New Zealand Teenager rescued after trying to cross Cook Strait in a dinghy

A teenager is lucky to be alive after he became stranded while trying to cross the Cook Strait in a dinghy and had to be rescued.

Lane Nichols, Georgina Campbell and Luke Kirkness, NZ Herald

news.com.auMay 29, 202012:42am

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A lucky teenager has managed to survive a night on New Zealand’s often treacherous Cook Strait in a three-metre wooden dinghy after being rescued Thursday morning.

The 18-year-old set off from Kenepuru Sound in New Zealand’s South Island around 10pm Wednesday before heading through Pelorus Sound and crossing the strait.

Bound for the Porirua coast, northwest of Wellington, the young man contacted the Harbourmaster alerting them he had broken down off the coast around 9am,” the New Zealand Herald reports.

Police were able to geolocate him using his cell phone location and he was located around 12km west of Mana Island. A Westpac helicopter directed police to his location.

The young man was in reasonably good nick, slightly cold but not hypothermic and very lucky Wellington Maritime Police Senior Sergeant Dave Houston said.

“He’s lacked preparation to do essentially a 100km voyage in a dinghy,” Houston said.
“In his situation, he didn’t check the weather forecast and lucky for him, it was probably the best weather conditions you could actually get.

“We’ve got strong tides that go through the channel, lots of rips and unsettled water. It’s all quite unpredictable and can change at the drop of a hat.”

The conditions on the water would not have been great in a dinghy, MetService said.

While swell conditions overnight yesterday for Cook Strait were almost non-existent with a swell around one metre, there were winds of up to 20 knots – around 40km/h.

The teenager was not an experienced seaman and was very lucky given how dangerous Cook Strait could be at times, Houston said.

The teen became stranded when his dinghy broke down. Picture: NZ PoliceSource:Supplied

The small outboard motor used to power the dinghy had broken down when the teenager called for help – his cell phone was also going flat, Houston said.

Greater Wellington Harbourmaster Grant Nalder said when he got the call he initially thought it was a hoax.

The teenager did not sound stressed when he called, did not sound like he was in a panic and was very casual about needing a tow.

Anyone in distress on the water should dial 111 to get emergency services moving more quickly, Nalder said, advising people to carry personal locator beacons too.

Houston spoke to the teenager’s mother during the rescue operation this morning and told the Herald she was very concerned for his welfare. She was elated once he was rescued.

The teenager told police the journey had been “quite rough” in patches and Houston said he was saturated after the ordeal.

The teenager would not be required to foot the bill for the rescue and at this stage he would not be facing any charges either.

Police said the teen wouldn’t be facing any charges over the incident. Picture: NZ PoliceSource:Supplied

There were fishing rods on the back of the dingy but Houston did not think the teenager had attempted to catch anything.

While the outcome was good and no one was hurt, the voyage was a great example of what not to do, Houston said.

“While the man did have a lifejacket on and carried his cell phone, he had not checked the weather conditions and was not an experienced seaman,” he said.

“Everybody going out on the water needs to remember to wear a lifejacket, check the conditions and only go out if it is calm and go out in daylight.

“You need to have all proper safety equipment and be an experienced and capable seaman if you are going to make this coastal voyage.”

If the teenager had not called police, they would not have been able to locate him using the phone’s data and it could have been a very different outcome.

And while Houston would not go as far as to say the decision to try and make the journey overnight in a small vessel was crazy, he did advise against it.

Meanwhile, harbourmaster Nalder reiterated those comments, saying the journey was somewhat ambitious.

“I don’t really advise small boats with no lights being out in the dark either … There are better ways of crossing the Cook Strait, like catching the ferry.”

This article originally appeared on the NZ Herald and has been republished with permission.

California: 2000 Rally Against COVID-19 Lockdown - (SF Gate ) 23 May 2020

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It was the largest protest rally in Sacramento so far over COVID-19 shutdowns — with haircuts on the side.

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At least 2,000 demonstrators came to the Capitol on Saturday to march around the grounds, feast on barbecue and demand that Gov. Gavin Newsom lift his restrictions on business, religious gatherings and other trappings of everyday life.
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The demonstration, dubbed Liberty Fest, was a cross between a tailgate party, music festival and political statement. Organizers said it would be country’s largest Memorial Day weekend protest against coronavirus stay-at-home orders.

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A massive throng gathered along 10th Street, facing the west steps of the Capitol, with hundreds arriving hours before the official noon start. Two busloads came from Southern California, organized by anti-vaccination protesters.

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While the crowd was peaceful, at least three demonstrators briefly hopped the temporary fence installed weeks ago along the sidewalk on 10th Street to keep protesters away from the west steps.
One man tried to give California Highway Patrol officers a copy of a 10-page treatise on the constitutional duties of law enforcement and allegations involving former Bay Area gang leader

Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, who was sentenced to life in prison for murder in a wide-ranging racketeering case that also snared former state Sen. Leland Yee in 2014. The officers refused to accept the document and let the man return to the sidewalk. Then two other men hopped the fence as well but immediately slipped back into the crowd.

Some in the crowd wore T-shirts bearing the slogan, “Resist. Rise. Revolt. Reopen.” Social distancing was non-existent as the sidewalk and closed-off 10th Street were clogged with humanity. Masks were rare, aside from reporters and the more than 100 California Highway Patrol officers on hand, and demonstrators said journalists who wore them were spreading fear. A few people were treated for dehydration as temperatures crept into the 80s.

Rock and country music played over a loudspeaker as some of the protesters marched slowly around the perimeter of the building. A flatbed truck, set up for speeches and live music, bore the sign, “Jesus, heal this land,” and signs vowing to recall Newsom were plentiful. An airplane circled overhead, towing a banner that said “End his tyranny” and depicted Newsom as Hitler.

“We pray for Gavin Newsom, as hard as that is for us to do, because he is so wicked,” Pastor Tim Thompson, a Southern California clergyman and a familiar sight at Capitol coronavirus protests, told the crowd as the rally began.

A card table offered American flags and Donald Trump merchandise for sale, while another vendor was selling shirts with the slogan, “1776. Forever Free.” Dozens of port-a-potties lined the sidewalk, and several area restaurants set up food trucks in the vicinity.

Haircuts, manicures and other services performed in close quarters remain prohibited for the time being under Newsom’s phased-in approach to resuming economic activities. At least one protester decided she would provide haircuts anyway.

La Donna Christensen, 39, a Roseville cosmetologist and hair stylist, set up six temporary stations on the sidewalk by the west side of the Capitol. Despite warnings of a license suspension from the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, she was out to show that haircuts aren’t hazardous..

“We’re going to do haircuts for donations, basically try to show that being in the cosmetology industry … is one of the most sanitary industries in the state,” she said. “Why do they close down the salons but we can go to Home Depot, Walmart, Target? It’s ridiculous.”

Jennifer Joseph, who drove up Friday night from Orange County, had her 9-year-old son, Jordan, get one of Christensen’s first haircuts.

“It’s time to open up the state,” Joseph said, adding that Jordan had been happy to let his hair grow out. “This isn’t the country I grew up in.” Joseph’s mother said that because she was donating the money to Christensen, instead of actually paying her a fee for her grandson’s haircut, she believed that wouldn’t jeopardize the Roseville woman’s license.

More than 100 CHP officers strolled through the Capitol grounds. Unlike previous rallies, when they were jeered by some protesters, they didn’t don helmets or line up along the fence line guarding the west side of the Capitol. They closed 10th Street to vehicle traffic as a portion of the crowd spilled onto the street and the parking circle that marks the eastern edge of Capitol Mall.

Newsom has opened up much of the California economy in the past two weeks, including restaurants and shopping malls. But demonstrators demanded that Newsom go further to revive an economy that has seen unemployment quadruple since his shutdown order took effect in mid-March.

“We’ve got to reopen everything now,” said Thinh Nguyen, 38, a manicurist whose North Highlands nail salon has been closed. His father, Vuong Tat Nguyen, who served in the South Vietnamese army, led a sizable group of pro-Trump demonstrators chanting, “Four more years.”

Wearing a scarf that merged the American flag with the flag of his homeland of South Vietnam, Thinh Nguyen said Newsom is overstating the COVID-19 risks. He added that he isn’t convinced Newsom will allow him and other manicurists to reopen anytime soon.

“Whatever he says is all lies, this governor,” he said.

Many in the crowd shared Nguyen’s belief that the risks of the coronavirus have been exaggerated. “It’s a lot of hype,” said James Reed, a medical marijuana grower from Siskiyou County.
His pot farm hasn’t been shuttered by Newsom’s order, but he said, “It’s not my livelihood that I’m worried about.”

Many of Newsom’s critics are demanding the right to go to church. Thompson, the pastor of 412 Church in Riverside County, said in an interview he appreciated President Donald Trump’s announcement Friday that he would order governors around the country to allow religious institutions to reopen. But Thompson added that Trump’s comments really aren’t necessary.

“It’s not up to the government to tell the churches what to do,” said Thompson. He added that his 412 Church in Murrieta has “been open full for the past month.”

Pressure is growing on Newsom to allow churches to reopen. The U.S Justice Department recently warned him that prohibiting religious services is unconstitutional — even though federal judges have turned aside legal challenges brought by California churches against Newsom’s order. Meanwhile, a large group of California clergy has vowed to reopen their churches for services May 31.

For his part, Newsom said Friday he would issue new guidelines on religious services within days. A large group of California clergy has vowed to hold in-person church services May 31.

Meanwhile, Newsom won a legal victory late Friday when a federal judge in Sacramento refused to allow a health club owner to reopen.

U.S. District Judge John Mendez refused to grant Sean Covell, owner of three Fitness System clubs in Sacramento, Lodi and West Sacramento, a temporary restraining order that would have overturned Newsom’s restrictions. Covell said Newsom’s order violated the First Amendment, but the judge said gyms have nothing to do with freedom of speech. On Saturday, Covell appealed to his gym members to donate to a GoFundMe account to keep his staff on the payroll.

Saturday’s rally was organized by various “Reopen California” organizations demanding the Newsom end California’s restrictions, as well as the CHP’s temporary ban on state property. Previous rallies at the Capitol have drawn hundreds and one resulted in multiple arrests.

One group arriving at the Capitol Saturday, an anti-vaccination organization called the Freedom Angels Foundation, said it chartered buses from Southern California — sold out at $30 per adult and $50 per family, according to the Angels’ website. The anti-vaccination activists planted oversized needles in the ground festooned with slogans like, “This is witchcraft.” Another sign claimed that a coronavirus vaccine would be used as a “weapon of mandated depopulation.”

Demonstrations have erupted nationwide over stay-at-home orders, and have included business owners concerned about their livelihoods, parents worried about their children being locked out of school or church and people angry that their right to protest has been curtailed.

The Reopen California Facebook page has 170,000 members. Its members have varied interests; some are fighting California’s vaccination laws while others are mostly focused on Newsom’s executive order.

California’s protests have been tense at times — 32 people were arrested at the Capitol on May 1 after hundreds refused CHP orders to disperse. Subsequent demonstrations have been a lot calmer as protesters stuck to the sidewalk while CHP officers guarded the western perimeter of the Capitol grounds.

A website advertising Saturday’s demonstration said: “This is a non-violent rally. No violence will be tolerated and anyone displaying violence and/or destructive behavior is not associated with the rally and disavowed by the other participants.”

The CHP banned protests at the Capitol after a huge throng demonstrating on the grounds in late April ignored social distancing guidelines. Conservative groups have challenged the ban in court but so far have been unsuccessful.

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https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Rally-against-Newsom-s-stay-at-home-coronavirus-15291370.php#photo-19451071 

San Clemente, California police won't allow anti lockdown protest to open up beach parking lot - 23 May 2020

https://web.archive.org/web/20200524131505/https://shauntrain.blogspot.com/2020/05/california-2000-rally-against-covid-19.html

World On Fire: Drama Series of WW2 - 22 May 2020

World on Fire, written by Peter Bowker and directed by Chanya Button, Thomas Napper, Adam Smith and Andy Wilson, is a World War II drama that first aired in the UK in September 2019—on the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war—and then in the US on PBS in 2020.
The ambitious, sprawling seven-episode series (or its first season) follows characters from five countries and takes place in France, Britain, Germany and Poland. Colored by anti-war and anti-fascist views, it is an admirable effort to trace the carnage of the war through the experience of working class and middle class characters, rather than prime ministers and generals.
The Second World War, the bloodiest conflict in human history, led to some 70 to 85 million deaths and vast, almost unimaginable destruction. As such, how could it not still remain a complex, recurring subject for artistic treatment?

Zofia Wichlacz and Jonah Hauer-King in World on Fire

 

World on Fire was generally well received and enjoyed audiences that averaged six million or so viewers per episode in Britain. That it held on to its relatively large viewership is a testament to the fact that Bowker’s creation maintains a level of drama, suspense and human interest throughout.
The series opens in 1939 in Manchester, England, at a protest against a rally held by Oswald

Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and its paramilitary wing, known as the blackshirts. The protesters are the ones arrested by police. Among them are Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King), from a family of means, and his working-class girlfriend Lois Bennett (Julia Brown). Neither Harry’s uppercrust mother Robina (Lesley Manville)—“I have a soft spot for Mosley”—nor Lois’ father Douglas (Sean Bean)—a bus conductor, pacifist and shell-shocked veteran of the Battle of the Somme in World War I—endorse their offspring’s relationship, for class reasons.

Harry is soon off to Warsaw where he is a translator for the British Embassy. Lois also joins the war effort, entertaining the troops as a singer, while her brother Tom (Ewan Mitchell) signs up with the British navy rather than go to jail for a petty offense.

On the Polish-German border, US radio reporter Nancy Campbell (Helen Hunt) learns that Hitler’s army is preparing a blitzkrieg through Poland. Based in Berlin, her broadcasts are closely monitored by her Nazi minder. Meanwhile, Harry falls in love with Kasia (Zofia Wichłacz), a Polish waitress whose brother and father have joined the resistance. Battle scenes include the courageous, but doomed defense of the post office in Danzig against the German onslaught, during which Kasia’s father is murdered.

Harry marries Kasia to get her out of Poland, but the latter tricks him into returning to England not with her, but with her young brother, Jan (Eryk Biedunkiewicz). Back home, Harry reconnects with Lois, who becomes pregnant, but understandably breaks with him over his relationship with Kasia.

World on Fire

 

On the war front, Nancy begs her nephew Webster (Brian J Smith) to leave Paris, where he works as a doctor. His lover is Albert (Parker Sawyers), a black jazz saxophonist who is a Nazi target on account of his race, his homosexuality and his “degenerate” music. Paris falls to the German forces in June 1940. In Berlin, Nancy defies Nazi menacing to help her neighbors, the Rosslers, hide their daughter’s epilepsy from Hitler’s deadly eugenics.

Harry, who enlists, is an officer in France with the British Expeditionary Forces, supervising the digging of foxholes and tank traps. Lois shows up to sing for the troops, but wants nothing to do with Harry, who is torn by his love for two women.

As tens of thousands flee Nazi-invaded Belgium, Harry and his unit head for the last route out of France—the evacuation from Dunkirk. The platoon comes across an ambulance of traumatized, shell-shocked British and French troops, including Senegalese soldiers. Harry takes responsibility for them. He, his men and their charges reach an overwhelmed field hospital run by Webster, and evacuate by sea as the Luftwaffe’s bombs rain down.

Finally, now part of the Special Operations Executive, Harry’s first mission is to parachute into Poland and intercept a resistance group that has been identified by the Nazis. Kasia, who narrowly escapes the gallows, is one of the resisters.

A second season is in preparation.

Along with its more intimate narratives, World on Fire dramatizes a number of critical military conflicts and horrific events in the early stages of World War II. The murderous, aggressive Nazi campaign generates resistance in every quarter, except the poshest. Families are torn apart, countries destroyed, lives and minds are lost, so inhuman is the terror and violence.

Sean Bean and Julia Brown in World on Fire

 

World on Fire adopts a soberly realistic and serious attitude toward history. That approach already flies in the face of a good deal of contemporary cinema that makes history fit into an ideological schema or agenda and/or simply invents it as it goes along (Inglourious Basterds, The Favourite, Wild Nights With Emily, etc.). The series is effective and intelligently done. It imaginatively and thoughtfully dramatizes the contradictions of human behavior without providing easy moral answers in every instance.

For example, the German factory owner, Rossler, feels obliged to join the Nazi party to divert attention away from his epileptic daughter, a candidate for the euthanasia program. He is a bitter opponent of fascism, but must operate his establishment as if he were not, for there are Nazis in his workforce. The pressure is acute—psychologically and physically debilitating.

For his part, Harry is not acting badly when he marries his Polish paramour Kasia, even though he also loves Lois. His intention is to save Kasia’s life. Also, as much as Douglas does not want to see son Tom return to combat, he refuses, for better or worse, to allow Tom to become a conscientious objector for opportunist reasons, so deep is his commitment to pacifism. Even the upper class Robina begins to soften around the edges and let go of her thoroughgoing snobbery. (Although, in this case, the series might have been made more politically pointed if Robina-Manville had remained a fascist sympathizer. In the British ruling elite and upper middle class, there were many who cheered on Hitler’s murderous attacks on Jews, Communists and Socialists, and the German invasion of the USSR.)

Most affecting are the scenes of global flight involving people from many nationalities, the young and the old, soldiers and civilians. These are reminiscent of today’s mass refugee crisis and the displacement of millions of people on a world scale. Furthermore, the brutalities of war are vividly depicted.

As well, World on Fire has clearly been influenced by the contemporary rise of extreme nationalist and fascist forces. Its unusual international scope and the conscious decision to shoot in different locations speaks to that. The mini-series is a less nationally-based examination of the world war than one has generally seen in the past. Moreover, the various protagonists draw the viewer in, their conditions are real, the problems are often life-and-death and at odds with the trivial matters on which so many films pivot today.

World on Fire on PBS

 

“World on Fire is a drama about World War II, told from a multinational perspective,” said writer Peter Bowker in an interview with Period Dramas. “I wanted to write a drama where we invested in a Polish family, a French family, just as much as we emotionally invested in a British one. …

“I deliberately set out to tell stories that weren’t traditional war stories,” the screenwriter continued.

“I wanted to write about what it was like to be a Senegalese soldier who found himself at Dunkirk.

What it was like to be gay in Paris, when you’d escaped to Paris to celebrate your sexuality and then the Nazis invaded. What it was like to be a conscientious objector with two children.

“What it was like to be an ordinary apolitical German family, who just hoped Nazism might be a passing phase and who had a child that was at risk because she had a disability.

“They struck me,” he said, “as stories that have remained largely untold, but also struck me as contemporary in our current preoccupations with nationality and borders and refugees, and what constitutes a genuine refugee and what constitutes genuine need.”

Bowker added, “I read a lot about the euthanasia programme that the Nazis put into place. It started about ten months before the war. Initially, it was directed at adults with long-term mental health problems and severe disabilities. It extended fairly quickly to the monitoring of newborns and children with disabilities. Essentially it was a dry run for the Holocaust.”

These are all legitimate and even commendable concerns or ambitions.

Mateusz Wieclawek in World on Fire

 

While there is an innovative element to Bowker’s global, humane and anti-war viewpoint and framework, World on Fire’s general approach to the historical traumas of the 20th century is relatively conventional, conforming uncritically to the official view of World War II as a monumental fight for democracy against fascism.

This has significance under conditions in which the grave threats of world war and fascism have re-emerged. World on Fire suggests legitimate horror at their re-emergence, but sheds little light on why such phenomena developed in the 1930s and why they are developing today. The origins of fascism are never considered in the series. Hitlerism might simply be some natural disaster that befell humanity, rather than the outgrowth of the crisis-ridden capitalist system. The same can be said for the war itself.

The series’ ideological conventionality helps explain why it accepts a superficial, anti-communist reading of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. The incursion was reactionary and characteristic of the Stalinist regime, which by that time had betrayed every basic principle of socialism and internationalism, but World on Fire takes the opportunity to imply that Nazi Germany and the USSR were merely two versions of totalitarianism and equally mortal enemies of the Polish people. This is made explicit in a scene in which two Polish resistance fighters are fleeing Soviet forces. One says: “I thought the Russians hated the Germans.” The other replies: “They do, but they hate us Poles even more.”

Overall, however, taking into account its defects and blind spots, World on Fire offers a rational and intriguing orientation toward titanic historical events, which, one hopes, will only encourage the viewer to look more searchingly into the upheavals of the past century.

Is This Tomorrow? America Under Stalinism - A Red Scare Comic Book from 1947

In 1947 the Catechetical Guild Educational Society in St. Paul, Minnesota put out this warning against Communist infiltration.  The inside cover provides this dire statement:
“The average American is prone to say, “It can’t happen here.”  Millions of people in other countries used to say the same thing…. Today they are dead – or living in Communist slavery.  It must not happen here!”

And so begins our cautionary tale. “The story is sad… the end tragic.”

Communist Jones lays out his diabolical plan: take advantage of the drought that is besieging the country.  Use the crisis as a means to seize power.

First, Communist Jones’ head of propaganda, Brown, gets to work.  He starts by making Americans hate each other’s guts.  He sends moles into various clubs and workplaces to infiltrate and start division and dissension.

Brown can rely on Hollywood to corrode American morals.  The respect for life will have to also be squashed.

And, of course, Brown knows he has the media in his back pocket.

Naturally, the workers need to grow to resent the rich capitalists.

And a race war is essential to any Commie takeover.

And so, there is murder in the streets.  White vs. Black, Labor vs. Capitalists,.. the American populace is divided and at each other’s throats.

At last, the time was right for Communist Jones to make his move.  He has found an ally in Washington DC – the Speaker of the House, Collins.
First, he needs to get the president and vice-president out the way.

As “luck” would have it, it has been arranged for the president and vice-president to appear together in a parade.
It would be a shame if anyone threw a grenade at them…


Of course, this makes Collins the new president.  Communist Jones props him up to be the hero we deserve, beating the drought.


Collins is weak, and easily hands over much of his power to Communist Jones.

Communist Jones gathers the top generals together and has them wasted.  Now there is no one to stand in the way of his plans.

Communist Jones nationalizes everything, and ensures the schools are under his thumb.

Book burning time.

And, finally, it’s time to take our guns and kill the Catholics.

Anyone who doesn’t fall in line is sent to Alaska…

Finally, Communist Jones is delivering his victory toast when this happens…

Clearly, he’s been poisoned.  No matter.  His replacement is ready to fill his shoes…

THE END.
 https://flashbak.com/tomorrow-red-scare-comic-book-1947-391142/?_sft_category=cold-war-2&sf_paged=2

Concert billed as first live show in pandemic ordered by Arkansas to cease and desist (NBC News) 13 May 2020

By Elisha Fieldstadt

 

An Arkansas venue planning to hold a country music concert with more than 200 people on Friday will be served a cease-and-desist letter, the state's governor said Tuesday.

"You can’t just arbitrarily determine when the restrictions are lifted. That is something that is done based on a public health requirement," Gov. Asa Hutchinson said during a news conference regarding an "intimate solo acoustic performance with Travis McCready" scheduled for May 15 at the Temple Live event space.

The Arkansas Department of Health issued a directive last week that said that starting on May 18, indoor venues could hold events with 50 people or fewer, and must adhere to other guidelines like arranging seating 6 feet apart. Venues that wanted to hold events with more than 50 people must be operating at less than 34 percent capacity and also submit a plan to the department.

"Clearly, it is three days before we determined it was an appropriate time to open up to a limited capacity in some of those informal venues, and even if you’re going to have 250 people at a venue, you still have to have a specific plan that would be approved by the Department of Health. None of that was done in this case," Hutchinson said of the McCready show.

The Department of Health will be sending the venue a cease-and-desist letter, Hutchinson said. On Wednesday morning, tickets for the show were still on sale.

A message seeking comment from Temple Live, which is in Fort Smith on the border of Oklahoma, went unanswered Wednesday.

Mike Brown, a venue spokesperson, told NBC affiliate KNWA last month that as far as he knows, the show is the first announced since coronavirus shutdowns began in March. He said the event would be in line with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

(Travis McCready: "Ride With Me" on The World-Famous "Viva! NashVegas® Radio Show" 4:25 min)

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/concert-billed-first-live-show-pandemic-ordered-arkansas-cease-desist-n1206051

Are "fan pods" the future of concerts? - by Richard Trapunski - 8 May 2020

Are "fan pods" the future of concerts?

The first post-quarantine concert is Travis McCready in Arkansas – and an extensive list of COVID-19 protocols will be in place

by Richard Trapunski

May 8, 2020

1:29 PM

Maria Jose Govea

MorMor played within a pod at last year's Red Bull Music Festival in Toronto – though not for social distancing reasons.

It's going to be quite awhile before concerts happen in Toronto again, but in some parts of the United States, where COVID-19 restrictions are being loosened, live music is already seeing a tentative return.

On May 15, the first non-livestream concert in North America in close to two months will happen in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Country-rock singer Travis McCready, frontman of the band Bishop Gunn, will play a solo acoustic show at the venue Temple Live.

The venue's website lists its extensive COVID-19 operating protocol for the show. The venue will operate at 20 per cent capacity, from 1,100 to 229. The space will have one-way walkways, the venue will be sanitized via "fog sprayers," soap and paper towel dispensers will be no-touch, masks will be available for purchase and every attendee will have their temperature taken when entering the venue. Food and drink will all be prepackaged or have lids.

Expand

 

Most intriguingly and most reminiscent of the dystopia Love Is Blind predicted just months ago, Ticketmaster says attendees will be separated into “fan pods,” rows of two to 12 tickets sold in groups at least six feet apart.

Could this be a glimpse into the near future of live music?

UPDATE (5/11): An earlier version of this story reported that Live Nation was putting on the concert. It is not. NOW regrets the error. 

@trapunski

RIP Tony Allen (1940 - 2020) - Drum Pioneer of Afrobeat - Requiescat in pace et in amore

 (Tony Allen: The 5 Major Drum Patterns of Afrobeat 3:22 min)

Tony Allen (1940-2020): Pioneering drummer of Afrobeat dies

Few drummers have played such a key role in creating a musical genre and style as Tony Allen. The Nigerian drummer, who died of an aneurysm aged 79 in Paris, where he lived, was the percussive genius behind Afrobeat. His long-time pioneering collaborator Fela Kuti (1938-1997), the famed Nigerian musician and composer, once declared “without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat.”
Tony Oladipo Allen was born in Lagos in 1940, the son of an auto mechanic. Having learned electronics he worked as a radio technician in his teens, which enabled him to repair band amplifiers when he did become a musician. Astonishingly, he did not take up the drums until he was 18, inspired by modern jazz.

A later collaborator, Sébastien Tellier, said this led him to “a very mysterious way to play drums.” Having learned by himself, without lessons, he “created another way to play.” Within four months of taking up the drums he announced he wanted to be a musician.

Tony Allen in 2015 (Photo credit–Tore Sætre)

Allen grew up listening to local West African music and immersed himself in jazz. His great contribution was bringing the two genres together. Allen described Afrobeat as “a fusion of beats and patterns. There was highlife [a popular West African music incorporating foreign rhythms and Western instruments], there was local Yoruba music like apala and sakara, there was jazz, and there was Western popular music like funk and R&B.”

He listened carefully to the jazz greats, studying Art Blakey and Max Roach above all. Blakey’s influence was huge, and Allen paid tribute to him in a four-track tribute EP in 2017. Allen described Blakey—in words that could also be applied to himself—as a magician because his playing sounded like more than one person on the drums. Indeed, when Allen finally left Kuti’s band, it took four percussionists to replace him!

In the jazz drummers he listened to, Allen heard an overall approach as well as technical skills. They were, he said, “telling a story by playing different rhythms, and they were doing it with independent coordination. That’s the way the drums should be played.” His approach was to follow “one central idea,” while allowing his limbs to play four independent lines and patterns on the drum kit. “You listen to it flowing like a river,” he said.

Allen’s focus on that one idea enabled him to be a flexible and constantly developing centrepiece of a band’s sound. Martín Perna, of Brooklyn-based Afrobeat group Antibalas, said that “with all that variation, he’s somehow more hypnotic than a pattern that doesn’t change.”

Fela Kuti Live (1971)

This ability to create four independent lines enabled him to cultivate a swinging polyrhythm. Roach’s playing got him interested in the hi-hat, which he thought overlooked in African drumming and which became central to his playing.

The Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, who recorded often with him, described Allen as putting “the percussionist’s role into the drums” of Afrobeat, centred around the cowbell. This allowed him to be remarkably laid back even while still the lynchpin of his band’s sound.

Kuti’s band, with whom he recorded dozens of albums, played six-hour sets four nights a week, with individual songs often the length of an LP side, so a certain stamina and reserve were necessary. Kidjo said that when playing Allen never even broke into a sweat!

Kidjo and Allen had been hoping to record again together with the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, who died in March of coronavirus.

When he taught Femi Koleoso, one of Allen’s first questions to the young drummer was, “Why is everything so aggressive?” Instead Allen encouraged playing quietly so the younger player could understand what was inside the beat. Allen himself had learned from a West Coast jazz drummer to practice playing on pillows to add flexibility: “Effortless—that’s what I tried to catch from [drummer Frank Butler].”

Tony Allen in 2010

Once Allen started playing, he quickly found work in Lagos’ highlife bands. In 1964, he auditioned for a jazz band organised by Fela Ransome-Kuti, as he was then known.

Kuti had just returned to newly independent Nigeria after five years studying music in London, where he played in an expatriate highlife band. The Lagos jazz band had only limited success, and Kuti began to expand its influences. This “highlife jazz” band, Koola Lobitos, meshed Kuti and Allen’s musical conceptions, blending jazz with local pop forms.

Koola Lobitos were locally successful in Nigeria and Ghana (home of Allen’s maternal family), and Ghanaian promoter Raymond Aziz coined the term Afrobeat to describe them.

In 1969, at the height of the Biafran secessionist conflict, Koola Lobitos undertook a 10-month tour of the US. There Kuti met Sandra Izsadore, who introduced him to the writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and other black radicals. He became sympathetic to the Pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

The band threw American funk into their mix, and Kuti began to write more explicitly political lyrics influenced by the Black Power movement, like “Black Man’s Cry” and “Why Black Man Dey Suffer.” Kuti expounded in these songs a black nationalist philosophy he called Blackism.

On their return to Lagos the band was renamed Fela Ransome-Kuti and Africa 70. He would later change his own name to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti—“he who has control over death.” Kuti’s politicisation made him a vocal critic of government corruption, mismanagement, abuses of the underprivileged and the military. This made him a target of the authorities and he was beaten, arrested and jailed frequently.

The rock drummer Ginger Baker (1939-2019), who had first met Kuti in London, lived in Nigeria between 1970 and 1976, funding the country’s first 16-track recording studio and playing on several Africa 70 recordings including the remarkable album Live! (1971). He spent a lot of time at Kuti’s house, which the bandleader fenced around in 1974 and declared an independent state, the Kalakuta Republic.

In 1977, after Kuti sang his satire about the army, “Zombie,” around a thousand soldiers attacked Kalakuta, burning the house and beating and raping its residents. Kuti’s 77-year-old mother, a veteran of the anti-colonial struggles, was thrown from a window. She died the following year from the trauma.

Allen admired Kuti’s refusal to fawn: “To sing against the government? Most of the bands I knew were praising them … Fela was against flattery, and so was I. I don’t want to play the music of flattery.”

He also recognised the legitimacy of Kuti’s targets. “What [Fela] was challenging, he was right,” he said, and he had realised that the government response was brutal: “I just said: ‘[Fela] is going to be an icon, and they will kill him one day.’”

However, this agreement only went so far.

Perhaps in response to the treatment meted out to Kuti, he withdrew from “singing militant,” saying “It’s not my thing.” The step back was not to his credit, especially as he continued to acknowledge Kuti’s authority. In 2016, Allen said that “If you check most of his [Fela’s] lyrics … in the 70s and 80s, that is what is happening right now.”

The band performed and recorded regularly through all this. Kuti was providing the band arrangements, with Allen creating his own essential sound within that. The drummer was musically happy, but felt increasingly financially exploited.

In 1978, the band played the Berlin Jazz Festival, and a recent CD reissue of Live! included the astonishing 16-minute drum duet between Allen and Baker recorded there. Baker’s big hitting, which often obscured some of his real jazz qualities as a drummer, are here brilliantly focused and directed by Allen’s groove. There was also a fine live performance of “Egbe Mi O” by Allen and Baker at a 2013 tribute concert to Kuti.

The financial disputes came to a head in Berlin, where the whole band quit in a dispute over unpaid royalties. Allen recorded one album with Africa 70 but could not establish his own band in Nigeria. He moved to London before settling in Paris in 1985.

The early French recordings were disappointing, with his playing disappearing under a swamp of electronica. He never sat still, however, and continued expanding his musical palette into what he called Afrofunk. By the late 1990s he was beginning to achieve a more successful sound. Paving the way was Black Voices (1999), an often hypnotic album that gave Allen space to swing inside dub electronics.

Allen was fêted by younger performers, like Blur’s Damon Albarn, who became a frequent collaborator in projects like The Good, The Bad and the Queen, alongside Clash bassist Paul Simonon and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong. A new song with Albarn’s Gorillaz and rapper Skepta has just been released.

Allen also recently released Rejoice with veteran South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela (1939-2018), whom he had met in Lagos in the 1970s. He had been planning an album this year with young musicians in Nigeria, London, Paris and America. “I want to take care of youngsters—they have messages and I want to bring them on my beat.”

Asked to sum himself up in three words, Allen said “Simple gentle guy.” The comment was an understatement, but it could not hide his real drive. “I still challenge myself every time with my playing. I still want to play something impossible, something that I never played before. That’s what I’m after.”

Tony Allen - Moanin (10:30 min) 

http://archive.vn/phn9Y

Little Richard - Early Rock ’n’ roller - Dead at 87 - Requiescat in Pace et In Amore - 12 May 2020

 

Legendary rock ’n’ roll singer and pianist Little Richard died from bone cancer May 9 at the age of 87. As one of the leading figures in rock ’n’ roll when it emerged as a distinct musical form in the mid-1950s, Little Richard played a significant role in shaping the genre and left an indelible influence on the world of music and pop culture in the decades that followed.

Little Richard in the 1950s

Richard Wayne Penniman was born December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia. He grew up poor in a family with 12 children. His parents were deeply religious and heavily involved in their local Baptist church, but they also maintained attachments to more earthly concerns. In addition to his role as a church deacon, Richard’s father was a moonshiner and a nightclub owner. This kind of split personality, in which religious morality concealed a more complicated, often illicit truth, was a conflict that would only be intensified in Little Richard.

The future singer and musician was the ultimate outsider. Besides his poverty, Little Richard was black in the segregated American south, and he was gay in a conservative Baptist community that denounced such things in no uncertain terms. The unconventional and defiant persona he adopted as a performer—effeminate, self-aggrandizing and wild—was undoubtedly a response to this, conscious or not. If he was forced to be an outsider, Richard seemed to be saying, then he was determined to be all the way outside. This was more personal than political, but the implicit challenge to the status quo and official morality that Little Richard embodied animated his music and, in part, explains his enduring appeal.

Like many of the R&B performers of his generation, Richard first sang in church. His initial attempts at a career in music came at the end of the 1940s, when he performed with regional medicine shows, essentially touring variety shows sponsored by one or another dubious miracle drug. Richard gradually found his way into the R&B world, performing with or befriending the likes of Johnny Otis and Billy Wright, whose look Richard borrowed for his own.

Richard’s first recordings of R&B music for the RCA label in the early 1950s failed to attract more than local attention. He continued to work as a musician, but could not support himself through music alone. He was working as a dishwasher in a Greyhound bus station when the independent Specialty Records label heard his demo and decided to record him in 1955. The results are legendary.

“Tutti Frutti” introduced Little Richard to the world. It was an unlikely hit. Richard had long performed another version of the song featuring sexually gratuitous lyrics. Cleaned up for the recorded version, the song retained enough suggestiveness that the suggestion seemed more like a recommendation.

Little Richard in 1956

The framework in which the enticing, though not profound, lyrics found a home was an explosive performance by Richard and his backing musicians. Richard’s attack on the piano was at times so insistent and even violent that the listener imagined him playing the instrument with balled up fists. Drummer Earl Palmer, who transitioned the music away from the swing feel of jazz and R&B bands and into the firm backbeat that became the signature of rock ’n’ roll, gave this and other Richard songs a distinctive groove. Lee Allen’s saxophone soared above it all, concise and confident.

Then there was Little Richard’s voice itself. He was shouting more than singing, punctuating his lines with the now-famous falsetto exclamations that the Beatles would imitate on their own recordings of the 1960s. He typically introduced Allen’s saxophone solos with a lacerating scream.

This was the basic formula that most of Richard’s greatest hits were built upon. It was exciting every time. Among his best recordings were “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Ready Teddy,” “Lucille,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Keep A-Knockin’” and “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!”

It was not so much the lyrics but the liberating energy of the music that mattered. Of the many performers associated with 1950s rock ’n’ roll, none seemed quite as wild or eccentric as Little Richard. He wore his hair in a tall pompadour, liberally applied pancake makeup on his face, wore a pencil-thin mustache above his lips and black eyeliner. He might be found seated at his piano or standing on top of it.

While they may not have been profound, the suggestiveness of many of the lyrics did reinforce the impression, cultivated by Richard throughout his career, that the singer was someone who had seen the things no one was supposed to see and heard the things that no one was supposed to talk about. His own life was lived as a dramatically open secret. His witty exchanges with countless interviewers always threatened to reveal just a little more than the listener was prepared for.

Little Richard’s music coincided with and found a large audience in the new teenage culture of the 1950s. It also contributed to changing attitudes in race relations. A frequently cited passage from Charles White’s biography The Life and Times of Little Richard is worth citing again. “With Richard,” music producer and arranger H.B. Barnum explained, “although they still had the audiences segregated in the building, they were there together. And most times, before the end of the night, they would all be mixed together.” Little Richard’s music grabbed people by the collar and hurled them across the “color line.”

The first wave of rock ’n’ roll led by Little Richard and a few others ended swiftly, as many of the genre’s leading figures had their careers interrupted or their lives cut short. Chuck Berry was thrown in prison in 1960 under the Mann Act. Elvis Presley was drafted into the army in 1958. Jerry Lee Lewis was caught up in a sex scandal, also in 1958, which saw him vilified internationally. Buddy Holly died in a 1959 plane crash that also claimed the lives of Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Eddie Cochran died in a car accident in 1960.

For his part, Little Richard abandoned his rock ’n’ roll career in 1958, retreating into the church and gospel music. This began a lifelong cycle in which he would transition back and forth between the secular world of rock ’n’ roll and his religious life.

Offers to perform in Europe in the early 1960s, where up-and-coming rock musicians idolized and imitated him, drew him away from gospel music for the first time. Opening acts on his famously rowdy 1960s British tours included The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Some of Little Richard’s bands of this period included guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and keyboardist Billy Preston.

None of Richard’s later recordings had the power or influence of his work from the 1950s, but his live performances retained their ferociousness for decades. Like many of his contemporaries, Richard was cheated out of music royalties and never saw the financial success that later generations of rock stars would achieve. He was always quick to remind interviewers and other musicians of his role in the music’s history, and the extent to which subsequent generations of musicians had copied his moves. From Elvis Presley and the Beatles to James Brown and Prince, Little Richard is always there somewhere in the music he helped to invent.

His brief but explosive contribution of the 1950s endures.

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Rome, Italy: Seagulls Eating Rats After Restuarants and Cafes Close

Seagulls 'now eating rats' after closure of cafes and restaurants in Rome during coronavirus lockdown

• Imogen Braddick

The closure of cafes and restaurants in Rome due to the coronavirus outbreak means seagulls have had to change their habits and start eating rats, zoologists claim.

Without any scraps to feed on in the empty streets of the Italian capital, which is usually buzzing with tourists, seagulls have had to adapt to survive.

"Animals are changing their habits as we change ours,” zoologist Bruno Cignini told local newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Mr Cignini, who works at Rome University Tor Vergata, said: “They are catching mostly pigeons but also swallows and black birds.

“They’re also going after fish in the Tiber. Luckily, they are also eating rats.”
The seagull population in Rome has exploded in recent years, according to experts, and last year, Matteo Salvini, the former deputy prime minister, joked that the birds were “the size of pterodactyls”.

He said: "Here in Rome there are seagulls that look like pterodactyls."

He made the comment during a Twitter argument with Rome’s mayor Virginia Raggi after she accused him of not providing the city with additional police.

As Italy prepared to reopen parks and public gardens on Monday, health officials reported 174 deaths, the lowest number since the national lockdown began on March 10.

A child rides a scooter at the Piazza Navona in Rome during the country's lockdown (AFP via Getty Images)

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said manufacturing and construction companies would be able to resume business, with retail reopening a fortnight later on May 18.

People will be allowed to visit close relatives as long as they respect social distancing measures and wear a mask, he said.

 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/seagulls-eat-rats-coronavirus-lockdown-a4430881.html