Join Us via Zoom (Zoom link below).
I’ll be on this event that way, by Zoom, as I’m in beautiful but parched Iowa City until the election. I won’t be spending much time on 2017-21 in my talk. My main topic will be the current US political situation and the urgent need and possibilities for an actual revolution. Imagine that!
Saturday, Oct 5th at 5:00 PM CT
Paul Street, author of “This Happened Here: the Trumping of America”
Meeting # 3,787 -
The speaker will discuss the lessons and nature of Donald Trump’s (first?) presidency, and will further present a radical analysis of current fraught US political situation on the eve of the 2024 presidential and likely post-election scenarios.
College of Complexes, weekly free speech forum on social issues and current events
Meetings at Dapper’s Restaurant, 2901 W. Addison (at California), Chicago, IL, and on Zoom
Main Page
Schedule
http://www.collegeofcomplexes.org/CoC-Current-Schedule-of-Speakers.html
https://www.facebook.com/collegeofcomplexes/
To Join the Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81216467150
Mobile phone
+13126266799,,81216467150# US (Chicago)
Landline
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
Meeting ID: 812 1646 7150
The music: I was going through old files on my phone and found this and said “damn, this is actually kind of cool; I think it deserves to go up. Maybe not, but what the Hell.” Two things: (1) a silly “song” about Amerika; (2) after a little dark minor key riffing, yet a different offbeat way to play Masters of War - version #648. (One day perhaps I will devote some word energy to my own lyrics for songs— right now politics get all that energy). Listening to this recording I realize why I probably forgot about it: the keyboard volume was too low and so you hear a bunch of finger tapping on the Yamaha. Today ’m like “so what? I’ll never hit this quite this way again.”
I think this is when I started liking doing haunting transitions from from organ to “acoustic” piano.
Speaking of haunting, as in 2016 and 2020 I am struck by the dark synergy between cooler weather, earlier nightfall, Halloween, and scary AF US presidential elections featuring horrible fascist monsters and bloody-jawed Masters of War.
A Halloween, election season memory: I knew the Trumpenstein was going to win about this time of year in 2016 when two things happened:
Bernie Sanders came to Iowa City and couldn’t get people enthused about the dismal Hillary Clinton campaign. This guy was a total rock star with overflow crowds out here when he was campaigning for himself in Iowa City earlier in the year. Now he was out here for the neoliberal elitist Hillary “My Turn” Clinton and he couldn’t get folks excited. I was like, “yikes, Trump may really win.” (Sanders told his friend the late U Iowa diplomatic historian Jeffrey Cox that “it’s like this in Wisconsin and Michigan too. I can’t sell her.”)
The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, proving that anything is possible.
College of Complexes Speaking Engagement on Zoom Tomorrow Night