“…and Cleveland’s Cold”

Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”

I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.

Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.

SPLAT![1]

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Ghosts of Christmas past: Aspen, 1967

Christmas vacation when you were a cadet at West Point was all about how you got there.  You could fly space available in uniform for half price, but even that was too much if you had to fly halfway across the country, so it was pretty common for cadets to look for “hops,” a free ride on an Air Force cargo plane that was going your way.

A friend of mine and fellow ski patrolman at West Point, we’ll call him Alex, discovered that his father’s former roommate at West Point had retired from the Army as a Colonel and took a job as the manager and groundskeeper at the Aspen School of Music.  The main hall at the school, about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide was used for chamber music concerts in the summer and had two offices at one end of the building with convertible sofas.  The School of Music was closed, and they were ours over Christmas, the Colonel said, if we could get out there.  A lift ticket that year was $6.50.  We could manage that.  We found an Air Force hop and rode in some spare web-seats on a C-141 loaded with cargo headed for McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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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Loss is More (Ali Siddiq’s Latest)

Ali Siddiq does some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in his new standup show. The whole thing is full of felt WTF’s that have made him America’s reigning ghetto existentialist. Like post-accident Richard Pryor, Siddiq consigns comedy to the ashes when he relives the loss of his half-sister, Ashley Rae Mitchell, who died when she was eight years old. Per Siddiq, her exit had a killer upshot: “I’m so dead inside I’m a fucking monster in the streets.” Siddiq isn’t being slick. He’s not out to excuse his own crimes even as he makes art out of collateral damage.

You can cut to the “chapter” where Siddiq recalls the death of his baby sister below (beneath the video of his whole show).

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Leave Me Alone

Pictures

..A series of drawings in a sketchbook. In the various pictures, Leila is drawn in blues and purples, while the girl she loves is drawn, usually, but not always, in reds and pinks. Sometimes the girl she loves looks a lot like Leila, but her (Leila’s) face is more angular, she’s a little taller, she’s got a femme fatale look to her while the girl she loves is more conventionally pretty, Leila has a heart tattoo on her right thigh while the girl she loves has a butterfly tattoo in the same place, Leila has big tits and the girl she loves has small tits, or medium-sized tits, usually they are both wearing a slutty little dress, both girls are haunted but Leila is undeniably more so. In the first few pictures, Leila is walking alone on the beach, smoking. In both pictures she’s smoking, actually, and in one she also holds a gun. Like some kind of femme Mersault, a thotty existentialist. She stares out at the horizon, and yet her gaze is rapt, as if she’s staring at nothing, or into the abyss. In these pictures, she is heartbreakingly alone, as if she’s arrived at the end of the world, like the girl in La Jetée.

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Wound Up Wrong

“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)

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Dr. Hrabowski’s Higher Ed

Freeman Hrabowski III grew up in Birmingham when it was known as the most segregated city in America, but he realized early he was born free to learn. (“Heaven for me was eating my grandmother’s blueberry pie and doing math problems.”) Hrabowski’s parents and grandparents passed down the idea that education might be an end-in-itself even if black people in the South didn’t have the luxury to conceive of “pure” learning at odds with economism. Hrabowski remains a realist when it comes to schooling. He knows culture don’t butter no bread. So, he’s become the foremost proponent of STEM education for black college students by building a scholarly vehicle for upward mobility—a research university that feels homey to kids in black communities who love learning math as much he did.

Hrabowski retired in 2022 after thirty years as president of the University of Maryland of Baltimore Country (UMBC)—a school with a less than toney pedigree that under his aegis has been the “baccalaureate-origin” institution for hundreds of black Ph.D.’s in natural sciences, math, and engineering. Scores more than have been formed by Ivies—or any other elite, predominantly white institution—in recent decades.

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Better than Heaven

You could start with “Like Someone in Love” or “You Must Believe in Spring” but I’m pretty sure “Peace Piece” is Bill Evans’ summit. Forget me though. Just listen up now—those thrill-trills in the piano’s higher register might make you forget how hard it is to die.

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Brothers Under the Skin

I got out of the hospital on Dec. 31 and this was my New Year’s song!  A while back, Morgan Wallen was caught on camera throwing the N-word around, yet his collaboration with Lil Durk, who’s not exactly a paragon either, makes the prospect of a genuinely integrated American culture sing. “Broadway Girls” is beneath the ken of censorious Cancel-cultists, but leave those goodies alone. Come dance to the future with Morgan and Lil Durk. B.D.

Hormones

I (Lust)

Shut up kiss me hold me tight

C was from Montreal and she was married to a pretty famous UFC fighter who was training at a big gym in San Jose for an important fight in Vegas. We met on a kink app used mainly by radical queers (or at least queers who like weird sex) and vampiric married couples at the very end of their rope, looking to stave off the apocalypse of the bourgeoisie, or at least to eroticize it.

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Got To Be Real

Click HERE to watch the Zoom tribute to Bob Moses hosted by Florida International University, with the participation of the Moses family. (There will be another homegoing ceremony in Cambridge in September.)

The presence of figures from FIU and Broward County’s public school system spoke to the Moses family’s will to keep on pushing the Algebra Project’s program in Southeast Florida. The AP has been integrated into FIU and Broward schools for over a decade and the Moses memorial became another occasion to strengthen institutional connections. (The AP/Broward County link is one more sign of Moses’s instinct to go where America Dilemmas are right in your face. The Broward County School Board is currently resisting Governor DeSantis’s threat to withhold salaries from administrators and teachers who enforce mask mandates.)

Bob Moses’s daughter, Maisha (who Zoomed in at 10:30), and his wife, Janet (who joined around 1:14:45), gave clear-eyed (if sometimes tearful) testimony, fusing kin-folk truths and the book of Curtis Mayfield with The Autobiography of a Yogi and musings of Movement elders. Informed by organizers’ imperatives, their tales of Moses’ life in struggle steered listeners out of doomy darkness. The way forward came into focus for me when another speaker, Whitney Brakefield, made the Moses family’s sense of what’s possible real. Ms. Brakefield instantiated an American future that might seem unimaginable, until you hear her. (She zoomed at 52:25.)

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