OMG!

Such a Kind Face!

Well, y'all, America went and did it. 

We've elected Donald Trump, a rich old lecherous crook, a pathological liar who has been defendant in about 1500 civil lawsuits, accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and who faces the charge of having raped a 13-year-old girl. He claims to have "had" more beautiful women than any man who has ever lived and has 5 children by the three beautiful women he married. Of these three, he has abused, betrayed, and divorced two so far. 

We have a president-elect who is a demagogue, a megalomaniac, and a narcissist I believe to be certifiably insane with delusions of grandeur. This man who calls himself a Christian would flush down the toilet the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment by making Islam an illegal religion inside our borders. He has a thing about borders, wants to build a great one, and told the world the the people beyond our southern border are rapists, murders, all manner of criminals. Yet he has no respect for Ukrainian borders and would gleefully award that sovereign state to Vladimir Putin, with whom he has shady ties, as Putin own private playground.

It's not just Latinos that the future President Trump hates. In 1973, after a long investigation, the United States Department of Justice sued Donald J. Trump, president of Trump Management, for illegal discrimination against Blacks in his residential rental business. He now happily attracts the favor and endorsement of white supremacists and white nationalists, the KKK, anti-Semitic groups, bigots of all stripes and patterns. 

There's even more, but I'm sure you recognize him from the drawing I offer and that you really do not need me to add color and paint. Our president-elect says that he has never had reason to ask for forgiveness, not from any person, not even from any god. He seems to be his own god.

America, what the hell have y'all done?

Did He say "Whatever we do for those LEAST in need?"

What a shameful situation to jump out at me from the New York Times  upon my waking. But I forced myself to read, to study every photo, the faces of the homeless old, a rapidly growing problem.

Look at the gizzled and graying men waiting in line. Health issues, including and especially mental health, the jobs lost post-2008 at an age that cruelly leaves a worker unemployable, turning him or her into a pariah.

But we can’t approach meeting the needs of the very people my inspiration spoke of: the least of these, not less in value, but it resources, in circumstances, in luck, in health, in family emotional support not to mention financial…We can’t love and feed and clothe and shelter and give meaningful work because WE HAVE TO CUT TAXES ON THE WEALTHY, THE FATTEST PIGS, DECADE AFTER DECADE FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS. 

We have a populace, being brought to bloom by Trump, that is  good at one thing only, well two, things: hate and greed. I don't want to see what it reaches full bloom.

The Hall of Shame in America is full to overflowing. And they cannot see that to treat our own and the very air we breathe with such contempt is truly national suicide.

It it really our time to fall on our swords? Or can we redeem ourselves? Of course, redemption survives Hellish conditions, still standing, still offering itself to those who will wake up and see the need.

But I don't think we will.

New York Times, May 31, 2016 (click here)

LOS ANGELES — They lean unsteadily on canes and walkers, or roll along the sidewalks of Skid Row here in beat-up wheelchairs, past soiled sleeping bags, swaying tents and piles of garbage. They wander the streets in tattered winter coats, even in the warmth of spring. They worry about the illnesses of age and how they will approach death without the help of children who long ago drifted from their lives.

“It’s hard when you get older,” said Ken Sylvas, 65, who has struggled with alcoholism and has not worked since he was fired in 2001 from a meatpacking job. “I’m in this wheelchair. I had a seizure and was in a convalescent home for two months. I just ride the bus back and forth all night.”

The homeless in America are getting old.

There were 306,000 people over 50 living on the streets in 2014, the most recent data available, a 20 percent jump since 2007, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They now make up 31 percent of the nation’s homeless population.

The demographic shift is mirrored by a noticeable but not as sharp increase among homeless people ages 18 to 30, many who entered the job market during the Great Recession. They make up 24 percent of the homeless population. Like the baby boomers, these young people came of age during an economic downturn, confronting a tight housing and job market. Many of them are former foster children or runaways, or were victims of abuse at home.  (Read more...)

Los Angeles

A 74-year-old man who lives in a tent

Food line, L.A.

PRINCE Rogers Nelson

"Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" (Hamlet Act 5 Scene 2)

Prince Rogers Nelson has joined the mass movement among our icons to leave us this year.

Price passed away Thursday morning, April 21, 2016. He was only 57, and there is no irony in "only."

This time we have lost a 7-time Grammy winner, a unique person born with a unique talent over which he labored until it was unworldly.

On everything, he wrote it, he performed it, he produced it. All of it. He was a complete musical world unto himself.

And he was perhaps the most beautiful man whose eyes I have ever looked into. Even through paper or cyberspace, the power of his beauty to knock me down and breathless was overwhelming.


"Purple Rain" from 1985 is  the song that was for most people their introduction to Prince although he began performing and recording long before, releasing his first album in 1978. Below in the video of Prince performing this emblematic song "Purple Rain" in a downpour of ordinary rain, though to me no rain is ordinary, at the Super Bowl in 2007. About working in the rain, Prince just said he wished that it had rained harder.

Standing next to Dhani Harrison, George's son, whom you'd recognize anywhere, is Prince during this tribute to George Harrison that took place when he himself was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Prince has a guitar solo begins around 3:18 and goes to over 6-minute end.  That's a three-minute solo. And this is what is called A MOMENT.

If there should be any skeptic out there, Prince in this solo, should wipe you out like "Out! Damn spot! Out I say!" (The Bard's Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1). The red hat allows you to step off the stairway, right into Heaven.

And then there is this above. "Motherless Child." Paul Robeson sang it. Mahalia Jackson sang it. Odetta sang it. And in 1999, when he was 41, Prince sang it. This performance demonstrates that he belongs in the company of the greats.

There is no way to comprehend how much genius, talent, gift this man who was truly beautiful has taken with him. I'm not even sure we can comprehend all the work he left, so much about to be discovered.

Prince, you have no idea how grieved and shocked we are, the loss we feel. I don't think we have any idea yet either.

Godspeed.