I seem to please the women I am with in retrospect. I don't mean that thinking back, I assess that they have been pleased. I mean they try to get me to be certain ways, or wish I were...but never see it happen. It's only after a relationship is over, looking back, that I go "Oh...she was always trying to get me to grow my hair. And here it is past my shoulders now. Hunh. That's sort of sad. She never got to see it." I've noticed this with a few things. It's always in retrospect. Or too often in retrospect.

But I'm married now. So nobody will be pleased!

I've been thinking a lot about life. About art. About meaning...and Meaning. About, as I said, what my place is. Where I can strike that blow. Everyone knew I'd be an artist all my life. So I thought that would be my Place. I thought that was my glory. The Long Dream. Just my own art. Just the fact that I could do it. Just the doing of it. Just the attention to craft, and mastery of my particular talents. And the fate that lies there. And the way I might speak back to the world through that tongue. And I do think that is all important for me. But lately, as certain needs have been met, and other certain hungers faded away, and as I grow older...I think to myself that Art itself is not enough of a goal for me. There are certain things that are important to me. Yes, I want to "say" things about them, explore, reveal my connection to them in this strange tongue that is "art." But I want to DO something about them, too. I guess I've said something like this before. As always, so many paths come together, so many tributaries to the sea, so many thoughts and events leading to other thoughts and events. And then you find yourself at a place, and wonder how it all seems so perfect and preordained that you have. This flow of fate, this growth, this opening my eyes to what the flow of my karma might be. Tools in my hand, and doors opening and I think to myself Maybe I really can change something. Something important. Something that needs badly to be changed. Maybe. And maybe that would matter in all of this.

Separately, one idea I was nurturing has come to begin to bear fruit, and I am still on that. That's a collective thing, a web thing, a thing where many people's path actually came together, and we all did and are doing our part to bring the project further forward. That made me feel good. Makes me feel good. That I could add something, or help be a part of something that is for doing, and is for others. My original idea is a bit different than the way it ended up with others added to the mix and with some air in its lungs, that's part of letting go or using good thoughts and energy where you can. Giving the rest up to fate. I may use the original idea for something else. It's the kind of thing you can apply in more than one instance.

I am having other ideas, too, lately.

I've never been a self-proclaimed Social Justice guy. I was born in 1969, I absorbed a lot of counter-culture, I feel very strongly about personal justice, and about fighting off tyranny, that is rooted in my life experience, not born from any larger or more expansive setting. Just a first-hand knowledge of injustice and abuse and the heart's natural repulsion of such forces. When I first read the Bill of Rights in an early law-oriented class (honors social studies class at about ten?) I felt every statement ring in my bones, because I was living under a tyranny of sorts. Or maybe I was born to have certain experiences in my life so I could form partially in reaction. For a while I was a counselor, helping messed up kids in trouble in school and in family. It was greatly satisifying for a time. Until the grind grew to be too much. Day after day of kids getting punished...for reacting to a crazy world and bad families. Vicious cycles that broke my heart. I felt I wasn't doing enough. And I missed my art very much. Would I have felt satisfaction so deeply, though, in these areas, if I had not lived the life I had? No. So even those curses, when you look at yourself as just another piece in many other peoples' lives instead of the unvarying and all-important Center, can be gifts to the world.

We are made of so many things, some of them reasons, some of the reasons-to-be, maybe. But either way, I grew up with a fist in the air. I gave my home life and household the finger at 15, I gave my high school the finger at 16, I gave the cops the finger for years. I lived life for many years purely for spite. And with the awareness that nobody was looking out for you. No one. Just you. And often without Justice. And I lived my life that way, too. For me and my own sense of justice.

And I still do. But I don't feel as reactive anymore. Or unprotected. Oddly. I hadn't expected it. But I guess as I've grown older and stronger, I have begun taking some of the time I've saved and put it toward thinking about how I can act. And what I want to act on. Don't get me wrong. I still react. And I probably always will. (And is there really such a hard line drawn between the two?) And sometimes I still flinch at ghosts that swoop too close to my face. But just as true journalism should be about giving a voice to the voiceless (as Amy Goodman says in her book Exception to the Rulers), true Artivism (a word I've coined from activism + art simply because I need a word for this idea) should do the same. (I guess "Guerrilla Art" is similar, but the word I'm using doesn't have that fun element that comes with Guerrilla Art (which is still great great stuff). That graffiti type element, that surprise, that vandal for a good cause thing. "Artivism" to me is...well. Art that doesn't exist for the sake of itself, but as part of an active and pointed agenda for good. Not "Art with a political agenda" because to me, "artivism" intends to be an act or set of acts, not a descriptor for boring or manipulative art...) At least I'm thinking so.

Nothing huge and earth-shattering here. Just thinking out loud. Or at least sharing some out loud. It may seem like I confess every little thought out here, but that's not so. Not a bit. That's just the copyrighted Nezua Confessional Tone©. Comes from growing up young around people sharing satsang in circles in ashrams, and therapy as well, and halfway houses, and settings with ideologies where you are encouraged to heal yourself from spilling your guts.

That's what's occurred to me lately, too. Yes, I've always "talked too much." But then, it's not surprising when you think of how many settings I've lived in, and how often, and for all this time, where there was a collective group who relied on each other's sharing of truth in one form or another.

There's my grandpa's colors. I talked about recently. And I was wrong about a couple things. My mother told me after reading my post.

The main thing was that my father was not taken out to the garage by shotgun and told to marry my mother. That was almost right. But not quite. My grandfather took his two sons-in-law and they all took my father out to the garage with the shotgun I mentioned, and papi was told that he would need to get his hair cut. That's what the gestapo tactics were about. My father and his long hair. And his Catholicism, I think. My Grandpa had quite a saying, back then, about "Catlicks." It wasn't very nice, and I won't repeat it, but it had something to do with them being [ - - - ]s "turned inside out." Archie Bunker sort of reminded me of my Grandfather, sometimes.

Those sons-in-law are both divorced out of the family now, as is my father, and my grandfather has since died. It's been forty years since the night of the German Alcoholic Boxer, the Shotgun, and the Long-Haired Mexican. My father's hair is short these days.

I mention Amy Goodman because it is Radio Pacifica that contacted me about doing weekly film reviews for a little while. And I have to say, I am very honored to even be doing that for such a station with such a history. A history that reminds me of Lorna Dee's Project Tupa. (It may not be "her" project, but she has been behind it for a while, really pimping it out there). It's a beautiful history of chasing truth and uniting the common people, and inspiring resistance to tyranny. In fact, when I was arrested as one of the RNC 1800, and I started a hunger strike in the Tombs, it was Radio Pacifica that interviewed me from my cell. (The articles online said I was on a "cell phone," and if that's a joke, it's a good one. It was a payphone in a cell.) I had a different name back then, but that part keeps changing, and it's not important. It will change again. And so will the name "Radio Pacifica," but those characters we become, and those stories we take part in and create and act out, and those forces of oppression we fight are eternal. We must not lose hope. We must hold out to the end. We must swing with every damn thing we've got. It may not be enough, but it is all we've got. So we find a way to move in, a way we can dance ourselves into the red zone. And then, we strike. And strike again. And again. From the hip, from the heart, from the very bright and bitter acid heart of our fury.

I will let you know about the stream and station info. First review is on November 7th, and will be on the film American Gangster.

I am slowly working on my latest song.

My entire musical self slept for a while. Dormant. And I thought it was because I was tired of my instruments. And so I gathered a few different ones over time, and especially drums (congas and bongos). But still an entire album went unreleased. The tracks layered and ready for mixing, ready for final touches. But in the end only my brother and a couple people got that collection of rough mixes, and I never finished them. I don't think anymore it was because I was tired of the instruments I was using. I think it was because I was tired of what I was saying. And in much of the last few years there has been a lot of shaking up of my internal maps. I've been the one behind it. Rerouting synapse paths, finding new directions I wanted to expand myself into, seeking growth. Shaking off crust, and layers of rust. That's how I see it. It's neverending, though. I remember at 16 I had one of these "wow, I'm waking up now" moments. And come to find they happen over and over and over again. I don't think I could be more grateful for that. I hate stagnance more than anything. And I get sick of myself very quickly. So it's good that I can change.

But this last year has been too tumultuous to use for my music, too much storm and ground settling, too many changes all at once. Even this blog spans an arc that sees vast changes in myself. At least going by my own measuring stick.

I've been working, here and there, on a song that I began in 1993 or so, but I have begin reworking. I never finished it, and it's called Manifesto. (I think it is track 1 on The New Album.) It moves pretty well, pretty rhythmically, with feeling as they say. It's a song about standing up and joining a battle, a song about weeding out poisonous seeds that have settled into your mind, a song about tearing away from a mental system of oppression. Because really, that's what it's about. It's not about them—those demons who are trapped in their own prisons and who wish to drag us into them, too. I mean, yes. Sometimes it's about Them. But even then, it—la lucha y esta canción—is about my own enslavement to a system of thought and reaction. About my own tendency to buy into illusion. My own desire to foment revolution in myself and in my life. And a beat and a melody that will light it up.

This is a bit of a change. Many of my songs over time have been more cynical, maybe more despairing, and often filled with anger that exists for the purpose of empowering oneself for the sake of....feeling powerful. Which is important sometimes! Very much so. But in this one may be growing a little further, trying for a bit more. Or so I hope. The overall topic is not really so new or sudden. Even the song I did last called If I Had A Hammer, while resting on a bit of a destructive metaphor, began talking about a harmful system. (It was written in reaction to the horror of Katrina, thus the lines about "some of us climb the mountain/we leave the rest there drowning/and it seem so far and wee/even tho it plays on your TV".) And to tell you the truth, even songs I was writing in 1989 in my very early songwriting years, had a "social conscience." I don't want to stretch or test my ability to communicate by trying to draw too much of a distinction between Manifesto and past songs that spoke of "social injustice." Talking about music is not often satisfying to me. Or accurate. But I will say it feels very different. Different...and very good. But later for that. You can let me know when it's time how it works for you.

For now, I have some webby junk to tend to. It's been a very slow week for web design, and I'm way overdue on some things.

Here's hoping we have time to do our work before our government makes too big a mess of the world. Or that if we don't, we at least have time to swing our hips a few times. It's a good beat, even out here on Proletariat Street.