About a week ago I saw an ad for The HUB, one of those blog sites where you throw up your stuff and if you get a zillion hits you earn half a penny, or somesuch arrangement, via Google and Amazon ads. I figured, what the hey, why not try it? So I filled out all the tiresome forms, wrote yet another online profile, and threw up one of my most popular blog posts, The Spirit Catches You.

The HUB rates your posts, and rates you, according to some mysterious system besides hits; it includes, among other criteria, one’s level of participation in the HUB community. Thus, I began at around 62, and soon skyrocketed past 80 for posting dozens of questions in the forums. As I watched everyone else’s numbers, and wondered how much money they were earning, I found myself constantly comparing myself. It gave me a super big knot in my stomach, anxiety born of competitiveness and the terror of not measuring up. This, after only two days and one little HUB.

The process of posting on the HUB is somewhat more involved than on WordPress: each block of text, visual image, or video goes into its own separate capsule, an extremely tedious process—but I figured, hey, it took me time to learn WP, eventually I’ll get this down too. But when ads began to insinuate themselves in between my capsules, I was less than thrilled. Still, I soldiered on.

A few days after joining the HUB I reviewed a couple of CDs on this blog. Since it had a lot of pictures, lyrics, and links, I decided it’d be a good post to use for honing my HUB skills. I figured it would be easy to copy text and put it into one capsule, then copy a photo, then more text, etcetera. Well, it turned out to be not quite so easy. I couldn’t get the lyrics to single-space, so I abandoned them altogether. Even without them, the process took a good three hours—for a post that had taken me less than an hour to write. I ran into many glitches, and couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted—but as I entered the fourth hour, I decided it would just have to do, even with an ad for a tattoo parlor smack in the middle of the first paragraph.

Half an hour after HUBbing, I received an email from the staff: my Joni Mitchell HUB was ix-nayed for being “overly promotional.” Overly promotional?! I admit it’s an uncritical rave, but hey, I adore Joni Mitchell!

After firing off an email (too soon) calling them insane, I read the rules, and discovered the problem was that I put in “too many links to the same site”—to Amazon, where I linked all the albums mentioned in the post. I was baffled: if we’re supposed to be making money from Amazon sales on the HUB, how could this be a no-no? Turns out it doesn’t matter where the links go—any HUB with a certain number of links to the same site is automatically bumped.

The irony is that an awful lot of HUBbers are using the site to shrewdly promote their own business ventures. A HUB purporting to be fitness advice links to a pamphlet on exercise sold by the Hubber. A HUB about ethnic cooking links the author’s self-published recipe book. You get the picture.

And what was I promoting? Joni Mitchell’s CDs! Bad HUBber! I’ve been censored for dirty talk, I’ve been censored for dirty pictures, but this is a first for me.

Needless to say, I am no longer a Hubber.

An Open Letter To George McGovern and the Democratic Party:

Please, please, please! You must STOP telling Hillary Clinton to drop out of the primary race! The situation is not exactly the same as it was in 1972—how could it be? We’re living in a whole different era, with different rules, different people and a completely altered political landscape.

One of Senator Clinton’s reasons for continuing is profoundly correct: she has brought in voters who will not vote for Barack Obama in November; they will vote for John McCain. To put it most bluntly, the majority of people who voted for Obama in the primary will vote for Clinton over McCain, but those who voted for Clinton will not vote for Obama in the general election. It’s that simple.

I don’t believe Obama can win the general election—but that isn’t the only reason I want Clinton to stay. I want her to stay because I’m still smarting from the last two elections, when the Democrats did not stand up and fight for themselves or their constituents (me). The 2000 election was stolen, and I’m not sure the Democrats and Al Gore did everything they could to prevent it. In the 2004 election, John Kerry promised during the campaign that he’d fight to the bitter end—and then he conceded well before the votes were counted! I felt utterly betrayed, and I lost all respect for Kerry.

Hillary Clinton is proving her loyalty and her strength (as if she hadn’t already proved that through her trials as First Lady, when she was stalked and maligned by the right wing). I respect her for refusing to cave into pressure, from George McGovern or anybody else. I’m with her all the way. I wish her party would have a little faith in themselves. Even though bad blood has been shed during the primary, the wounds can be healed in the interests of success in November. The voters know how important it is; why don’t the Democratic leaders?

Whether Clinton wins or not, her refusal to leave before she actually loses is admirable. As the first viable female Presidential candidate, she’s setting a powerful example for little girls.

Go, Hillary! We’re with ya!

Shine
Joni Mitchell
Hear Music, 2007

River: The Joni Letters
Herbie Hancock
Verve, 2007

Starting with Night Ride Home in 1991, the PR for Joni Mitchell’s new CDs has been pure hype. NRH was touted as a collection of “middle-aged love songs” (they weren’t), and Shine, just out, sports a sticker proclaiming it “The Radiant Return of One of the Greatest Singer/Songwriters of Our Time.” Return? I hadn’t noticed she’d gone away. Turbulent Indigo was released in 1994, and since then she’s put out a whole bunch of re-releases with a new song or two thrown in. Not to mention Both Sides Now, in which she covered old standards like Comes Love and Stormy Weather backed by a sixtysomething-piece orchestra. At 65, I’d say Joni’s working pretty darn hard! Besides, Mitchell doesn’t need promotional gimmicks: her fans buy every jewel she quietly slips out, and we’re so passionate about her that word-of-mouth always brings in new buyers. I don’t know if Joni feels like she records in fits and starts—she’s as involved in her painting as in music, so I’d guess not—but to me her considerable body of work seems like a seamless trajectory.

Shine could actually be touted thematically, under that popular modern tropism, Green: almost every song is about “this unfolding tragedy,” environmental destruction. She doesn’t bang our heads against the wall, but sings about the situation with deep and gentle pathos. I hate to separate Shine into parts, though, with lyrics here and music there: as critic Ann Powers has said, the genius behind Joni’s work is that each and every aspect–lyrics, melody, phrasing, intonation, even cover art—is executed with enormous care and consideration for the whole. Thus it would be misguided to tear her work apart, even to quote lyrics out of context—a rule I’m probably going to break any minute.

With the exception of one or two, the songs on Shine are typical Joni Mitchell—although, with her eclectic explorations, there really is no such thing as a typical Joni Mitchell song. The effect these songs have on me, however, is typical. This Place, for instance, a melodic elegy for the planet, is hauntingly addictive: every minute I’m not listening to it I want to be. The writer Doris Lessing has frequently complained that so many songs with upbeat messages are accompanied by desultory, dirge-like tunes. In This Place the equation is reversed: while the lyrics could break your heart, a joyous ballet could be choreographed to the melody. (The Alberta Ballet has in fact set a ballet, The Fiddle and The Drum, to Joni’s music. It debuted in February 2007, and a new full-length adaptation will debut in February 2009.)

My only sort-of quibble with Shine is the inclusion of yet another remake of
Big Yellow Taxi. Although the arrangement differs slightly from the original, with an almost Cajun sound, I for one didn’t need another version of one of the most overplayed songs in radio history. It could be she decided to include it because it so perfectly fits the album’s theme—and reminds us that Joni Mitchell was issuing environmental alerts umpteen years ago.

As a smoker, I must say something about Joni Mitchell’s attachment to cigarettes. Over the years she’s gotten predictable criticisms for it; some reviewers say she’s ruined her voice. Well, I happen to like her husky smoker’s voice at least as much as the sparkling bell tones of her youth. Sometimes I even prefer it: Mitchell used to do a lot of high-pitched woo-woo-ing that could break glass; the Ladies of the Canyon album is so full of screeching woo-woo’s I’ve been tempted on occasion to smash it. Again, Ann Powers agrees: “Decades of committed smoking have changed her voice, and she makes an adventure of exploring her more limited range.” Right on!

Bad Dreams (from Shine)

The cats are in the flower bed
A red hawk rides the sky
I guess I should be happy
Just to be alive…
But we have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls
While condors fall from Indian skies
Whales beach and die in sand…
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.

You cannot be trusted
Do you even know you’re lying
It’s dangerous to kid yourself
You go deaf and dumb and blind.
You take with such entitlement.
You give bad attitude.
You have no grace
No empathy
No gratitude

You have no sense of consequence
Oh my head is in my hands…
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.

Before that altering apple
We were one with everything
No sense of self and other
No self-consciousness.
But now we have to grapple
With our man-made world backfiring
Keeping one eye on our brother’s deadly selfishness.

And everyone’s a victim!
Nobody’s hands are clean.
There’s so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.
We live in these electric scabs.
These lesions once were lakes.
No one knows how to shoulder the blame
Or learn from past mistakes…
So who will come to save the day?
Mighty Mouse?
Superman?
Bad dreams are good in the great plan.

Jazz musician Herbie Hancock first worked with Joni Mitchell when she invited him to play piano on Mingus in 1979, an album that was, in my opinion, sadly underrated. She took on a huge challenge by going to Mexico to work with Charles Mingus when he was dying of cancer, putting lyrics to some of his compositions. While the result was somewhat uneven, a few of the songs, most notably The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines and Sweet Sucker Dance, are as cleverly witty as anything by Cole Porter. Hancock’s been a Mitchell fan ever since, and River: The Joni Letters proves it. As much original interpretation as homage, the album is, like Mitchell’s work, hauntingly beautiful.

from The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines

I’m down to a roll of dimes
I’m stalking the slot that’s hot
I keep hearing bells all around me
Jingling in the lucky jackpots
They keep you tantalized
They keep you reaching for your wallet
Here in fools’ paradise

I talked to a cat from Des Moines
He said he ran a cleaning plant
That cat was clanking with coin
Well he must have had a genie in a lamp
’cause every time I dropped a dime I blew it
He kept ringing bells
Nothing to it!

He got three oranges
Three lemons
Three cherries
Three plums
I’m losing my taste for fruit…

River reminds me somewhat of Mingus: nearly every opening chord had me anticipating the song God Must Be a Bogeyman–and not just because I can’t distinguish one jazz composition from another (sometimes I can). It’s the Joni Mitchell syndrome in action: just as every one of her new albums makes me re-play the old ones, River made me play Mingus.

Hancock’s interpretation of Joni’s signature song Both Sides Now is, to me at least, unrecognizable—I wouldn’t have known it if not for the liner notes. Still, it’s absolutely gorgeous—and how could it not be, with Wayne Shorter on sax and Dave Holland on bass? Also, Hancock’s interpretation is a perfect bridge to the non-Mitchell compositions on Shine, Duke Ellington’s Solitude and Shorter’s Nefertiti.

With two exceptions, I much prefer the instrumentals on River to those with vocal accompaniments. One of these exceptions is the last vocalist I would’ve expected to cover a Mitchell song, Tina Turner, who revamps Edith and the Kingpin from an inscrutable dirge into a sexy number for a hot mama. Almost as surprising is Leonard Cohen, talk-singing a brilliant interpretation of The Jungle Line. On the other end of the spectrum, Corinne Rae Bailey sings River, reprising Joni’s woo-woo’s with predictably unhappy results.

Edith And The Kingpin:

These two CDs go together like bread and butter—a detail not lost, of course, on Amazon with their “Better Together’ marketing ploy. This is one occasion when they’re right on target, and it’s worth putting out the money for both CDs.

Sweet Bird (from The Hissing of Summer Lawns and on River)

Out on some borderline
Some mark of inbetween
I lay down golden in time
And woke up vanishing

Sweet bird you are
Briefer than a falling star
All these vain promises on beauty jars
Somewhere with your wings on time
You must be laughing
Behind our eyes
Calendars of our lives
Circled with compromise
Sweet bird of time and change
You must be laughing
Up on your feathers laughing

Golden in time
Cities under the sand
Power ideals and beauty
Fading in everyone’s hand

Give me some time
I feel like I’m losing mine
Out here on this horizon line
With the earth spinning
And the sky forever rushing
No one knows
They can never get that close
Guesses at most
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching

Note: Joni Mitchell’s website is the best celebrity site I’ve run into on the Internet. Devoted fans keep adding to its exhaustive store of information, which includes a biography, musicology with every lyric to every song, and some of Joni’s paintings. It’s a must-visit for any serious Joni Mitchell fan.

As a daughter I was always leaving.
Then I became a mother and I learned you can’t leave, but you have to let go.
You have to be there like a rock letting go.

I had to let my babies out when it was time. For nine months my body held another, the most perfect union I‘d known, but when they decided it was time, I had to let them go. I fought, oh yes, I struggled and screamed out my pain, but in the end they had their way. I let them emerge. I was alone again.

I couldn’t leave the house even while they slept. When they wanted to be fed, I had to feed them, but when they wanted to sleep, I had to let them go into a dreamscape from which I was excluded. They woke me up whenever they felt like it, but I couldn’t wake them if I wanted their company.

They begged me to let them go. Out the door, down the street, into a world that could do them harm. They wanted to wander through dark thick woods or jump into pools of water. I was beside myself with terror, but they pleaded so hard I let them go.

The older they got the more wreckless they became. First it was climbing trees, then it was riding around on wheels, and one day it was a metal machine that sped through the streets, a weapon of mass destruction. It seemed incomprehensible, but I had to let them go.

And all the while I was still a daughter, and I wanted to leave.
I had to stay, even if I stayed alone.
I had to stay so I could be there like a rock letting go.

Someday, I was assured, I would be able to leave.
Someday they’d be so far gone that I could leave.

Someday has come and gone. I’m still here letting go.
My daughter keeps leaving, but when I try to leave she stamps her feet.
My son cannot seem to go. He needs me to be here to answer his calls.
Every day I plan to leave but I am told it would destroy them.
If I leave their world will crumble.

So I stay. There is nothing here for me anymore, but I must stay until someone or something takes me away. Only then will I be allowed to go.

When going is not an act of leaving I can go.
I can never leave. I can only let go.

Love You To Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising A Child With Special Needs

Edited by Suzanne Kamata / Beacon Press / May 2008 /

This just out: A collection of fiction, non-fiction, memoir and poetry about the experience of parenting a child with “special needs,” i.e., disability, chronic health condition, or whatever your phrase of choice happens to be. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the entire book–it just arrived yesterday–so this isn’t a review, but a shameless plug. I shouldn’t review it anyway, since I have a piece in it, titled “A Homecoming.” I hope to post it here later on–just as soon as I find my electronic version…I am soooo disorganized. Rather than a review, I’ll share my experience of being published in anthologies.

Having had enough experience with anthologies to know the drill, I send off my work and forget about it. More often than not I send something already written, sometimes even published elsewhere. I do this because I know that many proposed anthologies never see the light of day; either the editor was unable to continue or she couldn’t find a publisher. I used to get pissed off about this, but years in the biz have taught me how hard it is to put together anthologies. There are so many pieces to cobble together, all interdependent on each other, that it’s a miracle so many do get published. Writers want to know who the publisher is, or even if there’s a publisher, before they send their work–and the more accomplished the writer, the truer this is. Meanwhile, publishers want names of writers who’ve committed, and sometimes want to see their pieces. It’s a rare editor who doesn’t lie through her teeth to publishing houses, throwing around names of known writers, exaggerating their level of commitment. It’s all one big Catch-22 situation. I’ve begun and abandoned three or four anthologies–either I didn’t get enough good work, or I couldn’t get a publisher, or I just got sick of the whole damn thing. All of which is to say that, once I submit something to a proposed anthology, I don’t expect to hear back about it for awhile, if ever.

When the thing does fly, it’s a wonderful surprise, nine months or a year later, to find a contract in my mailbox, and a few weeks later, if it’s a paying gig and paying early, a small check. As small as

these checks are, they’re gravy. They always seem to come at the most crucial moment, too: when I’m on my last cigarette, or PG&E has threatened to turn off the lights.

After the contract and check, I usually forget all about the thing again. So it’s a great moment when, like yesterday, this labor of love arrives in my mailbox. Glossy, pristine, filled with unknown treasures, it never fails to give me a boost. I love sitting down and reading, in this order: the Table of Contents, author first; Contributor’s Notes; and my own piece, which I’ve probably forgotten, and which, if I’m lucky, surprises me by how good it is. (That was the case this time; many times I cringe, hating my piece). It’s usually a few days before I get to sit down and read through the whole book, but when I do, I begin with the authors I know first, then go back and read the rest. And finally, I place the new anthology on the bookshelf that’s been set aside for my own work. It’s quite a full shelf, and I do believe I’m going to have to start another one to accommodate this latest addition. My friend Chris Muncie says it’s a great day in a writer’s life–the day she starts “the second shelf.”

So I guess it’s a great day. I hope everyone will go check out Love You To Pieces, buy or borrow it, or stand in the bookstore and read it. This is a life experience that, if you haven’t lived it, will expand your mind, maybe even your heart. And if you have lived it–I don’t have to tell you. You know what hearing other people’s stories means to you.

Why did Barack Obama denounce Reverend Wright yesterday, after weeks of resisting pressure to do so? He says he was appalled by some of the things the Rev said in a National Press Club speech—but I read the speech, including the Q&A portion, and nothing the Rev said rivalled the snippets of Wrightisms that started the whole brouhaha. In fact, I very much liked Wright’s speech. With charisma and humor he described the Black Church as following a theology of liberation and transformation, and compared the actions of his congregation—feeding the hungry, helping the poor and afflicted—with the actions of the U.S. administration. I couldn’t even object to his portrayal of Louis Farrakhan as an “important” speaker, though I’m sure he and I would disagree on just what we mean by important.

During the Q&A, Wright refused to be drawn into the issues of the election, or the personalities of the candidates. True, it’s somewhat grandiose for him to assume that attacks against him are aimed at the entire Black Church. Speaking on Democracy Now! this morning, Melissa Harris Lacewell of Princeton, an Obama supporter, pointed out that “Wright doesn’t stand in for the whole black spiritual experience.” That’s hardly a reason for Obama’s drastic act.

I keep thinking I must have missed something or other the Reverend said that went beyond the boundaries of acceptable liberalism. Maybe it was his refusal to rule out AIDS as a government conspiracy–but plenty of perfectly respectable people hold that view, and, considering the U.S. experiments on black men at Tuskegee that went on up until the 1970s, to suspect our government of medical mischief isn’t that big of a stretch.

It seems to me that Obama is simply being the quintessential politician. I suppose he’s felt uneasy ever since the Wright flap began, but to denounce him right away, in response to public pressure, would’ve made him appear wimpish. Now he’s decided he’d be well rid of this burden imposed by standards of loyalty–so he found something in Wright’s speech to jump upon, and made his break. I hope he feels relieved. I always do when I declare to my sister that I shall never speak to her again. I am not being disingenuous: just a few short weeks ago Obama claimed Wright as a member of his family.

On the same Democracy Now program, Adolph Reed, a columnist for The Progressive, asked the question that begs asking: “Why should we be debating a candidate’s relationship to his church in the first place?” Reed, definitely not an Obamista, is, like me, pessimistic about the election, and he made several trenchant comments, including that “People say they’ll vote for a black man, but the closer we get, the more reasons people will find, supposedly not racial, to not vote for him.”

Since Reed reiterated my current thinking, I went and read his May column in the Progressive, to which I direct your attention. It’s a sad probability but, as Reed said today, “The game’s over. Neither one of them will beat McCain.”

I’ve just gone and read several articles about the Reverend’s speech, including those listed below, considered relevant to my post by some invisible omnipotent automated generator in the technosphere. I’m truly stunned by the vitriol aimed at Wright. And bewildered. I suggest everyone hear it from the horse’s mouth, and read or listen to the speech itself, along with the Q&A session (I’ve linked it above). Then make up your own mind about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama, and the racist American media. I don’t love Obama. But so far,  I do like his Rev.