There's life in the old guy yet

Finished draft of new play. Amazing. I rather like it. Getting feedback. It's timely, urgent, but also sad. Couldn't be otherwise. I call it TITANIC BLUES.

Our embarrassing "leader"

Here's what passes for coherence in Prez Bone Spur's deteriorating mind. From a speech he gave over the weekend.

“I never understood wind. I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. Tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So, the world is tiny compared to the universe.”

Not quite "Four score and ..."

The American way of death

This story outrages me. "Death with dignity" is a sham in this country, even in the few states that allow physician assistance. An outrage!

My novel LAST RIGHTS deals with this issue.

Hyperdrama as a New Kind of Dramatic Texts

An academic study of three of my hyperdramas by Nahla Sadek Elgawahergy.

Check it out.

Tick tock

My models for the 21st century, or How to Behave on a Sinking Ship

As large as the youth rallies have been, they are not yet large enough to push power to meaningful change.. Youth need to shut down the country and keep it shut down. Alas, it won't happen, the climate will worsen unabated. Oh, and happy holidays!

This town is giving families $500 a month. The results are remarkable

Since February, Tomas and more than 100 other families in Stockton, California, have been receiving $500 a month with no strings attached. The policy experiment is part of the historic Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (Seed) project, led by one of the youngest mayors in America, Michael Tubbs. As the name suggests, this guaranteed income program works to demonstrate what is possible when people who are struggling to make ends meet have the cash on hand they need to feel and be in charge of their own lives – and the Economic Security Project, the organization I co-founded in 2016, is pleased to be Seed’s first backer. All told, the project will run for 18 months, but we have already gleaned useful insights.

Read it. 

Music

Making an effort to get music back into my life .... going to learn some classic songs on the chromatic, starting with Stardust. Something I can do with arthritic hands.

At the Ash Grove

I saw him many times there during the 1960s. A hero of mine.

Oregon is expensive

American exceptionalism

Humanity Is Riding Delusion to Extinction

All the knowledge needed to save the world from climate catastrophe (and even nuclear war) is on our iPhones. Unfortunately, most Americans are too busy watching porn and trolling their exes on Facebook to unite, organize and save themselves. It’s an irrational, and classically human, defense mechanism of sorts. Such is life, in all its bizarre glory, all its absurdity.

Read the article. 

Black Friday

From THE OLD BEATNIK, my one act play:

O America
if Paris had kept his cock in his pants
would a thousand ships have failed to launch?

O America 
if you had kept your cock in your pants 
would you have built your city not on a hill but in the valley? 
If you had kept your cock in your pants,
would you have settled for a destiny less than manifest?

O America 
if you keep your cock in your pants, 
will our sordid history finally come to an end? 
Let me tell you the sad truth, America: 
your history has been driven by the one-eyed tyrant between your legs.

America, here are your divorce papers 
I can't live with you any more 
We are too different   

You get noisier every year 
with your ad campaigns   with your patriotic speeches 
and I cherish silence 
for reflection and self-discovery   

You think change is progress 
and I think change also kills what does not need changing 
rituals and cycles lost forever   

You are forever buying things 
a hoarder of possessions 
and my mantra is Less Is More 
my essentials on my back   

You worship the dollar 
and I worship the blade of grass 
breaking through the sidewalk   

You want to save the world 
and I want to save myself   

America, here are your divorce papers 
I don't want your City on a Hill 
I don't want your Manifest Destiny 

I sing the music of the universe 
My soul is dancing to Mulligan and Miles 
and my spirit soars like a bird

Deemer, Charles. 3 Plays About Family . Unknown. Kindle Edition. 

6 Things Every Non-Native Should Do On Thanksgiving

Check it out.

Back in the day

This was once my favorite holiday, a celebration of friendship, from 1967 on, for about a decade, when the Deemers, Fuquas, Bradleys, Richardsons, Crookses, five couples, six kids, would gather for several days of celebration, centered on Thanksgiving. Most of us were folk musicians, so we had lots of music. All of us drank too much, so there was much partying. It was grand! Started in LA but continued after some of us moved.

A grand time! Never the same since.

Now we're talking

Elizabeth Warren Unveils Bill Revoking Medals Of Honor For Wounded Knee Massacre

The Remove the Stain Act strips the highest military award from 20 U.S. soldiers who slaughtered hundreds of Native women and children.

Read the story. 

Happy holidays??? Today's UN Report

We're on perilous ground

We are on track for a temperature rise of over 3°C. This would bring mass extinctions & large parts of the planet would be uninhabitable.

We need to supercharge our #ClimateAction ambition NOW to close the #EmissionsGap: https://t.co/AQiWUdoCzi pic.twitter.com/yCCvn3wDS8

— UN Environment Programme (@UNEP) November 26, 2019

I cannot image a scenario in which we do what needs to be done. Instead I see widespread disaster, suffering and eventually upheaval and chaos. I should be dead by then. 

v. Thanksgiving

Fourth Thursday in November marks National Day of Mourning, others celebrate Thanksgiving

Nov. 28, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of the National Day of Mourning and is an opportunity for non-native youth to explore Thanksgiving from the perspective of Native American and Indigenous people.

Read the article

Right the first time

From The Washington Post:

“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women in uniform are fighting for,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham in December 2015. In another interview, Graham said, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” Graham has now become one of Trump’s most ardent advocates.

Many, many Republicans made the same shameful switch. That's politics for you.

Ramblin': the songs and stories of Woody Guthrie

Check it out.

I've heard a storm of words in me. I guess I got to where the only way that I could cry was on some piece of paper in words like these. But I know that these words that I hear are not my own private property.
I borrowed them from you. I borrowed them, the same as I walked through the high winds and borrowed enough air to keep me moving. You may have been taught to call me by the name of a poet but I am no more of a poet than you are. I am no more of a writer of songs than you are, no better singer. The only story I have tried to write has been you. All I am is just sort of a clerk and climate tester, and my workshop is the sidewalk, your street and your field, your highway and your buildings. I am nothing more nor less than a photographer without a camera.
I knew that my trail would be a story that whirls. I knew the tale would be a freewheeler, a quick starter, a high running circling chorus that keeps on repeating over and over, and would sing every song to be sung under the one tune and the one name.
And that song and that tune ain't got no end. It ain't got no notes wrote down and there ain't no piece of paper big enough to put down on.
Every day you are down and out, and lonesome and hungry, and tired of working for a hobo's handout, there's a new verse added to this song.
Every time you kick a family out of their home, cause they ain't got the rent, and owe lots of debts, there's another verse added to this song.
When a soldier shoots a soldier, that's a note to this song. When a cannon blows up twenty men, that's part of the rhythm, and when soldiers march off over the hill and don't march back, that's the drumbeat of this song.
This ain't a song you can write down and sell. This song is everywhere at the same time. Have you ever heard it? Woody has.

How socialist Kshama Sawant triumphed over Amazon in its own backyard

Read it.

Kurt Vonnegut on Making a Living as a Writer

PART A: FROM WRITING

I used to teach a writers’ workshop . . . and I would say at the start of every semester, “The role model for this course is Vincent Van Gogh—who sold two paintings to his brother.” —Kurt Vonnegut

The toughest, most fundamental question for a serious writer or artist of any kind, if you’re not born with a silver spoon in your mouth, is how to support your habit.

Read it. 

I supported mine in several ways during the course of my career: first, like Graham Greene, by making a distinction between entertainment and literature, a journalist to pay the bills, a literary artist to stay sane. Then, primarily in 1980s, I got good at the grant game. Later, in the 1990s,  Portland State University invited me to start a screenwriting program, and I taught part-time for the next twenty years. I consider myself lucky and, with regard to grants, having good timing.

But I feel the consequences in old age, having less retirement income than I would have had if I'd have taught full time. It was worth it.

Reading (a long time ago)

Olive bread

My cousin in LA is a great fan of my olive bread, so I always send her home with a loaf when she visits. And she always sends me a photo later.

Veterans Day

New member of the family

Whom we call "honey" after his coloring.

Photos by Robin Deemer

Sabrina Ionescu, Satou Sabally lead Oregon women’s basketball to stunning upset of Team USA

What a game to watch! And the season hasn't started yet.

A teenager in 1950s LA

I became a teenager in the right place at the right
time. Although you could count on one hand the number
of blacks enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Jr. High or
Pasadena High School, Los Angeles County had large
enough a black population to justify the existence of
radio shows that played "the very best in Negro
entertainment" around the clock. One such show was
Hunter Hancock's afternoon "Harlematinee" on KFVD.

Read BIRTHING LITTLE RICHARD.

Chesterton

Ordered a book of essays. Haven't read him in a while, might be just the leveling agent in these surreal times. My late poet friend Ger Moran kept trying to get me to do a one-man show on him, taking advantage of what Ger saw as a resemblance.

Mother of all Cinderellas

The late Jim Wylie

Folk music. Check it out.

Hail to the Chief

80 years old today

Remarkable! 30 years ago you could have gotten 100 to 1 odds this wouldn't happen. No competent doctor, looking at medical records and diet and lifestyle, would have endorsed it.

I deserve only minor credit. Mainly it's luck of the draw. No reasons. Our chaotic, unpredictable universe.

Happy birthday to me.

Home sweet home

Kenneth Rexroth

Video by Primus St. John, Oregon Literary Review

Mark Twain on Columbus Day

Mark Twain wrote in Pudd’nhead Wilson of Columbus Day, Oct. 12: “It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

Two hour marathon broken

Read the story.

IN HIS OLD AGE: DEEMER AT 3:17 A.M.

(review by Bob Hicks)

So this is the way it gets.

Lying in bed awake 

at 3:17 a. m.

my wife’s heavy breathing 

the weight of the dog on my leg 

I am visited by the ghosts 

of past mistakes 

and dance to a symphony of regrets 

I wouldn’t change a thing 

This is who I am 

counting my blessings 

in the dark morning

That’s Portland writer Charles Deemer’s poem The Bottom Line, from his new collection In My Old Age, just out from Round Bend Press. Those of you who follow Deemer’s bracing, political, personal, sometimes crotchety blog The Writing Life II will remember a while back when poems started poking out, almost on their own, as if demanding voice among the general background noise of sports rants and teaching woes and struggling with scripts and ramming one’s head against the broad national venality and extolling the virtues of a simple cup of coffee and a good plate of scrapple in the morning. Old men, Deemer has discovered to his delight, get to say and do pretty much what they like, or at least what they’re still capable of saying and doing. This book is the result of that irascible fit of creativity, and I, for one, am happy for it.

Read more. 

Sorry, Bone Spur

Here's the real map: And, of course, HRC won the popular vote easily.

From WP: What’s a ‘good death’? It’s not quite the peaceful drifting off I’d imagined for my dad.

But his death was not the peaceful drifting away I’d always imagined, where you floated into a calm, morphine-induced sleep, your breath came slower and slower and then simply stopped. He vomited blood over and over. A lifelong stoic who never complained of pain — even when he’d broken a hip the year before — he twitched restlessly in bed, eyes closed, his brow furrowed and his skin clammy.

Read it. 

This is why I am a firm believer in "death by hibachi." Not always easy to realize, however. My novel Last Rights deals with this.

A reputation abroad

¿Qué es ciberdrama?

Ciberdrama, también conocido como hiperdrama, es una forma de teatro que tiene lugar bien en espacios virtuales, bien en espacios reales con características similares a los videojuegos, como la división de las obras en escenas que pueden verse de forma independiente por un espectador móvil, capaz de moverse entre el escenario. En algunos casos, la audiencia puede elegir entre una escena y otra, ramificándose estas en otras escenas y creando un hilo narrativo diferente al que hubiera podido crear otro espectador. El concepto de hyperdrama fue acuñado por el teórico y académico estadounidense Charles Deemer, quien consideraba el drama tradicional como una forma de ciberdrama. Al respecto, ha escrito títulos como The New Hyperdrama e Hyperdrama: My Obsession with a New Theater Form.

Read more

City by City, the World Turns Out for Climate Strike

Check out the inspiring photographs.

In the beginning

One brave young lady started it this way at Swedish Parliament, Aug 2018  ...

A year later, millions around the world

Republicans are corrupt, Democrats are clueless

What climate crisis? Two hours into a three-hour debate, Democrats were asked about climate change and had a five-minute discussion. No one broke from the pack, defined by clueless commentators, to bring up what is supposed to be a life-threatening, planet-threatening emergency.

Next week the kids take to the streets. Millions and millions, around the world, I hope. Maybe they can wake somebody up.

'ABC and the DNC Should Be Ashamed,' Say Progressives, After Just One Question on Climate Crisis During Democratic Debate

"I don't know how Tom Perez and DNC leaders can look themselves in the mirror after tonight."

Read the story

Most livable countries

UN's top ten list:

1

Norway

0.953

2

Switzerland

0.944

3

Australia

0.939

4

Ireland

0.938

5

Germany

0.936

6

Iceland

0.935

7

Hong Kong

0.933

7

Sweden

0.933

9

Singapore

0.932

10

Netherlands

0.931

Love At Ground Zero

In my novel, 9/11 meets Romeo & Juliet.

John David Nugent

5.0 out of 5 starsHe Does It Again

June 3, 2004

Format: Paperback

In Love At Ground Zero, novelist, playwright, and teacher Charles Deemer presents a haunting story
 in the style of Romeo and Juliet about the love between an American boy and an Indonesian Muslim
 girl during the aftermath of the World Trade Center destruction.
Deemer puts the tale in present tense, occassionally passing cynical asides directed at the reader,
 making the novel not only a well-written narrative, but a challenging interactive experience.
One not only feels for the star-crossed protagonists, but also sees himself and his prejudices as the
 families regard one another with fear in light of present situations.
This is a novel which requires a second reading before an analysis can be made. As a rule, Deemer
 writes deep, moving, complex fiction which challenges the reader to think about himself and his own
 place in this changing world rather than the escapist shallow stories which purvade (sp?) Popular
 fiction today.
However, this novel deserves that second reading. And a third. And a fourth.
Definitely something which belongs in classrooms in later years.

Check it out.

Before poison

It may feel like the world's ending – but America has reason to hope Robert Reich

If stagnant wages, near-record inequality, climate change, nuclear buildups, assault weapons, mass killings, trade wars, opioid deaths, Russian intrusions into American elections, kids locked in cages at our border, and Donald Trump in the White House don’t at least occasionally cause you feelings of impending doom, you’re not human.

But I want you to remember this: as bad as it looks right now – as despairing as you can sometimes feel – the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We will again.

Not convinced?

Read it.  More optimism than I have at the moment.

Trump's logic about Alabama

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” - George Orwell, 1984

Dorian strikes Bahamas, unprecedented (climate change)

The Last Act of the Human Comedy

There is one human story. Dressed in new clothing and using new tools, we endlessly relive it. If we still read philosophy, literature, history, poetry and theology we would not be surprised that greed, hedonism and hubris have easily defeated empathy and reason. But because we do not, because we spend hours each day getting little bursts of dopamine from electronic screens, we think we are unique in human existence. We are unable to see that the climate conditions that allowed civilizations to flourish during the last 10,000 years will soon be replaced by a savage struggle to survive.

Read the essay by Chris Hedges