wrob's song videos
A LIST - greatest concert ever
B LIST - specialty occasion
C LIST - oblivion
This song stayed on the A list a long time, but was demoted to B. The most memorable performance was at a boozy bar - they loved it. A nice song for retirement homes and such? Deserving of a better fate? Write in!
Never ask a poet about your poem
Never ask a painter about your art
Never ask a musician about your tune
Never ask family about your life
And never ever ever
ask someone who wants to fuck you
for truth
Every so often life stops
and you face the naked truth
of your life
minus the din
of your hole-filling crutches
TERROR
Never stop escaping, little ape
(dedicated to richard sanderell, 1946-2021)
Oosa has bloodied the world
since the battle of Tippecanoe
The Moro Crater Massacre showed
oosan can-do through and through
How many graves put on layaway
as Oosa played at Dien Bien Phu
Displacement, genocide
Do sterile words offend you too?
All those bloody dictators bolstered
just to make a buck or two...
Those trails of tears tendered
courtesy of you-know-who
Peoples of color for whom
three fifths (or less) would do
Generations of wimyn
whose brilliance the world never knew
The poverty that pervades oosan people
A reign of self-terror we must undo
But Oosa didn't get everything wrong
Sweet friend, Oosa also made you
(A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots)
-by james suzman, 2020
This book doesn't crack the list of "16 books every humyn should read".
But maybe it should.
A sweeping study of homo sapiens' relationship to labor, from forager to hunter to farmer to factory to information age and beyond. The not-so-secret revelation is that we were much happier before our cleverness got cooking. Foragers work only two to three hours a day, have deeply satisfying community relationships, and no ulcers/suicide/income inequality.
The central thesis of suzman's work is that we need to return to some form of that reality, if we would save our sanity. For the thousands of years since the agricultural revolution, our lives have been a crucible of overwork (which is already an official cause of death in some countries, notably Japan). This may have been necessary when we didn't have enough resources for everyone, but around fifty years ago, our food-producing brilliance surpassed even our exponentially-expanding population. We now have enough food and resources for everyone.
More than enough.
It's time to stop pretending we don't.
Suzman's eye scans every "advancement" that changed how we work, from the rise of cities to the paradigm of scarcity to the birth of the service economy (and what that represents, a shift to an era when most workers don't produce anything tangible, because we don't NEED to - yes, i'm looking at you, you feckless financial advisers), to automation and the incipient age of robots.
He looks at the economists and philosophers who have commented on our progress, or predicted what's next.
He pulls it all together, with a plea to reclaim our lost humynity. A wonderful work.
