Sound Pressure @soundpressure - Tumblr Blog

i find it funny that conservatives try to paint me calling for the death and destruction of multi-billionaire CEOs as some radical "woke liberal" standpoint. as if that even has anything to do with politics, especially in this era of surface level circus politics. the same way they try to politicize the hurricanes or the wildfires destroying parts of america, as if climate change is somehow a red vs. blue issue. it's no secret i'm from a deeply conservative family in the sticks of florida and i still grew up hearing "i fought the law and the law won". the healthcare system has fucked each and every member of my family in a different way at one point or another, as is the case with pretty much every family in this scorched earth nation. remember when country music, the genre currently associated the heaviest with the most conservative faction of america, used to be staunchly anti-government and about sticking it to the man? remember when the coal miners, grandfathers to the "trump-er hillbillies" of appalachia that everyone loves to write off as ignorant, fought tooth and nail for unionization because the companies that were built off their labor didn't give a shit if they lived or died? since when has "upholding traditional values" gone hand in hand with... defending lawmakers and oil tycoons. my family and i complain about the same issues at the dinner table. the men in charge better hope they can keep their digital smokescreens running as long as they can because the moment the rednecks and the hippies lay down their swords long enough to realize they have the same enemy, all hell is gonna break loose.

poem-today

A poem by Ange Mlinko

THE HOLLY AND THE IVY

“Holly and his merry men, they dancen and they sing. Ivy and her maidens, they weepen and they wring.”

Christmas tunes aren’t meant to haunt, but ages ago there was a song: Ivy prayed to be let indoors, out of the cold, redeemed from want. Holly abided indoors all along. Ivy crept on walls and floors,

choice evergreen for funerals. Holly mocked her berry (black); he would not let her in the hall. What birds flock to Ivy? Owls? To Holly come the jay and lark. Red’s the right berry for a festival.

Sinister ancestor of our Christmas tune, interred in its tenderest sentiments …. Villagers twined their maypoles with holly and ivy as we festoon the fireplace, beribbon presents, unfurl a year from camera rolls.

Commercial tunes ingratiate, yet pluck the knot of memory and bring the dead to the brink of life. A maypole for a solstice fête festooned with evergreens, such as we hairspray now into swag and wreath,

was once a man and wife entwined to fend off winter weather. Though history keeps close its pain, we heed a song that’s redefined into something merciful, untethered to the burden of its old refrain.

Ange Mlinko

artbycaro

Bob Dylan “The Times They Are A-Changin’”

soundpressure

Love that it's Bob with a Jaguar

laurenwilford

“Meanwhile, I began to notice that, as kid culture filled up most of my days, I had been exiled from adult culture. Or rather, I began to notice that parents in the US lived in a strange, lonely and depressing gulf between two opposing cultures: one designed entirely around the fantasies not necessarily of children but of parents imagining the kind of uber-stimulation and play their children might need; the other designed almost entirely for single people or couples without children. Mixing these cultures is taboo. It was utterly surreal and hilarious to take my little brother, a single, 29-year-old musician living in Sweden, to the Children’s Museum – ‘What is this place?’ he kept repeating. It was also surreal and slightly stressful to take our daughter to certain restaurants and, once, to a bar in Portland at midnight, or out for the evening with adult friends, and it was off-limits to take her to many shows and performances.

“Our ‘family life’ was not supposed to intersect with our ‘adult life’. Being a family meant that we were eating at the local pizza house with its colouring pages and sticky booths; going to the event sponsored by Massive Corporation X or Y, where kids could jump in bouncy houses and glue-stick feathers to construction paper; spending our Saturdays at the playground. Then maybe we’d indulge in a ‘date night’ at some hip izakaya in Lawrenceville, downing cocktails while bleeding $15 per hour for a babysitter.”

“Why are American Kids Treated as a Different Species from Adults?”, Sarah Menkedick, Aeon