Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 194

“Amazing Grace”: Aretha Franklin’s transcendent tour de force

(Credit: Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

Aretha Franklin could have proclaimed whatever she wanted when she walked up the aisle of the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, on January 13, 1972. Her performance would be the first of two nights there and her introduction, the audience’s cheers, and an arsenal of microphones and cameras, gave her the foundation and anticipation to shout in a voice that had become internationally familiar. Still, at that church, when Franklin wasn’t singing, she hardly said anything.

Franklin was away from Detroit, where she was raised, and New York, where she lived, but a longtime friend, Rev. James Cleveland, led the New Temple service in front of his choir and her working band. Another minister, her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was in the house — as were her sisters and a couple of mentors. Her “Young, Gifted and Black” album would be released less than two weeks later, but she never mentioned that in the church. Neither did Cleveland nor her father. Aretha’s sense of style spoke for itself. On both nights she wore bright gowns, and dangling jeweled earrings, yet not an amount of glitter that could be called distracting. Her eyeliner and lipstick enhanced what may have been a shy smile. During those two nights, she sang religious songs with a fervor that incited ecstatic shouts from the congregation, and almost the same reaction from the seasoned musicians working alongside her. Other than unleashing her luminous vocal sound, nothing that Aretha Franklin said pronounced her as one of the most popular and influential singers on the planet. On those January nights she just seemed appreciative and eager to collaborate. About six months later, Atlantic would release the double-album “Amazing Grace,” which documented those nights. It remains the biggest selling LP of her career.

Franklin never had to say outright how much recording in the church meant to her. But it can be inferred from her 1974 appearance on the television quiz show “What’s My Line?” When asked about her trajectory, her answer was the sort of laconic statement that has always typified her interviews: “I did sing in the young people’s choir in my father’s church — I started there,” Franklin said simply. “And from there, here.”

She left out a few high points on that quiz show. As the world knows, most of her hit singles had been recorded by that time. National magazines featured her on the cover, and she had become a generational icon even before a nostalgia industry conceived of such a role. Still, Franklin’s polite and brief words on “What’s My Line?” summing up where she came from, and what she’s accomplished, didn’t acknowledge any of that, as if none of it mattered. But through her polite terse statement, she indicated the one thing that mattered a great deal.

The familiar Franklin narrative goes like this: Daughter of a famous minister, Aretha Franklin began singing gospel as a girl; crossed over to jazz-inflected pop; achieved little initial success; then, working with a street-smart producer, brought her earliest church background to a grittier take on r&b; became American soul royalty.

All of which contains some truth, yet misses the most interesting part of the story.

Here’s another version: Daughter of an influential minister, Aretha Franklin accompanied her father on the gospel circuit, where she remained close with the music’s most celebrated singers. She was only about a generation removed from this genre’s creation. Going secular, she eventually worked with a consistent team of musicians who ideally complemented her voice during the late ’60s and early ’70s. Franklin brought that group and her family to that Baptist church in Los Angeles and recorded “Amazing Grace” during those two January nights in 1972. For generations of gospel singers, the album is more influential than any of her internationally adored secular songs. Almost 40 years later, Franklin remained tied to her church roots, holding revivals in Detroit and singing at Albertina Walker’s Chicago funeral in 2010, a few weeks before her own serious health concerns curtailed several months of public and media appearances.

So Aretha Franklin began in the church and — as she and her father said time and again — never left. She just stayed on her own terms. Unlike Dinah Washington, she made the road from God to earthly romance a two-way street. Unlike Al Green, she never became ordained while making this circular trip. And, unlike Sam Cooke, few minded when Franklin moved back and forth from this divide. Even today, to call her a gospel artist is not a misnomer. True, her most recognized songs are secular (though maybe not so purely: at the Hollywood Bowl, in June 2009, she ended “Freeway of Love” by calling out to Jesus — an odd juxtaposition, but not that rare). And her mezzo-soprano delivery owes as much — if not more — to her family, friends, and gospel legends such as Clara Ward, as it does to blues/jazz hero Washington. While gospel fans debate whether the music was at its creative height in the late ’40s/early–’50s or late-’60s/early-’70s, Franklin grew up in the center of the action during the former era and achieved her artistic and commercial peak throughout the latter.

“Amazing Grace” also became a milestone because of Franklin’s call-and-response with her collaborators. Within the church, singer/pianist/arranger Cleveland’s vocal tone and compositions are even more influential than Franklin’s voice. He also brought choirs to a higher level of precision. But Cleveland never worked with a more accomplished rhythm section than on this album, primarily Franklin’s working band of bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and guitarist

Cornell Dupree. The group and environment gave Franklin the space and support to sing with more freedom than she had when she cranked out two or three-minute singles throughout the preceding decade.

“It was just an overwhelming sunshine wonderful moment in time,” said Atlantic engineer Gene Paul, who worked on “Amazing Grace.” “Because of the love and not worrying about making a hit record. I saw [producer] Jerry Wexler looking at her like she was really in her place. Perhaps the most delightful moment in making a record is not having to be involved in making a hit, and just making beautiful music.”

Did George Papadopoulos’ claims of Russia’s dirt on Clinton prompt FBI probe? NYT report

(Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew)

New details have emerged regarding George Papadopoulos’ role in the Russia investigation, according to a report published by the New York Times on Saturday. The report says Papadopoulos met with an Australian diplomat in London in 2016 where he allegedly claimed Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

At the time, Papadopoulos was reportedly a member of Donald Trump’s foreign policy adviser panel and met with Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat. According to the report:

“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.”

According to the New York Times, this revelation was one motivating force “that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.”

As Salon previously reported, Papadopoulos is a key figure in the ongoing Russia investigation, in which he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, but his role has been continuously understated by the Trump administration.

When asked in November what his role was with the Trump campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “It was extremely limited; it was a volunteer position. And again, no activity was ever done in an official capacity on behalf of the campaign in that regard.”

According to a CNN report, Papadopoulos’ legal team didn’t respond to their request for comment to confirm the NYT report. Ty Cobb, Trump’s White attorney reportedly also declined to comment, but said the following:

“Out of respect for the Special Counsel and his process, we are not commenting on matters such as this,” Cobb said in a statement according to CNN. “We are continuing to fully cooperate with the Special Counsel in order to help complete their inquiry expeditiously.”

 

Did Trump’s first year in office inspire great art?

Alex Moffat and Alec Baldwin on "Saturday Night Live" (Credit: NBC)

In a December 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway famously referred to war as “the best subject of all” for the way it “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.”

Though at the time Hemingway had not published much — on war or otherwise — war would indeed prove to be a ripe subject for the author. The things he experienced and witnessed as an ambulance driver for the Italian front in the first World War would inform much of his fiction — most notably, his 1929 novel, “A Farewell to Arms.” The novel, Hemingway’s second, was written from the perspective of Frederic Henry, an American expatriate who served as a lieutenant in the Italian Army’s ambulance corps, was wounded and carried on a love affair with one of his nurses. It was Hemingway’s first best-seller and a book that his biographer, Michael Reynolds, dubbed “the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I.” Of course, Hemingway’s successes be damned — whether or not war is the “best subject” is entirely subjective and will eternally be up for debate. But by classifying it as such, Hemingway was arguably hitting on something bigger: that extraordinarily bad times are rich material for great art.

But what about Trump? The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency being both symbol and harbinger of bad times was the catalyst for Salon dedicating a series to the question of whether bad times make great art at the start of this year. Now, as we near the end of Year One of Trump — a year that saw the empowerment of white nationalists, sweeping deregulation and unprecedented mendacity — can we say whether these bad times make for great art?

On a macro level, probably not — or not yet, at least. Though I’ve written several times about how 2017 has felt like a particularly strong year for cinema, the truth is that it’s tough to say for sure whether any year is good or bad for any artform — let alone all artforms — until a decade or so has passed. On the one hand, there are likely some brilliant YouTube videos or Soundcloud songs made this year that have yet to be discovered. On the other hand, there are likely some movies and novels released to great acclaim that will fail to hold up in the future. Will the Trump era be better for art than, say, the Obama era? Only time will tell.

But things get more interesting on a micro level. Trump’s short fingers have centimetered their way into so much of this year’s art that we can begin to spot some trends and evaluate a first wave of Trump-inspired art.

And, by and large, it ain’t been gold. Although all of the richness that Hemingway found in war could be found in Trump — he too “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get” — unlike serving in a war, the experience of living under Trump is not a tactile experience, nor is it full of gallantry or even much ambiguity.

As a result, the art that has aimed to tackle Trump head-on has tended to be didactic, repetitive and lacking in emotional resonance. Take for instance the current number one album in the country, Eminem’s “Revival.” On it, the 45-year-old MC’s ninth, he raps with his trademark verbal dexterity. But Eminem directs his venom at Trump, and many of his lyrics wind up sounding like they were lifted from a rejected New York Times op-ed: “Didn’t wanna piss your base off, did ya? / Can’t denounce the Klan, ’cause they’d break off with ya / You stay on Twitter, way to get your hate off, Nazi / I do not see a way y’all differ, at all,” he raps on one song called “Like Home.”

To be fair, Eminem is far past his prime, and he didn’t produce any gems during the Obama years either. But arguably because of his Trump verses, “Revival” has been just that for Eminem. (His freestyle Trump dis on the BET Hip Hop Awards in October went viral and kickstarted hype for the album.) And his clunky Trump rhymes have been illustrative of the problem with a lot of Trump art.

Comedy, for instance, has similarly suffered from a preoccupation with Trump. The nation has looked to comedians to make sense of — and provide comedic relief from — Trump. And while Trump has provided ample material and led to massive ratings spikes for political satire and impressions shows, the jokes have tended to be homogeneous, providing surface-level insights and cheap laughs. As entertaining as it is, there’s nothing deep or affecting about Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression, for instance.

And comedians have talked a lot this year about why joking about Trump is difficult. Shortly after Trump was elected, Janeane Garofalo expressed reluctance to joke about Trump, telling me “you can’t parody it, because it’s self-parody.” In a piece published in the Scotland Herald this summer, the stand-up Sara Schaefer added that the rapidity with which Trump creates material poses problems: “Comedians are now struggling to get the distance needed to make something awful hilarious.” But Vulture’s Jesse David Fox hit on the heart of the problem in an excellent year-end piece about “Our Year of Bad Trump Jokes”: “Currently, our political comedians are doing a fine job of telling their audience what is true and what is false, but it’s difficult for them to find something deeper — ‘a truth’ — because Trump isn’t deeper. His lies are transparent.”

The works that have succeeded in going deeper have been ones not necessarily inspired by Trump but, rather, inspired by the same forces that elected Donald Trump. Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service,” for instance, captured contemporary racial tensions, fears and hypocrisy. And, as such, each felt like a profound response to the Trump era. But in reality, each was composed before Trump was elected.

Kendrick Lamar and Kara Walker were similarly successful at aiming their efforts Trump-adjacent. The election of an egomaniac inspired Lamar to look inward and be self-critical — to great effect — on his April-released “DAMN.” And Walker took a historical view in a series of powerfully frightening and funny cartoons — described by the art critic Jerry Saltz as a “mad Boschian American Babylon of race, irredeemable evil, barbarity, hatred, demons, white people self-cretinizing, lynchings, dominance, submission, rage, modern Black Power figures, shuffling black cleaning ladies, beneficent whites, Civil War soldiers, plantation owners drawn and quartered by rebellious slaves, pickaninnies and Sambos sexually servicing white masters or being castrated” — she crafted this summer and displayed at Sikkema Jenkins Co. in September.

Though it feels like Trump has been president for an eternity, it’s important to remember that it’s actually still quite early in his tenure. For comparison’s sake, “A Farewell to Arms” was published more than a decade after Hemingway served in World War I. Trump will likely inspire very much art for very many years. At this moment, whether it winds up being great or not seems dependent on whether it can operate at a remove from Trump himself.

DEA operation played hidden role in the disappearance of five innocent Mexicans

(Credit: AP Photo/ Nick Ut, File)

At about 2 a.m. on April 21, 2010, a convoy of gunmen working for the Zetas drug cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, rolled into Monterrey, Mexico, a wealthy, bustling city considered that country’s commercial capital. With brazen efficiency, they set up roadblocks at all major thoroughfares, then sent a convoy of sport utility vehicles downtown, encircling a Holiday Inn.

The heavily armed men, some wearing ski masks, swarmed into the hotel’s lobby and rushed directly to the fifth floor, bursting into every room and rousting the guests from their beds. The gunmen questioned the guests, then separated four of them from the rest: a marketing executive at an eyewear company, a chemical engineer for a cosmetics manufacturer, a shoe salesman expecting his first child, and a college professor who was the mother of two.

Then the four were loaded, along with the hotel’s receptionist, into the gunmen’s vehicles and driven away. None of the hostages has been seen since. All are presumed dead.

For years, their relatives and friends begged for answers. Why were their loved ones — ordinary middle-class Mexicans with no known criminal ties — targeted in this spasm of drug violence? The marketing executive’s family futilely negotiated and paid a ransom before the Zetas cut off contact.

“We could never figure out why they were taken. What made them so important?” said David Anabitarte, the marketing executive’s supervisor and one of his best friends. “It was hard to accept what had happened because it never made any sense.”

Mexican authorities initially insinuated that the victims had brought on their own demise, adding insult to grief. The college professor, they alleged, may have been involved in a romantic relationship with one of the Zetas’ rivals. And they speculated that the marketing executive, who had managed to lift his family into the upper middle class, might have had some connection to the drug trade. Without any credible explanations for why the Zetas would move military-style through a major metropolitan city to kidnap random guests at a budget hotel, some of the people close to the victims began to believe that too.

“I remember sitting silently as some of Luis’ own relatives said that he must have had a secret life,” Anabitarte recalled. “It was unbearable. I knew it wasn’t true.”

Indeed, it wasn’t. And one law enforcement agency knew that for sure: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. U.S officials describing for the first time what happened at the Holiday Inn said up until the day before the inexplicable kidnappings, the DEA had been running a surveillance operation out of the Holiday Inn. Staying at the hotel were several members of the Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU), a team of Mexican federal police officers specially trained and vetted by the DEA. The team had been working undercover, trying to track the movements of a Zetas leader named Hector Raul Luna, who was known as “El Tori.” But Luna found out about the operation and sent his gunmen to the Holiday Inn to shut it down.

The DEA didn’t hang around to figure out how the tables had been so violently turned. It evacuated the SIU officers from Monterrey, and never looked back at the innocent people who weren’t so lucky. The agency never revealed its role in what had happened to either local or federal authorities. It didn’t offer to help investigate the incident, or to use its surveillance capabilities to track the kidnappers. Nor did it turn its scrutiny inward to figure out whether the intelligence leak that had drawn the Zetas to the Holiday Inn had come from within the SIU.

The DEA’s connection to the Holiday Inn attack, which has not been previously reported, was not an isolated incident. A deeper look at the agency’s Mexican SIU has found a decade of problems that have cost people’s lives. In June, ProPublica and National Geographic published a detailed investigation of a 2011 massacre that occurred in and around a small Mexican ranching town called Allende, less than an hour’s drive from the Texas border. The rampage there, like that in Monterrey, was also carried out by the Zetas, and was sparked, ProPublica determined, by a leak of intelligence provided to the SIU.

The Allende death toll, however, was far greater. Victims’ advocates say as many as 300 people are dead or missing. ProPublica found evidence of as many as 60.

In addition, according to interviews with numerous current and former DEA agents, the SIU itself has been plagued by infiltrations and attacks. Since 2007, most of the unit’s Mexican supervisors have either been compromised by payoffs and bribes from various drug traffickers, or killed in ways that strongly suggest they were inside hits. One of the supervisors, Ivan Reyes Arzate, was indicted earlier this year in a federal court in Chicago on charges of sharing sensitive information with drug traffickers.

Ángel Montes de Oca, 39, had just gotten married when he was kidnapped from a Holiday Inn, in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2010. His family spent years looking for him, because his mother refused to accept he wasn’t coming home. (Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)

In an interview, Reyes’ attorney strongly denied the charges against his client. The DEA however, had suspected for years that Reyes was dirty, as were other people in the SIU. But time after time the agency calculated that the benefits of the program outweighed the costs. And it has kept those costs secret from the Mexican families and American taxpayers that might disagree with that calculation.

“Why didn’t the DEA say anything?” asked the relative of one of the victims of the Holiday Inn attack. “With all their power and authority, why didn’t they try to help? I suppose Mexican lives don’t matter.”

The DEA did not respond to a long list of questions about the findings in this story. Instead it emailed a brief statement: “The Sensitive Investigative Unit Program has proven to be an effective international program for supporting host nation counterdrug units capable of conducting international drug investigations. The agents supporting the program work bi-laterally with the host nation law enforcement institution.  DEA trains, mentors and supports vetted host nation law enforcement investigators that make up the Sensitive Investigative Units.”

This examination of the DEA’s SIU program in Mexico is based on interviews with 23 current and former DEA agents who are deeply knowledgeable about the program, including several who served in senior positions. They would only speak on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing sensitive matters without the agency’s consent.

“If this had happened in the States, there would have been all kinds of outrage,” said one former agent, referring to the incident at the Holiday Inn. “But in Mexico, I’m sorry to say this, nobody gives a shit.”

The attack

Mexicans tout Monterrey, with over 4 million residents in the metropolitan area, as their country at its most modern. Surrounded by mountains in the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, it’s the poster-place for free trade, with a per capita income far higher than the rest of the country and a semi-arid landscape dotted with golf courses, colleges and the Mexican headquarters for companies like BMW, Mercedes Benz, Boeing, General Electric and Heineken.

But everything that makes Monterrey ideal for legitimate business — its access to major north-south highways and its proximity to the United States border — is equally attractive to the drug trade. In 2010, the Zetas had a lock on it.

Founded by former Mexican military officers, the Zetas ran an extensive counter-intelligence system, with scouts and informants throughout the city, according to current and former DEA agents. The cartel also had sources at high levels of the Mexican federal police, including, it is believed, the SIU. One of those sources alerted the cartel about some suspicious activity at the Holiday Inn.

The DEA agents who spoke about the incident said it was unclear whether the Zetas were told that there were Mexican federal police officers at the hotel, or just that there were people who looked like law enforcement of some kind. Either way, the Zetas dispatched a group of gunmen to eliminate the perceived threat.

But on this occasion, the cartel’s counter-intelligence capabilities only went so far. A day before the attack, unbeknownst to the gunmen, a logistical misstep had forced the members of the SIU to move to a different hotel. The SIU hadn’t reserved rooms at the Holiday Inn for enough days to cover the operation, and their rooms were no longer available.

By the time the Zetas’ gunmen arrived, the SIU members were gone and the traffickers scooped up four guests that vaguely fit the same profile. When they discovered their mistake, the Zetas tried to extract a small win. One of the kidnappers telephoned Anabitarte later that same day to demand a ransom for his friend and employee, Luis Miguel González.

“I knew it wasn’t a hoax, first of all, because they knew my name,” Anabitarte recalled. Then, he said, the kidnappers put González on the phone. “He told me, ‘Tell Zitlaly with an X that I love her.’”

That was the code Gonzalez and Anabitarte had agreed to use if he ever got in trouble. Zitlaly was González’s wife. When asked why the men felt that such a code was necessary, Anabitarte deadpanned, “This is Mexico.”

David Anabitarte, a marketing executive, was initially reluctant to talk about the Holiday Inn incident. One of his best friends, Luis Miguel González, was kidnapped in the attack and is presumed dead. Authorities initially speculated that the victims had been targeted because they had something to do with the drug trade. That wasn’t true. (Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)

Anabitarte wired the kidnappers the $3,000 they demanded. The next day, they asked for $140,000 more. The family said they needed a guarantee that González was still alive. Pay the money the kidnappers said, and González would be home by the weekend.

The family deposited the money in a bank account as the kidnappers had instructed. But González was never released.

“We made the decision, out of pain, or out of fear, or out of whatever you want to call it, to deposit the money without proof of life,” said Victor Béjar, one of the hostage’s uncles, through tears. “It was a mistake.”

Béjar said he stayed in Monterrey for days, trying to reach the kidnappers, sending them texts, and leaving voicemail messages. “We did what you asked. Now it’s your turn,” he pleaded with them. “We want our nephew. His wife is pregnant.’”

He added, “I don’t know what all I told them. But all I got was silence, total silence.”

A decade of trouble

When DEA agents in Monterrey and Mexico City learned about the attack on the Holiday Inn, they scrambled to get the SIU officers back to Mexico City as quickly as possible, according to current and former agents knowledgeable about the incident. The members of the unit were working undercover, but were hardly inconspicuous. Their accents and clothing made it clear they were from out of town, one agent said, and could easily have caught the attention of any hotel staff moonlighting as cartel scouts.

Even more astonishing in hindsight, the SIU members used personal credit cards to secure their rental cars and hotel rooms, the agent said, so their identities wouldn’t have been hard to trace — an operational flaw that was mentioned in a 2010 assessment of the SIU program conducted by a private contractor.

Other agents acknowledged, however, that the Zetas could have just as likely been tipped off by someone already on their payroll; either a mole inside the unit or a senior leader of the Mexican federal police. There was plenty of evidence by that time that the unit was leaky.

Three years earlier, the SIU supervisor at the time had alerted the DEA that the Zetas were offering him huge bribes for information, and that he was afraid he was going to be killed for refusing them. In a meeting, Rubén Omar Ramirez told a senior DEA official that he would lay low for a while in hopes that the Zetas would eventually lose interest in him.

He was killed the next day. A former DEA official knowledgeable about the murder said that Ramirez was at an SIU safe house in Mexico City when he was summoned to a meeting with commanders of the Mexican federal police’s anti-drugs division. On the way to the meeting, two gunmen on motorcycles intercepted his vehicle and opened fire.

News reports indicate Ramirez, a 47-year-old father of three, was hit at least three times. “It looked like an inside job,” said the former DEA official. “He was called to that meeting by someone he thought he could trust.”

Ramirez’s successor at the SIU didn’t fare any better. Roberto Velazco Bravo, a slight, bespectacled husband and father with a degree in psychology, was assassinated outside his home in May 2008, seven months after taking over as SIU supervisor. According to DEA records, Velazco, 36, had “directly participated in investigations that succeeded in locating Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and identifying other parts of the structure of his criminal organization, including his brother, Alfredo.”

After Ramirez and Velazco were killed, another senior Mexican federal police official who helped oversee the SIU, Victor Gerardo Garay, was fired from the federal police department on charges of corruption. A senior DEA official who worked in Mexico at the time said the agency had caught Garay on wiretaps seeking bribes from Colombian drug traffickers. The senior official said that an SIU member named Edgar Enrique Bayardo agreed to testify against Garay, and was put into protective custody in Mexico.

Garay spent four years in prison, but eventually was acquitted of the charges against him. Bayardo, however, was assassinated at his favorite Starbucks in Mexico City in 2009. Current and former DEA officials knowledgeable about his killing said that he, like Ramirez, had been summoned to the coffee shop by a phone call from someone he thought he could trust.

Ivan Reyes Arzate took over as supervisor of the SIU in March 2010. The Zetas’ attacked the Holiday Inn one month later. It’s unclear whether the two events are connected. The charges filed in Chicago against Reyes say he accepted bribes from traffickers allied with the Beltrán Leyva brothers. The DEA suspects the brothers had ordered the murders of the previous SIU supervisors. In addition, the Beltran Leyva brothers were allied with the Zetas.

“The fact that Reyes is still alive, and both of his predecessors are dead, that’s not a coincidence,” said one U.S. agent who had worked with Reyes in Mexico. “There’s a reason for that.”

All the tools in the world

Maria Teresa Sánchez, 69, has spent years trying to figure out why the Zetas would have kidnapped her son, Ángel Montes de Oca, from the Holiday Inn. He was the fifth of her seven children; a 39-year-old chemical engineer who worked for a company that made cosmetics and personal hygiene products, like hand sanitizer. It was his first steady job, after years unsuccessfully trying to make a go of a small chain of shaved ice stores called Hawaiian Paradise. He had just gotten married, finally feeling financially stable enough to support a family of his own. And he had traveled to Monterrey for business meetings.

“I didn’t know what to say, or what to do,” Sánchez, 69, said, recalling how she felt when she first learned her son had been kidnapped. “I didn’t believe it. Why would anyone kidnap my son? We don’t have any money. We weren’t involved in anything.”

Her daughter, Beatriz Montes de Oca, a 44-year-old physician, said, “I was looking for some kind of common denominator among the victims that might explain why they were taken and others were not. Was it their ages? Was it something about their room numbers?

“Usually people get kidnapped because they’re selling drugs, or because they were friends with the wrong person,” she added, “but that wasn’t the case with these people. There had to be some kind of confusion. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.”

Beatriz Montes de Oca and her mother Maria Teresa Sánchez met with countless local, state and federal Mexican authorities, pressing them to find their missing loved one.(Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)

Mexican authorities only added to the confusion, she said, with constantly shifting lines of investigation that never led anywhere, or even made much sense. The authorities theorized that the kidnapping could be part of some twisted recruitment scheme, saying that the Zetas had been known to kidnap people with special skills, like accountants and computer programmers, then force them to work for the cartel or be killed.

As more time passed, the police suggested that the attack was simply a way to demonstrate the Zetas’ strength to any potential rivals, and they warned the relatives of those missing that the mutilated bodies of their loved ones might appear dangling from a highway overpass or splayed in a public square.

“My mother watched television all the time. And she would call me if she heard that four bodies had been found somewhere, or that four hostages had been rescued,” Beatriz Montes de Oca remembered. “I was like the family command center. She’d call me with reports, and I would investigate.”

“It went on that way for years. Little by little, I began to say to her, ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t watch so much television.’”

The one thing that never occurred to the two women was that the United States had played a role in what happened at the Holiday Inn.

“I’m sad. I’m very angry,” Beatriz Montes de Oca said, when told of the DEA’s involvement. She mentioned that she had read the ProPublica/National Geographic account of what happened in Allende a year after the attack on the Holiday Inn. “How could they make the same mistake twice? I don’t understand.”

Her mother said, “They have all the tools in the world.”

Current and Former DEA agents said the agency did very little to investigate what had happened at the Holiday Inn. Agents posted in and around Monterrey questioned their confidential sources without sharing the role played by the SIU. Officials said the informants either had not heard about the kidnappings or didn’t want to talk about them. The DEA had long suspected that authorities in Monterrey were taking bribes from the Zetas, and the audaciousness of the raid only hardened those suspicions. So, agents said, the DEA didn’t think it wise to discuss the incident with them.

“We didn’t want to heighten our exposure,” a former U.S. agent said. “As far as DEA was concerned, we just wanted to stay in the background.”

One current DEA agent blamed the crazy pace of events in Mexico at the time. The year of the Holiday Inn attack was the deadliest of the Mexican drug war. Top politicians and police were being killed indiscriminately. Massacres seemed as routine as robberies. The Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderon, was struggling to keep his country on board with the effort, telling them the fight was costly but winnable. And the United States was preaching the same.

“So much was happening at the time, that you couldn’t stop,” the agent recalled. “You just moved on to the next thing. The pace, it was off the charts.”

Some current and former agents also noted that the Mexican government historically had not welcomed U.S. encroachments on its sovereignty, and may have resisted any DEA investigation. That argument seems less convincing when considering how aggressively the DEA has pursued Mexican criminals linked to killings of American law enforcement agents, like Jaime Zapata, who was shot to death in early 2011 in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Under intense DEA pressure and direction, Mexican authorities had arrested the primary suspects in that murder, who were also members of the Zetas cartel, within 12 days.

When Maria Teresa Sánchez learned about the DEA’s role in her son’s kidnapping, she wondered why the agency didn’t do anything to help find him. “They have all the tools in the world,” she said. (Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)

One former agent expressed regret about how the agency handled the Holiday Inn attack. “Something should have been done,” he said. “I told my boss about it. All he said was, ‘Let’s get our guys out of there.’ But as far as what happened to those families, I wasn’t given any direction about them.”

Another agent said that, unlike other U.S. law enforcement agencies, the DEA does not require its field offices to conduct internal reviews of any investigations that result in loss of life. “We don’t have that at DEA,” he said. “As long as I’ve been at the agency, I’ve never known them to have such a thing. And on the occasions we have done that, it hasn’t gone well. What you get is people trying to cover things up.”

Working in Mexico

Earlier this year, some 14 Democratic members of Congress expressed their concerns about the DEA’s SIU program in a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. That letter was prompted by ProPublica’s reporting on the massacre in Allende, and by a report by the Justice Department Inspector General about a DEA-led operation in Honduras that left four civilians dead. Since then, current and former agents said, the DEA has made some moves to strengthen its oversight of the SIU in Mexico and the 12 other countries where the agency operates such units. For example, it has moved the SIU’s Mexico City headquarters closer to the American embassy to improve the DEA’s ability to oversee and mentor the members of the unit.

Last week, the DEA distributed a 54-page SIU manual. Current and former agents said it marked the first time in the 20 years since the SIU program began that the agency had put rules for running the units in writing — including everything from what to do when a member of the unit fails a polygraph to how to disseminate sensitive information and handle operations in which members of the SIU are killed.

Some current and former agents defended the program, pointing out that with corruption endemic in Mexican institutions, it’s naïve to think that the DEA, with random polygraphs and occasional training, could keep their SIU completely clean. And they noted that the unit had helped capture significant trafficking targets over the years. Reyes, they said, was a textbook example of the tangled complexities of Mexican law enforcement.

Former drug traffickers who agreed to cooperate with the DEA told the agency as early as 2011 that Reyes had acted as a “bagman,” for the Beltran Leyva brothers, collecting millions of dollars in cash for himself and his bosses on the police force. The former SIU commander was known to own an exotic sports car and a sailboat on an annual salary in 2011 of about $80,000, according to an agent who knew him then. And his girlfriend, who was also a member of the SIU, made no secret of her penchant for luxury designer shoes and handbags.

But the agents said they never had enough evidence to have Reyes arrested. And U.S. officials worried they would harm other important security programs if they asked the Mexican Federal Police Chief to fire such a prominent commander.

“Reyes was put there by the people above him for a reason,” one agent said. “We couldn’t ask them to remove him without explaining why. And even if they had removed him, they would have put in someone else just like him.”

Still, Reyes did some good while running the SIU. Most notably, he helped capture a kingpin known Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal in 2010 — a major victory. Though that coup was later tainted when DEA received credible intelligence that Reyes was acting on behalf of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, which had offered him $1 million to get Valdez, its archrival, off the streets.

“When you work as an agent in Mexico, all you can do is work around the rumors and suspicions, especially when management isn’t willing or able to effectuate change,” said one current agent. “At some point you’re told, you have to work with what you’ve got.”

The unopened box

An unopened DHL box contains all that Anabitarte has left of his best friend, Luis Miguel González. The box contained clothing and other personal items that had been left in González’s room at the Holiday Inn, and the hotel had sent it to the eyewear company after the kidnapping. The box had been left in a storage room at the company. Anabitarte had forgotten about it, until a janitor asked whether it should be thrown away. Coincidentally, a reporter called him that same day to talk to him about what happened at the Holiday Inn.

Anabitarte didn’t call back right away, reluctant to reopen a deep emotional wound and frightened that discussing the kidnapping might provoke those responsible for it. Weeks later, he agreed to meet, insisting on a public place. And he brought the box.

In an underground parking garage beneath a glitzy Mexico City department store, Anabitarte pulled the box from the back of his Land Rover. His hands shook and his eyes welled as he opened the flaps. He rifled nervously through the contents, as if he was wondering whether he was doing the right thing.

David Anabitarte rifled nervously through a box that contains all he has left of his best friend, Luis Miguel González. The box contained clothing and other personal items that had been left in González’s hotel room after he was kidnapped. (Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)

He recalled that González was only 35 when he was kidnapped from the Holiday Inn. He had been enjoying a happy chapter in his life at that time, having ended a bad marriage and started a good one. He was expecting his first child, and doing well at the eyewear company.

He and Anabitarte had become as close as brothers. “If I was out of town and my family needed anything, Luis would take care of it,” he said. “And I would do the same for him.”

That, in the end, is why Anabitarte agreed to speak. He owed it to his friend, he said, to keep searching for the truth of what had happened.

“If the DEA knew what was behind all of this,” he asked, “why did they remain silent and allow so many innocent families to suffer?”

This man screaming “lock him up” at Disney World’s Trumpbot is all of us

(Credit: YouTube/Inside the Magic)

In what may be the perfect, poetic denouement for the atonal horror show that was 2017, a man claims he was removed from Disney World in Florida after screaming “lock him up” at the new animatronic, talking statue of President Donald Trump at the resort’s Hall of Presidents attraction.

As previously reported on Salon, Disney World recently unveiled a mechanical version of the 45th president of the United States, a debut that was followed by much hue and cry over the figure’s odd, gargoyle-like face, which bore only a passing resemblance to the man portrayed.

Though the Trumpbot emitted recordings of the real-life Trump, the animatronic president’s speech also failed to capture the measure of the man. The text was — compared to what normally comes out of the president’s mouth — reasoned, uncontroversial, generally sane. Trumpbot’s recitation lacked the dramatic ups, downs and sideways of his usual patter. Keen Twitter users fixed that problem to the amusement of many.

On Wednesday, Twitter user Jay Malsky, a comedian and actor, uploaded a video him apparently attending the new show at the Hall of Presidents featuring the robotic Trump. When it comes 45’s turn to speak, the video appears to show Malsky screaming at the Trumpbot, “Lock him up!”

I protested @realDonaldTrump at the #hallofpresidents cuz I'll never get this close in real life probs. #lockhimup pic.twitter.com/jKOQShIdz8

— Earnest Gay Thoughts (@JayMalsky) December 27, 2017

It’s a refrain familiar from when it was used against Hillary Clinton during many of the future president’s campaign rallies. To this day, some Trump supporters still shout “Lock her up!” during the commander in chief’s public events.

As one can see in the video, audience members were less than pleased with Malsky’s interruption. So to, Malsky claims, were the security guards who removed him from the Hall of Presidents and, eventually, Disney World itself.

As one of Malsky’s friends reports, the performer was treated well by security guards and discussed the brilliance of comedian Patton Oswalt with him. Oswalt, for his part, seemed delighted by this news.

If I'd been there I would've posted his bail. Or at least bought him a corndog. https://t.co/VZIGoAJB2A

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) December 29, 2017

Breitbart collected a large number of tweets from individuals attacking Malsky both for his politics and for disturbing any children in the audience who weren’t already terrified by the artificially pickled flesh of the mechanical golem subbing in for the real-life president. Elsewhere, The Daily Caller declared he was the “saddest man in America” and Sean Hannity’s website called him “deranged.”

To all of them, Malsky offered a statement on The Wrap saying, “Anyone that’s upset I disrupted a family vacation can check their privilege and consider getting mad about the thousands of children being taken away from their parents because of Trump’s racist immigration policies, or the families of the hundreds of trans Americans murdered each year by transphobic and homophobic people, or the negative impacts of the tax bill on poor and middle-income Americans.”

It continued, “My only regret us that Trump hasn’t blocked me on Twitter yet. . . and that Cher hasn’t retweeted me yet.”

But this story is about more than just one man. Truly, screaming at the top of his lungs in the darkness of the Hall of Presidents, Malsky was all of us who have either shouted in the streets or hidden under our covers in a year in which perhaps the least qualified individual available for the position ascended to the presidency of what still remains the most powerful nation on earth.

 

 

Yelling at a poorly-dressed flesh puppet who was neither aware of his protests nor capable of reasoned response to them until he was audibly exhausted, Malsky was the state of the resistance in 2017 — a movement that has made strides at the local, state and national levels, yet has failed to sway or stop an unfortunately implacable and obstinate commander in chief who, like the Trumpbot, repeats his false talking points on what appears to be an endless loop. Like his android, Trump seems tireless. Like Malsky, it is those who resist him who often get spent.

Let us hope in 2018 that those who oppose Trump in good faith find new, effective ways to make themselves heard and new ways to bring this country out of the darkness we find ourselves shouting in. Oh, and let’s hope Cher retweets Malsky. He deserves a treat.

Best essays of 2017: This little light: On fathers, sons & the little Pixar lamp

A still from "Luxo Jr." (Credit: Pixar)

Sometimes when I think about money, and not having enough of it, I daydream what it would be like to win the lottery. Then I snap out of it, because as a white, upper-middle-class able-bodied English-speaking male American citizen born in San Francisco in the late 20th century, I already won the lottery. And I should appreciate my good fortune.

There was a rule in my house that tennis balls were fair game as long as the tube had been opened. I loved the surely toxic smell of new tennis balls  that would rush out with the phwoosh of the tube’s pressure release, but my dad would invent games for us kids with the old ones , like “Step-ball.” How high could you throw the ball up the staircase and still catch it clean when it came back down? I got very good at not fumbling the ball . I was the shortstop on every Little League team I played for, and he was my coach for most of them.

When I was about a year old or so, my father took me into his office for the day. My father was a computer scientist, and he worked for a weird little startup that didn’t make any money. I remember going in there as a kid and thinking the people dressed strange.

At some point during that day, my dad played with me with a tennis ball. John Lasseter, an artist who worked with him, watched us, and suddenly the short film he had been trying to figure out was right in front of him. Using my actions, proportions and personality as a model for his main character, Lasseter created the short film “Luxo Jr.”

The name may not mean anything to you, and you may have never seen the short film,  but you’d probably recognize the title character. He’s a little lamp with a short body and a big head.

The startup that my dad worked at was Pixar. John Lasseter went on to direct many of Pixar’s greatest hits: “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Cars.” And today, before every Pixar movie, that little lamp hops out, jumps onto the “I” in “PIXAR,” squashes it, and looks out to the audience.

In a way, that little lamp is me.

But let’s go back to the short film my little lamp debuted in. It was late 1985. Pixar (then a part of Lucasfilm) was bleeding money, and would continue to do so for years. Steve Jobs bought the company in 1986 for $10 million, and would sink many more millions into Pixar before one movie  —  “Toy Story”  —  brought sustained profitability to the company.

For many years, Pixar was a hardware company. They made some of the finest computers for the purposes of digital imaging. But in the mid-‘80s, that meant they were selling those computers mainly to hospitals and government entities. The potential of computer graphics wasn’t well understood. Before Pixar, my father spent one election night debuting his digital paint software on national TV by turning states red or blue as the votes were confirmed. That sure as hell caught on.

But despite Pixar being a hardware/software company, they felt it was important to produce short films ,  if only to demonstrate the capabilities of their machines. So for the Siggraph Conference in 1986, a major gathering for the major nerds of major computer graphics, Pixar debuted “Luxo Jr.”

“Luxo Jr.” is a beautiful short. In the film, a large lamp watches a smaller child lamp play with a toy ball. They pass the ball back and forth, the larger lamp encouraging the smaller lamp as he figures out the physics of the new toy. Eventually, the little lamp, emboldened by the larger lamp, hops atop the ball, only to open a hole and flatten it.

The larger lamp shakes his head : C’est la vie. The smaller lamp hops off screen, dejected.

But in a third act twist, the little lamp pushes a beach ball back across the screen, and with an enthusiastic leap right in front of that big lamp, chases after his new toy. The older lamp shakes his head in bemusement, as if to say, “oh, kids.”

The premiere was a giant success. The Siggraph audience applauded throughout the entire reel, enough so that the light jazz piano score was completely drowned out.

Lasseter tells a story about how after the premiere of the short, he was approached by Jim Blinn, a computer science expert with NASA, who would go on to win a MacArthur Fellowship, or “Genius Grant.” Lasseter was nervous  —  he was not a programmer.  He didn’t think he’d have the technical answers to Blinn’s questions.

Blinn asked him if the larger lamp was a mother or a father.

As Lasseter tells it, this was a pivotal moment for the development of computer-generated movies. Up until that point, computer-generated movies were largely experimental tests of the equipment  —  “light passing through a prism” and the like. But a computer genius asking about the family relationship that exists between two lamps? That’s the moment when computers became a tool to serve a story instead of a technical novelty. Pixar would soon mostly ditch the hardware and software to focus on the development of feature films. “Luxo Jr.” was nominated for an Academy Award. And Lasseter gave Blinn the answer: father.

But I have one more answer for Jim Blinn. “Luxo Jr.” is, to me, a home movie. It’s me and my dad. Encouraging, comforting, energetic and kind, that big lamp, Luxo Sr., is as much my father as I am Luxo Jr. Every time I see my little lamp logo hop out in front of a Pixar movie, it’s not me I think about  —  it’s my dad. How he spent an afternoon hitting ground balls to me the day before my first Little League practice, and how proud I was when the other coach on my team said, “Well, I think we found our shortstop.” I must have been 7 years old, and I still remember that moment with such clarity. I can still feel the hard fabric on the bag of baseballs, the position of the sun in the sky.

When I look at the father and son lamp playing with a ball, it’s impossible for me not to feel like I won the lottery. My father’s greatest gift to me was enabling me to be myself , and I’m reminded of it by a little hopping lamp in front of every Pixar film.

Don’t worry, my dad isn’t dead. I realize I’m setting you up for that  —  building him up only to drop you off an emotional cliff. Dad still works at Pixar, and even if it’s no longer a weird startup that makes no money, the people still dress super strange.

I recently became a father.

Just seconds before my wife gave birth  —  up until then a normal delivery, the culmination of a normal, healthy pregnancy — about 15 doctors and nurses flooded into our hospital room as an alarm blared. My memory is spotty here  —  my brain has blocked a lot of it out  —  but I remember the OB/GYN thrusting our son onto my wife’s chest and thinking, “Huh, I didn’t think babies looked like that.” He looked gray. Floppy. Dead.

And before I could even move, a specialist pulled him off my wife  —  his umbilical cord must have been cut at some point, but I have no idea when  —  and someone called out, “No breath. No pulse.”

A white-haired man with a lanyard around his neck pushed his thumbs deep into my son’s chest cavity over and over and over again. He’d lift up my son’s arm, let it fall back to the table, and it would just slap the table, limp. Another specialist put a bag-valve mask over my son’s face, pumping air into his lungs.

My wife was screaming at the OB at this point, wanting information, salvation, but the OB was watching the resuscitation as closely as possible, and nobody — no nurse, no doctor — was responding to my wife.

It’s tough for me to say this, and I think this is where a lot of the sadness comes in, but there was a point there where I had this distinct thought: “I can’t control what’s going on with the baby. But if he dies, which seems like it’s going to happen, I can’t let this destroy my marriage.” I took my wife’s hand and we stared at each other, hoping for the best, and realizing that “the best” might include our son’s death.

The injected him with drugs — epinephrine, I’d later learn — and continued CPR. A nurse called out, “One minute, no breath. Two minutes, no breath.” An intubation tube threaded deep into my son’s tiny throat.

TV and movies make it seem like these situations are chaotic and noisy, but the truth is it’s quiet. So quiet that you think to yourself about how very quiet it is. The only thing piercing the stale air was the upbeat music blasting out of our laptop speakers. I think we were playing HAIM. I remember thinking that I should turn it off, but that would have required walking away from my wife.

In just a few moments, you have a lot of time to worry.

You think to yourself — not vocalizing anything, for fear of distracting the man compressing your son’s chest — how long can a human go without oxygen? How long before brain damage? How long before death? You have a clock ticking in your head. Some rogue synapse fires a thought: Didn’t the Kennedy daughter have something like this? You shove it away and hope for something to change.

I often think about winning the lottery, but there’s no greater lottery win in my life  —  no more dire dice roll  —  than the one that ended with my son coughing after two and a half minutes of resuscitation. It may have been longer; I don’t know. But he coughed. They ripped the intubation tube out and he cried. His skin started to pink up; they placed him in a rolling bassinet and raced him to the NICU. I hadn’t even touched him.

I woke up at 2 a.m. that night shaking. I couldn’t stop for 45 minutes. I didn’t want to wake my traumatized wife and I didn’t want to leave the room for fear that she would wake up, not see me, and worry there had been some emergency in the NICU she had missed. They warned us that babies who go through that difficult of an event sometimes forget to breathe. Tests were being run, trying to ascertain just what had happened and what might happen as a result.

My father is a great father, a man universally respected. He’s brilliant, but humble. You could know him your whole life and never know he won three Academy Awards for his breakthroughs in computer graphics. He was my first coach in every sport, my editor on my college application essays, the first call when I exceeded my goal SAT score.

He was also on the first flight to Los Angeles the next morning, arriving at the hospital in time for breakfast.

I always idolized my father, and still do. And I couldn’t escape the feeling, in those early days of my baby’s life, that I had already failed to live up to his example. I hadn’t protected my son.

* * *

They’re not exactly sure why my son needed to be resuscitated after delivery, but some combination of his umbilical cord being wrapped tightly around his neck, his size, and his twisted position in the birth canal caused him to get stuck. It’s extremely rare for a full-term baby to need the level of resuscitation our son needed. Statistics are tough to come by (and I’m not a medical researcher), but babies needing this level of resuscitation happen in less than .05 percent of births. But of those who do, approximately 30 percent will die or face disabilities due to oxygen deprivation.

Thankfully, after a little more than two days in the NICU, our son was discharged. He had passed all of his tests. The head of the NICU and our obstetrician agreed that, though the delivery was rough (“He just ran 10 marathons”), he wouldn’t face any long-term consequences from it. He’d be fine.

Two big lotteries in my life ,  and I’d won both.

As we walked out of the NICU, once it became clear my son would be OK, I saw the white-haired specialist who gave CPR to our son. He was typing on a computer. I saw the mousepad. It’s such a nothing detail, and so coincidental, but it was a “Toy Story” mousepad. I pointed it out to my dad, and I can’t tell you why, but just seeing that mousepad with my father there, my son’s heart monitor beeping strongly in the background, made me feel good.

My son is 10 months old now. Not quite as old as Luxo Jr., but as he approaches my age at that pivotal moment, I’ve been comparing myself to him more and more. He’s big  —  long, heavy and with a head circumference that’s never been lower than the 98th percentile of babies his age. His favorite thing to do is jump. Whether he’s in his jumper or I’m holding him, he has such power and force to his squats that it’s easy for me to imagine him squashing a toy ball or a capital “I” on a movie screen. He has my eyes, my smile, my love. And as he becomes my Luxo Jr., I find myself identifying more and more with Luxo Sr. The film becomes less about me as a baby, and more about me as a father.

I’m trying to be a good father. I want to be a good father. I am a good father.

I just hope I can live up to my dad.

The 22 most underrated albums of 2017

Keeping track of album releases became even more of a chore in 2017. The usual avalanche of new material came paired with an even longer list of archival releases, boxed sets and reissues. The result: There quite literally weren’t enough hours in a given week to absorb all of the music available to buy or stream, making it easy to gloss over or simply ignore even excellent records.

As a writer, this also made whittling down year-end lists particularly challenging. Some had glaring omissions — for example, Spoon’s much-lauded (and quite excellent) “Hot Thoughts” was surprisingly excluded from most round-ups. Really, anyone could have doubled their list in length and still missed some essential entries.

For these reasons, the field of underrated or overlooked 2017 albums feels even more full of great records than usual. Whether your yen is for slinky R&B or fractured pop, riotous rock or barnstorming country, chances are good there’s something for you on the list below.

Alex Lahey, “I Love You Like a Brother”

There’s clearly something in the water in Australia these days. The country that produced Courtney Barnett is also the home of singer-songwriter Alex Lahey, who made waves in 2017 with her debut album, “I Love You Like a Brother.”

The record brims with taut, hook-sticky songs (the effervescent punk-pop opener “Every Day’s The Weekend,” giddy rocker “Lotto In Reverse”) and nods to dreamy surf-pop (“I Want U”). Better still are the record’s reflective and confident lyrics, which are honest and vulnerable but never wallow in melancholy. Take the shambolic highlight, “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself.” An anthem for self-care, the song features a protagonist who realizes she’s mired in an unhealthy relationship and needs to make changes: “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in good health/I’ve gained weight and I drink too much/Maybe that’s why you don’t love me as much/I need to start taking care of myself.”

Purchase it here.

Game Theory, “Supercalifragile”

In summer 2017, the new album from Game Theory, the beloved ’80s power-pop band headed by the late Scott Miller, emerged after a fan-funded Kickstarter campaign. The release was bittersweet: Miller had been working on “Supercalifragile” and planning to reboot the band when he died. Months before the record was issued, the band’s long-time drummer, Gil Ray, passed on as well.

Still, “Supercalifragile” — which was finished with the help of artists such as Ken Stringfellow, Aimee Mann, Doug Gillard, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Mitch Easter and other former Game Theory band members — is true to Miller’s genius-level artistic vision. Occasional sampled sound effects add whimsy throughout and enhance the record’s fractured rock (the synth-spackled “Valerie Tomorrow,” dizzying “Time Warner”), acoustic indie-folk (“No Love”) and jangly pop (“Say Goodbye”). “Supercalifragile” could’ve easily been a reminder of what we lost when Miller died. Instead, it comes across as one more chapter of the lovely body of work he enjoyed creating.

Purchase it here.

Valerie June, “The Order of Time”

Why Valerie June isn’t yet a superstar is a mystery; after all, the Tennessee-born musician has released four soul-blues albums that defy categorization. The most recent of these, this year’s “The Order of Time,” is even more bewitching.

Although there are upbeat moments (in particular the brisk, twang-rocker “Shakedown”), the album places June’s singular, experience-weathered voice at the forefront. Minimal guitar and optimistic organ drive the stunning “Two Hearts,” which is about the moment someone feels love’s lightning bolt; the ominous, roots-blues song “Man Done Wrong” hints at a troubled relationship; and “With You” is a lilting, sparse folk song dusted with mincing strings and June effectively hovering at the top of her vocal range. “If And,” meanwhile, is a cautionary tale about living right while you’re alive: “If and you ain’t lovin’ your woman/If and you trust and believe in your man/If and you don’t show them you love them, it will be too late.”

Purchase it here.

Miguel, “War & Leisure”

Albums released later in the year tend to be left off best-of lists due to timing. Early holiday deadlines means critical consensus tends to coalesce in mid-November, which precludes many writers from even considering December-issued. In the case of Miguel’s “War & Leisure,” don’t be surprised if the album lands on some “Best of 2018″ lists. The chameleonic R&B/soul artist has crafted another winning record.

Credit for that goes to collaborators such as Kali Uchis, a guest on the Latin-electro swerve “Caramelo Duro,” and Rick Ross, who contributes a laid-back bridge to “Criminal,” which features typically retro-saturated production from Dave Sitek. Other songs end up pastiches of neo-soul, blues-rock and disco-pop, while “Now” even skims off part of Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” for effect. And, let’s be honest, only Miguel could get away with improving upon elements of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” which he does with verve on the standout “Pineapple Skies.”

Purchase it here.

Natalie Hemby, “Puxico”

“Puxico” — the debut album from the Nashville-via-Missouri artist, who’s written songs for Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town — was one of country music’s best-kept secrets in 2017. The record emphasizes keening folk and Americana, with Hemby’s smoke-curled voice at the forefront sharing hard-earned wisdom such as, “I find the finer things worth keeping are worn.”

Purchase it here.

The Bats, “The Deep Set”

In early 2017, New Zealand rock legends the Bats very quietly released their ninth album, “The Deep Set.” The well-crafted LP sighs with both melancholy and optimism, courtesy of gentle (and proud) chiming guitars and the gorgeous vocal interplay between Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward. “The Deep Set” will more than fill the Go-Betweens-shaped hole in your heart.

Purchase it here.

Rachel Kiel, “Shot From a Cannon”

Sure, the North Carolina-based Kiel is influenced by the Bangles — and, more, specifically, that band’s cascading harmonies and predilection for ’60s rock ‘n’ roll. But her latest album also encompasses Dylan daydreams, rootsy folk and wrought-iron pop with ornate melodies.

Purchase it here.

The Dream Syndicate, “How Did I Find Myself Here?”

The first record in 19 years from ’80s noise-rock merchants Dream Syndicate contains exactly what you’d want to hear from them: tornadic guitars, laser-burned keyboards and a droning psychedelic-meets-Krautrock sheen that’s a tall, cool drink of water.

Purchase it here.

Open Mike Eagle, “Brick Body Kids Still Daydream”

The latest release from Open Mike Eagle appeared on the lower reaches of some year-end lists, but it deserved a much wider audience. The Chicago-via-Los Angeles artist crafts inventive, vivid hip-hop based on his recollections of growing up in the public housing project Robert Taylor Homes.

Purchase it here.

The Regrettes, “Feel Your Feelings Fool!”

Headed by Lydia Night, the Regrettes stormed out of Los Angeles with their debut, a ferocious record indebted to ’70s and ’80s punk, and girl groups. Lead single “A Living Human Girl” smartly summarizes pressures faced by modern women and decides that embracing imperfections is the way to go.

Purchase it here.

Foxygen, “Hang”

Albums released earlier in the year tend to get lost in the shuffle when considering best-of lists. That fate befell Foxygen’s ambitious “Hang,” an orchestra-burnished collection of theatrical ’70s rock gestures that nod to Elton John, David Bowie and any number of AM Gold stalwarts

Purchase it here.

Neil Finn, “Out of Silence”

Finn documented the recording process for this album via a series of weekly marathon YouTube studio sessions. The results are vulnerable and sophisticated, with piano and strings adding ornate intimacy to his typically heartfelt songwriting.

Purchase it here.

Amber Coffman, “City of No Reply”

The ex-Dirty Projectors guitarist/vocalist finds her own unique footing on this solo full-length debut, which encompasses sunburned soul (“No Coffee”), buzzy electro (“Dark Night”) and sinewy R&B (“If You Want My Heart”).

Purchase it here.

Stokley, “Introducing Stokley”

Earlier this year, Stokley — who’s also the leader of Mint Condition — toured as a vocalist with The Revolution. Suck immersions in funk inform the snappy music on this record, which is full of pristine old-school soul and R&B.

Purchase it here.

Sweet Apple, “Sing The Night in Sorrow”

The J. Mascis-featuring Sweet Apple enlisted guests such as Robert Pollard and Rachel Haden for album number three — which, like the rest of their catalog, is a brash, loud rock ‘n’ glam record with a grimy underbelly and hooks for days.

Purchase it here.

Michelle Branch, “Hopeless Romantic”

Anyone who only remembers Michelle Branch from her early ’00s pop days is missing out on how she’s evolved as an artist. Her first full-length album in 14 years hews toward blues-rock, ’80s new wave and glittering retro-soul.

Purchase it here.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “The Punishment of Luxury”

Synth-pop legends Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (a.k.a. OMD) unleashed their latest stab at future-pop — and it contains both incisive social commentary and adventurous keyboard work that enhances their already-sterling legacy.

Purchase it here.

Leela James, “Did It For Love”

R&B artists had an especially strong 2017, which meant that Leela James’ latest record was somewhat overshadowed (save for “Don’t Want You Back,” which hit No. 1 on the Adult R&B charts). Remedy that oversight: “Did It For Love” is a sleek, contemporary soul record with smoldering ballads and upbeat, horn-peppered revues.

Purchase it here.

PVRIS, “All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell”

This Massachusetts-based trio, who’s opened for Muse in recent years, offers R&B-tinted synth-pop with midnight-hued programming on this introspective record. Crank up the atmospheric, goth-clouded “What’s Wrong,” which would hit the Top 40 in a perfect world.

Purchase it here.

Thundercat, “Drunk”

Thundercat received quite a bit of attention for collaborating with Yacht Rock kingpins Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on the soft rock-inspired “Show You The Way.” The rest of the producer and bassist’s 2017 album, “Drunk,” is as funky, atmospheric, retro-sounding and eclectic as that outstanding track.

Purchase it here.

Temples, “Volcano”

Synth-splashed psych-rock bands are a dime a dozen these days, but Temples distinguish themselves from the pack by cobbling from pastoral prog, “Nuggets”-inspired garage-rock and airy, harmony-drenched indie-pop.

Purchase it here.

Whitney Rose, “Rule 62″

Good luck trying to pigeonhole Canadian country artist Whitney Rose. The Raul Malo-produced “Rule 62,” which features steel guitarist Chris Scruggs and Mavericks drummer Paul Deakin, incorporates influences from hotrodding rockabilly, ’50s rock ‘n’ roll and lace-edged soul.

Purchase it here.

The loneliness of expat life

(Credit: Getty Images)

Reid Whitten, an international trade lawyer born and raised in Virginia, very willingly moved to his firm’s Brussels office. This has been the goal of the past ten years: to get through law school and, ultimately, move to Europe with a grown-up job. Three years later, though, expat life has turned out to be different than he anticipated. “The gritty everyday reality of it is that you’re going to experience a different kind of loneliness that there is much less risk of in a place with which you’re familiar,” he told “The Lonely Hour.”

For one, the girlfriend with whom he moved to Brussels left for graduate school in London — and that ultimately lead to a breakup. Also, Brussels is a transient town, with people coming for diplomatic jobs and leaving when those terms are up. “A lot of people are here for two or three years and then they move on,” said Reid. “So it’s hard to keep and maintain a group of friends.”

We sent Reid a diary to record some musings from abroad:

“Part of the part of being overseas is losing that feeling of being at home with your group of friends. Until you manage to reconnect, to rebuild that ‘squad,’ you really don’t have the same ease. You have to either make an actual affirmative effort to go out and be with people, or you have to stay in — and when you live by yourself, that is a lonely prospect.”

“So I come out and I sit down and watch the sun get a little lower. I sit there with people all around me chattering and I’m . . . checking social media to see what folks back home are doing. Maybe I snap a picture of how lovely it is here, and people who see it on Facebook probably go, ‘Man, that looks really cool. Look what Reid is doing!’ But they’re doing that from pretty far away.”

Another day, he said:

“I still have my tie and a light linen jacket on from work. I look like I am doing something important because that helps me have the sense that I am doing something important, and that staves off the existential questions of ‘What is it that you are up to?’ Because obviously if I’m wearing a tie I’m up to something super-important, right?” he chuckled.

“There is certainly a strategy that I developed for avoiding the creeping sensation of loneliness — to avoid looking at loneliness — and that is to just pack my day with things that I feel obligated to do. Not necessarily even things that I have to do or things that need to be done in the strict sense. But just a schedule of constantly having an activity so that I am doing something. The problem that I find with unstructured time is that it then allows for unstructured reflection, and that reflection tends to wander towards the dark end and of the loneliness.”

That only gets us halfway through this episode of “The Lonely Hour.” Hear Reid tell his full story, which takes a surprising turn:

State Department releases classified emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop

FILE - In this July 23, 2013 file photo, Huma Abedin, alongside her husband, then-New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, speaks during a news conference in New York. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin says she is separating from husband Anthony Weiner after another sexting revelation involving the former congressman from New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File) (Credit: AP)

The State Department announced the release of 2,800 documents, including a number of emails from Hillary Clinton’s former top aide Huma Abedin. Reports in CNN and USA Today noted that the emails in question were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop by the FBI, and released in response to a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a so-called government watchdog group with a history of making false statements about prominent liberals.

Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought, according to the CNN report: “All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-‘state.gov’ email address.”

Several of the emails found included classified information and were labeled “confidential,” or were severely redacted, according to CNN. According to a separate report about the release in USA Today, despite the redacted emails, some of the ones included the following information:

A message in one November 2011 email was redacted entirely and was marked “classified” and “confidential.”

The email’s subject line reads, “Egyptian MFA on Hammas-PLO talks,” an apparent reference to the Palestinian Authority.

In one 2010 email, Abedin forwarded an email another official sent to her and Clinton discussing changes in Israel’s Gaza policy. Another email in 2010 discusses the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and United Nations staffers who were still buried under rubble.

Former FBI Director James Comey said in a testimony earlier this year that “emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information by (Clinton’s) assistant, Huma Abedin.”

The FBI responded and said, “although we do not know the exact numbers, based on its investigation, the FBI believes it is reasonable to conclude that most of the emails found on Mr. Weiner’s laptop computer related to the Clinton investigation occurred as a result of a backup of personal electronic devices, with a small number a result of manual forwarding by Ms. Abedin to Mr. Weiner.”

For those who might not recall, Weiner’s laptop saga rattled Clinton’s 2016 campaign and resurfaced the controversy of her use of a private email server. Prior to the election, Comey claimed that the FBI discovered emails that were “pertinent” to the Clinton case, but “in connection with an unrelated case” which we now know was that related to Weiner.

The group that made the Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch, claims to be non-partisan but is infamous for mostly attacking prominent Democrats. As Heather Digby Parton wrote in Salon:

Judicial Watch [was] formed in the early 90s by a conservative gadfly named Larry Klayman. Klayman was a one-man wrecking crew who filed more than 18 lawsuits against members of the Clinton administration costing them millions of dollars in legal fees. The most notable of these was a $90 million invasion of privacy suit filed against Hillary Clinton and others on behalf of the “victims” of Filegate, one of the many scandals for which both Bill and Hillary Clinton were completely exonerated by two different independent counsels.

[T]hat was just one of many Judicial Watch lawsuits, including one in which Klayman sued his own mother for $50,000, that went nowhere. But they did achieve their true purpose, which was to damage reputations, smear political opponents and inflict huge legal fees on anyone who happened to be in the administration.

[…] The Obama presidency proved to be fertile ground [for Judicial Watch]. Judicial Watch  accused the administration of creating dozens of “czars” that don’t exist, and has made a fetish out of lying about the Obamas’ travel expenses. This so-called watchdog group has engaged in some truly weird conspiracy-mongering.

Parton warns against the press falling for Judicial Watch’s headline-seeking antics. “The first time it waged its campaign of character assassination against Bill and Hillary Clinton, it’s perhaps understandable that the press failed to recognize they were being manipulated by political operatives,” she writes. “There’s no excuse for the media to fall for it again.”

 

San Juan’s mayor blasts Trump as “disaster-in-chief”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz (Credit: Getty/ Joe Raedle)

One hundred days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and left most of the American territory’s infrastructure destroyed, Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of the island’s largest city, is continuing her bracing criticism of President Donald Trump for not doing enough to respond.

“Where he needed to be a commander-in-chief, he was a disaster-in-chief. President Trump does not embody the values of the good-hearted American people that have made sure that we are not forgotten,” Cruz said in an interview with ABC News.

Trump has defended his administration’s response to the disaster as deserving a score of 10 out of 10.

“I would say it’s a 10,” Trump said in an October press conference when asked how well the White House had done.

“I give ourselves a 10,” he continued. “We have provided so much, so fast.”

More than three months after Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane, only 70 percent of the territory-owned power company’s plants are operational. Many people still have to use generators for power.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told ABC News in a statement that it would take until May to get power working throughout Puerto Rico.

Refugees International, a non-profit group that helps displaced people worldwide, issued a scathing report earlier this month, in which they stated that “thousands of people still lack sustainable access to potable water and electricity and dry, safe places to sleep.”

The study also found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has done a poor job helping storm victims navigate bureaucratic hurdles. FEMA has also failed to renew a temporary program that is currently providing housing to nearly 4,000 Puerto Rican families who were relocated to New Jersey while their homes are rebuilt.

The slow rebuilding process has led hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to just give up and move to the American mainland. According to an estimate prepared by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York, up to 470,000 island residents are expected to move out by 2019.