in the full bright air conditioned hum
of my refrigerator day
are moments of triumphant scouring
call it progress
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.”
Afropean Fraternity
https://youtu.be/pXx7bT282dk?si=xdzhI2A0ZEAPKtHF
Headie One and Koba LaD are brothers under the Channel. Their rap song, “Link In the Ends,” establishes a connection between French Banlieue and English council estate.
Pop History Play
Let’s start with a hypothetical. Suppose you’re 21 years old, you’re a raging Anglophile obsessed with British music, culture, and history, and you’re in London for the first time ever, with a flat to yourself for 1 week. For that week only, you have no responsibilities and are free to do whatsoever you fancy, in this city which Samuel Johnson once remarked that to be tired of is to be tired of life. How do you choose to spend your time?
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.
Christers’ Quandary: Which Side Are the Demons On?
I rise to sing the praises of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson!
Playing the Long Game: A College Education
I. What Do I Know?
Just prior to college basketball’s conference tournament week (which I relish more than the giant carnival it relentlessly feeds, as rivers do the sea), I glanced briefly at an NBA game — just to check on the night’s outcomes — and caught a furtive glimpse at Lebron James going up for a jump shot. I noticed, with surprise, that James had drifted — egregiously — to his left.
“Uh oh,” I muttered to myself, watching the shot miss badly, reminiscent of the fate of many of The King’s early career jumpers, before he somehow corrected his awful habit of not going straight up, at long last making himself into a good shooter, not just a great scorer and everything else.
I took comfort in feeling that my ability to size up and divine what is happening, and what was about to happen — my cherished (if apocryphal) wisdom — remained intact; because, like many who count themselves fans of our beautiful game, I knew next to nothing about men’s college ball this year, outside the Big East: well, St. John’s and some of their conference rivals.
Emotionally Yours
Jordan Poole got his comeuppance all over again this year — as he slumped for months and became the butt of a thousand jokes and memes — but he came through (as his bosses affirmed in their exit interviews)…
[Poole talk ends at 30:00.[
I’m glad to find out Winger felt JP’s comeback, though I’m ambivalent about nice white managers of black genius. (Hi, Bob Myers.) It was on Poole to find his game once the Wizards’ other less talented point guard, Tyus Jones, went down with an injury, enabling JP to play his natural position. Haters aren’t done with Poole. He brings out the mean in recessives shamed by his fluency — “I’m an expressive person” — and physical gifts that enable him to show out like so…
And so…
JP heated up pretty often in games after the All Star break in late February, but what really counted were moments that led to a (rare) Wizards winning streak — an end of game strip of Giannis and this beautiful assist to Cory Kispert…
Choiceless Villanelle (Redux)
How fragile — heart, brain, womb, sinew, and bone.
How easily bodies, and dreams, can die.
A woman’s safest when she is alone.
Hunger From a Great Height
(Gaza Feb 29 2024)
A small grey rectangle
The aid truck arrives
Iron filings converge upon a magnet
Ants swarming a dropped chocolate
They may have weapons
hidden in their skeletal hands
Their hunger may be explosive
Forces of Victory
Today in Dakar, during the inauguration of Sénégal’s new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye put on a heavy gold necklace signifying he was “Grand master of The Order of the Lion.” The ceremony made me think first of Les Lions — Sénégal’s national soccer team — but I also heard echoes of Shelley…
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.
Faye’s party won a landslide victory, though he was released from prison just ten days before Sénégal’s March 24th election (after eleven months in pretrial detention on a bogus charge)…
A few hours after the polls closed, partial results were already pointing to a first-round winner: Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the candidate of the most outspoken opposition to the incumbent government, and second in command of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity party (PASTEF). Faye will be the youngest and most unexpected president in the history of independent Senegal.
Before his presidential candidacy, Faye was little known to the Senegalese public, working in the shadow of party leader Ousmane Sonko. Sonko, also a former tax official [and another victim of a rigged judicial proceeding] … gained popularity, especially among young people, for his highly critical discourse on the traditional political class and for his promises of a radical break from how the country has been governed for decades.
I flashed on Shelley again when I saw this photo of the grey-haired Maitre Cire Cledor Ly at the inauguration…
Thinking Ahead
Hate to be a Gloomy Gus, but it seems fair to say, Trump will not be tried on federal charges before the election.
Bur let’s say he gets convicted in New York or Georgia for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or screwing with the electorate.
Driving in Circles
Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.
Rape? What Rape? (Denial as a Tool of Liberation)
Great philosophers can make great errors when they confront things that challenge their closely held beliefs. Theodore Adorno, a brilliant critic of classical music, wrote ignorant essays about pop and jazz. Noam Chomsky, whose work is fundamental to modern linguistics, has a naive grasp of how media operate. Michel Foucault, whose writing on discourses and authority shaped postmodern thought, regarded the Ayatollah Khomeini as a guide to liberation from Western materialism. And then there’s Judith Butler.
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!)
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On the Beach
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PTSD & Seth Lorinczi’s Psychedelic memoir, “Death Trip”
I used drugs—marijuana, LSD and ecstasy—in the Sixties but I never thought of them as therapeutic. The author, Seth Lorinczi, and his new autobiographical book, Death Trip, A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, has opened my eyes as never before to the idea that psychedelics can help heal the trauma of the Holocaust. In Lorinczi’s telling of the story, psychedelics rescued him, psychological speaking, from the legacy of Fascism, World War II and the extermination of millions of Jews.
Two for the Road
Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. by Marc Andrus. Parallax Press (Berkeley, California). 207pps. $24.95
Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov. St. Martin’s Essentials (New York). 325 pps.
Marc Andrus, an Episcopal bishop, and Helen Tworkov, the founder of Tricycle, the first Buddhist magazine in America, both begin their books with the same event. Andrus writes:
On June 12, 1963, many people around the world, including the president of the United States, opened their newspapers and looked with shock at a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, seated cross-legged in a posture called the lotus position, engulfed in flame. Thich Quang Duc is composed and upright. The revered monk, in his mid-sixties, had been soaked in gasoline by a younger monk and had then struck a match to set himself on fire.
On the Road with R. H. Blyth
I found the first book of R. H. Blyth’s four volume set, Haiku, (originally published between 1949-1952) in a used book store on St. Mark’s Place. If haiku seems no more pertinent to you than, say, heraldry—one more subject about which even an informed person “need not be ashamed to know nothing”[1]—you may be mollified to hear I had an excuse to check Eastern Culture since I was Christmas shopping for a nephew who’s on his way to Japan this spring. The book’s cover—“Oriental brown simple rough peasant cloth”—got me to open “the Blyth Haiku bibles” (pace Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg). I fell in…
“Plop!”
To quote the last line of “the most famous haiku” with frog-and-pond as translated by Blyth—scholar-gypsy who brought the East to Beats and Salinger (see J.D.’s bow to Blyth in “Seymour, An Introduction”: “…haiku, but senryu, too…can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime.”)