American Kristallnacht

"Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'."

~ Hugh Green, The Daily Telegraph, 1938

They came in

with pepper spray pellets blazing,

triangulating

They came in through the window

with the full blessing and authority

of unhinged might

The numbing fear

that God is right,

right, right ... feel his fright

Let America shake

Hit 'em in the back,

and that girl, too, whack!

Shove her in the car, bang her head against the door,

she might bleed a little, might even leave a scar,

but don't worry, her court-appointed attorney won't get her far

They can't afford legal defense

and no parents will come to their aid,

so shoot up their room with toxic wounds

And then just leave it there

'cause nobody cares as Mr. Nobody stares ...

Let the pepper spray hang in the cavernous air

The gawd general self-appointed Horus

has granted the license to deal with the weak,

the sick, the drug abused, the American "scum"

So then after that bright light white will come

So the purity of the might will reign in the sun

So the filthy trash will all be on the run

This is American Kristallnacht

a renewed tomb's curse worse than Hitler's little minuet

America's Kristallnacht, feel the fact,

Syria's Assad was just the opening act

Of all the things I wish to forget

the burn in the nostrils is beyond neglect

frenzied my brain, not enough rain, the lump in the neck

In addition to your loss of faith in the system,

the chemical weapon pepper spray will swell

 the mucous membranes of your eyes,

 which will cease believing

Your nose and throat, your fleshy moat,

will burn like some 14th century lost castle,

coughing at the charge of the Catholic brigades

Your eyes will dry like the planetary deserts,

Your eyes will close involuntary against the peace-keeping army,

and you will hyperventilate, burning in their sin

Psychological effects include paranoia, anxiety, panic,

which is just what a peaceful street gathering needs,

See the revolution, see the seeds, you don't bleed:
The imposition of order creates chaos
and that's all you need to read

The Nazi call is here, it's clear

hidden now behind the double-hurricane wind shear

but no one should ever forget, the fear is here

Time and money people

who move just one stone

and call it a day

won't do much to resist

or stop the sway

More than likely

they will be the first to line up

on the day of the big state-sanctioned violence parade

When is the U.S. Supreme Court going to rule that a brick is free speech, too?

American Kristallnacht came this year

watch them drop behind the veil of hell,

no better than any dictator in any era

American Kristallnacht came this year

(With apologies to anyone still living or dead 
who experienced pre-World War II Germany,
 because things aren't that bad here, yet - DLM)

David Bromberg resurfaces after two decades to sound better than ever

If a star quarterback returns after retiring over twenty years ago, there aren't many who would bet on his success. If a world champion prize fighter took to the ring again after two decades, better have the ambulance ready. If Jesus came back from the dead, he might have a lot of catching up to do before he was ready for prime time. But if you found a Stradivarius violin in the attic, chances are it would sound pretty good.

David Bromberg is like one of those fine instruments. As his friend Jerry Jeff Walker stated about him, "The reason man created stringed instruments. David touched them with a lover’s fingers and they moaned that true love right back at him. Wood and wire and flesh spoke.”

So how does one explain the re-emergence of Bromberg? After a dozen albums and constant touring during the 1970s and 1980s with a lot of humor and instrumental verve, this noted master of guitar, fiddle, dobro, mandolin, pedal steel guitar decided he was burned out on the whole business, broke up his band, and retreated into a life of relative obscurity. But alas, that's a media-generated idea: that someone disappears when they aren't in the public life. He was simply off the public radar. But now, at age 70, he's back on the road.

"I was really doing well," he says of that time during the late 1980s when he broke up the band. "I was working too much without a break. I toured for two years straight and never went home. I realized that when I got off the road I was burnt out, but I didn't realize that until later. I came to the conclusion that I wasn't a musician anymore. When I wasn't performing, I wasn't writing, I wasn't playing on my own. I realized I was I-don't-know-what."

There were some studio credits along the way, as he appeared on other people's records here and there. But he says he wasn't really pursuing life as a musician for some time.

"I didn't play much guitar," he says. "The performing I did was very sporadic. I took 22 years off and I didn't realize I could step back in."

What he did instead was learn how to make violins. First, he enrolled in the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making in Chicago. But he wasn't as interested in knowing how to make violins as he was in trying to identify them. Especially violins made in the United States. Something just clicked in his archival mind about these instruments. He became an avid collector and known expert on violins. He now has a collection of 263 violins made in America, which he has offered to the Library of Congress. And when someone had a violin they needed to identify, Bromberg became the go-to guy.

"How do you tell what they are is what fascinated me," he says. "I started looking at violins, learning how to identify the makers, gaining the knowledge of the different makers. Now, in one small area of the violin world, American-made violins, I'm considered something of an expert."

After moving to Wilmington, Delaware, he opened a retail store and repair shop for violins and other instruments, David Bromberg Fine Violins. The business was part of a revitalization of that part of Wilmington, but it also became a place where Bromberg himself became revitalized.

By the next year, after the mayor of Wilmington had mentioned live music had once been a common offering in that part of town, Bromberg was leading what he called a regular "jam session." As it turned out, he didn't have to travel to play. He just stayed home, and people came to him.
"Some very good musicians started to show up, some of them from a long way away," he says.
Thus began the musical re-education of David Bromberg.

"I learned a whole bunch about singing," he says. "Phoebe Snow gave me some very good advice about singing. During the period I wasn't performing, I took some voice lessons. Now I sing a lot better than I did in the 1970s. I don't have the speed on the guitar that I used to have. That part is gone."

Within five years of moving to Wilmington, and after getting encouragement from the likes of bluegrass players Chris Hillman and Herb Pederson, he was ready to start recording again. He formed the David Bromberg Quintet and returned to the recording world with the 2007 release called, naturally, "Try Me One More Time."

It was nominated for a Grammy.

That was followed by a recording project that started with some playing for fun with John Hiatt, but became a concept Bromberg called "Use Me." He invited a wide variety of artists -- Hiatt, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Tim O'Brien, Vince Gil, Keb' Mo, Linda Ronstadt -- to suggest songs they wrote for him to cover, and then Bromberg would perform and record them. Then came an opportunity to record with producer Larry Campbell, a longtime friend and former producer and player for Levon Helm and Bob Dylan. The David Bromberg Band emerged with "Only Slightly Mad," which Bromberg says "is an old-time David Bromberg record" since it jumps around from Chicago-style blues to bluegrass, gospel and English drinking songs.

That ability to create shows and records with "too many different styles," as he put it, is why in the past decade Bromberg has earned the nickname "The Godfather of Americana."

"I did not make it (the nickname) up," he laughs. "When I was originally performing, there was no such thing as Americana. Commercial record stores couldn't figure out where to put me. Was I in the rock section, the blues section, the folk section, all the stuff I do. Now all of that is just called Americana, and that's what I was doing for all of those years."

Bromberg is from the generation born at the end of World War II (in 1945 in Philadelphia, later raised in Tarrytown, New York) that was just waiting to discover rock'n'roll by the time he was a teen in the late 1950s. However, he was more attracted to roots music than the mainstream Elvi of his day. He discovered Peter Seeger and the Weavers, and was especially drawn to the blues. A fan of Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, he discovered a now lesser known blind blues player by the name of Reverend Gary Davis, who he asked to teach him to play guitar while living in Greenwhich Village in New York,

He says he enrolled in Columbia University with the intention of becoming a musicology major, but he never got far enough along in his studies to actually study "musicology."

"I never got to the point where that actually happened," he says.

Nevertheless, he says the exposure to the lively Village music scene in the mid-1960s was essentially a study in numerous kinds of music that he was interested in. Now, in later years, his exposure to all forms of folk, blues, country, jazz and so on has led him to being just as undefinable. How does he remember that fabled time scrambling to make a living as a musician in the Village?

"Even when I got to the Village, people were saying it was not the same as it used to be, and they are still saying it now," he says. "What I remember is the joy that we all got when playing that music. We loved that music and we loved each other."

After a time playing for tips, he became a sought-after studio musician and backing musician for Tom Paxton, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rosalie Sorrels. Then he began to flourish as a hired hand for recording sessions, including for Bob Dylan's "New Morning" and "Self Portrait" LPs.

For the next decade or more, Bromberg played with a who's who of musicians. He got his first record deal in 1970 after getting a chance to play as a stand-in at the Isle of Wight Festival. The performance was so well received that Columbia Records offered him a recording contract. In 1971 his debut album included the song "The Holdup," the product of a collaboration with former Beatle George Harrison. Then he met members of the Grateful Dead, and they played on his next two albums.

At that point, his music was deep into the blues and folk, and his nasally voice (somewhat in the timbre of a jazzy Neil Young) wasn't great but it was laced with a lot of irony and sarcasm. That style, featuring horns and all kinds of other instruments with an increasingly large ensemble, developed a hit with a seven-minute version of "Mr. Bojangles," which interwove stories about traveling with the song's writer, Jerry Jeff Walker.

His humor is a trademark. For example, on "Only Slightly Mad," there's a song about how he'll take a lover back when, among other impossibilities, "they find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Even his liner notes on the CD are self-deprecating. He describes the song "Strongest Man Alive," about surviving all kinds of challenges where others have not, as "an old English drinking song that I wrote. Well, I wrote it and it sounds like an old English drinking song."

His shows are now like eclectic journeys into his encyclopedic mind, and the songs he chooses are as eccentric as he is.

"What I like in humorists," he says, "are people who take their subjects very seriously, but don't take themselves very seriously."

In the Beginning There Was a Word from Our Sponsors

Welcome, O welcome 

the many winged archetypes, 

supple and black, 

enfolded in milky white, 

milky way white, 

hanging in midair, 

peering through 

the portal, the slinky tube 

of the time traveling 

Dream Catcher wheel. 

Help is on the way ... 

Hooray. Hooray. 

Help is on the way … 

Hooray. Hooray. 

For whom? 

I cannot say. 

They exist in the imperfect 

Shapeless spaces unifying 

Our oppositional own imperfect 

Spaces. They resonate in 

The ripples of the swimming 

Pool light at moonlight, 

And intimate choices 

Made by man and volcano 

Long ago. 

Help is on the way … 

Hooray. Hooray. 

Help is on the way .. 

As they wave, pleading, 

Begging for business deals, 

Moving closer to our dreams, 

Tumbling through timeless 

Synchronistic switches 

That speak our name. 

They twitch in the fierce 

Firestorm of the Eve-bitten 

Apple, and dance, 

frightened and purple 

Help is on the way, 

They hope and pray: 

Hooray. Hooray. 

Their master, like ours, 

Has up and gone away.

~ Mythville

The Free Emergency Exorcism (Phoenix Uprising)

The media eye

with the Phoenix police

in the tear gas times

sittin' in with the news models,

are chillin' in the sussustudio,

but at Second and Van Buren

the naughty are brewing for a fight

covering their eyes with their hands,

flying under the radar, naked in the desert lands,

charring up their fairy bones

and she gotta work in the morning

but now she's gotta go underground,

seven years of peace got no peace,

seven years of yeast infections and got no lease

and nothing to do but now, with two options,

fight or retreat, the sulfur fire burning in the face,

facing the master race, the canininites out in front,

the Trump channel turning on,

with Willie and Bernie and Babe and Rat Bear,

fired up in the fat fog, crazy as the Fourth Estate Guy,

who gets it next, they grab him by the neck,

with the K9 unit comin' down to bring the Jesus ...

If only because there is hope for all of us.

If only. If. Only. Hope for all. One nation,

under great odds. One nation going quite O my gawd.

One nation under the heat. One nation under many storms, 

within, and without, increasingly so more without, than in.

We the people who formed a better thing than the One. 

We the people thinking outside the box of lost frogs,

running in amok, in the muck, like dead peasants, dead ducks:

One nation running out of luck, dying in the yuck, what the fucks

while money is speech, and speech is drowned in the diffusion

of the quickening, the quicker, the more dead. Ain't it so, Fred?

One nation, screwed to the floor by the Fed. 

Many who are now dead, 

One nature under the unnatural

with enemies from within,

enemies from without,

with no time to twist or shout

E kay Gee. Spy king of the KGB. 

Tree sap sucked out of the trees,

quite untested and without a teevee,

can't even afford a teepee, nor TP;

Oh thine eye that always sees,

we are all more nerve-wracked

than sea-sickened honey bees

Could it be the sun?

One nation under the gun?

The dogs set loose to run?

The mysteries of the sea?

The networks selling beer,

fear, the diva of the year?

Is it all above as so below?

Do you have an inkling, Drumpf,

do you even know?

This is more than just your reality show.

It's all about the gas, man.

It. Is. All. About. The gas.

To keep us running fast,

to win the future that never exists,

running past the master plan,

the Season of the Man,

the runover Santas,

long gone since Viet Nam,

on the long gone corner,

holding out a can

for loose change,

answered with a "Thank you, mam."

And then there's nurse named Mary, 

who died at the crisp of the Great Recession

The daughter who lost her mind, 

only to become wild

in the whoosh of the North,

now a witch, living in the woods,

living in the ditch, hounded by the cyclops,

who beat her back down, black and blue, bruises to prove ...

the soul-eating Egregore is born in red, white but who?

But they hesitate to arrest her again,

since she knows her God-given Black Madonna Gothic civil rights,

and the peace officers don't need that now, not tonight

Oh Lord! O gawd no oh no. Oh Lord. 

On the day the telephone call came, 

hearing of her mother's suicide,

after losing her job, her home,

her pride, all in one week,

She was never the same and neither was I.

One nation of fevered 

beauty queens to the south,

cast in a world of doubt

Fighting their way up the ladder

in service industry jobs.

Feeding the piggy slobs,

reptilians with their morning eggs.

Swabbing the decks.

Driven to exhaustion by the heat,

carbon dioxide

and conspiracy news.

Working double-time

to make a dent even close

to the way their father had it,

their grandfather, even harder,

since the farm is gone.

The trouble all starts when the land is sold. 

This world is too old. 

It's gone into retro,

and softly luminescent

in the swimming pool

moonish day-glow.

Enemies from within, 

tangle like the angels and devils

of our best and worst energies

with the enemies from without ...

No one's got no clout. 

It's money that talks. Money that shouts. 

Generation boomers,

checking on their Bloombergs

in their Sunday morning bloomers,

saying fuck them man it's me firsts,

me precious, me firsts. Me. Precious.

One nation under the fog

in breach-birth and stinking of bongs,

trying to just somehow get along,

singing one long damn "American Idol" song.

but the video goes up and it's show time on CNN

with the feedback meme running just a little too long.

but she made the clip, she tragically hip.

You can see her in the light

O gawd no. No. Can't be. Mary sweet God No!

Not My MOM! No!

Hidden in the fright. Full of worries,

nothing ever new, nothing ever right,

just her truth and her second sight,

asking the Baphomet what to do tonight.

Feedback loop. Fruit loop truths,

in the ultra violet byte,

killing the metaphysical germs,

living with the worms,

just past the portal

the truth of our most ancient

ancestors wrestle with their immortal,

just closing their eyes to feel normal.

We are one stand.

Like the Aspen, man.

Listen. Just listen. If you can.

Look into the free emergency exorcism light,

then you'll feel a little sick,

did I mention Tricky Dick,

or is it "And Ronald Reagan,"

what is the password again?

You been hypnotized, again and again,

I know you don't remember and it ain't no sin.

Now you can be just a human being

A human being. A human. Being.

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,

Jack the Jester and the Bard are here with you,

holding your tiny little hands

It's no shame, man

You can still be a hero

to the everyman

~ Douglas McDaniel,

Phoenix, Arizona,

August 23, 2017

Douglas McDaniel does way too many things at once. 
but if you Google "Mythville," that will be him, for you,
 one damn googlewack in the morning hue.

Wellington Station

Wellington Station

I saw you across

the commuter aisle

twitching and huffing

at Wellington Station.

I, too, am a loser

in the war. I lay

down my sword.

Set my auto alight.

Left it a funereal husk,

just a memory

to the challenges

of sunny October days.

Be still, my brother,

my angel of anxiety.

I see you gasping,

reading the news,

oh so careful

about what you touch,

what we all touch.

We meet in common

places of terror, our

shared communiques...

Oh veteran.

Oh war lord;

I lay down my arms,

I comply, I let go,

I ride smoothly

into the inner-city

bowels of tension

and glittering dreams.

Then I will take on the attire

of Napoleon's three-pointed hat.

I will curtsy, bend, that is,

into the sweet reflection

of what a peaceful city

wants to be.

The war news is hard,

ubiquitous as pearls and steel

and mobile phones.

My train runs silently,

beneath the stars and stripes

of all conquering heroes.

The Bunker Hill spire

is muted through glass

running by in the opposite,

direction. I descend

down the catwalk

of morbid hell. Silence

encloses me in a weightless

pipe of dread.

I am a monster.

I confess it all.

Just this, please,

after this night,

on the battlefield

of Boston,

will you let me

safely caress

my love, my sweet

daughter's face, or,

anything else I can keep

perfect or sane

for a whole rail yard

of days.

Let me retreat

with my bag of games,

my pen, my spear,

my telefrantic machines.

Let me walk, just one more time

into the target valley

of technology.

And though I will breathe

the very microbes of hell,

through pile drives, tunnels,

lost wheels and poisoned wells,

the endless botched catacomb

of the world you made:

Oh Wellington, allow my return

to Corsica, even Elbe, I will allow.

Where I can be at peace.

With who? Myself, at least,

as I wait for the night

to fall upon your victory.

If Napoleon could stoop

this far into the refrigerator,

he would have become

a suburban monk like me.

~ Boston, Massachusetts,

written October, 2001,

for the commemorative book of poetry,

"Ipswich at War,"

and includes the following two related poems ...

Have you considered insuring your personal airspace?

Image by Max Ernst

And Now for a Few Notes on Watching the Watchers

The other day I was in this coffee house,

 which I won't tell you the name of, 

and there was this old

guy in there who had the look. 

An older gent, who looked at me blankly

as if he hated me from behind these dark sunglasses. 

It was kinda creepy. 

The only way I can describe it is it reminded me

 of the stoic baseball manager stare.

Then I noticed the person I was looking at 

was merely a reflection of myself. 

I was staring at myself.

I had the stoic manager stare.

People stare from behind dark sunglasses a lot,

and one supposes it might be because they are

hiding.

Or it could just be a fashion thing.

Nobody smiles in public anymore, 

or so it seems, 

behind sunglasses.

That's most likely because the times are so hard,

and perhaps many people who stare blankly

with the stoic baseball manager stare

because they didn't like baseball, 

or, simply don't have jobs,

 just lost their homes in some financial,

 climate-related disaster or all of the above.

 Or they are voyeurs.

But most of all, staring is rude.

It's a kind of surveillance.

 A really, really crude kind of surveillance,

but surveillance nonetheless.

It needs to be turned into something more productive. 

People need jobs.

Cuts down on staring time. 

But staring skills could be better employed.

You could, for example, 

right now (operators are standing by) apply

 for training as a remote flyer of drones. 

That's staring on steroids.

Since the best and brightest of our generation

have determined surveillance society

is good for the economy,

and the encouragement of drone technology

is all of the wave, let us consider where the jobs are

 ... staring at a screen for drone technology.

First and foremost: It's the best short-cut

there is in the motion picture industry.

I know this because of my own experience

in film and television and motion pictures.

Fortunately, even as I write this,

 my life story is pieced together

 as some odd duck shot on the public

patois of surveillance society for posterity's sake.

 We are all pieced together this way. 

Or, we can be reconstructed that way.

We all have a legacy in film to be pieced together. 

To produce a full movie,

all you need are the necessary security clearances

 to obtain this productivity en masse.

For example, I have appeared in such films as "My Left Foot by the Laundromat," "Photo Radar," "Coffee and Cigarettes by the Convenience Store," a very Jim Jarmusch-style series of daily

sequences, and "Leaving Las Vegas with Less Money in My Pocket Than When I First Arrived."

Numerous bank, library and national monument documentaries.

 I have been a star walking

down the street and driving up and down

what seems like every road in America.

 You get the picture.

All of these films about myself are in pre-production

since nothing bad happened in them.

Unfortunately, great stories need conflict. I went to the Twin Towers a few years before 9/11, but that

film, "What the Bleep Do I Know About the Location of the Restroom," also is lost to the dustbin of

history. Another short film,"Cleanup on Aisle Three" has some comedic value, but short films don't

appear as fodder for theater matinees anymore.

Anyhow, I lack much conflict in film. Terrorists get all of the play these days and I'm not a big fan of

the genre. News media outlets, purveyors of such films, with tight controls on the hype, distribution,

serializations and so forth, like them. They get big repeat business. Horror films and fear-based stuff

is big business. Bigger than sex, in terms of theme, I suspect. However, as a long-time film critic, I

find this trend most unfortunate.

Still, it's a booming field, especially if we consider the future prospects of drones. Oh sure, the

blessings of such technological miracles come at the expense of the sanity of many individuals, but

look at the bright side. If every inch of the earth, every town, city square, park or, hell, blade of grass,

were under drone surveillance, it would force job creators to hire millions, perhaps even billions of

people to process the information.

It's good for lawyers, too. A whole new field of privacy law would need to be considered: personal air space. Could take a century to adjudicate. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't even been able to update the 1872 mining law allowing individuals and corporations to plunder federal property for

valuable minerals, despite the ecological damage to such lands beneath our feet.

I'll bet personal air space isn't even being considered.

I have my own mind on a film called "Bang the Drum Slowly in Personal Air Space."

 It combines baseball and horror into one big basket.

 It starts out when one of these airborne, dragonfly-esque,

nanotech devices comes toward me 

and I swat it with a baseball bat. 

I will do it mercilessly, 

with that stoic baseball manager stare.

Do You Know Me?

Night basement

alley sweats

meet on

the fashionably iced

mountain resort street.

Our time together

is the fate we keep

Strolling circles

bone to bone,

the Maker is making

our Time together;

Time that bends

with the wind.

We got silly with sin.

You played a game,

puckered and stroked

and waved me home

You know where I live,

and lived with you I did.

My penny price

was a plastic flower,

and poetry …

Enough!

Magic in a broken

bottle of vitamins.

Enough!

William Blake

kissed and ran,

ran and kissed.

Albion’s son took

safe harbor

in the box canyon's shadow

of mountain and mist;

Lingering there in early

afternoon cold shade;

and in the darkness,

howling at his phantom's

fire by electric streetlight.

His mind got quiet

out there, somewhere.

She saved a single

scrapple of soul,

petting his dry skull

as the river ran by.

He starved her,

got sorry later,

and fell in love.

Creek water ran

through their veins

and cleansed the salt

from his tear-duct dreams

They matched steps,

and in stepping claimed heights,

then showered to be sanctified,

then wined and dined, borrowing

on Telluride time ...

He wept and feared

and feared what she wept.

He wrote up a list of his faults,

or fell dead asleep trying:

Pride, shame, manic moods,

moments of empty bliss.

She pegged

her donkey

to a target,

sealed it

with a kiss

He was stunned

by the beauty

and purity of this.

From "Angel of the Avenues," a book of poetry by Douglas McDaniel

Want to Be a Bard? (Highly Not Recommended)

                                           
During the day tether down

your poor lonely lost soul

to the sandy shore

At night: The light. The Light!

Leave as the sun sets

Make like a bird and fly

in the direction of any wind,

talk to everyone,

feel every thing,

no matter how scary

because you fear not!

No matter how much

you scare those fiends

in the night, no matter

how creepy you are found,

follow each sound high or hollow

with your freaky Gnostic prescience

Be beyond all that fucking science!

They just don't know.

They just. Don't know.

They. Just. Don't. Know.

You know.

You. Know.

You.

~ Clancy's, Scottsdale, Arizona, July 17. 2017. 9:30 p.m., as the night's monsoon storm was moving in

Poolside

Four pigeons

by the whirlpool

coodling up chlorine

Flying life, safe as ginger

in a cabinet,

extrapolates lifespan

The wingspan

of swimming pool pigeons

is dependent upon supply,

depth and demand

It is to the good fortune

of the young chicks

that their short necks,

soft beaks, cannot

reach down to drink

Six poisoned pigeons

find survival in the short-term

risk at the swimming pool lip

Later, they will plummet

to the floor of the cooing

concrete cooridor

Anonymous slaughterers

break off with the wind,

bleached and careening