I’m probably not going to be writing too much in the near short term. Obviously there is a lot happening at the moment and I am tending to think reading more than I write is probably the best thing I can do.

I do know enough however to unequivocally write Black Lives Matter. I also plainly see the very legitimacy of many police departments across the country coming under further scrutiny– or even just the simple observations–of their own actions. I also feel that radical change — through the political process even — is not just justified, but is probably inevitable in many places at this point.

The pandemic also continues.

PLAYLIST LINK: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/18AgmCmRwjJawbY4Zs5rtm?si=k6A8QCR-T2a4upv8WAbKLQ

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A lot of chatter in the pundit class has arisen concerning Biden’s campaign being conducted while social distancing–“from a basement” is how I read some of the worried commentary.

I’ll just say that as long as the central issue in the election is about trump’s performance in office, Biden could basically do this from the pool.

When all you have to do is roll footage, it makes it kind of easy. Obviously it is a long way to November, but the poll numbers don’t look good for the incumbent.

Month’s end. New playlist for the month is now public. I was just going through it and feeling a bit melancholic about the passing of John Prine, specifically, and an ever-growing and ongoing catastrophe claiming tens of thousands of other Americans. And wondering if music is a coping mechanism or just escapist – and then contemplating the distinction. and wondering if I only think in terms of Americans dead because practically, it seems like our country is too far away from agency and initiative to make a difference outside its own borders – that many of its institutions cannot even act effectively or prudently inside their own jurisdictions. maybe their leaders are makng playlists. mourning songwriters. coping. escaping. It bothers me.

April was a rough couple of years. It came on the heels of a month that saw the supposed “greatest economy the world has ever seen” exposed for the hollow, precarious and brittle beast that it is. Equity markets giving back every fucking cent they made since the Cheeto was elected clown. And then today folks are talking about how April was ‘the greatest month the market has had since…”

63,871 (US) deaths from the virus at this moment.  If 9/11 happened 21 days in a row, the death toll from the virus would still be higher. If you counted every job that existed in Alaska, Connecticut, Nevada, Hawaii, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Vermont, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Maine, Oregon, New Hampshire and Kentucky – that would total 27 million jobs. 30 million jobs have been lost since February. Roughly 1 in every 5. Nero, watching Fox as Rome burns.

So like – lament, grieving is in order I suppose. But then there’s tons of countervailing points of reference that keep me from despair/despondency. Tonight, just before I started writing this, I saw a friend from college ask for advice online to help keep his two daughters (5 & 8) engaged as they learn music (guitar). And tons of people responded. Everyone wanted to help. And even if no one did, THE IDEA that in some house in the neighborhood of Riverside or Avondale or wherever holmes lives these days, has two little humans who are going to struggle with one-string versions of Black Sabbath tunes or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or something, and then eventually get it — and then think they’re hot shit for a quick minute — I’m not saying that’s priceless; i’m saying its worth a lot to me, just to know its there. And there is tons of that, everywhere – and i think it is kind of weird and completely, utterly illogical that stuff like that gives me courage and gives me hope, but it kind of does. Minus the kind-of. Away from the flourescents of the ICUs, there’s still a lot of beauty in the world — and inspiration too.

-s.

in 1967 David Hollander was at RCA studios with his camera, recording Nina Simone as she recorded Nina Simone Sings the Blues. Three shots below, more at the link.

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This is Day 44 of physical distancing. My guess is there are about 440 more to go before vaccines are available for Coronavirus.

Yesterday I made dough; today I made bread:

It came out fine. I also have some sourdough starter that is getting off the ground and looking for some of that sweet Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis I’m told is everywhere. 

Next weekend, perhaps a sourdough loaf will be on order.

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Since I’ve been taking screenshots for a while, just a reminder below that on March 26th, one month ago, there were 1,124 Americans dead and 80,000 confirmed cases. Today, the number of deaths exceed 55,341 with close to a million cases confirmed in the US. For context, the Korean War resulted in 33,686 US combat deaths.

We still have no serious federal response leading to the prospect of rapid and sustained testing, and instead we just have some voices being louder than others clamoring for their own economic interests and the health of The Economy^TM amid feckless ignorance coming from the White House. I periodically assume there is going to be a significant political reckoning for such a dramatic failure of public health policy, but then I ask myself where the evidence is to support such an idea is, and…

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Switching back to music: The presentation of J.S.Bach as a rule-breaking hacker by Kathleen Kajioka is both compelling and convincing and I would encourage a listen:

I don’t know that much about Bach, but I do see this trend he has of periodically slipping in phrases that simply do not fit. When I was learning the first prelude to The Well-Tempered Clavier, for example, there are a few bars where I was certain “that can’t be it” — that I’d misread the notes (which would be very easy for me). It just sounds wrong. Bars 22 and 23 in particular are just sort-of affronts to the calm (predictable?) harmony of the bars before it–except for the ones that were perhaps softening the listener up (maybe bars 8 & 12). What sounds wrong as a stand alone bar ultimately gets folded in successfully. But there is no reason for it. Other than ‘cuz. So much is ‘Haydn’ and then there are the components that make it unmistakably Bach. Anyhow – I had never focused on this harmonic subterfuge by Bach before, and found the idea compelling.

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Years back some folks bought a no-name guitar from Elderly Instruments for $100. It was a shit guitar. Fucking horrid by sight. But it was passed around. Nels Cline played it. Alex Skolnick played it. Matt Wilson, a jazz drummer, played it. All manner of folks who were open to it, had their run with the thing and recorded a song with the guitar. It resulted in the $100 Guitar Project: a collection of 51 songs at this point, all from a janky abomination.

The six-stringed atrocity travelled over 30,000 miles according to this NPR piece, and I’m working through the list of folks who contributed, looking for bodies of work I can identify with because openness to that sort of project seems like as great a gate-keeping device as I can imagine for identifying folks who produce a particular type of music I’m interested in.

Which is half of how I stumbled onto:

Ava Mendoza is my favorite artist I’ve discovered this week. (my GOD ! who makes an entire song out of artificial harmonics?!?) I guess she used to be from here (Bay Area) but is in Brooklyn now working with an outfit she is calling Unnatural Ways. Much of my week has inovled checking them out. Their bass player, Tim Dahl, is incredibly interesting as well, but I haven’t pulled that sweater string just yet.

This was beautiful. It was apparently filmed in temperatures below 20’F (and as the footage shows, there was a bit of a gale) but I’m glad they did it.

A guitarist I’ve seen a couple of times, and am always interested in, was apparently reunited with a guitar he cut his teeth on as an early musician, after pawning it 37 years earlier. A really charming story is unravelled in this video interview with Bill Frisell. One of the really great aspects of the story is how just the act of sharing seemingly trivial information with one’s friends and aquaintances can end up producing such amazing outcomes.

finally:

“If people saw this, they would stay home.” What the war against the coronavirus looks like inside two Bronx hospitals. Opinion by Nick Kristoff, Video by Alexander Stockton, Zach Goldbaum and Michael Kirby Smith.

 

 

a cell, infected by covid-19 virus

 

(praise be)

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enjoy.

… but it is likely not a successful therapuetic. More research is in on differential responses to Coronavirus in the US, focusing on behaviors. In a nutshell the study finds:

“political differences are the single most consistent factor that differentiates American’s health behaviors”

so there’s that. Also, this. (Vox is doing a lot of good work on this. cuz reasons maybe?)

I just saw Tyler Cowen referenced an AEI study quantifying the optimal lockdown measures for the US tied to outcomes of policy.:

IF newly infected persons ends up only infecting one other person on average (an idea expressed as R0 = 1) we can end the lockdown in 30 to 34 weeks. If our policy intereventions do better and reduce the reproductive number so that subsequent infections average out to 0.7 new cases per infection (R0 = 0.7), 11 or 12 weeks should suffice. R0 = 0.5 would move us past the lockdown in 7 or 8 weeks. Considering that the virus seems to be transmissible well before symptoms appear, that number seems like such a tough row to hoe. Many will either be unable to physically distance themselves–for economic or other reasons; others, in the absence of sufficient symptoms will use their rationalization engines to justify social activity.

Speaking of which, once he recovers, I hope an ethics investigation into Rand Paul finds him wanting and his peers hold him to account.

Finally, it is the end of the month, so the March 2020 Spotify playlist is now public.

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