Pacific Palisades fire from a flight leaving LAX. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
“The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital and is often ignored when it does not.”
– Jason Hickle
There’s nothing so terrifying as a nightmare come to life. The Santa Ana winds have haunted the dreams of southern Angelinos for decades. Like the Chinooks of the Rockies and the Mistrals of the Rhone Valley, these winds play on the mind. They tell you they’re coming for you. They whisper the dangers they bring with them. Van Gogh believed the mistral inflamed his madness. Another kind of madness seems to be inflicting LA, the madness of boundless consumption.
Some listen to the warnings of the wind. Some don’t. Those who listen are driven mad by those who don’t. In the chaparrals of southern California, the warning of the Santa Anas has always been: fire. Fires that race down hillsides and canyons faster than any Tesla can drive. Fires that leap roads, highways, malls. Fires that ride on the wind.
This is not new. The Santa Ana winds come with the territory–that territory being the desert basins behind the coastal mountains and canyons. They are katabatic winds that rush downhill, dry and fierce, as they pour through the Cajon, San Gorgonio, and Soledad passes. Geography makes them. Climate change and a rapacious real estate industry that has remained deaf to their message have turned them into killers.
Historically, the Santa Anas (ponder the resonance of that name in our time of mass xenophobia) are autumn winds, warm winds that carry the dust of the Mojave. Now, Santa Anas can erupt any time of year. That’s climate change, for you. Yet a threat that is omnipresent often seems somehow less ominous, making it more likely to catch you off guard.
Even so, LA wasn’t entirely taken by surprise this week. They had two days to get ready. The Santa Anas create the conditions for catastrophic fires on their own. They are fire-making weather events that dry out already parched landscapes, lowering the humidity and raising the temperature as they blow through.
On November 13, 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds whipped up a bonfire started by college students into an inferno that spread across neighborhoods in Montecito and Santa Barbara. The Tea Fire burned for three days, destroying 210 homes. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the charred landscape as “looking like Hell.”
The next day, the still-roaring winds, gusting to 80—mph, supercharged a fire in the Santa Clarita Valley that ravaged the town of Sylmar. The Sayre fire burned for a week and destroyed more than 600 buildings, including 480 mobile homes.
We don’t know how this week’s fires originated—cigarette, campfire, truck spark, downed power line, or arson. But the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, and San Gabriel Mountains were already primed to burn. Chapparal is born in fire and thrives in it. In their natural state, the chappal landscapes of southern California experience low-intensity fires once every 20 to 50 years.
After a couple of relatively wet years, the southern California coast has now flipped back into drought conditions. It hasn’t experienced any measurable rainfall in eight months. Climate change has made southern California drier, increasing the frequency and intensity of the region’s natural fire regime. Even fully functioning fire hydrants will never replace the amount of moisture climate change has stolen from the ecosystem.
They talk about the “urban-wildland” interface. In So Cal, that interface is under relentless siege as new luxury homes, condos, and “mixed-use” buildings creep inexorably up the hillsides and canyons, undeterred by the rugged geography, faultlines, or flammability. The boundaries between the natural and the manufactured have been shredded, both on the ground and in the atmosphere. The buffer zones are gone and now nothing is standing between you and the wind.
Yes, you were warned. But no number of red flags could really fortify you for what was coming; no amount of preparation at this late stage could save you from hundred-mile-per-hour winds from a hurricane of fire.
Even palaces burn.
Pacific Palisades fire. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
+++
+ You don’t have to be versed in Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear to understand that the people who always pay the heaviest price for these kinds of cataclysms in So. Cal–even in elite zip codes like Pac Palisades–aren’t Hollywood moguls or hedge funders, but LA’s mostly brown and black working poor…
+ Afropunk has created a list of the black families displaced by the LA fires and how people can make donations for their support as they rebuild their lives…
+ In 2019, Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told David Wallace-Wells: “There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this. The only thing that will stop this is when the Earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”
+ An initial estimate from AccuWeather Inc. puts the total cost of the LA fires at between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the most expensive fire event in history.
+ In July, State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled 1600 homeowner policies in Pacific Palisades. A year earlier, the same insurance company had dropped more than 2,000 policies in the nearby neighborhoods of Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido, all of which have now been ravaged by devastating wildfires. But the big insurers who have canceled policies for homeowners and businesses in climate-vulnerable states continue to insure the fossil fuel industries that make people’s homes uninsurable.
+ 19 of the 20 largest fires in California history have ignited since 2000…
+ Environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, author of Fire in America: “If we keep fighting a war with fire, three things are going to happen. We’re going to spend a lot of money, we’re going to take a lot of casualties, and we’re going to lose.”
+ Mike Davis: ‘The loss of more than 90 percent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate.”
+ It’s worth noting that one of the reasons California likes to keep its prisons as full as possible is that inmates make up around 30% of the state’s firefighting force. For risking their lives on the firelines, prisoners are paid between 16¢ to 74¢ an hour (maxxing out at $5.80 to $10.24 a day) and rewarded with a bologna sandwich and an apple for lunch on the job.
+ When there’s a mass shooting, the response from MAGA is “thoughts and prayers.” When there’s a climate-driven cataclysm, the response is: “Drill, baby, drill, rake, baby, rake, and log, baby, log.”
The LA fires will be used as Trump’s Reichstag fire against environmental regulations.
+ He’s deliriously wrong about everything in this post, except for the incompetence of Gavin Newsom, a preening servant of the real estate and energy industries.
+ President Empathy struts his stuff one more time…
+ If Biden keeps this up, he may be destined to end his presidency less popular than Trump was after Jan. 6, 2021.
+ Final presidential approval ratings…
Clinton: 66%
Reagan: 63%
Ike 59%
Obama 59%
George HW Bush: 56%
Ford: 53%
LBJ: 49%
JFK: 48%
Biden: 39%
Trump: 34%
George W. Bush: 34%
Carter: 34
Truman: 32%
Nixon: 24%
+ Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire: “In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing–the fateful blowup.”
+ By Friday night, the Palisades fire had advanced from Getty Villa (on the coast) to Getty Center (in the Santa Monica Mountains) above Brentwood. Will it then make a swerve toward the Hammer (Oxy Petroleum) Museum, as well?
+ Mountain lion mother and cubs fleeing the Palisades fire across Topanga Canyon Blvd…
+++
+ From the Breaking News That Will Surprise No One Wire: Several MAGA fans who flew to Greenland to try and start an American colony they intend to call “Trumpland” have been detained at the airport for being sex offenders.
+ In 2000, the global warming trend predicted the world would hit 1.5C warming in 2041. It happened in 2024.
+ According to a new study by Aurora Energy Research, rescinding the Inflation Reduction Act’s technology-neutral clean energy tax credits could increase Americans’ electricity bills by 10%. Some states, like Texas, could see increases of more than 20%.
+ Last year, the European Union imported more Russian LNG than ever.
+ The Federal Trade Commission announced that crude oil producers XCL Resources Holdings, LLC (XCL), Verdun Oil Company II LLC (Verdun), and EP Energy LLC (EP) will pay a record $5.6 million civil penalty for illegal coordination that led to a crude oil supply shortage. Before merging, the crude oil companies started working together, limiting the oil supply when the US faced shortages and inflated prices.
+ From Shalya Love’s intriguing piece in the New Yorker, “Do Insects Feel Pain?”: “Insects make up about forty percent of all living species. An estimated trillion insects are farmed per year; quadrillions are killed by pesticides, and many species have gone extinct as humans have cleared habitats for farms, factories, and cities.”
+ As more green power plants have gone online, German gas imports dropped by 11% in 2024.
+ After the first week of congestion pricing in NYC, the commute times into Manhattan were cut in half….
+ A study on the effects of hunting on wolf packs in Denali, Grand Teton, Voyageurs, Yellowstone national parks, and the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve showed that human-caused mortality had a detrimental effect on a pack’s survival, with a pack being 73% more likely to dissolve if a pack leader was killed by humans than if they had died of natural causes.
+ There are an estimated three million sunken vessels in the ocean, over 8,500 of which are classified as ‘potentially polluting wrecks’.
+ With his characteristically impeccable timing, Trump chose the day of the outbreak of the California wildfires to inveigh against environmental regulations, the plot to eliminate gas “heaters,” and call for more oil drilling and the seizure of Greenland and the Panama Canal.
+ Trump: “A gas heater is much less expensive, the heat is much better, it’s a much better heat. As the _expression_ goes, you don’t itch. Does anybody have a heater where you go and you’re scratching? That’s what they want you to have. They don’t want you to have gas.” Many non-native English speakers call them “furnaces.”
“I love the smell of my propane heater in the morning” is the Climate Apocalypse version of “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”…
+++
+ If you want to see how challenging it is to develop a psychological profile for the average Trump voter, check out the notes left by the cyber truck bomber in Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, the 37-year-old special forces Master Sgt., who rants against economic inequality and the one percent while praising Musk & Trump, who extols the virtues of masculinity but complains American men are too obese to win a war against Russia or China, who despairs that Americans spend too much time behind screens while backing a reality TV star and the person who runs the second most prominent social media platform.
Livelsberer’s last text…
Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans,
TIME TO WAKE UP!
We are being led by weak and feckless leadership who only serve to enrich themselves.
Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.
Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.
-MSG Matt Livelsberger 18Z, 10th Special Forces Group
Livelsberger’s “manifesto”…
We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.
We are crumbling because of a lack of self respect, morales [sic], and respect for others. Greed and gluttony has consumed us. The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.
We have strayed from family values and corrupted our minds and I am a prime example of having it all but it never being enough.
A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.
Our population is too fat to join the military yet we are facing a war with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran before 2030.
We must take these actions if we are going to make it past the next few years in one piece:
We must end the war in Ukraine with a negotiated settlement. It is the only way.
Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.
Weeded out those in our government and military who do not idealize #2.
The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous. The number of homeless on our street is embarrassing and disgusting. Have some pride and take care of this.
Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer.
Thankfully, we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.
We must move on from the culture of weakness and self enrichment perpetuated by our senior political and military leaders. We are done with the blatant corruption. Our soldiers are done fighting wars without end states or clear objectives.
This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?
Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.
Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around Trump, Musk, and Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.
+ Less than a decade ago, someone ranting like this at a coffee shop would have been reported to social services as a basket case. Now, this kind of rhetoric could land you a spot on a panel at Fox News or CNN.
+++
+ In response to Trump’s American Lebensraum plan to annex northern Mexico, Canada, and Greenland by “economic force,” Claudia Scheinbaum displays a historical map of Mexico, showing her nation’s territorial claim to much of the US by historical right.
By the way, the feisty new President of Mexico is now modeling a hat she’d like to sell you…
FoxBusiness: Mr. Senator, taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal isn’t a realistic proposal, is it? It’s just a negotiating tactic, isn’t it?
RICK SCOTT: Well, it would be pretty exciting.
FoxBusiness: Would you be okay with using the military?
Scott: I don’t know what he means by that.
+ Panama’s Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha said this week that canal sovereignty is “non-negotiable” and that “the only hands operating the canal are Panamanian and that is how it is going to stay.”
+ I think Panama is missing an opportunity to offload the canal on the unsuspecting Trump for as much as they can get before the canal is rendered defunct by climate change.
+ According to the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “It’s un-American to oppose Trump’s annexation of Canada, Mexico and Greenland…”
+ Italy’s neo-fascist leader, Giorgia Meloni, defended Trump’s designs on Greenland, saying he’s sending a message to China “saying that the US will not stand idly by …while other major players move into areas that are of strategic interest to the US and to the west.”
+ According to Nordic News, Donald Trump Jr. (who this week somehow managed to blame the LA fires on the war in Ukraine) ”bribed” homeless and disadvantaged people with hotel dinners to play Trump supporters in Greenland…
+ YouGov Poll: If Panama could not be acquired by other means, would you support or oppose the U.S. using economic or military coercion to take control of it?
Strongly support: 9%
Somewhat support: 13%
Somewhat oppose: 13%
Strongly oppose: 38%
Not sure: 26%[Jan. 8, 2025]
+ I’m all for Trump conquering Canada by “economic force” if he vows to bring back the Expos! (Just don’t tell him the tricolor caps are a Francophone thing…) and allows the State of Canada to maintain its health care system.
+ Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (once the apple of Melania’s eye): “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”
+ Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly: “President-elect Trump’s comments show a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our economy is strong. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats.”
+ Making Geography Great Again! The king of Denmark just changed the nation’s coat of arms. The new coat “more prominently feature[s] Greenland and the Faroe Islands– in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.” It’s hard to tell if the new design shows the blood streaming from the Faroe Islands’ annual slaughter of Pilot whales (actually large oceanic dolphins similar to Orca).
+ German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius: “It’s a little bit—let me express that diplomatically—astonishing to read things like that and to hear on television. I don’t know what his objectives are to annex Greenland, but anyway, alliances are alliances and stay alliances regardless of who’s governing countries. Otherwise, it would only be something like communities or whatever else.”
+ Trump says he wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America.” Why not rename it the “Gulf of Exxon?”
+ Trump can get away with this kind of geographical illiteracy because we live in a country where Stanford and Cal are playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
+++
+ China is the world’s largest steel producer, generating over half of global steel output. India is second. Japan is third. The US is fourth. China now produces more than six times as much steel as the US.
+ Sad…
+ South Korea now has more 84-year-olds than one-year-olds.
+ According to a piece in the Economist, the economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world is widening. By 2030, it’s estimated that Africans will make up more than 80% of the world’s poor.
+ In Denver, renters paid an average of $136 more monthly to landlords using rent-setting algorithms. Nearly 50% of Denver landlords use them.
+ Jim Tourtelott: “The most frightening Arabic word isn’t ‘jihad,’ it’s ‘algorithm.’”
+ If Putin faces any risk of being overthrown, it may come from rising Russian discontent with the soaring price of vodka, which has increased by more than 20% a bottle in the last year.
+ Both Trump and the Democrats are in full retreat on immigration. But they’re retreating in opposite directions: Trump away from his hard line and the Democrats toward it.
+ Forget those “Dreamers.” 48 House Democrats voted alongside all 216 Republicans to allow ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested (but not convicted) for minor crimes such as shoplifting…
+ If that’s not sleazy enough, here’s Rep. Ro Khanna telling the appalling story of how the Democrats in the Senate handed Trump pre-mature control of the NLRB:
Due to an unforced error by Democrats, we lost the National Labor Relations Board majority two years earlier than expected. This is a huge setback for the hundreds of thousands of workers across this country organizing for a better contract. Let me explain.
The NLRB is America’s leading labor law enforcement agency. In the last 3 years, union petitions have doubled because we have a strong NLRB that supports workers who choose to form unions, ensures that corporations allow free and fair union elections, and protects union workers if Big Business retaliates against them.
The term of our previous NLRB Chair, Lauren McFerran, just expired on December 15th. She was eligible for reconfirmation alongside a Republican, who’d be paired with her. This would’ve secured a 3-2 Democratic majority on the NLRB for the first two years of Trump’s second term. Bernie Sanders did the right thing. He cleared her nomination on August 6, but the Dems fumbled it.
On the morning of the 11th, Senate Democrats had a chance to move McFarren’s nomination vote through – which would’ve led to a secondary vote to confirm. Senator Vance, Roberts, and Manchin were absent that morning. But we delayed the vote (for what I’m hearing described as “no reason”) until Vance and Manchin returned, deadlocking the vote at 49-49.
We then failed to get word to Vice President Harris quickly enough to come and deliver the tie-breaking vote. In the 90 minutes that transpired, Senator Manchin returned first, swinging the vote in the other direction and ceding the NLRB to MAGA control two years earlier than necessary. These procedural blunders have massive implications for the American people, who deserve better from their elected officials. American workers deserve an explanation.
+ Tell me again, why do we need the Democratic Party?
+ Is it any wonder that only 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way democracy is working in the country, the lowest level on record?
+ The Last Word on Bidenomics: Financial stress causes highest mental health decline in workers since 2020…
+++
+ For the third straight year, major American cities experienced big drops in homicide rates:
Philadelphia: – 40%
New Orleans: – 38%
Washington, DC: -29%
Baltimore: -24%
Memphis: – 23%
Kansas City: -20%
Los Angeles: -15%
+ From the latest report by the Prison Policy Initiative: “The rate at which women are subjected to threats or use of force by police has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. In 1999, only 13% of people experiencing the use of force were women. By 2022, that share had doubled to 28%.”
+ There is little prospect that the killers of Robert Brooks will be perp-walked like Luigi Mangione…
+ Speaking of Luigi…
+ CP’s own Elliot Sperber snapped this while walk across the Sonny Rollins (Williamsburg) Bridge this week.
Photo: Elliot Sperber.
+ Jamal Gleaton, a Waffle House worker in Spartanburg, SC, on the prevalence of violence at the franchise and the need for 24/7 security for workers and customers:
“On New Year’s Day, over two dozen shots were let off into the Waffle House in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where workers continued to work after the shooting. For 24 shots to be let off and everybody’s health is at risk at that point, and there’s nothing being done about it, and you’re told that you still have to work for like nickels and dimes is a bit ridiculous to me. So you want us to come in here and work all these hours and ensure that everybody else is safe, feed everybody that walks through the door and we have to put up with some of this stuff. We do have rules where we can refuse service, but that again will cause another problem. You feel me? There’s no mediator there. So you want us to do all of this stuff for the little bit of wages we–some of us still making $3 an hour plus tips, some of us making $5 an hour plus tips. There’s no security. We show up. We do our job, and there’s always a risk factor. We walk in knowing that anything could happen at any time and we’ve just got to deal with it–24 hours a day. People are going to be people. But we’re the people who have to deal with it. There’s no safety net for us.”
+++
+ Need more evidence that Emmanuel Macron is the most belligerent European leader? Here he is lambasting residents of the cyclone-ravaged French colony of Mayotte, upset over the paltry flow of aid to the island, “If it wasn’t for France, you’d be 10,000 times deeper in shit.”
+ Trump doesn’t want to end NATO. He wants to make Europe even more militarized, saying this week he wants NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense. (The US currently “only” spends 3%.)
+ Minimal land has exchanged hands in eastern Ukraine in the last 12 months, despite a bloody year of slaughter.
+ John F. Sopko, who has served as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction since 2012, wrote a damning critique in the NYT of the US experience in Afghanistan: “In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people.”
+ Over one-third of the $108 billion spent on U.S. contractors in Afghanistan since 9/11 went to undisclosed (i.e., secret) recipients…
+ During his campaign, Trump vowed to end the Ukraine/Russia war in 24 hours. This week, he pleaded for more time (to sell more weapons, I presume): “I hope to have six months.”
+ A UN panel of human rights experts has called for the immediate release of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, also known as Abu Zubaydah, whom US authorities have detained at Guantánamo for nearly 20 years without charges. Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.
+ The Ever-Expanding Consciousness of Greta Thunberg: “The Sahrawi people have the right to self-determination, freedom, and dignity. They’ve been violently denied those rights. The world is watching in silence. I want to add my voice for Western Sahara liberation.”
+ President Biden showing White House reporter who’s the boos: “My being the oldest president, I know more world leaders than any one of you have ever met in your whole goddamn life.”
+ First Biden hangs a medal around the neck of Cheney, then HRC and Bono. Biden’s award ceremonies are creepier than the latest version of Nosferatu…
+ Macron on Musk: “If we’d been told 10 years ago that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would support a new reactionary International and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined it?”
+ Frances’s leading intellectual, Emmanuel Todd, on Elon Musk: “Elon Musk is an astonishing character. He’s the richest man in the world and so he has no filter. So, he says things that seem absurd to us. I mean, he interferes in German politics, he basically craps on the Germans. He interferes in English politics; he craps on the English. He’s just saying it out loud, but the truth is that when you read American geopolitical experts, this is what Americans think of us! Meaning he talks to Europeans the way Americans think. Americans despise us for our servility. And Musk is just the guy who says it. So we’re shocked.”
+ Jimmy Carter started out by pardoning Vietnam War resisters and draft dodgers on day 2. He ended up approving the MX missile, funding the Mujahideen, training death squad leaders, and getting into a bidding war with Reagan over military funding, a war that Carter won by proposing a Pentagon budget that even Reagan never equaled.
+ Greg Grandin: “Carter began by saying he wanted to deal with Third World nationalism on its own terms, not as just a front for geopolitical Cold War politics, meaning the Soviet Union. But that gives way very quickly. It was under Carter that the CIA began its operation in Afghanistan and began supporting the Mujahideen. It was the Carter administration that, in July 1979, urged by Brzezinski, began providing non-lethal aid to what became the Mujahideen. All of these things led to the end of detente and the pulling of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and the weaponization of Islam as a geopolitical tool by the United States. And we are still living with the consequences today. And all of his decency and humanity, especially compared to the orgiastic spasm of wealth and the clown circus that we’re living under now, you really have to examine some of the more unfortunate legacies of Carter.”
+ Of the seven presidents who followed Carter’s pardoning of Vietnam War resisters, 4 evaded the draft: Clinton, Bush, Biden, and Trump (as did kingmaker Dick Cheney), and Reagan lied about serving in Europe in WW2 and liberating Dachau–and we’ve been at war somewhere ever since. As Jim Naureckas pointed out to me: “Reagan and Bush Sr. were too old for Vietnam, Obama too young. No president that could have fought in Vietnam did so.”
+ How can you privatize the Post Office (as Trump and Louis DeJoy plan to do) if the private mail delivery companies, like UPS, refuse to deliver to rural America because it’s not profitable enough?
+ The “new” Congress is the third oldest in history…The average age in the Senate: 64; the House: 56.
+++
+ Beyond the racism, the trans-phobia, the ketamine habit, the space opera fantasies, Elon Musk, who briefly changed his name on X to Keikius Maximus, is just one extremely weird dude…
+ This week, I picked up two fantastic albums at our treasure of a used vinyl store here in Oregon City, OC Records: John Mayall’s Blues for Laurel Canyon (featuring Mick Taylor at his most uninhibited, before he had to worry about overshadowing Keith Richards) and Ike Turner’s Blues Roots. If Mayall’s classic set is hippie blues, Ike’s offering is something else entirely: dark, menacing, and lonely. Recorded at Ike’s famous studio in Inglewood, this is blues with a cutting edge, showcasing Turner’s gifts as one of the greatest arrangers in the history of blues and rock. When I first listened to it, I thought it must’ve been recorded after Tina split for her life to Wayne Shorter’s place. But no. It was recorded in 1972 before Tina’s Nutbush City Limits became a crossover hit. But the record sounds like a revenge tragedy. On a second playing, it struck me that one of the reasons for its sinister quality is there are no female voices on the entire record: no Tina, no Tina substitute, no Ikettes, none of the super-charged harmonies that gave Ike & Tina’s music its uplift. This is all Ike: vocals, guitar, keys, background vocals, even drums and bass on some songs: elemental music for the dark night of the soul. Even the gatefold cover exudes a kind of dangerous melancholy…
+ Rod Stewart explains why he recorded a version of Street Fighting Man (lyrics inspired by our friend Tariq Ali) shortly after the Stones: “I thought people should be able to understand the lyrics.” Given the rightward lurch of Stewart’s politics, we’d have been better off divining our own meaning out of Mick’s mush. (By the way, Elton John’s drag name for Stewart was “Phyllis.”)
+ Speaking of the Stones, I watched Catching Fire, the terrific documentary by Alexis Bloom on Anita Pallenberg, last night, and it must be said that none of “the boys” come off very well at all. Keith Richards insisting on playing in Paris on the night their newborn baby, Tara, died instead of flying to Switzerland to be with his distraught wife kind of sums up the entire experience with the three of them (Although, unlike Brian, Keith didn’t beat her.)…As their son Marlon laconically quips, “I suppose he played very well that night. Some said, very, very well.” It’s on Hulu if you haven’t seen it. Extraordinary footage. Unlike Mick, at least, Keith–whose misogyny extends so far as to offer to pay Anita to give up her acting career (Candy, Barbarella, Performance, etc.)– consented to be interviewed. Most of the narration (read by Scarlett Johansson) is from Anita’s vividly written and unsparing manuscript, found in a drawer by Marlon after her death.
+ One of the best things to happen to baseball over the last couple of decades is that Nate Silver went from writing (badly) for Baseball Prospectus to making even more dubious statistical claims about American politics in the New York Times, ESPN and ABCNews…
+ The real origins of “moneyball,” (paying players on the cheap) wasn’t with the Oakland A’s, but the Oakland Larks of the West Coast Negro Baseball Association, the short-lived league owned by Abe Saperstein (who also owned the Globetrooters) and Jesse Owens. Here’s a page from the Larks’ ledger book…
Page from the Oakland Larks ledger book. Source: Oalkland Public Library.
+ Jimmy Carter’s presidency was largely a shitshow, featuring neoliberal austerity at home and viciousness abroad, from Afghanistan to Central America to Korea. But he did invite Cecil Taylor to play at the White House…
+ As an antidote against the worshipful eulogies for Jimmy Carter, I highly recommend Cockburn and Ridgeway’s hilarious novelized dismantling of the toothy president, Smoke…
+ The late Stanley Booth on bluesman Furry Lewis: “He had begun to play a slow, sad blues, one that none of us had ever heard, a song without a name: ‘My mother’s dead,’ he sang, the guitar softly following, ‘my father just as well’s to be. Ain’t got nobody to say one kind word for me.’ The room, which had been filled with noise, was now quiet. ‘People holler mercy,’ Furry sang, ‘don’t know what mercy mean. People … ’ — and the guitar finished the line. ‘Well, if it mean any good, Lord, have mercy on me.’”
+ The full results of the 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Pol are now online, featuring the best of the year lists from 177 music writers (including my own humble contribution).
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Vicious Creature
Lauren Mayberry
EMI / Island
The Night
Saint Etienne
(Heavenly Recordings)
In Dreams
Duster
(Numero)
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Hiroshima: the Last Witnesses
M. G. Sheftall
(Dutton)
Flowers of Evil: the Definitive English Language Edition
Charles Baudelaire
Trans. Nathan Brown
(Verso)
Sea Level: a History
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg
(Chicago)
Covering Up What Has Already Been Found
“It’s hard enough to find out about the things the universe prefers to keep hidden without our government, which somebody you know must have voted for, covering up what has already been found. Sometimes, of course, it hides things to save its own neck and sometimes seemingly just for the hell of it.” (Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire)