You probably experience this too, but I am keenly aware of a few moments upon waking up every morning this year when the world’s in a quantum flux and things seem baseline normal. It lasts about four or five breath cycles, and then my software loads and takes a status report. And then it’s, “Oh right, everything’s not okay.”
I’m an inveterate optimist, yet my little fire is guttering in these hurricane times. The pandemic could have been a temporary setback and a time of national purpose, but through malpractice at the top where leadership should be, it’s a society-stressing, culture-paralyzing economic and health crisis. For those who get sick or who’ve lost loved ones, it’s worse than that. More broadly, 21st century technologies have enabled 19th century-style political mayhem and corruption to cycle back and to metastasize into a paranoid racist/nationalist movement that’s threatening the foundations of our country. The planet is shrieking in pain, and the millions who want to come to its aid are prevented from doing so by those in power and a perilous mistrust of institutions and even truth itself. It’s bad. We need to give ourselves the emotional slack sufficient to grieve and process what we’re living through.
I’ve started this journal to seek some signal amid this noise and to share constructive ideas about it all with whomever cares to read. Thank you for signing up. I’ve wanted to report, analyze and opine in print since I was a teenager. This need and skill is one of the very few things I know about myself. I’ve had some wonderful opportunities to be a journalist, and I love my current post writing and talking about music on public radio with WMOT. But as I said upon dropping out of the Facebook feed last week, I want to write on broader subjects and I don’t want to do that anymore in Zuckerberg’s AI-driven, blue-walled box. Please write back or comment. I loved the back-and-forth of Facebook, just not the environment or its business model. I hope this forum is more intimate, authentic and connecting. Your data will not be harvested or used against you.
Craig H. 9/13/20
This week’s top posts:
click the headline to read in full…
Bob Woodward Becomes Trump’s Confessor
It’s the same thing that debilitated this presidency before it began. He’s a fabulist. If Steve Jobs deployed a “reality distortion field” to get his way, as his biographer Walter Isaacson described, Trump’s RDF is a cheap knock off, effective only on the feeble minded. I mean, Trump didn’t just mis-speak the first time he said we’d have fewer US cases of Covid if we did fewer tests. He kept repeating it. He believes this. He lies to no one more comprehensively than he does to himself.
The Great Documentary ‘Bluegrass Country Soul’
We’re transported to Camp Springs, NC in 1971, where we see heroes, the living and the late great, almost unrecognizably young. There’s Sam Bush with long wavy hair and no beard, killing it with the Bluegrass Alliance, the band that would soon transform into New Grass Revival. And picking with him is Tony Rice, so young he has acne and a starter teen-stache, playing his last gig with the band as well as his first gig with J.D. Crowe, a historic collaboration. There’s Doyle Lawson, also pre-beard, playing mandolin with the Country Gentlemen, all in hot pink shirts, making ineffable magic on the totally weird and wonderful mountain climbing song “Matterhorn.” (Yes there’s a bluegrass classic that celebrates Europe.) There’s Jimmy Martin, resplendent in his plaid cowboy hat and dinner jacket, and there’s Ralph Stanley as a middle aged man performing with his young mentees Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley. Del McCoury is about 42 years old, with his signature pompadour and mutton chop sideburns.
Every frame is lovingly shot. The sound is great. You are there.
Black Artistry In Americana: An Anthology
On the eve of this year’s virtual Americana convention, I was writing to a new friend who’d asked to learn more about the key black artists making waves in roots and Americana music. It grew into a pretty long list with a playlist and some further reading attached. Pictured is the pivotal super-group Our Native Daughters, featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla.
Speedy Thoughts On The Spicy Verbiage of Formula One
New Published Work
Discovery: French Multi-Instrumentalist FKJ
It’s a hybrid work that reminds me of a bygone era but with updates perfect for our time. It’s an online performance, the medium of the Covid era. Yet it’s a rarity - a seamless, one-take run of a full EP, captured on film. FKJ plays in uncanny tandem with a programmed support structure. He plays piano, keys, guitar and sax, transitioning between them with baffling fluidity. He sings and subtly manipulates his playback gear. The feel is a chilled, hip-hop meets world-beat house concoction that can scan as jazz or pop.
The String
The Deal Of The Art
The painting at the top is Composition IX from 1936 by Wassily Kandinski, possibly my favorite artist. He worked through the Spanish Flu and WWI only to then be branded a “degenerate” by the Nazis. Despite his playful lines and spectacular, abundant love of color, Kandinski had something of an apocalyptic worldview and the Composition series was supposed to portend grim tidings for the world ahead. (He wasn’t wrong!) But he kept living and creating, moving when he had to. And his take on art and music proves a perfect benediction for Issue No. 1 of this dispatch.
"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."
If you’re seeing this newsletter on the web for the first time, please hit the button and leave your email. I’ll send a fresh note and a digest of posts, new work and findings from the web ever week or two. Happy to have you in the community.
Wow, Craig, that’s a lot right out the gate. Something to come back to every day over the coming week.... Nice job, great start.