Buy now and move your house with it. Call Reviewer Rob here at reviewermag.com/call… or email Rob@ReviewerMag.com

Lyrics by The Rolling Stones
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink of the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Spare a part for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth

And when I look into the this faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray blue
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, we all look so strange

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leading but get gamblers instead

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio

And when I look into this faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and
Black and white
They don’t look real to you
Or do we look too strange

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the three thousand million
Let’s think of the humble of birth

lyrics by Neil Young

From thrasherswheat.org.
——–
They were hiding behind hay bales,
They were planting in the full moon
They had given all they had for something new
But the light of day was on them,
They could see the thrashers coming
And the water shone like diamonds in the dew.

And I was just getting up, hit the road before it’s light
Trying to catch an hour on the sun
When I saw those thrashers rolling by,
Looking more than two lanes wide
I was feelin’ like my day had just begun.

Where the eagle glides ascending
There’s an ancient river bending
Down the timeless gorge of changes
Where sleeplessness awaits
I searched out my companions,
Who were lost in crystal canyons
When the aimless blade of science
Slashed the pearly gates.

It was then I knew I’d had enough,
Burned my credit card for fuel
Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand
With a one-way ticket to the land of truth
And my suitcase in my hand
How I lost my friends I still don’t understand.

They had the best selection,
They were poisoned with protection
There was nothing that they needed,
Nothing left to find
They were lost in rock formations
Or became park bench mutations
On the sidewalks and in the stations
They were waiting, waiting.

So I got bored and left them there,
They were just deadweight to me
Better down the road without that load
Brings back the time when I was eight or nine
I was watchin’ my mama’s T.V.,
It was that great Grand Canyon rescue episode.

Where the vulture glides descending
On an asphalt highway bending
Thru libraries and museums, galaxies and stars
Down the windy halls of friendship
To the rose clipped by the bullwhip
The motel of lost companions
Waits with heated pool and bar.

But me I’m not stopping there,
Got my own row left to hoe
Just another line in the field of time
When the thrashers comes, I’ll be stuck in the sun
Like the dinosaurs in shrines
But I’ll know the time has come
To give what’s mine.

KING OF THE ROAD

by Roger Miller

Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let…fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin’ broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.

Third boxcar, midnight train
Destination…Bangor, Maine.
Old worn out clothes and shoes,
I don’t pay no union dues,
I smoke old stogies I have found
Short, but not too big around
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.

I know every engineer on every train
All of their children, and all of their names
And every handout in every town
And every lock that ain’t locked
When no one’s around.

I sing,
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let, fifty cents
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but, two hours of pushin’ broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

Lyrics by The Pogues

When I was a young man I carried my pack
And I lived the free life of a rover
From the Murrays green basin to the dusty outback
I waltzed my Matilda all over
Then in nineteen fifteen my country said Son
It’s time to stop rambling ’cause there’s work to be done
So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun
And they sent me away to the war
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we sailed away from the quay
And amidst all the tears and the shouts and the cheers
We sailed off to Gallipoli

How well I remember that terrible day
How the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter
Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well
He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells
And in five minutes flat he’d blown us all to hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia
But the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped to bury our slain
We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs
Then we started all over again

Now those that were left, well we tried to survive
In a mad world of blood, death and fire
And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive
But around me the corpses piled higher
Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit
And when I woke up in my hospital bed
And saw what it had done, I wished I was dead
Never knew there were worse things than dying
For no more I’ll go waltzing Matilda
All around the green bush far and near
For to hump tent and pegs, a man needs two legs
No more waltzing Matilda for me

So they collected the cripples, the wounded, the maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla
And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where my legs used to be
And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me
To grieve and to mourn and to pity
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As they carried us down the gangway
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared
Then turned all their faces away

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me
And their ghosts may be heard as you pass the Billabong
Who’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me?

People are saying that we should try to “visualize” the stopping of the oil leak in the Gulf Of Mexico.

I don’t want to sound like Mister Party Pooper of Negativity, but… There’s no way. How do you plug a gusher with the weight of the whole ocean pushing down on it like it’s popping a zit? That’s all I want to know.

This ongoing oil slick is going to change the nature of our global environment indefinitely. Not only will the toxicity of the petro-pollutants bring death and disease to the region for the foreseeable future but the black-brown goo in the seawater will also raise the surface temperature level of the already steaming Gulf. This coming hurricane season should be watched very carefully.

Here’s a club photo of mine from Cafe Sevilla in the Gaslamp District which originally ran in Revolt In Style magazine about 15 years ago as a large blowup when their “cool-hip” pages were still 16-inch image tabloid-size. It was then erroneously credited by the editor of Revolt at the time, Trevor, to a Brazillian photographer I was friends with named Paolo. Thanks a lot, Trevor. You’re really cool.

Myspace privacy settings confound

[UPDATE: 3-23, Readers told me the Account Settings-Spam filter needs to be unchecked for friend requests or something like that. It's working again. Thanks all. ~Rob]

I had noticed that the amount of new friend request to the Reviewer Magazine Myspace had dropped off precipitously in the last few weeks. For a long time it was getting 10 to 25 new friend request per day, minimum. But then recently it seemed to stop. I attributed this to the hype you hear that everyone is migrating to Facebook as the current networking and social communicating website of choice and thought nothing more than oh well, things change. Facebook with it’s wall and activity stream is a bit less private that Myspace but one needs to adapt to the changing cyber environment, right?

Then the other day a friend tried to add Reviewer’s Myspace and asked me what the email address was. It appears that somehow the privacy setting for people to send a friend request now requires that you enter the email address for Reviewer Magazine’s Myspace to prove that you’re someone Reviewer “knows”.

That email address is info@reviewermag.com, just so you know.

There was a error message being talked about on Facebook that was saying certain person’s had “too many friends” and couldn’t be added. I don’t know if the mods there put that function in there or if it was a bug. But I’m starting to think that maybe there’s a similar default program on Myspace that kicks in when your friend list goes above a certain threshold. Ours has over 27,800.

Does anyone out there know where to find the control setting in your profile editor on Myspace to deselect the email option for people to send friend request? I’ve been looking for days and it it’s eluded me.

Email me at reviewer@myspace.com, Editor@ReviewerMagazine.com or info@reviewermag.com or just click IM and/or message me if you see I’m online.

Help! lol

This cover photo of mine that ran on issue number one of Reviewer Magazine, July, 1996, was originally an out-take from a shoot I did with a model in the Little Italy train yards just north of downtown San Diego. I was in the control room of a train car that was parked and leaning out the conductor’s window and shooting down at her while she was standing just outside it on the ground below. It was an out take because we were in between planned poses and I just popped off a quick shot as she reacted to the glare of the sun she was looking up into. The moody glamor photos we did inside the car after this shot appealed to the model more, but I liked this one best because it was so intensely honest and unplanned.

Shot in direct sunlight as described, with no fill flash, on my sturdy Nikon FM2 manually set at F4 and a high shutter speed, using Kodak TMAX 400.

Looking at this reminds me that I really must shoot more manually and stop using automatic settings. Learning to shoot with digital has made me way too lazy.