Howard Zinn R.I.P.
Howard Zinn, the people’s historian, died today.
Howard Zinn, the people’s historian, died today.
Creative tweeting from a historical perspective. More at historicaltweets.com. Hat tip to @sreenet.
A couple of white wood-hole ladders outside a house in the Acoma Pueblo which is a 12th century “Sky City” built by Native Americans in New Mexico. There are still people living full time on the 367 ft sandstone mesa. I found this a mystical and spiritual place despite the clatter of hordes of fellow tourists.
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I still don’t know what the real purpose of this exercise was but the new seven wonders of the world has been announced (on 7/7/07 no less) and they are:
I have visited the first three and don’t know why the Christ statue is in this list. It’s definitely awe inspiring but surely there are more impressive “wonders” to put on this list in its stead? Angkor Wat? The Acropolis? The pyramids of Giza? In any case, I don’t think we can limit the wonders of the world to merely seven. It might have made sense in the ancient times but not now.
Curiously enough, I haven’t been to the Taj Mahal just yet.
I wasn’t born then (no, really) but the summer of 1967 came to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This was when young people looking for a new social experience descended in droves to San Francisco, especially the Haight-Ashbury district and gave birth to the hippie counterculture movement. It was a time for free sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. No one embodied that time better than bad girl rocker Janis Joplin. Joplin and a bunch of other rock stars of the time including guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and incomparable beauty Grace Slick lived near Haight-Ashbury. Even today, you can see the remnants of those hippie days while strolling down the district with its motley collection of tattoo parlors, bong selling joints, and tie-dye clothing shops.
In today’s Journal, frequent hunter and washed-up rocker Ted Nugent opines [subscription] that this time should be re-classified as the summer of drugs. The Motor City Madman has choice words for the likes of Joplin: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit.” He also weighs in on what the hippies did to themselves: “Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”
Soulless rock music? For someone who mostly delivered crappy music, the Nuge shouldn’t be the one judging that. Drugs or not, the music of Joplin and co still incites passion in every rock music fan. It’d be easy for me to dig up a nice performance by Joplin on youtube to accompany this post but instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best covers of Joplin’s songs ever performed: by soul wunderkind Joss Stone and a bald but fabulous Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammy Awards.
When the book replaced the scroll…
Mohandas Gandhi died fifty-nine years ago today. He was killed by a lone gunman, Nathuram Godse, who fired three bullets at close range. The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) has put together a page with links to PDF files of the original press (mostly from The New York Times) coverage on that day.
Check it out here.
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