Christ Came To Nickelsville

Tonight I drove my codeine cough syrup addled ass down to Nickelsville for a 7 pm "strategy meeting" to discuss how the homeless campers were going to deal with their eviction, scheduled for sometime after 5 pm tomorrow. The media keeps asking us for a convenient time to arrive for the requisite dramatic footage. The answer, for the record, is "We don't know. Ask Greg."

The meeting was all about morale boosting and solidarity building. With media and cops in attendance, little actual planning was either possible or desirable.

There were numerous moments that made being there worthwhile. Within moments of my arrival, for instance, El Centro de la Raza Director Roberto Maestes greeted me as "young man." While this was probably because he couldn't remember my name, it still did my about-to-turn-48 heart good. This is a guy who was in the thick of Wounded Knee when I was just a pimply thirteen-year-old stoner.

I also spoke with a mysterious man named Harry. The last time I saw him was when we met at the Camp4Unity demonstration last June. A few hours before my arrest, we had a brief conversation that culminated in him handing me a hundred dollar bill he'd found on a sidewalk. "I don't want you to just pay the electric bill with this. Do something special." I told him tonight that one of our more challenged vendors had told me that he and his equally challenged wife were having a very tough time, and he just wished they could afford go out for dinner. I was able to say, "I'm going to make you very happy. Go somewhere nice." This, in turn, made Harry very happy.

Jim Page told me that if Mayor Nickels evicted the campers, he'd retaliate by playing a concert on his front lawn. This is the most original threat I've heard in years.

I told Nickelsville organizer Scott Morrow that I'd been spending my idle moments while home sick pondering what his life was like right now. This made him smile.

But the moment that had me thinking on my drive home was my conversation with the young man in the tan cap. He was PTSD, he said, and had lost a good ninety jobs in recent years. "I can't stay in shelters," he said. "I can't cope with the people." His cap said Heb. 10:10 across the bill. "What's Hebrews 10:10," I asked.

He grew slightly agitated and reached for his pocket bible. "You'd think I'd know this by now," he said, "since people keep asking."

He found it. "By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all," he read. His face grew serious and he looked me dead in the eye. "I think that if Jesus were alive, he'd be right here in Nickelsville."

"Jesus is right here in Nickelsville," I said, believing every word of it. "Places like this, where people come together to love and care for eachother, is where Jesus lives."

As I drove home, I considered how it is that I, an existentalist agnostic if ever there was, could say such a thing and actually believe it to be true.

The answer is surprisingly simple. God is love, and you don't need to believe in God to believe in love. Our notions of God are just framework for what's real. What's real is love, and love is real. And anyone who was at Nickelsville tonight knows just what I mean.

Jim Page, Joe Martin, and Artis at Folklife

When I heard that Jim Page, Joe Martin, and Artis the Spoonman — three of my favorite people in the world — would all be sharing a stage at Folklife, my Monday afternoon plans suddenly became clear. Take the girls and the video camera. The sun came out on the drive there. Twin A was in doggy heaven. Twin B waved her arms, nodded her head, and danced. We met our friend Revel, who graciously kept the girls distracted while I shot this video. Then we all ate strawberry shortcake on the grass. A lovely afternoon.

Head Full of Pictures

Jim Page dropped off a promotional DVD the Iraqi Children's Campaign did using one of his songs. He was sitting in on the editorial committee today. Artis invited him and he asked if it was OK that he was there. Is he kidding? The song is Head Full of Pictures, and the video is graphic in places. Here's a review I wrote when his CD by that name was new. It is the first CD of his that I truly love. The only one. Really. But I'm looking forward to others.

Lots of Seattleites think they know what Jim Page sounds like. Fast, leftist lyrics delivered in a nasally sneering style that moves most people down the sidewalk after just a song or two. Along with his frequent partner Artis the Spoonman, Jim Page has been this town’s musical equivalent of an IWW soap boxer for more than 25 years.

Here’s what many people don’t know: somewhere along the line, Jim’s music became more appealing. His vocal style mellowed, his songwriting broadened, the guitar work became tighter, but the hard political edge stayed sharp, slashing away at the denial and cant and outright horror that is American life in 2006.

Jim’s latest CD, Head Full of Pictures, released this year on the Whid-Isle label, is not to be missed. Backed by Hanuman’s Scott Law on mandolin and guitar, long-time session violinist and producer Billy Oskay, and Mark Ettinger on bass, Page has found a deeply layered folk sound to compliment his politics. The music gives the words a universality that, hopefully, will lift Page’s extraordinary songwriting to a new audience.

While there’s a bit here for everyone — a few love songs, a clever ditty about meeting one’s own clone, and a ribald conversation between Jesus and Buddha — this is fundamentally a war CD.

The opening trilogy of songs sets the tone, beginning with Petroleum Bonaparte’s loping bass line and spooky violin. “Hey George, what’s the body count? Does anybody know? When they’re brown and foreign do you bother or do you just let them go?” This moves into the title track, a song about PTSD (“I just wanna get numb and stay that way all the time”) that features first-rate mandolin and violin work from Law and Oskay over Jim’s driving guitar. Then comes Andres Raya, a jaw-droppingly perfect piece of songwriting that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll play about ten times straight before moving onto the rest of the CD.

Andres Raya was a Marine who, home on leave after a tour in Iraq, lured police into a tragic suicide-by-cop scenario that left himself and one cop dead, with another seriously wounded. Grainy video footage of the incident can be found online. Raya is seen, in a rain poncho with an assault rifle, moving “like a marionette on a slippery wire” across a parking lot, is if he’s caught up in a firefight in a war zone 7,500 miles away.

In Page’s deft hands, this becomes a story about a local boy from a dead end town who couldn’t live with what he’d become. “Some people have all the chances and some people have none / you lay down your burden where the river runs / reason and morality you can put them both aside / there’s flowers for Andres Raya in the alley where he died.”

There is also a Rachel Corrie tribute, about the 23 year-old peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. Page captures the innocence, outrage, hope, and sense of personal responsibility that make the Corrie story iconic. “And I’d rather be dancing, dancing to Pat Benatar, but someone has to do something about it and here we are.”

The other standout is Something About Us, a Bruce Cockburn-ish meditation about the “blood all over Uncle Sam’s brand new shoes.” Page sings the long, dark history that stretches from the Indian Wars to Abu Ghraib. “There’s something about us / that we don’t want to have to face / there’s a killer instinct deep in this American race / just ask anyone who’s been on the other end of that leash / and they’ll tell you.” An African mbira and a simple guitar line played over Page’s percussive rhythm offers an appropriately haunted feel to the song’s unspeakable theme.

Head Full of Pictures is a brilliantly rendered political folk album that stands up well to repeated listenings and speaks passionately to the present. If you’re a fan of Jim Page, this is as good as he gets. If you’re not, forget whatever you think you know and get this one anyway. You won’t be sorry.

Over My Dead Body

I went looking for something extraordinary and found it close to home. It fits with this weeks emerging theme. Jim Page with Joe Martin on harmonica and vocal back-up, last summer at a Capitol Hill Veterans for Peace benefit. Beautiful and moving. The second clip is from the same show. Jim nails Something About Us and Joe plays his fucking heart out.

We are born in nature and in nature we will die
And if we don't make it, it's not because we didn't try

They say they will incorporate the world
Over my dead body, over my dead body,
over my dead body, over mine.

They have all the money but we have the will
And I would rather be a match than a paper dollar bill
They have all the guns, all we are is flesh and blood
But we will multiply our numbers and drown them in our flood

They say they will incorporate the world
Over my dead body, over my dead body,
over my dead body, over mine

They have all the power, that's what they say
But we will turn those tables, take their power away
We will not be dissuaded and we will not turn around
We will face the barricades and we will tear them down

They say they will incorporate the world
Over my dead body, over my dead body,
over my dead body, over mine

You can call me a fool, that's alright with me
But I will live to see this good round world breaking free