Friday, December 27, 2013

Claims of Independence






I’ve been a fan of Bessie Smith for as long as I can recall.  My mom had her records when we were kids.  Last night, listening to all that Roy Eldridge I’d written about, I came upon a tune I’d never heard before:  "Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town."  Sharing it with the likely suspects, a dear old friend wrote back and told me I needed to listen to Memphis Minnie, a blueswoman of stature whose tombstone he and his wife and paid their respects at a few years back. 

Listening to Lizzie Douglas (a.k.a. Memphis Minnie) from Algeris, Louisiana now.  Fabulous.  Some beautiful slide-guitar on this track “Pickin’ the Blues.”  Born in 1897, the oldest of thirteen children she was playing guitar on street corners for dimes in Memphis by the time she was thirteen.  That’s only a few months older than my older daughter, which is utterly impossible to equate.  Within a few years she was touring the south with Ringling Brother’s Circus.  独立自主[1] by choice.



Writing now, pausing, to consider that life.  How tough you’d have to be as a young black girl touring the south with the circus in 1916, all by yourself.  You were either rough or got used up.  And indeed there are host of stories of her pistol packing, knife flashing, toughness, to compliment the grit in her voice and the pain in her guitar bends. 

She went on to record over 200 sides and her blues tale was ultimately one of can-do empowerment, winning cutting contests against male bluesmen in Chicago, and signing autographs with flash bracelets made of silver dollars when black women were mostly out in the fields.  Unlike her mother she had no children, married three times and lived her life independently.  The tombstone my friend visited was, it seems, paid for by Bonnie Raitt, which only increases the respect I already had for that other blueswoman. 

How much she, and me, and the United States and the world, all benefited from the artful articulation of the blues.  Minnie, who died in 1973 was, alas, never properly honored during her later life.  Looking at the many images, she had a poised, knowing smile and what looks to have been a broad pair of shoulders and some rather “hot” pants for a performer from the 20’s.  I like the one photo where her hair looks like a torch set off to the left, aflame.  A goddess messenger from Olympus, a woman with a guitar and ready to play it.  So glad to meet you Ms. Douglas. 

Meanwhile another Greek god, Plutus, (aka Mammon), the god of wealth, smolders a bit more dimly in today’s news.  The world has long suspected that bankers receive disproportionate compensation for the mental and certainly physical exertion involved in their efforts.  Today’s NY Times had an article discussing China’s start and stop effort to curtail “shadow banking” on the margins of China’s formal low interest banking.  Mr. Yao Jingyuan a former China state statistics official summarized the situation colorfully; suggesting bank heads in China had the rough add-value of canine highwaymen:

“Banking in China has become like a highway toll system,” Yao Jingyuan, the former chief economist at the state statistics agency, said late last week during a speech at Nanjing University, according to a report in The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper. “Banks charge every time money goes through them.”

“With this kind of operational model,” Mr. Yao added, “banks will continue making money even if all the bank presidents go home to sleep and you replaced them by putting a small dog in their seats.”

Fees for doing nothing.  Well paying, powerful roles that require no real agency. Staffing government positions with animals was Caligula’s trick.  This pending “privatization” of the Chinese economy will invariably continue for now in this start-stop fashion.

It’s enough to make you want break off and do it all by yourself.  And this throw-in-the-towel mood is high-tone on both sides of the Pacific this morning.  We’ve got a settlement, or the trappings of one, in Okinawa to move the U.S. base to a new landfill, elsewhere in the archipelago.  Washington and Tokyo were apparently happy with the accord.  The Okinawans however, who’ve only been “Japanese” since 1879, are talking about secession.  The Okinawa governor, Hirokazu Nakaima held is nose when he signed the document and suggested he was still skeptical that it would work.  Other Okinawans called him a traitor.  US defense guarantees are important for Japan, but Okinawans feel that costs outweigh the benefits.  If they really want attention, the Okinawans should strike up a conversation with Beijing.  The islands were a tributary kingdom to the Qing Dynasty before Japan ever laid claim.  I’m sure China would be happy to dust off their claim to the island chain if the islanders have had it with US protection.  


Meanwhile they’re stopping Google and Apple busses back in San Francisco.  The latest bubble continues to expand and feisty SF’s on the fringe of the party aren’t going to let the peninsula become a super-rich ghetto, without a fight.  People there all calling for the break up of the mighty golden state, into five smaller states.  This or secede all together.  This has long the call from the fringe movements in Texas and a popular idea up in Portland and Seattle as well.  Something about the ability to talk about it, or even vote on these questions is essential to let off steam.

And that works as long as the assumption is that it is a fringe concern, with no real chance of success.  If California or Texas, or Oregon really voted to secede, would the U.S. allow such a thing?  Rather unlikely.  We stared down this question once before and resolved it with no small amount of violence. “one union, indivisible.”  Says the Pledge.  The “right” to secede is certainly not enshrined anywhere.  And China certain likes it that way.  They like the lessons of the Civil War.  They reference it, when ethnic minorities push for independence here.  It must be taking everything they have though to “not interfere in other countries affairs” when they see the secessionist talk in Okinawa, or indeed, in California.  We don’t return the favor when things get hot in Xinjiang or Tibet.  Perhaps we would if they had the chance to vote on it.



Meanwhile, its only 10:30 in the morning but Memphis Minnie is drunk as a lord, both feet planted on the ground, one hand strumming, the other on the throat of her guitar singing “Drunken Barrel House Blues.”  It’s enough to make your think of that other battle of yore, Prohibition:

If you listen to me good people, I’ll tell you what its all about
If you listen to me good people, I’ll tell you what its all about
Well this good stuff is here, and its just come now

Catch me drunk in the morning, don’t say to me one mumblin word
Catch me drunk in the morning, don’t say to me one mumblin word
I can tell you all about it, and I ain’t gonna tell you nothing I heard.

Aw play

Well I believe I’ll get drunk.  Tear this old barrelhouse down.
Well I believe I’ll get drunk.  Tear this old barrelhouse down.
Cause I ain’t got no money but I can hope on out of town

Give me one more drink.  Drink of that ball and fun.
Give me one more drink.  Drink of that ball and fun.
And I’mma tell everything, soon as I get back home.

Get me a stein of beer, if not a drink of gin
Get me a stein of beer, if not a drink of gin
I feel myself getting sober, I want to get back drunk again




[1] dúlìzìzhǔ:  independent and autonomous (idiom); self-determination / to act independently / to maintain control over one's own affairs

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