Mutation and Transcendence

1.  Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Upsetters, "Revolution Dub:" Cut it up and start again.  Temporal and sonic disruptions in an Age of Crisis.  Isolation and quarantine of have exposed the roots of my dischronia.  In 1975, Michael Manley's socialist government was beset inside and out by the "dark forces."A year later, there was an assassination attempt on Bob Marley and the country swam in bloody political violence.  Dubby Conquerors like Scratch were there to bear witness and to tear up all of our sonic chronologies.  The past speaks in ghostly tones; the future is now.  Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of ghosts these days.

2.  James Brown, "Take Some...Leave Some" from The Payback (Polydor 1973):  The sounds of urban decay in the 1970s sounds really freakin' good right about now.

3.  Zora Neale Hurston at the Crossroads; or, The Devil and Zora Neale:  Thinking about African American folklore, the diaspora, and crossroads mythology.  Today I ran across a citation referring to The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a grimoire first published in 18th Century Europe, but found a home in the syncretic religious traditions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South and was then carried northward during the Great Migration.  It was embraced by black hoodoo practitioners.  It was a key early text in the history of Rastafarianism.  References to the text are found in the songs of bands like Toots and the Maytals.  It is an example of how so-called folk traditions aren't stale artifacts from the past, but parts of living, breathing spiritual systems, always changing, always with us.  As a professional folklorist, Hurston had a different agenda than peers like Melville Herskovits who excavated black American culture in search of African "remnants."  Of course the echoes of old Africa were there.  Hurston wanted to document the ways in which these tradition were alive and well today--an argument for the validity and value of black spirituality.  To study conjuration, magic, hoodoo, and voodoo, she became a novitiate studying African American esoteric wisdom from the inside as practitioner.  According to much of the scholarship on Hurston, her frustration with the mediocre sales of these studies of the folk prompted an increasing focus on fiction-writing.  There is a logic to that narrative.  And yet, when you consider a work like Moses, Man of the Mountain, the dichotomy between Hurston's scholarship and her art grows unstable.  Hurston's Moses is an amalgam of the Moses of black theology and folk traditions. He's the Biblical figure who led his people to the Promised Land; he's a conjure man and magician, a hoodoo priest, and trickster who with the turn of a phrase can fool old pharaoh and point his people in the direction of home.  What if Hurston's Moses is more than the fictional character in the novel, but also Hurston's contribution to the folk traditions documented in the tales she collected?  As a trained hoodoo priest, and student of and participant in the voodoo beliefs of Jamaica and Haiti, she was unique in that she had a foot in two worlds.  She was a scholar who deployed a scientific methodology in the study of black folklore, and she was a believer and practitioner who mastered the doctrine and ceremony of black Atlantic esotericism.  She didn't just document; she shaped and contributed as well.  Zora Neale Hurston at the crossroads.

4.  Myth and Robert Johnson:  I love the blues.  Although I'm generally inclined to read voluminously about musical genres I'm passionate about, the eternal bickering among the "bluesologists" bugs me to no end.  The literature on Robert Johnson is especially off-putting.  Every few years someone vomits up the "definitive" book on the subject--the "real" Robert Johnson.  And then let the skirmishing commence!  But does it matter?  OK, I suppose it does, but to me the compulsive will to "completism" obscures the power of the Johnson mythology in the popular psyche.  The "whens" and "wheres" of Johnson's wanderings are irrelevant to the ways in which his story captured the public imagination, and his sound burrowed into the consciousness.  One text I found particularly interesting in this regard is Zeke Schein and Poppy Bright's Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson's Lost Photograph.  By trying to track the origins of a photo alleged to be Johnson, Schein butted up against the blues professionals who were more interested in rebutting someone they considered an upstart and lawyers for Johnson's estate who wanedt to scrap over every possible penny to be earned. The joy expressed in Schein's book is in the hunt, as well as the immersive experience of listening deeply to and reveling in Johnson's music.  What Schein teaches those of us still willing to learn is that in this here America, myth and spirit transcend the selfish nit-picking blather passing for "fact," especially when all too often it isn't.

Sound & Vision

1.  Jill Freedmen's Resurrection City, 1968:  There are no photographs of civil rights leaders, or Hollywood celebrities; there are only a few pictures of marches and street demonstrations.  Instead there are people. Poor people. The people who waded through the mud and piss and built the shanties that gave Resurrection City its shape,who were its community.  They were the forgotten; Freedmen makes us remember them.  The were supposedly invisible; she forces us to look into their eyes. This is what photography is supposed to do.

2.  Coltrane's A Love Supreme:  I've been thinking a lot about McCoy Tyner.  His Inner Voices was the first jazz record I ever bought with my own money.  I still have that now-crusty old piece of vinyl.   A Love Supreme has been in my car stereo for days.  It is "Pursuance," the third movement that obsesses me.  I've listened to it over and over again.  Beginning with Elvin Jones's drum solo, and then a short phrase from Trane, Tyner's long run kicks in around the two minute mark.  He's like a bulldozer plowing the path that Coltrane then follows in his journey towards the ecstatic.  Of course it's a prayer; it's an expression of gratitude.  Something we can all use in our time of isolation and uncertainty.

3.  DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid's Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear, 2003):  Fractured fairy tales from the Year Zero.  I've realized I have a personal collection of crisis management music that reemerges during times of trouble.  Mad Professor and Lee Perry may be the brightest lights on these remixes but the standouts are at the fringes of the record--J Live, DJ Goo, Twilight Circus Dub Sound System.  Perhaps dub is my way of making sense of chaos?  Deep bass, ghostly apparitions bleeding into the sonic stew and then disappearing, hollowed out histories where all the linear narratives of the original songs are chopped up and made new in ways that tell different stories about the now.  The ghosts are always there for us.

4.  John Prine, "Sam Stone" from his S/T lp (Atlantic 1971):  I've been rereading Michael Herr's Dispatches for an online discussion with one of my classes.  When I'm building the syllabus, I tend to agonize over the Vietnam-era readings, sometimes skipping them altogether. More often I return to Herr's classic memoir.  I do so for the most selfish of reasons; every time I read it I think, "I really wish I could write like this."  And now we hear that the great John Prine has the dreaded virus.  I'm betting he pulls through.  But for the semesters I choose not to assign a long read for the Vietnam era, I have students listen to and discuss Prine's song, "Sam Stone."  Like the Herr book, I always think to myself, I really wish I could write like this. 

5.  A couple of weeks ago, the Athens-Clarke County Commission debated the mayor's directive to limit the numbers of people meeting in public spaces and whether or not to "shelter in place."  Beth and I sat on our couch and watched the livestream on YouTube.  The deliberations were serious, and despite the wide variations in ideology, our commissioners worked in good faith.   But only one of the commissioners, Ovita Thornton, pointed out the obvious and most intractable problem posed by our invisible enemy.  What about the homeless?  Hundreds of our neighbors live without shelter.  We step over them as we do business downtown; they stand strategically at intersections around town asking for help.  There are homeless camps under the overpasses and in the groves of trees around town.  How do those individuals social distance?  Where do they seek healthcare when they begin to exhibit the symptoms of this virus?  How effective is a shelter in place directive if there is a large and growing constituency huddled in anonymity outside the boundaries of our community?  It's telling that no one on the commission took up Mrs. Thornton's challenge.  No one.  It was as if she hadn't asked the question at all.

Athens is a wonderful place to live.  We are lucky to be here.  But the whole "bustling college town" line comes up way short when you consider that nearly 36% of Athenians live in poverty.  We champion our music and art and the great contributions made by the university, and we should.  But not if we pay tribute to those things while turning a blind eye to those who are too easily thrown away.  We can see it now; it stares us in the face.  There is no healthcare infrastructure capable of dealing with these problems.  Mental health facilities are negligible, especially the for the populations that need them most.  Drug treatment?  Almost non-existent.  Insert "leaky boat" metaphor here.

So the virus has shined a light on the sickness.  The old myths are dead.  The time is now for a New Honesty.  We can talk about the limitations and weaknesses of the system, but isn't the truth that there is no system?  I'm done with the American Dream, and especially the American dreamers.  Your myths are lies and your lies bring death.  There are too many of us standing outside your system, invisible, disposable, and ignored.  It ain't about differences of opinion or partisanship or whatever.  Its that too many people just don't care.  Maybe we could create a substantive foundation for change by actually seeing one another.  Stop turning away.  Stop pretending you don't see what is in front of your face.