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Weekly Reader: A baker’s dozen

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This Weekly Reader features links to articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

There’s a lot going on this week, so I’ve pulled in a baker’s dozen of articles and videos — everything from impeachment to people who coronasplain to a beautiful duet by two musicians featured in recent Saturday Soundtracks. I’ve tried to limit descriptions and quotes to just enough to entice you to dive deeper without getting too discouraged by the length. So let’s jump in!

We’ll begin with four impeachment and insurrection-related articles. First up, historian Lindsay Chervinsky, writing in Governing magazine, looks backward in As Trump’s Trial Nears, Here’s a History of Unusual Impeachments. Each of the cases she cites offers valuable insight and demonstrates that there is no such thing as a typical impeachment. 

Writing at Mother Jones, Mark Follman explains How Trump Unleashed a Domestic Terrorism Movement—And What Experts Say Must Be Done to Defeat It.

“Even the wifi password was a signal. Attendees at President Donald Trump’s rally in Dalton, Georgia, on January 4 who wanted to log in to the Make America Great network had to enter the phrase into their devices: ‘SeeYouJan6!’ Trump was in town that night ostensibly to boost two Republican Senate candidates, but he spent much of his speech railing about the ‘stolen’ 2020 election—and inciting supporters to descend on the nation’s capital two days later. ‘They’re not taking this White House,’ he declared, Marine One spotlighted behind him. The crowd roared. ‘We’re going to fight like hell.’”

This is a long and important piece worth your time.

At Just Security, Jason Stanley writes that scholars on the Nazis and anti-Semitism have seen this all before in Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda.

“The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly ‘globalist,’ but really Jewish, threat.“

Another long but important read.

In the last of the four insurrection/impeachment articles, Deirdre Sugiuchi writes about her personal experience in Religion Dispatches. I Grew Up Evangelical and the Christian Nationalist Insurrection Did Not Surprise Me rings true to some of my personal experience as well.

“However horrifying I find the spectacle of white Christians storming the Capitol in hopes of keeping Donald Trump in power, I do not find it at all surprising, because I grew up in the Christian nationalist movement. Growing up I came to understand firsthand that many Christian nationalists view people who don’t practice their form of Christianity as illegitimate. I also came to understand how racism is ingrained in the teachings of the white evangelical church.“

Here are two articles on the obvious hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell, and why serious people should stop listening to his lies. The first, by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times, is the more straightforward of the two. He simply says, I’m Not Actually Interested in Mitch McConnell’s Hypocrisy. You might find Bobbie Armstrong’s take on McConnell’s hypocrisy in McSweeney’s more fun. Take a look at I Am Dr. Frankenstein, and I Condemn the Actions of the Monster I Created and Did Nothing to Stop.

While we’re bringing humor and hypocrisy together, I also recommend Eli Grober’s short imagined monologue in McSweeney’s by a certain member of Congress from Georgia in The Terrible Things I Have Said and Done My Entire Life, and Right Up Until a Few Days Ago, Do Not Represent Me As a Person.

Right.

David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times, answers the question that should be asked more often in Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy? It goes against Republican talking points about their economic prowess, but historians could have told you this if you’d asked!

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades.…

“…Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.“

Speaking of false talking points. It is time to stop the “Unity” charade, and a good place to start is by taking the GOP talking points away from the beltway press. Eric Boehlert, writing in Press Run about Biden, the press, and the “unity” charade makes the case that it is time for the press to grow up.

Three days into Biden’s presidency and the press was demanding to know when he’d start placating the GOP by pushing “Republican priorities.” (Answer: That’s not how elections work.) That same day, CNN interviewed Trump supporters in Texas who wanted Biden to be ‘less divisive.‘…

Here’s the press’ skewed perspective: When Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, it wasn’t seen as a sign of weakness when he couldn’t find common ground with other side. When Biden wins the popular by seven million votes, he gets dinged for not being bipartisan.

As Boehlert notes, let’s stop the “unity” charade and see it for what it is.

I’ll just say it right up front: I love to read The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Angry Grammarian. And this one from late January updating the pandemic dictionary was a classic. Are you a covidiot who coronasplains? he asks. And what is a covidiot you may ask?

Definition of covidiot. Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer.

After reading that, you can probably figure out that coronasplaining is something done by a covidiot.

Let’s finish with three pieces that have nothing to do with impeachment, insurrection, fascism, pandemics, or conspiracy theories. In other words, normal stuff that we are now beginning to see again after four years of lunacy.

We’ll begin with entrepreneur Robert Glazer, writing on Friday Forward about Why Businesses Need More Common Sense.

“Lindstrom has discovered a link between empathy and common sense: the better we understand each other, the more problems we can solve through common sense. We treat others the way they want to be treated.

Unfortunately, studies have shown our ability to empathize has declined visibly, driven by social media, technology use and even the prevalence of Botox, which makes it harder to read people’s expressions.

Perhaps this is why common sense seems to be in such short supply today. As we lose our ability to understand each other, we struggle to find solutions that are both logical and widely accepted, based on a shared understanding of each other’s needs.“

Muriel Vega, writing for Preservation magazine, the publication of The National Trust for Historic Preservation (my old employer) has a short piece about The Meticulous Restoration of NASA’s Mission Control at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. For those of us who remember watching all those space flights in the 1960s, with pictures from Mission Control, this brings back a lot of memories.

Finally, we’ll end this Baker’s Dozen with an absolutely lovely piece by two musicians who have been featured in More to Come’s Saturday Soundtrack: John Smith and Sarah Jarosz. Eye To Eye is a beautiful tune for our time of separation.

I cry out, but I feel like you can’t hear me
I need it, and I wish that you were near me

Eye to eye
Remember when you looked me in the eye
Eye to eye
No, I don’t wanna have to wait in line
Can we stand
Eye to eye?

Enjoy the reading and the music.

More to come…

DJB

Seeking the truth

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“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.“

John 8:32 (KJV)

If only knowing the truth were as easy as the gospel writer, quoting Jesus, makes it sound. Spiritual truths are not my specialty. But in the worlds I do know, such as history, my experience is that seeking the truth is hard enough. Many of us spend a great deal of energy avoiding the truth, or — once we’ve found it — we try and conveniently forget what we’ve discovered.

I’ve been thinking about the seeking of truth since watching the film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Katrina Browne produced and directed Traces of the Trade, a documentary about her slave-trading ancestors from Rhode Island, the hidden history of New England’s complicity in slavery and her family’s reckoning with questions of privilege and repair. 

Katrina Browne at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, in a room where slave ship captains, including her ancestors, negotiated to purchase Africans. (Credit: Elly Hale)

Discovering the truth about her ancestors — the largest slave trading family in America — brought on questions, doubts, and new perspectives. Browne had approached her journey believing the old American myth that the South was singularly responsible for slavery. What she discovered when her grandmother made a short reference to their Bristol, Rhode Island, slave-trading ancestors in a family history was the large and complex web of people in every state of the Union whose livelihood and privilege benefited from slavery. She discovered, in her own way, what historian Edward Baptist meant when he spoke of how slavery made American capitalism in The Half Has Never Been Told, his influential and troubling work about the continental cotton empire.

We all cling to myths as if they were truth because they are comforting and help us avoid facts we would rather not consider. The battle of myth over truth was most recently seen in the now disbanded 1776 Commission. Historian Michael Kazin writes of the way that the commission — cobbled together to fashion a manifesto for “patriotic” education without a professional historian in their ranks — pines for a “simple, quasi-theological way of understanding the past.” There is nothing wrong, Kazin notes, “with venerating allegedly timeless values, but that is a task for preachers and ceremonial orators — not historians.” 

“…one reason historians argue fruitfully, if endlessly, about such topics is that they appreciate that how one defines those “values” helps determine the way one interprets what occurred. In the 1960s, the Americans who staged peaceful demonstrations to integrate bus stations, restaurants and workplaces and those who sent the police to beat them up both claimed they were upholding the causes of liberty and justice. But between George Wallace’s idea that freedom meant the right to exclude Black people from one’s property and Martin Luther King Jr.’s view that it meant giving equal access to everyone, there could be no compromise.“

Instead of clinging to myth, Traces of the Trade is the type of truth-seeking that has led individuals and institutions to consider much more deeply their role in human trafficking. Browne’s work contributed to the Episcopal Church’s 2006 decision to apologize and atone for its role in slavery.

Many of our challenges today comes from those, like the participants in the 1776 Commission, who proclaim to “know” the truth when what they know are their myths. They dismiss those who disagree with their worldview. They won’t do the hard work to find out the truths that may shake up their myths. They decry those who don’t hold their views of freedom and values even if those views and values mean they have the right to exclude Black people from their property or to deny them the right to vote. As Anand Giridharadas writes in Mayflower Mouth, these are the people who think they know the truth about what and who is American and what and who isn’t. They believe they have the right to make that choice for everyone else even when they are in a minority.

As Giridharadas writes, these gatekeepers of the American myth also suggest that Andy would be a good choice for an Americanization of his strange-to-their-ears first name.

But I don’t think I would make a good Andy. I even dare to think that Anand is as American as any other name. I know deep in my bones that I don’t live as a guest in (now ex-Senator David) Perdue’s country.* He lives as my fellow citizen in the country we share. Either mouths like his will learn to twist and blow and yawn and trill and roll in at-first unfamiliar ways, or, in the times that are coming, they will marginalize themselves. It is already a country of many names and many sounds; it is becoming all the more so by the day. This election is a referendum on whether America is a John-Bob republic or a country for us all. The John-Bobbers aren’t winning.

What is the personal myth that I hold dear? I believe that the idea of America is a beautiful thing. That we are a nation founded on ideals and not on a common ethnicity, language, religion, or culture. The idea of the United States is that anybody — anybody — can be an American if you agree to respect the principles of representative democracy. My myth is that our ideals say we don’t care about your skin color, your religion, your accent, your beliefs, or where you’re from.

But I know that the truth of how our past has played out into our present is much different than my idea of America or our common ideals. So yes, my myth is about values that I hold dear, but it also recognizes that America is a project, a work-in-progress. My myth is based on a vision and values, but the simple fact that I believe that vision to be true doesn’t make it so. Katrina Browne’s brave journey into her personal past makes that so very clear.

Real leaders know that you are at your best when you question what you know, realize there is much you don’t know, and try not to fall into the trap of “knowing what just ain’t so” to quote the great Satchel Paige. As a country, we need to continue to seek the truth about the struggles to form a more perfect union. There is work to be done every single day to make those values and that vision a reality. We are what we do, much more than what we have.

As in so many things in life, the journey of seeking is much more important than the destination of knowing.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

*Mayflower Mouth was written in response to then-Senator Perdue’s deliberate mispronunciation of now-Vice President Kamala Harris’s first name.

Jake Blount’s path through metal and funk to get to the Appalachian music of the Black community

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Jake Blount is an award-winning banjoist, fiddler, singer and ethnomusicologist based in Providence, Rhode Island. A solo artist and half of the duo Tui, he was a 2020 Strathmore Artist in Residence here in the DC area until the coronavirus hit. Blount serves as a board member of Bluegrass Pride and he is a 2020 recipient of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, which is where I first came across his work.

Oh, and he happened to spend years playing metal and funk guitar. Yes, people do take very different routes to get to a love of old-time music. This week on Saturday Soundtrack, there’s more on his path below.

Blount specializes in the music of Black communities in the southeastern United States, and in the regional style of the Finger Lakes. A versatile performer, Blount interpolates blues, bluegrass and spirituals into the old-time string band tradition he belongs to. He foregrounds the experiences of queer people and people of color in his work. His teachers include Rhiannon Giddens, Bruce Molsky and Judy Hyman. 

I’ve written of how Black folk music was often repurposed and repackaged for whites while the original artists had their voices erased. Blount goes back to the originals, whether in his solo work or with Libby Weitnauer in the duo Tui. Bobbie Jean Sawyer, writing in Wide Open Country, notes that Blount traces the Black and Indigenous roots of Appalachian music and showcases how old-time music spoke truth to power.

“One of the most persistent myths surrounding country music is that the genre is “white people music.” The erasure of the Black artists who shaped country music and the industry’s continual exclusion of people of color stands in contrast to genre’s longstanding mantra: “three chords and the truth.” And the truth is, country music would not exist without Black artists.

In 2020, Blount’s first full-length solo album, Spider Tales, was released on Free Dirt Records & Service Co. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart. Rolling Stone wrote of one of the songs on the album:

A queer and black performer working in Appalachian music, Blount gives an eerie, gender-flipped rendition of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” — famously covered by Nirvana — that’s heavy on mournful fiddle and every bit as unsettling as the original.

Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone opens Spider Tales. “The tune comes from Lucius Smith, a Black banjo player from Sardis, Mississippi, who often performed in a band with Sid Hemphill.” The video notes also tell us that Alan Lomax recorded Smith first in 1942, then in 1978. In this video, Blount is playing the banjo while Nic Gareiss performs with his feet.

Roustabout features Blount and Tatiana Hargreaves, another frequent musical partner. According to the notes on the video, this tune is from Dink Roberts, who lived in Haw River, North Carolina, and was an accomplished guitarist as well as banjoist.

In the Wide Open Country interview, Blount describes when he became immersed in Black old-time music.

“I sort of had this gradual, gravitational pull toward more traditional stuff and finding my way to it that really came to a head when the grand jury made the choice not to indict George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin,” Blount says. “I felt the need to go back to the songs my ancestors had sung, initially in the form of spirituals, and then eventually in the form of banjo and fiddle music to sort of understand how they had seen the world because songs are the only direct record they left us. So many of them couldn’t read or write and could not read or write the truth — even if they were able to put it to paper — for fear of persecution. I went looking for something that I needed to adapt to the world in front of me and wound up involved in this awesome jam scene and getting really into source recordings and learning old music. It just took on a life of its own.”

As people around the world protest racial injustice and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others, Blount says traditional old-time and folk songs, many of which are featured on Spider Tales, provide a soundtrack to the current Black Lives Matter movement.

We’ll end with Boll Weevil, which features Blount’s fiddling and vocals and was recorded live at the 2019 International Bluegrass Music Association World of Bluegrass gathering in Raleigh.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image by Michelle Lotker via JakeBlount.com

Weekly Reader: Lives well lived

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This Weekly Reader features links to articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy as January turned into February. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

Statistics tell us that January and February are the months in the U.S. with the highest death rates per 1,000 people. The pandemic has brought death and loss to the forefront of American life in ways reminiscent of other times of national trauma. In the American Civil War, more than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives. We are not at that scale yet, as an equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. However, in This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale, usually occurring without relatives nearby to help with the nursing and grieving and often happening anonymously in those days before those killed could be easily identified, changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. I suspect the scale and often the loneliness of loss through the pandemic will result in more changes in all our lives.

The pace of loss has been on my mind as I have been reflecting on the number of people who have passed away in recent weeks. This week’s Weekly Reader includes stories and remembrances of several individuals who touched the lives of others in ways known and unknown. All were well known in their fields. So many who died of COVID in the same time period are known only to their families and friends. But so many of those individuals also left remarkable legacies. I wrap it all up with an article that summarizes ten ideas that one person has used to help make a life well lived.

Hank Aaron (credit: Baseball Hall of Fame)

The great baseball columnist of The Washington Post, Thomas Boswell, wrote a heartfelt appreciation for the man who just may have been the greatest baseball player to ever play the game, Henry Aaron. Hank Aaron’s greatness and grace were underappreciated and unmatched makes a strong case for that assessment, and that’s saying something coming from this Willie Mays fan.

“The 1957 and 1958 World Series hooked me on Aaron, who died on Friday at 86, and (Warren) Spahn. Their Milwaukee Braves battled the New York Yankees, whom I already had learned to hold in equal parts awe and hate, on dead-even terms, winning in seven games in their first Series meeting before New York got revenge in seven games in ’58. Aaron hit .364 and slugged .600 in those two World Series.…

There was no conspiracy of silence about Aaron, no plot to keep him underappreciated — which he still is to this day. He was, simply, the greatest attention-deflecting machine the game ever produced. He played with understated grace, swift efficiency and a lizard-tongue wrist-snap of a swing. He tried to hit the ball 400 feet, not 450. That restraint, in an era that adored tape-measure homers, allowed him to blend contact with power; Aaron hit over .320 eight times yet routinely had years with around 40 homers but only 60 strikeouts.…

He had a quiet, utterly composed, almost Buddha-like presence. It was like talking to a bronze statue that suddenly began speaking, slowly and thoughtfully, the least-rushed man alive.“

I had the chance to see Aaron live once in my life, in 1966, the first year the Braves moved to Atlanta. On the last day of the season, our Little League coach told us all to gather around, and then he announced that the coaches and parents were taking us to Atlanta the next Sunday to see an Atlanta Braves game. This 11-year-old was over the top excited! I can’t remember the score, or who they played, but I will always remember seeing graceful Hank Aaron — the real home run champion — play baseball that sunny summer day.

Marcus Hayes, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, tells What legendary Temple basketball coach John Chaney meant to me and the Black community in America.

“I came to Philadelphia in 1995, just a farm boy with a fancy diploma. Within a year of my arrival, I met both Michael Jordan and John Chaney.

“On paper,” writes Hayes, “the coach was far less impressive than the player. In person, it wasn’t even close.”

“Jordan was a brand. Chaney was an institution.

But Chaney wasn’t just an institution. Along with a handful of other Black coaches, Chaney helped change an institution — the insular, powerful world of college basketball coaching. It was a world dominated by Bobby Knights and Dean Smiths; the stately legend of John Wooden; the hoary ghost of Adolph Rupp. It was a world made accessible to people like me by the late John Thompson at Georgetown; by Nolan Richardson at Tulsa and Arkansas; and, in gritty North Philadelphia, by John Chaney, who died Friday. He was 89.

You’ve heard this before, but for Coach Chaney this is true: Like Thompson and Richardson, Chaney will live forever through the lives he so deeply touched; and through lives he never knew he touched.“

I first met the late Barbara Erickson, President and CEO of the Trustees of Reservations who passed away much too early on January 15th, when she visited the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She came soon after taking on her role with the Trustees, the Massachusetts organization that was a precursor to the National Trust in the U.K. It was clear that Barbara was an impressive leader as well as an individual who was generous in spirit. We got to know each other a bit more when she came to the 2015 International National Trust Organisation (INTO) Cambridge conference when I served as an INTO Trustee and we were both speakers. Catherine Leonard, the Secretary-General of INTO, has written Barbara J Erickson, President and CEO of the Trustees of Reservations as an appreciation for Barbara and her work on the international stage. It includes a link to a blog I wrote after Cambridge.

Barbara was a force for preservation and conservation, and she will be missed.

Three generation of Brown men loved the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein. To be truthful, Daddy, Andrew, and I could quote multiple lines from several Mel Brooks movies, and when we watched them together the laughter was loud and long. Sadly, most of the main actors from that 1974 mini-masterpiece of a film have now passed away, including last week, the wonderfully talented Cloris Leachman.

Adam Bernstein, in The Washington Post, has a lovely tribute in his obituary Cloris Leachman, Oscar-winning actress who starred in ‘Young Frankenstein,’ dies at 94.

“It was ‘Young Frankenstein,; however, that delivered her enduring place in film history. The movie was bursting with brilliant visual and verbal gags that paid irreverent tribute to Universal Studios horror films such as “Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff and “Dracula” with Bela Lugosi….

To play Frau Blücher, Ms. Leachman tied her hair in a tight bun, affixed a chin mole and gave her skin a sickly pallor with makeup — she was made to resemble Judith Anderson’s severe housekeeper Mrs. Danvers from “Rebecca” (1940). But the pièce de résistance was her German accent and her fearsome glare. Horses whinny in horror at the mention of her name.

Ms. Leachman made the deadpan most of her deliciously cockeyed lines. ‘Stay close to zee candles,’ she says, holding an oversized candelabra with unlit candlesticks as she climbs a shadowy staircase. She overdoes her offer of a nightcap to an increasingly angry Frankenstein, first proffering brandy, then ‘varm milk . . . perhaps?‘ and, finally, the chocolate malted kid’s drink Ovaltine. Later, she confesses to a dark secret: “Yes! Yes!” she shouts of Victor Frankenstein. ‘He voss my boyfriend!’”

Writing in the New York Times, critic-at-large Wesley Morris has an appraisal of the life and work of the actress Cicely Tyson that is a moving remembrance of yet another giant we lost in recent days: Cicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall Apart.

“A wonder of poise and punch, the actress dared to declare herself a moral progenitor, taking on roles that reflected the dignity of Black women.“

“Tyson was a peculiar kind of famous. I was never told of her importance. I just knew. Everybody knew. This woman was somebody. She looked sainted, venerated — at 29, 36, 49 and 60. Even in anguish. It’s possible that happens once you’ve played a 110-year-old formerly enslaved woman in ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’ and after you’ve played Kunta Kinte’s mother. Or maybe those roles happen because you radiate venerability.“

If you want to think about your life and how you live it, take a look at Scott H. Young’s blog post Ten Ideas That Have Shaped My Life.

“Ideas are powerful. Arriving at the right time, they can alter the entire direction of your life.

But ideas also hide in the background, acting as assumptions. Quietly influencing your decisions, whether they’re true or false.“

Number 6 — Fear is overcome through exposure — rings true for me. And Number 10 — Happiness is in the pursuit, not the possession — is always a good reminder.

Rest in peace, Hammering Hank, Coach Chaney, Barbara, Frau Blücher, and Cicely Tyson. Like Marcus Haynes said, you will live forever through the lives you so deeply touched; and through lives you never knew you touched.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Cloris Leachman in her legendary role as Frau Blücher in the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein.

Reclaiming our sense of humanity

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The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, notes writer Steve Almond, “are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience.” It is why I believe in the power of stories. But power works for good and evil, and every story has a perspective. Not every story is told with the best of intentions.

“We do not tell stories as they are, we tell stories as we are. “

Anaïs Nin

The truth in this quote about stories attributed to French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer Anaïs Nin made me stop and think. We see through our own personal lenses as we tell stories, and there are other stories — sometimes hidden — that are part of the telling. Stories that may be good or bad, true or false.

We all decide if our stories will include a larger sense of humanity as we consider our relationship to others. I saw the quote about stories in a recent enewsletter, and an earlier post from the same organization with the subject matter title of Reclaiming our sense of humanity came to mind as I thought about the telling and absorbing of stories.

Reclaiming our sense of humanity strikes me as a necessary project in these turbulent times. In that work, the stories we tell ourselves and others are key to our growth personally and as a nation.

It is easy to look at the chaotic and never-ending news cycle and lose faith in the future, to question our ability to see each other as humans, worthy of care and love. People tell stories from the horrific and sick to the fantastical and sometime comical. (Jewish lasers in space, anyone?) These are often based on conspiracy theorists repeating baseless claims designed to spread disinformation and distrust. Or sometimes these stories come as part of a worldview from groups who believe that people who don’t practice their form of religion are illegitimate. Those stories tell us who they are. They also make it easy to turn to cynicism and despair.

There are different ways to approach life, to tell our stories, and to reclaim our sense of humanity. We can refuse to be drawn into the false stories and lies that are told to drive us apart. And we can do the work that is before us to remake our relationship to others.

“When you recognize that pain and response to pain is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself … It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word? Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.”

Sherwin Nuland

Journalist and broadcaster Krista Tippett shared her thoughts on the reclaiming of our sense of humanity and the need to move beyond all the coverage of the worst of human nature, in an interview with the Poetry Society of America. When asked “If you were to choose one poem or text to inscribe in a public place right now, what would that be?” she responds:

“The last line of a poem called “Vocation,” by William Stafford: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” The language of vocation — calling — is important to me, in civilizational as well as personal terms. Through all of the extraordinary disorientation and tumult of our world right now, I think we are also glimpsing the world that wants to be born — a world in which we center what is essential in human terms — and reimagine and remake our relationship to others and to the natural world.”

Tippet notes that the worst of human nature and action gets all the coverage in our chaotic news cycle, “but it is not the whole story of our time.” I like the idea that our calling in this moment is to look, hear, and work to “center what is essential in human terms” as we reimagine and remake our relationship to others. In short, it is to reclaim our humanity.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Helping hands image by James Chan from Pixabay

Yasmin Williams: Not your father’s Takoma Park fingerstyle guitarist

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Yasmin Williams released her second album Urban Driftwood yesterday, with a sound and style that stands as “her challenge to widespread preconceptions about the music made by young Black people or acoustic guitarists. It’s Williams’s achievement that she makes that challenge sound so calming and beautiful.”

Those were the words of writer John Lingan in last Monday’s Washington Post. And it was Lingan’s appreciation for Williams and her music that led me to explore more of the work of this 24-year-old bold acoustic innovator in today’s Saturday Soundtrack.

Williams grew up in Northern Virginia and she recorded Urban Driftwood at studios in Kensington, Silver Spring and Takoma Park, Maryland. As Lingan notes,

Anyone who approaches the acoustic guitar with a thumb pick or their bare fingers in suburban Maryland inevitably invites comparisons to Takoma Park’s John Fahey, whose experiments with country blues made his name in the 1960s and ’70s. After inventing the term “American primitive” to describe his spare style, Fahey founded Takoma Records, which released solo guitar records by such similar visionaries as Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho and influenced generations of younger players, including Jack Rose and William Tyler.

But her music doesn’t sound like Fahey’s, and it is certainly not primitive. She has “an unorthodox, modern style of playing,” notes her website bio. “Her music has been commonly described as refreshing, relaxing, and unique and has been called some of the most imaginative guitar music out today.”

As one can see on the video of Restless Heart and elsewhere, Williams utilizes hammering, bowing, percussion, polyrhythms, and a host of two-handed techniques to achieve this modern sound. As she notes to Lingan, she is not from the Takoma Records tradition of fingerstyle guitar.

“She doesn’t say it defiantly, just as a point of clarification. ‘Both my mom and dad have family from D.C. I am Chocolate City. I grew up with go-go and Earth, Wind and Fire.‘

The latter’s 1974 single Kalimba Story, for example, inspired Williams’s use of the African thumb-piano on the song “Urban Driftwood,” which also features her on the harplike kora. A guest djembe player enlivens the piece as well, and lends it a texture not often heard in the Americana world, where most acoustic-based music like Williams’s still resides. In the last decade or so, Black artists such as Leyla McCalla and Valerie June have opened up the genre to new lyrical perspectives and styles. Rhiannon Giddens, the banjoist and musicologist, has led an effort to educate the genre’s audience about traditional American folk music’s debt to African traditions. Williams admires those artists and many others in the traditional folk world, even if her style and ambitions are a little more flexible.

Williams is listening to her own muse, playing lyrical, technically challenging tunes, with simple beauty and impressive virtuosity, as she does here on Juvenescence.

Next up is the official music video of the title track from Urban Driftwood. I love the scenes from around Washington, DC, and I am enthralled by the music. Here’s how it is described on the music video:

“The narrative plot of Urban Driftwood culminates in the repetitive, meditative sounds of guitar, kora, kalimba, and hand drums on the penultimate title track, creating a sonic landscape that communicates the feeling of movement and evokes images of the natural beauty that persists within urban spaces. As she wrote the song, Williams was reflecting on her personal role in the context of the current societal moment, considering her position as Black female guitarist within a white male dominated field. Yasmin says, ‘There are not many Black guitarists within this genre and particularly with all of the political and social discord that was/is happening in the United States in 2020, I felt it was extremely important to include a song on the album that was inspired by my heritage and paid homage to who I am, the household I grew up in, the music I listened to as a child. ‘Urban Driftwood’ is more like the music I grew up listening to than any other song I’ve released so far.’”

In this video of After the Storm, the final track on Urban Driftwood, she is playing

“…a beautiful, brand new instrument – a Skytop Guitars Grand Concert acoustic guitar. This guitar, built by Eric Weigeshoff of Skytop Guitars in New Paltz, NY, has a Tunnel 14 Redwood top, and the back and sides are made from Quilted Sapele. There are two large side soundports in lieu of a traditional soundhole in the front. These side soundports direct sound upward toward the player and out to the audience, creating an awesome 3D soundscape for the player.“

She wrote the tune after George Floyd’s murder, but — as the listener hears — it is very calming. She told Lingan, “I didn’t want it to sound aggressive, that wasn’t how I was feeling. I wanted to be hopeful, because we could always use more of that.”

Yes indeed, we do need more hope today.

My hope is that we’ll hear a great deal more of Yasmin Williams in the months and years ahead.

Enjoy.

More to come…

DJB

Image from YasminWilliamsMusic.com

Weekly Reader: Help! I’m feeling optimistic

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This Weekly Reader features links to articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy here in the heart of winter. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

We will get the laughter part out of the way up front. Janine Annett, writing in McSweeney’s, pleads Doctor, Please Help, I’m Feeling Optimistic.

“Doctor, I’ve been feeling really strange these past few days. I haven’t really felt this way in about four years. My chronic migraines have completely disappeared, and the past few nights I’ve slept like a baby. I have pleasant dreams, sleep for eight hours without interruption, and then wake up feeling refreshed.…

I scrolled through Twitter to try and snap out of it and feel pessimistic again, but all I felt was joy seeing people praise Amanda Gorman and share those kindhearted Bernie memes.“

There’s more, and I promise you that you’ll laugh (if you’re not crying).

Let’s jump into the more serious stuff with two author interviews by writer and editor Anand Giridharadas in The Ink, his newsletter about money and power, politics and culture. 

The first is with policy guru Heather McGhee — the author of a forthcoming book, The Sum of Us, which argues that racism costs everyone, not just people of color. In the post Ending the uncivil war, Giridharadas and McGhee discuss how racism keeps us from having nice things, why the portals of disinformation need to be shut down, and how America can save itself in the Biden era. McGhee begins with “the parable of the pool” that anchors her argument.

“The parable is a story that I grew up learning from family members. It was a very visceral memory for many of them. There was a grand, resort-style public swimming pool in the heart of their community. In fact, in the United States there were more than 2,000 of them that were built with tax dollars over the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. In many ways, it was one of the most real, everyday examples of the New Deal consensus of government being a force for the improvement of the everyday quality of life of its citizens.

Yet in so many of these communities, the pools were for whites only or were segregated. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the courts began to knock down these segregation codes in recreational facilities, many towns in virtually every region of the country decided to drain their public swimming pools, rather than integrate them.…

It’s the parable at the heart of “The Sum of Us,” because in many ways the era that I’ve known my whole life, the inequality era, has been defined most dramatically by the hollowing out of the public goods that we share in common, an era of austerity and a lack of investment in public infrastructure.…The opening sentence of my book asks, “Why can’t we have nice things?” And the answer is that racism has drained our pools.“

The second interview I recommend — Love the world anyway — is with Ann Heberlein, author of a new biography of Hannah Arendt.

The “German-born, Jewish, American political philosopher and author of such enduring works as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a writer and thinker for our times. Heberlein’s book, On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt tackles this fascinating subject. Giridharadas’s interview with Heberlein delves into several parts of Arendt’s life and impact.

The next three articles deal with the role of journalism in the rise of Donald Trump, the media bias that you may not have expected, and what needs to come next.

Karen Attiah, writing in The Washington Post, calls out her fellow journalists and those who own media companies in The media had a role to play in the rise of Trump. It is time to hold ourselves accountable.

In Press Run, Eric Boehlert is upset about the way the New York Times characterized Donald Trump for four years verses their treatment of Joe Biden in After touting Trump as “populist,” New York Times paints Biden as elitist. Yes, this is about the Rolex nonsense.

“Reviving a long-running gotcha narrative that portrays wealthy Democrats as hypocrites, the New York Times has been dinging President Joe Biden since Inauguration Day as being out of touch with voters. It’s a dishonest pursuit that looks especially absurd following Trump’s four years of gaudy, country club excess, which the newspaper ridiculously labeled, “populism.”

At the swearing, the Times reported Biden wore, ‘a stainless steel Rolex Datejust watch with a blue dial, a model that retails for more than $7,000,” and noted the handsome piece “costs the equivalent of dozen or so stimulus checks.’…In the same article detailing the price of Biden’s Rolex ($7,000), the Times omitted any references to the cost of the gold Rolex Trump wore as president. ($36,000.)

The urgent wristwatch update came three days after the Times delivered a reported piece on Biden’s exercise bike of choice, Peloton, noting the high-end workout machine, “does not exactly comport with Mr. Biden’s “regular guy from Scranton” political persona.”

Instead of focusing on what’s on Biden’s wrist or in his exercise room, the better way to determine his “Everyman” agenda is to look at his earliest policy initiatives.

Also in The Washington Post, media critic Margaret Sullivan takes on the right wing media in Fox News is a hazard to our democracy. It’s time to take the fight to the Murdochs. Here’s how.

“Even James Murdoch, while not naming names, blasted the harm that his family’s media empire has done. “The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very much so,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.’

But it’s his father and his brother, Lachlan, who run Fox, not James.“

Let’s end with two history-related articles. First, Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky has a piece at her blog on Historians Contextualizing the Political Chaos: A Roundup. After the January 6th insurrection, she noted that…

“Right away, historians recognized the unprecedented aspects of these events, as well as their deep historical roots. They’ve written blog posts, op-eds, and columns helping us to understand the political developments following the insurrection, including discussions of impeachment, the 14th amendment, the 25th amendment, and D.C. statehood.“

Patsy Cline Historic Home in Winchester, VA

Brian Breham in the Winchester (Virginia) Star has the good news that the Patsy Cline House is now a national landmark.

“Cline was a Winchester native who went on to become one of the most highly regarded country music singers of all time. She lived at several addresses throughout her life, but the two-story, single-family home she shared with her mother, Hilda Hensley, on South Kent Street was where she stayed the longest.

According to information contained in the house’s National Historic Landmark nomination form, “it was her home when she started singing professionally, signed her first recording contract and made a name for herself in regional country music circles.”

Patsy Cline was a country music trailblazer and a woman who led the way for a whole generation of female performers in an industry long dominated by men. She was among the first to headline concerts and she became the first female to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1991, MCA records issued her first box set entitled The Patsy Cline Collection, which was subsequently named by Rolling Stone magazine as among their “50 Greatest Albums of All-Time”.

Enjoy a bit of Walkin’ After Midnight.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image: The iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo by Charles C. Ebbets, taken in 1932 as workers sat on an iron crossbeam high above New York City, got a new addition on Wednesday: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It was just one of many memes to feature the lawmaker in his mittens on Inauguration Day. (Bernie photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP, skyscraper photo by Charles C. Ebbets via Yahoo)

Turning back to what matters

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As our emotions ranged from exuberant and poignant highs to harrowing and tragic lows, a wise observer sent out a reminder of how the world works.

“One of the most painful things for me to watch in the frenzy of our life together in recent years was the loss of any capacity to remember that essential contradictions run wild in each of us and are real, too, in whoever our ‘others’ have become. There is a terrible but also a beautiful, and potentially redemptive, complexity at play whenever human beings are involved.”

We have all been through great leaps of emotion just over the past seven days. There was a transition of power in the U.S., although it was less than fully peaceful and featured pettiness and spitefulness right up to the end. Two recent occurrences took me back to last Monday’s More to Come post and thoughts of how far we have to travel to rebuild trust when we have political leaders in one party who are not serious. And yet we also saw historical firsts and great moments of grace and eloquence.

Let’s begin with two events — the firing of a truth-teller and the faux outrage over a decent and moral speech — that show how far we stand from transparency, truth, civility, and trust.

First, Fox News announced that it had fired Chris Stirewalt, the veteran politics editor who was an onscreen face of the network’s election night projection that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in Arizona. Later Fox News’s longtime Washington bureau chief announced his retirement after facing criticism from network executives as well.

Fox — which bills itself as a news network — was the first network to call Arizona for Biden, and they got the call right! But instead of sending kudos to the news division and decision desk, the owners and top executives at the network decided to punish those who told the truth. Their viewers, most especially Donald Trump, didn’t like truth mixed in with their “news.”*

Beyond firing the individual who was right, Fox also responded to this turn of events by cutting more news positions and hiring more opinion pundits. Just one day after Biden was inaugurated Fox had a “Breaking News” chyron that read: “Biden’s Disastrous First Week.” Clearly Fox’s business model of telling lies and tricking its viewers makes more money than telling objective facts and news, which is the point made in last Monday’s post:

“We cannot build a more trusting time…unless we also recognize that there are those who benefit from the discord and distrust, and who will work hard to undermine any efforts to reduce their influence over others. Their role in our society needs to be diminished and controlled.”

That news item was followed by faux outrage to President Biden’s call for national unity. We all expected Biden to urge a coming together in his inaugural address, as he’s been talking about it for two years. What surprised many of us was how he moved beyond feel-good language to note that “our prospects for much-needed ‘unity’ are threatened by various political forces. Among them, he said, are racism, nativism, political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism.”

President Biden looked at the 2017 events in Charlottesville and the insurrection of January 6th and saw what any objective viewer saw.

Unfortunately, objectivity wasn’t the goal in the reaction by the professional political class on the right. As Greg Sargent notes in the Washington Post, “Republican officials and their media allies are now widely condemning these words as an attack on themselves and their voters. The obvious trick,” Sargent noted, “is to game the media into saying Biden is already reneging on his unity promise by being divisive. Republicans,” he added, are also “working to reframe the national debate over how to repair the damage done during Donald Trump’s presidency on terms favorable to them.”

The faux outrage, just like Republicans pretending to care about the deficit again**, was widely anticipated.

The predictability of these responses shows why we need to stop listening to this professional political class on the right as if they are part of a rational, functioning political party that cares about the future of democracy and America. After four years of supporting every whim Donald Trump wanted to inflict on America while turning a blind eye to the unnecessary deaths of 1 in every 1,000 Americans under his mismanaged coronavirus response, they have lost their chance to be taken seriously until they clean house.

I generally do not read the conservative columnist George Will. As noted in other posts, I won’t buy books — even books on baseball — where Will has written a jacket blurb. But part of the title to a recent column grabbed me. The snippet was, “So the people need to grow up.”

When I was a young boy in Tennessee, I would, on occasion, do something foolish or moronic, leading my father to say, “It is time to grow up!” I know that reprimand from personal experience.

Will wrote in his column, “Five days before becoming president, (Biden) spoke five blunt words that would have been discordant in an inaugural address but that the entire nation needs to take to heart. Commenting on Republican members of Congress who refused to wear masks while crowded into protected rooms during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Biden said: ‘It’s time to grow up.'” Charlie Sykes, another conservative who has also had enough, agrees with Will and calls out the GOP as an unserious party.

Writer Anand Giridharadas looks at the events around us and has suggested that we are “living through a revolt against the future. The future,” he insists, “will prevail.”

Which brings me back to hope, potential redemption, and the things that matter. In her weekly note to readers of the On Being project, it was that wise observer Krista Tippett who noted that we all fall short in this life. “This is an uncomfortable truth to take in, a fact not about life as we wish it to be but about life as it is,” she begins. And then she continues with the thought that began this post, a thought that has been turning in my mind since it came across my screen.

“One of the most painful things for me to watch in the frenzy of our life together in recent years was the loss of any capacity to remember that essential contradictions run wild in each of us and are real, too, in whoever our ‘others’ have become.” Yes, we all strive. We all fall short. We are full of contradictions.

And yes, there is “a terrible but also a beautiful, and potentially redemptive, complexity at play whenever human beings are involved.”

There is hope and there is potential redemption. While a great many of these people who need to grow up are middle age or older, many of us met a 22-year-old young woman for the first time last Wednesday who is clearly a grown-up and who speaks in serious, yet lofty language. Amanda Gorman reminds us of what’s at stake if we give in to those who…

“…would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.“

Much has changed for the good. When a woman of Black and Indian parents can be sworn in as the nation’s first female Vice President by the nation’s first female Latina Supreme Court Justice just before hearing another woman of color, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, lift our hearts with her soaring words and images, we know that things have changed. As Amanda Gorman said, “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us.”

The future will prevail.

Young people, women, people of color, immigrants, and many others not in the traditional corridors of power are showing us what matters. How to be our best selves. Yes, we need the public to get serious, recognize what we almost lost on January 6th, and grow up. But that will only happen as we see the essential contradictions in ourselves that we so easily see in others and work toward a reconciliation with those who are willing to be serious about what matters.

It is past time to get to work.

More to come…

DJB

*Here’s the reason why.

**The Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman sets them straight.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Taking a viscerally emotional journey with guitarist and singer John Smith

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British born and based guitarist, singer, and songwriter John Smith hits so many right notes for me. His guitar work is novel and fresh, yet rooted in the fingerstyle tradition of British folk, while his singing is warm and welcoming. His website tells a bit about his background.

Steeped in the lineage of British folk, taking his cue from Richard Thompson and John Martyn, Smith has evolved a transatlantic blend of fingerstyle and slide guitar techniques. John’s intimate takes on love, loss and the journey we make, combined with his innovative guitar work, have won him a loyal following.  His honey-on-gravel voice and mesmerizing fingerstyle guitar are undeniable. Sometimes using a slide, sometimes with guitar on his lap, sometimes detuning mid-song, Smith’s obsession with the instrument has made a master of him. Whether by way of album or concert, he leads the listener, enthralled in his presence, on a viscerally emotional journey.

Let’s begin this Saturday Soundtrack with an optimistic look ahead. From the 2017 album Headlong comes the tune Far Too Good, heard in the live version from the eTown show. The sentiment that “you’re far too good for keeping down” is one I like to hear these days.

“Tell me your dream
Somewhere you wanna go or someone to be
What of those desires?
What hunger to sate, how high the fire?

Are you gonna make yourself unhappy? 
Are you gonna let it run you around? 
Have a little faith, we can pull it together 
You’re far too good for keeping down“

Salty and sweet from the 2013 album Great Lakes calls upon Smith’s childhood growing up in a seaside village. Here are two versions – a solo one followed by a duet with Irish singer Lisa Hannigan. Both are worth a listen.

Also from the Headlong album, this backstage video of Save My Life gives you the chance to hear Smith in a band setting.

Smith plays electric guitar, but you won’t be surprised to know that I gravitate toward his acoustic work. From the Fretboard Journal You Tube site, Smith performs Hummingbird. This is the title track off his excellent 2018 album.

There is beautiful fingerstyle guitar backing his vocals throughout, but at about the 2:30 mark you can hear a bit without the overlay of the vocals. I believe Smith is playing in a DADGAD tuning — sometimes known as the “grown man’s (or woman’s) tuning” — and it is simply lovely. (Click on the link and learn more about the tuning and how Smith came to live in that space.)

“For this track, John is playing his long-scale Fylde Alexander, an instrument with rosewood back and sides, a highly-figured Sitka spruce top and Yew binding. Though not plugged-in for this session, it’s equipped with a vintage DeArmond soundhole pickup that came to Smith via musician/producer Joe Henry.“

We’ll end with his most recent single, Friends, another tune of optimism for our times.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

The Hill We Climb

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In an inaugural ceremony full of wonderful moments and historic firsts, this was among the best.

Like so many, I was mesmerized by Amanda Gorman‘s six minutes of poetry in The Hill We Climb at the end of the ceremony for the Inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of United States.

“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust.

For while we have our eyes on the future,

History has its eyes on us.“

Yes, history has its eyes on us. But as Gorman ended her powerful call, it requires bravery for “our people diverse and beautiful” to “emerge battered and beautiful.”

“The new dawn blooms as we free it

for there is always light

if only we’re brave enough to see it,

if only we’re brave enough to be it.“

More to come…

DJB

Full text available at Poetry.com.