Current Greatest Hits Playing In My Room

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these lists…

1. Natacha Atlas - La Lil Khowf (featuring Clotaire K. and Sofiane Saidi) - From her 2006 album, Mishmaoul…  This is one incredible song.  Rock, rap and rai(?), with brilliant bluesy riffs and wonderful Arabic singing (in addition to the French raps and that opening English rap) and a great psychedelic-sounding accordian.   Or maybe the best thing about this is the “Dictaphone Poet” (as billed in the CD sleeve)…

2. Sussan Deyhim and Bill Laswell - Daylaman (Inextricable) - From a used CD I picked up at Etherea in the East Village…  I know Bill Laswell well enough; I have no knowledge of the other person and her prior projects.  And I took a rare gamble buying a CD I had never heard anything from before…  But it turned out to be very nice and is growing on me.  According to the CD notes: “‘Shy Angels’ is Bill Laswell’s reinterpretation of the entire ‘Madman of God’ album, in which Sussan Deyhim presents her uniquely personal reading of divine love poems by Rumi, Saadi and other Persian Sufi masters.”  But this particular song definitely has a jungle or drum ‘n’ bass quality, and the singing here (actually, in the whole CD, for that matter) curiously reminds me a lot of Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance.  (Even the words remind me a lot of Lisa Gerrard…but I think these are real words.)

3. M.I.A. - Bird Flu - Yes, this has grown on me, too (as I knew it would).  This is M.I.A. gone Bollywood/bhangra (um, sort of…).  And it is great.    I was pleased to see from a couple of sources yesterday morning that M.I.A.’s second album, K.A.L.A., is finally coming out on June 26.  I’ll be very surprised if it isn’t the best album of the year, at least.

4. The Tabla are the Drums (Ravi Shankar in dub) - As the title  says (in the parentheses), and it is pretty good.  I found this on either mudd up! or wayne&wax (both on my blogroll - and they’re often referring mp3s to each other).  (Of course, I did this on somebody else’s computer - you know who you are ;)…but I may finally be able to do this sort of thing at home within the next month or so.) 

———-

P.S., April 22 - Yes, kind of late for a P.S., but I didn’t want to take up a whole post with this…  Just wanted to mention that the sales date for the new M.I.A. album has been delayed until August 21 (damn).  Also, contrary to prior reports, which listed the album title as an acronym (hence my listing above - that was not a proofreading mistake!), it appears now that it’s really just initial-capped, no periods:  Kala.  Anyway, I hope it isn’t delayed any longer; it’s just about the only album that I’m really looking forward to this year.   

A Good Note from CounterPunch on HR 676

Following up on my post from the other day…  I wanted to mention that there’s a good note at CounterPunch (written by Corporate Crime Reporter) on HR 676 - the single-payer healthcare plan - and the lack of support from U.S. presidential candidates.  CCR says:

Polls indicate that the majority of the American people want single payer.

But who will deliver?

On Saturday, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) sponsored a forum in Las Vegas for presidential candidates to discuss health care.

No Republicans accepted.

Seven Democrats accepted.

All the candidates at the forum agreed that universal health care was the goal. (Even the Business Roundtable and the insurance industry now say they want “universal health care.”)

But only one - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) - accepts the only answer that will work - single payer.

Medicare for all.

The rest - including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Mike Gravel, and John Edwards - want some mixture of public and private health insurance.

They know this public/private mix won’t work - the healthy wealthy will buy private insurance, the sick poor will sign on with the government - and the government program will be crippled.

But they don’t have the guts to stand up to the private insurance industry and say - get out.

… 

 Kucinich is now the single payer champion.

The problem with Kucinich, of course, is that if he doesn’t get the nomination, he will take the stage at the Democratic Convention in 2008 in Denver - as he did in 2004 in Boston - raise the hand of the corporate nominee and endorse the corporate platform.

Then where will we be?

Nowhere.

Again.

A Campaign for Universal Healthcare in the U.S.

Yes, some people, at least, are trying to do things to bring  a government-guaranteed universal healthcare plan to the U.S.  I strongly recommend visiting the site of Healthcare- NOW to read about suggestions to promote the campaign for universal healthcare (specifically and most immediately to pass The United States National Health Insurance Act HR 676, which is by far the best idea being proposed by any elected officials at the present time). 

There are a couple of events being sponsored by Healthcare- NOW in New York City on Monday, March 26, related to the Healthcare Truth Summit for Single-Payer:  a press conference at City Hall with Dennis Kucinich, from 1:30 to 2 pm, and the “Truth Summit” itself from 7 to 10 pm at the New York University School of Medicine, Farkas Auditorium, 550 First Avenue (First Avenue and 30th Street).

I am also very pleased to see that ACT UP has joined this campaign.  With its good militant history, I trust that this group will contribute some aggressive activism to the effort, as well as addressing the deeper problems in the system itself, specifically with regard to the “medical-industrial complex.” 

ACT UP is organizing a march on Wall Street on Thursday, March 29 (billed No More Bull!  Healthcare for All), which is also part of their 20th Anniversary commemoration.  (Of course, since it is scheduled for 11:30 am, this is the worst possible time for me.  But I am hoping to participate in the campaign - with either of the two groups - even if I don’t make this march.)

There’s a good press release, with contact information, etc., for this one over on the NY Protest List. 

It Makes Perfect Sense That U.S. Hospitals Would Practice “Homeless Dumping”…

Given my own recent experiences with U.S. healthcare, I have no problem whatsoever understanding how hospitals in this country could practice ”homeless dumping.”  I guess everyone knows by now about “homeless dumping,” the tendency of some hospitals to take a sick patient who can’t pay bills and doesn’t have health coverage and dump him/her out in the street.  There was a particularly horrendous – but in my mind not so surprising - incident of “dumping” that made the news circuit last month.  From the L.A. times:

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said.  The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was described by police as a particularly outrageous case of “homeless dumping” that has plagued the downtown area.

“I can’t think of anything colder than that,” said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career.  ”There was no mission around, no services.  It’s the worst area of skid row.”

I say I have no problem understanding this, because it seems like just a logical extension of the way most of us are treated by the U.S. healthcare system if we don’t have insurance and don’t have a lot of money (whether or not we have homes).   Personally, I feel as though I’ve been treated like a piece of garbage because I have no health coverage or money to get decent treatment for my teeth.  So, I’ve been trying to get treatment in a sliding-scale-based clinic at Metropolitan Hospital (everyone take note!), because that place was recommended to me a long time ago, by an ex girlfriend who only went for some minor fillings or whatever and didn’t know any better.  I went there in serious need of heavy fillings and root canals, and suffering from a very bad dental infection (which has come back several times).

It took this place about nine months even to get to the first stages of a root canal that I knew I needed the first time that I went there in serious pain.  They did tell me that I could get treatment on an “emergency” basis - provided I wait for many hours - if I was willing to get the tooth pulled instead.  Maybe I was asking for too much when I expressed a desire to save my teeth…

Over the course of this time, I’ve had appointments canceled on me two out of three times, and each time I’ve had to go through major ordeals just to get appointments even one or two months down the road.  And when I’ve finally gotten there, the people treating me either forgot, or had no knowledge of, the problems that had already been discussed in prior appointments.  Plus, I had to wait for hours in the waiting room, with an appointment (made months in advance) just to get this wonderful kind of “treatment.”

Another lovely feature of this experience is that the uninformed student dentists(?) treating me refused to give me antibiotics and pain relievers when I requested them. Because of this, I went home after stage two of the root canal without any prescriptions. The dentist there said she wasn’t giving me anything because I wouldn’t need any medicine for infection or pain.  But, I ended up with a horrible infection and horrible pain, which was no surprise to me, given my history (which the dentists obviously knew nothing about).  And I somehow think if the dentist(s) knew anything about my history of infection or had any time to think about it, she/they would not have left me without medication.

I went today to try to get some medicine, during a time when I should definitely have been sleeping, and was told that I would have to sit for a “very long wait” before even being given the medicine that I should have been given before.  So, in my desperation to get some sleep, I said the hell with it and went back home.

At home, I discovered that I had some old antibiotics left over:  Three tablets of amoxicillin (from the times when this place actually did give me some medicine – months ago, before the root canal was started) and an older, fuller bottle of penicillin, from June of 2005, which I was given by Staten Island University Hospital (another sliding scale clinic, which is actually much better, though it also costs a little more – and when I think about how I complained about this place once too, I think now about how ridiculous it was for me to complain).

I also did some research on the Internet, where I learned that penicillin actually can often last a few years without expiring.  So, I think I’ll just medicate myself with these drugs for a while (plus maybe a handful of Advil now and then) and hope that they are as effective now as I remember them being sometime ago.

I don’t think that most of the people at this clinic are deliberately careless or negligent (except for maybe the woman at the reception desk – who probably loathes her job and is taking her anger about it out on patients, whom she causes to wait and suffer more than they might have to).  However, because of this barbaric non-system of healthcare that we must live with, a clinic like this obviously does not have the personnel or facilities that it needs to treat all the patients that it gets; conversely,  there obviously are many other patients with no other choice but to get “treatment” at a dump like this.  (Remember, everyone, it’s called Metropolitan Hospital, and it’s on 97th Street and First Avenue in New York.)

If Metropolitan Hospital – or any number of other hospitals in New York City – practiced “homeless dumping,” I wouldn’t be surprised.  And New York City is actually known to have a relatively good poor people’s hospital system – but relatively good obviously still means horrendously bad.

Here in the great United States of America, if you do not have health insurance and don’t have enough money and haven’t found a way to get into the sorry remnants of a Welfare system (which is much harder to get into than people might think), you might as well be a piece of garbage that the hospitals will gladly dump.  The U.S.A. does not care about your health or your suffering or that of 47 million other Americans.  Welcome to the richest and “greatest” country on Earth.

And, as I’ve always said, I have to wonder, where is the public outrage about this barbaric situation?  As a few people have pointed out, the “radical” Left is completely obsessed with Iraq and the Middle East to the point where it does absolutely nothing about this healthcare crisis or many other very bad things that are happening to poor and working people here at home.  Somehow, I can’t help thinking that this is exactly what the ruling class wanted; this was part of the plan all along.

There are more and more actions now to occupy recruiting stations and block sidewalks (at least) in protest against the war on Iraq.  And I say, all the power to them, because the old cattle stroll peace marches are worthless and ineffective.  But you won’t even find a cattle stroll to protest the healthcare crisis.  And this is an area that should be acted upon, with major civil disobedience and disruption.  Maybe some day (hey, I can always dream)…

Dancing Questionnaire

And now for something completely different(?)…  I picked this up at History is Made at Night.  Instructions were to send answers to an address from the blog where it originated.  But I think that I, too, am just going to do a post about it:

 Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

Spinning around on the hallway floor to Meet the Beatles when I was about four or five years old.

What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?

Stopping traffic in the streets of Manhattan as part of a group that advocated for revolution (even if most of the gawking onlookers didn’t quite get it).  All the while dancing.  I did that a few times with the New York City branch of the global anti-capitalist-festival group known as Reclaim the Streets.  The best event was actually for a relatively small cause, to defend the community gardens, in the spring of 1999.  We took over a street in the East Village for a while with little interference for a period that felt like hours.  (Probably not as long – I forget how long it was.)

Whats the best place you’ve ever danced in?

Again, with RTS, in the middle of 43rd Street near Broadway, on November 26, 1999.  (This was for ”Buy Nothing Day,” but also as a prelude to the protests in Seattle that were scheduled for November 30.  Somebody asked me if I wanted to join a bus out to Seattle, and I declined, because I didn’t think I should take off from work.  Hmm, how many times did I kick myself for that decision later on?)  Anyway,  it  was pretty impressive that we stopped traffic right near Times Square.  Though it didn’t last very long – 15 minutes?  And many of the people got arrested.  I didn’t get arrested – I had a knack for being invisible to the police back then.  (It might have helped that I was slightly older than the others and wore slightly less conspicuous clothes.  But I happened upon a video later and, as several other people commented, I actually was the wildest in terms of dancing.  Not meaning to boast or anything…)

You. Dancing. The best of times….

RTS was good, but golden moments of post-punk youth were better.  So…

Dancing to a live show by The Monochrome Set in the early ‘80s in a club called the Starlight Ballroom, which was a big, no-frills place in a rundown section of Philly (I think it was Kensington), with about 50 people in the crowd.  It was my 18th or 19th birthday, I was blasted in a nice way, and I loved to dance to The Monocrhome Set, even though they weren’t known exactly as a dance band.  I had good friends there to dance with too.  I think that was when I was dancing with all the members of an all-girl art school, toy-instrument kind of noise band called Head Cheese.  I went dancing a lot with Head Cheese, and that was fun, if a bit weird.  (By the way, brush with fame(?)… The singer of that band, with whom I was fairly good friends for a while (by which I mean just friends, though I wasn’t lacking in other ideas now and then)…went on to form a New York City synth-pop band that had a Top 40 hit in the ’80s.  The band was Book of Love, the song was “Boy” (popular especially with the gay set).  But I was no longer friends with Susan.  We’d had some kind of falling out over…what?…I don’t know…looking back on it, seems like nothing, from what I can tell…) .

You. Dancing. The worst of times…

Some benefit for the Direct Action Network Labor Solidarity Group, in 2001.  The benefit was a flop, and I was going through not-so-good times with different members of the group, for different reasons (no, not going to go into it here).  The band was some Irish band; I forget who, but they weren’t bad.  I sort of danced alongside a few people, activists, who were the only other people on the dance floor.  I got drunk, but not for good reasons.  Everybody was drunk, but it was a crappy time.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?

Hot Club, Philadelphia, late ‘70s – a seedy little place, very punk, very intimate, and wild.  That was great…  Emerald City, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, late 1970s.  Big, garish new wave club, very tacky, but with some incredible lineups and very underpopulated.  Saw a double bill there of The Buzzcocks and The Fall in about 1979…  Summer porch party  in a five-person communal  house in West Philly, 1981.  One member of the house was in a band called the The Stick Men, who were like a rap-influenced version of the no-wave-funk band The Contortions.  We were dancing to her record of The Sugar Hill Gang…  Hurrahs, NYC, early ‘80s.  Most outstanding experience was a Bauhaus show… Tier 3 and Mudd Club, NYC, early ‘80s.  Both were clubs around Soho (if I’m remembering right).  Tier 3 was much better, I thought, because it was more intimate and less trendy….   Little club in Tribeca (I forget the name), mid-late ‘80s; they were playing this stuff called “acid house” (loved it)…  Limelight, a converted church in NYC, in the mid ‘90s.   Not so great, and too trendy.  Went to an Orbital show there, and did not have a good time – Orbital was OK, place was far too crowded, just not into pressing bodies with strangers (I can do that on the subway during rush hour)…  Irving Plaza, NYC all the way from the mid ‘80s into the late ‘90s.  Not a bad place.  Had a lot of fun at a Chumbawamba show in about 1998(?) (though I’ve since then gotten very, very tired of Chumbawamba)… And, of course, dancing in the streets, and going to some small warehouse-type raves, with Reclaim the Streets…

When and where did you last dance?

The other night in my bedroom, with a wonderful long-haired cat (by which I mean, really, a cat – I’m not using slang).  He clung to my shoulders while I danced around the room to “Sunshowers” by M.I.A.

You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make you leap up for one final dance?

Right now… Probably the song that I just mentioned.