Music Week

PS [10-01]: I rushed this post out late last night, to squeeze it into September, which mostly mattered because I didn't want to take the extra time to dig out this week's paltry offering and replant it in the now extant but empty October Streamnotes file. In the clear light of morning -- something I prefer to sleep through, but once again failed today -- I can add a few more words. It takes me a while to get going these days, so this is prime time for collecting my thoughts.

When I do get moving, my main task today will be to work on the small (12x12) second bedroom upstairs, and its adjacent L-shaped closet. The house was built in 1920, which means the walls and ceilings were plaster on lathe. When we bought the house, in 1999, the room had ugly wallpaper and the ceiling was painted with a glittery popcorn finish. The closet was also wallpapered, with a pattern simulating wood. We hated all those things, but lived with them. I built a bookcase that covered the entire west wall, except for the closet door. I built another bookcase I situated on the east wall, just north of the big window. The other side of the window had a standalone bookcase, as did the north wall next to the east corner. The rest of the north wall, underneath its own big window, was occupied by a futon, usable as a spare bed, on a crude platform I had built. Laura's desk was up against the south wall.

A few years after we arrived, I noticed a crack in the ceiling, near the southwest corner, extending from the entry door out about three feet. I watched that crack grow over twenty-some years. A few months ago, some of the plaster had detached and lowered an inch or two, making its collapse inevitable. I started thinking about ways to push it back up and/or patch it over, but did nothing before it did collapse. I started looking for help to repair it, and finally found some.

Finding more cracks in the same ceiling, we decided to recover the whole ceiling with a new layer of 3/8-inch plaster board. We -- meaning our money and their labor, but I wasn't exctly a passive bystander -- did that last week. To prep, we had to move everything out of the room. For good measure, I also had them steam off the wallpaper, so I could paint the walls, and I cleared out the closet. Some years ago, I figured the walls weren't worth the trouble of repairing, so could be covered up with paneling. I bought several sheets, stored in the garage wood pile for an opportune time, such as now.

Riverside Handyman did the ceiling, including a quick paint, and took down the room wallpaper. I used his steamer to work on the closet, where the walls proved to be as bad as anticipated. That leaves me with the task of finishing the painting, fixing up the closet, and moving everything back so we can reduce the upstairs clutter to normal levels. Big push today (and probably tomorrow, and possibly longer) will be to sand and prep the bedroom walls, caulk the window frames, and mask them off for painting. But also I need to finish prepping the walls and ceiling in the closet -- the latter has a big hole, which used to provide attic access, to fill in and level. The walls mostly need a rough mud job, filling in cracks, corners, and some large missing chunks, but it won't need much sanding, as it will all be covered with paneling.

Aside from impatience, I have another deadline, which is that my brother, his wife, and their daughter are coming for a visit, arriving late Wednesday. They won't be needing the bedroom, and chances are I can put them to work on various projects -- not just this one, as I have more lined up -- but one point of the trip is a separate project, which is to finally sort through the stuffed attic of our ancestral family home on South Main Street.

My parents bought that small house in 1950, a few months before I was born, and lived their until they died, in a three-month span of 2000. They both grew up on farms -- my mother in the Arkansas Ozarks, my father in the Kansas Dust Bowl -- and through the Great Depression, moving to Wichita in the 1940s for war work. They were resourceful and self-sufficient, which among much more meant that they kept a lot of stuff. My father's "super-power" was his knack for packing things to maximize use of space -- I'm pretty good at that myself, but not nearly as good as he was at remembering what he had and where it was.

After they died, we cleared out some obvious stuff, but left most of it for my brother, who moved into the house, and added his own stash. When his work took him to Washington, my sister -- who had inherited the deed -- moved in with her grown son (and her own stash), who still lives there, after she died in 2018. While the attic has been plundered several times over the years -- that "wall of books" in the bedroom I'm working on mostly date from my purchases from before I left home in 1972 (or 1975) -- one harbors the suspicion that there are still precious memories (probably just junk to others, as antique treasures aren't very likely) buried in deep nooks and crannies.

So the plan is to gather some younger folk willing and able to do the spelunking to drag everything out, so we can sort it all out into the obvious categories (trash, recycle, desired by one of us, or deferred/repacked). They're figuring two days, which strikes me as optimistic, but not inconceivable. I think part of the operation should be to catalog everything (except the rankest trash) into a spreadsheet for future reference -- especially everything that gets deferred. I could use some sort of database of my own stuff, especially as I feel increasing need to unburden.

I'm not sure of the schedule for all of this. My niece is just budgeting enough time for the housecleaning, but my brother may be able to stay a bit longer. However long that is, I will mostly be occupied with them, while letting my usual grind slide. Plenty to do later, as we wrap up the year with another Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. Obvious point from below is that the unheard demo queue has grown considerably. And that doesn't count the download offers waiting in a mail directory, if indeed I ever get to them. (I did download the new Thumbscrew, but most just get shunted aside.)

This week's King Sunny Adé albums were a side-effect of Brad Luen's Ten favorite African albums of 1974. I didn't manage to get to the Adé albums on his list, because I started looking for gaps in my own list, especially as the 1974 albums Luen cites are late entries in multi-volume series.

Having just finished Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, I felt it was time to dust off my copy of Ned Blackhawk's much broader Native/American history, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. I've long had non-expert but somewhat more than passing knowledge of the subject -- I'm guessing I've read ten or so more/less focused books, starting c. 1970 with Peter Farb, Alvin Josephy, and especially Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins -- and I've often of late found myself thinking back on that history, especially for insights into possible evolution of settler-colonial societies.

Breaking news today: Iran launches about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Scroll down and the previous headline reads: "Israel's recent airstrikes destroyed half of Hezbollah's arsenal, U.S. and Israeli officials say." As I've noted, Hezbollah's arsenal was always intended not to attack Israel but to deter Israeli attack. Obviously, it was never sufficient to do so, and even less so as Israel is amassing tanks on the Lebanon border. I've never bought the argument -- so often and readily repeated by American media -- that Hezbollah is some kind of Iranian proxy, its strings pulled from Tehran, or that Hezbollah has any aggressive intent against Israel beyond what it sees as self-defense, or that Iran has any designs against Israel beyond the self-defense of its co-religionists in the region. But Israel's latest attacks on Lebanon are, as was undoubtedly their intent, forcing Iran to fight back.

I am saddened by this, and do not approve, but it's time to reiterate a point that I just made just yesterday:

One thing that follows from this is that every violence from any side is properly viewed as a consequence of Netanyahu's incitement and perpetuation of this genocidal war.

I didn't write this up yesterday, but I did entertain the idea of offering an extreme example: suppose Hezbollah has a nuclear bomb, and could deliver it deep inside Israel, and explode it, killing a hundred thousand or more Israelis (including quite a few Palestinians), would that still be Netanyahu's fault. Yes, it would. (It would also lead to a "why didn't you tell us?" scene, like in Dr. Strangelove. And while it was a pretty safe bet that Hezbollah had no nuclear capability, perhaps Israel should have a think before "counterattacking" Iran in the same way it went after Lebanon.)

One way you know that this is all Netanyahu's fault is because he is the single person who could, even if just acting on a whim, put an end to the entire war. He has that power. He should be held responsible for it.