Hungry Blues

Now that I've got the blog going on Gulf Coast Fair Housing Network, I've added the RSS feed to the sidebar. You should see it there right at the top. It displays links to the three most recent posts.

For more info on GCFHN, see my earlier Hungry Blues post, or just go straight to the GCFHN website.

What sort of experts on ethics write the Nuremberg defense into their professional ethics code?

That's psychologist Stephen Soldz quoted in the new article by Arthur Levine, about the role the American Psychological Association's support of its members' participation in military interrogations and torture.

Much of the article is familiar ground to readers here, but it is an excellent summary of the processes that have led some psychologists away from the healing professions and into the operational role of calibrating pain.

Along the way, Levine drops rich details that are new to print. Perhaps the most original portion of the article is Levine's treatment of the APA's Psychological Ethics and National Security task force, which has given cover to the ongoing role of psychologists in US torture.

[I]n February 2005, [Gerald] Koocher and APA president Ronald Levant led the creation of the blue-ribbon, 10-member Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force to study the problem. But they stacked the deck by ensuring that six of the 10 members were from the military. One was Capt. Bryce Lefever, a trainer at the Navy’s SERE School and author of the lecture “Brainwashing: The Method of Forceful Interrogation.”

Another was R. Scott Shumate, director of behavioral science for the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity division, who, according to his own bio, had “engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.” There were also Michael Gelles, chief psychologist of the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service; Col. Larry James, chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003; and Robert Fein, whose biographical blurb describes him as “a consultant to the Directorate for Behavioral Sciences of the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity.”

The boldest choice of all was Col. Morgan Banks, the very man accused of helping to introduce SERE techniques to Guantanamo. “It was like a Monty Python spoof,” says Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota medical school who followed the process for his book, Oath Betrayed. “At a certain level, you had to laugh.” Asked about charges that the APA stacked the deck, Koocher responded in an email that “the task force worked by consensus.”

Any countervailing influence, then, would have to come from the four civilian members. But when the task force’s discussions began, it soon became clear that the APA leadership was determined to resist their proposals. When Jean Maria Arrigo, an independent scholar on the ethics of military intelligence, and Michael Wessells, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, and a specialist in how children are affected by armed conflict, argued that international law such as the Geneva Conventions should be the gold standard in the APA’s ethics code, Koocher, serving as a liaison from the APA board, was dismissive. “We’re not going to go there,” he announced. “International law doesn’t have any standing in U.S. courts.” (According to Arrigo, one of the military psychologists was even blunter, declaring: “We’ve taken an oath to our commander-in-chief.”) Then, when Arrigo argued for an appendix of case histories that would clearly illustrate some examples of banned behavior, such as water-boarding, an APA lawyer who was advising the panel rejected the idea, warning that such examples could be used in court against psychologists. Wessells, still dissatisfied by the lack of specificity, cited the use of techniques like sleep deprivation as clearly out of bounds. To which one of the military panelists responded: “Maybe it’s useful to an interrogation to wake someone up early.”

Drafting the task-force report fell primarily to Stephen Behnke, a lawyer and psychologist who heads the APA’s Office of Ethics. Behnke produced a rough draft on day one, a model of ambiguous wording that effectively determined the scope of the discussions. Ultimately, the final report did assert that “psychologists are alert to acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and have an ethical responsibility to report these acts to the appropriate authorities.” But, crucially, it did not offer specific guidance on what did and did not constitute torture. And it noted pointedly that “over the course of the recent United States military presence in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, … rules and regulations have been significantly developed and refined.” In other words: Things are changing. Good luck feeling your way about.

Read the rest of Arthur Levine's article in the Washington Monthly, "Collective Unconscionable: How psychologists, the most liberal of professionals, abetted Bush’s torture policy."

This segment from a Mississippi Public Broadcasting series on the post-Katrina Gulf Coast of MS was made in March 2006, two months after the week that I spent there. The video is of a helicopter fly over of the MS Gulf Coast. It is impossible to understand the extent of the damage in Mississippi without going there, but this aerial view of just some portions of the 70 mile coastline is a good start.

When I read Bill Quigley's article about HUD's approval of plans to demolish thousands of livable public housing apartments in New Orleans, one sentence in particular jumped out at me:

Representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters chair the committee and subcommittee with oversight of HUD.

Being from Massachusetts, it struck me that Massachusetts residents represented by Barney Frank have a unique opportunity to play a role in the fight against HUD's decision to demolish the C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, Lafitte, and St. Bernard housing projects in New Orleans—homes to over 4000 families before Hurricane Katrina.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the ranking minority member of the Financial Services Committee, Frank has more than once called on HUD to respond appropriately to the Gulf Coast's massive housing crisis. But stopping the demolitions and bringing displaced New Orleanians back into their homes requires more than good positions. Frank needs to halt a process that has already been approved and launch a Congressional investigation. I believe that Frank will need to feel strong support from his constituents in order for him take the necessary actions.

Therefore I have been doing some organizing, which I hope to tell more about soon. In the meantime, you can check out the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Network website:

www.fairhousingnetwork.org

The site is still bare bones, but it gives you all the information you need if you are a 4th Congressional District of MA resident who wants to give Barney Frank a call to let him know that you support:

• Immediate cessation of the demolition plans for New Orleans public housing.
• A Congressional investigation into the HUD decision to demolish thousands of livable public housing apartments in New Orleans.
• The right of displaced public housing residents to return home to New Orleans immediately.

I will be adding more information and documents over time. I also have plans to expand the scope of the site beyond this particular crisis in New Orleans. After all, the post-Katrina housing crisis is region wide, for the whole Gulf Coast.

~
Photo: Inside a vacant apartment in the Lafitte housing project, New Orleans, LA, October, 2006 (John Fernandez)

Last year, Marsha Joyner wrote a guest post on Watch Night Services in African American communities. For the last two weeks, in the approach to New Years, her post has been drawing search engine traffic every day. Here are the opening paragraphs.

Those of us who grew up in America’s traditional Black communities know of Watch Night Services, the gathering of the faithful in church on New Year’s Eve. So as I ventured into the world it came as a surprise to me that other than the Catholic Church, which celebrates the eve of the feast of the Circumcision late on the evening of December 31, primarily white protestant churches generally do not have a church service for a secular holiday.

The service is an opportunity to tell the story of one of the most important milestones in the Blacks’ American history. The Watch Night Services that we celebrate in Black communities today can be traced back to gatherings on December 31, 1862, also known as Freedom’s Eve. On that night, Blacks came together in churches and private homes, anxiously awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation actually had become law. Then, at the stroke of midnight, it was January 1, 1863, and all slaves in the Confederate States were declared legally free. Blacks have gathered in churches annually on New Year’s Eve ever since, praising God for bringing us through another year.

Read the rest here.

UPDATE: If you liked Marsha Joyner's guest post on Watch Night Services, you might want read some of her other posts on Hungry Blues. I've added a "marsha joyner" tag to all of her posts. Click on the "marsha joyner" link at the bottom of this post or in the sidebar to go to the archive of her writings on this blog.

When I was thirteen, my dad took me to the Film Forum, just outside the West Vilage in NYC. My cousin Alan's first film was being shown there, a film called Land of Look Behind, a documentary about Jamaica just after Bob Marley's death. At the time I did not know Bob Marley's music and I knew nothing about Rastafarians or Jamaica.

All I really knew was that when I was five Alan lived with us in our house in Teaneck, NJ. He and my dad used to take photographs together and process them in my dad's darkroom. We converted our attic into a bedroom for him. Alan photographed me there. He somehow limited the available light to a shaft coming in from a single window.

He left us to go to Europe, where he studied with Roman Polanski, worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, and began his lifelong association and sometime partnership with Werner Herzog.

On the screen were astounding images of poverty in Jamaica, Bob Marley's funeral, Rastafarian reveries, live reggae performances, prisons and military police, incredible landscapes, marijuana smoking, and English made strange by unfamiliar accents that often seemed hypnotic. It was a ninety minute cinematic poem, a dream that has stayed with me for almost twenty-five years.

A few years ago, I found a VHS copy of the film at my parents house and brought it back here to Boston, excited to finally see Alan's film again. But I don't own a TV or VCR and somehow I never managed to arrange to watch the film at a friend's house as I'd planned.

It is therefore that much more exciting to have Alan inform me that Land of Look Behind has been digitally remastered and will be released on DVD next month, complete with special features---commentary by Werner Herzog and Alan, a digital photo album with never-before published images, and a soundtrack CD. You can pre-order Land of Look Behind now.

New York Times film critic Robert Palmer was also at one of those Film Forum screenings of Alan's film in December, 1982. Palmer wrote:

Land of Look Behind began as an exploration of Bob Marley's contributions to Jamaican pop music and Jamaican life. But somewhere along the way it became something different, a kind of meditation on the island's music and religion, its traditions and its pride, the feel of its inhabitants' everyday activities and some of their hopes for the future. Land of Look Behind won't satisfy viewers who like having things spelled out for them, whether by a voice-over or a mundane, predictable plot. It has neither, and that is both its minor weakness and its distinguishing strength.

More recently, Jim Jarmusch has said:

Formally the film flows easily, seemingly growing from the climate, the music, the speech patterns, and the gentle landscape itself. Footage of Marley's coffin being driven in the back of a pickup along the dusty roadways lined with throngs of devastated admirers does serve as a visual centerpiece. But the heart of the film inhabits its details. For me, specific images seem to recur in my memory (I've seen the film several times): the way that, in the opening sequence, a backwoods countryman carefully locates and presents a small indigenous tree toad to the camera; a shot of Gregory Isaacs from behind as he exits a ground floor office and walks into Kingston's hard sunlight; and the haunting closing sequence involving a young Rasta in the hills undulating to Marley's voice and rhythms floating from a tape player, as though the music contains the secret code to a deep spiritual mystery. And in fact, it does.

The trailer is up on YouTube.

A few clips from the film are also on YouTube. Check out this segment with Gergory Isaacs.

"We just want to go home," Ms. Williams said. "People knew us in our neighborhood. They never messed with us. I could leave my back door open when I went to the grocery. People don't understand that was our home. We want to go home."

Take Bill Quigley's fact sheet on the New Orleans affordable housing crisis and mix it with the stories of just two of the thousands of displaced families HUD is barring from return to their homes, and you get Quigley's latest article, "A Tale of Two Sisters."

When Katrina hit, they had been living in the C.J. Peete apartments for years. Ms. Bobbie Jennings had been there for 34 years. Her twin sister, Ms. Gloria Williams lived there for over 18 years.

Their combined families, 18 in all, evacuated to Baton Rouge to ride out the storm. When it was clear they would not be going home any time soon, their host family told them it was time to move on. In September 2005, the family of 18 moved into one daughter's damaged home in Slidell, about 30 miles away from New Orleans - all sleeping on the first floor because the roof was still damaged.

One of their sisters, Annie, was in the hospital with cancer when Katrina hit. It took the family weeks before the finally found her in a hospital in Macon, Georgia.

When the city opened, they got rides into town and checked on their apartments. No water had entered their apartments at all. But their doors had been kicked down and all their furnishings were gone. The housing authority told them they could not move back in for a couple more months while their apartments were secured and fixed up. The housing authority started fixing up and painting apartments in her complex, but abruptly stopped after a few weeks.

Slidell was getting tight, so they accepted an offer to relocate to California. After a month, they returned. Being 3000 miles apart from family was too heartbreaking. A four day bus ride brought them back to Slidell in January 2006. After hitching rides into New Orleans, Ms. Williams found a subsidized apartment. The only way the landlord would accept her, though, was if she paid him an extra $400 under the table. Otherwise, he would rent it to someone else who would.

So Ms. Williams paid the extra money and moved in with her grandchildren while she waited for her old apartment to reopen. She used FEMA money to buy new furniture. In late February 2005, Ms. Williams was hospitalized for three weeks for surgeries on her legs.

In June 2005, HUD announced they were not going to let any residents back in her apartment complex and three others (Lafitte, St. Bernard and BW Cooper) because they were going to be demolished. Over one hundred maintenance and security workers for the housing authority were let go. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago and all these decisions are being made in Washington DC.

The demolished buildings would make way for much newer and many fewer apartments which would be built by private developers. The demolition and private development would be financed by federal funds and federal tax breaks designed to help Katrina victims!

Nearly $100 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds were designated for the private developers. Another $34 million in Katrina Go-Zone tax credits were also donated to the developers.

(Read the rest.)

See also: This is My Home: The Fight for Public Housing in New Orleans, a video prodcuced by the Advancement Project.

Rest in peace, James Brown.

I had already listened my way through the phenomenal Hot 5 and 7 recordings from the 1920s and fallen in love with Nat Hentoff's selections from the supposedly inferior big band recordings of the 1930s. In fact I had collected nearly all of the pre-All Stars recordings, had listened to a good number of those later recordings, as well, and had steeped myself in Satch Plays Fats. But I did not fully understand Louis Armstrong's genius until I saw this clip on TV several years ago---I believe on the Ken Burns Jazz series.

The trumpet licks are---for Armstrong---throwaways. But the vocal performance is mind blowing. I tried to explain something about this experience of Armstrong, in passing, a couple of years ago. I said then that Ellison caught it in words: "vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. . . . red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising."

Fortunately for all of us, we also have the thing itself. We have this document from 1933.

Alternative version: There are several uploads of this video clip on YouTube. This other one has fuzzier picture and poorer sound, but the video and audio seemed a little more in sync to me.

The following fact sheet came via an email from Bill Quigley. It has also been posted on justiceforneworleans.org, a website maintained by the Loyola University of New Orleans Law Clinic, which Quigley directs.

1. New Orleans is in the worst affordable housing crisis since the Civil War. The US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reports that the city is 100% rented as tens of thousands of homes remain wrecked. There was a waiting list of 18,000 people for public and section 8 housing pre-Katrina. When the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) opened list for Section 8 in 2001, 19 thousand people applied.
2. Despite this, HUD has announced plans to demolish 4,534 apartments of public housing garden-style apartments:
   • 1546 in BW Cooper
   • 723 in C.J. Peete
   • 1400 in St. Bernard
   • 865 in Lafitte
3. John Fernandez, Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, has inspected 140 of these apartments and has concluded “no structural or nonstructural damage was found that could reasonably warrant any cost-effective building demolition. . . ; Therefore, the general conclusions are: demolition of any of the buildings of these four projects is not supported by the evidence of the survey; replacement of these buildings with contemporary construction would yield buildings of lower quality and shorter lifetime duration; the original construction methods and materials of these projects are far superior in their resistance to hurricane conditions than typical new construction and, with renovation and regular maintenance, the lifetimes of the buildings in all four projects promise decades of continued service that may be extended indefinitely.”
4. HANO's own documents show that:
   • Lafitte could be repaired for $20million, even completely overhauled for $85 million, yet estimate for demolition and rebuilding many fewer units will cost $100m;
   • St. Bernard could be repaired for $41m, substantially modernized for $130m, demolition and rebuilding LESS UNITS will cost $197m;
   • BW Cooper could be substantially renovated for $135 million compared to $221m to demolish and rebuild LESS UNITS;
   • HANOs own insurance company reported that it would take less than $5000 each to repair CJ Peete apartments.
5. • St. Bernard will go from 1400 units to 595 apartments – of which 145 will be market rate – leaving 160 low-income public housing units and 160 tax credit (mixed income) units.
   • CJ Peete will go from 723 units to 410 units – 154 public housing; 133 tax credit (mixed income) and 123 market.
   • BW Cooper will go from 1546 units to 410 units – 154 public housing, 133 tax credit (mixed income) and 123 market.
   • Lafitte will go from 865 to only a fraction as well.
6. The developers of these properties will get federal assistance to demolish habitable affordable housing in the following amounts:
   • $12.8m in Go Zone tax credits for Lafitte, plus $16.3m in CDBG funds
   • $7.4m in Go Zone tax credits for St. Bernard plus $27m in CDBG funds
   • $6.9m in Go Zone tax credits for BW Cooper plus $27m in CDBG funds
   • $7.3m in Go Zone tax credits for CJ Peete plus $27m in CDBG funds
7. New York Times Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, criticized this demolition saying on November 19, 2006: “Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States. . . . Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.”

(Cross-posted on the Dollars & Sense Blog)

See justiceforneworleans.org for more on this fight.

In my recent posts about the effects of torture on US military personnel at the US facilities where it occurs, I have emphasized that the torture question is more than a question of individual techniques during an interrogation. The interrogation room is only a small part of the regimen imposed on detainees in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Charleston, SC. If interrogators and medics are traumatized not just by isolated atrocities but by the overall environment they must function in, then how much the more so for detainees?

Most people are probably familiar with this image to the right. It is a photograph taken at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, January, 2002. You might even be familiar with the caption that often accompanies this photo.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray Januaryt 11, 2001 [sic] at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention. The detainees will be given a basic physical exam by a doctor, to include a chest x-ray and blood samples drawn to assess their health, the military said. The U.S. Department of Defense released the photo January 18, 2002.

Like many, I'm sure, I had learned to see this photo without seeing this photo. A combination of ignorance and denial led me to assume that the detainees were performing the salat, Islamic prayer. My misconception was helped, too, by the caption, which suggests the guys in orange are all just getting some fresh air while they wait their turns for routine medical examinations. Never mind that the men would probably all face one direction for salat and that they are not kneeling in positions I've seen in genuine images of Islamic prayer.

Let's come in a little closer to get a better idea of what we're looking at. Perhaps the first thing to note is that this detainee in the foreground, like all the others around him, is goggled and is wearing noise-blocking earmuffs. And yes, his hands are bound, but even more to the point, he is wearing thick mittens, limiting his sense of touch. The surgical masks make breathing more difficult and limit the sense of smell.

Alfred McCoy has explained that sensory deprivation is a cornerstone of US interrogation techniques.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. . . .

But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully [sic ] reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.

For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs. . . .

Dr. Hebb himself reported that after just two to three days of such isolation “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” If you compare a drawing of Dr. Hebb’s student volunteers published in “Scientific American” with later photos of Guantanamo detainees, the similarity is, for good reason, striking.

The next thing to note in this photograph is that the detainees are not in simple kneeling positions. If you look closely, you can see that many of the detainees have their ankles crossed behind them, making it impossible to kneel comfortably. McCoy:

During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at time—while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began. Again, it you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see repeated use of this method, now called “stress positions.”

By now, you may also be wondering why all of the men have their shirts lifted and their lower backs exposed. Most likely this is for the purposes of sleep deprivation, possibly in combination with sexual humiliation. Break Them Down, PHR's report on the use of psychological torture by US forces, describes this method of sleep deprivation.

One FBI report recounts an incident at Abu Ghraib in 2003 in which an agent witnessed a hooded detainee draped in a shower curtain and handcuffed to a waist high rail. A military policeman was lightly slapping the detainee on his back, which the agent was told was done because the “detainee was being subjected to sleep deprivation.”

As McCoy explains at length in the article I have been quoting, sensory deprivation and stress positions, which make the victims feel as if they are inflicting their pain on themselves, have been for fifty years the preferred methods of torture by the CIA. These approaches, along with other techniques, like sleep deprivation, meal manipulation, extremes of heat and cold, solitary confinement and sensory overload, are used in concert take total control of the the detainee's environment and assault his psyche continuously in order to destroy it. The health consequences [PDF] of such treatment are far reaching and profound.

In 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross was critical not just of specific techniques but of the entire system that the US had put in place at Guantanamo:

The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.

I write this for all victims of US torture, but today, in particular, I write this for Jose Padilla. I hope that what I have put forth here makes clear the relationship between this image of Padilla, released in yesterday's New York Times:

And these descriptions of Padilla:

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense. . . .

“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” [Padillia's lawyer] Mr. Patel said.

Padilla's condition is most certainly the consequence of prolonged solitary confinement and other abuses more grave than the goggles and earmuffs, above. Yet, this image shows that the system of torture was constant. In fact, according to the CIA's infamous 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, that is exactly the point:

The interrogator can benefit from the subject's anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role.

Psychological torture is constant so that the subject experiences the coercive interrogation as a relief from the status quo---though that "relief" is likely to include further psychological and physical abuse.

[Cross-posted at Never In Our Names]

UPDATE (12/7): I've written a little more about the image from Camp X-Ray here, at Never In Our Names.

FURTHER READING
The Southern District of Florida Blog posts excerpts from Padilla's December 1 "Reply to the Government's Response to the Motion to Dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct."

The SDFB also posts a link to Cryptome.org, which is hosting all of the documents in Padillia's filing, including the supporting exhibits (i.e., the rest of the still photos from the video of his trip to the dentist).

[DSCN7989.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.]

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

(Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness, 1968)

Yesterday I received one of those cool out of the blue emails that one sometimes receives as a result of having a blog with an email address attached to it.

H. Jerusha Korim wrote to me to say that she and her husband had been watching Reverand Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt on YouTube, which led them to start singing "Oh What a Beautiful City" together, which led them to go back on line in search of alternative lyrics for "Oh What a Beautiful City, which led them to me, presumably first here and then here.

Now the reason why I'm telling you all of this is that it seems to me that anyone who hasn't seen the Reverend Gary Davis clip on YouTube ought to check it out. The clip is of Davis singing "Children of Zion" on Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger's short lived TV show from the mid-60s. Reverend Gary Davis is mesmerizing and, as an added bonus, Pete joins in on his banjo towards the end. Anybody want to hazard a guess at who the two younger musicians are, looking on from the side? The one on the bench looks like he is having a life changing experience.

By the way, H. Jerusha Korim is a recording artist. She records and performs as Jerusha. You can find her CD and listen to some clips over at CD Baby. Her stuff sounds quite cool.

UPDATE: In the comments, Michael figured out that the two younger guys looking on at Rev. Gary Davis are Donovan (w/the big hair) and Shawn Phillips (on the bench).