we gotta buck the tide : a call to action

Yo musiclovers. I’m about to send out a mass
mailing call to action to those who care about the world. Modern
society is becoming increasingly sociopathic, no conscience about
anything any more, apathy, indifference, and ignorance are the order
of the day. We gotta buck the tide.

March, 2010: Dispatch #55: Sometimes You Gotta Buck The Tide: A Call to Action To All Who Care About the World.  Click here (Adobe PDF)

morningraga14 : joao e maria

Pra querida Jully no seu aniversario. This gorgeous tune is by Sivuca (Severino Dias de Oliveria, 1930-2006) and was made famous by Chico Buarque de Hollandia. morningraga14

quotes of the day

a New York take on the Yanomamo

My Vanity Fair editor, Dana Brown, came up to Montreal last week, and as we were sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee I told him about  the Yanomamo Indians, who live deep in the Amazon rain forest on the Brazil-Venezuela border, snort the hallucinogenic snuff of the Virola tree and then become their rishi, their animal alter ego, which is living a parallel existence to theirs somewhere in the forest. One of the Yanomamo I was with in l975 became a hawk and started screeching and flapping around in the malocca, or communal thatch house he was living in with the rest of his village.

.Dana, who is real New York,  was fascinated and asked, how do they know which animal is their rishi ? I said I wasn’t sure, but there was probably some complicated ritual/mystical process involving  shamans and a vision quest in which your rishi was revealed to you.

What if you take the snuff and become the wrong animal, some animal that is not your rishi ? he went on. This was not anything I had ever thought about. I wasn’t sure it ever happened. Presumably you took the snuff and became your rishi. I had always accepted this without questioning. You were primed and programmed to become this particular animal, so you did. But conceivably you could become another animal. Why not, especially if you were in a state of mental confusion when you took the snuff, or had a bad trip. Good question, Dana, I said. Then he thought some more and came up with his own answer, which was even more New York : “You don’t tell anybody.”

That is why I love this guy, and what I love about New Yorkers. Nothing is sacred, and there is no bullshit. They’re on the ball and get right to the point, and they’re very funny, and ultimately it’s all driven by their enormous heart.

the neurochemistry of altruism

Ncholas Kristof has an unlifting column in today’s Times. It’s about a book called the Power of Half whose genesis is that the author is driving his 14 year old daughter home from a sleepover in Atlanta in 2006, and they pullup to a stop light. where there is a black Mercedes on one side of the intersection and a homeless panhandler on the other and the kid says, “Dad if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a nice meal.” What an epiphany, a strong, clear bolt of indisputable truth ! The daughter gets her family the Salwens to sell their big luxurious house and donate half the proceeds to charity and get a house half the size, which they find to their surprise and delight there not being all this space to hide in and retret into brings them closer together. All I can say is we better get into it, cuz there’s going to be some serious, salubrious downsizing, musiclovers.Take it from the Suitcase.

Kirstoff goes on to say : “there is neurological evidence from brain scans that altruism lights up parts of the brain normally associated with more primary gratifications such as food and sex.” Very interesting. How much overlap is there in these regions that are stimulated by acts of altruism, what St. Paul called “charity,” love, sex, music, food and drugs ? I want to know more. How sound and advanced is the science ? So eventually there will be a pill we can take, Huxley’s Soma, that will keep these regions permanently massaged, all our negativity will fall by the wayside, and paradise on earth will begin.

Maybe this is another thing that’s going on in the outpouring of aid to Haiti.

the problem with capitalism

I was just turned down for a desperately needed refi due to the fact that the magazine assignments that my income dependent on– I had had such a great run the last few years that I had put all my eggs in the magazine basket– weren’t coming, due to not only to the recession but to the fact that there is a revolution in communication– the Internet is taking over everything, so all the print media– newspapers, magazines, books, are hurting.  A guy like me who writes ten thousand word pieces that give you the complete lowdown on their subject, the whole enchilada, in all its complexity and ambiguity, is becoming kind of like the Chinese ivory carvers centuries ago, who would spend a year on a single miniature elephant and if you lifted it up you would even they gave  you the full detail of its footprints. Readers these days don’t have time for more than a couple of graphs, and they can’t concentrate anything longer, so I’m sort of like a dinosaur, and if I’m not going to go extinct, I have to start moving some of my eggs into other baskets. Books,  t.v., my songs. But I am nothing if not adaptable, so I’m into it.  When our backs are to the wall, even the feint of heart rise to the occasion. So stay tuned. The world has not heard the last from the Suitcase by a long shot.

Actually I wasn’t turned down, I was told that if I paid all my debts, they would be happy to do the refi. But if I could do that, why would I need the refi ? So it was as good, or as bad, as being turned down. And in the end, everything has worked out fine, so I can live without the refi. I got an assignment today at last. This time I wasn’t even anxious about it because I’ve been living with these temporary stoppages of cash flow since the seventies, it’s goes with being a freelance writer, and I know something will always pull through. But I need to pay more attention to the business side of things. As the legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who has done very well for himself, writing more than fifty books about his climbs, told me once, “the business side is part of life.” And I need to set up the fam in the event of my departure, which each tick of the clock is getting closer to. Making money is not rocket science. It’s simply a matter of ambition and putting in the time and energy, and being able to do math. I was so good at math I never had to take another math course after the age of thirteen. Now I can hardly dial a phone numbers. So I guess I have to get my math chops back. Slap on a nice piece of music, put on the headphones, and tickle the keys of my calculator. There are many less pleasant ways to spend the time, and there something reassuring about the black and white certainty of numbers. Two and two always make four, but in life it doesn’t, and when people are reduced to numbers, as has happened in the modern financial system, they get end up shortchanged and not uncommonly shafted.

I have never paid the slightest attention to money. One year I made a mill, another 30 grand. I’m still here, and I’m going to die. Making money is not part of my heroic narrative. In fact, I shit on money, in the way that Reinhold Messner shits on flags, and Christopher Hitchens shits on God. (Returning to a hero’s welcome in his native South Tirol from the first ascent of Everest without oxygen, Messner told the governor, who before a huge outdoor crowd “this is a great day for South Tirol, for Germany,” “I didn’t do it for South Tirol. I didn’t do it for Germany. I did it for myself. I shit on flags). Greed, tribalism, and religion have been responsible for most of the oppression and carnage since the dawn of human history. So I have an inherent, deep-seated disrespect and suspicion of lending institutions, people whose lives are dedicated to making money, and people who traffic in it. Even before the recent economic crash, I was well aware how vile and inhuman the modern financial system had become, having had a few horrible experiences. Someone, something, had to come along and turn over the moneylenders’ tables, and what did it was the system itself. I see the whole thing as a sort of market correction.

But lately, my anti-materialist ideology has softened. I realize that ecology and economy are talking about the same, which we desperately need to put in order, and that I really need to put my own house in order. So I am trying to understand then system. As I say, it isn’t rocket science. In my high school class of 90 (no ordinary, public school, but St. Paul’s pre school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the old American ruling class and many of the country’s plutocrats have been educated for generations), half a dozen have become extremely rich, and they were the least interesting of my classmates, of middling intelligence, while I was at the very top of the class. So I should be able to do it.

In yesterday’s blog, I ruminated about one of the most  striking things I have repeatedly encountered in my travels : that the people who are living on a dollar a day in places like Haiti and Africa and India are generally more cheerful and relaxed and less stressed out and happier than the millionaires and the average middle class person in the West. What this tells you is that the American model that equates happiness with material well-being does not deliver in the end. And this is another transformation that the world is undergoing, because not everybody can have Americans’ level of material well-being anyway, and we all have to cut back on our consumption and acquisition of stuff, for the sake of the environment.

America, the creator and proselytizer of free market capitalism that the rest of the world has embraced or is violently resisting,  is a workaholic society. Everybody is working their asses off to pay the mortgage, credit cards, their ten thousand dollar family insurance policies, saving for their kids’ college education which is now up to fifty thousand a year (that is the next bubble, after the health care system’s,  that is going to pop and  I predict it will  be popping soon. Here in Canada, we have free education, or almost free. McGill, one of the top 20 universities in the world, is only $3000 a year. This is because the taxes are going to free health care and education not to billion-dollar a day wars that are lining the pockets of  Rumsfeld and Cheney and Halliburton and Carlisle and the rest of the military-industrial establishment). I’m a big fan of socialism, a system that provides free health care and education, as long as it doesn’t become totalitarian. These are the two basic responsibilities of good government, and they and freemarket capitalism are not mutually exclusive. Look at Canada and Europe.

In America, everybody has to be highly productive, because they are working for the Man. They are the indentured servants of the capitalist system. They owe their soul to the company store. Immigrants are working their asses off to secure a piece of the American dream. The Protestant and immigrant work ethics, and the nature of capitalist system, which makes its citizens pay the heavy price of having to work their asses off for their material well-being and living with the constant stress of losing their house, car, etc. if they let up for a minute, is what has made America so incredibly productive, and why it became the richest country in the world and the number-one superpower.

The goal of American society is to work your ass off so hard that you can set yourself up with a couple of mill and no longer have to work for the man, but for yourself, or to work your way off the treadmill and  up into the managerial class where you are getting a huge salary cum million dollar bonuses, to pass Go and proceed to Park Place, where you no longer have to worry about things like making your monthly payments. But making it doesn’t actually reduce your stress levels. It just gives you new, even bigger things that could blow up in your face to stress about.

Which is why the two billion plus people who are living on less than a dollar a day are more relaxed and cheerful than the billion or so who have everything. These people tend to live in the tropics and to have been colonized by Catholic Latin countries that don’t have the Protestant work ethic. They let things slide, their institutions and governments don’t function reliably, a certain amount of fucking around on the part of the men is tolerated.

The best country is Brazil, which has it all. As long as you’re not one of the thirty million homeless Brazilians. Except there is no sense of civic duty. The rich have even less compassion for the poor and black and disadvantaged than the rich in America do. As my pal Bob Olivier writes in his novel, The Bathtub Madonna, every country embodies the worst aspects of human nature in its own particular way. This applies even to Brazil.

Time to get back to work and bring in the bacon. The cupboard was almost bare.

canadian altruism

Just read in the Montreal Gazette about a homeless guy living in the streets of   our city who collected 3000 metal cans over the course of the last week, for which he got $150, which he gave to the Gray Nuns who are getting medical assistance and food to the victims of the Haitian earthquake.

Last year we had our local smalltime Bernie Madoff, a guy called Earl Jones, who bilked the people who trusted him with their money out of a mere $75 million, but that’s a lot of money up here, especially for people whose lifesavings and retirement funds were wiped out. Some lost their homes or were evicted from their rentals. A 90 year old woman in a nursing home, herself living on a tight fixed income,  read of their plight and sent  the victims of Earl Jones fund $5000, a big sum for her, but she explained, “If I didn’t do anything, I’d feel terrible.”

A lot of beautiful people up here, a lot of beautiful people in the world, eh ?

the earthquake in Haiti

Port au Prince is not the first city in Caribbean to have been wiped out by an earthquake, I realize looking at the old map of Jamaica on the wall in my study. The map still shows Port Royal, so it is pre-1692, when two thirds of this seamy home port of English and Dutch-sponsored privateers who preyed on Spanish galleons and relieved them of their bullion, was slammed by a massive quake that sent two of thirds of it into the sea. This should give pause to the apocalyptics.

Kate Garrigle died on Monday night

after a lengthy and brave fight against the Big C. She was the producer of Suitcase on the Loose, a dear friend, and an exceptionally wonderful human. I tried to express what she meant to me on McGarrigles.com. It was the 166th comment in only four hours. Now there are over 300 from all the people who knew her personally or were touched by her and her sister Anna’s incredibly beautiful music. Here’s what I said :

1. alex shoumatoff says:January 19th, 2010 at 7:31 pm

   Kate connected with an important part of me that no one ever had before, and I suspect, no I know, many other people had the same experience. She had the unusual ability to see who you really were, and to bring it out. Her intellectual curiosity was boundless, and we would have great far-ranging conversations for hours on the phone, sprinkled with the mischievous worldplay she loved. Musically she was a genius, far more sophisticated than the hoaky folkie image she projected in thousands of gigs going back forty years, when we first met in Boston. She was also very practical and a sharp businessman and had the gift of being able to make dreams come true, which she did for me, enabling me to realize my dream of 40 years of getting my songs recorded. “Suitcase on the Loose” never would have happened without her. She had class but was also a gypsy (not that there aren’t plenty of classy gypsies). She was a devoted mother and sister and had this loyal cadre of friends going back to childhood in St. Sauveur who were almost like a cult following and ranged in age from teens to 70 year olds. She leaves a huge hole in my life and everybody she touched that will never be filled. Your work is done, Kate, but the music lives. You did good. undying love to you, Anna, Jane, Rufus Martha, and Archangelo, la valise .

Haiti’s Horror : Part 1

“The psychology of all the aid that’s pouring in to Haiti is very interesting,” my wife remarked this morning in the kitchen as she was getting the boys’ breakfast. She is Rwandan and knows about horror and is getting a masters in clinical social work at McGill, so she is interested in the psychological aspects of human behavior. Yes, it sure is, I said, thinking about it for the first time.  All these celebs and megabucksters rallying to the cause, it’s commendable that people with visibility and followings and money to burn are using their profiles and money to help the Haitians who are left, and undoubtedly many of them are genuinely horrified and their hearts are going out to the victims of this catclysmic act of nature, but to what extent are they assuaging the guilt and emptiness of their lives ?  The emptiness of the modern culture that America created, with the best of intentions corrupted by the profit motive. Make life as easy as possible, measure success only in commercial terms, happiness in material terms. The guilt of complaining about one’s problems, financial, marital, professional, stressful and painful as they are, when here are these people who had nothing even before this happened but a history of oppression, deprivation,  and natural disasters, one after the other, who have now been slammed by one of inconceivable destructiveness. How can we fortunate ones in the rich, stable countries who take clean water, three meals a day, and security for granted, not respond, and the response is like a collective yearning to do something meaningful and help people other than ourselves and our own. It reminds me of the euphoria and hope, our better angels getting their fifteen minutes,  that Obama’s ascension to the presidency induced. Since then America has reverted to type. Change is too hard, too much sacrifice, too many vested interests in the status quo,  hope has given way to trashing the man who brought it. The entrenched racism of our society has resurfaced, and Obama, it looks like, the most capable president since FDR,will go the way of Jimmy Carter

Earlier in the decade I  sat in a friend’s new sauna in the Adirondacks. He had sold his company in Rhode Island for a couple of mill and was still its c.e.o., pulling in a couple of hundred thou a year, so he was set for life at the age of 50. Suddenly, maybe it was the alcohol he had been drinking,  he became nasty and started railing about affirmative action. “I don’t see why my hard-earned  dollars have to finance lazy blacks in the ghetto so they can sit around and do nothing,” he remarked. You won’t believe the things the summer people come out with in their camps. You should hear what they say about the Jews. That was the end of our friendship, and this is the attitude that has resurfaced. Guys in big pickups with gunracks and Obama stickers with a target in the O. Tiger Woods confirming all the stereotypes about oversexed predatory black men, betraying our worship of his desire to win,  was mannah from heaven, more fuel for the backlash.

We know deep down inside that this ignorant kneejerk bigotry is wrong, we would really like to get over it, yet this hasn’t stopped us from reverting to type like relapsing alcoholics who  managed to stay off the bottle for a couple of months. And then, as if to rub our shabbiness and scurviness into our faces, this horror, tens of thousands of innocent people who have known nothing but misery being annihilated in a few minutes, and they are blacks. Who we brought from Africa centuries ago and enslaved so we could have sugar for our tea, who have been exploited and brutalized ever since, more recently by their own shamelessly corrupt leaders and thugs.  Who are for the most part, like most Africans, lovely people, people of indomitable good cheer. How can someone living on a less than a dollar a day be so much more happy and relaxed than the people who have millions and want for nothing ? I have always been struck by this. What does this tell you about Western materialism ? We don’t need money, a young waitress in Prague told me when I apologized for not have enough money to give her a tip. The Haitian people are very strong and creative and have great character. They will recover from this. They know how to live on nothing. We all may soon have to take a page from their book.

Yesterday I told a Haitian friend who has family somewhere in the rubble how sorry I was, and he smiled nervously, almost embarrassedly. Such niceness, such willingness to live in conditions we couldn’t stand for half an hour, such serene acceptance, their plight now is a deep stab of the guilt knife. So we are opening up our pocket books even in this recession time when money is tight. But not everybody is doing it to feel good about themselves.  There are the people who really care, let us not forget them,  the good-hearted ones among us who don’t put themselves first. More of them than one might imagine. They are rising to the occasion. After the l994 Rwandan genocide we had a fundraiser in Lake Placid (we were living at that point in the Adirondacks) to get plane fare for three teenagers who needed to get out of their beautiful,  bodystrewn land  if they were ever going to have the chance to have a decent life. I posted a flyer in our convenience store, and some guy from Albany, I imagine him reading it and he sitting at the table eating a sub, was so moved he sent a check for a thousand bucks, and he didn’t want any recognition, he asked to remain anonymous. Those people exist, people who are willing to put their own lives at risk to save others, too, they are fewer, but they too exist. Canada being  a more altruistic society, has more of them. We’re more here for each other in my adopted land. [continued in Part 2 below]