Tag Archives: interview

Dear New York, Don’t Freak Out About Ebola. You’re Going to Be Fine.

by PiperThornton Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

A man who was recently in West Africa is being tested for the deadly Ebola virus at Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan, hospital officials confirmed on Monday, after he arrived overnight with symptoms that may be consistent with the virus.

“All necessary steps are being taken to ensure the safety of all patients, visitors and staff,” Mount Sinai officials said in a statement.

But that didn’t stop the inevitable rush of panic on Twitter from New Yorkers and others around the country worried about a potential spread of the disease, which has claimed 887 lives, mainly in West Africa. But, unlike African countries already suffering the misery of the biggest outbreak ever recorded, the American public has little to fear, says Dr. Jonathan Epstein, an Ebola expert and a veterinary epidemiologist with EcoHealth Alliance, an international organization of scientists that studies biodiversity and conservation.

Here is an edited transcript of our conversation about how New Yorkers, and the rest of the country, should think about this news. In short: Don’t freak out. They’ve totally got this.

Mother Jones: What happens now? Should we be worried?

Jonathan Epstein: We certainly shouldn’t be overly surprised if additional cases inadvertently make their way to the United States from Africa. We know that there are direct travel routes from countries in West Africa to the United States. So it’s certainly well within the realm of reason that people who have been exposed to Ebola would board a plane to get to the United States, even without knowing that they are infected.

Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Associate Vice President of Conservation Medicine at EcoHealth Alliance EcoHealth Alliance

Now, once they are detected and hospitalized, our public health systems here are really good. We have exactly what’s needed to control Ebola, and that is to rapidly identify a case with confirmatory diagnostic testing. Those tests are truly available here, whether it’s through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, or state health agencies, or the hospitals themselves.

Isolation is critically important with Ebola, and infectious disease wards in major hospitals have the ability to isolate patients. So, provided that the patient is isolated, and the doctors and nurses take appropriate precautions in terms of their own personal protective equipment—”barrier nursing”, wearing gloves, protective clothing, that sort of thing—all of the things are in place at hospitals in the United States to really limit the ability of Ebola to be spread from person to person. I really do have a high confidence that if cases do make it to the United States that they’ll be identified, and traced back, and addressed.

MJ: The mind instantly goes to the situation before a patient reaches the emergency room, or even in the emergency room itself, or those that may have shared a subway stop. How do we assess the level of risk on that front?

JE: The fortunate thing about Ebola virus, as opposed to other viral infections which are easily transmitted through respiratory routes and are airborne like influenza, is that it doesn’t become transmissible until a person is symptomatic, and feeling pretty sick. That’s not to say they still might not go out into the public or have interactions with people, but at the point at which they do get identified by a health care provider, their contacts, their history since they became symptomatic in the past few days or so, will then be traced back by public health authorities.

We’re paying very careful attention to flights coming in from West Africa, and people who are already symptomatic who might arrive at the airport would be detected by public health screens there. There’s high confidence that we’d identify people.

MJ: Tell me more specially about New York City. It’s obviously prepared for big things. Is the city prepared for infectious diseases?

JE: We’ve experienced an infectious disease outbreak. If you remember the influenza H1N1 outbreak of 2009, there were cases in New York City. Public health systems were in place, and very well-equipped to diagnose them rapidly, and a lot of education and outreach campaigns were set in motion to limit the possibility of people getting infected with influenza. There was a lot of activity with respect to prevention. New York City specifically is prepared for infectious disease outbreaks of this nature.

MJ: What should people be aware of if this case escalates in such a big city like New York?

JE: What people need to realize is that even though Ebola is a virus that can have scary symptoms, and has this scary reputation, it’s not extremely transmissible. You need very close contact with a sick, clinically symptomatic patient, so it’s very unlikely that a person arriving with Ebola would set off a huge chain-reaction and cause a massive outbreak, that’s just not a likely scenario. We have very good people conducting surveillance both in New York and nationally to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen. So the conditions here are entirely different than they are in rural Africa, or Central or West Africa where Ebola outbreaks have occurred.

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Dear New York, Don’t Freak Out About Ebola. You’re Going to Be Fine.

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

by NydiaI55htoavia Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ween co-founder Aaron Freeman in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Puss n Boots


Holly Williams


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As Gene Ween, Aaron Freeman was the co-leader of the long-lived alternative cult band Ween, which he started with friend Mickey Melchiondo (a.k.a. Dean Ween) when they were middle-school students in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In 2012, after more than 25 years of recording and touring, Freeman left the group as part of his effort to get sober.

Freeman, out this week, is his first album of original songs since leaving the band. It is an openly biographical and personal album that nonetheless utilizes Ween’s ability to inhabit numerous styles and eras of pop music. The musical reference points of post-Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney (“All The Way to China”), Donovan (“Black Bush”), and Cat Stevens (“Golden Monkey”) indicate inspirations that helped carry Freeman through his escape from addiction. I photographed him in Brooklyn, and we spoke again by phone from his home in Woodstock, New York. The following is in his words.

Going through the Ween breakup was really tough. Getting sober was a whole different thing. So there were two levels of it.

For me it’s a lot of patience, because I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to write again. When I write, it always kind of happens all in about a three- or four-week period, where I’ll just go into the zone. A lot of musicians talk about that. I think Bruce Springsteen said that no matter what’s going on in your life, it’s important to keep that one little radar up, because you don’t know when the universe is going to hit you with stuff to write. I really stuck to that concept, and I just waited, and waited, and waited. I would write little things, and record them on the voice memo on my iPhone, little scattered ideas. Then it came.

Last summer I was just sitting around, doing my thing, and then all of a sudden I picked up my guitar and boom! The obvious thing would be to put pressure on yourself, like, “Is this record going to be good? It’s the follow-up to 27 years of Ween, and now I’m doing this—what if it sucks?” When I finally got to the point where my subconscious could free itself of that, and it took a while, the songs started coming. I’d go into my room—the typical fucking artist thing—and scream and play my guitar, then come out six hours later, frazzled hair, not showered. My wife and son would look at me like, “Oh hey, he’s out. Do you want any food?” And I’d be like, “Aaaagh, gotta go back in!” That’s how I worked.

I’m thinking, “If I get one song, at this point in my life, that’ll be fucking amazing for me and my journey.” That one concept led to a whole record. I’m really proud of it, and really grateful I wrote it. It’s stripped down, no bells and whistles to it. I just wanted to go in, pay attention to the songs, get ’em on tape, and then move on.

No matter what goes on, I’ve written the songs that I love. They’re not very complex. I like to keep the words simple so they’re not too identifiable, and so they’ll last longer. I’d like to think that a kid could listen to it, or a bunch of old bums gathered around a trash can fire keeping themselves warm, they would both fully get it.

One of the things I’ve wanted for years, especially during the last five or so years of Ween, was more honesty. For me, it wasn’t getting sincere. We’d just put on our token songs that were kind of goofy, like “My Own Bare Hands.” Toward the end, it was just kind of…mundane. It would distract from the best parts of Mickey’s and my music.

This record is very autobiographical, it’s like a journal for me of things that I was really into in the last year or so… spiritual things and severe, gut-wrenching love songs.

That first song, “Covert Discretion,” is absolutely typical of me. There’s always been a whole bipolar thing going on with me: I’m pretty shy, or soft spoken, and then there’s the other part. A friend who does astrology told me, “You’re a Pisces, you’re totally water, and then you’ve got this fire planet.” A lot of stuff at the end of Ween was just brutal. I have to write about that stuff, or else I feel like I’m not being honest. If this is a song that calls for fucking brutal honesty, then the most important thing is to do that, and take it so far over the edge. That’s what people love about Ween, they love the honesty and not being scared to go there.

I was susceptible to hard-core addiction because my personality is that way. I think a lot of addicts, serious addicts, have that. They go full throttle and then they are coming down and they are trying to deal with it in a quiet way. It’s typical: I was either fuckin’ naked with a cowboy hat on looking for cocaine all night or I was just completely quiet in my room. And that’s a scary way to be.

The most wonderful thing about recovery is that you learn to maintain a steady way of being. There is always stimulus, whether it’s positive or negative. Buddhist philosophy really dives deep in to that: You sit with it, you meditate on it, and you let it pass. It is really difficult because you’ve never done that before. In the early stages of recovery, I’d have to go up to my room and just sit there in so much fuckin’ agony and just wait, recognize it, and let it pass. I had this mantra: Just be accountable. I wanted to be accountable for more than a week. It seems so simple, but it’s easier said than done.

In rock music, you don’t have to be accountable for anything! Laughs. It didn’t matter as long as I got on stage. For many years, I was fooling myself into thinking that I was going to lock myself away in my dressing room and help myself, and I never did because deep down I wanted to party just like everyone else was.

I think if this album sounds more derivative in certain ways it was because I was more clear-minded. I leaned on music that I loved. There’s a lot of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, XTC, and David Bowie—the things that I hold dear. The whole point of this record was to chill the fuck out. For some reason something made me want to record doubled vocals on almost the entire album, which is awesome. I’ve always had this weird desire to conquer and make perfect double vocals. To get spiritual on you, I really let the universe dictate how this whole thing was going to turn out.

If the music sounds like something I’m influenced by, I accept that and try to make it as sincere and honorable as it can. If it’s going to sound like John Lennon, I’m going to fucking make it sound like John Lennon. I’ll never say, “Oh, this kind of sounds like a Lennon song, so I better make it sound different.” That’s not the way I look at music. I consider myself as kind of a vessel of all these beautiful things that I’ve always heard, and I let it go through me. Of course, it always has my stamp on it, my creativity, but it honors what I love.

Fortunately, I’ve had the ability to never think too much about where I’m going. In Ween, my thing has always been: It doesn’t matter what kind of song it is or where it goes as long as it’s a good song. That’s what Mickey and I always adhered to.

The foremost thing is just writing music, and I’ve been very lucky to have 25 years of that under my belt. The Ween audience is very loyal and they’re great. I want to keep making music for them. I don’t want a big, bombastic career. I’ve been through that. If people want to come, they come. If they don’t, they don’t. I want to do great live shows, because I love performing, and I hope to write songs and maybe have other people pick them up, and make a living off of doing that.

But we’ll see. I have to pay the bills. When I lost Ween and decided to get sober, I had to embrace the fact that my income was going to be a tenth of what it was, but it was still worth it. I really believe if you do the right thing and you make yourself accountable and available, then good things will happen.

Aaron Freeman Jacob Blickenstaff

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

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Check Out These Vintage Photos of New York City’s 1970s Punk Playground

by TatianaPropstin Posted on July 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Two notable recent books from Glitterati Incorporated take readers deep into New York City’s 1970s punk underground. Playground: Growing Up In the New York Underground by Paul Zone, with Jake Austin (of Roctober fame!), features photos and firsthand accounts from a foot soldier in the rock and roll wars waged in the city’s now infamous clubs, including Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. White Trash Uncut, meanwhile, comes out of Andy Warhol’s factory scene and, as you might expect, takes an artier look at the New York scene.

Given that my tastes tend more towards the Ramones/Dead Boys/Dictators and less Warhol/Waters, Playground hits a real sweet spot. Zone’s photos pull back the curtain on that time and place in a way few other books on the ’70s NYC scene have done. Sure, you get plenty of (mediocre) performance photos. But that isn’t why you’re here. Where Playground shines is in its casual photos of friends—famous and not—behind-the-scenes, after hours and off guard, almost 240 pages of them. It also brings John Holstrom’s awesome oral history of the early New York punk scene, “Please Kill Me,” to life. It’s a perfect companion.

With the recent passing of Tommy Elderly/Ramone, Playground is particularly timely. It’s an exciting visual romp through a unique period in the history of rock and roll. Looking through the photos, it’s hard not to notice how many of the people featured have died, many way before their prime: drugs (too many to list), AIDS (which also took Zone’s brother, Miki), cancer (three of the original Ramones) and weird car crashes (Stiv Bators). How the hell are all the Stones still alive and the Ramones all dead? Here are some samples from that book:

Sylvain Sylvain, Johnny Thunders, and Jerry Nolan (New York Dolls) at Max’s. (August 1973)

Tish and Snooky at Manic Panic on St. Marks Place (1978)

Debbie Harry (Blondie) at Max’s. (1975)

Dee Dee Ramone and Connie Gripp in Max’s kitchen. (1975)

Wayne County at the Coventry, in Queens. (1973)

Crayola at Max’s. (1977)

Originally published in 1977, White Trash Uncut, by Andy Warhol Factory devotee and one time Interview staff photographer Christopher Makos, quickly went out of print and became something of a collector’s item. Finally reprinted, the book consists of a mix of artier photos—close-ups of body parts and portraits of players in the art and music scenes, focusing on that point of intersection between the two in venues like Max’s Kansas City. It leans heavy on photos of the well-known, if not outright famous: Richard Hell, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, the Dead Boys, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, David Bowie, Divine, Man Ray, John Waters, Marilyn Chambers and plenty other luminaries of that era. The reprint includes 25 photos not included in the original book. Here’s a sampling:

Punk rock fans, New York City.

David Bowie in Los Angeles.

Divine and John Waters

A hustler, posing. (Jeans by Fiorruci, Milan.)

Earring by Gillette.

The two books go well together, together giving a representative look at the intersection of music, art, scene-making, fashion, hustling, and hanging out that made the early New York City punk scene so indelible.

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Check Out These Vintage Photos of New York City’s 1970s Punk Playground

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

by Benito46Kjksdbk Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The most expensive World Cup ever has come and gone with a German victory and a Brazilian implosion. The hosts suffered an embarrassing two-game skid at the end of the tournament—losing by a combined 10-1 score in the semifinals and third-place game—leaving Seleção fans from Rio de Janeiro to Manaus longing for the days of jogo bonito.

But as Slate‘s Joshua Keating pointed out, they also might be ready for change at the top. During Brazil’s historic 7-1 loss to Germany on Tuesday, fans reportedly started an obscene anti-Dilma Rousseff chant; the president decided to stop attending games after enduring taunts in the national team’s opener against Croatia. Meanwhile, the government crackdown on Cup protests recommenced on Saturday, when some 17 people were arrested in advance of the final.

With all the tensions surrounding the World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics, I reached out to Juliana Barbassa, a former Rio-based Associated Press reporter. Barbassa is now finishing up a book about the upheaval in Brazilian society that led to last year’s national protests and today’s lingering violence. We talked about the country’s growing middle class, soccer’s effect on the national psyche, and the post-World Cup/pre-Olympics political dynamic:

Mother Jones: How did you come to this topic?

Juliana Barbassa: My whole family is from Brazil. I ended up in the US because of my father’s work, and ended up going to college and graduate school and becoming a journalist there. Then I had this chance to come here as the AP’s correspondent in Rio, and I started thinking about this. In 2009-10, Rio had just gotten the Olympics. It already had the hosting of the World Cup up its sleeve, and growth was tremendous. It seemed like Brazil and Rio were on everyone’s radar.

Having known Brazil and Rio in the ’80s and ’90s, post-transition-to-democracy when the economy was in the dumps—hyperinflation, Brazilians leaving Brazil for the first time—I had some real questions about whether what was happening now was addressing these inequalities that had hamstrung the country. So I wanted to spend time with the people who, because of their jobs or where they lived or who they are, were at the nexus of some particular aspect of this change.

Once I started going through the process, I started to feel like the really important change that was happening here was happening in the middle class and the lower middle class. Yes, there are these Brazillionaires who have more money than they’ve ever had before and go on mega shopping sprees in New York. But we’ve always had the hyperrich. It felt like the real shift was happening among the lower socioeconomic classes.

MJ: What’s most notable?

JB: There’s a visible reduction in punch-in-the-gut poverty. People aren’t hungry in the same way that they were. This new middle-class thing is very real, and you see it in things like the number of adults wearing braces. It’s shocking. Also, the number of first-time Brazilian fliers—people who could never afford an air ticket. At the same time, part of what’s interesting is a sense of affluence that’s kind of based on stuff. Some of that’s access to food and basic needs, but also cellphones, credit cards, cars—all those things are selling like they never have before.

But you can have the stuff of the middle class and still lead a life that lacks a lot of the things that the middle class expect, like access to good education, decent transportation, sewage treatment, basic things like that. The rest of the services and rights and expectations haven’t been met yet.

MJ: What role did this group play in the protests we saw last year?

JB: The protests were very heterogeneous: people from all over, all walks of life, a lot of university-educated people, some of this new middle class. But these protests were sparked by a revolt over an increase in the bus fare of 10 cents American—a wealthy person isn’t going protest over that. The other demands they were making I see as generally very middle-class demands: A lot of the signs read things like “I want FIFA-quality schools,” “I want FIFA-quality hospitals,” “If my kid gets sick, I can’t take him to a stadium.”

And also the next step—a government that pays attention to the needs of the population and tries to meet them instead of putting on these big events that people were starting to feel maybe detract attention from the things that are really necessary, a government that’s less corrupt, these kinds of things. These are demands of a growing middle class that’s finding its voice.

MJ: Do people think of the World Cup and Olympics megaprojects as separate phenomena?

JB: I think most Brazilians have been thinking of them as one. Also, because of the way that projects have been hooked onto this event and that event, it isn’t necessarily clear. Here in Rio it doesn’t make sense. For one of the World Cup projects, one of the big deliverables was this transit route that was supposed to go from the airport to the far west. The far west is where we’re going to have a lot of the Olympic installation. There’s nothing related to the World Cup. So why is this rapid transit route part of the World Cup? Who knows. People didn’t really have a sense of what it would cost or what it would mean until we started to get close to the World Cup. I think it will be the same for the Olympics.

MJ: After all of the buildup, what was it like once the World Cup actually got here?

JB: Just before it started there was a lot of tension in the air. There was a poll that said the majority of Brazilians did not think that this was a positive thing for Brazil. There was a bit of grumpiness. There was basically like a holding back that is absolutely not the way that Brazil usually approaches the World Cup. So there were a lot of questions about how people would react when it started. What if Brazil loses? Will there be a big explosion of protests again? But there hasn’t.

I think a lot of people were really turned off by how violent these protests have been: violence by the police, which is heavily armed in these sort of Robocop outfits—full body armor, massive weapons, very ready with the pepper spray and stun grenades and things like that—and then these black blocs: people who use these violent tactics. I don’t think there is sense that it’s all forgotten and over. President Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings are very low. I just don’t think that it’s manifesting as an anti-World Cup feeling. People are separating those things.

I feel like Brazilians used to identify with soccer. It was Brazil’s face abroad. Our national team, our biggest players, Pele and all that. There’s a Brazilian writer, Nelson Rodriguez, who was a real chronicler of soccer, who once said, “The national team was the nation in cleats.” It was that for a very long time. Ironically, now that the World Cup is here and the world is seeing Brazil and seeing the good and the bad, there is a little bit of a separation there. Brazilians by and large love their soccer, love their national team, but they don’t feel like either of them represents them—or that everything depends on whether Brazil wins or loses on the pitch.

MJ: Do you think the protests will return, and if so, will they be as large as last year? And what role will all of this play at the polls?

JB: It’s very unpredictable. Last year, nobody saw them coming. I do think people are more awake and aware about their rights and what’s owed to them. I don’t know if they’re unhappy enough to change it, but I do think that the country that we’ll have in 2016 is going to depend on how Brazilians process this change and how they see themselves, and the economic moment. We’re definitely post-boom. We haven’t grown since 2010. Jobs are still plentiful. Inflation is rising, but it’s not out of control. If those numbers start to change and people start to feel like they’re going to the supermarket and they can’t get as much as they used to—if it starts hitting people in the areas where it matters—I think that we might see more unrest.

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

by MaricruFerraro Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Holly Williams in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As the granddaughter of Hank Williams Sr. and daughter of Hank Williams Jr., Holly Williams‘ real inheritance may be the art of self-invention. Under a heavy mantle, Holly has carved out her own career as a singer-songwriter with a sweet but commanding voice and songs that tell the stories of family and friends in a wistful Southern setting.

The diamond-studded “HW” ring on her right hand is the only outward indication of country-royalty glitz. She grew up mostly outside of the music business, picking up the guitar in her late teens with a little help from her step-father, Johnny Christopher, a busy Nashville session guitarist and songwriter who co-wrote the modern classic “Always On My Mind.“

Last year, Williams released her third album, The Highway, produced by Charlie Peacock and featuring guest appearances by Jackson Browne, Jakob Dylan, and Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s touring behind the album through August, here and in the United Kingdom. Jacob Blickenstaff photographed Holly in Brooklyn and spoke with her by phone from the road. The following is in her words:

It’s not that I see myself operating outside of country music in that I don’t like it, or I don’t want to be there. I’d like to think that my music would be played on country radio if it were the ’90s, when they had a lot more singer-songwriters on there, like Lyle Lovett and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Now it’s all that “bro-country,” with Daisy Dukes, beer, tailgating, and fireworks. So everybody calls me an Americana artist or singer-songwriter, along with those people who are not mainstream enough for country radio today. I think “The Highway” is a country song, but radio doesn’t hear it that way, so I’m just living on the outskirts.

I opened my first store a year and a half after the car wreck with my sister. I couldn’t play for about eight months, and I didn’t know how long it would be. My sister was terribly broken. She had 28 surgeries and was in bed for two years. I didn’t want to leave my family and go back on the road. The recession hit and I had split with my first label. I had to take off big chunks of time from music. Music is my first love and always will be, but retail is just in me. Hank Williams and his wife Audrey owned one of Nashville’s first retail stores on Broadway—Hank and Audrey’s Corral—and my grandfather on my mom’s side owned a mercantile, and that’s what my new store is named, White’s Mercantile.

It’s really nice for me to escape and have a couple of hours a day to work on the stores. When you’re a solo artist, you really just think about yourself all day: Here is my interview, here are my songs. I just love getting out of my own head. Even at home vacuuming, just staring at a machine sucking up dirt and it’s very mindless—these domestic things somehow bring the creativity and ideas.

I didn’t have a big struggle finding my own identity. I consider what my dad went through to be much harder, considering he was the son of Hank Williams. His mom had him on tour at eight years-old; he dealt with an unbelievable amount of pressure. He would sing his own songs and the audience would boo and leave. But he proved he could do his own music and sell 50 million records. I come from a line of very independent people.

In the beginning, people would come to the shows after drinking all day, thinking it was going to be rowdy because I’m Bocephus’ daughter. And here I am at the piano singing Tom Waits songs. I could probably be a lot wealthier if I had signed with a major label and did straight-up country songs. I wanted to be able to find it on my own. It’s the longer road, but the more fulfilling one.

I was completely kept away from the music business. It was always, “I’m not Bocephus, I’m Daddy.” All we knew was fishing on the farm and hunting and going to Montana and playing with the cows. Dad was on tour all the time, we saw him every two to three months. We lived a very normal life in Nashville. My dad didn’t even listen to the radio. It is the complete opposite of what people think.

The funny thing is, I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 17, and it was through my stepfather. It was his guitar in the house. My dad never once mentioned, “y’all want to learn an instrument?”

I was writing lyrics at a really young age, like seven or eight. I loved to write stories. Throughout my teenage years I actually wanted to write poetry. When I picked up a guitar and learned three or four chords, that first day I ran downstairs and said, “Mom, I wrote a song!” it seemed like it came out of nowhere. It was very natural.

Whenever I’ve tried to sit down and write a song it never happens. Usually they come out of nowhere. “Waiting on June” came when I was washing dishes. A lot of songs get started that way, at a still moment. I just started singing it like that. I wanted to follow the story as starting from my Papaw’s standpoint; he was always waiting for her, from when they met to when they went to heaven.

The saying is true: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” My grandparents died and suddenly we can’t go to their house for Christmas anymore; the family July 4 is over. There’s so much tradition that ends when a couple who had been together for 60 years are gone. We try to do it the same, but it will never be the same. Part of what I write is about getting older and reminiscing and wanting things to be back how they were, like picking pecans and hanging with the cows on Papaw’s farm.

The cemetery that the song “Gone Away From Me” was written about, Oak Ridge Cemetery, is about two miles from my grandparent’s house. It’s where they are buried and my great-great-aunt Stella who died in infancy is buried, as well as relatives that go back five generations. The song is from my mom’s viewpoint, and also the generation before her—they had a lot of tragedy. Every year, the whole White family would go down to the cemetery around July 4 and visit in the afternoon and be there for each other. Now my grandparents are buried there with just a quiet little oak tree, it’s a sacred place for me.

July 3rd was a dreaded friend of mine
We’d all go down to the family plot in the Louisiana pines
Staring at that little baby’s grave
Stella was as young as she was brave

And what I’d give to go there again
Kiss my daddy’s face, hold my mama’s hand
Little did I know soon they would be
Lying right beside her, gone away from me
Gone away from me.

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

by RonaldDempster Posted on June 9, 2014

Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

By

The White House

President Obama explained his thinking about climate change during a sit-down interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; it will air Monday night during the final episode of Showtime’s climate series “Years of Living Dangerously.” Friedman also shared lots of the good bits in his Times column on Sunday. Here are some highlights:

Obama would love to make polluters pay for their CO2 emissions:

“[I]f there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions. … We’ve obviously seen resistance from the Republican side of the aisle on that. And out of fairness, there’s some Democrats who’ve been concerned about it as well, because regionally they’re very reliant on heavy industry and old-power plants. … I still believe, though, that the more we can show the price of inaction — that billions and potentially trillions of dollars are going to be lost because we do not do something about it — ultimately leads us to be able to say, ‘Let’s go ahead and help the marketplace discourage this kind of activity.’”

He knows we can’t burn all proven reserves of oil, gas, and coal and still keep warming below 2 degrees C, an internationally agreed-upon target:

“[T]here is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire. … [W]e’re not going to suddenly turn off a switch and suddenly we’re no longer using fossil fuels, but we have to use this time wisely, so that you have a tapering off of fossil fuels replaced by clean energy sources that are not releasing carbon. … But I very much believe in keeping that 2 [degree] Celsius target as a goal.”

Obama recognizes that methane leakage from natural-gas systems is a problem, but he is not necessarily inclined to address it at the national level:

Natural gas, the president said, “is a useful bridge” to span “where we are right now and where we hope to be — where we’ve got entirely clean energy economies based around the world.” Environmentalists, he added, “are right, though, to be concerned if it’s done badly, then you end up having methane gas emitted. And we know how to do it properly. But right now what we’ve got to do is make sure that there are industry standards that everybody is observing.” That doesn’t “necessarily mean that it has to be a national law,” he said. “You could have a series of states working together — and, hopefully, industry working together — to make sure that the extraction of natural gas is done safely.”

He says it’s hard to get our political system to tackle a long-term problem like climate change:

“I don’t always lead with the climate change issue because if you right now are worried about whether you’ve got a job or if you can pay the bills, the first thing you want to hear is how do I meet the immediate problem? One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.”

He wants to shift public opinion on the issue:

“The person who I consider to be the greatest president of all time, Abraham Lincoln, was pretty consistent in saying, ‘With public opinion there’s nothing I cannot do, and without public opinion there’s nothing I can get done,’ and so part of my job over these next two and a half years and beyond is trying to shift public opinion. And the way to shift public opinion is to really focus in on the fact that if we do nothing our kids are going to be worse off.”

Lastly, Obama warns against cynicism:

“I want to make sure that everybody who’s been watching this program or listening to this interview doesn’t start concluding that, well, we’re all doomed, there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a lot we can do about it. It’s not going to happen as fast or as smoothly or as elegantly as we like, but, if we are persistent, we will make progress.”

Ezra Klein, are you listening?

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

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Contact: Producer Joe Henry on Long Marriages and Short Recording Sessions

by StantonHsz Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joe Henry at the Greenwich House Music School in New York City. Jacob Blickenstaff

Since the mid-’80s, Joe Henry has alternately worked as a musician and producer in a career that encompasses soul, avant-garde jazz, country, R&B, rock, and folk. The range of artists he’s produced—Allen Toussaint, Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Aaron Neville, and Mose Allison among others—and the styles he has incorporated into his own music speaks to his reverence and broad understanding of American popular music as an art form.

Invisible Hour, out this week, is Henry’s 13th solo album and his first independent release since departing his long-time label Anti-. In a statement on his website, Henry says the album is about marriage and “the redemptive power of love in the face of fear.” He elaborated on the theme, and his career, during a recent chat in New York City. The following is in his words.

Just like being a musician, marriage is a constant engagement. There are moments where you have to care more about it than how either of you feel. When you commit spiritually and psychically, it doesn’t mean that you don’t make mistakes all over the place. People are seduced into thinking on that beautiful day that you’ll never have any significant problems. You think, “That couple over there, that won’t be us.” You have to let go of the idea that having a problem means somehow you’ve been betrayed. Otherwise you cut yourself off from your greatest resource, which is acceptance that you are going to encounter obstacles.

I have come to recently understand that I am not betraying the great mystery and poetry of song tradition to deliver the music as candidly as I can. With this album, I’m more consciously devoted to a particular sort of emotional clarity. I wanted to create the illusion, even if it is just an illusion, that nothing stands between the listener and the songs. I was working from an orientation of playing along with an acoustic guitar and being very orchestral in open-tunings, in real time on one instrument, enamored by the immediacy of that. I don’t think it is more authentic; I just mean there is a rumble, and weather in the air happens with the overtones of vibrating instruments in a room. I find that incredibly evocative and I wanted the record to have as close to that sensation as possible.

T-Bone Burnett was one of the first people I ever reached out to as a completely naïve singer-songwriter living in Ann Arbor. I made my first demos and was literally taking addresses off of the back of records: “T-Bone Burnett c/o Warner Brothers Records, Hollywood.” He wrote me back nonspecifically, “I lost your letter that came with this tape. I’m not really sure what you’re looking for, but it’s really great and you should keep going.” That was really what I needed, to have reached outside of my small frame and get some kind of response.

When you are just beginning, it’s amazing how little affirmation you really need, just the tiniest scrap. You’re in the desert and it’s a drop of water and you can keep going. To this day, when I get letters from people, I’m powerless not to respond. I feel like I have to let them know that they’ve been heard.

When all of us are starting out, we measure ourselves against the icons and we aren’t always aware of the ways in which we adopt somebody else’s posture. It’s like you want to be in the Boy Scouts, you think you have to put on that uniform to be authentically recognized. You live long enough and you realize, “I am part of the troop if I decide I am.” And that’s something you come to out of maturity—you can’t pregame it. The real trick is, how do you survive long enough to actually get good?

As a producer, some of my most meaningful work has come not from just sitting at home and the phone ringing one day but writing to people I’d like to work with. That’s how I wound up working with Bonnie Raitt. I sent a cold letter through her manager and I said, “If you don’t know, here’s who I am, here’s what I do, if you ever want to have a conversation or try something with no obligation, I’d be wide open to it.” I’ve gotten a lot of really meaningful work that way. I’ve had very few people who I’ve reached out to just not respond. The only people who categorically told me no were Kenny Burrell and Dr. Dre, who I wanted to produce a record of mine. I couldn’t get him to talk to me, but fair enough. I knew it was a long shot.

I make records quickly and affordably, because I believe in it. Not just because it’s economically expedient, but because I think making a record in three or four days invites a particular kind of focus and commitment that is almost invariably positive. I work with musicians who are not only willing to work that way, but love working that way, who appreciate the fact that right now this song gets revealed, conjured into the room, like a séance. It’s an exciting way to work it’s a sacred way to work, and as it turns out it’s also a really affordable way to work.

I’m stunned at how many people who live and breathe and admire the records from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s quickly forget that that’s how they got made. I don’t want to call out any names, but I could tell you a story of somebody revering a record from that period, pulling their hair out about their own record they spent a year and a half making. I’m saying, “You know that record that we were talking about the other day? Five of the ten songs on were recorded in one afternoon. And you are not going to get there if you are laboring over it to the point where you can’t stand the sound of it anymore. No one else is going to be able to stand the sound of it either.”

Putting this album out myself came down to this: I have had a great association with my former label, but I believe absolutely that artists should own their masters. They don’t share that view. I have nothing but respect for Brett Gurewitz, the owner of Anti-, but he has a band, Bad Religion, and I guarantee that Brett would not put out a Bad Religion record that he didn’t own the master for.

How I take a record into the world needs to be as unique as how I think about writing a song. It’s laziness or cowardice on my part not to, and then be sour at someone else when the record doesn’t do better. Bonnie Raitt—we made her last record together—she put that out on her own record label and she could’ve gone anywhere with it. I know for a fact because I had labels coming to me saying, “Is there any way you can get a meeting with her? Because she won’t talk to us.” I know she won’t. She’s not going to. This is a grand experiment for her and she is thrilled about it. At a certain point you start asking, “What am I getting for an advance that wouldn’t put me in an economy car? I am turning over my masters in perpetuity that my children ought to own. I’m better off taking out a home equity loan on my house, making my own record, and paying it off when I sell 10,000 of them, which I can.”

Everybody is trying to rebuild the model because it is not music that is broken down. People consume music more than they ever have. What is corrupt and failed is the delivery system. Good riddance to the very few labels who tell artists they aren’t allowed to work until we ordain that your work has value. When I was first starting out and there was no such thing as sitting at home with a computer with a great microphone, I sat on my hands until a label would give me the tiniest scrap to go try to do any goddamn thing. The thought takes root is that you don’t matter and your work can’t possibly matter. People say now any kid with a laptop can go sit in his basement and make a record. Yeah! How about it? It doesn’t have to sell 10 million copies to be meaningful.

“Contact” is an occasional series of artist portraits and interviews by Jacob Blickenstaff.

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Contact: Producer Joe Henry on Long Marriages and Short Recording Sessions

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More Evidence of Paul Ryan’s "Inner Cities" Problem

by KourtneLoughman Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012, was still defending his recent comments about inner-cities culture this week, when he appeared on Fox News and told host Bill O’Reilly, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Ryan was responding to criticism he drew after saying earlier this month, during an interview with conservative radio host Bill Bennett, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Some accused Ryan of using racist—or racially-loaded—rhetoric. Ryan replied that he had been “inarticulate” but was not “implicating the culture of one community”—that is, African Americans. Yet his interview with Bennett was not the first time that Ryan, a potential 2016 presidential contender, had given the impression that inner city poverty was linked to the supposed cultural deficiencies of minority Americans.

In 2005, Ryan spoke to the Atlas Society, a libertarian outfit devoted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” he noted, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.” And he observed that all political battles “usually” come down “to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.” Asked to describe the best Randian argument to advance libertarian notions on Capitol Hill and beat back the welfare state, Ryan replied,

I think the victimization argument. I think that the fact that collectivists speak down to people as victims is not only an arrogant thing to do, but it produces poor results. So backing up, this victimization class that collectivists try to produce, and showing the folks you’re trying to convince that this is not only in their best interests—in their worst interests—that it’s not dignifying, and it’s arrogant. That seems to work. We’re trying to recruit a lot of minority legislators to work with us on personal savings and health accounts because, of all things, it’s in their best interest to fight party bosses from the Democrats, who are really insisting on everybody toeing the line… But I always try to show how victimhood has gotten them nothing.

You can listen to Ryan’s full answer here:

In these remarks, Ryan appeared to be associating the “victimization class” with “minority legislators,” and suggesting that this group of people have gained nothing by accepting “victimhood.” It’s a message close to Mitt Romney’s 47-percent remarks and Ryan’s own takers-verus-makers line. But there is a racial cast to the comment.

In a 2012 interview, Ryan contended that inner city crime was a cultural matter. Speaking to a reporter with the ABC television affiliate in Flint, Michigan, Ryan remarked,

the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society. That’s what charities, and civic groups, and churches do to help one another make sure that they can realize the value in one another.

A key problem, he appeared to be saying, was with the character of poor people within the inner cities. Given the high percentage of African Americans in such areas, this remark, too, could be seen as racially charged.

It’s no shocker when Ryan—or other libertarians—denounce government assistance programs for breeding dependency and preventing recipients from developing a robust work ethic. But Ryan contends all this assistance leads to a cultural problem. In 2012, he told conservative host Star Parker that the best way to undo the harm caused by a “welfare state that lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency” is to bring “cultural antibodies back in.” And by tying this depraved culture to inner-city Americans, Ryan presents an analysis that can be read to include a racial component. What he said on Bennett’s radio show was not out of sync with his usual rhetoric. It was not inarticulate. It was a view he has expressed before and presumably believes fully.

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More Evidence of Paul Ryan’s "Inner Cities" Problem

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How Postmodern Jukebox Turns Kesha to Doo-Wop, Guns N’ Roses to NoLa Blues

by NormaBoismenu Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ever wonder what Miley Cyrus might sound like if it were written and recorded in the 1950s? Or what Pitbull and Kesha’s “Timber” would be like if it were produced at the height of doo-wop? Lady Gaga transposed to the ’40s? Daft Punk done by Irish tenor singers? A Motown tribute to Nickelback? Lorde’s “Royals” sung by a talented clown? “Blurred Lines” converted into a bluegrass dance tune?

Postmodern Jukebox’s “alternate history of pop music” has all that, and much more. For instance, check out the group’s recent cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” featuring Miche Braden—in the style of New Orleans blues:

“Before things took off on YouTube, I was a jazz pianist,” says Scott Bradlee, the group’s founder. “When I moved to New York when I was 24, I did the thing all musicians do: played clubs and so on. I had all these ideas in my head since high school, like when would I take classic rock and made it ragtime. I was probably the only kid in my high school who really liked ragtime. I wanted to find a venue for that kind of experience. I didn’t find it in jazz clubs—i found it on YouTube.”

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How Postmodern Jukebox Turns Kesha to Doo-Wop, Guns N’ Roses to NoLa Blues

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Elizabeth Kolbert: "Humans Will Eventually Become Extinct"

by JuliusI82gkpps Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Things have been pretty boring, extinction-wise, since an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Until humans came along, that is. Most folks might not know it, but there’s an mass extinction happening right before our eyes, and guess who is causing it? To better understand this madness, The New Yorker‘s acclaimed climate journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert clomped through the tropics, crawled into the caves at Lascaux, and emerged with a new book, The Sixth Extinction, which will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on February 11.

Also read Julia Whitty’s 2007 cover story on mass extinction and the hazards of vanishing biodiversity.

Kolbert’s book brims with the fascinating and harrowing details of humanity’s brutal and pervasive impacts on other species. Did you know, for instance, that “before humans finally did in the Neanderthals, they had sex with them”? Well they did. And as a result, Kobert writes, most of us are part Neanderthal—up to 4 percent.

No matter what Donald Trump says, it’s clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet. But there are other large-scale effects at play. For instance, acidification of the oceans and rampant deforestation, both human-caused, are putting serious strain on ecosystems, and some of them are on the verge of crashing. As one ecologist put it, “we’re busy sawing off the limb on which we perch.”

Ultimately, Kolbert says, humans, too, will go extinct. I recently reached the author at home in Western Massachusetts to get a better grasp on the scale of the problems our descendants will face.

Mother Jones: I was fascinated by your discussion of the “perception of incongruity,” and how humans create more and more elaborate explanations to account for contradictory evidence. Where does this turn up in the modern debate on extinction?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn’t fit into an existing paradigm. For a long time the story that we’ve been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn’t particularly special. What I’m trying to convey in the book is that we are unusual. We turn out to be the one species altering the planet like this, and that puts people back in the position of being responsible for what happens. There’s a big resistance to the idea that we could be such a big deal. The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time you can’t find anything like us.

MJ: Is it still the case that we don’t have a general theory of mass extinction?

EK: Yes absolutely. We can’t say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

MJ: So even though it appears cyclical…

EK: It is not cyclical at all! That whole idea has been debunked. It’s completely random as far as we can tell.

MJ: The people you came across during your investigation bring so much expertise and color to the book. What was your sense of their feelings toward the extinction? Alarm? Cynicism? Anger?

EK: That’s a really good question. I think alarm is a good word. I think there’s real sadness. If you’re a conservation biologist in many fields these days, you’re seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they’re chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in. Frustration would be another word. Things that evidently should be done are not being done. There’s also fascination. Grim fascination. We are seeing changes that should take thousands of years. That is amazing from a scientific point of view.

MJ: You write about a phenomenon called “overkill,” where first we killed off the megafauna—the large animals—and then the Neanderthals. If we accept the hypothesis that modern humans are responsible for the demise of these species, does that mean the sixth extinction has been happening ever since we came along?

EK: Yes. Laughs. how’s that for an answer? You know, we’ve been around for 200,000 years. Some people would say there’s even evidence that our ancestors were part of extinction in Africa, but I think that’s heavily disputed. It’s pretty widely accepted that the Australian megafauna were done in by people. That was 40,000 years ago. But when you look at the vast sweep of history, it will all be compressed down to this tiny little layer.

MJ: Given this timescale, it seems like an everyday person might struggle to grasp mass extinction, since you can’t actually see the degree to which it is happening in our time. How do you get around that?

EK: There’s this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It’s the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, “Okay, well, that’s the norm.” The fact that 100 years ago there were many more species? Well, that’s been erased because you weren’t here for that. That problem is really severe. Most of us live in parts of the world where we don’t expect to see much, and we wouldn’t necessarily notice things that are crashing. Bats are crashing, and if you’ve been watching even in one brief lifetime you would notice that there are many fewer bats. If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

MJ: The book kind of shows us how these animals are getting screwed at every turn. In one chapter you write about how the world is changing in ways that force species to migrate, and at the same time creating barriers to that movement. Is this something of a perfect storm?

EK: We don’t entirely know yet. But if you’re asking in the abstract, “What could you do to really mess up a lot of species?” it would be hard to design a better system than the one we’ve got. Practically everything is on the move now, in some way, because of climate change. And they’re going to run up against all these man-made barriers. We’ve completely changed the rules of the game. The territory they’d like to move to just isn’t there.

MJ: After spending time with with Suci, the Sumatran rhino, you wrote about experiencing a “flicker of interspecies recognition.” Would you attribute part of the human callousness towards the plight of animals to a scarcity of that experience?

Elizabeth Kolbert Barry Goldstein

EK: Really interesting question. I don’t know the answer to that. We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive—as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would. You know, a rhino is a grand animal. And if we did have more experience with that, as opposed to factory-farmed cows….On the other hand, the colonists who came to this country and saw the amazing herds of buffalo and slaughtered them very close to the point of extinction, which seems impossible to imagine, because the herds were so great. So that would be countervailing evidence.

MJ: At one point, you note the possibility that “eventually travel and global commerce will cease.” What does that suggest about the future of humans on this planet?

EK: Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct. It depends what “eventually” means. But the idea that were going to be around for the rest of global history… I don’t think there’s any scientist who would suggest that is true. It could be millions of years from now. We may leave descendants that are human-like.

MJ: Is this book a call to action?

EK: I very carefully avoided saying what it was. What I’ve laid out requires action commensurate with the problem. We’re talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action so I’m going to leave it to the reader.

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Elizabeth Kolbert: "Humans Will Eventually Become Extinct"

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