New Orleans born and bred woodwind genius Sidney Bechet lived a large portion of his life in exile in Paris. And I’m not talking Paris, Texas, which was as segregated as New Orleans. Bechet left the Other Paris to Wim Wenders and Ry Cooder.
We have two early album covers this week. They’re not vinyl LPs, but 10″ shellac albums. The first one dates from 1948 and features a cover by Jim Flora:
The second ten-incher dates from 1952 and features art by Burt Goldblatt:
Since the albums aren’t online in their entirety, here are two contemporaneous tracks:
I know it’s been a while. These two dumbasses are the best. They spent the recent polar vortex curled up basically on top of us and when I’m sick or otherwise incapacitated they’re on me at all times purring and kneading and grooming me. Slade eats constantly but also is constantly mewing to play fetch so he’s not gaining weight so much as getting swole. Ada disdains the very expensive cat fountain we bought for her and will sit on the counter yelling until we turn on the kitchen tap, then swats water at her brother. Kick picks them both up like a forklift and carries them around the house like stuffies and they never, ever bite her. There is fur just fucking EVERYWHERE and they disembowel their toys and stash the innards under the dining room table for us to find like some kind of horrifying CSI: KittyMurder.
“Over the weekend, I was mostly taking care of and playing with my grandchildren,’’ Abramson told Poynter on Monday afternoon. “And focusing on all that is right with my world.’’
Aww. It’s so nice that we checked in with her and not with, you know, all the people she ripped off or the ones she misgendered or called stupid uneducated kids with mohawks or whatever her problem was with Vice and BuzzFeed.
After all, Twitter was MEAN TO HER:
“Twitter is a savage environment, and at a certain point I just stopped going on Twitter,” Abramson said, “and had trusted friends and advisers to look at it and tell (me) if there is anything that I needed to know.”
“Twitter” is not a savage environment. The world is a savage environment when you screw up. Just ask any journalist not currently swanning around on apology tour of every major media outlet while promoting her book. Just ask the night cops reporter at any mid-size paper in the country. Nobody is nice to you when you fuck up.
So what happens now? Where does Abramson go from here?
She said she will continue teaching twice a week at Harvard. She expects to continue writing regularly for The Guardian and New York Magazine. She said she has no desire to ever run a newsroom again.
This story could not be more soft if Poynter actually smeared Vaseline on the lens. I don’t ask a lot of the outfit that mainly exists to run things like “do journalists swear too much” and “how fair is it to point out when people are lying liars who lie?” but I would expect the August Guardians of Standards and Practices to take a little more seriously when someone who should know better violates them flagrantly.
As far as the latest chapter in her career — a chapter that had her getting off Twitter, answering uncomfortable questions and retreating to the safety of her grandkids — Abramson refuses to let it consume her.
How brave.
How brave of her to continue to persevere by … literally not changing a damn thing and continuing to cash her checks. That must take a lot out of her. Again, the perspective that is presented here is Abramson-as-victim of the mean meanies on the Internet, and I hate to break it to the professional media observers but the Internet, like most of the world, is really really mean, sometimes to people who deserve it, sometimes to people who don’t.
I suppose since Abramson is a Very Important Person, she cannot ever really make an irredeemable mistake (after all, Brian Williams and Mike Barnicle remain employed) but it would be nice to see supposed standards applied in a … standard … way, and at least spare us the “I made mistakes, how dare you be mean and point them out” martyr act.
Former FBI honcho Andrew McCabe has been ubiquitous of late. His description of his encounters with the Insult Comedian are either bone-chilling or blood-curdling. Pick your metaphor.
People do not appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on criminal prosecutions but to comment on ones that potentially affect him. He does both of these things almost daily. He is not just sounding a dog whistle. He is lobbying for a result. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. Every day brings a new low, with the president exposing himself as a deliberate liar who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wants. If he were “on the box” at Quantico, he would break the machine.
The desire to distract attention from the McCabe book was clearly a factor in Trump’s manufactured “national emergency.” Oy just oy.
President Trump said on Friday that he “didn’t need to” declare a national emergency but did it to speed up construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
“I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden in the White House.
Except that the bill he just signed will very likely be used to keep him from doing just that. He should have vetoed that POS. When Oh When will we get the line item veto for the Oval Office? I know…double edged sword but…it would have been handy this week.
3 posted on 2/15/2019, 3:43:20 PM by Bloody Sam Roberts (Atrophy of science is visible when the spokesman goes from Einstein to Sagan to Neil Degrasse Tyson.)
Be oh so careful what you wish for.
To: Berlin_Freeper
Well he’s right..if Congress/Senate had done their damn jobs he wouldn’t need to do this, but he had no choice because this needs to be done NOW
“I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden in the White House.
This statement completely undermines any legal argument in support of a “national emergency” declaration.
15 posted on 2/15/2019, 4:06:39 PM by Alberta’s Child (“In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey.”)
To: All
“I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,”
The statement Pretty much guarantees he loses. That plus he signed just a bill where he agrees not to do what the act intends. I can only think he must know this so what do we conclude from that? Nothing good.
(James Garner “Support Your Local Sheriff” voice : “Well, I’ve been watching The Darnold for two years, and I haven’t seen him do one smart thing yet.”)
He just admitted that he doesn’t really believe there is an emergency. That undermines his declaration. Dumb.
That’s going to bite him (and us) in the butt.
22 posted on 2/15/2019, 4:33:28 PM by P-Marlowe (Freep mail me if you want to be on my Fingerstyle Acoustic Guitar Ping List)
It’s easy to see why Apple favors the scheme. It gets a windfall of new revenue at a time when the decline in iPhone sales has made selling additional services a high priority. It gets to bring more high-quality publishers onto its platform, burnishing its reputation as a premium brand. And it gets to talk loudly about how much it loves journalism, as Apple vice president Eddy Cue did when announcing Apple’s acquisition of the subscription news app Texture last year. “We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users,” he said at the time.
Publishers, meanwhile, may need to hire new employees to manage the partnership, build the necessary product integrations, and address customer service issues. At a time when the industry is already laying off hundreds of journalists, asking them to build out their partnership and product teams in exchange for a potential revenue increase in the single digits appears laughable on its face.
Man, we are willing to do just about anything except take ad revenue and subscription money and spend it on journalism. We’ll spend it on pundits and cable-yellers, we’ll spend it on consultants and digital paradigm shifts and machine learning plans, we’ll spend it on rebrand after rebrand after rebrand, we’ll spend it developing spin-off companies within our news media company, we’ll spend it on hush money for victims of serial sexual harassers, we’ll spend it on developing software to write box scores for high school baseball games, we’ll spend it on real estate. We’ll spend it on glitter glue. We’ll spend it on regular glue.
Anything, ANYTHING, other than news.
It’s my forlorn hope that after the video pivot and the podcast boom and the hyperlocal experiments and the longform mega-wank and the Facebook bots and the Snapchat productions and the endless, endless, endless shitshow that is paywalls, publishers will just finally be so tired they’ll agree to do journalism. But the enthusiasm for this type of thing is just too stupid and predictable. Can a webinar be far behind?
Krewe du Vieux ate my week and the Krewe of Spank whuppped my ass. Today is the big day, which is why this week’s entry qualifies as a placeholder. If you want to re-read Confessions Of A Krewe du Vieux Member to get into the spirit of the occasion, there’s no time like the present.
This week’s theme song was written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen in 1973. It’s one of my favorite Steely Dan album tracks. It’s the touching tale of a man in love with a French Quarter prostitute named Louise. Ooh la la.
We have two versions for your listening pleasure: the steel guitar driven Steely Dan original followed by a swell 2013 cover by Boz Scaggs:
That’s it for this week. The closing bat meme is a picture taken by Dr. A near the Den of Muses.
There’s a swell documentary currently showing on HBO, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists. It’s about the great New York newspaper columnists, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill. Not only were they fine journalists, they were great writers. I give the documentary 3 1/2 stars and an Adrastos Grade of B+.
“Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtue of stupidity, it was the epitome of blind negation.
Hate was just another luxury. And Trump stood naked revealed as the spokesman for that tiny minority of Americans who live well-defended lives. Forget poverty and its causes. Forget the degradation and squalor of millions. Fry them into passivity.”
Pete Hamill wasn’t always right but he never minced words. That’s pretty good writing for a high school dropout. I like his first name too.
I’m not big on Hallmark card holidays. My mother used to make fun of Mother’s Day and thought Valentine’s Day was silly. Her stock line about the former was: “It’s always mother’s day in this family.” Mom’s attitude about Hallmark card holidays prepared me for Valentine’s Day in New Orleans.
Valentine’s Day typically takes place during Carnival and I think you know what my priority is. The good news is that my awesome wife, Dr. A, agrees. In fact, Krewe du Vieux has marched on Valentine’s Day several times during its history.
We will spend today working on our costumes for the big day. And we will spend tonight with 53 of our closest friends as it’s Spank throws distribution night. Our theme is still top-secret. I wouldn’t even allow Slumlord Jared access. Unless, that is, he bribed me. I am easily corrupted. What else would you expect from a Greek guy who lives in the Gret Stet of Louisiana?
There’s an image going around social media that sums up New Orleans’ relationship with Valentine’s Day:
Holy St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Batman.
Finally a message for Dr. A. As Maybe Cousin Telly would surely say at this point:
“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” Omar begins. “I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”
“If I could respond to that …” Abrams says, before Omar cuts him off.
“It wasn’t a question,” the lawmaker says icily.
Abrams reacts angrily to this response, and only gets angrier from there. Omar pushes Abrams on Reagan-era policies in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, and he flatly refuses to answer. Instead, he angrily dismisses the entire line of questioning as a “personal attack.”
Omar points out that it isn’t a personal attack at all, but rather quite relevant to his current job. Trump has contemplated intervening militarily in the Venezuela conflict before; it’s reasonable to ask, with Abrams in a key office, whether he has learned from the cruel and illegal positions he took in the Reagan years.
But more fundamentally, what’s striking about this video is how angry Abrams gets about being held to account for his past actions.
Oh, and pointing this out is not a defense of Nicolás Maduro, who combines malevolence and incompetence. This is also about the United States. And when Elliot Abrams is your public face, the message is more than a little malevolent and incompetent as well. Not to mention just plain gross. Abrams is a creep.
I’m a whiskey drinker be it Bourbon, sour mash, rye. I’m not gonna lie: I like it all whether you spell it with an E or not. One could even consider this a mash note to distilleries, domestic and foreign: I’m fond of Irish, Scottish, and Canadian whiskies as well. I’ll take some more Tullamore, please.
That’s why I’m dispirited by the news that American distilleries are suffering from the Teetotaler-in-Chief’s “easy to win” trade war; hereinafter ETWTW. Last Friday, China joined the European Union in slapping stiff tariffs on American whiskey.
The Insult Comedian is too busy bloviating about his stupid wall to notice that the ETWTW is biting two red states in the butt: bigly. Big Whiskey is centered in Kentucky and Tennessee but the ETWTW is hurting craft distilleries as well.
This old-fashioned trade war is like a whiskey sour with too much lemon juice. Where the hell are Chinless Mitch and Aqua Buddha in all of this? The former is too busy handling the Kaiser of Chaos and the latter is too busy blowing him to make a stand for whiskey. They’ve truly missed the Maker’s Mark. As to the Tennessee delegation, Lamar Alexander is retiring and Marsha Blackburn is too busy importing Bachmannism to the Senate to stand up for Jack Daniel’s. Sinatra would be horrified:
One of the ironies of Tariff Man Trump’s ETWTW is that it’s hurting red state America the most. Ask a soybean farmer. Here’s a little known fact: soybeans are the biggest cash crop in the Gret Stet of Louisiana and those folks are getting hosed by the ETWTW with China. Believe me.
Enough soybean palaver, back to whiskey. Since puns are big among wineries, I think it’s past time for distillers to follow suit. Here’s my suggestion:
In addition to being a helluva pun, it’s a reference to the minimalist modernist Dutch art movement of the 1920’s, De Stijl, which means The Style in Kentucky and Tennessee, y’all. The image is Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. It’s a winner, I tell ya.
The last word goes to the Dubliners:
How come nobody told me that there was a Thin Lizzy version of Whiskey In The Jar? I guess the boys were out of town that week:
Urban roosters are popular in New Orleans right now. The Meters were ahead of the trend with the cover of this 1970 LP released by Josie Records.
Struttin’ was the first Meters albums to feature vocals. The back cover promotes their first two releases, which was not uncommon back in the day. Dig the crazy striped bell bottoms.
Obviously, no Democrat would talk like Trump anyway, because that kind of bigoted talk would get a person drummed out of the country’s multiracial party even as it got him celebrated and elevated in the country’s white ethno-nationalist party.
I am saying, though, that Democrats should stop pretending they can unite the country. They can’t. No one can. What they can do, what they must do, is assemble a coalition of working- and middle-class voters of all races around a set of economic principles that will say clearly to those voters that things are going to be very different when they’re in the White House.
Emphasis mine. Consensus, as Mr. A is fond of saying in stupid meetings we’re in, is not unanimity. You don’t get to have everyone agree with you, and everyone agreeing is not a sign of anything anyway. You get the balance of people to commit to something and the people who want to get on board afterward can, but the people who won’t? Fuck ’em, Bucky, we got work to do.
We forget this all the time because so much of our politics is about talking but as a politician you are supposed to DO STUFF. I know cable news has warped everyone’s brain to the point that we think if two people are yelling at each other that automatically makes both of them wrong, but it doesn’t. And I know our ignorance of history leads us to think that there was some indeterminate point in the past where “we” all rallied around the flag but “we” didn’t. As many people agreed with McCarthy as fought against him. Post-9/11 there were waves of hate crimes and paranoia and let’s not forget all the torturing. During our last glorious period of unity in World War II we locked up a bunch of Japanese-Americans who probably weren’t feeling like we wanted their unity at that point.
We confuse the way we need to remember things with the way they happened, and that’s where our need for unity comes from. It’s childish horseshit and we should be above it by now. People are dying.
Democrats took back the House and a bunch of state legislatures last fall because they said to the voters, here is what we are going to DO FOR YOU. Lots of people liked that. Because some people didn’t doesn’t mean Democrats somehow failed to “unite the country.” It means some people don’t want to get on board with where most of us are going and that’s fine, for them, they get to live their lives, but we don’t have to spend all our time freaking out about what they think or stressing because there are 12 people out there we ain’t converted yet.
Bemoaning the end of comity is good Sunday show ratings but I know of nobody sitting in the pain clinic twitching for an opioid fix who gives a damn if Ilhan Omar was rude. I know of nobody on the phone yelling at their insurance company about a test their doctor says they need to stay alive who worries about Amy Klobuchar being an asshole in the office that one time, or even Joe Biden challenging Trump to a monster truck rally or whatever believes-his-own-press shit Joey has going on today.
People will get united real fast if we stop talking about unity and start giving them clean water, good jobs and free health care. The ones that won’t, eh. The bleached suburban bookclub assholes currently making common cause with Nazi hicks in the hills, fine, you get invited to the party but don’t expect me to change the menu, the venue and the seating just to convince you to show up. Show up or don’t. The rest of us, we got kiddie concentration camps to close.
I was in a beach store in Florida in December the last time I saw confederate merch. It was the kind of place full of polished shells and mugs that looked like sunburned bodies, and I was trying to talk myself out of buying overpriced tchotchkes for Kick. Turned the corner and BAM, a bunch of beer coozies with the stars and bars. Like they were just another souvenir.
Last summer, I contacted officials at the Essex County Fair about their vendor policy and got hung up on. The policy on their website makes no mention of offensive merchandise — same with the Franklin County Fair site. The Saratoga County vendor handbook refers to “offensive writing/pictures/graphics” in a list of prohibited products.
Letitia James said, “Confederate flags are a tribute to a dark, hateful and painful past and have no place in our society beyond the history books. State-funded fairs and events should not be peddlers and profiters of this, or any other hateful paraphernalia.”
I’d love to see the fairs adopt a clear statement of principle like that, or like this: “Racist products are banned at the fair.” That wasn’t hard. Why are some people making it hard?
The junior-high punks might have called her corny, but like most hobbies people mock you for in adolescence, it’s now one of her greatest assets. The flute is earning her Shade Room–blessed viral fame, especially after one particularly notable moment from a performance at the University of Iowa’s homecoming. As she tells it, that video was born out of a direct challenge to her ability to play the flute — or to perform at all. During sound check, a professor threatened to report her to campus police unless she showed permits. “The privilege that you have to have to walk up to young women, brown women, black women, and yell, ‘Do you have a permit to be here?’ While we’re clearly onstage with microphones singing and dancing,” says Lizzo, shaking off phantom pangs of annoyance. She was so fired up that night, she told the audience the story, then ripped into a flute reworking of “Big Shot,” from Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, while she and her two dancers, dubbed the Big GRRRLS, hit the shoot with more ferocious joy than BlocBoy JB ever had, even though he invented the dance. She ended by lobbing her trademark “Bitch!”
“That ‘Bitch!’ was from the bottom of my heart,” Lizzo tells me. “That was for anybody who tries to stop my shine and tries to challenge my existence. Don’t challenge my motherfucking right to be here, bitch.”
There are some probably-not-strictly-SFW images at the link, and they are awesome.
President* Trump will be polluting the air in El Paso, Texas this evening. Beto O’Rourke, who is presumably done with his Dean Moriarty shtick, is off the road and will hold his own rally in rebuttal of the Insult Comedian.
That picture looks seriously photoshopped. Trump isn’t orange enough. Perhaps he missed a day on the White House tanning bed.
I’ve been hoping to use Asshole In El Paso as a post title forever. Thanks, Trumpy.
I’ve never seen the movie Horrible Bosses but, like everyone else, I’ve had some bad bosses. Besides, I know a good title when I see one. I have, however, seen 9 to 5 and it’s hard to imagine them being worse fictional bosses than Dabney Fucking Coleman.
In case you’re wondering where this is going, there was a spate of negative press last week about the latest entrant into the presidential race, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. According to articles in a slew of online publications, she’s a horrible boss. (Spate & Slew sounds like a shystery law firm.) The fact that there were so many articles right before her announcement ignited my bullshit detector. I don’t believe in coincidences.
There was a lot of melodrama on the tweeter tube about Klobuchar the bad boss. Some even wondered if she could continue in the Senate let alone run for president. I didn’t see anything disqualifying. She’s obviously a very difficult person to work for BUT so are many hard-driving workaholics out there including other Senators. not to mention lawyers, which is the workplace milieu from which Klobuchar comes.
The Klobuchar as bad boss articles are another example of the double standard at work. I don’t recall any MALE presidential contenders being judged on how they treated their staff, but it’s a thing because her name is Amy, not Arnie. She’s a piker, however, compared to LBJ or Trump whose staff is apparently in open rebellion. BTW, George W. Bush was a sweetheart of a boss but he was a horrible president.
Women in professional positions are judged by a higher standard than men. In the legal profession, many men are skeptical that women are tough enough to be lawyers, let alone bosses. Senator Klobuchar is 58 so she had to prove herself tough and worthy to older, often sexist, lawyers. Hence her horrible bossery. It’s not a management style I like, but it’s a dog eat dog world out there and you don’t want to be like Cheers barfly Norm Peterson and wear Milk Bone underwear.
My suggestion to Democratic primary voters is that they consider the information about Klobuchar’s management style alongside her record in office. If you don’t like what you’ve heard, support someone else. There are a lot of good candidates running. So many that I remain undecided.
There’s an upside for Klobuchar from the horrible boss stories: it proves that she’s tough enough to be president despite her Minnesota nice exterior. Additionally, if elected, she’ll work for us, not vice versa. And the American people can be horrible bosses too. Just ask the surviving staff members of the two recent presidents who were not re-elected: Jimmy Carter and Poppy Bush.
President Donald Trump suggested that he is ready to ditch his Inauguration Day promise of a “Hire American” economic policy — even though thousands of auto workers are being laid off, millions of Americans do not have jobs, and many millions of Americans cannot get better-paying jobs.
The huge policy shift in favor of employers and investors is emerging after Congress blocked his border wall and his border security reforms, and after the GOP-led Congress passed Trump’s tax cut.
“It is fair to say that the President is abandoning his Hire American policy,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
One of the draft visa-worker expansions is dubbed “country caps.” It would remove diversity provisions in immigration law to allow employers to offer citizenship to roughly 100,000 Indian outsourcing workers each year if they agree to cheaply replace the American graduates who are now working in well-paid software, accounting, design, engineering, medicine, and education careers. The panel is expected to draft their plan by February 15.
On Wednesday, Trump reaffirmed the pro-migration statement when he was asked by a reporter “So, you’re changing your policy officially, then? You want more legal immigration?”
Trump answered “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.”
“Our unemployment numbers are so low,” Trump said.
On February 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate was at 4 percent. But it also showed that 12.5 million Americans are either unemployed or want to get jobs. In the 1960s, roughly 97 percent of men aged 25 to 54 worked — but that percentage dropped to 80 percent in 2009 and was still only at 86.2 percent in December 2018.
I tell my son and his friends that if they plan on going into tech to expect to have a shorter career than other options. It pisses me off but I accept that it’s part of the industry. The youth bias is very difficult to overcome. The H1-B program and available staff offshore definitely makes it easier for employers to dump older tech workers.
