Judy Collins, Nico, Marianne Faithful and Bettie Serveert have covered this brilliant Bob Dylan song – but Fairport Convention’s is the best. I love Sandy’s vocals on this. Below are Dylan’s lyrics.
You will search, babe, at any cost But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost? Everybody will help you Some people are very kind But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I’ll keep it with mine I can’t help it if you might think I am odd If I say I’m not loving you not for what you are But for what you’re not Everybody will help you Discover what you set out to find But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I’ll keep it with mineThe train leaves at half past ten But it’ll be back in the same old spot again The conductor He’s still stuck on the line And if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I’ll keep it with mine
Brìghde Chaimbeul frees her instrument from the confines of kitsch.
The 27-year-old Scottish musician Brìghde Chaimbeul is considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world. Chaimbeul grew up a native Gaelic speaker on Skye, an island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, in a family of artists. Since pivoting, as a teen-ager, from the Great Highland pipes to focus on the smallpipes, she’s won national folk competitions and released three solo albums (the latest, “Sunwise,” in June), but also made pilgrimages to places such as Bulgaria, where other pipe traditions have flourished; collaborated with the indie singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek; and played for a Dior runway show. “In doing so, she has redrawn the bounds of her instrument,” Elena Saavedra Buckley writes.
The Scottish smallpipe, which has roots that go at least as far back as the 15th century, was nearly lost to history. “These bagpipes had mostly been hidden away in the backs of cupboards,” the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society journal explained in 1989, “or they had found their way, as curiosities of a former age, into museums, where they would lie dead and silent in display cases.” But, over the years, Scottish musicians advocated for smallpipes as a cultural corrective: something that could revive a lost, jubilant character of communal Scottish music, and that could help disrupt not only the regimented Highland piping culture but the kitschy idea of Scotland forged by English imperialism. Chaimbeul, lauded as a “musical genius” by her peers, is part of this lineage of bagpipe players who are luring tradition into the present. “It all stems from her tacit understanding of the tradition. It’s a kind of focus on the depth in our music, in which the layers of virtuosity are stripped away,” one of her collaborators said.
On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”
Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”
Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.
The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.
And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.
It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy.”
Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.
Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly.
There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”
Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates.
Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%.
Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “[t]errific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”
Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago.
