Lincoln's Birthday

"Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups." - Heather Cox Richardson on Lincoln's Birthday.

Classic Era Electro-Disco Valhalla

 "Lift Off," Patrick Cowley (1981): Disco did not die in 1979 but had a big litter of hyphenated disco babies. And should countdowns to Lift Off and exploding rocket engines count as Space Rock? 

 

"Hills of Katmandu (Disco Mix)," Tantra (1979): Italo Disco legend Celso Valli's late-classic era disco project; electro-disco w/ exotic and cheesy Eurasian melodies.  

"Magic Fly," Space (1977): I think Space also might figure somehow in the Italo Disco story that gets crazy big popular in Europe in the 1980s. I don't really know but I know there are scads of CD compilations of Italo Disco from the '80s with scores of acts doing something a little closer to Eurythmics Brit New Pop than Tantra or Space's proto-Eurodisco. But the Space Disco thing remains such a big thing all the way through the Italo Disco early 1980s; so big I've seen a best-of Italo Space Disco collection. I've read a couple of books I liked about Spaghetti Westerns but none yet about Italo Disco or Italo House; or maybe it should be 1980s Eurodisco? Like the Spaghetti's nickname leaves out Spanish, German, and other contributions from other parts of Europe in the making of Euro-Westerns. Presumably, the Italian designation means a lot of the production happens in Italy but this record is from France. I do remember reading somewhere (probably Wikipedia) that the production of Italo Disco records really doesn't take off in the early '80s until after the music industry in America abandons disco in 1979 (b/c, remember, some classic rock longhairs burn some disco records in effigy at a Chicago White Sox game in the late summer of that year). When the American disco imports dried up young people into disco in Europe had to make their own records, the story goes, but "Magic Fly," No. 1 in France, proves they were already making their very own disco, Space Disco, even before American disco imports had stopped. Another one for Team Disco. 

 

America, Allen Ginsberg (1956)

 Some favorite lines: 

America when will we end the human war? 

America why are your libraries full of tears? 

You should see me reading Marx! 

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. 

It occurs to me that I am America. America I am the Scottsboro boys. [Member of the crowd: "You are!] 

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? 

[Crowd stomps and cheers.]

There are many more but if ever there were a poem in which the words on the page do not do justice to a reading this would be one. Ginsberg's stoned humor is infectious. He builds the crowd to a frenzy. I don't know literary poetry from the scrawlings in a public bathroom, some of latter of which this reading actually resembles. But I get Ginsberg is "undressing" America, dressing her down, waxing sentimental about the radical dreamers like himself residing in her flower pots, mocking America, teasing her with a pinch of hopefulness and delirious despair. 

If you don't know you oughta listen to it at least once. And if you do know it what a performance, eh? 

"Dreams are wish fulfillment fantasies; neurotic symptoms are substitutes for forbidden pleasures, but as compromises they never satisfy. Art, on the other hand, not being a compromise with the unconscious either in the cognitive or in the libidinal sense, affords positive satisfaction, and cannot be simply classed, as in Freud's later formulations, with dreams and neurosis as a "substitute gratification." This I take to be the meaning of the contrast between dream and wit stated in Wit and the Unconscious: that one [dreams/neurosis] guards against pain, while the other [wit/art] seeks pleasure." -Norman O. Brown, 1959

 

"The reason why, in spite of the increase in productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living, is that, with increase in productive power, rent tends to even greater increase, thus producing a constant tendency to the forcing down of wages."

-Henry George, 1879

Disco Before They Called It Disco

The first disco critic Vince Aletti stumps for Temptations/Motown alumni Eddie Kendricks and his 1972 solo song, "Girl You Need A Change of Mind," as the first disco song, and he ought to know as well as anybody. 

The first pop hit that was first a big hit in early underground discos in 1972: Manu Dibango's Afro-funk global smash hit "Soul Makossa." 

"You Can Have Watergate Just Give Me Some Money," The J.B.'s (1973). In general, James Brown's funk, funky breaks, horns, chanted choruses, and hyperkinetic footwork are as elemental to early classic era disco as Philly Soul or Gloria Gaynor. 

Willie Henderson was a sax player from Chicago. He played on a bunch of R&B hits (Syl Johnson, Chi-Lites), got into some production work (Tyrone Davis), and put out a few novelty dance numbers like this one, "Dance Master," in 1974. Here's another kind of overlooked disco groove, call it Afro-Jazz funk, that proto-disco DJs were digging up before the music industry straitjacketed the music they were playing as Disco. 

 

Suggesting Republicans Better than Biden on any Humanitarian Issue Is Not Credible

Protesters Target Biden Administration 

Samraa Luqman: “I voted for Bernie Sanders, which tells you where I was on the spectrum. And to have a person like me to go from that extreme to say that I’m now willing to vote for Trump in order to oust Genocide Joe, it’s really a testament to how Biden has lost big time within my community.”

And, sadly, an even bigger testament to how dumb and tragically self-destructive is this Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, or at least its leadership as represented by this moronic spokesperson. 

By all means, protest Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza; and protest Biden's tacit support for that campaign. Demand a ceasefire and negotiated peace. 

But suggesting that Netanyahu's felonious buddy in the U.S. would be any better for the Palestinians, might reduce by even an iota Israel's violence or the humanitarian crisis in Gaza (or the West Bank), or even improve conditions in the U.S. for Arab-Americans, is beyond dumb and full-on Darwin Awards stuff. 

Even as a political gambit it stinks of another Putin election interference campaign. And shame on Democracy Now! for not calling out this idiocy but instead amplifying it. 

And, last, here we are again smearing Bernie Sanders by portraying his supporters as halfwits, when anybody that has actually followed at all what the guy says knows he would never equivocate Biden with the violent fascist Orange Dump in the way this spokesperson has.