Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
Recent Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
13, 2003
Rebel
Angel: a Memoir
Chapter
Seven: Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
By DAVID VEST
Since I started banging out these memoirs I have
left the Cannonballs, recorded
a new solo CD, joined the Paul deLay Band and toured
Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. Sitting backstage at
Bumbershoot in Seattle, waiting to go onstage while Wilco and
R.E.M. crank it up in another part of the festival, drinking
my ritual cup of tea before the show, I have a flashback that
sets me off again.
One winter morning in 1962 I wake up
at a stop light in Decatur, Alabama, behind the wheel of a 1957
DeSoto with the rest of my band, The Esquires, sound asleep.
I don't know how long I have been driving in a blackout. Since
the car is pointed south, I assume we are on our way to Birmingham
and hit the gas again.
Before joining Jerry Woodard's Esquires
(replacing the great Bobby Mizzell on piano, to be replaced myself
by Barry Beckett) I had played rock and roll on flatbed trucks
and in movie theaters, at skating rinks and high school dances
and live TV. I had toured with gospel quartets such as the Sacred
Aires and the Glorylanders, doing shows with the Statesmen, the
 Blackwood Brothers and the
original Chuck Wagon Gang. I made my first recording with the
Sacred Aires, a song written for us by Alton Delmore of the Delmore
Brothers called "I Can't Be Satisfied." That the first
song I recorded may have been the last one he wrote moves me
in strange ways.
Speaking of driving in a blackout, my
first composition, a rock instrumental, was called "Blackout,"
probably because Mizzell had done one called "Knockout."
My next song was called "Rebellion." What does that
tell you?
As a member of the Esquires I had jammed
with the Tommy Dorsey Band, Ace Cannon, Bill Black's Combo, Woody
Herman's Herd. I hung out with Bobby Goldsboro and met Roy Orbison.
I was about to get a total-immersion
baptism in the blues. I got married, quit the Esquires, settled
in Birmingham, got into college and discovered modern poetry
about the time I met Big Joe Turner. If I had trouble keeping
my head on straight, consider this: I'd get up before dawn, do
a TV show with Tammy Wynette and Fannie Flagg, run back to campus
and study Muriel Ruykeyser, Alexander Pope and Wittgenstein,
then head out to the clubs to play with Big Joe, Sam the Sham,
etc. Or maybe one of the local recording studios, where I'd run
into people like Doug Kershaw or ? and the Mysterians.
I met John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and
Lee Dorsey at the Pussycat a-Go-Go down under the viaduct. I
saw the great Roy Hamilton there. Some redneck slashed Lee Dorsey's
tires while he was working.
The night I met Jimmy Reed, the poor
man was too drunk to function. On his first song, he pulled the
big microphone to his face and hit himself in the mouth with
it, breaking a tooth and bleeding badly. They led him away unable
to continue.
Fortunately I had seen him elsewhere
at his best, on one of the big package deal R&B shows that
came through town occasionally. For two dollars you could see
Jimmy Reed, Sammy Turner, Joe Turner, Lavern Baker, Bo Diddley,
the Coasters, the Drifters (once with both ben E. King AND Clyde
McPhatter on the bill!), Big Maybelle, Sam Cooke, Barrett Strong,
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters -- and the Lloyd Price Orchestra.
There were white package tours as well,
most of them pretty lame. You got Bobby Vinton, Fabian, Bobby
Rydell. I did get to see Brenda Lee and Duane Eddy and the Rebels
at one of them. Both those acts had some soul.
Then came drugs. By that I mean that
drugs crossed over into public use. Musicians had always had
drugs. The first time I smoked pot, there was something elite
about it. Dope was for hip cats, it wasn't for the rubes. Suddenly,
now everybody had it. Within a few years even Willie Nelson was
smoking it, and there was nothing cool or special about it anymore
if people who looked like they worked at a feed store did it.
At my first rock show -- Carl Perkins
and Johnny Cash at the old National Guard Armory in Huntsville
-- I got a glimpse of the dark side. After the show I ran to
the dressing room door and heard Carl begging Johnny to "put
that stuff away, don't do that in front of these kids, please
Johnny, they'll all be in here in a minute."
Flash forward to a mid-sixties movie
premier ("Your Cheatin' Heart," starring George Hamilton
as Hank Williams) in Montgomery. I'm in the house band on a flat
bed truck in front of the theater. One by one the stars hop up
on the make-shift stage for a bow before they enter for the screening.
Johnny Cash arrives looking rail-thin,
his skin a dark yellow. He stands right in front of me, his hands
clasped behind him, waiting for the announcer to introduce him.
Cash is fidgeting fiercely. He is not merely uncomfortable in
his skin. He rubs all the skin off the area behind his thumb
until there is a bloody area about the size of a quarter. He
keeps right on gouging at it, as though the pain is giving him
some relief.
"Come on up here, Johnny Cash, and
tell these good people some stories about the wonderful times
you and Hank Williams had together," croons the emcee.
"I never met the man in my life,"
says Cash. He says it in an aggravated way that warns the emcee
not to ask him any more stupid questions. As Cash leaves the
truck, a fan tries to shake his hand. Cash snarls and slaps the
hand away, turning for a moment as if to say, "You want
to fight? Come on."
Later, backstage, I overhear a conversation
between Cash and Tex Ritter. If anything, Ritter, notwithstanding
his kindly uncle image, is in an even more dangerous mood than
Cash. He's delivering a stern warning. "I'm telling you
John, and I mean it. If you go out there and embarrass me and
embarrass Miss Audrey and embarrass Hank's memory, I'll whip
you with this pistol till you..." "Aw come on, Tex,
I didn't..." "Shut up when I'm talking to you. I'm
not kidding, John. If you can't behave yourself ..." "Don't
get mad at me Tex..." "I'm already mad. I'm beyond
mad. And I'm not telling you again..." Or words directly
to that effect, with Cash more or less begging Ritter not to
hit him or have him evicted from the dressing room.
These memories of a great artist at his
rock-bottom worst may seem disrespectful now that he's gone.
They aren't meanT to be. His entire career, including his magnificent
late comeback, is all the more impressive when you consider what
kind of personal demons he had to face down to get where he was
going, and how unattractive they were. He never pretended not
to cast a shadow. Nor did he ever kiss the shadow's ass.
To me, the romancing of people's bad
behavior is often more disturbing than the acts themselves. I
met people who were pretending to be alcoholics because Hank
Williams drank.
I also met a man who pretended to be
Johnny Cash. It was in Bryan's Lounge, on 5th Avenue, in Birmingham.
He was a short, balding man whose hair had been blond. He was
tipping heavily and invited me to sit at his table between sets.
He explained to me that he was Johnny Cash and he liked my music.
I had met some famous people in night clubs (Y. A. Tittle, Brooks
Robinson), but this was my first famous poseur. For twenty bucks
a song, you can be whoever you say you are.
Most people don't need drugs to make
them crazy.
More than a decade later I would meet
a professor down in southern Florida who, aided by years of pot,
had managed to convince himself that Willie Nelson was the greatest
poet of the 20th century. He based this opinion on his own deranged
analysis of "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," which he
saw as some kind of radical masterpiece. "It's not blue
eyes in a head," he assured me, "it's just blue eyes.
In the fucking rain, man."
When I told him that Fred Rose and not
Willie Nelson had written "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,"
he sat stunned for a moment, then recovered himself with a furious
explanation that it was Nelson and Nelson alone who had had the
genius to COVER the obscure song, transforming it from a run-of-the-mill
country ballad through a miracle of contextualism into a neo-surrealist
poetics. When I explained that Gene Vincent had in fact covered
the song back in 1958 he shook and then wept. I should have been
more careful.
Dope had a mind of its own. It was easy
to convince myself that it was more important to drink beer,
light up and listen to Hank Williams sing "I'm So Lonesome
I Could Cry" sixty or seventy times in a row than to go
home and study for an exam. "The silence of a falling star
lights up a purple sky, man. That's big time synesthesia. Just
to hear that line would have made Emily Dickinson come before
she crumpled to the floor."
Somehow I was convinced that all this
music and all this poetry and everything else I was studying
were all the same thing, really. My academic advisors were pleading
with me to make choices, do one thing and do it well, effectively
to the exclusion of everything else.
I dealt with this pressure by taking
more dexedrene, benzedrene, speed and LSD. I went to lots of
parties where people had drugs and took whatever people offered
me. I partied with lawyers and local celebrities and played water
basketball with Joe Namath. Four or five of us could be trying
to drown him and he would sink one basket after another with
a flick of the wrist.
One night, after taking LSD and playing
the same chord over and over in a night club, thinking I was
a genius, I borrowed a car and took off on some dubious errand
(to find a party? more drugs? food? who knows) promising to come
right back.
Within moments I had forgotten what I
was doing and where I was. It seemed to me that I was driving
on Interstate 65, that it was snowing (in July) and beginning
to accumulate, and that I had better drive faster before the
roads got worse. In fact, I was driving on Red Mountain, down
winding neighborhood backstreets and through people's yards,
pulling down laundry and clotheslines. The car came to a halt,
still running, with its hood under someone's back porch. I walked
down the alley, found a phone, and called the owner of the car.
"You can come and get it, I'm through with it." Later
I learned that I had hung up without giving the location. I don't
remember how I got home.
At eight o'clock the next morning I was
probably in class, wearing a coat and tie, discussing chiasmus
in the neo-classical couplet or reading William Shenstone's "Unconnected
Thoughts on Gardening."
I like to say that I left Birmingham-Southern
with a double major, both in English. I do know that I took more
hours in English than anyone in the history of the college. I
wrote, produced and directed a play which Arnold Powell, who
ran the drama department, called the most appalling instance
of the theater of cruelty he had ever been pleased to witness.
I minored in Philosophy, chiefly because visiting prof Edward
Churchill Bottemiller allowed me to ramble through his personal
collection of over 10,000 books. I remain grateful to professors
Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, Cecil Abernethy (who wrote a
wonderful biography of Pepys) and Howard Hall Creed, who worked
the phones and got me an NDEA Fellowship to Vanderbilt for grad
school.
Entitled to a married student deferment,
I had been mistakenly classified 1-A by my draft board. I went
in to ask about it and was assured that the error would be corrected
-- at the board's next meeting, the following October. I was
advised to keep my fingers crossed.
At Vandy I remained as conflicted as
I had been in Birmingham. During the week I went to class by
day but wrote fiction and poetry by night, getting my first poems
published in the Green River Review and the Roanoke Review, at
the time edited by Henry Taylor (more about Henry later). On
weekends I drove back to Birmingham for gigs (and gatherings).
I also worked a good many recording sessions, most of them produced
by Zeke Clements and some of them engineered by Scotty Moore.
Clements, a former Grand Old Opry star
and the co-writer of "Just a Little Loving," at this
stage of his career mainly worked "vanity" sessions.
Someone came to Nashville, wanting to be a star. Most of these
people would have made Richard Hell sound like Pavarotti. No
problem! If they could write a check, Clements sent them home
with a record.
He even tried to sell me one. It had
already been recorded! "You won't even need to play on it,"
he explained. "$5,000 and you have an album with your name
on it."
At one incredible session the artist
was an aspiring singer named Ottice Yawn. Mr. Yawn wished to
record a tragically sincere ballad called "Destroy Me."
The project required an agonizing number of takes, considering
the band's tendency to break up whenever we heard the title line.
I scored a Happy Hour gig across the
avenue from Vanderbilt at Ireland's Pub. It was a favorite hang-out
of Music Row people. There I met Charlie McCoy, some of the Foggy
Mountain Boys and a few of the Byrds. Joan Baez complained about
my music one night and left in a huff when the manager wouldn't
make me lower my volume.
I took a class with Allen Tate, at that
time the most famous writer I had ever met. Reactionary to the
core, he still had much to teach about poems. At 75 his famous
wit was intact. At a gathering I saw him cornered by a woman
who complained about the pronunciation of Marcel Proust's name.
"I know they say it's Proost. But I've always said it Prowst.
If I want to say it that way, why can't people just leave me
alone?" "Madame, what a wonderful idea," Tate
said, disappearing.
One day an editor from the Saturday Evening
Post sat in on the class, called "The Art of Reading Poetry,"
afterward telling Tate that "I ought to send some of my
writers down here for a few weeks and let them master the art
of poetry. Hell, I think it would make them better journalists!"
"I dare say it would," replied Tate, a little too calmly
for the visitor to catch his tone.
The editor, not smelling his own blood,
would not give up. "Say, have we ever published any of your
stuff? I don't think we have. Would you have anything laying
around that you could let us have? Bearing in mind that we're
not made of money, ha ha."
"I can't say that I have anything
at all for you, not at present. Look, I've got to run. Why don't
you have a nice day or something?" said Tate, showing that
death-head grin.
"Hey, that's a GREAT idea! I will!"
cried the editor after him down the stairwell.
Tate had the most original approach to
the problem of grading papers I have ever encountered. He simply
refused to read anything that bored him. In others classes we
competed or grades. In Tate's we competed for attention.
Thanks in part to a summer in France,
during which I spend days on a Velosolex scooter and nights at
a typewriter in the pantry, I was able to take a first novel
through four drafts while at Vanderbilt. I made the mistake of
mentioning the project to my adviser, Thomas Daniel Young, who
would later direct my doctoral dissertation. "If I were
you, I'd keep that to myself. We don't want people questioning
your commitment to scholarship. They might think, if you have
time to be writing novels, that we're not giving you enough work
to do up here."
I was bold enough to answer that some
might think it commendable to be ambitious in more than one direction.
"Don't be naive," I was told.
I still have a paper I wrote for Edgar
Duncan's Chaucer seminar. In blue pencil he wrote across the
top: "This is wonderful! It should be published." Then
came the grade: a rather large letter B.
In Nashville I could find nothing like
the drug parties I had attended in Birmingham, which usually
wound up feeling like episodes from a Dr. Strange comic book.
These gatherings were always fairly innocent and harmless. No
one did any hard drugs, no one freaked out. Humorless people
weren't invited back. In fact, everyone I knew back then who
used drugs did so more or less successfully. (That's far from
the case today, alas.) Anyway, we didn't "do" drugs
or "use" drugs. Where I came from, we "took"
them.
But in Nashville, no one was interested
in a "trip." These were hard-drinking graduate students
to whom the Visionary seemed ridiculous. In Birmingham we had
listened to the Byrds, Dylan, the Beatles and the Velvets. Nashville
listened to Nashville. Since the Nashville of the time was utterly
ashamed of hard-core country music, opting instead for the "countrypolitan"
sound of Eddie Arnold and 1000 violins, pickings were slim.
I had gone to graduate school imagining
that I would be among people who loved poetry.
In 1968 I saw Robert Kennedy speak at
Vandy's Memorial Gym. A few weeks later he and Martin Luther
King were dead, and National Guard troops were bivouacked at
the replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. I was sitting
in a drugstore, eating a BLT, when an elderly woman rushed in
to inform the pharmacist and me that "Dr. King has just
been shot, in Memphis, by a total stranger, a man he didn't even
KNOW!"
It occurs to me just now that I had been
sitting in the student cafeteria at Birmingham-Southern when
the news of JFK's death came, and that I was in the Vanderbilt
student snack bar when I heard about the massacre at Kent State.
Is this why I feel a low-level anxiety when I'm eating a sandwich
alone?
The last time I saw Allen Tate, he was
ardently defending the guardsmen who had fired on students in
Ohio.
With all my course work behind me, and
prelims passed, I headed off, thoroughly depressed, to "do
one thing" -- fill a teaching post at Longwood College in
Virginia, when I wanted to be doing three or four (playing music,
writing, traveling, acting). The last thing I did in Tennessee
was to tie all the drafts of my novel into a neat package and
throw the whole thing into the trash, saving nothing. Of my many
self-betrayals, this is the one that would eat at me the hardest.
I was "Dr. Vest" now, or would
be as soon as I completed my dissertation, but who was that?
Someone With a Sense of Direction
On an evening of the long light rain,
As you sit upstairs with the window open
let someone with a sense
of direction come along
the sidewalk underneath.
Let the stranger pass
beside the nameless trees
then cut across the street.
Let it take all night.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
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