Dems: Trans women are women!
Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…
Dems: Genocide!
I get the impression that Gordon Lightfoot knew time was short when he recorded his last album, three years ago. At 81, it wasn’t a big stretch.
It’s the best album he’s done in quite a while – done solo, just Lightfoot on an acoustic guitar, solo, his voice nowhere near it’s strength and power of his glory days, but still very much him. And it was a surprise – in 2016, he famously retired from songwriting, saying it’d caused a lot of problemls with, and for, the people closest to him in his life.
Lightfoot’s best work wrestles with one of those most troublesome human emotions – regret. Popular culture’s current affectation is to “have no regrets” – which is only possibly if you live a life with no failures, mistakes or risks. Like Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind, it sounds like a guy wrapping up accounts for a life spent swinging for the fence – and leaving a few broken bits and pieces in his wake.
It’s a wonderful end to a wonderful career.
I tried to figure out where to start writing something that I haven’t written dozens of times before, with a long-overdue watching of If You Could Read My Mind, the 2020 documentary about his sixty-plus year career, life and legacy.
The documentary opens, rather pointedly, with Lightfoot and his third wife watching him peforming “For Loving Me”, a semi-comic cad’s anthem that, it turned out, wasn’t nearly fictional enough to have not affected many of Lightfoot’s relationships over the years.
He’s visibly uncomfortable.
“Turn it off. I hate that f*cking song”, he says, face wrinkled in disgust that, we learn in the next 90 minutes, has a whole lot of hindsight behind it.
And the hindsight is fascinating indeed.
The first acoustic guitar part with a moving bass line that I ever learned to play, back in eighth grade, was “Sundown”.
And it occurred to me – while LIghtfoot’s music wasn’t a huge, life-altering influence at the front of my mind, like Springsteen or (in my annoying adolescent days) The Who, Lightfoot’s music was always not just there, but found a way to burrow into my mind. Lightfoot’s music was always filling – there was as substance to it. It didn’t just flit through the mind and keep going.
He was an infamously fastidious songwriter and producer (not to mention, as the documentary notes, a rhythm guitarist who was in his prime such a solid, powerful musical presence that his band didn’t need a drummer until well into the seventies). His craftsmanship was very deliberate, very personal (in sixty years, he never worked with a co-writer), and pretty much completely him.
He came to fame in the folk music revival scene of the early 60s, on the basis of a lot of live performances and several songs covered by other artists; “Early Molrning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind” were covered by everyone from a Johnny Cash-style version by, well, Johnny Cash, to a disco version by VIola Wells that topped the R&B charts for a month in 1980.
And that leads us to one of the things that always drew me to Lightfoot; his music, like Dylan’s, kicked the fey, mewling limitations of “revival” folk music out of the way. The covers wandered all over the waterfront – from Wills’s disco read of “If You Could Read My Mind”…
To the Replacements sloppy punk…
To Sarah McLachlan’s alt-pop:
Favorites, looking back at a sixty year carer? Leaving out some of the obvious ones, like “Sundown” and “Wrech of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?
Some days, it’s the maddeningly oblique “Summer Side of Life”, with not-subtle Gospel overtones, distinctly un-folky Hammond organ part, and one of the most glorious vocal hooks ever?
The subtle “Don Quixote”, a protest song about…well, everything, and one that runs through my mind every time I on the air, today?
The tartly autobiographical “Race Among The Ruins”?
The freezing-cold social commentary of “Circle of Steel”?
On any given day, any or all of ’em qualify.
But for today? Looking back at Lightfoot’s 84 years (and my own, uh, several decades), this one seems most appropriate; a wistful look back, wrestling with regret, and finding away to live with them and still live.
RIP, Gordon LIghtfoot.
…that the DFL made Minnesota a sanctuary state for Munchausen Mommies like this soulless crone.
(WARNING: You may vomit):
And when a Munchhausen Mom like this walks through a custody order to bring the kid that they’re “transing” to MN, the state will put her wishes above that of the other state’s court order.
Food for ugly, nightmarish thought.
DFL: Let’s fully fund education!
Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…
DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?
1980: Journalists and teachers were among my role models and beacons of sanity. And the guys in KISS were symptoms of the decline of civilization.
2023: One of the guys from KISS is a beacon of sanity:
And our “journalists” are signs of the decline of civilization:
I didn’t see that coming…
…more than about 30 years ago.
(Note to Soledad O’Brien: Your comparison would make sense if Paul Stanley’s parents had seen him at age six, standing in front of a mirror holding a tennis racket for a guitar, and hustled him into makeup and a leather pants suit).
What must it be like to be Jackie Rahm Little (who also goes by Joel Arthur Tueting), the guy arrested for a wave of arson and vandalism at mosques, a police car and Ilhan Omar’s office?
To commit one of the very few types of crimes that the Minneapolis law and order apparatus bother to investigate and prosecute – crime against Muslims?
If he’d burned down a bar in South Saint Paul, or a barbershop in North Minneapolis? He’d be a free man.
No, even if he had somehow gotten himself arrested. Because Big Left looks out for the insane and depraved:
By the way – I hope Nancy Nord Bence will go public with any knowledge she has of this criminal’s activities.
Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.
Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…
Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!
To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting
Rep. Vang,
You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.
You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.
This was your response:
Well,no. That’s not what it does.
Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:
The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.
No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.
Bumper sticker they don’t like?
Something overheard in a cafe?
A Trump sign?
Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.
It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.
Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.
That is all.
DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.
Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.
DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.
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