v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Science Deniers

From Paul Krugman in the NYTimes:

About denial: Epidemiologists trying to get a handle on the coronavirus threat appear to have been caught off guard by the immediate politicization of their work, the claims that they were perpetrating a hoax designed to hurt Trump, or promote socialism, or something. But they should have expected that reaction, since climate scientists have faced the same accusations for years.

And while climate-change denial is a worldwide phenomenon, its epicenter is clearly here in America: Republicans are the world’s only major climate-denialist party.

Nor is climate science the only thing they reject; not one of the candidates contending for the G.O.P.’s 2016 nomination was willing to endorse the theory of evolution.

What lies behind Republican science denial? The answer seems to be a combination of fealty to special interests and fealty to evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., who dismissed the coronavirus as a plot against Trump, then reopened his university despite health officials’ warnings, and seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.

The point, in any case, is that decades of science denial on multiple fronts set the stage for the virus denial that paralyzed U.S. policy during the crucial early weeks of the current pandemic.

About death: I still sometimes encounter people convinced that America has the world’s highest life expectancy. After all, aren’t we the world’s greatest nation? In fact, we have the lowest life expectancy among advanced countries, and the gap has been steadily widening for decades.

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The Economy is in an Artificially Induced Coma - Interview with Adam Tooze

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Fells Point, Baltimore during the Pandemic

At Vox Ezra Klein interviews financial historian Adam Tooze:

Ezra Klein

In your great history of the financial crisis, Crashed, you argue that American policymakers had spent years preparing for the wrong crises, which left them confused when the real crisis came and it wasn’t what they expected. With that history in mind, do you think policymakers are seeing this crisis clearly, or are they locked in past arguments?

Adam Tooze

It’s been shocking. So much of what’s happening in financial markets today seems incredibly familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time in the 2007-’08 story and its aftermath. The language, the script, even the names — the people who are actually contributing to the conversation — are a very similar group.

On the other hand, there’s this incredibly unfamiliar trigger. This isn’t how most of us imagined this would happen at all. It isn’t as though I was unaware of pandemic risks, but very few people contemplated the exact playbook we’ve seen: the very deliberate government shutdown of all of the major economies of the world, triggering this epic shock in the financial markets.

So we need to differentiate between two strands of the conversation. One strand of the conversation is what’s been going on in the financial markets. That is, to an extraordinary extent, a rerun of 2008 with slight modifications. We understand macrofinance far better than we did 15 years ago, so none of us are spending too much time on macroeconomic imbalances, like America’s current account deficit. To that extent, 2008 is a good guide to the mechanics of stabilizing the financial markets. And I think the Fed and ECB [European Central Bank] have internalized this.

It’s on the fiscal policy side where I think we are at risk of running in the wrong direction, because the real economic measures that we’re adopting are completely unprecedented. To think about what we need as a kind of wartime mobilization seems to me to miss the point completely. This is a much more peculiar task than that. The job is maintaining the economy on life support during a period of an artificially induced coma while we address the public health challenge.

We can all come up with idealized, perfect policies that maintain the status quo for three months so we can put the hammer down and then dance our way out. But that’s a completely unrealistic account of how politics operates. Right now, everyone is faced with a sort of prisoner’s dilemma logic: They must advocate for the kind of policies they would normally advocate for, or else someone else will get their policies passed. You’re forced by the dog-eat-dog nature [of] the American political system to engage in that kind of politics.

Ezra Klein

One of the things that has been so striking to me is the bifurcated nature of the conversation. There are people arguing for social democracy or a Green New Deal. And that argument takes place in a world where we have not just the political will to respond to the crisis, but the political will to build toward a new future.

On the other side of it, there were only a couple of days where Donald Trump was convinced that coronavirus was a big deal, and he had to act like the president and try to do the hard work of slowing it. Now he wants to pivot back to business as usual — the cure can’t be worse than the disease. It feels like there’s one conversation happening among people who want to imagine a new political future, and then another happening among people who can’t imagine themselves two weeks into the future.

Adam Tooze

The ultimate perversity is that their inability to imagine a future will not enable them to return to the pre-crisis situation. If people were to take Trump’s words literally and act on them, the result would be some apocalyptic mess on the scale of Iran, not Italy.

So it’s a conservatism which is wholly ineffective because it’s not going to deliver a continuity with the present — the situation is too dramatic for that. The Chinese Communist Party are the truly conservative ones right now. They recognize that everything has to change so that everything can stay the same. Trump isn’t able to perform that basic kind of statecraft of conservatism. You have to move precisely in order to stabilize the situation. If we don’t, what we’re headed toward is unspeakable mass death and huge economic losses.

Ezra Klein

I think that’s a really important point. And bringing China into this is a good bridge to something I want to talk with you about. I think people get that coronavirus is a global problem, but the economic crisis is being framed as a domestic problem. But it isn’t. What are the biggest international finance or geopolitical risks you see right now?

Adam Tooze

The first is the most boring and the most familiar: the eurozone and Italy. That issue is achingly tedious, but it looks as though the Europeans have woken up and moved to fix that situation.

Then there’s the China risk. China is the dog that hasn’t barked in this crisis so far because of the success of [its] conservative strategy. There has not been a big movement in the Chinese exchange rate and very little action on the Chinese balance of payments. But the situation may be more fragile than Beijing is comfortable with. And that has implications for everyone around them: the South Koreans, the Taiwanese, Singaporeans, the Japanese, the Australians. If the Chinese economy doesn’t come back strong, that’s a game changer for all of them.

I think the third element is the crisis that is hitting the big emerging markets: the South Africas, the Brazils, the Nigerias, and potentially the Algerians, the Indias, the Indonesias. These are huge countries with big economies, with large American interests in them, and big geopolitical ramifications. And they are in harm’s way. Their currencies are plunging, they have large debts, and they’re going to be hit by the public health crisis on a really epic scale — especially in South Africa, where they have a big immunocompromised HIV[-positive] population.

The fourth zone of risk is the OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] complex. A trigger for the crisis in the financial markets was the breakdown of the OPEC-Russia negotiations and the signal from the Saudis that they were just going to produce and let the oil price crash. That was the moment that the financial markets really plunged. We tend to focus very much on Russia, Saudi, and shale in the US, but the vulnerable high-cost oil producers and energy producers is a really alarming list of countries. On top of the list for me will be Algeria and Nigeria — I think there is the potential for quite substantial regional destabilization.

Ezra Klein

It seems to me that another risk is that we’re scapegoating and blaming and escalating tensions with China — the Trump administration, and others in the Republican Party, have already pivoted to this as a political strategy. The Trump administration tried to force the UN to call this “the Wuhan virus.” Senior Chinese officials are saying the virus came from the US military. Rising fury between the two largest economies during a crisis of this scale seems like a very dangerous situation.

Adam Tooze

There’s no doubt at all that the antagonism between China and the US is a central fault line. Yesterday I stumbled over the perfect complement to the Chinese-American standoff. The Iranian regime is quite committed to the idea that coronavirus was genetically engineered by the Americans to attack Persian genomes. The supreme leader went on television the other night to say that this was the reason why Iran would be refusing external aid, especially aid involving American doctors. Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center is finding very substantial minorities of Americans who are wholly persuaded that this came out of a Chinese weapons attack.

But the absolute worst case has not happened. A lot of us, I remember, had conversations with ex-Obama people lingering in international organizations who were very worried that in the event of a new financial crisis, the GOP in Congress and the Trump administration would sabotage their efforts to conduct global financial stabilization. What we’ve seen so far in the last couple of weeks is [that] the situation is so discombobulated, and the Trump administration is such a headless chicken, that there isn’t even a concerted nationalist pushback against the global stabilization efforts being pursued by the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund.

At the same time, the disarticulation of levels of power in the US government is such that you can have people pursuing security policy in one corner and you can have people pursuing global stabilization of the global financial system in another corner. And then you have the clown car performance in the White House. Sometimes, of course, these things interfere, but by the standards of the great Marshall Plan era, where all of the elements lined up, American power is grotesquely incoherent at this point.

This allows separate solutions to be pursued in different arenas. So, for political purposes, you run the anti-Chinese stuff. Meanwhile, the Fed is pursuing a policy which is actually quite accommodative of the People’s Bank of China. There’s a sort of a functionality that actually emerges out of the incoherence.

 

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Warding of the Trumpian Virus

From the NYRB, Spencer Traub writes about illness and crisis in medieval times:

Medieval scholars thought the plague arose from causes both universal (unfortunate astrological conjunctions) and particular (corrupted airs and humoral imbalances). One can’t control the stars, but one can control what Greek medicine called the six non-naturals, the mutable things like exercise and emotion that were thought to affect health. Across both the Islamic and Christian medical worlds, writers warned against sex and baths and commended sour food and strong smells. In a 1348 report, the Paris Medical Faculty warned that certain populations were more susceptible to the disease: those “bunged up with evil hu­mors”; “those following a bad life style, with too much exercise, sex and bathing”; “persistent worriers”; “corpulent people with a ruddy complexion.” Lifestyle changes might therefore improve one’s chances. Others tried to offer suggestions for the care of the sick. De Chauliac prescribed an ointment of figs, onions, butter, and fermented dough for the buboes; the polymath Ibn al-Wardi recorded the doctors of Aleppo anointing his compatriots with Armenian clay.

Much of this advice was meant for home use. Many early plague treatises were written in local vernaculars rather than Latin, as d’Agramont put it, “for the benefit of the people and not for the instruction of the physician.” After the plague returned, in 1360–1361, the audience for plague advice grew even larger. John of Burgundy’s De epidemia, a post-1361 bestseller in multiple languages, instructed readers to take dietary supplements—“a dose of good theriac the size of a bean”—and to sniff aromatics in cold weather, with shopping suggestions broken out by budget level: “ambergris, musk, rosemary and similar things if you are rich; zedoary, cloves, nutmeg, mace and similar things if you are poor.” Sometimes the plague sufferer was allowed a cheat day: in lieu of wine, a patient should drink vinegar in water, but “occasionally, however, he can be given, to cheer him up, white wine diluted with plenty of water.” By the fifteenth century, the English poet John Lydgate could sum up such advice with a cheerful jingle: “Drynk good wyn, & holsom meetis take, / smelle swote thynges,” he wrote, “walke in cleene heir, eschewe mystis blake.”

Such instructions provided a way to wrest agency back from a traumatic experience of collective vulnerability. The past few weeks have seen similar efforts on social media, which has begun to feel like a live-updating plague tract. Reminders to stay in, to wash our hands, to “#flattenthecurve” mark earnest attempts to conform individual behavior to the needs of collective well-being. But they do little to remedy our sense of powerlessness. They certainly don’t allay the chief concern of the young and asymptomatic, which is the risk of infecting the vulnerable people around them. Harvard, where I teach, shut down classes and evicted undergraduates from the dorms. (When plague hit medieval Oxford, the scholars scattered into the countryside, too.) During our last meeting in person, my students worried that they might unknowingly carry Covid-19 home to their parents and grandparents. I could think of no real reassurance to offer them.

So we search for everyday commodities to assuage our anxiety: rice, cleaning supplies, toilet paper. As I’ve been writing this piece, I’ve found myself besieged by scammy Internet ads for masks, which our government begs us not to buy. Before the pandemic was widespread in the United States, an email purportedly written by a distinguished scholar of coronaviruses was widely shared on Facebook. It said the usual things—wash your hands and sneeze into a tissue, etc.—but also suggested that zinc might impede the infection. Zinc lozenges suddenly became the theriac to cure all ills; masks and hand-sanitizer, the ambergris and zedoary to ward off infection.Of course, putting faith in the efficacy of our actions is also meant to stave off despair. Even as Covid-19 took hold, doctors, nurses, and quarantined patients recorded music videos and dance-offs to raise people’s spirits. As the pandemic has spread, people under lockdown in Italy have taken to their balconies to sing. As d’Agramont put it, “in such times, joyfulness and gaiety are most profitable.” 

Virtual Art Scene

Here are images from virtual gallery of Jon Rafsman 9_eyes.com/  which posts images from Google on a regular basis.

Two Years from Now

Here's an interesting blog post from Jacques Mattheij looking back two years from now on the pandemic:

Covid-19, a Retrospective

March 24, 2020

It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were made before and after. People shake hands and hug complete stranger with abandon, something that today, even with the virus mostly under control still feels extremely un-natural and would immediately result in people freaking out or at a minimum speaking up and indicating the fact that they are unconformtable. The economy is still in recovery. And it probably will be for a long time. The see-sawing stock market was uncanny to watch. Fortunes were made, and fortunes were lost over the backs of the weakest in society, the elderly, the immunocompromised.

The virus didn’t really care much about the stockmarket. It didn’t read the newspaper, did not participate in politics and didn’t care one bit about whether or not we felt it was important or a danger. All it took was one butcher not cleaning his knife properly and it was done. Patient zero, a man in his 20’s in Wuhan, China, probably never even realized he had contracted it. By the time the seriousness of the situation was recognized it was much too late and the virus had been spreading for weeks. It’s a miracle of science that they managed to figure out how it happened.

Having a psychopath at the wheel of one of the largest and most influential countries in the world didn’t help, but, to be fair, his enablers and the callousness displayed by the people who believed themselves not to be at risk was as much or maybe even more of a factor than the leader. The progression right up to the point where the American ICUs started to overflow was mild enough that lots of people must have thought “I’m young and strong, nothing will happen to me”. If only. When Wuhan, China got barricaded everybody seemed to think: That’s China, far away from here. And when the North of Italy collapsed the same happened. Then Spain got the bill for that massive party they had, in order not to upset the tourism. By the time New York hospitals were overloaded you’d think that authorities would have wised up. But everywhere it was the exact same pattern: slowly trying to curb a disease that was spreading very rapidly with a long incubation time and zero immunity. It was a bad scenario, and collectively we made it so much worse than it had to be.

The deathtoll was well in the millions, and it hit the healthcare industry harder than any other. A large fraction of an entire generation of Doctors and nurses was lost. According to a randomized WHO antibody test which has by now been completed by most countries where the healthcare system has recovered (Spain and Italy are still too harmed to participate) only 35% of the world population caught the virus. It still springs up every now and then whenever a closely connected group of individuals gets infected, a bit like Ebola, only a lot closer.

Old people have become a rarity, especially in public. They as a group suffered more than most. It’s hard to meet their eyes, knowing that we live because so many of them died. Triage at the admittance to the ICUs was based on life expectancy and recovery expectancy. People over 60 were given some morphine for the pain and not much beyond that.

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Wat Pho-Recling Buddha Temple in Bangkok

Our good fortunes took us to Thailand in 2009 and we were able to visit various Buddhist Temples including the large Wat Pho where one of the largest statues of the Buddha resides. Here is a description of the history of this temple from Wikipedia:

Wat Pho is one of Bangkok's oldest temples. It existed before Bangkok was established as the capital by King Rama I. It was originally named Wat Photaram or Podharam, from which the name Wat Pho is derived.^[4][9] The name refers to the monastery of the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India where Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment.^[6][10] The date of the construction of the old temple and its founder are unknown, but it is thought to have been built or expanded during the reign of King Phetracha (1688–1703).^[6][11] The southern section of Wat Pho used to be occupied by part of a French Star fort that was demolished by King Phetracha after the 1688 Siege of Bangkok.^[12]

After the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 to the Burmese, King Taksin moved the capital to Thonburi where he located his palace beside Wat Arun on the opposite side of the Chao Phraya River from Wat Pho. The proximity of Wat Pho to this royal palace elevated it to the status of a wat luang ('royal monastery').^[6]

In 1782, King Rama I moved the capital from Thonburi across the river to Bangkok and built the Grand Palace adjacent to Wat Pho. In 1788, he ordered the construction and renovation at the old temple site of Wat Pho, which had by then become dilapidated.^[1] The site, which was marshy and uneven, was drained and filled in before construction began. During its construction, Rama I also initiated a project to remove Buddha images from abandoned temples in Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, as well other sites in Thailand, and many of these retrieved Buddha images were kept at Wat Pho.^[13] These include the remnants of an enormous Buddha image from Ayuthaya's Wat Phra Si Sanphet destroyed by the Burmese in 1767, and these were incorporated into a chedi in the complex.^[14] The rebuilding took over seven years to complete. In 1801, twelve years after work began, the new temple complex was renamed Phra Chetuphon Vimolmangklavas in reference to the vihara of Jetavana, and it became the main temple for Rama I.^[15][16]

The complex underwent significant changes over the next 260 years, particularly during the reign of Rama III (1824-1851 CE). In 1832, King Rama III began renovating and enlarging the temple complex, a process that took 16 years and seven months to complete. The ground of the temple complex was expanded to 56 rai (22 acres), and most of the structures now present in Wat Pho were either built or rebuilt during this period, including the Chapel of the Reclining Buddha. He also turned the temple complex into a public center of learning by decorating the walls of the buildings with diagrams and inscriptions on various subjects.^[9]:90 On 21 February 2008, these marble illustrations and inscriptions was registered in the Memory of the World Programme launched by UNESCO to promote, preserve

and propagate the wisdom of the world heritage.^[17][18] Wat Pho is regarded as Thailand’s first university and a center for traditional Thai massage. It served as a medical teaching center in the mid-19th century before the advent of modern medicine, and the temple remains a center for traditional  medicine today where a private school for Thai medicine founded in 1957 still operates.^[19][20]

The name of the complex was changed again to Wat Phra Chetuphon Vimolmangklararm during the reign of King Rama IV.^[1] Apart from the construction of a fourth great chedi and minor modifications by Rama IV, there had been no significant changes to Wat Pho since. Repair work, however, is a continuing process, often funded by devotees of the temple. The temple was restored again in 1982 before the Bangkok Bicentennial Celebration.^[21]

 

 

The Education of Philip Wilson

From an interview with the superb Philip Wilson, original drummer for the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Butterfield Blues Band, at Perfect Sound Forever done around 1985:

Q: How about your earliest training in high school?

PW: The school I went to – Sumner High in St. Louis – was a very good school. I think Oliver Nelson went there, Lester Bowie (went) there, Dick Gregory, Grace Bumbry – it’s a very good music school. That’s what they were into mostly, music and sports… I had played violin first, and trumpet for a short time, but percussion was the main thing. I sang, too, in the school choir… I was in a drum and bugle corps too, called the American Woodsmen. That’s where I got a lot of training – I learned how to read, how to write music.

After graduation, I went to college for about a year – it was boring. That’s when I came to New York, in 1960. I was about 18 and working with Sam Lazar. First gig I worked was at Minton’s Playhouse – fantastic place. I met Henry “Red” Allen, Herbie Hancock, and a lot of musicians I’d only heard about… I stayed around New York for six, seven months, and then we went up to Nantucket in Massachusetts for a summer to play for the hoi-polloi, the right people. But they liked us, and we got down, played funk, played blues. It was a nice gig, but the people got kind of strange. We went to Cleveland, went to Denver – I’d been with Sam Lazar for three years now, and I was really kind of fed up with traveling by this time. He had this lady, and they would fight constantly. I went back to St. Louis and got a job waiting tables – thought I’d cool out for a while.

Yes, there’s quite a blues scene in St. Louis. Ike Turner, Albert King… Tina Turner and Fontella Bass went to my school. When I was in high school, they were singing out in nightclubs and stuff. Ike took Tina out of our school and on the road when they had a hit record! I knew this guitar player, Anthony Chenault – he’s Isaac Hayes’ guitar player now, but he went on the road with Ike Turner when he was 13 or 14. He used to play the solos on those records! I met him when he’d just come up from Arkansas – he could barely speak English!

So Anthony and I started a band, a trio, playing funk and blues. We wrote some of our own stuff and (we’d) do the hits of the day. That’s when I started finding these melodies in my head, and got into writing. We were supposed to make a 45, but I never saw the record and I never saw our manager again after the day we cut it… That band broke up, and I started working in a house band in one club, backing up all the people that came through. I got really tired of it, but I met some fantastic people. Who was it did “The Dog?” Yeah, Rufus Thomas. Man, he tore the place up! And he liked the band so much, he took us with him, through all these small towns in the Midwest and the South. Really low–class, man, I mean funky – people getting’ in fights every night.

We kind of floated away from Rufus Thomas and started working with Solomon Burke. I got Lester Bowie in the band, and Oliver Lake – good band! But the performers would treat you like shit, or try to pay you $25 a night and leave you packed in one room of some hotel. On Saturdays, you’d work from 10 ‘til 4, then come back at six in the morning for three or four hours more.

Well, Solomon Burke left us stranded one night – just drove away! (Producer) Bumps Blackwell told us to come out to Las Vegas – we were gonna work with the Wright Brothers at the Golden Nugget. We got there with $10 to our name, eight of us. We got to the Golden Nugget and they said, “Oh man, we didn’t think you were gonna make it, so we hired this other band.” I said “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” So we missed out on that gig. But Lester had a little money, so we started gambling, made about $200. And we went to L.A., trying to keep the band together.

This guy named Jerry Brown (Not the governor – ED), he was kind of the bandleader, he knew this lady. So we stayed with her and started working those gigs again. Mostly in Watts: you started Friday night until 4AM, came back at 8AM, got ‘til 10 or 12 Noon, and then maybe come back that evening again, until Sunday.

This was 1965, the time of the Watts Riots, and it was strange. We couldn’t get out or in. We’d go out, and the police would attack us. Go in, come back in, and they had checkpoints to stop you at every block. One time, on the way back from Hollywood, the National Guard and the police took us out of the car – threw us out of the car – jacked us up, popped us upside the head. I remember this cop kept asking Lester Bowie, “You know what eight o’clock means?” And Lester would go, “What am I supposed say? Yeah!” and WHOP! the cop would hit him again. But we’d laugh about it afterwards.

After that, Fontella Bass had a hit with “Rescue Me” and “Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing,” so Lester (her husband) left to play with her. I went to Phoenix with Oliver Lake, we had a trio that made a lot of money there. But I went back to St. Louis for a while, then I went to work for Motown in Detroit. No, no sessions – I could never get session work, they had five guys that played all the sessions. That drummer (Benny Benjamin), this guy started all those beats – he was a wino, man, but the most fantastic drummer I’d ever seen! I worked with Choker Campbell’s big band, backing the Motortown Revues, and I worked with Marvin Gaye for a short time.

All this time, Lester and them had been playing free music, funk, jazz, blues. And after I got fed up with Detroit and went back to St. Louis for a while, Lester called me up, told me to come to Chicago. That’s when I joined the Art Ensemble. I had been playing jazz and free music all along, and I liked the people. So we started a group: myself, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell.

We couldn’t make a dime – I’d never been so broke in my life! Speaking about punk rock – we used all those wild things, up on the bandstand. We did one concert with flashlights, and we did one with Allen Ginsberg where we pied each other. We started the show that way, throwin’ pies at each other. We played with the MC5 in Chicago – this was ’67, ’68 – and the people went crazy with those pies… I got a little bit of session work at the time, but Maurice White (of Earth, Wind & Fire), he was playing on all those records at the time, and had it mostly covered. Nobody else could get in there.

I worked with a lot of blues cats at this time. Magic Sam, Otis Rush – he wasn’t doing records, but I could dig that music, I could play the blues. Howlin’ Wolf was my favorite, but I didn’t stay with him long – he was a dangerous person to work with. You did not mess up. But I enjoyed that period very much. I learned a lot about playing the blues, I saw how different it was from playing rock and roll, and other things.

I jammed one night with Elvin Bishop and Paul Butterfield for about eight or nine hours, in my basement. Butter said, “I want you to play with me.” “Man,” I said, “I don’t wanna leave these cats” [the Art Ensemble]. “You ain’t makin’ a dime,” he said… It got to the point of a trauma, the guys got really angry with me. But I told them, “Man, I just cannot live like this” – I was the one living on the lowest rung. I didn’t expect them to take care of me. I could take care of myself. And that’s when I went with Butter. I wasn’t gonna close myself in; I was learning, always learning stuff.

The Butterfield Band was really very close. I brought Buzzy Feiten in – he came down to the Café Au Go Go one night and sat in, and I said, “Get him!” I brought Rod Hicks in… I got Dave Sanborn in the band, I’d known him since he was a kid.

The road was hectic, we worked all the time. I’d spend three months in California, three months in New York, three in the Midwest. I couldn’t believe I was working so much, by car, cab, airplane. It got to the point where I had no place to live. I said, “I gotta get a house,” and that’s when I moved up to Woodstock.

When I left Butterfield, I went up to Toronto. This producer had a big hit with Motherlode, “And When I Die,” and he wanted to put a band together behind that. I wrote a lot up there, every day. But the guy tried to rip us off…

We had a great keyboard player and singer, William Smith, and this guy Anthony Chenault, that guitar player from St. Louis I told you about. Well, it didn’t sound like the same band as made the record, but the people loved it ‘cause we were so good. We tried to hold the band together, but this guy, he ripped us off.

About that time, the Woodstock album came out with my tune “Love March” by the Butterfield Band. And they said, “Hey, come and get some money” – the record sold almost a million in the first week. I took the money and drove to San Francisco, I just wanted to get away from the East and everything there. This was around 1971.

I really got a chance to study, piano and guitar, every day. And I played with a drummer from Senegal in this percussion group, playing traditional African pieces. This guy was the lead drummer and choreographer for the Ballet International of Senegal. He came out to San Francisco and we played some gigs at Sacramento State, San Francisco State – all percussion, and Julius Hemphill on flute and alto, and I would sing these chants. We played opposite Sun Ra one time, he loved it – he wanted to hire us. This was very different from the clubs and the Fillmore – it was college concerts and workshops. I got a chance to open myself up to a lot of things, meeting all these intellectuals. They would really prod you, try to make you define all these things in words.

Well, I did that for a while, then I came back to New York and started that band Full Moon, with Buzzy, (saxophonist) Gene Dinwiddie, Freddie Beckmeier on bass, and Neil Larsen on keyboards. It was a good band too, but we had some problems, drugs and stuff… We had a manager I didn’t like at all, I didn’t trust him and that turned out to be true. We did two albums with [producer] Alan Douglas, who had a good deal with CBS at the time, and a tour. We got to L.A. and there was some kind of money hassle, and I told Buzzy, “I’m leaving.” There were too many other things going on, this influx of bad karma…

Once again, I got tired of all of New York. In ’76, I went down to Memphis to work for Stax. They were almost on the rocks, but still trying to hold it together. I was doin’ commercials and stuff, working better than I could here. I did studio work for Stax, some demos for Isaac Hayes. I started going to Mississippi every weekend to visit a friend who worked in the pressing plant in Rimrock, Arkansas. Really a country dude – a white kid, but he liked to drink wine, so we’d drink wine together. And this town had no black people nowhere – these were mountain people, jug folks. This guy had an eight–track studio and the best pressing plant I’ve ever seen. They did everything by hand – fantastic quality. But they were putting out these strange records, this jug music – no, not jug band music, this is different, they tuned the instruments really strange… I met another guy named Coon – a white guy, believe it or not – and started playing country and western, which I never had before. He turned me on to some black people playing country music, and some blues players like I’d never heard before, in Greenville [MS] and all those small towns.

Well, by this time, Stax was falling apart and I got a call from Anthony Braxton, sayin’ “Phillip, I want you to come work with me.” And I was broke, and I worked with him for a while; I did the Town Hall album and the big band album (Creative Orchestra Music) with him. We had Leo Smith on trumpet and David Holland on bass. We did a lotta good stuff. People say Anthony don’t swing, but when I was with him, he swung.

After that, I put another group together with Frank Lowe (saxophone), Olu Dara (trumpet) and Donald Smith (keyboards), Lonnie Liston’s brother. That was more of a jazz thing, but not exactly straight ahead – we got into singing and all kinds of stuff.

Shut Down the Government Fountain of Misinformation

From PressThink, some necessary rethinking and strong advice to get the virus of misinformation out of the press reports:

Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States. For three years this has been a massive — and unsolved — problem for the country and its political leadership.

But now it is life and death. On everything that involves the coronavirus Donald Trump’s public statements have been unreliable. And that is why today we announce that we are shifting our coverage of the President to an emergency setting.

This means we are exiting from the normal system for covering presidents— which Trump himself exited long ago by using the microphone we have handed him to spread thousands of false claims, even as he undermines trust in the presidency and the press. True: he is not obliged to answer our questions. But neither are we obligated to assist him in misinforming the American people about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government.

We take this action knowing we will be criticized for it by the President’s defenders, by some in journalism, and perhaps by some of you. And while it would be nice to have company as we change course, we anticipate that others in the news media will stick with the traditional approach to covering presidents.

This we cannot in good conscience do.

Switching to emergency mode means our coverage will look different and work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us. Here are the major changes:

* We will not cover live any speech, rally, or press conference involving the president. The risk of passing along bad information is too great. Instead, we will attend carefully to what he says. If we can independently verify any important news he announces we will bring that to you— after the verification step.

* We plan to suspend normal relations with the Trump White House. That means we won’t be attending briefings. (We can watch them on TV.) We won’t gather around him as he departs in his helicopter. We won’t join in any off-the-record “background” sessions with Administration officials. We won’t enter into agreements of any kind with the Trump team, which includes those nameless “senior advisers” who mysteriously show up in news stories.

* We have always tried to quote public officials accurately, including President Trump. In emergency mode we add a further check. In addition to, “does this fairly represent what he said?” we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying? If it is simply meant to demonize a group of people, rewrite a history that now embarrasses the President, or extend his hate campaign against journalists who are doing their job, we may decide not to amplify it, even though it happened. An old tenet of White House reporting states that what the president says makes news— automatically, as it were. Today we are disabling that autoplay system and replacing it with a manual one.

* In general, we will be shifting the focus of our coverage from what President Trump is saying to what his government is doing. We will be de-emphasizing the entire White House beat and adding people who can penetrate the bureaucracy from the rim, rather than the center of the distortion machine.

* Experience has taught us that there will occasionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a news writing formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true. Like so:

In January and February, President Trump minimized the danger of the coronavirus. “We have it totally under control,” he said on Jan. 22. But two days ago he tried to erase that fact and escape accountability for his prior statements. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” he said. If we judge by his public statements this is an outright lie. On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Refusing to go with live coverage. Suspending normal relations with his White House. Always asking: is this something we should amplify? A focus on what he’s doing, not on what he’s saying. The truth sandwich when we feel we have to highlight his false claims. This is what you can expect now that our coverage has been switched to an emergency setting.

One more thing. Because we don’t know that we have done this right, and because your confidence in us describes the limits of what we can achieve as journalists, we will be hiring immediately a public editor who is empowered to field complaints, decide if something went wrong, find out how it happened, and report back.

Early in President Trump’s term, Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, spoke these memorable words about the President’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric: “We’re not at war, we’re at work,” said Baron. This was a smart warning not to get caught up in bringing down a president.

Today we are recognizing that our journalism must shift, not to a “war” but to an emergency footing. (Donald Trump, meanwhile, is calling himself a “wartime president.”) We feel we cannot keep telling wild and “newsy” stories about the unreliable narrator who somehow became president. Not with millions of lives at stake. We have to exit from that system to keep faith with you, and with the reason we became journalists in the first place.

Santrofi at Womex19

Great music from Santrofi at the excellent Womex19 festival-check more videos of different groups out. From Songlines:

It’s surely the stuff of dreams. Five members of the new Ghanaian band Santrofi had never been to Europe before they landed at Germany’s Fusion festival in June for their first ever tour. They followed this by playing at many of Europe’s leading music festivals including Roskilde, Amsterdam Roots, FMM Sines and WOMAD.

In Ghanaian mythology, the santrofi is a brightly coloured bird that has additional wings on its horns. It’s believed you shouldn’t hunt it as if you bring one home, it’ll bring you bad luck, but if you let it go free, you’ll be blessed with good fortune. The santrofi is a bird that possesses great beauty and a powerful song – all attributes the band aim to exemplify in their innovative take on Ghana’s vintage highlife sound.

“Ghana has a really rich musical heritage and we want to bring it back, so we decided to form a collective and write our own songs” - Emmanuel Ofori

The young collective all cut their teeth playing with many of Ghana’s veteran highlife stars such as Ebo Taylor and Gyedu-Blay Ambolley. “We’re re-looking at highlife as it’s been out of favour,” explains bandleader and bass player Emmanuel Ofori who has played with Pat Thomas & Kwashibu Area Band. “Ghana has a really rich musical heritage and we want to bring it back, so we decided to form a collective and write our own songs.”

Stop Flattening the Curve!

 

As usual, McSweeneys is providing good mirth during these times of sacrifice, coronavirus, and falling Dows, Devorah Blachor writes:

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO! ”
—  Donald Trump, Twitter, 3/23/20

- - -

Every human life is precious. Life begins at conception. If you value human life, you must support the greatest president of all-time, Donald J. Trump, and also agree with him that we’re taking these coronavirus containment measures too far. It’s not really worth it to flatten the curve just to save millions of lives.

We were always at war with coronavirus.

Donald Trump is the only president brave enough to appoint unqualified judges because they’re anti-abortion. God bless our life-loving president! And God bless the stock market. If we can get back our bullish stock market, it’s totally worth sacrificing all those lives. Our bold and decisive stable genius seems to be the only world leader who understands that.

We were always at war with China.

The “shelter-in-place” orders are going to cause a recession, or even a depression. That’s way too hard for Americans to adhere to because, in this country, people want the freedom to walk around, go where they want, and do what they choose  —  even if they have coronavirus. Americans need freedom, just as long as they’re not women who have unplanned pregnancies, in which case they should be forced to give birth against their will.

Health officials say that we have to maintain social distancing, but what do they know about health? Even the surgeon general has said that people should stay home and that fifteen days of social distancing isn’t going to be enough. But why should we listen to the surgeon general when there are perfectly good random people on Twitter that the president is retweeting who say the exact opposite thing? Let people out of their homes! Sure,  that means that people will die, but the fear of the virus cannot collapse our economy. Sweet, beautiful cash is much more valuable than the lives of all those who will die from COVID-19. But don’t let women have abortions because that would be wrong.

We were always at war with women.

Economies are like fragile babies. We must treasure and nurture them. Just like Dear Leader says, automobile accidents kill plenty of people every year and we don’t ban them. Hell, we don’t even ban guns and they kill way more people than cars! If you add up all the people who are killed in car accidents and by guns, it still would be far less than the 1 to 3.4 percent of the population projected to die from coronavirus. So why are we even trying?

We were always at war with 1 to 3.4 percent of the population.

Take a look at those evil European and Canadian heathens with their ongoing commitment to containing the virus and their excellent universal health care systems. It’s like they care more about saving human lives than their economies — what a bunch of socialist losers.

We were always at war with Europe and Canada.

Do the math. Imagine if we force every woman to carry their unplanned pregnancy to term. We could fill the world with so many unwanted babies, and then all those babies could grow up to get killed by diseases like the coronavirus, and all because the Dow Jones had the sads.

That’s the American Dream! That’s the bold leadership of Donald Trump! Letting people die will make America great again!

We were always at war with caring about human life when profit was on the line.