Election Special: The Blues House
17 AugWhich is not at all the same as the House of Blues. No, the Blues House is what the White House would have been if John Birks Gillespie had been elected back in 1964, when he ran for the office. John Birks Gillespie, of course, was better known as Dizzy. He was from Cheraw, South Carolina, and was one of the finest trumpeters and most important jazz musicians of the 20th Century.
His Presidential run was at one and the same time not entirely serious and completely and utterly serious. A certain amount irony was involved, which is perhaps why the lyrics to the theme song were set to “Salt Peanuts” – a tune Diz would one day perform in the White House with President Jimmy Carter.
He developed a standard stump speech which eventually made its way into his autobiography, To Be or Not to Bop (Doubleday 1979 pp. 457-458). It’s full of jazz references that will be obscure to those who don’t know the music, and various contemporary references are likely to be lost as well. Though I never heard Gillespie give this speech, I’ve heard him speak on several musical occasions and his comic timing is superb. That is utterly lost in this transcription, though those familiar with his vocal patterns can – in some small measure – supply them as they read his words. Here they are.
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When I am elected President of the United States, my first executive order will be to change the name of the White House! To the Blues House.
Income tax must be abolished, and we plan to legalize ‘numbers’ – you know, the same way they brought jazz into the concert halls and made it respectable. We refuse to be influenced by the warnings of one NAACP official who claims that making this particular aspect of big business legal would upset the nation’s economy disastrously. Continue reading
For Health Aging, A Late Act in the Footlights – NYTimes.com
15 AugThat’s why the Burbank Senior Artists Colony is remarkable. Opened in 2005, it is a mix of market-rate and low-income apartments. The building looks like an upscale hotel but is built for the arts, with studios, a video editing room, a theater and classrooms.
Residents may arrive with no previous artistic experience or skill as an artist — but artists they become. The theater group that Sally Connors participates in is working with a troupe in London, via Skype, to write and perform a soap opera. Walter Hurlburt shows his oil paintings — for sale — at the colony’s periodic art exhibitions. Residents work with students from a nearby alternative high school to do improv theater, make claymation films and art from recycled items. Suzanne Knode wrote a short movie, “Bandida,” about an elderly woman who takes the bus to rob a convenience store. Then the residents filmed it — and Ira Glass’s “This American Life” television show filmed them — and submitted the film to the Sundance Film Festival. “A pistol, a plan, and sensible shoes,” says the poster.
There’s a video at the link.
via For Health Aging, A Late Act in the Footlights – NYTimes.com.
The grandfather clause (repost) — Crooked Timber
13 AugI saw a reference to (US Representative) Paul Ryan’s plan to kill Social Security and Medicare, but only for people currently under 55 (he doesn’t say “kill” of course, but if it was going to make things better he wouldn’t need to exempt everyone likely to care directly about the issue) and it reminded me to post this.
A policy like this has what economists like to call a time-inconsistency problem. To get the policy approved, Ryan needs the votes of people currently over 55 (hence the exemption) and in the current US situation, any Republican majority has to rely heavily on older voters. Say the plan passes. Sooner or later, the combination of demographics and the electoral pendulum means that the Repubs will be out, and the new primarily majority will face three choices (a) Repeal the whole thing if they can do so before it comes into force (b) Keep on paying high taxes to fund benefits they will never receive for the benefit of the selfish old so-and-so’s who voted to cut the rope once they had reached the top; or© extend the same cuts to the (as of 2011) over 55’s, and claw back some money for themselves.
If I were an over-55 Republican, I don’t think I would want to count on (b)
Discussion follows at the link below.
NBC’s war for fun and profit – Salon.com
13 AugVenerating the military is such a common American cultural ritual that one barely notices when it happens any longer. This morning, ABC News‘ Jake Tapper pointed to a fun, playful video of his ABC News colleague, Pentagon correspondent Luis Martinez, jumping out of a military airplane with the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army team that regularly parachutes into football stadiums during halftime as the adoring crowd cheers. In the four-minute video, Martinez plays the role of the hapless clown, acting goofy and nervous with his manly, stoic military guide, Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Figel, over whom Martinez openly slobbers and to whom he is symbolically tied as he jumps.
That worshipful, tongue-wagging fun and games with the U.S. military might not be the most appropriate activity for someone who is supposedly an adversarial reporter covering the Pentagon would never occur to any of them, because, like NBC, they’re just practicing America’s national religion — military worship — and who would ever object to that? Martinez was the reporter who gave anonymity to military officials to smear Michael Hastings over his Rolling Stone article that ended the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, allowing the anonymous officer to claim — falsely — that the quotes used by Hastings were off the record. Martinez did the same when he gave anonymity to a military officer to falsely attack a story by Jeremy Scahill exposing the network of secret prisons in Somalia which the U.S. effectively operates. Nobody practices this religion of military worship like the Pentagon Watchdogs who work at the nation’s major television networks.
Behind Nuclear Breach, a Nun’s Bold Fervor – NYTimes.com
11 AugShe has been arrested 40 or 50 times for acts of civil disobedience and once served six months in prison. In the Nevada desert, she and other peace activists knelt down to block a truck rumbling across the government’s nuclear test site, prompting the authorities to take her into custody.
She gained so much attention that the Energy Department, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal, helped pay for an oral history in which she described her upbringing and the development of her antinuclear views.
Now, Sister Megan Rice, 82, a Roman Catholic nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two male accomplices have carried out what nuclear experts call the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex, making their way to the inner sanctum of the site where the United States keeps crucial nuclear bomb parts and fuel.
via Behind Nuclear Breach, a Nun’s Bold Fervor – NYTimes.com.
Black, White, and Blues: A Commentary on Complex Truths and Traditions in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave
11 AugI forget just when I originally wrote this, sometime in the early 1990s, or maybe the late 1980s. A reference to FloJo sets 1988 as the earliest possible date, as that’s the year she set her “fastest woman in the world” records in the Olympics, but I may have written it a couple years later. No matter. Most of the references are, if not timeless, at least respectably old and well entrenched in American history (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner, W.C. Handy). Since TnT is all about truths and traditions I figued this little packet of poetic dynamite would be just the thing.
(Note: The hyperlinks in the poem are supposed to take you to notes at the end. But they don’t work too well. Still, if something in the poem is underlined, then there’s a note at the end commenting on it. The notes are in order.)
Independence Day, 2001: In Which a President Finally Frees His Slave Mistress
I
When Thomas Jefferson dreamed of Bessie Smith
Lincoln was shot and Michael Jackson got a nose job,
Atlanta was burned and Rosa Parks welcomed Neil Armstrong to the moon,
While hooded Klansmen invaded Star Wars with their laser whips
And FloJo embarrassed Hitler in Berlin.
The dream stained his sheets, the pleasure embarrassing.
Yet Tom needed his sweets and wouldn’t dream of his wife.
She was the mother of his children and the apple of his eye,_
But Bessie knew other things, secret hidden ways to sing
The blues, who do the voodoo? the long snake moan.
II
When Bill Handy had dinner with Mozart
Malcolm X traveled to Mecca and Lennon gave peace a chance,
The Declaration of Independence was signed and Haiti was born,
Bobby Kennedy was shot while chatting with Nat Turner at Trader Vic’s,
And Elvis became the King so he could buy his mamma a house.
It was a good evening. Amadeus sure could tickle the ivories,
And old Bill liked to tickle people, white folks too.
Wolfgang taught him the secret arts of notation so he could gather
Songs for Bessie to sing. That’s how the blues propagated.
Now old Tom could buy records and learn to dance.
III
When Jack Johnson escorted Marilyn Monroe to the theatre
Hiroshima was atomized so Nipponese could sing doo-wop in blackface
Chinese ghosts still haunting the Union Pacific.
Sequoya created his alphabet so the Cherokee could read Booker T.
And Augustine became a Christian before Aretha’s first was born.
The show depicted a familiar tableau:
Leontyne sang Aida in gold lame while Caliban
Fiddled with Queen Bess who couldn’t believe
That Tom had finally taken Shine’s advice and
Decided to jump ship and haul ass for New Jerusalem.
IV
When Bessie played with Martin Luther
Sometimes the magic worked, and sometimes it didn’t.
The writers of those manuals couldn’t cover everything.
Still, when Bird called and Louis Moreau played bamboula
Nijinsky would dance so fast he heated Chano’s skins.
Tom liked to watch but finally got hip to participatory democracy.
He embraced equality and burned his wig,
Freeing himself to perform unspoken acts
With his wife while the children were asleep,
Dreaming of genies and their magic lamps. Continue reading
Cultural Style: Jazz & B’ball, Classical & Football, and Beyond
10 AugThis is a set of out-takes from my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. In this passage I’m pursing a notion from mid-20th Century, an idea that provided Ruth Benedict for the title of her best-known book: Patterns of Culture. The title conveys the idea: cultures aren’t arbitrary collections of attitudes, activities, and traits; in matters large, small, and in-between they display patterns.
I begin with a passage that contrasts jazz and classical music on the one hand with basketball and football on the other, where jazz and basketball embody one style while classical music and football embody a different style. I then continue with a series of passages that move on from that to general styles of corporate organization, contrasting the hierarchical industrial corporation with the flatter and more fluid style that has emerged in high tech companies. I conclude some brief observations from my experience with one such company.
* * * * *
First, confining ourselves to the expressive sphere, let’s consider two brief examples from sports, which is, in many ways, a microcosm of the larger society. It is not difficult to see a thematic similarity between classical music and football, on the one hand, and jazz and basketball, on the other hand.
Football involves highly specialized players organized into elaborately structured units, enacting preplanned plays, and directed by a quarterback representing the coach/composer. Each team has eleven players on the field at a time, with the players being trained for very specialized roles. There is an offensive squad and a defensive squad—not to mention special-purpose units for executing and returning kicks. Each of these squads is, in turn, divided into a line and a backfield, with further specialization in each of these divisions. The offensive team is headed by the quarterback while the defense is similarly directed by one of the backfield players. The flow of the game is divided into four quarters each of which is punctuated by the individual plays of the game. The plays are divided into sets of four, called “downs”, with the players conferring between plays to decide what to do on the next play, or, at least, to confirm instructions sent in by the coach.
Basketball uses a smaller number of players, five, whose roles are less rigorously specialized. There is no distinction between offensive and defensive squads. And, while there are differentiated roles—a center, two guards and two forwards—this differentiation is not nearly so extensive as that in football. For example, on the offensive squad in football, there is a dramatic distinction between the interior line, whose players do not routinely handle the ball, and the backfield, whose players are supposed to handle the ball. No such distinction exists in basketball; all players are expected to handle the ball and to score. Beyond this, basketball involves a free flowing style of play which is quite different from discrete plays of football. Continue reading
Truth and Traditions 