Taoist essay update

 

     Made about half a dozen more cassettes since the last entry. The meditative vacuum cleaner has left me emptied. Let there be light upon light.

    I'm not going to jinx my Scribd essay by adding a link. The YouTube video and tribe blog went nowhere, but I'm telling you Notes of a Rebel Angel goes somewhere! Google the title, my name, and Scribd for a sense of what movies would be like if sacred sex was generally understood. I'm here today with a follow-up to the second section.

    That was a brief overview of pop music when it's invoked notions of alchemy and healing love making. I identified "Lover's Rock" by the Clash as the only song in the rock pantheon to take on with no uncertain terms the topic of men forsaking ejaculation in emulation of Eastern bliss.

   In the essay I deduce that the late Joe Strummer wrote the song - because writing partner Mick Jones has little of interest to say in retrospect. Now I am sure of it, thanks to the accompanying booklet to the 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition of London Calling. That reprints the Clash's promo fanzine Armagideon Times, which included a few words or a cartoon about each track on the album. Some of the songs must have been co-written, but here it falls along the lines of one man per song - Joe, Mick, or Paul Simonon. For "LOVERS ROCK" (no apostrophe) Joe offers a doodle of a guy and gal in profile puckered up in a smooch and the following note: This song is a book we tried to condense into two verses - The book is called "The Tao of Love & Sex" by "......". It's a thin book and a good one to get if you are a boy trying to be a man.

    The author whose name they couldn't remember is Jolan Chang. He was a Canadian-Chinese scholar, among the first to provide a kind of Western umbrella over Tantra, Taoism, etc. Strummer and Chang happened to die in the same year - 2002 - Chang at 84, Strummer at 50. Yes, it's a thin book, but one of the very first I ever found and read about this stuff. (Forget those long-standing, royally stiff Kama Sutra art plates!) I discovered Mantak Chia at the same time, who, at 65, keeps right on publishing a great amount of detail over the course of many related volumes.

   As for any other songs nearing the explicit nature of "Lover's Rock" or my own "Superblue"...the game is a little different now, the aformentioned rock pantheon co-existing with the rest of the past and the laterally expansive plurality of today. It's still a lot easier to find New Age soundtracks designed for extended embraces than any pop visionaries hawking their own herbs, sex 'n' rock&roll take on Five Element Theory.

Song Tour via Cassettes is Over

Between the spring of 2011 and now, I've done a whole lot of songwriting, rewriting, and recording. Many old songs and tapes were trashed, and dozens of cassettes have been taped over, sometimes not entirely so that the humor of random mash-ups can arise. There's one where I check in with Eckhart Tolle to see what he has to say as I'm taping over The Power of Now. He's always spot-on, naturally, further proving that the Now is perpetually available, even when dealing with pre-recorded mediums.

Yeah, cassettes are as dated as electric typewriters, but they sure do have their virtues. Not just the simplicity of operation, although single track one-touch recording certainly is simple. And dirt-cheap. I'm thinking more about how much one learns about the voice in such a primitive setting, where all hope for production enhancements is lost. You either keep it or try again. Some of the tapes are continuous 45-minute shows, most made implicit use of the pause button to create album-like consistency, and a few are collages with two or three undercoatings of me doing what I do.

Which is document my life - orally or vocally, spoken, sung, rapped, written, or improvised. Issues of the day are covered, and now that it is done, somewhere in the body of around 100 of these 60 or 90 minute tapes, at least one new version of almost every song I ever wrote exists.

And they can be cleaned and digitized in a jiffy. Which means I already have demos for all kinds of tunes that would be better off in the hands of other artists. All I really want to do is begin my interface with the current technology from here.

Every side has at least one cover version of a song too (kind of like my way of having a drums/space section in every show, as on a Grateful Dead tape). The electric keyboard Alcorn gave me has plenty of options, so there's never a glut of one sound or another. I wanted to be sure they were all worth listening back. It is like being a character in a Nick Hornsby novel, though. No one is expected to go through these tapes. The sheer volume of titles and performances therein is a private joy. We close this entry, then, as if this were a pure fiction and the song listing I've chosen to commemorate the close of this phase didn't (for you, dear reader) really have the lyrics and chords to go with it. This is the J-card for "SAV - Forever Sloppy" Side B, one of the last (recorded July 19 and 20, 2012):

11. Already Felt All Those Things

12. Love Can Be Thrilling

13. The Fat Angel (Donovan Leitch)

14. Til the Sun Finally Manages to Set (with Crush On You intro - hush!)

15. 2000 Year Blues

16. You Don't Really Know Me

17. Apatosaurs R Us

18. 'Til I Feel It

19. I Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way

20. Every Soldier's a Martyr

21. May This Be Love (Jimi Hendrix)

22. Just One Morning

SaveLove Music 2012

Just a quick update to authorize linking this blog to the savlove.com website. These last couple of years have substantiated roots that reach back to the days of Woodie Guthrie or Louis Armstrong - the American era when Depression (capital and lower case) was as rife as it is today - but without the modernity.

 These days I am so much less interested in how DNA and meditation reveal inner secrets of one's personal (or our collective) biology and that much more interested in presenting simple messages that everyone can  understand. To find emotional wholeness - to love one's self and others with depth and concern, for example - is a very strong base from which to work on a stronger economy. Job perfomances, shopping addictions, dietary choices and much more can be framed in terms of improved work environments. And music - the notes and phrases of melody providers, to use modern terminology - still plays a vital role in the civilized landscape!  When my latest songs come out, that will be a good thing. Otherwise I'm keeping on with the apartment tour of my catalogue ... refining, tempering, and expanding the spectrum of genres and lyrics that IS the world of John Savlove.

  One last note to complete this update: A singer for the sake of love campaigns his whole life and is never elected to office. The language of love is not bought and sold like the language of law. Rather, free or commodified, it is always there for people's delectation, taken advantage of in ways that are freely diluted by vulgarians of every class and political stripe.

John Savlove remains a true friend

 
 Leave it to the cosmos to direct me to the New York Times the day it runs the item about John Friend on the front page of the Tuesday Science section. I don't tend to read it these days. I do care deeply about what's going on in the world. I'm paying attention. But I also see how definitively I am the news, the thing that's going on that is truly on, regardless of how few people are hip to the what or why.

  When the founder of Anusara yoga suffers a fall from grace, that speaks directly to my life. Particularly when it's about sexual ethics. Elena Brower is the primary source for a quote in the piece, and that's significant because in the name of good taste I have consistently disguised or deleted my complaints about that yoga teacher on blogs since 2009. The Times lifts from her blog, and names her as Friend"s "former confidante". I doubt the break is as big as all that.

   I'm not surprised John Friend transitioned from a charismatic guru to an outed philanderer. As much as he knows about holistic health, he does not know enough to be transmutating his sperm essence. He's not a Taoist. In my book, he's like all the other men who do not really know the True Gentle.

   Anusara yoga became my favorite mode of yoga from the very first class. However, that was in 2004, and from years before that I've seen poses and stretches as supplemental to the Five Element Theory and so much else as filtered through Mantak Chia's approach. I've been studying the I Ching for decades, but developing a Taoist Soul body has taken my understanding of that to profound levels. This is not to put myself above Friend or Brower. This is journalistic therapy for myself and anyone reading this who needs to forgive these public figures their flaws and carry on with the promising mysteries inherent in the practice.

   Putting myself in their shoes is not the best way to show compassion or kindness. It's too easy to blow them away. Elena had the chance to put herself in my shoes and decided to go barefoot. Why? Because romance is just as dead in SoHo as it is on Wall St. I'm the one who coined the term "postromantic" back in 1999. And who identified how postromantic culture borrows and aspires to the romantic. My other blog discussed that further, until that blog was deleted for reasons typical to this writer's journey through a world of charlatans and power-abusers.

    People usually value me because I'm a good listener. We all want to provide content, and as much as I'd like to provide mine unbridled, it's more often wrapped up in a supportive context. That's just life. Universal laws are not mutable the way State or Federal laws are. Love is everything, which means all our petty conflicts and sub-laws are part of love. Hence, I embrace contradictions as they present themselves and ride the process. I have problems too, but being a lover of the cheatin' hurtin' kind ain't one of them.

    After as many people know about John Savlove as they do John Lennon or even John Friend ... that's when the real problems begin!