Latest Posts

Walk it like you talk it: Hope, joy, belief…and feet

Published by

Hope can seem so futile and remote in a world full of hate, cruelty, and inequality. Why would we hold out hope for the future when the harsh reality of the world stands ready to crush our optimism at a moment’s notice?

To be an advocate for hope is difficult at any time, but in the midst of the madness around us today it can seem a bridge much too far. Take the cynic’s route, the world’s oligarchs, autocrats, and rulers seem to say. It is much easier.

And they are right. It is easier to be a cynic. Hope is hard, but I want to believe that it is worth the effort.

One of my mentors is the Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade, and recently I have been reading some of Frank’s writings on hope and joy. And belief. And feet. Let’s start with hope and joy and work our way around to the belief and feet.

Why would we have hope in the face of reality? By our language and our actions, we demonstrate that what we see as real is always serious, harsh, and cruel. Frank reminds us that the words “harsh reality” stand as one word, one idea, instead of two. “Our assumption,” he adds, “is that in order to be real, something has to be conventional, predictable, and compromised.”

I often speak of hope grounded in memory. Rebecca Solnit suggests that if you study history deeply, you “realize people have often taken on things that seemed hopeless — freeing the slaves, getting women the vote — and achieved those things.”  Going back to our history and memory gives me hope.

Frank also calls on memory when speaking of hope, but from a different perspective. And this is where joy arrives. What if we have reality backwards? “What if joy, wonder, and peace,” he asks, “are what life is really about?” Can the harshness and bitterness be a passing phase? And he calls on a very personal memory to make the case for the reality of joy and hope. “All babies are born with the firm belief that joy, wonder, and peace are the norms of life….Babies are born with that understanding of life. And slowly, patiently, the elders of the world teach them that their view is wrong.”

We all know people who do not accept the world’s teaching. A friend of mine lived a joyful 99 years without losing her sense of wonder. “That’s wonderful!” — always spoken with joyful exuberance and a smile — was one of Anne’s favorite phrases. We heard it often. Living in a sense of wonder didn’t make Anne a Pollyanna. She lived her life more along the path that author Richard Holmes has encouraged when he challenged the rigidity of current perspectives and boundaries between disciplines and ideologies, calling instead for a culture with a “sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” 

Entering into the world as children, we began with the curiosity and amazement found at the heart of a wonder-filled life. Yet along our journeys, most step out of this sense of wonderment and instead become cautious, cynical, hardened, haughty or any number of other traits designed to protect our egos and allow us to function — or so we believe — in the adult world.

In taking those steps into what we see as reality, we too often lose the reality of a generous, more imaginative perspective. Perhaps our hope can be regained when we ground it in our natal memory.

Hope needs to lead to action, however, if we want it to be more than a feel good placebo. We have to believe in a better future, a better world. Frank suggests that hope is “hearing the music of the future; belief is dancing to it.” Belief is how we approach the uncertainties of life, “Making a guess about what is real and important and then acting on it.”

What if joy, wonder, and peace are the things that are real and important? Would we not live more fully with a generous, imaginative perspective? Would we not cry out against injustice? “Would we not,” Frank asks, “laugh at the notion of compromising with evil, hurting, and exploitation?”

Too many of us today are compromising with evil, hurting, and exploitation because we believe that’s what it takes to make the world work, or “we accept wrongs done to others as necessary for the greater good of society.”

We often like to think of a world without injustice in the abstract. But once again, Frank sets the record straight.

“I want something for my head. Instead, I am given something for my feet. Not a thing to understand, but a way to live.”

We have to live, Frank writes, “as if something were true. We will either live as if life is going someplace good, or we will live as if life is stuck in evil and not going anywhere.”

As the old saying goes: If you talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. It is only when we live in acting on our hope — out of a belief in joy, wonder, and peace — that we can find the true reality, as opposed to the harsh unreality, of life. Perhaps, as Frank writes in quoting one of my favorite Flannery O’Connor lines, “You will discover the truth, and the truth will make you odd.”

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Peter H from Pixabay

Note: The quotations from Frank’s writings are taken from Rites of Our Passage: Reflections Through A Christian Year, published in 2002 by Posterity Press.

Margo Price takes on country music…and challenges the ‘love it or leave it’ crowd

Published by

Margo Price is someone I turn to when I want to hear country that’s not yet tarnished by the Nashville music industry. The type of country you get from her longtime friend Sturgill Simpson, co-producer of her most recent album That’s How Rumors Get Started which was released in 2020. The type of music which you also hear from Jason Isbell, or Tyler Childers, where the roots are deep and the sensitivities are decidedly not “love it or leave it.” The type of country music I like to feature on Saturday Soundtrack.

Price, who is from a small town in Illinois and grew up singing in the church choir (which is almost a requirement to be a country singer), moved to Nashville when she was 20 years old. She came with a fresh approach to her songs and a voice that can easily handle both heartbreak and defiance. Hurtin’ (On The Bottle) is a very early Price single, which I’ve included so you can hear that great country voice coming of age.

The acoustic It’s Ain’t Drunk Driving if You’re Riding a Horse, is her dark ballad about a DUI arrest, in which she says what really scares her are the “coked-up truck drivers and T-Birds on meth” as well as the “liquored-up grandmas going down to the bar.” But in her telling, her horse does all the thinking for her.

“My equine companion is kind and good-hearted

But he will not back down from a fight

And down at the stable he’ll drink you under the table

But he wasn’t drinking tonight

Well I pleaded and pleaded without any gain

Took all the names in the Bible I could think of in vain

And the judge, he had the gall to swear on my wealth

He said, “what do you have to say for yourself

Of your sinning and your drinking

Do you feel much remorse?”

No, cause it ain’t drunk driving

If you’re riding a horse”

Hands of Time is from Price’s first full-length album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, and it is about turning back the clock on those cruel hands of time which have taken so much from those who worked the land in the Midwest.

Bob Boilen of NPR wrote of the day he greeted Margo Price in the NPR garage before her Tiny Desk performance.

“…tears were streaming down her face. It was Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, the day after the 2016 election. For her — as for many Americans — it was a stunning and bewildering moment in time, a day when life and the everyday took on new meaning. And so when she and her band began to play “All American Made,” a song she’s sung many times before, those words about America’s changes and failures in the 21st century seemed even more powerful.

The title song was part of a collection of strong material she released in 2017.

Margo’s 2017 album All American Made…was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.

As you can see in the official video and the lyrics, All American Made isn’t about your typical country music themes of drinking, fighting, and loving. No, country is a genre where you don’t hear a great deal about Reagan selling weapons to Iran.

Something in my bloodline or something
In my gut
Just go to California in a rusty pick-up truck
It’s all American made

1987 and I didn’t know it then
Reagan was selling weapons to the leaders
Of Iran
But it won’t be the first time baby and it won’t be the end
They were all American made

But I was just a child, unaware of the effects
Raised on sports and Jesus not the usual suspects
So tell me Mr Preddy what you do you think will
Happen next?

It’s all American made
And I wonder if the President gets much sleep at night
And if the folks on welfare are making it alright
I’m dreaming of that highway that stretches out of sight
And it’s all American made“

Her album Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman showcases Price’s dynamic live shows. Here is a audio version of Ain’t Living Long Like This featuring Sturgill Simpson on guitar in an arrangement that just cooks.

Revelations — a simple acoustic number with much more depth than the arrangement would suggest — is another of the live tunes from the Ryman album.

“I wrote Revelations on a crumbled up napkin
In an all-night diner by the roadway side
Waiter he was an angel kept filling up my coffee
And we made good conversation while I waited for my ride

Last night I played for a sold-out crowd down in Houston
Then we drove out to the ocean playing in the sand
These dark sunglasses I’m wearing this morning
Can’t cover up my headache or the scars on my hands

Been healing the sick, blessing the poor
My feet are so tired and bruised
Hallelujah, what’s it to you
Can’t you see I need saving too?“

That’s How Rumors Gets Started, Price’s newest release, is “an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time.” Again, the topics are not exactly standard-fare country music industry offerings.

“(W)hether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before.“

The set from Dee’s Country Lounge showcases more of the rock-and-roll sensibilities she’s been performing recently (warning: somewhat explicit lyrics).

I really came to know Price’s work through her duets, such as the ones with Jack White, the late John Prine, and a video released earlier this year with Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats.

Margo Price won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those looking for country outside the Nashville norm that tackles some of heartbreak of what people are really addressing in 21st century America, she’s worth knowing.

Enjoy.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Cover of the Margo Price album Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman (credit: Margo Price)

With Willie at ATT Park

The Say Hey Kid turns 90

Published by

Happy Birthday, Willie Mays!

My childhood hero turns 90 today, and that takes a lot of processing. I never saw Willie Mays play live, but I followed his career religiously, to the point that I would call the local newspaper in Murfreesboro, in those pre-internet days, and ask them to tell me the score of the Giants game played the night before in San Francisco.

I was such a fan that my friends gave me the nickname that Mays made famous — the Say Hey Kid. I still enjoy it when my life-long friend and preservation colleague Dr. Van West pulls that old nickname out of his memory box when we connect.

Woody Allen, in the movie Manhattan, said Willie Mays was one of the things that made life worth living, right after Groucho Marx but before “those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne.” I don’t know that I’d put Groucho before Willie.

James Hirsch wrote a wonderful biography of Mays entitled Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, which I reviewed on this blog in 2010. In that post, I recount the story of the role Mays played in the famous Juan Marichal/John Roseboro brawl. As I noted after recounting that incident, Mays is a man of incredible talent, a man of contradictions, but — most of all — Willie Mays is a man of character.

James Hirsch has a wonderful essay of appreciation in today’s New York Times entitled Willie Mays Turns 90. Here’s how it begins:

I once asked Willie Mays what his proudest achievement was in baseball.

His oft-cited designation as the greatest all-around player in history?

His two Most Valuable Player Awards?

The Catch?

None of the above.

“I came into the league with a 32-inch waist, and I retired with a 32-inch waist,” he told me 12 years ago when I interviewed him for a biography.

A bit surprising, but not really. Mays takes great pride in his durability as a player, and it wasn’t an accident. He never drank, never smoked, watched his diet and rarely went clubbing.

His self-discipline made possible an epic career that began with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, reached exalted heights with the New York Giants in the 1950s and didn’t end until 1973. Playing center field for 22 years in Major League Baseball, with a record 7,095 putouts and with 6,066 total bases, Mays surely ran more miles on the field, and with greater speed and more style, than any player before or since.

Hirsch has written a loving appreciation for an exceptional talent, who is carrying the torch for a generation of baseball players who are fast leaving us. Ten Hall of Famers — including Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Tom Seaver — have all died in the past year. Mays is now the oldest living member of the Hall of Fame, which again takes some personal processing.

I’m just thankful that I had a chance to watch the man who inspired one of the classic lines in sports, written by sportswriter Bob Stevens after Mays hit a game-winning triple in the eighth inning of the 1959 All-Star Game, which went, “Harvey Kuenn gave it honest pursuit, but the only center fielder in baseball who could have caught it hit it.”  

Happy birthday, Say Hey! I’m one of those who believe that you made life worth living.

More to come…

DJB

Image: DJB outside Giants Stadium in San Francisco by the statue of Willie Mays (photo by Claire Brown)

Weekly Reader: Bearing witness

Published by

Bearing witness is a term usually heard in a religious context. But observers writing about the murder of George Floyd, the Derek Chauvin trial, and other instances of justice served or justice denied have noted the basic responsibility we all have to stand up, especially in light of suffering and pain, and bear witness to what is happening in front of us.

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

Charles P. Pierce, writing in Esquire, notes the importance of bearing witness in his story Darnella Frazier Bore Witness to George Floyd’s Death With Massive Consequences.

“Darnella Frazier was 17 on the day that she stopped outside of Cup Foods and watched Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd for 10 minutes. She took out her cellphone and recorded the images that both engraved the facts of the case into the minds of people around the world and, ultimately, blew up all the easy, moth-eaten alibis used by the defense every time a police officer kills somebody.…

As citizens—hell, as human beings—we are obligated to bear witness to each other’s suffering, especially when that suffering is brought upon someone under the law. Ordinarily, any talk of this being a Christian nation makes my skin crawl and my teeth itch. But this civic obligation is at least Christian-adjacent. If there is a law or a practice that causes our fellow citizens to suffer, then we have an affirmative obligation, by virtue of our freedom to do so, to change that law and, if that isn’t enough, to change the people who make the laws. Darnella Frazier made that first step, bravely, and with no thought of reward, but simply because a sworn member of law enforcement was killing her fellow citizen right in front of her. She would bear witness to that with every tool modern technology afforded her.“

Many individuals and institutions put out statements following the verdict in the trial. I was especially taken by the comments of Michael O. Molina, Head of School for the Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys in Anacostia, here in D.C. A Statement on the Derek Chauvin Trial Verdict speaks to the fact that while the verdict is a reason for hope, it does not erase the fact that educators and parents — especially of young Black men growing up in today’s United States — “will always be faced with the enormous challenge of how to explain the horrors of the world to our students and our own children.”

The Bishop Walker School is an exceptional institution working hard to provide a better way. The educators there are bearing witness to the hard truths of life, as well as to their commitment to help these young children grow into strong men to help lead us out of the challenges of racism.

Nina Burleigh writing in The Nation, talks of how Americans — with the exception of health care workers of the time who bore witness to the impact of the 1918 pandemic — quickly let these memories slide out of our consciousness in Why Do We Forget Pandemics?

“Every November 11th, on Veterans Day, our world still remembers and celebrates the moment World War I officially ended. But the last great pandemic, the influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 that became known as “the Spanish flu” (though it wasn’t faintly Spain’s fault, since it probably began in the United States), which infected half a billion people on a far less populated planet, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million of them—including more soldiers than were slaughtered in that monumental war—fell into a collective memory hole.…

That virus, unlike Covid-19, mainly killed young healthy people. But there are eerie, even uncanny, similarities between the American experience of that pandemic and this one. In the summer of 1919, just after the third deadly wave, American cities erupted in race riots. As with the summer of 2020, the 1919 riots were sparked by an incident in the Midwest: a Chicago mob stoned a black teenager who dared to swim off a Lake Michigan beach whites had unofficially declared whites-only. The boy drowned and, in the ensuing week of rioting, 23 blacks and 15 whites died. The riots spread across the country to Washington, D.C., and cities in Nebraska, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas, with Black veterans who had served in World War I returning home to second-class treatment and an increase in Ku Klux Klan lynchings.

As today, there were similar controversies then over the wearing of masks and not gathering in significant numbers to celebrate Thanksgiving. As in 2020-2021, so in 1918-1919, frontline medics were traumatized. The virus killed within hours or a few days in a particularly lurid way. People bled from their noses, mouths, and ears, then drowned in the fluid that so copiously built up in their lungs. The mattresses on which they perished were soaked in blood and other bodily fluids.“

Future pandemics, Burleigh notes, “will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy, and kill more people than Covid-19, unless there is a transformative change in the global approach to dealing with infectious diseases.”

Bearing witness may be able to help us.

Is our species capable of such a change? My inner misanthrope says no, but certainly the odds improve if we don’t delete this pandemic from history like the last one. This, after all, is the first pandemic in which the Internet enabled us to bear witness not only to the panic, illness, and deaths around us, but to the suffering of our entire species in every part of the globe in real time. Because of that alone, it will be difficult to evade the memory of this collective experience and, with it, the reminder that we are all made of the same vulnerable stuff.

And to end the serious portion of this week’s review, Anand Giridharadas, in his newsletter The Ink, interviews the New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in Your pain, their gain. Keefe’s new book bears witness to the horrible impact of the plutocracy in today’s America. Giridharadas sets up the interview with the following:

“But to start with, there’s this moment in time when there are three brothers Sackler, who eventually become famous businessmen and philanthropists and billionaires. And all three brothers are sharing a single bed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. How did they go from that bed to being fabulously rich, even before OxyContin?

Finally, because I always try and make you laugh…AND I have a fond spot for libraries, I recommend If Libraries Were Like Run Like Used Car Dealerships by Sarah Totton on McSweeney’s.

Here are some testimonials from just a few of our SATISFIED patrons!

“I cured my ignorance with this one weird trick: reading books at the library!”
— Brandon, patron, East Branch

“I was suffering from terminal boredom. Then, I found the library. I’m cured!”
— Connie, patron, Main Branch

“I went in there and read the books and NOBODY STOPPED ME. I thought this must be some kind of scam. But it’s NOT!”
— Darryl, patron, West Branch

Enjoy your reading this week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by USA from Pixabay.

The practice of breakfast

Published by

Always an early riser, I often walked in on my father as he was preparing breakfast, the first rays of sunlight pouring through the kitchen windows. Sixty years on, the morning meal remains profoundly personal for me.

A deeply spiritual man and life-long seeker, Daddy had been at the dining room table since 5 a.m. reading scripture, meditating, praying, writing, and planning his day. He then moved into the kitchen for the next phase of his morning’s work.

Monday-through-Friday’s menu seldom varied for our family of seven. Eggs — often scrambled, although he later offered a great sunny-side-up version for those who preferred that option — were first on the plate. Bacon went next; two slices if memory serves, but it seldom is infallible these days. Toast with jam filled out the menu. A glass of milk, and later coffee as we aged out of one drink and into the other, sat on each place mat. Our food came with a helping of WSM morning radio on the side. Some people begin their day with the meditative stylings of Enya or George Winston. Our ambient music was Flatt and Scruggs.

Once the food was ready for the table, my father made sure we were all up and moving. “Rise and shine” was his favorite wake-up call. Some of us took it more literally than others. Mother, a habitual night owl, fell into the latter camp. Because he often rode his bike to work, Daddy was out the door before 6:45 a.m. As we grew older, we helped mother with the clean-up and getting ourselves off to school or summer jobs.

Rise & Shine merch from Ellie’s, our favorite bakery in Providence, RI

How I prepare and eat breakfast has changed through the years, but it has always been grounded in those memories. The realization came slowly, but over time it occurred to me that my father used breakfast as part of a morning practice, well before that term came to mean what it does today. When he walked into the Tennessee Valley Authority office at 7 a.m., he had already centered his soul, stimulated his mind, cheerfully provided for his family, and exercised. We could all do much worse in beginning our days.

Unconsciously at first, but more recently with deeper intention, I’ve followed in his footsteps.

The Buddhist monk and writer Thich Nhat Hanh first came to my attention in Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy. My wife, who is reading from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book of daily wisdom entitled Your True Home, recently asked me to listen to his take on a mindful breakfast.

“Even a daily habit like eating breakfast, when done as a practice, can be powerful. It generates the energy of mindfulness and concentration that makes life authentic. When we prepare breakfast, breakfast making can also be a practice. We can be really alive, fully present, and very happy during breakfast making. We can see making breakfast as mundane work or as a privilege — it just depends on our way of looking. The cold water is available. The hot water is available. The soap is available. The kettle is available. The fire is available. The food is available. Everything is there to make our happiness a possibility.”

As she read to me, it began to come together that with a few mindful changes, I could follow in the footsteps of my father’s morning practice. The opportunity to begin with a centering morning practice was always there for me, if I simply chose to follow the example I’d known my entire life.

Having recently put aside my electronic devices, my day now begins with a short reading followed by stretching and yoga poses, to limber both mind and body. Soon after my semi-retirement, I refashioned my morning walk from the metro station to the office into a regular stroll around the neighborhood. A shower to refresh for the day was followed by breakfast. Finally, instead of reading 30 minutes each way during my commutes to-and-from the office, I now sit in a comfortable chair by the window with a cup of coffee and read a book as part of my “non-commute”.

By the time I head upstairs to the “office,” I am well on my way to being centered, limber, and happily fed. The next step was to choose to make breakfast integral to my morning practice.

Coffee in the pot with my collection of favorite mugs

Breakfast was the one piece of my morning that wasn’t terribly mindful. Oh, I have routines for making breakfast that are generally well-considered and fit my empty-nest stage of life. The smell of coffee, prepared the night before, greets me. One of my favorite mugs, perhaps from Powell’s in Portland or the one “stolen” from the City Cafe in Murfreesboro, is waiting beside the freshly brewed pot.

But until recently, I prepared the meal more by rote (which is possible when you have the same menu), and I would eat each bite without much consideration for what, or how much, was going into my mouth. I acted as if there were more important things to focus on in the newspaper or on my tablet. My habit of devouring food is a sore subject for those near to me. Slowing down to savor the meal is, I’m afraid, a work in progress.

Tom Brown, in his 80s, still cooking breakfast…this time on Christmas Eve at my sister Debbie’s house

When I’m mindful of the practice of breakfast, I stop to appreciate the smell of the coffee before I begin preparation of the fixings for the eggs. Stepping back to focus on the details of the prep has led me to think of this meal in relation to others I’m having that day. My thoughts sometimes turn to how both of my adult children — who now live away from home — are lovers of a good breakfast and know how to fix one. For that I’m thankful. I know that upstairs Candice is somewhere along the path of her well-considered morning practice. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, everything is there to make my happiness a possibility.

Now, after savoring my food and reading during my non-commute, I head up to the desk where I’ll spend the rest of my morning. As I do so, I think of Tom Brown walking into the old office building by the substation in Murfreesboro and give thanks for the example of the practice of breakfast that was there in front of me, all along.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay

John Pizzarelli’s timeless take on the American Songbook

Published by

John Pizzarelli, the world-renowned guitarist and singer, is the son of legendary jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who died just over a year ago on April 1, 2020. The family, which also includes the double bassist Martin Pizzarelli, is jazz royalty. This week in Saturday Soundtrack, we’ll celebrate the music of John Pizzarelli.

Bucky was a long-time member of The Tonight Show Band, where he played with a wide variety of musicians and in different musical genres. John clearly got his start at a very early age, and both father and son play the seven-string guitars popularized in jazz circles by George Van Eps.

On the jazz standard I’ve Got Rhythm, you can hear John play his Moll seven-sting and sing in his easy-going crooner style…until he begins scatting with the lead at the 51 second mark. Then, oh my goodness! Extra bonus points if you figure out where the pick was hiding that shows up just before that solo. Oh yes, and the chord inversions are just wonderful.

Speaking of chord inversions, I always marveled at how those jazz cats could put their fingers down seemingly anywhere on a fretboard and make a beautiful chord that is just right for that passing phrase. Take a listen to the changes in this solo arrangement of How High the Moon.

“John has established himself as a prime contemporary interpreter of the Great American Songbook and beyond, with a repertoire that includes Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the Beatles.“

A recent home recording from the American Songbook of Sinatra’s The Way You Look Tonight is played on his acoustic seven-string. The amazing solo (there always seems to be one) begins about the 1:50 mark and it brings out an appreciative ovation from the family. In a recording from The Paste Studio, Pizzarelli continues in the acoustic vibe on Baubles, Bangles, and Beads.

In 2019, John honored the centennial of the legendary singer and pianist Nat King Cole with a selection of his classics. I love Pizzarelli’s arrangement and the video of (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66, one of Cole’s major hits.

The trio also has a beautiful arrangement of Cole’s It’s Only a Paper Moon with a very nice solo by Konrad Paszkudzki on piano.

Pizzarelli just won a Grammy for producing James Taylor’s recent foray into the Great American Songbook. If you go to YouTube and type in John Pizzarelli, you can go down a rabbit hole and never come out.

I would suggest there are much worse ways to spend a few hours!

Enjoy, and have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image: John Pizzarelli, from his Facebook post “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”

Weekly Reader: The catcher was a spy

Published by

Only one man has his professional baseball cards in the CIA museum in Langley, Virginia. The museum’s label is titled MORRIS (MOE) BERG BASEBALL CARDS and it reads in part:

Following his 15-year career with five different major league teams, the Princeton-educated Berg served as a highly successful Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative during World War II. Among his many missions on behalf of the OSS, the former catcher was charged with learning all he could about Hitler’s nuclear bomb project…Because of his intellect, Moe Berg is considered the “brainiest” man to have played the game.”

The true story is a bit more complicated.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles (or in this case a book) that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

You would be forgiven if in reading the headline, you assumed this was another rant about the cheating ways of the Houston Astros. It is not. Instead, as part of my regular “spring training” regimen, I read a book on baseball and watch the movie Bull Durham to prep for the season. This year, I turned to the entertaining and exceptionally well-researched 1995 book by Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy: The mysterious life of Moe Berg. I came late to this story and missed the movie entirely. Nonetheless, I was immediately enthralled after diving into this work a few weeks ago. Baseball stories, if well crafted, can be timeless, like the game itself.

Moe Berg was seen as different from any other baseball player even during his playing career. Legendary manager Casey Stengel described Berg as “the strangest man ever to play baseball”. As Dawidoff recounts in this page-turner of a book, Berg enjoyed “being” a baseball player more than he enjoyed “playing” baseball. The rhythms of the season, the copious amount of free time both during and between seasons, the ability to sit in the bullpen and tell stories, the travel and the first-class accommodations all suited the life he wanted to build for himself. Following his stint in major league baseball, Berg — like many bright young men of the day — entered the war to fight the Nazis. Again, the life of a spy in the free-wheeling OSS fit his personality, and he worked, among other assignments, to uncover the status of Germany’s atomic bomb program. The fact that he could speak several languages and read even more, had no real personal connections to tie him down, and was bright enough to understand more physics than the average person made him a useful operator for the new spy agency. His life began to change as the war wound down and it was found that the Nazi’s did not have a real atomic program to speak of. The buttoned-down CIA was not interested in keeping a free-lancing amateur sleuth employed during the Cold War.

Depending on your outlook, Berg’s unconventional life — where he lived the last 25 years unemployed, virtually homeless, and dependent on the goodness of others, including a sister and a brother — could be seen as extremely sad and unfulfilled. And yet he had many admirers and supporters such as the publisher Sayre Ross, who kept him afloat after they first met in 1967.

“‘It was better than reading books to listen to him,’ he says. ‘He was a great storyteller. He was an embellisher, and who the hell wasn’t. His language was a weapon of description. He colored it because people were interested.'”

After his death, Berg’s sister — who was estranged from Dr. Sam, their brother — took Moe’s remains to Israel where a rabbi suggested an unknown burial place. Dawidoff states that this made “the final mystery of Moe Berg’s inscrutable life” the fact that nobody knows where he is buried. But the author turns to making sense of that life in a thoughtful and sympathetic final chapter. His immigrant father’s driving discipline clearly marked all three of his children. Berg may have lived the way he did because he did not believe the tales he told others about his life.

“He never said what he really thought of himself, but his actions suggest that he saw Moe Berg as a mediocre ballplayer, a scholar only within the unlearned community of baseball, and an intelligence agent whose work had come to nothing.”

But Berg did a great deal with his life, asserts Dawidoff.

“He gained admission to two of the most rarefied clubs in the world — professional baseball and professional espionage — and for a brief time, his service in each compared favorably with anyone’s. As a spy working in Europe for the OSS, Berg was at the center of the seminal event of his time, the building of an atomic bomb, and his performance was exemplary. Some of Berg’s other accomplishments are a matter of degree. He was no scientist, but he learned more physics than most people. He was not formally a linguist, but he was a sensitive and appreciative student of languages, and knew a lot about them.”

But his most compelling accomplishment, from Dawidoff’s perspective, is what he did after the war. Trained at Princeton and Columbia Law, he could have been an big-time corporate lawyer. With a willingness to bend to the rules, he could have been a brilliant CIA agent. Instead, he lived the life he wanted, wherever it took him.

“Berg molded himself into a character of fantastic complication who brought pleasure and fascination to nearly everyone he brushed against during his fitful movements around the world. In the end, there are few men who find ways to live original lives. Moe Berg did that.”

My spring training ritual was a little late this year…which fit perfectly with the Washington Nationals’ opening day challenges, which began late after a cancelled series due to Covid-19. However, in the end, the Nats found an original way to persevere. As Thomas Boswell wrote in The Washington Post back on April 7th, Opening Day at Nationals Park was the culmination of 18 months — and 50 years — of waiting.

“One day can encapsulate 50 years. Not often. But Tuesday at Nationals Park did it for me.

Because of an outbreak that left nine Washington players in coronavirus protocols, the Nationals were forced to call up Hernán Pérez, elevate Andrew Stevenson from reserve to starter and sign catcher Jonathan Lucroy off the street just to field an Opening Day lineup against the Atlanta Braves.

With due respect to all major leaguers, that trio was weaker on paper than the sixth, seventh and eighth hitters in the Washington lineup in its final game as the Senators in 1971 — Dave Nelson, Del Unser and Tom Ragland — or the players in those slots in the first game of the new Nats in 2005 — Vinny Castilla, Terrmel Sledge and Brian Schneider.

Three anchors. So in the second inning, Pérez singled, Stevenson crushed a bullet through Atlanta’s alarmed second baseman (ruled an error) and both scored when Lucroy doubled.“

Of course, ace Max Scherzer allowed four home runs to the the first 10 batters he faced, so you knew it wouldn’t be easy. But the Nats came back to win when young superstar Juan Soto walked off the Braves with a single in the bottom of the 9th. With that, Boswell celebrated.

“This is baseball — quintessentially unpredictable, any-day-can-astound-or-amuse-us baseball. This is the game that Washington had from 1901 through 1971, lost for 33 years and now, in the culmination of a multigenerational cycle, celebrated again in full-throated yet pandemic-bizarre fashion as the Nats raised their 2019 World Series title banner before the opener.“

Yep, it is a long strange season and much can happen. But now that I’m through spring training, it is time to play ball!

More to come…

DJB

Digital declutter

Published by

Well before pandemic-forced quarantines, much of my time was spent in voluntary self-seclusion. How? By staring at my phone or tablet instead of making real connections with people.

The wake-up call for change came with the compulsory isolation of lockdown.

As we enter the next phase of whatever it is our lives are to become after the pandemic, there is the opportunity to answer our wake-up calls. As the old adage suggests, never let a serious crisis go to waste. If we too easily accepted bad habits as inevitable in a year of lockdown, it may be time to ditch that negative thinking. On the other hand, if we purposefully chose to use our year for good perhaps we can work to consolidate and build upon personal gains.

Cal Newport‘s 2019 book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World was recommended by a friend and former colleague, and it immediately resonated with work I’d been doing during 2020 to address the love/hate relationship with my smartphone. It was time to make permanent the digital declutter I’d struggled to adopt throughout the year.

When Newport begins by quoting the commentator Andrew Sullivan’s 2016 essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” I instinctively understood the premise about surviving an endless bombardment of news and gossip and images.

Like Newport, I was not overly engaged with many of the best-known social media platforms, having deleted my Facebook account in 2013. Yet, there was still a feeling of being overwhelmed by the perceived need to keep up with the news, to grow enraged at the latest atrocity, to see what hundreds of business “friends” on LinkedIn were doing at the moment, and to text and email and “like” and post emojis as a way to stay “connected” while feeling increasingly drained and unsatisfied.

It was exhausting.

What I was missing with my scattershot approach is what Newport calls a full fledged “philosophy of technology use,” rooted in deep personal values. Today’s technology mixes harm with benefits in a way that sucks one into overuse and manipulated addiction unless you step back and consider “what tools you should use and how you should use them.” Equally important, says Newport, such an approach “enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”

Newport covers ground that others have explored, especially around the manipulation used by technology companies to capture our attention and drive clicks. But beyond a thoughtful summary of the lopsided arms race with the giants of technology, the real value in Newport’s book is a clear pathway towards digital minimalism, which he defines as

“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.“

He suggests three principles underpinning digital minimalism:

  • Clutter is costly;
  • Optimization is important; and
  • Intentionality is satisfying.

Newport’s path is one I’ve taken over the past month to enact my personal digital decluttering:

  • Take a break from optional technologies for 30 days;
  • During the break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors you find satisfying; and
  • At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies, starting from a blank slate and recognizing what value each serves in your life.

There are a number of practices Newport calls upon to get through the declutter process, and I especially appreciated his use of a National Trust historic site, President Lincoln’s Cottage to illustrate the value of solitude. As the poet Wendell Berry has said, “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.” It takes solitude to focus.

In my personal month of digital decluttering, I removed the apps from my smartphone and tablet that beckoned to me when I was bored. I took off my Fitbit with its incessant buzzes to remind me to get up and move. The weather and Google maps remain on my phone, but if I find myself checking the temperature more than once a day, it serves as a reminder of how dependent I have become upon my devices. Thankfully, the weather seldom changes and I quickly lose interest.

Then there was the consideration of the places where I tended to reflexively reach for my smartphone. It has been hard at times, but I’ve generally followed the conscious decision to act in a different manner when I find myself in those places.

We still have home delivery of the Washington Post and New York Times. Rather than read them online which was my default, I’ve put aside my tablet at breakfast and work my way through one or both papers on a daily basis. Who knew the Post still had the comics? I’ve also become a fan of the obituaries, to read about lives well lived. Neither one showed up regularly in my algorithm-developed list of online stories, probably because they didn’t provoke outrage and drive clicks.

And I’ve done the unthinkable by leaving my smartphone at home. Newport writes about why this is so difficult, and yet why it is necessary to cut the imaginary cord that ties us to this tool. I’ve walked out with my phone still attached to its charger and the world didn’t end.

Most importantly, I’ve focused on what I truly value. My time reading has increased, as has the time spent with my guitars. I have been able to focus on professional and personal writing projects. Conversations have extended beyond just the dining room table. My phone has been used — get this — as a phone much more frequently. Rather than dealing with something via email, I’ve taken to suggesting a phone call. As a result, I’ve talked with friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in years. My actions around technology have also freed me to focus on a couple of projects that are especially meaningful at this point in my life.

Digital Minimalism has helped me begin the process to perform a personal reset following the pandemic. And that timing seems just right.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Steeldrivers continue exploring the heartbreak of broken affairs

Published by

“Guitars, whiskey, guns, and knives / Three’s a crowd and four’s a fight,” is just one of a dozen memorable lines from The Steeldrivers‘ catalog showing how the band has made a living exploring the heartbreak of broken affairs (or what Dolly Parton calls “sad ass” songs.) In spite of personnel changes, this Saturday Soundtrack will look at how the band continues making their own distinctive mark on that well-trodden road.

Songs of drinking, fighting, and bad loving pour out of The Steeldrivers like illegal corn liquor from an upended still. One commentator noted that a trio of dysfunctional relationship songs starts their album Hammer Down; however, it is something of an anomaly if one of their tunes doesn’t go down this path. Over the course of a show, they will sing some of the best sad country phrases around:

  • “Drinking dark whiskey, tellin’ white lies / One leads to another, on a Saturday night.”
  • “If you can’t be good, be gone.”
  • “You put the hurt on me like I never felt before.”
  • And the classic: “Never woulda loaded up a 44 / Put myself behind a jailhouse door / If it hadn’t been, if it hadn’t been for love.”

This Nashville-based bluegrass band with day jobs as songwriters and session musicians has shown up on More to Come for years after I first mentioned their performance at Merlefest in 2009. In 2011, I wrote a review of their live show at the Ram’s Head in Annapolis. Their third album, Hammer Down, was included in my list of best bluegrass albums of 2013 when I highlighted traits that have remained with the band through changes in personnel: great songwriting, soulful vocals, and skillful instrumental treatments. In 2015, I again highlighted a Steeldrivers album — The Muscle Shoals Recordings — as being among my list of best roots music of that year. (It later won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass album that year.) The following year I wrote about Adele’s cover of the band’s song If It Hadn’t Been for Love. And I’ve also featured the band when showcasing their original lead singer — the soulful Chris Stapleton — as well as in my New Year’s Eve ode to drinking songs from 2020.

After the Muscle Shoals album, the band seemed destined for new heights. But singer Gary Nichols decided to go his own way and the band was once again facing the need to reset. To go along with original members Richard Bailey (banjo), Tammy Rogers (fiddle), and Mike Fleming (bass), they had already added Brent Truitt on mandolin. Replacing the lead singer to follow Stapleton and Nichols was harder, but after a while they found one in a 25-year-old rock and roll singer from Berea, KY named Kelvin Damrell.

The choice isn’t as strange as it sounds. The band has always had a soul and R&B vibe that is unique among bluegrass bands. Damrell simply had to figure out how his vocal talents fit in this context. The band — which has always prided itself on its songwriting — also took the time to work on new material, primarily led by Rogers and her collaborators.

Bad For You, the band’s fifth album, arrived after this period of adaptation. And having covered so much of the band’s earlier work on More to Come, that 2020 album is what I want to focus on for this edition of the Saturday Soundtrack. The title track, shown here in a live video, opens the album. It sounds like a classic Steeldriver song, full of desperation and danger, with the harmonies and skill you’d expect from Nashville professionals.

The Bartender, shown as part of a series of performances from The Paste Studios, contains another great line of dysfunction. “Some may call me a sinner / but when its all said and done / I don’t pull the trigger / I just load the gun” captures the main character wrestling with his “role as a friend-in-need…or an accessory to a crime.”

Lonely and Being Alone (as in “there’s a difference in lonely and being alone”) is classic country bluegrass. Written by Rogers with Verlon Thompson, it makes the point that just because we’re by ourselves, that “doesn’t mean we’re lonely. We’re alone, and we’re good with that” as one reviewer noted. I Choose You is upbeat, by Steeldriver standards, and is about devotion over dysfunction. What a concept!

The Paste Studio session includes one old Steeldriver song from the Stapleton years, Blue Side of the Mountain. Damrell shows he can handle the band’s classic tunes as well, which will be a relief to Steelheads everywhere.

The Steeldrivers are beginning to tour again, and they will be at the historic Birchmere music hall in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 29th, if everything continues to improve on the pandemic front.

This is a band to catch live, so keep an eye out for when they may be coming to your city over the next year.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image from The SteelDrivers | Bad For You (photo credit: Anthony Scarlatti)

Thank God for the poets…and libraries

Published by

April is National Poetry Month. “Many Americans, probably a vast majority of Americans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry” writes Margaret Renkl in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled Thank God for the Poets. But we really need poets, just like we really need libraries. Our Weekly Reader will begin with a celebration of both.

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

Renkl’s take on American’s need for poetry continues:

“But tragedy — a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death — can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming. “Again and again, this constant forsaking,” Natasha Trethewey calls it in her poem “Myth.”

Renkl began her piece with a nod to the poet Amanda Gorman, who spoke at President Biden’s inauguration.

“Ms. Gorman’s poem — addressed to “Americans, and the World” — was timeless in that way of the most necessary poems, but it was more than just timeless. After a year of losses both literal and figurative, she offered a salve that soothed, however briefly, our broken hearts and our broken age.

Poets have always given voice to our losses at times of national calamity. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi — 1955” came in direct response to the murder of Emmett Till. Denise Levertov wrote one poem after another after another to protest the war in Vietnam. In 2002, Billy Collins delivered a memorial poem for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks before a special joint meeting of Congress.“

But suffering isn’t the only time when we need poetry.

“Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.“

Vartan Gregorian, who passed away on April 15th, was a scholar and a university leader, including an important time as president of Brown University where my son is an alumnus. Most importantly, however, Gregorian was a lover of libraries. Robert D. McFadden wrote about this aspect of his life in the New York Times obituary Vartan Gregorian, Savior of the New York Public Library, Dies at 87.

“By 1981, when the feelers went out to Dr. Gregorian, the library — the main research edifice at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and 83 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — was broke, a decaying Dickensian repository of 7.7 million books (the world’s sixth largest collection), many of them rare and valuable, gathering dust and crumbling on 88 linear miles of stacks.

The underpaid, overworked staff was demoralized. The beautiful Gottesman Exhibition Hall had been partitioned into cubicles for personnel and accounting. Tarnished chandeliers and lighting fixtures were missing bulbs. In the trustees’ board room, threadbare curtains fell apart at the touch. Outside, the imperious marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, and the portals they guarded, were dirt-streaked. Bryant Park in the back was infested with drug dealers and pimps and unsafe after dark.“

Gregorian, coming out of academia, seemed to be an odd choice to bring the institution back to life.

To Dr. Gregorian, the challenge was irresistible. The library was, like him, a victim of insult and humiliation. The problem, as he saw it, was that the institution, headquartered in the magnificent Carrère and Hastings Beaux-Arts pile dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911, had come to be seen by New York City’s leaders, and even its citizens, as a dispensable frivolity.

And his vision for what the library should be carried the day.

“‘The New York Public Library is a New York and national treasure,’ he said. ‘The branch libraries have made lives and saved lives. The New York Public Library is not a luxury. It is an integral part of New York’s social fabric, its culture, its institutions, its media and its scholarly, artistic and ethnic communities. It deserves the city’s respect, appreciation and support. No, the library is not a cost center! It is an investment in the city’s past and future!’”

Two recent stories on race in America showed how some institutions are making change, even if ever-so-slowly, while a third demonstrates that others that need a reckoning have yet to take those steps.

The University of the South (known as Sewanee to most) has a long history as a bastion of white male privilege. But as Nick Anderson writes in the Washington Post, the school’s first Black vice chancellor and president is helping the school face that past in ‘We are not leaving’: Sewanee’s first Black leader helps propel a racial reckoning at university. Ian Shapira, also writing in the Washington Post, chronicles the changes in another Southern school in his article VMI selects Cedric Wins as first Black superintendent amid racism investigation. Both are worth a read to see what has driven this change and the barriers to progress.

However, not every institution is taking the need to change seriously. The Atlanta baseball team, in my estimation, has been in need of a moral center for a while, and Jesse Spector, writing in Deadspin, captures my feelings on the subject in Once again the Atlanta Baseball Team proves itself a shrieking fraud on caring about Black people.

“You mean to say that a baseball franchise with a racially insensitive name, which does all it can to harm any argument that their name isn’t just insensitive, but outright racist, by encouraging its fans to do racist chants; which moved out of team’s urban core and into another county, in order to cater to its white fans, while positioning the ballpark better for driving than mass transit; which relegated a memorial patch for the greatest player in team history to a tiny number on the back of its caps, rather than a sleeve patch…

…that team booted its response to Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta?!“

Yep. That team.

“When you move your team to the suburbs for the specific purpose of getting away from Black people, you don’t get to act like stripping a big event from your ballpark is going to hurt Black people. And the once-in-a-generation event can still return to Atlanta in a few years, just as the Super Bowl came back to Arizona once the state finally recognized Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.“

Washington Post columnist Max Boot asks and then answers his own question in: Why is the GOP waging a culture war? Follow the money.

“I’m no economic determinist, but if you want to understand how the right got the way it is, follow the money. The GOP highlights culture-war issues to shake down rank-and-file donors while cutting taxes to please wealthy donors. Republicans have won the presidential popular vote only once since 1988, but they can’t afford to broaden their appeal by embracing a more populist economic agenda or by toning down the divisive social messages because either move would jeopardize the flow of fundraising. The right-wing money machine has become the tail wagging the Republican elephant.“

Finally, let me recommend three articles from recent stories in the news to wrap up this Weekly Reader. The covid-19 vaccines are an extraordinary success story. The media should tell it that way writes Leana S. Wen in The Washington Post.

“An infection rate of 5,800 infections out of 77 million fully vaccinated people is less than 0.008 percent — a remarkably low rate. Compare this with 68,000 daily new infections in the United States — which, over a 30-day period, is nearly 100 times higher than the infection rate for those vaccinated. Put another way: A total of 5,800 infections among the inoculated is orders of magnitude better than 68,000 infections per day in the general population.“

Next, Anand Giridharadas interviews ProPublica investigative reporter Alec MacGillis in The Ink on the power and tactics and cultural significance of Amazon in The one-click civilization.

And writing at the website FiveThirtyEight, Ryan P. Burge and Perry Bacon Jr. explore why It’s Not Just Young White Liberals Who Are Leaving Religion.

Enjoy your reading this week.

More to come…

DJB

Photo of New York Public Library Reading Room by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash