Thinking about the past spring in my garden as we now move towards Autumn… my favorite time of the year… do you feel the moment… my heart is feeling so good.
Write a Letter
My letter to the Politicians is something I wrote up when politicians send me their many letters for gathering money for their campaigns. Meant to be a humorous antidote but also saying something important at the same time. I need money in running a small business. Isn’t that the same as campaigning for a cause?
I have sent out many of my letters. Sometimes a few times to the same politicians. I never got a response until today.
I started to write postcards for swing states. It is fun to join in and help spread the word and try and influence votes through opinion and with good intent.
I made up what I called my Strong Women Series on Postcards. One was of Stacy Abrams. Now she is running for Governor in Georgia. I thought she might need some of these postcards. So, I got in all together with a letter to send.
I went to my local Post Office where my P.O Box is located.
I mailed off my little package with glee to the Abrams campaign, yes with a monetary donation.
Then I went to check my P.O Box. I had a retrieve postcard for a package. I went back to wait in line for my unknown package.
Not a clue who, from Washington DC, would be sending me a first-class do not bend large envelope to Hudley.
So, it was a real happy moment that in a moments time that two of my favorite politicians would cross ways by way of letters.
Yes, I did send Joe one of my standard letters. Damn it he did respond. He did not ask for money either. Wow my heart is so happy!
Reminds me years ago when my oldest son was about 3. He painted a wonderful rainbow for me. So, I sent a copy of the painting to Bill Clinton with a political ideal letter too. Thoughts that I shared with him in high regard.
He also wrote me back with a very similar letter.
The only two presidents who wrote me back.
In my life I have written lots of letters to all kinds of people. It is always nice when I get a response. But most times I don’t.
New Flipside Fanzine Vimeo Out
To bring forth original staff to share their youthful rebellion!
Hudley Flipside Presents…
It is my goal to bring an originally real narrative of Los Angeles Flipside Fanzine. I think it is a great narrative creation story.
When Flipside Fanzine put out our first 10 Live videos, we never planned to have them viewed in a theater. The Videos sold were created as home bound entertainment for fans of a growing punk scene. We charged 20 bucks for them. We only excepted cash. Sent to our P. O. Box. I managed the mail orders and then put the cash in our bank account. It was then used for upcoming projects.
This is what I had in mind when doing these close to an hour, more or less, videos. I did my homework.
Vimeo is the best I found to show these narrative documentary films. It is not a live podcast. It is put together with foresight and narrative interview history and with what I have preserved. Creating a narrative using many different professional editing programs. Like Adobe Premier Pro, my iPhone, Zoom and other sources.
A lot of documentary experts recommend this as a good way to go for small business entrepreneurs like myself.
Fun stupid t-shirts
http://tee.pub/lic/wOFJc1mFUIE
Good feelings coming back on a lazy Saturday in the San Fernando Valley.
Punk Rock Historian and Profession Consultant
Hudley Flipside
Moving slowly out into the world again like a young kid. But instead, I am now an old fool. That suits me just fine.
I feel a vacuum feeling drawing me down watching all the big festivals and bands touring. Been to maybe two shows since the pandemic began. Not eager to go out. Yet today I had to do something new locally. I saw a record store on Devonshire Street and Topanga on Facebook.
In Chatsworth a once sleepy town in the San Fernando Valley.
Yes, the horse stables are gone but finding DEADELY WAX Records did give me that old-fashioned feeling. No parking meters around and inside the place was cool and clean. A variety of records of all kinds from generations and genres.
Youngest son and I walked in and were greeted with a friendly hello.
All those good feelings coming back on a lazy Saturday in the San Fernando Valley.
From Jazz to Punk even saw a B People LP. I was walking through generations of music as flash backs mixed as albums passed my eyes in the viewing stalls.
I settled on two and son on one.
These summertime blues are eased a bit with a free feeling of what it was like in the valley once.
Now today it was just as nice. Easy traffic on the corner of Devonshire Street and Topanga an example of what life was like when head-shops and record stores once ruled everywhere.
Great place to go.
Son can stop by before or after going to CSUN and if I get the need I got a place to visit. Feels good to support a local small business record store.
This is the time for Jose Quavo
Punk Rock Historian and Profession Consultant
Hudley Flipside
The San Fernando Valley was a lot of fun for a short time.
Creating plenty of “amber moments” with Lynn, Sue, and a few others.
Today I had to make a Target run for my 100% organic cotton underwear or “panties” for short. Like it was such a big deal when it was announced in the film, Anatomy of a Murder. Yet it amazes me, and I feel like a pervert when I go into the lady’s underwear section here. It has expanded out with a million types of sexy underwear. I guess women put a lot of time in to thinking about underwear and being sexy regardless of the material. All synthetic and… well yucky. The little section of cotton underwear is small indeed.
“Sister Rose and Sister Blanche.
Blanche saying they’re going door to door to collect …lingerie…for needy sexy people”
~ Funny / The Golden Girls
Yet I digress, what really got me writing today is a song that came on the PA system while walking around. ‘Strawberry Letter 23.”
“Strawberry Letter 23” is a 1971 song written and composed by Shuggie Otis from his 1971 album Freedom Flight. It is also widely known by the 1977 cover version recorded by the Brothers Johnson and produced by Quincy Jones.
I knew the song briefly 1977 as a time when the tide came in with a variety of music. New wave, soul, disco, pop, punk, and progressive music. All merging in a kaleidoscope of fun.
Starbaby’s, The Mineshaft and The Red Onion were open for dancing. It was a great time for singing in back alleys with my buddies,
“This is the time for Jose Quavo.”
We all took shots and headed back into the clubhouse “to dance the night away.”
This was one of our favorite songs.
Happy happy international Cat Day !
Being Unladylike
Punk Rock Historian and Profession Consultant
Hudley Flipside
We have not yet learned to value the creativity, courage, and competence required to negotiate the ordinary but devastating frustrations and crises of human experience.
Jacobs, Ruth H. Be an Outrageous Older Woman Harper Collins. Kindle Edition.
“Alone with just a little bit of soul, right now, now, baby
Darling, everything is gonna be alright
One more time, just one more time, baby…”
What strange times we are living in. The contrary nature of life is overwhelming. Nature seems a bit outrageous and shrilling.
Just last week youngest son was meant to go on his first Geophysics lab above Ojai, California. The coastal regions to studying the mighty earth and her movements.
Then he went to one party with ten friends. The only time in a long while where he felt safe. Then right before the event he got the Covid19 tracer call. He did not get to go to his well planned out lab. That was last Monday. Most likely the worst day of his life. The family all tested negative. We were lucky. Yet I was mad as hell.
The opportunity will come again because that is his major.
Security is a good need, I think. I did not always feel this way.
Today while watching some news about the floods in Kentucky a commercial came on. I don’t know what was being sold but the song caught my attention. It was the song Security.
Otis Ray Redding Jr. (September 9, 1941 – December 10, 1967) was an American singer and songwriter. He is considered one of the greatest singers in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the “King of Soul”, Redding’s style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s. Label: Volt – 45-117, Vinyl, 7″, 45 RPM, Single, Promo 1964.
But my favorite recording of this song is by, well you know, The Saints.
Label: Harvest – HAR 5166
Format: Vinyl, 7″, 45 RPM, Single Country: UK 1978
What do you do if they call you shrill because you demand your rights? You don’t get anxious about being unladylike. You realize that a man who fought for his rights would be considered appropriate and that ideas of what is ladylike have been used to control women for centuries. You translate shrill to assertive and smile smugly. Congratulate yourself that you have learned how to be assertive in your later years despite your socialization to be a “good girl” and cave in when confrontation arises, fearful of censure.
Jacobs, Ruth H. Be an Outrageous Older Woman, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
A View To Enjoy…
In The Midnight Hour
Punk Rock Historian and Professional Consultant.
~ Hudley Flipside
So, this song came forth out of a longing to bring all this tighter together. Fermenting in my being. Diversity, the gospel, soul, rock & roll the wildness and enthusiastic mission of working and recording music.
Rise to stardom: “In the Midnight Hour” (1965)
The genesis of “In the Midnight Hour” was a recording session on May 12, 1965, at which Wexler worked out a powerful rhythm track with studio musiciansSteve Cropper and Al Jackson of the Stax Records house band, including bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn. (Stax keyboard player Booker T. Jones, who usually played with Dunn, Cropper and Jackson as Booker T. & the M.G.’s, did not play on the studio sessions with Pickett.) Wexler said to Cropper and Jackson, “Why don’t you pick up on this thing here?” He performed a dance step. Cropper explained in an interview that Wexler told them that “this was the way the kids were dancing; they were putting the accent on two. Basically, we’d been one-beat-accenters with an afterbeat; it was like ‘boom dah,’ but here was a thing that went ‘um-chaw,’ just the reverse as far as the accent goes.”[13]Pickett, Wilson, The Very Best of Wilson Pickett, Atlantic Recording Corp. and Rhino records Inc., 1993, liner notes by Kevin Phinney
Sometimes I feel I am standing still. I watch the Ed Sullivan show reruns and learn so much more about music. This is a magical place I have found, and I come across stories that inspire my imagination which is anything but standing still. The contrary nature of life now.
I saw The Chambers Brothers band. My mind drifted and I thought of the band Death and the Bad Brains or the mysterious DC band the Enzymes.
The Chambers Brothers band were live on Ed’s show. Playing their instruments and singing into the microphones while Brian Keenan, with a straight back and smile on his face, was thrashing his drums. I felt a jolt of enthusiasm rejuvenate my heart.
A song that moved through more than one, two or three generations and still is lingering to tell us all something real and magical about ourselves and music. Bouncing from the heart of American soil over the big pond to England and back again to the Ed Sullivan show reruns.
This is amazing to me. I am digging it immensely.
The Jam in 1977: Paul Weller, Rick Buckler, Bruce Foxton. Picture: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
That’s when my love come tumbling down
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
When there’s no one else around
I’m gonna take you, girl, and hold you
And do all things I told you, in the midnight hour
Yes I am, oh, yes I am
One more thing I just wanna say right here
I’m gonna wait ’til the stars come out
And see that twinkle in your eyes
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
That’s when my love begins to shine
You’re the only girl I know
That really love me so, in the midnight hour
Oh yeah, in the midnight hour
Yeah, alright, play it for me one time now
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
That’s when my love come tumbling down
I’m gonna wait, way in the midnight hour
That’s when my love begin to shine, just you and I
Oh, baby, huh, just you and I
Nobody around, baby, just you and I
Alright, you know what?
I’m gonna hold you in my arms, just you and I
Oh yeah, in the midnight hour
Oh baby, in the midnight hour
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Steve Cropper / Wilson Pickett
In the Midnight Hour lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc
The Plastic Hummingbird
“Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save.”
~ Sabrina Fair (subtitled “A Woman of the World”) is a romantic comedy written by Samuel A. Taylor
I recently purchased a wind chime. Well, it is spiral plastic flowers and hummingbirds that hang on the larger arbor of a hanging tubular burgundy flower bush highlighting our back French doors. They are also solar lights at night that are magical to look at. The cats like to look at it and so do I.
I went for a short cool down swim close to the morning, I looked up to see the plastic colorful hummingbirds and flowers spiraling around in the soft cool breeze. It was going to be a hot day. The Plastic Hummingbird sounded like the nice name of a book.
I started to ponder what the book would be about. The many places we have to be. In nature listening. On the computer writing. Looking into a realm of social media or in our mind’s imagination and then the world of our feelings. We have many places to be or focus our attention.
The world of technology is rather new, but we have long lived in the world of architecture, science, and places of another human’s imagination. Films, books, and music are blending all of these realms.
There is also the intuitive realm or magic, faith, and synchronicity.
The computer being a kind of oracle. Build by codes among codes among coding… computer programming. A vast new realm of communication on all levels of consciousness by conscious humans or the ‘lack-off.’
Later I went for another quick swim to cool off and once out of the pool sitting on my chair under the cool harbor next to my plastic hummingbird, I hear the sound of a real hummingbird. Under the vining vines of tubular flowers and bush, I see hummingbird right before my gaze. Weaving a little back and forth beating wings of 10-15 times per second. I look at the plastic hummingbird and then the living one and realize the contrary nature of life, plastic, and nature. Quickly grasping those things made and invented by humankind and those made purely by nature.
I flash back to a 1954 film entitled Sabrina. Humphrey Bogart as Linus Larrabee is just discovering something called “plastics” in the film. SO much money, collaborating, thinking and creativity yet no sense of how what they created will affect the environment.
Oh, dear me back to the love story.
“Linus Larrabee: Listen, I work in the real world with real responsibilities.
Sabrina: I know you work in the real world and you’re very good at it. But that’s work. Where do you live, Linus?”
Sabrina ~1995
The Seminary of Praying Mantis Publishing 
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