Even in this age of near-total Internet accessibility, Charlie Megira is a modern mystery. A casual search turns up little aside from a few cryptic articles. His brief career unfolded during a changing of the guard in the music industry, opening on the death of the compact disc and ending just prior to Spotify’s IPO. For an artist like Megira, living far away from a major music outpost, there was more chaos than structure for his recordings to exist and find an audience. This collection is the first attempt at putting the pieces together, compiling a life’s work of an artist whose spark almost shined unto the world.
His was a music both familiar and entirely alien at once. It touches on corners of darkness, an isolation both lonely and sweet, all wrapped in a cold glow that draws the listener into each note, each melancholy melody triggering unrecorded experiences. His various projects put out music which began as a junction point between Link Wray’s surf guitar and the theatrical psychobilly of The Cramps, took a turn towards goth-inflected post-punk, and towards the end of his career would sojourn back into his earlier musical fascination with late 1950s and early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll.
The Israeli guitarist recorded seven albums worth of material in 15 years during his all-too-brief 44 trips around the sun.Tomorrow’s Gone collects 24 of these tracks for a double album journey across his career, accompanied by a lavish booklet that documents his tragic existence. Armed with only an Eko guitar, a black tuxedo, and his signature wrap-around shades, Charlie Megira was a mold-breaking artist who disintegrated while we were all staring at our phones.
Get to know Charlie Megira's discography here.
Sounder is a 1972 American drama film directed by Martin Ritt and adapted by Lonne Elder III from the 1969 novel by William H. Armstrong. The story concerns an African-American sharecropper family in the Deep South, who struggle with economic and personal hardships during the Great Depression. It stars Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks.[5] Taj Mahal composed the film's blues-inspired soundtrack, and also appears in a supporting role. Taj Mahal recorded a soundtrack to the film, released in 1972 by Columbia Records. According to music journalist Robert Christgau, it was "the first soundtrack ever patterned after a field recording", featuring a "suite/montage/succession of hums, moans, claps, and plucked fragments", all performed in the key of the gospel blues song "Needed Time" by Lightnin' Hopkins. Fellow critic Greil Marcus regarded it as Mahal's "most eloquent music", although Christgau said "even Greil doesn't know anybody who agrees. I've always regarded field recordings as study aids myself." He gave the soundtrack album a C-plus in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981).
Oct 05, 2024 Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks to Mehdi About Israel, Palestine, and Apartheid
On the heels of the release of his latest book “The Message,” his first nonfiction work for seven years, the award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates joined ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ to discuss the book’s focus on Palestine, and the reception it has received from the mainstream media – including a shocking interview on CBS. In their discussion, Coates discusses topics for the first time since the start of his book tour – including his view of President Biden’s Zionism, and his advice to Vice President Kamala Harris on arms sales to Israel.
For his new book, which explores how mainstream narratives shape and sometimes distort our experience, Coates traveled to Senegal, South Carolina in the US, and the occupied West Bank.
“What I'm trying to do with this book is get out of the way. I'm trying to clear space, hopefully for Palestinian narrators and storytellers, and in a larger sense, you know, for Arab storytellers at large,” he tells Mehdi.
The Palestine section of his book was under attack early in the tour, with one interview on CBS going viral for the bigoted framing and aggressive nature of the questions that Coates was asked by host Tony Dokoupil.
“I was a little surprised, and then I realized what was going on, I was in a fight,” he says, about that interview. “So it was right there, you know, as a pop quiz, but I had studied.”
Mehdi asks Coates about the Biden administration and its steadfast support for Israel - while silence on Palestinian suffering. “[Biden] basically said to a Jewish audience ‘We know you wouldn't be safe without Israel’… That's your job, Joe… Are you saying that you're not going to protect Jewish Americans, who are Americans?” asks Coates, referencing remarks made by the president
“Were Israel’s actions in the Gaza war justified?”
That was the question posed at the debate hosted by the organization ‘Open to Debate’ in New York on September 26, 2024 in front of a live audience of more than 500 people.
Medhi Hassan was onstage against former Israeli government spokesperson (and gaslighter-in-chief) Eylon Levy, and he didn’t hold back, pointing out his long list of lies on Israel’s behalf. He also went through the kids killed, the ‘safe zones’ violated, the aid trucks blocked, and the torture and rape of Palestinian detainees. How could any of that be justified, he asked Levy, again and again. Unsurprisingly, he had no answer whatsoever and even insisted Israel owed no explanation to anyone for its (illegal) actions in Gaza. (At one point, he hilariously pretended not to be able to hear Medhi Hasan.)
Closing remarks
Madam Chair,
What is happening in Gaza is televised, it is on all your screens to see, with the victims reporting on
their destruction in real time. When the history books are written, when all is said and done, no one will
be able to say they didn’t know. No one will be able to say they didn’t know.
And something else which is there for all to see is which countries have taken a principled stance, a
moral stance, a legal stance, and which have not; which countries have engaged in good faith with our
requests for open discussion on arms transfers and which have not; which have stepped up to save lives
and which sent weapons to destroy lives; which countries tried to salvage international law and which
sent the message that the law applies only when politically or economically convenient.
And what the whole world is witnessing is that leadership is coming primarily from the Global South.
Not from those who have refused to condemn Israel, who continue to describe Israel’s actions as “self-
defence”, who continue to provide diplomatic, political or military support, those who are more
offended by people calling out and trying to stop genocide than by genocide itself, who fail once again
during this “never again” moment in history.
Apparently, no crime, no matter how grave – from ethnic cleansing to apartheid to settler colonialism
to genocide – is enough for Israel’s allies to say: Stop.
When Israel made allegations against UNRWA, the UN humanitarian aid agency providing life-saving
aid to the starving population of Gaza, and before investigations into these allegations were even
concluded, those States decided to suspend their aid to the whole organisation. On the other hand, in
decades of findings by United Nations experts, commissions of inquiry, fact-finding missions,
international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations that Israel is responsible for war crimes,
crimes against humanity, apartheid, settler colonialism and now an unfolding genocide, those Stat