"Phoenix Bird' (C) 1982 Mary Alice Bennett

Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell's long-overdue disclosure of UFOs and ETs...
ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com

Perhaps the most extraordinary series yet...from the mysterious mind of Mary Alice Bennett...

www.mjastudio.com

All artwork (C) Mary Alice Bennett, all rights reserved.

UFL (Unidentified Fishing Loman) Sighting in Idaho!

Jim Nichols of www.jimnicholsufo.com forwarded me the above photo (via Cutting Edge producer Jim Rodger), with the following wisecrack: "This is why we have NO UFOAZ shows on DVD...!!!"

"Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know what Ted Loman is doing these days since he left Tucson.

As many of you know I use to work with Ted on his old show UFOAZ. I directed 165 episodes over six and one half years with Ted.

Any way it was great to spend a little time with Ted on the lake. Check out the photo of Ted in action!

By the way our next shows will be a two part series with author Richard Dolan. The first show on 7/25. For further details go to our website at www.ufoshows.com."

Jim Rodger
Producer/Host - Cutting Edge TV
http://www.ufoshows.com/
520-744-8026



NOTE:
For free access to many hours of some of Ted Loman's most intriguing ufo/paranormal tv programs from UFOAZ and Off the Record, check out our archives hosted at http://ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com - ed.

Countdown...to 2012


A fascinating piece on the 2012 flap...at perhaps the strangest and most mindboggling website of them all...

http://fusionanomaly.net/2012.html

...together with a reminder from the late renegade philosopher and "guerilla ontologist" Robert Anton Wilson, regarding the fallacies of "fundamentalist futurism":

http://www.rawilson.com/chaos.shtml
(See "The Future of the Future")

Hummingbird...back again...

Detail from "Attracting the Hummingbird" (C) 2008 T.S. Minton, all rights reserved.

Comments from the Peanut Gallery (Letters to the Editor)

"Steve,

You rascal! Your site looks just GREAT!!"

Thanks so much,
Jim Nichols
www.jimnicholsufo.com

Sneak preview...of new German saucer art series by Jim Nichols

Just scoot on over to...
ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com

Comments from the Peanut Gallery (Letters to the Editor)

"Great to see more of your work from the archives. The Water Goddess one reminds me of the C.S. Lewis book I`m reading right now, "Perelandra" about the green goddess on the floating island. You are very expressive, glad to see you blogging again! "

- Mary Alice Bennett, Tucson Arizona
www.myspace.com/mjastudio
www.mjastudio.com

Divine Astrologer and Astropsychologist Dr. Luis Turi - back in Tucson.

See http://ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com/ ...includes photos by Charla Gene.

"Attracting the Hummingbird"

(C) 2007 T.S. Minton, all rights reserved.

- Thanks to Charla Genet for the digital photography.

- Previously displayed at Solar Culture Gallery, Tucson, Arizona.

Back with a bang after a long hiatus: more original art from the dusty archives of T.S. Minton

"Film of blood: the pre-resurrection" (circa fall 1991

"Jamming in a ring of fire"



"Father and son commiseration" - 1994

"Leaping from the ramparts"




"Life amid the machinery" - circa 1994



"Parturient urge"

"The woven mysteries of sleep"

"When the water goddess discovered land"

All artwork (C) Thodal S. Minton. All rights reserved.

"Faerie girl" - by Jasmine Ennis

Check out "The Music Maven"...

http://soundzlikemusic.blogspot.com

...editor T.S. Minton's freewheeling yet concise journey through rock and roll history. Youtube videos free (while they're available).

Wire side Sculptures Artist: Laure Marie Capsuto


- Dog made from car parts

- Cow head

- Gear horse

- Celtic inspired rendering of Bullwinkle's death.

"My sculptures and painting are a reflection of what I believe to be true and the spirit they reflect is that of unconditional love and hope that we can all be safe and able to live the way God intended us to live, with unconditional love and acceptance. I graduated from the Art Center of Tucson with a degree in Advertising art and have worked as a freelance professional fine artist since I was 16. My goal is to pursue a Bachelors degree in Art Therapy and to work with emotionally disabled children. I have 3 children of my own who are thriving in one of the best school districts in Tucson and I also have 3 horses, 2 of which I use for animal therapy. I currently still work as a freelance artist and have my work on display and for sale throughout the southwest. Please feel free to contact me if you know someone who would benefit from some animal therapy work or who would like a sculpture or painting."

Peace and unconditional love,

LaureLaureMC@comcast.net

http://www.myspace.com/ashedangel

Get new course on blogging for fun and profit - for free!

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

OSHO: Absolutely Free to Be Funny
Osho...a.k.a. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, born December 11, 1931


"They have starved thinking for centuries...I'm not going to console anybody, because the more you console them the more retarded they remain...I am not your savior, I am not going to help you in any way to enter into the kingdom of God. But I can explain to you how we can live here in the kingdom of beauty, love, joy. To me God is a dead word."

"A chimpanzee could do better than that!"
- Actually this is by "Congo (1954-1964), a chimpanzee who painted pictures at the age of two to four years under the aegis of Desmond Morris." So it's pretty damned good, considering.


Source: Wikimedia Commons

John Lennon: Genius, Revolutionary, Surrealist...Hypocrite

Today is the anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, on December 8, 1980. I remember I was quite shocked and affected by it when I came home from school (I was in 6th grade or so) and heard the news from my mom, then from the constant television coverage. I had just finished a big school report on Lennon, so I was quite the little expert on the irreverent Liverpoolian. Or maybe I wrote the report after his death. Whatever, I was steeped in his mythos at an early age.

I always had a natural love for the Beatles, and regarded John's brilliant, acerbic, surrealist take on things a necessary counterpoint to Paul's dapper, whimsical outlook. Together their unique chemistry made the greatest songwriting team in rock and roll history. In their solo careers, after the break-up inspired by entropy, the insufferable Yoko, and many other factors, Paul was often overly sentimental, sappy, and irrelevant. John on his own was too often strident, self-righteous, and smug.

"Power to the people"? A little too overtly agit-prop from the man who a few years earlier had astutely sung: "If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao/You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." And how about "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can." Something tells me John was not about to sign over the deed to his unit at the Dakota Apartments anytime soon.

And it's a damn shame, although par for the course, that one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was such a shitty father, at least to his son Julian ("Hey Jude..."). Watch the movie Pop and Me (1999), where the director, when traveling the world with his dad and interviewing fathers and sons about their relationship, encounters Julian at a poolside. Julian nails his famous father for abandoning him as a child, and for the hypocrisy of espousing his great message of peace and love in his music, while verbally abusing his own son in his early years.

For John at his best, see the You Tube videos below...spiritually prophetic, tender and affectioniate (towards his son Sean at least), beyond the wheels of Samsara just before a madman took his life in a senseless murder...


"Instant Karma"


"Watching the Wheels"


"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)"

Contemporary poetry: "Thumbs down!"
by T.S. Minton

"I no longer feel compelled, or even impelled, to write poetry these days, and possibly will not for years to come. Number one, that muse has closed down. When I do get the urge to go on a creative jag, in the midst of the skull-splitting caffeinated stress and frantic pursuit of business endeavors which presently dominates my daily life, I plan on going back ot my original love: visual art, especially cartooning. Number two, although I have no interest in actively following it, what I have heard of contemporary poetry bores me silly. I find most of it insular, cryptic, pseudo-intellectual, full of annoying cadences and overly wedded to the dogmatic concept that art should be a platform for anarcho-leftist political screeds (to wit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's wrong-headed little manifesto "Poetry as Insurgent Art"). I'll pass. Anyway, the greatest poet of our time, in an opinion I share with my former B.U. professor Christopher Ricks, is a rock and roller, not a self-conscious academic: Bob Dylan. Dylan, almost always, has dealt in riddles, rhymes, and metaphorical symbol-systems - NOT polemics. His concerns are the universal truths of the human heart - NOT promoting the passing ideologies of the day."
- From Squidoo.com/tsminton

Do you , uh, Squidoo? I do...

"Steve Minton is..."
See http://www.squidoo.com/tsminton

Create your own Squidoo Lens now! - Why not? It's free, and they'll break you off 50% of all ad revenue. ..plus submit your Lens to Google.

The Tony Redhouse Show...a new friend of T.S. Minton Blogs.

I've appeared several times on a new show on Access Tucson..."The Tony Redhouse Show"... a fascinating showcase for the aformentioned hoop dancer and Navajo teacher, and the always unexpected happenings that he brings about by his encouragement, nay insistence on audience participation.

- TSM



Access Tucson - Program guide
http://accesstucson.org/whatsontv/channel/12/

"Tony Redhouse, Navajo, is an articulate Professional Speaker and talented Hoop Dancer who infuses light-hearted humor and fun into every performance. Tony Redhouse is not just your ordinary speaker. Imagine colorful and mesmerizing Native American Dance, Stories, Music and audience participation in a dynamic speaking program. This is not a stoic history lesson or a worn out lecture on the plight of the American Indian. What you will get with Tony Redhouse is something personal, positive, thought provoking and even magical. Tony is one of the few Native entertainers today, who has successfully bridged the gap between cultures, social groups, races and ages. Tony has also founded his own style of yoga, Native American Yoga along with new spiritual interactive workshops, talking circles and meditative music. Mr. Redhouse has several music CD's out, and is a Grammy nominated artist. Mr. Redhouse brings healing in the form of Dance, Storytelling, Music and motivational speaking. Tony Redhouse has served as a Native American Traditional Consultant for HIV/AIDS, substance abuse recovery and Red Road Youth Groups. He is the recipient of several Native American Music Awards, and is a Kennedy Center Approved Artist. Tony has acted as Keynote Speaker for U.S. Governmental Conferences in Washington D.C. and for organizations Nationwide. "
http://www.myspace.com/tonyredhouse

"In Native American tradition, ceremony is practiced to restore personal balance in our lives. When the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional aspects of our being are each healthy and united, we experience healing and wholeness. We can then live in a state of peaceful bliss and open our hearts to "Soar like an eagle" to our highest good. Tony Redhouse creates a personal ceremony, eloquently using the most ancient forms of human expression: the voice, the drum and flute, to guide you on a meditative journey around the Sacred Circle of your life.
Tony Redhouse has served as a traditional Native American practitioner & consultant to Native American communities and behavioral health organizations. He is a visual artist, Grammy nominated recording artist, inspirational speaker, spiritual teacher, hoop and eagle dancer. He uses Native American art, dance and music to inspire and heal lives."
http://www.tonyredhouse.net/

Photos by Fred Willie, used with permission.
http://regulus2.azstarnet.com/blogs/bunnyblog/5193/

Tony Redhouse Four Winds, East Wind



Tony Redhouse Soul Blessings

"Our life is a beautiful tapestry of the many blessings carefully woven together for us by the Master Weaver of life.
In Native American Music tradition, music like art and dance tells a story. These songs reflect our human experience and express the memories, emotions and prayers of life. Soul Blessings is a rich mix of Native American, Afro-Cuban and original music which goes direct to the heart
Find your Soul Blessings with these rich layered rhythms, authentic yet soothing Native American chants, flute, guitar and fretless bass. Percussion sounds and bird whistles are from Tony's extensive collection of rare instruments. Tony is a known and internationally respected Navajo teacher, musician and healer. The production style of Liv Singh Khalsa (Crimson Series) adds powerful arrangements and beautiful sonic textures. Go to http://www.Tonyredhouse.net to hear music and see other videos by Tony Redhouse. "

Yuletide cheer...to one and all.

Myspace Christmas Graphics

Thanks also to
http://christmas-clipart.net

Music break...

Don't Look Back (You gotta walk) - Peter Tosh & Mick Jagger

Recently I was invited to blog at Idea tango.com, by technology guru and VP of Technology Pablo Bley of Tucson's The 3rd Party Media Alliance. Idea Tango is "a catalyst for innovation...providing our users with collaborative tools that help them learn, grow, share, and bring new products to market." Here are a few of my thoughts on the nature of creativity and invention:

A few morsels for thought: Where do ideas come from? No, not from "an idea factory in Schenectady," as a certain bellicose and aging science fiction/fantasy writer has been known to quip. Closer to the truth is that ideas bubble up from strange subterranean depths of the unconscious, maybe from contact with some "Mysterious Ray From Another Dimension" (referred to by some as the Jungian "collective unconscious"), from snippets of conversation lodged into our subconscious that emerge at moments of "coincidence," from shadows of dreams, maybe from the haphazard juxtaposition of disparate objects and the synergistic combinations with other, pre-existing ideas, i.e. Chocolate running into Peanut Butter or like the surrealist artists would have it, say, a giant pear sitting atop a feather, by the seaside.

What matters is not so much where ideas come from, but that we figure out how to tap these latent powers for the urgent matters facing our planet and its ticking time table. I would urge inventors of all stripes to keep in mind premises similar to what internet marketing pioneer and philanthropist Mark Joyner puts forth in his "Unifying Social Dynamics - Mark Joyner Construct Zero (version 1.0)":

"The attainment of the following will resolve much of the non-productive fixation of the world:

Universal Food and Water

Freedom From Disease

Universal Energy

Universal Education

Stabilization of Natural Resource Consumption

Imagine a world where the basic human needs are met for all and one would not have to live with the constant threat of impending starvation or disease. Note that I am not proposing an equal distribution of wealth, but technological automation that guarantees these rights to all regardless of their social position."
http://www.markjoyner.name/logs/mj_constructs0.php

The man I consider the second, yes second greatest inventor of modern times -- certainly the greatest American-born inventor ever -- was Thomas Edison. His methodology is familiar, and simple though not easy to replicate: relentless and exhaustively detailed written goal-setting and planning for Murphy's Law, ruthless persistence and a high percentage of perspiration, precious little sleep, and the like. Edison's greatest rival in the vaunted "War of the Currents" at the turn of the century, who attained victory over him in this war and was vanquished in the public imagination through the thwarting of J.P. Morgan and the eccentricities of his own imagination, was Nikola Tesla. You know, the guy who brought us the alternating current and polyphase distribution systems and AC motor, and contributed immensely to robotics, wireless communication, remote control, and other rather useful utilities. "The Wizard of Electricity" had a very different methodology than "The Wizard of Menlo Park," but one which I believe is complementary and as equally necessary as Edison's Calvinist-influenced work ethic ethos. Tesla was said to be able to envision blue-prints in his mind's eye, to vividly visualize the problems and solutions of his world-shaking, industry-spawning inventions, before he ever set his hand in motion to bring his gadgets into manifestation.

I believe we can learn much from the approaches of both of these great inventors; and I ultimately conclude that it was the tension and competition between these men which lead to the lighting and wiring of the world...in other words it was not either/or...rather it was "both"...their animosity fueled our gain...and we best produce new Edisons and Teslas to clean up the environment, feed the masses, unleash new forms of clean energy, etc. etc...before our little planetary experiment goes belly-up. The clock is ticking.

T.S. "Steve" Minton
Editor and publisher, T.S. Minton Blogs - "The Mind-Boggling Blog That's Guaranteed To Keep On Boggling"
http://tsmintonblog.blogspot.com/

Nikola Tesla: "The Man Out of Time"

---

The Mark Joyner Constructs - "Learn about the purpose of The Constructs, the Spread the Meme license model, and how you can use The Constructs in your projects."
http://www.markjoyner.name/logs/mj_constructs.php

The 3rd Party Media Alliance Group
http://www.3rdpartynetworks.com/

More about Nikola Tesla from Fusion Anomaly

http://fusionanomaly.net/nikolatesla.html

"Free speech allowed...as long as it agrees with us."

While Democrats enjoy very public support from Hollywood's top actors and musicians, who often hold lavish events for their favorite candidates, Republican supporters in Hollywood try hard to keep their political views quiet.
"They learn very quickly, if they know what's good for them, to donate to the Democratic Party," said Andrew Breitbart, co-author of "Hollywood, Interrupted." "If they were to donate to the Republican Party, they would be exposed to career-ending ridicule, period."

Hollywood stars mum on donations to GOP
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071116/NATION/111160098/1001

"To my surprise I am finding that there are a lot more non-liberals in Hollywood than I had once suspected. It's just that they live in the closet. Until things change I still can't recommend they come out either.
Conservatives exist in the closet in Hollywood because they know the nature of hiring out here. People hire people they are comfortable with. And most liberals in Hollywood detest conservatives.
Hollywood produces at least two blacklist-era inspired films a year, and it is a staple on serial television. My father-in-law, who was, in fact blacklisted in the '50s, was just on the Jerry Bruckheimer series, Cold Case, playing, what else?, a blacklisted writer.
Yet the lesson of not punishing those with whom you hold political differences is lost on the very people who insist it is the most important message of our time."

"What the Hollywood crowd is now experiencing is the end of a different kind of McCarthy era, one in which they're the ones behaving like the fascists they so volubly claim to despise."

The Heart of the Blues - Writer Andrew Breitbart, behind the Hollywood scenes.
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/qa200501141052.asp

Steve Ditko: The reclusive man of mystery...emerges from the shadows (somewhat).

(C) 1973 Steve Ditko

Jonathan Ross in Search of Steve Ditko - new BBC documentary http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/comicsbritannia/ross-ditko.shtml

Steve Ditko: "Recluse?"
http://www.bestofmostof.com/07may/index070502.htm

Steve Ditko interview (1968) - http://www.vicsage.com/essay/ditko.php

Ditko Looked Up - http://www.ditko.comics.org

Every Cover Steve Ditko Ever Drew - http://www.ditko.comics.org/ditko/covers/

Press release: Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko

Buy it now at Amazon.com!

"Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce the June 2008 release of the first critical retrospective of Steve Ditko, the co-creator and original artist of the Amazing Spider-Man. In the wake of the astonishing success of Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies, Steve Ditko’s status as a driving force behind the pop culture icon has been revealed to an audience the world over. But, in the context of Steve Ditko’s 50-year career in comics, his creative involvement with Spider-Man is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Ditko is known amongst the cartooning cognoscenti as one of the supreme visual stylists in the history of comics, as well as the most fiercely independent cartoonist of his generation. From his earliest days in the 1950s, working for the notorious low-budget Charlton Comics (the Roger Corman Productions of the comics industry), Steve Ditko broke every convention in comics, with his innovative special designs and imaginatively hallucinatory landscapes of Dr. Strange, the almost plebian earthiness of The Amazing Spider-Man, and his black-and-white views on morality and justice through his uncompromising vigilante of the late 1960s, Mr. A (inspired by the work of Atlas Shrugged author and Objectivist philosopher, Ayn Rand).
Why will this book appeal to such a broad readership, to those who may not even be comic-book, or Steve Ditko, fans? “For the non-comic-book reader,” says author Blake Bell (author and essayist for the Marvel Comics’ line of Ditko-related Omnibus reprint projects), “we tell the narrative of Steve Ditko, the artist, from humble beginnings in Johnstown Pennsylvania; to the dizzying heights of co-creating Spider-Man; to the spectacular Howard Roark-like determination, and tribulations, in bringing his personal and philosophical vision to a recalcitrant audience. There’s a fantastic, dramatic storyline running through Ditko’s career; the artist having walked away from the Spider-Man franchise (and the billions it was to generate) as it was reaching the height of its popularity. What price did Ditko pay, and what was the impact on his work?”
Comic-book fans have also been waiting for a definitive examination of Ditko the artist; a chance to have the entire artistic scope of his career in one volume. “Fans of Ditko, and comic art, will not be able to put the book down,” says Bell, “as we explode many of themyths surrounding key moments in Ditko’s career, as well as present reams of rare and unpublished Ditko artwork. For the comic art scholar, we also break down the “hows” of Steve Ditko as a great sequential storyteller, dissecting his work in depth for the firsttime, also with analysis and commentary by some of the most skilled and articulate comic creators of the day.”
While Steve Ditko himself remains absent for the World Wide Web (minus a summer back in 2001, when Bell himself worked for Ditko as his official web site designer), Strange & Stranger will assault the ’Net with similar intensity to that of the creator himself.
In addition to updates to Bell’s unofficial Steve Ditko web site at www.ditko.comics.org, readers will be able to keep abreast of updates with pages on Facebook, MySpace, and a dedicated feature page at the Fantagraphics web site, found through the portal www.steveditkobook.com and launching soon. This will have a web log offering on-going commentary on the process of creating the book, with commentary by Bell and the staff at Fantagraphics. It will also publish commentary by professional comic-book creators on Ditko’s career and artwork, and feature artwork that won’t make it into the book. As the book speeds to its June 2008 release date, teasers, convention appearances by Bell, as well as book store signings will be featured on the site.
2008 will mark the year when Steve Ditko fans the world over will have the opportunity to celebrate the artist’s 50-plus year career with this definitive volume from Blake Bell and Fantagraphics Books."

Coming soon on T.S. Minton Blogs...a new sub-blog: "Commentary on Comics & Comix: The comic book canon?"

Finally! A more intelligent take on the "Law of Attraction"...
...an audio interview with one of our most intelligent earthlings...Mark Joyner.

http://www.evolvingtimes.com/category/simpleology/
"Here is just some of what we explored in this first part of our conversation:
A very interesting concept called Utilitarian Model Flexibility.
An in-depth, no punches pulled look at Mark’s take on the Law of Attraction.
The importance of action in the Law of Attraction.
The interaction between inspiration, motivation, behavioral psychology and the power of feelings.
The role of values and morals in success.
The potential of technology to provide for everyone’s basic needs.
Self-interest as a tool for becoming a Freedom Agent.
And more!"

"The Mysterious Ray From Another Dimension..."

...has been beaming information into the mind of a man we'll call "The man who had all the answers"...read all about it at:

http://ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com/

Goodbye to Mitz a.k.a. "Captain Jack Sparrow" - R.I.P.
May 2007 - November 8, 2007

Today we had to say goodbye to the newest and youngest and itty-bittiest member of our family. First I named him "Mitzi" when we got him from my daughter's horse trainer in August, when we assumed he was a girl. Then we found out he was a boy, so I turned his name into "Mitz," then Jasmine got the notion to call him "Captain Jack Sparrow" (as he was born with only one eye). Little Mitz was a brave little warrior, but he was no match for what fate had in store for him in this wicked world. The eye infection in his one good eye went from bad to worse, and he went almost totally blind and was in too much pain. On the vet's recommendation we had no choice but to put him to sleep. It's a damn shame, and we'll miss him more than we can squeeze into words on a simple blog posting. All the inscrutable idiosyncraticies that made him unique: playfully biting my nose when he lay in a cute little pile next to me at night; shedding his white hair everywhere and getting it clumped up into dread locks; climbing up my leg when I was in the kitchen; and so much more - all gone, gone forever into that strange shadowland of death, that cometh for us all sooner than we'd prefer and swallows us all into its vast waste...eventually. Too soon for him. We love you, Mitz. See you on the other side, little buddy.

"May you stay forever young."

- Bob Dylan, "Forever Young"

"Are we listening?
Hymns of offering
Have we eyes to see
That love is gathering?

All the words that I've been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding

Into one....Into one.

So I walk upon high
And I step to the edge
To see my world below

And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down.
'Cause it's the world I know.
It's the world I know."

"The World I Know" - Collective Soul

"They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin...So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.

I cried and my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn't done much crying at one another. I was ashamed at myself for not being able to take it as well as he was.

' I got to, pup, because you're in pain and you can't eat. I got to.' But he didn't want to know that...It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone...

I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside me...I took him out in the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself, talking to him in the sheet...

I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed full of dirt I replaced the neat divot of grass I'd scalped off at the start. And that was all.

But I couldn't send him to strangers."

Harlan Ellison "Ahbhu" (from "The Deathbird")

More pranking of Pranksters and general befuddlement...

"Aw, Steve, you pulled your own covers. The mystery that was Steve Minton was part of his charm. Doesn't matter, everyone agrees it is a totally entertaining piece of writing, adding to the befuddlement that the subject matter deserves. I got another email about the phrase, If you can remember the sixties then you weren't there, and it was a learned astute thing that went through all the people the phrase was attributed to, but none of them mentioned Tim Leary, whom I first heard it from.

"So, your credentials are impeccable and your sense of humor is intact, go now into your future grinning and learning and keeping up the good work, for as Kesey once said, Our job is no less than saving the world.

"Thanks for the emails."

Ken Babbs
http://www.skypilotclub.com/


-- A happening can't be planned. An event can be planned and a happening can happen within the event. A happening is something that suddenly erupts and grows like a roman candle and explodes all into everybody.

---

[Note: the following content is published as I wrote and intended it. The first email to Ken Babbs is without the additional and unintentional gaffes added by his cut and paste onto his website Skypilotclub.com, which I added on my previous posting as it appears on the Babbs site. Rest assured that my own gaffes are very intentional and part of my already over-explained satirical intent. The second, non-moronic email is the "extended play" version I sent to Babbs, which he edited for brevity on his website. - ed.]

Dear Mr. Babbs,

I understand you were one of the main antagonists in the "Electrical Cool Aid Acid-Test", a famous novel from the swinging sixties and that you actually rode with Dr. Timothy O’Leary on his Magical Mystery Bus and did many other “far out” things back in the day. As such, I am very interested in your perceptions about that era’s long-term effects on cognition and memory. Also, do you still smoke “grass,” to use the vernacular of the time? Please review the little ditty I have cut and pasted below, from one of my web pages at...

http://interfusionpress.tripod.com/id37.html …and let me know if I have all my facts straights as sometimes I myself get a little “fuzzy.” Or at least recall as much as you can, ha ha.

A while ago I emailed to Mr. Paul Krassner, a famous pornographer and from what I understand co-founder along with Jack Karoake and Wavy Gravy of the “Merry Prankster” acid test concept and magical mystery tour movie. However, he wrote back that he didn’t get the joke or couldn’t open the link or something like that. Please help clarify my confusion and get me up to speed on this wonderful era that I missed out on.

Also, I look forward to the new Magical Mystery Bus movie by Stevie Ray Van Zandt….don’t you?

Cordially yours,
T.S. “Steve” Minton
Tucson, Arizona

Dear Ken,

Thank you for posting my preposterously inaccurate email and website excerpt on Skypilot.com. Looks like I finally pranked a Prankster - or did I? Surely you could not take seriously my deliberately absurd mish-mash of historical fact, riddled as it was with grammatical and typographical errors (made even worse by the glitches from your cut and paste job!) and suffused with a generally subliterate level of rhetoric. Most likely you didn't know what the hell to make of it, although I'm glad you found it to be a laff-riot and put it on your site.

Keeping in mind that brevity is the soul of wit, and that to over-explain satire surely diminishes its impact, allow me a few words of clarification. The inspirations that impelled me to craft this piece were several: the back-asswards statements of the late rapper Proof that "the Grateful Dead had previous to their shows (been) the protestors to legalize acid"; Sacha Baron Cohen's hilarious persona of Ali G, that know-nothing Generation Y hip-hopper masquerading as a know-it-all; Kesey's story in "Demon Box" about that befuddled hippie straight outta Woodstock who straggled up to his Oregon porch and claimed he never read "Sometimes a Cuckoo Nest" but saw the movie; and my mixed sense of bemusement and disgust at those lovable dim-wits among us who are too slovenly to properly research the chronology and key players of events that are not, in the span of history, that many decades old. I note that you express similar sentiments, in response to the recent History Channel documentary "The Hippies":

"Further disinformation--that picture of a bus, calling it the Ken Kesey prankster bus. I suppose it doesn’t do any good to point out that it is not Further but someone else’s bus, for as time goes on whatever anyone portrays as reality works just fine, for anyone who was there is probably dead by now, if not in body then probably in mind. Or as that girl shouted for a couple of hours at the Watts acid test, ‘Who cares?’ Yes, who. Who indeed.”
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/18/the-sopranos-meet-th.html

You've given me enough space already, Intrepid Traveler, and I don't want to over-toot my own horn regarding my hipster credentials, but just for the record, I am hardly an ignoramus on the lore of the Beats/Pranksters/hippie counterculture. Au contraire, as I was born in 1969, smack-dab into the swirling matrix of psychedelia and radical protest that was Berkeley, California, to parents who were (still are?) second wave (or third wave?) hippies who hit the Bay Area scene right after the Summer of Love. My birth name "Thodal" is of course from The Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of the Dead. My mom was a resident at Leary's Millbrook mansion for about a year circa 1965, sandwiched between the arrival of that raucous busload carrying Cassady, Kesey, yourself et al., and G. Gordon Liddy's bust. As a wee tot I lived for a while in the early 70s at the Cascabel Clayworks commune in southwestern Arizona (Google my poem "Cascabel Meditation"); as a teen my dad practically force-fed me a diet of "On the Road," "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "Kesey's Garage Sale," actually giving me extra allowance for reading them when I was about in 8th grade. As a student at Boston University, I chatted with Ginsberg after his reading at the Museum of Fine Arts, and I did my senior thesis on Kerouac (and I agreed then and now with your astute statement in a High Times interview circa 1990 that to really understand Kerouac, one needs to understand the full arc of his mighty "Duluoz Legend"). Also, in the course of my own travels I have paid my respects to Kerouac's house of birth and gravesite in Lowell, Mass., and paid homage to the house where he died in St. Petersburg, Florida as well. When Kesey made it to Tucson in the early 90s and read at the University of Arizona, I got to slap the ole teddy bear on the back as he walked down the stairs of the lecture hall.

All of the foregoing is a long-winded way of saying that "Yes, I really do know my ass from a hole in the ground, contrary to my satiric persona" and that my intentionally asinine email and webpage were attempts to see how many inaccuracies I could compound, and how many laughs I could compact into such a tiny space. Apparently I have succeeded on both counts. Thank you for allowing me to work my way into the pudding.

Ciao for now,
Steve Minton
Tucson, Arizona

p.s. Please post this on your site if you feel it is fit to print.

"Businmotion" episode 17, with Ken Babbs



Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters - excerpt from BBC documentary. Shows part of the arrival at Timothy Leary's Millbrook, New York mansion, and Neal Cassady at the wheel of Further and presiding over the Acid Tests.

T.S. Minton pranks a Prankster...or does he?

Recently I blasted off an email containing my "creative re-writing" of the 60s counterculture (see below) to one of its prime movers and shakers, the second in non-command of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, that colorful troupe of acid-fueled rabble rousers whose legendarily prescient 1964 trans-continental bus trip (driven by Beat Generation avatar and non-stop babbling visionary Neal Cassady) and subsequent "brain-melting" (to borrow a recent phrase from Phil Lesh) Acid Test events/happenings gave birth to the Grateful Dead and many other strange and wonderful things: Ken Babbs of Skypilot.com. A key concept these aging hipsters promoted back in the day was the blurring of boundaries between audience and performer...and in that spirit I have worked my way into the pudding...with a little help from the internet.

Note: the following content was recently posted at Skypilot.com. - ed.

[Ken Babbs writes:] In answer to all the emails wanting to know, is TS Minton for real or what?, the man hisself sent me this clarification:

Dear Ken,

Thank you for posting my preposterously inaccurate email and website excerpt on Skypilot.com. Looks like I finally pranked a Prankster - or did I? Surely you could not take seriously my deliberately absurd mish-mash of historical fact, riddled as it was with grammatical and typographical errors (made even worse by the glitches from your cut and paste job!) and suffused with a generally subliterate level of rhetoric. Most likely you didn't know what the hell to make of it, although I'm glad you found it to be a laff-riot and put it on your site.

Keeping in mind that brevity is the soul of wit, and that to over-explain satire surely diminishes its impact, allow me a few words of clarification. The inspirations that impelled me to craft this piece were several: the back-asswards statements of the late rapper Proof that "the Grateful Dead had previous to their shows (been) the protestors to legalize acid"; Sacha Baron Cohen's hilarious persona of Ali G, that know-nothing Generation Y hip-hopper masquerading as a know-it-all; Kesey's story in "Demon Box" about that befuddled hippie straight outta Woodstock who straggled up to his Oregon porch and claimed he never read "Sometimes a Cuckoo Nest" but saw the movie; and my mixed sense of bemusement and disgust at those lovable dim-wits among us who are too slovenly to properly research the chronology and key players of events that are not, in the span of history, that many decades old.

My intentionally asinine email and webpage were attempts to see how many inaccuracies I could compound, and how many laughs I could compact into such a tiny space. Apparently I have succeeded on both counts.Thank you for allowing me to work my way into the pudding.

Ciao for now,
Steve Minton

[Ken Babbs]
Meanwhile, I have received an email of such weirdness and laffs I thought I'd share it:

Dear Mr. Babbs,

I understand you were one of the main antagonists in the "Electrical Cool Aid Acid-Test", a famous novel from the swinging sixties and that you actually rode with Dr. Timothy O,Leary on his Magical Mystery Bus and did many other "far out things back in the day. As such, I am very interested in your perceptions about that era,s long-term effects on cognition and memory. Also, do you still smoke "grass, to use the vernacular of the time?

Please review the little ditty I have cut and pasted below, from one of my web pages at...http://interfusionpress.tripod.com/id37.html

and let me know if I have all my facts straights as sometimes I myself get a little "fuzzy. Or at least recall as much as you can, ha ha.

A while ago I emailed to Mr. Paul Krassner, a famous pornographer and from what I understand co-founder along with Jack Karoake and Wavy Gravy of the "Merry Prankster acid test concept and magical mystery tour movie. However, he wrote back that he didn,t get the joke or couldn,t open the link or something like that. Please help clarify my confusion and get me up to speed on this wonderful era that I missed out on.

Also, I look forward to the new Magical Mystery Bus movie by Stevie Ray Van Zandt.don,t you?

Cordially yours,

T.S. "Steve MintonTucson, Arizona

*******************************************************************

Tribute 2 "The Greatful Dead"

"The founders of the Electrical Kool-Aid Acid test and the "Koolest band in the world..."

by T.S. Minton

I like the Greatful Dead because they were always "drivin' that train hi on cocaine"!!The Greatful Dead were a bunch of wild longed hair Psychodelic Tripster Hipster acid rock and rollers from back in the 60s. Man what a wild time flowers in your hair, chicks always particpated in "free love" what a concept, no worries just sex & drugs & rock & roll 24/7..."Come and join the party everyday" like that song goes...

What a time...I wish I was around then but I'm only 19: but I guess if I was I'd only be an old man by now with a "Touch O'Grey" and I wouldn't have my whole miserable malcontented life ahead of me...

The "Dead" as Dead-heads (there devoted followers) used 2 call them used to ride "On The Road" with Dr. Timothy O'Leary's Magical Mystery Bus. All they did was have wild acid rave parties and free love orgies, the "Sexual Revolution" as (My Personal hero) Hugh Hefner called it was running rampage across the land. (Right on!) Also always "on the Bus" was the Deads' personal mentors Neil Cassidy and Jack Karaoke; 2 wild Old School hipsters who did it *all* back in the day (See the upcoming movie by Francis Ford "The Godfather" Coppolla, I can't wait and will get very loaded in homage to these three Great Men when this picture comes out)

Jerry Garcia (the same guy behind "Cherry Garcia" ice cream from ben and Jerry's, another personal favorite of mine) and The Dead also used to run around with Ken Kessey author of "The Electrical Kool Aid Acid test". He also did the screenplay for "One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest" by jack Nicholas. Plus Bob Dylan the poet laureaute world reknown as the singer of "Everybody must get stoned" and "Like A Rolling Stone" (of which the band and magazine took there namesake) was very much "On the Bus" as attested to the fact when he toured together with them.

They all used to get very loaded together with Tim O'leary at The Woodstock Nation peace & Rock festival and introduced the "Electrical Acid test" concept of which it has been an endurable influence on today's youth (to wit: witness the "rave" and "acid jazz" phenomenons) (Plus the work of rapper Proof has been an influence of "high" importance).

Again I just wish so bad I was around back in the day so I too could have been "Ridin' that train high on cocaine" straight thru to "Terrapin (*"TER-IPPIN" or "Trippin'" get it?) Station"...then we would get off and "Walk in the Sunshine" and be "skippin' thru the lilly fields" til we get down to the Black Muddy riverside and here "Uncle John's Band" and then me and my baby would go off in the woods 2 "d-scover the wonders of nature" wink :) wink. Man what a long strange (lysurgical acid) trip that would've been...!!

Now let's here from 2 recognized experts on Jerry & The Kool Aid Acid Tester Gang:

Searching for Jerry Garcia by Proof (up & coming rap star)

"The EP came about because I was putting out the 'Searching 4 Jerry Garcia' album and of course, the Grateful Dead had previous to their shows the protesters to legalize acid so they had electric coolaid acid testers. So therefore by the album being Searching 4 Jerry Garcia I thought that'd be dope to have the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Testing EP to hit off the DJs and radio stations and mix rotations across the nation. So I put six songs on there. The lead single is featuring MC Breed from 'Ain't No Future In Yo' Frontin'' and 'Gotta Get Mine.'"http://www.rapindustry.com/proof.htm

Homer Simpson (popular Television patriarch on Fox TV)

"Hello. I'm Homer Simpson. There have been many great counter culture heroes I have admired over the years. Steve McQueen, Dr. Demento, Dr. Denis Leary and Wavy Gravy. Mmmmm gravy. "http://www.paulkrassner.com/homersuppressed.htm

(NOTE: I think Homer needs to get his facts straighter - ed.)

T.S. (Steve) Minton

Artist/Writer/Publisher

***********************************************************************************

"We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us."

Prime Green, Robert Stone

"Resurrection Collage"



(C) Mary Alice Bennett.

(C) Mary Alice Bennett

Old hippies not burning out or fading away...just going "Furthur..."
Happening today...

"...it’s on to Lowell, MA, hometown of Jack Kerouac, for a very special event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s great and hugely influential novel, On The Road. Before the performance, Bob Weir and Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally (who also wrote Desolate Angel, an acclaimed Kerouac biography) will take to the stage to discuss Kerouac and Neal Cassady, who was immortalized in the novel as Dean Moriarity and would later be a pivotal force in the formative years of the Grateful Dead, as primary driver (“Cowboy Neal at the wheel”) of the legendary Merry Pranksters bus known as “Furthur.” "
http://www.dead.net/features/news/help-way-ratdog-kimock-steps-karan

"Greetings from sunny Tucson..."

From your host, T.S. Minton (circa 1996)

And speaking of Dylan...
here's a few of the most mesmerizing performances of his greatest song, as posted on YouTube...


The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan perform "Like a Rolling Stone" in Brazil



1966, City Hall, New Castle, England



Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, June, 1967

The great troubador of our times...the grizzled old man from the black iron hills of Minnesota...
blew through Tucson recently: Bob Dylan
(at the Casino Del Sol's Anselmo Valencia Tori Amphitheatre, Tuesday 07/24/2007)

Had lawn seats in the light drizzly summer monsoon rain at this spacious outdoor amphitheater, didn't matter because I met up with some cool people and was buzzed on beer and had my 4th opportunity in this lifetime to witness the greatest songwriter and rock and roller of our time. The Old Man performed 17 songs with his red-hot and masterful improvisatory band; he jammed lead guitar on the 1st three songs and smoking harmonica solos where noted with the asterix.

Sure his voice is grizzly and wheezy but it's seasoned like fine wine...and his band sure needs to be on their toes to follow the master wherever his mind might wander (since he never goes on stage with a setlist, a trick I reckon he picked up from his time touring with the Grateful Dead; recall Dylan's euology of Jerry Garcia where he stated "to me he wasn't only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he'll ever know.")
The man of many masks transmogrifies his old songs with startling and sometimes unrecognizable new arrangments because he's an artist constantly on the move, his Never Ending Tour takes us to places of the soul where familar tunes are imbued with an infinity of new meanings...for the wheel's still in spin and ole Zimmy keeps on keepin' on.

So where the hell is his Nobel Prize in Literature award yet?? (There, I got in my 2 cents.)

Concert also reviewed here:
Dylan's genius, magic not lost on AVA crowd
By Kevin W. Smith, Arizona Daily Star
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/193340.php

Setlist:

Leopard-skin Pill-Box Hat

Lay, Lady, Lay

Watching The River Flow

Workingman's Blues

Rollin' And Tumblin'

Simple Twist Of Fate *

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

Lonesome Day Blues

When The Deal Goes Down

Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) *

Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)

Highway 61 Revisited

Spirit On The Water *

Summer Days

Masters Of War

(encore)

Thunder On The Mountain

Blowin' In The Wind

For more details see
http://my.execpc.com/~billp61/072407s.html

"Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan" (on XM radio)
Wednesdays at 10am ET on Deep Tracks XM 40
"Take a trip to the land of radio magic. With music hand-selected from his personal collection, Bob Dylan takes you to places only he can. Listen as Bob Dylan weaves his own brand of radio with themes, dreams and schemes."
http://www.xmradio.com/bobdylan

A few insightful things said about Dylan (including by himself)...

Dylan is mysterious, elusive, fascinating – just like his music.

Over more than four decades, Dylan has produced 500 songs and more than 40 albums. Does he ever look back at the music he's written with surprise?

"I used to. I don't do that anymore. I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written," says Dylan, who quotes from his 1964 classic, "It's Alright, Ma."

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child's balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

"Try to sit down and write something like that. There's a magic to that, and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It's a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time."

Does he think he can do it again today? No, says Dylan. "You can't do something forever," he says. "I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can't do that."
Transcript, 60 Minutes interview by Ed Bradley, 06/07/2004
http://soundingcircle.com/newslog2.php/__show_article/_a000195-000647.htm

"Dylan is a strange, dubious character. He has more to do with the Lone Ranger than John Wayne--"Who was that masked man?" He keeps his distance. He is from somewhere else. He not only speaks in riddles, he lives in them. For more than ten years, he has had more in common with a dead blues singer or old-time ballad singer than with any contemporary.

I think the reason the changes in his voice have not much been commented on--and I think this because your question made me realize how completely I'd ignored the question myself--is that, despite changes in tone, pitch, clarity, etc.--any formal description--the attack, the point of view, the way in which the voice enters a piece of music, what it does there, how it gets out, or how the music gets away, if it does--has not changed. That is: it remains unpredictable. It's music as a game of three-card monte. This hasn't always been true. It wasn't true for Slow Train, Saved, Shot of Love, Infidels. But the way in which the singer works on "The Drifter's Escape," "Like a Rolling Stone," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and "High Water" defines Dylan as a singer, and defines his voice, in the greatest sense. As long as Dylan can draw breath, I imagine this will matter more than the actual sound he makes--because the twisting and turning that goes on in performances like these, the ability to bring a whole world into focus with the dramatization of a single syllable--the first "care" in "High Water" say--is the actual sound he makes."
Greil Marcus
http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/greilmarcus2.html

“The greatest rhymer of the last 50 years.”
Prof. Christopher Ricks, Boston University
Author, Dylan's Visions of Sin, reviewed here at The New York Times: 'Dylan's Visions of Sin': It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading)
[Note: Prof. Ricks was a former professor of T.S. Minton blogs editor & publisher Steve Minton at the aforementioned institution]

And now a word from Osho...
(A funny little lecture on the "F word" and its versatile meanings)

Osho - Strange Consequences

Comments from the Peanut Gallery
(Letters to the editor)

"Watched and listened [to "Ted Loman's UFOAZ and Off the Record Videos" - ed.]. I will recommend it to others for sure. Keep up the good work."
Tina Dugay
Chaityana Cultural Center
Tucson, Arizona

Emerging from the eccentricly eclectic mish-mash of music...

and often woefully near-Maoist and well-nigh seditious politics endorsed by Tucson's one-of-a-kind community radio station KXCI 91.3 FM...a song has been burrowing into my brain...with lyrics of such brutal no bullshit honesty and vocal delivery of such uncompromisingly expressed emotional ambivalence that it brooks rare comparison to those of Paul Westerberg's of the Replacements from their testament to pure vitality Let It Be (1984)...

"Coyote"



by Jenny Owen Youngs (who would have been about 3 years old when the aforementioned masterpiece was released).
[Note: the version which really does it for me is not the linked Youtube video above but the MySpace song linked below. - ed]

"One two three, I still hate me
There's no one else who I know how to be
Four five six, oh your body makes me sick
Don't take it away from me just yet
There's no one I can think of that I can stand less than you
Don't you want to touch my hands before you go?
I think I'm confused."

http://www.myspace.com/jennyowenyoungs

Neon collages...and a chivalrous southwestern vision...
by Mary Alice Bennett

(C) Mary Alice Bennett

Any day is a good day...for a few more from Charla Gené.
charlak@comcast.net

Noontime visitor...
"This Pigmy Owl was cooling off in my garden. 106 degrees today. So cute that I had to take a picture!"

"Butterflies like them too!"

"Zauschneria hummingbird trumpet"

These California natives want hot sun, good garden soil in a protected spot,and lots of water. They are a hummingbird favorite with profuse red flowers blooming late summer and fall. They grow back bigger and better every year.

"At least my pictures have a home on your blog. Most of the time, it’s more luck than patience. Also, learning how not to scare the little creatures away. They are my outdoor pets. Some of them know me and put a good vibe out totheir fellow creatures :) ...

Keep water, and a cool place in your yard, and they will come. . ."

Charla

"Tucson...it's 109 degrees today! The quails came by, and I was able to get a picture of one chick...almost actual size."

"Hope the Tucson monsoons bring you a lot of interesting creatures to enjoy!"

More from the vaults...
Artwork of the week...by T.S. Minton

"The day Johnny took magic taffy", 1994

Post-psychedelic, to be more accurate.

"This is the age of video violence", 1994 - 1996

(From a song title by Lou Reed.)

Praying to the gods of Amerian culture: TV, money, power; and as far as sex...well, notice the look of bemused concern on the face of our preoccupied and vegetated protagonist's woman.

"Eddie makes a beeline for the bike", 1994 (altered with Photoshop, 2007)

No idea how this one popped out of the outskirts of my subconscious.

(C) T.S. Minton. All rights reserved.

My ears were practically blown back by the mesmerizing torrent of sound...

That's how I felt when I stopped by Tucson's Access Tucson TV studios last night and happened upon Dan Harrigan's Noche de Sonora show...featuring that night Bisbee's Latin fusion band La Mezcla...

Founder Jim Harrelson.

Richard "Hunting Crow" Speer: Haight Ashbury veteran and understudy of Santana drummer Pete Valasquez.

"Jim Harrelson founded La Mezcla in 2005, after traveling throughout Latin America and Europe. His influences range from the flamenco guitar rhythms, to Ruben Blades of Panama, and Silvio Rodriguez of Cuba. He was first introduced to Latin music by friends within the exiled Chilean community living in Montreal - His love of music grew as he lived and traveled throughout Mexico, Latin America and Europe. Jim’s unique adaptations of their songs, as well as his own song writing and playing, has won crowds over from Mexico to Arizona and even the streets of Amsterdam. Accompanied by jazz guitarist Scott Baekeland on bass, Michael Panos on guitar and mandolin, with Richard Speer and Lonnie Brock on congas and drums, La Mezcla is becoming a featured band throughout Southern Arizona and along the Mexican border. Bisbee native Phil Hirales adds his passionate trumpet, sax, flute, and keyboards to the mix."

http://lamezcla.bisbee.net/

http://myspace.com/lamezclamusica

Harrigan and Son: Live Music Showcase
"Few opportunities exist for singers and musicians to perform on live TV. Harrigan and Son offers the chance for anyone to perform on either of our two Live Music Showcases, Noche de Sonora and Harrigan Afterhours. Noche de Sonora features the finest multicultural music west of the Pecos including Mariachi, Norteño, Cumbia, Tex-Mex, Waila, and Chicken Scratch. To learn more about Noche de Sonora and how to appear on it click on the wall. Harrigan Afterhours offers a full spectrum of musical performances and types of music including Folk, Country, Rock 'n' Roll, Indian, Classical, Folk Rock, and Bluegrass. Harrigan Afterhours is also an open door for Non-musical performance. We have had Magicians, clowns, dancers and mimes. To learn more about Harrigan Afterhours and how to appear on it click on http://harriganandson.tripod.com/. Noche de Sonora and Harrigan Afterhours is Public Access TV at it's best. Noche de Sonora and Harrigan Afterhours is Public Access TV at its best."

For the discerning collector of all things Al Perry...

We hereby present these extremely rare and extremely cool fliers for past appearanaces of Mr. Perry at Tucson's Club Congress...by T.S. Minton Blogs regular Mary Alice Bennett.

Al Perry
http://www.alperry.net/

www.myspace.com/alperry

www.myspace.com/alperryfanclub

Mary Alice Bennett

www.myspace.com/mjastudio
www.mjastudio.com

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070630/sc_livescience/brainscansrevealwhymeditationworks

Maritza Dominguez, actress

(C) 2006 poppy series Cheena Productions

www.myspace.com/phatflicks

"The Secret" takes it on the chin...again.
Critics of 'The Secret' bemoan claims (via Yahoo News)

"While "The Secret" has become a pop culture phenomenon, it also has drawn critics who are not quiet about labeling the movement a fad, embarrassingly materialistic or the latest example of an American propensity of wanting something for nothing.

Some medical professionals suggest it could even lead to a blame-the-victim mentality and actually be dangerous to those suffering from serious illness or mental disorders. "

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070623/ap_en_ot/books_the_secret

An encounter with the Tucson's "Godfather of Cow Punk"...Al Perry.

Yesterday Tucson treasure and Club Congress fixture Al Perry appeared on Access Tucson's The Bunny Show, hosted by our friend Bunny Uriarte, and played his witty and sardonically self-deprecatingly little ditty "Loserville":

This is the house
That all my troubles built
I live at the end of Blue Street
In a town called Loserville.
When your true love's gone
And you're down to your last cent
In this neighborhood
There's always a place to rent.

Afterwards at the customary free dinner provided by Bunny and her mom and director Martha McGrath, we had a chance to chat with this local legend whose dedication to quality roots music stands in stark contrast to a pop culture where "merchants of swill" seem to garner most of the laurels and airplay. Al and "T.S. Minton Blogs Guy" Steve Minton discussed a variety of musical trends and notions:

- How Tucson has produced acts of such indubitable musical integrity as Stefan George; Luca; Giant Sand; in my estimation himself; and yet few have burst into the national consciousness (Linda Ronstadt of course is a delightful exception). We both enthused about Stefan George: an awesomely adept guitar virtuoso whether it's country, folk, or blues that comes to hand; a grizzly-voiced singer with rich conviction, soul, and lovely harmonies with his partner Lavinia White; a writer of lyrics with profound meaning and depth...all in all, a great total package who deserves more recognition. (George was also a resident with yours truly at the Cascabel Clayworks hippie commune in the mid-70s, see below.)

- His influences: Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, among others; these acts account for the "cow" part of Perry's label as "the godfather of cowpunk." But what about the "punk" part of that moniker? Al mentioned the fact that rock music had reached such a nadir in the late 70s, dominated by performers I have elsewhere dubbed "bland corporate shit-rock", i.e. Styx, Toto, Foreigner, et al. that the only music at the time to burst on the scene with any quality and vitality was punk. He was impressed by the high-energy country rock acts that emerged in the 80s who fused punk intensity with country stylings, such as the Blasters and Jason and the Scorchers. Thus we arrive at "cow punk"...and our ears are enriched by it.

- How would a beginning Bob Dylan or Janis Joplin fare on American Idol? Not to well, we concluded: they lacked the requisite plastic Hollywood appearance; they had creaky and unusual (although incredibly emotive) voices; they were too blazingly original for a culture that enshrines corporate product over distinctive genius. Either of them though had more talent in their pinkie than anyone who's ever appeared on that Idol show. And even with a current musical scene where there's plenty of excellence (I think of most of the stuff on Tucson's 92.9 The Mountain, i.e. Norah Jones, The Killers, Augustana, and on 92.1 KXCI Community Radio, i.e. The White Stripes, The Shins, and other pleasing oddities they play from avant-garde to Americana) we both were stumped to name an artist of recent note who qualifies as epically great, i.e. an artist whose scope and depth could shake the foundations of our culture (as Bob Dylan and The Beatles did in the 60s). Sure Prince was an example of that level of protean musical skill, at least in his output a decade and two ago; even he though couldn't cut to the marrow of our culture as the aforementioned did.

Here's an excerpt from his site http://www.alperry.net/:

Perry is known throughout the world for his genuine love of almost all forms of music, although he has a particular affinity for Link Wray, Buck Owens, and Brian Wilson. His prodigiously eclectic tastes are reflected in the bands and musicians with whom he has played throughout his career: blues with the Subterranean Blues Band, rockabilly with the Psyclones and Hecklers, cowpunk with The Cattle, heavy metal country with Gila Bend, 60s garage with The Marshmallow Overcoat. The list of genres and musicians is virtually endless. In live performances, Perry moves seamlessly from original songs to surf instrumentals to covers of Merle Haggard, Porter Wagoner, Cream, or obscure groups that have long since vanished from the cultural radar.

Al Perry has always been an alchemist of sorts, transforming his ongoing musical education into songs that have delighted and amazed his fans and fellow musicians for years. "Always a Pleasure" continues that proud tradition. The music on this CD is stripped down and muscular, devoid of ostentation, brutally honest and elegant at the same time. The singing is also a revelation; soft and seductive, with almost no barrier between Perry and the listener. "Always a Pleasure" is, indeed --as one critic called it--an "instant classic."

The album can be ordered from Al Perry at the address below for $12 ppd. in the US, $14 ppd for the rest of the world. CD-Rs and singles can also be obtained, just ask.

Al Perry
PO Box 40421
Tucson, AZ 85717 USA

www.alperry.net/
www.myspace.com/alperry
www.myspace.com/alperryfanclub


Al Perry's Clambake

KXCI Community Radio 91.3, Mondays at 10pm
Click here for live streaming.

Comments from the Peanut Gallery
(Letters to the editor)

"I think your poem ["Cascabel Meditation: Sunrise"] qualifies as a saga - Wow! Terrific writing."
Mary Alice Bennett
Artist and writer
www.mjastudio.com
www.myspace.com/mjastudio

A little online exchange about the Tooth Fairy and Ted Loman's untouched stash of UFOAZ and Off the Record VCR tapes, 1991 to 2002.

http://ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com

Future blogger T.S. Minton, circa 1974...

At Cascabel Clayworks hippie commune, Cascabel, Arizona...

For more info see :

"Cascabel Meditation: Sunrise"

"One of the most remarkable bodies of work I have ever encountered."

- Prof. Barbara Jackson, Harvard University

"Cascabel Critiques" including comments by Christopher Ricks.

"Oh life of sin, spun away from the light of life

Bright from what was once

One fine flash that everything else

Gladly, gushingly reverberates from

Rush of spring, and I was the one who felt

The tinge of nectar!

The suspicion that the sunflower

Grows by God's grace."

Coming soon: "Cascabel Meditation: Illustrated"

Comments from the Peanut Gallery
(Letters to the editor)

"Just wanted to thank you for turning me on to Patti Griffin. Used to get her confused with Patti Austin or Nanci Griffith but no more. Children Running Through is a wonder, and I just got 1000 Kisses, too. More power to ya, music blogger."

Mark Zepezauer
Cartoonist, publisher of the former Tucson Comic News (1993 - 2000), and author of (among others)...

Boomerang!: : How Our Covert Wars Have Created Enemies Across the Middle East and Brought Terror to America (Paperback) ...from Amazon.com.

Doling out more from Mary...

"Egyptian Boat"

(C) Mary Alice Bennett

Artwork of the week
(or month...or whenever...) by T.S. Minton

"Lime Leopard in Repose", circa 2000

"The silent world of nature", 2000

"The dance of Kali", circa 1994 (altered with photoshop, 2007)

"Oogly Monster", circa 1994

(C) T.S. Minton

This posting is dedicated to Tony Palladini, a long-time friend and supporter of Interfusion Publishing, for reminding me to put the "T.S. Minton" back into T.S. Minton Blogs.

"Time travel in a box":
an interesting artifact from the mid70s discovered by T.S. Minton...concerning a more freewheeling time, at a more freewheeling school.

See our new sub-blog:

milesexploratorylearningcenter1970s.blogspot.com/




Teacher Jack with students at Miles Exploratory Learning Center, Tucson Arizona, circa spring 1976.

Another meeting of the minds: The Soothsayer and the Blog Publisher...





Internationally renowned French psychic and soothsayer Dr. Luis Turi and "The T.S. Minton Blogs Guy" Steve Minton, Access Tucson Studios, 06/02/07.

Comments from the Peanut Gallery
(Letters to the editor)

"Have been enjoying your weblogs very much."

Kyle Dayton
co-host The Cutting Edge cable TV program

From the desk of: Mary Alice Bennett...

"Swami's Panacea"

"Honduran Mayan"

"Coptic Mer-Lion"

"From Chiapas Also"

"Izapa Parrot Gator Tree"

(C) Mary Alice Bennett

mjastudio77@hotmail.com
www.myspace.com/mjastudio

www.mjastudio.com

More peanut butter...meeting chocolate:

Bob Dylan with Johnny Cash - Girl From The North Country (Live)



From "The Johnny Cash Show" 05/01/1969

Dennis the Red: The polymath man of many masks...

An old chum of ours here at Interfusion Publishing is Dennis the Red...a most interesting character. To wit:

* Sculptor...

* Musician...

Slipping into "unique" states of consciousness...

* Puppet master...

www.DennisTheRed.com

www.youtube.com/dennisthered

mail@dennisthered.com

Dennis the Red
P.O. Box 1443
Tucson AZ 85702

Naga Babas (winner of the October 2005 Short Film Contest at Tucson's Loft Theatre)

Puppet Cledd sings about India's Naga Babas

"The mysteries of the missing sphinx and antediluvian monuments and pyramids...solved? or deepened?"

See the new videos of classic UFOAZ programs posted at our new sub-blog...

ufoazandofftherecord.blogspot.com

"Let me get this straight..."
A new feature on T.S. Minton Blogs: equal opportunity political debunking...

"The smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.
And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party's bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh's show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats."
Beware the Bloggers' Bile by Joe Klein
Time magazine, 06/06/07

Sneak peak at "The Fall Portfolio"...

(C) John I. Henry

"Lovers"

(C) Beverly T. Ennis.

What will we serve up next??

At last it can be revealed: The amazing UFO art of Jim Nichols...assembled in book form for the first time.

Jim Nichols was born a Post-War baby-boomer in 1948 in the flatlands of northwestern Ohio. By the time he had reached his senior year of high school, Jim’s restless creativity fueled in him an abiding ambition to become an artist. Even while serving two years of Army service, he managed to complete a correspondence course in commercial art. Following his discharge, Jim resettled in Tucson, Arizona in 1972.

For a time, cactus, sagebrush, mountains and skies dominated his artistry and he made something of a name for himself as a painter of southwestern landscapes. By the late 1970s, however, he discovered he could not be content to limit his art to just desert scenes. Popular films of the day like Star Wars and Close Encounters rekindled a love of science fiction that he knew as a youngster. Soon alien landscapes and space ships captivated his creativity. Beginning in 1980 and throughout the following decade, Jim painted numerous UFO illustrations that have been published internationally. His notoriety in the field of UFO research earned him a co-host seat on a weekly, public access television program in Tucson, produced by Ted Loman, entitled UFOAZ Talks. This popular award-winning program ran from 1991 through 1997 and was aired on public access channels across the country.

Currently, after so many years of painting fine art and illustration, Jim has expanded his creative talents to include sculpting as well, thus bringing an added dimension to his legacy of artistic skill.

Now, for the first time, noted artist, James Nichols, has compiled a stunning visual portfolio including 40 of his most incredible original UFO illustrations. Nichols’s artwork has been featured in books, periodicals, and video media worldwide. This dramatic illustration collection spans twenty years of in-depth research. Many of his depictions are based on actual eyewitness accounts. More than just a collection of exciting UFO visions, James Nichols shares a detailed account of his own personal odyssey into UFO research as well as the secret story behind each unique image. The final result of this engaging combination of UFO art and commentary is an insightful overview of the unsolved enigma of Unidentified Flying Objects.

Click now at JimNicholsUFOArt.com for more information.

"This book is like nothing I've seen before in the UFO community and I've seen most of them. The story behind each of the paintings kept me wanting more. Jim has captured to perfection what the field of UFOlogy has been buzzing about for the last sixty years as well as the future to come."
Ted Loman UFO researcher and televison producer (creator of UFOAZ TALKS)

For more art by Jim Nichols, which combines crisp and pristinely rendered realism with visions of cosmic grandeur, check out the following links:

http://www.karinya.com/nichols1a.htm

http://pages.prodigy.net/ufoaz/biojim.htm

All artwork (C) James Nichols.

What's coming next...to T.S. Minton Blogs???

Digging a little deeper...into The Secret.

In working on the previous posts I've discovered an extraordinary new intellect...deeply influenced by the transpersonal and integral psychology of Ken Wilber...

"Julian Walker is a respected yoga teacher known for his integrally-informed approach to transformation, healing, bodywork, psychotherapy, and spirituality. He also maintains an active blog on Zaadz.com, and some of his recent posts regarding the pop-spiritual phenomenon known as “The Secret” caught our attention. Although clearly not alone in expressing concerns about The Secret, we found Julian’s views to be remarkably comprehensive, precisely because it's based in large measure on an explicitly integral framework."

21st Century Spirituality: Intention and Depth - Julian Walker



I sincerely hope I am am not stepping over the line in quoting too much of Mr. Walker from his blog at Exploring “The Secret.” Part 1. The Tricky Business of Creating Your Own Reality...if so somebody please nail me and I will quickly take it down...or for God's sake at least visit his blog and hear him out. My extensive quote below is in the spirit of his statement on his recent You Tube posting...click here... that the spiritual community needs nothing more than "good debate, critical thinking, and really getting in there and talking about the issues of the day." Forthwith:

"The Secret, which can be found in both DVD and book form, has managed to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and maintain a firm grip on the top two spots at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders for weeks. The central tenet of The Secret is “The Law of Attraction,” whereby one’s feelings and thoughts quite literally attract, manifest, and create real events in one’s life—the assumption being that most of us do this unconsciously, and making this process conscious is “The Secret” that “has travelled through centuries to reach you.”As Ken and Julian agree, what can be so tricky when evaluating a new approach such as The Secret, is that at first glance it can appear fairly innocent, even if lacking any kind of critical depth. If it’s helping people feel empowered and positive about their lives, what’s the problem?Well, the problem is that it’s not a basically solid approach with room for improvement, it’s a fundamentally confused way of understanding reality that misunderstands and contorts the genuine truths that it intuits. Some of the central points that Julian and Ken discuss are as follows:

• As with any “you create your own reality” schema, The Secret fails what can be called “the Auschwitz test.” According to The Secret, everyone who was murdered at Auschwitz—or Rwanda, or Darfur—created that reality for themselves, and therefore they are to blame for their fate. For obvious reasons, this position is an unconscionable as it is untenable.

• By teaching that the world quite literally revolves around you, The Secret encourages and entrenches narcissism. In developmental psychology, narcissism doesn’t mean an unhealthy obsession with thinking only about yourself, it means you can’t think about yourself. The capacity for self-reflexive awareness just isn’t there. The entire world and everyone in it is simply an extension of your-self, and you are literally unable to take the perspective of another human being. This is not mystical union; this is pre-rational fusion, and without the ability to take the perspectives of other sentient beings, the entire foundation for ethics evaporates.

• Actually, you are creating the universe moment-to-moment, but it’s not the “you” that you think. According to the great contemplative traditions, every person has at least two “selves”: the finite, temporal, egoic self-sense, and the infinite, transcendental, unqualifiable Self, or I-AMness. Your Self, your I-AMness, is indeed giving rise to the entire radiant Kosmos in this and every moment, but The Secret teaches that your separate self has the power to personally manifest a new car, win the lottery, or cure cancer… and this simply isn’t how things work.

• “The Law of Attraction” is true—as far as it goes. The problem is that The Secret takes this one relatively small piece of the puzzle and makes it the entire puzzle. A positive outlook will change your life and your intentions will co-create your reality, but so will brain chemistry, interior level of development, family relationships, natural disasters, cultural trends, language structure, environmental toxins, and, basically, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

• Developmentally, if one uses a scale ranging from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral to super-integral, The Secret teaches the magical thought structures that were humanity’s leading edge several hundred thousand years ago. As Ken explains, The Secret encourages childlike “primary process thinking,” which can be in the form of “the law of attraction” (e.g., if one black thing is bad, then all black things are bad) and “the law of contagion” (e.g., if this particular man was powerful, then a lock of his hair must be powerful too).

• The importance of understanding how unconscious psychological shadow elements color and affect one’s experience, and how The Secret can agitate, alienate, repress, or—perhaps even more worrisome—act on these disowned elements of consciousness.

• The genesis of the pre/trans or pre/post fallacy, and how The Secret is a perfect example of elevating pre-rational childish impulses to trans-rational spiritual glory. Simply because both categories of experience are non-rational, they can easily be confused, and often are.

The extraordinary thing about this dialogue is that, for all the critiques Ken and Julian have of The Secret, it’s not meant as a put-down or a mean-spirited attack. As evidenced by its incredible popularity, there are millions of people who are starving for something other than traditional religion or modern science in their search for meaning. By using an Integral Approach, one is able to look at what new offerings like The Secret have to bring to the table, and assess in good faith what their strengths and weaknesses really are, for the health and nourishment of every soul who dare grasp for “something more”—and for what we consider to be the real Secret of transformation and human happiness, we recommend an Integral Life Practice and an Integral Spirituality, bringing together Body, Mind, and Spirit, in Self, Culture, and Nature. "

(C) Julian Walker, www.julianwalkeryoga.zaadz.com

A dirty little secret about "The Secret"...and "The Secret Behind The Secret."

While we like positive thinking here at Interfusion Publishing (as long as it's tied to positive "do-ing")...and there's no doubt that the more one focuses on something and acts upon that focus with positive and emotionally driven belief, the more that thing will tend to manifest in one's life...even so, I'm a bit disturbed by the more cultish aspects of the overly zealous adherents of "the law of attraction" and a certain film and book now selling like hot cakes and touted by Oprah Winfrey. Their demonization of "negative thinking" reminds me of Christian fundamentalists who harp too much on "sin" and label anything they disagree with or don't fathom as "the work of the devil." When I consider the logical contortions required to justify this belief system in the face of explaining, say: slavery, the Holocaust, or 9-11 ("They must have attracted it into their lives by their beliefs") , I'm also ironically reminded of die-hard skeptics who, in the face of any corroborating evidence for the paranormal, twist their minds into logical pretzels and cry "irrational" or "poppycock." Any such adherents of "The Secret" who are too uptight to take in a little dead-on parody best leave now, or else darkness will overtake them. Those with stronger wills and more resilient critical thinking skills -- and senses of humor -- are invited to watch the following video, courtesy of You Tube:


"The Secret on Oprah" Parody by Saturday Night Live





A few links, pro and con:

'The Secret': Does Self-Help Book Really Help? - From MSNBC.com and Newsweek

Discovering The Secret: Rhonda Byrne Uncovers The Secret - From Oprah.com

From Biblicalsprituality.org - by Donald S. Whitley, Associate Professor of Biblical Spirituality and Director of Applied Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, founder and president of the Center for Biblical Spirituality.

"In the final analysis, The Secret is nothing more than Name It-Claim It, Positive-Confession, Prosperity Theology (without God and the Bible), built on a foundation of New Age self-deification. In other words, the book is just another version of what some TV preachers have taught for decades, namely, if you will sustain the right thoughts, words, and feelings, you will receive whatever you want. But The Secret adds this important twist: your thoughts can bring anything into your life because you are god."

'The Secret' - Spiritual Cinema? - From Rense.com, by Julian Walker. " Julian Walker is a contemporary integrator of Eastern and Western traditions of self-inquiry. He is a yoga, meditation and ecstatic dance teacher, a body worker, a DJ and a philosopher who writes on the relationships between spirituality, psychology and reality. Julian's central premise is that in a post-911 world neither old world religion nor naive New Age spirituality are sufficient or appropriate to the human condition."

The Secret Cashes in as Debate Rises by Julian Walker

"Two months ago I finally got around to watching The Secret and I had a secret - I was appalled. How could it be that this piece of work that was lighting up the eyes and kindling the knowing smiles of half the people I knew, was so incredibly bad? Bad philosophy, bad psychology, bad spirituality, bad relationship to reality, bad principles to tout as the secret to happiness - so i wrote a review and put it out there to the small community of people who surf the small community of zaadz blogs. I thought I might take a little heat, might offend a few people, but that would be OK, I like to invite people into critical thinking and debate - it's what is lacking most in the spiritual community. "

And a final word of wisdom from my old correspondent Dr. Mark Woodhouse, retired professor of philosophy and author of the intellectual tour-de-force...
Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age


"It would help the cause of growth, if New Age folks who constantly remind us how we "create our own realities" would distinguish between allowing, manifesting, projecting, and attracting -- all at both conscious and unconscious levels. "
MarkWoodhouse.com

Comments From The Peanut Gallery...
(Letters to the Editor)

Mon petit blog en francais, bien sur...

Mary Alice Bennett forwards the delightful news from her friend Christian Macé in San-Tropez [a famous beach resort near the Cannes Film Festival, on the Mediterranean, southeast coast of France. - ed.] that Mr. Mace has posted a link to T.S. Minton Blogs on his blog, Ovis Paranormal: "La Vérité est ici… Le blog de Christian Macé." What's doubly cool is that Mr. Mace's link...is en francais! Click here to check it now!

"Super...productions, very nice ! I had put it on my blog ! The best...."
Christian Macé
San Tropez

"Charla really captured their jewel-like quality. I always buy the hummingbird calendars, but her pics are better! "
Mary Alice Bennett
www.mjastudio.com

Say "Hello" to Hummingbirds...
Photographs by Charla Gene

Photographs (C) Charla Gene, charlak@comcast.net

Hooked on Hummingbirds DVD available now at Amazon.com!

"Hummingbirds are small birds in the family Trochilidae, native only to the Americas. They are known for their ability to hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings, 15 to 80 times per second (depending on the species).The Giant Hummingbird’s wings beat 8-10 beats per second, the wings of medium sized hummingbirds beat about 20-25 beats per second and the smallest beat 70 beats per second. Capable of sustained hovering, the hummingbird has the ability to fly deliberately backwards or vertically, and to maintain position while drinking from flower blossoms. They are named for the characteristic hum made by their wings."
Hummingbird entry, Wikipedia

More from Mary...
(Artwork by T.S. Minton Blogs regular Mary Alice Bennett...)

"Collage of a UFO Dream"

Paintings shown at The International UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada (co-founded by our distinguished associate Col. Wendelle Stevens, see UFO Photo Archives).

(C) Mary Alice Bennett, mjastudio77@hotmail.com

www.myspace.com/mjastudio
www.mjastudio.com

The UTIA Field Report: Wendelle Stevens

Fast Walkers - Brand New UFO and Alien Disclosure DVD with the World's Leading Experts and Stunning New Footage ! (DVD)

Comments from the Peanut Gallery
(Letters to the editor)

"Nice to hear from you my friend... Keep up the good work."
Blessings,
Dr. Louis Turi
Astropsychologist and Celebrity Psychic
www.myspace.com/drturi

Soundz: More recommendations from the music maven, part 2...
"Like Chocolate bumping into Peanut Butter...the wonders of true synergy." Sometimes extraordinary performers get together and make something extra-extraordinary, to wit:

Eric Clapton & Babyface - Change the World -- Live



Buy "MTV Unplugged NYC 1997" by Babyface now at Amazon.com


Santana and Jerry Garcia - Fire On The Mountain




Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson - Pancho and Lefty by Townes Van Zandt

Soundz: More recommendations from the music maven...

While it's true that there's lots of rubbish on the radio nowadays ('twas ever thus though, right?)...here's some proof that a few new luminaries are holding forth and producing music that deserves a place next to the greats of previous decades...music with aching passion, melodic beauty, yearning and genuine angst, blood, thunder and thuds:

Arcade Fire - No Cars Go

The Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies)

David Bowie & The Arcade Fire - Wake Up




"Win Butler...and his large band of unarty art-rockers rock so hard and so beautiful they can propel anyone who listens past the end of the record. They thud rather than thunder. But what a loud and joyous thud it is."
Arcade Fire, "Neon Bible" Grade: A+
Robert Christgau, Consumer Guide
Buy "Neon Bible" by Arcade Fire now at Amazon.com

The Killers - Mr. Brightside

The Killers - When You Were Young

The Killers - Read My Mind



Buy "Sam's Town" by The Killers now on Amazon.com

The Decembrists - Oh Valencia

Buy "The Crane Wife" by The Decembrists now at Amazon.com

The Hold Steady - "Stuck Between Stations"

Buy "Boys and Girls in America" by The Hold Steady now at Amazon.com

The Shins - Phantom Limb

"To you with Joe Bourne, Jazz, Blues and other grooves... "

Internationally known singer, entertainer and artist
Joe Bourne and Interfusion Publishing maestro Steve Minton at Park Mall, April 2007.

"Take the Feeling With You Live Music Series," presented by Park Mall and coordinated by Joe Bourne, will feature performances by musicians from throughout southern Arizona every Thursday through the end of May."
Tucson Citizen.com's Tucson Events Calendar


Coming next:
May 3: Cinco de Mayo Celebration with Homero Ceron, Cool Breeze and Grupo Luz de Luna (an eclectic blend of Latin music and mariachi)


To you with jazz blues and other grooves
by Joe Bourne (available now at Amazon.com).

Ancient mysteries...revealed on YouTube and MySpace Video.


Mysteries of the Sphinx by John Anthony West



John Anthony West interviewed on Ted Loman's Off the Record TV show, featuring NBC special on the age of the Sphinx, narrated by Charlton Heston. Directed by Bill Cote; used with permission of Mr. Cote and Ted Loman.


Michael Cremo Forbidden Archeology



Michael Cremo interviewed on Ted Loman's Off the Record TV program, discussing Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race, co-authored with Dr. Richard L. Thompson. Used with permission of producer Ted Loman.

Ancient Aircraft, part 1



Comparison of ancient cave paintings from France and Spain, to modern UFO sightings. Aerodynamics discussed, in relation to art on wall of caves. From Ted Loman's Off the Record TV show; used with permission of Mr. Loman.

Ancient Aircraft, part 2



Cave paintings from France and Spain, compared to modern aircraft. Discussion with researcher John I. Henry, by Ted Loman and co. on Off the Record TV program. Used with permission of producer Ted Loman.

"The Maya-China Connection", part 1



Comparisons of Chinese and Mayan pottery and cultures, by researcher John I. Henry. From Ted Loman's off the Record TV show, February 14,1997. Used with permission of producer Ted Loman.

"The Maya-China Connection", part 2



Comparisons between mythological creatures: Chinese dragons vs. Mexican dragons. By researcher John I. Henry, on Ted Loman's Off the Record TV program, February 14, 1997. Used with permission of producer Ted Loman.

Unknown Animals with Dr. J. Richard Greenwell



The late Dr. J. Richard Greenwell explaining the scientific possibility of Big Foot's existence in the Pacific Northwest and other regions of the globe. Featured on Ted Loman's Off the Record TV show; used with permission of Mr. Loman.

Cat history (emphasis on manx)



Discussion of the Manx cat, originating from the Isle of Man, U.K. From Ted Loman's fabled UFOaz program, May 12, 1995.

More Car Crazy...

Exclusive Concours d'Elegance at the Tucson National Golf Course, Tucson Arizona, October 1987.

"The Boy King," 1938 Packard.


1930's Cadillacs.

1930s Cobra.

Circa 1920 Mercedes.

Unknown (please email us at interfusionbiz@yahoo.com if you know).

All photographs by John I. Henry. All rights reserved.

More Car Crazy...

Hot Rods of 4th Avenue, Tucson, Arizona.

All photos in 17 mm. super wide angle.

Photographs by John I. Henry. All rights reserved.

Car Crazy...(continued)...

The National Automobile Museum, Harrah Collection, Reno, Nevada, circa 1989.

Car Crazy...

Italian Festival, Salt Lake City, Utah, summer 2006.



Car Shows, University of Utah, various years 1998 - 2003.

Photographs by John I. Henry. All rights reserved.

A tribute to Rolls Royce motorcars...
the finest car in the world.

Blenheim Palace, President's Picnic, Oxfordshire, England, 08/13/00. Event hosted by the Duke of Marlborough.

"You can have your cake and Rolls Royce too."

Brain teasers: Guess this place...

Photographs by John I. Henry

Celebrity Encounters...

Top left: Claudia Schiffer

Bottom left: Starlets frolicking by yacht on the French Riviera, circa 2000.

Right: "The always funny Fred Willard" (Ebert & Roeper) with The Formerly Brown Haired Photographer, Michael Landon Tennis Match, Reid Park, Tucson Arizona, June 1989.

Ever think about the connection between bioluminescent sea creatures and UFOs?

Neither did I, until I encountered this intriguing article by T.S. Minton Blogs contributor Mary Alice Bennett, from UFO Digest...

"Manta UFOs as Living Creatures and the Nature of Aquatic Cryptids"
http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0407/manta.html

And now some (good) comments from the Peanut Gallery...

"Very nice..."
Ted Loman
UFO researcher, television producer, television and radio host
Somewhere, USA

"Some amazing art!"
Joyce Hardin
Retired journalist
Tucson, Arizona

"Your site is amazing."
Carlos and Nancy Hadaway
Fountain Hills, Arizona
The Arizona Kid.com

"Deer Creek Crossing" by Carlos Hadaway.

New visions from "The Arizona Kid"...

We're delighted to showcase a new series by Carlos Hadaway: celebrated southwestern oil painter, western folkorist, and old friend of T.S. Minton and Interfusion Publishing. His pristinely rendered works are known both for their gritty realism and their visual grandeur. These new (and newer) works featured below capture a more subdued, introspective side of our favorite colorful cowboy.

First, though, here's an excerpt from his website The Arizona Kid.com:

Carlos Hadaway was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and raised in San Diego, California. He is the oldest of six in a family known as "The Wild Bunch". While still a child,

he suffered blindness twice and underwent six eye operations to eventually regain his sight. As a youngster, his keen interest in art was encouraged and nurtured by his third-grade teacher, Sister Helen Theresa.

During service in the Navy, Carlos was a cartoonist and created the original logo for the San Diego Padres (more info), the little bat-swinging Friar. (more info). After leaving the military, Carlos relocated to Arizona where he launched his professional art career and became known as The Arizona Kid.

Carlos participates in top shows in all the western states and has garnered numerous awards, including Best of Show at Old Town Tempe's Festival of the Arts and the George Phippen Popular Award at the George Phippen Western Art Show in Prescott, Arizona. One of his paintings hangs in the Arizona State Capitol, presented to the State of Arizona by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Licensed by Anheuser-Busch, Carlos created a series of six western prints featuring Budweiser® that has since become a collector's item.

As an artist, he has achieved success nationally and internationally, having appeared on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines. His work is found virtually all over the world.

Two highlights in Carlos' life were being selected as the 1994 Grand Marshal at the world's oldest rodeo, Prescott Frontier Days and 1992 Grand Marshal at the Pine Country Pro Rodeo in Flagstaff, Arizona.

In 1999, Scottsdale's Parada Del Sol, Arizona's premiere rodeo, commissioned Carlos to create the original artwork for the year 2000 celebration. Carlos has a large following who appreciate his unique style and true love of the West. When he's not painting, it's no surprise that his favorite pastimes are cowboying and collecting western memorabilia.

"History Lesson"

"Howdy Pardner"

"Indian Pots"

"Shrouded in Time"

"Window of Time"

"Winter View"

All works (C) Carlos Hadaway, all rights reserved. Used with permission.

A mesmerizing journey...

Take a trip through the Time Tunnel...



Music video interpreting time travel, photos by John I. Henry, video assistance by Dennis the Red.

(C) John I. Henry, all rights reserved.

Creatures of the deep...

Narrated by TV researcher John I. Henry...showing now at T.S. Minton Blogs, courtesy of youtube.com/tsminton...



(C) Ted Loman/UFOAZ, used with permission.

To boldly blog where no one has blogged before...

Below you will find the first of many postings to come...video clips from the new youtube.com/tsminton...legendary UFO and paranormal researcher and investigative interviewer Ted Loman's appearance on Larry King Live (March 27, 1997) discussing the Heaven's Gate cult suicides.



(C) Ted Loman/UFOAZ, used with permission.

Pictures from "The Bunny Uriarte Show":




My daughter Jasmine with local celebrity Bunny Uriarte of "The Bunny Uriarte Show" fame. See her community cable TV show on Access Tucson.



Yours truly (the guy in the middle) with the aforementioned notables.

The center of attention (naturally).

Contemplating the universe (at Steve Eye's Solar Culture Gallery)" February, 2007 .

Photographs (C) 2007 John I. Henry. All rights reserved.

From the vaults of T.S. Minton

Artwork of the week

"A man and his future", 1994

"The Riff-Raff Series," part 1

"Stragglers in the park", 1994

"Gone are the days" (detail), 1994

(C) T.S. Minton

Crazy about cats...
1st photo titled "Vampire Cat"
2nd photo titled "Psst...E = MC cat"

Both photos optical, non-digital.

(C) John I. Henry, gloves24@hotmail.com

From galaxies to green earth...

"Deep space supernova"

"Meteor Cube"

"Frog's Eye Reflection"

"Fountain of Vedic Bliss"

"Turquoise moonbeams"

A touch of levity...

"Energizer Bunny encounters his father at the Louvre"

French tradition states that the day before a man gets married, he is allowed to do something foolish. Hence, the above photo.

"Puppets riding in style"

Can you name the two puppets? Email the editor now at interfusionbiz@yahoo.com.

Photos (C) John I. Henry.

Travel section...

"Province of Alberta, Canadian Rockies"

"Monte Carlo, Monaco"

"Cote d'Azur, Nice"

"Saint Jean Cap Ferrat"

"Cote d'Azur, Cannes"

"Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris"

"Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, Paris"

"Inner vestibule painting, Queen Hatshepsut's Temple at Deir el Bahiri"

"Mysterious guest visits Temple of Horus at Edfu"

All photos (C) John I. Henry

The Swamp Gas Report #3
More images from Martha McGrath...

Images recently seen...

...in the mid-western Tucson sky (near "A" Mountain)...

...taken 02/08/07...

Photographs (C) 2007 Martha McGrath, martha_mcgrath@yahoo.com.

FastWalkers - Brand New UFO and Alien Disclosure DVD with the World's Leading Experts and Stunning New Footage !

Name that person, name that place...

Email blogmaster and editor T.S. Minton at interfusionbiz@yahoo.com if you "think" you have the right answers...or please add a comment in the blog. All correct answers will be posted.

All above photos (C) John I. Henry

Note: Above photo is by unknown photographer. If you know of the photographer, please notify us at once at interfusionbiz@yahoo.com and we will acknowledge copyright if requested.

From the vaults of T.S. Minton:
Artwork of the week

In the months to come, I will be breaking loose with some choice selections of material from my various phases as an artist...from the 70s to the present. Some periods have been more prolific than others, some more figurative, and many pieces are beyond easy classification (blurring the boundaries between abstraction, surrealism, cartooning, and more academic rendering). Below are two pieces from the mid-90s, when I was immersed in a self-study of the classic drawing system The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. After hours of rigorous practice following Nicolaides' lessons on gestures, contours, form, etc. I often would unwind and let my own muse flow in pieces like these. His influence was still keenly felt in these more expressive sessions, and I was also impressed by the statement of Tucson artist George Welch (who was my instructor in an oil painting class at Pima Community College circa spring 1993) , who told me that effective abstractions must take natural forms as their starting point. While I'm under no obligation to listen to any "musts," and I'll record here that most of my art teachers and professors over the years I've found to be tedious pedants who mainly just squelched my natural inclinations and gifts, Nicolaides and Welch did help me elevate my artistic game (in Welch's case more for his own impressive abstract work and aforementioned statement, rather than what I found to be his overly discursive teaching methods).

- TSM

"Entrance", 1994.

"Flora Too Can Yearn", 1995.

(C) T.S. Minton

More spring cleaning...

Previews of T.S. Minton's "Neo-Humans on Regenerative Earth" (coming summer 2007 through Lulu.com):

(C) 2007 T.S. Minton

A little spring cleaning...
here at T.S. Minton Blogs.

Since things are getting a bit out of hand over on the right hand column of this blog...with all the images posted there...and since I am concerned that readers might get confused and overlook the blog posts of previous months, it's time for some spring cleaning. I have made the executive decision to erase the images of that column and post them as blog entries, as follows:

Worlds of Crystal Fantasy
Photographs (C) John I. Henry, gloves24@hotmail.com.

Hey Ya...
('Nuff said.)

Artist's Showcase: Mary Alice Bennett...

Hanging out recently at the computers lab at the Access Tucson community television studios (one of my major haunts for nearly a decade...the tv studio, not the computers) I have made the acquaintance of a most interesting and talented individual...Mary Alice Bennett. She'll take it from here (from her MySpace page here):

About me:
Mary Jill Alice (MJA) Bennett was born in Stony Brook and grew up on Long Island, where she learned to sail and was introduced to the world of art as a child model for the portraitist John Koch. When the family moved to Arizona in the late 1950s, MJA fell under the spell of the landscape and peoples of the Southwest which has continued to shape her art and life. She studied painting at Pomona College in the late 1960s, graduating in 1969 with an exceptional class that included Chris Burden and Hap Tivey. MJA spent the next few years in living in a cave north of Taos, New Mexico, where she became interested in Native American culture and danced in numerous Pow-Wows at Taos Pueblo and later in Arizona with the famous dance group Azteca Splendor. After returning to Arizona, MJA settled in Tucson, where she has lived for the past 30 years. MJA enjoys reinterpreting Meso-American and Middle-Eastern stone carvings in color media, chiefly acrylics, water colors and colored pencils. MJA's father was a test pilot/aviator, and her mother was a musician and an artist who devoted her life to seeking harmony within both disciplines. While in New Mexico, MJA began dancing with Native Americans in Pow-Wows and notes that this form of dancing continues to influence her work. MJA also enjoys reinterpreting Meso-American and Middle-Eastern stone carvings in color as archeological restorations. Departing from the oils she used in her early paintings, MJA currently works with acrylics, water colors, and colored pencils.

All works (C) Mary Alice Bennett. Used with permission.

MJA also has some unique twists on the following topics (see her MySpace blog):

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper

Leonardo Da Vinci's The Adoration of the Magi

Arcana Arcanissima and the Mysteries Transmitted in Paintings

The Magdalene and the War on the Divine Feminine

Ever heard that line by poet Ezra Pound that "literature is news that stays news"?

Well, here some old news...from last month. It snowed in Tucson. "Big deal?" you say? Then you don't know the town where our local saying in the summer is, "Yeah, but it's a dry heat," where most winters are like Indian summer. My point is that these lovely photos by Charla Genet (charlak@comcast.net) should be news that stays news...because they are photographic poetry, preserving an ephemeral, beautiful moment in time...a cold one, too.

All photographs (C) Charla Genet, charlak@comcast.net

Salon.com...kicking ass once again.

(Somewhat).

In a pre-Sept 11th world...seemingly life-times ago...when I worked at a certain non-Microsoft

software giant here in Tucson, I used to sit at my computer and devour Salon.com, in between (and sometimes during!) phone calls. I loved how they would showcase divergent political opinions, from lefty Joe Conason to righty David Horowitz (they are less balanced in these even more polarized times, where each side wants to play a zero-sum game of ideologies...it's not even "yes, but" anymore but "no, no, no"...on BOTH and EVERY side). It was the first online publication I read with the level of literacy of, say, Vanity Fair or The National Review. Most of all, though, I loved the freewheeling, acerbic, trenchant wit of Camille Paglia...

Camille's back!
"After a six-year absence, our cultural high priestess and pioneering Web proto-blogger has returned! And nobody -- not Hillary, Obama, McCain nor Anna Nicole -- can escape her level gaze."
New Camille Paglia column

Real talk with Bill Maher
"The talk show host sizes up Hillary and Obama, and explains why he's so over McCain."
Also features a Salon Conversations podcast MP3 of the interview.

Bill Maher & Guests Discuss Religious Fanaticism


Bill discusses Jesus Camp, and religious fanaticism with Sandy Rios, Reza Aslan, and Bradley Whitford.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about...a zero-sum game of ideologies...on BOTH and EVERY side...

"The next step...beyond surrealism or psychedelia..."

Coming this summer from Interfusion Publishing:

Neo-Humans on Regenerative Earth. (C) 2007 T.S. Minton

"The Shaman, the Genius, and T.S. Minton"
(Going right to left, that is...)

Photograph by John I. Henry.

Yours truly approximately one week ago (February 2007) at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show with Ea Orgo, a well-known Mexican healer and shaman, owner of a health spa, and frequent vendor at the annual gem and mineral show. In the middle (in book form at least) is Nikola Tesla...you know, the greatest inventor of all time. (Anybody who says "Edison" needs to be jolted with alternating current energy...just kidding).

Contact Ea Orgo at eaorgo@hotmail.com or www.mayanmajix.com. He writes: "Thanks for the photo, it's a great reminder of all the magic in our lives..many blessings."

50 Million John Henry Fans Can't Be Wrong.

Well, ok, not that many...

But I have been getting lots of emails about Henry's mesmerizing series of crystal photographs. Also, many people at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show (ending today) who have seen these photos have been clamoring for more. So here they are...

"UFO in Hyperdrive Approaching the Aries Galaxy Cluster"

All photographs (C) John I. Henry, gloves24@hotmail.com

[p.s. Holy crap, I just discovered how to insert photos within the blog! - ed.]

The Swamp Gas Report, #2:

Courtesy of recent Drudge Report postings, here's two more links to recent sightings of cockamamie poppycock. If only people would listen to CSICOP -- (The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), recently rechristened CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), publishers of The Skeptical Inquirer -- they'd realize that they're not really seeing what they think they're seeing. After all, CSI has all the answers. It's Official Reality.

Strange Sightings In Triad Skies
http://www.wxii12.com/news/10955774/detail.html

Mysterious Lights Spotted Over Phoenix, Again
http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_038103140.html

I'm sure there's a prosaic explanation, since it behooves us to be "rational" and explain away whatever doesn't fit inside our tiny little paradigm. Especially if there's tenure at stake and scientific peer pressure at play.

Or, if you're tired of my sarcasm and want to cut through the officially fabricated b.s., spend some time with Dr. Lynn D. Kitei, M.D., author of The Phoenix Lights. It's heartening to realize that some people in this world know the true definitions of "critical thinking" and "rationality."

Who are...
the "Neo-Humans"....

...on "Regenerative Earth"?

Stay tuned...coming summer of 2007 from Interfusion Publishing.

Culture Wars, round one

(on this blog at least...)

Chomsky, Horowitz & other wing nuts...

I think that Zepezauer guy (see below) is trying to find chinks in my right wing armor. The other day he sent me some interesting links, in response to my statement that although it's a tough job being a "right wing fascist" when you've got hyperbolic ignoramuses and blowhards like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity professing to be your spokespeople, it's hard not to swing a little to the right when (to quote my several day old email) "I read little ditties like David Horowitz's unrebutted (as far as I'm aware) 'The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky' and watch with nauseau as the left embraces dubious cause celebres, from Mumia to Fidel to Tookie."

Zepezauer shot me back the following Horowitz-bashing links (Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 60s, who swung to the conservatism in response to what he saw as the bloodshed and hypocrisy committed by his idealistic former colleagues)...

http://blog.zmag.org/ee_links/refuting_horowitz_and_collier

http://www.lewrockwell.com/wall/wall26.html

http://rwor.org/a/013/horowitz-battering-ram.htm

http://horowitzwatch.blogspot.com/

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/carson1.html

And let's allow the bellicose Mr. Horowitz what he calls his...
Replies to (Leftwing) Critics

Enough verbosity. Now for a little fun. Let's watch Sacha Baron Cohen pretend to be Ali G and pretend to make an ass of himself interviewing Prof. Noam Chomsky...


Then let's watch Noam Chomsky pretend (I assume) not to be a conspiracy buff...

Finally, we'll watch David Horowitz pretend (I hope) to cover up for the execrable Ann Coulter's denunciation of 9/11 widows...

I must be doing something right...

to have elicited comments like this, from my cross-posting of excerpts of my music blog on www.rockandrollreport.com:

"you have no idea what you are talking about. but i really thought it was great how you tried to act like youre a music critic extrordinaire. Sadly you come off like a know-it-all prick. you are a dumb ass, who knows as much about music as a stupid drugged out hippy. if i were you i'd stick to blogging about iraq, or what foods you like to eat, or quantum physics, because frankly after reading that mindless dribble you wrote, it seems that you know ABSOLUTELY nothing about music. let alone GOOD music."

...by one "dont know".

And my old correspondent Mark Zepezauer, laff-riot political cartoonist and publisher of the former Tucson Comic News and a host of rabble-rousing books including Boomerang!: How Our Covert Wars Have Created Enemies Across the Middle East and Brought Terror to America, writes:

"Good to see you have better taste in music than in politicians (last I heard). "

Zep was referencing my circa 2003 blog posting, the annoyingly pungent but unrebutted "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Became a Right Wing Fascist".

The Mind-Flipping Phantasmagoria...
of John I. Henry's Worlds of Crystal Fantasy.

In keeping with our long-standing tradition here at Interfusion Publishing of featuring material

which is not merely adequate or even just excellent but aims to "boggle the mind", we are pleased to offer a sneak peak at some of the most remarkable work yet of international photographer John I. Henry.

These images (see the right column of this blog. Hint: they're colorful) were taken over recent years from crystals and gems purchased at Tucson's Gem and Mineral Show, utilizing fiberoptics and back lighting techniques which produce results not often seen by us mere mortals. For more information contact Mr. Henry directly at gloves24@hotmail.com.

These photos...along with other work too delectable to mention...will be featured more extensively in Interfusion Magazine, T.S. Minton's new print publication available summer 2007 - offered exclusively through Lulu.com.

"The" Rock Music Canon

That said (see previous post), here's some good lists to use as guideposts in building a comprehensive collection...

Robert Christgau
I vehemently contend with self-appointed "Dean of Rock Critics" on, e.g. Shawn Colvin's Fat City and Patty Griffin's Flaming Red (the crudely wraught but charmingly spunky albums by his beloved New York Dolls -- which Christgau insists on touting way out of proportion to their worth or weight -- seem like endearing triflings in comparison to these deeply felt, soaringly melodic and exquisitely crafted masterpieces). However, he's still turned me on to lots of great music over the years and can do the same for you...

Christgau's Consumer Guide A+ list

A Basic Record Library: The Fifties and Sixties

The Seventies and 1980

Rock Library: Before 1980

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the 90s (see 'the A lists")

Greil Marcus
See his list of essential recordings up through 1979 in the book Stranded: Rock and Roll For a Desert Island, and his updated version of that list here.

Rock Lists
(see especially the lists of Christgau, Dave Marsh, and Rolling Stone)

Allmusic.com:
A great source for discographies and song lists and other information, even if some of the writing has an amateurish ring.

And my personal favorite (wink wink)...
T.S. Minton's Version of the Canon/Favorites/Top 10

A handful of great songs deserve special recognition, nay deification, above and beyond any place they may or may not have on my lists below: "Holy River" and "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Prince (with Rosie Gaines): dig any deeper and you'll be at the center of the earth; "Left of the Dial" and "Little Mascara" by The Replacements, which define teenage angst, yearning, and the button-bursting urge to be somewhere, anywhere but here; many of the impossibly poignant and classy selections from the Burt Bacharach tribute album One Amazing Night and The Very Best of Burt Bacharach ; "True" by Spandau Ballet; the nonsensical ecstasy of "Band on the Run" and "Jet" by Paul McCartney and Wings (Manfredd Mann's Earth Band's version of Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light" falls in this same category); and "Life in a Northern Town" by Dream Academy.

T.S. Minton's Top Ten

First off, I realize such list making is a fan-boyish thing, and there's no such thing as a "definitive" list, plus it's ever-changing. I swear however I won't jerk you around with specious nonsense like the usually urbane and sensible Greil Marcus, who in some list-making book published around 1990 was called upon to produce his list and proceeded to put Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex at #1 and other 1977-era U.K. punk classics for the other 9. Yes, those albums were all thrilling, revolutionary, ass-kicking, idol-smashing etc. -- BUT WHERE THE HELL were Layla, Abbey Road, Blonde on Blonde, Every Picture Tells a Story etc. etc., i.e. the classics that define the form (many of which Marcus himself spent many insightful pages touting)???

Anyway, here's where it stands for me now:

I could play dirty and place The Grateful Dead's live recording One From The Vault at #1, from the invitation-only performance at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco 08/13/1975. That really wouldn't be fair, though, since it was a live show not an album. It was, though, in my opinion and those of many other aficionados, the Dead's finest hour, and probably the best set of music ever played on American soil (or at least in a dead heat with the best moments of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.) So let's come down from the aery spheres and get real:

1) Blood on the Tracks (1975) - Bob Dylan.
The great troubabdor of our times, or one man wrestles with life's most bitterweet emotions, creating complex allegories and endlessly rich emotional palettes to process his wrenching divorce. Not that the songs are the most transcendent individually; as a whole, however, it's rock's best example of a supremely intelligent, sustained artistic sensibility at work.





2) Blonde on Blonde (1966) - Bob Dylan.
A snotty, acerbic, inpenetrably profound and poignant amphetamine-fueled punk-poet visionary in the thrall of his own genius.

3) Highway 61 Revisited (1965) - Bob Dylan. [Seeing a pattern here? - ed.]
"An explosion of vision and humor that forever changed pop music," says Greil Marcus. Inconsistent, yes, (i.e. not all of it is as moving as "Queen Jane Approximately") and his self-conscious word-salad absurdism can grate, but imagine an album where individual songs can stand on their own as among the greatest, most influential artworks of the 20th century: "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Desolation Row," for starters.

4) A Few Small Small Repairs (1996) - Shawn Colvin.
Sure, she lacks the edginess of early Liz Phair or the avant garde elan of PJ Harvey (nor does she need to wear her sexuality on her sleeve, or stick heroin needles in her arm to win critical cachet like Courtney Love). BFD, in a flash of inspiration she produced the greatest non-Dylan album in this catalog. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined music as endearing, nuanced and beautifully melodic as "You and the Mona Lisa" (with instrumental breaks by John Leventhal as indescribably delicious and richly textured as Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic) or "Wichita Skyline" (a satori above the clouds).





5) Fat City (1992) - Shawn Colvin.
The greatest vocal performance in rock history (although "Set the Night to Music" by Roberta Flack with Maxi Priest, the best of Smokey Robinson and Al Green, "Here and Now" by Del Amitri, and "More Than Words" by Extreme are also strong contenders). "Polaroids" is as multi-layered lyrically as a story of the memory of a dream in which photographs capture images of the deepest love, that vanished into thin air. Every second of every hiccup and heave of her richly timbred voice contains more nuance and emotion than many singers achieve in their entire careers.

6) Exile on Main Street (1972) - The Rolling Stones.
The male version of of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville...an album about the limits of decadence, the peak of rock's most raucous band that also plumbs Mick's depths ("Loving Cup"). (Sorry I couldn't also squeeze in Between the Buttons, Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Some Girls -- all among rock's best.)

7) Flaming Red (1998) - Patty Griffin.
Little would you know if you were relying solely on the likes of Christgau and Marcus (shame, shame) of rock history's great unsung masterpiece.

8) White Album (1968) - The Beatles.
Yeah, but what about Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Abbey Road?

9) Purple Rain (1984)- Prince. The one-man-band plus The Revolution, at his ecstatic, passionate best (or is it Sign O'The Times?).

10) Layla (1970) - Derek and The Dominoes.
The highest highs and the lowest lows of a man (Eric Clapton) madly in love, in peak form, dueling tit for tat -- furiously, lyrically, elegiacally -- with Duane Allman.




Rare video of Derek and The Dominoes appearing on the Johnny Cash Show in 1970. Unfortunately Duane Allman, who was never an offical member of the group, does not appear.

I realize I'm leaving lots out; Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Let it Be by the Replacements (the most conspicuous absence on the above list...rock stripped down to its purest expression of no bullshit vitality and poignant enough to rip your heart out of its chest), Blondie's Parallel Lines, and Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, and many other great records mentioned below deserve a special place at the summit of any comprehensive collection. I'm derelict in my duty to leave out Elvis, Ray Charles, and other heavyweights, I know. And of course if the range of my knowledge extended much beyond rock, I would have to list the best recordings of Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Woodie Guthrie, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis, i.e. Kind of Blue as absolutely unsurpassed as the finest examples of their respective genres.

There's other ways of looking at "best-of" rock history list-making. We can categorize by best of breed: punk (London Calling by The Clash is surely the greatest punk album); psychedelia (Grateful Dead's Live/Dead is the peak of that particular trip); soft rock (name me a better example of soft rock than "Sailing" and "Arthur's Song: The Best That You Can Do" by Christopher Cross and I'll hit you with a wet noodle, or with James Taylor); Brian Eno defines ambient art rock with Another Green World (with mind-boggling help from Robert Fripp); Bob Dylan and Shawn Colvin are the male/female apotheosis of the singer-songwriter; nothing in heavy metal has surpassed Led Zeppelin IV/Zoso, the best hard rock has gotta be AC/DC's Back in Black, the best metal would be whatever is Metallica's best; country rock fans can do no better than Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel; and so forth. And I can't name great individual albums by the following, but it would be insanity not to include their best-ofs or greatest hits in your collection: Crosby, Still and Nash (and on occasion Young), Elton John, and to some extent Billy Joel.

Here are some more highlights by decade of what I, and many other rock historians and list-mavens consider essential, A+ level(or close) recordings that will fire off endless endorphins, open the heart, stretch the mind, and shake the booty of any discriminating listener .

1950s
I'm no expert here, except of course to mention Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly and other greats better anthologized in the Christgau links above.

1960s
Any comprehensive collection of hits by Motown, Stax/Volt and Philly soul, girl groups and Phil Spector [and Motown's 80s counterpart, the monster hits of Madonna like "Crazy For You", "Into the Groove" and "Cherish" as anthologized on The Immaculate Collection. - ed.]
Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringin' It All Back Home (1965)
Bob Dylan and The Band - The Basement Tapes (1967, released 1975)
The Band - Music From Big Pink (1967), The Band (1969)
Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground (1969), Loaded (1970)
Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced? (1967), Axis: Bold As Love (1967), Electric Ladyland (1968)
The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966), "Good Vibrations"
The Beatles - Help! (1965), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) [Rock's most over-rated album does have some great parts. - ed.], Magical Mystery Tour, 1968 (parts) The Rolling Stones - Between the Buttons (1966), Beggar's Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969)
Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (1967)
Elvis Presley, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

1970s
Elvis Presley - "Suspicious Minds" (1970)
Van Morrison - Moondance (1970), "Wavelength" (1978)
Sly and The Family Stone - Greatest Hits (1970), There's a Riot Goin' On (1971)
The Who - Who's Next (1971), "Squeeze Box," "Who Are You"
Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story (1971), "Gasoline Alley," "You Wear It Well", "Tonight's The Night"
Pink Floyd - never a big fan, but can't live without "Wish You Were Here"
The Beatles - Let It Be (parts), (1970)
The Eagles Greatest Hits I and II
Steely Pretzel - Countdown To Ecstasy (1973) , Pretzel Logic (1974)
Blondie - Parallel Lines (1978)
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (1975), Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
The Rolling Stone - Sticky Fingers (1971) , Some Girls (1978)
Jerry Riopelle - Take a Chance (1974?), A Little Bit at a Time (1975?) [For samples of this unsung, indelibly soulful and great performer -- a Tucson favorite from the mid-70s and piano session man who played with Ike and Tina Turner on "River Deep Mountain High" -- click here. - ed.]
Grateful Dead - Mars Hotel (except for the stinker "Money Money") (1974)
The Clash - The Clash (U.S. and U.K. versions, 1977 and 1979), Give 'Em Enough Rope (1978)
Bob Marley - Live! At the Lyceum (1976), Exodus (1977)
Jimmy Cliff et al. - The Harder They Come (1972)
Bob Seger - Night Moves (1976 ), Greatest Hits (1994)
Elvis Costello - This Year's Model (1978), Armed Forces (1979)
Neil Young - After The Gold Rush (1970), Decade (1977), Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Live Rust (1979)
Stevie Wonder - Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973 )
David Bowie - Changes One (1976), "Heroes", "Modern Love"
Jackson Browne - Running on Empty (1977)

1980s
The Clash - London Calling (1980), Sandinista! (1981)
Elvis Costello - Get Happy! (1980), Trust (1981)
Prince - Sign O' The Times (1987)
Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA (1985)
The Replacements - Let It Be (1985), Tim
Steve Winwood - "Arc of a Diver" (1981), "While You See a Chance"
Dream Syndicate - "Life in a Northern Town"
R.E.M. - "Reckoning" (1987)
Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual (1983)
Foreigner - "I Want To Know What Love Is"
The Cure - Greatest Hits [released 2001, covers 80s and 90s. - ed.]
Til Tuesday - Welcome Home (1986)

1990s
Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)
Sonic Youth - A Thousand Leaves (1998)
Shawn Colvin - Cover Girl (1994)
Freedy Johnston - Can You Fly (1992), "Bad Reputation"
Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)
Collective Soul - "World I Know", "Shine"
Eric Clapton & Baby Face - "Change The World" on Babyface MTV Unplugged NYC (1997)
Del Amitri - Twisted (1995)
The Young Dubliners - "Black and White"
Giant Sand - "Shiver" on Selections Circa 1990 - 2000

And some (relatively) recent stuff that I consider some of the best pop music of the last 25 years...(I'll organize it better sometime soon...)

PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea (2000)

Alicia Keys - "If I Ain't Got You"

Backstreet Boys - "I Want It That Way," of which Christgau says, "I now regard as one of the great pop songs of the history of rock 'n' roll." I've come to agree with the stamement, and "Quit Playin' Games (With My Heart)" (The Concert for New York City version) is even better.

Five For Fighting - "Superman," "Easy Tonight"

Shawn Colvin - "Anywhere You Go" on Whole New You (2001)

Luca - "Sick of Love"...see MySpace.

U2 - "Stuck in a Moment"

Lisa Loeb - "I Do," "Stay"

Vanessa Carlton, "A Thousand Miles" *

And yes, the department of Guilty Pleasures...

The better songs of Bryan Adams and Journey, which as a critically minded egghead I would've once bashed as corporate "shit-rock", have come to mean a hell of a lot more to me than, say, the New York Dolls (and not to bash them in particular, but rather to show that the vaunted Christgau is occasionally wrong-headed not just in what he denies but in what he affirms).

Kelly Clarkston - "Since You Been Gone"

Plus some assorted gems from the 90s to now that deserve canonization somewhere...

Assorted tunes by The Counting Crows, Norah Jones, Wheezer, Bare Naked Ladies and John Mayer

Sixpence None the Richer, "Kiss Me"

Snow Patrol - "Chocolate"

Tori Amos - "Sleeps With Butterflies"

Sugar Ray - "Fly," "Every Morning"

Deep Blue - "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

Goo Goo Dolls, "Name"

Jack Johnson [For all his finesse and charm, he needs more deep feeling, though -- a little angst would do his art some good. -ed.]

Wallflowers - "The Beautiful Side of Somewhere"

Jet - "Look What You've Done"

Wheat - "I Met a Girl"

Carbon Leaf - "Life Less Ordinary"

Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart (with Sheryl Crow) - "Old Habits Die Hard"

Aqualung - "Brighter Than Sunshine"

Trey Anastasio - "Shine"

"How to get thousands of hours of free (and legal) music online, with free record guides to boot."

Soundz: T.S. Minton's Guides to Music...

"One likes to believe in the freedom of music
But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity."
"The Spirit of Radio" - Rush

"Listening for the secret, searching got the sound
But I could only hear the preacher, and the baying of his hounds."
"Unbroken Chain" - The Grateful Dead

Here's what I'm trying to accomplish with this music blog:

Goal #1:
First, just to have fun vigorously discussing the music I love and immerse myself in, with others who have similar (ahem) refined taste; to form a community of happy bloggers blissfully confirming our own biases; and occasionally, to encounter wise guys who will challenge my assumptions (fat chance changing my preferences, but sometimes it's fun to engage educated, opposing points of view), much like I will do on these blogs, from time to time, to self-appointed sacred cows of the rock critic world like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus; and to offer a great launching pad for lots of amazing free (and legal) streaming music.

Goal#2:
To become less long-winded. Just kidding.

Goal #3:
To strongly promote the concept of rock history canonization for a new generation which both benefits and suffers from the easy access to whatever fractionalized form of music strikes their fancy. The Wired Generation enjoys obvious conveniences: ipods, free downloads and streaming music, cheap CDs, satellite radio, etc. But I want to help ensure that this new crop of eager beaver music seekers won't go through life unaware of, e.g. those rare gems of rock music from past decades, which have achieved near universal critical consensus, but little commercial exposure: the melodic hippie heaven of Love's Forever Changes (1967) and the self-titled first album by Moby Grape (1967); the eponymous Manfred Mann's Earth Band (1972) ("Living Without You": the creme de la creme of non-pretentious art/jazz rock, an amazing feat); Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic (1974): twist your mind around lyrics soaked in the jaded despair of the Watergate era, immersed in virtuoso musicianship with every note and jazz-rock noodle logically calculated; Television's Marquee Moon (1977): strangled vocals of visionary punk poet Tom Verlaine and searing, ecstatic guitar duels with Richard Lloyd on the title track; and Freedy Johnston's indelible singer-songwriter workhorse Can You Fly (1992).

I owe my exposure to all of these sleeper classics to their canonization by list-making mavens like Marcus and Christgau. IMHO, you owe it to yourself to check them out if you haven't already. Of course different critics have different canons, but when music aficionados (of the styles I'm promoting on this blog) see overlaps, they should really take heed, and scramble off to their nearest CD store or go online to, say, the link below and buy 'em up ASAP...









I'd recommend you check out the following versions of "The Canon," compare notes and look for common denominators. There's a reason certain vaunted albums have caused so much fuss over the decades: they are uncategorically great. To go through life without hearing, say, Pet Sounds or London Calling would be, IMHO, a form of insanity. Yes, of course there can be intelligent differences of opinion and taste. But to muddle along without a visceral, gut-level appreciation for, say, the indisputable pillars of rock like Dylan, The Beatles, Motown, and The Clash is a reality-tunnel I do not care to visit, let alone live in. Some of my other faves like The Grateful Dead, Shawn Colvin, and Burt Bacharach are admitedly more acquired tastes -- but I still feel the same way toward their greatness, i.e. if you don't love 'em, what planet are you from??

First though, here's some links to more free music than you could stuff in your ears if you had nothing to do but listen...for the next decade. Note: Some require free registration.

Sugarmegs.org:

Pinch yourself, you're not dreaming: free access to thousands of hours of "over 6,000 shows with new shows added daily" in Windows media streaming format, plus over 1500 shows of "the original SugarMegs RealAudio collection" -- decades of free concerts by The Grateful Dead (and new music by Phil and Friends and Ratdog), and free musical gems from The Allman Brothers to Frank Zappa.

Vault Radio from Wolfgangsvault.com:

"Bill Graham and his concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, produced more than 35,000 concerts all over the world. His first venue, the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, was home to many of rock's greatest performers - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Prince - and the list goes on and on...Graham taped thousands of live performances and stored the tapes in the basement of the BGP headquarters. These tapes and the concerts they captured lay dormant until the Bill Graham archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's given first name was Wolfgang) in 2003...Vault Radio is now playing selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Songs will be added to and removed from the radio show on a regular basis. We will be broadcasting unaltered live performance music from many of the greatest bands of the last 40 years. The music you hear on Vault Radio has not been sweetened or polished. You'll be listening to what the band played that night - nothing more, nothing less."

Don't do it! Don't go through life without hearing 107.1 KGSR Austin, Texas: true blue community radio.

Archive.org:

Live Music Archive or etree.org "is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community."

Yahoo Music:

"Internet radio, Music Videos, Artists, Music News, Interviews, Performances." If can deal with sitting through the annoying little ads, there's lots of good free videos available.

Youtube:

My latest discovery: open up a separate window to log on to You Tube and use it as a self-programmed radio...i.e. minimize the window to just hear the music (and not necessarily watch the video) while you're doing other things on the desktop and online. Most of the videos are short, so it pays to have a list of your favorites you want to hear, to keep the music flowing.

Coming up next: "The" Canon.

T.S. Minton: "Tycoon on the Rise." Photo (C) 2002 John I. Henry.

The Swamp Gas Report:

"Strange Lights in the Tucson Sky and Buffoonish Media Reports Across the USA: Which is more mysterious?"




Photo taken 01/27/07 and (C) ,Martha McGrath, producer of the Puro Sabor community cable TV program on Access Tucson. Shot on the west side of Tucson, Arizona. For more of Martha's mysterious "encounters", click here.

NEWS FLASH! NEWS FLASH!

Earth to so-called journalists, earth to so-called journalists: get your tongues out of your cheeks and just report the news...otherworldly though it might be.

Recent links posted on the Drudge Report (as close as we can come to a centralized source for the news in this decentralized age) offer a flurry of recent apparent UFO sightings. At the least this concentration of activity seems rather "anomalous."

http://www.wyff4.com/news/10841468/detail.html
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/breaking_news/16539378.htm
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/staticarticles/article53936.html