I notice that Facebook is filled with mother's day messages today. My parents, who were originally socialists, or at least my dad was, he was a leader of a DeLeonist Socialist Faction in the late 40s and into the 50s, were adamantly opposed to the celebration of mother's day and father's day because they were essentially commercial holidays designed to create money for greeting card companies, department stores, etc. According to Wikipedia, Anna Jarvis, the woman who originally created Mother's Day, campaigned against what it became: "The commercialization of the American holiday began very early, and only nine years after the first official Mother's Day had become so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become,[23][24] spending all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.[23] She decried the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "...wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ..."[24] She died later that year."

However, Mother's Day is now one of the most commercially successful American occasions, having become the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States[25] and generating a significant portion of the U.S. jewelry industry's annual revenue, from custom gifts like mother's rings.[26] Americans spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts—like spa treatments—and another $68 million on greeting cards.

My niece Bernadette sent me a video of our recently deceased friend Jack Savage. Jack showed Bernadette around Boulder when she visited, sometime in 2010. She's the same age as Jack (both were born in 1989). She took this video clip with a camera I gave her when she arrived in Boulder. I play the straight man to Jack's comedic self in a moment in which he is creating a spontaneous riff on what would happen if Leonard Cohen and Barak Obama had a baby. It ends with Jack saying he needs a Jungian analyst. Jack's last line is: "I need a Goldberg" He's referring to a friend of mine, Jonathan Goldberg, a Jungian analyst in his 70s. Strangely, I was just visiting with him
( Isee him an average of 3 times a year) yesterday. He also looks at the camera during the brief video and says "you stand guiltless in your predicament" which was a nice, if out of context, statement for Jack's survivors.

Bernadette
Hi I read that you are gathering videos of Jack for an extension to the memorium and I remembered I uploaded this once from the camera you gave me when I went to visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17HXWXyZCO8&list=UUmyEYSvfRtY3Q3RUO-LMbcg&index=6

Also just posted some thoughts on Jack's poems: http://www.zaporacle.com/some-thoughts-on-the-poems-of-john-jack-spencer-savage/

http://www.zaporacle.com/savage-reflections-the-poems-of-jack-savage/

http://www.zaporacle.com/jack-savage-in-memorium/

Zi6 6904

http://www.youtube.com

As short as his writing career was, Jack Savage was one of the greatest poets of his generation, the millennial generation. His poems are the voice of the soul, sometimes celebratory, often struggling with the darkness of the world, always profound. http://www.zaporacle.com/savage-reflections-the-poems-of-jack-savage/

Savage Reflections—-The poems of Jack Savage

http://www.zaporacle.com

Among other talents, Jack was a brilliant poet, and for a while he had a section on this website called “Savage Reflections” which he allowed me to build for him with some of his best poems. Later Jack asked me to take it down, but I kept all the poems and am reposting them here, as well as many oth...