My son Austin and I were privileged and proud to participate in today's March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C. No politicians. Just the teen-aged survivors who are putting NRA-backed politicians on notice and who will be blanketing the country between now and November. So incredibly inspiring to see these young people deal with their profound trauma by working to save future lives. Emma Gonzales' six and a half minutes of silence was incredibly moving. NRA supporters who claim that these young are too young to have mature positions on such matters and are the tools of liberal special-interest groups not only have no idea who they dealing with, they are missing the fellowship--and leadership--of some outstanding human beings.
Jimmie Vaughan
Happy birthday to Jimmie Vaughan. I had the great good fortune to move to Austin in 1977, just in time to drop into the middle of the blues community centered around the original Antone’s club on Sixth Street. Jimmie was the inspirational force who drew many great blues players to that remarkable scene.
Jimmie was in his mid-twenties but had already been a Texas guitar legend for nearly a decade. After seeing Muddy Waters at a Dallas club in 1968, Jimmie had an epiphany that the blues was his natural home, and ever since he has relentlessly pursued the best aspects of the blues—space, tone, playing behind the beat, and telling a story. The original T-Birds were a quartet, and Jimmie mesmerized audiences and fellow musicians with his ability to play rhythm and lead simultaneously. Blues legends like Buddy Guy and rock stars like Billy Gibbons and Eric Clapton thought of him as a peer.
When I met Jimmie and Kim Wilson in the late ‘70s, I was just as impressed with their attitude as I was with their heavy chops. I knew other white bluesmen with unique talents, but they tended to buy into the entire blues lifestyle and the professional limitations that came with it. Kim and Jimmie were absolutely convinced that the way to become rich and famous rock stars was to only play the real blues shit. And then they proceeded to demonstrate that their preposterous notion was dead right.
After quitting the T-Birds and taking a few years off in the ‘90s, Jimmie re-emerged with a very different approach. He fronted his Tilt-A-Whirl band as the singer, added a rhythm guitarist, and carved his guitar style down even further to lean hard on the soulful, elemental basics that make the blues so irresistible.
Jimmie is still out there playing the real Texas blues and adding new aspects to his mastery. Most recently he’s been working a lot with an organ trio. Whatever he does, Jimmie’s less-is-more approach is always nothing less than the real deal. He’s a national treasure. Every time I listen to Jimmie I remember why I fell so hard for the blues so many years ago.
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Today is the birthday of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder was born in the whaling village of Bedford, Massachusetts in 1847 and he painted seascapes all his life. He moved to New York City at the age of 20 and died there in 1917. Ryder only produced about 150 paintings in his lifetime, and he rarely signed or dated them. Ryder's early paintings were mostly landscapes, but he created a unique artistic vision of stylized shapes and figures captured under the gauzy, golden haze of moonlight. Despite his small output and a reclusive lifestyle, the New York art world acknowledged his genius during his lifetime. He was a founding member of the Society of American Artists, the famous 1913 Armory Show featured ten of his paintings, collectors snapped up his rare canvases, and after his death the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a memorial exhibition of Ryder's paintings. Since his demise, thousands of forgeries have been foisted onto the art market. Ryder used poor and ill-matched painting materials and unorthodox techniques--he reworked some paintings for decades--that have caused his moody canvases to literally disintegrate over time.
The Oscars
My son Devin is a staff writer for The Jimmy Kimmel show, and he picked up a sweet sideline gig writing jokes for the Oscars, which Kimmel is hosting again this year. Tonight Devin is closeted backstage at the Oscars with other writers, feeding Kimmel jokes in real time. He just texted me this photo of him backstage in his first purchased tux with Oscar. The joke "Oscar is 90 years old, which means that he's at home watching Fox News" in Kimmel's opening monologue was the first of Devin's gags. Lots of hard work and long hours will culminate for him at Kimmel's after party. He's promised more photos. I want a shot of him with Sam Rockwell.
"I really believe that I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon"
So says Trump, whose crippling-then-vanishing bone spurs kept him from running into any Viet Cong when his country called, but who is convinced that he would have personally stopped Nikolas Cruz, even if it meant using his bare hands against that AR-15.
This is the deranged narcissist who told us that "I alone understand the problem, and I alone can fix it." Who wins every golf game. Who wins the popular vote despite all evidence to the contrary. Who gets the biggest crowds. Who has the best words. Who gets the best ratings. Who can assault women with impunity simply because he is who he is. Who is faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive.
This is also the man who is using images of Parkland survivors in the hospital to solicit donations to his reelection campaign.
My conscious self understands that Trump's personal insanity is on some level a sideshow that keeps us distracted from the grinding, horrific destruction and damage his administration is inflicting, but it means something that we have a dangerous lunatic as our President and that his very real mental derangement is the public face of our country and the driver of his policy.
A change of heart
Republican State Representative Chris Harris represents a rural district in Kentucky. Harris is a conservative Christian. Eighty percent of his constituents voted for Trump. On Thursday Harris rose to speak to his colleagues about his plans for Lent. He had decided, he told them, to give up his "A" rating from the NRA. He was now supporting a ban on assault rifles, a ban on bump stocks, and more rigorous background checks on gun buyers.
"I have had a change of heart," Harris said. "Without action, without good works, our faith and our prayers are dead."
Chris Harris most likely just committed political suicide, but it will be through these changes of heart--one by one--that progress will be made and the NRA will be broken.
Winslow Homer
Best birthday wishes to Winslow Homer. Homer had a twenty-year career as the preeminent American illustrator before committing himself to oils and becoming celebrated for his paintings of rural America. His move to Prout's Neck, Maine in 1893 reignited his love of the sea and trout fishing streams. In his later years Homer divided his time between the Bahamas and Maine. Homer's mature oil paintings include some of the first works of genius by an American artist, and as a watercolorist he has never been surpassed.
Teacher with trigger fingers, part 3
Wild Bill Hickock ("Mr. Wild Bill" to his adoring students): metal shop teacher, Deadwood, South Dakota.
Teachers with trigger fingers, part 2
Annie Oakley: home economics instructor, Willowdell, Ohio.
Teachers with trigger fingers, Part 1
Wyatt Earp: geometry teacher, Arizona Territory.
Girls grab gold
I hate hockey shootouts--unless they turn out with the U.S. women's team winning Olympic gold. Before heading to the Olympics, the team successfully fought USA Hockey for 15 months to get the same pay, equipment, staff and travel as the men's team. (They demanded, and got, a pay increase from $6,000 a year to $70,000 a year.) These women were obviously not to be messed with. The team battled relentlessly all night and came from behind to beat the Canadian favorites. The offensive firepower was provided by the identically brilliant Lamoreux twins--Monique tied the game in the third period and Jocelyne scored the winning goal with a mind-bending triple-deke move. Goalie Maddie Rooney (someone changed her Wikipedia job title to "Secretary of Defense" last night) provided a final save to nail down the win. A great win by a gritty team.
The Students Take Aim
Cultural tipping points are a slippery concept. Zealots can be too quick to declare temporary dynamics to be profound, permanent shifts. And history tells us that most change happens incrementally across societal ebbs and flows.
But tipping points do happen. Decades or generations of almost imperceptible shifts finally reach critical mass and start an avalanche. The seemingly sudden shift in attitudes toward gay marriage grew out of a long process of gays leaving the closet and being true to themselves amongst family, friends, and coworkers. Tipping points are often triggered by specific events or images. I am old enough to remember how the news footage of Bull Connor's vicious dogs attacking black protesters in Birmingham contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year. The MeToo movement started with a tweet.
It's too early to tell if the student survivors from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School represent a tipping point in our endless inability to deal with gun violence in America. It's hard not to see them as traumatized innocents who are about to be sliced and diced by the gun manufacturers and their bought-and-paid-for stooges: the NRA (their storm troopers), the Republican Party (their Politburo), Fox News (their Pravda), and the alt-right blogosphere (their online hate factories). The gun manufacturers have worked hard to own this country, and they will lierally stop at nothing to keep it that way.
But it feels different. This student uprising is a truly spontaneous revolt against the perceived norm, which is important. And the students have shown themselves to be not only passionate and tenacious but extraordinarily well spoken and savvy about the media--both mainstream and social. They are the gun lobby's worst nightmare--the voices of the young. innocent victims personified. The attempts yesterday to write them off as silly children or brand them as tools of the adult left did not go well--some of the individuals who did so have lost their jobs. They have put real pressure on Trump, Congress, and the Florida state legislature to take action. I don't see any of those people actually taking meaningful action, given that the NRA owns all of them, but you can see that they are finally feeling real heat, which is a very new thing for them. The students have made it clear that the NRA is their enemy and that they will attempt to shame any politician who accepts funds from that group. Most eye-opening of all, the students have forced the NRA to abandon their traditional strategy of total silence following a mass shooting and to lay low until the outrage dies down. They have forced the NRA out into the open in the middle of the national anger. Just today it was announced that NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch will join a live CNN town hall on gun violence that will air tonight. This is a huge tactical mistake on the part of the NRA. We will see angry, passionate, and eloquent teenaged survivors calling bullshit on the NRA on national television. I don't see how this represents anything but a huge trap for the gun lobby. We will see if they get really snared and if we're living through another tipping point for a seemingly impossible problem.
Raping the anthem
ike almost all my fellow players, I make it a point to never criticize other musicians in public. What would be the point? What kind of performance, no matter how dismal, would ever warrant it?
Now I know.
I didn't catch last night's NBA all-star game, but, after reading some of the backlash about Fergie's rendition of the national anthem, I caught it tonight on YouTube.
There is no existing statute that covers a rape of The Star Spangled Banner. We might want to reconsider that after last night, but the reality is that Fergie won't do jail time for her musical mugging of Francis Scott Key.
I have no problem with singers taking creative liberties with the national anthem. One of my favorite performances of that old British alehouse melody is Marvin Gaye's gorgeous, totally untraditional version at the 1983 NBA all star game.
We Americans are suffering through a grim period in which too many of us are confusing the United States and patriotism with ourselves instead of celebrating that the country belongs to all of us. Last night Fergie took the national anthem to an utterly personal place. Unfortunately, that place turned out to be not an artist's stage but a seamy karaoke-bar platform under the cheap lights where, at five minutes before closing, a would-be chanteuse with eight tequila shooters under her belt desperately tries to score points with the last guy left at the bar.
Fergie doesn't deserve condemnation for being a cosmically godawful singer. She's not the first vocalist to try to go to soul town without knowing what that even means, much less how to get there. And it's not a crime that the national anthem clearly means absolutely nothing to her personally. What earns her our lasting scorn is that she had no clue that the bar song she was sleazing her way through (she did every low trick short of simulating oral sex with the mic) was a song that actually meant something to everybody else in the room. This profoundly disturbed woman needs to go away somewhere for a few years and give the country enough time away from her to drive all memory of last night's assault from our collective consciousness.
Returning fire
The NRA didn't always own the U.S. government. They worked hard over many years to buy it, and we, the majority of Americans who support common-sense gun control, haven't done enough to stop them.
We are not powerless. It's pretty simple: We need to get off our collective asses and make politicians fear us more than they fear the NRA.
Don't vote Republican. The NRA owns the GOP lock, stock, and smoking barrel. In 2016 the NRA spent $5.9 million on Republican candidates while only donating $106,000 to Democrats. The GOP is the political arm of the NRA, so if we want to limit its influence we have to defeat Republicans. (And don't forget the countless other benefits we would receive if Republicans did not control Congress!)
If your local, state or federal representatives are considering or voting on anti-gun-control legislation, get all over them.
There are two nationwide groups dedicated to defeating the NRA and passing gun-control legislation. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg helped to establish Everytown for Gun Safety (everytown.org), which now has over four million members. Moms Demand Action (momsdemandaction.org) is another important group that is doing excellent work in combatting the NRA. Join these groups, contribute to them, and participate in their political action programs.
The NRA can be defeated. But only by us.
Nikolas Cruz is one of our own
The blood, gore, shell casings and bullet fragments haven't even been removed from the floors and walls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but the classification of shooter Nikolas Cruz has begun in earnest. He is said to have been pictured in a MAGA hat in his Instagram profile. No, say others, records show him to be a registered Democrat. He is said to have posted Arabic sayings on social media, perhaps indicating that he is an ISIS sympathizer. No, say others, his posts indicate that he wanted to kill Muslim terrorists. No one claims him. He must, he has to, belong to the other side.
Nikolas Cruz is an American. He lives in a country that glorifies violence. Like many other Americans, he amassed a small arsenal of knives and guns, including an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which used to be outlawed but is America's most popular weapon. It's designed to kill the maximum number of people as quickly and efficiently as possible, and it does a very, very good job of it. Like every young American, Cruz grew up with school shootings. He was intimately familiar with the security of his former high school. No doubt he was bullied at school. No doubt he posted all kinds of horrific stuff on social media that shocked people who never alerted anyone. Like dozens of other Americans each year, he lived in a black and white world full of supposed enemies against whom he was powerless, so he went about the easy task of amassing the tools he needed and then, in minutes, he slaughtered them.
We Americans like to think that Nikolas Cruz is an exception. But we do literally nothing to ensure that. We glorify murder and mayhem. We covet and fetishize weapons designed only for murdering other human beings. We do nothing--nothing--to halt access to these weapons, thereby liertally putting our children and every other American in harm's way. We look the other way when people are bullied or post obvious signs of their mental desintegration online. Until we decide to make him one, Nikolas Cruz is no exception, and we are his helpmate.
Another Win for the real america
The amazing Chloe Kim, the daughter of immigrants, brings home the gold for the U.S.A. in the women's half pipe snowboarding competition.
The Real America Wins Again
Adam Rippon, the openly gay figure skater, won a bronze medal for his country last night as a member of the U.S. Olympic skating team. Rippon chose not to meet with Vice President Mike Pence, who will never stand on any knd of legitimate podium celebrating contributions to America. Pence's most notable "accomplishments" as a leading un-American have been the sponsorship of widely condemned "religious freedom" laws that legalized discrimination against gays and his call for the distribution of federal funds to those "seeking to change their sexual behavior."
Steve Ramsey
Just learned that Steve Ramsey has done his last gig on earth. I had the amazing good fortune of being in a band with Steve when I lived in Massachusetts and of becoming one of his many friends. Steve was a great guy with a fabulous smile and a sardonic wit. Steve played with many of the best in the business because he was a musician's drummer--one of those rare people who could tell a real story behind the kit. Very sad, tough news, but it helps to recall the many great times with Steve.
ron porter's wonderful career
Donald Trump, who has been charged with sexual assault by 16 women, allowed a known wife beater to serve as White House secretary for over a year. Two of Ron Porter's ex-wives and a girlfriend warned the FBI and the White House about his years of abusive behavior. Porter was unable to get a security clearance because of his past, but Trump allowed him to manage top-secret information on a daily basis.
No one in the White House acted on this information until his past appeared in the newspapers. Hope Hicks, Trump's communications director and Porter's current girlfriend, wrote a White House statement that lauded Porter's service. Chief of Staff John Kelly urged Porter to stay in his role. The White House told Senator Orrin Hatch that Porter was the victim of a smear engineered by Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager and Hope Hicks' former boyfriend. Today Trump spoke to reporters about Porter.
Trump said absolutely nothing about the three women who suffered abuse at the hands of Porter, noting instead that "this is a tough time" for Porter. Trump said absolutely nothing about ensuring a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual assault in the White House, instead noting that Porter is asserting his innocence. Trump today praised Porter for "an excellent job" and said that he hoped that Porter would go on "to have a wonderful career."
The crisis is already here
While Trump and the GOP are aggressively destroying our law-enforcement system, the careers of dedicated public servants, and the Congressional process, the Democratic leadership responds with--a limp warning. Specifically, that the firing of Rosenstein and Mueller "could precipitate a constitutional crisis."
Shouldn't that be "WOULD constitute a constitutional crisis," Senator Durbin?
In their Year of the Long Knives Trump and the GOP haven't been sitting idly by. They got Comey. They got Yates. They got McCabe. They have identified, publicly, out in the open. that their next targets are Rosenstein and Mueller. They've nuetered Sessions and Wray. They are arguing from the floors of Congress and in the media that being a Democrat and being a traitor are synonymous. They and Fox News have successfully engineered a steep drop in the public's faith in the FBI and the DOJ and convinced millions that Mueller's investigation--which they claimed to support a year ago--is dead on arrival. They have purposefully misinterpreted classified information and released it to the public to help Trump without allowing the release of any rebuttal. These people have no taste for governing, but when it comes to destroying government and the rule of law, they are working it.
The response by the Democrats in Congress has been to issue toothless statements of outrage, engineer a confused and squeamish government shutdown that lasted about two minutes, and to beg the Republicans to please release their memo, too.
Surely, at this point in the active war against our national system, with real bodies piling up and with 35% of the population being constantly whipped into a froth against our law enforcement agencies, Congressional Democrats should be making it crystal clear that firing either Rosenstein or Mueller will absolutely mean--no ifs, ands, or buts, no compromises--a complete legislative shutdown and the active mobilization of massive public protests. STAND FOR SOMETHING, DONKEYS! RESIST!