Tag: The Clash

Sunda’s Theme Music

Rain is hovering over the valley’s Sunda with a soft threat of rain. Sunshine is skipping in and out, and gray, traveling clouds are posturing like the rain threat is for real. It’s 43 F with a high of 51 F possible, ‘they’ say.

This is Feb. 16, 2025. With news firehoses running everday, February has taken a fast track through the year. Twelve days until it’s run its time and we’re on to March.

The morning mental music stream was jumping with a variety of remembered offerings. Now running the scene is a song by The Clash called “Clampdown”. Straight out of 1979, it’s a song about capitalism and how it beats people and steals their lives. I don’t know what prompted the Neurons to pull it up today. I mean, I’d just been reading again how the GOTP wants to put everyone to work at lower wages, young and old, to make ‘Merica great again. Cuz work is fun! Everyone loves the drone of machines grinding past, putting out new toys. If not there, they enjoy standing on their feet sixteen hours a day, waiting on other people. Or hustling food from kitchens tables before hurrying home to rest in front of the TV, computer, and walls. Of course, the billionaires and most millionaires would be exempted. CEOs, too. They’re wealth creators, you know. Tax them less and they’ll spend more, even as the poor starve and die. Yeah, I don’t know what prompted The Clash and “Clampdown” to get pulled into the MMMS.

In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown

h/t to AZ Lyrics.com

Coffee has breached my defenses once again, taking over my agenda as it is wont to do. Hope you enjoy the music and the day embraces you in positive ways. Cheers

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Mood: rebellious

This is Saturday, March 23, 2024 — 032324.

Winter’s turn continues to erode our confidence that spring has actually arrived. Rain. Heavy clouds signaling more rain may be falling. 51 F with milky, intermittent sunshine. Could be bleaker but something about this pulls me down.

I’m not alone in feeling a downward tug. Before I mentioned it, another friend announced that he felt blah and blamed it on the weather change from sunshine and warm air to cold rain. Others quickly agreed with him. Several wondered if we’d get snow. Then came memories of March and April snowstorms fro previous years. I volunteered the time I remembered walking down the street in early July and looked across the valley at the snow on Grizzly. Wow, the others exclaimed.

The cats are back in the house. Papi tried the front door, side door, and back door, in and out times three, before acknowledging with plaintive meows, there’s no sunshine. The sunshine is gone! Where is the sunshine? Stop the rain. Make it stop.

“Can’t, little buddy,” I answered the ginger blade. “You’ll need to endure, just like us.”

Tail up but a sulky look over his shoulder to me, he headed for the bed.

The Neurons loaded the Clash into the morning mental music stream (Trademark floundering). The song is “The Magnificent Seven”. Now, the original 1960 movie which went by that name was a favorite of mine but was a remake of a 1954 Japanese movie Seven Samari, released in the US as a film called, The Magnificent Seven. The 2016 remake was called The Magnificent Seven. It wasn’t bad. I suspect the next edition of The Magnificent Seven movie will be set in space, or maybe another planet.

Anyway, the Clash’s song, “The Magnificent Seven”, is a punk statement on society’s states, especially as people’s buttons are pushed to conform, go to work, and enjoy the entertainment provided. Keep up with what’s going on by buying the latest consumer goods and you’ll be happy, because you’ve been told, that’s how it is. Seems fit to me as we plug in, turn on, and tune out, feasting on whatever powers our pleasure centers: shopping, cooking, games, sports, hunting, television, movies, books, fashion, TikTok, the net.

Well, now I’m depressed. Thanks, neurons. Think I’ll go escape into a novel. Shut up, neurons. They’re so eager to laugh and mock me when I act hypocritically by conforming to the mores and norms. Bloody hell.

Stay positive (ahem), lean forward, be strong, and vote. Think I’ll nurse more coffee and escape into my writing. It’s a safe place. Here’s the video. Cheers

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Monday’s Theme Music

Hooray! Hurrah! Hoozah! It’s Monday, October 11, 2021. Indigenous People’s Day. Federal holiday in the U.S., for those keeping score at home. Was once upon a time called Columbus Day. But his truth caught up to his myth.

Drizzle and fog blanket the autumn colors outside. Winter’s sharp air is already cutting in on fall’s dance. 49 F right now. Just one short of the predicted high. Low will be 28 F. Freeze warnings are out there. We bedded down the garden for the season yesterday. Watched football, read books, ate soup, drank coffee and hot chocolate. Separately.

Sunrise pricked our gray world with feeble rays this AM at 7:19 AM. Sunset cometh at 6:39 PM. Our daylight period continues its shrinking ways.

Finished Ferrante’s “Lying Lives of Adults” yesterday. I enjoy her writing style. But I was dubious of some of the thinking and self-awareness assigned to a fourteen/fifteen year old female teenager. I guess I compared her to me and people I knew at that age, prompting my dubious reaction. The book invited cogitation about humans and relationships, though, and life in general. You could read much between scenes and characters, understand underlying extensions of what’s going on because so much of the situations are familiar to most of us: affairs. Confusion about sex. Crushes and love. Struggling to understand our bodies and relationships. A good read.

Have The Clash with “Train in Vain” (1980) in my morning mental music stream. Can’t ascribe a reason why. It’s just pulled into the head and took up residence.

You didn’t stand by me
No, not at all
You didn’t stand by me
No way

h/t to Genius.com

Well, stay positive and test negative. Wear a mask as needed by the situation. Get vaccinated. Sip some coffee, as Ima gonna do. Enjoy life, if you can. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

As inexorable as the sun arriving in the east each AM, we’ve cycled into another Tuesday, labeled May 11, 2021, for official record keeping. The star known as Sol punched in at 5:54 AM and will punch out as regular as Fred Flintstone at 8:21 PM. Spring sunshine is as plentiful as green leaves and temperatures are expected to tiptoe into the upper seventies today. Lovely.

Feeling well today. During my Saturday evening hospital visit for a damn kidney stone, I was given batteries of tests to verify all is well. They keep saying things like, ‘you’re remarkably healthy.’ I always think, you should see the other guy. CT scan showed liver, gall bladder, appendix, intestines, colon, stomach, lungs, kidneys all in great shape. Blood work support those claims. So, yea, me, or more rightly, yea Mom and Dad for giving me genes that set me on the road of having good health.

Mom and Dad are still about. Dad and his siblings are all alive. Now residing in San Antonio, Texas, Dad is the oldest of that lot of five. Mom is less fortunate. Living in Pittsburgh, PA, second to youngest, she’s the sole survivor of her gang of five. Mom is 85 this year and Dad is 89. Mom had health problems over the last five years, dealing with various heart, lung, foot, and cancer issues. Now she consumes twenty meds a day but still moving. Dad had been doing well but suddenly has issues the last three years. Now he’s losing blood, uses a walker or a cane, oxygen at home for his COPD, and several care-givers coming in a few times a week. Despite several hospital stays, cameras inserted into various orifices, and lots of blood and urine work, they don’t know where the blood is going. His spirits are up, though. Dad is pretty indefatigable.

Mom and Dad divorced almost sixty years ago. They’ve arrived at this point in their lives with good partners. Dad is on his third marriage (although he lived with another three women for years) while Mom is on her sixth fellow. Mom and her fellow are not married but they live together. I’m happy they have someone growing old with them, taking care of them. I’ve seen how hard it is when you’re elderly and living alone.

I’m listening to The Clash in my head this morning. They’re singing the 1978 song, “Guns On the Roof”. Reading about the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan brought me to this song. We’re still leaving one thousand troops in there, along with contractors. We’ll also continue pursue our latest military fad, drone warfare. That brought up The Clash line, “I like to be in U.S.A. Pretending that the wars are done.” The United States is never done with war. Peace would wreck too many stock portfolios.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, and get the vax. Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56YW42FMqek
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Wednesday’s Theme Music

“Wednesday, Wednesday. Can’t stand that day.”

Yes, happy humpday, April 14, 2021. I have nothing against Wednesdays, myself. I enjoy Wednesdays. It’s a nice midpoint. I guess I’m a ‘week is half-done’ sort of person.

The sun snuck up on us at 6:32 AM and will shy back behind the planet at 7:51 PM. The weather is strolling away from winter, gaining more spring confidence everyday. Green thickens in the trees around us and adorns the rolling hills. Although it’s now 49 degrees F, we expect the thermometers to see 73 before beginning its evening descent.

I found myself singing a 1982 song. I dreamed of a Porsche 911 SC, which was produced between 1978 and 1983 (yeah, I looked it up to confirm what I recalled). Thinking of the car and the years the model was produced led me through the memory vaults. I recalled that I lived in Texas in 1978, having been assigned there in the military after I returned from the Philippines, then got out, moved to West Virginia, went back into the military a year later, was assigned again to Texas in 1979, and then ended up on Okinawa by 1981. The song that came to mind then was “Rock the Casbah” by The Clash.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, get the vax, and enjoy the music! Cheers

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Monday’s Theme Music

I can only imagine the shit so many people face daily. I’m sorely aware of my privilege. I have it pretty fucking good. Don’t need to work, having put my time and life into two moderately successful careers while experiencing good luck and little tragedy.

Others aren’t having it so well. They’re struggling to pay for food and shelter. Many times, they work several jobs; work defines their lives and aspirations. They’re being forced to work for little pay under conditions that the rest of us shun. Yet, we depend on them while looking the other way and pretending all is good.

As data about COVID-19 is gathered and analyzed, and corporations, governments, and faux patriots demand that businesses re-open, that we ‘return to normal’, people must decide, should I stay or should I go? That makes the Clash’s 1981 classic the official theme music for this May Monday during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

We’re self-isolating, practicing social distancing. Yeah, this isn’t because I’ve sworn off people (“I’ve had it with you damn people!” he yelled in dramatic fashion, shaking a fist as he did), but because the gov’t. is following epidemiologists’ advice, trying to flatten the curve by slowing COVID-19’s spread.

Thinking about going for a walk through the neighboring streets and hills, having coffee (in my house), or doing yard work, the Clash’s punk-rock classic, the rockin’, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” 1982. I imagine many people have pondered this the last few days – should I stay or go to the store, etc.

It struck me as a humorous choice, and a rockin’ one.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I watched Atomic Blonde, an interesting take on the spy situation in Berlin as the wall was coming down, along with East Germany (GDR), and ultimately, the U.S.S.R. The music was a wonderful compilation of the new wave and punk era sound relating to Europe. Hits from Flock of Seagulls, Nena, After the Fire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and others were offered. The final song was “London Calling” by the Clash. That’s an intriguing choice, since the song was released in 1979, ten years before the wall fell. I guess it could be seen as a bookend, and some ironic meaning found there, given the events of the movie. I enjoyed the movie, mostly. The violence was a little tedious, but it was a good cast, with Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, and John Goodman (among others) complementing Charlize Theron and James McAvoy’s roles.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

The Clash came to mind today because it’s the anniversary of Sid Vicious’ death. He died of a heroin overdose when he was twenty-one. These facts came together in a tsunami of media concern about punk rock and drugs.

Sid didn’t play on this song, “London Calling,” which came from an album by the same name. The mash up of styles and sounds and social awareness in the songs attracted me, but it wasn’t music normally encountered in the places I frequented or the people I hung out with. That meant I often listened to it alone in the car or at home.

“London Coming” came out 1979. I was stationed at Randolph AFB, San Antonio, Texas, having returned to service after taking a year off to buy a restaurant and go to college. The restaurant didn’t work out and the local economy sucked, so I returned to the military and stayed in another sixteen years.

 

 

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