"To those who left us....and who brought us together"

I think the worst part of getting older is the parade of departures from this mortal coil moves ever faster. And now I have to write about yet another one.

I'm writing today to talk about Karl. I'm not going to mention his last name out of respect for his family's privacy. 

Two weeks after Mr. Brilliant died in 2013, I joined a social group for widows and widowers. I didn't want to join a grief group. I felt they were all too churchy and I truly did not want to sit in a room full of crying people. Some would say I should have, that I pushed grief away and that is why it's been squeezing out in manageable doses over eight years. 

I also didn't want to join "singles" groups. I already knew that dating wasn't in the cards for me. It had been horrible in my 20s, and I knew that it was going to be even worse for an overweight woman pushing 60  So when I found a group on Meetup whose mission was to build friendships with people who "get it" in a safe space, but by sharing enjoyable times, it was exactly what I needed. 

We've all known people who are like the mayor of whatever the group is. "The mayor" is always someone whose very presence signals that you are welcome. He's the first one with the smile, the extended hand, the "tell me your story" when someone new comes into the room. Karl was that person.  He wasn't hitting on people, he was all about welcoming. I've realized how important this is, after joining a group here after I moved where the men don't talk with any women they're not interested in fucking, and the women seem to see all new women as interlopers. The group in NJ was nothing like that.

Every Wednesday for two years I had dinner with these people, and Karl was always right there, showing genuine delight at being with everyone, and extending that smile, that hug, that warmth, to the new and the tentative. He had an unfailing instinct for where people's boundaries were and respecting them, while providing just the right amount of comfort. And last year during that long, cold winter, I was able to host Zoom calls for the group and see them all virtually. I am now particularly glad that I had that opportunity. I had no idea that the last Zoom I hosted would be the last time I'd see Karl.

I was at one of these dinners when I got the call that my father had passed away. I'm glad I was.

Karl and I shared an enjoyment of jam bands, especially the New Jersey-based Railroad Earth. I went with him and our friend Stacey to see Hot Tuna in Stroudsburg, PA in 2014, retracing the steps and the restaurant Mr. Brilliant and I had traced  a few years earlier for a different show. Karl and I weren't on the same page politically, and to be honest, I'm glad I never had to have political discussions with him during the Trump years. But upon reflection, he really did test my "You can't support Trump and still be a good person" doctrine.

Karl always closed every "widder dinner" with this toast:  "To those who left us...and who brought us together." Our friend Stacey, who has endured far more than her own share of tragedy already, noted today that he has now joined them. Perhaps he will now bring THEM together in an alternate universe version of the camaraderie those they had left behind shared.

My heart hurts today for Karl's loved ones, for Stacey who was such a close friend, for Carolyn and Carol and Bette and Kurt and Susan and Dan and Lynne and Gordon and Elsa and all the others I haven't met in person and who are new, and who I just can't remember right now, for they are the ones who have to face the empty space at the table every Wednesday. His loss makes grieving just that much more difficult for those who will no longer have his smile to welcome them and show that even in the face of indescribable grief, there is warmth and friendship and hope.

Right Wing Anti Vaccine Death Scorecard Episode 4, or COVID Is Nowhere Near Done With These People Yet

 Today's entry into the death pool is Bob Enyart, Colorado wingnut talk show host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, who died this week from COVID-19. 

According to the Denver Post, Enyart had refused to be vaccinated because of his concern about abortion, believing the lie that COVID vaccines are made of aborted babies.

The term "Good riddance" certainly applies to Bob Enyart, a man who once read the names of people who died of AIDS while playing Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."

So let's give this paragon of right-wing hate the proper send-off, shall we?

Honorable mention: Victoria Wolski, known for posting QAnon banners from bridges and demanding that she be treated with Ivermectin while in the hospital.

Honorable mention 2:  Josh.

Phil Schaap (1951-2021)

 When I lived in New Jersey, especially after Mr. Brilliant died, there were two evening radio shows I listened to frequently. One of them was Rich Conaty's Big Broadcast on WFUV on Sunday evenings, and the other was Phil Schaap's Traditions in Swing on Saturdays on WKCR, the Columbia University station. Conaty's show was about ALL popular music from the 1920s and 30s, while Schaap was all about jazz. And on Saturday nights, he'd go into the roots of the music that characterized the Big Band era. It used to make Mr. Brilliant crazy when I'd listen to either one of them, because he had that particular disease that so many in my generation had of hating the music our parents listened to, and his father was one of those WWII vets who thought Glenn Miller was the ne plus ultra of musicians for all time.  (Fun anecdote:  Years later, when Mr. B. would talk about the Grateful Dead in similar terms, I would occasionally remind him of this.)

I've loved 1920s jazz for a long time. I could go into my whole thing about how I believe that the feeling of "coming home" that I have when I listen to the Hot Fives, the Hot Sevens, Bix Beiderbecke, and others, is a past-life memory, but I'll spare you all that. Suffice it to say that everything I know about early jazz and swing, I learned from listening to Phil Schaap on Saturday evenings. I learned about Bix and Tram (Frankie Trumbauer) and everything about Louis Armstrong's early music, and people I wouldn't have heard otherwise, like Ben Webster and Sidney Bechet and Stuff Smith and Bunny Berrigan. The man was a walking, living encyclopedia of jazz music and jazz musicians and had more anecdotes about them than could be stored in a million books or tapes.

Rich Conaty died in 2016.  Phil Schaap died yesterday after a four-year battle with cancer.

When it comes to the complete, comprehensive history of jazz, it was all stored in Phil Schaap's brain. His death is the 20th century music equivalent of the Library of Alexandria burning to the ground.

 

Another blogger gone too soon...R.I.P. Mike Finnigan

 

I am absolutely gutted to learn of the passing of the talented and generous-of-spirit Mike Finnigan. 

 

I didn't know Mike as a musician. I didn't even know how prominent and well-known a session guy he was or that he was a performing musician until quite recently. How I didn't know is surprising and how Mr. Brilliant didn't know is even more surprising, given that he was far more knowledgeable about such things than I was.

 

I only knew Mike Finnegan as one of the progressive bloggers with a sizable following who always extended a hand to us little folks down the blogging ladder to drive readers in our direction, via his regular feature Mike's Blog Round-Up at Crooks and Liars.

 

We've lost so many of the best bloggers. Mike joins a group of incisive commentators who left us too soon and who we miss every day. Steve Gilliard, Jon Swift (Al Weisel), Skippy (Gil Christner), "Doghouse Riley", and Maggie Jochild. Their voices would be so valuable in these weird times.

I'll end this memorial with this incredible cover by Mike Finnigan of Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come.

 

Rest in music, sir.

R.I.P. Skippy. Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day.

There was a time, now very far away, when most political bloggers kind of sort of knew each other.  Some knew each other better than others, crossing over into "meat world," and others only knew each other online.  Many of us stopped blogging somewhere along the way, only to pick it up again later, but there were others who kept on going.

When Steve Gilliard died we were all still blogging and word spread like wildfire.  Since then, we've lost so many -- Doghouse Riley, "Jon Swift" (Al Wiesel), Bob Rixon, and just this month we lost Shaun Mullen of Kiko's House.  But perhaps no loss cuts deeper than finding out only now that last summer, unbeknownst to me, we suffered the unfathomable loss of the whimsically named "skippy the bush kangaroo," who equally unbeknownst to me, was author/actor/comedy writer Gil Christner.  Joe Gandelman wrote about him after his passing.

Skippy was one of those "big name bloggers" who always had room for us smaller folk.  He didn't care if you were famous, or if people would recognize you at Netroots Nation, or if you hung around with Markos the Huge.  Skippy was one of the founders, along with Al Wiesel, of "Blogroll Amnesty Day."

Because the families of Jon Swift (I will use his blog name from here on out) and Skippy did not see fit to allow their blogs to remain up (though both can be somewhat seen through the Wayback Machine via the links in this paragraph), you won't get the chance to really see how these two guys were the ones who formed a true community of progressive bloggers who DIDN'T pull up the ladder behind them.

Blogroll Amnesty Day started as a giant "Fuck you" to one of those ladder-pullers, Atrios, who for seventeen years has managed to build and sustain a huge following with one- and two-sentence posts.   In 2007, Atrios decided that he would purge his blogroll of all but the blogs he deemed "important", and gave himself amnesty to do so.  Amnesty against what, I don't know, unless it's amnesty for becoming exactly what progressives were fighting against.  At the time, Jon Swift wrote:

This past weekend Atrios, the proprietor of Eschaton, declared a Blogroll Amnesty Day, saying, "one of the big complaints by new bloggers is that it's impossible to get onto blogrolls because established bloggers tend not to add them." I thought that adding new lesser-known blogs to his blogroll would be a wonderful idea. Although for some inexplicable reason that I am at pains to discover, Atrios has never seen fit to link to me, I, nevertheless added Eschaton to my own blogroll and introduced myself to Atrios with a sincerely sycophantic email, since he is after all a blogging pioneer who deserves our respect.

But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. "Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they're hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list," he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus' General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling. Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. "It sucks and it feels bad," he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios' Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

Thus began the teaming of Jon Swift and Skippy to appropriate Blogroll Amnesty Day for mere mortals and make it an annual celebration of newer and smaller-readership blogs, combined with an exhortation to "Look up!  Link down!"

Since Jon Swift left this mortal coil, blogger Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has been carrying the torch for these two most generous men; both professional writers who got paid for their work, but toiled away in the trenches with the rest of us under their pseudonyms, encouraging us and asserting that what we were doing had value.

Without further ado, here is this year's entry, renamed now to the Jon Swift Roundup.  I hope you'll click through and read these self-selected posts by some of the long-timers as well as those who picked up sociopolitical blogging long after it was left for dead by many.

Rest well, skippy.  The world is a darker place without you.