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Blog Entries [230 - 239]

Sunday, September 18, 2022

A week I was planning on skipping this exercise, then wrote the long Bacevich comment, then had a peek around the usual sources. Rather haphazard approach, but quite a bit got stuck in my net.

Tariq Ali: [09-14] King Charles III May Keep His Head -- His Kingdom is Another Story: "The monarchy needs death and weddings for its cyclical renewal." I like this opening: "Charles is a name that most English monarchs have avoided since the 17th century. Let's therefore start where we really should."

Andrew Bacevich: [09-13] Will the U.S. Learn Anything from Putin's Disastrous Invasion? Alternate title: "Russia's Underperforming Military (and Ours)." Not really. Even though the U.S. military studies its own failures, the conclusions rarely waft up to policy levels, unless they argue that the failures can simply be solved by spending more money -- that's something the top brass and their congressional enablers can always get behind. This suggests that the real obstacles to change are high up in the security state, with their broad misconceptions about the competency, efficacy, and desirability of military power. To the extent that they can explain Russia's failures in terms where the U.S. is plausibly more proficient (like logistics), they shield themselves from self-doubt. But as should have been clear from Iraq, a virtuoso performance in capturing Baghdad wasn't anywhere near sufficient to achieve the desired political goals (roughly speaking, leaving Iraq as a stable and peaceful democracy integrated into the western capitalist economy). That's basically because it's very hard to occupy a foreign country, and very easy for natives to disrupt it, and once that starts, military domination does as much or more harm than anything else.

It may be clear now that Russia lacks the ability to conquer alien territory like the U.S. did in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it remains to be seen whether Russia will be able to defend its occupation of predominantly Russian areas like Crimea and Donbas -- where they know the language, and have cultural affinities unlike the U.S. in the Middle East.

One lesson the U.S. should draw from this war is that Russia isn't much of a threat beyond its borders, except for the nuclear threat. If the U.S. was seriously interested in world peace, it would make nuclear disarmament a major diplomatic priority, offering to sacrifice its own arsenal in the process. Secondly, it would negotiate pullbacks around Russia's borders. Thirdly, it would try to come up with a process for adjudicating border disputes in the region (and elsewhere: Kosovo and Bosnia are still unsettled; also, more ominously, Korea and Taiwan). But none of this is going to happen as long as U.S. politicians (and their security mandarins) think wars can be won, and that the projection of military power matters.

Bacevich has a book coming out in November on this theme: On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century. One thing I've long been struck by is how poorly the British people have been served by their deep feelings of their imperial past -- now mostly nostalgic but never far removed from the racist prerogatives the British claimed. When you look at the history of imperialism, it's easy to sympathize with the oppressed, but the experience has also warped the humanity of their oppressors, and that too takes a toll.

In looking up Bacevich's book, I noticed that Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad have a new book, with a striking subtitle: The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. One lesson few have learned from the last few years is how fragile many things we depend on are, like supply lines. As systems get more complicated, as fewer people understand how they work, as resources get stretched, as responsibility is blurred or shirked, the world becomes more fragile, and things break, often catastrophically. (Which, by the way, is a mathematical term, meaning suddenly. There is a branch of mathematics called catastrophe theory, which studies discontinuous functions.) We live in a world which is increasingly fragile, governed by economic and political systems which assume it isn't, and are regularly blindsided when things break.

Jamelle Bouie: [09-13] It Is a Well-Known Truth That Opponents of Democracy Don't Want You to Have Nice Things: Looks at "the old idea that political democracy requires a certain amount of economic equality." Finds many examples, especially before 1870, when the Gilded Age took off -- like the 1920s and 1980s, a brief period when greed grew into "irrational exuberance" before the bubbles burst. "Wherever you look in U.S. history, you see Americans grappling with the connections among equality, inequality and democracy. Crucially, many of those Americans have struggled to make democracy itself a tool for the more equitable distribution of wealth and status." Which is, of course, why conservatives, as the self-recruited (or otherwise employed) defenders of the rich, have always distrusted and often plotted against democracy.

Rachel M Cohen: [09-14] What Republicans would do if they win back Congress. I could elaborate, but short answer is that it would be very bad and real ugly. Given how clear Republicans have been about their plans, I'm left with the nagging question: why would any significant number of American voters want to hurt themselves like that?

Artin DerSimonian: [09-15] New attacks on Armenia call for immediate Western diplomatic engagement. This is the latest flare up of another post-Soviet territorial conflict, with ramifications for Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, and the US -- which is to say lots of countries with ulterior motives and chips on their shoulders. U.S. involvement is particularly disturbing: see Eldar Mamedov: [09-16] Caucasus conflict highlights US hawks' reckless support for Azerbaijan.

Connor Echols: [09-16] Diplomacy Watch: Putin reportedly spiked a peace deal in early days of war. A roundup of news in this week of no serious diplomacy. Robert Wright [09-16] writes more about the "spiked deal" report: You can't prevent a war after it starts.

On the battlefield, Ukraine has regained significant territory to the east of Kharkiv, including the strategic town of Izium, but has not yet crossed the border into Luhansk. Ukrainian gains in the southwest near Kherson have been less impressive. Russia responded to its losses with attacks on infrastructure in Kharkiv.

• Ross Douthat: [09-17] The Quality That Sustained Queen Elizabeth Is Hobbling Putin: Get ready for this: Putin "has been hobbled in his fight because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy." For the record, Putin's been in power for 16 of the last 22 years (and arguably for the other 6), and unlike Queen Elizabeth II he was actually elected (four times). There are lots of problems with Putin, but this one is purely in Douthat's noggin. He's never worth reading, but sometimes he's so bad you can't miss him as an example of how little talent and insight it takes to write for the New York Times.

• Connor Echols: [09-14] Zelensky takes weapons push to Congress -- and the defense industry: Seems at first like a rude reach, but you can hardly blame him for thinking that the arms merchants, pulling their strings in Congress, are the real powers behind American support for war in Ukraine.

• Fred Kaplan: [09-13] When Will Russians Realize the Disaster in Ukraine Is Putin's Fault? Russia's political system and media are so closed off it will be hard to measure. On the other hand, any whiff of dissent is likely to be blown up as propaganda. Kaplan cites some examples, but cautions: "the fog of this war is particularly thick; there is so much that independent analysts and journalists can't yet see."

• Paul Krugman: [09-16] What Ukraine Needs From Us: Gets off on the wrong foot by accusing "realists" as having "spent the whole war urging Ukraine to surrender and have been disappointed in their predictions of military defeat, are now predicting inevitable economic collapse." That's not a fair description of any "realist" I'm familiar with. I don't identify as such, but I've often found the realists to be more grounded than the fantasists and ideologues who dominate US foreign policy. But after reiterating his credentials as a liberal hawk, Krugman does have some interesting things to say about the macroeconomic effects of the war on Ukraine. Still, he runs out of space before getting to the question raised in the title. It's an open question whether the U.S. and E.U. will offer anywhere near as much support in rebuilding Ukraine as they did in tearing it apart. Past history doesn't offer many positive examples, but the West's welcome of Ukrainian refugees is categorically different from refugees from other war-torn nations. But we should be clear on two things: one is that no significant rebuilding will be possible before a negotiated peace; the second is that a lot of money will be required, and on more favorable terms than the West (especially the private sector) is used to. Probably a couple more things are worth mentioning: prewar Ukraine had quite a reputation for corruption and cronyism, which won't be easy to recover from; also Ukraine's recovery will to some extent be tied to Russia's own economic recovery, which is something U.S. planners will be especially reluctant to support.

Susan B Glasser: [09-15] A Second Trump Term Would Be a Scary Rerun of the First: "Scary" may be too mild of a word, given how the subhed cites velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The most obvious point is that the one thing Trump has clearly learned from his first term is to hire flunkies who are above all personally loyal to Trump and Trump alone. Don't expect any adults-in-the-room types. Maybe some diehard conservative agenda types will get on board, but only if they grovel a lot. (Mike Pompeo is the model here.) But it's not inconceivable that he felt sabotaged by the conservative apparatchiki Pence stocked his administration with, so he could lean more to popular/demagogic policies, most effectively in foreign policy (where the liberal/interventionist worldview has led to disaster after disaster). But it's not likely, because he doesn't seem to be capable of coherent thought, and his focus on hiring only the most servile flunkies all but guarantees incompetence. Still, it's hard to imagine how ugly it can get.

Julia Gledhill/William D Hartung: [09-11] How the Arms Industry Scams the Taxpayer. Arms spending is so popular on Capitol Hill that the House added $37 billion to the Defense Department's already astronomical ask, and the Senate topped with with $45 billion.

• Nick Cleveland-Stout: [09-16] Who held defense stocks while making national security policy? Cites a New York Times report: These 979 Members of Congress Reported Trades in Companies Influenced by Their Committees (part of a longer article: Stock Trades Reported by Nearly a Fifth of Congress Show Possible Conflicts). "At least 25 members sat on committees that shape national security policy while simultaneously trading financial assets in companies that could create competing interest with their work, such as defense stock." These include members of both parties, ranging from Senate Armed Services Committee former chair James Inhofe (R-OK) to progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

Briahna Joy Gray: [09-15] Debt is a Form of Social Control: "To be indebted means to lack freedom. That's why elites melt down in response to Biden's new plan to forgive $10k of student debt. They don't want you to be free." There's more to this the author goes into, and more beyond that. Much as debt maintains the class order here in America, the IMF has proven to be a more effective tool at preserving the domain of elite capitalism than imperial armies ever were. That's because most of the time debt is easier tolerated than challenged, but not always. Which makes one wonder: why do we keep paying tribute to the rich, when they don't have anything better to do with their wealth than loan it out?

Caroline Houck: [09-13] The questions over the queen's role in Britain's violent empire, explained by a historian: Interview with Caroline Elkins, who is the right historian to ask this question to -- see her recent book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. The British Empire had started to unravel before Elizabeth was coronated, but the most brutal periods of repression in Malaya and Kenya occurred on her watch, and she was often called to represent the fading empire (she was in Kenya when her predecessor died).

Sarah Jones: [09-16] What Happens When a Party Rejects Humanity? No need to ask "what party?" And while Ron DeSantis got the photo op, Greg Abbott and Doug Ducey joined him in the second paragraph: all three governors thought it would be funny to bus immigrants to liberal enclaves up north. For more on this:

• Jamelle Bouie: [09-17] What the Martha's Vineyard Stunt Says About the Trump Wannabes.

• Jonathan Chait: [09-15] DeSantis Tries to Prove Liberals Hate Immigrants as Much as He Does, Fails: "Borrowing a tactic from the White Citizens Councils."

• Chas Danner: [09-16] Martha's Vineyard Migrants Leave Island as Outrage at DeSantis Grows.

• Alex Shephard: [09-16] Ron DeSantis's Cruel Treatment of Migrants Is the Future of GOP Policymaking: "The Republican Party's platform is all about trolling the libs."

• Michele L Norris: [09-16] What Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis don't understand about America: "They are playing with people's lives to impress their base. It's ugly stuff. And it underestimates the generous spirit of this country." Actually, haven't they been pretty successful so far betting against that "generous spirit"?

Sarah Jones: [09-14] Lindsey Graham Caught the Garbage Truck: He probably thinks he's some kind of great compromiser with his federal abortion ban after 15 weeks, but he's just another jerk who thinks he's funny. But his stunt is not only view as proof of malevolence by the left; isn't not very well received on the right:

• Samaa Khullar: [09-16] "Terrible timing, terrible tactics": Fox News host scolds Graham for hurting GOP with abortion bill. The argument against Graham isn't that he's not going far enough; it's that signalling to the people shortly before the election what you want to do is "bad tactics."

• Nicole Narea: [09-14] Lindsey Graham's national abortion ban bill makes the midterm stakes very clear.

• Alexandra Petri: [09-17] Please don't confuse what Lindsey Graham wants with what the GOP wants: A more tongue-in-cheek response.

Sarah Leonard: [09-08] Free the Internet: "A handful of companies control the web. It doesn't have to be that way." A review of Ben Tarnoff's book, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. The Internet wasn't always a business. Since it became one, it may have become slightly more entertaining, but also misinforming and exploitative in ways that are hard to even grasp and reckon with. Page also links to a 2019 article: Jason Linkins: [2019-12-31] The Death of the Good Internet Was an Inside Job. That was part of a Decade From Hell retrospective of the 2010s.

David Leonhardt: [09-17] 'A Crisis Coming': The Twin Threats to American Democracy. Big article, covers the partisan divide in considerable depth, as well as structural issues (quotes Steven Livitsky with this oxymoron: "We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world"), but I find curious the lack of data on money in politics. This is part of a broader Democracy Challenged thread, but again there I don't see anything specifically on money, or the fact that most major media organizations (including the New York Times) are owned by very rich special interests.

Milo Milfort/Anatoly Kurmanaev/Andre Paultre: [09-16] Fuel Hike Plunges Haiti Into Near Anarchy: "Discontent over economic misery spilled into the largest national protests in years, prompting international calls for action."

Ian Millhiser: [09-15] 3 takeaways from that Trump judge's latest order in the Mar-a-Lago case: "Judge Aileen Cannon's latest order shows a disregard for established law." Millhiser also wrote: [09-15] The Supreme Court hands the religious right an unexpected loss. Don't expect it to last. "The Supreme Court disposes of the Yeshiva University case with an implicit threat." Update: Hurubie Meko: [09-16] Yeshiva University Halts All Student Clubs to Block L.G.B.T.Q. Group.

More on Trump and associates:

• Jacqueline Aleany/Amy Gardner: [09-17] Gaetz sought pardon related to Justice Department sex trafficking probe.

• Luke Broadwater: [09-17] Trump's Former Accounting Firm Begins Turning Over Documents to Congress.

• Reid J Epstein: [09-18] Echoing Trump, These Republicans Won't Promise to Accept 2022 Results. "Five others did not answer the question."

• Maggie Haberman/Glenn Thrush: [09-16] Trump's Team of Lawyers Marked by Infighting and Possible Legal Troubles of Its Own.

• Benjamin Hart: [09-14] The FBI Seized Mike Lindell's Phone in a Hardee's Parking Lot. Late night comics had a lot of fun with this story.

• Kelly McClure: [09-18] Save America rally in Ohio included a QAnon theme song and one-finger salutes. This is taken as signifying Trump's full conversion to QAnon, although I still suspect that's above his head. Also on this is Lauren Sue: [09-18] 'This is the week when Trump became Qanon'.

Timothy Noah:

• [09-12] Why Isn't Everybody Rich Yet?: "The twentieth century promised prosperity and leisure for all. What went wrong?" Reviews new books by J Bradford DeLong (Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century) and Thomas Piketty (A Brief History of Equality): the former on how since 1870 previously unimaginable wealth has been created, the latter on how the rich prevented it from being widely disseminated, but also on how the more egalitarian period between WWII and the Reagan-Thatcher reaction produced the peak growth of DeLong's "long century," creating the broad "middle class" we're in danger of losing now. I have a number of nits to pick with Noah here -- like his Timothy Snyder-credited assertion that Stalin and Mao were greater monsters than Hitler -- but would rather note that his 2013 book, The Great Divergence: America's Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, is still, as I put it in one of my Book Roundups, "probably the first book to start with if you want to understand how incomes and wealth have diverged since 1973, with the rich and the superrich pulling ever further ahead while everyone else stagnates or worse."

• [09-16] Strike Settled. Now Let's Nationalize the Railroads. Settling the strike is a good example of something Biden could take an interest in and make work, while Trump or any other Republican would either ignore the problem or come down solidly on the side of the owners (see Reagan, Coolidge, and Benjamin Harrison for particularly gross examples). As for nationalizing the railroads, that wasn't something I've given much thought to. But the profit figures Noah cites are suggestive. Railroads are natural monopolies, which is why they've been heavily regulated in the past. The profit figures suggest not heavily enough. The thinking for wanting to nationalize companies has changed since the early days of socialism, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to nationalize some companies/industries today. Amtrak is already an example, where there is a public need that the private sector is not able to provide. That could be true for rail freight, or at least its infrastructure, as well.

Kaila Philo: [09-14] Election Deniers Are Running to Control Voting in More Than Half of U.S. States: 18 of 36 gubernatorial races, 10 of 30 races for attorney general, 13 of 27 races for secretary of state; no need noting which party ticket they are all running on.

Charles P Pierce:

• [09-17] The Republicans Built a Time Machine, Powered by Racism: "This is who the party has always been, they just aren't hiding it anymore."

• [09-15] Brett Favre's Links to Mississippi Welfare Scandal Redefine "Quarterback Sneak".

• [09-13] Ken Starr Was a Political Hack Who Did Some Embarrassing Crap: He died last week. Funny that this is the only mention I've seen of it in my weekly trawl.

• [09-08] The Unjust Consequences of Dobbs Keep Rippling Across Women's Lives: "A 23-year-old in Alabama is unable to post bail because she smoked pot on the day she found out she was pregnant."

Andrew Prokop: [09-14] The case for Democratic optimism -- and pessimism -- in the midterms. I'm not in a position where I have to, or want to, worry about November elections. For me there is very little to think about, and very little I can do about it. Still, it seems odd to me that 538 gives Republicans a 71% chance of taking the House, and Democrats a 71% chance of keeping the Senate. I know the former is gerrymandered to help Republicans, but have no clear idea how much. I also have no notion of how much effect the Republican voter-suppression bills will actually have, and even less idea whether the provisions that allow officials to reject results will kick in. (Georgia seems to be the main test case.) I do know that voter turnout will be down this year from 2020, because it always is in non-presidential elections. (I hate to say "midterm," which implies that electing a new Congress and a majority of state governors and legislators is not just less important but a mere reflection of the exalted presidency.) That killed the Democrats in 2010, but same thing happened in 2006 and 2018 and those are counted as "blue waves." I'm not sure that having more uninformed voters in presidential election years is really such a good thing. The other thing I do know is that it would be tragic to elect Republicans almost anywhere, let alone in quantities sufficient to do real damage. And I get the sense that more and more people see that. The question is whether enough do.

Nathan J Robinson:

• [07-11] We Can Build Paradises for the Public: "We need to recover the concepts of great public goods, public services, and public works. The New Deal's WPA provides a vision of what is possible." Cites Joseph Maresca's book, WPA Buildings: Architecture and the Art of the New Deal. It shouldn't be hard to think of nice things even the WPA didn't envision, but catching up is a start.

• [09-14] Can We Drop the Silly Idea That America Is "Heading for a Civil War"? Reviews the recent literature, which I and others have debunked several times before, then points out: "The idea distracts us from the class war we're actually in, and is a deeply misleading framework for understanding the real risks we face." Democratic politicians don't like to talk about class, probably because they spend most of their time and energy begging money from rich donors, who'd rather talk about abstract threats to democracy than tangible benefits at their expense. Even the phrase "real risks" detracts from the "class war" point, offering an alliance on issues that do threaten the rich, like climate change. On the other hand, a coat of "populist" culture war paint can scarcely hide the fact that Republicans are first and foremost servants of oligarchy. By the way, the term when people rise up against oligarchies isn't civil war. It's revolution.

• [09-15] How Media Copaganda Hides the Truth about the US Punishment Bureaucracy: Interview with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Unusual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System, and publisher of the Copaganda (I take this coinage to mean: propaganda for cops). Also see his [2020-08-10] piece: Why "Crime" Isn't the Question and Police Aren't the Answer. "The U.S. is currently caging human beings at a rate that is unprecedented in its own history and in the recorded history of the modern world. We're caging people at five times the rate that we did when Nixon was president. We're caging people at a rate of five or 10 times what other comparably wealthy countries do right now."

Sigal Samuel: [09-14] China is committing genocide. The world has no plan to stop it. This is about the Uyghur minority in the northwest province of Xinjiang, where they represent about 45% of a population of 26 million (vs. 42% Han, a number that has been rising and no doubt will eventually constitute a clear majority). Like many minorities around the world, they are subject to unfair treatment, prone to rebellion, and subject to harsh repression. The word "genocide" gets bandied about liberally in such cases, especially because it implies an obligation of other countries to step in and stop the perpetrators -- not that this has ever actually happened, even in the case of Rwanda, a much less fearsome power than China. (Ok, it has occasionally been used as a pretext for invasion, as when Russia invaded Ukraine ostensibly to protect ethnic Russians from Nazi genocide, but who really believes that?) While it seems likely that China trods on basic human rights in Xinjiang and elsewhere, you have to wonder why such hysteria over China -- especially given that there is absolutely no way the UN or any other world power can rectify the situation. There is no global world order. We live in a system where nations are not accountable to law or other nations, and that can only improve when all nations agree to establish some common standards -- something that is impossible to achieve with nations at each others' throats.

Alex Skopic: [09-13] The Commodities Markets are Absurd, Unstable, and Dangerous. Cites the recent book by Rupert Russel: Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World.

Emily Stewart: [09-08] What if we're fighting inflation all wrong?. Points out that the Fed is a blunt instrument for fighting inflation, rather limited and indirect in its efficacy, and indiscriminate in its side effects. Meanwhile, what we're calling inflation is often just an aggregation of discrete market failures, each better dealt with through direct policy changes. If your house has a roach infestation, the Fed can probably fix it by burning the house down, but less destructive solutions are possible -- just not from the Fed.

Derrick Bryson Taylor: [09-17] Western Alaska Lashed by Strongest Storm in Years: "Remnants of Typhoon Merbok" hit Alaska with "winds of around 90 miles per hour and heavy rain, causing significant coastal flooding. Also [09-17]: Storm Surge in Alaska Pulls Homes From Their Foundations. "Sea surface temperatures recorded along Alaska's western coast were at or near record highs."

Speaking of climate:

• Raymond Zhong: [09-15] In a First Study of Pakistan's Floods, Scientists See Climate Change at Work.

It looks like Tropical Storm Fiona will turn north into the Atlantic after hitting Puerto Rico. (PS: [09-18] Hurricane Fiona knocks out power to all of Puerto Rico, with "catastrophic flooding.") Typhoon Nanadol is heading north to Japan, and expected to follow the entire length of Honshu, with 39 million people facing hurricane-force winds in the south, and many more heavy rain. Meanwhile "dangerous heat" returns here to Kansas, with record-setting 100°F days in the forecast.

Michael Wines: [09-07] In Voter Fraud, Penalties Often Depend on Who's Voting: Author "searched through newspapers, online databases and other sources to compile a list of roughly 400 voter fraud prosecutions over the last five years." That may seem like a number, but it's "infinitesimal in a country where more than 159.7 million votes were case in the 2020 general election alone."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 12, 2022

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38685 [38637] rated (+48), 48 [56] unrated (-8: 19 new, 29 old).

I don't have much to say about music this week, so the reviews can speak for themselves. I did have quite a bit to say yesterday in Speaking of Which. One thing I didn't bother with was the 21st anniversary of September 11. That's something I don't need to be reminded to "never forget," but the endless memorials have grown tiresome, especially as we still haven't come to terms with the much greater tragedy of the wars G.W. Bush and his merry band of Vulcans then launched to remind the world not to challenge American omnipotence.

If you still are interested, I wrote a bit of memoir and comments on various articles in a September 10, 2021 Speaking of Which, which more or less coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison massacre, so I wrote about that, too. The pieces cited there are still worth pondering (except for Olson, which I ponder enough), starting with Garrett M Graff's After 9/11, the US Got Almost Everything Wrong. I quoted Graff's section heads there, and they sum up the argument (but I'll add some clarifying notes here):

• As a society, we succumbed to fear. -- Which was largely orchestrated by political interests, and echoed by a pliant media.
• We chose the wrong way to seek justice. -- With the blunt instruments of war, guaranteed to compound injustice and regenerate resistance.
• At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way. -- Elevating an out-of-control security state, concerned only with projecting power abroad (well, and stifling dissent at home).
• Abroad, we squandered the world's goodwill. -- Only thinking of our own power, and using it to inflict harm far greater than the original offense.
• We picked the wrong enemies. Starting with peace and social justice advocates at home and elsewhere, with scant concern (and ultimately blanket racism) for the inevitable collateral casualties of war.

I've written about 9/11 many times over the years. The first was written in October, 2001, and backdated for the September, 2001 notebook. One line from then: "Those of us who survived Sept. 11 have survived a wake-up call: we need to look at our lives, and work all the harder to make right." That wasn't a very popular sentiment at the time. And that's part of the problem now.

Also note that all Responsible Statecraft did on 9/11 this year was to reprise their 9/11 at 20: A Week of Reflection pieces.

New records reviewed this week:

Jeff Arnal/Curt Cloninger: Drum Major Instinct (2021 [2022], Mahakala Music): Drummer, I've run across him a number of times since 2000, although rarely as first credit. Based in Asheville, NC, as is Cloninger, who works with modular synthesizers. B+(***) [bc]

Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra: Popular Culture (Community Music Vol. 4) (2020 [2022], Royal Potato Family, EP): Nine-piece band, recorded Vol. 3 as the Hot 9, reverts here to band name he set up after arranging the Kansas City soundtrack. Six songs (Grateful Dead, Eddie Harris, Beatles, Bessie Smith, Ellington, and Ellington-via-Mingus), 28:42. Finale is typically gorgeous. B+(**) [sp]

Blue Reality Quartet!: Ella's Island (2022, Mahakala Music): Avant jazz supergroup -- Joe McPhee (tenor sax), Michael Marcus (reeds), Warren Smith (vibes), Jay Rosen (drums) -- second group album. Some fine moments, then they dither a bit. B+(**) [sp]

Rob Brown/Juan Pablo Carletti: Fertile Garden (2020 [2022], NoBusiness): Alto sax and drums duo, two improv pieces (57:08). Brown is an associate of William Parker since the early 1990s -- In Order to Survive, Little Huey, Raining on the Moon, various Quartets (O'Neal's Porch), etc. He is in fine form here, which gives the drummer plenty to work with. A- [cd]

George Cartwright/Steve Hirsh/Chad Fowler/Christopher Parker/Kelley Hurt: Notice That There (2020 [2022], Mahakala Music): Date not given, but suggested by "created during the pandemic and in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder." Cartwright plays guitar and sax, Fowler stritch, Parker piano, Hirsh drums, Hurt vocals (not a major factor). B+(**) [bc]

Con+Kwake: Eyes in the Tower (2022, Native Rebel): UK hip-hop duo, Confucius MC (William Carbine-Glean) and producer Kwake Bass, with jazz keyboardist Alexander Hawkins, and Shabaka Hutchings co-credited as producer. B+(***) [sp]

Confucius MC: Somewhere (2021, YNR Productions): British rapper William Carabine-Glean, singles since 2017, seems to be his first album. [sp]

Gustavo Cortiñas: Kind Regards: Saludos Afectuosos (2022, Pesato Candente): Drummer, from Chicago, has a couple albums, this one mostly a vehicle for vocalist-pianist Meghan Stagl, with some nice trumpet from Emily Kuhn, plus guitar and bass. B+(*) [cd]

Steven Feifke/Dijon Watson: Steven Feifke and Dijon Watson Present: Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra (2022, Cellar): Big band, leaders play piano and trumpet, Feifke is the arranger. Guest spots for Kurt Elling and Sean Jones, the band well stocked with mainstream players, some young (like Alexa Tarentino and Roxy Coss), some with big band experience (like John Fedchock). B+(*) [cd]

Tim Fitzgerald: Tim Fitzgerald's Full House (2019-21 [2022], Cellar): Chicago-based guitarist, seems to be his first album, has published a book of Wes Montgomery transcriptions, leads a septet here (wasn't Full House a Montgomery title?), with trumpet (Victor Garcia) and two saxophones (Greg Ward II, Chris Madsen). Ten songs, all penned by Montgomery in new arrangements. B+(*) [cd] [09-16]

Forest Chorus: Forest Chorus (2019 [2022], Orenda): Quintet, Finns Mikko Innanen (baritone/alto/sopranino sax) and Joonas Lappänenn (drums), Argentine Seba Saenz (trumpet), and Americans Caleb Vaazey (guitar) and Miller Wrenn (bass). B+(***) [bc]

Chris Forsyth: Evolution Here We Come (2021 [2022], No Quarter): Guitarist, has a couple dozen albums since 1998, but I hadn't heard of him. So I don't know how this record fits in the greater scheme of things, or even whether he's really jazz (which is suggested by many duo albums, including one with Nate Wooley). This is a quartet, with second guitar, electric bass, and drums, kicking off with a delightful groove piece, and more of the same to come. It also has guest spots, including a Steve Wynn vocal on one track, and Marshall Allen playing EVI on the opener. B+(**) [sp]

Chad Fowler/William Parker/Anders Griffen: Broken Unbroken (2022, Mahakala Music): Arkansas-based free jazz saxophonist, dials it back a bit here by playing stritch, saxello, and alto flute. Backed by bass and drums, with Griffen also playing some trumpet. B+(***) [bc]

Chad Fowler/William Parker/Anders Griffen: Thinking Unthinking (2022, Mahakala Music): Same group, probably same session, three more pieces (47:58). B+(***) [bc]

Joel Futterman/Steve Hirsh: Warp & Weft (2021, Mahakala Music, 2CD): Piano and drums duo. B+(***) [bc]

Joel Futterman/William Parker/Chad Fowler/Steve Hirsh: The Deep (2022, Mahakala Music): Piano, bass, sax, drums, playing one 51:56 piece, recorded in one take. Enough going on that the piano explosions stand out even more. A- [bc]

Matthew Halsall: The Temple Within (2022, Gondwana, EP): British trumpet player, DJ, label head, dozen-plus albums since 2008. Four tracks, 23:10, mixes in flute, harp, piano/organ, bass drums, extra percussion. Likes a good beat. B+(**)

Heart of the Ghost: Summons (2022, No Quarter): Avant-sax trio from DC area, Jarrett Gilgore on alto/soprano sax, with Luke Stewart (bass) and Ian McColm (drums). They have a couple previous cassetts, plus a live album with Dave Ballou. Hype suggests they started in punk, then got creative. Blasts right out of the gate, still steady with the horn chills down or drops out. B+(***) [bc]

Steve Hirsh/Zoh Amba/Luke Stewart: An Unlikely Place (2022, Mahakala Music): Drums, tenor sax/piano, bass. Amba, originally from Tennessee but based in New York, seems to be the breakout free jazz star of the year, but three earlier albums have eluded my grasp. This is an unplanned 48:19 improv, strong enough to suggest that Amba should be a subject for further research. B+(***) [bc]

JER: Bothered/Unbothered (2022, Bad Time): Alias for Jeremy Hunter, of Skatune Network, first album. Upbeat ska. B+(*) [sp]

K.O.G.: Zone 6, Agege (2022, Pura Vida Sounds): Kweku Sackey, from Ghana but based in England, initials for Kweku of Ghana, first album -- Bandcamp has various singles and EPs, attributed to K.O.G. & the Zongo Brigade. Souped up highlife, rapping at times. B+(**) [sp]

The Koreatown Oddity: Isthisforreal? (2022, Stones Throw): Rapper, Dominique Purdy, from Los Angeles (despite the initial misdirection), started in stand up comedy, prolific since 2012. B+(*) [sp]

Steve Lehman & Sélébéyone: Xaybu: The Unseen (2022, Pi): Alto saxophonist, studied under Jackie McLean and Anthony Braxton, has released some of the finest avant-jazz albums of the last 15 years, took a radical turn with his 2016 Sélébéyone, a fusion of electronics, hip-hop, and mbalax -- the title translates as "intersection" from Wolof. Here he doubles down, with vocals in Wolof (Gaston Bandimic) and English (HPrizm), an extra saxophone (Maciek Lasserre on soprano), and drums (Damion Reid). Uncredited electronics and samples. Dense, with sharp edges, the sax breaks remarkable, but few and far between. B+(***) [cd]

Enrico Rava/Fred Hersch: The Song Is You (2021 [2022], ECM): Trumpet and piano duets: five standards, ranging from Monk to Jobim, one original each, one joint improv. Very comfortable. B+(***) [sp]

Howard Riley/Keith Tippett: Journal Four (2016 [2022], NoBusiness): Two major avant-jazz pianists in Britain: Riley's 1970 The Day Will Come is a Penguin Crown album, but Tippett (1947-2020) was the flashier player. They each take a warm-up solo here (15:53 for Tippett, 10:26 for Riley) then conclude with a 46:47 duet. B+(**) [cd]

Jeremy Rose: Face to Face (2022, Earshift Music): Australian saxophonist (tenor/soprano, also bass clarinet), several albums (I have a newer one in the queue). Quartet with piano, bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Jackie Ryan: Recuerdos De Mi Madre (2022, Open Art): Standards singer, grew up north of San Francisco, mother was Soledad Garcia, born in Mexico. Songs in Spanish, some even I recognize, with a band that features Paquito D'Rivera. B+(**) [cd] [10-07]

Wayne Shorter/Terri Lyne Carrington/Leo Genovese/Esperanza Spalding: Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival (2017 [2022], Candid): Venerable saxophonist, 83 when he was called on to headline the festival, played one set with his regular quartet, then assembled this one for another set, giving the drummer featured place, followed by piano and bass-vocals. The vocals flow nicely with the music, and as does the sax. B+(**) [sp]

Sonny Singh: Chardi Kala (2022, self-released): Based in Brooklyn, sings, plays trumpet, dhol, and harmonium, drawing on Sikh devotional poetry (gurbani), projecting high spirits as well as "denouncing tyranny, oppression, and dogmatic ideologies, while uplifting oneness and justice." The bit of lyric I understood helped. B [sp]

Clark Sommers Lens: Intertwine (2021 [2022], Outside In Music): Bassist, side-credits since 1998, has a couple albums with his group Ba(SH), Lens seems to be another group -- although Geof Bradfield (reeds) and Dana Hall (drums) overlap, joined here by Chris Madsen (tenor sax) and Matt Gold (guitar). Original pieces, nicely orchestrated postbop. B+(**) [cd] [09-16]

Vic Spencer x Small Professor: Mudslide (2022, Coalmine): Chicago rapper, albums since 2012, while producer Jamil Marshall goes back a bit further. Most memorable cut is a murder yarn. B+(*) [sp]

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022, Stones Throw): Brittney Parks, born in Cincinnati, based in Los Angeles, plays violin, sings, raps, and presumably wrote the 18 bits that toss and turn in this kaleidoscope of an album. A- [sp]

Eric Vloeimans & Will Holshouser: Two for the Road (2021 [2022], V-flow/Challenge): Trumpet and accordion duo, not the most felicitous of combinations, recorded live. B(*) [cd]

Wrecking Crew: Sedale Threat (2022, self-released): Hip-hop collective, Small Professor brings the beats, others I haven't heard of. Title a Lakers basketball reference I didn't get, although I caught a couple more. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

None.

Old music:

Yugen Blakrok: Return of the Astro-Goth (2013, Iapetus): South African rapper, first album, I liked her 2019 album Anima Mysterium but didn't bother to look back at at whatever else was available. Mostly this album, with its cosmic beats and consciousness to match, noting "of all the things to waste the most terrible is the mind," and pushing: "we need a paradigm shift." A- [bc]

Kanif the Jhatmaster: The Hashemite (2016, Iapetus): South African hip-hop producer Rufus Sebright, "first appeared on the South African hip-hop scene in '97," but this seems to be his first album headlining. Note that 9 of 10 titles end in "Dub" (the other ends in "Ska"). And that's about all there is to it. B+(*) [bc]

Kanif the Jhatmaster: Flight of the 50 Foot Vimana (2016, Iapetus, EP): As understated as dub, but much more inscrutable. Seven tracks (25:01). B+(**) [bc]

Enrico Rava: Il Giro Del Giorno in 80 Mondi (1972 [1976], Black Saint): Italian trumpet player, still active, looks like his first album, appeared on a small label at the time before being reissued here. Title translates to Around the Day in 80 Worlds. Quartet with guitar (Bruce Johnson), bass (Marcello Melis), and drums (Chip White). Tries to be funky but also a bit out. B+(**) [sp]

Enrico Rava: The Pilgrim and the Stars (1975, ECM): First of many records on ECM, backed by guitarist John Abercrombie's trio, with Palle Danielsson (bass) and Jon Christensen (drums). They set a fine pace, and he sounds exceptional. A- [sp]

Enrico Rava: The Plot (1976 [1977], ECM): Return engagement, same quartet, similar vibe. B+(***) [sp]

Enrico Rava: Secrets (1986 [1987], Soul Note): Quintet with electric guitar (Augusto Manicinelli), piano (John Taylor), bass (Furio Di Castri), and drums (Bruce Ditmas). B+(**) [sp]

Enrico Rava/Franco D'Andrea: For Bix and Pops (1994 [1996], Philology): Trumpet and piano duets, not a style of music either is known for, and may seem a bit stiff, but nicely done. B+(**)

Enrico Rava/Ran Blake: Duo En Noir (1999, Between the Lines): Trumpet/flugelhorn and piano duets. One Rava original, the rest standards, with Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" a nice addition to the usual fare (not that they will ever run out of things to do with "Tea for Two"). B+(***) [sp]

Lou Rawls: The Essential Lou Rawls (1963-81 [2007], Philadelphia International/Legacy, 2CD): Soul singer from Chicago, started in church, recorded with the Pilgrim Travelers in 1962, also with Les McCann, becoming a fixture at Capitol (1962-70), but wasn't a very big star there (3 singles charted 13-17-18). He got a second chance on Philadelphia International (1976-81), where he scored his biggest hit -- the still remarkable "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" -- but little else. That's as far as this goes, but he moved on to Epic, and kept releasing records up to his death in 2006. Impresses as a singer, but rarely finds the right song or arrangement. B- [sp]

Shorty Skilz: Spirit Scream (2019, Iapetus, EP): South African rapper, half of Witchcraft Books, short debut album (7 tracks, 24:09). B+(*) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Bobby Broom: Keyed Up (Steele) [09-23]
• John Escreet: Seismic Shift (Whirlwind) [10-07]
• Song Yi Jeon/Vinicius Gomes: Home (Greenleaf Music) [11-18]
• Steve Lehman & Sélébéyone: Xaybu: The Unseen (Pi) [08-26]
• William Parker: Universal Tonality (2002, Centering/AUM Fidelity, 2CD) [09-30]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Queen Elizabeth II of England, or what's left of the British Empire, died at 96, ending her 70-year reign. No links follow, because it's not a story that matters, or should matter, to much of anyone. During her reign, the British monarchy has become a total irrelevancy. I'm not sure whether her being a woman had something to do with that -- most likely it would have happened anyway, as she followed a longterm trend or diminishing competency and clout, going back at least as far as George III, or perhaps even to the so-called Glorious Revolution. But watching Claire Foy play her in the first season of The Crown, one must note that she was trained for irrelevance and decorum in a way that must have been common for well-bred women in an era sorely lacking for feminism, and that she took to her role uncommonly well, with a grace and temperance that eluded her ridiculous progeny. The only sensible thing to do at this point would be to spare us from further humiliation and depredation by dissolving the monarchy. And, while you're at it, flush the aristocracy, including the House of Lords, away as well.

Of course, as an American, I grew up staunchly opposed to any and all shreds of aristocracy. One of the first things I learned was that we fought a revolution to free ourselves from the rule of a hereditary "noble" class. So I've always found it bizarre when Americans show any fascination, let alone deference, to European or other monarchs and aristocrats, yet many do, and I can't begin to fathom why. Surely it's not the aura of awe that monarchs have traditionally tried to cultivate, as these days anyone can see through that. That viewpoint is so unnatural I find it hard even to watch fantasy shows like Game of Thrones, where all one can hope for in life is pledge allegiance to a Great House and suffer their fate. Invariably, such societies are marked by their ignorance and cruelty, and their leaders by vanity and stupidity. We've come far too close to that with the Houses of Bush, Clinton, and Trump.

PS: I wrote the above the day after. Turns out I did find some links worth mentioning (although they were a small minority):

• Victoria Brownworth: [09-11] The queen is dead. The legacy of her colonies is not.

• Hari Kunzru: [09-11] My Family Fought the British Empire. I Reject Its Myths. Choice line here: "She spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction." Also: "My hope is that as the screen of Elizabeth falls away, Britons ay find it easier to recognize the unhealthiness of a dependency on imperial nostalgia for self-esteem."

• Anatol Lieven: [09-10] How Queen Elizabeth shepherded England out of Empire: "She showed that her country could retain roots and tradition while accepting change and ultimately becoming something better." Not really. The "roots and tradition" she maintained was the residue of Empire, which was preserved as a mindset even after all the territory was lost. Lieven pretty much admits as much in his last paragraph: "That the legacy of the British Empire should have helped to produce a consensual multi-racial Britain, and that the Monarchy should have played a positive role in this, . . ." But it and she didn't.

• Hamilton Nolan: [2021-03-09] Down With the British Monarchy: An old piece, but still timely. "What is a monarchy if not the highest veneration of inequality?"

• Nathan J Robinson: [09-09] What Will Future Historians Think of Our Priorities? Why is the late Queen on page 1, while Failure to Slow Warming Will Set Off Climate 'Tipping Points,' Scientists Say is relegated to page A20?

• Ryan Zickgraf: [09-10] Thomas Paine Was History's Greatest Hater of the British Crown. I'm sure he had plenty of rivals for intensity, but if you want to talk about effectiveness, the only competition I can think of was Oliver Cromwell. Subhed: "The American Revolution was inspired by ruthless criticism of the British monarchy. Why stop now?" Perhaps because the British monarchy has atrophied to the point where it's become a quaint if unseemly relic, where further criticism borders on cruelty. But then you see how the death and succession is played up in the media, and think it still needs to be knocked down a few rungs.

David Atkins: [09-09] Voters Don't Believe You Stand for Things Until You Actually Do Them: "What's behind the Democratic comeback summer? Chalk it up to voters seeing Republicans overturn Roe and Democrats making big moves on issues like climate change." One problem with this is that Republicans seem to think Democrats stand for all kinds of nefarious things they've never seen them make the slightest move to implement. But credibility is always a problem when you run on one set of issues, then when you win pivot to servicing your donors' lobbyists. Republicans have it easier: they get votes because they profess to hate the same people their voters hate, after which all they have to do to deliver is to keep slinging the same shit. Still, nice to see Democrats believing in things and doing something about those beliefs.

Gil Barndollar: [08-28] The 'Stabbed in the Back' Myths of the War Hawks: "They're always eager to cover failures in cries of betrayal." Examples, working back, from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Imperial Germany, which gave us the definitive term: Dolchstosslegende. That was the term that was parlayed by the Nazis into their WWII rematch. In America, it's just used to keep adding to the ignominious list.

Patrick J Buchanan: [09-10] How Liberal Elites Detest Middle America: How can anyone really believe this? Sure, elites of all stripes tend toward snobbery, and liberal ones can come off as condescending, but that's usually because they at least care, even if not enough to understand. Conservative elites, including the author, are the ones who like to see working people suffer. And if you want to talk about condescension, how can you think that someone like Trump has a mystical bond with Middle America because he likes fast food, pro wrestling, Ted Nugent, and the occasional lynching?

David Corn: It Didn't Start With Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy. Nice to see more people recognizing this: "Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections." Corn explores this more in his new book: American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.

Chas Danner: [09-06] A Guide to the Intense Debate Over Biden's Big Democracy Speech: No surprise, but most of the debate is over peripheral issues, like the lighting, the flag and Marines in the background, and the issue that most perturbs Republicans: how many of their followers are being dissed for MAGA-ness. The fact that the Republican Party, not as a bunch of ill-tempered individuals but acting in concert as a party, is consistently, systematically working to undermine democracy, not so much. Useful for one-stop opinion scanning, in an age where media would much rather cover what people say than what they do.

More recent examples:

• Eric Alterman: [09-09] President Biden Spoke the Truth About Trump. Corporate Media Threw a Fit.

• Jonathan Chait: [09-08] GOP Response to Biden's Democracy Speech Proves His Point.

• David Edwards: [09-11] Chris Christie says he felt 'attacked' by Joe Biden warning of Donald Trump's threat to democracy. Good. No dementia yet.

• Jason Lange: [09-08] Most Americans see Trump's MAGA as threat to democracy: "Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the two-day poll -- including one in four Republicans -- said Trump's 'Make America Great Again' movement is threatening America's democratic foundations." Even more surprising, the poll "found that 60% of Republicans don't think Trump's MAGA movement represents the majority of the party." Biden was hoping to appeal to those voters, but virtually all of the Republican political class is wedded to Trump and MAGA.

Nonetheless, what's important to stress is that the message isn't "Republicans are bad people," but Republican politicians want to do bad things, which will ultimately cause much harm -- even to most Republicans. It's hard to draw such a fine line, especially given that most Republicans aren't going to hear what you say, and that many of them really do seem to be filled with hate.

Dave DeCamp: [09-08] White House: Biden Wants 'Other Options' for Iran if Nuclear Deal Talks Fail: He seems to be asking for war plans: "Back in July, Biden said he was willing to use force as a 'last resort' against Iran to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon." If his war planners are honest, there is no way to use force against Iran in a way that won't make them more motivated to build nuclear weapons. And if you recall the timelines Netanyahu was spouting about how soon Iran could have nuclear weapons (less than 5 years from the early 1990s), you should realize that the only reason Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons is that they don't want them. That means Biden will most likely order up another round of sanctions, which annoy but don't really threaten Tehran, and which express such deep-seated hostility that every marginal encounter between Iran or "Iran-backed forces" and the US and its "allies" threatens to blow up into broader conflict.

It doesn't seem to have sunk in yet, but the experience with Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere has shown that sanctions have no significant effect on resolve to resist US dictation, regardless of how much pain they inflict on ordinary citizens or even elites. The only place where sanctions worked was South Africa, where the Afrikaner elites finally put their business interests above what was already a losing political position. (There is some chance that sanctions might sway Israel to compromise with Palestinians, either by calving off chunks of territory Israel has little future in, like Gaza, or by extending political rights and economic opportunities to Palestinians within Israel's extended borders. On the other hand, sanctions could just as well backfire there, too. One critical element is to extend an acceptable off-ramp, which the US has almost never been willing to do.)

More on Iran:

• Ben Armbruster: [09-08] Iran derangement syndrome season is here again: "With the rebirth of the nuclear accord seemingly within reach, those who'd rather have war are turning their hysterics into overdrive."

• Connor Echols: [09-06] Saudi-led OPEC+ snubs Biden with oil production cuts: I'm not saying that we need more, let alone cheaper, oil, but if that's a goal that Biden thinks might be worthwhile, the obvious way to get it is to dial back the sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. Such a move would also make it easier to tighten the squeeze on Russian oil. Guess who's opposed to any such move?

• Faezeh Foroutan: [09-11] Suspicious bind: Iran's relationship with Russia. This relationship is complicating restoration of JCPOA, which by design has to get Russia on the same page as the US and the EU powers, but Russia has little reason to cooperate with the West these days, and the US (under the thumbs of Israel and Saudi Arabia) only knows how to drive Iran away. The smart move is usually to divide your "enemies," but hostility is so hegemonic in the US that they're driving them together -- most consequentially the one "enemy" the US cannot afford: China.

• Daniel Larison: [09-09] Spoiler! Israel may get its fondest wish to see the JCPOA die. Sooner or later, this idea of subcontracting US foreign policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia -- an idea started by Kissinger but only reduced to an unthinking jerk reflex by Trump -- is going to be viewed as a horrible mistake. Isn't it?

Ross Douthat/Kristen Soltis Anderson/Erick Erickson: [09-07] Is the Democratic Midterm Surge Overrated? Why Republicans Can Still Win the House and Senate. A "round table" where the partisans try to psych each other up. I don't mind them fantasizing, other than that if they're right it will be such a tragedy for the whole country. Also, we can't let up. Democrats not only need to win majorities; the larger the majority, the better the prospects (especially in the Senate, where its undemocratic rules don't stop with the filibuster).

Related:

• Frank Bruni/Molly Jong-Fast/Doug Sosnik: [08-25] 'A Stirring of Democratic Hearts': Three Writers Discuss a Transformed Midterm Landscape. A similar confab on the Democratic side, just as shallow, but at least you don't feel like they're cheering the Devil.

• John Quiggin: [09-05] "Republican" as an identity: Points out that Ross Douthat continues to reflexively identify with the Republican Party, even though his fellow Republicans do virtually nothing he advises, and often do things he takes exception to. It's really remarkable how otherwise decent people have stuck with the Party even as they have recognized how badly Trump has betrayed them -- especially as it should have been clear that Trump wasn't leading the Party astray; he was channeling its deepest and ugliest convictions.

• Andrew Kirell: [2018-12-11] Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously? An oldie, but worth trotting out every time he opens his yap.

Connor Echols: [09-09] Diplomacy Watch: Erdogan's balancing act between Russia and the West. Remember: the only thing that ends the war in Ukraine, and therefore the only story on Ukraine that really matters, is a ceasefire and constructive negotiations. Once again, that didn't happen this week. Only good news I see here is that Biden resisted the chorus demanding that Russia be added to the "state sponsor of terrorism" list, which would have kicked in a raft of dangerous US laws. Also note the quotes from Matteo Salvini, a far-right politician in Italy who seems to be on the rise, questioning the value of sanctions against Russia ("I would not want the sanctions to harm those who impose them more than those who are hit by them").

More on Ukraine and Russia:

• Anne Applebaum: [09-11] It's Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory: "The liberation of Russian-occupied territory might bring down Vladimir Putin." No, I didn't cross the paywall to read this fantasy. She's cultivated her hatred of Russia through several books -- first historical, but more and more polemical -- and developed as a world-class warmonger. The link is here merely to document how far self-propagandizing can go.

• Connor Freeman: [09-09] EU Backs Off Russian Energy Price Cap. The ideal originally advanced by Janet Yellen, that we could arbitrarily cap Russia oil and gas prices to keep Russia from financing Putin's war without reducing global supply, was never going to work.

• Brandon Gage: [09-11] 'We ask you to relieve yourself of your post': Kremlin officials have begun a mutiny against Vladimir Putin. I have no idea whether to give this any credibility, but it's not from an obvious propaganda source, and it's at least as hard to doubt that there are whispers and rumblings along those lines. Still, it's not an environment conducive to accurate polling.

• Valerie Hopkins: [09-06] 'Nothing Has Really Changed': In Moscow, the Fighting Is a World Away: The same basic article could have been written about the US at any point in the 20+ year War on Terror, which even indirectly affected only a tiny sliver of the people, most comfortably out of sight and mind. The Vietnam and Korea Wars cut a slightly broader swath, but few Americans were exposed to serious risks or hardships. No doubt, US war planners had hoped that the sanctions they imposed on Russia would generate some opposition to the War in Ukraine, but Putin's government seems to be covering up those hardships rather nicely. No doubt Moscow will look bleaker come Winter, but thus far it's Europe that seems to be more seriously worried.

• Fred Kaplan: [09-08] Why Vladimir Putin's Latest Threat to the Rest of the World Is So Not Scary.

• Paul Krugman: [09-08] Wartime Economics Comes to Europe: "The West isn't exactly at war with Russia." But US/NATO support for the war in Ukraine is having a disproportionate economic impact on Europe, which over the last 20-30 years had much more business with Russia, and therefore much more to lose to sanctions (especially gas, a major import that is relatively hard to second-source). Two interesting things here: one is that the stock complaints about Biden (e.g., inflation) are hitting Europe much worse than the U.S. (which, if anything, suggests that Biden's extra spending isn't the problem, and may even be part of the solution); the other is that while Biden seems to have been successful in bringing Europe back under the NATO umbrella (after 4 years of Trump trashing the franchise), continuing the war in Ukraine through a harsh winter risks finally breaking the alliance. Right now, it's mostly right-wing parties (e.g., in Hungary and Italy) that have turned anti-Ukraine, but as hardships like high prices, controls, and even rationing pile up, that could change suddenly.

• Karl Ritter/Joanna Kozlowska: [09-10] Russia announces troop pullback from Ukraine's Kharkiv area: This is being touted as a big gain for Ukraine's counteroffensive, but also suggests that Russia doesn't feel the need to hold the area northwest of the breakaway Luhansk region. The map also shows some Ukrainian gains north of Kherson in southern Ukraine.

PS: We're starting to see breathless reports like [09-11] Amid Ukraine's startling gains, liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing. And: [09-11] Ukraine's New Offensive Is Going Shockingly Well. And where there's less progress to report, excuses: [09-10] Ukraine's southern offensive 'was designed to trick Russia'.

Sarah Jones: [09-08] The Magic of Barbara Ehrenreich. Tributes to the late writer -- as I put it last week, "the most important writer the American left has produced" -- continues to pour in, the new ones using their time to delve even deeper.

• Peter Dreier: [09-11] Barbara Ehrenreich Showed Us the Need for Socialist Policies: "She made radical ideas sound like common sense."

• Gabriel Winant: [09-09] On Barbara Ehrenreich: With considerable depth, informative and fascinating.

• Nathan J Robinson: [09-04] She Kicked Ass: I cited this last week, but it's worth citing again.

Jen Kirby: [09-06] New prime minister, same old battles over Brexit: Liz Truss takes over the Conservative Party, replacing Boris Johnson.

• Kojo Koram: [09-06] Britain's New Prime Minister Is Still in Thrall to the Empire.

• Denis MacShane: [09-09] Liz Truss Gets Her History Wrong. But isn't that a prerequisite for the office?

Robert Kuttner: [09-09] Bannon in Custody: "This time, there's nobody to pardon him." Kuttner's written about Bannon before: an interview, published the day before Bannon got fired from the White House.

Branko Marcetic: [09-07] Ignoring Gorbachev's Warnings. I could have filed this under Ukraine, which is a good example of the consequences of ignoring Gorbachev's insightful critique of America's attitude toward the world, but it is only one example, of which there are many. This piece even misses some. Gorbachev was surely joking when he told told Bush that Russia no longer needed the Brezhnev Doctrine -- the excuse for overthrowing the reform government in Czechoslovakia in 1968 -- so the U.S. was welcome to it (e.g., in Panama). The article does point out that Gorbachev continued to be an insightful critic of American power long after he left office. His proposals for Ukraine are thoughtful and almost certainly would have prevented the current war. Many American business thinkers celebrate "thinking outside the box," but nowhere is that notion more anathema than in the salons of Washington's foreign policy establishment -- a group that alternately celebrated and deprecated Gorbachev but, much to our peril, never took him seriously.

Ruth Marcus: [09-11] What Chief Justice Roberts misses. I doubt if he actually misses the point, but having lost control, is basically trying to make the best of a nasty situation -- the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" comes to mind. Marcus quotes Justice Kagan: "The way the court retains its legitimacy and fosters public confidence is by acting like a court. By doing the kind of things that do not seem to people political or partisan. By . . . doing something that is recognizably law-like." But the majority today, the Court having been meticulously packed over several decades (but packed nonetheless), think themselves free to act out their prejudices, with only the flimsiest gossamer of legalistic reasoning -- with or without Roberts on their side.

David Marques: [09-09] Conservatives Want You to Die for Their Personal Beliefs: "A Texas judge's ruling that employers don't have to cover HIV-prevention medication is further proof that the right sees public health policy merely as a tool to punish political enemies."

Dylan Matthews: [09-07] Humanity was stagnant for millennia -- then something big changed 150 years ago. Interview with economist Brad DeLong, whose "new magnum opus" is Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. It's a big subject, and an important one. During those years humans created previously unimaginable wealth, and have fought over that wealth, even to the point of threatening to destroy it all. We've literally changed the surface of the earth and our relationship to nature, yet our understanding of what we've done remains shallow and conflicted. This is an interview.

By the way, when I looked up DeLong's book, I found the same title by George Scialabba: Slouching Toward Utopia: Essays & Reviews (paperback, 2018, Pressed Wafer). Here's an interview from 2013: What Are Radicals Good For?.

Matt McManus: [09-11]: The Political Tradition of Republicanism Should Be a Touchstone for Democratic Socialists: No, not the Republican Party, although the early years there are worth knowing about, and might tangentially fit into the framework of the book reviewed here: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage, ed. by Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White. PS: I looked the book up on Amazon and suffered sticker shock ($81.29). One chapter on US: "Solidarity and Civic Virtue: Labour Republicanism and the Politics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America," so yeah, early Republicans before the oligarchs took over. That's followed by pieces on Marx, Turkey, and France. The major book on this phase of the Republican Party is David Montgomery: Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967). I read it a long time ago, when I still had a sentimental attachment to the GOP (my grandfather's middle name was Lincoln), but like Labor Republicanism that didn't last long.

Ian Millhiser: [09-06] Why Trump's FBI investigation could now be delayed for months or even years: "Trump Judge Aileen Cannon's order [appointing a "special master"] is egregiously wrong and could be overturned on appeal. But it helps Trump run out the clock." On Twitter, Millhiser adds: "The unspoken undertone of this piece is that I genuinely wonder whether it will be possile to successfully prosecute Trump, no matter the evidence against him, when so much of the judiciary is on his side." Millhiser followed this up with: [09-08] DOJ warns judge that delaying the FBI's Trump investigation is a national security risk.

• Ryan Bort: [09-09] Judge Eviscerates Trump's Bogus Lawsuit Against Hillary Clinton

• Brandon Gage: [09-08] Trump's Save America PAC, created after 2020 loss, under investigation by federal grand jury. Also: [09-08] Justice Department leans in on Trump's special master request for documents.

• Timothy Noah: [09-08] The Special Master Problem Didn't Start With Judge Cannon: "It isn't just that she's a Trump appointee who's hedging her bets. It's also that special masters are unaccountable and undemocratic."

• Heather Digby Parton: [09-09] Trump's MAGA judge can't save him: Legal woes pile up even after favorable "special master" ruling.

• James D Zirin: [09-07] Indict Trump Over the Mar-a-Lago Documents? Don't Indict? There's a Third Option. "A grand jury report puts the facts out there -- and avoids the risk of a hung jury."

Also by Millhiser:

• [09-07]: Obamacare is under attack by Republican judges again. Here's what's at stake.

Luke Mogelson: [09-10] How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police: "At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from 'backing the blue' to attacking law-enforcement officials." I can tell you, if not from personal experience at least from long observation, that calling cops names and getting in their face, threatening them, never works out, and I'll add that "white skin privilege" only works in passing (it keeps them from noticing you, but not when you give them no choice). Mogelson has a book coming out next week: The Storm Is Here: An American Chronicle. He started covering the anti-lockdown riots (especially in Michigan, where they stormed the Capitol and tried to kidnap the governor), then continued through the BLM demonstrations and reaction, winding up with January 6.

Andrew Prokop: [09-08] A new book claims Trump's efforts to politicize the Justice Department were worse than we knew.. Of course they were. Do you think Trump appointed Jeff Sessions for any other reason? Wasn't it clear when he turned to William Barr that the problem with Sessions was that he wasn't political enough? Book is by Geoffrey Berman, who was USDA for Southern District of New York until he was fired in June 2020 for not being political enough for Barr. For more, see Benjamin Weiser: [09-08] Trump Pushed Officials to Prosecute His Critics, Ex-U.S. Attorney Says.

Thomas E Ricks: [09-05] Why I've stopped fearing America is headed for civil war. Unlike the 1850s, there's no institutional support for civil war today. I've often joked that the 2nd Amendment was passed to be sure that a strong federal government couldn't nip a civil war in the bud, but wasn't repealed because no one imagined it could be used again (or wanted to admit that was the reason; besides, there were still Indians to kill). And no one could imagine that we'd ever be dumb enough to regard a random psycho with an AR-15 as a "well-regulated militia." While Ricks may sleep tight, there is still a good chance of a fair amount of semi-random right-wing violence from the crazies egged on by the Republicans and their propaganda wing.

Nathan J Robinson: [08-29] Our Invasions: "If we're never going to hold U.S. war criminals accountable, what moral credibility do we have when we condemn Russia and others? We don't even begin to practice what we preach."

Alex Shephard: [09-07] CNN, Politico Want to Give Authoritarianism a Fair Shake: "Are these outlets truly ignorant of the threats facing our democracy, or are they looking to profit from its fall?"

David Siders: [09-09] 'The environment is upside down': Why Dems are winning the culture wars: I think it would be more accurate to say that Republicans are losing "culture wars" to the people affected by them, in many cases decisively enough that Democrats have lost the will to side with the Republicans. Democrats have never seen "culture wars" as a winning political issue: otherwise, why would Bill Clinton push the Defense of Marriage Act? Or why would Democrats repeatedly pass the Hyde Amendment? I've seen a report that Biden will change the federal narcotics definitions to legalize marijuana. Once cultural change issues get to the point where 60-70% support them, they're difficult for the self-proclaimed Democratic Party to oppose.

Jeffrey St Clair: [09-09] Roaming Charges: Special Master Blaster. Starts with a Barbara Ehrenreich quote (more later), then goes into how justice works (or doesn't work) in America. He points out that the rich and powerful get special treatment, but even so Trump is in a class of one. (What other criminal can boast of appointing his own judge?) He also notes that when the FBI raids a residence, they often seize property, and have to face lesser constraints for "forfeitures" than they do with regular indictments.

There is a map here showing "50-Year Change in Summer (Jun-Aug) Temperatures: 1973-2022. The point of the map here is to show how much hotter the West has gotten over this period, which is pretty dramatic, but I couldn't help but look at where I live, in south-central Kansas, where it seems to have gotten a bit cooler. (Also a big chunk of eastern Nebraska, and southeast South Dakota, along with isolated spots in the Midwest, from Indiana down to Oklahoma and up to the northeast corner of Montana. The South and East are all up, but not nearly as much as the West.)

Astra Taylor: [09-06] Debtors, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Shame. One of the smartest writers on the left, but she got to this op-ed as an activist, fighting for debt relief. As she writes: "If debt is a dual source of profit and power, shame is its handmaiden. Shame isolates and divides, making class solidarity more difficult. The knee-jerk anger at the idea of student debt cancellation in some circles, while ostensibly about fairness, reflects the common though misguided view that when one person gains, another loses."

• David Dayen: [09-08] Why It'll Be Tough for Republicans to Cancel Student Debt Cancellation: "There are significant legal hurdles, and if Democrats implement debt forgiveness quickly, significant political ones as well."

Michael Tomasky: [09-06] Economics, Democracy, and Freedom: It's All One Argument. Adapted from the author's new book, The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity. A major thrust here is the attempt to reclaim "freedom" as a goal (and therefore a principle) of progressive economic policy. As a political proposition, this is similar enough to my own that it may save me writing a book (I don't seem to be making any headway on anyway).

Jason Willick: [09-05] How a 1950s new left manifesto explains the 2020s new right: Well, I had to click this to see what the fuck he was talking about, but I'll save you the trouble: It's C. Wright Mills' 1956 bestseller, The Power Elite, which was about a world very different from the one we inhabit now. (Nicholas Lemann's book Transaction Man does a good job of showing how America changed from the big corporate power Mills wrote about to leaner/meaner financial depredation.) Still, don't expect to learn anything about Mills in a piece that starts: "One of the disorienting features of modern American politics is the sense that the parties' identifies have turned upside down." In Willick's bizarre "upside down" world Republicans are trying to defend the little guy against the tyranny of the FBI and military leaders, while Democrats are conspiring with "big corporations to control expression." Or, as he quotes AEI Fellow Yuval Levin: "Today's Right implicitly understands itself as the outside party, oppressed by the powerful and banging on the windows of the institutions. Today's Left implicitly understands itself as the insider, enforcing norms and demanding conformity."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 5, 2022

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38637 [38595] rated (+42), 56 [51] unrated (+5: 23 new, 33 old).

I'm tired and sick and generally disgusted, so have next to nothing to say about this week's music. If you want to go to a happier place, try Phil Overeem's September list. That's where I found Witchcraft Books (or whatever the proper credit is). Before that, the only A- record on my list was Vol. 6 of the Sam Rivers archives, which is probably the 6th A- in that series so far.

I wrote a pretty long Speaking of Which over the weekend. I thought I could get up today and give is an extra edit pass, but wound up spending most of the day on the August Streamnotes index. Only thing I got out of that was the news that the Streamnotes index passed 20,000 last month.

I did a fairly extensive update of the Robert Christgau website last week. We've had several episodes where resource limits choked the website, and one of those occurred last week. I had been working on coding changes to check for attempted hacks using HTTP arguments (especially the GET variables set from the URL), so I pushed myself and puts checks on the last such cases. There's no proof that the resource limits were being caused by those hacks, but since I knew it was a security risk, it was the obvious fix to make. I've been monitoring the website more closely since then. We've had one fault, but it was short-lived, and I don't know what caused it. As the changes hit most of the database code, let me know if you run into anything amiss. It's also possible that the checks will catch some reasonable requests, so let me know about that, too.

Given today's fault, the changes don't appear to have fixed the problem. The entry process limit exists primarily as a defense against DOS (denial of service) attacks, but I don't see any evidence of that level of traffic. That means, most likely, that some page requests are causing processes to hang. I have no way of identifying hung processes, so I'm left to guessing, looking at code for suspicious loops. (Code injected through arguments can easily cause hangs like that, so my first guess wasn't necessarily a wrong one.) I put some logging code in to help, but after I didn't get any data back in three days, I discovered a bug, and had to start over. (Ah: caught 17 errors so far, some suspicious, but I forgot to log the script name, so should add that.)

New router seems to be working OK. It picked up all the old DHCP addresses, so I ran into less trouble than expected. In some ways the transition was a little too smooth.

The second album (Holy Souls) from my friend Cam Patterson's band Fox Green is available now. I've been slow getting around to it, but you can listen for yourself on Bandcamp, and order a CD or download there. The first one, The Longest April, was a high B+ both by Robert Christgau and yours truly.

New records reviewed this week:

Florian Arbenz: Conversation #6 & #7 (2021 [2022], Hammer): Swiss drummer, has a trio (since 2006) called Vein, started his superb Conversation series during lockdown, entertaining various guests. Guest here is pianist Kirk Lightsey, in a duo for the first part, expanded to a quartet with Tibor Elekes (bass) and Domenic Landolf (tenor sax/bass clarinet). B+(***) [bc]

Karl Berger/Max Johnson/Billy Mintz: Sketches (2017 [2022], Fresh Sound): Mostly piano-bass-drums trio, with Berger also on vibes. All three contribute songs, plus one from Charlie Haden and one trad. B+(***) [sp]

Camp Cope: Running With the Hurricane (2022, Run for Cover): Australian alt-rock trio, Georgia McDonald the lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist, two other women on bass and drums. Third album. B+(*) [sp]

The Chats: Get Fucked (2022, Bargain Bin): Australian post-punk group, second album, knock their songs off like bowling pins. B+(***) [sp]

Tashi Dorji/Susie Ibarra: Master of Time (2020 [2022], Astral Spirits): Bhutanese guitarist based in Ashville, NC; numerous albums since 2009, mostly solo improvs and duos, like this one with the drummer/percussionist. She gets into the Buddhist thing. B+(**) [bc]

Drug Church: Hygiene (2022, Pure Noise): Rock band from Albany, NY; somewhere in the punk/hardcore/grunge constellation. Fourth album since 2013. I don't find the grind unlistenable, but don't get much more out of it. B [sp]

Silvana Estrada: Marchita (2022, Glassnote): Mexican singer-songwriter, from Veracruz, second album, title translates as "withered." B+(*) [sp]

The Fernweh: Torschlusspanik! (2022, Winterlude): Brit rock group, from Liverpool, name and title sounded German to me, so I called up Google translate and was amused to find that the English for "Fernweh" is "Wanderlust." The title translates as "last minute panic." Second album. Only non-English song title is French ("Pas devant les enfants"). B+(*) [sp]

Florist: Florist (2022, Double Double Whammy): Indie folk band quartet from Brooklyn, self-released debut EP in 2013, fourth album on the current label, the eponymous title suggesting that they've reached a level worthy of re-introducing themselves. Emily Sprague sings, and seems to be into modular synthesizers. Nice flow to the music. Does run a bit long. B+(***) [sp]

Al Foster: Reflections (2022, Smoke Sessions): Drummer, joined Miles Davis in 1972, had a couple albums as leader 1978-79, a scattered few since including one in 2019 on this label, huge number of side credits along the way. Leads a powerhouse quintet here, with Nicholas Payton (trumpet), Chris Potter (tenor and soprano sax), Kevin Hays (piano and Fender Rhodes), Vicente Archer (bass). I don't care for the ensemble horn tone, but as soloists they're impressive as expected. B+(*) [sp]

Ezra Furman: All of Us Flames (2022, Anti-): Singer-songwriter from Chicago, debut 2007 as front for a band (Ezra Furman & the Harpoons), solo since 2012, has a fairly remarkable string of albums. I'm having trouble focusing on this one, but maybe I should just let it be. B+(***) [sp]

Michael Grossman/Jai Morris-Smith: Curious Music (2020-21 [2022], Research/Astral Spirits): Australian guitar duo, both indulging liberally in "treatments," which fade into ambience. B [bc]

Ben Harper: Bloodline Maintenance (2022, Chrysalis): Singer-songwriter from California, 16th album since 1994, mixed race, mixed genre but blues seems to be his default setting, a reserve of strength when he gets topical, as in "We Need to Talk About It." B+(**) [sp]

Keefe Jackson/Oscar Jan Hoogland/Joshua Abrams/Mikel Patrick Avery: These Things Happen (2016 [2022], Astral Spirits, EP): Sax quartet, leader plays tenor and sopranino, backed by piano, bass, and drums. Opens with a Monk riff, covers Dewey Redman and Herbie Nichols, includes two songs by the pianist, and returns to Monk again. Short enough we'll call it an EP (21:55). B+(**) [bc]

JID: The Forever Story (2022, Dreamville/Interscope): Atlanta rapper Destin Route, third album, debut was called The Never Story. Slippery, some stories. B+(**) [sp]

Lykke Li: Eyeye (2022, PIAS): Swedish singer/songwriter, last name Zachrisson, fifth album since 2008. Soft pop, doesn't grab me, but has some moments. B+(*) [sp]

Roberto Magris: Duo & Trio: Featuring Mark Colby (2012-19 [2022], JMood): Italian pianist, from Trieste, started around 1982, has recorded a lot since 2005. Alternates cuts between a duo with saxophonist Mark Colby (the later session) and a trio with Elisa Pruett (bass) and Brian Steever (drums), adding congas to the latter on two tracks. Nice showing for Colby. B+(**) [cd] [09-01]

Rudi Mahall/Michael Griener: Jazzpreis (2020-21 [2022], Astral Spirits): German duo, bass clarinet/clarinet/baritone sax with drums/vibraphone. Mahall has a lot of shared or side credits since 1992. Griener, two years younger, has about half as many credits, but was leader on a 2014 quartet with Mahall I like, and joined Mahall's group Die Enttäuschung for their 2017 Lavaman album. B+(***) [bc]

Roc Marciano & the Alchemist: The Elephant Man's Bones (2022, ALC/Marci/Empire): Rapper Rakheim Calief Meyer, has a dozen alums since 2010, this the first one with Dan Maman producing. Not much stands out from their inscrutable groove. B+(**)

Matmos: Regards/Uklony Dla Boguslaw Schaeffer (2022, Thrill Jockey): Electronica duo, M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, originally from San Francisco, now based in Baltimore, 13th album since 1997, a collection of works by Polish computer Schaefer (1929-2019). Opens with beats. Could use more. B+(*) [sp]

Tommy McLain: I Ran Down Every Dream (2022, Yep Roc): Swamp pop crooner, got on the "one hit wonders" list with his 1966 recording of "Sweet Dreams" -- the only one to chart as pop (15) but these days you know it from Patsy Cline (1963) and I also know it from writer Don Gibson (1956; Faron Young cover sold more, but I'm a bigger fan of Gibson's compilations). McLain recorded a number of albums in the 1970s, but this is only the second one since. Aside from a Fats Domino cover, originals, some sharing credits with Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and Van Dyke Parks. Nothing immediately grabs me, but some of it sinks in agreeably. B+(*) [sp]

Mdou Moctar: Niger EP Vol. 1 (2022, Matador, EP): Saharan guitarist from Niger, has uniformly appealing albums since 2013, long on groove, not many vocals. This is long enough (42:58), but starting with two "drum machine version" takes and concluding with four live tracks (most of old songs), is nicely discounted, and about as functional as the other albums. B+(***) [sp]

Mush: Down Tools (2022, Memphis Industries): Post-punk band from Leeds [UK], third album, some jangle in the guitars, some static in the amps. Reminds me of Psychedelic Furs and/or Pavement. B+(**) [sp]

Jessica Pavone: . . . Of Late (2021 [2022], Astral Spirits): Plays viola here, Abby Swidler violin or viola, Aimée Nieman violin on one track, which also has voice from all three. Mostly slow and methodical, thinking of minimalism. A bit more interesting toward the end, but I've never liked the shrillness. B [bc]

Harish Raghavan: In Tense (2021 [2022], Whirlwind): Bassist, based in New York, second album, quintet with Morgan Guerin (reeds), Charles Altura (guitar), Joel Ross (vibes/marimba), and Eric Harland (drums). B [sp]

Joe Rainey: Niineta (2022, 37d03d): Pow wow singer from Minneapolis ("faithful to tradition"), first album, backed by "cinematic, bass-heavy production from Andrew Broder." Jarring at first, grows on you. B+(**) [sp]

Dave Rempis/Tomeka Reid/Joshua Abrams: Allium (2022, Aerophonic): Alto/tenor sax, with cello and drums, in what's by far the most atmospheric album Rempis has ever recorded. Lovely stretch toward the end, but hard to get excited about all the down time. B+(***) [cd] [10-04]

Joan Shelley: The Spur (2022, No Quarter): Folk singer-songwriter from Kentucky, albums since 2010, some in the group Maiden Radio. Nice voice, very pretty album. B+(**) [sp]

Ben Sidran: Swing State (2021 [2022], Nardis): Pianist, started in a rock band with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, has three dozen solo albums since 1970 (of which I've only heard one before this), I have him down as a vocalist but not here: eight standards (including "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Stompin' at the Savoy," and "Tuxedo Junction"), backed by Billy Patterson (bass) and Leo Sidran (drums, his son). B+(**) [cd] [09-16]

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Let's Turn It Into Sound (2022, Ghostly International): Started with a fascination for synthesizers and sound design, debut 2012, sings some, tenth album, some interesting quirks in the electronics. B+(*) [sp]

Something Borrowed, Something New: A Tribute to John Anderson (2022, Easy Eye Sound): Country singer, has a big, goofy voice you can't mistake for anyone else, debut in 1980, 22 albums through 2020, most of them charted but only 3 went gold, starting with 1982's Wild & Blue. Not immediately clear how many of these were written by Anderson, or how recently they were recorded. (This starts with John Prine, who died in 2020, singing "1959," written by Gary Gentry, and ends with a Billy Joe Shaver song, and one by Bo Diddley in the middle.) B+(**) [bc]

Charm Taylor: She Is the Future (2021, Sinking City): Born in St. Louis, based in New Orleans, "liberationist & pollinator is generating new music and art as movement in the throes of social revolution, emergent motherhood, and a global yearning for a better world." First album. Sings some, raps more. B+(**) [bc]

Teddy & the Rough Riders: Teddy & the Rough Riders 2022, self-released, EP): Nashville band, guitar-bass-drums plus pedal steel, released an album in 2019, back here with six songs (19:56). B [bc]

Matt Ulery: Become Giant (2022, Woolgathering): Chicago bassist, albums since 2009, goes long on strings here, with three violins, viola, cello, and drums, on the multipart title piece plus one more (total: 36:25). B+(**) [cd]

UNKLE: Ronin II [Mixed] (2022, self-released): Founded in 1990s by British electronia producer James Lavelle, a group that included DJ Shadow (Josh Davis) for their 1998 debut, Psyence Fiction, but has reduced here to someone called Miink and occasional guests, revisiting old tunes and adding a couple new ones. The closer is by far the most impressive. B+(**) [bc]

Wiri Donna: Being Alone (2022, self-released, EP): New Zealand-based "rock project," Bianca Bailey singer-songwriter, six tracks (23:46) EP after a 2-track single. B [bc]

Witchcraft Books [Shorty Skilz/Kanif the Jhatmaster]: Vol I: The Sundisk (2022, Iapetus): Cover can be parsed several ways, with Bandcamp page using "Witchcraft Books" in title as well as artist credit, with the duo names way below. Both artists have separate albums on the label, so I was tempted to elevate their names, but for now will just note them. South Africans (I think), closer to U.S. underground hip-hop than to local grooves (kwaito or amapiano), but was mastered in Marseille and Catalonia, and covers a fair swath of cosmos. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Daunik Lazro/Jouk Minor/Thierry Madiot/David Chiésa/Louis-Michel Marion: Sonoris Causa (2003 [2022], NoBusiness): French saxophonist, albums since 1980, plays baritone here, with contrabass sarrusophone, bass trombone/telescopic tubes, and two 5-string basses, so you could say they "get down." B+(**) [cd]

Prince and the Revolution: Live (1985 [2022], NPG/Legacy, 2CD): March 30 concert in Syracuse, "televised live and semi live around the world," released at the time on tape (VHS/Betamax, with a Laserdisc in 1988), source for numerous bootlegs, until the Estate finally came up with the definitive box set (3-LP, 2-CD, Blu-ray), or just the 2-CD and/or Blu-ray. I'm just streaming the audio. The set draws heavily on his most recent album, Purple Rain, along with familiar earlier material. The auditorium and the crowd don't do the sound any favors, so while the energy is high and the songs are great, I don't see this as terribly useful. B+(**) [sp]

Sam Rivers: Caldera [Sam Rivers Archive Project, Volume 6] (2002 [2022], NoBusiness): Featuring Doug Matthews (acoustic & electric bass, bass clarinet) and Anthony Cole (drums, tenor sax, piano), a trio that had been playing together since 1994. Rivers himself plays tenor & soprano sax, flute, and piano, plus gets a vocals credit. Opens with piano, finds new and varied combinations, what improvisation is all about. A- [cd]

Old music:

Tony Conrad: Early Minimalism: Volume One (1964-65 [1997], Table of the Elements, 4CD): Experimental film/video producer, composed pieces on the drone end of the minimalist scene that developed in New York in the 1960s. The first disc here is "Four Violins," and right away you'll hear the electric viola tone that John Cale brought to the Velvet Underground. Unfortunately, for 32:30 (and it seems much longer) you'll hear nothing else. The later sessions are slightly more fetching, not that the drones vary much there, either. The box is flimsy with a promotional wraparound, but it does include a fairly substantial booklet. B+(**) [cd]

Nazareth: Back to the Trenches: Live 1972-1984 (1972-84 [2001], Sanctuary/Castle, 2CD): Scottish hard rock band, debut 1971, moved into arenas with their 1975 album Hair of the Dog, solid but nondescript, from the era before metal became dead weight. B [cd]

Marianne Nowottny: Manmade Girl: SOngs and Instrumentals (2001, Abaton Book, 2CD): Singer-songwriter, second album after a 1999 debut, Discogs lists four more since. Songs fractured, backed with keyboard. Second disc of instruments, slips into background. B+(*) [cd]

Precocious Noise and Early Electronica Pt. 1: Incantations for Tape (1920s-60s [2018], Sound Miracle): Odd electronic music, from days when anything you could coax out of a circuit seemed like a breakthrough. How valuable this is will depend on the documentation. [NB: Streaming issues may have confused me here: it's possible that some pieces were omitted, while others were added at end.] B+(*) [sp]

Precocious Noise and Early Electronica Pt. 2: Wire Recorded Pieces (1921-62 [2020], Sound Miracle): Most of these date from the 1950s, with early ones from 1921, 1938, 1944. Later pieces include a few well-known names, like Ligeti, Ussachevsky, and Pierre Henry. B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Richard Baratta: Music in Film: The Sequel (Savant)
• Kristin Berardi: The Light & the Dark (Earshift Music) [10-14]
• Rob Brown/Juan Pablo Carletti: Fertile Garden (NoBusiness) [04-20]
• Gustavo Cortiñas: Kind Regards: Saludos Afectuosos (Pesato Candente) [09-02]
• Steven Feifke/Dijon Watson: Steven Feifke and Dijon Watson Present: Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra (Cellar) [09-09]
• Tim Fitzgerald: Tim Fitzgerald's Full House (Cellar) [09-16]
• Daunik Lazro/Jouk Minor/Thierry Madiot/David Chiésa/Louis-Michel Marion: Sonoris Causa (2003, NoBusiness) [04-22]
• Shawn Purcell: 180 (Origin) [09-12]
• Howard Riley/Keith Tippett: Journal Four (NoBusiness) [04-20]
• Sam Rivers: Caldera [Sam Rivers Archive Project, Volume 6] (2002, NoBusiness) [04-18]
• Jeremy Rose & the Earshift Orchestra: Disruption! The Voice of the Drums (Earshift Music) [10=14]
• Clark Sommers Lens: Intertwine (Outside In Music) [09-16]
• Matt Ulery: Become Giant (Woolgathering) [08-26]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 4, 2022

I made the point a while back that Trump only became leader of the Republican Party when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Once he became viewed as a winner, all else was not merely forgiven but accepted as virtue. So when he lost in 2020, he should have been disposed of. But he came up with a clever way of escaping the trap: he declared himself the real winner, and most Republicans wound up falling back in line. After all, most Republicans are sheep, mired in a bubble of misinformation, and neither smart nor curious enough to think for themselves. With his "big lie," Trump has not only maintained his position as the leader of his party, he has kept himself in the spotlight continuously over the last two years -- mostly to get beaten up and humiliated even more, but professional Republicans are powerless to to stop him. They, after all, have become too complicit in his lies.

One result of this is that the 2022 elections are going to be a referendum not on Biden but on Trump. This is a huge difference from 2010. In 2008, Bush was even more unpopular than Trump was in 2020, but Bush basically went into hiding after leaving the White House, and two years later had been conveniently forgotten. Biden's record is arguably better in 2022 than Obama's was in 2010: both have presided over economic recoveries that could be better, and both have had legislative wins (although Obama's ACA was little appreciated at the time, partly because implementation was delayed). And give Biden credit for getting out of Afghanistan, where Obama got deeper in (but, at least, out of Iraq, although he got back in again later). But achievements like those don't seem to motivate voters, certainly not like fear and loathing. And let's face it: nobody in America elicits more fear and loathing than Trump.

But let's also note that Trump's onus has rubbed off on much of his party. And that's not just because the Big Lie and all the little liars who have dutifully lined up behind it has come to be viewed by so many as an assault on democracy as well as on the nation as a whole. And it's not just because the investigation and prosecution of January 6 has kept memory of those events from fading -- indeed, Trump's vow to pardon the rioters is a self-own, somewhere between Roosevelt's "I welcome their hate" of "economic royalists" and Napoleon crowning himself emperor. While Trump once could claim 80 million voters, the January 6 riot was just a few thousand fanatics, for which at most a few hundred have been charged with crimes. He's systematically belittling himself, all the while appearing even more ominous and abhorrent to the 85 million who voted him down in 2020.

While voters often remained confused about who is responsible for what, they got a crystal clear demonstrations of who the Republicans are when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That's been a partisan crusade since the 1980s, and while Trump did the ultimate packing of the Court, the "trigger laws" that have snapped into place, depriving more than a third of Americans of a right that had been secure for 50 years, is purely the work of local Republicans. It remains to be seen whether Republicans will get the blame they deserve for dozens of other unpopular positions they have taken, let alone for the longer-term damage they've done to the economy and to society. Democrats have two more months to make those charges stick.

As for Trump himself, he more and more looks like a walking corpse. He may or may not get indicted, and possibly more than once. Unless he cops a plea, it will be hard to convict him, but the nicks and scrapes aren't likely to help him politically. He's too whiny and peevish to make much of a martyr, and the few who are inclined to see him as such aren't going to have much effect -- except perhaps through self-defeating acts of violence. If Democrats come out of the election stronger than before, his reputation as a winner will take a beating. We're already seeing articles like Nate Silver: [09-02] Why Trump's Presence in the Midterms Is Risky for the GOP. He may still announce a presidential run for 2024 -- it will be hard for him to resist a graft he has been cultivating ever since leaving office -- but I doubt he'll make it to Iowa or New Hampshire, let alone sweep the primaries. He's no longer the outsider he campaigned as in 2016. And he's no longer the winner. While others will seek his blessing, carry his colors, and promise to finally deliver on his vision of Make America Great Again™, no one else is likely to duplicate his clown show, and few (other than the idiot press) will miss the drama.

Facebook tells me that today is Mary McDonough Harren's birthday. Alas, she is no longer with us, and greatly missed.

Natalie Schachar: [09-02] Barbara Ehrenreich, Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side, Dies at 81. This reads more like a profile than an obituary, including the quote: "So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear." I figure her as the most important writer the American left has produced. Everyone else who comes to mind filled some niche or other, but she ranged everywhere, and the few subjects she missed were ones we were waiting for her to weigh in on. In 2016, when sensible people were searching for books to explain how it was possible Trump won, few looked back as far as her 1989 Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. That was probably my introduction, followed by The Worst Years of Our Lives, a title she spent on the 1980s when even worse years were still to come. I imagine that The American Health Empire (1971) and her explicitly feminist works from the 1970s are a bit dated, but wouldn't be surprised to find otherwise. Blood Rites was a wholly original take on war, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch introduced many of us to the hard work of poverty, Dancing in the Streets offered joy, and Bright-Sided told us not to get too obsessed with it. I read her primer on dying, Natural Causes, earlier this year, and found it reassuring, as she no doubt intended. Too bad I missed the memoir, subtitled A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything, which could double as mine. Something to live for.

• Economic Hardship Reporting Project: Ehrenreich founded this website and its journal, and it has a wealth of material on why hard work is so hard. Start with [2018-07-19] Barbara Ehrenreich and Alissa Quart Discuss the Future of Journalism With Vogue. This was about when Quart published her book Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America.

• AP: [09-02] Barbara Ehrenreich, 'Myth Busting' Writer and Activist, Dies.

• Alex Press: [2019-10-22] On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview With Barbara Ehrenreich: This takes off from the 1977 articles she wrote with John Ehrenreich -- my wife remembers them as especially brilliant.

• Nathan J Robinson: [09-04] She Kicked Ass: "The late Barbara Ehrenreich was a model for leftist writers and thinkers, combining deep knowledge, scathing wit, and a righteous anger at injustice." Probably the deepest piece within this deadline. Includes "some bonus Ehrenreich quotes."

• Jia Tolentino: [2020-03-21] Barbara Ehrenreich Is Not an Optimist, but She Has Hope for the Future.

• The Nation relinked three pieces by Ehrenreich: [2011-12-14] The Making of the 99% (with John Ehrenreich); [2015-03-23] Can Women and Men Live Together Again?; and [2015-12-01] What Happened to the White Working Class?.

Kate Aronoff: [08-23] Made-in-America Electric Cars: Good in Theory but a Complicated Mess in Practice: That's what you get when you try to do two things at once. Biden is starting to move away from free market globalization (which has stripped America of most manufacturing jobs) to a national economic policy that brings manufacturing jobs back. That makes the switch to electric cars harder and more expensive, but it's as good a place to start the policy as any.

Also on electric cars:

• Rebecca Heilweil: [09-01] The long road ahead for American-made electric vehicles.

Ross Barkan: [08-29] Don't Mock the Payroll Protection Program: Sure, it was an easy reach when Republicans reacted hysterically to Biden's student loan order, especially given that lightning rods Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were on the list of major beneficiaries of PPP loan forgiveness. But the program was one of a number of measures that helped people get through the early days of pandemic lockdown. Not every measure has to help everyone, and not every measure has to help the poorest of the poor. Forgiving student loans is effectively middle-class relief: the rich don't need it, and the poor can't use it, but for people in the middle it makes a lot of difference. PPP was more of an upper-middle-class program, but it was packaged with things like supplemented unemployment benefits that helped more people. Farm supports only directly help a small population, but they help keep food plentiful for the rest of us. Bank bailouts only obviously help filthy rich bankers, but they can be justified for keeping businesses open and running. (I don't quite buy that, but that's an argument that reasonable people who care about more than bankers can accept.)

I've long hated when people decry business supports as "corporate welfare." Welfare should be thought of as a good thing, something we all deserve more of. The preamble of the U.S. Constitution declared that the reason we have and should want a federal government is "to promote the general Welfare." The art of politics is maintaining a balance that benefits most of the people most of the time. The practice of politics tries to break this asunder, favoring some interests at the expense of others, and in its most degenerate form disfavoring others out of pure spite (or a misguided belief in zero-sum games). Republicans these days offer many examples of such degeneracy. We shouldn't emulate them.

Kim Bellware/Alex Horton: [09-02] VA plans to offer abortions for veterans regardless of state laws. This looks like an important policy change, and a brave one under the circumstances. Still doesn't go as far as an idea I thought of long ago: making VA centers available for abortions for all women, regardless of military affiliation. I liked the idea because it would be almost impossible to set up the sort of gauntlets women often have to pass through to get to clinics (at least that's the case here in Wichita). Related background: Alex Horton/Rachel Roubein: [07-29] Abortion ruling will worsen military personnel crisis, Pentagon says.

Daniel Davis: [08-29] The Real Problem With Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal: It Came 10 Years Too Late. Or earlier still, but Davis's perspective was formed by serving in Afghanistan in 2010-11 ("at the height of Petraeus's Afghan surge"), which clearly proved that the US was not going to escalate its way to a satisfactory solution, but still had some leverage to negotiate with.

Also:

• Gil Barndollar/Jason Dempsey: [09-02] Don't Believe the Generals: "Afghanistan was a lost war long before last year's final withdrawal." The authors served in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2014, which is the critical window for understanding that there was nothing the US could do in Afghanistan that had any chance of working. Before that you could make excuses like "we dropped the ball" by rushing into Iraq, imagining that focus would help, that you could find better Afghan leaders than Karzai, that you could get more help from Pakistan, etc. Instead, all focus meant was more firepower, and that failed for all to see.

• Jacob Batinga: [09-01] Sanctions are Destructive, Illegitimate, and Totally Bipartisan: "Destitution should not be a tool of U.S. foreign policy." I filed this under Afghanistan following the photo, but destitution is a tool (actually, a weapon) the U.S. has used many times, pretty much never with its advertised effect.

Last week I followed Tariq Ali's Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, with The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold, a slim volume compiled from previous essays. They're a little scattershot, but his insights and speculations have proven remarkably solid. Perhaps the best part is his background and analysis of the Russian intervention in 1979 and its 10-year occupation, which like the US invasion in 2001 he viewed as doomed from the start.

Connor Echols: [08-26] Diplomacy Watch: Will six months of war turn into six years? This weekly report came out before Ukraine announced its offensive in the Kherson region, but once again has no progress to report. As for the offensive: Against fierce resistance, Ukraine makes small gains in the south near Kherson. Or so they say.

More on Ukraine:

• Connor Echols: [09-02] Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine?

• Jan Cienski: [09-02] Energy war erupts as Putin and the West clash over oil and gas: The G7 thinks they can starve Russia's war effort by capping the price they pay for Russian oil and gas. I don't see how that can work, or why anyone thinks it can.

• Blaise Malley: [09-01] Can the Quincy Institute Survive Putin's War? This is a rehash of Joe Cirincione's resignation, who felt the "transpartisan" think tank (backed by Koch and Soros money) wasn't sufficiently anti-Putin. I've found their Responsible Statecraft website to be a dependable source for sanity, one I've cited often in these pages (especially the work of resident expert Anatol Lieven and "Diplomacy Watch" reporter Connor Echols. No one there doubts that Putin is responsible for the war, and that his armed intervention deserves to be beaten back. On the other hand, they acknowledge the history that led to the conflict. And most importantly, they recognize that continuing the war only adds to the harms already inflicted. And they realize that the only way out is through negotiation, which they correctly criticize both sides for shirking.

• Geoffrey Roberts: [08-26] Are these hawks really calling for a preventative war? Well, not exactly. As I understand it, they're saying that we don't need to worry about the war with Russia -- and they're really thinking of this as America's war to defeat Russia, not just to help Ukraine defend itself -- going nuclear, because Putin will always back down when faced with America's nuclear deterrent. Hence, we should send even more dangerous and provocative weapons to Ukraine. But while they are hawks and seek to extend the war, I don't see any reason to call it "preventative": the war is already ongoing, started by Putin when he invaded Ukraine beyond the breakaway regions. Still, the "preventative war" mindset does appear to be operative here: that's how Putin described his invasion. But the term isn't even an oxymoron; it's a self-negation. No one ever prevents a war by starting one.

• Ravil Maganov is the eighth Russian oil executive to die under mysterious circumstances since the war begun.

Nick French: [09-03] US Life Expectancy Has Declined Again. Neoliberalism and Antidemocratic Rule Are to Blame. The more obvious reason is Covid-19, but it's hit the US much harder than most relatively well-off countries. Plus there's guns, opiates, car wrecks (which St Clair reports are twice as likely to be fatal in the US as in other countries like France and Canada). But sure, having a health care system that is better at making money than saving lives is part of the story. And putting prices on everything ensures that unprofitable people will suffer.

Tareq S Hajjaj: [09-01] Israel's 'Operation Breaking Dawn' killed 49 Palestinians. These are their stories. All wars should be reported like this. All war supporters should be read these reports. Note that the absence of any Israelis profiled is because none died in this particular bit of slaughter.

Jacob Heilbrunn: [08-28] Trumpism Before Trump: "How a small group of reactionaries hijacked the Republican Party -- decades before the 2016 election." Lead photo: Newt Gingrich. Review of Nicole Hemmer: Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Dana Milbank's recent The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party covers the same ground.

Alex Henderson: [08-26] Moderna sues two competitors for 'patent infringement' over COVID vaccine technology. Patents are basically a license to steal from the public. By claiming whole swathes of technology, they also inhibit further development of that technology. And when they're applied retroactively, the entire market gets blindsided. The whole racket should be demolished -- as indeed it only exists because political laws have been enacted to favor private interests.

Umair Irfan: [08-31] Why Covid-19 death rates remain stubbornly flat. A little over 400 per day, which would add up to 150,000 for the year: offhand, that's about as many people as die from guns, drug overdoses, and auto accidents combined, which are the three non-disease statistics that routinely outrage various people.

Ben Jacobs: [09-02] Biden defended democracy -- and pounced on a political opportunity: "The goal was to make 'MAGA Republicans' a label for everything that voters find politically toxic about the GOP right now." Biden gave a prime time political speech that quite rightly called out Republicans as a threat to democracy. He tried to limit blame to a subset of the party defined by their blind loyalty to Trump, and phrased that in terms just short of name-calling. I'm not much for broad labels, but one needs some way of making the point that electing Republicans will cost you rights, including the right to fair elections in the future, and impose other hardships. Biden's trying to be gentle about this, leaving a lot of room for Republicans to distance themselves from the most extreme elements of their party, but few of them will give him any respect for the effort. And frankly, I'm not sure coddling them is worth the effort. The Republican Party is designed to ratchet ever further to the right, so you can see where they're going, and should be alarmed. Of course, Republicans are reacting hysterically (reminds me of the old lawyering advice: if you have the facts, pound the facts; if you have the law, pound the law; if you have neither, pound the table).

• Steve M: [09-04] Trump, Biden, and the "They"/"You" Gap. Suggests some fine tuning for the speech. E.g., Focus on "pro-Trump politicians and activists, rather than the vaguer "MAGA Republicans." Given that the original Democratic response to MAGA was "America is already great," Biden seems to be picking a fight he previously ducked. M covered some of this earlier: [09-02] After Biden's Speech, Republicans Play to Low-Information Voters, as Usual.

• Philip Bump: [09-02] Figuring out how many 'MAGA Republicans' there actually are. He offers pie charts for a variety of definitions, of which the largest was 15% who "believe Biden didn't legitimately win" in 2020. Other definitions are smaller, but look larger than they are in cases where the set is reduced to "only Republicans" or "Republicans/leaning independents." On the other hand, the share is probably larger among Republican Party activists (office holders, candidates, local party officials, and larger donors), as intraparty politics is designed to draw players to the right.

• Igor Derysh: [09-02] "Late-stage dementia": Trump erupts on Truth Social over Joe Biden's MAGA takedown.

• Domenico Montanaro: [09-02] Biden's speech walks a fine line in its attack on MAGA Republicans

• Tyler Pager: [09-03] Biden's stark warning: The U.S. is threatened by its own citizens.

• Heather Digby Parton: [09-02] Biden's MAGA warning drowned out: Republicans' hissy fit works to distract the media.

• Nikki McCann Ramirez: [09-02] Republicans Call Biden Divisive While Equating Him to Satan and Hitler: Never ones to make nuanced distinctions.

• Greg Sargent: [09-02] MAGA Republicans are seeting with rage because Biden his target.

Benji Jones: [08-30] How melting glaciers fueled Pakistan's fatal floods: "Pakistan has more than 7,000 glaciers. Climate change is melting them into floodwater." For more on Pakistan's floods, see St Clair, below; also:

• Fatima Bhutto: [09-03] What Is Owed to Pakistan, Now One-Third Underwater.

• Ammar Ali Jan: [09-03] The Floods Devastating Pakistan Are More Than a Natural Disaster.

• Nathan J Robinson: [09-04] Climate Catastrophe Is Theft: "Those who caused the bulk of the climate crisis owe damages to those who are harmed by it. If U.S. emissions cause flooding in Pakistan, the U.S. must compensate Pakistan." That's not going to happen, but the data in the charts here is public, and it would be naive to think that it won't be noticed, digested, and regurgitated as anger. Then there's the "Mansion" section, which needs to be seen to be believed.

Benji Jones: [08-31] How Jackson, Mississippi, ran out of water: A massive flood pushed an already stressed system over the brink. Why was it stressed? You know. If you don't, see Krugman, below.

• Kate Aronoff: [09-02] Mississippi's Dry Run for Eco-Apartheid.

• Paul Krugman: [09-01] Can You Drown Government in an Empty Bathtub?

Ed Kilgore: [09-01] Rick Scott Wants Mitch McConnell to Be 'Cheerleader' for Bad Candidates: Over at FiveThirtyEight Republicans are still favored 75-25 to take control of the House, but their Senate prospects have dwindled to 32-68. That's because Republicans have nominated some really bad Senate candidates, although it's quite possible they just don't know yet how bad Republican House candidates are: they just don't get as much polling and media attention (except for Sarah Palin, who just lost a "safe" R seat in Alaska). McConnell's is Republican leader in the Senate, and (whatever else you may think of him) a shrewd judge of whatever he can get away with, at least with respect to the Washington media bubble. He knows that he can get away with more as Majority Leader than as Minority Leader, and he sees chances of that are slipping away, so he's taken discreet steps to cover his ass. Scott is a MAGA fanatic, who was made head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee (with McConnell's approval, no doubt), figuring the time was ripe for his brand of aggression. Democrats should hang Scott's manifesto on the neck of every Republican candidate this year, but in the meantime Republicans are hanging themselves. I don't normally like to get into retail politics here, but a few more examples:

• Matt Stieb: [08-30] Blake Masters Has a Lot of Thoughts About Black People: Most politicians understand that it's always a mistake to generalize about any group of people, especially "Black people," but here you go. Most inflammatory is his lament over "the end of Jim Crow."

• Laura Vozzella: [09-04] Youngkin to boost Maine's LePage despite racially incendiary rhetoric. Despite? Youngkin's Virginia campaign was masterful in his ability to dog whistle racism while seeming like a normal guy. But isn't he cutting it a little close with LePage? Or is that where he sees opportunities emerging? Vozzella also co-wrote [09-03] Youngkin builds -- and burns -- bridges with Black voters.

Anatol Lieven: [08-30] The tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev: Dead at 91, the last President and General Secretary of the Soviet Union, often blamed for its demise, but rarely credited for the reforms he intended, and almost universally eschewed by later Russian voters. His reforms were readily embraced by other Communist nations -- except North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, whose defenses had been hardened by American sanctions, and China, which moved quickly to strangle Glasnost in its crib, while introducing more effective economic reforms. (It's worth recalling that China reacted with similar horror to Krushchev's de-Stalinization.) Gorbachev's Wikipedia page makes reference to him being "committed to preserving the Soviet State and its socialist ideals." The tragedy there is how few of his followers -- nearly all high-ranking functionaries in the Party -- retained any socialist ideals at all. Most, including Boris Yeltsin, shifted effortlessly to kleptocracy, some not even bothering to dress it up as a form of democracy.

Also:

• Valerie Hopkins/Ivan Nechepurenko: [09-03] Russians Mourn Gorbachev in Silent Protest Against an Absent Putin.

• Thomas Geoghegan: [08-31] Putin's War on Gorbachev's Children: A writer I like a lot, but I don't quite buy the argument that Putin's intention is to undo Gorbachev's legacy, or that Ukraine, which at least until recently mirrored Russia's oligarchy, furthers that legacy.

• Masha Gessen: [08-31] Mikhail Gorbachev, the Fundamentally Soviet Man: I complain below about US indifference (and worse) to post-Soviet Russia, but it's worth recalling how hostile the US was to Gorbachev when he was introducing his reforms -- not least those aimed at reducing Cold War tension.

• Melvin Goodman: [09-02] America's Exploitation of Gorbachev.

• Fred Kaplan: [08-30] How Mikhail Gorbachev's Successes and Failures Foretold the Tragedy of Modern Russia.

• Paul Krugman: [09-02] The Nightmare After Gorbachev: He starts by noting that few people (in the West, anyway) recall how severe the Russian economic collapse was in the 1990s, and therefore see little link to the rise of Putin, whose popularity is based on reversing the collapse. He offers some useful charts for measuring this collapse, plus a few "explanations," none of which are very persuasive. (I have my own theories, but that is another, probably quite long, essay.) One point I do want to add is this: after the Soviet Union dissolved, hardly any Americans had any interest in Russia, especially in making the transition work -- true, Sam Nunn helped secure nuclear weapons; Bill Clinton's people helped Yelstin rig an election; but business interests were mostly looking to pick over the bones (although Russian mobsters usually got there first), and the arms merchants were keen to expand NATO, at Russia's expense.

• Dylan Matthews: [08-31] Mikhail Gorbachev and the lonely crusade of changing the system from within.

Anatol Lieven: [08-30] There's a good chance Liz Truss's Ukraine, China policy will be worse: "She is expected to win the contest for PM next week but no matter who's in the role, the Brits will continue to follow Washington anywhere." Sounds like a distinction without a difference, but that seems to happen a lot with conservatives. I'm not surprised that Britain has their own security think tanks, but I hadn't heard of the Henry Jackson Society, named after the longtime "Senator from Boeing."

Sarah Mervosh: [09-01] The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading: "The results of a national test showed just how devastating the last two years have been for 9-year-old schoolchildren, especially the most vulnerable." As someone with decidedly mixed views of education, I'm tempted to point out that the skill they lost most on was test taking, that reading and math are the most intensely tested subjects. I suspect most students should be able to make that up in fairly short course. But I also suspect that what was really lost was something in short supply already: personal attention. There is a lot of debate these days on what school is and should be; e.g., see the New York Times series What Is School For? I haven't read through all of this yet, but the first section I clicked on was Care, which was probably the first thing sacrificed (if indeed it was much provided; in my day it wasn't).

Ian Millhiser: [08-31] The 4 major criminal probes into Donald Trump, explained: This piece has been around for several weeks, but keeps getting updated, so works as a general introduction.

For more on Trump and his tribulations:

• Ben Jacobs: [08-31] The DOJ's latest filing has even more damning claims against Trump.

• Charlie Savage/Maggie Haberman: [08-31] Trump's Lawyers May Become Witnesses or Targets in Documents Investigation: Specifically, M Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb.

• Peter M Shane: [08-31] Donald Trump's Executive Privilege Fog Machine: "No one should be fooled by Trump's claims of privilege over the Mar-a-Lago documents."

• Alex Shephard: [09-02] Trump Is Having a Nuclear Meltdown on His Sad Social Media Platform.

• Brynn Tannehill: [09-01] Here Are the Possible Outcomes of a Trump Prosecution. They're All Bad. Then, to make matters worse, the author posits that not prosecuting Trump would be the worst outcome of all ("pave the way for despots who would also turn over state secrets to hostile foreign powers for profit"). Some of these scenarios (including that one) I'd dismiss out of hand, like a "civil war" breaking out if Trump is indicted, or the Union dissolving as red states secede. That's not to say you won't have the occasional crackpot resorting to violence to defend Trump's honor -- that's not a prediction, as it's already happened -- but it won't happen on a scale that matters. And of all the bad scenarios the author mentions, there's one I actually like: that the Espionage Act might be found unconstitutional.

• Stuart A Thompson: [09-02] Trump Embraces Conspiracy Theories He Only Winked at Before.

Samuel Moyn: [08-31] 'Sweeping' DoD plan to mitigate civilian harm merely humanizes endless war. This sounds like it may be different from the more conventional defense of "humanitarian war," which admits to killing people but in order to achieve some "greater good" -- a nebulous theory that some neoliberals love to push but never seems to work out right. So most likely this is seen as a corrective against the "take the gloves off" mantra of the Bush-Cheney years. But civilian harm is inevitable given the way the US military is trained, and recent attempts to throttle it have failed (e.g., McChrystal's short reign in Afghanistan, which was abandoned not because it didn't work but because American soldiers revolted against the restraints). Moyn has a recent book along these lines, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

Lindsay Owens/David Dayen: [08-31] Why Obama-Era Economists Are So Mad About Student Debt Relief: "It exposes their failed mortgage debt relief policies after the Great Recession." Of course, we've largely buried the memory of those programs, ignoring why they didn't work, and concluding we didn't need them after all. While the Biden policy is much better designed -- for debtors that is, where mortgage debt relief was actually aimed at helping banks -- there are still "a lot of ways the government can mess this up. See Dayen's [08-30] Implementing Student Debt Relief Is Critical.

Mitchell Plitnick: [09-02] Rebutting AIPAC's case for war with Iran. Aside from inflicting random acts of terror upon Iran, I don't see an actual war plan here. Israel doesn't have the proximity of logistics, let alone the numbers, to defeat Iran. Iraq, much better positioned, fought an 8-year war against Iran, and really just for border lands, and failed. In theory the US could launch something from its Persian Gulf crony petrostates, but they're pretty exposed to reprisals, in many cases literally living in glass houses. A US return to Iraq and/or Afghanistan (or for that matter Pakistan) expressly as a base against Iran wouldn't be tolerated. And while the US (or for that matter Israel) can nuke Iran back past the stone age, how will that play when the radiation cloud wafts past India and China and across the Pacific to America? It's hard to think of anything more disgraceful. So why? To stop JCPOA? That agreement delivers exactly what Israel campaigned for before it was signed, except without the gratuitous fireworks that warmongers see as necessary and self-validating. Since the US can't win a war with Iran, wouldn't we be better off learning to live with a world we cannot change?

More on Iran:

• Richard Falk: [09-02] To Renew or Not to Renew the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement, That is the Question. Nothing other than a treaty with verification can do the job. Anything else simply dares Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Trump trashed a treaty that had been working as planned purely as a sop to Israeli (and possibly Saudi) political interests, and offered nothing to replace it. Biden supposedly wants to restore the treaty, but not at the expense of normalizing or in any way improving relations with Iran. As I noted above, there is no practical alternative. To pretend that Iran is a country the US can continue snubbing forever without suffering any consequences is delusional, yet such delusions are rarely even challenged in Washington.

Jeffrey St Clair: [09-02] Roaming Charges: Losing It: Opens with a terrifying section on the floods in Pakistan (including a satellite picture that takes a while to sink in).

Let me close with this quote from Daniel P.B. Smith, scraped from Facebook, on Trump's cache of secret files:

My theory is that he had completely disorganized piles of mixed-up stuff, including top secret stuff he could show to visitors to impress them with what a big-shot he was [and] how great the US was. If he has photos of Macron in flagrante delicto I can easily see him showing them to everyone.

And that the reason all that stuff went to Mar-a-Lago was not that he is selling it to the Russians, but that his staffers were constantly trying and failing to grab stuff back from him and get it filed back in the proper place. When the time came to move Trump out of the residence at the White House, they suddenly found dozens of boxes with top secret files mixed up with flattering newspaper clippings. "My god, there is no way in hell we can sort this out now. If we leave it here, we could get in trouble ourselves. As well as embarrassing Trump by exposing his childishness and gross mismanagement. The only thing to do is to box it all up quickly, get it the hell out of here, and tell him to hide it at Mar-a-Lago and keep it hidden no matter what."

And the reason why Trump obstructed attempts by the Archives to get them back is that he has occupational defiant disorder, and wouldn't give them back for no better reason than that they asked. Plus that he has enough of a clue to realize that his habit of mixing up documents was something he could get away with while he was still President, but would embarrass him now that he wasn't surrounded by people to cover for him.

That he's embarrassed by what a mess they are in is shown by his accusing the DOJ of spreading out documents on the floor in order to make it look as if Trump had done it.

Heck, the dozens of empty "Top Secret" folders are probably empty because he went through them, didn't find anything that interested him, and tore them in quarters to show he had finished looking at them.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, August 29, 2022

August archive (done).

Music: Current count 38595 [38552] rated (+43), 52 [51] unrated (+1).

This is the last Monday in August, so wraps up the August archive (link above). I'll do the indexing later, but for now, the count for the five-week month is +212 rated, -25 unrated. Latter number failed to drop this week because I got a big package of fall releases from Matt Merewitz. All of the pending promos in my queue have September or October release dates. I jumped the gun a couple times below, but generally held myself back.

Two notable, relatively young jazz musicians died last week: Jaimie Branch (39, trumpet/vocals), and Joey DeFrancesco (51, organ). The latter is survived by his father, another organ player, Papa John DeFrancesco. The Branch list will direct you to a couple of A- live albums, but misses the side-credits, which include A- work with James Brandon Lewis, Dave Rempis, Rob Mazurek, and Heroes Are Gang Leaders (Lewis again, but worth noting in their own right).

Also passed last week was producer Creed Taylor (93). He started at Bethlehem Records in the 1950s, headed up ABC's Impulse! label during its 1960s heyday, and ran his own CTI label in the 1970s (results there were mixed, but the 1970s were a tough decade for above-ground jazz).

The Wichita Eagle finally published an obituary for Dotty Billings -- I wrote a bit about her a couple weeks ago. It's a pretty deep survey of a remarkable life. We were fortunate to have known her, and counted her a friend.

Christian Iszchak has published another of his excellent An Acute Case consumer guides. As usual, I'm struggling to keep up. Phil Overeem published a remarkable one-record-per-year list on Facebook. That steered me to the Dead Moon comp, and convinced me to give Tommy Womack some deeper listening. Phil mentions recent reading of a Womack memoir, but as far as I can tell, doesn't specify: Dust Bunnies (2018) seems to be the most recent, but there's also Cheese Chronicles (2008). (I haven't done an album dive on his early Government Cheese group, but I have a 2-CD compilation from 2010 as a high B+.)

Now I'm wondering if I didn't shortchange Loudon Wainwright III's Years in the Making. It's hard to listen to these long multi-CD sets by streaming. Besides, the box violates my album cover formatting standards, but it's more or less at the same level. On the other hand, it's an odds & sods compilation, whereas the Dead Moon and Tommy Womack 2-CD sets are true career summaries.

I wrote another fairly long Speaking of Which last week, posted late last night. It's been suggested that I should break the long paragraphs up, but that runs against my formatting concept. Also the fact that I'm reading it in my text editor instead of on the browser screen, but mostly that I'm exhausted by the first pass and never feel like taking the extra time for an edit. (On the rare occasions when I do, I inevitably wind up changing lots of things. E.g., I just added a line to the Madeleine Ngo item: "Economics has long prided itself on being 'the dismal science,' but its attraction to sadists is less often recognized.")

I should also note that I've changed the website home page to do an automatic redirect to the blog. Another reader request, and a fairly easy one to do. I should probably write a new explainer page.

Only got the new router half-installed: I was gratified to at least get the wired machines working, but still need to work on the wireless and other details. Will resume work on that after this is posted.

Still feeling pretty awful. At east I'm fairly functional, but it's hard to get enthusiastic about anything these days. Summer has gone by in a blur, which is probably a good thing, since (using 100°F days as a standard) this is easily the 4th hottest summer since we moved here in 1999. (Could rank higher if we used 90°F days, or average highs, or average temperature.) Still not done: September usually doesn't cool off much until the last week, and maybe not then. Of course, it's not all weather, and not all pain. At least I have lots to do -- something I have a knack for turning into frustration.

In my article search, I noticed this piece -- Men have fewer friends than ever, and it's harming their health. It doesn't quite describe me, but I've been pretty isolated since the mid-1960s, and most of the time I've gotten by ok, so it's hard to tell. But I can see how isolation has increased -- that was the point of Robert Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone -- and the only mitigating factor I've seen since then has been the rise of virtual friendships through shared interests (probably most of the people I interact with most days).

New records reviewed this week:

Aitch: Close to Home (2022, Capitol): British (Manchester) rapper Harrison James Armstrong, first studio album after several EPs and singles that charted in UK. B+(*)

JD Allen: Americana Vol. 2 (2022, Savant): Tenor saxophonist, refers back to his 2016 album Americana, which was subtitled "Musings on Blues and Jazz." Originals here, aside from "This World Is a Mean Old World" and "You Don't Know Me." With Gregg August (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums), plus Charlie Hunter (guitar on 8 tracks). Allen remains an impressive saxophonist, but this seems a little muddy. B+(**) [cd] [08-26]

Roxana Amed: Unánime (2022, Sony Music Latin): Jazz singer from Argentina, debut 2004, moved to US in 2013, only second album since then. Band includes Martin Bejerano (piano) and Dafnis Prieto (drums), and most songs -- only two co-credit Amed -- have featured guests. B+(***) [cd] [09-16]

Chouk Bwa & the Ångströmers: Ayiti Kongo Dub #1 (2022, Bongo Joe, EP): Haitian group, sometimes Chouk Bwa Libète, teamed up with the Belgian production duo -- they have a previous album together, Vodou Alé (2020). Three tracks, 19:04. B+(*) [bc]

Chronophage: Chronophage (2022, Bruit Direct Disques): Indie band from Austin, debut 2017, moved to New York in 2021, third album (following two self-released cassettes). B [bc]

Stella Donnelly: Flood (2022, Secretly Canadian): Australian singer-songwriter, second album, first showed a knack for cataloguing and skewering "male assholes." Some of that here, but not quite as sharp. B+(**) [sp]

Matthew Fries: Lost Time (2021 [2022], Xcappa): Pianist, fifth album, trio with John Hébert (bass) and Keith Hall (drums), original material, dedicates this album to his late mother. B+(**) [cd] [09-23]

Phoebe Green: Lucky Me (2022, Chess Club): Pop singer/songwriter from Manchester, first album after an EP (aside from a self-released CDR from 2016). B+(**) [sp]

Lauran Hibberd: Garageband Superstar (2022, Virgin): Brit singer-songwriter from Isle of Wight, first album after several singles, title stakes out her pitch and claim, and the best pieces sound like some kind of femme Ramones with a bit of Bowie complex. B+(***) [sp]

Julia Jacklin: Pre Pleasure (2022, Polyvinyl): Australian singer-songwriter, started in the garage band Phantastic Ferniture, third solo album. B+(*)

Calvin Keys: Blue Keys (2022, Wide Hive): Guitarist, originally from Omaha, headed to California in 1969 and cut his debut in 1971 (recently reissued). With Gary Bartz (alto sax), Steve Turre (trombone), Henry Franklin (bass), Babatunde Lea (percussion), plus seven others in smaller print. Ends on a strong groove. B+(**) [sp]

Kyle Kidd: Soothsayer (2022, American Dreams): Singer (songwriter not clear), from Cleveland, started in Mourning [A] BLKstar (four albums 2017-20, heard of but haven't heard), solo debut, intro reads "living as a queer, androgynous person," gets a lot of support, transcending genre as easily as gender. B+(*) [bc]

Kokoroko: Could We Be More (2022, Brownswood): British 8-piece Afrobeat band, led by Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), first album after several singles and EPs. B [sp]

Clemens Kuratle Ydivide: Lumumba (2021 [2022], Intakt): Swiss drummer, first album was called Murmullo, so he called the group on his second Clemens Kuratle Murmullo. Ydivide is a new quintet, with alto sax (Dee Byrne), piano (Elliot Galvin), guitar (Chris Guilfoyle), and bass (Lukas Traxel). I'm most impressed when the sax charges ahead. B+(*) [sp]

Steve Lacy: Gemini Rights (2022, RCA): Guitarist in r&b/hip-hop collective The Internet, second solo album after a Demo EP. Should be funkier or smoother or something. B [sp]

The Mountain Goats: Bleed Out (2022, Merge): Singer-songwriter John Darnielle's band, 21st album since 1994. Not sure of the lyrics, which extoll or maybe just call out revenge, "wage wars get rich die handsome," "make you suffer," an endless supply of oxygen and hostages, and lots of blood -- reportedly written during a "pandemic spent devouring classic action films." That leaves strong images, and the music is as appealing as ever. A- [sp]

Lucas Niggli/Matthias Loibner: Still Storm (2022, Intakt): Swiss drummer, albums since 1993, most share headline credits with others and vary accordingly -- I especially like his albums with Aly Keita and Jan Galega Brönnimann. Loibner is from Austria, records since 2001, plays hurdy gurdy and adds some electronics. Starts ambient, grows from there. B+(**) [sp]

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom: Reset (2022, Domino): Singer-songwriter Noah Lennox, co-founder of Animal Collective in 1999 and still involved with them, while maintaining a solo career since, well, 1999. Working here with English producer Peter Kember, who he's collaborated with off and on since 2011. I haven't cared for what I've heard in the past -- 3 of 8 albums; 7 more from Animal Collective, never topping B+(*) -- but this is often clever, with some sonic depth and intricacy. Still, I've heard many of the hooks elsewhere (most obviously from the Drifters). B+(**) [sp]

Silvan Schmid: Augmented Space (2019-20 [2021], Ezz-Thetics): Swiss trumpet player, first album, solo, credit also for amplifier on the title piece, which he manages to get some rhythm out of. B [bc]

Scorpion Kings X Tresor: Rumble in the Jungle (2020 [2021], Blaqboy): Credit per cover, where Scorpion Kings are South African amapiano producers DJ Maphorisa and Kabza De Small, and Tresor is Mukengerwa Tresor Riziki, a singer originally from Congo, credited as writer of these 14 pieces (99:00). B+(***) [sp]

Superorganism: World Wide Pop (2022, Domino): Indie pop band, based in London but with international members from the Far East (Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand). Second album, sets out to unify the world, but not without a little fragmentation. B+(***) [sp]

Tank and the Bangas: Red Balloon (2022, Verve Forecast): New Orleans-based funk group, half-dozen mostly live albums since 2014, second on this label following 2019's Green Balloon, Tank is singer/rapper Tarronia Ball. B+(***) [sp]

WA Records: If You Fart Make It Sound Good: Ciclo De Improvisacion: Liberada (2018 [2022], WA): From Barcelona, a label and/or collective or perhaps just an ad hoc set of electroacoustic experiments, with most pieces apparently named for their artists, or unnamed by the artists. Not many farts, unless trombones count. Gets better toward the end. B [bc]

Loudon Wainwright III: Lifetime Achievement (2022, StorySound): Folk singer-songwriter, debut 1970, crossed 75 with his 25th studio album. He has been counting the years at least since 2012's Older Than My Old Man Now. He reminds us here that his father died at 62, and he's enough of an ironist to know he's living on borrowed time, turning it into a game where he can do what he wants "for fun and free." Doesn't seem he sweated the music much, even when on the odd occasion he cranked up his band. But he still has things to say, and is finding more all the time. A- [sp]

Miguel Zenón: Música De Las Américas (2022, Miel Music): Alto saxophonist, from Puerto Rico, debut 2022, has won a MacArthur fellowship. Quartet with Luis Perdomo (piano), Hans Glawischnig (bass), and Henry Cole (drums), playing the leader's original compositions. Several guest spots, including one vocal, but most dazzling of all is the sax. A- [cd] [08-26]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Brasil Novo ([2022], Música Macondo): Curated by DJ Tahira (from Sao Paulo) and Tim Garcia (London), eight tracks -- "contemporary," other sources say "over the last fifteen years," and talk about hard-to-find 20th century roots -- something called samba de coco, from the more African-influenced nordeste. B+(**) [bc]

Tommy Womack: 30 Years Shot to Hell: An Anthology (1987-2017 [2022], Schoolkids, 2CD): Singer-songwriter from Kentucky, more alt-rocker than country but his songs can fit and teach them a thing or two. Started with the band Government Cheese, which provides four songs here, plus three more for two bands he played in with Will Kimbrough (The Bis-Quits, Daddy), which leaves 35 from his solo work. More than half is remarkable, rest has a chance. May be too much, but he's entitled to include it all. A- [sp]

Old music:

Dead Moon: Echoes of the Past (1988-2004 [2006], Sub Pop, 2CD): Garage rock band from Oregon, founded 1988, led by Fred Cole (singer/guitarist), with Toody Cole (bass, his wife) and Andrew Loomis (drums). Recorded studio 10 albums through 2004, 4 more live, plus a couple early compilations picking up singles and stuff. I'm not finding any dates here, but Cole saw this as a final summing up: they toured Europe in support of the album, then broke up. Nothing here is great enough to be deemed essential, but none of it is disappointing either. I don't see myself wanting to explore further, but as a chunk of history, this is a pretty fair memento. A- [r]

Esquire's All American Hot Jazz Sessions (1946-47 [1988], RCA): Esquire was (still is, despite numerous ups and downs) a magazine, founded in 1933. It ran a jazz poll piece in 1943, which to organizing concerts. I'm not sure when they stopped, but Playboy, which eclipsed them in the 1960s, ran its own jazz poll for many years. This rounds up their mostly swing-oriented picks for 1946-47, with extra cuts from related artists (Jack Teagarden, Lucky Thompson). I wish it was easier to decipher the credits -- Discogs is no help -- but the first All Stars lead off with Louis Armstrong singing and Duke Ellington on piano, with Johnny Hodges on alto and Don Byas on tenor; the second group only repeats Charlie Shavers, but picks up Buck Clayton, Coleman Hawkins, and Teddy Wilson (among others). Leonard Feather is MC, and claims 8 writing credits. CD adds 5 extra cuts, by Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, and Mildred Bailey. B+(**) [cd]

Michael Jon Fink: A Temperament for Angels (2004, Cold Blue Music, EP): Electronic music composer. Discogs credits him with 7 recordings (4 albums, 2 singles/EPs, 1 miscellaneous), most 2001-04 with outliers (1982, 2014, 2019); also played in the Negative Band on a Stockhausen album I remember from 1975. This is considered a single, but as a single 28:24 piece should at least count as an EP. Ambient electronics, occasional strings and cymbal. B+(*) [cd]

Jim Fox: The City the Wind Swept Away (2004, Cold Blue Music, EP): Electronic music composer, has a handful of records 1998-2013, this one a 22:25 single, performed on piano, strings (a quartet), and trombones (3). Still ambient. B+(*) [cd]

T.D. Jakes: Praise & Worship (1978-98 [2008], Verity/Legacy): Kind of a big deal among the holy rollers, styles himself as the bishop of an unaffiliated Dallas megachurch, The Potter's House, broadcasting his sermons as The Potter's Touch. He's hobnobbed with Bush and Obama, appeared on Dr. Phil and in a handful of films, some based on his novels (a subset of the 30+ books he's published). He works his choir hard, having them solo at the start and for breaks, but they're also foils for his own spiels, which I find amusing but are no doubt as meant as sincere and even profound -- at least as much as this consummate showman can muster. B+(**) [cd]

Draco Rosa: Vino (2008, Phantom Vox): Singer/songwriter from Puerto Rico, started out in boy band Menudo (with Ricky Martin, whose breakout album Rosa produced), went solo in 1988 as Robby. This one is in Spanish, including covers of Cohen and Dylan. Mainstream rock feel, although that may be misleading. B [sp]

Swing-Groups: 1931 to 1936 [Robert Parker's The Golden Years in Digital Stereo] (1931-36 [1987], ABC): Parker (1936-2004) was an Australian audio engineer who developed a process for converting old 78 rpm records to digital stereo. He used this to release several dozen CDs of public domain material, some single-artist sets (Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, Gracie Fields, Al Bowly), but most were topical compilations, ranging from Opera 1904 to 1935 to Saucy Songs 1928 to 1938. This grabs 16 songs from as many big bands, most but not all as white as the cover pic. Sound seems good, but I'm not one to be picky. B+(**) [cd]

The Three Johns: Eat Your Sons (1990, Tupelo): Side project for Mekon guitarist Jon Langford, with John Hyatt (vocals), Philip "John" Brennan (bass), and a drum machine. Ran from 1981-98, producing several great records, especially 1986's The World by Storm, then regrouped for this swan song in 1990. Postpunk, has the urgency but less clear on the mission. B+(**) [lp]

Loudon Wainwright III: Surviving Twin (2017, StorySound): A live performance, recorded as a documentary by Christopher Guest for Netflix, so this counts as a soundtrack. Solo, alternates new songs about his namesakes -- figuring himself as a "surviving twin" to his late father -- with spoken word pieces written by his father. I don't have a lot of patience for the latter, and doubt I'd ever play them again, but they kept me interested, even as I felt they ran too long. B+(*) [sp]

Loudon Wainwright III: Years in the Making (1973-2018 [2018], StorySound, 2CD): Back cover continues with "Forty-five years of offbeaten tracks, and hitherto unheard Loudoniana: A comprehensive 2-CD audiobiography, orphaned album cuts, live recordings, radio appearances, home demos, and much more. Fun by and for the whole family (PG13) with an accompanying booklet filled with dozens of documents, drawings, doodles, and drafts, historical, ephemeral, and otherwise in between." [Caps reduced, punctuation added.] Possible that the booklet provides some dates, but the last song is refers to the occasion of his 71st birthday (he was born in 1947), so I took that and subtracted 45, which goes back to his 4th album (the first one he wrote a title to, Attempted Moustache). Could go earlier, but not much. Some covers, some songs I recognized, some I didn't, like the one that goes "I woke up and I felt so bad/ . . . /Feels like we're right on the brink/ But it ain't Gaza/ No, it ain't Gaza/ It's not as bad as Gaza/ or the Ukraine." That was probably written 5-8 years ago, but feels prety timely right now. B+(***) [sp]

Vickie Winans: Praise & Worship (2003-06 [2008], Verity/Legacy): Gospel singer, birth name Bowman, from Michigan, sang with International Sounds of Deliverance as a teenager, married Marvin Winans (of the gospel group Winans), solo debut in 1985. This draws on her two albums for Verity (plus a live track), long on chorus and bombast. B-

Tommy Womack: Stubborn (2000, Sideburn): Thought I'd check out some of his earlier albums I had missed. This was the oldest I found on Spotify, second in his list. Opens rockabilly, has some interesting songs. B+(**) [sp]

Tommy Womack: Circus Town (2002, Sideburn): Most songs are memorable, the hot ones like "You Can't Get There From Here" instant hits, the ballads take a little longer, unless the jokes are especially obvious. One highlight is everything you need to know about "The Replacements." A- [sp]

The Tommy Womack Band: Washington D.C. (2002 [2003], self-released): Radio shot, title reflects where it was recorded, nothing much you'd consider political. Band credit emphasizes loud and fast, which suits them fine. Not sure whether these songs are original here, but I recognize a number of them from the 30 Years compilation. B+(***) [sp]

Tommy Womack: Namaste (2016, self-released): Title a greeting used in yoga. One song cites the Dalai Lama to become a better Christian, but after surveying ancient Rome and Jerusalem, he concludes ("God Part III"): "I believe in Beatles, I believe in love." Ten more songs, some trivial, some funny, a closer that is plainly lovely, all worth hearing again. A- [sp]

Added grades for remembered lps from way back when:

• The Negative Band: Karlheinz Stockhausen: Short Wave (1975, Finnadar): B+

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dan Cavanagh and James Miley With John Hollenbeck: Another Life (S/N Alliance) [10-21]: cdr
• Jeff Denson/Romain Pilon/Brian Blade: Finding Light (Ridgeway) [09-23]
• Dave Douglas Quintet: Songs of Ascent: Book 1: Degrees [10-07]
• Joe Fiedler: Solo: The Howland Sessions (Multiphonics) [11-04]
• Noah Garabedian: Consider the Stars Beneath Us (Outside In Music) [09-23]
• Yosef Gutman Levitt: Upside Down Mountain (self-released) [09-30]
• Darryl Harper: Chamber Made (Stricker Street) [10-28]
• Olli Hirvonen: Kielo (Ropeadope) [11-11]
• Sana Nagano: Anime Mundi (577) [10-28]
• Timothy Norton: Visions of Phaedrus (Truth Revolution) [11-04]
• Rick Rosato: Homage to Be (self-released) [10-14]
• Eric Vloeimans & Will Holshouser: Two for the Road (V-flow/Challenge) [09-01]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 28, 2022

OK, here's another week. Apologies for the occasional repetition, and less-than-ideal sorting. I keep finding more shit, and eventually it stinks up the place. As I recall, Warren Wake used to call this sort of thing "shovelware."

Wrapping up, I saw this tweet from Steve M. (who, if you ever look at Twitter, you should be following):

Fox News is the worst thing that's happened to America in my lifetime. 9/11 doesn't even come close.

That was attached to a Fox segment where the hosts were discussing "a Missouri school board plan to allow teachers to spank students with parental consent." But it could have referred to damn near everything they do. They're evil, and millions of people have become meaner and dumber for exposing themselves to their shameless propaganda.

Steve M's blog is also worth following. I don't pay very close attention to primary elections, but he tells me pretty much all I need to know (and then some). Recent stories:

• [08-07] Republicans really think issues can't hurt them.
• [08-08] Ron DeSantis, the most arrogant candidate in America.
• [08-10] Trump is a sick, needy guy, part XCVIII.
• [08-10] The conspiracy to keep right-wingers paranoid and stupid.
• [08-11] When the violence escalates, Republicans will just deny it's real.
• [08-12] Republicans attack democracy and the rule of law, and David Brooks blames everyone but the perpetrators.
• [08-13] Republican stochastic terrorism is the new assault-weapon mass murder.
• [08-15] New York Times: The GOP is a big-tent party that welcomes both rude FBI-bashers and polite FBI-bashers.
• [08-19] Threatening federal agents: It's a felony and a campaign stunt!
• [08-20] Mitch McConnell couldn't have put the Trumpiest toothpaste back in the tube.
• [08-23] That new poll confirms everything I've said about a Cheney 2024 run -- and shows that the parties aren't equally extreme.
• [08-24] Can Anybody Find Republicans Somebody to Love?
• [08-24] And in other election news about extreme Republicans . . .
• [08-25] Republicans: Glad to be unhappy?
• [08-26] The worst people, aided and abetted by the worst people.
• [08-27] Why does the New York Times keep telling us that GOP extremists are chastened when they aren't?

He also writes some at Crooks & Liars:

• [08-25] Republicans Going Off the Deep End, Part Infinity.
• [08-28] Shamelessness -- It's Every Republican's Superpower.

Also from Rick Perlstein (also worth following), our foremost historian of the US right:

Fed chair Jerome Powell: we need "some pain." In other words (to simplify), for people who work for wages, to help those who live on investments. When I wrote the part of my 1976-80 book REAGANLAND on Volcker doing that in 1979, I almost cried.

When Obama won in 2008 and I saw that Volcker was his top economic adviser, I cringed. Volcker became Chair of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (until 2011, when he resigned and was replaced by former GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt). Perhaps even more consequential for Obama were economists Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, who got a mention below.

I've also seen tweets of Senators Lindsey Graham and Josh Hawley threatening riots if Donald Trump is charged and arrested. One tweet, by Tim Hannan, asks: "Is that a threat? Or are you insinuating someone should get away with crimes because there is a threat of violence? Or are you finally admitting Donald Trump can cause riots?"

Dean Baker: [08-22] Bernie Sanders Makes the Washington Post Oped Page: We Don't Need Government-Granted Patent Monopolies to Finance Drug Research: I followed the link to Caleb Watney/Heidi Williams: [08-22] Drug pricing reforms can hurt innovation. Here are 3 ways to prevent that. But one of those three ways proposes extending monopoly rights, so you're better off sticking with Baker, who's pushed this issue hard for many ears now. Moreover, I think it could be pushed harder than even Baker does. I'd say that all drug development should be publicly funded, that the science developed should be shared, and that the testing should be open sourced. I'd also point out that while it would be cheaper and more productive in the long run for the US to replace all private funding, drugs are by their nature an international product. One could negotiate international agreements to share much of the cost of development. The result would be more competition than at present, including manufacturing, which would no longer be tied to patent rights. Also:

• Alexander Sammon: [08-25] It's Time for Public Pharma. This focuses more on the manufacturing end than on r&d. My own thinking is that if you can provide licensing standards (FDA approval) agreeable to most nations, you can freely import from any nation which meets those standards, and that will provide a lot of manufacturing competition where currently we have very little. Of course, if the private sector fails to compete, I wouldn't mind the public financing of new and competitive companies to fill the gap. I'm thinking they could be set up as employee-owned, to avoid the bureaucratic overhead of public ownership.

Zack Beauchamp: [08-24] How do we know who's winning in Ukraine? The real answer is that there is no winning in this or any other war. There is a map if you think territory matters much: Russia has consolidated gains in the east and southeast, north of Luhansk, and west of Donetsk to Kherson, linking up the breakaway regions of Crimea and Donbas. Early in the war, Ukrainian forces concentrated on defending the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, offering little resistance on the southern front, as Russian forces invaded from Crimea. The move to expand west from Donbas didn't happen until later, after Russia gave up on Kyiv, and refocused on Mariupol. The map shows Ukrainian counteroffensives, which have gained a small amount of ground east of Kharkiv and north of Kherson, but the current map isn't much different from one 2-3 months ago. It's hard to see much ground changing hands from here on, but the destruction of fighting a stalemated war could increase. US weapons shipments to Ukraine have shifted to missiles and drones that can attack sites well beyond the fronts (potentially risking attacks inside pre-war Russia -- already started in disputed Crimea). Russia still has the ability to attack anywhere in Ukraine, even as far removed from the battle lines as Lviv and Odesa. Of course, the map doesn't account for lives ended or maimed, for the destruction of infrastructure and other property, the dislocation of millions of people, the economic costs, for Russia the costs imposed by severe sanctions, which also redound to hurt the rest of the world economy, and for the US and its "allies" many billions of dollars that could have been used for real problems but are being wasted on unnecessary war, one that will only harden feelings and darken prospects for many years to come. So, yes, it's hard to tell who's winning, because that's the wrong question.

• Anatol Lieven: [08-25] Six months after Russian invasion, a bloody stalemate, a struggle for peace. Lieven also wrote [08-24] Putin fairly deconstructed: a man, a myth, the state: a review of Philip Short's 800-page biography, Putin: His Life and Times.
• Masha Gessen: [08-26] The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina. I doubt the "mysterious" would have occurred to me, no matter how obscure or baffling the evidence was: when a warmonger like Dugina is killed, the karma is glaring. More here on her more famous father, whose own star ascends higher from his daughter's martyrdom (from his eulogy: "She lived for our victory and died for it -- for our Russian victory, our truth").
• Caroline Houck: [08-23] Everything we actually know about the Moscow car bombing. The car bomb killed Darya Dugina, who is the daughter and accomplice of political ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, who has been prominent in developing an intellectual rationale for Putin's embrace of Russian nationalism. How much actual influence he has is disputed, but he has been a vocal supporter of Putin's war in Ukraine. To get the scoop, Houck interviews Brian Taylor, who doesn't seem to know any more than the rest of us.
• Ellen Ioanes: [08-28] Six months in, how are sanctions impacting Russia's economy? Serious disagreement on this, with one always suspecting that reports of calamity are rooted more in wishful propaganda than in fact. (Krugman's spin about Russia's trade surplus is an example. Another is this report [08-29] that Cracks emerge in Russian elite as tycoons start to bemoan invasion.)
• Dawn Stover: [08-19] Deteriorating situation at Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant.
• Robert Wright: [08-24] The murder of Daria Dugina is a wild card in a non-zero-sum conflict. My only quibble is that it's not just possible for war to be a less-than-zero-sum game, it's inevitable. Yet time and again, we see belligerents arguing that sunk costs have to be redeemed, lest they be sacrificed in vain, as if any other outcome was possible.

Tom Boggioni: [08-28] Truth Social is headed for bankruptcy. Also:

• Igor Derysh: [08-26] "Trump never pays his bills": Truth Social reportedly stiffs contractor amid financial "disarray".
• Peter Wade: [08-28] Little Revenue, Lots of Debt: Trump's Truth Social Faces Bleak Financial Future.

Kevin Carey: [08-24] Biden's big new student loan forgiveness plan, explained. This will be a test of whether an eminently reasonable centrist compromise can survive politically, where the left position is that education, at least in state-supported colleges and universities, should be a right as far as a student wants to take it, and the right position is that people who can't afford to pay for higher education should remain in penury until the last dime of their debt is accounted for. As a practical matter, the right position is untenable, which is why we have a hopeless maze of rules and programs for offering and (in some cases) excusing debt, which several generations of students have been forced into as state austerity has relentlessly fobbed off public investment in favor of private debt. For someone my age, college was mostly affordable, debt was minimal (but I still hated every bit I had to pay off, and not just because I got screwed out of a degree), and there were decent-paying alternative careers (I managed). Later generations, however, faced fewer options, and more obstacles, and the result is that most of this country suffers under the dead weight of politically-induced debt, which is possibly the single main reason generations after mine have had to face declining opportunities -- and nowadays even declining life expectancies. My big complaint about this plan is that it doesn't address the present and future problem of more people having to take on ridiculous debt just to get the bare education they need -- and we need for them to have -- not just to prosper but to survive. Beyond that, sure, the limits are too low, and the means-testing is discriminatory and provocative, but this is a meaningful step, one we have to defend, one that we must because the arguments we're going to be hit with are seductively wrong and ultimately destructive, and have to be overcome to make any further progress.

• Zachary D Carter: [08-25] What the Critics of Loan Forgiveness Are Forgetting: "Functioning societies eliminate burdensome debt all the time."
• David Dayen: [08-25] One Way Out of the White House Political Box on Student Debt.
• Sarah Jones: [08-24] Biden's Student-Loan Forgiveness Is Good. It Could Have Been Revolutionary.
• Paul Krugman: [08-25] The Two Big Questions About Student Debt Relief: "First, will it significantly increase inflation? The answer, if you do the math, is a clear no. Second, is it a good policy? The answer should be: Compared to what?"
• Branko Marcetic/Ben Burgis: [08-27] Student Debt Relief Was Never Supposed to Happen. "We've come a long way from the era where the automatic reflex of liberal and other tastemakers was to dismiss any idea coming from the Left." As I've been saying for some time now, all the serious, workable ideas are on the left. And we've become increasingly aware that the neoliberal salves peddled by Clinton and Obama simply failed to deliver results for their voters. When the Biden administration looks left, it's not because they want to, but because they're under a lot of pressure to actually deliver on their promises, and that means they have to come up with solution which actually address the problem. (Needless to say, they still have room for improvement.)
• Madeleine Ngo: [08-25] Will student loan forgiveness make inflation worse? Opponents (or maybe I should say haters?) are grasping at straws here. The first two cited are disgraced economists Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, who seem to regard anything that doesn't increase economic pain as bad. Economics has long prided itself on being "the dismal science," but its attraction to sadists is less often recognized.
• Timothy Noah: [08-24] Biden's Student Debt Relief Program Is Excellent, but Student Loans Suck to Begin With.

Steve Coll: [08-27] A Year After the Fall of Kabul: Coll wrote the book on Afghanistan (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001) before everyone else did and he had to write another (Directorate 5: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan), so he's the obvious choice for this assignment. However, his subhed misses the point: "For the Biden Administration, supporting the Afghan people without empowering the Taliban is the foreign-policy case study from hell." First, the Taliban are already in power, so the worry about "empowering" them is pure crap. Second, the only way the US can "support the Afghan people" is through the Taliban. Anything else is war, and the last thing the Afghan people need is more war. The only conclusion possible from US policy since the Taliban seized power is that the US doesn't want -- and probably never wanted -- to help Afghans. Otherwise, they'd put their bruised egos aside and offer something respectful and constructive.

• Rozina Ali: [08-24] The Afghan Women Left Behind: "After the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, a U.S. organization shut down the country's largest network of women's shelters. Its founders think that it made a huge mistake."
• Responsible Statecraft: [08-25] Symposium: Was withdrawing from Afghanistan the right thing to do? They polled 20 "scholars," who with a few exceptions respond with a lot of hemming and hawing. Withdrawing was the only right thing the US did in Afghanistan -- not that they even did that right, but after pretending that everything's hunky dory for 20+ years, it's hard to just turn on thinking clearly.

Ryan Cooper: [08-23] The Big Bet on Natural Gas Is Blowing Up in the World's Face: "It's not clean, it's not cheap, and it's not a bridge fuel to anyplace good." Still, the article is mostly about Russian gas, which has become a political chip in the Ukraine War, which as is so often the case is used to reinforce another separate point. Sure, gas is not clean -- burn it and you get carbon dioxide and water, don't and you're leaking a more potent greenhouse gas -- but it's a lot cleaner than coal, both in its energy equation and in the impurities that also get released by burning it. That led to the "bridge fuel" argument, which made more sense in the 1990s, when wind and solar were more expensive than they are now. I'll have more to say about this under Krugman, below.

David Dayen: [08-19] The Real Inflation Reduction Acts. On the Inflation Reduction Act: "The policies here are fine, but too much of Democratic political positioning involves concealment, and I think it generates natural but unnecessary skepticism." On the other hand, he offers the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA 2022) as an example of a law which lowers prices by increasing competition.

Igor Derysh: [08-24] Florida GOP primary loser Laura Loomer cries fraud: "I'm not conceding because I'm a winner". If that last word was a blank, what would you fill in? I suspect the most common pick would be "jackass" (or something comparable but probably more scabrous). If you can stand more on Loomer, see Ali Breland: [08-24] Laura Loomer Loses GOP Primary, Opportunity to Vie for Most Racist Congressperson.

Thomas B Edsall: [08-24] When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner. One of those NY Times writers who's taken the newsletter bug, but tends to go for quantity rather than quality, devoting much of his pieces to quoting the latest academic studies of things he's used to covering as news -- I'm reminded here of Karl Rove's taunt about the "reality-based community" being reduced to studying what Rove's crowd were creating through their actions. Edsall studies Trump like that, which makes him useful as a summarizer of conventional wisdom, but a somewhat less than acute critic. For another recent example, see: [08-03] Trump Has Big Plans for 2025, and He Doesn't Care Whether You Think He'll Win, where he points out: "This is no idle threat; Trump has taken some lessons from his first term." His conclusion: "Trump is not just going to walk away and let other candidates stir his toxic political brew." As Trump continues to dominate the news, some more pieces:

• Jacqueline Alemany/Isaa Arnsdorf/Josh Dawsey: [08-27] Inside Trump's war on the National Archives
• Maggie Haberman/Glenn Thrush/Alan Feuer: [08-23] Trump, Without the Presidency's Protections, Struggles for a Strategy.
• Fred Kaplan: [08-26] Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Shows Trump Kept Some of America's Top Secrets, Is in Huge Trouble.
• Ryan McCarthy: [08-26] Why the redacted affidavit for the search of Trump's home is so concerning: "The newly released affidavit sheds light on the classified documents at the center of Trump's growing legal problems."
• David Rohde: [08-26] The Dangers of Trump-Prosecution Syndrome.

Amy Goodman: [08-24] "War Poisons Everybody": Remembering Howard Zinn on His 100th Birthday: He was a historian, died in 2010 at 87, best known for his A People's History of the United States, but I remember him as a peace activist back in the 1960s (I don't recall whether I read his 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, but that's about when I first became aware of him. This collects several interviews from 2001-09.

Gabrielle Gurley: [08-25] Democrats in Danger of Missing the Marijuana Moment.

Margaret Hartmann:

• [08-19] Why Ivana Trump Was Buried at Bedminster Golf Course: 3 Theories: They didn't think very hard here. It reminds me more of how people often bury their dead pets in their backyards. But with a person, there's an added sense of ultimate possession. Plus, I bet it creeps the hell out of Melania.
• [08-23] Trump to 'Save America' by Putting Portrait in Smithsonian.

Ed Kilgore: [08-22] Ludicrous Kansas Abortion Recount Could Be the Wave of the Future. After losing their anti-abortion referendum by a 59-41 margin, a couple of its proponents insisted on forcing a recount. It was only a partial recount, because they couldn't raise enough money to pay for a full one. But they tried anyway, because they couldn't imagine losing an election in a state they were sure they had locked up. Surprisingly enough, they did manage to nudge the margin 93 votes in their direction, leaving the No margin at 165,000.

Paul Krugman:

• [08-22] Of Dictators and Trade Surpluses: "According to a new NBC News Poll, U.S. voters now consider 'threats to democracy' the most important issue facing the nation." But does that mean they're worried about Russia and China? Most Democrats I know consider Republicans the major threat to democracy (hence the heightened interest in Jan. 6, Trump's "big lie," the Republicans who echo it, voting suppression laws, gerrymandering, and some of us are still concerned about billionaires who can afford to try to outright buy elections). And the overall poll numbers are no doubt inflated by Republicans who worry about Democrats (and George Soros) subverting their innate right to rule. But aside from some dead end Hillbots, nobody worries about Russia or China subverting our democracy. The main people who talk about autocracies in Russia and China are those in the arms business, which doesn't explain Krugman, who merely wants to argue a point: that trade surpluses, as enjoyed currently by Russia and China, aren't a sign that autocracy works better; indeed, he takes them as a sign of weakness. In this, he's confusing consequences with causes (the trade surpluses have very different causes and meanings). He goes on to make other unfounded declarations, like "China's Covid response has gone from role model to cautionary tale." Economists may enjoy laughing at China, but I wouldn't be so quick to condemn them for still taking the pandemic seriously. Nor would I consider the ability of the state to direct the private sector to prioritize public health over profit a sign of weakness. One reason the American imperial project is bound to fail is that wealth and power has become so concentrated in the hands of a global financial elite that it's a constant political struggle to provide any state direction outside of the defense sector (which is probably why they seem to be running things). Also, about those trade balances: the main effect of running trade deficits for the last 50 years -- they went negative in 1970, a year after Hibbert's Peak, when domestic oil production started to decline -- has been the redistribution of wealth upward, increasing inequality. That's been an unequivocally bad thing for most Americans.
• [08-23] Must We Suffer to Bring Inflation Down? His conclusion is "there don't seem to be any realistic alternatives," but he doesn't really explain why. Like why is inflation such a problem? The Fed thinks it's a problem, because they're looking out for the banks, and they don't like the idea of paying off debt with inflated dollars, but one could argue that the bigger problem we have is debt overhang, and wouldn't inflation help reduce that? And just because the Fed killed inflation by generating a massive recession once, does that mean recessions are the only way we can limit inflation? Maybe they're the only way the Fed can, but that's not the same thing.
• [08-26] Europe and the Economics of Blackmail: This does a reasonable job of laying out the broader economic effects of the Ukraine War on oil and food commodity prices, showing why Europe is getting hit harder than elsewhere by gas supply restrictions from Russia. My only gripe is this line: "But whatever happens now, we're getting an object lesson in the dangers of becoming economically dependent on authoritarian regimes." But isn't the real problem the sanctions imposed by the US and its allies? Saudi Arabia, which is practically the gold standard among authoritarian regimes, never seems to run afoul of US dictates. On the other hand, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela have governments that were elected at least as democratically as the US. One rule of thumb is that mutually beneficial trade makes conflict less likely. The US has been schizophrenic about this, promoting trade as a way of binding allies (especially in East Asia, where the US has long endured trade deficits), but also blocking trade where political conflicts emerged. Of late, US policy has been dominated by arms sales: those who buy are accepted as allies (like Israel and Saudi Arabia), those who don't are deemed enemies (a useful category, as their hostility boosts the market for arms -- as Russia has done in Eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East, and China and North Korea in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan). In this, Europe is getting squeezed: one day it's OK to trade with Russia, but now it's not, with gas the trickiest commodity. If the US and China should come to blows, a similar impact will be global. You'd think sane people would recognize that threat and make a strong effort to mitigate possible conflicts, especially by promoting trade. Unfortunately, the level of sanity in Washington, Moscow, and Kyiv leaves much to be desired. One last point: the only ways not to risk "the economics of blackmail" are total autarky (the only example, and not by choice, is North Korea; the only big country with a chance of doing that is China, and that wouldn't be by choice either) or some kind of international focus on mitigating conflicts, which needs to extend beyond ending war to dealing with climate stress and inequality. The US can't do the former (all the "America First" malarkey in the world wouldn't begin to scratch the surface) and doesn't want to do the latter, but as the chief source of conflict these days can help a lot by just dialing the vitriol back. That includes not parroting the line that set me off on this tangent.

Daniel Larison: [08-26] Whose war is the US fighting in Syria, and why? With ISIS demolished, the persistence of US forces in Syria is beginning to remind me of stories of Japanese soldiers creeping out of the jungles of New Guinea to resume a war they hadn't heard had ended 20-30 years before. I would have been as happy as any of you had the Assad regime fallen in the Arab Spring, but that didn't happen, and hanging out and taking pot shots like outlaw bands isn't going to change a thing. Also see:

• Kyle Anzalone: [08-26] Biden Receives Bipartisan Criticism for Bombing Syria.
• Caitlin Johnstone: [08-25] US Invades Syria, Kills People, Claims Self-Defense.

Andrew Latham: [08-22] What if China is not rising, making it more dangerous? Review of Hal Brands and Michael Beckley: Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, the latest of a steady stream of books on how China threatens US global supremacy, inevitably leading to conflict and perhaps escalating to war -- because the one thing American experts on China and Russia cannot conceive of is the US adopting a less commanding and confrontational global stance. The twist here is that the authors see the escalation risk coming not from China's hubristic ambition to rule the world, but from the sense that aggression is the only way to save China from its internal contradictions and decline. Others have argued that much, and their track record of predicting declines in Chinese economic growth is abysmal. The net combination suggests America needs urgently to prepare for war (which will be sold as deterrence, because we all know how well that works). On the other hand, their historical analogies should give us pause: were Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941 really suffering such a degree of decline that they saw no alternative to war? In 1914 some Germans thought their odds against Russia were better then than they might be a decade hence, but the underlying assumption was one of German expansion. Japan in 1941 may be an easier case, but that's only because Japan started its war in 1937, against China, and that war was faltering, compounded by the American oil and steel embargo. On the other hand, if you want to point to a declining empire desperate to score military points, isn't the US the obvious candidate? Is it really a coincidence that a year after the debacle in Kabul, the US is back in the driver's seat with the bankrolling of Ukraine against Russia?

Andrea Mazzarino: [08-14] A Military Rich in Dollars, Poor in People: "And the Frayed Social Safety Net That Goes With It." Military recruitment seems to be down, and will probably drop more if people can get an education otherwise. Meanwhile, services for veterans keep becoming more expensive, even as they benefit an ever-smaller segment of society. Coming out of WWII, it was easy to expand benefits for veterans: because there were so many, those programs had broad (if imperfect) affects. Those days are over. And while both parties give lots of lip-service to veterans, only the Democrats are inclined to do anything about it, and they're under increasing pressure not to limit their programs to veterans.

Harold Meyerson: [08-26] 'Pro-Life': America's Most Patently Absurd Misnomer: "The relationship between anti-abortion states and concern for human life is certifiably inverse."

Nicole Narea: [08-25] DACA is in jeopardy. Can the Biden administration save it?

Anne Nelson: [08-26] A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: Recently uncovered documents reveal the inner workings of the Council for National Policy ("a secretive network of powerful conservatives").

Yasmin Rafiei: [08-25] When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home.

Zach Rosenthal/Mary Beth Gahan/Annabelle Timsit: [08-22] At least one dead after Dallas area hit by 1-in-1,000-year flood. This follows three more 1-in-1,000-year rain events, in St. Louis, eastern Kentucky, and southeastern Illinois.

Greg Sargent/Paul Waldman: [08-25] Leaked audio of a billionaire GOP donor hands Democrats a weapon.

Robert J Shapiro: [08-22] Yes, Americans Are Better Off Under Biden: "Households have seen a stunning rise in employment and income, even considering inflation." We're going to be seeing more pieces like this, as there should be -- one thing Democrats have never been much good at is "tooting their own horn." But one shouldn't get smug and complacent here. Everything good that Democrats have done since Biden took office could have been done better with more Congressional support, which means getting more Democrats elected. And people need to understand that their future depends on their political support. Shapiro also wrote [08-22] Forget FDR. Biden Is a Major President in His Own Right. Related here:

• Nick Hanauer: [08-24] I Helped Coin the Phrase "Middle-Out Economics." Biden Is Making It a Reality.

Jeffrey St Clair: [08-26] Roaming Charges: Nuclear Midnight's Children: Starts with the nuclear peril in Ukraine, which segues into a rather scathing attack on those who've used recent natural gas shortages as reason enough to revive the nuclear power industry. (Personally, I'm open-minded about nuclear power, but think advocates have to come up with agreed solutions on several problems first: what do you do with radioactive waste? how do you prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons? and how do you prevent reactor sites from acts of war?)

He quotes a Lawrence Summers tweet: "Every dollar spent on student relief is a dollar that could have gone to support those who don't get the opportunity to go to college." So much wrong with this it's hard to know where to start, but I'd start by questioning whether the people who came out of college with debt actually got the "opportunity to go to college." If you get my drift, you'd see that student loan relief is precisely going to the people who Summers claims to be advocating for. Beyond that, every expense on anything can be opposed as an opportunity cost to something else one would rather see. Do we need to start comparing lists? St Clair's comment offers one example: "Just retitle your degree a Toxic Asset -- which it probably is -- and the entirety of the loans that paid for it will be forgiven with interest in no time." He then points out that the average size of PPP loans to businesses "forgiven without a bleat from Summers or anyone else" was $109,000. He follows that up with a list of members of Congress who got their loans forgiven: one as high as $4.3 million, but the line that pops out for me is Matt Gaetz ($476,000). He also notes that "Trump had more then $280 million in loans forgiven and failed to pay taxes on most of the money he pocketed." Also this:

It's probably a good time to revisit the Lewis Powell's 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce on how to crush the left, where he lays out a plan (still the playbook for today's Republicans) for how conservatives can take back universities from the Marxist contagion. He argues that one strategy is to raise the cost of higher education, both to keep the working classes out and to force those who do take out loans to get a degree to go to work in corporate American to pay off the debt.

Chris Stirewalt: [08-28] What I Learned About Media Rage After Getting Fired From Fox. He was political editor at Fox News when they called the 2020 election for Biden. Interesting that he survives currently as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This piece was excerpted from his book Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America & How to Fight Back.

Margaret Talbot: [08-28] Justice Alito's Crusade Against a Secular America Isn't Over: "He's had win after win -- including overturning Roe v. Wade -- yet seems more and more aggrieved. What drives his anger?"

Kenneth P Vogel/Shane Goldmacher: [08-022] An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives: The guy's name is Leonard Leo, operating through a group called the Marble Freedom Trust. Also see the Washington Post editorial [08-28] A $1.6 billion donation lays bare a broken campaign finance system.

Sarah Vowell: [08-28] What's With All the Fluff About a New Civil War, Anyway?

Bryan Walsh: [08-28] Americans keep moving to where the water isn't: After all, "the housing is cheaper and plentiful -- but climate change and extreme weather are worsening."

I've been reading Tariq Ali's new book on Winston Churchill. I've never read any of Churchill's books, nor any of the numerous hagiographies, but I've gathered a pretty comprehensive view of the man over the years -- enough so that I can picture him set in a Mt. Rushmore-like monument of the great monsters of the 20th century (Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are, for us Americans at least, automatic picks, but can't you just imagine Churchill poking his mug out in Theodore Roosevelt's cranny, behind Hitler and Stalin to his left, and flanked by Mao on his right? Ali's subtitle was His Times, His Crimes, and Ali's 432 pages don't come close to exhausting the subject.

One omission I expected something on was the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22), which broke out after Kemal defied the terms of Ottoman surrender to create an independent Turkish Republic. Britain was exhausted after the Great War, but encouraged Greece to grab as much of Asia Minor as possible, with disastrous consequences. Churchill was Secretary of State for War and Air in this period (1919-21), and as such was directly responsible for ordering poison gas in Iraq (in case you ever wondered where Saddam Hussein got such an idea). His role in the Greco-Turkish War would have been a bit more indirect, but it was exactly the sort of thing he would have done. The book does include material on Churchill's scheme to attack the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli in 1915 (which cost him his post as First Lord of the Admiralty), and on Britain's role in defeating the anti-Nazi resistance in and after WWII. (One thing I'm skeptical of is Ali's tendency to treat the post-1945 Labor government of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin as a mere extension of Churchill's government -- which they were part of until the 1945 elections, when Churchill tried to hog the glory and got soundly booted out of government. Greece does seem to be one case where Attlee followed through on decisions Churchill had initially made. On the other hand, Churchill was lucky to be spared having to deal with independence in India and Palestine -- not that Attlee and Bevin handled either at all well.)

Still, I've learned a few things I hadn't previously known here. Consider this paragraph (p. 365):

The introduction to the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 states: 'If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of the people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.' Many years later, Haim Cohen, a former judge i the Supreme Court of Israel, stated: 'The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel.'

Of course, I was aware of a long affinity of antisemites for Zionism. Arthur Balfour, the British minister who attached his name to the declaration of Britain's intent to establish a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine, was well known as an antisemite. From the beginning, From the very beginning, Zionists assumed that antisemitism was so ingrained in Europe that safety can only be gained by leaving Europe. Theodor Herzl and his followers rarely missed an opportunity to pitch Zionism to imperial powers as a way of solving their "Jewish problem." Zionists scored their big diplomatic breakthrough not because Britain was enlightened but because it wasn't. But even with the British, the idea was less to get rid of their own Jews than to build a supposedly loyal white colony with refugees from Eastern and Central Europe (of course, that also helped deflect them from entering the UK). The first modern European state to seek to expel Jews was Nazi Germany, so as soon as Hitler seized power, the Zionist Yishuv started negotiating exit visas for Jews to immigrate to Palestine. This became the Fifth Aliyah (1929-39, a period when Jewish immigration came mostly from Germany). Even so, the numbers were limited by the British and by the Yishuv itself. During this period, Germany was still considering other forced emigration schemes, like expelling Jews to Madagascar or Siberia, so the surprise isn't that Nazis would approve of Zionism, but that they viewed it as a possible "final solution." It wasn't until later that Nazis realized that expulsion was unworkable, so they settled on extermination, giving the word Endlösung its current, bitter tone.

PS: For a recent piece on the tortured relationship of Zionism and antisemitism, see Peter Beinart: [08-26] Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way? People with informed misgivings about Israel's treatment of Palestinians are routinely charged with antisemitism, even if they are Jewish (or dismissed as "self-hating Jews") or progressives who fully support the right of Jews to live in their own countries. Meanwhile, most classic antisemites have become fervent supporters of Israel -- especially Christians who view the establishment of Israel as a prophesied step toward the apocalypse, when true Christians will rise to heaven, and Jews, well, won't. (My grandfather was one such person; I remember that from a conversation we had when I was a child. David Lloyd George was another such person. He was the Prime Minister of the UK who issued the Balfour Declaration committing Britain to creation of a "Jewish homeland.")

In its early days, the suggestion that criticism of Israel was antisemitic cut the Zionists some slack, especially among the left, where people were especially sensitive to classic antisemitism. But 75 years after the founding of Israel, 55 years after the seizure of Gaza and the West Bank (whose occupants are still denied basic human rights), 40 years after Israel's cruel and senseless attack on Lebanon, 20 years after the last even remotely progressive Israeli government, it's gotten hard for Jews and others used to living in peace and prosperity away from Israel to feel any sort of obligation to defend the racist thugs who run Israel these days. Yet it is true that we are seeing not just a rise in anti-Israeli feeling these days, but a totally separate rise in anti-Jewish agitation. People my age can still keep this straight, but I fear younger people will be confused, with "antisemite" reduced to an epithet to use arbitrarily. This is not unlike recent propaganda turn in Russia and Ukraine arguing over which side has the Nazis.

I'm off on a bit of a tangent here, so let me return to Beinart:

In a terrible irony, the campaign against "antisemitism," as waged by influential Jewish groups and the U.S. government, has become a threat to freedom. It is wielded as a weapon against the world's most respected human rights organizations and a shield for some of the world's most repressive regimes.

One more point: what bothers me about Americans who offer blind, dogmatic support to Israel has less to do with their support for oppression and injustice abroad -- of course I disapprove, but I generally don't think Americans should moralize over other nation's internal affairs -- but because I fear that they see Israel as a model for the United States: in their construction of a repressive and racist domestic regime, and in the violence and subversion they so readily resort to when facing other countries. The U.S. has gone way too far down those paths already, and we need to reverse course and treat our own people and the rest of the world with newfound respect and charity. And sure, the latter point suggests that even if we don't go so far as to criticize Israel for its sins against human rights and international peace, at least we stop enabling and subsidizing its worst impulses.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, August 22, 2022

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38552 [38520] rated (+32), 51 [60] unrated (-9).

Another lousy week, this one again cutting into my listening, as I struggled to find things as well as to write. Still managed to come up with two A- records early in the week (Dangermouse/Black Thought, Megan Thee Stallion). On Thursday, Robert Christgau posted his vacation-delayed Consumer Guide. I had previously recorded grades for 12 (of 14) albums, but mostly lower grades (exception was the Regrettes aptly-titled Further Joy, near the top of my 2022 list). Given that the week was already wasted, I decided to do some re-listening, and several of those albums got better. It helped that Dan had since my initial review sent me a CD. Also that I picked up a physical of Beyoncé: after the revised review below was written, but I noticed much more detail, which helped push it up the list. Senn was probably a just case of shifting weight to the good parts from the less inspired parts. And Lizzo? I went through five more passes, each starting with songs I loved and ending with me having lost attention somewhere in the second half. On a sixth play, I forced myself to pay attention all the way to the end. The second half does have some good stuff, but only if you work at it. That's not my definition of A-list pop. I also gave Kari Faux (a 2021 album I heard and quickly forgot) another spin, and left it at B+(*). Also the Regrettes, which I moved up a bit to the top slot on this year's list. (I didn't bother rewriting the review, which you can find back in June.)

Of the two records I hadn't heard, The Paranoid Style was on my radar, but hadn't been available until this week. Folk and Great Tunes From Siberia and the Far East isn't on my streaming services. (The sample is worth its 2:38, but doesn't prove that 2-CD will be worth the trouble.) I will note that the Russian "republics" -- why the quotes? that's what they're called, while what we call "Russia" is officially a federation of republics -- Christgau has "never heard of" are confused with misspellings, which doesn't attest much to the documentation.

I also wasted time writing a new review of África Negra's Antologia Vol. 1, only to find that I already had one (back in May), same grade but with group name misspelled. I was pretty sure I had heard that one, but couldn't find it until it was too late.

I do have a fairly long Speaking of Which to show for last week. I've had to fiddle with it a few times since: adding the Marcotte example, tuning the Soros language, fixing typos (the 'c' key on this keyboard seems to be on strike) and mental lapses (Barry, not Bobby, Bonds). Still has some points I can see weaving into a book.

I didn't get to this week's releases in my tracking and metacritic files (tracking file is up to 2638 albums, with 896 of my grades). Not much happening in August, anyway, and I'll catch up soon enough. More pressing for me is installing a new mesh wireless router. I'm bugged that it comes with zero documentation, other than "download the app and follow instructions." That's the same sort of "idiot proofing" that came with my printer, which still doesn't work properly, possibly because it's impossible to understand how it's supposed to work. Hopefully, the new wireless will end my wife's complaints about dead spots for her portable devices. I'm still wired for pretty much everything, so the impact on me is more likely to be breaking things.

Speaking of breaking things, I need to install the new Ubuntu release this week. Also need to do some programming. No idea what I'll be listening to.

New records reviewed this week:

Richard Baratta: Music in Film: The Sequel (2022, Savant): Drummer, mostly involved in film production over the last 35 years, did an album of Music in Film in 2020 (subtitle The Reel Deal), returns with a sequel here, mostly familiar tunes, arranged by pianist Bill O'Connell, with Vincent Herring (alto sax), Paul Bollenback (guitar), bass, and percussion. B+(*) [cd] [08-26]

Mike Clark/Leon Lee Dorsey Featuring Mike LeDonne: Blues on Top (2022, Jazz Avenue 1): Drums, bass, piano. LeDonne brought two songs (including the title), the 7 covers mostly jazz standards, with "Willow Weep for Me" and "Can't Buy Me Love" the outliers. B+(**) [cd]

Jeff Coffin: Between Dreaming and Joy (2022, Ear Up): Saxophonist, from Massachusetts, based in Nashville, plays all of them, plus clarinets, flutes, melodica, percussion, coke bottles, and "bungee chair bass." Debut 1999, recorded a lot after that with Béla Fleck and Dave Matthews, his own discography picking up after 2015. Opens with a couple of appealing funk/groove pieces, diversifies later, which can mean Brazilian and Moroccan percussion, DJ Logic's turntablism, or his flute. B+(**) [cd] [08-26]

Danger Mouse & Black Thought: Cheat Codes (2022, BMG): Producer Brian Burton, debut 1999, got more attention for his 2004 Grey Album mash-up of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album, has a wide range of albums since then, most notably here duos with rappers Doom (Dangerdoom) and Cee-Lo (Gnarls Barkley), hooks up here with Roots rapper Tarik Trotter, who has a lot to say. A-

Michael Dease: Best Next Thing (2022, Posi-Tone): Trombonist, a dozen albums since 2010, lines up a particuarly strong sextet here with Alex Sipiagin (trumpet), Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto sax), Renee Rosnes (piano), Boris Kozlov (bass), and Rudy Royston (drums). B+(*) [sp]

DJ Premier: Hip Hop 50: Vol. 1 (2022, Mass Appeal, EP): Chris Martin, from Houston, half of Gang Starr, later PRhyme, has a lengthy production discography. Five-track (14:00) EP starts to recognize 50 years of hip-hop, each track with a guest star (or 2): Joey Bada$$, Rapsody/Remy Ma, Nas, Run the Jewels, Lil Wayne/Slick Rick. B+(**)

Billy Drummond and Freedom of Ideas: Valse Sinistre (2022, Cellar): Drummer, not related to bassist Ray Drummond (although they played together in a trio called the Drummonds, with Renee Rosnes, who at the time was married to Billy). Wikipedia only credits him with four albums (plus four for the Drummonds), but his side credits run over 350. Impressive group here, with Dezron Douglas (bass), Micah Thomas (piano), and Dayna Stephens (sax). B+(***) [cd]

Fade In: Live Fast, Die a Legend (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Italian trio: Federico Calcagno (bass clarinet/clarinet), Pietro Ella Barcellona (contrabass), Marco Luparia (drums). First group album, Calcagno has a 2019 album and a few side credits. B+(**) [bc]

Michael Hackett/Tim Coffman Sextet: Western Skies (2022, Summit): Leaders play trumpet/flugelhorn and trombone. Third album for Hackett, first for Coffman (although he has more side credits). Group includes alto sax (Sharel Cassity), piano, bass, and drums, with a couple more credits for extra percussion. B+(*) [cd]

Art Hirahara: Ascent (2022, Posi-Tone, EP): Pianist, has been busy the last couple years as producer/label owner Marc Free kept him in the studio, anchoring a house band for all his other artists. Solo here, brief: 3 songs, 10:40. B+(*) [sp]

Art Hirahara: Verdant Valley (2022, Posi-Tone): Pianist, plays some organ, leads the label's "house band" with Boris Kozlov (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums) here as everywhere, plus Donny McCaslin (tenor sax/alto flute) to brighten it all up, and spread joy. B+(***) [sp]

Hudson Mohawke: Cry Sugar (2022, Warp): Scottish DJ/producer Ross Birchard, first alias was DJ Itchy, fourth album since 2009 (not counting his collaboration TNGHT). A bit heavy on the pedal. B+(*) [sp]

Kiwi Jr.: Chopper (2022, Sub Pop): Indie band from Toronto, third album. Upbeat. Catchy. B+(***)

Darren Litzie: My Horizon (2022, Summit): Pianist, first record, has two saxophonists (one doubling on flute) as well as bass and drums, wrote 5 (of 10) pieces, opening with Cole Porter and closing with Monk. B+(*) [cd]

Russ Lossing: Folks (2017 [2022], Sunnyside): Pianist, a couple earlier albums but discography picks up around 2000. This is a trio with John Hébert (bass) and Michael Sarin (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Russ Lossing: Metamorphism (2017 [2021], Sunnyside): Same piano trio, plus Loren Stillman on alto sax. Title split over two lines without hyphen, but most sources take it as a single word. B+(**) [sp]

Brian Lynch and Spheres of Influence: Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To (2018 [2022], Holistic MusicWorks, 2CD): Trumpet player, one of Art Blakey's last Jazz Messengers, albums since 1988, postbop but also quite a bit of Latin jazz, especially with Eddie Palmieri. Decided to reclaim his legacy by re-recording it, which he started with Songbook Vol. 1: Bus Stop Serenade. Second disc reprises the same songs in radio or alternate versions. B+(***) [cd]

Arlo McKinley: This Mess We're In (2021 [2022], Oh Boy): Country singer/songwriter from Cincinnati, released his debut (Arlo McKinley & the Lonesome Sound) in 2014. Second album since, both on the late John Prine's label. He grows on you, but he's a little short in the humor department. B+(*) [bc]

Megan Thee Stallion: Traumazine (2022, 1501 Certified/300 Entertainment): Rapper Megan Pete, Wikipedia has this as her second studio album, Discogs as her third album, I'd also count the "archival" Something for Thee Hotties. I love everything I've heard by her, and I'm perplexed why others harbor doubts. This feels old style, a bit conservative or at least even-tempered by her standards. Also sports more name guests. Still plenty impressive. A-

T.S. Monk: Live: Two Continents One Groove (2014-16 [2022], Storyville): Drummer, full name Thelonious Sphere Monk III, played in his famous father's group in the 1970s, other than his name is best known for a funk single in 1981 ("Bon Bon Vie"), Discogs divides his work between T.S. Monk (a funk group, 3 albums) and Thelonious Monk Jr. (6 albums), but he's identified as T.S. Monk on all nine. This is a sextet, his first album since 2003, selected from sets in New York and Bern, with Josh Evans (trumpet), Willie Williams (tenor sax), Patience Higgins (alto sax), Helen Sung (piano), Dave Stryker (guitar), and Kenny Davis (bass). B+(*) [sp]

The Paranoid Style: For Executive Meeting (2022, Bar/None): Singer-songwriter and sometime rock critic Elizabeth Nelson, husband Timothy Bracy, and several others, third album, serviceable rock and roll, the speed lets her work more words in, and drop more names (like Barney Bubbles, P.G. Wodehouse, Steve Cropper, and Doug Yule). Ends with a straight cover of "Seven Year Ache," plucked from a list of possibles that probably runs into the hundreds. A- [sp]

Ethan Philion: Meditations on Mingus (2021 [2022], Sunnyside): Chicago bassist, arranged ten Mingus compositions for 10-piece band, with Russ Johnson (trumpet) and Geof Bradfield (tenor sax/bass clarinet/flute) the most familiar names in the band. No real surprises: great music, with some juicy bass parts. B+(***) [cd] [08-26]

Gonzalo Rubalcaba/Aymée Nuviola: Live in Marciac (2021 [2022], 5 Passion): Pianist and singer, both from Cuba, both based in Florida. I prefer their 2020 album together (Viento Y Tiempo: Live at the Blue Note Tokyo), probably because the extra rhythm steadies her vocals, whereas she's very much in the spotlight here. B+(**) [cd]

Alex Sipiagin: Ascent to the Blues (2022, Posi-Tone): Russian trumpet/flugelhorn player, moved to US in 1990, played in big bands before his 1998 debut. Has recorded extensively ever since, mostly for mainstream labels Criss Cross and Posi-Tone. He's joined here by Diego Rivera (tenor sax) and the label's rhythm section (Art Hirahara, Boris Kozlov, Rudy Royston). B+(**) [sp]

Sylvan Esso: No Rules Sandy (2022, Loma Vista): Electropop duo from North Carolina, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, fourth studio album. B+(***)

Alune Wade: Sultan (2022, Enja): Originally from Senegal, based in Paris, sings some but main instrument is bass guitar, so this is long on groove. Long on everything else, too. B [sp]

Kelsey Waldon: No Regular Dog (2022, Oh Boy): Country singer-songwriter from Kentucky, fifth album since 2010, rings true as always. B+(***) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Miles Davis Quintet: Live Europe 1960 Revisited (1960 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Part of a Norman Granz package tour, his last tour with John Coltrane, backed by Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, with five long takes of four songs ("So What" opens and closes), total 75:23. Material has been reissued a number of times, most definitively in Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series Vol. 6 (4-CD), which like this is superb throughout. A- [bc]

Frank Kimbrough: 2003-2006: Lullabluebye/Play (2003-06 [2022], Palmetto, 2CD): Pianist, originally from North Carolina, moved to New York and taught at NYU and Juilliard, died in 2020 (at 64), which has occasioned a reevaluation: I, for one, was never much of a fan, until his 2017 Monk's Dreams, and even more so the multi-artist Kimbrough in 2021. His first album appeared in 1998, but he's best known for his 2003-14 run on Palmetto. This reissues his first two albums there, a trio with Ben Allison and Matt Wilson, and another trio with Masa Kamaguchi and Paul Motian. I underrated both at the time, especially Lullabluebye. B+(***) [cd]

Horace Silver Quintet: Live New York Revisited (1964-66 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Pianist, original leader of the Jazz Messengers, which under Art Blakey invented hard bop. Silver continued with his own quintet, writing some of the most indelible melodies in jazz, especially during this period (this offers two takes of "Afrian Queen," one each of: "Song for My Father," "The Natives Are Restless Tonight," "Que Pasa," "The Tokyo Blues," and "Señor Blues"). With Joe Henderson a tour de force on tenor sax, Carmell Jones or Woody Shaw on trumpet, plus bass and drums. A [bc]

Cecil Taylor: Mixed to Unit Structures Revisited (1966 [2021], Ezz-thetics): First three tracks come from a 1962 album credited to Gil Evans Orchestra (Into the Hot, the follow up to Out of the Cool), but they are distinct from the other three tracks: for starters, Cecil Taylor wrote and played piano on these three, while John Carisi wrote and Eddie Costa was the pianist on the other three. Taylor's cuts featured Archie Shepp, Jimmy Lyons, Henry Grimes, and Sunny Murray; the others went with Gene Quill, Phil Woods, Barry Galbraith, Osie Johnson, etc. When Impulse got around to reissues in 1998, they decided to pull the Taylor cuts out and combine them with a Roswell Rudd session from 1966 (Rudd and Ted Curson played on "Mixed" in the 1961 session; only Rudd returned for the later tracks, so the reissue felt short-changed). This replaces the Rudd tracks with one of Taylor's most famous 1960s albums, with Lyons, Eddie Gale (trumpet), Ken McIntyre (alto sax/bass clarinet), Grimes and Alan Silva (bass), and Andrew Cyrille (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Cecil Taylor: With (Exit) to Student Studies Revisited (1966 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Student Studies was a quartet set -- piano, Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Alan Silva (bass), and Andrew Cyrille (drums) -- recorded in Paris (58:47), originally released as 2-LP in 1973 by BYG, with some later reissues as The Great Paris Concert. This opens with a 19:20 sextet piece -- same group plus Bill Dixon (trumpet) and Henry Grimes (bass) -- from the Blue Note album Conquistador!, bringing this to 78:13. Big finale. B+(***) [bc]

Old music:

Milton Nascimento: Yauarete (1987, Columbia): Brazilian singer-songwriter, guitarist, a major figure since his 1967 debut, albeit one I have next to no experience with. The fast ones have some interesting twists. B+(**) [sp]

Grade (or other) changes:

África Negra: Antologia Vol. 1 (1981-95 [2022], Bongo Joe): [See review.] A-

Beyoncé: Renaissance (2022, Parkwood/Columbia): Last name Knowles, started out in Destiny's Child -- no need to note that any more. She is probably the biggest pop star in America, at least since her 2013 eponymous album, although she's less familiar to me than any contender I can think of. I thought her first 3-4 albums were crap, and even when she got better, I doubt I've played any of them more than 2-3 times. Consensus seems to be that this one is her best yet. I can't argue. I know I should be impressed by her encyclopedic mastery of disco and house beats, and on some level I am, but when I recognize one, I recall liking it better where it came from. [was: B+(***)] A- [cd]

Dan Ex Machina: All Is Ours, Nothing Is Theirs (2022, self-released): New Jersey band and/or singer-songwriter Dan Weiss -- not the drummer, nor the other drummer, but known to me mostly as a rock critic. Several albums and EPs on Bandcamp, little noted elsewhere. This batch was written 2003-11, played live and eventually recorded over the last decade, with shifting lineups, but they get better as the record goes on (and as you play it more). One called "Drinking and Driving (Separately)" finally delivers everything that the pre-rock-and-roll scolds feared. [was: B+(***)]] A- [cd]

Frank Kimbrough: Lullabluebye (2003 [2004], Palmetto): [was: B] B+(***) [cd]

Frank Kimbrough: Play (2005 [2006], Palmetto): [was: B] B+(**) [cd]

Lizzo: Special (2022, Atlantic/Nice Life): R&B singer Melissa Jefferson, fourth album, breakthrough was her third, so this seems more like a second. Starts with three or four possible hits, but fades toward the end -- maybe "fades" isn't the right word for the music, which is strong enough, but doesn't hold my attention like it should. [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

The Regrettes: Further Joy (2022, Warner): [See review.] [was: A-]: A [sp]

Derek Senn: The Big Five-O (2022, self-released): Singer-songwriter from San Luis Obispo, three previous albums, claims he's sold out a venue in Aberdeen ("where his Americana's more popular than with the Americans"). Some topical songs, some personal, at least one on the "Zeitgeist." Mostly mild-mannered, but "Texas Legislature" riles his blood. [was: B+(**)] A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jackie Ryan: Recuerdos De Mi Madre (Open Art) [10-09]

Purchases:

• Beyoncé: Renaissance (Parkwood/Columbia)
• Miranda Lambert: Palomino (Vanner/RCA Nashville)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 21, 2022

In his book on Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, Tariq Ali offers this quote from George Kennan on "the political psychology of the West in relation to Russia in 1917" (where Churchill sent British troops to try to "nip Bolshevism in the bud"):

There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision . . . Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side . . . the centre of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life is no longer worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil . . . our enemy will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.

Churchill viewed all his enemies this way, but this is still a pretty good description of how Americans view the war in Ukraine -- or for that matter, how most protagonists in most wars have viewed their enemies, at least in the last century or so, as the traditional craving for loot and plunder came to be seen as uncouth. (Even in the 19th century, when loot and plunder was clearly the goal, politicians learned to speak of "civilizing missions" and such.) War has never worked like that. Even if one imagines moral differences at the start of a war, they soon disappear over its course. The US, for instance, entered WWII thinking that precision bombing would minimize civilian casualties, and ended the war levelling whole cities with atom bombs.

As Louis Menand noted in his section on Kennan in The Free World, Kennan had a pretty low opinion of democracy. So did Churchill, although he allowed that all other systems are worse. (At least democracies allowed him to retire in disgrace, perhaps to return again.) Americans like to tout democracy to others, but have a pretty tawdry record of practicing it at home, with a long history of contempt for voters -- one that Republicans these days are especially keen on, but Demorats have a pretty spotty record as well, especially where it comes to limiting the inordinate influence of money.

Andrew Atterbury: [08-21] DeSantis uses cash and clout to reshape Florida school races: The money helps build his personal political machine. The focus on school boards signals that he thinks his brainwashing agenda is a winner.

Bruce Bartlett: [08-10] I Quit the GOP and Moved Left. Will Liz Cheney Do the Same? Not likely, but after writing the rest of this I have to allow a slight chance. I still don't trust Bartlett, but at least he built his career on trying to argue that Republicans were better people than Democrats. He wrote a whole book on how conservatives are more generous and care more about their families. He wrote another one on how the Party of Lincoln was still less racist than many Democrats. He was wrong, and eventually admitted as much, but in trying to pretend Republicans were something they weren't, he prefigured his move left. He at least had a shred of integrity. Maybe she does as well, but it's different. She grew up trading on her father's far right brand, deeply imbued in militarism and crony capitalism, so it's reasonable to think she holds the same beliefs, but maybe it was all an act: she's really the DC insider she grew up as, and was never that comfortable going back to Wyoming to validate her political cred. (She failed in her Senate campaign, then lucked out with a House seat, which she immediately turned into a slot in the Republican House leadership.) That she lost her primary suggests less that Trump has real pull in the state than that the locals never really trusted her, not least because she never really was one of them. (They may not have trusted her father either, who abandoned them as soon as he wrangled a posh job in Washington.) She may have initially gambled that she could lead the Republicans back to true conservatism, but soon discovered that the best she could do with her hand was enjoy the publicity, even as it demolished any prospects for a career in Republican politics. Better to be a martyr for principle than to slink back into obscurity like Adam Kinzinger or Jeff Flake. She reminds me of Hillary Clinton: both had to sit back and chafe while knowing they could do a better job as president than the amiable morons they served (GW Bush in her case; sure, Bill Clinton was less of a moron, but he did have his dumb spots). Whether she moves left or not will depend much on who she hangs out with in the next few years: her ambition is the given, where it takes her is secondary, even though that's what matters to other people. I can think of dozens of scenarios that will pay her much more than her House salary, but it's not worth my time to speculate, other than to note that if she runs for president in 2024 as a Republican, she will get crushed much worse than in Wyoming, and that if she runs a spoiler campaign as an independent, she's unlikely to get as many votes as Gary Johnson did in 2016 (3.27%). It's probably still good publicity to encourage such speculation now -- an embarrassing number of pundits can think of nothing better to write about -- but I doubt she will be willing to expose herself to such brutal numbers. Better to enjoy her present celebrity, and indulge in a little buckraking. Also on Cheney:

• Hunter DeRensis: [08-17] Loser Liz Cheney: We knew ye, and that was the problem: "For 20 years she remained committed to using American power as a blunt force instrument, including torture and endless war."
• Richard Eskow: [08-19] Liz Cheney and Donald Trump -- The Two Faces of American Totalitarianism.
• Ben Jacobs: [08-19] The Never Trump wing of the GOP never had a chance.
• Sarah Jones: [08-17] The Culpable Liz Cheney. I liked the original title better, but lost it.
• Ed Kilgore: [08-17] Liz Cheney and the Demise of Anti-Trump Republicanism. You have to understand that for Republicans the most important thing in the world is winning -- something they value so highly they're willing and eager to dispense with any scruples in the process. Winning is what makes all the evil they do possible. Trump won many Republicans over during the 2016 primary season, mostly by echoing their own basest instincts, which was easy, given that all they had to do was watch Fox News. Trump won over the rest of the Republicans when he prevailed in the 2016 election. This wasn't an ideological victory (or surrender), because aside from a few minor quirks (like tariffs) they were all singing from the same hymnal. It was a matter of style, and no Republican -- even one whose own instincts left him constantly wrong-footed like Lindsey Graham -- could argue with that. In theory, when Trump lost in 2020, he should have been quickly forgotten, with a new generation of successors rushing forward their new and improved versions of Trump, but he pulled a dirty trick on them: he declared victory anyway, and the rank and file bought it -- showing how little grasp on reality they actually have -- so now all Republicans have to go along with this "emperor's new clothes reality." It's really pretty funny if you can get past your tears for the demise of democracy -- I'm sorry to say, but those of us who grew up on I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky shed those long ago. Eventually this will become obvious, and Trump will be discarded as the loser he is, much like the Bushes and Nixon and Hoover and Benjamin Harrison (I've only recently read about what a horrible president Harrison was -- so awful the voters brought back Grover Cleveland, only to regret it; that's a story that will probably resurface if Trump wins the 2024 R nomination). But until then, why shouldn't cynical Republicans go along with the charade? Washington has long run on herd instinct, the shroud of popular ignorance, and a natural ease with spouting conventional wisdom. That's why politicians are almost never punished for being wrong, as long as they seemed right at the time. Kilgore also wrote: [08-19] Trump (Mostly) Got His Revenge on Republicans Who Voted to Impeach.
• Amanda Marcotte: [08-19] If Liz Cheney runs for president, I'm registering as a Republican just to vote for her. This is unspeakably dumb. Marcotte assumes that only Republican primaries matter, and that even if you expect to wind up voting for a Democrat, which one doesn't matter, because they're all interchangeable. Even if Cheney were any good (which she isn't), and even if she had a chance (which she doesn't), this tactic is at best a wet blanket, designed to demoralize the only political party that has any chance of saving your sorry ass from Trump or DeSantis or Cruz or Hawley or dozens of more or less equally loathesome threats.
• Timothy Noah: [08-16] Liz Cheney's Loss Is a Defeat for Conservatism. Assumption here is that "real conservatives" have character, of which Cheney is an example. "Trumpery," on the other hand, was "mostly a mishmash of nonideological vices: rank bigotry, xenophobia, authoritarianism, greed, and a gleeful breaking of rules and ethical norms large and small." But while conservatives like to claim their own "rules and ethical norms," everything else on that list is their "ideology," perhaps less these days stated as high-minded principle than revealed in crude speech and base actions.
• Jeffrey St Clair: [08-19] Dizzy Miss Lizzy, the Last Spin. Much more, but on Cheney: "if she doesn't immediately land a gig at CNN or MSNBC she'll get a fat book deal and a seat on an oil company board." He cites what may be the worst liberal swoon over her: a Robert Reich piece titled "In Praise of Liz Cheney. May we have more politicians like her," with the subhed "We need more politicians who stand by their principles, even if it costs them everything." The cost? Cheney's net worth is $14.7 million (24th highest in the House, so she "lost everything" for standing up to Trump?). I expect that to go up a lot, even if she just falls back on the usual post-Congressional job on K Street. St Clair also has a long section on Salman Rushdie, including a lengthy quote from Edward Said.
• Daniel Warner: [08-19] Is Liz Cheney a Profile in Courage?. Reference to JFK's 1955 book ("ghostwritten by JFK staffer Ted Sorensen, added to Kennedy's intellectual aura and was an important step of the created mythology in the rise of the former president"). Evidently it's still enough of a fetish that "Cheney was one of the recipients of the Kennedy family's Profiles in Courage 2022 awards."
• Ryan Lizza/Eugene Daniels: [08-17] Cheney to launch anti-Trump organization after primary defeat: First step, a PAC called "The Great Task." Nothing says you're a political player like having your own slush fund.

Zack Beauchamp:

• [08-12] Trump is pushing us toward the abyss: "His conspiracy theories about the FBI search have spawned a GOP assault on the legitimacy of the American state -- and set the stage for violence."
• [08-19] To understand what the Trump investigation might do to America, look at Israel: "Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, and it has thrown Israeli politics into chaos." This is an interesting story, but it's hard to see a lot of direct relevance. One possible angle is that both Netanyahu and Trump tried to make themselves personally indispensable to their political parties, and have continued to practice politics as they are facing criminal charges.

Ben Burgis: [08-18] Salman Rushdie's Stabbing Should Remind Us That Free Speech Is a Nonnegotiable Progressive Value. Also on Rushdie:

• Aaron R Hanlon: [08-16] Cancel Culture Did Not Stab Salman Rushdie.
• Siva Vaidhyanathan: [08-16] Salman Rushdie Changed Everything.

Jonathan Chait: [08-19] Mitch McConnell's Terrible Candidates Are His Own Fault: Subhed ("This happened because the GOP decided not to confront Trump's election lies") is way off base. Republicans are nominating terrible candidates because Republicans, even ones who are not personally evil, are naturally attracted to really badass candidates. That's why their primaries are full of ads where candidates shoot their enemies. And while most of us are properly offended by both their behavior and by the stupidity that justifies it, this isn't something new: "I'd rather be right" was a 1964 Barry Goldwater bumper sticker. If McConnell, who was pretty emphatic in rejecting Trump's election lies, really feels that sorry for himself, he could switch his party affiliation. He'd probably be welcomed, and most Republicans think he's a RINO anyway.

David Daley/David Faris: [06-29] Democratic Strategies That Don't Court Disaster: This is a couple months old, responding to the the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, but it's a subject I expect to return to. Principles matter, but so do tactics, and Democrats haven't been much good at either. I wasn't very impressed with Faris's "fighting dirty" tactics, but there's something to be said for fighting, especially over things that are important and practical. Here's a line that caught my eye: "Yes, the nation is in this dangerous position because the Republican Party has swerved decisively toward authoritarianism. But this lurch has not happened in a vacuum. Over and over again, the forfeit of democratic freedoms has come about via the right's wing's opportunistic exploitation of a pronounced pattern of Democratic toothlessness in the face of bared GOP fangs."

Kelly Denton-Borhaug: [08-16] Is Moral Clarity Possible in Donald Trump's America? Tom Engelhardt starts his introduction with a story from a recent Trump book (The Divider: Trump in the White House, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser), where Trump is complaining to John Kelly about US generals not showing him as much loyalty as German generals accorded Adolf Hitler. ("Why can't you be like the German generals?") Hitler's generals wound up trying to excuse themselves as "just following orders," which is exactly what Trump expects of his minions. Author has a book: And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War Culture. She tries to come up with some exceptions, but Liz Cheney isn't very convincing. She cites two recent books that illustrate the lengths to which most Republicans are willing to go to stay in Trump's good graces: Mark Leibovich: Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission, and Tim Miller: Why We Did It: Travelogue from the Republican Road to Ruin. This reminds me that when you're talking about an "authoritarian personality" you're not talking about would-be dictators like Hitler and Trump, but about the good folk who freely follow them, even to complete and utter ruin.

Connor Echols: [08-19] Diplomacy Watch: Talks to end the war are back on the agenda: Not a lot of good news here, but after both sides accused the other of risking nuclear disaster, they've finally agreed to worry about it. Some more articles on Ukraine. I'm not much inclined to cite pieces bragging about or deploring long-distance attacks (Ukraine has started to hit deep in Crimea), or accounts that sanctions are crippling Russia or not -- staples of war propaganda. The first batch is from a recent (and possibly ongoing?) Washington Post series about who knew what when:

• Shane Harris/Karen DeYoung/Isabelle Khurshudyan: [08-16] The Post examined the lead-up to the Ukraine war. Here's what we learned.
• Shane Harris/Karen DeYoung/Isabelle Khurshudyan/Ashley Parker/Liz Sly: [08-16] Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion.
• Isabelle Khurshudyan: [08-16] An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
• Greg Miller/Catherine Belton: [08-19] Russia's spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed.
• Greg Miller/Catherine Belton: [08-19] 5 things you need to know about Russia's intelligence failures ahead of the invasion of Ukraine.
• George Beebe/Anatol Lieven: [08-19] On Russian invasion, US intel got it right -- but policymakers stumbled. Based on the Washington Post "Road to war" piece above: looks important, one I should go over more carefully than I get a bit of time. I do, however, suspect that the American instinct, to shore up an anti-Russian coalition in the hopes that doing so might deter Putin, was misplaced, and if anything made the invasion more likely. What was needed at that time was a constructive diplomatic offer, one that could have prevented to war. But US diplomats have long been trained never to let anyone call them out for "appeasement," so escalating threats was the only tool they allowed themselves.
• Christian Caryl: [07-28] Russia locked up Vladimir Kara-Murza for telling the truth about Ukraine.
• Emran Feroz: [08-18] In Europe, Some Refugees Are More Equal Than Others.
• Rachel Pannett/Annabelle Timsit/Mary Ilyushina: [08-22] Car explosion kills daughter of Putin ally Alexander Dugin. I'm familiar with Dugin as a featured character in Masha Gessen's The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

Melissa Gira Grant: [08-11] Why the Right Can't Quit Its Antisemitic Attacks Against George Soros. Even if it's pure coincidence that the Republicans's chosen billionaire boogieman ("puppet master") is Jewish, when they attack him, they almost inevitably fall back on classic anti-semitic tropes, which seem to be embedded in their genetic heritage. Reminds me that Fred Koch and Fred Trump were nazi-sympathizers back in the 1930s, but few dwell on that given the more recent crimes of their progeny offer plentiful targets.

Jonathan Guyer: [08-15] No one has been held accountable for the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal: What do you expect? No one has been held accountable for the orders-of-magnitude more disastrous 20+ year war. No one is every really held accountable for America's foreign policy debacles, largely because they're never freely debated and critiqued before it's too late. At least the final withdrawal, regardless of how ugly it may have seemed, ended the war: the first positive turn in more than 20 years. Still, articles like this make me nervous. For one thing, they exaggerate and isolate the problem: the final withdrawal was far less catastrophic than any given year of the war. It doesn't compare poorly to comparable events, like the evacuation of Saigon. Although many Afghans sought to leave the country as the Taliban took over, the exodus looks to be far less than with Vietnam. The obvious explanation for poor planning is that Americans from Biden down felt they needed to demonstrate faith that the US-installed Afghan regime could stand on its own without US military support (which had, in any case, always been a mixed blessing). Both the US-backed regime in Vietnam and the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan had managed to survive for a couple years after foreign troop withdrawals. It's easy in retrospect to see how this situation was different, but no one in the administration could have argued that ahead of time -- had they done so, they would have been dismissed as defeatist. Second point is that Republicans are looking to hang Afghanistan on Biden, whose approval figures dropped below 50% at that very moment. Democrats can point to the Trump agreement on withdrawal, much as Obama pointed back to Bush's agreement to withdraw from Iraq, but that doesn't seem to be a very convincing argument. Critics will always argue that if we hadn't withdrawn we'd still be able to hold the government together and support our clients, ignoring the fact that doing so only protracted a tragic war. More on Afghanistan:

• Ryan Cooper: [08-16] Joe Biden's Senseless Economic Strangulation of Afghanistan.
• Daniel L Davis: [08-18] Americans Must Face the Hard Truth on Afghanistan: "We must resist the temptation to believe that if only the United States had done this or that differently, the war would have been won." This was part of a broader symposium a year after the Taliban takeover, which looks like it probably includes some examples. But history has shown repeated that America doesn't like hard truths, certainly not about its good intentions, even less so its incompetence.
• Conor Echols: [08-15] GOP drops scathing review of Afghanistan withdrawal, White House reacts. Evidently they dusted off their old briefs on "who lost China" from the Truman years. They think this is going to be a big political club, especially for 2024, so they're promised to investigate it to the hilt if they capture the House in 2022, much like they did "Benghazi!"
• Charlotte Greenfield: [08-10] International economists ask Biden to release Afghan central bank funds. Of course, Amerians would rather burnish their reputation as sore losers than allow the only Afghan government that exists to use its money for its own people.
• Jen Kirby: [08-15] Afghanistan's staggering set of crises, explained.

Margaret Hartmann:

• [08-17] All the Juicy Gossip From Jared Kushner's Book. More than you really need to know. For a more traditional book review, see Dwight Garner: [08-17] Jared Kushner's 'Breaking History' Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir: "What a queasy-making book to have in your hands. Once someone has happily worked alongside one of the most flagrant and systematic and powerful liars in this country's history, how can anyone be expected to believe a word they say?"
• [08-18] A Guide to the Many Houses Mehmet Oz Forgot He Owns. So sad when rich people can't remember how rich they are. Speaking of Oz [08-19] "Incredibly embarrassing": Trump regrets backing "awful" candidate Dr. Oz after collapse in polls.

Rebecca Heilweil: [08-17] Airlines are trying to resurrect the Concorde era. Partly they're desperate to take advantage of rising inequality by offering exclusive services for the rich. Let's face it, in a more equal world they wouldn't be so concerned with sorting us by class when we get on public transportation.

• Jeff Wise: [08-17] The Eternal Disappointment of the Return of Supersonic Travel. For lots of reasons, it's a safe bet that the new companies betting on this working will fail. Still, how dumb is it to call your company Boom? The headline writes itself: "Boom Goes Bust"; still not as bad as the distinct possibility of "Boom Goes Boom."

Sean Illing: [08-14] How capitalism ensnared some of its radical critics: Interview with Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern. This reminded me that Gilles Deleuze invented the term "postmodernism" in 1979. It made no sense to me until I saw it used for architecture, and that reminded me that modernism always sought to push boundaries, but limits were hit at different times -- "modern" typefaces hit theirs with Giambattista Bodoni in the 18th century. The avant-garde in art and music pretty much did their thing in the 1960s, by which time the world didn't have much more that could be modernized. Jefferies (following Deleuze) thought that postmodernism, in letting us escape from the tyranny of the modernist vector, could be liberating, but he has a convenient scapegoat for its failure: neoliberalism. The term now is mostly used by its critics, but it was initially proclaimed by its adherents (much like "New Democrats" and "New Labor"). It would be more accurate to describe it as a degenerate tendency in liberalism, one whose plotline parallels Breaking Bad. Liberalism initially sought a set of freedoms for a set of people, both of which were rather limited by the imaginations of early liberals, but the initial idea spurred people to want more freedoms for more people, until the latter became universal. Neoliberalism limits that spread, not by arguing with the principle (as conservatives do) but by restricting the permissible methods (preserving or restoring the crude capitalism of earlier eras). Unclear to me how this restricts postmodern art, but it does create an ever-widening division of classes, ensuring that the liberal ideal of broad freedoms for all people can never be met.

Ellen Ioanes: [08-14] After the latest clash with Israel, Gazans' struggle continues.

• Steve France: [07-17] Kahane's hateful version of Judaism provided the vision for Israel's extreme right: Review of Shaul Magid's book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.
• James North: [08-20] U.S. gives another $1.3 billion in weapons to Egypt's vicious regime -- to keep Israel happy?
• Jonathan Ofir: [08-16] When Israeli politicians can't get their Hasbara straight: "and the willing media doesn't seem to care," which suggests they understand the truth all too well, but also as long as the US swallows anything they say, what they say doesn't matter any more (e.g., Biden administration expresses 'concern' over Israeli raids, but refuses to condemn them.
• Yumna Patel: [08-18] Israeli army raids, shuts down offices of 7 Palestinian civil rights organizations.
• Mitchell Plitnick: [08-19] With Iran deal closer than ever Israel presses for war. I'm not sure how close a resumption of the JCPOA deal is, especially with Biden's recent trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia to kowtow to their war parties. I also can't imagine how an Israeli war against Iran would work. I suppose they could launch long-distance missiles at each other, and Israel's could carry nuclear warheads, but the long-term consequences of such attacks are impossible to fathom. If Israel's goal is to feel safe from the threat of Iranian nuclear attack, something like JCPOA is the only viable solution. On the other hand, nixing the deal and trying to suppress Iran by bombing it virtually guarantees the opposite reaction. How dumb is that?

John E King: [08-17] Paul Sweezy Was One of the 20th Century's Great Economic Thinkers.

Will Leitch: [08-17] The 'Real' Home-Run Record is 73, not Not 61. He does mention the Roger Maris asterisk, but not why it ever existed, with no mention of Babe Ruth let alone Ford Frick. I gather that Aaron Judge, who is one of the very few contemporary baseball players I've actually heard of, is on a pace to top 61 home runs this (Maris) season, but probably not 73 (Barry Bonds).

Steve M: [08-19] Threatening Federal Agents: It's a Felony and a Campaign Stunt!: This is about Republican Florida State House candidate Luis Miguel, who wants to introduce a bill where "all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds ON SIGHT!" Whether he's a cynic, as the author believes, or simply insane, he's gotten some traction. "Much of the Republican electorate thinks the most batshit insane right-wing proposals sound perfectly reasonable, and the rest might not agree but don't think they're at all objectionable."

Dana Milbank: [08-04] The GOP is sick. It didn't start with Trump -- and won't end with him. An excerpt from the Washington Post columnist's book: The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. I'm a little suspicious that Milbank only goes back 25 years, basically to Newt Gingrich, because Gingrich (much like Trump today) was clearly a manifestation of a pre-existing malady, a deep sickness in the American soul that only seemed new because no one else had previously acted it out so flamboyantly. But we should be thankful whenever anyone draws attention to the continuity in the Republican program to screw us over so completely.

Ian Millhiser: [08-19] The 4 major criminal probes into Donald Trump, explained.

• Isaac Arnsdorf/Josh Dawsey/et al.: [08-16] Trump is rushing to hire seasoned lawyers -- but he keeps hearing 'No': "The former president's current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer who's never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company and a former host at far-right One America News."
• Matthew Cooper: [08-19] Trump "Will Be Indicted" Interview with Jennifer Taub, law professor, author of several books on financial crimes (e.g., Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime).
• Josh Dawsey/Isaac Arnsdorf: [08-17] Trump rakes in millions off FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.
• Maggie Haberman/Katie Benner/Glenn Thrush: [08-20] The Final Days of the Trump White House: Chaos and Scattered Papers.
• Quinta Jurecic: [08-] Why the Trump classified-files scandal is so dangerous.
• Josh Kovensky: [08-19] Boom! Trump's Longtime Fascination With Nukes Long Preceded Mar-A-Lago Search.

Eve Ottenberg: [08-19] The Biden-Trump Persecution of Julian Assange: This is the clearest example since 9/11 of the US pursuing a political vendetta for no better reason than spite and arrogance. At least with 9/11, the hunting down of Al Qaeda's leader was tied to thousands of deaths at their hand. What did Assange do to merit so much vitriol? Exposing some secret documents that hardly mattered? More like thumbing his nose at American power, which when you get down to it, was Al Qaeda's core crime -- just writ much more dramatically. Author quotes one famous chicken hawk asking, "can't we just drone him?" This story has gone well beyond sick and embarrassing.

Will Porter: [08-20] Biden Steps Up Somalia Strikes After Redeploying Troops. Follow up on [03-16] Over 1 Million Somali Children Near Starvation as Pentagon Plans New Troop Deployment. Also see:

• Kelly Beaucar Vlahos: [08-18] US bombs Somalia for the third time this summer. After which: [08-20] At least 20 people are dead after gunmen stormed a hotel in Somalia's capital. That's about the same number killed by the US strikes

Matt Stieb: [08-18] The Accountant Flips on Trump's Empire: Trump Organization CFO pled guilty to 15 charges, most dealing with tax evasion, and agreed to testify in a further trial of the Organization itself (how that is not a trial of its owner isn't clear to me).

Margaret Sullivan: [08-21] My final column: 2024 and the dangers ahead.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, August 15, 2022

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38520 [38474] rated (+46), 60 [77] unrated (-17).

I wrote a fairly substantial Speaking of Which last week, posting it on Sunday. I added another link and comment on China/Taiwan today, prompted by mail from Crocodile Chuck. War gaming is not my thing, but every scenario I've been able to imagine is bad to worse for everyone involved. Of course, that was also true for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but the dangers of China invading Taiwan are probably an order of magnitude greater. Chuck is so worried by Biden's complicity-verging-on-taunting that he's feeling nostalgic for Trump, but he's in Australia, so would escape many of the horrors another Trump term would entail. I also think he underappreciates how unstable Trump is, especially if his hand-picked cronies decide to challenge his manhood.

Made a sizable dent in the unrated albums list this week. The records I picked up here were mostly filed in the cases I originally set up when we moved here in 1999. 17 of the remaining 60 are new promos, so I know where they are, and I'll pick them up routinely over the next few weeks (11 are still advances). The others are going to prove harder to find, but a big chunk were 2006-08 promos I never bothered with, so they may be hiding out together. (In any case, I probably had good reason for ignoring them.) Then there are a couple large boxes. I graded the Sinatra this week based on past grades (plus streaming the one I missed).

New records reviewed this week:

Kyle Aho: Rituals (2021 [2022], OA2): Pianist, some electric keyboards, teaches at Missouri State, second album as leader plus some side credits, most songs have words from various literary sources, Christin Bohrisch sings, Randy Hamm plays sax and flute, band also includes trumpet, cello, bass, and drums. B [cd] [08-19]

Quentin Baxter Quintet: Art Moves Jazz (2022, BME): Drummer, recorded this in South Carolina, has a couple albums plus a group called Ranky Tanky. Hard bop quintet with trumpet (Charlton Singleton), tenor sax (Mark Starbank, piano, and bass, plus a couple guest spots. Opens and closes with Monk, in between has an original suite, three Jimmy Heath pieces, one by Robert Watson. B+(*) [cd] [08-12]

Bobby Bradford & Friends: Jackie Robinson: Stealing Home (2018 [2022], Cryptogramophone): Cornet player, born 1934, moved to Los Angeles in 1953, got a commission to write a piece honoring Robinson's centennial. Friends include saxophonists Vinny Golia and Chuck Manning, William Roper (tuba/euphonium and spoken vocals), plus piano, bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Raymond Byron: Bond Wire Cur (2021 [2022], ESP-Disk): Last name Raposa, died at 41 a month after this came out, born in Indiana, grew up in California, started in Castanets c. 2005, played on records with Sufjan Stevens and Chris Schlarb. Label calls this "weird rock," although I'd lean more toward "weird folk." Back cover lists 10 more names as "featuring," but this feels pretty solo. B+(***) [lp]

Willi Carlisle: Peculiar, Missouri (2022, Free Dirt): Folksinger from the Ozarks, earned his credentials the new-fashioned way, with a BA in Writing and Performance Studies and a MFA in Poetry, plus two self-released albums before moving up to a named label. B+(***) [sp]

Cheekface: Too Much to Ask (2022, self=released): Indie g-b-d band from Los Angeles, third album, singer Greg Katz is clear enough you get all the jokes, and they are legion -- isn't it about time for a Dead Milkmen revival? Single is presumably "We Need a Bigger Dumpster." A- [sp]

Lindsay Clark: Carpe Noctem (2022, Audio Sport): Folkie singer-songwriter, based in Portland, fifth album since 2009, title translates as "seize the night." She doesn't. B [sp]

Avishai Cohen Trio: Shifting Sands (2021 [2022], Naïve): Israeli bassist, based in New York, close to 20 albums since 1998. Trio with Elchin Shirinov (piano) and Roni Kaspi (drums), playing originals plus one trad piece. B+(**) [sp]

King Princess: Hold On Baby (2022, Zelig/Columbia): Pop singer-songwriter Mikaela Mullaney Straus, identifies non-binary, second album. B+(**)

Lauv: All 4 Nothing (2022, Virgin): American pop singer-songwriter Ari Leff, debut a middling hit (16), second album. Catchy in a rather unassuming way. B+(*) [sp]

Lil Silva: Yesterday Is Heavy (2022, Nowhere): British dj/producer, first album after 12 years of singles and side credits. Mixes the pop up front, then goes on a long meander. B+(*) [sp]

Meridian Brothers: Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimento (2022, Ansonia): Colombian group, led by Elbis Alvarez since 2006, not sure whether you'd label them salsa or cumbia, but the reference here is to 1970s salsa dura, aided by hypothetical collaborators from the era. B+(**) [sp]

Kyle Motl: Hydra Nightingale (2019-21 [2022], Infrequent Seams): Bassist, more than a dozen credits since 2015, takes this one solo, with one original piece, four more from composers I don't recognize, one of those augmented with spoken word snatches, mostly from Ronald Reagan not really explaining the economy. B+(***) [cd]

Tami Neilson: Kingmaker (2022, Outside Music): Country singer-songwriter, born in Canada but based in Auckland, New Zealand; fifth album, has done rockabilly and Patsy Cline, spreads this out a bit more, but still snags a duet with Willie Nelson. Ends strong. B+(***) [sp]

Ben Patterson: The Way of the Groove (2022, Origin): Trombone player, second album, background in USAF Airmen of Note, original pieces with guitar (Shawn Purcell), keyboards, bass, and drums, plus tenor sax (Luis Hernandez) on 4/10 tracks. B [cd] [08-19]

Pussy Riot: Matriarchy Now (2022, Neon Gold, EP): Per Wikipedia, "a Russian feminist protest and performance art group," with "a membership of approximately 11 women," although I suspect that is variable and erratic. The long article identifies various download releases, but doesn't attempt a discography. Discogs lists three albums and six singles/EPs (but not this one, a "mixtape" of 7 songs, 19:11). No trademark punk here. Starts light pop, ends up with something like a march, most arresting song goes "I want to hear 'fuck you'." Whatever they are, they're certainly not part of Putin's war machine. B+(*)

RedGreenBlue: The End and the Beginning (2018 [2022], Astral Spirits): Chicago trio -- Paul Giallorenzo (synthesizer, pump organ, electronics), Charlie Kirchen (bass), Ryan Packard (drums, electronics) -- plus Ben Lamar Gay (cornet, electronics) on the second side ("The End"). The cornet helps. B+(*) [bc]

Mark Rubin (Jew of Oklahoma): The Triumph of Assimilation (2021, Rubinchik): Mostly hillbilly banjo tunes framing loose translations of Yiddish poems. This can get a bit heavy (e.g., the closer "Spin the Dreidel"). Remarkable, but I'd appreciate a bit more humor, as in "Down South Kosher." B+(**) [bc]

Charlton Singleton: Crossroads (2022, BME): Trumpet player from South Carolina, second album a decade after his debut, plays in Ranky Tanky with most of Quentin Baxter's quintet, not only steps out front here but brought his own compositions. B+(**) [cd] [08-12]

Josh Sinton: Steve Lacy's Book of Practitioners, Vol. 1 "H" (2021-22 [2022], FIP): Solo baritone sax, working his way through six Lacy compositions. Sinton's quartet Ideal Bread released three albums of Lacy compositions (2008-14, the latter 2-CD). Obvious appeal limits due to tricky music and instrument, but this is serious stuff. B+(**) [cd] [08-12]

Trio Xolo: In Flower, in Song (2019 [2022], 577): Avant sax trio, no one I've ever heard of before: Zachary Swanson (bass, also the composer), Derrick Michaels (tenor sax), Dalius Naujo (drums). Seems like there are dozens of comparable records, but this one kept growing on me. A- [cd] [08-19]

Chris Walden: Missa Iubileum Aureum (Golden Jubilee Jazz Mass) (2022, Origin): Composer, big band arranger, has done a lot of soundtracks, German-born, based in Los Angeles. Played by LMR Jazz Orchestra, with St. Dominic's Schola Cantorum and featured vocalists Tierney Sutton & Kurt Elling. C- [cd] [08-19]

Neil Young + Promise of the Real: Noise & Flowers (2019 [2022], Reprise): Band formed by Willie Nelson's son Lucas in 2010, has recorded on its own through 2021, backed Young on two studio albums, a soundtrack, and a live album 2015-18, tagged along for this 2019 tour of Europe, playing Young's standard songbook. Rocks hard, sound so-so, nothing you haven't heard before. B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Albert Ayler Quintet: At Slugs' Salloon 1966 Revisited (1966 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Tenor saxophonist, quintet set with brother Donald Ayler (trumpet), Michael Samson (violin), Lewis Worrell (bass), and Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums). This set has been kicking around a long time. It's always struck me as strained but not quite to the breaking point. B+(*) [bc]

Old music:

Bad Brains: Bad Brains (1982, ROIR): DC hardcore punk band, first album, gimmick was that they were rastafaris and peppered their thrash metal with reggae nods, but nothing you can skank to. B+(**) [sp]

Bad Brains: Rock for Light (1983, PVC): Second album, a bit slicker I suppose, but is that a plus? B [sp]

Bob Brookmeyer: Back Again (1978 [1990], Gazell): Valve trombonist (1929-2011), has a reputation as an arranger, so his records tend to be overly thought out. But this quintet didn't need much direction to satisfy him: Thad Jones (flugelhorn/cornet), Jimmy Rowles (piano), George Mraz (bass), Mel Lewis (drums). A- [cd]

Desole: A Story to Tell (2006, Abacus): Indie band from Arizona, accents optional but not on cover. As best I recall, I got a promo at the time and never found time to play it. Doesn't look like they ever recorded anything else, so now it's just a checklist item. Not awful, but a bit fancy/artsy, aimed at arenas they never came close to. B

Julie Dexter/Khari Simmons: Moon Bossa (2006 [2007], Brash Music): British soul/jazz singer, moved to Atlanta in 1999, four albums 2002-11, Simmons is an Atlanta-based producer, credits lacking but figure him for the easy groove, which only occasionally reminds one of Brazil. [ex-CD] B+(*)

Disques Vogue: In Paris Highlights (1948-56 [1995], RCA): French jazz label, established 1947 by Léon Cabat and Charles Delaunay, appears to be unrelated to the American label Vogue Records, but a British offshoot was founded in 1951, initially named Vogue Records, later Vocalion. The labels were bought up by BMG, RCA Victor, and eventually Sony Music. RCA did a series of of ten CD reissues c. 1995, for which this is a sampler. The artists are famous Americans who passed through Paris, some live, others studio. This picks out 20 tracks, some nice ones, but the series is rather mixed. B+(**) [cd]

Peggy Duquesnel: Summertime Lullaby (2009 [2010], Joyspring Music): Standards singer, plays piano, Discogs lists three albums (including a 2-CD Xmas), website links to a new album, Piano for My Soul (filed under "New Age/Meditation"; Amazon product description says it's her 16th self-released album). Very serviceable, especially her piano. [ex-CD] B

Elmore James: The Classic Early Recordings 1951-1956 (1951-56 [1994], Virgin, 3CD): Major blues figure, born in Mississippi, eventually made his way to Chicago, hit on his signature guitar riff on his first single ("Dust My Broom"), returned to it often, died at 45 in 1963, leaving 12 years of records, nearly all superb, although Rhino's Robert Palmer-selected 1993 compilation (The Sky Is Falling: The History of Elmore James) is possibly all you need. These early cuts are also available in less redundant 1-CD packages -- Let's Cut It: The Very Best of Elmore James (1991) and Blues Kingpins (2003) are two I own and recommend highly -- but when the trick is this good redundancy isn't much of a complaint. His later compilations, like Shake Your Money Maker: The Best of the Fire Sessions (2001) and King of the Slide Guitar (1992) are even better, and The Complete Fire and Enjoy Recordings (3-CD, from 1995) doesn't suffer either. A-

Rafael Karlen: The Sweetness of Things Half Remembered (2014, Pinnacles Music): Australian tenor saxophonist, first album, only a couple more since. Backed by piano (Steve Newcomb) and string quartet. It is gently paced and rather lovely, although the strings are still a bit arch for my taste. B+(***) [bc]

Kent Kessler: Bull Fiddle (2001 [2002], Okka Disk): Chicago bassist, probably best known in the Vandermark 5 (1997-2010), but he's played in number of more/less related groups, including several with Rodrigo Amado. This is his only album as sole leader, but he's joined by Michael Zerang (drums) on 4/12 tracks. B+(**) [cd]

Ken Peplowski/Howard Alden: Concord Duo Series: Volume Three (1992 [1993], Concord): Discogs decided the title was the Ken Peplowski & Howard Alden, but spine and elsewhere use the slash. My title is on the front over as a logo, but not on the spine. Back cover adds "Recorded Live at Maybeck Recital Hall." In the label's prime, Concord rounded up every notable mainstream pianist in the country to do a solo set there. Their 1992-96 Duo Series ran out at 10, mostly musicians whose careers were revived by the label. Peplowski plays clarinet and tenor sax, Alden guitar. Both lean toward swing era standards, but here they look back to Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke, and into the bop era with Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano. B+(***) [cd]

Maurice Peress: The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue: Paul Whiteman's Historic Aeolian Hall Concert of 1924 (1996, Musicmasters): His name seems like a joke on first acquaintance these days, but Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) was the biggest jazz band leader in 1920s, with sales of nearly two million for a 1920 release, and numerous other hits: he had much more to do with the 1920s being called "the jazz age" than Armstrong or Ellington. He employed some of the best-known white jazz musicians of the age (Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Jack Teagarden, Bunny Berrigan, many more), as well as singers like Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey (also, crossing the color line, he backed Paul Robeson on his classic "Ol' Man River"). One of his biggest coups was staging the 1924 debut of George Gershwin's jazz-influenced "Rhapsody in Blue." Peress (1930-2017), who started in New York under Leonard Bernstein and went on to conduct many orhestras, as well as to write Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots, reconstructed Whiteman's concert and conducted, featuring Ivan Davis and Dick Hyman on piano. I recall Gary Giddins praising this in his campaign to get more jazz played by classical repertory orchestras. B+(***) [cd]

Bobby Previte: Empty Suits (1990, Gramavision): Drummer, albums since 1986, also guitar, keyboard, percussion, electronics, and vocals here. Group is a quintet with trombone (Robin Eubanks), guitar, keyboards, and bass, plus a half dozen guests, most famously Elliott Sharp (guitar) and Marty Ehrlich (alto sax). Music has elements of fusion but is otherwise hard to pin down. B+(**) [cd]

Maddy Prior/June Tabor [Silly Sisters]: No More to the Dance (1988, Shanachie): English folk singers, not sisters, both born in 1947, Maddy the better known due to her fronting of Steeleye Span. June's first album was a 1976 duo with Maddy called Silly Sisters, reunited here, the cover with both credits. Both have many solo albums and collaborations since the late 1970s. Very trad, not my thing, but nice together. [ex-CD] B+(*) [sp]

Raise Your Window: A Cajun Music Anthology Vol. 2: The Historic Victor/Bluebird Sessions 1928-1941 (1928-41 [1993], Country Music Foundation): Previous volume was called Le Gran Mamou, and covers the same years, with many of the same artists, but this is the one I happened to stumble on. Classic stuff, expertly selected and annotated. I'd be surprised if Vol. 1 isn't every bit as good. A- [cd]

Mark Rubin (Jew of Oklahoma): Southern Discomfort (2015, Rubinchik): "Oklahoma-born, Texas-reared, and now living in New Orleans," spent some time in Austin where he founded the bands Killbilly and Bad Livers (better known, he played upright bass and tuba). First album under this moniker. A- [sp]

Frank Sinatra: Capitol Records Concept Albums (1953-61 [2004], Capitol, 14CD): Growing up, I didn't care much for him as a singer, but always thought he was a terrific actor, and occasional songs from the 1960s charmed me. So I hardly knew anything before his founding of Reprise in 1961 until well after the fact. His early work divides into three neat eras: as a big band singer, especially with Tommy Dorsey (1940-42); a declining period with Columbia (1946-52); and his revival with Capitol (1953-61). A decade before Elvis, he was the nation's biggest teen dream. After Elvis, he was the very definition of adult music. Straddling those periods, he was the first major LP artist: while his "concept albums" fell short of the term as I knew it in the 1970s, each formed a coherent whole, while most other LPs dissoled into hits + filler. His voice was unique, smooth and precise, simply masterful. His bands ranged from perfunctory to bombastic, or often sunk into a morass of strings. I had merely sampled him when I picked this slim box up in a going-out-of-business sale, figuring it would be nice to own them all, but more often than not I went to streaming sources to plug the holes. When I finally got to this, I had heard all but the final album (Point of No Return), with its perfect vocals adorning a maudlin string backup. Individual album grades follow. B+(***) [cd]

• Swing Easy! (1954, EP): A
• Songs for Young Lovers (1954, EP): B+(***)
• In the Wee Small Hours (1954-55 [1955]): A-
• Songs for Swingin' Lovers (1956): A+
• Close to You (1956 [1957]): B+(*)
• A Swingin' Affair! (1956): B+
• Where Are You? (1957): B
• Come Fly With Me (1957 [1958]): B+(**)
• Sings for Only the Lonely (1958): B
• Come Dance With Me! (1958 [1959]): B+(***)
• No One Cares (1959): B-
• Nice 'N' Easy (1960): B+(***)
• Sinatra's Swingin' Session (1960 [1961]): A-
• Come Swing With Me! (1961): A-
• Point of No Return (1961 [1962]): B+(*)

Hank Snow: 16 Top Tracks (1961-65 [1988], RCA): Part of RCA's "Diamond Series": at least 25 single-artist comps with 16 tracks each, all released in 1988 with stock artwork proclaiming "Digitally remastered from original recordings." I only count 6 country artists (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Jim Reeves, and Snow), mixed in with 1930s jazz (Benny Goodman, Fats Waller), early rock (Elvis Presley, Duane Eddy) and soul (Sam Cooke, Eartha Kitt), plus some outliers (Mario Lanza, Jose Feliciano). I loved Snow's 1985 duo with Willie Nelson (Brand on My Heart, so this is probably the first collection of his I bought. Turns out it was assembled from early 1960s albums, two of which were covers of other people's hits, so the only Snow smash here is "I've Been Everywhere." The next Snow comp I bought picked up his early (1949-56) hits: I'm Movin' On and Other Great Country Hits, which came out in 1990. Highly recommended, but 1997's The Essential Hank Snow sweeps the field, from 1950-73. Best discovery here is "The Last Ride," but he also does pretty credible takes on others like Don Gibson and Dave Dudley and Johnny Horton. B+(***) [cd]

Songs From Chippy (1994, Hollywood): Chippy was a musical theatrical play, written by Jo Harvey Allen and Terry Allen, set in West Texas in the 1930s. The Songs were recorded in Joe Ely's home studio, the various artists including the Allens, Ely, Butch Hancock, Robert Earl Keen, Wayne Hancock, and Jo Carol Pierce. These artists probably have a dozen A-list albums between them (more if you include Pierce's ex-husband, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who came out of the same Lubbock plain). Lots of prime songs here, especially Ely's trademark groove. A couple I even recognize from elsewhere (like Wayne Hancock's "Thunderstorms & Neon Signs" and Pierce's "I Blame God"). A- [cd]

Stompin' Western Swing: Roots of Rock 'n' Roll Vol. 2 (1936-41 [1996], President): British label, founded 1957, started in mainstream pop, had some success with disco imports in the 1970s. This Roots of Rock 'n' Roll series ran to 7 volumes, given a free hand by the EU's 50-year copyright limit to pick essential records. It started with Vol. 1: Big Band, Blues & Boogie, which just from reading the song list I'd be hard pressed to improve on (leads off with "Flyin' Home," "The Honeydripper," "Walk 'Em," "Minnie the Moocher," eventually hitting "Five Guys Named Moe," before ending with Big Bill Broonzy and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup). This one has a bit less to pick from, but hits everyone you'd expect, from Milton Brown, Hank Penny, Bob Wills, and Cliff Bruner through the Modern Mountaineers and the Blue Ridge Playboys. There are comparable western swing sets, but few that end this strong. A- [cd]

A Taste of Soca (1993-94 [1994], Ice): A contraction of "soul of calypso," first defined by Lord Shorty in 1975, seems like a parallel to the development of reggae to dancehall and ragga, the rhythm harder and the words cruder than with calypso. Eddy Grant founded the label to compile calypso classics, but went on to release a fair amount of contemporary soca, of which this is a sampler. I'm a sucker for the beats, but still prefer the wordsmiths, which here include Duke as well as Sparrow. B+(***) [cd]

Abdul Wadud/Leroy Jenkins: Straight Ahead/Free at Last (1979, RED): Cellist (1947-2022), born Ronald DeVaughn, father of r&b singer Raheem DeVaughn, played in Black Unity Trio (1971), several albums each with Julius Hemphill and Arthur Blythe. Duo here with the violinist, with two side-long pieces written by Jenkins. B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Mike Clark/Leon Lee Dorsey Featuring Mike LeDonne: Blues on Top (Jazz Avenue 1) [08-12]
• Jeff Coffin: Between Dreaming and Joy (Ear Up) [08-15]
• Billy Drummond and Freedom of Ideas: Valse Sinistre (Cellar) [08-05]
• Gordon Grdina's Nomad Trio: Boiling Point (Astral Spirits)
• Gordon Grdina/Mark Helias/Matthew Shipp: Pathways (Attaboygirl)
• Michael Hackett/Tim Coffman Sextet: Western Skies (Summit)
• Darren Litzie: My Horizon (Summit)
• Brian Lynch and Spheres of Influence: Songbook Vol. 2: Dance the Way U Want To (Holistic MusicWorks) [08-15]
• Gonzalo Rubalcaba/Aymée Nuviola: Live in Marciac (5 Passion) [06-29]
• Miguel Zenón: Música De Las Américas (Miel Music) [08-26]

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