Before the pandemic, for my birthday each year I’d roast a whole lechon in my Oakland yard and invite anyone I could to help eat it. It’s an odd tradition, but many Filipinos celebrate their birthdays by being the ones to treat their friends and family at the celebrant’s expense. For a social introvert like me, holding a pig roast turned out to be a smart move because I was able to gather all of my favorite people in the same place while being too busy roasting a pig to talk for too long. And if I got to share with them a little taste of home, even better.
I’d like to say I began roasting whole pigs out of a desire to share the food customs of my people. I’ve grown prouder of being Filipino as I’ve grown older, but it wasn’t always easy. Growing up in areas where Filipinos weren’t so common, I was bullied for many, many things, and the Filipino food my mom sometimes packed for school lunch was one of them. On those days I’d need to look for isolated corners of the schoolyard just so I could eat my chicken adobo and garlic rice without classmates pointing, staring, and running away because they didn’t know any better. I remember being so embarrassed one time by how the sinigang in my packed lunch smelled that I snuck out before eating to throw it away so no one would know it was mine.
Even today, as Filipino cuisine hits more levels of mainstream, there’s a mix of pride and saltiness in me that the food I was once teased for, that I was forced to hide in the shadows, was now becoming trendy. It’s hard to know how to feel when Rachael Ray decides to put her own strange twist on a Filipino classic, when at the end of the day it still helps bring awareness to Filipino food as a whole. In some ways roasting a pig resolves that tension, to be part of this arrival and bring it full center in my own world, on my own terms.
The truth is I actually began roasting pigs because someone said I couldn’t. It was a dream I’d casually talked about with friends, until someone I barely knew told me it was impossible, that it was too much work and so far from his norm that it wasn’t worth doing. Little did that long-forgotten person know that aside from pork, aside from karaoke and Catholicism, another Filipino pastime is a stubborn resolve to prove people wrong about them. I didn’t know the first thing about roasting a pig, and I was very young when I’d last experienced one in the Philippines, but our national hero, Jose Rizal, taught us Filipinos that we are capable of literally anything and everything. (Aside from being a revolutionary writer, he was a biologist, ophthalmologist, painter, and fencer, as well as a fluent speaker of 22 languages.) With a little hater juice to fuel us, not even the colonial Spanish could keep us down.
It turned out roasting a pig is quite a labor of love, and I couldn’t just roast it the way I’d wanted: on a spit over fire with an apple in its mouth while friends took turns spinning it. The best way to cook a pig evenly, I found out, is to spatchcock it like you would a chicken. (It also turns out butchers don’t have whole pigs on hand, and that first time I luckily snagged an order with the local butcher just in time for pig day.)
Jayo Miko Macasaquit
Jayo Miko MacasaquitJayo Miko Macasaquit
For each roast, I’d build an aboveground roaster from cement blocks, following wonderful advice from some folks in Miami, and wire together large grill plates and iron to sandwich the pig for roasting. I’d later learn to weld so the plates are more structurally sound. The pig needs to be marinated—I chose a citrus and oregano mojo, also from the Miami folks—in an ice tub overnight. Years later I learned to inject it with the marinade using a giant syringe, plugging holes with garlic and salting every crevice for a better roast. Roasting the same way each year didn’t feel right, and besides, I had something to prove. That guy whose name I can’t remember—I had to prove him wrong, or something.
On the big day, the pig would roast for almost eight hours, and each hour I’d pour fresh coal in. Guests trickling in were recruited to the kitchen to chop fruit, or if they were lucky they’d be pulled into rolling mountains of lumpia for the deep fryer. As the eight-hour mark grew near, I’d ask for help flipping the pig, removing layers of brick, and cranking the heat, the secret to perfect crackling. With guests hungrier by the hour, the cooked pig then needed to rest (in plain view) for a torturous few minutes. After it rested, I’d stand at a station with a big cleaver, thick rubber gloves, and an apron, and hack gleefully away at pig meat while filling the plates of people lined up. Dogs milled about the table and under plates, looking to score. Laughter, singing, slurps, Beyoncé, and the haze of Oakland fall would fill that street well into the early evening.
As the roast wound down and only my closest friends remained, I’d sit somewhere in the yard with them, quietly content as they talked around me, eyes rested on the dull embers of the pit growing fainter with the night.
Jayo Miko MacasaquitJayo Miko Macasaquit
Jayo Miko Macasaquit is Mother Jones’ human resources director. Share comments and Recharge story tips at recharge@motherjones.com.
Restaurants are still reeling from the pandemic, but opportunities are growing to transform the industry and explore new models for survival. Tune in Thursday for a conversation with chef and restaurateur Tunde Wey, One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman, chef and owner of Reem’s California Reem Assil, and Mother Jones senior editor Maddie Oatman as they unpack how the pandemic has laid bare fundamental inequalities but also primed restaurants to remake the industry.
The devastation couldn’t be more severe. Yesterday, India recorded its highest single-day death toll from COVID for the ninth consecutive day, and the highest new number of cases anywhere in the world. But the United States announced it’s immediately shipping supplies and tapping “every resource at our disposal” for aid, including rapid testing kits, oxygen, protective gear, and vaccine material.
The pledge is reactive, not proactive, but it’s a big step. On the moral and medical questions, there’s an excellent interview, published yesterday, by New Yorker writer Daniel A. Gross with philosopher Peter Singer, whose pioneering texts on effective altruism—how to do the most good—contain a prescription for pandemic relief. “Where does responsibility lie for making the distribution more equitable?” Singer’s answer persuasively compares pandemic aid to climate action: “Governments should be getting together so that the burden is distributed equitably among affluent nations, just as we get together in the Paris agreement.”
It’s not a controversial idea, but he welcomes controversy on other fronts. Last week he co-launched the peer-reviewed Journal of Controversial Ideas, “a response,” Singer says, “to a worrying trend of restricting freedom of thought and discussion, including in academic life.” The journal focuses on lightning-rod ideas without fear of intimidation by “petitions or letters signed against them,” a fear that backfoots many early-career academics and media workers who wouldn’t chance their comfort or employment to discuss and defend essential questions. Which is how Singer got his own start, planting a flag for concepts, including animal rights, that land crosswise for many carnivores and traditionalists who steer clear of his philosophy. The journal is “particularly aimed at protecting junior academics who don’t have tenure.”
The full Q&A is worth a read. Whether the journal itself meets a high bar, decide for yourself. But if unflinching academic analysis makes you queasy, brace for impact. For the faint of philosophical heart, turn instead to the 10th-anniversary edition of his book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty.
Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.
The word “downsizing” seems to have been downsized.
Looking back in the newspaper archives, there is a steep climb from 1990 to 1996 in the use of the word “downsizing” in stories. Then, it levels off—much higher than before, but well below its peak—and it plods along from there. Personally, I haven’t heard it in a few years. (Except for that Alexander Payne movie, which I reviewed long ago.) We have other terms for the horror of losing your job: laid off, fired, let go. Downsizing now might even refer more often to empty nesters scaling down to a smaller house as the nuclear family cools its reactors with kids off to college. (My personal formative experience with downsizing was Office Space.)
Downsizing refers to slashing jobs in a more permanent sense. It means restructuring and cutting the assumed fat; it would lead to some slim, slick world of only real jobs. These marks of efficiency seem to fit a certain era we’ve passed. (Sorry…that I hope we’ve passed.) It certainly makes sense it would congeal with Democrats saying the era of big government is “over.” And as the free trade consensus under President Bill Clinton implemented neoliberal reforms that fundamentally changed the market—and welcomed globalization with too little discussions of labor—perhaps downsizing fit the moment: a bit of fancy speak for the idea that it was a good thing to be losing jobs. It’s funny to think it became about the empty nesters. The irony of a generation throwing away what was necessary even if the kids were still in the house.
In 1996, at the peak, Mother Jones wrote about “The Wages of Downsizing.” A small piece, it begins with a scene of the author bemoaning those calling the middle of the 1990s a boom time for jobs (including a dig at economist Joseph Stiglitz, who would later win a Nobel Prize). And then it turns, unexpectedly, into a small parody piece. It gives you a list of questions to ask if you’re worried about being downsized. And I think we can just end with reprinting them:
Is a corporate layoff lurking in your future? Ask yourself these 10 questions:
1. When you get up the guts to say “promote me or lose me,” does your boss show concern, or a sudden fondness for counting ceiling dots?
2. Does your paycheck remind you of that old Led Zeppelin album The Song Remains the Same?
3. Has your boss asked, “What kind of future do you see for yourself here?”
4. Do you feel your company’s product is an eight-track cassette in a CD world?
5. Are you merging with another company whose CEO is nicknamed “The Guillotine”?
6. Did you get a memo saying your performance review has been “canceled until further notice”?
7. Does your Christmas bonus give you visions of Bob Cratchit?
8. Are you the highest-paid person in a department where business isn’t exactly booming?
9. Have your job responsibilities been trimmed back to the point where you’ve got time to rearrange your desk accessories—daily?
10. Do executives repeatedly cancel meetings you’ve scheduled because of “time constraints”? Do you then see them outside, playing lawn volleyball instead?
If you answered yes to several of these questions, your job may be headed for the chopping block.
Yesterday’s murder conviction marks an extremely rare moment of accountability in a history of killings by police too often unrecorded, unacknowledged, unpunished. It’s a moment of cautious exhalation, relief, and some celebration. It’s also a reminder of how much work there is to do. Let us know how you’re processing it. Is there a recharge for you? Is it a clear inflection point or an isolated respite from violence so entrenched and expected that the verdict feels overshadowed by the untold number of charges never brought? Let us know:
One recharge, if you’re looking for it, is a reminder from history: “Tyranny hates memory,” as the essayist Tom Christensen wrote in his book River of Ink: Literature, History, Art, a mapping of civilizations. He’s writing not about policing in the United States but about the role of memory in resisting tyranny that thrives on the obliteration of memory. And he’s connecting the dots between memorials to books and memorials to lives, between democracy and organizing, each attacked with impunity by the powerful parties of state, god, police, or all three throughout history.
Tyranny hates memory, he writes, because oppression flourishes when it can crush its first disinfectant, which is witnessing. But memory, witnessing, documenting—each is preservable. Each is a recharge. Let us know how you’re feeling after the verdict of Derek Chauvin.
Historically, 4/20 means one thing above all: observing, as one does, the anniversary of the first pasteurization test, named after Louis Pasteur, whose invention in 1862 improved food safety by eliminating pathogens and extending shelf life. 4/20 is also the 119th anniversary of Marie and Pierre Curie’s Nobel-winning work on radioactivity, and it’s the day, in 2008, when Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an IndyCar race.
Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton would be 113 today, and it’s the 516th anniversary of something graver—the banishing of Jews by Philibert of Luxembourg at the instigation of a bishop. It’s also the day when the historic verdict in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial is expected. 4/20 means many things to many readers, a reminder to expand, not cement, our intuitive understanding of calendar and culture. Your banner day, your dominant chord, and your frame of reference and salience lead only so far.
But on 4/20, another pattern emerges: In language lies history. Eponyms like “pasteurization” get stripped of capitalization through culture: “petri dish,” named after Julius Richard Petri; “saxophone,” Adolphe Sax; “diesel,” Rudolf Diesel; “mausoleum,” Mausolus; “nicotine,” the French ambassador to Portugal Jean Nicot, all associations faded by familiarity and living in use. As Lawrence Weschler once wrote, “Wasn’t it Pound, I think, who said, ‘Culture is what happens when we begin to forget sources’—maybe not, maybe it was somebody else.”
Pound, or Weschler—maybe it was somebody else—was right to a degree but wrong in a deeper political sense. Culture is what gets elided, erased, or transmuted, not made, when we (“we”?) begin to forget sources.
But in the spirit it’s meant, it’s wisdom. You don’t need to know Nicot to mark yesterday’s nicotine news: The Biden administration is considering making tobacco companies reduce nicotine levels in all US-sold cigarettes so they’re no longer addictive, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Maloney. I’ll believe it when I see it, or see it when I believe it.
Each Friday, we bring you a look at our archives to propel you into the weekend.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm’s last section of his final book in a series tracing the history of the world over the past few centuries is titled “The Landslide.” It begins in the early 1970s. He published the book in 1994. For the left—and Hobsbawm was a leftist, a committed one; his critics would lambast his staying aligned with communists even after the terrors of Stalin’s reign were revealed—the 1990s seem to have been frustrating times.
Looking back, what happened? Did the left lose? This is the era in which some decided there was an end to history. (That’s off now, by the way.) Bill Clinton was coming to power in the United States as an austerity-minded Democrat; Tony Blair was on the rise in the United Kingdom (Hobsbawm warned that Blair was “Thatcherism in trousers.”) And, of course, the Berlin Wall had fallen.
There’s an excellent new documentaryabout Hobsbawm on the YouTube channel of the London Review of Books. You don’t need to really know anything about him, or his work, to enjoy it. (I’m sitting here with a massive reading list, unsure exactly how this keeps happening—some great thinker of some age unknown to me.) It traces something we hear passingly as the rise of neoliberalism. (And please forgive me my sins, dear Lord; you do not have to email me about how exactly you define neoliberalism—I just admitted I learned about Hobsbawm this week; I’m working on it.)
Hobsbawm’s trajectory neatly traces the narrative I’ve seen in Mother Jones’ archives. In the 1990s, there is a crisis, and it is pegged as having started sometime in the 1970s. In 1996 we published a short piece titled “What’s Left?” Here’s what we asked Noam Chomsky and a few others:
What happened to the movement that integrated America, stopped the costly war in Vietnam, and opened workplace doors for women? Several commentators offer opinions on where the left went wrong and where it should go.
It’s an interesting phrasing of the question. Hobsbawm seems to note that this is a world phenomenon, a global wreckage of the post-USSR order. We phrase it more as a moral failing in the United States. There is also an idea that what happened here was not the forces of history driving austerity politics and toppling a “golden age” after the war (Hobsbawm’s description of it). Instead, it is us. We, the left, have failed. We “went wrong.”
Three of the four people we asked in 1996 answered something akin to: Identity (or grievance) politics is splitting up the left. The other answer says the left kept taking in false moderates and centrists. (Hobsbawm was not a lover of identity politics. It had whiffs of a nationalism he disliked and feared from his experience living in Berlin as Hitler rose to power.)
I’d be curious if this “What’s left?” question would be answered differently today. Or if the question would be phrased in this way—as in what we did wrong. Some would still lambast identity politics (I disagree); others would hate the left’s flirtations with centrist austerity (I find this appealing). The most provocative thing may be the degree to which, ironically, leftists rarely focus on the larger structure of this debate. The grand forces of history are cast aside. Isn’t that what we did?
There are many reasons to mark the moment in chess, especially if you study the game and the history of human rights movements that run through it. The expansion of educational opportunities is a growing feature, in focus this weekend during ChessKid’s inaugural online tournament for girls and women in the United States.
One of the awards is the opportunity for the top 10 kids in each section to join a camp instructed by every US champion of this century, including Jennifer Shahade, Irina Krush, Anna Zatonskih, Jennifer Yu, Rusa Goletiani, Sabina Foiser, and others. Shahade is an acclaimed broadcaster and educator, and Krush is phenomenal at every aspect of competition. (Krush beat me handily when we were both kids in a team matchup with world champion Anatoly Karpov, the greatest evisceration in my early memory.) Family plaques await the top three mother-daughter pairs in K through 3rd grade, 4th through 5th grades, 6th through 8th grades, and 9th through 12th grades, with individual and team prizes.
If you’re new to the strategies and tactics, consider: There are more possible games in chess than the number of atoms in the known universe: 10^120 games, 10^81 atoms. Read up on the inaugural event, and share Recharge tips at recharge@motherjones.com.
Little, if anything, is laugh-worthy in the news right now, but the catharsis, joy, and recharge of laughter are available if you do some digging.
The year is 1964. The setting: a festival in Antibes, France. The band is 21-year-old George Benson on guitar, Brother Jack McDuff on organ, Red Holloway on saxophone, and Joe Dukes on drums. The music is scorching. The laugh isn’t yours—it’s Holloway’s.
Minutes in, he replicates a bursting laugh through his horn, a familiar technique in improvisational swing of the era but rarely accomplished with such expressive vitality on video. The laugh is teed up here, and Benson gets in on it, circling his arm behind Holloway during the laugh, and fashioning another sound on guitar that you’re bound to recognize. You can see, hear, feel, or imagine how much tension and release are coded in these moments, designed for a crowd but deployed for themselves.
The MacArthur Foundation has awarded a New York-based nonprofit $100 million to expand efforts to eliminate homelessness in 75 communities across the country within five years. Community Solutions was chosen out of six finalists in the competition, with a track record of housing more than 235,000 people in the past decade.
But numbers tell just part of the story. For a personalized portrait of a housing crisis that predated the coronavirus pandemic, and is compounded by it, watch this short new documentary. At eight minutes long, it centers on a woman living in a tent encampment before the city of Oakland bulldozed it. Voice of America acquired Living in a Tent from producers Deana Mitchell and Wendi Jonassen, and it cuts powerfully through the policy headlines to do narrative justice to an unjust story, with inside-the-tent interviews and carefully framed footage that respects the multidimensional experiences of who is telling the story.
The film and grant come on the heels of the United Nations designating the Bay Area housing crisis “systemic cruelty.” And the doc is crushing. It’s also illuminating, pairing urgency with deeply observed storytelling. More than half a million people experienced homelessness before the pandemic on any given night in this country. There’s a recharge to be found in filmmakers doing the hard-to-thread work of unpacking a crisis too often shorthanded or underreported in the media.
A good rule to live by is always stay skeptical of world days as substitutes or surrogates for action year-round, but not so skeptical that you underestimate a healthy reminder to effect change. World Emoji Day is July 17, but who’s arguing emojis don’t deserve year-round campaigns? World Tuna Day, May 2, crucial around the clock. And don’t get reporter Rebecca Leber started on Earth Day as little more than a “trite” blip on corporate calendars for PR stunts, she says in her scathing “I’m an Environmental Reporter and I Hate Earth Day.”
But some days are singularly beneficial, like World Health Day, sponsored yesterday by the World Health Organization. As the repercussions of the pandemic reverberate, health deserves a day. Every day. Take time if you can. Observe your health with three tips:
1. Consult a doctor before ingesting Recharge advice, but barring any reason not to, get yourself vitamin D if you’re sunlessly indoors. Just don’t buy the myth that it prevents or mitigates COVID-19, put to rest by Harvard Health’s senior faculty editor Dr. Robert Shmerling, who reported Monday that a “randomized controlled study of people with moderate to severe COVID-19 who received a high dose of vitamin D showed no benefit” in recovery or risk reduction. But nutritional value persists.
2. Billie Holiday would have turned 106 yesterday. Here’s a recording that gets nowhere near the shares or airtime it deserves, from a rehearsal in 1956: “My Yiddishe Momme.” The baby in the background is her godchild Bevan Dufty, future member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and director of Bay Area Rapid Transit. Rejuvenation is health too. This brings it.
3. A clear mind doesn’t hurt, so let me settle a small debate: Your well-being is your wellbeing, no hyphen. Never mind the Los Angeles Times opinion writer who insisted weeks ago that everyone hyphenate well-being as “the correct form”: “Teenagers used to be teen-agers. Cellphones used to be cell phones. Email used to be e-mail. So it’s understandable that writers would start compressing well-being into wellbeing. In fact, I see it a lot. But the closed form isn’t in major dictionaries yet and, until it is, ‘well-being’ remains the correct form.’”
Sorry to break it to you, but I hereby announce, effective today, by the authority vested in me as Mother Jones’ copy wrangler, that “wellbeing” is closed up in our style guide, just for you. Begone, hyphen. Wellbeing is an intact concept and should be an intact word. But if hyphenating serves your individual, organizational, or reader health, go with it.
Bonus tip: Stop chewing gum. It’s mostly unhealthy, unless you don’t mind your genetic code dug up 5,700 years from now like this wad of gum from the Stone Age, whose chewer, scientists say, was a young Danish woman.
The New York Times has a touching obituary of the New York poet Robert Hershon, who died this week at 84. Across a 50-odd-year career, Hershon and his collaborators at the “self-editing” Hanging Loose Press—it started life as a binder of looseleaf poems you were free to keep or discard as you liked—published work by the writers Denise Levertov, Maggie Nelson, Cathy Park Hong, and Ha Jin, among countless others.
In a 2002 profile, a Brooklyn Rail interviewer recalled meeting Hershon and leaving with a pile of literature:
“One of the reasons the press has lasted so long is that we get a kick out of it,” Hershon says, choosing an armful of books to give me before I leave. “And one of the pleasures of a press is to be able to give books away.”…Then, glancing through the pile, he adds a book of his own. “There’s my old head,” he quips of a younger-looking jacket photograph, “I don’t know how I lost it.”
Hanging Loose’s first office, before it was a true press, was the legendary McSorley’s bar on Manhattan’s East Seventh Street; Hershon and his collaborators soon landed in Brooklyn digs, before small Brooklyn presses were a thing, and eventually bounced back to the island—powered throughout by Hershon’s tireless enthusiasm, love of new writers, and subversive wit. The Times obit reprints his “F Stop,” a subway poem from 1985:
Don’t push. There is another F train right behind us.
There’s another F that’s faster and finer than this F is. It serves French fries and frog legs. All the seats face front and are covered with monkey fur. A flutist plays melodies in F. It’s an infinitely superior F train. It’s right behind us. Why don’t you wait?
Ah, because we know the
faces of those for whom
the trains have never come.
And we fear that what finally
roars from that sour tunnel
is fury itself. There is another F train right behind us.
Let some other fool wait.
And they start the push
toward home.
Poetry is more interesting than reporters talking about it, so go read the obituary and then read his work.
An ambitious new series, Solutions Cinema, is off to a strong start. The monthlong festival searches for action and accountability around entrenched injustices through a slate of interactive films. Instead of one-directional storytelling, the 12 films are coupled with audience dialogue, including panels with filmmakers, featured characters, and students. Free screenings range widely, from a portrait of an Oakland high school’s reckoning with COVID-19 by director Peter Nicks, interviewed before by Mother Jones’ Brandon Patterson, to a documentary about grassroots journalism by Dalit women in India defying threats of violence and intimidation, by directors Rintus Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh.
The two, Homeroom and Writing With Fire, top my list. There’s another, about migrant laborers in Italy and Côte d’Ivoire (The Invisibles), and a timely documentary about South Africa’s escalating water scarcity (The Water Queen), along with a look at indigenous people in Mexico defending their community (Cherán: The Burning Hope). What’s uniquely promising here—the festival runs throughout April, launched by Doha Debates and Maine’s Point North Institute—is more than the scope and scale. It’s the basic premise, a kind of wager that is vanishingly incentivized in much of today’s media: a bid for dialogue instead of monologue. An effort to learn and unlearn. And an affirmation that audiences are drivers, not passengers, of cinema. The goal of engaging across divides without false equivalencies or neutrality, and finding that sweet spot, needs amplifying.
As my colleague Maddie Oatman wrote in her interview with the musician Jake Blount back in December, “genres” are neatly parceled networks of marketability, a bit of code to construct artistic expression as a workable commodity. The banjo player and fiddler feels “compelled,” he says, to unpack “boundaries between genres that were created specifically to divide music by who was playing it and who was listening—because that’s where genre comes from.” He wants instead to “highlight the interconnectedness of very different traditions” of Gullah music, blues, jazz, bluegrass, and spirituals.
His interview has stayed with me. It jumped to mind as I scrolled and stumbled through Every Noise at Once, a living archive of all genres in the world. The website maps “an algorithmically generated…scatter-plot of the musical genre space based on data tracked and analyzed for 5,304 genre-shaped distinctions…as of 2021-03-30…Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like. Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract, or combust.”
Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.
Today it was announced that Larry McMurtry, one of the great novelists of his time, died. He was 84. A writer of the American West, McMurtry is often remembered for his classic Lonesome Dove. It is, according to our reporter Tim Murphy, worth the read (however long). As Tim joked in recommending it today: “[melville dies] ‘read Moby Dick if you haven’t.'” But McMurtry wasn’t just a writer of cowboys and horses. His incisive novels became classic films, like The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. I haven’t dug in, but I’ve also heard a few mentions of McMurtry’s work for the New York Review of Books. (My own experience with McMurtry is mainly through his son, James McMurtry, who has made some of my favorite albums of the last 20 years.)
Michael Mechanic, a senior editor here—with a book out soon on the inner lives of the rich (order!)—interviewed McMurtry in 2014. Give it a read. I particularly liked this quick back and forth in which McMurtry swats down the annoying interpretations of Lonesome Dove he has seen:
You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you’d intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?
Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.
No hugging sprees just yet, but yes, senior centers and assisted-living homes are easing restrictions following loosened federal guidelines for vaccinated adults. Ninety-four-year-old Gloria Winston of Rhode Island rejoiced in an interview with the Associated Press: “This is the beginning of the very best to come, hopefully, for all of us” who are fortunate enough to emerge safely from isolation. “We need the nourishment of each other.”
“The hug I got was just unimaginable, how much it made me feel,” a vaccinated Ohio resident said. Policies vary by state and facility, but reviews are underway. Almost 1.5 million long-term-care residents are fully vaccinated, along with 1 million staffers, according to the CDC, underscoring the mounting toll of isolation and the healing effect of vaccine-enabled hugs.
See you soon. Let’s meet for that Recharge picnic, all quarter-million subscribers to this newsletter. I’ll make spanakopita. You bring that cucumber-mint thing you keep emailing about. Or cantaloupe. We’re not picky. Hmm, 217,466 subscribers. Maybe we should call it off. We’d need a ton of phyllo dough. Some of you can’t even have feta. Spanakopita without feta is like a newsletter without music, so here, in the name of reportorial vigor, is your daily lift: The Rascals’ “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” Let us know how your day’s going at recharge@motherjones.com.
A few weeks ago, Recharge boosted you with the good news that you can hear the first sounds ever recorded on the surface of Mars. Well, now there’s more. NASA released the sounds of the Mars rover’s wheels as they clank across the planet’s surface. “The sounds were picked up by one of the two onboard microphones. This audio is taken from a 16-minute sequence recorded during a 27m-drive on 7 March,” says the BBC.
My take on space noises? They’re cool. And, dare I say it, weird. The second sounds from Mars are like you’re inside a metal can being thrown down a stairwell (at least to me).
As last time, this is an opportunity to pontificate, long and hard, on the connection between our planetary existence and sound. My colleague Daniel King scratched together a Mars playlist (Mars Volta, Bruno Mars, Mars Breslow, John Coltrane’s “Mars”). But I’m going to give myself more leeway here. A few “space” albums or songs I’d listen to post-rover noises: “Spaced Out on Your Love,” by Errol Stubbs; the album Guitar in the Space Age! by Bill Frisell; and (sorry, a weird one) the art “recording project” writ album Captured Space, released just last year. Finish off with “Spaced Cowboy” by Sly & the Family Stone, one of the greatest songs of all time, and you’re good to go.
Do you have a “space” playlist? Are you going to get mad at me about the “Spaced Cowboy” hot take or just realize I’m right? Email us at recharge@motherjones.com.
“I say to my students all the time, ‘If you want to learn how to write, if you want to learn history, listen to jazz,'” Nikki Giovanni said Tuesday in a livestream with bassist Christian McBride and poet Evie Shockley, presented by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. They converged on a trio of themes—the sculpting of sound, the pairing of words, and the making of movements for change.
Giovanni’s poetry lands in a lineage of writers and educators including Thulani Davis, featured here before, whose new book, Nothing But the Music, is a must-read of musical impressions, improvisation, and insight. The New York Times on Friday ran a spectacular feature on Davis—the first woman to win a Grammy for best album liner notes—by Daphne A. Brooks. Which leads me to a question and, I think, one of its answers: When do notes line the music, and when does music accompany the vivid language of the notes? When they illuminate each other, bringing you closer to each, you’ve got the creative core of Davis’ work.
An extra Recharge: Thanks to readers who wrote in with tributes to drummer Roy Haynes on his 96th birthday, adding to the 22 musicians we interviewed:
You’ve given me lifetimes of joy and I come home to you every day. Bless you and thank you. I will always come back to your playing. It is the best of life. —Michael T.
Happy birthday to the still-reigning king of percussion, Roy Haynes. Your session at Newport with John Coltrane is the most potent hymn to freedom and the future that I’ve ever experienced. I wish you and all your brothers and sisters everything that you and Trane played and implied. Thank you for the blessings you continue to lay on my ears and my life. Back at ya, infinitely multiplied. Live long and enjoy.
—Scarlet T.
Happy birthday, many more. Chicago fan. Enjoy snap crackle for 60 years. Stay healthy and safe. —Albin C.
Snap, crackle, and oh my God he’s still got pop too! Have a great birthday. —Joe V.
Thanks for the memories and stories of Roy, one of my inspirations as a drummer. Saw him play trio at Jazz Alley in Seattle when suddenly this [very drunk listener] gets on the stage between encores screaming, “We love you, Roy!” He’s standing in front of his drums sipping his brandy while [this person] is pounding his drums. The pianist and bass player pack up while Roy in his cowboy hat and snakeskin boots just stands there with a big smile watching. Security escorts her offstage and the band comes back for one more. —Jud S.
God bless you, Roy. Your longevity gives and sustains life for the great art form you helped to create. Meeting you and jamming with you at places like the Steer Inn, Sonny’s Place, and Gerald’s and listening to your recordings gave my musical life a great lift and inspiration to live performing, composing, and recording. You are the greatest. I hope I get to see you once more. —Greg B.
The signature sound, pulse, stamina, and versatility of Roy Haynes, who turns 96 today, run as deep as the musicians who treasure him express here. For his birthday, I spoke with more than 20 musicians, each invoking a story that anchors Haynes in the pantheon of postwar jazz.
What emerges is not just reverence but a reflection of American rhythm over the 20th and 21st centuries. Haynes swung with Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, opening a new path by creating a language within a language. He expanded time instead of just marking it, freeing his hands to play above, around, and across the beat. He has become, as Wayne Shorter says, “a champion”—or, in the words of Mary Lou Williams, “the greatest drummer in the world.”
The interviews, conducted this week, have been edited and condensed. Hit the arrow at the right to return to the top.
Roy! Haynes! Drumming has always existed—someone’s always hit something and made a sound—but then comes Roy Haynes to spark imagination and wonder beyond rhythm and dancing and the pulse of life. Thank God for Roy in his 96th year. I’ve seen him several times, and when you do, you’re changed, your life is enriched. That’s what the music is about, and certainly what he’s been a vessel of his entire life. When you think of Thelonious Monk or Charlie Parker or Trane or Chick, you think Roy Haynes. He plays with levity and depth and so much joy. He’d have his left foot on the leg of the hi-hat stand, not even playing it. Like a dancer. Off the ground.
Dee Dee Bridgewater, vocalist:
There was one time Roy and McCoy were playing on a program, and Roy took a solo. I’ll never forget, he just stood up and started tapping. Oh my lord. I had never seen him tap. I knew he did, but what a moment. He taps like he plays drums. I love everything about Roy Haynes, and we both love cowboys. In the ’90s he was always wearing cowboy boots, so my idea was to get him to do a country-western album [laughs]. I remember we were honoring Max Roach at a tribute up in Harlem, and we were in the green room, and Roy had on some mean cowboy boots. I said, “We gotta do this album,” and he started singing, “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em!”
When he turned 90, I went to see him at the Blue Note, and whenever I see him it feels like he’s just dancing behind the drums. If he insists on getting to the bandstand at 96, baby I’mma try and be there.
Terri Lyne Carrington, drummer and founder of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice:
I’m indebted to Roy. Words can’t express my gratitude for the inspiration he’s given me since I was a kid. I met Roy when I was very young—he would let me sit in on his kit and encourage me as a young girl who wanted to play the drums and had potential. The most important thing is people actually mentoring—mentoring moments. Roy is the hippest, the one I gravitated to when I started teaching, making sure my students check him out. My generation may cite Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette, but I know for a fact that Jack’s biggest influences were Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones. I keep telling my students to go back to Roy, that they’re missing the whole boat if they don’t go to Roy and take a deep dive.
Roy has so much magic. I’d just humbly say thank you—and people bullshit and say stuff like this all the time, but I truly mean it—for providing so much inspiration. He knows I love him dearly. Roy’s way of making the drum set more fluid is unparalleled. He had and has the freedom to move away from 2 and 4, and make the drum set one sound. But you never miss the element of oomph. His playing makes me see other possibilities for myself.
Roy Haynes in 1999
Jack Vartoogian/Getty
Marilyn Crispell, pianist:
Everything that exists vibrates.
It’s been said that we live in a universe
Composed of music
Recurrent beats from our own heartbeats
To seemingly random or chaotic beats
Part of a pattern too large to see
Waves of a universal pulse.
Happy birthday, Roy.
I played with Anthony Braxton for many years, and I was thinking of his concept of a pulse, like a wave and the phrases that fit it, with a crest and a valley. That larger picture has its own beat, and Roy plays that larger pattern.
Andrew Cyrille, drummer:
When you hear Roy and he’s playing with Thelonious Monk, you know it’s not Frankie Dunlop. You know it’s not Art Blakey. You know it’s not Ben Riley. You know it’s Roy Haynes. There’s a name given to Roy’s playing called Snap, Crackle, Pop. He has a way of assigning rhythm that’s different from other drummers, approaching those beats and the fractions within a bar that gives you a signature, and Roy’s always had a distinct one.
I remember talking to Max when I was a youngster—he was playing at Smalls Paradise—and after he played, I walked over and said, “Max, you played everything,” and he said, “No, I didn’t play everything. There’s a whole universe out there. If you want to find something for yourself, go out there.” That opened the door for me. Roy does too.
Billy Drummond, drummer:
One time I’m playing the Charlie Parker Festival. Max Roach is there, playing solo drums, and he sees Roy in the audience and pulls him onstage and the two of them are telling stories about their time with Charlie Parker. Which was already cool. Roy had just come from a car show where he’d won a trophy for his vintage Bricklin SV-1, which has gull wing doors, like the DeLorean from Back to the Future. After the festival, I’m on my way home and I come across Roy just sitting alone in his car, with the wings up, chilling with his trophy in the back and a cooler with ice and champagne. I say, “Hey, Mr. Haynes!” And he says, “Man, you want some champagne?” And we just hang out. I’m asking all these questions about Trane and Newk and Bud Powell. Just me and Roy on a side street in New York, drinking champagne. In his Bricklin! I got somebody walking by to take a picture of us. I have a few Roy Haynes stories, but encounters like that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
Every time I see Roy play, it’s a lesson in the mastery of what I’m trying to do. I make a beeline to see him at every opportunity. There’s a clip of him in the ’40s with Lester Young really breaking up time, playing syncopated rhythms that set the template for what came decades later. That’s why he’s the freshest, the hippest no matter what setting. And still is.
Tia Fuller, saxophonist:
Two years ago I got the chance to play with Roy for the Pixar film Soul, and he was an embodiment of history and extraordinary energy. He had more energy than all of us put together. Just to see him not only behind the drums, but I got video of him playing on piano—90-something years old. Here he is having played with all the greats, a legend, and still jumping into this music as optimistic as when he first picked up an instrument. That’s worth volumes.
Roy Haynes in 2008
Richard Ecclestone/Redferns/Getty
Marcus Gilmore, drummer:
He’s my grandfather first, but he’s also my hero in a lot of ways on the instrument. Just a blessing every day. He’s one of the most important musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, that degree of wisdom and information, a learning experience. Not literally “How do you do this?” but being around him, his energy. We’ve always had a special connection. And it’s good you’re talking to Terri. She’s known him a very long time, coming up in Massachusetts together. My grandfather knew her grandfather, and Terri’s been in the community forever, came up in that community between grandpops and Jack DeJohnette.
Tammy Hall, pianist:
Mary Lou Williams comes to mind. She recorded an album with Roy Haynes in 1976 called A Grand Night for Swinging. She said, “He is the greatest drummer in the world.”
I used to be a little skeptical of that—not necessarily his ability, because he is great and one of the most innovative—but I remember first hearing her say that. I thought, “Really? The greatest?” But yes! I agree! Yes, he is the greatest drummer in the world.
I’m working on a piece right now about Mary Lou Williams called Convergence, where she and Nina Simone and Hazel Scott and Dorothy Donegan all meet up in Paris. It’s an oral tradition, an experiential one, and Roy is a mentor to many. I know one of his mentees, a young drummer who’s brilliant, Darrell Green. He’s learned a lot from Roy.
Billy Hart, drummer:
The last time I saw Roy was a year ago, and he still sounds fantastic in his 90s. I remember him at the Vanguard. When I was a teenager, a guy came up to me and said, “Have you checked out Roy? No? Well, you better get on it right away.” When I heard Roy’s recordings, there was my dream played out for me. I went up to Roy and said, “How you doing, Haynes?” And he looked at me and said, “How you doin’, Haynes?” [laughs] I mean, we’ve had Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Roy Haynes. It just keeps going and it’s made an impact. God bless Roy.
Louis Hayes, drummer:
I’d like to give my regards to Roy’s family, such a magnificent family, especially his daughter and two sons and his grandson, Marcus. My respect and regards to all of them, a big part of Roy’s life. Family and community are very important to me, and Roy has been part of this history of what they call bebop. He was there with Charlie Parker, Monk, Dizzy. Happy birthday, Roy.
Harmony Holiday, poet, choreographer:
The first thing I think of is Roy’s Western style. I love how he brought this Black cowboy energy into jazz because no one else really did. That’s a big deal. He still rocks the Black cowboy, and I saw him perform with Jason Moran. I was a big Tony Williams fan, and I got to see Roy live at a festival in Harlem. Roy seemed super young—you couldn’t tell he was the oldest person onstage. I didn’t think about age at all. I just thought about him being this amazing drummer, and he’s backed up Sarah Vaughan.
Roy Haynes in 1993
Jack Vartoogian/Getty
Jon Jang, pianist:
When I was 17 and getting my feet wet in the music, in 1971, there were two inspirational recordings with Roy Haynes that turned my life around: The live recording of My Favorite Things with John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, and Jimmy Garrison, and Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, with Roy and Miroslav Vitouš. 96-year-old Roy Haynes joins an unbelievable small group of musicians who keep on keepin’ on creating music at the highest level. Cellist Pablo Casals recorded the Bach Cello Suites in his early 90s. Verdi composed his last opera when he was 80 years old. Eubie Blake was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in his 90s.
Jerome Jennings, drummer:
First time I met Roy, I used to hang with Clark Terry. I used to take CT to hospital visits because a friend of mine asked me, and one night we went to hear Roy at the Vanguard. The fact that I was with CT, Roy was very nice and cool to me, and when I heard Roy play the snare, it felt good. Lot of people when you think Roy Haynes, you think his complexity, but just hearing him lay it down, put it right down the pipe, right down the pocket, that was amazing. He was in his 80s and just jumps up.
One of the first things Roy said to me was, “Do you know my grandson, Marcus Gilmore?” He was singing Marcus’ praises, rightfully so. Marcus is bad. Roy helped create the language for jazz drums, man—him and Max, Art Blakey, Roy Porter, stretching the possibilities. I wish Roy a happy 96th.
Oliver Lake, saxophonist:
I had the pleasure of seeing Roy at the Blue Note and was totally blown away. I was just in awe at how present he was, how he swung the band, lifted the band off the bandstand. He doesn’t age. That he’s 96 is incredible. I’ve performed with his son, Graham Haynes, and throughout my career I’ve been associated with very strong drummers. I just go with the feeling of the drums, the drummers who play from the heart and want to make a complete communication.
Branford Marsalis, saxophonist:
Roy is one of the greatest jazz drummers ever. Pretty much the greatest. I’d say the greatest, yes. I mean, Elvin’s a close second. They’re basically tied, but—in this bizarre quest we have for individuality and innovation, pedagogical competence goes right out the window. When you think about the fact that Roy played with Sarah Vaughan’s trio, which is a specific kind of discipline, and then with Charlie Parker, which is another, then Coltrane, then Monk! And Roy sounds totally different in all four settings.
Roy grew up in that dance era where intensity and the beat were major requirements, and because he did, the shit will always have exuberance, intensity, energy, joyousness. And if the conversation is the usual boring-ass jazz conversation about “singular imprint”—which to me is, you find the five things you do well and play the same shit on everybody else’s records—then no, but if you’re thinking about the level of versatility he has, the shit’s just astounding. It’s something to admire. With a lot of my colleagues, the understanding of jazz comes through harmonic understanding, not basic tap-your-foot impulse. The music has to reflect all of that—and Roy’s does.
Roy Haynes in 2012
Jack Vartoogian/Getty
Tiger Okoshi, trumpeter:
Happy, happy birthday to Roy. We recorded together with Gary Burton, and I first met Roy at the rehearsal. I thought I was just there to watch. After a few songs, Gary asks me to bring my trumpet and join Roy. I was so nervous, but I tried my best and then I wasn’t nervous. After that, Roy, Steve, and Gary hired me for the gig. Gary says, “We want you to play.” Roy’s snare stuff was unbelievably swinging.
The sound of Roy’s drums: If you know the Japanese taiko drummers, they’re feeling the vibration of the skin—they don’t hit it, they bounce it. That’s how I felt. Roy doesn’t need the cymbals like other drummers. His drums are like boom. Swinging so bad.
Like a Rolls-Royce. I felt I could play anything on top of it. Thank you so much, Roy.
Danilo Pérez, pianist:
How I met Roy: I was in Barbados playing a festival, and a friend of mine and friend of Roy’s went to this club to jam, and I was drinking my glass of wine, so I went over my limit and I was on the happy side. Three hours went by and all of a sudden this hi-hat from heaven joins us. I look and there’s this man with a huge hat and nice boots. I didn’t recognize him, so I’m thinking, “My God, this guy’s incredible, I gotta get him to New York, get him a gig!” I said to him, “Sir, can you give me your phone number? You’ll take New York by storm. What’s your name?” He goes, “My name is RoyHaynes.” I almost fell off my chair.
That night, he took me around Barbados to eat fried fish, and that’s the first time he asked me to play with his quartet. We had that mentorship. One time we’re on a bus listening to Dear Old Stockholm he did with Trane. I’ll never forget how emotional Roy got listening to it. I carry that moment in my heart deeply. He’s cooking with some beautiful colors. And Roy was crucial for connecting me with my history of jazz in Panama. The first person who hired Roy was Luis Russell. Panama has a long history of jazz greats, and Roy was the first to hip me to that.
Reggie Quinerly, drummer:
One time I was at Port Authority at 4 in the morning, taking a train, and who do I see? There’s a short diminutive man in a cowboy hat. I walked up to him and said, “I know who you are” [laughs]. He was nice and cordial, told me he’d been partying all night and was taking the train back to Queens. Just the giddiness I had seeing Roy Haynes. It cannot be overstated how much he means to the music. First time I remember seeing him, he was playing in my hometown of Houston. What struck me was his life force and energy radiating from the drums, hitting me in my chest. That’s the vibe, and that stuff goes on the recordings. To me he plays life.
Wayne Shorter, saxophonist:
Hey Roy, happy birthday man. I’ll never forget the time we had at Slugs. Yeah man you were a champion and still are. You’re always gonna be a champion to me. You know? We love you man.
Roy Haynes in 2005
Schellekens/Redferns/Getty
Marcus Strickland, saxophonist:
A story I love to tell: We’re at a festival in Boston, and after we played we got into a limo, and the limo driver was blasting a Missy Elliott song. Roy knew all the lyrics—every single lyric. I didn’t know the lyrics. That shows me, man, this cat has never ceased to absorb what’s around him. He’s a force, always bringing fire. The first time I saw Roy was at the Vanguard. Russell Malone put out word that Roy was looking for a new saxophonist, and the first thing I notice is Roy’s boots. I’m used to drummers being all up in the hi-hat, but his foot was just chilling on the hi-hat stand donning those boots. And his ride cymbal was so strong he didn’t need the crutch of the hi-hat. Right then and there, it dawned on me how he changed the music.
Nasheet Waits, drummer:
My first introduction to Roy was through my father, Freddie Waits, who had a good relationship with Roy, the way you see old friends interact with jokes and hugs and admiration. I grew up in Greenwich Village and I’d tag along. Mr. Haynes, thank you for blessing us with your presence. You’ve been an inspiration for me and my father. I remember the first time I consciously “stole” something from Roy as a drummer. [laughs] I was in my 20s at the Vanguard. I was studying Roy, and for a week after, I was trying to sound like him, and people were like, “You sound like Roy—you sound like you were listening to Roy all week.” That’s exactly what I was doing. That’s the highest compliment—for a minute. I was like, “You’re right, I did see him last week, and this is All. His. Shit. Right. Here.” [laughs]
Howard Wiley, saxophonist:
First of all, anybody who’s in the lineage of the music so long and playing at a high level, everybody talks about Tony and Elvin and Philly Jo, but when you talk about their associations, you’re talking Roy Haynes. He’s on Dear Old Stockholm with Coltrane. What Roy is playing is so thick. It’s a thing he has and he makes whatever band he’s in. Roy Haynes all day. You talk about the Bud Powell tribute band? Roy. Haynes. All. Day. What I like about these cats, man, the OGs, they’d play the same equipment and sound so different. Roy put out this album that nobody messes with: Praise.
I was playing this gig with Amiri and Amina Baraka at the Malcolm X Jazz Festival with Marcus Shelby, and Amina was like, “Play this song,” and I’m like, “I’m shaky on the bridge,” and when you tell an old-school sister you don’t know something right before you go onstage, you get that look: It’s a very particular Motherfucker, are you serious? You done got me out here? I know that look, but I’m like, “Here’s this Roy Haynes song I really like and I think you’re gonna dig it too. It’s called ‘After Sunrise.’” And we play that. When I tell you I got the biggest hug and kiss from Amina after, and she’s tough, my man. Roy’s music has such a universal love.
First time I met Roy was at a conference. I introduce myself, we start talking. I’mma wear the OGs out, so I’m talking to him for an hour, and how you play all that shit in some cowboy boots? He’s wearing snakeskin pants and cowboy boots killing the drums. The joy he embodies. All praise is due, and happy birthday. This time last year he was scheduled to play Blue Note at 95 and I’m like, this motherfucker is 95 and playing the Blue Note. That’s the dude you wanna be—the drums and the spirit.
Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archive to propel you into the weekend.
In 1997, Mother Jones profiled Marianne Williamson, then a New Age icon. It is—as was noted by the New Republic when Williamson ran for president in the 2020 primaries—a “prescient (and slightly mocking)” piece. Take that for what you will. Williamson has since gotten the treatment from the New York Times Magazine.
The main thing the piece predicts, correctly, is that Williamson would move her self-help style into activism and a political-first attitude. Here’s a section from 1997:
“I’ve always been the first to say that spiritual seeking without service is self-indulgent,” [Williamson] says. “I think the question is: Dear God, how can I serve? Not that I’m trying to figure out what someone needs…I am saying we don’t have the time on this planet to wait until we’re more spiritually evolved to check out what’s going on in this country.” Appendix A to The Healing of America is called “Resources for Activism.” Appendix B consists of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
It’s a nice read, filled with smart points about the evolution of self-help mythology. And it’s got some wonderful one-liners (even if you disagree): “Offering religion without rules, salvation without sacrifice, the former cabaret singer has remade herself into the perfect priestess for a culture steeped in pop.”
Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? We're a nonprofit (so it's tax-deductible), and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget.
We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?
