Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (final).

Tweet: Music Week: 51 albums, 9 A-list

Music: Current count 43953 [43902) rated (+51), 25 [24] unrated (+1).

As I've noted often of late, my life is in some kind of limbo until I figure some stuff out, including what (if anything) I should work on writing. It's easy to blame (or credit) procrastination for a big part of that, but one part that is on some kind of schedule is eye surgery. I saw the doctor today, and he was pleased enough to schedule the second (right) eye. I go in next week, April 8. After that, my vision at least should start to clear up. I have an appointment with my old eye doctor a week or two after that, which I will have to reschedule: my annual check up, a full year after he recommended that I see the surgeon in the first place (well, actually more like the 3rd or 4th time) -- it's taken that long.

In the meantime, I spent several days working on the backyard shed. A couple of boards had come loose, and the whole structure had slipped off its mounts. It also had a lot of rot on the outside boards. Short of replacing them, my brother advised applying linseed oil and paint thinner, so I did that. I put it all back together, and screwed it firmly to the shed.

The shed itself is raised 6-inches, sitting on treated timbers. It's enough space for small critters, like rabbits, to hide, which makes it tempting for the dog to dig around. Laura wanted me to close it off, so I bought a roll of 1/2-inch hardware cloth, cut it into 8-inch swathes, and wrapped the shed with it. That involved a lot of crawling around and digging, so the wire wound up below ground level. Not fun at my age, but over four days I got through it.

I still have more to do there. I have some plastic edging I want to dig in next to the wire, which will extend the depth another 3 or 4 inches. I also need to caulk some cracks in the paneling, and repair at least one split trim board. There's a bit of overhang on the ends, and a soffit problem -- if that's the right word (I need to get on a ladder to look at that). I need to wash the siding down, and see about touching up the paint. All that can wait for a nicer day. Same for much clean up around the yard. I also need to pull the grill out, and figure out why I'm not getting all the burners to light.

Indoors, I started to work on a blog post expanding on a tweet I wrote:

It occurs to me that there are 3 kinds of Democrats: A) those concerned for everyone (left); B) those who are self-interested (elites, pace Reagan); and C) those who are nation-oriented (pace Trump). Each has good reason to be anti-R, but conflict with other-D, which weakens opposition to R.

It quickly became too much of a rabbit hole, so I wound up moving my scraps to the notebook. What got me thinking was Robert Christgau's self-reference to Patriotic Democrats. Bill Clinton's New Democrats were a reaction to losing to Reagan. Clinton accepted (and effectively validated) the core of the Reagan attack on welfare and big government, but thought he could win by doing it better. And sure, he did it better, at least for the tech and finance industries, but few of his gains trickled down to the middle class (let alone to the poor), and in the end he didn't win much.

Reagan also made patriotism a big part of his pitch, mostly because it seemed to be a more respectable way of flattering and rallying white identity. Trump even more so, especially as he rarely campaigns on his corrupt economic agenda (when he does, they're reduced to gibberish: tax cuts, drill drill drill, tariffs). All along, some Democrats have tried to out-hawk and out-jingo Reagan and the Bushes, to little a vail. But with Trump they have good reason to suspect he's a phony, and to assert themselves as much truer patriots. (Again, so far, to little avail.)

This came to a head with Russiagate and the Ukraine impeachment, which was led by the so-called Security Democrats (and was, I think, a complete disaster, but that's a long story -- one important point, little recognized, is that they helped provoke Putin's invasion of Ukraine, where they remain the most dedicated party to perpetual war. So what I'm wondering here is whether Patriotic Democrats aren't making the same mistake viz. Trump as New Democrats made viz. Reagan? I.e., validating them on points they'll seem more credible for, while aligning themselves with thanklessly bad policies, and looking less than honest in the process.

But sorting all that out, and showing that the left has better answers, is a taller order than I'm up to right now. But what it turns out I was up for was assembling a 2025 Metacritic File. I made it all the way through Album of the Year's publication list, even the metal ones I regard as completely useless. I've also gone through the reviews/lists at All About Jazz, Hip-Hop Golden Age, and Saving Country Music, and I've included Phil Overeem's list, plus all of the grades so far from Robert Christgau and myself. It is, to date at least, as comprehensive as I've ever done, resulting in 792 new music albums listed, although only a paltry 14 old music albums.

The immediate payoff started with last week's large review list, and continues below (more jazz this week, because AAJ took a long time, Overeem was a good source, and I was quicker than usual to move on some albums I got email on, like the Marsalis. I didn't really touch my demo queue again this week, because most of what I have there is still unreleased. I did continue to post on Bluesky about Pick Hit albums as they I recognized them. My preference there is to find Bandcamp links, but sometimes I have to search out substitutes. By the way, Tim Niland is doing something similar on Bluesky. If you like my tips (or even if you don't), you should follow him there. I'll be adding his listings to my Metacritic File. (He doesn't do grades, but only writes about things he likes.)

It seems highly unlikely that I'll keep this file anywhere near up-to-date, but it's something I can always fall back on when I find myself out of sorts, or just get frustrated trying to figure out what to play next.

The last two weeks have thrown the March Streamnotes archive into overdrive. I haven't done the indexing yet, but it's on my head, even before getting around to drawing up my todo list. One thing I did do was to create the 2024 frozen file. Late adds to the regular 2024 file henceforth will be marked. I've done this for many years now, but never this late before.

What I'm more likely to work on next week is a new Book Roundup. The latest one I've done was back on April 25, 2024, so nearly a year ago. I'm way overdue, and have a lot of catching up to do. Then there is the problem of all the book notes I have left over from a year ago. Most have lost their timeliness, but still should be worked in somehow.

New records reviewed this week:

• Artemis: Arboresque (2025, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Banks: Off With Her Head (2025, Her Name Is Banks): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bdrmm: Microtonic (2025, Rock Action): [sp]: B+(***)
• Black Milk & Fat Ray: Food From the Gods (2025, Computer Ugly/Fat Beats): [sp]: B+(**)
• Booker T & the Bleeds: Ode to BC/LY . . . And Eye Know BO . . . Da Prez (2022 [2025], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B
• Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky (2024 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(***)
• Brother Ali: Satisfied Soul (2025, Mello Music Group): [sp]: A-
• Rob Brown: Walkabout (2023 [2025], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(**)
• Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber: If You Can't Dazzle Them With Your Brilliance, Then Baffle Them With Your Blisluth Pt. Two (2022-24 [2025], Avant Groid Musica): [bc]: B+(**)
• Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet (2024 [2025], Blue Note): [sp]: A-
• Doodlebug and 80 Empire: A Galactic Love Supreme (2025, Gladiator): [sp]: B
• Mathias Eick: Lullaby (2024 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• Sam Fender: People Watching (2025, Polydor): [sp]: B+(*)
• R.A.P. Ferreira: Outstanding Understanding (2024, Ruby Yacht): [bc]: B+(**)
• Sullivan Fortner: Southern Nights (2023 [2025], Artwork): [sp]: B+(**)
• Rose Gray: Louder, Please (2025, PIAS): [sp]: B+(***)
• Billy Hart Quartet: Just (2021 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• William Hooker: Jubilation (2023 [2025], ORG Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Horsegirl: Phonetics On and On (2025, Matador): [sp]: B+(**)
• Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life (2024 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jennie: Ruby (2025, Columbia): [sp]: B
• Anthony Joseph: Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back (2025, Heavenly Sweetness): [sp]: A-
• Lola Kirke: Trailblazer (2025, One Riot): [sp]: B+(***)
• Benjamin Lackner: Spindrift (2024 [2025], ECM): [sp]: B+(***)
• James Brandon Lewis Trio: Apple Cores (2025, Anti-): [sp]: A-
• Lolo [Mamah Diabate/Jabel Kanuteh/Stefano Pilia/Marco Zanotti]: Lolo (2025, Black Sweat): [sp]: B+(***)
• Loot: Loot (2023 [2025], ICP): [bc]: A-
• Jako Maron: Mahavélouz (2025, Nyege Nyege Tapes): [sp]: B+(***)
• Branford Marsalis Quartet: Belonging (2024 [2025], Blue Note): [sp]: A-
• Caili O'Doherty: Bluer Than Blue: Celebrating Lil Hardin Armstrong (2025, Outside In Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jeremy Pelt: Woven (2024 [2025], HighNote): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ivo Perelman/Ken Vandermark/Joe McPhee: Oxygen (2025, Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(***)
• PremRock: Did You Enjoy Your Time Here . . . ? (2025, Backwoodz Studioz): [sp]: B+(***)
• Dave Sewelson/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/George Cartwright/Anthony Cox/Steve Hirsh: Murmuration (2023 [2025], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(**)
• Six Sex: X-Sex (2025, Dale Play, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Dayna Stephens: Hopium (2022 [2025], Contagious Music): [sp]: B+(*)
• Thomas Strønen: Relations (2018-22 [2024], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
• Trio Glossia: Trio Glossia (2024 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jesse Welles: Middle (2025, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
• YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds (2025, AD 93): [sp]: A-
• Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek: Yarin Yoksa = If There Is No Tomorrow (2025, Big Crown): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Young Mothers: Better If You Let It (2022 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• William Hooker: A Time Within: Live at the New York Jazz Museum, January 14, 1977 (1977 [2025], Valley of Search): [sp]: B+(***)
• Ginger Johnson and His African Messengers: African Party [Deluxe Edition] (1967 [2025], Innovative Collective/BBE Music): [sp]: A-
• Music Is a Message From Space ([2025], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Neil Young: Oceanside Countryside (1977 [2025], Reprise): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Six Sex: Fantasy (2019, Dale Play, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Six Sex: Area 69 (2022, Dale Play, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
• Six Sex: 6X (2023, Dale Play, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
• Six Sex: Satisfire (2024, Dale Play, EP): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jacob Felix Heule/Teté Leguía/Sanishta Rivero/Martín Escalante: An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing (Kettle Hole) [03-07]

Just Thinking: About Democrats

I started to write this up as a blog post, but two days later decided to pull the plug, and file it here. I still see this kind of model building as important. Individual people are complicated and conflicted, but are made up of various mixes of abstract lines like these. Working these out in some detail could be the first chapter of a book on "Weird 2024."

I started yesterday with a very schematic tweet:

It occurs to me that there are 3 kinds of Democrats: A) those concerned for everyone (left); B) those who are self-interested (elites, pace Reagan); and C) those who are nation-oriented (pace Trump). Each has good reason to be anti-R, but conflict with other-D, which weakens opposition to R.

I thought about unpacking this by writing out a thread of replies, but I don't really like that format: the 300-char chunks cramp my style, and all you wind up with is an instantly disposable chain of tweets. So while the basic idea is pretty simple, we need a little space to air it out, and draw out some of the implications.

I've been thinking a lot about how to think about news. A big part of most thinking is based on historical analogies: we can only know what has already happened (to the extent that we know anything at all), so the first thing we do with any new discovery is to put it into the framework of all that we understand of what came before. Which, needless to say, for most people isn't very much at all, but it's all we have. Beyond that, the best we can do is to use reason to make inferences and conjectures. (The worst is to use prejudices and raw emotion.)

The reasoning I prefer is made up of models. I, for example, have built up fairly complex mental models of various people and groups. And while they serve me fairly well, I'm happy to tune them further when new information suggests revision. It's hard to resist going into obvious examples here -- Trump, Putin, Netanyahu are all actors who respond to stimuli in fairly predictable ways, although pundits, who seem to be selected more for their prejudices than for their understanding, often get them wrong -- but let's just stick with the case at hand: the Democratic Party.

In my formulation, there are three main kinds of Democrats, based on their sense of interest and affiliation, but also based on how much they accept or reject Republican political advances:

1. Those who focus on their own individual elite interest. They accept much of the Reagan worldview (neoliberalism), but think they can promote business interests and manage government and the economy more efficiently than Republicans, to better effect for more people. Despite evidence that they are right, they have very little credibility, and are easy to attack as corrupt and hypocritical.

2. Those who focus on national interest. They are responding to Trump's "America First" jingoism, the sincerity of which they doubt -- partly because Trump denigrates large numbers of Americans, partly because he seems personally cozy with foreign autocrats. This draws on decades where the only form of public service given universal respect has been in the military -- a prime recruiting ground for recent Democratic candidates, but associated with foolish, losing wars.

3. Then there is the left, where the focus is universal: not just citizens, or elites, but everyone. While this is a potentially stronger alternative to the Republicans, this antagonizes the other sections of the Democratic Party, who often seem more aggravated by the left than by the right.

One thought I had was that before going into the three interest segments of the Democratic Party, I could apply the same analysis to the left (substituting class solidarity for nationalism as the selective group interest -- for the century up to 1950, that was the defining characteristic of the left, but much less so since then, partly because class segregation lessened after 1950, partly because the red scare demonized class consciousness, and partly because the new left was both more individualist and universalist.

Daily Log

Started today with a schematic tweet:

It occurs to me that there are 3 kinds of Democrats: A) those concerned for everyone (left); B) those who are self-interested (elites, pace Reagan); and C) those who are nation-oriented (pace Trump). Each has good reason to be anti-R, but conflict with other-D, which weakens opposition to R.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 46 albums, 10 A-list

Music: Current count 43902 [43856) rated (+46), 24 [25] unrated (-1).

I'm stuck in some sort of limbo, and expect to be for some time. For now, I'm waiting for an appointment with the eye surgeon, later this month, where he will evaluate the operated-on left eye, and probably schedule surgery on the right. After the surgery, I was hopeful that this would clear up quickly. I'm less optimistic now. The left eye is somewhat better for distance, but still far from clear. There's a fairly significant color shift between the eyes, which suggests I'm getting more light through the left eye. I can see well enough to drive, watch TV, etc. Reading is a bit more difficult, but not impossible.

Surgery will make the right eye worse before it gets better. Right now I have doubts that the left eye will be able to compensate for the right as well as the right has for the left. In the long run, of course, it should be better, but in the really long run we're all dead. It's not like I'm looking forward to decades of improved vision. On the other hand, I've lasted much longer than I imagined at 20, when my life was a total wreck, or even at 30, or 50 (when I started looking forward to retirement). Looks like I just have to get through another 6-8 weeks. After which it will be summer, and I can complain about the heat, instead of the cold.

If I weren't in limbo, what I should be doing is working on my planning documents, to figure out what I want to do for the next year or two, so I can get on with it. I have plenty of vague ideas -- too many, really, so a big part of the process of articulating them is to help weed out those that are impracticable or just not worth the trouble.

Lacking that, I sometimes pick out some little chore and take a shot at it. For instance, my wife was worried about the dog digging under the shed -- it's a dachshund mix, and seems especially inclined to dig -- while I've been bothered by rot and displacement of the ramp I built up to the doors. We had a couple of relatively warm days early last week, so I worked on that. I treated the ramp with linseed oil to stop the rot, and replaced the rusted nails with deck screws, finally attaching the ramp to the shed so it can't get shifted any more. For defense against digging, I got one side wrapped with 1/2-inch square hardware cloth. I still have three more sides to do, plus I need to do some caulking and other repairs, but that can wait until it warms up again.

Another chore weighing on my mind was the need to update the database for Robert Chrisgau's Consumer Guide. Since he started buckraking on Substack, he's delayed his Consumer Guides from his website for nine months, so there's little pressure for me to keep them updated. I do add the monthly columns each month a day or two after they appear, but some code checks timestamps and hides them until the release date. Same thing with the database: if you try to access a CG entry less than nine months old, you'll get a link to the Substack page where, if you're a subscriber, you can read the review. With that setup, I should be updating the database regularly, but I've tended to let it slide -- in this case, well over a year.

Another thing I did last week with no planning or foresight was Loose Tabs. Although I gave up spending much of my life reading news the 2024 election, when I terminated my Speaking of Which columns, I found myself with a couple dozen browser tabs open to various articles that had caught and kept my attention. I've been noting some of those under my notebook's Daily Log headings, but I wanted to clean up, and there were so many of them that I found it easier just to dump them into a blog post. Then, of course, I wound up writing (just added the counter, so 95 links, 7389 words). Note that counter includes a greatly expanded note on Robert Christgau's March Xgau Sez Q&A, some extra Dean Baker links, and a second thought on turning minds to slop. I have no plans to do this again, but it might not be a bad idea to keep an open file to collect scraps like this (like I have, but don't use often enough, for Books). In this, I was encouraged by the reader who wrote in:

Really appreciated your latest post, your eloquence always clarifies my thinking even though I have empathized fully with the need to step away from current events. Thank you.

In looking up the X follower numbers in the Loose Tabs piece, I found myself unable to imagine what having many thousands let alone millions of followers might be like, but at my level they feel like personal friends. My Bluesky account is up to 76 followers, with 50 posts. Most of this week's posts have been Pick Hit record links. I thought that was one thing Bluesky might be good for, as (unlike X) their links to files work, and there's no real reason to hoard references to build up suspense for this post. And this week I have a huge number of good records to recommend -- possibly because it's the first week in 2025 where most of my reviews are of 2025 releases.

The Pick Hit posts have at most throwaway notes, but they include links, mostly to Bandcamp pages where you can listen to the music. The only A- record below I didn't tweet about was Saba, which I couldn't find a good link for. I've used a few other link sources in recent weeks, but I'm looking for somewhere you can actually sample the music, without having to go to a streaming service. My format have changed several times as I think about how to package this service, and it will no doubt continue to evolve. If/when I do start dipping under the A- line, I can go to "HM" for Honorable Mention. I can't imagine adding "Duds" to the mix, as I'm a pretty tolerant guy, and nothing much really offends me -- the worst I hear these days is more like a waste of time.

I expect to do more non-music posts, but the one such tweet I want to reiterate here is my response to a widely circulated (at least 1.4M Views+; I picked it up second or third hand) by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who wrote:

If you were raised in the U.S., you've been subjected to a relentless bombardment of Marxist propaganda throughout your entire life—at least since you started kindergarten (probably sooner).

How old were you when you first realized that?

First response I saw was from Doug Henwood, who wrote something like: "As an actual Marxist, I can assure you that isn't true." My own response reached back into memory. I started kindergarten in 1955 (there was no pre-school then, at least in working class neighborhoods in Wichita), back when the Pledge of Allegiance (with its newly-inserted "under God") was obligatory, before the Supreme Court ruled against prayers in school, and didn't exit high school until after I read the required Animal Farm, with its teacher guide dictates of which pig meant what. During that entire time, I was never given -- in school, in church, in the Boy Scouts, or on the only three TV channels that existed back then -- even the slightest hint that communists might be anything but sheer evil. Later on, I came to recognize much of what I had been told as propaganda, but none of it was Marxist. The effect was first of all to make me a true believer in "the American way of life," then as I recognized what America's leaders were actually doing, most obviously in Vietnam but all around the world, I started having doubts, and in fairly short order flipped. I started reading actual Marxists, and found deep insight into the modern world, compassion for its victims, and hope for the future. That didn't necessarily make me a Marxist. It certainly didn't make me a fanboy of Stalin or Mao, whom Marxists could critique as savagely as they did Hitler or Churchill. But, as I put it in my response:

I was 16 when I dropped out of high school. By then I suspected that everything I had been taught was wrong. Only later, after I started reading Marxists, did I come to understand how and why, and develop the tools to find truth and fend off nonsense. We need more critical theory, not less.

I probably should have said "critical thinking" instead of "theory," but the key word there is "tools." And to be fair, it wasn't just Marxists who opened my eyes. After I quit school, I tried to figure out what had gone so terribly wrong, so I read a lot of books about education. The best one was by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, where they argued that the most important thing anyone can obtain from education is a sensitive "bullshit detector." I got mine the hard way.

While Lee's argument is utter nonsense, it is not unprecedented. Back in the 1950s, unbeknownst to me, the John Birch Society was saying that same thing, trying to double down on the McCarthyism that had fallen into disgrace. But the idea is the same: they want the power to dictate what is taught, by by whom, and "Marxist" or more lately "left-wing" is just their name for whatever it is they want to ban. The right has never had any qualms about resorting to force, but often they hope that intimidation will do the trick, and that's the real intent of Lee's messaging.

As for the real effect, we'll see. People like Lee and Trump and Musk give "Marxist" and "left-wing" a lot of good publicity, because they admit that there is an alternative to their own crude, cruel, dysfunctional worldview. The left can't buy or finagle this kind of publicity. Nothing, least of all any kind of conspiracy, is pushing Americans leftward more effectively than the "irritable mental gestures" and malfeasance of the Republican Right.

But, where was I? Impulsive projects, I think. One worth mentioning is that instead of continuing to get marginal returns from adding to my 2024 Metacritic/EOY Aggregate, I created a new one for 2025. I started by plugging all of my own paltry 2025 list (and its tracking file), then I went to AOTY and picked up their 125 highest rated albums of 2025. I've also started looking at select publications, so that at this point the list is up to 256 albums -- way short of 3616 from 2024, but it's enough of a start that I've come up with a huge and varied crop of A-list albums this week, most of which I wasn't aware of a week ago. On the other hand, I did throttle back on my jazz promo queue, as I was getting into future release territory. And I haven't looked at many non-promo jazz records yet, because AOTY doesn't do a good job of tracking them. (I'll add some stuff from jazz sites later; also from sites like HHGA and SCM, which have already contributed a couple albums below.)

I'm skeptical that I'll do a very good job of keeping this up to date, but it is useful in providing answers to the question of what to play next? (As this week goes to show.)

I did finally finish with Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times this morning. Coming after his tour de force four-volume history of the world 1789-1991, this has been a really extraordinary experience, doing much to help me frame my own understanding of the world. I've written up two posts based on quotes from the book (Hobsbawm Today and Hobsbawm Again), and will probably do another one soon based on a very insightful section on America. I have a lot of things I should read, but the one I'm inclined to check out first is Christiopher Lasch: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, but seems like a pretty good title for 2024).

PS: Overheard from the news room (i.e., my wife's den): Q: "Are you making the same mistake that Biden made?" A: "No, of course not." No fucking idea what they're talking about, yet people can talk like this on TV and think we should take them seriously. Reminds me of a "Get Fuzzy" comic strip, where Rob asks "do you smell something?" and Satchel (the dog, and not normally the sharpest tool in the shed) gives a real answer: "About 857 things. Can you be more specific?"

New records reviewed this week:

• Nils Agnas: Köper Sig Ur En Kris (2023 [2025], Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• Yazz Ahmed: A Paradise in the Hold (2025, Night Time Stories): [sp]: B
• Annie & the Caldwells: Can't Lose My (Soul) (2023 [2025], Luaka Bop): [sp]: A-
• Ichiko Aoba: Luminiscent Creatures (2025, Hermine): [sp]: B+(*)
• Willow Avalon: Southern Belle Raisin' Hell (2025, Assemble Sound/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jarod Bufe: Brighter Days (2024 [2025], Calligram): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ethel Cain: Perverts (2025, Daughters of Cain): [sp]: B
• Clipping.: Dead Channel Sky (2025, Sub Pop): [sp]: A-
• Cymande: Renascence (2025, BMG): [sp]: B+(**)
• Marie Davidson: City of Clowns (2025, Deewee): [sp]: A-
• The Devil Makes Three: Spirits (2025, New West): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ex-Vöid: In Love Again (2025, Tapete): [sp]: B+(*)
• Lorraine Feather: The Green World (2022-24 [2025], Relation): [cd]: B+(***) [03-28]
• FKA Twigs: Eusexua (2025, Young/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(*)
• John Glacier: Like a Ribbon (2025, Young): [sp]: B+(*)
• Tim Hecker: Shards (2020-22 [2025], Kranky): [sp]: B+(**)
• Lady Gaga: Mayhem (2025, Interscope): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jeffrey Lewis: The Even More Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis (2023 [2025], Don Giovanni/Blang): [sp]: A-
• Damon Locks: List of Demands (2024 [2025], International Anthem): [sp]: A-
• Brandon Lopez: Nada Sagrada (2023 [2025], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(***)
• Tate McRae: So Close to What (2025, RCA): [sp]: B+(***)
• Mogwai: The Bad Fire (2025, Rock Action): [sp]: B+(*)
• Panda Bear: Sinister Grift (2025, Domino): [sp]: B+(*)
• Saba & No I.D.: From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D. (2025, From the Private Collection): [sp]: A-
• Moonchild Sanelly: Full Moon (2025, Transgressive): [sp]: A-
• Shygirl: Club Shy Room 2 (2025, Because Music, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Skaiwater: #gigi (2024, GoodTalk/Capitol): [sp]: B+(**)
• Skaiwater: #mia (2025, GoodTalk/Capitol, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Songhoy Blues: Héritage (2025, Transgressive): [sp]: B+(***)
• Squid: Cowards (2025, Warp): [sp]: B+(*)
• Sharon Van Etten: Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory (2025, Jagjaguwar): [sp]: B+(*)
• Chris Varga: Breathe (2024 [2025], Calligram): [cd]: B+(*)
• Sunny War: Armageddon in a Summer Dress (2025, New West): [sp]: B+(*)
• Reggie Watkins: Rivers (2024 [2025], BYNK): [cd]: B+(***) [03-28]
• Michael Wollny Trio: Living Ghosts (2024 [2025], ACT): [sp]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Plastikman: Musik (1994 [2024], Nova Mute): [sp]: B+(**)
• Studio: West Coast (2006 [2025], Ghostly International): [sp]: A-
• Yo La Tengo: Old Joy (2025, Mississippi, EP): [sp]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Bantou Mentale: Bantou Mentale (2019, Glitterbeat): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bantou Mentale: Congo Animal (2020, Glitterbeat): [sp]: A-
• John Coltrane: Sun Ship (1965 [1971], Impulse!): [sp]: [was: C+]: B+(***)
• John Coltrane: Sun Ship: The Complete Sessions (1965 [2013], Impulse!, 2CD): [sp]: B+(**)
• Paul Dunmall Sun Ship Quartet/Alan Skidmore/Julie Kjær/Ståle Liavik Solberg/Mark Wastell: John Coltrane 50th Memorial Concert at Cafe OTO (2017 [2019], Confront): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Kenny Dorham: Blue Bossa in the Bronx: Live From the Blue Morocco (1957, Resonance) [04-12]
• Adrian Galante: Introducing Adrian Galante (Zoho) [04-25]
• Freddie Hubbard: On Fire: Live From the Blue Morocco (1967, Resonance) [04-12]
• Charles Mingus: In Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts (1977, Resonance) [04-12]
• Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3: A Colection of SF Bay Area Salsa and Latin Jazz: Renegade Queens (Patois) [03-21]

Daily Log

Spent some time today rewriting the Christgau seciton in my Loose Tabs post. I started this because Laura complained that she didn't understand the section. I rewrote it further after receiving this reaction from Bob:

With all respect to and fondness for Laura, I have my own preferred language, been making my living as a professional writer for 60 years. I also have my own politics, and they're by no means the same as Laura's. I believe the question of how literate Trump is has been soft-pedaled and camouflaged and very much doubt he's capable of reading two consecutive paragraphs of abstract reasoning or analysis. And while I don't believe in God I do believe in evil. I've gotten several heartening responses to my rhetoric in that answer and am proud I did.

P.S. I am also, absolutely, a Democrat with a capital D.

The following is my letter to Christgau, followed by the revised section.

Laura was confused about something I wrote, which seemed to her to scramble who said what. I've since done some further editing to make it harder to misunderstand, but you never really know. Neither of us have any objection to what you wrote, let alone to your right to write it. Pointing out that I would have written something slightly different wasn't meant as a critique let alone as a reprimand. We all do what we can, within the limits of language and understanding.

I've been thinking a lot about the problems and pitfalls of trying to talk about Trump, as I think a lot of what has been done hasn't worked at all well, but I don't have many good ideas. I do believe that left and center need to have more respect for each other, and snipe at the other less, but I'm not inclined to back way from principles. No doubt that position favors the left, as the center critique of the left is rarely principled, but most often articulated as "leftist policies are unacceptable/impossible."

I've rewritten the section a couple times, but haven't posted it yet. I'll paste what I have at the end here. Obviously, much more could be said. I didn't elaborate on "superpower," but I'm interested in how attacking Trump seems to make him stronger. That doesn't mean don't bother attacking him. I think this has a lot to do with credibility, which is a big problem for Democrats (mostly unfairly, but they're not very good at explaining why). Still, when you see stupid and/or evil, you have to say something.

I don't believe in God either, nor Evil (as a force, a thing, or an innate trait), although I'll grant that the word has some utility and economy (so long as you can free it from its abuse in support of war and other violence -- that seems to be the main purpose of treating political opponents as evil, and I was reacting against that). I mention "animal spirits" (which is a Keynes term) and power, and that could be developed further. A big difference between the new left and the old left was the attitude toward power, which the new left was very distrustful of, and perhaps consequently did a very poor job of obtaining or nurturing.

I don't believe there is a soul either, but I find the word useful for a collection of traits beyond heart and mind (or the term I use here: brains). Describing Trump as an unruly mass of animal spirits unchecked by his void of heart, soul, and brains and amplified by power seems like a pretty good model for him.

For what it's worth, our friends here are almost all on the left side of the political spectrum, most comfortable as Democrats, some not at all -- which I have to respect. (I know a few people on the right, but don't engage with them much on politics, not that I have much trouble when I do.) I never had any fan interest in the Democrats -- a close cousin turned me into a Yankees fan, but I resisted his enthusiasm for the Kennedys, and I only really turned against the Republicans when Nixon became president (by which time I was well to the left of most Democrats; even earlier, I read my father's IAMAW newsletter, supported civil rights, and was anti-war). I voted against Nixon and Dole in 1972, but didn't vote again until 1996, when I was in MA with Laura, and couldn't resist the opportunity to vote against Dole again. After voting for Nader in 2000 (in KS, where the Gore campaign was so lame I could imagine Nader beating him; he didn't come close, which I took as a revelation), I decided the Democrats were the only game in town, so if you want to accomplish anything you have to go through them. Still, it's easy to get the impression that the people who run the Democratic Party hate us more than they fear Republicans, even Trump. What politics I have I got through careful consideration of the options.

Daily Log

There is a tweet going around by @BasedMikeLee (presumably the R-Utah Senator) which reads (image link):

If you were raised in the U.S., you've been subjected to a relentless bombardment of Marxist propaganda throughout your entire life -- at least since you started kindergarten (probably earlier)

How old were you when you first realized that?

I tried writing a post, using the image of the tweet:

I was 16 when I dropped out of high school. By then I suspected that everything I had been taught was wrong. Only later, after I started reading Marxists, did I come to understand how and why, and develop the tools to find truth and fend off nonsense. We need more critical theory, not less.

The preview looked bad, but the post came out looking good.

Friday, March 21, 2025

Daily Log

Nathan J Robinson tweet:

An important thing about Elon's project is that it tries to get you to resent people (government workers, immigrants, educators, etc.) who have a minute fraction of what he has, on the grounds that somehow they have too much and their wealth is obscene.

Musk's "interesting" comment came up when someone pointed out: "On a $247,000 federal salary, property records show Judge Boasberg lives in a $2.4 million house in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in D.C." As Timothy B. Lee explains: "There's absolutely nothing interesting about a Yale Law grad at a prestigious law firm married to a Stanford MBA management consultant moving to DC in 1995 and 30 years later living in a house now worth $2.4M."

ADAM quotes White House Press Secretary as saying "Anyone who dares to touch Israel will end up in hell." Next tweet down notes that Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum "has officially recognized Palestine as a state and welcomed the Palestinian ambassador." A bit further down, I see: "The Israeli regime is declared an illegal state by the International Court of Justice, its occupation of Palestine must be dismantled and all Israelis evacuated."

David James, responding to "Elon Musk says that he thinks we could have a million people on Mars in 20 years" (later refined to: "Best case 20 years, but probably closer to 30"), tweeted:

If an asteroid hit Earth, killing 99% of all life, Earth would still be a billion times more habitable than Mars. Only deeply gullible people believe humans are going to lvie there anytime soon. Google "does Mars have a magnetosphere"

Ok, I did, and it doesn't, so the surface of Mars is constantly bombarded with harmful solar radiation. However, someone on Reddit has an easy fix:

You can solve the magnetosphere problem quite easily, actually. You just have to park a large electromagnet at Mars' L1 point, between Mars and the Sun. It'd need somewhere around 1GW of power, which is roughly equivalent to a modern nuclear reactor's output, or that of a 1km solar array. A big job, but far from impossible.

As an engineer, I bristle at the word "impossible," but a quick calculation suggests that's about as far from possible as the square of the distance between here and Mars. The post also notes another problem: "Mars' atmosphere is over 95% CO2." While that sounds good for retaining faint solar heat, it's not so great for breathing. Of course, you could use that CO2, if you could add the right mix of water and minerals, and use it to grow enough algae to create enough O2 to breathe. After all, that's what happened on Earth, but that organic process took several billion years, not 30.

Loose Tabs

Daily Log

Cold front was promised for today, ending a two-day patch in the low 70s (albeit windy), so I rushed yesterday to get my shed ramp project finished. I wound up needing the head lamp to see, and left a lot of clutter in the shed to be sorted out later, but did get it to a reasonable state of completion. I reassembled the ramp (two boards had come off), and treated it with three coats of linseed oil (diluted with equal part of paint thinner). I cut hardware cloth (0.5-inch wire squares) down to an 8-inch strip, and attached it across the entire front of the shed, to deter the dog from digging under it. The other three sides will have to wait, but before I screwed the ramp down I wanted to make sure I had the area around the door covered. The two outer ramp boards are pretty rotted toward the end, but the rest is solid enough for now.

When I went to bed last night -- early for me, as I was exhausted -- it was still 70°F, but when I got up this morning the thermometer read 36°F, then strangely dropped to 30° before jumping back to 36°. Looks like it had rained, but I haven't gone out to inspect anything. I'm pretty sore from crawling around the ground, and I'm feeling like I got enough accomplished to slack off for a few days. Big project today will be to get my business expense records in order, for taxes. Not a big job, but everything with taxes always seems traumatic. When I was looking for something to do last night, I started compiling a 2025 Metacritic File, which I resumed work on this morning (currently 82 lines). I also opened a blog file called Loose Tabs, as I have a bunch of tabs opened to articles I'd like to close but remember somehow, and that seemed like the plainest way of dealing with the matter. (I've done some of this in the notebook, which is public but less conspicuous, but also a bit harder to work with.)

Daily Log

I ran across multiple references to "anti-anti-Trump" yesterday: in comments to the op. cit. Ganz post, and in a couple posts by Scott Lemieux: Collaborator's remorse, which used the phrase "professional anti-anti-Trump pundits" while linking to The Donald Trump that exists in my imagination who is the opposite of Donald Trump would be a much more popular president than Donald Trump.

Monday, March 17, 2025

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 42 albums, 6 A-list

Music: Current count 43856 [43814) rated (+42), 25 [34] unrated (-9).

I wrote a fairly long political post over the weekend, only very indirectly occasioned by recent events, although it's impossible to totally block out Trumpism and its discontents. The actual stimulus was reading Eric Hobsbawm's 2003 autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, specifically the part where he offers a leftist's observations on the Thatcher demolition of civil society, and the hollow Blair response. With Reagan and Clinton, that all seems pretty familiar. And while in many ways Trump is the linear descendent of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes -- even his utter contempt for legalities isn't unprecedented -- he now seems to be breaking things just to show that he can.

Probably thanks to reading Hobsbawm, I've been revisiting the Trump/Fascist arguments, so I wound up spending way too much time today on a John Ganz post, There Was Never Any "Fascism Debate". As I recall, there was, but the academic end was mired in arbitrary definitions, and the popular end was if anything counterproductive. After the election, I was convinced that it was a waste of time. I still think it has no potential to influence anyone's politics, and mostly serves people like me as a chance to flaunt one's historical knowledge, it is very hard for people to understand the present except via historical analogy, and there are very few antecedents who come close to Trump's extraordinary impact. While there are still quite many variations, and we're still nearer the beginning than the end of Trump's reign of terror, it's the shoe that comes closest to fitting.

The question then is what can one learn from the analogy? Very little, I suspect, about the Führer himself, but if you look at his deputies, his active and passive supporters, his mass of fans you will find unnerving similarities. Even more worrisome is how ineffectual anti-Nazi resistance was, both from the liberals and social democrats who underestimated him and even more so from the leftists who understood the threat perfectly yet were powerless to stop him. There is, as yet, little reason to be that pessimistic, or to surrender even if one were, but it is clear that Trump is doing not just the bad things we expected, but more that we didn't (or couldn't without exposing ourselves as fantasists). And that Trump's acts will not only get worse, but will leave a lasting print that may never be excised.

My post goes into some of that, but obviously much more is still kicking around in my head. I still have no plans to write about this, or much of anything else. My only addition so far to my planning documents has been to open a still-empty file on house projects. I've spent three days so far on one, which initially seemed too simple to bother writing up (although, somewhat less formally, I did mention it in the notebook): fixing up the ramp into the shed -- something I've wanted to do for years, which now merged with my wife's request to do something to keep the dog from digging under the shed. It's going very slow, and I'm exhausted today, but at least I've started to feel like I have it under control.

Recovery from eye surgery is also going slowly, and hard to gauge, with more erratic or just uncertain moments. Makes it hard to get on with life, so I've tended to let everything slip. I still haven't done the frozen file thing, and I have very little idea what new albums are coming up. The only reason I have much new jazz to report is that it's easier to pick an album out of my promo queue than it is to figure out some good prospect from the media. But I did get a boost this week from Robert Christgau's March Consumer Guide, which netted four A- records, four high B+(***), and one more B+(**), none of which were particularly on my radar. I have the three records I had previously heard -- Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice, GloRilla: Glorious, and Marshall Allen: New Dawn -- graded somewhat lower, after brief encounters. Incidentally, I have GloRilla's 2024 mixtape, Ehhthang Ehhthang, a notch high, and two recent Allen features -- Sun Ra Arkestra: Lights on a Satellite and John Blum: Deep Space -- at A-.

Four of the Christgau picks, plus one of my jazz albums, led me to dig into unheard back catalog, so there's quite a bit of Old Music this week. I was at one point tempted to start up a 2025 Metacritic file, as an aid in prospecting, but I wound up making little if any further changes to the 2024 file, despite my expectation of doing so. (One reason I didn't was that it was straining my eyes.) Still, like much else, up in the air for now. I have few (if any) expectations for next week. (Although I do want to get more done on the shed Tuesday, before the next cold front blows through on Wednesday. By the way, in local news last week: A highway pileup in western Kansas shows how dust storms can turn deadly; also numerous reports of fires around Kansas last week. The weather is keeping pace with all the other Trumpian weirdness, and there's no reason not to blame him for that too. Campaigning to promote disasters isn't exactly causality but is close enough to count.

By the way, I added the Chills album after the initial cutover, so it's not counted in the weekly census. It is tempting to add the reissue of Studio's 2006 album West Coast, but I'm just nearing the end of a first play. I've been posting preview notes on the week's A- records on Bluesky. Initially I was able to link to Bandcamp pages, but I've run into a few snags lately, where I try to offer the best links I can find. I'm up to 35 posts and 68 followers there now. I commented on Lemieux's tweet:

I'd never heard the term before, but this is the 2nd time today I've run across "anti-anti-Trump pundits." What or who are they? The phrase suggests something different from pro-Trump pundits, or pundits who are naive, overly generous, or simply deluded about Trump. But what? And why?

Lemieux was kind enough to reply:

It generally refers to people on the left (or ostensible left) who often criticize Trump's opponents and rarely criticize Trump. But evidently at some point it becomes a distinction without a difference.

That sounds more like a troll than a pundit. I formulated a reply:

I'm well familiar with trolls who claim to be left but only appear to attack other lefties (e.g. on Israel), but "professional pundit" implies some kind of position, not just function. Still, I guess I can think of some NYT/WaPo pundits where the distinction scarcely matters.

I'm also familiar with leftists who are so focused on US sins they ignore or even get a bit myopic about the likes of Putin and Trump, but they rarely reduce to pro-Putin/Trump, so I don't mind them. But they do generate an anti-anti- dynamic, which I find unhelpful. If you have a principle, better to use it.

I thought of Matt Taibbi when writing this, but couldn't work him in under the limit. He's not really a leftist: he presents as some kind of iconoclast, balancing his left and right targets, although until 2016 his "left" targets were pretty silly (like 9/11 Truthers). After 2016, he got obsessed with the Clinton camp's anti-Russia rationalizations, which he considered a worse outrage than Trump's election. I haven't followed him since he left Rolling Stone, so I don't know where he's gone with his snark. He wasn't wrong when debunking "Russiagate," but had problems keeping the bigger picture in focus.

I did google "anti-anti-Trump": without quotes I got nothing of significance (mostly pieces about Never Trumpers), but with quotes some pieces do show up. Some titles, dates, and possibly quotes (but links only if I followed them, which mostly I did not; sorted by year from early to now):

• The unbearable lameness of the anti-anti-Trump . . . [Week, 2015]
• Against Anti-Anti-Trumpism [National Review, 2016]
• The Anti-Anti-Trump Right [Atlantic, 2017]
• David Harsanyi*: Why the resistance is the best thing that's happened to Trump [2017] [*] author of a book subtitled The Case Against Democracy.
• Charles J Sykes: If Liberals Hate Him, Then Trump Must Be Doing Something Right [NYT, 2017]: "anti-anti-Trumpism has become the new safe space for the right." "In many ways anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself, because at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character, only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery and bombast." For a "conservative" reply to Sykes, see Dan McLaughlin: Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Trump [National Review, 2017]; alternate title: It's OK To Be Against Trump's Critics.
• The cowardly spectacle of the anti-anti-Trump movement [Week, 2017]
• Anti-Anti-Trumpism is the Glue Holding Together . . . [New Republic, 2017]
• Steve Helmoff: The anti-anti-Trump movement gather steam [HoffPost, 2017]
• Strange Bedfellows [Crooked Media, 2017: "It is this propaganda trick that has powered the anti-anti Trump posture most of my fellow Trump-skeptical Republicans have adopted."
• Charlie Sykes: The Agony of the Anti-Anti-Trumpers [Bulwark, 2020]
• National Review's Biden Profile Is Anti-Anti-Trumpism as Art [NYM, 2020]
• Andrew O'Hehir: Waterloo for the anti-anti-Trump left (and all other normalizers) [Salon, 2020]: "Those who made their peace with Trump all made the same fatal mistake: Believing that he believed in anything."
• Why the Anti-Anti-Trumpers Need DeSantis [Bulwark, 2023]
• The Dilemma of the Anti-Trump Conservatives [Mother Jones, 2024]: "I almost feel sorry for the anti-Trump-but-more-anti-anti-Trump conservatives."
• Anti-Anti-Trump Conservatives Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism [Democracy Americana, 2024]

One obvious point here is that most of these references are old (mostly from 2017), and most come from or relate to Never Trumpers (e.g., Sykes, who wrote a book, How the Right Lost Its Mind), many of whom have a major stake on maintaining their conservative bona fides. (Sure, a few have moved closer to Democrats, especially to ones they find congenial on issues of empire and economy.) Few even mention anti-anti-Trump sentiments on the the actual left, let alone name names. I suspect that if one did, they'd turn out to be sham leftists and/or simple fools.

New records reviewed this week:

• Bad Bunny: Debí Tirar Más Fotos (2025, Rimas Entertainment): [sp]: B+(***)
• Bag of Bones: No One Gets Saved (2023 [2024], 577): [sp]: B+(**)
• Towa Bird: American Hero (2024, Interscope): [sp]: B+(***)
• Robert Sarazin Blake: Let the Longing Run Wild & Free (2025, Same Room): [sp]: B+(**)
• Charly Bliss: Forever (2024, Lucky Number): [sp]: A-
• The Chills: Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs (2025, Fire): [sp]: A-
• Helene Cronin: Maybe New Mexico (2025, self-released): [sp]: A-
• Jonah David: Waltz for Eli (2024 [2025], Swish Tap): [cd]: B+(*)
• FACS: Wish Defense (2025, Trouble in Mind): [sp]: A-
• Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio: Dream a Dream (2024 [2025], Libra): [cd]: A-
• Funkrust Brass Band: Make a Little Spark (2024, self-released): [sp]: A-
• Future: Mixtape Pluto (2024, Freebandz/Epic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Freddie Gibbs: You Only Die 1nce (2024, ESGN): [sp]: B+(**)
• Muriel Grossmann: MGQ Live in King Georg, Köln (2022 [2025], Powerhouse): [sp]: B+(***)
• Patterson Hood: Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams (2025, ATO): [sp]: B+(***)
• Lady Blackbird: Slang Spirituals (2024, Foundation Music Productions/BMG): [sp]: B+(***)
• Ben Markley: Tell the Truth (2024 [2025], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Mdou Moctar: Tears of Injustice (2025, Matador): [sp]: B+(***)
• Isabelle Olivier: Impressions (2024 [2025], Rewound Echoes): [cd]: B+(**) [03-21]
• Juan Perea: Lightkeeper (2022-24 [2025], Zoho): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jim Snidero: Bird Feathers (2024 [2025], Savant): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mitch Towne: Refuge (2024 [2025], Cross Towne): [cd]: B+(*)
• University of Nevada Las Vegas Jazz Ensemble 1: Let the Good Times Roll (2024 [2025], Vegas): [cd]: B+(**)
• Wavy Bagels With Driveby: A Carfull (2024, Break All): [sp]: B+(**)
• WDR Big Band: Bluegrass (2025, MCG Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Rodney Whitaker: Mosaic: The Music of Gregg Hill (2024 [2025], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• None

Old music:

• Helene Cronin: Restless Heart (2014, self-released, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Helene Cronin: Belong to the River (2015, self-released, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Helene Cronin: Old Ghosts & Lost Causes (2019, self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
• Helene Cronin: Landmarks (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(***)
• FACS: Negative Houses (2018, Trouble in Mind): [sp]: B+(*)
• FACS: Lifelike (2019, Trouble in Mind): [sp]: B+(*)
• FACS: Void Moments (2020, Trouble in Mind): [sp]: B+(*)
• FACS: Present Tense (2021, Trouble in Mind): [sp]: B+(*)
• FACS: Maggot Brain 020324 (2024, Trouble in Mind): [bc]: B+(***)
• Funkrust Brass Band: Dark City (2017, self-released): [sp]: B+(***)
• Funkrust Brass Band: Bones and Burning (2019, self-released, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Patterson Hood: Killers and Stars (2004, New West): [sp]: B+(*)
• Laura Taylor: Cry Me a River: A Tribute to Julie London (2000 [2001], Quicksilver): [sp]: B+(**)
• Laura Taylor: My Funny Valentine: Memories of Chet Baker (2002, Staying Power): [sp]: B+(***)
• Laura Taylor: Mountain Greenery (2006, Staying Power): [sp]: B+(**)
• Laura Taylor: Have Mercer on Me: Laura Taylor Sings Johnny Mercer (2010, Staying Power): [sp]: B+(***)
• Laura Taylor: Dancing in My Feet (1979, Good Sounds): [sp]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Samo Salamon/Ra Kalam Bob Moses Orchestra: Dream Suites Vol. 1 (Samo) [04-10]
• Reggie Watkins: Rivers (BYNK) [03-28]

Daily Log

Yesterday was cool and windy again. When I saw the temperature at 45°F, I decided to suspend work on the shed. Saturday was my second day of working on the ramp, and like the first ended in a drastic, unplanned change of course. One problem is that it's taken quite a while for me to figure out what I was trying to do in the first place. I now realize that the original plan was to run the slats on top of a lip piece below the door, so they slide under the closed doors. The slats are, in turn, supported by blocks of pressure-treated wood, which rest above ground on paving stones, and partly slip under the lip piece. It proved impossible to slide the assembled ramp both under and over the lip piece. I considered cutting the ramp pieces and/or cutting the lip, but eventually realized that the best solution would be to pull the whole ramp out, knock off the supports, position them under the lip, and screw them down. I could then slide the rest of the structure over the lip, and screw it down, both into the lip and the supports.

I was nearly raedy to do that as it was getting late Saturday, but looking at the bottom side of the ramp, I realized I should paint it with linseed oil, which my brother (and through him, my father) had recommended as the cure-all for rotting wood. (There is considerable rot in the ramp, although the critical middle sections appear solid.) I decided that was a job for another day -- hopefully a warmer one. The weather forecast showed warming for Monday (72) and Tuesday (67) before rain on Wednesday, so that seems like the window to work in.

It also occurred to me that while I have the ramp off, I should cut some hardware cloth and install it, at least under the ramp, to close off entrance via that route. So I might try that, or if it proves difficult, one of the edging solutions there. It should also be a good day to finally get around to trimming the front hedges. Trash goes out tonight, so it would be nice to fill the dumpster.

Hobsbawm Again

Blog post link. I started this yesterday, but left it unfinished over night. I wrote a good deal more on it Sunday, then posted it late evening, although it could certainly have used another editing pass. I also recall wanting to add another footnote somewhere.

Daily Log

I did software updates this morning, which was an occasion for cleaning up a bunch of stranded Firefox tabs. One had an article by Tom Carson, Fables of Our Fathers, about "the botched and weirdly alientation symbolism of the WWII memorial in D.C.," which inspired a series of tweets:

I mentioned Tom Carson's novel "Gilligan's Wake" in my latest Q&A, and also an essay on 1945. I still haven't found it, but ran across this Baffler piece on WWII Ancestor Worship, which like the novel is way too soft on Bob Dole, but otherwise sharply reasoned: link

I might add that while Ancestor Worship is the full extent of the Right's mandate on history curricula, it's also something that neolibs have indulged in wholesale, hoping they can win votes by convincing us they're the Real Americans, guardians of a slightly different but still faultless legacy.

Isn't that why they call themselves "progressives," to root their modest reforms deep in America's past, while glossing over the false starts and wrong turns, much as "conservatives" do with slavery, racism, etc? Still odd the forgetting of FDR, who saved capitalism by his alliance with the left.

I started working on a Hobsbawm quote post, since moved into its own file.

Daily Log

I felt like starting work on sundry house projects yesterday, and it ultimately took a toll I'm really feeling this morning. Main thing in my mind was that I felt like the key to cleaning up the garage was adding a new 3-foot wide shelf unit, which would fit in the space between the sheet lumber rack and the SW corner. So I set out to Lowe's to buy something, but didn't like their choices: a plastic unit for $90, and a steel unit for $130. By then, I had another project to shop for (below), and the task overwhelmed me. While I've had no problem driving since my eye surgery, trying to find the right fasteners and washers got to be too much. I took a break, got a sandwich at a nearby "deli," then moved on to Home Depot.

The choices there were even more extreme: a slightly inferior plastic unit for $55 and a similar steel unit for $160, but at least it was easier to decide to go cheap. I have a big steel unit in the garage already, and it's mostly loaded with junk I could easily move to the cheaper unit. The other thing I was hoping to store there is scrap wood, which will be fine there. My plan is not only to collect the wood scrap from the garage, but from the basement as well, which may open up a wall I can fill with more urgently needed shelving.

The other project is that L got into a panic about the dog digging under the shed, which sits on treated timbers about 4 inches above ground level. She is afraid the dog, who is seriously concerned about whatever may be lurking there, will dig his way under and get stuck and hurt. I rather doubt that, but she insisted I wedge a board in one particularly recent excavation spot. I found a loose piece of paneling that fit, and screwed it into place, but it isn't meant for outdoor use, and is wasted there. I went looking for a better solution, thinking mostly of wire that I could wrap around the base of the shed. Meanwhile, I seem to have already hurt my back.

I was thinking some kind of wire to wrap around the perimeter. The smallest rolls I found were 24-inches. I bought a 25-foot roll of 1/2-inch squares (it's called "hardware cloth"), figuring I could cut it in half into 12-inch high sections. (Ok, now I see that I miscalculated and bought 2-3 times as much as I need.) I also looked at edging, and bought a 20-foot roll that is jagged on one edge, so you can pound it into the dirt. I also, just to experiment with, bought three 3-foot plastic sections that might be easier to install. But by then, I was preoccupied figuring out how to attack the wire to a shed that is covered with concrete panels. I had a big box of roofing screws with washers, which might work, but the washers weren't large enough to overlap the wire mesh, so I spent a lot of time looking for some kind of clips that would hold the wire and could be screwed down. I eventually found 1/4-inch torque washers, with four spikes around a 1/2-inch square -- the 1/4 is the square hole in the middle; larger-sized washers have the same overall diameter, but larger holes in the middle -- and bought a box. I'm thinking I can pound them into the panel on top of the wire, then use the roof screws to secure the wire to the underlying lumber. So I bought another drill bit to drill through the paneling.

Next day, of course, I find myself thinking of other solutions. I could add wood (or vinyl) trim around the base, and use that to secure the wire, which would probably give it a better look -- not least because it would cover up the erosion of the lower panels. Looking at it again this morning, I'm seeing cracks in the panels that need caulking, and other signs of wear and tear. Looks like it could also use another coat of paint.

And I still have to fix up the ramp, which I built instead of paying the shed builders an extra charge (which at this point seems like a pittance compared to the work and expense I've put into it so far). One thing I want to do there is to secure the ramp to the shed. (It's slid an inch or two downhill.) Another is that where I nailed the boards to the frame, I need to go back and redo all that with deck screws. And I've never managed to get a good finish on it, so I might just cover it up with flat roofing material.

Other ideas finally occurred to me today, like trenching around the shed and filling it up with gravel, which wouldn't abate the dog's curiosity, but would inhibit digging. I've also seem some edging alternatives that might be easier to install, and rise higher above ground, so they might work. (Samples here, especially the Vigoro plastic decorative border, which comes in 22-inch sections (so I'd need about 20, so about $90; the dog is pretty serious about digging, but it's not like I'm defending against badgers or beavers, which would laugh at such obstacles).

Cooler today, nice but pretty windy. I don't feel like diving into the shed-fence, but I should go out to the garage and assemble the new shelving, and maybe think about working on the ramp. I have some very long screws, if I can find a good place to attach them. I also have lots of deck screws. But it will involve a lot of bending down and sitting and shifting around, so not much fun. Beyond that, I should work on the planning documents. Much of what I just wrote can go into the house plan. (Just opened the file, with some outline but no content.)

Kayla Gogarty: [03-14] The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces: This surveys "320 online shows -- 181 right-leaning and 129 left-leaning," and found that "right-leaning online shows had at least 480.6 million total followers and subscribers -- nearly five times as many as left-leaning." Unclear how many actual people are involved, but Joe Rogan's 39.9m does seem like a lot, followed by the more right-ideological Ben Shapiro (25m) and Jordan B Peterson (23m), then Russell Brand (22.5m) and Theo Von (22.3m). Far ahead on the left is Trevor Noah (21.2m) -- the only name I recognize in print large enough to read, and like Tucker Carlson (13.9m) a name originally established on network TV.

The 2024 presidential election has been dubbed the "podcast election" -- in part because President Donald Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and their vice presidential picks made various appearances on podcasts and online shows as candidates.

I was led to this piece by a tweet that opined:

we just need stupider leftists. I'm dead serious. charismatic guys with the stamina to record 100 instagram reels a week in the front seat of their car saying stuff like "trump made summers too hot" and "the fries at wendys's taste better ever since they went woke"

Daily Log

I added an answer"> to my Q&A file today: a reader (fairly well known to me) asked about my tastes in fiction, so I did my best to come up with an answer (even though it's mostly that I don't have any). I also added a postscript to Music Week. Since I hadn't updated the notebook to include the intro, I'll pick that up under the original posting date.

I clicked on a piece by Evgenia Kovda: [03-12] Against Nihilism: "Politics in the age of stupidity. Against the senile vibe shift." While there is something to be said for labeling contemporary Republican political thought as "nihilism," and for that matter seeing corrollaries between Trump's wanton destruction of the US public sector to the dismantling of the Soviet system in the 1990s, I'm not making a lot of sense out of this particular article. I see now that one source of my confusion is that I don't recognize what "Red Scare" is (seems to be a podcast? this led me to a whole article on Sanders-Trump voters, which is relevant to my research interest).

Daily Log

Pleased to see that when I got up, my number of Bluesky followers has grown from 23 to 54. A look at the list reveals only a couple familiar names.

Added to the list that I'm following: John Ganz, Glenn Kenny, Jamelle Bouie.

Main project today is to take Sunday's leftover brisket and make a small meal out of it, for Janice and Tim. We had invited them Sunday, but the message didn't get through, so I didn't fix any extra dishes. We don't really have enough leftovers, so I'm scrambling to add some sides and dessert. Pantry isn't very well stocked for this, but I have a small (1 lb) cabbage, and some carrots. I can make tzimmes out of the latter. I thought about cooking the cabbage, and found a recipe with sour cream, but finally thought better, and turned it into mustard slaw. For dessert, I'm thinking black & white cookies, with ice cream. I've never made the former, which involves mixing up the dough and piping it (another skill I should have but never got the hang of), baking the cookies, making and spreading two batches of icing.

I thought the brisket came out too salty -- I didn't account for any salt in the pre-packaged marinade, which seems to have been substantial -- so I covered the leftovers with water, then drained it off. I think it will be ok. [PS: It was. Carrots and slaw both came out very good. I added golden raisins to both, and did the carrots with lemon juice instead of orange, adding cinnamon and nutmeg. Didn't make a lot, so all gone. Cookies also came out very good.]

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 45 albums, 7 A-list

Music: Current count 43814 [43769) rated (+45), 34 [38] unrated (-4).

Added a postscript below.

Supposedly on the mend, although the left eye feels a bit worse than it did a week ago, or maybe I just expected better, so I'm more troubled by the twitches and flashes. I have discontinued the 7-day eye drops, leaving me with just the prednislone. Still a couple weeks before I see the doctor again. Until then, no schedule for the right eye.

It's hard to say that anything personal is back to normal in what is evidently an extremely abnormal period in American history. I'm not back to following the political world in any detail, but I have signed up for a Bluesky account, where I am following 25 and have 33 followers. I salted my following list by looking at Robert Christgau's, which gave me a couple of political sources and more friends and music critic colleagues. My wife's list yielded some more of both, but she's only following 31, with 23 followers (but pretty inactive with just 2 posts).

For whatever it's worth, my current list of political oracles is: Ryan Cooper, David A. Graham, Doug Henwood, Kevin M. Kruse, Scott Lemieux, Adam Serwer, Astra Taylor, and NonZero. There's a good chance that I would add any of the people I currently follow on X if I ran across their handles (especially if you let me know who you are; I've searched for a couple, but thus far to little avail).

For my own part, I've made 22 posts to Bluesky, which includes 18 original posts, 2 self-replies, and 2 more replies, so I'd like to think there is some value in following me there. Since setting up my account there on Feb. 13, I've made 8 posts on X, and 2 replies. My current thinking is that I'll continue to post blog announcements and make occasional replies on X, but will make a bit more effort on Bluesky. In particular, I've started posting notices when I come up with A/A- grades, as opposed to making you wait for Music Week. I may at some point extend this to a few lower-graded albums, but this week the pick hits have been coming so fast I haven't been tempted.

Of course, I don't mean to discourage you from following me on X: I have 625 followers there, but my last five posts have view counts in the 76-88 range (with 1-3 likes per post, and 1 total reply), so that number doesn't seem to mean much. I do find that even when I use their algorithmic "For You" feed, most of what I find there is still useful. It's only when I wander into the replies lane that I see any indication that it's become a cess pool of rage and inchoate thought. For instance, at the moment, I'm seeing in my "For You" feed: Nathan J Robinson, Eric Levitz, Rick Perlstein, Keith Gessen, Yanis Varoufakis, Samuel Moyn, Ian Millhiser, Kate Willett, Jeremy Scahill, and a half-dozen names I don't recognize but welcome. (I cut the list short at Max Blumenthal and Jeet Heer, who are less reliable but sometimes interesting.)

The big advantage I see Bluesky having over X is readers can follow links instead of having to separately google titles. My first idea there was to use it to recommend thoughtful articles, as I have done for years in Speaking of Which. I did a couple of those, and expect I will do more, but I haven't read much worth reporting after the first two. (Probably my oversight, as bad times tend to write themselves.) So much of what I know I pick up from X and Bluesky. And while I'm nowhere near reviving weekly political reviews, I've written Daily Log bits in my notebook every day from March 5 through yesterday. Nothing terribly important there, but I am thinking about a few things.

The one "normal" thing I did last week was listen to a lot of music. I'm not really done with 2024 yet, but I found it easier to pick 2025 CDs out of the promo queue than look for 2024 stragglers, so just went with it until I accidentally played a couple that aren't out yet. After I caught up, I finally opened my mail, and fell way back behind again. So the 2025 list is finally real, even though I haven't frozen the 2024 list yet. (Maybe next week. I figure I'm best off kicking this post out first.)

Also advancing, but not absolutely finished, is the 2024 EOY Aggregate list. Main thing I did last week was to add a bunch of Uproxx Music Critics Poll voters, which pushed the Metafile Legend list up to 610 sources. My first pass was to just pick out all of the names I had counted in previous years, but then I decided to explore a bit, so I picked out a few albums that struck me as underrated, then checked the voter list for each, and added some (or all) of them. Main thing I wanted to do was to nudge the totals toward more hip-hop. The biggest list I focused on was Doechii's 10th place Alligator Bites Never Heal -- only a B+(***) album for me, so not a big favorite of mine, but I thought it might reveal a little more underground interest than Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator (both same grade for me) -- which for now at least pushed the album from 7th to 4th place (behind Charli XCX, Lamar, and Beyoncé, passing MJ Lenderman, The Cure, and Waxahatchee). I also did a bit with Sabrina Carpenter (still in 13th, but -4 now vs. -27 last week).

I just checked, and see I'm no longer blocked from Facebook (but had to jump through some hoops to login). I'm still upset, and not likely to be posting anything there in the near future, but it was nice to see some updates from true friends. I logged in from a different machine than the one I'm writing on, which should also cut down on my activity.

I've made next to no progress on my planning documents. It's hard to develop any enthusiasm for attempting much of anything. Which may be a good thing if all you're interested in is music reviews, because that seems to be the path of least effort.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ambrose Akinmusire: Honey From a Winter Stone (2023 [2025], Nonesuch): [sp]: B+(**)
• Steve Allee Big Band: Naptown Sound (2024 [2025], Jazzville): [cd]: B [03-15]
• Marshall Allen: Red Dawn (2025, Mexican Summer): [sp]: B+(*)
• Russ Anixter's Hippie Big Band: What Is? (2024 [2025], self-released): [cd]: A-
• Barry Can't Swim: When Will We Land? (2023, Ninja TUne): [sp]: B+(***)
• Tim Berne/Tom Rainey/Gregg Belisle-Chi: Yikes Too (2024 [2025], Screwgun/Out of Your Head, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Benjamin Booker: Lower (2025, Fire Next Time/Thirty Tigers): [sp]: B+(**)
• Alan Chaubert: Just the Three of Us: Me, the Trumpet and the Piano (2021-23 [2025], Pacific Coast Jazz): [cd]: B+(**)
• Chlöe: Trouble in Paradise (2024, Parkwood/Columbia): [sp]: B+(***)
• Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Situation (2024 [2025], PlayOn): [cd]: B
• Liz Cole: I Want to Be Happy (2024 [2025], self-released): [cd]: B
• Sylvie Courvoisier/Mary Halvorson: Bone Bells (2024 [2025], Pyroclastic): [cd]: A- [03-25]
• Ermelinda Cuellar: Under a Lavender Sky (2024 [2025], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Deepstaria Enigmatica: The Eternal Now Is the Heart of a New Tomorrow (2022 [2025], ESP-Disk): [cd]: A-
• Jorrit Dijkstra: PorchBone (2023 [2024], Driff): [bc]: B+(***)
• Kenyon Dixon: The R&B You Love (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
• Doseone/Steel Tipped Dove: All Portrait, No Chorus (2025, Backwoodz Studioz): [sp]: B+(**)
• Paul Dunmall: Red Hot Ice (2024, Discus): [sp]: B+(**)
• Paul Dunmall/Kevin Figes: Duos (2022 [2024], Discus): [sp]: B+(*)
• Joe Elefante: Joe Elefante's Wheel of Dharma (2024 [2025], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ensemble C: Every Journey (2024 [2025], Adhyâropa): [cd]: B
• Satoko Fujii GEN: Altitude 1100 Meters (2024 [2025], Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
• Daniel Garbin: Rising (2023 [2025], 6x20): [cd]: B+(*)
• LP Giobbi: Garcia (Remixed) (2024, Round): [bc]: B+(**)
• Philip Glass: Philip Glass Solo (2021 [2024], Orange Mountain Music): [sp]: B+(***)
• Keiji Haino/Natsuki Tamura: What Happened There? (2024 [2025], Libra): [cd]: A-
• Jon Irabagon: Server Farm (2023 [2025], Irabbagast): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rodney Jordan: Memphis Blue (2020 [2025], Baxter Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Laura Jurd & Paul Dunmall: Fanfares & Freedom (2023 [2024], Discus): [sp]: B+(***)
• Karl Latham: Living Standards II (2024 [2025], Dropzone Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner: The Music of Anthony Braxton (2024 [2025], Pi): [cd]: A-
• John Mailander's Forecast: Let the World In (2024 [2025], self-released): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Michi: Dirty Talk (Stones Throw) ** [B+(*)]
• Jackson Potter: Small Things (2024 [2025], Shifting Paradigm): [cd]: B+(**)
• Noah Preminger: Ballades (2024 [2025], Chill Tone): [cd]: B+(***)
• Redman: Muddy Waters Too (2024, Gilla House): [sp]: B+(**)
• Rick Roe: Tribute: The Music of Gregg Hill (2024 [2025], Cold Plunge): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gina Saputo: Daydream (2024 [2025], GSJQ Productions): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mark Scott III: Soft Light (2024 [2025], Miller Three Publishing): [cd]: B+(**)
• Sentient Beings: Truth Is Not the Enemy (2024, Discus): [sp]: B+(***)
• Stress Eater: Everybody Eats! (2024, Silver Age): [sp]: A-
• Omar Thomas Large Ensemble: Griot Songs (2024 [2025], Omar Thomas Music, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*)
• Warmdüscher: Too Cold to Hold (2024, Strap Originals): [sp]: B+(*)
• Simón Willson: Bet: Live at Ornithology (2024 [2025], Endectomorph Music): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Paul Dunmall/Paul Rogers/Tony Orrell: That's My Life (1989 [22023], 577): [sp]: A-
• The Laws of William Bonney Saxophone Quartet: 1993-2007 (1993-2007 [2023], Aheulian Handwave): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Jorrit Dijkstra/François Houle/Karlis Silins/Kenton Loewen: Coastlines: Music of Steve Lacy, Volume I - Quartets (2022 [2023], Afterday): [bc]: B+(***)
• Jorrit Dijkstra/François Houle: Coastlines: Music of Steve Lacy, Volume II - Duets (2022 [2023], Afterday): [bc]: B+(*)
• Kölner Saxophon Mafia: Die Saxuelle Befreiung (1984, Jazz Haus Musik): [sp]: B+(**)
• Kölner Saxophon Mafia: Unerhört - Stadtklänge (1984 [1985], Jazz Haus Musik): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Nils Agnas: Köper Sig Ur En Kris (Moserobie) [03-14]
• Archer: Sudden Dusk (Aerophonic) [04-18]
• Jarod Bufe: Brighter Days (Calligram) [03-07]
• Geoffrey Dean Quartet: Conceptions (Cellar Music) [04-04]
• Lorraine Feather: The Green World (Relation) [03-28]
• Nnenna Freelon: Beneath the Skin (Origin) [03-31]
• Dave Hanson: Blues Sky (Origin) [03-31]
• Jake Hertzog: Ozark Concerto (Zoho) [03-21]
• Marilyn Kleinberg: Let Your Heart Lead the Way (Waking Up Music) [05-01]
• Silvano Monasterios Venezuelan Nonet: The River (self-released) [04-04]
• Matthew Muñesses/Riza Printup: Pag-Ibig Ko Vol. 1 (Irabbagast) [04-04]
• Ben Patterson Jazz Orchestra: Mad Scientist Music (Origin) [03-31]
• Juan Perea: Lightkeeper (Zoho) [02-07]
• University of Nevada Las Vegas Jazz Ensemble 1: Let the Good Times Roll (Vegas) [03-01]
• Chris Varga: Breathe (Calligram) [03-07]
• WDR Big Band: Bluegrass (MCG Jazz) [03-01]
• Rodney Whitaker: Mosaic: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin) [02-28]
• James Zito: Zito's Jump (self-released) [04-15]

Daily Log

Saw this tweet from Finnegan's Take, a two-dimension chart under "Told my wife I felt bad for Marco Rubio being sad and we started talking about who in the right-wing world was having fun right now and who was miserable and this is what we came up with." Left-right dimension goes from "Primarily Stupid" to "Primarily Evil," with Donald Trump the arbitrary midpoint. (Actually, Trump is off the scales in both dimensions, so this is just a design trade off.)

The vertical spread was between "Having a Great Time" and "Having a Bad Time," with RFK Jr. near the top (and about 30% toward stupid), and Rubio near the bottom (and about 60% toward evil). JD Vance got the far upper right corner (great time + evil). Trump scores about 70% happy here -- which again is a rather arbitrary design decision. Two foreigners (not counting Musk) made the plot, both in the happy/evil quadrant: Benjamin Netanyahu (evil, but way underrated at about 20%, and 40% happy), and Vladimir Putin (40% evil, 80% happy). As for Musk, his 40% stupid makes some sense, but I'd put his "great time" score a bit above Trump's.

Daily Log

Kevin Kruse pointed to this thread by Angus Johnston:

My very strong suspicion is that the left/right axis and the fight/don't-fight axis are in the process of unlinking, and that the fight/don't-fight split is emerging as the core struggle in the Democratic Party.

I naturally recoil both at the use of "axis" and fight metaphors. The former not only has historical associations, but even in its purely technical meaning, it shows a readiness to reduce complex wholes to linear points -- which you can do with left/right only if you define the line narrowly, using commitment to equality as a gauge. (The left would use political power to equalize wealth; the right would use its power to fortify and perpetuate hierarchy, seeing inequality as naturally generated by markets.)

But "fight" could mean lots of things, including violence, which gets us into "situational ethics" -- the notion that some actions are justifiable in some situations but not in others. We needn't go into that here, but I question the notion that "left" has ever been aligned with "don't fight." Sure, leftists eschew violence, both on moral and (most of the time) on political grounds, but self-conscious leftists have always been more activist, and more principled, than mere Democratic-leaning voters. We've also been conscious of our weakness, and therefore willing to compromise and support supposedly more viable "moderates," as we've done in campaigning for Biden and Harris. But seeing as how self-sacrifice to the "moderates" has failed, leftists still have principles and tactics to oppose the Trumpist regime.

Johnson continues:

The thing about "we should have caved on trans rights" and "we lost because of Latinx" isn't just that they're wrong -- although yes, both are horrifically wrong. It's that even if they were right, they'd be irrelevant to defeating the Trumpist attack on democracy and the federal administrative state.

The "my mom hasn't gotten a Social Security check in seven weeks, my cousin lost his job at the VA, and my neighbor's kid's cancer drug trial was cancelled right before the treatment went live" voter is the 2026 voter the Dems need to be laying the groundwork for landing right now.

And the way you land that voter is the way you get those Social Security checks and VA jobs and cancer trials back. You fucking fight.

And it's going to turn out that the left wing of the party is going to be overrepresented in the Fight wing, because the left wing of the party is more likely to be organizers, and more comfortable with the language and tactics that the moment demands.

But the first old white moderate guy to break ranks with Team Don't Fight and figure out how to grab hold of a week's worth of news cycles is going to make a VERY big splash.

And since folks are asking, no, the DNC doesn't have the power to stop this. The DNC itself has basically no power at this stage in an election cycle, and even the party's congressional leadership -- who are distinct from the DNC -- are largely without weapons in this kind of a fight.

2026 is going to see an insurgent wave within the Democratic Party. We're not going to have incumbent Dems getting thrown out of office for joining Team Fight -- the internal risk with the Democratic Party to officeholders in standing up to Trump right now is essentially nil.

Someone asked what Team Fight's affirmative message is. That's simple:

It's that Dems can be counted on to fight for the people who are being fucked over by Trump. To fight to fix what he's breaking, to build it back stronger and better, and to make sure no one like him can ever break it again.

In other words, it's Make America Great Again or Let America Be America Again -- whichever idiom works for you.

Among the comments, note this pair:

Benjamin Hartnett: I am a leftist but I am 100% in the fight Trump camp, whether that fighter is left, right, or center Dem. This one simple trick will win you leftist support, it's so easy!

John Nemeth: And I'm a moderate Dem who increasingly cares less and less about little policy differences between left and center and much more about who has courage and is pissed. Team fight.

I replied under Kruse:

I'm leery of anyone who says "axis" and/or invokes "fight" metaphors, but after a far worse loss in 2008, the Tea Party brought Republicans back, to win Congress in 2010 and (slightly rebranded) the White House in 2016 & 2024. They won by appearing principled and resolute, free of crippling "norms."

Daily Log

Eighth day since the cataract surgery, which means I can stop two of the three eye drops, and also stop using the shield over the eye when I sleep. Hard for me to gauge how effective the surgery was. I've only driven twice in the last week -- once last Friday, the day after, when I drove home from seeing the doctor, and again on Wednesday, when I went to dentist and afterwards to Dillons. Both were fine using my regular glasses. The expectation is that the left eye will see much better at distance, but that I will need glasses for reading. That may well be happening, but for now the unchanged right eye seems to be compensating nicely. The one thing I can say is that I haven't had any serious complications.

I have an appointment on March 31 to see doctor again, at which point they will probably schedule surgery on the right eye. I'll try not to worry about it until then.

Per Doug Henwood, Trump tweeted:

South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country. They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding. To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!

I commented (and I'll spell out the shorthand here, because I'm no longer under the gun):

There must be some way to weaponize this (and much more*), to drive a wedge between Trump and his xenophobic base, but Democrats won't (or can't). *E.g., his alien mother and wives, his sugar daddy Musk, Rupert Murdoch, right-wing Cubans; he's the most cosmopolitan president ever, but that's ok with his base because he's a bigot?

I'm not up to unpacking this, but I could add at least ten bullet points of elaboration, mostly on what Democrats can or cannot allow themselves to say about Trump and/or his base. And it's true that they need to walk a fine line here, and figuring out exactly how to do that isn't easy -- especially given the predeliction of the Trump base to suspect everything Democrats say as specious and redolent of their elitism. (Obviously, my vocabulary isn't right for the task. Trump speaks to his base as one moron to another, establishing a common bond that is hard to break, especially when you start from the assumption that you're talking to racist morons.)

I got a "preview" of The Nation's Elie Mystal's newsletter, "Elie v. U.S." While his section on "The Bad and the Ugly" seemed like useful news (although not really news, even to me), his section on "Inspired Takes" pointed me to an Adam Server piece, The Great Resegratation that looked useful, but was paywalled at The Atlantic. Still, a worse problem was "The Worst Argument of the Week," where he rants against Elissa Slotkin's counter-Trump speech, or more specifically her explanation of her motives as told to Tim Alberta at, yes, The Atlantic. When I saw his heading, it never occurred to me that his goal wasn't to identify one example of bad argument but to top it with a worse one.

The Slotkin comment he attacks is "It doesn't win elections to speak to just the base of the party," then after suspicious dots tacked on, "if it did, Kamala Harris would be president." We can debate the latter quip, but the former point couldn't be more obviously true, proven as much by Trump's win as by Harris's debacle. Mystal seems to be arguing that focus on base or others is some kind of zero-sum game: that her appeal to independents and disaffected Republicans cost her as many Democratic votes. But the Trump campaign made comparable efforts -- e.g., every time you saw a pic of Trump at the podium, he was surrounded by people wearing "Blacks for Trump" t-shirts -- and they proved if anything more effective (without seeming to have any effect on the ardor of his base. That Harris wasn't effective enough is beyond doubt. But that she should have written off the voters she needed to win in order to cater to ones she already had is really insane.

The mail came with a reply address, so I wrote back:

When I saw "The Worst Argument of the Week," I naturally assumed you would identify and critique some patently malicious argument. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be, I'll see your argument and top it with one that's even worse.

One more quote from Mystal, in another falsely labeled section, "In News Completely Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos":

My point is: if any Democratic candidate defended Luigi Mangione, that person would probably win the 2028 primary in a walk. My other point is that the American Republic, like the Rome of Julius Caesar, is in its death spiral, and it's going to get far more depraved and violent before the end.

His second point, sadly, is probably true. The first is highly dubious, because that's not the kind of people Democrats want to be. (Although the delight so many Democrats showed when Obama and Biden killed Al-Qaeda's leaders suggests that some of them are as deranged as the "voting to kill" Republicans.

Including yesterday, tweeted on Bluesky blurb/ratings for albums:

• Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner: The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi) [9]
• Russ Anixter's Hippie Band: What Is? (self-released) [9]
• Keiji Haino/Natsuki Tamura: What Happened There? (Libra) [9]

First one basically explained the concept: that rather than holding my cards until Music Week, I'll post a notice on Bluesky whenever I find an A-list album. I figured to save chars I'd use numeric grades -- A: 10, A-: 9, B+(***): 8, B+(**): 7, etc. -- although for now I'm just planning on 9+ (and, come to think of it, the numbers both seem more generous and less pretentious than the grades). There doesn't seem to be any way to get bold and/or italics, and I don't want to use quotes for titles, so I'm hoping context will suffice there. I'll add a brief note when I think of one, but won't try to recapitulate the review (see Music Week for that). But I can afford to add a link, especially when I find a Bandcamp page.

Daily Log

Today's Bluesky article tweet (based on an article I wrote about yesterday):

Ezra Klein: A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics: A disturbing interview with Martin Gurri, not just for what he knows about anti-news but as an example of someone led to make bad value judgments and still think he's thinking for himself.

I followed that with a self-comment:

Of course, it's not just the media messaging and massaging, but the people who have adopted it for their own purposes (ego, profit, power). Rs had the jump here because they've long seen news as purely instrumental. As Rove put it, they create reality, while Ds only observe it.

Looking for a succinct term for the way news of the world is reported across the whole internet, I came up with "anti-news," sensing it as a particle capable of colliding with and annihilating institutionalized reporters of news. I googled it, and came up empty, but did find some reference to "anti-media," which is the same idea less accurate. Surely the internet is media, even as it competes with other forms of media. While I imagine that my coinage will be intuitive enough, it would take a much longer essay to adequately expand on it, mostly because we first have to explain how news refers to the reporting, not to the events being reported, and that such news stories were always mental constructs of the reporters and institutions (not that there was any such thing before the 18th century).

Gurri's essential insight is that the internet, by removing nearly all of the barriers to becoming a news oracle, eroded the authority of established news vendors, undermining trust and creating a vacuum where everyone was free to pick whatever theories and facts most suited them. He seems to be pretty comfortable with this changed world, which predisposes him against those who are alarmed by such a cavalier disregard for truth. Hence, he embraces the right wing's "freedom of speech" histrionics, while seeing any efforts to counter disinformation as coercion and thought control.

I was going to mention that I've ordered a copy of Gurri's book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018), as well as another book that turned up in the same search: Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (rev. ed. 1996). I read Lasch's early The New Radicalism in America (1965) and possibly his The Agony of the American Left (1969), but gather that he turned into some kind of cultural conservative in his later years -- the big books were The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) and The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), but I never read any of his later work. However, his last book -- he died in 1994, and the book was published posthumously -- sounds like a trenchant, perhaps jaundiced, critique of the elites who by then had come to dominate the Democratic Party. (They are, of course, "liberals" in some sense of the word, but not of the left, where Democrats divide from Republicans not much in terms of class issues as social mores.)

I'm not sure when I'm going to find time to read these books, as reading's going very slow these days. On the other hand, these Daily Logs are getting longer.

I picked this quote up from a tweet, Tim Alberta in Atlantic on Elisa Slotkin's "response" to Trump's joint address (my bold):

Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team's resistance to Trump's first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags -- all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives -- Slotkin saw last night the opportunity to set a different tone.

Jamelle Bouie objected (I'm adding UC for readability, and a link for a term even I had to look up):

I'm sorry, I'm tired of this shit. There was no pronoun policing. I have encountered exactly three or four land acknowledgments in like ten years, and the most you'll hear about "intersectionality" is in liberal nonprofits. This is just freefloating resentment masquerading as analysis.

But the real problem is the bit I marked in bold, and Slotkin hasn't helped there in the least. Democrats don't know how to talk to regular people about Republicans and especially Trump, and Slotkin's change up is just much more of le même chose. Why is a long story, but one part is who they want to impress, and another is what they think will work. It's like they're still studying Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (as if nothing's changed in culture or literacy since 1987) and The West Wing (where an idealized Clinton always had the perfect Bible quote riposte -- although his usual solution to political problems was to bomb Iraq).

I figured I should look up some more comments on Slotkin's speech, but first, here's the full transcript. Actually, under the circumstances, I thought the speech was pretty good. It hit a lot of points very succinctly, and made clear the resolve of Democrats not to roll over and play dead while Trump trashes everything and everyone. Of course, I disapprove of her focus on "national security," and especially her credit of Reagan -- "peace through strength" was already a sick and tired cliché well before he read it off his teleprompter. The only credit Reagan deserves for "winning" the Cold War was that he let Gorbachev do his thing, rather than giving Soviet hard-liners reason to remove him when they could. It's not unheard of for politicians to try to usurp other party leaders for their own purposes -- one recalls how Republicans adopted Harry Truman as a Cold War saint -- but we're still paying for many of Reagan's "accomplishments," and there is a direct line from Reagan's conservatism to Trump's agit-prop. To fix what ails America today one needs to look past Trump and the Bushes to Reagan and Nixon, and start undoing much of what they did. (Not all: e.g., I would rather try to improve on Nixon's agricultural reforms than go back to FDR's, but reversion to FDR's banking and labor laws and income tax rates, while perhaps not ideal, would be an improvement.)

The other thing I should note is that Slotkin doesn't talk about any of the culture war phantoms the Atlantic writer (Tim Alberta) seems to expect Democrats to talk about. Most likely she didn't bring them up simply because they were relatively unimportant -- she cited dozens of things that have immediate adverse impact on most Americans, and on much of the world -- but perhaps also because she realized that Republicans talk about them mostly just to provoke Democrats into defensive and self-righteous caricature (and to distract them from talking about really widespread problems).

Some reference pieces on the Slotkin response speech (and, if I find any, on her opening act):

• Henry J Gomez: [03-05] Ronald Reagan is 'rolling in his grave,' Sen. Elissa Slotkin says in Democratic response to Trump: Typical example of how the mainstream media tried to reduce her speech to a single controversial sound bite -- one that Republicans could easily reframe as sacrilege (what right does she have to say anything about our Dear Leader?).

• Annie Karni: [03-05] Warning That Trump Will 'Make You Pay,' Slotkin Gives Democratic Response.

• Christian Paz: [03-05] The Democrats' response to Trump is splintered -- but getting better: "In front of one of the biggest audiences they'll get, the party seems to have a message, but is unsure how to say it."

On Trump's speech:

• Andrew Prokop: [03-05] Trump's (very long) speech to Congress, explained in500 words: "Trump signalled more tariffs, more DO, and a continued war against 'wokeness.'" Even shorter version: Trump spews ugly nonsense.

• Harold Meyerson: [03-05] The State of Donald Trump's Union Is Permanent Culture War: "Propose economic fixes? He'd rather refight battles with Biden."

Daily Log

I started today by posting this on Bluesky:

After the election, I wrote a long recap, and declared that the end of my Speaking of Which series, a weekly recap of things I found troubling. That is still a good guide to what's happened since (but scratch the false hope option, which was nothing more). Link

That took some rather extreme editing to get down to 300 characters, making me wonder how useful my plan is going to be. I explained the plan a bit in a self-reply:

Ran out of space there, so 2 pts: I'm not restarting SoW, but will try to link to a few pieces here, with short comments, and collate them later; see the piece for "false hope option," but it was a hypothetical path for Trump to solidify his win by doing sane things - not what he's actually doing.

My first link tweet:

Thomas B. Edsall: [03-04] Trump Is the Real Thing [aka "Vengeance Is His"]: Coming out of my coma, this is a succinct but severe wake-up piece, showing how his admin seeks to undermine law and order (trust), and the ways and means to resist, leading up to a powerful list of what we can expect, ending with "expect the worst."

In Speaking of Which, I would have quoted from the article, at least this conclusion:

Assuming that the past six weeks are predictive of what's next, expect an age of anxiety; expect the elimination of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of jobs; expect the decimation of liberal institutions to go on for all four years of Trump's second term; expect government services to deteriorate; expect reduced funding of the safety net; and expect more homelessness, hunger and disease. Expect poverty; expect the financial starvation of universities and of nongovernmental organizations; and expect unannounced raids, unreliable data and an America increasingly aligned with authoritarians worldwide. Expect a pervasive climate of suspicion and a preoccupation with revenge. Expect more suffering, more fear, less security and less happiness.

In other words, expect the worst.

I would also have noted some of the articles noted:

• Ben Penn/Tatyana Monnay: [02-26] Covington Revenge Deepens Worries of Defending Trump Targets.

• Walter Olson: [02-26] Trump Punishes Large Law Firm for Representing His Adversary.

• Adam Bonica: [02-28] The DOGE Purge: Empirical Evidence of Politically Motivated Firings: "And what it means for American Democracy."

• Jack Goldsmith: [02-10] The President's Favorite Decision: The Influence of Trump vs. U.S. in Trump 2.0: "Presidential immunity was not the most important part of the case."

Edsall, as is his custom, also collects and quotes emails from various experts, including Daniel Chirot, Fathali Moghaddam, Dan McAdams, and Steven Pinker, which go more into Trump's psychology. Normally I would frown on such speculation, but with Trump these matters are pretty close to the grotesquely exposed surface.

I'd probably also follow up on related links:

• M. Gessen: [02-08] The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump. Also: [02-15] The Barrage of Trump's Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It's Supposed To. The author is eminently qualified for the job of misinterpreting Trump as Putin, and that's likely to prove a lucrative (if fruitless) sinecure. While I don't doubt that Trump's goals are as autocratic as Putin's, the author sorely misunderestimates the function of bad ideas in the Trump arsenal, which is mostly to provoke Democrats and opponents to histrionic responses, which in turn will be written off as hysterical and deranged, while Trump's minions slip by with more subtle but still damaging schemes.

• Thomas B Edsall: [02-25] The Chaos Agenda Is Going Full Speed Ahead.

• Brooke Harrington: [02-25] Trump Is Like F.D.R. — Only in Reverse.

• Ezra Klein: [02-25] A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics: Interview with Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2014; revised 2018). I'm very sympathetic to the notion that changes in media have a largely unrecognized but profound influence on how people understand public affairs, but my interest waned when I read that he voted for Trump in 2024, and seeing how far he's willing to stretch things to defend Trump. He starts with Trump as the champion of free speech, which is plainly ridiculous. (Pro tip: the guy who wants to be able to sue for libel or defamation is no friend to free speech.) But he does make this point:

  Honestly, the vast majority of Americans want reform, want change. They are not for the institutions. They have no faith in them. So I would say that for the Democratic Party to regain its mojo, what they need is to bring government, this enormous construct, down to the level of the human being. How do you humanize that thing? In some bizarre way, that's what Trump is trying to do without thinking about it very much. But the Democrats aren't even thinking.

  Gurri goes on to explain, "What we have is a revolution," and likens it to FDR and Reagan, admitting "revolutions are messy, and mistakes will be made."

  If you want to have a pessimistic view, this is a remarkably un-self-reflective bunch. They're a bunch of action people -- Musk and even R.F.K. Jr. and certainly Trump. These are people who want to do things. That's not a bad thing, but you need somebody to explain what the hell you're doing. You need to explain, as we were talking about before: What's the end state? Why did you take this step here? Are you doing it because the next step is going to be over there and this is a logical place to be? Or are you just ramming through and tearing up things as you go along? . . .

  That's a great idea -- ruled by digital sociopaths. I think you're right. My take, though, is: There is this colossal transformation going on. We're moving from the industrial age to something that doesn't even have a name yet. We're at a very early stage of this. And the rule of the digital sociopath, hopefully, will be an early stage that we transcend.

  To want to be president of the United States, you're already not a normal human being.

  Last question, Gurri is asked to recommend three books. He rattles off:

  1. Andrey Mir: Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization
  2. Paul Ormerod: Why Most Things Fail
  3. Hugo Mercier: Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe: "it's about the question of whether somebody like Donald Trump can talk to you, a fairly liberal human being, and through the magic of his disinformation, suddenly you walk away thinking, 'I will vote for that man.'"

  I'm torn on whether to order Gurri's book (or for that matter, Mir's similar and slightly later, and therefore more Trump-aware one). The others may also be interesting, but I already have a fair grasp of their issues, if not their specific arguments.

• Cass R Sunstein: [02-26] This Theory Is Behind Trump's Power Grab: This is "the unitary executive theory," by which the presidency becomes a dictatorship.

• David French: [03-02] Trump Is Doing Real Damage to America.

• Jamelle Bouie: [03-05] Trump Promised Retribution. Turns Out He Had a Very Big Target in Mind.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 20 albums, 3 A-list

Music: Current count 43769 [43749) rated (+20), 38 [46] unrated (-8).

This will be another perfunctory installment, just noting the few albums I've managed to check out, with minimal embellishment or commentary. I'm effectively stalled, a state unlikely to change any time soon. I've had a rough week, although perhaps not as bad as I had feared. I expect more of the same, although I suppose I should be cheered that the arctic chill has retreated into usual Winter gloom. Also that two minor surgeries have moved to done from looming, and while I can't say I've recovered, I've survived no worse than expected.

I had the root canal last Monday, and go back to dentist for a crown on Wednesday, which should be uneventful. I had cataract surgery on my left eye on Thursday, and went back for post-op exam on Friday. I've written about it at more length in my notebook, but no need linking much less reiterating all that here. Both of these events seemed rather ominous coming out of the anaesthetic, but improved significantly the day after. The eye is still blurry, but I'm told that a day later my vision with it had improved from 20/80 to 20/50. I was cleared to drive home, and did confidently. Since then, it's hard to gauge further improvement. It is still not as good looking at computer or reading as the also-not-very-good right eye, but I'm fairly functional with the combination.

Still, "functional" does not mean I have much if any ambition to work on anything, including figuring out my future writing life. Aside from the paltry few records below, the only things I've written in recent days were the surgery write-up, a list of highly-rated television shows, and a post-dream tweet:

Starting to reimagine my "Weird" book idea as a three-act play, one act for each Trump campaign, starting out as farce and ending up as tragedy, with more corpses on stage at the end than "Hamlet." Meanwhile, reading Hobsbawm on Berlin 1932.

I didn't initially cross-post this on Bluesky, figuring I'd keep my powder dry there until I figured out what I wanted to do, but seeing as I had 27 notifications there this morning (vs. 2 on X), I let it rip (adding the book title).

I couldn't very well excerpt, much less explicate, Hobsbawm in that format, but the gist was that by 1932, the Weimar Republic parties had lost their credibility and their ability to govern, but the left had nowhere near the power to initiate a revolution, despite seeing the obvious need for one. As for the Nazis, they too were unable to seize power on their own, but were ultimately gifted it by aristocratic conservatives who deluded themselves into thinking they could control Hitler as a tool. Hitler offered them a degree of popularity they could never muster on their own. They, in turn, gave Hitler the power to destroy the whole nation.

But their decision to do so wasn't driven by necessity. The KPD, while growing as the SPD lost credibility through ineffectiveness, was far from being able to rise to power, and if sensible people just managed to keep their heads and smooth out the kinks in a badly shaken economy, both the Communists and the Nazis would have faded back into the Weimar muddle. The right picked the Nazis not because they had to, but because they relished the idea of using Nazi stormtroopers to impose their will on an unruly public.

A few months ago, I was thinking that the mainstreaming of the "Trump is a fascist" meme was simply bad tactics: the few people who even remotely understood it had already made up their minds on Trump — most against, but there are some people who like that aspect of Trump — while everyone else was simply confused. But now I'm beginning to realize that there are very few historical analogies, especially well known ones, that capture the present moment with such resonance and depth. And also that the real problem isn't the right fringe that Trump has rallied to power, and certainly not the leftists who see catastrophe unfolding so clearly, but the emboldened "center-right" who see Trump as their ticket to growing their already ridiculous oligarchy, and the cowardly "center-left" who have dissolved into nothingness.

Historical analogies are almost by definition always wrong, but we have few other techniques to clarify out thinking. But rather than start with "is Trump Hitler?" perhaps we should start with "is American Weimar?" Very few Americans know anything significant about Weimar Germany (or any other period of German history, even the Nazi period), but among the few that do, some on the left and more on the right could make a few connections. To the extent that you do, Trump and Hitler, regardless of their differences, are too unique to map to anyone else. The real question is who, in Trump's world, plays the role of Papen, Hindenburg, Krupp, Schleicher, et alem? (Thälmann is irrelevant to the handover of power, as are the more famous minions Hitler promoted and/or eliminated.)

I wouldn't expect much precision in such personal analogies, but general types keep returning in various guises — much as Napoleon III reinvented his namesake as farce. I'd also point out that much of Weimar was unique and specific to its time and place, while contemporary America is no less so. (A good background reference here is Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which includes several more comparative studies.)

Perhaps the quote I was looking for was this one (pp. 57):

We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. The only uncertainty was about what would happen when it did. Who would provide a new ship? It was impossible to remain outside politics. But how could one support the parties of the Weimar Republic who no longer even knew how to man the lifeboats? They were entirely absent from the presidential elections of 1932, which were fought between Hitler and the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann and old imperial Field Marshal Hindenburg, supported by all non-communists as the only way of holding up the rise of Hitler. (Within a few months he was to call Hitler to power.)

Initially I retyped a promising piece from the following page (p. 58), which didn't quite get to where I recalled it going, but since it's typed, I'll offer it anyway:

As I entered the school year 1932-3, the sense that we were living in some sort of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering. The presidential election of May 1932, the first of several in that ominous year, hd already eliminated the parties of the Weimar Republic. The last of its governments, under Brüning, had fallen shortly after and given way to a clique of aristocratic reactionaries governing entirely by presidential decree, for the administration of Franz von Papen had virtually no support in the Reichstag, let alone even the makings of a majority. The new government immediately sent a small detail of soldiers to dismiss the government of the largest German state, Prussia, where a Social-Democratic-Centre Party coalition had maintained something like democratic rule. The ministers went like lambs, as Papen, trying to bring Hitler into his government, revoked a recent ban on the wearing of their uniforms by Nazi stormtroopers. Their deliberately provocative parades now became part of the protection squads of the various parties. In July alone eighty-six were killed, mainly in clashes between Nazis and communists, and the number of those seriously injured ran into hundreds. Hitler, playing for higher stakes, forced a general election in July. The Nazis were returned with almost 14 million votes (37.5 per cent) and 230 seats — barely fewer than the combined strength of the Weimar parties (Social Democrats, Catholics and the now virtually invisible Democrats) and the communists with over 5 million and eighty-nine seats. For practical purposes the Weimar Republic was dead. Only the form of the funeral remained to be determined. But until there was agreement between the President, the army, the reactionaries and Hitler (who insisted on the Chancellorship or nothing), its corpse could not be buried.

This reminds me that I long ago broke the habit of marking up books. (I was taken aback some months ago when I opened up my old copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment and found that it was more underlined than not, mostly in ink.) The Hobsbawm books are full of bits I can imagine wanting to refer back to. (I found the quote above only by looking Papen up in the index.)

As my tweet suggests, I now think one has to look at all three Trump presidential campaigns to get a coherent picture of how he works, what his appeal is, and how badly Democrats have bungled the "assignment" of talking about him. (Chait's term in quotes, which despite its inherently snide air is useful for focusing on the one essential asked of every Democrat who's run against him, which is to beat him. Any other compromise is forgivable, but letting him win is not.) We also have to pay considerable heed to the Sanders campaigns, and the intense preoccupation of centrist Democrats with stopping Sanders even at their own expense.

Such ideas continue to percolate in my head while I'm otherwise doing next to nothing. Sorry about that, but I'm not ready to "face the music" (even when it's just music). I spent a lot of time last week fiddling with the jigsaw puzzle — which requires eyesight, but not so critically — and watching TV. I didn't get much of the latter done, but did finish Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — L gave up after 2-3 episodes, but I hung on and watched the 4th — picking up with the 5th (easily the best, with Chris Chalk as James Baldwin; way too much drinking himself to death after that, while the aging "swans" hardly seemed worth the trouble, although Jessica Lange's ghost of a mother added some value). I also watched Get Millie Black (which L had started without me, but we finished up together).

It's her TV, so unless I get impose, I only get to watch what she wants when she wants, and mostly this week she wanted to watch Oscar movies. To that end, we watched Anora, which milked 10 minutes of plot for 139 minutes of overkill editing, and The Substance, which was horrible — although both had a fair amount of what one friend calls "redeeming social value." With that, I've seen 3 (of 9) Best Picture nominees (the other is Conclave; L went ahead and saw Emilia Pérez without me, as well as 3 animation nominees — although I did catch the end of Memoirs of a Snail).

I watched the first 30-40 minutes of the Oscars, and found myself irritated or worse by virtually everything starting with the host change to Conan O'Brien — another reminder that elections have consequences? Sure, I haven't watched Jimmy Kimmel since the election, but not because I want to live in a world devoid of humor and meaning, where "the times" are only whispered about in hushed, ominous tones. While I took comfort from Kimmel's ridicule of Trump, I came away thinking that we have to find new ways of talking about Trump and his posse to his base. Still, that's no reason to back off when you're right.

Only thing to note on this week's music is that I finally dipped into the 2025 demo queue. I can't say I felt the need to move on, but found it took minimal thought to pull the next item from the queue, especially compared to searching out more 2024 prospects. Of the latter, note that the two A- albums came from Chuck Eddy's 150 Best Albums of 2024, which I belatedly added to my EOY Aggregate.

I suppose I should also note that I've added a fair number of individual top-10 lists, drawing mostly from the Uproxx Music Critics Poll. I originally went through the critics list and picked up names I recognized (pretty much anyone I had picked up in a previous EOY Aggregate). But at some point, I decided it would be ok to skew the results a bit toward hip-hop, so I grabbed the voter lists for several well-regarded albums, especially Doechii's Alligator Bites Never Heal -- now in 7th place, which also helped lift Kendrick Lamar's GNX to 2nd, Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter to 3rd, and Tyler, the Creator's Chromakopia to 11th. (I didn't go through their voter lists, but those three albums picked up more than other contenders, especially the Cure's Songs of a Lost World (drop from 2nd to 5th) and Adrianne Lenker's Bright Future (4th, I think, to 8th).

Quite possible I'll do a bit more of that sort of thing, and look for a few more lists, although at this point the utility of putting more work into this project is dwindling.

New records reviewed this week:

• Frank Carlberg: Dream Machine (2023 [2025], Red Piano): [cd]: A-
• Cumgirl8: The 8th Cumming (2024, 4AD): [sp]: B+(*)
• Dengue Dengue Dengue!: Agita2 (2024, Club Romantico, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
• Peter Erskine & the Jam Music Lab All-Stars: Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner (2024 [2025], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Flagboy Giz and the Wild Tchoupitoulas: Live From the French Quarter Fest 2023 (2023 [2024], Injun Money): [sp]: B+(**)
• Andreas Gerth & Carl Oesterheit: Music for Unknown Rituals (2023 [2024], Umor Rex): [sp]: A-
• Glorygirl2950: Queen of the Land (2024, self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
• Brad Goode Polytonal Big Band: The Snake Charmer (Origin)
• Hieroglyphic Being: Quadric Surfaces (2024, Viernulvier): [bc]: B+(***)
• Erik Jekabson: Breakthrough (2024 [2025], Wide Hive): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jessica Jones Quartet: Edible Flowers (2020 [2025], Reva): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jupiter & Okwess: Ekoya (2025, Airfono): [sp]: B+(*)
• Doug MacDonald: Santa Monica Session (2024 [2025], DMAC Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Polyfillas: Rude Boys of England E.P. (2024, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Praktika: Balani Factory (2023 [2024], Blanc Manioc): [sp]: A-
• Valknee: Ordinary (2024, TuneCore): [sp]: B+(**)
• Vincenzo Virgillito: Precondition (2017 [2025], self-released): [cd]: B
• Jeong Lim Yang: Synchronicity (2023 [2025], Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(***)
• Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 22: Ebo Taylor (2025, Jazz Is Dead): [sp]: B+(*)
• ZA!/Tomás De Perrate: Jolifanto (2024, Lovemonk): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• None

Old music:

• Andreas Gerth & Carl Oesterhelt: The Aporias of Futurism (2021, Umor Rex): [sp]: B+(*)

Unpacking: I have a half-dozen still-unopened packages on my desk. Check back next week.

Daily Log

Shortly after breakfast, I threw this tweet out there:

Starting to reimagine my "Weird" book idea as a three-act play, one act for each Trump campaign, starting out as farce and ending up as tragedy, with more corpses on stage at the end than "Hamlet." Meanwhile, reading Hobsbawm on Berlin 1932.

I probably should have followed up on Bluesky, but I have very few followers there, and haven't really gotten into what I imagine my strategy there to be, which is to start plugging articles of interest, which would in a small manner revive the suspended Speaking of Which. For now, I'm still inclined to take things very easy. After pretty dramatic improvement in left eye the day after surgery, I have little subsequent progress to report. The left eye is still blurrier than the right eye. The color shift is less pronounced than when I first uncovered the eye, which makes me think it was still pretty dilated. It's surely worn off by now -- I didn't notice at the time, but there's no obvious dilation now -- but it's still notable when I go from eye to eye. Still bits of flashing around the edges. I got a new shield with an elastic strap, which is nicer than having to tape the old shield in place.

Trying to think up something to watch next, I started a TV Shows List.

Daily Log

I had cataract surgery on my left eye on Thursday, Feb. 27. We had to get up early and drive far east (past Webb, off 13th N) for the 11AM appointment. They did some further testing: photos of both eyes with bright green light, which took many attempts before they got something satisfactory. They had me sign a bunch of forms where I agreed to hold them utterly blameless for whatever horrors they might inflict on me. While I don't doubt that there is some value in some of that, I'd like to see a law that says that no contract is enforceable unless it has been negotiated through lawyers, of which at least one is committed to defend whoever has to sign and has the power to veto anything that doesn't meet some standards of fairness and propriety. (This would include every "click-through" license ever, where rejection or amendment hardly seems an option.)

They then went to work on me. I laid down on a gurney, with my knees raised and head tilted up. I was plumbed for an IV, and hooked up to a blood pressure cuff and oximeter, and possibly other wires. I was given eyedrops to numb and dilate my eye. The doctor came in and put marks on what felt like my eye to help him align the toric lens, which is supposed to correct astigmatism. The anesthetist checked my vital signs, and talked a bit about what she was going to do. They administered some kind of tranquilizer through the IV, which didn't knock me out of make me loopy, but supposedly calmed me down. She also talked about an injection to block the nerves -- not sure which, but evidently bruising around the eye is a common side-effect, as the needle goes in "blindly" and could hit a blood vessel -- but I don't recall seeing, much less feeling, a needle. When I came to later, I saw marks on my forehead, but not on my eyelid, so that was probably the doctor's marks.

They wheeled me into surgery, and worked fairly quickly. I had asked the doctor to annotate what he was doing, but he said very little, so I had little direction or notion what was going on. Before long, they covered up my right eye. All I could see out of the left was bright white light, with black splotches. He may have mentioned inserting the new lens. They finally put two strips of very sticky tape in an X-pattern over the eye. When I looked at it later, I was surprised to find how much loose skin from the eyelid they had pulled into and over the eye.

I was told to leave the tape on for at least six hours. They wheeled me past the prep/recovery area, all the way to the door, where Laura had brought the car around. I got off the gurney, somehow put my shoes and coat on, and stumbled to the car, for the long ride home. I put my glasses on, including the clip-on for darkening. I was surprised to find I could see well enough from my right eye that I could imagine driving home. But the ride didn't bother me -- evidently I still had enough of the tranquilizer working.

I was pretty out of sorts for the rest of the day. I played an Art Tatum/Ben Webster CD that I've always found remarkably calming. I checked email, but spent little time on the computer, or doing much of anything else. I mostly sat at the jigsaw puzzle, putting a piece in now and then. I had just started reading Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times, so I may have read a bit of that. About the only thing I felt like doing was eating, so I snacked a lot: potato chips and baba gannouj, vanilla pudding, a frozen Stouffers for dinner. I thought about TV, but I don't recall actually watching any. I had a tiny bit of headache, and more exhaustion. Finally, about 7 o'clock, about the time I could have taken the tape off, I went upstairs instead, turned on Coleman Hawkins, read a couple pages, put on the CPAP mask, and took a nap.

I woke up two hours later. I peeled the tape off, surprised at how intensely it clung to the loose and dissheveled skin of my eyelids. I closed my right eye, and the left was extremely blurry, but rather bright. I closed my left, and the right was unchanged, so was usable, and I could see well enough for practical purposes. When I looked at the computer, I noticed that the dark blue of my Mahjongg game was bright blue through my left eye, and the yellow tinge of the tiles turned bright white. Laura had rented a couple Oscar-bait movies, but decided it was too late, so we watched Father Brown instead. I worked on the puzzle a bit after that, then did my eye drops, went upstairs, read a bit, taped the eye guard into place, and tried to sleep. I spent a couple hours without really dozing off. I visited the bathroom, noting that the tape obscured my left eye vision even worse than the blurriness, and again tried to sleep.

I woke up from one of those tedious, repetitive dreams that at least I could recognize as the work of the subconscious brain, an hour or less before the alarm was set to go off. We had to return to the clinic for the 11:30 post-op exam. I got up, had breakfast, and read a bit. Laura drove, although by this point the left eye was much less blurred. I imagined that I could drive. At the exam, preliminary tests suggested that my left eye had already improved from 20/80 to 20/50. The black eye, splitting headaches, etc., that I had been warned of hadn't materialized. I had a bit of flashing to the far left, especially when there was extra light that way, but that was dismissed as normal. I asked about driving, and he said I was clear to drive if I felt like it. I did, and drove home.

One bit of confusion was the scheduling. Doctor told me he wanted to see me in 2-3 weeks for a follow-up. When I got to the receptionist, she initially offered me an appointment in one week. When I asked for something downtown, that got pushed back to one month. She seemed to be under the impression that the purpose of the follow-up was to measure for the right eye, not to examine the post-surgery left. When she offered a late March date for East, I accepted the April date for Downtown, but left confused. I figured I could wait until Monday to try to get hold of someone who knows something. At this point it seems like I should move on to the right eye as soon as the left settles down. I'm supposed to do the eye drops and wear the nighttime eye guard for a week, and continue the steroid drops until I run out (three weeks?).

I can't say that the left eye is much better this morning than it was after the exam yesterday. It's still somewhat blurry, and somewhat bothered. But I spent most of Friday watching TV, which included Laura's two movies, plus episodes 5-8 of Feud: Capote & the Swans. I figure it will be more TV today, but thought I'd start the day with this note, while listening to a work CD -- something I've neglected the last couple days.

Feb 2025

Apr 2025