Viral Solidarity

As long being a touring performer is no longer a viable option, I’m livestreaming most weekdays at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm Eastern Time, 6 pm GMT) for an hour or so.

Mondays I host Pandemic Open Mic Mondays. Please sign up and participate! On Tuesdays, the show is Fifth Estate Live, produced by Fifth Estate magazine editorial collective member, Peter Werbe. Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, it’s Discussions with David, produced by me.

Where you can watch the livestream broadcasts:

You can also listen to any of the broadcasts after the fact in podcast form if you look for This Week with David Rovics on any podcasting platform, if you follow me on Patreon, as well as on Soundcloud.

While livestreaming a concert for the internet on April 2nd at Big Red Studio in Corbett, Oregon, we were also making a high-quality recording of the show. I cut out most of the talking and tuning, and this live album is the result. But if you want to hear the whole show, with all the talking and tuning, you can download it for free. Thanks to Canada’s National Union of General and Public Employees for sponsoring the concert!

Notes from a Failed State by David Rovics

At the beginning of June, 2020 I spent a long day at Big Red Studio making this solo acoustic album, mostly consisting of songs written during the pandemic lockdown period of April and May.

Pandemic Sessions Album Project

In the interest of making a great album with stellar local musicians, and employing said musicians so they might pay their rent for a month with our collective help, I have an album crowdfunding campaign going, to that end.

Online Concerts and Other Events

During and after the crisis (but especially during) I’m available to do concerts, workshops, talks, discussions, etc., online. There are many ways this can be done. I can broadcast on Twitter (Periscope), Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, VK and/or Twitch, individually or simultaneously. I can broadcast directly on your group’s Facebook Page, if you give me admin access. It can be very public or very private, or somewhere in between. Here’s more info on hosting online events. Here’s more info on online house concerts.

Podcasts

There are several dozen episodes of my podcasts, This Week with David Rovics and Song For Today, available for free on all the usual podcasting platforms. Here are some about the COVID-19 crisis.

Rent Strike

A lot of people are not going to pay their rent this month, across the USA and elsewhere. Not paying the rent is not a rent strike. A rent strike is an organized, collective effort to make long-term change to property relations in this sick, capitalist society. These relations desperately need to change, and now is the time to start making it happen — because we must, which is a pretty good instigator, in case morality and humanity weren’t good enough reasons to begin with. Please check out this project: Artists For Rent Control.

Things To Do At Home

Here on my website you’ll find in the Songbook section that many of the songs listed there include sheet music. I also have two albums of children’s songs that you’ll find up there, and a songbook of sheet music and chords for singing the songs yourself, too. Just email me if you’d like a complimentary copy of the children’s songbook.

I could recommend that it’s a good time to catch up on listening to albums, podcasts and audio books of mine and other folks, most of which you can easily find for free on this website or on streaming platforms like Spotify. But you already know that being quarantined is a good time for consumption of such material. What is also very important is to find more active things to do. That’s why I advocate and help facilitate the actual playing of an instrument and learning of songs.

But another principle I’d emphasize is the project orientation. People who are used to working normal jobs are often unfamiliar with this way of life, which is more familiar to artists, writers, and musicians. That is the project orientation — pick a project, and then get obsessed with it. If you get in the zone, you can spend hours or even days or weeks working on a song, a recording, a novel, or any number of other things, virtually forgetting where you are. But if you’re watching the clock and trying to fill your time, you’ll probably lose it.

If you have young children, or even older children, and you’re finding it stressful to spend so much time with them, this could be a great time to read the ebook, Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort, which will make you a better parent, and make your life easier at the same time. If you’re thinking about homeschooling, How Children Learn is a classic by John Holt which I highly recommend. Don’t teach, or preach.

If you, like me, enjoy reading history books that are really well-written and will take you on a nice journey, my favorite authors, both in terms of style and content, include Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous People’s History of the United States), Charles Mann (1491, 1493), Robert Fisk (The Great War For Civilization, Pity the Nation), Eduardo Galleano (Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War), John Ross (War Against Oblivion), Naomi Klein (Shock Doctrine), Matthew Desmond (Evicted), Nancy Isenberg (White Trash), Chris Hedges (Death of the Liberal Class).

If you’re looking for good sci fi movies to watch, I highly recommend anything directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium, Chappie). For reality as it is today, Ken Loach. If his stuff gets too depressing, switch to Michael Moore.

If you’re out of toilet paper, or even if you’re not, try filling an old bottle, such as a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle, with water. Then aim and squirt it where you want things to be clean. Voila, keep it up for 30 seconds or so, and you will be clean. Welcome to the way the rest of the world cleans their asses. Toilet paper is really a stupid invention and is not at all hygienic. Water is much better, as they have long known in the Middle East, Japan and elsewhere. Good time to figure that out yourself, if you hadn’t already. You can dry your clean ass off with a cloth towel, which can be laundered.

If spending too much time at home is causing you to gain weight but the stores have not yet run out of vegetables, you can actually stay home, get very little exercise, and still lose weight, if you stop eating grains and beans altogether, and follow a more macro/keto/paleo kind of diet, such as the one laid out in the book, the Plant Paradox. This is an especially good idea right now, because obesity is one of the complicating factors that makes you more likely to die from Clovid-19 if you get it.

Almost all of the books I mentioned here are available as audiobooks online, either for free through your local library (apps such as Overdrive and Libby are often used to provide free reading and listening materials to library card holders) or for money through Audible.