I think a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. Woody Allen

Our friend, and my Little Brother Edwin’s mom, Martha Silva became a Citizen yesterday and Michele and I were lucky enough to be at the Paramount Theater in Oakland to see it. I left feeling great about America, our America. The American that welcomes immigrants, the America that has demonstrated diverse opinions result in a stronger, more resilient, county, the America that knows that, what we used to call the melting pot, is why we have prospered.

An organization starts dying when it worries more about keeping people out than it worries about trying to get more people in. That is a sure sign that the organization no longer wants to move forward, that it wants to stay in the past, slowly atrophying. I read the papers or hear Trump on the radio and I worry that we have changed into a country that wants to go back to the past, I worry that we now are trying to keep people out, then I look at Facebook or Twitter and that worry is amped way up; to fear, barely covered by rage. But in a very real way, all that is fake news, yes, all the bad news we read about has happened but that wasn’t all that happened. It is not even most of what happened. Last year, 754,700 immigrants became citizens up from 291,800 in 2010.

This morning, I watched 726 more people become new citizens. Of that 726 people, the largest subgroup was about 150 from Mexico, followed by The Philipines – which was a surprise – then China and India. These new citizens came from 82 different countries ranging alphabetically from Afghanistan to Yemen. When we left, the afternoon group was already starting to line up. Also, when we left, Martha had already applied for a passport and registered to vote. And we know that she is going to vote.

You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out, it’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have. Grace Slick

We went to see Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Jefferson Starship the other night. They were billed as being part of the fifty-year celebration of Woodstock (although when we got there the announcer said it was part of a Women in Music series). It was fun and I’m glad we went, but it was also sort of strange. When Michele mentioned it, I said: “Uh, OK.” not really thinking it through. About halfway through the first set, it occurred to me that most of the band was younger than they should be. Obviously, the lead singer was new – it turns out that, over the years, nineteen different women have sung Joplin’s part? role? including a woman, Shiho Ochi, from the Japanese band Superfly – and this Joplin looked to be under forty. The band should be my age, maybe even a year or two older – and two were, the drummer, Dave Getz and the bass player, Pete Albin – but most of these performers seemed younger than me, way younger. Still, the music sounded pretty much the same. OK, I was much more aware of how bluesy it was but I think that is because I’ve listened to so much blues in the interim and there was an electric violinist, Kate Ruso, who was terrific. Still, sitting there, I began to realize that I was watching a kind of Möbius performance wherein a cover band named Big Brother and the Holding Company playing music from the original Big Brother and the Holding Company.

It sort of makes me wonder, What is Big Brother and the Holding Company? What is any big name band? Is it just a branding company? I vaguely knew that old swing bands like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra continued playing the same sound with a variety of players but it never occurred to me that rock bands were doing the same thing.

The feature act was The Jefferson Starship and I went through the same process, thinking at first that the Grace Slick part was played by Grace Slick but, of course, the singer was only channeling Grace Slick. Her name is Cathy Richardson, she was quite good, and she really seemed to carry the band, just like Grace Slick used to do. The strange thing that I found out when I got home is that Cathy Richardson sometimes plays the Janis Joplin parts for Big Brother and the Holding Company. There was one original Starship player, David Freiberg – with the white hair and grey sweatsuit in Michele’s picture above – who had returned after being away for twenty years.

The concert and I don’t know what else to call it, was in the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium and we sat in typical theater seats (pleasantly clapping after good solos). These were two outlaw bands, they came into being during the “don’t trust anybody over 30” 60s and they almost defined the counterculture. But this was almost like going to a Classical concert, nobody was dancing in the aisles and the youngest attendees were very close to 60. It was surreal, but surreal in a fun way.

About an hour ago, I was walking out of my office for the day.

There was a man what I believe was his teenage son hanging a small sign they made outside my office (we let people leave well wishes on our wall).

Astonishingly, his sign read: “Trump supporters for Ocasio-Cortez.” pic.twitter.com/IjVKbvetEI

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 10, 2019

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. Now the Lorraine Motel is the National Civil Rights Museum and Martin Luther King Jr. has a holiday named after him, but then, in 1968, King was not a popular figure with white people. He was a trouble maker, as Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country.

Sunday afternoon, it feels like a month ago, Michele and I drove from Mountain View Arkansas to Memphis Tennessee. We both were feeling punk, Michele with a head cold and me with a chest cold so we ended up doing not much. This was our third time in Memphis, the first time I didn’t even know about the National Civil Rights Museum, the second time, we didn’t have time, so it was on top of our list this time and we spent most of Monday there. It is not a happy place, partially because it is the site of a murder but more so because it tells the African-American story from the African-American side and that side of the story paints a picture that is not as benign as our whitewashed version.

I’ve written and rewritten these couple of paragraphs several times, mostly talking about the African-American journey and this museum. The journey has been almost impossibly hard and the museum doesn’t try to gloss over that; we are only about a third of the way through the museum when slavery ends and Jim Crow starts. This museum is terrific at reminding us of the astounding journey that African-Americans have taken in a world that has done its damndest to hold them back. I suggest the National Civil Rights Museum to anybody traveling through Memphis.