Catch Eddie Palmieri’s smile (@ at 4:24) as his brother keeps firing…
Various Authors
Homie
I hadn’t seen my musician-friend for a bit, but we met up by the 125th St. pier one evening before the heat wave hit. I headed down to the same spot the next night, hopped the fence and sat closer to the river. He’d sent me a link to “Unwind” after I got home the day before. It was in my ear as I unwound with the breeze and a corona, though the song is more exacting than relaxing…
Hope you feel the precise ache in the singing/playing, and don’t pass over the lovely wordless outro. Like the singer, you may feel like you’re waiting on someone, but I wonder if it’ll turn out better than this song’s ender…B.D.
Breathless (Danny Lyon’s “SNCC” & “The Bikeriders”)
Watch “SNCC” (with a quick and dirty review) below. A short film on “The Bikeriders” back story follows…
SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)
Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.
Itamar the Monster
This long investigative report (published in the Sunday Times Magazine on May 16) by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti should become the most consequential piece of magazine journalism since Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic ten years ago. May it be read in Israel where the public has become ever more impervious to crimes committed against Arabs. One of Israel’s extreme right-wing pols has condemned the Times piece as a “blood libel.” But Itamar Ben-Gvir — the ultra-settler who’s been Israel’s Minster of National Security since 2022 — seems to be in avoidant mode. This swatch from the article, detailing Ben-Givr’s support for mass murder and assassination, suggests why he might be betting evasion is his best option…
(Forever) Young Walton
An indelible passage from David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game:
It was funny, [Lionel] Hollins said, we were so young and so cocky. Not just the championship year, but even more the year after. We didn’t think there was anyone who could beat us, and we didn’t think it would ever end. We walked out on the court before every game and we couldn’t wait for it to start.
“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear” (Redux)
Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death on April 24 for lyrics that excoriated the Islamic Republic’s rulers and enablers. His uncle tweeted a message for the Iranian diaspora that should be heard by every believer in free speech…
The uncle of imprisoned Iranian rapper #ToomajSalehi has a message for Iran. pic.twitter.com/fi2XUrnAaO
— Chelsea Hart چلسی هارت (@chelseahartisme) April 26, 2024
xxx
The following First dispatch was originally posted in January, 2023…
Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about his music and the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”
Style Wars (& Keeping It Real Universal)
“Men have united to form the Avengers of Hating Drake; Drake, in response, has doubled down. If you are too busy to keep up with all the rap men happenings, I have collected the details for you.”
River Sides (“Hey, hey, hey”)
A cover from last summer’s leg of the Never Ending tour…
Well I was born up in the mountains
Raised up in a desert town
And I never saw the ocean
Till I was close to your age now…
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey, you rolling river
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right
Good News from Chattanooga: Paul Baicich & Tom Smucker on Operation Dixie (21. C.)
The UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is not simply impressive; it is HUGE. With 3,613 ballots counted, some 73% of the workers voted in favor of union representation. (The final total was 2,628 votes in favor of joining the UAW, and 985 votes against.)
Clearly, the union gained the confidence of the VW workers after impressive UAW strikes and contract victories last year at “The Big Three.” This election in Tennessee has been closely watched because the union has struggled for years to organize foreign-owned auto operations in the South.
Will Mercedes-Benz in Alabama be next? Could be: Those workers vote next month. — Paul Baicich
…
It’s even better than you think.
I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left-wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years past, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster’s Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.
As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south.
If Gaza’s Children Starve, Israel Will Lose Its Moral Legitimacy Forever
An editorial in Haaretz…
The fighting in Gaza must stop. Not tomorrow. Today.
All available resources must immediately be directed to stopping the unprecedented famine that is underway in that embattled sliver of land that has already seen unspeakable suffering. As bad as the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 was, the people and government of Israel must now recognize that today not just the country’s security but its legitimacy are at stake as never before.
Gaza Insta (The Children at Risk NOW!)
View this post on Instagram
On the Beach
View this post on Instagram
Brothers Under the Skin (Redux)
Wesley Hogan’s felt appreciation of Tracy Chapman’s Grammy duet with Luke Combs (here) sent your editor back to another crossover move by the Man of Country, Morgan Wallen. I’m reposting the video of his duet with Lil Durk (along with a short comment on it below). Wallen’s & Durk’s mannish boys’ stance seems backward compared to Chapman’s and Combs’ progressive politesse. Yet the rougher guys’ vernacular — “I’d’ve stayed my ass at home” — brings home the less than colloquial lyrics — …”I’ll get a promotion…we’ll buy a bigger house and move to the suburbs” — that undercut (slightly) Chapman’s attempt to make a song of the people, by the people, for the people. You need to keep an ear out for how underdogs talk now if you mean to write to/for them. I’m glad Wes Hogan is out to make sure we don’t forget C’ and C’s award show turn, but Wallen’s & Durk’s forgotten collab belongs to a river of song that runs below all the Broadways in this world — deep beneath the attention of the gentility. B.D.
Double-Play: C. Liegh McInnes & Peter H. Wood on Baseball and Color Lines
At the world’s fair of the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, Daniel Murray, and Thomas J. Calloway organized the Exhibit of American Negroes to represent the history, culture, and institutions of their people. (The Paris world fair was a celebration of ruling ideas of progress intended to uphold “achievements of the past century and propel development into the future.”) The Library of Congress online archive has collected the photographs, charts and other materials curated by Du Bois et al. Looking through the files, among the images of black laborers, students, mothers, organizers, homes and churches, a picture of Morris Brown College’s black baseball team resonated with a young African American man, a century on.[1] Du Bois, or perhaps Calloway, must’ve seen how this tableau of a true team evoked more than stats or won/lost records ever could…
Your editor sent Peter Wood this photo after reading how Jackie Robinson’s example helped propel Wood on his path to writing books like Black Majority and Near Andersonville. The photo also went to First contributor C. Liegh McInnis since he’s a baseball fan with deep feelings for the Negro Leagues as well as a certain distance on Jackie Robinson and the ideal of integration.
Talk Therapy (or Lip Service)?
Twitter dialogue between…
Fania Oz-Salzbarger [“Mom, Israeli, Jewish, humanist, History prof. Loving daughter of Amos Oz. Tel Aviv U (BA, MA), Oxford U (D.Phil), Uppsala U (Dr. h.c) Democracy must win.”]
&
Ambassador Majed Bamya [“Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, New York. Palestinian from Yaffa. Refugee. The time for freedom is always right now!”]
“New Ancient Strings” (& Gangster Critics)
When I had a yen for kora music in the past, I used to play In the Heart of the Moon — the 2005 CD by Toumani Diabaté and guitarist Ali Farka Touré.[1] But last month I caught up with Diabaté’s CD of duets with another kora master, Ballaké Sissoko. Their cooly canonic New Ancient Strings (1999) may be my go-to kora groove going forward.
Bet
“With your first experience in Vegas — what did you think?”
“On earth, it’s probably the closest thing to a dystopia.” – Victor Wembanyama 😂 pic.twitter.com/PoJRveKG3w
— Evan Abrams (@EvanHAbrams) December 29, 2023
H/T Thomas Beller.
UAW-D Beats Bosses (& the Doomy Left)
Rad twitterers stuck on gestural politics have missed what might turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of America’s class struggles. While nobody with any sense is proclaiming a New Millennium for this country’s workers, there may be a new conjuncture around the corner. Thanks to the UAW, as well as Teamsters at UPS, who have won the largest victories for American labor in a half-century. It’s imperative that would-be leftists NOTICE what’s happened in factories and warehouse (and delivery trucks). With a little help from Labor Wave radio, you can listen below to an interview with historian (and former UAW staff organizer) Erik Baker, who has addressed the UAW’s recent wins in Jewish Currents, “Revaluing the Strike.”
“We are sweet since we are born”
Six Miles Out isn’t La Terra Trema, but this short film about fishermen gently brings home the truth talked up by its Palestinian sponsors: “we are not numbers.”
Click on “Read more” for a bigger screen…
Hatikvah
Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”
Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.
