[y66]

Erik Olin Wright; Marxist Sociologist With a Pragmatic Approach

Quote

Dr. Wright, who was the Vilas distinguished research professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, spent his entire teaching career at Madison, starting in 1976. His presence was a draw for students and helped the university’s sociology department maintain its place for decades as one of the premier departments in the country.

While immersed in theoretical aspects of social class and social change, Dr. Wright also delved into real-world challenges like poverty, income inequality and unemployment. His venue was often the A. E. Havens Center for Social Justice, which he established to bring in visiting scholars to discuss progressive ideas.

He wrote hundreds of research papers and published 15 books. A 16th, “How to Be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21st Century,” is to be published this year.

Part of a circle of intellectuals that prided itself on being nonideological — as distinct from doctrinaire Marxists — he believed in open debate and empirical evidence.

.. In recent years, Dr. Wright’s focus had shifted “to the democratization of the economy and to the ruling class,” said Mitchell Duneier, a former Madison colleague who is now chairman of Princeton’s sociology department.

Dr. Duneier, who interviewed Dr. Wright in December for a sociology textbook, quoted him as saying:

“If I were to write a 50-page text on how to think about class in the 21st century, I would begin by saying the problem of class is not the problem of the poor, the working class or the middle class. It’s the problem of the ruling class — of a capitalist class that’s so immensely wealthy that they are capable of destroying the world as a side effect of their private pursuit of gain.”

In addition to scholarship, Dr. Wright loved teaching, and his courses attracted many non-Marxists. When he accepted the university’s distinguished teaching award in 1998, he said his best ideas came from dialogue with students.

“Scholarship remains a passion,” he said, “but teaching is a joy.”

[kenberg]

y66, on 2019-February-03, 08:01, said:

Erik Olin Wright; Marxist Sociologist With a Pragmatic Approach

This RIP thread has been very useful to me. I had never heard of Erik Wright but I have now gone to his website and I plan to follow some of the links. This "class" stuff interests me, and often I think fiction writers come closer to getting it right than academics. Two books that I recently read are The Nix and Olive Kitteridge. A striking scene in The Nix has a young girl, a high school senior with an unhappy home life in a small Iowa town whose father is an immigrant factory worker, leaning against the walls of her school, listening to the band practicing. She had played the oboe but her anxiety kept her from performing. She is secretly reading the poetry of Allen Ginsburg. In Olive Kitteridge,a young man with a very modest background is contemplating suicide, and recalling the poetry of John Berryman whose poetry often focused on his own father's suicide. .

The point is that class, although definitely in the background, is not the conscious issue. She was not reading Ginsburg so that she could move up in economic or social class, she was reading Ginsburg because she liked to read Ginsburg. For me, it was mathematics and physics that I found interesting. Moving up in class was not at all the motivation. Sort of the opposite, really. In my immediate neighborhood my interests made me a weird kid. But by age 10 or so you don't have to stay in your immediate neighborhood.

There is often too much focus in learned treatises on "rising above your background". I was fine with my parents and their way of life, I just was more interested in math and physics than I was in my father's occupation of installing weatherstripping.

Anyway, thanks again for another interesting post. I expect to be seeing a bit of what Wright has to say.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2019-February-03, 08:51, said:

There is often too much focus in learned treatises on "rising above your background". I was fine with my parents and their way of life, I just was more interested in math and physics than I was in my father's occupation of installing weatherstripping.

I think a better way to look at it is "not being limited by your background". If you want to follow in your parents' footsteps, fine, but it shouldn't be your fate if you have other interests.

[kenberg]

barmar, on 2019-February-03, 10:16, said:

I think a better way to look at it is "not being limited by your background". If you want to follow in your parents' footsteps, fine, but it shouldn't be your fate if you have other interests.

With this I agree entirely. What I was trying to get at is that, in my experience, movement from one class to another is not usually motivated by class concerns. Movement from one class to another is a by-product as a person pursues more specific goals. When I was in high school I would drive over to the university in the evening for physics lectures. I did this for the same reason that I went swimming. I enjoyed it. Any change in class that came out of it was accidental.


Back to Wright. I listened to the first 15 minutes of one of his lectures:
https://www.youtube....h?v=KmiiSSMZPnE
It is very academic. I plan to look at more but my thinking right now is that it is unlikely that he and I would have found much common ground if we were to discuss class. The old joke is that Wagner's music is better than it sounds, maybe that applies here as well. I plan to take another look.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2019-February-03, 22:40, said:

With this I agree entirely. What I was trying to get at is that, in my experience, movement from one class to another is not usually motivated by class concerns. Movement from one class to another is a by-product as a person pursues more specific goals. When I was in high school I would drive over to the university in the evening for physics lectures. I did this for the same reason that I went swimming. I enjoyed it. Any change in class that came out of it was accidental.

It's easy to say things like that when you were already in a decent class. Your father probably made a decent living installing weatherproofing, affording you the opportunity to pursue your dreams.

If you're living hand to mouth, your decisions are mostly motivated by survival, not enjoyment. You take whatever jobs you can get. If you think about class concerns, it's mostly about how society has all these barriers that make it hard for you to move up to a class where you can do what you enjoy rather than just get by.

[kenberg]

barmar, on 2019-February-04, 09:43, said:

It's easy to say things like that when you were already in a decent class. Your father probably made a decent living installing weatherproofing, affording you the opportunity to pursue your dreams.

If you're living hand to mouth, your decisions are mostly motivated by survival, not enjoyment. You take whatever jobs you can get. If you think about class concerns, it's mostly about how society has all these barriers that make it hard for you to move up to a class where you can do what you enjoy rather than just get by.

Yes, there is the "hand to mouth" class, those in serious poverty. And that wasn't me. But I think that Wright was addressing broader class issues than this. In the talk that I cited, he gets into the Marx view of class, the Weber view, the Durkheim viwe (I jad never heard of Durkheim), he lists these people, and then he speaks of David Grusky whom I also had never heard of. back in the 50s I had a friend who was always talking about Max Weber and trying to get me to read him Nope. I did try Marx once.

I have now listened to more of Wright. He really likes metaphors. He really likes analogies. I find them distracting. He sees meaning in a rule change in basketball from, I think, the 1950s. Ok, if he says so. we are now 20 some minutes into his talk and we are discussing football.

I need to stop. I don't think I am going to finish this tak. Now we are back to baseball, and how high the pitching mound is.

Ah! He just said "Enough of my sports analogies." Yes!

[y66]

Izzy Young

Quote

Izzy Young, whose Greenwich Village shop, the Folklore Center, was the beating heart of the midcentury folk music revival — and who in 1961 presented the first New York concert by a young Bob Dylan — died on Monday at his home in Stockholm. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Philomène Grandin.

Anyone wanting to capture the essence of the times could do far worse than head to the Folklore Center, at 110 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West Third Streets. Established in 1957, it was nominally a music store, selling records, books, instruments, sheet music and fan magazines, most sprung from sweat and mimeograph machines, like Sing Out!, Caravan and Gardyloo.

In actual practice, the center was also equal parts hiring hall; Schwab’s Pharmacy, where young hopefuls awaited discovery; matchbox recital space for organized performances and impromptu jam sessions; nerve center for gossip on a par with any small-town barbershop; and forum for continuing, crackling debate on the all-consuming subject of folk music, which thanks in no small part to Mr. Young was enjoying wide, renewed attention.

“I began hanging out at the Folklore Center, the citadel of Americana folk music,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), recalling his arrival in New York in 1961. “The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”

Crackling loudest above the din was Mr. Young, who, with his horn-rimmed glasses, prodigious vocal capacity and bottomless cornucopia of opinion, was the platonic, genially abrasive New York nebbish from Central Casting.

“His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room,” Mr. Dylan wrote. “Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good-natured. In reality a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too.”

Until he closed the shop in 1973 to move to Stockholm and start a similar center, Mr. Young reigned supreme as a handicapper (“The first few times I met Dylan, I wasn’t that impressed,” he said. “But as he began writing those great songs, I realized he was really something”); an impresario (he organized hundreds of concerts throughout the city, including Mr. Dylan’s first formal appearance, at the Carnegie Hall complex, as well as performances by the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Jean Ritchie and Phil Ochs); and an evangelist who almost single-handedly put the “Folk” in Folk City, the storied Village nightclub.

He was also a writer, with a regular column in Sing Out!; a broadcaster, with a folk music show on WBAI in New York; an agitator (in 1961, he helped organize successful public protests after the city banned folk music from Washington Square Park); a ferocious keeper of the castle (“He was even known to throw people out of his store,” Dick Weissman, a former member of the folk group the Journeymen, wrote, “simply because they irritated him”); and an equally ferocious defender of the faith. (Mr. Young repudiated Mr. Dylan after he began wielding an electric guitar in the mid-’60s.)

If, at the end of the day, the Folklore Center was a less-than-successful capitalist enterprise — who, after all, goes into folk music to get rich? — it scarcely mattered. Joni Mitchell was discovered there. Peter found Mary there, after seeing her photo on a wall. (Paul joined them soon afterward.) Mr. Van Ronk, then the more established musician, met the newly arrived Mr. Dylan there and invited him to take the stage at the nearby Gaslight Cafe.

Mr. Young, in short, was the original folknik — quite literally, for it was he who had coined the term, in the late 1950s, as attested by the Oxford English Dictionary.

[PassedOut]

John Dingell

Quote

Impoverishment of the elderly because of medical expenses was a common and often accepted occurrence. Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today.

Not five decades ago, much of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth — our own Great Lakes — were closed to swimming and fishing and other recreational pursuits because of chemical and bacteriological contamination from untreated industrial and wastewater disposal. Today, the Great Lakes are so hospitable to marine life that one of our biggest challenges is controlling the invasive species that have made them their new home.

We regularly used and consumed foods, drugs, chemicals and other things (cigarettes) that were legal, promoted and actively harmful. Hazardous wastes were dumped on empty plots in the dead of night. There were few if any restrictions on industrial emissions. We had only the barest scientific knowledge of the long-term consequences of any of this.

And there was a great stain on America, in the form of our legacy of racial discrimination. There were good people of all colors who banded together, risking and even losing their lives to erase the legal and other barriers that held Americans down. In their time, they were often demonized and targeted, much like other vulnerable men and women today.

Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress. Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.

I’m immensely proud, and eternally grateful, for having had the opportunity to play a part in all of these efforts during my service in Congress. And it’s simply not possible for me to adequately repay the love that my friends, neighbors and family have given me and shown me during my public service and retirement.

[y66]

Walter P Jones

Quote

Out of college, Mr. Jones joined the National Guard and became a wine salesman as well as a Catholic. In 1982 he was drafted by local Democrats to fill out the term of a state representative who had died in office. Mr. Jones served for 10 years, and when his father retired from Congress, he ran for his seat.

Walter Jr. lost the 1992 Democratic primary. He tried again in a reconfigured district in 1994, by which time he had switched parties; a strong foe of abortion rights, he felt more comfortable as a Republican. He won that race and rode into office as part of a Republican wave led by the new speaker, Newt Gingrich.

Courtly and well liked, Mr. Jones was voted the nicest member of the House of Representatives in a 2004 survey of top Capitol Hill staffers by The Washingtonian magazine.

His political impulses were basically libertarian, and he occasionally strayed from Republican orthodoxy. He fiercely opposed measures that would contribute to the national debt and voted against President Trump’s tax-cut bill for that reason. He denounced the influence of money in politics and urged Congress to counter the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision

But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when President Bush sought congressional authority to use military force in Iraq, Mr. Jones gave his wholehearted support.

Filled with patriotic fervor, he made perhaps his biggest publicity splash when he pushed for the menus in the Capitol cafeteria to be changed to read “freedom fries” instead of “French fries,” an idea he borrowed from a North Carolina restaurant chain.

He was roundly applauded by Republicans and ridiculed by Democrats. (Tina Fey, on “Saturday Night Live,” said that in France, “American cheese is now referred to as ‘idiot cheese.’ ”)

It was only about a month later that Mr. Jones attended the Camp Lejeune memorial ceremony that would affect him so profoundly and lead him to apologize, many times, in public.

“I did not do what I should have done, to read and find out whether Bush was telling us the truth about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 and having weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Jones told NPR in 2015.

“Because I did not do my job then, I helped kill 4,000 Americans,” he said. “And I will go to my grave regretting that.”

[Winstonm]

Gene Littler - professional golfer

[y66]

Gene Littler, Golfer With a Gorgeous Swing



From Successor to Hogan? by Herbert Warren Wind (1955):

Quote

Not since Sam Snead came out of the mountains and joined the tour in the winter of 1937 has any young professional so captivated the interest and imagination of the American sports public as Gene Littler, the soft-spoken, sensible, self-possessed young man from La Jolla, Calif., who so far this season has taken the Los Angeles and Phoenix Opens and generally dominated the first month and a half of the 1955 winter circuit. When Snead broke through to win the Oakland Open shortly after leaving West Virginia, he was such a rank unknown that the newspapers and wire services spelled the unfamiliar name Sneed. And, of course, there was Sam's unforgettable comment when he was shown the photograph of himself accompanying the New York Times's account of his victory: "How'd they ever git mah picture? I ain't never been to New York."

AN UNOSTENTATIOUS PREDICTION

Littler's superb talents, on the other hand, have been clearly perceived by people close to golf for quite some time now, and though there are sports pundits who week after week make like they have "discovered" him, it was at least two years ago that Johnny Dawson of the Thunderbird Club in Palm Springs unostentatiously predicted that Littler had the game and the temperament to succeed Ben Hogan as the country's greatest golfer.

At the time Dawson made this prognosis, Littler—who still looks like a Wheaties ad subject who grew up and whose appeal is certainly enhanced by his boy-next-door appearance—was 22, serving in the Navy, and although the possessor of an impressive record in California competition, a mystery man to most golf fans east of Yuma. A lot of us got our first look at the young amateur late in the summer of 1953 when he was a member of the American Walker Cup team which met and defeated a good British side at Kittansett near Cape Cod. What we saw was the soundest natural golf swing since the days of the young Snead. (To digress briefly, Snead is the only golfer who had any influence whatsoever on the development of Littler's swing. When Sam was stationed at San Diego during the war, Littler had the opportunity to watch and study his method.) During the Walker Cup play, it took even the veteran golf observers four or five holes to appreciate Littler's self-schooled technique. In those days Gene took the club back with a very, very slow, easy, relaxed rhythm, then paused a lazy second at the top before droning slowly down into the ball, delaying his accelerated hitting action until the very last moment when the club head was only two feet or so from the ball. There were quite a few of us, I remember, who, on first watching Gene, got the idea that he hadn't had time to hit out some practice balls and was still warming up. He was all warmed up, to be sure, and during the full course of his rounds never changed the unhurrying tempo of his shot-making or, for that matter, his benign attitude toward the whole pressureful business of competitive golf. He won both his singles and foursome matches at Kittansett, and when he went on to win the National Amateur a fortnight later everyone who had watched him was gratified (since the Amateur is a rough championship) but no one was really surprised.

Today, some 18 months later, behind him a successful first year as a pro in which he won over $13,000 in prize money and finished a stroke behind the winner in the National Open, Gene has changed very little either as a person or as a golfer. The speed of his swing has quickened perceptibly, due to the week-in, week-out demands of the circuit, but it is still (along with Snead's) one of the two slowest and soundest in golf. He is a little longer off the tees, say eight or 10 yards. He walks a little faster between shots, at what might be described as a brisk saunter. He still lines up his shots without fuss and then, as he phrases it, "I just take the club back and let it go."

"CONCENTRATION AND ATTITUDE"

One morning last week, before going out for his round in the Pro-Amateur, which preceded the start of the Tucson Open, Gene arrived at the El Rio Club after finishing his morning cup of tea in the trailer in which he lives on the road with his wife Shirley and their year-old son Curt; and, since he was asked, he talked about his golf and the circuit. "I didn't play really well in some of the tournaments I've won," he was explaining. "On the tour, playing golf continuously, you get a little bit tired physically after a while but that doesn't bother you. What really gets worn down is your concentration. You've got to keep alert all the time. That's one of the two big things I've learned on the tour, and the second one also has to do with your attitude. That's learning to minimize your mistakes, not to get sore at yourself. The experience all of us are trying to gain from the tour is how to assemble a fairly good round even when you're not hitting the ball particularly well that day. That takes concentration—and attitude."

One technical department of his game which, by Littler's own assessment, can stand considerable improvement is the pitch to the pin from 120 yards out. "On the short circuit courses, it is the birdie shot and you can't score without it."

When his round was over, Gene, as is his habit, headed back to his trailer, changed into his old clothes and lounged around with his son before dinner. It is Gene's opinion that living in a trailer is the next best thing to living at home—"Everybody's proportions are different," the mature young man was saying the other night, "but, for myself, I find I can play better if there are some other things in my life to think about besides golf, golf, golf."

[kenberg]

I see that Andre Previn died. I was thinking he msr be abcient but he was "only" 89, just shy of 90. He started very young.

See a sample at https://www.youtube....h?v=lZMuYCWu4CU

The WaPo Obit had various anecdotes, one that struck home:

Quote

His memoir of his years working — and playing — in Hollywood, "No Minor Chords" (1991), recounted his youthful near-dalliance with screen siren Ava Gardner, who was "the kind of beautiful that turned men into Jell-O molds."
"She listened to me play, quite attentively," he wrote, "and then asked an incredible question: 'Would you like to take me home later?'

"Well, I was 17 and I simply could not allow myself to put a subtext connotation to this, so I asked: 'You mean you don't have a ride home?' Ava gave me a long, searching look, saw that I was serious, excused herself and got up from the piano bench."

I have long felt that an under-appreciated fact about adolescent males is that we often had only a very weak grasp of what's going on. That applied to me and yes, Becky might say that it still does. Not that Ava Gardiner ever suggested to me that I take her home, but I can definitely relate to the confusion in his mind.

[nullve]

Keith Flint

[y66]

Quote

Hal Blaine, the ubiquitous drummer whose work in the 1960s and ’70s with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, the Ronettes and many others established him as one of the top session musicians of all time, died on Monday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90.

Mr. Blaine, who played on at least 40 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, was a reliable and adaptable musician, able to offer delicate brushwork on a ballad or a booming beat on records produced by Phil Spector, who was known for his so-called Wall of Sound.

Mr. Blaine brought drama to a song’s transitions, often telegraphing a big moment with a flurry of strokes on a snare drum or tom-tom.

If he had a signature moment on a record, it was on the Ronettes’ 1963 hit, “Be My Baby,” produced by Mr. Spector. The song opened cold, with Mr. Blaine playing — and repeating — the percussive earworm “Bum-ba-bum-BOOM!” But the riff came about accidentally.

“I was supposed to play more of a boom-chicky-boom beat, but my stick got stuck and it came out boom, boom-boom chick,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “I just made sure to make the same mistake every few bars.”

Three years later, he used the same beat, but in a softer way, on Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.”

Mr. Blaine was part of a loosely affiliated group of session musicians who in the early 1960s began dominating rock ’n’ roll recording in Los Angeles. Along with guitarists like Glen Campbell and Tony Tedesco, bassists like Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and keyboardists like Leon Russell and Don Randi, Mr. Blaine played on thousands of recordings through the mid-1970s.

He famously said he gave the group its name, the Wrecking Crew, although Ms. Kaye has insisted that he did not start using that term until years after the musicians had stopped working together.

His skills led producers to use Mr. Blaine as the drummer for various groups’ studio work, replacing their credited drummers. The drummer heard on the Beach Boys’ records was often Mr. Blaine and not the drummer the group’s fans knew, Dennis Wilson, whose brother Brian was the band’s creative force.

“I must tell you, first of all, Dennis was not really a drummer,” Mr. Blaine told Modern Drummer magazine in 2005. “I mean, they had bought him drums because they needed drums in the group. So he learned as they went on.”

Asked if Mr. Wilson was angry that he was replaced in the studio, Mr. Blaine said he was not.

“He was thrilled,” he said, “because while I was making Beach Boy records, he was out surfing or riding his motorcycle. During the day, when I was making $35 or $40, that night he was making $35,000” performing live.

Mr. Blaine’s other studio credits include Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Ms. Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s “A Taste of Honey.”

In 2000, Mr. Blaine was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with four other studio musicians, including the drummer Earl Palmer, who had helped introduce him to session work. The Recording Academy gave Mr. Blaine a lifetime achievement Grammy Award last year.

Hal Blaine was born Harold Simon Belsky on Feb. 5, 1929, in Holyoke, Mass., to Meyer Belsky, who worked in a leather factory, and Rose (Silverman) Belsky. When he was 7 the family moved to Hartford, where he was inspired to learn drumming by watching the fife and drum corps of the Roman Catholic school across the street from his Hebrew school.

“One of the priests noticed I was watching, and before long I was playing with these kids,” he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.

On Saturdays, he regularly went to a theater in Hartford to watch big bands, singers and vaudeville acts, and he grew to admire virtuoso drummers like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa.

When he was 14, he moved with his family to Southern California. He attended high school in San Bernardino while his parents opened a delicatessen in Santa Monica.

After serving as an Army cartographer during the Korean War, Mr. Blaine attended a drum school in Chicago run by Roy C. Knapp, who had been Mr. Krupa’s teacher. He began to play drums in strip clubs, and by the late 1950s he was working with a jazz quartet. He then worked with the teenage idol Tommy Sands and the pop singer Patti Page. He also played briefly with Count Basie’s big band at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, filling in when Mr. Basie’s regular drummer, Sonny Payne, was sick.

Until the early 1960s, Mr. Blaine thought of himself as a jazz drummer. But his work in the Los Angeles studios identified him, almost exclusively, as pop music’s go-to session drummer.

Once he established himself in the studios, Mr. Blaine rarely performed live. One exception came in the 1960s, when Nancy Sinatra persuaded him to work with her at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; she put his name on the marquee and arranged for a nanny for his daughter, Michelle. And in the mid-1970s, John Denver brought him on tour.

“His favorite time was with John,” Mr. Johnson, Mr. Blaine’s son-in-law, said in a telephone interview. “They were like brothers, and he was really torn up when John passed.” Mr. Denver died in 1997 when the single-engine airplane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay in California.

Mr. Blaine was far less busy in studios in the 1980s. By then producers were increasingly relying on drum machines, and more self-contained bands insisted on playing their own instruments. He started giving drum clinics and worked on commercial jingles. He played most recently at a party for his 90th birthday at a Los Angeles nightclub.

Jim Keltner, a drummer who also became known for his session work, recalled the first time he saw Mr. Blaine play, in the 1960s.

“I can hardly describe the effect it had on me,” Mr. Keltner wrote in the foreword to “Hal Blaine & the Wrecking Crew” (1990), an autobiography written with David Goggin. “He was playing a beat I’d heard thousands of times but was giving it a certain kind of sophisticated funk that I’d never heard before.”

“How was he able to do these things with his drums?”

By Richard Sandomir at NYT.

[Cyberyeti]

nullve, on 2019-March-04, 11:49, said:

Keith Flint

I went to see Stiff Little Fingers last night. They played this as a tribute (with an expletive laden message to "talk to somebody" if you're in that situation):

https://www.youtube....h?v=7g2T_IZoN1I

[y66]

W.S. Merwin, Poet

Black Cherries by W.S. Merwin

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

[Winstonm]

New Zealand's 49 Muslim victims of hatred.

[y66]

Alan Kreuger, Economist

From Barack Obama:

Quote

Over the weekend, America lost a brilliant economist, and many of us lost a dear friend.

When I asked Alan Krueger to serve as my chief economist in the White House, he’d already had a stellar career inside and outside of government. He spent the first two years of my administration helping to engineer our response to the worst financial crisis in 80 years, and to successfully prevent the chaos from spiraling into a second Great Depression. During his tenure as the Chair of my Council of Economic Advisors, he helped us return the economy to growth and sustained job creation, to bring down the deficit in a responsible way, and to set the stage for wages to rise again.

But Alan was someone who was deeper than numbers on a screen and charts on a page. He saw economic policy not as a matter of abstract theories, but as a way to make people’s lives better. He believed that facts, reason, and evidence could make government more responsive, and his enthusiasm and curiosity was truly infectious. It’s part of what made him not only a great economist but a great teacher – someone who could make complicated subjects accessible and even fun. A landmark, real-world study on the positive impact of the minimum wage. His creation of the “Gatsby Curve” that illustrated the connection between concentrated wealth and social mobility between generations. A rollicking speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on how understanding the economics of rock and roll might help us solve one of his deepest concerns: rebuilding the middle class in a changing economy. Through it all, he had a perpetual smile and a gentle spirit – even when he was correcting you. That’s what made him Alan – a fundamentally good and decent man.

[StevenG]

Scott Walker.

Tilt is amongst my favourite albums ever.

[Cyberyeti]

Roger Charlery AKA Ranking Roger, co-frontman of The Beat (The English Beat in the US). A voice of my teenage years, along with bands like the Specials and the Selecter on the 2 tone label, they brought a big ska revival 1978-85 ish.

https://www.youtube....h?v=BR4HiPHRbrs