Various Authors
American Humor
“Old Town Road”–the country/rap hybrid that’s graduated from tween meme to pop moment, thanks chiefly to censorious types who got it bumped off Billboard‘s country music chart, led your editor to Fly Rich Double’s country/rap jape, “Big Boom.” It’s another novelty song that’s not fated to be an American Country classic. OTOH, there’s at least one video sparked by the song (see below) that may be funny for all eternity. It starts slow but I hope that sexy tractor keeps you rocking until the brothers start their delirious dance…
(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue
First contributor Ty Geltmaker steered your editor to “The Life of Gad Beck”—a graphic biography of a gay Jewish hero who fought Nazis in Germany during World War II (and survived). (The image below is from the body of the work…)
The Groveland Four’s Story Bends Toward Justice
Last week, Florida’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, accepted the unanimous recommendation of the state’s clemency board and issued pardons to the “Groveland Boys”—four African Americans—Earnest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin—who were wrongly accused of raping a white women seventy years ago. Back then, they became victims of Jim Crow injustice and, in particular, of a Southern sheriff, Willis McCall, who made “Bull Connor look like Barney Fife.” To quote Gilbert King who uncovered quashed evidence collected by the FBI of McCall’s crimes against the Groveland Four, including the extra-judicial killing of Samuel Shepherd and attempted murder of Walter Irwin. King’s book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2012) informed a citizens’ movement that pressed Florida’s officials to act.
After Action Report & Alliance Memories
“Tom ate trouble for desert.” That was Sarah Martin—former head of the Grant Houses’ tenant association—lauding her late comrade Tom DeMott at his Memorial, which was held at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem on December 1rst.
Homegoing & Tom DeMott’s Hidden Obit
I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…
The Case for Macron (& Merkel)
H/t to Bruce Jackson for steering your editor to this Vox photo of our nasty, goofy President smiling at Putin while Macron and Merkel look harder.
An Untired Peacemaker’s Last Stretch (Uri Avnery R.I.P.)
Uri Avnery, “grandfather” of Israel’s peace movement (who once fought for the Irgun) died on August 20th. Avnery’s angle on Middle East conflicts began to change after he served valiantly (and sustained a serious wound) in the 1948 war. Back in that day, “I and my friends raised for the first time the principle that there is a Palestinian people with whom we have to make peace,” as he told an Israeli interviewer a few years ago, adding: “I don’t think there were 10 people in the world that believed in this. Today it is a world consensus.”
Isiah Thomas, Smokey Robinson & Jesse Jackson at Aretha Franklin’s Homegoing Service
Sisters who sang at Aretha’s funeral are getting much respect, per the # of YouTube views, but there were men there who were worthy too…
Isiah Thomas’s moving eulogy comprehended Aretha’s messages to the grassroots (and to Detroit, capital of the 20th Century) even as he took in her universality.
Aretha’s Tree of Life (“Sharing the sunshine for the last time…”)
“There ain’t gonna be no last time!!…”
Mexico’s Election & Cherán
The authors of The Nation‘s account of the Mexican election, Margaret Cerullo and JoAnn Wypijewski, tried to keep triumphalism in check. But their call and response still managed to seem a bit beamish. Their claim the election meant Mexicans had become “heroes of their own story” reminded your editor of this story about a place in the country where everyday people have been acting like heroes for years. I hope it doesn’t seem churlish to point out citizens of Cherán chose to abstain from the recent election…
A Fascist Fashion Statement?
Historical analyses of FLOTUS’s fashion statement, such as one below, are being shared on social media…
This sort of analysis prompted Ty Geltmaker–a student (and ex-Professor) of modern Italian History–to dig into his own archives. Geltmaker comments below…
Our Developer President: A Dialogue Between Samuel Stein and Rachel Weber on Real Estate, Cities, and Trumpery
There’s a certain kind of person who sees real estate everywhere they look — someone who walks around a city and thinks not just, “who lives here?” but “who owns this, who’d they buy it from, and where’d they get the money?” Some think this way because they’re in the property racket, or hope one day to be. Others with this mentality are just perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have been hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products. We are definitely in the latter camp, and as such have quite a bit to obsess over these days. The following dialogue, between two urban planners and property scholars (one in New York City and one in Chicago), ruminates on the meaning of the Trump presidency and the relationship between property development and governance.
Gangsta Rap
Bruce Jackson isn’t too far removed from news of the day. H/t to him for finding this faux-news photo on Facebook…B.D.
“Sidewalks, Fences and Walls”
Solomon Burke cut “Sidewalks, Fences and Walls” long after he sang songs that made him “King of Rock and Soul” in the 60s. There’s a good cover by Bob Dylan (on a bootleg) which steered your editor to the original. Other Firsters had already heard and loved it. More from one of them below…
“What man isn’t a Solomon to some missing-Mary in his life?
I can’t fucking believe she married Billy. Billy!”
David Hockney’s Happy Phenomenology
Hockney’s pictures have been derided as “merely decorative” and the late Peter Fuller takes up that criticism with the artist in the short clip posted below. Hockney’s musings link pleasure in his art to affirmations of his (gay) self: “We should like ourselves.” There’s another BBC program where the artist is sound-tracked by snatches from Stravinksy’s opera, “The Rake’s Progress,” which flashed your editor back to an 80s Hockney show that seemed largely about cruising. (Not that Hockney’s phenomenology of his intentional body in space is always so libidinal.) While gay liberation is on his canvasses, the splashy promesse de bonheure in Hockney’s art belongs to everybody everybody. It’s a 60s thing, though it evokes other avatars of happiness that deserve dap–Greeks who first depicted the human smile, young French revolutionaries who declared: “happiness is the new idea in Europe,” ex-West Africans who flipped the mask of tragedy even as their favorite color reminded them of their lost continent. It’s all about blue for Hockney too!
If you’re around New York, go see his show at the Met before it closes on February 25th. B.D.
Canciones Para Puerto Rico
Chatter about “Almost Like Praying”–the song Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and recorded to benefit hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico–reminded your editor of this performance by the brothers Palmieri and salsero Ismael Quintana…
Breaking Down Wisdom Machines (& That Shuddering Fridge)
John Ashbery’s death reminded your editor of Philip Levine’s comments on Ashbery’s wit. Not to worry, I’m aware Ashbery and Levine were something other than brothers in verse but bear with me…
Putin vs. King Remembered in Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDIlQ3_lsKE
The music video above, in which an African emigre duo who call themselves A.M.G. extol Putin, seems to soundtrack Nathan Osborne’s musings on the link between contemporary rap and Trumpery. But there are (always) countervailing trends in the hip hop nation as you’ll see if you try videos in the body of this text by Big K.R.I.T.—a rapper from the Dirty South. He makes conscious music for our mess age: “I don’t rap, I spit hymns.” K.R.I.T. stands for King Remembered In Time. (A.M.G.’s initials, OTOH, are associated with the Mercedes logo.)