We knew this day would come. The Day After has arrived in Gaza, or is at least beginning to arrive.
Israel has kept objective eyes mostly away from Gaza during the war. Now the Associated Press has deployed cameras to capture the scene.
What did it mean? What does it mean? What will it mean?
Associated Press: Palestinians confront a landscape of destruction in Gaza’s ‘ghost towns’
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
Cause I’m in need of some restraint
In 1968, French director Jean Luc Godard filmed the Rolling Stones recording the track Sympathy for the Devil for the album Beggars Banquet. The final film, Sympathy for the Devil (1 + 1) interspersed many scenes of political and social elements that made it into a Godard film, and not just a typical music documentary—for the time and for now.
(The film is available for rent or sale on many platforms, but not currently for free. Instead, included below are a few clips that give you the flavor of the work.)
Opinions have long differed about this as film art or music art. At the very least it is a slice of time, a time before the Rolling Stones became billionaires, a time when John Lennon—who is seen dancing—was not yet killed, a time when artists like Godard (maybe not so much the Stones) believed in the power of art to expose, incite and transform.
As for the song, which I played before breakfast this morning:
Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith
I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
Cause I’m in need of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politeness
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
Life is change
How it differs from the rocks
Crown of Creation, Jefferson Airplane
This is not about the Jefferson Airplane song. Nor is about keter, the highest point that crowns the Tree of Life according to Kabbalah.
The sun rises here behind a hill to the east. The rising sun casts a diminishing shadow on the mountains to the west. In the early minutes of dawn, the mountain tops light up while the lower mountains remains in shade. For a little while. Today it looked to me like a golden crown.
© 2025 by Bob M. Schwartz
Yesterday I tried to find just the right music for today, January 20. I focused in on the blues, not because I am “blue” or others should be, but because the blues is in popular music, or maybe in all music, the most viscerally real to the human experience, and great listening. Years in Mississippi showed me how real things can be, and how that may lead to suffering, but doesn’t kill the human spirit, instead raising it to sublime artistic heights.
Listening to the blues led me to specific blues, particularly electric guitar blues. At first I focused on generations of classic blues players, moved over to contemporary players, landed on Jimi Hendrix, who was a move away from Funkadelic, led by George Clinton. The third Funkadelic album was Maggot Brain (1971). The album is considered one of the greats, though exactly what genre it belongs to is debated.
The first track, the title track, is legendary. Ten minutes of guitarist Eddie Hazel playing, a solo originally recorded with a backup band. But when George Clinton heard the playback, he stripped most of the other instruments and just processed the guitar. In the view of some, it is the greatest electric guitar solo ever, which given the competition—including Hendrix—is remarkable. Some have called it “one of the greatest solos of all time on any instrument.”
Here are excerpts from a music journalist explaining the making and meaning of Maggot Brain:
Funkadelic plunges into the dank throes of an existential quandary, as Clinton intones, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y’all have knocked her up/I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit.” Clinton really knew how to rivet attention and prep you for the journey of a lifetime.
The mythos surrounding this 10-minute epic is extraordinary. Clinton claimed that he and Hazel were tripping hard, and then the bandleader told his guitarist to play like his mother had died. Realizing that Eddie had executed a world-historical solo, Clinton decided to excise most of the other players’ contributions from the track and then “Echoplexed everything back on itself four or five times,” as he noted in Brothas. “I could see the guitar notes stretch out like a silver web.” (An alternate take with all the instruments intact appears as a bonus track on a 2005 CD reissue of Maggot Brain, and in retrospect, you can’t argue with Clinton’s decision. The keyboards, bass, and drums are fine, but they impinge enough on Hazel’s wizardry to be distracting.)
This solo—with its solarized, distraught wails, smooth dive bombs, and shattered-crystal grace notes—occupies the loftiest perch in the guitar-hero pantheon. How can something so mournful fill you with so much life? It was perverse of Clinton to place such an elegiac show-stopper at the beginning, but in the early ’70s, perversity was the man’s lifeblood. Conventional wisdom in those days involved starting albums with the most instantly appealing song; instead, Clinton opened with amplified and warped chewing sounds and a lysergic monologue about planetary impregnation and cranial infestation. Out of such grotesque imagery, Clinton and Hazel alchemized heavenly beauty.
Dave Segal, Pitchfork
So if you are feeling less than good about the day, or about days to come, listen to the “alchemized heavenly beauty” of Maggot Brain.
© 2025 by Bob M. Schwartz
For more about why AI and Coyote are contemplating a candle on January 20, see How to January 20, 2025 and beyond: Keep a light lit in your window, on your desk, anywhere.
Those of us concerned about the next four years of American leadership, which starts today, can react and respond in many ways. We consider how to act, what to say and what to think.
Today I offer a simple idea. Not a solution, just a simple idea.
Starting today, and as long as it is valuable, keep a dedicated light lit. In your window, on your desk, wherever it can be seen by you and by others. That is far from all we might choose to do or say. But it is a bright start.
We just celebrated two holidays where light is an essential element, whether in a lamp or from a star. Also, many traditions include lights that stay lit constantly as reminders and messages.
I have long used battery-operated electric candles around the house, for various occasions. Now I see that the idea of an eternal light, on this occasion, for this purpose, can be useful.
Starting today, I am keeping one of those candles on my desk, lit at all times, and when night falls, one in my office window. What is that saying for me, what might that say for you? What if someone asks: Why is there a candle in your window, what does it mean? We might benefit from thinking about that.
If I say be happy today, January 20, 2025, you may wonder what to be happy about. Light a light, keep it lit, and you may discover.
© 2025 by Bob M. Schwartz
Congress has long mandated that after the death of U.S. presidents, official flags at the Capitol fly at half-staff for thirty days.
Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at the age of 100. So during the Inauguration on January 20, flags would be flown at half-staff. But Trump objected crudely, saying that Democrats were “giddy” at the possibility. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson thus ordered that during the Inauguration the flags would be fully flown.
Trump was Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2024. But for their magazine cover on Inauguration week, we appreciate that it is this particular former president who is featured. We don’t know how Trump feels about this, though we might yet hear.
If America needs role models for moral leadership and exemplary living, we have had few presidents, maybe none, who fit the role better than Jimmy Carter.
David Lynch died this week. Praise and appreciation have been profuse.
Among his many wonderful creations is the TV series Twin Peaks.
Phil Hoad in the Guardian ranked Lynch’s films and TV shows:
The great American film-maker died this week, leaving behind a body of work unmatched in its seductive strangeness and transcendent mystery. We put it in order.
While these kinds of rankings can be controversial, there is little doubt—for me at least—that Twin Peaks is at the top. Hoad wrote:
1. Twin Peaks S1 & 2 (1990-91)
A damn fine cup of coffee. A girl wrapped in plastic. A log-carrying oracle. Grief expressed through novelty song. Thumbs up from Dale Cooper. Canada as the source of all corruption. Backwards talk from dwarves and dames. Traffic lights in the night. The leering demon behind the sofa. Like a fish in a percolator, the original Twin Peaks was where the Lynchian sensibility filtered irreversibly into the zeitgeist.
Audiences had never seen anything like it: an ostensible homage to the comforts of daytime soap opera, none of it facile or ironic, but cut with Lynch’s habitual 1950s pop-culture references, dadaist skits and appalling sexual brutality. Not only did it expand the parameters of television but it amounted to the fullest and most seductive statement of the director’s worldview; his great American cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil warred for the souls of small-town prom queens and FBI agents alike.
Yes, the second season dips badly after Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed, and Lynch was occupied with Wild at Heart and other things. But his collaborators’ flailing attempts to replicate Lynchian weirdness in his absence only served to highlight his inimitable talent for finding the offbeat route to overwhelming emotion. Every time the series called for revelatory violence or charged metaphysics (“It is happening again!”), he returned to the director’s chair and unfailingly delivered. Thanks for warning us about the Black Lodge, Mr Lynch – and see you in the White one.
By 1990, some of us had already watched thousands of hours of TV, and had already seen the dazzling strangeness of Lynch films like Blue Velvet. We had also seen some interesting and inspiring experiments in television programs. But as Hoad wrote, and is worth repeating, “Audiences had never seen anything like it.”
(On a personal note, in the midst of Season 1, I organized a viewing party for friends and printed up a little Twin Peaks booklet to follow along.)
Before Lynch’s death, I was already in the process of rewatching Twin Peaks. The moment Episode 1 began, when I heard the unforgettable theme music, and watched the opening credits, I was reminded of a central message that the experience of Twin Peaks, and other Lynch creations, reflects: Things are strange, everything is strange, and that is wonderful.
The original Twin Peaks series is streaming on Paramount+ and available on other services.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
—attributed to Anton Chekhov (a dramatic principle known as Chekhov’s Gun)
The Netflix documentary series, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, is recommended.
Nine nations have an estimated 13,000 nuclear weapons. According to the principle of Chekhov’s Gun, if you have hung 13,000 guns on stage, in the ensuing global drama, one of those weapons will be used. As one expert notes in the series, that we haven’t experienced nuclear Armageddon is not because we are smart, but because we are lucky.
We are either living in a new Cold War or never left the first one. Either way, as dark as it may be, we need to learn and contemplate exactly what a Cold War equipped with so many available nuclear weapons means.
That is the theme of the series. It covers the histories, up to the present, of the Cold War and The Bomb, which are inextricably linked. The world after World War II cleaved into two mighty factions, both convinced the other was an existential threat and must be defeated or removed. The difference from every other fight before in history is that those powers posed a literal existential threat—and still do.
Daniel Ellsberg is famous for his Vietnam War-era whistle-blowing, with his leaking of the so-called Pentagon Papers, revealing that the war was a costly and unwinnable lost cause. But years before that, Ellsberg was one of the brains at the Rand think tank, which was asked in the 1950s to evaluate the possible outcome of a thermonuclear war. Ellsberg relates his shock then and now. The estimate was that 600 million people might be killed—20% of the world’s population at the time.
© 2025 by Bob M. Schwartz
In any area, when learning, I seek teachers over time. Eventually, I may narrow that down, not ignoring the value of the others, but recognizing that as we progress, as we change, as everything changes, some are more fitting for immediate study, some less.
This has been the case with my religious life. I am neither a practitioner nor advocate for flitting from one beautiful sweet flower to another or to staying with one tradition or teacher for a lifetime. It should be a matter, as I repeat regularly, for pursuing and testing what works. One should never be reluctant to follow a single narrow road or to follow different paths that may look to others like mindless wandering. If we clearly see, not easy, that the single narrow road and the multiple paths are all one beneficial way.
Study all, study some, study one, study none.
This can apply to any area of learning. You can follow this in any direction. Start with one, expand to some or many, come back to a few or just one. Nothing will be lost or wasted, provided you keep them all carefully in mind.
But what about “study none”? Is there a point at which, whatever the path or paths, you can or should stop studying? This is subtle, so subtle that I am challenged beyond my reach. All along, wherever you are on the path, you are always studying none. One of my earliest influences, Sri Ramana Maharshi, had a nice way of dealing with this, a way consistent with many other traditions.
When asked a question about practice or philosophy by a student, he directed the student to ask “Who is asking the question?” That is, any investigation begins, and ends, with investigation of the mind asking the question. Whatever the subject, not just the spiritual but in all areas, the study is that. Of course there is much to learn in any area. That is why we have teachers, schools, and vast bodies of knowledge. But our relation to all that knowledge, to all others and to ourselves, is beyond and beneath all those studies. Which, in a crude way, is what I mean by study none.
© 2025 by Bob Schwartz
Bob Schwartz 