Tag: history

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker: 1945

Seth Anderson0 comment

tumblr_lwcwzvrsEd1qz4m9to1_1280.png

Sounds intriguing, especially since not much music was recorded during these years of the creation of bebop since the war effort curtailed the recording industry.

The historic live Town Hall sessions by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker from 1945 have been discovered on an acetate pressing, and are transferred with digital enhancement to CD. Why this concert was not issued initially is understandable, but Ira Gitler’s informative and insightful liner notes suggest they likely were misplaced. What Gitler’s essential writing also reveals is that these dates were approximate by only weeks to the original studio recordings of these classics, and there was no small amount of controversy surrounding this revolutionary bebop. Clearly bop was a vehicle for intricate melodic invention followed by lengthy soloing, aspects of which Parker with Gillespie were perfectly suited for.

Fact is, the situation surrounding the sonic capture and extended neglected shelf life of this performance was far from optimal. Symphony Sid Torin is the M.C., rambling as always, making repeated references to Dizzy “Jillespie” and misidentifying Max Roach as Sid Catlett on “Salt Peanuts.” (Catlett does sit in on “Hot House” in a more supportive than demonstrative role.)

The tracks with the brilliant Roach are on fire, particularly the super-hot “Salt Peanuts,” with pianist Al Haig flying beside him. Haig is perhaps the most impressive musician. The rhythm section, especially Haig, is more present in the mix and up front, while the trumpet and alto sax are buried.

As the concert progresses, it gets better, with Gillespie’s muted trumpet clearer. Parker lays back on the mike, but not in spirit or bravado for “Interlude,” which is now known as “A Night in Tunisia,” and better balanced during “Groovin’ High,” which was originally titled “Whispering.” There seems to be an unplanned slight key chance in the bridge of “Groovin’ High.” A late-arriving Parker was in part replaced by tenor saxophonist Don Byas, who sounds terrific on the opener, “Bebop,” until Parker steps on-stage and ups the ante. At under 41 minutes in length, this can be looked upon as a historical document, likely appealing only to completists. But the overriding factor of previously undiscovered Diz and Bird makes the CD something all bebop fans should readily embrace, despite its audio deficiencies.

(click here to continue reading iTunes – Music – Dizzy Gillespie: Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945 by Dizzy Gillespie.)

I’ve read1 that the reason Charlie Parker was late was because he was wandering the streets of New York looking to score some heroin, and then fixed before he started playing. This was the Bird’s typical routine apparently.

Footnotes:
  1. in Outlaw Blues, and elsewhere [↩]

JFK gets schooled on Chicago-style politics

Seth Anderson0 comment

Was it a golden time for  politics? Or is it just that our current toxic political climate is so much worse than anyone could imagine? I cannot imagine President Obama having this frank of a discussion with Mayor Bloomberg of NYC for instance…

Picasso on The Cross
Picasso on The Cross, Daley Plaza

Clarence Page reports:

I came across a telling example of how Boss Daley’s talents of persuasion could come in handy as a force for good behind one of my favorite pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In Chris Matthews’ new bestseller, “Elusive Hero,” the NBC and MSNBC talk-show host excerpts transcripts of a taped conversation between Daley and John F. Kennedy. The president was rounding up votes for the civil rights bill in late October 1963.

It was two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march on Washington — and only a month, it would turn out, before Kennedy would be killed in Dallas.

On this day, the White House taping system picked up Kennedy asking Daley for help. Rep. Roland V. Libonati, a Chicago Democrat like Daley, was holding up the act, Kennedy said. The congressman wanted a tougher bill. The trouble was that if Libonati had his way, the bill would lose the Republican support it needed to survive opposition from southern segregationist Democrats.

“He’ll vote for it,” Daley said calmly. “He’ll vote for any (expletive) thing you want.”

Kennedy laughs. “Well,” he said, “can you get him?”

“I surely can,” said Daley, who added later, “He’ll do it. The last time I, I told him, ‘Now look it, I don’t give a (expletive) what it is, you vote for it, for anything the president wants and this is the way it will be and this (is) the way it’s gonna be.'”

That, as the old-timers used to say, is how you get things done in the city.

(click here to continue reading JFK gets schooled on Chicago-style politics – chicagotribune.com.)

 

Jack the Ripper identity still a secret

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First Site of Scotland Yard
First Site of Scotland Yard

Weird, and I wonder why Scotland Yard is keeping 123 year old records secret?

Scotland Yard recently turned down a request to release the thick Victorian ledgers that contain the police reports, tips, clues and maybe a theory or two about Jack the Ripper. And that’s fueling a new round of speculation about Jack. Was he just a drifter who left London as authorities closed in, or could he — gasp! — have been a royal? Did police ever get close to figuring it out?

Jack the Ripper slit the throats of five women in London’s squalid Whitechapel district in 1888. The murderer used almost surgical precision.

Retired homicide detective Trevor Marriott is the latest sleuth to try to unmask the killer. Marriott believes Jack was a German sailor. And he says he’s oh, so close to proving it.

But the British government won’t play along.

(click here to continue reading jack the ripper’s identity still a secret – chicagotribune.com.)

 

The Crimean War – By Orlando Figes

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Crimean War Memorial
Crimean War Memorial

I’ll have to  look for this book, my knowledge of this era is fairly shallow.

The Crimean War was the first major war to be covered by professional foreign correspondents, who reported on the disastrous blundering of commanders and the horrors of medical treatment at the battlefront. Today, we remember fragmentary stories: the charge of the Light Brigade, symbolizing the blundering; Florence Nightingale, for the medical treatment. But the real war has faded away, eclipsed by the two vastly worse world wars that were to come.

Still, the Crimean War — in which three-quarters of a million soldiers and untold multitudes of civilians perished — shattered almost four decades of European peace. It inflamed Russia’s rivalry with the Ottoman Empire over the Balkans, providing the tinder for World War I. And by thwarting Russian’s ambitions in Europe, it made possible the fatal rise of Germany.

In “The Crimean War: A History,” Orlando Figes restores the conflict — which predated the American Civil War by eight years — as “a major turning point” in European and Middle Eastern history. He argues forcefully that it was “the earliest example of a truly modern war — fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph, important innovations in military medicine and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene.” The ferocious yearlong siege of Sevastopol “was a precursor of the industrialized trench warfare” of World War I.

The war itself was initiated when religious squabbles over holy places in the Ottoman towns of Jerusalem and Bethlehem prompted Russia to march troops into present-day Romania, threatening the partition of Ottoman lands. In response, the Ottoman Empire declared war, and Britain and France rallied to its defense. The devastating combat around the Black Sea proved unbearable for Russia: two-thirds of the soldiers killed in the war were Russian. After losing Sevastopol, Russia accepted a humiliating peace.

Figes, a renowned professor of history at the University of London, might be thought the loneliest of creatures, the Crimean War buff. But his history is a huge success

(click here to continue reading Book Review – The Crimean War – By Orlando Figes – NYTimes.com.)

There’s an excerpt here or at the iTunes iBook store if you are interested but still undecided…

The Secret Knowledge – By David Mamet – sucks

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Cab 6570

Unfortunately, David Mamet, author of such seminal works as Glengary, Glenn Ross and quality films such as The Untouchables, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and The Verdict has become a Tea Party, Know-Nothing conservative Republican. Sad, really.

Anyway, Christopher Hitchens, himself a late-blooming conservative, yet still a critical thinker, eviscerates David Mamet’s autobiography, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.

Read, and chuckle

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:

“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”

Or this:

“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”

Some of David Mamet’s unqualified declarations are made even more tersely. On one page affirmative action is described as being “as injust as chattel slavery”; on another as being comparable to the Japanese internment and the Dred Scott decision. We learn that 1973 was the year the United States “won” the Vietnam War, and that Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin — “never worked a day in his life.” Slackness or confusion might explain his reference to the ­Scottish-Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook as a Jewish courtier in the tradition of Disraeli and Kissinger, but it is more than ignorant to say of Bertrand Russell — author of one of the first reports from Moscow to analyze and excoriate Lenin — that he was a fellow-traveling dupe and tourist of the Jane Fonda style.

Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in “The Secret Knowledge” that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.

(click here to continue reading and chuckling Book Review – The Secret Knowledge – By David Mamet – NYTimes.com.)

 

Generation PC, 1964-73

Seth Anderson0 comment

G3 case open

Never really liked any of the names for my generation, but Generation PC is not bad. I first used a computer in 6th grade, learned a little BASIC and Fortran in high school, even owned a Timex-Sinclair that used a cassette player to store programs on, etc. I started writing college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my time at UT, was using a computer and a dot-matrix printer. In other words, computers were growing up at the same time I was

We PCers were in our teens and 20s in the Eighties (1984-93; not to be confused with the ’80s); and in our 20s and 30s in the Nineties (1994-2003; not to be confused with the ’90s). Our immediate elders — the OGX — managed to squeak through the Seventies without being noticed by lifestyle journalists, management consultants, marketers, and pop demographers — because, according to the statistics, they were the tail end of the baby boom. This made OGXers feel neglected, and they preferred it that way; in fact, they built a negatively-charged generational identity around their non-Boomerness.

…

A 1993 New York Times story described “the postboom, pre-millennium set” as baby busters, baby boomerangs, New Lost Generation, twentysomethings, Generation X, slackers, 13ers. (All of which were actually attempts to name the cohort I’ve called the OGX.) The NYT writer went on to list some harsher labels — latchkeys, technobabies, videos, cyborgs, posties, protos (for proto-adults), borders, downbeats, mall rats, nowheres, burnouts, remotes — before settling for blanks. All very confusing.

If you ask me, these various latter terms were attempts (by frightened and resentful older Americans) to capture two unique aspects of PCers.

1) PCers were the first American generation to grow up with PERSONAL COMPUTERS.

Personal computers — which were less powerful, and cost much less than (first-generation) business, scientific, and engineering-oriented desktop computers — entered the market in 1977, with RadioShack’s TRS-80, Commodore’s PET, and Apple’s Apple II, all sold for purposes of education, game play, and personal productivity use. In 1981, when the oldest PCers were turning 17, IBM introduced its PC; in ‘84, when the youngest PCers were turning 11, Apple introduced the Apple Macintosh. Although my family had a personal computer, I brought a typewriter to college in ‘86; the following year, the school’s new computer lab opened, and typewriters suddenly became obsolete.

As Time would point out in a “Whoops! We were wrong!” cover story in 1997, we PCers (no longer called twentysomethings, by the perennially confused magazine, but Generation X; this error is compounded by the fact that — this time — Time was lumping together PCers and older members of the Net generation) weren’t slackers, after all. In fact, we were “flocking to technology start-ups.” During the dot-com boom of the Nineties (1994-2003), PC-savvy PCers founded Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Amazon, Razorfish, The Silicon Alley Reporter, CNET, Excite, Hotmail, theGlobe.com, Feed, Suck, Netscape, PayPal, and Tripod (full disclosure: I worked at Tripod), among other pioneering outfits. More recently, PCers have founded or developed: MySpace, Wikipedia, Gawker Media, Second Life, Blogger.com, Fark.com, plus KaZaA, Skype, Joost, others. Oh yeah, PCers also started Linux.

(click here to continue reading Generation PC, 1964-73 – Brainiac – The Boston Globe.)

Apple Logos

A few of my cohorts:

Spike Jonze, Christy Turlington, Rick Perlstein, Philip Rosedale, James Frey, Marilyn Manson, Jason Bateman, David Grohl, Jason Priestley, Bobby Brown, Jennifer Aniston, Chastity Bono, Donnie Wahlberg, Mariah Carey, Arthur Phillips, Paul Rudd, Sarah Vowell, Renee Zellweger, RZA, Everlast, Susan Choi, Aimee Bender, Rebecca Odes, MC Ren, Kelly Link, Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez, Elliott Smith, Daniel Radosh, Edward Norton, Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson, Christian Slater, Jack Black, Alison Smith, Dweezil Zappa, Kevin Corrigan, Gwen Stefani, Elizabeth Gilbert, Trey Parker, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Matthew McConaughey, Ellen Pompeo, Jay-Z. Elsewhere: Sophie Okonedo, Cate Blanchett, Edwidge Danticat, Matthew Perry, David Mitchell, Rachel Hunter, Marjane Satrapi, Pankaj Mishra, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hari Kunzru, Julie Delpy, Linus Torvalds.

First Ramps of the Season

Seth Anderson0 comment

Look what I got today from Harmony Valley, WI, via Freshpicks.com

First Ramps of the season
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone1

Allium tricoccum — also known as the ramp, spring onion, ramson, wild leek, wild garlic, and, in French, ail sauvage and ail des bois — is an early spring vegetable with a strong garlicky odor and a pronounced onion flavor. A perennial member of the onion family (Alliaceae), the plant has broad, smooth, light green leaves, often with deep purple or burgundy tints on the lower stems, and a scallion-like stalk and bulb. Both the white lower leaf stalks and the broad green leaves are edible. The flower stalk appears after the leaves have died back, unlike the similar Allium ursinum, in which leaves and flowers can be seen at the same time. Ramps grow in groups strongly rooted just beneath the surface of the soil. They are found from the U.S. state of South Carolina to Canada. They are popular in the cuisines of the rural upland South and in the Canadian province of Quebec when they emerge in the springtime. They have a growing popularity in upscale restaurants throughout North America.

A thick growth of ramps near Lake Michigan in Illinois in the 17th century gave the city of Chicago its name, after the area was described by 17th-century explorer Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, and explained by his comrade, naturalist-diarist Henri Joutel.

The plant called Chicagou in the language of native tribes was once thought to be Allium cernuum, the nodding wild onion, but research in the early 1990s showed the correct plant was the ramp. The ramp has strong associations with the folklore of the central Appalachian Mountains. Fascination and humor have fixated on the plant’s extreme pungency. Jim and Bronson Comstock founded The West Virginia Hillbilly, a weekly humor and heritage newspaper, in 1957, and ramps were a frequent topic. For one legendary issue, Jim Comstock introduced ramp juice into the printer’s ink, invoking the ire of the U.S. Postmaster General. The mountain folk of Appalachia have long celebrated spring with the arrival of the ramp, believing it to have great power as a tonic to ward off many ailments of winter. A ramp bath was featured in the film Where the Lilies Bloom (1974) about life in North Carolina.

(click here to continue reading Allium tricoccum – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. Lens: John S, Film: Kodot XGrizzled [↩]

CCP Holden Building purchased by SCC

Seth Anderson3 Comments

CCP Holden 1872

Good news re: an old, seemingly abandoned historic Chicago building on W. Madison. Local ad agency Schafer Condon Carter has purchased it, and it going to restore it. I don’t know how much they paid, nor how much they’ve budgeted to modernize it, but I’m happy they are doing so.

An employee left the following comment on the above Flickr photo:

Hey, good news! The advertising agency I work for, Schafer Condon Carter, recently bought the building and are in the early stages of internal demolition. We will be moved in by November of this year! The space has been vacant for quite some time and desperately needs some love which we’re all excited to give it! You can track the buildings progress from our site, www.sccadv.com. We will be installing time-lapsing cameras to catch its development. Cheers.

and via www.urbanremainschicago.com/item.aspx?itemID=700

charles p. holden was a well-known chicago resident during the 1860’s & 70’s. he was deeply involved in real estate and/or development in and around the westside of chicago. this particular building was built shortly after the great chicago fire of 1871. as a consequence of the fire, this structure contains 8 seperate vaults w/ ornamental cast iron safe doors. that way, any valuable assets stashed away could be rescued if another conflaguration was to arise. in addition to the vaults, the first floor contained cast iron fluted columns w. corinthian capitals. the window and door casings were milled in a deep relief pine wood (typical of this period). interestingly, the load bearing columns on all of the upper floors were fashioned in the form of rounded wood columns w/ simple banding near the cap. the decorative stone facade will be rehabilitated during the building’s conversion to other uses.

From the SCC website:

Schafer|Condon|Carter (SCC) is pleased to announce its purchase of the C.C.P. Holden building at 1027 W. Madison Street in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. The agency plans to move its operations to the 34,500 square-foot building in the fall of 2011 after an extensive renovation.

C.C.P. Holden, a well-known Chicago political figure, railroad magnate and real estate developer was very involved in the massive reconstruction efforts after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and built the Italianate limestone, sandstone, terra cotta, brick and timber structure in 1872. It is one of only a handful of such architectural gems in Chicago. SCC will be working with Chicago-based Widler Architecture on the restoration.  When finished it will be a model of conservation and sustainability.

(click here to continue reading Schafer | Condon | Carter.)

1872 C C P Holden
another view

I’ll have to stop over there later this summer and see what changes are visible from the outside.

Gandhi Biography by Joseph Lelyveld Roils India

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Aphrodesia

Why would it matter if Gandhi was bisexual? His deeds wouldn’t change, only the description of his private life would be more precise. Banning books is never the correct answer.

GANDHI is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide.

The problem, say those who have fanned the flames of popular outrage this week, is that the book suggests that the father of modern India was bisexual.

The book’s author, Joseph Lelyveld, does write extensively about the close relationship Mohandas K. Gandhi had with a German architect1, but he denies that the book, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” makes any such argument.

In an interview Mr. Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, said he thought he had “treaded very carefully” with the information, which he knew was delicate.

“I lived in India, and there’s an Indian word called tamasha,” he said, which translates to “spectacle.” “I’m surprised to find myself at the center of one, because I think this is a careful book, and I consider myself a friend of India.”

Still, this week Gujarat, the state where Gandhi was born and grew up, banned the book after reviews and news articles about it appeared in Indian newspapers. Gujarat is particularly conservative — alcohol can’t be sold in there, for instance — and the state is governed by a Hindu nationalist party.

(click here to continue reading Gandhi Biography by Joseph Lelyveld Roils India – NYTimes.com.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. Hermann Kallenbach, the German-Jewish architect with whom Gandhi lived in Johannesburg [↩]

The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology

Seth Anderson0 comment

Artifactual Nonchalance

Ah, the sounds of my youth. Vinyl record scratches, dial tones, busy signals, typewriter keys clacking, modems squawking even. I’m with David Pogue, and will miss these sounds as they join previously vanished sounds, horses clomping on cobblestone streets, ship masts creaking, and steam rail engines.

Then there’s the record-scratch sound, still used frequently in ads and comic scenes to indicate someone’s train of thought going off the rails. Isn’t it weird that we still use that sound? For the most part, the last 20 years’ worth of viewers and listeners have never even heard that sound in real life! (In a 2008 NPR segment, the host asked some teenagers if they could identify the sound. They couldn’t. “I have no idea…. I know I saw it on TV.”)

And then there’s the rewind/fast-forward gibberish sounds — of TAPE. What will they do in the movies, now that random-access digital video formats deprive producers of that audience-cueing sound?

What about modem-dialing shrieks? Sure, we’re all thrilled to have always-on Internet connections. But wasn’t there something satisfying, something understandable, about that staticky call-and-response from our computers to the mothership?

We’re losing the dial tone, too. Cellphones don’t have dial tones. Only landlines do, and those are rapidly disappearing. And without the dial tone, how will movie producers ever indicate that someone’s hung up on a character? (Even though that was an unrealistic depiction to begin with.)

Funny thing is, we’re replacing these sounds mainly with… nothing! What’s the sound of broadband? Of rewinding a CD?

(click here to continue reading The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology -David Pogue – NYTimes.com.)

 

Artists and Payoffs

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Romans Discussing Motor Scooters 1993

Justin Moyer tries to point the finger at artists who play for “undesirables”

Paul Robeson penned a tribute to Stalin. Bob Marley played for Robert Mugabe. And Paul Simon and Queen performed in apartheid-era South Africa. Chart-topping musicians don’t just win Grammys and score endorsement deals – they get paid mega-bucks to perform in unsavory places for unsavory people. Usually no one pays attention.

But not last week. When the big paydays that R&B stars got from the Gaddafi family became public, critics lashed out faster than Naomi Campbell denying taking blood diamonds.

(click here to continue reading Beyonce and Mariah Carey sang for the Gaddafis. Now they’re changing their tune..)

Well, except all of the examples Justin Moyers cites were big deals. I had heard of all of them, and so did you too in all probability. Not to mention that these incidents took place in the quaint era before internet gossip rags, and before the 24 hour cable news networks set the agenda.

Let’s peek at how big of a deal, via the magic of Google.

  1. Paul Robeson and Stalin yields: about 149,000 hits
  2. Bob Marley and Robert Mugabe: about 47,000 hits
  3. Paul Simon in apartheid-era South Africa: about 382,000 hits
  4. Queen Plays in South Africa: about 15,600,000 hits, some1 of which are about the performing artists who performed as Queen.

So, on to the bigger point: should we criticize the artists who took money from dictators, and bankers, and other undesirables? Or the Medicis, or Bill Gates? Even if the artists are already wealthy, like Beyonce, Usher, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Lionel Richie, 50 Cent? I don’t like the music of any of these pop stars who took Libyan blood-for-oil dollars, but that isn’t relevant. Unless the National Endowment of the Arts suddenly becomes a pet project of the G.O.P.2, artists should be able to get paid without sniping from the chattering classes.

Footnotes:
  1. most? [↩]
  2. ha ha, I know, bad joke [↩]

Oriental Consistory

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oriental Consistory

From the NYT, April 18, 1905

High Masons At Chicago
Members of the Masonic Order assembled here today to celebrate the golden jubilee of the Oriental Consistory. The new home of the Oriental Consistory, at Dearborn Avenue and Walton Place, is to be dedicated.

Members are here from England, Turkey, France, Hawaii, and Cuba. The one hundredth convention of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of the Valley of Chicago is also being held.

 

Lupercalia

Seth Anderson2 Comments

A Velvia Kiss

Thought by many to be the genesis of St. Valentine’s Day, and thus Hallmark’s Day1, Lupercalia was a fertility orgy celebrated today.

Lupercalia was an ancient pastoral festival, observed on February 13 through 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Lupercalia subsumed Februa, an earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February its name. The Lupercalia by name was believed in antiquity to have some connection with the Ancient Greek festival of the Arcadian Lykaia (from Ancient Greek: λύκος — lykos, “wolf”, Latin lupus) and the worship of Lycaean Pan, the Greek equivalent to Faunus, as instituted by Evander.

In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a god sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus, who is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan.

Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins. The 2nd-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr mentions an image of “the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus,”] nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, on the Ides of February, a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt.

Plutarch described Lupercalia:

Lupercalia, of which many write that it was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.

…

The festival began with the sacrifice by the Luperci (or the flamen dialis) of two male goats and a dog. Next two young patrician Luperci were led to the altar, to be anointed on their foreheads with the sacrificial blood, which was wiped off the bloody knife with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and laugh.

The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the victims, which were called Februa, dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran round the walls of the old Palatine city, the line of which was marked with stones, with the thongs in their hands in two bands, striking the people who crowded near. Girls and young women would line up on their route to receive lashes from these whips. This was supposed to ensure fertility, prevent sterility in women and ease the pains of childbirth. This tradition itself may survive (Christianised, and shifted to Spring) in certain ritual Easter Monday whippings.

 

(click here to continue reading Lupercalia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Sounds like fun! If it wasn’t so cold in Chicago, I might gird my loins with a goatskin and wander the West Loop whipping young lasses…

Footnotes:
  1. as I call Valentine’s Day [↩]

Ten Reasons Ronald Reagan Ain’t All That

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Shouldn't That Be a Right Turn?

Ronald Reagan was never a hero of mine – he was the President right as I became interested in politics, and his genial, fact-free hatred of everything liberal still irks me. Even worse is how the conservatives worship him as a god, conveniently omitting mention of all of deeds that don’t conform to the Reagan myth.

Tomorrow will mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon. Senate Republicans spent much of Thursday singing Reagan’s praise from the Senate floor, while conservative publications have been running non-stop commemorations. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich are hoping to make a few bucks off the Gipper’s centennial.

But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. This image of Reagan as a conservative superhero is myth, created to untie the various factions of the right behind a common leader. In reality, Reagan was no conservative ideologue or flawless commander-in-chief. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma — he raised taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit — and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill.

ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention when talking about President Reagan:

…

Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?“

(click here to continue reading ThinkProgress » 10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan.)

Especially humorous is Ronnie’s record re raising taxes:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.

Some counter-programming:

 

The Ronald Reagan who won the cold war, cut taxes, shrank the government, saved the economy, and was the most beloved president since FDR is a myth, Bunch says. The cold war fizzled out primarily because of Soviet economic collapse. Reagan cut taxes just once, in 1991, and thereafter raised them yearly. He vastly expanded the government and burdened the economy with enormous deficits. Moreover, his approval ratings were just average, reflecting his divisiveness as a political figure. Bunch also shows that however tough-talking, Reagan was a negotiator who achieved nuclear arms reductions by talking with Soviet leader Gorbachev and got into the Iran-Contra mess because he wouldn’t send combat troops abroad. In practice, especially of foreign policy, he was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. The truculent jingoist of the myth was concocted after Alzheimer’s silenced the man and the would-be juggernaut launched by the GOP’s 1994 election triumph crashed and burned before a Democratic president who shrank government and the deficit, balanced the budget, and even racked up surpluses. Bunch names the leading, venal mythmakers and shames the myth exploiters, too. Anyone interested in America’s immediate future should read this book.

And a bit of historical perspective from Peter Dreier:

During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession.

These trends were not caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology.

Reagan is often lauded as “the great communicator,” but what he often communicated were lies and distortions. For example, during his stump speeches, while dutifully promising to roll back welfare, Reagan often told the story of a so-called “welfare queen” in Chicago who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using eighty aliases, thirty addresses, a dozen Social Security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Journalists searched for this “welfare cheat” in the hopes of interviewing her and discovered that she didn’t exist. But this phony imagery of “welfare cheats” persisted and helped lay the groundwork for cuts to programs that help the poor, including children.

Reagan’s most famous statement—“Government is not a solution to our problem. Government is the problem”—has become the unofficial slogan for the recent resurgence of right-wing extremism. The rants of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the lunacy of Tea Party, the policy ideas promulgated by propaganda outfits like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation masquerading as think tanks and the takeover of the Republican Party by its most conservative wing were all incubated during the Reagan years. Indeed, they all claim to be carrying out the Reagan Revolution.

What did that revolution bring us?

Many Americans credit Reagan with reducing the size of government. In reality, he increased government spending, cut taxes and turned the United States from a creditor to a debtor nation. During his presidency, Reagan escalated the military budget while slashing funds for domestic programs that assisted working-class Americans and protected consumers and the environment. Not surprisingly, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush followed in Reagan’s footsteps.

(click here to continue reading Reagan’s Real Legacy | The Nation.)

Rockefeller and Reagan

Greg Mitchell interviewed Eugene Jarecki about the upcoming HBO film about Reagan, which truth be told, I probably don’t have the intestinal fortitude to sit through.

An orgy of Ronald Reagan worship, including at the Super Bowl, will roll out today to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.  For those who can stand to wait another day for a more evenhanded, though often critical, assessment, HBO will be airing Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, fresh from Sundance, titled Reagan, on Monday night at nine. Jarecki (left) is best known as the director of the acclaimed docs, Why We Fight and The Trials of Henry Kissinger (and, more recently Freakonomics).  Reagan is  an extremely well-made film, featuring some expected and some surprising talking heads, plus occasional spurts of fun provided by a Daily Show clip, Phil Hartman’s famous SNL skit portraying two faces of Reagan (public bumbler, private strongman),  and even a Simpsons moment.

Reagan’s two sons take center stage.  That would be the rightwing radio talk show ranter Michael Reagan (who was adopted) and the much more liberal Ron Reagan.   Others interviewed include familiar Reaganites such as George Schultz, James Baker and Grover Norquist, and what Jarecki calls ‘honest brokers” including Tom Frank, Andrew Bacevich, Will Bunch, Frances Fitzgerald, James Mann and Simon Johnson.

At Sundance, Jarecki admitted he had “an axe to grind,” but not so much to expose Reagan as a bad guy but to dispel various “myths” that absurdly enlarge — or diminish – him.  He also revealed that he had received a fair amount of criticism from some who feel the film is too kind to Reagan.  Indeed, its first half paints a largely favorable picture of the man’s early life and rise to the governor’s mansion in California, but the second half, on his presidency and fallout from it, proves largely critical.   What that means is that viewers who like the first half are more likely to stick around and learn something in the latter sections.

“The Reagan sales pitch has been going on a long time,” Jarecki told me in an interview this week.  “If people see the real Reagan they may learn a lot.  What’s amazing is how much we are told about Reagan today is only half true,” if that.

(click here to continue reading “Reagan” Comes to HBO: An Interview With Director Eugene Jarecki | The Nation.)

Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb

Seth Anderson0 comment

This looks rather interesting

Roscoe Holcomb is one of the giant iconic figures in American traditional music. He personified the “high lonesome sound” so celebrated and admired today for its powerful and haunting effect. His style of singing and his brilliant banjo and guitar playing transport the listener straight back to the earliest roots of American music, a style that remained vital in his native eastern Kentucky long after disappearing everywhere else. Although Roscoe died in 1981, his masterful performances have only gained in recognition and respect since then. This DVD gathers together 2 documentaries about Roscoe made by filmmaker John Cohen and classic performances captured in the 1960s. It presents a comprehensive overview of Roscoe’s great and varied artistry as well as offering an incisive and intimate portrait of the man himself and his background and environment.

(click to continue reading Amazon.com: Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb: Roscoe Holcomb: Movies & TV.)

ABC published this:

Odds are you haven’t heard of Roscoe Holcomb. If you’re a fan of American music, though, his is most certainly a voice worth hearing.

Holcomb was the “high lonesome” singer of eastern Kentucky, a man whom performers from John Cohen to Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton revered as a source of spare, original mountain music and the hardship behind it. His voice, which reached almost into falsetto at times, told of work and pain and wondering — stoicism and emotion delivered by a man on a porch with his banjo and the traditions within him.

In the early 1960s, Cohen, a musician and historian, traveled to Kentucky to film a stark, black-and-white movie about Holcomb called “The High Lonesome Sound.” It helped propel the aging Holcomb into a career that took him away from manual labor and, for a time, into a world of performance where people appreciated him for his music.

Now, Cohen has taken unused footage from that session and several others to create a compelling new movie, “Roscoe Holcomb From Daisy, Kentucky.” It is the anchor of a definitive new DVD called “The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb” that also features other rare video of performances and a copy of the original 1962 movie.

Quiet, introspective and moody, the new film reveals a man trying to make sense of his life and his music — a kind of music that Dylan referred to as “an untamed sense of control.” In long, lingering clips around Holcomb’s house, interspersed with performances, he comes across as a man lost in time, figuring himself out. In short: authenticity, the kind that any Nashville wannabe today would hand over his pickup and his hound to acquire.

(click to continue reading Review: DVD Revisits a ‘High Lonesome’ Musician – ABC News.)