MJ Vs. The Pope

This is a tough one...both have a lot of young boy sex karma on their hands. At his height MJ was adored, literally, all over the world. When we were in Nepal his was the only face on what public media they had, T-shirts. He's an amazing performer. I remember the night he sang Billie Jean at Motown's 25th Anniversary show like it was yesterday, god, what a performance. The Pope inspired dreams of freedom in Poland, Lech Walesa and the ultimate demise of Communism. There is no single individual, in my mind, more responsible for the fall of Communism.

Beyond who they are as individuals, MJ personifies to me, the epitome of big business interests in world wide music. The Pope represents, similarly, to me, the embodiment of the corporatization of spirituality. Therefore, I find it very interesting to see them in concurrent states of demise and disarray as the 21st century takes off.

MJ built a world around himself. An amazing, intuitive child... with some deep problems. He felt a sense of great power as those valuable copyrights he stole from McCartney (Sony has them now) and others, along with his own string of hits, paid off. So, the arrogance and sense of inviolability grew until he felt safe, maybe even justified, abusing kids. He may genuinely see himself as some benefactor preserving the innocence of children. Things grow till they sow the seeds of their own demise and in the smallest and weakest little cancer patient poor kid, comes the seed of undoing.

The church stresses sexual abstinence, particularly in its clergy. Sex is viewed, essentially, as negative. They give it a little lip service, that maybe it can be part of marriage, so you can use rhythm. But the overriding message is that sex is dirty, something to be avoided, unless you are producing a Catholic. It' not even covert. Mother Theresa herself said her primary concern is not alleviating suffering but bringing souls to Christ.

Well, hey there, ever heard of the field of psychology? I mean, it's pretty well established that going for long periods without fulfilling the body's natural desire for sexual expression is damaging (and I mean with real human beings, not the internet). I can attest to this first hand, believe me. This is not up for grabs in my mind... it's reality. They had a Newsweek cover saying 90% of marriages are sexless. Then you look at our society in general which tells people, basically, sit in your office all day and be on the phone and take meetings and report back and tell the group and check in and keep your cell on and Blackberry too and.....it's endless and people are stressed and unhappy and sexless and they don't even know about it or care. It's wild. They should get a clue, cause my life a has turned around like night from day now that I have an active, healthy sex life. Your whole world changes. I was willing to accept so little for myself, without even realizing it.

Now, I know this is what Jesus wanted for us, cause, the guy was party central. He was drinking and hanging with the ladies and defending them and giving some things for people to think about like, don't judge, don't be so into money, think about God. He hated the establishment. He's one of the greatest revolutionaries that ever lived. It's too bad the Romans co-opted it.

So, I gotta go with the Pope, even though he's spawned from that line of co-opter/subverters and represents a philosophy that has kept billions of women barefoot and pregnant for centuries cause at least he has the right attitude about the war in Iraq. And, after all, I'm only comparing him favorably to MJ. Then again, MJ is only responsible for a few messed up boys, not thousands.

I find it terribly sad that a religion which does command so many people essentially counsels people to live their life in such a way that may produce more Christian children but will be without true happiness and fulfillment. And don't go writing me telling me how fulfilling it is to work all day and cook and clean and tend others and never yourself... cause I just don't buy it and both Jesus and Buddah said that following one's inner path to God was the way to fulfillment.

WMG Goes Public

P2P's Story
Check out this story about WMG's IPO. Notice how they mention the biggest assets of the company... Happy Birthday (one of the reasons Eyes on the Prize has been unavailable for the past 10 years is because in it some friends sing Happy Birthday to MLK and WMG demands payment) and our friend Don Henley's album. Well, at least they're a reporting company now, that should provide many hours of good reading.

Something The Lord Made

These days when stressed out, beer-bellied men get a little chest pain they go in for a quad bypass and get another 20 years. In the 40's they died. Alfred Blalock is the doctor who performed the first heart surgery, turning Johns Hopkins into the preeminent hospital in the country. By figuring out how to turn a vein into an artery he saved babies that were turning blue and dying. Thing is, it wasn't really him that figured the thing out. The man who made the critical leaps that allowed this miracle was a high school educated black man named Vivien Thomas.

In the thousands and thousands of papers written about this procedure, Vivien Thomas has only been mentioned twice. He was finally awarded an honorary doctorate after working at Hopkins teaching the technique he pioneered for 50 years, but was relatively little known. His brother, who fought for equal pay for black teachers in the 50's, is even less known.

Blalock received one accolade and award after the next throughout his lifetime and I'm sure he worked diligently. But he took all the credit for something he did not achieve alone, and may never have achieved at all, had it not been for Thomas. I guess the classic story of the white guy taking all the credit is Sir Edmund Hillary, who could have never climbed Everest without his Nepali sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, a name you've probably never even heard before.

The interesting part, to me, was the psychology of people who are allowed to do this and the sense of entitlement and the rationalization and denial they may, or may not have lived with. Blalock never demonstrated any type of guilt or remorse, or even awareness, for taking the spotlight while the guy who made his fame possible had to enter Hopkins through the service entrance and use the ladies room when there was none for "coloreds only". Do people like that feel any understanding of how much their skin color and anatomy buy? Had it not been for the color of his skin, his life would have been filled with the type of struggle and degradation his partner felt every day.

Having to push that knowledge down every day has got to exact a cost somewhere, sometime. Here's how I look at it. Life is about learning. Blalock didn't learn. He enjoyed. But, that's not enough. Thomas learned... or did he? The guy never really quite learned to value himself or stand up for himself. Their portraits hang next to each other at Hopkins today. So, in the end, I guess they both got their due.

It sure makes you wonder about that sea of white male faces that is credited with Western Civilization. How many of the great leaps in thought and innovation came from similarly uncredited sources? My guess is LOTS, starting with Jesus, who was not white but was co-opted to the point where almost any white person, any person, thinks of Jesus the way he was portrayed by Renaissance painters. Vivien, precisely because of his lack of education, was able to see things the doctor had lost touch with. So much of our education is a deconstruction of what we already know. So much intuitive knowledge is squeezed out of us through the "education" process. Most great leaps forward occur when technological, higher thinking is matched with basic, intuitive knowledge.

Dr. Andrew Weil has done much to alert the public to the toxic nature of almost all our drugs. The drugs we use to cure often do exactly the opposite. A childhood friend of mine was recently diagnosed with MS, so they gave her drugs and now she has leukemia. Another friend was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and now has to have her body toxified for the next nine months. Perhaps modern medicine would do well to look toward simplicity and connection to nature. The problem is, you can not patent Something the Lord Made.

Stringer Sonies Up Between A Rock And A Hard Place

It'll be interesting to see what Howard Stringer does as he takes the helm at Sony. He has acknowledged that the company's five year slide was due to the fact that the content and product development sides could not agree on protection levels. Duh. We're at a standstill. All the new improvements people want in hardware have to do with controlling when, where and what they consume: customizing their content, exercising their fair use rights to duplicate and share the entertainment, avoiding commercials they have no interest in seeing, etc., etc.

The content providers, rather than trying to find ways to direct and customize the advertising so that people actually will value it and respond to it, use their $600M Spiderman legs to strangle the mothership, and offer them less and less while charging more and more. I'm not optimistic. What happened is that the US based entertainment dollars won out over the increasingly commodity oriented hardware industry. It's almost like sacrificing the weaker child for the stronger... after crippling the once robust child.

This guy appointed Andy Lack and is no friend of free culture. It looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. While electronics still accounts for 70% of Sony's business, that will now shift to the cash cow content scam. Why play on a level field when you can go to a government subsidized hill from which you can roll boulders over your customers? Why innovate and progress when we can just keep milking the same cash cow?

Book Group

I had book group last night. I always feel so blessed to have this group, I thought I'd post about it. When my son was born, I didn't do some of the usual Mommy stuff like the little specialized mommy/baby groups. Still coming off a highly professional mentality, growing up in the 60's-70's with ERA, Women's Lib, having had an artist, definitely not housewife-type mother... I just did not relate to the mentality, the image, the role, the submission, the mental deadness, the whole bit. I did all the Gymboree, child-oriented stuff, Eric was in every class the city of Palo Alto offered, but I had no real social context or support system for what was my actual job & role at that point.

By the time my daughter was born, I was getting pretty isolated and starting to repeat some of what I had witnessed growing up... a frustrated, angry mother, devoid of an emotional support network. I loved being able to see the rapid growth of my amazing children and really learning about selflessness in a way all the meditating and studying could never achieve. I felt fortunate to be able to focus on them. But where loss of ego teaches, reveals truth and intensely deepens connection, loss of identity wasn't all good...especially when you have an insecure husband as your primary reference point. This isn't some monastery. This is Palo Alto, baby!

When Bria turned one, and my parents did not even send her a birthday card, all sorts of realizations about my own childhood started flooding back and I had one of my major life epiphanies. I started to see my entire childhood for what it was. I went back and read all my diaries, from the time I was 14. At that point, I could no longer be in denial. I could not believe how I had been treated by my parents and realized that at some point I would have to speak up. I did so in a very gentle way, but, as soon as I poked, all the angry denials and venom came flying. To make a long story short, while attempting to reconcile, I was unwilling to completely recant my life experience, though I was willing, wanting, to forgive and move on. I eventually lost the relationship with my parents and sister, after giving it over a year to rise above being a horribly and completely toxic situation.

But, as I found out again with my more recent pruning, the divorce... when God closes a door, he opens a window. At the same time, I realized I did not have to repeat my parents introverted mode and I made the decision to create community around me. The year that followed saw me very involved in my church, my kids' schools and mostly, my fantastic Evergreen Park neighborhood. I threw about ten neighborhood parties in that next year, started a Mom's group at Peers Park, we rented the Field House and did art projects & music with the tots. I also started the book group. Well, starting that book group was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life and now, nine years later, I still reap the benefits every month.

Unlike some of the book groups I became aware of, which were closed and exclusive, the women in my group have been very open and have brought in a number of women over the years. The original core is still there and we have an extremely steady, robust group of 13. I think about how stultifying those closed off groups must be now, though I doubt they notice.

Although they're all great moms, this is not quite the demographic I find among the women at my church and kids' schools. Some of them have been in senior ranks of management at places like Intel and NASA. We have high-profile money managers for financial insights, a doctor for complete medical knowledge, engineers, writers, lawyers.

Last night, Carol, who is the President of the Packard Foundation (oddly enough, we also have the #2 in the Hewlett Foundation) told us about a trip she took to Ethiopia with her 13 year old daughter, Hana. The Foundation supports birth control all over the world. She talked about what they saw there... ten year old girls contracted out for marriage and genital mutilation and rape. I see such high awareness among these women and it stands in increasingly sharp contrast to these insular PTA-type housewives I know who just seem to be going more and more inside their own little world of empty gossip.

So, that's it... my friends, neighbors, homies... I feel so very blessed to have this amazing group. And, I must say, they are quite indulgent of me. I can't even remember the last time I read the actual book. I'm not interested in reading any more women as victim novels. I don't need to enter that world over and over. I much prefer my own. It's probably been a year since I've read fiction. Being such a supporter of the arts, I regret dissing authors, but, I don't have the patience for it now and don't count on this next generation for much interest.

I read the blogs and websites and downloadable non-fiction books and periodicals, usually several hours a day. There is too much info I want to keep abreast of for me to waste time reading about one downtrodden woman after the next. Yes, they all rise above the shitty lot left to women in their world and we can all see their cages far more easily than we can see our own.

Last night I threw out a bunch of stuff about the restrictions on our freedom from this excessive copyright law and they seemed to understand the issues quite readily, even though none of them had much familiarity with the it. It just shows how easily awareness can be raised. They quickly understood the value of society having a vibrant artistic sensibility. Other issues, like skipping commercials and fair use copying will be a bit more difficult as there is still an assumption that IP is like tangible property. Just wait till this summer... little do they know that when it's my turn to pick the book.... you got it... they'll be getting a big old load of Intervision.

Fogarty's Fantasy or Fantasy's Fogarty?

CBS Sunday Morning did a small piece on John Fogarty this morning. Their stories usually have a light, happy ending bent, including this one. After creating 10 Gold Records and 6 Platinum Albums for Fantasy Records in the late 60's/early 70's, and making millions and millions of dollars.... for that label, he left. He left with nothing. After contributing one of the greatest liberal legacies to music the world has ever seen, what Bruce Springsteen described as Hank Williams level contribution of socially conscious, simply crafted songs which go right into our cultural legacy... the man was left with nothing but bitterness and defeat and contributed nothing to music for 18 years.

But, Fogarty is a musical genius, and can't just lay dormant forever, despite being, in his own words, "in jail". So, in 1985 he released Centerfold, which was a hit. Fantasy sued him for infringing their copyright, ostensibly for sounding too much like himself. They owned him. He did not own himself... can you imagine what that feels like to an artist? The CBS story goes on to say, yes, yes, his wife, his kids, he's playing music, he's happy... and that was all they wrote.

Well, CBS, there's a lot more to the story. Instead of shining your light on this little family happy ending, why don't you talk about what's really happening here. Fogarty's story is the story of what happens to 99% of our artists, the only difference is that Fogarty has such an incredible magnitude of genius, he overcame what the others couldn't. CBS also does not mention that Fogarty not only won the lawsuit but got attorney's fees, the first to do so. Thus, he did much to chill some of these frivolous lawsuits. It shows you the gaul of these labels, with reluctant courts only willing to step in when things get this egregious.

I literally cried at this story just thinking about shutting down an artist like that for 18 years. It is an absolute crime against humanity and those in their little Fantasy world will have a lot of karma to deal with. To think that those rapists will own that CCR catalogue, virtually forever, makes me sick to my stomach, ripping off an 18 year old boy who turned out to be one of our greatest songwriter/poets. They want to take credit for him? They murdered him.