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Music: Current count 26475 [26446] rated (+29), 425 [414] unrated (+11).
Count up a bit, but that's mostly because I got into a run of listening to the legendary Dutch anarcho-punk group Ex, finding virtually all of their catalog easily accessible on Bandcamp. I discovered this cache when Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Merkuria (or Merkurya) died and I went off looking for his old Éthiopiques volume -- one I had long hoped to listen to. I also recalled that he had done a live album with the Ex (one I thought I had heard, but evidently not), as well as an A- record with Either/Orchestra (Éthiopiques 20: Live in Addis). I've long been interested in Ex, but it hasn't been easy coming across their records. Before this binge, my ratings were:
Perhaps I should also include some jazz-oriented records that guitarist Terrie Hessels (aka Terrie Ex) has done:
This preoccupation with the Ex has taken up so much time (and I'm still a few records short of done) that I haven't done anything in recognition of the recent deaths of Merle Haggard and Tony Conrad. The one thought I have on Haggard is that I'll always be grateful to my old friend Harold Karabell for prodding me to look beyond Hag's "Fightin' Side" jingoism. I have 25 of his records graded in my database, which leaves me far short, especially on the early LPs, but that's still quite a few. As for Conrad, I'm looking at his Early Minimalism box still sitting on my unplayed shelf over a decade after a publicist generously sent it to me. Safe to say, he's due.
I also want to note the recent death of a non-musician here, Manfred Menking. Born in Germany (East Prussia) in 1934, he survived bombing in WWII, fled west in advance of the Soviet army in 1944. He studied to become a doctor, was offered a Fulbright scholarship to complete his pediatric residency in Ohio. In 1973 he moved to Wichita, where one of his patients was my nephew. He was devoted to peace, working with Physicians for Social Responsibility and Wichita's Peace and Social Justice Center -- where we met him shortly after moving here in 1999. He was charming, delightful, very kind. It was a pleasure to have known him.
There was an uptick of incoming mail last week. Most importantly the long-awaited package from Portugal arrived -- probably a replacement after I complained last week. Probably just a temporary blip, but with my general slowdown this is the first time in a long time I've felt behind.
I commented on a Tom Carson tweet a couple days ago. Carson responded in an email that Robert Christgau forwarded to me, part of which noted that I don't allow comments on the blog. I've been using a piece of blog software called Serendipity. It has a reasonably nice feature set, but having used it for more than a decade, I'm stuck with an older version (which I've hacked on a bit), and more importantly I've been stuck on a server that isn't up to handling the now large (and somewhat bloated) database. I tried turning comments on for a while, but I didn't get much valuable feedback, partly because people had trouble with the interface. Spambots, on the other hand, seemed to sail through, and the maintenance got to be too much. Then I ran into database performance problems, so I hacked what I called a "faux blog" in parallel to the Serendipity one, and I've been updating both for some time now. I use the latter for links I post, because it's more likely you'll be served the page, but it doesn't have some nice features, like RSS, of comments.
However, because the "faux blog" is just a collection of hand-edited web pages, I can insert comments into those pages. The only thing is that you have to email them to me, and I have to decide it's worth the trouble, and we all have to wait until I update the site (which usually happens when I have something new to post, or sometimes when I've screwed up and need to fix something fast).
So I've added Carson's letter and a rather long-winded response to my Candidate Analogies post. Not sure whether this will become standard practice or is just a one-shot. I should note that I've bumped into Carson numerous times over the years. Back in the 1970s, he submitted an unassigned review of Brian Eno's Another Green World which Voice music editor Christgau liked enough to consider running alongside the review he had assigned me to write. Carson was one of the organizers of the Christgau 60th birthday Festschrift, Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough, and he edited my piece there (A Rock & Roll Critic Is Something to Be). He also offered invaluable editing advice when I wrote a "mass letter" as the 2004 election approached -- let's see, where is that thing? Oh, here. I've only read him erratically -- a big compilation of his writings would be most welcome, or maybe several as his political writings are matched by his culture critique (he long did a TV column for Esquire) -- and he's usually not only a sharp thinker but has retained a rock critic's ear for hook lines: possibly the most radical thing I've ever read was his conclusion to an essay (which I can't find now) on 1945 pointing out that winning WWII was the worst thing that ever happened to the United States.
I should also mention his novel, Gilligan's Wake -- perhaps the only novel I've read since 2001, partly because I could imagine him writing it just for me -- or more precisely because he presented a vision of 20th century America in myriad dazzling details that I was uniquely prepared to appreciate. Perhaps too much Alger Hiss, and too kind to Bob Dole, but brilliance abounds -- one bit that seems perfect is Mary Ann's self-healing hymen, maintaining her virginity no matter how much she screws around, a knack shared with America, the only country in the world that can fuck you over while remaining as pure and innocent as ever.
I've been struggling to get anything read recently, only finishing Jane Mayer's invaluable Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right a couple days ago. I should write something about the book, which updates and deepens Max Blumenthal's 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party while paying particular attention to the Kochs and their financial and political networks, but no telling when I'll get around to it. Meanwhile, I came across Carson's review of Daniel Schulman's Koch family bio, Sons of Wichita, so thought I'd pass it along: The Brothers Koch: Family Drama and Disdain for Democracy.
New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week: