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Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 36 days ago, on September 14.

I rather arbitrarily rushed this out, partly because it had been so long that some of the old stories have started to fade — like Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel, in the new "Topical Stories" section — while others have taken significant turns. Back when I was doing Speaking of Which I had a routine of cycling through a series of websites and sorting out whatever I found. This isn't normally anywhere close to that systematic, with this time even less than usual. Another reason for doing it now is that I have better things to do this week, and I don't want the draft file hanging over my head. I figure I can add more if need be, and possibly revisit some bits, like I did ten days after my last one, in More Thoughts on Loose Tabs. No guarantee that I'll do that again, but it seems like there's always more to say.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Charlie Kirk: Right-wing activist, hustler, and media personality, shot and killed on September 10, his martyrdom quickly refashioned as an excuse to purge any critical discussion of the right. Wikipedia offers a comprehensive biography as well as a sampling of his views. He ran Turning Point USA, an organizing group reputed to be popular on college campuses and instrumental in getting the vote out for Trump -- one of many ways he was closely aligned with Trump (I'm tempted to say, like Ernst Röhm was aligned with Hitler, but less muscle and more mouth). He had a prominent talk radio program, and wrote several books:

  • Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations, with Brent Hamachek (2016)
  • Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters (2018, forward by Donald Trump Jr)
  • The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020)
  • The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth (2022)
  • Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024)

Some more articles on Kirk:

  • Jeffrey St Clair [09-15] An occurrence in Orem: notes on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Much of this appeared in a Roaming Charges at the time, but here has been restructured for this one subject.

  • Kyle Chayka [09-17]: Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson came from the same warped online worlds: "The right-wing activist and his alleged assassin were both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement at all costs."

  • Eric Levitz [09-20]: The comforting fiction that Charlie Kirk's killer was far-right: "Why some progressives lied to themselves about Tyler Robinson." Not a lot of good examples of "progressives" lying to themselves here (Heather Cox Richardson, Jimmy Kimmel, although few reports are detailed enough to tell). I see little value in trying to tag a label on a shooter, and much risk, of confusion or worse. But in general, shooting your opponents isn't a very left thing to do, while on the right it's both more common and more in tune with their ideology (inequality bolstered by power ultimately based on force) and custom (like their gun fetishism). But it's also likely that the more violent people on the right become, the more tempting their victims will find it to fight back in kind. When they do, that shouldn't suggest that their violence is somehow the consequence of left thinking — where inequality is seen as the key problem, and violence is opposed both on moral and political grounds — as opposed to a stray impulse from the broader American gun culture. I'd go so far as to say that if/when someone who identifies with the left shoots an alleged enemy of the left, that such a person is experiencing a (perhaps temporary) suspension of principles, not acting from them. I can even imagine scenarios where anti-right violence is reasonable — e.g., "self-defense" (which I reject as a right, where as with our "stand your ground" laws can easily be construed as a license to kill, but may accept as a mitigating factor, one rooted less in ideology than in our common human culture).

  • Katherine Kelaidis [09-24]: MAGA's first martyr: "The killing of Charlie Kirk could turn the movement into a faith that outlives Donald Trump. "As MAGA's first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions' martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith."

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-24]: The right wants Charlie Kirk's death to be a "George Floyd" moment. Not that they want anyone to react quite like Kirk himself reacted to George Floyd's murder. Interview with Tanner Greer ("a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog the Scholar's Stage"). This starts with a pretty thorough description of why Kirk mattered to the right ("second only to Donald Trump himself"). Beyond the media prowess, the grass roots organizing, and the networking, Greer claims him as a model: "an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular."

  • Steven Pinker [09-28]: The right's post-Kirk crackdown has a familiar mob logic.

  • Art Jipson [10-01]: Charlie Kirk and the making of an AI-generated martyr.

  • Alain Stephens [10-14]: The right wing desperately wants to make Charlie Kirk its MLK: "On Kirk's 'National Day of Remembrance,' white supremacists want to replace a tradition of justice with their own manufactured myth."

Jimmie Kimmel: His late-night show was suspended in response to orchestrated outrage over some speculation over Charlie Kirk's shooter, but reinstated (with numerous local stations blacked out) after a week or so. The suspension appears to have been triggered by the affiliates, which are often owned by right-wingers who jumped on this opportunity to exert their political preferences, but they did so in the context of inflammatory rhetoric by Trump's FCC chair. This goes to show that while acquiescence to fascism can be coerced, it's often just eagerly embraced by previously closeted sympathizers.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17] Let's be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel: He "was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn't like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up." Trump's agent here is FCC head Brendan Carr, who earned his appointment by writing the FCC section for Project 2025.

    Carr's threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing "the power of censorship" or interfering "with the right of free speech." There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for "news distortion," in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.

    But months before the shooting, Carr had begun investigating complaints under this exception against ABC and CBS stations, specifically allegations of anti-conservative bias. Stations had to take Carr's threat seriously — even though Carr himself had declared (in a 2024 tweet) that "the First Amendment prohibits government officials from coercing private parties into suppressing protected speech."

    Hours after Carr's Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel's comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.

  • Constance Grady [09-18] How Jimmy Kimmel became Trump's nemesis.

  • Jason Bailey [09-18] Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation is un-American: "Everyone concerned about free speech should be concerned about his show being pulled from the air."

  • Cameron Peters [09-18]: Trump's brazen attack on free speech: "How the Trump administration took Jimmy Kimmel off the air."

  • Jeet Heer [09-18]: Jimmy Kimmel's bosses sold us all out: "The mainstream media is complicit in the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era. Kimmel's suspension is just the latest proof."

  • Adam Serwer [09-18]: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel's mistake.

    What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian who said something he should not have said. The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning. You are not allowed to criticize the president's associates. You do not even retain the right to remain silent; you must make public expressions of emotions demanded by the administration and its allies or incur its disfavor, which can threaten your livelihood.This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show.

  • Eric Levitz [09-19]: The right's big lie about Jimmy Kimmel's suspension: "the right believes that liberals are getting a taste of their own medicine."

  • Paul Starr [09-22]: Capture the media, control the culture? "Trump's attack on Jimmy Kimmel helps spotlight an even bigger problem."

  • Christian Paz [09-24]: Jimmy Kimmel's return showed the potential — and limits — of celebrity: "An emotional monologue, a takedown of Trump, and a victory for individual action." But note: "Sinclair and Nexstar are continuing their boycott of his show."

The right-wing war on free speech: The Kimmel suspension was just one headline in a much broader offensive.

  • Benjamin Mullin [09-15] Washington Post columnist says she was fired for posts after Charlie Kirk shooting: "Karen Attiah said she was fired for 'speaking out against political violence' and America's apathy toward guns."

  • Shayan Sardarizadeh/Kayleen Devlin [09-18] What is Antifa and why is President Trump targeting it?.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17]: The third Red Scare: "The right's new assault on free speech isn't cancel culture. It's worse."

  • Charlie Savage [09-18]: Can Trump actually designate Antifa a terrorist group? Here are the facts.

  • Jeff Sharlet [09-26]: Rubber glue fascism: "A close reading of "National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence."

  • Louis Menand [09-26]: Where the battle over free speech is leading us: Starts by quoting Trump's Jan. 20 executive ovder on "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," then this:

    The President and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a "60 Minutes" interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being "anti-Trump" and "radical," coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word "diversity" from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that "promote gender ideology."

    After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump's political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes. It has also warned that it may revoke the visas of and deport any foreign nationals who joke about the death of Charlie Kirk. West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.

    This piece goes on to review a couple of books: Christopher L. Eisgruber: Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right; Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. "Eisgruber thinks that the maximalist character of American free-speech law is the best thing about it, but Dabhoiwala thinks it's the worst."

  • Matthew Whitley [09-27]: What liberals get wrong about Trump's executive order on antifa: "Liberals dismiss antifa as just an idea — instead of acting to defend the activists, researchers, and organizers facing persecution."

  • Nicole Hemmer [09-30]: We have seen the 'woke right' before, and it wasn't pretty then, either.

  • Thor Benson [09-16]: Republicans want to protect free speech for themselves and no one else: "The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress continue to attack free speech in numerous ways." Based on an interview with Adam Serwer, who sums up: "Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want. So it basically means that only conservatives have a right to free speech." Or: "I sometimes refer to it as conservatives believing they have a right to monologue. They can speak, and you have to listen and like it. But you can't talk back."

Trump's political prosecutions: He's been collecting his grudge list. Now his DOJ has it, and is moving against his "enemies," including his investigation of John Bolton, and indictments so far against James Comey and Letitia James.

Trump, Hegseth, and the rally at Quantico: They're certainly making it look like they want to use the military to dominate and control their political enemies. The New Republic did a series of articles in 2024 about What American Fascism Would Look Like, and they're worth revisiting now that it takes less imagination to see their relevance. In particular, see Rosa Brooks [2024-05-16]: The liberal fantasy is just that: on the military in fascist America. While she starts dismissive of "liberal fantasy," she does concede this much:

Even without the specter of a president bent on retribution, the vast majority of military personnel will err on the side of obedience if there is even the slightest uncertainty about whether a particular presidential directive is unlawful. And if the senior officers most inclined to object have already been demoted or dismissed, it is implausible that Trump's orders will face widespread military resistance.

No one should kid themselves about the degree of legal latitude President Trump would enjoy. Bush administration lawyers had to turn themselves into pretzels to argue that torture wasn't really torture­. But most of Trump's stated plans won't even require lawyerly contortions. Historically, there's been a strong norm against domestic use of the military to suppress protest or engage in law enforcement activities, and some legal safeguards exist. But under the Insurrection Act, the president can employ the military domestically in response to rebellion or insurrection, or when "any part or class of [a state's] people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution," or when an act of rebellion or violence "opposes or obstructs the execution" of the law.

The Supreme Court has historically interpreted this as giving the president complete discretion to decide what kind of activity justifies domestic use of the military. "The authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the President," opined the court in Martin v. Mott in 1827. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and deploys military personnel domestically to quell protests or round up immigrants, there will be plenty of unhappy military personnel—but they are unlikely to have any basis on which to claim such deployments are unlawful.

And when it comes to military action outside the United States, the news is worse. Notwithstanding Congress's constitutional powers and legislation such as the War Powers Act, successive presidents have enjoyed a virtually unconstrained ability to use military force beyond our borders. There would be plenty of military unhappiness if Trump directed attacks on Mexican soil or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but it's unlikely military leaders would have any lawful basis to object.

Military leaders who dislike the orders they receive sometimes engage in the time-honored Pentagon tradition of stonewalling and slow-rolling, looking for ways to quietly thwart the objectives of their civilian masters while maintaining a facade of compliance. But if President Trump uses his power to fire or demote insufficiently loyal general officers, as he says he will, even this dubious avenue of military resistance will likely be closed off.

The purpose of the Quantico gathering of all of the military's general officers was pretty clearly to assess and police their loyalty to the administration, which increasingly matches Trump's political agenda. One big thing on that agenda is staying in power beyond Trump's elected term. Using the military to do that seems desperate and risky, but it is something to think about, if only because it is something Trump's people are definitely thinking about. The following are some articles on the Trump-Hegseth military — rechristened the War Department, because they want you to fear it, and because they see a growing cult of "warrior ethos" as serving their needs:

Shutdown: The federal government was nominally shut down on October 1, with the expiration of the earlier continuing resolution that allowed the government to spend appropriated money pending new authorization. For an overview, see Wikipedia: 2025 United States federal government shutdown. it has continued at least 12 days, making it one of the longest of the increasingly frequent shutdowns. I've paid very little attention to this, but have noted a few articles below. Without careful study, I'm inclined to believe that Democrats are historically so opposed to shutdowns that if they're responsible for this one — and they are blocking cloture on some kind of continuing resolution in the Senate — they must have an awful good reason for doing so. And with Trump politicizing every nook and cranny of government, I'm not sure that shutting things down will be much worse than letting them continue to run amok as they've been doing. But that's not a reason for or against shutdown; it's just a reason not to get overly worked up over the issue.

Bari Weiss: Former "anti-woke" New York Times commentator keeps failing upwards, now to the top editor spot at CBS News.

Epsteinmania: Not dead yet, especially if you're a Democratic pol, but fading fast.

Kamala Harris: She's in the news (barely) with her campaign memoir, 107 Days.

  • Jeet Heer [09-26]: The shortest presidential campaign: "a devastating indictment of Joe Biden. It also documents the limits of her own politics."

  • Eoin Higgins [10-07]: Jonathan Chait thinks Kamala Harris went too far left. He's just falling for Trump's demagoguery. I haven't read Chait since he moved to The Atlantic — not that I wouldn't have taken the opportunity to ridicule recent pieces like Democrats still have no idea what went wrong, but paying for him seems a bit much — but he seems stuck in the idea that the left-right axis is all there is to politics, and that implies that the left party should hew as close as possible to the right party in order to obtain the most votes. But politics doesn't work that way: some issues don't have a left-right divide, and there are other traits to consider, like integrity, competency, fortitude, and leadership skills. But perhaps most foolishly, he assumes that the right's talking points matter to the mugwump voters he reveres as centrists. The problem is centrism isn't merely a shade between left and right. Centrists are conflicted, embracing some things the right says, and some things the left says. The trick isn't to muddy the waters, as Chait would have you do, but to make your points seem more important than theirs. Soft-pedaling rarely if ever works, because they pick up on your doubts and don't believe you.

    By the way, for an idea of what Chait's been writing over there, see this list of titles. His anti-Trump pieces are probably as good as ever.

  • Amy Davidson Sorkin [10-08]: Who can lead the Democrats? "Kamala Harris almost won in 2024. So why does her new book feel like another defeat?" Possibly because henceforth the losing is what people remember, what defines her, and what she'll never escape from. "One of the puzzles of 107 Days is that such details do not, on the whole, come across as humanizing, let alone endearing, but as dreary and even sour." Maybe because she's a loser? And nothing she has to say is substantial enough to overcome that? "Harris was dealt an enormously difficult hand and for the most part she played it well, galvanizing much of her party while enduring an immeasurable level of misogyny and racism. And she almost won." But she didn't. And the "galvanizing" had less to do with her than with a party base that desperately wanted her to be the leader they needed. The party was psyched to move beyond Biden, and readily accepted her as their leader. I can nitpick now, but I didn't have a problem with going with her back then, nor did other Democrats. We trusted her, and even her team, and they let us down. That's not easily forgiven. Still, one thing I wonder here is since she does have some kind of critique of Biden, would it have helped had she been more explicit about it during the election.

  • Ross Barkan [10-11]: The emptiness of Kamala Harris: "The lack of vision in her book tour shows why she lost."

No Kings protests: I've never had much interest in demonstrations. My first was against the Vietnam War, and while I was not just opposed, the war had shaken all my faith in American justice and decency, I only went because my brother insisted. I only went this time because my wife insisted. We wandered around the northwest perimeter, and left early. Lots of people, all sorts, many in costume, most with a wide range of homemade signs. They were lining Douglas, but hadn't blocked traffic. It was very loud, with chants of "this is what democracy looks like," and car horns (presumably in approval, but I saw one Trump pickup with four flags blasting out "YMCA"). Here's some video (caption says "8,000 to 10,000 people"). I'm not making a search for articles, but ran across some anyway:

  • Quinta Jurcic [10-18]: Resistance is cringe: "But it's also effective."

    Idealism helped motivate Trump's opponents during his first term. But it has the potential to carry even more weight during his second, given how the president's anti-democratic project is not as constrained as it was the first time around. As Levin of Indivisible told me, "The real enemy in an authoritarian breakthrough moment is nihilism and cynicism and fatalism." This idea was a regular subject of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that totalitarian regimes depend on eroding their subjects' sense of political possibility. Such governments, she wrote, aim not "to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

    "I didn't like resistlib cringe content in the first Trump administration," wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media post two months after Trump's second inauguration, admitting: "I was wrong. I was just being a snob." As Gurri suggests, the administration's insistence on irony and insincerity has given a new power to plain, old, corny symbols. Recently, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune went viral, showing a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear gas in front of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one but two American flags. Even the name of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage that might have felt cheesy a year ago, but today carries a new seriousness.

Major Threads

Israel: Worse than ever, but main news story as been "Trump's Peace Plan," which (without much research yet, I can safely say) doesn't show much understanding of "peace" or "plan," and is probably just a deniable, insincere feint by Netanyahu. Still, it's hard to imagine Israel accepting any measure of peace without strongarming by the US, so hopeful people are tempted to read more into this than is warranted. Many articles scattered below. I'll try to sum them up later.

  • Muhannad Ayyash [07-13]: Calling the world to account for the Gaza genocide: Review of Haidar Eid's book, Banging on the Walls of the Tank, which "reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible."

  • Amos Brison [08-01]: Germany's angel of history is screaming: "As Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin's backing, German public support is plummeting. Yet the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course — all in the name of atoning for Germany's own genocidal history." One sign from the demo pic: "NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE."

  • Ben Lorber [08-20]: Israel's iron grip on the American right is slipping away: "Generational shift, isolationism, and nationalist anger are breaking the GOP's pro-Israel consensus. But the left must remain wary of their motives."

  • Alaa Salama [08-29]: Forget symbolic statehood — the world must recognize Israeli apartheid: "To push to recognize a Palestinian state creates the illusion of action, but delays the real remedies: sanctioning and isolating Israel's apartheid regime."

  • Bernie Sanders [09-17]: It is genocide: "Many experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I agree." It took him quite a while, but he's pretty clear (and blunt) about it here.

  • Lili Meyer [09-18]: How "antisemitism" became a weapon of the right: "At a time when allegations of antisemitism are rampant and often incoherent, historian Mark Mazower offers a helpfully lucid history of the term." Review of Mazower's book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-19]: The growing conseusns that Israel is committing genocide: "A UN commission joined a chorus of experts in calling Israel's actions a genocide. Will the world listen?

  • Joshua Keating [09-23]: Turning point or political theater? The big push for Palestinian statehood, explained.

  • Nick Cleveland-Stout:

    • [09-25]: Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post: "Netanyahu referred this week to a 'community' pushing out preferred messaging in US media -- and boy are they making a princely sum."

    • [09-29]: Israel wants to train ChatGPT to be more pro-Israel: "In a new $6M contract, US firm 'Clock Tower X' will generate and deploy content across platforms, help game algorithms, plus manage AI 'frameworks" to make them more friendly to the cause." Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale "is at the center of the Israeli government's new deal," so aside from whatever misinformation they produce, there is an element of old-fashioned payola at work.

    • [10-07]: Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curry: "The Jewish state is seeking to target Christian Evangelical churches for support, using celebrities and an anti-Palestinian message in a new $3.2M effort."

  • Lama Khouri [09-26]: The necropolitics of hunger: man-made famine and futurity of the Palestinian nation. This stresses that both the short-term and long-term impacts of Israel's starvation tactic concentrate on children. Even those who survive will bear the scars as long as they live. This is sometimes hidden in jargon, like "the mental architecture of unchilding" and "intergenerational biological inheritance," which may take you a while to unpack, but is no less hideous in abstraction.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [09-27]: Israel wins TikTok: "Larry Ellison and a constellation of billionaires will finally get their way, buying the very app they wanted to kill a year ago for being too 'pro-Palestinian'. Hard to credit this, but note: "TikTok has now become where 30% of Americans get their news." Related here:

  • Jonah Valdez [10-01]: The Trump-Netanyahu peace deal promises indefinite occupation.

  • Joshua Keating:

  • Phyllis Bennis [10-03]: Trump and Netanyahu's 20-point Gaza ultimatum: "The plan for Gaza does not promise to end Israel's genocide — but does promise indefinite occupation."

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Shaul Magic [10-07]: The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging: "Two years after the 7 October massacre and the onset of Israel's slaughter in Gaza, American Jewry has been profoundly transformed." Magid is the author of an interesting book on the relationship between American Judaism and Zionism, The Necessity of Exile.

  • William Hartung [10-07]: $21.7 billion in US military aid has fueled Israel's war on Gaza: "A new report shows how American support has been essential to what many experts are now calling a genocide."

  • Jeffrey Sachs/Sybil Fares [10-08]: A decolonised alternative to Trump's Gaza peace plan: "Only a deoclonised plan centered on Palestinian sovereignty can bring lasting peace to Gaza." They list 20 points, in parallel to the Trump points. The most problematic part of this is the extension of Palestinian sovereignty to include some (or all) of the West Bank, with all of it governed by the PA. Although I can imagine Israel, under pressure, giving up its claims to Gaza, there is no chance of it doing so with the West Bank settlements let alone the (illegally, sure) annexed Jerusalem and Golan Heights. While the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank is grim, the situation in Gaza is far more dire, so much so it has to be addressed separately — which means bracketing the broader and more intractable issues of ethnocracy and apartheid. A second point is that the PA is more accurately seen as an Israeli client than as a representative of the Palestinian people. They have no more right to administer Gaza than Hamas does. While I expect that whoever organizes aid to a post-Israel, post-Hamas Gaza will be in the driver's seat, the goal there should in a fairly short time frame to stand up a new polity, which will certainly still have to negotiate with donors but will practice sovereignty. One big problem is that Israel (and before them the UK, and before them the Ottomans) has never allowed the establishment of democracy in any Palestinian territory. Hence, leadership has either been appointed to quislings, or seized by revolutionaries, with neither serving the people well, giving Israel an excuse to run roughshod over all of them.

  • Trita Parsi [10-09]: Trump Gaza Deal will work: If he keeps pressure on Israel: That assumes that Trump has any independent will in the matter. No evidence of that yet.

  • Gershon Baskin [10-09]: A first short note on some thoughts this morning. I was pointed to this piece with a tweet from Michael Goldfarb, who wrote: "Simply the most important piece written about the deal to end the war in Gaza written by a man with two decades of negotiating experience negotiating with Hamas including the last two years since the war started." Baskin is a New York-born Israeli columnist, who founded the think tank IPCRI. He was an adviser to Rabin during the Oslo years, and was involved in the Gilad Shalit negotiations, and has been involved in later "back channel" negotiations with Hamas (via Qatar). He offers some details here:

    During the period between the Israeli attack in Doha and September 19, I was working on ways to get back to the point where we were negotiating the end of the war, with all of the details. Hamas was in a paralysis mode and did not know what to do or how to get back to talks about ending the war.

    On September 19, in the late evening Witkoff called me and said "we have a plan." We had a long conversation and I supported what the Americans were planning and I made a few suggestions on how to get Hamas on board. I was requested to convince the Hamas leadership that Trump was serious and wants the war to end. Throughout the last months I have been in contact with 8 members of the Hamas leadership outside of Gaza. Three of them engaged with me in discussions. I did not make suggestions regarding the Israeli side because for over a year I believed that if President Trump decides that the war has to end, Trump will force Netanyahu into the agreement. That is exactly what happened.

    So he seems to have some inside connections, but isn't really an insider, especially on the Israeli side. He admits to having very few details, but stresses that this isn't just a ceasefire, but an end to the war. He's very generous to Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner. I'm skeptical — perhaps he is also, and simply realizes that these are very vain people who respond to flattery, something I'm in no position to care about — and in any case I'm less forgiving, but it does appear that Netanyahu's decision to bomb Qatar finally crossed a red line, which at least temporarily moved Trump to what seems to be Witkoff's deal. Netanyahu has always preferred bending to breaking, so he bent, trusting his own skills to win out in the end. (After all, he signed Wye River, but kept it from being implemented.) One more quote here (my bold):

    The new government in Gaza — this has to be a Palestinian government and not a neo-colonial mechanism which the Palestinians do not control. The names of independent Gazans with a public profile have been given to the Americans and also to other international and Arab players involved with the day after and the reconstruction of Gaza. The names that Samer Sinijlawi and I submitted to these important players were Gazan civil society leaders that we met with several times on zoom. They drafted a letter and signed it to President Trump that I delivered to Witkoff for the President stating that they were willing to play a role in the governance of Gaza. We don't know how this new government will be formed and when it will take over. Hamas agreed from the outset to this kind of government, even from last year. We don't know if Mahmoud Abbas will ask Dr. Nasser Elkidwa to play a role in the governance of Gaza — something that he has said that he is ready to do.

    I would go much farther in separating Gaza from Israel, including from the Palestinian Authority, which is of necessity an instrument of occupation. I also worry about the thinking on future governance and development by everyone involved, which is another reason to stress the importance of self-determination in Gaza. On the other hand, the people need help, and humoring the rich is inevitably baked into that deal.

  • Refaat Ibrahim [10-10]: When the bombs in Gaza stop, the true pain starts: "The ceasefire brought a silence taht revealed Gaza's deepest wounds — the grief, loss and exhaustion that war had only buried."

  • Ramzy Baroud [10-13]: The defeat of Israel and the rebirth of Palestinian agency: It's hard to argue that either of those things happened, but there is still life in Gaza after two years of genocide, and the current "mere pause" (Baroud's term) offers a moment to reflect on the many failures of Israel's vilest schemes and the West's indulgence of Israeli atrocities. Baroud's prediction that "there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict" depends primarily on whether Israel can be permanently separated from Gaza, which is not yet envisioned in the Trump plan. Then, of course, there is the West Bank, which is still up for grabs, and will be until Israel learns from its failures, including the damage to its reputation, and sets out on another course.

  • Juan Cole [10-14]: Terror from the skies of the Middle East: a hug airbase with a small country attached to it. Cole, by the way, as a new book: Gaza Yet Stands.

  • Jonah Valdez [10-15]: Israel's mounting ceasefire violations in Gaza: Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires in the past, and one has good reason to be wary, but I'm not seeing a lot of detail here, beyond the aid restriction from 600 to 300 trucks per day.

  • Connor Echols [10-16]: Gaza ceasefire hanging by a thread: "Repeated violations of Monday's agreement could provoke a return to war." The both-sides-ism here, as everywhere regarding Gaza, is remarkably asymmetrical: Hamas is accused of dragging its feat on repatriating the bodies of dead hostages, some or many of which are likely buried under the rubble of Israeli bombing; Israel, on the other hand, is killing people, and hindering the delivery of aid. The reports about Hamas executing Israel-supported gang members are troubling, but could well be fake (easy to understand why Hamas might execute Israeli agents, harder to see why they would take and publish videos) — in any case, if Israel cared, they should prioritize the release of gang members over hostage corpses. And by the way, note that Israel's decimation of Hamas's civilian administration, as well as their support for gangs to sow chaos, is making the transition to peace all the more treacherous. And that too was undoubtedly part of the plan.

  • Tom Hull:

    • [10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse." The first of two pieces I've written on plans to end the war. This one takes Trump's 20 points one-by-one, noting the hidden assumptions and various possible meanings. I promise a second piece, more on what I think should be done.

    • [10-21]: Making peace in Gaza and beyond: A second piece, fairly long, tries to put the Gaza War Peace Plan back into its broader context, so peace can work for everyone. Along the way, I sketch out several ideas for developing international law to provide a framework that puts people about nation states and their power interests.

  • Win McCormack [10-19]: The crime is nationcide: "This is the precise offense of which Israel is guilty." I find this less useful than Baruch Kimmerling's term "politicide" (the title of his 2003 book, subtitled "Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, which I recall as the first book to really get to the core of Sharon's agenda). Sharon's goal was to destroy the Palestinian Authority, leaving Palestinians with no political options or hopes: with none, all they could do was fight, and Sharon was confident in his ability to kill any who do. This is where the "utterly defeated people" phrase came from. But nationcide makes two mistakes: it assumes that there is a nation to kill, and it suggests that the genocide is incidental to some other aim. There never has been a Palestinian nation to kill. The idea of one was a reaction to Israeli nationalism, and Israeli has struggled mightily (and successfully) to prevent one from forming, but there is a Palestinian people. While Sharon was content merely to reduce them to powerlessness, the current mob has gone much further. I'm not sure "genocide" is the best word for what they're doing, but it is a word that that has legal weight, and if it is to mean anything it has to be applied here.

Russia/Ukraine:

  • Connor Echols:

  • Anatol Lieven [09-30]: 'The West demanded that we get involved in a war with Russia': "In an interview, Georgian President Mikheil Kavelashvili talks about how external interference has poisoned his country's chances for EU ascension."

  • Carl Bildt [10-19]: Putin is out of options: "Whether Russian leaders realize it or not, they have no path to victory." That's been true for a long time. But Ukraine also has no path to victory, and it's long proven futile for either or any side to think in those terms. Perhaps Putin's hope was that Trump would throw Zelensky under the bus, but he missed his chance to dicker in Alaska, and when Europe regrouped behind Zelensky Trump had to pick sides. So the war slogs on, under the dead weight of leaders who were selected not for insight and reason but because they projected as tough and tenacious, cunning and/or stupid.

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

  • John Whitlow [09-18]: The real estate roots of Trumpism and the coming clash with democratic socialism: "Trump's brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York's real estate industry. As mayor, Zohran Mamdani vows to curb that sector's outsized power."

  • Michael M Grynbaum [09-19] Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times: "The judge said that the complaint failed to contain a 'short and plain statement of the claim.' Trump has 28 days to refile." Trump was asking for $15 billion in damages, because four New York Times reporters were "disparaging Mr. Trump's reputation as a successful businessman."

  • Cameron Peters [09-23]: Trump's weird day at the UN, briefly explained.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-25]: Why voters keep shrugging off Trump's corruption.

  • Eric Levitz [09-26]: The big contradiction in progressive thinking about Trump: "The Democratic debate over whether 'moderation' works is very confused."

  • Brian Karem [10-03]: I've covered Trump for years -- and I've never seen him this scared.

  • Margaret Hartmann [10-10]: Will Trump win a Nobel Peace Prize? All about his desperate bid. Lots of grotty details, but all? The main thing that's missing is the calculation behind the bid. Trump surely knows that he has no real interest in the prize, what it stands for and/or the legacy behind it. And given that he focuses much more on being seen as a warrior (or maybe just a thug), wouldn't he be a bit embarrassed if he actually won? Even Obama was embarrassed when he won. I'll never forget Ariel Sharon's face when GW Bush introduced him as "a man of peace." Sharon's autobiography was Warrior, and he wasn't exactly reknown for his wit. But most importantly, Trump surely understands that the absurdity of his bid guarantees that it will be huge publicity either way. And his supporters will add his loss to the long list of slights and insults he has endured as their champion.

  • Alex Shephard [10-10]: Why Trump will never win a Nobel Peace Prize: "He's embarrassingly desperate for the honor, but his presidency is becoming ever more dictatorial and bloodthirsty."

  • Michael Tomasky [10-10]: Memo to future historians: This is fascism, and millions of us see it: "From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else — this is no longer America.

  • Nia Prater [10-12]: Trumpworld goes to war over Nobel Peace Prize loss: "The White House and Trump allies are attacking the Nobel Committee, which gave Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado this year's prize."

  • CK Smith [10-13]: Trump saves Columbus Day from "left-wing arsonists": No more Indigenous Peoples' Day.

  • Kim Phillips-Fein [10-14]: A family business: "Trump's theory of politics." A review of Melinda Cooper's book, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance.

  • George Packer [10-17]: The depth of MAGA's moral collapse: "How we got to 'I love Hitler.'" Paywalled, of course, but looks to be a major review of the recent prevalence of Nazi paraphernalia among young MAGA Republicans -- I've already skipped over dozens of such stories, figuring that there is little reason to nitpick among the excrescences of people we already know to be vile and/or stupid. But if you need to be reminded that "Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic — it's antihuman," Packer is here for you. My only question was whether to give this its own slot in the miscellaneous articles, or to dedicate a whole section to recent right-wing ideologizing. But then I realized I already had a section on that explains his subtitle. While one could just as plausibly argue that Trump is merely the vessel of Fox's fermented rot, is unique contribution was in freeing the right from any second-thoughts of shame. In such a universe, the new normal is to seek out the most extreme expressions, which brings them back to Hitler.

  • Simon Jenkins [10-20]: In Gaza, and now Ukraine, Donald Trump may be peace activists' greatest ally. That deserves our backing: "It's a fool's game trying to understand the president's true motives, but do our misgivings matter if the outcome is a speedy end to war?" Yes, it does matter. Peace terms matter, and their variances reflect the intents and goals of those who negotiate or dictate them. Never trust the fascist, even if it seems like the trains are finally running on time. They won't be for long, because the inequity and arrogance, the belief above all in the efficacy of force, is fundamental for them, and will always come back to bite you. Other key point here is don't assume that what Trump is pushing for is really peace. Real peace requires that people on all sides feel safe and secure. That's not Trump's thing. I'd also worry about giving Trump any praise, even ironical, that can be taken out of context (as you know he will do). I don't have a problem acknowledging real accomplishments, but we should keep in mind that the wars Trump supposedly is ending were ones that he helped start in the first place, and has helped sustain as long as he's been president.

Democrats:

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [07-25]: Un-hinged: Trump at the UN. Mostly excerpts from the speech, as they practically write their own critiques. For instance, when Trump says, "Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated," all St Clair needs to add is: "Energy costs are up, gas prices are up, grocery prices are up, inflation is rising."

  • [09-26]: Roaming Charges: What's the frequency, Donald?

  • [10-03]: Roaming Charges: He loves a (buff) man in uniform: Quotes from Trump's nonsense at Quantico, then moves on to recent ICE tactics, then to Israel. He quotes an Israeli rabbi praying for all the children in Gaza to starve, and another "frequent commentator on NewsMax" as saying he wants Greta Thunberg terrified, "rocking in a corner, covering her eyes, pissing." Then there's this Mike Huckabee quote:

    I've been married 51 years . . . There comes a point where there's just no point in even thinking about getting a divorce. The reason Israel and the US will never get a divorce is because neither country can afford to pay the alimony . . . We're hooked up for life.

    It's hard to tell what he understands less of: international relations, America, Israel, or marriage. But he must be thinking of divorce if he's rationalizing so hard against it.

  • [10-10]: Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency. Opens with (examples follow):

    The fatal flaw in Donald Trump's scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

    Much more, including:

    • The Energy Department has added "emissions" and "climate change" to its banned words list. Too bad George Carlin isn't around to expound upon the 1,723 words you can't say in the Trump Administration . . .

Marcy Newman [08-17]: Sarah Schulman tackles the urgency, and pitfalls, of solidarity: A review of her book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.

Zack Beauchamp

  • [08-20]: How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't: This is a basic asymmetry: the right wants hierarchy and inequality, and those who profit can afford to hire propagandists; the left, lacking such incentives, depends on good will/altruism, which can be tough to muster when everyone has to scratch out a living. That may have been good enough for a long time, but the big right-wing media push since the 1970s has flooded the zone with crap — a surprising amount of which was taken seriously during the New Democrat vogue. We don't need our own counter-crap, but we do need a way for scholars and reporters to do honest work about the real world, and to make a living doing so.

  • [09-03]: The right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be: "A roundtable discussion among leading MAGA intellectuals suggests they might be suffering from success." Not an interview, but a review of a 2-hour video roundtable featuring Curtis Yarvin, Patrick Deneen, Chris Rufo, and Christopher Caldwell. "The overall direction, it is clear, is giving more and more power over our lives to Donald J. Trump." For background, refer back to:

  • [2024-09-25]: The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term: Caldwell, Deneen, and Yarvin again, plus James Burnham, Harvey Mansfield, Elbridge Colby.

  • [09-19]: This is how Trump ends democracy: "The past week has revealed Trump's road map to one-party rule." Having just read his chapter on Orban's Hungary in his The Reactionary Spirit book, much of this seems pretty familiar.

Katha Pollitt [09-09] We're living in an age of scams: "The anonymity of the Internet makes us all vulnerable to being swindled — and it's making us trust each other less." This is very true, and very important, aside from the obvious point that the age of scams didn't start with the Internet: scams have plagued us at least since the snake oil salesmen of the medicine shows, accelerating with every media advance. They grew out of the invention of money as a representative of value, and the spirit of capitalism, which considered all profits morally equal. This article hardly scratches the surface, not even mentioning AI, which is already a major source of fabricated scam props. I'm surprised that nobody has taken this up as a political issue, given that nearly everyone would support measures to cut down on fraud, spam, and non-solicited advertising. (I wouldn't have a problem with people producing ads and putting them on a public website where people could request them.)

Henry Giroux [09-26]: The road to the camps: echoes of a fascist past.

Julian Lucas [09-29]: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now he wants to save it." "Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again." Not real clear to me how he intends to do that, but I suppose more of it is laid out in his new memoir, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web.

[PS: I was struck by this book title by one of Berners-Lee's blurbists: The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. This also led me to Tim Wu: The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, and (only slightly blunter) Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse, and What to Do About It.]

Umair Irfan [09-29] America's flood insurance system is doomed to fail: "Between Congress, property development, and climate change, there's no easy fix."

Peter Balonon-Rosen/Jolie Myers/Sean Rameswaram [09-30]: How Rupert Murdoch took over the world.

Peter Turchin [10-02]: Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out. "An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times." I read Turchin's 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is based on a database of crisis periods that increasingly looks like a misguided AI training set. Here he reduces the wisdom of ages to something he calls "the wealth pump," where:

  1. It causes growing popular discontent.
  2. The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.
  3. The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming "precarity."

Thus he sees frustrated, desperate "wannabe elites" driving nations to ruin. He suggests some remedies here that I don't disagree with: regulation encouraging production over rent extraction; progressive taxation; worker empowerment (including unions); reducing concentrations of political power. Still, when I read his title, my gut reaction is emphasize new aspects of the present instead of recurring patterns of inequality — and not because I discount the problems posed by significant inequality. It's just that the quantity and quality of changes from 250, 100, even 50 years ago are so overwhelming.

Whitney Curry Wimbish/Naomi Bethune [10-02]: Microsoft is abandoning Windows 10. Hackers are celebrating. "The company will stop supporting the OS on October 14. Advocacy groups warn this will leave up to 400 million computers vulnerable to hacks or in the dump." Ok, here's an idea to mull over: any time a company effectively ceases to support a copyrighted software product, that product must be surrendered to the public, as open source software, so that the public can pick up the slack. Stuff that's officially mothballed obviously should qualify. There also needs to be a mechanism for to appeal cases of inadequate support, so companies that aren't serious about support can't simply lock up their old products by pretending to go through the motions. Selling off the technology to a sham company might be another way to work around this, and another loophole that could be tightened up. There are probably more angles to consider, but the general point is that we should do what we can to make forced obsolescence unviable as a business strategy.

Jared Bernstein [10-03]: Measuring the vibecession: "Why top-line federal statistics miss the economic pain average Americans feel."

Tom Hull [10-04]: Cooking Chinese: My own piece, but surely worth a mention here. Some pictures and links to recipes. Not much technique, but all you really need are some knife skills, a glossary of ingredients, and a willingness to turn the heat up and work fast. Some philosophizing on the theme that a possible path to world peace is learning that all food, no matter how exotic it seems, lands on the same universal taste buds. I also wrote a postscript here:

Dan Grazier [10-07]: US gov't admits F-35 is a failure: "With some wonky, hard to decipher language, a recent GAO report concluded the beleaguered jet will never meet expectations." It was conceived in the 1990s in Lockheed's famous "skunk works" as a state-of-the-art stealth fighter-bomber. The contract was awarded in 2001, but the first plane didn't fly until 2006. It's been a fiasco, but has made Lockheed a lot of money. Lately, you mostly hear about it when some sucker ally agrees to buy some, less because they need or even want it than to please America's arms exporters.

Ruth Marcus [10-09]: Nixon now looks restrained: Author focuses on cases where a president weighs in on a pending criminal case, as Nixon did with Charlie Manson, and Trump with James Comey, but the point can be applied almost everywhere. "But the thirty-seventh President looks like a model of restraint when compared with the forty-seventh, and his supposedly incendiary commentary anodyne by contrast to what emanates daily from the current occupant of the White House. What was once aberrant — indeed, unimaginable — is now standard Trumpfare, demeaning not only the Presidency but to the rule of law." Still, one shouldn't hold Nixon up as a "model of restraint," or as any sort of moderate or liberal, as he consistently did things that in their context were every bit as extremely reactionary as Trump is today. Indeed, Trump's argument that nothing he does as president can be illegal has a singular precedent: Richard Nixon. The slippery slope that Nixon started us on leads directly to Trump.

Bruce E Levine [10-10]: Celebrating Lenny Bruce's 100th birthday: "The world is sick and I'm the doctor".

Democracy Now! [10-10]: 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for anti-Maduro leader María Corina Machado "opposite of peace": interview with Greg Grandin, who pointed out (per Jeet Heer, link below):

Machado's brand of democracy promotion, reliant as it is on US military intervention, deserves skepticism. Speaking on Democracy Now! on Friday, Yale historian Greg Grandin described her winning of the Nobel as a "really a shocking choice." Grandin noted that Machado supported a coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Her hard-line position on economic matters has both hampered and divided the anti-Maduro coalition. And the fact that she's praised both the bombing of Venezuelan boats and welcomed further American interventions into Venezuela is likely to strengthen Maduro's hold on power, since it vindicates his claim that the opposition is filled with US puppets. Grandin also pointed out that if the Nobel committee had wanted to legitimize the anti-Maduro opposition, they could've given the award to feminist leaders who are both critics of the regime and oppose US intervention.

    Jeet Heer [10-13]: The Nobel Peace Prize just surrendered to Trump: "Trump is mad that he didn't win. But by honoring Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee has endorsed his war against Venezuela — and continued Europe's MAGA groveling." Heer concludes:

    Trump is foolish to think he needs to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He has all the power and glory he could want, because the people who could theoretically stop him have decided to surrender.

  • Greg Grandin:

    • [09-09]: The rift in Trump world over Venezuela: "The Trump administration wants to exert more control over Latin America. Will it come by deal-making or by force?"

      The latter question isn't even rhetorical. To Trump, a "deal" is an occasion when someone else surrenders to his ultimatum. Such deals tend to be as resented as force, just less dramatically opposed. But also note that Trump's maneuvers against Latin America are easy to pin on Marco Rubio, who often seems even more excited to restore reaction there than he is here, and will be no less so when they blow up. Ominous section here on "importing the logic of Gaza."

    • [10-14]: Trump's Caribbean killing spree: "The president's unprecedented and lawless attacks supposedly target drug cartels, but serve a far more troubling political agenda."

  • Gabriel Hetland [10-14]: How María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize could lead to war: "Machado's record makes a mockery of the idea she is a committed champion of peace, promoter of democracy, or unifying figure."

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on July 20, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Jamelle [09-30]: Links to After volatile summer, Trump's approval remains low but stable, poll finds, and adds:

    Perhaps instead of cowering under a blanket labeled "health care," Democrats should respond and advance on the issues that move people. This, of course, would require a foundation of conviction and principle, which may be asking too much of the party's leadership and strategists.

    Note that the image cut off before showing the most damning poll results, that Trump is -20 on "the war between Russia and Ukraine," and -19 on "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict": two issues that Biden blew even worse.

  • Josephine Riesman [10-05]:

    It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends.

    • Apologies in advance for including an Amazon book link, but I doubt any review can really do this one justice. The book is: John Kennedy: How to Test Negative for Stupid — And Why Washington Never Will. Senator Kennedy ("the one from Louisiana") is being billed as "one of the most distinctive and funny politicians," lauded for "his perceptive (and hilarious) takes on the ridiculousness of political life in this scathingly witty takedown of Washington and its elite denizens." I've seen him dozens of times, and can't say I've ever noticed his wit, but he does offer a pretty good impersonation of the dumbest person in all of America, as well as one of the most repugnant politically. On the other hand, his most quotable quotes turn out to be more humorous than I expected:

    • "Always be yourself . . . unless you suck."
    • "I say this gently: This is why the aliens won't talk to us."
    • "If you trust government, you obviously failed history class."
    • "I believe that our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."
    • "Always follow your heart . . . but take your brain with you."
    • "I'm not going to Bubble Wrap it: The water in Washington, D.C., won't clear up until you get the pigs out of the creek."
    • "I have the right to remain silent but not the ability."
    • "Common sense is illegal in Washington, D.C., I know. I've seen it firsthand."
    • "I believe that we are going to have to get some new conspiracy theories. All the old ones turned out to be true."

    Granted, on balance we're not talking Groucho Marx level here, or even Yogi Berra. But he's possibly funnier than Bob Dole, who was much wittier than anyone so evil had any right to be.

  • Comfortably Numb [08-18]: Features a New York Times headline from Sept. 18, 1931 [most likely fake]: "HITLER CONDEMNS RIOTS.; He Says They Were Provoked by Paid Agents in Germany." This appeared in my feed just below a picture of mink-clad protesters with signs for "Rai$e the Rent," "Frack Brooklyn," and "Billionaires Against Mamdani." And just above a Fox News headline: "Billionaire's cash flows to anti-Israel activists in nationwide 'No Kings' rallies." More signs noted on placcards:

    • First they came for the immigrants and I spoke up because I know the rest of the God damn poem"
    • No crown for the clown
    • Trump gave my nut to Argentina [chipmunk costume]
    • I caught the woke mind virus and all I got was empathy and critical thinking skills

    Other comments:

    • Imagine what a shitty president you have to be to have nearly 7 million Americans use their day off to protest you.

    Miscellaneous memes:

    • Republicans have $200 million for a ballroom, $1 billion for a new jet and $72 million for endless golf trips. They have money to give ICE $50,000 bonuses. They have $1 million per day to occupy American cities. They have $3.8 billion to send Israel weapons and $40 billion to bailout Argentina. But there's no money for healthcare.

Current count: 254 links, 13906 words (18425 total)

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Monday, October 20, 2025

Music Week

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 45041 [45001] rated (+40), 16 [29] unrated (-13).

My 75th birthday is coming up this week. It's been a long, strange trip, one I'm increasingly reflecting on. I'm not big on milestones, but close to 30 years ago I decided to celebrate by cooking up a big dinner for a few close friends, and that's become an annual tradition almost ever since. Back in the 1980s I started seriously exploring the great world cuisines, so each annual dinner has turned into some kind of challenge to discover something new. At some point, I should gather my notes and document these (and similar) events, so I can have something to link to here. The best I can offer right now is a sketch of a recent but relatively modest Chinese (with a few extra notes here).

I've been thinking about this year's event for a while now, and it's just about the only thinking that gives me any pleasure. While I've never gotten to the obvious choice of Italian — which I have cooked on many occasions — or such less obvious ones as Persian, German, Scandinavian, or most of Africa and Latin America, I've long contemplated trying my hand at Indonesian/Malaysian, so that is this year's theme (possibly with a switch to French for dessert, as birthday in my family always means cake).

In good years, I would have thought this through well by now. In bad years, I found myself throwing something quick together at the last minute. (We've even done American food, twice: soul food featuring fried chicken, once just a lot of hamburgers.) I hoped this would be one of the good years, but I guess I'm slowing down, because time sure seems to be accelerating. I've complained all year about how little I've gotten done, and even this most happy of tasks seems to be slipping away from my grasp.

So all I've managed so far has been to flip through some cookbooks — one I've long had but never used, Cradle of Flavor, and a couple more I picked up from the library after the No Kings demo — and order some daun pandan and kecap manis, which seem to be mandatory. I've built up a list of possible ingredients, and figure I'll make two shopping trips: one today to look for the more esoteric staples, and one on Wednesday to pick up the meats and vegetables and whatever else I've missed. Whereas most years, I'd start from a well defined list of recipes, what I'm thinking of doing this time is just buying a lot of possible ingredients then looking through the cookbooks to find things to do with them. It's an overkill strategy, but my small experience with Rijsttafel suggests many small dishes brimming with flavor to mix into big piles of festive rice. And scanning through the cookbooks offers a lot of sambals that can be used as building blocks or just served on the side. That way I can start soon, and escape from the world.

Today, however, I need to post a lot of stuff. This Music Week, of course, but also I have the follow up to my Gaza War Peace Plan post, tentatively titled Making Peace. It's something of a joke to say that all I've done in the last week has been to figure out the solution to peace in the Middle East, because there is zero chance that anyone who can do anything about matters will read me and put such obvious solutions into practice. But pretty much everything you need to know is in those two posts. Of course, you could make it even simpler and say: try to do the right thing for everyone involved, be honest and open about it, and adjust when necessary. The first one got 104 views, which is not a lot but up from my previous posts. I'm not begging for money, but more free subscribers would be nice. The second post should go out tonight, possibly by the time I post this.

I should also go ahead and publish whatever I've managed to save up for Loose Tabs. I haven't come close to making my rounds, let alone making even a cursory edit, but the draft file wc word count is 14235 (so about 12k actual words), and some of the sections are beginning to smell funny. What I'm hoping to do now is to post it when this goes up, but dating it ahead to Tuesday (or, given that I rarely post before midnight, dating this back to Monday). I can always add change bars as I find other things that fit in (many, no doubt, already in open tabs I want to close). I can also write another More Thoughts on Loose Tabs, like I did last time. Indeed, I'm already having more thoughts on the Gaza posts, with new ones sure to come as I read Ilan Pappé new book, Israel on the Brink and the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence. Say what you will about the Nazis, the British, and even the Mongol Hordes, but there are no historical precedents for what Israel has done in and around Gaza, and we have even less historical guidance for anticipating the aftermath. (And yes, I've read Pankaj Mishra's ambitious The World After Gaza, where he, like Pappé, tries to look ahead after looking back. Another book along these lines that looks promising is Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, although it is also billed as a memoir, as it's hard to find solid ground here.) I'm sure I'll have more to say after Pappé book. Indeed, I should do another books post, as more relevant books are appearing all the time — and many more are in the works: Amazon already has pages for 2026 books by Omer Bartov (Israel: What Went Wrong) and Norman G Finkelstein (Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry Into Corruption in High Places).

Meanwhile, I'm overwhelmed with domestic tasks. I talked to more roofers last week, and hope to get some concrete bids this week, and be able to make some decisions next week. I don't know how I'll find the time. Each discussion generates new questions, ideas, and worklists, requiring more thought. Meanwhile, stuff breaks, and has to be repaired (or lived with), and repairs drag on. I feel like I should be able to fix most things, but my own skills are clearly diminishing, and it's hard to find other folks to pick up the slack. After all, we live in a world where fraud is so prevalent it's hard to ever trust anyone.

One thing I should work on but will postpone at least another week is the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I still expect to send out ballots in mid-November, but at this point my ambitions don't extend much beyond trying to keep it barely afloat. I do have the website set up, but the ballot invites and other documentation needs a close edit. If anyone who reads this wants to help, please take a look at what's available, suggest edits and/or ask questions. I may be short on initiative, but I still try to respond to requests. I've mostly suppressed the FAQ because there haven't been any, but how could there possibly be no questions? Maybe there's some AI that can scan the website, rephrase it as questions, and make me wonder what it missed and/or what needs to be answered better?

One thing I won't be doing this week is listening to new music, or for that matter working much on the computer. Fortunate that we have a pretty large (and varied) list of finds this week to tide you over. And that I have a lot of treasured old music to enjoy.

PS: I held this post back until I published my second Gaza piece: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond. This is also archived here. Also now available is Loose Tabs. Given that the latter collects 36 days of notes, it can't properly be called a rush job, but everything there (250 links, 13861 words) feels incredibly rushed and slapdash. Some day I expect to look back at it and pick out a dozen or so bits that I still think make good points, but right now I just have this desperate urge to clean house. I may well add a few changes later, but this opens up a new scratch file.

New records reviewed this week:

Affinity Trio [Eric Jacobson/Pamela York/Clay Schaub]: New Outlook (2024-25 [2025], Origin): Trumpet-piano-bass trio, second group album, each contributes an original, along with six covers, starting with "On the Sunny Side of the Street." B+(***) [cd]

Ammar 808: Club Tounsi (2025, Glitterbeat): Denmark-based Tunisian DJ/product Sofyann Ben Youssef, third album under this alias, also works with the Tuareg rock group Kel Assouf (based in Belgium). B+(**) [sp]

Bar Italia: Some Like It Hot (2025, Matador): British new wave band, fifth album since 2020, lead vocalist is Nina Christante, but guitarists Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi also sing, and separately released a pretty good album earlier this year as Double Virgo. Still, she's a plus, and the more they sound like New Order, the more I like them. A- [sp]

Bobby Conn: Bobby's Place (2025, Tapete, EP): Singer-songwriter from Chicago, a "long time musical mischief maker and cultural provocateur," albums back to 1997, this one appears on Spotify as two EPs -- the 6-track (19:10) "Side One" and the 3-track (21:20) "Side A" -- distinct enough they should be kept separate, but interesting that he's into both approaches. B+(*) [sp]

Hollie Cook: Shy Girl (2025, Mr Bongo): English reggae singer-songwriter, daughter of Sex Pistols' drummer Paul Cook, tenor so albums since 2011. B+(**) [sp]

Madi Diaz: Fatal Optimist (2025, Anti-): Singer-songwriter, half-dozen albums since 2007, plays guitar, piano (her original instrument) on one track. Minimally folkie, something I'm rarely attracted to, but this one feels right. Title song is especially strong. A- [sp]

El Michaels Affair: 24 Hr Sports (2025, Big Crown): Hip-hop group led by producer Leon Michels, who produced albums in 2002 by Sharon Jones and Lee Fields, has group albums since 2005, including one with Black Thought in 2023. B- [sp]

Esthesis Quartet: Sound & Fury (2025, Sunnyside): Quartet of Elsa Nilsson (flute), Dawn Clement (piano, vocals), Emma Dayhuff (bass), and Tina Raymond (drums), all pictured on cover, third album, plus Bill Frisell (guitar). B+(**) [bc]

Carter Faith: Cherry Valley (2025, MCA Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, from North Carolina, dropped her surname Jones, but Wikipedia just refers to her as Faith. First album after a couple EPs. First song that caught my attention, midway through, was "Grudge." B+(**) [sp]

Robert Finley: Hallelujah! Don't Let the Devil Fool You (2025, Easy Eye): Blues/soul singer-songwriter, b. 1954 in Louisiana, has played music since he was 11 but didn't record until 2016. Fifth album, with daughter Christy Johnson on backing vocals, on eight songs that at least allude to gospel ("Praise Him," "His Love," "Helping Hand," "On the Battlefield," "I Am a Witness," etc.). The religion doesn't bother me, especially when the guitar transcends it. A- [sp]

Tomas Fujiwara: Dream Up (2023 [2025], Out of Your Head): Drummer, a Braxton student, fair number of albums since 2007, lots of side credits. Quartet with Patricia Brennan (vibes), plus Tim Keiper and Kaoru Watanabe on a long list of African- and Asian-sounding instruments, mostly percussion but some flute-like. A- [sp]

Todd Herbert: Captain Hubs (2024 [2025], TH Productions): Strong tenor saxophonist, several albums since 2007, mainstream group here with David Hazeltine (piano), John Webber (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums), playing five Herbert originals, two pieces by band members, and covers of Coltrane, Shorter, and "You Go to My Head." B+(***) [cd]

Maja Jaku: Blessed & Bewitched (2025, Origin): Jazz singer-songwriter, last name shortened from Jakupović, from Serbia, based in Austria, some songs co-written by Adrian Varady (drums, co-producer) or Saša Mutić, with two standards. Recorded in Brooklyn with Michael Rodriguez (trumpet), Alan Bartus (piano), Dezron Douglas (bass), and Johnathan Blake (drums). This is nice, especially on standards like "Never Let Me Go." B+(***) [cd]

Zara Larsson: Midnight Sun (2025, Summer House/Epic): Swedish electropop singer-songwriter, fifth album since 2014. B+(*) [sp]

Jens Lekman: Songs for Other People's Weddings (2025, Secretly Canadian): Singer-songwriter from Sweden, works in English, seventh album since 2004, fancy flights, but long (17 songs, 79:37). B+(***) [sp]

Lizzy & the Triggermen: Live at Joe's Pub (2024 [2025], self-released): Los Angeles-based swing band, Lizzy Shaps (Elizabeth Shapiro) the singer, nine musicians, some I've actually heard of -- Ricky Alexander (tenor/baritone sax, clarinet), Gordon Au (trumpet), John Allred (trombone), Luca Pino (guitar) -- playing standards with a few originals and some patter. B+(**) [cd]

Russ Lossing Trio: Moon Inhabitants (2020 [2025], Sunnyside): Pianist, has a couple dozen albums since 2000, this a trio with Masa Kamaguchi (bass) and Billy Mintz (drums), opens with five covers: Tchaikovsky between two Ornette Coleman tunes, Harold Arlen, Sonny Rollins, closing with three originals. B+(*) [bc]

Kelsey Mines: Everything Sacred, Nothing Serious (2024 [2025], OA2): Bassist, from Seattle, has a couple of albums on Relative Pitch, composed all of this, with flute (Elsa Nilsson), trombone, piano, guitar, drums, and percussion, and some additional recording in São Paulo, co-produced by Steve Rodby, with liner notes by Jovino Santos Neto. B+(*) [cd]

Andy Nevala: El Rumbón (The Party) (2023-24 [2025], Zoho): Pianist, based in Atlanta, self-released a 2000 album, has a few more credits, teaching experience, some big band work. Lively Latin jazz album, ten pieces from all over turned into a seamless party experience. B+(***) [cd]

Nicholas Payton: Triune (2025, Smoke Sessions): Trumpet player from New Orleans, albums since 1994, also plays keyboards, with Esperanza Spalding (bass and vocals) and Karriem Riggins (drums), with some guests (mostly vocals). I'm not much impressed here until the last two cuts: the first is the funk anthem "#bamisforthechildren" — "BAM" (Black American Music) is his preferred term for jazz; the second is an extended keyboard vamp called "Feed the Fire," which ends with some fairly impressive trumpet. B+(*) [sp]

Princess Nokia: Girls (2025, Artist House): New York rapper Destiny Nicole Frasqueri, fifth album. "I know what I'm doing. I trust my process." B+(***) [sp]

Reneé Rapp: Bite Me (2025, Interscope): Pop singer-songwriter, kicks off. B+(**) [sp]

Jussi Reijonen: Sayr: Salt/Thirst (2025, Unmusic): Finnish guitarist, has at least one previous album, has another Sayr: Live in Helsinki schedule to release on same date but this is the only one I was sent. "Sayr" is a concept from Arabic music, used here to denote a series of (thus far) solo albums. B+(*) [cd] [10-24]

Jussi Reijonen: Sayr: Kaiho - Live in Helsinki (2025, Unmusic): Finnish guitarist, also plays oud, which adds to the Arabic tones of his thoughtful solo work. B+(*) [os] [10-24]

Rubén Reinaldo: Fusión Olívica (2024 [2025], Free Code Jazz): Spanish guitarist, Bandcamp page has "Reinaldo" in quotes and shows last name as Baña, I'm not finding anything on Discogs but he has a previous duo album on Bandcamp. Backed by organ (Antonio López "Monano"), bass (Gustavo Hermán), and drums (David Failde). He bravely defied Trump and sent me vinyl, was buried under some pile until it came to the top of my unplayed list. Fits in the soul jazz idiom, but a bit fancier, with the bass adding a resonance organ never quite delivered. A- [lp]

Gonzalo Rubalcaba/Yainer Horta/Joey Calveiro: A Tribute to Benny Moré and Nat King Cole (2025, Calveiro Entertainment): Cuban pianist, flanked by two saxophonists (tenor and alto), and backed by others, playing four songs that Cole covered in his Havana albums, plus four from Cuban star Moré. B+(***) [sp]

Rich Siegel: It's Always Been You (2025, self-released): Singer, also plays piano, wrote several songs here but mostly far-ranging covers, ranging from Berlin to Tom Waits, with a mix of French, Spanish, and Brazilian, backed by bass (Cameron Brown) and drums (Tony Jefferson). B [cd]

Tom Skinner: Kaleidoscopic Visions (2025, International Anthem): British drummer, mostly has jazz credits like Sons of Kemet but has some other ventures, like Owiny Sigoma Band and, more commercially, the Smile (a trio with two blokes from Radiohead). Second studio album under his own name, has him also playing vibes, guitar, piano, and all sorts of electronics, with two saxophonists (Robert Stillman and Chelsea Carmichael), guitar, bass, cello, and vocals (Meshell Ndegeocello, Contour, Yaffra). B+(**) [sp]

Sudan Archives: The BPM (2025, Stones Throw): Brittney Parks, from Cincinnati, learned violin early, studied ethnomusicology later, works both into her varied dance-pop, third album after a couple of EPs. I'm having trouble coming up with specifics here, which suggests something is lacking, but that too eludes me. A- [sp]

Suede: Antidepressants (2025, BMG): English group, first album in 1993 was part of the Britpop wave, had a break between 2002-13, known in the US as London Suede, but they dropped the qualifier for their last couple albums. Lots of guitar, an impressive din of sound. B+(*) [sp]

Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl (2025, Republic): Big star, you know that, 12th album (not counting remakes) since 2007, a Google search offers more info on psychological disorders and political polarization than info on the music itself, which has received such mixed reviews you sometimes wonder who is listening to what. I'm not enough of a fan to be able to recall any of her songs by name, but I've heard them all, and mostly enjoyed them. This one has a 59/23 score at AOTY, which means that Pitchfork's 5.9 rating is precisely average. On the other hand, from the very first play I found nearly all of this delightful. A- [sp]

Patrisha Thomson: Your Love (2025, PT Designs Productions): Standards singer, third album, songs cover a wide range, including one original (dated 2005). B [cd]

Henry Threadgill: Listen Ship (2025, Pi): Saxophonist, founded Air in 1971, especially notable for its free jazz developments on early jazz models, has had a very notable solo career since 1979. Just composer and conductor here, leading a group of six guitarists and two pianists through a maze of sixteen fractured "roadmaps." B+(***) [cd]

Mark Turner: Reflections On: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (2025, Giant Step Arts): Tenor saxophonist, one of many to emerge in the 1990s, has been especially busy of late. Extended piece, with ten movements built around spoken word excerpts from James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel about race in America. Quintet with Jason Palmer (trumpet), David Virelles (piano/profit/organ), Matt Brewer (basses), and Nasheet Waits (drums). Strong group, and the narration is interesting. B+(***) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Kenny Barron: Sunset to Dawn (1973 [2025], Muse/Time Traveler): Muse Records was a label founded by Prestige Records producer Joe Fields in 1972, which ran up to 1996 when it was sold to 32 Jazz (run by Joel Dorn; Fields moved on to found the HighNote and Savant labels). The latter reissued much of the catalog on CD, before being sold to Savoy Jazz (a venerable label name by then part of Nippon Columbia), which reissued some samplers, but let the label's many releases go out of print. Muse was a very important (mostly mainstream) label during its time: I count 112 titles in my database, most unrated because the music hasn't been readily available on streaming. So the announcement that this new label (or new label name, as it seems to be associated with Craft, which itself is tied to Concord) will be reissuing from its catalog is terrific news. This is the first of the reissues, the pianist's first recording, mostly electric piano with bass (Bob Cranshaw), drums (Freddie Waits), and percussion (Richard Landrum and Warren Smith). The product push is focused on luxury vinyl, but my promo copy is a CD (better for me, although Gary Giddins' original back cover notes require a microfiche reader). Nice record, but wouldn't have been my leadoff hitter. (I have 32 Jazz's reissue of Barron's second album, Peruvian Blue, rated A-.) B+(**) [cd]

Roy Brooks: The Free Slave (1970 [2025], Muse/Time Traveler): Hard bop drummer (1938-2005), from Detroit, started with Blue Mitchell in 1960, rarely appeared as leader (first in 1964, then this in 1972). Crackling live quintet with Woody Shaw (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor sax), Hugh Lawson (piano), and Cecil McBee (bass). A- [cd]

Ivan Farmakovskiy: Epic Power (2010 [2025], SteepleChase): Russian pianist, one article says "renowned" and mentions prizes he won in 1994 and 1997, I didn't find him in Discogs until I backed into an entry with his name in Cyrillic, which yielded two 2009-10 titles. I wonder if the "iy" in his name here is meant to pawn him off as Ukrainian? This was from the same period, a trio with bass (Christian McBride) and drums (Jack DeJohnette), mosty playing his originals. Very impressive work. Hard to see why anyone would sit on this. B+(***) [sp]

Carlos Garnett: Cosmos Nucleus (1976 [2025], Muse/Time Traveler): Alto saxophonist (1938-2023), from Panama, moved to New York in 1962, released his first five albums on Muse (1974-78), with this the fourth, a large group playing his original pieces, in a Coltrane-ish spiritual jazz vein, with some vocals by Cheryl P. Alexander. B+(*) [cd]

John Lennon/Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band: Power to the People: Live at the One to One Concert (1972 [2025], Universal, 2CD): Two full concerts at Madison Square Garden, spun off from a "Deluxe Edition" that includes much more (9-CD, 3-DVD, book, stickers, who knows what else?). This runs 31 songs, 141 minutes. Lennon's own songs from his two now-classic albums, plus a few songs originating in his previous group, are well known, sharply performed. More songs, especially those sung by Ono, are new to me or long forgotten, but not without merit (although often, as remembered, "shrill"). Most tracks previously unreleased. The exceptions are probably from Some Time in New York City, although I suspect that the sound is much improved here. I haven't seen the "Deluxe Edition" box, but hear that it has some tie-in to the film Betrayal at Attica B+(**) [sp]

Pharoah Sanders: Love Is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings (1975 [2025], Transcendence Sounds, 2CD): Tenor saxophonist (1940-2022), a Coltrane protégé in the 1960s, coming off a series of expansive albums on Impulse! that helped define what we've since come to call "spiritual jazz" (in the trinity, he was "son" to Coltrane's "father" and Ayler's "holy ghost"). Quartet with Danny Mixon (piano/organ), Calvin Hill (bass), and Greg Bandy (drums). Some of this has been out before, but not at this length (11 tracks, 113 minutes). Starts with an "Improvisation with Pipe Organ" that I find very murky, but ends with a resounding "Love Is Everywhere." New label seems to be a spinoff of Barcelona's Elemental Music. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Roy Brooks: Beat (1964, Workshop Jazz): Hard bop drummer from Detroit, first album as leader, with Blue Mitchell (trumpet), Junior Cook (tenor sax), George Bohanon (trombone), Hugh Lawson (piano), and Eugene Taylor (bass). B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Martin Bejerano: The Purple Project (Figgland) [11-21]
  • Theo Bleckmann: Love and Anger (Sunnyside) [10-31]
  • Tomas Fujiwara: Dream Up (Out of Your Head) [09-12] [damaged]
  • Thomas Morgan: Around You Is a Forest (Loveland Music) [11-07]
  • Tom Ollenberg: Where in the World (Fresh Sound New Talent) [11-21]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 13, 2025

Music Week

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 45001 [44977] rated (+24), 29 [29] unrated (+0).

Week is a day short, but the rated drop is mostly because I haven't been paying much attention. Indeed, I'm surprise the drop isn't worse, but I've lost track of time. Last Monday we had insurance out to look at the roof, and they decided that he had enough hail damage to replace the whole roof, but that the most visible wounds were our own fault, so didn't merit them putting a tarp up to stop the leaking. Since then, I've been talking to roofing contractors, who curry favor by admitting that insurance companies are really criminal enterprises, then lose with sales pitches that make me as wary of them. The only things are are clear right now is that this is going to cost us a lot of money, and I'm not really going to trust whoever I wind up picking. The whole experience has me reeling so severely that I took time out today to work up my solution to a much simpler problem: peace in the Middle East.

This will be the subject of two Notes on Everyday Life pieces: one on the actual plan, and another on what I think would be a better, albeit far from ideal, plan (links to local drafts, the former nearly done, the latter just barely outlined). Events are moving fast, with the hostage exchanges today, the ceasefire and very partial withdrawal presumably started, and Trump off to Egypt to wax eloquent on the art of the deal. I'm hoping to post those on Tuesday and Friday, with the latter shortly followed by an updated Loose Tabs. The draft file is close to ready now, with nearly 10,000 words so far (193 links), but I figure I should keep it open until the second post is ready, as the Israel section (27 links so far, plus whatever I find during the week) will help document.

Aside from this writing, I need to concentrate on house matters next week. It's going to be rough.

New records reviewed this week:

Agnas Bros.: Sista Försöket (2025, Moserobie): Swedish group: Kasper Agnas (guitar), Max Agnas (piano), Mauritz Agnas (bass), and Konrad Agnas (drums). They have several albums going back to 2012, as well as solo credits, especially Konrad (the eldest, b. 1990; there was also a previous generation of Agnas Bros., with their father, Urban, and his brothers, Tomas and Joakim; Urban's wife Sabrina, niece Maja, and nephew Nils also have Discogs credits). Live, moves along nicely (32:54). B+(***) [cd]

Eric Alexander: Like Sugar (2024 [2025], Cellar Live): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, has a lot of records since 1995, especially quartets like this one, with David Hazeltine (piano), Dennis Carroll (bass), and George Fludas (drums). Title is a nod to Stanley Turrentine, but not quite a tribute. This suits him very nicely. B+(***) [sp]

Bright Eyes: Kids Table (2025, Dead Oceans, EP): Conor Oberst, has been releasing albums under this group/alias since 1998, has some songcraft but that's never sufficed for me. Not sure this should be called an EP (8 songs, 29:06). B+(*) [sp]

Lucrecia Dalt: A Danger to Ourselves (2025, RVNG Intl): Sound artist from Colombia, María Lucrecia Pérez López, based in Berlin, has a dozen albums since 2011. B+(***) [sp]

Maya Delilah: The Long Way Round (2025, Blue Note): English singer-songwriter, plays guitar, first album after two EPs and some singles. Nice batch of songs, with an easy flow. On a jazz label, but not really. B+(**) [sp]

Earscratcher: Otoliths (2024 [2025], Aerophonic): Free jazz quartet with Dave Rempis (soprano/alto/tenor sax), Elisabeth Harnik (piano), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), and Tim Daisy (drums), second album, first I've heard all week that's just pure delight to listen to. A- [cd]

Margaret Glaspy: The Golden Heart Protector (2025, ATO, EP): A singer-songwriter of considerable interest, although these 7 songs (25:23) seem to be covers, all but one duet features. The most familiar song is also the most distinctive ("Have You Ever Seen the Rain"). B+(***) [sp]

Phil Haynes & Free Country: Liberty Now! (1996-2025 [2025], Corner Store Jazz, 2CD): Drummer, wide range of releases since working with Paul Smoker in the 1980s. This appears to be two albums in one package, a nightmare configuration for anyone trying to run a poll that distinguishes between new and old archival music. First disc is a recent set with Hank Roberts (cello), Jim Yanda (guitar/vocals), and Drew Gress (bass), each contributing new songs. The second is probably the same group, but playing old Americana, including "Revolution," "What's Going On," and "Respect" -- a 71:16 sampler from their previous albums, or possibly stray tracks from those sessions. The scattered vocals aren't much good, but the melodies take you back. The new material (61:15) is a bit harder to connect with, but the vibe is the same. B+(**) [cd] [10-17]

Hunx and His Punx: Walk Out on This World (2025, Get Better): Punk band from California, principally Seth Bogart, three albums 2011-14, regrouped here for a fourth. B- [sp]

Charles Lloyd: Figure in Blue (2025, Blue Note): Tenor saxophonist, also plays some flute, he's been a big name since the 1960s, recorded this on his 87th birthday, in a trio with Jason Moran (piano) and Marvin Sewell (guitar), with 14 tracks stretching out to 98 minutes. He takes it easy for the most part, with most of the muscle (and sinew) from the guitar. B+(*) [sp]

Jim McNeely: Primal Colors (2025, Challenge): Pianist, composer and big band director, working here with Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Frankfurt Radio Bigband, for a major production. B+(*) [sp]

John Michel/Anthony James: Egotrip (2025, Loudmouth): Underground rapper and producer, first album I can find by either. Pretty splashy. B+(**) [sp]

Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night (2025, ATO): Singer-songwriter from Texas, leader of the alt-country-rock band Old 97's (20+ albums 1994-2024), has also released 8 studio solo albums since 2002 (one previous one from 1989). Easy to listen to, and not without merit. B+(**) [sp]

Neal Miner: Invisibility (2025, Cellar Music): Bassist, a name I thought I recognized from Lou Kaven's Smalls labeld, but I find I hadn't made any note of his 2006 album there -- I do have several side-credits from then and since. This is a trio with Chris Byars (tenor sax, also on his Smalls album) and Jason Tiemann (drums), playing his compositions ("mostly contrafacts over classic American standard songs"). Bryars is the leading talent who came out of that scene, a retro player jumping off from bebop, much like Scott Hamilton did with swing. B+(***) [sp]

The Prize: In the Red (2025, Anti Fade): Australian power pop band, "equal parts brains and bravado." B+(**) [sp]

Jason Rigby: Mayhem (2024 [2025], Endectomorph Music): Tenor saxophonist, first noticed as one of Fresh Sound's new talents (2006, or for side credits 2002), several albums since, 40 credits total. Also plays bass clarinet, flute, piano and other keyboards, percussion, electronics, along with Mark Guiliana (drums, electronics). Fast stuff up front is most appealing. B+(***) [sp]

Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (2025, self-released): Singer-songwriter, originally from Kansas, moved to New York City, seems to have gotten a late start after years of practicing law, his 2014 debut was interesting, and three (now four) subsequent albums have only gotten better. Not much of a voice, but orks for him, probably because the songs justify the lyric sheet but wind up sounding even better. A (Day 2) sequel is promised, but not until Sept. 2026. He has more confidence than I that we'll still be here. A- [cd] [10-17]

Grant Stewart: Next Spring (2024 [2025], Cellar Music): Tenor saxophonist, from Toronto, mainstream ("steady swinging, muscular hard bop"), couple dozen albums since 1992, a couple co-led with Eric Alexander, this a quartet with Tardo Hammer (piano), Paul Sikivie (bass), and Phil Stewart (drums), playing standards including Monk, Shorter, Barry Harris, and Bob Mover. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Ray Charles: Best of Country & Western (1962-85 [2024], Tangerine): Thirteen songs, including three each from the two 1962 volumes of Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, where his customary application of strings and chorus to country standards just added to his genius reputation. This picks up some later hits like "Crying Time" (1964), but only includes two songs after 1967: a Johnny Cash cover from 1970, and a Willie Nelson duet from the latter's 1985 Half Nelson. Some classics here, but this can slip into formula. B+(**) [bc]

Old music:

Agnas Bros.: Lycka Till Med Musiken (2017 [2018], Agnas Musikproduktioner): Third group album (first was 2012) for Urban Agnas' sons Konrad (drums, b. 1990), Kasper (guitar, b. 1992), Mauritz (bass, b. 1995), and Max (piano, b. 1997). B+(**) [bc]

Agnas Bros.: Frya (2022, Haphazard Music): Fourth album. B+(**) [bc]

Ray Charles: The Complete Swing Time and Down Beat Recordings (1949-1952) (1949-52 [2004], Night Train, 2CD): First recordings for the blind pianist-singer, before he moved on to Atlantic and stardom. He had a few minor r&b hits during this period ("Confession Blues," "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand," "Kissa Me Baby"). I've always heard that he was a Charles Brown wannabe early on, and there's a fair amount of that here, but other undeveloped styles as well. B+(*) [sp]

Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society: Eye on You (1980 [1981], About Time): Drummer (1940-2013), from Fort Worth, part of Ornette Coleman's mid-1970s Prime Time group. This is a similar-sounding group, with two saxophonists (Byard Lancaster and Charles Brackeen), two guitarists (Vernon Reid and Bern Nix), electric bass (Melvin Gibbs), violin (Billy Bang), and percussion (Erasto Vasconcelos). Still, none of them (even Bang) can quite pull off the sort of miracles Coleman so often delivered. B+(***) [bc]

Jim McNeely Quintet: Rain's Dance (1976 [1978], SteepleChase): Pianist (1949-2025), owns one of the few solo piano albums I've rated A- (his Vol. 20 entry in Maybeck Recital Hall Series), but is best known for extensive work in big bands, starting with Thad Jones/Mel Lewis in 1978, including its later Vanguard Jazz Orchestra edition, and work with several European big bands. Quintet with Larry Schneider (tenor/soprano sax), Mike Richmond (bass), Bob Merigliano (drums), and Sam Jacobs (percussion). B+(***) [sp]

Grade (or other) changes:

Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (2025, Loma Vista): Country singer-songwriter, fifth studio album since 2016 (plus a live Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman). Strong upbeat pieces, doesn't lose much on the ballads. [was: B+(***)] A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Agnas Bros.: Sista Försöket (Moserobie) [09-26]
  • David Greenberger & the Hi-Ho Barbers: Ginger Ale (Pel Pel) [11-17]
  • John O'Gallagher/Ben Monder/Andrew Cyrille/Billy Hart: Ancestral (Whirlwind) [10-24]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Music Week

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44977 [44927] rated (+50), 29 [20] unrated (+9).

Bernie Sanders is wrong, It's not okto be angry about capitalism. It's a curse, a chore, a dead weight that saps your energy and spirit and leaves you empty and bitter. That's probably why most people are resigned to its inevitability. And those who can afford it, which probably includes us, will wind up just paying them off to make the problems go away. Most capitalists, after all, are satisfied just taking your money. Political ideologues aren't so easily paid off. No point going into details about what's driving these statements. They're my problems, not yours. But they're coming for you, just as surely as they came for me.

I posted a piece on Cooking Chinese last week. It was on my Substack newsletter, which for various historical and philosophical reasons I call Notes on Everyday Life. After several political posts (and one on Sheila Jordan), I wanted to do something closer to my own everyday life. Your mileage may vary, but cooking, eating, and socializing are pretty universal. Of course, when I was done, I still had further thoughts, so I spent a couple days writing them up, in Friday's (updated yesterday) blog post, Cooking Chinese (Again). That, plus capitalism, pushed this Music Week post out a day.

I was surprised to find the rated count so high (50; 30 is my idea of a good week), as it seems like I spent much of the week desperately searching for things to listen to next. I did the cutoff late Monday, so got most of an extra day in, but I wasn't able to listen to much that day. (My initial cutoff count was 49. I added the Carrier album late Monday, before I finished opening the day's mail, so that made 50, and bumped the A-list from 2 to 3. Tuesday morning I added Wednesday, figuring it would be nice to have at least one new A- album, and that I was overdue in getting to it anyway. But it will be in next week's count.)

Three things helped with the rated count: Phil Overeem's October 1 list suggested some titles (including Wednesday, and a Patricia Brennan album that I expected would show up in the mail later); the About Time Records Bandcamp page, where I listened to everything (checks; missed one, so next week for Ronald Shannon Jackson); and a look into Mark O'Leary's early work: three newly issued tapes that date from 1998-2001, on Bandcamp, plus many of his 2000-08 Leo releases, on Spotify. He wrote me via my Q&A form, adding "even a modest mention of . . . would be very appreciated." Modest mentions is about all I seem to be good for these days, but I wrote up two of those last week, spending most of my listening time trying to figure out how old they were. I got the recording dates from him later (1998-2001), so that's why they're in the "changes" section below. I gather he went off in a different direction after 2008, but I didn't venture there: too many albums, no idea where to start. Maybe later.

It seems like most of what I get through the Q&A form are plugs for reviewing albums. I follow up on them more often than not, but still find it disappointing when my opinion is only sought for commerce. More anger about capitalism, I'm afraid.

If you haven't already, a subscription to Notes on Everyday Life would be appreciated. They do one thing well that I've never been able to do on my own, which is to track readership. It's good to get some evidence back that I'm not just shouting into the void. I'm thinking that my next piece there is going to be a "modest mention" of a sensible peace plan for Israel/Gaza. I've thought about that for 25 years, basically ever since Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Shaul Moffaz blew up the Oslo Accords (with non-trivial assists from Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Bill Clinton), although most of the ideas I've come up with over the years no longer work, mostly because I've always assumed that sanity can prevail. The question now is more along the lines of can insanity be constrained? I'm pretty skeptical, especially where Trump is concerned, but if it could be constrained, some ways are more realistic and/or more viable than others.

Don't expect such a piece real soon. While I have a pretty good idea where to go, I need first to collect some Loose Tabs, especially to pick up details on the "Trump Peace Plan" (which is probably one of those compound oxymorons like "Holy Roman Empire"). Not much in the draft file so far, so I have a fair amount of work to do there.

New records reviewed this week:

$ilkMoney: Who Waters the Wilting Giving Tree Once the Leaves Dry Up and Fruits No Longer Bear? (2025, Lex/DB$B): Rapper from Virginia, Murphy Graves, fourth album since 2018, all long, run-on titles. B+(***) [sp]

Marja Ahti: Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth (2025, Fönstret): Born in Sweden, based in Finland, combines field recordings with electronics and sundry instruments for speculative ambient arts, including a couple others on clarinet and cello. B+(*) [bc]

Pheeroan akLaff/Scott Robinson/Julian Thayer: aRT: Live at Kampo Bahal Gallery (2025, ScienSonic, EP): Drums, reeds, bass trio, the drummer originally named Paul Maddox, from Detroit, has a long and distinguished career starting with Oliver Lake in 1975, including work with Henry Threadgill and Wadada Leo Smith. I think of Robinson as being more retro, but not here. The bassist has few side-credits, mostly with Robinson or Klaus Suonsaari. The three recorded a trio album in 2024 which has proven elusive, but this shorter (23:34) improv piece is probably indicative, but also seems tentative. B+(*) [bc]

Gary Bartz & NTU: The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control (2022-23 [2025], OYO): Alto saxophonist, in his 80s now, best known for his Afro-centric NTU Troop albums (1970-74), but has a long catalog up through 2011, less recently (although he was featured on one of the Jazz Is Dead albums). I like the sax here, but can't get into the vocals, although they work well enough for slow soul jams. B+(*) [sp]

Chrome Hill: En Route (2024 [2025], Clean Feed): Norwegian jazz group, fifth album since 2008, main name I recognize is Atle Nymo (tenor sax, bass clarinet), but composer is Asbjørn Lerheim (Fender Bass VI, electric guitar, electronics), backed by Roger Arntzen (bass, electronics) and Torstein Lofthus (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Mike Clark: Itai Doshin (2024 [2025], Wide Hive): Drummer, generic name is easy to forget but he's been active since the the early 1970s (with Herbie Hancock) and Discogs credits him with 21 albums since 1992. Quintet of veterans here -- Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Craig Handy (sax), Patrice Rushen (piano/rhodes), Henry Franklin (bass) -- so mainstream you know what to expect, but can't help but be pleased. B+(***) [cd]

Tom Cohen: Embraceable Brazil (2025, Versa): Drummer, from Philadelphia, has several previous albums back to 1997, plays a wide range of Brazilian standards here, some with Chico Pinheiro on guitar and/or Barbara Mendes for vocals. B+(**) [cd]

Jorge Espinal: Bombos Y Cencerros (2023 [2025], Buh): Guitarist from Peru, has a previous trio album from 2015, not sure how much else. This is solo, improv, but the credit reads: "all at once, prepared electric guitar, bass drum, cowbell, pedals, and laptop." Nine pieces, 29:07. For a while I could imagine Captain Beefheart singing to it, but it wound up too fragmented even for Tom Zé. B+(**) [sp]

Debby Friday: The Starrr of the Queen of Life (2025, Sub Pop): Electropop singer-songwriter, born in Nigeria, raised in Montreal, second album. First, which won the Polaris Prize, I liked a lot, this is a bit more inscrutable. B+(***) [sp]

Miho Hazama: Live Life This Day: Celebrating Thad Jones (2025, Edition): Japanese pianist, based in New York, debut 2012, her 2023 m_unit album caught me by surprise, but she's also been involved with European big bands: a 2018 album with Metropole Orkest, and since 2019 she's been "chief conductor" of the Danish Radio Big Band, a post that had previously been given to several notable Americans: Jim McNeely, Bob Brookmeyer, and Thad Jones. They're bolstered here with strings from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, for this live program of Jones compositions plus a couple Hazama additions. B+(*) [sp]

Conrad Herwig: Reflections - Facing South (2020 [2025], Savant): Trombonist, started with Clark Terry in the 1980s, played with Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano, and Mingus Big Band, but has shifted into Latin jazz, especially with his series of The Latin Side Of recordings. Trio here with Eddie Palmieri (piano) and Luques Curtis (bass). The Latin quotient seems subdued without percussion, but they enjoy space to breathe, without just being hurried along. B+(***) [sp]

Hot 8 Brass Band: Big Tuba (2025, Tru Thoughts): New Orleans brass band, founded 1995, long led by Bennie Pate, who died in 2021, carries on. B+(**) [bc]

JID: God Does Like Ugly (2025, Dreamville/Interscope): Atlanta rapper Destin Route, started with mixtapes in 2009, fourth studio album since 2017, sprawling with 15 tracks, 57:06, many guests, a fairly generous view of God. B+(***) [sp]

Rick Keller: Heroes (2024-25 [2025], Vegas): Saxophonist (tenor, soprano, alto, some flute), started career in 1983 in Europe, based in Los Angeles since 2001 (and now Las Vegas?), has a couple records as far back as 1988, many more side credits, styles this as tributes to "musicians who shaped my development" -- mostly with fusion connections (Davis, Shorter, Zawinul, Hancock, Marcus Miller) or groups (Weather Report, Brecker Brothers). Some vocals don't help. B- [cd]

Zack Lober: So We Could Live (2025, Zennez): Canadian bassist, previuos album from 2021, couple dozen side credits going back to 2003. Nice quartet with trumpet (Suzan Veneman), tenor sax (Jasper Blom), and drums (Sun-Mi Hong). B+(***) [cd]

Donny McCaslin: Lullaby for the Lost (2024 [2025], Edition): Tenor saxophonist, started early 1990s, has released regular albums, especially since 2000, has always impressed me with his chops if not necessarily judgment. Opts for a fusion-heavy mix here, employing various combinations of guitars (notably Ben Monder), keyboards (Jason Lindner), bass, and drums. B [sp]

Mexstep & Principe Q: Tráfico (2025, Puro Unity, EP): San Antonio rapper Marco Cervantes, has a couple previous albums, with "genre-defying" DJ/producer Svani Quintanilla, the grooves a mix of Tex-Mex and turntablism. Six songs, 16:51. B+(***) [bc]

Joe Morris/Brad Barrett/Beth Ann Jones: Abstract Forest (2025, Relative Pitch): Avant-guitarist, many albums since 1990, here with cello and bass. B+(***) [sp]

Elizabeth Nichols: Tough Love (2025, Pulse, EP): Country singer-songwriter, from Kentucky, seems to be her first record, not much info available but has some appeal, could stick around; 7 songs, 20:08. B+(**) [sp]

Bill Orcutt/Steve Shelley/Ethan Miller: Orcutt Shelley Miller (2024 [2025], Silver Current): Guitar, bass, drums trio, considered "experimental rock," because all three have rock band backgrounds (Shelley on Sonic Youth; Orcutt's first group was called Harry Pussy -- I still file his records under rock, but list them with jazz). B+(***) [sp]

Juan Pastor's Chinchano: Memorias (2024 [2025], Calligram): Drummer-led Latin jazz group, seems to be "(2)" in Discogs (which doesn't have this or other albums on the artist's website, but gives him a side credit for James Davis' Beveled). Cover adds names for Stu Mindeman (piano), Matt Ulery (bass), Dustin Laurenzi (tenor sax), and "featuring" Gian Luiggi Cortez Mejia (congas/cajón/bell/cajita). B+(***) [cd]

Patrick Shiroishi: Forgetting Is Violent (2025, American Dream): Alto saxophonist, based in Los Angeles, very prolific since 2014. "Supporting cast," including some notable rock figures, is mentioned in the write-up but not properly credited. Mostly voices, not very distinct. Some fine sax runs over a noise backdrop. B+(*) [bc]

Kalie Shorr: My Type (2025, Pound It Out Loud, EP): Singer-songwriter from Maine, based in Nashville, which gets her no-twang pop anthems a bit of a country audience. Has a good album from 2019, plus several EPs. This one has 6 songs, 18:19. B+(***) [sp]

Wadada Leo Smith/Sylvie Courvoisier: Angel Falls (2024 [2025], Intakt): Trumpet and piano duo, the former in his 80s, an early AACM member, his discography going back to 1971, but it seems like he only rose to a much higher level after 2010, as he started getting grant money for expansive compositions. Swiss pianist, very productive since 1997. Her name is first on the front cover, but his comes first on the back, and on the spine. Similar to last year's duet with Amina Claudine Myers (or this year's with Vijay Iyer). A bit slow for my taste, but rewards a close listen. B+(***) [cd]

Sprints: All That Is Over (2025, City Slang/Sub Pop): Irish garage punk band, Karla Chubb the singer, second studio album after some EPs. Another strong album. B+(***) [sp]

Laura Taylor: Think I'm in Love (2025, Vegas): Las Vegas-based standards singer, recorded a pretty fair disco album in 1979, Discogs goes straight from it to this one, but I have four intermediate albums in my database, including a tribute to Julie London and Chet Baker and a Johnny Mercer songbook. B+(*) [cd]

The Third Mind: Right Now! (2025, Yep Roc): Americana "supergroup" -- best known are Dave Alvin, Victor Krummenacher (Camper van Beethoven), and Jesse Sykes (who takes most of the vocals) -- take some improv ideas from jazz, which include some heavy guitar, and a closing 7:51 "The Creator Has a Master Plan." B+(***) [sp]

Pat Thomas: ود ود (Wadud/Most Loving) (2023 [2025], Nyahh): British avant-pianist, often drops Arabic into his titles -- best known is his group, Ahmed -- solo here, one 30:35 piece, piano sounds prepared. B+(***) [bc]

UNLV Jazz Ensemble 1: Double or Nothing (2025, Vegas): College-level 21-piece big band, directed by Dave Loeb and Nathan Tanouye, mixed a couple of original pieces along with standards, notably Ellington/Strayhorn and Gillespie. B [cd]

Kamasi Washington: Lazarus [Adult Swim Original Series Soundtrack] (2025, Milan): Tenor saxophonist, major chops but also has crossover appeal, one of three soundtracks for Shinichiro Watanabe's anime series (the others are by Bonobo and Floating Points). Soundtracky, with some boss sax. B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Armen Donelian: Stargazer (1980 [2025], Sunnyside): Pianist, had played with Mongo Santamaria and Billy Harper before recording this first album, a trio with Eddie Gomez and Billy Hart, originally released in Japan in 1981. B+(**) [cd]

Hot Chip: Joy in Repetition (2005-22 [2025], Domino): British electropop group, 8 albums 2004-22, this compilation appears to be selected from singles (including a bait track included here, but of uncertain age). Looking back at my individual album grades, I'd say that selection helps, but doesn't clear them as a singles band. B+(**) [sp]

Mark O'Leary Group: I See Further Than You (2001 [2025], TIBProd.): Irish guitarist, released a series of albums on Leo in the early 2000s that were well regarded in Penguin Guide, but moved away from jazz (or toward something else?) after 2008. This is one of several old tapes recently released, this one with Michael Formanek (bass) and Joey Baron (drums). (Two others I reviewed last month but spent most of my time puzzling over the missing dates.) B+(**) [bc]

Eli "Paperboy" Reed: Sings "Walkin' and Talkin'" and Other Smash Hits [20th Anniversary Edition] (2005 [2025], Yep Roc): Blues-smitten singer-guitarist from the Boston suburbs, made a pilgrimage to Clarksdale, Mississippi after graduating high school, but went to Chicago for college, then returned to Boston to record his first album: 12 tracks here, with the reissue adding 15 more (4 bonus tracks + 11 radio sessions). B+(**) [sp]

Atef Swaitat: Palestinian Bedouin Psychedelic Dabka Archive (1970s [2025], Majazz Project/Palestinian Sound Archive): Two sides (46:31) compiled from "immersive field recordings from weddings across the Galilee in the 1970s." B+(***) [sp]

John Taylor: Tramanto(2002 [2025], ECM): English pianist (1942-2015), many side credits starting in 1970 with John Surman, Graham Collier, Harry Beckett, Alan Skidmore, and Kenny Wheeler. This is a trio with Marc Johnson (bass) and Joey Baron (drums). This was a live recording in January, befor the April studio session the trio released as Rosslyn. B+(**)

Wednesday: Bleeds (2025, Dead Oceans): Country-ish rock band from North Carolina, although they also venture into Sonic Youth territory, principally Karly Hartzman (vocals, guitar), although guitarist MJ Lenderman has the bigger profile, and most of the songs (aside from a Lefty Frizzell cover) are jointly credited. Lots of people love this album, and they're not wrong. A- [sp]

Old music:

Abdullah: Life's Force (1979, About Time): Trumpet player Leroy Bland, better known as Ahmed Abdullah, Discogs (which notes that he kept the Arabic name even after converting to Buddhism) treats this as a group name. Played with Sun Ra, Arthur Blythe, a few others -- his 1974 group, Melodic Art-Tet, is especially notable. Group here with Vincent Chancey (French horn), Muneer Abdul Fatah (cello), Jerome Hunter (bass), Jay Hoggard (vibes), and Rashied Sinan (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Pheeroan ak Laff: House of Spirit: "Mirth" (1979 [1980], Passin' Thru): Drummer, first album on his own, solo, produced by Oliver Lake. B+(***) [yt]

Willem Breuker Kollektief: William Breuker Collective (1983 [1984], About Time): Dutch saxophonist (1944-2010), a co-founder of ICP, ran his group from 1974 on, a not-quite big band which played free jazz while liberally quoting from Kurt Weill, classical, and circus music. Most of their records are on the BV Haast label. I've sampled them occasionally where I could, but my grades are all over the place, as is their music. This was snagged from a rare New York performance, much like European labels latch onto concerts by visiting Americans. This one is more wonderful than not, but still trips up more than I would like. B+(***) [bc]

François Carrier Trio With Uri Caine: All' Aba (2001 [2002], Justin Time): Canadian alto saxophonist, debut 1994, impressed me early and has long been a favorite. The pianist was in peak form during this period. A- [bc]

Mike Clark: Plays Herbie Hancock (2022 [2023], Sunnyside): Veteran drummer, joined Hancock's band in 1974, and remained in the Headhunters long after Hancock left. Acoustic trio here with Jon Davis (piano) and Leon Lee Dorsey (bass), playing eight Hancock standards. B+(**) [sp]

Jerome Cooper: The Unpredictability of Predictability (1979, About Time): Drummer (1946-2015), best known for Revolutionary Ensemble, also injects flute, whistle, balafon, percussion, and voice into this early solo album. It's a remarkable tour de force, especially as the balafon adds a melodic overtone to the basic thud of the drums. A- [bc]

Jerome Cooper Quintet: Outer and Interactions (1987 [1988], About Time): Drummer-led quintet, his compositions, he also plays chiramia, balaphone, and flutes, joined by Joseph Jarman (tenor sax/flute), William Parker (bass), Thurman Barker (drums), and Jason Hwang (violin). Best parts here focus on the percussion. B+(***) [bc]

Fred Hopkins/Diedre Murray Quartet: Prophecy (1990 [1998], About Time): Bassist (1947-99), not much as a leader (two more albums with the cellist around this time list her first, but he started out with Air in 1975, was a regular with David Murray, and appeared with others like Don Pullen, Oliver Lake, and Henry Threadgill. Quartet with cello (Murray), guitar (Brandon Ross), and drums (Newman Baker). B+(***) [bc]

Sam Jones Plus 10: The Chant (1961, Riverside): Bassist (1924-81), a dozen-plus albums starting in 1960, huge number of side credits (especially with Cannonball Adderley and Cedar Walton). Second album, three brass, three saxes, drums, piano/guitar (Victor Feldman/Les Spann) or piano/vibes (Wynton Kelly/Feldman), three tracks where Jones plays cello and Keter Betts picks up the bass. B+(***) [sp]

Joe Morris: Racket Club (1993 [1998], About Time): Avant-guitarist, long list of records starts in 1990, this one with two saxophonists (Jim Hobbs on alto and Steve Norton on baritone), electric bass (Nate McBride), and two drummers (Jerome Deupree and Curt Newton). B+(***) [bc]

Mark O'Leary/Cuong Vu/Tom Rainey: Waiting (2004 [2006], Leo): Freewheeling guitar-trumpet-drums trio. B+(***) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Ståle Storløkken/Stein Inge Braekhus: St. Fin Barre's (2002 [2008], Leo): Guitar-organ-drums trio, recorded on the guitarist's home turf in Cork City. B+(*) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Eyvind Kang/Dylan Van Der Schyff: Zemlya (2004 [2008], Leo): Another trio, recorded in Seattle, with viola and drums (and electronics credits for all). I'm rarely getting a good sense of how the guitar fits into these records, but the viola is exceptional here, and the timbre is close enough that the two instruments co-extend. A- [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Kenny Wollesen/Jamie Saft: The Synth Show (2005 [2008], Leo): The guitarist adds E-Bow and Soundscapes to his repertoire, with Saft on synthesizer and Wollensen on drums. At the time, there was a boomlet for "jazztronica," extending from Matthew Shipp's Blue Series to postmodernists like Dave Douglas and even to retro-oriented Nicholas Payton. My favorites, like Nils Petter Molvær and Nik Bärtsch, focused on rhythm. This one is more into texture. B+(*) [sp]

The Henry Threadgill Sextet: When Was That? (1981 [1982], About Time): Saxophonist (alto/tenor, clarinet, flutes), started with Air in 1975, effectively kicked off his solo career here (after a best-forgotten 1979 album on Arista/Novus), a group with Olu Dara (cornet), Craig Harris ( trombone), Fred Hopkins (bass), Brian Smith (piccolo bass), and drums (Pheeroan Aklaff or John Betsch). B+(*) [bc]

The Henry Threadgill Sexett: Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket (1983, About Time): Seven figures (back facing) on the cover, so the group appears to be misnumbered, with both drummers returning, the only change being replacing the piccolo bass with a proper cello (Diedre Murray). B+(**) [bc]

Grade (or other) changes:

Mark O'Leary Quartet: White Album (1998 [2025], TIBProd.): Early New York set with Paul Motian (drums), Kenny Werner (piano), and John Patitucci (bass). B+(*) [bc]

Mark O'Leary Group: A Simple Question (1999 [2025], TIBProd.): Early trio with Marc Johnson (bass) and Bill Stewart (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Affinity Trio [Eric Jacobson/Pamela York/Clay Schaub]: New Outlook (Origin) [10-17]
  • Kenny Barron: Sunset to Dawn (1973, Time Traveler) [10-17]
  • Patricia Brennan: Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic) [10-24]
  • Roy Brooks: The Free Slave (1970, Time Traveler) [10-17]
  • Adam Forkelid: Dreams (Prophone) [10-24]
  • Carlos Garnett: Cosmos Nucleus (1976, Time Traveler) [10-17]
  • Maja Jaku: Blessed & Bewitched (Origin) [10-17]
  • Lizzy & the Triggermen: Live at Joe's Pub (self-released) [08-14]
  • Kelsey Mines: Everything Sacred, Nothing Serious (OA2) [10-17]
  • Roberto Montero: Todos Os Tempos (Vaicomtudo Music) [10-17]
  • Ted Piltzecker: Peace Vibes (OA2) [10-17]
  • Rich Siegel: It's Always Been You (self-released) [09-12]
  • Enoch Smith Jr.: The Book of Enoch Vol. 1 (Misfitme Music) [11-07]
  • Pat Thomas: Hikmah (TAO Forms) [11-07]
  • Patricia Thomson: Your Love (PT Designs Productions) [10-01]
  • Henry Threadgill: Listen Ship (Pi) [09-26]
  • Wayne Wilkinson: Holly Tunes (self-released) [11-07]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 6, 2025

Cooking Chinese (Again)

I took a break last week to cook some food for friends before they went off on tour of Europe. I was feeling nostalgic for some Chinese, and I had some scallops and crabs in the freezer I wanted to use up, having long ago bought them in anticipation of such an occasion. I can't claim the food was really remarkable, but it hit the spot. And the process is fascinating enough I thought it might be useful to write something about it. I also thought it was well nigh time to write something in Notes on Everyday Life that wasn't just about politics and the woes of capitalism. And what's more quotidian than cooking? (Even if this particular meal isn't just everyday fare.)

You can read the piece here: Cooking Chinese: "Let's take a break and cook up something tasty." Or you can also read it in my archive, but if you go read it at Substack, you'll show up in the statistics they send me, and that will make me feel a bit better. Even more gratifying would be a subscription. You might even pass links or copies on to your friends, and encourage them to subscribe. It's all free, and I expect to keep it that way. But it's not something I'm highly motivated to do while remaining totally oblivious to whether anyone reads it or not. Writing, like cooking, is something I do to share. And while I may do that for vain, selfish, and/or egotistical reasons, I do care how it is received.

On the other hand, since I have the plate picture handy, let's go ahead and include it here (cw from top: eggplant nuggets, soft shell crabs, baby bok-choy, peanut sauce noodles, scallops in not-so-spicy orange sauce, with some curried fried rice in the middle:

Like everything else these days, this piece took me much longer to write than I expected, or thought it should. So when I got it into what seemed like reasonable shape, I clicked on "publish" (or whatever it's called) before realizing that I had links in the file to several recipes that I hadn't uploaded yet. Then I figured I should also include a link in the notebook. Then it occurred to me to file this blog entry. It doesn't fit any of my regular series, but that's just as well. In order to publish a blog entry, I have to do a full website update, and that inhibits me from posting trivial blog entries. But since I have to do an update anyway, it's kind of liberating just to jot down a few afterthoughts. It's possible that my favorite form of writing is meta-commentary.

I always struggle to keep from going off on tangents, each an interesting story in its own right, but obstacles to getting to any sort of point. I imagine that when I get my memoir directory set up, I can just dedicate a file to each and every thread, and explore them ad nauseum. For instance, I mention five (or six, if you count Claiborne, which I don't) cookbooks. I'd like to list all of my cookbooks, thumb through them, and note recipes I recall making, with whatever memories they evoke. This will include close to a dozen Chinese cookbooks, and a bit more than a dozen Indian, as well as 3-5 each from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia/Malaysia, Myanmar, and Iran, as well as a few regional surveys (my sources for dishes from the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Indochina -- I've been remiss on Vietnam, especially given that I regularly shop in Vietnamese grocers, but I've never been very happy with local Vietnamese restaurants, which we have quite a few of).

Similarly, I'd like to build a fairly detailed log of birthday (and other major) dinners. The memoir will explain how these came about, and evolved over the years. For now, let's just say that they started around 1995, after I left Contex -- although they probably overlap time I did consulting for Xyvision -- and they arose from socializing with friends who worked there. The first two were Chinese. If memory serves, one had 18 dishes, the other 22. The third was Indian. In 1998, we moved to New Jersey, and I did Indian again, this time inviting friends out from New York City. That one I remember as the most spectacular one ever. Or maybe I just felt challenged by the guests, who had a lot of experience with the cuisine. Or maybe there was a Turkish menu in that series, perhaps between the two Indians. There was a Turkish restaurant in Brookline we loved, and I made a lot of Turkish food before NJ.

In 1999, we moved to Wichita. I don't recall making birthday dinner that year: seems like I prepped a "beer butt chicken" for my brother's grill one year, but that hardly counted. I do recall skipping one other year later. A friend had moved to Salina, so we drove up there and went to Brookville Hotel for fried chicken. But we've generally done something every year. One of the most modest was a single Brazilian feijoada. Spanish, Thai, Moroccan, Cuban, Russian, Greek, Korean, and French were major productions. I've made a lot of Italian, Japanese, Ashkenazi, and Middle Eastern (in which I include Israel, even an "Eretz Israel" cake attributed to Ariel Sharon's wife), as well as substantial menus from Mexico, Iran, and Hungary, but I don't think they landed on my birthday. One year when I was down in the dumps, a friend talked me into just grilling hamburgers. (We had several meats, homemade buns, potato salad, baked beans, slaw, and my mother's legendary coconut cake.) Another year I just dug into the "soul food" cookbooks. For 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, we ate in the backyard: Turkish yogurtlu kebap, Tunisian bisteeya, and various salads from Iran to Morocco, with two cakes: coconut again, and flourless chocolate.

This may sound like bragging, but I'm really just a rank amateur. I have no training, no restaurant experience, and I'm really quite inept at lots of things (especially bread). I have no sense of food as art, and never serve plated meals. Everything is "family style": pass it around and pick out what you want. That may go back to my childhood, when restaurants were road stops, never destinations. I was moderately picky then, but I always was interested in trying something exotic. I remember jumping at my first opportunity to order veal (in Pocatello). I don't remember what it tasted like (which was probably nothing). Much of what I remember about going out into the world was tied to food.

I allude to various food stories in the piece, but always had to steer the piece back on course. The first "Chinese" food I ate was actually a bit earlier. My aunt found a "chop suey" kit and wanted to serve us Chinese. It wasn't very good. (Mostly the kit's fault, I'm sure, but she almost never cooked for us, and was the only female in my mother's family who wasn't famed as a cook.) It was another decade before my parents finally went to a proper Chinese restaurant. My father's cousin, from Dodge City, came to town and wanted to try the Chinese. We went to Albert's, and spent an hour in line waiting for a table. My father was miserable, but my mother was delighted not to have to cook, and by then I had a fair idea what to look for. After my mother died, the first thing we did was to drive out to Dodge City, where I made my mother's last birthday dinner for the cousin, who hadn't been able to join us for the funeral. After that, we drove on to Phoenix, where my mother's last sister lived. I don't think I cooked for her then, but we did hit up a Chinese restaurant at some point. (I also remember Mexican.)

Aside from my fellow Boy Scout, there was another Chinese family in our neighborhood -- they also owned a Chinese restaurant, although I wasn't aware of it at the time -- and they had a daughter who was in my grades 1-6. She was the smartest person I knew back then, which may help explain why I never bought in to the notion of white male superiority. She had the advantage of having been held back a year, because English was her second language, but I still remember an embarrassing incident in 2nd grade where she clearly understood the language a lot better than I did. Good chance she was taller than me, too.

I did finally mention my mother's last birthday dinner, but there are many other stories I can recall about cooking for her. She may not have had any clue how to cook Chinese, or even what she was eating -- she was a seafood-phobe, but other than that was pretty much game for anything -- but her taste buds were primed for Chinese. Indeed, everyone's equipped to discern sweet, sour, salty, hot, and various aromatics. It's just that no other cuisine attacks your taste buds as systematically as Chinese. (Indian, with its wider array of spices, aims more for the nose.) She regularly declared things that I had cooked the best she's ever had. She even learned to cook a particularly easy but delicious dish: 1-2-3-4-5 Ribs.

Many more stories could be worked in. I recall making the scallops dish for my cousin-mentor at her home. I often took cookbooks (and sometimes supplies and knives) on long car trips, on the off chance that someone might ask me to cook something. (Last time I was in Buffalo, we chased down some veal scallopine and sauteed it with cream, wine and capers. One time in Idaho, we went to a remote mountain cabin, and cooked Turkish food on a campfire. Another cousin in Arkansas took a meal I cooked there and included it in a family cookbook.) My sister lived with us in New Jersey for several months when she was pregnant. That overlapped soft-shell crab season, which we made several times a week. I don't recall whether we used the Kuo recipe then, or I got into it later, but we did cook a lot of Chinese during those months. I remember a Szechuan duck that was even more work than the more famous Peking duck I made later.

I had the plate photo for the recent meal. I've been taking those fairly regularly, so I scanned through the archives looking for something else I could use. The "mise" photo is similar in scale to this particular meal, and give you a good idea of the level of complexity involved. It took me a while to figure out what the white-and-gold plate was between the eggplant and peas: salted duck egg, peeled and coarsely chopped, which went into the rice along with the peas, tofu, sausage, egg, zucchini, bacon, and shallots. (This time I omitted several of those, while adding a sauteed red bell pepper.) Since those pictures came roughly at the end, I thought I should include another picture near the top, which would be picked up in the PR. The 2020 plate was by far the most similar to this latest meal. The big difference is that it involves a fair amount of deep frying, which I probably haven't done since. (I had to look closely to find bits of spinach in the scallops. This time I just used a small saucepan with a half-inch of oil, but wound up with a lot more spinach, as is obvious.) What I have seems patchy, but there are many more images of interest. Again, something for the memoir pile.

I also wound up adding several files to the Recipes (new) directory. I figured the curious should be able to follow the links, without me having to clutter up the narrative too much. I set up the Recipes (old) directory in 2000, when I first transplanted my ocston website, but I've always been pretty erratic at updating it. (I don't know whether anyone else refers to it, but it's useful to me when I travel.) I redesigned it in 2007, but I've never been happy with it, and again have been pretty erratic at updating it. Like much else, it needs a redesign. I have more indexing information than I've wound up using. I should be able to search by ingredient, as well as source and cuisine. There is a dinner log feature, but I've rarely updated it: some meals are fully broken out (and include recipes I've never made again), but many more meals are missing. A couple items have pictures, but much more could be done there, just using the current photo archive.

One possible book project is to compile my mother's recipes, and augment them with a few of my own, woven together in some kind of memoir. Would be a good opportunity to collect family lore, although at this point most of that will be second-hand. While I have my mother's recipe files, the problem there is that very little of what she actually cooked ever got written down. (I have her chicken & dumplings because I asked for it long ago, but I only much later tried re-inventing her meatloaf, which has since evolved into my own distinct version.) On the other hand, much of what is in the files are recipes she cadged from others, as much from etiquette as genuine curiosity, as there are many she never made again, and look to be best forgotten.

My next bout of serious cooking is likely to be my birthday dinner in late October. I'm thinking about Indonesian this time. I've cooked a half-dozen recipes from the Indonesian section of The Complete Asian Cookbook, including the local variant of a fried rice pilaf, a chicken fried then simmered in brazil nuts and coconut milk, and the world's greatest peanut sauce. I also remember a tiny restaurant in Somerville (north of Boston, back in the 1990s) that served a huge rijsttafel for two, that consisted of 8-12 dishes: curries, salads, rice, fried bananas. That always seemed like something to explore in some depth. I cooked Burmese last year. As part of my research, I picked up a cookbook by James Oseland, Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking From the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, but I never made anything from it. So just as last year's dinner was determined by the desire to open a previously unused cookbook, I took this as an omen that Indonesian should be next. Given the alternatives, this is the one thing I'm actually looking forward to thinking about.

One last thing to note here is that my Substack newsletter, Notes on Everyday Life, has been a pretty modest success so far. The day after posting, I got a statistics report showing 80 views, 4 likes, 0 comments, 0 new subscribers (66 total). September's stats were down from August, mostly because posts were down from 3 to 2 (but also the "30d open rate," whatever that means, is down 7.02%). I never set a schedule to work to, but I expected to get more out than I've been able to. But I am reasonably happy with the posts so far, especially as the extra time and care seems to read better. And I have lots of ideas in the pipeline -- although it's possible that Loose Tabs and Music Week are suffering as a result. But I'm more inclined to blame my shortcomings on a world that is failing us worse than even I could have imagined.

Music Week will be delayed a day, so Tuesday (and probably not early). Monday has been wiped out by home maintenance issues, which at the moment are too upsetting even to go into. I expect Tuesday will be unpleasant too, but I should have time for what is essentially a bookkeeping task.

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Monday, September 29, 2025

Music Week

September archive (finished).

Music: Current count 44927 [44894] rated (+33), 20 [17] unrated (+3).

Making slow progress through a depressing series of everyday life challenges, where even accomplishments sometimes feel like losing ground. Certainly losing time, as this is the last Music Week of September. I've been writing daily notebook entries to get myself going each day, so many of the gory details are in there. No need to rehash them here. I do have fairly modest hopes of getting two things done this week:

  1. The website set up for the 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll (link will be here, probably tomorrow, as what I have works, but I keep wanting to restructure the documentation, and still need to edit the invites). This falls far short of any imagined redesign, but it should suffice for the coming poll. I'll follow this up with messages to my email lists, to get people thinking about the eventuality. Actual voting is unlikely to be open before mid-November, but I don't want to be cut up short, as has always happened in the past.

  2. I hope to write up and send out a Notes on Everyday Life post. I'm thinking it will be on cooking Chinese, featuring a recent meal with some technique and lore. After several posts on politics, this should point back toward everyday life (mine at least). Not that cooking is much of a refuge, given that the fascists aren't going to stop with the usual victims.

Future posts will include one on building computers, and one on recycling. I'm also thinking about doing one on three books on jazz in the 21st century, which might just turn into a list of things I think they've missed. I also have a couple books handy on fascism in America, and some thoughts about what does and does not work in the analogy. I'm thinking we should distinguish between first- and second-wave fascism. What they have in common is a desire to seize power and to use it violently against their enemies, allowing for no dissent. Both are authoritarian, but that word seems to intend some kind of static equilibrium, whereas the actual movements are not just dynamic but insatiable. On the other hand, the cultural framework is different: first-wave fascism was distinctly modernist, whereas second-wave is postmodernist (atavistic in its desires, but can't really pull that off.

I actually have very little in the Loose Tabs draft file at the moment, and even less desire to flesh it out. Still, I should, of only to keep an eye out. We're at once powerless to resist but complicit if we do not. In between it often seems that all one can do is tsk-tsk, which I suppose is the point of the column: to show that we witnessed this and knew better but couldn't do anything about it.

I got a few things out of the Slobodian book on Hayek's Bastards, where the "new fusion" is characterized by "hard currency, hard borders, and hard-wired culture." All three of those are very much at odds with a real world they hope to subdue with arbitrary force. It's easy to predict that they will fail, not least because flex is key to survival of the capitalism they adore in theory but can't stand in practice. The unknowns are how many people, especially among the rich, they can con along the way, and how much damage they can do before their failures wipe them out. As we learned from the first wave of fascism, those variables are large and deadly.

I noted this quote (p. 168), which is not quite the point I wanted to make, but still worth sharing:

Common across the platforms and decades is a will to startle and an atmosphere of competitive speculation about the events of the near future. These are attention plays in an economy where attention is a scarce resource. Their strategy is to hit the same notes with a sledgehammer, the ones their consumers expected to hear: the crisis is around the corner. The crash is coming. The status quo is doomed. All assumptions must be undone. Taboos must shatter, the unspoken said aloud. Your liberty is at risk. Act now and act quickly. The centralizers are coming. The socialists are coming, The refugees are coming. The gold requisitioners are coming. The authorities are coming. The state is coming (even if we are the state).

It's easy to dismiss this as "paranoid style," but it feeds on real problems, just blaming the wrong people and offering the wrong remedies. The sad thing is that it works, mostly because the people they hate -- the "progressives" who have deluded themselves into thinking growth and profit are all that elites need to keep ahead of their problems -- don't have answers to these problems (at least ones that respect, much less address, their complaints).

I'm moving on to David A Graham's The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America: a thin but important book, as it appears now that the plan was not just a bunch of bad ideas, but a very methodical approach to seizing power and installing loyal (and self-starting) cadres deep enough in government to have significant impact. Before the election, someone said that the key was that Harris voters believed that she would do things like ending wars that she said she wouldn't do, while Trump voters didn't believe he would do what he plainly said he would do. We've only been able to test one of those hypotheticals: Trump has not only delivered on his promises, he's done so in spectacularly brutal fashion, far exceeding the fears of most of his opponents (even me). Graham's book helps explain this, although I suspect that a fuller explanation requires that we look not just at Trump but to the ideological convictions of his followers, and the power bases they had wormed their way into, in preparation for their leader's permission to go crazy.

With September over, the September archive is complete, and added to the 2025 index. While I don't feel like I got much else done during the month, I do count 187 albums rated (+1 one grade change). Although this week is relatively thin, a lot of terrific albums appeared came to my attention during the month.

New records reviewed this week:

JD Allen: Love Letters (The Ballad Sessions) (2025, Savant): Tenor saxophonist, many albums since 1999, mostly trios which show how imposing he can be, this one lightens up, adding a piano (Brandon McCune) to his usual bass (Ian Kenselaar) and drums (Nic Cacioppo). B+(**) [sp]

Mulatu Astatke: Mulatu Plays Mulatu (2025, Strut): Ethiopian musician, plays vibes, keyboards, percussion, emerged as "the father of Ethio-Jazz" in the 1970s, a compilation of his early material was released as Vol. 4 of Éthiopiques in 1998, which led to his reemergence on the world stage. Now 81, this is billed as his "first major studio album in over 10 years," although I've heard a couple of live collaborations in that period. Old pieces, mostly new big band arrangements, credits unclear, horns a plus. B+(***) [sp]

Decius: Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience) (2025, The Leaf Label): British electronica group, brothers Liam and Luke May, with Quinn Whalley (Paranoid London/Warmduscher) and Lias Saoudi (Fat White Family). Presumably named for the short-lived Roman emperor (249-251) -- at least their album art is Roman. B+(***) [sp]

Doja Cat: Vie (2025, Kemosabe/RCA): Singer-rapper Amala Diamini, from Los Angeles, fifth album since 2018, rather hit and miss. B+(**) [sp]

Dave Douglas: Alloy (2025, Greenleaf Music): Trumpet player, major figure since 1993, joined by two younger trumpet players here (Alexandra Ridout and Dave Adewumi, the idea being to forge a stronger trumpet bond), plus vibes (Patricia Brennan), bass (Kate Pass), and drums (Rudy Royston). B+(**) [sp]

Baxter Dury: Allbarone (2025, Heavenly): Sometimes comes off as a chip off the old blockhead -- spoken vocals, choppy beats -- but that's rarely sufficed with regular albums since 2002. This is touted as his "best yet," and sometimes is. B+(*) [sp]

Robbie Fulks: Now Then (2025, Compass): Folkie singer-songwriter, steady stream of albums since 1996, ranging from bluegrass to Michael Jackson covers to a session with some of the Mekons. Another mixed bag of songs. B [sp]

Geese: Getting Killed (2025, Partisan): Brooklyn band, fourth album since 2018, Cameron Winter the singer, plays keyboards and guitar, backed by guitar-bass-drums. Irritating singer aside, there is something interesting in the mix here, mostly rhythmic. But "irritating" is an understatement. B [sp]

Gao Hong/Baluji Shrivastav: Neelam (2025, ARC Music): Chinese pipa and Indian sitar duo, both with substantial discographies on their own since their moves, the former from China to US in 1994, the latter from India to UK in 1982. The latter's ragas, aided by Yousef Ali Khan on tabla, seem to be the base for improvisations. B+(*) [os]

Jade: That's Showbiz Baby! (2025, RCA): British dance-pop singer-songwriter, surname Thirwall, formerly in the group Little Mix (6 albums, 2012-20, all BPI platinum), first solo album, grew on me a bit, then made me regret it. B+(**) [sp]

Sofia Kourtesis: Volver (2025, Ninja Tune, EP): DJ/producer from Peru, based in Berlin, has one album and five EPs since 2014, presumably does her own lead vocals (not credited). Six songs (28:01). B+(**) [sp]

Harold López-Nussa: Nueva Timba (2025, Blue Note): Cuban pianist, many notable musicians in his family, half-dozen albums since 2007, second on Blue Note (a deal that seems to have required him to relocate from Havana, so he wound up in Toulouse, France). B+(**) [sp]

Maruja: Pain to Power (2025, Music for Nations): English avant-rock band, half-dozen EPs since 2016, first studio album, has some jazz rep probably due to the prominence of Joe Carroll's saxophone, vocalist Harry Wilkinson is more rapper than singer. B [sp]

Mark O'Leary Group: A Simple Question (2025, TIBProd.): Guitarist, from Ireland, Discogs lists several dozen albums from 2005-18, early records on Leo were well-regarded in Penguin Guide, seems to have moved to "rock/ambient/post-rock" around 2008, but has a bunch of recent releases, this a nice trio ("a new paradigm") with Marc Johnson (bass) and Bill Stewart (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Linda May Han Oh: Strange Heavens (2025, Biophilia): Bassist, born in Malaysia, grew up in Australia, lives in New York, has a dozen or so albums since 2012, as well as such notable side credits as Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, and Vijay Iyer. This trio with Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet) and Tyshawn Sorey (drums) got mid-year poll votes two months before its release date. I was pleased when my copy arrived, until I opened up the "origami-inspired" packaging and didn't find any music inside. This is supposedly a feature: "This innovative design caters to the environmentally-conscious listener, who is aware of the harmful effects of plastic in the environment, yet feels that a digital download is just not enough." I'll grant that digital downloads aren't enough, as I'm often left scrambling to collect bits of information that accompany physical CDs, but the music itself is essential to the value proposition. So I ignored this until I could conveniently stream it. (Downloading is a pain I avoid if possible. I did wind up consulting the packaging to determine that the recording dates were Jan. 10-11, 2025, at Bunker Studios -- information not (yet) available at Discogs or Bandcamp. As for the music, simple pleasures: focusing on the bass leads, neat fit for the trumpet (who I like more here than on any of his own albums), outstanding drummer. A- [sp]

Kassa Overall: Cream (2025, Warp): Drummer from Seattle, bounces between jazz (played with Geri Allen in 2009) and hip-hop (Das Racist in 2010), in 2013 did albums with Peter Evans, Vijay Iyer, and Kool A.D., and released a mixtape Christgau and I liked but not on his discographies at Discogs or Wikipedia (Stargate Mixtape). Joined Jon Batiste's Tonight Show band, and started crossing over in every which direction, from Marisa Monte to Carmen Lundy, Arto Lindsay to Cass McCombs, Yoko Ono to Danny Brown. This one, where the title is an acronym for "cash rules everything around me" (caps some places, but u&lc on the cover), offers "eight interpretations of hip-hop classics," but no vocals, so they sound like extended samples. No credits given either, but the saxophonist deserves a shout out. B+(***) [sp]

Sam Prekop: Open Close (2025, Thrill Jockey): Started in rock bands Shrimp Boat and the Sea and Cake, seems to have moved fully into electronic music these days (although I do hear some probable guitar). B+(*) [sp]

Rent Romus/Tatsuya Nakatani: Uplift (2023 [2025], Edgetone): Saxophonist, plays everything and then some, Discogs has a picture of playing two simultaneously, many albums since 1995. Live duo with drums here. B+(**) [sp]

Cécile McLorin Salvant: Oh Snap (2025, Nonesuch): Jazz singer-songwriter, widely acclaimed, has three Grammys, even a MacArthur, eighth album since 2010, most easily winning the vocal jazz category in the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. While I don't doubt her technical skill, I've never gotten much out of her albums, and this one delivers less than usual. B [sp]

Shame: Cutthroat (2025, Dead Oceans): British post-punk band, fourth studio album since 2014. Agreeably trashy, until it isn't. B [sp]

Martina Verhoeven/Luis Lopes/Dirk Serries: Invincible Time (2023 [2025], Raw Tonk): Pianist (electric), with two guitarists, one long take (50:16). B+(**) [bc]

Vlure: Escalate (2025, Music for Nations): Scottish rave-punk band, first album, although NME thinks they've "spent years honing their sound." They do have one. B+(**) [sp]

Webber/Morris Big Band: Unseparate (2024 [2025], Out of Your Head): Tenor saxophonists Anna Webber and Angela Morris, also flute, lead a conventional big band (plus vibes and guitar), which leans free but doesn't poke its head out too far. B+(***) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Mark O'Leary Quartet: White Album ([2025], TIBProd.): No date given, but featured drummer Paul Motian died in 2011, so that's an outer bound. The guitarist started up c. 2000, so that narrows the window down a bit. The others -- Kenny Werner (piano) and John Patitucci (bass) -- started in the early 1990s. B+(*) [bc]

Old music:

Decius: Decius Vol. I (2022, The Leaf Label): British electronica group, Roman statuary on the cover. B+(**) [sp]

High on Fire: Cometh the Storm (2024, MNRK Heavy): Metal group, 9th studio album since 2000, first I've tried -- only because Dan Weiss included it in his 2020-2024 top 50, and it was the last unheard album there (of 2), but note that I did (for no discernible reason) have their first album in my database. First album after a 6-year break, with a new drummer and some "Turkish folk music and Middle Eastern music" mixed into "the band's previous sludge metal and stoner metal genres." The mix isn't very integrated, more like an interlude. The metal strikes me as generic, though not especially offensive. B [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Mat Maneri/Matthew Shipp: Chamber Trio (2002 [2005], Leo): Guitar-viola-piano trio, recorded in New York, where the latter two already had several records together. Takes a while to kick in. B+(**) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Tomasz Stanko/Billy Hart: Levitation (2000 [2005], Leo): Guitar-trumpet-drums trio. Guitar gets more traction, and the trumpet is superb, as expected. B+(***) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Mat Maneri/Randy Peterson: Self-Luminous (2002 [2005], Leo): Guitar-viola-drums trio. The viola dominates once more, but less decisively. B+(**) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Uri Caine/Ben Perowsky: Closure (2003 [2005], Leo): Guitar-piano-drums trio. The piano adds a jolt of energy. B+(**) [sp]

Mark O'Leary/Steve Swallow/Pierre Favre: Awakening (2000 [2006], Leo): Guitar-bass guitar-drums trio. B+(*) [sp]

Sam Prekop/John McEntire: Sons Of (2022, Thrill Jockey): Two-thirds (or sometimes half) of Chicago indie rock band the Sea and Cake (11 studio albums 1994-2018), guitar/vocals and drums. Prekop was previously in Shrimp Boat (1987-93), which I recall from a 3-CD retrospective box issued by avant-jazz label AUM Fidelity in 2004 (Something Grand). McEntire has little else under his own name (Discogs lists a 1998 soundtrack and three singles/EPs, two with Prekop, and a compilation of Cluster), but played in Tortoise and Bastro/Gastr Del Sol, with Stereolab and Red Krayola, and has an even larger production discography. This slots as electronica, four pieces ranging 7:51 to 23:41, each flowing into the next, simple and beguiling. A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Rick Keller: Heroes (Vegas) [08-11]
  • Jussi Reijonen: Sayr: Salt/Thirst (Unmusic) [10-24]
  • Laura Taylor: Think I'm in Love (Vegas) [08-18]
  • UNLV Jazz Ensemble 1: Double or Nothing (Vegas) [08-25]

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Monday, September 22, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44894 [44857] rated (+37), 17 [21] unrated (-4).

I got a late start on this, well into Monday evening, so this will have to be perfunctory. One week's worth of records. I'm more or less current in a diminishing promo queue, although there are a couple of promising items I still haven't gotten to. Beyond that, I've been struggling to figure out what to play next, and that's led to a pretty scattered set of albums. Complicating things is that I was responsible for a disturbing number of mistakes in my bookkeeping. Only one (of six) A- records had its cover scanned, and a couple hadn't been accounted for at all. I doubt that I've caught them all, so there may well be records in the monthly archive that never made it into Music Week.

I don't know why I've been so scatterbrained this week, but a lot of things are happening very fast now, and I'm not coping well. I did manage to get my recycling kiosk built today. It will stand next to the front door, and collect items to give away, go into recycling, or the trash. Lots of room for CDs and books, since that's most of what we have. Next step will be to set up an accounting system to track what we're getting rid of. I can see the argument that there's no need, but I want to keep some sort of audit trail, at least of things no longer needed but still useful as memories.

I've started work on my next Substack post. It's going to be further thoughts on the latest Loose Tabs, but will be space-limited, so will focus on only a few key points. That piece is nearly done, so shouldn't take more than another day or two. Beyond that, I have a few more ideas. Some will be closer to the "everyday life" theme. I'm thinking about writing one on the advantages of building your own computers, and how one goes about doing that.

New records reviewed this week:

Adult Mom: Natural Causes (2025, Epitaph): Singer-songwriter Stevie Knapp, fourth album since 2015, may be considered a band now. Songs include one about cancer. B+(**) [sp]

Apathy: Mom & Dad (2025, Dirty Version/Coalmine): Underground rapper Chad Bromley, from Connecticut, 20 albums since 2004, Nancy & Ronald Reagan on the cover, looking sunny and care free, which is not how he remembers their era. "Grew up in the '80s with a welfare budget." Old style turntablism, dazzling wordplay, political smarts, bearing the full weight of history. A- [sp]

Lucian Ban/John Surman/Mat Maneri: Cantica Profana (2022-23 [2025], Sunnyside): Pianist from Romania, moved to New York 1999, has frequently looked back to his native music, as in his 2011 Transylvanian Concert with Maneri (viola) and his 2020 recording of Transylvanian Folk Songs with Maneri and Surman (baritone/soprano sax, bass clarinet). The latter was dubbed The Bela Bartók Field Recordings, although the recordings were new, based on his research. Subsequent tours generated two more live albums, this and The Athenaeum Concert (below). This one was taken from three earlier concerts. Surman is an inspired addition here. A- [sp]

Lucian Ban/John Surman/Mat Maneri: The Athenaeum Concert (2024 [2025], Sunnyside): Notes quote Bartók: "A future generation might conceivably discover and embody in their art music properties of the peasant music which have altogether escaped us." B+(***) [sp]

Jon Batiste: Big Money (2025, Verve/Interscope): Pianist, singer-songwriter, bandleader, has done some acting, is basically a big deal, born into "a New Orleans musical dynasty," cut his first album at 17, organized his band Stay Human before it became Stephen Colbert's Tonight Show house band (2015-22). I'm surprised at how little detail info is available on this -- big name, major label, but nearly a month after release, AOTY has 0 critic reviews, a 65/57 user score. Two featured guests: Andra Day and Randy Newman, but several other songs (e.g., "Maybe") channel Newman. Title song is big bunk, and cover shows Batiste playing guitar. Half of this is really good, in as many different ways. The other half tails off, but again through divergence. Few albums are so scattered, but few artists have so many options, and the authority to pursue them. A- [sp]

Big Thief: Double Infinity (2025, 4AD): Not my idea of a folk-rock band, just a very talented singer-songwriter (Adrianne Lenker) with enough of a band to deserve group billing (minus their bassist this time, but additional musicians make up for that. First play strikes me as near-perfect. I don't know how much more time I'll put in, but quite possibly one of the year's best. A- [sp]

Johnathan Blake: My Life Matters (2025, Blue Note): Drummer, from Philadelphia, several albums as leader since 2012, many side credits. With Dayna Stephens (sax), Jalen Baker (vibes), Fabian Almazan (piano), Dezron Douglas (bass), "plus special guests including Bilal and DJ Jahi Sundance," playing "a suite of songs that serves as a dual treatise on the importance of family values and the social imperative to stand up in the face of injustice." Does that. B+(**) [sp]

David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra: Who Is the Sky? (2025, Matador): Talking Heads majordomo, their 2-4-6 albums topped my annual lists, but his solo career has been very erratic, with interesting side projects early, a fine 1994 eponymous album, and more misses than not. He's slowed down considerably over the years, this coming 7 years after American Utopia, which itself was 6 years after Love This Giant. He seems at least to have recovered much of his chunky rhythm here, and Brian Carpenter's band helps (although they don't much sound like themselves), as he seems to aim at some bigger stage. B+(**) [sp]

Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (2025, Daughters of Cain): Singer-songwriter, aka Hayden Anhedönia, shades of darkwave or gothic or whatever, identities and aesthetics unfathomable (by me at least), but somewhere way back was an evident overdose of Baptist religion. Second studio album, ignoring whatever this year's Perverts was (a drone exercise, but it still got 77/27 at AOTY, with this one currently at 83/28). Seems thoughtfully composed at first, slips into some not-bad ambient drone, then tries to square the circle. B+(*) [sp]

Cardi B: Am I the Drama? (2025, Atlantic): New York rapper Belcalis Almánzar, got a lot of interest with her mixtapes and singles in 2016-17, followed that with a triumphant studio album in 2018, second album here, makes up for lost time by running 23 songs, 70:49, including old singles back to 2020's "WAP." B+(**) [sp]

Loyle Carner: Hopefully! (2025, EMI/Universal): British rapper-singer, fourth album, pretty successful over there, not so much here. B+(**) [sp]

Double Virgo: Shakedown (2025, Year0001): British duo/group, principally Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, first album after singles going back to 2020, so seems to be a parallel project to Bar Italia, where they defer to singer Nina Cristante. Hints of Pavement and Wire, not that I feel like pursuing them. B+(***) [sp]

Kathleen Edwards: Billionaire (2025, Dualtone): Canadian singer-songwriter, sixth album since 2002. Jason Isbell co-produced, and provided the backing band. B+(**) [sp]

Anat Fort: The Dreamworld of Paul Motian (2024 [2025], Sunnyside): Pianist from Israel, moved to New York in 1996, gained some attention with her ECM debut in 2007. Motian's started out as Bill Evans' drummer, went on to play with dozens of other famous pianists, rather oddly as he always seemed to be following his own drift, nudging the pianist to sharpen the contrast. His own groups almost never included piano, often guitar (especially Bill Frisell). Fort picked out 11 of his songs, with Steve Cardenas (guitar), Gary Wang (bass), and Matt Wilson (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Luigi Grasso: La Dimora Dell'atrove (2024 [2025], LP345): Italian saxophonist (soprano, alto, baritone, bass clarinet), albums since 1999, supported here by NDR Bigband, which he is a regular in. Bills this as "two themes and variations." B+(*) [cd] [09-26]

Michael Hurley: Broken Homes and Gardens (2025, No Quartet): Folk singer-songwriter (1941-2025), recorded an album for Folkways in 1964, a couple more 1971-72, then appeared as the lead artist on the 1976 album Have Moicy! Recorded steadily after that, but less notably, finishing this a month before he died on the road. B+(***) [sp]

Josiah the Gift & Machacha: The Happening (2025, BarsOverBs): New Jersey rapper, member of Umbrella Collective, several albums since 2020, here with producer Mattæus Overgaard Jensen. B+(**) [sp]

Kirk Knuffke/Stomu Takeishi/Bill Goodwin: Window (2025, Royal Potato Family): Cornet player, many albums since 2009, superb both in free and mainstream contexts, trio here with bass and drums. Also sings a couple songs here (not a plus, but not a minus either). B+(***) [sp]

Lizzo: My Face Hurts From Smiling (2025, Nice Life/Atlantic): Rapper Melissa Jefferson, four albums since 2013, Cuz I Love You (2019) a big hit, has a fifth one planned for later this year, calls this poorly-received interim effort a mixtape (AOTY: 50/3). Distinction seems to be hard, fast, rude, and repetitive. B+(*) [sp]

The Oxys: Casting Pearls Before Swine (2025, Cleopatra): Punkish band from Austin, third album since 2020, some past credits for various members, including two from Sylvain Sylvain and the Sylvains. Ten songs (28:14). B+(**) [sp]

Vinnie Paz: God Sent Vengeance (2025, Iron Tusk Music): Underground rapper from Philadelphia, Vincenzo Luvineri, started in 2006 with Jedi Mind Tricks, with 17 albums, most with metal-sounding titles, like Fires of the Judas Blood, The Priest of Bloodshed, The Pain Collector, Savor the Kill, Burn Everything That Bears Your Name, Lower the Blade, Tortured in the Name of God's Unconditional Love. I'm not into the pain, let alone the violence, that fills these tales, but I noted lines like "my life is darker than Charlie Parker" and "beware the wrath of a patient man," and the gloomy music lays bare the harsh reality. No reason we need to live in dystopia, but there's something to be said for not flinching when you do. A- [sp]

Carmen Staaf: Sounding Line (2024 [2025], Sunnyside): Pianist, from Seattle, based in New York, debut 2004 but mostly side credits (most often with Allison Miller or Jenny Scheinman). Explores Monk and Mary Lou Williams here, with various accompanists: Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet duo) to open and close, Darren Johnston (trumpet plus others) for two tracks in the middle, Ben Goldberg (clarinets, three tracks, two with Johnston), one Monk tune just adds bongos (John Santos). B+(***) [sp]

Peter Stampfel, Friends & Daughters: Song Shards: Soul Jingles, Stoic Jingles, Vintage Jingles, Prayers and Rounds (2025, Jalopy): 46 songs of sorts, as noted in the subtitle, in less than 43 minutes, done up in his own inimitable style by one of our leading semi-pop folklorists, although for once I find the style grating, possibly because the humor is all but unfathomable. I briefly glanced at the notes when I first heard of this, and they seem likely to be interesting, but since I've played it I've lost all interest. B- [sp]

Craig Taborn/Nels Cline/Marcus Gilmore: Trio of Bloom (2024 [2025], Pyroclastic): Keyboards (mostly electric), guitars (too, including lap steel), drums. Billed as a self-titled debut, but the names are big enough they couldn't keep them off the cover. Long (70:18). A- [cd] [09-26]

Natsuki Tamura/Satoko Fujii: Ki (2025, Libra): Japanese trumpet and piano duo, their 10th, a relatively quiet affair that breaks up a bit toward the end. B+(**) [cd]

Tyler, the Creator: Don't Tap the Glass (2025, Columbia): Los Angeles rapper Tyler Okonma, started in Odd Future, solid gold since 2011, cashes in with a short one (10 tracks, 28:50), after 2024's 52:54 Chromakopia. B+(*) [sp]

Us3: Soundtrack (2025, Us3): British group, bill themselves as jazz-rap, debut 1993, I filed them under rap at the time, and haven't heard anything since until this, which I found a DownBeat review for. No rap here, as the title implies. B [sp]

Milan Verbist Trio: Time Change (2025, Origin): Belgian pianist, first album, trio with Toon Rumen (bass) and Jens Meijer (drums), mostly originals (covers from Ornette, Stanko, Bach, and Peacock). Has some impressive moments, but who doesn't? B+(*) [cd]

Wild Iris Brass Band: Way Up (2025, Ear Up): New Orleans band founded by Jeff Coffin (tenor sax) and Ray Mason (trombone), with trumpet (Emmanuel Echem), alto sax (Jovan Quallo), sousaphone (Neil Konouchi), drums (Justin Amaral), and tambourine (Ryoko Suziki). Coffin, who does a lot of side work in Nashville, has albums back to 1999 and close to 200 side credits back to 1989. B+(*) [sp]

Saul Williams: Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople (2024 [2025], International Anthem): Spoken word artist, started doing open mic, won a poetry slam title in 1996, which led to roles in a documentary (SlamNation) and a feature film (Slam), and from 2000 on to albums, including one with saxophonist David Murray. Niño is a percussionist, who has regularly recorded with "& Friends" (since 2009). Music didn't quite grab me, but the insights/good messages of the farewell message did, like "we are all bearing witness to the horrendous acts of our government" and "we have a special responsibility because we're in the belly of the beast." B+(**) [sp]

Simón Willson: Feel Love (2024 [2025], Endectomorph Music): Bassist-composer, from Chile, based in New York, third album, quartet with Neta Raanan (tenor sax), Evan Main (piano), and Kayvon Gordon (drums). Interesting postbop, saxophonist continues to impress. B+(**) [cd]

Gaia Wilmer & Ra Kalam Bob Moses: Dancing With Elephants (2023 [2025], Sunnyside): Brazilian alto/baritone saxophonist, studied in Boston (where she met the percussionist), has worked in New York and Sao Paulo, producing several albums since 2017, mostly large groups (sextet and up). Her she takes Moses' solo tracks and builds on them, with various combinations of five more saxophonists, piano, guitar, and/or voice (Song Yi Jeon). Mixed results here, and Moses gets overwhelmed, but George Garzone remains unmistakable. B+(*) [sp]

Yoko Yates: Eternal Moments (2024 [2025], Banka): Pianist, originally from Japan, studied at Berklee and in Cambridge (UK), second album, original pieces, quintet with Jamie Baum (flute), Sam Sadigursky (clarinet/bass clarinet/alto sax), bass, and drums. B [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Charlie Rouse: Cinnamon Flower: The Expanded Edition (1977 [2025], Resonance): Tenor saxophonist (1924-88), played in big bands early, ranging from Bull Moose Jackson to Dizzy Gillespie (and including brief stops with Basie and Ellington), but best known for his work with Thelonious Monk (1959-70, the band continuing after Monk died as Sphere). His own work is rather mixed, including Brazilian themes: Bossa Nova Bachanal (1962) and this in 1977, expanded here past 80 minutes. B+(*) [cd]

Old music:

Chris Cacavas: Chris Cacavas and Junk Yard Love (1989, Heyday): Singer-songwriter from Tucson, played keyboards and lap steel for a 1980s band of some note, Green on Red (Dan Stuart was the leader; Steve Wynn and Chuck Prophet also played at various points), started his solo career here, which appears to be up to 18 albums now, but still lacks a Wikipedia page. I looked into him after noticing a single (***) Christgau review for a 1992 album, identified as this but more likely Good Times. Solidly within their genre. B+(*) [yt]

Chris Cacavas & Junkyard Love: Good Times (1992, Heyday): Second album, the group name firmed up, easy to see from the cover how Christgau might have confused the title. One extraordinary song. I couldn't find the lyrics online, so tried to transcribe them: "I'm a saint/ I can do no wrong/ if you see me walking down the street/ just throw flowers at my feet/ and if you got something to say /well you best get on your knees and pray/ because I'm a saint/ I can't believe this crazy life I'm living/ where I can do what I want and all is forgiven/ can you see the trouble I'm in/ I'm evil but just can't sin/ if you don't believe a word I say well alright/ I'll ride on your dash one day/ because I'm a saint." Another verse, then ends with a chorus answering "he can do no wrong" to each assertion of "I'm a saint." Several more good ones. Could be a SFFR (subject for future research). B+(***) [yt]

Mary Halvorson/Kirk Knuffke/Matt Wilson: Sifter (2011 [2012], Relative Pitch): Guitar/cornet/drums trio, presented this as a group eponymous album but the names, all fairly well known by then, were prominent on the front cover, and this turned out to be a one-shot grouping. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Todd Herbert: Captain Hubs (TH Productions) [10-01]
  • Andy Nevada: El Rumbón (The Party) (Zoho) [08-08]
  • Premik Russell Tubbs & Margee Minier-Tubbs: The Bells (Margetoile) [10-15]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 15, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44857 [44818] rated (+39), 21 [21] unrated (-0).

A few weeks back, before starting my long, slow read of John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, I quickly thumbed through Bernie Sanders' post-2020 campaign memoir, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, and got enough out of it to write up a review, which I sent out to subscribers of my Notes on Everyday Life newsletter, and posted as Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty (also archived). I quickly realized I had more to say, but dragged my feet until I finally posted More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism last week (also archived). I put a lot of thought into those pieces, not that they shouldn't be crafted to make sharper points. But they do raise an important question that hardly anyone has raised: if Americans really want a revolution, and there is some evidence for this, why were they only offered a chance to vote for Trump but not for Sanders? There's a lot to unpack there, and I can imagine it taking book-length, but the key ideas can be found in these two pieces.

In the meantime, I collected notes for Loose Tabs. As soon as I mailed the Sanders piece out, I decided to finish Loose Tabs off before posting this Music Week. I started with a PS to last week's Music Week, with an update on my everyday life, a plug for the Sanders piece, a note on Robert Christgau's latest Consumer Guide (my reviews below, with Young a late upgrade), and a bit on my not-yet-ready Loose Tabs. I worked on it well into Sunday evening, then decided to post what I had, so I can get on with my life. All I've done on it so far today was to fix the ellapsed days counter (28), and add a couple tweets. Even so, I didn't get around to doing the cutoff until 6PM, and it's close to 9PM as I'm writing this.

What I am considering is going back over the Loose Tabs and writing up some sort of executive summary/further reflections I can send out as the next newsletter. But I also have a couple more ideas in the works, ones that come closer to everyday life. And really I could use some detox from politics.

Big push this week will be house stuff. It's time to finally build that recycling kiosk. The scrap wood is pretty much organized. Main problem is likely to be rain, but it should be cooler in a day or two, and only Wednesday seems likely to rain much. Also need to work on the Jazz Critics Poll website, but I'm running out of things in the way, and the actual setup is pretty simple. (Designing a new website would be harder, and may not happen any time soon.) Setting up my own writing framework is also on the todo list.

Lot of records this week from the HHGA list. There's probably another dozen I haven't heard yet. I also picked up tips from Phil Overeem's September list. Not a lot of jazz this week. Fair number of things in the new jazz queue, but very few have been released yet. I also have a folder of download offers that I haven't touched.

On first play, Big Thief's Double Infinity is already an A-, and not a low one.

I'm thoroughly enjoying Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and should wrap it up this week. I'm up to Joseph Stiglitz, which I think only leaves Thomas Piketty. (Stiglitz is not listed on the book cover, but is in the chapter on Samir Amin, along with Dani Rodrik. I have another half-dozen recently purchased books in the wings (and more older ones), but suddenly I'm tempted to look for Quinn Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, which complements the critics of capitalism with critics of the capitalist world whose preferred cure is even more extreme capitalism. The individuals listed, like Murray Rothbard and Charles Murray, don't especially interest me, but the pseudo-revolutionary ardor of the far right is very much among us. I've also just learned that the title is a play on Joan Robinson's characterization of Keynes' Bastards (Samuelson, Solow, and the other neo-Keynesians who dominated American economics until they lost ground to Friedman and his "school").

New records reviewed this week:

Africa Express: Africa Express Presents . . . Bahidorá (2025, World Circuit): British nonprofit founded in 2006 by Damon Albarn and Ian Birrell to promote African musicians, although their roster through five albums includes many others. Rather scattered, with some nice stuff, especially near the end. B+(*) [sp]

Amaarae: Black Star (2025, Interscope): Ama Serwah Genfi, born in the Bronx, parents from Ghana, third album. Nice beats, dense, generously sprinkled with sex. A- [sp]

Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream (2025, Lex): Rapper Frank Walton, close to a dozen albums since 2016. B+(*) [sp]

Blood Orange: Essex Honey (2025, RCA/Domino): British singer-songwriter Devonté Hynes, previously recorded as Lightspeed Champion (2008-10), fifth album since 2011. B+(*) [sp]

Blueprint: Vessel (2025, Weightless): Underground rapper Albert Shepard, from Columbus, Ohio, a dozen-plus albums since 2003, some very good, most real steady. This is both. A- [sp]

Chance the Rapper: Star Line (2025, self-released): Chicago rapper Chancelor Bennett, has mixtapes since 2012, but this is only counted as his second (or third) studio album (some dispute whether the title is one word or two). Much of interest here, some amusing, some making me uncomfortable, impressing on me that the impact of racism is still very palpable (e.g., the 4th of 4 "black commandments": "if they wanna we go to war"), not that the solution isn't clear ("my problem is your problem; your problem is my problem"). A- [sp]

Charley Crockett: Dollar a Day (2025, Lone Star Rider/Island): Country singer-songwriter, has been kicking out 2-3 albums per year since 2015, making this his 16th. All are good. None are great (although I gave his Live From the Ryman Auditorium an A-). B+(***) [sp]

Orhan Demir/Neil Swainson: Wicked Demon (2024-25 [2025], Hittite): Turkish guitarist, acoustic, based in Canada since 1977, has a 1990 album and several more recent, nice duo with bass. B+(**) [cd]

Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force: Khadim (2025, Ndagga): German DJ, side credits back to 1993, released his first Afro-centric ndagga albums in 2013. This particular group is fairly minimal: Bada Seck (bougarabou, thiol, mbeung mbeung bal, tungune), Serigne Manoune Seck (bougarabou, khine, mbeung mbeung, tungune), and Mbene Diatta Seck (vocals). B+(**) [sp]

Evidence: Unlearning Vol. 2 (2025, Rhymesayers Entertainment): Rapper/producer Michael Perretta, former member of the jazz-inflected Dilated Peoples (5 albums, 2000-14), has a half-dozen solo albums since 2007, including Unlearning Vol. 1 (2021). B+(*) [sp]

Fatboi Sharif & Driveby: Let Me Out (2025, Deathbomb Arc): Rapper from New Jersey, several albums since 2021, with various producers (Steel Tipped Dove twice), first with fellow NJ producer. Somewhat ghoulish. B+(*) [sp]

Ingebrigt Häker Flaten/(Exit) Knarr: Live at Artfacts '22 (2022 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): Norwegian bassist, Discogs credits him with 58 albums since 2000, performance credits go back to 1994 and number 274, he's anchored such major groups as Atomic and the Thing, as well as numerous Ken Vandermark projects. Septet here named for a 2021 album, here with Mette Rasmussen (alto sax), Atle Nymo (tenor sax/clarinets), Erik Kimestad (trumpet), guitar, piano, and drums. B+(*) [sp]

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/(Exit) Knarr: Drops (2024 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): Same band concept, although the cast has shifted, with Amalie Dahl on alto sax (except for one track with Mette Rasmussen), Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor, no trumpet, Marta Warelis taking over at piano (with electronics), Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, and an extra drummer for one track ("a bold, extended lineup"). B+(**) [sp]

From the Dirt: Colored Edge of Memory (2025, self-released): Americana band from Frederick, Maryland, with Dan Kenny as singer-songwriter, filed them under folk although there is also a bluegrass influence. Seems nice enough, but I doubt that much will stick. B+(***) [sp]

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist: Alfredo 2 (2025, ESGN/ALC): Rapper Fredrick Tipton, many albums since 2004, several with producer Alan Maman since 2018, including their previous Alfredo (2020). B+(*) [sp]

The High & Mighty: Sound of Market (2025, Eastern Conference): Hip-hop duo, Eric Meltzer (Mr. Eon) and Milo Berger (DJ Mighty Mi), recorded an album in 1999 on Rawkus that got some notice, three more through 2005, now one more. B+(***) [sp]

Kaytranada: Ain't No Damn Way! (2025, RCA): Haitian DJ/producer based in Canada, fourth album since 2016, not counting many mixtapes, a few collaborations, and lots of production work. Fairly basic beat-centric album, exactly what I expect. B+(***) [sp]

Knowledge the Pirate: The Round Table (2025, Pimpire/Trouble Chest Entertainment): Rapper Richard Iverson, half-dozen albums since 2018, this one sometimes co-credited to executive producer Roc Marciano, who also gets a featuring listing on one song. B+(**) [sp]

Lex Korten: Canopy (2024 [2025], Sounderscore): Pianist, also plays Rhodes, couple previous albums, scattered side credits (recently: Simon Moullier, Alfredo Colón, Sasha Berliner, Zoh Amba). Most tracks here feature voice (Claire Dickson), alto sax (David Léon), guitar (Tal Yahalom), drums (Stephen Boegeheld). I'm not much into the vocals. B [cd] [09-19]

Rocío Giménez López/Franco Di Renzo/Luciano Ruggieri: La Palabra Repetida (2025, Blue Art): Argentinian pianist, has a couple albums since 2017, trio with bass and drums, their second together, standards, mostly from jazz (Davis, Ellington, Parker, Shorter, Coltrane). B+(**) [bc]

Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya: Come Back (2025, Umsakazo): South African vocal trio, best known for backing Mahlathini (1937-99), but they have a fair number of albums on their own, starting in 1966, with this new album their first since 2007. Classic township jive, can't miss. A- [sp]

Lili Maljic: The Nearness of You: In Loving Memory of Jim Rotondi (2024 [2025], Pacific Coast Jazz): Standards singer, sticks to A-list songs, handles them well enough, the dedication to the trumpet player, who died two months after helping out here, is a nice touch. B+(**) [cd]

MindsOne: Stages (2025, Fort Lowell): Hip-hop group (Kon Sci, Tronic, various DJs but mostly DJ Noumenon), fifth album since 2007. Old school scratches, and (per HHGA) "precision, moving between introspection and sharp observations about life, ambition, and purpose." A- [sp]

Nils Petter Molvær: Khmer Live in Bergen (2023 [2025], Edition): Norwegian trumpet player, developed a distinctive strain of jazztronica in the 1990s -- which, by the way, started with Masqualero with Arild Andersen, which once again brings us back to George Russell and his Electronic Sonata -- especially on the ECM albums Khmer (1998) and Solid Ether (2000). This draws songs from both albums, bringing back the original band from the latter, plus long-time collaborator Jan Bang (live sampling). A- [sp]

Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones (2025, XL): Alt-r&b singer-songwriter Marcus Brown, second album. B [sp]

Nova Twins: Parasites & Butterflies (2025, Marshall): British duo, Amy Love (vocals/guitar) and Georgia South (bass/vocals), third album, funk beats, metallic clang hilights, can rap some. I've been a fan so far, and some of this is really extraordinary, but it's rather hit-and-miss, taking four songs to get to "Soprano," and more to get to what sounds like supercharged Queen. B+(**) [sp]

Panic Shack: Panic Shack (2025, Brace Yourself): Welsh post-punk band, Sarah Harvey the singer, first album after a couple EPs, 11 songs, 34:16. Some of the themes I'm not into, but they have so much fun with them I can't complain. Reminds me of some '70s new wave, only not male. A- [sp]

Preservation & Gabe 'Nandez: Sortilège (2025, Backwoodz Studioz): Former has a 25-year history as an underground DJ without revealing so much as a name (unless it's Jean Daval? "half-French," from New York); 'Nandez (or Nadez) is younger, "half-Malian," both with some connection to Billy Woods. B+(***) [sp]

Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (2025, Loma Vista): Country singer-songwriter, fifth studio album since 2016 (plus a live Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman). Strong upbeat pieces, loses a bit on the ballads. B+(***) [sp]

ShrapKnel & Mike Ladd: Saisir Le Feu (2025, Fused Arrow): Hip-hop duo, Curly Castro and PremRock (Mark Debuque), from Philadelphia's Wrecking Crew, fourth album since 2020, couple more since, this one produced by Ladd, who has a rep as a spoken word artist including collaborations with jazz musicians, especially Vijay Iyer. B+(**) [sp]

Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love (2025, Tan Cressida/Warner): Rapper originally from Chicago, father a South African poet and political activist, mother a law professor noted as a "critical race theorist," started with Odd Future in Los Angeles, 6th studio album since 2013 (counting an Alchemist collab), but short at 24:08 (11 tracks). B+(*) [sp]

Zach Top: Ain't in It for My Health (2025, Leo33): Country singer-songwriter, grew up on a rance in Washington, second album. B+(**) [sp]

UFO Fev & Body Bag Ben: Thousand Yard Stare (2025, 1332): Rapper and beats, I've seen cover scans with the credits flipped but will go with Discogs (especially since they have a scan to prove it). B+(**) [sp]

Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (2025, Reconstruction): Countryish singer-songwriter, never heard of him through 6-7 albums since 2004, son of Steve Young (1942-2016), another one I've barely heard of (just enough to have him redundantly listed in my country and folk files, neither of which actually graded an album). Christgau recommended this one, and it's interesting enough, and more than a little amusing. Not yet enough to send me back to the catalogs, but I wouldn't rule that out. I sat on the fence here a while, but finally decided not to give a fuck. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Bar-B-Q Killers: Part 1: The Last Shit (1986 [2025], Chunklet Industries, EP): Athens, GA garage band, three songs, 8:24. Title per cover, but Discogs lists as Chester Drawers, after the first song on what is basically a single. Group went on to release an album, Comely, in 1987. B [bc]

Marshall Crenshaw: From "The Hellhole" (2012-16 [2025], Yep Roc): Retro rocker in the early 1980s, seemed major for several striking albums, still sounds much the same, although this collection of remastered stray tracks stikes me as pretty useless. B- [sp]

Woody Guthrie: Woody at Home: Vol 1 + 2 (1951-52 [2025], Shamus): Famous folksinger (1912-67), from Oklahoma, wrote hundreds of songs, with most of his recordings in 1944-49. These previously unreleased tapes -- 22, with 13 songs that hadn't been previously released -- were recorded shortly before he was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease, which ended his career early. This is fairly minor, but interesting. B+(*) [sp]

Old music:

Body Type: Expired Candy (2023, Poison City): Australian garage rock group, four women, second album after two EPs. Pretty good, but ran on well past my peak interest. B+(***) [sp]

The High & Mighty: Home Field Advantage (1999, Rawkus): Philadelphia hip-hop duo, rapper Mr. Eon (Erik Meltzer) and producer DJ Mighty Mi (Milo Berger), first album, draws some notable guest spot artists, like Eminem. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Tom Cohen: Embraceable Brazil (Versa) [10-10]
  • Juan Pastor's Chinchano: Memorias (Calligram) [10-03]
  • Natsuki Tamura/Satoko Fujii: Ki (Libra) [09-19]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

I moved an already long draft file into the blog queue on Friday, after posting my Notes on Everyday Life piece, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. In doing so, I set an implicit deadline for posting this before Monday, when I normally expect to post a Music Week. I could spend an infinite amount of time wrapping this up, trying to make sense of it all, so the budget was hopeful self-discipline. But at 3AM Sunday night/Monday morning, I'm sick and tired of working on this, with no good answer, so I'm opting for the short one, which is to post what I have. If I look at it Monday, I may add a few more similar things, edits some of what I have, write extra notes, or maybe just shrug and move on. There is certainly no shortage of material here. Whether it does any good is another question I can't begin to contemplate, much less answer.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on August 17.

I'm trying a new experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Index to sections:

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: I'm ready to retire this one, but Trump keeps squirming, so his most opportunistic opponents still hope to reel him in. Since last time: the appearance of Ghislaine Maxwell as Trump's character witness ("a perfect gentleman"); the leak of Trump's contribution to Epstein's "birthday book."

Israel: This is just a small sampling on what remains the single gravest issue in American politics -- even though, by looking at both parties in Congress, it barely seems to register. That's not just because the slaughter and devastation has grown to immense proportions, not because Israel has discredited itself to most people around the world, nor because in providing so much economic and military support the US is now widely viewed as complicit and discredited. It's because Israel is the example Trump is following to secure his own domination domestically. (I explain some of this in my latest Notes on Everyday Life post, but if you know what to look for, you can spot numerous examples throughout this and other Loose Tabs posts. Israel has become a veritable laboratory for fascism. America is not only following their model, but has been bankrolling them for decades. The neocon right understood this at least as far back as their 1996 paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The religious right got an even earlier jump with their apocalypse mongering. Democrats, on the other hand, have cut their own throats by pledging eternal loyalty to a regime that is completely inimical to their own stated beliefs and values. It's no wonder why so many Americans find them undeserving of trust.)

Russia/Ukraine: Last time I posted was just after the Alaska summit, but before Zelensky and his European allies descended on Washington to derail whatever impression Putin had made and return Trump to his usual path of fickle incompetence. As I've since noted, "all sides seem to have lost sight of the ball and are just kicking air." What I mean is that we need to focus more on the people involved than on the land that both sides feel so entitled to. The war started in 2014 when three divisions of Ukraine rejected election results and attempted to split from Ukraine. Russia aided their division, especially in Crimea, but it still seems likely that most of the people there supported realignment with Russia then, and still do now. They should be given the right to decide on their own, free of military coercion, where they want to belong. Of course, the war, both before and after the 2022 invasion, has brought changes, mostly in turning large numbers of people into refugees, but it probably means that the people on both sides of the front line are on the side they want to be. If so, neither side should fear a referendum, as it would very likely legitimize lines that are basically stalemated. One should also be talking about refugees, their rights to return and/or compensation, minority rights in the postwar settlements, and the options of people who find themselves stranded to move wherever they want. Unfortunately, leaders like Putin and Trump have little concern for people. They're much more into symbolic bragging rights. But both sides have done nothing but lose since war broke out. They both need to stop. Refocusing on people is one way out.

Trump regime exploits: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (himself): As for the Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal quirks -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious threats from fanciful ones.

  • Zachary Small:

  • Margaret Hartmann: Basically a gossip columnist who's made "tremendous content" out of Trump's follies. (She also covers the British royals, Michelle Obama, and some Epstein matters I filed [or ignored] elsewhere.) After the newer pieces, some older ones for your amusement.

  • Ed Kilgore [08-24] Trump sees whitewashed US past and dystopian present: Well, as Mort Sahl once said about Charlton Heston, if he were more preceptive, he'd be a happy man. But Trump doesn't want to be happy. His stock in trade is being angry, which gives him a mission in life, and a readymade excuse for everything. This starts off with the Trump tweet I cite below. It's impossible to rank all of the ways Trump offends me, but his insistence on recasting history to suit his prejudices is fundamental to all his other lies.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [08-27] Why does the MAGA elite love conspicuous cosmetic surgery? Picture of Kristi Noem.

  • Ashlie D Stevens [08-28] Don't buy the Cracker Barrel fallacy: "Online petitions and viral outrage give the illusion of influence — but real power lies elsewhere."

    • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-09] What was the Cracker Barrel skirmish really about? "Trump is repaying rural voters' loyalty by shafting them." Sure, but the thing to understand is that the right is really just a rage machine. Any sort of change can kick them into high gear.

  • Brian Karem [08-29] As America implodes, Trump can do anything he wants.

  • Laura Beers [09-02] The Orwellian echoes in Trump's push for 'Americanism' at the Smithsonian.

  • Elie Mystal [09-05] Donald Trump really is the biggest loser. For starters:

    The Trump administration repeatedly lost in court this week. A federal judge in California ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act when he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Trump violated the law when he attempted to cut off federal funding to Harvard. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump's tariffs are illegal. And a panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the most conservative and reactionary appellate court in the country — ruled that Trump's targeting of Venezuelans was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act.

    One reason for not celebrating is that the Supreme Court can still reverse most of these rulings. But they all reflect Trump actions, so (a) they've already had impact, and (b) frustrating them reinforced the idea that Trump needs even more support and power to overcome the forces against him and those he represents. This is a column which rounds up a lot of miscellany: notably this:

    In her new book, Amy Coney Barrett positions herself as a helpless cog in a legal machine that gives her no choice but to rule the way she does, even if she doesn't like it. As Joe Patrice explains over at Above the Law, her entire act is risible. But it's an act we've seen from every first-year, fascist-curious law student who wants to make a career as a Federalist Society judge.

    Mystal also references:

    • Elie Mystal [09-04] The military has officially entered the deportation business: "The administration's decision to deploy military lawyers as immigration judges is terrible and illegal, but when has that ever stopped Trump?"

    • Steve Vladeck [09-02] 176. Illinois v. Texas: "A quick look at President Trump's (apparent) plan to send uninvited and unfederalized Texas National Guard troops into Illinois — and how it could (and maybe should) quickly end up in the Supreme Court."

  • Amanda Marcotte [09-03] Trump's long weekend of humiliation: "The harder he tries to be a dictator, the more he's mocked by both Americans and foreign leaders." Same theme as Mystal's piece, but less obviously written by a lawyer:

    Alas, Trump is still alive, but there is a consolation prize for those who were holding vigil: He and the White House reacted with over-the-top defensiveness, removing all doubt that the infamous narcissist was feeling deeply embarrassed by the gleeful speculation of his demise.

    While it may be impossible to dissuade the faithful, it certainly isn't hard to get under il Duce's paper-thin skin. [Original draft had der Führer, but upon reflection I opted for the diminutive form. I also changed "thin" to "paper-thin" per Marcotte.]

  • Richard Luscombe [09-04] Trump's second presidency is 'most dangerous period' since second world war, Mitch McConnell says: "Former Senate leader likens administration's fixation with tariffs to isolationist policies of the US in the 1930s." As I'm not alone in pointing out, McConnell blew his chance to get rid of Trump during the second impeachment vote: had he and a handful of other Republicans voted to convict, Trump could have been disqualified under the 14th amendment from running again, which would have kept him off the ballot in 2024. At the time, it would have cost Republicans nothing, as Trump was already out of office.

  • Daniel Warner [09-05] Donald Trump's media domination. Pardon me while I scream: Why anyone has even the slightest interest in this flaming asshole is one of the few things about the world I find utterly incomprehensible. But Warner has a theory (or two):

    Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It's exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." . . .

    This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump's relation to the media:

    "Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was — still is — the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods."

    The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can't get enough of him.

    This points to:

    • Stef W Kight [2017-09-22] The insane news cycle of Trump's presidency in 1 chart. While the topic labels are cryptic, and the events 8 years old, I remember literally every one of them, even though most are trivial and stupid, and those that aren't trivial (e.g., Putin, North Korea, repealing Obamacare) were handled as stupidly as possible.

  • David Friedlander [09-06] Trump bump: "The president has jumped into the mayor race. But is he helping Cuomo or Mamdani?" He probably sees this as win-win: if Cuomo does win, he can claim credit; if not, he gets an enemy he can hate from a distance -- actually two: Mamdani and New York City -- and he knows how to play that with his base.

  • Andrew Lawrence [09-08] Trump's strongman image got boos at the US Open, and perhaps that was the point: "It was just the authoritarian image Donald Trump hoped to project at the US Open: the president himself, looming from Arthur Ashe Stadium's giant screens like Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Gate, as he stood at attention for the national anthem." Also this:

    • Bryan Armen Graham [09-07] The USTA's censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American: "By asking broadcasters not to show any protest against Donald Trump at Sunday's final, the governing body has caved to fear while contradicting its own history of spectacle." Doesn't this article just feed into his cult? Trump thrives on being hated more than any president since FDR (or probably ever). And is anything more American than hypocrisy? (I could riff on cowardice as well, but probably would wind up defending it.)

  • Radley Balko [09-08] Roundup: One month of authoritarianism. "Here's what happened in just one month of the Trump administration's dizzying push toward autocracy." This is a very long bullet list. It's likely he has more in the archives, but as with Amy Siskind's The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (2018, 528 pp), it risks turning into numbing overkill. You really don't have to know everything bad that Trump has ever done to decide whether to vote him up or down. A fairly modest random sampling should suffice.

  • Moira Donegan [09-09] Trump apparently thinks domestic violence is not a crime.

  • John Ganz [09-09] Trump's petty-tyrant brand of fascism: "The GOP president is both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss."

  • Kojo Koram [09-09] From Washington to Westminster, the populist right needs to erase history to succeed. It's up to us to resist: Trump you know about. Farage is also pushing his own "patriotic curriculum."

  • Jeremy Varon [09-11] Trump is already at war:

    Trump's current penchant for military aggression has odd roots in his professed disdain for the "stupid wars" of recent decades. His "peace" persona is skin deep. Trump supported the Iraq War before it began, turning against it only when it bogged down.

    One gets little sense that he grew to question dodgy interventions based on judicious assessments of what conflicts are, for reasons of principle or national interest, worthy of military sacrifice. "Stupid wars" are for him simply ones that America can't decisively win. And winning is the ultimate measure of strength, or virtue, or sound policy.

    Trump's fondness for this view has long been clear. Recall his claim that Senator John McCain, for the sin of being captured, was "not a war hero." Or his disparaging the U.S. dead in a French World War Two cemetery as "losers" and "suckers" because "there was nothing in it for them." Even winners can be losers, when the victory is not a life-sparing blowout. True to form, Trump praises the "Department of War" moniker for sending "a message of victory."

    Military victory, most simply, means overwhelming one's foe, with minimal loss of American life. So Trump punches down, attacking those with little capacity or will to fight back. Hapless, alleged drug smugglers on the high seas are no match for U.S. missiles. Neither is the Venezuelan army, should President Maduro be baited into a response that triggers a full-bore U.S. assault. Nor can undocumented immigrants — vulnerable, frightened, often poor — physically resist ICE agents with big guns. Americans outraged at the assault on their communities and neighbors are stymied as well. The homeland, for Trump, is a soft target, with a near-guarantee of zero losses. Winning indeed.

    Actually, the Bushes aimed to "punch down" as well. The younger just underestimated the risks, as bullies are wont to do. The author has a book: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror.

Democrats:

  • Jamelle Bouie [2024-12-18]: Now is not the time for surrender: Reminded of this because he quoted a chunk of it on Bluesky:

    This is a grave mistake. Trump's hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He'll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition -- to impose a form of autarky on the United States -- is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won't reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

    Obviously, the big miss here was that Congressional Republicans have been totally aligned with and subservient to Trump, so their thin majorities have held, even to the extent of bypassing their own filibuster rules in the Senate. Moreover, corporate America, including big media companies, have jumped at the opportunity to debase themselves to please Trump. (And they've kept very quiet whatever reservations they may have felt to his tariffs and other economic policies.) Much of this is unsurprising, given the way the election spun in its last couple months -- although I admit I resisted recognizing it at the time. But the last line is spot on, and you can prove it by noting that while Trump's popularity has steadily dropped since January, the Democrats not only haven't picked up his losses, they've actually lost approval alongside him.

  • Matthew Sheffield [2024-12-09] Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally: "Author Erik Loomis discusses how labor unions and liberal religious organizations preserve institutional memories and explain progressive viewpoints." Interview with Loomis, who has written books like A History of America in Ten Strikes, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice, and Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe. First thing I was struck by here was the section "Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years." I would have followed that immediately with "but they talk to their donors all the time." The donors are their patrons, their constant companions, their friends, and ultimately their eyes and ears. And politician, like fishers, naturally value, and tend to obsess over, landing the big donor over the little voter. In the short term, that's seen as the key to success. Over the longer term, it's their ticket to the revolving door. The next section is "The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party." Everything else here is useful, ending with "Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win."

    I mean, that's the lesson Democrats need to take care of, right? You, having a candidate who could articulate a policy is not going to win. Nobody cares. Having a candidate that can articulate your hopes, your dreams, your fears, or your hatreds, that's a win. That's a much more winning approach, right?

    And they'd better learn that, right? Some, I don't know, like. The conditions in 2028 are likely to be different, right? So maybe a Josh Shapiro Gretchen Whitmer, some of these people on a fairly deep Democratic bench could win, but if they are going up against somebody, presumably not Donald Trump, but who can continue to channel the kind of Trumpian resentment.

    There's a very good chance that while we may think that these people are clowns, that they are in fact incredibly strong candidates because the everyday low information voter sees them as articulating their again, hopes, dreams, fears, and or hatreds. And if Democrats don't learn that. Then it's going to be very difficult for them to tap into what is a very clear desire for a populist politics in this country.

    And populism could go either way, right? Populism can be incredibly reactionary as in Trumpian populism, or it can be channeled for a progressive, for progressive aims as it was in the 1930s. Democrats have to figure out how to manage that. And if they don't, then people that we might think are idiots and clowns, like anybody who's been appointed into the Trump administration, like one of them is probably going to be the candidate in 2028, whether it's a Vance, or another candidate, or Laura Trump, I mean, or Dana White, the head of UFC, like maybe a perfect Republican candidate.

  • Harold Meyerson [08-28] The idiocy (both moral and strategic) of the Democratic National Committee: "At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on US provision of offensive weapons to Israel." The article stops there, but unfortunately the idiocy doesn't. This title can be recycled regularly.

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-03] What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom's Trump mockery. I don't see Newsom as a viable presidential candidate, and I suspect his trolling will only reinforce that view, but I don't mind him having a little fun at Trump's expense, and given his target, it's hard to imagine that he could escalate into excess -- that may be a fundamental flaw in his strategy. But his example reminds us that Democrats are looking for someone who can and will fight back, and he understands that much, and is auditioning for the role.

  • Anthony Barnett [09-03] Stephen Miller calls Democrats a "domestic extremist organization": "Congressional Democrats should demand that he retract his grotesque claims or resign." No, they shouldn't. They should reply in kind, or just shrug him off, as in why should anyone care what a fascist troll thinks? He's so clearly obnoxious that you could use him as the public face of the Trump regime. Demanding an apology just grants him power he doesn't deserve.

  • Chris Lehmann [09-03] What makes Democrats so afraid of Zohran Mamdani? More on Mamdani:

  • Jeet Heer [09-05] Old, wealthy Democrats are sabotaging their won party: "The problem of gerontocracy includes the donor class."

  • Ross Barkan:

    • [09-05]: Imagining an imperial Democratic president: Sure, dream on. I expect the courts to spin on a dime, pretty much like they did when Trump took charge. The only things that might limit them are overwhelming popular support, and fresh legislation that explicitly allows a Democratic president to do what Trump can only do with executive orders. And if the courts still obstruct, you can impeach some miscreants, and create new court positions which can be filled with more reasonable jurists. But Biden and Obama wound up making extensive use of executive orders, especially after Congress was lost, and both took heat from Democrats for not going farther. Trump has demolished many of the inhibitions they felt, and many Democrats will push their next president to do much more, especially how important it has become to revise his rules and replace many of his personnel.

    • [08-31]: Democrats will have to shift on Israel. But when? That, of course, is a theme of his recent book on the 2024 election. More generally, Democrats have to decide whether they're for or against war, for or against racism, for or against universal rights, or they want to spend their remaining days trying to convince voters that Israel deserves to be exempted from the standards of justice and decency they expect everyone else to adhere to. The main reason Democrats lose elections isn't that people disagree with the ideals they like to tout. It's that they don't find Democrats to be credible advocates because, well, they're conflicted and incompetent.

    • [2021-03-28]: The three factions of the American left: "Understanding what it means when we talk about 'the left' in America." This is an old (2021) piece that popped up in some discussion somewhere. Seemed like it might be useful, although I'm having trouble following it. I think he's saying the three factions are: (1) The Socialist Left (specifically, the DSA, but he sees Sanders are the leader); (2) The Liberal Left (here Warren is a leader; but under them he also mentions "The Alphabet Left," of which WFP is the only example given; and (3) The Moderate Left, which needs some more explanation:

      The moderate voter is not more fiscally conservative, in a classic sense, than even the socialist voter, but the moderate retreats from certain left signifiers. Unlike the socialist, the moderate is proudly pro-capitalist. Unlike the liberal, the moderate does not treat patriotism or religion as an embarrassing or ironic vestige of a lost world. Many moderates earnestly embrace nationalism and American iconography. They go to church on Sundays and, if they live in small towns, might organize their lives around religious institutions. Secularism is the default in both the socialist and liberal left; moderates are far more likely to turn to religion to give meaning to their lives.

      There is good news for those who want Americans to embrace incredibly progressive or even socialistic economic policy: moderates are in full support, as long as it's packaged appropriately.

      He then goes on to say that "unlike 20 or 30 years ago, there is no moderate faction of the Democratic Party complaining about deficit spending or the growth of welfare. RIP the Atari Democrat. RIP neoliberalism." The "Atari Democrat" article is dated 2016. I've heard the term, but needed a refresher, so we're basically talking about Clinton + Silicon Valley. "Neoliberal" I know all too well, both as Charles Peters and Milton Friedman. I wouldn't dismiss the existence of either of them within the Democratic Party. What progress may have been made under Biden is that some of them may now agree that some things should be done to actually help labor and the poor, instead of just assuming that everyone who loses their job to globalization and financialization will land on some kind of ritzy "symbolic manipulator" job (per Robert Reich). But lots of Democrats like that are still around, still chasing money, even if they've loosened up a bit.

  • Isaac Chotiner [09-08] Texas's gerrymander may not be the worst threat to Democrats in 2026: An interview with Nate Cohn, "the New York Times' chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters."

  • Eric Levitz [09-10] Democrats can't save democracy by shutting down the government: "The party should only force a shutdown for its own political gain."

  • Gabrielle Gurley [09-12] Virginia special election shaves GOP House margin: "Democrat James Walkinshaw triumphs in a ginormous victory." This was one of the seats elderly Democrats won in 2024 then lost through death, so this isn't really a pickup. Another one, in Arizona, is up for a vote on Sept. 23.

  • Andrew Prokop [09-12] Democrats are on the verge of a dangerous mistake: "There's one big guardrail left on Trump's ambitions." He means the Senate filibuster. Republicans have used long used it to keep Democrats from passing much-needed reforms, or at least to dilute them to ineffectiveness. But if Democrats use the filibuster to block some Republican outrage? Republicans could just change the rules to get rid of the filibuster — as, indeed, they've already done to keep Democrats from blocking their extremist judicial nominations. Unexplained is what good a rule is if you can't use it, but they're free to use it against you? Not much, as far as I can see.

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Current Affairs:

Ezra Klein [01-17] Democrats are losing the war for attention. Badly. Actually, just an interview with Chris Hayes, relating to his book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, with a title cleverly chosen to grab your attention. Why was Trump able to win with lies while Democrats struggle to make anyone aware of their accomplishments? Attention is one obvious metric which is skewed ridiculously in favor of Republicans and especially Trump. I've read Hayes' book, and he makes a lot of interesting points. But he also engages in hyperbole, because he knows the surest way to get attention is to stick your neck out, become conspicuous, and flaunt it as far as you can get away with it. And he wants attention as much as his subjects do. It is, as he admits, his business. So it's not surprising that he overrates it, especially its fungibility -- which in his business may translate directly into advertising revenues, but for most people the profit motive is less obvious. Still, it's useful as a prism, not least because it renders part of the scheme opaque.

  • Derek Thompson [02-28] The end of reading: Only an excerpt of a transcript from a podcast, probably got here from a link in the Klein/Hayes interview. One stat: "50 years ago, about 40 percent of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year compared to about 12 percent who hadn't read any. And now those percentages have flipped."

George Salis [06-30] Borne back ceasefully: a rare interview with Tom Carson: He was one of the rock critics Christgau cultivated in the late 1970s. I first heard about him when he wrote a review of Brian Eno's Another Green World that was good enough it almost bumped my assigned piece. I met him once in New York, uneventfully, and read him as regularly as I could, though not as often as my wife read his Esquire reviews (usually on the newsstand). He was one of two critics Christgau tapped to fill in while he was off doing the CG-70s book -- the other one I remember better, probably because he didn't do as good a job. So I had something of a bond with him, with mixed feelings, but he wrote a brilliant piece on 1945, especially the observation that winning WWII was the worst thing that happened to America. Shortly after that, he published a novel called Gilligan's Wake, and I felt like he could have written it just for me. (I knew the TV show intimately, and most of the literary and historical references -- not that I ever made any headway through Joyce, but that seemed unnecessary. The only choice he made that I strongly differed with was saying nice things about Bob Dole.) I still frequently refer back to a couple of key concepts from the novel: the notion of America's perpetual innocence illustrated by Mary-Ann's self-healing virginity; the argument that America exists only for a certain group of people: the true Americans. I became reacquainted with him when he edited my essay in the Christgau Festschrift Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: A Rock & Roll Critic Is Something to Be.

Robert Kuttner [07-30] Tom Lehrer and Mort Mintz, RIP: "Both challenged American smugness, one with satire and the other with great journalism."

Daniel Felsenthal [08-01] A book called Fascism or Genocide that's reluctant to discuss either: A review of Ross Barkan's "engrossing, literary analysis of the 2024 election disappoints with its blinkered vision of US politics." The book is Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. The title comes from a Palestinian activist's view of the Trump or Harris choice, although the review tells us Barkan was reluctant to go deeper into either topic (but especially Gaza). This sounds like a version of the book I've been contemplating on the 2024 election, perhaps one where the focus is on the cognitive dissonance that allowed voters for both candidates to ignore much of what each stood for (which in the case of Harris included democracy, at least as we knew it, and some semblance of justice under law and economic opportunity for many, if not really all). Instead, people voted on phantom fixations and whims, which tilted to the macabre, bequeathing us a suddenly real dystopia.

Nick Turse: National security fellow for The Intercept, has been covering the Trump military everywhere, with a unique specialty in Africa. I've touched on many of these stories above, and could have distributed them accordingly, but for now, let's keep them together to see the pattern:

David Dayen:

Sarah Jones [08-20] The manifest destiny of J.D. Vance. I can't say as the analogy occurred to me, but not since McKinley has there been an American president so ebullient about expanding American territory, from Greenland down into Mexico (or perhaps Venezuela is next?). One snag may be that land comes with people already on it, but Israel has some ideas about that (updating Hitler's use of America's own Manifest Destiny idea).

It's not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants who it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending," as DHS wrote in its post of Gast's work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.

Harold Meyerson [08-25] A federal appellate court finds the NLRB to be unconstitutional: "And just like that, it frees Elon Musk -- and any fellow employers -- to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed." This reverses 88 years of rulings upholding the act's constitutionality. It's like they're daring us to revolution.

The New Republic: David W. Blight edited a special issue on Trump Against History, asking "how is Trump changing our sense of who we are?" Probably a lot more to talk about here than I had time for. Titles:

  • Johann Neem: Trump is the enemy of the American Revolution: "He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it's our responsibility to uphold the Founders' legacy."

  • Molly Worthen: What besieged universities can learn from the Christian resurgence: "Educators can fight back against Trump's attacks by re-embracing 'old-fashioned' disciplines and ideas."

  • William Sturkey: Trump's white nationalist vision for the future of history: "The administration is using the tools of the state to influence — even poison — how America's racial history will be taught in our public forums and schools."

  • Edward L Ayers: Trump's reckless assault on remembrance: "The attempts of his administration to control the ways Americans engage with our nation's history threaten to weaken patriotism, not strengthen it."

  • Michael Kazin: The two faces of American greatness: "It is the task of historians to grapple with Trump's favorite concept — and to redefine it."

  • Jen Manion: Learning history is a righteous form of resistance: "It's a way to combat Trump's attempts at remaking the past to justify erasing protections for the most vulnerable."

  • James Grossman: "Indoctrination"? We call it "education." "It's not 'divisive' to teach about division. It's divisive to bury it."

  • Geraldo Cadava: The diversity bell that Trump can't un-ring: "The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed."

  • Amna Khalid: Authoritarianism is made — and it can be unmade: ""Autocrats do not merely fade away; they have to be countered and stopped."

  • David W Blight: What if history died by sanctioned ignorance? "We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion." Includes a useful summary of the Nazi ascent in 1930s Germany (I edited this to use a numbered list):

    In Richard J. Evans's trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:

    1. the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
    2. widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
    3. the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
    4. the Nazis' ritualistic "dynamism," charisma, and propaganda machinery;
    5. the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy
    6. the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes
    7. they knew whom and what they viscerally hated — communists and Jews — and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
    8. vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.

    All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

    In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

  • Leslie M Harris: The high price of barring international students: "Global collaboration is necessary for success, if not survival, in our hyper-connected world."

Trevor Jackson [08-25] The myth of clean energy: "Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion?" Review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Part of the argument here is that new energy technologies don't directly replace old ones, and often require more use of the old ones, at least in the short term (e.g., a lot of oil and gas, and still some coal, goes into making the turbines that generate electricity from wind). That isn't news, and certainly doesn't discredit the shift from fossil to renewable energy sources. Fressoz is co-author of an earlier book, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, which I've ordered.

Henry Giroux [08-29] Domestic terrorism and spectacularized violence in Trump's warfare state: I don't often read, much less cite, his pieces, because the language and hyperbole don't strike me as all that useful (e.g., Resisting the deadly language of American fascism; Against the erasure machine; Trump's reign of cruelty; Trump's theater of cruelty; Childicide in the age of fascist theocracies; Neoliberal fascism, cruel violence, and the politics of disposability; The nazification of American society and the source of violence). But we've entered a stage where reality is rising to meet its most fevered denunciation, so maybe we need to invoke the specter of nazi/fascism not to scare the naive but to grasp the full enormity of what is happening.

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media's complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home. . . .

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich's insight into the fascist "perversion of pleasure" is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno's warnings about the authoritarian personality come into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

Besides, this piece led me to others, like:

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [09-01]: Defender of the backwoods: the good life of Andy Mahler.

  • [09-05]: Roaming Charges: Multiple megalomaniacs. Starts with the US attack on a boat near Venezuela. When I asked google for "us sinks boat near venezuela," AI replied:

    There are no recent or documented incidents of the United States sinking a boat near Venezuela, although there have been historical concerns about Venezuelan narcotics trafficking and tensions between the two nations regarding foreign involvement.

    However, further down the same page, we find:

    The Wikipedia entry notes:

    James Stavridis, a former US Navy admiral, characterized the strike and other US military activity around the same time as gunboat diplomacy intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of Venezuelan oil rigs and materiel. He wrote that drug interdiction was likely not the sole reason for the increased US military activity. On September 5th Trump ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighters, to conduct combat air patrols in the region and support the Southern Caribbean fleet, amid growing tensions. Following the flyover of the USS Jason Dunham, Trump gave permission to shoot down Venezuelan planes if they presented a danger to U.S. ships.

    In an exchange on X in which writer Brian Krassenstein said "killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime", Vice President JD Vance responded "I don't give a shit what you call it."

    Much more here, of course. Notable quote from Benjamin Balthasar: "It's funny how the Right likens everything to slavery, except slavery, much the way everything is antisemitism, except actual antisemitism."

  • [09-12] Roaming Charges: The broken jaws of our lost kingdom: Starts with a personal story about being shot at while protesting the Iraq war in 2003, then notes: "The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets." He also notes that Trump said nothing about the recent assassination of Democrats in Minnesota, or the "173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month," although he added that Trump's quiet "was probably welcome, given what he might have said." He then lists some of the right-wing incitements to further violence I noted below. He digs up more, of course, including a 2023 Kirk quote: "I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational." It's not often you see a right-winger put their body where their mouth has gone. St Clair also notes, "After these kinds of traumatic episodes, Fox News invariably tries to coax Trump into saying something humane, but time after time, he shows that he just can't do it."

    On other fronts, note:

    • The 400 richest people in the US are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.

    St Clair also cited a tweet from Sen. Elissa Slotkin:

    We are in an AI Race with China right now. The last ti me we were in such a race - with Russia on nuclear technology - we won because we set up the Manhattan Project. We need that level of ambition again, for the modern age.

    I've often sympathized with Slotkin when she was critiqued from the left, but this is wrong on more levels than seemed possible in just three sentences. She assumes: that AI and nukes are comparable; that both are worth pursuing; that there is a race with a definite goal; that the "race winner" gets some kind of advantage; that the "race loser" is a failure; that "ambition" is measured by such a race. She also gets basic history wrong: the Manhattan Project was set up out of the misplaced fear that Germany was developing such weapons; Russia's nuclear program was a response to the US using nuclear weapons, and threatening Russia in what became known as the Cold War only after both sides had but respected and refrained from using nuclear weapons (although most vocal threats came from US warriors, from 1940s calls for preëmptive attack before Russia could respond in kind up through Nixon's "madman" theory). Also note that Slotkin is falling back on one of our dumbest tropes, the notion that declaring war proves we are serious -- although in examples like the "war on poverty" and "war on drugs," that seriousness quickly dissipated after the PR campaign, not so much for lack of serious effort as because war didn't work on abstract targets.

Harold Meyerson [09-01] Trump celebrates Labor Day as the most anti-union president ever: "His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy." More on labor:

Doug Muir [09-09] Five technological achievements! (That we won't see any time soon.) Crooked Timber's "resident moderate techno-optimist" presents "five things we're not going to see between now and 2050."

  1. Nobody is going to Mars.
  2. Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining.
  3. Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power.
  4. There will be no superconductor revolution.
  5. There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives. We're not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes.
  6. Airships.

Matthew Duss [09-09] Encased in amber: "Biden's wars and the unmaking of liberal foreign policy." The subtitle suggests a ringing and much deserved indictment, but the article itself is just a review of Bob Woodward's latest insider blabfest, succinctly titled War. While Woodward has no opinions of whatever he writes about -- or perhaps I should say, conveys from his insider sources -- Duss is fairly admiring of Biden's "restraint" regarding Ukraine. While as I'm sure I've made clear by now, I mostly blame Putin, we still haven't seen a clear history on what Biden did or did not do between taking power and Putin's invasion. After all, it took Putin 8 years between the 2014 coup and secession and the 2022 invasion, so what spooked him? Where the record is clearer is how little Biden did after the invasion, and especially after the war stalemated, to negotiate a peace. That's been bad for Ukraine, bad for Russia, and bad for the world, including the US. But if Ukraine suggests that Biden and his crew didn't feel like peace was worth their effort, Gaza not only proved it, it showed that they had no regard for human rights, they had no clue how to talk about war, and they had no willpower to back up what few humanitarian sentiments they could muster. As Duss notes, not only did Biden's wars cost them the election, they still have no comprehension of their failures.

Jill Lepore [09-10] How Originalism killed the Constitution: "A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution." Another Atlantic article I can't read (and you probably can't either), on a subject various people have written entire books on (just from my roundup files: Erwin Chemerinsky, Madiba K Dennie, Jonathan Gienapp, Eric J Segall, Cass R Sunstein, Ilan Wurman), but none as long as Lepore's own new We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which this is most likely tied to. The short definition is that "originalism" is whatever Antonin Scalia thinks at any given moment. While the article and book are no doubt interesting, you might start with a review:

David Dayen [09-10] Political violence and the reality distortion field: "Sadly, we've always had violence in America; what's different today is the aftermath, and the battle to define political opposition amid violence." The occasion for this article was the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed today. Dayen starts by decrying and condemning all political violence, and offers very little information about Kirk -- probably for the best, given that it's hard to say anything about Kirk that couldn't be misconstrued, especially by trigger-happy right-wingers, as suggesting that he had it coming. Dayen does place the shooting among the "47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year" (by the time of writing, Kirk's wasn't even the most recent). But his bigger point was how the right sought to exploit this shooting not just for political advantage but to direct violence against the left:

My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I've seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn't really matter when there's an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

"The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization," said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. "Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination," said writer Tim Urban. "The Left is the party of murder," said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

I'm not interested in collecting opinions about Charlie Kirk, but for an example for the first quoted paragraph, consider this from Barack Obama:

We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie's family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

As a non-believer, "praying" always triggers my bullshit detector, but then I start wondering what Obama's selection algorithm is for who he prays for -- I doubt that he has time to qualify thousands of Gazans (or Africans, or hundreds of ordinary American citizens) for personal attention (like knowing spouse names and counting children). And if he's so selective, why single Kirk out, except perhaps that he's semi-famous? Surely he's not a fan? I also don't care for the motivation clause, which suggests that condemning some murders turns on motivations. But then, as someone who's ordered and rationalized murders, that may be the way his brain works.

Along these same lines, Eric Levitz tweeted:

We do not yet have any confirmation of the shooter's political ideology or motivation.

In recent years, political violence has emanated from both the left and the right.

The way to honor the memory of a "free speech" proponent is not to crack down on progressive speech.

The casual "both sides do it" tone is completely baseless, as is claiming Kirk as a free speech proponent. And scoring shooters by incidental ideological attachments is just a pointless game, unless you can show that the ideology promotes violence (which, come to think of it, right-wingers often do, including implicitly in their opposition to regulating guns). In his usual too-little, too-late mode, Levitz qualified his "both sides" assertion with statistics, a chart show 444 total deaths from "Domestic Extremist-Related Killings in the U.S. by Perpetrator Affiliation," where right-wingers were responsible for 75%, Islamists for 20%, and "left-wing extremism (including anarchists & Black nationalists)" 4%, with 1% unaccounted for.

As for the second quoted paragraph, the first example I ran across was a tweet from someone named Matt Forney:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

I don't know who this guy is -- but his X handle is @realmattforney, so he must think he's somebody special, and the image showed 687K views by 3:09PM, so less than 3 hours after the shooting -- but you have to not just reel in disgust but actually marvel at some pundit whose first thought after a news event was "what would Hitler do?" Similar, minus only the explicit Nazi appeal, reaction from Laura Loomer (who I have heard of):

It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.

If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain.

We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all.

The Left is a national security threat.

Trump himself took up this same line of argument, here:

For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges and law enforcement officials.

And while right-wingers are lambasting Bluesky for "cheering the assassin," the closest thing to an off-color comment I've seen there was from "Kim," who wrote:

Remember while they are chastising you for not mourning a dead Nazi, these are the same cunts who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse and gave him a television contract.

Calling Kirk a Nazi may be rude, and may even be technically inaccurate (not something I'm expert enough, or interested enough, to argue one way or the other), but its relationship to terrorism isn't real, not even in some hazy stochastic correlation. Trump just fixates on it because it hits close to home. But the use of violent hate speech is hundreds or maybe thousands of times more prevalent on the right than on the left. It's so common it rarely gets noticed. But the incredible whining on the rare occasion the tables get turned is pretty disgusting.

By the way, everyone dies in vain. That may not be right, but it's just the way the world works. That's just a rhetorical device that sounds sensible until you give it any thought. Someone should write up a full guidebook to how to make bogus right-wing arguments, not because the right needs one, but to simplify deciphering -- much like Gramsci argued that Machiavelli wrote The Prince not for actual princes, who grew up learning those tricks, but for the rest of us, to understand what they were doing.

More background on Kirk and/or reaction to his shooting:

  • A Mighty Girl [09-10] Three months, two political killings: the poison in our politics. The other assassination featured here was Emerita Melissa Hortman, a Democratic leader of the Minnesota House, although her husband, also killed, was mentioned only in passing (see 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators.

  • James H Williams [10-10] New York Yankees hold moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.

  • Rev. Graylan Scott Haglar [09-11] The killing of Charles James Kirk: Violent speech leads to violence.

  • Susan B Glasser [09-11] Did Trump just declare war on the American left? "After Charlie Kirk's tragic killing, the President speaks not of ending political violence but of seeking political vengeance." Well, that's what he said. Granted, he's sometimes unclear on what he can and cannot do, and on when and if what he says will be taken seriously by his staff, his fans, and everyone else. But what he says does give you some insight into what he's thinking and what he wants to see happen, which is mostly evil.

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [09-11]: What Charlie Kirk meant to young conservatives: "The late Talking Points USA [sic] leader built a movement that will outlive him."

  • Ben Burgis/Meagan Day [09-11]: Charlie Kirk's murder is a tragedy and a disaster: This joins "most on the Left [who] have rightly condemned his murder," but focuses more on the threat of right-wing vengeance for martyrdom, which they worry may be facilitated by failing to show due remorse and contrition. No doubt the treat is real. But why should we set ourselves up for a moral test, and blame ourselves for offenses they've long wanted to do, that Kirk himself was at the center of. It's not like Kirk ever felt the slightest twinge of guilt over the genocide in Gaza, or all sorts of other offenses. He lived to amass power to inflict terror, and his followers have no interest in anything but exploiting his death to further those same goals. I don't know how to stop them, except by making clear how horrible what they want to do really is. But blaming anyone other than the one who killed him won't help. Nor does offering sympathy when all it will do is inflate his importance and be used to hurt others.

  • Eric Levitz [09-11]: The right's vicious, ironic response to Charlie Kirk's death: "They're calling him a martyr for free speech as they demand a violent crackdown on progressive dissent." Even here, and even though he clearly knows better, he can't help but kick at some phantom leftists to burnish his both-sidesism.

  • Joan Walsh [09-11]: Let's not forget who Charlie Kirk really was: "The right-wing influencer did not deserve to die, and we shouldn't forget the many despicable things he said and did."

  • Ian Ward [09-12]: Why Charlie Kirk had no counterpart on the left: "Over the past decade, Kirk built an entirely new infrastructure for the GOP." This seems quite plausible, not that I've ever had any interest in understanding how this sort of politics works.

  • Chris Hedges [09-12]: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk: He calls the killing "a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration."

    His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

    Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

    "We have to have steely resolve," said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show "War Room," adding, "Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are." . . .

    The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk's killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.

    The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the "radical left."

    It seems significant that Bannon called his program "War Room" long before the killing, to show us that he had already resolved to wage war, long before Kirk gave him excuse and rationalization. It's worth noting that while Democrats seek to marginalize the left, reducing us to a harmless minority, right-wingers insist on obliterating us. This suggests that they fear something more fundamental, like exposure. They want a public that follows them uncritically, unaware that there is any other alternative.

  • Alain Stephens [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination is part of a trend: spiking gun violence in red states: "It's not Washington or Chicago but Republican-run, reliably right-wing states that lead the nation in gun violence rates."

  • Elizabeth Spiers [09-12] Charlie Kirk's legacy deserves no mourning: "The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division."

  • Elie Mystal [09-12]: How to canonize a white supremacist: "On the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, the certain blowback, and this country's raging gun problem." One piece Mystal spend some time critiquing is Ezra Klein [09-11]: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

  • Zach Beauchamp

    • [09-12]: Let's be honest about Charlie Kirk's life — and death: "We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time." Sure, but oddly enough the right can't do honest: to them it's only how can this help us and/or hurt them (which in their zero-sum worldview amount to the same)? People who can hold two thoughts can be conflicted. They can feel ambivalent. They can act confused. Carried too far, felt too intensely, they can be schizophrenic: floundering, acting in contradictory ways, even lapsing into catatonia. The right have it so much easier. They're wrong, but at least they're sure of themselves. They can act, boldly, decisively, Too bad they're sociopaths.

      Ok, I'm just riffing on the line. The article sticks to its subject. Beauchamp says, "I want you to think about two sentences," but when I do I'm not sure the distinction they make is significant, or even that he's deciphering them right. Inflection, which isn't clear written down, would reveal more than order. He cites a lot of pieces (some cited elsewhere in this section, some I'm not bothering with), then attempts to draw a set of "red lines" around what one can and cannot say, proscribing every other possible reaction — especially ones that are quite natural for those who have been personally injured by Kirk's bigotry. I'm not saying Beauchamp's wrong, and I agree that conscientious leftists should avoid unnecessary offense, but before Kirk and his cohort can lecture us on how to speak, they need to show some discretion themselves.

    • [09-11]: Our country is not prepared for this: "On the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk — and the threat to democracy it created."

  • Christian Paz [09-12]: How Charlie Kirk remade Gen Z: "Three reasons his message resonated so strongly with young conservatives." The third is the most interesting: "He tapped into a nascent oppositional culture on campuses, and among youth." I don't really get how or why, or even how much, but this doesn't seem right, and certainly not necessarily so.

  • Jamelle Bouie [09-13]: Charlie Kirk didn't shy away from who he was. We shouldn't either.

    It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn't seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

    But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk's influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

    Also notable by Bouie:

    • [09-10]: They don't want to live in Lincoln's America: A "response, of sorts, to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, whose speech for 'national conservatives' was a direct rebuke of the creedal nationalism of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg." I'm not surprised that right-wingers should hate iconic credos of American liberalism like "all men are created equal" and "government of, by, and for the people" -- I save my own ire for the avowed liberals who are so quick to sell their fellow citizens out. But it's rare, and perhaps a sign of the times, to see "conservatives" like Schmitt come out so explicitly against the original aspirations of American patriotism.

    • [08-27] We are not 'property of Donald Trump'. "The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It is the property of the United States -- of the American people." "The Smithsonian Institution does belong to Donald Trump, either." Yet Trump feels entitled to remake both in his own image, with no consult or consideration of anyone else.

  • John Ganz [09-13] Reflections on violence: "Two reasons for Kirk's murder." The 2nd amendment, and the 1st. I don't particularly agree with either explanation, or with the first section below: I think it's possible to objectively distinguish hate speech, and that it should also be protected as free speech, although one should also be free to reply, even in kind. The real variable is power (as the 2nd section below notes), and that is not symmetrical either in fact or in theory: it is almost invariably the right that feels entitled to suppress the speech of others, or to require that their own favored speech be propagated, because their notion of order requires power to establish and maintain, and cannot withstand scrutiny. (I'm not denying that there are people who identify with the left who are tempted to take up the tools of the right, especially when they have been victimized, and that such people become more and more dangerous as they gain power, but it is not their leftness that drives them to abuse power — it is power itself.)

    It's long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It's actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. . . .

    Norms of civility are also impossible to enforce without abrogating someone's freedom of expression. For instance, some believe that at this time one should refrain from criticizing Kirk and his ilk. That's an exercise of power. Calls to decorum exist to circumscribe what can be said. . . .

    I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse. But I also won't engage in the dirty rhetorical trick that slyly suggests that a speaker created the unruly conditions for his own murder, as that late lamented beau idéal of civility, William F. Buckley, once did about Martin Luther King Jr. I opposed both the substance and form of Kirk's politics and still do. That's my opinion, and I feel it's a reasonable opinion shared by many — by millions in fact — although there are now efforts to drown it out as being unacceptable and disrespectful to the dead. I consider such talk tantamount to intimidation and blackmail, and I resent it. It's the same kind of droning idiocy and enforced conformity that led us from 9/11 to the destruction of civil liberties and to disaster in Iraq.

  • Media Matters [09-10] Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: "Just kill them": Brian Kilmeade. Given the people Trump has pardoned, and the ones he wants to prosecute, it's hard to give him or any other Republican any credit for anything they say about "law and order."

  • Intelligencer Staff [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination and the manhunt for his killer: What happened: "A running account of the shooting and its aftermath." This is the first piece on the shooter I've seen, and as one of the subtitles puts it, "Misinformation about the suspect is all over the place." As I tried to point out before, I don't really care what his motivations and/or identities are. But one tweet by Zachary D Carter seems fairly plausible:

    I see no point in searching for left/right valence in Tyler Robinson. He fits the school shooter archetype: young, disaffected, ideologically amorphous, extremely online and raised in gun culture. The theater of such violence is just expanding to include political assassination.

  • Joseph L Flatley [09-11]: Death of a troll "Charlie Kirk, 1993-2025." Like the author, one of the first things I thought of on hearing of Kirk's assassination was the 1967 assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell. Maybe Kirk wasn't as flagrant a Nazi as Rockwell, but Rockwell never had a shred of respectability or influence, and his killing had no discernible consequences or import. It merely removed a shit stain of an individual from the public eye. Kirk differs not in being a better person but in having rich and powerful promoters, who still seek to use his death for their own gain. One thing I had forgotten was that Rockwell was killed by one of his own disgruntled followers. Makes sense. Who else would consider him worthy of a bullet? By the way, good pull quote here: "Charlie Kirk died as he lived — making very little sense."

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Donald J Trump:

    • The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of "WOKE." The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE is BROKE. We have the "HOTTEST" Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

    • Here's another one, which seems to be Trump reminiscing about his days as a Democrat:

      The confused and badly failing Democrat Party did nothing about Jeffrey Epstein while he was alive except befriedn him, socialize with him, travel to his island, and take his money! They knew everything there was to know about Epstein, but now, years after his death, they, out of nowhere, are seeming to show such love and heartfelt concern for his victims. Does anyone really believe' that? Where were they during his very public trials, and for all of those years before his death? The answer is, "nowhere to be found." The now dying (after the DOJ gave thousands of pages of documents in full compliance with a very comprehensive and exacting Subpoena from Congress!) Epstein case was only brought back to life by the Radical Left Democrats because they are doing so poorly, with the lowest poll numbers in the history of the Party (16%), while the Republicans are doing so well, among the highest approval numbers the Party has ever had! The Dems don't care about the victims, as proven by the fact that they never did before. This is merely another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of the others, in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President, and the record setting failure of the previous administration, and the Democrat Party. The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them, it's time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax, and give the Republicans credit for the great, even legendary, job that they are doing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

  • I've seen several this several times, without a source:

    Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

    I would have left out the "draft dodger" bit, which I consider a mark of real courage (although not really in Trump's case).

  • cassius marcellus clay [08-23]: [PS: sorry, lost the link]

    in 10 yrs dem voters asks have gone from "please improve something" to "please stop trump/fix what is being broken" to "you dont even need to accomplish anything just pretend to have the same contempt for the GOP that you do for your voters" and the answer has been "no, send us $3" every time

  • Doris Ravenfeather Gent [08-17]: Meme with picture of Putin and caption: "we did not get Trump elected because we like Trump. We hate America, and he is weak and stu pid, and that is good for us." Gent comments:

    No doubt this is Putin's thought process . . . it may not be an actual quote, but definitely believable . . . Because Trump is weak and Stupid and very manipulative! . . . Annnd, Agent Krasnov is and has been an asset for Putin all along.

    I seriously doubt this, on many counts (not Trump being weak and stupid; while that clearly hurts America, how, or whether, that helps Russia is a different; but first you have to figure out what Putin wants, rather than just assuming he started with hating America, and deriving everything from that, projecting your own global ambitions onto a country with limited means for attaining them). I am saddened to say that the meme was forwarded by a local leftist friend, who isn't normally affiliated with the warmongering Democratic cabal, which just goes to show how poorly the world is understood by even our friends, and how much work it's going to take

  • Nate Silver: not a direct link to something that evidently appeared on X (where it looks like an attempt to flatter the algorithm). Normally "more" is followed by "than" (not "that"), but that incoherency is easily lost in trying to imagine what the fuck "Blueskyism" might possibly mean, especially if you assume that it must fit somewhere in the remaining tangle of nebulous concepts.

    Electorally speaking it's more important for Democrats to avoid Blueskyism that leftism. Not that Bluesky is important but it embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people. If you could subtract those the left would win more often.

    Kim draws more conclusions from this than I would, including, "he's a miserable being choosing a miserable life when choosing the be less miserable requires so little action from him." I'm more of the view that he's a spreader of misery than a victim.

  • Dave Roberts [09-01]: Tweet and additional comments, something that could have been said more succinctly and calmly in 2 or 3 paragraphs, but for the record, let's unravel it here:

    To me, the lesson of the pandemic is a very familiar one, although as far as I can tell, no one is talking about it or learning it (which is also familiar). It's about the contrast between America's two political parties.

    When Covid popped up, the parties' reactions were extremely on brand.

    Dems, America's A students, scrambled to do the responsible thing. Strained, sweated to do the responsible thing, to be seen doing the responsible thing, to get the gold star from the (imaginary) teacher.

    Now, of course there were lots of decisions made by Dems in the heat of crisis, with insufficient information, facing no-win trade-offs, that one could go back and second guess. (Indeed, that is US pundits' favorite indoor sport!) Perhaps you would have made the trade-offs differently.

    But the entire Dem professional establishment was desperately trying to do the right thing & be responsible.

    Contrast: immediately upon the arrival of the virus, the right started spreading insane conspiracy theories, attacking public health officials, & refusing to act in solidarity.

    At every single second, they worked their hardest to destroy trust, to foment doubt & anger & resentment, to prevent solidarity.

    And those lies mattered. The vaccine skepticism deliberately spread by the right led to 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths. Again: they caused mass death.

    And then afterward -- this is the part that makes me feel crazy -- all the retrospective analysis & discussion shit on Democrats. They've been on the defense ever since, criticized from all quarters for this or that decision. Much of that criticism is fact-free bullshit, but . . .

    . . . even if you buy it all, surely the party that worked desperately to save lives & end the pandemic deserves more credit, a higher grade, than the party that worked desperately to spread lies & get people killed! Surely they're not the ones that should be apologizing!

    But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them.

    Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.

    Somehow our diseased information environment has produced the net outcome that the pandemic is considered a political problem for Dems, not the party that lied about it & got people killed at every juncture. The party that tried, but not perfectly, to save lives, is being forced to apologize.

    I've written a million threads on this theme, it's pointless, I know. But it's insane. Dems have to try, to be responsible, to please everyone. Republicans just have to jump around like fucking gibbons, throwing shit at the wall, and if they occasionally, accidentally hit something . . .

    . . . it's their targets who must apologize. They're never held responsible for the lies. Never held responsible for getting so many people killed. Never held responsible for anything. It's just the people who care, who try, that we hold responsible, that we shit on & demonize. Never the gibbons.

    Think about it. "Dems were too zealous in trying to prevent the spread of the virus" is, in US politics, a greater disadvantage, a bigger problem, than "Republican lies got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for no reason."

    Just a pathetic fucking country. Pathetic.

    Adding one thing: this whole dynamic is neatly replicated around the issue of climate change. Dems take shit constantly: they're acting too fast, too slow, doing the wrong things, focusing on the wrong tech, bad Dems!

    GOP gibbons just throw shit & lies & block all policy & that's fine I guess.

    Dems care, and try, and for that are punished.

    GOP lies, hurts people, doesn't give a shit, and is rewarded.

    Various comments, including this from Ben Weinberg:

    The way this pathetic state of affairs is such a mass scale self-inflicted regression feels unique to our history. While people went thru far worse for the good of the country, this is the most unsympathetic populace we've ever had.

    My belief is that big tech decided technofascism was preferable to regulation and tried to align algorithms to that in late 2021-22. The idea of a shift absent that just doesn't hold up.

    I don't put a huge amount of stock in the notion that Democrats care where Republicans don't. Another way of looking at this is to go back to Karl Rove's argument that Democrats are bound to study reality, while Republicans are free and bold enough to act and, thereby, create their own better reality. Democrats responded to this by embracing the "reality-based community," but it also locked them into an orbit of conventional thinking where it became impossible to do anything that wasn't underwritten by their corporate sponsors. In effect, they substituted their own phony reality, which constrained them as apologists for the status quo. Democrats sometimes remind me of the "shoot and cry" Israelis, who could never see a way to avoid a war they were bound to regret. And while they could point to their crying as proof that they're living, caring humans, they're effectively no different from the shameless right-wingers they hope to guilt-trip. It's a losing proposition, because if you're going to shoot anyway, it makes sense to go with the side that's really into shooting.

  • Bari Weiss [09-12]: Matthew Yglesias responded to this, adding that "the core of free speech and a liberal society is precisely that I don't need to agree with the hagiographic accounts of Kirk's life and work to find his murder unacceptable and chilling."

    Someone in the newsroom said that this shattering event feels like the aftermath of another Charlie: Charlie Hebdo. It was a decade ago that Islamists burst into the offices of the satirical Paris newspaper and murdered 12 people who worked there.

    One similarity was that the killings were condemned by people all across the left-right political spectrum, as opposed to the killings that are only condemned by the left. Another similarity is that in both these cases, the right jumped on their victimhood as an excuse to foment violence against their supposed enemies. One might contrast this with, say, the bombing of Gaza, where several US Senators skipped the "hopes and prayers" and jumped straight into cheers and jeers, like "finish the job!"

  • Keith Edwards [09-12]: asks "Why did Laura Loomer delete this [tweet from 7/13/25]?"

    I don't ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I'd say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.

    Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.

    Here's another (or possibly just longer) Loomer tweet attacking Kirk. Evidently Kirk's treason against Trump was in criticizing Trump's Israel-directed bombing of Iran.

  • erictastic:

    He was killed on camera. No one's family deserves to have to witness that. It's unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that "I don't care that he's dead." "He's not a hero." "He's a scumbag." "He shouldn't be celebrated."

    I'm talking about George Floyd. You thought I was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

    Further down my Facebook feed, I ran across this, which quoted California D governor Gavin Newsom:

    I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.

    The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.

    I shouldn't complain about safe pablum coming from politicians, who know better than most that anything else will get them crucified. I also don't mind the occasional ironic twist that presents a foe as an unwitting ally, as long as it is remotely credible and/or amusing. But this is more than a bit excessive, and it makes you wonder who Newsom knows, and why.

Current count: 321 links, 19901 words (25023 total)

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44818 [44780] rated (+38), 21 [22] unrated (-1).

After another week of massive thrashing, I finally decided to delay this until after I finished my next Substack Notes on Everyday Life piece. It is called More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. As it goes out in email, I want to give it a night to rest, then reread and edit it tomorrow. (The link above will get you to my first rough draft, in what I regard as the definitive archive for such pieces. I made an edit to the previous column, Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty, which was so minor I didn't bother with updating the copy on Substack.) I wrote the section on Sanders' political program on Monday, while it was raining all day. I wrote the preceding "thumbnail history" today.

The extra day (or may be two, since I only did the cutover around 9 PM on Tuesday) let me push the rated count over 30. I was surprised to see the A-list grow to 10. Not a record, and not much more than last week's 8, but I figured I'd resist my temptation to downgrade the non-jazz releases I rarely spend much time with, especially as Haim, CMAT, and Sabrina Carpenter held up for 3-5 plays each. Still didn't get anything serious written about the latter, but it's not like I haven't been writing about anything.

I should also mention that I have a fair amount of Loose Tabs drafted. Pretty good chance I'll post one of those before next Music Week. It's pretty ugly so far, but I also opened up a book file for the latest political concept. Mostly just gross outline cribbed from a letter which goes back to June 1. As my plan going way back before that has always been to spend a month writing off the top of my head, the fact that I've already procrastinated more than three months bodes ill, but it's a step. A big chunk of tomorrow's post fits in with the thinking.

So it's not like I'm getting nothing done, but the pace remains extremely slow. I did manage to finally get Laura's new computer up and running. Only thing left is to configure the mailer. I had a long-running problem with a light upstairs, which I finally got working (at least with the original halogen bulb; the replacement dimmable LED bulbs come on but never dim, and worse still never turn off -- wonder what could explain that?). I have some padding ready to put up in the carport, to keep from banging the new car doors on the brick. I started to put it up on Sunday, but ran out of light; they it rained, then I wrote, and tomorrow I have a gruesome dentist thing, but it shouldn't take long once I get it started. I got far enough on the woodpile project to take some pictures. Then I noticed that the first round of pictures on it were dated June 19.

I spent some time today shopping for hooks to hang moulding on. I don't urgently need to add it, but I have lots of pieces in the basement. Next step will be to build the recycling kiosk. The idea there is to cobble it together using up some of the most useless pieces of scrap wood. It will sit in the foyer, and collect stuff to give away. I'm looking forward to doing some decluttering after that. Also need to do some plumbing: upstairs sink is probably something I can do, but I'll need some help for the basement floor drain.

That should be enough for the week -- especially Loose Tabs can chew up endless time. Also need to do some work getting Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll set up. We don't need to send invites out until November, but I don't want to put things off to the last minute, per usual. I'm slowly working my way through John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and finding it very useful. I've ordered a bunch more books in the last week, with no idea when/how I'll get to them. The way things are going, it's doubtful I will.

PS [Sept. 13]: Thought I'd do a brief update on how the week is going. Dentist was no worse than expected (real pain was paying for it). I picked up my new glasses. The computer ones help. The distance ones not enough to get much use (so far), although the short focus bifocals will probably be an improvement. Still haven't dealt with the mailer on Laura's computer. I did get the carport bumper guards up, and still need to caulk around them. Putting off the plumbing work until next week. I also hope to get the kiosk built next week.

I finally sent out my 4th Notes on Everyday Life newsletter, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism Friday night. If you are one of 62 subscribers, you should have it by now. If not, follow the link, or you can read it onsite here. Not much feedback so far: 2 likes, 0 comments, 0 new subscribers. I'm pretty much resigned to this never being much of a thing -- same for Bluesky, where I have 193 posts but followers seem stuck at 124. Much of the Sanders posts can be cut-and-pasted into my new book file (still too cryptic to bother linking to), at which point I can add footnotes and other elaborations.

Robert Christgau published his September Consumer Guide a day after I posted this Music Week. In the interim I had graded Amaarae's Blackstar first at B+(***), then upgraded to A- (he gave it *). I already liked the Haim album, and Mahotella Queens was an automatic A-, but the rest of his A- albums fell short for me (Stampfel and the Oxys don't seem to be available yet), while two lesser-graded albums hit my A-list (Chance the Rapper, Panic Shack). The Whitmore album was a 2018 released, previously reviewed (* by him, ** by me). I gave the Crenshaw album, which is actually remixed odds and sods from 2012-16, a B-. I had S.G. Goodman at B+(**), and haven't revisited yet.

Main reason for doing a mid-week update is to update the NOEL post file, before moving my Loose Tabs draft into a blog post file (3344) to wrap it up: hopefully Sunday, otherwise I'll postpone Music Week until I do. If you're curious, you can get a head start with the draft file. Some good stuff already there. I just added a couple paragraphs to my initial Charlie Kirk take, which is based on a David Dayen piece. No doubt I'll be adding more links today, including some on what an ogre Kirk was, and more on how the right seeks to exploit his killing to increase the level of political violence in America. Maybe I'll even find someone wondering cui bono?

New records reviewed this week:

Baths: Gut (2025, Basement's Basement): American electropop producer Will Wiesenfeld, fourth studio album since 2010 (also has two "B-Sides" compilations), has scattered moments but doesn't sustain them. B [sp]

Marilina Bertoldi: Para Quien Trabajas Vol. 1 (2025, Sony Music Argentina): Argentinian singer-songwriter, considered rock, has a couple previous albums, sort of a new wave sound, in Spanish, impressive until it slips a bit toward the end (10 songs, 29:27). B+(**) [sp]

The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie (2025, Anti-): Indie rock band from New Zealand, singer-songwriter Elizabeth Stokes the singer-songwriter, Jonathan Pearce is lead guitarist/producer, fourth studio album since 2018. B+(***) [sp]

Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend (2025, Island): Pop singer-songwriter, started with Disney as a teen, so this is counted as her 7th album, but just 3rd in my book. This follows up on her breakthrough hit. A- [sp]

Chicago Jazz Orchestra: More Amor: A Tribute to Wes Montgomery (2024 [2025], Chicago Jazz Orchestra): Trombonist Jeff Lindberg is artistic director, with several group albums starting with a Porgy & Bess in 2004. Bobby Broom is featured here on guitar, playing both Montgomery's classics and the chintzier fare of his later years, with no shortage of strings. B+(*) [sp]

Chicago Underground Duo: Hyperglyph (2024 [2025], International Anthem): Rob Mazurek (trumpets, electronics, voice, flutes, bells) and Chad Taylor (percussion, including mbira and kalimba). B+(***) [sp]

CMAT: Euro-Country (2025, CMATBaby/AWAL): Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, third album, all effusively admired, and not without reason, although the big production can be as much work to listen to as they were to concoct. "Ready" is way over the top, enough so that the more modest fare comes as a relief. I'm not very good at parsing her texts, but accept on faith that she's very smart, means well, and is having a remarkably good time with her newfound fame. A- [sp]

George Coleman: George Coleman With Strings (2022 [2025], Savant): Tenor saxophonist, now 90, perhaps best known for his brief term in the Miles Davis Quintet, but he's recorded some outstanding albums on his own: My Horns of Plenty (1991) is a favorite, Eastern Rebellion (1975) is another classic, and A Master Speaks (2016) kicked off one of history's finest octogenarian revivals. Seems like everyone wants to do a strings album sooner or later, even though very few have panned out. Stan Getz, in Focus, is perhaps the only one where the strings are as interesting as the sax; Art Pepper's Winter Moon is one where the strings are as gorgeous as one might hope for, and the sax even more splendid. But early efforts, like Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster, were nothing more than signature saxophone over mediocre backdrops, and that's been par for the course. Bill Dobbins handles the strings here, and gives them a tolerable air of 1940s soundtrack melodrama. Also helping is a fine mainstream rhythm section: David Hazeltine (piano), John Webber (bass), Joe Farnsworth (drums), and Café Da Silva (percussion). A- [sp]

Hannah Delynn: Trust Fall (2025, self-released): Nashville-based folkie singer-songwriter, first album after a couple of EPs, very slow, rather an accident that I gave this sufficient play to warm to some of its details. B+(**) [cd] [09-09]

Dijon: Baby (2025, R&R/Warner): R&B singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas, American but born in Germany to a military family stationed there. Second album, got some rave reviews but I have trouble getting past the glitchiness. B+(*) [sp]

Joe Ely: Love & Freedom (2025, Rack 'Em): Legendary Lubbock singer-songwriter, started in the Flatlanders, his 1978 Honky Tonk Masquerade is an all-time favorite, and he's had lots of good ones since then, most recently 2024's Driven to Drive -- but that one was reconstructed from older demos. This was also based on home studio demos, but no info on how old they are. (One song talks about being 30 but feeling 45. Ely's 78 now.) Still sounds pretty good. B+(***) [sp]

Fieldwork: Thereupon (2024 [2025], Pi): Fourth album under this name, the first in 2002 with pianist Vijay Iyer and sax (Aaron Stewart) and drums (Elliot Humberto Kavee). The second substituted Steve Lehman on sax (2005), and the third brought in Tyshawn Sorey on drums (2008) -- a supergroup, even then, with Sorey contributing 6 songs to 3 for Iyer and 2 for Lehman. All three are superb, as is this new one, from the free rhythmic extravaganza to open to the soft landing to close. Song credits split 5-4-0, but "all tracks collectively developed." A- [cd]

Folk Bitch Trio: Now Would Be a Good Time (2025, Jagjaguwar): Indie folk-rock trio from Melbourne, Australia; first album, after singles going back to 2020. B [sp]

Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2 (2025, Mass Appeal): Wu-Tang rapper Dennis Coles, went solo in 1996, followed by Supreme Clientele in 2000. Regarded at the time as the most gangsta of the Clan, I wasn't a fan at the time, although later albums like Fishscale impressed me. B+(*) [sp]

GoGo Penguin: Necessary Fictions (2025, XXIM): English fusion band, 7th album since 2012, a piano-bass-drums trio but with synths and extra strings. B+(**) [sp]

Omer Govreen Quartet: All Things Equal (2024 [2025], J.M.I.): Israeli-born, Amsterdam-based bassist, has side-credits with Michael Moore and Ziv Taubenfeld, probably his first album as leader, original compositions, played with Aleksander Sever (vibes), Floris Kappeyne (piano), and Wouter Kühne (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Haim: I Quit (2025, Columbia): Three sisters, all sing, play guitar-bass-drums-plus, with producer Rostam Batmanglij (mostly keyboards but also guitar, mandolin, and sitar) co-credited on all songs. I was reluctant at first, but this is pretty catchy. A- [sp]

Ill Considered: Balm (2025, New Soil): London-based group, ten numbered albums plus a few more starting with their eponymous debut in 2017, specialize in free improv built on top of deep grooves, although this one short-changes the groove in favor of solemn ambience. Group is reduced to: Idris Rahman (tenor sax/bass clarinet/flute), Liran Donin (bass/taishogoto), and Emre Ramazanoglu (percussion). Unusual business plan calls for an LP run limited to 300, each with "a unique hand-painted cover by Vincent De Boer [where] each one forms part of a larger 300-piece canvas" (on Bandcamp for £50, limit 1 per customer). B+(**) [sp]

Ill Considered: Live at Eye Film Museum (2024, New Soil): A full live show in Amsterdam, in one 89:28 chunk (although there are obvious gaps between pieces). B+(**) [bc]

Ill Considered & Rob Lewis: Emergence (2024, New Soil): I've tried to follow this group fairly closely, but several recent albums escaped my attention. As best I can figure out, Lewis is a London-based cellist-composer who mostly does soundtrack work. Some of that comes through, only sometimes as overwrought drama. B+(**) [bc]

Ill Considered: UnEvensong (2024, New Soil): Fourth album in as many months, rushed out in early December as a Christmas album, but while titles like "Come All Ye Faithful" and "Frosty the Snowman" are familiar, they don't weigh heavy on the music, which soars (ah, there's a wee bit of "Auld Lang Syne"). B+(***) [sp]

Larry Keel/Jon Stickley: Larry Keel & Jon Stickley (2025, self-released, EP): Two flat-picking guitarist singer-songwriters, filed this under bluegrass, which seems to be where they've been working since 2004 or so. Five songs, 17:09. B [cd]

KRS-One: Temple of Hip Hop Global Awareness (2025, R.A.M.P. Ent Agency): Another old-timer, just turned 60, still able to summon up the anger and the sound ("boom bap back to the basics") of his prime, which like Public Enemy and Wu-Tang sounds especially great right now. Of course, he's even more self-conscious and ever more didactic than his peers, but that's always been his thing. A- [sp]

Laufey: A Matter of Time (2025, AWAL): Icelandic singer-songwriter, last name Jónsdóttir, mother a Chinese classical violinist, has studied in Scotland and at Berklee, lived in DC and Los Angeles, has a twin sister who's a violinist and has a degree in international relations. Third album since 2022, gets some attention from jazz critics, but also hits the pop charts. Whatever this is, it is pretty accomplished. B+(**) [sp]

Billy Lester Trio: High Standards (2017 [2025], Ultra Sound): Pianist, described by Howard Mandel in 1998 as "a late-bloomer on that reticent branch of the jazz tree, the school of Lennie Trisano." His Discogs credits start in 2002 (aside from a composition credit for a song Anthony Braxton recorded first in 1997 as part of his Tristano Project). Trio here with Marcello Testa (bass) and Nicola Stranieri (drums), same as his Italy 2016 album, playing standards plus a closing 9:29 "Free Improvisation." B+(**) [cd] [09-12]

Christian McBride Big Band: Without Further Ado, Vol. 1 (2025, Mack Avenue): Mainstream bassist, emerged as a band leader in the 1990s and has retained his standing as a poll winner. He's had many ventures, with this his fourth big band album. Key here is that he's lined up a long list of big name singers, starting least conventionally with Sting and Andy Summers. B+(**) [sp]

Ashley Monroe: Tennessee Lightning (2025, Mountainrose Sparrow): Pistol Annies singer-songwriter decided to go big on her 7th album (since 2009): 17 songs, 61 minutes. So far hardly anyone has noticed (80/1 at AOTY after nearly a month). I can't say as I noticed much either, at least until the closing "Jesus Hold My Hand." B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg: Looms & Legends (2024-25 [2025], Pyroclastic): Alto sax/clarinet player, tends to work the gentler side of free jazz, and has since 1981. Solo here, includes some shakuhachi, a very attractive album, one that doesn't sound like practice, as most solo reeds albums do. Holds up to multiple replays. A- [cd]

Superchunk: Songs in the Key of Yikes (2025, Merge): Indie rock band from North Carolina, 13th studio album since 1990 (with a 2001-10 gap), Mac McCaughan the singer-songwriter. Got a reputation for political songs recently, but I'm mostly just hearing soaring guitars. B+(**) [sp]

Sunny Sweeney: Rhinestone Requiem (2025, Aunt Daddy): Country singer-songwriter, sixth studio album since 2006. Terrific sound, songs include anthems, as timeless as the clichés they're built on. A- [sp]

Teyana Taylor: Escape Room (2025, Taylormade/Def Jam): R&B singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2014, two gold records so far, also has a fairly substantial acting career. Talks through a lot of this. B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippett/Louis Moholo-Moholo: Live in Foggia (1985 [2025], Ogun): British saxophonist, b. 1949, not a lot under his own name but side credits start up in 1971, joining the pianist in 1978, and the drummer by 1982, while also working in groups led by Chris McGregor, John Stevens, Tony Oxley, and Barry Guy. This same trio recorded Tern in 1982. Two long pieces here (45:34 and 27:11). In fast company here, he rises to the occasion. A- [sp]

Old music:

Hannah Delynn: The Naked Room Demos (2021, self-released, EP): "Stripped down and straight forward," 5 songs, 18:57. B [bc]

Hannah Delynn: Making Friends (2023, self-released, EP): Five well-crafted, nicely produced songs, 16:58. Leans toward pop, but doesn't deliver much. B [bc]

Evan Parker/Ned Rothenberg: The Monkey Puzzle (1997, Leo): Duo, another one followed in 2007, former plays soprano and tenor sax, latter bass clarinet and alto sax. Parker has a lot of this sort of thing, both solo and duo. Rothenberg adds a nice balance. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg Double Band: Overlays (1991, Moers): Two alto saxophonists (with Thomas Chapin), two electric bassists (Jerome Harris, also on guitar, and Kermit Driscoll), two drummers (Adam Rudolph, credited percussion, and Billy Martin). The basses set up a funk current that the saxes tease at and play with like Ornette Coleman. A- [bc]

Ned Rothenberg: The Crux: Selected Solo Wind Works (1989-1992) (1989-92 [1993], Leo): Seven pieces (54:45), on alto sax (4), bass clarinet (2), and shakuhachi (1). He fills his space with wonder and fascination. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg Double Band: Parting (1996 [2004], Moers Music): The last of three Double Band albums, released after second saxophonist Thomas Chapin's death, with Jerome Harris back on electric guitar and bass, Tony Scherr on electric and acoustic bass, and drummers Michael Sarin and Samm Bennett. Wile some of this is impressive, it can also be overwrought. B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg: Ghost Stories (1999-2000 [2000], Tzadik): Four tracks recorded in three sessions, a 6:30 shakuhachi solo, and three longer: duos with Riley Lee (shakuhachi) and Satoshi Takeishi (percussion), and the 19:41 title piece with cello (Erik Friedlander), pipa (Min Xiao-Fen), and percussion (Takeishi again). B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg Sync: Harbinger (2001-03 [2004], Animul): Plays clarinet, bass clarinet, alto sax, and shakuhachi, backed by Jerome Harris (acoustic bass, string guitar, acoustic bass guitar) and Samir Chatterjee (tabla). This is very nice. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg/Satoh Masahiko: Decisive Action (2003-04 [2004], BAJ): Duo with piano, two sessions, Rothenberg playing clarinet, bass clarinet, alto/soprano sax, shakuhachi. B+(**) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Mike Clark: Itai Doshin (Wide Hive) [10-03]
  • Orhan Demir/Neil Swainson: Wicked Demon (Hittite) [07-14]
  • Wadada Leo Smith/Sylvie Courvoisier: Angel Falls (Intakt) [10-03]
  • Mark Turner: Reflections On: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Giant Step Arts) [10-10]

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