That's Garth at 1:39 (and Ed Sullivan at 0:01).

Safe travels, Garth Hudson. The last man standing from a, genuine, band of all-stars.

RIP

pic.twitter.com/ad6f6fd6tk

— 𝙱𝚘𝚋𝚋𝚢’𝚜 𝙷𝚎𝚎𝚕 (@SalvadorDafti) January 21, 2025

ADDED (prompted by Leslie Graves):

When I get off of this mountain
You know where I wanna go?
Straight down the Mississippi River
To the Gulf of America

AND: I like this description of Hudson's part in that song: "The bullfrog-like syncopations that tease and cackle as Levon Helm sings the verses are from Hudson’s clavinet. He unfurls organ lines like bunting atop the choruses, but the cackling cheerfully persists." That's Jon Pareles, writing in the NYT, in "Garth Hudson: 11 Essential Songs?The last surviving original member of the Band died on Tuesday. He was a master on keys and saxophones who could conjure a panoply of scenes and eras."

Here's that 11-song playlist:

It's time to play "Was that racist?"

I'm getting email from an outraged reader who's on my case for not censoring the following comment, which appeared on yesterday's post about a NYT article titled, "Protests Draw Shoulder-to-Shoulder Crowds After Months of Virus Isolation." Out of discretion, I will refrain from naming the commenter, who said:

I'm sayin right out now. Like the 60s, the bulk of the "protesters" are lookin for a hook up. Nothin like a meaningful virtue signal to fire up the hormones. Mostly lookin for that Hot Monkey Love the libs all crave.

Was that racist?

IN THE COMMENTS: Leslie Graves said:

Is it safe to assume that they thought this because of the reference to "hot monkey love"?

I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, where the meaning is given as "To engage in hot serious sex. To go at it with the prowless [sic] of a monkey. In that you actually make each other wanna make noises similar to that of a screaming monkey."

Urban Dictionary doesn't represent this as having racial overtones.

The person also might have thought that claiming that hormones and the desire to hook up are actually what is causing folks (some of whom are people of color) to flood into the streets, as opposed to a high-minded desire to protest the killing, and that saying that is insulting to those people of color in a racist way.

I will say that back in the 60s, whenever there was an anti-war protest in nearby Madison, it was very common for the old folks to offer commentary suggesting that the main reason for those students (virtually all of whom were white) to flood into the streets was to get some action. So, that's how I read the comment.

MadisonMan said:

Why run to the teacher, so to speak, over something like this? If you find something in the comments racist enough to email the host, why isn't racist enough to comment on directly?

Some people don't want to engage in open debate. They want censorship. The person who emailed me said: "I don’t subscribe to the Zuckerberg view" and wanted to attribute it to me for not "filtering" it out. I get something like 1,000 comments a day and, though I delay them in moderation to squelch known trolls, I can't possibly read them all and think about what they mean. In any case, I do subscribe to the Zuckerberg view.

ADDED: Is Gilda Radner racist?



Is Maureen Dowd?

"We’ve relabeled 'comments' as 'conversations' to help create an environment where everyone is welcome and encouraged to share their thoughts."

From "Goodbye 'moderators,' hello 'audience voice reporters': Here’s how The Wall Street Journal is refocusing the comments to incentivize better behavior."

We decided we could do more to foster elevated discourse and to welcome broader parts of our audience to join in conversations around our articles....

We know there will inevitably be a small group of people who may not like the changes, but there is a far larger group that would like to contribute to audience conversations, if the postings became more thoughtful....

Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box....

[W]e have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.

Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked....

Thanks to Leslie Graves, in last night's café, for pointing to that article. I'm giving this post my "blog commenting" tag because it relates to my experience here on the blog. Consider that a prompt for the conversation here. To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle.

"I mean, I see some folks that don’t say nice things about me, and that’s okay. Because if you turn that into this energy, I’ll love you."

Said President Trump — transcript — at what Vox calls "Trump’s madcap, unscripted gun control meeting with lawmakers... Trump had Democrats cheering in his bipartisan gun control meeting."

What was really going on? To my eye, it looks like how he played the Democrats over DACA reform, getting them enthused that he'd flipped to their side, and then wasting their time and leaving them disappointed. Now he's getting them energized again — turn your hate into into this energy — and then I’ll love you. I'll love you...

But what kind of romance is he talking about? He's a political pick-up artist, no? They can't let that happen again, can they? Or will a second time work to their advantage because then the pattern will be obvious and they can sound the alarm? But some people will find Trump's game playing a wonderful triumph.

This gun control legislation won't pass, and the Democrats will have spent the run-up to the 2018 elections threatening to take away our guns... and defanged in their Trump-hating.

IN THE COMMENTS: Leslie Graves said:

DJT may have found that a similar tactic worked for him with cheated-upon women: Turn back to them with passion and interest for a time.

Yes, and he's catching Dianne Feinstein on the rebound. (See "California Democratic Party won't endorse Dianne Feinstein," 3 days ago). The L.A. Times makes it sound almost orgasmic: "Feinstein shakes with glee after Trump suggests adding assault weapons ban to background check bill." Well, see for yourself:



Turn that into this energy. I’ll love you.

"Okay, I am just going to right out and say that Time's Man of the Year should have been me."

Lewis Wetzel wrote in the comments to yesterday's post "It can't be that Time colludes with prospective Persons of the Year to see what access it can get out of the process of honoring somebody." Wetzel offers these "bullet points":

-changed the oil -- myself -- on the 2001 Explorer.
-learned how to make a darn good Alfredo sauce.
-read both "Iliad" and "Odyssey."
-hired a guy to do some yard work I've been putting off.
Have you done better? Your immediate response will be to say "Yes!", but then look at the bullet points again, especially the one where I changed the oil in the 2001 Explorer. By myself.

Also in the comments Leslie Graves wrote: "Who would be on the cover of Time this year if the Koch acquisition had already taken place?"

Meade answers that question: "Someone born November 27, 1953 in Norfolk, VA maybe?"

Google tells me Meade is talking about Steve Bannon. That brings up 2 points:

1. Why would the Kochs want to highlight Bannon? The Kochs don't like Bannon publicly, but Bannon was instrumental in getting Trump elected and he's gone now. The Kochs haven't publicly liked Trump either, but as Bannon famously said: “If Pence were to become President for any reason, the government would be run by the Koch brothers—period. He’s been their tool for years... I’m concerned he’d be a President that the Kochs would own" (quoted in "The Danger of President Pence" in The New Yorker).

2. In yesterday's post, I expressed suspicion that Time did have the idea of making Trump Person of the year again this year, but only as a co-winner, and pairing him with someone in a negative way, which is what Time did to Bill Clinton in 1998 (making him co-Person with Kenneth Starr). Now, I'm seeing that the co-winner could very easily have been Steve Bannon.

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."

Scribbed Albert Einstein in German on hotel letterhead, making a document in lieu of a tip for a bellboy. The paper sold at auction yesterday for $1.5 million (NYT).

People love their Einstein quotes. Einstein is the one person we all recognize as GENIUS!!! so we imagine — kind of absurdly — that anything that popped out of his noggin is genuisish.

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."

He wrote that at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I wonder if he was trying to crank out something that the Japanese bellboy would see as wise — some Japanese-sounding wisdom.

IN THE COMMENTS: Leslie Graves said:

The Imperial Hotel! Presumably, he was in the version of it that lasted from 1922-1967, and that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a man who did not live a calm and modest life.

Yes, the article says 1922.