Music:
Member Since: 8/29/2006
Band Website: illinoisjohnfever.com
Band Members:
LUTE TUCKER = pipe slider, hand sleights + yelling
ROBT. HALL = battery, metaphysical guidance + shouting
YOUR ACOUSTIC HOSS = Collusive strings + OTR-drumming
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Howdy folks! This here's a quote from the insightful CORNEL WEST, and we believe it fits the profile of IJF quite nicely:Q: So you’re optimistic about the future?
A: The categories of optimism and pessimism don’t exist for me. I’m a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism. Optimism is a secular construct, a calculation of probability. Black folk in America have never been optimistic about the future – what have we had to be optimistic about? But we are people of hope. Hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn’t generate optimism. It just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended. I am a prisoner of hope. I’m going to die full of hope. There’s no doubt about that, because that is a choice I make. But at the same time, the end doesn’t look too good right now.
original
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"Engaged Buddhism is a term originally coined by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. During the Vietnam War, he and his sangha (spiritual community) made efforts to respond to the suffering they saw around them. They saw this work as part of their meditation and mindfulness practice, not apart from it. Since then, the term continues to apply to Buddhists who are seeking ways to apply the insights from meditation practice and dharma teachings to situations of social, political, and economic suffering and injustice."
HE WHO PASSIVELY ACCEPTS EVIL IS AS MUCH INVOLVED IN IT AS HE WHO HELPS TO PERPETRATE IT. HE WHO ACCEPTS EVIL WITHOUT PROTESTING AGAINST IT IS REALLY COOPERATING WITH IT.
-- MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR
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!! holy smokes !!
if not for the following biologicial radios, then we'd still be playing animal bones and rakes
!! R.L. BURNSIDE !!
!! BUKKA WHITE !!
!! SON HOUSE !!
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OTHAR TURNER from a beautiful, self-spoken article about his life, posted at folkstreams.net :
"I come up the hard way, but I never been in no trouble. Never have. I never had a law to come and say, 'Well, I got you for killing a man, I got you for stealing this, I got you for such and such.' Never been arrested and carried and locked up in jail in my life. You can search from Free Springs, Holly Springs, Thyatira, Looxahoma, Senatobia, Coldwater, Sledge, Crenshaw, Batesvllle, Grenada, Canton, Jackson, around on back to Como. Nothing about Othar. 'Othar,' they'll say, 'Oh, I never knowed Othar to do nothing to nobody, he's a good man. If he's done anything, he's just getting a little fun. I don't believe nothing like that about Othar. He don't do nothing but to treat you right.' That's what I mean by that's my motto. My mother taught me from a baby, until I got big enough to know, to get out on my own: treat everybody right. Treat people like you wish to be treated. I want friends and good behind me when I'm dead and gone. I want people to speak well of me. I work for that. I love to meet anybody. With a smiling face. That's the way I live. And that's the way I hope I'll go."
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From GUIDE FOR THE SEEKER by Richard Hittleman:
"You find yourself existing in a dimension of constant threat and danger. You are beset on all sides by endless problems which, in your delusion, you attempt to resolve with the very instrument that creates them. You seek to Know and Understand, but you cannot because you are eternally separated, in a subject-object relationship, from that which you would Know. Through a universal conspiracy--in which you unknowingly participate--you accept these situations as 'the natual course of events,' as 'life.' Hypnotized by the self-appropriated authority of ordinary mind immersed and believing in not only one but many 'selves' which ordinary mind manufactures and maintains, you subscribe unquestionably to its illusory propositions. Among these fantasies, the doctrine of DESIRE-ACTION-FULFILLMENT convinces you that it is natural and necessary to strive for happiness, success, pleasure, and security, that such elusive objectives can be achieved through the right kind of action, and that somehow your achievements can be made permanent. So, dutifully complying with the party line of the conspiracy, you experience incessant desires that compel you to undertake the incessant actions dictated for their gratification. But because your desires are interminable, because your actions can never truly satisfy these desires, and because you seek what is ultimate and permanent in a state where only constant impermanence and fluctuation obtain, you suffer. You suffer throughout not only this lifetime, but throughout an infinite number of lifetimes.
"How does one awaken from this illusion, this dream of self, to that Reality which is his/her true and eternal nature? By total abandonment of all that is of the not-Self."
Influences:
THE ME NOBODY KNOWS , R.L. BURNSIDE , SCOTT DUNBAR , FRED MCDOWELL , PHILIP COHRAN , DEAD KENNEDYS , OTHA TURNER , NAPOLEAN STRICKLAND , BLOOD MERIDIAN , ANDRE MINVIELLE , BUTCH CAGE , WILLIE B. THOMAS , ROYAL TRUX , FELA , JOSEPH SPENCE , JOHN FAHEY , ALAN LOMAX'S VARIOUS RECORDING PROJECTS , VIOLENT FEMMES , MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT , JEFF MANGUM + NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL , JACK T. CHICK , THE MISFITS , "MAGGOT BRAIN!" , H. RAP BROWN , NOR MISSISSIPPI ALL-STARS , CHESTER HIMES , THE ROLLING STONES , FRENCH HIPHOP , I SEEM TO BE A VERB , SONNY CHIBA , THE PIXIES , ELDRIDGE CLEAVER , BIG BLACK , BUKKA WHITE , COSMIC MICHAEL , GASTR DEL SOL , SIMON JOYNER , SKIP JAMES , DOO RAG , PRINCE , REPO MAN ,
AND JOHNNY CASH
Sounds Like:
a haiku:
strings hold the frontline
while shrill vocals trap kit fight
over breathing room
Record Label: TRANSNATIONAL RECORDS
Type of Label: Indie
