Records & Rarities

I have owned records for more than forty years now, though I only became a serious collector about three years ago. The longest continuing record in my collection is the LP Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck, that I bought in 1976. I still purchase and listen to LPs but I "collect" 45 rpm records in the sense that I'm always looking for rare and unusual artists, labels and songs in that format, and I have little difficulty finding them, mostly at a trio of local records stores in Knoxville.

The embedded playlist below has videos of a few of my favorite rarities. Some of them feature recognizable songs, including one co-written by Merle Haggard and another made famous by Jim Reeves. A few of them were from labels based in East Tennessee and presumably received only a regional release.

My favorite part of sharing these records on YouTube is receiving feedback from viewers, especially those for whom the old records have sentimental value.  I have heard from the daughter of one artist and from a persistent gentleman who bugged me until I sold him a record that he hadn't seen or heard in more than forty years.

RIP MLK

The January/February issue of The American Conservative will soon be out with my review of Manufacturing Hysteria. It is appropriate that it come out near the Martin Luther King holiday as the FBI' COINTELPRO harassment of King was one of my topics. I wrote:

The most famous target of Hoover and the FBI was Martin Luther King. The investigation of King was based the assumption that some of his associates were Communists, but the FBI’s level of attention suggests a more personal motivation. Hoover intervened to keep Marquette University from granting King an honorary degree and was especially agitated at King’s winning a Nobel Peace Prize. The bureau’s most egregious abuse of power in this case was a crude attempt to wreck King’s marriage by sending him illegally recorded tapes of his marital in"infidelities, accompanied by a crudely forged letter encouraging him to commit suicide before his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Writing in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald discusses King's opposition to militarism and the Vietnam war, which should be highlighted along with his views on racism, poverty and civil rights:

King argued for the centrality of his anti-militarism advocacy most eloquently on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City - exactly one year before the day he was murdered. That extraordinary speech was devoted to answering his critics who had been complaining that his anti-war activism was distracting from his civil rights work ("Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?"). King, citing seven independent reasons, was adamant that ending US militarism and imperialism was not merely a moral imperative in its own right, but a prerequisite to achieving any meaningful reforms in American domestic life.

Here is audio of one of speeches on the war:

Lost Highway . . .

Hank died sixty years ago today:

800 Pound Gorilla . . .

Somehow Glenn Reynolds and Michael Barone talk about polling and the election for more than thirteen minutes and never get around to discussing Nate Silver:

More Damaging Romney Footage . . .

This won't help the Romney campaign:

Duquesne Whistle

A thick-headed hipster takes a beating in Dylan's latest . . .

Operation Shift Blame

In the near term, at least, Barack Obama is a solid favorite to win the 2012 election. Since the economy is weak and the president is a KENYANSOCIALISTCHICAGOALINSKYITEMARXIST, his rightwing critics are straining for reasons that he is in the lead.

John Hindraker (via Memeorandum) thinks he has found it, and apparently, the fact that Republicans brought about the disaster in the first place and people don't trust them has nothing to do with it:

I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy.

I would give his argument more credence if he defined his terms and used hard data—how much "over 100 million" and what does he mean by "welfare"? The term "public employee" is reasonably precise, but as Paul Krugman notes, government payrolls have shrunk under Obama.

William Jacobson sees another cause—a Liberal Media Conspiracy to demoralize Republicans and conservatives:

It’s November 7.  Barack Obama has won.  The Republican presidential strategy has failed.  The media is jubilant.  The right-blogosphere is going through a serious introspection.  The left-blogosphere is dancing on our graves and shoving it down our throats.  Four years of fighting the Obama agenda was for nothing.
Oh, I’m sorry.  Let me correct that.  It’s September 9, not November 7.  The rest of the paragraph above can remain as originally written.

 The most absurd part is Jacobson's assumption that right-blogosphere is capable of "serious introspection."

I don't know how the election will come out, but I'm becoming more confident that Obama will prevail and I'm certain that far from introspection, the rightwing will become more detached from reality and blame the Liberal Media, or Hollywood or fraud: anything but their own failings.