Rising Star

 I was pleased recently to find this video interview of guitarist and composer, Gwenifer Raymond, which includes snippets of some of her performances.

(trans) 894 views May 24, 2022 On this muggy Thursday evening we were guests in Bernd Mair's loft for the first time. The relaxed and intimate atmosphere reminded some of the visitors of the legendary Tiny Desk Concerts from the USA.

Our first musician in this exclusive setting was Gwenifer Raymond, a guitarist originally from Wales who now lives in Brighton, England. She calls her style of playing the guitar Welsh Primitive, based on American Primitive and Blues music. Live, however, it quickly became clear that Gwen's music also lives from her energetic and passionate style, which is deeply rooted in punk.

Schnittraum Tirol produced the interviews and the live recording. Enjoy!

-------------------------

Gwenifer Raymond has done a lot of pre-performance interviews since I first came across her a couple years ago, but they are mostly boilerplate endlessly repeated -- so read one and you've seen them all. There is an enthusiastic review of her history and style by Kitty Empire on The Guardian.

Words can't do justice to Raymond's performance on the guitar (or banjo).  Be sure to watch some of the full performance videos available on Youtube.  I think the first one I found was Sometimes There's Blood.

Dust

The September 21st edition of Native America Calling has an excellent discussion of the history of the Dust Bowl, including the mostly ignored effects of that calamity on Native American communities. The guest speakers also pointed out that the current drought in the Southwest along with unsustainable farming  and water management is leading us into a replay of the Dust Bowl.

Housing by the Numbers

 If you look around Albuquerque nearly all the new housing under construction will look like the one on the right.

That house on the right and the two north of it built at the same time all sold for about $400,000 each.  

To buy or rent one of those three houses you need an income of about $98,000 a year.

The median household income in New Mexico is $50,000.

Recommended Reading

A friend recommended a novel to me recently, The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.  I looked through her copy briefly and was skeptical about the story on two counts.  It starts out looking like a coming-of-age chronicle about a London teenager, and the main narrator is a fig tree!

I looked up the book on Amazon and the synopsis there showed that there was more to the story and that it dealt mostly with Cyprus and its turbulent history.  That was a topic of interest to me,  and it reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's book, Bitter Lemons, which I had enjoyed many years ago. So I bought the Kindle version and was glad in the end that I did.

Shafak skillfully ties together complex themes of history, ethnic antagonisms, personality development and ecology.  Her conscription of a tree as narrator, while seemingly improbable, turned out to be an inspired choice which made me rethink my own ideas about literary style.  

The omniscient narrator that carries the story in most novels really has no more grounding in reality than Shafak's fig tree.  The author actually does make use of the third person point of view to carry much of the plot's action, while the consciousness of the tree provides perspective as well as a surprising but satisfying ending to the story.  While I think the technique of jumping back and forth in time is much over-used to maintain suspense, Shafak uses it very effectively to explain the development of personalities and relationships.

Shafak's Amazon author's page shows some impressive academic credentials which give weight to the research acknowledgements in the book's endnotes, and she clearly drew on her own personal history of emigration in crafting the plot and characters of The Island of Missing Trees.

------------------

Update:

Take twenty minutes to watch a TED Talk by Shafak.  It will explain a lot about her writing purposes and style.  She is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and impressively articulate. She writes in both Turkish and English.

911

Getting Real about Homelessness

 One local Albuquerque news program reported this evening that there are currently about 2,800 people living on the city's streets.  The encampments are all over the city in parks, under highway overpasses, in empty lots and on sidewalks.

The City Council voted to authorize some safe campsites recently, and then turned around and decided to prohibit such refuges.  The mayor vetoed that change.  The Council voted again to over-ride the mayor, but one councilor changed her mind and the veto was upheld. So now there are two official sites with room for maybe a hundred tents.

Mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures are not going to solve the homeless problem.  Experience has shown that improved conditions for the homeless in any given locale will ultimately attract more homeless. It is a National problem which will require a significant commitment at that level.

A lot of problems contribute to homelessness including addiction and mental illness, but the fundamental cause is simply explained -- it is the lack of affordable housing -- and that affects not only the down-and-out but also families who are working and still unable to afford exorbitant rents or house purchase loan payments. So the inescapable conclusion is that what is needed in the way of a solution is a massive effort to create affordable housing nation-wide.

The housing crisis in turn is really just a symptom of an economy featuring ever-increasing inequality in wealth and income over the last fifty years.  The extent of that inequality has been well known for a long time: the top one percent are now likely paying a smaller percentage of their income than the guy who delivers your Sunday newspaper.

Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, concluded this about what must be done to make the economy work for the rest of us:

"The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital.  This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instance of primitive accumulation.  For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros.  This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market.  Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth..."

In fact, Biden has recently promoted the idea of establishing some reasonable tax rates for the country's top earners.  I would suggest that the income from that sort of tax on the billionaires might be devoted entirely for at least the first year or two to the objective of creating affordable housing.  Such a financial injection into the national economy would have an immediately obvious effect on homelessness as well as improving the prospects for working families for home ownership, while simultaneously providing a big boost to the home construction industry. It seems like a win-win which even some Republicans might get behind.

Fantasy vs. Reality

 In 1969 I was living in a third-floor walkup apartment in New York's Lower East Side.   The apartment building dated from the Civil War era; the bathtub was in the kitchen.  On July 20th of that year I hosted a Moon Landing party for a group of friends.  It seemed to me at the time to be quite a unique opportunity to witness a remarkable event in human history.  I was surprised that the noisy socializing in my two-room apartment showed that no one other than me had much interest in the tv images showing the first steps on the Moon.

By 1970 we were in San Francisco where both our daughters were born.  We were living in the Outer Mission in a second-floor railroad flat in a building that was likely built not long after the 1906 earthquake.  I recall enjoying the Star Trek series which I think was by then already in rerun.  In those early days of the often-reborn series the sets were pretty primitive and the depictions of imagined extraterrestrial life were really corny.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the upbeat, adventurous plots and their depiction of a human society that had evolved beyond the petty prejudices of the present.

Fifty years down the road I have lost track of how many versions of Star Trek have appeared, and the rockets have gotten a lot bigger.  Astronauts regularly shuttle between Earth and the orbiting space station.  It looks like humans will again set foot on the Moon within a short time, and there are plans to send people to join the robots already on Mars.  I find myself now less than enthusiastic about the prospects of sending humans beyond Earth's gravitational embrace.

The satellites allowing vastly enhanced understanding of weather and climate patterns are of undeniable value, and the pictures brought a million miles back from the Webb telescope are breathtaking.  Lofting humans into Space, however, seems to me to be an irrational distortion of priorities.  Space travel enthusiasts tout the advantages of human perception, performance and flexibility, but those traits' long-term value seems questionable in the face of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics.

More importantly, given the current trajectory of Humankind, it seems doubtful that a human society with the resources to support something like interplanetary travel will be viable long enough to make that happen.  The odds of avoiding catastrophic, irreversible climate change seem no better than 50/50.  Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the the present state of international relations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

Those billions aimed at carrying a few humans into Space would be better invested now in giving  us a chance for a real future.

Fundmentals

"We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn."

 — Bernie Sanders, The Guardian - 2 Sep 2022

* * *

It is interesting how little direct acknowledgement of those facts about our economy get in the discourse leading up to the pending mid-term elections.  The attention of voters is directed instead to symptoms rather than fundamental causes. The inadequacies of health care, education and housing dominate the conversation because they present imminent threats.  The proposed responses are really little more than symbolic gestures.

What all of that points to is the peripheral importance of the electorate in the governing process.