Montreal Jazz Festival part 2

So I didn’t get to jam with Taj Mahal or have the deep discussion about the universal language of music or to compare our musical journeys over the last forty years as I was hoping. Taj was catching up with doudou his old pal who had the rising sun where all the great bluesman and woman performed in the seventies and eighties. here is a story about it.

There was a house in Montreal…
Bugs Burnett

A random sampling of awesomeness photo: Courtesy Justin Time

And it was called the Rising Sun, and many excellent live recordings, it turns out, were made there

Twenty-five years ago my father took me to my first B.B. King concert, and halfway through his set at Place des Arts, King invited butch blues legend Big Mama Thornton on stage to belt out a song.

The hard-drinking Thornton – who would die four years later, in 1984, at the age of 58 – was booked at Doudou Boicel’s Rising Sun Celebrity Jazz Club across the street. And when Big Mama took the mic, she just about blew King off the stage.

“B.B. King came to my club after that show and he gave me a hundred bucks and he gave Big Mama a hundred bucks, and [blues legend] James Cotton was there and they played until 4 in the morning,” Boicel says today. “I was an idiot – I didn’t record that show.”

But Boicel, now 67, recorded just about everybody else, and many of the recordings that survived the 1990 fire that destroyed Boicel’s historic club have been digitally remastered and released by Montreal’s Just a Memory Records, a division of Justin Time Records.

Two new releases are Sassy Mama by Big Mama Thornton, recorded at the Rising Sun in 1977, and Walk On by Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, recorded at Boicel’s Rising Sun Festijazz (precursor to the Montreal Jazz Festival) at Place des Arts in 1980.

“Big Mama drank her gin with milk,” Boicel recalls.

He remembers Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee famously feuded for decades after Terry – who was blind – refused to pay his share of their gasoline bill because he wasn’t the one driving their car from gig to gig.

“I had to pay them

separately,” Boicel says. “They insulted each other while they were singing on stage. But when they were off stage they didn’t say a word to each other.”

Other releases include Goin’ Way Back recorded by Muddy Waters and his entourage in a Montreal rooming house in 1967; Black Night Is Falling by John Lee Hooker, recorded in 1977; and Salt Peanuts, a live set by Dizzy Gillespie also recorded at the Rising Sun.

“John Lee was a very good friend,” Boicel says. “He always came with young 17- and 18-year-old girls. He told me, ‘When they’re 20 they’re too old for me!’”

Boicel continues, “Many musicians were surprised to learn I was black because black club owners were extremely rare. So they played without pay to help me out after the club burnt down in 1990. Taj Mahal came and paid his way to help me out. Dizzy was a real friend. He cancelled a tour in [Mexico] after the fire to come to Montreal to help me, and without getting paid. And when Taj toured Japan, he told Lightnin’ Hopkins, ‘There’s this black guy in Montreal running this place called The Rising Sun. We need to support our black brother.’”

Boicel sighs. “I lost a lot of recordings in that fire. But some remained. So I contacted Jim West [at Justin Time] and sold them.”

West has been releasing the Rising Sun sessions ever since, as well other historic Montreal concerts by the likes of Oscar Peterson (1951), Nina Simone (Let It Be Me) and Chet Baker (Love for Sale, recorded at the Rising Sun in 1978).

“They’re historical recordings,” West says. “It’s like finding a treasure vault. And the atmosphere was great at Doudou’s club. He was friends with all of these people. Over the years we’ve had offers for recordings made at other clubs – including some in New York – but they just don’t have the same meaning for us. The Rising Sun was a special place.”

***

Three ladies, presumably Taj’s cousins, were sitting further down the table backstage, and Taj was getting ready for the Thunderbirds’ set to be over and for his turn to take the stage, stoking up with a couple of glasses of brown Barbados rum on the rocks.  So we didn’t really connect, his attention being so divided. Someone came and got him and said it was time to go on and he left without even saying goodbye or anything and I figured if he wanted to pursue our acquaintance he would have asked me to meet him after the show, but he didn’t, because the three ladies, relatives perhaps from his St. Kitts side, were waiting to see him then, and Bong his tour manager said they were flying out to the next city on their tour at six in the morning. I also think after forty years of performing he had become the good time hard-living itinerant bluesman he played on stage and had maybe  long ago ceased to be interested in the sort of intellectual shuff I was. We really weren’t that much on each other’s wavelength, or we were were but didn’t have the opportunity to break through to each other in the half an hour we spent together. Taj plays his music, and I play mine. His musical persona is far more developed, but I found his performance a little coarse and repetitive, like a real juke joint bluesman, though occasionally he took off on some really incredible flights on the neck of his guitar. He is a very idiosyncratic sui generis musician, and so am I. It reminded me of an ordnery  90 year old banjo picker named Cordell Kent I jammed with a few years ago on his porch in a little place in western Tennessee called Defeated, because the Confederates had lost a battle to the Union there. We were going along fine in the key of G on one number and suddenly without warning and for no apparent reason Cordell switched to another key. I said I thought we were playing in G, and Cordell said, well you play in your key, and I’ll play in mine.

I was sort disappointed, thinking that Taj would have progressed further in forty years of music-making to something more intricate and subtle, like Gary Davis, something more beautiful. But a lot of journeymen on the road bluesman find a certain groove and sound and perfect certain signature licks, and then that’s what they play for the rest of their careers, like Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. In the end, musicians are producers, not consumers. The consumers are the audience, the same sort of people who go to PGA tournaments. I’m not sure what they really get  out of it. And then there are the critics, an even more curious breed. They are not musicians, in most cases, but they put them selves out as people who know something about playing. Some musicians play for audiences, some play for themselves,  to liberate the notes their brains are bursting with. I  am the latter. I rarely perform and I have to say it shows. Kate McGarrigle gave me an incredible gift of getting twelve of my tunes out there before she died in the Suitcase on the Loose, even though my vocals leave something to be desired, and the arrangements are  a little too haut folk for me. My voice is too didactic, because I wanted each word to be recognizable, I hate it when you can’t make out the lyrics, so I sound a bit like John Houseman in the E.F.Hutton commercial : we don’t make money, we earn it. I should of sung more melodious.

Two days later my pal Bob Olivier and I took in two shows. The first was Gil Evan’s orchestral arrangement of Porgy and Bess for Miles Davis, with Ron de Lauro on the trumpet. De Lauro was fine, but he wasn’t Miles. I like the original opera better. Then a hot jazz band from Paris in the style made famous by Django Reinhardt, whose 100th birthday is this year. The band was  called Gypsie Planet with Christian Escoude as the alpha, David Reinhardt (who is Djano’s great-grandson) and Daryll Hall on guitars, Marcel Azzola on accordion, Flordin Nicolescu on violin, and Jean-Baptiste Laya on base. Escoude took most of the guitar solos, and Bob found his lightning up and down the scales a little tiresome after a while. High testosterone jazz, he called it, too competitive between the musicians. Too virtuosic when if they were going to be competing they should have been trying to produce the most beautiful and melodious solo. Nicolescu, a lubugrious tall dark-skinned Rumanian was unbelievable on the violin. When one of the guitarists, usually Escoude, was soloing, the other two bumpchinked chords. I loved it, but I agree with Bob. Great music is not about the speed you can play the notes in. Even the hottest jazz has a ceiling. B0b was right, Escoude was too bravura and into showing what a great guitar player he was. You could tell from the minute he walked on that he had a big ego and was not the shrinking violet type. At one point he cut off Reinhardt in the middle of a solo. Bob thought the most tasteful and sensitive of the guitarist was Daryll Hall. “Jazz today has become insipidly competitive and anti-musical,” he said. “who wants to hear a bunch of music jocks running off scales so fast you can’t make out a single note ?” Being a guitar player, I, though,  was very happy that I got to hear Gyspie Planet. Some day I gotta learn that stuff. And later I took in some melodious refined jazz of the highest order, shows Ahmad Jamal and Keith Jarrett.

Two days later I took Dan Stepchuk, who is married to my wife’s kid sister, to see Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed with Zorn on sax. The Stepchuks were visiting from Ottawa for the weekend. This was a totally different kettle of fish. I was hoping to hear Lou sing Take A Walk on the Wild Side. and his songs from his Velvet Underground days, as were many in the audience. Mickey Foote, who produced clash’s first album, after listening to Suitcase on the Loose, told me was my voice on one of the songs sounded just like Lou in a certain Velvet Underground which he named but meant nothing, cuz I had never heard Lou or the band, antedeluvian as I am, so it was a case of independent convergence, except that we are both products of the sixties.

Laurie and Lou were friends of the McGarrigle sisters and always joined them in their Carnegie Hall Christmas concert, so I was looking forward to finally hearing them.They came out on the stage of the Salle Willfred Pelletier, the most prestigious venu in the festival. Lou looked old, he sat at a guitar that was plugged into a synthesis and all sorts of other special effects, a whole orchestra of sonic possibility,  and sat there the whole show hunched over like a patient in a wheelchair in a hospital corridor. Laurie, in her fifties I would guess but short haired and still pixiesh, stood  on the left, playing an electrified violin and a few times a keyboard, and Zorn was on the sax in the middle. They were like a trio about to give a chamber concert, but when they started playing it was… I don’t know how to describe it. Far out, with moments like classical, Indian, Tibetan monastery droning trumpets and clashes symbols, bagpipe, wind rushing out of the portals of Hades as I once described howler monkeys, 2001 Space Odyssey,  the oracle of Delphi,  a ten or fifteen minute taking off on a single note, D.  They were tapping into the universal sound of being here. Not the flattened pentatonic wail, but something more primal. Pygmies and Bushmen and Cayapo of the Amazon would have gotten into it, but a lot of the audience didn’t, and there started to be a slow exodus, two or three people at a time who found it skritchy and cacophonous and  couldn’t stand it.  200 irate festivalgoers demanded their money back, which is unheard of at the jazzfeste, and got it. On the next number Zorn went wild on the sax, playing it as freely and inventively as I have ever heard a sax blown, trilling and skronking, sounding like an elephant trumpeting. In the middle of it, I don’t know how he knew when to do it, a long haired guy came in and gave Lou a bass and he gave hin the guitar. sometimes it got a little creepy, like suspense music in a horror movie. One unhappy, belligerent member of the audience yelled, Play some music ! and Zorn said to him, “If you don’t think that’s music, give the fuck out of here !” “Oddly enough,” the Gazette reported, ” Zorn’s other show, the two-concert Masada Event, generated no such controversy. “”It was modern and so ancient at the same time,” said Russ Davis of the New Yor jazz station MOJA. “The musicianship was increidlbe, the spirit coming from the stage was so ebullient and uplifting– but deep, high art and folk art at the same time. What more can you ask for ?” This is an accurate description of what Zorn was doing when we took in.

What do we call this ? Dan and I puzzled. Avant garde ? Indubitably.  I could hear Phillip Glass and the Night Kitchen, my pal Arto Lindsay getting incredible skritchy sounds on the guitar, which he doesn’t know how to play in the sense of knowing any chords. I understood the provenance of the performance. It reminded me of dan up the street who rents a soundprooof studio on St Laurent once a month with his friends, none of them professional musicians, and they all bring different instruments they don’t really know how to play and they play whatever they feel like, not worrying about whether it fits it with what the others are doing, they just let out, whatever notes and beats possess them, creating a really interesting dense field of unpredictable sound, which is incredibly therapeutic, like primal scream therapy. I felt like my cylinders were blown out and my envelope was pushed and felt refreshed at the end of one of dan’s jams and this is just how I felt after Lou and Laurie and Zorn’s show. whether the relentless droning cacophony could be called music is another thing. I would say definitely yes. whatever you were listening for, it was there. Wow dan said I never heard anybody do that with the sax before. this is bringing up all kinds of dark emotions. it’s very industrial and angry.

that wasn’t how it made me feel. it was a constantly changing field of sound. laurie going one two three four same note over and over expanding into a whole violin section, then contracting again. this is what music will sound like 100 years from now, what it has always sounbded like. but for dan it is conjuring images of environmental disaster, the oil spill. edge postindustrial apocalyptic sounbdscapes, he calls it, uncertain music for uncertain times. to me it started like a polite trio that very soon blows the whole thing open. I go to the urina and the guy next to me says, gee, man, I couldn’t stand it. it was so disorderd and non-musical. I thought they were singers. I went to George Benson last night. He was great.” I say : “Well it just shows you how many kids of music there are.”

dan continues, “it was shrill, repetitive, 35 minutes would have been enough . it has to be one of the edgier performances of the festival. it had the feeling of them jamming among themselves, and we got to watch and experience what they were up to.  we should go somewhere and have a martini. every one in a while ya got to go hear something like that. get out of the comfort zone. take some artistic medicine. it was unsettling. not soothing.” Dan works for the Canadian government in a department whose mandate is to streamline the bureaucracy.

No offering at the festival generated such a buzz since smacked-out Chet Baker nodded off onstage in l985.

outside the sun was dying beautifully in a high rosy ribbed rack of cloud at the end of St. Urbain between the walls of highrise . the doors of my perception had been opened and everything seemed new, heightened, charged. Music that can do that to you get high marks from me. As Louis Armstrong said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never understand it.”

back home I open an email from a Russian translator who has just translated nine poems of the obscure prerevolutionary silver Age poet, Velimir Klebnikov (1885-1922), about whom the nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, who obviously didn’t think much of him,  wrote, “Klebnikov’s work is a phenomenon of towering incoherence.” That what Lou Laurie and Zorn’s show was “a phenomenon of towering incoherence.” Bravissimo !

The festival is to be congratulating for taking such an open-minded view of what jazz, and music are.

dan

yo tidebuckas

we are not alone. here’s is another soul brother. we just have to find

each other.

i’m off to the Gulf to find out what’s happening to the wildlife. a two

week tour from panama city to tampico. or maybe the other way

around.

When I get back the Tidebuckas who have found each other will be

putting our  heads together to figure out how to bring the millions of

others who are on the same page as Derrek Jensen together. Jensen

has hit the nail on the head : anything that is written that does not

start with the premise that our culture is destroying the planet is

unforgiveable.

Upping the Stakes

Calling All Fanatics

Protecting nature should be more important than enjoying it

by Derrick Jensen

Published in the July/August 2010 issue of Orion

I’VE ALWAYS kind of hated that quote by Edward Abbey about being a half-hearted fanatic

(“Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic”).

Not so much because of the racism and misogyny that characterized some of his work.

And not even because of the quote itself. But rather because of how that quote has been

too often misused by people who put too much emphasis on the half-hearted, and not nearly

enough emphasis on the fanatic.

The fundamental truth of our time is that this culture is killing the planet. We can quibble

all we want—and quibble too many do—about whether it is killing the planet or merely causing

one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the past several billion years, but no reasonable

person can argue that industrial civilization is not grievously injuring life on Earth.

Given that fact, you’d think most people would be doing everything they can to protect life on

this planet—the only life, to our knowledge, in the universe. Sadly, you’d be wrong.

I think often of a line by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “Few books today are forgivable.” He wrote this,

I believe, because we have become so very alienated from our own experience, from who we are, and

this alienation is so destructive to others and to ourselves that if a book does not take this alienation as

its starting point and work toward rectifying it, we’d all be better off looking at blank pieces of paper. Or

better, actually experiencing something (or someone). Or even better, entering, as Martin Buber might

have written, into a relationship with something or someone.

I agree with Laing that few books today are forgivable (and the same is true for films, paintings, songs,

relationships, lives, and so on), and I agree for the reasons I believe he was giving. But there’s another reason

I think few books (films, paintings, songs, relationships, lives, and so on) are forgivable. There’s that little

nagging fact that this culture is murdering the planet. Any book (film, painting, song, relationship, life, and

so on) that doesn’t begin with this basic understanding—that the culture is murdering the planet (in part

because of this alienation; and of course this murder then in turn fuels further alienation)—and doesn’t work

toward rectifying it is not forgivable, for an infinitude of reasons, one of which is that without a living planet

there can be no books. There can be no paintings, songs, relationships, lives, and so on. There can be nothing.

The conservation biologist Reed Noss has called his field a “combat discipline”: we are in a crisis, and our

attitudes and actions need to reflect this. And so I sometimes try to apply the Ed Abbey quote to the work

of a firefighter. If you were trapped in a burning building, would you want the firefighters to be reluctant

enthusiasts, part-time crusaders, half-hearted fanatics? Should the mother of a very sick child be reluctant

or half-hearted in defense of that child?

I’m not saying we don’t need recreation. I’m not saying we don’t need amusement. Hell, I have three mystery

novels in my backpack right now. I’m not saying a firefighter doesn’t need to rest—having hauled seven

unconscious people out of the burning building, we could hardly blame the firefighter for grabbing a quick

drink of water or sometimes taking a day off; and I’m not saying the mother doesn’t need to sleep or take

some time away from the stress of caring and advocating for her child. We all need the occasional escape,

or even indulgence. But we must be able to pursue those escapes and indulgences with the knowledge that

others are rushing into the burning building, that others have taken over the job of advocating for whatever is

necessary to heal that child.

And that, frankly, is part of the problem: there aren’t nearly enough of us working anywhere near hard enough

to stop this culture from killing the planet. Obviously, or the world would be getting healthier, instead of being

desecrated with ever increasing speed. If there were more of us trying to stop this culture from killing the planet,

then those who are working themselves to death could afford to take a little time off and not feel as if things would

fall apart while they climbed the mountains or ran the rivers.

“It is not enough to fight for the land,” Abbey continued; “it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can.

While it is still there.” But this part of the quote might actually bother me more, in part because of its fatalism

and in part because we—humans—are not the point. Yes, absolutely we should enjoy and commune with and

make love with and touch and be with and absorb and be absorbed by the land. Yes, absolutely we should sit

in the sun and feel it warm our bones, and we should listen to the whispering voices of trees, and we should

open our ears and our hearts to the voices of frogs. But when the forests are being flattened and the frogs are

being extirpated, enjoying them isn’t enough. So long as there’s still something we can do to protect them,

shouldn’t protecting them be far more important than enjoying them? Because, once again, we are not the point.

The trees, the frogs, do not exist for us. It is our culture that is killing them, and it is up to us to stop it.

Have you ever had anyone you love die or come to grievous harm needlessly, from some unnecessary act of

stupidity or violence? I have. And in the aftermath I have never wished I had spent more time enjoying this other,

but rather wishing I had acted differently such that I was able to prevent the unnecessary losses.

As my artist and writer friend Stephanie McMillan wrote in her essay “Artists: Raise Your Weapons”: “If we lived

in a time of peace and harmony, then creating escapist, serotonin-boosting hits of mild amusement wouldn’t be a

crime. If all was well, such art might enhance our happy existence. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure or decorative

art. But in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance

is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.”

I would extend her comments beyond art: in times like these, for anyone not to devote her/his talents and energies

to defending the planet is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.

The questions I keep coming back to are these: in this time, as countless multitudes of humans and nonhumans suffer

for the profits and luxuries of a few, and as species go extinct at rates greater than any in the last scores of millions of

years—as large-vertebrate evolution itself is being halted—what does the world need? What does the world need from me?

I want to be very clear: I don’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t love the world or each other (human or nonhuman).

Or that we shouldn’t play games or have fun. I’m not saying we shouldn’t rest or go hiking or read good books (and

Desert Solitaire is a great book). I’m not even saying I have a problem with Abbey’s quote as such; my main problem with

the quote is the many would-be activists who use it as an excuse for inaction.

We are in a crisis, and we need to act as such. We need to rescue people from the burning building. We need everybody’s help.

Derrick Jensen lives and writes in northernmost California, where the worldwide amphibian die-off has silenced the spring.

He is the author of

The Montreal Jazz Festival : Reuniting With Taj Mahal after 40 years

The Montreal Jazz Festival is one of the great musical joie de vivre blow-outs on the planet. I’ve been going to it since l999, when I did a story about it for Travel + Leisure. The most memorable concert I have gone to was Joao Gilberto, the great bossa nova guitarist and singer, six or seven years ago. He kept the sold out crowd in the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier waiting for an hour. Finally as we were all fuming and clapping our hands angrily he walks out in a suit with his guitar, sits on a stool, and for the next three hours goes through the entire bossa nova repertoire, one song of Jobim, Vinicius, Bonfa, Baden Powell, etc, after another without interruption or introduction, with spare zen-like precision, not hitting a single false note or off rhythm with his voice or guitar. An absolutely astounding performance that blew us all away. Then he just got up and left the stage.We all got up screaming bravo clapping wildly hoping for an encore, but he never came back.

One of the great things about the Festival du Jazz is that it’s one of the few venues in the modern world where the elders are venerated. I have seen the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and Ray Charles all in their eighties, almost nothing left of them physically, give amazing performances that only accentuated the elusive spirituality of the musical transmission. Such was the case with 79 year old Sonny Rollins, the last of the greats, who played and recorded with all the cats, Theolonius, Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Miles, Bud Powell, J.J.Johnson, Max Roach, Clifford Brown et al. One of my main buddies, George Goodman, who was a legendary writer for Look and later a reporter for the New York Times and is himself a gifted sax and flute player, has been writing the official biography of Sonny for several years and is about to deliver it, so I was curious to see what he was like, having heard many of the cats in the early sixties when I had a fake i.d. that said I was the crown prince of Afganistan, but never him. George says he is a lovely man, unlike Miles and most the other greats, who were motherfuckers, and this came through with the mellow unassuming persona he projected. He was a frail old man, almost dwarfed by his sax, at times it seemed like he could hardly hold it up, but man could he get some sounds out of it. Sonny’s thing is improvisation, and he kept on wittily throwing in  all sorts of instantly recognizable quotations from classical and folk music. What struck me was how much his approach to jazz resembled this thrush that has been singing for a mate in our back alley, the same species I heard at our camp deep in the Adirondack woods last weekend. The song starts with pure, clean, liquid fluting, G to A, which is following by a wheezing, mocking commentary, a complex cluster of notes that is never quite the same.

Monday evening I had a great reunion with Taj Mahal, the legendary bluesman. I had not seen him since we jammed for hours in a music store in Berkely in l970. A 23 year old long-haired hippie who had been tripping around communes in northern Cal and scenes in the Bay Area,  I was trying out one of the guitars, and in walks this big black dude. He hears me playing an intricate stride-thumb rag, Gary Davis’s Slow Drag, which I learned from the master himself, and picks up another of the guitars, and we played all the songs I learned from Davis, which he knew cold, and he comes out with some great old southern country blues numbers I didn’t know and tried to keep up with, but this guy really knew his shit and blew me away, then he said, well I gotta go, nice playin with ya, and shook my hand and left. And only after he was gone did I realize, shit that was Taj Mahal. I had just been trying to figure  the tricky riff in his version of “Good Morning Little School Girl,” on his double album, Giants Steps/Ol Folks At Home, which had come out a year earlier.

Since then, Taj, a real scholar of the roots, had gone to Mali and done an album with Toumani Diabete, the legendary kora player, which whom I stayed when I went to Bamako a few years ago and recorded “One Morning Soon” with Toumani’s insanely fantastic guitar player, Fantamady Kouyate (You can hear the original one-take version in the Music From Many Lands section, and the parts that Kate McGarrigle used in her arrangement of “One Morning Soon” on Suitcase on the Loose). So I was really looking forward to seeing him again after all these years and comparing our musical journeys. Unfortunately, his tour manager, whose name was Kong, said Taj could only “do a hang,” there would be no time to jam and maybe record a few minutes at my pal Bob Olivier’s studio, as I was hoping. They had barely made it to Montreal, having missed their flight, and Taj had some cousins he had to see, one of whom was not well, so the only time he had was right before he went on. So I went back stage at the Metropolius, and there he was. A huge black dude with a Hawaian shirt and a panama hat, now 67. He lives in Hawaii, but most of the time since l967 he has been touring, he told me. With him were three ladies, his relatives, and his old friend Doudou Boicel, a French Guyanan who ran the Rising Sun, a club where Taj and everybody else under the sun played in the seventies, before the jazz festival was founded. We could hear through speakers the Thunderbirds, a white southern blues band who were the opening act and were outstanding.

Taj told me he grew up in Harlem and one side of his family, which I think included the three ladies, was from St. Kitts. So he had a Caribbean component, and so did Sonny Rollins, he told me, which I hadn’t known, and which explained a lot. I told him last year I went to Andros and met the niece and a protege of the great Bahaman rhythm and rhyme singer/guitarist Joseph Spence, and Taj started singing one of Spence’s tunes. We reminisced about Manny Greenhill, Taj’s first manager, who bought my songs not long after Taj and I jammed in the music store, which he had no recollection of. He was fortifying himself with a bottle of Barbados brown rum and this was obviously not the time to get into a deep discussion about the similar melodic sequences that produce more or less the same emotions that I have collected in many cultures, countries, and continents in the last 45 years, or to run my theories about the universal language of music by him, which needed to be illustrated with guitar playing. Then it was time for him to go on. He was a force, his blues had a driving good-time African groove, like Texas roadhouse blues from the forties, or the juke joints of Bamako. Not a lot of subtlety, but every once in a while he would take off with some riff or syncopation that was completely out of the box but completely in rhythm. A heavy dude, who has created his own niche and legend. I hope to get down with him while we’re both still here, but that is not in our hands. Except my success in making my book and t.v. series, Chasing the Wail, happen.

But now I’ve just found out that I’m going to Tampico, to write about the last 8000 ridleys and how they are faring in the nightmare in the Gulf.

the confirmed ridley fatalities

The arribada at Rancho Nuevo beach in Tamaulipas, when thousands of Kemp’s ridley turtles come out of the sea (the poisoned Gulf of Mexico) and nest en masse, lasts from April to June, so it is pretty much over, but there will still be stragglers till August. Most of the adults are circulating in the Gulf of Mexico, where some, the Obama Administration confirms, have been corraled into British Petroleum’s  500,000 square mile “burn fields,” which have subsequently been ignited. At least 424 turtles have been burned to death, not only ridleys, but four of the other species that frequent the gulf. In addition, the sargasso seabeds near shore are favorite haunts of young adult ridleys, and they are great oil collectors, so there is probably even greater mortality in them. BP could be looking at a $50,000 fine from U.S. Fish and Wildlife for each turtle, all seven marine species being endangered, the ridley the most critically. The Manchester Guardian’s environment section had a story about this horror on the 25th.

My friend Ben Kernan, who has an apartment on Panama Beach, which has been hit by the oil, says leatherback turtles, the largest of the marine turtles, nest on it, so it must be awful for them, too. The Montreal Gazette reported also on the 25th that there are 51 confirmed reports of marine mammal strandings, some dead, some alive, all covered with oil : one sperm whale, three spinner dolphins and 67 bottlenose dolphins. Three dead spinner dolphins were also found on Mexico Beach, south of Panama City, without symptoms of petrochemical exposure. Dolphins travel in pods to which they are selflessly loyal. If one gets sick they hold him up to the surface so he can breathe.

The Gulf of Mexico also has the world’s greatest concentration of cold seap communities, bizarre sunless abyssal ecosystems, as deep as 2.7 kilometers down, whose plant species live by chemosynthesis, instead of photosynthesis, there being no light, processing cold petrochemicals seeping up from the icy seabed, and whose animal species include clams, mussels, and two-meter tube worms that are centuries old that live off microbes that feed on the emissions of methane and hydrogen sulphide. I wonder if these creatures will benefit and proliferate from the disaster. There are an estimated 8000 cold seap communities in the gulf,  and there is a management conflict with the deep-sea oil operations, says  Charles R. Fisher, a professor of biology at  the University of Pennsylvania, who has an article on them in the journal Nature. One sector that is definitely benefiting are the 1700 boats makers, including Stanley boats of Ontario,  are going great guns because of the oil spill.  Stanley boats are aluminum and business is booming. The company has three million dollars worth of new orders.

Meanwhile Alex, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, is threatening to veer toward the gulf in the next few days. If it does, more oil could be pushed into fragile coastal ecosystems where the turtles and the shrimp and the waterbirds are,  and the westerly winds could push the oil into the western gulf, which is so far slick-free.

the latest oil spill numbers

60,000 barrels a day and “worst-case scenario” 100,000. That’s a big difference. They don’t really know. That’s how out of control this hemmoraghing of our toxicity is.

A friend asked, “Why didn’t Obama immediately hire all the 450,000 people who are out of work to  help with the clean-up and bill BP for their wages.”

That would have been really stepping up to the plate. And he could still do it. Like the Civilian Conservation Corps which got three million able-bodied young men through the Depression and resulted in many works of enduring beauty. Here’s what Wiki has to say about it :

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program for unemployed men age 18-24, providing unskilled manual labor related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural areas of the United States from 1933 to 1942. As part of the New Deal legislation proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the CCC was designed to provide relief for unemployed youth who had a very hard time finding jobs during the Great Depression while implementing a general natural resource conservation program on public lands in every U.S. state, including the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The CCC became the most popular New Deal program among the general public, providing jobs for a total of 3 million young men from families on relief.^[1] Implicitly the CCC also led to awareness and appreciation of the outdoors and the nation’s natural resources, especially for city youth.^[2] The CCC was never considered a permanent program and depended on emergency and temporary legislation for its existence.^[3] On June 30, 1942 Congress voted to eliminate funding for the CCC, formally ceasing active operation of the program.^[4]

During the time of the CCC, volunteers planted nearly 3 billion trees to help reforest America, constructed more than 800 parks nationwide that would become the start of most state parks, developed forest fire fighting methods and a network of thousands of miles of public roadways, and constructed buildings connecting the nation’s public lands.^[5]

CCC workers constructing road, 1933.

CCC camps in Michigan; the tents were soon replaced by barracks built by Army contractors for the enrollees.^[6]

cultural survival and social justice

part three in this series of reflections.

As I went to these remote tribal societies and saw what was great about them and what we have lost, and how their cultures were in various degrees of contact with and stages of  being destroyed by the outside world, the delicate balance was tipping and they were fighting for their livelihoods and way of life, many were already living in a state of demoralized degradation, and I learned how they have been fucked over repeatedly by the white man, to me social justice and cultural survival were inextricably linked. But I was just a visitor, the Suitcase, to these cultures.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who grew up in Somali culture, has a completely different view. To her the traditional society is the oppressor, in her case fundamentalist Islam and the male-based clan, family, and political and economic systems,  the source of social injustice. A most interesting woman and heroic narrative.  From her Wiki bio one gleans that she was the daughter of a prominent member of the Somali revolution, who was imprisoned for opposition to the Siad Barre dictatorship, a progressive who nevertheless had the “traditional procedure” performed on his daughter’s clitoris when she was five. In exile in Kenya she attended a fundamentalist Islamic school and was very devout. She was  the niquab and agreed with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Then she goes to the Netherlands and speaking six languages is hired by the immigranation to translate for the immigrants and refugees and asylum petititoners who don’t know Dutch. She herself gets asylum by giving false stories about her abuse and living in daily terror in Mogadishu, which she had left when she was eight. She sees the plight of  Somali women and begins to doubt Islam and influenced by one of her professors at the University of Leiden, Herman Phillips, author of The Atheist Manifesto, becomes an atheist and embraces modern Western culture with the same fervor than she had embraced Islam. She sees how her fellow exile Somali women are kept almost like prisoners or slaves by their husband. I have seen this myself, in Every, a suburb of Paris. An apartment house of nothing but Sudanese. All four wives and their children and the husband crammed into flats meant for one nuclear family. The men go out into the larger society and work, but the women never leave the premises.

Ayaan enters Dutch politics and declares that  Islam, Ayaan  is “a bankrupt religion, “the new fascism.” This vision of a new caliphate is like the Third Reich. Where little girls and boys have their genitals mutilated, women who have sex before or during marriage with someone else are stoned to death, “and apostates like me are killed.” Mohamed himself was a pervert because he married a nine-year-old girl and immediately started having sex with her. Some cultures are better than others, says, and the culture of the West, of the enlightenment, where a woman can get to be a supreme court justice and not be condemned to be one of the fourth wives of some man her parents gave to her, is better.  She became a big booster of assimilation, chucking the baggage of your culture of origin and getting on with it. Multiculturism (the mosaic of ethnic groups and cultures that exists in Canada instead of the American melting-pot approach), she declared in a recent op ed piece, only “postpones the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and the appropriate.”

Not surprisingly, Ayaan got death threats, and the Dutch government was obliged to provide her with bodyguards. But then it was discovered that she had gotten asylum under false pretenses, and her citizenship. But her new pro-Western, assimilationist politics were music to the ears of the American Entreprise Institute, a conservative think-bank, which made her a fellow, and she moved to Washington.

So where does this woman fit into the scheme of DVW and the Tidebuckas ? She is a very important voice for women oppressed under Islam, and her social justice campaign is sponsored by the right. Her commendable social justice cause is in conflict with our cultural survival cause, and it has nothing to do with the environmental preservation and biodiversity conservations. But we are now going to embrace these sorts of social injustice issues. Is this not sending a mixed message, further muddying waters already muddied by the large amount of content that has nothing to do with biocultural preservation, our stated mission ? The relationship between environmental and biodiversity preservation, cultural survival , and social justice is obviously variable. Sometimes they are completely unrelated, sometimes they are even in conflict. But we embrace all three types of causes, because ultimately what we are concerned about is improving the quality of life for all  sentient being, including humans.

I asked my wife about this contradiction, and she said, “without conflict, there is no advocacy, and without advocacy and educating people about the real situation, there can be  no improvement or change.”

Obviously the material quality of life is much better in the West, and you can get somewhere if you work hard, which is why there is a constant flow of immigrants to the U.S., Canada, and Europe from places that to the Suitcase who is just passing through seem great like Mexico, Brazil, Peru, India, Mali. These places have something that is missing from the West, which is why I go to them. My wife, a clinical social worker specializing in the psychological problems of immigrants, brought home a documentary one day about a Somali family who belong to a Bantu sub-clan (as opposed to Hamitic, which most Somalis are, although these racial terms are no longer used because they are fraught, so let’s say this family’s ethnic group looked more central African) so it is being slaughtered by the North Africa-looking majority. The documentary opens with the family in a UNHCR refugee camp. They are going to be resettled in Atlanta and are learning English. Then they come Atlanta, and marvel at their first escalator, etc. And are given $1100 a month to live on. But this is impossible for a family of six. The mother, for the first time in a society where you have to pay for everything– housing, food, electricity, water, cable t.v., clothes, health care– is overwhelmed by all the bills and becomes so depressed she can’t even get up from her livingroom sofa. Shaking a stack of bills in her hand, she asks, “And this is freedom ?”

Not surprisingly

She became a rabid integrationist.

the oil spill

has displaced the oil sands in Alberta as the greatest environmental horror show on the earth, not to diminish the horror of what is happening up there, which is only going to get worse, as offshore drilling has become like nuclear power after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The megabucks  BP is losing in the gulf will be recuperated in the oil sands. Not to worry, shareholders, hang in there.

And who even remembers Haiti ?

biocultural preservation and social justice, continued

There are some good models in Kenya for integrating the efforts to preserve the wildlife and the local  culture and to advance the cause of social justice, which as I pointed out in the last blog are not always on the same page. Wangari Maathai’s Greenbelt movement, which is restoring the native forest ravaged by clearcutting and cotton-planting during colonialism, and is empowering women to return to their ancient central roles as caretakers of the forest and its sacred springs, wood-gatherers, and tenders of the hearth. Kenya is a pretty chauvinistic society. I went with Wangari to the parliament in Nairobi. She stood out in the sea of suits in the garden where some trees were being planted in memory of some colleagues who died in a plane crash, on there way to mediate sone etnbic conflict in the north. Another model is Anthony Russell’s ecolodge at Shompole group ranch, down in the rift valley right on the Tanzania border, where the lake that gets hundreds of thousands of migrating flamingos is. The Shompole Maasai are partners in the business, they staff the lodge and their former top poacher is now the top wildlife guide for the tourists, the animals are protected by the Shompole because they understand a lion for whose skin they can only get a hundred bucks is worth $20,000 in tourist dollars if they keep it alive. With the profits from the lodge, Anthony has been able to get running water to every hut. Before that, the women had to walk two hours each way to get water and bring it back to their huts in plastic gerrycans. So this has freed the women, been a huge emancipation from their daily grind, so much so that the men are feeling are little threatened. It’s a rare win win win situation. But I hear the Maasai, some of whom can be very money-minded, are suing Anthony because they feel he is ripping them off and not giving them enough of the profit. This knowing Anthony I very much doubt. It is more likely that the profits are way down because of the tribal genocide in Kenya a few years ago, which destroyed tourism throughout the country, just as it was finally recovering from the hotel bombing in Mombassa,  and was then followed by the global economic crash. There is undoubtedly less income to go around.

Coming from modern Western society, which had been destroying the natural world and native people for centuries,  I had a reverence for traditional cultures and an attraction to the Other,  American blacks, Brazilians, that looking back on it was a bit romantic and naive. It was transformative to meet and spend time Amazon Indians, pygmies, and Bushmen who were still hunting and gathering and acutely attuned to the flora and fauna they were surrounded by and depended on. Who could identify 18 species of bee on the wing. To learn about the Navajo belief system, in which every creature and natural force has its way, which must be respected. But as V.S.Naipaul wryly observed,  the Western white people who went off to see the world  had their return plane tickets in their back pocket. The more time I spent in other cultures, the more I saw that they were just people. The traditional cultures had severe limitations. Visiting them was one thing, but having to spend your life  in them, they being your social arena, would have worn thin pretty quickly. But for many years, being so open and receptive to everything, particularly new things, I only saw the good side. It wasn’t until I had a gun pointed to my head by a robber in Cabo Frio, ten years into my adoration of all things Brazilian, that I realized there was a nasty, violent side to the culture, too, and the violence often had a perverse, sadistic extra twist.

As far as the native people go, it’s tragic that there are only 300 Bushman who are still living traditionally, hunting and gathering in the desert, trance-dancing as they have for the last 75,000 years, the way humans have for most of our history. They are lovely, gentle people, their society is egalitarian, the women have as much power and freedom as the men, and get everything they need in four hours and have the greatest amount of leisure time of any society. But they can’t be kept in zoos. And inevitably they are going to want Western goods. The pygmies who were naked in l983 when I first visited them were all wearing t-shirts in 2000. Most of the Bushmen, like the Australian aborigines, are working on ranches. They have been sucked into the money cultures and marginalized, stuck on the lowest peon rung, are being abused and exploited.

The Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall calls the romantic primitivism of young white Europeans who go to the aborigines, the Navajo, the pygmies, the Amazon Indians, “designer tribalism.” But some of these honkies, bazungu, bilagaana, and all the other words for white intruders, are on a genuine quest for an alternative to the rapacious soul-less modern materialistic culture, and because I am one I will now switch to we. It is only natural that we  Rousseauesque, luddite Other Questers would seek out the last remote societies whose people are still highly attuned and connected to the animals and plants in their ecosystems, and be captivated by them, as I was and still am. Relative to where we are now, and where we have to go, it would be a good idea for all of us to look at these hunter-gatherers and herders and see how they have framed what we are doing here and understand what is going on. Maybe there are some things that could be adapted that would help  get us back in line. Maybe they have the therapy for the new modern syndrome, nature deficit disorder.

the relationship between biocultural diversity preservation

and social justice, as I was saying in the last blog, is variable. I grew up in Bedford, New York, where the Nature Conservancy, which has gone on to get protection for outstanding natural sites all over the world,  began, with the preservation of the Mianus River Gorge with its immense virgin hemlocks. The first chapters of the National Audubon Society and the Garden Club of America started here. My father was the president of the Bedford Audubon Society in the l950s. He was also played a major role and served on the board the Westmoreland Sanctuary, which was given by Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of the Pittsburgh coke magnate, who lived in Bedford. The upper stratum of  Bedford lived on large estates with hardwood forests– big oak, hickory, maple, tulip, ash trees and the women took their gardens very seriously. Living in the richest deciduous forest on earth, with 4000 species of higher plants from ferns on up, we were surrounded and spiritually nourished by nature. I would not be surprised if Bedford had, and still has, more nature sanctuary and wildlife preserves than anywhere else in country. Which had been given by people who did not want their part of the glorious forest to ever be destroyed by development. It is also true that they did not want to be encroached on by the hoi polloi, and they got a big tax break. But their primary motivation was their deep love of nature.

Bedford had, and still has, four-acre zoning, which means that only the well-off can live there, and in the early seventies, which I became the resident naturalist of the Marsh Sanctuary, another of Bedford’s nature preserves, there was a lot of talk about how this zoning was exclusionary. Politicians in White Plains and developers were saying they were going to bust it. The Marsh Sanctuary consisted of two properties. One, which included a Greek amptheatre that Isadora Duncan had danced in,  was just outside of Mount Kisco, the down blue collar burg that was the service town for the people in the estates.  Still mostly Italians then, but now it is mostly Latino. I was a regular patron of the Midnite Diner. The other was a marsh where the rare Muehlenberg turtle had once been seen. The turtle was useful in getting the four-lane 684 routed several miles east, saving the marsh and that part of Bedford, the Mount Kisco side. The sanctuary’s two pieces were separated by the 250  acre Cook estate, which when I was there had just been acquired by a developer named Green. Green wanted to build 60 houses, which he was allowed to under the zoning, but he wanted to cluster the units, so they would all be together in one place, and the bulk of the property would not be touched.  But Bedford did not allow clustering, so Green sued to have his property taken out of Bedford and annexed to Mount Kisco.

There were a lot of arguments in Green’s favor, and I was in favor of the annexation and endorsed Green’s development plan. The Cook Estate had some of the last meadows in Bedford, most of the land that had been hayfields until 1917, when the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage as the way to get around, having reverted to forest. The meadows were a haven for butterflies, and one of the meadows had a population of the rare blunt-leaved milkweed. Only one of them was going to be converted to houses and lawns and pavement. Green was also offering to give the sanctuary 60 of his acres, of gorgeous forest near the marsh, plus  $150,000 for a right of way through a little skunk cabbage swamp on the other parcel, so he could put in a bridge. This was going to be how cars entered the development. All this was great, plus Mount Kisco would be providing all the services to the development, fire department, police, water, etc. so it seemed only fair that it should be the tax revenues from it. Plus revolutionary that I am, I liked the idea that egalitarian Mount Kisco would be getting bigger, and the rich people’s preserve of Bedford would be contracting. So I wrote a letter in the local rag, the Patent Trader, explaining why I supported the annexation and Green’s development, and the court gave the land to Mount Kisco.

But no sooner did Mount Kisco get the land that it promptly rezoned it for 350 units plus office space the square footage of the Chrysler building. I hadn’ realized that once land is in your jurisdiction you can do anything you want with it, as long as it doesn’t violate your own zoning laws. I felt completely betrayed and disillusioned. This was apparently what Mount Kisco and Green had planning to do all along. The masses weren’t ready to have the land turned over to them, because they had no sense of stewardship, no conservation ethic, no appreciation of nature because they had never experienced it. This qualities are only found in the upper classes, and the American conservation movement, the creation of the national park system and all the local sanctuaries in Bedford had been spear-headed by rich, conservative Republicans — a subject that I will be writing about this summer.

So here in my own home stomping grounds is a case where biodiversity conservation and social justice are at odds. England, with its vast hereditary estates and something like 80% of the land still in the hands of the old aristocracy, is another, and the national parks in Africa, which were created by European arisotocrats, evicted the local people who had been hunting the game sustainably for centuries, and classified them as poachers.

More on this in my next blog.

Green

progress report

Where are we now in our ninth year of existence ? The original mission, to document and raise consciousness about species and cultures whose survival is in question, continues with ever-growing. Many of the 56 Dispatches and the blogs are devoted to the tragic decimation of the world’s biocultural diversity. Originally, my son Andre and I envisioned two Web sites : the Dispatches, and Shoumatopia.com, which would be a chronicle of my peripatetic consciousness, for which there is a huge paper trail : 100-some cartons of papers, a few thousand manila files about issues I am following, three computers worth of files, and yesterday I just started my 400th notebook. These journals, or thought-catchers, as I call them, contain 80,000 pages of reflection, travelogue, reportage, on the spot natural history description, poetry and lyrics, research, lists of flora and fauna encountered in various locales and remote corners of the planet, and all sorts of other stuff. My final book– I have just sent out proposals for six– Allah willing will be autobiographical, drawing on this enormous trove of documentation.

Sometimes I didn’t have an environmental or cultural Dispatch to put up, and we had to put up something, so Andre would post one of my old stories, or something that had never been published, which was not directly related to the mission of DVW but was very interesting and worth rescuing from oblivion, so Shoumatopia.com was gradually folded into it, and the mission expanded. The downside of this was that what this site is all about became less clear, and it became more self-referential. But all travel writing is  self-referential, as David Reiff points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Graham Greene’s Lawless Roads. A reviewer of one of my books said I “revel in the subjective.” But it’s really more that I don’t see any way out of any writer not being subjective.  Even the most rigorously unbiased, neutral, objective hard science has a subjective component. Some factor may be overemphasized, a crucial factor may have been overlooked rendering the data and their interpretation worthless. Or the scientist may be so intent on finding evidence for the theory he is trying to prove that he is blocking out inconvenient truths.

What I liked about making the Dispatches more open-ended was that their cornucopia of offerings convey  and celebrate without deliberately intending to do so the astonishing diversity of what is out there, although only a minute part of it, but it is this unfathomable diversity of life and the tragic ongoing accelerating loss of it that drove the creation of the site in the first place. And the reader doesn’t know what’s coming next, from what part of the world, or what the subject is going to be. Much of what they document in loving detail no longer exists, so at least there is a record of it, and that is the primary purpose of writing,  as far as I am concerned. So what the Dispatches have become really about is flux. They are a chronicle of flux. Nothing is permanent in this world. One of the first teachings of Buddhism and the ancient Greek philosophers.  Least of all moi. Who is really vanishing here, anyway ? I am 63 now, definitely no longer a spring chicken. And the sort of long-fact writing I do is on the verge of extinction. Magazines in general are struggling to survive, because young people go to the Internet for their information and entertainment. Legendary film critics are being laid off, editorial wells are shrinking, my latest story has been reduced to 4000 words. I can barely clear my throat in 4000 words. So I’m kind of like a dinosaur, the last degenerate gasp of the great Russian literary tradition that starts with Gogol (my ancestor) and continues into the New World with Nabokov. The world will survive in one form or other, nature will survive, although many species, including possibly us, will be out of there. As Lewis Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell (I used the quote as the epigraph of my book on Westchester County), “But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and delicate as cilia.” I don’t really agree with the first sentence, though. Everything is fragile. The last 8000 Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, for instance, which I’m still trying to get an assignment to write about. By the way, in answer to the question in my last blog, it looks like the ruptured well is spewing 60,000 barrels a day. How extraordinary that the BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg announced that the company is putting up $20 billion help the “small people.” This shows how deeply hierarchical and condescending European society still is. I was going to say British, but Svanberg is a Swede.

With the addition to our small, dedicated staff of Natasha Sniatowski, a hard-score social activist– Tasha has comes on board as our social justice coordinator, the Dispatches are going to take on a more radical activist thrust. Cultural survival is a form of social activism, but there are many other sources of social injustice besides cultural oppression, and some traditional cultures, like the Somali clan system,  as Ayaan Hirsi Ali delineates in her book Nomad, are sources of social justice, particularly toward women. Ideally environmental and social justice are on the same page, as with Wangari Maathai’s Greenbelt Movement in Kenya. But this is not the case. The relationship between environmental and social justice and cultural survival is fluctuating, like everything, and since this such an important subject, I will go into it in my next blog.