A Fragmentary Thursday
An observation from the Parisian metro: Many, many people, almost all of them young, are walking around with cell phones with shattered screens. (No, I’m not being nosy—they’re right up on top of you on some of the more crowded lines and many of them seem to have no qualms about getting on their phones in the middle of packs of people).
Apparently, this is a generalized phenomenon?
A superb metaphor for modern culture, in which we are glued to our phones as though they were our very lives, and it turns out that the thing to which we are so fervently attached is…broken.
Two things I gave students a few years ago (just before Bill Cosby was convicted) that I just stumbled on looking over old course blogs—what Washington says is especially moving:
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Just because some of you may never have heard Bill Cosby say the kinds of things that Amy Wax refers to in the book we read, here’s a bit from him on Meet the Press about a decade ago:
As we discussed in class, Cosby’s statements on these matters are now largely (and conveniently) overlooked because of the accusations of sexual violence against him. But he’s not the only black celebrity who has made statements along these lines. Here’s for example Denzel Washington saying similar things:
Washington’s comments here brought him the same kind of criticism Cosby received for his remarks.
Why do you think such comments from black men are received with such hostility by some critics, black and white, while it’s much harder to find anyone criticizing, for example, a certain University with an overwhelmingly white student body celebrating a black rap artist who routinely writes lyrics like these: https://genius.com/Lil-wayne-love-me-lyrics?
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The myth of the Soledad Brothers on the American radical left, and its expansion into mainstream institutions well beyond the ranks of self-professed revolutionaries, is an intriguing story.
The Soledad Brothers were three black inmates in a California prison in the 1960s who were accused of the murder of a prison guard in retaliation for the shooting of a number of other inmates by a guard. Their cause became an object of interest by much of the ‘radical chic’ left intelligentsia of the 1960s-70s (Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and a host of other celebrities of the era advocated for their acquittal), and the argument put forth was that they were unjustly accused by prison officials only because the three were outspokenly politically radical and the prison was trying to silence politicized inmates who brought light to the injustices of the prison system.
The central player of the three, George Jackson (who is described at length in the Collier/Horowitz piece), published a book titled Soledad Brother and was killed in an attempted escape from prison after he was smuggled a 9 mm pistol (possibly by one of his attorneys) and murdered a number of guards and other prisoners before being fatally shot himself as he attempted to reach an exterior prison wall.
The other two Soledad Brothers were eventually acquitted in a controversial trial in which several members of the jury openly declared their political support of Jackson in the wake of the trial. Meanwhile, it was revealed years afterward by a former political friend of Jackson’s who visited him in prison and sometimes recorded their conversations that Jackson had actually admitted murdering the guard during one of those meetings.
George Jackson’s writing is today studied and celebrated in many colleges and universities, including the one at which this class is being taught, and the myth of the Soledad Brothers as innocent, hapless victims of a racist American system is still uncritically presented. Collier and Horowitz quote Jackson briefly to give you a sense of what he believed, though they end the quote they provide a bit prematurely. Here’s that full quote and a few more from the same book:
“There are many thousands of ways to correct individuals. The best way is to send one armed expert. I don’t mean to outshout him with logic, I mean correct him. Slay him, assassinate him with thuggee, by silenced pistol, shotgun, with a high powered rifle shooting from 400 yards away and behind a rock. Suffocation, strangulation, crucifixion, burning with flamethrower, dispatch by bomb” [Thuggee was a cult of murderous highway criminals in India that preyed on travellers–they would join travelling groups and win their confidence, then strangle and rob them] (Blood in My Eye, p. 28)
“Violence is not supposed to work in Amerika. For no one, that is, except the ‘omnipotent administrator.’ But this has yet to be proved to my satisfaction since I know that a bomb is a bomb is a bomb; it twists steel, shatters concrete and dismembers men everywhere else in the world? Why not those made in Amerika? A bullet fired from an assault rifle in the hands of a Vietnamese liberation fighter will kill a pig in Vietnam. Why won’t it kill a pig in the place where pigs are made?” [Jackson, like other revolutionaries of the ’60s, spelled ‘America’ with a ‘k’ to impute a connection between the US and Nazi German. ‘Pig’ was ’60s leftist slang for ‘police officer’ and more broadly for ‘member of the establishment’] (ibid., p. 29)
“[W]hat is needed is total revolution, the armed struggle between the have-nots with their vanguard and the haves with their hirelings and macabre freaks that live through them, civil war between at least these two sections of the population is the only purgative. Total revolution must be aimed at the purposeful and absolute destruction of the state and all present institutions, the destruction carried out by the so-called psychopath, the outsider, whose only remedy is the destruction of the system. This organized massive violence directed at the source of thought control is the only realistic therapy” (ibid., p. 87)
Is George Jackson someone from whom college students can learn important things about American history and politics? How might a conservative explain the fact that Jackson, an outspoken proponent of murder and widespread violence and chaos as part of a necessary ‘revolutionary movement’ that would be led by a ‘vanguard’ of convicted felons like himself, is taught in college courses today?
Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac has just passed.
Like probably 93% or so of Americans of my generation, the music of that group is a significant part of my mental soundtrack. It’s the mid-’70s pop giant material that takes up much of the space there, though I later discovered that they were an energetic live rock band in earlier incarnations both before and after the two Americans Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined. I have a sketch of something written on Nicks, who was an obsession of mine (again, along with probably every other teen boy at the time), that I’ll perhaps put up here at some point.
McVie was not the writer of the Fleetwood Mac songs that are most resonant in my memory, but this one is just irresistible in its rendition of what it feels like to be hopelessly in love.
Godspeed, Christine Perfect (her quite perfect birth name).
When I was in my mid-20s, a good friend from work lost her sister to suicide.
She wanted the service recorded and she knew I had a portable 4-track machine and some basic skill using it, so she asked me to do it. It was the least I could do in such an awful situation.
Part of the service comprised the singing of several hymns by a duo, one of whom played acoustic guitar and sang harmony while the other sang lead. They were wonderfully skilled, the austerity of the guitar and their otherworldly vocal harmonies floating above the gathered congregation and holding us all in a spell of melancholic awe. Every bit of the music they produced was heavenly in inspiration and delivery, but three hymns especially seared profoundly into my soul.
“Earthen Vessels”
“I am the bread of life”
“Your love is finer than life”
As I was writing this, I imagined I was going to upload those versions of these hymns that so touched me at that funeral service in their unadorned majesty, but then it somehow came to feel inappropriate, given the sacred context in which they were recorded and the personal purpose for which they were intended. (I even occasionally feel that I should not have kept the recordings myself once I’d passed them along to my friend, as they are a priceless gift not intended for me but for the deceased woman and those who loved her, yet in my weakness I found them simply too lovely to give up).
I was a few years out of college then, still unsure about my trajectory, trying to find my way, and profoundly indifferent at that time to religion and spirituality. Through these several decades, this music stayed in me tenaciously, determinedly. Even during long periods in which if I had been asked about what I thought of the subject matter of the lyrics, I would have rolled my eyes or shaken my head or sneered.
For thirty years now, they have been floating around in my head and in my heart, doing some kind of unfathomable, mysterious work.
I honestly don’t know what I think about this view of comedy. Or perhaps I do and I don’t want to admit it.
It is certainly true that comedy helps us to deal with aspects of this world that are unbearable without laughter. I have seen things in border town Mexico—legless men with open wounds displayed dragging themselves from table to table in a bar begging for coins; what appeared to be bodies (too still to be merely sleeping) lying in the gutters of streets with heavy foot and auto traffic wholly indifferent to them—that would make it impossible to go on if one had to look at them squarely for too long. Laughter is one of the deflections, the self-defense mechanisms we use in such situations.
I have laughed in the face of many horrible things.
I am not at all sure, though, that we can be morally exonerated for this response, and even if it is instinctual or somewhere close to that.
Perhaps more perfected creatures than we would be unable to laugh at those boys sniffing glue in the Moscow streets. The saints among them might take up the calling of helping those in such desperate straits. The rest would perhaps at least endeavor to preserve the searing truth of those experiences on their hearts and to communicate, baldly and without the dissimulation of laughter, its life-changing message to others.
An oldie but a goodie: Who are the most intolerant people in America? It has to be those scary quasi-fascists who voted for Trump, yes? Nope. It’s the Woke leftists.
Here’s Band Geeks again. These people are one of my most treasured recent music finds on YouTube.
It’s Richie Castellano’s project, and here he is doing every single part in the Jackson 5’s “ABC,” including young Michael’s lead vocal and the ridiculous funkiness of that bassline.
And I posted previously about all their classic Yes covers. I was not aware then that they had done not just the title track but the entire Close to the Edge LP.
I know that record quite thoroughly. I have listened to it many times over the years. This is practically note perfect, no small achievement for such technically challenging songs.
They do these songs so authentically that the singer in Yes, Jon Anderson, is going on tour with them next year to play them. And it is stunning that Jon, who is pushing 80, still sounds just about as he sounded in the early 1970s.