By Jeanne Treadway from Next World Stories, published in January 2009.

FOR MORE THAN 20 years I’ve relied on three musical traditions to carry me through the ferociously maniacal holidays. On Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree makes me laugh so hard I usually pee myself. Dec. 8, I mourn John Lennon’s death and celebrate Jim Morrison’s birth. I dervishly dance to Spanish Caravan, Waiting For the Sun, LA Woman and When the Music’s Over until I fall in a puddle of sweat and spent euphoria. Then I play a hodgepodge of John and Yoko and add my personal chorus to So This Is Christmas. I thank John and talk a bit to him about the state of Peace on Earth these days.

Image by Jude Valentine.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve, I play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Jessye Norman’s incredible soprano lifting Ode to Joy to the heavens. These personal rituals remind me of the essentials: ecstatically singing out loud, dancing long and hard, laughter, peace, love and joy. So often during the past 10 years, though, I felt as if I was just going through the motions during these sacred days. What the hell could I say to John Lennon about peace?

Since Nov. 5th, my mood has improved. I actually feel hope stealing around my heart and into my thoughts, that ‘audacity of hope’ thing. It’s not a gushy goofy hope either. I am all sunshine and daisies because Barack Hussein Obama got himself elected but I still simmer in an edgy stew of 10 outrageous and unholy years, which can suddenly boil up and choke me with fury. So, I’m cautiously happy. No matter how brilliant, well-mannered and beautiful he is, Obama is a politician and most of them are scoundrels, so he might be one too. But when I read that our soon-to-be-President called Nancy Reagan to apologize for making a joke about seances in the White House, my cheerfulness settled in for a while. This man just might have integrity. He might understand his power to wound and to heal. Imagine.

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“Only humans have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don’t use their brains, and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere — a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they’ll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there in my vision, and it makes me shudder to think about it.”
– The Lakota Shaman Lame Deer
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Revised. Non-collige virgo rosas.

Good Morning,

The Moon is in Cancer now, making a sextile to the Taurus Sun today. This water-to-earth combination should provide a little relief over yesterday’s scattered mental energy of the Gemini Moon with so many Aquarius planets in the scene; i.e.,. for a couple of days we had an Airy Overload.

Venus in Aries, just done being retrograde, is currently leaning into her third square to Pluto: I’ll come back to that in a second.

Mercury is doing something pretty interesting: he/she/it is in the last degree of Taurus, moving slower than one degree a day. This is a shift in consciousness, as Mercury slows to a station, which will occur in about one week in Gemini. The ingress to Gemini is Thursday afternoon/evening in USA time zones.

The forthcoming Mercury retrograde involves a series of transitions of Mercury between Gemini and Taurus, which will provide a useful and interesting contrast between airy Mercury and earthy Mercury.

Mercury in Gemini can be pretty gosh darned slippery and tricksterish, and now we’re going to have him/her/it slow to a station there, making a quincunx to Pluto and a trine to the North Node. Given the surge of vital force (i.e., sex energy) that is spouting at this time, and the way we are trained to convert that to fear, we may be in for an interesting ride on the back of a pig. Note, this is not the normal time of year to be talking about death. It is springtime here in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s time to be frolicking in the fields and forests, flirting your head off and sniffing the pretty people as they walk by.

Then again it was T.S. Eliot who said that April is the cruelest month, breeding memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. What he was saying is that if you’re feeling dead inside and springtime calls you to life, that will be painful.

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Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Rahmana Finney in San Francisco, one of our new and vibrant additions to the Planet Waves staff. Below, she weighs in on Obama, race and Prop. 8. –RA

Dear Friend and Reader,

BETTY DAVIS IS ONE of my all-time favorite singers. She is a beautiful, statuesque, caramel Leo fireball who recorded a number of albums in the 1970s, and then just disappeared into relative obscurity. She dated Jimi Hendrix, was married to Miles Davis (who said she was just too young and wild) and had a kick-ass band backing her up which included members of Sly Stalone’s band and Sylvester doing back-ground vocals.

Betty Davis from the 1970s album cover "This is it." Photographer unknown.

Sylvester was an openly gay man who could sing his ass off and did so for everyone from Chaka Khan to Luther Vandross, and unfortunately eventually died of AIDS. Betty’s music is just pure FUNK music at its nastiest and sweatiest. One of her most famous tunes is “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up”—a funk classic in the underground community of soul and funk music heads.

She wore lingerie on stage, cursed at the audience, and her album covers are some of the most erotic, sexy things ever made. She was unabashedly wild and free—long before Madonna or Britney, but little is known about her. She wore a big kinky afro and most definitely did not fit the establishment’s acceptance of beauty. But I think looking at her picture, you will agree she is the bomb.

I love Leos; especially Leo women. They are such rebels. They live by a creed that is very popular in the Black community. It is called “I don’t give a fuck.” It can be very handy in life. Very effective when dealing with cut-off utilities, racist bosses and the visual stimulation we are often assaulted by daily in our neighborhoods of crack addicts and gutted buildings. I am thinking of Miss Betty Davis as I celebrate this Leo man we just elected to be the first Black man for President of the United States of America, and simultaneously repealed the right to marriage for the gay community. Ah, bittersweet—one of my favorite words.

It applies to the first and last breath you take and every one in between. Because I toasted last night, as a matter of fact, shed tears, with black people who voted for Obama and Proposition 8, banning marriage for anyone who isn’t straight. Damn it why did it have to be bittersweet? I am amazed that these same black people who are overjoyed at a milestone in the history of this country being set, could be comfortable with such blatant prejudice. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why people care who other people are fucking. I just don’t get it! And the thought occurs to me: HOMOPHOBIA IS ANOTHER FORM OF SEXISM.

Does anyone feel me on this one? This Leo man we just voted for is tall, dark and handsome, straight and married, and a father. He is not the typical angry stereotype of Black men. He is measured, calm, sophisticated and very political. And he fits into our comfortable categories. He’s not threatening. Why is gay marriage threatening? Why are people so uncomfortable even just imagining two people of the same gender having sex?

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Dear Friend and Reader,

YESTERDAY, AS THE election results rolled in, Eric wrote that we have a long struggle ahead, a massive clean-up job after close to a decade of President Bush. He’s right, and as hundreds of electoral votes built up momentum in a sweeping and early victory for Senator Barack Obama, votes were counted with slightly less fanfare in Florida, Arizona, Arkansas and California.

At a "No on 8" party at the Music Box Henry Fonda in Hollywood, Jeff Miller, left, and Todd Thurman, who are married, listen to Barack Obama's speech with their son, Justin. Photo by Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times.

Florida, Arizona and California voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman in their constitutions, making same-sex marriage virtually impossible to gain. In Arkansas, they banned fostering or adopting children “outside of a valid marriage.” This was imposed to prevent same-sex couples from adopting or fostering children, though it now affects cohabiting heterosexual couples, single people and anyone else who isn’t married.

In California, the decision was joined with a win for animal rights activists, whose proposition to eliminate battery cages (confining farm animals to a space smaller than two-feet squared) reigned victorious. This means that thousands of California citizens checked “yes” for animal rights and “yes” for revoking human rights.

This topic is a difficult one for me, both because I’m gay and because I devoted a year of my life towards a thesis against the institution of marriage: to condense 100 pages into a couple of sentences, I’ve researched marriage as a culture that extols one group, privileging its behaviors and mores over less traditional, but no less loving, partnerships and families. And within the institution itself comes a set of rules, based on a history of patriarchal order, that divides us into masculine and feminine expectations for work outside the home, household labor, child rearing and, yes, sex.

I think it’s time to move past marriage, to develop a form of partnership that’s inclusive of all the formations that relationships take. We should accept not just same-sex and opposite-sex monogamous partnerships, but those of caregivers and the disabled, of cohabiting friends and siblings, of people who are committed to more than one partner. These relationships exist, they don’t fit and are denigrated by the exclusive definition of marriage and they deserve equal recognition under the law.

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Fast check-in…

I live and work in Kingston, a city of 23,000 in the hills north of the big city. Kingston is the county seat, so all the campaigns have their offices here. The Republicans are right downstairs from my studio; there is nothing much going on. I just spent an hour over at Democratic headquarters around the corner by the cigar shop, and they’re still working the phones and driving people to the polls, which close in more than two hours.

The mood is definitely not elated, but it’s calm and upbeat. There is not that feeling of “we’re about to lose.” I think that most Democrats and those supporting Obama are cautious and not feeling too confident. In the often mythical war between Dems and Pubs, Dems have taken a beating the past decade; most of this involves not Republicanism but rather church-based, allegedly Christian, not terribly charitable, neoconservatism.

Apparently voter turnout was extremely strong across the country — I keep reading record numbers — and that’s for a reason: beneath the hope and optimism lurks a sense of fear and anger. And there is some concern. Despite the attack ads, Obama is not exactly a leftist or a liberal or a radical. He is a straight-on moderate; he is a product of a political process, though I feel he’s kept some of his values intact. I think it’s crucial that we not confuse him with a progressive, though he is closer to it than anything we’ve seen in a long time.

I’m going to keep repeating this: whoever takes office, the work begins now. I suggest you commit to it now. There is a very, very big mess to clean up; nearly a decade of Bush, more than half a century of post-World War II growth (with its economic ‘other side of the tracks’ and an environmental situation) that seems to have reached a maximum limit.

We are, as I’ve written many times, entering a phase of prolonged restructuring…rethinking…enforced changes…the kinds of changes we don’t like to make. We invest a lot of shadow material in Saturn, Pluto and Capricorn: all of our authority issues; many of our security issues; many of our family issues. And for the foreseeable future, it is Saturn, Pluto and Capricorn (with a big dose of Uranus) that are in the picture.

Uranus brings in the element of fun: of liberation, of throwing off the mental shackles and expressing ourselves. Remember that old line from Emma Goldman, about how if she can’t dance, it’s not her revolution. This is not quite a revolution yet, but you can have fun even when you’re cleaning up after a party

Rockin’ on,

–efc

Obama won in Ohio — it’s all over folks. Here’s a farewell tribute to Sarah Palin:

Hello from Dominick’s Cafe in Kingston,

…where I am going to try to write a couple of weekly horoscopes. Or maybe I better just try one. Anyway, it’s not working…all these people in the cafe want their charts done. They are calling in their favors…they have fed me every day for six months. And Rachel and Genevieve are doing all the work today while I sit here with my laptop and teenagers and their parents crowded around. I got back from voting in New Paltz at 6:45 am, came back, did a little of this and that…and passed the fuck out.

But here is what I’ve been thinking.

I’ve never, ever seen such interest in an election. And this is the direct result of Mssrs Bush, Rove and Cheney and their shenanigans the past eight years.

It is true, we’ve paid a high cost for this level of participation…and the soldiers and families in Iraq who continue to be the last people to die for a lie — in the immortal words of John Kerry — have really paid that price. We have sacrificed civil liberties, $6 trillion in debt, and a government structure that is basically gutted, pillaged and ravaged; a banking structure that remains on the brink of collapse; we have a lot of ideologue judges injected throughout the federal courts, and John Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court for the next decade or so…whose decisions will affect countless millions of lives.

But suddenly we care. Suddenly it matters. When the votes are counted, we will see that there was unprecedented turnout today, and there are many thousands of people going to the polls with cameras, video cameras and with the ability to report their experiences on the Internet when they get home. The denial factor is starting to finally give way to awareness. It has taken a lot.

We have a moment when a presidential candidate will walk up to the poll in his home city, surrounded by reporters as he slides his ballot into the machine, and say, “I hope this works. I’ll be really embarrassed if it doesn’t,” something that everyone has felt today.

We are using the power that’s in our hands…and we cannot stop.

No matter who is elected or installed into office today, we need this measure of vigilance. The First Amendment had and has a purpose, and it has new life with the Internet being so widely used. This is keeping people aware and personally involved, and it’s keeping the media honest because there cannot be too big of a gap between what we hear on CNN and what we read on so many different blogs and alternative news sites.

This is actual progress.

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

Editor’s note: the following piece was written by Shanna Philipson. –RA

Brother, beware! Obama wants your closet, too.

Before you cast your vote for Obama, you may want to consider his views on your pants.

Kevin and Markus Deamus of Dallas, TX. In 2007, Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway sought to ban the low-hanging pants trend. Obama also opposes. Photo by Mei-Chun Jau/DMN.

That’s right: Obama wants you to pull up yo’ pants. In an obvious appeal to the grandmother vote, Obama revealed his true conservative feelings in an interview posted today on MTV.com. Responding to a write-in question from a young man, Obama stated:

…brothers should pull up their pants. You’re walking by your mother, your grandmother, and your underwear is showing. … What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face that you don’t have to pass a law [against], but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people. And, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.

Never has a candidate reached deeper into the collective American closet than now. Pull up my pants? For real? Where will this lead, and more importantly — where could this end? For example, under an Obama administration would we have to tuck in our shirts? Tie our shoes? Slick down our cowlicks and groom our eybrows? Would we have to say “excuse me” after we burp? Or “pardon me” when we step on another’s toes? Will we suddenly need to know which fork to use — or the difference between “who” and “whom”?

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