"For many years, Yusuf Islam has been pretending he didn’t say the things he said in 1989, when he enthusiastically supported the Iranian terrorist edict against me and others."

"However, his words are on the record, in print interviews and on television programs. … I’m afraid Cat Stevens got off the peace train a long time ago.”:

Salman Rushdie emailed Howard Fishman, the author of a long Washington Post article called "The Meaning of Yusuf/Cat Stevens/After a brilliant but turbulent career, he is reemerging on the public stage. How should we feel about him­ — and his music — now?" 

Fishman, who is a culture writer, and who clearly wants to be able to indulge himself in the pleasures of listening to the wonderful old Cat Stevens recordings, goes on to say:

"[Cat] Stevens said he had originally wanted to serve as a bridge between two great cultures, yet, while Islam welcomed its famous convert, western audiences were hostile."

"'On the other side, people said, "He is a bit of a traitor." He has "turned Turk," if you like. So I was often used as a bit of a spokesman, and I was useful for certain occasions.... I thought, "Everybody should get this," but it didn’t work out quite like that.'... One of the most upsetting times for Stevens, he reveals, was his portrayal as a supporter of the Iranian fatwa that forced the novelist Salman Rushdie into hiding in 1989. 'I was certainly not prepared or equipped to deal with sharp-toothed journalists,' he said. 'I was cleverly framed by certain questions. I never supported the fatwa. I had to live through that.'... Stevens emphasised the importance music has in his life once more. 'It is a mystical thing still. It is something that permeates our emotion, our soul, sometimes our intellect. Our body moves to it. I didn’t know where I was going but music helped me to get there.'"

From "Yusuf Cat Stevens on Islam, the fatwa and playing guitar again/The singer-songwriter tells Desert Island Discs about walking away from his fans, and the difficulties of following a spiritual path" (The Guardian).

"I never supported the fatwa" — you can believe that or not. He's crying "fake news." I choose to believe him, because I've always loved Cat Stevens.

It's hard for me to listen to new music. I have to force myself to put time into listening to anything new.

It's interesting to be old — I'm almost 69 years old — and to experience my mind as new things happen now and with all my memories of what I did and what I felt in the past. One of the biggest differences I see in myself is openness to new music.

In the 1960s, I had endless openness to new music and was always tuning into the radio to find things. Hearing them once — I remember the first time I heard "I Got You, Babe" (it was on a station that only came in late at night from Fort Wayne, Indiana) — I could instantly bond and know this was good, this matters to me. I would read about music that hadn't been released in America yet and long to get a chance to hear it. I had a photograph of Cat Stevens from a magazine pinned to my bedroom wall at a time when it was not yet possible for me to hear his music.

These days, I still listen to Cat Stevens. In fact, I have one song ("Morning Has Broken") that I play every day. That's how grounded I am in the old things. What I love most is what is repeated.

So I had a hard time trying to be interested in the list my son John made of his "Top 100" songs from the past decade. It's a very carefully and individualistically curated list and the best of an entire decade, and it's my son and I ought to care that a decade is about to end (in 17 days!). But it's so hard for me to begin to listen to something new and to continue. The only way I can open up to it is to listen multiple times. Maybe on the 5th or 6th time, I could bond and feel that this is good and this matters to me. I need the repetition, but how to get to the stage where it is repetition?

One thing is TikTok! When I want physical and mental rest and recreation, I love to sit back and scroll through whatever the TikTok app decides to serve up as "For You." Often, the very short videos have a musical soundtrack, and some audio clips are used repeatedly. So a snippet of music can make it into my head and become liked by my ancient brain.

Here's a good example. I'll just give you 2 videos using the same song clip (which has been used in many other videos, collected here, with embedded video at the top giving you the entire song). The audio clip has been used over 1.5 million times, and I'm giving you 2 from the same person, which says something more about me and repetition:

Morning has broken...

The post title is the title of a 1913 Christian hymn sung by Cat Stevens that I often listen to on my morning walk/run. I had to look up the lyrics in the second verse because as Stevens sings it — and I've listened closely, over and over — it sounds like this:

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from Heaven
Like the first cue ball on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass

But there can't be a cue ball in Eden!

"Unlike silly songs for children by, say, Raffi, or maudlin songs for parents like Dylan’s 'Forever Young' or Cat Stevens’s 'Father and Son'—two ballads eager to preserve their singers’ sons in amber..."

"... [Paul] Simon had genuinely intergenerational appeal. He shared with us young passengers the joyful and terrible news of adulthood with patty-cake rhymes ('mama pajama,' 'drop off the key, Lee') and jaunty rhythms, scored by a panoply of ludicrous and wonderful-sounding instruments—from the hooting cuíca in 'Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard' to the triumphant parade drums of 'The Obvious Child.'"

From "Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water" by Daniel Drake (NYRB).

It's interesting, the music a parent shares with a child and imagines suits the child's interests and needs.

I agree that Dylan's "Forever Young" and Cat Stevens's "Father and Son" are not good children's music. And maybe the even both deserve the adjective "maudlin." Especially the Dylan song, which is one of the Dylan songs I dislike. Now, "Father and Son" — that's a great song. Love it. (And commenters: Don't revisit the old topic of Cat Stevens's religion. I will consider it a threadjack and delete.)



No, that's not maudlin at all. It's incredibly brilliant. But not a children's song. Maybe good for a teenage boy and his father, but it's hard to imagine any father and son who could both identify with it and enjoy it together.

"I pity you with your inefficient nostrils."

#4 on Scott Adams's list of top 10 favorite "Dilbert" strips.

Maybe I like this the best because I myself have lost nearly all my own sense of smell. And I happen to know that Scott Adams has lost his sense of smell. I've heard him say (on a Periscope) that he's completely happy to have no sense of smell because most smells are bad. Might as well love whatever it is that's your predicament if you can't change it. If I were deaf, I'd enjoy the quiet. If I were blind, I wouldn't have to bother with turning lights on and off.

Here's a 2009 blog post by Adams, "Addition by Subtraction":

Recently I lost my sense of smell thanks to, I assume, some allergy meds I’ve been snorting.... Over time I have come to realize that the ratio of stinky smells to delicious smells is very high. If the price for not smelling a flatulent cat five times a night is that I also don’t get to smell pumpkin pie once a year, I’ll take that deal.

What about the problem of not realizing your house reeks?  Solution: Never let anyone else in your house. Communicate only by Periscope and blog. But that's not what he says. He says he keeps nonanosmic people around to keep track of stinks for him.

Adams also likes the lost sense of taste that accompanies the loss of smell, and he adopts the bright-side perspective there too. It keeps his weight low, because food seems merely utilitarian. He theorizes that fatness/skinniness in human beings correlates to the intensity of the smell sense.

That is, he pities you with your efficient nostrils.

BONUS:

"Instead of watching it on a TV screen, I wanted to recreate the conditions under which I’d originally enjoyed this movie, so I booked it at Chicago’s Music Box Theater..."

"... as part of my film series, 'Is It Still Funny?' It was a packed house, and as Harold embarks on that first fake suicide, I could feel my own tension building."

From "A Movie Date With My Younger Self" by Marc Caro (in the NYT).

"I listen to my words but they fall far below/I let my music take me where my heart wants to go..."

Just a Sunday morning song. It's what I was listening to and I found it quite beautiful. I'd appreciate it if you'd resist saying the usual things that are said against this performer.

"It's an argument with which older, calmer people needle the emotional young."

I wrote in the previous post. Meade asks: "Did you mean 'the emotionally young'?"

No, I'm not insulting anyone for emotional immaturity. I'm characterizing young people as more emotionally raw. They're not emotionally young, they're emotional, as is typical of the young. Note that I referred to "older, calmer people."

It's like that Cat Stevens song, "Father and Son." We hear the calm voice of the man who's "old... but happy," saying "it's not time to make a change," and one ought to "relax" and put much more time into thinking and learning. Then — at 1:24 — Stevens suddenly switches to the young man's voice, and he's so wound up and emotional. He can't deal with his father at all, he's sick of the same old thing, and he's got to run away. The old man returns at 2:44 ("sit down, take it slowly"), and the young man again at 3:15 ("All the times I have cried...").

***

Please keep the comments on topic. I want none of the usual diatribes about Cat Stevens's religious notions relating to fatwa and so forth. Let me just say in advance, I will delete anything in that category along with discussion of this decision to delete, though you're welcome to discuss any of that in the next or the last open thread. Or click on the Cat Stevens tag and revisit all the times we've already done that.

"If everybody could love Alfred Hitchcock, I think it would be a better world."

Odd intro, by Cat Stevens (in 1976), to "Peace Train."

Yesterday, we were talking about Sun Myung Moon's idea for peace: marriage across national and cultural boundaries.

I ran into the Cat Stevens peace suggestion just now, by chance and unrelated to Sun Myung Moon (even by marriage). I was over on YouTube, clicking on the next song after "Longer Boats," a song we were talking about and trying to fathom:

Mary dropped her pants by the sand
And let a parson come and take her hand
But the soul of nobody knows
Where the parson goes, where does the parson go?

Please spare me the usual Cat Stevens hating. That's been talked to death. (Here's an elaborate Wikipedia page on your favorite Cat Stevens topic.) The subjects of this post are: 1. odd suggestions for world peace and 2. what is the song "Longer Boats" about? 

I'll start you off on the right track:

Topic #1: In 1969, right after they married, Yoko Ono and John Lennon sat in bed together for world peace. And — take note! — John Lennon and Yoko Ono had married across national and cultural boundaries.

Topic #2: The suggestion from Stevens is that he was imagining aliens in spaceships coming to earth and bringing us a better world, apparently free of the inferior traditional religions of human beings. In that view, there's no parson molesting Mary. Mary and the parson are simply traipsing off into a new way of life, liberated by the philosophy of the aliens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Now, this is smart, from creeley23:

I take Stevens' Hitchcock remark before "Peace Train" as a reference to the train-into-the-tunnel ending of North By Northwest, i.e. it was a coded reference to the "make love, not war" sentiment of the time.

Well, then. I wasn't going to say it, but I thought the "longer boats" were longer cocks! That's why it was so telling that Mary dropped her pants. And I thought "the parson" was some wags name for his waggler: Where does the parson go? I thought I had it all figured out!

"Peace Train" ... "Crazy Train" ... "Love Train."

At the Rally to Restore Sanity — or, I should say, on the Rally to Restore Sanity, because I'm watching C-SPAN — it was great to see Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) singing his great old song "Peace Train." It was also amusing to have Ozzy Osbourne barge in with "Crazy Train" and okay for the O'Jays to resolve matters with "Love Train."

From my TV perspective, it looked like a huge crowd on the Mall. It was overwhelming white. And — I'm not lying — I wrote "overwhelmingly" before I remembered that "overwhelmingly white" had become a hilariously common way to refer to crowds drawn to conservative rallies.

The crowd also looked pretty young and disproportionately male. Because it's comedy?

UPDATE: Ed Morissey has video of the Cat Stevens performance and a good summary of the controversy — which also comes up in the comments to my post — about presenting Stevens as an emissary of peace when he spoke with some degree of approval of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

UPDATE 2: Tobin Harshaw collects opinion about the larger event.

"Ooh, baby, baby, it's a wild world. It's hard to get by just upon a smile..."

Cat Stevens sang that:



And we were talking about smiling. Do you use that tremendously effective device, the smile? It's hard to get by just upon a smile, but it could work as part of a repertoire. Here in Wisconsin, the smile is deployed. And go to Indiana. You'll find some heart-melting smiling amongst the Hoosiers.

But what of people who don't rely on smiling? There are places — maybe places where they call Wisconsin and Indiana "fly-over country" — where people not only don't try to get by just upon a smile; they don't smile at all. And they mistrust those who do rely on smiling. Do you think those people are surly? They think you are unsophisticated. For example, Dick Cheney doesn't smile.

Oh, yes, he does!

Uh! Wow. Now, I need to rethink this. Hmmm. Not sure I know what to do with that smile. Don't try to get by just upon that!

Hey, Cheney is getting blogged like mad today. What the hell did he say?

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.... Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.”

Obama wanted to smile at the whole world:

But it's hard to get by just upon a smile.

You can become President just upon a smile... and not much more. But then what do you have?

You're not the world's nice guy. It's not a cocktail party. It's real, and we're the United States.

"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

Back to Cat:

The son says: "I got a feeling that when I have kids, I'm going to have a little girl, and she's going to be completely sensible."

The father says: "I do believe in karma, and if you think for one minute that there would be anything karmically correct for you to have a well-behaved little girl, you're dreaming."

Justin Townes Earle and Steve Earle.

***

That made me think of the old Cat Stevens song "Father & Son." The 2 points of view. The son seeing himself as different from the father, and the father believing the son really will be just about the same as he was.

Here's Cat, as a young man, singing the great song beautifully, powerfully. And here's old Cat -- "look at me, I am old" -- singing the song again, in his Yusef Islam self-re-invention. The voice is the same, slightly mellowed.

Who knows if the young man and the old man are different or the same?

Michael Jackson picks the name Mikaeel after rejecting Mustafa....

... as he converts to Islam at some mansion in L.A.

Cat Stevens was there. Maybe he sang this song.

"5 Biggest Reasons TV Lists Are Hot! Hot! Hot!"

What are your Top 5 Favorite TV List Shows?

How did I miss "40 Most Softsational Soft-Rock Songs"? Here's the list, though. Let's see if I can say what I hope I can say that I've never liked a single one of them. Oops, no, I can't. I'm not ashamed to have liked and to still like:

33. Cat Stevens - "Peace Train"
13. Carpenters - "Superstar"

But that's all.

Moist.

It's moist and gray, really dank -- but nicely cool -- here in Madison today. It's been so pretty all week, but I have a ton of work to get done, so it's okay with me. I've got a thousand résumés to read -- literally. (I'm chairing the Appointments Committee.) And I've got three smallish, more-or-less scholarly things to crank forward. And some other things that I ought to write on a to-do list so I don't fritter away mental energy intermittently prompting myself to do.

Anyway, like that tree fungus? It's so clean and crisply designed. Not really that fungus-y, as fungus goes. I ran across it yesterday, walking to school, when I detoured from the main lake path up onto the woodland path:





That last picture after that last post makes me want to link to these lyrics (which were not written by Cat Stevens):

Morning has broken, like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlight from heaven.
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetnes of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.
Born of the one light Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning;
God's recreation of the new day.

The Cat Stevens comeback.

Cat Stevens, AKA Yusuf Islam, has signed with Atlantic Records to put out a new album of pop songs:

"I feel right about making music and singing about life in this fragile world again. It is important for me to be able to help bridge the cultural gaps others are sometimes frightened to cross."

Some folks don't like it, but I'd like to hear what he has to sing.

You know, I had a picture of Cat Stevens on my wall, back when I was a teenager in the 1960s. This was when my walls were entirely covered with large and small pictures cut from magazines like 16 and Tiger Beat. Mostly 16. How I loved that magazine. I knew the day it was due on the newsstands and made a special, eager trip to the drugstore to buy a copy. If for some reason the new issue hadn't arrived on time, there would be lamentations. Anyway, the Cat Stevens picture got on the wall based solely on looks, as none of his records were playing in the U.S. at that time. I knew he was popular in England, which counted for a lot in those days. In college, I heard his records all the time, even though I never bought them myself. The singer-songwriter trend of the early 70s was not my style, though I liked the catchy songs well enough not to go crazy when someone else played them. These days, they play those old Cat Stevens songs -- "Peace Train," etc., etc. -- at my favorite café here in Madison. I enjoy the nostalgic feeling and the fact that they are great songs.

If the man who will always be Cat Stevens to me wants to do some new songs and "help bridge the cultural gaps," I say good. Why bitch about things he's done or said in his nonmusical mode? He's a musical artist. It's good to have him in his zone again. Let's hear the songs and take it from there.

Mel Gibson, you are discredited forever.

Everything you ever did is now tainted.

"Freedom!" It has no meaning anymore.

What artist has ever crashed like this? Not Michael Jackson. Not Woody Allen. Not O.J. Simpson. You've shown an evil heart and it changes the meaning of all of your artistic work. How horrible! How painful! Try to imagine the penance you must do.

Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you'll live... at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

So sad to think of the Mel Gibson I thought existed.

IN THE COMMENTS: A lot of people are defending Gibson and complaining that people are criticizing him because he's considered right wing. I note that doesn't explain my position, which has nothing to do with his politics, whatever they're supposed to be. I concede that my comment about O.J. Simpson is extreme (and that Simpson isn't an artist, though it would be easy to make up some sports-talk bullshit declaring his athleticism artistic). My point is that what Simpson (presumably) did doesn't change the meaning of the achievements that made him a big star. Gibson, on the other hand, has revealed something loathsome about his mind that affects our interpretation of the works of art that sprang from that mind. In particular, it changes "The Passion of the Christ," which had to be defended at the time of its release from charges that it is anti-Semitic.

UPDATE: Details on the aftermath of Mel's meltdown. I note the restaurant where he'd been drinking is called Moonshadows. Do we really need to think about Cat Stevens here? Oh, if I ever lose my reputation, oh if.... I won't have to work in Hollywood no more.