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Judgment Day

A Bird Hung in the Sky

A change is gonna come…

You’ve been hearing that your whole life, probably. But now the change is here…

Of course, it’s been happening for a while. We’ve heard increasingly dire warnings since the 1960s and even before.

But it was easier to say, oh sure, that’s tomorrow . That’s for those folks in the future to worry about. For sure, they’ll have the technology to cope. For sure…

Well, kids… the future is here and it don’t look like it’s gonna be pretty.

And you can blame all those people in the past… who — like a lot of folks today — just didn’t want to hear about it…


A Bird Hung in the Sky

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Friday, October 28, 2005

lyrics
A Bird Hung in the Sky

A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
It flew between the clouds
and dove right into the sun

I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
The sky turned black
as the sun burnt into my eyes

Don’t the city sure look strange
cars scattered all around
The city sure looks strange
cars scattered all around
Don’t the people look funny
lying there dead on the ground

(C) 1975, 2007, TK Major

Smogsville, USA

PS… It’s actually kind of a nice day here in the smoggiest urban area of the United States… except, I guess, for the smog. It was stinkin’ hot yesterday but today there’s a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. Of course, that ain’t gonna help the poor SOB’s out in the inland empire or even OC. But if you can overlook the brown haze stacked up on the horizon like multiple blankets of steel wool you could almost fool yourself into thinking it was a nice day. (Check out the layering in the picture above — it’s like a merde parfait… so to speak.) See those long ugly things out in the harbor? Those are a source of a huge amount of pollution — they’re oil tankers and container ships and they pump brown, heavy particulate matter across the harbor area 24/7, never turning off their engines completely, pumping out poisons that put the area at the top of the asthma risk index — and harming anyone with lungs. Long Beach used to have the cleanest air, on average, of all of Southern California. But, in the name of trade — that is to say importing cheap, shoddy goods from offshore businesses owned by multinational corporations — we’ve had these poison-spewing behemoths shoved down our throats.

UPDATE: Silly me! I forgot we had a brush fire raging in the hills to the east. Not that the tankers and container ships don’t deserve all the hell anyone can give ’em. They do. But they’re not the only culprit this time…

A Bird Hung in the Sky
This is actually a new fire, near Griffith Park, in LA. At 2:57 this afternoon…

A Bird Hung in the Sky
A few minutes ago, 6:17 pm

A Bird Hung in the Sky
L.A. as seen from the good ol’ LBC, about 30 miles to the south… don’t worry about us… one good thing about this city is that there’s precious little brush to catch fire…

A Bird Hung in the Sky

A Bird Hung in the Sky

A Bird Hung in the Sky

The Los Angeles Times has a good photo slide show on the fire here.

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A Bird Hung in the Sky

A bird hung in the sky...

I wrote the first two verses of this dark little slice of apocalyptica back in the early or mid 70’s and then added another 2 verses — only one of which survived — in 1986.

My initial vision had been general collapse of civilization (as we know it, heh)… but by 1986 I was bitterly convinced that we were squandering any last chances we might have to not plunge the world into an irreversible spiral into gashouse global warming.

(Oh well… it’s like watching a high speed accident on a rainy day… you yell as the oblivious drivers hurtle toward each other, their windows up, their minds filled with details that are going to seem very, very insignificant in about a second and a half. I hate that sound. Where was I? Oh, yeah… the end of the world. As we know it.)

Anyhow, as we artistic types know all too well (or oughta), sincerity and good intentions typically make bad art. As a friendly warning against good intentions, I have included the usually excised last verse here — just so you can see how bad things could get if I wasn’t looking out for y’all.

Now, mind you, by the time I got to the last verse, I was laughing myself off my chair — I knew I would never use it. But I view songwriting like I view other excretory processes — you don’t stop just ’cause you don’t like what’s coming out.

That’s what editing is for and, if you brave those usually excised last two verses, you’ll see why, for this writer, at any rate, editing can be — you know — real important.


A Bird Hung in the Sky

A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
It flew between the clouds
and dove right into the sun

I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
The sky turned black
as the sun burnt into my eyes

Don’t the city sure look strange
cars scattered all around
The city sure looks strange
cars scattered all around
Don’t the people look funny
lying there dead on the ground

[excised verse]
Six years underground
Six years of living hell
Six years underground
ever since the ionosphere dispelled
Our old friend Mr. Sun
turned out to be the Fiery King of Hell

(C) 1975,1986,2005, TK Major

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