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|
Monday, March 30, 2015
Music Week
Music: Current count 24768 [24735] rated (+33), 399 [409] unrated (-10).
Average week, but the mix below is a little peculiar. I've been trying
to declutter. I have these 13x15.75-inch Stearlite plastic baskets that
hold two rows of CDs, about 75-80 total. Back when Jazz CG was jumping,
I used two baskets to hold the incoming queue, and sorted them somewhat,
so one basket had a row of unpromising shit and a row of vocals, while
the other basket had instrumental jazz, sometimes sorted further but
more often not. Under this scheme the unpromising shit almost never got
touched, so most of it still dates from before the initial sort -- 2011
or 2012, maybe even 2010. Sometime last year I started filing the vocals
with the new jazz. Couple weeks ago I merged the baskets, so now I have
one basket, with the row of the old unpromising shit on the left and
everything else on the right. Under this scheme I've finally started to
deplete the left(over) row, and you'll see a fair amount of 2008-10
"new" releases below. Some are not as bad as I expected -- Chris Massey,
Project Trio, Times 4, Bossa Brasil -- but none (so far) are things I'm
ever likely to want to play again.
Some of the incentive for running through this queue is to get them
out of my sight. After I play them, if they are graded B+(**) or less
and are by someone I don't have a serious interest in (by definition,
for the "unpromising shit" row), then go into another basket. When that
basket fills up, I haul it downstairs and empty it into an unsorted
shelf unit full of similar records that I can't imagine ever wanting
to play again. (These are not necessarily "bad" records -- by definition,
anything B+ is actually pretty good, but it's all relative. Unless I'm
travelling or something, I almost never play as many as ten previously
graded records in a week -- for pleasure or nostalgia or whatever. In
a house with, conservatively, ten thousand CDs, well, you do the math.)
When that downstairs shelf unit fills up -- actually, it's the last
of three with open space -- I'll be in a quandry. When I moved to Kansas
in 1999 I sold off 90% of my LPs for a pittance (35-cents apiece), more
to avoid the shipping costs than for what little money I made. I've
never sold surplus CDs -- in part because the only decent used stores
here shut down long ago -- but I imagine it would wind up being the
same miserable experience. I could build more shelves, but I'm running
out of space, not to mention patience. Best idea I've come up with is
to donate the surplus to a local library. I took a step and contacted
Wichita State University last week. Getting cold feet now, but I do
need to do something. My main goal over the next month or so is to get
rid of all the baskets on the floor except for my one incoming queue.
(Looking around, I count nine, plus a couple hundred CDs in front of
other CDs in a bookcase. Also need to get several piles of books off
the floor.) I'm not exactly a hoarder, but I do have too much shit.
One cluster of exceptional records here comes from Robert Christgau's
Expert Witness last week: The Paranoid Style and The Close Readers,
two groups I had never heard of -- indeed, their 2013-14 records never
appeared in my metacritic files. I sorted the Paranoid Style's EP a bit
differently, but remarkable finds.
No less obscure is my jazz pick, Gabriel Amargant. My new jazz queue
got very short before some late-week mail game in, so I was scrounging
around for some new jazz on Rhapsody. It's been several years since I
received whole batches of Fresh Sound New Talent releases, but I've
been finding them fairly reliably on Rhapsody, and I've checked out a
few names I'm familiar with, but Amargant was a total unknown to me.
Still, with nothing else obvious to choose, I looked him up and was
blown away. Reminds me that when I did get whole batches, about half
of the releases were Spanish artists and I found a fair number of
worthwhile records there -- still, few as good as this one.
The other A- this week is by Courtney Barnett. An Australian, she
got a fair amount of attention for her "Double EP" compilation last
year, A Sea of Split Peas (finished 59th in Pazz & Jop).
Still, this first real album is a huge leap forward. For whatever
it's worth, I also came real close to giving Action Bronson an A-.
I finally backed off because I have a hard time following rap lyrics,
especially on computer, and I suspect he's something of an asshole.
I could be wrong, and sometimes the music overcomes my doubts. But
after three plays, the lower grade felt right.
New records rated this week:
- Gabriel Amargant: And Now for Something Completely Different (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: A-
- Christian Artmann: Fields of Pannonia (2014 [2015], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
- Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015, Mom + Pop Music): [r]: A-
- Bossa Brasil and Maurício de Souza Group: Here. There . . . (2010, Pulsa Music): [cd]: B+(*)
- Action Bronson: Mr. Wonderful (2014 [2015], Atlantic/Vice): [r]: B+(***)
- The Close Readers: The Lines Are Open (2014, Austin): [r]: A-
- Tom Collier: Alone in the Studio (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B
- Bruce Cox Core-Tet: Status Cymbals (2012, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
- Isaac Darche: Team & Variations (2014 [2015], Challenge): [cd]: B+(**)
- The Go! Team: The Scene Between (2015, Memphis Industries): [r]: B
- Susie Hansen: Representante de la Salsa (2010, Jazz Caliente): [cd]: B
- Kaze: Uminari (2014 [2015], Circum-Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
- Levon Mikaelian: United Shades of Artistry (2014 [2015], self-released): [cd]: B
- Chris Massey's "Nue Jazz Project": Vibrainium (2010, Chris Massey Music): [cd]: B+(*)
- Nellie McKay: My Weekly Reader (2015, 429): [r]: B+(*)
- Moonbound: Confession and Release (2005-07 [2008], Unsung): [cd]: C
- Curtis Nowosad: Dialectics (2014 [2015], Cellar Live): [cd]: B+(***)
- The Paranoid Style: The Purposes of Music in General (2013, Bar/None, EP): [r]: A-
- The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall (2015, Worldwide Battle, EP): [r]: B+(***)
- Sarah Partridge: I Never Thought I'd Be Here (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
- Kim Pensyl: Foreign Love Affair (2014 [2015], Summit): [cd]: B
- Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass (2015, Spacebomb): [r]: B+(*)
- Project Trio: Project Trio (2010, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
- Mark Rapp: Token Tales (2009, Paved Earth): [cdr]: B+(*)
- Times 4: Eclipse (2010, Groove Tonic Media): [cd]: B+(*)
- TRP (The Reese Project): Eastern Standard Time (2008 [2009], In the Groove): [cd]: B
- TRP (The Reese Project): Evening in Vermont (2011, Rhombus): [cd]: B-
- Phil Sargent: A New Day (2010, Sargent Jazz): [cd]: B-
- The Michael Waldrop Big Band: Time Within Itself (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B
- Lenny White: Anomaly (2010, Abstract Logix): [cd]: B-
- Mark Wingfield: Proof of Light (2014 [2015], Moonjune): [cd]: B
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- LeAnn Rimes: All-Time Greatest Hits (1996-2007 [2015], Curb): [r]: C+
Old records rated this week:
- Woody Herman and His Thundering Herd: Keep on Keepin' On: 1968-1970 (1968-70 [1998], Chess/GRP): [r]: B+(*)
- The Mendoza Line: Lost in Revelry (2002, Absolutely Kosher): [r]: B+(*)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet [RAAQ]: Intents and Purposes (Enja)
- Tony Adamo: Tony Adamo & the New York Crew (Urbanzone): May 1
- Andrew Bishop: De Profundis (Envoi)
- Andrew Diruzza Quintet: Shapes and Analogies (self-released)
- Charles Evans: On Beauty (More Is More): May 12
- Steve Johns: Family (Strikezone): May 5
- Tyler Kaneshiro & the Highlands: Amber of the Moment (self-released): May 5
- Robert Kennedy Trio: Big Shoes (self-released)
- Curtis Nowosad: Dialectics (Cellar Live)
- Old Time Musketry: Drifter (NCM East): March 31
- Dave Stryker: Messin' With Mister T (Strikezone): April 7
- Javier Vercher: Wish You Were Here (Musikoz)
Sunday, March 29, 2015
In the Dark
No Weekend Roundup this week. Got distracted with what follows, and
time got away from me. But if I had the time, the thing to focus on this
week is Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen. This isn't the first time --
Saudi Arabia and Egypt were fighting in Yemen in the mid-1960s -- but
they've never been this overt about it (possibly because Egypt seems to
be on their side this time). The US should be appalled, expecially since
it's being done with US-manufactured armaments. The UN should condemn
this blatant aggression, sanction all countries contributing to war in
Yemen, and try to arrange a democratic resolution between the eleven
distinct armed groups vying for power there. And needless to say, if
democracy is the goal, Saudi Arabia and Egypt cannot be the solution.
When I started writing this blog, I would include more or less short
notes whenever I saw a movie, along with grades, but at some point I
stopped doing so. I still have some rough notes in my scratch file for
movies that date back to 2011-12 (Hugo: B+; The Skin
I Live In: B+; The Lincoln Lawyer: A-;
Source Code: B+). It seems like we see fewer movies
each year. Four independent theaters have closed since we moved to
Wichita in 1999, leaving us with Bill Warren's monopoly, and Warren
got rid of an older theater that he used for relatively arty films --
said he was looking for a "higher use" for the property and wound up
selling it to a church. At the time he promised he'd keep showing
those films in his other theaters "because his wife liked them," but
within a year he divorced her, too. We also haven't rented movies
since moving here -- a fairly regular occurrence when we had a store
around the corner in Boston. We've been watching more TV series, but
not many films on TV.
I wrote a long post about American Sniper the other day,
but didn't wrap it up in a capsule review, so I thought I'd do that
here, and round it out with the rest of the little we saw from 2014.
I also went back and checked for releases in 2012 and 2013. I would
have guess that the number of movies I've seen last year was down,
but I came up with 20 in 2014, only 18 in 2013, and 20 in 2012. I
can remember back in Boston it seems like we must have seen one or
more per week, but those days are long gone. These are collected
from various annual release lists, so may well be incomplete --
it's also possible that my memory is fading.
The Lego Movie (Feb. 1): Animated, got rather amazing
hype when it came out. Lots of famous actor-voices, with Will Ferrell
as the villain, Lord Business. I suppose there is a lesson there about
capitalism, which I might have appreciated more had not everything else
been so annoying.
C+
300: Rise of an Empire (Mar. 4): Sequel to 2007 film
300 (which I haven't seen), based on ancient Greek war legends
as Sparta and/or Athens battles Persia, tied to an unpublished Frank
Miller graphic novel which raises everyone and every thing to the
level of war porn. Of course, as porn I enjoyed Eva Green (Artemisia)
much more than Sullivan Stapleton (Themistocles), even though with
the fate of civilization at stake she was consigned to the wrong side.
[TV]
B-
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Mar. 6): Wes Anderson movie,
based on various writings by Stefan Zweig, mostly set before and during
WWII, told through flashbacks from much later. The hotel appears to be
not in Budapest but somewhere in the Austrian Alps -- at least in some
mountains somewhere in Central Europe. Remarkably deep cast; Oscar wins
for production design, costume design, makeup and hair. Quite a story
too. [Saw it a second time on TV]
A-
Noah (Mar. 10): Bible epic from Darren Aronofsky,
although it could have come from one of those graphic novels,
especially as the "Watchers" take over. God destroys the world,
but the decision as to whether mankind should expire seems to be
Noah's, and he's in a foul mood. Happy ending, of course. [TV]
B-
Ida (May 2): Polish movie, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski,
nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, about a sheltered orphan
girl raised in a convent from WWII seeking insight into her past. Turns
out her parents were Jewish, killed by a farmer who hid her in a convent.
More interesting is her aunt, a lawyer who joins the search, and pays
a terrible price. In black and white, slow and heavy. [TV]
B+
Belle (May 2): The story of Dido Elizabeth Belle
Lindsay, the daughter of a British Captain Sir John Lindsay and an
enslaved African woman in the West Indies, adopted in 1765 and
raised as a "free gentlewoman" by Linday's uncle, William Murray,
Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice (a perfect role for Tom
Wilkinson), who eventually writes a key legal ruling that advances
the cause of abolition.
A-
Boyhood (June 11): Richard Linklater film, shot over
12 years as its principal subject (played by Ellar Coltrane) grows up
from six to eighteen, from first grade to leaving home for college,
and less closely follows his sister (a couple years older), mother
(Patricia Arquette's Oscar role), estranged father (Ethan Hawke, who
was evidently absent for most of the previous six years but takes a
consistent interest here). Several ill-chosen stepfathers come and
go, which provides most of the stress and strain. It all seems rather
eventful and remarkable compared, say, to my own life, but also quite
ordinary, which is the charm. I left hoping they had shot enough extra
footage to craft a Girlhood starring older sister Samantha
(Lorelei Linklater). Otherwise this will remain unique.
A
Snowpiercer (June 27): Directed by Joon-ho Bong from
a French graphic novel, depicts a future dystopia where the class system
is rigidly stratified from the back to the front of a train endlessly
racing through frozen wastes. The oppressed masses in the back revolt
and try to seize the master in the front. The class analysis became more
interesting in retrospect once the action subsided. [TV]
B
The Hundred-Foot Journey (August 8): Lasse Hallström
food film, with Helen Mirren running a Michelin-star restaurant in
the south of France, Indian emigre patriarch Om Puri setting up shop
across the street, his son (Manish Dayal) developing into a chef good
enough for Mirren to poach, and Charlotte Le Bon as intermediary.
The food itself is a little over-the-top, and the story is a bit
pat, but both are easy to enjoy.
B+
A Most Wanted Man (July 25): Film of a John Le Carré
novel starring the late Philip Seymour Hofman as a dissheveled German
spy chief, who finds and attempts to use a Chechen refugee to trap
a Muslim philanthropist into disclosing a financial conduit to a
terrorist organization. The CIA gets involved, turning all of Hofman's
reassurances into lies. With Le Carré the fiasco may be the point,
but one still expects more of the world within movies.
B
Magic in the Moonlight (July 25): Woody Allen movie,
with Colin Firth as a illusionist/sceptic who's not skeptical enough,
and Emma Stone as a charlatan and love interest. Suffers from some of
the worst philosophizing of Allen's career -- reminiscent of his
earliest movies but less funny. I wouldn't have minded so much, but
Laura went beyond hating this and spent the second half heckling.
B
Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
(Aug. 27): Oscar-winning movie by Alejandro Iñárritu, about an
actor (Michael Keaton), a big star in Hollywood playing a cartoon
superhero ("Birdman") seeking to salvage his acting credentials by
staging a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver story. Problems
ensue, including a scene-stealing co-star (Edward Norton) and the
vow of a critic (played by Lindsay Duncan) to pan the opening. Many
continuous pan shots turn the theater into a labyrinth, adding to
the claustrophobia. Even more annoying were the frequent lapses into
fantasy or magic -- Keaton levitating, smashing objects, quarrelling
with his Birdman alter-ego. At the climax of his opening, Keaton
takes a real gun instead of the stage prop and kills himself --
the ending the movie seemed to be aiming at -- but not even that
came off right: we find out that he merely shot his nose off, and
that the critic came around for the guy willing to spill his own
blood for art. Then he jumps out the hospital window and flies
away -- I suppose as Birdman repossesses him. Not without its
virtues -- Emma Stone's supporting role is one -- but pretty
full of shit.
B
Nightcrawler (Sept. 5): Jake Gyllenhaal plays a
crook and self-help devotee who finds his calling in shooting gory
video at car wrecks and crime scenes -- he's advised, "if it bleeds,
it leads" -- and selling it to news broadcasters. He then finds
that he can get even more sensational footage by orchestrating
the events -- in particular, he stages a shootout between cops
and home invaders he tracked down. Creepy.
B+
The Imitation Game (Sept. 27): Benedict Cumberbatch
plays Alan Turing (mathematician, cryptanalyst, a major figure in
the development of computer science), focusing on his work during
WWII in breaking Germany's Enigma encryption codes, but extending
from grade school to his arrest for homosexuality in 1952 and death
in 1954. The latter events were ghastly by any standards, and they
make Turing a martyr, but the film plays this up in all sorts of
perverse ways, making Turing appear more dysfunctional and stranger
than he actually was, distorting his work, and consigning his
colleagues at Bletchley to the sidelines, cheering or (more often)
booing as he solves all the problems single-handedly. (See
Wikipedia's section on "Accuracy" -- the longest I've ever seen.)
Keira Knightley has a nice supporting role, again riddled with
inaccuracies but something the movie could have used more of.
B-
Gone Girl (Oct. 3): David Fincher film of a bestselling
novel which Laura and virtually all of her friends had read. Rosamund
Pike plays the wicked wife who frames her husband, played by Ben Afleck,
for her murder, and he's guilty enough the charges have some traction.
Of course, a body would help, but she loses nerve and doesn't go through
with her planned suicide. Instead, she returns to a former boyfriend,
finds him a bore, murders him, and passes it off as self-defense. Many
times you see a movie and leave wondering what happens next, but with
these people it's impossible to care (and probably ridiculous to boot).
B+
Inherent Vice (Oct. 4): Paul Thomas Anderson film of
a Thomas Pynchon novel, set in southern California in the 1970s, with
close to a dozen odd characters improbably interconnected in multiple
ways -- all that looping back has a whiff of conspiracy, but my brief
familiarity with Pynchon (V. is my all-time favorite novel; I
failed to get through Gravity's Rainbow but still intend to
finish it some day) suggests that's just the way the world is wired.
Doesn't feel like a great movie, but a persistently interesting one.
A-
St. Vincent (Oct. 24): Bill Murray plays a surly
Vietnam Vet -- smokes, drinks, gambles, has a wife with Alzheimer's
in a nursing home he can't afford and a Russian prostitute (Naomi
Watts) in his bed when he can; otherwise he's just a dirtbag and
asshole, until he reluctantly befriends a neighbor kid (starting
with a scam for babysitting money). The kid goes to Catholic school,
and evidently the only thing they teach there is saints, so when
he get an assignment to write up "a real-life saint" he does some
research and settles on Murray. Probably the best scene is when
some mobsters try to shake him down for money he has a stroke and
creeps them out. What creeped me out was the sanctimoniousness
over his Vietnam "service."
B-
American Sniper (Nov. 11): Clint Eastwood's Iraq War
film traces the path of Chris Kyle from good-hearted Texas simpleton
to serial killer but gets caught up in the action sequences, leaving
us with only the sketchiest sense of how he played his "legend" into
postwar fame and fortune, or even how he got martyred as an advocate
for the therapeutic value of shooting guns for the mentally ill.
Sienna Miller reminds us that wives can be forgiving as well as
hysterical. Bradley Cooper plays Kyle partly as modest stoic and
partly as action junkie, clearly preferring the hunt to his home
life, not that he has the critical facilities to question any
convention. That any Iraqis emerge with more dimensions than paper
targets is due to the scriptwriter's fabrications, but even they
turn out to be clichés, and even more absent is any hint of the
thinking that made American soldiers arbiters of life and death
in that miserable country. I could imagine someone making a mirror
movie from the sniper Mustapha's viewpoint, with all that discipline
and craft ending as his head explodes from Kyle's distant shot, but
who in America would pay to see such a thing? We'd rather be fed
the self-adulatory pablum this picture delivers. Still, it's sad
that the only pride America can take from this war is the efficacy
of its assassins.
B-
Selma (Nov. 11): Daniel Oyelowo does a fine job as
Martin Luther King as the SCLC moved into Selma, Alabama to campaign
for voting rights in 1965, and great care was taken in the casting
of the many others who made up the movement, including the tensions
between SCLC and SNCC. The white violence against the marchers was
also palpable (although several incidents were merely mentioned).
On the other hand, I was constantly irritated by how far portrayals
of major political figures strayed from my own vivid memories from
the day: especially Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon Johnson and Tim Roth as
George Wallace. (I was more forgiving of Dylan Baker, who often plays
psychotic killers, as J. Edgar Hoover, although the resemblance was
equally remote.) One could have made a stronger point that the 50th
anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which came from demonstrations
in Selma, coincides with recent Republican moves to gut the Act and
once again to deny poorer Americans the right to vote.
B+
I suppose it wouldn't hurt to include 2015 (to date):
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Feb. 26):
Two or three storyline threads stretch our favorite Indian hotelier,
Sonny Kapoor (played by Dev Patel) way past the breaking point, but
this is saved by the same thing that saved its predecessor: it's a
marvelous showcase for venerable British actors and actresses --
Bill Nighy and Ronald Pickup have the most to do sorting out their
love lives, and Penelope Wilton makes a brief show for a trailer
laugh. On the downside, it seems like they spent a lot of time at
the end trying to kill Maggie Smith off, then couldn't do it. Ends
inevitably with a big Bollywood dance.
B
Movies I didn't see but would have liked to:
- Chef (May 9): Jon Favreau as LA chef who quits his job
and opens a food truck in Miami (with Sofia Vergara).
- Foxcatcher (May 19): Steve Carrell Oscar nominee.
- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Aug. 22): Roberto
Rodriguez film based on Frank Miller graphic novel.
- The Drop (Sept. 12): Dennis Lehane story, with the
late James Gandolfini.
- The Theory of Everything (Sept. 27): Stephen Hawking
biopic, with Eddie Redmayne Oscar win.
- Whiplash (Oct. 10): JK Simmons Oscar win.
- A Most Violent Year (Nov. 6): Crime and business in
New York City in 1981, with Jessica Chastain.
- Still Alice (Dec. 5): Julianne Moore Oscar win.
- Wild (Dec. 5): Reese Witherspoon Oscar nominee.
- Mr. Turner (Dec. 19): Mike Leigh film about painter
J.M.W. Turner.
- Two Days, One Night (Dec. 24): Marion Cotillard.
- Big Eyes (Dec. 25): Tim Burton movie.
For a baseline, I went through the 2013 film list. Just wrote down
grades (and can't guarantee my memory is perfect there).
- Fruitvale Station (Jan. 19): Sundance Grand Jury winner,
a day in the life of a young black man killed by police in Oakland.
A-
- 42 (Apr. 12): Jackie Robinson in 1947. A-
- Iron Man 3 (Apr. 14): Robert Downey Jr. [TV]
B-
- Mud (Apr. 26): Matthew McConaughey. A-
- The Great Gatsby (May 10): Baz Luhrmann film, very
disappointing. C+
- All Is Lost (May 22): Robert Redford sinks at sea
(or maybe not). [TV] B+
- Before Midnight (May 24): Richard Linklater film
with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, third in series. A
- Red 2 (July 19): Bruce Willis shoot-em-up, with
Anthony Hopkins as a mad scientist. [TV] B+
- The Butler (Aug. 16): Lee Daniels film, based on
long-term White House butler. B+
- Gravity (Aug. 28): Alfonso Cuarón film, George
Clooney and Sandra Bullock go to space, only one comes back. B+
- Philomena (Aug. 31): Stephen Frears film. B+
- 12 Years a Slave (Oct. 18): The story of a free
black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. A
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Nov. 15): Sequel,
prequel, indecisive. [TV] B
- Inside Llewyn Davis (Dec. 6): Coen brothers take
on '60s folk scene. B+
- American Hustle (Dec. 12): Abscam movie. A-
- The Wolf of Wall Street (Dec. 17): Martin Scorsese
film about greed in the 1980s. B-
- Saving Mr. Banks (Dec. 20): Emma Thompson as P.L.
Travers, author of Mary Poppins, sparring with Walt Disney.
And 2012:
- Arbitrage (Jan. 21): Investment fraud film, with
Richard Gere. B+
- The Hunger Games (Mar. 12): Future games. B+
- Marvel's the Avengers (Apr. 11): Comic/fantasy mish-mash.
B-
- The Three Stooges (Apr. 13): Farrelly brothers update
the classic. B-
- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (May 4): Retirement home
for famous British actors. B+
- Moonrise Kingdom (May 25): Wes Anderson film. A-
- Five Broken Cameras (May 30): Documentary, protesting
the wall at Bil'in. A-
- Ice Age: Continental Drift (June 27): Cartoon. [TV]
B-
- Argo (Aug. 31): CIA stages fake film in Iran. B+
- Hyde Park on Hudson (Aug. 31): Bill Murray as FDR.
A-
- The Master (Sept. 1): Paul Thomas Anderson film about
spiritual cult. B-
- Anna Karenina (Sept. 7): Joe Wright film of Tolstoy's
novel. [TV] B
- Silver Linings Playbook (Sept. 8): Bradley Cooper
and Jennifer Lawrence. B+
- Quartet (Sept. 9): Retired British singers. B+
- Trouble With the Curve (Sept. 21): Clint Eastwood,
baseball scout. [TV] B+
- Seven Psychopaths (Oct. 12): Criminals, screenwriters,
and dogs in southern California. B+
- Lincoln (Oct. 8): Steven Spielberg film, with Daniel
Day Lewis. A-
- Killing Them Softly (Nov. 30): Hit men. B+
- Django Unchained (Dec. 11): Quentin Tarantino film.
A-
- Les Miserables (Dec. 25): Hugo musical. [TV] B
Time prevents me from going back further. One last statistical check
is for how many A/A- records in each year: 2014: 4; 2013: 6; 2012: 5.
Down last year, but not much more than random chance.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
American Sniper
I finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood's American Sniper
film yesterday. It took me so long mostly because my wife, who usually
picks the films we see, wanted no part of it: I had to go alone, something
I hadn't done since I caught the "last chance" showing of Pedro Almodovar's
The Skin I Live In in 2011. I didn't argue very hard. Everything
I had read[1] suggested that the movie has many problems and few virtues.
More importantly, I read Nicholas Schmidle's profile of the sniper in
question, Chris Kyle
(In
the Crosshairs), so I had a pretty good idea what the story was going
to be. The only question was whether director Clint Eastwood might add
some nuance and conflict that Kyle doesn't seem to have ever grasped.
But after Eastwood's senior moment at the GOP convention, and given his
occasional infatuation with American jingoism, that wasn't guaranteed.
It turns out that the movie is remarkably compressed (despite a 2:20
running time). It starts with what became the trailer, a scene with Kyle
on a rooftop in Fallujah contemplating shooting a child and/or his mother
as armored vehicles inch down a rubble-strewn street with US soldiers
methodically going house-to-house, kicking doors in. He ultimately kills
both, but before the shots are fired, the scene is interrupted for a
little background.
We see a pre-teen Kyle hunting with his father, and fighting with
schoolkids. At the family dinner table, his father explains that there
are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs,
who protect the sheep from the wolves -- Kyle's worldview in a nut
shell. Grown up, Kyle rides bulls and broncs in a rodeo. Then, after
a news report of a terror attack he signs up for the Navy Seals. We
then get many scenes of sadistic basic training, a bar break where he
picks up a wife, intense sniper training, 9/11, and his first tour in
Iraq, where his first kills were that child and mother.
The bulk of the film recounts his four tours in Iraq, each staged
with an intense action sequence, separated by brief returns home as
his family grows. Two of the action sequences involve talking to his
wife on the phone, so she gets in on the war experience. As a sniper,
Kyle lurks patiently on rooftops and in buildings, surveying the war
calmly, methodically picking off "bad guys." But over time he seeks
more action, so he joins in on clearing buildings, and is close by
as two of his closest buddies get shot (one killed instantly, the
other survived but was blinded and died in a later surgery).
The action intensifies, with the final battle ultimately won by
Mother Nature as a sandstorm engulfed Sadr City. That was the one
where he made an "impossibly long shot" to kill his nemesis, a
notorious Syrian sniper, only to have his building surrounded by
swarming enemies with AK-47s -- the intense action interrupted by
a call to the wife to tell her he's "ready to come home now." Of
course, the crowds ate it up. The postwar scenes were anticlimactic:
at first he showed signs of PTSD, but they fade away as he dedicates
his life to helping other veterans. He takes one multiple-amputee
to the shooting range, and when the disabled vet hits the target,
he announces that he feels like he got his balls back. Salvation
through shooting becomes Kyle's cause. In the last scene, he gets
into a truck with another PTSD-damaged vet. Then the movie cuts to
black, revealing that the vet murdered Kyle that day. The movie
ends with footage of Kyle's funeral, and indeed it is touching.
Just not clear for what.
The film is based on Kyle's autobiography, American Sniper:
The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military
History, written with two co-authors. The book came out in
2012 and was a bestseller before his death in 2013, and has sold
many more copies (more than 1.2 million) since. The movie doesn't
show anything about Kyle's post-Navy business or how the book
and his self-promotion affected his life. The movie doesn't
bring up Kyle's claim to have shot looters after Hurricane
Katrina from atop the Superdome, or his story about "punching
out Scruff Face" -- Jesse Ventura, who successfully sued Kyle's
estate for libel (see
Nicholas Schmidle: The Ventura Verdict).
This would be a good time to quote
Wikipedia's paragraph on "Historical accuracy":
The film takes several dramatic liberties with the story; The
Guardian wrote that "this film alters Kyle's book significantly."
The child that Kyle is forced to shoot in his first engagement is not
found in the memoir. The characters of Mustafa and the Butcher were
created for the film, and Kyle's real-life 2100 yard shot was taken
to kill an insurgent holding a rocket launcher. Slate notes that the
climatic battle in a sandstorm at the end of the film never took place.
A scene in which Kyle finds weapons hidden under an insurgent's
floorboards, and the subsequent firefight, was also created solely
for the film.
"The Butcher" is an "Al-Qaeda enforcer" who is shown attacking a
child -- the son of a "sheik" who gave info to Americans after Kyle's
team broke into his house -- with a drill. He is killed in the firefight
after the scene with the weapons stash. Mustafa is an enemy sniper --
an Olympic-winning marksman from Syria who appears at least three times
in the movie, becoming a personal obsession for Kyle. Kyle kills him
with his 2100-yard long shot, as part of the climactic battle scene.
In other words, each and every significant encounter Kyle has with
any Iraqi was invented for dramatic effect. (Presumably at least some
of the anonymous, long-distance sniper kills come from the book. Kyle
was credited with 160 kills. The movie shows maybe a dozen.) No doubt
the fiction adds to the movie's drama. Perhaps it also whitewashes the
US war effort, but Kyle was never more than a small cog in the military
machine -- his rank after four tours was Chief Petty Officer, basically
a sergeant -- and his approach to the war was so simplistic you hardly
expect anything more: kill "bad guys"! Who are the "bad guys"? The ones
who are trying to kill you.
One of Donald Rumsfeld's most indelible one-liners was that "you go
to war with the army you have, not necessarily the one you want." The
actual army that Kyle belonged to is defined simply: they are trained
to be extraordinarily lethal, when deployed they are very focused on
their own self-defense, and their primary defense strategy is to be as
aggressive as possible. No one in Kyle's army questions why they are
in Iraq. No one doubts their right to be where they are or go where
they want. And everyone is deeply affronted any time they meet any
form of resistance. No one recognizes that other points of view are
possible. For Kyle, in particular, everyone he kills is evil; if not,
he wouldn't have killed them. The whole movie, from the sheepdog
story on, is testament to Kyle's moral certainty, and the tearful
funeral excess just serves to elevate his moral certainty to the
nation as a whole. And that's why the movie elicits such a solemn
reaction from a certain kind of American: the one who believes that
America is the greatest nation in the world, so great that the rest
of the world can (or should) prostrate itself at our feet.
Nothing in the movie gives you a chance to question either the
politics or the wisdom of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq,
let alone the wider trajectory of US involvement in the region.
Even though most of the movie takes place in a foreign land, it
never leaves an American mindset. For that reason it works as
propaganda: even without explicit lies it reaffirms the war by
not questioning it. What makes that worse is that the trajectory
of understanding the Iraq war started to change with the Surge
in 2007. The early period, 2003-04, was eventually viewed as an
unmitigated disaster, but that boiled down to three things:
- Initially the war was supposed to be this huge success, so
everything was very open, and journalists actually wrote about
Iraqis -- Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near is a good
example, but Thomas Ricks' Fiasco uncovered the military,
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City
took on the occupation administration, and Seymour Hersh's
Chain of Command exposed Abu Ghraib.
- After Paul Bremer left, the US essentially shut down coverage
of Iraq, and few journalists ventured beyond the Green Zone, so
little was written. This didn't fix the perception that Iraq was
a disaster, but it limited the political damage.
- From 2007, the Surge military escalation was accompanied by a
great increase in military-focused reporting. Again, the Iraqi
countryside was too dangerous to cover, but more importantly, the
US military refocused on saving its reputation. This is when Ricks
changed his tune and wrote The Gamble, and you start seeing
books like Bing West's The Strongest Tribe, Linda Robinson's
Tell Me How This Ends, and an avalanche of soldier memoirs,
including Kyle's.
It's hard to remember that when Bush et al. conjured up this war,
even though they led with the fear card, they tried to present the
war like we'd be doing the Iraqis one big favor. That sentiment was
one of the first casualties of the war. There's an old joke that
goes: it's hard to remember that your mission was to drain the swamp
when you're ass-deep in alligators. In the early days, Iraq was seen
as an epic adventure in nation building. In the end, it's no more
than alligator killing, which is probably why the SEALs are the last
soldiers standing tall.
Moreover, the worldview has changed. Early in the War on Terror,
the "bad guys" were few: the religious fanatics of Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, the Baathist elites of Iraq and Syria, a few others -- as
much oppressors of their own people as enemies of the US. However,
it turns out that the US was never "greeted as liberators" -- that
everywhere the US bombed turned into enemy territory. That should
have led us to question our entire approach, indeed who we are, but
not being capable of introspection, we've changed out view of them
instead. Looking at the US response to ISIS, even we can imagine no
upside: just a long slog of killing a neverending supply of "bad
guys," because once we enter a region, practically everyone turns
into "bad guys."
Of course, if you're not entranced by this latest, most vicious
twist on "the American religion," it's possible to view American
Sniper differently. It is a celebration of a cold blooded killer,
but it also details his descent into PTSD, as he turns into someone
his wife at one point says she no longer recognizes. Kyle at least
saves himself by doubling down on the militaristic pietism that made
him rich and famous, but he is surrounded by other vets who can't
make that work -- including the one who killed him. It takes an
extraordinary amount of empathy to watch this movie and conclude
that the war has been disastrous for Iraqi families, even though
there are scenes that show just that. But it should be easier to
see how expensive the toll on American lives has been, whether you
do or do not accord any special value to the lives of soldiers.
Kyle should be viewed as a tragic figure in American history. He
sure is no hero.
[1] Some links from previous posts:
We can add a few more:
One more thought about the movie. One thing that is loosely implied
is that Kyle got a perverse satisfaction out of sniping, at least for
a while. Bradley Cooper plays Kyle as exceptionally modest -- lots of
other characters dub him "The Legend" and offer other accolades, but
Kyle mostly sloughs them off. Even though he's always teamed with a
spotter, sniping is patient and methodical work, not something full of
adrenaline rushes. But as he goes from tour to tour, he keeps getting
drawn back for more and more -- although he never articulates it,
there is something to sniping that he never experienced before and
that once he experienced it would be missing from his life. It
reminded me of a remarkable interview in the second season of The
Fall, where serial killer Paul Prescott explains the intense
sensation of living that he feels when he kills someone. Of course,
Prescott killed far fewer people than Kyle, and did so furtively
against the law whereas Kyle was on his government's payroll -- the
difference was that Kyle never had to hide what he was doing -- but
both were similar in the meticulous, artful way they set up and
dispatched their victims. (You can find a summary of the episode
here, although it skips the part I'm referring to.)
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Daily Log
A draft letter to a big shot today:
Dear Secretary John Kerry,
I doubt you'll ever read this, much less take me seriously, but seeing
as how you're stuck with Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's PM for the rest
of your term, and seeing as how no one else is saying the sort of things
I offer below, I figure there's no harm in trying.
As you know, Netanyahu vowed that there will never be a Palestinian
state as long as he's PM. That wasn't just a rare moment of candor --
in his first term he turned Rabin's "Peace Process" into a sham, and
more recently he frustrated George Mitchell's peace mission. That is
the one thing he has been consistent about through a long career of
playing politics about everything else.
But it's not just Netanyahu. As Avi Raz shows in his book, The
Bride and the Dowry, Israel could very easily have negotiated a
peace deal in 1967 with the Arab states while creating a viable
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza without any of the mess
and fuss of later settlements, but none of the major politicians of
the period were willing to do so. Instead, you get Abba Eban jumping
from one line to another, whatever it took to hold at bay the diplomats
who crafted UNSCR 235.
I could go on and on -- I've considered writing a book on the
subject -- but Netanyahu's statements and his election make it clear
for now that Israel will resist any efforts to resolve the conflict.
Still, it is more important now than ever that someone make the
effort, and you are perhaps the only one who can do that. But you'll
have to go about it differently from all past efforts. In particular,
you need to realize that negotiations can only work if both sides
have compatible goals -- "prevention of a Palestinian state" is not
one of those -- and reasonably equal power. The Oslo Accords is an
example of what happens when one power holds all the cards.
What I want to propose is that you put together a complete,
standalone deal, preferably supported by the Quartet, which Israel
can accept or reject, the latter with adverse consequences (loss
of aid, economic sanctions). The deal would only cover Gaza, which
would become a state, fully independent of Israel, with no claims
on Israel or claims for Palestinian people not living in Gaza.
Gaza would defined by its borders, a state representing the people
who live there.
Gaza's founding would be subject to several conditions. The state
and legal system would be based on a constitution written to ensure
democratic procedures and minority rights, including strong protections
for freedom of speech, religion, assembly and petition, privacy, etc.
(though not gun ownership), and a pacifism clause similar to the one
in the constitution of Japan. The constitution could be amended after
10-20 years by two-thirds vote. Gaza would also be subject to special
international tribunals that would have the power to reject and remove
judges (for 10-20 years) and investigate and prosecute corruption of
public officials (for as long as substantial foreign aid is offered
to reconstruct Gaza). Gaza would have no army, limited policing, and
strictly regulated armaments.
Everyone who lives in Gaza at the time of independence will enjoy
full and equal rights of citizenship. This will not prejudice any
claims refugees may have to "right of return" elsewhere. But the
UNRWA program for Palestinian refugees will begin to be phased out.
Israel would remain responsible for policing its own border with
Gaza, but would not be allowed to enter Gaza (including air space),
and will not interfere with shipping into Gaza. (An international team
may be tasked with inspecting shipping to identify any contraband.)
An international tribunal will resolve any border conflicts between
Gaza and Israel/Egypt. An international bank will be set up to handle
all aid contributions to Gaza, and the bank's funds will insure any
border damage claims. Israel would be responsible for covering any
damage claims found against the government or any of its people.
Water is also subject to this tribunal.
Draft proposals for all of this should be circulated publicly and
comments collected and considered, but all final decisions are yours,
informed by the guiding principle that the resulting state should be
as fair, equitable, peaceable, and prosperous as possible. The whole
package would then be voted on in Gaza. If approved, Israel would
accept (or reject), with a time frame set as part of the package.
One of the principles here is that we should do what we can when
we can do it, not wait until some hypothetical future point where
everything can be given a "final status." (More than anything else,
it was the "final status" requirement that broke Oslo.) Since Israel
deconstructed its Gaza settlements in 2005 there has been nothing but
self-perpetuating "security concerns" preventing Gaza from being
separated from the problems of Israel's other occupied territories.
This still leaves the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights,
which are more conflicted, more difficult issues that may in turn
require different solutions. Another day for them, but we should at
least make a start by clearly articulating the requirement that no
matter how many states and what borders we wind up with, every person
currently under Israel's thumb, and every stateless refugee from the
conflict, must attain full and equal rights under whatever state he
or she lands in.
Obviously, a lot more details need to be worked out, but this is
a clear and basic strategy which would make a substantial step toward
peace in the region. That is something you would like to accomplish,
isn't it?
Monday, March 23, 2015
Music Week
Music: Current count 24735 [24701] rated (+34), 409 [420] unrated (-11).
Eighteen records below come from Rhapsody. I played Kendrick Lamar
and Modest Mouse three times: one clicked, the other did not. I see
that Christgau has given Modest Mouse six A- grades plus a relatively
long ungraded review (not in his Dean's List so presumably B+ or less).
I have them with four A- records (including the one Christgau missed),
so I'm less of a fan but not unable to tune into their shade of alt.
This one just strikes me as real patchy.
Also played Vijay Iyer three times, also on the computer because
ECM -- once the best-bankrolled label in jazz -- has lately gotten
cheap. I'm often hard pressed to explain why I like some piano trios
and less so others (unless there's a lot of crashing involved, often
the case with Irène Schweizer or Satoko Fujii), but I usually know
(as I did with Iyer's two previous albums with this trio) but this
time I didn't. I'm a bit bothered that in recent lists both
Jason Gubbels and
Chris Monsen -- two critics who usually line up very closely with
me -- picked Break Stuff as among the best jazz albums so far
this year, and I'm always aware that listening on the computer is far
from ideal. But I feel like I gave Iyer a fair shot, and besides I have
a bigger disagreement with Gubbels and Monsen: Rudresh Mahanthappa's
Bird Calls, number 3 and 1 respectively, a record I dislike far
more than the B+(*) I gave it suggests. Iyer and Mahanthappa have huge
reputations I mostly agree with (in my database, Iyer has 10 A- grades
and Mahanthappa has 5, plus each has one full A). Otherwise I scoured
the lists for records I hadn't heard (6/16 from Gubbels, 2/6 Monsen).
Checked out DRKWAV and Makaya McCraven from Gubbels list, and have
them at B+(***).
More surprising for me is that only one of the eleven jazz albums
on my
2015 A-list is on either list: Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth:
Epicenter (my #1, #2 on Gubbels). The others:
- Schlippenbach Trio: Features (Intakt)
- Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music)
- Charles McPherson: The Journey (Capri)
- John O'Gallagher Trio: The Honeycomb (Fresh Sound New Talent) *
- Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (TUM, 2CD)
- Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (TUM)
- Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (Blue Note/ArtistShare)
- Jim Snidero: Main Street (Savant)
- Katie Thiroux: Introducing Katie Thiroux (BassKat)
- Oliver Lake/William Parker: To Roy (Intakt)
I expect most of them will get there eventually. One curious thing
about this list is that all of my A-list jazz has come actual CDs (some
in curious advance packaging), and none from Rhapsody or downloads.
(All four of my non-jazz A-list records are from Rhapsody.) I've rated
19 jazz records this year based on a computer source: 6 ***, 7 **, 4 *,
1 B, 2 B-. The grade breakdown for physical jazz CDs: 11 A-, 22 ***,
29 **, 21 *, 12 B, 3 B- -- similar curve aside from the shutout at the
top. One might conclude I'm susceptible to bribes. Maybe I just tend
to appreciate the effort. Or maybe there's a selection effect, where
people send me things I'm more likely to like (and skip things I'm
more likely to dis). Or maybe it's just the speakers and the audio
quality.
Robert Christgau's 2014 Dean's List has finally appeared at
BN Review. He came up with 63 records, for some reason omitting
Steve Reich's Radio Rewrite (rated A- on Jan. 30, same date
as two other list items) and Angola Soundtrack 2 (A- on Mar.
13, same date as Aby Ngana Diop). Only one record on the list hasn't
been reviewed in Expert Witness: Sunny Sweeney's Provoked.
He offers some excuses for the shorter-than-usual list -- he's come
up with close to 90 in recent full-employment years, and slacked
off toward 60 during a previous CG hiatus -- then concludes: "Maybe
the field is thinning out, or maybe the downtick is a blip." My own
experience was that I came up with an all-time record 170+ A-list
albums released in 2014, so I can only conlcude that the music is
there if you have the time and tenacity to dig it out. The industry's
bottom line may suck, but there's no evidence that lack of incentive
is keeping musicians from making good music. And with streaming,
more music is probably accessible to more people than ever before.
On the other hand, I can't say anything hopeful about incentives
for writing about music.
Another deadline snuck up on me, so no Twitter reviews this week.
New records rated this week:
- Oren Ambarchi: Quixotism (2014, Editions Mego): [r]: B+(**)
- Antoine Berjeaut: Wasteland (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(*)
- Dewa Budjana: Hasta Karma (2014 [2015], Moonjune): [cd]: B+(*)
- Clem Snide: Girls Come First (2015, Zaphwee): [r]: B+(**)
- Dahi Divine: The Element (2013 [2015], Right Direction): [cd]: B+(**)
- Stephan Crump/Mary Halvorson: Secret Keeper (2013 [2015], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(**)
- DRKWAV: The Purge (2015, Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(***)
- John Fedchock Quartet: Live: Fluidity (2013 [2015], Summit): [cd]: B+(***)
- Janice Friedman Trio: Live at Kitano (2011 [2015], CAP): [cd]: B+(*)
- Gang of Four: What Happens Next (2015, Metropolis): [r]: B+(*)
- Maxfield Gast: Ogo Pogo (2014 [2015], Militia Hill): [cd]: B+(**)
- Colleen Green: I Want to Grow Up (2015, Hardly Art): [r]: B
- Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff (2014 [2015], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
- Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope): [r]: A-
- Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm: Spark (2014 [2015], Water Street Music): [cd]: B+(**)
- The Mavericks: Mono (2015, Valory): [r]: B+(**)
- Makaya McCraven: In the Moment (2014 [2015], International Anthem): [bc]: B+(***)
- Modest Mouse: Strangers to Ourselves (2015, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
- Raoul: The Spanish Donkey (2014 [2015], Rare Noise): [cdr]: B
- Sachal: Slow Motion Miracles (2014 [2015], Okeh): [cdr]: B
- Benny Sharoni: Slant Signature (2014 [2015], Papaya): [cd]: B+(**)
- Alex Sipiagin: Balance 38-58 (2014 [2015], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
- Bjørn Solli: Aglow: The Lyngør Project Vol. 1 (2013 [2015], Lyngør): [cd]: B+(**)
- Jacky Terrasson: Take That (2014 [2015], Impulse): [r]: B+(**)
- Steve Turre: Spiritman (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
- Unhinged Sextet: Clarity (2014 [2015], OA2): [cd]: B
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- David Borden: Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments (1981 [2015], Spectrum Spools): [r]: B+(***)
- James Clay: The Kid From Dallas: Tenorman (1956-57 [2015], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
- Connie Converse: How Sad, How Lovely (1954 [2015], Squirrel Thing): [r]: B+(**)
- Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness (1989-98 [2015], Strut): [r]: B+(**)
Old records rated this week:
- Milford Graves: Percussion Ensemble With Sunny Morgan (1965 [2003], ESP-Disk): [r]: B+(*)
- Randy Weston: Blues to Africa (1974, Arista/Freedom): [r]: B+(**)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Isaac Darche: Team & Variations (Challenge): April 14
- Kansas: Miracles Out of Nowhere (Epic/Legacy, DVD+CD)
- Kaze: Uminari (Circum-Libra): May 5
- Jason Miles/Ingrid Jensen: Kind of New (Whaling City Sound)
Miscellaneous notes:
- Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness (1989-98 [2015], Strut):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
- LeAnn Rimes: All-Time Greatest Hits (1996-2007 [2015],
Curb):
C+ [rhapsody]
- Swamp Dogg: The Best of Swamp Dogg (1970-76 [1982],
War Bride):
A- [rhapsody]
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Weekend Roundup
The top story of last week's news cycle was Israel's elections for a
new parliament (Knesset). Many people hoped that the voters would
finally dispose of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the last
minutes "Bibi" swung hard to the racist right and wound up with a
six-seat plurality, mostly at the expense of small parties nominally
to the right of Likud. That still leaves Netanyahu only half way to
forming a new Knesset majority coalition, but few observers see that
as a problem, although it probably means further concessions to the
"religious" parties -- Shas, United Torah, etc. Best place to start
reading about this is
Richard Silverstein: Israeli Election Post-Mortem: Rearranging the
Deck Chairs:
In shreying about the Arab masses running to polling places and foreign
governments funneling shovels-full of cash to topple him, he appealed to
the worst devils of Israel's nature, to turn Lincoln's quotation on his
head.
The results cannot but worsen the growing rancidness of the Likud
vision of contemporary Israel in the noses of many Israelis, Diaspora
Jews and the world at large. There is a growing sense that Israel cannot
get itself out of the mess it's in.
Some other links on Israel:
-
Robert Fantina: Netanyahu's victory - what is the cost? Netanyahu,
of course, figures there should be none, as he's already walked back
many of the inflammatory things he said to rally Israel's right to his
election cause. If there were any doubts that he is a liar, someone
who will say whatever it takes under any circumstances, that should
have been dispelled, especially if you add the Boehner speech to what
he said before and after election. There is no doubt that more and
more people are noticing this -- especially previous supporters of
Israel who are becoming embarrassed at what their fantasy has turned
into. But the campaign not only haunts Netanyahu, the election taints
the voters. By re-electing Netanyahu, Israel's voters have shown that
they're unwilling to do anything to change course. Therefore, only
other nations can help Israel change course. We've nudged closer to
that realization, but the US in particular probably isn't there yet.
Still, every new event will be seen through the prism of this election.
-
Allison Deger: Meet the Knesset members from the Joint List:
as I look at these pictures, I'm reminded of Bill Clinton's promise
to appoint a cabinet "that looks like America looks."
-
Richard Silverstein: Israel's Election: Bibi and Blood in the Water:
Starts with Netanyahu's pre-election press conference statement, then
adds, "Bibi is runnin' scared." Post-election we know that his hysteria
worked, saving Likud from finishing second to "Just Not Bibi." Not sure
this is helpful, but
Annie Robbins: An American translation of Netanyahu's racist get out the
vote speech translates Netanyahu's screed into an American political
context (replacing "Arab" with "black," "right wing" and "Likud" with
"Republican," "Labor" with "Democrats," "Israel" with "United States").
That may help you understand just how far Israeli political culture has
sunk, and why certain Americans are so gung ho about getting the US to
emulate Israel more, but you'll miss some nuances: e.g., Democrats in
the US welcome the support of blacks and aren't ashamed to appoint a
couple to cabinet posts and such, Israel's Labor Party (aka The Zionist
Camp) wouldn't dare do anything like that. Indeed, their fondness of
"the two-state solution" is more often presented as a way to separate
Jewish Israelis from Arabs.
-
Josh Marshall: Bibi: Wait, the Arabs Love Me!: Netanyahu starts
to explain away his recent racist comments, including extracts from
an interview for American ears (with Andrea Mitchell).
-
Jonathan Alter: Bibi's Ugly Win Will Harm Israel: "Netanyahu came
back from the dead by doing something politicians almost never do --
predicting his own defeat. He told base voters that he would lose if
they didn't abandon far-right-winger Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayeudi
Party and flock back to Likud. Instead of trying to hide his desperation,
he flaunted (or contrived) it, to great political effect, winning by
several seats more than expected." Something not often talked about
is how often right-wingers have to appeal to liberal values to cover
up their own inadequacies. Thus someone like Netanyahu has to talk
about his desire for peace and security, or even something as specific
(and easily disproven) as his commitment to providing infrastructure
for Arab Citizens of Israel, even while making such laudable goals
impossible. That they get away with it is because their platitudes
are so universal they are rarely questioned. Even rank hypocrisy is
often excused as mere incompetence. GW Bush, for instance, is famous
for his failed wars, his imploded economy, his gross incompetence
after Hurricane Katrina -- an embarrassing string of bad luck, as
no one would dare suggest that his results were intended. But really,
those results were entirely predictable given his worldview. Likewise,
Netanyahu's repeated failures to make any progress whatsoever toward
peace and justice have been deliberate, and in a sense heroic.
-
Alex Kane: J Street's fall from relevance: "In a postelection
statement [Jeremy] Ben-Ami said J Street would continue to stand 'for
an end to occupation, for a two-state solution and for an Israel that
is committed to its core democratic principles and Jewish values.' It's
a nice sentiment but one that is out of touch with the facts on the
ground, as Netanyahu's final days of campaigning revealed."
-
David Shulman: Israel: The Stark Truth: "Mindful of Netanyahu's
long record of facile mendacity, commentators on the left have tended
to characterize these statements as more dubious 'rhetoric'; already,
under intense pressure from the United States, he has waffled on the
question of Palestinian statehood in comments directed at a foreign,
English-speaking audience. But I think that, for once, he was actually
speaking the truth in that last pre-election weekend -- a popular truth
among his traditional supporters."
-
Anshel Pfeffer: Netanyahu stoked primal fears in Israel: "Netanyahu,
in his own tiny bubble of privilege and sycophancy, was on the verge of
losing the election. But he emerged in time to stoke the primal fears of
his electorate of their fate. It was a destructive tactic that took
advantage of racism and ignorance and jeopardised Israel's diplomatic
position within the international community. It won the election but
has divided Israel like never before."
-
Ryan Rodrick Beller: To evangelicals, Zionism an increasingly tough
sell: When the British invaded Palestine and set up their "home
for the Jewish people" there, about 10% of the native population
were Christians -- communities dating from the Crusades or even
earlier. To the Zionist Yishuv, however, those Christians were just
Arabs, same as the Muslims. It's always been curious how completely
American evangelicals sided with the Zionists against their own
co-religionists. The standard explanation had to do with seeing
Israel's ingathering of Jews as a precondition for the Apocalypse.
That always struck me as sick and demented, and anti-semitic seeing
as how the Jews are destroyed in the end while the true believers
ascend to heaven. But this story suggests that a big part of the
explanation is sheer ignorance, changed when evangelicals learn of
how Palestinian Christians are treated by Israel.
-
Juan Cole: Obama with Drama: Translating his cojmments on Israel's
Netanyahu from the Vulcan: And not exactly into ordinary English,
more like Cole calls "Bones-speak": "Netanyahu's attitude toward
Palestinian-Israelis makes 1960s Southern governors like George
Wallace and Orval Faubus look like effing Nelson Mandelas in comparison.
He's creating a Jim Crow atmosphere."
-
Philip Weiss: Who can save Israel now?: "Yaniv was almost in tears.
When will the liberal Zionists help Yaniv and call for real outside
pressure? Last night Peter Beinart, the leading liberal Zionist, tweeted
a comment by Rep. Adam Schiff on CNN that from now on the US must not
veto Palestinian statehood resolutions in the Security Council. Beinart
is rising to the occasion, making his way toward BDS."
-
Jeff Halper: Netanyahu's victory marks the end of the two-state
solution: "No one can be happy when racism and oppression win the
day. In a wider perspective, however, the election may represent a
positive game-changer. Not that anything has really changed, but finally
the fig-leaf that allowed even liberal Israeli apologists to argue that
the two-state solution is still possible has been removed.
[ . . . ] Since Israel itself eliminated the
two-state solution deliberately, consciously and systematically over
the course of a half-century, and since it created with its own hands
the single de facto state we have today, the way forward is clear. We
must accept the ultimate "fact on the ground," the single state imposed
by Israel over the entire country, but not in its apartheid/prison form.
Israel has left us with only one way out: to transform that state into
a democratic state of equal rights for all of its citizens."
Weiss also quotes the Zionist Camp activist Yaniv as saying "We need
a Mandela." The problem is more like Israel can't even come up with a
De Clerk. (Arguably Yitzhak Rabin auditioned for the part, but he couldn't
deliver, partly because he didn't face the demographics and worldwide
ostracism white South Africa faced, and partly because he got killed
before he could rise to the situation -- if indeed he could.) Still,
nobody remembers De Clerk as a great man, partly because his hands were
plenty dirty before he relinquished power, partly because Mandela took
the glory when he showed such grace and dignity in assuming power.
Still, Israel's situation isn't exactly analogous to De Clerk's.
It's not that the Apartheid metaphor isn't applicable. If anything,
Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is
more rigorous, terrifying, and dehumanizing than anything South
Africa did. And it's only a matter of time until most of the world
sees Israel's Occupation as a gross affront to human rights, peace,
and justice, and takes action to isolate and ostracize Israel. But
the demographics will never be equivalent: whites in South Africa
amounted to no more than 15% of the population, whereas Jews are
a majority within Greater Israel, and that majority could be grown
by lopping off territory with large concentrations of Palestinians
(most easily, Gaza). Sure, free return of Palestinian refugees
from 1947-49 might tip the scales, but realistically that's not
going to happen.
This demographic position gives Israel's leaders options, but
time and again they've chosen to maintain the status quo, at the
cost of continued strife and insecurity. They've done this partly
because they've psyched themselves into both into believing they'll
always live in peril -- that the world will never accept them as
peaceable neighbors -- and into thinking they will always win.
(This mentality was amply illustrated in Tom Segev's 1967,
which showed how terrified Israeli civilians were of impending
war and how utterly confident Israel's generals were of their
victory.)
History also gives Israel's leaders options. The Zionist
movement is now 135 years old, more than a century has passed
since Britain's Balfour Declaration opened up Jewish immigration,
and the state of Israel has existed for 67 years, under its
current borders for 48 years (aside from returning Sinai to
Egypt in a deal that established that Israel could coexist with
a neighboring Arab state). Fifty years ago one could imagine
Israel meeting the fate of Algeria, but no one believes that
now. By 2001, all Arab states were willing to recognize Israel
in exchange for a deal which would create a Palestinian state
from the territory Israel seized in 1967. The PLO had already
agreed to that, and Hamas has since come to that position.
Only Israeli greed and intransigence has prevented a peace
deal from happening. Well, that and the gullibility of American
political leaders, who for one reason of another have been
spineless when they needed to stand up to Israel.
Netanyahu's great value to Israel has always been his ability
to manipulate US opinion -- something he's been known to brag
about, unseemly as that may be -- but lately he bound his fate
to the Republican Party. In doing so he has started to alienate
Democratic supporters of Israel, but more than that he has opened
up a mental association between Israeli and Republican policies --
militarism, racism, harsh justice, targeted assassinations, an
omnipotent security state, increasing economic inequality, and
much more.
I'll try to write more later about what should be done, but
for now I just want to leave you with a warning. Unless something
is done to correct the trends we're seeing in Israel, the situation
there will continue to grow more desperate and unjust, and unless
the US can break its tail-wags-dog subservience to Israel we will
wind up in the same dystopia.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Daily Log
Jason Gubbels published this
Jazz 2015: First Quarter Round Up [Ranked Roughly]. I'll add my
grades in brackets (where I have them):
- Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago (ECM)
- Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth, Epicenter (Clean Feed) [A-]
- Vijay Iyer Trio, Break Stuff (ECM) [***]
- New Vocabulary (with Ornette Coleman), New Vocabulary (System Dialing)
- Rudresh Mahanthappa, Bird Calls (ACT) [*]
- Makaya McCraven, In the Moment (International Anthem)
- Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet, Intents and Purposes (Enja) [*]
- Albert "Tootie" Heath, Philadelphia Beat (Sunnyside)
- Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord, Jeremiah (Hot Cup) [***]
- Hypercolor, Hypercolor (Tzadik) [**]
- Mark Helias/Tony Malaby/Tom Rainey, The Signal Maker (Intakt) [***]
- Drkwav, The Purge (Royal Potato Family)
- Curtis Nowosad, Dialectics (Cellar Live)
- Benny Sharoni, Slant Signature (Papaya) [**]
- Prism Quartet, Heritage/Evolution (Innova) [**]
- Matt Lavelle/John Pietaro, Harmolodic Monk (Unseen Rain '14) [**]
So 16 records, 6 I haven't heard, 1 A- (a very strong one), a 3-4-2
split among B+, nothing obviously lame let alone awful. The mass of
unheard records initially bothered me the most, but I'll catch up with
most of them in due course. Chris Monsen has also started a
2015: favorites list, and if we leave out the non-jazz (Sleater-Kinney,
Jazmine Sullivan, Aphex Twin) and a couple belated 2014 releases, you get:
- Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (ACT) [*]
- Detail: First Detail (Rune Grammofon)
- Kirk Knuffke: Arms and Hands (Royal Potato Family)
- Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff (ECM) [***]
- Hypercolor: Hypercolor (Tzadik) [**]
- Wooley/Rempis/Niggenkemper/Corsano: From Wolves to Whales (Aerophonic) [**]
Three records in common with Gubbels, and I'm not a big fan of any
of them -- least of all Bird Calls (and my complaint isn't that
the record is tied to Charlie Parker; if anything it's that it veers
too far away from its ostensible subject matter).
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Rhapsody Streamnotes (March 2015)
Pick up text
here.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Music Week
Music: Current count 24701 [24687] rated (+14), 420 [420] unrated (+0).
Oklahoma trip chewed up three days, so doesn't completely explain this
week's shortfall. While I felt rather depressed before and melancholy (and
tired) after, could be that the rest of the drop came from giving Madonna
and Myra Melford at least five spins each before my lack of an A- response
sealed their fates. Neither album reduces my estimation of the artist, but
when I want to hear them I'll go elsewhere. I wound up landing on B+(***)
a lot this week: six times out of fourteen records. Tanya Tagaq has by
far the most uncertain grade, with some upside if I cared to work at it
more than I'm willing, but also some downside. Most likely to be overrated
are Atomic and Hailey Niswanger, although they gave me more pleasure than
Melford or Madonna.
The one A- is Ryan Truesdell's second Gil Evans Project album. It also
took about five spins. I didn't go back to recheck its predecessor, 2012's
Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans. At the time I was
duly impressed giving it B+(***), but many other jazz critics were wowed
and it wound up fourth in the
Jazz Critics Poll. Possibly deserves a revisit, but I wouldn't be
surprised to find that the more proven arrangements and the live sparkle
still give the new album the edge.
Not much mail either. And despite adding quite a bit of bulk to the
Music Tracking file, I'm not finding
much of interest to look up on Rhapsody, and often not finding what I
look for. I do have some downloads from Cuneiform and ECM but haven't
been in a hurry to get to them. Haven't been in much of a hurry to do
anything.
Should have a Rhapsody Streamnotes out in a day or two. While I was
belatedly hacking out the tweets collected below, Matos wrote:
Much as I sometimes miss "keeping up," I am so happy not to drum up
instapinions anymore unless I want to. Bcz it's that or nothing unless
you've got leverage or tenure or w/e. Otherwise it's chump work. There
are exceptions, but that's what they are. I wasted years on it. "What
did you spend your thirties doing?" "A debased version of something I
did in my twenties."
Sure rained on my parade. Been one of those days.
New records rated this week:
- Atomic: Lucidity (2014 [2015], Jazzland): Norwegian quintet loses all-star status with drummer change, not that Broo and Ljungkvist don't step up [cd]: B+(***)
- Phil Bowler: Phil Bowler & Pocket Jungle (2013 [2014], Zoho Music): bassist-led group goes for mild-mannered Afro-Cuban tryst with Grupo Los Santos stalwarts [r]: B+(*)
- Madonna: Rebel Heart (2015, Interscope): the good songs level out long before you reach 19, although the "deluxe" ones almost earn their keep [r]: B+(***)
- Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (2013 [2015], Enja/Yellowbird): pianist's compositions turn on electric guitar/bass (Liberty Ellman/Stomu Takeishi), with cornet [cd]: B+(***)
- Billy Mintz: The 2 Bass Band . . . Live (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): drummer-led tentet, many stars, not quite avant but skew their postbop that way [cd]: B+(**)
- Tisziji Muñoz & Marilyn Crispell: The Paradox of Independence (2014 [2015], MRI): guitarist and pianist clash and contrast, backed by bass-drums [r]: B+(**)
- Hailey Niswanger: PDX Soul (2013-14 [2015], Calmit Productions): tenor saxophonist goes full r&b, often with organ, but seems to still be auditioning singers [cd]: B+(***)
- Open Field + Burton Greene: Flower Stalk (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Portuguese string trio (guitar-viola-bass) with some bite risk prepared piano thrash [cd]: B+(***)
- Gretchen Peters: Blackbirds (2015, Scarlet Letter): country singer-songwriter, some clicks, some doesn't, probably not cost-effective to sort out [r]: B+(*)
- Roberta Piket: Emanation (Solo: Volume 2) (2014 [2015], Thirteenth Note): solo piano, checks off McPartland, Hancock, and Chopin as well as Gillespie, Monk [cd]: B+(*)
- Dawn Richard: Blackheart (2015, Our Dawn): neo-soul singer, some interesting beat production but strikes me as cluttered and cranky [r]: B
- Pops Staples: Don't Lose This (1999 [2015], dBpm): demo vocals from 1999, dressed up comfortably by daughter Mavis and producer Jeff Tweedy [r]: B+(**)
- Tanya Tagaq: Animism (2014 [2015], Six Shooter): less interesting for aboriginal throat singing than for the attempt to give voice to geologic strata [r]: B+(***)
- Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (2014 [2015], Blue Note/ArtistShare): Gil Evans' archivist produces a greatest hits live thing with star power and just enough vocals [cd]: A-
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- The Rough Guide to the Best African Music You've Never Heard (World Music Network): a short-lived proposition, until you've heard it and know better [r]: B+(**)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Tom Collier: Alone in the Studio (Origin): March 17
- Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music): April 7
- Michael Oien: And Now (Fresh Sound New Talent): advance, June
- Sarah Partridge: I Never Thought I'd Be Here (Origin): March 17
- Unhinged Sextet: Clarity (OA2): March 17
- The Michael Waldrop Big Band: Time Within Itself (Origin): March 17
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Weekend Roundup
It's been a slow week for me, as I spent much of it in Oklahoma,
visiting relatives and attending the funeral of my cousin Harold
Stiner. Harold was just shy of his 90th birthday, and is survived
by his wife, Louise, whom he married in 1948 and lived with until
death did they part. Their life together was a sweet story, but I
wouldn't go so far as to dub it the American Dream -- they never
made the sort of money American Dreamers feel entitled to, but they
never really wanted either, and left behind two children, four
grand-kids, and eleven great-grands, so it certainly counts as a
human success story. The one part of the funeral I was somewhat
troubled by was the "military honors" -- the flag-draped coffin,
two soldiers standing at attention, one playing "taps," the ritual
folding and presentation of the flag. It's not that Harold hadn't
earned the honor. Like most Americans his age, he got sucked up
into the US military in the closing stretch of WWII and wound up
in the army that occupied Japan, where he served as a guard in
the courts that tried Japanese war criminals. He talked about that
experience often, but never talked about actual combat -- and he
was a mere 20 on VJ day. My own father (only two years older) was
also in the army at that time, but he never invested any identity
in being a veteran, and died in 2000, before the War on Terror
turned into a bizarre Cult of the Troops. I wondered whether
Harold's identity was conditioned by that newer Cult, and felt
like the stink of America's recent wars (Vietnam most certainly
included) hasn't come to taint Harold's more honorable service.
Just a thought, but war does imbue this week's select links:
Nancy LeTourneau: Feith Demonstrates Republican Ignorance on Foreign
Policy: Lots of things one can say about the 47 Republican Senators
who signed Tom Cotton's letter vowing to sabotage any agreement Obama
manages to sign with Iran, although critics have tended to latch onto
the notion that the letter violates the Logan Act (itself very probably
unconstitutional, something that hasn't been ruled on because no one
has tried to enforce it) and the challenge the letter represents to the
president's prerogative to conduct foreign policy. It would be better
to focus on how totally counterproductive the letter was: how it shows
that the US cannot become a trusted party in negotiations because a
substantial factional power only believes that disputes can only be
solved through war.
One of the unintended consequences of the Tom Cotton letter fiasco is
that the media focus has turned away from the actual negotiations with
Iran to the various excuses
Republican leaders are coming up with to explain why they signed it.
But there are a couple of exceptions. I have to give Joshua Muravchik
some credit. At least he dispensed with all the right wing cover about
how we need a "better deal" and got right down to it with
War With Iran is Probably Our Best Option. But what he's really
recommending are surgical strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.
He has to admit that won't stop Iran from continuing to build new ones,
so we'll have to commit to a kind "whack-a-mole" ongoing war. And then
he has to admit that we'll have to do that without IAEA inspectors, so
the whole argument devolves into one big mess.
Then there's Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that published an
op-ed on the negotiations by none other than Doug Feith, who purports
to have found the
"fatal flaw in Obama's dealings with Iran."
[ . . . ]
Feith's point is that President Obama is taking a "cooperative"
approach to the negotiations when he should be taking a "coercive"
approach. [ . . . ]
This one reminds me a lot of the Republican insistence that we can't
talk about a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants until
we "secure the border." The result of that insistence is that the border
is never secure enough -- just as Iran never stops being enough of a
threat to pursue an agreement. It is meant to leave regime change (most
likely via military intervention) as the only option on the table.
I can only shake my head at the ignorance of people who don't remember
that it was regime change in Iran that got us here in the first place.
I think it's time Americans admit that we got off on the wrong foot
with Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979, and that we need a fresh start
based on mutual respect. That won't be easy because we utterly lack
the ability to see ourselves as others do (not that many others dare
say so to our faces -- cf. "The Emperor's New Clothes" for insight).
Americans always assume that our own intentions are benign, and never
think that our interventions in the rest of the world aren't welcome;
actually, we wouldn't even call them interventions, despite presence
of US military in over 100 other countries and the CIA in the rest,
the US Navy on all seven seas and satellites in space able to spy on
every square inch of the world's surface. We do, however, perpetuate
childish grudges against any nation that offends us, regardless of
how counterproductive our shunning becomes: North Korea is the longest
running example, and for its people perhaps the saddest; then there is
Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, and a few others -- the neocons would love
to add Russia and China to that list. The fact is that the US has done
Iran much more harm than vice versa, yet we are totally unaware of any
of that: the 1953 coup, equipping the Shah's police state, supporting
Iraq's invasion (one of the deadliest wars since WWII), prodding the
Saudis to promote anti-Shiite propaganda, crippling sanctions, cyber
warfare. Iran hasn't been totally without fault either, and a little
contrition on their part would be good for everyone. But the attitudes
you see from Cotton, from Feith, from Muravchik and so forth show you
how blind and vicious we can be. Iran, after all, has at least as much
reason to worry about a nuclear-armed Israel as vice versa, and even
more so about a nuclear-armed United States -- a country which within
the last fifteen years has invaded and pretty much wrecked two neighboring
countries (Afghanistan and Iraq). And an isolated, villified, wounded
Iran is far more dangerous than an Iran that is integrated into global
trade and culture. The latter might even contribute constructively to
our many problems in the region.
I could say much more about this, but for now I just want to bring
up one side point. I have no real worries about Iran producing nuclear
bombs -- I don't think they ever intended to build them let alone to
use them, possibly because they suspect that they would be useless (as
they have been for everyone else but the US against WWII Japan). But
I do worry about Iran's ambitions to build nuclear power plants: to
see why, recall that the worst nuclear wasteland in Japan isn't the
A-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it's the drowned nuclear
power plants at Fukishima. On the other hand, I don't see that the US
can arbitrarily deny Iran access to nuclear power -- the NPT promises
not to limit that access, and dozens of other countries (most notably
India) have nuclear power plants. But if Iran is going to have nuclear
power plants, we should do everything possible to ensure that they
will be as safe as those plants can be, which means sharing advanced
technology and making sure the plants are inspected and follow "best
practices." To do that we need cooperation, not war.
Gideon Levy: To see how racist Israel has become, look to the left:
Of course the right is racist -- see Max Blumenthal's Goliath:
Life and Loathing in Greater Israel for abundant proof of that --
but loathing of Arabs is as much of a driving force behind the former
left in Israel as for the right.
The foreign minister [Avigdor Lieberman] said "Those who are against
us . . . we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head,"
aiming his ax at Arab Israelis. Such a remark would end the career and
guarantee lifetime ostracism of any Western statesman.
[ . . . ] But such is the intellectual, cultural
and moral world of Israel's foreign minister, a bully who was once
convicted of physically assaulting a child. The world can't understand
how Lieberman's remark was accepted with such equanimity in Israel,
where some highly-regarded commentators still believe this cynical,
repellent politician is a serious, reasonable statesman.
No less repugnant was his savaging, in a televised debate, of Joint
List leader Iman Odeh, whom he called a "fifth column" and told, "you're
not wanted here," "go to Gaza." None of the other party heads taking part,
including those of leftist and centrist slates, leader in the debate,
stepped in to stop Lieberman's tirade. [ . . . ]
The racism of the campaign season has been planted well beyond the
rotten, stinking gardens of Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, Eli Yishai and
Baruch Marzel. It is almost everywhere. Our cities have recently been
contaminated by posters whose evil messages are nearly on a par with
the slogans "Kahane was right" and "death to Arabs."
"With BibiBennett, we'll be stuck with the Palestinians forever,"
threaten the posters plastered on every overpass and hoarding, on
behalf of the Peace and Security Association of National Security
Experts. It is impossible to know their level of expertise on matters
of peace and security, but they are clearly experts in incitement.
The message and its signatories are considered center-left, but it
too spreads hate and racism. [ . . . ]
Such is the state of public discourse in Israel. Yair Lapid and
"the Zoabis," in reference to Haneen Zoabi, Moshe Kahlon who says he
won't sit in a government coalition "with the Arabs," Isaac Herzog
who will conduct coalition negotiations with all the parties with the
exception of the Arab ones, Tzipi Livni and her obsession with her
Jewish -- and also nationalistic and ugly -- state. Even the dear and
beloved (to me) Amos Oz, who in Haaretz ("Dreams Israel should abandon --
fast," March 13) called for a "fair divorce" from the Palestinians. He
has the right not to believe in the prospects for a shared life, we must
call for their liberation, but to call for a divorce without asking the
Palestinians what they want rings with a rejection of them. And what
about Israel's Arab citizens? How are they supposed to feel when one
of the most important intellectuals of Israel's peace camp says he
wants a divorce? Are they to remain among us as lepers?
I've said for quite some time now that the main rationale behind the
"two-state" partition resolution is that it doesn't depend on Israelis
to rise above their deep-seated racism; all it depends on is their will
to cut loose some land and prerogatives they still want and a lot of
people they can't stand and have constantly wronged.
Also see
Haviv Rettig Gur: Is Netanyahu about to loose the election? for its
review of the prospects for post-election coalition building, especially
in the face of the refusal of all Zionist parties (left, right, or center)
to negotiate with the Joint (Arab) List. For more on this, see
Philip Weiss: Herzog and Netanyahu are likely to share power --
because Herzog won't share it with Arab List. (I suppose there
are Republicans who feel that the election of a Democrat should be
invalidated if a majority of whites vote otherwise, but unlike
Israel we don't have a political system that makes it easy to sort
out votes like that, or a media that legitimizes such racism. In
Israel Jews even have their own language.)
More Israel links:
Akira Eldar: Who will stop the Israeli settlers?:
On March 13, 2005, the second Ariel Sharon government decided to
dismantle all the illegal outposts that had been erected since the
government came into office in March 2001, and were listed in the
report prepared by attorney Talia Sasson.
The government averred that it would thus fulfill the first stage
of the Road Map set down by the Quartet, in keeping with an Israeli
commitment made in May 2003. This clause, which included a total freeze
on settlement construction, was not included among the 14 reservations
Israel presented to the Quartet.
The signature of then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this
decision is just as worthless as the paper upon which the Wye River
Memorandum, the Bar-Ilan speech and all the "two-state" speeches made
before the United States Congress and the United Nations General Assembly
are written.
But it's time to remind those with short memories that Isaac Herzog
and Tzipi Livni were also part of that government. The latter was appointed
head of a special ministerial committee whose job was to convert the outpost
report into action -- primarily by ensuring the dismantling of outposts
built after the formation of the previous government (in which Livni also
served). A significant portion of those outposts were built on private
Palestinian land.
Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics show that over the past
decade, the settler population in the West Bank has grown by 112,000
(from 244,000 to 356,000).
Figures from Peace Now show that in the same period, the illegal
outposts gained 9,000 more residents -- about three times their population
10 years ago. More than half of the growth occurred during the time when
Livni and Herzog bore ministerial responsibility for this gross violation
of Israeli and international law.
The Kadima/Hatnuah leader and the Labor Party and Zionist Union chairman
were also both partly responsible for allowing hundreds of millions of
shekels to flow to the settlements via the leaky pipe known as the
"settlement division," which suddenly became the national punching bag.
According to the outpost report (presented a decade ago), the division
"mainly erected many unauthorized outposts, without approval from the
authorized political officials." [ . . . ]
Every Israeli government since 2005 has ignored the report's unequivocal
recommendation to clip the wings of the division, especially its budget,
which continues to fund the effort to wreck peace.
William Greider: What About Israel's Nuclear Bomb? Israel began its
work on developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s when fear that it might
be overwhelmed by much more populous adversaries was more credible. By
the mid-1960s, Israel's denials offered a convenient out while the US
attempted to corral all other nations (including Iran) within the confines
of the NPT. But one side effect of US acquiescence in this "don't ask,
don't tell" treatment is that we're not allowed to factor in Israel's
nuclear deterrence capabilities when evaluating possible threats from
possible enemies like Iran. No nuclear-armed power has ever directly
attacked another nuclear-armed power, not even at the height of conflict
between the US and the Soviet Union. One can even argue that conflicts
become more stable when both adversaries possess nuclear weapons: one
can point not only to the Cold War but to the way India and Pakistan
walked back from a likely fourth war in 2002. Israel hates the idea of
a nuclear-armed Iran less because it fears Iran -- Iran, after all, has
not committed direct military aggression against another country for
several centuries now, whereas Israel has done so close to ten times
since 1948 -- so much as because it hates the idea that any nation it
attacks might fight back.
Anne-Marie Codur: Why Iran is not and has never been Israel's #1
enemy.
Mike Lofgren: Operation Rent Seeking: Reviewing James Risen's
book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, on how
the Global War on Terror turned into a racket and a cash cow for
the nation's military profiteers:
It is difficult to read Pay Any Price and not come away with
the sick feeling that the Bush presidency -- which, after all, only
assumed office by the grace of judicial wiring and force majeure --
was at bottom a corrupt and criminal operation in collusion with
private interests to hijack the public treasury. But what does that
say about Congress, which acted more often as a cheerleader than a
constitutional check? And what does it tell us about the Obama
administration, whose Justice Department not only failed to hold
the miscreants accountable, but has preserved and expanded some of
its predecessors' most objectionable policies?
Partisans may squabble over the relative culpability of the Bush
and Obama administrations, as well as that of Congress, but that
debate is now almost beside the point. If Risen is correct, America's
campaign against terrorism may have evolved to the point that endless
war is the tacit but unalterable goal, regardless of who is formally
in charge.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
A Funeral in Oklahoma
I took some notes from a gravestone in the cemetery on the east
edge of Stroud, Oklahoma: William M. Stiner, born January 14, 1896;
died November 29, 1973. Lola Stiner, born July 7, 1900; died March
27, 1968. They were married, till death they did depart. on November
2, 1919. Lola was my mother's oldest sibling, the eldest in of ten
born to Ben and Mary Lou Brown, eight surviving infancy: my mother
the youngest, plus three girls I knew as aunts and four boys I knew
as uncles. I knew William M. as Uncle Melvin. I was in the cemetery
to bury his oldest son, who I always knew as Harold Stiner, but who
turns out to have been a William also, William H. Stiner. He was
born in Milfay, Oklahoma, on May 11, 1925, and died March 7 this
year, at the age of 89.
Aunt Lola was born and grew up on a farm near Vidette, Arkansas,
a three-way junction which in its heyday was the location of a post
office and two other buildings, but which has long since disappeared
from maps. (The closest towns today are Henderson, seven miles west;
Viola, eight miles east; and Bakersfield, Missouri, seven miles north;
much larger is Mountain Home, sixteen miles west, past Lake Norfolk.)
Our great-grandfather and his father moved from Ohio to Mountain Home
shortly after the Civil War -- I reckon that made them carpetbaggers,
although Baxter County was a unique Republican enclave in the former
slave state.) When Ben Brown died in 1935, that farm was passed on to
his oldest son, Ted, who by then had his own adjacent farm and was
able to buy his mother and siblings out.
Melvin also came from those hills, growing up on a farm a few miles
north and west, near Gamaliel, practically on the Missouri border. He
and Lola got married in Arkansas, and sometime before Harold was born
in 1925 moved to Oklahoma, eventually settling on 160 acres a few miles
east of Stroud, their driveway attached to US-66, and they grew that
farm into substantially larger by the 1950s. They had a second son,
Duan, in 1927, and a daughter, Mary Lou, who died two days after her
birth in 1935. We visited often, usually every two or three months,
from as early as I can recall in the 1950s up to Lola's death in
1968. I did miss her funeral -- I went through a very anti-social
period in the mid-late 1960s -- and didn't return to Oklahoma until
after I moved back to Wichita in 1999. I doubt my parent went much
either. For one thing, Melvin isn't fondly remembered by anyone I
know. Even when we were children, he was recognized as gruff and
something of a blowhard -- a guy who would argue points that were
plainly ridiculous. After he came down with diabetes he got even
more cranky and whiny, self-centered and demanding. He also had a
nasty habit of pinching Lola. She was heavy and had a high-pitched
voice, so it's like he liked to hear her squeal. And that got so
bad Duan's wife tried to talk Lola into leaving Melvin.
After Lola died, a quite sudden massive heart attack, Melvin was
beside himself. He survived another five years, and remarried twice
in that stretch, in the process squandering nearly all of the money
he had accumulated. Those marriages aren't noted on their tombstone
(which was probably arranged on Lola's death, when that seemed like
the right thing to do). Duan told me that his dad "went woman crazy"
after Lola died, but I always figured he was hard up and desperate
for comfort and support, and he himself didn't have much to offer
in return -- except money. I wasn't close enough to know whether he
got fleeced or whether one or both of the wives earned every penny --
both scenarios were possible.
Nonetheless, I always rather liked Melvin. He managed to run a
large and complicated farm -- chickens and pigs and lots of cattle,
corn and hay (I heard stories about cotton but don't recall seeing
any), a big vegetable garden with exceptional green beans, quite a
bit of pastureland including a large pond we fished at, some woods
including a rugged valley under the dam; also a couple oil wells
and we were impressed with how much money he made from billboards
along US-66, at least until the Turner Turnpike stole the traffic.
Before the turnpike, the trip took five or six hours each way --
two-lane country roads and crawling through a dozen-plus towns,
notably Stillwater and Cushing. I-35 and the Turnpike cut that
drive down to a bit more than three hours. He worked hard, from
dawn to sunset and then some, but he took time to socialize, and
had a wicked sense of humor.
By the time I remember going down there, both Harold and Duan
were grown, had served in the Army, married, and were living on
their own. I'm not sure whether Harold saw any action in WWII --
he turned 20 in March of 1945 as the US was fighting for Iwo Jima --
but after Japan surrendered he was part of the occupation force,
and most memorably was a guard on duty during at least some of the
Tokyo war crimes trials. Nor am I sure how long Harold served --
I've seen pictures of him in uniform with corporal stripes -- but
by 1948 he had returned to Oklahoma, and he married Louise Byrd
on June 9 of that year. About that time, he bought a farm three
miles north of Stroud, and they lived there from then until they
moved into a Stroud nursing home last year. Their marriage lasted
almost 67 years. (I can only think of one longer.) They had two
children, Julie and Jeffrey, but not until the early 1960s, so I
barely knew them at the time. They went on to have children (4)
and grandchildren (11 for now).
I doubt that Harold ever made a living as a farmer. He drove
trucks and worked in gas stations, even owned one for a while.
He was deeply religious, for many years a "song leader" at the
Stroud Church of Christ, so active in the church I can recall
him running out on a visit to go there. He was so kind and
generous to everyone that it seems like he was often targeted
by scam artists, but he always seemed to make do, was satisfied
with his lot, and hardly ever complained. I never begrudged his
faith, but I did have my doubts about the pride he took in his
military service. It seems like every subsequent male member of
his family signed up and followed suit, and when I visited in
recent years I always heard stories of so-and-so in Afghanistan
or Iraq -- a sad waste of American lives that has only caused
far greater suffering around the world. Yet I never heard any
articulation of the ideology that drives US power projection;
all I heard was the naive belief that by "serving" they were
somehow "keeping America safe."
And those were the themes of Harold's funeral: his unstinting
dedication to church and country. Harold isn't the first person
I've known to plot out his funeral in advance, picking favorite
bible verses and songs, but he probably went furthest in planning
the entire event. He was certainly the first person I've known to
have installed a grave marker ahead of time. (I've known spouses
with names on markers while they were still living -- in fact,
one who did it twice.) I don't know whose idea it was to bring
a military honor guard to the burial, but the casket was draped
in a US flag, two soldiers in dress uniforms stood at attention
off to the right behind the casket. One played taps, then they
folded the flag and presented it, rather nervously, to Louise.
I've known many veterans, but I had never seen anything like this.
My grandfather was in the army in France during WWI, but that played
no part in his funeral. My father was in the Army toward the end of
WWII -- he was only two years older than Harold -- but it never
occurred to us to emphasize that he had been a veteran. (Indeed, he
regarded his time in the Army as a time when he did nothing useful
or worthwhile.) My cousin Bob Burns was a veteran of Korea, but there
was nothing military at his funeral. I skipped a lot of funerals so
my sample size isn't large, but for most WWII veterans service was
something you just did and forgot as you got on with your life. The
"greatest generation" hoopla didn't occur until after Vietnam gave
war a bad name (actually, an even worse name), and only with the
post-9/11 terror/oil wars, when soldiers are recruited from an ever
narrower segment of the population, has military funeral honors
turned into such a self-identified cult. Maybe I could see this
for someone with 20+ years in the Air Force like James Hull, my
last surviving uncle -- he didn't actually fight in Vietnam but he
services airplanes that dropped thousands of tons of bombs, killing
thousands of Vietnamese -- but for Harold it feels like wrapping
his own honorable service with the stink of more recent wars. At
the least it shows his naivete.
Harold's brother, Duan, turned 18 the same day Americans bombed
Hiroshima. He, too, joined the Army, and did a tour in the occupation
of Japan. He got out, then was called back and did a tour in Korea,
where he saw combat (but seems to more clearly remember the cold).
He came back, got a job as a butcher in a grocery store, and married
Catherine. She had a son already named Johnny, about my age, and
they had two daughters in quick succession, about my sister's age,
Judy Kay and Cathy. (They later had a son, Michael Duan, who I only
knew as an infant until recently.) Whereas we usually only saw Harold
when we went to his place, Duan and Catherine came to Aunt Lola's
pretty much every time we visited, and their children often stayed
over. In the 1960s Duan started his own meat business, and my parents
would periodically buy a half beef from him.
From the Parks Brothers website,
Obituary for William Harold Stiner:
William Harold Stiner was born in Milfay, Oklahoma on May 11, 1925
and departed this life in Stroud, Oklahoma on Saturday, March 7, 2015
at the age of 89 years.
Harold was the son of Melvin and Lola (Brown) Stiner. He was a
resident of Stroud area all of his life. He was in the United States
Army where he served in WWII. He was a member of the Church of Christ
in Stroud and retired from Lincoln County as truck driver. He married
Louise Byrd in Stroud, Oklahoma on June 9, 1948. Harold was preceded
in death by his parents, one step grandson and one sister.
Survivors include wife, Louise of home, one son and daughter in
law, Jeff and Jan Stiner of Atlanta, Georgia, one daughter and son in
law, Julie and Johnny Rainwater of Stroud, one brother, Duan Stiner of
Bristow, four grandchildren, Rachel Richey, Jerred Eversole, Jana
Angelo, and Jamilyn Glidewell, and eleven great grandchildren, Kylee,
Dylan, Mason, Addison, Sydney, Skyler, Tayler, Chandler, Keller,
Nicholas and Trevor, other relatives and friends.
Funeral service will be held at the Church of Christ in Stroud on
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 1:30 P.M. with L.D. Byrd and Kyle Wright
officiating. Burial will follow in the Stroud Cemetery under the
direction of Parks Brothers Funeral Service in Stroud.
Family will receive friends at the Parks Brothers Funeral Chapel on
Tuesday, March 10, 2015 form 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M.
Link for
photos.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Daily Log
Got back from Oklahoma today. Took a back roads route, driving NW from
Bristow to Pawnee, then jogging over to Ponca City. Wanted to see the
Pioneer Woman memorial there, since I picked up a number of old photos
with various relatives on or near to it. Picked up the highway at Blackwell
and zipped home.
Wasn't able to get on the Internet during the trip, so waiting for me
was 268 email messages and 216 new tweets.
Matt Rice reviewed 20 albums:
- Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (Matador) [A-]
- Bjork: Vulnicura (One Little Indian) [B]
- Death Grips: Fashion Week (Third Woods) [B+]
- Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night (Colubia) [B-]
- Fall Out Boy: American Beauty/American Psycho (Island) [B]
- Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop) [B]
- Lupe Fiasco: Tetsuo & Youth (Atlantic) [B+]
- Fifth Harmony: Reflection (Epic/Syco) [B+]
- Indiana: No Romeo (Deluxe Edition) (Epic) [B]
- Joey Bada$$: B4.Da.$$ (Cinematic/Relentless) [B-]
- Lil Wayne: Sorry 4 the Wait 2 (free download) [C+]
- Ne-Yo: Non-Fiction (Motown) [B+]
- Rae Lynn: Me (Valory Music Group) [C]
- Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife (EarDrummers/Interscope) [B+]
- Dawn Richard: Blackheart (Our Dawn) [A-]
- Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) [A]
- Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (RCA) [A]
- Tanya Tagaq: Animism (Six Shooter) [A]
- Meghan Trainor: Title (Epic) [B-]
- Viet Cong: Viet Cong [B]
Monday, March 09, 2015
Music Week
Music: Current count 24687 [24592] rated (+95), 420 [499] unrated (-79).
Saturday evening I checked the rated count and found I was only +17
for the week, a pace that would leave me well short of a productive +30
week. I decided that would be a good time to make a pass through the
unrated file and see if any of those albums had been rated elsewhere
(checking against the year-end files and sometimes the indexes for
Recycled Goods or Rhapsody Streamnotes). I've made less systematic
sweeps in the past and often netted a dozen or two missing grades.
This time I picked up 72 albums, turning a slack week into a monster,
statistically speaking.
Wound up with 26 records below, so not much shy of a normal "good"
week. Two new non-jazz A-list releases (or three if you count a reissue
of a cassette that only previously had a run of 50 units) so that may
finally break the 2015 drought -- although all three are close to the
borderline, and McMurtry and Tuxedo nearly got written up as HMs until
4-5 plays nudged me over the line. The live McMurtry was something I've
been meaning to check out, so this seemed like a good time.
My Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file is already long enough to post.
Good chance I'll post it some time this week, although I won't promise.
For one thing, I'll be out of town a few days: one of my cousins,
Harold Stiner, passed away on Saturday, so I want to at least make
an appearance at the funeral. He was 89 -- a teenager when he joined
the Army and wound up stationed as a guard during war crimes trials
in Japan. When he returned, he bought a small farm north of Stroud,
married Louise Byrd, and they both lived there until moving to a
nursing home a few months ago, more than 65 years. We went down there
often when I was a child, and I spent a lot of time fishing his pond.
He was an exceptionally kind, open, generous person, and will be missed
and remembered fondly.
New records rated this week:
- Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments, Pt. 2 (2015, Warp, EP): outtakes EP, maybe just an afterthought, from last year's "Syro" [r]: B+(**)
- Ab Baars Trio & NY Guests: Invisible Blow (2012 [2015], Wig): Dutch tenor saxophonist, group goes back to 1990, so they've grown old and mellow together [cd]: B
- Ab Baars Trio: Slate Blue (2014 [2015], Wig): Fay Victor and Vincent Chancey -- I like them enough but they're not what Baars needs [cd]: B+(***)
- Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015, Matador): while the boys make clunky music and hog the vocals [r]: B+(*)
- Anat Cohen: Luminosa (2014 [2015], Anzic): leads with her clarinet, group less than focused except when her Brazilian guests take charge [cd]: B+(***)
- Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (2015, Sub Pop): not an artist I want to get to know better, not that the fancy production never clicks [r]: B
- Ross Hammond: Flight (2014 [2015], Prescott): guitarist meant for bigger things tries his hand at folk-oriented solo pastorale [cdr]: B+(**)
- Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (2010-12 [2015], TUM, 2CD): Finnish saxophonist gets all the help he needs: William Parker and Andrew Cyrille [cd]: A-
- James McMurtry: Complicated Game (2013-14 [2015], Complicated Game): hard luck songs continue, less political because he's too smart to blame it all on Obama [r]: A-
- Kyle Nasser: Restive Soul (2013 [2015], AISA): tenor saxophonist, uses guitar-piano-bass-drums for complex postbop layering, very au courant [cd]: B+(*)
- Prism Quartet: Heritage/Evolution, Volume 1 (2014, Innova, 2CD): obscure but long-running sax quartet invite six famous saxophonists to guest, rub off [cd]: B+(**)
- Nate Radley: Morphoses (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): guitarist-led trio plus Loren Stillman's sax for extra splotches of contrasting color [r]: B+(*)
- John Raymond: Foreign Territory (2014 [2015], Fresh Sound New Talent): young trumpet player backed by solid pros on piano-bass-drums, postbop but pretty sharp at that [cdr]: B+(**)
- Spin Marvel: Infolding (2014 [2015], RareNoise): Brit jazztronica group host Nils Petter Molvaer, a bright spot in their post-Miles underworld [cdr]: B+(***)
- Story City: Time and Materials (2012, self-released): jazz-rock returns, not hot enough for fusion, not soft enough for smooth, not bad but no matter [cd]: B
- Tradisyon Ka: Gwo Ka: Music of Guadeloupe, West Indies (2014, Soul Jazz): a drum-and-chant music never far removed from Africa, done by trad band with guests [r]: B+(**)
- Tuxedo: Tuxedo (2015, Stones Throw): Jake One and Mayer Hawthorne go retro-disco, which treats them as well as retro-Motown did; who knew we still need this? [r]: A-
- Typefighter: The End of Everything (2014, Hope Witch): pretty good DC-based garage-pop band -- i.e., rough as punk but hooks pop out [r]: B+(**)
- Carlos "Zíngaro": Live at Mosteiro de Santa Clara a Velha (2012 [2015], Cipsela): Spanish violinist, improvised from classical to jazz, goes solo [cd]: B+(**)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Ata Kak: Obaa Sima (1994 [2015], Awesome Tapes From Africa): rapper from Ghana, belated release of Brian Shimkovitz's original inspiration for Awesome Tapes From Africa [r]: A-
- Next Stop . . . Soweto, Vol. 2: Soul, Funk and Organ Grooves From the Townships 1969-1987 (1969-76 [2010], Strut): soul, funk, organ grooves from South Africa, thin glosses on things done better elsewhere [r]: B+(*)
- Next Stop . . . Soweto, Vol. 3: Giants, Ministers and Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1978 (1963-78 [2010], Strut): the iceberg beneath the more visible stars that went into exile [r]: B+(**)
- No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds of the North-West Grunge Era 1986-97 (1986-97 [2014], Soul Jazz, 2CD): 28 songs by 23 bands with one or more members who played on a bill with Nirvana [r]: B
Old records rated this week:
- Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: Arroyo (1990 [1993], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
- Chico Hamilton and Euphoria: My Panamanian Friend (1992 [1994], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
- James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards: Live in Aught-Three (2004, Compadre): first live album sums up a decade-plus of learning and writing [r]: A-
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Stephan Crump/Mary Halvorson: Secret Keeper (Intakt): advance, April
- Maxfield Gast: Ogo Pogo (Militia Hill)
- Bradley Williams: Investigation (21st Century Entertainment, 2CD)
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Weekend Roundup
Some scattered links this week:
David Atkins: Missing Selma: The Final Death of GOP Minority Outreach:
When I saw the movie Selma, I couldn't help but think of how much
that was gained by the civil rights movement in the 1960s has been lost
in the last decade due to Republican courts, state legislatures, and the
failure of Congress to renew voting rights protections. (Of course, more
than renewal is needed: voting rights protections need to be extended
beyond the deep South to everywhere Republicans hold power.)
Facing demographic reality after their devastating defeat in 2012,
Republicans issued a report saying they needed to consider policy changes
to court minority voters. That olive branch lasted a few weeks before
their base and its mouthpieces on AM radio urgently reminded them that
bigotry is a core Republican value and would only be dismissed at the
peril of any politician that didn't toe the Tea Party line.
Now the party finds itself shutting down Homeland Security to protest
the President's mild executive order on immigration and almost ignoring
the Selma anniversary entirely. The minority outreach program is not just
dead: it's a public embarrassment and heaping ruin.
[ . . . ]
And they will continue to try to disenfranchise as many minority voters
as possible -- one of the reasons why the Selma memorial is so problematic
for them. Republicans are actively trying to remove as many minority voters
as possible from the eligible pool, and have no interest in being reminded
of Dr. King's struggle to achieve the end of Jim Crow and true voting
rights for African-Americans.
The GOP has made it abundantly clear that things are going to get much
uglier before they get better. Their base won't have it any other way.
This is probably as good a place as ever to hook a link to
Kris Kobach Floats Idea Obama Wants to Protect Black Criminals From
Prosecution. Of course that's taken a bit out of context --
Kobach is obsessed with voting irregularities and has repeatedly
pleaded with the Kansas state legislature to give him authority to
prosecute voting infractions (seeing that county prosecutors rarely
do so, preoccupied as they are with killing and stealing), and his
actual examples are voting-related. Still, he was unwilling to raise
any objection to a caller who repeated the whole racist canard, and
by adding his own parochial examples the caller no doubt considered
his paranoia confirmed.
Conservatives Who Hate "Big Government" Are, Shockingly, Not Up in Arms
About Ferguson: References
Adam Serwer, who dug through the DOJ's report on police abuses in
Ferguson, Missouri (those protests last year weren't only about police
shooting an unarmed teenager -- that sort of thing happens all over
the country -- but were rooted in a long pattern of predation).
You're probably aware that Ferguson used the cops and courts to generate
tax revenues. How extreme were the fines? From the report:
[O]ur investigation found instances in which the court
charged $302 for a single Manner of Walking violation; $427 for a
single Peace Disturbance violation; $531 for High Grass and Weeds;
$777 for Resisting Arrest; and $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527
for Failure to Comply, which officers appear to use interchangeably.
Now, here's the thing: Isn't this the sort of thing right-wingers
ought to be complaining about? Government charging you a three-figure
fine for walking wrong, or not cutting your grass properly? Aren't
some of these an awful lot like taxes? Don't right-wingers hate taxes?
Don't they hate government attempts to micromanage citizens' lives?
Isn't turning "high grass and weeds" into a rime punishable by large
fines a sort of aesthetic political correctness?
[ . . . ]
Oh, but of course. . . .
Available data show that, of those actually arrested by FPD only because
of an outstanding municipal warrant, 96% are African American.
And:
Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows
that African Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations,
and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of
Ferguson's population.
So I guess it doesn't matter that this is oppressive Big Government
using jackbooted-thug powers to restrict citizens' FREEDOM!!!! and
shovel more and more cash into the insatiable maw of the bureaucracy --
because, y'know, that stuff doesn't matter when it happens to Those
People.
No More Mr. Nice Blog also reports that
This Frigid Winter Is Not Frigid in the West (see the map).
And on that front, see
Florida Officials Banned From Using Term 'Climate Change'. Not clear
whether this also means that Floridians will be banned from calling for
help when the last glaciers melt and their state vanishes under the rising
ocean. (The article points out that "sea-level rise" is still a permitted
term.)
It's always tempting to shame conservatives for their hypocrisies and
frequent lack of principles, much as it's tempting to point out that the
movement to change the existing order to make it even more hierarchical
and inequal (and usually more brutal) is more properly termed fascist.
My own pet example is abortion/birth control, which used to be more
closely associated with the right (albeit often tainted with racist
"eugenics" concerns) than the left. More properly, conservatives should
support abortion/birth control rights because: (a) it is a matter of
personal freedom in an area where the state has no legitimate interest;
(b) we expect parents to assume a great deal of responsibility for their
children, and the assumption of such responsibility should be a matter
of choice (whereas pregnancy is much more a matter of chance). If you
want, you can add various secondary effects: unwanted children are more
likely to become burdens on the state, to engage in crime, etc. But the
Republicans sniffed out a political opportunity for opposing abortion --
mostly inroads into traditionally Democratic religious blocks (Roman
Catholic and Baptist), plus the view resonated as prohibitionist and
anti-sex, reaffirming their notion of the Real America as a stern
patriarchy, and adding a critical faction to the GOP's coalition of
hate.
Conservatives should also be worried by unjust and discriminatory
law enforcement such as we've seen in Ferguson -- after all their own
property depends on a system of law that is widely viewed as basically
fair and just. They also should worry about global warming, which in
the long run will disproportionately affect property owners -- that
they aren't is testimony to the political influence bought by the oil
industry (along with the short-sightedness of other businesses). But
again these worries are easily swept aside by demagogues seeking to
discredit science, reason, and decency.
Ed Kilgore: How Mike Huckabee Became the New Sarah Palin: I always
thought that had Huckabee run in 2012 he would have won the Republican
nomination: he was as well established as the "next guy in line" as
Romney, we would have captured all of the constituency that wound up
supporting Rick Santorum (I mean, who on earth really wanted Santorum?).
I'm less certain he's got the inside track in 2016, but he's kept up
his visibility and he's learned a few tricks from his fellow Fox head,
Sarah Palin. On the other hand, it's hard to look at Huckabee's new
book title -- God, Guns, Grits and Gravy -- and not wonder
whether he's toppled over into self-caricature.
While nobody has written a full-fledged manifesto for conservative cultural
resentment, Mike Huckabee's new pre-campaign book is a significant step in
the direction of full-spectrum cry for the vindication of Real Americans.
It is telling that the politician who was widely admired outside the
conservative movement during his 2008 run for being genial, modest,
quick-witted, and "a conservative who's not mad about it" has now released
a long litany of fury at supposed liberal-elite condescension toward and
malevolent designs against the Christian middle class of the Heartland.
[ . . . ]
In a recent column recanting his earlier enthusiasm for Sarah Palin,
the conservative writer Matt Lewis accused La Pasionaria of the
Permafrost of "playing the victim card, engaging in identity politics,
co-opting some of the cruder pop-culture references, and conflating
redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism." The trouble
now is that she hardly stands out.
Speaking of Huckabee, he's been pushing this
placcard on twitter, proclaiming "Netanyahu is a Churchill in a
world of Chamberlains." This vastly mis-estimates all checked names.
Neville Chamberlain's reputation as a pacifist is greatly exaggerated:
he did, after all, lead Britain into WWII when he decided to declare
war against Germany over Poland after having "appeased" Hitler in
letting Germany annex a German-majority sliver of Czechoslovakia.
From a practical standpoint, his war declaration did Poland no good
whatsoever, so it's impossible to see how declaring war any earlier
would have had any deterrence or punitive effect. (Moreover, declaring
war over Poland definitely moved up Hitler's timetable for attacking
France, leading to the British fiasco at Dunkirk.) Of course, by the
time Chamberlain declared war, hawks like Churchill were on the rise
in Britain, and Churchill took over once Britain was committed to war
with Germany.
Churchill is generally given high marks for leading Britain through
WWII, but more so in America than in England, which voted him out of
office as soon as the war was over. A more sober assessment is that as
a military strategist he didn't make as many bad mistakes in WWII as he
had in the first World War (at least nothing on the scale of Gallipoli).
But he failed miserably in his attempt to keep the British Empire intact,
in large part because he was so tone deaf about it. If you look at his
entire career, you'll see he did nothing but promote war and imperialism,
and in doing so he left his stink on nearly every disastrous conflict
of the 20th century. Indeed, he got a head start in the 1890s in the
Sudan, then moved on to the Boer War in South Africa. His penchant for
dividing things led to the partitions of Ireland, India, and Palestine,
each followed by a series of wars. He was a major architect of Britain's
push into Palestine and Iraq (and, unsuccessfully, Turkey) during the
first World War, and followed that up by supporting Greece against
Turkey and the "whites" in the Russian Civil War. As WWII was winding
down he sided in yet another Greek Civil War and attempted to reassert
British control of Malaya. After WWII he is credited with the keynote
speech of the Cold War, which led to virtually all of the world's
post-WWII conflicts (up to 1990) aside from his post-partition wars.
He also was the main instigator behind the 1953 US coup in Iran, so
give him some credit for all that ensued there -- including Netanyahu's
speech this week. Churchill died in 1965, but even today he is invoked
by hawks in the US and UK as the patron saint of perpetual war and
injustice. He should be counted as one of the great monsters of his
era.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, is a much smaller monster, if only
because he runs a much smaller country. Still, even within Israeli
history, he hasn't had an exceptionally violent career: certainly he
ranks far behind Ariel Sharon and David Ben Gurion, nor does he have
the sort of intimate sense of blood-on-his-hands as Menachem Begin
or Yitzhak Shamir or even Ehud Barak, nor the sort of military glory
of Yitzhak Rabin or Moshe Dayan. I'm not even sure I'd rank him above
Shimon Peres, the political figure most responsible for Israel's own
atom bomb project, but he certainly moved up on the list with last
year's turkey shoot in Gaza (and to a lesser extent the West Bank).
But for two decades of rant about the "existential threat" posed by
Iran, he's stayed out of actual war. What he is really exceptional
at is avoiding peace. He was the most effective politician in Israel
when it came to sabotaging the Oslo "peace process" and he has been
singularly effective at wrecking Obama's peace efforts. Indeed, his
entire Iran obsession makes more sense as an anti-Palestinian stall
than as a real concern. What makes Netanyahu inordinately dangerous
isn't so much what he can do directly as prime minister of Israel as
his skill at persuading official opinion in the US: as we saw, for
instance, when he helped parlay the 9/11 attacks into a Global War
on Terror, or when he shilled for Bush's invasion of Iraq, or his
longstanding efforts to drive the US to war against Iran. Huckabee's
attempt to ride on Netanyahu's coattails should show you just how
dangerous Netanyahu can be, and what a fool Huckabee is.
Paul Krugman: Larry Kudlow and the Failure of the Chicago School:
On the conservative predeliction for economic frauds:
Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent
note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that
The interesting thing about Kudlow's continuing influence over
conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness
to a kind of performance art.
And Chait doesn't even mention LK's greatest hits -- his sneers at
"bubbleheads" who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his
warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high
stock market is a vote of confidence for the president -- but only,
apparently, if said president is Republican.
But what's really interesting about Kudlow is the way his influence
illustrates the failure of the Chicago School, as compared with the
triumph of MIT.
But, you say, Kudlow isn't a product of Chicago, or indeed of any
economics PhD program. Indeed -- and that's the point.
There are plenty of conservative economists with great professional
credentials, up to and including Nobel prizes. But the right isn't
interested in their input. They get rolled out on occasion, mainly as
mascots. But the economists with a real following, the economists who
have some role in determining who gets the presidential nomination,
are people like Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer.
[ . . . ]
Maybe the right prefers guys without credentials because they really
know how things work, although I'd argue that this proposition can be
refuted with two words: Larry Kudlow. More likely, it's that affinity
fraud thing: Professors, even if they're conservative, just aren't the
base's kind of people. I don't think it's an accident that Kudlow still
dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.
Also see Krugman's
Slandering the 70s. Some time back I read Robert J. Samuelson's
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of
American Affluence, which tries to argue that the stagflation
of the 1970s was every bit as disastrous as the Great Depression.
I figured out that Samuelson's mind was permanently wedged -- a
conclusion that's been repeatedly reaffirmed ever since -- but I
never quite understood why he was so agitated. Krugman's third
graph suggests an answer: changes in income for the top 1% only
rose by about 1% from 1973-1979, vs. 72% for 1979-1989, 55% for
1989-2000, and 13% for 2000-2007. Moreover, median income 1973-79
was up nearly 4%, so the elite 1% actually trailed the economy as
a whole. Still, no one actually came out and said that the right
turn from 1979 through Reagan's reign was needed because capital
returns during the 1970s were insufficient. But that does seem to
be the thing that motivated the rich to so brazenly exploit the
corruptibility of the American political system to advance their
own interests. And they succeeded spectacularly, so much so that
there doesn't seem to be any countervaling power that can bring
the system back toward equilibrium. On the other hand, the second
surprise in the chart is the relatively anemic gains of the 1%
under Bush, as the increasingly inequal economy started to drag
everyone down -- an effect Bush was desperate to hide behind tax
cuts, booming deficits, and the real estate bubble.
Mike Konczal: Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? I'm not
sure that Konczal's term "liberal nihilism" helps us in any way,
but I am reminded that throughout history liberals, unlike labor
socialists, have sucked up the notion of free markets -- one source
of our political dysfunction is that even left-of-center we tend to
confuse two rather different sets of political ideas. But Konczal
is right that the stagnant or declining wages -- one part of the
increasing inequality problem -- has little to do with the "stories"
you hear urging resignation to the status quo. He explains:
But wage growth is also a matter of how our productive enterprises
are organized. Over the past thirty-five years, a "shareholder
revolution" has re-engineered our companies in order to channel
wealth toward the top, especially corporate executives and shareholders,
rather than toward innovation, investments and workers' wages. As the
economist J.W. Mason recently noted, companies used to borrow to invest
before the 1980s; now they borrow to give money to stockholders.
Meanwhile, innovations in corporate structures, including contingent
contracts and franchise models, have shifted the risk down, toward
precarious workers, even as profits rise. As a result, the basic
productive building blocks of our economy are now inequality-generating
machines.
The third driver of wage stagnation is government policy. As
anthropologist David Graeber puts it, "Whenever someone starts talking
about the 'free market,' it's a good idea to look around for the man
with the gun." Despite the endless talk of a "free market," our economy
is shaped by myriad government policies -- and no matter where we look,
we see government policies working against everyday workers. Whether
it's letting the real value of the minimum wage decline, making it harder
to unionize, or creating bankruptcy laws and intellectual-property
regimes that primarily benefit capital and the 1 percent, the way the
government structures markets is responsible for weakening labor and
causing wages to stay stuck.
Konczal delves deeper into the robots story
here.
Various links on or related to the Netanyahu speech:
-
Mondoweiss: Annotated text of Netanyahu's address to Congress: Closest
thing I've found to instant, contextual correction of Netanyahu's numerous
lies and misrepresentations. Still woefully incomplete; e.g.: "But
unfortunately, for the last 36 years, Iran's attacks against the United
States have been anything but mock. And the targets have been all too
real." That presumably includes the occupation of the US Embassy in
Tehran in 1979 and the ensuing hostage crisis, but what are the other
attacks? It was the US that send a commando force into Iran supposedly
to extract those hostages. It was the US that shot down an Iranian
airliner full of civilians, and that shot up an Iranian oil platform.
It was the US and Israel that engaged in the "Stuxnet" cyberterrorism.
What else?
- James Fallows: A whole series of pieces:
On the Use and Misuse of History: The Netanyahu Case;
The Central Question: Is It 1938?;
The Mystery of the Netanyahu Disaster, and a Possible Explanation;
The 'Existential' Chronicles Go On;
On 'Existential' Threats (subhed: "A word that has replaced thought").
-
Gareth Porter: The Long History of Israel Gaming the 'Iranian Threat':
As you probably know, Israeli spokesmen started hyping the Iranian Threat
in the early 1990s, often projecting schedules for Iran building nuclear
arms within five years (or less). Iran moved to the top of Israel's enemies
list after Iraq was disabled in the 1991 Gulf War: it seems that Israel
always has to keep an "existential threat" on the horizon, both to justify
continued militarism long after peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan
and effective deterrence against Syria, and to trivialize and excuse its
continuing unjust occupation of Palestinian territories and exile of
millions of Palestinians.
-
Tony Karon/Tom Kutsch: Netanyahu's hard line on Iran: A four-point reality
check: is this an existential threat? is Iran "hellbent on conquest
and subjugation"? would an agreement "all but guarantees that Iran gets
nuclear weapons"? would the allies "get a much better deal" by killing
the current deal? Netanyahu is wrong on all four counts.
-
Max Blumenthal: Top Republicans to welcome Netanyahu, who called 9-11 attacks
"very good," said anti-US terror helps Israel: by the way, I remember
seeing 9/11 interviews both with Netanyahu and Shimon Peres where they were
beside themselves with glee in anticipation that the attacks would force
the US to become ever more like Israel.
-
Matt Taibbi: After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School:
"First of all, the applause from members of the House and Senate was so
over the top, it recalled the famous passage in the Gulag Archipelago
about the apparatchik approach to a Stalin speech: 'Never be the first one
to stop clapping.'"
-
Brank Marcetic: Netanyahu's Crime Isn't Playing Politics -- It's
Warmongering
-
Uri Avnery: The Speech: Numerous impressions, the sheer nonsense of
Netanyahu's speech evident in how far afield Avnery's mind wanders,
from "the moral imposter" Elie Wiesel and the fake Holocaust fetish
to the security of Israel's "second strike" capability which, if Iran
did attack Israel, "would annihilate Iran within minutes."
-
Philip Weiss/Adam Horowitz: It was a bad week for the Israel lobby:
Not just Netanyahu's folly, but Obama finally appointed Rob Malley to
his top Mideast security post ("Malley has said that only international
pressure will make Israel do anything about the occupation"), and it
looks like Netanyahu's leading Democratic stooge on Iran, Sen. Robert
Menendez (D-NJ) will be indicted for corruption.
-
Jim Newell: Netanyahu blew it: How he misunderstood Congress &
inadvertently ruined his own goals
-
Josh Marshall: Can an Israeli Government End the Occupation?:
Gives you some background on how Palestinian parties have been frozen
out of government coalition building in Israel. Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza can't vote in Israeli elections, but "Palestinian
Citizens of Israel" amount to about 20% of the electorate, and have
typically claimed about 10% of Israel's Knesset membership (voting
turnout is typically light, and some Arabs vote for Zionist parties).
-
Bill Moyers/Michael Winship: "We are hostage to his fortune": Sheldon
Adelson, Benjamin Netanyahu and America's dark money conspiracy:
I've long warned that one reason Israel is so dangerous for American
democracy is that neocons idolize Israel's stealthy belligerence as a
model for American foreign policy, which given US size and worldwide
interests would be even more disastrous. However, with Adelson trying
to export America's money-politics to Israel, Israelis should also
worry about the fate of their own democracy (as if right-wing efforts
there to trample on non-Jewish rights weren't ominous enough).
Actually, Adelson is worse than either: his serious proposal for
dealing with Iran is to drop a "demonstration" nuclear bomb in
their desert, then follow it up with "the next one in the middle
of Tehran" if they refuse to surrender.
Also, a few links for further study:
Andrew Bacevich: How to Create a National Insecurity State: Much here
going back to Vietnam, occasioned by Christian Appy's new book, American
Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, but in the plus
ça change, plus c'est le même chose spirit I want to point out this
paragraph on Obama's new Defense Secretary, Ash Carter:
So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack,
Michael O'Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals
and old Washington hands one and all. Besides all being employees of the
Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported
the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS
today. For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is
sound -- we just need to try harder -- who better to consult than Pollack,
O'Hanlon, and Kagan (any Kagan)?
Subhankar Banerjee: Arctic Nightmares: Author of Arctic Voices:
Resistance at the Tipping Point, on oil exploration in the Arctic
Ocean, what it entails, and where it's taking us.
Lee Drutman: A Lobbyist Just for You: Businesses have hired lobbyists
in Washington to defend and advance their interests in all matter of ways.
Sometimes they seek advantages over other businesses, as in the recent
squabble between retailers and banks over "cash card" fees, but mostly
they seek to cheat the less organized "public interest" -- i.e., you. We
could seek to limit their predation by regulating lobbying, but courts
have increasingly viewed that as a restriction of free speech (the idea
that corporations should enjoy individual rights weighs in here, even
though "free speech" for corporations is mostly a matter of money pushing
its weight around -- there's nothing free about it). So Drutman poses
another approach, which is to support public interest lobbyists as an
antidote to private interest lobbyists. He also proposes more transparency
in lobbying, and more competent staff for Congress to sort through the
pros and expose the cons of lobby propaganda. It's a useful start, but
he ignores another aspect, which is all the PAC money going to elect
Congress in the first place.
Phillip Longman: Lost in Obamacare: A review of Steven Brill:
America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the
Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, promising "Buried in
Steven Brill's convoluted tome are important truths about how to
reform our health care delivery system." That does indeed take some
digging, even in the review, but here's one point:
What Brill gets most importantly right about the political economy of
health care is the role that provider cartels and monopolies increasingly
play in driving up prices. He provides excellent on-the-ground reporting,
for example, on how the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has
emerged as a "super monopoly" dominating the health care market of all
of western Pennsylvania -- first by buying up rival hospitals or luring
away their most profitable doctors, and now by vertically integrating to
become a dominating health insurance company as well.
Brill similarly reports how the Yale-New Haven Hospital gobbled up
its last remaining local competitor in 2012 to become a multibillion-dollar
colossus. Importantly, Brill shows readers how, after the merger, an
insurer could not "negotiate discounts with Yale-New Haven," because "it
could not possibly sell insurance to area residents without including the
only available hospital in its network and the increasing share of the
area's doctors whose practices were also being bought up by the hospital."
Obamacare essentially attempted to rebalance the health care industry
on a basis of universal coverage as opposed to the previous (and worsening)
basis of discriminatory insurance pricing (which had pushed most Americans
out of the market, often into "safety net" programs), while leaving the
rest of the profit-seeking industry unchanged. That was a real improvement,
but a rather temporary one as the industry adjusts to the changes. Clearly
one such adjustment is increasing consolidation and monopoly rents. I know,
for instance, that the largest hospital in Wichita (Via Christi) has been
buying up previously independent physician groups. At the very least, this
calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement -- something Bush destroyed and
Obama has been loathe to resurrect. Or single-payer. Or both.
Friday, March 06, 2015
Daily Log
Good
letters in Wichita Eagle today. Gretchen Eick:
War on education is a nightmare
Kansans are living a horror movie. The governor recently cut $44.5
million from public education to help cover his horrific budget gap
this fiscal year of more than $300 million. Another shortfall of more
than $600 million is expected for the fiscal year starting July 1.
Who doesn't know that tax cuts for the wealthy produced this?
Meanwhile, the mindless majority in the Kansas Senate passed a bill
that would criminalize teachers and librarians who expose students to
material deemed harmful.
These Neanderthals also want to repeal five years of work by
educators on the Common Core standards. This could also cancel
Advanced Placement classes and the International Baccalaureate
program. How would our students be competitive with students from
other states?
Kansas Republicans would also cut by more than half Parents as
Teachers funds for early childhood education.
Our governor and Legislature are waging war against public
education and the dedicated teachers on the front lines. This is a
nightmare.
Also Laura Tillem:
Pushing us to war
Israel and its belligerent leader, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, are the only serious threat I face as an American Jew.
Netanyahu helped push the United States into the stupid Iraq
War. Now we face the prospect of our Congress giving in to the
aggressive Israeli desire to see us go to war with Iran.
Israel does not speak for me and many other American Jews. Israel
is the one with nuclear bombs that the world is not supposed to
mention, let alone inspect. Netanyahu's Israel is the one whose
politicians threaten to nuke Iran. Israel is the one pretending to be
afraid of ISIS but underplaying its horrors because ISIS is an enemy
of Iran.
His Israel is the one that goes around trying to undermine and
manipulate our U.S. democratic elections and blackmail or buy out our
politicians. Israel is the one that has taken more U.S. aid than any
other country ever.
Can we please remember this quote from our "friend" Bibi? "If you
take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have
enormous positive reverberations on the region."
Thursday, March 05, 2015
Daily Log
Took the "HealthCare.gov Experience Survey (March 2015). My answer
to "6. What issues did you face or what question sdid you have when
filling out your application or looking for plans?"
First time there were numerous problems with site availability,
state maintenance, restarting procedure. Not clear why all the info
requested is needed. Many plans were offered with little differences,
including many plans with inapplicable features (e.g., childhood
dental). Second time unclear how to continue previous plan. Both times
provided insufficient feedback that enrollment was successful -- seems
like healthcare.gov expects the insurance company to handle the
response, but my insurance company (BSBCKS) didn't do that, so I had
to wait days/weeks for confirmation. I've never explored dental
insurance options because I didn't want to further complicate health
insurance enrollment. I've seen warnings that I need to file some sort
of income documentation to continue getting my discounts, but it's not
clear how to do that -- I'm hoping my tax person will know what to do
there. I get email from you about messages sent to me, but don't get
the messages in my email. I have to log in to access the messages, and
never seem to be able to find them.
David Everall wrote me a letter, asking this question:
Secondly, when you state "As long as recorded music is treated as
private monopoly instead of as a public resource we're cheating
ourselves out of a higher standard of living and cultural
understanding." I'd be interested to know how you feel artists should
be remunerated for their work. Your post seems to imply that all music
should be available for free on sights such as Rhapsody. If you've
ever posted anything related to this issue I'd appreciate being
pointed towards it.
Rather belatedly, I wrote back:
Not sure if I've ever written at more length on this specific
question -- something that should be worked out in the "Share the
Wealth" project. One point is that we could significantly reduce
copyright periods without having any significant impact on the
motivations of creators. Another is that more mechanical licensing (as
opposed to monopoly rents) within the copyright period would make for
wider distribution. Another is that even under the current regime
we're seeing a lot of music freely released -- mostly with some promo
angle, but enough that a person could easily fill every waking minute
with free music and never hear the same thing twice. Even if
copyrights were abolished (which, unlike patents, isn't something I
particularly advocate) it seems likely that there would still be a lot
of new recorded music released -- maybe at first not as much as now,
certainly not exactly the same musicians as now, and maybe the
"quality" would lag a bit, but a lot more than anyone could
handle. Then, of course, you could add other means of inducements or
motivations -- Kickstarter type things, prizes, resume builders, other
private or public grants. Also worth noting that changes to
society/economy that make possible more leisure time would result in
more music being given away -- it's not something that can only get
done by paying people to do it.
I'm not saying that Rhapsody should be free. As with software, I
don't mind people trying to build a business around distributing and
sorting free content. Of course, if the content is indeed free, the
businesses will have to be competitive and efficient.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Daily Log
I wrote the following about Minnie Minoso in a facebook comment:
As someone who stopped paying attention to baseball in the late
1990s, but who knew a great deal about its history up to then, I was a
little surprised in reading Minnie Minoso's obits that he hadn't been
inducted into the BBHOF. He wasn't a classic power hitter like Mays or
Aaron (out in the midwest I followed the later more closely and
consider them to be very close to equals), but he was a very good
hitter and very solid all-around ballplayer for a very long time. His
longevity helps you forget that he missed about as much of his prime
career to segregation as Monte Irvin (in the HOF) and that if he had
come up when he was talented enough he almost certainly would have
wound up with 3,000 hits. I always thought he had a strong (though not
"slam dunk" HOF case) even apart from his special merit as the black
Cuban pioneer. Way back when, though, I figured him a victim of what I
thought of as the cult of Branch Rickey: to make Rickey look even
braver than he was, the HOF nabobs slighted the contributions of other
owners and players who made critical advances in integrating baseball
-- above all Bill Veeck. The actual contrast there is interesting:
where Rickey only signed established negro league stars still in the
first half of their careers (Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don
Newcombe -- basically certain stars; and he passed Irvin on to the
Giants because he didn't want his team to become too black), Veeck
signed players Rickey wouldn't touch: Larry Doby was too young,
Satchel Paige was too old, Luke Easter was a lot older than he let on,
and Minoso was Cuban. Most important, all of those signings worked out
(although Paige and Easter didn't last long). Since I lost interest,
Veeck and Doby made the Hall of Fame. The case for Minoso is if
anything better than the one for Doby. Back when I tried to rank
baseball players I had him close to (or maybe even ahead of) Roberto
Clemente.
Interesting that Elvis Costello took the time to come up with
a list of "500 albums essential to a happy life" -- I can do
quite happily without all the classical myself, but while there
are a few records I dislike on the list, more I would nitpick,
and many more that I'd say he missed, it is a pretty decent list.
Monday, March 02, 2015
Music Week
Music: Current count 24592 [24560] rated (+32), 499 [493] unrated (+6).
Surprised at all the mail that came in this past week, especially
today. (I don't always get Monday's mail added into Unpacking, but
this week I did.) In particular, I've gotten more than a few packages
from publicists who seemed to give up on me years ago. I'm not sure
whether I should be gratified by the recognition. I've actually been
quite bummed this winter with my inability to move on to what seem
to me to be more serious writing projects.
A mid-week check suggested that the ratings rate was falling off,
possibly because the
EOY Aggregate File seems
finally to be finished. (Don't know what happened to the Dean's List
I promised last week.) But bad weather kept me inside, and the growing
queue encourage me to pick some items off. May also have helped that
I have more than the usual number of recommendations to make this week.
I started off last week checking out some records featuring the late
trumpet player Clark Terry: Dinah Washington was the first of a great
many singers to tap Terry; I only found one record he recorded with
Coleman Hawkins, but it grew on me (as Hawk almost always does); the
Buddy Tate didn't include Terry (some confusion on my part, but I
followed through anyway).
I looked for the Tristano several months ago but it wasn't available.
I haven't received Uptown's vault releases for a couple years now, but
have tried to catch them when they showed up on Rhapsody. I usually
found them disappointing -- often sound, sometimes annoying patter or
just uninspired performances, but Chicago 1951 grabbed me right
away. There are other good examples of the interplay between Warne
Marsh and Lee Konitz, but this is the best example I've found of
Tristano's innovative playing. Braxton's duets with Dave Holland are
also remarkable: Braxton has often been much easier to follow on
standards than through his own knotty compositions, but you rarely
get to focus so intently on his bass playing. The relationship
between the two musicians goes back a couple years earlier, at
least to Holland's 1972 album Conference of the Birds, with
one of Braxton's most virtuosic performances ever.
Three new jazz albums made the grade -- all on European labels.
Chris Lightcap's album jumped to the top of my nascent
2015 list. Non-jazz 2015 A-list albums continue to lag: I could
cite Ghostface Killah's disc as the first of the year, but even there
top billing went to the Canadian jazz group BadBadNotGood. I was
tempted by A Place to Bury Strangers, but didn't feel like a second
spin would make a difference.
Also in today's mail were copies of Robert Christgau's new memoir,
Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, and
Carola Dibbell's first published (but not first written) novel, The
Only Ones. I read an early draft of the former, and my wife read
an even earlier draft of the latter. Christgau's book was released
last week, so I've been gathering links of reviews and interviews for
possible use on his website. I'm not sure how many of these we will
use on the website, but here is my current, unexpurgated list:
-
Alex Pappademas: Maximum Bob: The Dean of American Rock Critics' Memoir
Is Revealing, Rewarding, and Full of Copulating (Grantland, Feb. 19,
2015)
-
Kate Tuttle: Books (The Boston Globe, Feb. 21, 2015)
-
Leah Carroll: Almost Famous: The B+ Adventures of Robert Christgau
(The Concourse, Feb. 23, 2015)
-
Jack Dickey: How to Survive 13,000 Album Reviews (Time, Feb. 24, 2015)
-
Dwight Garner: Robert Christgau Reflects on His Career as a Rock Critic
(New York Times, Feb. 24, 2015)
-
Dan Buyanovsky: "I'm a Good Writer" - Robert Christgau on the Life and
Legacy of Robert Christgau (Noisey, Feb. 24, 2015)
-
Dan Weiss: Q&A: Robert Christgau on His Memoir 'Going Into the City'
and Not Loving the War on Drugs (Spin, Feb. 24, 2015)
-
Mark Athitakis: Going Into the City (BN Review, Feb. 25, 2015)
-
Jon Foro: Authentic Voices; New Memoirs from Kim Gordon and Robert
Christgau (Omnivoracious, Feb. 25, 2015)
-
Kevin J.H. Dettmar: 'Going Into the City,' rock critic Robert Christgau's back pages
(Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26, 2015)
-
Jon Dolan: Robert Christgau, Rock & Roll Radical (Rolling Stone,
Feb. 27, 2015)
-
Devin McKinney: Guts on the Page: Notes on the Absolute Unity of Robert
Christgau (Critics at Large, Feb. 28, 2015)
-
Arum Rath: Robert Christgau Reviews His Own Life (NPR, Mar. 1, 2015)
Margaret Eby: The Dean's List: Robert Christgau's 10,000 Opinions
(Brooklyn Magazine, Mar. 2, 2015)
For more on Carola's novel, look
here.
New records rated this week:
- BadBadNotGood & Ghostface Killah: Sour Soul (2015, Lex): a very noir-ish (if not exactly jazzy) soundtrack for "pimping ain't easy" raps [r]: A-
- Daniel Bennett Group: The Mystery at Clown Castle (2014 [2015], Manhattan Daylight): saxophonist, can cruise with a good beat but too much shout/circus/flute here [cd]: B+(*)
- Mike Campbell: Close Enough for Love (2014 [2015], ITI): standards singer, makes the most of Steely Dan, much less of Kenny Loggins [cd]: B+(*)
- Chamber 3: Grassroots (2013 [2015], OA2): guitar-sax-drums trio + bassist for good measure, not a chamber jazz lineup, even when coverng Nirvana [cd]: B+(*)
- Lainie Cooke: The Music Is the Magic (2014 [2015], Onyx Music): standards singer, draws more on jazz repertoire than cabaret, gets help from Myron Walden [cd]: B
- Paul Elwood: Nice Folks (2011 [2015], Innova): banjo player recapitulates career, starting with folk songs, moving on to avant and/or worldly groove [cd]: B+(***)
- Otzir Godot: In- (2014 [2015], Epatto): Finnish percussionist cuts a solo album; tunings are unique but I prefer the drumming to the ambient noise [cd]: B+(**)
- Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (2013 [2015], TUM): legendary drummer gets help from bassist who adds just enough body [cd]: A-
- Mark Helias Open Loose: The Signal Maker (2014 [2015], Intakt): puzzling over why Tony Malaby never breaks loose, I see the bassist wrote the tunes [cd]: B+(***)
- Eddie Henderson: Collective Portrait (2014 [2015], Smoke Sessions): trumpet-led classic hard bop quintet, Gary Bartz on alto, George Cables riffing blues [r]: B+(**)
- I Never Meta Guitar Three (2011-13 [2015], Clean Feed): Elliott Sharp's invitational for solo avant-jazz guitarists, looking to break new ground, or strings [cd]: B+(**)
- The Susan Krebs Chamber Band: Simple Gifts (2014 [2015], GreenGig Music): jazz singer backed by piano-reeds-percussion-violin/viola, a crucial weepy effect [cd]: B+(***)
- Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): two saxes (Malaby & Cheek), stellar work by Craig Taborn, especially on the VU cover [cd]: A-
- Chad McCullough & Bram Weijters: Abstract Quantities (2014 [2015], Origin): Dutch-US (Seattle) quartet, postbop so skilled I never noticed a thing [cd]: B+(*)
- Tatsuya Nakatani/Kris Tiner/Jeremy Drake: Ritual Inscription (2012, Epigraph, LP): avant-jazz from Bakersfield, ground fractured forever shifting [bc]: B+(**)
- Not Twice: Flight Plans (2014, Epigraph, EP): avant-trumpeter Kris Tiner backed with keybs/electronics, not much traction for trumpet, short too [bc]: B
- Kate Pierson: Guitars and Microphones (2015, Lazy Meadow Music): B-52s singer goes solo, sets up the classic beat but doesn't quite hit the punch lines [r]: B+(*)
- A Place to Bury Strangers: Transfixiation (2015, Dead Oceans): sort of heavy metal shoegaze, trading fuzzy noise for something harder [r]: B+(***)
- Chris Potter Underground Orchestra: Imaginary Cities (2013 [2015], ECM): still kicks ass when he solos, still struggles as a big band arranger [dl]: B+(**)
- Reggie Quinerly: Invictus (2014 [2015], Redefinition Music): drummer-led quintet, the vibes-guitar-piano adding up to frothy lightness [cd]: B+(*)
- Schlippenbach Trio: Features (2013 [2015], Intakt): with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens, together since 1972, free jazz fractured but superbly balanced [cd]: A-
- Songsmith Collective: Songsmith Collective (2014 [2015], Blujazz): Andrew Rathbun's homework assignment: take a poem, compose a score, sing it backed by jazz nonet [cd]: B
- Jack Wright/Ben Wright/Kris Tiner: For Instance (2014, Epigraph): father-son sax-bass duo, avant-wilderness wanderers, meet trumpeter with label [bc]: B+(*)
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
- Anthony Braxton: Trio and Duet (1974 [2015], Delmark/Sackville): an amusingly abstract puzzle for trio, plus you-focused standards with Dave Holland [cd]: A-
- The Rough Guide to African Rare Groove: Volume 1 ([2015], World Music Network): one suspects that what makes it rare is the not quite fully realized groove [r]: B+(**)
- Lennie Tristano: Chicago April 1951 (1951 [2014], Uptown, 2CD): with disciples Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, of course, a slightly stranger shade of bebop [r]: A-
Old records rated this week:
- Coleman Hawkins/Clark Terry: Back in Bean's Bag (1962 [2014], Essential Jazz Classics): relaxed mainstream swing masters, with Tommy Flanagan; reissue adds much[r]: A-
- Buddy Tate Quartet & Quintet: Tate a Tete: At La Fontaine, Copenhagen (1975 [1999], Storyville): Texas tenor goes to Denmark, picks up local band including Tete Montoilu [r]: B+(**)
- Dinah Washington: Dinah Jams (1954 [1997], Verve): one party everyone wanted to jump into; trumpets alone: Brown, Terry, Ferguson [r]: A-
- Dinah Washington: Sings Fats Waller (1957 [2010], Fresh Sound): Eddie Chamblee's duets don't mesh, but she gets under the skin of "Black & Blue" [r]: B+(**)
- Dinah Washington: Sings Bessie Smith (1957-58 [2010], Fresh Sound): she's more polished but savors Smith's grit and sass while the trombone gets dirty [r]: B+(***)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Christian Artmann: Fields of Pannonia (self-released): April 7
- Atomic: Lucidity (Jazzland): March 17
- Dewa Budjana: Hasta Karma (Moonjune)
- Anat Cohen: Luminosa (Anzic): March 17
- Dahi Divine: The Element (Right Direction): April 7
- John Fedchock Quartet: Live: Fluidity (Summit)
- Janice Friedman Trio: Live at Kitano (CAP)
- Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time · Redemption (TUM)
- Mikko Innanen: Song for a New Decade (TUM, 2CD)
- Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm: Spark (Water Street Music): April 7
- Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (Enja/Yellowbird): March 24
- Merzbow/Balasz Pandi/Mats Gustafsson/Thurston Moore: Cuts of Guilt/Cuts Deeper (Rare Noise, 2CD): advance, April 7
- Levon Mikaelian: United Shades of Artistry (self-released): April 7
- Billy Mintz: The 2 Bass Band . . . Live (Thirteenth Note): May 12
- Kyle Nasser: Restive Soul (AISA): March 24
- Hailey Niswanger: PDX Soul (Calmit Productions): April 7
- Kim Pensyl: Foreign Love Affair (Summit)
- Roberta Piket: Emanation (Solo: Volume 2) (Thirteenth Note): May 12
- Raoul: The Spanish Donkey (Rare Noise): advance, April 7
- Sachal: Slow Motion Miracles (Okeh): advance, April 7
- Benny Sharoni: Slant Signature (Papaya): March 17
- Ryan Truesdell: Lines of Color (Blue Note/ArtistShare): March 17
- Mark Wingfield: Proof of Light (Moonjune)
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Weekend Roundup
The Kansas state legislature has past the half-way point in their
scheduled session this year, and the Republicans there have already
succeeded in their most evident goal: to make Kansas the laughing
stock of the nation (with all due respect to the state legislatures
of Texas and Missouri). Crowson's cartoon:
This primarily refers to a bill that passed the Senate (see
Luke Brinker: Kansas could put teachers in prison for assigning books
prosecutors don't like), but the war on public schools has gone
through a number of skirmishes: first and foremost a massive funding
cut -- from levels that the courts had already established were the
minimum required by the state constitution. But also there have been
two bills to rejigger the election of local school boards (a festering
ground for people likely to sue when the state doesn't deliver its
mandated funding): one is to move the election dates and make them
partisan (assuming the Republican brand holds; voters have been known
to accidentally elect Democrats in non-partisan elections), and another
to make it illegal for any schoolteacher or relative of a schoolteacher
to run for any school board (this would, for instance, disqualify 2014
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis). There is also a bill,
still pending, where the state would pay foster parents more for foster
children who are privately- or home-schooled.
Some more scattered links this week:
Dean Baker: Robert Samuelson's 'Golden Age' Mythology: I actually
read Samuelson's book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The
American Dream in the Age of Entitlement (2008), where he argues
that the inflation spiral of the 1970s was every bit as damaging as
the Great Depression in the 1930s -- a point my parents, who lived
through both, would have found incredible. So I'm well prepared to
reject anything Samuelson has to say, but note the following:
Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 2/22/15) was inspired by a graph in
the new Economic Report of the President to tell readers that the
real problem for the middle class is not inequality but rather productivity
growth. His point is that if we had kept up the rates of productivity
growth of the Golden Age (1943-73), it would have mattered much more to
middle-income families' living standards than the rise in inequality
since 1980.
This is true in the sense of "if I were six feet five inches, I would
be taller than I am," but it's not clear what we should make of the point.
We don't know how to have more rapid productivity growth (at least not
Golden Age rates), so saying that we should want more rapid productivity
growth is sort of like hoping for the Second Coming.
Superficially, Samuelson is just grasping at straws to dismiss the
obvious effects of increasing inequality. Sure, if we had much more
productivity growth, the middle class might be better off, but only if
it were possible for the middle class to capture a substantial share of
that productivity growth -- but in recent years, no share of productivity
growth has gone to increased wages. As Baker points out:
If we can only sustain the 1.5 percent annual productivity growth of the
slowdown years (1973-1995), this would still imply income gains of almost
60 percent over three decades. While it would of course be better to have
Golden Age productivity growth, since we don't know how to get back such
rapid growth, why not pursue the policies that we know will be effective
in restoring middle class income growth?
It is also worth noting that these equality enhancing policies are also
likely to provide some boost to productivity. We know that the most important
determinant of investment is growth in demand. This means that if we push
the economy, rather than have the Fed slam on the brakes with higher interest
rates, we will likely see more investment in new plant, equipment and
software, and therefore more productivity growth.
In addition, in a tighter labor market workers will leave low-productivity
jobs for jobs with higher productivity that offer higher wages. A reason that
many workers, including many with college degrees, have taken jobs in
restaurants is that there are not better-paying jobs available. If the
economy were stronger, better jobs would be available causing productivity
to rise due to a shift in composition.
The bulk of the article reviews Samuelson's period breakdown and shows
where his effort to force history into his preconceived periods breaks
down. Baker skips over the question of why 1946-64 productivity levels
are no longer attainable, but James K. Galbraith wrote a whole book on
the subject: The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of
Growth (2014) -- something I'll get around to writing about sooner
or later.
By the way, see Galbraith's
Reading the Greek Deal Correctly. He sees the recent agreement
between Greece's new left-leaning government and the ECB not as a
defeat for Greece's voters so much as a way everyone can save face
by kicking the ball down the road a few weeks.
Josh Marshall: Kerry's Clean Hit: When John Kerry pointed out how
wrong Benjamin Netanyahu's predictions supporting the 2003 Iraq War
were, I recalled how Kerry had voted for the Iraq War Resolution in
2002 and wrote them off as two peas in the same pod. Marshall argues
that Kerry's position was more, uh, nuanced than my memory recalled:
There's some important background on this new intrusion of the Iraq War
into the current debate about Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli
election. It's true that like a number of Senate Democrats, John Kerry
voted for the Iraq War resolution in late 2002. That was due to a mix
of belief in national unity, political cowardice and a credulous
assumption that President Bush was actually on the level when he said
he needed the authorization to wage war to avoid it, to get inspectors
back into Iraq. It was or should have been clear that this was not true,
that inspectors and Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the goal that
made the threat of war necessary. They were cudgels and covers to help
make the war a fait accompli.
Many Democrats either didn't think Saddam would relent or thought
that if he did, Bush would lose his casus belli. I don't exonerate
them. They were helped along in these maybe misunderstandings by a
health dose of cowardice and what they saw at the time as political
self-preservation. As it happened, when Bush lost his rationale
for war, he simply invaded anyway.
This was mainly obvious at the time, not entirely obvious to everyone.
But to suggest that Secretary Kerry 'supported' the Iraq War like
President Bush or Benjamin Netanyahu is silly.
That brings us to Netanyahu. Some believe that the Israeli government
either wanted the Iraq War to happen or goaded the Americans into the
attack. In fact, the Israeli security establishment was very divided on
the wisdom of the US administration's policy. Indeed, Ariel Sharon
pointedly warned President Bush of the dangers of what he was planning.
Indeed, the best account of his discussions with President Bush suggests
his warnings were highly prescient -- about the spillover of radicalism
growing out of a US occupation, the zero sum empowerment of Iran and
more.
It was Netanyahu, then technically a private citizen, though he would
soon enter Sharon's government in late 2002 who not only supported a US
attack on Iraq but advocated for it endlessly within the US.
Italics in the original; I added the bold. Of course,
the practical effect of Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, and others in voting
for Bush's Iraq War Resolution was to rubber-stamp the invasion. (As
I recall Marshall at least wobbled on the war plans: in particular,
I recall him praising Kenneth Pollack's influential pro-war book,
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.) But he is
right that Netanyahu's warmongering went much further, both in words
and in actually lining up his rich American donor network to lobby
war support. Marshall also includes a video of Netanyahu testifying
before a House committee promoting the war. Even among Israelis few
politicians have that sort of chutzpah. Of course, no one's dredging
this episode up because we're interested in learning from history.
Netanyahu's past record of influencing Congress matters right now
because he's still at it, with an invitation by House Republicans
to address Congress to try to undo any progress Obama might make on
negotiating a deal that would ensure that Iran not develop nuclear
weapons. I haven't bothered collecting links on the various aspects
of this -- either the propriety of Natanyahu's speech (widely opposed
both in Israel and in the US) or on the tortuous negotiations (often
hamstrung by hypothetical scenarios only Americans can imagine). (OK,
if you are curious, check out:
Paul R Pillar;
Gareth Porter, also
here;
Robert Einhorn;
William J Perry, et al.;
Jeffrey Simpson;
JJ Goldberg;
Stephen M Walt (interview);
Philip Weiss;
Richard Silverstein.) Also, let's quote from
Jeffrey Goldberg: A Partial Accounting of the Damage Netanyahu Is Doing
to Israel (recalling that Goldberg has a long history of parrotting
whatever Israel's current propaganda line is on Iran):
Netanyahu is engaging in behavior that is without precedent: He is
apparently so desperate to stay in office that he has let the Republicans
weaponize his country in their struggle against a Democratic president
they despise. Boehner seeks to do damage to Obama, and he has turned
Netanyahu into an ally in this cause. It's not entirely clear here who
is being played.
For decades, it has been a cardinal principle of Israeli security and
foreign-policy doctrine that its leaders must cultivate bipartisan support
in the United States, and therefore avoid even the appearance of favoritism.
This is the official position of the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in
Washington, AIPAC, as well, which is why its leaders are privately fuming
about Netanyahu's end-run around the White House. Even though AIPAC's
leadership leans right, the organization knows that support for Israel
in America must be bipartisan in order for it to be stable. "Dermer and
Netanyahu don't believe that Democrats are capable of being pro-Israel,
which is crazy for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that
most Jews are Democrats," one veteran AIPAC leader told me.
In Israel, cynicism about Netanyahu's intentions is spreading.
"Netanyahu, who purports to be the big expert on everything American,
subordinated Israel's most crucial strategic interests to election
considerations, and the repercussions will endure for some time,"
Chuck Freilich, a former deputy head of Israel's National Security
Council, wrote last week.
Robert Wright: The Clash of Civilizations That Isn't: Reaction to
Roger Cohen's polarizing rant, "Islam and the West at War," along with
Graeme Wood's Atlantic piece, "What ISIS Really Wants" (links
in the article if you really want them). You may recall that GW Bush
(aside from a momentary slip-of-the-tongue about "crusades") was very
careful to make clear that his Global War on Terror wasn't a campaign
against his family friends in Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, Bush was practically
the only politician in America to defend a deal that would sell US ports
to Abu Dhabi: proof, if you want it, that for him at least money always
trumps identity.) But most Americans have never been very disciplined
or principled about distinguishing the targets of our wars from anyone
else who might share superficial traits, so it isn't surprising that
prolonged war with self-identified Muslims should result in more than
random acts of slander and violence. In the days of purely nationalist
wars (e.g., the two World Wars), this was mostly ugly and repaired easy
enough once the war ended. (Indeed, the anti-Kraut hysteria of WWI was
much reduced in WWII, as the embarrassment of the former provided a
vaccination against repeat in the latter -- not that Japanese-Americans
were spared.) But in more recent wars -- let's call them "post-colonial" --
US entry is predicated on dividing populations into groups we call allies
and enemies, one we support and the other we kill, and in such wars any
mental generalization undermines the mission and ultimately loses the war.
(Vietnam is as good an example of the dynamic as Afghanistan or Iraq, but
the downside was much more limited there: it ultimately turned into a
nationalist war, with the US deciding that perpetual scorn and isolation
was still some measure of victory.)
Those post-colonial wars have, without exception that I am aware of,
been fools' missions, but they would pale compared to the fevered notion
that "the West" must wage war with all of Islam -- well over one billion
people, including a few million already resident in "the West." Wright
points out that this insanity can point to an intellectual pedigree:
In 1996, when I reviewed Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of
Civilizations for Slate, I fretted that Huntington's world view
could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy." This was before 9/11, and
I wasn't thinking about Islam in particular. Huntington's book was
about "fault lines" dividing various "civilizations," and I was just
making the general point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as
radically different from Americans -- as Huntington's book, I believed,
encouraged us to do -- we were more likely to treat Japan in ways that
deepened any Japanese-Western fault line.
Since 9/11, I've realized that, in the case of Islam, the forces that
could make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy are
particularly powerful. For one thing, in this case, our actual enemies,
such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, themselves favor the clash-of-civilizations
narrative, and do their best to encourage it. When the Atlantic tells
us that ISIS is "very Islamic" and the New York Times runs the headline
"Islam and the West at War," it's party time in Mosul. Order up another
round of decapitations! Get Roger Cohen more freaked out! Maybe he'll
keep broadcasting a key recruiting pitch of both Al Qaeda and ISIS:
that the West is at war with Islam! (Wood noted, a week after his
article appeared, its "popularity among ISIS supporters.")
Wright doesn't go very deeply into the people in "the West" that
buy into this "clash of civilizations" malarkey, except to note:
I don't think it's a coincidence that commentators who dismiss attempts
to understand the "root causes" of extremism tend to be emphatic in
linking the extremism to Islam, and often favor a massively violent
response to it.
By the way, the wind is at their backs. Last week, CBS News reported
that, for the first time, a majority of Americans polled -- fifty-seven
per cent -- favored sending ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and
Syria.
Haven't we seen this movie? The Iraq War, more than any other single
factor, created ISIS. After the 2003 invasion, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a
Jordanian who led an obscure group of radical Islamists, rebranded it as
an Al Qaeda affiliate and used the wartime chaos of Iraq to expand it.
Al-Zarqawi's movement came to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then
evolved into ISIS.
Note that more and more post-colonial rationales -- the idea that
we're fighting for some (good) Afghanis/Iraqis/Muslims against other
(bad) ones -- is giving way to outright nationalist/colonialist ideas
(not yet with Obama and his echelons but with the people most loudly
beating the war drums).
Also worth quoting Paul Woodward on
ISIS and the caliphate:
Millions of Muslims, without being extremists of any variety, see the
Islamic world as having been carved up by Western colonialism, robbed
of its sovereignty, and placed under the control of compliant and corrupt
rulers. Broadly speaking, what's on offer right now is a brutal ISIS
caliphate vs. a fractious status quo. That seems like a lousy choice.
As Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated over the last half
century, the project of pan-Arab secular nationalism was a spectacular
failure.
On the other hand, the Arab monarchies have the durability of a
chronic disease -- their ability to survive has accomplished little
more than cripple the region.
If ISIS and the other forms of Islamic extremism are seen for what
they are -- symptoms of a disease, rather than the disease itself --
then the remedy cannot be found by merely looking for ways to suppress
its symptoms.
Also, a few links for further study:
Henry Farrell: Dark Leviathan: Subhed: "The Silk Road might have
started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a
fiefdom run by pirate kings." As a libertarian experiment, this reminds
me of some of those Murray Rothbard schemes I typeset for the Kochs
back in the 1970s -- especially the naive notion that trust can be
comoditized and brokered through a marketplace.
All of these petty principalities are vulnerable to criminals trying
to extract ransom, and increasingly to law enforcement, which has
inveigled its way into trusted positions so that it can gather
information and destroy illicit marketplaces. The libertarian hope
that markets could sustain themselves through free association and
choice is a chimera with a toxic sting in its tail. Without state
enforcement, the secret drug markets of Tor hidden services are
coming to resemble an anarchic state of nature in which self-help
dominates.
Nancy Le Tourneau: The Scott Walker Antidote: Minnesota: Compares
and contrasts the results of Democratic government in Minnesota under
Mark Dayton and Republican government in Wisconsin with Scott Walker.
You can follow up with
Ed Kilgore: Scott Walker's Koch Angle: you don't have to be as
screwed up as Kansas to get screwed. For more on Walker, see
A Noun, a Verb, and "Union Thugs".
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Feb 2015 |
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