April 13, ’18 Isley Bros. Fight the Power

13 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

As ever buy a book, book a show… You can scroll down to my power to the people-John Lennon Memorial Friday the 13th Giant Quarter-Ring Sidewalk Street Show blog if you are ready to join the love army. Well are you?

Go Back We’re Going the Wrong Way

Arizona’s striking teachers had to explain the facts of life to the states conservative politicians. The tyranny of only cutting taxes and never raising them ever-ever-ever is capute. It turns out the cost to our future, the loss of not investing in our youngsters might save money in the present but will bankrupt our nation’s future.

A productive well educated future worker is far more valuable than another round of tax cuts that end up in the pockets of a golf playing Cadillac driving-private equity-carried interest deduction gluttonous-capitalist who is well past the most productive years in their now much shorter less influential lives.

Making Change Makes People Happy

That my card carrying teacher union sympathizing brothers and sisters is but a first shot with a water pistol across the bow of a scorched earth winner take all now collapsing conservative all wet revolution.

I’ll take only one more moment to do a tap dancing victory lap on the forehead of the foul mouthed former disgraced adulterous Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. His intemperate trolling rhetoric has infected our constitutional form of government until now. Now is the moment when his kind are rounded up and sent in one miserable pile of venomous pythons to insult one another on a cruise ship of no return. Goodbye.

More and More of Us, Less and Less of Them

Now that we are getting back to basics. Now that we are beginning to understand we need to do a few things right. You know we need schools and teachers. We need health care. We need a social security system. We need to focus on clean air and water. We need to fix our energy system and do something about the climate.

Seems so simple doesn’t it? Getting the basic things right means we will have the time and energy to handle the more complicated things. Keep the faith. Helping our teachers so they can help our children is simply doing something besides helping the high and financially mighty.

Let’s go peeps…

Books · News! · Performances

April 12, ’18 Summer Reading Self-Esteem

12 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

As ever buy a book, book a show… My highlight reel, biography, book synopsis and contact information are a few clicks away. You can scroll down to my blog. Hope you come back soon…!

She’s Got it in Spades…

Friends of the Library raise funds all year long in support of the summer reading programs. They are selfless citizens dedicated to the proposition that the most precious natural resource is life! Sort of love life locally but think globally… These peeps wear glasses and have books on their coffee tables.

Aside from the juggling and comedy my show is really about infusing my young readers with a sense of self esteem. Inner self confidence is a construction project. We don’t come ready made with very much of this appreciation in our own abilities. We need to have an elder guide us to the location of this cultivated inner resource.

Having the Heart to Try

I use volunteers to accomplish all manner of amazing tasks. Most of the children succeed, some struggle but learn right in front of an audience, and the biggest gift is the look of determination on their faces as they risk trying.

No admission charge the summer reading program is aimed at creating a safe, non-commercial- free to the public event where parents and children, friends and neighbors, librarians and volunteers can gather for the important purpose of building a more resilient community.

So I do take offense at politicians too mightily focused on tax cuts. I am one of the many who believe our children are a future worthy of investing in. We want our employers to have access to the brightest, best educated, most self confident college graduates our country can create.

True Grit Uncovered

Go see a show this summer. Support your summer reading program. Sell a cupcake and give the proceeds to your library. Read a book. Volunteer to help children learn how to read. Be sure to be enthusiastic about these little new people. Encourage them. Tell them how good they are. Our kindness and helping hand up might well be one of the single best ways we preserve our freedoms and protect our liberties. We give without limit. Love and kindness is infinite. You’ll see your generosity shining back in the eyes of the children looking up to you.

Audience Bestowing Honor Upon our Little Risk-Taker

Books · News! · Performances

April 10th, ’18 Headwaters

11 Apr 201811 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

As ever buy a book, book a show… My highlight reel, biography, book synopsis and contact information are all right here a few clicks away. You can scroll down to my blog. Hope you will and see you back soon.

Where Spirits Go to Fly

Tideline

Much preparation is underway in readying our boat to sail from San Francisco to Santa Catalina Island. I’m working on acquiring a second anchor. Type, size, shackle, chain, rode and large bucket to stow the gear in is in process. Anchoring a boat requires skill. Next to going somewhere being able to set your hook into the ocean floor is right up there on the to do list.

I’ve carved most of the summer to make this round-trip voyage. From the middle of July to the middle of September we will be sailing. I’ve never been to Catalina during prime time, peak season. I am ever the busy busker seeking to know more about my California kind and how my kind behaves when the days are long and dusk is a straggler.

Sunset in Living Color

In the present there are shows to do, writing to get done, circus workshops to teach between now and when we shove off. There remains much on the plate with life not offering a momentary lapse to flirt with a standstill.

For hijinks I’m reading about the expedition and discovery of the source of the headwaters of the Nile River. The source waters eluded discovery and somewhat stubbornly were finally located in the latter nineteenth century.

Like consciousness it is always easier to witness the phenomenon of thought even if you are left to wonder from where our river of thought begins? When the headwaters to my mind can be plausibly located and convincingly explained, until those mysterious temporal coordinates are precisely set down, I will wait in the camp of those who seriously question whether this precise location will ever be found.

Heart Counting on Change

Books · News! · Performances

Four-Seven-Eighteen Saturday Californian

7 Apr 20187 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Buy a book, book a show. You can find things out just by clicking around. No mystery, no hyperbole, just straight prose and performer as unmasked and as native Californian as is appropriate.

Misty Saturday Morning,

Bay Club- San Francisco

I’ll begin with a quick dispatch from Fox’s Tucker Carlson dissing us this weekend via his tweet cage.

Yes, real estate is too expensive but it isn’t the fault of the lunch bucket crowd. Those card carrying Teacher Union members don’t buy houses and don’t set policy.

For starters California is widely popular. We have beaches, mountains and desert. We have Hollywood and North Beach. We have redwood trees. We make many of the best wines and movies in the world. Facebook, Google and Apple all make their home offices here. We make the world’s most important automobile here. It is called Tesla.

But, come on dude, Dana buddy what? You going full provincial on us? Not at all. The entirety of the West Coast, my favorite Left Coast has shown the rest of the country how. Work opportunity, education, health-care, social security and Medicare are all supported by large majorities. We want clean air and water. We want to solve anthropogenic climate change. We want nuclear power shuttered and a 21st Century renewable energy system deployed.

That’s us in a progressive nutshell. We want to make good on our promise. We want to weave our citizens into a unified patriotic mosaic. We want peace, freedom and women to have robust access to equal pay, family planning services and the best education we can provide them.

This kiss up and kick down thing doesn’t work. Massive tax cuts to an out of control elite invited most of the kicking. Tucker bites at California’s progressive wave. We are a cleansing wave of purer purpose. We advocate for a more fully empowered middle class. A busker knows a lot about playing his act to a lunch bucket crowd. They’re known as the people. Let’s rock blue wave friends and roll… time to take back our country.

From California with Love

Books · News! · Performances

April Sixth, ’18 Fire for Everyone and Everything

6 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Buy a book, book a show. Be sure to surf my digital frontier. That means click on my menu and look around. You can always message me, our password protected switchboard is open. As well I might add you can go to www.thenoveljuggler.com and find even more to do and not to do.

Trial by Fire

Once out touring I soon discovered the pleasure of soaking at the wide array of hot springs. In the Kootenay’s of British Columbia my friends Max and Virginia had a wood fired sauna. The Doukhobors settled the Slocan Valley and first of firsts was building a sauna. Wood fired, buried in river rock, and generous buckets of water tossed atop allowed a hard working soul useful heat and steam that they could use for purposes of easing aches and scrubbing skin clean. I built my own sauna in Camp Verde, Arizona.

Hot water for the two hot dogs in Key West

About the same time I’d come to be friends with locals who had grown up barbecuing with mesquite. Once you’ve been down this road you’ll be hard pressed to take any other.

Now a good outdoor earthen oven is in our future. We’ll bake breads, pies and pizzas. Fire roasted vegetables can be cooked to a fine delectability. Once the oven cools we’ll dry fresh sliced fruits and vegetables and store in jars for use in salads on days we won’t be building a fire.

We’re both passionate about the flavors found in foods cooked by wood fire. So this is our way of expanding our menu and making cooking an adventure. A lot of our journey is being taken up with expanding what we prepare to eat. We can surf around to specialty food suppliers and buy anything we might want.

It’s Friday and we’re battening down for our pineapple express, fixing some hibiscus tea, turning a few pages to our favorite hard bounds notching our idle time while waiting for the sunny breaks, news dumps and other politically inspired bimbo eruptions.

Sincerely yours

Books · News! · Performances

April 5th,’18 Blue Corn Blue Vegan Shoes

5 Apr 20185 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Starting Here Starting Now

Here you find yourself- things have come to this… if you click around you’ll discover information about my shows and books. Buy a book, book a show. Be sure to surf all my digital frontier. You can always message me, our password protected switchboard is open.

Busker Believing Navajo Blue Corn

You’ve Got to Look Into Things

There is a connection between a street show and eating a whole food plant based meal. You can eat more, better, new or same. Like many of you I’ve too often picked same. The ruts to the Oregon Trail and my dietary habits look like impossible to surgically separate Siamese twins.

I’m trying to do what I can to maintain my health. Whiskey, Marlboros and jumbo sized banana splits are off my preferred list. Replacing these finer things from another era are kale, arugula and hibiscus tea.

That will take the comedy right out of the entire stinking tragic mess called life faster than getting eighty-sixed from Joe’s Spic and Span Café in Salt Lake City, Utah because there isn’t nothing you can eat— unless you can tolerate heaps of salt, sugar and saturated fat without needing to go immediately to the emergency room due to the signs of malaise being exhibited by your flagging spirits and low pulse.

Pretty as a Peacock

Eating can be an exploration. If you can find it in the corner 7-11 then put that on the list of things you will not eat and put all things you can’t find in those isles on the list of things you can. That’s simple enough.

So for starters how about some blue corn tortillas? Better still how about growing a crop up in the Navajo Nation? A simple rule of thumb goes like this: if it is a plant and darker in color it is likely more nutritious. So, is blue corn got that hot little better for you going for it?—- “Researchers found blue corn tortillas contain 20% more protein than their white corn counterparts. They also have less starch and a lower glycemic index (GI), which may be good news for humankind.”

Plain as Day Rumpled as an Afternoon

I’m going to go out on the limb of a cornstalk and just state flat out that blue corn’s better in every kind of way for you than that pale to bright yellow corn we toss to hogs and fatten cattle with.

Tomorrow we’ll delve into the virtues of earthen ovens ancient indigenous man used for fire roasting food. Appears the Anasazi were eating pepper and goat cheese encrusted pizza several hundreds of years before Elvis first shook his hips with such licentiousness that all the women in my family fell strangely silent, sad, lonely and ultimately hungry for things I didn’t know even existed. That’s tomorrow… come on back to this crackling fire of a tall tale you hounds for peace, freedom and hot almond milk lattes.

Books · News! · Performances · Uncategorized

April 4th,’18 Anasazi Beans and Sonoran Mesquite Flour Feast for Fools

4 Apr 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Welcome… if you click around you’ll find information about my shows and books. Buy a book, book a show. Be sure to surf my digital frontier and message me. The switchboards are open.

Wheat-Barley-Rye-Buckwheat-Mesquite Flour

Food of the Desert Dwellers

Mesquite Pancakes — Mesquite (Sweet and Spiceful) Pancakes

Beginning last August my wife and I embarked upon a gastronomic revolution. The idea was to tip the sacred cows over and leap into the culinary inconvenient truth of our eating too few and too familiar foods. We wanted to stretch our boundaries and we also wanted to rid our diet of empty calories and replace them with foods rich in healthful micronutrients that would fight off free radicals and enhance our cardiovascular well-being.

First off you’ll need to break the fever. In this case I mean habits. Old habits always die hard. With support from each other we began preparing nothing but whole foods plant based meals. At the start of our journey the first thing needing fixing was our taste buds. We tossed out the salt, sugar and booze. In two weeks time we could taste and identify flavors that had simply gone lost hidden beneath these too dominant other food and beverages.

Tucson Mesquite Flour — **Sonoran Desert Mesquite Flour has a Distinct Flavor all its Own**

Otherwise things proceeded at an alarmingly positive pace. Once we slowed down and ate our meals with greater care we’d arrive at the end our much lighter meals feeling full. Feeling contentment after eating lighter, less oil based, more leafy-greens, less starchy, no meat meals takes a couple of skills. You need to chew your food slowly. You need to taste the flavorful meal. You need to be sure to use spices. Become friends with garlics, onions and curries. Shallots, cilantro, fresh made horseradish are flavor boosting helpers.

Downer side problems abound but not insurmountably so. We have issues. Won’t drill down but they exist and you’ll have to trust me when I say these are good problems to have.

Wagon Wheel Saloon — **Patagonia’s Strictly for Medicinal Purposes Human Oil and Lubrication Joint**

Our instrument is essentially the body and mind. Taking better care isn’t just about trudging at a low dull level. Eating with inspiration is a means of being good to yourself and when you are treating your life with kindness you are on the right track even if it takes a little more doing, time and care. Let’s get going peeps we have a world to save and fun to have.

Books · News! · Performances

March 30,’18 Lookout Mountain Lookout!

30 Mar 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

More hiking more thinking more reflecting. More Sonoran…today, tomorrow and Sunday.

As ever buy a book, book a show, look around, come on back nice to have you around

Books · News! · Performances

March 29, ’18 Showboating Circle Show

29 Mar 2018 Dana Smith1 Comment

Like-Kind Desert-Dwelling Art Brained Dune Drifter

Gathering a crowd on a sidewalk for a street show requires guts. Buskers look for flow. If there is enough foot traffic it’s worth a shot. Transcending this issue is an intangible. I won’t try to name the mystery. We either hold a key to the pedestrians curiosity or not.

In 1967 Jeff Sheridan stepped into NYC’s Washington Square and met the moment. The silent slight of hand magician’s public setting gave the act a sense of mystique.

The impromptu, serendipitous street show’s were given room to run, but as the formula took root the initial exuberance of the performing form began to dissipate.

In this moment in our evolving global culture gathering an audience for a sidewalk show has shifted from places where it is expected to be found— think inner urban areas, performing arts festivals— to less easily predictable settings— rest areas, campgrounds and farmers markets.

Gather them where you find them

It isn’t just movies being hit hard by the cultural shift. Music has been disrupted. Journalism has been hard hit. The book business, especially fiction. I find much to admire in the work of Ann Patchett, Isabel Allende and Jonathan Friesen But, in this moment none are moving the mass markets imagination, none strike a blow at the sales counter as did James Michener.

Our appetites have been supersaturated. Street show or best selling author, once venerable film directors or rock and roll stars— for all of us the work we do and our ability to connect is murky. Our formulas feel spent and harnessing our content to whatever form has the sensibility of being forced. There is the risk of predictability.

Put Art Everywhere

The birth of Dixieland, the impressionists or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I wonder now how it struck and moved the audiences in the present moment then? How far did they go? How long were they moved? When the new work was exhausted did they cling to the past or let go? —and trusting something new would catch them then leap? —

As ever buy a book, book a show, poke around here at my site. Hope you’ll come back and spend more time with me.

Books · News! · Performances

March 28 The Magic Pen Bit

28 Mar 201828 Mar 2018 Dana SmithLeave a comment

What we are looking—-

Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy appearance in San Francisco is coming up April 21st

I played a month long string of high school shows in 2000 that included: Chinle High School in the Navajo Nation, Robert F. Kennedy High School in Delano, California and Cupertino High School in the high tech center of the universe Silicon Valley. The Heavyweight Championship of the World of Opportunity according to busking was the chance to work with Navajo Native Americans, the offspring of the United Farm Workers and the cresting wave of students sited at the center of the digital revolution.

The external tour was accompanied with a simultaneous inner tour. A personal stalemate hit me hook, line and sinker. The younger self was going to have to make room for the emerging more mature self, the soul could not expand and grow if held hostage to fool youths thousand errors.

For a showman a piece of our equipment is the interior-emotional-psychological realm right out in the open in full view of our audience. I had resolved to give my audience the most pristine unvarnished experience I could muster. I sought to retrieve my integrity.

Steer and Aim with Heart

I experimented. Too honest, too sweet, too much of anything was too much. Balance came into play. Laughs? Sure, but not at the expense of others. Applause? When it is earned not asked for. Life is a full contact sport. Acknowledging the wounding is a chance for us to speak honestly about our what hurts.

“Reach into your chest pocket and pull out your magic pen. This is the magic pen you use to write the story of your life.” I would get all the children to raise their imaginary pen high into the air. “This is your story, the one you steer right through the center of your heart, between what you trust and know and doubt and fear. Your story is a great story. Whether it is the work you do at school, the teeth you need to brush, or telling your mom and dad when they tuck you into bed as they give you a kiss goodnight that you love them.” I would place my pen back into my pocket. “So lets all put our pens away for now. When you wake up tomorrow, don’t forget about your pen, it’s your magic pen, write with it, this is your story, be the author of your life…”

I don’t do this every show. It works with children until the age when the end of innocence arrives. The conceit and symbolism of the magic pen is a little much from that moment until they are old enough to resolve the deeper contradictions confronted in a world desperate for more willing souls daring to live their lives written out loud. You and I— we— all of the world have noticed the Stoneman Douglas High School Students have picked up their pens.

Two thousand miles I roamed
Just to make this dock my home

Buy a book, book a show, surf around the site. And hope you’ll come back. I’ll be here trying to keep it real…