A terrain of uncertainty
And a time of imposition
It was rough going, to be frank,
Fraught days best left forgotten
We eked out a strange kind of life
The small mercies sufficient unto themselves
When dread was a daily intruder
And our only defense was a stare
Branded itinerant, of no fixed abode
Still we fashioned temporary shelter
Falteringly, we laid our bed of unease
Always wondering when we would next hear laughter
But even in the most precarious moments
We remembered the words of the ancestral songs
And even if we could only sing them softly
We were comforted by their blanket of soul
Serene about the way forward, resolute about the challenge
This interlude shall pass, and we will leave our mark
And the elders' refrain will resound
Full throated, all parts sung in harmony:
In those painful hours, our hearts were hoping
In those silent days, our eyes were watching
In those dark years, our wounds were healing
For even with the tears, we knew our time was coming
The spirits returned our voices, truly the world will remember
And we shall tell everyone the story of those dark chapters
How we never gave up the struggle and proved our mettle
Remember: there is more in the mortar than the pestle
Roy Haynes, whose power and sensitivity on the drums made him a first choice for leading jazz instrumentalists and singers and whose tasteful pokes, polyrhythms and grooves landed him on swing, bebop, cool, Third Stream, spiritual, free jazz and fusion recording sessions, died on November 12. He was 99.
Born eight years after the first jazz 78 was recorded in 1917, Roy began his recording career in Luis Russell's band in New York in 1945. His first bebop recordings were made in 1947 with Babs Gonzales, and he was soon recording behind Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Milt Jackson, Brew Moore, Al Haig, Bud Powell, Kai Winding, Stan Getz and Charlie Parker. And that was just in the 1940s.
Roy was on more than 400 recording sessions. Stylistically, he was more rhythmically busy than most drummers but less so than Max Roach and less bombastic than Art Blakey, Roy played with sly sophistication and unpredictable drama, providing instrumentalists and singers with solid time but also hip interactions. So much so that Sarah Vaughan liked to play around with his name when introducing him during performances. She'd say "Roy" and leave space for Roy to add a bass drum fill before saying "Haynes."
You can hear this playful, mutual salute on Shulie a Bop, in 1954, from Swingin' Easy by moving the time bar to 1:29. Go here...
In tribute to Roy, here's my complete 2008 JazzWax interview along with a brief conversation we had in 2010 about Red Garland's four tracks recorded with him and Charlie Parker:
JazzWax: Is it tough being Roy Haynes? Roy Haynes: [laughing] By the time I wake up every day, there’s so much I have to do and get done. Recently it has been crazy. Houses, automobiles, my god, there’s never a dull moment. And still be a drummer. I didn’t even realize I was going to be living this long and playing and having great-grandchildren.
JW: How do you stay so young? Is it a diet and workout thing? RH: No, no, there’s no secret. I work out mentally. I always watch what I eat. And I have a 10-speed bike that I haven’t had time to ride as much as I’d like. I don't eat pork. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.
JW: Are fellow musicians shocked? RH: [laughs] I recently played with bassist Stanley Clarke in Manhattan. We hadn’t seen each other in some time. He was holding a private sound-check on the afternoon before our performance. Nobody else was supposed to come in. But I had to go check the drums they had for me. I had to bogart my way in. Stanley saw me there from afar and later told me I blew his mind. He said I looked like I was 30. He said I had on this tank top on and these muscles. [laughing]
JW: What was it like growing up in Boston in the 1930s? RH: It was beautiful. The house we lived in, my father bought it when I was about 2 years old. Boston in 1940 was heavily Irish at the time. We had an Irish family on one side of our home, French-Canadians on the other and a synagogue in front of our house. It was great growing up with all different kinds of kids. My brother, who’s 81, always talks about how much fun it was growing up there. My parents were wonderful people. They were from Barbados.
JW: How did you come to the drums? RH: The drums were always with me, ever since I can remember, man. I always wanted to be a drummer. My brother had drumsticks around the house, and those were the first sticks I picked up. The feeling and beat were always there, as long as I can remember.
JW: Did your parents encourage you? RH: My father would come see me wherever I played. He even traveled to New York. My mother never came. She was a very religious woman. But one time when I was playing at a small club in the Roxbury section of Boston, I saw her standing at the door smiling and laughing while I played. That felt beautiful.
JW: What did your dad do for a living? RH: He worked for Standard Oil. When the depression came, that screwed him up financially. Fortunately we had that house he bought, so we had a place to live.
JW: One of your first big gigs was in 1945 with Luis Russell, a legendary New Orleans pianist and bandleader. RH: That’s right. Luis Russell had played with King Oliver. He was a great pianist and musician. He used to front Louis Armstrong’s band, and Louis used Russell’s band back in the 1930s. But by 1945, Russell was fronting a swing band. He had heard about me from saxophonist Charlie Holmes. Charlie was in a band I had played with in New London, Conn., during the war. Back then, there was a naval base there, and anytime soldiers and sailors are together, there's always music, women and dancing. When Luis heard about me from Charlie, he sent a special delivery letter to Boston Local 535. There were two musicians union locals in Boston then—Local 9 and Local 535. I don’t have to tell you which was which. I was pretty popular during that period so the Local knew that I was playing drums for the summer on Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. Luis Russell believed in me even before he heard me, and that gave me enormous confidence.
JW: Some of your earliest dates with Russell were at the Savoy Ballroom in New York. What was that place like in the mid-1940s? RH: Oh man, that was my first gig in New York. The energy level was great there. People were always dancing. They called the Savoy the “Home of Happy Feet.” The building had two floors. The ballroom was on the second floor, and you could feel that surface bounce. There were a lot of happy girls there. They had one night a week where ladies got in free, I think on Thursdays. And there were always two bands there on two bandstands, side by side.
JW: What made Luis Russell's band so special for you? RH: Well, we played the Savoy, which of course was exciting. But even more incredible for me was that I was playing behind an 18-piece big band. You learn a lot keeping time for a big band people that are dancing to, especially one that had to be on top of its game at the Savoy. I found out after I got back to Boston that I had changed the sound of that band after playing with them for more than a year. Luis didn’t tell me. Musicians had told my brother.
JW: In late 1947, you started a long run with Lester Young. RH: Yes, I was with him for two years. He was a very humorous guy. He had his own way of talking. It was like a foreign language unless you understood it. Otherwise, what he said wouldn't have made much sense to you. You had to pick up on his special way of putting things to know what he meant. Sometimes you wouldn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. Thelonious Monk sort of reminded me of Lester. They both had their own way of talking.
JW: And both radically changed jazz at the time. RH: Back then, there were people playing jazz who were so original, even more so than everyone else who played it, you know. They developed different ways of communicating in the different parts of the ghettos we lived in and hung out in. There were a lot of exceptional people and musicians in the neighborhoods who never got credit. You've never heard of them and they're all but forgotten. Lester Young was one of those special people you did hear about. But you had to have a little imagination about a lot of things to get where he was coming from.
JW: For example? RH: I told this story to Miles back in the 1940s, and he got a kick out of it. During the period when I first came to New York, the standard size of a bass drum was 26 inches. So when I joined Lester Young in 1947, I still had that size bass drum. But it was stolen the day before or on the same day we were supposed to go to California by way of Chicago. So when I got to Chicago, Max Roach was there. He told me there was a guy in town from Ludwig drums. Max said he'd introduce me to him. So I met the guy, and went to the factory, which was on the north side of Chicago. Joe Harris, a drummer from Pittsburgh, went with me. The drum I got that day was one of the first smaller, 20-inch bass drums.
JW: Was there something wrong with it? RH: No, not at all. It was just smaller and had a slightly tighter sound.
When I got the bass drum back to the Hotel Pershing where I was staying in Chicago, Lester took a look at it and without missing a beat nicknamed it "Princess Wee-Wee." Everything Lester Young named had a female connection, like Lady Day for Billie Holiday. He had that kind of fast mind. "Princess" was a name of affection for him. "Wee-Wee" was small, you know? It was quick. The man had a special kind of genius but you had to understand his way of thinking to get him and appreciate his way of thinking. Miles [Davis] and Max [Roach] came by the hotel before we left. They were in town the same day with Charlie Parker, who had just gotten fired for something at some club. When I told them the name Prez had come up with for the drum, they laughed because the name was so perfect.
JW: As a jazz drummer, you've always been one of the most careful listeners. What are you listening for? RH: How do you know I’m a listener?
JW: When I listen to you play, I can hear you listening intensively behind Prez, Bird, Monk, Sonny. And I can hear you responding, sometimes feeding musicians the lines they pick up on. I also can hear you anticipating the figures they're going to play. RH: What instrument do you play?
JW: A little piano. Mostly I do a lot of listening to recordings. RH: You must, because that’s a hell of a statement, unless you read that someplace.
JW: No, no. It's just that I can hear your sensitivity and the conversation you're striking up on the spot with the musicians you're recording with. RH: That’s very true. I do do a lot of listening. I recently heard a Mary Lou Williams recording on the radio from 1970 with me on drums. It was a live recording. As I listened to it recently, I could feel myself listening to what she was doing, trying to catch up with her on drums, listening to see what direction she was going in. It was the first time I had ever heard what you're talking about. Joe Fields produced it. He was supposed to send me some more money. You can put that in there. [laughing]
JW: On a Roy Haynes recording, there's the beat you're keeping and then there's that extra dimension of how you're listening and responding. True? RH: Yes, and that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that expressed as such.
JW: From a drummer's standpoint, which bass player kept the best time in the 1940s? Tommy Potter? Roy Haynes: It's not for me to say who was the best in the 40s. I don't know. I'll tell you one thing, Paul Chambers was the best for me, in the 40s, 50s or whenever. I loved that guy. I loved that feeling he created. With Paul, the feeling was always there. I loved his warmth and how he could let certain notes ring short or long. He had so much warmth and imagination.
JW: But there were so many great bassists back in the 40's—Potter, Curly Russell, Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown. RH: Yeah, yeah, they were all good, too. But after I played with Paul in the mid-1950s, it was a whole different feeling. There was so much warmth there. Bass playing is all about how you let your notes ring and how you cut certain notes short. The bass developed into a completely new feeling with Paul. Back in the 1940s Tommy Potter was great, and Curly Russell was known to be a nice guy and a business guy who was always on time. He was very popular in those days. But the feeling with Paul Chambers, wow. I don't like to start naming a lot of different names or to say who has this or has that. A lot of people like to do that but it's not really my thing.
JW: The bass player is pretty important to the drummer, yes? He keeps time, and you play off of that? RH: Definitely, definitely. He's critical to what I'm doing. I like to be around bass players who can feel what you're doing and play off of it. I'm a different type of drummer as well for the bass player and for everyone else. I'm constantly moving and shifting.
JW: Did you like playing with Charlie Parker? RH: The first time I heard him on a record I knew he was different. The record was Hootie Blues, with Jay McShann, and Walter Brown singing. You knew right away that Bird was unusual, that his approach was completely different than anything else you had heard. And that sound, it was so confident.
JW: You played on many of the live performances of Bird with strings. Did you dig that format? RH: I love melodies, and a lot of the tunes Charlie Parker played with strings were melodic. The strings format sometimes could be a little stiff. But he was trying to reach that audience, I think, and it seemed to work.
JW: But did you like playing with the strings? RH: It was cool, you know [laughing]. I don't think that I'd want to do that all night, every night. And we didn't. In fact, there were times when he'd stretch out on the strings stuff with the rhythm section and hang loose rather than play the arrangements as written.
JW: What was the big difference between you and Max Roach behind Bird? RH: I had and have a different type of cymbal beat, for one thing. Max's cymbal beat was more on the one: dah-dah dom, dah-dah dom, dah-dah dom. Mine is more dom dah-dah, dom dah-dah, dom dah-dah. That's as far as I'll go with that. [laughs] That's one of the things I'm sure Bird liked about me. Lester Young as well. I had a distinct cymbal beat. Beyond that, Max was one of the greatest drummers ever.
JW: Was Miles Davis naturally cool or did he have to work at it? RH: [laughing] He was naturally cool. We were both into fast automobiles and sharp clothes. We both were mentioned in a 1960 Esquire article on style and fashion. We were both in our 30s back then, so we had a lot in common that way. In fact, 10 years earlier, in the summer of 1950, we both bought convertible automobiles the exact same week. It wasn't planned.
JW: What make? RH: I had a 1950 Oldsmobile 98. Miles had a Dodge convertible, but it was a fast Dodge. I think he called it the Blue Devil. Mine was light gray.
JW: What was Miles like to be around? RH: Miles would always come by my gigs someplace with women and say to them [imitating Miles' raspy voice]: "Yeah, me and Roy, we used to smash up our cars. We were the sharpest mothers on 52d St." His exact words. There was a lot in common there. It was an exciting period, man. In fact, I met my wife when I was working with Miles in Brooklyn. It was Miles' gig, and she had come to see him. The ladies loved Miles. I had some fans, too, but I wasn't nearly as popular as Miles. He had just left Charlie Parker then and I had just left Lester Young. We were the coolest of the cool.
JW: Listening to Bud Powell, it sounds like he was always trying to throw off the drummer. True? RH: Not really. Bud could outfox anyone, another player. But not me or any drummer he played with. The drummer was going to make him sound good. It was beautiful playing behind him. Cause he had so much rhythm. All you had to do is accompany him.
JW: Did Charlie Parker like doing that Cole Porter date in 1954? He seemed to resist it. You played with him on most of the album's tracks in March of that year. RH: It's hard to say whether he dug it or not. It could have been Norman Granz's idea.
JW: How did Sarah Vaughan come up with her signature introduction of you—saying your first name while you added a fill before she said your last name? RH: She started introducing us on this tune she'd scat, which ended up being Shulie-A-Bop. We'd do that every night in the clubs. It just developed into that scene like it did. I can go all over the world, and someone will come up to me and say, "Roy...dat-dat-dat...Haynes." A lot of people remember that. It lived on.
JW: Did you have to listen hard to Sarah to figure out where she was going on a song? RH: Usually I knew where she was going. But if she was scatting, naturally, that's ad-libbing, and I'd have to figure it out. But when you're with somebody for that length of time—five years—it all becomes second nature. I'm into lyrics. I love lyrics. Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s. It was great. With Sarah, that was the first time I had gone to Europe, Africa, the West Indies and a lot of places in this country.
JW: Was she tough to work for? RH: No, she was beautiful to work for. Most artists have a pretty good sense of humor, at least those who play this type of music.
JW: Your playing on Cutie, on Sonny Rollins's The Sound of Sonny, is a pure example of you listening and carrying on a conversation with a date's leader and soloist. RH: Wow, I don't remember that one.
JW: Here, listen [playing the track]. RH: Oh, yeah. OK, Cutie. Is that what it's called? I wish Sonny had played that at Carnegie Hall last fall. I heard he didn't want to release the album.
JW: He apparently didn't like how it sounded. RH: That's fine. Look, he hears what he hears. It's a feeling, you know. I would hope that he'd release it someday.
JW: Your brush work on Cutie is a trip. RH: I don't play brushes often anymore. I did use them on one of my gigs recently with my quartet. There was a drummer there who later wanted me to show him some things. You know, brushes are not too popular now. Everything is about power. I think I'm going to start playing more brushes because a lot of other drummers don't play them.
JW: Monk's greatest live recordings, in my opinion, were made with you at New York's Five Spot in 1958. You were having some "conversation" with him on those recordings. RH: We were there for about 18 weeks, three sets a night once Monk would show up. Sometimes he wouldn't turn up until there was no telling what time. That was a very exciting period. That was one of my first gigs after leaving Sarah. I had young children then, so it was nice to play the gig, hang out a little bit and then go home.
JW: Did you and Monk work out in advance what you'd play? RH: Monk didn't talk that much. He would hire you for what you do. At least in my case that was the situation. We were in the Five Spot more than once, you know. He didn't call me for the dates. He had Nica [de Koenigswarter], the Baroness, call me. He was close with her.
JW: Was Monk hard to play with? RH: There was a lot that was tricky about playing with him. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. Like you mentioned before, you really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You know. It was a lot. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well.
JW: Tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin also was with you. Did his playing get in the way while you were trying to listen to Monk? RH: Not really. Sometimes John would play just the melody of a Monk song. Then when he'd play his solo, it was different. At that point, he's leading his own thing and you're behind him at that point, listening to what he's doing and playing off him.
JW: Billie Holiday's last club recording was April 1959 at George Wein's Storyville club in Boston. You were on drums. Do you remember the gig? Was Billie ill? RH: Of course. [singing in a deep voice, from Gigi] "€I remember it well." I didn't see Billie in bad shape. I thought she was cool. We were playing there for a week. She was cool. I remember the club was crowded every night. A lot of my friends came in. My wife was there for the whole weekend. She wanted to tape it, but I said, "No, Billie isn't going to allow that." Looking back, Billie probably wouldn't have been aware of it. All in all, it was a beautiful week.
JW: Was it different playing behind Billie compared to Sarah? RH: Billie was from an older school than Sarah but I loved that. I just played some nice soft brushes behind her. I do remember that when she'd get off the set, she'd go and cry. It was sad. She told me she had cirrhosis of the liver, the same thing Lester Young had died from. But her voice sounded good that week. You'd never have known that just three months later she'd be gone.
***
Charlie Parker and pianist Red Garland played together several
times at clubs between 1947 and 1949 in Philadelphia and again in Boston in the early 1950s. But despite their gigs, only four known tracks exist of Parker and Garland playing on the same date. These tracks are from a Boston radio broadcast in March 1953. The recordings represent the merging of two Midwestern players, both of whom were influenced by the same saxophonist and were deeply rooted in the blues. Yesterday I spoke briefly with Roy Haynes, the drummer on the Storyville date.
The year 1953 was an important one for Garland. In addition to his Boston broadcast with Parker, Miles Davis had approached him to join a group he was forming. The musicians Davis lined up were Sonny Rollins on tenor sax, Oscar Pettiford on bass and Max Roach on drums. Garland happily agreed, but the group never came to be. Davis was struggling to kick a drug habit, and by the time he resumed recording for Blue Note in 1954, Horace Silver was on piano.
So for the next year or so, Garland continued playing behind Lester Young and many other headliners who passed through Boston. In March 1955, Miles Davis returned and asked Garland to be part of a recording session for Prestige with Oscar Pettiford and Philly Joe Jones. Davis wanted Garland to play light and airy, like Ahmad Jamal, and the result was The Musings of Miles. By October of '53, Davis formed a new group, the famed quintet, with Garland, John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers.
But two years before Musings of Miles and the emergence of his Jamalian piano approach, Garland was trying to find himself stylistically in Boston, as captured on the recordings with Charlie Parker.
Four songs were performed live and somehow recorded—Moose the Mooch, I'll Walk Alone, Ornithology and Out of Nowhere. Parker is relaxed and peppery on these tracks, while Garland exhibits terrific time and a bluesy touch. But this isn't yet the Garland who would flower under Davis' direction two years later. Nevertheless, the result is fascinating, and what we hear in Boston is the beginning of Garland's earthy, polished sound.
Roy Haynes: Red and I made up the house rhythm section at Storyville. He was going with a girl up in Boston so Red liked to work there steadily. Red and Bird sounded great together. When you've got a genius up front like Bird, he's listening to everything and absorbing it. Red was doing the same. You could hear them listening to each other. They were a nice fit. Hey, what do you expect? They had a great drummer [laughs]. By the way, the bass player, Bernie Griggs, was something. If he had lived longer, he would have been great.
JazzWax clip:Here's Parker and Garland together live in March 1953 at Storyville on I'll Walk Alone. Dig Garland's block-chords passage toward the end of his solo and Roy Haynes' jack-in-the-box bass-drum accents throughout...
Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations.
Note: unless you have specific experience caring for someone who has amnesia but not dementia, please do not offer care suggestions.
The patient
In June 2022 the side-effects of a long surgery left my mom with permanent anterograde amnesia: she can no longer form new long-term memories. Memory isn’t just one neurological system, so very occasionally she will able to remember certain types of things. But for the most part, if she hears or sees something, a few minutes later she will no longer remember it.
To medical professionals her condition looks a lot like dementia — amnesia is a common symptom of dementia — but she doesn’t have dementia. One difference is that (as I understand it) dementia is a progressive disease, while this amnesia is stable. There is no cure.
Someday I might post about the experience about caring for her, but for now I’ll just say that this type of amnesia is not something one should wish on one’s worst enemies.
Needs
My mom still lives on her own in an apartment. Because she cannot remember things, she goes through each day in a state of low-grade anxiety about where her grown children are and whether they are all right. She feels she hasn’t heard from any of us in a long time. This anxiety manifests as extremely frequent attempts to call or text us.
Paper notes and other forms of reminders didn’t seem to help, and would become out of date even if they weren’t misplaced. My siblings and I would call to let her know we were okay, but five minutes later she’d be back to being worried. She wasn’t in the habit of scrolling back through text messages, so once she’d read a message, it was immediately forgotten and effectively lost.
I thought some sort of unobtrusive, always-on device installed in her apartment might be able to show her notes written by my siblings and me.
Design goals
My goal was to find a display that:
Could stay on for months on end
Would let my siblings and I easily post short messages to it that would remain visible until replaced
Was large enough and easy enough to read without glasses
Required no interaction to wake or read and was relatively foolproof (touching it wouldn’t disrupt it)
Was resilient to network failures
Didn’t glow at nighttime
Didn’t require hardware hackery (I’m a software person)
Would boot directly into displaying messages (no interaction needed to start an app)
Was not enshittified with a subscription service or proprietary app store
Was reasonably affordable
Would not look out of place in a home
Device
Given the above design goals, I searched for a tablet-size electronic ink display with Wi-Fi connectivity and a decent web browser.
One device that seemed to fit my parameters was the BOOX Note Air2 Series. At the time it cost US$500, which is expensive but is still far cheaper than screens intended for use as commercial retail displays. It’s marketed as a note-taking device and ebook reader, but it also has a capable web browser. It’s big enough to read from a few feet away.
A critical question I couldn’t answer online was whether I’d be able to have the device automatically start its web browser and have that browser display a designated start page. Happily, when the device arrived I was able to confirm it could do both of those things.
The physical case of the Note Air2 looks reasonably nice and not particularly tech-y. The e-ink display is clear and legible; it refreshes quickly enough to not be distracting. By default the device’s backlight was turned on but I could turn it off.
I found a small metal stand to serve an easel for the display so that it felt more like a picture frame.
Web software
Since the physical device was satisfactory, the next step was writing a simple website that could drive the display. The site would have two pages:
A Board page showing the messages. The e-ink device would boot into showing this page. This is the only page my mom needed to see.
A Compose page my siblings and I write messages and save them to be displayed.
The device needed to run for months, and needed to be resilient in the case of network and service failures. At the same time, I also needed to be able to remotely update not only the messages being displayed, but the software displaying those messages.
With that in mind, I factored the Board page into an outer frame and an inner page:
The top-level outer frame acts as a thin shell around the inner page. At top of every hour, the outer frame reloads the inner page to pick up potential software changes. If the network is down and the inner page doesn’t reload, the frame just tries again an hour later. To maximize reliability, the outer frame has very little logic and no external dependencies.
The inner page actually displays the messages. Every 5 minutes it queries a simple web service for message data and displays the messages. The inner page contains a small amount of logic, but as few dependencies as possible.
Since it’s essentially impossible to debug anything that happens on the device, I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
The Compose page presents a simple web form my siblings and I can use to compose and save a message. I designed the form to work well on a phone screen so that we can write messages when we’re out and about. A small web app manifest lets us save the Compose page to a phone’s home screen as an icon for quick access.
The whole site is tiny, entails no build process, and with the exception of the service (below) is just static files.
Visual design
I was concerned about the possibility of e-ink burn-in, so the Board page randomly changes which message appears where. Other visual elements like the date and time alternate from side to side, with the intention that no single pixel is always on.
To style the note text I chose the free Architect’s Daughter font for a handwritten feel. This font works well on the e-ink display. Labels are displayed in Open Sans.
One small challenge was maximizing the size of the message text. Sometimes a message is just a word or two; other times it might be several sentences. A single font size can’t accommodate such a wide range of text content. I couldn’t find a pure CSS way to automatically maximize font size so that a text element with word wrapping would display without clipping.
I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.
Service
Just a tiny amount of text data is necessary to drive the display, so I was happy to find the minimalist JsonStorage service that was perfect for this project. A single JSON object stores the text and metadata for the current set of messages. The Compose page can save to the service with a POST request, and the Board page can retrieve the data with a GET.
The service has a free tier that I started with, but I liked the service so much that I eventually paid for a $1/month basic tier. (It appears that tier is now $5/month.)
Trial and installation
I spent a couple of weeks working on the software and letting it run for long periods of time. I was pleasantly surprised that the Boox display worked as well as it did and seemed to stay up indefinitely.
I brought the display over to my mom’s apartment on November 12, 2022, turned it on, joined it to her Wi-Fi, and rebooted it to confirm everything worked in the new environment.
I thought the bathroom counter might be a good place for it, but my mom thought she’d rather have it in her bedroom, so we found a home for it on a windowsill.
My mom was happy with the display right away.
Retrospective
Despite her amnesia, my mom came to remember that this display exists and what it’s for. She looks forward to seeing updates from her children on it.
If we tell her about something that’s coming up, she often asks whether we’ve already put that event on the MomBoard. On the flip side, we have to be careful to keep it up to date; if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.
Looking back, the display is essentially the only intervention of any kind we’ve tried that’s actually been successful at improving her quality of life (and ours). One reason it’s worked so well is that it didn’t require her to learn anything new. Without the ability to remember new things, it’s virtually impossible for her to learn a new skill or to form new habits.
The device’s reliability has surpassed my expectations. There was one period where the device seemed to stop working, but I traced the problem to a faulty Wi-Fi hub; after that was replaced, it’s worked flawlessly since. For my part, keeping the software as simple as possible and sticking to vanilla web technologies surely helped avoid bugs.
The display still looks great, and it still displays messages day in and day out.
If you want to try to set up something similar to what I describe here, I’m happy to answer technical questions or share advice.
I will be resetting the sequence of regular entries in the year to come in order to go about something like normalcy in times that may be increasingly abnormal as the year 2025 progresses.
For the moment, I want to spend a few weeks thinking on specific histories that lay out the life span of an authoritarian or autocratic political system or movement: how it gained power and how and why it eventually lost it. I’m not going to be shy about drawing analogies, but I’m also going to stress the differences between then and now.
I can’t promise these will be encouraging, either. That is part of what we need to be thinking about now.
The South African state under the rule of the National Party and the system of apartheid began in 1948 and ended formally in 1993.
Over those long years, historians and intellectuals developed a sustained challenge to the idea of apartheid as a rupture or break in South Africa’s national history, arguing that the roots of systemic racial discrimination, spatial segregation and white supremacy preceded 1948 by at least three decades. Most commonly, scholars saw the 1913 Land Act and the terms of the peace at the end of the South African War as formal harbingers of what was to come, and the structural conditions established by diamond and gold mining in the 19th Century as the central underpinnings of what became apartheid.
I am part of that orthodoxy, but I’m also grateful that there’s another historiography that underscores the distinctive nature of the apartheid state, that sees 1948 for what it was: a dramatic political rupture, the beginning of a major revision of the political order in South Africa.
For most of the 21st Century, in my public writing, I’ve tried to warn of the dangerous possibilities of an American version of South Africa’s 1948. The central analogy I’ve pointed to followed from the National Party assembled a governing majority after a highly contested parliamentary election despite performing worse than the United Party. The United Party dithered in the wake of the election: they expected the National Party to fail quickly due to their inexperience and extremism. What they didn’t expect is that the National Party would push forward a dramatic slew of legislative and executive changes that not only imposed the strict racial segregation they’d promised but also hobbled the ability of any opposition party to challenge them in the future.
South Africa was still ostensibly a democracy after that point but it was effectively a one-party state, an early example of what is now being called “competitive authoritarianism”, with the additional complication that the majority of the country’s residents couldn’t vote at all. White voters who had opposed the National Party at first mostly went along with them after both because opposition became personally and professionally risky and because apartheid functioned somewhat like an addictive drug: once you’d gone all in on harsh racial segregation and suppression of opposition, you feared even more what would happen if you let up at all. Moreover, the National Party bound many of its voters even more closely to it by dramatically expanding the civil service—in effect, a presaging of postcolonial strategies all over the world for creating an overnight middle-class through government payrolls.
Once that self-reinforcing political order took full shape, what could possibly bring it to an end? The simplest observation I can make is that from the beginning, many whites—and many outside observers—could see the end of apartheid plainly enough, which was that it had a problem of numbers that was insoluable by any means. Small minorities that define themselves in racial, ethnic or religious terms that are highly endogamous, that can’t easily expand to incorporate new members who violate the exclusivity of the group definition, are always on the road to ruin the moment they claim dominion over the political system. At that moment, the menu of options shrinks dramatically. They can facilitate some form of secession or partition that invites the excluded majority to move to a territory the minority is willing to cede. They can offer some form of highly limited—and always revocable—power-sharing in the middle hierarchies of state authority. They can try to keep the excluded majority internally divided against one another. They can brutally attack the least hint of resistance. They can try to thin the ranks of the excluded majority with incarceration, violence, and manufactured precarity, while also trying to recruit immigrants and promote natalism within their own ranks. They can build the capacity of an administrative state to rule through regulation and service provision, extending that capacity through inclusion of the racial majority at the lowest ends of the civil service, and have that capacity increase the dependence of the entire population on state provision while also using regulatory power to make segregation and deprivation more materially manifest, to have the landscape itself enforce the minority’s domination.
The apartheid state tried all of these measures, though not all at once and not equally, because they understood as well as any other minority that has seized power over a sovereign territory that the problem of numbers would bring them down in time if they didn’t find an escape hatch. Apartheid was in some sense distinctive in the post-1945 world not just because of racial segregation or minoritarian power but because of the astonishing systematicity of the state’s attempt to enact all of these strategies for sustaining the unsustainable. The state moved people and destroyed townships, but more banally it built highways, walls, power and water infrastructures, zoning regulations, prisons, domestic spying, policing and legal authority over political action, and much more, that all reinforced its ideology and its practical maintenance of minority power.
The opposition struggled to fully grasp the key point about numbers, in part because it’s one thing to be a majority by dint of exclusion from political and economic power and another thing to act as a majority with strong, cohesive solidarity against all those effective moves that an authoritarian state with this kind of capacity could employ.
The white opposition in the legislature settled quickly into trying to be an impediment to the regulatory state and to be a legitimate source of information about government activities, both of which provided at best a speed bump to apartheid’s unfolding.
The nationalist organizations that set out to challenge apartheid successfully worked the numbers in their favor at first through mass defiance campaigns, but the apartheid state killed 69 people in Sharpeville in 1960 just how far they’d allow that kind of challenge to go forward. As the historian Paul Landau argues in his recent book Spear, the African National Congress’ next move was to plan for a genuine revolution that invoked the favorable weight of numbers as the key feature of its vision, but I think Spear and many other historical accounts make pretty clear that the planners were undone not just by the strength of the apartheid state but by their faith in revolutionary teleology, by their dependence on fixed ideas about models for revolutions, rather than in developing a better understanding of what the numbers looked like from the bottom-up, on the actual conditions and circumstances that might move the biggest numbers of people into putting their weight of their own lives against the ultimately limited capacity of the apartheid state to imprison or kill all the possible opposition to its power.
In the end, the numbers were what mattered.
Activists in the Global North love to give themselves more credit than they’re entitled to for the end of apartheid, in part because that’s how they try to mobilize for campaigns in the present against other targets. The isolation of the apartheid state hurt it, to be sure, often more psychologically than materially, and pushed it into more desperately transparent attempts to fracture the growing cohesion between all the groups excluded from political power. What mattered a great deal in this case was not divestment but the refusal of global finance to roll over loans to South Africa, not because activists demanded it but because apartheid was seen as a risky investment.
The ANC after 1976 and then into the new constitutional democracy it helped to shape has loved to give itself credit by celebrating the armed struggle represented by its own cadres and training camps in the frontline states and its diplomatic efforts elsewhere. The former in particular mattered very little except as another psychological weight on whites who supported apartheid. There’s one military conflict outside of South Africa that did matter, and that’s the war in Angola that involved not just local nationalist militaries but Cuban troops. Whether or not you think the South African military “lost” a key battle in that war, the conflict did put unmistakeable stress on their ability to field sufficient soldiers against potential enemies within the region. Inasmuch as the ANC could claim to be building capacity for that kind of challenge to apartheid, they intensified that stress.
Where numbers were finally put into play was in the internal struggle after the Soweto uprising. By the 1980s, many townships and much of the Eastern Cape had become at least partially “ungovernable”, where the state could only deploy suppressive military and policing power in the face of mass unrest and otherwise lost a lot of its more quotidian administrative presence. What the ANC had imagined as a more orderly and conventional kind of Marxian overthrow without really knowing how to mobilize the masses required for that action was happening after 1976 in more emergent and grass-roots ways. Not without organization, but also not without a rigid imaginary of how party structures, doctrine and mass action should interrelate. Numbers were the central fact here: that there was more territory and way more people than a state dependent on a white minority and their hirelings could successfully keep under control.
I suppose you could also credit a turnover in leadership within the National Party for doing the math in the mid-1980s and concluding that it was time to strike a deal with a reliable negotiating partner before that generation of leaders died off. It’s by no means inevitable that people who have been in charge of an authoritarian political order decide to seek a negotiated end to it when it is starting to unravel, as we’ll see in this series of essays.
So why did the bad times of apartheid end, after 45 years of disfiguring, destructive, unnecessary oppression? I have a chart for you, based on arbitrary numbers I’ve assigned by impulse.
There is of course also the problem that the bad times arguably did not end, either because apartheid wormed its way into the constitutional order that it helped to negotiate or because it created persistent structures that reproduced themselves after the apartheid state itself was no more. I am personally inclined to say that at least some of South Africa’s bad times after 1993 are global bad times, e.g., that South Africa’s biggest problems have been the big problems of neoliberalism everywhere. Which also means that it’s important not to understate how much of the badness of apartheid did end. There’s a big difference between a state that tore down communities because people with the wrong skin color lived there and a state that is haplessly unable to build communities where it has promised to build them, even if those both end up with people who have nowhere to live.
Moreover, at least a few bad times since 1993 also seem to me to be neither global neoliberalism nor zombie apartheid but particular to South Africa itself—or tracked against other kinds of 21st Century trends. But I’ll get around to Jacob Zuma in this series eventually.
The takeaway for Americans? The history of apartheid’s origins and its end has a few lessons.
Don’t underestimate people you think of as incompetent extremists when they win an election. This might be a lesson that comes a bit too late.
There’s a role for a more-or-less liberal opposition party under “competitive authoritarianism” but it’s pretty small. This is a lesson that I’ll talk about in other histories as well: in these bad histories, liberal parties and liberal discourses tend to shrink to insignificance pretty damn quick if and when the state becomes thoroughly authoritarian.
It’s pretty easy to use civil service expansion to create loyalty to an authoritarian regime. Until you run out of money to pay them.
The more doctrinaire the plans for some kind of national-scale response (revolution, protest, general strikes) the less likely those plans are to correspond with the actual feelings and situation on the ground among the people who will actually need to respond in very large numbers.
Even in the 1960s, it was pretty easy for a state with apartheid’s capacity to spy on everybody planning to challenge it until there were so many challengers that spying was irrelevant. So maybe don’t meet up a farmhouse and keep all the maps and charts out in the open. Assume that if you’re in active opposition that there’s someone spying on you.
Ungovernability requires huge numbers of people to sacrifice their future aspirations and it takes leaders who are right there alongside the people taking those risks in the localities and places where it’s happening. Don’t bother issuing calls to action on Bluesky, etc. But ungovernability (and boycotts) works when it threatens interests who have actual weight of authority that can rival or compete with an authoritarian state’s upper leadership.
The weight of numbers in South Africa doesn’t really scale over to the U.S. situation in 2025: this is pretty much an even split with a very lumpy geographic distribution.
The federal government after January 2025 in the U.S. is unlikely to build the kind of capacity or systematicity that the apartheid state created for itself to accomplish its repressive ends. That also breaks the analogy in all sorts of ways.
Transitional you may call it these days, the corner of 12th and Chicon
A far cry from its salad days as an out-and-out combat zone
When hardened hookers used to walk the streets barely causing a shrug
And the weary cops turned a blind eye to the open air markets of drugs
Change has been long coming but it creeps up on you all of a sudden Places betray only faint traces of their previous reputation
Located just a mile from downtown, no wonder there's been gentrification
The inescapable reality of commerce and real estate transactions
Suffice to say in this case, that there has been a whitening
A rebrand now that the corner is no longer so frightening
And as a fitting testament to the changing face of East Austin
On the mural, they painted the face of Bad-era Michael Jackson
Still, the other heroes are there, defiant: Bob Marley, Nina Simone and Prince
Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, Sade, Sly Stone (or is it Jimi Hendrix?)
The conscience of a certain tribe: Dick Gregory, Muhammad Ali
And, keeping it real, conflicted martyrs like Tupac and Biggie
Throughout, the nearby Eastside Community Church aimed to provide shelter
Modified latterly to host, on their premises, a Pregnancy Resource Center
You never know in Texas, this was ground zero for maternal mortality
Where Barbara Jordan fought for civil rights, they try to preserve her legacy
The last holdouts remain but now no longer have sway
Just a few transients holding on to faded glory days
Rough trade, ambling in the early morning to the liquor store
Passing, as they do, the fresh-faced women out walking their dogs
Lululemon leggings, some carrying their yoga mats, nubile young things
Or the others now heading to work out on the shiny exercise machines
Complicated tributes to physical perfection, elliptical witnesses
On their treadmills to modernity, edifices of health and fitness
The parking lots where the Guinean immigrants would sell African clothes
Trinkets, carvings, dashikis, herbal oils, and the like are now mostly closed
Once their steady remedial work was done, the developers moved in
It's a safe neighborhood now, and on a few plots they've started construction
A couple of desultory food trucks, beasts of burden, now stand alone
On the way to middle school with the 11 year old past 12th and Chicon
No crossing guard here, those who walk these streets are on their own
Eyes wide open, we take it all in. Then a quick hug before I turn and walk home
Ital Corner by Prince Jazzbo
One step forward, two steps backwards on the corner. "Now you are commercial" in Babylon go the lyrics of this upsetter dub joint.
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