Yeah, that’s nothing. Bribery racketeering wire fraud, forget it. There’s so much more.
Yeah, that’s nothing. Bribery racketeering wire fraud, forget it. There’s so much more.
… sell their universities to corporations run serious risks.
UD‘s pal Carl Elliott tells all in a New York Times opinion piece.
When Joan Baez received Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award this week, it made me nostalgic.
Baez hates nostalgia as only someone who has lived long enough to be the object of every old hippie’s nostalgia can be. For a lifelong pacifist, her language about it is positively violent: “I think I’m trying to strangle people into coming up to the present so much of the time, because people tend to live aeons ago.” But there’s nothing wrong with being knocked back to the past now and then, and the occasion of her award knocked me back.
It knocked me back to 1968, to after-school afternoons I spent in the biggest bathroom in my parents’ house in Bethesda (good acoustics), playing my nylon string guitar and singing Child ballads the way she sang them, the way I learned them from listening to her. Geordie, House Carpenter, Queen of Hearts — they were all songs of doomed lovers, all fraught tales set in the darkest of keys. Matty Groves, an adultery and murder ditty, had twenty three verses. I knew them all, and went into long trances, chanting them in my little echo chamber.
There are certain soprano voices – Kathleen Battle’s, Julia Lezhneva’s – equipped with an absolutely eerie high-piping perfection, a radically original and expressive force. Joan Baez was my first encounter with this type of unsettling sound. Long before I knew anything about the operatic voice, I was haunted by the folk treble, and spent hours trying to produce it myself. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in her book, On Beauty and Being Just. Beauty inspires imitation. Wherever Baez was when those notes streamed out of her, I wanted to be there too.
Almost fifty years later, I still pursue that treble. I’m at my baby grand in the living room now (the guitar leans on a wall nearby), but the tattered Joan Baez Songbook remains my favorite thing to play. W.H. Auden called music “the best means we have of digesting time,” and I think that’s because – for me, at least – the making of music never changes. It’s always in some ecstatic way the journey back to tonal paradise.
Think of that whole “lost chord” idea in Arthur Sullivan’s famous song. The chord he keeps searching for was “the harmonious echo / From our discordant life.”
No doubt Baez will receive the Amnesty International award for her political work with a sense of irony. “I’m a little concerned about offering hope,” she said in a recent interview. “But one has to bash on regardless.”
At a young age I sensed the serene concord Baez had somehow made all the discordance of life yield; I sensed the way she summoned that harmonious echo again and again. And that’s also a form of bashing on – keeping the long song going, verse after verse, whatever the circumstance.
Having heard Baez, how can I (to quote the great old American folk song) keep from singing?
Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Oh dear, where can Sepp Blatter flee?
Oh dear, Qatar is up a tree,
FIFA has had quite a scare.
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Old World and New, folks – Old World and New. Two notorious all-male criminal syndicates gather for their respective high-level organizational meetings. The American group chooses as its venue a tits and ass sports bar overlooking a parking lot in a shopping mall in Waco Texas. The Euros choose a five-star Swiss hotel with views of Lake Zurich and the Alps. The Americans resolve their differences with each other and with the police outside the venue by shooting wildly. The Euros go quietly.
Yes, when it comes to class, the old country still has us beat.
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In 2011, Emory University was touting the achievements of Aaron Davidson, 93C. Aaron is currently awaiting charges on – let’s see – bribery, bribery, bribery, bribery, and bribery.
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When you control the most popular product of the most popular sport on earth, you can do [anything]. Neither the shady awarding of World Cups nor the thousands of slaves that will die in Qatar building World Cup stadiums has made a serious dent in FIFA’s power. One can only hope this will.
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International soccer has a notorious reputation for corruption and intrigue, one that contrasts sharply with its squeaky-clean image in America. For millions here, the sport represents an antidote to the cynical, alienating gloss of the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Don’t buy it.
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The “sheet” play.
The other half? Students with laptops.
SOS likes the anti-climax of the final clause.
Khadar was charged with two counts each of second-degree reckless endangerment, third- and second-degree assault; breach of peace, assault of a public safety officer, four counts of interfering with an officer, drunken driving, evading responsibility, reckless driving and failure to wear a seat belt.
One student stabbed another and then jumped out of a window.
The stabbed student is recovering.
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Update: The students were acquainted:
[B]oth were from Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Daily News reports that both belonged to a conservative Yale Political Union group called Party of the Right. According to [Tyler] Carlisle’s LinkedIn, his “primary interests [included] political theory and defending a coherent and cohesive justification for Conservative politics.”
Carlisle was the attacker.
Drugs? Psychotic break? Many possibilities.
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9/27/2015: UPDATE: Alcohol, three-way sex, and jealousy. And, it seems, a sudden psychotic break.
The Yale Daily News coverage of the release of the police report is really two stories: The sad details of the stabbing and suicide, and the anger of some in the Yale community that its newspaper published these details.
UD has read very similar comment threads whenever a suicide – with or without violence – is covered in the press. Our human instinct seems to be homicide:public; suicide:private.
I’m not sure what this writer means by Greek life itself; Greek life on American universities today is Greek life itself. Greek life has looked better and worse at various times in its history; current Greek life is current Greek life, and if you want to see what some of it looks like at one of America’s most gilded, seemingly least depraved, cultural locations, read this.
If there is a Greek life itself, some essence of Greek life, it seems to UD (who has done more than her share of research on the subject) to have to do with the cultivation of the complex and highly advantageous hypocrisy Walter Kirn features here. The collective refinement of what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism is about as good as frats seem to get.
According to Mark Kruea, Myrtle Beach’s public information officer, no shooting deaths occurred this year [there were three shooting deaths last year] and only one person was injured in a shooting …
Kruea said three motorcyclists and one moped rider died in traffic accidents. Other riders filled local emergency rooms to capacity with non-fatal injuries. Several crimes occurred, including robberies and kidnappings.
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Bikers are pissed with all the security measures.
Alonzo Pritchard, a Memphis tire shop manager who attended Bikefest for the 18th consecutive year, said the city had sapped the life out of the gathering… Sean Robinson said he would not be returning [to] Myrtle Beach until officials got rid of the traffic loop, did away with the barricades and let motorcyclists travel without major impediments. As far as he was concerned, he would rather spend his money somewhere more hospitable to riders.
Little by little, even America’s most dissolute locations are refusing to host spring breaks and bikefests. So where’s the American city enterprising and sketchy enough to become the go-to hospitable place for all of this country’s frats and bike clubs?
UD’s putting her money on Reno.
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Note to moped riders: Do what everyone else who lives anywhere near Myrtle Beach does during Memorial Day weekend: FLEE.
Tom O’Dare and Michael Smith, myhorrynews.com:
Myrtle Beach police said in a statement that Reginald Rivers, 23, of Charleston struck a North Carolina man riding a moped on North Kings Highway at 6:42 a.m. Sunday.
According to police, Rivers was driving at a high rate of speed when he struck Brandon Brinson, 21, of Magnolia, N.C. Brinson died from injuries sustained in the crash.
Rivers was charged with felony DUI resulting in death and hit and run resulting in death, along with driving under suspension, possession of a firearm by a felon and five counts of threatening the life of a public official.
At a 6 p.m. Sunday bond hearing, Myrtle Beach chief municipal judge Jennifer Wilson said she couldn’t set bond on the felony DUI and hit and run charges because Rivers was already out on bond on an armed robbery charge in Charleston.
A circuit court judge will have to hold a bond hearing on those charges.
Wilson did set a $50,000 bond on the five threatening the life of a public official charge, $20,000 on the possession of a firearm by a felon and $544 on the DUS charge.
Rivers told the judge that he couldn’t be charged with the DUS “because I don’t even have a license.”
When Rivers was brought into the city courtroom, he was very unsteady on his feet and continuously talking to which Wilson admonished him a number of times to remain quiet.
After several rambling conversations, Wilson tacked on a 30-day contempt of court charge because Rivers would not be quiet and follow the judge’s instructions.
For the city charges, Rivers faces a court date of June 10.
No date was set for a bond hearing for the charges of felony DUI and hit and run.
Wilson appointed a public defender for Rivers though he told the judge that he already had a public defender in Charleston on his other charges pending there.
He asked Wilson how long it would take to get a bond hearing in General Sessions court because he was afraid it may take a long time.
“I have no idea,” Wilson said. “Mr. Rivers looking at your record, you should know how the court system works.”
AN EPITAPH FOR THE AMERICAN DEAD
Who should dare to write their praise
Do so in the plainest phrase.
Few names last, where many lie;
Even names of battles die.
These will stand for many more:
Wake, Bataan, Corregidor,
Attu, and the Coral Sea,
Africa, and Sicily;
Callahan, who ran his ship
To the very cannon’s lip.
Men, devoid of name and hour,
With direction gathered power;
Stripped of selfhood, each must be
Our hostage to Eternity.
[M]aybe, as Waco Convention Center Director Liz Taylor suggests, things just happen.
I met Taylor during the Branch Davidian siege, when it was her task to convince the world that Waco wasn’t what it appeared to be. “I have learned to take things in stride,” she told me this week [after the biker shootout]. “It is all part of a growing community.“
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Higher Ed, Texas-Style
Governor Abbott has promised to sign open carry. He also has endorsed another gun lobby priority — legislation to permit concealed handguns on the state’s college campuses. That bill has drawn alarm from university officials, including Chancellor William McRaven of the University of Texas system who posed a dilemma about gun rights and free speech: “If you’re in a heated debate with somebody in the middle of a classroom, and you don’t know whether or not that individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students and faculty?”
Oh please. Ask me a hard one. Once everybody’s packing, everybody knows everybody’s packing. Heated disagreements are resolved exactly the way the two sides of the Bandidos vs. Cossacks debate resolved them.
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A bar is one of the very few places in Texas where you cannot openly carry a weapon — one of the few where you can’t carry an assault rifle, for that matter — but no one seems to have doubted that the [Waco] bikers would have easy access to serious firearms. This is a state where a request by Chipotle that people not display guns while ordering burritos caused a public protest.