Tuesday Tunes #?

After a leave of absence I can only attribute to, well, ‘have you friggin’ looked outside?!’ I’m back with a bit of music for your earholes. It seems fitting that I choose a song that has all the vibes of a 90s chick rock smash. Music is transportive, and this track is no exception. Interestingly, it’s from 2020, from a 20-year-old that never even set foot in the 90s. Gotta love it. Also, gotta love this British-Filipina songstress, beabadoobee. Enjoy, mi gente.

Listen to Worth It on Spotify. beabadoobee · Song · 2020.

The Flag

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We were driving through Ronald, a quiet country town along the eastern crest of the Cascade Range in Washington, when we saw our first American flag; red, white, and blue, blowing in the wind on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

“Whenever I see that flag now, I get nervous,” said my friend Teddy from the passenger seat. “American flags and big pickups.”

On cue, the row of fluttering flags gave way to a massive billboard: “Trump/Pence 2020.” Less than a day after 75,000 marched in silent protest against racial injustice in Seattle, we didn’t see a single Black Lives Matter sign in Ronald. Not even a flyer. But the flags continued to wave—a world apart, and a reality all the same.

My friend’s comment struck me. I have to blame my own naiveté on this one, but, until recently, the flag had always been a symbol of where I come from. Maybe pride is too strong of a word to explain exactly how I felt seeing the Stars and Stripes, but at the very least I saw it as a cultural identifier.

That’s changed.

To hear my friend say that the flag hanging in his classroom, emblazoned across his American passport, and flying above the soccer stadiums he grew up playing in (and that many of his teammates ended up representing at an international level) made him nervous—even afraid—was a punch to the gut, a sucker punch to the kidney. Worse still, I know he’s right.

More than ever, the American flag has become divisive—a weapon of hate cloaked in faux-patriotism. Suddenly a global identifier has become a banner for mistreating neighbors, people of color, and those of different belief systems.

We’ve talked the Colin Kaepernick situation to death, about his audacious disrespect for the flag (which his silent and peaceful protest was never, EVER, about), but what is obvious now is that the entire circus around Kap’s actions was a rallying point for transforming a symbol of peace and unity into something else entirely. Somehow it became a call from the highest position in the land to ostracize a citizen with legitimate concerns for the safety of his fellow citizens, all justified by a piece of cloth that increasingly represents the few.

Our flag is no longer ours. Many would argue that it never was, but there is no doubt that the American flag of 2020 has been co-opted so drastically, that it’s hard to recognize what it stood for in the first place.

Eric Trump laid it bare at the Republican National Convention at the beginning of September:

“Under President Trump, freedom will never be a thing of the past. That’s what a vote for Donald Trump represents.” Now, pay attention here. “It’s a vote for the American spirit, the American dream, and for the American flag.”

A single man synonymous with a national symbol. Those are fighting words. Those are battle lines drawn. The message seems clear: If you don’t blindly tramp with Trump into the ether, you cannot wave the American flag, much less be American. I hesitate to draw on historical tyrants, but you can’t help but draw some parallels here. That toxic rhetoric has more than tainted the well, it has poisoned it for generations to come.

During times of great strife and tragedy, the flag has served to unite a population. Now, in one of the most consequential periods of United States history, that symbol has only worked to divide it.

What do we do with a flag that no longer stands for the good of its people? Somedays, it’s honestly hard to imagine untangling the venomous strands that are currently strangling it, to surgically remove the fear the banner has already instilled in so many. During the silent march, I only saw a single American flag above thousands of black-clad marchers. It was flying upside down, the stars pointed toward the street while the bars stacked up toward the sky. It was a simple gesture, but a poignant one. We are not living in the America that our flag was born into, and we need a symbol that reflects that. It’s time for a change. For starters, it’s time to recognize that we may not have always been part of an upside-down nation, but we’re sure living in one now.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday Tunes #62

Pardon the delay, but have you looked out the window lately? It’s been a rough couple months, but the last few weeks have been especially challenging. Recent events have pulled back the hood on an ugly truth in the U.S., a truth that has festered for far too long. I don’t have a soap box to stand on here, and frankly, I’m still trying how to put my feelings into words.

That being said, I urge you to listen to this Joey Bada$$ album “ALL-AMERIKKAN BADA$$” from 2017. Every track rings remarkably clear—3 years later. In actuality, hip hop has been one of the best documenters of racial inequality in the U.S. dating back to the beginning of the genre. Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Outkast, and countless others have been putting out reality bombs for decades, and all—for all the wrong reasons—are timeless. Listen to “Slump” by Outkast and see what’s changed. Not a whole lot.

Joey Bada$$ has an entire album of those tracks, and each one is worth a play right now. It’s up to us to make sure these tracks seem antiquated to the next generation, but for now it’s time to listen.


Person(al) News — Baby Florence!

Yesterday my sister Kori and her partner Matt gave birth to a beautiful 8-pound baby girl, Florence Leonie Baker in Los Angeles, California. Because of the current situation, only Kori and Matt were allowed in the hospital, leaving the rest of the family glued to screens in different corners of the United States. Thankfully, everything went well and both baby and mom are resting comfortably. We are trying to make the best of providing the in-person support so many first-time moms rely on via FaceTime and some app called Marco Polo.

It’s all super surreal. No other way to put it, really. Initially, Kori was even urged to wear a mask throughout the delivery (that lasted about one contraction). Hard to imagine a scenario like that just two months ago, but here we are.

Florence’s birth will forever mark this bizarre time, but her arrival has already been such an incredible jolt of positivity to our family. She’s my parents’ first grandchild, and, thanks to some clever work by the new parents, her name was the most beautiful surprise.

You see, Florence was the name of my great grandma, a lady most of us knew as “Grammy Moo-Cows,” as she lived her entire adult life helping operate a family dairy farm. But Florence was more than just a farmer in rural Maine. She was also the first woman in her family to go to college (in the 1910s, no less), and taught in a one-room schoolhouse for decades. She was an avid reader, and she drove well into her 90s (they took away her license after she flipped her car—twice). She also encouraged me to write. When she told me that I was a good writer, I didn’t believe her. But, when she told me to bring her all of my graded school papers for her review, I did. She may not have known it then, but her persistence gave me a confidence I never knew existed, and, in her own, gentle way, she pushed me to follow a path I’d never ever imagined (11-year-old me was destined to be a pro soccer player after all). She lived until she was 103, but her influence endures to this day. Not just in me, but in the dreams of dozens of great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and children that she fostered and encouraged.

Now that name lives on in my family’s newest generation, and I couldn’t be more proud of my sister and her partner for making it so. This little one might have a lot to live up to, but boy does she have a good head start, and a lot of hands to help her along the way. We love you, Baby Flo.

Tuesday Tunes #59

By design, my travel radius has shrunk by the week, and I am now a certified neighborhood wanderer in the Age of COVID-19. Interestingly, it has really inspired me to whip out the camera again. Here are a few snaps I got around the neighborhood, with little to no editing. I’m using a 50mm fixed lens known as the Plastic Fantastic, and I’ve had a lot of fun forcing my feet to be my best zoom lens.

Oh, and a song for that song that reminds you of someone you’re trying to forget? Yep, we got that.





The Weirdest Part About All Of This

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the coronavirus for a while now and I have yet to make the massive breakthrough you were surely all waiting for. What I do know is this: This pandemic is a different kind of cruel. I’m not going to go into how many people it has killed, or the towns and families it has destroyed–those are a different kind of tragedy. What I think is hardest about this whole thing is that COVID-19, at its core, eliminates our way to cope with tragedy.

When we suffer a terrorist attack or our community is ravaged by a hurricane, our first impulse is to offer a hand, to come together as a community to feel safe and rebuild. That’s our human instinct. Now, the nature of the virus effectively eliminates our ability to come together, keeping us separate when we need our community most.

I write about sports and my analogies and comparisons often stem from the sports world. In this case, it’s one of the easiest ways to see the chaos that the coronavirus is wreaking on community. Sports have long been a unifying force in times of war, illness, and hardship. Look at any tragedy in the last century, and there’s all but guaranteed to be a galvanizing sports moment that follows shortly after. Not this time. We’ve lost all major sports leagues and even the Olympics—an event that had only ever been cancelled by world wars—has been pushed indefinitely into the future. Stadiums, the places we so often go to escape the hardships of our lives, have transformed into epicenters of disease. Many Americans say they won’t even think of stepping foot into a stadium until there is a proven vaccine for COVID-19.

Beyond sports, the loneliness we are living right now will likely have mental repercussions for years to come. But the alternative feels so, so much worse. Running to be with family is one of the main ways of transmitting the disease, and transmitting in a way that might directly harm those closest to you. It’s a poetic purgatory, a painful limbo that makes this whole situation all the harder.

This post doesn’t come with a bow or any sort of solution, but writing it down is the first step to processing a new and strange reality. Stay safe, stay healthy, and can’t wait to hug you all soon.

Tuesday Tunes #56

The virus that continues to shape our lives has taken a turn in the U.S. I’m currently sitting in Seattle, having escaped uncertainty and a lockdown in Spain to now be under a mandatory stay-at-home order in my hometown.

Anyways, there’s been a whole lot of bad news lately, so J Balvin’s timing could not have been better. Reggaeton has become my newest guilty pleasure, and Colombia’s crowned prince has been a major factor in that. Mr. Balvin decided to drop a new album last week, adding a little bit of color to an increasingly gray horizon. Check it, and disfruta, gente.

From Italy: A Written Warning to Spain and the World

This op-ed was written in Spanish by a few Italian friends during the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic (something my friends liberally label an epidemic at this stage). The original text can be seen here.

In Italy, it was only a couple of days ago we were living a very similar situation to the one we have here in Spain today. The epidemic is spreading, the government announcements, the experts on television and makeshift commentators, the political opportunists taking advantage of the media alarm to have a little bit more visibility, the media bombarding us with loads of contradictions. Many newspapers opted for sensationalism, seeking clicks and sales, while the detailed facts were diluted by fake news and misleading titles. Thus, we went from the irrationality of, “Save yourself while you can”, to the trivialization of, “It’s only the flu.”

One of the first recommended measures for containing the epidemic was to avoid crowded places. We followed that recommendation by avoiding unnecessary trips to the supermarket, thinking to barricade ourselves in our houses for weeks, but not to renounce aperitivos, dinners, crowded shopping malls, bars, pubs, or clubs—including in established “red zones,” or areas with high risk of catching the virus.  The economy didn’t have to stop, because while they told us to stay at home, they asked some of us to continue with our normal life as consumers.

Meanwhile, the hospitals started filling up with patients infected by the virus, and intensive care units in the regions most affected in the north were heading towards full capacity. Doctors and public health workers took on extra shifts to take on the rising wave of patients, pleading with the public to follow the outlined preventative measures. “Stay in your homes to avoid infection.”

The government’s containment measures turned more and more drastic by the hour. We didn’t listen to them.

Not long before they halted the freedom to move in and out of designated “red zones” in the north of Italy, the news leaked out in the newspapers. Many fled in the night to their home towns and villages in the south, ignoring the risk of expanding the infection, an infection that would thus start with the members of close family they were running to see.

At the same time, social media users insulted us one after another; young people and very young people calmed by the idea that the risk was only for the elderly, kept going out to crowded parties and nightclubs. All the while, many ignored the preventative measures, even though the national health system is on the brink of collapse in certain areas of the country and runs the risk of not being able to cure many of those with bad infections.

In the race against time to contain the epidemic and avoid inundating the resuscitation departments, the government has finally declared the entire country a “red zone” so that the only permitted movement in the country is for work or emergency reasons. Under the pressure of the labor market, production has still not stopped, many workers are still obligated to show up to their jobs, exposing themselves to greater risk of contraction as the number of infected, hospitalized, and dead continues to rise.

The infected are no longer just numbers, we are beginning to put a face on them—these are family members and friends. “The others,” are now us.

During this week, the longest in our country’s history, the epidemic has exposed our contradictions. We have been witnesses to the triumph of individualism, of “Save yourself,” of “I don’t care,” of the incapacity to renounce our individual freedoms in order to perform our civic duty to protect those around us, the community, the vulnerable peoples in our community.

The noise of panic, the silence of indifference.

We have seen the advanced, and technologically-proficient Western society, crumble in front of our eyes. The incapacity to predict, to prevent harm, to act, to act without panic, to practice unity. We weren’t prepared, we didn’t understand.

With time, after this serious state of emergency, the deaths, and the non-peaceful predictions, may we rediscover, little by little, the importance of unity and education, of empathy and care, in our frayed social fabric.

Maybe we are beginning to understand that nobody can be saved alone, that borders don’t exist, that health is a universal right, that the economy can wait, that life is fragile and that to protect it should be a collective effort. Regret grows with each turn of this contagion curve: Not understanding it before, we think, had been a mistake. Spain, our adopted home, we wrote this so that you can all have this in mind as well. So that there can be more prevention, without waiting until it’s too late.

Tuesday Tunes #54

Yeah, yeah, it’s Wednesday, but I still have a song that just needs to get out there—late or not. May you never dance alone, groove people. This one’s for you, Jo! B EZ, gente.

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Tuesday Tunes #53

Here we are, and oh how much has changed. And yet, some things stay the same. The insatiable quest for good music, for one.

On a rainy Tuesday morning in Seattle, I was tuned into KEXP, the local listener-driven radio station, and heard this haunting new tune. I can only describe it as Sam Smith meets RnB meets M83. Seriously, you have to try this one to understand what I’m saying. Introducing Mega Simone and “Hit Me Where the Heart Is.”

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