a particular hue that when the sun hits just right and if you know anything of history or even something of events in the here and now, it's a color that can easily remind anyone of a wash of dried blood -- it's a town known as Cherokee.
¶ 10/19/2003 09:19:00 AM
