Mick Hartley

Bill Withers 1938 - 2020

Well that's sad. What surprises me is that a singer who released very little material, and who seemed to be destined for a minority cult following, became so well known that his death is featuring on headlines across the world. Maybe it's because he was one of a kind, and maybe it was because he was an eloquent and principled man who did his best and then packed it in when he got fed up with it all.

I featured Use Me, from a 1978 Old Grey Whistle Test session, back in 2011, and linked to this 2010 interview:

So why has Bill Withers not released any new music since 1985? A fascinating new documentary, Still Bill, offers clues without quite getting under his skin. In one of the film’s candid moments, he plays a few sombre chords on the piano, turns to the camera and says, ‘Thoreau said most men live lives of quiet desperation. I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.’

I find him slumped in his wife’s Los Angeles office, from which she runs their music company, handling rights and royalties to his songs. For a second it’s hard to reconcile this figure with the powerfully built, dark-haired man who chopped out the chords to Use Me. It’s not that his curls are now grey, he also seems to have shrunk.

He’s polite but taciturn, uttering pithy statements punctuated with a defiant stare. I ask where he got the inspiration for his most memorable songs. ‘If I knew how to explain songwriting,’ he says, ‘I would write a bestselling book. If that’s what you do, that’s what you are. You are that.’

Is he still making music? ‘Not really that much. That kind of stuff, to me, was a lot more interesting at 35 than at 71 years of age. I’m not motivated to wanna draw attention to myself or travel all over the place. There was a time for that. When it was done it was done. Now it’s something else.’

The trailer for Still Bill is here:

"Most of the major record companies called me up. They had this Rhythm'n'Blues syndrome in their minds, with the horns and the three chicks and the gold lamé suits, and I wasn't really into that...."

Here's Ain't No Sunshine, from that same OGWT session:

Mean streets

At about the same time as John Vachon was capturing that front porch image of idyllic small town America in the previous post, pioneering street photographer Helen Levitt was roaming New York's rougher areas like the Lower East Side and Harlem:

New York, 1940 © Film Documents LLC

New York, 1940 © Film Documents LLC

New York, 1938 © Film Documents LLC

New York, 1940 © Film Documents LLC

New York, 1940 © Film Documents LLC

New York, 1945 © Film Documents LLC

Helen Levitt previously - Street views (more 1940s NYC); Manhattan Transit (subway, 1978).

A Kehrer Verlag retrospective was published in 2018.

Front porch

John Vachon - August 1941. "Front porch. Elgin, Illinois."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

Sittin' on a Boat Dock

Live from Dallas, the great Freddie King on the 1966 show The !!!! Beat:

Otis Redding's (Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay was recorded in 1967 and released in 1968. Entirely different feel, of course, but....well, as we see here, sitting on docks was already a thing...

Here's Freddie some years a later, laying down a very solid groove while sporting the most outrageous lapels.

He died young, aged only 42, in 1976. His diet didn't help. He was, apparently, in the habit of consuming Bloody Marys rather than solid food so as not to waste time when setting up shows.

Seals, spiders, sheep

Some images from the Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2020 Competition:

“Above the Crabeater Seals”. Antarctica. © Nature TTL/Florian Ledoux

“I’m not going easy”. Singapore. Great white pelican, struggling with a non-native fish. © Nature TTL/Robert Ferguson

“Coexistence”. Iceland. © Nature TTL/Dipanjan Pal

“Startled Owl”. UK. Baby owl perplexed by dive-bombing jackdaw. © Nature TTL/Paul Holman

“Nothing here but this tree”. Australia. Lichen Huntsman spider. © Nature TTL/Caitlin Henderson

“Shadow game”. Tuscany. Sheep sheltering from the evening sun. © Nature TTL/Marek Biegalski

It is all getting a bit serious, Ma

Howard Jacobson in Tablet, on his mother, and worrying. Coronavirus Shmoronavirus.

Ascertainment bias

An excellent overview from Martha Henriques at BBC Future on those coronavirus stats, and why death rates vary from country to country - Coronavirus: Why death and mortality rates differ. The whole piece needs to be read to get the full picture, but here's an encouraging snippet from Carl Heneghan, an epidemiologist and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford:

During an epidemic, doctors are more likely to attribute a death with complex causes as being caused by the disease in question – a trait known as ascertainment bias.

“We know, during an epidemic, people will call every death as though it’s related to Covid-19. But that is not the case,” says Heneghan. “Always, when people look back at the case notes and assign causation, they realise they will have overestimated the case fatality in relation to the disease.”

The reason for the bias is that “there’s a tendency to focus on the worst-case scenario”, says Heneghan. “That’s the only message that gets out there.”

One example is the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, known as swine flu. Early case fatality rate estimates were inflated by a factor of more than 10. Even 10 weeks into the epidemic, estimates varied widely between countries, coming in between 0.1% and 5.1%. When medics later had a chance to go through case documents and evaluate cases, the actual H1N1 case death rate was far lower, at 0.02%.

That’s not a cause for complacency, says Heneghan. But it could be an antidote to some of the alarm at the very high reported death rates in some countries.

But yes, it's....complicated.

Reactions in Europe

What's happening over there, across the Channel? Well, in Italy, the singing has stopped:

A few days into Italy’s lockdown, people across the country sang and played music from their balconies as they came together to say “Everything will be alright” (Andrà tutto bene). Three weeks on, the singing has stopped and social unrest is mounting as a significant part of the population, especially in the poorer south, realise that everything is not all right.

“They are no longer singing or dancing on the balconies,” said Salvatore Melluso, a priest at Caritas Diocesana di Napoli, a church-run charity in Naples. “Now people are more afraid – not so much of the virus, but of poverty. Many are out of work and hungry. There are now long queues at food banks.”...

Tensions are building across the poorest southern regions of Campania, Calabria, Sicily and Puglia as people run out of food and money. There have been reports of small shop owners being pressured to give food for free, while police are patrolling supermarkets in some areas to stop thefts. The self-employed or those working on contracts that do not guarantee social benefits have lost salaries, and many small businesses may never reopen.  [...]

There are also signs that criminal organisations are exploiting the situation. Investigations are under way into the activities of a Facebook group called “National Revolution” that has been inciting people to loot supermarkets.

“The people [behind this group] are those who, before the lockdown, made a living from house robberies and shop thefts,” said a source from the Sicily unit of Digos, Italy’s anti-terrorism police squad. “But with some of these criminal activities being on standby due to the lockdown, the only shops open to rob are supermarkets and chemists. These are people who, due to rampant poverty in the south, usually survive from criminal activities, but who are now not doing so well.”

Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, has asked the government to establish a “survival income” for the poorest citizens owing to fears that “criminal groups could promote violence acts”.

Officials also worry that the mafia will take advantage of the rising poverty, swooping in to recruit people to its organisation. “Criminal organisations have plenty of money and people could end up working for them, and once that starts, they won’t go back,” said Orsina.

Meanwhile, taxes for small businesses have merely been suspended, not abolished, meaning owners will still have to find money for contributions at a later stage, despite losing income during the lockdown. And those who can tap into financial support are coming up against stifling bureaucracy.

“Bureaucracy is the real enemy of this country and in a crisis situation it’s impossible to solve this problem,” said Massimiliano Panarari, a professor at Luiss University. “People may have tried to keep their spirits up at the beginning of the lockdown, but now their thoughts are returning towards the bitter reality of a terribly fragile country.”

And in France:

Conspiracy theories, long popular in France and a fixture of the yellow vest movement, blame the capitalist elite and also Jewish people for starting the epidemic or encouraging it. Many of the claims, shared millions of times on social media, talk of a “military virus” deliberately spread with the aim, variously, of boosting drug company profits, killing the elderly or delivering the country into the hands of multi-nationals or the secret “illuminati”.

One popular belief is that the virus was invented by the Paris Institut Pasteur. It was no accident that Agnès Buzyn, the minister of health until six weeks ago, along with her husband Yves Lévy, head of the national medical research institute Inserm, blocked distribution of chloroquinine, a supposed miracle drug for fighting Covid-19, according to one theory. The couple are part of a Jewish cabal, according to posts shared thousands of times.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, is fomenting the conspiracy virus. The runner-up in the 2017 presidential election said on Monday that her supporters were using common sense when a quarter of all the French believe the virus was created in a laboratory, according to Ifop polling.

Half of all French people believe the Macron administration is hiding the truth of the pandemic, according to the same Ipsos poll. Ms Le Pen said the government “is lying to us about absolutely everything without exception”.

The hero of the conspiracy camp is Didier Raoult, 68, the Marseilles epidemiologist with Messiah-like hair who claims that chloroquinine is the solution to the virus. A supporter of the yellow vest movement, Dr Raoult, whose admirers include President Trump, is seen as a saviour thwarted by fake government claims that trials so far have not shown his chloroquinine compound to be effective. [...]

True to French tradition, the air is thick with paradox. The more people distrust the supposedly pro-capitalist president and the governing establishment, the more they want the state that he commands to take charge and usher in a new world order after the pandemic.

A big majority of the country wants a more powerful protective state to emerge from the crisis. More than 70 per cent want the state to curb capitalism and nationalise key sectors, according to a Viavoice poll for today’s Libération newspaper.

It's almost as though each country is proceeding according to national stereotypes: the Italians with organised crime and a stifling bureaucracy; the French with half-baked conspiracy theories and a passion for the contrarian. The great European unification project, meanwhile, is not looking so great anymore.

And us Brits? Stiff upper lips and muddling through? Hmm....

Boats on the Upper Lea

Between Tottenham Hale and Stonebridge Lock.

It's not quite Monte Carlo.

The People's Park

It's one of the largest green spaces in London, created in early Victorian times to provide the East End with a place to escape the grime and drudgery of their cramped and insanitary lives:

Victoria Park is one of London’s most important historic parks and its oldest public park, visited by millions of Londoners for nearly 170 years as a place of healthy recreation, sports, play and relaxation.

The park is the largest in Tower Hamlets at 86.18 hectares and has one of the highest visitor numbers of all the London parks with around 9 million visits per year. A wide range of formal and informal sports, sponsored activities, events and festivals take place throughout the year.

Victoria Park is a key link in a green corridor that stretches from the River Thames at Limehouse, along the Regents Canal and through Mile End Park, along with the new Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park virtually next door.  The park is bordered on its northern boundary by the London Borough of Hackney.

Once again in 2018, Victoria Park was successful in retaining its Green Flag and Green Heritage Awards, for the fifth year. In addition to this, it regained its crown as the nation's favourite park, coming first place in the People's Choice Award.

The People's Park no more, though. It closed last week:

In order to ensure community safety, following the failure of some visitors to follow social distancing guidance, the council and local police have taken the joint decision to close Victoria Park until further notice.

More details here:

A spokesman said: “While many visitors to the park were behaving responsibly and exercising individually as recommended, a significant number of visitors insisted on gathering in groups, holding picnics, drinking, sunbathing and playing football and team sports.

“These visitors ignored requests from our park and community safety teams to stop their activities. When the crowds of people became unmanageable, our response was escalated to involve the local police.”

Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, supports the decision, though she acknowledged it was not easy to make.

She said: “It is disappointing that the failure of some visitors to adhere to the social distancing guidance has to lead to the closure of the park, limiting outdoor access to those who need it the most - those living in small and overcrowded accommodation.”

So yes - it was bad. So punish the offenders then. To deprive so many locals of their only green space because of the irresponsibility of a few, though?

And this:

Londoners are being warned that others, including the Royal Parks, will follow suit if people are seen to be ignoring social-distancing rules by gathering in groups or not keeping a two-metre distance between each other.

We're being asked to put up with the most severe constraints on our liberties any of us have ever experienced. Yes, I understand the rationale. But too often this just seems to bring out the worst and the pettiest in officialdom, as they appear to glory in their powers. This paternal authoritarianism, with us all being treated as naughty children who'll be punished if we don't behave....at some point they have to realise that ultimately they rely on our consent. If, that is, we don't live in a police state.

The sorry history of the WHO

The World Health Organisation (WHO) embarrassed itself at the weekend over Taiwan:

On Saturday, Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK aired an interview with Bruce Aylward, the WHO assistant director-general, who spoke to journalist Yvonne Tong on a video call.

In the segment, Ms Tong asks if the WHO would reconsider letting Taiwan join the organisation. She is met with a long silence from Mr Aylward, who then says he cannot hear her and asks to move on to another question.

Ms Tong presses him again, saying she would like to talk about Taiwan. At this point, Mr Aylward appears to hang up on her.

When the journalist calls Mr Aylward again, she asks if he could comment on Taiwan's response to the coronavirus.

Mr Aylward then replies: "Well, we've already talked about China."

His last line appeared to mirror China's stance on Taiwan, which is that the island is a breakaway province. Taiwan, however, considers itself an independent country.

Not keen to talk about Taiwan, then - which is reckoned to have one of the world’s best healthcare systems, and has responded well to the current Covid-19 crisis - Aylward has taken every opportunity to praise the Chinese response. After visiting Wuhan, he said “if I had Covid-19 I’d want to be treated in China”., and he told the NYT that “China is really good at keeping people alive”, complaining that sceptical journalists see the nation as “some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies.”

Ian Birrell at UnHerd notes that this isn't the first time the WHO has let politics get in the way of saving lives:

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general and Aylward’s boss, has gone out of his way to praise China’s “extraordinary” efforts to curb the deadly virus. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response,” he said at one point. He also insisted the country deserved to be “congratulated” for protecting its people, along with “the people of the world”.

Just days later, the views of those citizens in China were glimpsed: the death of a doctor who was arrested for trying to warn about the outbreak sparked a rare outburst of open anger against the system.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Tedros endorsed this autocratic regime. He was, after all, health minister for seven years under Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, who ran one of Africa’s most brutal one-party states, which jailed journalists, tortured dissidents and shot pro-democracy protesters. He was accused of covering up cholera outbreaks. Then shortly after defeating his British rival to win WHO’s top job, he tried to honour Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe by naming him a “goodwill ambassador”. Mugabe, bear in mind, so devastated his nation that life expectancy plunged by 26 years at one point; meanwhile, the elderly dictator flew abroad for treatment as his health deteriorated, before dying in Singapore last year aged 95.

This ridiculous idea was cancelled after a storm of protest. Human rights groups noted that Mugabe, an ally of China, was head of the African Union when it helped manoeuvre Tedros into the post. The Washington Post also pointed out that China “worked tirelessly behind the scenes” to help his cause, saying his success would be “a victory for Beijing” and for Xi’s desire to demonstrate his nation’s growing strength.

Does this explain why WHO echoed China’s opposition to travel restrictions in the early days of this crisis and now promotes the flawed idea that this nation is a role model for fighting the virus?  [...]

WHO was guilty of disastrous inaction over the deadly ebola outbreak six years ago, when its slack approach was accused of fuelling death and suffering. The terrible epidemic killed more than 11,000 people in three west African nations, provoking fear and paralysing these countries, as I saw for myself in Liberia.

Yet when Médecins Sans Frontières begged the world for help and warned the disease was out of control, it was rebuked by a WHO spokesman on social media. Only after four more months did this body, which is supposed to show global leadership, concede that  there was an international health emergency. A devastating inquiry by British and US experts accused it of “the most egregious failure” for failing to sound the alarm.

Reach back further in time and there are other examples of this body’s flaws, not least the inept way it coped with the Aids crisis that led the UN to set up a separate body for the disease....

Birds on the water

Walthamstow Wetlands:

Blaming the Jews for the plague, again

We've already seen some of the depressingly predictable antisemitic conspiracy theories that the coronavirus has spawned. You can check some of them out at MEMRI, if you have the stomach.

Lev Topor in Fathom:

Some Turkish and Iranian politicians and officials blamed the US and Israel for spreading the virus for strategic reasons, while jihadists accused the Jews of an anti-Muslim conspiracy and white supremacists blamed the Jews for spreading the virus to further their global dominance and financial gains. Antisemitic conspiracy theories began spreading even more quickly than the disease itself, on some official media outlets, as well as the regular internet and on the dark web. [...]

Throughout history, Jews have often been treated as scapegoats, accused of being the cause of society’s problems, perceived as being diseased or as a group deliberately spreading disease among non-Jews. Greek leaders used many negative adjectives to describe Jews in the 4th and 5th centuries. The eastern Roman Emperors Theodosius II and Justinian described Jews with words such as ‘perversity,’ ‘contagion,’ ‘pollution,’ ‘a plague’, and ‘contamination’. During the Black Death pandemic of the Middle Ages (1347-61) Jews were accused of ‘poisoning the wells’. The Nazi ideology framed all Jews as a bio-threat. After the establishment of Israel, some hostile Arab officials blamed Israel and the Jews for spreading AIDS among Arab leaders and officials. Terror organisations such as Hamas have spread the lie that the Zionists use AIDS-infected women to lure Arab leaders to their doom. Islamists and white supremacists are associating COVID-19 with Jews though, typically, they are using the more acceptable dog-whistle code word ‘Zionist’ as a stand-in for ‘Jew’. [...]

Throughout history, across great spans of time and space, antisemites have managed to blame Jews for their social and political problems, associating Jews with wars, financial crises, crime and plagues, and using radically different discourses to do so, religious and secular, left and right. Today, traditional antisemitic stereotypes are being updated by Islamists and white supremacists to blame Jews for COVID-19. No virus has shown a greater capacity to mutate than antisemitism. It is up to us to build up our herd immunity to every strain.

See the article for links and references.

Northern Sky

Music in a time of social isolation. A cover of "Northern Sky" by Nick Drake, featuring Katherine Priddy on vocals, Jon Wilks on guitar, Lukas Drinkwater on double bass, Jon Nice of The Grizzly Folk on keyboards, and Knees Thompson on percussion.

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky.

I've been a long time that I'm waiting
Been a long that I'm blown
I've been a long time that I've wandered
Through the people I have known
Oh, if you would and you could
Straighten my new mind's eye....

In Wuhan

US coronavirus deaths are now supposed to have surpassed China's - but can we really trust China's figures?

Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual number is at least 40,000.

“Maybe the authorities are gradually releasing the real figures, intentionally or unintentionally, so that people will gradually come to accept the reality,” a Wuhan resident, who gave only his surname Mao, told Radio Free Asia.

A city source added that, based on the aggregation of funeral and cremation numbers, authorities likely know the real number and are keeping it under wraps....

Reports of the funeral’s crematoriums working nonstop also raised questions.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a man surnamed Zhang told RFA.

Wuhan residents said the government was paying families 3,000 yuan for “funeral allowances” in exchange for silence.

“There have been a lot of funerals in the past few days, and the authorities are handing out 3,000 yuan in hush money to families who get their loved ones’ remains laid to rest ahead of Qing Ming,” Wuhan resident Chen Yaohui said, in a reference to the traditional grave tending festival on April 5.

“During the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremate bodies around the clock,” he added.

China has used state propaganda in an attempt to avoid blame for the spreading of COVID-19, despite reports showing how the government suppressed initial reports of human-to-human transmission and gagged Wuhan labs that discovered the novel virus resembled the deadly SARS virus of 2002-2003.