This Can't Go On

For as long as any of us can remember, the world economy has grown a few percent per year, on average. Some years see more or less growth than other years, but growth is pretty steady overall. I'll call this the Business As Usual world.

In Business As Usual, the world is constantly changing, and the change is noticeable, but it's not overwhelming or impossible to keep up with. There is a constant stream of new opportunities and new challenges, but if you want to take a few extra years to adapt to them while you mostly do things the way you were doing them before, you can usually (personally) get away with that. In terms of day-to-day life, 2019 was pretty similar to 2018, noticeably but not hugely different from 2010, and hugely but not crazily different from 1980.

If this sounds right to you, and you're used to it, and you picture the future being like this as well, then you live in the Business As Usual headspace. When you think about the past and the future, you're probably thinking about something kind of like this:

I live in a different headspace, one with a more turbulent past and a more uncertain future. I'll call it the This Can't Go On headspace. Here's my version of the chart:

Which chart is the right one? Well, they're using exactly the same historical data - it's just that the Business As Usual chart starts in 1950, whereas This Can't Go On starts all the way back in 5000 BC. "This Can't Go On" is the whole story; "Business As Usual" is a tiny slice of it.

Growing at a few percent a year is what we're all used to. But in full historical context, growing at a few percent a year is crazy. (It's the part where the blue line goes near-vertical.)

This growth has gone on for longer than any of us can remember, but that isn't very long in the scheme of things - just a couple hundred years, out of thousands of years of human civilization. It's a huge acceleration, and it can't go on all that much longer. (I'll flesh out "it can't go on all that much longer" below.)

The first chart suggests regularity and predictability. The second suggests volatility and dramatically different possible futures.

by Holden Karnovksy, Cold Takes |  Read more:

Images: Cold Takes 

"Miracle House" in Lahaina

What Saved The ‘Miracle House’ In Lahaina? (Honolulu Civil Beat)

Image: Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023

No App, No Entry

No app, no entry: How the digital world is failing the non tech-savvy (The Guardian)

Image: Observer Design

[ed. Took a trip last week and thought the same thing. At no point did I interact with anyone but TSA. Parking, check-in, bag tagging, ticketing, seating - all require an app or email now.]

"Whatever the word is for the opposite of heartwarming, it certainly applies to the story of Ruth and Peter Jaffe. The elderly couple from Ealing, west London, made headlines last week after being charged £110 by Ryanair for printing out their tickets at Stansted airport. (...)

The Jaffes, aged 79 and 80, said they had become confused on the Ryanair website and accidentally printed out their return tickets instead of their outbound ones to Bergerac. It was the kind of error anyone could make, although octogenarians, many of whom struggle with the tech demands of digitalisation, are far more likely to make it.

But as the company explained in a characteristically charmless justification of the charge: “We regret that these passengers ignored their email reminder and failed to check-in online.”

Alaska State Fair, 2023

Exhibits, Alaska State Fair 2023
Image: markk

How Privatization Robs Us of Our Most Precious Assets

You name it, it’s been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itself have been outsourced to private companies by state and local governments who buy into the idea that The Private Sector is more efficient at serving the functions of government. But this is baloney, as Donald Cohen shows in The Privatization of Everything How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back(co-written with Allen Mikaelian). Cohen, the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest, joins today to take us through case studies of privatization in action, like Chicago’s disastrous deal to sell its parking meters. Cohen shows us that when we privatize, we are turning our own assets over to someone else who will sell them back to us and pocket our money. He explains why privatization is a bad deal and why public goods and services should remain in public hands. There is a right-wing effort to stigmatize public services as Big Government (calling public schools “government schools” for instance), and Cohen makes the case for why we need a pro-public culture that unashamedly demand that what belongs to the people stays in the hands of the people.

This conversation originally appeared on the Current Affairs podcast. It has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON

It really is the privatization of everything. That is one of the key takeaways that I had from your book after going through it. You document case after case after case. People might hear about prominent cases—school privatization and so on, but you show it’s everything.

DONALD COHEN

 And there was plenty left on the cutting room floor. Currently, that’s the big issue about Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and direct contracting Medicare—we didn’t cover that at all. There are definitely things that we didn’t get to.

ROBINSON
Did you cover war and the military?

COHEN
Not really, no. That’s another big one we have to add.

ROBINSON
But this is not to say that this book is skimping. You do go through many case studies.

COHEN
There’s a book out now by Mariana Mazzucato about the consulting industry, which we don’t talk about as well, which is basically the brain outsourcing—government brains—to huge consulting firms. So, there are other things to explore.

ROBINSON
What are some of the cases of efforts to privatize, successful or not, that people might not know or realize?

COHEN
I would venture to say most, but I will give a few cases. Let me say how we define privatization. My definition is it’s about private control over public goods. Public goods, in my definition, are the things that we all need to survive, the things that we need everyone to have: health, clean air, transportation, education, all the above.

I’ll give a couple of examples because that’s the best way to get into the real issues, which our book intends to draw a through line into some larger issues that connect all the public sectors. So, parking meters in Chicago—I’ve told this story many, many times, and most people who don’t live in Chicago don’t know about it. Everyone who lives in Chicago does. In 2008, the worst of the recession, cities were bleeding red ink. The mayor at the time announced a proposal from a private consortium of Morgan Stanley from Wall Street, a sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East, and a national parking company, LAZ parking, which is basically all over the country. That consortium offered the city $1.1 billion upfront in cash in exchange for control of the city’s 36,000 parking meters for 75 years. It was announced on a Friday and the vote was on Tuesday. Now, just to put in context, 2083 is when that contract ends. So after the fact, it was analyzed and scrutinized and all that. It was a terrible deal, an unbelievably stupid way to borrow on future revenue. Everybody borrows on future revenue, that’s how we buy houses and things, but for 75 years, incredibly stupid. Prices went way up to park.

But here’s the most important thing: that for the life of the contract, if the city wants to do any one of its important jobs—transportation, land use, housing, environment, parks—and they would like to eliminate parking spots, they have to buy them back. So, if you have to buy the spots back at the future value of the spot, fundamentally, you don’t do it in many cases. In fact, there was a professor at one of the universities there that interviewed transit planners within a year or two after the deal, and found that they were unable to complete a plan to create bus rapid transit or dedicated bus lanes. If you want to create bike lanes or pedestrian laws, your hands are tied to deal with the fundamentals. So for me, what that says is that privatization is really an assault on democracy because it gives them legal contractual control over the stuff that should be ours to control. (...)

ROBINSON
Yes, and have a few more decades to go. One of the points that you make in the book is the Indiana toll road case as well, which has parallels. I think people might not think of it this way, but when you sell a public asset and take the check upfront for much less than what the thing is worth over the period of time that you are giving this company or consortium the right to collect revenue, you are essentially transferring wealth, just handing it over from the public sector to the private sector.

COHEN
Enormous amounts. So, the parking in Chicago needs to be modernized for credit cards and all that, like most cities are doing right now. That may cost some money, so they needed some cash, and they could have borrowed it. The rates to park went way up, I think eight bucks an hour or something like that. So my question would have been to them is: if the private entities think they can make money doing this, why can’t the city? Because the city has great needs—housing needs, climate needs; it has all sorts of municipal needs that would benefit the city. You’re exactly right. It’s pure extraction. (...)

COHEN
Some of them went bankrupt because they made bad choices, but then they’ve just changed the way they do the deals. But here’s what’s interesting about that. There’s going to be a lot of infrastructure money flowing, given the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s a lot of money that we need to build infrastructure. There are two things that are really important to remember: things cost money, and there’s only one place to get that money—us. Taxes, tolls, and fees. That’s it. The reason this is important is that the people who want to privatize, or do these public private partnerships, will often say, “no new taxes, more efficient.” It’s all motherhood and apple pie, but you have to take it back to that basic fact. It costs money, and there’s only one place to get it, and that’s us. So if rates are going to go up more than they need to, then someone else will get that money.

ROBINSON
Yes, there’s a wonderful story that is told. Perhaps you should give a version of what the pitch for privatization is, because it’s the same in almost every case. It’s this wonderful fantasy about how everyone is going to benefit, and we will get something for nothing.

COHEN
That’s a great question. There are a few pitches, and one is: cheaper, better, faster. The private sector is more efficient, so we can provide public services more cheaply. But let me stop on that one because we deal with this argument all the time. So they say they’re more efficient. Let’s just think about what efficiency is. Efficiency is spending or doing less and getting more—less effort for more. Well, there are two ways to be efficient. One is to do things smarter. We’ve all figured that out in our homes. But the other is to do them cheaper. So when the private sector says, “we’ll do it more efficiently,” they’re going to spend less money on something because, remember, they will take a bunch of money out.

ROBINSON
Yes, they have to make a profit.

COHEN
They’ll get profit. That goes out, and executive compensation. So, tell us exactly what you’re going to spend less money on because it’s very concrete and very real things: fewer workers, lower pay for workers, poor quality equipment, or less maintenance. It’s very concrete, and that’s absolutely what happens. So, that’s efficiency. Better? If someone’s got a better idea, we could buy that from them. But we don’t have to give it. There may be some private company that has some clever idea about how to do something. Well, let’s just buy it and we all do that. Faster? Not really. They say it all the time, but not really. So, that’s one thing: cheaper, better, faster, and more efficient. The other argument we hear a lot is that the public sector doesn’t have the money. So, they don’t have the money to build the new road. Again, we take that back to what I was saying earlier, but I’ll say it a little differently now. We have to borrow money to build a road, and you borrow money to build to buy a house. Borrowing is actually the easy part because, it turns out, you have to pay it back. And there’s only one place to get that—taxes, tolls, and fees: us. Let’s just break it down to the actual nuts and bolts truth of it. It’s all math. (...)

ROBINSON
The private sector may have some good incentives to satisfy consumer demand, but they also have a boatload of bad incentives. The profit motive creates all sorts of reasons why it would be good for you to do things that are socially toxic and harmful.

by Nathan J. Robinson and Donald Cohen, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Sea Drones

Sea drones and the counteroffensive in Crimea (Reuters)

Image: South West News Service

[ed. What's next? Tunneling drones? Maybe Elon has contingency plans for his Boring company technology.]

“Girl” Trends and the Repackaging of Womanhood

“What kind of insufferable girl are you?” my TikTok algorithm asked me the other day. The options were “femcel,” as in someone who’s pathologically unlovable because she’s a radical feminist; “coquette,” as in, someone who wears bows and listens to Lana Del Rey, or “blogger,” as in me. The original video appears to have been deleted (too insufferable, perhaps), but it stayed with me not because it was particularly insightful or laden with meaning but because it offered yet another “girl” on the internet for me to be, and maybe the only accurate one.

It’s the summer — or the year, or maybe the decade — of mostly made-up microtrends involving the word “girl.” People on TikTok and everywhere else on the internet are talking about their “girl dinners,” which amount to thrown-together plates of whatever happens to be in the fridge. They’re going on “hot girl walks” (a.k.a. walks). They’re having “feral girl summers.” They attempt to determine via viral Pinterest mood boards whether they’re “strawberry girls” or “cherry girls” or “vanilla girls” or “tomato girls” or “coconut girls” or “coastal cowgirls” or “rat girls” or “downtown girls” or “okokok girls” or “lalala girls” (don’t worry about those last two, it was part of a TikTok thing that lasted approximately five minutes). They girlboss and do girl math with their gorgeous gorgeous girlies during hot girl summer. They buy viral pink paste and powdered greens in efforts to become “clean girls” or “That Girls,” and when they fail, they become, evidently, “insufferable girls.”

Reading them all in a row, you’d be forgiven for thinking these terms are at best silly and meaningless, and at worst obnoxious and insidious. For one, a solid percentage (if not most) of the people participating in and discussing “girl” trends are women, which therefore makes it feel slightly infantilizing and icky and like, why should 30-year-olds care what type of “girl” they are? Shouldn’t we have figured ourselves out by now? You could make the argument that pathologizing the things women and girls do smells a bit too strongly of gender essentialism; you could say that labeling normal human behavior as “girl-coded” only otherizes women in an already patriarchal world. But I would argue that both miss the point, because these supposed “girl trends” aren’t really trends at all. They’re marketing campaigns.

There’s an SNL sketch from a million years ago that illustrates this phenomenon, in which the local news invents a harmful teen trend designed to frighten parents. “They call it ‘souping,’” Bill Hader-as-news-anchor tells the camera. “Teenagers are drinking expired soup cans to get high! Every teenager is doing it, and it will kill them.” (Emma Stone, who plays the teen, says, “There’s no way teenagers are doing that”; the news anchor then invents a new moral panic around teenagers called “trampolining.”) The gist is that there is something deeply wrong with Today’s Teens, something unknowable and sinister that the current generation of adults never would have imagined being part of, and if it isn’t “souping,” then surely it’s something else. To figure out what, you’ll just have to keep watching.

This is sort of what all trend journalism feels like to me these days. A single video goes viral, some people start talking about it, the media picks it up, and suddenly it’s used as fodder for the kind of lowest-common-denominator broadcast news segments where old people marvel about how foreign young people have become — and it’s not a coincidence that it’s almost always young women they’re referring to here — even though the thing they’re talking about isn’t even really happening on a scale that’s by any measure newsworthy. The result is a discourse that ends up basically amounting to “girls = wrong and/or stupid,” even when, half the time, the original video was made for people who already knew it was kind of stupid, or meant to be a joke.

Take “girl dinner,” for instance, which caused outsize controversy because it combined the concept of womanhood with eating. In May, a 28-year-old showrunner’s assistant named Olivia Maher posted a video of her dinner, a medieval peasant-inspired plate of bread, cheese, pickles, wine, and grapes that she dubbed “girl dinner.” On the term, she told the New York Times that “it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to have what’s a ‘typical dinner.’” But like everything that goes viral, once it became national news, it seemed as though this was a thing young women were doing en masse, as though putting together a plate of leftovers was a novel idea that could therefore be designated as an eating disorder or otherwise problematized.

“Girl dinner” is kind of over now. The fact that I’m writing about in August it is, to use a different made-up trend from two years ago, “cheugy,” or late to the proverbial party. Soon, however, there will be another social media trend for girls, because “girls” sells.

by Rebecca Jennings, Vox | Read more:
Image: Alana Laverty, Girl Dinner via:

Seattle Center

Image: markk

Second Class Citizens

There is no way to regulate and control pregnancy without regulating and controlling people. States that have enacted abortion bans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization have also considered the establishment of regimes for the surveillance and criminalization of anyone who dares to circumvent the state’s dictates for the acceptable use of one’s body.

This is why the war on abortion rights is properly seen as a war on bodily autonomy and why the attacks on reproductive freedom have moved hand in hand with renewed attacks on the gay, queer and transgender community. It’s all part of the same tapestry of reaction. And this reactionary impulse extends to the means of the anti-abortion political project as well as its ends.

The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.

We just witnessed, in fact, an attempt by anti-abortion lawmakers to do exactly that — to try to remove the public from the equation.

A majority of Ohio voters support the right to an abortion. The Ohio Legislature — gerrymandered into a seemingly perpetual Republican majority — does not. In many states, this would be the end of the story, but in Ohio, voters have the power to act directly on the state Constitution at the ballot box. With a simple majority, they can protect abortion rights from a legislature that has no interest in honoring the views of most Ohioans on this particular issue.

Eager to pursue their unpopular agenda — and uninterested in trying to persuade Ohio voters of the wisdom of their views — Republican lawmakers tried to change the rules. Last week, in what its Republican sponsors hoped would be a low-turnout election, Ohioans voted on a ballot initiative that would have raised the threshold for change to the state Constitution from a simple majority to a supermajority. They defeated the measure, clearing the path for a November vote on the future of abortion rights in the state. (...)

But as the Ohio example illustrates, the assault on bodily autonomy often includes, even rests on, an assault on other rights and privileges. In Idaho, to give another example, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, which passed before Dobbs was decided, would punish state employees with the termination of employment, require restitution of public funds and possible prison time for counseling in favor of an abortion or referring someone to an abortion clinic. Other legislatures, such as those in Texas and South Carolina, have pushed similar restrictions on speech in pursuit of near-total abortion bans in their states.

There’s something that feels inevitable in this anti-abortion turn toward political restriction. The attack on bodily autonomy is not general. It is aimed at women. It subjects their bodies to state control and in the process degrades their citizenship. “Without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not — in the way men took for granted — determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them,” the dissenters in Dobbs wrote. For women to take their place as “full and equal citizens,” they “must have control over their reproductive decisions.”

In other words, the attack on bodily autonomy is an assault on both political equality and reproductive freedom. It creates a class of citizens whose status is lower than that of another group. And once you are in the business of degrading the citizenship of one group of people, it’s easy to extend that pattern of action to the citizenship of other groups. The authoritarian habits of mind that you cultivate diminishing one form of freedom may lead you to view other forms of freedom with equal contempt.

by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Len Saltiel, Anchorage Evening, AK

via:

The Rise of Private Cops: How Not to Tackle Homelessness

Forgive me for expressing my considerable frustration with this article. On the one hand, it does describe a problem that is routinely ignored: they way private police are clearing the homeless out of public spaces, and beating them up while doing so, and the regular cops are not defending the rights of the homeless even when bystanders present evidence the private cops were out of line.

Author Sonali Kolhatkar points out that homelessness is primarily the result of the lack of affordable housing. When I was a kid who had just come to New York City, and Manhattan had plenty of ungentrified ‘hoods, there were also plenty of single room occupancy hotels where the poor could still get a bed and have access to a bathroom. As the tide turned back in favor of city living, those buildings were purchased, razed, and replaced with upscale housing. So there is some merit in describing where ultimate solutions lie.

But what about the fake cop abuse right in front of her? What about action to combat that? The homeless man beaten up in this account was on a public sidewalk. A private guard has jurisdiction only over the private property of the party that hired him. It does not extend to public areas, or even to the property of someone who does not employ him, say a neighboring business. Private guards similarly are not allowed to use force save defensively.

It is disappointing not to see Kolhatkar spell out why the guard was acting illegally, since far too many are deferential to men in uniforms, much the less suggest action steps, like filing a report with the local precinct and cc’ing the chief of police, the mayor, and important local media (the big local TV stations, any important local papers). One report won’t change things but a series of complaints will raise the specter of bad press about out of control security thugs. (...)

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

The Rise of Private Cops: How Not to Tackle Homelessness 

During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.” (...)

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

As we responded to the assault against the unhoused man with an appropriate level of shock, the three white women who had also watched the incident unfold rushed to the guard’s defense. They seemed to know instinctively by our visible horror that we were visitors to the city, and informed us in no uncertain terms that the guard was simply doing his job. “Leave the poor man alone,” said one of them, sporting what appeared to be scrubs (I wondered, was she a health care worker?). She wasn’t referring to the victim, but rather his assaulter.

Meanwhile, an employee of prAna, the storefront where the attack took place, shooed us away from the still-wet blood spatters that now stained the sidewalk. He used a spray cleaner to wipe away the evidence, seconds after I photographed it. The yoga studio, which also sells high-end clothing, boasts on its website that the Sanskrit word for which it is named, is “the life-giving force, the universal energy that flows within and among us, connecting us with all other living beings.” (...)

There is indeed a serious problem of homelessness in Portland and the business owners who have resorted to private security claim they simply want to “clean up” the problems that the city refuses to. A political battle is ensuing over allowing homelessness to flourish rather than cracking down on the unhoused.

But there is a glaring omission in the police-versus-private-security and violence-versus-the-unhoused fights, and that is the fact that Oregon is simply an unaffordable place to live. One economist told OPB’s April Ehrlich, “We have the worst affordability… Low vacancies and high prices… [are] indicative of a housing shortage.” According to Ehrlich, “Oregon is among states with the lowest supply of rentals that are affordable to people at or below poverty levels.”

by Sonali Kolhatkar, Z/Economy For All/ Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Eh, where to begin (how about rebranding homelessness as the "unhoused"). I certainly agree that private security is a problem but this account seems more like some liberal's birdseye view rather than a deep dive into the complexities. Comments about methheads could come straight from any city. Here, from Naked Capitalism: ]

***

"I cringe each time I see Sonali Kolhatkar‘s byline.

She is beyond clueless. Aside from her failure to call 9-1-1 when witnessing an apparent (to her) unprovoked assault, she claims to be a “reporter.” Why then, didn’t she follow-up with a public-records inquiry about the eventual (no thanks to her) police response? Kolhatkar can only be bothered to share her superficial, personal, and privileged reaction, which apparently isn’t shared by the presumably quite “liberal” yoga class, who evidently saw more than her. We’ll never know the whole story.

Kolhatkar has discerned that “Oregon is simply an unaffordable place to live”??? News-flash: if a person has no job, no income, and no assets, nowhere is an affordable place to live."

***

"I have to admit that I didn’t read the article because homelessness has become a trigger issue for me. Just writing this quick comment is going to ruin my morning and I will now be thinking about my former home for hours and I won’t be able to think about anything else. I won’t be able to read any responses either so feel free to call me a hater or whatever, I’ve heard it all before so many times. When homeless people begin to frequent an area, it certain cities with a big enough homeless population, there is always a second wave. First wave is people who need help and can benefit from it. Second wave is what I call the methheads. Apologies I know we aren’t supposed to call people that but I feel it’s an incredibly fair label. These are the people who were on meth before they became homeless, or more accurately, made their home under the highway. They bully and rob the other homeless people, and everyone else. The go to the bathroom everywhere all the time. And they panhandle for meth. Soon, all the first wavers are gone because they can’t handle it and now that community if left with nothing but second wavers destroying homes and businesses, bullying, threatening, and attacking everyone. Darting out into the street in front of cars intentionally. And smoking meth all the time. Hanging out with the young kids from the neighborhood. After 5 or 10 years of the second wave taking hold, things get really desperate until you get around the idea that you are going to have to leave your home and start fresh, leave your friends and neighbors, your home town. It’s such a weird feeling to see a community torn apart because a small number of activists thought they could let people ‘camp’ in a city and do drugs all day and night and that that wouldn’t turn into a huge disaster for the drug addicts and the rest of the community. I’m still struggling with the trauma of having a second waver attack me with a golf club in 2021. Since then the hardest part has been hearing all of the activists talk about criminalizing homelessness or housing is a human right, when all I asked about is can we get some police to take action against the people who are destroying our community? Not talking about arresting any and all homeless people, I just want the person who threatened to kill me in the park to get arrested, or the person with the golf club, or the guy selling meth to the teenagers. I don’t care if they get charged and do time, but at least getting processed might make them change their ways? If the idea is that enforcing the law would cause someone harm because they are poor, what about poor people with cars? Shouldn’t they be allowed to drive drunk? Any attempts to clarify are often met with shouts of “YOU CANT CRIMINALIZE HOMELESSNESS!!!!!” So people are left with no good options. Especially businesses. Often a person living on the street will get mad at a business for some reason and then decide to torment that business until it’s forced to relocate or close. I don’t think it’s a good idea for businesses and residents to hire goon squads to harass homeless people. I can also understand why many are, they have been left with no choice. If a business was doing it in my old neighborhood I would not complain. As more and more blue cities turn into meth camps, people are going to start finding solutions where ever they can, like hiring goon squads. It’s just human nature. The left can keep pointing fingers at everyone and acting like they are morally superior, but that’s just going to make more regular people so pissed off they vote republican. It certainly isn’t going to help people living on the street, no matter which wave they rode in on. Now I’m going to go spend the next few hours, maybe the rest of the day, thinking about my former city council, mayor, and activists stealing my home and my home town. And about all the first wavers in Austin that weren’t able to escape before the second wave, and the activists who insist everything is going according to plan, destroyed everything."

Sardinecore

Name: Sardinecore.

Age: Freshly spawned this summer.

Appearance: Fishy.

Sardinecore, you say. What fresh (fish) hell is this? Are you planning to make a lot of fish puns?

I am: it’s o-fish-ial. So what’s sardinecore? Well, tinned fish – often in beautiful, colourful packaging – has been hot for a while. It is served in bars at an eye-watering mark up and London’s Saltie Girl restaurant even has a “tin list” menu. Then a chef called Ali Hooke made #tinnedfishdatenight a TikTok phenomenon.

Tinned fish date night? Holy carp. There’s nothing erotic about a pilchard or a sprat. Sexy is in the eye of the beholder. Apparently, Hooke’s husband “Leaned over and told me he had always dreamed of sharing a moment like this with someone he loved”. Anyway, scales have also been having a design and fashion moment.

You mean a fishion moment. I do not. I mean LA brand Clare V produced “Liberez les sardines” T-shirts and caps, and luxury label Bottega Veneta has created a much-coveted “Sardine” bag. (...)

It’s very beautiful, but how many tins of tuna can you fit in there? Four, I reckon.

Sold! It’s over £3,000.

Are you squidding? Unsold. But hang on, I thought this summer’s sea-themed trend was mermaidcore? That was back in early summer, a fashion lifetime ago. But, yes, all those gauzy, iridescent, diaphanous fabrics and fishtail shapes probably paved the way for sardinecore.

by The Guardian | Read more:
Image: UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images; CLARE V

[ed. Love 'em (much more than politicians, read below).]

Mike Pence is Still An Absolute Coward

Three things sum up the essence of Mike Pence, the former vice-president of the US: the first is that he reportedly calls his wife “Mother”. He has denied this, but he is creepy enough that the rumours have never been definitively refuted. The second is that he refuses to eat a meal alone with any woman who isn’t his wife. The third – which may be linked to the first two items – is that he doesn’t have a chance in hell of becoming president.

Ever since announcing his campaign for the 2024 nomination, Pence has been polling in the single digits. But you don’t need to look at the polls to realise that the 64-year-old’s chance of being the Republican nominee, let alone the next president of the US, are nonexistent – you just need to look at him. It may be a cliche, but passing the “would I have a beer with them?” test is still an important component of getting elected as president. Vibes matter. And Pence? He has all the vibes of a resurrected corpse of a 17th-century Puritan minister.

He has the politics of one as well. Pence, who is an evangelical Christian, is a reactionary zealot who spent his vice-presidency kowtowing to Donald Trump. He is the most anti-abortion mainstream presidential hopeful out there, supporting a federal ban on abortions at just six weeks and a ban on abortion even when pregnancies aren’t viable. He has spent his political career fighting to undermine LGBTQ+ rights and once argued that homosexuality was “learned behaviour”. He has downplayed the climate crisis and wants to ramp up fossil fuel use.

The good news is that Pence will never be president. The bad news is, rather than being a genuine presidential run, his campaign feels like a rehabilitation tour. One that seems to be working. And why wouldn’t it? There is nothing that certain factions of the US media seem to love more than whitewashing the reputations of odious politicians. Look at George W Bush: he has gone from being an accused war criminal to being portrayed as a lovable grandpa and latter-day hero. In March, for example, on the 20th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, the New York Times published a piece about all the overlooked good stuff that Bush did, with the headline “In This Story, George W Bush Is the Hero.” It was a fascinating way to mark the anniversary of a war that displaced approximately 9 million people, directly killed at least 300,000 civilians, destabilised the Middle East, and unleashed devastating environmental contamination that is causing birth defects in Iraqi children born long after Bush announced that his mission had been accomplished.

Pence doesn’t even need to wait 20 years for the “hero” treatment to begin. After all, he is the guy that, during the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021, bravely told Trump: “Look, mate, I’m not sure all the votes for Joe Biden were fake. I don’t think you did win the election.” During his appearance at the Iowa state fair last week, Pence played up the image of himself as the saviour of US democracy and a lot of the media seemed to buy into it. “Pence is having a moment. It’s all about Trump and Jan 6,” a Politico headline read. “In Iowa, Mike Pence delivers a powerful message against Trump,” a Washington Post piece opined.

I am glad that Pence had the decency not to try to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election. But, let’s be clear, the fact that he refused to subvert democracy doesn’t make him a hero; it just means he did the bare minimum. One of the many pernicious legacies of the Trump era is how low he has set the bar for everyone else.

by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
[ed. Funny/not funny. It's disgusting that our political system produces these types of candidates, regularly. Hardly the best or the brightest. Anyone running for a political office should be immediately suspect, just on motives alone. But the other not funny thing is that the media elevates such people endlessly, making their various Machiavellian pursuits seem almost normal and worth attention.]

Nippon Gakki: A Short History of Japanese Guitar Making

On June 29, 2023, Fender launched its first flagship retail store — four floors of Fender products finished with a Fender-themed café for you to quietly contemplate your next 6-string purchase.

Considering Fender’s been in business for 77 years, this was a momentous event in the company’s history. Surely, it opened near the historic Fender factory in Fullerton, California, right? Maybe adjacent to the modern Corona, California, factory? Leo Fender’s childhood home?

If you guessed any of these locations, then you’re only a couple of continents off — Fender’s flagship store opened in the bustling megalopolis of Tokyo, Japan. And as crazy as that might sound to American guitarists, no other country is so deserving of representing the 6-string’s historic legacy outside of America itself. The steel-string acoustic and electric guitar might have been born in the United States, but, as you’ll soon see, they’ve found a second home in the land of the rising sun.

• Japan’s Classical Upbringing
• A Pause Until the Postwar Years
• Boom & Bust
• The Lawsuit Legend
• A Farewell to Clones
• A Long-deserved Re-evaluation

Japan’s Classical Upbringing

Where to begin? While this story is primarily concerned with the history of Japanese guitar making through our uniquely American perspective, Japan’s interest in the 6-string stretches back to before the rise of mid-20th-century MIJ (Made In Japan) exports.

The year was 1853. The first solidbody guitars were nearly a century in the future. America’s oldest guitar manufacturer, C. F. Martin, had just celebrated its 20th birthday. California had entered statehood three years prior, and several thousand miles off San Diego’s sunny shores, Japan was sequestered in 200-plus years of isolation.

That is, until the United States arrived. Japan entered diplomatic and trade relations with the USA, and the country was introduced to a rush of Western ideas and goods. Naturally, this included the star of our story: the guitar, in its contemporary, gut-stringed, classical variation.

The classical guitar and many other Western instruments were quickly adopted, with several reports of Japanese musicians enthusiastically venturing across the ocean to train with European masters. However, few prominent Western musicians dared to travel to the East until 1929, when maestro Andrés Segovia — arguably the first world-class Western guitarist to perform in Japan — performed a string of concerts in Tokyo and Osaka. All at once, the classical guitar’s popularity skyrocketed, with bountiful demand and precious little supply.

It’s around this time that a few familiar faces begin to appear. A small bookstore in Nagoya, Japan, founded by Matsujiro Hoshino, started importing classical guitars from Salvador Ibáñez — yes, that Ibanez. Yamaha (at the time known as “Nippon Gakki,” or, in English, “Japanese Musical Instruments”) had already accrued nearly half a century’s worth of instrument-building expertise before jumping into the Spanish guitar game in the early 1940s.

During this era, Japan experienced a concurrent musical craze — Hawaiian music — fueled by early electrified lap steel guitars. The first Japanese electric guitar company, Guyatone, began constructing electric lap steel guitars and amps by 1933, only a few years after their inventions in America. Japan’s instrument industry was barreling toward the same 6-string revolution that was happening in America, with one rather significant hurdle in their path: World War II. (...)

Boom & Bust

The ’60s would be the first time American guitarists really got an authentic taste of Japanese electric guitars; as we’ll soon see, it was a veritable flood of instruments.

But first, let’s take stock of Japan’s early ’60s musical proclivities. The rock revolution led by the bands of the British Invasion was still a few years off, but surf music was immensely popular on both sides of the Pacific, driving increased demand for electric guitars and basses.

Why was Japan so fond of surf rock? For one, it was a fresh, new form of music that exclusively featured the electric guitars and basses that were steadily winning over the hearts of young Japanese musicians. And, more importantly, surf music is mainly instrumental — there’s no language barrier to muddy the musical waters.

The first big-name American act to tour Japan would be the Ventures in 1962, and the band’s impact on Japanese guitar culture cannot be overstated. Remember the classical-guitar stir caused by Segovia in 1929? Magnify it tenfold. The demand for electric guitars experienced exponential growth in Japan, further driving the need for more Japanese guitar factories. (...)

The Lawsuit Legend

It’s an almost universally accepted fact among guitar historians that the ’70s was a tough time for the guitar industry. Japanese factories reacted to the dismal landscape by taking a more cautious and conservative approach to guitar building; the wild and peculiar Japanese 6-strings of the 1960s largely disappeared for a time. Moreover, even a few big-name American brands began outsourcing production to Japanese factories, such as Gibson transforming Epiphone from an American-made brand fully on par with its Kalamazoo counterparts to a lower-priced brand aimed at the student market.

The quality of American guitar manufacturing continued on a downward streak, but, at the same time, the Japanese factories left over from the guitar boom’s bust only raised the quality of their instruments. Brands such as Greco, Hondo, Fernandes, Burny, Takamine, Suzuki, Ibanez, and Aria began creating heavily inspired or near clones of classic American guitars, some of which (but certainly not all) built to a higher standard than their contemporary American equivalents.

Most of those instruments were relegated to beginners or hobbyists (the reputation, if not the quality, of Japanese guitars was still rough at this point), but by the latter half of the ’70s, American companies began to take notice, and these imitations were regarded less as flattery and more as “cutting into our bottom line.”

If you’ve ever wondered why Japanese guitars from the late 1970s and early 1980s are referred to as “lawsuit” guitars, then here’s why: While many parts of a guitar can be cloned with impunity, Gibson secured a trademark for its headstock shape in hopes of scaring off would-be clones. Many Ibanez copies from that time featured a nearly identical headstock to an actual Gibson instrument, prompting Gibson to take Ibanez to court — the two companies settled, and Ibanez modified its headstock. That’s it. Frankly, this was one of the period’s only full-scale “lawsuits” — it’s all a bit less exciting than the name implies!

Fender took a slightly different approach at the time. Japanese labor and production costs were significantly lower than their American equivalents, so the lower-priced 6-string copies made by Japanese companies like Tokai and Greco were far more alluring to consumers than a full-priced Fender.

Instead of a lawsuit, Fender established a joint venture in 1982 between several Japanese distributors and the FujiGen Gakki factory — the same factory that was making the clones that were eating into Fender’s sales. This would mark Fender’s first move outside of the United States.

by Cameron Day, Sweetwater |  Read more:

Images: Toshiyuki IMAI, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

[ed. I've had two Ibanez 335 Gibson copies, a Takamine 12 string (Martin copy) and a Yamaha "red label" acoustic over the years. My buddy had an Ibanez Les Paul copy. All were equal to, if not better than the originals. Heard about these "lawsuit" guitars over 40 years ago from a retired Nashville musician when it was all very mysterious and no one knew the whole story. He sold me my first one.]

TOAGOSEI Hydrogen station Tokushima

via:

Curtiss P-40 Warhawk

via: here and here

Robbie Robertson's Big Break. A Reevaluation of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz

The Last Waltz represents a dramatic reimagining of the possibilities inherent in the "rockumentary" genre. Ostensibly, the film chronicles the final concert given by The Band in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, but ultimately it stands as much more than a simple documentary. It may be the best film ever made about the music scene, but rather than celebrating the now fabled rock group, what The Last Waltz really does is foretell is death. Yet as a film that moves beyond the music to engage with ideas about imagemaking (both that of the guitarist, Robbie Robertson, and, more indirectly, that of the filmmaker himself), it has resonance beyond its own history. Recent screenings of the re-released and digitally remastered print have engaged unexpectedly large and varied audiences. United Artists has also released the remastered film on DVD, complete with extra footage, audio commentary from Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and liner notes by Robertson.

Earlier concert films such as Gimme Shelter and Woodstock featured relatively low-quality footage and unimaginative camerawork. Their rudimentary approaches implicitly question the importance of the very events that the films attempt to capture, as though they were just rock concerts and did not deserve the expense and care given to more serious subjects. But from the outset, Scorsese and The Band commited to making The Last Waltz the first concert film shot in 35 mm. It is crammed with astonishing visual depth and unexpected images -- the stage presences in intimate and overwhelming close-ups set against a dark and brooding background. The influence of the film's clarity can be clearly traced in such later works as the Talking Heads' Stop making Sense (1984) and U2's Rattle and Hum (1987). Moreover, Scorsese's camerawork further confounds the expectations of the genre by essentially eliminating the audience from the film, thus focusing all the attention on the musicians themselves.

Beyond its obvious importance as a concert film, The Last Waltz deserves renewed critical attention simply as a film, because no thorough explication of its basic thematic contruction has yet appeared. It has long been relegated to the margins of Scorsese scholarship and generally merits only a passing mention, alongside his 1978 documentary American Boy, as a minor diversion for the director that helped to fill the gap between New York, New York (1977) and Raging Bull (1980). This is unfair, because The Last Waltz marks a crucial turning point for Scorsese and is the first installment in a tetralogy of films that dominate his mid-period of work. It stands as his first exploration of the manner by which image may be manipulated as a means for eliminating risk, a thematic obsession which continues in The King of Comedy (1982), The Color of Money (1986) and Casino (1995).

In addition to critical neglect, The Last Waltz has also been the victim of general misinterpretation. It is often viewed in idyllic terms as an embodiment of nostalgia for the past, when in reality its focus is the future. Seeing it as a film built around a musical event reveals a calculated, commited and personal narrative. The movie's real subject is not The Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson. The film represents a highly crafted and complex exercise in image-making. There is ample filmic evidence to suggest that Robertson influenced Scorsese's contruction of the film in order to establish himself as a star within the Hollywood community and launch his post-Band career. Robertson was the only member of the group to work with Scorsese during the 18-month postproduction period, and in drummer Levon Helm's estimation the duo "edited the movie to please themselves.". To his credit, Michael Bliss does pick up on Robertson's overwhelming presence in the film and argues that "given the amount of footage devoted to Robertson, the film might just well have been titled Robbie Robertson Speaks.". The guitarist's dominance goes far beyond the amount of camera time allotted to him, however, because virtually every visual and thematic aspect of The Last Waltz is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group. Because of this, the movie has no interest in simple nostalgia, despite the presence of numerous luminaries from the Woodstock era who approach their performances with an air of hushed reverence, as though they were taking part in the last hurrah for a rapidly evaporating age.

Robertson took a tremendous risk when, in 1976, he decided to disband the group because of its commercial failures and late keyboardist Richard Manuel's burgeoning drug and alcohol problems. He himself needed to establish an identifiable public persona; his talents as a songwriter, guitarist, and producer were widely acknowledged, but the group had publicly avoided the usual egotistical posings of rock stars. The Band enjoyed a reputation as a cohesive whole, which served to downplay Robertson's individual identity. But in reality, The Last Waltz represents an exercise in self-mythologizing -- through the interviews with their distinctive camerawork and settings and the on-stage footage of the actual concert -- for Robertson, and the deconstruction/destruction of the group as a whole. (...)

Although Scorsese handled the planning for the filming of the concert, the idea to do interviews came from Robertson. They were conducted in 1977, almost a year after the event. The guitarist also suggested that Scorsese do the interviews, but in retrospect the director feels that this was "not a good idea" -- finding the members of the band to "very quiet and very formidable.". But in fact the interview segments constitute the most facinating part of the movie: this is where the construction of Robertson's image and the deconstruction of The Band's really occur. Scorsese talks with the members of the group, both singularly and together, at different locations at Shangri-La, their studio/headquarters in Malibu. In keeping with his own reservations, he truly is a terrible interviewer -- nervous, tentative, and clearly in awe of Robertson. Scorsese's deficiencies, however, only serve to acceuate Robertson's skills as a rhetorician: although he frequently bandies about pseudo-intellectual cliches, he is always articulate and well-spoken

Conversely, Scorsese's inexperience as an interviewer hurts the other band members, whose answers betray their relatively limited vision or their reluctance to speak. Manuel and Danko seem like precocious children who offer up amusing anecdotes about stealing bologna, and suggest that women are the real reason The Band stayed on the road for 16 years -- "not that I don't like the music." Compared with Robertson's artistic posturings and grand designs, Manuel's admission that "I just wanna break even" seems downright refreshing, but it's also sophomoric. Similarly, Scorsese admits that Helm proved a "formidable" subject who was not interested in talking. Helm himself is less reserved in his judgement of the situation: "I already had a bad attitude when I realized that the cameras had completely ignored the spirit of the event... I said, 'This shit don't mean nothing to me.' Nothing. I was just coarse and rude, country rude, because I was so damn angry." 

Organist Garth Hudson, however, stands as the exception, speaking with a quiet intensity and perspicacity about The Band's attraction to the rustic lifestyle of Woodstock and the role of street musicians as a healing force. Unfortunately, he only speaks twice, and in both cases, he is surrounded by the other four band members. Scorsese never approaches him in a more personal and revealing setting, and it must be noted that of The Last Waltz footage, Scorsese cuts short only the performance of "Genetic Method/Chest Fever," a pairing of songs which had long served as Hudson's concert showcase. Helm laments that The Last Waltz includes nothing to show "how Garth Hudson led the band and inspired us all." Perhaps Robertson felt threatened that the keyboardist's undeniable talent and quiet leadership would overshadow his own contribution to the group, and used his influence with Scorsese to marginalize Hudson's presence in the film. (...)

Quite different strategies are applied for the other members. While discussing how The Band got its name, Manuel curls up on a coach in the fetal position, looking, in Helm's words like "Che Guevara after the Bolivians got through with him," Conversely, Helm is never interviewed alone; Robertson is always present, although at times he is off-camera and only his voice is heard. During two conversations that take place in the backyard at a picnic table, Scorsese carefully frames Helm with the pool table in soft focus in the background. The central metaphor of cutthroat remains ever present. (...)

Thus Casino, The Color of Money, and The King of Comedy all revolve around the complicated relationship between image and risk. But Scorsese had already begun to examine this issue through the persona of Robertson in The Last Waltz. And the difficulty in applying the term "documentary" to The Last Waltz derives from its decidedly non-objective presentation of the demise of The Band. The focus of this film is Robbie Robertson; Scorsese built it around him and built it for him. After screening the movie for the first time, Ronnie Hawkins, the Canadian singer for whom The Band played back-up in the early 1960s, joked sarcastically, "The goddamn movie'd be awright if it only had a few more shots of Robbie" [emphasis original].

by Stephen E. Severn | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Call Me Levon (The Bitter Southerner):]

“My joy is to play the drums,” Levon told CBS News in 2007. “The singing part is just something I glommed my way into.” I hear that.

And I recall that Levon attended Berklee School of Music, which happens to be exactly 5.7 miles from my house, for a semester in 1972.

“I'd always had a complex about my total lack of musical training — beyond several million hours of field work," he writes in his autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire.” And so he shaved his beard and enrolled with his given name, Mark L. Helm. Why he only lasted a semester, I don’t know. But I love that this bona fide rock star gave education the old college try. (...)

Hollywood is more than ready for a movie about the very troubled Band — we don’t just have the Robbie-Levon drama: The Band backed Dylan when they went electric; singer and pianist Richard Manuel hung himself in a hotel room; bassist Rick Danko pegged out at 56. And of course it will come — complete with an amazing re-mastered soundtrack and maybe a few new songs written and sung by Robbie Robertson.

This film will directed by Martin Scorsese, who, of course, made “The Last Waltz,” and who lived with Robbie when they both got divorced. Levon says that during the editing of “The Last Waltz” the two became “blow buddies” and “their wives kicked them out and they moved in with each other, and they just … poor guys. You know, that looks OK in Hollywood, but it just looks weird everywhere else.”

Well.

Robbie now does the music for each and every Scorsese film, and is an executive at Dreamworks. Nice work if you can get it.

Levon didn’t get it. And neither did the rest of them. Instead, he got cancer.

After the Maui Fires, Locals Fear Being Shut Out of Recovery

For years, Lahaina has had everything that makes Hawaii special: sweeping views of the Pacific, a charming main street and a rich cultural heritage.

Lahaina also has everything that makes Hawaii an increasingly difficult and frustrating place to live. Tourism dominates, putting pressure on the environment and disrupting daily life. Wealthy visitors drive home values to astonishing heights (the median home price in the Lahaina area is $1.7 million), placing homeownership out of reach for most permanent residents. Within its small patch of western Maui, the oceanfront community of 13,000 people — once a center of whaling and ancient Hawaiian power — contains all of the economic tensions that have simmered beneath Hawaii’s gorgeous surface for years.

Those strains are being laid bare by the devastating wildfires that leveled Lahaina this week, killing at least 80 people and destroying or damaging as many as 1,700 buildings.

Officials and residents stress that the fires did not discriminate, wiping out fancy vacation rentals and modest homes dating back to the days of Lahaina’s sugar plantations. Mick Fleetwood, the leader of the band Fleetwood Mac, lost his popular restaurant, Fleetwood’s on Front Street, and the staff members lost their employer.

And many have pointed to the way the community has immediately stepped up to help each other, with volunteers and neighbors offering food, places to stay and transportation.

Yet, as residents were allowed back into their neighborhoods on Friday for a first look at the damage, many worried about how or whether they could rebuild — a reflection of the disparity among Hawaii’s multilayered society of renters, owners, part-time and full-time residents, low-wage workers, newcomers and Native Hawaiians. Some Hawaii residents who lost their homes and jobs said they could not see how they would be able to stay.

Many said they feared Lahaina would simply re-emerge as another Waikiki, dominated by corporate-owned luxury brands and packed with tourists.

“My concern is that we’re going to lose a lot of people, because it’s going to take too long” to recover, said Angie Leone, 46, who built a business in Lahaina managing 50 rental properties with 12 employees. After the fires, about five units were left. Four of her employees lost their homes.

The Leones’ own home just outside Lahaina was spared. But the community she and her family love had begun unraveling. Already, a friend who ran a jewelry business in Lahaina told her that he planned to move his family to Kentucky. She said she hoped officials would approve building permits for reconstruction and allow people to reopen businesses that employ workers quickly.

“I think the people of Lahaina would want it to be restored historically,” she said. “The local community would not allow it to become a Waikiki. It needs to be preserved and rebuilt with the character and the heart that it has.”

Her husband, Michael Leone, 48, added: “It won’t be the same. But it could be better.”

How this vivid microcosm of Hawaii recovers from the disaster could either end up exacerbating economic tensions or prove a turning point.

Angus McKelvey, a state senator who grew up in Lahaina and now represents parts of Maui, said the town was at a “fork in the road.”

Many of the neighborhoods that burned were densely populated with many of the town’s original plantation-style homes that, over time, had been bought by investors and subdivided into apartments that were rented out to workers. Because of the town’s density, he said, the destruction of the hundreds of homes there translates into as many as 6,000 people who are now homeless.

Mr. McKelvey, a Democrat, said the state should work swiftly to purchase and redevelop the land into higher-quality, affordable housing. The alternative of leaving it to market forces could lead to investors taking advantage of the tragedy “to put up more million-dollar homes,” he said.

It’s a “bold opportunity,” he said, but “people are generally scared of what could emerge from the ashes.”

by Jill Cowan and Michael Corkery, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung for The New York Times
[ed. After the initial shock, this is what I wondered. How do you recreate something so unique, in an equitable way?]

The Band (w/Robbie Robertson)

[ed. Had this up a while back but thought I'd do it again with Robbie's passing. I've been to Nazareth, PA (home of the Martin guitar factory. And, Mario Andretti. Big race track near town. Nice place. And yes, we did sing this song as we were driving into town, doesn't everybody?). See also: Every time the music dies, we lose a little bit of our souls (Guardian); and, How ‘The Last Waltz’ Became One of Rock’s Greatest Docs (NYT):]

"The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem."

Pat Martino Trio

[ed. Passed away recently. A guitarist's guitarist. See also: Pat Martino, Open Road (Documentary); and This Musician stunned me. Pat Martino a Guitar Giant. [Update]: Robbie Robertson, too. Geez.]