The terrible option

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My brother Frank

If you’ve known someone who died by their own hand, you walk around for the rest of your life with a question mark so real, you can see it with your eyes and feel it on your skin.  Why?  What drove them to do it?  Even though people commit suicide all the time, no one wants to confront that darkness or our resentment that they have left us with the terrible knowledge that death is not just a reality, it’s an option.

I’ve known several people who have taken their own lives, but the two I miss most dearly are my brother, Frank, and my friend the folksinger, Phil Ochs.  They were very different people, and their suicides were very different.

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The Burial (For Real)

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After another senseless act of violence, the family of Clyzayvion “Ty” Landfair—a 17 year old student at Holmes County Central High School, in Lexington, MS—has started a Go Fund Me page to cover the expenses of his funeral.

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Jumpin’ Johnnie: The Posthumous Interview

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I dreamed I saw Johnnie Green (the NBA veteran who started out with the Knicks, and died last week) last night, alive as you or me.

Dreamer: Man, could you leap! Miss the bus to Heaven, you can get there on your own. Like Gus Johnson told Sports Illustrated about his storied leaping ability: “I just say ‘legs, jump,’ and they say ‘How high, Boss?’” I first saw you play against Walter Bellamy in 1957 when you were a senior at Michigan State, and Big Bells was just a soph at Indiana.

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The Most Interesting

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After Marilyn told Adele that she and Grif were packing winter clothes for the Buddhist retreat in New Mexico, Adele asked me if New Mexico wasn’t hot.

“They have mountains,” I said, “and mountains have snow.”
“Do all mountains have snow?”
“Come to think of it, why should any mountains have snow? Aren’t they closer to the sun? Shouldn’t deserts have the snow?”
“When you’re at the café, ask Fran.”

Besides being an licensed electrician, free jazz musician on instruments of his own creation, reader of the most daunting Oulipo works, and maker of art postcards based on mathematical calculations that he sends family, friends, waitresses, and people he meets in cafes. (I have three), Fran is the kind of guy you can ask about mountains and snow. He was answering my question through improvisations on planetary rotation, wind direction, reflection of light, absorption of heat, when I noticed a dark-haired, 60ish woman at the next table, who had been making notes in a spiral bound pad, turn more and more toward us.

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Table Music (Kierra Sheard; The Band; Lillie Mae; Tony Joe White; Smokey Robinson; JB, Bobby Bland & BB King; Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins; Sugar Blue; Playboi Carti; JUL; St. Etienne; Obrafour)

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I’ve been stuck on Kierra Sheard’s duets lately. There are wonderful ones with Jekalyn Carr (on Sheard’s last album), with Tasha Cobb, and a couple with Sheard’s mother Karen Clark (of the Clark Sisters). One of those Mother-and-Daughter ones has an indelible moment where Karen gently induces her pregnant daughter not to go full-on. (The tale of what once happened to “Gimme Shelter’s” Merry Clayton shadows her maternal attentiveness.) What comes next here is great from the jump (catch the guy who starts hopping on one leg pretty early on) but it gets transcendent when Ms. Sheard and her chorus lock on their truth: “He’s holding me up!!!”

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Archival Charmers (A Thanksgiving Playlist from Scott Spencer)

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Ok, here’s what we have: an amazing amalgam of poetry and music from Mark  (caged by rain, etc.), a moody groove Celeste sent my way four years ago, a current fav — funny with a nice beat — the best drug song ever (dig the drum on knock me clear out), and Levon’s daughter Amy Helm, who I am always pushing on folks, though maybe she’s old news to you, which would be great…

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Betrayal

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When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.

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Narcissus in Gaza

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A view from one of London’s wisest …

The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.

In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.

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November’s Children

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This past week, we’ve received a master class in the difference between polling and voting. There’s an enormous difference between an easy answer to a poll question, and the private choice in the stillness of a voting booth. And what we’ve witnessed is that when it comes to pulling the lever or marking the circle, Democrats are victorious in, at times, astonishing places and in astonishing ways. And MAGA Republicans are enduring so much … losing.

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The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)

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This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…

Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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Barbarism and Culture

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The author responded to recent poems in First and then went further with his thoughts…

“I’m on the side   . . .
[of] the ones used as messages . . .
of those whose deaths are part of an estimated number . . . ”

Oh my, oh my — what to do with (lines from) poems such as this, and those by Alison Stone…Such good lines/poems — are we allowed to admire them, as well as being moved, being led to reflect, to sympathize, to cry? Might there not be something just a bit off in such admiration? But if so, then why have poems at all?  Which, inevitably (for some) leads to . . . Adorno:

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The Day After (Who Rules Gaza If Israel “Wins”?)

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“We can’t have a reversion to the status quo with Hamas running Gaza,” Blinken…told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We also can’t have — and the Israelis start with this proposition themselves — Israel running or controlling Gaza.”

The following piece, published last week in Foreign Affairs magazine, speaks to the future of Gaza. Its author once served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and as finance minister. Before his dismissal by the P.A.’s President Abbas in 2013, Salam Fayyad was known for being a modernizer committed to reforming the political economy and security structures of the West Bank.

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Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)

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Intifada

“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”

..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…

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Better than “Heaven”

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Songs on the new Stones album might rev me up down the line, but I was put off by early hosannahs for the faux-gospel “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” which features Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Compare “Heaven” with live collabs between Stevie and the Stones from 1972, when they’d mash up “Uptight” and “Satisfaction.” (You can watch here — check Mick and Stevie’s dance — now that’s a throwback!)

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Two Formicating Junkies

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Joey, a guy I knew, used to call every month or so. He hardly ever had an agenda. No, “Can we…” or “What do you think about….” or anything like that. It was just to talk for a while, checking in, letting me and maybe himself know that he was still around.

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