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Photo by Bob Minkin

I was going through my archives today, looking for a few rarities, and I found these two songs I thought would be worth hearing again:

Sultans of Swing 11/6/97 Maritime Hall, SF
David Gans – guitar, vocals; Bob Nakamine – guitar; Alan Feldstein – guitar, vocals; Jennifer Jolly – keyboard; Phil Lesh – bass; Clayton Call – drums; Anthony Aversano – percussion

Bird Song 12/27/97 Maritime Hall, SF
David Gans – guitar, vocals; Chuck Garvey – guitar, vocals; Jennifer Jolly – keyboard, vocals; Phil Lesh – bass; Clayton Call – drums

These shows were benefits for the Unbroken Chain Foundation.

More Gans music on the tunes page.

I know nothing about this beyond what’s on the web site, but Phil Lesh is doing an oral history project for Deadheads, starting this weekend at Jones Beach.

Why do the Sixties remain so devilishly fascinating to us today? Is it the sense of an opportunity lost, or a vision brought to life? For our elders, is it nostalgia for a golden age?

I’ve always thought of that period as a second Renaissance; where in 15th century Florence the lost knowledge and art of the ancient Greece and Rome was reintegrated into Western culture, in San Francisco in the 60s the introduction of non-Western ideas and philosophies began to widen our culture into something truly global; a very necessary development, if we want our species to survive the next century without self-destructing.

Ann Coulter: Deadhead

… I really like Deadheads and the whole Dead concert scene: the tailgating, the tie-dye uniforms, the camaraderie – it was like NASCAR for potheads. You always felt like you were with family at a Dead show – a rather odd, psychedelic family that sometimes lived in a VW bus and sold frightening looking “veggie burritos.” But whatever their myriad interests, clothing choices, and interest in illicit drugs, true Deadheads are what liberals claim to be but aren’t: unique, free-thinking, open, kind, and interested in different ideas.

Ann Coulter: smut peddler

Her fans may enjoy hearing her talk about poisoning Justice Stevens or say that it’s a pity Timothy McVeigh didn’t park his truck next to the New York Times building. But that’s not because the remarks make either Stevens or the New York Times seem particularly ridiculous. It’s because Coulter seems to be able to get away with unbridled aggression by presenting it as mere mischief, leaving her critics looking prim and humorless. (“Perhaps her book should have been called `Heartless,’ ” said Hillary Clinton after Coulter’s remarks about the widows, inviting the response, “Oh lighten up, girl.”)

That rhetorical maneuver doesn’t really have a name, but it’s a close relative of what we think of as smut. In the strict sense, of course, smut is the leering innuendo that veils sexual aggression. But in a broader sense, smut can be any kind of malice that pretends to be mere naughtiness. It might be a leering vulgarity, a racial epithet, or simply a venomous insult — what makes it smut is that it’s tricked out as humor, so that if anyone claims to be offended you can answer indignantly, “Can’t you take a joke?”

Ann Coulter: tool of evil

Who benefits when smut dominates the public sphere? Smut, having no other purpose or effect than gratifying base impulses, provides no platform on which to build. But its effect is more pernicious: when it crowds out that which is not smut, nothing gets built.

We are in a time of great decadence. Our nation has turned its back on its greatness and its destiny. Our legislature is corrupt and depraved, and its depravity has made it weak and cowardly. Our judiciary is inept and marginal. Our executive branch is in the hands of men who have seen clearly that all they needed in order to seize imperial power from this situation was the will.

…

Reasonable people who have access to the facts are this administration’s worst enemy. And as this administration and its allies take great pains to suppress the facts, they also takes great pains to suppress reason.

And there is why Coulter has received her reward. Why we have a Fox News. How we have come to have a mainstream media that consistently fails to follow arguments to their logical conclusions and insteads presents “both sides,” as though truth and falsity are of equal weight. How it is that our national discussion about the education of our people focuses on the obsessions of a religious sect.

Reason is the enemy of the men in power and their friends, and they have dedicated themselves to extirpate it from the public sphere.

And lastly, Ann Coulter: the Musical