New Orleans in Boston
Got back from DC today in time to join my honey and a bunch of his church buddies at a gorgeous concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Blind Boys of Alabama. Scrumptious. (If you’re in NYC you can catch the band at the Blue Note next week, the Blind Boys are off to Ottawa, and then Australia and New Zealand).
Everything was lovely, but favorite bits included PHJB bass player Walter Payton coming down front to sing I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (I hope I can shimmy like Walter Payton when I’m that age) and the Blind Boys’ wonderful version of “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” (watch a video of them doing this number).
Cognitive dissonance: Preservation Hall’s program notes go weirdly, unnecessarily over the top in their self-celebration of the hall itself: “To this day, Preservation Hall has no drinks, air conditioning, or other typical accoutrements strictly welcoming people of all ages interested in having one of the last pure music experiences left on the earth.” I’m not sure that’s true even if you limit your understanding of “earth” to the French Quarter.
And I was just sad reading this phrase from the Blind Boys’ bio: “The Blind Boys’ audience - once rigidly segregated and confined to traditional Gospel venues - now reflects the group’s eclectic, global following…” while noticing that Symphony Hall had somehow managed to attract to this event an audience that looked to be about 98% white. I wonder if we could get the Blind Boys to cover Lou Reed’s “I Wanna Be Black.”
Those quibbles aside, a marvelous time was had by all.
Image: Jazz at the Preservation Hall
Uploaded to Flickr on January 7, 2005
by rickz
Our bureacrats is not learning
10:50 AM Boston
WBUR/NPR’s On Point is spending the whole hour with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Education not one of my big issues, I’m not listening that hard.
But my sensitive ears perked right up when Secretary Duncan made my least favorite grammar error!
He said “my parents instilled (some valuable character trait or other, I was distracted by my anguish and forgot) in my brothers and sisters and I.“ The end is near, brothers and sisters.
It made me go back (and how easy it was, thanks to good search!) to the wonderful article in Harper’s April 2001 by David Foster Wallace called Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage (requires a Harper’s subscription to see the whole page - I say buy one it’s a good magazine, you won’t regret it, if you must have it for free google the full title). In the article he proclaims himself a “SNOOT,” the term used in his family for what others call Grammar Nazis. In my family, we just called them our friends.
If you’ve ever been tempted to understand what drives people like us, or conversely want a funny, interesting reasonable-length thing to read so you can say you’ve read something by David Foster Wallace, check out the article.
Gaza (back) on my mind
So far, I have done exactly two actual (teensy tiny) things to express my deep sadness about the tragic situation in Gaza. I went to one peace march in Boston and I gave a donation to one of the groups I saw represented there, the one that seemed most in line with my own simultaneously anti-Hamas, anti-Israeli government policy position. They’re called American Jews for a Just Peace (but they accept memberships also from non-Jews like me).
On their mailing list the other day, I got this moving letter, published in the Cambridge Chronicle, by Richard Hess, who did much more than I did, he was arrested in the “die-in” at the Israeli consulate. The son of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, he asks “Why do we just watch as Palestinians are brutalized? Why are we unable to empathize?” As to why he was willing to be arrested “I refuse to be a good man doing nothing. I am screaming, ‘These people are dying!’”
As Mosaic producer Jamal Dajani reminds us in his latest blogpost, “The war has ended, but life in Gaza has not returned to normal. Thousands of people remain homeless, and many still remain hungry. Their stories have all but disappeared from US media coverage.”
A good time to remember that it’s our US military aid to Israel that made all the killing possible. We need to take some responsibility.
