The cunning cons of party pols

By Courtney Haden

Two games that put the fun into Fun City are speed chess and three-card monte. Though some say New York City’s official recreations are kvetching and kvelling, the board game and the card game capture, I think, the essence of that great metropolis.

Chess is a game of supreme strategizing, in which success is dependent on one’s ability to think several moves ahead. Take away the luxury to deliberate, as the masters of speed chess demonstrate daily in Washington Square, and instinct becomes a crucial component in vanquishing one’s adversary.

Three-card monte, on the other hand, is a game of skill only for the person holding the cards. As widespread as the legend of this street con is, there’s always one mark who steps up to the table thinking he can beat the dealer.

Manhattan’s unique diversions have become America’s lately. The presidential race, still a human gestation away as of Super Fat Tuesday, has picked up incredible velocity thanks to the various media accompanying the contest, so that the daily engagements between the Democratic senators on one side and between rival wings of the Republican Party on the other comprise hourly confrontations.

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Argentine band transforms the blues into world music

By Courtney Haden

That music is a universal language might be proven by how fluently people communicate with it, none more persuasively than four visitors from Argentina whose band’s name reflects their shared passion: Mo’Blues.

Think for a moment about the thing you love best to do in this world. Now consider whether you would leave your home and travel 5,000 miles to another hemisphere to do it. That’s what the talented quartet Mo’Blues did last week, stopping off in Birmingham en route to becoming the first South American band ever to compete in the colossal International Blues Challenge, held annually in Memphis, Tenn.

Santa Fe, Argentina, is a city roughly the size of Birmingham, but it does not resemble the sort of place one might imagine to be a hotbed of I-IV-V progressions. “It shows how powerful the blues is,” bassist Sebastian Casis grins. “Maybe you are surprised that it kind of bounces to you, because America shared the blues with the rest of the world and now it’s bouncing back.“

Thanks to Susan Collier and the Magic City Blues Society, Mo’Blues has been bouncing into Birmingham regularly since 2000, winning more fans with each stopover not just because of their strop-razor-tight musicality, but their effervescent personalities. As they discuss the nuances of their chosen music, they are not troubled by provincial American notions of authenticity and entitlement. They know they have found a new way of telling some old stories and they couldn’t be happier to have you hear it.

Although Argentina is a bracingly cosmopolitan nation, its native culture blended with many world influences, urban blues music was heady stuff for boys who had grown up under one repressive government or another. “We saw the contemporary world through TV, and we saw a new expression of young people living a kind of freedom, you know?” says keyboard whiz Gabriel de Pedro. “In our city and in our situation, I believe music was the food of our souls.”

For guitarist Federico Teiler, that meant exotic phonograph records: “I bought the first Elvis Presley record, then the Beatles, then Stevie Ray Vaughn.” Drummer Ruben Tissenbaum concurs with the choice of SRV, saying, “It is the blues for me. I heard Led Zeppelin and these others that were related to the blues, but the first time I heard Stevie Ray Vaughn, I heard the classic Texas blues.”

Listening to the modern blues-rockers drew Mo’Blues into the timeless vortex of music. “For instance,” Casis noted, “I got my first Led Zeppelin record when I was 19. It was like a miracle. Then I read about Jimmy Page playing with the Yardbirds and what music [they] played. The time line was going back. I found out about Willie Dixon… I began to understand the lyrics. I think all of us learned to speak English from these records. I learned how to say, ‘Doncha?’ and ‘Doncha wanna?’”

The first time Mo’Blues played together, according to Ruben, they put together a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughn at the Hard Rock Cafe in Buenos Aires: “We played twenty songs from him; it was incredible.” The band began playing regularly in clubs all over Argentina, then hit the American festival circuit on the do-it-yourself plan in 1999, playing Bluestock in Memphis and the Down Home Blues fest in Camden, SC. Considered a mere novelty at first, the players’ tightly interlocked instrumentation gave notice they were no dilettantes. “We are not a soloist with a backup band,” Casis says. “We work as a team. We play all together in the same moment and try to be the other.”

The 2008 Blues Challenge seemed the perfect spot to stage a sort of coming-out party for the band, since, as Susan Collier put it, “Everybody in blues will be in Memphis.” Mindful of many complications to simplify, Collier and the band started working on the logistics of the trip during its 2006 Birmingham visit.

Up against 160 other bands from around the world, Mo’Blues had a great rookie outing. Playing at Alfred’s, they finished second by only a few points, missing the contest finals, but earning a slot at a battle of the bands held at the New Daisy Theater on Beale Street, where the group finished in the top four and pocketed $500.

Susan’s Monday e-mail summed up: “The trip overall was a huge success, as they couldn’t walk down the street without people coming up to them for autographs and saying how much they loved them. The success was the promoters, record labels and the big wigs in the blues world being in awe.”

That awe translated into a new alliance with a high-profile PR rep as well as an offer of several festival gigs in France — on the promoter’s tab, for a change. It was more validation of the band’s wide appeal, but you needn’t take the Memphians’ word for it. After all, Mo’Blues will be performing this Saturday night in Birmingham, starting around midnight at Marty’s, which would be a great blues room in anyone’s town.

Why should you make the effort to see a band breakin’ the blues en Espanol? Because of that universal language thing we mentioned earlier. As Susan Collier explained, “To hear them do ‘There’s a red house over yonder’, very familiar lyrics to anyone who loves the blues, in Spanish, and to sit back in the crowd and watch; me personally, I see a crowd singing in English, I see a band singing in Spanish and all of a sudden I see the crowd going, ‘Casa rojo’. I’ve never seen a blues act do what they are doing. That’s why I believe in them so much.”

Mo’Blues believes in us as well. Federico Teiler chose his words well as he sought to define the band’s deep regard for Birmingham: “We are taking so seriously the thing to be here. We are thinking so strongly to be here more. Here we found a place that we can call home.”

Mo’Blues will perform this Saturday night at Marty’s. Show details are online at www.martysbar.com.

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The time has come to pick a president

By Courtney Hayden

The phrase is, “like carrying coals to Newcastle.” Unless you’re an English miner, a Newcastle resident or both, you may not recognize it as a simile for superfluity. Newcastle-on-Tyne, you see, is famous for coal mining and exporting, so much so that as early as 1661, historian Thomas Fuller was writing, “To carry Coals to Newcastle… [is] to busy one’s self in a needless Imployment.”

Nowadays we use more modern syntax, such as, “like taking Mike Huckabee to Samford University.”

On the Baptist campus last Saturday, The Man Who Would Be Bubba found safe haven among thousands to express ideas outside the mainstream of contemporary Republican thought. He spoke with a longtime preacher’s ease of topics that make him anathema to Bush-Cheney acolytes: a national sales tax and putting faith into practice.

Noted is the irony of the GOP getting what it claimed it wished for, namely, an active Christian in contention for the presidential nomination. All those years Atwater and Rove sought to energize the base, they never meant for evangelicals to get that energized. The ‘Publicans were quite content to herd the holy into polling places to cast votes for candidates giving lip service to Bible values, but once the elections were over, the Christian Right went back to being marginalized.

The rise of Huckabee from Arkansan anonymity has given the GOP Establishment shivering fits, mainly because he is not beholden to them. He has shown disquieting willingness to forego Bush-Cheney talking points in favor of his own agenda, decidedly less billionaire-centric than the current Administration’s.
Huckabee offers shivers as well to those still inclined to think that church and state should be separated. The candidate believes, “It’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God.” To that end, Huck would amend the Constitution “so it’s in God’s standards,” thus, presumably, making it possible to render unto Caesar and God at the same time.
Barring divine intervention, Huckabee will not win the GOP nomination. Even with the help of campaign pro Ed Rollins, he cannot outflank the cynicism of both Mitt Romney and John McCain, two pols clearly capable of saying and doing anything to cadge votes. However, in getting even this close, the preachin’ politician has crashed through the stained-glass ceiling. Perhaps next cycle Huckabee will head the slate for the Theocratic Party.

Another churchgoing candidate came to town last weekend, but he worked on the Sabbath. Barack Obama drew a crowd five times the size of Huckabee’s to Bartow Arena, plowing considerably different ground than his fellow Christian the day before. Mike Huckabee may have been born in Hope, but for many in the hall Sunday, Obama personified hope.

I eavesdropped Monday on a conversation between a young pundit and a radio host at Brown University to learn what might persuade African-Americans of the candidate’s viability. The pundit, a Birmingham native who uses the tag “Bronze In Alabama,” explained to the host that he was a former “Clinton acolyte” who believed in the couple’s service to American society. “However, when President Clinton began attacking Mr. Obama, implying that he is race-limited, he drove me from them,” the young man said.

“Bronze” was put off by Bill’s comparison of Obama’s chances with Jesse Jackson’s runs in the Eighties: “The implication was that any old Negro can win a primary in South Carolina.” He went on to suggest that such poisonous rhetoric endangered the Democratic Party alliance between Northeastern liberals and Southern blacks.

Though “Bronze” said he was taken by Obama’s unapologetically African-American bearing, he saw as well a literary allusion to a character in Ralph Ellison’s epic novel, Invisible Man, viewing Obama as a real-life Todd Clifton: “a real omni-American, an individual neither defined by race or education or any of these sorts of externalities, but an individual, as Dr. King said, defined by the content of his character.”

Amid the jumbled rhetoric preceding next week’s primaries, Barack Obama has used his considerable gifts to fashion a platform of hope on which to mount his campaign. It is powerful mojo; the stuff not of mere politicking but of statesmanship. The greatest of our presidents have used hope to channel deep American desires for transformation, the worst have taken hope in vain.

Much has been made of Senator Edward Kennedy’s somewhat unexpected endorsement of Obama — it had been thought he would remain neutral longer — but a more significant Kennedy endorsement appeared Sunday in The New York Times. In an op-ed piece entitled “A President Like My Father,” Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg drew a line of succession from JFK to BHO: “It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.”

Even after Tuesday’s voting the campaigns continue. Barack Obama will confront the truth that there can be no New Politics as long as there are Old Politicians. Even if he surmounts the doggedness of the Clintons’ machine, he faces a fall campaign potentially the most corrosive since Andrew Jackson’s time.

No matter who bears the Republican standard, Obama will be the target of special interests entrenched and empowered by the Bush-Cheney cabal, mighty money machines at home and abroad unwilling to accede to the scrutiny of open and transparent government. They cannot afford to be displaced, so whether through Swift Boats or crooked voting machines, playing the race card or the Tony Rezko card, they will use every means at their disposal to maintain Republican control of the unitary executive branch they have helped forge in the last seven years.

Should Barack Obama somehow triumph over those odds, all he has to do then is figure out how to govern what’s left of the nation. It is the luck of the oarsman: if you manage to run the rapids, you get to go over the waterfall…

Courtney Haden is a Birmingham Weekly columnist.

Photos by Jonathan Purvis.

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