Blog Entries [240 - 249]

Monday, August 7, 2023

Music Week

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40662 [40636] rated (+26), 12 [14] unrated (-2).

I published another Speaking of Which yesterday (5691 words, 93 links). Could have written much more, but couldn't find the time, and by Sunday evening the will was flagging as well.

I have even less to say about this week's music, or for that matter this past week. I'm making minor progress on my technical projects, but still have a lot more to do. Posting this early will open up some time on Monday. One thing I did get done last week was a trip to Thai Binh, as I was running low on hoisin sauce. While there, I picked up some pork and eggplants, so I need to cook dinner on Tuesday, and make time for all that entails. At last, a project with a reasonable expectation of completion.

Christian Iszchak wrote a longer review of Flang Dang. I heard the mid-1970s albums when they came out, but haven't played them in ages, and probably only have them on vinyl (if that). I had the record in my tracking file, but hadn't pursued it. But I had checked out a couple of his more recent albums. I also remember his earlier group, Amen Corner, but didn't register anything by it in my database.

I didn't get July's indexing done (or at least I don't remember doing it), so maybe next week.

New records reviewed this week:

Aline's Etoile Magique: Eclipse (2023, Elastic): Violinist Aline Homzy, from Montreal, based in New York. Quintet with vibes, guitar, bass, and percussion, plus some guest spots. B+(**) [cd] [08-25]

Bdrmm: I Don't Know (2023, Rock Action): British shoegaze band, Ryan Smith the vocalist, second album. Influences "drawn from a wider range of sounds," blended together nice but indecisively. B+(*) [sp]

Gordon Beeferman/Michael Evans/Michael Foster/Shelley Hirsch: Glow (2021 [2023], Tripticks Tapes): Keyboard player, half-dozen albums back to 2001, with drums and tenor/soprano sax, with Hirsch's improvised vocals. B+(*) [bc]

Will Bernard & Beth Custer: Sky (2023, Dreck to Disk): Guitar and clarinet duo, with Custer singing a couple (like "John Brown's Body"). Low key and down home. B+(*) [cd] [09-05]

Geof Bradfield Quintet: Quaver (2021 [2023], Calligram): Tenor saxophonist, born in Houston, based in Chicago, albums since 2008 plus a fair number of side credits. Quintet with Russ Johnson (trumpet), Scott Hesse (guitar), Clark Sommers (bass), and Dana Hall (drums). B+(***) [cd]

The Clientele: I Am Not There Anymore (2023, Merge): British indie rock band, founded 1991 but first album not until 2000, this only their second since 2010. B+(*) [sp]

Bethany Cosentino: Natural Disaster (2023, Concord): Singer for Best Coast, four albums 2010-20, first solo album, amps up the pop riffs, finding excitement in topical events that would bum most people out. B+(***) [sp]

Ember: August in March (2023, Imani): Brooklyn trio, fronted by Caleb Wheeler Curtis (strich, trumpet, reed trumpet -- never heard of the latter, but his native instrument is alto sax), with bass (Noah Garabedian) and drums (Vincent Sperrazza), group has a 2021 album with Orrin Evans. One of many terrific free sax trios this year, with a neat twist. A- [cd] [08-11]

Foo Fighters: But Here We Are (2023, Roswell/RCA): Grunge band from Seattle, formed 1994 by ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, who switched over to guitar and vocals. Eleventh studio album, fifth I've heard, having skipped the last three. No rush on this one either, but it showed up on three mid-year lists, and is probably the highest-rated non-metal album that I hadn't bothered with (86/31 at AOTY). Starts off tolerable enough, but the anguish is communicable. B- [sp]

Michael Foster: The Industrious Tongue of Michael Foster (2022, Relative Pitch): Saxophonist (tenor/soprano), produces his inevitable solo album, aided by sampler and oscillators, featuring more tongue effects than outright blowing. B+(*) [sp]

Leo Genovese/Demian Cabaud/Marcos Cavaleiro: Estrellero (2023, Sunnyside): Piano-bass-drums trio, the first two Argentines who studied at Berklee, with Cabaud moving on to Portugal, where he met the drummer. B+(**) [sp]

Georgia: Euphoric (2023, Domino): British pop singer Georgia Barnes, third album. B+(***) [sp]

The Ghost: Vanished Pleasures (2023, Relative Pitch): Tenor/soprano saxophonist Michael Foster, leading a free jazz trio with bass (Jared Radichel) and drums (Joey Sullivan). Quite a few albums since 2013, a couple under this name (but with different players). B+(***) [sp]

Cory Hanson: Western Cum (2023, Drag City): Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, third album, previous titles The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo and Pale Horse Rider. Leads with guitar, which remains dominant even when buried in the band sound. B+(*) [sp]

J Hus: Beautiful and Brutal Yard (2023, Black Butter): British rapper Momodou Jallow, parents Gambian, third album. B+(**) [sp]

Mike Jones Trio: Are You Sure You Three Guys Know What You're Doing? (2022 [2023], Capri): Pianist, goes back to the 1990s, with Penn Jillette (bass) and Jeff Hamilton (drums). Standards, everything from "Perdido" to Jobim, closing with an original. B+(**) [cd] [08-18]

Andy Fairweather Low: Flang Dang (2023, Last Music): Welsh singer-songwriter, recorded three low-key but remarkably catchy albums 1974-76, but virtually nothing after 1980 up to 2006 (exception is the 1983 Moments of Madness, credited to Local Boys). Since then he's turned out several live albums, coasting on his reputation, such as it is. But it appears the lockdown got him to concentrate, to write some new songs and play everything but the drums. The label calls this "a remarkable return to form," but it's also a disarmingly engaging return to basics. A- [sp]

Lowcountry: Lowcountry (2023, Ropeadope): A group of Gullah singers and storytellers from South Carolina, led by trumpeter/composer Matt White and percussionist Quentin E. Baxter, talk and sing some, rooted in one of the few American communities that retains much of its African past, framed by a a string quartet and a jazz combo, including ringer Chris Potter on tenor sax. B+(***) [cd]

Chad McCullough: The Charm of Impossibilities (2022 [2023], Calligram): Seattle-based trumpet player, albums since 2009 including several groups. Cut this one in Chicago, with Jon Irabagon (tenor/soprano sax), Larry Kohut (bass), and Jon Deitemyer (drums), with Tim Hagans co-producing. Credits Olivier Messiaen's "Techniques of My Musical Language," while finding his own. A- [cd]

Jesper Nordberg: Trio (2023, Gotta Let It Out): Danish bassist, first album, trio with violin (Stefan Pōntinen) and Ruhi Erdogan (trumpet). Good use of these pairings. B+(***) [bc]

Kresten Osgood/Bob Moses/Tisziji Muñoz: Spiritual Drum Kingship (2022 [2023], Gotta Let It Out): Two drummers plus electric guitar. The latter is an American, born in Brooklyn, released an album on India Navigation in 1978, but didn't really produce much until the late 1990s, when he recorded albums with Moses, Pharoah Sanders, Dave Liebman, Marilyn Crispellm, and Rashied Ali. Moses is of similar age, not just a drummer but a student of percussion everywhere. Osgood is younger, from Denmark, started around 2002, starting with Sam Rivers, Oliver Lake, and other notables. Such a tour de force by the guitarist that it takes two very fast drummers to keep up, and these two make the album. A- [bc]

Chuck Owen and the WDR Big Band: Renderings (2019-21 [2023], MAMA): Arranger/conductor, composer of three (of eight) tracks here, teaches at University of South Florida, has seven previous albums since 1995 with his group, the Jazz Surge. German big band here, with a featured spot for Sara Caswell (violin). B+(***) [cd]

Susanne Sundfør: Blómi (2023, Bella Union): Norwegian singer-songwriter, sixth studio album since 2007. Dedicated to her theologian grandfather and to her daughter, title from Old Norse (to bloom), only partly in English. B+(*) [sp]

Tainy: Data (2023, Neon16): Puerto Rican reggaeton producer Marcos Efrain Masis Fernández, first album (other than a co-credit from 2006), nineteen tracks have co-credits including some fairly major ones (Bad Bunny, Julieta Venegas, Myke Towers, Skrillex). B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Abdul Wadud: By Myself: Solo Cello (1977 [2023], Gotta Groove): Cellist, originally Ronald DeVaughn (1947-2022), very little under his own name, but his duos with Julius Hemphill are well remembered. B+(**) [bc]

Old music:

Ember With Orrin Evans: No One Is Any One (2020 [2021], Sunnyside): Alto saxophonist Caleb Wheeler Curtis, formed this trio with Noah Garabedian (bass) and Vinnie Sperrazza (drums), and caught the ear of the pianist, who joins in on the back stretch (four tracks, of ten), slowing things down. B+(**) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Adam Birnbaum: Preludes (Chelsea Music Festival) [10-10]
  • Itamar Borochov: Arba (Greenleaf Music) [09-09]
  • Christian Dillingham: Cascades (Greenleaf Music) [09-01]
  • Darrel Grant's MJ New: Our Mr. Jackson (Lair Hill) [10-06]
  • Chuck Owen and the WDR Big Band: Renderings (MAMA) [07-21]
  • Claudia Villela: Cartas Ao Vento (Taina Music) [09-08]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 6, 2023

Speaking of Which

Trump's third indictment led off the week, so naturally he hogged the news. He complains about being singled out, as if he's the only president ever to get caught running a byzantine scam to reverse election results. If anything, he's the one getting special favors. Anyone else trying to incite violence against witnesses would at least get a gag order, or more likely be remanded to jail for the duration.

Top story threads:

Trump: He gets his own section again this week, because he got indicted again, and this time it's the big one, the case we've been waiting for. Well, not all of it, but stripped down to the most basic and unassailable points.

DeSantis, and other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Paul Krugman: [07-31] Goldilocks and the Bidenomics bears: "It's hard to overstate how good the U.S. economic news has been lately. It was so good that it didn't just raise hopes for the future; it led to widespread rethinking of the past." After noting Larry Summers' plea for "many years of very high unemployment," Krugman goes on to say: "And as I said, we've had an astonishing recovery in jobs and G.D.P., which puts the sluggish recovery of the 2010s to shame; indeed, it suggests that the failure to achieve quick recovery from the financial crisis was a huge economic tragedy." Then he wrote another column expanding on that: [08-01] Frying pans and fiscal policy. Looking at the first two charts there, the slow recovery from the 2008-09 recession up through 2016 can largely be explained by the Republican gospel of austerity, which they dropped as soon as Trump took office. But especially in 2009-10, when Democrats had Congressional majorities, Obama's "confidence men" deserve much of the blame (especially Summers, who like Geithner and Furman didn't get invites to return from Biden; the term was the title of Ron Suskind's 2011 book on Obama's economic team, due to their belief that the key to recovery was Obama projecting confidence about the recovery; at the time, Krugman ridiculed them for their belief in "the confidence fairy").

  • Eric Levitz: [08-04] America's economic outlook keeps getting better: "Productivity and real wages are rising."

  • Bill Scher: [08-04] Don't expect Biden to get credit for the economy anytime soon. Cites Clinton and Obama as Democratic presidents who saw sustained economic growth during their terms, but got so little credit for it that the voters replaced them with Republicans, leading to massive redistribution toward the rich, and major recessions. I have some theories about why things work out this way. One is that Democrats can be counted on to support measures to stimulate the economy -- as they did with legislation to help Bush in 2008 and Trump in 2020 -- while Republicans insist on austerity when Democrats are in charge, figuring that the president will be blamed for their own acts. Key here is that Republicans are much more adept at blaming Democrats for anything and everything, whereas Democrats prefer to frame their policies positively, and are eager to compromise them to receive the thin veneer of bipartisan support.

  • Emily Stewart: [08-01] Can Joe Biden convince Americans the economy is actually good? "Bidenomics, or the real story of a sort of made-up thing."

Law, order, and the courts:

Climate and Environment:

  • Kate Aronoff: [07-31] What Florida's corals look like after catastrophic bleaching: "What's alarming about this year's bleaching event is just how quickly the corals died."

  • Tom Engelhardt: [08-03] Extremely extreme: After a paragraph summarizing the shocking climate news from this summer, he segues into the self-appointed leader of the "Me-First" movement: Donald Trump. Sure, he did a lot of bad things as president, only a small fraction of which he's since been indicted for, but his sins of omission will be judged by history even more harshly, including four years of doing nothing (beyond his active obstruction) on climate change.

  • Georgina Rannard/Mark Poynting/Jana Tauschinski/Becky Dale: [08-04] Ocean heat record broken, with grim implications for the planet.

Ukraine War: Regarding the counteroffensive, Robert Wright writes in [08-04] Biden's Ukraine quagmire:

This week a widely followed Twitter account called War Mapper quantified the amount of terrain Ukrainian forces have retaken since the beginning of their counter-offensive two months ago. The net gain is a bit over 100 square miles. So the fraction of Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia has dropped from 17.54 percent to 17.49 percent.

This gain has come at massive cost: untold thousands of dead Ukrainians, untold thousands of maimed Ukrainians, and lots of destroyed weapons and armored vehicles.

At this rate of battlefield progress, it will be six decades before Ukraine has expelled Russian troops from all its territory -- the point before which, President Zelensky has said, peace talks are unthinkable. And at this rate of human loss, Ukraine will run out of soldiers long before then -- and long before Russia does.

In short: Recent trend lines point to a day when Ukraine is vulnerable to complete conquest by Russia. For that matter, the counter-offensive has already made Ukraine more vulnerable to a Russian breakthrough in the north, where Ukrainian defensive lines were thinned out for the sake of the offensive in the south. . . .

The resolve is admirable. But have things really come to this? We're throwing Ukrainian men into a meat grinder week after week in hopes that maybe Putin's regime will collapse, and maybe this will be good for Ukraine?

Emphasis in original. This last line is followed by reasons such a collapse may not be good for anyone. Another source points out that Russia has actually gained ground in the north, while the counteroffensive has been grinding away in the south. He also cites a series of tweets by a Tatarigami_UA. Of course, much of this argument depends not just on the amount of land gained but on the resources spent and other damages, and on how much depth both sides have for reinforcements. While the US and its allies can provide Ukraine with enough war matériel to fight indefinitely, Russia has a big long-term advantage in manpower it can commit to the fight. Russia also has two more big advantages: it can hit virtually all of Ukraine, where Ukraine can barely nick territory within prewar Russia (e.g., through recent drone attacks on Moscow, or most recently [08-04] Ukraine strikes Russian commercial port with drones for first time). And Russia has nuclear weapons, which aren't terribly useful in the war but should give one pause when hoping for any kind of militarily dictated victory.

Also, I haven't seen anyone really put this info together, but it looks to me like Ukraine is becoming much more cavalier at hitting Russian targets behind various "red lines": in Crimea, the Black Sea, and in Russia itself. Russia is responding with more purely punitive attacks (i.e., nowhere near the front, such as on Black Sea ports). Until recently, US aid was conditioned on Ukraine restraint, but that seems to be going by the wayside.

  • Blaise Malley: [08-04] Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine War 'peace talks' this weekend, but Russia not invited.

  • Roger Cohen: [08-06] Putin's Forever War: An extended portrait of a Russia isolated by sanctions and agitated and militated by a war footing that seems likely to extend without ends, if not plausibly forever. I suspect there is a fair amount of projection here. The US actually has been engaged in forever wars, boundless affairs first against communism then against terrorism (or whatever you call it). Russia has struggled with internal order, but had little interest in "a civilizational conflict" until the Americans pushed NATO up to its borders. On the other hand, once you define such a conflict, it's hard to resolve it. The US has failed twice, and seems to be even more clueless in its high stakes grappling with Russia and China.

  • Geoffrey Roberts: [08-02] The trouble with telling history as it happens: More a reaction to than a review of Serhii Polkhy's new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, which no matter how expert or up-to-date ("early 2023") is quickly passed by events, and inevitably swayed by unproven propaganda. I've read Plokhy's The Gates of Europe: A history of Ukraine and found it useful, although I already had a pretty decent grounding when I wrote my 23 Theses.

Israel, again:

  • Izzeddin Araj: [08-01] Israel's judicial crisis is not surprising: "Israel's settler-colonial ideological mission not only impacts Palestinians but prevents the country from being a democracy for Jews as well."

  • Jonathan Guyer: [08-03] Biden wants to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together. But why? "And who will actually get the most out of it? (Hint: Not Americans or Palestinians.)" I haven't thought much about this, but can note that both Fred Kaplan and Richard Silverstein are very critical. I see three obvious problems: one is that, especially in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has a history of armed aggression, not the sort of country you want to tie yourself to; I'm a bit less worried than Kaplan about Saudi Arabia tarnishing America's brand as a supporter of democracy, but autocratic states are by their very nature brittle, so while you may like the current leadership (God knows why), that could change any moment (cf. Iran); and as long as Israel dictates American foreign policy, we're stuck holding the bag for whatever commitments Israel makes (usually war tech, although I've also read that the Saudis want nuclear tech). The tricky part with all of these Abraham Accord deals is that they depend on Israel moderating its treatment of Palestinians to not embarrass their new partners, but Israel's domestic political dynamics are only becoming more violent and abusive, effectively sabotaging the deals.

  • Jonathan Kuttab: [08-03] Why the Israeli judicial protest movement is bound to fail: "The time has come for Israeli Jews and their supporters to answer whether they believe in human equality or will continue to insist on Jewish supremacy."

  • Jonathan Ofir:

    • [07-31] Israel expanded an apartheid law last week: "Israel broadened a racist law that allows communities to exclude non-Jews based on 'social and cultural cohesion.'" This is one of 65 laws in Adalah's Discriminatory Laws Database.

    • [08-05] Jewish supremacy won't end from within. BDS is still the only hope. It's increasingly hard to argue that sanctions can persuade countries to change their core policies -- more likely the isolation they enforce only makes the rulers more recalcitrant, and sometimes more belligerent -- but they are something one can do to register disapproval short of war, and they can be adopted by individuals and groups even short of persuading states to act. Can it work? I doubt it. Up to 2000, Israeli politicians at least made gestures -- often, we now know, in bad faith -- to maintain good will from the US and Europe. Thereafter, the US capitulated, giving Israel's right-wing a green light to do whatever they want, certain of blind, uncritical American support. A reversal of that policy, where the US joins the rest of the world in deploring Israeli human rights abuses, while working to ensure Israel's security by negotiating normal relations with Israel's supposed enemies (especially Iran and Syria), wouldn't necessarily have any impact on Israeli politics, but it's the only thing that might. Meanwhile, civilian efforts to support BDS is the only game in town.

  • Philip Weiss: [08-02] Israel advocates finally condemn skunkwater -- now that it's being used on Jews.

  • Jeff Wright: [07-30] Another North American church names Israeli apartheid: "The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has declared that 'many of the laws, policies and practices of the State of Israel meet the definition of apartheid as defined in international law.'" Although I'm about as lapsed as a person can be, I grew up in that church, and took it seriously enough that they awarded me a Boy Scout God & Country medal. They are evangelicals, but not Old Testament fundamentalists. On the other hand, their focus on the New Testament has led many members (like my grandfather) to focus on "Revelations," which is the gateway to "Christian Zionism." But they have always been fundamentally decent people, and in the end that seems to have won out.

Around the world:

Other stories:

Clay Risen: [08-05] Charles J. Ogletree Jr, 70, dies; at Harvard Law, a voice for equal justice.

Nathan J Robinson:

  • [08-04] Does Hunter Biden matter? "Republicans believe the president's son is at the center of the corruption scandal of the century. Democrats think Hunter is a non-issue and the worst allegations are mere conspiracy theory." This is pretty thorough, and cuts the Bidens less slack than I would, but I can't quarrel much with his conclusion: "I certainly think we have ample evidence that Hunter Biden is scummy and Joe Biden is dishonest." It still doesn't answer the question raised up top: "Should voters care, and how much?" If Democrats offered a clear alternative to the graft that Republicans seem to revel in, they should be able to overcome a few embarrassing slips. But while Obama campaigned against money in politics back in 2008, he made no effort once he got elected to change a system that happened to give him (if few Democrats) a big advantage. Biden also seems comfortable with moneyed interests, even though they're always accompanied by the smell of corruption. Still, corruption isn't the only issue voters have to weigh. There are many other issues, some much more important. Even if you believe the worst about the Bidens, you should think back on the 1991 Louisiana governor race, where voters were advised: Vote for the crook: It's important.

  • [08-02] Is the critique of consumerism dead? "Today's left seems less inclined to critique advertising, consumerism, and pop culture." Another piece tied into Barbie, which since I haven't seen yet I should reserve judgment on, but it's clearly not tied into Mattel's PR machine. Still, my first reaction is "boring," perhaps because that's all stuff I examined so critically in the 1970s I feel like I'm unlikely to come up with anything new. I will note that although related, those are three different things.

    Advertising is an industry which presents a view of products (and the world) that is distorted to further the ends of its sponsors -- mostly to make more money, although political advertising has darker goals). And by the way, advertising is not free speech. It is very expensive speech, sponsored by special interests but ultimately paid for by the people it targets. It is almost always intrusive and unwelcome.

    Consumerism is a political reaction to corporate malfeasance. It attempts to give consumers rights and recourse against advertising, and beyond that against malign products, whether by design or defect. As we are all consumers, this movement is potentially universal, but it tends to wax and wane as business practices become normalized. It's possible that Robinson is thinking of something slightly different, which doesn't have a good name. This is the idea that consuming is an essential occupation of everyday life, a panacea for all our needs and desires. That is, of course, an idea advertising is meant to stoke, and one we may be better off learning to live with at a level well short of an addiction or compulsion, but it's impossible to blot it out.

    Pop art is simply art that reflects and reacts to popular consumable objects. Growing up when and where I did, it always struck me as perfectly normal: even if eventually it seemed a bit shallow, that shallowness was as real as the world it represented. Robinson spends a lot of time on what a leftist should make of this, and ultimately doesn't reach much of a conclusion. Maybe because it's not a problem we need to solve.

  • [08-01] Climate denial may escalate into a total rupture with reality: If I were his editor, I'd be tempted to strike "may" from that title, although I can see that it leaves open reason for contemplation, even though the evidence is pretty conclusive. At this point, the really dogmatic denialists aren't even the fossil industry shills who have an obvious economic stake but others whose objections aren't based on any understanding of science or economics, and their evidence, well, isn't evidence at all.

  • [08-03] Nomi Prins explains the difference between the market and the economy: Interview with the former Goldman Sachs trader, turned journalist, whose intro omits her 2009 book It Takes a Pillage, which as I recall was the first to expose/explain how far the banking bailouts went beyond the $700 billion slush fund Congress appropriated. She talks about her new book: Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [08-01] Americans' trust in military hits 'malaise era' territory. This sounds like good news to me, although the numbers still have quite a ways to fall. So does the recruitment crisis. Now if only some politicians could see the wisdom of cutting back on war spending. The pressure for more remains intense:

Alissa Wilkinson: [08-04] Lessons from a Barbenheimer summer: The fad of releasing serious, thought-provoking movies appears to be over. (This week's most-hyped releases are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and The Meg 2: The Trench. Beware the colons.) The two movies are still generating commentary, especially Oppenheimer.

  • William Hartung: [08-02] Oppenheimer and the birth of the nuclear-industrial complex.

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [08-04] Little Boy and Fat Man earrings: a nuclear parable: An excerpt from St Clair's book, Grand Theft Pentagon, following by a Roaming Charges, much of which (including digs at Pence, RFK Jr, and "slit their throats" DeSantis I'm tempted to quote. Here's a taste:

    • DeSantis reminds me of Phil Gramm, the TX politician who amassed millions from banks and oil companies and seemed to be the prohibitive favorite in '96 GOP primaries, but was soon exposed as just a mean SOB with no real political skills at all other than shaking down corps for PAC $$$.
    • When DeSantis' campaign ran low on money and he began firing staffers, he hired them to fill government-funded positions in Florida instead.
    • More than half ($5 million, in fact) of the funds in RFK, Jr's SuperPAC came from Timothy Mellon, scion of the Mellon banking fortune, who has denounced social spending as "slavery redux," donated $53 million to state of Texas border wall construction fund, and gifted $1.5 million toward the legal defense of Arizona's vicious anti-immigration law.

I can't call it a tweet, and certainly won't call it a truth, but after Trump deemed "really quite vicious" Nancy Pelosi's quip about him in court ("I saw a scared puppy"), he wasn't satisfied with just being the victim. He added: "She is a Wicked Witch whose husbands journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!" True gentleman he is. Salon, which never misses a tweet, covers this story here and here.

Another tweet, from Younis Tirawi, in Jenin: "Israeli occupation forces fired 300 bullets on a car with 3 Palestinian fighters inside. After they all were killed, they kept their bodies inside the car, pulled it and paraded with their bodies home to the occupation military camp near Dotan."

Also from Noga Tarnopolsky: "Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, convicted eight (8!) times of terrorism & hate crimes, says a medal of valor ought to be awarded to his Jewish Power activist Elisha Yered, a suspect in the murder of 19-year-old Palestinian Qosai Mi'tan."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 31, 2023

Music Week

July archive (final).

Music: Current count 40636 [40606] rated (+30), 14 [14] unrated (-0).

Seemed unlikely I would hit 30 albums this week, as I've started every day with something old (Fats Waller today), and often found myself uncertain what to play next. The two A- records this week were recommended by Brad Luen and Chris Monsen, having largely exhausted Phil Overeem's July 2 list. Only things that nudged me up to 30 were writing an extra-long Speaking of Which and, when my initial count was 29, an EP recommended by Harbinger Entity.

The reviews will have to speak for themselves. What follows is mostly rant, meant mostly just to clear my head, so no real reason for you not to jump to to the review section. End of the month, so the July archive is final (link above), but I'll post this before I wrap up the indexing.

I've been plagued by technical problems lately. My top problem today was getting a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1300 scanner to work with my computer (a home-built running Xubuntu 22.04). The SANE supported devices list says it's supported (except for wi-fi, which I neither need nor want), but I've spent many hours trying to get it to work, wrote several letters, eventually called up Fujitsu. Bottom line seems to be: no way. Fortunately, I should be able to return it (assuming I can get the label printed and/or the QR code scanned, both of which are proving difficult). This appears to be a case not just of getting a proprietary driver in place but of much basic functionality embedded in applications programs.

The printer problem is due to the HP OfficeJet Pro 9010 I bought a year back, which is now refusing jobs sent from my computer. This is the worst purchase I ever made in my life, for lots of reasons, but in theory should work. I need to contact HP, and try to hold back my anger.

I still don't have the email problem fixed. I have a server, which my regular ISP (Cox) refuses to accept email from. I'm thinking about implementing a short-term workaround, but it's quite possible that the underlying problem is keeping other mail from being delivered. One effect of this is that I'm not getting any questions through my form. Also the mail lists are at least partly broken (at least I'm not seeing them). Another problem with the form is that the captcha package (securimage) is no longer supported, so I should probably find a replacement (or just punt).

Another distracting project here is that my Sony 5-CD changer is broken (and Sony is no longer making them). Most likely a bad belt, but getting to it has been arduous, and I'm still not there. (I've looked for professional repairs, but been turned off by the sticker shock, so I've been thrashing.) Given how little I use the upstairs system for, I'm wondering whether it might be better to just replace it with an iPod equivalent, assuming I can load up such a thing from my Linux computers. (If we ever get a new car, I may have to switch to something like that, replacing my well-stocked CD travel cases.) Any suggestions? Longer range, I'd still like to set up a network jukebox.

Also had a very annoying mouse problem (erratic response). I bought a replacement, but it had the same problem. Turns out the fix was to plug the wireless connector into the front USB port instead of the back one.

I also have the usual scads of house projects. Anything outside will have to wait until hell freezes over (minus a month or two, if we're lucky and have a decent autumn). Forecast is 107°F tomorrow, which would be the hottest so far this year (although no record).

End rant.

My friend Max Stewart is presenting a show of his photography (August 4, here in Wichita).

New records reviewed this week:

Aila Trio: Shaped by Sea Waves (2022 [2023], Edgetone): Swedish bassist Georgia Wartel Collins is the writer here, Aila an extra first name. She is based in Norway, second group album, with tenor saxophonist Karl-Hjalmar Nyberg and drummer Andreas Winther. B+(***) [sp]

Akmee: Sacrum Profanum (2022, Nakama): Norwegian quartet, second album: Erik Kimestad Pederson (trumpet), Kjetil Jerve (piano), Erlend Olderskog Albertsen (bass), and Andreas Wildhagen (drums), 3-2-2-1 pieces respectively. B+(**) [bc]

Aphex Twin: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/In a Room7 F760 (2023, Warp, EP): Electronics producer Richard D James, born in Ireland, grew up in Cornwall, has been recording since 1985, has slowed down of late, with an album in 2014 and several EPs since. Four songs, 14:31. Nice beats, but not much more to it. B+(*) [sp]

Ingebrigt Haker Flaten & Paal Nilssen-Love: Guts & Skins (2022 [2023], PNL): Norwegian bassist and drummer, the rhythm section for Atomic, the Thing, School Days, Scorch Trio, and countless other groups over the last 20-30 years, headline for an explosive octet. Ragged at first, then they slow it down and regroup more impressively. B+(**) [sp]

Aldo Fosko Collective: This One Time (2023, Hitchtone): From Croatia, plays Rhodes piano and bass clarinet, sems to be his/their first album. Fairly large group, generates impressive swing, but Alba Nacinovich's vocals disrupt and/or confound. B+(**) [cd]

Gabriels: Angels & Queens (2023, Atlas Artists/Parlophone): Gospel-inspired soul trio from Los Angeles, Jacob Lusk the lead singer, with Ryan Hope and Ari Balouzian, follows up 2022's short Angels & Queens: Part I (7 tracks, 27:29), with a second part (6 more songs, 21:31), but folds the two parts together. (Adding to the confusion, Spotify has a Deluxe Edition, with a second disc's worth of live and other extras, which I've heard but I'm not factoring in.) B+(**) [sp]

Allan Harris: Live at Blue Llama Jazz Club (2023, Love Productions/Live at Blue Llama): Jazz singer, plays guitar, more than a dozen albums since 1994, writes some: four songs here, out of ten, the covers from "Sunny" to "Nature Boy." With piano, bass, drums, and spots for Irwin Hall (alto sax, flute). B+(**) [cd]

High Pulp: Days in the Desert (2023, Anti-): Los Angeles-based jazz collective, self-released album in 2018, this their second with Anti-. Core group is a sextet, no names I recognize, with guest spots, including one track each for James Brandon Lewis (tenor sax), Brandee Younger (harp), Jeff Parker and Kurt Rosenwinkel (guitar), Daedelus and Telemakus (electronics). B+(**) [sp]

Carly Rae Jepsen: The Loveliest Time (2023, Silent): Canadian pop star, seventh album, but this is the second of those compiled from extra scraps -- there are also remix albums of two others -- these from the sessions that gave us The Loneliest Time. B+(***) [sp]

Russ Johnson Quartet: Reveal (2022 [2023], Calligram): Trumpet player, based in Chicago after a couple decades in New York, albums since 2004, moving from left of mainstream to farther out. Quartet with Mark Feldman (violin), Ethan Phillon (bass), and Tim Daisy (drums). Starts off with a romp, but less striking when they slow down, by which I mostly mean the violin. B+(**) [cd] [08-04]

Sarathy Korwar: KAL (Real World) (2023, The Leaf Label): London-based drummer, born in US but grew up in India, where he learned tabla. Three studio albums, plus this live one, offered as a companion to his 2022 album Kalak. Mostly stripped down to rhythm here, some reminding me of DJ Shadow. B+(**) [sp]

Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination (2023, Hyperdub): Electropop singer-songwriter, from Ontario, fourth album (or fifth if you include her DJ-Kicks). B+(*) [sp]

Large Unit: New Map (2021 [2022], PNL): Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love's avant big band, several albums since 2014, this particular iteration lists 15 musicians, with 3 brass (trumpet/trombone/tuba), 3 reeds, 2 basses, 3 drums/percussion, and scattered others (guitar, harp, accordion, electronics). Two long pieces, one shorter, tend to hold back their firepower for interesting ambiance. B+(**) [sp]

Large Unit: Clusterfuck (2021 [2022], PNL): A second album released the same day, same group, recorded during the same three-day stretch, with more three pieces (48:52). A little more thrash, perhaps to justify the title. B+(**) [sp]

The Lemon Twigs: Everything Harmony (2023, Captured Tracks): Soft rock band from Long Island -- seems more accurate than Wikipedia's other genres (indie pop, or various rocks: indie, pop, power, glam, art, baroque). So soft it is. Also rather glum: "every day is the worst day of my life." C+ [sp]

Mahalia: IRL (2023, Atlantic): British neo-soul singer, last name Burkmar, second album after a compilation of earlier singles and EPs. B+(***) [sp]

Rita Ora: You & I (2023, BMG): Pop singer, born in Kosovo, moved to England when she was a baby, parents added Ora to their original surname (Sahatçiu). Third album since 2012. B+(**) [sp]

Mehmet Ali Sanlikol & Whatsnext?: Turkish Hipster (2023, Dunya): Turkish composer, born in Istanbul of parents from Cyprus, studied at Berklee and remains in Boston. Fourth album, his group named after his 2013 debut. Title is apt enough, but the widely scattered styles, ranging from trad to hip-hop to symphonic (I'll have to take his word for "psychedelic") cancel each other out. B [cd]

Skrillex: Quest for Fire (2023, OWSLA/Atlantic): Electronica producer Sonny Moore, debut was a 2009 EP, and that's been his main vehicle, with only one studio album (2014) before two this year. B+(*) [sp]

Skrillex: Don't Get Too Close (2023, OWSLA/Atlantic): Third album, released a day after his second. Tools are the same, but this seems more substantial as song -- not that I'm quick enough to be sure of what they're worth. B+(**) [sp]

Dudu Tassa/Jonny Greenwood: Jarak Qaribak (2023, World Circuit): Israeli (Mizrahi) musician, leads the group Dudu Tassa & the Kuwaitis, which play songs based on Iraqi classics, including songs by Tassa's grandfather and great-uncle Daoud and Salih Al-Kuwaity. The group opened for Radiohead in 2017, leading to this collaboration. Sounds Arabic to my ears. B+(*) [sp]

Felo Le Tee/Mellow & Sleazy: The III Wise Men (2023, New Money Gang): South African amapiano trio, affiliated somehow with DJ Maphorisa (Themba Sonnyboy Sekowe), although the producer names that appear here areTshelofelo Mokhine, Phemelo Sefanyetse, and Olebogeng Kwanaite (plus Mlotlasi Phoshoko on one track). Beats are inscrutable enough they take quite a while to settle in, and will be hard to distinguish from future efforts. But pretty good for now. A- [sp]

Sam Weinberg Trio With Chris Lightcap & Tom Rainey: Implicatures (2022 [2023], Astral Spirits): Tenor saxophonist, has appeared on a number of albums since 2016, not someone I've recognized so far, but his bassist and drummer are prominent enough they got their names on the cover. They help a lot, but Weinberg himself gives a clinic on what free jazz sax needs to sound like to keep your attention throughout. A- [bc]

YMA & Jadsa: Zelena (2023, self-released, EP): Brazilian artists, very little info I can find on either (Jadsa's surname is Castro, and comes from Salvador). Six songs, 18:38. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Nina Simone: You've Got to Learn (1966 [2023], Verve): Piano-playing jazz singer-songwriter, with a previously unreleased seven track, 32:56 live set from Newport Jazz Festival. Backed by guitar (Rudy Stevenson), bass ( Lisle Atkinson), and drums (Bobby Hamilton). B+(*) [sp]

Old music:

Aila Trio: Aila Trio (2018, Hoo-Ha): Trio led by Swedish bassist-composer Georgia Wartel Collins, with Karl Hjalmar Nyberg (tenor sax/clarinet) and Andreas Skår Winther (drums). Nice sax tone. Nice bass solos, too. B+(**) [sp]

High Pulp: Pursuit of Ends (2022, Anti-): Jazz collective, came together in Seattle, self-released an album in 2018, then sold this one to a rock label. Simplifying the credits a bit: Bobby Granfelt (drums), Rob Homan (keyboards), Antoine Martel (guitars), Andrew Morrill (alto sax), Victory Nguyen (tenor/soprano sax, flute, trumpet), and Scott Rixon (bass & guitar), with a couple guests (Theo Croker, Jacob Mann, Jaleel Shaw, Brandee Younger) featured on one track each, and a few spare parts. B+(*) [sp]

Roots of Rock (1927-37 [1979], Yazoo): Actually just a country blues sampler, from a label which did yeoman work rescuing classic recordings, cleaning up the sound, organizing them into LPs, and later reissuing them on CD without trying to cram more into them (this one came out in 1991). These songs run early -- only Blind Blake came later than 1931. The title/cover concept is ridiculous: rock mostly came out of later jump blues, thematically shifted for the emerging teen market. But many (all?) of these songs got revisited in the 1960s, and recognizing their sources opened a few eyes. B+(***) [sp]

Co Streiff-Russ Johnson Quartet: In Circles (2011, Intakt): Dutch saxophonist (alto/soprano), wrote four pieces to the three by the American trumpet player, the Quartet rounded out with Christian Weber (bass) and Julian Sartorius (drums). B+(*) [r]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Aline's Etoile Magique: Eclipse (Elastic) [08-25]
  • Kris Davis Diatom Ribbons: Live at the Village Vanguard (Pyroclastic, 2CD) [09-01]
  • Ember: August in March (Imani) [08-11]
  • Pascal Le Boeuf: Ritual Being (SoundSpore) [08-25]
  • James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love (Tao Forms, 2CD) [09-08]
  • Doug Richards Orchestra: Through a Sonic Prism: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (self-released) [09-08]
  • Todd Sickafoose: Bear Proof (Secret Hatch) [09-29]
    • SLUGish Ensemble: In Solitude (Slow & Steady) [09-15]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Speaking of Which

Started early enough, but once again this is chewing up Sunday evening. While I'm having a lot of trouble getting my own projects organized, it's almost therapeutic to stumble across a piece and write a few off-the-cuff comments.

Here's a Patriotic Millionaires meme, picturing Ronald Reagan, saying: "In 1984 I lowered the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%. Then I imposed the first ever income tax on social security benefits to make up for it."

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: I've generally ignored the horserace articles, even the snippy ones about DeSantis's faltering (or rebooting, take your pick) campaign. Trump got back into the news cycle, provoked with additional indictments, which elicited the usual vicious incoherence. Elsewhere, Republicans have been very busy in their endless quest to hurt people and screw up the future.

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-28] Republicans are threatening to sabotage George W Bush's greatest accomplishment: It's a program I admit I hadn't heard of, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which "has saved as many as 25 million lives," and "is currently supporting treatment for over 20 million people who depend on the program for continued access to medication." So, just the sort of thing today's Republicans want to kill, all the more so since it gives them an opportunity to repoliticize AIDS and trash Anthony Fauci as one of the great monsters of our time. And if Bush's legacy gets trampled along the way, well, it turns out that he was just RINO scum all along.

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [07-26] Ron DeSantis's Nazi outreach is a strategy, not an accident.

    • [07-26] Conservatives have a new master theory of American politics: I'm always intrigued by theories, as they imply thinking, even when they derive from the right, where such skills have atrophied if ever they existed. This one's based on what Chait's calling Longmarchism, which argues that the Left has, over decades, implemented a "long march through existing institutions," infiltrating and capturing them to such an extent that only a political revolt by right-thinking Americans can restore the nation as God intended. Chait points to Christopher Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (reviewed here) and Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh. Chait does a decent job of debunking this nonsense, but a few points could be clearer:

      1. There is no control structure on the left -- nothing remotely resembling the cells Communists and Birchers tried to set up long ago, nor even anything similar to the economic ties Koch, Thiel, etc., have set up to direct the right. (Koch was a Bircher, so that kind of thinking comes naturally to him. The right would like you to think of Soros in those terms, but he's just an old philanthropist, throwing money at worthwhile causes, and not just political ones.)

      2. The ideas that the right so objects to are less the result of conscious political propaganda than common reactions to situations that most people face. People become anti-racist because they don't like the effects of racism. As America has become more diverse, tolerance and respect have become more necessary, if just to get by and to get along. Even businesses understand that. (If the left really had infiltrated corporate America, wouldn't we have also changed their views on profits, on unions, on pollution, etc.?)

  • Tim Dickinson: [07-29] These Christian nationalists want to stone adulterers to death: "Aspiring theocrats want to install Old Testament justice in America." Interesting that the first person I thought of after seeing the headline was Newt Gingrich. Dickinson also wrote: [07-28] Vivek Ramaswamy is on the rise. So are Christian nationalist attacks on his religion: He's Hindu, but this is the first I've heard of anyone giving him grief for it. He seemed to get along swimmingly at a recent Christian confab in Iowa. I can remember when Protestants could get really worked up over points of theology -- my Grandmother, for instance, told me that the Lutherans she grew up with were "worse than the Catholics" -- but nowadays the only thing good Christians need to agree on is the others they all hate in common.

  • Robert Downen/Carla Astudillo: [07-25] Ken Paxton's far-right billionaire backers are fighting hard to save him: Otherwise it's sunk cost: buying an Attorney General only to see him impeached.

  • Kate Kelly/David Perlmutt: [07-30] Inside the party switch that blew up North Carolina politics: Tricia Cotham, who ran as a pro-abortion Democrat, then switched to the Republicans to override an anti-abortion bill veto. You've long known that there is little Republicans wouldn't do to steal elections, but Trojan horse candidates are a new low.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-24] First Republican debate: Who's in, who's banned, who's boycotting: The Fox News debate is on August 23. It shouldn't be hard to find something better to do on that day (though probably not outside).

  • Kelly McClure: [07-29] Judge throws out Trump's lawsuit against CNN. Trump sued CNN for $475 million for defamation. For more details, see Andrew Zhang: [07-29] Judge dismisses Trump's 'Big Lie' lawsuit against CNN. Evidently "big lie" isn't recognized as a Nazi trademark, so can be used by others to refer to other big lies. Trump also objected to being called "Hitler-like," which either means he's a little touchy or he's holding out for something stronger. The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice," which is technical jargon judges use for "you're wasting my time." No mention in these articles for CNN's countersuit against Trump for calling them "fake news." Maybe they didn't feel like wasting the judge's time suing?

  • Ian Millhiser: [07-27] What's new in the new indictment against Donald Trump? "Trump allegedly tried to destroy evidence in the federal case involving classified documents."

  • Nicole Narea/Li Zhou: [07-27] Your 5 biggest questions about Trump's latest indictment, answered. Not really. My first one is whether the revised indictment would push his court date out, and that wasn't broached. I'd expect his lawyers to make such a motion. The whole thing about whether Trump might go to jail isn't very clear. My impression is that, unlike the New York hush money case, everyone who's been convicted of the crimes Trump is charged with here has gotten a jail term. (For a "legal scholar" view, see Tom Boggioni: [07-29] Trump 'may die in prison' if he doesn't strike a deal after 'shocking' new charges.) The authors ask whether it's even possible to jail Trump, given his Secret Service protection. But why does he even need extra protection if he's in jail? (Sure, laugh, but aren't jails supposed to be the safest places in America?) If not, maybe you can find a higher security facility, like Guantanamo? Or maybe cut a deal with the British and exile him to Saint Helena, like Napoleon? He might even like that idea, at least until he got there. (Maybe he could build a luxury golf resort there, and it would be a pilgrimage destination.)

  • Tori Otten: [07-28] Madman Trump promises to run for President from prison if he's convicted. It's been done before (Eugene Debs in 1920), but "it is unclear how things would work if Trump won." Author also wrote: [07-28] Elise Stefanik wins the prize for stupidest Trump indictment reaction.

  • Catherine Rampell: [07-27] A year after Dobbs, House GOP proposes taking food from hungry babies: The concerns of the "pro life" begin at conception, and pretty much end with delivery.

  • Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [07-26] Trump struggles to find enough lawyers to handle his many indictments: Reminds me that when Duke Ellington was asked how he kept such a great orchestra together for so many decades, he confided a secret: "I pay them." Maybe Trump should try that. Maybe he should also try to be a better client. I heard somewhere that MAGA really stands for "make attorneys get attorneys."

  • Zachary Siegel: [06-27] Their kids died of fentanyl overdoses. Republicans can't wait to exploit it. "Grieving parents are at risk of becoming mere props in the latest chapter of America's twisted war on drugs."

  • Molly Taft: [07-21] The GOP darling who claims fossil fuels are good for humanity: Alex Epstein, who's written the books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) and Fossil Future, and insists that oil is "a wonderful, live-sustaining product," while deriding "wasteful, unreliable solar and wind schemes." Koch loves him.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-28] Trump is an extremely dumb fascist: "The latest criminal indictment highlights his idiocy -- but also the threat he still poses to American democracy." He points out that "fascism is a sensibility far more than it is a political program." Trump certainly has that sensibility, no matter how much one might quibble over his political alignment with historic fascists. And dumb? Very. The one thing he has is instincts, which are disturbingly popular, but not very original, given how easy they were to pick up from Fox and the like.

  • John Wagner/Amy B Wang: [07-26] Giuliani not contesting making false statements about Georgia election workers.

  • Scott Waldman: [07-26] Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump's second term. They call this "Project 2025," and describe it as not a white paper but a "battle plan," to implement as soon as a Republican is sworn in as president in 2025. "It would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department's renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California's car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials."

  • Brett Wilkins: [07-26] DOJ sues Greg Abbott over "barbaric" Rio Grande buoy barrier: I'd be more inclined to charge him with attempted murder, then add further charges with each additional victim. That may not fly, given that those specific charges are usually filed by states, but the feds must have something along those lines. Or they could just extradite him to The Hague, to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Of course, he'd probably use that for a campaign ad. For more, see Nicole Narea: [07-25] Biden is taking Texas to court over its floating border barrier.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Note separate pieces on Hunter Biden and Robert F Kennedy Jr much farther down. There are also pieces under various topics, including Ukraine, Israel, and the military. Democrats have enough excess baggage without having to pile it all on here.

  • EJ Dionne Jr: [07-30] The GOP pays a price for its extremism. But Biden does, too. He means, Biden pays a price for the GOP's extremism; not that there's anything extremist about Biden. He blames this on the media's habit of repeating whatever Republicans say, even if only to debunk it afterwards. "A two-minute report on a congressional hearing will inevitably air whatever charges some right-wing committee chair makes. They lodge in people's memories no matter what might be said during those 120 seconds to debunk them." Dean Baker suggests a better approach: "Actually, competent reporters would simply report that Republicans on a House committee repeated long-debunked lies about President Biden and son: full stop."

  • Rebecca Leber: [07-26] Biden's $250 billion lure to clean up the dirty legacy of fossil fuels. One section here is subtitled: "Balancing ambition, exhaustiveness, and speed will make all the difference." Sounds difficult, and given the pervasive influence of moneyed interests in all facets of American politics, it will be a tough trick for Democrats to pull off, but at least they try to balance off a broad range of interests. Handing this over to the Republicans is a sure recipe for disaster.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-28] The 'AOC Left' has achieved plenty. Rejoinder to Freddie deBoer: [07-25] AOC is just a regular old Democrat now, a piece that I found too cloying to cite on its own.

  • Josh Marshall: [07-28] Age, the blue sky and that enduring question of 'is Joe Biden too old?' Of course he is. But it's not like with athletes, where losing a step off the dribble or a couple feet off the fastball can wipe you out. He needs to pace himself, surround himself with good people, get help when he needs it, and prepare to bow out if/when it gets to be too much. And if needed, there is a clear succession plan in place (which unfortunately involves a couple old-timers from Congress, but odds of getting to them are rather slim). Assuming Kamala Harris is his running mate again, it would be reassuring for her to step up, and for him to let her. But the underlying situation is that Democrats have decided not to risk another open primary in 2024. If they did, there would be a fight between left and corporate wings of the party, and Biden uniquely disarms that gap. The left has a lot of popular issues to run on, but the system (and not just the DNC) is rigged against them -- e.g., Bloomberg spent $500 million on a suicide mission just to keep Sanders from getting the nomination in 2020; this year No Labels is a ready-built stalking horse for the Bloomberg class -- and the risk of letting any Republican (much less Trump) back in so grave that few progressives are willing to risk backing anyone better than Biden. The age issue will fade in the general election, where Teams R & D will rally to their side. And if, perchance, Republicans wind up nominating someone younger than Trump, Biden can always roll out Reagan's disarming quip, that he "won't hold his opponent's inexperience against him."

The Supreme Court:

Climate and Environment:

  • Matthew Cappucci: [07-25] Violent storms tear through Europe with 'gargantuan' hail in Italy.

  • Judith Deutsch: [07-27] What is the 'cost' of climate change? My eyes quickly glaze over when I read pieces like this, where the point seems to be: incalculable but certainly much more than we can afford. But it raises many more questions, like what is the distribution of costs? And how much of those costs are actually charged to those responsible for them? The answer to the latter is certainly very little. While one can imagine schemes to bring the two closer in line, I'm doubtful that they can ever get even moderately close.

  • Laura López González: [07-25] What you need to know about killer humidity. Quotes Jeff Goodell, whose latest book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: "A wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees -- which basically means both outdoor air temperature and humidity levels are high -- is the upper end of human adaptability to humid heat. Beyond that, our generates heat faster than it can dissipate it." You may be familiar with that wet bulb temperature (35°C) from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, where it finally motivates a long list of reforms.

  • Umair Irfan: [07-26] What "record-breaking heat" actually means.

  • Pablo Manriquez: [07-27] 100 degree days, wildfires . . . to Congressional Republicans, nothing to see here.

  • Bill McKibben:

    • [07-11] Is it hot enough yet for politicians to take real action? Not really, but that's mostly because politicians can't take real action on something as big and independent as the climate or the economy. They can, at best, nudge it a bit. The question is whether they can recognize the need, and find something they can do that might lead to that nudge. As far as I can tell, there is one party that sees the problem, and for them, virtually every bit of news reinforces that view. And there's one party that doesn't see the problem at all, or if they admit to, don't see any possible solution. (See Manriquez above.) The next question is, when new people start to see the problem, will they also be willing to select the one party that takes the issue seriously?

    • [07-26] Heat waves and the sweep of history.

  • Alissa J Rubin: [07-29] A climate warning from the cradle of civilization: "Every schoolchild learns the name: Mesopotamia -- the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Today, much of that land is turning to dust."

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols:

  • Dave DeCamp: [07-27] Ukraine's Parliament votes to extend martial law, pushing back elections: So Ukrainians, and by extension their supporters in the West, are fighting for democracy, but they can't have it until their present leaders have met their war aims?

  • Fred Kaplan: [07-27] Ukraine's new stategy against Russia: "Why Ukraine had to reboot its summer offensive." So it hasn't worked, but they're making adjustments, and both sides continue to inflict damage. Kaplan's conclusion: "the war remains, in some ways, what it has been almost from the beginning: a competition to see which side gives up first." Unfortunately, that conception only gives both sides reason to keep fighting.

  • Daniel Larison: [07-26] Did the US know the Ukraine offensive might fail, and if so, when? Some prominent Americans are still in denial: e.g., Democratic Senators Mark Kelly and Tammy Duckworth: [07-24] We've been on the front lines. We know what Ukraine needs. More and fancier weapons, of course. That piece in turn led me to David Axe: [02-20] Some of the best weapons in the world are now in Ukraine. They may change the war. They haven't, at least yet. Even if Ukraine, at considerable cost, manages to gain some ground back this summer, it's hard to see a military path to the "victory" they desire. And what about those "best weapons in the world"? They're not looking so hot -- more like what you should expect when the arms industry is in corrupt embrace with a military that has only tested their wares in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. "Refusing to negotiate with an adversary, whether out of pride or ideological hostility to diplomacy, is usually self-defeating."

  • Eve Sampson/Samuel Granados: [07-22] Ukraine is now the most mined country. It will take decades to make safe. Maybe the US should have signed that international treaty outlawing the use of mines, which would have put some pressure on Russia and Ukraine to conform. Same for cluster bombs. The "ordnance contamination" map reminds us that the problem isn't just mines. All kinds of shells and bombs can fail to explode, lying in wait for a future disturbance. "The sheer quantity of ordnance in Ukraine is just unprecedented in the last 30 years. There's nothing like it."

  • Katrina vanden Heuvel/James Carden: [07-28] When facts cut through the fog of war: "As the Ukraine counteroffensive grinds on, conditions on the ground are now too obvious to ignore. Is it time for talking, yet?" Of course. It's never not been time to talk. Just as it's always been obvious that no definition of victory could justify the costs war has exacted on both sides.

Israel:

Around the world:

Other stories:

Dean Baker:

  • [07-25] Why we do this crap: Review of The Ends of Freedom, by Mark Paul. Not a new idea -- Baker cites Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as predecessors -- but the argument here is that a bunch of basic economic needs should be provided as rights (work, housing, education, health care, basic income and banking, a healthy environment), wrapping up with a final chapter ("How Do We Pay for It?").

  • [07-21] The Chinese need to stay poor because the United States has done so much to destroy the planet: John Kerry went to China last week to scold them for not doing enough to limit greenhouse gases (see: China's Xi rebuffs Kerry's call for faster climate action), even though one may legitimately wonder what sort of example the US set during its period (now distantly remembered) of comparable economic growth. Although the Chinese economy has grown very fast in recent years, its per capita income is still way below the US, so it shouldn't surprise us that its political leaders feel the need to make up the difference. And in any case, China seems much more committed to reducing emissions than the US is -- what with the still-powerful Republicans actively sabotaging any effort the Biden administration makes. As Baker notes, "China is by far the world leader in wind energy, solar energy, and electric cars." He adds: "If we did want an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, the United States could adopt a policy of making all the technology that is develops fully open-source, so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it, without concerns about patent monopolies or other protections."

Ben Burgis: [07-28] The Pentagon budget is obscene, even without the right-wing culture-war amendments. It's also untouchable politically, especially as Democrats have, for various reasons, become its biggest supporters.

  • Connor Echols: [06-26] Proposed military slush fund would risk new boondoggles.

  • Binoy Kampmark: [07-28] Dotty domains: The Pentagon's Mali typo leak affair.

  • Branko Marcetic: [07-29] NATO's expansion into Asia is the mother of bad ideas: Not a fine turn of phrase, but yes, a very bad idea. I could easily list five, maybe ten, instances where NATO would only make the situation worse. Taiwan is the big one, as it would shatter the "one China" fictions that seem to be so important to the Beijing regime. I'd also worry about the bad smell of Europe's former imperialists joining together to "protect" their favored "allies" in Asia and elsewhere.

  • George Will: [07-26] It's time to end the 'era of Great Distraction': I'm not suggesting you read him, but wanted to note that this is what they're calling the Global War on Terror these days: a Great Distraction that caused us to lose focus on the big threats we need to spend trillions preparing for war with: Russia and China. Ends with an ominous warning, so you'll know that he's serious: "Time will tell -- soon -- whether we have refocused too late."

John Ehrenreich: [07-30] The making of Robert F Kennedy Jr: A long, critical, but not totally unsympathetic review of the fringe presidential candidate's public life. (I went with the subtitle above; the actual published title suggests that someone at Slate is eager to throw both author and subject under the bus.)

Jonathan Guyer: [07-24] The dark -- and often misunderstood -- nuclear history behind Oppenheimer, explained by an expert: Christopher Nolan's new Oppenheimer movie, serendipitously paired with Barbie, produced a bunch of links last week. This interview with Alex Wellerstein, author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, adds substantially to the discussion. Turning to the present, he says: "If you disengage, then the only people who are really making decisions on this issue are going to be the people who have a lot to gain from it. And that's how you end up in a situation with arms races, when the military, Congress, and contractors are making a lot of the decisions."

  • Kai Bird: [07-17] The tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer: By the co-author of the book the movie is based on.

  • Aja Romano: [07-24] Barbieheimer: Destroyer of worlds, savior of cinema. Reminds me of an old Minutemen album, Project: Mersh, where the cover image is a bunch of marketing types sitting with coffee and charts, and one of them exclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs." After several years of doldrums, with big budgets going almost exclusively to superhero fantasies, it's like someone decided to roll the dice on making good films on topics people could take seriously. Sure, there have been some decent films the last few years, but I can't remember when two films like these were the industry's major product rollouts at the same time. Also see David Dayen: [07-28] Barbenheimer reveals the drastic choices of Hollywood executives: "The big opening weekend contrasts with everything the studios have been doing for the last couple of decades."

  • Ryu Spaeth: [07-25] Who are the Japanese in Oppenheimer? I was intrigued by the title, as I was surprised that there were any. After reading the article, my surmise was right, unless they dug up some documentary reels of devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But if the question is about the decision to kill so many people with such a "cruel" (Hirohito's word) weapon, we should entertain the question of just who we thought they were. It's hard for Americans now to appreciate how racist Americans then were regarding all Asians (though perhaps a bit less hard than it was in the years BT [Before Trump]). John Dower wrote about this in War Without Mercy.

  • Jonathan Stevenson: [07-28] Why 'Oppenheimer' matters: "The father of the atomic bomb still speaks to the danger of complacency."

  • Alissa Wilkinson: [07-27] The nuclear bomb's enduring, evolving place in pop culture.

Sarah Jones: [07-27] Walking out of the Dream Factory: Writers and actors are still on strike, as are many others.

Elias Khoury: [07-28] Anti-imperialism is both morally correct and absolutely necessary for the left.

Eric Levitz: [07-25] Why elite colleges do affirmative action for the rich. He means why elite colleges perpetuate the elite class system by favoring the rich -- especially through legacy admissions -- but the affirmative action programs that were just outlawed also existed to benefit the rich, because that's what elite colleges are all about. Related:

  • Fabiola Cineas: [07-25] Affirmative action for white college applicants is still here: I rather wish he wouldn't call it "affirmative action," which can be read as an attempt to score points by reassigning a deprecating term, like "corporate welfare" or "socialism for the rich." Most likely he just means it as irony, as Ira Katznelson did with his book title, When Affirmative Action Was White, which showed how many New Deal programs, including Social Security, were written to avoid benefiting blacks.

Carlos Lozada: [07-18] A look back at our future war with China: Lozada was book review editor at the Washington Post, since graduated to opinion writer at the New York Times, but he's still just digesting books. There are a lot of books on developing conflicts between the US and China, many assuming that superpower conflicts are inevitable and likely to blow up in war. The books he touches on here have titles like Destined for War, Danger Zone, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and The Avoidable War. Also Party of One, whose loose cannon author argues that "Xi's China is brash but brittle, intrepid but insecure, . . . a would-be superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come."

Dylan Matthews: [07-28] How "windfall profits" from AI companies could fund a universal basic income: "Companies like OpenAI and Google could make unthinkable profits from successful AI. Will they share the wealth?" Silly question. Given his hypothetical, he probably means: "will we tax it from them?" Although the question too obvious to ask is: "why should we give it to them in the first place?" Such profits depend on monopoly pricing, and that is a grant the government gives to companies, for reasons that are increasingly difficult to explain let alone justify. The other point hardly anyone is making is that nearly all of the misuses we can envision for AI are tied to its commercial exploitation. There are lots of good reasons for slowing AI down, which is why lots of people are talking about regulations. But regulating AI monopolies is going to be incredibly difficult, both technically and politically. It would be much simpler to limit the money flow, which would allow us to make more judicious decisions on how we use it.

Note that I'm not arguing against the author's "global UBI" proposals. They have some merits, but aren't dependent on this particular tax stream.

  • Alexander C Karp: [07-25] Our Oppenheimer moment: The creation of AI weapons. CEO of defense contractor Palantir Technologies, so he's selling, but mostly he's worried that engineers might grow a conscience, as Oppenheimer did (belatedly, maybe). "The preoccupations and political instincts of coastal elites may be essential to maintaining their sense of self and cultural superiority but do little to advance the interests of our republic." On the other hand, putting nukes on autopilot . . .

  • Sara Morrison: [07-27] The tricky truth about how generative AI uses your data.

Rani Molla: [07-25] A UPS strike would have been worse than you think. I'm pleased to see this strike not happening. Of course, my sympathies would have been with the union members had they struck, as I am with all unions, almost all of the time. But I'm a bit worried that a rash of strikes could provoke a backlash, as happened in 1946, leading to a Republican Congress passing Taft-Hartley (with enough racist Democratic support to override Truman's veto; unfortunately, Truman spent a lot of his time leading up to 1946 badmouthing strikers, who had spent WWII under wage controls while defense contractors were guaranteed cost-plus-10% profits).

Sara Morrison: [07-24] Welcome to X, the wannabe "super app" formerly known as Twitter. It's not only hard to imagine Musk's "super app" taking off, it's hard to comprehend what kind of ego could think it has a chance. One of the core problems of capitalism is that people don't have enough money to satisfy all the people who want to take it away. Back when Microsoft was top dog, they spoke of a "vig," which is a piece of all the commerce on the internet, much like what you'd pay your local mafiosi for protection. That didn't go over well, then other companies came along, each with its own angle to take a cut.

Musk faces two big problems. One is "first mover advantage," which is the tendency of first entrants to dominate the markets they open up. This is especially true where network effects are critically important: Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others became unstoppable once they gained enough users that their networks became their strongest selling points. (And mostly they did this by offering services for free, a point Musk doesn't seem to understand.) The other is coming up with a new angle that's so incredibly attractive that people will sell their souls and worldly possessions to get in on it. After 25 years of fevered competition, how many great, and exploitable, ideas are left? Facebook thought they had one in VR, but how's that worked out? And everybody's hot for AI, but that's many different things to various people -- many of them mere productivity enhancements, to be bundled into other products and services.

Also:

Nicole Narea: [07-26] What the new Fed interest rate hike might mean for the economy: For starters, it shows that Powell's still willing to give recession a chance? Related:

Claire Potter: [06-28] The right's campus culture war machine: "How conservatives built a formidable network for ginning up scandal in higher education." Review of Amy J Binder/Jeffrey L Kidder: The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, and Bradford Vivian: Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. One difference is that left student politics is spontaneous and local, whereas right organizes students for broader political purposes. As the pull quote puts it: "Conservatives are playing a long game that treats youth as junior partners in a larger political enterprise. They pay students more and invest heavily." A couple more quotes:

But what both books show is that the right is better positioned to take advantage of the scandals -- some provoked and others resulting from poor decisions -- that do erupt. National student organizations are better at channeling students with conservative leanings into professional activism aimed at creating bad press for higher education. Right-wing media is so effective at seizing on and amplifying controversies, making sure that the distortions that proliferate on social media become the focus of higher education coverage, that mainstream news organizations are often just covering the coverage rather than investigating events. The networks that sustain the campus culture wars are not only powerful and well-financed; they operate far beyond campus. . . .

As it turns out, however, conservatives are much better than liberals at recruiting and training students. Conservatives have "managed to build an elaborate, well-funded organizational space," Binder and Kidder write, "that galvanizes young supporters and grooms future leaders by pulling them outside the confines of campus" and into paid work that sets them up for postgraduation careers as movement conservatives.

Nia Prater: [07-24] Can last-ditch lawsuits kill congestion pricing in New York? I really hope so. I don't feel up to the full rant now, but I really hate the whole idea. (And to the extent that it is championed by liberals I fear it will be a political disaster, not unlike the 55 mph speed limit. On the other hand, I wouldn't be terribly opposed to the idea that Paul Goodman proposed in 1949: banning all cars from Manhattan.) For what it's worth:

  • Paul Krugman defends the congestion pricing plan here: [07-24] An act of vehicular NIMBYism. I'm not convinced. For the case he's talking about, you could simply raise the existing toll, without having to do whatever they're planning on doing to collect and police the tax. If you carry this logic to extremes, everybody's car will have to be tracked everywhere, and everyone will eventually get billed for the congestion they cause. The effect is to turn every road into a toll road. There's a simpler way to tax people for road use, which is to tax gasoline, as we've done forever (but evidently it's more agreeable to levy phantom tolls than to raise the gas tax; there's also another whole scheme to tax miles instead of gas, arguing that only taxing gas would give electric cars a free ride -- why don't we just consider that a feature?).

It's no accident that the vogue for solving policy problems with economic cost-benefit solutions began when inequality started kicking off. Any time you make something depend on the ability to pay, you drive inequality upward. There may be cases where that's easier than other solutions, but as a general rule, it not only favors the rich, it drives people to become rich, by penalizing people who aren't. It also undermines the idea that government should provide free services. And if services for some reason have to be rationed for some reason, it makes their distribution unfair.

Andrew Prokop: {07-26] The drama over Hunter Biden's plea deal, explained. The judge threw Republicans in Congress a lifeline to continue their harping on the president's troubled son. Jonathan Chait [07-28] argues that The Democrats can't wave away their Hunter Biden problem, but why not? It's just noise coming from Republicans who have nothing better to rant about. It's not part of the value proposition to be decided in the 2024 elections. Hunter Biden is hardly the only presidential scion to trade on his family name while getting into drugs and other sleaziness. Consider George W Bush, who is arguably worse because he got into politics after he supposedly cleaned up. (You might say his past related to his character, and there's something to that, but it was really Dick Cheney's character that should have bothered us.) What's unique about Hunter Biden is that he's being prosecuted for infractions that would barely have warranted a wrist slap for anyone else (ok, at least for any wealthy, competently-lawyered white male). Of course, by all means, feel free to tackle such sleaze in general (which includes certain Supreme Court justices).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-28] Roaming Charges: Fighting our real enemies. Starts with stories about the late Sinéad O'Connor. I don't have any, and barely remember her music, but they make for better reading than her obituary (or this one). He also reprinted her 2013 piece: It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

PS: I took a break from the above to read Phillip Maciak: [07-28] Behind the rage of Raylan Givens, on the TV series Justified: City Primeval (we've watched three episodes so far). The essay touches on race privilege, the sketchy relationship between policing and justice, and the deep anger of machismo, but it's also fiction, and entertainment (a lot of both).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 24, 2023

Music Week

July archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40606 [40575] rated (+31), 10 [17] unrated (-7).

I published another Speaking of Which last night. With a couple edits today, it comes to 5,264 words (85 links). Big news since then is that Israel, under Netanyahu's far-right government, has passed its bill to curtail Israel's Supreme Court from overruling anything the government does. Presumably this will help keep Netanyahu, who has been fighting corruption charges, out of jail, and will further protect his allies, some of whom have long criminal records. Many Israelis, and many long-time American supporters of Israel, regard this law as an assault on what's long passed for democracy in Israel. Here are some New York Times reports:

I'll probably have more to say about this next week. Meanwhile, for a more critical view -- which compared to the New York Times, also means a more balanced view -- Mondoweiss is a good source. The first article out there is: New Israeli law is shock to U.S. Zionists, who fear break with American Jews.

While looking at the Times, I noticed an obituary for Reeves Callaway (75). I'm not sure whether I ever heard of him, but he led pretty much the life I imagined for myself when I was a teenager (my actual models were Colin Chapman, Carroll Shelby, and Carlo Abarth -- I liked to imagine shutting down my neighbor's GTO with one of Abarth's souped-up Fiat 850s).

I don't have much to add about this week's record reviews, except that it's gotten hard for me to think of things I really want to listen to next. Not only am I playing more non-work CDs when I get up, I'm finding myself stuck in extended patches of silence (or tinnitus). Very little in my demo queue has been released, and I inadvertently jumped the gun on a couple items.

In the Old Music section, Allen Lowe has been rhapsodizing about Tony Fruscella. I previously gave his 1955 eponymous album -- the only one released under his name in his brief lifetime (1927-69) -- a B+(***), which on replay seems about right. I only found two more albums, and didn't bother with the one I couldn't date. Jazz Factory has boxes of everything, but I haven't heard them.

As you probably know, Tony Bennett died last week, at 96. I liked his big hit when it came out, and I've always thought he was a good singer and a generally cool guy, but stuck in a niche that was neither jazz nor rock. So I thought I'd try a few of his early albums, focusing on things that seemed closer to jazz, but that didn't last long. (Another Lowe favorite, Dave Schildkraut, showed up in the Bennett credits, but I can't say as I noticed him in the music.) I considered a 1987 compilation called Jazz, but didn't have the time to track down where it all came from, so passed for now. My grade list for Bennett is here. Nothing A-listed, or even close, I'm sorry to say.

Looks like the heat has finally arrived here in Wichita, with 100F forecast every day through Friday. Still not the worst we've ever seen. I still have a long list of domestic projects, which have been frustrating me no end. Despite service calls, I'm still not receiving server email. I did get the server admin messages rerouted, so that's manageable. I have a new scanner to set up. Also a broken CD player: if I can't fix it (and thus far I haven't even managed to take it apart), I'll need to find service. I did manage to get the car oil changed (a typically bad experience with this dealer). I still need to line up a new doctor, as mine quit. Probably much more I'm blotting out of my increasingly feeble mind. At least July has one more Monday, so I don't have to face wrapping up the monthly archive yet. Got a couple packages in the mail today, to be unpacked next week.

New records reviewed this week:

Blur: The Ballad of Darren (2023, Parlophone): One of the big britpop bands of the 1990s, with six albums from that decade, but this is only their third since (2003, 2015). Maintains an air of grandeur. B+(*) [sp]

The Cucumbers: Old Shoes (self-released, EP): New Jersey group founded in 1983 with Deena Shoshkes and Jon Fried, released a delightful EP then, and an eponymous album in 1987 that remains a favorite. Since then, Deena has released several solo albums while occasionally reviving the group, as she does here, for a brief seven songs (23:11), as delightful as ever. Like old shoes, "I'm the one that fits you." A- [cd]

Sammy Figueroa: Something for a Memory (Busco Tu Recuerdo) (2022 [2023], Ashé): Percussionist (especially congas), from the Bronx, has led His Latin Jazz Explosion since 2006, before that had many side-credits, notably with pop bands like Chic. Thinking about his father here, a bolero singer named Charlie Figueroa, who died young, leaving no direct memories on his son. Featuring Gonzalo Rubalcaba (piano) and Aymée Nuviola (vocals), with Figueroa also singing, plus a sample from the father. B+(**) [cd]

Paulo Fresu/Omar Sosa: Food (2023, Tuk Music): Italian trumpet/flugelhorn player, in a duo with the Cuban pianist, playing a variety of keyboards, samplers, and effects, also credited with voice. Guest slots provide additional vocals, cello, and steel pan. The trumpet is very nice. B+(**) [sp]

Max Gerl: Max Gerl (2023, JMI): Bassist, electric and acoustic, with a nice solo album, ten originals plus a Monk. B+(*) [cd]

Jenny Lewis: Joy'all (2023, Blue Note): Singer for Rilo Kiley (2001-07), released a solo album in 2006, four more since. Nice enough. B+(**) [sp]

Doug MacDonald: Big Band Extravaganza (2022 [2023], DMAC Music): Touted as "the great straight ahead jazz guitarist," which means he probably wouldn't mind if I thought of Wes Montgomery (when I thought of anyone at all). B+(**) [cd]

Donny McCaslin: I Want More (2023, Edition): Tenor saxophonist, plays some flute, regular albums since 1998, as well as session work, notably for Dave Douglas, David Bowie, and Maria Schneider (for which he won a couple Grammys). Always impressive chops, but his slick postbop can be a turn off, especially when he goes with the synths as here. B [sp]

Lori McKenna: 1988 (2023, CN): Singer-songwriter from Massachusetts, 12th album since 2000, title refers to the year she got married, at 19, a union that endures, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and increasingly in well-observed song. A- [sp]

Near Miss: The Natural Regimen (2022 [2023], Kettle Hole): Chicago trio, with two tenor saxophonists (Rob Magill, also on soprano and bass clarinet, and Gerrit Hatcher) plus drums (Bill Harris). A bit rocky, but they may prefer it that way, at least to hitting some hypothetical bulls eye. B+(***) [cd]

Palehound: Eye on the Bat (2023, Polyvinyl): Indie band, fourth album since 2015, singer-songwriter El Kempner, trans pronouns but sounds female. B+(**) [sp]

Nate Radley & Gary Versace: Snapshots (2023, SteepleChase): Guitar and piano duo. B+(**) [sp]

The Rempis Percussion Quartet: Harvesters (2023, Aerophonic, 2CD): Saxophonist Dave Rempis, from Chicago, plays alto and tenor, assembled this two-drummer quartet (Tim Daisy and Frank Rosaly), with bass (Ingebrigt Håker Flaten), in 2006, and returns with their ninth album. I hit the second disc first, and thought it was nicely balanced, as cogent or more as anything they've done. The first was more typically aggressive, although it settled down after a nice bass solo. Next piece added Jean-Luc Cappozzo on flugelhorn. A- [cd]

Marc Ribot/Ceramic Dog: Connection (2023, Knockwurst): Jazz guitarist, although this group, with Shahzad Ismaily (bass) and Ches Smith (drums), dating back to 2008, is more rock-oriented (or maybe "post-rock"), with vocals. Also some fairly major guest spots, including James Brandon Lewis (sax) on two tracks, Anthony Coleman (farfisa) on three, and Oscar Noriega (clarinet) on one. Includes a noise blast I could do without, and ends on an instrumental romp I'd' like to hear more like. B+(**) [sp]

Arman Sangalang: Quartet (2022-23 [2023], Calligram): Tenor saxophonist, from Chicago, studied at Indiana and Northern Illinois, first album, with David Miller (guitar), Matt Ulery (bass), and Devin Drobka (drums). B+(**) [cd] [08-04]

Lisa Marie Simmons/Marco Cremaschini: NoteSpeak 12 (2023, Ropeadope): Poet, born in Colorado, "survived several troubled adoptions and foster homes," sang in church choir, moved to New York, wound up in Italy, with keyboardist Cremaschini providing music for her words. Has a previous NoteSpeak album from 2020. This one is supposedly captivated by the number 12 (as in the 12-tone scale). The music is full-bodied without drawing attention away from the words, and the speaker can sing as easily as speak, but holds your interest either way. A- [sp]

Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing (2022 [2023], Pi): Drummer-led piano trio, with Aaron Diehl (piano) and Matt Brewer (bass). Four covers, none I immediately recognized as standards -- ok, I should have noted "Angel Eyes," but the others are composed by Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, and Harold Mabern -- ranging from 10:25 to 15:43. Sounds more together than your average piano trio, but I can't really tell you why. A- [cd]

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway: City of Gold (2023, Nonesuch): Bluegrass singer-songwriter, plays banjo and guitar, from California, fourth album after a 2017 EP. B+(***) [sp]

Paul Tynan & Aaron Lington: Bicoastal Collective: Chapter Six (2022 [2023], OA2): Trumpet/flugelhorn and baritone sax, respectively, backed by electric bass (Trifon Dimitrov) and drums (Joe Abba). B [cd]

Colter Wall: Little Songs (2023, Black Hole/La Ronda): Canadian country singer-songwriter, more western than most. Fourth album, songs advertised as "little" but carefully nuanced. B+(***) [sp]

Adrian Younge: Jazz Is Dead 18: Tony Allen (2018 [2023], Jazz Is Dead): Bandcamp page credits, Allen, Younge, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, but cover omits Muhammad, and 18 releases in I see no need to mess with the what's become canonical order. Nigerian drummer Allen is unusual in two respects: he's relatively famous, and he's dead (in 2020, at 78), so for once we get a date on the sessions. He also gives you more than the usual beat, along with organ vamps and section horns. On the other hand, the title has never been more à propos. Eight songs, 27:58. B+(*) [sp]

Nicole Zuraitis: How Love Begins (2022 [2023], Outside In Music): Jazz singer-songwriter, plays piano, at least four previous albums, starting in 2008. This is divided into "oil" and "water" sides. Co-produced by bassist Christian McBride, with Gilad Hekselman (guitar), Maya Kronfeld (organ/keyboards), and Dan Pugach (drums), plus guests. B+(*) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: 60 Years (1961-2019 [2023], The Village): Six previously unreleased pieces (83:35) from Los Angeles pianist Horace Tapscott's community organizing project, dates not missing (at least from what I've found, which alludes to the group's founding in 1961, and continuation twenty years after Tapscott's death in 1999. I think of this as social music from the brief period when the avant-garde sought a deeper audience in black power, but in retrospect the vocals didn't always help. B+(***) [bc]

Old music:

Count Basie/Tony Bennett: Basie/Bennett: Count Basie and His Orchestra Swings/Tony Bennett Sings (1958 [1959], Roulette): Basie's "New Testament" band got very busy during this period, not just cranking out their own bombastic swing albums but appearing with others who wanted to sing or play along. Bennett recorded several albums with them, and the uplift helps on the fast ones, which makes me wonder why the singer decided to slow it down. B+(*) [r]

Tony Bennett: Cloud 7 (1954 [1955], Columbia): The late singer's first LP -- preceded by the 10-inch Because of You in 1952 -- offering ten standards, 33:05, with small jazz combos: two tracks with Al Cohn (tenor sax) and Gene DiNovi (piano), others with Dave Schildkraut (alto sax), Charles Panely (trumpet), and Chuck Wayne (guitar), among others. Good voice and nice band(s), but doesn't sound major. B+(*) [sp]

Tony Bennett: The Beat of My Heart (1957 [1996], Columbia/Legacy): One of the early albums treated to an expanded CD reissue, with six songs added (but one dropped). Mitch Miller remained the producer at Columbia, but British pianist Ralph Sharon, who would serve as Bennett's music director at least through 2001 (he died at 91 in 2015), took over the arranging, and was presumably responsible for the scattershot lineup of jazz notables, including six drummers (ranging from Art Blakey to Jo Jones to Candido), three each flutes and trombones, Nat Adderley on trumpet, and Al Cohn on tenor sax. One of his jazziest records, both by song selection and arrangement, but also a rather weird one. B+(**) [sp]

Tony Fruscella: Tony's Blues: The Unique Tony Fruscella (1948-55 [1992], Cool & Blue): Trumpet player (1927-69), from New York, recorded an eponymous album for Atlantic in 1955, another session that wasn't released at the time, and a few live sets, like this one: one 1955 track with Hank Jones, eight short tracks from 1948 (23:00) with Chick Maures (alto sax) and Bill Triglia (piano), and three long tracks (39:23) from 1955 with Phil Woods (alto sax) and Triglia. Fruscella has a reputation as a forgotten hero. He makes a fine showing here -- as does Woods -- but this doesn't feel all that unique. B+(**) [sp]

Shuckin' Stuff: Rare Blues From Ace Records (MS) (1955-81 [2002], Westside, 2CD): A r&b label run by Johnny Vincent in Jackson, Mississippi, from 1955-62, with a revival in 1971 (a few of these tracks are dated 1977-81, and more are listed as previously unreleased), before it was sold to Demon Music Group in the UK. A couple songs, including the title track, I know from elsewhere -- The Best of Ace Records, Vol. 2: The R&B Hits is one I play a lot -- but most cuts are fairly generic blues, and I like them just fine. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • The Cucumbers: Old Shoes (self-released) [07-21]
  • Mike Jones Trio: Are You Sure You Three Guys Know What You're Doing? (Capri) [08-18]
  • Near Miss: The Natural Regimen (Kettle Hole) [07-07]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Speaking of Which

I saw a headline in the Wichita Eagle on Friday -- the article was unsigned but attributed to Las Vegas Review-Journal -- that puzzled me: "Bidenomics is just tired liberalism on steroids." So what is it they're trying to say? It's rejuvenated liberalism? Maybe they want it banned for doping? The phrase "on steroids" has largely lost its literal meaning, in favor of "much larger, stronger, or more extreme than is normal or expected." So at the very least it should cancel out "tired," leaving us with "Bidenomics is just liberalism." That may be the author's complaint, but why is that such a bad thing?

Trump waxes nostalgically about "make America great again," but the closest America ever came to something resembling conventional notions of greatness was the period during and after WWII, when liberalism was most pervasive and hegemonic. In many ways, the original MAGA movement was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but unlike Trump, Johnson had no desire for nostalgia. His signature program meant to extend New Deal progressivism to all Americans.

Johnson isn't remembered especially well today because he blew so much political capital on the Vietnam War. One lesson we should draw is that it's always a mistake to assume military might is some kind of measure of greatness. Liberals made that mistake in WWII, partly because the enemies were so abhorrent, and partly because the war effort was led by one of their own (brilliantly, I might add). Vietnam started to divide liberals, but I'm old enough to remember when most were staunchly on board, and I've never really forgiven them for that war -- or for allowing themselves to be duped into thinking that communism was such a threat to freedom that they should kill or punish anyone tempted to think otherwise, or for becoming the unwitting victims of their own witch hunts.

Since the 1970s "liberal" has become little more than an epithet, thanks mostly to the relentless slanders of the right -- "tired" is just one of the milder ones, leaving us with this puzzle: if liberalism is so tired, how can it be such a threat?

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

The Supreme Court:

  • Ian Millhiser: [07-17] How the Supreme Court put itself in charge of the executive branch: "The major questions doctrine, explained."

  • Walter Shapiro: [07-19] Sonia Sotamayor's book scandal is banal and troubling: "The Supreme Court justice's buckraking hardly compares to that of her conservative coleagues. But it still says a lot about how much Washington has changed." Well, it says two things: one is that no one in America thinks they're making enough money, even with a cushy lifetime job and pension; the other is that when other Justices are mired in scandals showing them to be truly corrupt, any innocuous bit of buckraking looks suspect.

  • Stephen Siegel: [07-21] Clarence Thomas's cherry-picked originalism on affirmative action: "Originalism" originally meant whatever Antonin Scalia wanted it to mean, because only he claimed unique, divine, infallable insight into the minds of the crafters of the Constitution. Since his death, other conservatives have stepped up as originalism's self-appointed oracles, no less dishonestly than Scalia.

Climate and Environment:

Ukraine War: The great "counteroffensive" has been going for more than a month now, but the New York Times hasn't changed its maps page since July 9.

Around the world:

Other stories:

David Byler: [07-17] 5 myths about politics, busted by data: Or proven, depending on how you read the data:

  1. Democrats aren't young. Both parties are old. Their breakdown has 30% of Democrats 65+, 28% 50-64, 29% 30-49, and 14% 18-29. But the older cohorts lean Republican (+7 and +5), and the younger ones favor Democrats (+8 and +5). They don't give you the median, but the median Democrat is 5-8 years younger than the median Republican.
  2. Republicans aren't rural. Democrats aren't urban. Both are mostly suburban (57-53, edge Democrats), but as they note, "Democrats fare best in neighborhoods that are close to the city center, while Republicans thrive in exurbs and small metros." As for the rest, the urban split is 27-11 Democrats, the rural 36-16 Republicans.
  3. Religious Democrats and secular Republicans are both common. The secular ("unaffiliated," a somewhat broader category) split is 39-14 Democrats, with Republicans leading 59-33 among Protestants and 21-17 with Catholics ("other" splits 10-6 Democrats). But they also note that the number of Republicans who seldom or never attend church has shot up from 30-42% (time frame unclear), so while Republicans are more likely to identify as Christian, they may be less than committed.
  4. Both parties rely on White college graduates -- not just Democrats. Democrats have an edge among "white, college educated" of 37-31%, which is surely higher than it was even 10-20 years ago, maybe a reversal, as Republicans have had a big advantage there.
  5. The Hispanic vote is not the GOP's only route to victory. I don't really get this point: "Republicans could very well win in 2024 by building on recent gains with the White working-class and Asian American voters, regaining recently lost college-educated suburbanites or finally making inroads with Black voters." Really? Based on what policy mix?

I see lessons here for Democrats, in that they need to hold onto and expand their substantial share of mainstream voters, especially ones free enough of Republican prejudice as to still have options. Of course, it's also important to keep the groups Republicans offer no joy to, which means offering tangible benefits, and not just taking them for granted. (Failure there may not translate to Republican votes, but to non-voting.) But I also don't put much stock in multisectoral statistical breakdowns and their attendant identity politics

As for Republicans, they're already performing way above where they should be if voters were rational and voted their best interests. How they improve on that is hard to imagine. They're certainly not going to change course, at least as long as the current one seems to give them a chance to squeeze through on some technicality. Their only real hope is that Democrats discredit themselves -- a card they've been playing, with diminishing returns, since the check kiting scandal of 1993.

Robert Crawford: [07-20] How media makes impact of U S forever wars invisible: Review of Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. An excerpt from this book is here: The convenient myth of "humane" wars. There's also an interview with Solomon: [06-23] How America's wars become 'invisible'.

Tyler Austin Harper: [07-19] 'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' tell the same terrifying story: Author ties them both to the search for the Anthropocene boundary stratigraphy. Nuclear fallout is one obvious marker, as it was non-existent before the Trinity test in 1945 and the subsequent annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to be followed by hundreds of further atmospheric tests (528, according to Arms Control Association, with 215 by US and 219 by USSR, 50 by France, 23 China, and 21 UK). But another marker would be to look for buried plastics, which are if anything more ubiquitous. The coincident release of two movies exploring such geologically important shifts is unlikely enough that some people have turned it into a thing. And many are writing on one, the other, or both. I should note that I haven't seen either movie, and I'm not likely to soon -- we just don't do that anymore, but I also gather that the formerly pretty good Warren Theatres we once had here have turned into rat traps under soon-to-be-bankrupt Regal.

Idrees Kahloon: [06-05] Economists love immigration. Why do so many Americans hate it? Well, economists think growth can be infinite. More practical souls ask: where are you going to put it all?

Dylan Matthews: [07-17] The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity: "The founders of Anthropic quit Open AI to make a safe AI company. It's easier said than done."

Matt McManus/Nathan J Robinson: [07-21] Are we in the grip of an 'American cultural revolution'? Christopher Rufo thinks it's already happened, but he's belatedly fighting back in his book: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Sounds like good news, at least until I read the fine print:

The "revolution," in Rufo's telling, is comprised of -- wait for it -- diversity programs at colleges, Black Studies departments, protests against police brutality, and corporations that tweeted pro-BLM platitudes in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. His evidence for dangerous revolutionary changes in our society consists of things like the appearance of the term "institutionalized racism" in the newspaper.

Since "the radical left conquered everything," you might wonder if Rufo is smuggling his missives from jail or some cave, but he's actually been appointed by Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College. I know Robinson's made it his life's worth to debunk the so-called thinkers of the right, but why bother with one this hallucinatory?

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-21] Roaming Charges: Political crying games. He starts with the Congressional smackdown of Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) for identifying Israel as "a racist state" -- a reaction so shrill Jayapal wound up voting for a Resolution proclaiming that Israel is "not racist or an apartheid state" and that "the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel." No doubt such eternal fealty will be tried repeatedly as Israel's state lurches farther and farther to the right.

St Clair offers two quotes, one from Prime Minister Netanyahu ("Israel is not a state of all its citizens but rather, the nation state of the Jewish people and only them") and former PM Ehud Barak ("who says that the current government is 'determined to degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society'"). When it does, bank on Congress to pass another near-unanimous Resolution reassuring Israel of America's eternal submission. Israel is no longer an ally. America has become its vassal.

The only argument I can imagine against Israel being a racist state is to question whether Jews are a race. While that has been a common claim in the past, it makes no sense to regard Jews as a race in America or Europe. However, in Europe, government-issued identity cards specify who is a Jew, and who is not, with the latter group subject to further distinctions. And those cards determine the rights you have, and how you are treated by the state, and probably how you are treated by many other organizations. Maybe there's a fancier word for that system, like ethnocracy, but if you're an American, that system sure sounds like racism. And if you know anything about South Africa, you'll probably see affinities to their since-abandoned system of Apartheid.

St Clair also mentions on RFK Jr's attack on Biden for "threatening Israel with ending of the special relationship between our two nations," and his pledge, "As President, my support of Israel will be unconditional." And he quotes Nikki Haley: "The U.S.-Israel alliance is unbreakable because Israel's values are American values." I've long felt that American neocons were jealous of Israel's freedom to bomb their neighbors (and their own people; I'd say "citizens" but they aren't recognized as such) with no fear of repercussions, but I'm not sure most Americans actually share those values. Which ones they do share are hard to pin down, especially given that the most vehemently pro-Israeli Americans are hoping for a rapture which will, or so they believe, consign all Jews to hell. But if you're pro-Israel enough, you never have to worry about being tagged as anti-semitic. (Just consider RFK Jr.)

St Clair also includes more than you want to know about Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town," including a contrast to the late Tony Bennett, whose experiences in small town America included the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march.

More links related to the above:

PS: While American politicians are tripping all over themselves to swear allegiance to Israel, note that American elites are starting to have second thoughts:

Tweet from No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen:

Marjorie Taylor Greene warns Joe Biden is trying to "finish what FDR started" by trying to address problems related to "rural poverty," "education," and "medical care." She warns it's similar to when LBJ passed "Medicare and Medicaid."

The White House responded:

Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.

This may prove to be the silver lining in the right-wing bubble: that they can no longer hear themselves when they say things that are incredibly unpopular.

Biden also responded by using Greene as narrator for a 30-second political ad.

I've been reading Peter Turchin's End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is a comparative history of several millenia of revolution and civil wars, attempting to glean some quasi-scientific insight into the evident disintegration all around us. Thumbnail histories going back as far as Nero's Rome are always interesting, but his conceptual framework is rather oddly framed if not plainly wrong. He sees two forces that drive societies to the brink of disintegration. Mass immiseration is widely recognized as one. But his main one is what he calls "elite-overproduction," by which he a fractious rivalry between multiple aspirants ("elites," if you must, but limiting that term to the political arena). Whether this is caused by too many elites or simply by weak governing structures is less clear. If sheer numbers of princes were the problem, you'd expect Saudi Arabia to be the most fractious country in the world today, which it plainly isn't.

Given the key concern of immiseration, and his identification of a "wealth pump" driving it, much of Turchin's current political analysis is quite reasonable. But then I ran across this (pp. 219-220):

The Democratic Party has controlled its populist wing and is now the party of the 10 percent and of the 1 percent. But the 1 percent is losing its traditional political vehicle, the Republican Party, which is being taken over by the populist wing. Tucker Carlson, rather than Donald Trump, may be a seed crystal around which a new radical party forms. Or another figure could suddenly arise -- chaotic times favor the rise (and often rapid demise) of new leaders. Earlier I argued that a revolution cannot succeed without large-scale organization. The right-wing populists intend to use the GOP as an already existing organization to group power. An added advantage is that control of one of the main parties offers them a non-violent legal route to power.

Two fairly staggering problems here: if the Democrats are the party of the 1%, how come most known one-percenters are big Republican donors? And how come Republicans campaign for them -- especially with tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-labor measures -- so shamelessly? Given this, it's especially bizarre to paint the Republicans as opposed to plutocracy. Sure, they pander to prejudices and exploit the fears of some people who have not fared well under plutocracy, but where are their programs to shut down the "wealth pump" and offer help to reduce immiseration?

It is true that some of the very rich hobnob with Democrats, that many Democrats are very solicitous of their support, and that Democrats like Clinton and Obama have rewarded such benefactors handsomely -- including doing very little to slow down the wealth pump. Some rich Democrats may see the need for sensible reforms -- Franklin Roosevelt was called "a traitor to his class," but his New Deal did much more than just rescue the poor from the Great Depression: it also saved the banking system, rebuilt industry, and built a large amount of infrastructure, which led to the post-WWII boom. Some may simply be thinking about how much damage dysfunctional Republican ideas could do. And some may simply regard the Democrats as offering better service for their interests.

Turchin's fascination with Tucker Carlson may be excused as he wrote this book before Fox fired him. Still, I have to think that part of Turchin's confusion lies in his overly broad notion of elites, which at various times he divides into economic and credentialed classes. The Democrats have made gains among the latter, mostly because the Republicans have turned savagely against education and expertise, especially science. Still, characterizing this latter-day know-nothingism as "counterelite" conflict ignores who's really in charge, functioning mainly to deflect blame where it is due.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 17, 2023

Music Week

July archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40575 [40543] rated (+32), 17 [17] unrated (-0).

First up is a new Speaking of Which yesterday, with 75 links (2550 words). I do this every week, but like to provide the link here, partly because it takes a lot of work (even relatively short ones like this), and partly because my Twitter announcements for Music Week typically get more than twice as many views as my Speaking of Which announcements.

And yeah, I'm still on Twitter, and not on Mastodon or Blue Sky or (heaven forbid!) Threads (nor for that matter Instagram, or many other things I may not even be aware of; while I am on Facebook, my use is minimal, more to follow family and old friends, and not to promote my writings or even opinions; hence I rarely accept friend requests unless I know you personally). And (checking now) I see that my Twitter followers have dropped back under 600 (a pinnacle I thought I reached last week), and last week's Music Week announcement was viewed by half as many people used to be the case, so maybe it is true that Elon Musk has set fire to his $44 billion, or maybe he just wants me to take a hint.

I started yesterday's column with a pitch to ask me questions, or at least offer some feedback, only to discover that the form isn't working. That may explain why I haven't heard anything since February. The first obvious problem has to do with the captcha software, which has stopped serving images. (I just checked and the same software is till generating images on the Christgau website, so that may have just been a red herring.) I disabled it, then tried testing again, and while it seemed to work, I didn't get the forwarded mail, so there is an as-yet-undiagnosed server problem as well. So stand by, but know you don't have to use the form: regular email works.

I wrote a fairly long comment reply to one of Allen Lowe's Facebook screeds. I thought maybe I would expand it here, but don't feel up to it at the moment. A slightly better formatted version is in my notebook under "Daily Log." One point I do want to take exception to is Lowe's claim: "THERE IS NO LONGER ANY EXCUSE for critic/voters to be unaware of anyone, to just pull the lever for the same person year after year" (for which he then gives a fictional example). But there is a big excuse, which is the finite amount of listening time in each day, far short of what's available let alone of the still vast amount that isn't available (at least free, and who knows how much there is that isn't even that?).

Lowe's had a bug up his ass about jazz polls recently. I've been pretty explicit about the limits and biases built into even the best critics polls -- I also talk a bit about this in my JJA Podcast -- but please, we're doing the best we can, with limited hours and lots of other pressures (not least of which is money). (And let me add that the better I get to know my fellow critics, the more impressed I am with how much they know, and how hard they work to share their knowledge and understanding.)

Jazz polls will never give you a perfect accounting of genius (or whatever they're imagined to be measuring). What they do offer is a chance to learn something you don't already know. And that's a good thing, because the odds that you know it all are nil. As an example, at least 25% of the records that get votes in the Francis Davis Jazz Poll every year were previously unknown to me.

Also, for future reference, Phil Overeem reposted another Allen Lowe piece in response to Robert Christgau's A- review of Lowe's America: The Rough Cut. I think what he's trying to say is that roots are dirty, which is practically the definition everywhere but music.

Aside from Hwang, which I got in the mail, and who is one of those guys I've voted for "year after year" (at least since Billy Bang died), all of my picks below are someone else's recommendation. Most of the misses, too. That's just how it always works.

New records reviewed this week:

African Head Charge: A Trip to Bolgatanga (2023, On-U Sound): Dub group started in 1981, with percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and producer Adrian Sherwood. B+(**) [sp]

The Harry Allen Orchestra: With Roses (2023, Triangle7): Tenor saxophonist, retro swing, many albums since 1994, this a fairly large band -- eight pieces, not counting guests and singer Lucy Yeghiazaryan, who I'm not especially impressed with. B [sp]

Jeff Babko/David Piltch: The Libretto Show (2022 [2023], Tudor Tones): Piano-bass duo, four Babko originals, plus covers of pianists Mac Rebennack and Denny Zeitlin, and a Jobim with a bit of guest violin. B+(*) [cd]

Caterina Barbieri: Myuthafoo (2023, Light-Years): Italian electronica composer, sixth album since 2017, mostly works with minimalist synths. B+(**) [sp]

Selwyn Birchwood: Exorcist (2023, Alligator): Blues singer-songwriter from Florida ("down where rebel flags meet Mickey Mouse""), parents from Tobago and UK, plays electric guitar and electric lap steel guitar, sixth album since 2011. Guitar most impressive. Songwriting a little iffy, but I jotted down one line: "I love you baby, like the church loves money." B+(*) [sp]

Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings (2023, Ghostly International): Singer-songwriter from Buffalo, based in New York, third album (or second if you discount the cassette-only debut). Ballads singer, something I rarely tune in for, but I did notice the ghostly calm shift toward mesmerizing. B+(**) [sp]

Carook: Best of Carook (So Far) (2021-22 [2023], Atlantic): Nashville-based singer-songwriter Corinne Savage, several singles and EPs, has a substantial Wikipedia page, where I note 839.6K TikTok followers, but the only Discogs entry is one track on a label Record Store Day sampler. Signs of a cult figure, trendily trans, which I'm little inclined to indulge, so forgive the pronoun infractions, but "they" sound her to me, so let's go with that. Eleven songs, 34:07, the first couple and at least one more too slight to consider, but she learns some tricks along the way, after which the music more than suffices. And while I rarely catch words, I did jot down a couple lines: "hey, hey it's ok/everybody feels kinda weird some days"; and "lately the weight of the world is a lot." [PS: I've seen this described as "old music," but the singles start up in 2021, though they may have been recorded earlier. Everybody releases singles ahead of the albums they belong to, so despite its name this strikes me as more of a new release. I've seen a Nov. 2022 release date, but the label release is May 12, 2023, not that I know what, beyond digital, was actually released. I've noticed that whoever insists on "(So Far)" as part of their best-of title has been cursed to never have any more hits. I doubt that applies here.] B+(***) [sp]

Carook: Serious Person (Part 1) (2023, Atlantic, EP): Seven songs, 21:12, should be more consistent but isn't. Opens with two pretty good songs that could be more musical, then reverses the formula. Only one that makes me want to hear more is the closer, which isn't like any of the others. B+(***) [sp]

Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Emergence (2022 [2023], PlayOn): Tenor saxophonist, also plays flute, from Texas, played in Willem Breuker Kollektief in 1990s. Michel is a guitarist, who wrote four songs (to 3 from Coke, out of 12). Group also includes concert harp, pedal steel, bass, and vibes. B+(*) [cd]

Maria Da Rocha/Ernesto Rodrigues/Daniel Levin/João Madeira: Hoya (2022 [2023], Creative Sources): Portuguese string quartet: violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Starts off with a solo piece each (average 4:07), then six shorter duo pieces (2:15), then two quartet pieces (22:54 total). B+(**) [cd]

Oivia Dean: Messy (2023, EMI): British pop singer-songwriter, first album after several EPs. B+(*) [sp]

Deer Tick: Emotional Contracts (2023, ATO): Singer-songwriter John McCauley and band, a couple members going back to 2007, another to 2009. Eighth album, basic Americana. B+(*) [sp]

Gabriel Espinosa: Bossas and Boleros (2022 [2023], Zoho): From Mexico, based in New York, plays bass and sings, shares both roles with others, "with Kim Nazarian" noted on the cover. Five originals among ten songs. Touted guest spots include Anat Cohen, Fred Hersch, and New York Voices, none of which help much. B- [cd]

Orrin Evans: The Red Door (2020-22 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Pianist, from Philadelphia, has recorded quite a bit since 1995. Several lineups, half with horns added (mostly Nicholas Payton and Gary Thomas), three with vocals (Jazzmeia Horn, Sy Smith, and Alita Moses). B [sp]

Drayton Farley: Twenty on High (2023, Hargrove): Country singer-songwriter from Alabama, second album. B [sp]

Gel: Only Constant (2023, Convulse): Hardcore band from New Jersey, Sami Kaiser the singer, who previously fronted a band called Sick Shit. Calling them "punk" helped to get me curious, but the only resemblance is in their minimal song structures and times. First album, after a couple EPs, but at 16:29 this could be counted as another, despite ten "songs." B [sp]

Kevin Harris & the Solution: Jazz Gumbo (2023, Blujazz): Singer, no idea which of 33 of his name at Discogs might he be, but he's recovered impressively from throat cancer, and leads a band including Donald Harrison (alto sax), Will Lee (bass), and Jerry Z (organ/piano) through a list of r&b-to-jazz standards like "Yes We Can Can," "I Get Lifted," and "Freedom Jazz Dance." I'm not wild about any of them. B- [cd]

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023, Partisan): English singer-songwriter, initials for Polly Jean, was a big deal in the 1990s -- I really disliked her first two albums, but was won over by To Bring You My Love, even though I've only intermittently enjoyed her since, liking but not being wowed by her 2011 album-of-the-year contender Let England Shake. Only her second album since, shows a lot of work, yet remains exceedingly difficult to get into. B+(*) [sp]

Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response: Book of Stories (2023, True Sound): Violinist, b. 1957 in Illinois, parents immigrated from Hunan after WWII, has spent considerable time mastering classical Chinese music but he's mostly recorded cutting-edge jazz, making him the heir apparent after the deaths of Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang. Trio here with guitarist Anders Nilsson, who blends in beautifully, and drummer Michael T.A. Thompson. A- [cd]

The Japanese House: In the End It Always Does (2023, Dirty Hit): British singer-songwriter Amber Mary Bain, second album, after several EPs. B+(*) [sp]

The Malpass Brothers: Lonely Street (2023, Billy Jam): Country duo, Christopher and Taylor Malpass, from North Carolina, fourth album. Trad, with an easy-going manner. B+(***) [sp]

Gretchen Parlato/Lionel Loueke: Lean In (2022 [2023], Edition): Jazz singer from Los Angeles, father and grandfather were musicians, sixth album since 2005, paired here with the guitarist and occasional vocalist from Benin, usually backed by drums (Mark Guilliana), sometimes bass (Burniss Travis). Not sure if this is intended to sound Brazilian, or that's just their natural fusion. B+(*) [sp]

Bruno Parrinha: Da Erosão (2023, 4DaRecord): Alto saxophone, solo, even with such a talented player always a difficult proposition, one that at 43:24 outlasted my patience. B+(*) [cd]

Kim Petras: Feed the Beast (2023, Island): German pop singer-songwriter, moved to Los Angeles at 19, by which point she was a celebrity as the "world's youngest transsexual." First album, after a couple mixtapes and the 2022 EP Slut Pop. I thought the latter was pretty great, but didn't care for her Grammy-winning duet with Sam Smith (which closes out this 15-song, 40:36 album). This has gotten savaged by critics (59 on Metacritic). Hard to tell whether that's prejudice -- or what kind, given that many pop albums get savaged when they fail to overwhelm. Especially given that this one does feel rote as often as not. B+(*) [sp]

Ernesto Rodrigues/Florian Stoffner/Bruno Parrinha/João Madeira: Altered Egos (2023, Creative Sources): Portuguese group: viola/crackle box; electric guitar; clarinet/alto sax; double bass. B+(***) [cd]

Ernesto Rodrigues/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Flak/João Madeira/José Oliveira: The Giving Tree Moving On (2023, Creative Sources): Viola/crackle box, cello, electric guitar, double bass, percussion. An extended piece in eight parts. B+(**) [cd]

Bill Scorzari: The Crosswinds of Kansas (2022, self-released): New York-based singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2014, before which he was some kind of hot shot attorney. Thirteen songs, stretched out to 71 minutes, has a long list of supporting musicians with a few tracks each, suggesting this was recorded over multiple sessions, perhaps going back to 2012. Christgau suggests reading along with the lyric sheet, but he has one, and would do that. Still mostly guitar and words, the latter almost talky. Seems like the surest way to a high grade around here is to remind me of John Prine, which happens when his usual Dylan gets off on a story. A- [sp]

Tiny Ruins: Ceremony (2023, Ba Da Bing): New Zealand singer-songwriter Hollie Fullbrook started this as an alias in 2011, grew it into a band. Fourth album, rather nice. B+(*) [sp]

Josie Toney: Extra (2023, Like You Mean It): Country singer-songwriter, plays violin, notably for Sierra Ferrell, first album. B+(**) [sp]

Young Thug: Business Is Business (2023, Atlantic): Atlanta rapper Jeffrey Williams, third studio album after a lot of mixtapes. [PS: Also available is (Metro's Version), where Metro Boomin' produced more tracks, but still not all of them.] B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (1961 [2023], Impulse!): Recently discovered at the New York Public Library, "eighty minutes of never-before-heard music," and who isn't psyched to listen to more vintage Coltrane, especially his 1961 group with Dolphy? After all, the same group (give or take a bassist) recorded Live at the Village Vanguard in November, a career highlight which loses nothing even in its 4-CD Complete version. This goes back to August, and while the group isn't quite as together, the sound isn't nearly as great either. Granted, by the time they get into "Greensleeves" they've hit great, but you've heard that how many times before? B+(***) [sp]

L'Orchestre National Mauritanien: Ahl Nana (1971 [2023], Radio Martiko): Music from the northwest Sahara, recorded in Casablanca, Discogs and Bandcamp have group name and album title swapped, probably the label's mixup, but across multiple editions this way makes the most sense. I can't say much either for its "revolutionary" nature (unlikely) or its supposed influence on later "desert rock" (probably not directly, but similar bands of this vintage undoubtedly existed). Still, it is rather unique, as befits a discovery from a relatively unknown corner of Africa. B+(***) [sp]

Piconema: East African Hits on the Colombian Coast (1978-84 [2023], Rocafort): Various artists compilation, no idea when these nine tracks were recorded, or indeed whether the artists hail from Palenque in Colombia or from Kenya, the home of Benga with its sweet guitar and incessant rhythm. [PS: All groups appear to be from Kenya or Tanzania, active in 1978-84, plus or minus a couple years, with all songs available as singles or in some cases on albums, although Discogs provides few dates. But the compilers first heard these songs on Colombian sound systems.] A- [bc]

Old music:

The Ultimate College Party: 50s & 60s Party Anthems (1953-62 [2014], Jasmine, 2CD): London-based, Czech-manufactured reissue label, in business since 1982, cherry-picking through the past unencumbered by America's ridiculously extended copyright regulations. Clifford Ocheltree often showcases their wares in his daily featured recordings. He reckons this one has "48 A+ songs, 7 A and 4 more A-." That's a bit high, but it looked too good not to order (and that's something I almost never do these days). Half are hits I have in other often-played anthologies and never tire of, and the other half are items I remember from my misspent youth (except maybe for "To the Aisle," a real find). I sampled the dates, so I might be off a bit, but not by much: the few 1960s cuts are early, even "Surfin' Safari." Ignore the concept: the pivotal age here is 16, even when "Tequila" is served. Also, the print is damn near impossible to read. But those hardly qualify as quibbles. A [cd]

Grade (or other) changes:

Elle King: Come Get Your Wife (2023, RCA): Singer-songwriter from from Los Angeles or New York, daughter of comedian Rob Schneider, took her mother's name, started as an actress in 1999, recorded an EP in 2012, followed by an album in 2015, with this her third, and most country, right down to the trailer cliché, which she treats as a badge of honor. [was: B+(**)] A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Geof Bradfield Quintet: Quaver (Calligram) [08-04]
  • Aldo Fosko Collective: This One Time (Hitchtone) [05-23]
  • Max Gerl: Max Gerl (JMI) [07-28]
  • Allan Harris: Live at Blue Llama Jazz Club (Love Productions/Live at Blue Llama) [07-28]
  • Russ Johnson Quartet: Reveal (Calligram) [08-04]
  • Low Country: Low Country (Ropeadope) [07-28]
  • Chad McCullough: The Charm of Impossibilities (Calligram) [08-04]
  • Arman Sangalang: Quartet (Calligram) [08-04]
  • Mehmet Ali Sanlikol & Whatsnext?: Turkish Hipster (Dunya) [07-21]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Speaking of Which

Too late for an introduction.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Seems like a relatively tame week for evil, but there are always examples.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Necessarily a grab bag, but we're probably stuck with it.

  • Eric Levitz: He's one of the better writers at New York Magazine, but I find a lot to quibble with this week:

    • [07-11] Biden's unpopularity is more mysterious than it looks. Returns to the subject of his previous piece: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far), admitting that "the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I'd previously allowed." I find both arguments unconvincing, but I'm not sure I got them right. One problem is that lots of things are only explicable with statistics, but they don't carry the same weight as experience. And even experience is subject to interpretation. By all objective measures, the 1980s were a great decade for me, but I didn't credit Reagan with any of that, and in fact I blamed him for a lot of problems that hadn't really materialized yet, but which seemed all but inevitable given his policies. If you expect the economy to go to hell when a Democrat or Republican takes over, it isn't hard to find evidence that you're right -- especially given that both have primarily given us more inequality.

    • [07-08] The 'greedflation' debate is deeply confused: Sure, he scores easy points against straw men or hacks -- Robert Reich is an example -- not least by pointing out cases where profits all but automatically rise when external events impact supply. (If you're as old as I am, you may remember the "windfall profits tax" passed in 1973, when OPEC forced oil prices way up, inadvertently making American oil men suddenly much richer.) On the other hand, I don't buy the argument that monopoly couldn't be raising prices now because if it existed, it would have raised prices previously. There are lots of reasons for monopolists not to fully exploit their power the moment they get it, but to do so when others give them cover for rising prices (as well as the incentive kick of raising costs). But also, "greedflation" provides an alternative to the cruel notion that inflation should be fought by taking away people's jobs.

    • [07-12] The case for Cornel West 2024 is extremely weak. But the case would be stronger if Levitz hadn't made a wrong turn in his first sentence: Cornel West recently decided that the best way for him to advance economic and social justice in the United States . . . thereby marginally increasing the odds of a second Trump presidency." I'm not interested in debating the last part, which as Levitz admits is a very marginal concern. The mistake is in thinking that West's campaign is only about "economic and social justice," and only in the US. If that's all that's at dispute, I'd happily concede that Biden is already making progress in that direction, and that West, no matter how much more he wants to achieve, isn't likely to do much better. If that's all he wants, he, like Bernie Sanders, would be better off working with Biden. But West has another major plank in his campaign, one that is diametrically opposed to both Republican and Democratic leaders, and that is foreign policy, and the almost certainty that current policies will lead to more wars that will eventually prove disastrous both for America and for the world. [E.g., see this interview; also another interview by Chris Hedges.] Not many people understand that, but that's all the more reason for West to stand up and argue the case. My biggest worry for 2024 is that some Biden miscalculation will throw us into a war, that will trigger a rebound for Trump, who is already arguing that only he can save us from world war. The rest of the article consists of minor arguments with a pro-West piece by Lily Sánchez, which pale in importance to this issue.

    • [07-13] A new order blocking Manchin's pipeline could hurt the climate: "Restricting Congress's authority to exempt energy projects from judicial review would undermine the green transition."

    • [07-15] Can extremely reflective white paint save the planet? If anyone does come up with a plausible geoengineering scheme for cooling the atmosphere, Democrats (in particular) will happily throw a lot of money at it. This is an example of a small hack that's unlikely to scale significantly, but at least it involves spending more to avoid simply cutting back on energy use -- one solution that no one serious considers plausible.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-14] Biden's new plan to forgive $39 billion in student loans, explained: "More than 800,000 borrowers are now eligible for student loan forgiveness." Something else for Republicans to try to ruin.

  • John Nichols: [07-14] Jesse Jackson's politics of peace: "His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns called for ending military interventions, supported disarmament, and sought deep cuts in Pentagon spending." Not even Bernie Sanders has done that since, which is more evidence of how deeply rutted our thinking is on the military. I've long thought that Jackson would have won the Democratic Party nomination had he run in 1992, but he didn't, to avoid blame for losing a second term to GWH Bush. I also thought that Clinton owed him big time for not making the run, and I expected some kind of payoff for the favor, but never noticed one.

  • Timothy Noah: [07-12] You'll be very surprised who's benefiting most from Bidenomics: Not really. "Red states, not blue ones, are seeing the biggest income gains." Isn't it always like that? Poor states vote Republican, and better off states bail them out.

Climate and Environment:

Ukraine War: Conspicuous by absence is any news on how well Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is going, which suggests it isn't. On the other hand, NATO met, and continues to rack up milestones, which as usual mostly involve arms sales. Wake me when we see some diplomacy, because once again nothing else matters. The Gessen piece is historical, stuff you should know. It doesn't mean that Putin's invasion was in any way justifiable, or that sending arms to help Ukraine fend off that invasion is bad policy, but understanding America's deep culpability for the conflict would go a long way toward negotiating a way out of it. Conversely, not recognizing how this all went wrong prevents us from understanding the chief lessons of this war: that deterrence and sanctions are more likely to provoke war than to prevent it; and that not just the combatants but the world cannot afford for wars like this to go on and on.

Around the world: But mostly Israel, again.

Other stories:

Kai Bird: [07-07] Oppenheimer, nullified and vindicated: Co-author of the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird explains the campaign to get the federal government to admit that they erred in 1954 in revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance, thus excluding the director of the Manhattan Project from any further role in atomic weapons planning. The vindication didn't come until December 18, 2022, and serves as another example of something Biden's administration has done that Obama's was too chickenshit to venture. I will quibble with the assertion that Oppenheimer was "the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism." Sure, he was the bigger celebrity, but the execution of the Rosenbergs was a graver miscarriage of justice. But Oppenheimer is a clearer example of how McCarthyism worked: it meant that anyone with a vaguely leftist past could be crucified as a traitor, and hardly anyone would dare come to their defense -- especially liberals who could themselves be tarred as "fellow travelers."

Jonathan Chait: [07-11] In defense of independent opinion journalism: "The 'hack gap' between right and left has been closing." I'm not convinced. I won't deny that there are hacks on the left, but they differ significantly from hacks on the right. For one thing, they're not all aligned against their partisan enemies. Take Chait, for instance, who only seems truly happy when he's attacking people to his left -- a considerable number, given his support for the Iraq war, his pimping for charter schools, and his "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination." But even when leftists slip into hackdom, they still start with commitments to truth and justice that are utterly alien to the right. Then, by the way, there is the deeper problem of objectivity, which is impossible, making it a claim one should always be suspicious of.

Bob Harris/Jon Schwarz: [07-04] Carl Reiner's life should remind us: If you like laughing, thank FDR and the New Deal: "Their comedy descends directly from the Works Progress Administration." The WPA did a world of good for America, but much of what they did, especially in the arts, would be considered too frivolous, and in many cases too controversial, for "taxpayer" funding these days. Until that attitude changes, we're stuck with a government distinguished mostly by misery: how miserable its workers feel, and how miserable they make the rest of us.

Noasm Hassenfeld: [07-16] Even the scientists who build AI can't tell you how it works: Interview with Sam Bowman.

Oshan Jarow: [07-14] Poverty is a major public health crisis. Let's treat it like one. You'd think that such an argument would make people more inclined to support anti-poverty measures, but Republicans have aligned themselves pretty firmly against public health (or at least doing anything about it).

Jess Lander: [07-13] What led to Anchor Brewing's downfall? Sapporo, some workers say. America's oldest craft brewer is going out of business, supposedly a victim of Covid or maybe bad marketing, but I'm suspicious of two ownership changes: in 2010, owner Fritz Maytag, who had rescued the brewery after prohibition, sold to Griffin Group ("a local beverage consulting company," which smells a lot like private equity even if they're not a big name), and in 2017 Griffin pawned the carcass on to giant Japanese brewer Sapporo. It's easy enough to say that the latter didn't understand American craft brewers, and to illustrate this with various marketing blunders, but the deeper truth is that they simply didn't care, especially after the workforce unionized in 2019. After all, it's not unusual for big companies to buy up small ones only to shutter them, leaving the larger company with one fewer competitor (even if, as in this case, one that barely mattered).

Back when I worked for a high-tech startup, where most employees owned a small sliver of stock, I concluded that the world would be much better if employees owned a controlling share of stock, thus resolving conflict with management. (Unions, valuable as they are as a balance against management power, usually increase conflict, especially when they lack legal rights, as is often the case in the US; on the other hand, in Germany, where "co-determination" gives workers a stake in management, unions align more closely with management.) I'd like to see many policies that help facilitate employee ownership. One of the most obvious ones would be to allow employees to claim defunct businesses, wiping out the company's previous debt obligations, and providing funding for a fresh start. I have no doubt that a company like Anchor could be revived, if handed over to workers who care about the product and the customers, and about their own jobs.

Shira Ovide: [07-14] We must end the tyranny of printers in American life: "Printers cannot be reformed. They must be destroyed, once and for all." I had to include this because my latest printer purchase, a HP OfficeJet Pro 9010, is the biggest purchasing mistake I've ever made. They insisted that I use a wireless connection, and while it is recognized by my Linux computers, I'm not able to send any jobs from them to be printed. (At one point, this worked, but even then scans couldn't be uploaded, at least not using sane.) One main reason for the wireless connection is the need to reorder ink as part of a subscription program that was originally offered for $2.99/month, then immediately raised to $4.99/month. Of course, they haven't sent me any ink, because I haven't been able to print. I've owned several HP printers going back to their LaserJet II in the 1980s, but they've never pulled anything like this before. At last, as Ovide will be happy to hear, I'm learning to live without printing. Now I need to figure out how to stop paying for nothing.

Kelsey Piper: [07-12] Stop looking to Mother Nature for answers to resource questions: "The silly way we think about resource scarcity." Followed, sad to say, by an equally silly answer. While it's true that we haven't discovered every earthly resource we might eventually manage to exploit, that's mostly because people keep assuming that only very short terms matter: a "50 year" phosphorus find may be a big deal for 50 years, but 50 years is a pretty short time frame.

Sigal Samuel: [07-11] Scientists unveil the key site that shows we're in a new climate epoch: Title has it backwards: some scientists decided we are in a new climate epoch, then looked for a geologic site that could be used as a marker between the old Holocene epoch and the new Anthropocene. They found one, but it's not based on climate change. Rather, what it marks is the appearance of fallout from nuclear bombs testing, which increased significantly around 1950. On the other hand, human impact on the geostratigraphic record goes back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, eventually becoming dramatic enough to justify the term Anthropocene (much like the Cambrian is sometimes called the age of trilobites).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-14] Roaming Charges: Clusterfuck in Vilnius. He's in a bad mood, starting with cluster bombs for Ukraine.

Two subjects I didn't want to say anything about are No Labels and RFK Jr. -- among other things, do I file them under Republicans, who they effectively work for, or Democrats? -- but if you want some well-reasoned analysis, turn to No More Mister Nice Blog:

An old piece I ran across, still worth mentioning:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 10, 2023

Music Week

July archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40543 [40512] rated (+31), 17 [14] unrated (+3).

Another hefty Speaking of Which yesterday (80 links, 5441 words). I was panicking about my inability to get anything done, but once I settled into this piece, a calm settled over me, and I felt my thinking and (hopefully) my writing become clear. Perhaps I should stop worrying about whether anyone else reads and/or cares about these exercises, and just consider them therapy.

Picks last week were non-jazz, but this week they're all jazz -- the band behind Aja Monet is practically all-star, while the others are more avant. Gerry Hemingway wrote a while back and asked if I'd be interested in him sending me something. I said sure, not expecting side credits, but they made my week. His own songs-with-vocals album Afterlife was perhaps the biggest, most pleasant surprise of 2022.

Spent most of today catching up with the indexing on June's Streamnotes, which entails the annual list and the artist index. Beware that the latter is 21,814 records long.

New records reviewed this week:

Jason Adasiewicz: Roy's World (2017 [2023], Corbett vs. Dempsey): From Chicago, plays vibraphone and balafon, couple dozen albums since 2000, many more side credits. Project here was music for a film. Group a nicely balanced quintet, with Josh Berman (cornet), Jonathan Doyle (saxes), Joshua Abrams (bass), and Hamid Drake (drums). A- [bc]

Susan Alcorn/José Lencastre/Hernâni Faustino: Manifesto (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Pedal/lap steel guitar, alto/tenor sax, acoustic/electric bass. B+(*) [sp]

Jalen Baker: Be Still (2022 [2023], Cellar): Vibraphonist, second album, with piano (Paul Cornish), bass (Gabriel Godoy), and drums (Gavin Moolchan). B+(*) [cd]

João Barradas: Solo II: Live at Festival D'Aix-En-Provence (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Portuguese accordion player, several albums since 2013, this a six-part improv, where he is also credited with MIDI controller and voice. B+(*) [bc]

Carlos Bica: Playing With Beethoven (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Portuguese bassist, albums since 1995, was commissioned by Cineteatro Louletano "to respond creatively to the musical legacy of Ludwig von Beethoven," so starts with eleven classical themes and plays with them. With Daniel Erdmann (tenor/soprano sax), João Barradas (accordion), and DJ Illvibe (turntables). Mixed results. I'm hard pressed to identify the Beethoven here, although he makes a ready scapegoat when it goes wrong. B [sp]

Big Freedia: Central City (2023, Queen Diva): New Orleans bounce rapper Freddie Ross, second album (plus mixtapes, EPs, and a bunch of singles). At best, this reminds me of George Clinton's funk foundry, but at worst the banging gets out of hand, turning into pure headache. B- [sp]

Valentin Ceccaldi: Bonbon Flamme (2023, Clean Feed): French cello player, brother of violinist Théo Ceccaldi, has at least one previous album. Joined here by Luis Lopes (guitar), Fulco Ottervanger (piano, keyboards), and Étienne Ziemniak (drums), bits of spoken word. Dense, with rock energy that might explode but doesn't quite. B+(***) [bc]

Entoto Band: Entoto Band (2023, Guitar Globetrotter): Songs from "the golden era of Ethiojazz," with singer Helen Mengestu and saxophonist Amanyal Tewelde, along with Dutch guitarist Joep Pelt. B+(**) [sp]

Gloss Up: Before the Gloss Up (2023, Quality Control): Memphis rapper, first mixtape after a flurry of singles appearances (4 in Discogs), 12 tracks, 29:53. B+(***) [sp]

HIIT: For Beauty Is Nothing but the Beginning of Terror (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Italian pianist Simone Quatrana, in a trio with Andrea Grossi (bass) and Pedro Melo Alves (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Jelly Roll: Whitsitt Chapel (2023, BBR Music Group): Singer-songwriter Jason Bradley DeFord, from Tennessee, started out hip-hop but goes country here, which among other things means he gets to stretch out his drawl and crank the guitars up. But he's as dissolute as anyone around, and religion can't save him (neither "Dancing with the Devil" nor "Hungover in a Church Pew." B+(**) [sp]

Kala Jula & Gangbé Brass Band: Asro (2019 [2023], Buda Musique): Band with roots in Mali and Benin, feat. credit on cover for Fama Diabaté (voice, balafon), with three guitarists (one also on kora, and everyone adding to the percussion), with added sax and brass from the Gangbé Brass Band. B+(**) [sp]

Izumi Kimura/Gerry Hemingway: Kairos (2022 [2023], Fundacja Sluchaj): Japanese pianist, based in Ireland, has a 2010 album and several more since 2016, including a 2019 trio with the drummer and Barry Guy. Sharper here as a duo, the focus shifting from piano to drums (or marimba or vibraphone), and back again. Then out of nowhere comes something totally different: a trad piece with Hemingway's bluesy, otherworldly vocal. A- [cd]

John Carroll Kirby: Blowout (2023, Stones Throw): Los Angeles-based keyboard player, tenth album since 2015, also lots of pop session work. Dance grooves, but closer to smooth jazz than to techno. B- [sp]

Kool Keith: Black Elvis 2 (2023, Mello Music Group): Veteran rapper Keith Thornton, started with Ultramagnetic MCs (1984-93), also worked as Dr. Octagon and Dr. Dooom (not to be confused with MF Doom, the late Daniel Dumile), used this name for his 1999 release of Black Elvis/Lost in Space, released much more before cycling around for this sequel. (The Return of Dr. Octagon came out in 2006, 10 years after Dr. Octagonecologyst.) Has some of that old school bite. B+(**) [sp]

Lil Uzi Vert: Pink Tape (2023, Generation Now/Atlantic): Rapper Symere Woods, from Philadelphia, third album, a big one at 87:03 (26 songs, 3 billed as bonuses). Mostly stuff I have trouble distinguishing from dozens of other young rappers, although the beats and production are above average. Then there are the metal mash ups with Bring Me the Horizon and Babymetal. Not awful, but wtf? B+(**) [sp]

Aja Monet: When the Poems Do What They Do (2023, Drink Sum Wtr): Poet, from Brooklyn, last name Bacquie, four books since 2012, first album, songs co-credited to the musicians: Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (trumpet), Weedie Braimah (percussion), Luques Curtis (bass guitar), Marcus Gilmore (drums), Elena Pinderhughes (flute), and Samora Pinderhughes (piano). Much remarkable here, but it does go on awfully long (83:00), and demands a lot of attention. A- [sp]

Margaux Oswald/Jesper Zeuthen: Magnetite (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Swiss pianist, based in Copenhagen, has a couple previous albums. Duo with Zeuthen, who is Danish, older (b. 1949), plays alto sax, played in Pierre Dørge's New Jungle Orchestra. B+(***) [sp]

Bruno Parrinha/Vine Leaf: Tales of Senses (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Just the group name on the cover, which is an English translation of the Portuguese alto saxophonist's name. With Luis Lopes (guitar) and João Valinho (drums). Strong, steady. B+(***) [sp]

Emanuele Parrini/Samo Salamon/Vasco Trilla: Eating Poetry (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Italian violinist, debut a duo album in 1998, joined here by guitar (from Slovenia) and drums (from Portugal). B+(**) [sp]

Phiik & Lungs: Another Planet 4 (2023, Tase Grip/Break All): Two rappers from New York, otherwise I know very little about them. B+(*) [sp]

Peso Pluma: Génesis (2023, Double P): Mexican rapper, sings more, actual name Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, father traces roots back to Lebanon, third album. B+(**) [sp]

Marek Pospieszalski: No Other End of the World Will There Be: Based on the Works of Polish Female Composers of the 20th Century (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Polish saxophonist, leads an octet here. Listing the composers, or even the musicians, would be an obscure exercise (not that I don't recognize trumpet player Tomasz Dabrowski). I rarely like records that lean this much toward classical, but this keeps me interested. B+(**) [sp]

Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess (2023, Heavy on It): Rapper Janae Wherry, from St. Louis, second mixtape. No doubt she puts out, but B+(*) [sp]

Liba Villavecchia Trio: Birchwood (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): Alto saxophonist from Barcelona, Discogs lists two items 1999-2002 but kicked off from 2020 on. Second Trio album with Alex Reviriego (bass) and Vasco Trilla (drums). Sounds great at first, then pretty good as the riffs roll on. B+(***) [sp]

WiFiGawd & Soudiere: 36 Chambers of Pressure Vol. 2 (2023, Purple Posse, EP): DC rapper, has a lot of work out since 2016, as does French DJ Soudiere, their first volume (9 songs, 23:47) out in October 2022. This one offers 9 more songs (22:03). Tight in the groove, or buried in the mix. B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Brew: Heat/Between Reflections (1998-2019 [2023], Clean Feed, 2CD): Trio of Miya Masaoka (koto), Reggie Workman (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums). Masaoka was born in Washington DC, lived in Paris, studied in San Francisco, is based in New York, is a master of many traditional Japanese instruments, has appeared on 50+ albums, mostly with free jazz figures. First disc, with two 1998-99 sessions, is deeply compelling. The latter disc is a recent session, considerably lighter. A- [cd]

Luther Thomas: 11th Street Fire Suite (1978 [2023], Corbett vs. Dempsey): Alto saxophonist (1950-2009), from St. Louis, was involved in the Black Artists Group, Human Arts Ensemble, and Saint Louis Creative Ensemble, with just a handful of albums under his own name. Mostly solo -- Luther C. Petty gets a flute credit -- including voice and "little instruments." Starts out of tune, and never really gets on track. C+ [bc]

Old music:

Izumi Kimura: Asymmetry: Piano Music From Japan and Ireland (2009 [2010], Diatribe): Japanese pianist, born in Yokohama but based in Ireland. First album. Label ran a "Solo Series" with four releases each in 2010 and 2014, with no one else I've heard of. Composed pieces, alternating as advertised, still not easy to dive in randomly and discern which is which, but I'm hardly one to know. B+(**) [sp]

Izumi Kimura/Cora Venus Lunny: Invisible Resistances (2022, Farpoint): Lunny is an Irish violinist, daughter of a noted Irish folk musician, has a few albums since 2011. Duet with pianist Kimura. B+(*) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Maria Da Rocha/Ernesto Rodrigues/Daniel Levin/João Madeira: Hoya (Creative Sources) [06-01]
  • Gabriel Espinosa: Bossas and Boleros (Zoho) [06-23]
  • Doug MacDonald Trio: Edwin Alley (DMAC Music) [08-01]
  • Ernesto Rodrigues/Florian Stoffner/Bruno Parrinha/João Madeira: Altered Egos (Creative Sources) [06-01]
  • Ernesto Rodrigues/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Flak/João Madeira/José Oliveira: The Giving Tree Moving On (Creative Sources) [06-01]
  • Paul Tynan & Aaron Lington: Bicoastal Collective: Chapter Six (OA2) [07-21]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 9, 2023

Speaking of Which

I could write about Israel every week, as every week some new outrage occurs there. I don't, because I tire of making the same points over and over, and because what happens there is mostly out of sight and therefore out of mind. But since the current Netanyahu government took power, built as it is on ultra-religious parties tied to settler aggression and violence, a direction has clearly emerged, which if unchecked will lead to the end of Jewish Democracy -- let's face it, there's never been universal democracy in Israel -- and eventually to genocide against Palestinians. The ruling junta's plot to break the judicial system, which sometimes acts as a brake on the government's violence, has been widely reported, because it's been widely protested by Israeli Jews and their sympathizers in the US. The violence directed against Palestinians has received much less attention, mostly in the form of pieces like: [07-04] Israel targets West Bank militant stronghold in major operation. Of course, it helps to know that all Palestinians are considered "militants," and any place they're in the majority is a "stronghold." For a brief introduction to what happened there, see Jeffrey St Clair: [07-07] The meaning of Jenin.

I'll follow up with some more links, but first I want to be clear on several points:

  1. From its inception in the 1880s, Zionism has always been a colonial settler project, pitched to gain sponsorship by an imperial power. The UK adopted the movement in 1917 to use against the Ottomans. After the British withdrew in 1948, Israel became independent, but still needed allies for arms (first Russia, then France, then the US).

  2. With British protection secured, the Zionist community (Yishuv) was segregated and grew self-sufficient, buying land while marginalizing Palestinian workers -- the powerful Jewish labor union insisted on only employing Jewish labor. The adoption of Hebrew as their national language further isolated Jews from Arabs. When Israel was declared, a separate-and-unequal society and economy already existed, reinforced by law.

  3. Like all settler colonialists, Zionists understdood that success depended on numbers. In the US and Australia, an overwhelming number of settlers (aided by disease and superior arms) relegated the few surviving natives to reservations. But settlers never had a chance in places where they were a tiny minority (like Haiti or Kenya), nor were settlers ultimately able to retain power in places where they held substantial power but were still a minority (like South Africa and Algeria). When the British withdrew, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 35%. Israel attempted to solve this problem by partition (a UN-approved plan they agreed to but didn't honor), war, and the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from land they occupied during the war. The Palestinians remaining in Israel were accorded some rights, but lived under a military justice system separate from Jews, and faced economic restrictions.

  4. Israel never accepted its borders. (There are still Israelis who believe they are entitled to the East Bank of the Jordan, to southern Lebanon, and to Sinai.) It obliterated the UN partition plan, by seizing West Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Western Galilee, among other expansions. It then launched wars in 1956 and 1967 to seize more land. After 1967, Israel developed a complex system of control over the occupied territories, but they kept wanting more, to which aim they permitted settlers to claim an ever-expanding array of select locations.

In 1967, Israel faced three threats -- Arab attack, Palestinian uprising, and world opinion turning against Israel -- beyond the obvious demographic trap, but could have navigated their way around them. The threat of Arab armies (mostly Egypt and Syria) was largely ended by Israel's 1967 blitz, which gave them territories that could be returned for peace -- as finally happened with Egypt in 1979, and almost happened with Syria in 2000 (before Barak got cold feet and/or greedy). Israel could have organized Gaza and the West Bank into an indepdendent Palestinian state, which could have repatriated refugees, thus degrading the PLO and its offshoots. And world opinion -- which would later tip the balance against South Africa -- was most sensitive to injustice, which Israel had started to address by ending military rule within the 1967 borders.

But Israelis weren't satisfied, and given the belief system they had painstakingly constructed, probably couldn't be. They had built a military juggernaut, and doubled down on it, becoming one of the most thoroughly militaristic societies the world has ever known. Meanwhile, the state supported the ultra-orthodox, who moved from apolitical to nationalist and beyond. The stratification of society and economy inflated Jewish pride, while grinding Palestinians into resistance, which could be met with half-hearted accommodation (like Oslo), or simply with violence. Such violence risks international support, but as long as the US blindly follows, Israel can manage the rest.

I'm not insensitive to the plight of Palestinians under Israel's yoke. Nor do I see this oppression as steady state. Under the current political regime, Israelis will continue to take land and livelihood from Palestinians. Moreover, they don't fear violent uprising. They welcome it as an opportunity for even more violent reprisals. No one can doubt that Israel has the firepower to commit genocide. And more than a few Israelis already have the mindset. With more violence, more will join them, until some tipping point, which is becoming increasingly likely -- especially if the US swings back to some Christian Zionist fanatic or fool. Donald Trump is certainly the latter, if not necessarily the former.

But I'm also bothered by what Israel's cult of dominance is doing to them. They have ordered a society which is racist at its core, which is profoundly unequal and unjust, which is maintained both by psychological manipulation and brutality. That's no way to live. (Late in his life, Ariel Sharon admitted as much, not that he did anything about it.) As a result, Israelis are doomed to struggle and suffer, finding themselves increasingly out of step from the rest of the world -- not least from Jews in the diaspora, who are finding it increasingly difficult to even recognize their brethren.

Injustices everywhere increase the odds of revolutionary violence spilling into further war, which is a big reason -- even if sympathy and solidarity doesn't move you -- to worry and warn against them. However you measure such things, Israel is one of the most unjust nations in the world today. It's also one of the most heavily armed, so it's not like world opinion can do much if they snap. But the threat I worry even more about is that the US will see Israel as a model, and seek to replicate its injustices at 50 times the scale. If you don't know who I'm talking about, start with the Republicans section below.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

  • Walker Bragman: [07-06] How Ron DeSantis turned Covid denialism in a major political weapon: "The Florida governor's deadly anti-public health politics may just help him outflank Trump, who looks like a moderate in comparison." I wouldn't call Trump a "moderate" here. He just likes to have it both ways, taking credit for the vaccination program while through his own miraculous recovery testifying that we didn't really need it. If you want to dwell on a pivotal moment in history, consider what would be different if Trump had died in Walter Mead instead of bouncing back. His recovery, more than anything else, revitalized his campaign -- and, of course, allowed him to carry on with his post-election nonsense.

  • Philip Bump: [07-05] You can't be more conservative than Trump when he defines conservatism.

  • Margaret Hartmann: [07-06] Trump sours on Kari Lake because she's too Trumpy. Follow up to reports a few weeks back touting her as Trump's vice-presidential running mate. Not only does she add gender balance to the ticket, she's already proved she can lose Arizona. Highlight is a Trump "truth" on Lake's new book: "I know this book is great, because I wrote the foreword." Hartmann also wrote: [06-29] Melania Trump releases 'Yearning to Breathe Free' NFT. Biggest surprise here is that Melania seems to have gotten into the NFT racket earlier than her husband.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-06] 4 revelations from the latest unsealed records in the Trump classified documents case:

    1. Prosecutors relied on security footage to build their case against Trump
    2. Trump didn't initially argue to prosecutors that he declassified the documents
    3. Trump's lawyers probably never looked beyond the storage room for classified documents
    4. We still don't know all the reasons why prosecutors believed that Trump still had documents in his possession

  • Timothy Noah: [07-06] The truth about the GOP and the deficit: All they do is raise it. You know this, right?

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-06] Ron DeSantis's ghoulish embrace of American Psycho Patrick Bateman: "The increasingly hopeless presidential candidate is now clinging to a weird right-wing meme in hopes of winning over the misogynistic-sociopath vote." Aka, "the base"?

  • Marianna Sotomayor/John Wagner: [07-07] House Freedom Caucus votes to oust conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Further proof that they eat their own. (Mo Brooks is a previous example, in case you forgot.) Admittedly, not as dramatic as the guillotining of Robespierre. More like a playground squabble. Also note: the most unflattering pic of MTG to date.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-07] Pay attention to what you see: Donald Trump is losing his marbles.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [07-03] There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage: "Let us count the ways." Provides many examples of Graham's warmongering over the years, but woefully incomplete, missing even such egregious examples as his insistence in 2008 that the US go to war with Russia over Georgia. But while he's a broken record on war, on many other subjects -- especially Trump -- the one thing he repeatedly shows us is how little thought occurs before he speaks. There's quite a bit on him in Mark Leibovich's Thank You for Your Servitude, where he is depicted as a habitual flunky who's always looking for a leader type to suck up to -- he's floundered since John McCain's death. (As Kathleen Parker put it: McCain's "death five years ago left his wingman without a lead pilot.")

    I still have this vague memory of a quote from him from back when he was still in the House (1995-2003), explaining that Republicans need to lock in as much power as possible while they still have the chance, because longer trends were working against them. That stuck with me as smart, cynical, and evil. But probably not an original thought, as those seem beyond him. Rather, as he's wont to, he just inadvertently spilled the beans about a plot that had already been hatched. Vlahos also cites: Jack Hunter: [2022-03-05] Sadly, Graham's call for Putin's assassination is not his craziest moment.

  • Peter Wade: [07-09] DeSantis whines to Fox News that 'the media' is sabotaging his campaign. After all, that's his job.

Democrats: Like a shaggy old coat, the only thing protecting us from the life-sapping chill of Republican sociopathy. The latter should be so obvious by now that a Democratic rout in 2024 should be a lock, but still we worry.

Courts and Law:

Climate and Environment: I can add that in Wichita, at least, we've been in a lucky bubble of nice weather, with major storm fronts bypassing us to the north or to the south. We did have three days over 100°F when the heat dome that's so impacted Texas spread north, but no record temps were threatened. We did have an exceptionally warm and early Spring, associated with a drought that really hurt the winter wheat crop (so farmers may dispute my use of "nice"). And while this week has brought a lot of rain -- still not enough to bring the year back to normal, but the farmers raising corn are optimistic -- we've been spared the severe weather that's repeated hit points to the east.

Ukraine War:

  • Blaise Malley: [07-07] Diplomacy Watch: Washington may deny it, but looks like someone wants to talk to Russia. Still too early to declare that sanity is at long last breaking out, as details are few and veiled. The same "Track II" is discussed by Trita Parsi: [07-06] Former US officials reportedly open talks with Moscow. Also mentioned is Richard Haass/Charles Kupchan: [04-13] The West needs a new strategy in Ukraine: "A plan for getting from the battlefield to the negotiating table." Haass is outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kupchan is a senior fellow. Both are wired deep into the foreign policy blob, but aren't speaking in any official capacity. Kupchan wrote on [02-24]: US-West must prepare for a diplomatic endgame in Ukraine. It doesn't take a genius to see that much, but feigned ignorance is still the word in Washington, and will be until it isn't.

  • Jen Kirby: [07-07] The US's controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, explained.

  • Patrick Leahy/Jeff Merkley: [07-07] Here's why supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions would be a terrible mistake.

  • Marc A Thiessen/Stephen E Biegun: [07-08] Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine: I don't think I've ever linked to one of Thiessen's columns before. He's never right about anything, but this one is outrageously dumb that I couldn't help. Just give it a second's worth of thought. NATO's proposition offers two things: one is access to American and European arms; the other is the deterrence provided by its vow to jointly defend any member (at least attacked by a non-member, as Greece and Turkey found out). Maybe NATO membership would have deterred Russia from attacking, but that was never an option: before 2014, Ukraine was effectively aligned with Russia; and as soon as the government flipped in 2014, ethnic Russian enclaves divided Ukraine, with Donbas proclaiming independence and Crimea being annexed by Russia. From that point, Ukraine could buy arms from the West, but NATO membership was out of the question as long as borders were disputed. But it's too late now for joining NATO to deter a Russian attack.

    Until Ukraine settles its borders with Russia, NATO membership would mean two things: a declaration of war [*], committing NATO members to send troops into the fight to reclaim Ukrainian territory; and it would undermine Zelensky's command -- unless you think NATO would give up command of its own troops. And in theory it would commit Ukraine to defend other countries -- not that any of them are currently under threat, but there are always "war games" to participate in (which is pretty much NATO's speed -- it was never designed to fight real wars, just to parade about and feel self-important). Ukraine actually has the best of possible deals now: unlimited arms and support, while retaining its own control and autonomy.

    As for "after the war," NATO membership might be possible, but the prospect only gives Russia more reason to prolong the war. At best, it's a chip that Ukraine can exchange in negotiations, but there may never be negotiations if Zelensky holds it too tight.

    [*] Biden has said as much: see Katie Rogers: [07-09] Biden says Ukraine is not erady for NATO membership.

Israel, and elsewhere around the world: See the introduction above.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [07-09] Mixed progress in the fight against inequality and for democracy.

David Broder: [06-12] Silvio Berlusconi was the iconic political figure of our times: Trump, and maybe Putin, will be disappointed to have been overlooked, but if you've ever had trouble imagining what Trump might have been like if he had been twice as rich and not a fucking idiot, Berlusconi would fill the bill.

Sean T Byrnes: [07-06] The myth of Reagan's Cold War toughness haunts American foreign policy: I was just reminded of this in the Lindsey Graham articles above, where Graham's Reagan would be shooting Russian planes down. This is a review of William Inboden's book, The Peacemarker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. The book tries to pass Reagan off as a great diplomat. The reviewer is critical, and I'm more so, but sure, Reagan deserves some credit for overcoming his jingoism and letting the dissolution of the Soviet empire play out. But it's not like he learned any meaningful lessons from the experience. American hubris only grew after the Cold War, to no small extent out of the demented notion that Reagan's rhetoric and his military buildup had succeeded.

Sam Fraser: [07-06] Biden's disgraceful nomination of Elliott Abrams: It's not much of a reward: a seat on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which can issue reports and make recommendations but has no policy role. The USACPD is variously described as non-partisan or bi-partisan (with four vacancies, is Biden obligated to appoint a Republican?). [PS: As the update to Corn, below, explains, Abrams was recommended by Republican congressional leaders to fill a Republican slot on the Commission. Still seems like Biden could have vetoed their recommendation, especially considering the embarrassment it caused.]

In any case, on paper Abrams looks like a perfect choice. He's had many titles involving "public diplomacy," and no one has more experience lying about human rights abuses by the US and its allies. Fraser mentions some of these, starting with the 1981 massacre in El Salvador that was the first of many things Abrams lied to Congress about. Fraser also reminds us that Abrams was finally convicted of lying to Congress in 1991, but avoided jail thanks to a pardon from GWH Bush. He also mentions Abrams' work for Trump to undo diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Iran. But for some reason he skips over Abrams' tenure under GW Bush, especially his role in dismantling the Oslo Accords and ending any prospect for a "two-state solution" in Israel. More on Abrams:

I'm seriously baffled by the lack of reference to Abrams' role under GW Bush regarding Israel/Palestine. At the time, it was well known that he was in direct contact with Ariel Sharon, providing advice as well as cover for carving up the PA, especially the decision to dismantle settlements in Gaza and wall it up into a Hamas-run prison enclave. Afterwards, Abrams wrote a book about his role. I haven't read it, but I wrote up this Book Roundup entry at the time:

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013, Cambridge University Press): A self-serving memoir in the manner of Dennis Ross and so many other failures, but Abrams didn't fail -- he was pure evil, and was remarkably successful not just at wrecking any prospects for peace in Israel's neighborhood but in making everyone involved, including the US, much meaner and crazier. No idea how much of this he admits to -- such creatures usually prefer to dwell in the dark.

Steve Fraser: [07-06] The return of child labor is the latest sign of American decline.

Eric Levitz: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far): For one thing, I hate the term. New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, even Great Society were better. The only other president to get his own "omics" was Reagan, and hardly anyone ever understood what that was about. (Had they done so, they would have hated it.) Clement Attlee liked to speak of "leveling up" as a path to greater equality that didn't involve hardship. Biden's preferred term seems to be "middle out," which is less easily diagrammable, but at least graphic. The problem, of course, is that Biden's reforms, while more substantial than anything Obama or Clinton attempted, are still piecemeal, and depend a lot on companies to grow before the benefits trickle down to workers and the public. If that's a hard sell, it might help to offer greater rewards with more Democrats elected to Congress. And/or it might help to scare people about how much worse off Republicans would make us.

Annie Lowrey: [2019-10-21] $350,000 a year, and just getting by. We've heard variants of this many times before. They're always based on mistaking elite private services (e.g., education) for essentials and/or high savings rates based on the assumption that public programs like Social Security won't suffice.

Mark Oppenheimer: [07-07] In Tabula Rasa, John McPhee looks back at books not written. Since he turned 80, McPhee seems to have given up on writing about new travels and acquaintances, and settled for writing about writing, in this case "a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn't make it."

Adam Ozimek: [07-05] The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession: The "idea" is that the way to reduce inflation is to lay people off. I don't doubt that it works, but it's the worst of all possible solutions.

Nathan Robinson:

Lily Sánchez: [07-08] Cornel West's presidential campaign deserves the left's solidarity: I wouldn't go that far, but it deserves some respect. West is going to be saying a lot of things that Biden won't say, and that deserve a respectful hearing. One hopes that if his arguments are persuasive, Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee is) will adopt some of them. In any case, we should at least respect his freedom of speech, and see his campaign as an exercise thereof. Especially tiresome and disrespectful is the argument that he could act as a spoiler. If that happens, the only thing that proves is that the Biden/whoever failed to make the pretty obvious argument that a majority of voters would be better off with the Democrat than with the Republican. I know that no matter how much I might prefer West, it's extremely unlikely that I won't vote for the Democrat in 2024. But I'm not going to waste my breath denouncing West when there are Republicans that actually deserve taking down.

An alternative view comes from Ben Burgis: [06-13] Cornel West should challenge Biden in the Democratic primaries. This makes sense because we live in a two-party system, and the right has chosen one of those parties, which gives the rest of us only one realistic option. One result is that most of the left have aligned with the Democrats, as have most of the people the left needs to convince to achieve even the most obvious reforms. And sure, there are a lot of retrograde elements in the Democratic Party, but it's not beyond hope, or reason. One of my mantras is that the solutions are all on the left. Republicans are only interested in power, but Democrats are also interested in results, and that's what's moving them to the left. Well, along with Bernie Sanders, who by running with the Democrats has gotten a lot more open ears and doors than he ever could in a third party.

On the other hand, West may have his own reasons for running on the fringe. I can think of several, but no point speculating here.

Norman Solomon: [07-04] Patriotism and war: Can America break that deadly connection? I'd be happy just for a respite from the fireworks, which on the evening of the 4th were audible 50-100 times per minute for hours on end, well into the night. I always figured if you loved the land and the people you were good, but the never-before-permanent military became some kind of fetish after WWII. By the time I was a teenager, I was being told to "love it or leave it," where "it" was every stupid and senseless thing done in the name of "national defense." In that environment, the usual icons and tchotchkes like flags and anthems lost all their allure. Still, to the cultists who worship such things, our reluctance only proves that we should be chucked out (if not simply wiped out). On the other hand, we can still read the Declaration of Independence, which was what the day was originally about, as an aspiration we still need to work on. Meanwhile:

Too late for me tonight, but do take a look at the blog for No More Mister Nice Blog, especially First they came for the pro-LGBTQ retailers.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next