This week's diva is the legendary gospel and blues singer and guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Born in Arkansas in 1915, she began playing music as a child, accompanying her mother, who was a traveling evangelist, in tent revivals throughout the South. She became a star attraction on her own, mainly as a gospel singer, although she also made significant jazz and blues recordings. Indeed, her combination of the sacred and the secular was considered somewhat scandalous back in the day.
Sister Rosetta, who died in 1973, is probably best known as an important precursor to early rock and roll. With her virtuoso rocking guitar playing, she pioneered an original sound all of her own. Musicians from Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Bob Dylan to Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin have cited her as an influence, and both Little Richard and Johnny Cash have said she was their favorite singer.
Here's Rosetta in a clip from the early 60s, performing her classic rendition of "Down by the Riverside." As you'll see, she totally rocks.
Maybe Phyllis Schlafly thinks this is how rape victims should be treated.
A fascinating article by Ingrid D. Rowland about women artists in the current New York Review of Books contains this horrifying anecdote about one of the greatest female artists of all time, the 17th century baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Gentileschi was raped by her father's colleague, Agostino Tossi. Here's what followed:
To save Artemisia's social standing (and then only barely), the
Gentileschi, father and daughter, had only one real alternative: to
charge Tassi with rape in a Roman court. In the course of proceedings
whose transcripts are still preserved in Rome's State Archive,
Artemisia endured a medical examination to establish the state of her
virginity and then the ordeal of testifying under torture. She was
subjected to the sibille, the "Sibyls" (for their oracular
powers), strings threaded between her fingers and then progressively
tightened, a dreadful prospect for a woman who intended to live by the
work of her hands. It is unlikely that the sibille were applied
for long, or with more than symbolic force: her testimony of Tassi's
misdeeds is a horrific tale of stalking and rape, and the court found
in Artemisia's favor.
But I suppose Schlafly might concede that maybe, just maybe, if a woman's virginity is proven medically, and if she holds up under torture, then perhaps it really was rape. After all, though she did say that “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women,” she added the generous qualifier "except in the rarest of cases" to that statement.
Artemisia Gentileschi, by the way, was a fierce and fabulous artist. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to her work up close when a terrific show featuring the work of her and her father, Orazio Gentileschi, came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What's thrilling about her art is not only her stylistic virtuosity and boldness, but her subject matter, which often addressed women's experiences in a manner that can only be called feminist.
There's this painting, for example, perhaps her most famous. It's called Susanna and the Elders (1610) and has as its subject, in Rowland's words, "a terrified young woman, surprised at her bath by two old lechers."
Well, it looks like they're going to do it. They may have done it already, in fact.
Give antifeminist, anti-intellectual wingnut Phyllis Schlafly an honorary degree, that is.
There have been some fine posts on the subject by many people, including BrianLeiter and my favorite bitch. As I've noted in previous posts on this subject, two "no honorary degree for Phyllis Schlafly" Facebook groups have beencreated, as well as this student website, and there are plans to protest the degree at today's graduation ceremony.
But all of that was for naught, apparently.
I could say a lot more about this travesty, but i'll leave it at this: honoring Schlafly is an act of the most profound disrespect to the female students of Washington University. Washington U. sees fit to bestow its highest honor on a woman who believes those students' husbands should be able to rape them with impunity.
That is one hell of a message to send to young women just as they are setting forth into the world.
Proud of yourselves, Washington U?
Previous to the Schlafly episode, I had thought of Washington U. as a fine school, one that I would have been proud to attend or to be employed by, or to send my (hypothetical) children to. But from now on, I will make a point of having nothing to do with the school. I will urge everyone I know not to apply to go to school there, or apply for jobs there, or speak there. The honorary degree for Schlafly is just so, so beyond the pale.
Something else I meant to mention in the last post: as you may have noticed,
Megan McArdle moved the ball, as she so often does. She claims that no no no, I got it all wrong, she wasn't really arguing that the minimum wage has a disemployment effect:
Most of the post is responding to an argument I have not made: that the
minimum wage decreases employment. To be sure, I might make that
argument--but then again, I might not. I think the empirical evidence
is ambiguous . . .
Despite the coy language here, her previous post
certainly did give the impression that she thought an increase in the minimum wage leads to a decrease in employment. She didn't say a word in that post about how the evidence was "ambiguous" -- in fact, she didn't show much familiarity at all with the economics literature on the subject.
What she did, first, was to mention the original Krueger and Card
paper that found that a minimum wage increase in New Jersey did not have a
disemployment effect. Then she pointed to a Cato Institute paper by Kevin
Murphy that made several (valid) criticisms of the paper. And that was it --
she acted like that was game, set, and match. She didn't mention Krueger and
Card's subsequent study, which used better data and methodology, and came to
the same conclusion as the first. Nor did she mention a number of other studies of
the minimum wage which also showed no disemployment effect.
That was misleading, to say the least. The impact of the minimum wage on
employment is a subject of intense debate within economics. As I mentioned in
my previous post, there have also been a number of good studies that show that
it does have a disemployment effect. Over the years, in fact, there have
been more published studies showing that increasing the minimum wage decreases
employment, than there have been studies showing no effect. And even now, it's likely that more (American) economists would tell you that the minimum wage generally decreases employment than would tell you it generally does not. But the empirical evidence overall is mixed.
Okay, so now's she's arguing against it because it's "trivial" and helps people who are not really poor. But those are not arguments she'd made in the previous post.
Anyway -- just to reiterate: Megan's presentation of the evidence on the minimum wage's effect on employment
score was either deliberately misleading or ignorant. I'll leave it up to you
to decide which.
Also, to reiterate about EPI, I do think they're pretty great. One of the more encouraging political developments in recent years is that, in Democratic circles, more and more policy types have abandoned the neoliberal rostrums that were fashionable in the 80s and 90s and have come around to supporting the progressive economic policies that EPI has always championed. The reason I
didn't cite EPI's research is not that I don't think it's high-quality. It's
just that I wanted to avoid the tiresome "liberal bias! liberal
bias!" accusations that would inevitably ensue if I cited studies from an
ideologically inclined think tank.
A few responses to Megan McArdle's most recent posts about minimum wages and monopsony.
First, there's the argument that the minimum wage is trivial. Megan writes:
The main thing to remember about the minimum wage is that it is
trivial. If the minimum wage actually made a substantial improvement in
worker's conditions at the expense of employers, it would also almost
certainly cause substantial disemployment.
Last year the minimum wage was $5.15; by July of next year it will go up to $7.50. That's more than a 40% increase in a little over two years. If that's "trivial," then I'd like all my raises to be that "trivial."
It also seems strange that employers always fight tooth and nail against these "trivial" minimum wage increases. If it's really no biggie, why bother?
You are not allowed to argue in favor of school choice if the only evidence you can come up with is two links from Cato. . . . And you are definitely, definitely not allowed to talk to me about the
minimum wage if the best evidence for your position comes from EPI.
I don't know if she was referring to me, but just in case there's a misunderstanding, none of the half dozen or so studies I cited to were by EPI. They were all academic, peer-reviewed studies from economics journals. The only thing from EPI I linked to in my post was a letter on their website that was signed by several hundred economists, including a half dozen or so Nobel laureates, that supported raising the minimum wage.
As it happens, I think EPI is terrific, and the quality of the work they do is generally excellent. But I deliberately chose to cite only academic studies, because they tend to have more credibility than something coming from a partisan think tank.
Oddly enough, it was Megan who cited a study coming a partisan think tank, the Cato Institute. It was a perfectly good study, as it happened. But it was the only one* she cited in the minimum wage post I was responding to. So I guess I'm a little confused that she implied that both EPI and Cato were unacceptable sources, when she herself cited Cato (and it was the only study she cited). And I very deliberately did not cite any of the EPI studies.
Ms. G's argument relies heavily on the question that invariably gets
deployed by the commenters I call The Jedi Masters of Econ 201: "If you
lower wages by one penny, will everyone quit? If not, you've got a
monopsony". The technical answer is that we don't know, because the
government keeps employers from finding out.
But the real answer is that this is trivial. Almost no markets in
existence look like the models in the economics textbooks; if Ms. G is
going to reject generally applicable market principles in any situation
that doesn't exactly correspond to perfect competition, then she should
stop taking economics classes now; none of the models will be any use
to her.
I'll quote what I said in my post:
To be fair, all models are stylized and radically simplified
representations of reality, and leave out many features that are very
important in the real world. Still, some models are better than others
at getting the basics right.
Megan seems to think I have an issue with models. But as I made clear in that post, I have nothing against models in general. I do, however, have a particular issue with the perfect competition model of the labor market. I think monopsony mostly (but not always) is a more useful concept for understanding labor markets. And it happens to be every bit as much of a model as the perfect competition model is. It's a better one, though. A labor market which includes frictions (monopsony) is not only far more plausible, but the predictions you get from that model are a better match for the empirical facts on the ground.
*UPDATE: What I meant to say was that the Kevin Murphy paper was the only study she mentioned other than the Krueger and Card study.
First things first: to contribute to the Shulman campaign via Act Blue, click here.
And to learn more about Dennis Shulman, visit his campaign website here.
You may wonder, of all the candidates and races going on this year, why did I choose to support this one?
As I've mentioned before, I grew up in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District. It's a politically moderate district that for many years was represented by a centrist, pro-choice Republican, Marge Roukema. Lately the district, like the rest of New Jersey, has been trending increasingly Democratic . (According to a recent poll, in the district, Bush's approval rating is 74% negative, 22% positive.) And yet, since 2002, it's been represented by one of the worst pro-Bush, pro-war, anti-choice hacks in Congress, a far-right Republican named Scott Garrett (he has a lifetime perfect score of 100 from the American Conservative Union).
But you know what? Even though Garrett is a nightmare, and even though he's increasingly out of step with the district, this fight is not going to be easy. The power of incumbency is not to be taken lightly, and this has long been a Republican district, after all.
Yet there's something I find irresistibly compelling about this race. There's the tilting-at-windmills, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quality of it, for one. An ordinary citizen who's not especially wealthy or well-connected politically, becomes increasingly (in his own words) "heartbroken and troubled by our recent direction as a nation." One day, he decides to stand up and do something about it. That something? Running for Congress.
As I like to say, if you're gonna dream, you might as well dream big. And I'm always a sucker for a scrappy underdog. So I'm throwin' down here.
Camille Paglia's latest column is up to the high standards that must make Joan Walsh and everyone else associated with Salon beam with pride. Indeed, this month the old gal is in especially fine form.
This time out, she's peddling Vince Foster conspiracy theories. Honest to Maude:
I for one have renewed questions about the 1993 suicide of Deputy White
House Counsel Vince Foster, Hillary's former law partner and longtime
friend, whose files were purged by Hillary's staff before they could be
examined for evidence. One must always be skeptical about Web rumors,
but my interest was piqued last year by claims that Foster was
shattered by the role he had played three months earlier in the
outrageous order for federal agents to attack David Koresh's ranch at
Waco, Texas, producing a conflagration that led to 76 deaths, including
21 children. Why has the Waco fiasco been forgotten? It triggered the
worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the 1995 revenge
bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Wow, Camille sure does seem eager to party like it was 1999. I wonder what the subject of her next column will be? Paula Jones? Kathleen Willey? Mysterious deaths and drug running out of the Mena Airport?
My favorite part is that "one must always be skeptical about Web rumors" bit. Because, as you know, sunlit rationality has always been the primary characteristic of the pensees which Ms. Paglia has so generously shared with a grateful world.
Jayzuz, Obama getting the nomination is going to the worst thing that ever happened to the misogynist Clinton haters like Paglia, Modo, Tweety, and the rest. What will they ever do with themselves? They ought to form a support group.
Finally, Camille notes:
My latest salvo,
"Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform" (the keynote
address of a conference on feminism at Harvard University in April)
will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of Arion, to be published in print and on the Web in June.
Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I've been feeling a tad under the weather and somewhat depressed. Probably a bit of blogger burn out as well, to tell you the truth.
But I just finished reading yet another stupefyingly lame and ignorant union-bashing post by Mickey Kaus, and that definitely got my juices flowing. Yes, Ann Coulter's arm candy is at it again, making the same smug, ill-informed arguments he always makes on this topic. And actually, they're not even really arguments -- to describe those verbal burps of his as an "argument" bestows on them a dignity they in no way deserve. They're more like half-assed gestures toward an argument, really. Mickey don't do much intellectual heavy lifting these days, and that's putting it mildly.
When it comes to unions, Kaus's style of "argument" is as follows: he'll seize upon some random news story concerning (almost always) either the schools or the auto industry. If test scores are down or Ford or GM is doing poorly, it's always, always the union's fault -- and that's true whether or not the union was even mentioned in the story. He almost never considers alternative explanations or complicating factors. And he certainly never bothers to get off his lazy ass and look at what the social science research says about the subject.
Case in point: today's post, in which he trashes card check and bashes unions because the UAW is resisting a change in Ford's manufacturing system that apparently would improve efficiency.
And that's it. That's his entire argument. All right, he does throw in some bullshit about how card check destroys the sacredness of the secret ballot. And he extends his anti-union "argument" somewhat by implying that unions are inefficient in general and that "the Wagner Act is not designed for an era of continuous change and improvement."
The Wagner Act took effect in 1935. Is Kaus seriously trying to argue that there was no "change and improvement" -- no technological innovation or efficiency improvements, is what he means, I guess -- between, say, '35 and '45? Or '35 and '55? Or '35 and whatever year it was that we suddenly stopped needing unions?
Before I get to the main subject of this post, I wanted to share my enthusiasm about my favorite new blog: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though Ta-Nehisi's blog centers on politics, he is also the author of a fascinating-sounding new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. (You can watch an engaging video about the memoir here). He's had some especially smart things to say about the presidential race. Read this post, for example, about Hillary Clinton's instantly infamous "hard-working white people" remark, and why "the obligatory 'not a racist' defense" is irritatingly beside the point, and offensive to boot.
All this is by way of introduction to my favorite of his most recent posts, this expert takedown of Christopher Hitchens' recent nasty, dishonest, and embarrassing attempt at a hit job on Michelle Obama (which appeared in Slate, wouldn't you know. And just when I thought Slate couldn't possibly suck any harder). Ta-Nehisi has a much, much higher opinion of Hitchens than I do (I think the man descended into disgraceful hackdom long ago), but that doesn't stop him from seeing very clearly what Hitchens was trying (and pathetically failing) to do in that piece, and calling him on it. Among other things, Ta-Nehisi points out that if you want to smear someone for the non-existent radical views they allegedly had in college, it would help matters if you yourself don't have a lengthy and well-documented past as a Trotskyite Trotskyist, as Hitchens himself does. D'oh!
The Hitchens piece, contemptible piece o' shite though it is, a surefire sign that, now that it's clear Hillary's presidential campaign is all but over, the right is proceeding apace with its attempt to Hillary-ize Michelle Obama. We have, of course, all heard about how "unpatriotic" she is. Maureen Dowd has already cattily attacked her for not being sufficiently deferential to her husband. And now we're being treated to Hitchens' exegesis of how her college term papers prove she's really Stokely Carmichael in drag. Delightful! But hey . . . radical, unfeminine, unpatriotic -- remind you of any other right-wing caricatures of a certain prominent Democratic woman with a famous husband?
I wanted to draw your attention to this post from Megan McArdle, which I hadn't seen until today. What the person who blogs at Economics of Contempt says is true: I read his post criticizing McArdle's post on the Coase theorem, and in my own post I borrowed a crucial idea from it without linking to or acknowledging it. That was wrong. While my posts on that subject also drew on my own prior knowledge and other research I was familiar with, his post made a very important point about the applicability of Coase in the real world upon which my post was based. He also quoted from Coase himself, and I used an extended version of the same quote in my post. I'd read the Coase paper before but my memory of it was hazy; his use of the quote inspired me to go back and reread it.
Not to have acknowledged the Economics of Contempt post was ungenerous and dishonest. I apologize to the blogger and I promise that from now on I'll take care to cite the sources I use and give them the appropriate credit.
The mortgage crisis is not a reflection of the moral turpitude of the
borrowers. If you want to criticize someone's values, assail the greed and shortsightedness of lenders
who got caught up in a speculative frenzy and loaned money to people
who had no realistic prospect of paying it back. Professionals loaned
money to amateurs, not the other way around.
I've written a long post about Washington University's disgraceful decision to award Phyllis Schlafly an honorary degree. You can read it up on Crooked Timber, here.
UPDATE: It's great to see that the General is on the case as well.
I have another post up at Crooked Timber. This one is about inequality and pain. As it turns out, economic inequality impacts practically every
dimension of human existence; even physical pain is unequally shared. You can read the post here.
I've decided to institute a new feature: each Tuesday, I will provide a different reason as to why you should support Dennis Shulman, the Democrat (and blind rabbi) who is running for Congress in New Jersey's 5th District. The incumbent, Scott Garrett, is a pro-war, anti-choice, Bush-loving zealot (he has a lifetime "perfect" score of 100 from the American Conservative Union).
You can read my earlier post about the race, which contains detailed info about Shulman's positions and Garrett's record, here.
Here's today's reason: last week, Scott Garrett voted against a bipartisan effort to make college more affordable. According to Shulman's website, Garrett voted against "a series of amendments
that would allow families hit hard by the mortgage crisis to still access PLUS loans
and protect families participating in lender of last resort programs from
abuse." The final roll call vote on the bill was 388-21. Garrett was the only member of Congress from New Jersey to vote this way.
On this issue, as with so many others, Scott Garrett is out of step with the mainstream views and middle class values of his constituents. It's time for a change, which is why I urge you to support Dennis Shulman for Congress. To contribute to the Shulman campaign via Act Blue, click here. To learn more about Dennis Shulman, visit his campaign website here.
I'm proud to announce that this week I'll be guest blogging over at Crooked Timber. Crooked Timber is one of my favorite blogs, and I'm honored that Henry Farrell asked me to write for them this week. I can only hope that I can live up not only to Crooked Timber's high standards, but to the flattering things Henry said about me in his introduction.
My first post, which concerns the Iraq War and Edward Said's Orientalism, is up. You can read it here. I apologize to Henry and the crew for waiting until today to start; I had been planning to get the post up yesterday, but life intervened, as it has its way of doing.
I wanted to inform readers that a new Facebook group has been created to protest Washington University's plans to award antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly with an honorary doctorate. It's called Official Commencement Protest of Phyllis Schlafly, and you can find it here.
I'm told that while the earlier Facebook group is intended to be more a discussion forum, this new group will focus on anti-Schlafly protest and activism. Which is a little confusing, because the other group was also listing actions you can take to protest, but whatev. If you're interested in putting pressure on Washington U. to put an end to this farce and abandon plans to award her the doctorate, then I urge you to join this new group.
Here's part of the group's description:
We view the sexist and
anti-intellectual views expressed by Ms. Schlafly as offensive and feel
an honorary degree from our university is completely inappropriate.
While we support her right to speak her mind we also wish to use our
own right to free speech. Regardless of your political convictions, if
Ms. Schlafly's views on the rights of women (especially the status of
married women) are completely out of touch with what you believe, then
join us in protesting at commencement.
And just to emphasize: it's Schlafly's anti-intellectualism as much as her antifeminism that makes the university's decision to honor her so offensive. Unless, of course, you think that granting an award to someone who has made a career out of propagating kooky, fact-free conspiracy theories completely consistent with the values of scholarship and intellectual integrity.
The new Facebook group points out that, among other things, Schlafly rejects the theory of evolution and believes that creationism (or "intelligent design") should be taught in schools. Which is not exactly surprising, but it's another reason why Washington University's decision to honor her is such a colossal embarrassment.
Meanwhile, I just learned that The Atlantic's twisted, hate-filled, overprivileged antifeminist-superhack-in-residence -- in other words, Caitlin Flanagan -- has won a major national magazine award.
The judges called Flanagan's work "thoughtful and bracingly honest, filled with humor and empathy, and free of cliches and political correctness."
Excuse me while I barf.
"Thoughtful" -- only if you consider it "thoughtful" for a writer to display stunningly shameful levels of ignorance not only of feminist writings and scholarship but also of the most basic social science research on the subjects she writes about.
Filled with "empathy" only if you think that smug, vicious attacks on working women are compassionate.
And "free of cliches and political correctness" -- what the hell? Flanagan gleefully traffics in every goddamn wingnut antifeminist cliche in the book! Both the ones that date back at least as far as the antisuffragist movement of the 19th century (i.e., women as keepers of home and hearth), as well as the more newly minted ones, such as that HIllary Clinton is a hateful ballbusting bitch.
To paraphrase a line from Zoolander, is everybody on crazy pills today, or what?
The Washington University scandal -- said scandal being the fact that they're planning to award an honorary doctorate to arch-antifeminist, arch-wingnut, arch-anti-intellectual conspiracy freak Phyllis Schlafly -- just keeps getting better and better.
Know who they've chosen as commencement speaker this year?
C'mon, just guess. I'll give you a hint. Try to think of the one person in America who, more than any other, has been driving the left blogosphere in general, and the feminist blogosphere in particular, out of our everlovin' collective mind of late.
Have you got a guess? Good. Answer after the jump.
Washington University, the highly respected research university located in St. Louis, Missouri, is planning to award Phyllis Schlafly with an honorary doctorate.
Wash. U. will honor anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly at commencement. WHAT?
This
is the woman who lives the hypocrisy of having a career that takes her
around the country lecturing "family values" groups on how women should
stay home.
This is the woman who said of husband-wife rape,
"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think
you can call it rape [sic]."
This is the woman who described sex
education classes as "in-home sales parties for abortions." Do her
views fit with the future the men and women of Wash U's graduating
class see for themselves and their peers? Probably not. Then why honor
her with them? Wouldn't having someone like her in the midst of Wash
U's female graduates be incongruous at best, offensive at worst?
E-mail Chancellor Wrighton and let him know what you think! Wrighton@wustl.edu.
Invite your friends, talk about what's going on. This should at least be an issue.
Other people to contact are:
Jane Stone, coordinator of the Board of Trustees: jane_stone@wustl.edu
William Danforth, Chancellor Emeritus: 314-935-9850.
Okay, I'm back. I wonder -- would any university even think of awarding an honorary Ph.D. to a person whose most prominent contribution to American public life was as an anti-civil rights crusader? Or an anti-Semite?
Another thing that is so very disturbing about this is that Phyllis Schlafly holds so many truly nutty views about things other than gender. This is unsurprising, given that she was once a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society (the Birchers, you may remember, believed that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy).
She is deeply anti-intellectual and throughout her life has shown nothing but contempt for the values of scholarship and intellectual honesty. She has also promulgated all manner of bizarre conspiracy theories. For example, she has been identified as one of the leading proponents of conspiracy theories about the National American Union -- the belief that “behind closed doors, the Bush administration has collaborated with
the governments of Mexico and Canada to merge the three nations into
one Socialist mega-state." She has described Mexican immigrants as "invaders" seeking to take control of America.
In short, Schlafly is not just a misogynist who has done great harm to the cause of women's advancement in this country, she's also crazy as a loon about virtually every other issue under the sun. And we are supposed to honor her -- why, exactly?
This is a monstrosity and a farce. If Schlafly is awarded a doctorate, every decent person connected with Washington U should hang their heads in shame. It will be a very sad day indeed for women, for academia, and for America.
Laura Nyro is a part of the template from which my own musical and feminine consciousness was printed. In the back of my mind, I knew Laura had done it, even before I knew what "it" was. It turns out that "it" meant making no apologies, not being a victim, celebrating the voice and exploring how the voice connected to being a woman in the real world. She has done a lot of work for us, as a matriarch, as a singer and songwriter, to make sure we are more comfortable in our own authority, to encourage and defend, to give us permission. Thank you, Laura. It would have been a lot harder without you.
-- Rosanne Cash
With her characteristic eloquence and wisdom, Rosanne Cash puts her finger on one of the things that is so special about Laura Nyro: her songs broke new ground in telling the truth about women's lives. Laura wrote about a female sexuality and women's experiences with a rawness and emotional honesty that, among her contemporaries, only Joni Mitchell would equal. To me, the work of those later female singer/songwriters who also were intimate chroniclers of women's emotional and erotic lives -- artists like Rickie Lee Jones, P.J. Harvey, and Liz Phair, for example -- are simply unimaginable without her.
Laura Nyro was born in the Bronx in 1947, to a Jewish mother and an Italian Catholic father (her birth name was Laura Nigro). She was a remarkable prodigy, writing such classic songs as "And When I Die" and "Wedding Bell Blues" before she was 18. Other artists, such as Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Fifth Dimension, Blood Sweat and Tears, and Barbra Streisand had top 40 hits with the tunes she wrote. (Personally, I think Babs' cover of the torchy "I Never Met to Hurt You" is the best of these).
But what is most remarkable about Laura Nyro are those albums she made in which she sings and plays her own songs. These records -- More than a New Discovery (1967), Eli and the 13th Confession (1968), New York Tendaberry (1969), and Christmas and the Beads of Sweat (1970) -- were like nothing anyone else was doing at the time. Musically, they were complex and formally inventive, an improbable melange of folk music, jazz, gospel, show tunes, and 60s girl-group rock and roll. Lyrically they were wildly, kaleidoscopically poetic and deeply, intensely personal. At the time there were only a handful of others playing the singer/songwriter game at this level. Besides Joni, there was Dylan of course, and Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young. But that was about it, so far as I can see.
Those first four albums were thrilling, and then? Well, after that furious burst of productivity, Laura's creative spigot slowed to a trickle. In 1971, working with the singing group LaBelle, she released an album of cover tunes of 50s and 60s doo wop and girl group hits. That album, Gonna Take a Miracle, is a favorite of mine, and of other fans as well. After that, though, there was nothing I got very excited about. She released four more albums of original material, but I never much cared for her later stuff. She made her most lasting and important contributions with those first four brilliant albums.
What caused Laura to slow down? Well, for one thing, she was a shy and sensitive person who was deeply uncomfortable living her life in the public eye. Her second major stage appearance, at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, was a legendary disaster -- she got booed off the stage, it was said, and she was so crushed she never quite got over it. Only, years later, evidence came to light which indicated that wasn't exactly the case; D.A. Pennebaker, the director of the documentary about Monterey, dug up footage of Laura's performance there which he described as "mesmerizing," with nary a boo to be heard. I've linked to a video of one of her songs from that concert below; you can judge for yourself.
Laura's desire for privacy in her intimate life may also have had something to do with why, periodically and for years at a time, she turned her back on her career. Laura was bisexual; though she married and had a child, and had important relationships with men, her most lasting partnership was with a woman, an artist named Maria Desiderio. Maria was with Laura when she died in 1997, at age 49, of ovarian cancer. The same diseased had also killed Laura's beloved mother, who was the same age as Laura when she died.
Searching for Laura Nyro videos on Youtube was a frustrating experience. In contrast to other divas I've blogged about (such as Dolly Parton, Etta James, etc.), I could find very few clips of Laura performing. Since thsoe were so scarce, I'll also link to some Youtubes that are audio only. And even there, I couldn't find audio of some of her greatest songs, including "The Confession" ("Only now am I a virgin/ I confess"), "Woman's Blues" ("My lover's mouth/Been so good to me"), "New York Tendaberry" ("Sidewalk and pigeon/You look like a city/But you feel like a religion/To me") and others.
We'll start with one of those rare videos of Laura in her prime performing one of her classic songs."Save the Country." Sure, the lyrics are full of pie-in-the-sky 60s utopianism, but they also touch ground upon occasion ("I've got fury in my soul"). And I'll confess, I've always found the song's direct invocation of King and the Kennedys to be quite moving. Plus, Rosanne Cash covered this song and Kanye sampled it, so it's gotta be cool, right?
I'll explain the title of this post in a bit (and trust me, it will be worth the wait).
But first: while reading this fun and informative article about the political culture of Jersey City, New Jersey in Politics magazine, I came across the following quote, from former Jersey City mayor Gerald McCann:
"Politics is a big deal in Jersey City," he says. "Everywhere else the
national pastime might be baseball, but in Jersey City the pastime is
politics."
And it occurred to me: so maybe that's where it comes from -- "it" being my lifelong penchant for political junkiedom. I suppose I get it from my parents, both of whom are Jersey City born and bred. And I myself lived in Jersey City for a few years early on in my life -- in fact, my earliest childhood memories are from that period.
Here's the thing about Jersey City: local politics is indeed the number one obsession there. The other important thing about Jersey City is its longstanding tradition as the most politically corrupt city in America. New Orleans? Chicago? Kansas City? Providence, Rhode Island? Cicero, Illinois? Pikers, all of yiz*!
(*Linguistic note: "yiz" is the Jersey City-ese plural for "you" -- exactly as "youse" is the Brooklynese version of same).
As the Politics article points out, Jersey City has long held a well-deserved reputation on the corruption front. It goes back at least to 1889, when a New York Times story, headlined "Jersey City Corruption," described the city as (in Politics' words) "a hopeless cesspool in which corrupt judges, law enforcement officials,
politicians and the press all interact to operate with equal disregard
for law, ethics or the public good."
My family's history intersects with Jersey City's history. Indeed, my paternal grandfather was a Jersey City Teamster and a ward healer. I'd love to claim that he was a principled lefty who courageously fought the machine and stood up for the rights of workers everywhere, but sadly, the evidence indicates otherwise. Indeed, while Jersey City was very much a Democratic city, its political culture was not progressive at all, not even when it came to labor. Beginning in the 1930s, for example, the city's despotic mayor, Frank Hague, tried to suppress union activities.
Interestingly, both of my parents had a strong visceral reaction to Jersey City's head-to-toe, all-permeating culture of political sleaze: they became conservative Republicans. They tell a story that when they voted for president in 1964, theirs were two of only three votes in their Jersey City precinct for Goldwater (and they never did find out who the mysterious third voter was, either). My dad later became involved in local politics in the town where I grew up. Both my parents remain devout conservatives to this day, though I've spent a frustrating lifetime trying to argue them out of it.
Back to Jersey City -- there is at least one thing to be said in that metropolis's favor: politics there are rarely boring. Indeed, the history of Jersey City is one long, tawdry, albeit richly comic, spectacle. Above all, there are The Mayors. With depressing but predictable regularity, they end up in jail. And even when they don't, many of them blaze new trails in the annals of American buffoonery. Herewith follows a brief rundown of a few of Jersey City's finest.
The invaluable organization STATS, which monitors misreporting about science and statistics in the media, has caught the New York Times misrepresenting the research on breastfeeding. The Times recently reported that:
Studies have shown that children who are fed formula have increased risks of ear and respiratory infections, obesity, diabetes and even cancer.
Only, for the most part, they don't. As STATS explains, while there is "robust evidence" that breastfeeding decreases the risks of ear infections and diarrhea, the evidence concerning the impact of breastfeeding on respiratory infections, diabetes, and cancer is unclear at best.
STATS continues:
But not all women can breast-feed or can breast-feed all the time.
Nevertheless, the government has decided that women should do so as a
matter of public health policy, and the way to get them to do that, it
would seem, is to scare them into nursing by over-stating the risks and
playing up limited research on the risks of formula. Unfortunately too,
the Times has continued to give uncritical support to this campaign by
using a journalistic formula of its own.
The point that not all women can breastfeed cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Some women are physically unable to do so -- their breasts do not produce enough milk, and their babies risk starvation if the mother relies on her breast milk alone. The relentless guilt-tripping "breast is best" propaganda can be quite harmful in cases like these.
