Ron Sylvester: Iraq vet: Wounds outlast combat: The Wichita Peace Center sponsored a video/talk at the library last night, where a local Iraq War vet, Ethan McCord, talked about the WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video. It basically shows a US helicopter mowing down a group of Iraqis on a street in Baghdad, one of whom was carrying a video camera (mistakenly identified as some sort of weapon). A van then pulls up, the driver trying to load up the wounded to take them to get help. The helicopter then destroys the van. McCord was one of the first soldiers on the ground in the video. He pulled two badly wounded children out of the van, and carried them to an Army vehicle nearby to be taken for treatment. (Not clear if that even happened, since at one point we hear orders countermanding use of the vehicle to help the civilians, let alone whether they survived.) McCord left Iraq disabled with wounds from an IED, and is currently working with Iraq Veterans Against the War. Another Iraq vet, Will Stewart-Starks, also appeared.

For me the most striking thing about the talk was the detail in how US soldiers are desensitized and brutalized to fulfill their combat roles, and how this is constantly reinforced through the ranks. When asked about fragging, which happened often enough in Vietnam to sour the officer core on the draft, McCord pointed out that today's soldiers are more likely to kill themselves. He then cited yet another case just a day or two ago.

There was much play on the "support the troops" meme, but what I took away is something different. The real atrocity isn't what happens when you put troops into action, regardless of the reasons for doing so; rather, it starts in basic training, when you start to turn normal people into soldiers. Once they are soldiers, their skillset and survival instincts are bound to produce atrocities, as we've seen continuously in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those atrocities raise serious questions as to whether there is any practical political use for the US military in foreign nations where the US wants to consolidate any sort of friendly popular alliance -- i.e., where the collateral damage intrinsic to the way US troops are trained and deployed makes it impossible to sway enough "hearts and minds" -- and that should be enough to convince us to shy away from those wars.

But the human cost of supporting this kind of military goes back further, all the way to basic training. If we really cared for the people who fall under the "support the troops" slogan we wouldn't turn them into soldiers in the first place. We'd work to give them education, jobs, a chance to build families and grow old without the scars of war.

One person at the meeting made the point that he voted for Obama in 2008 specifically to stop the war, then was shocked when Obama turned around and escalated the war in Afghanistan. He didn't seem to take this personally -- e.g., as an example of the perfidy we expect from politicians. Rather, he wondered what there is in the power structure in Washington that bends people who should know better to their will. Another person pointed out that as we were meeting Obama was speaking about the semi-withdrawal of US forces and semi-closure of the US war in Iraq. Reading about Obama's speech in the paper this morning was far more disappointing than imagining it last night. There was no need for Obama to hie off to an army base to frame the speech, or to make a big show of going around shaking hands with soldiers. And there was no excuse for saying this:

As we do, I am mindful that the Iraq War has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it is time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq's future.

It's bad enough to continue some Bush policies because you can't move the federal bureaucracy around fast enough to realign it on a new set of principles. But it's something else completely to go out of your way to whitewash George W. Bush, a president who ended eight years of one miserable, cynical failure after another with public support polling around 22% -- Obama, despite being the victim of a well-financed, professionally-managed smear campaign, as well as the drag of two wars and a huge recession he didn't start, still polls better than 45%. If Obama was elected for any reason at all, it was to bury Bush. What he said isn't just false -- if Bush was truly committed to our security, he wouldn't have started wars to engender future attacks on us; if he loved our country, he wouldn't have bankrupted the government and filled it up with corporate cronies to pick over the remains; if he cared about our young people he wouldn't have turned so many of them into soldiers to be cracked in hopeless, pointless foreign wars. And it's not time to turn the page: there are still 50,000 troops in Iraq, more than double that in Afghanistan, plus unlimited air power and imperial embassies relentlessly poking and prodding their way in what should be the internal affairs of other countries; there are still strong efforts to resist our presence and dominance, and they will keep fighting as long as we are there; there are still millions of displaced people, with little hope of returning to any sort of normal life until we leave; and we are still burning up hundreds of billions of dollars every year we stay, while our own country rots and collapses. Just because Obama has surrendered to the pro-war forces in this country doesn't mean we should; all it really means is that Obama has become as much a part of the problem as the hawks he once ran against.

Then Obama goes on to say:

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there.

Uh, hullo! Some of us were dead set against "the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11" as of that very day. Obama may be asserting that we're not in the political spectrum, not even at the far fringes of it, which would be a pretty insulting position to take for someone so eager to forgive and cozy up to war criminals like Bush. But more importantly, it's a downright stupid position to take. One big reason so many people went along with the "use of force" idea after 9/11 is that they didn't have the faintest notion of what they were getting into. Had it been well understood that nine years later "use of force" would wind up meaning that 4,400 US soldiers would die, another 32,000 would be wounded (many gravely), that 20-25% of US soldiers would suffer from PTSD (leading to a rash of suicides), that we would have burned through $750 billion in direct expenses while incurring long-term debts and liabilities of several trillion dollars, that we would have vastly destabilized Iraq and Afghanistan (and less directly Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Lebanon, while pushing Iran much closer to developing nuclear weapons), that even after drawing down troops in Iraq we would still have more than 160,000 troops stationed in Asia, that we still wouldn't be able to lay our hands on the two supreme leaders of Al-Qaeda, would we still be talking about near-unanimous "use of force" support?

Some of the people who opposed that "use of force" did so for basic principles, but some were just a hell of a lot smarter than the conventional wisdom. But then conventional wisdom was pretty dumb to think that you could round up a small cell of religious fanatics on the far side of the world with a huge army and air force and navy that were built to reduce whole nations to stone age rubble. In fact, the only people, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were in any way responsible for 9/11 who were captured were picked up by old-fashioned police work, by Pakistan -- we'll see about bringing them to justice when/if they ever get a trial, but we've so debased the concept of justice along the way it may not matter.

As if that wasn't enough, let's wind up with one more Obama quote:

Every American who serves joins an unbroken line of heroes that stretches from Lexington to Gettysburg; from Iwo Jima to Inchon; from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own. Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.

First, the wars that Obama lines up here aren't equivalent, and to the extent that they form a trend line we should be disturbed. The American Revolution was a war to throw off an abusive foreign power, fought against their troops on our soil. The Civil War was a struggle between competing notions (ideals and interests) of what our nation should be, with one side defending their custom of holding most of their workforce in perpetual slavery. WWII was a war that we reluctantly entered after an aggressively imperial Japan attacked us, or more specifically our relatively benign imperial interests in the Pacific. Korea can still be painted as a defensive war, but only if you assume that our occupation of Korea is legitimate and a Korean invasion of our occupied zone isn't. Although Vietnam was superficially divided like Korea, it was us who invaded there, with over 500,000 troops to prop up a puppet government that even we had to overthrow several times before we got a stable combination. And Afghanistan didn't even offer us the fig leaf of a favorable invitation: from 1979 on we deliberately and perversly wrecked a country that meant nothing to us, promoting a religious fanaticism that ultimately turned back on us, leading us to further escalate the destruction.

There are three vectors to these wars: one is that each one is further removed from home; the second is that the ideals we use to justify these wars have become ever more debased; the third is that the soldiers have become more mercenary -- even before the draft was eliminated the balance of effective force shifted toward the professional air force and navy, but today's warrior caste is an unprecedented extreme.

The second big problem with this quote is the assertion that fighting these wars has made "the lives of our children better than our own." Independence removed an imperial burden, the Civil War cleared the stage for a vast industrial expansion, but those blessings were accomplished post-war. WWII is a bit anomalous in that it did significantly boost the domestic economy by proving the value of massive Keynesian spending and regulation, traits that we kept for the most universally prosperous decades of our history. On the other hand, all subsequent wars have drained our economy and sapped our resources for virtually no benefit. We haven't been threatened by a foreign power in over 200 years. Virtually everything that has made our lives better results from science and industry and trade, and those are blessings of peace.

As for "troops are the steel in our ship of state," it's hard to imagine a more brazenly imperialist line of crap. If Obama keeps spewing lines like that it's going to be awful hard to argue back when Glenn Beck accuses him of being a fascist.

Of course, what Obama's doing here is probably just pandering. Practically everybody panders to the troops -- probably more than half of the crowd in last night's antiwar meeting are guilty in some sense, even if what they really mean by "support" is that they want to salvage the human beings they presume the troops were before they were shipped off to war. But pandering to the troops isn't about salvaging people: it's about keeping the war machine grinding along. At least when Bush rambled on about "support the troops" you knew he didn't care how many were broken; all he really meant was "support my wars." Maybe what Obama really means by "support the troops" is "don't blame me for my wars." Fair enough, but what I don't see is how he gets to peace without cutting way back on the machinery of war, and the troops are a big part of that -- both because they serve and because they gravitate into cheerleading groups like VFW, which politicians like Obama wind up thinking they have to placate.

This is the second installment of Michael Tatum's post-Christgau consumer guide. The debut came out a month ago, and I expect this to remain a monthly feature as long as he can stand the workload. I've built a nice little archive area for these columns -- first one is here and you can work out the rest from links there.

A Downloader's Diary: September 2010

by Michael Tatum

In classic lapsed-Catholic fashion, my superego spent all of August wondering if I championed the critically-drudged Liz Phair and Eminem records last month merely to make a splashy impression for my first column. This month I felt guilty about gravitating toward an obvious album of the year consensus pick, so I branched a little out of my comfort zone and found an Afropop excavation I loved even more. What do they have in common? They're both masterminded by two men from conservative religious backgrounds who realized they needed to leave a little bit of their world behind because the great wide world had something more to offer. So what if I'm projecting -- take that, Glenn Beck.

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (Merge) One of the many reasons I admire Win Butler is that when he titles his band's new record The Suburbs it won't be a two-dimensional attack on the same -- he leaves the sophomoricism to Green Day, who keep it so simplistic Broadway comes a-calling. Not to say he is uncritical of where he came from, but like his relationship to the Mormon faith into which he was born, he can't dismiss it entirely -- it informs one of the many facets of the man he has become. This confuses a lot of people who confuse irony with complexity: contrary to what some have suggested, Butler doesn't hate his fans. His gentle derision of the arcade kids in "Rococo" doesn't derive from anger, but from empathy -- he was once that kid who was bored when the bombs were dropped, that kid in the corner with his arms folded tight, the one who used to wait but now he's ready to start. The message here is that the distance that young people cultivate to deal with the painful transition from innocence to experience is an emotional dead end, and this album means to shatter those defenses, one exhilarating anthem after another. And if you need further balance, there's Régine Chassane's glorious "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," about why starry-eyed arcade kids flee to the city -- even if they return home to settle down to raise their future daughters before the damage is done. A

Best Coast: Crazy For You (Mexican Summer) The superior shoreline in question is Los Angeles, a slacker Shangri-La where Bethany Cosentino smokes weed, hangs out with her cat Snacks, pines for various pretty boys, and with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno cooks up a dreamy pop amalgam that suggests Sister-era Sonic Youth channeling, well, the Shangri-Las. The swooping, instantly hummable melodies confirm that not only does Cosentino have the Carole King/Barry Mann part down, but the way she wraps her decorous vocal cords around them shows she's got the Ronnie Spector part down, too. But the shallow lyrical conception -- twice she promises to love the object of her affections "till the end" as if it means till the end of summer vacation -- leaves one wondering how much she's really pondered "Leader of the Pack" and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow." Has she spent too much time lying in her deckchair reading teenage romance novels, or did she think such complexities would mar the music's sunny innocence? I enjoy basking in this music's considerable charms regardless -- but truthfully, I've never been the beach-going type, and I've been a fellow denizen of the superior shoreline in question for twenty-five of my thirty-nine years. A-

Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma (Warp) His vaunted Coltrane connections aside, Steven Ellison's frenetic samples overlaying samples overlaying samples, denser and more ambitious than anything he attempted on 2007's Los Angeles, at their best recall great Jon Hassell, Nils Petter Molvaer, and other inheritors of Miles Davis' mid-70s fusion fracases. Cue up any track and he'll cram your ears with fistfuls of sonic candy, though Auntie Alice's harp flourishes are an irritation, and like other laptop wizards, I wish he'd curb his fondness for film soundtracks. But what's missing, especially since the music isn't guided by or tied together by any organizational principles other than a mix so clinical you can hear the clanging together of surgical instruments, is emotional payoff -- what a big-brain like Ellison might cynically dismiss as "cheese." With twelve of the seventeen tracks ranging from one minute to two and a half, cutting out before their patterns induce the hypnosis this branch of electronic usually intends, there's no ebb and flow, no climax, either within tracks or across the record as a whole -- randomly jumbling its sequence (yes, I tried) neither improves nor weakens its shambolic mesh. The pop junkie in me wonders whether or not this could be strengthened by more guest vocalists, but Laura Darlington's wobbly offer as a "sounding board" is upstaged by the finest use of a ping pong ball as percussion in the history of recorded music. And Thom Yorke pontificating in his highly processed warble if there's "anyone out there" inadvertently illuminates that if Ellison knew he was reaching people emotionally, he wouldn't have to coax Yorke to ask. A-

El Guincho: Piratas de Sudamerica: Vol. 1 (XL/Young Turks) The brainwave behind this five song EP, the first of a projected series, is both so ingenious and obvious I'm surprised Manu Chao or Tom Zé didn't think of it first. In an aesthetic strategy similar to Moby's Play, Pablo Díaz-Reixa tweaks various "field recordings" (in this case, lost classics from the Cuban orchestras of the '30s -- the title is a slight misnomer) with his bag of studio tricks, aiming for shimmering lo-fi charm rather than extravagant arena-ready grandiosity. Díaz-Reixa realizes his cross-cultural dreams best on his remix of the Lecuona Cuban Boys' "Hindou," a shameless romanticization of the far-east so beguiling in its naivety even V.S. Naipaul would approve. My only objection to the package -- aside from the anti-climactic closing lullaby -- is its brevity. Treated as an in-between side project, a warm-up for the release of Díaz-Reixa's Pop Negro in September, the music is strong enough to warrant a wider exploration, a grander context -- a Play of its own. A-

Los Lobos: Tin Can Trust (Shout! Factory) Compromise has kept these amenable East Angelenos thick as thieves for thirty years, but it's also trapped them in an artistic rut since the bean counters kicked them off Warner Bros. By "compromise" I don't just mean the vagaries that defined their tenure at the accursed Hollywood Records, but the aesthetic cease-fire that's prevented David Hidalgo from instigating the kind of power play that enabled them to make such daring records with Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake (1996's underrated Colossal Head more so than 1993's overrated Kiko, and the Latin Playboys spinoffs most of all). Although they cared enough about the music to fight their way back onto the roster of a sympathetic indie -- the first they've been on since the Slash years -- this band has been through too much for one of them to start rocking the boat: second banana Cesar Rosas, still the band's traditionalist, contributes lively if predictable salsa and norteño pastiches, while Hidalgo mildly indulges the band's more experimental side, without veering too far into the strange. Having said that, this is their strongest record since their mid-90s peak regardless -- even on the new original saddled with an embarrassing Robert Hunter lyric (never, never, never rhyme "in this world" with "give it a whirl") Hidalgo executes one of the record's many fierce, stark guitar solos. And then there's the amazing "27 Spanishes," which makes "Cortez the Killer" look two-dimensional -- starts off with foreboding whip-crack snares, then ends by offhandedly pointing out that these days the Conquistador-Aztec progeny "sit around on their porches playing guitar." Hey guys -- those imperialist assholes are responsible for my existence, too. A-

M.I.A.: Maya (XL/Interscope) Theoretically, I approve of the metallic, lo-fi aesthetic -- it's the natural of impulse of artists following a blockbuster to head for the metaphorical ditch: Neil Young of course, Nirvana's In Utero, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Some have suggested a more precise analogy might be to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but these are the kind of squiggles, squawks, and bleeps that fire the synapses, rather than blur into white noise tedium. Tune into the lyrics however, and you realize that the difficult music is actually the artiste's way of covering up -- subconsciously, I bet -- her insecurity about the ideas she's expressing. The intro suggests that the government utilizes the internet (Facebook, apparently) for purposes of identity theft, but the pop psychologist in me wonders if Maya Arulpragasam might actually be worried about losing her identity to her fiancé. "You know who I am," she repeats unconvincingly in the first track, before bemoaning "You want me be somebody who I'm really not" when her man gets a little too close in the next: "I try and not show it/But I think you really know." Sometimes she buries her fear in political metaphor: "They told me this is a free country/But now it feels like a chicken factory/I feel cooped up, I wanna bust free/Got nothing to lose if you get me." Sometimes, as in the defensive "Born Free," she transfers her fear to the media. Other times, she's more oblique: "Gravity's my enemy." When she resigns to her fate by copping to the terminally lame "It Iz What It Iz" cliché, I throw up my hands. We existentialists believe it is what you make it. And it doesn't "take a muscle to fall in love" -- how about lowering your defenses a little? A-

D.O. Misiani & Shirati Jazz: The King of History (Sterns Africa) Over the last decade, Sterns Music has cemented its reputation as the finest distributor and compiler of classic Afropop by assembling long overdue, definitive sets by the genre's giants: Papa Wemba, Rochereau, Franco (twice), and Etoile de Dakar. Comprised solely of vinyl-only recordings almost entirely unheard outside of their native Kenya, this left-field surprise accomplishes something I didn't think possible: it adds a new giant to the canon. You won't be disappointed if you hunt for Daniel Owino Misiani's only other American showcase, the '80s provenance recordings collected on Earthworks' long out of print Benga Blast!, but despite its clear mastery, it's also somewhat by the numbers, perfunctory -- expressed in Beatles terms, a Let it Be. This mid-'70s explosion of hit singles, which rescues only one of the three smashes cited on Misiani's entry on Allmusic.com, is the real blast: a benga Please Please Me. The Shirati Jazz are young guns ready to make some noise, led by a rebel-rousing young man whose deeply Christian father destroyed his first guitar, delighted for the opportunity to commit heresy after joyous heresy on a slew of killer 45s. You say you want rollicking rhythms, rubbernecking bass, dualing quicksilver guitar lines, and harmonies so indelible you could interchange with them the equally indelible melodies? You'll get them -- but you could get those on Benga Blast! too, if not so ebulliently or energetically. What will keep you coming back are the whoops, whistles, birdcalls, cowbells, and other surprising percussive devices that sound spontaneous as they leap out of your speakers even though some of them must have been carefully timed in advance. Think the New York Dolls, of girl groups, of early rock and roll -- hell, of the Beatles. Such exuberance, such joy -- you'd think they were inventing a new kind of music or something. A+

The Roots: How I Got Over (Def Jam) The title is the latest of their multi-layered pop-culture in jokes: a reference to the classic Clara Ward gospel tune inspired by the night Ward's sister faked a bout of glossolalia to scare off white lynchers, but also a nudge and a wink to the cynics who think it takes samples from Jim James and Joanna Newsom to entice the indie audience into lapping up Ahmir Thompson and Associates' expert rap-rock-R&B-whatever hybrid. Fact is, the indie crowd has been hip to these Philadelphians since their debut, released on the same now-defunct label that broke Nirvana and Beck. It wasn't until they made the lateral switch to MCA and then Def Jam however, that they actually began deserving their rep: partly because their revolving door of rappers, singers, and musicians has kept their sound in a perpetual state of fruitful evolution, and partly because they realized the medium is the message -- that good songs are more compelling than good politics and good intentions. Because of this I prefer 2007's Rising Down, but it's a measure of their remarkable consistency that 2002's breakthrough Phrenology, 2004's underrated groove workout The Tipping Point, and now this, supposedly their swansong but don't count on it, all come pretty damn close. Like Win Butler, their searching ruminations on God are far from vacant navel-gazing -- thank the smarts of Black Thought and the revolving door of rappers, etc. for that. But what makes a quatrain like "Out on these streets where I grew up/First thing they teach you is not to give a fuck/That type of thinking can't get you nowhere/Someone has to care" affecting in song like it isn't on the page isn't the otherwise expert vocals, it's the power and subtlety of the rhythm section -- suspiciously described this time around by more than one young indie-rock critic as "in the pocket." I'd say that if Ahmir Thompson challenged Al Jackson, Jr. and Tony Thompson to a round of billiards played with drum sticks as cues, I know who I'd put my money on. A-

Honorable Mentions

Robyn: Body Talk Vol. 1 (Cherrytree) "My label's killing me," she complains, though does concede to their ill-conceived marketing scheme ("Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do," "Fembot," "Dancing on My Own") ***

Brian Wilson: Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (Disney) Making up with modestly gorgeous arrangements for what he completely lacks in interpretive nuance and ironic subtext ("It Ain't Necessarily So," "Someone to Watch Over Me") ***

Janelle Monáe: The Archandroid (Atlantic) George Clinton and Outkast's sci-fi was goofy and they knew it, hers is pure camp -- too bad the American Musical and Dramatic Academy encouraged her to take camp seriously ("Cold War," "Tightrope") **

Reflection Eternal: Revolutions Per Minute (Warner Bros.) "A shift in the hip hop paradigm" no, "Download from your local internet provider" why not? ("Ballad of the Black Gold," "Just Begun") **

Sage Francis: Li(f)e (Anti/Epitaph) This former fiction writing group proctor would like to point out his short stories could be tightened by a sharp DJ and/or a well-programmed drum machine ("I Was Zero," "London Bridge") **

Method Actors: This Is Still It (Acute) Athens, GA's own Gang of Two ("Do the Method") *

Jason Moran: Ten (Blue Note) Stride-happy pianist with deceptive taste in song titles constructs unassuming foundations that cry out for some dissonance, cognitive and otherwise, from a more daring soloist ("Gangsterism Over Ten Years," "Old Babies") *

Field Music: Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries/Revolver) Hooks with no bait ("Them That Do Nothing") *

Trash

Rick Ross: Teflon Don (Def Jam) It's obvious why mush-mouthed William Leonard Roberts II failed as a corrections officer -- his oafish baritone conveys the authority of a bar drunk bellowing at you to pass the peanuts. Nevertheless, like so many civil servants before him, he harbored dreams of hip hop stardom, so he adopted both the name and persona of a famous drug trafficker (who sued for ten million), generating his own tepid publicity by manufacturing an absurd beef with 50 Cent -- who retaliated by coaxing Roberts' babymama to spill the beans about Roberts' employment history on YouTube. Fortunately, it's almost written into the Def Jam contract for the likes of Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Erykah Badu to lend their names even to the label's D-list artists, which proved just the commercial push Roberts needed to fund the debauched lifestyle he details so banally in song. What baffles me is why even critics are cottoning to his rote gangsta boilerplate -- he'll never die a "bitch nigga," whoop de ha hey. This record compensates toning down the faux-gangsta posturing of his previous flops by upping the misogyny, but I reserve special umbrage for "Tears of Joy," which begins with a snippet of Bobby Seale quoting Huey P. Newton in favor of offing cops and declares, "I gotta represent for Emmett Till / All the dead souls in the field." I'm no advocate for murder, but at least Bobby Seale was standing up for years of Emmett Tills who died at the hands of bigots merely for being black -- the only civil rights the Teflon Don seems to give a shit about are the rights to cruise hot bitches, drive Lamborghinis, and (no kidding) take his mom to the Poconos, all in the guise of a unrepentant pusher defending his turf by pointing his automatic at guys he, in his previous life, would theoretically have worked alongside. Bet in a real shootout between the cops and whomever, he'd choose whichever side had the most guns. In the meantime, I believe this liar like I believed Ronald Reagan -- nothing stuck to that motherfucker either. B-

Sam Amidon: I See the Sign (Bedroom Community)

Budos Band: Budos Band III (Daptone)

Matthew Dear: Black City (Ghostly International)

Lissie: Catching the Tiger (Fat Possum)

Laura Marling: I Speak Because I Can (Astralwerks)

John Mellencamp: No Better Than This (Rounder)

Pulled Apart by Horses: Pulled Apart by Horses (Transgressive)

Ra Ra Riot: The Orchard (Barsuk)

Wavves: King of the Beach (Fat Possum)

Almost blew another week, but in the end enough stuff came together that I can say that Jazz Consumer Guide (24) is done. Initial query suggests it may appear in the Village Voice around September 29, although later dates are possible as well. Draft currently totes up to 1617 words covering 56 albums, so expect the HM list to be long. Leftovers come to 1400 words and 44 albums, so it looks like we'll be trapped in backlog for quite some while. I still have a fair sized shelf of rated, still in need of review albums, so I'll probably focus on them the next week or two, adding to next cycle's draft and kicking some into surplus.

The collected Jazz Prospecting file is here: totals came to 218 albums prospected, plus 97 carryovers from past rounds. Despite my best intentions to rush up the cycle, the prospecting period was almost exactly three months (July 1 to August 30). I still have a fair amount of transitional paperwork to do, but did at least catch up with the incoming mail. Two weeks of Jazz Prospecting notes below, with almost nothing new getting into the final draft -- not even the Joe Locke dud, which is my usual rationale for bothering with Rhapsody this late in the game.

Will post a new "Downloader's Diary" in short course, and rather thin "Recycled Goods" and "Rhapsody Streamnotes" should be out by the end of the week. I'm beat, bothered, bewildered, but hopefully the nastiest summer we've had since 2000 will wind down before long. New cycle begins now, and the queues are overflowing.

Conference Call: What About . . . . ? (2007-08 [2010], Not Two, 2CD): Quartet, on their sixth album since 2000, the core Gebhard Ullmann (tenor sax, soprano sax, bass clarinet), Michael Jefry Stevens (piano), and Joe Fonda (bass), with George Schuller their present and most frequent drummer -- other albums have used Matt Wilson, Han Bennink, and Gerry Hemingway. Ullmann is very prolific, but he seems to perform best when someone else sets the parameters, which Stevens does here -- most likely Fonda too, as the Fonda/Stevens group goes back even further and has been recorded even more extensively. Two live in Krakow sets, the second a bit easier to get into -- Stevens' "Could This Be a Polka?" had me thinking first of tango -- but both satisfying mixes of sour and not-quite-sweet. A-

Esperanza Spalding: Chamber Music Society (2009-10 [2010], Heads Up): Bassist, singer, Downbeat cover girl; b. 1984, Portland, OR; third album since 2005, singing more each time, with a lot more scat here, but also with Gretchen Parlato taking over two vocals, and Milton Nascimento chiming in on a third (a Spalding original -- Parlato takes the semi-obligatory Jobim cut). The chamber effect comes from violin-viola-cello, steadied by Leo Genovese piano, with Terri Lynne Carrington drums, and Quintino Cinalli percussion. "Wild Is the Wind" is a welcome cover, but there's not much else to latch onto. B-

ROVA & Nels Cline Singers: The Celestial Septet (2008 [2010], New World): World renowned saxophone quartet plus world renowned guitar-bass-drums trio, works out to be a pretty full-featured band. The saxophonists -- Bruce Ackley, Steve Adams, Larry Ochs, and Jon Raskin -- are used to orchestrating their own harmony, but assuming the Singers will take up the slack they get to stretch out a bit here. But Nels Cline, bassist Devin Hoff, and drummer Scott Amendola don't harmonize so much as build up the ambient noise level, putting this into Electric Ascension territory, minus the annoyances of the Coltrane script. Closest they come is Ochs's 25:23 paean to Albert Ayler, "Whose to Know," where the noise climax seems well-earned. B+(***)

Judith Berkson: Oylam (2009 [2010], ECM): Vocalist -- "soprano" is how she puts it -- plays piano and various keybs here, accordion elsewhere; studied at New England Conservatory; based in Brooklyn; cantor at Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation Kehilat Shir Ami; also has a band named Platz Machen into Hebrew liturgy. Second album. I've heard the first, Lu-Lu, and, well, didn't like it. This was headed the same way, but little bits started to connect -- fragments of Porter and Gershwin, a slice of German (OK, very probably Yiddish), some piano. Very spare and rather arty. B+(**)

Kneebody: You Can Have Your Moment (2009 [2010], Winter & Winter): Postbop group with a little funk undertow, probably related to their fondness for Fender Rhodes and effects. Adam Benjamin (as I said), Shane Endsley (trumpet), Kaveh Rastegar (electric bass), Ben Wendel (sax, melodica), Nate Wood (drums -- the only one not credited with effects). Cut an eponymous album for Dave Douglas's Greenleaf Music label in 2005, and got their name out front on Theo Bleckman's Twelve Songs by Charles Ives. Played this one too many times and have to move on: the horns are names I recognize but have yet to register strongly, the Rhodes is neither here nor there, and the drummer's a busy guy who has something beyond funk to add. B+(*)

Theo Bleckmann: I Dwell in Possibility (2009 [2010], Winter & Winter): Vocalist, b. 1966 in Dortmund, Germany. Has a rather high voice, which he supplements with various toys to produce odd sounds. Francis Davis raved about him in a recent Village Voice column: "Beckmann is the most startlingly original male vocalist since Bobby McFerrin" -- then thinking further insisted that Bleckmann's "more rigorous intellect" will help him avoid "the same slippery slope into feckless novelty" McFerrin was prone to. This is the most hard core of Bleckmann's records, a solo effort, but not exactly acappella -- his credits read "voice, autoharp, chime balls, chimes, finger symbals, flutes, glass harp, hand-held fan, Indonesian frog buzzer, iPhone, lyre, melodica, miniature zither, nut shell shakers, rotary pan flute, shruti box, tongue drum, toy amp, toy boxes, toy megaphones, vibra tone, water bottle." The songs include James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Kurt Schwitters, Meredith Monk, "I Hear a Rhapsody" and "Comes Love," plus original music to lyrics from Emily Dickinson, Euripides, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Rather difficult to hear and/or to pick up on, sometimes cute, no doubt brilliant. B+(*)

Hat: Local (2008 [2010], Hatmusic): Spanish group. I've been listing them under pianist Sergi Sirvent, but this one swings pretty hard to guitarist Jordi Matas, who outwrites Sirvent five to three and plays the crucial instrument here, while Sirvent plays Fender Rhodes and a little trumpet -- not what you'd call brilliant but he's still rather effective. The quartet is rounded out with Marc Cuevas on bass (acoustic and electric) and xylophone and Oscar Doménech on drums and tinaja, each writing one song. All four also enjoy voice credits, although there's not a lot -- part of the opener, and a Matas song called "Money" that may be the first such song not to ring up some cash registers. Matas plays terrific screeching guitar there -- I'd peg it as a rock song but the musicians are way too fancy and the vocals don't get any mileage out of their crudeness. Seems transitional, but no idea to what. B+(**)

Dawn of Midi: First (2010, Accretions): Piano trio: Pakistani percussionist Qassim Naqvi, Indian contrabassist Aakaash Israni, and Moroccan pianist Amino Belyamani. Based in New York and/or Paris. First album. Evenly balanced group, the piano more rhythm than melody, especially setting out various minimalist lines, while the bass covers the whole gamut. Got stuck playing this too many times today, which makes me want to force the grade and move on. Agreeable as background, but really appreciates your full attention. B+(***)

Commitment: The Complete Recordings 1981/1983 (1980-83 [2010], No Business, 2CD): Bassist William Parker was less than 30 when he formed this group, with one self-released album (released 1981; reissued as Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace by Eremite in 1998), side credits with Frank Lowe and Billy Bang, with Cecil Taylor still in his future. Violinist Jason Kao Hwang was less than 25. The senior member was Will Connell, Jr., b. 1938. He turned to music after an accident in the Air Force nearly blinded him. In Los Angeles in the 1960s he fell into Horace Tapscott's circle, then moved back to New York "because I wanted to be a hermit." He plays flute, alto sax, bass clarinet, wood flutes here. I haven't found any other credits for him, unless he's the "Will Connell" playing bass clarinet on a a 2007 Bill Dixon album -- would have been close to 70, still 13 years younger than Dixon. Fourth member is drummer Zen Matsuura, who went on to play with Billy Bang and Roy Campbell -- not a long credit list, but he's on Campbell's 2007 Akhenaten Suite, deserving of another plug. Parker recorded a piece called "Commitment" in the late 1970s, but the piece doesn't appear here. What we get is the 1981 Commitment Ensemble album (recorded October 13-14, 1980; 36 minutes on the first disc) and a long live set from Germany in 1983 (38 minutes on the first disc and 48 more on the second). One of those records that would have sounded interesting but unfocused at the time, but sounds prophetic now. Hwang, who was born in Waukegan, IL, had yet to develop his mastery of Chinese classical music, so he sounds more like Leroy Jenkins here -- a pretty good deal. Connell is plug ugly on alto, but his flutes hit the right notes in contrast to the violin. Parker and Matsuura keep it all moving at breakneck speed. A-

Bobby McFerrin: Vocabularies (2010, Emarcy): Actually, title is consistently spelled "VOCAbuLarieS" -- a not-so-subtle way of pointing out that most of the sounds are vocal. The balance comes from producer-cowriter Roger Treece's synths and programming, Alex Acuña's percussion, and small doses of Donny McCaslin sax and Pedro Eustache woodwinds. The cover notes Treece's contribution "and over 50 amazing singers" -- not counting a crowd of 2500 in Bergen, Norway. Each song has at least 16 singers, a chorale effect that trivializes any individual -- McFerrin is always credited as "lead vocal," and Lisa Fischer often as "featured vocal," but neither make much of an impression. B

Ismael Dueñas Trio: Jazz Ateu (2009 [2010], Quadrant): Pianist, b. 1975 in Badalona, in Spain up the coast from Barcelona. Fifth album, as best I can reckon, since 2003 -- I've heard the two on Fresh Sound New Talent, both excellent but somehow lost in my shuffle. Joan Matera plays bass and Oscar Domènech drums. For the most part this maintains a steady rhythmic flow, something I'm tempted to call postmodern stride, although it may just come from listening to Jarrett and Svensson. But he doesn't stick to the groove, shifting into melodic passages that work off something familiar, and in at least one case breaking into dissonance that resolves itself into something lovely. A-

Portico Quartet: Isla (2009 [2010], Real World): British group: Jack Wyllie (saxes, electronics), Milo Fitzpatrick (double bass), Duncan Bellamy (drums, piano), and Nick Mulvey (hang drums, percussion). Record also has a string quartet -- two violins, viola, cello -- arranged by Fitzpatrick, but mostly what you hear is soprano sax riffing over percussion, not much as jazz but a very listenable synthesis of postrock minimalism and world fusion. B+(**)

Ergo: Multitude, Solitude (2009, Cuneiform): Brett Sroka on trombone and computer; Carl Maguire on Fender Rhodes, Prophet synthesizer, and effects; Shawn Baltazor drums. I've run into Maguire before -- a fine pianist who pushes the state of the art in postbop compositions, but he's less distinctive here. Sroka has a previous album under his own name. This is the group's second. B+(**)

The Stanley Clarke Band (2010, Heads Up): Bass guitarist, b. 1951, came out of Chick Corea's Return to Forever and established a fusion rep in the 1970s, which I can't say I paid any attention to. This is only the second of 30+ albums under his name that I've heard. The album is a mess, with Ruslan Sirota's keybs and Charles Aluna's guitar standard pieces, along with a lot of guests -- Hiromi gets a shout out on the cover, and her piano does stand out, if garrishly. Some funk, one cut dedicated to Zawinul, one cut is called "Sonny Rollins" but gives you Bob Sheppard instead, some vocals. Hard to sort it all out; not awful, but little reason to. Nor am I sure if the "global warming" song is as dumb as it seems, but could be. B-

Pharez Whitted: Transient Journey (2009 [2010], Owl Studios): Trumpet player, from Indiana, studied at DePauw and Indiana University, two previous albums on Motown (1994 and 1996), based in Chicago now, teaches at Chicago State. Sexet with Eddie Bayard -- Edwin on Mark Lomax's more challenging record -- on tenor and soprano sax, Ron Perrillo on piano/keyboards, Bobby Broom on guitar, Dennis Carroll on bass, Greg Artry on drums, with Broom producing. Freddie Hubbard and Barack Obama inspire pieces. Solid hard bop, nothing spectacular, not much from Bayard, who made such a big impression on the Lomax album. B

These are some even quicker notes based on downloading or streaming records. I don't have the packaging here, don't have the official hype, often don't have much information to go on. I have a couple of extra rules here: everything gets reviewed/graded in one shot (sometimes with a second play), even when I'm still guessing on a grade; the records go into my flush file (i.e., no Jazz CG entry, unless I make an exception for an obvious dud). If/when I get an actual copy I'll reconsider the record.

Theo Bleckmann/Fumio Yasuda: Berlin: Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile (2007, Winter & Winter): Twenty-three songs, most Weill-Brecht or Eisler-Brecht, the few others including several I'm equally familiar with, like "Lili Marleen" and "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt." Yasuda, Bleckmann's partner in Las Vegas Rhapsody, plays piano and arranges string quartet for that Weimar feel. Bleckmann is German, gay, possesses remarkable facility in the upper registers. This is, in short, his patrimony. One play can't possibly do it justice, but will have to do for now. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Oliver Lake Organ Quartet: Plan (2009 [2010], Passin Thru): Follows an Organ Trio record, adding trumpeter Freddie Hendrix to returning Jared Gold (organ) and Jonathan Blake (drums) -- Lake, of course, plays alto sax. The second horn reminds me of the harmonics Julius Hemphill coaxed out of the World Saxophone Quartet (minus the booming tenor and baritone parts), and Gold does some very interesting things -- I've seen reviews invoke the idea of Monk on organ, but he doesn't just jump around a lot; he gets some positive spin on chaos. Main caveat is that it seems off here and there, a sign of the risks they're taking. B+(**) [Rhapsody]

Joe Locke: For the Love of You (2009 [2010], Koch): Instrumentally a fairly snazzy quartet, with Locke's vibes rattling against Geoffrey Keezer's ivories, and George Mraz and Clarence Penn pushing the rhythm. Problem is they added a singer, Kenny Washington, like Jimmy Scott a little guy with a lot of octaves. First song is awful. Second is "Old Devil Moon" -- can't hardly ruin that. Evens out a bit after that. B- [Rhapsody]

Nasheet Waits: Equality: Alive at MPI (2008 [2009], Fresh Sound New Talent): Cover can be parsed various ways: one implication is that Equality is meant to be the group name. Waits is a drummer, best known for driving Jason Moran's Bandwagon, a piano trio with Taurus Mateen on bass. All three are present and accounted for here, and all three contribute songs -- Mateen one, Moran and Waits two each. Moreover, Moran doesn't seem to be too unhappy to see the tables turned. He has his own record and has shown up on several more lately, but this is his most energetic performance in several years. Oh, and there's a fourth guy here: alto saxophonist Logan Richardson. He had a terrific debut album, Cerebral Flow, in 2006, and is in prime form here too. A- [Rhapsody]

Bill Charlap/Renee Rosnes: Double Portrait (2009 [2010], Blue Note): Two pianists; you know that. Husband and wife as of 2007; I didn't know that, and having also not known that vocalist Sandy Stewart is Charlap's mother, I'm glad not to have missed that. Rosnes is four years older, from Canada, more of a modernist and more of a composer -- albeit only one song here among a batch of eight covers -- where Charlap is more retro and more of an interpreter. I have them down for one A- each, out of six Charlap records and three by Rosnes -- both have comparable discographies, but Charlap has been more active lately. Just piano here, sounds more like solo than duets, can't tell you who does what. Attractive, of course, but nothing really enticing. B [Rhapsody]

Scott Hamilton/Alan Barnes: Hi-Ya (2009 [2010], Woodville): I heard an interview with Benny Carter once where a caller asked "what did you learn from Johnny Hodges?" Carter's answer: "never to play any of his songs." Only two of nine songs here don't have Hodges' name on them -- some also Ellington or Strayhorn, but Hamilton gives Barnes some cover with his tenor sax, and Barnes plays baritone as well as alto. Nice, loose, plenty of swing. Still, not Hodges -- I imagine Barnes is as leary of that comparison as Carter was. B+(**) [Rhapsody]

Scott Hamilton Quartet Plus Two: Our Delight! (2005 [2006], Woodville): The "plus two" are Mark Nightingale (trombone) and Dave Cliff (guitar); both do nice work, the trombonist roughly comparable to John Allred. Ten standards, starting off in rousing fashion with "Get Happy", ending with "In Walked Bud," some Ellington/Strayhorn along the way, the title cut from Tadd Dameron. Delightful indeed. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Portico Quartet: Knee Deep in the North Sea (2007, Vortex): First album for British quartet, new record Isla reviewed above. This one was nominated for the rock-centric Mercury Music Prize which put it on the UK Top 200 Albums Chart, so I guess we can consider it pop jazz, although it's much more interesting than that. The hang drums at least start out with that shimmering steel drum sound. A bit less minimalist, more pop than the new one, with the sax searching out hooks; otherwise the same basic sound. B+(**) [Rhapsody]

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around.

Bryan and the Haggards: Pretend It's the End of the World (2010, Hot Cup): Four of seven songs written by Merle Haggard, a couple more that I was surprised to find credited elsewhere. The band is a second cousin to Mostly Other People Do the Killing, with Moppa Elliott and Jon Irabagon common denominators, guitarist Jon Lundbrom useful for music that originally guitar-dominated, and Bryan Murray the nominal leader, not just because his tenor sax looms the largest. Like MOPDTK, they know their history and run it through hoops, starting with Bird and skittering through Ornette until "Trouble in Mind" bears the holy ghost of Albert Ayler, which frees drummer Danny Fischer to rip off a pretty good Rashied Ali impression. B+(***)

Dave Holland Octet: Pathways (2009 [2010], Dare2): Basically Quintet plus extra horns, not as much as the big band, but plenty for all practical purposes. Recorded live at Birdland, some applause and shout outs. Intermittently terrific, especially when trombonist Robin Eubanks bowls his way to the front. B+(***) [advance]

Scenes [John Stowell/Jeff Johnson/John Bishop]: Rinnova (2009 [2010], Origin): Guitar-bass-drums trio. Stowell is a subtle craftsman, and Seattle's standard rhythm section lay out smartly measured postbop ambience. B+(***)

Brad Mehldau: Highway Rider (2009 [2010], Nonesuch, 2CD): Started out with piano trios, making an impressive debut and sustaining his Art of the Piano Trio series longer than anyone has a right to; dropped the obligatory solo album, but then started moving onto large canvases, more composer than improviser. This one sprawls over two discs, awash in a huge string orchestra, which alternately annoys and soothes me. Joshua Redman also graces the affair, sounding functionally comparable to Jan Garbarek if not quite so sweet or sharp. B+(**)

Some re-grades as I've gone through trying to sort out the surplus:

Angles: Epileptical West: Live in Coimbra (2009 [2010], Clean Feed): [was: A-] A

Billy Bang: Prayer for Peace (2005 [2010], TUM): [was: A-] A

Satoko Fujii Ma-Do: Desert Ship (2009 [2010], Not Two): [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

The Mark Lomax Trio: The State of Black America (2007 [2010], Inarhyme): [was: A-] A

Unpacking: Found in the mail this week (and the week before):

• Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet: Natural Selection (Sunnyside): Sept. 21
• Newman Taylor Baker: Singin' Drums: Drum Suite Life (Innova): Sept. 28
• Lucian Ban & John Hébert: Enesco Re-Imagined (Sunnyside): Oct. 26
• David Bixler & Arturo O'Farrill: The Auction Project (Zoho): Sept. 14
• Blob: Earphonious Swamphony (Innova): Sept. 28
• Hadley Caliman & Pete Christlieb: Reunion (Origin)
• Andrea Centazzo/Perry Robinson/Nobu Stowe: The Soul in the Mist (Ictus): advance, 2007
• Nels Cline: Dirty Baby (Crypgogramophone, 2CD): box includes thre 40-page booklets, 66 images by Ed Ruscha
• Ryan Cohan: Another Look (Motéma): Sept. 14
• Decoy & Joe McPhee: Oto (Bo Weavil)
• Joey DeFrancesco: Never Can Say Goodbye: The Music of Michael Jackson (High Note)
• Denise Donatelli: When Lights Are Low (Savant)
• Paquito D'Rivera: Tango Jazz: Live at Lincoln Center (Sunnyside)
• Jean-Marc Foltz/Matt Turner/Bill Carrothers: To the Moon (Ayler)
• Fond of Tigers: Continent & Western (Drip Audio): Oct. 12
• Rebecca Coupe Franks: Check the Box (RCF)
• Joe Gilman: Americanvas (Capri)
• Jared Gold: Out of Line (Posi-Tone)
• Goldbug: The Seven Dreams (1k)
• Conrad Herwig: The Latin Side of Herbie Hancock (Half Note)
• William Hooker Trio: Yearn for Certainty (Engine)
• Lena Horne: The Essential Lena Horne (1941-75, Masterworks/Legacy, 2CD)
• Jon Irabagon: Foxy (Hot Cup): Sept. 14
• Bobby Jackson: The Café Extra-Ordinaire Story (Jazzman)
• Tomas Janzon: Experiences (Changes Music)
• Matt Jorgensen: Tatooed by Passion: Music Inspired by the Paintings of Dale Chisman (Origin)
• Andrew Lamb Trio: New Orleans Suite (Engine)
• Anne LeBaron: 1, 2, 4, 3 (Innova, 2CD): Sept. 28
• Barton McLean: Soundworlds (Innova): Sept. 28
• Tim Moltzer + Markus Reuter: Descending (1k)
• The NYFA Collection: 25 Years of New York New Music (Innova, 5CD): Sept. 28
• Michael Pagán/Colorado Saxophone Quartet: 12 Preludes & Fugues (Tapestry)
• Ivo Perelman/Rosie Hertlein/Dominic Duval: Near to the Wild Heart (Not Two)
• Ivo Perelman/Brian Willson: The Stream of Life (Leo)
• Portico Quartet: Isla (Real World)
• Mike Pride: From Bacteria to Boys (AUM Fidelity): Oct. 12
• Tom Rizzo: Imaginary Numbers (Origin)
• Florian Ross: Mechanism (Pirouet): Sept. 28
• Scanner with the Post Modern Jazz Quartet: BLink of an Eye (Thirsty Ear): advance, Nov. 2
• Dolores Scozzesi: A Special Taste (Rhombus): Sept. 7
• Blaise Siwula/Nobu Stowe/Ray Sage: Brooklyn Moments (Konnex): advance, 2005
• Blaise Siwula/Dom Minasi/Nobu Stowe/Ray Sage: New York Moments (Konnex): advance, 2006
• Nobu Stowe-Lee Pembleton Project: Hommage an Klaus Kinski (Soul Note): advance, 2007
• Nobu Stowe & Alan Munshower with Badal Roy: An Die Musik (Soul Note): advance, 2008
• Nobu Stowe: Confusion Bleue (Soul Note)
• Achille Succi/Nobu Stowe/Daniel Barbiero/Alan Munshower/Lee Pembleton: L'Albero delle Meduse (www.vlme.org/ensembles/jelly.html): advance, 2009
• Trio Ricochet: February 2006 (Trio Ricochet): advance, 2006
• Helen Sung: Going Express (Sunnyside): Sept. 14
• Tribecastan: Strange Cousin (Evergreene Music)
• Tribecastan: 5 Star Cave (Evergreene Music)
• Doug Webb: Midnight (Posi-Tone)
• Kenny Werner: No Beginning No End (Half Note)
• Bruce Williamson Quartet: Standard Transmission (Origin)

I used to do these extra link collections, then stopped when I decided to comment on links more often. Still, I'm not getting to everything I want to note for future reference, so I'll try it this way on Sundays.

• Joel Kovel: Zionism's dreary burden on Jewishness
• Paul Krugman: Appeasing the Bond Gods
• Paul Krugman: This Is Not a Recovery
• John Quiggin: A Keynesian zombie idea
• Jane Mayer: Covert Operations: I've previously linked to this piece on the Koch family's scheming, but worth linking again.
• Frank Rich: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party: in turn, based on Jane Mayer's piece above.
• Maxine Udall: Capitalist Myopia
• Nation Readers' Summer Books: more list fodder.

Andrew Leonard: "I was wrong again!" What Ben Bernanke meant to say: A pretty apt translation of the Fed Chairman's speech to the choir in Jackson Hole. Most memorable line: "The working class is unbelievably screwed." Followed by the gratuitous, "This is kind of bumming me out." It's not like Obama had no choice but to renominate Bush's top pick for the Federal Reserve chairmanship. The chatter campaign behind giving him a second term was based on his supposed success but any way you slice it we're worse off now than when Bush nominated Bernanke in the first place. It's bad enough when Obama recycles Clinton advisers; it's downright indecent when he keeps Bush cronies in office.

Andrew Leonard: Paul Krugman: "I told you so, again": This was written over a week ago, so it doesn't include Krugman's latest Predictions I Wish Had Been Wrong:

Looking for some other stuff, I found this post from October 2008 in which I predicted a level of right-wing craziness about Obama similar to that facing Bill Clinton, but worse.

But Leonard is right that that "Reading Paul Krugman's blog these days is like looking into a hall of mirrors, infinitely refracting the same message: I told you so." I'm not sure that Krugman's prescription for the stimulus was big enough but he was sure right that Obama's figure was way too small. I see today that Laura Tyson has a New York Times op-ed on Why We Need a Second Stimulus, so maybe that's something that Obama will finally run on even though passing it has no chance in the current Congress. She doesn't note that at least since Nixon Republicans have a perfect record of supporting stimulus spending when in office and only opposing it when they think the Democrats will get blamed for the economic downturn. One thing that Krugman points out is that austerity-minded Germany has actually done more stimulus spending than the US given how Obama's efforts have been eroded by cuts in state and local spending. You'd think they could have thought that through, and moreover that they could have explained the analysis, but they don't seem to have even tried. In fact, Christina Romer's analysis was in Krugman's range, about double what Obama asked for, so you can't even say they didn't have the analysis. They just didn't have the guts to level with the American people, and that at a time when they had virtually nothing to lose.

The old saw is that hindsight's 20/20, but that's clearly wrong here. Even Obama's hindsight isn't that good. On the other hand, people like Krugman and Leonard keep seeing these things as they're happening.

Glenn Greenwald: Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity: Starts with Glenn Beck looking whiter than ever and a packet of Charles Krauthammer lies -- nothing new there. But the following paragraph hit home:

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

Seems to be working, but that's partly because the people who are bankrolling the anti-Obama revolt have lots of friendly support from the media, and partly because the Democrats are playing rope-a-dope, certain that no matter how much principle they concede they'll still be viewed come November as the lesser evil.

To put this in perspective, read Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece Covert Operations, on the billionaire Koch brothers. They've been bankrolling libertarian think tanks for decades, but their ideas have never gained much traction, so now they've moved on to mass organizing:

"Ideas don't happen on their own," Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. "Throughout history, ideas need patrons." The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public's support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, "was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions -- Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates." Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs' agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were "very controlling, very top down. You can't build an organization with them. They run it."

Of course, getting a lot of moderate income people to rush out into the streets and demand tax breaks for the rich, government services cuts for everyone else, an end to regulating pollution by chronic despoilers like Koch Industries, a never-ending spiral of extortionary health care costs. So the Tea Party talk points don't put it like that -- they appeal to conservative personal virtues, and they spice it up with market-tested fear-mongering, jingoism, and good old fashioned bigotry. While enough people respond to this to form crowds and get pictures taken, they're a declining demographic.

Still, I wonder what would happen if someone tried to organize a counter-movement, a populist uprising for equality and a real program of opportunity: education, health care, infrastructure development, small business loans, antitrust, a non-imperialist foreign policy, wring the money out of elections and drive the lobbyists out of Washington.

Tim Potter: Wichita's graffiti law stirs up worries. My sister's son, Ram Hull, was in the news Monday, stirring up resistance to a new law likely to be approved next week that would criminalize possession of "spray paint, broad-tipped markers and other potential graffiti tools on or within 100 feet of public property." The photo shows Ram violating this law by sketching in a public park. Schools are public property too, although there may be some kind of exception for art students -- at least as long as the city can afford to keep art in the curriculum.

Seems like a parody of other laws which give the police broad discretion to hassle people they take a dislike to. I haven't talked to Ram about this, but one thing I'm struck by is that he has the perspicacity to imagine being the victim of the law -- that he just doesn't see it as something that will be applied to other people. In doing so, he also shows more respect for law than others have who mostly see it as a club for attacking people they don't like.

PS: For much more on this, including some art, goto www.civilmarkers.org.

Frank Rich: How Fox Betrayed Petraeus: I've had nothing to say about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque for the simplest of reasons: it's really none of my business. In fact, that seems like such an obvious position I don't get why anyone is yapping about it. I suppose I can imagine that the backers of the project might like some publicity for some reason, but they weren't the ones who came up with the button-pushing Ground Zero Mosque banner. But as Rich points out, the project known as Cordoba House (or merely as Park51) was ignored by everyone for the better part of a year until Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. propaganda machine jumped in and stirred everyone up. In the old days that used to be called sensationalism, or simply yellow dog journalism, but these days Murdoch doesn't do much of anything without ulterior political motives. Moreover, Murdoch seems to have really hit the jackpot here, getting virtually everyone to take an embarrassing stand on something virtually no one should even care about. You read a lot of charges that so-and-so hates America and is working to destroy our country, our economy, our freedom, our way of life. Well, that's Rupert Murdoch for you, laughing all the way to the bank as he turns his conveniently adopted country into a cesspool of idiocy and hatred.

The most easily excitable Americans are the conservative masses, and Murdoch has been pushing their buttons for decades. It is easy to dismiss conservatives as stupid because they seem incapable of recognizing a fundamental contradiction in their thinking. On the one hand, they revile government for interfering with the private sector, especially for regulations to prevent the private sector from harming itself or others. On the other hand, they demand that the government butt into anything and everything that in any way annoys them. (Sure, some self-styled libertarians are consistently anti-government, but they're statistically insignificant.) There are two ways conservatives manage to bridge this contradiction: one is that they feel specially entitled, that they alone should decide what should be free and what should be suppressed; and the other is that they simply hate everyone else, so they never have to take an opposing view seriously. And nowadays the world is just jammed packed with people they hate: foreigners, Muslims, colored folk who might as well be one or the other, gays, and pretty much anyone liberal enough not to hate any of the people they hate. Wave a mosque in front of them -- any mosque, anywhere -- and they get riled up; add the "ground zero" insult and they go ballistic. And that's no theory: that's what just happened.

Conservatives are wrong on this issue in so many ways people are tempted to argue them all, which is a waste, even though it is certainly true that most Moslems, especially in America, are harmless, that freedom of religion protects believers more than heretics, that much of what we treasure in America is the result of our diversity and our progressive overcoming of prejudice, and that (as Rich points out in his title) all the public diplomacy money can buy, meant to advance our interests and to protect our troops in the Muslim world, is instantly undone by such displays of anti-Muslim bigotry. Such arguments not only don't register with conservatives, they simply make them hate you more than ever. The only argument that stands a chance of prevailing is the simple one: that it's none of their business. You might even add that if they want to blow off steam making fools of themselves, they have that right, but their tantrums aren't going to get us to abandon the constitutionally protected freedoms this country is based on.

Still, there is one conservative argument here that sticks in my craw: all this 9/11 "hollowed ground" horseshit. What happened was horrible -- you know, I was there at the time and lost a loved one, so it was a lot more real for me than it was for 99% of America sitting at home watching the media cheer on the warmongers -- but it's just plain unhealthy to keep picking at the scab, reveling in victimhood without the slightest consciousness that our lust for revenge -- over a crime that hardly any American had the slightest comprehension of -- has since killed 10 (20?) (50?) (who knows?) times as many of them, and profoundly disrupted and deranged the lives of at least ten times more. With no real end in sight as long as we keep picking at it, feeling entitled to, well, act like conservatives: hating people for not submitting to us, feeling the need to strike back at every offense, locking ourselves in a perpetual war of all against all, when in fact we live in a world where there is plenty of everything except mutual respect. I don't mind an occasional nod to history, but real estate in lower Manhattan can be put to better use than to perpetuate our self-indulgent madness. If we can't break out of this death spiral, we'll turn into Israel, a nation doomed to fight on forever, alone, reviled, for no better reason than that they can't imagine a world of equal rights and mutual respect.

Of course, Murdoch is also blindly helped out by chickenshit liberals -- some seeking compromise, some merely sympathizing with the distraught emotions of bigots and crybabies. Murdoch loves them because they legitimize an issue which actually doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, and because ultimately all they do is feed the fury. On the other hand, if there is a silver lining if all this, it will be for yesterday's liberal hawks to realize that their cause is doomed -- that America itself is so broken that there is no way it can fix anything else.

There are lots of real, important, and difficult issues facing the nation. This isn't one of them. Enough already.

Thought I might wrap up this Jazz Consumer Guide round last week, but the week didn't cooperate very well. Still have work to do to get the new server sorted out and the legacy websites running. Still have a bunch of other things I'm working on around the house. Have had an exceptionally tough time writing, and haven't managed to get my incoming mail catalogued. Still, I'm close enough that I'm sure I will have it all wrapped up this coming week.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd post this little Downbeat poll item. I still haven't looked at the Downbeat Critics Poll results, even though the August issue is off the newsstands now. I will do a more systematic review of it, as in past years, when I get a bit of time -- sometime after I get this column wrapped up.

I filled out a ballot for the Downbeat readers' poll ballot. Did it off the top of my head, not looking at my notes, so I leaned on their suggested lists except in the rare cases where I didn't find anyone or thing to my taste.

• Hall of Fame: Lee Konitz. Figured I should pick one from the checklist. George Russell, Anthony Braxton, and Abdullah Ibrahim were equally tempting.
• Jazz Artist: William Parker. Again, from the list, as is everyone below except those noted as write-ins.
• Jazz Album (June 1, 2009 to May 31, 2010): Rudresh Mahanthappa & Steve Lehman: Dual Identity (Clean Feed). Write in. Best album I saw on the list is Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Forty Fort (Hot Cup), my other pick hit last column.
• Historical Album (June 1, 2009-May 31, 2010): Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood (Hip-O Select). Wish I had some of the Mosaic boxes everyone else is voting for, even more so the Stan Getz-Kenny Barron People Time box that unaccountably missed the ballot.
• Jazz Group: Mostly Other People Do the Killing
• Big Band: Steven Bernstein Millennial Territory Orchestra
• Trumpet: Dennis Gonzalez. Surprised he was on the list, also surprised that Randy Sandke -- my first thought -- wasn't.
• Trombone: Roswell Rudd
• Soprano Saxophone: Brent Jensen (write in)
• Alto Saxophone: Rudresh Mahanthappa
• Tenor Saxophone: Houston Person. Lots of ways one could go here.
• Baritone Saxophoone: Ken Vandermark. Don't normally pick a second instrument player.
• Clarinet: Ben Goldberg
• Flute: Juhani Aaltonen (write-in)
• Piano: Satoko Fujii. Again, many real good choices.
• Electronic Keyboard: Craig Taborn
• Organ: Jared Gold. Not many good choices, but I've just been listening to his work with Oliver Lake.
• Violin: Billy Bang
• Guitar: Bill Frisell. I thought of several others, like Anders Nilsson, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and Mark O'Leary, but none on the list.
• Bass: William Parker
• Electric Bass: Stomu Takeishi
• Drums: Lewis Nash
• Vibes: Joe Locke
• Percussion: Han Bennink
• Miscellaneous Instrument: Howard Johnson (tuba). Had to limit myself to the list here otherwise I'd go crazy.
• Male Vocalist: Freddy Cole
• Female Vocalist: Sheila Jordan
• Composer: John Zorn. Don't know if it's cheating to commission recordings of your compositions, but he's done that often enough to gain some focus as a composer.
• Arranger: Gerald Wilson
• Record Label: Clean Feed
• Blues Artist or Group: James Blood Ulmer
• Blues Album (June 1, 2009 to May 31, 2010): Maria Muldaur, Garden of Joy (Stony Plain). Surprised to find one on the list that I knew and could get behind.
• Beyond Artist or Group: Youssou N'Dour (write-in). List runs from Angelique Kidjo to Grizzly Bear to Pink Martini to Wilco, including Anthony Braxton for some reason.
• Beyond Album (June 1, 2009-May 31, 2010): Leonard Cohen, Live in London (Columbia). No question once I saw it on the list, eligible by time frame. (My own lists are annual, so I don't have an easy way to sort on their time frame.)

More on this when I finally get around to doing a Critics Poll review. I'm more struck than ever by the imbalance in the instrumental categories: with Steve Lacy gone, I'd probably name twenty tenor saxophonists before thinking of a soprano; same ratio or steeper for acoustic piano over electric, and acoustic bass over electric, and not much less for drums over percussion. One thing I've done a bit here is to flip back and forth between mainstream and avant players -- there's no real way to compare them, so I decided just to split my own rather catholic interests. Hence Houston Person instead of David Murray or Ken Vandermark, and Lewis Nash instead of Hamid Drake or Paal Nilssen-Love -- any of which would be equally valid.

I'm in the middle of an especially turbulent bout of interesting times right now. That this has kept me from posting is the least of my concerns. Much of my problems are due to those machines that a former boss -- actually, the VP of Software Development at my first engineering job -- insisted on calling the Confusers. I'm in a lull right now, temporary no doubt, so let me unpack this a bit.

I have had a dedicated server since 2003, originally at Rackshack, which eventually got sucked into a company that calls itself The Planet. I never got a lot of good out of it, and never got it to do a lot of the things I thought I'd like to do with a dedicated server, so it's sort of limped along for several years now -- on my long list of things to do. Finally, it fell down a couple weeks ago, so I started shopping for another one. Finally on Monday I ordered a new one from Hosting and Designs in Beaverton, OR. I got a faster machine (E8200 Quad Core), more memory (2GB vs. 1GB), a larger bandwidth allotment (2TB vs. 1TB), for less money, which I immediately threw away by adding cPanel/WHM in the hopes that it would finally put me ahead of the sysadmin curve. Also threw some money into the setup fee for a "Total Security Package" which is so effective that it has not only kept me from logging into the server, it's managed to keep H&D's technical team from fixing the problem. (Or something has, but I'm getting ahead of myself.) While shopping for this, I got some bad vibes from H&D: they were slow responding to questions; admitted they didn't have the "best ping times" and weren't using "Tier 1 providers"; their help desk tools were buggy, and their SSL certificate was self-signed (Firefox didn't like that); they don't provide DNS servers, and I didn't fully understand what that meant or how they figured I could work around it (still don't).

Anyhow, I didn't find anything else that looked better, and I had a slow, annoying burn from Planet, so I ordered their deal on Monday. They promised it up in 24-72 hours, and I was notified it was up mid-Wednesday -- about 48 hours, not fast, but OK. I tried logging in and the machine didn't like the password they gave me. After three tries it banned me. I filed an urgent ticket request, and 24 hours later the machine is still inaccessible (to me, at least). I've complained several times since then. (In fact, could complain again now, but I'm trying to chill out.) In the meantime I raised the DNS question, and got at first a completely evasive answer. When I challenged this, the reply was basically: that's your problem. I've spent a bit of time looking into workarounds -- supposedly they do work, otherwise how could H&D get away with this? -- but not being able to log in and configure my server I'm just guessing (or maybe hallucinating).

Meanwhile, another long-desired computer project has come in. I have a Linux machine that I set up in 1998 and is still the heart of my system. (I'm typing this on a much more powerful machine I built in 2007, although I'm actually just using it as an X-server for a laptop where emacs is running and storing files. But the old machine is the Internet firewall and router, and I've accumulated over 10 years of mail on it, as well as totally clogging its puny disks. The Red Hat Linux on it is ancient, the Mozilla browser doesn't know about certificates issued in the last 5-6 years, and the 512MB RAM is pretty much always overloaded into swap. The migration plan is to move all of its application purposes -- chiefly mail -- onto my other machine(s), and replace it with a small computer running a lightweight Linux firewall/router (like IPCop, or maybe a BSD-based one like pfSense). While shopping for the dedicated server, I got worked up one night and ordered the parts for the new router box.

I wanted something small and specialized. Looked at a lot of rackmount boxes which, despite the small height, are really pretty large and awkward (and expensive). I looked at a lot of boxes before I happened on the idea of a Micro-ITX motherboard with a low-powered Intel Atom CPU. I found an Intel board for $76.99 that should do nicely, then I found an Apex chassis with 250W power supply for a real cheap $38.99. Added 2GB RAM, a D-Link NIC so I'd have two ethernet ports. Could have gotten away with a smaller disk drive, but couldn't find one much cheaper than a 320GB Seagate, and added an ASUS DVD burner, mostly just to install the software. Whole thing came close to $250, about twice what an appliance router would cost, but still a pretty good deal. Put it all together yesterday. Makes a neat little package, smaller than a shoebox. Haven't fired it up yet, mostly because the big issues remain: what distro, and what are all the other things that have to happen to move the old machine out?

Copying the files off the old machine should be easy. Managed to NFS-mount its file systems onto my main machine. Mail would be tougher. Installed Thunderbird on the main machine. Previously had Evolution, but Thunderbird's a successor to the old Mozilla Mail I had been using, so I figured that would be easier. It wasn't: Thunderbird has some wizards for your mail server settings and to pick up old address books, mail, etc., none of which worked, let alone explained their failings. I did get the address book moved by exporting it, copying the file, and importing it (the only time the wizard actually let me select a file). Couldn't pick up any of the old mail, but I was able to manually work out the server settings, so now I can send and receive mail on the main machine.

I then tried installing another mailer, Claws, advertised as lightweight with good import features. I copied all of the old mailboxes, including my big Sent and Inbox files, to places and names I could keep track of, then started feeding them into Claws. It picked them up with only one problem: the old Inbox hadn't been compressed in a long while, so it still had about 30,000 deleted messages in it, all of them restored. (Other mailboxes may have the same problem, but I rarely delete from saved or sent mail.) So I deleted that, compressed the file, copied it, and imported it again, message count now down to 5000. Claws insisted that I set up its mail server settings, but let me get away with tom@localhost, so it's not competing with Thunderbird for the real mail.

Don't know whether I'll wind up using one or the other. For now, Claws manages my mail archive, and Thunderbird is my current mailer. Both have novel features, at least for me. Claws doesn't display HTML, but does a nice job of hacking HTML down to plain text, and a lot of mail looks better that way. Thunderbird formats HTML, but doesn't by default display graphics from elsewhere, so all those shopping and music publicist messages are showing up with big holes in them. I can get the graphics by clicking, and can whitelist certain mail addresses, but it's amusing and not unpleasant to drop them out. Thunderbird also tries heuristics to identify junk mail and scams -- most of what I get from music publicists fall into the latter category -- and presumably adapts to my reports. A lot of squishy uncertainty here, but looks and feels like progress. Only thing I've used the old machine for today was responding to a piece of yesterday's mail.

Also on the confuser front, I saw that there is a new release of Ubuntu (10.4.1) and tried installing it on one of my two Ubuntu machines. The change was from 8 to 10 and it failed -- first time I've seen that happen with Ubuntu. Very little info and no hint of how to work around it, so for now I'm stuck. Will have to dig a lot deeper. (I've had a similar problem with Fedora, and found that the command line tools work better than the window ones.)

Also have a bookcase I need to build, which actually I felt more like doing yesterday than all of this computer stuff. Too hot right now, but I may get the wood cut up for that later this evening. Also got two new books: Andrew Bacevich's Washington Rules and Chalmers Johnson's Dismantling the Empire. Also got Nicholas von Hoffman's Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky and Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus out from the library, so the thing I'd most enjoy doing right now is taking the next week and just reading.

The thing I'm least enjoying is trying to finish up the Jazz Consumer Guide column. I play stuff and can't write shit, play more stuff and still come up empty. Play new things and have no space for them. Play old things and can't come up with words. Meanwhile, I have lots of other things I do want to write about. Getting to where I hate this job.

Of course, it will be better when more things work -- and they will start working, much as mail last night bounced around from disaster to hopeless before it kind of came together.

PS: Nagged H&D right after posting this. After a couple minutes thumb twiddling, they came back and said, "try it again." Ping worked. I logged in as root. I logged into cPanel/WHM. Now all I have left to do is . . . all sorts of things I barely understand. Starting, I suppose, with DNS.

PPS: Roughly 24-hours later, I have made some progress. After much confusion and a few failed efforts, the nameserver is resolved and DNS set up for my initial domain. Adding more domains should be straightforward, but I'm trying to think through how I manage accounts and map accounts to websites and all that, which is something that cPanel provides tools for but doesn't offer a conceptual model (as far as I can tell). Also got the Ubuntu upgrade to work: had to delete some packages before upgrade then restore them afterwards. Have one more machine to upgrade, but should be the same deal.

Time kind of got away from me this week. The main distraction was the need to do something about the demise of my dedicated webserver, which is still up in the air -- although I do expect to ink a new deal sometime this week, which will result in a lot more things to do. Meanwhile, I did finally take the first steps toward closing out this Jazz CG round. That isn't much evident in this week's Jazz Prospecting, which has tended to follow my usual random methodology. (Well, not quite random, as I've been focusing on the priority box, aside from some time pretty much wasted on Rhapsody.) Next week the shift should be more evident, with fewer new records -- although some that I have played and didn't write up will likely poke through -- and a final return to the handful of records I've previously left hanging. But mostly I need to play stuff that I've rated but haven't written up. And I still have no idea for pick hits. And the duds list is empty while the HMs are way, way too long. I figure odds of wrapping up are 50-50. Got enough words, but it still strikes me as rather scruffy.

Peter Evans Quartet: Live in Lisbon (2009 [2010], Clean Feed): Trumpet player, best known for his role in Mostly Other People Do the Killing, but has two solo albums on Psi (haven't heard either) and a slightly different Quartet on Firehouse 12 -- bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Kevin Shea return here, but the guitar is replaced here by Ricardo Gallo's piano, at once more traditional and more shocking. AMG describes Evans as influenced by Don Cherry and Lester Bowie, but I don't hear either. In chops and conception, he reminds me of early Freddie Hubbard, when he could cross from avant to hard bop without ever seeming out of place. B+(***) [advance]

Ab Baars/Meinrad Kneer: Windfall (2008 [2010], Evil Rabbit): Tenor sax-bass duets, although Baars occasionally lightens up with clarinet, shakuhachi, or noh-kan (a "high pitched Japanese bamboo transverse flute commonly used in traditional Imperial Noh and Kabuki theatre"). One of Baars' more appealing, more charming efforts, although the real test here is following the bass, which demands and rewards concentration. B+(**)

Myra Melford's Be Bread: The Whole Tree Gone (2008 [2010], Firehouse 12): Pianist, b. 1957, cut a couple of trio albums in 1990-91 that Francis Davis noticed, and gradually worked her way into the front rank of cutting edge jazz pianists. Teaches at UC Berkeley. Be Bread is her most expansive group, previously heard on the 2006 album The Image of Your Body, much advanced here: Cuong Vu (trumpet), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Brandon Ross (guitar), Stomu Takeishi (acoustic bass guitar), and Matt Wilson (drums). A-

Meg Okura and the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble: Naima (2009 [2010], Meg Okura): Violinist, also plays erhu, b. 1973 in Tokyo, Japan, based in New York. Has a previous album, Meg Okura's Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble (2006), as well as several in Japan that AMG doesn't have a clue about. Also shows up in side credits on a couple dozen albums, mostly John Zorn circle but also with Dianne Reeves, David Bowie, and Ziggy Marley. Group is chamber-ish, with flutes (Anne Drummond Jun Kubo), piano, cello, bass, drums, and percussion (Satoshi Takeishi), and the pieces tend to be suite-like, the last four under the group title "Lu Chai I-IV." The title track, of course, is an arrangement of Coltrane; everything else original. Striking music when it all clicks, which often it does. B+(**)

The Claudia Quintet + Gary Versace: Royal Toast (2009 [2010], Cuneiform): Last three Claudia Quintet albums rated A- in Jazz CG although they've all been sort of marginal: soft sounds (Chris Speed's clarinet, Ted Reichman's accordion, Matt Moran's vibes, Drew Gress's bass) floating on John Hollenbeck's quirky rhythms. This one is much like those, with Gary Versace's piano adding one more soft touch -- he does take one cut on accordion, but after Reichman that's anticlimactic. But it also slips a bit when soft gives way to slow, and I think that tips this just a bit under. Still a fascinating group. B+(***)

Allison Miller: Boom Tic Boom (2010, Foxhaven): Drummer, from DC, based in New York, second album after one in 2005, substantial list of side credits since 1999, mostly rock (exceptions include Virginia Mayhew, Marty Ehrlich, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Judy Silvano, and Todd Sickafoose). Mostly piano trio with Myra Melford leading, Sickafoose on bass, and some guest contribution from violinist Jenny Scheinman -- just one cut as far as I can tell. Four originals from Miller, two from Melford, one each from Mary Lou Williams and Hoagy Carmichael ("Rockin' Chair"). Slows down for the finale, but Melford is in very fine form -- a better showcase for her piano than her own record. A-

Remi Álvarez/Mark Dresser: Soul to Soul (2008 [2010], Discos Intolerancia): Saxophonist, lists soprano first but cover pic features tenor -- website also lists alto and baritone up front, perhaps alphabetically -- from Mexico City. Website shows this as fifth album since 1996, although it's only the second with his name first. Duet with the veteran bassist, very solid and relatively straightforward here, with the sax working cautiously around the edges. B+(***)

Pete Robbins: Silent Z Live (2009 [2010], Hate Laugh Music): Alto saxophonist, b. 1978, grew up in Andover, MA, studied at Phillips Academy, Tufts, and New England Conservatory; moved to Brooklyn in 2002. Fourth album since 2002. Two quintet variants, half with Jesse Neuman on cornet, the other hand with Cory Smythe on piano; both with Mike Gamble on guitar, Thomas Morgan on bass, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Gets a sweet sound out of his horn, working freebop grooves and angles, dicier with the cornet than with the piano, but engaging in all cases. B+(***)

Jim Rotondi: 1000 Rainbows (2008 [2010], Posi-Tone): Trumpet player, b. 1962 in Butte, MT, attended UNT, based in New York, has more than a dozen albums since 1997, mostly on mainstream/hard bop labels Criss Cross and Sharp Nine; also more than 50 side credits since 1992. Sole horn, with Joe Locke on vibes, Danny Grissett on piano, Barak Mori on bass, and Bill Stewart on drums. Hard-edged, bright sound, another very solid record. B+(**)

Dave Mihaly's Shimmering Leaves Ensemble: Eastern Accents in the Far West (2010, Porto Franco): Drummer, plays some piano here, also has a voice credit; based in San Francisco, after starting in NJ and NY; credits Andrew Cyrille, Barry Altschul, and Zakir Hussain as teachers, and reports that he's taught for some thirty years. First album according to AMG, although his website lists several more, including three string quartets and an expanded "Coretet" version of this group. Two-horn trio, with David Boyce on tenor sax and Ara Anderson on brass instruments (trumpet, bass trumpet, sousaphone), both occasionally spelling Mihaly on drums. I recall Anderson from Tin Hat; Boyce has a couple dozen credits, the only one I recognize a hip-hop album, Haiku D'Etat (actually, a pretty good one, with Aceyalone). The two horns twist in interesting ways, with just enough support from drums (and sometimes piano) to tie it together. B+(**)

Bill Frisell: Beautiful Dreamers (2010, Savoy Jazz): Guitarist, has cornered a slice of Americana and keeps working it, in this basic framework with Eyvind Kang on viola and Rudy Royston on drums. His originals fit in neatly enough, but the gems are the covers, including "Beautiful Dreamer," "It's Nobody's Fault but Mine" (Blind Willie Johnson), "Tea for Two," "Goin' Out of My Head," and especially "Keep on the Sunny Side." A-

Ratko Zjaca/John Patitucci/Steve Gadd/Stanislav Mitrovic/Randy Brecker: Continental Talk (2008 [2010], In+Out): Guitarist, studied in Zagreb, based now in Rotterdam; AMG lists 3 records since 2000 (not including this one); website lists 8 but not much detail. Mitrovic, b. 1963 in Belgrade, also based in Rotterdam, plays tenor and soprano sax. The others, better known, play trumpet (Brecker), bass (Patitucci), and drums (Gadd). Mostly modern postbop, with nice sax runs and trumpet blasts, but slips into some skunk funk near the end. B

Kihnoua: Unauthorized Caprices (2009 [2010], Not Two): Larry Ochs group, second his his website's group list after Sax Drumming Core, but then ROVA is on the far end. Ochs plays saxophones (probably sopranino and tenor), rough and rugged as usual, but not as rough as Dohee Lee's vocals -- her attack is barely restrainted. Also on board is Scott Amendola, drums and electronics. Group name "borrowed from ancient Greek might have meant 'the difference.'" Vocals draw on Korean "p'ansori singing" and "sinawi improvisation," but could just as well be avant horn attack. Some guests: Liz Allbee (trumpet + electronics), Fred Frith (guitar), Joan Jeanrenaud (cello). B+(**)

Contact: Five on One (2010, Pirouet): Not what you'd call a supergroup, but well-established veterans -- bassist Drew Gress is the youngest by more than a decade, drummer Billy Hart the elder by much less -- the front-line players easily recognized, each with sweet spots that are undeniably theirs, the rhythm section impeccable, pianist Marc Copland playing both roles. Most prominent, of course, is the sole horn, Dave Liebman on tenor and soprano sax. I've never been a fan of his soprano, but he works it in nicely here -- a sinuous interweaving that is likely inspired by the master of the art, guitarist John Abercrombie. B+(***)

Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra: Mezzanine (2010, Owl Studios): The biggest band in Indianapolis, or at least Bloomington, where this was recorded and Brent trombonist-conductor Wallarab teaches. I thought their previous album, Where or When, was a terrific territory band throwback, but they get all orchestral here, and while arranger fans will find bits to admire, this doesn't really get going until third cut from the end, where they take a break from Wallarab's book. Even then, how often are you tempted to call "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Cherokee" dainty? B

Correction: Two Nights in April (2009 [2010], Ayler): Piano trio, from Sweden: Sebastian Bergström on piano, Jaocim Nyberg on bass, Emil Åstrand-Melin on drums. First album, drawn from two live sets on two consecutive nights, the piano has a hard edge that leans free but may know a thing or two about rock. B+(***)

Myron Walden: Momentum Live (2009, Demi Sound): Tenor saxophonist, b. 1972 (or 1973?), started on alto, establishing himself as one of the better mainstream boppers around before taking time off to refashion himself on tenor. Got hit with a lot of hype on him last fall, including a bunch of advances for albums that the publicist never followed up on. The first was called Momentum, and it seemed like a pretty decent hard bop outing. This is a live reworking, with Darren Barrett (trumpet) and Yasushi Nakamura (bass) carrying over from the studio album, Edin Ladin (piano) and John Davis (drums) replacing David Bryant and Kendrick Scott. Main diff this time is sonic, where they're going for (or stumbled on) the thin-skinned underwater sound of Charlie Parker boots. The plus side is an engaging looseness, especially the horns sliding to and fro. The piano solos don't do much, and the usual live ballast doesn't add anything. B+(*) [advance]

Myron Walden/In This World: To Feel (2009 [2010], Demi Sound): Last fall's batch of CDRs included two Walden albums promised for Jan. 15 release. I did what I usually do: wait for the real copy, which in this case never came. Looks like everyone else did too. I haven't found a single review of either album, and the only place where it is Amazon, fronting for a retailed identified as Myron Walden. Not clear if "In This World" is a band name or just a logo. One page in the hype package lists the band as: Jon Cowherd (piano), Mike Moreno (guitar), Yasushi Nakamura (bass), and Obed Calvaire (drums). AMG, with no track info, confirms Cowherd-Moreno-Nakamura, but has Brian Blade and/or Kendrick Scott on drums, plus David Bryant on Fender Rhodes and Chris Thomas on acoustic bass. Band doesn't matter much here. Walden's To Feel approach is to run ballads past us, everything slow and soft. B [advance]

Myron Walden/In This World: What We Share (2009 [2010], Demi Sound): Same deal here: don't know anything more about band, recording date (presumed 2009 because I got the advance before 2010 rolled over), etc. Record is a little more energetic, and guitar (Mike Moreno?) does a nice job of framing the tenor sax. Walden is an attractive mainstream player, worth taking seriously, but he's not making any big breakthroughs. I have one more CDR in my pile, a 2-cut thing called Singles, which I assume is just a pure PR fantasy. He seems to have one more album in the pipeline, Countryfied, also on Amazon. Didn't come my way. B+(*) [advance]

These are some even quicker notes based on downloading or streaming records. I don't have the packaging here, don't have the official hype, often don't have much information to go on. I have a couple of extra rules here: everything gets reviewed/graded in one shot (sometimes with a second play), even when I'm still guessing on a grade; the records go into my flush file (i.e., no Jazz CG entry, unless I make an exception for an obvious dud). If/when I get an actual copy I'll reconsider the record.

Ivo Perelman: Brazilian Watercolour (1998 [1999], Leo): Several Perelman albums have been reissued in Brazil on Atração Fonográphica and worked their way to Rhapsody that way -- this one under the title Aquarela do Brasil, but aside from a few title translations this matches the release on Leo. One of the few cases where Perelman plays a couple of pop tunes from his homeland, here "Desafinado" and "Samba de Verão" -- the strain and choppiness he adds makes them all the more alluring. With Matthew Shipp on piano, Rashid Ali on drums, Guilherme Franco and Cyro Baptista on percussion and wood flutes. A singular tenor saxophonist, even on a lite samba. Also has a piano credit somewhere, but it's not clear to me where Shipp gives way. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Ivo Perelman with C.T. String Quartet: The Alexander Suite (1998, Leo): The quartet is sharp and jazzwise, led from the bassist: Jason Kao Hwang (violin), Ron Lawrence (viola), Tomas Ulrich (cello), and Dominic Duval (bass). That makes them about as astringent as the tenor saxophonist, who squeaks and squawks above them, pretty much as sharp and bloody as cutting edge gets. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Joe Morris: Colorfield (2009, ESP-Disk): Guitarist, from Boston, with about 30 albums since 1990, has been on a roll lately -- I count three A-list records since 2004 under his own name, a near miss, and a few more under other names, but most of those rode in on the coattails of hard-blowing saxophonists (Ken Vandermark, Jim Hobbs). Missed this one from last year, a trio with pianist Steve Lantner and his usual drummer Luther Gray. Don't know Lantner, but he worked with Joe (and Mat) Maneri, has a half dozen albums since 1997, and provides a consistently interesting contrast to Morris's irrascible guitar. B+(***) [Rhapsody]

Lee Konitz/Chris Cheek/Stephane Furic Leibovici: Jugendstil II (2005 [2010], ESP-Disk): Bassist Leibovici, who previously recorded as Stephane Furic, wrote all eight pieces, and acts as music director for the two saxophonists. He sets the ground rules, reining in the saxes as they're mostly yoked to the melody -- not much here for rugged individualists, although the music is pleasantly engaging. B+(*) [Rhapsody]

Herbie Hancock: The Imagine Project (2010, Hancock): Recorded in seven countries with guests from even further across the universe, this is a colossal engagement of liberal internationalism, and a pretty good showcase for at least some of the talent. But is the choice of such obvious songs lazy thinking or a real paucity of alternatives. Lennon's "Imagine," sure, but can't you do better than Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" for an encore? (Pink sings both, paired first with Seal then with John Legend.) Lennon-McCartney return later, showcasing quintessential good guy Dave Matthews, almost as wasted as Sam Cooke is on James Morrison. Colombia and Brazil get some respect, but Bob Marley is routed through Somalia and the Sahara to East L.A., faring better than Dylan "Times They Are a Changin'" done by the Chieftains with Toumani Diabate kora. Silly as the others seem, the latter is the album's only real gag moment. High point? The closer with Chaka Khan, Anoushka Shankar, and Wayne Shorter. Plus a pianist who always sounds impeccable no matter how little he does. Not a jazz record, but the finale could be worked that way. B [Rhapsody]

Some corrections and further notes on recent prospecting:

Ivo Perelman/Dominic Duval/Brian Willson: Mind Games (2008 [2010], Leo): Drummer's name is "Willson," not "Wilson" as I had it. In my defense, the label says "Wilson" on the front cover, the back cover, the credits in the booklet, and at least three times in Art Lange's liner notes. The label did get Willson's name right on the newer Ivo Perelman/Brian Willson duo, The Stream of Life -- the one I didn't get and haven't heard. AMG has his name both ways, several times, adding to the confusion. The publicist also has the drummer's name as "Wilson" in the hype sheet, so this looks like an uphill battle.

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes -- 196 records thus far -- look here.

Unpacking: Found in the mail this week:

• Henry Darragh: Tell Her for Me (Henry Darragh)
• Matt Garrison: Familiar Places (D Clef)
• Robert David Hall: Things They Don't Teach You in School (Robert David Hall Music)
• John McNeil/Bill McHenry: Chill Morn He Climb Jenny (Sunnyside): Sept. 21
• Myra Melford's Be Bread: The Whole Tree Gone (Firehouse 12)
• Marc Ribot: Silent Movies (Pi): Sept. 28
• Joan Soriano: El Duque de la Bachata (IASO, CD+DVD)
• Paul Tynan & Aaron Lington: Bicoastal Collective: Chapter Two (OA2)
• Greg Ward's Fitted Shards: South Side Story (19/8): Sept. 28
• Sarah Wilson: Trapeze Project (Brass Logic)

Alex Pareene: Poll: Americans not actually that worried about the deficit: I don't put much stock in polls, which can always be jiggered in all sorts of ways, but this one does help point out that deficit hysteria is a big issue only because it's been chatted up by a couple of special interest groups with hidden agendas: the finance industry, who now that they got theirs don't see any need for further government largess, at leat in favor of anyone else, and the Republicans, who are committed to this idea that if you make government miserly and unresponsive to people needs the masses will give up on the notion that they can use their votes to defend and advance their, and the public's, interest, and will settle for the party that best feeds their prejudices and exploits their fears. Yet for all their frenzied hand-wringing over the issue, they never bother to point out the obvious: that deficits can easily be fixed by raising taxes, that the rich are currently taxed at rates way below historic norms, and that taxing the rich (unlike consumption taxes which hit everybody) wouldn't drag the economy further down -- they're productively investing virtually no money now; indeed, they're mostly parking it in government bonds (even at record low rates) because that's the safest bet they can make (which shows you how little they are really worried about the deficits.

What makes this poll significant isn't the paltry 7% obsessed with the federal deficit. It's the contrasting 58% who say "the most important problem facing the country is either the economy or unemployment." Again, that's a problem that translates into a straightforward solution: the government can pick up the slack by pumping money into the economy, creating jobs directly and indirectly by contracting for services, multiplying as the cash flows throughout the economy. There are smart ways of doing this, and not-so-smart ways, and it can be financed through deficits and/or taxes and/or inflating the money supply. But the argument that you can't fix the unemployment problem because we can't in any case raise taxes or suffer even moderate inflation or cope with long-term deficits comes down to the 7% telling the 58% to forget it: to live with chronic unemployment and underemployment, suppressed wages, greater insecurity, and a persistent unraveling of the social fabric because rich people might be inconvenienced contributing back to a nation that has actually treated them very generously.

That ratio -- 7% to 58% -- actually seems to explain a lot of what's going on in this country. There are a lot of issues that if fairly discussed and evaluated would break down into ratios like that. A well connected but tiny minority -- 7% is probably too generous here -- managed to keep a single-payer health care away from serious consideration, even though it consistently polls at close to 50%. (Actually, among people all around the world who actually have such systems it polls much higher, as indeed it does in the US when we discuss Medicare.) Foreign wars, and defense spending in general, is another matter where a tiny percentage of well connected interested parties has been able to keep fair discussion from every happening.

One has to wonder why right now there is so much loose talk going around about the urgent need to preemptively attack Iran in hopes of halting or significantly delaying their nuclear program. The US war in Iraq is clearly winding down, with US forces withdrawing to their luxury bases and forces being moved out of country. Afghanistan is in worse shape, but Obama is certainly hoping for a similar result there: the key, as in Iraq, is to tone down the conflict, to improve security and improve the functionality of the Karzai government. On the other hand, Israel's real problem is the international backlash against the occupation, especially the cruel siege on Gaza. Meanwhile, Iran has been locked in its own internal political crisis, doing pretty much nothing else. So why all the war hysteria over Iran?

The centerpiece is Jeffrey Goldberg's broadside in The Atlantic, titled The Point of No Return, or as it's touted on the magazine's front cover: "Israel Is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran: How, Why- and What It Means." Some reactions: Glenn Greenwald discusses "how propagandists function," pointing out how Goldberg himself has changed his story according to whatever line he wants to push. Stephen Walt points out that the main thing Goldberg is doing is getting us accustomed to talking about war; he calls this "mainstreaming war with Iran." Paul Woodward focuses on the gamesmanship between Israel and the US here: the Israelis are saying that if you don't do it they will try, but it's really beyond their capabilities to do it right, so if the US wants to save Israel from fucking it up, better for the Americans to throw their greater firepower at it. Tony Karon explores the question, "Why do people talk to Jeffrey Goldberg?". Gary Sick pooh-poohs the entire proposition, mostly by looking at Iranian reality.

Then there's Trita Parsi: A campaign for war with Iran begins, which adds much more than reaction to the debate. In particular:

Two days after President Obama's election victory in November 2008, then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed her categorical opposition to U.S. engagement with Iran. "We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue -- in a situation where you have brought sanctions, and you then shift to dialogue -- is liable to be interpreted as weakness," Livni told Israel Radio. Asked if she supported any U.S. dialogue with Iran, Livni replied in no uncertain terms: "The answer is no."

A big part of the problem with Israel and/or the US bombing Iran is that doing so will almost certainly make the problem worse in the future. A show of force would only harden opinion against Israel and the US, and redouble Iran's efforts to develop better defenses and a deterrent against future attacks. So what would reduce or end the threat? The very thing that Obama's election promised, the one thing that Livni was so emphatic about preventing: diplomatic talks. The only possible conclusion is that Israel is against what might work and in favor of what surely will not. Such disinterest in solving the problem makes one wonder whether Israel even considers Iranian nukes to be a real problem.

Indeed, this is hinted at by quotes in Goldberg's article; e.g., where Ehud Barak admits that the problem he sees is demographic: that Jews would be less likely to immigrate to Israel, and more likely to emigrate from. Of course, a much more sensible answer would be for Israel to agree to one of many reasonable solutions to the Palestinian conflict, which would let the hot air out of anti-Israeli passions and reduce Israel to being a normal state. But that's the problem they really don't want to solve.

PS: This has been heating up for a while. Back in July Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh published an op-ed, characterized by Tony Karon as "a how-to-bomb Iran manual, adding that "The idea that you can bomb a country and then 'make sure the confrontation does not escalate out of control' is, quite simply, bizarre." Of course, people need reassurances to keep from thinking these things through -- like, for instance, how Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq would cost no more than $20 billion and how its reconstruction would be "self-financed."

Karon starts his piece off with a photo of Iraq War-enabler Peter Beinart chatting with Hillary Clinton, and titles his piece "On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War." Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up today which starts off with Goldberg's own track record of promoting war with Iraq: his piece is called "Does the past record of jouralists matter?" -- he's responding to James Fallows defending Goldberg's "journalism." The one interesting thing about Fallows's post is the paragraph summing up a 2004 piece on the same recurrent threat:

And then there was the previous Atlantic cover story about bombing Iran, which I did back in 2004. It was based on a mock war-game exercise to see what, in practical terms, it would mean to "take out" Iran's nuclear facilities. The conclusion was that, even then, Iran's facilities were too dispersed to eliminate by an aerial attack; that an attack would likely unify and motivate Iranians behind their government and the drive to become a nuclear power; that even if Israel attacked on its own, the United States would still be blamed; and that even the most "successful" attack would exchange a temporary tactical advantage (temporary delay in Iran's plans) for a major strategic setback, namely lasting complications and vulnerabilities for the U.S. around the world. Last year Anthony Cordesman, of CSIS, laid out a similar analysis of an Israeli strike, which came to similar cautionary conclusions.

Fallows goes on to quote Goldberg doubting that bombing Iran would do any good (and then waffling), a neat little bit of deniability in case it all blows up. Does make me wonder why we even stop to take such fantasies seriously, but Greenwald has an answer:

I'm now finishing up a long article for Harper's about America's War Culture: why war advocacy has been and continues to be the reflexive, required perspective of the nation's foreign policy elite. I don't want to say too much about the piece, but one central reason for this is that those who were most spectacularly wrong in cheering for the attack on Iraq have not only faced no accountability, but have thrived, been rewarded, have seen their positions of influence elevated. Conversely, those who were right continue to be marginalized. That's due in part to the ethos implicit in Fallows' defense of Goldberg: it's so unfair to have their prior behavior affect their current status and credibility. As a result, our war policies -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Iran -- are all being shaped by the very same war-hungry political and media elites who performed so disgracefully in 2002 and 2003.

I have to admit I share that frustration, but the core reason is certainly simpler. Any time Israel needs to deflect attention from its own deeds and wants to bolster support from Washington, it drums up its bogeyman, which has been Iran since the fall of Iraq and the Soviet Union. So, Israel taps its usual mouthpieces, like Jeffery Goldberg. That he was wrong on Iraq in 2003 is your opinion; as far as his employers are concerned, his record is spotless, because he's always said what he was supposed to say.

Glenn Greenwald, on Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article "Israel Is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran":

If you were an Iranian, is there anything that would convince you of the need for nuclear weapons more than watching Israel bomb your country?

Of course, most Americans won't see that, because we lack the ability to imagine how other people see things. We're not even very good at understanding each other.

Alex Pareene:

Former Mexican President Vincente Fox calls for Mexico to legalize drugs, which would probably help their situation a lot, though not as much as it would help them if we legalized drugs.

This isn't even a case of putting our interests ahead of theirs, as "realist" foreign policy wonks suggest we should do. It's more a matter of forcing our hypocrisies onto others so we can avoid facing up to our own problems.

David Frum (quoted by Glenn Greenwald after Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said "the professional left . . . should be drug-tested"):

More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base.

Frum tries to pretty this up a bit. If "Repub pols" so feared the GOP base, they woundn't work so hard to push its buttons, but then the GOP base is usually satisfied to get out and vote then stay out of the way while the pols go about their main job of servicing the rich. The "Dem pols" don't have it so easy because the "Dem base" actually has reasoned interests and concerns in conflict with the interests and concerns all pols face day to day -- the lobbies, the media, etc. -- which often makes the base inconvenient.

Of course, Gibbs wasn't talking about the base. He was talking about pundits who care about actual issues regardless of whatever's most tactically convenient for Obama. Greenwald quotes Bob Herbert: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." That seems like a pretty sober statement to me. There are more than a few examples; even some, like the surge in Afghanistan, where Obama has outdone Bush, and some of these (maybe not Afghanistan) are retreats from his campaign pledges. It shouldn't be surprising that Obama gets some flack from people who supported him in 2008: he's fallen way short of their hopes, he's fallen short of his promises, and he doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of what we desperately need from him, which is to keep the Republicans out of power for the next 2-6 years.

Going back to the top item above, one thing that nearly all of us expected from Obama was to do a better job than Bush of sorting out our differences with Iran. That hasn't happened, and he hasn't excluded the possibility of doing something far worse.

Matthew Yglesias: Progressive Consumption Taxes. I meant to write something about this a few weeks ago, but it slipped out of my consciousness, until Yglesias brought it up again. What he calls a "progressive consumption tax" is actually an opt-out income tax: it lets rich people opt out of paying income tax on any money they choose to save rather than spend. I can think of several things wrong with this.

For starters, consumption taxes should be point-of-sale, since that's precisely when one has the money to pay them -- if the tax pushes the price above what you are willing to pay, then you walk away from the purchase. (Sales taxes depress economic activity a bit, but more often than not you need what you're buying so you pay the tax. Sales taxes also depress profits a bit, since every now and then a seller will settle for a bit less profit rather than losing the sale.) The problem is that point-of-sale taxes can't be progressive unless you can distinguish how much buyers have bought in the past, something that would take a lot of nosey bureaucracy and would still be almost laughably easy to subvert. (You could, of course, tax more expensive items or certain kinds of items at higher rates, which would make a sales tax somewhat progressive, but that gets real complicated real fast.) Robert Frank's scheme gets around this problem by taxing income minus savings, so the rap on consumption is false advertising.

The bigger question is why exempt savings, especially since savings is simply what people who have too much money have left over after they've bought everything they needed. For years and years economists lecture us on the virtue of savings, arguing that the economy depends on investors, that government policy should do everything possible to increase savings. We already bend over backwards to encourage savings, deferring taxes on retirement accounts, deducting taxes on home borrowing, barely taxing dividends and capital gains. One paradox is that with all of this policy favoring savings the nationwide savings rate keeps dropping -- which of course is cited as evidence that we need even more favorable treatment of savings. Also curious is that the rare occasion where savings goes up is precisely when the economy as a whole tanks. So why on earth should we think that savings drives the economy?

Well, the reason some people say that is because pretty much by definition savings is the exclusive defining trait of the rich: people who have more money than they need to satisfy their consumption desires have savings, and people who don't don't. Sure, there are marginal cases where poor people scrimp to save something away, and there are rich people who come up with ever more fanciful ways to squander their money, and you're no doubt right to find the former virtuous and the latter foolish, to expect that the former will improve their lot and the latter will throw it away. But what's good for individuals is often irrelevant to the whole economy or society. (Drug use is often tragic for individuals but is big business coming and going for the economy as a whole.) So whenever you hear someone talking on about how we need more savings, what he's saying is that rich people should be able to dig deeper into your pockets. Encouraging savings is one of the main ways we allow our country to become more and more inequal.

Another big way we make wealth more inequal is by flattening the tax rate. That's what repeated movements to cut "marginal" tax rates have done. Shifting to sales taxes, which are necessarily flat, also favors inequality. And capped payroll taxes and special treatment for unearned income is even more regressive than flat tax rates. The only real way to keep inequality from getting way out of hand -- as it's pretty much done in America, and done even worse in the crony capitalist havens of the developing world -- is to progressively tax excess income, which is to say: what we need to do is to tax savings. Frank and Yglesias imagine they can make up for the inherent shortcomings of their scheme by jacking up the tax rates on extravagant spenders. That might help a little, but the opt-out nature of their scheme is a big and dangerous loophole.

I've written a lot about taxes in the past so let me reiterate a few points:

• Taxes are necessary to support government spending while keeping the currency reasonably stable. How much spending we need depends on how many services we prefer to be provided equitably through public spending rather than through profit-seeking private enterprise -- we now have many examples of this like education, roads, sanitation, parks, justice, and defense, and one can easily add to this list. We need to raise approximately as much in taxes as we plan to spend for all of these reasons.
• A government is too big only if it crowds out and doesn't satisfy private economic activity that we actually need. (I doubt that such conditions are actually possible, at least in a responsive democracy.) As long as government spends what it takes in, its effect on the economy should be neutral, except in times when private sector lags, in which case government spending stimulates the economy.
• Because tax policy distorts economic activities, you generally want to make taxes as invisible and unobtrusive as possible. (This is the exact opposite of most US practice, which is to make taxes appear as ugly as possible.)
• Sales taxes, like VATs, are a good way to provide the bulk of tax revenues, because they are always available -- their funding is a necessary part of the transaction -- and they can be efficiently collected through businesses. They can be varied by product, which is useful for adjusting prices to reflect externalities. A VAT can be structured to exempt labor costs, thus minimizing its depressive effect on jobs. They can even be seasonally adjusted, and as such can be autotuned to reflect revenue needs.
• Income taxes should be retained and should be significantly progressive to counterblance the extraordinary advantages that our economic system allows some individuals. Progressivity helps to maintain a fair and equitable society, and expresses a general desire to limit greed even short of confiscatory rates. (We have in the past had marginal income tax rates as high as 90% without damaging the economy. In fact, growth rates during that period were much higher than they have been since the rates were cut.)
• I would make a distinction between earned and unearned income. Both would be taxed progressively: earned income (wages, small business profits) would be taxed same as now; unearned income (interest, dividends, capital gains, gifts, inheritance) would be taxed at a rate that progresses as your total unearnings accumulate over your lifetime. This has the merit of encouraging poorer people to save to supplement their future income without unduly favoring the rich (who save because they have too much money, and whose money multiples with very little effort on their own).
• Stiffly progressive estate taxes are necessary to prevent the undemocratic accretion of a hereditary aristocracy. There are countless examples of the harm such people do -- the fact that the new right has been largely funded by heirs is just a particularly odious one. Whatever inheritance that does slip through the tax net would be treated as unearned income as above.
• Corporate profits should continue to be taxed, but using a progressive rate structure which would encourage competition by undercutting the advantages of scale that large corporations enjoy.
• Since so many government services are borne at the state and local level, we need a system for uniform tax collection and systematic tax sharing. This would also work to counter political lobbying for local tax preferences which too often these days guides plant location and corrupts local politics. This system should provide automatic countercyclical measures so that state and local government can adjust appropriately to economic cycles. State and local governments which receive a larger tax share than they wish to spend should be able to rebate the excess to their constituents on an equal basis.
• I would get rid of the current system of property taxes, mostly because it requires a tax to be paid from savings as opposed to sales and income taxes which are paid from available funds -- i.e., if you cannot afford the tax on a purchase, you have the option of foregoing the purchase, but if you cannot afford the tax on a property, you can be forced to liquidate the property. (Estate taxes are like property taxes, but since the owner is no longer with us, he or she isn't distressed by the judgment.)

Most people on the left instinctively reject non-progressive or even regressive taxes, probably because they are tired of losing battles over progressive income and estate taxes. You can have a progressive tax system with a lot of regressive or flat taxes if the progressive component is truly effective. Similarly, people on the left rarely care to cut or eliminate property taxes because taxing property is a straightforward way to soak the rich, but the need to save for property taxes introduces a lot of distortions in the system.

This all seems to self-evident to me that sometimes I think someone should set up a soapbox and campaign on these ideas -- I'm tempted to call them Smart Taxes. (Can't use Fair Tax, which has already been debased to sheer stupidity. How can anyone think that eliminating a one-page rate table simplifies the tax code, as compared to the thousands of pages of FASB rules that try to figure out what is income and deductible expense, a problem that will persist no matter what the rate.) But this sort of jiggering of the tax system is just a nice way to make the system a bit more efficient and sensible. The real question is whether we want to live in a more equitable society, whether we appreciate the core values of mutual respect, openness, fair treatment, equal opportunity, honesty. There is much research, as well as common sense, that shows that more equitable societies are happier, less stressful, more productive societies. If you want that, then devising a tax system to represent those values is straightforward. Meanwhile, the people who don't want that will be screaming bloody murder over any scheme that hints at progressivism, even one like Yglesias and Frank proposed with an opt-out for the superrich.