"What I do is I collect stories. I seek out the elders and garner stories and songs and poems. Characterized critically as: "Oh, that's that Sixties stuff." Like somebody doing old rock-and-roll would be doing "Fifties stuff." Or, "This is the Nineties, you know."
I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past, you know." And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot." Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now - I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious trouble.
No, it's not that - that "that's Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Nineties" - that whole idea of decade packages. Things don't happen that way... No, that, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that. Time is an enormous, long river, and I'm standing in it, just as you're standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world."
Grapeseeder,
ReplyDeleteSeeing your post on Muddy Sava brought this question back to me. As FOBGM was always one of my favorite sites, when you originally posted this in March I downloaded it in hopes of reliving happier times. All I could ever get out of it was screens of the cover art of the various LPs and a file with stings of numbers in them. I certainly never found anything that remotely resembled the old blog or any links to any of the LPs. At the time another blogger named Kegan also encountered what appears to be what I am seeing and sent off an inquiry on the Wrath side. The response to him was that this is a .rtfd file that opened on a mac as a text editer. So my question is, is there anyway this file can be viewed correctly on a regular computer. I had no trouble with Joski's file at the same time but this one I can get nowhere with. Sorry to be so long winded and thanks for all you do here and other places in sharing the musical jewels.
Jon
Hi Grapeseeder,
ReplyDeleteA big thanks!!! for archiving this and the other buried blogs. Much appreciated!!
And to answer the above question, once you download and extract the file, the archive contains 2 folders: archive from may 09.rtfd and archive til may 09.rtfd
Open either of the folders, sort all the files by File Type, and look for the Rich Text Format file TXT.rtf
You can click on this file and it will open in MS-Word. It contains the text and links to the file downloads. The links are the asterisks: ******. Hover your mouse over any of those links, hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, and then click on the asterisks. They'll open up in your browser to the Mediafire download page for that album.
I did this on a PC with no problems.
All the best,
dcat... :-)