“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” Fred Hoyle
40 years ago. A beautiful 20 min doc describing the “overview effect”, the experience of unity of self and world, that astronauts have on seeing the earth from space. Please watch and share widely. The people are waking.
I started write about Grand Challenges in the park at the same time as the voice of a man, yelling at himself, angry at himself, was carried to me on the wind, and I thought: that’s one.
My name is James Maskalyk, and for the next 20 minutes, I am going to try and keep it together. Makes you nervous this kind of thing, but there’s one thing you learn early in medical training, if you panic, do it on the inside. So far so good, right? Practice makes practiced.
This is a talk about practice. One of mine is emergency medicine, among other things, and that’s why I am here. That, and I worked in Sudan and wrote a book about it. You all know a war is happening there, right? Our newest country, our newest conflict. Another Grand Challenge.
The book I wrote about Sudan is about a war that has never really left, that drew the air out of the small town I worked in like a forest fire would. It takes a lot of energy to feed a war, large amounts of fear and hatred, and it takes great courage to stand weaponless before it. Some of my friends are doing that right now, Sudanese and not. They are there, in the middle. They are brave. They change the world.
Do I? Maybe by standing with them. Do I by standing here, telling stories from far away? Possibly, but less so. Stories can only get you so far, no matter how full of action.
A Semantics professor, Irving Lee, held up a matchbox at the beginning of his semester, and asked his students: What is this? Eventually someone said “Matchbox”, and he would throw it at them and say “Matchbox is just a NOISE”. So are these words leaving my mouth, and no matter how well I put them together, no matter how sweet the sound of a sentence that offers sincere help, nothing will ever beat the hand that pulls you up. All the talk about Sudan, and places like it, pales against the people struggling in the mud.
That said, it is my sincere pleasure to be here, in front of you. When I get a chance to do these talks, I am thrilled, because the dialogue moves me closer to an abiding answer about how to live more authentically. I am also mystified. How is this on anyone’s radar? From what I’ve seen, working in places that need the most help is fairly lonely business. It is what makes the readjustment so jarring. Where were you guys? Maybe you just like the stories.
I’ve been a curious witness, watching the story of health evolve over the past 15 years since I stepped off the plane in Santiago, Chile, into a vastly different landscape of sickness and disease than the one I was trained for. I worked there, in the public health system where people tried to pay for their grandfather’s surgery with a dozen mastercards that they borrowed from their neighbours, and the poor, well they just died, and I realized that if I could look forward to any societal status as a physician in Canada, it was because I took care of the sick ones, no matter where, and no matter when. The sickest, though, by all accounts, seemed to be in other places. I decided to go to them.
How could they be so sick? A curiosity became an interest, a focus then a career, and I watched international health change to global health as schoolchildren understood the world as an ecosystem in a way that my zoology professors struggled to explain. Economists, geneticists, apiarists alike have clearly detailed interdependence at all levels, and show us that nothing is immune to what ails one part of an intricate and complex system, nothing separate from it, not even us, and in that sense, we are in this together, like it or not, and the question how to do the best we can with what we have, is an increasingly vital one, because our connection to the war in Sudan, and places like it, is not esoteric nor academic, it is important because it directly involves you. Because of that, noone is free from war until all of us are.
Though this may be my belief alone, I believe we are seeking something, each of us, in every sentence and every action, buzz around it like moths do a bright light. How honest we are with what we are looking for is how close we come to finding it. I believe, what we seek, is freedom from the ties that bind, that stop us from connecting fully with the source of all things, from letting love pass through fully, fearlessly. For me, that is what the Grandest Challenges speaks to. Framed in the language of health and the body, it is why we want to be well. Though the work is often at the level of particular diseases, it must also be at the barriers that stand in the way of people doing it for themselves, at the injustices that let the suffering of so many serve the purpose of a privileged few, holds them from joining their ranks as surely as their malaria does sick in bed.
The largest example of this, for me, is in war. My first taste of it was as a brand new doctor, working with a recently surrendered group of Khmer Rouge in the south of Cambodia. On the conditions of their surrender, after 25 years of fighting, they had been given a hectare of land, deep in the jungle, to carve into rice fields. They were starving and malarious. I arrived to this valley, home to these many people and a dam, built at gunpoint during the war, that claimed the lives of hundreds during its construction, and stopped one kilometre short of completion. With a borrowed land cruiser and a borrowed translator, my intent was to do a month’s worth of medical clinics in the morning and spend the afternoons meeting with village elders to find out their challenges.
My first afternoon, there was a party for my arrival. Women hurried back and forth between steaming pots and a table set under a large bamboo house, high on sticks. As I sat to eat, we saw a rooster tail of dust from an approaching truck. It slowed, and the driver stuck his head out the window and yelled something in Khmer. My translator turned to me and said “they want to know if you want to see the woman now, or if you will start tomorrow.” I set my bowl down, and walked to the back of the vehicle. In the box was a woman, old for that place, 60 or so, with a fever, barely conscious, bleeding from her mouth and nose. I was terrified. “Tomorrow!”, I said with a certainty I didn’t have, “Take her to the hospital!”, and we sat down to a meal these people could not afford, and one short day of reprieve.
I learned a lot that month, about war and sickness, how to take care of as many people as possible with the resources at hand. My medical kit, full of borrowed antibiotics and equipment, as big as a refrigerator, dwindled down the size of a lunch pail, full of only a few essential medicines. I am still learning. It is why we call it practice.
To do as much as we can with the tools at hand for as many people as possible, that is the grand challenge, and that is what we must focus on. William James says, take the simplest case of sensorial attention, trying to keep your gaze on a dot on the wall. Soon you will find one of two things has happened, either the dot has become blurry or indistinct, or your mind has been called to other things. However, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot, how big it is, what color, how far away, you can keep your attention on it for a comparatively long time. This is what genius does, in whose hands an idea coruscates and grows.
This is the question that we must meditate on, to roll over and over again in one’s mind, how to do the best with what we have at hand. We are part of a time when society has turned from religion to science and its inventions to deliver us from evil, to medical science to deliver us from suffering. Because of the promise, people sat in my waiting room the other night, beside that man angry at yelling at himself, or make trips over hot miles in Sudan on a faith that medicine can deliver us from uncertainty, though anyone who is a student of research will tell you that what we don’t know far eclipses what we do, that what we learn most from studies is how flawed our methods are at approximating the truth.
What is the faith in, then? I would say that it spreads from the sacred space between a doctor and a patient, one that is inviolable and beyond undeclared interests, that happens when I close the curtain or gesture towards the somali woman sitting underneath the thin shade of a tree with ten others, and say, “Hi, my name is james, I’m from Canada. How can i help you”, then let nothing stand in my way from doing that. Medicine as an example of life caring for itself.
The same cannot be said about the question when asked by a foreign government, or a foreign investor, because no matter how important the welfare of the suffering person in front of them, their interests can only ever tie with the competing ones, and often finishes a very distant 2nd. For that reason, I am a bit more uncomfortable with placing industry as an important leader in our quest to solve these grandest challenges, and think of it is a necessary component, but as a follower, never the arbiter in deciding what counts as a common good. Rather than protect a promise from a business to deliver a magic bullet, or encourage them to do so, I would favor removing the barriers that prevent the distribution of ideas and local solutions from flourishing.
I would argue that in the business of health, to do the best we can with what we have at hand, we already know much of what we need to focus on, and like my medical kit in Cambodia, it doesn’t need to be full of fancy medicines or new equipment, but a small amount of essential tools and medicines, and a local system who is able to answer, and deliver on the sincerely asked question about how best to serve the person in front of them. The rest will follow, and until it does, it will sit heavy as unfinished business.
I spent the first half of this year in Dadaab, Kenya, the world’s largest refugee camp. My practice was focused in the feeding centre, and pediatrics ward. It was exacting, difficult work, for which I was well trained and had good experience for. Still, I was challenged. I saw things that I had never seen before. One child I cared for, his skin fell off, he was so malnourished. When you turned him, it crumpled like tissue paper on a wet windshield. I had never seen anything like it, couldn’t find anyone who had. I looked in books, on the web. No similar cases. Many challenges like this. When I arrived to Dadaab, we were getting 1000 people per week, by the time I left, 1000 per day were making the trip across Kenya’s dangerous border, arriving starved, some naked and raped. By the time I left, we had so many kids in the feeding centre, I couldn’t keep track of them all, scattered in tents, the dusty yard.
It was a difficult place to find respite. And dangerous. The risk, primarily, was kidnapping and because of it, on our way to the field, we were asked for a sample of handwriting, to give answers to questions that only we would know, so we could prove, if we were taken, that we were still alive. We lived in a compound, and went about our work, and never mentioned it, in fact, I would say we didn’t even think about it.
One night, after tossing and turning in bed, I feel asleep. Deep in the night, I woke to shouting. My first thought was: “this is it….Shabaab’s come for me”. I rolled out of bed, swiftly grabbed what I thought I would need for my months in captivity. Passport, money, iPod, iPod charger. The essentials. I pulled my window’s curtain aside and searched the courtyard for the sweeping flashlight beam of whatever guard sold me out.
Nothing. Silence. The courtyard was empty. Then a cheer, like someone scored a penalty a kick, or missed it. Football. Champion’s league. A late game, and with the time change, the middle of the night. I lay back down, and my heart eventually quieted.
Though I would have said I wasn’t even thinking about the danger, in fact, I was thinking about it ALL the time. It was right there, at the top of my subconscious, filtering everything that went deeper, or came up through it. It coated every nuance of my experience, and I believe that is true of these grand challenges, the images of suffering, of the bombs dropping in Sudan, the starving people in Somalia, nuclear weapons sitting silent in their silos, the man yelling at himself on the street. Even though you cross over to the other side, it doesn’t matter. It sits there, as unfinished work, and though you will never be able to accomplish it all, there is no other solution but to start.
Sadly, for two of my colleagues who were working on it, who followed me in Dadaab, they fell to the risks inherent with working so close to the suffering, and were kidnapped. Two women. From Spain. They are still missing, presumed to be in Southern Somalia. Two months later, around last Christmas, two more MSF’ers were collateral in this dangerous turn, and killed in Mogadishu. I mourn them, even though we’ve never met.
They didn’t make these risks. It was done by those who fostered distrust for people in white landcruisers as part of larger political, economic, or religious agenda, who had one hand extended with food, and the other calling in the drones, that made us look disingenuous and expendable.
Despite these risks, or because they are ours to share , we are still in Dadaab, and I would bet you that today, even on a Saturday, that people are hovering over maps and figuring out how we can get safely back into Mogadishu, because matchbox is just a noise and trying to get rid of war with fighting is like trying to clean something with dirt.
People know this, feel this. It is why on April 21, I didn’t wake up to Kony posters. You can’t change the world by liking something on facebook. A click changes the world a click’s amount. Right now, my co-director of the Ethiopian program is on a plane there, our 6th month in two years, to live beside, work beside, and show solidarity with Ethiopian doctors, share their weight of trying to do the best they can for the person in front of them with the tools they have. No orator, however eloquent, no video campaign however sincere, can match the power of guiding someone’s hand on an ultrasound probe until they get the right picture, or while they deliver their first baby. Worthwhile work is difficult, and long. It takes years to build trust, seconds to lose it. One drone. We need to involve as many capable hands as possible, such that our existing tools can attain their true worth, and in these hands, corruscate and grow.
I work in Ethiopia to work myself out of a job. Who better to care for victims of a famine, or do research about the most efficient way to distribute resources than the people for whom it is a daily reality. Try as we might to place ourselves, as great as our capacity for empathy is, as sophisticated as our tools of approximation are, it is no substitute for proximity.
We should share our tools and peripheralize as much knowledge as possible so this can happen as quickly as possible, because by many accounts, not only are people dying early, of preventable things in unacceptable numbers, but we are exerting such pressure on our ecosystem that we need to, as quickly as possible, learn to live peacefully, cleanly, and efficiently together before we face even grander challenges.
What could be grander than the ones we have right now? What about “Holy frack, where did our water go?”, or “it spreads like SARS, but it lasts like HIV”. Future historians might not talk about our age as “the digital age”, but the “age of antibiotics”. I am overemphasizing none of these possibilities.
I was working for a medical journal when SARS hit, and I watched the response carefully. At its worst, people were fighting for recognition in petty academic wars with stakes so small they were invisible. At its most hopeful, people shared ideas in a way only possible in our modern world.
The challenges will continue, and we need to remove as many barriers that prevent us from sharing the best of what we’ve learned efficiently and effectively. I look forward to the time when we lose the energy that that surrounds protecting proprietary ideas, and devote it to their efficient delivery.
It is why, out of all the projects that I am involved in, the one that has the greatest potential for this is Open Medicine. Not only can you get the science free of cost and undeclared bias and industry influence, you can have the software that we use to publish it. The possibilities are enormous. Not just publishing the evolving results of a study that goes on forever, but also lectures, curricula. We are talking about an article where you can have the structure and format of how we teach emergency medicine in Addis, but also the presentations themselves, and with these, a videocast of our Ethiopian colleagues delivering the lecture for the 80% of the world where their medicine matters. For those who think that we will remain indefinitely at the apogee of privilege are poor students of history, those who don’t think that we need as many true friends as possible, blithe to human nature.
I see a day where Addis Ababa University is a destination for Somalis who want to learn emergency medicine, Sudanese, North and South, who want to share their ideas about how best to control outbreaks of meningitis. The faculty there will be the editors of an online wiki textbook, with many colleagues from around the world, about how best to address their common emergencies. Their research institute will collaborate with MSF-East Africa to make context appropriate guidelines for the care of starving children, using local foods and publish them in Open Medicine.
Open Medicine will be like Google, except that you won’t be able to buy product placement, only deserve it. Research, seminars, curricula, opinions, available to anyone who can get online, for free. Openmedicine.uk, or openmedicine.et, for their country’s guidelines, openmedicine.net to search them all. The governments of these nations, in an effort to do their job of representing the best interests of their citizens, and all people no matter where they live, will have demanded that all publicly funded studies, or of drugs and devices that will be adopted by national formularies, need to be published in Open Access journals. This will not only encourage innovations, but spread them as widely as possible, because there isn’t much time, and the best idea needs to win.
Are these solutions up to the grand challenge? No. Practice makes practiced, never perfect, only better. It is called the grandest challenge because it will always lie ahead, in the distance. There will be no grandest victory, only the struggle, of which each of you is part of whether you recognize your agency or not. While saving the world might not be possible, we can redeem the notion of what a human being is. The way to do that is by asking the questions sincerely, starting to work on the answer, and never giving up.
i am, and that’s the way it is.
one saturday night, in dadaab, we stood in a puddle around stacked soda crates, a goat sizzling over coals beside us, when the three, buzzed-out speakers in the canteen started to play this song and the same dozen cast of characters that i share my hospital days and compound nights with drifted to the tent, and danced, grinning, mud between their bare toes.
soon, it was only me and one of the departing three for whom the party was held leaning on the red cubes of coca-cola, and we agreed that there was no club in new york city that was better than this one, none where you could dance so sincerely, freed completely from the fear that there might be another, better way to spend your time.
this afternoon, i tried to walk from my outpatient clinic to the ward, and was stopped every three yards by a somali woman who pointed at the baby on her hip before detailing an illness in a language i could’t understand. one of the nurses smiled as he walked by. you’re going to miss being so famous when you leave, he said. i will.
so i nodded my head to the beat of a mother’s wagging finger, and over her shoulder saw the familiar eyes of a woman from the TFC’s (therapeutic feeding center) perilous first bed. i looked into them each morning as she asked me, wordlessly, to do something more, anything. he’s dying, she would say. i know, i know. patience. he’ll make it, i said, only half believing.
now she was moving through the gate’s swinging door, a box with a month’s worth of cups and shawls and mats and plates under her arm. behind, an older daughter carried her happy young brother, newly discharged. his mother and i looked at each other, as we had each day for a month. this time she raised her hand in the air, shook it as she walked past. though i will never be on the field for a goal that 60 000 fans will cheer, there’s no way it could sound any sweeter than the beads did clacking on her wrist.
the credit, of course, was hers and the trip she made back and forth to the jug of ORS so she could pour water in as fast as it poured out, the nurses who took over when she was too tired, the people who gave us money for the tin cup she used. but it is these moments that are so remarkable, that they keep us coming back, are worth all the sleeplessness and latrine running, daydreams of drooping faces, the awkwardness of a home that fits you less well than it did before you left because we get to be witness to the concentrated effect of the human spirit’s brightest part; intention manifested.
i remember once, months and a lifetime ago i watched a lizard track a moth up a wall. as she fluttered from one face to another, the lizard leaped, flew, narrowly missed, and the bug bumped back to the burning light. in that instant, i saw how lizards became birds. not by trying to grow feathers, and not by imagining what it would be like to fly, but by wanting that moth in their mouth so sincerely. the wings come later, but they fit perfectly.
you become what you pay attention to. and what that is, there are no rules, only possibilities. we’re all making it up what a human being is as we go along, moment to moment, and if you’re not deciding, someone is. in that understanding is a scary freedom and the world’s real magic, that as the universe manifests perpetual change, it does it, at least in part, through our imaginations.
intention made manifest. for me, some of it is self evident. msf is the world’s largest medical NGO and despite a teetering financial system around the world where even the most confident economist admits she doesn’t know what’s going on, its budget is the largest in its history, made up almost entirely by contributions of individuals around the world who give a few dollars each towards the idea that reducing suffering, even by a little bit, lightens the weight on us all.
with that money, we mark on maps military movements, to decide if we can get close enough to strike, not with weapons, but with a hospital large enough to accommodate the wounded from both sides, the hundreds of civilians who are drawn screaming into today’s modern version of war. with it, we sit like i did the other day, with a group of new arrivals who walked for kilometres through the desert heat to give up their freedom in dagahaley because it was better here, in this place where camels drop, than where they came from. among them, was a young mother who had delivered just the day before, on the road, a tiny baby, invisible under scarf. it wasn’t until she pulled it aside that i saw him, fragile and new, clinging to her breast. we said to her, we’ll take you to the hospital to rest, and we’ll find room for your husband too, and tomorrow we’ll help you work on tents and food, don’t fear, we’re here, you’re safe. it’s not near as sweet as kissing away the tears of someone you love, but it’s about as close as strangers can get, and if there’s any hope to be had in the world, it is in this direction.
like any optimist would, i deny the aspersion, citing realism. either way, i think we’re slowly winning, and if you’re not convinced, talk to your grandpa who lost two brothers to measles and one in the war, then take a walk down your quiet city street. but as you do, and the thousand dollar computer in your pocket shuffles songs, remember that there are still places where tin cups matter. it starts outside this door, the one with the curtain billowing in the sandy wind, and it reaches to the curb you’re stepping off of.
the work is never perfect, only better. but we try, sincerely, and one day, maybe, wings that fit.
http://www.mixcloud.com/jamesmaskalyk/xoxmas2012fromdoctorjames/
could be both.
as is my habit, i made a mix from some songs i heard this year that seemed to fit together. most, if not all, were released in 2012. notable in their absence are kendrick lamar’s record, killer mike’s, clinic, many others. kept it on the rock’n’roll side. xoxmas
***
cold specks – send your youth- love this woman. saw her twice in three days, the second time at massey, and though some of the magic was the company, at least part of it was a voice that sent straight shots to the soul, kindling a kind of graceful explosion. she sang her last song acapella, and filled the hall.
walkmen – beautiful music on a great record from one of my favorite bands. they’re playing jan 16, danforth music hall. bring earplugs.
alabama shakes – boys & girls – saw these guys at lees. they’re, like, 20. i met them on my way in, as they were shivering in the doorway. we talked. they rocked. i like the line ” ‘why’ is an awful lot of questions”.
lee fields and the explosions – moonlight mile – surprised i haven’t seen this as one of the records of the year on any lists. what more do you want? on this cut, the horns let lee fields (who’s been doing this for 40 years) walk that line between beauty and melancholy. plus i love songs about listening to the radio. i don’t know why.
(rest of tracklist after le jump)
april 29, 2011 – Dagahaley refugee camp, Dadaab, Kenya.
insomnia’s found me again, brittle, circling thing.
today, after lunch, as is my habit, i lied down in my warm room and let the fans breeze play through my mosquito net. sometimes i’lll fall asleep for a few minutes, other days i just my close my eyes, and let the scenes behind them flash like dreams.
today, my pillow coiled over my head, i remembered a day, when as a boy, i shot a robin. it was early in the morning, and the grass was still wet with dew. i had my little gun, and some bright copper BBs. with them, i was allowed to shoot only two things: targets, and varmints. i lived in the country, and there was little to do that interested me but walking through fields and woods looking for both. my little brother was three years younger, and when you’re ten, and he’s seven, you can only sigh at the complexities of a world that you’ve been able to understand in those interceding three years, and pout when your mom makes you take him along on patrol. “fine. but you can’t shoot.”
the varmints fell into two main categories, gophers whose holes could break a horse’s leg, and magpies who strewed the garbage from our burning barrels across the backyard and terrorized songbirds. moles were also varmints, because they ate our garden, but these i trapped as they blindly burrowed through their tunnels. they were also the only ones i got paid for: a dollar each.
its possible that i never actually got permission from my parents to shoot the magpies, and lumped them into the varmint category on my own. no matter. i only shot at them anyway. they were too smart, and our barrels were in such a wide open space, that even with all my sneaking, i could not get close enough. if i did hit them from far away, the BB would bounce off their thick wings, and they would fly to the trees and laugh at me until i walked away, which is one of the most humiliating things that can happen to a frontier varmint sheriff. with gophers, however, i was much more able to discharge the responsibility given to me to make the field a safer place to graze.
as varmints became fewer, in exactly equal proportions, targets expanded. this is a partial list: telephone pole, telephone wire, telephone wire box, golf ball, the surface of a far away pond, flying seagulls, a hanging rope, my little brother (i shot him in the eye, but i mostly didn’t mean to, and anyway, i made him not tell or i would never let him shoot), raspberries, ears of corn, bugs, bees, mushrooms. and, one day, in the morning, the grass slick with dew, a robin.
i was on my way to the spruce tree, closest to the burning barrels to do my morning magpie sweep, and saw it hopping along, looking for worms that had stayed too late. it wasn’t a varmint, that was clear, but it did look suspiciously like a target, and anyway there was no way i was going to hit it, not from this distance.
i pumped the air into the gun carefully, so the lever wouldn’t clack against the barrel. once, twice, three slow times, drew a BB into the chamber, raised the little gun, and put the bevel of the site on the bouncing bird’s red breast.
pop.
the bird stopped. with him, my heart.
no no, hop.
he turned his head, and fell.
the world rushed in to see what i’d done. i looked behind, to the house, towards my neighbour’s, for a witness to my evil, then ran towards the dead bird.
he lay there, in the soft grass, a bloom of even redder blood on his red chest. i looked around again, then picked him up by a wing. it was warm, and wet from the dew. his eyes were shut by tiny gray lids.
i laid the gun down, held his body against my stomach, and ran towards the thick stand of willows at the bottom of the hill. i arrived, breathless, blood on my hands, my shirt. i dragged the heel of my shoe into the ground until i’d made a robin sized hole, then placed him in there, and with my heart still pounding and no benediction, covered him with loam.
i wiped my hands in the grass, walked back up the hill, found my gun, dried it off, put it back in the garage. my mom saw me coming out.
“jimmy, come here, i need you to bring this to your dad….wait. what happened?” she said, looking at the blood tracked onto my rugby pants.
“i shot a robin.”
“why?”
“i don’t know.”
“you can’t do that.”
“i know.”
“go tell your dad.”
“ok.”
i did. he took the gun away. my brother was smug. but i don’t think he could have known, back then, that is a sin i would still pay for, dozens of years later, thousands of miles away, in a refugee camp, tossing and turning in a hot bed, twenty minutes before the car leaves to a hospital full of the sick and starving, but i do and i’m not sure if atonement for our transgressions that drives us here, or if is the realization that suffering is contagious and can infect our dreams and the same is true of peace and that is why we stay.
i am writing this in kensington, watching drops dimple the concrete behind my building.
it is a new year, hours in. so far, it seems very hangover-y. despite this, my hopes are high. not only am i confident that the headache prevalence will diminish, i am anticipating other truths to declare themselves. people are getting it, i think, more and more each day. school children understand that the world is an ecosystem in a way that my zoology professors struggled to explain, that all things are connected. soon, economic news that we aren’t buying as much as before won’t be seen as the end of civilization, but its beginnig. the occupy movement won’t be seen as a failure because it lacked message, but important because of the inclusivity of its process, and its peacefulness. “post-modernism” wil be replaced by “post-secularism”, and we will meditate more, discovering that if we are not our thoughts, then we can only be the universe effervescing, and the charred skeletons of children burnt black in drone attacks will be as unacceptable as if it were a block away. we will realize that the opposite of happiness is not sadness, but fear, and as it fades with the understanding of our agency, we will want less, work less, party more and have better sex. the real obama will come out of hiding, and risk his life to start telling the truth of how the military corporations are running the world, because we can handle this truth and work to end their dominion. other politicians will follow or be toppled. a robot will be invented that can unpack my suitcases, because i really don’t like doing that. packing seems fine. it’s the un-.
last year i did a lot of packing. and un. from asia, to europe, africa, the nevada desert. i spent the first part of this year in the world’s largest refugee camp, dadaab, working with somali’s fleeing the violence in their country amidst a great drought. people were starving and many died. two of my colleagues got kidnapped after i left, two others were recently killed in mogadishu. 2011 has been a big, bad year.
i was lucky enough to work with many somalis. the cultural rift was large, but they were generous of spirit. we learned with and about each other. once i asked a man why music, for many of his countrymen, was forbidden. “because it distracts one from god”. puzzled, i answered, “but music IS god”.
so, from me to you, from 2011 to 2012, music to god, god to music, may both move us through these brand new days, and when we doubt the brightness of a human spirit may its everpresent effervsecence dance us. the past is for ghosts.
all of these songs came out on records released this year, though a couple of tracks were released previously. each of them have been stuck in my head for months, and the albums worth buying. i hope you like them.
they are not mixed, but they are loosely ordered to make sense played in sequence. here is the link to a youtube playlist. a couple of tracks aren’t there, and if you really need the links (or even the tracks) i can sort you. hit me on here.
1. Bobby – Youth Lagoon – Probably listened to this record, the suuns, and tuneyards more than any other this year. kid from san diego. haunting melodies. saw him at the garrison after a seven day silent mediation retreat. could see the music. it looked beautiful.
2. Lord Can You Hear Me – Spacemen 3 – old band on a new record. one of the best albums of the year might be a mixtape, done by MGMT for “late night tales”. buy it. what’s old becomes new.
3. God is taking care of me – Reverend Deacon Williams – ignore what i wrote above about old songs on new records, and MGMT’s being the best. This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel On 45rpm 1957-1982 triple CD set will remove any distinction between music and god.
4. Powa – Tuneyards – all kindsa could not stop listening to this record. this and youth lagoon on repeatrepeat. saw her twice, once in barcelona, one in trono. looping her voice, banging on a drum, face smeared with electric neon paint, shouting about love and gangsters.
5. The Wolves – Ben Howard – i think i like this song so much because i watched Danny Macaskill’s trials video a million times. still, howard is from the UK, a young guitar virtuouso, who just released his first record. but it is macaskill who is le shit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShbC5yVqOdI
6. Ritual Union – Little Dragon – awesome. saw them at the Hoxton. i still have their drumsticks on my kitchen counter. when they were finished, brenalynn was, to the drummer: “buddy. drumsticks.” he walked down and handed her one, and she was, like, “what the fuck good is one drumstick” and pointed him back to his kit. i have them both.
7. Separator – Radiohead – i sometimes start my shift by asking my students who the best band in the world is, and if they don’t say radiohead i fail them, because how could their medicine be trusted if their judgement is so poor? lotsa people hate on this record, but they are also wrong. hate on the remixes. radiohead does it best. except modeselektors does bang the SHIT out of Miss Magpie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B74uDKMMoPE
8. Opus – Strangeboys – what can you say about these guys. garage punk record followed by something much more mature. surprising but still cool. i will buy every record they do, and go watch their lazy awesome shows when they come through. i wish i was seeing this band right now and drinking whiskey.
9. Doom Wop – Mr. Heavenly – these guys are included because they seem to give a fuck, but also not really, and if “doom wop” doesn’t become a musical genre, i will recant all my optimism about humanity’s future. doom wop? the record is much more poppy than this cut. and one of the guys is from modest mouse. what else do you need? more doom wop, that’s what.
10. Serve the People – Handsome Furs – sure, i’m fond of the album cover, and i know people can hate on the obviousness of the refrain, but its best not to consider haters. husband/wife team from montreal, wide travellers through music scenes around the world, from asia to eastern europe, and, really, if you say you serve the people and instead swerve the people, you’ll soon be over. truth. the smartest people i know are working on that.
11. Black and White – Generationals – aren’t you glad I included your new favorite song?
12. North Star – The Rural Alberta Advantage – i’ve been living off my RAA from the beginning, and though i know that even if there’s no end in sight it’ll come anyway, and when it does, if im there, tracing the big dipper’s front lip to the north star, i’ll be happy. there is space in these songs like the RA sky that is this mixtape’s album cover.
13. The Life – Gary Clark Jr. – Whoever Gary Clark Sr. is, dude must be proud. This album is tiight. More black keys than the black keys when needs be, then an uptempto newsoul joint like this that hits, particularly so, having got home at 4 in the morning. they tell me it’s the life.
14. The OtherSide – The Roots – Shit. I won’t comment on how they played Fishbone’s “Lying Ass Bitch” when a notorious climate denying antigay republican guested on Jimmy Fallon, nor that I haven’t heard such urgent, tight rhymes from black thought since ever. I will say that, one time, I was in the BK and ?uestlove was djing at the brooklyn bowl, and i ran into him at the door, said thanks, and he went in for the knuckles and i gave him magic fingers and he was bedazzled. i will also say that any year that has roots/radiohead/tom waits = not a complete catastophe.
15. 3 heures – Angelo Spencer – sure, he’s from brittany, and he’s appropriated malian music like it was his own, but who cares if it sounds so sweet. on a tous besoin amour ici.
16. New Year’s Eve – Tom Waits – i also fail residents if they don’t answer that Tom Waits is one of three people, living or dead, they could share dinner with. you probably wouldn’t eat much, likely leave the table at different times, and find yourself sitting on a porch with jesus watching a car burn wishing that you still smoked, but if bet if you didn’t say too much, tom might come to your new year’s eve party one year and play this song.
may many many deep deep blessings dimple your days. love. j.
