Singer Rhiannon Giddens becomes new artistic director of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk...

These are not normal times.

I filled my guitar with water and it sounds UNREAL

Head-Shrinks and I

I went to a Freudian. She didn't

say anything, just took reams of notes.

I wanted to read them: No. Once

I said the word "emblematic,"

and she rolled her eyes. I quit

after the second session. Freudian

time-waster. 

A psychologist had me 

write charts of when I catastrophize,

over-react. They made for a good

map of how nutty I was,

but didn't crack the nut. 

I liked her a lot. 

Then a psychiatrist, polymath,

know-it-all. I listened a lot,

which suited my diffidence. 

I want to be told how to fix

things, not blab and gab

and gas-bag. He prescribed

meds that work. Finally! 

I just don't have the time

or energy to stay crazy,

you know? Too much of

a commitment. 

I noticed that if a session

ran out of gas (because I

didn't talk), a couple of shrinks

would say, "Want to talk about

dreams?" Inside joke among

shrinks, I think. Doubly funny,

as after I sleep through 

a great night of dreaming,

wild surrealistic rides,

I feel as sane as hell. 

hans ostrom 2022

Emily Dickinson on ghosts: "One Need Not Be a Chamber to Be Haunted"

"Ghosts," by Elizabeth Jennings

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"if there are any heavens," by e.e. cummings

Old Funk Band

 The Ohio Players, Jazz Alley, Seattle, 10/2022

The first beat hits
like a boulder dropped on a roof.
Drums and bass hammer hard &
velvet vines of joy entwine from there.

Everything sizzles, black and bubbling--
horns, guitar, keyboards. This

is music for community, to get bodies
up & dancing and minds up to float
above their troubles. Webs of
call-and-response spread. At

least three of these Black men
have been brewing this elixir for 50 years.
The small wizened man
at one keyboard, baseball cap
set back, is the chieftain
of arrangement. Funk, hot

and cool, climbed the highest
mountain of rhythm-and-blues.
Apotheosis, mof-fo. From there,
pop music settled in soft digital foothills,
calibrating robot beats, dismissing
musicians, hiring impresarios
of turntables and knobs. Played

live, funk draws blood from all
the way back to Africa, across
oceans painted by blood-red
moons, up through islands
and land-masses into New Orleans,
then up the rivers to industrial
Black cities. Funk stomps

on evil as it dances. It turns-
on lovers. Funk screams
sweetly, jokes, smiles, winks, punches
in syncopation like Muhammad Ali,
lays out opponents--boredom,
worry, snobbery. Funk

will find a way to turn you into
a dancing fool--the best kind--
even if you just sit there and on the floor
inside your head, roll your
hips, shake your head, raise
your hands, laugh and smile,
hold that other body with you there,
and praise the big-little lord called Life.

hans ostrom 2022

Rhiannon Giddens, American Tune (with altered “Mayflower” verse by P. Si...