Prison yard, Alcatraz. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
[Apologies for more typographical chaos than usual in this edition of Roaming Charges, which was largely written and assembled by iPhone after the 8-week-old Australian shepherd chewed her way through the powerchord of the editor’s Macbook Pro.)
“During the Cold War, US allies used to deny the disappearances — the uncertainty was part of the terror. Now they just straight-up say they have a right to kidnap innocent people. The terror now is the fuck-you impunity these thugs claim.”
– Greg Grandin
+ In Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” a man called only the Traveler visits an island penal colony of a country not his own. Or a country that he doesn’t recognize as his own. Why is he here? We don’t know. He seems to be on some kind of inspection, though who he might be reporting back to and what effect his report might have on what is going on here is unclear. The story opens with the Traveler being shown a new torture and execution device by someone called the Officer, a machine that inscribes the fatal sentence of the state on the flesh of the condemned, over and over again, slowly, on strip after strip of skin, for 12 hours, until the victim bleeds to death. The machine was designed by the Commandant, now deceased. Its use once attracted large crowds, mainly of women, who would toss handkerchiefs at the condemned, as the killing machine did its lethal work. The Condemned do not know they have been condemned. They don’t know they’ve committed a crime. Silent accusations are enough in this penal colony. Once accused, the accused is presumed guilty. He is never told he has been accused. He is never given the chance to defend himself. He only learns of his offense when it is written on his skin by the stabbing of needles: “Honor thy Superiors.”
Trump dreams of his own penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out.
Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers.
Trump’s ICEtapo has sent 238 people to El Salvador. A Bloomberg analysis shows that more than 90% of them had no criminal record. And of those with criminal records, only five had been convicted of felonies. This hardly matters. To be sent to El Salvador means you are guilty. You are a terrorist in the eyes of the state that deported you, even if the state’s highest courts have intervened on your behalf. There will be no return. Even two self-proclaimed Autocrats say they don’t have the power to make it happen. Only the machine writes the fate of the condemned.
This is merely the precedent. Trump wants to use the egregious treatment of noncitizens to break the legal system that protects citizens from abuses of state power. Trump is eager to deport American citizens to El Salvadoran prisons. He told Buekele to build more of his concentration camps for a coming flood of American “criminals” (aka, dissidents), who will be condemned as “terrorists” and stripped of their rights: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”
+ Supreme Court justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson on the 9-0 decision ordering the Trump administration to return wrongfully deported man from El Salvador: the government’s argument implies “it could deport and incarcerate any person, including us citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
+ Welcome to the “left-wing industrial complex,” Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas!
+ First, you get away with deporting non-criminal non-citizens. Then you try to deport non-criminal citizens whose ethnicity you dislike. Last week, Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez, a 20-year-old Georgia man of Mayan heritage, was pulled over and arrested by Florida Highway Patrol for “being an undocumented immigrant over the age of 18 who had illegally entered the state of Florida.” There were just two problems. First, the enforcement of DeSantis’s punitive immigration law Gomez-Lopez supposedly violated, has been blocked by a federal court. Second, Gomez-Lopez is a US citizen. When Gomez-Lopez appeared for his arraignment before the local court, his advocates presented the judge with his birth certificate and Social Security card as proof that he is a natural-born US citizen. Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggins said, “In looking at it and feeling it and holding it up to the light, the court can clearly see the watermark proving this is an authentic document.” Riggins said there was no probable cause for his detention, but that her hands were tied because ICE had asserted jurisdiction and wants him sent to a detention center for deportation.
“It’s like this dystopian nightmare of poorly written laws,” said Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “We’re living in a time when this man could be sent to El Salvador because, what? Is he going to be treated as a stateless person?”
+ Meanwhile, in Boston: “Immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni says she was born at Newton Wellesley Hospital, grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, and was educated at Wellesley College. So, anyone can imagine her surprise when she says she received an emailed letter from the Department of Homeland Security, telling her to self-deport within 7 days…”
+ Alec MacGillis, Pro Publica: “Kseniia Petrova left Russia in protest of Putin and found work at a Harvard lab, w/ a valid visa. She arrived with only a backpack. CBP stopped her recently at Logan for failing to declare frog embryos she had brought from Paris for her lab. This would normally come with a fine. Instead, she is in prison in Louisiana. “I feel like something is happening generally in America. Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”
+ Trump’s “counter-terrorism Czar,” Sebastian Gorka, told Newsmax this week that political opponents of Trump’s mass deportations could be charged with “abetting terrorism.”
It’s really quite that simple. We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists… And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.
+ Sen. Chris Van Hollen, after being refused any contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador on Wednesday:
“The courts of the United States have said there’s no evidence to support the charge that he’s part of MS-13, so I asked the Vice President of El Salvador whether or not El Salvador has any evidence that he’s part of MS-13 or has committed a crime. So I asked the Vice President, ‘So, if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and the US courts have found that he was illegally taken into the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CEPOS. And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to keep him at CEPOS. I pointed out that neither the government of El Salvador nor the Trump Administration has presented evidence to support the claim that he has committed any kind of criminal act. So why not release Abrego Garcia today? And he said, what President Bukele said the other day at the White House, which is that “El Salvador can’t smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking him to smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States, I’m simply asking him to open to the door to CEPOS and let this innocent man walk out.’ And I pointed out that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, has said that the United States would send a plane to El Salvador to pick him up. And why did she do that? Because the Supreme Court of the United States, in a ruling of 9-0, has said that the Trump administration has to facilitate his return to the United States. Now there is no evidence that the Trump administration is complying with that order. In Fact, the US embassy here has told me they’ve received no direction from the Trump administration to help facilitate his release. So the Trump administration is clearly in violation of American court orders. That still leaves the question of why the government of El Salvador continuing to imprison a man where they have no evidence he’s committed a crime and they have been provided with any evidence from the United States that he’s committed a crime.”
+ CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins: “You said if the Supreme Court ruled that someone needed to be returned, you would abide by that.”
Trump Almighty: “Why don’t you just say, isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country? That’s why nobody watches you.”
+ El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One in every 57 Salvadorans is incarcerated, triple the rate of the U.S. And Bukele’s set to double the size of its concentration camp prison to 80,000, mostly to house deportees from the US.
+ Civil liberties and 1st Amendment lawyer Jenin Younes on the Trump non-responsive response to judicial orders in the Mahmoud Khalil case:
After the immigration judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case ordered the government to provide evidence to justify deporting him, this is what they filed. I’ve been a lawyer for 14 years, & a criminal defense lawyer for 9 of those years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Totally nebulous, vague allegations about involvement in “antisemitic protests” and “disruptive activities” without any specific attributions of unlawful activity or even “antisemitic” speech to Khalil himself (which in any event is protected; the US rightly does not have hate speech laws). In the US and all civilized societies, if gov’t is going to punish someone under the law, it had better provide evidence of specific forms of unlawful activity BY THE INDIVIDUAL it’s targeting. Not only has the gov’t entirely failed to do that here, but it’s obvious it’s case is predicated on punishing 1A protected speech and protest.
+ Contempt of Court is now the official policy of the Trump Justice Department.
+ The Trump administration not only sent flights to El Salvador while the court was adjourned for a short period of time, but when court resumed the Trump admin concealed the fact that the flights had already left from the court: “Those later-discovered flight movements, however, were obscured from the Court when the hearing resumed shortly after 6:00 p.m. because the Government surprisingly represented that it still had no flight details to share.”
+ Federal Judge James Boasberg, finding probable cause that the Trump Administration is “in criminal contempt of court” in the Venezuelan deportation case:
The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’
+ Matthew Segal: “My guess is that any Trump officials implicated by this order will, quite understandably, want due process.”
+ James Ball, the New European: “The fight over García’s custody is not a battle about one man’s fate. It is also not a row about immigration, illegal or otherwise, or border security. It is a battle for the US Constitution, the rights it guarantees, and the basic freedoms of Americans.”
+ We’re watching the Milgram Experiment breakout in real-time, as hundreds of ICE agents commit sadistic acts against innocent people, they’d never imagined themselves ever doing back in Sunday School…(At least I hope they’d never imagined themselves doing it): A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday on Tallman Street in New Bedford after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle with axes, as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive. Like so many others, he was detained without a warrant.
+ The former cop who sent gay makeup artist, Andry Jose Hernandez, Romero to a hellhole of a prison in El Salvador is a known liar, who was put on a Brady List of cops whose testimony should not be trusted at trial. He also drove drunk into a family’s house and falsified his overtime hours.
+++
+ Here’s an example of the Trump “Red Pill” Effect in action. Most Republicans want an unnamed president to follow court orders. Except when that President’s name is Trump…
Reuters/IPSOS poll on Trump’s conflicts with federal courts
The president should obey federal court rulings, even if he disagrees with them…
All
Yes: 82%
No: 14%GOP
Yes: 68%
No: 28%Dem
Yes: 97%
No: 3%Other
Yes: 82%
No: 11%
But use “Trump” instead of “the President” and the answers shift dramatically…
Trump should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop…
All
Yes: 40%
No: 56%GOP
Yes: 76%
No: 22%Dems
Yes: 8%
No: 92%Other
Yes: 35%
No: 57%
+2028 National Republican Primary Poll…
Donald J. Trump 56%
JD Vance 19%
Ron DeSantis 4%
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 4%
Nikki Haley 3%
Vivek Ramaswamy 3%
Marco Rubio 2%
Tulsi Gabbard 2%
Brian Kemp 1%
Glenn Youngkin 1%
Ted Cruz 1%
Josh Hawley 1%
Tim Scott 1%
Steve Bannon 1%
– Yale
+ As for the Democrats, I’ve seen garden slugs with more spine…
+ The Democrats’ evolving position on ICE’s mass deportations (keep the good ones, deport the bad) mirrors their bold stance on the death penalty of opposing executions for innocent people.
+ So many Democrats show nothing but contempt for constituents who demand they take an ethical stance, which may not be to their immediate political or financial advantage.
+ Harvard finally stood up to Trump, now Trump wants to crush Harvard by removing its tax-exempt status (not likely) and banning it from admitting any foreign students.
+ Trump Almighty on Harvard…
+ Harvard President Alan Garber: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
+ Sen Lisa Murkowski, the Republican from Alaska, speaking to leaders of non-profit groups in Anchorage, on Trump’s relentless fits of retribution: “We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But I am in a time and a place where I certainly have not been before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
+++
+ Nouriel Roubini on Trump caving to the tech industry by exempting high electronics from his tariffs:
Expensive IPhones and other high end consumer electronics purchased mostly by the well-off/affluent are exempted; but the 80% of good Chinese cheap consumer goods purchased by his left-behind blue collar base at Dollar Stores, Walmart, Costco, and other low price retailers are slapped with a 145% tariff. Most of them are low-end low value-added labor intensive good quality cheap Chinese products that we never ever manufactured in the US in the first place or that we stopped producing decades ago as it is not our comparative advantage to produce low end cheap goods! So he says that he wants to reshore tech rather than cheap toys . But his exemptions will not reshore iPhones or tech goods and they will not reshore either cheap goods we can’t and won’t produce at home! So all contradictory dissonant inconsistent and incoherent policies taken by the seat of the pants and are decided and reversed on a whim via UnTruth Anti-Social in the middle of sleepless zombie nights!
So not even Make America CheapToys Again! This 145% tariff is the most regressive tax in US history that shafts the working class that he pretends to want to help while leading to almost no reshoring ever of jobs on goods we stopped producing in the US in the 1960s nor of the tech goods we want to reshore and that we are now exempting from tariffs to avoid pissing off many US consumers and to avoid screwing Apple’s and all other US tech firms’ profits!
+ Promoted as a way to revitalize manufacturing in the US, the immediate effect of Trump’s chaotic trade policy seems to be tanking it instead.
Philly Fed Survey: “New orders fell sharply, from 8.7 in March to -34.2, its lowest reading since April 2020”
NY Fed Survey: “Expected orders and shipments plunging.”
+ According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.”
+ As Trump slashes research funding for America’s top universities, China is filling the “mind shaft gap.” Since 1985, China has produced more than 400,000 postdocs. In 2024 alone, 42,000 new students entered postdoc programs in China, a threefold increase from 2012.
+ China has installed more industrial robots (276,000 units than the rest of the world combined (265,000 units).
+ Daniel Melendez Martinez: ‘Trump may [or may not] have written “The Art of the Deal,” but he is messing with those who wrote “The Art of War.”
+ Goldman Sachs analysts on the effect of Trump’s tariffs on employment in the US: “A net negative impact from trade protection on employment, even before accounting for the employment drags from the growth slowdown we expect”.
+ Michael Hartnett, Bank of America’s chief investment strategist, said the U.S. is no longer the global economy’s “primary growth engine.”
+ According to Fortune, half of American parents are subsidizing their Gen Z and millennial adult children at the rate of $1,474 a month.
+ Coachella on the Enstallment Plan: Billboard reports that more than 60% of attendees at Coachella used a “buy-now-pay-later” plan to finance their tickets at the three-day music festival. General admission tickets this year start at $499. The payment plan charges an upfront $41 fee.
+ $30 billion: the amount it would cost Apple to move 10% of its production out of China and to the US over the next three years.
+ Trump’s tariffs will raise new-home costs by $9,200, according to the New York Post.
+ Amount Trump claims his tariffs are generating a day: $2 billion (or even $3.5 billion!)
+ Total amount actually collected per day since April 5: $250 million
+ Ray Dailo, the billionaire hedge funder: “I’m worried about something worse than a recession.”
+ Bruce Kasman, JPMorgan’s chief economist: “Disruptive U.S. policies have been recognized as the biggest risk to the global outlook all year.”
+ Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “While uncertainty remains elevated, it is now becoming clear that tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected and the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth…My confidence in inflation moving back down is lower than it was.”
+ A Trump-appointed judge just quashed a rule that capped credit card late fees at $8—siding with big banks over consumers. That means $32 fees are back, and Biden’s crackdown on junk fees is out the door.
+ Despite DOGE’s slash-and-burn attack on the federal workforce, government spending is up $154 billion under Trump…
+++
+ Apparently, Pete Hegseth’s a great Secretary of Defense because he can throw a wobbly forward pass. But I remember when he threw an axe on live TV, missed the target, and almost killed a pedestrian, the errantly tossed axe hitting a military musician (a drummer) in the arm and preparing us for the collateral murders he’s now inflicting on peasants around the world.
+ Trump’s a pretty good salesman…for the opposition to any policy he’s proposing: In January 2025, 77 percent of Canadians opposed being annexed by the US. By April, the number had risen by seven points to 84 percent.
+ The collapse of European tourism to the US:
Change from previous year
Austria
2024: +22
2025: -22Denmark
2024: + 10
2025: -35Germany:
2024: + 20
2025: -30Iceland
2024: + 18
2025: -35Norway
2024: + 10
2025: -25Spain
2024: + 20
2025: -25Sweden
2024: + 10
2025: -20UK
2024: + 8
2025: -35
+ Nearly 900,000 fewer people went to the U.S. in March as cross-border travel has plummeted. In 2024, international travelers to the US spent $254 billion, an average of $4,000 per visit.
+ Why would anyone come here knowing they could be “accidentally” arrested without cause and sent to a death camp in El Salvador with no recourse whatsoever…
+ The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen tells Zeit newspaper: “The West as we knew it no longer exists. Europe is still a peace project. We don’t have bros or oligarchs making the rules. We don’t invade our neighbors, and we don’t punish them.” No irony detected.
+ As predictable as melting ice sheets….Greenland’s foreign minister has said it is seeking deeper cooperation with China and potentially a free trade agreement.
+ Why would anyone come here knowing they could be “accidentally” arrested without cause and sent to a death camp in El Salvador with no recourse whatsoever…
+ Elon Musk: ‘Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, was running around on stage with the Tesla stock cut in half. He was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a jerk. Who derives joy from that?” Perhaps Elon’s baby mammas…?
+ Incredible piece in the Wall Street Journal on how Musk impregnates, then gags his harem of baby mammas…
Musk offered [Ashley] St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk’s children…In 2023, he had a meeting in Austin where people he described as Japanese officials asked him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman, according to a text message reviewed by the Journal. “They want me to be a sperm donor. No romance or anything, just sperm,” he texted St. Clair. Musk later told her he gave his sperm to the person who asked for it, without naming the woman…While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies… [he] sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages.
+ It’s as if a bunch of 13-year-old boarding school brats are running the country…
+ Jesus in the Land of Gadarenes asked the Gerasene Demoniac: “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion,” because many devils had entered him. (Mark 5:9)
+ A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer readings on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these defective machines beyond the 50,000-mile warranty limit…
+ Since 2014, one-third of Tesla’s profits (or roughly $10.7 billion) have come from government-sponsored climate credits. So much for Elon Musk’s claim that his companies are being “strangled to death” by regulations. But the billionaire’s car company, Tesla, might not have survived without them. According to a review in E&E, “in the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere.”
+++
+ The real takeaway here is that UnitedHealth has been making billions off the denial of care…
+ A study in Nature estimates that the elimination of US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause 25 million deaths worldwide, which would place Trump, Musk, Rubio and RFK, Jr in the ranks of some of the world’s most infamous mass killers…
– 15.2m deaths from AIDS
– 2.2m deaths from TB
– 7.9 additional child deaths
+ RFK, Jr’s Children’s Health Defense to Peter Hildebrand, who unvaccinated daughter Daisy died from complications associated with the measles: “Do you or your wife have any regrets about not giving the MMR to Daisy or any of your children?
+ Peter Hildebrand: “Absolutely not. And from here on out if I have any other kids in the future they’re not going to be vaccinated at all.
+ This is a perfect example of When Prophecy Fails Syndrome, where followers of apocalyptic preachers don’t abandon their prophet when his prophecies but only become more devoted to him, even as he leads them to ruin.
+ As for the Prophet (RFK, Jr), why shouldn’t he be held accountable for his complicity in this infanticide by medical negligence?
RFK JR: And these are [autistic] kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
+ For an alleged champion of autistic children, RFK, Jr. seems to know nothing about autistic children or their abilities, which are often as diverse and remarkable as any other children. People with autism can write poems, dance, run businesses, make films and do complex math. Instead, this self-aggrandizing jerk seems to view them as human throwaways, nothing but a drain on society–sounds familiar. You know who doesn’t pay taxes, Bobby? Elon Musk (2018) & Jeff Bezos (2007 & 2018), along with Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros…
+ Elizabeth Warren: “I won’t share RFK Jr.’s lies about autism. It’s disgusting and dangerous. If he had a shred of decency, he would apologize and resign. Autistic people contribute every day to our nation’s greatness. To every kid with autism, I’m in this fight all the way for you.”
+ The Lancet estimates that nearly 500,000 children could die from AIDS-related causes by 2030 as a consequence of Trump’s decimation of PEPFAR programs.
+ The global growth rate in CO2 emissions was 3.5 PPM, causing NOAA to extend its y-axis by 1 ppm for the first time. The significance of the graph is still understated, since it’s charting the rate of increase not the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which would continue to grow even if the rate of increase fell flat or even decreased.
+ According to Berkeley Earth’s dataset, March 2025 tied with March 2016 and March 2024 as the warmest on record. It was 1.55°C above preindustrial (1850-1900) levels.
+ Imagine living in a place that cared even a little bit about your health and well-being…
+ A new study in Science estimates that as many as 1.4 billion people live in areas with soil dangerously polluted by heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead.
+ This week Trump’s EPA began gutting the bans on toxic forever chemicals. How does this “Make America Healthy Again,” Bobby old chap?
+++
+ Jay Gatsby would have regretted inviting every single one of this rotten crowd to his parties…
+ Speaking of creeps. Here’s Kyle Langford, a 20-year-old new right candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor of California: “I am pro-deportation. You know, I want, like, I was thinging too, first off, like, deport all the men and then for the women maybe you’ll have, like, a one-year timeline to marry: we know who you, we know where you are, if you marry one of our Californian incels then you can stay. But if you don’t, then you’re getting sent back across the border.”
+ Alec Karakatsanis on his important new book, Copaganda: “I wanted to write a book about how institutions that think of themselves as being liberal contribute to the mythologies that underlie the authoritarian turn in our society.”
+ This is a greivous insult to bats, who are communal, intelligent, environmentally beneficent and don’t recognize borders of any kind…
+ Although the number of Americans who express a belief in God and attend church services has been in steady decline, the number of Americans who believe there is “life after death” has increased from 76% in 1973 to 83% in 2022. (General Social Survey, 1973-2022). This says something profound about the current state of American politics, though I don’t know what the hell it is…
When They had My Trial, Baby, You Could Not be Found…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza: Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed
Mohammed Omer Almoghayer
(OR Books)
Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump
James Ridgeway
(Haymarket)
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
Adam Becker
(Basic)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Ones and Twos
Gerald Clayton
(Blue Note)
Owls, Omens and Oracles
Valerie June
(Concord)
Water Song
Savina Yannato
(ECM)
Stubbing It Out for Good
“Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.