More mental morsels for your chewing pleasure...
>>Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola made their jazzy duopolistic presence felt at Harlow's in Sacramento a couple of evenings ago (www.charliehunter.com, www.scottamendola.com). I nearly always recommend just about anything Charlie Hunter does, in large part because of his unparalleled ability to play both guitar and bass parts simultaneously on his custom 7-string guitar. (What’s more, the guitar parts sound like guitar parts, and the bass parts sound like they were played on an upright.) And while his chops are, as some say, sick, his taste - knowing what to play, when to play it, and how to play it, is what sets him apart from the wannabes. Scott Amendola’s playing, at first glance, seems almost free-form as he navigates his kit (complete with heart-shaped gong) like one of the deities you see on a East Indian or Tibetan thanka painting. But he and Charlie have that seemingly extra-sensory perception, and it was on display tonight.
Check ‘em out.
>> Saw What Would Jesus Buy earlier this evening. It is the second documentary film about activist/performance artist/hell-raiser Reverend Billy, with this Church of Stop Shopping in tow (www.revbilly.com). The film succeeds in showing a multidimensional portrait of the man and his cause - demonstrating the excesses and consequences of consumerism. Besides the often laugh-out-loud humor of his performances and the lyrics he writes (parodying such classic Christmas carols as Deck The Halls and Joy To The World), it shows the seriousness with which he takes his mission. He is shown walking the walk (getting arrested at Disneyland, getting kicked out of malls and stores, being banned from all Starbucks in California), as well as talking the talk as only he can in the faux-Billy Graham style. He deals with his troupe’s bus being rammed by an 18-wheeler on an icy road, resulting in 13 hospitalizations. He is also shown with his wife, expressing a sincere doubt about whether his message will have any effects, or have we as a society been so brainwashed by consumerism that it’s now an irremovable part of our cultural DNA.
One cannot expect movements like this to have results overnight, or even within the historical finger snap of a few years or even a decade. Changing attitudes like the deep strand of consumerism in our culture takes generations to fully realize. What Reverend Billy is doing is sowing the seeds of change, seeds that like their literal counterparts, take time to germinate and grow - and that assumes that the soil in which they are planted are fertile. It may not seem like it now, but with the rise of the Transition movement, the rise of the “sustainability” concept, and the awareness of the limitations of unfettered capitalism articulated by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders and Thom Hartmann, our soil may be receptive to the concept to a life beyond consumerism. Perhaps the soil is hardened at the first few inches (our current generation), but if you dig deeper (the future), you’ll run into some receptive soil waiting for Reverend Billy’s ideas to take root.
It may also be possible, that if the predictions made regarding economic collapse come to fruition (see Mike Ruppert's work, and Thom Hartmann's recent book The Crash of 2016), then a life beyond consumerism may be made for us.
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