Thursday, December 26, 2024

Odds and Sods (1)

Internal links: Xmas Eve dinner; desk mess; election q&a.

I know I should be working on my big essay for the 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I've struggled with the task in the past, as may be painfully evident if you look back at my 2022 and 2023 essays:

I've been fairly calm about the impending task, at least up until yesterday, which I spent hacking out a fairly wordy Music Week, instead of moving on to the next obvious step, which is to examine the results and write up footnotes on all the various discrepancies (2023 albums that got votes in both years, albums that got votes in wrong categories, albums that could be split or combined, albums in categories that got top-ten votes from critics who left them off their category lists; I also need to count up how many voters skipped the categories altogether, or only included top-ten picks there -- the latter was often at my urging, so barely counts as endorsement of the category). Given that this next step is mere paper shuffling, something that in years past I've been really adept at, I'm baffled at my procrastination. I'm accustomed to avoiding writing, but dread of mere gruntwork is something new and unsettling.

Yet here I am, not just procrastinating but inventing a new blog post: something to do while I'm not doing what I ought to be doing, but also a workaround, a way of sneaking up on the real task. For instance, in adding the links above, I now have the relevant pieces opened in tabs, as ready references, and repositories of ideas I could eventually employ.

But before we circle back to the Poll, I have a couple other things I want to address -- and, as the title suggests, don't expect any thematic organization here, other than that I'm anticipating a wish to occasionally post personal thoughts, as random and haphazard as everyday life (which suggests differentiation as a numbered series; as for "sods" instead of "ends," that comes from the title of a Who album, a compilation of their miscellany and detritus, an Anglicism which has since entered my vocabulary).

I keep copies of most of my blog writings, plus occasional notes I'm less concerned with in sharing, in my online notebook. One thing it's especially handy for is keeping track of past calendar events, including the occasional fancy (or at least hearty) dinners I've been known to prepare. As the dinners are somewhat popular items, I often note them on Facebook, and occasionally mention them in my Music Week posts. I meant to say something about Xmas Eve yesterday, but didn't get to it before I felt the compunction to post. Later last night, I had second thoughts, and added the following section, but didn't post it. This morning, it seemed like it might fit better here.

I did finally take some time off to rustle up a small Xmas Eve dinner: two guests, my nephew Ram and long-time family friend Kathy Jenkins, who had been a regular for that particular event until she moved out of Wichita a few years ago. I wanted to do something easy but still outstanding. In a dream, I imagined roasting chicken thighs on a rack above root vegetables, which would be enriched by drippings. We made a quick shopping run the day before, and couldn't find some things I had wanted, so I wound up doing a lot of improvising.

I had two Ottolenghi recipes in mind for the chicken, but didn't have and couldn't find the complements (fennel and clementines for one, Jerusalem artichokes for the other), so I consulted the web and settled on a sumac-and-zataar variant. For the vegetables, I had onions, yukon gold potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, a turnip, golden beets, delicata squash, and leeks. The beets had to start early, and that turned disastrous: I put them in a glass dish I assumed to be oven-safe but which shattered. I had to cool the oven, clean the mess up, throw them away, and start all over. Beyond that, the main problem was that I had too much of everything for my pretty large roasting pan. And my idea of reducing the marinade to make a sauce never really panned out, although I did brush more, including a few bits of onion and lemon, on top of the chicken, which helped it brown up. So I didn't have the sauce and garnish to finish the chicken.

I also bought a package of baby spinach, figuring I could turn it into a side salad. I was thinking of the Bella Luna salad (a local restaurant), but didn't find a close enough recipe. Instead, I just threw all sorts of things in: cucumber, onion, pepper, and tomatoes from my Greek salad; bacon and sauteed mushrooms (I had bought them thinking I might add them to the roots, but had no space); toasted pecans; creamy goat cheese and gorgonzola; capers; some olive-feta antipasto; golden raisins; and I made a balsamic vinaigrette with mustard and a bit of honey; and a generous sprinkle of sumac and black pepper. Turned out to be a really nice combination of textures and flavors.

I had just enough leftover applesauce to make a cake, so I served it with ice cream for dessert. Here's the Facebook write-up (same pic as above).

I took another picture today, of my main computer workspace, which has turned into a ridiculous mess. One of the main things I need to do before I can make any real headway on my essay is to clear this desk. The really critical problem is the stack of CDs, in front of the three-tier CD shelf unit, with the stack on top of it. I need to be able to find my 2024 Jazz A-List albums (at least the ones I actually possess), few of which I've actually replayed since I initially reviewed them. The shelf unit I assembled and positioned when I was doing the 2023 essay, at which point it was jammed to the gills with 2023 and 2022 CDs -- all really good records, by the way. I need to remove enough of the older ones so I can file the newer ones and find them when I want one. The daunting problem here isn't so much sweeping the desk clear as finding other places to put everything, given that all the other places have similar problems.

The first thing that needs to go is the black basket, which has my promo CD queue with hype sheets. Everything there is 2025, and none of it has to be touched until I'm done with 2024. (For similar reasons, I'm automatically deleting all of my 2025 email, so nothing extraneous gets stuck in my inbox.) Then I need to clear out the baskets to the lower right, refiling them elsewhere, which will open up space for thinning out the shelf unit. Probably not a huge amount of work, but every item needs to be gone over and dealt with accordingly.

While writing about this, I got distracted with the thought that it would be nice to be able to take a wider-angle picture (maybe a fisheye lens? or is there one with less distortion?). I did some shopping, and ordered a 3-lens clip-on for my phone (or so the pitch says). As an engineer who's pretty skilled at figuring out the ramifications of how small changes, I see this as the start of a much more overwhelming project. Still, it's more tangible than imagining an open-ended essay based on an enormous lode of significant data.

I haven't been following politics since signing off with my last Speaking of Which, but I do have some thoughts about what happened in the 2024 election, and why it happened. I'm nowhere near wanting to write them up, but I do have enough grounding to react to this item in today's Xgau Sez:

Harris is the establishment. Trump is viewed by his voters as a counter-establishment force, albeit uncontrollable, self-centered, and potentially dangerous. I also have to disagree with you on your assessment of KH as a public speaker . . . she rambles on, often changing her policies to please the crowd in front of her. Voters sensed, correctly, her duplicity and lack of a moral compass when discussing Israel or the Ukrainian issue. -- Ricardo Pini, New Zealand

May I suggest that unless American politics is your academic specialty or something you refrain from gross generalizations about a nation half a world away from yours. It's certainly true that today's active Democrats have a collegiate/academic tinge/orientation that diluted or strained their moral compass and damaged their appeal to large swaths of the working-class electorate. But the "establishment" is the people with too much money, not the people who inflect a major field of discourse. As far as Harris's lack of moral compass is concerned, do you really believe that being compelled to do some sort of impossible balancing act as regards Palestine, an issue regarding which only a sliver of the American electorate and indeed political class knows how to "solve" unless making Netanyahu and his apparatchiks vanish in thin air suddenly becomes practicable, is what cost her the election? What cost her the election was her gender, her color, her classiness, and the Dems' failure to address the economy in a clear and plausible way.

Pini makes four points here, and they're basically correct, not that I wouldn't shade them a bit differently:

  1. While there is no single, monolithic establishment in America, Harris campaigned as if there was one, and she was its candidate in the election. She raised more money than Trump, and made it clear that the changes she championed weren't incompatible with maintaining the prerogatives of great wealth. She, like Biden (and Obama and Clinton) would be good for business. She surrounded herself with billionaires and ultraconservative Republicans, while discounting past moderate heresies. She was the candidate who committed to law and order. She was the one who supported the military and clung to the fantasy of Pax Americana (even as it degenerated into mere cover for Israel's genocide). That, at least, was certainly her message. We can argue over whether it was the right message, and whether she was a credible advocate for it, but the point is fundamentally solid.

    Moreover, this point wasn't very controversial even before the election. Many on the left were deeply bothered by her association with the Cheneys, by the strategy to woo rich Republicans, and by her unwillingness to offer any real hope of ending Biden's wars. Like many people, I tried my best to minimize and to rationalize these faults, always keeping them in perspective of the far more ominous Trump faults. And I trusted the competency of the campaign, even when they zigged when I thought they should have zagged. And it came close to working, and arguably could have with just a few minor tweaks. (One I find especially appealing was the idea of shifting more Harris money to down ballot Democrats, hoping for reverse coattails, by focusing more on issues where Republicans were unpopular. The assumption behind the Cheney ploy was that Trump was weaker than generic Republicans, but the opposite may have been true.)

  2. The view of Trump as "a counter-establishment force" was the big surprise of the election. It made no sense to Democrats, who quite correctly recognized Trump as a total fraud, and were quite clear as to their malevolence. But in their scramble for the high ground of the status quo, Democrats blinded themselves to the myriad failures and iniquities of a system that has been so corrupted by greed and violence at least since Nixon/Reagan that they can't imagine anything different. Nobody noticed when Trump switched his campaign slogan from the fatuous "Make America Great Again" to an even bigger lie: "Trump Will Fix It."

  3. I don't have a strong opinion on Harris as a speaker, as opposed to her message, but I did notice her stumble a few times, especially in her inability to show any meaningful concern over Gaza. I doubt many other politicians would have done better, but firmer principles might have helped. Bernie Sanders is an example here. Barack Obama was more effective early on, when it looked like he had some, and less later on, when he messed them up.

  4. I understand the point about "her duplicity and lack of a moral compass" but I don't feel like condemning her in those terms. Although morals are important in everyday life, they are something of a luxury in politics, where one is weighing relative evils with much uncertainty. Biden made a major mistake in not pressing Israel to halt its war. Harris made a lesser mistake in not breaking with Biden over the issue, and another in not talking about the conflict in terms that made it clear that she would end it. That may or may not prove the "lack of a moral compass," but what's more unforgivable is that it shows poor political judgment. Christgau's notion that there's "some sort of impossible balancing act" involved here is naive to the point of being disingenuous. I'm not going into details here -- I've written millions of words on Israel, Ukraine, and their related wars against "terror" and often for "ethnic cleansing" if anyone cares to consult them.

As for Christgau's last sentence, it's not implausible, but also far from certain (and one that I find both unlikely and unhelpful). The election was close enough that dozens of things could have shifted it enough to change the result. Everyone is free to pick their own fave theories and pet peeves. Mine is that Biden's wars doomed Harris, and not because there's some sliver of voters who think he picked the wrong side, but simply because he allowed them to drag on, with no hope of resolution and recovery. Most people don't have much understanding of the conflicts that led to those wars, but they do realize that whatever they may be, they're not worth the costs of war. Some responsible party needs to shut them down, much like the US and USSR agreed to do -- within just a few weeks, at most -- with Israel's wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. And Biden failed to miserably at that simple task that some voters chose instead to believe Trump's promise to "fix it."

While I don't doubt that there are people who voted against Harris because of "her gender, her color, her classiness," I doubt that any of those traits were decisive. As for "the Dems' failure to address the economy in a clear and plausible way," I don't even think they failed. Their problem wasn't the insufficiency of their argument, or their failure to advance practical reforms that would help most people. Their problem was that half of America refused to listen to anything they had to say, in large part because they had come to discredit anything any Democrat might say, and indeed to doubt the validity of rational discourse.

The main thing that's become clear to me from the 2024 election is that Democrats don't know how to talk to other people, even when they really want to. Nor do Republicans, 'but for some reason that hurts them less, and may even help them fire up their base. It's going to be really hard for Democrats to turn this around: the foundation of credibility is incorruptibility, which isn't easy to politicians who spend most of their waking hours desperately begging for money. I don't doubt that the pendulum will swing again, but it's much more likely that Republicans will discredit themselves than that Democrats will discover integrity.

PS: I've been toying with the idea of writing something on the 2024 election, tentatively titled, "Did Something Weird Just Happen?" I doubt I have the stomach for wading through the minutiae of Trump campaign agitprop, let alone for interviewing the people who voted for him, but sooner or later someone is going to figure this out -- or at least some of it. (I suspect I have some angles that won't come easily to others.)

I promised to come back to the poll, but at this stage it would be better just to post this and start with the work of footnoting and/or desk clearing. At this point I've finished the leftovers (aside from one last piece of cake for tomorrow) -- something I'm usually not too keen on, but they've been really delicious. I also need to post Christgau's Q&A, which should make it up tonight. (I keep putting off updating the database, which still needs some rather tricky utility work, but is way overdue, and would no doubt help him with his upcoming Dean's List.) And I gave up on trying to figure out which new jazz album I should play next, and settled into five hours of an Elvis Presley box I stumbled and don't begin to understand. It's getting late, and I've avoided useful work for another day.

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