Richie Havens RIP

 

Richie Havens, who sung every song he knew during a three-hour opening set at the Woodstock Festival, died today at the age of 72.

Ding, dong!

 

The BBC has decided not to play “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead,” even though it’s soared to the top of the charts and the BBC has a tradition of playing top-of-the-charts music.

But there’s plenty of other music [ht: tm] to mark the Iron Lady’s time in power.

Magic Slim RIP

 

Chicago blues guitarist Magic Slim died yesterday at the age of 75.

Said Bruce Iglauer, founder of Alligator Records, “Magic Slim was a true Chicago bluesman through and through. He gloried in the rough edges of the music. He never tried to make it slick.”

Like generations of Southern bluesmen who migrated to Chicago in the mid-20th century, Mr. Slim lived the hard life he sang about. As a child working the cotton fields of the rural South, he couldn’t afford a guitar, so he made one by taking baling wire from a broom, nailing it to a wall and coaxing a primordial music from it.

He tried the piano, but when he lost the pinkie finger on his right hand in a cotton-gin accident, he focused on guitar, playing gigs when he wasn’t working in the fields.

Dave Brubeck RIP

One of my favorite memories of the late Dave Brubeck is his appearance at the Chicago Jazz Festival, when he shared the stage with Taylor Eigsti.

Eigsti was only 16 at the time. During the first set, the two pianists played some of Brubeck’s most famous compositions. And during the second set, they played Eigsti’s new work.

Brubeck remarked to the audience that, while at his age he had a great deal to teach, he had even more still to learn.

Money is speech

 

Obama and Romney are on pace to each raise more than $1 billion with their parties by Election Day.

From the beginning of 2011 through Oct. 17, Mr. Obama and the Democrats raised about $1.06 billion, and Mr. Romney and the Republicans collected $954 million, including some money for the party’s Congressional efforts, setting up 2012 to be the most expensive presidential campaign in history. . .

The overall totals do not include hundreds of millions of dollars being raised and spent by “super PACs” and other outside groups, mostly to benefit Mr. Romney and other Republicans. Groups aligned with Mr. Romney have spent $302 million on campaign advertising that they are required to disclose to the F.E.C., compared with about $120 million for groups aligned with Mr. Obama. Tens of millions of dollars more has been spent on issue advertisements whose precise costs are difficult to measure.

“Everything they told me was a lie”

 

It is, in the midst of the Second Great Depression and the current presidential campaign, the perfect time for this song. . .

The lyrics are here.

Lockout of the day

Given new employer militancy, I have been forced to inaugurate a new feature: lockout of the day.

The most recent employer-initiated lockout of workers is the Minnesota Orchestra [ht: sm]:

Minnesota Orchestra management locked out its musicians at midnight Sunday, and has canceled concerts through November, after the two sides failed to reach a contract agreement. . .

The Minnesota Orchestra lockout decision came as no huge surprise. Management put forward its first contract proposal almost six months ago. It’s a tough document, containing cuts which would slash the average pay of a Minnesota Orchestra musician from $135,000 a year to $89,000. . .

Musicians could each face a loss of 30 to 50 percent of their salaries under the proposal, raising the possibility that some might leave for better paying jobs elsewhere, threatening the orchestra’s reputation as one of the best in the world.

Novel economics

Isn’t there something wrong when the vice-presidential candidate for a major political party in the United States gets his economics from a work of fiction?

Don’t get me wrong, I love novels. I read novels all the time. I even think that the everyday economics is represented in novels—and in music, art, children’s books, and so on.

But I don’t get my economic ideas from works of fiction. Unlike Paul Ryan:

(3: 21)  It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are. I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech (at Bill Taggart’s wedding) on money when I think about monetary policy. And then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end, and go back to a lot of other things that she did, to try and make sure that I can check my premises so that I know that what I’m believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism…

Is this then the monetary policy Ryan gets from d’Anconia’s speech in Atlas Shrugged?

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’”

I wonder what Ryan’s economics would be today if like the rest of us, instead of Ayn Rand, he’d read Dostoevsky, Pynchon, and Austen when he was young.

“Romney & Bain”

Protest of the day

Three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot have been convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” over a protest in the lavishly rebuilt Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow.

Update

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina have been given 2-year prison terms.

The trial and the sentences demonstrate, as was explained to me during my stay in Moscow, the close alliance between the Putin regime and the Russian Orthodox church—and the efforts of both to stamp out all dissent.