Well, it’s just hours until 2006 and I am listening to It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry. Damn, I love this song. Timeless on a night all about time and its passing.

I try to not get so bogged down with my own intensity, but I revisited Einstein’s Dreams today, and it is even more magical than the ten times before now when my imagination contemplated time in regards to the fictional vignettes thought up by physicist and author, Alan Lightman.

As much as time intrigues me and nostalgia grips me, as I grow older, it is Space that I long for. Paradoxically, I feel too far away from my center here in these Southern parts, but have more open space than I can remember. Maybe I am truly a city dwellar, after all. Little bit country, lot bit Rock-n-Roll.

Which brings me, quite cheesily, to that 70’s song that had me daydreaming out of the back of my parents Hurst Oldsmobile, complete with a T-top, fog-horn, and tinted windows, a la Starsky and Hutch. Ahhh, the good ol’ 70’s…

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All ’round the day was going down slow
Night, like a river, beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go drifting into

Time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well, I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these

Time passages
There’s something back there that you left behind
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don’t know why you should feel that there’s something to learn
It’s just a game that you play

Well, the picture is changing, now you’re part of a crowd
They’re laughing at something, the music’s loud
A girl comes toward you you once used to know
You reach out your hand, but you’re all alone in those

Time passages
I know you’re in there, you’re just out of sight
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

-Al Stewart

My resolution in 2006 is to live in the moment. Happy New Year!

My first known introduction to Paul Pena was through the documentary Genghis Blues, which follows him to Tuva, a region on the border of Serbia/Mongolia made famous for its deep and culturally significant Tuvan throat singing. My real, and unknown, introduction to this musical genius found my teenaged ass rocking out to the Steve Miller Band’s rendition of his Jet Airliner. It would be 17 years later until I heard Pena’s version, which is miles beyond the SMB version that made the song famous.

Born in Hyannis, Massachusets in 1950, Paul Pena’s grandparents hailed from the Cape Verde Islands, just off the Western coast of Africa. (It is interesting to note that the famous Cesaria Evora also hails from this same island, a location obviously entrenched in its rich musical heritage).

Two years after his debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, Paul moved to San Francisco, soon becoming one of the city’s many creative sons.

After picking up a Radio Moscow feature on his short-wave radio, Paul Pena spent the following 8 years trying to find the origin of the amazing harmonies he heard, ultimatley revealing the art of Tuvan throat singing. Using English-Russian and Russian-Tuvan dictionaries and an obsolete ‘Opticon’ scanning device which translates text into sensations, Pena trained himself in this Tuvan art form.

Damn. That’s a whole bunch of work to try and learn a skill that few on Earth master. Now nicknamed “Earthquake” by the Tuvan masters themselves, Paul Pena had indeed taught himself this absurdly difficult art, and well.

Plagued by years of battling both Pancreatitus and Diabetes, Paul’s suffering ended October 1, 2005. I can only thank him for the music he has given us, and look forward to his treasures I have yet to discover.

“It is just a fact…most poor people are poor because they are lazy.”
-An acquaintance

Perhaps one positive outcome of Hurricane Katrina is the sparked dialogue surrounding poverty in America, which demands analyzing race relations, as well. While my acquaintance did, in fact, mutter the outrageous quote above during a heated debate last Friday (whilst imbibing alcohol, praise tha lawd), my dismay stems from the realization that most white Americans agree with her. And in case you’re not paying attention, when upper-middle class white people speak this way, they are careful to not say black people when they say poor people, but it is precisely what they mean.

Let us re-examine the O.J. Trial, which was the last nationwide topic that sparked dialogue on race to this extent. The response to the trial of the decade was sharply divided along race lines. Not because black people in this country necessarily thought OJ was innocent, but because they, like me, were eager to see the system work in their collective favor. A black man gets away with murder and his brilliant black attorney uses the justice system to get his rich client off, just as white men have been doing for hundreds of years. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. But when the tables are turned, whitey no likee. There existed an overwhelming need of white America to hang O.J. Forget that he was the model of a “good black man” and played golf at our white country clubs. He killed our blonde-headed white sister, and no matter the case, we must take him down.

Not since the O.J. trial has the race issue been so out in the open. We all harbor racist thoughts. Whether we agree with the voices that tell us, from years of white conditioning, that poor people are mostly black and those black folk don’t work (cuz they’re lazy, remember?), our collective consciousness impacts non-whites in a truly negative and oppressive manner. In fact, blacks make up only 1/4 of America’s poor and nearly half of the poor, of working age, DO work. Introducing the idea of the effects of slavery upon a people, which officially ended 140 years ago, was far beyond the grasp of my acquaintance the other night. Let me remind some of my white brethren…we made black people eat, drink, shit, and live everywhere that we did not want to. Let them eat cake, and not anywhere we have to look at them. This was law, less than 50 years ago. 50 years, people. Remove your collective blinders, please, as they are not becoming on you.

My background is a privileged one. I have parents who have always encouraged me and believed in me to an extent that is daunting. They instilled in me a quest for knowledge and self-education that will live with me always. And, as luck would have it, our society expects that I will excel because I am a middle-class whitey.

Ponder, for a moment, how poverty begets poverty. Then, place your natural born poor self into a society which reinforces the idea that you will be and become nothing. Add a generous amount of slavery into the hearts and minds of all inhabitants of this society, and tell me, how does this equation pan-out?