Omicron and the Dismal State of the Arts

To recap:  even for those of us who weren't on a record label and never got commercial airplay, for several decades millions of musicians made a pretty good living from making their own recordings and selling them on concert tours.  Even if the gigs might not all pay well, a decent turnout pretty much guaranteed hundreds of dollars of CD sales at every show.

By 2013, when Spotify started their free tier, this income stream was basically eliminated for millions of us artists, some more than others.  For artists in places like the US, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere, this loss of income was combined with the cost of housing skyrocketing.

With gentrification also affecting small businesses tremendously, music venues were continually disappearing or moving into smaller and more expensive spaces.  This has meant paying gigs have become less and less common in countries without significant public arts sponsorship, like the US.

The ranks of artists still touring over the past decade in the US have gotten increasingly people with advantages that allow them to minimize expenses, such as an inheritance, or home ownership, or artists who are exceptionally good at crowdfunding to make up for all the lost income and increased expenses.

Any profession this precarious involves cutting corners whenever possible.  No need for a tour van when you can pack into a small rental car.  No need to spend money on hotels when you can stay with people on their foldout couches.

When the pandemic hit, and all the touring stopped, some governments had programs in place to support unemployed artists.  In the US, it lasted for a year, before they cut us off again.

As vaccines were spreading, prior to the new variants, and things were opening up in many parts of the world for a while, many music venues were staying closed.  This has probably been especially true in the folk and trad music scenes, which tend to be an older and more vulnerable age group.

Along with venues still often being closed, many people are more hesitant to go out to gigs, and more hesitant to have house guests or host house concerts.  This all further restricts already precarious economics.

I don't know what the future holds, but given how much advance planning is involved with organizing tours and other things involved with the arts, I know this, unequivocally:  2022 will be another devastating year for working musicians.

The only way I can imagine organizing a tour that won't run into major problems is if I were touring with a camper van and doing outdoor concerts beneath a portable canopy.  And a functioning camper van has been outside of my budget ever since I first wanted one, when I was three years old.  

I even wrote a song called "Daddy's Camper Van," despite daddy not having a camper van, which appears on my first album of children's songs, but the power of positive thinking did not cause a camper van to materialize.  It's probably a stupid idea anyway.

Road Report: Fall 2021 Pandemic Travels

I spent a bit more than five weeks on tour, from mid-October til late November. The whole thing involved a wide variety of unique experiences, with a lot of common threads between them.

The tour began and ended with a bit of travel chaos. If you're ever traveling during a global pandemic on someone else's frequent flier miles, don't do what I did, and assume the ticket booked for you still exists on the day you're planning to use it. Check in advance several times in the weeks leading up to your flight that it still exists, because if it doesn't, there are several extra things that can go wrong. In my case, my flight had been rebooked, but no one seems to have told either me or my sponsor, so when I got to the Portland airport to fly away, there was no flight.

The next day I was on my way, but the great deal on a rental car I had gotten for the day I was originally supposed to arrive was no longer valid, and the new rental car deal was about twice as expensive. With the gigs I had lined up in England and Scotland as economically marginal as they were, this meant that even with the free plane tickets I barely broke even. The many canceled gigs didn't help either.

I had over twenty gigs lined up between England, Scotland, Germany, Belfast, and northern California. Of the six gigs that were canceled, three were due to the aforementioned travel chaos at the end of the tour, one because the owner of the pub was in hospital with Covid-19 (he very sadly died soon thereafter), and two because of what some people have been calling "the controversy."

"The controversy" was extra noisy throughout my travels, largely due to the coincidence that the lengthy trial of the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia almost perfectly coincided with my entire tour, and I am forever guilty of having interviewed Matthew Heimbach during the Capitol siege, and even guiltier for disagreeing with the gatekeepers of antifascism about whether or not he has radically changed his political views for the better.

First, just as I was leaving for the tour, I got a nice booking in Manchester, which was un-booked 24 hours later, after the organizer heard about the set of accusations (there were other people I talked to which caused offense among those watching for thought crimes, you see). All the other gig organizers in England were either not on Twitter or knew me too well to think anything of the allegations, which they generally considered to be bizarre at best.

So my journey actually began with a second trip to the Portland airport, this time to board a flight that actually existed, to Vancouver, BC. I had a six-hour layover at that lovely airport. To use such an adjective to describe this airport is not mere hyperbole. There are little waterfalls and fountains and comfortable chairs. No music is piped through the ceilings to drive people like me crazy, and those ceilings are very high, with great air circulation, and presumably filtration, because there is no scent of jet fuel, no headaches. (Basically the opposite of the Amsterdam airport in every possible way.)

The airport, like most of the airports I've encountered since March, 2020, was basically dead quiet. Gate after gate with no flights departing, and no people waiting for flights. I picked an abandoned gate to pass the time with my guitar, which is how I have been passing a lot of time in recent years, preferring playing music to anything involving a screen (though I still probably spend as much time in front of screens as I do playing music, overall).

I sat next to the big glass wall that presents a view of all the airplanes, buses, and other vehicles on the tarmac, looking out at the scene as I played for hours. Sometimes people were sitting not far away and listening, but I ignored them, thinking they'd feel most comfortable that way. One of them started clapping eventually, though, so I said hello, of course, and he was another touring musician, a very nice Irish guy named Martin Nolan, whose music I still want to look up.

Although during the pandemic there have been some issues with my methods of travel, pretty much all the international flights I've done for several years now have been using frequent flier miles, usually someone's else's (one wonderful patron of the arts in particular). This is the only way I was able to go to Australia last time, and it's the only way some of these tours make any money at all lately. In any case, this time I somehow found myself in business class on the very long flight from Vancouver, BC to London, England.

Business class is an entirely different experience from economy class, as is obvious to anyone who's seen a modern commercial transatlantic kind of plane. Business class seats get almost completely horizontal, so it's like sleeping on a very small bed, but one you can pretty much fully stretch out in, which of course comes with a tasty dinner and movies on a screen that's bigger than your average laptop.

What was most notable about being in business class, though, was the horrendous, elitist tirade I had to listen to, with this obviously very rich German couple berating Air Canada for daring to sell them full-price business class tickets when Air Canada's lounge at the Vancouver airport is closed, as it has apparently been throughout the pandemic. The poor rich couple apparently had to spend their layover at the airport with the commoners, sitting beside the little waterfalls on those cloth chairs. Maybe they even had to listen to me playing the guitar, if they walked past the gate I was occupying. The world outside of the lounges can be frightening and unpredictable... The young Asian man who was the head flight attendant on that flight never wavered from his meticulously professional, polite and profuse apologies. He never quite agreed with the Germans that the lounge should have been open, but he did otherwise give the impression that he thought they had a valid point, regardless of how often they repeated it during their critique of Air Canada's service.

Coming through immigration at Heathrow, folks traveling on US passports were now in the fast lane, along with most Europeans and certain others. For the first time, I scanned my passport and crossed the border there at the airport without even being asked what I was doing in the country or for how long I was staying.

Aside from that change, other notable changes to life on the ground in England since my last visit two years earlier was there were a lot fewer Poles, there was a serious Brexit-related labor shortage, lots of empty shelves in the stores, lots of polarized views on various pandemic-related issues, very few people participating in the contact tracing program or wearing masks, and the purge atmosphere of paranoia in left Labor Party circles around constantly-swirling, false allegations of antisemitism was very palpable. Everywhere I went there were more stories about the ongoing purge of the socialist elements of the Labor Party, generally on false grounds of antisemitism, and oddly enough many of those being purged are Jewish.

I had originally planned the tour to coincide with the COP26 talks in Glasgow which took place earlier this month. I hadn't realized the tour would also coincide with the extradition trial against Julian Assange, but I accidentally had good timing, and after a couple of nice gigs in Birmingham and Liverpool, playwright, musician, and founder of Actors for Assange, Tayo Aluko and I took my rental car from Liverpool to London, miraculously found a parking space in a parking garage in the center of the city, and walked to the Royal Courts of Justice.

Being a professional, and being forever concerned with whether sound systems will work at protests (since so often they don't), I was happy to see the sound company that had been hired for the occasion had done a good job setting up a stage and an adequate sound system to fill the area in front of the courts. They hadn't been prepared for a musical performer, but they had a direct box in their truck to plug in, so I could amplify my guitar, always nice when you don't want to sound like you're completely clueless. I did a quick sound check, and it sounded good, and loud.

 As was noted by various speakers on various occasions throughout the week, the British media -- and I'd add, the US media -- has largely been ignoring the fact that the Biden administration has not dropped Trump's extradition efforts, or the case against Assange for doing such great journalism that they want to put him in prison for the rest of his life. Much of the rest of the world's media was there for the week, covering everything, along with lots of dedicated citizen journalists with smartphones and microphones on sticks of various descriptions. The scene was very reminiscent in that way of the first Zuccotti Park occupation of the Occupy Wall Street era, also in terms of the turnout, which was in the high hundreds, by my estimation. A decent turnout these days for any rally related to this cause, from what I've seen – and certainly far short of the kind of mass uprising one might hope for, when journalism itself is in the crosshairs of the US so-called Justice Department, ostensibly led by the allegedly progressive Merrick Garland.

Tayo and I went straight to where the rally was happening because I didn't want to march for an hour with a guitar on my back. (Figuring out how to avoid long walks with the guitar on my back is one of the main logistical elements when it comes to touring, generally, but this is especially true in the big cities.) The march was beginning at BBC Broadcasting House, to send the message that some of us have noticed how alternately biased or nonexistent BBC's coverage of Assange, the US's charges against him, and this extradition trial has been, especially in recent years.

When the march arrived at the courts, it felt a bit like a family reunion for me. There was Richard Burgon, member of the British parliament from Leeds and member of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, who had been spending many hard years fighting the good fight in that dubious institution, since he moved on from organizing all my gigs in Leeds, which he did for many years before entering the parliament. There was Lowkey, one of the best wordsmiths alive today. There was my old friend Guy Smallman, on assignment as a photojournalist in all the right places, covering events in front of the court every day. There was the Danish filmmaker whose last name I can never remember, Niels. (He's the only Danish filmmaker I know in London, so I never need to remember his last name.) Last time I was in London, we made a great video together in front of Belmarsh Prison, where Assange is being held. Now he was marching with Stella Moris, Julian's partner, longtime member of his legal team, and the mother of their two young children. 

Every one of the speakers at the rally was electrifying, there were no duds. Stella focused her remarks each day on the recently-published revelations garnered from dozens of whistle-blowing intelligence agents who talked to Yahoo News investigators about the CIA's plans to extrajudicially assassinate Julian Assange on the streets of London. She asked each day if a country knows another country's secret police have plans to assassinate a person, do you then ignore that knowledge and extradite him anyway? Knowing what we all know about the intentions of the Saudi monarchy to assassinate Jamal Kashoggi, would we extradite him to Saudi Arabia? Is extraditing Assange to the US any different?

While Assange's supporters include lots of prominent journalists, politicians, and others, the ranks definitely include a lot of folks who might be dismissed as conspiracy theorists, including lots of people with various concerns about pharmaceutical companies and government regulators. The polarized atmosphere around these questions in England, Germany, and Belfast would be hard to overstate. While I'm a supporter of everybody getting vaccinated for Covid -- having myself drawn the conclusion based on the evidence presented to me through the world's media, the world's public health departments, and every doctor and scientist that I personally know that this is a good idea -- people have all kinds of legitimate reasons to be skeptical. In the face of so much disinformation from tabloid media, social media and elsewhere, it's no surprise that many people are confused about the science, and it's especially no surprise that people distrust their governments. And it's also no surprise that people who distrust corporations and governments would be wanting to defend Assange, because I'm pretty sure there is no one in history who has been responsible for exposing so many actual conspiracies than Julian Assange, from the US State Department's systematic undermining of democracies around the world (see the Embassy Cables) to the US military's war crimes (see Chelsea Manning).

On the subject of the pandemic, what was especially notable to me was how much popular response to government mandates varies depending on whether the government is generally trusted by the people or not. The more polarized the society politically, the more polarized it is around anything having to do with the virus. So in my beloved home away from home, Belfast, many view anything having to do with masks or vaccines as some kind of British plot. In England, it's all some kind of Tory plot. In Germany, it's part of the creep towards fascism that will end with the unvaccinated being sent to camps. Meanwhile in Demmark and to a large extent in Scotland, where the government has a lot more popular support among the working class, by my estimation, there is widespread and relatively uncontentious cooperation with the public health departments. I have not traveled personally in the US during the pandemic outside of the west coast and the northeast, but my impression from talking to lots of my friends is that this dynamic exists throughout the United States as well – where most people are cooperating with public health advice in Democrat-run states, but in Republican-run states where the public health messaging is generally very confused and contradictory, it's an ongoing disaster.

The larger venues I used to play in in London have all disappeared, and even with a significant audience in cities like London, it's increasingly difficult to make a living at this, even with the free plane tickets. I played to packed audiences in small venues, one badly ventilated, the other not at all. My friend Jane gave me NHS lateral flow tests to take with me, and every few days I continued to test negative, despite those gigs, and despite the fact that there was no system for checking anyone's vaccination status or Covid status anywhere in England that I saw. Each time I took the test I wondered what I'd do if I tested positive, but luckily I never had to figure that out.

I had gigs on the south coast, too. At one, the organizer was home with Covid, and the audiences were anemic, I think largely because the older folks who make up the local population and my fan base were staying home for safety reasons. At least that's the explanation I prefer. In any case, I went back to London after each of those gigs, in order to spend more time in front of the royal courts.

Stories abounded about Labor Party purges everywhere in England, but in some parts the progressives are on the offensive. Newcastle was a breath of fresh air, with mayor Jamie Driscoll and a dedicated team of fine upstanding radicals successfully implementing all kinds of local initiatives. Later in Scotland, I heard much more about similar initiatives there in Ayreshire, among folks who knew about what was going on in Newcastle, too. They call it community wealth-building. This was one of the programs of great interest to my old friend, university professor and New Systems Studies department head at George Mason, Ben Manski, who came to Scotland for the COP26, and to make connections with such folks.

The first thing on my calendar for Scotland was an international antiwar protest, a joint endeavor between Code Pink from the US, Stop the War from the UK, and Veterans for Peace, which has chapters in both countries. The sound system didn't have an input for a guitar, but some very resourceful though jet-lagged American peace activists negotiated to rent a very nice little Bose amp that a nearby busker was using, and it all worked out brilliantly.

This antiwar rally with a hundred people at it would be the biggest event I'd end up singing for during the COP26, somehow or other. While it was great fun seeing friends in Glasgow from all over Europe and North America, the events put on by the ad hoc coalition of organizers that were mounting a response to the COP26 meetings were very varied. I heard great things about some of the cultural events going on that were part of these efforts, but the one I was assigned to sing at (for free) had 20 people at it. Very high-quality group of 20 people, though, since I knew most of them personally.

What was to be the big rally after a spirited march of tens of thousands of mostly young people was an unmitigated disaster from a sound point of view. I don't know how it went from any other vantage point, because I spent the first half of the rally trying and failing to offer my assistance to the obviously incompetent person doing the sound. "I know what I'm doing," he apparently told people. No, he didn't, unless there was some other kind of sabotage going on. The proof is in the pudding. The sound system they had was adequate for a crowd of ten thousand, though certainly not big enough for the actual crowd that was expected. However, because of whatever issues they were having with feedback -- constant issues -- the volume was never loud enough to be heard by more than the first thousand or so people. I didn't want to crowd in and try to get close enough to hear the faint noises and feedback coming from the stage, so I left.

In other wet places like Denmark or Germany there are covered sound trucks groups use for marches, but in the UK and the US this is a rare thing, and if anyone has a sound system they can put on wheels, it's on some kind of a bicycle contraption. Which can be great -- I had a wonderful time singing on the back of a rickshaw with a sound system in Chicago at the NATO protests in 2012, for example -- but this time it was raining, so the similar plans that we had for doing that sort of thing on this march were foiled. As a result, there was no live music on the march aside from a wonderful samba band, and unaccompanied singing, of course. Why we can't get it together to deal with the weather in the UK or the US, I don't know, but it's a constant and somewhat embarrassing problem. And I didn't bring a sound truck either, so there we go.

Of course, much of what was happening in Glasgow aside from the COP26 meetings was a big counter-conference of some kind. Although I was only playing for small audiences, I was too busy to attend any of that, so I have no idea how it went. Hopefully it was groundbreaking stuff, and went much better than the rally on the Green. The main conference was clearly a disaster, ensuring our extinction, if we remain on this path.

The city itself was thriving as usual. I was staying in the Govanhill neighborhood, famous for the Govanhill Baths among other things. The baths, and the struggle to save the big community center that the baths were part of, have been at the center of the community for decades now, and my host, Fatima Uygun, and her departed husband, my former touring partner, Alistair Hulett, were long in the middle of all that. A new addition to the community, at least since the last time I investigated the neighborhood thoroughly, is a big community garden, outdoor kitchen, a huge tipi sort of thing, full of people of all ages, some of whom were celebrating an imminent wedding. As with the neighborhood, the scene was a mix of folks whose ancestors came from all over Europe as well as all over the Middle East and South Asia. Some women had made several massive vats of delicious food, which was supposed to be largely eaten by COP26 delegates from South America, but the word when I was hanging out there was they opted for a meatier meal elsewhere in town. A familiar story to me, indigenous folks from the Americas getting tired of being fed vegetarian food -- though I suspect if they had come to this tent and seen the meticulously-prepared vats of classic South Asian cuisine, they might have happily settled for a vegetarian meal this time.

Glasgow has many pubs in it with an Irish Republican theme and clientele, where what they know of as "rebel songs" -- songs supportive of the Irish independence struggle -- are somewhere between welcome and mandatory. The brilliant singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Paul Sheridan and I had a little gig in one of those crowded pubs. We were to have had another gig that evening at a somewhat larger and probably much more crowded pub, but the owner of the Squirrel Bar, a guy known as Skin, was in the hospital in critical condition with Covid. The pub was closed, and the gig didn't happen. A few days later I got the news that Skin had died.

As I was going from one thing to the next in Glasgow and heading to the airport to fly to Germany, where I had four good gigs lined up, I was getting urgent messages from one of the gig organizers about a member of their collective who had been reading about my interview with Heimbach -- certain people (or a certain person) continually make sure to remind the world as often as possible that there was this interview, it's like they're promoting it, though they claim to not like it, or me. The way this was all happening only days before the gig, there was no time to sort it out or talk about whatever the concerns were, and the gig was canceled.

I was leaving Glasgow before the COP26 conference was entirely over, but the Glasgow airport was still very quiet. Despite this, the few cafes that were open were very busy, because they were so terribly understaffed. Switching flights in Amsterdam, the airport was quieter than I've ever seen it. Things were very quiet at the new airport in Berlin, which is a very nice one. It took a long time before they finished it, but it's much nicer than the old one was.

I had a couple days before what was to be a very nice gig in Berlin, and I spent them staying with friends who live in a big collective house in the town of Oranienburg. If people know about Oranienburg it tends to be because it's where the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was located -- or is still located, at least in museum form. I spent part of an afternoon there. I'm not sure how much is conveyed about the depth of the horrors that went on there, but it's good that they don't build other things on the land where so many people were exterminated.

I'm not sure if some of the folks who live near the camp agree with this. Many would, understandably, like to move on. Some of them might be fascists, or at least that's what their new neighbors from other parts of Germany -- former West Germany -- tend to think. Maybe they're right, I don't know. Many of the locals vote for the AFD, the main far right electoral party in Germany. It all reminds me so much of the way liberals and leftwingers in the US often talk so derisively and dismissively about the views of Trump supporters or Proud Boys, on the assumption that they're all, as Hillary Clinton would say, "deplorables." Very much the same way so many progressives in England view those who voted for Brexit, or for the Tories.

What was most striking to me about Oranienburg aside from the extensive and beautiful walking trails through forests and farmland, was the way the center of the town felt like going back in time. Reminiscent of towns I've seen in Romania or Cuba during long-ago travels in those countries, it's an attractive town where few people seem to be thinking in terms of making money off of commuters or tourists. There is not a decent shot of espresso to be found anywhere in Oranienburg, including near the train station, which is usually where such a thing might be found, if it is to be found anywhere. There's not even a single chain cafe, not even a really bad one like Coffee Brothers.

The show in Munich was the sort of arrangement that's very common in Scandinavia, from my experience, but less common most other places. A local secretary of the union, IG Metall, was using union funds to sponsor a cultural event in Munich's premier punk rock bar, in the cause of supporting leftwing culture and ideas in society. The event was free to the public, and very well-attended. As at all the gigs I did in Germany and most of the restaurants I dined in, there was someone looking at each person's Covid status via a QR code on everyone's phone, or in my case my CDC card plus an ID. Where this system generally seemed to break down was in pretty much all of the cafes and restaurants I went to that were run by immigrants. (I'm sure the vaccine-hesitant folks in Munich figured that out quickly, too.)

Lots of people in Berlin were involved with the major efforts there to stop the gentrification process that's been going on there for decades, which has seen rents in Berlin double in recent years, like in so many cities in the US.  The recent referendum, where a majority of Berlin's voters voted at least in principle for a state buy-back of over 200,000 apartments, was a constant subject of conversation.  In Munich, where gentrification has also been going full-tilt, the numbers of people living on the streets was especially notable, though nothing like Portland or other cities in the US.

While I was in Munich, the news was full of stories about how fast the Covid numbers were rising each week in Bavaria, where I was, and in nearby Austria, where they were making plans for a lockdown only for the unvaccinated. The response from certain elements of society was a demonstration of 35,000 people, which is very large for a small country especially, and indicates a lot more dissent than that number represents.

In Cologne I did a show with a local songwriter who was, along with another of the organizers of the show, a longtime leftwing radio host. Gerd Schinkel is his name, and he was good enough to give me a day-long, extensive tour by car and by foot of two massive open-pit coal mines in the area, along with the various resistance camps surrounding them.

I have visited and sung at the resistance camp at the Hambach Forest on many occasions, but in recent years, as the coal mine continues to expand and the climate justice movement around Germany and the world continues to grow, the resistance camps around these mines have grown into a large and popular movement. There's a farmer in the village of Lützerath who has given over much of his land for the resistance to build treehouses and other structures. On his farm and elsewhere, there are hundreds of treehouses, hundreds of tents and other structures, and hundreds of people, at any given time, it seems. At times when there's more activity going on, there have regularly been thousands.

There is a pall in the air familiar to anyone who has experienced the sectarianism of the modern pseudo-anarchist movement in places like the US or Germany these days. Whether anyone involved with the movement thinks victory is possible is hard to discern, but what people think of white people wearing dreadlocks is clear from the large screeds in front of the welcome center, handwritten in big letters with markers.

From my vast experience being part of the radical environmental movement in many different countries over several decades, I can tell you with complete certitude that among the mostly white people that make up the radical environmental movement in places like Europe, Australia, and North America, a very large percentage of them have dreadlocks. So now some wack German pseudo-leftist has apparently come up with the very dubious theory that dreadlocks are a symbol of resistance, and can only be worn by people of African heritage. If this is not the German secret police trying to destroy the movement, I don't know what it is.

But this nonsense was just the tip of the iceberg. Gerd Schinkel -- a 71-year-old leftist with a long record of standing for all the good causes in his capacity as a songwriter, performer, and radio host -- was recently denounced on stage for having used what someone apparently characterized as "coded antisemitism." This is a term in certain fetid corners of the German and US pseudo-left that they use when people say things that aren't at all antisemitic, but some idiot wants to feel important by claiming that it is. What constitutes "veiled antisemitism" can be pretty much anything that the Nazis thought of Jews. So if you talk about "profit greed," this is veiled antisemitism, since everybody knows Jews are greedy. What, you didn't know that? Probably because you're not hanging out with these alleged activists who clearly know what antisemitism is, unlike 71-year-old leftists from Cologne, or New York Jews like me. Needless to say, getting denounced as an antisemite by a bunch of well-meaning German fanatical kids is actually devastating, as I know from personal experience as well (these elements, known locally to some as the Antideutsche, have attacked me repeatedly in the past, starting around 2002).

The last leg of my travels in Europe would be an extended visit to Belfast. Not that it was necessarily long or long enough, but it was longer than it was intended to be. My flight out of Ireland, to California, didn't exist, so by the time everything was sorted with a new itinerary, it was too late for California. Given that situation, we can easily say that we saved the best for last.

To be clear, it's not that the actual gigs I had there were exceptional in terms of attendance or audience enthusiasm -- I've got good crowds in various places, including Belfast. What's so great about Belfast is the quality of what we might call the resistance there. Of the places I've traveled -- which is only 25 of the 200 countries in the world, and mainly a dozen of them, repeatedly, mostly former British colonies, along with other countries in Europe where most people speak English fluently -- Belfast is unique, with the exception of Palestine. I'm quite certain if I spoke other languages and spent more time in place like Chiapas, Bolivia, Kashmir, Catalonia or the Basque lands, I'd find lots of parallels. Certainly the people involved with anti-colonial struggles in all of these places identify with each other, viscerally, which can be plainly seen in so many ways, including from the murals on the walls.

It was far from my first visit to Belfast, but having been away for two years, and having spent so much time around the performative circular firing squads that pass for significant elements of the left in places like the US, England, and Germany, Belfast was a powerful reminder of what a community feels like when it has a sense of common purpose, and a shared history.

And as I'm reminded on every visit to Belfast, this sense of common purpose is dynamic, and very modern. For example, the nationalist cause is for independence and sovereignty, but it is not the sort of nationalism that people from places like the US, England, or Germany may understand. Irish nationalism is anti-racist, anti-colonial, and fundamentally internationalist. If being a nationalist and an internationalist at the same time don't make sense to you, then just think of it as sovereignty, because that's what is meant by the term in Ireland. So, when a young boy went missing and was later found naked, beneath a locked manhole cover, the Republican (or nationalist) community mobilized. Hundreds of people were involved in searching every inch of the neighborhoods where anyone thought any leads might be found. The people mobilize in cases like this because they have no faith in the authorities to do the same, and because they don't want the British occupation or the overwhelmingly Protestant and often Loyalist police forces to come invade their homes. But they all want to find out who killed this boy, and the concern for this one life throughout the nationalist areas is palpable.

Something else that's ubiquitous in Republican Belfast is deep respect for the elders. If you're at an event at some venue in West Belfast, the Ardoyne, or various other neighborhoods, you can be sure that many of the people present who are in their sixties or older have spent years in and out of prison, all for politically-motivated so-called crimes. If you meet people in their forties or fifties, they may or may not have spent a lot of time in prison for being a volunteer for the IRA or the INLA, but they quite likely grew up making petrol bombs, throwing bottles at British troops, making tripwires and engaging the soldiers in foot chases, and doing many other things that were perfectly normal for children growing up in many neighborhoods in Belfast and elsewhere in the northern six counties of Ireland known to the British and the Loyalists as Northern Ireland.

The walls of the Irish-language school I was invited to sing at were adorned with beautiful artwork made by the older students, as well as big murals that were more permanent features of the buildings, featuring revolutionaries from the long struggle for Irish independence, including many who are still very much alive today, as well as revolutionaries from other countries, such as Spain and the United States, among them Angela Davis and Rosa Parks.

One of the most touching moments of the past five weeks on the road was at one of the classes at the Irish school. It was a class of elementary school-age kids, and they were asking me lots of intelligent questions. After I sang a couple songs and we had a little Q&A, one girl told me that was I was doing was really great, and that I shouldn't let anyone tell me otherwise.

I'm sure she had no idea about the specific stuff I'd been dealing with in recent months, the mystery dude on Twitter who spends most of his waking hours trying to ruin my career, or any of that, but her words were certainly just what I needed to hear, and they were amplified in so many ways by all of my Belfast family.

After spending what I originally thought would be my last day in Belfast before the last gig on my Europe tour -- which ended up being the last gig on the tour aside from a birthday party, because the visit to California was derailed, ending me up with a couple extra days in Belfast -- I dropped my phone.  More like I launched it out of my bag, by accident, like a slingshot, unwittingly using the elastic band of a mask to do so.  My phone in its allegedly shock-absorbent case flew out of my bag and hit the ground with a crack.  Luckily I didn't need to call anyone or look at a map.  I knew where the Falls Road was, I had seen the venue there and could find my way back, and everyone I needed to be in touch with would be there.

In true West Belfast fashion, the gig was in a pub infamous for having been attacked by Loyalist paramilitaries.  The man behind the bar was a man everyone knew.  Jimmy had single-handedly prevented a massacre, refusing to move from the entrance of his pub and let the Loyalist thugs in, taking the bullets himself, and somehow surviving.  Also in true West Belfast fashion, the gig was a fundraiser for a local charity called Palestine Aid -- every cent raised gets directly transferred to contacts in Gaza.  I was on the bill with a brilliant local songwriter, Pol Mac Adaim, producer of two of my recent albums, whose brothers both spent decades in prison between them, like so many of the people in the audience did.  And typically of a West Belfast audience, of all the songs Pol and I sang on many different subjects, the song that moved the room the most was Pol's beautiful tribute to Rachel Corrie, the young member of the International Solidarity Movement from Olympia, Washington, who was slain by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian doctor's home in Gaza.  Jimmy had decorated the room earlier in the day, with Palestinian flags hanging from the walls in every direction.

And in true West Belfast fashion, no one called me an antisemite.

And now, back to Portlandia.

May Day! Crowdsourced Tour Promotion

If I'm going to have crowds, they need to be sourced!

From October 19th through November 19th I'll be on tour in Europe, and then northern California just after.  Your help getting the word out will mean the difference between audiences, and crickets!

Booking a tour is one part of the equation in this line of work.  That involves communicating with a whole bunch of really high-quality folks, some of whom run venues, others of whom are working with them to make a local event happen.  They're all trying to get the word out among their networks, but what will really amplify their efforts is if everyone who has gotten to the point of clicking on this blog post and reading this paragraph will take a moment to look at where I'm playing (below) and tell a friend in one of those towns about my upcoming gig there.

Most of the info below is expanded upon in more detail at davidrovics.com/tour, including with things like links for buying tickets online in some cases, but the basic info of date, venue, and town is below, along with posters for gigs that have their own cool graphics...

October

19  Kitchen Garden Cafe with Jess Silk, Birmingham
21  Katie Fitzgerald's, Stourbridge
22  Liverpool Irish Center, Liverpool
23  Don't Extradite Assange Rally at BBC Broadcasting House, London
23  Telegraph at the Earl of Derby, London
25  Folk in the Cellar at the Betsey Trotwood, London
26  The Folklore Rooms, Brighton
27  The Wax Cactus, Worthing
29  The Fox & Newt, Leeds
30  The Old Coal Yard, Newcastle

November

5  Corner Pocket Snooker Centre, Dalkeith (Edinburgh)
7  The Squirrel Bar with Paul Sheridan, Glasgow
10  Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße, Berlin
13  FLEX, München
15  Nachitgall, Köln
17  The American Bar, Belfast
19  The Red Devil with Pol Mac Adaim, West Belfast
22  Flow Restaurant and Bar, Mendocino
23  House concert in San Francisco

Antifascist Playlist

Understanding fascism through the lens of the songs of, um, David Rovics.

I woke up one morning once again thinking about how to stop fascism, and a Google Alert mentioned a song I wrote that I had forgotten about, about people who went on trial for defending themselves against being attacked by Nazis, and I thought, I should compile a playlist.  In the process of doing that, and putting it together more or less chronologically, I realized that this playlist could use an extended introduction.

In putting together a playlist like this, my first challenge was to figure out which songs really belong in it.  This is more complicated than it may appear.  I may have mostly been going on instinct here in choosing which songs to put in and which to leave out, but to the extent that thought was involved, this required answering the question, what is fascism, and what isn't fascism?

In many important ways, the answer is irrelevant, and in other ways, the answer is crucially important.

Why it's irrelevant is when we're talking about the oppression of humans by other humans, this has come in so many different forms over the centuries.  I've written many songs about American apartheid -- slavery and Jim Crow.  Many others about genocide, pogroms, massacres, the clearing of the west, interning people in reservations.  Many more about imperial, genocidal wars, such as those waged against the peoples of Korea and Vietnam by the US Air Force.  US policies of slavery, genocide, and carpet-bombing all rival the worst horrors committed by the Nazis, as unimaginably horrific as they were.  But was or is it fascism?

Yes and no.  But for the purposes of this playlist, with its aims of brevity and specificity, no.  Why?

Because no matter how bad anything that happened before the twentieth century was -- including slavery and genocide, two of the worst imaginable things humans could do to other humans on a systematic basis -- it was not fascism.  Why?

Because fascism, or national socialism, as it is/was also known, was/is fundamentally a response to socialism -- a response to the fear of socialism, and a response to actually existing forms of it.  The national socialist movement in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, that rose up in the wake of the Russian Revolution after 1917, was a response to the Russian Revolution and the global atmosphere at the time that gave rise to it.

After the Russian Revolution, the ruling classes around the world realized they needed to up their game -- they needed to respond to this development, in a big way.  To cut a very long story short, they did respond.  Responses were complex, and varied over time and place radically.  Initially, the response in the US was a campaign of state terror waged against socialists, communists, anarchists, and any other element of society opposed to the continuation of rule by the robber barons of capitalism.  The response following the 1920's, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the White House, was very different, with a government more sympathetic to the welfare of the working class, much like those that were in power in Scandinavia then.  

In many countries, there were powerful elements of society pushing for a more egalitarian future, with some of the more enlightened elements of the powers-that-be realizing that major changes were necessary in order to maintain their hegemony, and not go the way of the USSR, with a successful worker uprising toppling the capitalists and the tsar's head rolling on the floor and all that.  But in these same countries, such as in the US and in Sweden, other elements of the ruling class were more interested in massacring workers who rose up -- and they did, repeatedly, in 1931, and at other times.  These elements of the ruling class -- along with major segments of society at large -- were sympathetic to the rising fascist movements in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, and were hoping to see something like that in the US.  Some of the more prominent supporters of fascism in the US that you've probably heard of include industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The policies of the fascists -- not necessarily reflective of the beliefs of all of their supporters, but the actual policies of the actual fascists in power in Italy and Germany in the 1930's -- were designed to mimic elements of real socialism, and not in small ways.  While poverty, hunger, and unemployment characterized life for the working class in much of the UK and the US, for example, in Germany there was more or less full employment, as there was in Moscow.  The full employment in Germany was largely dedicated to building up the country's military capacity, for many years prior to the beginning of hostilities in what became known as World War 2, but it also was directed at the general well-being of the German working class, who were generally in much better shape than their counterparts in most of the other countries still recovering from the devastation wrought by the last war they had all been in with each other.

Within the ranks of the fascist movement -- as with other political movements -- there are, and were, divisions.  These have included elements that are attracted to the cause out of more anti-elitist, underdog sorts of notions, hoping this would be a movement to serve the interests of the working class -- interests which many people now and in the past have not felt were not being served by the left parties that have sometimes been in power, or have failed to ever seize it in the first place.

These days, it's become fashionable in certain dark corners of the more anarchist wings of the internet to accuse people on a fairly wanton basis of being fascists or fascist sympathizers if they (we) are trying to understand the phenomenon of fascism, in its current or even historical contexts.  We are told that by making a distinction between different current and historic divisions within national socialist movements, we are encouraging "entry-ism," we are "platforming," we are basically trying to taint an otherwise pure left with fascist idea, somehow or other.

This orientation belies a deep confusion, and a profound misunderstanding of what fascism -- national socialism -- is all about, and why it has attracted so many millions of fanatical adherents around the world over the course of the past century.  It's not dangerous to talk about this stuff -- it's dangerous not to talk about it.  It's not dangerous to talk to fascists and understand why they became fascists, it's dangerous not to do that.  We will only possibly win this argument by engaging in it.

davidrovics · Antifascist

The Playlist

There are 24 songs in the playlist, more or less organized chronologically. You absolutely have to listen to the songs to understand why the songs are relevant -- I am by no means going to explain that here, just so you understand. The music is the main thing, what I'm now about to write is only accompanying material, to highlight certain aspects of the songs themselves.

1933 is the year Hitler came to power, and is the title of the first song in the playlist. As with most of the songs I've written about history, I wrote this one because of how prescient events of 1933 in Germany seemed in the period following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump's appeal to the defeated and disenfranchised American working class mirrored Hitler's appeal to the German people. Both actively engaged in demonizing and scapegoating groups of people both within their national borders and outside of them, who generally had nothing to do with directly causing the problems that Hitler and Trump were supposedly so concerned about.

By later in the 1930's, my nanny Lola was one of many German Jews who fled Germany. Lola was part of an organized effort to get the children out, called the Kindertransports. She lived out the war in London, under the regular bombardment of German planes and missiles. At the end of the war, she married a New Yorker and moved to New York City, where I was born a couple decades later.

Popular history here tends to peg World War 2 as beginning when the US officially entered the war, in 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not with the US naval blockade on Japan that preceded the attack. In what they call the European theater, the date is often 1939, when Germany invaded France (again). But it was years earlier when German and Italian troops and armor were first sent to Spain to defend the military junta from the people there. The Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the years during which the US was officially neutral on the question were mostly organized under the banner of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

Many of the leftwing refugees from the Spanish Civil War who survived and escaped went to France, where they were generally treated terribly by the authorities. This got much worse when Germany invaded -- except for the lucky few who sailed to Chile, on a boat that was made available through the efforts of many people, including the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda.

Even as German troops were invading European countries, the US, Canada, and many other nations were refusing to take in refugees, such as the family of the famous Dutch Jewish girl, Anne Frank, whose father tried and failed to find asylum for him and his family in North America. He was sent back. The official atmosphere of hostility towards eastern and southern Europeans, Jewish or otherwise, in the United States and Canada at the time would be hard to overstate.

While Henry Ford was one of many supporters of fascism in the United States, Chiune Sugihara was one of many opponents of fascism from the Empire of Japan. He and his wife, Yukiko, were directly responsible for saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, who were able to get out of Russia before the Nazi troops arrived, using visas signed by the rebel diplomat. Many of the refugees survived the war by hiding out in China, living under Japanese occupation. To this day, their descendants refer to themselves as Sugihara Survivors.

The overwhelming majority of Polish Jews who weren't able to get out of Poland with the help of diplomats like Sugihara were condemned to die in the Nazi death camps, after being herded into ever-smaller ghettos. Once only a small fraction of what was once a large and thriving Jewish population was left, the Jews of Warsaw rebelled, fighting the Nazi troops for 28 days and nights, in what is widely considered to be among the very most impressive urban rebellions in the history of urban rebellions, in April and May, 1943.

Later in 1943, the Nazis were planning on rounding up all the Jews of Denmark, but a Nazi official spilled the beans and, possibly with the assistance of Danish physicist Neils Bohr, convinced the Swedish king it was time to give asylum to the Danish Jews. The Danish resistance soon began the boatlift operation, which successfully saved the lives of 95% of the Jews of Denmark.

In June, 1944, US, British, Canadian, Polish, Danish, and other soldiers from Allied nations landed in France, as the Soviet Army was making its way westwards, into Germany, at the cost of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians, and a country completely destroyed. Losses among the soldiers landing in Normandy were also tremendous.

Among the principal victims of fascism in Germany were the Germans. "First they came for the communists" is a quote made famous later. One of those communists they came for was Hamburg City Council member, Franz Jacob, who was eventually executed in 1944.

Many of the losses in lives among members of the Dutch resistance to fascism during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands happened during the last few months of the war. One of the resistance members killed, in a drive-by shooting while standing on a sidewalk in his home city of Eindhoven, was a young man named Henk Streefkerk.

On May 1st, 1945, Soviet troops liberated an international group of women who had been imprisoned at Ravensbruck, who were on a forced march to Berlin, being led by the SS. Upon realizing they were free, they started singing "The Internationale," and were joined by the Soviet soldiers.

In the decades following World War 2, Germany became a society that made huge strides in coming to terms with its horrifying recent past. One of the many traditions that became commonplace across the country was that of the Stumbling Stones -- little bronze squares embedded into sidewalks in most of the cities in Germany, and some other countries as well, informing anyone who looks at them who used to live at that address, or who ran a shop there, before they were deported to Auschwitz or wherever else, and info like the date of their deportation and death.

In the decades following World War 2, the contradictions that existed within many countries that gave rise to the many different militant social movements that existed before the war, continued to exist after the war. In many cases, that got worse by the 1980's, with the dissolution of industry in many western countries, the loss of so many millions of union jobs, the rise of technology, further automation, and the precarious gig economy. Among the ranks of police officers in many different countries, fascism continued to be a popular idea. This was true of the highest-paid uniformed officer on the Portland police force, before he retired.

It was also true of the fascist on the Max Train in Portland who stabbed two men to death, and almost killed a third. It was true of the guy in the bar who had the misfortune of harassing CeCe McDonald, before he was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors right in the middle of his swastika tattoo -- right before CeCe then went to prison.

In many formerly Warsaw Pact countries, fascism has been especially popular in the past few decades, with the collapse of the former regime, which called itself socialist. Whether or not it was socialist, depends on who you ask. In any case, in answer to the collapsed state of affairs, fascism became popular. Especially in Serbia. But also in Bulgaria, where one Nazi had the misfortune of dying one night, as he attacked two Roma men at a train station in Sofia. No one knows who stabbed him, but Jock Palfreeman went to prison for it.

The ideology of white supremacy in the US obviously has so much to do with the ideology of national socialism. Anyone familiar with fascism is aware that many of the biggest inspirations of the fascist movement in Europe were the race-based systems of oppression originating in the US, especially. So there has long been both explicit and implicit connections between the white supremacist movement in the US and the fascist movement, to the extent that they are separate at all. The mass murderer who took the lives of so many people at the African Methodist church in South Carolina is a case in point.

The case of the Rotherham 12 in England is a classic example of how the police typically collude with fascists, even in countries run by people who like to portray themselves as liberal democrats. Antifascist marchers were deliberately "escorted" by police to a known far right hangout, at which point attacks ensued. Those who defended themselves against the far right hooligans were arrested, homes raided by police at dawn. For years, they faced potential prison time, until finally being acquitted. This pattern has repeated itself in many different countries over many decades.

When the far right rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia -- including many explicitly fascist members of the right -- one of them drove his car into a group of marchers, wounding many, killing one. Vehicular and other such attacks have since become commonplace across the country.

With the rise of Trump and his xenophobic policies, one descendant of people who lived under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, Will Van Spronsen, felt the time had come to make a stand, White Rose-style, knowing he faced certain death in his effort to free those detained at the ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.

Similarly, Michael Reinoehl was doing security in downtown Portland, Oregon after a day of physical conflict with the far right on the streets of the city, when Trump supporters descended on the place in hundreds of flag-draped pickup trucks. The inevitable happened again, when he shot and killed a member of a far right group who he thought was about to do the same to someone else. He was killed in a hail of bullets by police from several different jurisdictions days later, none of whom had their body cams on. This was yet another indication of the sympathies of the police in such situations.

Woody Guthrie's guitar had written on it the phrase, "this machine kills fascists." It wasn't that his guitar had a special function, like James Bond's guitar would. Woody was talking about the power of words, to foment movements, to inspire people, and to educate and organize them. Which requires engaging with them, of course -- not shunning them. But rather, recruiting them.

Wandering Minstrel Accosted by Bluegrass Purist at Kenilworth Park

Just by way of introduction, I'm a musician, among other things.  I was raised by musicians, and I've been playing things with strings on them for a very long time.  I even travel around the world and play music for a living.  I'm 54 years old, and I've been doing this for most of my adult life.  Intro done.

Recently I got a mandola.  For those who don't know, a mandola is just like a mandolin, but usually tuned a fifth lower in pitch.  

I was inspired to get a mandola because for a very long time I had been into improvising on my guitar, tuned in open tuning (DADGAD), with a capo on the seventh fret.  Capoed up there, and in that tuning, I love the tone, and how easy it is to play stuff involving high speed and big intervals, both of which can be harder without a capo, in first position.  A lot of the musical ideas I've been working with have kept me on the first four (lower-pitched) strings of the guitar.  It occurred to me one day that if I tuned a mandola to an open tuning like CGCF, it could be a lot like playing the first four strings of a guitar, capoed on the seventh fret.

So, I got a mandola, and my theory turned out to be correct.  I've been playing all kinds of stuff that sounds very medieval, because of the sound of the instrument, and the open tuning.  I could fit right in at a Renaissance Fair if I wore the right clothing, for sure.  (I know they didn't have steel-stringed instruments back then, but that's OK, it still works.)

For those of you out there who know what an acoustic guitar sounds like, but maybe not a mandola or a mandolin, there's one fact that's particularly relevant:  mandolins and mandolas, like banjos, are loud.  Even a steel-string guitar with lots of resonance isn't loud like a mandola is.  There's a reason mandolins feature so much as instruments for single-note soloing in the context of a bluegrass band -- you can easily be heard above a guitar on a mandolin when you play one clear note, even if the guitarist is really banging away.

When it occurred to me that my new musical obsession was exceedingly portable, I started following my small children around the neighborhood with a mandola.  They like to spend hours barreling around on the hills in the parks with bikes and scooters, and I really needed something to do other than listen to podcasts, anyway.  Playing the mandola instead of listening to podcasts has been amazing for my mental health, not to mention my proficiency at the mandola.

I've discovered that when you're playing a musical instrument in a public setting and you're not busking, most people assume you want space, and they give it to you.  Most people also enjoy the music, and they want to tell you about that, in a way that doesn't distract you too much from playing more music.  

I really don't always know how to respond when people say the music is so nice, as they so often do.  I want to tell them I'm just learning to play this instrument and I'm really not very good at it, but that seems like an arrogant thing to say, as I'm playing stuff that no beginning music student could be playing.  I'm often not sure if they're saying they like the sound of this unusual instrument -- most people have no idea what it is -- or if it's what I'm playing on it that they like.  I don't think they generally know, either.  But in any case, people tend to like it.

I have been gratified to learn that people like hearing music like this.  They may be fans of different kinds of music from whatever it is that I'm playing, be it classical, punk, hip-hop or whatever, but they can appreciate someone playing an instrument while walking down the sidewalk or hanging out in the park, just in principle.  The impact on children is obvious -- they tend to gather round me, gawk, listen, ask questions, make comments, and dance.  I find the mood in the playground is always uplifted by live background music, and the kids get along with each other better, particularly my own kids.

It's also gratifying because of the aforementioned volume issue.  Playing the mandola isn't like blasting canned music from a pickup truck or boom box or whatever, but by acoustic instrument standards it's loud, and can certainly be heard clearly at a hundred feet away, unlike with someone plucking on an acoustic guitar or ukelele, for example.  People in the vicinity -- albeit few in number when I'm in the middle of a grassy park in a residential neighborhood -- have little choice but to listen, so it's nice if they're not suffering through the experience.

There was something always lurking in the back of my mind, though, having spent many years immersed in the bluegrass scene and playing with bluegrass musicians (including as recently as recording my latest album last summer, which features a whole lot of bluegrass mandolin and banjo on it).  That is, that I was not playing the mandola properly, from a bluegrass orientation.

For those of you who aren't familiar, there are ways you play instruments if you're a bluegrass musician, and ways you don't.  Mandolins and mandolas (and mandocellos) are generally tuned like violins and violas (and cellos), in fifths.  

Aside from how an instrument is traditionally tuned, there is the way it is traditionally played.  In bluegrass, the banjo has a fifth string.  It also has a resonator, to make it extra loud.  But the more important thing is the fifth string, which is also a phenomenon shared in common with what is known as old-time music, the clawhammer style of banjo-playing, which also employs a five-string banjo as opposed to the four-string one more common in Irish folk music.

When bluegrass aficionados hear someone playing a five-string banjo in such a way that the player does not appear to be exhibiting any real understanding of what the fifth string is all about, and how it differs from the other four strings in terms of its basic musical purpose, we say they are playing the banjo "like a guitar."  This is an insult, basically.  Usually you wouldn't actually say it to someone, unless you're trying to be mean, or helpful, or both.

Likewise, with proper bluegrass mandolin playing, there is etiquette.  Nothing as obvious as a fifth string to contend with, but in bluegrass, the mandolin player tends to avoid open strings.  There are ways to finger chords that involve open strings, but there are always ways to finger them that avoid them, and this is the general preference the vast majority of the time.  When playing chords, the bluegrass mandolinist generally "chunks" on the two and four, while the bass player drives with the one and three, creating the basic bluegrass sound -- the bluegrass equivalent of drums and bass, in rock or reggae terms.  In order to get that concise, tight "chunk" sound, playing entirely closed chords is essential.  The open strings ring out way too much, and with bluegrass mandolin, string-muting is a constant thing that involves both hands, in order to get that clear, rhythmic sound that we think of when we think of bluegrass mandolin.

And when we bluegrass snobs see someone going around with a mandolin who is playing lots of open strings on it, as with people playing banjos who aren't doing anything special with the fifth string, we mutter under our breaths and we think, "that person doesn't know how to play the mandolin, that person is playing it like a guitar."

So, when I got this lovely mandola and set about to play music on it like I wanted to, in an open tuning, really playing it more like a four-string banjo, in the Irish sense, than like a mandolin in the bluegrass sense, I was always looking over my shoulder for the bluegrass purists who I might offend through my errant musical behavior.  I knew they'd be out there, and hoped I'd win them over, despite my musical rebelliousness, if they listened for a few seconds and gave me a chance.

However, this was not to be, at least not with the one guy who apparently lives right next to Kenilworth Park, who accosted me last night, as I was walking home with my little boy, passing his house.

A tall, thin man with orange hair and two small white dogs, he looked to be around forty years old.  He wasn't shouting, but he was livid, veins bulging, really scary levels of anger being displayed.  I worried about whether he was armed, and I worried about my young child, as I stood there taking in his rage.

"I live right here," he said, pointing to his house.  "You make me listen to that thing every day.  You should really go to Trade-Up Music and learn how to play that thing.  It's a mandolin." 

I didn't point out that it's actually a mandola.  Then, with much more emphasis, he continued.

"It's tuned G-D-A-E."

He spat out the proper pitch of each string like it was quoting a sacred religious verse, and I was a heretic.

"And those eight strings are four pairs, they're supposed to be the same pitch as each other."

This last bit was a particularly low blow, not even worthy of a bluegrass purist -- whatever else he might have to say about this situation, my instrument was at least in tune with itself, I have excellent pitch.  Regardless of which musical style I may be disrespecting, I'm doing it in tune.

"Are you serious?" 

This was all I could think of to say in response, as I backed away with my son and continued towards home.  He made it very clear he was indeed serious.  And I knew exactly what kind of serious he was, because he's just a really emotionally disturbed version of the bluegrass purist that most of us bluegrass aficionados have within us.

I'm actually afraid to bring my mandola back to Kenilworth Park, for fear of being shot by this guy, he's really obviously unhinged.  I wish he could just relax and enjoy some nice music instead, like most of his neighbors have been doing, but I guess not.  

Moral of the story, perhaps, is if you're going to play the mandolin (or the mandola) in Kenilworth Park, you better play proper bluegrass, or else.

Music Therapy

My latest online concert begins with a little improvisational instrumental music, and me talking about the joy of music a bit.  I thought I'd expand on that theme a little.

As most anyone who hasn't been on Mars for the past couple years knows, rates of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed.  They're pretty bad in "normal" times as well.  There are a lot of good tricks to make life more bearable, and even to improve the lives of those around you at the same time.

Before I expound on this subject, for those who have been wondering about my relative absence online in recent months, particularly compared to latter 2020, when I was livestreaming multiple interviews and performances every week:  you're not mistaken, I have been doing much less stuff online lately.  This is largely because life in what they used to call the real world got a lot busier, with concert tours in Europe starting up again.  But it's also because much of the content I've been creating isn't so much for public consumption yet.

People who know me or and my music know it's mostly very political, and that's true.  Years go by where I'm too immersed in following news developments and editorializing about them that I hardly pick up a guitar unless I'm working on a new song or giving a concert.  But then things happen.  Like a global pandemic, borders shutting down and all the tours getting canceled, and other things, like the internet becoming an increasingly toxic space to be in, regardless of its many assets.  In recent months my tendency has been increasingly to turn off the computer, and the news, and just play music instead.

This has meant that instead of listening to podcasts about the dire state of the world for hours every day in one ear while I'm keeping my small children entertained, I'm playing the mandola.  I'm a bit less informed about the minutiae of the unfolding disasters on the planet, but my skill on the instrument is improving by the day, and as I follow the kids around, if we're outside and there are other people around, I make them happy in the process.

I realize that most people with 9-5 jobs don't have hours every day either to listen to podcasts, play with their children, or play musical instruments, whether they do those things simultaneously or not.  But there are modified versions of this practice, to suit your schedule, hopefully.

There is no need to be a good musician for music to be a very therapeutic daily practice for you, your kids (if you have any), and people around you.  For you or people around you to enjoy whatever you're doing on an instrument, it helps a lot if you have some facility at it.  I find that if people focus for 20 minutes a day on learning how to play an instrument, they can make a hell of a lot of progress within a few months, by which time they can get to the point where it's fun to play, and potentially enjoyable for other people within earshot as well.

If you do have some basic facility with a musical instrument, and you know what a musical scale is, then you can engage in the practice I do lately every day.

While following the kids around in a city park with my mandola, taking in the sights and sounds and tactile sensations of the breeze, the rustling leaves, the barking dogs, the children sliding down the slide and swinging on the swings, etc., I improvise on the mandola within a particular scale (or key).  Very vaguely thinking about the Indian classical music tradition/ritual of the raga, I start an improvisation with a particular note in the scale.  I come up with a simple musical riff of some kind, and return to it frequently, ending the phrase, eventually, on the note I began the improv with.  When it feels like it's over, I pause for a little while, and start with another note, doing an improv with a different vibe, often alternating between faster and slower types of patterns.

I find that having just a little bit of repetitive framework for my musical wanderings in the park each day like that increasingly feels like I'm engaging in a sort of religious practice.  I don't know about everyone else, but for me, even as a fairly accomplished musician with a diverse musical palette, if I'm improvising on a mandola for 3 or 4 hours in a day, I'm going to repeat a lot of musical phrases in that time period -- a whole lot of repetition is involved, in fact, even if each larger phrase might be somehow distinct from each other one.  In any case, repetition is OK!  Not only OK, it's one of the essential elements in how you get better at a lot of things, very much including playing an instrument.  And the repetition, along with the music, generally, can have a lot of therapeutic effects on the player, and folks in the area who might happen to be listening.

Aside from everything else, there is something profoundly therapeutic about playing a musical instrument in a park, or anywhere else, because in doing so you are to some small extent reclaiming the real world, outside of the internet.  Your primary audience is the wind and the squirrels, not your hundreds or thousands of faceless followers out there in the ether.  In the modern age, it almost feels strange to be doing such a thing, with no one following me around with a camera, in order to livestream the event.  I'm absolutely certain if many passersby saw someone filming me, they'd think it less unusual.  

In any case, I recommend the practice.  And if you find yourself in Portland, Oregon, drop by Kenilworth Park sometime and bring an instrument!

Touring During Delta

So many complicated decisions.  Is it safe to play concerts?  Here are my two cents.

As the fourth wave of the pandemic is shutting the US down one way or another, hospitals overflowing, a thousand people dying a day, and so on, obviously a lot of tour and other travel plans are being canceled.

If you listen to the headlines, you may get the impression this fourth wave is a result of the Delta Variant.  But the Delta Variant is also the primary variant spreading in other countries that are not having a fourth wave, like Denmark.

Whereas in some countries, a central public health authority makes sensible decisions based on best practices and good data that are applied nationwide, such as in Denmark, in other countries, there is no central authority to speak of, and any regional efforts at having a strategy to cope with the pandemic are soon overwhelmed by the realities of living in one country with no internal borders, where the idea of having a regional strategy to deal with what is at the very least a national problem is basically a joke.  That's our situation in the US, so every individual musician and audience member, along with everyone else in society, is left making their own decisions, based on whatever they conclude seems to make the most sense under the extremely complex circumstances.

As one of those individuals, having no hope that the public health authorities in the US will ever get it together, I have come up with my own approach based on my assessment of the costs, benefits, and risks involved.

What the pandemic's most recent chapter has taught us, or at least those of us who are paying attention, is that under the right circumstances, a country can avoid a fourth Delta Variant wave, and end social distancing, masking, restrictions on singing, dancing, etc., through widespread vaccination, the national use of a corona pass system, and a national policy of requiring all visitors be fully vaccinated.  Denmark is one country that has demonstrated this is possible.  I'm just back from a tour there.

While there is no way to really benefit from the Danish model without a national government's involvement in its effective implementation, we can at least assume that if we do our best to approximate it, we're conducting ourselves in a way that is safe enough so as not to cause problems for society, even if there is always some kind of risk, if you're going to leave your bedroom.

So, my policy for the current situation is only to play in countries where vaccine access is universal (and where I'm allowed in), and wherever practical, to require proof of vaccination for anyone who comes to a gig, including of course any musicians involved.  When playing in countries like Denmark, all of this is already standard procedure, and legally required.  Where this isn't the case, it's inevitably going to be less predictable.

If there are bans on social gatherings or concerts, etc., I would not try to do a concert against some ordinance like that, but if concerts are allowed, then I would reject any arguments against having them, on the basis of putting people at risk.  If everyone is vaccinated then it is a risk I'm perfectly willing to take, and I think it's easy to argue based on actual lived reality (in Denmark) that any potential costs are outweighed by the benefits.

Society here in the US and in most places is twice as anxious and twice as depressed as usual.  People are overdosing on opiates and other things at a massively escalated rate.  They need live concerts, if live concerts can be conducted reasonably safety (and they can), and anything else that fosters community and togetherness.

The planet is facing unprecedented doom and gloom, and thus, we need live music and other things that bring people together more than ever.  I also believe this is the case, despite the carbon footprint involved with being a touring band.  Lots of major structural change needs to happen, and musicians giving up on touring in order not to burn gasoline is not going to prevent the apocalypse.  And if those touring bands are part of building a movement that might lead to the transformation of society, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Those of us who play music for a living are aware that there are always risks involved with this business, even if no one is worried about catching viruses from performers or audience members.  The very act of touring is dangerous.  Driving is dangerous, and every time we spend another five hours driving down the highway to the next gig, we're aware of the risk we're taking in order to continue to pursue our chosen professions for another day.  Life is full of such calculations, and now with Covid we have another one, which we may just have to get used to factoring into the mix.

Surviving the Weather

I've dabbled recently in writing some practical advice pieces, such as one I wrote about healthily eating while living out of a car, without refrigeration.  Now, for whatever it may be worth, I'm compelled to share a couple of insights about surviving the weather.

Most anyone living in 2021 is dealing with extremes of weather that they hadn't encountered before.  I grew up in what used to be the relatively temperate climate of southern New England, as it is known, the northeastern United States.  There were a lot of things I never needed to know about dealing with extremes of weather, because we didn't have any when I was a kid.  Since then, I've spent much of my time traveling.  

Although I very intentionally tried to organize tours in such a way that I would be traveling to places during a nice time of year -- like touring Australia in Australian winter, thus entirely missing the increasingly scorching summers wherever I might be otherwise, and doing gigs in California and Florida in the winter -- things didn't often work out that way.  I have ended up spending lots of time during record-breakingly hot summers in hot places like Texas, Arizona, and Japan, and I have done multiple tours of eastern Canada and Alaska in winter.

The good news is, although climate chaos is terrible and is causing so many problems for so many people and other creatures, the planet has long had a lot of different kinds of weather.  We're just not used to having all kinds of weather in all places, like is increasingly happening, to characterize the phenomenon in lay terms, the only ones I know.  But there are parts of the world where people are used to all these kinds of weather.  I've spent time in some of them, and learned a couple tricks.

Water

Here in the western parts of North America, things are generally very dry, except for the thin strip of land hugging the coast.  So, when the temperature goes up to 116F (46C) as it did recently in Portland, although hot, it's a dry heat.  But whether you're in the desert or in the swamp-like conditions of New Orleans or Hiroshima in a normal summer, water is your friend.

In fact, just to emphasize the point, during the heat wave when it did get up to 116 degrees, I was in Portland with my family, happily playing inside and outside, even during the height of it all.  Those of you reading this who know me well may be aware that I really don't like hot weather, so you might be surprised to hear that we're getting by OK, though I'd prefer a much cooler climate, the way it used to be.  But if it gets really hot and you have access to running water and shade, you'll be fine.

The key, however, is not removing your clothes and getting in a pool.  I mean, that's great, if you have a pool, and if you don't mind staying in it all day.  But otherwise the thing to do is to remove your clothes -- or actually just your shirt or top -- get it wet, wring it out a bit, and put it back on.  When it dries out, repeat the process.  You can easily do this all day, every day, and you can do it for every member of your family, too.

If you have kids, set the example.  Do it yourself.  Outdoors or indoors, whether you have air conditioning that works well or not at all, but especially if you don't have AC or if you're outside.  Get your shirt wet frequently, set the example, and your kids will try it, too, and they'll love it.  Everyone will be happy, no one will be grumpy, and no one will get heatstroke and drop dead either.

If you have good AC, that's great, you can fight the heat that way and stay indoors all the time like they advise on the radio.  But if you lose power and you don't have a generator, you'll still need my advice here.  Also, in hot climates outside of the US, fighting the heat with powerful air conditioning that uses massive amounts of energy is not the norm.  Even in the rich and very subtropically hot and humid islands of Japan, very few households have central air conditioning.

In very fashion-conscious Japan, men often wear a wet t-shirt beneath another layer, which is a dry shirt, so they can be cool in both senses, even in very hot and humid weather.  It's also common to wear a wet towel around your neck there in summer.

Shade

Knowing how to use shade is vital for coping with hot weather, whether it's dry heat or wet heat, but especially in dry, desert-style heat like what we're currently experiencing in the western US and Canada.

For your house or apartment, if you live in one, you need to pay close attention to where the sun rises and sets.  Reflective curtains and blackout curtains work way better than other kinds, they need to be very serious curtains, but then wherever the afternoon sun is going to hit, close the windows in that room beforehand, and the curtains.  When the sun sets and things start to cool down out there, if they do, open all the windows and keep them open all night.

When you go outdoors in direct sunlight, well, just don't do that!  Don't be too cool for an umbrella.  Women throughout Japan and Mexico use umbrellas not just for rain, but for sun.  You can do it, too, whoever you are.  If it's cool enough for grandma Yamaguchi, it should be cool enough for you.  By using an umbrella, especially in combination with a wet shirt, you can happily take the dog for a little afternoon walk in triple-digit weather.  (Although make sure you do that with a very well-hydrated dog on a grassy field, or the dog will burn up on the pavement and die.)

If the heat is really dry, I swear to you it's true that you can sit in the shade of a typical cement building in the desert when it's way over 100 degrees, and you will be perfectly comfortable and cool with no air conditioning, whether the window is open or closed.  And if your shirt is wet, you might get cold.  I'm serious, and I speak from experience.

Layers

That heading may sound like a heading for coping with cold weather, and I thought I would talk about that, too, but first it bears mentioning that layers are good for hot weather, too.  There is a common misconception that if you're hot, the best thing you can do is remove your clothing.  This may be true if you're going swimming, but otherwise, it's not.  Wet clothing, or loose clothing that provides shade, will both keep you much cooler than removing your clothing will.  People wear types of clothing we might generally characterize as robe-like in the deserts and tropics of Africa and Asia for very practical reasons.

But among the weather extremes we are experiencing a lot of recently, extreme cold is another.  In Texas, known of course more for heat, and in east Texas, humidity, than any other kind of weather, it got way below freezing last winter, and stayed that way for a while.  The electrical grid froze and stopped working.  As with the heat wave that's going on now, during the freeze in Texas last winter, people died.  People got frostbite and died.

I know people who are used to cold weather were sometimes shocked to hear that people actually got frostbite and died in Texas when it was not even very far below freezing.  Pretty much any Canadian or Norwegian over the age of seven knows how to avoid getting frostbite and dying when it is well below freezing outside, while they are in fact not only not getting frostbite and dying, but are enjoying the weather, outside, for hours on end.  But in Texas, some people die when the heat goes off.

As with the heat deaths, these deaths are pretty much entirely avoidable.  Of course extreme weather will affect the vulnerable more, and more elderly people die in winter or summer than in spring or autumn, during a typical year.  (At least I'm pretty sure I heard that from a reliable source and I didn't just make that up.)  But if you know how to cope, you'll tend to die a lot less, and even be able to enjoy whatever weather you find yourself in.

This is very much true of cold weather.  I say that perhaps as someone who prefers it to hot weather, but nonetheless, all you need to know how to do is to know how to dress yourself.  This is not something people learn how to do in climates where it rarely freezes in winter, however.  

For a typical person living in Houston or Miami, the warmest article of clothing they own for the bottom half of their bodies is probably a pair of jeans.  The warmest top they own is a sweater or a light jacket.  Among the more privileged sorts who take ski vacations in Colorado and such, they may own more useful items of clothing, and I doubt any of the people who got frostbite and died in Texas when the power went out are among that set.  (Of course, they're also probably not reading this blog post.)

I've never gong skiing, but everyone has seen how skiers dress on TV.  Every bit of their skin is covered.  That's the first thing you need to do when it's below freezing.

If the warmest thing you own to cover your legs with is a pair of jeans, then you need to figure out how to have another layer either under or over the jeans.  If they're loose enough, you can wear long underwear, also called thermal underwear (if you own any or can find any to buy).  Assuming you don't have ski pants, another thing that works very well for warmth on top of your jeans are rain pants.

As with closing your windows to keep the heat out, when surviving outside in sub-freezing weather, keeping every inch of skin covered at all times means doing just that.  Not just having a top on and a bottom on, each with a few layers, but tucking things in properly, everywhere, so there is no space where air can come in between your socks and the bottoms of your jeans, or under your shirt, or down your neck.  Cover all of that in ways that it stays covered, and you don't need to keep messing with it.

Once properly wrapped and layered, with a little bit of movement, your body will keep you warm just fine, indefinitely.  You can get through an entire winter like that, without getting frostbite and dying, even if it never goes above freezing, and the heat never comes back on.  It's obviously much nicer if you have a place to live and heat, but even if you're living in a car, if you have clothing and you know how to dress, you can avoid frostbite.

When temperatures go way below they did in Texas last winter, then the advice I'm giving here is less applicable.  At least from my experience, at a certain point, there is no good alternative to serious winter clothing, like the kinds of winter pants and winter jackets that most any resident of the Arctic has hanging by their front door.  There is a level of cold where a scarf and hat is a joke, and you need goggles and a long hood, so you look like Kenny in South Park.

Insulation

One of the big problems with housing of any kind in parts of the world where they are used to a temperate climate is there's no need for insulation.  Which is fine when it doesn't get very hot or very cold.  But if it does, insulation, like layers, is essential.

Of course, pointing this out may or may not be very helpful, if you can't just get your house renovated, or if you're a renter, or living in your car.  But the insulation principle is one you can keep in mind, whenever trying to avoid extremes of heat or cold.

The ground is great insulation.  The more you can into it, the more temperate the climate will be.  Basements, caves, cellars, holes in the ground, these are all your friends.  If there's no power and it's very hot out, storing food in as deep a hole as you can dig will keep it much cooler than anywhere else.

A stove is much better than a fireplace.  If you're keeping yourself warm through a fire of any kind, make it more like a stove as much as you can.  Surround that fire with objects that hold heat, like bricks, cement, stones.  After the fire goes out, even if it's been going strong for a half hour, those objects stay warm for a while, maybe even all night.  Of course, if you're indoors and working with a fireplace, this will work much better than outdoors, but the principle applies either way.

And of course, as with dressing and keeping every inch of skin covered when the weather is below freezing, even if you're in a structure with no insulation and no heat, finding and blocking every place where air may be coming in, such as cracks at the bottoms of doors, will help keep the warmth in a lot, even if the only warmth you have is being produced by your body.  Each of our bodies produces as much warmth as an old-fashioned, hot light bulb.  That can easily hot a room if it's insulated.

On the off-chance you happen to find yourself outdoors and in a blizzard or otherwise surrounded by snow and sub-zero temperatures:  the snow is your friend.  Snow is very warm.  Snow is insulation.  Make a cave out of the snow, and get in it.  If your skin is all covered, once you're in a small cave made of snow, your body will warm up the space quickly, and you'll be warm and cozy while you wait for the blizzard to pass.  You can stay that way for days if you have to, and your main problem will be the usual hunger and thirst and occasional need to expose your skin long enough to relieve yourself, but you won't get frostbite.  Just don't pee into the wind.

And thus concludes my advice for surviving the weather.