Letters From Fukushima: Tepco Worker Emails

"I just wanted people to understand that there are many people fighting under harsh circumstances in the nuclear plants. That is all I want.

Crying is useless. If we’re in hell now all we can do is to crawl up towards heaven." 

".... But everyone here pays respect and has lowered their head to pray for those who are facing the brunt of it and fighting on the front lines surrounded by enemies.

Although I am not in a position to say such a thing, I beg you to hang in there.

What I can do for you is limited. But when the time comes, we will take our turn to protect you all. Without fail."

"I myself have had to stay in the disaster measurement headquarters the entire time ever since the earthquake occurred, and have been fighting alongside my colleagues without any sleep or rest. Personally, my entire hometown, Namie-machi, which is located along the coast, was washed away by the tsunami. My parents were washed away by the tsunami and I still don’t know where they are. Normally I would rush to their house as soon as I could. But I can’t even enter the area because it is under an evacuation order. The Self-Defense Forces are not conducting a search there. I’m engaged in extremely tough work under this kind of mental condition…I can’t take this any more!"

[From WSJ]

Veronica Lake.

From Vintage Photographs

Dance, Dance, Dance

(title unknown):

 "

Miles

[Vintage Photographs]

Sonny Clark

Clark seated at piano backstage at Syria Mosque for Night of Stars event, 1946. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Heinz Family Fund; © 2004 Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive.

Forty-eight years ago today, the pianist Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark died of a heroin overdose in a shooting gallery somewhere in New York City. He was thirty-one. The previous two nights—January 11 and 12, 1963—he had played piano at Junior’s Bar on the ground floor of the Alvin Hotel on the northwest corner of Fifty-second and Broadway. On Sunday, January 13, the temperature reached thirty-eight degrees in Central Park. 

The next thing we know with certainty is that Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a noted jazz patron, called Clark’s older sister in Pittsburgh to inform her of her brother’s death. Nica, as the baroness was known, said she would pay to have the body transported to his hometown and that she’d pay for a proper funeral. 

What is not known, however, is if the body in the New York City morgue with Clark’s name on it was his. Witnesses in both New York and Pittsburgh (after the body arrived there) believed it wasn’t; they thought it didn’t look like Sonny. Some suspected a conspiracy with the drug underground with which Clark was entangled, but, as African Americans in a white system, they were reticent to discuss the matter. It was probably a simple case of carelessness at the morgue, something not uncommon with “street” deaths at the time, particularly when the corpses were African American. Today, there’s a gravestone with Clark’s name on it in the rural hills outside Pittsburgh, where a body shipped from New York was buried in mid-January of that year. How painful it must have been to stay silent and let a funeral proceed, not knowing for sure where Sonny’s body was. His may be one of the thousands of unidentified ones buried in potter’s field on New York’s Hart Island, where Sonny himself dug graves years earlier, while incarcerated at Riker’s Island on drug charges. 

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[From Paris Review]

Lovely piece on a great jazz pianist. I might even have the recordings with Grant Green Stephenson's talking about. Like all the commenters, I hope he does do a biography on Clark. There are so many jazz biographies screaming to be written.