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Monday, November 14, 2022

November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 39065 [39002] rated (+63), 46 [43] unrated (+3: 18 new, 28 old).

PS: As I've been doing most weeks, I started this introduction with a link to the previous day's Speaking of Which column. The political/news posts are a lot of work, and a lot of deadline pressure, so I think they deserve a friendly extra link, especially as I routinely link to Music Week on Facebook, but rarely to my other blog posts. Also, having depressurized after the post, I feel like I can get a bit more personal here -- especially given that the music reviews that make up the bulk of the content are already done and tucked away. But this week I went on at much more than expected length, and a reader -- one who often retweets and/or forwards me -- wrote in to ask if I couldn't break it up into two posts: one politics and one music. That's not unreasonable: I've long had a plan to split it up and maintain separate blogs for politics and music. But practical and personal problems have kept that from happening, and at this point I'm losing interest in both.

So I've done two things: I've moved the political part to the bottom of this post, adding this mini-explanation. And I've also copied the political part to yesterday's post, as a postscript. But while the intro is important to me personally, I doubt that it warrants its own post. It's mostly more drivel on the eternal book question, but if you're curious, by all means scroll down and read. I doubt if this is a satisfactory solution, but it's all I'm prepared to do for now.

I've made a small bit of progress toward organizing the Jazz Critics Poll, but not nearly enough. I was pleased to receive unsolicited mail from one of the voters today, reminding me that people are interested in this happening. I've thus far failed to line up a sponsor, but I want to make my website the focal point, so not lining up sponsorship won't stop it from happening. I would appreciate any suggestions on how to make the presentation more appealing, and/or how to better get the word out when we announce the results.

I'm still planning on sending the voter invites out this week. Basic minimal qualifications for voting are that you need to have heard several hundred new jazz releases this year, and to have written about several dozen of them (broadcast journalists also count -- we have a number of them, although that's not a world I'm very familiar with; thus far I've heard 681 jazz releases, out of 1113 in my tracking file). Here's a list of voters from 2021. If you know someone else who should be voting, let me know.

This week's records started with a long trawl through the late Loretta Lynn's back catalogue. I had looked for her albums a while back and found very little, so it's likely that their addition to streaming services is recent and ongoing (availability starts to get patchy after 1977, and I'm still missing one duet album with Ernest Tubb and several with Conway Twitty -- who, like many country stars of the period, I know almost exclusively from compilations).

A couple of minor notes here: I complained last week about Jerry Lee Lewis albums failing to hit 30 minutes, but threw in the towel here: none of Lynn's 1960s and 1970s albums do (they mostly run 11 tracks). I only did the first (of three, I think) Greatest Hits LPs, partly because I used to own the LP, and partly because she was only beginning to find her unique voice when it came out, so it shows a different side of her compared to the later compilations. One thing I found interesting was that during breaks from this immersion in her work, I found myself recalling other country songs, mostly from George Jones and Merle Haggard. Must be some common bits of melody wafting through all three.

The Mingus record was due to a user question. He asked whether my having skipped the record meant some sort of disapproval. You can rest assured that omissions simply reflect ignorance. Had I been aware of the album (at least during the last 20 years) I would have listed it. Now I am aware, and have listed it.

The new stuff came late in the week, mostly promos that weren't due for release until early November, plus a couple of the August NoBusiness releases I just got this week. I've aded things to my jazz and non-jazz files, but haven't gotten around to rethinking the order (what's currently there is likely to change, possibly a lot). I see that AOTY is reporting the first 2022 Music Year End Lists (Decibel, Uncut). I haven't tracked them yet, but will soon begin to (the current Aggregate File has 80+ ratings (*) and mid-year lists (+), so is somewhat biased toward early-year releases, but the ranking there is: Wet Leg, Big Thief, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Rosalia, Beyoncé, Mitski, Black Country New Road, The Smile, Nilufer Yanya. I weigh the EOY lists more heavily (5 points for top picks, 4 for 2-5, 3 for 6-10, 2 for 11-20, 1 for all other mentions), so the current numbers will soon get swamped.

I just realized that one of the reasons I've been avoiding playing downloads (e.g., the new Thumbscrew album) is that the Klipsch speakers on the machine I collect them on are flaky, with one side turned down to squelch noise. I've just ordered a new pair of (slightly cheaper) Creative Labs speakers, so hopefully that will fix the problem. I had to replace the mouse last week, and I'm delighted with the new one, not least for eliminating the wire.

New records reviewed this week:

The Attic [Rodrigo Amado/Gonçalo Almeida/Onno Govaert]: Love Ghosts (2020 [2022], NoBusiness): Portuguese tenor saxophonist, one of the best avant players over two decades, third group album (the first I filed under bassist Almeida's name; this one has a new drummer). A- [cd]

Jakob Bro/Joe Lovano: Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian (2021 [2022], ECM): Danish guitarist, albums since 2013, 6th album on ECM since 2015. Bro played on Motian's Garden of Eden (2006), while Lovano (tenor sax/tarogato) played in a long-running trio with Motian and Bill Frisell. Group here adds Anders Christensen (bass guitar), two double bassists (Larry Grenadier and Thomas Morgan), and two drummers (Joey Baron and Jorge Rossy). Only one Motian composition here (vs. two for Bro, three for Lovano). B+(***) [sp]

Armani Caesar: The Liz 2 (2022, Griselda): Buffalo rapper, released a mixtape in 2020 called The Liz, gets dark, dense, and obscure. B+(*) [sp]

Coco & Clair Clair: Sexy (2022, self-released): Atlanta-based pop/rap duo, Taylor Nave and Claire Toothill, first album after a 7-track 2017 EP. Hard to gauge sexy, but cute, clever, sometimes nasty, sure. B+(*) [sp]

George Colligan: King's Dream (2022, P.Ice): Pianist, more than two dozen albums since 1995, solo, original compositions. Title reflects on Martin Luther King, promising "a balm for turmoil of recent days." B+(**) [cd]

Olli Hirvonen: Kielo (2022, Ropeadope): Finnish guitarist, fourth album, has a solid rock-fusion vibe. B+(*) [cd]

Homeboy Sandman: Still Champion (2022, self-released): New York rapper Angel Del Villar II, many albums/EPs -- he seems to prefer 20-30 minute chunks -- since 2007, with this his third album this year (10 tracks, 33:23). Produced sparingly by Deca. Takes a couple tracks before his words start to flow with the mix, but they never melt into oblivion -- just too fascinating. A- [sp]

Dan Israel: Seriously (2022, self-released): Singer-songwriter from Minneapolis, started around 1998, Discogs lists 13 albums plus a compilation (Danthology). Bandcamp page includes a full lyric sheet, but this rocked past me so fast I never wondered about the words. B+(*) [bc]

Song Yi Jeon/Vinicius Gomes: Home (2020 [2022], Greenleaf Music): Voice and guitar. She was born in South Korea; educated in Graz, Basel, and Boston; based in Switzerland; third album, backed by the Brazilian (NY-based) guitarist. Seems like a fairly limited concept, but grows on you. B+(***) [cd] [11-18]

Kirk Knuffke/Michael Bisio: For You I Don't Want to Go (2020 [2022], NoBusiness): Cornet and bass duo. Knuffke has managed to slip easily between mainstream and avant contexts, so singularly it's never clear where this modest, bare bones project fits (not that it matters). A- [cd]

Sarathy Korwar: Kalak (2022, The Leaf Label): Percussionist, born in US, raised in India, based in London. Fourth album. Describes this as "an Indo-futurist manifesto." Opens with a recipe that lost me with the 10 crushed chili peppers, then enters a vocal piece I can only find exotic. After that, the music gets more enticing, especially the drums, so when the vocals return they have something to build on. B+(***) [sp]

Dave Liebman: Trust and Honesty (2022, Newvelle); Leader plays soprano and tenor sax, accompanied by Ben Monder on guitar and John Hébert on bass, with Monder taking most of the leads. Nothing rushed, so you need to let it seep in. B+(**) [sp]

Mama's Broke: Narrow Line (2022, Free Dirt): Canadian folk duo from Nova Scotia, Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria, play string instruments (mainly guitar and violin, plus banjo and a bit of cello). Second album. Rather dank. Perhaps you have to be a lyrics hound to care enough, but I can see the appeal. B+(**) [sp]

Mama's Broke: Count the Wicked (2017, self-released): First album, following a 2014 EP. Music has a bit more snap. Can't speak to the lyrics. B+(***) [sp]

Timothy Norton: Visions of Phaedrus (2021 [2022], Truth Revolution): Bassist, debut album, leads a smart postbop sextet with trumpet (Josh Evans), sax (Jerome Sabbagh), piano (Randy Ingram), guitar, and drums. B+(***) [cd]

Houston Person: Reminiscing at Rudy's (2022, HighNote): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, started in the 1960s at Prestige, where he also did A&R, and has followed Joe Fields (the late, so now producer Barney Fields) from label to label. Easy-going live set, standards he's mostly done before, backed by guitar (Russell Malone), piano (Larry Fuller, bass (Matthew Parrish), and drums (Lewis Nash, also credited with a crooning vocal). Spottier than his best records, but some lovely parts. B+(***) [cd] [11-18]

Smino: Luv 4 Rent (2022, Zero Fatigue/Motown): Rapper Christopher Smith Jr., from St. Louis, third album, pretty sneaky. B+(**) [sp]

Sonido Solar: Eddie Palmieri Presents Sonido Solar (2022, Truth Revolution): Palmieri arranges and plays piano on just two tracks, but his imprimatur means something to the actual band leaders: Jonathan Powell (trumpet), Louis Fouché (alto sax), Luques Curtis (bass), and Zaccai Curtis (piano). They are joined by trombone, tenor sax, and three percussionists, playing Latin jazz classics. B+(**) [cd]

They Might Be Giants: Book (2021, Idlewild): Billed as "two catchy weirdos," I loved their 1986 debut -- "of course you do" was Bob Christgau's reaction when I gushed about how much -- but they wore out their welcome pretty fast, even as Christgau maintained his more moderate level of interest, which turned out not to include six albums since 2013 (his last-reviewed Nanobots, until this one). I only noticed (or bothered with) one of those, Glean, a low B+ from 2015, although this one was in last year's tracking file. This is comparably idiosyncratic. Reportedly comes with a book, which I haven't seen. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Yuji Takahashi/Sabu Toyozumi: The Quietly Clouds and a Wild Crane (1998 [2022], NoBusiness): Japanese piano and drums duo. Takahashi lived in Europe 1963-66, where he studied with Iannis Xenakis, and in the US 1966-72, with most of his early work classical (including Bach, Beethoven, Satie, Messiaen, and Cage; in 1979, he recorded Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated). B+(***) [cd]

Old music:

Homeboy Sandman: Nourishment (Second Helpings) (2007, Boy Sand Industries): New York rapper Angel del Villar II, first album, title recycled from a debut EP, long semi-popular career ahead of him. Fast and freaky. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Before I'm Over You (1964, Decca): She wrote a song here ("Where Were You"), but it's outshone by the covers, especially the sly "Wine, Women and Song," and how often she makes you forget well-known hits, like "Loose Talk" (Carl Smith) and "The End of the World" (Skeeter Davis). B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Songs From My Heart . . . (1965, Decca): Two original songs, still nothing notable, but she got a hit with "Happy Birthday," and "Oh, Lonesome Me" is as great as ever. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Blue Kentucky Girl (1965, Decca): Johnny Mullins wrote the title song for her, not just a hit but a signature song. She wrote four songs, mostly slow spots. "The Race Is On" opens the second side. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Hymns (1965, Decca): Too great a singer to make a really bad album, and this fills a niche that is all but expected in Nashville, but the songs about children praying got under my skin, and the old time religion just fills me with dread. B [sp]

Loretta Lynn: I Like 'Em Country (1966, Decca): The one original in a sob story "Dear Uncle Sam," which could use more context and anger. Covers of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash don't disappoint. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: You Ain't Woman Enough (1966, Decca): Do you suppose "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" (covered here with extra twang) got her thinking? The title cut was her first self-penned masterpiece -- the one that stuck with me last time I played her Definitive Collection. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind) (1967, Decca): Another signature song, her first number one single. Two more Lynn originals add to her anger and frustration: "Get Whatcha Got and Go" and "I Got Caught." B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Loretta Lynn's Greatest Hits (1961-67 [1968], Decca): With just 11 songs (26:06), and nine of them 1965 or earlier (including the better-forgotten "Dear Uncle Sam"), you can do much better: I'd rank them: 20 Greatest Hits [1987], Country Music Hall of Fame [1991], then The Definitive Collection (2005), with the 3-CD Honky Tonk Girl (1994) nearly all first rate. A-

Loretta Lynn: Who Says God Is Dead! (1968, Decca): Note punctuation, on one of four originals here, which (aside from "Mama, Why?") aren't as perverse as last time. Bluegrass helps, and standards like "The Old Rugged Cross" and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" are reliable. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Fist City (1968, Decca): Title song was her second number one single, just one of five songs she wrote (or co-wrote). While she's willing to fight for her man there, she wastes no time dumping him in "You Didn't Like My Lovin'." A- [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Your Squaw Is on the Warpath Tonight (1969, Decca): Title cut explains that "squaw" is nickname given by an abusive or at least damn annoying husband, but the album cover takes one aback these days, as does the choice of "Kaw-Liga" as a cover (although "Harper Valley P.T.A." isn't much better). Also comes up super short after a song (not one Lynn wrote) was pulled due to a copyright dispute. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Here's Loretta Singing "Wings Upon Your Horns" (1969 [1970], Decca): Single wasn't that big (11) or for that matter that memorable: "loss of innocence" is a more common phrase for those not obsessed with demons and angels, a recurring theme here. Though not really on "Let's Get Back Down to Earth," the best song here. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Loretta Lynn Writes 'Em and Sings 'Em (1965-69 [1970], Decca): She started writing songs a couple albums in, and gradually increased, but no more than five songs (including co-writes) to an album. She didn't have enough for a full album when she went into the studio in December 1969, but instead of adding cover filler, they dropped a few of her self-penned hits into the mix: "You Ain't Woman Enough," "Fist City," "Your Squaw Is on the Warpath," "Wings Upon Your Horns." Two great songs there, and two pretty good ones, which is about all I can say for the new ones. This was probably more useful at the time, but I had to assemble it as a playlist, checking out the missing "What Has the Bottle Done to My Baby" on YouTube. B+(***)

Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter (1970 [1971], Decca): Title song was an inspired piece of storytelling, another number one hit and her first song to graze the pop charts (83), and went on to serve as the title of her autobiography and of the movie made about it, as well as a 2010 tribute to Lynn. Only two more Lynn credits here. The rest reveal little, but show off her still remarkable voice. B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: I Wanna Be Free (1971, Decca): Title song was a country hit (3), but little remembered. It's one of four Lynn credits here, along with covers she doesn't need but handles as well as you'd expect ("Rose Garden," "Me and Bobby McGee," "Help Me Make It Through the Night"). B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: You're Lookin' at Country (1971, Decca): The title song is perfectly iconic, but they she throws a cover of the perfectly fake "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Beyond that, the usual batch. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Alone With You (1961-64 [1972], Vocalion): Eleven tracks compiled from her first three albums, avoiding all five charting singles, including just two of her own writing credits. Makes you wonder why, other than to show off Owen Bradley's production skills. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: One's on the Way (1972, Decca): Shel Silverstein wrote the title song, but I can't imagine anyone else singing it. She only co-wrote one song, the trivial "L-O-V-E, Love," but the filler is uniformly solid, "It'll Feel Good When It Quits Hurtin'" fits her nicely, and you have to wonder why it took her so long to do "Blueberry Hill." B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Here I Am Again (1972, Decca): Shel Silverstein wrote the title song again, but not one he will be remembered for. Lynn's sole co-credit is for the so-so "I Miss You More Today." The rest is decent enough, except for a cover of "Delta Dawn" where the star gets submerged in the backup. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Entertainer of the Year (1972, Decca): This breaks her usual habit of naming the album for the top single, but the label didn't care call the album "Rated X." The song wasn't about sex per se, but about the tainted past of divorcées -- a quaint relic of an earlier period which Lynn did as much as anyone to end. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Love Is the Foundation (1973, MCA): Shel Silverstein came to the rescue again with "Hey Loretta" ("I love you more than my Irish setter," "this a-women's liberation, honey, is gonna start right now"). Would have been a good album title, too, but they went with the William Cody Hall title song first, and it sold well enough. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn/Conway Twitty: Country Partners (1974, MCA): Second duet album together, note that the billing order flipped. This opens with a definitive break up song ("As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone"), and the few exceptions are at best nostalgic. B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: They Don't Make 'Em Like My Daddy (1974, MCA): Jerry Chestnut wrote the title track, another perfect single attached to another beautifully sung but less than remarkable album. Note that this is one of her first albums to inch above 30 minutes. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Back to the Country (1975, MCA): No self-penned songs (again), although the single couldn't have been written for anyone else, and was ultimately a milestone: "The Pill." B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn/Conway Twitty: Feelins' (1975, MCA): First I was confused by that apostrophe, then by the song it was attached to, then it got worse. Some of their best songs are marked by humor, but never this sophomoric. B- [sp]

Loretta Lynn: When the Tingle Becomes a Chill (1976, MCA): Lola Jean Dillon wrote the moving title song. Lynn's only song is "Red, White and Blue," where her Cherokee identity resurfaces. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn/Conway Twitty: United Talent (1976, MCA): Title is kinda creepy, as is the embrace on the cover, and for that matter the talkies "The Letter" and "God Bless America Again." On the other hand, the rest is more upbeat, but maybe because they rushed to get this over with in an exceptionally short 24:42. B [sp]

Loretta Lynn: I Remember Patsy (1977, MCA): Patsy Cline had four top-two hits before her plane crash death in 1963: "Walkin' After Midnight" (1957), and from 1961-62 "I Fall to Pieces," "Crazy," and "She's Got You," plus a couple lesser hits -- a fairly thin discography for such a legend, but her voice elevated lesser fare, and that's all history required. Cline befriended Lynn when the latter arrived in Nashville, but only three years separated them (b. 1932 to 1935; first singles 1955 to 1960). This tribute remakes nine songs from Cline's songbook, and goes straight for the top shelf: the four I listed above, and "Sweet Dreams," "Faded Love," "Why Can't He Be You," "Back in Baby's Arms," "Leavin' on Your Mind," then ends with a 7:11 interview excerpt to establish Lynn's bona fide -- as if her voice wasn't ticket enough. B+(***) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Out of My Head and Back in My Bed (1978, MCA): Another number one single, but neither it nor the follow up stick for me. B [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Making Love From Memory (1982, MCA): I Remember Patsy was her last top-10 country album until 2004's Van Lear Rose, and this was the first one that didn't chart at all. A couple odd things here, like the jazz steps on "When We Get Back Together," but I rather like Lynn's own song, "Then You'll Be Free." B [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Lyin', Cheatin', Woman Chasin', Honky Tonkin', Whiskey Drinkin' You (1983, MCA): Title song injects a badly needed bit of energy, if not quite anger, but it fades, like her career trajectory. B+(*) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Just a Woman (1985, MCA): Three singles stiffed, and the album topped out at 63, but having put Owen Bradley in the rear view mirror, there is much evidence that she's trying harder, including two songs she wrote, and a closer about a wedding ring, called "One Man Band." B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Who Was That Stranger (1988, MCA): Two originals, neither of them singles, but the singles stiffed. All the fun here comes from the fast ones, which are more plentiful than in a long time. B+(**) [sp]

Loretta Lynn: Still Country (2000, Audium): First studio album since 1988. Not much more to say about it. B+(*) [sp]

Charles Mingus: Tonight at Noon (1957-61 [1964], Atlantic): Outtakes from The Clown (1957) and Oh Yeah (1961), compiled into a 38:08 LP in 1964 after the bassist had moved on to Impulse!, then basically forgotten about until digital reissues became trivial. In the meantime, the cuts were added as bonuses to CD reissues, and compiled into Rhino's 6-CD Passions of a Man: The Complete Atlantic Recordings. Of course, parts -- especially those with Booker Ervin and Roland Kirk -- sound brilliant. Pianist Wade Legge, who died at 29 after an impressive list of side-credits, may also be worth a deeper look. B+(***) [sp]

Dolly Parton/Loretta Lynn/Tammy Wynette: Honky Tonk Angels (1993, Columbia): Credit per spine, which makes sense given that it had been several years since Lynn and Wynette had recorded (1988 and 1990). Starts with the Kitty Wells hit, which has never before been encased in such vocal splendor. Wells is credited as a special guest, as is Patsy Cline ("Lovesick Blues" 30 years after her death). Lynn and Wynette write their own showcases, and Parton amends the roster of "I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven." B+(**) [sp]

Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn: Mr. and Mrs. Used to Be (1965, Decca): Duets, the first of three albums together. Tubb was 51 and declining, Lynn 30 and on the rise, their voices an odd mix, and they spend more time breaking up than anything else. B [sp]

Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn: Singin' Again (1967, Decca): Country music's odd couple, back for a second engagement. The voices still don't mix, but through mutual respect they mesh much better. And Loretta's getting better at faking romance, but "Beautiful Friendship" is more to the point. B+(**) [sp]

Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn: Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man (1973, MCA): A better duet partner for Lynn than Ernest Tubb, whose flat Texas tone never quite meshed with Lynn. Twitty, two years older with a 1959 start in rockabilly, was a comparable star in Nashville: 10 number 1 singles through 1973, vs. 7 for Lynn, though Lynn was arguably more famous beyond country music. The obvious competition was George Jones and Tammy Wynette, who released during their 1969-75 marriage, and has real chemistry before they started developing their breakup material. Twitty and Lynn was just an act, which helps explain why they were doing covers of "Bye Bye Love" and "Release Me" on their first album. But the intercourse of their voices was something to marvel at. B+(***) [sp]

Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn: Two's a Party (1981, MCA): Their tenth (and last) duet album, laid on thick. B [sp]

Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn: The Best of Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn [20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection] (1971-88 [2000], MCA Nashville): They knocked out an album every year for a decade, then one more after a seven year break. This 12-track max series should be ideal for hit-and-miss artists, but picking one song per album overrepresents the bad ones, and misses their one stroke of genius: "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." Pick any of several alternative comps that have it, even the 24-track The Definitive Collection, which picks up everything here and still improves on it. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Attic [Rodrigo Amado/Gonçalo Almeida/Onno Govaert]: Love Ghosts (NoBusiness) [08-30]
• Hal Galper: Ivory Forest Redux (1979, Origin) [11-18]
• Kirk Knuffke/Michael Bisio: For You I Don't Want to Go (NoBusiness) [08-30]
• Zach Phillips: Goddaughters (self-released) [08-12]
• Scenes: Variable Clouds: Live at the Earshot Jazz Festival (Origin) [11-18]
• Cory Smythe: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (Pyroclastic) [12-02]
• Wil Swindler's Elevenet: Space Bugs: Live in Denver (OA2) [11-18]
• Yuji Takahashi/Sabu Toyozumi: The Quietly Clousd and a Wild Crane (1998, NoBusiness) [08-30]
• Gebhard Ullmann/Steve Swell/Hilliard Greene/Barry Altschul: We're Playing in Here? (2007, NoBusiness) [08-30]
• Dan Weiss Trio: Dedication (Cygnus) [11-11]
• Rodney Whitaker: Oasis (Origin) [11-18]

Former Introduction

I wrote some on the 2022 election last week in yesterday's Speaking of Which. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time studying elections. I could name you every Senator since 1900, and most of the then-current members of the House. I poured through almanacs and colored in county maps to plot the spatial division of party splits, going back in many cases to Reconstruction after the Civil War. I went to the library a couple times each week, and regularly noted votes as tracked by Congressional Weekly. I did a lot of the same things Kevin Phillips did while writing The Emerging Republican Majority: effectively the Bible of Nixon's Southern Strategy and cult of the Silent Majority. In that book I glimpsed the future: the rise of reaction, and the end of the liberal America I had grown up in (and found deficient, although one can be nostalgic comparing it to the changes wrought by Nixon, Reagan, and their descendants down through Trump and beyond).

I gave up on electoral politics after McGovern's tragic loss in 1972, only to return in 1996 when presented with an opportunity to vote against the villainous Bob Dole (who had eked out a win in 1972 against Bill Roy in the dirtiest, most despicable campaign of my experience). But whenever I did pay attention to an election, I found my peculiar experience gave me considerable insight. You can find analyses of various elections as far back as 2000 in my notebooks. This year's seems rather paltry by comparison, as if I'm struggling not just with the data but with my motivation. One question I need to answer in the next month or two[*] is whether make a serious attempt at writing the political book I've been turning over in my head since the mid-1990s. The latest iteration of the outline envisions three sections:

1. The evolution of the Republican Party from Nixon to the present, seen mostly as the pursuit of power regardless of the costs, including to their basic competency.
2. A survey of several prominent problems that Republicans have proved themselves incompetent to address, much less to ameliorate.
3. A prescription for the Democrats to forge a political stance that is capable of both winning elections and addressing problems.

As I noted in a tweet I quoted in the post, the first part is the easy one: books like David Corn's recent American Psychosis and Dana Milbank's The Destructionists, or older ones like Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew (2008), offer a surfeit of examples that go to the heart of the GOP (and not just the MAGA fringe). One can also draw on a rich literature on problems and solutions, most formulated on the left because that's where critical thinking survives. The tough problem is figuring out how to package both the critique of Republicanism and a practical range of solutions in a way that wins over a viable political majority. I have some ideas there, or at least some personal reactions, but putting them together won't be easy, and may be resisted as much by the left as by the center and the right.

The idea here is to provide a framework to help Democrats better understand what needs to be done, and what they're up against. It won't try to argue with Republicans or unaligned refuseniks -- not that I won't offer some suggestions for Democrats to win them over. It won't offer a left critique of mainstream Democrats, liberalism, and/or capitalism (although I suppose that's where I'm coming from, so it's liable to seep through, but only where I think it might be helpful for winning elections and setting policy). It won't engage in the sort of utopian thinking I've long been partial to. It won't be based on polling, or for that matter on the sort of political science Thomas Edsall and Ezra Klein base their analyses on. I'm not going to tell Democrats they should tell people what they want to hear.

I recognize that Republicans have a long-term credibility problem because nothing they say about problems and nothing they try to do about them actually works. Everything they've touched in the last 40-50 years has turned to crap, and it's getting increasingly hard to ignore that fundamental flaw in their thinking (though they try, by shouting louder and more desperately). Democrats have sometimes won elections by appropriating Republican rhetoric, but that's only saddled them with their own long-term credibility problem. The only way to reverse this is to promise and deliver on things that actually work. That's a tough sell, because we're so used to stupid posturing, and because the media practically polices pubic discourse to make sure nothing sensible survives. (That's a big part of why they love and/or hate Trump so much.)

[*] Let's make this specific: to make decision by the end of the year, either to write the book or to never think about it again. The alternative would be to work on the memoir, which could spin other things off eventually. In the meantime, I have the Jazz Critics Poll to run (and/or to ruin).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

PS: I started to write a plug for this post in Monday's Music Week post, and it got a bit out of hand. As it makes more sense here, I'm adding it to the end of this post, as well as burying it at the end of the Music Week post. I'm not updating the notebook to reflect these changes.

The following section was started on Wednesday, mostly finished by Thursday, although I've added occasional bits. This intro was written Sunday afternoon. The Arizona and Nevada Senate races were finally called for the Democrats, giving them 50 seats, plus a chance to pick up one more in the Georgia runoff, As I understand it, the extra seat will save them from some procedural hassles, so would be a big plus. Plus one seat still means that Manchin and Sinema can veto legislation, and perhaps most importantly any change to the filibuster rule, but it will take both of them instead of either/or. Still may not matter much if the House goes to the Republicans, as seems likely.

Democrats have bravely claimed their showing as some kind of win, at least a victory over expectations, which seem to have been set by a combination of Republican arrogance and Democratic self-doubt. I haven't dug into the results nearly as much as in previous years, so have very little to say about specific races. Some of the articles below are helpful (especially the interviews), but none are anywhere near definitive.

Still, I'm not very happy with this election. I've felt all along that Democrats should be able to do better. I'm particularly saddened at not picking up the Senate seat in Wisconsin -- I seriously doubt anyone has ever won three Senate terms by slimmer margins than Ron Johnson (although Russ Feingold was close on track with his first two wins, before Johnson beat him). Also in Ohio, which is a state I've always felt Democrats should be winning, and Iowa and Missouri, which should be more competitive. (North Carolina was actually a bit closer, but always seems to fall short, as do the big hopes centrist Democrats hold for Florida and Texas.)

In Kansas, Democratic governor Laura Kelly won a very close race against one of the most loathsome Republicans I've encountered in a long time, but didn't have enough coattails to carry an Attorney General race where Republicans nominated the wretched Kris Kobach, let alone her former Lt. Governor Lynn Rogers, who ran for Treasurer. The State Supreme Court justices Republicans were keen to purge for ruling that abortion is a constitutional right were easily retained, and the House gerrymander failed to get rid of Kansas' one Democratic Representative. I also think it's significant that Sen. Jerry Moran, who is a reliable Republican foot-soldier but far from the worst, only barely managed 60% of the vote, despite outspending Democrat Mark Holland by 6.6-to-1 (felt more like 30-to-1, which was about what happened six years ago, when Moran again was capped at 60%). Despite its bloody-red reputation, Kansas reliably has a close to 40% Democratic base no matter now little they campaign. Shouldn't we be able to build on that?

Americans voted for a new Congress, many Governors, and lots of lower offices. I ventured last week and the week before that the relentless drumroll of media stories touting Republican polling gains, even in publications like Vox that supposedly lean left, amounted to gaslighting. As the actual votes got counted, the New York Times (as usual, one of the worst offenders) immediately spun by asking their pundits: How did Democrats escape a rout?. A better question is why did a party that had nothing to offer America except more corruption, a diminished economy, less equality, more injustice, more guns and violence, fewer rights and an increasingly tattered security, with such contempt for the people that they spent the last two years scheming ways to steal elections and sabotage popular efforts when they lost anyway: why did this Republican Party still managed to get anywhere close to half of the votes? I suspect that the real effect of the gaslighting was less, as I mentioned last week, to set up another round of election-stealing charges, than to simply legitimize a Party that deserves nothing less than total dismissal.

I opened this file Wednesday afternoon because I wanted to start with this tweet from Rick Perlstein:

Let's be real. When the opposition is organized around doing nothing to help human beings, runs lunatics, and abandons the basic pretense of commitment to democracy, and the result is a tie, this is a demonstration of the weakness of the Democratic Party, not its health.

I only half approve of this tweet. The slam on the Republicans is succinct but fundamentally right. What's missing is not just extra charges, of which there are many, but appreciation of how effective Republicans are at campaigning with such obvious faults. Without considering how Republicans tap into deep-seated psychic traits, it's impossible to tell whether a tie is a sign of Democratic weakness or heroism. One can argue either case, but let's start by nothing that unlike the midterm fiascos of 1994 and 2010, Democrats held their own this year. This was certainly not because Republicans got lazy and/or missed tricks. Their relentless demonization of Biden drove approval polls toward 40% over a year ago, and their media manipulation far exceeded anything in my memory. They had tons of money, which helped them select emotional hot buttons, forcing Democrats to back-peddle and depend on reason.

Yet still, voters resisted. Biden's argument that democracy was at stake may have seemed too abstract, but it became much more palpable when the Republican-packed Supreme Court stripped Americans of their constitutional right to reproductive choice. Granted, Democrats should have done a better job of illuminating the much broader threat that Republicans poised to our freedoms, to our well-being, to society as a whole. Or alternatively, they could have tried harder to get people to fear and loathe Republicans, as Republicans have done to liberals and ultimately all Democrats over the last 40-50 years. But that's an uphill battle, and isn't necessarily in their nature (or necessarily a good thing). The Democratic Party is diverse and divided, intent on representing and servicing everyone -- which puts it at a severe disadvantage when facing such a single-minded adversary.

Scanning further down in the Perlstein thread, I see he writes more [other comments in brackets; mine are TH]:

• Writing a whole book about it. [TH: Good. Been thinking about my own. What's wrong with R's is easy part, although few have noted the toxic power lust going back to Nixon. Hard part is what D's can do, given the asymmetries in identity and approach. Also, per W Rogers, Ds are not "an organized political party."]
• What have Dems done to create a more robust sense of party identity ("tribalism"), build their own media ecosystem, and degrade the strategic capacity of the oppositions? Every excuse is an indictment.
• Learned helplessness. If we don't win, the planet and the society collapse.
• [jeff scheiner: Don't overlook money and media though.] Thanks for the reminder. Democrats collect and spend absurdly large amounts of money with no coordinated strategic vision, and have created no media platforms to define the terms of battle.
• [desertbunny: We need a mechanism to be able to sue for political malpractice.] That mechanism is called "grassroots participation in Democratic Party politics." Volunteer in your ward/county organization, etc. The only out is through.
• [VHistory: I'm not so sure I'm as much of a pessimist. Remember, many voters inexplicably don't see the GOP that way. Fundamentally we're just a broken electorate. Plus, I think if Dems become more activist it'll help them. They survived because of the things they did for people.] This is optimism, not pessimism. It's a faith that it's possible to build a vision in which the Democrats won operational control of the country for generations, like under FDR, and the GOP functions as an oppositional rump.
• [David Silva: But let's not overlook the raw emotional appeal of the GOP. The attractive power of a lynch mob.] Dems one had a raw emotional power, of helping you stick it to the boss. One of the wages of Clintonism was making that go away.
• [john maccallum: Of course the Democratic Party is weak. No labor unions or big city political machines to offset GOP $$$, a need to placate monied interests to raise $$$, dispirited core groups by a reactionary corporate media run by the rich.] And . . . Democrats couldn't have done more to rebuild union power? Every excuse is an indictment.

A couple more comments from the thread:

• John Sheehan: One party has a 24-hour a day propaganda arm pushing its lies our 365 days a year. The other party, the Democrats, don't have that advantage. You're acting like it's a level playing field. [TH: No, you need strategies that work better given the unevenness of the playing field. Some tilts, like the Senate, are impossible to change. Gerrymandering, money, media access, etc., are also uphill climbs.]
• Vax-o-licius: The theory underlying this tweet is that with better messaging and strategy Dems could romp to overwhelming victory. There is no evidence this is the case. What the last 7 years have taught us is that there is a pretty large constituency in this country for GOP lunacy. You can ALWAYS criticize the Democrats' messaging and strategy -- and you should -- but it's important to keep in ind that through all the scandals, incompetence and corruption, through Jan 6 and the fine job Dems did exposing it, the % of people who approve of Trump has gone UP.
• ZaxxonGalaxian: Should be a landslide every election against this GOP, but we have to contend with a signif part of the older white electorate brainwashed by Fox News, fundamentalist churches, and Facebook conspiracy theories. The youth + educated + minority vote doesn't way outnumber them yet.
• LeftOfTheDial: We can't just blame the GOP. The Dems are constrained in what policies/messages they can offer as a compelling, progressive alternative to the GOP by a combination of neoliberal ideology and subservience to donors. The result: tepid incrementalsm and ties.
• AXEL LYCAN: The Dems waste so much money and energy on the same old add-makers and media advisors that have lost them thousands of races since Obama even came into office.
• Cute Username: I feel like there is a substantial amount of evidence that the American people are a bunch of jerks who don't care about that kind of thing. For instance, your own books.
• Kenny Log-ins: The fact that you can't see, or refuse to recognize, that the issue is WHITE PEOPLE ENTRENCHING INTO WHITE SUPREMACY is . . . unsurprising. Nah must be the Dems fault. [TH: This accompanied by a chart showing white men breaking 63-35 R, white women 53-45 R. I don't doubt that racism is part of what's driving the R's, especially when it can be coded as crime or wokism, but is White Supremacy really a useful term for mostly inchoate prejudice? And how does condemning whites for racism help you win elections?]
• Real Benisons: Rightist Rs promised the psychic income of cruelty/owning libs/racism to plenty of humans. Is democracy as such anywhere near as salient to voters as freedoms? Ds could seize high ground against Rs who've become hostile to freedom in many ways.

I don't think we can stress too much the role of the mainstream media in conditioning (and legitimating) expectations for the election. One piece you should read is from Steve M.'s invaluable No More Mister Nice Blog: [11-09] Democrats hold off the red wave -- and The New York Times. The bulk of the piece is a day-by-day roll call of articles predicting doom for the Democrats. Nore was the Times alone in drinking Republican Kool-Aid: he includes similar pieces from The New Yorker, CNN, Bloomberg, Politico, Axios, and Washington Post. Millions of Americans depend on these outlets for relief from the non-stop propaganda spewed out by Fox and kin, so when the "reality-based" world gets snowed, it's hard for most people not to think they might have some kind of point. In this case they were wrong.

M. also wrote an earlier [11-05] piece on one specific New Yorker writer: Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a well-worked ref:

This is how the media works: Right-wing outlets offer pure GOP cheerleading and relentless demonization of Democrats, while Republican spin doctors live rent-free in every "liberal" media journalist's head, and stories routinely bash Democrats as a result.

PS: Dean Baker has another example of how the New York Times spread misinformation in the runup to the election: [11/03] It's Five Days Before the Election and the NYT Has Another Bad News About the Economy Story that Contradicts Government Data.

Another tweet on party mentality, from Josh Marshall:

Dems went into the senate battle Tuesday tense/worried. Most GOPs put on paper that they were absolutely going to run the fucking table, get 55 seats. Both were looking at the same roughly tied polls. This remains an enduring feature of the collective mentality of both parties.

Not a propos of the election, but another tweet caught my eye:

Whether it's Democrats defriending their Facebook contacts for being Republicans or Republicans shooting and killing their neighbors for being Democrats, both sides have an intolerance problem.

True enough, but it's not the same intolerance problem.

Here are a few post-election links/comments that caught my eye:

Isaac Chotiner: [11-11] Nate Cohn explains why this year's midterms broke the mold: Interview with "The [New York] Times' polling guru." Chotiner also wrote: [11-10] The accurate election polls that no one believed.

Matthew Cooper: [11-11] Why Did Democrats Do So Well in the Midterms? I'd probably be more tempted to write a "Why did Democrats do so poorly" piece, since my default position is that Republicans are so bad, and that Democrats are objectively so much better, that if everyone gave the question serious thought the results would have been much more favorable. Still, this makes the case that some Democratic arguments -- especially on abortion and democracy -- resonated with enough voters to stay close even given the Republican snow job.

James Fallows: [11-09] The Political Press Needs a Time Out: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. How about if we waste less time trying." More examples of misleading analysis, especially from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Judd Legum has more: [11-10] Political media is broken.

Benjamin Hart: [11-12] Donald Trump's Gift to Democrats. Interview with Amy Walter, of Cook Political Report. Trump has been in the news literally every day since he left office, which has made him much harder to forgive than, say, GW Bush, who became a hermit after 2008, and was totally forgotten by 2010 (even though his administration could be blamed for virtually everything had gone wrong in Obama's first two years). No doubt Trump motivated more Democrats to vote than would have without his constant irritation, but he also motivated his followers, and gave them renewed confidence even if based on lies. Hart's title isn't meant that way, but Republican elites who have no problem with Trump as long as he's winning will point to this disappointment as proof that he's not worth the drama, and should be dumped ASAP. Godspeed, sure, but Trump is still able to do one thing no other Republican can: suck all the oxygen out of a room, so it becomes impossible to rationally debate issues. Given the irrationality of Republican stances on virtually all issues, his removal may not work out as well as they think.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske/Paul Kane: [11-12] Democrats surged to flip state legislatures, defying past GOP gains.

Ellen Ioanes: [11-13] Democrats kept the Senate. But Georgia is still important.

Robert Kuttner: [11-11] Did We Just Save Democracy? Maybe, sort of, aside from the fact that democracy wasn't in very good shape in the first place. Kuttner refers to a review of his book Going Big: FDR's Legacy, Biden's New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy: [11-07] Steps in the Left Direction.

Eric Levitz: [11-10] David Shor's (Premature) Autopsy of the 2020 Midterm Elections. Midterms basically turn on which party comes out to vote, and which stays home. So the interesting point Shor makes here is: Republicans were up by about 2% relative to Democrats. Still, Democrats did better in battleground states, and seem to have gotten lazy in states they thought they had locked up (e.g., New York, California).

Maurice Mitchell: [11-11] How the Democrats Won and Lost and 2022 Midterms. "Tuesday's results are a reprieve, but we still have mountains to move."

Will Norris: [11-10] The Beginning of the End of the Subminimum Wage: "D.C. voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to force restaurants to pay employees the full minimum wage. The rest of the nation is likely to follow."

Charles P Pierce: [11-10] No One Can Pretend that Wisconsin Is a Republic: Wisconsin has the most grotesque partisan gerrymandering of any state. It's so bad that when Democrats got 51 percent of the vote statewide, they only won 30 percent of the seats in the state legislature.

Nathan J Robinson: [11-09] The Majority of Americans Do Not Support Right-Wing Extremism.

Bill Scher: [11-09] America Does Care About Democracy and Abortion Rights. Some curious poll numbers here: 52 percent say the Republican Party is "too extreme," but 51% say the same about the Democratic Party (huh?); 56 percent believe Republicans want to pass a national abortion ban, but 53% believe Democrats want to cut police funding (as recently as 2021, Democrats actually voted to increase police funding). Part of this can be blamed on Democrats having poor messaging skills, but there's some deep psychology here that Republicans have learned to exploit but which leaves Democrats awkwardly clueless.

Jeffrey St Clair: [11-11] Roaming Charges: The Searh for Intelligent Life in American Politics: He's proudly outside of the two-party system ("I don't think a candidate I've actively supported has ever won elective office"), but that gives him some perspective: "The fact that Democrats are relieved at the narrowness of their loss and Republicans outraged by the thinness of their win speaks to the different psychologies of the two parties. One lives in fear, unsure (with reason) about its own beliefs. The other perpetually angry that not everyone bends to their will." This is followed by the illustration for "a blue surge is coming for Florida, sooner rather than later." On the other hand, he quotes Ted Cruz on why Democrats did better than expected: "Because for two years they have governed as liberals. They've governed as whacked out lefty nut jobs. You know what that did? That excited their base. That excited a bunch of young voters." Maybe they should do more of that? Many other subjects, as usual. E.g.: "I don't understand fleeing Twitter when you can watch one of the most grotesque people on the planet be shredded day after day in his very own safe space, in front of the people whose admiration he craves."

Paul Street: [11-11] Twelve Takes on the Mid-Terms: I had doubts about linking here (he uses the "F-word" much more than necessary, as in "Republi-fascists," and nicknames Joe Biden "Burn Pit"), but couldn't deny you the dig at David ("statistically illiterate moron") Brooks.

Tessa Stuart: [11-09] It Was a Huge Night for Abortion Rights -- Even in Kentucky.

And here are few more items (mostly) beyond the election:

Dean Baker: [11-11] The Crushing Health Care Cost Burden that Never Came: Dredges up the ominous 1990s warnings of billionaire Scrooge Peter Peterson to make a couple points. One is that the cost growth projected back then wasn't really in Social Security and Medicare but in a profit-hungry health care system, that Medicare was actually doing a better job of controlling than private heath insurance was. Another is that cost growth basically went flat after the Affordable Care Act kicked in around 2015 (aside from a blip up with the pandemic in 2020, and a slide down as the pandemic abated). None of this suggests that Medicare-for-All wouldn't fare even better than Obamacare, but it does show that we'd be in much worse shape had Democrats not passed the ACA. And had Trump managed to repeal ACA, today's gas prices would just be a rounding error (even if most of the extra costs were paid for in service quality).

Jonathan Chait: [11-01] Progressive America Needs a Glasnost: "Stop being afraid to speak out against the madness." What he seems to mean is that Progressives should purge their ranks of hysterics and fringe eccentrics, but he starts with the example of the unnamed staff at the New York Times who persuaded the editorial board to not give air to an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for martial law to crush Black Lives Matter protesters. The rejection didn't prevent Cotton from airing his noxious views, and may have given him a publicity boost. There's no really good solution to issues like this. Chait has a few more examples, which are mostly things the right rails against as "cancel culture" and "political correctness." I certainly see a need to handle those cases better, but they rarely bother me, at least where the people being chastised have little power of their own. And I still have a bad taste from 1992, when Bill Clinton went out of his way to attack a minor rapper dba Sister Souljah.

Kate Conger/Mike Isaac/Ryan Mac/Tiffany Hsu: [11-11] Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk's Takeover of Twitter. I'm not sure why you should care, but if you're curious this is the basic story. Also:

• Alex Heath: [11-10] Elon Musk is putting Twitter at risk of billions in fines, warns company lawyer. Twitter has signed various consent decrees to get out of legal hot water, and is still bound to them, regardless of what the new capo thinks.

• Paul Rosenberg: [11-12] What's behind Elon's Twitter disaster? A fundamental misunderstanding of "free speech": "Engineers don't understand freedom of speech, community or human behavior." And that's even before the monetizers get their grubby little hands on it.

Kelly Denton-Borhaug: [11-10] What an American Addiction to War Means to Veterans. Author has a book: And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and US War-Culture. Last week was Veterans Day, the only American holiday date (aside from Christmas, New Year's Day, and the 4th of July) considered so sacrosanct that it hasn't been gerrymandered into a long weekend. The date was originally fixed at the end of what was then called the Great War, making it a celebration of peace, but as the "war to end all war" in fact spawned more wars (David Fromkin wound up writing a book on the postwar settlement called The Peace to End All Peace), the holiday got taken over as a tribute to the martyrs, and eventually a celebration of American militarism. Every year, it's a holiday that makes me sick to my stomach.

I remember back when I was drafted in 1969, the greatest fear I felt wasn't what the "enemy" might do to me -- my life wasn't worth much as the time, which is part of the reason they looked on me as ideal draft bait -- but what the Army would certainly do to me to try to turn me into a killer. (Not that I didn't know well enough what was going on in Vietnam. My next door neighbor was sent there and came back in small bits.) So when the author talks about "moral injury," I recognize something deeper than the better known PTSD that affects so many veterans. "War damages all who wage it" is fairly profound, but even there the net isn't cast wide enough. War damages the politicians who vote for it, the writers who cheer it on, and many bystanders, who matter how innocent they think they are. If I've learned one thing important in my 72 years, it's that.

Connor Echols: [11-11] Diplomacy Watch: Could US-Russia nuke negotiations help set the stage for talks? Not a lot to report, but there is a report that Biden and Putin will be talking about extending the START treaty that limits some nuclear weapons. As Churchill once said, "jaw jaw is better than war war." Echols also wrote: [11-07] New White House reports suggest diplomacy isn't a four-letter word after all.

Also on Ukraine:

• Jen Kirby: [11-11] What Russia's withdrawal from a key Ukrainian city means for the war: Russia has withdrawn from Kherson, the largest city they managed to capture early in the war, and the capital of Kherson Oblast, which they annexed a month or so ago. Also on this:

• Fred Kaplan: [11-10] Fallback Plan: "Russia's withdrawal from Kherson is its most Humiliating setback since the failed invasion of Kyiv."

• Robert Wright: [11-11] Decoding Biden's Ukraine Diplomacy Signals.

• Thomas Moller-Nielsen: [10-27] Why Did Russia Launch This Catastrophic War? A long piece which goes fairly deep into history, and stresses the diplomatic failures leading up to the March invasion and ever since. I could probably nitpick, but will refer you instead to my 23 Theses post, which is still pretty relevant.

John Hudson: [11-12] US intelligence report says key gulf ally meddled in American politics: "The United Arab Emirates steered US foreign policy in its favor through a series of legal and illegal exploits." Given that what happens in US politics has profound impacts on the rest of the world, I'm not surprised when foreign countries try to affect US elections -- especially given that the US has a long record of trying to influence foreign elections. So most of what this proves is that it's not just Russia (and Israel, which is much more aggressive, given their proxies -- speaking of which, see Michael Arria: [11-09] AIPAC spent over $4 million trying to stop Summer Lee but she's headed to Congress).

Paul Krugman: [11-08] Is Divided Government Good? Don't Take Elon's Word for It. Refers to a Musk tweet, endorsing Republicans for Congress to lean against the Democrat in the White House. But the US has had divided government -- a President from one party and control of one or both Congressional bodies by the other -- with startling regularity (from memory so I may be off a bit: 2/8 years Truman, 6/8 Eisenhower, 0/8 Kennedy/Johnson, 8/8 Nixon/Ford, 0/4 Carter, 6/8 Reagan, 4/4 Bush I, 6/8 Clinton, 2/8 Bush II, 6/8 Obama, 2/4 Trump). In some cases that can lead to constructive compromises (although offhand, the examples that come to mind involve R Presidents working with D Congresses, and most of them are dated (like under Eisenhower and Nixon). But mostly it leads to obstruction and sabotage, which was most explicit after 2010, and would probably be even worse now (as of this writing, the Senate has 50 Democrats + a chance for one more in Georgia, but the House is leaning Republican, and that would be enough to torpedo any legislative efforts, and to hold even essential spending hostage). That might be OK if, like most contemporary Republicans, you believe problems (like pandemic and climate change) to be scams, and government to be intrinsically incompetent if not downright evil. On the other hand, if you think that we are facing real problems (even ones Republicans campaigned hard on, like inflation and crime) you should want a functioning political system, which these days means Democrats in charge. The only plus I see to divided government over the next two years is that it will make it easier to blame Republicans for inaction and obstruction in 2024. Still, it means two more years wasted so arrogant twits like Musk can get off easy. One last thing to note here is that the argument works best in the mid-terms, when the presidency is already fixed. You never find people arguing for divided government during a presidential election, because they always want to win both. So why credit it as an idea at all?

Jill Lepore: [11-07] The case against the Twitter apology: "Our twenty-first century culture of performed remorse has become a sorry spectacle."

Anatol Lieven: [11-09] Grim outlook on global warming emerges from UN conference: "Necessary carbon reduction targets will not be met; the US and China will have to work together to prevent further damage." Not much news (as least that I noticed) from the UN's COP27 climate conference in Egypt.

Ian Millhiser: [11-11] The legal fight that could kill Biden's student debt relief plan, explained: "The program is almost certainly legal, but that fact is unlikely to persuade a judiciary dominated by his partisan foes." One of whom, a Trump judge in Texas, has already ruled against the program.

Timothy Noah: [11-10] Inflation Is Dwindling (Just Like I Said It Was). He further suggests "there's even a growing possibility we can avoid a recession." But won't that require the Fed to stop its interest rate hikes when prices stabilize, instead of waiting until they get the unemployment rate they seem to be looking for?

Jonathan Ofir: [11-11] Meet the new kingmakers of Israeli politics: "The racist, homophobic, ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism list was the big winner in Israel's most recent election. It is also a perfect reflection of where Israel is heading." This trajectory is hardly surprising, given that Israel has maintained domestic repression (an apartheid state) and militarism ever since 1948, with no interest in mitigating injustice or reconciling with worldwide norms. One can imagine the US, following 9/11, sinking ever deeper into the same mental rut -- indeed, that appears to have been the aspirations of the neocons who ran Bush's war machine and their apocalyptic allies in the fundamentalist churches -- but most Americans turned out to not have the stomach for perpetual war. Also:

• Richard Silverstein: [11-11] Itamar Ben Gvir: the Rebbe's Disciple.

Barnett R Rubin: [11-05] 14 months later: Five conclusions on Afghanistan withdrawal. During the Bush years, Rubin was one of the few experts on Afghanistan who could be counted on to offer sober analysis of the war there. Then, he went to work for Obama, and disappeared from pubic view. So good to hear from him again. The main conclusion is that US sanctions only serve to make a bad situation worse. The most interesting point is that China, Russia, and Iran haven't shown any desire to join with the Taliban in thumbimg noses at the US. I read this as suggesting an opportunity for a joint engagement, which could mitigate some of the Taliban's worst characteristics, and also reduce friction between the the US and its supposed nemeses.

Alex Shephard: [11-11] The Attempt to Annoint Ron DeSantis as Trump's Heir Will Fail. I'm not so sure. Trump's command over the GOP Establishment was almost completely based on his reputation as a winner, established in the 2016 election and reinforced by virtually nothing since -- not that he hasn't tried to keep up appearances, rather remarkably keeping much of his base in line after wrongfooting such supposedly savvy Washington insiders as McConnell, Graham, and McCarthy.

More on Trump:

• Jonathan Chait: [11-11] The GOP Revolt Against Trump Is More Serious Than You Think. The Murdoch machine got in some quick blows -- see the New York Post "Trumpty Dumpty" cover -- but they've tried and failed to bring him down before.

• Igor Derysh: [11-10] "Coordinated effort across Fox News, WSJ and NY Post": Rupert Murdoch dumps "biggest loser" Trump.

• Liz Goodwin: [11-11] A red wave of criticism crashes into Donald Trump after midterm losses.

• Ed Kilgore: [11-11] How Many Republican Chokers Is Trump Responsible For? Mentions Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, Adam Laxalt, and Blake Masters. Actually, those four came pretty close in seats that were far from Republican locks. And JD Vance and Ron Johnson, who were both deranged enough to make this list, won their seats.

• Ryan Cooper: [11-09] Republicans Have a Disease Called Donald Trump: "Sane parties change their tune when they lose repeatedly. The GOP is not sane." That seems to make sense, but the case was even clearer in 2008, when Obama won by a landslide and Democrats had solid control of all of Congress, yet instead of triangulating (like Clinton did after losing Congress in 1994), Republicans doubled down on crazy (remember the Tea Party?), and made a huge comeback in 2010. And after Obama won again in 2012, they went even crazier in 2016 with Trump, and got away with that, too. So while it's possible that their shtick is wearing thin, they didn't lose badly enough this year to force them to change. And given that their base is highly susceptible to and motivated by their insanity, it's going to take a really shattering defeat before they consider alternatives.

• Paul Woodward: [11-10] Voters are getting sick of Trump: Quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial: "Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat." His other example is from John Podhoretz, so "people" is a rather rarefied commodity.

Washington Post Editorial Board: [11-12] Here's how Congress can make the lame-duck session a mighty one: In recent years, when Democrats won governorships in North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans in those states (including the lame duck governors) moved quickly to pass laws to undermine established powers of their governors. That's seemed like bad taste, but but there are things that the old Democratic majorities can still do that would make the next two years more bearable. Most important is to get rid of the unnecessary law that requires Congress to vote on raising the federal debt limit -- something that Republicans have often used to try to extort concessions from Democratic administrations. They raise a few more issues. (I'm skeptical about "fight Russian aggression," especially given that money for arms for Ukraine has had overwhelming bipartisan support so far.) I doubt that much can (or should) be done, especially on measures that have floundered for two years (mostly due to the filibuster, which is especially unlikely to be changed in a lame duck session), but I'd be open to ideas. Related:

Alex Thomas: [11-10] Democrats Have Two Months to Trump-Proof the Presidency: "With the party likely to cede the House -- if not the Senate -- to the GOP, meaningful steps to limit some of the executive branch's power must be taken during the lame-duck session." One problem here is that in a divided government, the only way to get many things done is through executive orders -- which you may not want to deny Biden just on the chance that Trump (or some equally malevolent Republican) might win in 2024.

David Yaffe-Bellany: [11-11] Embattled Crypto Exchange FTX Files for Bankruptcy: "The speed of FTX's downfall has left crypto insiders stunned." At one point, FTX was "valued" at $32 billion. Also:

• Andrew Perez/Rebecca Burns/Matthew Cunningham-Cook: [11-12] Crypto Champion Sam Bankman-Fried's Road to Ruin Leads Straight to Capitol Hill.

• Emily Stewart: [11-11] The spectacular implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained

• David Dayen: [11-10] Why Is Congress Still Writing Crypto Regulations: "The FTX debacle shows that crypto is less an industry than it is a scam." And: "Putting together a weak regulatory and tax regime for crypto right now is like putting together a prescription drug benefit for fentanyl."

Bonus tweet from Zachary D Carter:

There is no "good" version of crypto. It has been a fraudulent project from the jump, and anyone who failed to see that over the past decade should not be in the business of thinking and writing about American political economy.

We must do the best we can with an imperfect world, but we must also be able to distinguish between genuinely difficult moral trade-offs and simply lighting things on fire for money.

PS: I wrote the following on Monday, November 14. It started as a reference to this Speaking of Which post, but kept growing until I got complaints about hijacking my Music Week post for politics. So I thought it might be more at home here:

I wrote some on the 2022 election last week in yesterday's Speaking of Which. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time studying elections. I could name you every Senator since 1900, and most of the then-current members of the House. I poured through almanacs and colored in county maps to plot the spatial division of party splits, going back in many cases to Reconstruction after the Civil War. I went to the library a couple times each week, and regularly noted votes as tracked by Congressional Weekly. I did a lot of the same things Kevin Phillips did while writing The Emerging Republican Majority: effectively the Bible of Nixon's Southern Strategy and cult of the Silent Majority. In that book I glimpsed the future: the rise of reaction, and the end of the liberal America I had grown up in (and found deficient, although one can be nostalgic comparing it to the changes wrought by Nixon, Reagan, and their descendants down through Trump and beyond).

I gave up on electoral politics after McGovern's tragic loss in 1972, only to return in 1996 when presented with an opportunity to vote against the villainous Bob Dole (who had eked out a win in 1972 against Bill Roy in the dirtiest, most despicable campaign of my experience). But whenever I did pay attention to an election, I found my peculiar experience gave me considerable insight. You can find analyses of various elections as far back as 2000 in my notebooks. This year's seems rather paltry by comparison, as if I'm struggling not just with the data but with my motivation. One question I need to answer in the next month or two[*] is whether make a serious attempt at writing the political book I've been turning over in my head since the mid-1990s. The latest iteration of the outline envisions three sections:

1. The evolution of the Republican Party from Nixon to the present, seen mostly as the pursuit of power regardless of the costs, including to their basic competency.
2. A survey of several prominent problems that Republicans have proved themselves incompetent to address, much less to ameliorate.
3. A prescription for the Democrats to forge a political stance that is capable of both winning elections and addressing problems.

As I noted in a tweet I quoted in the post, the first part is the easy one: books like David Corn's recent American Psychosis and Dana Milbank's The Destructionists, or older ones like Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew (2008), offer a surfeit of examples that go to the heart of the GOP (and not just the MAGA fringe). One can also draw on a rich literature on problems and solutions, most formulated on the left because that's where critical thinking survives. The tough problem is figuring out how to package both the critique of Republicanism and a practical range of solutions in a way that wins over a viable political majority. I have some ideas there, or at least some personal reactions, but putting them together won't be easy, and may be resisted as much by the left as by the center and the right.

The idea here is to provide a framework to help Democrats better understand what needs to be done, and what they're up against. It won't try to argue with Republicans or unaligned refuseniks -- not that I won't offer some suggestions for Democrats to win them over. It won't offer a left critique of mainstream Democrats, liberalism, and/or capitalism (although I suppose that's where I'm coming from, so it's liable to seep through, but only where I think it might be helpful for winning elections and setting policy). It won't engage in the sort of utopian thinking I've long been partial to. It won't be based on polling, or for that matter on the sort of political science Thomas Edsall and Ezra Klein base their analyses on. I'm not going to tell Democrats they should tell people what they want to hear.

I recognize that Republicans have a long-term credibility problem because nothing they say about problems and nothing they try to do about them actually works. Everything they've touched in the last 40-50 years has turned to crap, and it's getting increasingly hard to ignore that fundamental flaw in their thinking (though they try, by shouting louder and more desperately). Democrats have sometimes won elections by appropriating Republican rhetoric, but that's only saddled them with their own long-term credibility problem. The only way to reverse this is to promise and deliver on things that actually work. That's a tough sell, because we're so used to stupid posturing, and because the media practically polices pubic discourse to make sure nothing sensible survives. (That's a big part of why they love and/or hate Trump so much.)

[*] Let's make this specific: to make decision by the end of the year, either to write the book or to never think about it again. The alternative would be to work on the memoir, which could spin other things off eventually. In the meantime, I have the Jazz Critics Poll to run (and/or to ruin).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, November 7, 2022

November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 39002 [38944] rated (+58), 43 [47] unrated (-4: 15 new, 28 old).

Rating count shot through the roof this week because I spent several days listening to the late Jerry Lee Lewis, and his Mercury albums rarely cracked 30 minutes, so they went fast. Nothing below impressed me as much as his best compilations and live albums, but I enjoyed almost every minute. There must be a solid A- Smash/Mercury best-of somewhere. (Christgau lists 1970's The Best of Jerry Lee Lewis at A- and 1985's Milestones at A, but those weren't available, and I didn't bother reconstructing them.)

Last time I looked, there was very little back catalog available from Loretta Lynn, but that seems to have changed recently, so she may be next week's focus. [PS: The first records are remarkable. I expected the country music norm of lots of filler around a famous single or two, but her voice is extraordinary, and the covers show it off.]

I spent a lot of time compiling my 2022 best jazz and best non-jazz files. I hadn't run any numbers before, so the big surprise was that I'm starting out with 73 non-jazz A-list new albums (which is a bit more than I usually wind up with) but only 49 jazz (which usually starts higher than non-jazz, but the numbers tend to even out as I scour EOY lists. On the other hand, B+(***) albums favor jazz 147 to 92, while lower grades are fairly even at 388 jazz, 376 non-jazz. In 2021, jazz divided at 77 A-list, 163 B+(***), and 455 lower; while non-jazz had 83 A-list, 122 B+(***), and 368 lower.

As best I recall, I used to get into November with a 2-to-1 jazz advantage overall, with somewhat reduced but still positive ratios in the upper grade tiers. The only thing I did differently this year was to track the metacritic file from early in the year, so I suppose that made me more aware of new non-jazz (especially hip-hop and country) records. The change in jazz grades suggests that I've shifted the line between B+(***) and A- down. I don't know about that. I could test this by going back to a few dozen B+(***) albums to get a sense of how many I had cut short. Probably a few, but I'd be surprised if they made up the deficit.

The thing that bothers me most about the lists is the ordering of the A-lists, especially for jazz. I have less sense of a top album, a top-five, a top-ten, etc., than ever before (e.g., I haven't played the Omri Ziegele album since I reviewed it, which is likely given that I streamed it, but I haven't played the top-rated CDs (Marta Sanchez, Andrew Cyrille, Rob Brown, Manel Fortiá) either, or anything else on the A-list. I'm sure that if I played them again, I'd like them again, but have absolutely no sense of how to order them. In such circumstances, what tends to happen is I add new records near the bottom of the list (this week's A- records are at 45 and 46), so early records wind up toward the top of the list. The non-jazz list is in slightly better shape, but I expect both will see a lot of reordering in the coming weeks. Plus additions, of course.

I arbitrarily nudged the Selo I Ludi grade up not due to any relistening but because I wanted to include it in the latecomer section of the EOY lists. Just seemed like the sort of record that belongs there. I'm not through reviewing the year's Streamnotes archives for possible additions. It's a slow, unpleasant process.

I should note that yesterday's Speaking of Which includes a long note on a piece by Brad Luen that Robert Christgau reprinted as a guest post last week. One more thing I want to stress is that it doesn't take a very high percentage of deaths (or other calamities) to produce a huge psychic toll. I'd say there is zero chance of all human beings being exterminated, and given that there is virtually zero chance of eradicating civilization (by which I mean our accumulated knowledge about the world). But there are a lot of bad things that can happen, and they reverberate through the living, often mutating into further bad things. One question I've been wondering about for at least 30 years is how close we are to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity. This isn't simply a question of population and resources, but varies considerably by organizational efficiency. The closer we are to the edge, the more fragile our world becomes. And if bad things create bad people -- which is suggested by the rise of neo-fascist parties around the world -- the risks of real systemic breakdown explode. These thoughts are the foundation for much of what I wrote yesterday.

I'm aiming to send out Jazz Critics Poll ballot requests by November 15. I've done some website setup, and should start assembling a mail list later this week. Sponsorship is still unsettled, but I'm not going to worry about that.

After I started writing this, I noticed that I still had unpacking to do. Next week for that.

New records reviewed this week:

Konrad Agnas/Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/Mattias Ståhl/Per Texas Johansson: All Slow Dream Gone (2022, Moserobie): Texas -- cover/spine only offers one name each, and that's how he appears -- plays clarinets (including bass and contrabass), an impressive showing over a first-rate rhythm section (drums, bass, vibraphone). A- [cd]

Daniel Avery: Ultra Truth (2022, Phantasy Sound): British electronica producer, 2013 debut called Drone Logic, this starts with a piano riff that expands into a reverb cloud. I prefer drums, and sometimes this delivers. B+(**) [sp]

Brian Charette: Jackpot (2021 [2022], Cellar): Organ player, debut 2009, seemed at first like he wanted to set out a new path for his instrument, but hard to do that when the temptations of soul jazz are so obvious. Quartet with Cory Weeds (tenor sax), Ed Cherry (guitar), and Bill Stewart (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Shemekia Copeland: Done Come Too Far (2022, Alligator): Blues singer, father was Johnny Copeland, 11th album since 1998. The high-minded opener should hit harder, but her formula for success isn't really "Dumb It Down"; it's catchier tunes, with a bit of humor. B+(**) [sp]

Trevor Dunn Trio - Convulsant Avec Folie à Quatre: Seances (2022, Pyroclastic): Bassist, electric as well as double, started in a band called Mr. Bungle, has a dozen or so albums as leader, a much longer list of side credits (Discogs lists 249). This revives his 2004 group Trio-Convulsant, with Mary Halvorson and Ches Smith returning on guitar and drums, and adds a chamber jazz quartet, consisting of Carla Kihlstedt (violin), Mariel Roberts (cello), Oscar Noriega (clarinet), and Anna Webber (flute). B+(***) [cd]

R.A.P. Ferreira: 5 to the Eye With Stars (2022, Ruby Yacht, EP): Chicago rapper, previously Milo, fell back on his own name, the initial standing for Rory Allen Philip. Starts brilliantly, doesn't fade so much as fracture. Short album: 9 tracks, 23:09. B+(***) [sp]

Joe Fiedler: Solo: The Howland Sessions (2022, Multiphonics): Trombonist, debut 1998, did a tribute to Albert Mangelsdorff in 2005, marks the 50th anniversary of Mangelsdorff's first solo performance with his own solo album. Tough going, but interesting. B+(**) [cd]

Fred Again: Actual Life (January 1-September 9 2022) (2022, Atlantic): British electronica producer Fred John Philip Gibson, third album, all stylized as time slices in everyday life. B+(*) [sp]

Satoko Fujii: Hajimeru (2021, Libra, EP): Japanese avant-pianist, very prodigious, slipped this 4-track, 29:01 digital album out with no publicity last year. B+(*) [bc]

Satoko Fujii: Bokyaku (2022, Libra): Concept here is to take found noises ("trains, airplane, helicopters, laundry machine, water drops, parked boats, constructers, etc.") and play a little music to go with them. Perhaps too little. B [bc]

Steve Gadd/Eddie Gomez/Ronnie Cuber: Center Stage (2022, Leopard): Credit below the title is WDR Big Band, arranged & conducted by Michael Abene, with the guest stars on drums, bass, and baritone sax. I don't know when this was recorded, but it came out two weeks before Cuber died (at 80). He sounds pretty good here, buoyed not less by the heft of the big band than by his rhythm co-stars, ably aided on a selection of funk tunes by WDR's guitar (Bruno Müller) and organ players (Bobby Sparks II). B+(*) [sp]

Gato Libre: Sleeping Cat (2022, Libra): Trumpet player Natsuki Tamura's group, ninth album since 2004, with trombone (Yasuko Kaneko), and wife Satoko Fujii backing on accordion (instead of her usual piano). Slow, a bit too sketchy. B+(*) [bc]

Buddy Guy: The Blues Don't Lie (2022, RCA/Silvertone): Chicago blues legend, 86 now, born in Louisiana, moved to Chicago and got picked up by Chess, his first recordings -- I Was Walking Through the Woods, from 1960-64 -- made Robert Santelli's top 100 blues albums list. I was less impressed by him than by the giants's of the Chess blues stable, at least until he teamed up with Junior Wells (Hoodoo Man Blues was number 8 on Santelli's list, vs. 78 for Guy's album). He's long since outlived all of them, developed as a singer, never had to make any excuses for his guitar, and I now find he's had a half-dozen albums between the last one I noticed (2010) and this one. He gets a lot of help here, but is just as effective on the closing solo take of "King Bee" (but he's still not Muddy Waters). B+(***) [sp]

Jupiter: The Wild East (2022, Moserobie): Originally (2004) a guitar-organ duo of Håvard Stubø and Steinar Sønk Nickelsen, soon joined by saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar, and eventually by drummer Johan Holmegard. Best when the sax breaks out. B+(*) [cd]

Kanda Bongo Man: Yolele! Live in Concert (2016 [2021], No Wahala Sounds): Congolese soukous star, emerged in the 1980s, got some US recognition when Hannibal several albums 1987-93 (from Amour Fou to Soukous in Central Park). B+(**) [sp]

Kanda Bongo Man: Kekete Bue (2022, No Wahala Sounds): First new album since 2010, although it includes "reinterpretations of some of his classic songs." B+(**) [sp]

Mavi: Laughing So Hard, It Hurts (2022, United Masters): Rapper Omavi Minder, from North Carolina, has a 2019 album after a couple self-released efforts. B+(**) [sp]

Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars (2021 [2022], Palilalia): Guitarist, founded the noise-punk duo Harry Pussy (1993-98), released a solo album in 1996, a couple dozen fringe albums since. He plays all four guitars here, so a solo album with overdubbed overtones, more metallic klang around rough-hewn riffs. B+(**) [sp]

Phoenix: Alpha Zulu (2022, Glassnote): French indie pop band, sing in English, seventh album since 2000, of which their fourth (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix) was an international breakout with solid critical support. They remain catchy, but I suspect a long popular slide is in order. B+(*) [sp]

Plains: I Walked With You a Ways (2022, Anti-): Alt-country duo of Jess Williamson (who has four albums since 2014) and Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee, five albusm since 2012, after her debut with P.S. Eliot). Starts with harmonies as tight as the McGarrigles, and develops from there. A- [sp]

Rufus Reid Trio and the Sirius Quartet: Celebration (2022, Sunnyside): Bassist, several dozen albums since 1979 plus hundreds of side credits. Trio with Steve Allee (piano) and drums (Duduka da Fonseca), plus string quartet on six (of 11) tracks. B- [sp]

Antonio Sanchez: Shift (Bad Hombre Vol. II) (2022, Warner): Mexican drummer, based in New York since 1999, usually a jazz guy, but he seems to have gotten into this via soundtracks, and has lined up guest singers for nearly every track. B [sp]

Josh Sinton's Predicate Quartet: Four Freedoms (2022, Form Is Possibility): Leader plays baritone sax, bass clarinet, and alto flute, played in the Steve Lacy tribute group Ideal Bread. Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet) is most impressive here, backed by Christopher Hoffman (cello) and Tom Rainey (drums). A- [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Crossroads Kenya: East African Benga and Rumba, 1980-1985 (1980-85 [2022], No Wahala Sounds): Seven singles (48:31) by as many bands, none I recall, but I couldn't name most of the bands on the so-far definitive Guitar Paradise of East Africa compilation. This may be second- or even third-tier, but that guitar sound is pretty hard to resist. A- [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Killer Keys of Jerry Lee Lewis (1956-60 [2022], Sun): Sun Records 70th anniversary series, remastered from original mono tapes, on vinyl, 14 "favorites, alternative versions & deep cuts." Seems like a fairly arbitrary collection, with two big hits but only a couple more obvious picks. B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Jerry Lee Lewis: Jerry Lee Lewis (1958, Sun): After his two breakthrough hits in 1957 ("Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On," "Great Balls of Fire"), and one last top-ten single in early 1958 ("Breathless"), Sam Phillips figured he'd try an LP. They seem to be throwing a lot of shit at the wall, with covers of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins not measuring up. But "Jambalaya" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" do get the blood pumping. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Essential Jerry Lee Lewis: The Sun Years (1956-63 [2013], Legacy, 2CD): Sure, a top shelf single-CD compilation like Rhino's Original Sun Greatest Hits is more choice, but Rhino's supplementary single-CD Rare Tracks was nearly as good. This isn't as consistent as either, but runs 40 tracks without breaking down. A- [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Golden Cream of Country (1956-63 [1969], Sun): Released by Shelby Singleton, who had produced Lewis at Smash, soon after he bought the Sun catalog. His earliest hits charted even higher on the country charts than on the pop charts, and by 1968 he had settled into a country music niche, so Singleton scoured the archives to construct a competitive album. No dates were offered, so I'm going with Lewis's Sun tenure, but most likely toward the end of that, and even so some pieces sound like they could be doctored (strings weren't big at Sun, and Linda Gail Lewis (who would have been 16 in 1963), joins for a duet). Eleven songs (none essential), 26:56. B [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: A Taste of Country (1956-63 [1970], Sun): Even his biggest early singles placed higher on the country chart than on pop, so it shouldn't be surprising that even when he was recognized as a rock star, he recorded a lot of country filler. He reinvented himself as a full-fledged country artist when he moved to Smash in 1964. When Shelby Singleton (who had produced Lewis at Smash) bought Sun in 1969, he cashed in with this "new" album of oldies: mostly ballads but Lewis can't quite contain himself when Hank Williams is concerned ("Your Cheatin' Heart," and better still is "You Win Again," one of the few covers Lewis owns). Short: 11 tracks, 26:37. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Country Songs for City Folks (1965, Smash): I guess the concept is that "city folks" wouldn't already know these 12 hit songs, but half of them I recall as hits from a time when I wouldn't be caught dead listening to country music: the biggest was "King of the Road," but it was hard not to also recognize "Walk Right In," "Ring of Fire," "Detroit City," "Wolverton Mountain," and "North to Alaska" (where little sister Linda Gail Lewis made her debut). B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Soul My Way (1967, Smash): Jerry Kennedy took over as producer, and toyed with the idea of flipping Ray Charles over, which works surprisingly well when he picks something upbeat (e.g., "Turn on Your Love Light") and turns on the Memphis horns. Not everything fit that mold, so this is remains a curiosity, a road not taken. Short: 26:56. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Another Place, Another Time (1968, Smash): This is where Lewis finally makes his commitment to contemporary country music, scoring two top-five singles (the title track and "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)"). Eleven songs, 27:33. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis & Linda Gail Lewis: Together (1969, Smash): His little sister was 12 years younger, with a brash but not very artful voice. She appeared as a duet partner on a couple previous songs, but gets a whole album here (and another on her own, but just one). For a guy who famously married an underaged cousin (along with seven other wives), they don't have much chemistry, but his leads are solid enough. She finally got another shot in a rockabilly revival in 1990, and hung on for a couple dozen mostly good albums. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: She Still Comes Around (To Love What's Left of Me) (1969, Smash): Two more hit singles, the title track and "To Make Love Sweeter for You" (his first #1 since "Great Balls of Fire"). Eleven songs: 27:48. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Sings the Country Music Hall of Fame Hits, Vol. 1 (1969, Smash): With a couple country hit albums under his belt, this must have seemed like the easiest way to get a third, and indeed this was his highest charting country album ever. This doesn't have the crossover novelties of Country Songs for City Folks, but if you listened to country music from the late-1940s into the mid-1960s, you should recognize them all. (Granted, "Sweet Dreams" did cross over for Patsy Cline, #44 in 1963, and Tommy McLain, #15 in 1966, but the original country hits were by writer Don Gibson and coverer Faron Young in 1956.) Of course, he sings them credibly -- not that you'd pick these versions over Williams or Frizzell or even Gibson -- and he adds his signature piano. But Linda Gail heats up "Jackson" enough to give Cash & Carter a run for the money. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Sings the Country Music Hall of Fame Hits, Vol. 2 (1969, Smash): Same deal here, extending the session to a second day, with Linda Gail returning for a second closing duet ("Sweet Thang"). B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye (1970, Mercury): New label, same producer (Jerry Kennedy), eleven short songs (26:51), most well-known filler ("Working Man Blues," "Waiting for a Train," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "Since I Met You Baby"), a formula that can easily be milked for three albums a year. He's enough of a stylist that he doesn't have to eclipse Chuck Berry or Merle Haggard to be entertaining singing their songs. And give him a song like "When the Grass Grows Over Me" and he'll own it. B+(***)

Jerry Lee Lewis: There Must Be More to Love Than This (1971, Mercury): The only Lewis to co-write a song here is Linda Gail. The rest (aside from "Sweet Georgia Brown") come from contemporary Nashville songsmiths, who have reams of songs for any situation, especially a crumbling marriage. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Touching Home (1971, Mercury): Another solid if unspectacular album, with the usual pair of modest hit singles. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Would You Take Another Chance on Me? (1971, Mercury): Feeling the gravity of the countrypolitan trend, but he doesn't let it sink him, partly because he can talk as well as sing through the murk. Or turn up the heat, as he does on "Me and Bobby McGee." B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: The "Killer" Rocks On (1972, Mercury): "Me and Bobbie McGee" was enough of a hit -- his first top-40 pop hit since "High School Confidential" in 1958 -- that they decided to recontextualize it in an album of rock covers (if you count two tracks by Joe South). "Chantilly Lace" is in his wheelhouse, and his Elvis impression is getting better. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Who's Gonna Play This Old Piano? (1972, Mercury): Back in his country groove, the title song custom built for him, several others of note. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Sometimes a Memory Ain't Enough (1973, Mercury): Producer Sam Kesler provides the title single, and revives an oldie he co-wrote for Elvis. Of the rest, "Falling to the Bottom" fits Lewis best. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Session . . . Recorded in London With Great Artists (1973 [1984], Mercury): Originally released on 2-LP, trimmed down to 14 tracks (56:35) for CD (which matches my stream), later offered in a 2-CD "Complete" edition (2006, Hip-O Select, 25 tracks, 94:03). I'd be curious about some of the missing songs ("Be Bop a Lula," "Satisfaction") but chances are the editions even out. The "great artists" aren't so great: most famous are Albert Lee, Peter Frampton, Rory Gallagher, Gary Wright, Delaney Bramlett, and Klaus Voorman. Good enough for an oldies show, with a major in red hot piano. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Southern Roots: Back Home in Memphis (1973, Mercury): So he does a couple soul songs with the Stax crew including Memphis horns ("When a Man Loves a Woman," "Hold On! I'm Coming"), but he's also being pulled back to Louisiana, with Huey P. Meaux producing, feeding him both "Blueberry Hill" and a Doug Sahm song ("The Revolutionary Man"). But he tops them all with "Meat Man." B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: I-40 Country (1974, Mercury): I-40 crosses Tennesse, passing through Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, extending east across North Carolina to Wilmington, and west across Arkansas and Oklahoma on to Barstow, California (2,556 miles total). What the highway has to do with this record isn't evident: maybe the Memphis-to-Nashville path he followed, but he's usually more fun when he heads the other way. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Boogie Woogie Country Man (1975, Mercury): His 30th album, with two songs by a young songwriter named Tom T. Hall, he cuts back on the strings and powers through eleven songs in 28:55. Holds the title song back until the end. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Odd Man In (1975, Mercury): Picks up where the last album left off with another boogie woogie, then segues into "Shake, Rattle & Roll." Reprises "Goodnight Irene," and boogie woogies "Your Cheatin' Heart." B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Country Class (1976, Mercury): Eleven more songs. I wouldn't say he's just going through the motions, but nothing especially notable here. Ends with a creepy one about making love to one woman while thinking of another. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Country Memories (1977, Mercury): Opens with "Middle Age Crazy," where the line "trying to prove he still can" suggests self-revelation, but he distances himself a bit by taking it easy when a little crazy might have helped. He follows this with a real nice Ernest Tubb song, and includes a lovely "Georgia on My Mind." B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Jerry Lee Keeps Rockin' (1977 [1978], Mercury): His last album for Mercury, feels a bit like contract filler, although he acquits himself well on familiar hits ("Blue Suede Shoes," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Lucille"). I assume the recording date is 1977, because that's the year Lewis's Mercury compilations end. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Jerry Lee Lewis (1979, Elektra): After a decade-plus in Nashville cranking out 2-3 solid mainstream country albums each year, he goes to Los Angeles, where producer Bones Howe wanted him to rock a little. He obliges. B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: When Two Worlds Collide (1980, Elektra): After his return to rock and roll stiffed (186 pop, 23 country), the label beat a retreat to Nashville. This one didn't do any better (32 country). Title song from Roger Miller. Fave is a dixieland throwback. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Killer Country (1980, Elektra): Leans back toward rock, but scores his biggest hit in a while with another middle-age crazy tale, "Thirty-Nine and Holding." Includes interesting takes on "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Over the Rainbow." B+(**) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Young Blood (1995, Sire): After being dropped by Elektra, he released two albums on MCA and three more on off labels before this one-shot, recorded in five studios over a couple years. A mix of rockabillied country songs and countrified rock and roll. Voice isn't in great shape, but he can still boogie. B+(*) [sp]

Jerry Lee Lewis: Last Man Standing (2006, Artists First): Somehow, Lewis managed to outlive all the other major Sun stars from the 1950s, so he claimed the title with an album of 21 old songs featuring that many duet partners, where the median name is probably more famous than Lewis (and only certain exception is Delaney Bramlett, although in a better world Toby Keith and Kid Rock would count, and maybe Robbie Robertson, Don Henley, and/or Eric Clapton). Still, I'm not sure the guests add (or detract) all that much. B+(**) [sp]

Linda Gail Lewis: The Two Sides of Linda Gail Lewis (1969, Smash): Jerry Lee's little sister, appeared as a duet partner in 1967 (when she was 20, and he 32), raised her profile in 1969 with their Together and this solo album -- the only one she released until 1990. She sings with gusto, and wrote a couple songs, but not as good as the ones Hank Williams wrote. B+(*) [bc]

Grade (or other) changes:

Selo I Ludy Performance Band: Bunch One (2019, self-released): Ukrainian covers band, struck me as "pure corn," a favorite of Ukraine sympathizers in the first month of the Putin invasion. [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Laszlo Gardony: Close Connection (Sunnyside) [12-02]
• Ramsey Lewis: The Beatles Songbook: The Saturday Salon Series: Volume One (Steele) [01-06]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 6, 2022

I started this relatively early in the week, with the extended comment on the Brad Luen piece, followed by the Timothy Noah piece on economicism, which I had set aside. I wrote the intro Saturday afternoon. I decided some weeks ago that not just lust for power but the assumption that one deserves power and the other side must be denied power is central to the Republican understanding of the world. That makes Nixon (and not Reagan or Goldwater) the godfather of the modern Republican Party. I could add more detail on how and why, but the key elements are here. After the election, I need to decide whether to write this analysis up as a short book. A recent spate of books on the fundamental rot at the heart of the Party (see Heilbrun below) should cover that part adequately, but they tend to focus on the fringe and neglect the center.

The rest of the book would be harder to get straight. Democrats face two problems: how to get more votes than Republicans, and how to deal with an increasing array of serious problems (many directly caused by Republicans), and others also caused by deep assumptions that both parties share. I have some ideas there, but they're rough and far from ready.

Not a lot below on major foreign elections in Brazil and Israel (see St Clair for both, but I didn't comment much). I suppose I should point out that the rise of the racist and possibly genocidal Kahanist party in Israel is a problem for Democrats in the US, who have hitherto automatically supported whatever Israel does but will find a huge disconnect between their pro-democracy, pro-equality posture here and in Israel, while Republicans will have no trouble accepting the new government -- not least because many Republicans admire Israeli repression and militarism, and would like to implement the same here.

Two days before the 2022 US elections, the so-called "mid-terms": a term I hate, because it suggests that only presidential elections really matter, and this is just a referendum on the last, a chance for disgruntled people to express their "buyer's remorse" without much consequence. But of course, there are consequences, the obvious one the chance to divide government to undermine any possibility of the party holding the presidency to get things done. Of course, that can be a good thing (as in 2006 or 2018) or a bad thing (1994 and 2010 were the worst), depending on which party is sabotaged. (Note though that 1994 and 2010 set up successful second term campaigns for Clinton and Obama, perhaps a source of hope if Republicans win in 2022, although the second terms of Clinton and Obama were mixed blessings, leading to defeats four years later.)

I continue to believe that reports of a "Republican surge" -- the title of a David Brooks column I haven't read and won't link to -- are pure gaslighting, with the added ominous overtone of convincing the right that their losses are stolen, which will help justify whatever post-election schemes they've spent the last two years putting into place. When actual votes start getting counted Tuesday evening, we will start to be able to see through the media fog, and possibly get some measure of how effective (or not) the last two years of election denialism and vote rigging have been. Still, I don't expect the mainstream media to be quick to learn from its errors -- especially its inability to recognize phony campaign issues, or to properly spotlight the corruption of money in politics least of all its own advertising windfall).

I'm not wild about Biden's characterization of this election as a test and defense of democracy. It's not that I dispute the point, but democracy in America has been crippled since well before Leonard Cohen wrote his hopeful song about it. The test of a democracy is not merely whether people get a chance to vote and have their ballots counted, but whether doing so produces a government that responds to and takes action on behalf of most people. Back in the 19th century, it's easy to find and quote elites bemoaning the prospect that extending suffrage would let the "mob" take over government and using it for popular causes (like those promised in the Preamble to the US Constitution). But as suffrage became more universal, elites had to fall back on treachery to convince the masses not to claim their rights. Money is a tool, both to buy propaganda and to train candidates, who inevitably spend more time chasing it than they devote to their constituents' needs and hopes. And the media, with its elite ownership, advertising funding, and crass competition for the passing attention of viewers, is the ecosystem in which this deception takes place.

It's often remarked that Republicans are better at playing the game of politics than Democrats. One theory is that Republicans simply care more about their policy goals than Democrats do -- if, indeed, Democrats, being hopelessly torn between their donors and their voters, actually have any (rather, their favorite trick is to try to work out compromises, like Obamacare, that ultimately satisfy neither camp). But Republicans are pretty careless about policy too: they mostly like wedge issues they can campaign on but don't have to do anything about once they're in power. A very good example is how much Reagan bashed Carter in 1980 over the plan to give the Panama Canal to Panama. After the election, he didn't lift a finger to rescind the transfer plan. Even when Bush I invaded Panama, no one suggested recovery of the Canal should be a war aim. Thomas Frank, in What's the Matter With Kansas?, went too far in chiding Republicans for never delivering on their promises to the religious right, but mostly because he riled up the suckers in the rank and file.

The single most important thing to understand about Republicans is that they are addicted to power, and will do anything, at least within their identity as the party of True Americans, to seize and protect it. That identity goes all the way back to the Civil War, when they rose to save their vision of a Free West and wound up having to destroy the Slave Power. That left them with a very WASP power base, against which the Democrats were derided as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." While "rebellion" originally referred to secessionists, the list of the others Republicans hated grew to include populists, progressives, labor unions, socialists, and communists, all the way up to the post-WWII Red Scare. Coming out of the McCarthy hysteria, Nixon made a few tweaks to Republican Party identity: following Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority, Nixon welcomed white southerners and white suburban ethnics into the G.O.P., making them True Americans, giving up on the dwindling support of Blacks for the one-time Party of Lincoln.

Nixon is sometimes disparaged by conservative ideologues, who feel he never believed much in their principles (other than his own casual bigotry, which was almost universal among conservatives back then; even the rabid anti-communism he built his career on was something he was willing to compromise on). But he did obsessively believe in one thing: power, which was so important he was willing to do virtually anything to get and keep it. Republican contempt for democracy was all but inevitable given that they sought power by merging empowering the rich, boosting the military, and rallying (mostly religious) cultural reactionaries. Reagan was more successful at applying Nixon's strategy, partly because he avoided Nixon's deceitful smarminess, and partly because after McGovern, Carter gave up on unions as the backbone of the Democratic Party in favor of triangulating business interests -- a balancing act that proved difficult to pull off, although Clinton and Obama got some mileage out of it.

But as demographics and repeated doses of dysfunctional policy started to erode their credibility, Republicans have been stuck in a pattern of doubling down, a bluff that has kept their vote share close enough to win (sometimes without even a plurality). Trump's innovation here is that even when he has an indefensible record, he's always on the attack, and that's kept kept together a party that should have been banished for gross incompetence as well as indecency. Rational people, like myself, wonder how long they can keep this farce up. We'll get some idea after Tuesday.

Connor Echols: [11-04] Diplomacy Watch: Putin blinks, returns to Black Sea grain deal after just 4 days. I haven't put much effort into this regular section this week. The New York Times Updates headlines should give you a flavor:

• Pentagon unveils new U.S. comand and more Ukraine aid
• The Defense Department says it will support Ukraine for 'as long as it takes.'
• Moscow is pouring new conscripts to the front line to try to halt Ukrainian advances.
• Putin says 318,000 new soldiers have joined Russia's forces in his mobilization push.
• G7 diplomats end their meeting in Germany with a plan to coordinate on rebuilding Ukraine's infrastructure.
• China warns against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and Germany urges Beijing to do more to end the war. [Olaf Scholz visited Beijing.]
• A top Biden aide assures Kyiv that the outcome of the U.S. midterm election won't impede military aid. [Jake Sullivan]
• Amid a forest of Ukrainian flags, soldiers honor a fallen comrade with vodka.
• With 4.5 million Ukrainians cut off from power, officials reiterate calls for energy conservation.
• Southeast Asia is a case study in Russia's declining prospects as an arms exporter.
• Here are 5 ways that sanctions are hitting Russia. [Finance, Trade, Technology, Energy, Elites]

The New York Times map page hasn't been updated since October 11, following Ukrainian ground gains in the two weeks before October 4, and widespread Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. The links I picked up are mostly on the lack of diplomacy:

• [10-27] Phyllis Bennis on Progressive Dems Retracting Letter Urging Diplomacy to End Ukraine War

• Branko Marcetic: [11-03] No, calling for diplomacy is not 'Westsplaining': "If anything, Global North elites are fleeing their colonial muscles by ignoring the war's impact on 65 percent of the world's population."

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [11-01] US-trained Afghan commandos join Russian campaign in Ukraine.

Thomas Edsall: [11-02] 'Elites Are Making Choices That Are Not Good News': I was steered to this piece by Dean Baker, who agrees that "the basic point in the column is completely true," he adds that Edsall "hugely understates the extent to which the screwing of noncollege educated workers was the result of deliberate government policies." Sure, but why are we still litigating Clinton's stupid idea that the US can afford to lose blue collar jobs because cheaper trade will open up all those lucrative "symbolic manipulator" jobs his Labor Secretary Robert Reich touted? One can understand why workers who got shafted in that deal bear grudges against the Clintons, but who in their right mind thinks voting Republican is going to in any way fix their problem?

Shirin Ghaffary: [11-04] How Elon Musk is changing Twitter: Before the sale, Twitter was a middling company with a massive network of users, which gave it a huge market valuation, as investors figured capturing that many eyes could eventually be exploited to make a lot of money. But the business model didn't demand much from users, so few people felt burdened by signing up and joining in. Musk's purchase may or may not have political and/or cultural implications, which may or may not be ominous, but immediately what it means is that henceforward Twitter has to make enough money to pay off its new owner and the debt he has saddled the company with. So Musk is starting to do the same things that private equity firms do when they swallow up companies: asset stripping and cost reductions. The net effect will make Twitter a much nastier place to work, and very likely a much less satisfactory place for users -- who, we should remember, contribute virtually all of the content that attracts viewers in the first place.

The proposal for "making people pay for blue check marks" sounds like a tax at first, which is bad enough, but the fine print is considerably more alarming. The idea is that a premium program would "include other benefits like fewer ads and more visibility for your Twitter replies to other people's threads." The first part is relatively benign -- damn near everyone seems to be moving to a model of paying-to-avoid-ads -- but the latter is the first step toward a pay-to-play scheme. Eventually premium user's tweets will all be ads, because the model that pays the most -- although "ads" suggests that they're selling things; very often it will just be well-heeled people hiring megaphones to hector you. I expect they will eventually drive most users away, turning into a death spiral. Musk and his credits will lose a lot of money, and make an ugly mess in the process.

More on Twitter:

• Jason Linkins: [10-28] Will Elon Musk Ruin Twitter? That's the Wrong Question. "Twitter really is just a weird bubble of self-selecting outlier freaks; we're disproportionately elite but largely unfollowed by the masses. We're loud and we're persistent and we're representative of nothing in particular." Kind of like Elon Musk, except that his case is so bad he wanted to buy the company.

• Nikki McCann Ramirez: [11-04] Elon Musk Blames 'Activists' for Twitter Losing Money as He Guts Its Staff. If you're rich enough, nothing that goes wrong can ever be your fault.

Jonathan Guyer: [11-02] Netanyahu and the far right have triumphed. Here's what it means for Israel. Interview with Daniel Levy. I've followed Israel's slide to the far-right for 25+ years, but even still I'm shocked by how viciously racist Netanyahu's coalition partners are -- way beyond bigots in any other part of the world. More on Israel:

• Richard Silverstein: [11-03] Nations Dither in Face of Israeli Fascism: This is the first piece I've seen with actual numbers: Netanyahu's "sweeping and shocking victory" netted "65 seats out of 120." Likud got 32 seats, enough to form a majority with three far-right religious parties: Religious Zionist (14), Shas (11), and UTJ (7). The coalition as a whole is +12 seats.

• Thomas L Friedman: [11-04] The Israel We Knew Is Gone: I'm not sure I've ever linked to a Friedman piece before, but for a columnist so long so deep in bed with Israel, I take this as some kind of signpost. Still, it reminds me of Lindsey Graham's January 6 tantrum about how he's "so done with Trump." Still, Friedman effectively prophesied this end-of-democracy election back on [07-15] when he wrote: Only Saudi Arabia and Israeli Arabs Can Save Israel as a Jewish Democracy. There you have the scapegoats. I'll spare you the details, not least because they make little sense to me, but once again the Arabs (Saudis as well as Palestinians) let Israel down, causing Israelis the anguish of empowering its most genocidal party. By the way, James North [11-06] on Friedman: Israel has lost Thomas Friedman, the 'NYTimes' columnist who protected its image for four decades. North had previously written: [10-24] A surprise: the 'NYTimes' finally profiles Itamar Ben-Gvir, the racist kingmaker in Israel's election.

• Jo-Ann Mort: [11-03] Netanyahu Is Back, but the Real Winner in Israel Makes Bibi Look Timid: "The showing by Itamar Ben-Gvir's racist, nationalist party portends a hard-right turn."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [11-03] Will Biden stand up to Israel's new far right government? No. Are you kidding? Biden, most Democrats, and virtually all Republicans have surrendered any capacity for independent thought when it comes to Israel, even though the US regularly finds itself tainted by the one-sided alliance. Sure, neocons take Israel as a role model for their belief that arbitrary violence can keep their critics in line, and many Republicans are fans of fascist repression of religious and ethnic minorities, but Democrats know better in theory, even if they can't bring themselves to call out Israel's actual practice. Plitnick also wrote: [11-03] Biden administration and Israel lobby in a panic following Netanyahu's far-right election sweep.

Benjamin Hart: [11-01] Of Course Trump Is All In on Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theories. This sort of kneejerk deflection is one way to avoid a self-examination that might reveal that you're some kind of monster, or at least a major asshole.

Jacob Heilbrunn: [10-30] How the Republican Fringe Became the Mainstream. Review of Robert Draper's new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind, although it could easily be expanded to include Dana Milbank's The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party and David Corn's American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, or possibly others: now that the end-point is obvious, the debate is more about when the craziness started. I've been reading Corn, who looks back all the way back to McCarthy and the John Birch Society. One can even go further: Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan goes back to the DuPonts in the 1930s, and Heather Cox Richardson's To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party does a pretty good job of making Benjamin Harrison sound like a Bircher. But crazy is a dimension beyond promoting oligarchy with racism and demagoguery, something that runs deep in the Republican Party. The crazy really takes off with Obama's election in 2008, after which the chastised party pros fell behind the Fox-fanned Tea Party mania. John Amato and David Neiwert got it right in their short 2010 book: Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. After the party pros nominated Mitt Romney and lost again to Obama, the rank-and-file was ready for someone as crude and vicious as Trump. And after Trump eeked out a win against Hillary Clinton, well, you don't need a book to explain how crazed the Republicans became.

It's gratifying that so many people have figured that much out. But the problem with focusing on how irrational Trump and his fans have become is that doing so often misses how bad Republican policy has become, and how little reporting gets done on how those policies harm the vast majority of Americans, and much of the world. Reagan and the Bushes were frontmen who were sent out to sugar-coat their administration's graft, while Romney and Ryan were forthright enough to come off as supervillains. With Trump, policy and performance are separated: he is a master at sucking up media attention, so no one bothers noticing what the goons in his administration actually do. With him, the transformation of the presidency to show business is complete, and that's mostly a bad thing, but hardly the worst. Similarly, his association with unsavory characters is bad, but nowhere near all of it.

By the way:

• Robert Draper: [10-17] The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Long profile piece. I find her boring, but the press and the late night comics love her (or love to hate her, which for practical purposes is the same thing).

Ellen Ioanes: [11-05] An atmosphere of violence: Stochastic terror in American politics: Interview with Kurt Braddock, "about how rhetorical strategies can lead to violence."

Umair Irfan: [11-03] Your free pandemic health perks are on the way out: "The privatization of the Covid-19 response is well underway as federal funding runs out." I got a third Covid-19 booster shot last week. I had to go to Walgreens, and wait about 20 minutes until they squared away my insurance (which was Medicare + supplementals, good enough I almost never run into problems). I haven't been following this, but we're missing a big opportunity, not only to continue Covid-19 coverage but to start to build a universal foundation that can be incrementally extended toward universal health care. Most senior citizens are confused when people talk about Medicare-for-All, because they know that Medicare for them doesn't cover everything, and they have to get supplemental insurance to make up the gaps. So they think they still have private insurance, but have trouble understanding that it's so affordable because Medicare itself does all the heavy lifting. (Of course, like all private insurance, it gets ratcheted up every year, and unlike most they get to factor your age into the price, so "affordable" is a pretty relative term.) On the other hand, let's imagine a system where some things get covered automatically for everyone. That list could have started with the Covid-19 precautions and treatments, and be expanded going forward. Everything moved from individual/group policies to universal helps lower the cost of the policies, and can help manage overall costs, while getting us closer to the universal coverage we want and deserve.

Paul Krugman:

• [10-31] The Truth About America's Economic Recovery. "Inflation is high, but a lot has gone right." I'm always wary of "truth" in titles, which implies not just that the author knows best but that you don't. Still a fairly balanced presentation of inflation, jobs, spending, etc.

• [11-03] The G.O.P. Plot Against Medicare and Social Security: "let's note that the push to slash major benefit programs may be the ultimate exaple of an elite priority at odds with what ordinary Americans want." Such plots are as old as the bills they set to wreck, and they've never gotten any traction, so why worry now? I'd offer two reasons: the first is that such proposals reveal a moral bankruptcy that should warn you off everything else they want to do; second, they reveal profound ignorance about how the world works.

Brad Luen: [10-23] The Semipop Review of Catastrophic and Existential Risks: Starts by defining catastrophic risks ("things that could kill off a decent percentage of the world") and existential risks ("things that could result in the collapse of civilization"), then reviews a handful of books, opening with Will MacAskill's What We Owe the Future, then focusing on four such risks: AI (Martin Ford: Rule of the Robots, Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence), Climate Change (David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth), Bio-Risks (Michael T Osterholm/Mark Olshaker: Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs), and War (Bear F Braumoeller: Only the Dead, Bruce G Blair: The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, Fiona Hill/Clifford G Gaddy: Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin), before concluding with "The Intersection" -- the domino metaphor strikes me as more apt here, as various risks increase the likelihood of war, which in turn accelerates other risks. Luen is a professor of statistics and describes himself as "an unprincipled philosophical centrist."

The only one of these books I've read is the Wallace-Wells, which among the half-dozen similar tomes I've read (going back to McKibben's The End of Nature, which I read in the mid-1990s during a July trip to a very steamy Florida, which illustrated his points better than his prose did) is as good a place to start as any. I've read very little about AI: I had a serious interest in it back in the 1980s, about the time neural nets and fuzzy math were invented, but lost track after that, and these days most "practical applications" I see are better described as Artificial Stupidity. I wouldn't say that AI is "value-neutral," but like most things its usefulness or not is fundamentally a political question. But the rest of the risk, as well as items Luen didn't include (most obviously various resource limits, including water and air as well as minerals and productive land). Were I do redo this exercise, I would start with politics, and try to show that bad politics both increases risk and degrades one's ability to cope with disaster. (Bad politicians like to hide increasing risk by shifting it to individuals: see The Great Risk Shift, by Jacob S Hacker. Also by pretending it isn't real: see The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis.)

The thing I find most disturbing about the pandemic wasn't how vulnerable we were -- beyond the legitimate fear of a new disease, the economy collapsed as much from supply chain fragility as from politically-ordered lockdowns -- but how a sizable political bloc has grown determined to prevent governments from responding to any future pandemic (which we should now understand to be a certainty). It's easy enough to think of technical solutions to most problems -- not that it's technically easy to switch from a carbon-fueled train to a solar-driven train without slowing the former down (the two great bugbears of the climate change debate are the ideas that the crisis is in the future, and that the only acceptable solution is one that imposes no costs or changes to our way of life). But we lack the political will to make changes based on rational analysis, and even when the lessons are hard-earned, lots of people refuse to learn them. My touchstone here was Jane Jacobs' 2004 Dark Age Ahead, which foresaw increasing cognitive inability to deal with the problems inevitably produced by technological complexity. (Richard Florida reviews Jacobs' book from the perspective of 2016, late enough to claim she prophesied Trump, here: Even Late in Her Career, Jane Jacobs Made Predictions That Are Coming True Today.) I've read more books along these lines, and none of them make me very optimistic for this century -- not that I don't doubt that humanity and some measure of civilization will survive into the next century.

I should probably read the Braumoeller book, although at the moment I suspect some methodological problems. It's certainly one possible critique of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, but as I understand it -- I recall buying a copy but never got around to reading it -- the argument isn't just about the frequency of wars but also about the reasoning behind them. Up through WWII, most wars aimed at plunder, but that's become a much less popular rationale since, especially as the cost/benefit calculation has flipped, and the threat of nuclear annihilation looms. But I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency of war remains fairly steady: after all, I write about wars (and "lesser" but still violent conflicts) virtually every week.

By the way, I just bought a copy of Brian T Watson: Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We'll Face, which greatly expands on the subject of Luen's review. It's notable that the first chapter is "Capitalism," which even more than politics is the rarely-examined (except by Marxists, who obsess over it) prime mover driving us into the future. I should also note that my latest Book Roundup has a long list of recent books on post-capitalism (aka "degrowth" or "post growth") thinking. Scant chance that any signifiant number of American politicians are going to even start talking about this -- Democrats have long seen growth as the magic elixir that allows them to be pro-business as well as helping everyone else; on the other hand, Republican economic scams often seem to be anti-growth, without giving us any degrowth benefits. Much more on war and the diminishing competency of politics there.

Ian Millhiser: [11-03] The nightmarish Supreme Court case that could gut Medicaid, explained: "Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski is the single greatest threat to America's social safety net since Paul Ryan."

Steven Lee Myers: [11-06] Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday's Midterms: "Researchers have identified a series of Russian information operations to influence American elections and, perhaps, erode support for Ukraine." I wouldn't read much into this, but of course, that's what they do. I doubt it will have any effect, unless Democrats use it as some kind of excuse for losing (as Clinton's coterie did after 2016). More interesting is whether they can nudge Republicans into an anti-Ukraine stand, which is something they're tempted by. Also, note: [11-04] Twitter layoffs gutted election information teams days before midterms.

Timothy Noah: [10-25] May God Save Us From Economists: Economics "can be a useful tool for policymaking, but it's become the only tool. It's time for economics to back the hell off." As Noah points out: economists overvalue modeling; economists undervalue data; economists don't get societies; economists don't get irrationality; economists don't get people who aren't economists. Noah then looks at three domains: criminal justice; health care; and climate change. Central to this is the notion that every problem can be decided by a cost/benefit analysis (provided you can assume a value for human lives, which is kind of a problem; as with many math problems, the devil's not so much in the details as in the assumptions). Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy is one of the books cited.

Jeffrey St Clair: [11-04] Roaming Charges: History Ain't Changed: Starts with elections in Brazil and Israel.

Elections: No horse races, and no post-mortems, but a few quick links on the election:

• Ezra Klein: [11-06] Republicans Have Made It Very Clear What They Want to Do if They Win Congress: "It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government's efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming."

• Rich Logis: [11-04] The GOP's Nefarious Mythologies Have Become a Dire Problem for Democracy: "Democrats need a crash course in storytelling to counter the poisonous tales the right is telling -- and selling."

• Tori Otten: [11-04] Billionaires Have Spent $881 Million This Election (Mostly on Republicans)

Mike Davis: More pieces on the late leftist scholar Mike Davis:

• Forrest Hylton: [11-04] Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: Mike Davis, 1946-2022: Another good piece on the late historian and critical thinker.

• Tyler Reeb: [11-06] Mike Davis' blue-collar odyssey to "City of Quartz": From trucker to legendary leftist writer.

A couple closing tweets. The first is from Bill Kristol, who 20 years ago I would have put near the top of a list of top-ten public enemies:

Hey, don't want to interrupt my Democratic friends when they're engaged in their favorite sports of The Gnashing of Teeth and The Tearing of Garments, but it looks as if the Democratic Party will have the best midterm performance by a party in the White House in two decades.

So I don't regard his opinion as anything more than a random blip, but there it is. The second one is from someone named Benedict Evans:

Suggesting Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter is like suggesting Linux as an alternative to Windows.

I started using Linux around 1998, and I never regretted it, so this makes me more (not less) inclined to switch. Still, while the two comparisons aren't analogous. It doesn't make much difference to me whether you are also running Linux, or are saddled with Windows or MacOS (or whatever they call it these days). On the other hand, with Twitter-like software it does matter whether the people I want to follow are on the same service I'm on. For social media, network effects are the basis of effective monopolies, which is what Twitter, Facebook, etc., are. Mastodon doesn't come remotely close, and for various technical reasons -- it's designed to prevent monopolization -- it likely never will be. On the other hand, I could see setting up a server and migrating a fairly close-knit group (like, say, the Expert Witness group currently at Facebook) -- which would probably work better than it does on Facebook. But I haven't looked into it enough to make any decisions.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 31, 2022

October archive (final).

Music: Current count 38944 [38918] rated (+26), 47 [43] unrated (+4: 19 new, 28 old).

Rated count the lowest in quite some time (3rd lowest in 2022, after a 0 and a 21), mostly because I spent two days cooking birthday dinner (if you're interested, there's a writeup in the notebook), and took a while after that to get back to work. I did catch up some while working on Speaking of Which, but had trouble thinking of things to search out.

I got a kind note from Don Malcolm suggesting I write more about the late Mike Davis, but I haven't read that much by him -- in particular, I don't have his Los Angeles books, and I have very little personal experience with the city or the area, so I've always wondered how much I'd get out of them. But I did manage to collect some links, including an interview from shortly before he died. One thing I was struck by was how often he was identified as a Marxist historian. As far as I can tell, that's not something he wrote much about (although he was often published by Verso Books, and one recent title there was Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory). But I know from my own experience that once you get the key ideas from Marx and his followers, you can go anywhere and examine anything and find fresh insights. That's what Davis did -- and also what Barbara Ehrenreich did, although somewhat less obviously.

Best thing about my birthday was hearing from several friends and relatives I've been missing. I still have a lot of catching up to do.

I saw a newspaper article last week explaining that despite reports to the contrary, Jerry Lee Lewis was still alive. Next day, he died, at 86. I'll listen to some more albums in the next week, but for now here's my list (long on compilations and live albums). Although Rhino's Original Sun Greatest Hits is the A+, the one I return to most often is a later live album called Rockin' My Life Away.

I got zero response to my Jazz Critics Poll request last week, so I'm just going ahead. I'll set up the website framework and mailing list later this week, and should be ready to send out the ballot invites mid-November. I have one probable sponsor lined up, which is one more than I minimally need, so I expect it to go fairly smoothly.

I got my copy of Rick Lopez's magnificent The Sam Rivers Sessionography: A Work in Progress, so let's go ahead and put it in my book scroll. Lopez has been producing extraordinary sessionographies for 20+ years -- I first ran across him when I was writing my William Parker/Matthew Shipp Consumer Guide in 2003, where I raved about his "treasure troves of information, some of the finest scholarship available on the internet today." I should have gone farther and pointed out that this is what the Internet was built for, and what vulture capitalists have denied us with their relentless monetization. Few people are more worthy of your support (and, as I said, the book is gorgeous). By the way, you can find an excerpt at Perfect Sound Forever.

New records reviewed this week:

Arild Andersen Group: Affirmation (2021 [2022], ECM): Norwegian bassist, started as a George Russell protégé in the late 1960s, has had a long and fruitful career. Quartet here with Marius Neset (tenor sax), Helge Lien (piano), and Håkon Måjset Johansen (drums), the multipart title piece jointly credited, plus his own "Short Story." Remarkable balance and poise. A- [sp]

Tim Berne/Matt Mitchell: One More, Please (2021 [2022], Intakt): Alto sax and piano duo, their first duo record 2017's Førage, this the fifth by my count, but the only other one I've managed to hear is 2020's Spiders, still a slight preference although most likely they're all quite close, high-level collaborations. B+(***) [sp]

Bi Ba Doom: Graceful Collision (2022, Astral Spirits): Free jazz trio, first album as such but musicians are fairly well established: Chris Pitsiokos (alto sax), Luke Stewart (bass), and Jason Nazary (drums), everyone also electronics. B+(***) [bc]

Sarah Buechi/Franz Hellmueller/Rafael Jerjen: Moon Trail (2021 [2022], Intakt): Swiss vocalist, titles in English (except for one in French, one in German), modestly backed with guitar and bass. She sings with rare poise, although the best known standards (like "I Thought About You") can feel tortured. B+(**) [sp]

Tito Carrillo: Urbanessence (2021 [2022], Origin): Trumpet player, from Chicago, second album, original pieces, played by a sextet with sax (Troy Roberts), piano (Ben Lewis), bass, drums, and congas. B+(*) [sp]

The Claudettes: The Claudettes Go Out! (2022, Forty Below): Indie band from Chicago, founded by keyboardist Johnny Iguana in 2013, singer Berit Ulseth, fifth album. B+(*) [sp]

Zella Day: Sunday in Heaven (2022, Concord): Indie pop singer-songwriter from Arizona, self-released an album at 14 in 2009, second album since. B+(*) [sp]

John Dikeman/Stefan Gonzalez/Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/Jonathan F Horne: Texas Butt Biters (2019 [2022], Astral Spirits): Sax. drums, bass, guitar, recorded in Amsterdam (Dikeman's home turf), although the others have ties to Texas. B+(*) [bc]

Kaja Draksler/Susana Santos Silva: Grow (2021 [2022], Intakt): Piano and trumpet duo, from Slovenia and Portugal, both have been very active of late, including a previous duo in 2015 (This Love, on Clean Feed). Has an uncomfortably industrial feel, not expected given the instruments. B [sp]

Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork (2022, 4AD): English post-punk band, second album after an acclaimed debut, Florence Shaw vocalist (mostly spoken word). It's a vibe I'm hopelessly attracted to, even if I never seem able to parse it. A- [sp]

Lincoln Goines: The Art of the Bass Choir (2020-21 [2022], Origin): Bassist, seems like he's been around a while but his may be his first leader album. Employs 10 bassists, but usually in duos, with a drummer (of four total), cello on two cuts, voices on two more (one an Adam Nussbaum rap, praising Jaco Pastorius). Cites "Steve Swallow's upper register explorations" as an inspiration, so much of this sounds like guitar. B+(*) [sp]

Eric Jacobson: Discover (2022, Origin): Trumpet player, leads a hard bop quintet, with Geof Bradfield (tenor sax), Bruce Barth (piano), bass, and drums, playing half originals, plus covers including Dizzy Gillespie and Blue Mitchell. B+(**) [sp]

Benjamin Lackner: Last Decade (2021 [2022], ECM): German pianist, albums since 2003 (mostly as Benny). This is a quartet with Matthias Eick (trumpet), Jérôme Regard (bass), and Manu Katché (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Michael Marcus: Abstractions in Lime Caverns (2021 [2022], ESP-Disk): Plays reed instruments (here: soprano/tenor sax, alto tarogato, G clarinet, bass flute, gong), discography starts 1990, including Cosmosamatics (with Sonny Simmons, 9 albums) and Duology (with Ted Daniel, 4 albums). These are duos with drummer Jay Rosen, expanded to trios (2 tracks) or quartets (3) with Frank Lacy (French horn) and/or Tarus Mateen (bass). B+(***) [cd]

John McCowen: Models of Duration (2020 [2022], Dinzu Artefacts/Astral Spirits): Contrabass clarinet player, has several albums, this one solo, nothing electronic but sounds like a cross of Stuart Dempster's deep drones and an amplifier feedback album like Metal Machine Music. I don't think he's trying to be annoying, but the title suggests a test of endurance. B [bc]

Mali Obomsawin: Sweet Tooth (2022, Out of Your Head): Bassist, from the Wabanaki First Nation of Canada, also sings and plays hand drums, organized her debut albums as three movements, drawing on folk tales and jazz musicians, including co-producer Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet/flugelhorn), saxophonists Noah Campbell and Allison Burik (also bass clarinet), guitarist Miriam Elhajli (also sings), and Savannah Harris (drums). A- [cd]

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Fruition (2021 [2022], ESP-Disk): Tenor sax and piano duo, they have well more than a dozen, starting with 1996's Bendito of Santa Cruz, and the obsessive documentation of every encounter can grow numbing. For many years I was sent all of them, and tried my best to figure sort them out. All of Perelman's records are good, and many are outstanding, and same for Shipp. But for me at least, the torrent has slowed down, even as Perelman's ambitions have grown: I never heard last year's 9-CD Brass and Ivory Tales or the Special Edition Box (only 1-CD + Blue-Ray + book, with Shipp) or this year's 2-CD Magic Dust or this week's Reed Rapture (duets with 12 famous saxophonists that would fill up as many CDs). On the other hand, this single (11 tracks, 60:13) really hits the spot. A- [cd]

Barre Phillips/György Kurtág Jr.: Face à Face (2020-21 [2022], ECM): Bass and electronics duo. Phillips has albums going back to 1969, including a bass duo with Dave Holland in 1971. Kurtág's father is a famous Hungarian composer (b. 1926, so 96). B [sp]

Tegan and Sara: Crybaby (2022, Mom + Pop): Twin sisters, last name Quin, from Canada, tenth album since 1999. Gloomy song titles, but otherwise pretty jaunty. I must be missing something. B+(***) [sp]

Walking Cliché Sextet: Suite Chase Reflex (2019 [2021], self-released, EP): Korean-born, New York-based bassist SeaJun Kwon, debuts with a single 26:15, leading a sextet with tenor sax (Jacob Shulman), alto sax (Aaron Dutton), trombone (Michael Prentky), piano (Erez Dessel), and drums (Charles Weller). B+(*) [bc]

Walking Cliché Sextet [SeaJun Kwon]: Micro-Nap (2020-21 [2022], Endectomorph Music): Aside from part-time subs on piano and drums, same group for a 50:33 program, starts with piano intro before rousing the horns, before finally smoothing out with the 15:31 "Suite Transient." B+(***) [cd]

RA Washington/Jah Nada: In Search of Our Father's Gardens (2021 [2022], Astral Spirits): Washington, from Mourning (A) Blkstar (an Ohio-based "gender and genre non-conforming amalgam of Black Culture"), plays piano, drums, and sings; Nada, from other Ohio groups (the only one I've heard of is Obnox) plays bass, synths, and drums; others from their circle add horns, guitars, and vocals. B+(*) [bc]

Brodie West Quintet: Meadow of Dreams (2020 [2022], Astral Spirits): Alto saxophonist, from Toronto, has a couple previous albums going back to 2003, including a duo and a trio with Han Bennink. This one has piano (Tania Gill), bass (Josh Cole), and drums (Nick Fraser), plus wild card Evan Cartwright (credits: drums, vibraphone, and guitar). B+(*) [bc]

Chris Williams/Patrick Shiroishi: Sans Soleil II (2022, Astral Spirits): Trumpet and saxophone duo, both play related instruments and other "objects" and, yes, they've done this before. B+(*) [bc]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes (2014-21 [2022], In+Out): Bassist, probably holds the record for most albums anyone has played on (Wikipedia says 2,221 recording sessions). Title is from a 2014 "autobiography" which has Dan Ouellette's name on the cover, and was the basis for a PBS documentary, to which this is the official soundtrack (the 2-LP adds one song and reorders others). Although he has a substantial number of albums as leader (or co-, Wikipedia count is 61), he spent his career (still active at 85) making other people sound good. This starts way down the road, at 74, the tracks picked less for representativeness than to support views of him soloing, or playing in small groups (like duos with Bill Frisell or Jon Batiste). B+(**) [sp]

Sun Ra & His Blue Universe Arkestra: Universe in Blue (1971 [2022], Cosmic Myth): Dates unknown, "probably live in California, ca. August 1971," released on LP with two different covers in 1972, and neglected since. Starts with sludgy blues organ, then a June Tyson vocal on "When the Black Man Rules This Land." Adds two bonus tracks, a plus, especially when John Gilmore gets cranked up. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Michael Marcus: Sunwheels (2000 [2001], Justin Time): Cover extends the credit: "with Rahn Burton/Nasheet Waits/& Special Guest Carlos 'Patato' Valdes." Back cover just lists Marcus, shown with tenor and soprano saxophones, the others playing organ, drums, and congas. B+(***) [sp]

Michael Marcus Trio: Blue Reality (2001 [2002], Soul Note): Plays alto sax and saxello here, with Taurus Mateen (bass, electric bass, percussion) and Jay Rosen (drums). Album title was resurrected by Marcus and Rosen for their Blue Reality Quartet! in 2020, which missed having a bassist tie things together like Mateen does here. (The Quartet doubled up on reeds and drums with Joe McPhee and Warren Smith.) A- [sp]

Michael Marcus: Speakin' Out (2001-02 [2002], Drimala): Solo album, mixes it up by playing clarinet, tenor sax, alto sax, saxello, and bass clarinet. This has the usual limits, but Marcus has spent most of his career working with minimal support, so he's well prepared to go it alone. B+(**) [sp]

Michael Marcus: Stone Jump (2019-20 [2021], Not Two): Five more names on the cover, but over several sessions we're mostly looking at quartets, with piano (John Austria on electric, or Denton Darien on acoustic), bass (Tyler Mitchell), and drums (Warren Smith), with Lawrence Feldman's alto flute on two tracks. By his usual standards, this feels rather luxe -- even has ballads. B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Agnas Flaten Ståhl Texas: All Slow Dream Gone (Moserobie) [10-28]
• Dan Cavanagh and James Miley With John Hollenbeck: Another Life (S/N Alliance)
• Avram Fefer Quartet: Juba Lee (Clean Feed) * [11-18]
• Ahmad Jamal: Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964 (Elemental, 2CD) [12-02]
• Ahmad Jamal: Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1965-1966 (Elemental, 2CD) [12-02]
• Jupiter: The Wild East (Moserobie) [11-15]
• Reverso: Harmonic Alchemy (Outnote) * [11-11]
• Esbjörn Svensson: Home.S. (2008, ACT) [11-18]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

I feel like this week's edition is a mess, and I have neither the time nor the will to try to clean it up. Arguments could certainly be structured better, but all I can offer at the moment are hot reactions. I'm really chagrined by the media's embrace of the idea that Republicans are increasingly likely to win Congress -- FiveThirtyEight has shifted its estimate significantly, giving Republicans a 49 in 100 chance of taking the Senate, and an 81 in 100 chance of wrecking the House -- not least because there is no rational basis for such a shift. If it happens, it wouldn't be the first time I've been disappointed by the American people. (After Nixon beat McGovern in 1972, I was so disgusted that I didn't bother voting again until 1996, when the opportunity again arose to vote against Bob Dole. And today I was reminded of 2004 as I just read that part in David Corn's American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy; my campaign letter is here; my immediate analysis of the Kerry loss is here, as are some later thoughts. One line I want to pull out here: "At this point it's impossible to project how bad [four more years of Bush] will be, but it is certain that this election has cost us four years of opportunity to work on problems that are bad and getting worse." Rereading this 18 years later, I'm surprised at how much more is still relevant.)

If Republicans do win, the reasons are purely emotional, the sort of anger that drives a guy to punch a wall. The only possible outcomes are a hole in the wall and a broken hand (quite possibly both). But whatever emotional satisfaction punching the wall gives you will be temporary: the anger will return, because Republicans are counting on it, and because that's all Republicans can do. Sure, they can exhort you to be God-fearing Christians, and they can punish you for what they perceive as your failures, but neither the heavenly carrot nor the earthly stick actually works, at least at a macro level, so you're only going to get angrier, and that seems to be all they need to get away with their grift.

One consolation I can offer is that if Republicans win Congress, it will be easier for Democrats to run on anger in 2024 (as Harry Truman did in 1948). If Democrats win, they will be judged harshly both for doing things and for not doing enough. As the US system makes presidential elections more important than congressional ones, a loss now for a win later may seem like a prudent strategy. But after so many wasted opportunities, it's just possible that time is running out.

The runoff election in Brazil is today. Very little on it below, as almost everything written this week is pure speculation. But if Lula wins, the world will be a slightly better place. And if Bolsonaro wins, the decline will continue -- especially given the latter's war on the Amazon, which once was the world's most valuable carbon sink. The difference in degree isn't just that Lula isn't as far to the left as Bolsonaro is to the right. It's also because it's a lot easier to break things than to build.

[PS: Election in Brazil has been called for Lula, but it looks closer than 2020 was for Biden over Trump.]

I gather that some nations impose a press blackout a few days before an election. The idea is to prevent some last minute sensational charge, especially a false one, from swaying an election. It's impossible to expect that, and given the degree of early voting, it may not have any effect anyway, but it would be nice to sit back and take a deep breath, and consider one's choices rationally. I've been trying to do something like that, although quite frankly my votes were locked in the day the Kansas primary winners were announced. The only thing that's changed since then is that my level of disgust over KS Republican gubernatorial candidate Derek Schmidt has increased by roughly an order of magnitude, eclipsing even the well-established obnoxiousness of his running mate for Attorney General, Kris Kobach.

In past years, I would have followed competitive Senate races, and a few others, closely, but I've tried my best to blank them out of my mind. Still, enough poll-driven pseudo-news has leaked through that it's clear that Republicans are engaging in a massive gaslighting operation intended to convince people that a massive Red Wave is coming on November 8, which will no doubt be foundation for charges that any actual votes that Democrats might win will be viewed as fraudulent. (Of course, Republicans never complained when large Democratic polling leads in 2016 and 2020 evaporated. Trump claimed he actually won bigger margins.)

There's a lot of obvious bullshit in this gaslighting, but the substantial piece is the assertion that Americans are most concerned with Republican talking point issues -- inflation (most conveniently reduced to gas prices), "crime" (which, since Republicans won't take responsibility for guns as a contributing factor, is reduced in meaning to what Republicans have defined it as since the 1970s: racism), and "open borders" (which, come to think of it, also reduces to racism). Supposedly Americans concerned with these issues trust Republicans more, although it's hard to think of a single reason why. Maybe there is some polling favoring Republicans on inflation-fighting, but more general economic concerns usually favor Democrats, and for good reason: the last three Republican presidencies ended in recessions, and the fourth (Reagan's) started in one that got worse for two years before the Fed belatedly reduced interest rates and kicked off a recovery that, thanks to Reagan, was much more unequal than most.

The one thing from the Republican playbook you don't hear much these days is how the Democrats are weak on defense. This is a bit surprising given how Biden's approval polls plummeted with withdrawal and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, but Biden has managed to present as both firm and sane in Ukraine, and Republicans don't seem to have a viable sound bite response. Granted, Tom Cotton still wants to start a war with China, but even Lindsey Graham seems rudderless since McCain died, while a faction of Republicans seem to prefer their former campaign aide and fellow fascist, Vladimir Putin -- a strange wind that has kept any Democratic anti-war camp from forming.

State and local races, especially governor, will have a huge impact locally -- if Derek Schmidt wins, Kansas will jump right back into contention for the worst right-wing horror show in the nation, like was the case when Sam Brownback was governor -- but Congress is strictly a numbers game, with the Democrats needing a bit beyond a simple majority to legislate effectively. Without a working majority, the next two years will be painful but basically stuck in status quo: much-needed reforms will be impossible, major problems will be allowed to slide, simple things like budgets will be held hostage. Biden will attempt to compensate with executive orders, and the Republican-packed courts will do their best to swat them down. And the incessant squeals from the right-wing propaganda machine will drone on and on. But lots of even worse things will be stopped until Republicans get another chance to steal another presidential election. Indeed, the big story of 2022 may be how effective their election stealing efforts will be.

But, like so much else, we won't know that until the votes are counted (assuming that's still permitted).

One of the first things I wrote was a long comment under Ukraine, specifically under the Eric Levitz piece about the Progressive Caucus letter to Biden urging the administration to take seriously the need for negotiations. As the comment was pretty general, I thought it better to pull the comment up here (although I'll add some more specific words down there).

It seems to me like it should be easier for the Democratic left to define a position on the Ukraine War that offers practical steps toward peace with justice. I've been trying to do that since the beginning. And along the way I've been willing to put my pacifist principles aside to allow that Putin's escalation of a conflict that should have been resolved peacefully long ago was so egregious that Russia's forces deserved a good ass-kicking, which Ukraine has to some extent been able to inflict with massive arms and financial support from the US and Europe. And I can see continuing this counterattack until Putin is willing to negotiate rationally, but I don't see how that can happen unless the US and Ukraine makes it clear that they are ready to negotiate as well. And the US really has to be part of this, not to pressure Ukraine into making concessions for peace, but because the US holds most of the real trading chips (sanctions, deployment of NATO forces, etc.).

However, that also implies that a useful arbiter has to be someone else, and the USA's habitual either-you're-with-us-or-against-us mindset takes any independent stand to be treason. (China's great crime isn't that they want to take over the world, but that they refuse to knuckle under to an American hyperpower world order.) But that's easy for me to say, as I started out with a long critique of American power and hubris. The Democratic left has several disadvantages: while they understand the core issues of equality, freedom, and justice at home, they've never had to reckon with the effects of American power abroad (minor exception for some people my age, who started with Vietnam). Making this worse is that the Democratic Party has been flooded with people from the armed services: even if most ex-soldiers are right-wing jerks, a significant minority saw their tours as public service, and they've found an esteemed home in the only American political party that actually values service to the public. And finally, there's the Republicans, with their extraordinary ability to trigger Democrats, especially Progressives. That's a real shame, because foreign war rots the very fabric of society -- a lesson Democrats in particular should have learned from Vietnam, and should have stuck with them through the neverending War on Terror.

There's a real chance that Republicans will flip the script on Ukraine, attacking the war not because they want peace and prosperity but because they can blame its expense and effects (like high gas prices) on Biden and the Democrats, with their ideals of American-led world order, and their disdain for Putin (a real but much-maligned conservative hero).

I want to add one thing: There is a need for a peace movement during but mostly after the Ukraine War. The goal is not to dictate or advocate for a specific resolution of the war, but to define a political agenda to prevent a recurrence and/or similar wars in the future. As such, we start with a deep critique of war making, especially the belief that war is justified by national and/or imperial ambitions. This has relevance to Russia, to the US, to their allies, and to various factions within Ukraine. But it is Russia alone that inserted its forces in Ukraine, and despite my own pacifist instincts, I have no problem with Ukraine fighting back, or with other nations (including the US, despite a poor record in other countries) helping them resist and roll back Russia's aggression. I do, however, believe that such support can come with conditions, especially agreement from Ukraine to seek a ceasefire and negotiated withdrawal of alien forces, and to allow people who live in contested territories to determine, by fair vote, whether they should stay in Ukraine or join Russia. The principle is that there is no justification for annexing territory except by the express approval of the people who live there. During and after the war, we should work to establish a process for resolving this and similar conflicts in the future.

Negotiations should be resolved on the basis of what's right, not on who has the power to extort concessions from the other. What's right may not always be clear, but one measure is whether a measure can be voluntarily agreed to, or can only be forced. For instance, no nation would voluntarily sacrifice its sovereignty, so it is wrong to demand that it do so. Some examples that wouldn't be right: demanding reparations, war crimes trials, changes to laws regarding minorities (although it's fair to note human rights abuses), preventing trade or association with other countries (although each country has the right to refuse to trade with other countries; i.e., to implement sanctions). So while US aid to Ukraine should be conditioned on Ukraine negotiating on the basis of doing what's right, it shouldn't pressure Ukraine to surrender things that are within its rights. I would say, for instance, that the provision of water to peninsular Crimea is not something that should be expected of Ukraine, although it could be something that Ukraine chooses to offer for other considerations.

At present, whatever negotiations may be going on are in secret, with little opportunity for the public to assess their intentions or progress. Therefore, it's impossible for anyone else to assess, or to make anything more than the most general suggestions. On the other hand, after the current hot conflict is resolved, there will be much for a peace movement to do. We need to make the world understand that the US and Russia both did much to provoke this war, and that even if nothing the US did justified Russia's invasion, it is critical to eliminate such provocations in the future. It is further imperative to understand that much of the "defense doctrine" both powers have espoused is severely faulty: it simply doesn't work, or worse (the logic that supposedly prevents war in fact provokes war).

Vincent Bevins: [10-30] In Today's Election, the Survival of Brazil's Democracy Is at Stake.

Patrick Cockburn: [10-28] Rishi Sunak and Britain's Post-Brexit Fairy Tales. By the way, in case you're wondering what an Indian Hindu is doing leading the Conservative Party in England, see (hint: he's a near-billionaire):

• Helen Sullivan: [10-24] Who is Rishi Sunak? Everything you need to know about Britain's next prime minister.

• Ahmed Twaij: [10-27] Rishi Sunak makes history in the UK -- but not positive change.

Connor Echols: [10-28] Diplomacy Watch: The West doesn't know how to talk about Ukraine: That's largely because any time someone speaks the plain truth -- that the only way out of the quagmire is through negotiation, which will involve some give and take on both sides -- they get shot down. Echols starts with the example of Romanian Defense Minister Visile Dincu, who was forced to resign after acknowledging reality. Then there was a letter to Biden sent by the House Progressive Caucus, who were pressured to retract it within 24 hours.

• Eric Levitz: [10-26] Progressives' Ukraine Letter Was Right (and Pointless): Seems to me like now's a good time to remind Biden that negotiation is the only way out of the war, although that most reflects my doubts that the people handling this (and him) understand the stakes, let alone the limits of American power. On the other hand, a public letter might not have been the best way to deliver the message. The Progressives are in a delicate position, in that their hopes for meaningful change rest on beating Republicans in the elections, and that requires a degree of solidarity with more conservative elements in the party. Thus far, the democratic wing of the party has stayed solid with the security wing, at least on this issue. I think they deserve some reassurances that Biden isn't going to let his hawks and/or Zelensky go off the deep end.

  The other thing to note here is that Progressives sometimes have the option of joining with conservative Republicans to block bills that threaten foreign war and/or increased militarization of civil society. Thus far they haven't done that with Ukraine, which leaves them open to doubts and even attacks like from Aleem, Marcetic, and St Clair below.

• Zeeshan Aleem: [10-28] Democrats are exhibiting perilous groupthink on Ukraine: "Conflation of diplomacy with appeasement is not just foolish -- it's dangerous."

• Fred Kaplan: [10-24] The U.S. and Russia Are Both Running Their Annual Nuclear-War Exercises Right Now. Awkward Timing!

• Stephen Kinzer: [10-28] When pipeline politics go boom: "We may never know who sabotaged Nordstream 2. But it wasn't he first, nor likely the last casualty of such fierce geopolitical conflict."

• Branko Marcetic: [10-27] With Progressive Congress Members Pulling Their Ukraine Letter, Diplomacy Is Now a Four-Letter Word: Sure, that

• Vijay Prashad: [10-27] The West Must Stop Blocking Negotiations Between Ukraine and Russia.

• Barry Zellen: [10-29] Russian aggression gives US excuse to focus military, and more, on Arctic: And doing so helps Russia to think that US support for Ukraine is just one part of a broader anti-Russian manoeuvre.

Ezra Klein: [10-30] Do the Democrats Deserve Re-election? He should know better, but can't even bring himself to answer his own question. Instead, he offers a long list of complaints about tactics, without accounting for the numerous obstacles (beyond Joe Manchin) that Democrats have had to struggle with over the last two years, including his own intractably suspect publication. The obvious rejoinder to the title is "compared to what?" -- not a hypothetical question, given that the answers are clearly Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy. Klein is smart enough to know that they did no good when they were in power, and that they wouldn't have gotten any better with another chance. Indeed, one of Klein's complaints about Biden is: "Politics has not moved on from Trump." That's not going to happen by punishing Democrats for not delivering an arbitrary list of programs that the Republicans wouldn't even have considered. But instead of answering his own easy question, here's Klein promising: "Next week, I'll take a closer look at what Republicans are promising to do if they are given the power to do it." You know, I wrote about just that -- Rick Scott's Senate campaign manifesto -- back in March.

Eric Levitz:

• [10-26] The Media Did Not Trick Voters Into Disliking Inflation: Seems like a strange point. Inflation is an economic dislocation that has both winners and losers, but you never hear about the winners: those who have the power to raise prices or wages (whichever they benefit from) have a good chance of coming out ahead, while everyone else loses. Arguably, more people are properly concerned about inflation because more people come out on the losing end, but the media does have much to do with that perception. It seems strange to ignore that.

• [10-24] Return of the Hostage Takers: "Surveys consistently find that rising prices are far and away the public's top concern and that Republicans are widely seen as more credible inflation fighters than Democrats." Really? Why the fuck is that? As noted above, inflation has winners as well as losers. Republicans favor the rich, and Democrats, well, also favor the rich, but also care a bit about the poor. So, assuming that both profess opposition to inflation, and have their favored remedies, you'd expect each to help its preferred voters, at the expense of the others. Republican remedies fight inflation by cutting employment and services, and those have widespread effects -- even within the business sector, most businesses are hurt to protect banks. Give Republicans more power, and they will flaunt it, to try to force their way on budgetary issues, even at the risk of defaulting. That's what Levitz means by "hostage taking." Democrats would have been well advised to pass a law getting rid of the debt ceiling crises, but couldn't manage to squeeze that through in time.

More on inflation:

• Paul Krugman: [10-27] Republicans Have No Inflation Plan: Even if they did, they wouldn't implement it, because as long as Biden (or any Democrat) is president, their sole goal is tanking the economy to make Democrats look bad. Contrast this to 2020, when Democrats enthusiastically supported a bold rescue plan, because Democrats care more about helping people than about making their opponents (even Trump) look bad. But if a Republican was president, Republicans still wouldn't have a plan for fighting inflation, because the two or three things they think they know about the economy are wrong. But also because short of implementing wage-and-price controls -- which Nixon did, badly, but no one of either party would consider now -- there isn't much a party can do about inflation: that job has been turned over to the Fed (along with the task they take more seriously, which is keeping the banks profitable). You might counter that Democrats don't have an inflation plan either, but they do have plans for reducing the pain caused by inflation. And you'll find that they are invariably opposed by Republicans.

Ian Millhiser:

• [10-28] Lindsey Graham's surprisingly complex Supreme Court case about Trump's Big Lie, explained.

• [10-25] Biden's student debt cancellation program is in grave danger from a Republican judiciary.

Nicole Narea: [10-28] What we know about the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. More than I knew about threats to other members of Congress. Also a reminder that Pelosi's home had been vandalized in December 2020. But strangely: nothing on the rabid vilification of Pelosi in Republican campaign ads (see below). While it's possible to imagine political figures of all stripes as targets of violence, only one side prides itself on its guns and eagerness to use them. It's a big step from "voting to kill" to actually doing so, but we're seeing it more and more. [PS: Narea later wrote: [10-29] The attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband is the culmination of longtime GOP hate-mongering.]

• Ashley Parker/Hannah Allam/Marianna Sotomayor: [10-29] Attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband follows years of GOP demonizing her: I've seen dozens of ads attacking Pelosi over the years, and while most were stupid and demagogic, some involved guns (although I guess I haven't seen any with a hammer).

• Philip Bump: [10-28] The Fox News response to the Pelosi attack, in 40 short seconds.

• Ruth Ben-Ghiat: [10-28] The attack on Paul Pelosi was shocking -- and yet also predictable: "Rising political violence is not surprising when people are told they face existential threats."

• Tom Boggioni: [10-30] Lawmaker: Pelosi attack stems from Trump.

• Kelly McClure: [10-28] Suspect in Pelosi attack had a dark internet presence.

• Isaac Stanley-Becker: [10-30] Elon Musk, right-wing figures push misinformation about Pelosi attack.

Siona Peterous: [10-28] The backlash against Ron DeSantis's puzzling voter fraud arrests. What's so puzzling? The arrests were a PR stunt, and that's what DeSantis does. And they were meant not just to harass 20 voters in a state with 10+ million registered voters, but to send a message intimidating more voters (still a tiny percentage, but Bush's margin of victory in 2000 was officially 537 after the recount was stopped). Interview between Sean Ramaeswaram and Lawrence Mower.

Kelsey Piper: [10-27] The shrinking ozone hole shows that the world can actually solve an environmental crisis: True enough, but the big difference is that industry was willing to find substitutes for CFCs, because they could profit either way. But replacing fossil fuels is not just harder: it takes business from established companies and moves it to new ones (no matter how much oil companies diversify into renewables). As long as political systems are stacked in favor of profits, it will be all but impossible to transition from fossil fuels to non-carbon energy.

Jeffrey St Clair: [10-28] Roaming Charges: Tales From the Democratic Crypt: After the funding appeal, starts with the aborted Progressive Caucus letter on Ukraine, which "like a v-2 rocket . . . had exploded in the Democrats' faces before most people had even heard the sound of its flight." More on that above. Further down, he quotes a tweet from National Review: "Remember Rumsfeld's rule: 'Sometimes you have to kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys." For context, the article linked to was titled "To Contain Xi, Defeat Putin in Ukraine." Every word screams insane, from the disgraced authority to the racist innuendo of the metaphors, all the way down to any possible meaning, let alone agenda. I would start by questioning why the US needs to "contain China" when it has few options for expanding, but would no doubt regard such intentions as threatening, then ask why defeating Russia in Ukraine should make much of an impression on China, then ask whether defeating Russia in Ukraine is even possible (and how calling Putin a chicken advances any such ambitions?). And never forget that Rumsfeld's first big mismanagement job was when Nixon tabbed him to wreck the Office of Economic Opportunity. He went on to spend his whole life failing up, probably due to his knack for sharing racist jokes with superiors -- at least until Bush scapegoated him in 2006. Much more here, including a picture of a book subtitled "The inside story of Liz Truss and her astonishing rise to power," marked down for clearance.

Michael D Swaine: [10-28] Biden's boilerplate defense strategy: it's all about China: "The NDS continues a long tradition of painting China as an aggressive nation working to weaken the US." Publication of the latest National Security Document kicked off a number of alarms. In particular, the obsession with China as a strategic rival and possible enemy, while no doubt good for the defense business, is liable to turn fantasies into reality. More pieces:

• Connor Echols: [10-27] Biden's nuclear weapons policy carries 'the seeds of a new nuclear arms race'.

• Emma Claire Foley: [10-28] Biden's nuke review abandons campaign rhetoric on disarmament: "While the new nuclear posture document curbs some of the worst excesses of the Trump era, it lacks vision for world without atomic weapons."

• Ted Snider: [10-27] When the US threatens to use nuclear weapons: "Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman just reaffirmed that Washington would maintain first use to protect 'our allies.'

Karen Tumulty: [10-29] I'm sorry I said nice things about Glenn Youngkin: The worst journalist in America -- she won her title in Alex Pareene's Hack 30 (why isn't this still online?), but continued to "fail up," landing as deputy editorial page editor and columnist at the Washington Post -- admits that she fucked up again. Speaking of Youngkin, see Steve M. on Katherine Miller (Considering the Post-Trump Era in a Tucson Sports Bar): Slow Lerner.

Alissa Walker: [10-26] Mike Davis Was Right: A truck driver who developed as "an activist historian with an unapologetically Marxist bent," Davis wrote a couple dozen books, especially on his home town of Los Angeles (City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles; Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster; Setting the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties). The one I was most impressed by was Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, which pretty thoroughly upturned everything I thought I knew about 19th century colonialism. A couple more examples illustrate his eye for odd but profound detail: Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), and The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005, one he lived long enough to update as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism).

• Lois Beckett: [08-31] Mike Davis, California's 'prophet of doom,' on activism in a dying world: 'Despair is useless: Interview with Davis, a couple months ago.

• Barry Eidlin: [10-29] Mike Davis's Many Contributions to Building a Better World Will Live On.

• Jack Hamilton: [10-26] I Still Don't Understand How Mike Davis Could Write Like That: "A Marxist whose books did it all."

• Hua Hsu: [10-26] Mike Davis could see the future: "Often misread as a 'prophet of doom,' the Marxist historian was actually an optimist and a dreamer."

• Amitabh Pal/Norman Stockwell/Dave Zirin: [10-26] Saying Farewell to Mike Davis: "It's difficult to not feel the full weight of his passing."

• Jon Wiener: [10-25] Mike Davis: 1946-2022: An obituary by the co-author of Davis's last book, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.

Marcy Wheeler: [10-27] John Durham's Investigation Has Disclcosed Corruption: His Own: "The Barr-appointed special counsel was supposed to reveal 'the crime of the century.' All he revealed was his incompetence -- and worse."

Here's a tweet triptych from Steve M.:

• The goal of right-wing news and opinion is not to inform. The goal is to create and reinforce the right set of allegiances and hatreds, and to ensure that the audience never questions those allegiances and hatreds.
• The multiple right-wing propaganda messages about the Paul Pelosi attack are designed to ensure that no one in the audience wavers in their hatred for Nancy Pelosi and love for fellow righties. He wasn't a righty - he was a psycho-lefty! It was a gay tryst gone wrong!
• Right-wing media's one job is to guarantee that the audience never questions the right's main premise: that right-wingers are good 100% of the time and liberals/lefties/RINOs are evil 100% of the time.

M. writes more about this: [10-30] If you don't like these deflections, the GOP has others:

When real-world events threaten to expose the GOP as a threat to American civilization, the party uses kettle logic -- multiple arguments, many of them incompatible with one another -- to rally both rabid and moderate party supporters, and to reassure fence-sitters that all evil lies elsewhere. Look at January 6: To the rabid base, the party's propagandists argued that the violence was justified, or was the work of Antifa or the FBI (or both), or that it was encouraged by Nancy Pelosi, who (they falsely claim) was personally and solely in charge of the Capitol Police. To voters in the middle, the response has been whataboutism: Remember when Antifa and Black Lives Matter burned down entire American cities? (Which didn't happen.) Why isn't there a select committee about that?

While a lot of people still fall for this "kettle logic," and another bunch of them use but don't need it -- the ones who are unfazed by the violent events like the assault on Pelosi, and therefore need no reassurance -- an increasing number of people recognize this spin as the bullshit it is, and tune it out almost automatically. One of the things this election will measure is how gullible people remain after 20-40 years of Republicans lying to them continuously.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 24, 2022

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38918 [38880] rated (+38), 43 [41] unrated (+2: 15 new, 28 old).

I spent a lot of time working on my Book Roundup post, which got rushed out late Saturday. I suppose it wouldn't tip my hand severely if I linked to my Books: Next Draft file, which is where I've been organizing the column. The "Main" and "Secondary" sections should be empty after each post. "Draft" contains entries I've written a bit about: I may be planning to return and write more, or they simply didn't make the cut, but they may show up in a future "Main" section. Similarly, "Noted" missed the "Secondary" cut, but could be expanded into "Main" section entries later (or grouped under other "Main" section entries).

That left me Sunday to scratch together a Speaking of Which. Considering the late start and limited time, and the fact that I posted before midnight, I feel like I came up with quite a bit. I wrote half of the introduction to start, then finished it at the end. As we get closer to the election, I feel more like spelling out the obvious.

I have very little to add on the music, except that I found out about Mary McCaslin's death last week, which sent me back to pick up the ones I missed. The others are here. I played Swift and Jepsen today, in that order, while trying to write, so I wasn't hanging on every word (not that I ever am, but they got three plays each). Swift is higher on the list, and more likely to go up than down (unlike Jepsen, which tails off a bit toward the end -- maybe because I wound up listening to the longer version).

One more thing here, and it's important (at least to me): if you've voted in Francis Davis's Jazz Critics Poll in the past, and you would like to help out with my organization of this year's poll, send me an email to express your interest. I want to set up a mailing list, and need some people to test it out on before I send out the actual ballot invitations (around mid-November, with a mid-December deadline). I'll also explain some of the mechanics of how the poll works, and how I see using the website as a voter reference (e.g., I'd like to add a FAQ). I'd welcome comments and questions, but I'm not asking a lot: mostly just tolerate getting some test email. Also, as per recent years, if you want to nominate a voter, or nominate yourself, please let me know.

Need to get this up and out of the way early, so I can get on with cooking birthday dinner. Going with some favorite comfort foods this year, not least because I expect that will reduce wear and tear.

New records reviewed this week:

Claudia Acuña: Duo (2022, Ropeadope): Singer from Chile, based in New York since 1995, presents nine songs, featuring jazz notables like Kenny Barron, Christian McBride, Fred Hersch, Regina Carter, and Russell Malone. Remarkable singer, working in her native Spanish. I find her a bit too operatic, but one can't help being impressed. B+(*) [cd]

The Airport 77s: We Realize You Have a Choice (2022, Jem): Indie band from Maryland's DC suburbs, guitar-bass-drums with a bit of keyb, longer follow-up to their 2021 (8 songs, 25:56) debut. Chunky rhythms, some hooks, closer to rockabilly than to punk. B+(*) [sp]

Akusmi: Fleeting Future (2022, Tonal Union): French producer Pascal Bideau, first album under this alias, plays alto sax, flute, keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, percussion, with a group that also includes saxophonist Ruth Velten, plus trombone and drums -- sort of a jazz band playing dance music riffs. B+(**) [sp]

Gyedu-Blay Ambolley: Gyedu-Blay Ambolley and Hi-Life Jazz (2022, Agogo): Saxophonist from Ghana, bandleader since 1973, his debut album defined a genre, Simigwa, but his roots are in high-life, which he's messed with enough to be called "the godfather of hiplife." I'm not seeing credits or dates, but this seems to be new (he is 75 this year), and not better for the postmodern effects. B [sp]

Bibio: Bib10 (2022, Warp): Electronica producer Stephen Wilkinson, from England, tenth album since 2005, has a similar number of EPs. B+(*) [sp]

Burial: Streetlands (2022, Hyperdub, EP): William Bevan, electronica producer since 2005, niche ambient. He mostly releases EPs: this 3-track job runs long enough at 34:27 but the concept is so small we might as well label it accordingly. B [bc]

Tommy Crane: We're All Improvisers Now (2020-21 [2022], Whirlwind): Montreal/New York-based drummer, has a couple albums, also plays keyboards and synth bass here, augmented by occasional guests: saxophonists Charlotte Greve, Logan Richardson, and Chris Speed get one track each, guitarist Simon Angell three, electric bassist Jordan Brooks six, French horn (Pietro Amato) two. Lives up to its billing as "tranquil yet propulsive," but not to its title. B+(*) [sp]

Criolo: Sobre Viver (2022, Oloko): Brazilian singer-songwriter Kleber Cavalcante Gomes, raps some, eighth album since 2006. B+(**) [sp]

Jens Düppe: Ego_D (2022, Enja/Yellowbird): German drummer, has a few albums since 2004, also plays piano (like a drum), possibly everything else here, including some (but not all) of the spoken word, which starts with "the beat." B+(***) [sp]

Open Mike Eagle: Component System With the Auto Reverse (2022, Auto Reverse): Chicago rapper, born with the name Michael Eagle, eighth album since 2010, reportedly a revue of his whole oeuvre, hard for me to ascertain even though I'm something of a fan. I just enjoy the ride. A- [sp]

Flohio: Out of Heart (2022, AWAL): London rapper Funmi Ohiosumah, billed as her debut album (although Discogs lists another, from 2020). B+(**) [sp]

Darryl Harper: Chamber Made (2022, Stricker Street): Clarinet player, has been around a while, although there is little on him in sources like Discogs (at least that I can find; he's cut a number of albums as The Onus). This starts with a "Suite for Clarinet and String Quartet" written by Ryan Truesdell. The album is filled out with pieces written by others (Stevie Wonder is the only one that qualifies as a cover), further exercising the "chamber jazz" idea. B+(*) [cd] [10-28]

Hickeys: Fragile Structure (2022, self-released): Spanish rock group, four women, sing in English (I think), a little darker and harder than indie pop. B+(**) [sp]

Jason Kao Hwang/J.A. Deane [Dino Duo]: Uncharted Faith (2021 [2022], Tone Science Music/Blue Coast Music): Violin/electronics duo, started with violin solos which Deane (aka Dino) added to remotely while suffering from throat cancer, dying before release. I wasn't familiar with Deane, but Discogs credits him with a dozen albums (1986-2011). B+(**) [sp]

Dieter Ilg: Dedication (2020 [2022], ACT): German bassist, more than two dozen albums since 1989, at least if you count group efforts, especially with Marc Copland and Charlie Mariano. Solo bass, twelve original pieces, although he cites inspirations on three: Bach, Beethoven, and Nat Adderley. Solo bass albums have inevitable limits, but this one remained engaging and interesting, even while I was working on other stuff. B+(**) [sp]

Dieter Ilg: Ravel (2021 [2022], ACT): He has been leaning toward classical composers lately, with volumes on Bach and Beethoven. This trio -- Rainer Böhm (piano) and Patrice Héral (drums) plays eleven pieces by Maurice Ravel, a name but not music I know, but evidently able to craft fetching melodies. B+(*) [sp]

Carly Rae Jepsen: The Loneliest Time (2022, Interscope): Canadian pop singer, sixth album, light and catchy, works with a bunch of producers and gets something out of all of them. Weak spot is Rufus Wainwright's help on the title track. A- [sp]

Keith Kirchoff/Dominic Lash/Steve Noble: Christian Wolff: Exercises and Explorations (2013 [2021], Spoonhunt): Wolff is an avant-classical composer (b. 1934 in France; his parents were German book publishers Kurt and Helen Wolff, who fled Nazi Germany and wound up in New York, where they helped found Pantheon Books). Wolff's was associated with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the 1950s. His later work often had political references, like the piece dedicated to Marxist economist Harry Braverman. He doesn't play here, so I moved his headline name to the title and credited the work to the musicians, who play piano, bass, and drums (in the Vortex, a London jazz club). B+(***) [sp]

Wojtek Mazolewski Quintet: Spirit to All (2022, Wirlwind): Polish bassist, mostly works through this Quintet -- tenor sax (Marek Pospiezalski), trumpet (Oskar Torok), piano (Joana Duda), and drums (Oba Janicki) -- which over 10+ years has earned the right to go by the initials WMQ. I rarely mention composers because everyone does that these days, but what's outstanding here isn't the individual performances (note-perfect as they are), but the flow and texture. A- [sp]

Louis Moutin/Jowee Omicil/François Moutin: M.O.M. (2022, Laborie Jazz): The French brothers play drums and bass, usually in groups like Moutin Réunion Quartet or Moutin Factory Quintet. Trio here, with Omicil -- born in Montreal of Haitian descent, studied at Berklee, divides his time between Miami and Paris -- playing sax and clarinet, most impressively. B+(***) [cd] [10-25]

Carlos Niño & Friends: Extra Presence (2019 [2022], International Anthem): Percussionist, based in Los Angeles, also does electronics, released an album in 2020 called Actual Presence, which is expanded and remixed here from 10 to 18 tracks. Opens jazzy with Devin Daniels on alto sax, but later pieces shade into ambience. B+(*) [sp]

Christopher Parker & the Band of Guardian Angels: Soul Food (2019 [2021], Mahakala Music): Pianist, from Little Rock, but recorded this group in Brooklyn, with Jaimie Branch (trumpet), Daniel Carter (winds), William Parker (bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums), and wife Kelley Hurt (vocals). I could do without the vocals, but the band lives up to its reputation. B+(**) [sp]

John Patitucci Trio: Live in Italy (2022, Three Faces): Bassist, website lists 17 albums since 1988, skipping over a long list of side-credits, including long stints with Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter. He did a previous Trio album in 2009, with Joe Lovano (tenor sax) and Brian Blade (drums). This one has Chris Potter ably taking over the saxophone spot. B+(**) [sp]

Photay With Carlos Niño: An Offering (2021 [2022], International Anthem): Electronica producer Evan Shornstein, has several albums and EPs since 2014, self-released this collaboration with percussionist Niño in 2021, has an ambient feel with a lot of shimmer. B [sp]

Charlie Puth: Charlie (2022, Atlantic): American pop singer-songwriter, third album. Catchy enough it seems like there must be a boy band in his past, but not really a surprise there isn't. B+(**)

Kristjan Randalu/New Wind Jazz Orchestra: Sisu (2021 [2022], Whirlwind): Pianist from Estonia, albums since 2002. The 11-piece Orchestra is directed by Wolf Kerschek, with a couple of famous guests (Ingrid Jensen, Ben Monder) added for one track each. B

The Daniel Rotem Quartet: Wise One: Celebrating the Music of John Coltrane: Live at Bluewhale (2020 [2022], self-released): Saxophonist from Israel, based in Los Angeles, looks like his fourth album since 2018. With Billy Childs (piano), Darek Oles (bass), and Christian Euman (drums). Coltrane songs (one trad., "Song of the Underground Railroad"). B+(**) [sp]

Harvie S & Roni Ben-Hur With Sylvia Cuenca: Wondering (2022, Dot Time): Bass, guitar, and drums. The guitarist suggests a cross between Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery, the former's precision and he latter's effortless groove. The leaders have done this before with another drummer, but this one deserves more than afterthought billing. B+(***) [cd]

The Angelica Sanchez Trio: Sparkle Beings (2022, Sunnyside): Pianist, from Arizona, debut 2003, this a trio with Michael Formanek (bass) and Billy Hart (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Jason Stein/Damon Smith/Adam Shead: Volumes & Surfaces (2021 [2022], Balance Point Acoustics): Bass clarinet player, based in Chicago since 2005, has had a string of superb albums. Backed by bass and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Taylor Swift: Midnights (2022, Republic): Tenth album, I'm listening to the 13-track, 44:02 "Standard Edition," but two longer versions are available. Serious people are studying this like the pop event of the year (at least, post-Beyoncé, who got a similar treatment). I've heard all of her albums, and mostly liked them, but I couldn't recall a single song on Rob Sheffield's top-50 ranking (not that I would do any better with a Beyoncé list). But I can say that this seems real fine as background while I'm trying to write, and when I stop a minute to tune in, it just gets better. But I can't begin to tell you how good this really is, or how it stacks up against any of her other good albums. A- [sp]

Bilana Voutchkova/Susana Santos Silva: Bagra (2021 [2022], Relative Pitch): Bulgarian violinist, 10+ albums since 2013, duets with the even more prolific Portuguese trumpet player. Both also credited with "objects," which include something flute-like. Free improv, often too subliminal for my ears. B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

The Jazz Passengers: Reunited (2010 [2022], Enja/Yellowbird): Group founded in 1987 by Roy Nathanson (sax) and Curtis Fowlkes (trombone), with Bill Ware (vibes), Sam Bardfield (violin), Brad Jones (bass), and EJ Rodriguez (drums), recording regularly through 1998, less often since (most recently 2017). Group here adds guests Marc Ribot (guitar, 1-6), and spots three vocalists: Elvis Costello, Deborah Harry, and Susi Hyldgaard (but not on "Reunited," which sounds odd enough to be Nathanson and Fowlkes). Reissue adds two tracks. B+(**) [bc]

Mal Waldron: Searching in Grenoble: The 1978 Solo Piano Concert (1978 [2022], Tompkins Square): Pianist, was long remembered as Billie Holiday's last accompanist, but did brilliant work throughout a long career (1956-2002). B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Mary McCaslin: Way Out West (1973, Philo): Folk singer-songwriter, born in Indianapolis but raised in California, where she developed a fondness for western ballads. Second album, the first to get much notice. While I missed it at the time, I recognize half of the songs from her 1992 The Best of Mary McCaslin: Things We Said Today, and the other half could fit just as well. A- [sp]

Mary McCaslin: A Life and Time (1981, Flying Fish): Last album of her 1973-81 prime period, only to be followed by a couple of distant additions (1994, 2006). Voice is prime, songs (only three originals, plus one by husband Jim Ringer) are pretty good, too. B+(***)

Jowee Omicil: Let's Do This (2006, Jowee Juise): First album, just has "Jowee" on the cover, with a picture of the artist with soprano sax pointed to the heavens. Also also plays clarinet and alto sax, with Darren Barrett on trumpet, and a groove-oriented rhythm section. B [sp]

Jowee Omicil: Let's Bash (2017, Jazz Village): Fourth album, doubles down on the funk concept, adds some narration, and at times waxes elegant. B+(*) [sp]

Jim Ringer: Waitin' for the Hard Times to Go (1972, Folk-Legacy): Folk singer-songwriter from Arkansas (1936-92), married Mary McCaslin, released six albums 1972-81, including one duo album with McCaslin (The Bramble & the Rose). This was his first, mild-mannered and easy-going, and smart enough to sneak in a John Prine cover. B+(*) [bc]

Jim Ringer: The Band of Jesse James: Best of Jim Ringer (1973-81 [1996], Rounder): Nothing here from Ringer's first album, but all the rest are sampled liberally, with Mary McCaslin two duets from The Bramble & the Rose sorted to the end. McCaslin wrote the liner notes, a few years after Ringer's death. B+(*) [sp]

Rocket From the Tombs: The Day the Earth Met the . . . Rocket From the Tombs (1975 [2002], Smog Veil): Legendary Cleveland punk rock band, nothing released during their 1974-75 lifetime: singer David Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner moved on to Pere Ubu (Laughner died young, leaving "Life Stinks!"), while a couple others wound up in Dead Boys (long-forgotten, but for a while they were the more famous group). These live tapes surfaced in 2002, just before Thomas organized a revival of the band. The high points are songs I know from Pere Ubu, which quickly developed into a more nuanced band. Still, this sounds pretty remarkable. A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Claudia Acuña: Duo (Ropeadope) [09-23]
• Patricia Brennan: More Touch (Pyroclastic) [11-18]
• Mali Obomsawin: Sweet Tooth (Out of Your Head) [10-28]
• The Ostara Project: The Ostara Project (Cellar) [11-18]
• Harvie S/Roni Ben-Hur/Sylvia Cuenca: Wondering (Dot Time) [10-14]
• Sonido Solar: Eddie Palmieri Presents Sonido Solar (Truth Revolution) [10-28]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 23, 2022

In this month's Q&A column, Robert Christgau was asked a dumb political question ("Were you always a pablum-puking liberal or did you have to be brainwashed?"), and took the occasion to comment on the November election:

I was raised in a born-again Christian family in Queens, Republicans though never true conservatives who like most Americans came to think the Vietnam War was a mistake. I started moving away from Christianity in my early teens, explicitly espousing atheism at 17. Influenced by several women I cared for, prominently including the two referred to in the Canada question below, I became a leftist in the '60s and would now label myself a "left Democrat" because I believe the word "progressive" has lost most of its mojo. I thank you for giving me an excuse to remind And It Don't Stop readers that there are crucial elections taking place November 8, perhaps as crucial as any we've known, and to urge them to vote as soon as possible as well as donate to favored candidates, as I have to over a dozen since March or so. Never since World War II has democracy been in so much peril.

Substitute Wichita for Queens, and note that I'm eight years younger -- which still adds up to 72 this week -- and the first two (or with minor edits three) sentences also describe me fairly well. I endorse the rest of the paragraph as well, although as always I have minor quibbles. I've been a careful observers of party politics since the 1960s, but never been an activist, or even a donor. (My wife has made the occasional contribution, and continues to pay for it with volumes of spam.) This year, we have yard signs for Laura Kelly, Chris Mann, and Lacey Cruse, but that's it.

While it's true that "never since World War II has democracy been in so much peril," the word "peril" implies that the real damage has yet to happen. The biggest threat to democracy in America is the influence of money, and that battle is so far gone Democrats hardly ever even talk about it any more. (Democrats dropped the ball when they found that Obama and the Clintons could raise even more money than the Republicans, but their riches didn't trickle down to the rank and file candidates, and came at the cost of policies that made the rich even richer while screwing everyone else.) And campaign donations, which candidates are obliged to spend most of their time pursuing, is just the tip of the money iceberg: the real advantage money has is in lobbying (the number of registered lobbyists is over 11,000, roughly 20 for each member of Congress). Then there is major media, which is divided between propaganda organs like Fox and "balanced" sources, which are also owned by the very rich. Again, the game has been so far lost that hardly anyone talks about it.

The only "threats" that do raise eyebrows are the Republican scams to gerrymander districts and suppress voting, but those, too, are mostly locked into place, and protected by a court system that has been overwhelmingly captured by Republican Party operatives. As for the courts, each week I cite articles by Ian Millhiser. The lifetime appointment of judges was one of several severe limits on democracy enshrined in the Constitution -- another is the hugely malapportioned Senate -- which have long been open to abuse, and lately targeted by Republicans. Still, Republicans are so rigid in their contempt for democracy, and relentless in their assault on it, that it's hard to keep up with them. The only real solution is to revolt in such numbers that all their tricks prove insufficient.

It's gotten to be a cliché to say that this election is the most important in our lives. A better word for it might be desperate, as what we are struggling against isn't just what Republicans might do in the next 2 years, but the cumulative weight of what they've taken away from us over the last 40+. The 6-3 Republican domination of the Supreme Court goes back to GHW Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas, who until GW Bush's nomination of Roberts and Alito was limited to an ominous and often bizarre minority of 2 (with Scalia, nominated by Reagan). Legislation that hurt unions and helped the rich goes back even further. That cumulative weight is ever harder to stop let alone reverse. And it also chews up time.

If Republicans win the House and/or the Senate this year, the immediate effect will be to derail any possibility of Democrats passing laws to protect and aid Americans. The resulting rancor will be unpleasant, and the inaction will hurt the most vulnerable -- which thanks to the Supreme Court and Republican mastery of most state legislatures now includes many more women, who are being denied access to reproductive care (one problem that a democratic majority in Congress could easily repair). But aside from its immediate effects, giving Republicans any measure of power to disrupt Congress will cost us opportunity, for a minimum of two years, to deal with problems that are festering while we do nothing. The most obvious is climate change, which would have been much easier to deal with 20-30 years ago, when the threat was clear to anyone willing to look at the evidence. But there is much more that we need to do sooner rather than later. Education, in particular, is always time sensitive.

I wish I could be more optimistic about Biden finding a path out of war, as the current path is potentially even worse than climate change. Every week I try to remind you all that the only way out of the Ukraine war is through negotiation, and that negotiation there shouldn't stop with the disputed territories but extend to a fundamental reëvaluation of how powerful countries behave beyond their own borders.

I spent all last week working on yesterday's Book Roundup, which touches on at least some of these issues. So I didn't get a start here until this morning. There is certainly a lot more I could have written about, but this will have to do for now.

AP: [10-20] Military suicides drop as leaders push new programs: No mention of exiting the war in Afghanistan. Strange no one thought of that as having any bearing, what with the "personal issues, including finances and marital stress."

David Atkins: [10-21] Republicans Cannot and Will Not Reduce Gasoline Prices: Gas prices is one of their big talking points, along with inflation more generally, and that old standby "crime." It really amazes me that Republicans think people are so gullible they'll think that Republicans can solve any of these "problems," but then there's little in their spiel that does not regard a massive suspension of disbelief. But at least it's possible to believe that most Republicans do want to see less crime (not that that's what they mean by the term, and not at the expense of their gun fetishism). Same for inflation, as long as you define the term the way they do: as escalating wages, not commodity prices. But Republicans are joined at the hip to the oil industry, and the only thing they want to see is more profits, and the only easy way to get them is through higher prices.

I don't want to get caught in the weeds of individual races, but here are some more general election pieces:

• Jake Johnson: [10-23] Dark money groups have pumped $1 billion into GOP campaigns to recapture Senate.

• Paul Krugman: [10-10] Will Gas Prices Doom Democracy?

• Paul Krugman: [10-17] Preparing for Republican Debt Blackmail: I mention the threat of Ukraine blackmail under that section, but debt blackmail is even more likely, given that Republicans have tried it a number of times since the Gingrich shutdown in the 1990s.

• Dana Milbank: [10-21] In Nevada, election deniers prepare to sabotage the midterms.

• Jennifer Rubin: [10-23] Democrats have a strong closing argument: The GOP would wreck the economy: This starts with manufacturing a debt limit crisis (per Krugman, above), but much more could be said. After Obama won in 2008, Republicans repeatedly sandbagged the economy, believing that voters would blame Obama for their hardships. I doubt that McConnell will be caught again saying that Republicans' goal is to make sure Biden is a "one-term president," but you can be sure that's what he's thinking. And even if Republicans weren't simply acting in bad faith, their ideas about how to run the economy are so wrong-headed they couldn't help if they wanted to. Rubin gives a hint of this here: [10-20] Republicans' inflation plan: Tax cuts that'd make Liz Truss blush.

• Robert J Shapiro: [10-20] C'mon, Democrats. Tout Your Economic Record: "Despite inflation, they have a great story to tell about the Biden administration's record."

• Sophia A McClennen: [10-10] Michael Moore predicts Democrats will win big in the midterms. Given that 90% of what you're reading is predicting a Republican blowout (at least in their own minds), thought you could use some good cheer.

Jonathan Chait: [10-21] How Vaccine Skeptics Took Over the Republican Party: "A case study in the party's dysfunction." Always carping about something, in the early days of the pandemic, as the severity of Covid-19 was so great that hospitals were being overwhelmed, the knee-jerk response was to insist that businesses should decide for themselves what precautions (with the market in its usual role as judge and jury), but most held out hope that future vaccines would render the question moot. Then they started shifting to promoting quack treatments. And when the vaccines finally did become available, they trumpeted individual choice and allowed for "religious" exemptions. I can see a case for allowing people to decide whether or not to get vaccinated, but I've never understood why anti-vaxxers would campaign for others not to get vaccinated. Certainly self-interest argues otherwise. So what it seems to come down to is that certain people (Republicans, mostly) just like to spout off and make sure everyone hear them. And in doing so, they've tapped into the conspiratorial mindset that runs through the Republican Party, enough so to intimidate more sensible members of their cohort. Of course, to the rest of us, that just makes them look stupid, vain, arrogant, and malign -- traits they'd happily wear as a badge of honor. This is the same dynamic that has worked for the "stop the steal" campaign. Hard to say which proposition is more ridiculous, but both are thriving in the mental sewers of the Republican Party.

Conor Echols: [10-21] Diplomacy Watch: Could Lula be a force for peace in Ukraine? Probably not unless/until he gets elected, but Brazil is a big country, and someone needs to cajole both the US/Europe and Russia into negotiation. From what I gather, the general feeling in the Global South is that the Ukraine war is an internecine squabble within the Global North that has become a major headache for the rest of the world -- driving up prices of food and fuel, forcing nations to take sides, etc. -- and so perhaps Brazil and Mexico (where AMLO has made his own proposals) could combine with other more/less neutral countries (South Africa, India, perhaps China) to form an effective lobby for peace. They could, for instance, threaten to sanction all belligerents. That would raise some eyebrows.

• Connor Echols: [10-19] Defense contractors eye long-term profits from Ukraine war.

• Andrew Desiderio/Jonathan Lemire: [10-19] Biden world privately thinks McCarthy could fold on Ukraine aid. Republicans are torn between their habitual support for military adventurism and their desire to humiliate Biden at any cost, with odds on the latter. If Republicans win the House, it's more than just likely that they will hold hostage every Ukraine aid deal for some special consideration. In that case, Biden will have to weigh how much of his domestic agenda to surrender for Ukraine. That's a very nasty prospect, which makes it even more attractive to Republicans. Also see Alex Shephard: [10-23] Congressional Republicans Look to Sow Chaos in Ukraine if They Retake Congress.

• Richard Falk: [10-21] Ukraine War Evolves: Slouching Toward Armageddon.

• Karen Greenberg: [10-20] Is There an Off-Ramp from the Latest Forever War?

• Ellen Ioanes: [10-22] Russia's destroying infrastructure in Ukraine, and the consequences are dire: "Moscow's next target may be a massive dam in Kherson."

• Boris Kagarlitsky: [10-21] Nationwide Protests of Putin's War, and Exodus From Putin's Russia.

• Jack F Matlock Jr: [10-17] Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine.

• Peter Rutland: [10-18] Why Crimea is the key to the Ukraine war.

• Joshua Yaffa: [10-17] Inside the US effort to arm Ukraine.

Jonathan Guyer: [10-21] The secret history of America's tactical nukes. A lot of thought has gone into the idea that if you could scale nuclear bombs down enough, it would blur the difference between escalating to nuclear weapons, weakening inhibitions against their use. Some of those "thinkers" were Russian, but most were American.

Ellen Ioanes: [10-20] Why Liz Truss was UK prime minister for only six weeks: This makes me jealous for a political system that doesn't restrict change to fixed terms, although the UK system is still deeply flawed: allowing even a completely hapless Parliament five years before having to call new elections has created a peculiar dynamic: the dominant party (in this case the Tories) has incentives for infighting and self-destruction with no immediate risks. Meanwhile, new Prime Ministers are selected in a very limited partisan process which the overwhelming majority of UK citizens have no say in. If the US had such a system, it would be easy to imagine Trump (and maybe even GW Bush and/or Bill Clinton) getting purged mid-term, especially if their replacements weren't limited to even less popular VPs (Pence maybe, Cheney for sure). On the other hand, in the American system, embattled Presidents can fight back and actually strengthen their control (as both Trump and Clinton did after impeachment). By the way, after much speculation, Boris Johnson Drops Bid to Return as UK Prime Minister.

• Michael Bluhm: [10-22] What broke Britain? Interview with Matthias Matthijs.

• Tanya Gold: [10-23] The Bonfire of the Tories.

• Timothy Noah: [10-21] Did Liz Truss Kill Reaganomics? No, it was already dead. She was just surprised to find that when she trotted it out, it really stunk.

• Gary Younge: [10-21] Leaderless, Rudderless Britain Is at the Mercy of Desperate Conservatives.

Jay Caspian Kang: [10-21] What would a nation of sports gamblers look like? I don't like gambling of any sort, but the more sports gambling becomes legit -- our Democratic governor's big "bipartisan" deal this year was to legalize it -- the more irritated I get. It's not so much that I worry about the integrity of professional sports (which have been ruined by money already), but that on a personal level, I've never been able to see why people would throw money away to prove that they aren't really that smart. (As compared to pure games of luck, sports betting lures in people who think themselves experts, but the odds are balanced so they still lose more often than not.) By the way, what really bothered me about the Kansas legalization wasn't that it allowed people to legally lose money that many were illegally losing before, but that the revenues are being earmarked to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals west of State Line Blvd., in yet another massive giveaway to whichever billionaires own them now (last I knew the Chiefs belonged to HL Hunt, and the Royals to one of the Wal-Mart heirs.)

More gambling:

• Kathryn Schulz: [10-17] What we've lost playing the lottery: "The games are a bonanza for the companies that states hire to adminster them. But what about the rest of us?" The rationale, which I accept, is that gambling should be legal, and should be run by the state, because the state can run a cleaner, more honest game than the Mafia, and with much less onerous side-effects. And the state can pick up some profits along the way, which it can then use for other worthwhile things, but preferably not so much that officials feel the need to market (promote) the practice (beyond the bare minimum necessary to prevent a black market). That shouldn't be too hard to grasp, but in practice gambling has become legal because operators with few better scruples than the Mafia have lobbied to pass laws, giving them various levels of monopolies and incentives to rake in as much profit as possible. I know a guy who signs his email with "lottery: n., a tax on stupidity." He's not wrong, even if you replace "lottery" with more skilled games, each seeking its own level of stupidity. In this light, the operators in this article are basically just tax farmers.

Ian Millhiser:

• [10-20] America's Trumpiest court just declared an entire federal agency unconstitutional: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established by the banking reform bill that followed the 2008 meltdown, which followed massive fraud, especially in home mortgages (but extending way beyond there, such as to derivatives that were designed to lose investor money). The fine print doesn't go so far as to say that federal law cannot prosecute fraud, but by underming the agency that fights fraud, that seems to be what they're aiming for.

• [10-23] What the Constitution actually says about race, explained: "There's a glaring flaw in the Supreme court lawsuits attacking affirmative action."

More pieces on legal issues:

• Chas Danner: [10-22] Biden's Student-Debt Forgiveness Plan Gets Held Up by Appeals Court.

• Jane Mayer: [10-19] The conservative stalwart challenging the far-right legal theory that could subvert American democracy: "J Michael Luttig is opposing Republican groups in one of the most momentous cases that the Supreme court is considering this term." But Steve M thinks Mayer is being overly optimistic: [10-19] This isn't how you fight the enemies of democracy these days: "Politics in America, at least on the Republican side, is total war, with permanent one-party rule as the ultimate goal."

• Ben Protess/William K Rashbaum/Jonah E Bromwich: [10-23] Trump's Business, Under Threat, Faces a Tough Test in Court: "The Trump Organization's trial on tax fraud and other charges begins Monday in Manhattan, raising questions about the future of the former president's family business."

Indigo Olivier: [10-20] "Cannibal Capitalism" Is Eroding Society's Basic Structures: Interview with Nancy Fraser, author of Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet -- and What We Can Do About It. The best example I can think of capitalist cannibalism is private equity; see Jason Linkins: [10-15] The Industry Devouring the American Dream.

Areeba Shah: [10-19] Legal experts mock failed Durham probe: No other prosecutor "has ever posted such a dismal record": "One legal analyst noted Durham got 'two acquittals at trial in a system where the feds win 95% of their cases." Also: Ankush Khardori: [10-18] John Durham Almost Makes Ken Starr Look Good.

Alex Shephard: [10-20] The Spectacular Failure of Right-Wing Social Media Platforms: It's really just network effects: whoever gets in first with a service that appeals to virtually everyone gets a lock on the business, and can exploit that by collecting and selling data. There are a lot of right-wing jerks in America, but not enough to build their own niche ecosystem -- especially given that the insular echo chamber they crave is already available on mainstream platforms.

Jeffrey St Clair: [10-21] Roaming Charges: Vincent, Duck! Soup!

Emily Stewart: [10-20] How airlines squeeze you for every penny. Deregulation promised cheaper tickets, and that worked for a while. But in a grossly unequal society, with limited supply and far-from-perfect information, they created a game for predatory companies.

Bob Woodward: [10-23] The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is in unparalleled danger. "I have decided to take the unusual step of releasing [tapes of my 20 interviews with Trump]. I was struck by how Trump pounded in my ears in a way the printed page cannot capture." The interviews cover many topics, but Woodward concludes: "I believe the tapes show that Trump's greatest failure was his handling of the coronavirus." Early interviews reveal how incapable he was of comprehending the problem, and how he resisted attempt to nudge him into a responsible position. Less clear is how he got worse over time. After he recovered from his case, he intuited how to play the pandemic politically, while the nation as a whole suffered its darkest days. Even today, most Republicans are following his lead, and working to dismantle any possibility of public health officials responding to future crises.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Last Book Roundup was on May 1, the second of a burst of two. This one should have a follow up relatively soon, although this one was so difficult to pull together that it's hard to imagine when the next one will be ready. This is not for lack of books I know about: my draft file has nearly 300 books noted (at least before adding the short note section below, but those are in theory still eligible for a longer write up). My rule of thumb is to publish a post when I get 40 books for the top section, but a smaller number might make more sense, especially given my tendency to tack on supplementary lists. We have a lot of Russia and China this time: Abelow, Brands, Gaeotti, Hoffman, Short. A special case of sublists is when I list previous books by authors (Levine, Lopez, Mead, Moyn, Scialabba; I don't count Chomsky here because I'm only listing new books by him and co-author Prashad).

Two sublists are things I haven't done before: Under Short, I give you a select list of other books on Putin, as well as a much more indiscriminate one of books I hadn't noted before. In theory, you could look them up, but that would be a pain. It would be nice to break the big file up into topical ones, and try to sort out the potentially useful titles from the rest, including some way to flag right-wing nonsense (to varying extents: Brands, Concha, Hegseth/Goodwin, Jones, Mandelbaum, Mead, as well as a number of sublist selections).

I also sorted the Leibovich sublist into two sets: one of books which (like Leibovich) offer useful reporting on Trump (especially in his last months in office), and a second one of self-serving memoirs, mostly of Trump associates. Normally, I would have lifted one of those items to the head of the list, but none seem worthy. On the other hand, a couple books that could have been developed as longer items got stuck on sublists (under Milbank, Corn is a book that I'm actually reading). I also left Shrecker under Bunch, as the two books seemed complementary. On the other hand, I did wind up breaking Haberman out of its original perch under Leibovich. And I wound up writing an entry for Hoffman's old (2011) book as an anchor for Khodorkovsky's new one. Hoffman's book is also relevant to the Short (Putin) list, but stands a bit apart.

As I've explained repeatedly, this is basically a research exercise, meant to gain a sense of the state of knowledge and understanding of the world, reflected in book form. With few exceptions, the descriptions are based on blurbs, samples, and sometimes reviews, mostly from digging through Amazon (as unpleasant as that often is). The only books below that I've read much from are: DeLong, Leibovich, Corn, and Smil. I've ordered copies of: Cooper, Levine, Milbank, Moyn. I've also read other books from: Bunch, Chemerinsky, Chomsky, Fischer, Hochschild, Hoffman, McKibben, Draper, Purdy, Gessen, Satter, Tomasky, and further down: Berry, Heinberg, Meier, and Rushkoff.

Benjamin Abelow: How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How US and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (paperback, Siland Press): A short (88 pp) summary, valid as far as it goes, but unlikely to shed much light on why the "provocations" led to such an egregious response from Putin. I would argue that although the US wanted to expand NATO to grow its arms market, and found that the easiest way to sell expansion was to fan old and new fears of Russian power, they never had the slightest desire to actually go to war with Russia, and it's strange that Putin could ever think so. On the other hand, while traditional economic ties and Russia's imperial legacy suggest why Russians like Putin think of Ukraine should be a subservient satellite, those attachments don't justify invasion and destruction, with its attendant risk to Russia's world standing. Several blurb writers, like Noam Chomsky, praise Abelow's telling of one part of the story that is widely ignored in the US, but there are other stories that need to be integrated. For more general books on Russian history, see Galeotti below. For books specifically on Putin, see Short. Here are a few more books on the Ukraine-Russia War, a few written since the 2022 invasion, a few more going back to 2014:

• Paul D'Anieri: Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press).
• Media Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict (paperback, 2022, OR Books). [11-15]
• Peter Conradi: Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War (2017; paperback, 2022, Oneworld): Included here because it describes in more detail how the Cold War was rekindled -- many points highlighted in Abelow's short book.
• Yuri Felshtinsky/Michael Stanchev: Blowing Up Ukraine: The Return of Russian Terror and the Threat of World War III (2022, Gibson Square): Felshtinsky has a previous book, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (2007).
• Valentine Green: Russia Ukraine, Putin Zelenskyy: Your Essential Uncensored Guide to the Russia-Ukraine History and War (2022, independent): 94 pp.
• Mark Galeotti: Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (2022, Osprey Publishing). [11-08]
• Taras Kuzlo: Putin's War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime (paperback, 2017, Create Space).
• Fred Leplat/Chris Ford, eds: Ukraine: Voices of Resistance and Solidarity (2022, Resistance Books).
• William J O'Donnell: The Solution to Putin's War: The Lessons Learned Solving the Russian-US Cold War and Putin's Motivation and Psyche Provide a Durable Solution to Putin's War (paperback, 2022, independent): 76 pp.
• Ilya Ponomarev/Gregg Stebben: Does Putin Have to Die? The Story of How Russia Becomes a Democracy After Losing to Ukraine (2022, Skyhorse): Seems over the top, but he was a Duma member 2007-16, the only one to vote against annexing Crimea, defected to Kyiv, where, as he put it, "I keep a machine gun by the door." [11-15]
• Christopher M Smith: Ukraine's Revolt, Russia's Revenge (2022, Brookings Institution Press).
• Marc Miles Vaughn: The History of Ukraine and Russia: The Tangled History That Led to Crisis (paperback, 2022, History Demystified): 164 pp.
• Volodymyr Zelensky: A Message From Ukraine: Speeches, 2019-2022 (2022, Crown): 144 pp. [12-06]

Walt Bogdanich/Michael Forsythe: When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (2022, Doubleday): Major consulting firm, their services are available anywhere a company wants to squeeze a little extra profit from their business, or rationalize and cover up their own misdeeds. A blurb from Joseph Stiglitz reads: "Every page made my blood boil as I read about McKinsey's flawed reasoning and vast profits made from ethically dubious work for governments, polluting companies and big pharma." Somewhere in my readings, I remember a piece of advice given to would-be managers: if they really want to scare their employees, just threaten them with bringing McKinsey in.

Kevin Boyle: The Shattering: America in the 1960s (2021, WW Norton): A "lively" history of the decade, expanding the decade a few years on either side, by a historian whose previous books were on civil rights and labor. I'm not sure how well this lives up to its title, a catchphrase that denotes some catastrophe that befell America, whereas I would argue that we started to find a new unity and vision that was then squelched and perverted by the political reaction of the 1970s (Nixon) and 1980s (Reagan), leaving Democrats too traumatized to even attempt to recover. I have no idea whether this book continues to ostracize the left movements of the extended 1960s, or hopes to find a way to move forward by sifting through the rubble.

Hal Brands/Michael Beckley: Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (2022, WW Norton): The authors, professors and senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, start from a belief common among American foreign policy mandarins: "The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the 21st century." That's dangerous nonsense on several levels: neither country depends on propagating its political system abroad: the US likes to talk about democracy, but is more interested in business, demanding that its "allies" open themselves to global profiteering, and pay up monopoly rents. Conflicts with the US happen when countries decline to submit to American dictates on how they do business. China is the big one, because it's the largest economy, it has the most foreign trade, and it follows a go-along-to-get-along philosophy, making it easier to deal with than the US often is. But also note that US foreign policy is largely (and increasingly, or so it seems) defined by the marketing of US arms: "allies" are countries (democratic or not) that buy US arms, "enemies" are countries that buy from someone else like Russia and China (or build their own and try to compete, like Russia and China). The "danger" comes in mostly because arms races are destabilizing, regardless of who promotes them. Also note that within this mindset, other commodities can be viewed as security issues, including chips, oil, even food. Recent (and a few forthcoming) books on China (many more in previous reports):

• Anne-Marie Brady: China as a Great Polar Power (paperback, 2017, Cambridge University Press).
• Kerry Brown: Xi: A Study in Power (paperback, 2022, Icon Books).
• Maria Adele Carrai/Jennifer Rudolph/Michael Szonyi, eds: The China Questions 2: Critical Insights Into US-China Relations (2022, Harvard University Press).
• Lulu Yilun Chen: Influence Empire: Inside the Story of Tencent and China's Tech Ambition (2022, Hodder & Stoughton). [11-22]
• Josh Chin/Liza Lin: Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (2022, St Martin's Press).
• Martin Chorzempa: The Cashless Revolution: China's Reinvention of Money and the End of America's Domination of Finance and Technology (2022, Public Affairs).
• Carl T Delfeld: Power Rivals: America and China's Superpower Struggle (paperback, 2022, Economic Security Council).
• Frank Dikötter: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (2022, Bloomsbury). Has written several earlier books on Chinese history: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (2013); The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 (2016); Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (2020). [11-15]
• Ian Easton: The Final Struggle: Inside China's Global Strategy (paperback, 2022, Eastbridge Books).
• Howard W French: Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power (2017, Knopf; paperback, 2018, Vintage): Africa specialist, previously wrote China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (2014).
• Aaron L Friedberg: Getting China Wrong (2022, Polity): Wrong wrong: "the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthless of the Chinese Community Party."
• Chin-Hao Huang: Power and Restraint in China's Rise (paperback, 2022, Columbia University Press).
• Chris Miller: Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (2022, Scribner).
• Stephen Roach: Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (2022, Yale University Press). [11-29]
• Kevin Rudd: The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping's China (2022, Public Affairs): Former Prime Minister of Australia.
• Susan L Shirk: Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (2022, Oxford University Press).
• Desmond Shum: Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China (2021, Sribner).
• Robert Spalding: War Without Rules: China's Playbook for Global Domination (2022, Sentinel): Former Brigadier General, previously wrote Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept (2019).
• Katie Stallard: Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea (2022, Oxford University Press): Wilson Center fellow's Cold War revanchism.
• Stephen Vines: Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World's Largest Dictatorship (2021, Hurst).

Will Bunch: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics -- and How to Fix It (2022, William Morrow): Ever since WWII college has been sold as the ticket to success. Early on, we made an effort to promote opportunity by keeping the costs low, but as inequality increased, and the unions which protected blue collar workers were undermined, the powers that be realized that the penalties for not getting a higher education were such that they could charge more for access to privilege. One goal was to stifle political dissent (aka free thinking). Another was to restore the advantages of the wealthy. Of course, they couldn't fully revert to the elitism of the pre-WWII university system, but by shifting costs to students and suckering them into increasingly deep debt, they effectively closed the doors of the class system while maintaining a hint of openness. Granted, poor but truly exceptional students could still rise through the gauntlet but by then they were likely to be properly acculturated -- Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are good examples of this. Related:

• Derek W Black: Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy (2020, Public Affairs).
• Ellen Schrecker: The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (2021, University of Chicago Press): 616 pp. Higher education grew after WWII, first with the GI Bill, then with the growth of a prosperous middle class, which suggested that everyone should go to college, and encouraged learning for its own sake. That was the promise noted here, but as the Vietnam War radicalized a generation, the forces of reaction started clamping down, eventually foreclosing that promise and restoring the notion of higher education as a passport to elite status in an increasingly inequal world.

Erwin Chemerinsky: Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (2022, Yale University Press): Author has a number of books on The Conservative Assault on the Constitution (2011), as well as the more positive We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (2018). So you can guess what he thinks of the legal theory Antonin Scalia popularized as Originalism. My own take is that it's awfully convenient to have a theory that says the law should mean whatever you think the original authors must have intended. Of course, it's bullshit, but not uncommon among conservatives, who love to claim long pedigrees for whatever their current prejudices dictate. A second problem is how Originalism fights the notion that constitutional law should be flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.

Noam Chomsky/Vijay Prashad: The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (2022, New Press). Based on conversations, although the former's knowledge and understanding of American power is encyclopedic, and seemingly on instant recall. Prashad wrote one of the broader (and deeper) histories of the modern world: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. Related:

• Noam Chomsky/Marv Waterstone: Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books).
• Noam Chomsky/James Kelman: Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter (paperback, 2021, PM Press).
• Noam Chomsky: Notes on Resistance (paperback, 2022, Haymarket Books): Interviews with David Barsamian.
• Vijay Prashad: Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning From Movements for Socialism (paperback, 2022, Haymarket Books).
• Noam Chomsky's Little Book of Selected Quotes: On Society, Capitalism, and Democracy (paperback, 2021, Lumière): 107 pp.

Joe Concha: Come On, Man! The Truth About Joe Biden's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency (2022, Broadside Books): Starts by railing about "open borders, record inflation, and skyrocketing crime." In what universe are those even things? "The withdrawal from Afghanistan left thirteen U.S. service members dead and hundreds of Americans stranded as Afghans fell from airplanes." The entry of the U.S. into Afghanistan (remember GW Bush?) left 2,426 American soldiers dead, and millions of Afghans displaced (or worse). Biden ended that, not on the best terms imaginable, but given the cards he was dealt. "Though Biden may seem like a doddering idiot, stumbling from one mistake to the next, his blunders always hew closely to progressive dreams for American policy." Like making sure all Americans have food to eat, and health care that doesn't bankrupt them? No: "Dreams like saving the planet by attacking Elon Musk and strengthening the middle class by making gas prices higher than Hunter Biden in a motel room."

Ryan Cooper: How Are You Going to Pay for That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Questions in Politics (2022, St Martin's Press): Good idea for a book, but I was thinking more literally: a compendium of dumb questions (like the title one), each followed by a smart answer. Rather, Part I at least is a discourse in the history of economics, with something called "neo-propertarianism" singled out for especially harsh rebuke. He seems to mean neo-liberalism, but without any noble intents or rationales, which brings it back to old-fashioned capitalism, another term he'd rather duck. I've only seen the TOC for Part II, which offers more topical chapters: labor, healthcare, "the social climate," inequality, "a new collective American freedom," and finally "How to Argue with Propertarians."

J Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022, Basic Books): An economist teaching at UC Berkeley, the author has published a modest blog as long as I can remember, generally echoing and reinforcing the liberal views of Paul Krugman, all the while working on this "magnum opus" on the biggest question of our time, which is what's changed during our time. His 20th century is a long one, from 1870 to 2010, his starting date reflecting an American (as opposed to a British) bias: the industrial revolution may date back a bit earlier in England, but it really takes off after the US Civil War. The end date seems arbitrary, but the decade since doesn't (yet) have a lot to show for itself. We've seen extraordinary technological advances in this period, for the first time generating material wealth way beyond population growth. DeLong pegs the break at 1870: before then new technology was converted into population growth, but not per capita wealth, and the endpoint following the debacle of neoliberalism in the 2008 recession. He doesn't insist that the end point is terminal, but does note that the progress of the long century has repeatedly been interrupted by backsliding into war and recession, obstacles largely triggered by reactionary politics -- something we have yet to overcome, and a mental problem that may be getting even worse.

Gary Dorrien: American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (2021, Yale University Press): Big book (752 pp), includes chapters on the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, also on later figures who extolled socialism without a party framework, and winds up with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but the first couple chapters start with the Christian formulation of a "social gospel" and with Jewish Universalism. Dorrien has written 18 books, six with Theology in the title, and one subtitled Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism. It's good to be reminded of this history, and that the impulse behind social justice has always acted as a counterweight to the more touted focus on individualism.

David Hackett Fischer: African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (2022, Simon & Schuster): Notable historian, one I first encountered in his Historians' Fallacies (1970), although his main work was Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), which meticulously traced cultural threads from England to America. Here he tries something similar, only with the much more deliberately obscured connections from Africa through people brought to America as slaves. It's remarkable that he's come up with so much material (960 pp). Also on early American history:

• Mark R Anderson: Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution (paperback, 2022, University of Oklahoma Press).
• Joseph J Ellis: The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (2021, Liveright).
• Woody Holton: Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (2021, Simon & Schuster): Major effort (800 pp) to broaden the history of America during the Revolution, by showing how "overlooked Americans" influenced the Founders.
• Woody Holton: Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (paperback, 1999, University of North Carolina Press);
• Woody Holton: Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007; paperback, 2008, Hill & Wang).

Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022, Farrar Straus and Giroux). Intends a defense of "classical liberalism," which he traces back to late 17th century arguments "for the limitation of the powers of government through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction." To do that, he has to rescue his preferred doctrine from later "neoliberalism," but also from conventional "left-of-center" political interests: those who recognize that the more complex the world becomes, the more we need reasonable government regulation that limits the tendency of the rich and powerful to prey on the poor and weak. That doesn't leave him with much more than abstract principles to stand on, making it hard to convince people such hyper-individualism is in their interest.

• Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man (1992, Free Press): Famous pinnacle of post-Cold War triumphalism, arguing that the endpoint of history is "capitalist liberal democracy."
• Francis Fukuyama: Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995; paperback, 1996, Free Press).
• Francis Fukuyama: Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States (2008; paperback, 2011, Oxford University Press).

Mark Galeotti: A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, From the Pagans to Putin (2022, paperback, Hanover Square Press): One thing that's become painfully obvious in the last six months is that the Americans who direct or report on foreign policy understand very little about Russia in general and Putin in particular. They also seem to be blind to America's own contribution to the rewarming of the Cold War (see my Abelow comment above; I suppose I should reiterate my standard disclaimer here: nothing the US has done with Ukraine or NATO justifies Putin's invasion, and nothing Putin has done or can do will rectify the errors the US has committed). I don't know whether Galeotti is a good or bad observer of Russia, but in 2019 he published a short book called We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong, and the chapters there cover a lot of sensible ground. This book here boils Russian history, including Putin, probably up to the eve of the invasion, down to 240 pp, which probably isn't enough but is certainly more than most Americans know. He also has a book coming out in November on Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, which was mostly written before the invasion but at least deals with it. There are a couple other competing histories of Russia, as well as more specialized tracts:

• Antony Beevor: Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 (2022, Viking).
• Kees Boterbloem: Russia as Empire: Past and Present (2020, Reaktion Books).
• Rodric Braithwaite: Russia: Myths and Realities: The History of a Country With an Unpredictable Past (2022, Pegasus Books).
• Orlando Figes: The Story of Russia (2022, Metropolitan Books).
• Mark Galeotti: The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (2022, Yale University Press).
• Nancy Shields Kollmann: The Russian Empire 1450-1801 (2017, Oxford University Press).

Maggie Haberman: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (2022, Penguin): New York Times reporter assigned to Trump starting with his campaign, pictures a younger Trump on the cover because she goes back further to merge her reporting and observations with a background character study. As such, this appears to be one of the more definitive tomes in a ridiculously large shelf of writings on Trump. Coming so late may seem to diminish its immediate usefulness, but as one of the more comprehensive studies, its utility may grow, especially once we have the luxury of regarding Trump in hindsight. (I originally listed this with similar books under Leibovich below, but decided it merited its own note.)

Oona A Hathaway/Scott J Shapiro: The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (2017; paperback, 2018, Simon & Schuster): A history of the 1928 Paris Peace Pact, which is isn't exactly recalled today as having "remade the world," and for that matter is hardly remembered at all (even as, using the name better known in the US, the Kellogg-Briand Pact). The book puts it in a much broader context, after a Part I on "Old World Order," in the first half of Part II ("Transformation") before it gets blown up by WWII, winding up with Part III ("New World Order"), where the first three chapters merit some pondering: "The End of Conquest," "War No Longer Makes Sense," and "Why Is There Still so Much Conflict?"

Peter Hegseth/David Goodwin: Battle for the Amerian Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022, Broadside Books): Fox News host, reduces his co-author to a "with" credit, but Goodwin is the one with experience in what they call "classical Christian education," where they "assigned the classics, inspired love of God and country, and raised future citizens that changed the world." Much as they seek to brainwash children to follow their political prejudices, they fear their enemies are doing the same, and winning: "Today, after 16,000 hours of K-12 indoctrination, our kids come out of government schools hating America. They roll their eyes at religion and disdain our history." It's possible that public education has become more liberal, but in my day public schools were well stocked with teachers dedicated to installing conservative identities in pupils. My own radicalism was not taught to me but found on my own after I became aware of the hypocrisy and worse of the established powers. The authors might counter than even in the 1950s education was gripped by liberal ideals -- most dangerously with the notion that learning was good for its own sake -- which introduced the possibility of doubt. (They do, after all, declaim a "century of miseducation.") I was taught that America's wars were just and advanced freedom (most notably those against monarchy, slavery, and Nazism), which raised the question what the US was trying to do in Vietnam. I was taught that the founding principle of the Declaration of Independence was that "all men are created equal," yet even then it was a major struggle to secure basic civil rights for all. Despite occasional school prayers (and the rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance), I don't remember God being a major part of school, but I got plenty of that in church (which, finally, also backfired). What makes this book worrying is that it seems to be a blueprint for the right-wing political movement to impose ever more draconian and dim-witted restraints on what it is permissible to discuss in school: in effect, turning them into indoctrination camps like we were taught Communists ran. I'm concerned that these schemes will turn future generations into brainless automatons at a time when we more than ever need people skilled in critical thought, but that effect will be mitigated by rebellion. Perhaps even more so, I see this kind of schooling as a cruel punishment of children who are anxious to learn and find their way in the world, but are still awfully naive and gullible.

Adam Hochschild: American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis (2022, Mariner Books): Historian, has written several books about the emergence of conscience as dissent from imperialism, starting with King Leopold's Ghost about the depradation of the Congo, backtracking to the anti-slavery movement (Bury the Chains), then forward to dissent against World War I (To End All Wars). This moves to America and picks up toward the end of the "war to make the world safe for democracy," with its "lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons," through the first great Red Scare, the collapse of the American left, and the closing of immigration.

David E Hoffman: The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (2002; paperback, 2011, Public Affairs): This book is rather dated now, but written two years after Putin's rise to power, it provides a portrait of the oligarchy he was given by Yeltsin's corrupt mismanagement of the transition from state control to "shock treatment" markets. The scheme adopted for distributing assets let those most able to raise quick crash -- often the same crooks who ran Russia's black markets -- to grab immense fortunes dirt cheap. Part one profiles six: Alexander Smolensky, Yuri Luzhkov, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky. After the many disasters that befell Russia in the 1990s, Putin had his hands full. His first move was to rally the military to take back Chechnya (which had effectively broken away in what's now called the First Chechen War). That gave him some popular support, but to consolidate power he needed to bring the oligarchs under control, which started with the prosecution of Khodorkovsky. I was reminded of this when I came across the following book. We should beware that some of Putin's loudest critics are oligarchs who fell out of favor (cf. Bill Browder). Of course, there are other oligarchs who saved their empires by remaining loyal to Putin.

• Mikhail Khodorkovsky/Martin Sixsmith: The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin's Power Gambit -- and How to Fix It (2022, St Martin's Press).

Alex Jones: The Great Reset: And the War for the World (2022, Skyhorse): TV crackpot, in the news recently for losing a libel case filed by the families of victims in a school shooting he claimed was fake news. Joe Rogan says "he's the most misunderstood guy on the planet." Roger Stone says he's "the most maligned patriot in the country." Tucker Carlson says "maybe Alex Jones is onto something." The best Donald Trump can come up with is Jones's "reputation is amazing."

Mark Leibovich: Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washigton and the Price of Submission (2022, Penguin Press): Journalist, has written profiles of the rich and famous in technology and football, as well as in Washington, which he depicted as a den of thieves in his book This Town (2013: "There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation's capital, just millionaires"). The rich have often demanded subservience, but few more so than Donald Trump. Leibovich chronicles the flattery and groveling of Republicans desperate to curry favor with Trump. I recall an early cabinet meeting where they went around the table, where everyone had to praise and thank Trump -- none more so than "chief of staff" Reince Priebus, who ultimately offered a blurb for this book: "It's a hundred times worse than you've been hearing." More recent (and some forthcoming) books on Trump:

• Rachael Bade/Karoun Demirjian: Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump (2022, William Morrow).
• Peter Baker/Susan Glasser: The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 (2022, Doubleday). [09-20]
• David Enrich: Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice (2022, Mariner Books).
• Major Garrett/David Becker: The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of "The Big Lie" (2022, Diversion Books).
• Jonathan Lemire: The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020 (2022, Flatiron Books): Politico reporter.
• Tim Miller: Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell (2022, Harper): Former Republican operative wakes up.

We also have more memoirs from the Trump administration and fellow travelers. None of these appears to merit its own section head:

• Geoffrey Berman: Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle With the Trump Justice Department (2022, Penguin): Former US Attorney for Southern District of New York under Trump.
• Michael Cohen: Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics (2022, Melville House): The former Trump fixer's second book, after Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J Trump (2020).
• Kellyanne Conway: Here's the Deal: A Memoir (2022, Threshold Editions).
• Michael Fanone/John Shiffman: Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul (2022, Atria Books).
• Jared Kushner: Breaking History: A White House Memoir (2022, Broadside Books).
• Paul Manafort: Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced (2022, Skyhorse): The word conspicuously missing, not just in the subtitle but in the blurbs, is "pardoned."
• Dick Morris: The Return: Trump's Big 2024 Comeback (2022, Humanix Books): Hack more associated with the Clintons, but always looking to grub for a job.
• Peter Navarro: Taking Back Trump's America: Why We Lost the White House and How We'll Win It Back (2022, Bombardier Books): Trump White House advisor, nominally director of trade and manufacturing policy, notably hawkish on China.
• Kristi Noem: Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From the Heartland (2022, Twelve): South Dakota governor.
• Mike Pence: So Help Me God (2022, Simon & Schuster): 560 pp. Not out yet, so we don't know whether he'll dish up some dirt, or just regurgitate his homilies. [11-15]

Bruce E Levine: Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian -- Strategies, Tools, and Models (paperback, 2018, AK Press): "The capacity to comply with abusive authority is humanity's fatal flaw." Although this talks of tools and models for resistance, the intro focuses on why anti-authoritarians should be valued in the first place. As it is, much social effort has been directed at breaking such people, sometimes going to the point of declaring them mentally ill. Much of this resonates with my own life, where anti-authoritarianism was an unknown but defining trait of my teenage years. Strange to see someone writing about it now, but then authoritarians have never left us, and in some respects are making a comeback. Levine also wrote:

• Bruce E Levine: A Profession Without a Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (paperback, 2022, AK Press): Questions the whole edifice of modern psychiatry, in the tradition of Thomas S Szasz: The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), a book I personally found useful in my struggle with the arbiters of mental illness.

Barry Lopez: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays (2022, Random House). Nature writer (1945-2020), bibliography is about half fiction, though titles there tend to read like Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven, Crow and Weasel, and Lessons From the Wolverine. One title here is "Our Frail Planet in Cold, Clear View." Introduction by Rebecca Solnit. Selected nonfiction:

• Barry Lopez: Of Wolves and Men (1978; paperback, 1979, Scribner).
• Barry Lopez: Artic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986, Scribner; paperback, 2001, Vintage).
• Barry Lopez: Crossing Open Ground (1988, Scribner; paperback, 1989, Vintage): Essays.
• Barry Lopez: The Rediscovery of North America (1991, University of Kentucky Press; paperback, 1992, Vintage Books): 58 pp.
• Barry Lopez: About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (1998, Knopf; paperback, 1999, Vintage).
• Barry Lopez: Horizon (2019, Random House; paperback, 2020, Vintage): Essays.

William MacAskill: What We Owe Each Other (2022, Basic Books): Oxford philosophy professor, cofounded the Centre for Effective Altruism ("which has raised over $1 billion for charities"), based on his working concept about how we should be living our lives. He's gotten a lot of press in the last couple months, which makes one naturally skeptical, although I am at least impressed that one of his rave reviews comes from Rutger Bregman, whose Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World is itself a powerful argument that we can make the world much better through practical steps. Still seem a stretch that, as one Amazon reviewer put it, "people might look back in millions of years and say this was the most important book ever written." Related:

• William MacAskill: Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work That Matters, and Make Smarter Choices About Giving Back (2015, Avery; paperback, 2016, Penguin).
• Tony Ord: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020; paperback, 2021, Hachette Books): Another Oxford philosopher working on effective altruism.
• Benjamin Todd: 80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good (paperback, 2016, Create Space): As a MacAskill student at Oxford, founded the title non-profit. 80,000 is the average hours in a human career (40 per week × 50 weeks per year × 40 years).

Michael Mandelbaum: The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower (2022, Oxford University Press): Implies the hits just keep on coming, but his time divisions -- Weak 1765-1865, Great 1865-1945, Super 1945-1990, and Hyper 1990-2015 -- suggest he's not so sure about the Trump effect (probably too early for him to weigh in on Biden), and that's the least of his problems. During the so-called "weak" period, Americans successfully fought two wars of independence against Britain -- that was Madison's view of the War of 1812, and while the war results were mixed, it finally ended Britain's attempts to control American shipping -- and an expansionist war against Mexico, as well as minor scraps with Barbary pirates and the opening of the China trade, and it ended with a Civil War where the Union became the technically most advanced fighting force in the world. American power was always base on economic power, which exceeded Britain's by the end of the 19th century. With WWII the US economy reached 50% of worldwide GDP, and in its fight against Germany and Japan, the US built a network of bases that straddled the globe, less concerned with empire -- which the war had proven was no longer a viable principle for ordering the world -- than with protecting a vast expansion of corporate business interests. Still, it's sheer hubris to call American power in that period "super," and even more so "hyper." US economic power started to slip after its WWII apogee. By 1990, Europe had achieved parity with the US, and Japan was richer per capita, and China was starting its rapid rise. The Soviet Union collapsed less because the US outbid it in the arms race than because Eastern Europe wanted to join in the bounty of Western Europe. Since then, the US has not only become an ever-smaller slice of the world economy, its enormous arms advantages have proven to be useless and often counterproductive, although that doesn't seem to have sunk into the blinkered brains of the people who work the "hyperpower" grift. The Table of Contents doesn't seem too bad here, so this is probably a decent recounting of the history, but looking over his past book list, he strikes me as a hack or an idiot, and possibly both. QED: in 2011, he was co-author of That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, with Thomas Friedman (who is definitely both).

Bill McKibben: The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened (2022, Henry Holt): Seems like he's been writing the same book over and over since his critical book on climate change, The End of Nature (1989). I guess it was the one that convinced me some years later when I read it on a midsummer trip to Florida, although I never stopped hating the much-too-sharp "end of nature" dividing line, and always suspected him of being a sanctimonious scold. The twist here is that it's structured as a memoir, so we should get a glimpse of his class and educational background (Harvard), but at 240 pp I wouldn't expect much detail on the devolution of the American Dream. As for "graying," he's ten years younger than me, so he missed out on the 1950s, the decade when we really enjoyed burning cheap gasoline.

Walter Russell Mead: The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (2022, Knopf): Big (672 pp) tract on the "special relationship" between Israel and the United States, and its supposed benefits for the Jewish people, with pretensions of "demolish[ing] the myths that both pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists have fostered over the years" -- always in favor of the prevailing security doctrines. Blurbs are all from reliable supporters of Israel, most firmly ensconced on the right. As Dan Senor puts it a bit too revealingly, "Walter shows that US support for Israel is ingrained in American political culture and critical to America's strategy for world order." I can imagine architects of American world order not binding themselves so helplessly to Israel, but none since James Baker (or maybe Dwight Eisenhower) have so much as entertained the thought. This book is intended to make it even harder to break the common bonds of colonialism and occupation. Mead has also written:

• Walter Russell Mead: Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (1987; paperback, 1988, Houghton Mifflin).
• Walter Russell Mead: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001, Knopf; paperback, 2002, Routledge).
• Walter Russell Mead: Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2004, Knopf; paperback, 2005, Vintage).
• Walter Russell Mead: God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007, Knopf; paperback, 2008, Vintage).

Dana Milbank: The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (2022, Doubleday): Washington Post columnist, but (hopefully) not just recycling his recent columns, as the promise here is to offer some historical context, showing that today's Republicans are linear descendents of at least several decades of past Republicans, with Newt Gingrich a key transitional figure on the way to today's gallery of crazy. (I would have started with Nixon and Reagan, although I can see arguments for older and less successful figures, like Goldwater and McCarthy.) The mainstream press seems to be the last haven of reporters desperately trying to find rare voices of reason among Republicans. On the other hand, consider how similar is the title of Thomas Frank's 2008 book: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation. Related:

• David Corn: American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (2022, Twelve): Same theme, but goes back to the Goldwater nomination in 1964, drawing a line not from Goldwater to Trump but from the shared characteristics of both's supporters (or from McCarthy, with at least a dotted line back to the Know Nothings, the Anti-Masons, and the Salem witch trials). (I bought this after Milbank, but decided to read it first.)
• Robert Draper: Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (2022, Penguin): Author of one of the best books on George W Bush: Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush (2007), and eventually followed it up with the near-definitive To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (2020). This starts with the 2020 election, which strikes me as a little late.
• Nicole Hemmer: Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (2022, Basic Books): This moves the pivot to Gingrich and/or the rise of Fox, in both cases focusing not on the platitudes used to disguise the Reagan-Bush right turn but on relentless villification of the enemy.
• Nicole Hemmer: Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (paperback, 2018, University of Pennsylvania Press).

Samuel Moyn: Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2022, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Author has a background of writing about human rights, which gives this book a peculiar frame of mind, asking whether war can be made humane (I'd say certainly not) as opposed to a different question, whether a war can have an effect which is on balance humanitarian (I'm doubtful but it's harder to be certain, because it's conditioned on an unknowable future). Americans have argue in favor of both, and especially since the end of the Cold War those arguments have come to dominate debate over whether to go to war: at least public debate, where advocates of war like to dress their motives (most often revenge or intimidation) with higher-minded arguments. Also by Moyn:

• Samuel Moyn: A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (paperback, 2005, Brandeis University Press).
• Samuel Moyn: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010; paperback, 2012, Belknap Press).
• Samuel Moyn: Human Rights and the Uses of History (expanded 2nd edition, 2014; paperback, 2017, Verso).
• Samuel Moyn: Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018; paperback, 2019, Belknap Press).

David Pepper: Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines (paperback, 2021, St Helena Press): Lawyer, has written several novels (political thrillers), examines how Republicans have taken over statehouses and used them as political forums for suppressing votes, gerrymandering, pushing their culture war agendas, and tripping over each other in competition to shower business interests with special favors. I would expect something on ALEC here: the Republican organization that crafts model laws for state legislature, leading to the systematic sweep of bad ideas across every state Republicans have seized power in. (A prime example of their work is the "stand your ground" laws promoting gun violence.)

• Jacob Grumbach: Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics (2022, Princeton University Press): Practically the same title as Pepper's book, but with more both-sides-ism.
• Ira Shapiro: The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America (2022, Rowman & Littlefield).

Jedediah Purdy: Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening -- and Our Best Hope (2022, Basic Books): Serious thinker, was touted as a homeschooled genius from West Virginia in 1999 when his first book appeared (For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today -- as I recall, he was anti-irony), but even then had graduated from Harvard and would go on to Yale Law School, a post as an Appeals Court clerk, a fellow at the New America Foundation, then on to teaching law at Duke. Six books later, he sensibly writes: "Politics is not optional, even though we may wish it were." The basic reason is that if you don't stop them, people who seek to take over and use government for their own private interests will enjoy a free run to loot and pillage. On the other hand, people rarely perceive public interests clearly, due to flaws in the system and in the people who campaign in it. Seems likely to me that the 23 years since he first wrote have pushed him to the left, even if he remains a stick-in-the-mud.

• Zach Gershberg/Sean Illing: The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (2022, University of Chicago Press).

George Scialabba: How to Be Depressed (2020, University of Pennsylvania Press). Author made his reputation as a social critic with freelance book reviews, eventually collected in several volumes. This is sort of a memoir: a collection he's kept of notes from various psychiatrists who have attempted to treat his depression over the years (he was 72 when this came out), which as Barbara Ehrenreich points out, winds up being "a devastating critique of psychiatry." His other books:

• George Scialabba: Divided Mind (2006, Arrowsmith Press).
• George Scialabba: What Are Intellectuals Good For? (paperback, 2009, Pressed Wafer).
• George Scialabba: The Modern Predicament (paperback, 2011, Pressed Wafer).
• George Scialabba: For the Republic: Political Essays (paperback, 2013, Pressed Wafer).
• George Scialabba: Low Dishonest Decades: Essays & Reviews 1980-2015 (paperback, 2016, Pressed Wafer).
• George Scialabba: Slouching Toward Utopia: Essays & Reviews (paperback, 2018, Pressed Wafer).

Matthias Schmelzer/Andrea Vetter/Aaron Vansintjan: The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (2022, Verso). Argues that "economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work." Needs to be more specific. It's a common liberal convenience to see growth as the solution that benefits all, therefore saving us from having to tackle inequality. Of course, in a resource-limited world, growth cannot be infinite, which makes the inequality problem all the more pressing. As growth is so tightly bound up with capitalism, many sketches of a more equitable degrowth society go by "postcapitalism," a word this title points at.

• Samuel Alexander/Brendan Gleeson: Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2018; paperback, 2019, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Samuel Alexander: Beyond Capitalist Realism: The Politics, Energetics, and Aesthetics of Degrowth (paperback, 2021, Simplicity Institute).
• Lucio Baccaro/Mark Blyth/Jonas Pontusson, eds: Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (paperback, 2022, Oxford University Press).
• Nathan Barlow/Livia Regen/Noémie Cadiou, eds: Degrowth & Strategy: How to Bring About Social-Ecological Transformation (paperback, 2022, Mayflybooks/Ephemera).
• Giacomo D'Alisa/Federico Demaria/Giorgos Kallis: Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (paperback, 2014, Routledge).
• Jason Hickel: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (paperback, 2021, Windmill Books).
• Tim Jackson: Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (paperback, 2021, Polity).
• Giorgos Kallis: Degrowth [The Economy: Key Ideas] (paperback, 2018, Agenda Publishing).
• Giorgos Kallis: In Defense of Degrowth: Opinions and Manifestos (paperback, 2018, Uneven Earth Press).
• Giorgos Kallis: Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care (paperback, 2019, Stanford Briefs).
• Giorgos Kallis/Susan Paulson/Giacomo D'Alisia/Federico Demaria: The Case for Degrowth (paperback, 2020, Polity).
• Vincent Liegey/Anitra Nelson: Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (paperback, 2020, Pluto Press).
• Paul Mason: Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being (paperback, 2020, Penguin): Previously wrote Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2016).
• Oli Mould: Seven Ethics Against Capitalism: Towards a Planetary Commons (paperback, 2021, Polity).
• Anitra Nelson: Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy (paperback, 2022, Pluto Press).

Peter Shinkle: Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans Together to Win World War II (2022, St Martin's Press): I generally accept the argument that Franklin Roosevelt thought American involvement in WWII was inevitable, and that he rather relished the leading the nation in that fight. That's likely why he chose to run for an unprecedented third term. True, he ran as an anti-war candidate in 1940, but so had Wilson in 1916. While Wilson quickly changed course in 1917, leaving a lot of ill-feeling even after winning the war, Roosevelt was patient, waiting for right moment, which was served up by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, followed immediately by declarations of war by Japan and Germany. Anti-war sentiment on both the right and left evaporated almost immediately. This book suggests another reason for such unity in entering the war: in 1940, Roosevelt laid the groundwork by inviting prominent Republicans to take over the War Department (Henry Stimson, Secretary of State under Hoover) and the Navy (Frank Knox, 1936 VP nominee). A chart early in the book shows that many more Republicans were given strategic positions even before Pearl Harbor. The bipartisan alliance survived the war, and even in the hyper-polarized present both parties can be counted on to line up behind wars like Afghanistan and Ukraine. (Iraq had a few dissenting Democrats, but every one of the 2004 presidential hopefuls rallied to the cause. The only 2008 exception was Obama, who closed ranks with the hawks after becoming president, and who kept one Republican Secretary of Defense, then later replaced him with another.) I have serious reservations against calling WWII "the good war" -- it was horrible any way you slice it, ultimately turning the US as genocidal as its opponents, leaving the "losers" destroyed and the "winners" insufferably conceited and soulless -- but FDR made it look so easy few appreciate what a remarkable job he did in running it. No later US president has come remotely close.

Philip Short: Putin (2022, Henry Holt): Weighing in at 864 pp, this is billed as "the first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin," but its July release means it's missing an all-important chapter on the decision to invade Ukraine in March and the still on-going war, with Putin challenged as never before by international sanctions, internal dissent, and military frustration. Author has previously published biographies of François Mitterand, Pol Pot, and Mao, as well as a book from 1982 called The Dragon and the Bear: Inside China & Russia Today. I've cited numerous books on Putin the past, most notably:

• Catherine Belton: Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West (2020, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2022, Picador).
• Karen Dawiska: Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (2014; paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster).
• Timothy Frye: Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (2021; paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press): "Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works."
• Mark Galeotti: We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong (paperback, 2019, Penguin Random House).
• Masha Gessen: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012; paperback, 2013, Riverhead).
• Steven Lee Myers: The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015, Knopf; paperback, 2016, Vintage Books)
• David Satter: The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin (2016; paperback, 2017, Yale University Press).
• Mikhail Zygar: All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (2016; paperback, 2017, PublicAffairs).

Some recent ones I had missed:

• Heidi Blake: From Russia With Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West (2019, Mulholland Books).
• Eliot Borenstein: Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism (paperback, 2019, Cornell University Press).
• Anna Borshchevskaya: Putin's War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America's Absence (2021, IB Tauris): "Washington's go-to expert on Russian involvement in the Middle East."
• Michel Eltchaninoff: Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin (paperback, 2018, Hurst): Originally published in French in 2015.
• Samuel A Greene/Graeme B Robertson: Putin vs the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (2019; paperback, 2022, Yale University Press).
• Amy Knight: Putin's Killers: The Kremlin and the Art of Political Assassination (2017, Thomas Dunne Books; paperback, 2019, Biteback).
• David G Lewis: Russia's New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order (2021, Edinburgh University Press).
• Michael Millerman: Inside "Putin's Brain": The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin (paperback, 2022, independent): Nickname for Dugin, who got in the press recently when his daughter was killed by a car bomb, kind of like Karl Rove was referred to as "Bush's Brain," but not really (Rove actually was in a position to pull Bush's strings, like Steve Bannon would have been if they only worked); Dugin is more of a free pundit who thinks up arguments to flatter Putin -- Trump and the Republicans have dozens of acolytes to do that.
• Anna Revell: Putin: Vladimir Putin's Holy Mother Russia: A Biography of the Most Powerful Man in Russia (paperback, 2017, independent).
• Andrew S Weiss/Brian "Box" Brown: Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (2022, First Second): Graphic novel biography, all the better to present Putin as "a devious cartoon villain, constantly plotting and scheming to destroy his enemies around the globe and in Ukraine." [11-08].
• Amber Snow, ed: On the Brink of War: Selected Speeches by Vladimir Putin (paperback, 2022, independent).
• Vladimir Putin: First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President (paperback, 2000, Public Affairs): Not recent, but I hadn't noticed it before. Not the sort of subtitle a sane person might come up with.

Daniel Sjursen: A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism (paperback, 2021, Steerforth Press/Truth to Power): Author spent 18 years in US Army, taught history at West Point, retired a Major (long using that rank as part of his byline). I don't much like it when an author claims their book to be a true story, but in Sjursen's world of antiwar conservatism everything must be cut-and-dry. In any case, he has a lot of myth and rationalization to cut through, and does so in a sensible 688 pp. Seems like I've read a bunch of this online, and while truth may be elusive, he's rarely wrong.

Vaclav Smil: How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going (2022, Viking): Bill Gates' favorite author, a Czech-born Canadian scientist with several dozen books, mostly relating to energy policy. The title tempted me to pick this up -- after all, good policy must be rooted in "how the world really works" -- but learned little I didn't already know, and found his imagination overly constrained by fossil fuels. (Perhaps this should have been expected, given that one of his titles from as recent as 2015 is Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century.) He has lots of books, but I'll only note a couple recent ones:

• Vaclav Smil: Energy and Civilization: A History (paperback, 2018, The MIT Press).
• Vaclav Smil: Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World (paperback, 2021, Penguin Books).

Michael Tomasky: The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity (2022, Doubleday): Political writer, edits Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, has a couple books, including one in 1996 announcing that the left is dead (Left for Dead), and one in 2019 that tried to salvage the center (If We Can Keep It), seems to have rediscovered the progressive sympathies he always claimed to have -- probably because the title has been presented as an ovearching concept for Biden's Build Back Better agenda. He has some suggestions, like critiquing economics that put self-interest over public needs, and recognizing that such traditional American ideals as freedom and democracy need to be grounded in a sense of shared equality, which has been all but killed by the neoliberal consensus.

Gaia Vince: Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World (2022, Flatiron Books): For the last 30-40 years, we have been divided into two camps: one recognized that people were changing the atmosphere in ways that would affect global climate, with far-ranging risks but couched in assurances that we could save ourselves through more/less easy reforms; the other denied that climate change this was happening, or denied that it would make much real difference, or trusted in God and/or capitalism to swiftly correct any problems that did occur. Perhaps we need a third approach, which admits we've failed to prevent climate change but takes seriously how to deal with the myriad problems it causes. One such problem is that as climate changes, some parts of the world will become uninhabitable, and others will become unsuitable for current uses. This will push many people to leave their current homes, and seek new abodes, and often new occupations. That's what this book is about: noting, for instance, that in 2018 1.2 million people in the US were displaced by extreme conditions, up to 1.7 million in 2020, as the US "averages a billion dollar disaster every eighteen days." Other parts of the world are in even more peril. ("In India alone, close to a billion people will be at risk.") There are other reasons why people move away from their homes, and that's been happening for some while, but it would be surprising if it didn't accelerate in coming years. How well we handle this change will say much about us as people, and about our future.

• Gaia Vince: Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made (2014; paperback, 2015, Milkweed).
• Gaia Vince: Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time (2020, Basic Books).

Brian T Watson: Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We'll Face (paperback, 2019, Anvilside Press): I could imagine writing a book like this, which starts with a long laundry list of systemic problems (Capitalism, Technology, Webworld, Politics, Media, Education, Human Nature, The Environment, Human Population, Transportation, Miscellaneous Forces) then winds up showing how any (let alone all) of them are unlikely to be solved (that chapter is called "Possible Reforms and Their Likelihood"). I'd shuffle the deck a bit -- in the 1990s, when I started thinking along these lines, I started with resources and environment, but back then I at least had some faith in reason to see a way through technical obstacles, but that idea has taken a beating ever since. So I see no more reason to be optimistic than the author, not that I would deny that the very act of looking into the abyss implies a certain unreasoned hope. Missing here is recognition of the unknown: e.g., no mention of pandemic a mere year before Covid-19 hit. While climate was most likely mentioned under Environment or Population, it's at least as much a headline as "Webworld." Another big topic is war: both as a cause of destruction and as a likely consequence, in both its conventional and annihilationist modes. Bibliography is just a list of mostly familiar books relevant to each chapter.

Additional books, with very brief (or in most cases no) comments. There is no count limit here per post (although I kept a lot of books back for lack of time to consider them; current count = 232). It's possible I will write a further entry on these at a later date.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback, 2021, WW Norton): Previous subtitle: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall. List of "protagonists" runs from Idi Amin to Donald J Trump.

Wendell Berry: The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (paperback, 2022, Shoemaker).

Alan S Blinder: A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021 (2022, Princeton University Press).

Cori Bush: The Forerunner: A story of Pain and Perseverance in America (2022, Knopf): US Representative (D-MO).

Jelani Cobb/David Remnick, eds: The Matter of Black Lives: Writing From the New Yorker (2021, Ecco): 848 pp.

Ted Cruz: Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System (2022, Regnery): The only "weaponizing" going on is on the right. If Cruz were more perceptive, he'd be a happy man.

Mike Davis: Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986; 1999; 2018, paperback, 2018): His first book, reprinted with similar covers along with: City of Quartz (1990), Ecology of Fear (1998), Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), Planet of Slums (2006), Buda's Wagon (2007), and The Monster Enters: Covid-19, the Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism (2020, a revision of his 2005 book The Monster at Our Door).

Ludo De Witte: The Assassination of Lumumba (2001; paperback, 2022, Verso).

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (2021, Beacon Press).

Russ Feingold/Peter Prindiville: The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It (2022, Public Affairs): Former US Senator (D-WI).

Phil Gramm/Robert Ekelund/John Early: The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate (2022, Rowman & Littlefield): Former US Senator [R-TX], a prime architect not just of increasing inequality but specifically of the 2008 financial meltdown.

Max Hastings: The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 (2022, Harper): "Author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict."

Richard Heinberg: Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (paperback, 2021, New Society).

Will Hurd: American Reboot: An Idealist's Guide to Getting Big Things Done (2022, Simon & Schuster): Former US Congressman (R-TX) and CIA officer.

Andrew Kirtzman: Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor (2022, Simon & Schuster).

Henry Kissinger: Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy (2022, Penguin). Sections on: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Le Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher.

Arthur B Laffer/Brian Domitrovic/Jeanne Cairns: Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States (2022, Post Hill Press): Supply-side guru, argues that economies boom when cutting marginal taxes, lag when taxes goes up. Almost always wrong.

Andrew Meier: Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty (2022, Random House): 1072 pp.

Scott Nations: A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation (2017; paperback, 2018, William Morrow): 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, 2010 (the "flash crash").

Benjamin Netanyahu: Bibi: My Story (2022, Threshold Editions): Former Prime Minister of Israel. Note far-right publisher.

Michael Ratner: Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer (paperback, 2021, OR Books). Worked for Center for Constitutional Rights and National Lawyers Guild. Died 2016.

Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022, WW Norton): The most obvious are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with their rocket ship companies promising literal escape from Earth, but the mentality in the tech world is more widespread.

William Shatner/Joshua Brandon: Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (2022, Atria Books).

Sheldon Whitehouse/Jennifer Mueller: The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (2022, The New Press).

Richard D Wolff: The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself (paperback, 2020, Democracy at Work).

Julian E Zelizer, ed: The Presidency of Donald J Trump: A First Historical Assessment (paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press): Historian, similar books on Bush and Obama.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 17, 2022

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 38880 [38847] rated (+33), 41 [38] unrated (+3: 13 new, 28 old).

Spent a fair chunk of time last week working on my construction project (something I should have been able to do in 2 days, finished, but given my decrepit and disorganized state took 7 days, scattered over 12, with no finish. The notebook has a gruesome blow-by-blow recounting, but no pictures.) Still need to clean up the space, and start using it. No interest or constructive suggestions on my Facebook post about magazines and jigsaw puzzles, so the magazines at least will be put in next week's recycle bin. I do much appreciate Clifford Ocheltree's note of sympathy.

I also reposted some AI-transformed photographs of my sister done by her son, Ram Lama Hull. You can also check out his artwork (beware that when I typed his name into Google, I was offered a chance to change my "parental controls") on Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook. It looks like his website has lapsed, so we need to work on that.

By the way, although most of my Facebook posts are public, my only reason for having an account there is to follow family and old personal friends. I almost never publicize my writing there, so I tend to ignore friend requests of people I don't know personally (although I've let a few "virtual friends" through based on personal email interactions). I gather it's possible to follow someone on Facebook without getting approval as "friends," so that would seem to be an option if you have some peculiar interest in what I do there.

I always announce new writing on Twitter, and occasionally make other posts there, so suggest you follow me there. I appreciate your interest there. Latest writing, by the way, was yesterday's Speaking of Which. Didn't start it until Sunday noon, and still came up with a decent-sized post.

I heard from Chris Monsen a few days ago that Frode Gjerstad is taking down his Bandcamp account, so made a mad rush to listen to a few things I had missed. All good records, many live sets posted in 2019, but none I spent enough time with to get to really like, and many more I didn't get to at all. No links, as indeed they are gone now.

Robert Christgau published his October Consumer Guide last week. Nothing there I hadn't already heard, although I had two full-A albums at much lower grades (Amanda Shires: **; Harry Styles: B). I also left the A- Beths at ***, the same grade I went with for Christgau's B+ Ezra Furman and Rhett Miller. (For whatever it's worth, I also had the A- Styles at B, and the ** Styles at C+.) But I had A- grades for A-listed Gogol Bordello, Sudan Archives, and Loudon Wainwright III (and also for *** Charli XCX), and various shades of B+ for everything else (though never exactly the same).

After that, I was scrounging, which always slows me down and bums me out. I'm thinking now that I'll stop the tracking files after this year, and settle into a life of playing old stuff (of which I still have thousands of CDs). Still, it's hard to go cold turkey. One thing that will keep me going this year is that I'll be running this year's edition of the Jazz Critics Poll that Francis Davis started up at the Village Voice back in 2006. I should be able to send ballot requests out mid-November, with a probable deadline of December 11. If anyone has thoughts on this project, please contact me directly by email. I doubt there will be many changes from last year. The tools for tabulating the ballots work very well, but there is a lot of work getting people to vote and writing things up.

I expect next week will be another slack one, as I need to spend more time on housekeeping issues, including some cooking. I also need to figure out my way around a new Chromebook. If it works out, I won't be so tied down to my desk.

Odds are finally better than 50-50 that I will manage a Book Roundup this week. I have enough material, but just need to sort and prioritize it.

New records reviewed this week:

The 1975: Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022, Dirty Hit): English alt/indie band, fifth album since 2013, got a critical rep early which I never quite heard, but this has a sunny appeal that only comes when you craft something catchy. B+(***) [sp]

Ahanes: Petrichor (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Three Greek jazz musicians -- Nicky Kokkoli (sax), Giannis Arapis (guitar), and Alex Zethson (keyboard) -- ventured to Stockholm for a winter festival, picked up three locals for this sextet: Mats Åleklint (trombone), Torbjörn Zetterberg (bass), and Nils Agnas (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Alvvays: Blue Rev (2022, Polyvinyl): Canadian indie pop group, Molly Rankin sings and plays guitar, third album, nice, upbeat appeal. B+(**) [sp]

Anat Cohen: Quartetinho (2021 [2022], Anzic): Israeli clarinet player, based in New York, has long been drawn to Brazilian music, delivered mostly by Vitor Gonçalves (piano, accordion, Fender Rhodes) here, the quartet fleshed out by Tal Mashiach (bass, guitar) and James Shipp (vibraphone, percussion, glockenspiel, analog synth). B+(**) [sp]

Whit Dickey Quartet: Root Perspectives (2022, Tao Forms): Drummer, worked with pianist Matthew Shipp from the early 1990s, both in and out of the David S. Ware Quartet. Produces yet another variation of that here, with Tony Malaby on tenor sax and Brandon Lopez on bass. Kicks off loud, and rarely lets up, but Malaby doesn't sound quite right: like he's straining to channel Ware. B+(**) [cd] [10-21]

Charlotte Dos Santos: Morfo (2022, Because Music): Pop singer, born in Oslo, father Brazilian, mother Norwegian, studied as a jazz singer at Berklee, based in Berlin, first album after a 2017 EP. B+(***) [sp]

Eliane Elias: Quietude (2022, Candid): Brazilian pianist-singer, back in São Paulo immersed in dreamy samba. B+(**) [sp]

Brian Eno: Forever and Ever No More (2022, Verve): Cover squeezes all the spaces out from the all-caps title -- a conceit I decided not to humor after finding that my first attempt at typing the title came out wrong. One of his few albums lately to offer lyrics, but the music is drearily ambient, probably to fit the gloom of the words, but vice versa is also possible. B+(*) [sp]

Amina Figarova: Joy (2022, AmFi): Pianist, born in Baku (now Azerbaijan), trained in classical music, moved to Rotterdam in 1988, then studied at Berklee and switched to jazz. Dozen-plus albums since 1993. Husband Bart Platteau plays flute, in a band that includes trumpet (Alez Pope Morris) and saxophone (Wayne Escoffery), with a vocal guest spot. B+(*) [cd]

Paolo Fresu/Dino Rubino/Daniele Di Bonaventura/Marco Bardoscia: Ferlinghetti (2022, Tuk Music): Trumpet/flugelhorn player, originally from Sardinia, many albums since 1985, this is soundtrack music for a documentary about famed beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. With piano, bandoneon, and bass. B+(***) [sp]

Paul Heaton + Jacqui Abbott: N.K-Pop (2022, EMI): Formerly of the Beautiful South, he the main writer/singer (first noticed in the Housemartins), but she added another dimension, and still helps. It's been some time since they were as good as they used to be, but stick around long enough and they'll pay off. B+(***) [sp]

Loraine James: Building Something Beautiful for Me (2022, Phantom Limb): British electronica producer, aka Whatever the Weather, fashioned this as an homage to the music of Julius Eastman, who's receiving renewed interest well after his short and troubled life (1940-90). There's a compositional sophistication here that rarely shows up in electronica, but also a layer of electronic glitz that the chamber groups that have been reviving Eastman lately haven't imagined. Makes me wonder what she might do with Harry Partch. A- [sp]

Ted Kooshian: Hubub! (2022, Summit): Pianist, sometimes plays electric, leads a quintet with trumpet (John Bailey), tenor sax (Jeff Lederer), bass, and drums, with occasional guests, including a vocal (Jim Mola). Originals (aside from "Somewhere"), bright and sunny. B+(**) [cd]

Tove Lo: Dirt Femme (2022, Pretty Swede): Swedish pop singer, original name Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson, fifth album since 2014. Has a reputation for dark and dirty, but this is pretty snappy. "Love can forget a lot/ it's why we go on at all." A- [sp]

M.I.A.: Mata (2022, Island): London-born Mathangi Arulpragasam, parents from Sri Lanka, burst on the scene with a Diplo-produced mixtape in 2004, then major albums in 2005-07. Sixth album, all short titles, album a trim 33:02. Not sure about the words or meanings, but the beats are clearly something I've been craving lately. A-

Margaux Oswald: Dysphotic Zone (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Pianist, born in Geneva, based in Copenhagen, first solo album after a couple co-credits, short (2 pieces, 32:50). Leans heavy into the instrument. B+(*) [sp]

Kerry Politzer: In a Heartbeat (2022, P.Ice): Pianist, teaches in Portland, half-dozen albums since 2000, original compositions here, quintet with trumpet (Thomas Barber), sax/flute (Joe Mains, bass, and drums (husband George Colligan, a major pianist in his own right). B+(**) [cd] [10-21]

Marek Pospieszalski Quartet: Dürer's Mother (2019 [2022], Clean Feed): Polish tenor saxophonist, has several albums and side projects, quartet here with piano (Elias Stemseder), bass, and drums. Original pieces inspired by "composers, from Schubert to Britten to Lachenmann." B+(***) [sp]

Susan Reed: Thousands of Ways (2021 [2022], OA2): Violinist, also sings (3 songs here?), has a couple books and several albums (some oriented to children), is grooming her daughters for a string band. All originals, backed by guitar, bass (David Friesen), and drums. B+(***) [cd] [10-21]

Eve Risser/Red Desert Orchestra: Eurythmia (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): French pianist, albums since 2008, one from 2016 leading a White Desert Orchestra. Afro-European fusion, group includes five horn players, electric guitar and bass, plus a Mali component with balafon and djembe. B+(***) [sp]

Oliver Sim: Hideous Bastard (2022, Young/XL): Bassist-vocalist from the XX, first solo album. B+(*) [sp]

Günter Baby Sommer & Raymond MacDonald: Sounds, Songs & Other Noises (2016-19 [2022], Clean Feed): Drums and sax (alto/soprano) duo, the latter from Glasgow. Seems like I should be more familiar with him, but most of his albums are improv duos, including a previous one with Sommer. B+(**) [sp]

Sun Ra Arkestra Directed by Marshall Allen: Living Sky (2022, Omni Sound): Sun Ra died in 1993, so you could count this as a ghost band, but his long-time alto saxophonist is no ghost, still carrying the flame at age 98. The big band is bigger than ever (20 pieces, including a string quartet). Mostly extended vamp pieces, background music that swings gently and/or roils, highlighted by a scratchy alto sax -- presumably Allen, just enough to rough up the edges. A- [sp]

Bernardo Tinoco & Tom Maciel: NoMad Nenúfar (2022, Clean Feed): Saxophonist (alto/tenor), also credited with duduk and flute, has a previous album leading the group Garfo. Duo with Maciel playing piano, synths, and drum machine, although they add a live drummer (João Pereira) for three (of 5) tracks. B+(*) [sp]

Steve Turre: Generations (2022, Smoke Sessions): Trombonist, also plays shells, leads a quintet with a trumpet player named Wallace Roney Jr. -- son of the famed trumpet player who died at 59 in 2020, and also of the late pianist Geri Allen (who passed in 2017) -- and a drummer named Orion Turre (the leader's son, also via cellist Akua Dixon). Also a long list of "special guests." B+(**) [sp]

Bobby Watson: Back Home in Kansas City (2022, Smoke Sessions): Alto saxophonist, grew up in Kansas City, joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, recorded several masterpieces in the 1990s (mostly on the Italian RED label), returned as Director of Jazz Studies at UMKC in 2000, retiring 20 years later. Leads a quintet here not far removed from Blakey's, with Jeremy Pelt (trumpet), Cyrus Chestnut (piano), Curtis Lundy (bass), and Victor Jones (drums), with a guest spot for singer Carmen Lundy. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Sun Ra Arkestra/Salah Ragab/The Cairo Jazz Band: The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt (1983 [2022], Strut): "First ever official reissue," unfortunately the Bandcamp page doesn't do much to clarify who's playing what when. The earlier Praxis (1983) release does attribute the first album side to Sun Ra, with drummer Ragab's quintet playing the middle track on the B-side, sandwiched between two longer Cairo Jazz Band tracks (also led by Ragab). Impressive as the Arkestra is, the Egyptians more than hold up their end. B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

Detail [Johnny Dyani/Frode Gjerstad/John Stevens]: Backwards and Forwards: First Detail (1982 [1983], Impetus): Avant-jazz trio (bass, alto sax, drums), first record together (and Gjerstad's first ever), group continued at least to Last Detail in 1996 (with Kent Carter after Dyani died in 1986). Also note that while the cover bills this as "First Detail," the 2015 Rune Grammofon album First Detail was recorded nine days earlier, and "First Detail" returned as a song on their Last Detail album. B+(**) [bc]

Detail [Frode Gjerstad/Johnny Dyani/John Stevens] + Paul Rutherford/Barry Guy: A Concert: Detail + (1983 [2020], Circulasione Totale): Cover lists last names, and not in the order given above, which inserts Rutherford/Guy after Gjerstad (who, by the way, plays soprano and tenor sax instead of his usual alto). B+(***) [bc]

Detail/Bobby Bradford: In Time Was (1986 [2019], Circulasione Totale): Live recording from Bracknell Jazz Festival, with Johnny Dyani on bass, a few months before he died, plus Frode Gjerstad (sax) and John Stevens (drums), plus Bradford on cornet, who is the star here. B+(***) [bc]

Detail/Billy Bang: Detail + Billy Bang (1989 [2019], Circulasione Totale): After Johnny Dyani died in 1986, Kent Carter took over bass in the trio with Frode Gjerstad (tenor sax) and John Stevens (drums). This adds violinist Billy Bang for a 49:41 improv. B+(***) [bc]

Frode Gjerstad Trio: Remember to Forget (1997 [1998], Circulasione Totale): Norwegian alto saxophonist, started with the group Detail in 1982, has by now a large discography of his own, and more side credits. Recorded this at Cafe String, Stavanger, when William Parker and Hamid Drake were visiting. B+(***) [bc]

Frode Gjerstad Trio: Mothers & Fathers & (2005 [2019], Circulasione Totale): Part of a large stash of live tapes Gjerstad put up on Bandcamp. Gjerstad plays alto-, bass-sax, and clarinet, with Jon Rune Strøm on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. B+(***) [bc]

Frode Gjerstad/Louis Moholo-Moholo: MIR-13 (2013 [2019], Circulasione Totale): Sax and drums duo, live shot from a club in Oslo (MIR). B+(*) [bc]

Frode Gjerstad Trio With Steve Swell: At Constellation (2014 [2019], Circulasione Totale): Leader credited with "reeds," backed by Jon Rune Strøm (bass) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), from an appearance in Chicago, with the trombonist chiming in. B+(***) [bc]

Archie Shepp/Attica Blues Big Band: Paris: Live at the Palais Des Glaces (1979 [2004], Blue Marge): Circa 1970, there was a brief period when avant-jazz met black nationalism and tried to merge into a semi-popular community music. Shepp exemplified the concept, especially with his 1969 Kwanza and 1972 Attica Blues. The latter inspired this big band, with Ray Copeland directing and several vocalists. B+(***) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last two weeks:

• Tito Carrillo: Urbanessence (Origin) [10-21]: cd damaged
• Whit Dickey Quartet: Root Perspectives (Tao Forms) [10-21]
• Amina Figarova: Joy (AmFi) [09-23]
• Paolo Fresu/Dino Rubino/Marco Bardoscia/Daniele Di Bonaventura: Ferlinghetti (2022, Tuk Music): [sp]: B+(***)
• Lincoln Goines: The Art of the Bass Choir (Origin) [10-21]: cd damaged
• Eric Jacobson: Discover (Origin) [10-21]: cd damaged
• Ted Kooshian: Hubub! (Summit) [10-07]
• Michael Marcus: Abstractions in Lime Caverns (ESP-Disk) [10-28]
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Fruition (ESP-Disk) [10-28]
• Houston Person: Reminiscing at Rudy's (HighNote) [11-18]
• Susan Reed: Thousands of Ways (OA2) [10-21]
• Josh Sinton's Predicate Quartet: Four Freedoms (Form Is Possibility) [10-28]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

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