First Solo Music Gig of 2011 Plus the Gulf Coast

El Vaquero writes:

my first solo concert of the new year will be next week, on february 17 at 7:30 p.m. in historic rock hall, maryland, which has a wonderful performance space called the mainstay.

it's part of a series of events at the mainstay that week in honor of new orleans. i admit, it wasn't my idea to call the event "oysters and ned sublette," but i think it's a fine name, and if i've gotta be second-billed, let it be to the great high-cholesterol fast food of colonial days. the plan is to have gulf oysters available at intermission, in support of the louisiana seafood industry.

http://rockhallwave.com/2011/02/07/ned-sublette-mainstay-feb-17/

The Mainstay is located at 5753 Main Street, Rock Hall (Kent County), MD.

*The Black Swan*

OK, a couple of people made the mistake of asking what I thought about the Black Swan, nominated for something like 5 academy awards. This expresses very well what I thought about it, though I would be less kind and say further the writing is thudly, lazy, dumb and unimaginative. In other words, the movie I saw was exactly what I expected to see and that is why I hadn't seen it before now, when three cabin-fevered friends employed it as a pretext to get the hell outta dodge on the first nice day in weeks and weeks of dreadful winter weather.

We shared our contempt of this movie. We agreed that the only bit that rose above the general mess was the staged solo of the Black Queen. That had the advantage of no dialogue, and of being danced by an authentic ballerina prima (Sarah Lane of American Ballet Theatre) to the authentic Tschaikovsky music, rather than the tarting up of Tschaikovsky by the movie's composer.

Nor are we the only ones to feel this way.  C said plaintively, "I suppose if you don't know anything about dance or artists you will think this is good. But I think even if I didn't know anything about dance or artists I still would have seen this as a bad movie."

We could not suspend disbelief. You just bet someone can dance with a blade of glass in her abdomen.  You just betcha a dancer whose entire back is covered in a tattoo will be accepted into a world class ballet company.

"But the ballerina must die.  They must die for the art.  Ballerinas' only role are to be instruments of the will of the male director. It's only a movie!  This is merely a paradigm of the ballerina's art. It's a horror film, for pete's sake, not to be taken seriously.  Lighten up you silly women."

Give us silly women a foxtrot break here. Now, if you wanted to do something new and exciting with Swan Lake, that remains a paradigm of the artist's and / or ballerina's experience, we effortlessly came up with several directions while we drove off to dinner in the dark.

At dinner we were bombarded relentlessly with the Super Bowl so-called entertainment up on the television screens which were on every wall and at every angle so thoughtfully provided by the only restaurants open on Sunday night down here.  This so-called entertainment was even dumber and more pointless than The Black Swan.

E said, "That movie wasn't worthy of my tutu.  I'm glad I decided after all not to wear it." C exclaimed, "E! You wouldn't have worn a tutu!" E looked at us. "Well, people dress up to see the Harry Potter movies." She reflected, spoon hovering, "I think they have more fun with Harry Potter than we did watching Natalie Portman starve, then kill herself and bore us all to death." Thoughtfully, she sipped another spoonful of her crab bisque.

Slavery's Constitution & the Perfecting of it in the Constitution of the C.S.A.

Some time back I worked through Richard Beeman's excellent, deeply informative study of the Philadelphia (Constitutional) Convention,  Plain Honest Men: The Making of the Constitution (2009). Beeman provides the debates and the articles that deal with slavery as much central attention as any of the other signally important issues, such representation in the hopefully central government.

That same year, 2009, David Waldstreicher also published a study of the Constitution and the making of it, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification.  A much slimmer book than Plain Honest Men, Waldstreicher (also auther of Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004)), it focuses on this Document sans the entertaining and enlightening context of the personalities and histories of the delegates to the Convention.  He also runs down the various 'historians' schools' approaches to the Constitution, which, like that of the

"... 'republican' or 'ideological school tends to see slavery as at most a side issue -- a distraction that nearly derailed the Constitution.  This is true even though the same historians are sometimes willing to discuss the issue of slavery in other contexts.  There are two reasons for this.  One is that the scholars of republicanism take ideas and rhetoric most seriously  In doing this, they have advanced our understanding of political change in this era. But they tend to see slavery as the opposite of ideas, of discussion, of reason.  Slavery in their view was an ancient institution propped up by a traditional, shared, and irrational racism that, Bailyn and Wood argue, hardly anybody challenged until many decades later.

Yet, recent scholarship depicts African slavery in the eighteenth century as a dynamic, changing modern institution.  Its innovations, and the rise of enlightened critiques of colonialism, contributed to the emergence of antislavery during the same decades, the 1760s and 1770s ... . Instead, these historians bring slavery back into the narrative as post-Revolutionary, American antislavery. ... this explains the Constitution's silence about slavery and suggests the praiseworthy antislavery implications of that silence.  It also excuses the framers from having done anything more. (pp 11-12)

Now, imagine reading along with these two books, a study of how the C.S.A believed it perfected the Consitution by ridding it of the distractions of democratic inclusion and all the other Enlightenment idealism.  The C.S.A. constitution filled in those perceived absences or silences of good taste (the Constitution never employs the words slavery or slaves) by making textually explicit that this is a democracy for white men only.  It was based ideologically and economically on white supremacy, slavery and the inferiority of anyone who is not a white man.  Among real life challenges the C.S.A. encountered immediately with this Constitution was ... C.S.A. women. The C.S.A women had to handle things alone -- whereas the C.S.A government and constitution promised to care for them, as naturally ordained inferiors -- like the slaves -- in the place of their naturally ordained superiors, their (white) male relatives.  Among many other problems, not that much later arrived the necessity to employ slaves and even freemen by the Confederate armed forces.

This book also puts the slaveholding thinking within a nineteenth century, international political and sociological matrix of white supremacist, anti-enlightenment and anti-democratic, anti-reform movements throughout Europe, South America and the U.S.A. Recall, for instance the re-institution of serfdom in Middle Europe and in Russia.  This book is Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010) by Stephanie McCurry. 

I've never seen anything quite like McCurry's study.  Among the many fascinating, unknown events are the women-organized food riots in the Confederacy.  Speculators and gougers hoarded food, raised the prices beyond anything that war or no war, the wives and mothers of the average troop in the Confederate army would never have been able to afford.  The biggest riot was in Atlanta.  For some reason Margaret Mitchell did not choose to include this very large event in her Civil War Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.

A Beautiful Day, Plus The War of 1812, Andrew Jackson & *The Black Swan*

On the Eastern Shore! 46 degrees. The sun is shining. The wind is not blowing. Most of the snow has been washed and melted away, though the mounds from clearance of parking lots for instance, were so large, they are still significant. The birds are wicked active and vocal. Outdoors smells like April.

Upon arising I went to work, attempting to compose coherent take away on the War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson. What a land grab!  Most of what was soon to be known as the Cotton Kingdom.  Additionally he ridded his natal state of South Carolina of any need to further regard anything coming out of the U.S.A.  How differently things might have turned out for this country if Andrew Jackson hadn't been where he was when he was.  So much happened because of him, the person he was. Part of what he was, was that he, like Julius Caesar, was possessed of extraordinary battle luck.

About an hour into this a neighbor calls. She and another friend are determined to catch The Black Swan; today's the last chance to do so around here, over in Easton. Would I like to go with them? I hemmed for a minute. I decided it would be healthy to play hooky.

el V says it's nice in NYC too, and the rain of yesterday significantly reduced their snow mountains, which are considerably larger than ours! He's in a better state of mind after hanging out with our friends uptown last night.  He was so miserable Friday night and yesterday.

Numbers, Plus Squirrels

According to Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010), Yale University Press:

"Out of perhaps twelve and a half million (a number that has been revised upward from ten million) Africans brought to America, say Eltis and Richardson, only an estimated 389,000 came to the territory that became the United States, broken down as 129,000 to the Chesapeake, 211,000 to the Low Country, 27,000 to the middle territories and New England, and 22,000 to the Gulf Coast.[1] "
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[1] Eltis and Richardson, 18

The Gulf region, including Florida and Louisiana, received about 22,000 Africans in total, and these people largely came in three periods - some 6,000 arriving in the 1720s, another 2,000 in the 1770s and another 10,000 in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (after the Louisiana Purchase by the U.S.), despite legal abolition of the slave trade from Africa after 1808.  Recall these numbers are ONLY for those brought to what became the United States directly FROM Africa.  These numbers are not imports from Cuba, other parts of the Caribbean or anywhere else.
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Through the kitchen window this morning:  Did squirrel tails provide the inspiration for semaphore communications? Sycamore Squirrel Complains and Signals Via Tail:

There were nuts here.
I found nuts here.
I ate the nuts that were here.
Surely there are nuts here now.
Where are the freakin' nuts?!!!?!!!?!!!

Sycamore Squirrel & Nuts Update: he found new nut largess spread on the patio and already buried them. It took only minutes, because it's mulch in which he digs. He's now sitting in imitation of statue on one of the backyard storm-downed branches, tail silent.

“Benjamin Franklin And the Birth of a Paper Money Economy,” Plus Birds

This was a lecture given by Professor Farley Grubb on March 30, 2006, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The Reserve Bank and The Library Company of Philadelphia co-sponsored this lecture as one of many events held in the city of Philadelphia to mark the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin.

I never expected currency in the colonies and economist Farley Grubb would have played a role in the research for The American Slave Coast. I wonder if my amigo L and / or her husband are familiar with Grubb as he comes out of the U of Chicago School of Economics, and so does L's. husband.

W College's B&G's have not yet cleared away the tree and branches fallen into the back yard from the last storm. Despite the fog and sog, the temperature today is considerably higher than it's been in days. The birds love that broken tree and the branches. There's a surprising number of different birds -- surprising to me, anyway. Maybe the fall made sleeping insects / pupae? in the bark more accessible to them? I can see the birds very clearly through the kitchen windows since the trees are bare and the bushes flattened by the storm haven't stood up again. (I suppose the new glasses also help.)

As you can see from the county's Bird List, the county and the Eastern Shore are haven and home to enormous number of and kinds of birds, not only shore and water fowl. Jays, robins, chickadees, nuthatches, wrens, finches, sparrows, juncos, cardinals and bluebirds are our common backyard birds.

What's also enjoyable to watch from the kitchen windows in winter are the squirrels dance-springing in the aerial acrobatics from tree-to-tree, fenced yard-to-yard. The cats also lost most of their invisibility, with the loss of foliage and the arrival of snow. You see them making their usual rounds along their usual paths now, where usually these passages are hidden. Through the windows I also contemplate the still unsolved mystery of certain tracks in the snow, and what unseen creature it is that makes them.

Elsewhere it was not a good day.  From Texas to Michigan, they're buffeted by 50 MPH winds, ice and rain, and then feet of snow.  In Egypt it was a really bad day for the Egyptians; it was not that good of a day for journalists either, but that's their job.  Zunguzungu has a great deal of well-informed commentary about Egypt, with good linkage.

What do women have to do with the origins of the Civil War?

The writer, Elizabeth R. Varon, goes on to say, "Growing up in Virginia in the 1970s, I often heard this answer: nothing."
Today's Disunion column is "Women at War," the war being the American Civil War.

"Much has changed since then. A new generation of scholars has rediscovered the Civil War as a drama in which women, and gender tensions, figure prominently. Thanks to new research into diaries, letters, newspapers and state and local records, we now know that women were on the front lines of the literary and rhetorical war over slavery long before the shooting war began. They were integral to the slave resistance and flight that destabilized the border between North and South. And they were recruited by both secessionists and Unionists to join a partisan army, with each side claiming that the “ladies,” with their reputation for moral purity, had chosen it over its rivals. So what do women have to do with the origins of the war? The answer is: everything."

The quality of this Disunion series that chronologically follows the lead-up to the Civil War is outstanding. The commentary's quality varies from equally outstanding, to insane.

The most consistently high quality commentary was in response to the column that quoted and discussed directly Jefferson Davis's and his confed's VP's speeches that proclaimed in detail how the confederacy was about slavery, first, last and always. The reason this column's commentary was so consistently high quality is that there were no neoConfeds jumping in to insist the war wasn't about slavery. It was impossible to argue with pres. Davis, I guess. There was one commentator though who did get in, "Why do you always have to drag in slavery when talking about the Civil War?"