Index
Latest
2024
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2023
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2022
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2005
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2004
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2003
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2002
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2001
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
|
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Rhapsody Streamnotes (January 2016 Part 2)
Pick up text
here.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Music Week
Music: Current count 26163 [26129] rated (+34), 408 [402] unrated (+6).
The dead CD changer crisis is over. Having suffered two dead changers
from Sony in just a few years, I splurged and bought the Yamaha. Main
problem is that in order to let you change all five discs without having
to spin the carousel around, the new unit is a couple inches deeper than
the old one. The stereo equipment is housed in a cabinet I built way back
in the 1970s for components of the time. The face of the new unit sticks
out from the front edge, but at least the feet fit. I suppose I could
tidy it up a bit by expanding the small hole in the back for the wires,
but for now it works. Sounds pretty good, too.
I continue making minor additions to the
EOY Aggregate file, even after Pazz & Jop -- mostly adding
selective P&J and JCP ballots. Still, I'm hundreds short of
logging them all, so I suppose I could be accused of cherrypicking
favorites to tweak the standings. Main result of this has been
that Kamasi Washington's The Epic moved ahead of Julia
Holter's Have You in My Wilderness to claim 9th place,
while Sleater-Kinney's No Cities to Love edged ahead of
The Epic to 8th. Neither gainer is a particular favorite
of mine, although I do like both more than Holter. Main reason
I think I'm doing this is that I'm continuing to scour the lists
for prospects, so I'm picking out ballots that look promising.
However, no amount of fudging is going to displace Father John
Misty or Tame Impala from the top ten. Of course, their current
tie for 5th is fragile.
The other reason, I suppose, is that I'm reluctant to move on
with my life, even though I've been very neglectful of website
work I've committed to (not to mention writing a book or two).
In this regard January 31 looms as a drio dead date: I intend to
freeze the
2015 list then, which would
make it a good date to halt doing everything else 2015-related.
This week's finds all come from scrounging around the lists,
and I'll do some more of that next week. Every A- record this
week came highly rated from someone but was a pleasant surprise
to me. I wound up liking Bully more than similar groups like
Chastity Belt and Childbirth. Crampton turned out to have one
of the year's best electronica albums -- seems like I've parked
a lot of those in the high B+ tier this year (Carter Tutti Void,
DRKWAV, Floating Points, Jlin, JME, Kammerflimmer Kollektief,
Lifted, Lnrdcroy, LoneLady, Noonday Underground, RJD2/STS,
Skrillex/Diplo, Jamie XX).
Even better is Plastician. Michaelangelo Matos spent 60 P&J
points on his top two: one, as far as I can tell, is a podcast,
something I have no clue what to do with (and rather doubt should
be considered an album at all), and the other is Plastician's cut
and paste dance mix. It at least is CD length, although I have no
idea how to get one burned. (For one thing, I doubt the samples
are cleared, but if you can figure this out, please consider
sending me a copy.)
The reissues lists from electronica specialist publications and
stores were full of obscurities I had never heard of. I managed to
dig up a handful of those, sorting Patrick Cowley and Savant above
the A- cusp -- Mariah and Arthur Russell below. (The Trevor Jackson
compilation is more Adrian Sherwood so I wouldn't call it obscure.
It's probably possible to assemble an A- Sherwood CD, but why go
to that trouble when you can have a half-dozen B+'s instead?) I
also waded through three Rough Guides, something that eats at me
more than it will you, because I want to have some idea when and
where these songs come from, and that information is awful hard
to dig up. Still, a winner there, disguised as something else
(Lost in Mali).
Three high HMs might have benefitted from more patience and
dilligence on my part. Damily is a Malagasy guitarist/band that
recycles soukous with extra grit and distortion. Michael Bates
is a bassist leading what's basically a Michael Blake sax trio,
roughly comparable to Blake's own Tiddy Boom (an A- in
2014). Then there's the Velvet Underground's Complete Matrix
Tapes, which at 4CD got one spin and a summary judgment.
Lots of wonderful music in there, but also lots of old news --
1969: Velvet Underground Live came from these tapes --
and I got a bit tired of hearing several songs recycle four or
more times. Chances are if I had the box, the booklets, etc.,
I might have leaned the other way. But I didn't really get the
sense that additional sets added much, unlike some jazz boxes
I can think of (Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel, Art Pepper
at the Village Vanguard).
Current plans are to publish a Rhapsody Streamnotes by the
end of the month. Currently 90 entries in the draft file --
shorter than most columns but not too shabby.
New records rated this week:
- Julian Argüelles: Let It Be Told (2012 [2015], Basho): [r]: B+(***)
- Julian Argüelles: Tetra (2014 [2015], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(***)
- Julien Baker: Sprained Ankle (2015, 6131 Records): [r]: B+(*)
- Michael Bates: Northern Spy (2015, Stereoscopic): [r]: B+(***)
- Bully: Feels Like (2015, Startime International/Columbia): [r]: A-
- Elysia Crampton: American Drift (2015, Blueberry): [r]: A-
- Damily: Very Aomby (2015, Helico): [r]: B+(***)
- Stephen Haynes: Pomegranate (2015, New Atlantis): [r]: B+(***)
- Christine Jensen and Maggi Olin: Transatlantic Conversations: 11 Piece Band Live (2013 [2016], Linedown): [cd]: B+(*)
- Knxwledge: Hud Dreams (2015, Stones Throw): [r]: B+(*)
- Los Lobos: Gates of Gold (2015, 429/Savoy Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
- New York Gypsy All Stars: Dromomania (2015, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
- Kresten Osgood, Masabumi Kikuchi, Ben Street & Thomas Morgan: Kikuchi/Street/Morgan/Osgood (2008 [2015], ILK Music): [r]: B+(***)
- Laura Perlman: Precious Moments (2015 [2016], Miles High): [cd]: B+(*)
- Plastician: All the Right Moves (2015, self-released): [sc]: A-
- Joan Shelley: Over and Even (2015, No Quarter): [r]: B+(*)
- Taraf de Haïdouks: Of Lovers, Gamblers and Parachute Skirts (2015, Crammed Discs): [r]: B+(**)
- James Taylor: Before This World (2015, Concord): [r]: C+
- Tenement: Predatory Headlights (2015, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(*)
- Zomba Prison Project: I Have No Everything Here (2015, Six Degrees): [r]: B+(**)
- Zs: XE (2015, Northern Spy): [r]: B+(**)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Buena Vista Social Club: Lost and Found (1996-2000 [2015], World Circuit): [r]: B
- Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Live in San Francisco 1971 (1971 [2015], Sundazed): [r]: B+(**)
- Patrick Cowley: Muscle Up (1973-81 [2015], Dark Entries): [r]: A-
- Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics (1981-87 [2015], On-U Sound, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
- Karin Krog: Don't Just Sing: An Anthology: 1963-1999 (1963-99 [2015], Light in the Attic): [r]: B+(**)
- Lost in Mali: Off the Beaten Track From Bamako to Timbuktu ([2015], Riverboat): [r]: A-
- Mariah: Utakata No Hibi (1983 [2015], Shan-Shan): [r]: B+(**)
- The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Salsa (2008-13 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: B+(**)
- The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Samba (2009-14 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
- Arthur Russell: Corn (1982-83 [2015], Audika): [r]: B+(**)
- Savant: Artificial Dance (1981-83 [2015], RVNG Intl): [r]: A-
- The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (1969 [2015], Polydor, 4CD): [r]: B+(***)
Old music rated this week:
- Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen: Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas (1973 [1974], MCA): [r]: B+(***)
- Stephen Haynes: Parrhesia (2010, Engine Studios): [r]: B+(**)
- New York Gypsy All Stars: Romantech (2011, Traditional Crossroads): [r]: B+(***)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Allison Au Quartet: Forest Grove (self-released): February 16
- Brooklyn Blowhards (Little(i)Music): April 8
- Heroes Are Gang Leaders: Highest Engines Near/Near Higher Engineers (Flat Langton's Arkeyes)
- The Great American Music Ensemble: It's All in the Game (Jazzed Media): March 4
- Florian Hoefner: Luminosity (Origin)
- Bruce Torff: Down the Line (Summit): February 9
Miscellaneous notes:
- Lost in Mali: Off the Beaten Track From Bamako to Timbuktu
([2015], World Music Network):
A- [rhapsody]
- The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Samba (2009-14 [2015],
World Music Network):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Salsa (2008-13 [2015],
World Music Network):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
- Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics
(1981-87 [2015], On-U Sound, 2CD):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:
- The Velvet Underground: Live at Max's Kansas City
(1970 [1972], Cotillion): Of course, I had the original LP, recorded
on a cassette machine under the table with its attendant awful sound.
Don't recall whether I picked up the 2004 2-CD reissue, but if I had
it ought to be in the database).
B
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Weekend Roundup
Some scattered links this week. The longest involves some recent
attacks on Bernie Sanders from normally left-leaning individuals who
have reconciled themselves to a Hillary Clinton nomination. I hadn't
given this contest much thought previously, and still don't feel all
that partisan today. I have in fact been critical of both candidates,
especially on foreign policy where I believe both are dangerously
fond of American (and even more so Israeli) military might -- not
identically so, as Clinton has been more consistently hawkish (cf.
her recent attacks on Sanders for thinking that normalizing relations
with Iran might be a good idea).
I suppose you can count me as one of those reconciled to an eventual
Clinton nomination. I was very much against her in 2008, not only for
the usual policy reasons but because I didn't like the smell of dynasty
(something eight years of Bush II did nothing to dispell). That's still
an issue, but has been mitigated somewhat by her growing experience and
stature, as well as the passage of time. The fact that Obama turned out
to be almost identical to what I feared from Clinton in 2008 has added
to the fatigue factor. I am, after all, an old guy, cynical after so
many disappointments, and skeptical of what any one person can really
accomplish as president. On the other hand, being reconciled to Clinton
is a far cry from having any will to support her. I don't really have
the will to support Sanders either, but at least I find his popularity
refreshing -- something I want no part in dampening. So when he is
attacked unfairly, which is how I would characterize Krugman and Geier
(two writers I generally admire) below, I feel that's worth pointing
out. Much as I expect to protest against many policies of whoever wins
the election.
Still, it's worth bearing in mind that fundamentally I regard Sanders
as decent, honest, and earnest -- more so than any significant presidential
candidate since George McGovern. (Nothing still says more about the decay
and decline of America during my lifetime than Nixon's margin over McGovern.)
Clinton, on the other hand, is every bit as corrupt and opportunistic as
her husband (albeit probably somewhat less vain). The Republicans, on the
other hand, are all far off the deep end. What distinguishes Clinton from
them isn't any edge she has in intellect or character -- it's merely that
she hangs with somewhat more decent and sensible people, and knows she has
to broaden her appeal more across class and racial and other lines, which
means she has to behave more decenty and sensibly herself.
Amy Davidson: The Contempt That Poisoned Flint's Water: Flint,
Michigan was in bad shape way back in 1989 when Michael Moore filmed
his documentary on his dilapidated home town, Roger and Me,
but not even Moore followed up to see how bad it could get. Thanks
to austerity measures, many of Flint's children have been poisoned
with lead.
Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit's water system, which
had Lake Huron as its source. It was scheduled to be connected to a new
pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such
desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an
Emergency Manager. When that manager felt he couldn't negotiate a
low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left
with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its
active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades
before. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do
was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn't matter if the residents
were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water
began to fail the tests. In August, 2014, and again that September, the
water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform
bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed
to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to
disinfect it. It took a lot of chlorine -- and that may be where Flint's
troubles really began. [ . . . ] By October, 2014,
General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water,
because it was corroding its equipment. It was also -- and this should
have been entirely predictable -- eating into the lead pipes that
delivered the water to people's homes, causing them to crumble into
the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to
build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and
perhaps permanently destroy it.
A lot of things make Flint a bellweather for America -- a depressed
city in a depressed state in a depressed region, leading to bankruptcy
and a suspension of democratic accountability. But for a big picture,
you might look at the American Society of Civil Engineers'
2013 Report Card on Drinking Water. DR Tucker's
post has numerous links on this story, especially to Rachel Maddow.
Paul Krugman: Weakened at Bernie's: Starting with a lame, ungrammatical
pun isn't a good sign. While admitting that "Hillary Clinton is no paragon
of political virtue," Krugman takes a couple of cheap shots at Bernie
Sanders: first on his single-payer health plan, second on his desire to
restore Glass-Steagall and break up the "too big to fail" banks. In both
cases he argues that Sanders' plans aren't detailed enough, that they
hand-wave some important details and muff others. More substantively, he
argues that Sanders fails to appreciate the shadow banking problem. And
as often as not, the linch pin in his argument is that political realities
don't make Sanders' preferred solutions practical. For
details he cites
Mike Konczal on banking and
Ezra Klein on health care. Between us wonks, those pieces have some
merit. But the cheap shot is the way Krugman turns his technical critique
into a way of diminishing Sanders' integrity, honesty, and competence:
But here's the thing: we now have a clear view of Sanders' positions on
two crucial issues, financial reform and health care. And in both cases
his positioning is disturbing -- not just because it's politically
unrealistic to imagine that we can get the kind of radical overhaul
he's proposing, but also because he takes his own version of cheap
shots. Not at people -- he really is a fundamentally decent guy --
but by going for easy slogans and punting when the going gets tough.
I won't say that Krugman et al. are simply shilling for Clinton,
even though the timing -- a week before the first contest -- is a
bit suspicious. But the effect of this sniping is to paint Sanders
as some sort of fantasist, implying Clinton -- whose thinking on
these issues is utterly conventional, not to mention compromised
to the hilt by industry profits -- is the pragmatic choice. But in
another post --
How to Make Donald Trump President -- Krugman reveals his fear
that if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, the consequences
could be dire. That's always a risk in America, but it would be a
shame if we let fear of Trump (or really of any Republican likely
to be nominated) stifle much needed debate on real problems and
sensible solutions. There will be plenty of time to worry about
the demise of civilization after the nominating conventions. (By
the way, part of Krugman's nightmare scenario is based on Michael
Bloomberg running as a third party -- a threat he's made if Trump
and (or?) Sanders are nominated. No More Mister Nice Blog analyzes
a possible Bloomberg run
here.)
A second front of attack on Sanders bothers me more:
Kathleen Geier: Bernie's Greatest Weakness, who writes:
On Tuesday, his offhand remarks describing Planned Parenthood and the
LGBTQ rights organization the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) as "part of
the establishment" created a firestorm, particularly on social-justice
Twitter. Less than 24 hours later, his tone-deaf comments on reparations
stoked even more outrage. Sanders's left-wing critics have seized on
both statements as evidence of his alleged weakness on civil rights,
women's rights, and LGBTQ issues.
Although some of their attacks on Sanders have been unfair, his
critics, regrettably, have a point. For all his political virtues,
Sanders has had difficulty connecting his message of economic populism
to the other major social justice concerns of the modern left, such
race, gender, and sexuality. And unless he overcomes these problems,
he will be unable to achieve his goal of expanding beyond his base
and sparking a popular mass movement. [ . . . ]
Sanders's Achilles heel is that because he focuses so singlemindedly
on economic inequality, he is not always able to speak to the needs and
desires of the modern left, a left that is passionate not only about
economic injustice but also about injustices tied to race, gender, and
sexual identity and orientation. Today the left urgently needs leaders
who are fully comfortable with and fluent in the politics of intersectionality,
and who clearly understand that, while race and gender inequality are deeply
rooted in economics, they also have separate dimensions that cannot be
addressed by economic remedies alone.
And here I was, thinking that the great work Sanders was doing was
to restore inequality to the center of political debate. Granted, he's
talking in terms of inequality instead of class, but there isn't much
difference between the two, and adopting the more inclusive terminology
isn't a bad move. When I was growing up there was a tendency in the new
left to think of liberation as something you deliver to other people --
the image was pampered suburbanites struggling for oppressed minorities
here (and the depressed majority in the third world). The immediate
effect was to put all sorts of fringe groups on tiny pedestals, policed
by a cult of "political correctness," just as that mindset dovetailed
with the right's campaign against unions and workers and pretty much
everyone who wasn't filthy rich. The result is that the affluent visions
of the 1960s have decayed into a world where a substantial majority
have become distressed and depressed -- and the cause there is almost
all economic.
Especially disappointing (to me, at least) is that the piece was
written by Geier, who until recently had focused her writings pretty
much exclusively on inequality.
More explicitly pro-Clinton than anti-Sanders is
Katha Pollitt: The Hillary Clinton Double Standard (the article's
magazine title is less nasty: "Yes, Hillary's a Democrat"): She says
some nice things about Sanders, then cavalierly dismisses him:
But Bernie Sanders isn't going to win the nomination . . .
can we at least be honest about that? And if he did, he wouldn't win the
general election. And if, by some miracle, he did, he'd still get creamed
by the same political and economic forces that hemmed in President Obama.
I worry a bit about the final point myself, but then I remember that
for all the insanity and abuse heaped upon Obama he's still president,
and that entails quite a lot. The bigger problem is his inability to
implement much of a legislative legacy, but that assumes he wanted to.
Sanders may run into more trouble for wanting to do more, but he also
might do more because he tries to do more, or because after a decade
or two of debauchery and decay more needs to be done. As for the first
two arguments, that's mostly conventional thinking: all Sanders needs
to do to win the Democratic nomination is to convince most Democrats
that he's more committed to their aspirations than Clinton is, which
given her slavish devotion to the banking and health care industries
plus her penchant for perpetuating and extending overseas wars may be
easier done than said. And winning the general election is a proposition
that this year's crop of Republican blowhards practically seals: anyone
with a proper fear of radical upheaval will have no choice but whoever
the Democrats nominate -- even if they prefer a dedicated defender of
the status quo like Clinton or Obama, they'll find plenty of ways to
rein in Sanders.
The rest of Pollitt's article is an argument with Doug Henwood, who
wrote a long essay in Harper's titled
Stop Hillary! Vote no to a Clinton dynasty and has expanded it to
book-length as
My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency. I haven't seen
the book, but the article strikes me as actually pretty mild -- aside
from giving Dick Morris unwarranted opportunity to fantasize. The main
problem I see is that the Clintons have built a political machine that
serves their personal ambitions while the Democratic Party atrophies.
Obama was similarly neglectful of the party base, so both presidents
spent most of their terms with Republican-dominated Congresses as the
excuse for not delivering any gains for their voters, while they were
free to cozy up to business supporters. Given her track record and
connections, it's inconceivable that Hillary will break that pattern.
Nor is she likely to undermine the neocon orthodoxies of US foreign
policy. So why lift a finger for her until the conventions, when she's
likely to wind up the last ditch defense against the Republicans?
Yet The Nation is running articles like
Suzanna Danuta Walters: Why This Socialist Feminist Is for Hillary --
the subtitle concludes with a myopic "but it can't hurt." Again, she
embraces Clinton by assuming the inevitability of conventional wisdom:
And visibility matters: It's substantively different to have a woman
president advocating for gender equality as opposed to having a man
do so, just as it is to have a black president advocating for racial
justice -- because gender and racial difference live in and through our
marked bodies. This is why, for example, the struggles for affirmative
action and diversity remain so pertinent to all aspects of social,
political, and educational life. It's unlikely that Bernie's redistributive
economic policies, admirable as they are, would ever make their way through
Congress. How is a leftist agenda that remains little more than a vision
better for women than actually having a woman (who has, don't forget, an
agenda that shares much in common with this vision) -- after all these
years -- in the Oval Office?
A lot of wishful thinking and special pleading there, from the notion
that the wife of a former president will be a feminist icon to the claim
that claim that Clinton "shares much in common" with Sanders' vision.
I'm old enough to recall a bunch of cases, especially in the South,
where term-limited male governors ran their spouses as surrogates --
the Wallaces of Alabama for one -- not to see the Clintons furthering
that tradition. I'm not saying that Hillary will be a transparent front
for an extra Bill Clinton term, but I'll be surprised if there's any
substantive difference.
Robert Kuttner: Thinking Harder about Political Correctness:
But what exactly is political correctness? The term was first used by
lefties to make fun of themselves. I've been hearing it used ironically
since the 1970s. As in: "This may not be politically correct, but may
I buy you a drink?"
This use of "politically correct" initially reflected the New Left
and the feminist movement of that era mocking the efforts by the
Communist Party to insist on rigid conventions of speech, along the
lines of George Orwell's Thought Police in his novel 1984.
Then the right got hold of the phrase and used it to claim that
left-wingers were the new conformists, enforcing speech codes and
embracing extreme identity politics. Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The
Closing of the American Mind, attacked liberal college professors
for imposing "politically correct" ways of thinking on impressionable
undergraduates. The term then became a staple of rightwing rhetoric
against liberals.
Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination:
I found this too late to work into the attacks-on-Sanders section
above, even as a footnote to Geier's piece. Coates at least doesn't
argue that we should dump Sanders because Clinton is inevitable.
Rather, he argues that Sanders is fair game to attack because he
purports himself as someone who supports the same ends as Coates --
an end to racism and equality regardless of race -- but disagrees
with Coates' preferred means (reparations). To make his point,
Coates flips the roles of class and race inequality, arguing that
you can't make real progress on the former unless you first tackle
race. If that were true -- and I think it partly is -- it would
behoove us to find ways to target race-specific economic inequality
above and beyond the universal. (And note that this is different
from the more common notion of attempting to redress past iniquity,
something which in a zero-sum context would create as many present
losers as there had been past losers.) On the other hand, a point
I think has been clearly proven is that attempting to end racism
at the same time political forces are driving economic inequality
to unprecedented heights does not work -- and not just because
creating a black 1% that parallels the white 1% helps so few, but
it also if anything deepens the grip of inequality on our thinking,
inevitably adding to the iniquities that already exist.
Gilad Edelman: How to Corral the Donor Class: Book review of Richard
L Hasen: Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and
the Distortion of American Elections. E.g.:
The corruption theories, Hasen explains, tend to boil down to inequality
anyway. Lessig's argument -- that money causes politicians to rely too
much on wealthy funders -- is just another way of saying that rich people
have more influence than the rest of us. Teachout's theory of corruption
as putting private interests ahead of public interests sounds appealing,
but how do we know the $74 million spent by the environmentalist Tom
Steyer to support Democratic candidates in 2014, for example, wasn't in
the public interest? We have to assume that public interest is, by
definition, determined only through equal democratic participation.
Hasen thinks that assumption is right; it just has nothing to do with
corruption. "[G]iven that we have fundamental disagreements over the
meaning of the public interest," he writes, "the best we can do is to
define the public interest procedurally, by ensuring that every voter
has a roughly equal chance to influence policies and elections." In
other words, what makes money different is that there's no correlation
between how rich someone is and how closely his views align with what
the public wants. The problem with Senator Smith, who wants Soros's
money, isn't that he's "corrupt." It's that letting one rich benefactor
sidestep the deliberative democratic process and determine a policy
choice that affects everyone seems fundamentally unfair.
Bill McKibben: The Real Zombie Apocalypse: Thought I'd flag this
now that 2015 looms as the hottest year in recorded history globally
(although only the second-hottest in the US, a tiny victory for all
you naysayers).
David Remnick: Seeds of Peace: Profile of MK Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian
leader of the Balad Party.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Music Week
Music: Current count 26129 [26097] rated (+32), 402 [389] unrated (+13).
Missed my usual Monday deadline this week. Stuff happens, most of
which is getting me down.
Rated count dropped back into normal range, although that may just
be because I lost Sunday to cooking (Italian, for six). I played old
favorites that day, winding up with Ben Webster's Soulville --
I'm tempted to bump it up a notch to A+, but the CD player (a Sony
CDP-CD345) was dead this morning, so it will be some time before I
play anything on the good stereo. I suppose I can still play CDs on
the computer, but that's not really the same thing (and I've never
done it except to test the sound system). I can still stream stuff,
so there'll be more of that in the next week or so until I sort this
out. The problem is in the mechanics: the motor, gears, belts, or
what have you that are used to open the tray and change discs. I've
gone through four or five CD changers in the lifespan of one receiver,
and they seem to be getting crappier all the time. They're also not
getting cheaper (actually, I mean less expensive; a free market should
weed out planned obsolescence, but when have we had one of those?).
Pazz & Jop came out last week. I meant to do some of my usual
analysis this week, but that got wiped out with the rest of the week.
The album totals are
here, compiled by Glenn McDonald. I've noted the standings
there in my
EOY Aggregate, scoring
them like a regular list (which means 1 point for everything from
21st to the end). Some notes:
There were 481 voters this time, out of a "thousand plus"
invites sent out (past years have had close to 1500, but they're
less forthcoming this year. Kendrick Lamar was on 43.6% of those
ballots; Courtney Barnett 34.6%; no one else more than 20%. The
top three point totals were 2639-1872-1073, so huge margins for
Lamar and Barnett. The former was no surprise at all. The latter
shouldn't have been, but Sufjan Stevens has been securely ranked
second in my EOY aggregate ever since Lamar passed him. P&J
reliably values American hip-hop more than my EOY Aggregate,
which includes dozens of British and European lists. Kendrick
Lamar topped both lists by large margins, but below nearly every
US hip-hop artist gained from EOYA to P&J:
- Vince Staples: Summertime '06: from 12 to 7
- Drake: If You're Reading This It's Too Late: 19 to 18
- Future: DS2: 20 to 17
- Miguel: Wildheart: 22 to 14
- Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf: from 32 to 15
- Shamir: Ratchet: 34 to 31
- The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness: 35 to 19
- Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside: 39 to 26
- Dr Dre: Compton: A Soundtrack: 41 to 56
- ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP: 52 to 65
- Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife: 64 to 40
- Young Thug: Barter 6: 66 to 32
- The Internet: Ego Death: 67 to 57
- Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show: 94 to 39
- Dawn Richard: Blackheart: 100 to 29
On the other hand, Sleaford Mods: Key Markets dropped from
36 to 122, and Young Fathers dropped from 56 to 120. My theory for
the two drops on this list (Dr. Dre and ASAP Rocky, but especially
the former) is that the albums sucked. I won't try to dig through
the data, but I think there's a fairly decent correlation between
quality (as measured by the gold standard of my grades) and the gain
from the EOYA baseline to P&J.
It would be helpful if P&J made available demographic data
on the electorate. I imagine that at least 95% of the voters are
Americans (or at least based in the US), and that helps tilt the
electorate toward US hip-hop. On the other hand, the voters are
probably 90-95% white, and the number of hip-hop specialists is
probably quite small.
Note that the biggest gains in my hip-hop list above were
posted by women (Dawn Richard, Jazmine Sullivan). P&J voters
are also more likely to favor women artists relative to the EOYA
baseline. To wit:
- Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit: from 3 to 2
- Grimes: Art Angels: 7 to 4
- Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness: 8 to 33
- Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love: 10 to 5
- Bjork: Vulnicura: 11 to 23
- Joanna Newsom: Divers: 13 to 16
- Carly Rae Jepsen: E-mo-tion: 16 to 3
- Beach House: Depression Cherry: 23 to 38
- Adele: 25: 27 to 35
- Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass: 42 to 67
- Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon: 46 to 61
- Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material: 47 to 20
- Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool: 49 to 115
- Florence + the Machine: How Big How Blue How Beautiful: 50 to 64
- Hop Along: Painted Shut: 59 to 22
- Laura Marling: Short Movie: 61 to 112
- Torres: Sprinter: 65 to 28
- Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss: 71 to 176
- Jenny Hval: Apocalypse Girl: 72 to 112
- Ibeyi: Ibeyi: 74 to 143
- Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars: 78 to 118
- Waxahatchee: Ivy Tripp: 79 to 37
- Susanne Sundfor: Ten Love Songs: 83 to 72
- Jessica Pratt: On Your Own Love Again: 90 to 63
- Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show: 94 to 39
- Dawn Richard: Blackheart: 100 to 29
- Ashley Monroe: The Blade: 102 to 36
- Rhiannon Giddens: Tomorrow Is My Turn: 105 to 52
The trend is a bit less pronounced here, because other styles and
the US/UK split enter into the matter, and because the electorate is
probably 80-85% male (I counted once, but don't recall the numbers).
To sharpen it a bit I dropped
two non-singers (Holly Herndon, who dropped from 21 to 78, and Maria
Schneider, 69-289). I also extended the EOYA cutoff to 110 to pick
up Monroe and Giddens (no hip-hop artists in that range, but the next
one down, Heems, got a bump from 113 to 74). Among style issues,
P&J likes country (including alt) more than EOYA (aside from
Musgraves and Monroe, above, Chris Stapleton rose from 62 to 24,
James McMurtry from 107 to 51, and Eric Church from 138 to 83). On
the other hand, with rare crossover exceptions P&J has little
interest in electronica, with rare crossover exceptions, really
isn't very interested in electronica.
Last week I made a list of albums I thought would finish
higher in P&J than in my EOYA. My list included several names
that did indeed make significant gains: Sleater-Kinney (10-5),
Vince Staples (12-7), Kacey Musgraves (47-20), Hop Along (59-22),
Chris Stapleton (62-24), Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night
(81-49), Bob Dylan: The Cutting Edge (96-86), Ashley Monroe
(102-36), James McMurtry (107-51), and Heems (113-74). Others on
my list didn't do so well: Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of
Delete (14-30), Lana Del Rey (46-61), JLin: Dark Energy
(48-127), ASAP Rocky (52-65), Arca: Mutant (57-66), Ezra
Furman: Perpetual Motion People (76-184), . Most of these
are records that had steadily gained throughout my list build.
Furman was probably just wishful thinking, given that almost all
of his support came from UK lists. Oneohtrix was my main surprise
here: it had closed strong late, was as close to hip-hop as to
electronica, and had quite a bit of US support (including an A-
from Christgau), so it seemed likely to buck the anti-electronica
bias (similar to Flying Lotus last year).
Some big gains I didn't mention: Carly Rae Jepsen (16-3),
Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (28-11), The Weeknd
(35-19), Waxahatchee (79-37), Titus Andronicus (75-50). I also
didn't look far enough down the EOYA list to even consider:
Hamilton (134-21), Royal Headache (108-44), Beach Slang (144-48),
Future: 56 Nights (194-56), Bully: Feels Like (136-62),
Colleen Green: I Want to Grow Up (342-68), Yo La Tengo: Stuff
Like That There (126-69), Julien Baker: Sprained Ankle
(219-70), The Sonics: This
Is the Sonics (356-73), Speedy Ortiz: Foll Deer (159-77),
Joan Shelley: Over and Even (253-80), Laurie Anderson:
Heart of a Dog (193-83), JD McPherson: Let the Good Times
Roll (226-94), Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone
(218-95), Beauty Pill: Describes Things as They Are (492-97),
Jeffrey Lewis: Manhattan (211-98). The biggest surprise for
me was Jepsen, despite being aware that the album made substantial
gains over time. Hamilton was less of a surprise, but it's
such an unusual item (and appeared so late in the year) there were
no obvious rules for how it might move. I hadn't even been aware of
it until Rolling Stone -- almost alone among publications --
listed it 8th. (Its only other top ten placement was number 2 at
Billboard.) I played it, and found it a rather unique item --
a trait some like a lot, while most of the rest of us simply put it
out of mind. (I quibbled more with the tone than with the facts of
the history -- I never thought of Hamilton as an immigrant striver;
he seemed much more to be a proto-Napoleon, an empire-builder. Of
course, constant contrast to Burr makes him look good. As for as
the music is concerned, I appreciate the hip-hop as a joke, but
it's clear to me Lin Manuel-Garcia draws more on the hack-musical
tradition than any other resource.)
I didn't attempt to predict many losses: I flagged Julia
Holter (8-33) and Kamasi Washington (9-8) as possibles, and Blur
(15-53) and Sleaford Mods (36-122) as probables, and thought
Adele (27-35) could go either way. Otherwise, I rather expected
everything on the EOYA list that wasn't rising would fall a bit
but roughly maintain order. To some extent that happened toward
the top of the list: Sufjan Stevens: Carrie and Lowell
(2-6), Jamie XX: In Colour (4-9), Father John Misty: I
Love You Honeybear (5-10), Tame Impala: Currents (6-12),
Bjork (11-23), Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down (17-27).
Beyond that most of the exceptional drops were genre-related:
electronica: Jamie XX (4-9), Chvrches: Every Open Eye (31-41),
Arca (56-66), Floating Points: Elaenia (29-76), Holly Herndon
(21-78), Four Tet: Morning/Evening (82-104); jazz: Maria
Schneider (69-289), Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (99-190),
Vijay Iyer: Break Stuff (98-232); metal: Deafheaven: New
Bermuda (24-54), Ghost: Meliora (84-104), Faith No More:
Sol Invictus (63-125), Tribulation: The Children of the
Night (95-143), Iron Maiden: The Book of Souls (73-179);
and something I can only disparage as damaged art rock: Holter (8-33),
Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (30-106), Tobias Jesso
Jr: Goon (44-102), Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder
Sweet and Other Distress (77-538) -- but note that Beauty Pill
was an exception.
Kamasi Washington: The Epic (9-8) is a unique case.
The idea that it might drop was largely based on the fact that it
got reasonably good support among jazz critics (4th place in the
Jazz
Critics Poll, I pick up a lot of jazz lists, and P&J has
very few jazz critics voting. Take those jazz critics away and
The Epic finishes a few slots lower (12-15th). I also
noted that it did exceptionally well in Europe, and that would
work against it in P&J. I also don't think it's all that
great (and as I noted, records I don't like tend to sink), but
it's also a fairly unique item if you get into it, and I've long
suspected that there is a latent jazz audience waiting for
something to break out of the tradition and the school system.
So it wasn't certain to drop, but I wouldn't have been surprised
if it did. And now we know that it held its own, passing four
records ahead of it (Stevens, XX, Misty, and Holter) while getting
passed by three others (Jepsen, S-K, and Staples). Maybe I should
be hopeful that more such crossovers will follow, but I still
rather think it's a fluke.
The vote distribution has a long tail: only 2 records appear
on more than 20% of the ballots, 14 on more than 10%, 32 on 5% or
more, roughly 100 on 2%, roughly 200 on 1%, and more than 1200 on
fewer ballots (the highest single ballot album came in 267th).
Relative rankings are pretty much meaningless after 250th place
(if not more like 200th). I've long felt that the poll would be
much more interesting if you allowed voters to cast longer ballots --
to fatten up that tail -- where 11-20 are accorded 3 points (vs.
minimum 5 for the top 10), 21-30 2 points, and everything after
that 1 point. The marginal points wouldn't have much impact on the
totals, but they would make it much easier to analyze the voting
base and the affinities of individual voters. The poll could also
solicit various forms of demographic information. I'd also like to
construct a taste profile where voters rate a selected list of
records independently of their rankings. More work, sure, but a
lot more useful data. (I did use the expanded voting scheme on a
couple of polls I ran on the Christgau website, and I thought it
worked well -- the voter base was small and pretty homogeneous,
so the extra data helped a lot.)
- Glenn McDonald also calculates a number of extra metrics to
help explain the data (explanation
here). Aside from
kvltosis, which attempts to find records that were popular among
voters who stayed clear of the really popular records -- a dialectic
which can elevate records favored by smallish cliques (like jazz and
metal) rather than true obscurities -- McDonald's other categories
have meaningful names which undermined by peculiar definitions. One
you can sort of understand is
enthusiasm: the ratio of points to votes. The list it generates
is a mix of poll leaders (6. Lamar, 14. Stevens, 16. Jepsen, 23.
Washington, 25. Barnett, 28. Grimes) and low-vote albums where odds
suggest that there will be a wider spread of vote value. To limit
the latter effect, McDonald only lists albums with 5+ votes: the
result is that the top three have 5-6 votes, and half of the top
40 have 10 votes or less. Some of those certainly do show albums
that only a small circle likes a lot (like #19 Laurie Anderson,
or with a wider circle #4 Hamilton) but some are statistical
flukes.
Several of McDonald's terms seem almost as arbitrary as their
definitions. Hipness, for instance, favors album voters who also
voted for singles over those who didn't. I've been on both sides
of that equation, and hardly feel hipper for having filled out a
singles list this year. The
Hipness
list itself may steer slightly toward pop, but mostly looks like
noise to me. Except, that is, for the bottom five (min. 5 ballots):
Dave & Phil Alvin: Lost Time, Ezra Furman, Jeffrey Lewis,
Laurie Anderson, and Yo La Tengo. Michael Tatum must be kicking
himself for not filing a singles ballot this year (also Robert
Christgau and Cam Patterson).
I'm not going to bother with deconstructing McDonald's other
terms, like Monolithity, Vitality, and Singularity, none of which
mean anything you can imagine. I will note that I personally followed
a voting strategy which undermines those categories: I deliberately
only picked singles from albums I didn't pick. I don't know how
common that strategy is -- you'd largely eliminate it by allowing
more than 10 album picks -- but it complicates using singles data
to gain insights into voters. (I'll note, for instance, that Dan
Weiss moved up on my "similar ballots" list because I literally
cribbed some singles from his ballot. We did have two albums in
common -- Barnett and Heems -- enough to put him on my list, but
further down.) I will comment on Metalism, a category which exists
only because McDonald is a Metalist (#5 this year). The same concept
could be applied with any reasonably identifiable genre -- hip-hop,
country, jazz, electronica, Latin, African, etc. As someone who is
the proud owner of a .000 lifetime metalism score, I dare say
anything else would be more interesting.
My own ballot-plus-analysis is
here,
including previous ballots back to 2008 (used to calculate Breadth,
another concept I find statistically dubious). The Centricity score
is more useful: it measures how much overlap a voter has with the
poll average, so the people who go with the crowd have high scores
(I find it curious that I only recognize 2 of the 20 most centric
voters) and those who abhor crowds have low scores. My centricity
scores have averaged .131, with a low in 2014 of .061, but reached
a record high this year at .234, almost exclusively on the strength
of voting for Courtney Barnett: 166 other votes; after that it's
James McMurtry (16), Heems (11), Laurie Anderson (8), Sleaford Mods
(6), Henry Threadgill (4), Irene Schweizer (2), Lyrics Born (1),
and Paris (1). I could have totally goosed my score by voting for
Kendrick Lamar, which would have placed in my top 20, but as much
as I admire the album, I still don't really feel it (and I've played
it twice since voting), nor did I feel like wasting a vote (that
ultimately went to Heems but probably should have gone to a third
jazz album, Schlippenbach Trio or Chris Lightcap). The point being
that these numbers are volatile, depending as much on strategic
choices as taste.
All of the EOYA values listed above are taken from last week's
file. Since then I've added in a bunch of new lists, plus noted all
the P&J results. I'll add more data over the next few days, but
I'm getting pretty close to done. Main thing I will be doing is jumping
from individual ballot to ballot. For instance, I'll check out everyone
I don't already know who has a similar ballot to mine. (Michael Tatum,
not for the first time, topped that list.) Ever since the Voice built
its database-driven P&J reporting system this kind of hopscotch
has been its most useful feature, allowing you to repeatedly pose the
questions: who likes the albums I like, and what do they also like.
Also see the Hilary Hughes interview with the former Pazz & Jop
poobahs:
Robert Christgau, Joe Levy, Ann Powers, and Greg Tate on the Year That
Was. Christgau gets cranky about Hamilton, Kamasi Washington,
and Chris Stapleton, and I have to admit I basically agree with him on
those.
The big music news of the week was David Bowie's death. I was a
pretty serious fan back in the 1970s, but I have to admit that I've
been surprised by the outpouring of testaments and such. (Last time
that happened was with Michael Jackson, who like Bowie touched many
people deeper than I realized. Here are some links I collected:
I spent a few days last week going through nearly all of the Bowie
albums I had missed. I can't say that I missed much, although the song
"I'm Afraid of Americans" has only become truer. Despite the jazz moves,
I can't, however, see his new album, Blackstar, as some sort of
final masterpiece. Which isn't to deny that it is a big improvement --
his best since Scary Monsters (1980) or maybe even Heroes
(1977). (Actually, my favorite Bowie album ever is Lust for Life,
under Iggy Pop's name, which also came out in 1977.)
Finally, more EOY lists:
New records rated this week:
- The Arcs: Yours, Dreamily (2015, Nonesuch): [r]: B
- Battles: La Di Da Di (2015, Warp): [r]: A-
- The Bellfuries: Workingman's Bellfuries (2015, Hi-Style): [r]: B
- David Bowie: Blackstar (2016, Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
- Kenny Carr: Exit Moon (2015, Zoozazz Music): [cd]: B+(*)
- Bob Gluck/Billy Hart/Eddie Henderson/Christopher Dean Sullivan: Infinite Spirit: Revisiting Music of the Mwandishi Band (2015 [2016], FMR): [cd]: B+(***)
- Health: Death Magic (2015, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(*)
- Lil Dicky: Professional Rapper (2015, self-released, 2CD): [r]: A-
- Lions: Lions EP (2014 [2015], self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
- Jenny Maybee/Nick Phillips: Haiku (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B
- Terrence McManus and John Hébert: Saints and Sinners (2015, Rowhouse Music): [dl]: B+(*)
- John Raymond: John Raymond & Real Feels (2014 [2016], Shifting Paradigm): [cd]: B+(***)
- Adam Rudolph/Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra: Turning Towards the Light (2015, Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(**)
- Skyzoo & Antman Wonder: An Ode to Reasonable Doubt (2013, self-released, EP): [r]: B+(**)
- Skyzoo: Music for My Friends (2015, First Generation Rich): [r]: B+(**)
- The Stryker/Slagle Band Expanded: Routes (2015 [2016], Strikezone): [cd]: B+(***)
- Snarky Puppy/Metropole Orkest: Sylva (2014 [2015], Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Mike Osborne: Dawn (1966-70 [2015], Cuneiform): [dl]: A-
- Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is a Hurtin' Thing (1971-77 [2015], Luv N' Haight): [r]: B+(*)
Old music rated this week:
- David Bowie: David Live (1974 [2005], Virgin EMI, 2CD): [r]: B
- David Bowie: Stage (1978 [2005], Virgin EMI, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
- David Bowie: Tonight (1984, EMI America): [r]: B-
- David Bowie: Never Let Me Down (1987, EMI America): [r]: B-
- David Bowie: Black Tie White Noise (1993, Virgin): [r]: B
- David Bowie: The Buddha of Suburbia (1993 [2007], Virgin): [r]: B
- David Bowie: Outside (1995, Virgin): [r]: B-
- David Bowie: Earthling (1997, Virgin): [r]: B
- David Bowie: Hours . . . (1999, Virgin): [r]: B-
- David Bowie: Heathen (2002, ISO/Columbia): [r]: B
- David Bowie: Nothing Has Changed (1995-2014 [2014], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(*)
- Sue Foley: Change (2004, Ruf): [r]: B+(***)
- Peter Karp/Sue Foley: Beyond the Crossroads (2012, Blind Pig): [r]: B+(*)
- Tin Machine: Tin Machine (1989, EMI): [r]: C+
Grade changes:
- Carly Rae Jepsen: E-MO-TION (2015, Interscope/Schoolboy/Silent): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-
- Lord Huron: Strange Trails (2015, Iamsound): [r]: [was: B+(**)] B+(***)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Melissa Aldana: Back Home (Wommusic): advance, March 11
- Cowboys & Frenchmen: Rodeo (Outside In Music): CD, no cover
- Blue Muse: Blue Muse Live (Dolphinium)
- Kenny Carr: Exit Moon (Zoozazz Music)
- Roxy Coss: Restless Idealism (Origin)
- Mike Freeman ZonaVibe: Blue Tjade (VOF): January 25
- Ira Hill: Tomorrow (self-released)
- Joseph Howell: Time Made to Swing (Summit)
- Christine Jensen and Maggi Olin: Transatlantic Conversations: 11 Piece Band Live (Linedown): February 15
- Matt Kane & the Kansas City Generations Sextet: Acknowledgement (Bounce-Step): March 4
- Urs Leimgruber/Alex Huber: Lightnings (Wide Ear)
- Dick Oatts/Mats Holmquist/New York Jazz Orchestra: A Tribute to Herbie +1 (Summit)
- La Orquesta Sonfonietta: Canto América (Patois): February 12
- Matt Parker Trio: Present Time (BYNK): February 12
- Jemal Ramirez: Pomponio (First Orbit Sounds Music)
- Roswell Rudd & Heather Masse: August Love Song (Red House): February 26
- Samo Salamon Bassless Trio: Unity (Samo)
- Carlos Vega: Bird's Ticket (Origin)
- Ray Vega & Thomas Marriott: Return of the East West Trumpet Summit (Origin)
Miscellaneous notes:
- David Bowie: Nothing Has Changed (1995-2014 [2014],
Columbia/Legacy):
B+(**)
- Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is a Hurtin' Thing (1973 [2015],
Luv N' Haight):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:
- Ed Sanders: Beer Cans on the Moon (1972, Reprise):
B-
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Daily Log
Made a belated birthday dinner for T.J. Edmonds last night: a rather
somber occasion coming a month or so after the death of David Brewer,
his "long-time companion" and, thanks to the blessings of the US Supreme
Court, finally husband. They were long-term friends of my sister's --
virtual family would be more like it. David worked at the local public
TV station (program director, if memory serves). I used to run into
T.J. a couple times a week when he worked for Wichita's last decent
record store. He was into techno, worked on the side as a DJ, and did
some original electronica music.
I offered him the usual bewildering range of choices, and he opted
for something Italian (not seafood). I consulted Marcella Hazan's
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and came up with a menu:
- Pasta (Penne) with Peas, Bacon and Ricotta Sauce (p. 163)
- Veal Scaloppine with Tomato, Oregano, and Capers (p. 364):
scaled up by 50%
- Sauteed Broccoli with Olive Oil and Garlic (p. 477)
- Zucchini Gratin with Tomato and Marjoram (p. 533)
- Baked Stuffed Mushroom Caps (p. 76)
- Panzanella (Bread Salad) (p. 554)
- Romaine Lettuce Salad with Gorgonzola Cheese and Walnuts (p. 551)
- New York Cheesecake -- from Ruth Reichl's autobiography
I always assume we need a cake for a birthday, but neither Hazan's
almond nor her walnut cake seemed appropriately grand, and I thought
the creaminess of the cheesecake would be a nice ending. I've made
the stuffed mushrooms several times before, and had made different
panzanella recipes. I've made several other scaloppine recipes --
the one with cream, capers, and grappa is my favorite, edging out
even the piccata -- but thought that since I went non-tomato with the
pasta, I'd put the tomato sauce on the veal.
Veal has always been difficult to buy around here, but a couple
strategic Dillons stores have recently started stocking several cuts
in tightly sealed packages. Still, I was only able to come up with
one 8 oz. package of scaloppine, but found a couple "veal chops" --
looked like thick T-bones -- deboned and sliced them into three layers
and pounded them thinner, and they worked fine.
Only other shopping problem was that I couldn't find any porcini
to mix into the mushroom stuffing, but I figured that would have been
overkill -- for one thing, I was using baby portabellas instead of
the usual buttons. I also cut the pancetta back and made up the
difference with diced prosciutto, although that too hardly made any
difference.
Aside from a minor cosmetic glitch with the cheesecake, I thought
everything came out splendid. Was anticipating eight people, but only
six showed. Good group. Was pleased that I could do it.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Pazz & Jop Notes
At the last minute, Brad Luen ran a poll at the Expert Witness
Facebook group. He counted 47 ballots: "34 in the voting thread
and 13 solicited through other means." Voters allocated P&J
points. He broke point ties by "(i) points per vote, (ii) points
after dropping highest score." I wasn't aware of this, so didn't
vote, although it's not inconceivable that my P&J ballot --
posted on my blog more than a week ago -- was one of those picked
up "by other means." I've scraped off the Facebook thread, so will
get a better idea when/if I analyze it [e.g., Paris got one vote
for 8 points, like on my ballot; I was the only one to vote for
Paris in P&J].
Meanwhile, the standings
(the three numbers are total points, number of votes, and highest
points on any ballot; any album with only one vote wasn't ranked,
even if the point total would have placed it):
- Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (423/35/20)
- James McMurtry: Complicated Game (282/26/18)
- Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (272/26/18)
- Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (269/19/30)
- Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (190/19/15)
- Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf (187/20/15)
- Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts: Manhattan (183/17/20)
- Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (161/15/18)
- Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (147/15/15)
- Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (141/14/16)
- Heems: Eat Pray Thug (139/17/16)
- Grimes: Art Angels (113/10/17)
- The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall (91/10/15)
- Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) (89/6/20)
- Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (62/5/20)
- Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (58/6/12)
- Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (57/5/15)
- Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (57/5/16)
- The Chills: Silver Bullets (57/6/15)
- Joanna Newsom: Divers (50/3/25)
- Future: DS2 (50/6/12)
- Robert Forster: Songs to Play (48/5/11)
- Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (45/5/10)
- The Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (43/5/11)
- The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (42/2/22)
- Hop Along: Painted Shut (42/5/14)
- Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (40/5/12)
- Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (39/3/15)
- Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete (35/4/11)
- Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (31/2/19)
- Miguel: Wildheart (31/4/14)
- Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (30/4/10)
- Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (29/3/13)
- Fabiano Do Nascimento: Dança Dos Tempos (28/2/14)
- Lyrics Born: Real People (28/2/18)
- Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago (27/2/20)
- Aram Bajakian: There Were Flowers Also in Hell (27/3/12)
- J.D. McPherson: Let the Good Times Roll (26/2/20)
- Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (24/3/9)
- Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect (23/2/13)
Also receiving at least two votes:
- Father John Nisty: I Love You, Honeybear (22/2/15)
Highest reported point totals with one vote:
- D'Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah (25/1/25)
- Chris Stapleton: Traveler (25/1/25)
Monday, January 11, 2016
Music Week
Music: Current count 26097 [26050] rated (+47), 389 [395] unrated (-6).
Most of the following list appeared in last week's
Rhapsody Streamnotes, so no news there. I think I ran the program
that counts the ratings on Thursday when I cloned the file and was
surprised to find the ratings count at +32, normally a good week's
work. Or maybe that was Friday when it was posted. The new draft file,
which I set up as "January 2016 Part 2" currently has 20 records, a
pretty healthy start. (Actually, I think I seeded it with three 2016
releases I had already written up -- Friday's RS had no 2016 releases.)
The 2016 releases thus far are jazz items I shoved to the end of
the queue to concentrate on 2015 releases. I haven't begun to look
for new 2016 streamables, although I did notice a new David Bowie
album on Rhapsody last night, and with the news of his death I'm
spinning it now. (Marks a return of the "thin white duke" crooner,
with orchestral swing and quite a bit of sax adding a jazzy air,
the dramatic flair reminding me of Ziggy Stardust as much
as anything else. Bowie produced a lot of lousy records following
1983's Let's Dance -- itself a very mixed bag -- and I thought
his much-touted 2013 The Next Day came up short, but I can
imagine someone more sentimental than I falling for this record.
Will play it again for next week. Maybe I'll also get around to
that 1993 album still marked 'U' in my database.)
I expect good things from Intakt, but still was surprised to find
my first A record of 2016, an African-born, balafon-driven jazz trio
called Kalo Yele. The balafon player, Aly Keïta, comes from
Côte D'Ivoire, but the other two musicians are recognizably Swiss,
yet somehow managed to be born in Cameroon (once a German colony,
divided between France and Britain after 1919, independent in 1960
with the British dragging their heels until 1961). Lucas Niggli is
a well-known drummer I need to look into further -- I do know that
he was a protégé of Lucien Favre, who's long been fascinated by
African drumming. But I've never heard of clarinetist Jan Galega
Brönnimann, who provides the perfect complement to the percussion.
Marvelous.
I also came close to A-listing Intakt's other January release,
a piano trio with Aruán Ortiz, Eric Revis, and Gerald Cleaver. A
lot of piano trio fall into my "nice" trough, and this one --
largely thanks to the rhythm section -- rose above that, but only
a few each year really dazzle me, and this didn't quite.
One piano trio that did dazzle me was released in 1953 as
Introducing Paul Bley -- as
much as Revis and Cleaver impressed me, note that Bley managed to
get help from Charles Mingus and Art Blakey. Bley's second great
album came in 1958 when he expanded to a quintet by hiring a young
alto saxophonist named Ornette Coleman: I first ran across this
as Live at the Hilcrest Club, but my current copy is simply
The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet. And in 1961-62 he was in
one of the most famous avant-garde trios in jazz history, with Jimmy
Giuffre and Steve Swallow. He was also famous for having married
two brilliant musicians, the composer-pianist Carla Borg (better
known under his name) and the singer-songwriter Annette Peacock
(don't know her maiden name, but her first husband was bassist Gary
Peacock, later an important collaborator of Bley's), and he recorded
several albums of their compositions. Bley continued to record
through 2008, mostly solo and trio albums, some exceptional (1965's
Closer and 1989's BeBopBeBopBeBopBeBop are personal
favorites but I've only heard about a third of them). Anyhow, he
died a week ago, and should be remembered as a giant of modern
jazz.
I rarely listen to multi-disc sets on Rhapsody because they are
invariably too much to swallow in one stretch, and it's hard to break
up the experience like I would normally if I had separate discs.
However, I took a chance with a 4-CD box that Phil Overeem has been
touting, Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush last
night when I was working on my screed about ISIS, and it fit the
bill perfectly, running on and on with deep blues and soul grooves
and the occasional chintzy cover. Rush missed the heyday of Chicago
blues, failed at Philadelphia International, then spent three or
four decades working the chitlin circuit, a nice career for a guy
who never came close to stardom. I wrote my review before the last
disc finished, only to find that the last few cuts tailed off quite
a bit. I thought about docking the grade then, but decided to let
it slide by. Having only heard one previous album (out of at least
three dozen), I'm going out on a limb saying that he probably doesn't
have a single A- record in his catalog so there's something inherently
unseemly about grading a 4-CD box that high, but he was so steady he
grows on you, and over the course of a long career one winds up
admiring that.
Maybe I'll find an appropriate time to try The Complete Matrix
Tapes. Last time I looked, The Cutting Edge wasn't there,
at least in a recognizable product configuration. (The Dylan bootlegs,
by the way, completely buried the Miles Davis bootlegs in my
EOY Aggregate: Old Music,
37-15, with Ata Kak's Obaa Sima (one of those Awesome Tapes
From Africa) in third place. The list is pretty idiosyncratic, largely
because it's built from 20-30 lists, less than 10% of the new release
albums lists I've compiled, and partly because the longer lists skew
toward obscure electronica (although it looks like most are so obscure
I haven't flagged them).
Meanwhile, I keep adding to the
EOY Aggregate (although I
haven't touched it in a couple days). Current standings (with Pazz &
Jop coming out later this week; my grades in brackets):
- [728]: Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Aftermath/Top Dawg/Interscope) [A-]
- [477]: Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty) [***]
- [404]: Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop Music) [A-]
- [352]: Jamie XX: In Colour (XL/Young Turks) [***]
- [325]: Father John Misty: I Love You Honeybear (Sub Pop) [B]
- [325]: Tame Impala: Currents (Caroline) [*]
- [282]: Grimes: Art Angels (4AD) [A-]
- [265]: Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness (Domino) [B]
- [249]: Kamasi Washington: The Epic (Brainfeeder) [**]
- [247]: Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) [*]
- [237]: Bjork: Vulnicura (One Little Indian) [B-]
- [219]: Vince Staples: Summertime '06 (Def Jam) [***]
- [199]: Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City)
- [162]: Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete [***]
- [139]: Blur: The Magic Whip (Parlophone/Warner) [**]
- [136]: Carly Rae Jepsen: E-mo-tion (Interscope/School Boy) [***]
- [132]: Kurt Vile: B'lieve I'm Goin Down (Matador) [B]
- [131]: Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (ATO) [*]
- {130]: Drake: If You're Reading This It's Too Late (Cash Money) [B]
- [127]: Future: DS2 (Epic) [A-]
- [121]: Holly Herndon: Platform (4AD) [**]
- [121]: Miguel: Wildheart (RCA) [***]
- [120]: Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop) [B]
- [119]: Deafheaven: |New Bermuda (Anti)
- [116]: Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD) [***]
- [104]: Viet Cong: Viet Cong (Jagjaguwar) [**]
- [98]: Adele: 25 (XL)
- [97]: Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (Southeastern) [*]
- [96]: Floating Points: Elaenia (Luaka Bop) [***]
- [92]: Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar) [B-]
- [88]: Chvrches: Every Open Eye (Universal) [**]
- [86]: Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experment: Surf (self-released) [A-]
- [85]: Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (World Circuit) [A-]
- [85]: Shamir: Ratchet (XL) [A-]
- [84]: The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness (Republic) [*]
- [80]: Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (Harbinger Sound) [A-]
- [78]: Wilco: Star Wars (dBpm) [***]
- [77]: Destroyer: Poison Season (Merge) [*]
- [76]: Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit I Don't Go Outside (Columbia) [*]
- [75]: D'Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah (RCA -14) [A-]
- [75]: Dr Dre: Compton: A Soundtrack by Dr Dre (Aftermath/Interscope) [B-]
- [75]: Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass (Sony) [*]
My grades here are pretty evenly distributed: 8 A-, 8 ***, 5 **, 8 *,
5 B, 3 B-, 3 ungraded. Robert Christgau, who's always a bit more in step
with the critical consensus, graded eight (or nine with Adele) of these
records higher than I did, moving five over the A- line: Jamie XX,
Sleater-Kinney, Oneohtrix Point Never, Miguel, Jason Isbell. Other
aggregate lists pretty much agree, regardless of depth or method --
I'd say they're probably more consistent this year than most. P&J
will shuffle these around a bit, but I don't forsee anything major,
unless Holter or Washington take a dive (Sleater-Kinney will probably
pass them, maybe Vince Staples and/or Oneohtrix Point Never too. UK
favorites typically fall off, but that mostly means Blur and Sleaford
Mods. The closest thing to a late gainer (like Beyoncé and D'Angelo
in recent years) is Adele, which could go either way.
Also not a lot of lower-ranked albums with much P&J upside
potential. The best outside shots I see are: Lana Del Rey:
Honeymoon (46), Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (47),
Jlin: Dark Energy (48), ASAP Rocky: At.Long.Last.ASAP
(52), Arca: Mutant (57); Hop Along: Painted Shut (59),
Chris Stapleton: Traveler (62); Ezra Furman: Perpetual
Motion People (76), Ashley Monroe: The Blade (102), James
McMurtry: Complicated Game (107), Heems: Eat Pray Thug
(113). Bob Dylan has also always run much higher in P&J than in
aggregates, so either Shadows in the Night (81) or, more
likely, The Cutting Edge bootlegs could crack the top 40.
New records rated this week:
- Brian Andres and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel: This Could Be That (2015 [2016], Bacalao): [cd]: B+(*)
- Babyface: Return of the Tender Lover (2015, Def Jam): [r]: B+(***)
- Beauty Pill: Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are (2015, Butterscotch): [r]: B
- Carter Tutti Void: f(x) (2015, Industrial): [r]: B+(***)
- Mary Foster Conklin: Photographs (2014 [2016], MockTurtle Music): [cd]: B+(**)
- Joseph Daley/Warren Smith/Scott Robinson: The Tuba Trio Chronicles (2015 [2016], JoDa Locust Street Music): [cd]: B+(**)
- Dâm-Funk: Invite the Light (2015, Stones Throw): [r]: B
- Dej Loaf: #AndSeeThatsTheThing (2015, Columbia, EP): [r]: B
- Dr. Dre: Compton (2015, Aftermath/Interscope): [r]: B-
- C Duncan: Architect (2015, Fat Cat): [r]: B-
- FKA Twigs: M3LL155X (2015, Young Turks, EP): [r]: C+
- The Foxymorons: Fake Yoga (2015, Foxyphoton): [bc]: B+(***)
- Michael Gibbs & the NDR Bigband: Play a Bill Frisell Set List (2013 [2015], Cuneiform): [dl]: A-
- Hieroglyphic Being: The Acid Documents (2013 [2015], Soul Jazz): [r]: A-
- Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl: We Are Not the First (2015, RVNG Intl): [r]: A-
- Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: Azui Infinito (2015 [2016], Greenleaf Music): [cd]: B+(**)
- The Libertines: Anthems for Doomed Youth (2015, Virgin EMI): [r]: B+(*)
- Liturgy: The Ark Work (2015, Thrill Jockey): [r]: C-
- Lnrdcroy: Much Less Normal (2014 [2015], Firecracker): [r]: B+(***)
- Meek Mill: Dreams Worth More Than Money (2015, Atlantic/MMG): [r]: B+(*)
- Gabriel Mervine: People (2015 [2016], Synergy Music): [cd]: B
- Milo: So the Flies Don't Come (2015, Ruby Yacht): [r]: B+(**)
- Hudson Mohawke: Lantern (2015, Warp): [r]: B
- Róisin Murphy: Hairless Toys (2015, PIAS): [r]: B+(**)
- Noonday Underground: Body Parts for Modern Art (2015, Stubbie): [r]: B+(***)
- Aruán Ortiz Trio: Hidden Voices (2015 [2016], Intakt): [cd]: B+(***)
- Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect (2015, Hardly Art): [r]: B+(**)
- Raury: All We Need (2015, Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
- Schnellertollermeier: X (2013 [2015], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(**)
- Dale Watson: Call Me Insane (2015, Red House): [r]: B+(**)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83 (1955-83 [2015], Soul Jazz): [r]: A-
- Bobby Rush: Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush (1964-2014 [2015], Omnivore, 4CD): [r]: A-
- Ty Segall: Ty-Rex (2011-13 [2015], Goner, EP): [r]: B+(*)
- Idrissa Soumaoro: Djitoumou (2010 [2015], Lusafrica): [r]: B+(***)
- Dale Watson: Truckin' Sessions, Vol. 3 (2014 [2015], Red River): [r]: B+(***)
Old music rated this week:
- Michael Gibbs: Tanglewood 63 (1970, Deram): [r]: B+(*)
- Michael Gibbs With Joachim Kühn: Europeana: Jazzphony No. 1 (1994 [1995], ACT): [r]: B+(**)
- Throbbing Gristle: The First Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (1975 [2001], Thirsty Ear): [r]: B
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Steve Barta: Symphonic Arrangement: Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (Steve Barta Music)
- Nicholas Bearde: Invitation (Right Groove): January 29
- Laura Perlman: Precious Moments (Miles High)
- Julian Shore: Which Way Now (Tone Rogue): February 12
- The Stryker/Slagle Band Expanded: Routes (Strikezone): February 5
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Weekend Roundup
Some scattered links this week, mostly about that perennial favorite,
war in the Middle East -- nothing on the Oregon standoff (aside from
this link to
Josh Marshall, who describes it as "white privilege performance
art"). Also, in honor of the five 4.0 or higher earthquakes that
hit just northwest of Enid, Oklahoma, here's Crowson's cartoon:
You'd think anyone worried that much about the price of gas would
take an interest in the wars disrupting the world's largest oil producing
region, but, well, Kansas isn't lacking for "stone-age brains" (see
below). So back to the wars:
Thomas E Ricks: What are the Saudis up to with those executions? Regional
dominance: Actually, this column appears to have been subcontracted to
Sarah Kaiser-Cross, no great loss since Ricks has never impressed us as a
deep thinker. The argument:
Saudi Arabia had a difficult year. Despite Saudi Arabia's best efforts at
restoring order in neighboring Yemen, the Kingdom's efforts to pummel its
way to peace have largely failed. Near Saudi Arabia's northern borders,
Syria and Iraq continue to struggle through maddening states of chaos and
civil war. Internally, Saudi Arabia is battling domestic terror cells,
ISIS recruiters, and Shiite protesters. Finally, its American partner,
in Saudi Arabia's eyes, all but abandoned the Kingdom by signing the
nuclear deal that resulted in greater economic and political power for
its long time rival, Iran.
Saudi Arabia's recent executions and the subsequent tension with its
rival, Iran, were calculated moves, designed to send a clear message to
opponents at home and abroad that Saudi Arabia remains in control.
Simultaneously, the executions forced Iran to engage in a no longer
subtle political battle for regional dominance.
Power (and hubris) in Saudi Arabia has long been based on two things:
the world's largest and most profitable oil reserves, and possession of
the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina. Even in the 1960s the Saudis
thought they could take on the rising tide of pan-Arab nationalism in
a proxy war against Egypt in Yemen. Oil provided the money to advance
their ambitions, and much of that went into propaganda as they pushed
their rigid, backward-looking version of Islam throughout the region.
Through the 1970s, that seemed to be working out, with oil prices on
the rise and the Nixon-Kissinger policy of bolstering regional allies
(Iran and Saudi Arabia). However, in 1979 there were two crises: one
was the revolt in Mecca that seized the Grand Mosque; the other was
the revolution in Iran which, among other things, presented a new
claimant for leadership of the Islamic world. The Saudis struggled
through the depressed oil market of the 1980s, doubling down on their
proselytizing -- conveniently tied to the US-sponsored jihad against
the infidel Soviets in Afghanistan -- and helping finance Iraq's
ambitious and brutal war against Iran. That led to a new crisis in
1989-90, when Iraq, ending its bloody stalemate with Iran, turned
on Kuwait and threatened the rest of the Persian Gulf. The Americans
saved Kuwait then, at the expense of compromising the sovereignty of
the Saudi Kingdom -- at least in the eyes of its salafist followers.
Meanwhile, Iran carefully cultivated ties to Shiite Muslims, aided by
the increasingly virulent anti-Shiite behavior of the salafists. Then
the US finally returned to "finish the job" in Iraq in 2003, igniting
a full-bore Sunni-Shiite civil war that eventually spread into Syria,
and erupted elsewhere where order had broken down (mostly due to the
sort of interventionism Saudi Arabia has so long engaged in). The net
result is that the Saudis find themselves facing opposition from the
increasingly restless Shiites living in the Kingdom's eastern parts
(i.e., where the oil is), from the increasingly militant salafists
who resent the Kingdom's cozy relationship with the US, and from the
ever-present pressures to liberalize -- iconically represented by
efforts to overturn the Kingdom's ban on women driving, although the
prospect of the people voting for their own leaders is surely more
disconcerting. And, well, bummer about those low oil prices, which
has plunged the government into deficits for the first time in many
decades.
This situation has been deteriorating for some time, but has gotten
much worse in the past year -- especially after King Abdullah's death,
which brought to power a new king and a much more aggressive coterie
of bureaucrats. It suits this power elite to see every turn against
them as having been orchestrated by archenemies in Tehran, much as it
suited American cold warriors to see every peasant revolt and strike
as the handiwork of devious manipulators in Moscow. Hence, the mostly
Shiite Houthis in Yemen were viewed as Iranian proxies when they had
more likely emerged as an indigenous alternative to the complete mess
that pro- and anti-Saudi Sunnis had made of the country. (Much the
same happened with Hezbollah in Lebanon, although the fracturing and
the level of foreign manipulation there was much more complex.)
So, sure, Ricks (Kaiser-Cross) is right that the mass executions
were KSA's way of showing who's in charge, and that the consequences
of rebellion will be severe. (And thankfully they didn't throw in a
couple of women drivers to round out their demonology.) But they've
also demonstrated to the world that their ridiculous regime rests on
little more than sheer brutality, with even its usual trappings of
piety looking shamefully tattered. Thankfully, the Iranians reacted
crudely as usual: if they had any sense, they'd stop chanting "death
to . . . ," issue a fatwa that capital punishment is un-Islamic, and
curtail their own efforts to force a return to medieval religion.
It would, after all, be easier to counter anti-Muslim hysteria in
the west if the self-appointed leaders of the Islamic world can't
control their bloodlust.
For more on the paranoia and madness underlying Saudi aggression,
see
Kenneth M Pollack: Fear and Loathing in Saudi Arabia. I found the
following paragraphs particularly amusing:
Finally, the Saudis feel frustrated and abandoned by the United States.
Many Saudis and other Gulf Arabs consider President Barack Obama deeply
ignorant, if not outright foolish, about the world and the Middle East.
They evince out-and-out contempt for him and his policies. From their
perspective, the United States has turned its back on its traditional
allies in the Middle East. Washington is doing the least it can in Iraq,
and effectively nothing in Libya and Syria, with the result that none
of those conflicts is getting better. If anything, they are actually
getting worse. Moreover, Saudi Arabia seems to differ over whether Obama
is using the new nuclear deal with Tehran to deliberately try to shift
the United States from the Saudi side to the Iranian side in the grand,
regional struggle or if he is allowing it to happen unintentionally.
The more charitable Saudi position is the former, because that suggests
that Obama at least understands what he is doing, even if they think it
a mistake and a betrayal. The latter view, for Saudis, sees him as a
virtual imbecile who is destroying the Middle East without any
understanding or recognition.
The depth of Saudi anger and contempt for the current American
leadership is important to understand because it is another critical
element of their worldview and policies, as best we can understand them.
With the Middle East coming apart at the seams (in Saudi Arabia's view),
the United States -- the traditional regional hegemon -- is doing nothing
to stop it and even encouraging Iran to widen the fissures. Since the
United States can't or won't do anything, someone else has to, and that
someone can only be Saudi Arabia. The dramatic increase in Riyadh's
willingness to intervene abroad, with both financial and military power,
has been driven by its sense that dramatic action is required to prevent
the region from melting down altogether and taking the kingdom down with it.
This view of Obama correlates with reading too much Chales Krauthammer,
a certifiable form of dementia. The fact is that US interests have never
aligned very well with Saudi interests, but the US humored the theocratic
despots because they helped recycle a lot of money back to the US, and
the Saudis had a way of dismissing what they didn't like (especially US
support for Israel) because alignment with the US let them pursue their
real interests -- pre-eminence in the Islamic world -- relatively freely.
Along the way they (like Israel) learned that they could push America's
buttons by opposing Iran, so they wound up blaming everything on Iran.
American enmity toward Iran has been irrational (and counterproductive)
ever since the 1980 Hostage Crisis. Obama wasn't ignorant in realizing
that, although he was perhaps foolish in not admitting as much, and in
not pursuing a more constructive relationship with Iran -- one that would
defuse much of the hostility in the region, not least by undermining the
rationales for Saudi (and Israeli) aggression. Pollack's next paragraph
almost admits that the Saudis have a cockeyed view of everything:
That is why the Saudis have been consistently overreacting to events in
Washington's eyes. We look at Bahrain and see an oppressed Shiite majority
looking for some degree of political participation and economic benefit
from the minority Sunni regime. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed mass
uprising that could spread to the kingdom if it were to succeed -- which
is why the Iranians are helping it do so. We look at the Yemeni civil war
and see a quagmire with only a minor Iranian role and little likelihood
of destabilizing Saudi Arabia. The Saudis see an Iranian bid to stealthily
undermine the kingdom. We see a popular Saudi Shiite cleric who would
become a martyr if he is executed. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed
firebrand stoking revolution in their country's oil-producing regions.
In the Syrian peace talks, we see a need to bring the Iranians in because
of their critical support for Bashar al-Assad's regime. The Saudis see
the United States legitimizing both a Shiite/Persian/Iranian influence
in a majority Sunni Arab state and the murderous, minority Shiite regime.
The list goes on.
Pollack then suggests that the Saudis are right and the the US is
abandoning its traditional ally in favor of its enemy. Actually, Obama's
real shortcoming is his failure to criticize nominal allies like Saudi
Arabia when they are dead wrong (and Iraq and Egypt and Turkey and most
of all, in case you're wondering where this cowardice comes from, Israel).
But then his failure to criticize is symptomatic of a deeper problem,
which is the lack of constructive principle behind US foreign policy --
a legacy of the cold war when America routinely favored pro-business
despotism over popular democracy -- and the naive faith that a sufficient
show of force solves every problem.
Stephen M Walt: Give Peace a Chance (And why none of the current presidential
candidates want to talk about it): As a "realist" Walt admits "one could
argue that the United States benefited from war in the past." I won't let
myself be sucked into that one, even though one of his examples -- "the
Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s" -- cries out for correction. The thing about
being a "realist" is that you can excuse anything if it furthers your
"national interest" -- whatever that means. For a long time American
foreign policy was nothing but service to American business interests:
mainly supporting "open trade" (as in the "opening" of Japan), allowing
American banks and business to make loans and investments abroad. Then
came WWII and the US started building bases around the world, evolving
into the capital vs. labor class struggle known as the Cold War. Business
(and not just American business) obviously gained from this shift, but
along with foreign bases and alliances came a cult of power for its own
sake. When you go down a list of the world's countries, America's view
is that the "good guys" are the ones largely subservient to US power, and
the "bad guys" are the ones that chafe and resent us, or worse still go
their own way. (The closest to exceptions here are Israel and Saudi Arabia,
which profess alliance but go their own way, showing that one of the traits
we most appreciate in a foreign country is hypocrisy.)
Walt lays out four reasons why promoting peace should be considered part
of the national interest, and therefore a goal of our government:
- "When a country is on top of the pyramid, the last thing it should want
is anything that might dislodge it." The US is the richest country in the
world, so why risk that through the risk and uncertainty of war? Especially
since the US hasn't been very successful at war lately (like since WWII).
Or, as Walt puts it, "as we learned to our sorrow in Iraq, what looks like
a smashing success at first can easily turn into a costly quagmire."
- "Second, peace is good business." Sure, there are a few businesses that
sell arms, but they are "a small and declining fraction of America's $17
trillion economy." He adds, "peace encourages economic interdependence
and thus global growth and welfare. . . . If you think globalization is
a good thing, in short, promoting peace should be a key part of your
agenda."
- "Third, peace privileges people who are good at promoting human welfare,
whether in the form of cool new products, better health care, improved
government services, inspiring books, art, and music, and all the other
things that bring us joy. War, by contrast, elevates people who are good
at using violence and who profit from collective hatred: rebel leaders,
warlords, terrorists, revolutionaries, xenophobes, etc."
- "Last, but not least, peace is morally preferable. There's an enormous
amount of human suffering in any war, and our basic moral instincts tell
us that the alleviation of that suffering is intrinsically desirable."
Still, every Republican presidential candidate dwells on how much more
tougher he'd (or she'd) be than any Democrat, and every Democrat (including
Sanders) takes pains to show how high a hurdle that would be to clear. So
why isn't anyone even giving lip service to peace? Walt offers some reasons,
including the excess adulation for "the troops" that practically everyone
feels obliged to buy into. Let me add a few more:
- We've become highly compartmentalized, so very few people (voters)
in America have any conscious stake in foreign policy, or indeed in the
rest of the world. If the US overthrows a democratic government in Iran
or Chile, that may be big news there but it means nothing here. As such,
the few people who really care about foreign policy are like a special
interest group, and virtually all of them are economically bound to the
current system. That only gives a practical politician one option for a
campaign pitch. And it's even worse when you win and find yourself stuck
in an unmovable system.
- The title of "commander in chief" has become baked into the job
description of President of the United States, and indeed has come to
tower over the position's other responsibilities (like respecting and
protecting the constitution). Maybe it has something to do with the idea
that chief executives delegate tasks but commanders lead. Politicians
certainly prefer the latter image. (Indeed, we came to wonder whether
Bush thought the job entailed anything else.)
- People readily accept the assertion that "we're engaged in a war"
even though the alleged war is almost totally disconnected from their
everyday lives. Selecting a president is one of the few war-related
acts anyone has to do -- an appeal that the media readily subscribes
to. This is especially attractive to Republican candidates, who have
nothing else of substance to offer (their economic programs are all
geared to the donor class).
- It is widely thought that leading the nation in a time of war is
a higher calling than leading it during peace. Franklin Roosevelt, for
instance, broke tradition and ran for a third term because war loomed
and he wanted to be the man who ran it. Both Bushes started wars to
recast themselves as glorious commanders (although one failed to pick
fights he could claim to win).
- Indeed, the US has a long history of electing former generals to
become president: Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant,
Hayes, Garfield, the other Harrison, but only Eisenhower in the last
120 years. Theodore Roosevelt was famous for his Rough Riders stunt.
Truman in WWI, and Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, and the first Bush in WWII,
and Carter post-WWII all made a big point about their service (if not
their rank; Reagan was in the US Army Reserve, where he "narrated
pre-flight training films").
Walt also revisits Syria, asking
Could We Have Stopped This Tragedy? It's a fair question, and after
a fair review he concludes "no" -- vindicating his initial suspicions.
Still, his "realism" trips him up, leading him to imagine counterfactuals
whereas simply listing what the US in fact did should have sufficed to
show that no variation could have worked. He touches on that here:
To be sure, the Obama administration has not handled Syria well at all.
President Barack Obama erred when he jumped the gun in 2011 and insisted
"Assad must go," locking the United States into a maximalist position and
foreclosing potential diplomatic solutions that might have saved thousands
of lives. Second, Obama's 2012 off-the-cuff remark about chemical weapons
and "red lines" was a self-inflicted wound that didn't help the situation
and gave opponents a sound bite to use against him. The president wisely
backed away from that position, however, and (with Russian help) eventually
devised an arrangement that got rid of Assad's chemical arsenal. This was
no small achievement in itself, but the whole episode did not exactly
inspire confidence. The administration eventually agreed to start a
training program for anti-Assad forces, but did so with neither enthusiasm
nor competence.
And consider what has happened since then. More than 200,000 people are
now dead -- that's approaching 100 times as many victims as 9/11 -- and
numerous towns, cities, and villages have been badly damaged, if not
destroyed. There are reportedly some 11 million displaced people either
internally or out of the country, about half Syria's original population.
A flood of refugees and migrants has landed in Europe, provoking a new
challenge to the European Union's delicate political cohesion and raising
the specter of a sharp increase in right-wing xenophobia. The carnage in
Syria has also helped fuel the emergence and consolidation of the so-called
Islamic State, intensified the Sunni-Shiite split within Islam, and put
additional strain on Syria's other neighbors.
Obama's failures here largely stem from his blanket acceptance of the
main tenets of American foreign policy. The only thing he's rejected has
been the Bush (Cheney/Bremer/but probably not Rumsfeld) notion that US
troops can occupy and rebuild a Middle East nation like Iraq -- a tenet
that no one in the security establishment still believes. But he still
accepts: that the US has vital interests in the region; that the main
thing there is to credibly project power such that the nations' leaders
defer to American directives; that the US should have a free hand to
intervene destructively anywhere we are challenged (or evidently just
for the hell of it); and that the people in those nations don't matter
at all. Thus the US instinctively saw the uprising in Syria as an
opportunity to get rid of the insufficiently servile Assad regime.
They just couldn't figure out a way to make that happen once a direct
command failed. Even now, there is no "humanitarian" option: all they
can do is destroy, so all they can do is to add ISIS (and Al-Nusra and
who knows what else) to their enemies list. The result is that the US
is actively engaging in attacking both sides of the civil war. It's as
if the US had decided to fight WWII by bombing both German and Russian
forces on the Eastern Front, hoping that they'd be able to recruit
some Free Poles once everyone was killed.
Until the US realizes that the lives and welfare of ordinary people
matter more than the fickle allegiances of a handful of corrupt elites,
the US will have nothing constructive to offer the region (or the world).
And if they did, they'd realize that the brutal force they so worship is
the problem, not part of the solution. Of course, it's hard to imagine
the US changing to improve the lives of people abroad when Republicans
here are working so hard to reduce the livelihoods of most Americans
here. (Similarly, Democrats need to realize that they cannot help their
voters here unless they start to respect people abroad, which means
they have to start to unwind America's imperial tentacles, and return
to the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt envisioned as the New Deal of the
postwar order. You'd think that Sanders, at least, would figure that
out.)
Rick Shenkman: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the
Bombing: Lest you think that my comments above about how Americans
react to problems with brute, unthinking force, without any care for the
human lives affected, here's a case example: when Sen. Ted Cruz promised
to "carpet bomb" ISIS, his poll numbers went up.
While many factors can affect a candidate's polling numbers, one
uncomfortable conclusion can't be overlooked when it comes to reactions
to Cruz's comments: by and large, Americans don't think or care much
about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air
power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition
backed by the United States "carried out at least six apparently
unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital,"
Sana'a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about
no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant
media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you've heard
about the HRW findings.
Shenkman has a theory on this, something to do with what he calls
"our stone-age brain" -- in fact, he has a whole book on the subject
(Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of
Smart Politics). In particular, we fail to recognize the victims
of our bombs as human, let alone as people much like us. Distance
has much to do with this, as do the various grouping words we use
to sort people. I tend to think of it as a failure of imagination:
in particular, the ability to imagine the situation reversed, as
almost any interaction can be. (The Golden Rule, in its numerous
variations, is an attempt to formulate this logically. When you
hear someone talk like Cruz, you should realize that he lacks the
most basic skill needed to live in society.) Shenkman emphasizes
the value of storytelling as a means of restoring humanity to the
people our warriors target.
Shenkman suggests that this "stone-age brain" may have had some
Darwinian advantage, but you don't have to buy that. What you do need
to recognize is that we're no longer living in stone-age tribes. We
live in a complex society where we routinely confront strangers, and
indeed depend on their good will for our own survival. In this world,
the instinct to rally behind a charismatic strongman is overrated and
quite possibly disastrous, even though it still seems to be the bread
and butter of American politics -- at least it's second nature to
politicians with a natural knack for appealing to our basest instincts.
But it's not uniquely American: people all around the world think the
same thing. The difference is in who has the power to "carpet bomb"
other countries. In that regard, the US is most potent and dangerous,
but probably not unique -- despite neocon fantasies of a unipolar
world.
Paul Woodward: How to lose the propaganda war with ISIS: Big
announcement Friday was that the Obama administration is launching
a new propaganda ministry to counter ISIS's mastery of social media
(see
New York Times article). After all, nothing can be more potent
than their lies except for our lies. Woodward comments (emphasis
original):
Picture the many meetings that must have taken place over recent months
in which policymakers repeatedly said: in order to stop ISIS we need
to improve the image of the West.
This proposition should have been met with howls of scorn and yet
instead, multiple teams of straight-faced bureaucrats from multiple
agencies nodded their heads in agreement.
At the same time, I greatly doubt anyone believes this kind of PR
exercise will have any value whatsoever and yet the consensus of support
derives from one fact: no one has come up with a better idea.
Better to do something worthless than to do nothing at all -- so
the thinking goes.
The term radicalization has been pathologized, thereby
divorcing it from its psychological meaning. It's viewed as a disease,
with the implication that if the right steps are taken, the contagion
can be controlled.
But to be radicalized is to rebel and anyone who has taken
up such a position of defiance has, in the case of ISIS, already reached
a conclusion about the West. Indeed, they have most likely reflected
more deeply on the West than the majority of their generational
counterparts who, being less likely to engage in cultural critiques
of any kind, don't have a particularly coherent view of the
West -- good or bad.
Woodward's critique is right but the problem is worse than that.
The one group of people most likely to swallow the propaganda whole
is the one that creates. It amounts to a process of self-delusion,
where constant reiteration drums the talking points deep into the
psyche. As such, it moves the argument away from reality and into the
fantasy world of the propagandist, where logic turns self-fulfilling.
It's already hard to think of any war the US entered more thoughtlessly
than the war against ISIS, and the propagation of this propaganda is
likely to cement current delusions (e.g., about our righteousness and
their evil). If, that is, it works at all, which I guess isn't a
given.
Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:
Nu'man Abd al-Wahid: How Zionism helped create the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia: Delicious lede:
The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist
entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British
imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very
few students. . . . but if you would like to delve into how and why the
British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four hundred years you're
practically on your own in this endeavor. One must admit, that from the
British establishment's perspective, this is a formidable and remarkable
achievement.
The Saud family took over Hijaz in 1925 after the British switched
sides against their former "Arab revolt" client, Sharif Hussain --
the main disagreement between the latter and the British was the
Zionist colony in Palestine. Thus Saudi Arabia became a Beitish (and
later American) client state.
Justin Fox: Why Economists Took So Long to Focus on Inequality.
Income of the top 1% started to grow cancerously in the 1980s, but
few economists noticed let alone studied it, at least until Thomas
Piketty and Emmanuel Saez came along and made the data impossible
to ignore. Fox has some ideas, but they aren't very convincing.
Paul Krugman has a comment
here.
Olivier Roy: France's Oedipal Islamist Complex: Roy is a French
expert on militant Islam -- has written several books on the subject.
He points out that French jihadists are either recent converts, which
he sees as radicalized youth who turned to Islam to formalize their
revolt, or second generation Muslims, similarly radicalized from their
experiences. On the other hand, he notes that there are no jihadis
among first-generation immigrants or the more thoroughly integrated
third-generation. That seems roughly right for the US as well.
Why Islam? For members of the second generation, it's obvious: They
are reclaiming, on their own terms, an identity that, in their eyes,
their parents have debased. They are "more Muslim than the Muslims"
and, in particular, than their parents. The energy that they put into
reconverting their parents (in vain) is significant, but it shows to
what extent they are on another planet (all the parents have a story
to tell about these exchanges). As for the converts, they choose
Islam because it's the only thing on the market of radical rebellion.
Joining the Islamic State offers the certainty of terrorizing.
Omid Safi: Ten Ways on How Not to Think About the Iran/Saudi Conflict:
All are worth considering, including "we in the United States should do
some long and hard looking into our own culpability" -- and not just for
the two points Safi mentions (selling arms to Saudi Arabia and overlooking
Saudi human rights violations) -- for starters, I recall how we did the
same things when Iran was controlled by a despotic monarchy, how much we
resent Iran's rejection of us, and how we've let Israel and Saudi Arabia
manipulate our loathing of the Iranian government to hurt the Iranian
people. Also noteworthy is oil: Saudi Arabia is already suffering from
low oil prices; once we let Iranian oil flood the world market, Saudi
Arabia will be hurting even more. The history of the waxing and waning
of Shi'ism is fascinating, but that's the sort of fact that opportunists
can parlay into an excuse for war and repression, as we've seen, e.g.,
in America's attempts to pit Shi'a against Sunni since 1990 (not that
Iran didn't try something similar after Iraq attacked in the 1980s).
Friday, January 08, 2016
Rhapsody Streamnotes (January 2016)
Pick up text
here.
Monday, January 04, 2016
Music Week
Music: Current count 26050 [26017] rated (+33), 395 [396] unrated (-1).
One New Year's resolution that I've been able to keep is that I
stop adding records to the previous year's list, so that now that
2015 is gone, I'm officially done with 2014. The final list for 2014
is here. Since the January 31,
2015 freeze date, I added 81 records to the file, bringing the total
number of records there to 1248. That was up slightly from 2013
(1222) and 2012 (1190), but still well below the record years of
2011 (1415) and 2010 (1300). The first year I topped 1000 records
was 2004, when I started
Jazz Consumer Guide --
1052 that year, which has only dropped below 1000 twice since
(982 in 2005, 996 in 2008). The last Voice-published JCG
was in 2011, and the freebies thinned out after then, but I had
started using Rhapsody in 2007, which took up the slack (and then
some).
In fact, the share of rated records I've sourced from Rhapsody
(and a few other download sources, including links from publicists)
has increased every year since 2007 (16.1%), up to 58.1% in 2014.
(The series from 2008-13: 21.9% 34.0%, 42.5%, 46.8%, 47.4%, 49.5%.)
It is not clear whether that trend will be sustained for 2015: my
plan is to "freeze" the file no later than January 31, and to
continue to add stragglers until December 31, 2016. The current
2015 file lists 1007 albums,
of which 505 (50.1%) are from Rhapsody, etc. Virtually everything
I add in that time will be streamed, so if I wind up with 1200
records (a little less than my 2012-14 average) I'll wind up at
58.5%. Odds of that happening are probably 50-50. Last year I
added approximately 230 albums to my 2014 list after January 1
(133 in the pre-freeze January 24 Rhapsody Streamnotes, plus
about one-third of the 50 more in the February 13 RS, plus 81
post-freeze albums, so another 193 wouldn't be out of ordinary.
However, I suspect that I'm beginning to slow down, so I may
not add that any. The number of physical albums I received (or
in some cases bought -- not easy to separate the two, but the
latter is certainly a tiny share for the last 5-6 years) has
declined every year since 2011 (753, 623, 617, 523, 502), and
significantly since 2004-07 (1017, 941, 1092, 956) -- peak JCG
years, but also pre-Rhapsody, so I was also buying more CDs.
It would be a lot of work (and probably not worth doing) but
I could go back through the metacritic files (and I'd probably
need some additional sources) and figure out my share of all
(at least fairly well known) jazz releases. If I did so, I have
little doubt that it would show that my share has decreased
regularly since 2004-07 (with a probable peak year of 2004).
I've currently heard 211 of the 426 jazz records in the
2015 EOY Aggegate
List, so 49.5% -- better than I would have expected, but I
have many fewer jazz lists compiled this year. (Actually, I
have a larger sample list,
2015 Music Tracking: Jazz,
with 1040 jazz albums listed, of which I've heard 610 -- 58.6%;
that list includes everything I have heard, whereas the aggregate
only lists records that have appeared on other lists.) That's just
one data point -- not a trend -- and while it strikes me as respectable
I still sense that I am slipping.
I keep expecting my
Jazz and
Non-Jazz EOY lists
to converge in length, but while I added four non-jazz albums this
week (Days With Dr. Yen Lo, Halsey, Nozinja, and Skylar
Spence -- underground rap, teen pop, Afro-electronica, and disco),
Allen Lowe matched that on the jazz side (with a little help from
Matthew Shipp), and Steve Swell added an extra, so now the counts
are 76-63. Evening out compared to a month ago, but still there
are blips. After the JCP ballots were sent off, I received 5-CD
packages from both Lowe and Swell. It took a while to sort them
out, but I wound up with five A- and 4 B+(***) (one of Swell's is
2-CD). Lowe's are all fairly matched, with a couple regulars and
many friends circling around a common approach -- the sort of
thing he previously released in single packages (the 3-CD Blues
and the Empirical Truth and the 4-CD Mulatto Radio).
Three of Swell's sets are the sort of avant-jazz that has little
chance of appealing to non-believers -- solo trombone album, a
compilation of scattered live sets (including more solo), and
a trio with Peter Brötzmann -- but all are exceptionally well
done, hence my grades. The fourth, Kende Dreams, is an
all-star quintet where everyone excels. Good chance had I gotten
it earlier it would have wound up on my ballot, but not feeling
like bumping anyone so soon, I left it a notch lower in my file.
Terrific album, even for someone with no interest or knowledge
of Bartók (like me).
Among the old music, I picked out the two Kaiser records because
I had them marked as ungraded, and could skip the step of finding
them by tuning into Rhapsody. The unrated account is listed weekly.
These are records that I have (at least at one point had) but never
got around to. New records pile onto the end of that list, but I
currently only have two unrated 2015 releases -- a cassette tape
I can't play and a Kansas CD I won't (at least not now) -- and most
recent years have been handled with similar efficiency. So most of
those records are ten or more years old, many bought up when the
last decent local record stores went out of business, and some date
back to the LP era (in which case I quite possibly don't have them
anymore). Still, I always like to knock a few off whenever I get in
the neighborhood, as I was with the new Kaiser/Russell album.
Negro Religious Field Recordings appeared in an Allen Lowe
Facebook post. I clicked on it, then found it on Rhapsody, and figured
why not? There's probably a lot more down that rabbit hole, and maybe
some day I'll go there, but for me this resonated not just from hearing
Lowe's latest records but from checking out a Staples Family reissue
that's nowhere near as good.
Good chance I'll post a Rhapsody Streamnotes sometime this week.
Draft file is currently 125 records deep, more than enough. Probably
enough time left in January for a second column too, although I have
a couple other ideas kicking around.
EOY Aggegate list
should be winding down, but I'm still have a bunch of lists I
haven't transcribed yet, and a few stragglers are coming in. One
thing I did do was to score the Robert Christgau [RC] and Michael
Tatum [MT] grades I've been tracking: 5 for A/A+, 4 for A-, 3 for
B+/***, 2 for **, 1 for *. I'm not sure I have them all yet, and
will add new ones when they appear (until I stop working on the
file). I might wind up doing the same thing for my own grades,
but that would be a lot more work.
Here are some EOY lists by critics you should know by name (and
note I especially appreciate long lists, which I regard as realistic
for people who listen broadly):
Also:
For a list of many more lists, look
here.
New records rated this week:
- Peter Brötzmann/Steve Swell/Paal Nilssen-Love: Krakow Nights (2015, Not Two): [cd]: B+(***)
- Cécile & Jean-Luc Cappozzo: Soul Eyes (2015, Fou): [cd]: B+(**)
- Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (2015, Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
- Deradoorian: The Expanding Flower Planet (2015, Anticon): [r]: B
- The Deslondes: The Deslondes (2015, New West): [r]: B
- Dr. Yen Lo: Days With Dr. Yen Lo (2015, Pavlov Institute): [r]: A-
- Open Mike Eagle: A Special Episode Of (2015, Mello Music Group, EP): [r]: B+(**)
- Jean-Marc Foussat & Jean-Luc Petit: . . . D'Où Vient La Lumière! (2015, Fou): [cd]: B+(**)
- Patty Griffin: Servant of Love (2015, PGM): [r]: B+(**)
- Halsey: Badlands (2015, Astralwerks): [r]: A-
- Hamilton [Original Broadway Cast Recording] (2015, Atlantic, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
- Ted Hearne: The Source (2015, New Amsterdam): [r]: B+(*)
- Amy Helm: Didn't It Rain (2015, E1): [r]: B+(**)
- Henry Kaiser & Ray Russell: The Celestial Squid (2014 [2015], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(***)
- Toby Keith: 35 MPH Town (2015, Show Dog Nashville): [r]: B
- Kode9: Nothing (2015, Hyperdub): [r]: B+(**)
- Lightning Bolt: Fantasy Empire (2015, Thrill Jockey): [r]: B+(**)
- Low: Ones and Sixes (2015, Sub Pop): [r]: B
- Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Man With Guitar: Where's Robert Johnson? (2013 [2015], Constant Sorrow): [cd]: A-
- Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Where a Cigarette Is Smoked by Ten Men (2015, Constant Sorrow): [cd]: A-
- Allen Lowe: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: We Will Gather When We Gather (2015, Constant Sorrow): [cd]: A-
- Allen Lowe/Matthew Shipp/Kevin Ray/Jake Millett: In the Diaspora of the Diaspora: Ballad for Albert (2015, Constant Sorrow): [cd]: B+(***)
- Old Man Luedecke: Domestic Eccentric (2015, True North): [r]: B+(***)
- Nozinja: Nozinja Lodge (2015, Warp): [r]: A-
- Dave Rawlings Machine: Nashville Obsolete (2015, Acony): [r]: B+(*)
- Rival Consoles: Howl (2015, Erased Tapes): [r]: B+(**)
- Royal Headache: High (2015, What's Your Rupture?): [r]: B+(*)
- Matthew Shipp: Matthew Shipp Plays the Music of Allen Lowe: I Alone: The Everlasting Beauty of Monotony (2015, Constant Sorrow): [cd]: A-
- Troye Sivan: Blue Neighbourhood (2015, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
- Skylar Spence: Prom King (2015, Carpark): [r]: A-
- Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (2015, Sonnet Sound): [r]: B+(*)
- Steve Swell: Kanreki: Reflection & Renewal (2011-14 [2015], Not Two, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
- Steve Swell: Steve Swell's Kende Dreams: Hommage à Bartók (2014 [2015], Silkheart): [cd]: A-
- Steve Swell: The Loneliness of the Long Distasnce Improviser (2015, Swell): [cd]: B+(***)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Ed Sanders: Yiddish-Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side (2006 [2015], Okraina, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
- Sonny Simmons: Reincarnation (1991 [2015], Arhoolie): [r]: B+(**)
- The Staple Singers: Freedom Highway Complete: Recorded Live at Chicago's New Nazareth Church (1965 [2015], Epic/Legacy): [r]: B+(*)
Old music rated this week:
- Henry Kaiser: Devil in the Drain (1987, SST): [r]: B+(*)
- Henry Kaiser & David Lindley: A World Out of Time, Vol. 2 (1993, Shanachie): [r]: B+(*)
- Negro Religious Field Recordings: From Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee (1934-1942): Vol. 1 (1934-42 [1994], Document): [r]: A-
- Team Hegdal: Vol 1 (2009 [2010], Øra Fonogram): [r]: B+(***)
- Team Hegdal: Vol 2 (2011, Øra Fonogram): [r]: B+(***)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Jenny Maybee/Nick Phillips: Haiku (self-released): January 29
- Gabriel Mervine: People (Synergy Music): January 22
- Naked Truth: Avian Thug (Rare Noise): January 22
Added grades for remembered LPs from way back when:
- Ed Sanders: Beer Cans on the Moon (1972, Reprise):
B-
Sunday, January 03, 2016
Saudi Kills
I've missed doing this the last couple of weeks. I've had other things
to focus on, and figured I'd wind up writing pretty much the same things
about the same outrages when I returned as I would have written before.
So Saudi Arabia's mass execution of 47 mostly political prisoners came
as a bit of a shock. Not a complete shock, mind you. Since King Abdullah's
death last year, the Saudi monarchy has been increasingly aggressive about
throwing its power around, most obviously in its entry and escalation of
Yemen's civil war: one of the most blatant war crimes of the last decade,
one that practically every day generates reports of atrocities. But Saudi
Arabia has been meddling in the affairs of other countries since 1980 --
partly in response to the twin shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the
siege at Mecca's Grand Mosque, both in 1979, but largely because the
Reagan administration, following Kissinger's 1970s strategy of promoting
regional powers as proxies for American mischief, encouraged the Saudis
to help finance the Holy War in Afghanistan against the infidel Russians.
The Saudis not only ponied up the money, they understood that to recruit
Mujahideen they needed to promote their state-linked Salafist doctrine
throughout the Islamic world. In doing so, the Saudis (and their fellow
aristocrats among the former British cronies of the Persian Gulf states)
built the financial and human infrastructure that promotes reactionary
terror throughout the Middle East -- one that has taken on a life and
logic of its own, turning on its former masters as surely as the Terror
devoured the Jacobins.
America's role in all of this can has resulted in one blunder after
another, the root cause two beliefs we picked up from the British who
got there (and got out) first. One is the conviction that all those who
(however temporarily) stand with us are advancing civilization (basically
a mental framework we have for admiring ourselves). The second is blind
faith that any problem can be solved by force, so long as it is so swift
and brutal that no one will dare repeat the offense. The first is little
more than a invitation for sycophancy and corruption, one that attracts
the worst possible allies, but which wears thin on anyone with integrity
or principles. While the latter is so blatantly unjust that that it only
breeds resentment and subversion, including those asymmetric acts of
sudden violence we dub "terror" -- terminology oblivious to what real
machines of war, like B-1 bombers and C-5 gunships, routinely wreak.
Of course, the British only made matters worse, except for a few oil
company owners, but they trained the Israelis in their methods -- in
some cases personally, as with Ronald Wingate and Moshe Dayan; often
by example, as with their suppression of the 1937-39 Arab Revolt; and
ultimately well enough that the Israelis preserved the whole of British
colonial law for selective application to the Palestinians. With such
methods, the Israelis have managed to destabilize their dominance and
extend their conflict for many generations. America followed in those
footsteps not because the approach seemed to work as out of arrogance,
figuring that the self-appointed rulers of the free world were destined
to succeed.
Of course, they haven't. Nearly fifteen years of active US military
intervention in the region has cycled tragedy and farce in an ever
more irresistible whorl -- among the casualties we find the brains
of all current presidential candidates (even Rand Paul; even Bernie
Sanders). Isn't one of those textbook definitions of insanity the
belief that repeating the same act will produce a different result?
The most immediate threat we face comes from the neocons, refreshed
by a brief respite from an Iraq fiasco that they're now convinced
they had won (until the lily-livered Obama sold them out), anxious
to send American troops back into the fray. To accomplish this, they
not only peddle flattering self-delucions, they never waste a chance
to paint ISIS as the gravest threat to civilization, like, ever. And
they've been so successful that hardly any "very serious" political
pundit dispute the urgent need to "smash ISIS" (that seems to be the
favored phrase, as if several million people living on their land
are mere cockroaches).
Their propaganda campaign has worked is largely because we seem to
have this primordial fear of an Islamic State -- presumably dating to
the downfall of Constantinople in 1454 if not the Battle of Tours in
732, although who knows about either? (More likely this is some sort
of mirror reflection where we fear that others should do to us as we
did to them; e.g., in the Crusades from 1092 and the Inquisition from
1492. Islam was almost never spread by the sword after the 8th century --
the exceptions were converts with a history of raiding, like the Turks
and Mughals, and most people under the early Caliphs retained their
pre-Islamic religions and legal systems without compulsion.) But while
we're geing goaded into war with an "Islamic State" centered in Raqaa,
we hear nothing about the more/less equally brutal Islamic State in
Riyadh -- Saudi Arabia -- which represses Shi'a, bans all non-Muslims,
punishes people they consider criminals with beheadings, which even
practices the ancient art of crucifixion. Last week's mass executions,
on top of the bombing and invasion of Yemen, should offer us a wake
up call. Saudi Arabia gets a free pass from the neocons because they
are rich, both selling the West oil and reinvesting their profits in
Western banks. The only reason the Raqaa IS seems more brutal is that
they are engaged in a life-and-death struggle, whereas the Riyadh IS
is sitting high, directing most of its brutality abroad -- but not
all, as we should see clearly now.
I shouldn't need to say this, but I am not advocating US military
intervention to right the wrongs of Saudi Arabia. I don't think the
US can or should do that, but we should stop helping the Saudis commit
those wrongs -- every bomb they drop in Yemen is, after all, made in
America -- and we should realize our limits in Syria and Iraq (among
other things, that we can't really distinguish friend from foe, that
we don't really have anything to offer the people there other than
death and destruction, and that we have no business doing that).
Maybe you think I'm one of those awful isolationists? I have two
answers to that. One is that if you have to choose between being a
serial murderer and a hermit, I'd much prefer that you opt for the
latter. The other is that it is possible to interact with the Middle
East (or anyplace else) without becoming one or the other. You can,
for instance, trade, invest, exchange students and tourists -- all
you need for that is stability and security and mutual respect,
which pacts, meddling, an arms race, and intervention obliterates.
In fact, aside from a tempest over piracy (the Barbary Wars, 1801-05)
the US pretty much did just that, all the way up through 1945: after
that Israel, the Cold War, and oil greed and fear distorted things,
but also the US forgot its founding principles, starting with
appreciation of freedom from foreign dominance and entanglements,
an aversion to maintaining a standing army, and at least a nominal
belief that "all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights" -- you know, life, liberty, the
pursuit of happiness. Ironically, the same time Americans were losing
their principles the UN was adopting them as basic human rights. One
could have built a foreign policy around those ideals, but Truman and
Eisenhower didn't, and later presidents -- especially Nixon, Reagan,
and the Bushes, but also fatefully the Democrats as well -- only got
worse.
Here are some links on the Saudi mass executions:
Saudi Arabia: Mass Execution Largest Sine 1980:
The mass execution to begin 2016 follows a 20-year high of 158 executions
in 2015. [ . . . ]
Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding due process violations
in Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system that make it difficult for a
defendant to get a fair trial even in capital cases. A Human Rights Watch
analysis in September revealed serious due process concerns during four
trials of Shia protesters before the Specialized Criminal Court. They
include broadly framed charges that do not resemble recognizable crimes,
denial of access to lawyers at arrest and during pretrial detention,
quick dismissal of allegations of torture without investigation, and
admission of confessions that defendants claimed were coerced.
Angus McDowall: Saudi mass execution driven by fear of Sunni militancy:
Most of the negative reaction has focused on Shiites who were killed for
"crimes" we would view as free speech, but also on the list were dozens of
people we would call "Sunni militants" and probably put on our own kill lists:
The Al Saud ruling family regard the expansion of Shi'ite Iran's influence
in the Middle East as a threat to their security and to their ambition of
playing the leading role among Arab states.
Inside the kingdom, however, it is the threat of a rebellion by the
majority Sunnis that most alarms a dynasty whose rule is based on
conservative support at home and an alliance with the West.
All past threats to the Al Saud, from a 1920s tribal rebellion to
riots in the 1960s, a siege at Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979 and protests
in the 1990s, were caused by conservative Sunni anger at modernisation
or ties with the West.
That was why the al Qaeda uprising that began in 2003, and attacked
the Al Saud by turning its own conservative Salafi brand of Sunni Islam
against it, was such a danger. It is why the jihadist movement's latest
iteration, Islamic State, is also a problem.
While Islamic State seems to lack real support among Saudis, some
may sympathise with its broader goals, approving of its rhetoric against
Shi'ites and the West and its criticism of corruption among the Al Saud.
By executing al Qaeda ideologues and attackers, Riyadh was showing its
determination to crush support for the militant cause. By also killing
four Shi'ites, angering Iran in the process, it was telling conservative
Sunnis it was still on their side.
In other words, the Saudis seek to solve all their problems by killing
anyone who questions the right of the ruling family to usurp all of the
nation's vast wealth.
Adam Withnall: How Saudi Arabia's own media reported on the execution
of 47 people:
The Saudi press, regulated by the government and required by the country's
constitution-like charter to "strengthen national unity," exists under a
perpetual state of self-censorship.
In an editorial entitled "Law took its course," the major Riyadh-based
English language news outlet Arab News portrays the executions in the
context of prominent terror attacks on foreigners in the kingdom and
"proceedings that took years in the courts."
I believe KSA means Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Ben Hubbard: Iranian Protesters Ransack Saudi Embassy After Execution
of Shiite Cleric
Simon Tisdall: Saudi executions put ball of regional tension in Iran's
court:
Nimr's merciless dispatch will thus be seen as deliberate Saudi defiance
of western opinion and international human rights concerns and, possibly,
as a direct challenge to Tehran. Iran's leadership may now feel duty bound
to pick up the gauntlet. This is why the outrage and condemnation currently
being expressed by Iraqi, Lebanese and Yemeni Shia politicians is essentially
background noise. Likewise the limited, spontaneous street protests in
Bahrain that followed the executions. Shias in Saudi Arabia and across
the region will wait to see what Iran decides. They will take their lead
from Tehran.
At the very least, Iran can be expected to exploit these events
diplomatically, stepping up its propaganda campaign against what it
habitually terms the illegitimate and irresponsible Saudi regime.
Countries such as Britain and the US, closely allied to Riyadh, are
already embarrassed by Saudi human rights abuses. Public disgust will
increase their discomfort, though they will not abandon their strategic
Saudi alliance for one dead Shia cleric.
Saudi Arabia breaks off ties with Iran after al-Nimr execution
Caroline Mortimer: David Cameron criticised for turning 'blind eye' to
mass executions in Saudi Arabia
Jessica Schulberg: Fiorina and Carson Defend Saudi Government, Which
Cites Sharia Law to Execute 47 People. You could probably get
similar statements from most other candidates.
Maajid Nawaz: Saudi Arabis's ISIS-Like Justice:
Among those killed today was Ayatollah Nimr al-Nimr. He was a vocal
Saudi-Shia opposition cleric who publicly criticized the ruling al-Saud
family and called for elections. In 2011 Nimr said that he favored
protest over violence, "The weapon of the word is stronger than bullets,
because authorities will profit from a battle of weapons." The Saudi
interior ministry however, accused him of being behind attacks on
police and allying with another regional theocracy, Shia Iran.
In fact, Saudi Arabia's regional tension with Iran has reached such
levels that it is prepared to countenance the execution of minors.
A 17 year old relation of al-Nimr has been sentenced to crucifixion --
his headless corpse to be displayed in public for several days. And
Abdullah al-Zaher, who was 15 when he was arrested, also awaits
beheading. This makes him the youngest person so far to be sentenced
to death.
Beyond executions, Nobel Prize nominee Raif Badawi, a blogger who
started the "Free Saudi Liberals" forum in 2008, has been convicted
of "insulting Islam" and given a 10-year prison term with 1,000 lashes.
And as Lujain al-Hathloul's and Maysa Al Amour's imprisonment shows,
women still can't drive in Saudi Arabia. Nor, apparently, can they
use social media to complain about being unable to drive. Meanwhile,
neighboring Yemen has been carpet-bombed to oblivion by the House of
Saud.
Rami G Khouri: 2015's Dark Legacy in the Middle East:
Applying this principle to the last year in the Middle East reveals
several troubling trends that have made life difficult for hundreds
of millions of people. One in particular stands out, and strikes me
as a root cause of many other negative trends that plague our region.
This is the tendency of governments to use increasingly harsh measures
to restrict the freedoms of their citizens to express themselves and
meaningfully to participate politically and hold power accountable.
Several aspects of this behavior make it especially onerous. It is
practiced by all states in the region -- Arab, Israeli, Iranian, and
Turkish -- leaving few people in this part of the world who can live
as fully free and dignified human beings. It is justified on the basis
of existing constitutional powers, so governments can jail tens of
thousands of their citizens, rescind their nationality, or torture and
kill them in the worst cases, simply because of the views they express,
without any recourse to legal or political challenge. It shows no signs
of abating, and indeed may be worsening in lands like Egypt, Turkey,
and others. And, it is most often practiced as part of a "war on terror"
that seeks to quell criminal terror attacks, but in practice achieves
the opposite; the curtailment of citizen rights and freedoms exacerbates
the indignities and humiliations that citizens feel against their
government, which usually amplifies, rather than reduces, the threat
of political violence.
Capital punishment by country: Lots of statistics: 102 nations have
completely abolished capital punishment, it's fallen into disuse but hasn't
been outlawed in 57 more, leaving 37 nations who actively make a habit of
killing their own people. In 2014, China killed the most, but 2nd place
Iran killed the most per million (aside from a statistical blip in Equatorial
Guinea), followed by Saudi Arabia. With Saudi Arabia's body count growing
from 90 in 2014 to 158 in 2015 (or 205 in 2015 + 2 days), there's little
doubt that Saudi Arabia is the most execution-prone state. United States
is ranked fifth at 35, but that vastly underestimates the number of death
sentences handed out here. Egypt is listed 8th with 15, but last year
Egypt handed out hundreds of death sentences in a single day/trial.
Israel is not listed because all of their executions are extrajudicial.
We also don't have statistics for people shot and killed by police, but
those are significant factors in the US and Israel. Nor for people
killed by governments in military actions -- a statistic that Syria
and Iraq excel in, although Saudi Arabia has been racking up a high
score in Yemen recently, and I calculated that during Israel's recent
51-day assault on Gaza their kill rate per capita was higher than
Syria's.
If I could whisper into the ear of Ayatollah Khamanei, I'd suggest
he should review the relevant books and conclude that capital punishment,
at least under circumstances today, is contrary to the laws and spirit
of Islam. Abolishing the institution in Iran would do wonders for that
nation's international respect, and would instantly give it moral high
ground to criticize Saudi Arabia. As it is, Iran is nearly as bad as
Saudi Arabia, and the pair, with their deep conceits and pretensions
are embarrassments to Islam. This is because the belief that it is just
for the state to execute criminals opens the door for all kinds of
state-directed violence. We see this even in the US, which until
recently could point to a strong legacy of due process.
Ran out of time to comment on anything more, but here are some
single-line links I had opened up:
Saturday, January 02, 2016
How to Fish
Thought I'd share a recipe I evolved for two since I tried it last
night, working mostly from memory and hunch, and it came out marvelous.
My original idea was to write it up and mail it to a cousin, but then
I thought of a couple more people who might enjoy it. And then it dawned
on me that I could just as easily post it here for the masses who read
this blog.
The basic recipe is "Baked Fish with Capers and Olives" from Nancy
Harmon Jenkins, The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, which I've
transcribed and annotated
here. That recipe calls
for two pounds of fish to serve 6-8. I picked out three filets from a
bag of frozen pacific cod, probably a bit less than 1 lb. I also had
two Yukon gold potatoes on hand, so I peeled them (not necessary) and
cut them up into a rough 1/2-inch dice. Put them in a bowl, added some
extra virgin olive oil (about a tablespoon, a generous amount), salt
and pepper. Also coarsely chopped three cloves of garlic, added to
the potatoes, then spread them out in a 9x12 baking dish (effectively
oiling the dish). I placed the fish in the middle of the pan, moving
the potatoes to the side.
Heat the oven to 400F. In the same empty bowl (no, I didn't wash),
I put one 14 oz. can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes, a teaspoon of
lemon juice (not fresh, but do it right if you want), 1/2 teaspoon
of sugar, about two tablespoons of capers, and about one-half cup of
green olives (from the Dillons olive bar: large, pitted, no stuffing;
cut in half lengthwise). Stir this mixture up, then spoon it over
the fish. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top. (I used "gluten free" but
you can probably find something better.) Finally, drizzle a little
more olive oil on top (I used about 2 teaspoons).
Bake for 35-40 minutes, by which the potatoes should be done, the
sauce bubbly, and the fish flaky. The recipe above also promises
browned bread crumbs, but mine stay pretty white (although they do
add some texture. And that's it: about 10-12 minutes of prep, plus
the wait while it bakes. You could add a green salad -- I'd probably
do horiatiki (Greek) [1] or panzanella (Italian) [2] or maybe
fattoush (Lebanese) [3] depending on what I had on hand (or some
ad hoc mix, since they're all pretty compatible).
If the fish is frozen (and not very thick) you don't even need
to thaw it out. Fresh tomatoes would be more work, and unless they're
home grown aren't worth the trouble (use them in the salad). Use
any kind of flaky white fish -- you can probably get away with farm
fish like swai or tilapia but it won't be as good as cod. I suppose
you could try this with salmon, but I'd rather do something else
with it [4]. Bluefish should work. Catfish might -- I've never tried
baking it [5]. For salt cod, try
this (it's a fair amount
of work, and a staple that was once cheap enough to feed to slaves
but isn't anymore).
Notes:
[1] Horiatiki (Greek) salad: toss together romaine lettuce,
cucumber (peeled, seeded, chopped), red onion (chopped), tomatoes (cut
into wedges or chunks), bell pepper (any color, sliced thin), kalamata
olives (pitted), feta cheese, parsley, anchovies, capers (most of these
are optional, but it won't be recognized as a Greek salad without the
lettuce, tomatoes, olives, and feta; the capers aren't in Jenkins'
recipe). For dressing, use 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, juice of
1/2 lemon, 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano, salt and pepper to taste:
shake it up, pour it on, and toss.
[2] Panzanella is an Italian salad with bread -- ciabatta
works well, cut the crust off and dice it; mix it with shopped tomatoes
so it starts to get mushy (it should blend into the salad, not stand
out like croutons -- nothing against croutons). Also use romaine
lettuce, red onion, cucumber, and basil (again, more or less -- the
bread and tomatoes are key). Not in the recipe, but you can add some
grated parmesan. For dressing, use 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil,
1/4 cup red wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon balsamic, salt and pepper.
[3] Fattoush is another bread salad, from Lebanon, but here
you want some crunch: traditionally use toasted pita bread, although
I'd rather make croutons from French bread than use those pita crisps
that show up at most local restaurants. (The best I've made was with
Turkish pide bread, which is not the same thing as pita.) Use romaine
lettuce, cucumber, radishes (chunked), scallions (chopped), tomatoes
(chunked), parsley, mint (again, more or less). Jenkins calls for
pickles ("plain brine-pickled cucumbers, not sweetened or heavily
flavored with garlic or dill"), which isn't a bad idea but I'd rather
add capers, and I'm surprised she didn't include olives (kalamata,
pitted, coarsely chopped) and/or feta. For dressing, crush a couple
garlic cloves in some kosher salt, then add 1/4 cup extra-virgin
olive oil, 1/4 cup lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons of ground sumac.
[4] The easiest thing to do with salmon is to marinate it
in teriyaki sauce (equal parts, e.g. 1/4 cup each, regular soy sauce,
sake [Japanese rice wine], and sugar) for half an hour, then skin-side
down broil it 6-10 minutes (or until it browns on top and flakes),
brushing it with reserved marinade midway. If no skin, turn it over
midway. I usually make rice (sometimes
fried with ham and egg) and
stir-fried lima beans with
it, although there are lots of other options -- unfortunately, they
almost all take longer to cook than the salmon.
Of course, there is much more you can do with salmon. I've had
several guests tell me that Barbara Tropp's
Clear-Steamed Salmon
with Ginger-Black Bean Vinaigrette was the most delicious
meal they had ever had. The ingredient list can be daunting --
my secret is Chef Chow's Szechuan Hot Bean Paste, which as far as
I can tell is no longer sold (I've bought two jars in my life, both
in NJ, one when I lived there in the early 1980s, the other when
I moved back in the late 1990s -- I use it sparely but I'm almost
out). But the techniques are pretty straightforward: marinate the
salmon, steam it (over onion and spinach), mix up a big bowl of
vinaigrette in the food processor, and spoon it over the steamed
fish.
[5] I don't think I've ever made catfish from a recipe. I
grew up on fried catfish, some of which I personally caught (well,
not many). So I can do that, but nowadays what I prefer is dredge it
in flour, sautee it in olive oil infused with a couple crushed cloves
of garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Usually serve that with
pasta. In fact, add some preserved lemon peel, chopped garlic, and
capers to the oil I cooked the fish in and use it to sauce the pasta.
Actually, you dump the pasta into the pan, put the fish on top,
spritz it with lemon juice, and garnish with parsley.
Jenkins' book has become my go-to standard for Mediterranean,
although I also use Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert, Sarah Woodward,
and lately Yotam Ottolenghi -- also Penelope Casas for Spanish,
Marcella Hazan for Italian, and Tess Mallos for Greek and Middle
Eastern. (Whoa! Just checked those names and discovered that the
latter three, all in their 70s, died in 2012-13. Roden and Wolfert
are also in their 70s. Don't know about Woodward, whose short but
well-illustrated Classic Mediterranean Cuisine is a perfect
first book on the subject -- and my still-best sources for a dozen
or more recipes I've made many times, from Paella Valenciana to
Imam Bayildi).
Someone once told me that if you can read a cookbook, you can
make anything. I would like to think I've shown that to be true.
|
Dec 2015 |
|