On the leap day of this leap year, your favorite author, songwriter, and publisher in permanent exile is scheduled to update you on his activities during the past couple of months here at Mission Control (having failed to do so last month). Before proceeding with such relatively trivial matters, however, he asks that you join him in a moment of silence for Aaron Bushnell, whose extraordinary act of self-sacrifice constitutes a Kierkegaardian leap of faith which one hopes will awaken an indifferent world to the horrors in which, to varying degrees, we are all complicit.
Airman Bushnell’s radical form of protest reinforces my suspicion that this Leap Year/Year of the Dragon portends something apocalyptic. My annual tarot reading with Madame Sidney, as interpreted by myself, seems to reveal as much:
Surely some revelation is at hand. Hearken therefore to Gabriel’s trumpet blast, which may well proclaim the merging of the personal, the historical, and the mythological.
It’s true that we passed Y2K without a hitch, and nothing much appears to have happened on December 23, 2012, the date the Ancient Mayan calendar predicted would mark the end of “the Fifth Sun” and the consequent destruction of humanity, but could 2024 be “the year 2000 y poco” which (according to Graham Hancock) the descendants of those same Ancient Maya in the Yucatan have been dreading?
In any case, whatever the current annus has in store for us—whether it be horribilis or mirabilis—we must carry on as best we can. In recent years, as if I were some kind of secular Benedictine, I’ve adopted Ora et labora as my personal motto. So let’s get down to business:
How White Is Your Monkey?
If you missed the free e-book promo for White Monkey, never mind. You can still email me at mark.will.write@gmail.com to get a free copy (PDF or epub). After reading this short dystopian text, please remember to rate and review it on Amazon and elsewhere.
Weekly Jukebox in Your Inbox
Well, bi-weekly, at least. As you may have noticed, I’ve been leaking tracks every other Friday from my forthcoming solo album, My Name Is Will. Here’s the latest:
Hope you’re not too much of a bitch to sing—and whistle—along.
In Pod(s) We Trust
If you missed the “special emergency edition” of Texting that Tomek and I did on the Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interview, here’s the unlisted video:
In my humble opinion, my Russia-based co-host and I offer a much more insightful analysis than that proffered by Jon Stewart, who nauseatingly argued that America’s shitty infrastructure (in comparison with Russia’s) is somehow “the price of freedom.”
And please be sure to watch, if you haven’t already, the fascinating interview I conducted with Toronto-based singer-songwriter Lionel Doe on Guitar & Pen:
Stay tuned as well for an upcoming episode of G&P during which Lionel and I will review Van Halen’s classic album Fair Warning.
As for Books Are Burning!, my sometime co-author G.J. Villa and I will soon be discussing Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger.
And I’m currently planning a BAB! mini-series called “Bowie Books” (or something to that effect), in which I examine the musical, cinematic, and literary connections between David Bowie and the books The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi.
Thanks for your continued interest and support, Substackers. See you next month.
MW