“At the end of the 60s, superstar drummer and angriest man in rock Ginger Baker was on the verge of collapse. Strung out on heroin, deeply grieving Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alienated from his former Cream and Blind Faith bandmates, he needed a new direction. He found it in Nigeria, where he decamped after driving a Range Rover from Algeria across the Sahara Desert. (A madcap adventure captured in the 1971 documentary Ginger Baker in Africa). Once in Lagos, Baker started jamming with Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti. The meeting of these two musical forces of nature produced a suite of recordings. ‘Baker’s drumming appeared on several albums alongside the Nigerian king of afrobeat,’ writes Okay Africa, ‘including Why Black Man Dey Suffer (1971), Live! (1972) and Stratavarious (1972).’ Kuti’s longtime drummer and arranger—and inventor of the “afrobeat”—Tony Allen was highly impressed with Baker’s range, and Nigerians, as Jay…

Military man Mike Miles has launched his overhaul of Houston’s public schools, and parents and teachers are alarmed. Miles previously failed in Dallas, but that has not dimmed his authoritarian style. Trained for school leadership by the Broad Academy, which admires authoritarian style, Miles was imposed on Houston as part of a state takeover.

The state education department is led by non-educator Mike Morath but controlled by Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott hates Houston, because its a Democratic city. The takeover was triggered by the “failure” of one high school, Wheatley, which enrolls higher proportions of students with disabilities than other high schools. Miles, however, has far exceeded his mandate by firing the staff at 29 schools—not just Wheatley—and telling staff to re-apply for their jobs. Miles now sees himself as an education expert and has declared his grandiose ambition to create a “New Education System” (NES), to show the nation…

     Good Morning!

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“The poet speaks to all men of that other life of
theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.” 
“All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.”
– Edith Sitwell, English poet

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Everything you invent is true: You can be sure of that.
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
– Julian Barnes, author of
“The Noise of Time”

This week I’m in Lisboa. Sounds idyllic? Wish you were here?

I’m here for a summer school. This is an annual event, tied to my field of work. Doctoral, post doc and more experienced academic researchers come together to share their research and discuss sociology and education in Europe. Our summer school has been in Strasbourg, Naples, Brussels and now Lisboa. It didn’t happen at all during the pandemic. But we’re here now. Yippee.

Of course, it’s tricky to keep the funding for such a summer school going at any time. My colleagues do great work locating the euros. They believe it’s an event worth holding as it provides a unique opportunity for people to come together to learn. And to write together.

Everyone at summer school is doing sociological research, but using different theories and methods and focused on a different topic…

I have some mixed feelings about the work of Cormac McCarthy, the renowned author who died this past Tuesday, June 13, at the age of 89. Chief among them is his dearth of women characters in major roles; he was a novelist very focused on (white) males. Also, his depiction of violence could get to the very edge of being gratuitous.

Still, there was a time about a dozen years ago when I became engrossed in his fiction — reading eight of his bleak novels almost consecutively and then later a ninth. Why?

Well, the guy could flat-out write — producing prose and dialog that almost felt biblical (albeit occasionally veering into near-nonsense). That writing had southern gothic Faulkner vibes early in McCarthy’s career (when his novels were mostly set in America’s south) and terse Hemingway vibes later in McCarthy’s career (when his novels were mostly set in America’s southwest…

“At some point, John Cage must have decided he was not going to be one of the world’s great composers so he invented a fallback career for himself. Perhaps it was after Arnold Schoenberg, his teacher, said he was ‘not a composer, but an inventor – of genius.’ Mr. Cage became, instead, one of the leading philosophers and wits in 20thcentury music, a man whose influence went on expanding even while his composing pretensions seemed to shrink. … These are not the titles of musical works but of books in which Mr. Cage has verbalized, with his private blend of high seriousness and sly humor, the ideas that have unchained the imaginations of so many musicians and nonmusicians in our time. There is no question but that he was a welcome and liberating influence in a time dominated by Serialism and other forms of musical strait-jacketing. I must confess that…

Only days ago, the Network for Public Education released a report on the growth of Christian nationalist charter schools. It is titled “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda.” Many of these charters are affiliated with the far-right Hillsdale College, and call themselves classical academies. Their goal is to indoctrinate their students into extremist political views and to teach a rose-colored version of American history.

In Texas, a charter of this stripe is applying to the State Board of Education for the fourth time, hoping that new conservative members of the board will grant them a charter.

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle reports:

Last summer, the Texas State Board of Education denied for the third time an application from Heritage Classical Academy to start a charter school in Northwest Houston. Heritage will try again next week, and although very little…

The theocrats are on the march, and they won’t rest until they have overthrown the Founding Fathers’ vision of a secular republic. We used to call them “Fundamentalists,” but now they are known as “Christian nationalists” or Dominionists. Different name. Same game. Make America a Christian nation, but their kind of Christian.

The Founding Fathers had studied history. They knew that Europe had been torn apart by religious wars and religious persecution. They wanted their new nation to be free of sectarian strife. Their Constitution foot the action protected free exercise of religion while assuring that government neither favored nor disfavored any religion.

Frederick Clarkson wrote a frightening article for Salon about the determination of the evangelical right to conquer the nation for their religious views.

Their target right now, he writes, is Pennsylvania, but they are active in every state. This is ironic because Pennsylvania was founded by…

“… A spaghetti western is a subgenre of the Western film. They were most common in the 1960s and 1970s. Spaghetti westerns are typically Italian-made Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s. There is no precise definition of a spaghetti western, and it is difficult to clearly define the term as it encompasses a wide variety of approaches, themes, and tones. Spaghetti westerns are further defined by the period they were produced, usually the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Films of this era were released, among the most notable films, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). The majority of these films were produced in Italy by directors such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. Still, there were also significant numbers of them made in Spain, Germany, and France. The Eurospy genre also falls within these parameters and refers to European…

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, surrenders at the U.S. Courthouse in Boston on June 28, 1971, accompanied by his wife at the time, Patricia.

“Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who after experiencing a sobbing antiwar epiphany on a bathroom floor made the momentous decision in 1971 to disclose a secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam, what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif., in the Bay Area. He was 92. … The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy. It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks…