Friday Calls for Music

Hello again. I will try to be fairly brief today, though it's tempting to rave a while. It's been a week since ISIS attacked Paris - vicious pointless mass murder, but I guess that goes without saying. It is hard to say much about it without being pulled into the political aftershocks - which have been very, very depressing. I don't know how, but in this country at least, this attack by Vicious Extremists on random civilians has led, largely to a clamor to stop helping the random civilians trying to flee the same vicious extremists. Why are American's trying to stop Syrian refugees from coming here? That is such a profoundly wrong approach. It's cowardly (strange how quickly Awericans - especially conservatives - are to give up their freedom, their willingness to help others, etc., when something bad happens somewhere); it's cruel and spiteful - punishing the people who ISIS hurts the most for ISIS' crimes; and it's astonishingly bad politics. ISIS claims for legitimacy are based in the idea that whatever they do, they are better for Sunni Moslems than Americans and Europeans (etc.) ever are - and turning those refugees away is like saying, Yes They Are.

That's not getting into the general anti-Islamic politics being trotted out - closing Mosques? discriminating against Moslem immigrants? Databases and ID cards? Concentration camps? I don't know how many of these ideas have widespread support - Donald Trump and some other high profile republicans are supporting (at least floating, as possible solutions) some of these things. Some of the others seem to come from random minor state officials - so who knows. (The Mayor of Roanoke! That's the prize winner: Via George Takei's informed (to put it lightly) response. This, by the way, really gets under my skin: "it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then" says the mayor of Roanoke. "Then" by the way would be December of 1941 - when Imperial Japan attacked the US, sinking a good part of our Pacific battleship fleet, while embarking on the conquest of Burma, Singapore and Indonesia, the Philippines and much of Southeast Asia; and when - as of December 11 - Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. So - ISIS poses a threat as "serious" as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany together? This stuff used to drive me crazy in the run up to our invasion of Iraq in 2003 - comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler - however nasty a dictator Hussein was, he had a country that was already shattered and held together by a thread (and that only nominally) - Hitler had Germany, the most powerful country in Europe. Etc.... That all aside from the fact that FDR was dead wrong to intern Japanese Americans during WWII. ISIS is not Japan. They aren't even Iraq.)

See? I can get sucked deep into political crap if I want. I don't want. I will stop. Let us hope that music helps:

1. Robert Johnson - Phonograph Blues
2. Nirvana - Frances Farmer will Have her Revenge on Seattle
3. Fairport Convention - Sloth
4. Pogues - Sally MacLennane
5. Miho Hatari - Sweet Samsara Part II
6. Radiohead - Airbag
7. Robert Wyatt - Hasta Siempre Comandante
8. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Cinnamon and Lesbians
9. Leo Kottke - Airproofing
10. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Excerpt from the Messiah

Video: here's Malkmus and the Jicks, channeling a bit of the Allman Brothers in Paris:



And always good to hear the Pogues: