If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening around you, perhaps you should start paying closer attention, because it’s happening.  It happening, your country is being overthrown and it isn’t going to stop happening until you’ve been completely overrun by a brutal and unaccountable corporatocracy without a face and a regenerative head.  As I stated before in a couple other posts, I grew up enjoying standup comedy with my father ever since I was a kid.  Rare were such moments when I would feel emotional about a famous person passing away, but I actually wept when George Carlin died.  I grew up listening to him, since the days when he was more of a wordsmith who would do wonderful routines about the English language, some of them were even moderately clean comedy routines.  Hit such as “Icebox Man” and “Fussy Eater”, from his album, A Place For My Stuff, were personal childhood favorites of mine.  But as he got older, he held back less and opened up more in ways that truly spoke the truth about American culture, our government, politics, and the true owners and controllers of our country.  Rather than getting into a big opine of him and trying to convince you how awesome he was, I’ll let him speak for himself and you can decide for yourself.

For more great George Carlin materials…

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

I flew straight to Los Angeles, California after I got out the Navy, Redondo Beach actually.  When I got there, I was staying with my brother and two other guys from my hometown.  It was a day I’ll never forget because less than 2 hours after my friend, Django picked me up from LAX, we went to visit a girl I’d known since middle school who put 2 hits of blotter acid on my tongue and we partied like it was a few days after the L.A. Riots of 1992 because it was a few days after the L.A. Riots of 1992.  We lived just a block and a half away from Torrance Beach by Miramar Park on Palos Verdes Boulevard and it was one of the best trips I’ve ever had.  My musical tastes were already beginning to change after my brother had turned me on to a few different things.  We had a great stereo with speakers mounted closer to the ceiling.  We trekked the beach for hours, smoking weed and talking.  I was tripping bean, and the sun had already been down a few hours by this time.  I had just peaked in my acid trip and was starting to mellow out after my brother gave me a long talk how L.A. was a city where anyone could be anything they wanted to be, anyone they wanted to be if they just made the commitment.  We’re walking along the shore and the waves that came crashing down were mesmerizing until this little baby seal walked right up to me and started barking at me.  At first I thought I was just tripping, and my brother (whom was totally sober) let me know, “nope, that’s a fucking seal.  Wow.”  We got back home, and listened to Philip Glass, Music for the Screens, which I will post later.  Then as he was winding down, my brother put a CD by Maurice Jarre into the stereo that blew my mind like no other.  It really knocked me for a loop.  For those of you who don’t know, Maurice Jarre is a composer who has done music for films for a long time, and is best known for the soundtracks to the classic films such as Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif, and Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, as well as contemporary classics such as Witness, starring Harrison Ford,   Maurice Jarre’s original motion picture soundtrack to director Adrian Lyne’s (Fatal Attraction) 1990 film, Jacob’s Ladder, starring Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, and Danny Aielio.   Quite frankly, Jacob’s Ladder was better than every other film that Adrian Lyne’s best film.  But I’ll let you decide for yourself.  I was coming down from a heavy trip, listen to this then tell me if there was a part that would’ve woken you up from a come-down slumber after a heavy acid trip?

Jacob’s Ladder is one of my all time favorite films, a true masterpiece of dramatic horror mystery.  I was more than a little disappointed that the 21st Century remake monster of our current Hollywood community wasted their time remaking rather than taking a risk on buying a new intellectual property.  But you can purchase Jacob’s Ladder on DVD at Amazon.  It’s also currently available streaming on Amazon Prime if you happen to have Amazon Prime.  But this post was so I could share the Jacob’s Ladder original motion picture soundtrack with you, which you can also find on Amazon as well.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Interesting little factoid about yours truly, I’ve purchased more than a few soundtracks before I’d even seen the movie.  As I stated already in the previous post, I’m a big fan of dramatic music.  Which is why I have so many motion picture soundtracks in my CD collection.  Before I joined the Navy, I was into a lot of punk rock bands like Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, and Naked Raygun, or dark industrial electronica like Ministry or Skinny Puppy.  My brother told me about an album by Peter Gabriel, called Passion, which was the original motion picture soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, a film by Martin Scorsese.  He was living in Los Angeles while I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia.  So naturally I ran right out to the local shopping mall and purchased the cassette tape right away.  Passion, by Peter Gabriel, whom I was not the biggest fan of at the time by the way, profoundly changed my musical tastes immediately and forevermore.   My first foreign country that I ever got to visit was Bahrain, and I was there for more than 2 weeks before I even saw my ship.  Uncle Sam put me up in a د.ب500BD per night Sheraton Hotel, which comes out to about $1,375 per night, of which I was in my own room for 10 days before they made me stay at the ASU (American Support Unit), but I digress…  I liked the music, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, sounding so primitively mysterious in its different tones and scales that people in that portion of the globe played.  However, I had only really heard it in the taxi cabs when I explored the city of Manama.  I ended up surprised when I went shopping and ended up buying all these bootlegs that supplied me with the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers discography on Thames.  Only for me to find out that Mother’s Milk (which was new at the time) and Uplift Mofo Party Plan were thus far the only halfway decent things they had recorded as of yet.  I was jet-lagged, so I would wake up at 0400 and would hear the call to prayer faintly over the city loudspeakers from behind my hotel window overlooking the dusty island city off the coast of Saudi Arabia.  To me, it was all so filled with an ominous mystique that I found more intriguing than foreboding.  But I was still musically immature at the time and hadn’t quite found that which would change my worldview yet.  After listening to this soundtrack, I listened to it exclusively on my Walkman for more than a month.  At first, I wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Last Temptation of Christ, being that at the time the last thing I wanted to see or hear anything about was Jesus.  Having grown up in Catholicism and Christianity, not to mention that once you get into the military you will be exposed to all sorts of Christian influence peddlers seeking to take advantage of ungrounded or spiritually ambivalent youngsters away from home for the first time, I simply wasn’t interested in such a film.  But once my brother, whom has always been a strong influence on me, told me that the Christians absolutely hated that film, I hopped on a bus and transferred to another bus to find a video store to rent that film and made my entire department watch the New York accented apostles and Jesus in a show that folks thought was sacrilegiously blasphemous.  However, I quite found Nikos Kazantzakis’ interpretation of Christ to be more than a little influential for me.  I believe that concept far more than I do just about anything some reprobate faith peddling huckster tries selling it.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy this playlist.  Thus far, this is the first actual “playlist” I’ve shared.  This is by far the best work that Peter Gabriel has done to this very day, and I would also highly recommend picking up this soundtrack,  Peter Gabriel’s Passion Soundtrack on Amazon.

If you enjoyed that, and have a deeper curiosity for learning more about his influence and what later became known as “world beat”, you might want to check out PASSION SOURCES, released by Real World.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.