Dear Fred: Reading ‘Good Things Happen Slowly’

Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz

Fred Hersch

Crown Archetype

2017

Dear Fred:

I was going to write this to you directly, but I thought if I published it, that it might lead more people to read your new autobiography. It certainly is good!

I have loved your music, both as a player and as a composer, for a long time. (Readers, in case you didn’t know it, Fred is an award-winning, killer jazz pianist and composer. You should listen to him. He has released solo work, and played with ensembles of varying size; he has also composed a lot of fully notated music that is -- well, you could say that’s art music or whatever, the main thing is, it’s GOOD.)

You are a little older than me, and we have some things in common. For instance, we both got to New York around the same time – although you stayed and I didn’t. It was great to read that your impressions of that nasty, smelly, rough, dangerous NYC of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s align with mine – and that we both loved it. Like you, I sat on the curbs outside the clubs I couldn’t afford to get into and listened, blown away, to the music inside.

Unlike you, I am not gay, but I lost my best friend to the first wave of AIDS, along with many other good and talented friends. Reading about your life with the diagnosis for going on 30 years now helps me immensely in understanding what he went through. It was very painful to bring all those memories back up again, but in a way good too.

Like you, and like many folks that I think will like this book, I have always felt ill at ease and different, yearning for acclaim and acceptance. Me? I performed comedy for years – now I write. Your writing here is great, too – clear and concise and straightforward, but evocative. I didn’t realize until I got to a certain point in the book that David Hajdu helped you out with it. He is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, someone I read and re-read to remind myself how to communicate on the page effectively. (Don’t worry – you do not sound like him, you sound like you. The best writing mentors help their pupils sound like themselves.)

Jazz really sustains me as a writer, the idea that you just have to swing with what you’ve got. And then you write: “In jazz, it’s individuality, not adherence to a standard conception of excellence, that matters most. . . . Difference matters – in fact, it’s an asset rather than a liability. There is no describing how exhilarating this epiphany was for me, as a person who always felt different from other people. In jazz, difference is the key element that makes artistry possible.” Amen.

It’s great to read about all these aspects of your life – how you approach creative projects, your struggles with addictions (I’m right there with you, again), and just the contours of the changes wrought by time and circumstance as they cut and shape your life and work. Thanks for being brave about putting all that down on paper – it certainly inspires me to be as rigorous. Didn’t someone once say that all the good stuff is hidden inside the pain?

I was sorry to read of your recent and intense health struggles. I am just coming out of a period of being physically and mentally ailing to the point that I was in bed for three months – nothing compared to what you went through, but nothing like anything I’ve experienced before. Reading those passages was an inspiration as well, although I’d just as soon we could all skip that shit and just have the inspiration straight. Still, reading about your perseverance came at just the right time for me. Thanks for the help.

And hey, I still have a ways to go before I get through your discography, but the one I’m most grateful for isn’t even on there. In 1999, you made, in collaboration with Beth Kephart and Art Lande (Art lives near me here in Boulder) Nourishing the Caregiver, which I found providentially at the time my mother was dying from cancer., and many nights when I couldn’t sleep after a day of taking her to her chemo I’d put it on and feel better. It’s the best medicine I possess.

Anyway, that’s basically it. As a creative person, and simply as a person, your book gets me where I live and makes me feel connected, not wrong, like I’m not so different after all. I think that if the world doesn’t grant you the feeling of fitting in, and if the impetus is strong enough, you can build an entire culture out of yourself, and it ends up being a gift that others can inhabit as well. I think that is exactly what you have done and are doing. 

I hope you are feeling OK, being productive, and having fun with Scott. Thanks for everything!

Sincerely yours,

Brad Weismann

The NRR Project #46: 'Swanee,' Jolson, and the problem of blackface

‘Swanee’

Composer: George Gershwin

Lyricist: Irving Caesar

Performed by Al Jolson

Recorded: January 8, 1920

2:34

For decades, male entertainers in America had two things – a tuxedo and an Al Jolson impression. Anyone could get a laugh of recognition simply by going down on one knee and calling out “Mammy!” The World’s Greatest Entertainer was, for much of his career, precisely that.

Jolson was a performing marvel. At the time, vaudevillians and variety artists hid their hunger for audience approval under a veneer of stylish nonchalance. Compared to them, Jolson was a dynamo, a sweaty, energetic pulse of naked need. He had big, rubbery facial features and a resonant voice, both essential in being heard and seen in the farthest reaches of the cavernous, unamplified theaters of the day. He was one of the first to treat singing a song like he was acting out a three-minute playlet, to sing TO the audience, not just at it. His energy was an embrace that theatergoers felt obliged to return.

Jolson, the son of a rabbi, was born in Lithuania and migrated to America with his family at a young age. Motherless at age 14, he and his brother Harry began busking, singing in the streets for money. After 15 years on the road, Jolson finally opened a New York show as the lead in La Belle Paree in 1911. For then until his stage retirement in 1926, he was the number one theatrical attraction in the country.

He also worked in blackface. This was a holdover from the tradition of the American minstrel show, which had seen its heyday from the 1840s through the end of the 19^th century. Although rapidly becoming an anachronism, the idea of a white man acting out the caricature of a black man was still strong in, and acceptable to, the general audience. Jolson excelled at “selling” songs, especially in wringing out all the pathos from sentimental ballads, especially those by Stephen Foster, which were written expressly for minstrelsy (“My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home”). Part of the license for acting out vulnerability and feeling onstage was, for many white performers of the era, came from adopting a concept of blackness that was inseparable from identifying it with childlike immaturity and a lack of emotional repression.

It’s painful now to see the incongruity of one ethnic minority mocking another to make itself acceptable to the mainstream -- A Jew playing a Negro for affluent white, largely Christian viewers. Jolson was not unconscious of the dilemma, and went out of his way throughout his career to befriend and stand up for black entertainers. Still, he made a fortune out of singlehandedly perpetuating a demeaning, stereotypical representation of blackness that otherwise might have died out much sooner.

At the edge of the Jazz Age, pop songs about the ‘dear old South’ were still big. The legacy of Foster and other sentimental balladeers was powerful, and the Victorian era was rife with maudlin nostalgia in vocal music. Odes to times past, the rural homestead, and the balms of motherhood filled the music racks of pianos across the land – particularly poignant in a time when the American population was moving rapidly from farms to cities.

“Swanee” is the archetype of that kind of song. Jolson had a hit two years earlier with the similar “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” and a year later would score again with “My Mammy,” but “Swanee” was his biggest hit, selling two million records and more than a million copies of the sheet music. Perhaps what distinguishes it is its composer – George Gershwin.

The 20-year-old Gershwin wrote it for a 1919 revue, after which it languished until Jolson heard Gershwin play it a party (some say at a bordello). Gershwin had already been working for five years in Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger, one of many who would demonstrate and promote new pieces for performers and laymen alike. After the success of “Swanee,” his first and biggest hit, Gershwin would focus on composing for the stage and the concert hall for the rest of his short life.

The song is a perfect vehicle for Jolson’s style. Its lyrics are typically plaintive and yearning, but they are couched in a springy, energetic, propulsive melody utilizing percussive block chords. It is not played as much as it is stamped out on the keys. The opening phrases charge up the scale – “I’ve been away from you a long time/I never thought I’d miss you so”; the next are framed in melodramatic staccato –“Somehow I feel/Your love was real/Near you I long to be.”

For the chorus, the shift from minor to major key brightens the tone, the repetitive “Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya” like a freight train chugging along. Gershwin makes a narrative out of the piece, again turning to stair-step phrasing – “I’d give the world – to – be/Among the folks – in – (and the payoff, in a falling phrase) D-I-X-I-E . . . “ It’s easy to remember, infectiously singable.

The bridge brings in quotations from earlier songs – the explicit “I love the old folks at home” phrase from Foster, but also in its use of a subtle musical paraphrase of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” an 1855 gem, which can easily be hummed along in harmony with “Swanee, Swanee/ I am coming back to Swanee.” (If remembered at all today, “Mockingbird” is as the opening theme music, in parodic form, for the Three Stooges shorts.)

By song’s end, it’s become a triumphal celebration of return, a glorious anticipation of trouble no more, almost a march. No wonder it was a hit. Despite its racist connotations, you can’t deny it’s a nifty piece of work.

Jolson gradually weaned himself away from blackface, but not before performing in it in the first sound feature film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and again and again in special appearances in film and on radio.

At his memorial shrine at Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, a bronze statue of Jolson shows him on one knee, hands spread, just as he posed on stage at the end of belting his crowd-pleasing songs. You can’t tell if he’s wearing blackface or not.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: William Jennings Bryan recreates his 1896 'Cross of Gold' speech.

The NRR Project #45: 'Crazy Blues' (1920)

‘Crazy Blues’

Composer: Perry Bradford

Performed by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds

Recorded: August 10, 1920

3:26

To begin with, the blues were never really just the blues. By the time Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920, becoming the first African-American to sing the blues on record, blues concepts and forms had already infiltrated American music. However, her recording sold more than a million copies, sparking a storm of interest and a host of followers, and codifying a genre of music.

Pioneers such as Ma Rainey, while on vaudeville tours at the turn of last century, heard early blues sung by non-professionals and started to pick up the vocabulary, pulse, and feeling of the music. However, when it came to black music, the mainstream taste of the time ran to what were termed “coon” songs – racist and derogatory comedy songs that emphasized stereotyped black behaviors, sung by “coon shouters” (oddly, these were mostly white women, in and out of “blackface” makeup).

Even African-American musical giant W.C. Handy, composer, bandleader, and “father of the blues,” infused elements of ragtime and proto-jazz into his pioneering compositions such as “Memphis Blues” in 1912. That tune was first sung on record by a Caucasian, Morton Harvey, two years later. It was a staid rendition, not “hot” nor deeply felt, delivered as a kind of novelty number. Soon, these pseudo-blues became the province of white female singers such as Nora Bayes and Marion Harris.

Pianist, singer, and composer Perry Bradford convinced Okeh Records’ A&R director Fred Hager to take a chance and record Mamie Smith. She had appeared in Bradford’s 1918 revue Made in Harlem, and she had a strong, clear contralto voice that transferred onto acetate well using the acoustic recording techniques of the day. Despite reported pushback from groups that didn’t like the idea of a black singer making records, Hager went ahead.

Revenue trumped racism. Copies of the record sold by the hundreds of thousands, not just to African-Americans customers but whites as well, rich as well as poor. Here was a genre of music, a sibling of newly-born jazz, which really connected with listeners and exploded into the big time. Soon singers such as Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter were drawing audiences all across the country. Soon, despite the record industry’s attempt to ghettoize the music by classifying African-American recordings as “race records,” they were welcomed into everyone’s consciousness.

Smith’s accompanists were black, too – Ernest Elliott on clarinet, Leroy Parker on violin, Johnny Dunn on cornet, Walter “Dope” Andrews on trombone, and either Willie “The Lion” Smith or Bradford himself on piano – both men claimed the distinction in later years. “Crazy Blues” is not traditional, straight blues – Bradford artfully interpolated enough variation to make it unique. However, all the elements are there – the repeated phrases, the mournful elegance of the lyrics, and most importantly the undisguised feeling that distinguished the blues from the pallid offerings of the pop hits of the day such as “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Whispering.”

The raucous interplay of the instrumentalists are in keeping with the organized chaos of early jazz orchestration, none of it laid out on paper but rather made up on the spot in what were known as “head” or “hum” arrangements. The strong rhythmic sense propels the song, particularly the step-down note sequences between chord changes (that familiar “wah-wah-wah” sound). Dope Andrews’ performance on trombone is a distinctive and delightful feature, using the “tailgate” or “smear” slide technique that allowed the trombonist to flow from one note to the next with ripe abandon.

Smith sings full-out, bending the notes or sidling up to them rather than landing on them with the precision of a conventional vocalist. It’s an urgent, raw sound, one that demands attention. Even though the lyrics are despairing (“I can’t sleep at night/I can’t eat a bite”), there’s something positive and assertive in her delivery that affirms a key part of the blues – the idea that the singer is working through their emotions, purging themselves of the hopelessness that inspired the song in the first place, using the music to come out on top. No wonder people were knocked out by it.

Interestingly, the last verse of “Crazy Blues” is often altered or omitted by singers and scholars. It’s an egregious example of minority-on-minority racism. “I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop/Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop,” Smith sings.

Prejudice against Asian immigrants, and Asian-Americans, was just as rife as anti-black sentiment at the time. Anti-“Chinese” riots had been recorded since the 1870s, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was on the books. The stereotype of Chinese as pidgin-English-speaking opium addicts who constituted a “Yellow Peril” that consciously sought to destroy Western civilization was entrenched in the culture. Bradford cast his despairing singer into an imagined situation where they could end their misery by bringing on death through killing a police officer, a disturbing projection of a transgressive desire.

Later performers would change the words; on Leon Redbone’s 1977 album Double Time, he artfully slurs and mumbles the offending passage. The lyrics in question are a blemish on an otherwise transformative, landmark composition.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Al Jolson sings Swanee.

The NRR Project #44: 'Tiger Rag'

‘Tiger Rag’

Composition origin unknown

Performed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band

Recorded: March 25, 1918

3:11

  

Define jazz. Go ahead, give it a shot. Its very slipperiness, its looseness, its inclusiveness, its constant evolution and convolution, is perhaps a definition in itself. Robert Christgau termed it “inventing meaning while letting loose,” and that’s close enough for me.

The birth of recorded jazz is here with this squawky recording of five white guys playing music created by African- and Latin-Americans, an appropriation familiar to students of this country’s cultural history. To the uninitiated, it sounds like a riot in a music store – a raucous and random compendium of blatts and squawks, trills and slides, polyphonic discoordination. The mainstream initially characterized it as a fleeting novelty, nothing more.

Although the Original Dixieland Jass (later, Jazz) Band copyrighted the tune, its origins are much older. “Tiger Rag” had long been considered a “standard” by the early jazz bands in New Orleans, where it was born without historical documentation. It went by various names – “Weary Weasel,” “Number Two Blues,” “Play Jack Carey” (after the New Orleans trombonist who made his instrument growl), and others. It’s a mashup – various cels of repeated phrases that serve as templates, beds for improvisations, call and response, the fragmentation and juggling of notes among the players. (The Band originally recorded the piece on August 17, 1917, but they did so for Vocalion using a strange and soon to be outmoded vertical-cut recording process, instead of the familiar lateral, outside-in tracking that became standard.)

But there’s a through-line underneath, a strong, syncopated, swinging motor that drives an aggressive assertion of unity through diversity, a loose confederation of soloists sharing time and tempo. Jazz burst forth in a tepid time musically, drugged with delicacy, sentiment, and the insipid imitation of European song models. The only “stirring” music was written for marching bands. The bold, insistent assertion of “Tiger Rag” made it a hit.

The bearers of these glad tidings were musicians from New Orleans, brought up first to Chicago and then New York to capitalize on the sudden demand for hot music to dance to in tony nightclubs. When Cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, pianist Henry Ragas, and drummer Tony Sbarbaro began their gig at Reisenweber’s Café in Manhattan in early 1917, they sparked a craze and started a musical revolution. Soon trainloads of Crescent City musicians were headed north to make some money and spread the new musical gospel.

It helped immensely that jazz was a vernacular music, rather than an art music that required years of training and a submission to an academic tradition and repertoire, dragged down into dullness through tradition and politesse. It was rough, crude, participatory, and eminently replicable, something you picked up “by ear” through participation and kept in unwritten “head arrangements,” a trial-and-error ethos that’s stuck with it to this day and kept it vital. With jazz there was freedom and a chance for the individual voice to soar – even if it had to roar above the other creatures in its pandemonious musical zoo.

“Tiger Rag,” covered countless times in countless ways since its debut recording, became one of the foundations of jazz development, along with other gems like “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Indiana,” “Didn’t He Ramble,” “Careless Love,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Keep A-Knockin’,” and other tunes that would influence everything that came after them.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Mamie Smith sings Crazy Blues.

The NRR Project #43: 'After You've Gone'

‘After You’ve Gone’

Music: Turner Layton

Lyrics: Henry Creamer

Sung by Marion Harris

Recorded: October 18, 1918

3:22

“After You’ve Gone” represents a turning point. Up until it became a hit, “black” and “white” musics stayed in their respective corners. Bluesy music wasn’t even thought to be fit for recording. When it finally was, it was classified as fit only for “race records,” not for right-thinking Caucasians, who were still awash in sentimental ballads and waltz tunes. After it hit, the mainstream move away from the stilted, pallid songs of the day began in earnest, sparking the collective creation of the Great American Songbook.

The tune was composed by African-American vaudeville partners Layton and Creamer, who supplied many shows and revues around Manhattan with material – the Ziegfield Follies, for one. Though civil rights were still abysmal, finally black artists were finding their work valued. It gave them a toehold in the entertainment world that would lead to other opportunities.

The song is definitely built on a blues lament – it’s a classic you’ll-be-sorry-for-leaving-me song. The cadences are long and loping, with a series of descending chords that make the singer feel as though they’ve stepping down into the phrases. Meanwhile, the poignant runs up and down to the “gone” notes actually convey woefulness. Songwriting is starting not to tell but to show, to embody strong and intense emotion in the music itself, in compact unis, all tied together to reinforce an overarching theme. The architecture of pop is under invention.

The lyrics are direct and conversational, and reflect the growing idea in American songwriting that a song is personal, sung to an imaginary individual, instead of just belted out to the crowd. The song tells a story, and conveys a perspective – a two-minute miracle. This, along with a melody that welcomes harmony and variation, resulted in it being one of the most recorded standards ever.

The delivery of Marion Harris in this recording is stiff and polite. It would take the 1927 recordings made by Last of the Red Hot Mamas, Sophie Tucker (covered earlier her in the series) and Empress of the Blues Bessie Smith to really give the material the swing and heft it deserves. Since then, it’s been recorded countless times, in all kinds of tempi and arrangements. It’s indestructible.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Tiger Rag. 

The NRR Project #42: Early Heifetz recordings

Acoustic recordings

Jascha Heifetz, violin

53 sides recorded between Nov. 9. 1917 and Dec. 19, 1924

What would it be like to be the best ever at something? The epitome, the paragon, the pattern of perfection? It is painful, wonderful? Both? Is the expression of genius-level talent inevitable?

Case in point -- Jascha Heifetz. Born in Lithuania in 1901, he was the son of a violin teacher who noted his responsiveness to his playing in the child’s infancy. Lessons began at age 2, and his status as a prodigy spread quickly. By 1911, he was giving outdoor concerts in Odessa that drew thousands.

The looming Russian Revolution prompted the Heifetzes to flee the hard way – to the East, across Siberia and the Pacific to America. Heifetz’s appearance at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 1917 electrified the musical world and led his lifetime recording relationship with Victor Records (later RCA).

The records in this selection were made over 16 sessions, all using the acoustic recording process. This literal analog method of reproduction was best for brass, all right for vocals, piano, and high-register strings – and deadly for many others without a crisp sound that cycled between 250 and 2500 Herz. Heifetz’s strength, speed, accuracy all come through loud and clear.

Heifetz’s preternatural technical skill meant that he could leap over the first and highest hurdle to instrumental mastery. (Yes, he practiced diligently nonetheless.) After a century of so of robust, flamboyant, and sentimental showmanship in violin soloists, Heifetz focused on eliminating all affectation – paring everything back to the notes on the page and how to express them as cleanly as possible. This led to accusations of robotic performances later in his career. However, it’s evident that he was merely locked into a laser-like intensity of focus that precluded excessive gestures.

The pieces recorded here are very much a part of the violin repertory of the time – concert pieces, many considered “light,” lyrical works by Sarasate, Paganini, transcriptions by Fritz Kreisler, the last of whom was the top-dog fiddler of the day. Heifetz subordinates himself to the needs of the piece he is playing rather than imposing a style. His dedication to clarity, clarity, clarity markedly narrowed the gap between the composers’ intents and the listeners’ ears.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: After You’ve Gone. 

The NRR Project #41: 'Over There'

‘Over There’

Written by George M. Cohan

Singer: Nora Bayes

July 13, 1917

2:54

Evangelical interventionism.

This and other songs were part of a massive effort to turn a neutral U.S. population into one willing to send its sons off to die in a foreign war. It birthed the American Century, making the country a full-fledged major power. The repercussions were vast. Let’s break it down:

On November 7, 1916, Woodrow Wilson won his second term as U.S. president, in one of the closest contests in the history of the office. World War I had been raging since the summer of 1914, and Wilson’s campaign platform leaned hard on neutrality. “He kept us out of war” and “America First” were his slogans.

This was in keeping with America’s nominal isolationism. George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 famously adjured the country not to involve itself in foreign affairs: "Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?" The concept has been permanently misremembered as the “caution against entangling alliances,” but the idea is the same.

He hired George Edward Creel, a muckraking journalist, who founded the Committee on Public Information, a government-sponsored propaganda agency. It issued government press releases, produced "morale-lifting" materials, and enforced press censorship at the behest of the War Department.

The first nationwide effort to influence public opinion was massive and thorough. Instead of being presented as just another geopolitical conflict between yet another combination of nation-stats, entry into the War was portrayed as a new Crusade. It was "the War to End All Wars," the "War to Make the World Safe for Democracy." Through the press, posters, movies, radio, bond drives, public rallies, and songs, the CPI sold the war to the people.

Isolation and peace-mongering were tantamount to treason, and songs such "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" disappeared from the music-store racks.

We've met brash George M. Cohan before in this series (link here). "Over There" was his last and biggest hit, the epitome of his peppy style. Shortly after war was declared, he jotted it down. It's a perfect little marching song -- urgent, repetitious, catchy. The lyrics are a perfect evocation of the (manufactured) spirit of the day:

"Johnnie get your gun, get your gun, get your gun
Take it on the run, on the run,
Here them calling you and me, every son of liberty!
Hurry right away, don't delay, go today,
Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy's in line . . . .

Over there! Over there!
Send the word, send the word, over there!
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer
Send the word, send the word  to beware
We'll be over, we're coming over,
And we won't come back 'til it's over over there!"

It makes you want to sing along, march along, join in. It gives the unwary an image of war as a lark crossed with a divinely ordained mission. Cohan asked singing star Nora Bayes ("Shine On, Harvest Moon") to be the first to record it. He clear, strong, straightforward delivery is perfect.



The number of WWI songs is profuse. "Over There" is only  the best-known; others include gems such as "Hock the Kaiser," "Hello, Central, Give Me No Man's Land," and "If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!" The mixture of martial ardor and rank sentiment is an appropriate disconnect for a war that was supposed to be fought for noble reasons, but wound up creating a "lost generation" of disabused humanity.

By June 26, 1917, th first U.S. troops arrived in Europe. Eventually, more than four million American men enlisted, and tow million served overseas. The conclusion of the war 18 months left America indisputably an international force.

Thee demonization of Germany and its culture affected many in the U.S. Steinbeck records the shunning his German-American family experienced by suspicious neighbors. My German-American grandfather joined the cavalry, and made it only as far as New York by Armistice Day. He still wound up changing the spelling of his funny-sounding name, and its pronunciation.

In terms of the nation's psyche, the repercussions were even greater. One of the CPI's young propagandists was Edward Bernays. He studied the propaganda efforts and decided that the same techniques could be applied to any situation requiring mass persuasion. He bcame the father of public relations, what he termed "regimenting the public mind." His offspring -- the advertising industry.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: the early Heifetz recordings.

The NRR Project #39: The Bubble Books (1917 – 1922)

The Bubble Book

Written by Ralph Mayhew and Burges Johnson; illustrated by Rhoda Chase

Singer: unknown; perhaps Henry Burr

14 iterations, 1917 -- 1922

Multimedia. It’s ubiquitous now, but this was one of the first attempts to combine sound and image – a quite successful attempt that helped entrain young imaginations. But was it progressive or pathetic? Allow me to go on a tangential ramble . . .

I will not insult your intelligence by doing other than pointing to Cary O’Dell’s comprehensive and eloquent essay on the subject, which you should now pause and read immediately here. (Even more great information here at Little Wonder Records & Bubble Books.)

For our purposes, they were carefully crafted, sturdy little artifacts, little books containing “three 5 ½-inch discs to accompany the three nursery rhymes printed in the books.” The authors were Ralph Mayhew and Burges Johnson; Rhoda Chase did the beautiful illustrations. It is thought that the popular Henry Burr recorded the songs.

They sold millions of copies. Kids loved them. Parents loved them. Remember, until electrical motors were introduced, all gramophones were spring-driven and required cranking. Gramophone needles were cheap; they came in boxes and their frequent replacement was encouraged. This is known in parenting circles as “giving the kids something to do.” It was a welcome distraction.

There’s no doubt it was an educational aid as well. The tradition of early attempts to plow through more and more complex words by “sounding it out” is made much easier when your infant eye can match the incomprehensible spelling of a familiar word. The tricks of phonetic language, the paths phrases follow, the cadences at the base of the language, and the vast eccentricities of English, were never more well-served.

Other people might argue that it was just another step into unreality, dwelling in the metaphoric media world instead of staying grounded in direct, literally unmediated everydayness.

I don’t know. I never ran across these, but of course my generation of children had picture books wed to two-sided, 45-rpm records that told the story and made a beeping sound when it was time to turn the page. Later, Disney and many other companies made long-playing records on the same principle, and so it unfolds as each new step in technology carries it forward in some iteration.

Which makes me think it’s ubiquitous and needed. We hunger for stories, no matter the form. I crammed myself into corners, bowed with books, reading my way out from under. We played and sang along to our childhood story-records; poignant, maybe, but not pathetic.

In contrast, certain child-friending devices come off today as rather frightening. Who remembers Teddy Ruxpin? A frightening doll that could talk and had limited eye motion, a resident of the Uncanny Valley. Powered by large batteries shoved up its backside. It “read” stories on interchangeable cassettes, and it remains something I still suspect Stephen King conjured up as a practical joke.

But I digress. Hypnotized now by our digital lives, it’s educational to peruse these quaintly analog ancestors. Part of the mission of the “Harper Columbia Book that Sings” was to create a new generation of customers. It worked.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Listen to the Lambs.’

Rockies game review: or, why I’m not a sportswriter

Seattle Mariners @ Colorado Rockies

May 29, 2017

1:10 p.m.

  

If you’da told me the Rockies were going to be in first place in the National League on Memorial Day this season, I’d have kicked you right near in the viaduct. The Rox have a long tradition of flaming out right after April, and considering the ludicrous amount of injuries we opened the year with, it seemed like now less than ever they deserved another shot from this enthusiastic but gun-shy fan. Our prospects, literally and figuratively, didn’t look good.

I waited ‘til yesterday to go – surprisingly, it was not hard to get tickets. (The previous day’s game was a sellout.) The Bolder Boulder and other holiday activities sucked away some potential crowd members, although a few people with insane stamina, still in their racing bibs, showed up to the game.

It was slightly disheartening, but familiar, to watch the Rockies lose. However (a Rockies fan must always seek qualifiers) there was definitely a different kind of losing going on in this game. This was close. Traditionally, the hit-happy bunch are let down by a series of exploding starting pitchers, who are then replaced by a dreary litany of failed relievers down the years –nay, decades, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time and again.

Yesterday, our pitchers as a group (we used five, they used seven) suffered from a kind of dreaminess. They seemed to hurl the ball in a state of Borgesian lassitude, as though they were not quite sure any of this was real or not. This caused them to run the count up to 3-0, again and again. Despite the then heroic shakes of their respective heads, pulling them back to consensual reality, and a few strikes thrown, often as not our pitchers were getting pulled with only one or two outs and the bases loaded. You can’t keep this kind of foolishness up for long without getting punished for it.

 Otherwise, it was a good, clean game, full of swats (17 total hits, 11 runs) and no errors. Time crept by as the pitchers kept changing; the good old Rockies employee who runs gear out from the bullpen when pitchers change and then dashes back, to wild acclamation from the crowd, got worked. It would be easy to cite Parra for his ill-advised steal attempt that killed the 4th as well as some momentum, but it's a standard move. If he'd made it I'd be saying the opposite,so what do I know? In the end the Mariners just did, as Grandpa used to say, more gittin’.

In the stands, we kept our scorecards and cracked wise, one ear on the radio. The usual scoreboard shenanigans kept everyone amused, and there was plenty of hat-doffing and singing and moments of silence for Memorial Day. (What has happened to the interactive magic of the hapless fan out there trying to catch a fly ball, or replacing a base, for prizes, between innings? Is there some kind of liability issue? Has the nnany sstate taken even this away from us?) And, as I predicted, the giant anthropomorphic tooth won the mid-inning race around foul ground, maintaining a lead from the beginning over the anthropomorphic toothbrush and anthropomorphic toothpaste. Not bad.

And, oh yes, when did I predict it would rain? 2 p.m. When did it start raining? Exactly. And who was happy I brought two ponchos? Yes, that is right. Father is right.

Oh, yes. They beat us, 6 to 5.

The NRR Project #38: John McCormack sings ‘Il mio tesoro’

Detail from William Orphen's portrait  of McCormack

‘Il mio Tesoro’

From Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Performed by John McCormack; accompanied by Walter Rogers and ensemble

Recorded May 9, 1916

4:09

  

What is the hell is an Irish tenor? From the late 19^th century through the middle of the 20^th, you couldn’t throw a brick-end without hitting one. They infested churches, bars, social halls, auditoriums, and stood by pianos, organs, and spinets in countless parlors, warbling melodies that charmed the ear and made a tear well up here and there. And John McCormack was the ultimate manifestation of the phenomenon.

An Irish tenor is not necessarily Irish, although it would have behooved him to don a moniker like Reilly or Flanagan before taking the stage. It’s the vocal quality and material covered that makes an Irish tenor. He does not have the strong blare of a Verdiean tenor, nor the all-day toughness of a Wagnerian heldentenor. An Irish tenor is light, lilting, legato – smooth as silk and full of feeling. It’s perfect for sentimental ballads, whether they be about a girl or about Ireland.

John McCormack was a true son of the sod, born in the small town of Athlone in the dead-center of Ireland. His vocal gifts were appreciated, and his community chipped in to send him to Italy for training. He rose swiftly in the opera world, and began to record in 1904. He rapidly became second only to Caruso in terms of recordings sold.

Though McCormack could essay much of the tenor repertoire, he switched his focus to concerts around 1912. There he performed the hits people really loved. He was the first to record “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and he made famous other chestnuts such as “I Hear You Calling Me,” and “The Last Rose of Summer”; his Irish ballads like “The Minstrel Boy,” “Mother Machree,” “The Wearin’ o’ the Green,” and many, many others proved insanely popular with the Irish-American population, which was finally beginning to overcome generations of prejudice.

This recording is a perfect example of his work. It is eminently listenable, flawless, with an extraordinary breath control and sense of articulation. Parlors everywhere had a large stock of McCormack records nearby. Soon crooners and jazz babies would take over the top spot in American musical culture, but McCormack is one of the last remnants of that genteel tradition in American vocal music. He was perfectly lovely.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: The Bubble Book. 

NRR Project update: New selections for 2017!

Dear and faithful reader -- here is the list of recordings selected by the National Recording Registry for 2017, just announced today. The comprise 25 recordings from the across the history of American recorded sound. I have been plowing forward through time on this project, and am currently working on an essay concerning John McCormack's 1916 recording of "Il mi Tesoro." So lenghthy is this project (I have tackled 34 out of 475 to date) that each year I find myself adding the new entries to the list, circling back to cover selections that predate where I'm currently at, etc. I am hanging in there, and I hope you are, too. Hopefully someday a complete compendium will  be assembled. In the meantime, I am still learning and having fun sharing what I find out with you. Thanks for reading!

The NRR Project #37: 'They Didn't Believe Me' (1914)

Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian premiered 'They Didn't Believe Me' on August 14, 1914. World War I was 10 days old.

‘They Didn’t Believe Me’

Music: Jerome Kern

Lyrics: Herbert Reynolds

Performed by Harry Macdonough and Alice Green

Recorded Sept. 8, 1915

3:27

It sounds like it was written yesterday. That’s the key to what makes one still refer to Jerome Kern in the present tense. His songs are very much alive.

At last. In this marathon effort, I feel for the first time contact with modernity. Up to now, what had popular American music been? Hymns and gospel songs, Stephen Foster, marches, sentimental ballads, minstrel-show hits, George M. Cohan, operetta, bawdy “extravaganza” songs, and ragtime. Even the first great contributor to the Great American Songbook, Irving Berlin, dwelt in the peppy, razz-mah-tazz mode of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911) for many years.

By 1914, the precocious Kern, who took the piano very seriously and studied for years in New York and Heidelberg, had been in show business for nine years. He began as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway and song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley, and worked his way up in both New York and London.

When a London producer brought an English show, “The Girl from Utah,” to Broadway in 1914, the first act needed punching up. (The story goes that first acts in English theater could be indifferent, as the audience always showed up late; but Americans were prompt and restless. They wanted a complete evening of entertainment, dammit.) Kern and Herbert Reynolds threw five new numbers into the show, and “They Didn’t Believe Me” was one of them.

Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian premiered it on August 14, 1914, and it quickly became a national hit. Five weeks later, Victor Talking Machine Co.’s house tenor and gifted administrator Harry Macdonough recorded it with Alice Green, aka Olive Kline. Kline was a substitute singer in a church quartet Macdonough sang in, and one Sunday he sent her a note during the sermon asking her to make a test record. She became a popular member of the Victor stale of singers.

As sung here, the song is delivered in a very stiff, 19^th-century style. The introductory verse has a bit of hurdy-gurdy feel to it, but when Macdonough hits the chorus, even his essential whiteness can’t prevent the song from sounding vernacular, conversational. The melody is almost non-schematic – it seems to wander about, but it exists strictly to illuminate the meaning of the words, pared-down and essential. (Access that recording here.)

For the first time in American music, someone is singing TO someone rather than at someone. The rhythm is a sauntering 4/4, conducive to the foxtrot that was taking over American dance halls. It tells a story, and words and music serve each other in lovely symbiosis. Most importantly, there is an emotional current running through the piece. It has a pulse, it can be inhabited emotionally, which confers and augments the interpretive power of its performers. Here’s the beginning of the sensitive, insightful, witty, and vital catalogue of “standards” that will remain current, and keep feeding imaginations, for a long time to come.

Kern would go on to create six key “Princess Theatre” musicals after this, experiments in small-scale, believable musical comedies that charmed everyone, moving up step by step, churning out a musical a year, partnering fatefully with Oscar Hammerstein II, creating the legendary vernacular opera Show Boat, and moving on through Broadway and Hollywood.

He wound up writing more than 700 songs, among them “All the Things You Are,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Who?”, “A Fine Romance” – and on and on. And they all still sound fresh. “They Didn’t Believe Me” is a great place to start exploring his work.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: the great John McCormack sings ’Il mio tesoro.’ 

The NRR Project #19: 'Casey at the Bat' (1906)

‘Casey at the Bat’

DeWolf Hopper

Recorded 1906

4:36

What can you say about “Casey at the Bat”? That’s fresh, I mean. It’s engraved on our collective consciousness. Everyone knows it; it’s part of American mythology. We’ve all recited it, or heard it recited. It’s been performed, recorded, adapted, parodied thousands upon thousands of times. It’s on short list of “America’s best-loved poems,” along with “The Night before Christmas,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and homiletic narratives such as those of Edgar A. Guest (“It takes a heap o’ living/To make a house a home”), et al. In other words, it’s annoying.

The facts are these – Ernest Lawrence Thayer, a 24-year-old humor columnist for the San Francisco Examiner (a Harvard classmate of millionaire publisher William Randolph Hearst’s, who gave him the job), cranked out this mock epic as his last piece for that paper, on June 3, 1888. It was buried, like the piece of comic doggerel Thayer and everyone else took it for, at the bottom of the fourth column on Page 4 that day. It bore no byline. (Thayer received proper attribution years later, but never made an extra dime off his best-known creation.)

As a poem, it certainly works. It’s memorable, it tells an interesting story in an interesting way. Its pace is bouncy and fee, fun, and seemingly crafted to speak aloud, actually. It’s almost a parody, but not quite – “A straggling few got up to go in deep despair” is exactly how many baseball fans have felt when the home team was down late in the game. Ultimately, it’s a bit of a homily about tragic pride as well.

But then. Back in those days, casual pieces that were “evergreen,” or capable of being inserted at any time of year, migrated into other papers of the same chain, and rival publications as well. The sheer volume needed to fill the daily “news hole” meant that all kinds of material found its way into the pages, good, bad or indifferent. The New York Sun ran it a few weeks later. Writer Archibald Gunter read it, clipped it out and stuck it in his wallet. He had a friend who was huge ham who he thought might like it.

DeWolf Hooper reciting "Casey at the Bat" for an early synchronized-sound film, 1922.

DeWolf Hopper was one of the funniest men of Broadway. At 6’5” and 230 pounds, he was an adept comic actor who got his start with the proto-musical comedy team of Harrigan and Hart. Hopper wound up starring in more than 30 productions during the period. (He was quite a ladies’ man as well, with as many wives as Henry VIII, and the nickname ‘The Husband of His Country.’)

And he was a big baseball fan, or “crank,” as an adherent of the sport was termed then. He had already started interpolating freestanding comic baseball sketches and “bits” into his performances as early as 1885.

When Hopper glimmed this poem, something clicked. On August 14, 1888, Hopper recited the poem at a special performance of the comic opera Prinz Methusalem that was attended by the both the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox. It was a huge hit. Hooper was uniquely suited to deliver this bombastic narrative of battle, stretching it out, embellishing it with rococo diction and gesture, and wringing every laugh possible out of it. (This usually took him five minutes and 40 seconds; he speeds up to fit it all in on one side of this Victor disc.)

Hopper claimed to have performed the piece 10,000 times, which would mean that he got up and performed it every day for seven months out of the year over the course of the 47 remaining years of his career. I’m glad that age could not wither nor custom stale his enjoyment of performing it, but I wonder if it got a little tiresome for others.

Oh, and I don’t know if any literary scholar has covered this last point but: Casey is a big fat jerk.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ’They Didn’t Believe Me.’

How to Get in Trouble: Activism 101

The Denver Women's March, January 21. [Photo by Brad Weismann]

This is a personal story. There’s no claim to objectivity here. If you’re not liberally inclined, this story is not for you. The question I asked myself after Trump’s election, after a weeklong coma of disbelief, was: what should I do, in the face of massive, reactionary assault on what I consider to be essential American values? What can I do? And as Chris Edelson put it bluntly in the Baltimore Sun the other day, “This is not a hypothetical question.”

“What should I do?” I commit journalism; people were asking ME what to do. I had no idea. I know what my convictions are. I am an unreconstructed guilt-ridden and bearded white male liberal, raised during Vietnam, the Space Race, the Civil Rights movement and the aspirations of the Great Society. I’ve read enough history to know what a national crisis looks like. So, I know that sitting on the sidelines and invoking a nonexistent sense of impartiality is pretty hard for me, loudmouth fool that I am. So, farewell, sidelines.

Though I’d reported on social-justice movements, actions, and figures, I had not a clue as to how these organizations were created or maintained. How did they formulate a plan for social action? What does it entail? Who teaches it? What works?

So, I started asking people around the area. The response was spotty – oddly, some of the more established rights organizations were the slowest to respond. Some I’m still waiting on.

One who got back to me immediately was Scott L. Levin, the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League. The 104-year-old organization was founded to protect Jewish people, but has since broadened its scope to advocate and educate on and about civil rights issues, and to facilitate human relations.

Levin said, “We’re tremendously busy these days. The amount of hate incidents have gone up dramatically. (This was late December, three weeks before Trump’s inauguration.)

“There is a lot of hate that’s going on online, and I think people need to call it out in real time when they see it. We have to take whatever steps are necessary not to normalize this behavior. We can speak up, we can continue to call on our leaders. It’s not who we are in Colorado.

“We try to tell people that words matter. The ADL has one of the state’s biggest anti-bullying program, in 50 schools. This is about changing the culture.”

I asked him how someone with zero knowledge could start.

“I think there are lot of things they can do,” he answered. “Engagement has to be done on a person-to-person level. Just even getting together with friends and acquaintances, talking through the issues of the day, gives you a place to start. Plus, it’s therapeutic. From that, you develop a group of like-minded people, then come up with a mission statement. In a very public way, too. We’re seeing all these public communities come together -- communities of color, LGBT – and when we unite we maximize and leverage our influence. This is a kind of time that we haven’t seen in our country for a few decades. A level of activism is called for beyond the normal. We’ve got to be prepared and do our work NOW.”

Then I talked to Evan Weissman (no relation – the question has come up before). He’s a nice, smart guy, who worked for years with Buntport Theater Company in Denver. He came up with the idea for Warm Cookies of the Revolution, a hybrid of civics and interactive fun that’s been holding events in Denver since November of 2012. The best description I can find of their methodology is in a previous interview I did with Evan:

“Of the Warm Cookies inspiration, he says, ‘I kind of was over the idea that we had to do things the way we had been. Protesting and organizing are important, but this is a different way to attract more people.

‘We want to have fun, but we don’t want it to be hokey – we don’t want to hoodwink people, or hit them over the head with a message. It’s a tough balance to work out – engaging ways to discuss important issues.’”

Warm Cookies has covered all manner of topics – voting, immigration, financial policy, and so – framed in participatory, un-stodgy ways. The group’s development now seems prescient. I got hold of Evan before the January 29 edition of the group’s “Sunday School for Atheists” informational meeting. The featured speaker was Dr. Erica Chenoweth of the University of Denver, an expert in international studies who made a quantitative study of political action, violent and non-violent, and their relative effectiveness.

“I’ve been incubating this recess,” he said in early January, as life started to crank up again for everyone after the holidays. “I don’t know where the story is or where it’s going. I have hope. Hope is what allows us to do action, otherwise we fall prey to cynicism, which is just retreat.”

OK, was he worried? “It depends how much stock you put into a national election,” he said. “That’s not the litmus test, however much they tell us that. The campaigns are run by people who get us to shop – and I don’t know that I buy that.

“I think we need to take it out of the realm of where people’s minds are set. We forget about our ownership. We own the community. If I say to you, ‘Make a list of everything you own,’ no one says the sidewalks, the radio waves, the library -- we just don’t l think like that. If we remember that we own these things, we can decide what is done with them.”

(I think about those thousands I marched with on January 21. It was a huge and impressive event, far larger than anyone had anticipated. How many were there – 100,000? 200,000? People kept streaming in that day, from all points of the compass, into Civic Center Park, walking in from farther and farther out as the parking lots and spaces filled, the trains and buses disgorging throngs, most bearing homemade signs – properly spelled and punctuated, for once. At least liberalism has that! An astonishing and peaceful display of commitment. But I worry, too. That was a cinematic kind of protest, that spontaneous outpouring of mass feeling that swells up right before the movie ends. Would less dramatic efforts be as well-peopled?)

“It’s about activating a sense of responsibility. I think the key,” he said, “is that’s all incremental. You have to start small. You have to do what you can do. If you’re trying to do the perfect thing, you’ll never get anything done.

“It’s like that saying, ‘Learn one thing and you learn everything.’ So you want to get in there and mix it up. The joy is in the struggle, when you’re working with people. Enjoy the rebellion.”

The Sunday School for Atheists session on “The Science of Effective Resistance” on January 29 was held in the McNichols Building at 144 W. Colfax. It was packed to capacity. There was child care, there were Spanish translators. Collapsible buffet tables at the rear of the space held multiple sign-ups sheets, surveys, requests for ideas, and information from a number of social-action causes. Off to the side was a massive array of treats, a kind of inspired potluck (hey, the group’s guarantee the presence of cookies is right there in its title) that kids and others made short work of.

The buzz was lively and friendly. Long-time local musician and activist Jamie Laurie got the crowd’s attention focused with some call and response action. Chenoweth’s presentation was brisk, engaging, and convincing. Evidently no one had ever done a study of the relative effectiveness of violent versus non-violent protest. Using a sensible methodology and wielding and impressive array of metrics, Chenoweth asserted that success rates of non-violent social actions were double those of violent ones. 

Reasons? First, the barrier to participation is lower. It takes a peculiar set of qualities to motivate someone to pick up arms, and inevitably aligns them with a group of like-minded individuals. “Participation in non-violence is easier for non-risk acceptant individuals,” she said. “Also, this allows for participation on a day-to-day basis. There are not a lot of casual insurgents.”

There’s a lower “cognitive barrier” as well. “This is not about converting people, melting hearts,” she said. “It’s about creating a coalition – and if you’re comfortable with everyone in your coalition, you don’t have a coalition. If you form a group, you will probably form an agreement in terms of goals and methods. Trust me – you will spend 95 percent of your time in meetings figuring those things out, and 5 percent in the actions.

“Instead of pushing at an issue, it’s more about pulling. You are pulling neutrals over to the role of passive allies, then to active allies.” (Funny, this is the same methodology used to get people to become season subscribers to arts organizations.)

“Eventually, you create links with those who constitute pillars of support for what you are opposing.” (As activist Srdja Popovic puts it in his 2015 book Blueprint for Revolution, “it is awfully hard to shoot people you know.”)

She had more advice for activists. She cited the example of activist and teacher of non-violence James Lawson, who before organizing spent nine months to a year visiting the people he wanted to help, going from door to door and “finding out what people care about, personally,” Chenoweth emphasized. “What were they ashamed of? What were they afraid of?” This approach ensures that the reasons and motivation for change come from the community itself, instead of being imposed from the outside. Developing communication and trust, and modeling the concept of taking care of one another, proceeds from this approach as well.

Chenoweth heartened the crowd with her estimate that it only takes the participation of 3 ½ percent of a total given population to create a critical mass that mandates change. “And, we never know when something might make a difference, so we have to keep doing it,” she added.

Meanwhile, organizations keep popping up everywhere, and it seems like show people definitely have an advantage in creating something that works in record time. A few weeks ago, theatrical stalwart Mare Trevathan innocently put out a query on her Facebook account wondering how she could set up a civics-education class. Her friends GerRee Hinshaw and Rebecca Aronauer had formed the group Said & Done for the implementation of one social-action event after the Women's March, and they invited Trevathan to build on their existing platform. Within a few days, two Civics 101 sessions were organized and completely filled. The two-hour sessions (the first one took place in Longmont last night) cover the three branches of government, what local involvement in the political process looks like, a rundown of basic rights, effective activism, and facing fears about taking action.

“We plan to put something of a ‘franchise’ plan (without the $ part) – a template people can take to make one of these themselves,” Trevathan wrote. Already, the production of similar events across the state and region are planned.

So, guess what? Resistance is highly doable. One act lays the foundation for another. Given who our current president is, the barrier has never been lower for political involvement. Any action helps. Remember how we were told that the sharing of partisan information digitally during the election just created an “echo chamber” that had no effect? Bullshit. Relaying and amplifying messages are good, though they are no substitute for in-person, analog, real-world actions.

So start something. Pick something, stay focused on one topic --reacting to every outrage leads to exhaustion – and every issue is intertwined with others, ultimately. Communicate; find common grounds, build coalitions. Persist. Progress is incremental and never guaranteed; sometimes the most mundane actions bring about the greatest change. And don’t be so damn serious – in today’s America, you are already in trouble with many of your fellow citizens, simply for believing what you believe. It’s going to get worse before it gets better – you might as well have as much fun as possible.

“Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.” Deuteronomy 30:11-14

RESOURCES

The sheer volume of information for would-be activists is cascading through the social system right now. Here are some places and works I found useful:

Anti-Defamation League

American Civil Liberties Union

Warm Cookies of the Revolution

For questions and information about the rapidly developing Said and Done: Civic 101 project, please contact Mare Trevathan at MareTrevathan.gmail,com.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Administration

This guide, compiled by former coongressional staffers, is free and readily available online.

Blueprint for Revolution

Srdkja Popovic

2015

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Erica Chenoweth

2011

Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution

Andrew Boyd

2016

The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action

Michael N. Nagler

2014