The Divided States

I was emailing yesterday with a friend in Tel Aviv, who was marveling from afar at the dysfunction and insanity here in the US – the lack of testing, the absence of presidential leadership on any meaningful forward-going plan, the reckless crowds of protesters, the handful of states deciding to open back up even as their COVID numbers continue to climb.

As I pointed out to him, this has been a fascinating experiment in federalism, with states taking wildly different approaches to handling it all. But though I’m grateful for the institutional competency here in New York (and in California, where my parents live), it’s also becoming increasingly clear that, without some kind of more centralized response, even the best-managed states face serious problems of leverage and coordination.

So I’ve been particularly fascinated by consortiums of states – one of the three states on the west coast, two more of seven each in the Northeast and Midwest – banding together as sort of nations of their own. At this point, though it already feels like we’ve been living in this new COVID reality forever, we’re still in early days. And, I suspect, the varying responses across states (or groups of them) will play out with increasingly disparate results over the months and years ahead.

Previously, whenever I’d read a book like The Handmaid’s Tale, built around a vision of a fractured US, broken apart into a handful of new nations – some scientifically modern and democratic, others backwards–looking theocratic autocracies – it always seemed rather far-fetched. How, exactly, would we get from our current world to that sort of dystopia? But, as of now, it seems like a distressingly much shorter leap.

April 22, 2020

Buy Hyacinths

If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves

alone to thee are left,

Sell one & from the dole,

Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

– Muslihuddin Sadi, 13th Century Persian Poet

Strung Up

When I was a child, my parents would put me to sleep by playing The Woods So Wild, a suite of Renaissance lute suites performed by the great Julian Bream:

Ever since, I’ve found the sound of classical lute and guitar exceedingly relaxing. Enough so that I even purchased a nylon-stringed guitar myself some years back, and have spent time practicing at least semi-regularly since. While it’s far below the trumpet, and really even below the piano and upright bass and possibly even drums, in terms of my instrumental competence, I can still play a mean “Packington’s Pound” (track 3 above), which is pretty much all I need.

Anyway, also throughout my childhood, I spent a bunch of time on various Pacific islands. My father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, sub-specializes in ocean medicine – if you get the bends in the Pacific, there’s a decent chance you get med-evaced to him. So, during summers, he would head to islands on work trips, to meet local physicians and dive operators and the like, and I got to tag along. (Rough, I know). As a result, I also picked up an early love of slack key guitar, a style of open-tuned, finger-picked playing invented in Hawaii after the military left a huge number of guitars on the islands after WWII, and young-musicians there self-taught without knowledge of traditional tuning and technique.

For example, I’ve listened the grooves off of Keola Beamer’s Mauna Kea (White Mountain Journal) ever since it was released, and I was thrilled to see it used, a decade later, as the soundtrack for Alexander Payne’s wonderful The Descendants:

So, in the midst of this pandemic, and particularly in need of musical soothing, I was particularly excited to discover Yasmin Williams, an unorthodox finger-style lap guitarist. On her latest album, Unwind, she also uses tap shoes, a cello bow, and whatever else she can think of to make music that sounds both contemporary and timeless:

Unwind is great, as are the other albums above in this post.  Especially in these anxious times, I give all of them two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

April 20, 2020

Inaudible

For the first time in a while, I have unused Audible credits, and a pile of unplayed episodes from even my favorite podcasts. Turns out, the vast majority of my prior listening time was either commute- or shopping-related, and I’ve jettisoned both of those almost entirely from my quarantine life.

Indeed, as my daily rhythm has shifted during this pandemic, I’ve dropped a ton of habits and technologies that were otherwise just defaults. If nothing else, it’s been a good chance to see which ones I actually miss in their absence – and miss enough that I’m willing to proactively find ways to add back in.

As I’m still using Streaks to track a more limited daily habit rotation, and still sticking to a wildly pared down project / to-do list, those constraints, plus rebuilding my schedule from scratch, are a pretty excellent way to hone in more generally on what matters to me in everyday life.

April 19, 2020