music

There is a good guitar player at the bean this evening, Craig Sorseth. First he was doing "Crazy Love", a Van Morrison song, and he was playing it well. Then he went into "Long Black Veil", which I heard him say was by the Band, but I thought it was a Johnny Cash song, although Jerry Garcia did it too. Maybe it's a traditional.
It is kind of a quiet summer evening down here on 2nd street, kind of getting chilly though. I went for a two hour bike ride today so I'm quite tired. I'm not a competitive cyclist type of cyclist. I just do it to supplement the karate, and add in some jogging. Cycling seems to be easier on the knees. Don't let me leave out walking.
Apparently George Orwell was quite a visionary for his time. None of his attitudes or ideas really seem dated in the least. He wasn't a racist, and he saw the problems with colonialism right from the start. He also was one of the first to take note of the problems of the soviet union, and to take an active voice in criticizing their actions. 1984 was all about a state in which the individual is constantly being monitored and watched...a state similar to the disaster in Russia in the time of Stalin. Of course, many countries are moving towards increased monitoring of citizens, like England, setting up video cameras in all sorts of public places. That sort of thing is often described as being "Orwellian".
He also wrote about working as a dishwasher, and about life in the underclass, actually living the life of a bum and intermittent laborer for a while. Check out Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. Definitely worth reading.
Another guy in the news recently is Philip K. Dick. He was an obscure science fiction writer during his life, but many of his themes have increased in relevance, making him seem like a visionary. He was an interesting character, fueled in his writing by amphetamine binges...not living the healthiest lifestyle. There was an extremely interesting short story by Robert Crumb about Dick's experience of a brain seizure. During the seizure he had some sort of extreme religious vision that he says changed his life. My question is, was the vision real if it was just the result of a "seizure"? How would one ever separate real visions from fake ones anyway? Read the story and see what you think.