covid-19 – Brooklyn Diasporism

Late Start? Not Today.

Covid, the era more than my case last year, has made it difficult to wake up as early as I’d like to or used to. It’s not a problem, exactly,¹ but it is frustrating.

Most days I sort of shrug it off when I’m steeping coffee 30 or 45 minutes later than I’d hoped to be. Today, however, I managed to get up as intended, and reflecting on this I can’t help but think of the broader lethargy the pandemic and its mishandling has brought to bear. I need to remember that it isn’t just me, just my problem, that even among the most resilient and unaffected of us, Covid has cast a unique shadow over our lives. Keeping this in mind serves empathy, which is always a better emotional start to a day than self-pity.

🎵 Listening to Canto Ostinato

Even the change I’m describing here doesn’t make me late for anything, but it does make me feel like I don’t have time to do everything I like to do to start my day. ↩

One reason we will never return to “life before COVID-19” is the same reason we have never returned to “life before 9/11.” By politicizing these events, we have sought not solutions, but rather agreement and influence — power, in short — and retaliation, and therefore found only anti-terrorism, not peace, a vague hope of containment, not a cure.

RIP Henry Grimes and Giuseppe Logan

Two more victims of COVID-19: Giuseppe Logan and Henry Grimes, both of whom had extended musical trials and disappearances followed by later-life public resurgences. Included in this post are Mr. Logan’s quartet LP from 1965, and Mr. Grimes performing on Marc Ribot’s 2005 Albert Ayler tribute, Spiritual Unity. Both men strike me as characteristically New York improvisers, a bit more introverted than their Chicago-based peers, for example, somehow more aggressive in their spiritual stance.