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Monday, December 25, 2023

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 41474 [41422] rated (+52), 21 [21] unrated (+0).

The final number of voters in the 18th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll is 159. It took quite a bit of last-minute hustling to reverse what initially looked like a small decline and turn it into a record turnout. Next thing I have to do is to write an essay to introduce that data, and try to make some sense out of it. As usual, I keep stewing on it, leaving me little option but to panic tonight or (more likely, and more panicky) tomorrow. I do have last year's essay, which looks like it might be reusable as a template.

I also have last year's other piece, with tables of past winners and a memoir/history of the Poll. We also usually do an In Memoriam, which I've barely started, but Andrey Henkin's Jazz Passings website already has much more than I need.

I need to get all the writing done by the end of the week, plus clean up some details on the Poll website, so ArtsFuse can publish the results the following week (January 1-5). Results and ballots won't be available there until ArtsFuse is set to go, but the rest of the material is available for anyone who wants to take a peek. I'd appreciate the extra eyes, especially if you catch mistakes or have suggestions to make things clearer or more useful.

I started collecting a few notes on EOY lists, before realizing that I don't have time for such indulgences right now. (Maybe after the 1st?) But here's what I had:

Tim Niland, who (sad to say) shut down his long-running "Music & More" blog mid-last year, posted this 2023 Music Rewind list on Facebook, soon to disappear forever. [PS: more permanent link.]

Some more EOY lists you won't find in AOTY's 2023 Music Year End Lists (which is the main, but not the only, source for my aggregate):

• Humanizing the Vacuum [Alfred Soto]
• Chris Monsen's Listening Booth
• RIOTRIOT [Dan Weiss] 40-1: Also 82-41.
• So It Goes [Stephen Thomas Erlewine]

For my lists, I'll just refer you to the index. I'm continuing to update them as I find and hear more. This week's haul is, for once, mostly non-jazz. But I started off the week by exploring Joe Bebco's jazz ballot. Bebco is editor of The Syncopated Times, which is about the only outlet covering trad and swing jazz these days (or "real jazz," as I like to call it). Two of his records hit my A-list, and many more came close.

Despite everything, I managed to scratch out another abbreviated Speaking of Which yesterday. It left me in a very bad mood, especially as I ponder the relationship between the year in jazz and the year in everything else. There is much to be said for listening -- to jazz, of course, or to pretty much any kind of music, which continues to evolve in humane ways that enhance thought, reflection, and/or body movement. One might also note that even if the business seems increasingly perilous, that isn't stopping people from making music and enjoying it.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this, but I while I usually end months on the last Monday, I like to extend the last week of December to the end of the month, so the year ends per the calendar. In this case, that means next Sunday (Dec. 31). I didn't want to hold this post back until then, so I'll probably just declare next week over a day early. At any rate, this week isn't end-of-month.

New records reviewed this week:

A.S.O.: A.S.O. (2023, Low Lying): Berlin-based duo, initials (they prefer lc but I don't) for singer Alia Seror-O'Neill, cover photo includes producer Lewie Day (looking askance), first album, easily tagged trip hop, but much more than just another example. A- [sp]

Actress: LXXXVIII (2023, Ninja Tune): British electronica producer Darren Cunningham, tenth album since 2008. B+(**) [sp]

Aluna: Mycelium (2023, Mad Decent): British dance-pop singer-songwriter, recorded a couple albums with producer George Reid as AlunaGeorge, released a good solo album in 2020 (Renaissance), tops that here. A- [sp]

Avelino: God Save the Streets (2023, More Music/OddChild Music): London-based rapper, first album, claims the country from the streets up. B+(**) [sp]

Baby Queen: Quarter Life Crisis (2023, Polydor): Pop singer-songwriter Arabella Latham, from South Africa, headed to London at 18 with 40 demo CDs, took her six years to get a contract and an EP, follows up here with her first proper album, then doubles down with a "Deluxe edition" (9 extra songs, a second disc adding up to 73:20). A- [sp]

David Bandrowski & the Rhumba Defense: French Onion Superman (2021 [2022], self-released): New Orleans banjo player, band includes trumpet (Mark Braud), clarinet (Tom Fischer), trombone (Charlie Halloran), bass, and drums. Covers include "Johnny Too Bad" and "Dippermouth Blues," and sure, they're liable to slip into rhumba at any time, even when it seems least appropriate. B+(**) [sp]

McKendrick Bearden: Bright as the Mines Out (2023, self-released): Singer-songwriter from somewhere South, that doesn't automatically signify country, had a group called Mothers, also a side-credit with Faye Webster, before this debut. B+(*) [sp]

Benny Benack III: Third Time's the Charm (2023, La Reserve/Bandstand Presents): Singing trumpet player, third album, mostly standards, pianist Emmet Cohen is outstanding with several big solos, guitarist Peter Bernstein appears on a few cuts. A highlight is the duet with Bria Skonberg (she's another singing trumpet player) on "In a Mellotone." B+(**) [sp]

Cigar Box Serenaders: Spasm (2022 [2023], self-released): New Orleans jazz primitives, eponymous debut in 2018, all play homemade instruments: from cigar boxes for the banjo, guitar, resonator, and violin; plus a "dresser drawer bass" and "wine box drum set," with Sarah Peterson vocals on three tracks (including a "Don't You Feel My Leg." B+(**) [sp]

Jessi Colter: Edge of Forever (2023, Appalachia): Country singer, was married to Duane Eddy (1961-68) before her more famous union with Waylon Jennings (1969 to his death in 2002). Her debut album came out in 1970, with a second in 1975, but she got much more recognition for 1976's Wanted! The Outlaws, with Willie Nelson headlining. The records spaced out after 1984. This one sees her turning 80, produced by Margo Price, and mixed by her son, Shooter Jennings. B+(**) [sp]

Dan Ex Machina: Ex's Sexts (2023, self-released): As a rock critic, Dan Weiss has such widely varied taste that I keep expecting his records so develop an eclectic (if quirky) syncretism, but here, especially, he falls back on punk, not as a formalist, but maybe just because he has a lot of anger to work out, or maybe his guitar has a mind of its own. Note that Spotify has a 10:26 title song not on Bandcamp. Lyric I noted: "I want to use my fucking power to destroy the more powerful." A- [sp]

Mick Flannery: Goodtime Charlie (2023, Oh Boy): Irish singer-songwriter, eighth album since 2005. B [sp]

Frog & Henry: England & Italy: 2020-2022 (2020-22 [2022], self-released): New Orleans trad group, "string and brass band," six albums since 2017 on their Bandcamp, the second namechecking spots in or near Europe. B+(**) [bc]

The Garden of Joy: Bouncin' Around (2022 [2023], self-released): Another New Orleans trad-jazz (I'm tempted to say folk-jazz) group, promising much in their titles, and mostly delivering. Hunter Burgamy (guitar/banjo/vocals) seems to be the main guy here, with others coming and going. B+(**) [sp]

Hannah Gill: Everybody Loves a Lover (2023, Turtle Bay): Jazz singer, 25, based in New York, first album (unless she recorded something as Hanna Gill and the Hours: Wikipedia has an entry for the group, suggesting she did, but Discogs doesn't list anything). Eleven standards from the 1920s through the 1950s, with a swing band led by Danny Jonokuchi (trumpet), with sax, trombone, piano, guitar, bass and drums. The upbeat pieces are really up. B+(***) [sp]

Charlie Halloran and the Tropicales: Shake the Rum (2023, self-released): New Orleans trombonist, shows up in a number of trad jazz outfits, draws on all around the Caribbean for this ("calypsos, biguines and waltzes"). B+(***) [bc]

Charlie & the Tropicales: Presents for Everyone! (2023, self-released): Charlie, of course, is trombonist Halloran, from New Orleans, well-positioned to catch whatever blows up from the Caribbean. I hate Christmas music, but this promised to be a bit different, with few obvious standards, and calypsos to open and close ("Party for Santa Claus" and "Postcard to Sparrow"). B+(**) [bc]

Jaimee Harris: Boomerang Town (2023, Thirty Tigers): Austin-based singer-songwriter, second album. Slow to slower, gloomy till it doesn't matter any more, which helps. B+(**) [sp]

Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr.: Congo Square Suite (2023, Truth Revolution): Alto saxophonist, born into New Orleans Indian royalty, where his father and namesake was a Big Chief, but this is the first time he's adopted the title (although he did don the regalia for the cover of his 1992 Indian Blues). Serious about the "suite" here, with his quartet giving way to a classical orchestra. Bottom line: the orchestral stuff (most of it) is, ugh, patently classical (if a bit on the grand side); the quartet, when they get a chance to play, is pretty good. B [sp]

Malcolm Holcombe: Bits & Pieces (2023, Singular): Singer-songwriter from North Carolina, plays guitar, 18th album since 1994. B+(***) [sp]

Ice Spice: Like . . ? [Deluxe] (2023, 10K Projects/Capitol, EP): Bronx rapper Isis Naija Gaston, produced a six-song, 13:08 EP under this title back in January, reissued in April with a seventh song, now reissued again, this time packed with eleven songs (including two takes of "Princess Diana"), but still only 22:07. The extra heft helps, giving time to let the clipped beats and words find their own magic. A- [sp]

Wata Igarashi: Agartha (2023, Kompakt): Japanese techo producer, fifth album since 2012. B+(**) [sp]

King Krule: Space Heavy (2023, XL/Matador): English singer-songwriter Archy Marshall, relased one album under that name, four more under this alias. B+(*) [sp]

MJ Lenderman and the Wind: Live and Loose! (2023, Anti-): Singer-songwriter from North Carolina, initials for Mark Jacob, has been slotted country but rocks pretty hard here, but so does that other band he plays in, Wednesday. B+(**) [sp]

Man on Man: Provincetown (2023, Polyvinyl): Roddy Bottum, played keyboards in Faith No More and guitar in Imperial Teen, formed this duo with boyfriend Joey Holman and released an eponymous album in 2021, back with a second album that's pretty explicit. They go for an '80s new wave sound, a bit on the heavy side. B+(***) [sp]

Rainy Miller/Space Afrika: A Grisaille Wedding (2023, Fixed Abode): British singer-songwriter, produces brooding electronica, with occasional breaks and asides. Space Afrika is a Manchester-based duo, and several pieces have featured guests. B [sp]

Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday 2 (2023, Young Money/Republic): Fifth studio album, resurrects the title of her triple-platinum 2010 debut (and her 2012 sequel, and mostly her 2014 follow up). Big-time operation, lots of writers and producers and some no-doubt-pricey samples, the basic digital edition running 22 tracks, 70:14, with four other variations (mostly bonus cuts, but also a 10-track, 32:05 "physical" -- which may solve the overkill problem, but probably doesn't). Still, much more idiosyncratic than expected, not least when she leans into those Trinidadian roots. B+(***) [sp]

The New Wonders: The New Wonders (2023, Turtle Bay): New York-based trad jazz band, led by Mike Davis (cornet/vocals), named for Bix Beiderbecke's favored cornet model, backed by Roy Alexander (clarinet/alto sax), trombone, banjo, piano, bass sax, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

NewJeans: Get Up (2023, ADOR, EP): South Korean girl group, second EP, six songs, 12:10. B+(**) [sp]

Michel Pastre/Louis Mazetier/Guillaume Nouaux: Fine Ideas (2023, Camille Productions): French retro-swing trio: tenor sax, piano, drums. Pastre started out in 1996 with Tuxedo Swing Band and Paris Swing Orchestra, led his own big band on a 2001 album called Diggin' the Count, has a 2015 Charlie Christian Project. The others have similar backgrounds -- Mazetier is probably best known for Paris Washboard. B+(***) [bc]

Peacherine Ragtime Society Orchestra: Take Me to the Ragtime Dance (2023, Rivermont): Eleven piece "ragtime-era orchestra" directed and conducted by Andrew Greene, couple previous albums. The instrumentals play like light classical music, with occasional circus airs, while the songs -- several celebrating America's entry into WWI -- take musical theatre back into the age of operetta. B [sp]

Maisie Peters: The Good Witch (2023, Gingerbread Man): English singer-songwriter, second album. B+(**) [sp]

Grace Potter: Mother Road (2023, Fantasy): Country-rock singer-songwriter, two early albums as Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (2002-04), third solo since 2015. Rocks hard, though the change-of-pace works just as well. Message: "you can't keep a good time down." A- [sp]

Priya Ragu: Santhosam (2023, Warner): Born in Switzerland, parents Tamils from Sri Lanka, stage name shortened from Ragupathylingam. First album, story reminds one of MIA, sometimes the music does, too. B+(**) [sp]

Regal86: La Onda: Groove In-Groove Out (2023, self-released): Techno producer from Monterrey (Mexico), Discogs lists three albums (not including this one, or others on his Bandcamp). Earns its reputation as "hardgroove," which while highly repetitive never wears out one's patience. B+(***) [sp]

Logan Richardson: Holy Water (2023, Wax Industry): Alto saxophonist, from Kansas City, sixth album since 2007. B [sp]

Molly Ryan: Sweepin' the Blues Away (2022, Turtle Bay): Jazz singer, mostly swing standards, fourth album since 2008 (including one featuring Dick Hyman, another with Bucky Pizzarelli), Bandcamp page also includes three Dan Levinson albums featuring her. Hard to find credits here, but turns out Levinson is her husband, playing tenor sax and clarinet here, and Rossano Sportiello is the pianist. B+(***) [sp]

Smoking Time Jazz Club: Six Blues, Five Joys & a Stomp (2023, self-released): New Orleans-based trad jazz band, ten or more albums since 2012, nine members, Sarah Peterson the main vocalist, three horns (Charlie Halloran on trombone), lots of banjo. Thirteen songs, twelve from 1926-40 singles, mixed per title. A- [sp]

Soggy Po Boys: It's Good to Laugh Again (2022, self-released): Another trad jazz group, but this one from New Hampshire. Seven pieces (two sessions with different bassists), guitarist Stu Dias the singer. B+(***) [sp]

The Streets: The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light (2023, 679/Warner Music UK): English rapper Mike Skinner, appeared in 2002 with a breakout album. Beats are interesting enough, words are awkwardly hit and miss; e.g., "behind every great man, a girl rolls her eyes"; "work is so much more fun than fun"; "outside of the night club I don't know what to do/ inside it's too dark to care." B+(**) [sp]

The Third Mind: The Third Mind/2 (2023, Yep Roc): Best-known member of this "supergroup" is guitarist Dave Alvin, but Jesse Sykes is the singer, and first named, followed in a banner on the cover that I perhaps should have taken as the artist list by Alvin, David Immerglück (guitar), Michael Jerome (drugs), Victor Krummenmacher (bass guitar/harmonium/melotron). B+(***) [sp]

Leon Thomas III: Electric Dusk (2023, Ezmny/Motown): Possible that the III doesn't appear on the album, but I picked it up from a review, I'm old enough to associate the name with a jazz singer (1937-99) old enough to be his grandfather (but I'm pretty sure isn't). First album for this one, but he has a Wikipedia page as an actor and music producer. B+(***) [sp]

Dlala Thukzin: Permanent Music 3 (2023, Dlala): South African dj/producer, "famous for his versatility of blending amapiano, afro tech, and gqom." Solid groove for five tracks, 33:01. B+(***) [sp]

David Toop & Lawrence English: The Shell That Speaks the Sea (2023, Room40): Toop is an English author and curator as much as a musician, his first album New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments with Max Eastley on Brian Eno's Obscure Records (1975), his most famous the compilation Ocean of Sound, a soundtrack for his book of that name. English is an Australian in the same mold. Together, they made a darkly ambient album which never quite engaged my interest. B [sp]

Tuba Skinny: Hot Town (2023, self-released): New Orleans trad jazz band, close to a dozen albums since 2009, got on my radar when Maria Mauldaur recorded Let's Get Happy Together with them (2021). Erika Lewis and Greg Sherman sing here, with Todd Burdick's sousaphone the gravity that holds them together -- also cornet, clarinet, trombone, guitar, banjo, washboard, and bass drum. B+(***) [bc]

Marta Warelis: A Piece of Earth (2021 [2022], Relative Pitch): Polish pianist, has several co-credits with free jazz players, goes solo on this one. No details on how the piano was prepared, but I'm imagining some sort of variable-pitch table saw (aka "timbral possibilities" moving "in constantly interfering waves of energy"). B+(**) [sp]

Westside Gunn: And Then You Pray for Me (2023, Griselda/Empire): Buffalo rapper Alvin Worthy, fifth studio album (plus a lot of mixtapes). Nominally a sequel to Pray for Paris (2020). Super long: 75:17. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Baikida E.J. Carroll: Orange Fish Tears (1974 [2023], Souffle Continu): Trumpet player, played in the Black Artist Group in St. Louis. First album as leader, of only five through 2001, omitting the initials after this one. Also plays flugelhorn and percussion, with Oliver Lake (alto/tenor sax, flutes, percussion), Manuel Villaroel (piano), and Nana Vasconcelos (percussion). Starts very hot, wanders when the piano drops out. B+(***) [bc]

Dick Hyman: One Step to Chicago: The Legacy of Frank Teschemacher and the Austin High Gang (1992 [2022], Rivermont): Not the easiest cover to parse, starting up top with "George Avakian Presents," ending "featuring Kenny Davern · Dan Levinson (clarinets)," and also lists the band members, with Hyman's name prefaced by "transcribed and directed by." Adding to the confusion, the back cover credits the first six songs to Dick Hyman and His Frank Teschemacher Celebration Band, the next seven to Kenny Davern and His Windy City Stompers, and the finale to "Dick Hyman-Kenny Hyman and Their Combined Bands." Levinson plays clarinet in Hyman's band, but Hyman plays piano in both -- the only other musician to appear in both bands is Dan Barrett (trombone), but on only two of the former's tracks. Teschemacher (1906-32) started played clarinet and alto sax with his Chicago west-side high school chums, a legendary group including Bud Freeman and Jimmy McPartland. Classic jazz, expertly done. A- [sp]

Old music:

Molly Ryan: Let's Fly Away (2014 [2015], Loup-Garous Productions): Swing-era standards singer, cobbled this together from two sessions, consecutive days but "featuring" pianist Dick Hyman only appears on half the tracks, with Mark Shane on the rest. Other personnel varies, and arrangements are split between Dan Levinson (9) and Dan Barrett (5). B+(**) [sp]

Molly Ryan: Swing for Your Supper! (2013, Loup-Garous Productions): Dan Barrett (trombone) does most of the arrangements here, 13-to-5 over Dan Levinson (clarinet/saxophones). Front cover lists Bucky Pizzarelli as "featuring," but Chris Flory plays most of the guitar (13-to-5, again). She has a fine voice for these songs, and the band -- mostly Arbors Jazz regulars -- is superb, so I'm a bit surprised that this doesn't quite take off. B+(**) [sp]

Dlala Thukzin: Permanent Music (2020, Dlala): South African dance grooves. Cover adds EP, but at 37:53 from six tracks, we'll ignore that. The grooves are compelling enough, but the occasional vocals raise the excitement. A- [sp]

Dlala Thukzin: Permanent Music 2 (2021, Dlala): Beats about the same, voices sparser and toned down a bit. Six tracks, 35:57. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• None.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

In a recent trawl through my Facebook feed, I came across a meme quoting Benjamin Franklin: "Life's biggest tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late." First thing I was reminded of was that documentary film about the five former Shin Bet chiefs, all of whom had, in their retirement, come to see their tenures as failures, as each had preserved and deepened conflict with Palestinians, instead of working to ameliorate injustice and secure a durable peace. But each in turn, in youthful vigor, had climbed the ranks of the security services by proving to be more aggressive than their predecessors.

The annals of Israeli history are filled with ambitious young men grabbing everything they could, only to turn into old men with regrets. Even Ariel Sharon ended his days with the admission that it's not good for Jews to rule over other people. Old David Ben-Gurion warned against launching the 1967 war, on grounds that have long seemed prescient -- not that he wasn't delighted with the way the war turned out.

My second thought is that this offers a prism for viewing Joe Biden. I quote Jeffrey St Clair below, placing Biden in the line of New Democrats from Clinton to Obama (and back again), which is certainly true of Biden when he was younger, but I can't dismiss the possibility that he's become wiser as he's aged. (Of course, he still has a long ways to go on foreign policy, which is the realm of American politics most completely wrapped up in myth and nonsense.) But also, he reminds us that a big problem with getting old is that you lose the ability to act on whatever wisdom you manage to garner. All the while, his declining polls remind us that the foolish young look for leaders with vigor, which Trump, despite his years and obvious incompetence, manages to fake with brash, reckless promises.

Again this week (no doubt next week as well), I'm mostly working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, so have to limit my time here. I made a quick round of the usual sources, noted things that looked interesting, and mostly left it at that.

Top story threads:

Israel: Latest from New York Times, which can certainly be counted on to echo whatever Israeli leaders want it to say, is: Israel says it is intensifying its campaign against Hamas. That translates as "more genocide."

• Mondoweiss:

  • [12-18] Day 73: Reports surface of Palestinian deaths inside Israeli detention camps.

  • [12-19] Day 74: Hamas tells Israel it 'arrived too late' to tunnel; forces arrest doctors at Al-Awdeh Hospital.

  • [12-20] Day 75:Security council postpones ceasefire vote as Hamas leader arrives in Cairo for talks.

  • [12-21] Day 76: Extrajudicial killings of men in front of their families in Gaza

  • [12-22] Day 77: Palestinians in Gaza face famine, as political prisoner count in West Bank soars.

  • [12-23] Day 78: UNSC resolution criticized as 'meaningless,' hundreds of thousands evacuate central Gaza.

  • [12-24] Day 79: Bethlehem cancels Christmas celebrations as Israel continues to bomb Gaza.

• Yuval Abraham: 'The hostages weren't out top priority': How Israel's bombing frenzy endangered captives in Gaza.

• Amena Al-Ashkar: [12-21] Hamas official calls for Palestinian elections, national unity in the 'day after' the war. Look, if Israel had followed my advice six weeks ago, this wouldn't be happening. They say they wanted to destroy Hamas, but they missed their opportunity. That, simply, stupidly, is because they can only think of destroying something with bombs. Hamas committed suicide on Oct. 7. Had Israel limited its tantrum to a week or two, then washed their hands of the mess and turned the rubble Gaza over to the UN, the Palestinians would have disposed of Hamas themselves. Instead, after two months of spirited resistance, they're back in front of microphones, as the self-proclaimed leaders of Palestine, ready to wheel and deal.

• Doaa Alremeili: [12-22] The situation in Gaza is getting worse, Mohammad.

• Phyllis Bennis: [12-22] Why we need a ceasefire now.

• Alexander B Downes: [12-21] The cruelty and futility of Israel's starvation blockade on Gaza.

• Julia Frankel: [12-22] Israel's military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history. Related here is:

• Evan Hill/Imogen Piper/Meg Kelly/Jarrett Ley: [12-23] Israel has waged one of this century's most destructive wars in Gaza: "The damage in Gaza has outpaced other recent conflicts, evidence shows. Israel has dropped some of the largest bombs commonly used today near hospitals."

• David Ignatius: [12-16] In the West Bank, I saw how peace will require confrontation with Israel.

• Ken Klippenstein/Daniel Boguslaw: Israeli military censor bans reporting on these 8 subjects.

• Yoav Litvin: [12-22] The anatomy of Zionist genocide.

• Ibtisam Mahdi: Gaza's health crisis 'catastrophic,' say Palestinian experts.

• Branko Marcetic:

  • [12-19] Israel's assault on Gaza is unlike any war in recent memory.

  • [12-20] In Gaza, the next generation of radicalization begins: "Leadership in Tel Aviv claims that taking out Hamas will end its security problems. The evidence suggests the opposite."

• Andrew O'Hehir: [12-24] Israel's "heavy cost" in Gaza: 15 soldiers killed this weekend: Don't laugh. Using the Gilad Shalit exchange rate, that's equal to 15,404 Palestinian lives -- probably more than Israel killed during the period, but it's hard to tell for sure. But not enough to give Netanyahu second thoughts about the wisdom of his course.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [12-21] Biden administration's flawed response to Yemen attacks increases possibility of regional war.

• Alex Shams: How Jesus's hometown is coping with war at Christmas.

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [12-20] GOP House candidate is Israeli citizen, IDF veteran: Mazi Melesa Pilip, nominated to run for George Santos's vacant seat.

  • [12-23] Biden's Band-Aid solution for Gaza.

• Mark Lewis Taylor: [12-22] Israel and genocide: Not only in Gaza. Consider Guatemala, 1987, with its own Israel connection. Article cites Jeff Halper's 2015 book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification.

• Philip Weiss:

  • [12-17] Weekly Briefing: 'Well, you dropped the atom bomb,' Netanyahu tells Biden. Among other things, this cites (rather critically) Ezra Klein interviews Nimrod Novik.

  • [12-24] Weekly Briefing: Seeking hope in the darkest days.

US, Israel, and a decaying empire:

• Adam Johnson: [12-18] Bernie Sanders's incoherent pernicious Gaza cease-fire position, explained.

• Joshua Keating: [12-21] How a Yemeni rebel group is creating chaos in the global economy: "The Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, explained."

• Branko Marcetic: [12-23] Joe Biden has the political space to push for a cease-fire in Gaza. He just doesn't want to.

• Nicole Narea: [12-22] The US may be flouting its own laws by sending unrestricted aid to Israel.

• Jon Schwarz: Samantha Power calls on Samantha Power to resign over Gaza.

• Stephen Semler: [12-18] Pols loaded with industry cash vote up military budget.

Zionism, Antisemitism, and Palestinian rights:

• Fabiola Cineas: [12-21] How Republicans are weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI.

• Rashid Khalidi: [12-23] Open letter to the Columbia administration.

• Eric Levitz: [12-23] Masha Gessen on Israel, Gaza, and the Holocaust analogies: An interview.

• Yonat Shimron: [12-21] Shaul Magid on reviving Jewish exile as a counterweight to Zionism: "In a new book, the Dartmouth scholar argues exile can be seen as an equally positive and constructive Jewish identity." Interview. His book is: The Necessity of Exile: Essays From a Distance.

Trump, and other Republicans:

• Aaron Blake: [12-18] 3 in 10 Trump voters want a president willing to break 'rules and laws': "While 65 percent of Trump backers said a president should always follow the rules and the law, 30 percent said breaking rules and laws could be justified. The split among Biden voters was 83-15 against breaking rules and laws." The phrasing is broad enough one could read more or less into it. A lot of this depends on what law we're talking about, and who is violating it for what reason. Civil rights campaigners broke plenty of laws, and many of us applauded them. Same for whistleblowers exposing state secrets. No doubt a large chunk of Biden's 15% includes people who recognize that there are times when laws are meant to curtail freedom and defend injustice. A good chunk of Trump's 30% might agree with that statement, but with other standards of freedom and justice. What's more troublesome, but only partially revealed in the headline, is how Republicans are well on their way to becoming a cult of criminality. This is most obvious in Republican support for tax evasion and other business crimes -- everything from financial scams to pollution dumping to bribery and fraud -- but most specifically Trump himself.

• Jonathan Chait: [12-22] Asking Trump 'will you be a dictator?' is not a real question: "Hugh Hewitt tries, fails to Hannitize Trump's authoritarian problem."

• Matt Ford:

  • Criminal defendant of the year: Donald Trump.

  • Texas's middle finger to the federal government -- and the constitution.

• Mike Godwin: [12-20] Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you. The author of Godwin's Law admits it's more of a "rule of thumb," especially when it's not pure hyperbole, and there are specific points to be made.

• Margaret Hartmann: [12-22] So what is Rudy Giuliani up to these days? This piece has been updated many times of late, most recently with his bankruptcy filing.

• Ed Kilgore: [12-19] Trump is benefiting from his incoherent Israel-Hamas war stance

• Marianne Levine/Isaac Arnsdorf: [12-23] Trump says he would indemnify police. Experts say that's already reality in most departments.

• Tori Otten: Dumbest Senator of the year: Tommy Tuberville.

• Matt Stieb: [12-22] The sex scandal that could take down Moms for Liberty. On the other hand: Jennifer C Berkshire/Jack Schneider: [12-15] Moms for Liberty isn't going anywhere.

• Tatyana Tandanpolie: [12-22] "I'm not a student of Hitler": Trump insists Nazi leader "didn't way it the way I said it". This reminds me of an old LBJ story. He starts a rumor that his opponent is a "pig fucker." An aide asks him if it's true? LBJ explains: I don't care. I just want to see him stand up there and deny it. Still, Trump's "it's a very different kind of a statement" may well be better than even LBJ hoped for.

• Michael Tomasky: Kevin McCarthy was the most incompetent House Speaker of all time.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruling: They held that Trump's name should be taken off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado, due to the 14th Amendment's prohibition against insurrectionist (i.e., secessionists) holding office. I've ridiculed that argument ever since it was first raised.

• Erwin Chemerinsky: [12-20] Colorado's ruling against Trump raises questions only the Supreme Court can answer.

• Eric Levitz: [12-21] The legal merits of the Colorado Supreme Court decision don't matter.

• Ian Millhiser: [12-20] Everything you need to know about the court order removing Trump for the ballot.

• Andrew Prokop: [12-19] The fraught debate over whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump, explained.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Rachel M Cohen: [12-17] A historian's advice to the Democrats trying to build stuff: "What supply-side liberals can learn from the past." Interview with Brent Cebul, author of Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century.

• Matthew Duss: [12-14] Ukraine and Israel and the two Joe Bidens. "In Ukraine, Biden has spent two years articulating a stirring argument for a rules-based order. In Israel, he set about burning that argument to the ground. Is a morally consistent foreign policy possible?" Well, is a politically consistent one possible? It's hard to keep one's goals straight when in each arena they are set by competing interest groups, each with its own agenda.

• Chris Lehmann: [12-19] Biden's best chance for 2024 is to take aim at corporate America.

• Eric Levitz: [12-20] Why Biden's poll numbers will get better (And why they won't). Quoting sub-heads: On the up side: 1) Voters will likely warm to the economy in 2024; 2) Conventionally Democratic voters -- who pay little attention to politics -- are depressing Biden's numbers; 3) Democrats have been doing well in recent elections; 4) Some Trump supporters say they would switch to Biden if the Republican is convicted in one of his many trials. On the down side: 1) The economy has been improving for months, yet Biden's numbers haven't; 2) Biden isn't getting any younger; 3) Third-party candidates threaten Biden more than Trump; 4) Early polls may be more predictive in a rematch; 5) The off-year election results are perfectly consistent with a Biden loss; 6) There's reason to suspect that polls overestimate how many votes Trump would lose from being convicted.

• Holly Otterbein: [12-20] 'Medicare for All' bill becomes part of Dean Phillips' presidential pitch.

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Jodi Kantor/Adam Liptak: [12-15] Behind the scenes at the dismantling of Roe v. Wade.

• Ian Millhiser: [12-22] In a big victory for Trump, the Supreme Court tells Jack Smith to go away.

• Abbie VanSickle/Steve Eder: [12-24] Clarence Thomas's clerks: An 'extended family' with reach and power.

Economic matters:

• Christian Paz: [12-16] Black and Latino Americans haven't experienced the same economy as everyone else.

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [12-22] Diplomacy Watch: Zelensky says discussion of negotiations 'not relevant'.

• Anatol Lieven/Alex Little: [12-21] Ukraine should take a page out of Finland's fight with Stalin: "Helsinki had to sacrifice territory for autonomy, but its pride and prosperity soared."

Around the world:

• Ellen Ioanes: [12-17] Argentina's new president, Javier Milei, explained.

Other stories:

Bob Hennelly: [12-19] New York City is crumbling -- but officials don't "have enough oomph" to build it back up: "The least any city can do is make sure its buildings remain standing."

Hannah Natanson: [12-23] Half of challenged books return to shools. LGBTQ books are banned most.

• Reshma Kirpalani/Hannah Natanson: [12-21] The lives upended by Florida's school book wars.

Will Oremus: [12-23] Elon Musk promised an anti-'woke' chatbot. Grok is not going as planned.

Jonathan Shorman/Katie Bernard/Amy Renee Leiker/Katie Moore: [12-19] Across Kansas, police conduct illegal search and seizures 'all the time,' upending lives.

Jeffrey St Clair: [12-22] Roaming Charges: The sickness of symbolic things: Title from Fannie Lou Hamer: "I am sick of symbolic things. We are fighting for our lives." Pull quote:

Bill Clinton, Al Gore, HRC, Barack Obama & Biden all share the same New Democrat philosophy: hawkish on defense, pro-business & banks, punitive criminal justice policies and a desire to roll back Great Society social programs. Clinton and Obama had the rhetorical skills to sell symbolism to the base, to make people see what isn't there. The others don't and they paid the political price.

Rolling back "Great Society social programs" was less a desire than a chit they were happy to sacrifice to achieve their business goals. Biden seems less interested on that score, but that may just be because the Democratic base is getting more agitated, demanding not just defense but expansion of the safety net.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens: The relentless growth of degrowth economics.

Zephyr Teachout: [12-11] The big unfriendly tech giants: "We must ensure that corporations aren't able to pick and choose winners and losers in journnalism."

Siva Vaidhyanathan: [12-11] Elon Musk's real threat to democracy isn't what you think: "How the attention-starved CEO took over our communications infrastructure."

Selected obituaries:

• [12-22] Antonio Negri, 90, philosopher who wrote a surprise best seller, dies: The book was Empire, co-written with Michael Hardt, "offering what many found a compelling interpretation of globalization after the Cold War."

• [12-21] Robert M. Solow, groundbreaking economist and Nobelist, dies at 99: "His elegant work established that the main determinant of economic growth was technology, not growing capital and labor."

• [12-19] J.G.A. Pocock, historian who argued for historical context, dies at 99. I took a course from Pocock at Washington University. I had earlier read, and much admired, his work, so I had high expectations, but I was still amazed at his ability to stand in front of his desk and reel off hour-long lectures that read like carefully edited book passages. It gave him the appearance of being the most brilliant person I ever met, and nothing in the content suggested otherwise. (Unlike, say, William H. Gass, another brilliant lecturer I encountered there.)

• [12-19] Mars Williams, 68, saxophonist who straddled new wave and jazz, dies.

• [12-10] Shlomo Avineri, Israeli scholar skeptical about peace, dies at 90: A prominent "public intellectual," wrote books on Hegel, Marx, and The Making of Modern Zionism (1981, rev. 2017), worked in Israel's foreign ministry under Rabin.

• [12-07] Benjamin Zephaniah, poet of social justice issues, dies at 65.

I was surprised not to find an obituary for Arno J. Mayer, who died on Dec. 18 at 97. He was one of the very greatest historians of the last century, even since his landmark books Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (1959), and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (1967). I especially recommend three later works: The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (1988), and Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel (2008). He was the first I'm aware of to emphasize the continuity of the World Wars, referring to 1914-45 as "the 30-Years War of the 20th Century." Another item I recommend is Studs Terkel's interview with him in "The Good War". He was born in Luxembourg in 1926, his family reaching the US in 1941, and soon joined the US Army, where while still in his teens was assigned to babysit "high ranking German prisoners of war" (e.g., rocket scientists; Mayer was one of the Ritchie boys, as was Guy Stern, who also died last week). I expect we'll have more to link to next week. Meanwhile:

• Enzo Traverso: [12-19] Arno J Mayer's 20th century.

• Counterpunch: Articles by Arno J Mayer. E.g., Israel: The wages of hubris and violence. This was written in 2009, and posted in 2015, but remains insightful:

  Since Israel's foundation, the failure to pursue Arab-Jewish understanding and cooperation has been Zionism's "great sin of omission" (Judah Magnes). At every major turn since 1947-48 Israel has had the upper hand in the conflict with the Palestinians, its ascendancy at once military, diplomatic, and economic. This prepotency became especially pronounced after the Six Day War of 1967. Consider the annexations and settlements; occupation and martial law; settler pogroms and expropriations; border crossings and checkpoints; walls and segregated roads. No less mortifying for the Palestinians has been the disproportionately large number of civilians killed and injured, and the roughly 10,000 languishing in Israeli prisons.

  Despite the recent ingloriousness of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, Israel's ruling and governing class continues to stand imperious. . . . Israelis must ask themselves whether there is a point beyond which the Zionist quest becomes self-defeatingly perilous, corrupting, and degrading.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 41422 [41370] rated (+52), 21 [17] unrated (+4).

I've been almost totally swamped in trying to compile the 18th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. Deadline for ballots was Friday, December 15. I'll admit I was pretty bummed when I went to bed with only 145 ballots counted: down 6 from 2023, down 11 from 2022, so my two years in the helm were beginning to look like a death spiral.

What made this worse is that for the first time ever, I started thinking about how to expand the poll a month before the I needed to send ballots out. I had a list of contacts from a prominent PR guy. I collected the names from the DownBeat Critics Poll. Then I started searching for jazz publications and blogs, and found many more -- some pretty far-flung. I accosted contacts for leads and contact info. I had contacted over 200 possible voters in 2022, and figured 250 this year wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Then I stumbled. I barely got my initial invite mailing out in mid-November. And while I dashed off a few letters after that, all the way to deadline day, I never came close to my goal. In the end, I only got 25-30 new invites sent out, of which only half sent in ballots (as opposed to 75% from 2022's invite list). But that only came close to making up for the attrition, less than half of which I have any insight into (illness/death, job/career shifts, a lot of "no fucking time," a couple of snits).

One possibly big problem is that it's impossible to verify that an email address works, or rather that it's impossible to distinguish a non-working email address from one that's simply being ignored, or simply being too vigilantly monitored by spam assassin robots. In a few cases, I tried to track down alternative contact routes (I've even tried Facebook messaging). Another source of attrition was the demise of JazzTimes. We've long had 10-12 of their writers voting, and a third or more dropped out this year.

Along the way, my distaste for Substack has grown by leaps and bounds: I don't see any way to contact their users, even in the few cases where I currently subscribe. Ted Gioia is only the most prominent of several searches that dead-ended there. (He claims 84,000 followers there, a really extraordinary number. His top-100 list, which I've tracked for years in my EOY aggregates, is buried behind the wall there.) While a precious few are cashing in big time, and many more figure they have nothing to lose -- indeed, I can think of a few writers, like Christian Iszchak and Brad Luen, who have really blossomed with the platform -- the obvious result is atomization, breaking culture into tiny, isolated droplets. (Of course, this line got the engineer in me to thinking up different ways to structure it, to build collectives instead of tearing them apart, but the lure of money is hard to work around, perhaps even more so when there isn't any.)

Still, I'm feeling better about the Poll today than I was back on Friday. I've extended the deadline, at least for a select few, to Tuesday night (or -- what difference does a few hours make? -- to Wednesday morning). Current ballot count is 154, so there's still a slight chance we'll hit the all-time record. More importantly, some of the late ballots have been real doozies. Just to mention one, Joe Bebco (editor of New Orleans roots rag, The Syncopated Times), managed the rare feat of voting for 16 albums no one else has voted for -- good chance I'll review most of them next week. The album list is up to 743 at the moment, and that's +32 from last year's record number.

I figure I'll start writing my essay on Wednesday. As with last year's essay, I figure I'll start with some data crunching, then try to pick out what's most interesting in the various tables. Whether this will include a capsule summary of the top-ten and the minor list winners may depend on whether Francis Davis beats me to the punch. (He's suggested he might write such a piece, or maybe not, but if he does so, he's promised to do it early. Previous essays were structured that way, followed by his own list. In the past, I've usually been content to link to my list -- up to 75 jazz A/A- this week; the Max Koch album took over the Debut slot in my ballot.)

Almost everything new this week, especially up top, comes from the jazz ballots. My non-jazz list continues to flounder (51 A/A- records, way down from last year). One problem is that I've had virtually no time to work on the EOY aggregate, which is stuck at 94 lists. I need to find time to update the Christgau database with his latest Consumer Guide (my previous grades: Buck 65: A-/A; CMAT: ***; Feelies: **; Megan Moroney: ***; Azuka Moweta: ***; Piconema: A-; Homeboy Sandman: **; not graded yet: Barbie, Dolly Parton, Tele Novela). Then it'll be easier to factor his grades into the Aggregate.

I did manage to squeeze out a relatively cryptic Speaking of Which yesterday. I noticed a couple more things today that I should have noted, so I added them to the file, with some extra mark up (red border-right) to flag the changes. I may make a regular habit of this.

New records reviewed this week:

Ambrose Akinmusire: Owl Song (2023, Nonesuch): Trumpet player, debut 2008 on Fresh Sound New Talent, moved to Blue Note in 2010 made him a star. Trio with Bill Frisell (guitar) and Herlin Riley (drums). Rather pretty, for sure. B+(*) [sp]

Lina Allemano Four: Pipe Dream (2021 [2023], Lumo): Canadian trumpet player, several albums, this with Brodie West (alto sax), Andrew Downing (bass), and Nick Fraser (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Biig Piig: Bubblegum (2023, RCA, EP): London-based Irish alt-pop singer-songwriter Jessica Smyth, spent much of her childhood in Spain, short mixtape (7 songs, 17:58) after several EPs. B+(*) [sp]

Vilhelm Bromander: In This Forever Unfolding Moment (2021 [2023], Thanatos): Swedish bassist, several widely scattered albums since 2008, although a 2016 title (Oh Lord Give Me Strange) seems most relevant here. Starts with what sounds like a prayer (vocal Marianne Svasek), then swells as the 12-piece orchestra kicks in, including an exceptional reeds section (Martin Küchen, Elin Forkelid, Alberto Pinton, and Christer Bothén), brass (Emil Strandberg and Mats Äleklint), violin, vibes, and rhythm. Two shorter pieces follow, each ending nice, 33:24 total. A- [sp]

Filipe Catto: Belezas Sao Coisis Acesas Por Dentro (2023, Joia Moderna): Brazilian singer-songwriter, half-dozen albums since 2011, authorities divided on pronouns. More rock than MPB. More opera, too. B+(*) [sp]

Ed Cherry: Are We There Yet? (2022 [2023], Cellar): Guitarist, played with Dizzy Gillespie 1978-92, his own first album in 1993. Quartet with vibes (Monty Croft), organ (Kyle Kohler), and drums (Byron 'Wookie' Landham). B+(**) [sp]

Avishai Cohen & Abraham Rodriguez Jr.: Iroko (2023, Naïve/Believe): Bass and congas duo, the former well known since 1997, the latter a newcomer, both also credited with vocals (as is Virginia Alves). The background is interesting enough, but the vocals can turn into something of a joke ("It's a Man's World," "Venus," "Fly Me to the Moon"). B+(*) [sp]

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: Dancing on the Edge (2023, Sophomore Lounge): Name leader debut, previously fronted Louisville band State Champion, stretches seven songs to 51:10 then spreads them out over 2-LP -- I've seen them called "slacker jams." B+(**) [sp]

Marike van Dijk Nonet: Stranded (2022 [2023], Brooklyn Jazz Underground/ZenneZ): Dutch saxophonist (soprano/alto), nine-piece group spread out with only two more horns (a second sax, and a trombone), the extra rhythm players very much in flux. B+(**) [sp]

Mike Dillon & Punkadelick: Inflorescence (2023, Royal Potato Family): Vibraphonist-percussionist, long list of credits in the jazz-pop-funk margins in groups like Critters Buggin, Garage à Trois and the Dead Kenny G's, also backing Ani DiFranco and Brave Combo. B+(*) [sp]

The Go! Team: Get Up Sequences Part Two (2023, Memphis Industries): English jangle rock band (or is it "noise pop"?), kicks it up a notch or two. B+(***) [sp]

Laura Groves: Radio Red (2023, Bella Union): English singer-songwriter, second album after a debut in 2009, with three evenly-spaced EPs in the interim. B+(*) [sp]

Mats Gustafsson & Ensemble E: EE Opus One (2022 [2023], Trost): Norwegian baritone saxophonist, many groups and albums since 1992, also credited here sith "flute, spilapipa and conducting. The rest of the group make for an odd mix: Helga Myhr (hardanger fiddle), Sylwia Swiatkowska (bilgoraj suka), Susana Santos Silva (trumpet), Mariucha Bikont (vocal, tuba), Daniel Formo (organ, prepared piano), and Arne Forsén (prepared piano, clavichord, percussion). B [r]

Mats Gustafsson: Hidros 9: Mirrors (2022 [2023], Trost): Ninth is a series of albums that started in 1997 with Hidros One, co-credited to a group called Nu-Ensemblen ("nine improvisers, tape and conductor"). This uses two nonets -- NyMusikk Trondheim and Avant Art Ensemble -- with the same array of violin, cello, bass (2), guitar, organ/prepared piano, bass drum, and drums/electronics, plus a half-dozen soloists. B+(*) [sp]

Ron Horton: A Prayer for Andrew (2023, Newvelle): Trumpet player, part of a tight postbop collective that mostly recorded for Palmetto in the early 2000s, their interest in Andrew Hill comes as no surprise. Thirteen songs (7 by Hill, 6 by Horton), runs 78 minutes. No date given, but certainly before pianist Frank Kimbrough (in exceptional form here) died in 2020. With Marty Ehrlich or John O'Gallagher on alto sax, Marc Mommaas on tenor, Dean Johnson (bass), and Tim Horner (drums). A- [sp]

The Human Hearts: Viable (2023, Open Boat): Franklin Bruno, a Mountain Goats sideman with some solo albums hardly anyone noticed from 1991, adopted this moniker c. 2012, with a Christgau-lauded LP (Another) and EP (Day of the Tiles) that I've never managed to stream whole, and didn't get much from the bits I did hear. This is another one, not fetching enough (although Jenny Toomey helps) to motivate me to put in the work to figure out what's really here, but not so lame as to exclude the possibility. B+(**) [sp]

Terry Klein: Leave the Light On (2023, self-released): Alt-country singer-songwriter, originally from Boston (I think) but based in Austin, and sounds like the real deal. Fourth album. Third one (Good Luck, Take Care) is a good one, and this one comes real close. B+(***) [sp]

Max Koch: Ten Bulls (2021 [2023], Jazzwerkstatt): German guitarist, first album, other names on the cover, in order: Bill Elgart (drums), Max Hirth (tenor sax), Stephan Deller (bass), Max Arsava (piano). Four Koch originals, one from Ornette Coleman. Sax impressed from the start, before I started wondering who the guitarist was. Terrific all the way through. A- [sp]

Koma Saxo: Post Koma (2021 [2023], We Jazz): Berlin-based Swedish bassist Petter Eldh, fourth album under this group name, using Christian Lillinger on drums, with any of several saxophone/flute players (Mikko Innanen, Jonas Kullhammar, Maciej Obara, Otis Sandsjö), with Sofia Jernberg (vocals) on three tracks. Interesting sounds, but often they together awkwardly. B+(*) [sp]

Marthe Lea Band: Herlighetens Vei (2023, Motvind): Norwegian tenor saxophonist, second group album, also credited here with flutes, piano, vocals, udungu, percussion. Joined by Andreas Røysum (clarinets; she also plays in his band), backed by fiddle, bass, and drums. The folk roots make for immediately engaging instrumental jazz, the vocals a bit more mixed. A- [sp]

Helge Lien Trio/Tore Brunborg: Funeral Dance (2022 [2023], Ozella Music): Norwegian pianist, has a 1999 debut, and mostly (more than a dozen) trio albums since 2003, joined here by the tenor saxophonist, who writes four pieces to Lien's five (plus a cover of "Après Un Rêve"). B+(***) [sp]

Antti Lötjönen Quintet East: Circus/Citadel (2023, We Jazz): Finnish group, led by the bassist-composer, fourth album since 2020, with Verneri Pohjola (trumpet), Mikko Innanen (alto/baritone sax, oboe), Jussi Kannaste (tenor sax), and Joonas Riippa (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Tkay Maidza: Sweet Justice (2023, 4AD): Born in Zimbabwe, moved to Australia when she was five, rapper/singer, second album after several EPs. B+(**) [sp]

Robin McKelle: Impressions of Ella (2023, Doxie): Standards singer, has a 1999 album before her 2006 Introducing. She hews close enough to her model here to faithfully recall the words Fitzgerald famously ad-libbed on "How High the Moon," but such fidelity flexes for a duet on "I Won't Dance" with Kurt Elling with some ad-libbed French I don't recall. After that, her "Embraceable You" stands on its own. Accompaniment is as impeccable as you'd expect from Kenny Barron, Peter Washington, and Kenny Washington. B+(***) [sp]

Joe McPhee/Mette Rasmussen/Dennis Tyfus: Oblique Strategies (2018 [2023], Black Truffle): Tenor and alto sax duo, plus whatever it is that Tyfus -- original name Dennis Faes, a "Belgian illustrator, visual artist, radio-maker, musician and event manager" -- is doing (credits: "tape, percussion, voice," but the others also get credit for "voice"). B [bc]

Joe McPhee & John Edwards: Tell Me How Long Has Trane Been Gone (For James Baldwin and John Coltrane) (2019 [2022], Klanggalerie): Tenor sax and bass duo, opens with speech on the title subject, then gets down to business. B+(**) [sp]

Palle Mikkelborg/Jakob Bro/Marilyn Mazur: Strands: Live at the Danish Radio Concert Hall (2023, ECM): Danish trumpet player, probably best known for composing the 1989 Miles Davis album Aura, but his own discography goes back to 1967, not huge but steady ever since. Joined by guitar and percussion here, with Bro writing most of the pieces. B+(*) [sp]

Nils Petter Molvær/Norwegian Radio Orchestra: Certainty of Tides (2023, Modern): Norwegian trumpet player, started in Masqualero with Arild Andersen, developing perhaps the most appealing form of late-1990s jazztronica. The orchestra fills a similar (albeit more ambient) role here, setting up his trumpet, eloquent as ever. B+(***) [sp]

Roy Nathanson: 82 Days (2023, Enja/Yellowbird): Saxophonist (mostly alto but opens on baritone), best known for the Jazz Passengers (with the late Curtis Fowlkes) but has a few albums going back to 1987 with his name on the cover, with two recent Sotto Voce albums testing my patience with vocals (unlike, say, his 1987 cover of "Speedo," which is an all-time favorite). This started off as a 2020 lockdown-coping ritual, where he greeted 82 days with a standard played from his balcony, then on the 83rd got together with friends and "turned the ritual into a kind of free neighborhood music school." Not clear if this was recorded then or later. I love the sax, and hate the vocals (ok, not all of them, certainly not Cleo Reed's closer). B+(***) [sp]

Nation of Language: Strange Disciple (2023, PIAS):l New wave redux band, from Brooklyn, Ian Richard Devaney the singer, third album. B+(*) [sp]

Augusto Pirodda Septet: The Monkey and the Monk (2021 [2022], El Negocito): Italian pianist, several albums since 2003, three horns can mix it up, rhythm can break it up, Lynn Cassiers (voice & electronics) is the wild card. B+(**) [bc]

Anthony Pirog: The Nepenthe Series Vol. 1 (2023, Otherly Love): Guitarist (also guitar synth), several albums since 2014, this one solo piece and eight duos with as many guests, also on guitar or adjacent instruments (electric bass, pedal steel, monomachine). B+(*) [sp]

Adam Rudolph/Tyshawn Sorey: Archaisms 1 (2023, Defkaz): Percussion duo, Rudolph mostly working with hand drums. Number not evident on the packaging, but used consistently by label in its PR. B+(***) [sp]

Thollem/Terry Riley/Nels Cline: The Light Is Real (2021-22 [2023], Other Minds): That's Thollem McDonas, mostly a pianist who more than dabbles in electronics, with a diverse discography since 2004, mostly collaborations, including several trios with guitarist Cline and various guests. This is built up from Tholem and Riley's voices (or voice samples), to which Cline later added guitar and effects. I find it a bit difficult. B+(*) [bc]

Micah Thomas: Reveal (2022 [2023], Artwork): Pianist, has a couple albums, trio here with Dean Torrey (bass) and Kayvon Gordon (drums), on a thoughtful set of originals. B+(**) [sp]

U SCO: Catchin' Heat (2019 [2023], self-released): Portland-based avant-fusion (I guess?) band, third album, with Ryan Miller (guitar, clarinet), Jon Scheid (bass guitar, tenor sax, cello, synths, vocals), Phil Cleary (drums, synths), plus guests on two (of six) tracks. B+(**) [sp]

Brad Walker + Extended: Side by Side (2021 [2023], self-released): Tenor saxophonist, from New Orleans, backed by Extended, a trio of Oscar Rossignoli (piano/fender rhodes), Matt Booth (bass), and Brad Webb (drums). Strong and resilient. B+(***) [sp]

Web Web x Max Herre: Web Max II (2023, Compost): Munich-based group, half-dozen albums since 2017, sax/flute player Tony Lakatos the best known player but Roberto Di Gioia (drums, bass, guitar, strings, organ, mellotron, harp, percussion, trumpet, backing vocals) is probably the main guy, joined here by co-producer and synths player Herre. B+(*) [sp]

Hailey Whitters: I'm in Love (2023, Big Loud/Pigasus, EP): Country singer-songwriter, four albums since 2015, Raised seemed like a breakthrough. This adds six songs more , 17:41. B+(**) [sp]

Mareike Wiening: Reveal (2023, Greenleaf Music): German drummer, based in New York, two previous albums, smart postbop quintet with Rich Perry (tenor sax), Glenn Zaleski (piano), Alex Goodman (guitar), and Johannes Felscher (bass), joined by Dave Douglas (trumpet) on three tracks. B+(***) [sp]

Jack Wright: What Is What (2023, Relative Pitch): Saxophonist, b. 1942 in Pittsburgh, credits start in 1983, and have always been extremely fringe, but he's a very striking player, going solo here on soprano, alto, tenor, and soprano again. B+(***) [sp]

Neil Young: Before and After (2023, Reprise): New recordings of old songs, mostly obscure ones (although the series of "Mother Earth/ Mr. Soul/ Comes a Time" breaks that mold), done very simply, which he can do any time he wants. B+(**) [r]

John Zorn: Parrhesiastes (2023, Tzadik): Composer claims credit, band identified elsewhere as Chaos Magick, consists of Brian Marsella (fender rhodes), John Medeski (organ), Kenny Grochowski (drums), and Matt Hollenberg (guitar). B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Hasaan Ibn Ali: Reaching for the Stars: Trios/Duos/Solos (1962-65 [2023], Omnivore): Pianist, originally William Henry Langford Jr., only released one album in his lifetime (1931-80), titled The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (1965), but recorded one in 1965 eventually released as Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album. Since that release, the label has collected more previously unreleased scraps, with a 2-CD collection of solos in 2021, and now this: a 1962 trio with Henry Grimes (bass) and Kalil Madi (drums); three 1965 tracks backing vocalist Muriel Gilliam; and two solo tracks from 1962. Some impressive piano, sound far from ideal. B+(**) [sp]

As-Shams Archive Vol. 1: South African Jazz, Funk & Soul 1975-1982 (1975-82 [2023], As-Shams Music): Ten mostly-long tracks (85 minutes), opening with Kippie Moeketsi, closing with Sathima Bea Benjamin. B+(**) [sp]

Derek Bailey & Paul Motian: Duo in Concert (1990-91 [2023], Frozen Reeds): Guitar and drums duo, combines two sets, one from Groningen in 1990, the other from NYC in 1991. B+(**) [bc]

Steve Davis: Meets Hank Jones, Vol. 1 (2008 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Trombonist, played with Art Blakey late 1980s, twenty or so albums since 1995, digs up a trio session here with Jones on piano and Peter Washington on bass. B+(**) [sp]

Bill Evans: Tales: Live in Copenhagen (1964) (1964-69 [2023], Elemental Music): Piano trio with Chuck Israels (bass) and Larry Bunker (drums), two sets from Copenhagen in August, 1964, plus a "bonus" -- a stray "'Round Midnight" from Aarhus in 1969, with different bass and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Joy: Joy (1976 [2023], Cadillac): One-shot London-based jazz group: Jim Dvorak (trumpet), Chris Francis (alto sax), Frank Roberts (piano), Ernest Mothle (bass), Keith Bailey (drums). Upbeat, with a minor South African connecation. B+(*) [bc]

Roland Kirk: Live at Ronnie Scott's 1963 (1963 [2022], Gearbox): Tenor saxophonist, also credited with stritch, manzello, flute, nose flute, and siren (but surely you knew all that), plays a set (4 songs, 37:53) with a crack local band: Stan Tracey (piano), Malcolm Cecil (bass), Ronnie Stephenson (drums). A- [sp]

Malombo Jazz Makers: Malompo Jazz (1966 [2023], Strut): First iteration of a long-running South African jazz group, led here by Abbey Cindi (flute/harmonica), with guitar, drums, and occasional vocals. B+(*) [sp]

Malombo Jazz Makers: Malombo Jazz Makers Volume 2 (1967 [2023], Strut): A second volume, appeared in 1971. B+(*) [sp]

Amina Claudine Myers: Song for Mother E (1979 [2023], Leo): Keyboard player, from Arkansas, one of her first albums, dedicated to her mother (Mrs. Elnora M. Thurman), all original pieces, four on piano, four on organ, with Pheeroan akLaff on drums. B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

John Zorn: Nove Cantici Per Francesco D'Assisi (2019, Tzadik): Composed and produced by Zorn, ten songs -- I don't know which one didn't factor into the title -- played by three guitarists: Bill Frisell, Gyan Riley, Julian Lage. B+(*) [r]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Steven Kamperman: Maison Moderne (Trytone) [09-29]
• Lothar Ohlmeier/Tobias Klein: Left Side Right (Trytone) [02-16]
• Reggie Quinerly: The Thousandth Scholar (Redefinition) [01-19]
• Jim Snidero: For All We Know (Savant) [02-16]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

I'm extremely preoccupied with other work, so don't expect anything more than the occasional for-future-reference link here. Of course, if I did have time, I could write much about these pieces (but, especially re Gaze, refer to recent weeks. Meanwhile, look for links to Sarah Jones below.

PS: I've added a couple more links and/or comments since this was originally published Sunday afternoon. They are marked with a red right-border, like this one:

Top story threads:

Israel:

• Mondoweiss:

  • [12-11] Day 66: Israel attacks ambulances, medics in Gaza; people across the world join strike for Palestine.

  • [12-12] Day 67: Israeli forces storm Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

  • [12-13] Day 68: Israel announces death of 10 soldiers, UN says Israel destroyed nearly quarter of Gaza's buildings.

  • [12-14] Day 69: Reports of Israeli soldier shooting women and children execution style in Gaza.

  • [12-15] Day 70: A deteriorating public health crisis in Gaza, raids across the occupied West Bank.

  • [12-16] Day 71: Al Jazeera journalist killed in Gaza, protests in Tel Aviv after Israel kills own hostages.

  • [12-17] Day 72: Israeli forces kill Palestinians in church, UNRWA warns of mass flight to Egypt.

• Yuval Abraham: [12-17] 'The hostages weren't our top priority': How Israel's bombing frenzy endangered captives in Gaza. I suspect most Israeli authorities would prefer all the hostages dead, as that would shift them from being an inhibition against genocide into a martyred cause for.

• Jehad Abusalim: [12-15] Refaat Alareer was a brilliant poet and intellectual -- he was also my teacher: And he's dead now -- one of the few casualties of Israel's genocide with a name others can relate to.

• Miriam Berger/Hajar Harb: [12-17] Gaza, smashed by Israeli strikes, sees new threat: Disease.

• Ranjani Chakraborty: [12-13] Why Israel has so many Palestinian prisoners: "Inside Israel's dual criminal justice system."

• Jonathan Cook:

  • [12-05] How Israel uses AI genocide programme to obliterate Gaza.

  • [12-15] Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel's own actions on 7 October? They "fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens."

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [12-15] The cost of freedom: "Many in Gaza are faced with difficult choices that aren't choices at all."

• Jeff Halper: [12-15] Why Biden's 'day after' means two-state apartheid.

• Chris Hedges: [12-17] The death of Israel: "Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception."

• David C Hendrickson: [12-13] Hawks pushing for more fronts in Israeli military operations: "Supporting Netanyahu may mean accommodating actions against Hezbollah, Iran, West Bank, and more."

• Gideon Levy: [12-13] Israel's first unanimous war: "We've never before had a war like this, a war of complete consensus, a war of total silence, a war of blind support; a war without objection, without protest, without refusal to serve, without opposition, neither in the beginning or in the middle. . . . The brainwashing by the media is at fire-hose intensity, spraying forth from the TV news studios day and night, and even those in whom doubt may be starting to stir do not dare to raise them publicly. . . . As far as Israelis are concerned, it's possible to keep this war going forever, to kill all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and destroy it entirely for good."

• Eyal Lurie-Pardes: [12-12] Why Israel's top court is greenlighting a civil rights crackdown.

• Adam Miyashiro: [12-14] How racist discourse fuels Israel's settler colonial genocide.

• Mouin Rabbani: [12-15] Quick thoughts; Ongoing post on the war on Gaza: Ongoing commentary, latest update December 16.

• Nathan J Robinson: [12-13] There is no good reason to oppose a ceasefire in Gaza: "The rest of the world sees what the United States still does not: Israel's actions in Gaza can only succeed in producing an endless cycle of violence and suffering."

• Mina Sadi: [12-15] Israel's attack on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin camp is part of a cultural genocide.

• Jeremy Scahill: [12-11] This is not a war against Hamas: "The notion that the war would end if Hamas was overthrown or surrenders is as ahistorical as it is false."

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [12-13] IDF death toll mounts as 10 senior officers, soldiers killed in Gaza ambush.

  • [12-17] IDF disasters leave 10 dead in ambush, 3 hostages killed.

• Nadia Taha: [12-12] It's time for Gaza's journalists to be treated like the heroes they are.

• Jeff Wright: [12-14] The hope of ending 'Israel's fever dream': An interview with Craig Mokhiber: Former Director of the Ne York Office of the UN's High Commissioner of Human Rights after he stepped down in protest over the UN's failure to prevent a 'textbook case of genocide' in Gaza."

• Zi Zhou: [12-14] The growing global support for a Gaza ceasefire, explained: "Why the US and Israel are becoming 'increasingly isolated.'" Uh, because they're excusing, defending, and committing genocide?

Also note that the New York Times has run a collection of articles under the title What is the path to peace in Gaza? The dumbest is "Let NATO nations send troops," by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, although not by a huge margin over Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere's "The answer lies with Biden." The closest to my thinking is Jerome M Segal's "Grant Gaza statehood." He's much more tentative than my proposals (from recent weeks, shouldn't be hard to look them up), as he misses one key component: that Israel should have absolutely no say in or direction over the territory of Gaza and its people. Israel has proven, beyond any doubt, its incompetence as well as its inhumanity as what used to be called a "mandate" power. The other key point of my plan is that it separates Gaza off from Israel's more general, deeper, and intractable problem with the Palestinians still under its power. While a more general solution is still desirable, the case for separating Gaza off has become extraordinarily more urgent, not just for the people suffering there but also for those who realize the grave peril Israel and the United States are causing to their reputation and standing in the world.

US, Israel, and a decaying empire:

• Christine Ahn: [12-15] More sanctions and military pressure won't improve North Korean human rights.

• Andrew J Bacevich: [12-15] Israel is not America's responsibility.

• Daniel Brumberg: [12-16] Are Israel and the United States on a collision course? "For Washington, Netanyahu's singular and relentless focus on military tactics represents a strategic nightmare."

• Eli Clifton: [12-15] US lawmaker: Backing Israel is the 'path of least resistance'.

• Ryan Grim: [12-14] State Department stuns Congress, saying Biden is not even reviewing Trump's terror designation of Cuba.

• Robert E Hunter: [12-11] Biden needs to stop coddling Bibi: "The US must press for a ceasefire and then get serious about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

• Daniel Larison: [12-12] Keep US troops out of post-war Gaza: Incredibly, someone actually proposed such a thing. Anyone with the slightest recollection of the US "peacekeeping" force in Lebanon will instantly recoil from the thought. Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (1990) should be mandatory reading. Even without the overhead of serving as Israeli proxies, the US military has a terrible track record as "peacekeepers."

• Jon Schwarz: [12-12] How Biden's state department conceals its "human rights black hole" in the Middle East.

• Sarang Shidore/Dan M Ford: [12-15] Mapping it: striking US isolation in UN vote.

• Robert Wright: [12-15] Biden's Israel impotence: "The frequency and directness with which Israeli officials convey to the world that they don't care about Biden's opinion is getting embarrassing."

Zionism, Antisemitism, and Palestinian rights:

• Michael Arria: [12-12] The Shift: Misleading U.S. headlines on Palestine activism.

• Zack Beauchamp: [12-12] The return of liberal Zionism?: "For many Jews, the October 7 attacks discredited both the Zionist right and the anti-Zionist left -- paving the way for the resurrection of a seemingly dead political tradition."

• Peter Beinart: [12-11] Harvard is ignoring its own antisemitism experts: "The university's new advisory group on antisemitism elevates political concerns over academic integrity."

• Tim Dickinson: [12-16] Turning Point USA's AmericaFest is infested with antisemitism.

• Emma Green: [12-15] How a student group is politicizing a generation on Palestine: "Activists with Students for Justice in Palestine have mobilized major campus demonstrations in support of Gaza -- and provided an intellectual framework for protesters watching what's happening in the Middle East."

• Donald Johnson: [12-10] Anti-Palestinian racism is inherent in Zionism and you're not allowed to talk about it.

• Sarah Jones: [12-12] Don't lose sight of Gaza.

• Eric Levitz: [12-11] How bad is antisemitism in America, really? If you more or less align liberal and/or left, and are still seriously concerned about the rise of antisemitism, this is for you, and provides a fair and judicious appraisal of the situation.

• Nicole Narea: [12-15] What elite universities -- and their critics -- get wrong about campus antisemitism.

• Katha Pollitt: [12-15] Why have feminists been so slow to condemn the Hamas rapes? Maybe because the charges are wrapped up in a propaganda campaign meant to promote genocide? One fallback position seems to be that "of course, Hamas committed rapes -- all armies rape." But wouldn't that also apply to the army that's 10 times as large, with 100 times the budget for death-dealing arms? It's been some times since anyone proclaimed the IDF as "the most moral army in the world" -- I can't recall hearing that since Sharon became Prime Minister. (You should have seen his face when Bush called him "a man of peace.")

• Ishmael Reed: [12-15] To shame Dr. Gay, the media had to shield Representative Stefanik.

• Jen Wieczner: [12-12] How Bill Ackman's campaign to oust Harvard's president failed.

Trump, and other Republicans:

• Eric Adelson/Patricia Mazzei: [12-17] Florida Republicans strip powers of embattled party chairman: Christian Ziegler, "who faces a criminal investigation and has resisted calls to resign."

• Isaac Arnsdorf: [12-16] Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, praises autocrat Orban.

• John Cassidy: [12-12] What Trump's civil trial tells us about his upcoming criminal cases.

• David Gilbert: [12-14] Moms for Liberty is tearing itself apart: "One of the Republican Parlty's most successful grassroots organizations is being torn apart by scandal, including accusations of sexual assault."

• Maggie Haberman/Shane Goldmacher/Nicholas Nehamas/Jonathan Swan: [12-16] Jeff Roe, top strategist for star-crossed DeSantis Super PAC, resigns.

• Margaret Hartmann: [12-13] Trump spent legal defense fund money at Mar-a-Lago.

• Kelly McClure: [12-16] Trump recirculates Hitler rhetoric at campaign event in New Hampshire.

• Ally Mutnick/Burgess Everett: [12-17] Senate GOP enters critical stretch for fending off bad candidates.

• Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebaeng: [12-14] 'Dictator' Trump plans to deploy massive number of troops on U.S. soil.

• Luke Savage: [12-14] Nikki Haley is an anti-worker fanatic, not a "moderate".

• Ian Ward: [12-15] The crazy conservative scheme to make Trump look normal: Rehabilitate Nixon.

• Li Zhou: [12-13] Why Republicans are pursuing an unfounded impeachment inquiry into Biden.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Kevin Breuninger: [12-15] 'Good one, Donald': Biden flaunts stock market record highs, mocks Trump for predicting 'collapse'.

• David Marchese: [12-15] Rep. Ro Khanna has a reminder for Democrats: Americans love money.

• Nicole Narea: [12-09] Can Democrats overcome their deep divisions over Gaza? "The party is fractured over President Joe Biden's unequivocal support for Israel as it continues its military campaign in Gaza ahead of 2024."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • [12-13] Republicans' thin corruption case against Joe Biden, explained.

  • [12-14] Why Biden may give in to Republican demands on immigration: "It's partly about Ukraine aid. But the politics of immigration have also changed for Democrats."

• Michael Tomasky: This impeachment will do more to reelect Biden than anything Biden could do himself.

• Li Zhou: [12-13] Why Republicans are pursuing an unfounded impeachment inquiry into Biden.

Legal matters and other crimes: Also see the Sarah Jones article in the main section, which relates to the Kate Cox abortion case but goes much deeper. I've moved other pieces on Cox down there.

• Justin Elliott/Joshua Kaplan/Alex Mierjeski/Brett Murphy: [12-16] A "delicate matter": Clarence Thomas' private complaints about money sparked fears he would resign.

• Matt Ford: America's most corrupt mayors have a friend in the Supreme Court.

• Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling:

  • How a Supreme Court leak helped conservative justices unite to overturn Roe.

  • Broke Giuliani must pay up $148 million for defaming Georgia election workers. Also:

    • Charles Bethea: [12-15] Watching Rudy Giuliani self-destruct at a defamation trial in Washington.

    • Andrew Rice: [12-13] Rudy Giuliani can't resist digging himself a hole at his defamation trial. Also: [12-15] The women Rudy Giuliani tried to destroy, and [12-15] Why Rudy Giuliani lost so big.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [12-11] l The Supreme Court hands down a small but unexpected victory for LGBTQ people.

  • [12-13] The Supreme Court will hear its biggest abortion case since it overruled Roe v. Wade: "The justices will decide whether to ban mifepristone, a drug used in half of US abortions."

  • [12-14] The Supreme Court case that could shut down Trump's election theft trial, explained: "Trump claims that when the president tries to steal an election, it's not illegal."

Climate, environment, and COP28: Isn't the latter supposed to do something about the former?

• Umair Irfan:

  • [12-11] Pledges to slash methane pollution at COP28 are leaving out one big thing: "Cows."

  • [12-11] The severe El Niño in South America is a preview of a climate-changed world: "Dengue, drought, and floods are hammering Peru and Bolivia this year."

• Benji Jones: [12-14] Welcome to the extinction capital of the world: "Our planet faces a mass extinction. I visited ground zero." Hawaii.

• Elizabeth Kolbert: [12-13] What did COP28 really accomplish?

• Eric Levitz: [12-14] The new global climate deal is mostly hot air.

• Kate Morgan: [11-11] How to detox coal country.

• Paige Vega: [12-13] Don't be satisfied with a pledge to end fossil fuels.

• Aarhus University: [12-14] People, not the climate, found to have caused the decline of the giant mammals.

Economic matters:

• John Cassidy: [12-15] The Federal Reserve is trying to catch up with falling inflation.

• Emily Stewart: [12-13] Starbucks has lost $11 billion market value, and not because of boycotts: "Starbucks's messy December, explained."

Ukraine War:

• Joshua Keating: [12-16] What happens in Ukraine if US aid disappears?

• Anatol Lieven: [12-13] Biden says Ukraine has already won. He's right.

• Charles P Pierce: [12-13] Republicans in Congress stiffed Ukraine, but gave Zelensky some unsolicited advice: How's this for snark? "Their stance on military aid made Neville Chamberlain look like Charlemagne." Related here:

  • EJ Dionne Jr: [12-17] Ukraine shouldn't have to pay the price of the GOP's wedge politics: I fear that Democrats are making a grave error treating growing Republican opposition to funding endless war in Ukraine to "wedge politics." They're setting themselves up as the War Party, while more and more Americans are growing weary of war abroad. And who are they to Ukrainians would be "paying the price" by not extending a war that is already costing them dearly?

• Paul Sonne/Rebecca R Ruiz: [12-17] How Putin turned a Western boycott into a bonanza.

Other stories:

David Atkins: [12-13] Conservatives have lost the culture war: Which is why it works for them: it gives them an endless source of complaints, a fount of anger to ride to power on, with nothing they can actually do.

Kyle Chayka: [12-07] The terrible twenties? The assholocene? What to call our chaotic era.

Elise Craig: [12-10] Resilience is invaluable in tough times. Here's how to build it.

Tom Engelhardt: [12-13] Keeping TomDispatch alive: In deeply troubled times: Bills itself as "A regular antidote to the mainstream media." For 23 years, one of the world's most important sources of critical thought and fine writing on the world's really big issues. Only thing I can think of to make it better would be if they took an interest in publishing little old me.

Trip Gabriel: [12-16] Paul Chevigny, early voice on police brutality, dies at 88: "An eminent civil rights lawyer, he was one of the nation's foremost experts on abusive policing. He also successfully challenged New York's Cabaret Law." I remember his book, Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City (published in 1969).

Masha Gessen: [12-09] In the shadow of the Holocaust: I cited this article last week. It has since become news controversy in its own right.

• Calder McHugh: {12-16] Masha Gessen kicks the hornet's nest on Israel and the Holocaust: Interview.

Jeet Heer: [12-15] The 2 Murrays and the age of pretend anarchy: "The strange global influence of anarcho-capitalism." Bookchin and Rothbard: I've noted the name they share before, as I've been fascinated with both.

Jordan Heller: [12-14] An oral history of the George W Bush shoe throwing, 15 years later.

Sarah Jones: [12-14] The anti-abortion movement is anti-human: Read this one:

Abortion opponents try to hide their authoritarian tendencies. In victory, though, their motives are clear, and so is the movement's true character. Forced birth is not an accidental outcome of the end of Roe v. Wade, but rather the primary goal -- no matter the consequences. A woman's needs become secondary to fetal requirements. The viability of a fetus does not seem to matter, nor does the woman's health. Just ask Kate Cox. . . .

These women have revealed a crucial truth: Abortion bans weren't written for human beings. As written, they strip women of their humanity and reimagine them as vessels. A vessel is not a person. A vessel has no rights. A vessel is only useful as long as it is functional. When it is no longer fit for purpose, it is cast aside; there are plenty more where it came from.

Also on abortion and the Cox case:

• Greer Donley: [12-17] What happened to Kate Cox is tragic, and completely expected.

• Maureen Dowd: [12-16] Supreme contempt for women.

• Ian Millhiser: [12-12] The sinister court decision denying Kate Cox an abortion, explained: "The court's opinion reads like something out of Franz Kafka, or maybe something out of Jim Crow."

• Alexandra Petri: [12-15] GOP baffled that 'We don't care if you die' is not a winning slogan. Which, in turn, links to:

  • Madison Fernandez: [12-15] Republicans struggle as they keep getting forced to talk about abortion.

• Li Zhou: [12-12] One Texas case shows why women can't rely on legal exceptions to abortion bans: The Kate Cox case.

Inkoo Kang: [12-10] The best TV shows of 2023: Having almost totally lost my appetite for movies, and having given up reading fiction decades ago (never any time), streaming TV series has become my only respite from the long work day. Still, I've only seen four of these: Reservation Dogs; Somebody Somewhere; Barry; and Succession (of course). More TV links:

• Inkoo Kang: [11-21] Why can't we quit The Morning Show?

• Inkoo Kang: [12-14] The Crown ends with a whimper. "Without a living protagonist fit to carry it, The Crown is increasingly populated by ghosts."

• Matthew Gilbert: [12-01] The 10 best TV shows of 2023: Boston Globe piece, so no way I can read the details, but add Bear and Poker Face to the list we've watched, and Fargo from the HMs (which we're in the middle of, same for Slow Horses, and Shetland -- which has taken a very Fargo-ish turn this year). Year End Lists have more lists I should check out, like this one from Playlist, where numbers 20-16 are Full Circle, Slow Horses, Shrinking (which I didn't like, but there's something to it), Justified: City Primeval, and Fargo.

• Vikram Murthi: [11-21] How Reservation Dogs changed the TV landscape.

Josh Katz/Aatish Bhatia: [12-17] Seven things we learned analyzing 515 million Wordles.

Joshua Keating: [12-13] Why we still underestimate what groups like Hamas are capable of: "Two decades after 9/11l, extremist groups continue to pull off surprise attacks. Why?" Article quotes Erik Dahl: "We have too much information and not enough understanding of what's going on in the world."

Matt McManus: [12-12] It's time to break up with our exploitative political and economic system: Review of Malaika Jabali's book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How to Move On.

Charles P Pierce: [12-14] Andre Braugher was one of the greatest actors of his generation.

David Remnick: [12-10] Are we sleepwalking into dictatorship? Liz Cheney has a book to sell you.

Norman Solomon:

• [12-14] Unilateral sanity could save the world: What Daniel Ellsberg understood, especially in his 2017 book: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planer.

• [12-15] Noam Chomsky at 95: Still speaking hard truths, still ignored by mainstream media.

Jeffrey St Clair/Alexander Cockburn: [12-15] The sinister career of Ariel Sharon: From Sabra and Shatila to Gaza: Old piece from 2001, when Sharon had just become Prime Minister, so this misses his most politically toxic years, as he systematically demolished the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian Authority. Baruch Kimmerling wrote a good book about Sharon's rule, for which he coined the term Politicide. That's still a pretty accurate term for Israel's plan, although it never fully masked a hope for genocide. Despite the title, the piece does go back before 1982, mentioning the 1951 massacre at Qibya that did so much to establish Sharon's reputation as a war criminal.

Rick Sterling: [12-15] From Dallas to Gaza: How JFK's assassination was good for Zionist Israel.

George Varga: [12-13] Lester Bangs at 75: Legacy of 'America's greatest rock critic' endures 4 decades after his death.

Joan Walsh: [12-14] I finally left Xitter because of Alex Jones. Lots of complicated reasoning can go into deciding whether or not to engage in a social media platform, but the marginal difference of Alex Jones being on or off it is infinitesimally small. Of course, the point could simply be that Jones and Musk are each so bad they deserve each other, but if that were the point, why does Walsh make it about herself?

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, December 11, 2023

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 41370 [41321] rated (+49), 17 [6] unrated (+11).

Let's see how quickly I can knock this out.

Speaking of which yesterday. Abbreviated intro and pretty much the same old news, but still came to 5184 words (114 links).

Lots of records below, but fewer A-list than in the last couple weeks, so diminishing returns? Two came from jazz poll ballots, and two from Chuck Eddy's latest PJPR post.

Deadline for the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll is coming up fast: Friday, December 15. I have 77 ballots counted. Hopefully we'll add at least that many more. It will be dispiriting (and a personal embarrassment) if we don't. Right now New Releases is a very tight two-album race. Total number of albums with votes is over 500.

EOY Aggregate has grown slowly as I fall ever farther behind. Last I checked it was a dead heat between Boygenius and Olivia Rodrigo, with Caroline Polachek close in third.

I'm updating my other lists as I go along, but have nothing much to report there.

I filed the following as my Jazz ballot:

New Releases:

1. Rodrigo Amado/The Bridge: Beyond the Margins (Trost)
2. Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (Impulse!)
3. Steve Lehman/Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (Pi)
4. James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love (Tao Forms)
5. The Rempis Percussion Quartet: Harvesters (Aerophonic)
6. George Coleman: Live at Smalls Jazz Club (Cellar)
7. Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Sixth Decade From Paris to Paris: Live at Sons D'Hiver (RogueArt)
8. Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response: Book of Stories (True Sound)
9. Emmet Cohen: Master Legacy Series Volume 5: Featuring Houston Person (Bandstand Presents)
10. Farida Amadou/Jonas Cambien/Dave Rempis: On the Blink (Aerophonic)

Rara Avis (Reissues/Historical):

1. Roy Hargrove: The Love Suite: In Mahogany (1993, Blue Engine)
2. Steve Swell's Fire Into Music: For Jemeel: Fire From the Road (2003-04, RogueArt)
3. François Carrier Ensemble: Openness (2006, Fundacja Sluchaj)

Vocal:

1. Lisa Marie Simmons/Marco Cremaschini: NoteSpeak 12 (Ropeadope)

Debut:

1. Dave Bayles Trio: Live at the Uptowner (Calligram)

Latin:

1. Aruán Ortiz: Pastor's Paradox (Clean Feed)

I should probably just give up on trying to vote in the three specialist categories, as I have little sense of them anymore. Good chance my vote is the only one for each of the three (although Ortiz does have votes for Serranias, which seems to be regarded as more authentic or paradigmatic (or whatever the word is).

New records reviewed this week:

Bar Italia: The Twits (2023, Matador): London-based indie rock band, a guitar-bass-drums trio with Nina Crisante doing most of the vocals. Fourth album, second this year (after Tracey Denim), which it stretches out a bit, in ways that may or may not improve. B+(***) [sp]

John Blum/David Murray/Chad Taylor: The Recursive Tree (2022 [2023], Relative Pitch): Avant-pianist, has a rather thin discography, starting with a solo in 2002. The interest here, of course, is the tenor saxophonist, who lifts any encounter. He sounds a bit thinner here than on Plumb, probably due to having to navigate a more fractured landscape -- mostly piano, but the drummer chips in. A- [sp]

ML Buch: Suntub (2023, 15 Love): Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter, initials for Mary Louise, plays guitar, second album. B+(*) [sp]

Dave Burrell: Harlem Rhapsody (2023, Parco Della Musica): Pianist, debut 1969, now in his 80s, mostly avant-garde but has a particularly memorable solo album of Jelly Roll Morton. This, too, is solo, six improvs on oldies averaging 10 minutes, quite often fascinating. B+(***) [sp]

Adriana Calcanhotto: Errante (2023, Modern/BMG): Brazilian singer-songwriter, MPB, 17 albums since 1990. A fine example, probably one among many. B+(**) [sp]

Call Super: Eulo Cramps (2023, Can You Feel the Sun): British electronica producer Joseph Richmond-Seaton, fourth album. B+(**) [sp]

Chory Thicket [Christy Doran/Ronan Guilfoyle/Gerry Hemingway]: A Breath of Time (2023, Auricle): Guitar, bass guitar, drums; improv trio, dates from 2016 but this is their first record. B+(**) [bc]

Chouk Bwa & the Ängstromers: Somanti (2023, Bongo Joe): Haitian group, several previous albums, hard rhythms and chants. B+(**) [sp]

Creation Rebel: Hostile Environment (2023, On-U Sound): UK-based reggae/dub group, basically Adrian Sherwood's Hitrun and On-U Sound house band, had a run of albums 1978-84, so I would expect some personnel turnover nearly forty years on, but they do have that sound. Not a vocal powerhouse, but voices too find the groove. A- [sp]

Harold Danko: Trillium (2023, SteepleChase): Pianist, from Ohio, several dozen albums since 1974, this a trio with tenor sax (Rich Perry, from Danko's 1990s Quartet) and trumpet (Kirk Knuffke), playing Danko originals that have something to do with Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" (as have two of his other albums). B+(**) [sp]

DJ +1: Aromáticas (2023, También): Colombian electronica producer, "draws inspiration from the herbal teas his mother would make," so pretty ambient. B+(*) [sp]

Nick Dunston: Skultura (2022 [2023], Fun in the Church): Bassist, based in Brooklyn, couple previous albums, this one makes use of samplers and electronics, mixing in scattered vocals and sax/clarinet (Eldar Tsalikov), a jittery combo. B [sp]

Hilario Duran and His Latin Jazz Big Band: Cry Me a River (2023, Alma): Cuban pianist, based in Toronoto since 1995, with more than a dozen albums since then. Big band, Paquito D'Rivera among the star-laden cast. B+(**) [sp]

Ekiti Sound: Drum Money (2023, Crammed Discs): Leke Awayinka, divides his time between London and Lagos, has a previous album (though searching for "ekiti sound" also a compilation of Emmanuel Omotuyi and His Osirigi Band, from 1975). B+(*) [sp]

The Feelies: Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground (2018 [2023], Bar/None): The Velvet Underground emerged in 1967 as weird and arty, but after John Cale left, Lou Reed's band developed the basic guitar sound that became for model for most of the alt/indie bands from the 1990s on. The Feelies, from New Jersey, were one of the first to get on that bandwagon, with their jangly 1980 debut Crazy Rhythms. So this live set from White Eagle Hall in Jersey City work as their roots album, taking eighteen songs I know better than the back of my hand, and performing them as normally as humanly possible. B+(**) [sp]

Alan Ferber Nonet: Up High, Down Low (2022 [2023], Sunnyside): Trombonist, debut 2005, mostly large groups since then, with four nonet albums plus a big band. B+(**) [sp]

Funkwrench Blues: Soundtrack for a Film Without Pictures (2023, Need to Know): As best I can tell, this is Frank Swart, bassist and sometime producer, with no name credits but a bunch of side credits since 1991, mostly with folk singer-songwriters (e.g., a Nathan Bell record, this same label, that made my top ten in 2021). Aims for some kind of Miles Davis fusion here, and picks up enough top guests (including a couple of Davis alumni) to make it happen. B+(*) [sp]

Muriel Grossmann: Devotion (2023, Third Man, 2CD): Austrian saxophonist, but born in Paris, based since 2002 in Spain (now Ibiza), debut 2007, one album each year since 2015, many titles (like this one) suggesting sincere spirituality, the main evidence being devotion to John Coltrane. Backed by guitar (Radomir Milojkovic), organ (Abel Boquera), and drums (Uros Stamenkovic). Raises the rafters. B+(***) [sp]

Miho Hazama's M_unit: Beyond Orbits (2023, Edition): Japanese pianist, based in New York, seventh album since 2012, just composer and conductor here (Billy Test plays piano), leading a large ensemble -- 18 names on back cover, counting the two designated as "special guests" (Christian McBride and Immanuel Wilkins), but 13 seems to be the standard configuration, including two violins, viola, cello, and vibes. The compositions are complex, cosmic in sweep and grandeur, and expertly played. A- [sp]

Lisa Hilton: Coincidental Moment (2023, Ruby Slippers): Pianist, has produced a steady stream of albums since 1997, adds Igmar Thomas (trumpet) to her long-running trio of Luques Curtis (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (2023, Ghostly International): Harp player, makes for a richly resonant if rather static form of ambient music. B+(*) [sp]

Ingrid Laubrock: Monochromes (2022 [2023], Intakt): German saxophonist (tenor/soprano), based in Brooklyn, many albums since 1998. One 39:18 piece here, composed using taped sounds (trumpets, accordions, percussion, Harry Bertoia sculptures), plus Jon Irabagon (sopranino sax), Zeena Parkins (electric harp), and Tom Rainey (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Lenhart Tapes: Dens (2023, Glitterbeat): Producer Vladimir Lenhart's "Belgrade Ethno-Noise outfit," aims at "re-tooling of submerged Balkan musics." B+(***) [sp]

Gregory Lewis: Organ Monk Going Home (2022 [2023], Sunnyside): Organ player, hit on the idea of playing Monk tunes on organ in 2010, released five such albums on his own up to 2017, now returns with a sixth (and a label). With Kevin McNeal (guitar) and Nasheet Waits (drums). Wrote one original to go with seven (mostly lesser-known) Monks. B+(*) [sp]

Mat Maneri Quartet: Ash (2021 [2023], Sunnyside): Viola player, father Joe Maneri was famous for his microtone works, he followed suit, with many albums since 1994. Quartet with Lucian Ban (piano), John Hébert (bass), and Randy Peterson (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Lesley Mok: The Living Collection (2023, American Dreams): Percussionist, styles herself as a "sound artist," first album, rounded up a nonet here, with two brass (Adam O'Farrill on trumpet and Kalun Leung on trombone), two reedists (David Leon and Yuma Uesaka), piano (Cory Smythe), and strings (viola, cello, bass). This is a very ambitious, and mostly accomplished, piece of work. B+(***) [sp]

Mozart Estate: Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping (2023, West Midlands/Cherry Red): Latest alias for Lawrence Hayward, British singer-songwriter behind Felt (1982-92), Denim (1992-97), and Go-Kart Mozart (1999-2018). Corny or camp? B+(*) [sp]

Nihiloxica: Source of Denial (2023, Crammed Discs): Second LP from a "Bugandan techno outfit" based in Kampala, Uganda, described as "Bugandan drums meets UK bass." The drums put it over the top. A- [sp]

Maciej Obara Quartet: Frozen Silence (2022 [2023], ECM): Polish alto saxophonist, albums since 2009, third quartet album for ECM, here with Dominik Wania (piano), Ole Morten Vågan (bass), and Gard Nilssen (drums). Postbop, nicely poised. B+(***) [sp]

Endea Owens and the Cookout: Feel Good Music (2023, BassBae Music): Bassist, from Detroit, based in New York, graduated from Juilliard, played in the Late Show's house band (co-produced by bandleader Louis Cato). First album, ten musicians plus singers (Jhoard, Shenel Johns) listed, but septet is probably it. B+(**) [sp]

Jeb Patton: Preludes (2021 [2023], Cellar Music): Pianist, half-dozen albums since 2005, quintet with Mike Rodriguez (trumpet), John Ellis (tenor/soprano sax, flute, bass clarinet), bass, and drums. Eight original "Prelude in" titles followed by a cover of "Prelude to a Kiss." B+(**) [sp]

Eddie Prévost/NO Moore/James O'Sullivan/Ross Lambert: Chord (2022 [2023], Shrike): Percussion, plus three electric guitarists. B+(*) [bc]

Amy Rigby: Cut & Run (2022, Southern Domestic): A "ragtag collection of covers I recorded for my podcast or just to learn how they go, & some new songs that might not make the cut for my 'proper' album in progress." On the low end of lo-fi, should be throwaway stuff, but isn't. B+(**) [bc]

Amy Rigby: Cut Two (2023, Southern Domestic): More rough demos and podcast scraps. B+(**) [bc]

Say She She: Silver (2023, Colemine): "Female-led 8 piece" from Brooklyn, or maybe just the trio of singers (Piya Malik, Sabrina Mileo Cunningham, Nya Gazelle Brown) up front, the band name a nod to Chic ("C'est Chi-Chi"). The music too, except when the lush vocal harmonies win out. B+(***) [sp]

Slowdive: Everything Is Alive (2023, Dead Oceans): British shoegaze band, released three albums 1991-95, regrouped for another in 2017, and now this fifth one. Love the sound here. Not sure how much more there is. B+(**) [sp]

Simon Spillett Big Band: Dear Tubby H (2023, Mister PC): British tenor saxophonist, several albums since 2006, compiled a Properbox and wrote a biography of Tubby Hayes, who is further honored here. This keeps getting brasher. B+(***) [sp]

Elias Stemeseder/Christian Lillinger: Umbra (2022 [2023], Intakt): Piano and drums duo, plus guests on most cuts: Peter Evans (piccolo trumpet), Russell Hall (bass), DoYeon Kim (gayageum), with Brandon Seabrook (guitar) as a fourth on four tracks. B+(***) [sp]

Sultan Stevenson: Faithful One (2022 [2023], Whirlwind): British pianist, parents from Barbados and St. Vincent, first album, half trio, half adding trumpet (Josh Short) and tenor sax (Denys Baptiste). B+(**) [sp]

Loren Stillman: Time and Again (2022 [2023], Sunnyside): Alto saxophonist, born in London but raised in New York, released an album on Soul Note in 1997 (when he was still a teen), and pretty regularly since 2003. Trio with bass (Drew Gress) and drums (Mark Ferber), on his own pieces. Another strong album. B+(***) [sp]

Two Shell: Lil Spirits (2023, Mainframe Audio, EP): Electronic music duo from London, half-dozen singles and EPs since 2019, nothing LP-length, but these five cuts (16:41) make for a very satisfying demi-album. A- [sp]

Martina Verhoeven Quintet: Driven: Live at Roadburn 2022 (2022, Klanggalerie): Dutch pianist, married to guitarist Dirk Serries, who plays here, along with Colin Webster (sax), Gonçalo Almeida (bass), and Onno Govaert (drums). One 49:31 shot, aptly named. B+(***) [sp]

Colin Webster Large Ensemble: First Meeting (2022 [2023], Raw Tonk): Saxophonist (alto here), based in London, has a huge number of albums since 2011. Large means octet here, two sets (66:55) from Cafe Oto, with two more saxophonists (Rachel Musson on tenor and Cath Roberts on baritone), trumpet (Charlotte Keeffe), electronics (Graham Dunning), guitar (Dirk Serries), bass (John Edwards), and drums (Andrew Lisle). Gets noisy, I'm tempted to add exquisitely (not my normal reaction). B+(***) [bc]

Wilco: Cousin (2023, dBpm): Jeff Tweedy's band, back for their 12th studio album (since 1995), pleasant as usual. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

John Butcher & Gerry Hemingway: Roulette - New York City (2005) (2005 [2023], Auricle): Sax and drums duo, both well established, recorded a couple days before a similar duo they released in 2008 (Buffalo Pearl). B+(**) [bc]

Clairvoyance Is the Dance (2023, Huveshta Rituals): "Polish-Belgian tastemkaker Kreshik" compiled this 18-track sampler of "worldwide talents." Seems deliberately obscure. B+(*) [sp]

Luis Russell: At the Swing Cats Ball: Newly Discovered Recordings From the Closet, Volume 1 1938-1940 (1938-40 [2023], Dot Time): Originally from Panama, he moved to New Orleans in 1919, then worked his way up to Chicago (1925) and New York (1929), both running his own band and using it to back Louis Armstrong (11 of 20 tracks here feature Armstrong; the last four are solo piano). Crudely recorded airchecks, sound so-so, not a major discovery. B+(*) [sp]

Bernie Worrell/Cindy Blackman Santana/John King: Spherical (1994 [2023], Infrequent Seams): P-Funk keyboard whiz from the launch in 1970, did a solo album in 1978, several more in the 1990s and later, before he died in 2016. Fusion jam session here with drums and guitar. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Lenhart Tapes: Duets (2021, Novo Doba): Eight tracks of Afro-Balkan Ethno-Noise, seven with features singers (Mirjana Raic or Svetlana Spajic), the other featuring "Orchestra." B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Alia Trio: Shaped by Sea Waves (Edgetone) [07-07]
• Frank Carlberg Large Ensemble: Elegy for Thelonious (Sunnyside) [03-08]
• The Rob Dixon/Steve Allee Quintet: Standards Deluxe (self-released) [02-01]
• Anne Foucher & Jean-Marc Foussat: Chair Ça (Fou) [??-??]
• Jean-Marc Foussat/Daunik Lazro: Trente-Cinq Minutes & Vingt-Trois Secondes (Fou) [??-??]
• Amanda Gardier: Auteur: Music Inspired by the Films of Wes Anderson (self-released) [01-26]
• Riley Mulherkar: Riley (Westerlies) [02-16]
• Noertker's Moxie: In Flitters: 49 Bits From B*ck*tt (Edgetone) [11-07]
• Bill Scorzari: Through These Waves (self-released '16)
• Bill Scorzari: Now I'm Free (self-released '19)
• Bill Scorzari: The Crosswinds of Kansas (self-released '22)/li>
• Rob Sussman: Top Secret Lab (Sus4music) [12-12]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Woke up yesterday thinking of an introduction I might write in lieu of gathering links, a task I really don't have time for this week. But I gathered a few links instead. So I'm barely going to hint at an introduction here. Some of that is time, but there's also an element of "fuck it!" too. As Molly Ivins was known to say, "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas!" The government of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (and slower but no less surely in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem), and the government in Washington is fully committed to helping and defending them (despite the occasional "tsk, tsk" -- surely I don't need to quote Moshe Dayan again on what Israelis think of American "opinions"?). Meanwhile, Washington is funding a hopeless war in Ukraine just to marginalize and alienate Russia, and, well, too many other things to list here.

And no matter how careful we are at distinguishing between the specific groups of people responsible for all this, we are all going to feel the effects of a generalized backlash, because, well, that's just how people operate. They may not be exacting at ferreting out root causes, but they understand when they've been wronged, and they can find the general direction those wrongs are coming from. And, really, the political leaders in Jerusalem and in Washington have no answer, since they're more guilty of such gross generalizations than anyone.

Anyhow, basta per ora! I have some real work to get to. And then, latkes and chopped liver on rye rolls for a midweek Hannukah dinner.

Top story threads:

Israel:

• Tony Karon/Daniel Levy: [12-08] Israel is losing this war: "Despite the violence it has unleashed on Palestinians, Israel is failing to achieve its political goals." I listed this piece first, because everyone pretty much understands the enormous human costs of the "Israel-Hamas War" -- the dividing point isn't on the facts, but whether one cares. What's harder to grasp is the possible political goals of the war: why Israel's leaders insisted on waging it, why in this particular way, what they think they might achieve, and why they think it's worth the effort. That's the subject here, and something to think about. And it really hits Israel's leaders where it hurts: complain about their racism, their arrogance, their contempt, their savagery, and they'll just puff out their chests; but call them losers, and their minds explode. Once again, refer back to Richard Ben Cramer's 2004 book, How Israel Lost.

• Mondoweiss: Philip Weiss's website continues to do heroic work:

  • [12-04] Day 59: Palestinian civilians have nowhere to run as Israel expands ground operations south.

  • [12-05] Day 60: Israel surrounds Kamal Adwan hospital, 'shooting anything that moves'. Subheds include: "Israel plans to flood Hamas tunnels with seawater"; "WHO: Israeli forces notified us to empty medical warehouses in 24 hours."

  • [12-06] Day 61: US believes Israel's Gaza invasion could last until the end of January.

  • [12-07] Day 62: UN Chief invokes Article 99, warning Israel's war on Gaza threatens 'international peace and security'.

  • [12-08] Day 63: Israeli army rounds up, strips and blindfolds civilian men in Gaza, takes them to unknown location.

  • [12-09] Day 64: U.S., alone against the world, vetoes Security Council resolution on Gaza ceasefire.

  • [12-10] Day 65: U.S. rushes arms to Israel as Palestinians announce over 250,000 homes destroyed in Gaza.

• Maha Abdallah/Aseil Abu-Baker/Lina Ali/Marya Farah: [12-10] Are human rights really universal? Palestine and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 75 years later.

• B'tselem: [12-07] Humanitarian catastrophe as policy.

• Allia Bukhari: [12-09] Germany's Muslims fear rise in Islamophobia amidst war in Gaza: We've already seen this in several examples of shootings in America. Israel's propaganda war aims not just at tarring anyone who criticizes Israel as anti-semitic, but at dehumanizing Palestinians, making it easier to accept their deaths and destruction, and encouraging others to join in the killing. Germany is perhaps more susceptible to this propaganda war than most other nations (as is the US and UK).

• Zah Cheney-Rice: [12-05] Norman Finkelstein's long crusade: "A cantankerous Israel critic takes a rare turn in the limelight." I've been citing Finkelstein's Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom (2018, so you might be thinking he'd seen nothing yet, but he saw plenty) since this war began, but I read his two seminal books -- Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995) and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000) -- while the second intifada was still going on, and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005) shortly after, and they are masterful dissections of the stories Israelis tell themselves and others, a hard-nosed chronicle of national mythmaking. I haven't followed his later book closely, because he was effective enough at teaching how to see through the hasbara, further instruction seemed unnecessary (e.g., his critiques of books by Dennis Ross, Richard Goldstone, and Ari Shavit, or his I Accuse! Herewith a Proof Beyond Reasonable Doubt that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda Whitewashed Israel; also two previous books on Gaza, the first titled This Time We Went Too Far).

• Marin Cogan: [12-06] The Israel-Hamas war is tearing American cultural institutions apart.

• Alexis Grenell: [12-08] No, the Israel/Palestine conflict is not "simple". The complaints are just window-dressing. The core of this piece is simple enough: it is a brief for the annihilation of Hamas, mostly because they've said some bad things, and done some desperate things. For the magazine's left-leaning readers, this is all wrapped up in concern for the innocents Hamas has taken advantage of and used as an excuse for their evil deeds, but the word for that isn't "complexity": it's obfuscation. But you don't want to know anyway.

• Yoav Haifawi: [12-09] 'Democratic margins' get even thinner in '48 Palestine: "The war on Gaza has provided an opportunity for the police, under ultra-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to launch an all-out repression campaign against the Arab population, and any opposition to the slaughter of Palestinians." Title is rather oblique. It refers to the so-called "Arab Citizens of Israel" -- Palestinians who stayed put during the Nakba, and were subsequently granted citizenship in 1950, in a law that stripped Palestinian refugees of their property and any right to return (a right the UN always supported). Their "citizenship" was never equal, either de jure or de facto, but has increasingly come under attack, especially under the current government.

• Benjamin Hart: [12-07] Why Israel won't forgive Benjamin Netanyahu: Interview with Anshel Pfeffer, a Haaretz reporter and author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Imad Abu Hawash: [12-08] 'It would've been better if they shot us': Palestinians recount prison abuse: "Newly released inmates detail cases of humiliation, torture, rape threats, and a prison beaten to death by Israeli forces in the weeks since October 7."

• Adam Johnson: [12-07] The "Hunt for Hamas" narrative is obscuring Israel's real plans for Gaza.

• Eric Levitz: [12-04] The price of Hamas's destruction is too high.

• Gideon Levy: [12-07] Israel is fostering the next generation of hatred against itself.

• Mark Mazzetti/Ronen Bergman: [12-10] 'Buying quiet': Inside the Israeli plan that propped up Hamas.

• Jay Michaelson: [12-06] Elise Stefanik's calculated demagoguery on antisemitism and free speech: Background for this week's SNL opener -- probably the best they could do, since they're not really up to dealing with genocide and Washington's complicity. Another take:

  • Michelle Goldberg: [12-07] At a hearing on Israel, university presidents walked into a trap. By the way, Stefanik's premise about "intifada" being intrinsically violent is historically wrong (not that you can expect university presidents to know better). Goldberg also wrote: [12-04] The backlash to anti-Israel protests threatens free speech.

  • David French: [12-10] What the university presidents got right and wrong about antisemitic speech.

• Tom Mutch: [12-02] Top Israeli official reveals catastrophic plan for rest of Gaza.

• Nicole Narea: [12-08] Israel's wartime assault on the free press: Subheds: "Israel's history of killing journalists"; "Israel is limiting press access to Gaza, where it was already difficult to be a journalist"; "Journalists covering the conflict are being harassed, arrested, and censored in Israel and the West Bank."

• Jonathan Ofir: [12-08] I used to think the term 'Judeo-Nazis' was excessive. I don't any longer.

• Kareena Pannu: [12-08] Despite lack of evidence, allegations of Hamas 'mass rape' are fueling Israeli genocide in Gaza.

• Claire Parker/Jon Gerberg/Judith Sudilovsky/John Hudson: [12-08] Israel wants civilians to arm up. Gun permit applications are soaring.

• Paul R Pillar: [12-08] Evidence of ethnic cleansing growing in West Bank and Gaza.

• Harriet Sherwood/Patrick Wintout: [02-08] UN says Gaza near 'full-blown collapse' as US vetoes ceasefire call: Thirteen countries voted in favor. The UK abstained.

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [12-05] US and Israel jointly conspired to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

  • [12-08] Israeli Security Cabinet orders execution of Palestinian poet, because of a joke.

• Adam Taylor: [12-06] Unexploded bombs, many U.S.-made, could make parts of Gaza uninhabitable.

• Philip Weiss: [12-03] Weekly Briefing: Half of Americans under 35 see Hamas attack as 'justified by Palestinian grievances'. Well, it's not like we didn't train youngsters to see "extremism in the defense of liberty as no vice." (For you youngsters out there, that is a Barry Goldwater quote. Later Republicans may be more explicit about their weapons of choice.) On the other hand, old lefties (like myself), brought up on the successes of Gandhi and MLK tend to view violence as never justified, either on moral or political grounds -- forgetting that both got murdered for their troubles.

• Li Zhou: [12-06] The "apocalyptic" humanitarian situation in Gaza, captured by one quote. Isreal has repeatedly ordered Gazans to go to "safe zones," but, as a Unicef spokesperson points out: "There are no safe zones in Gaza. These are tiny patches of barren land. They have no water, no facilities, no shelter from the cold, no sanitation."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [12-06] Two dangerous bills in Congerss take aim at Palestinian solidarity. The House passed a "bill equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and effectively laying the groundwork for other laws to be crafted that could classify pro-Palestine protests and demonstrations as crimes." A second bill would "establish the Commission to Study Acts of Antisemitism in the United States," which given "the whereas clauses (100% about October 7 & its aftermath)" is designed to "target criticism of Israel & Zionism." Also on Congress in a time of lobby-induced hysteria:

  • Michael Arria: [12-07] The Shift: Congress embraces McCarthyism.

  • Ben Burgis: [12-08] Congress is absolutely wrong to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

  • Connors Echols: [12-07] Dems call for more oversight of US weapons in Gaza. As it's beginning to dawn on a few (but still not many) that possibly full endorsement of genocide may not be the best look for America.

  • Chris Lehman: [12-05] The House of Representatives rules that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

  • Jonathan Weisman: [12-10] A fraught question for the moment: Is anti-Zionism always antisemitic? This is historically ignorant. Before 1948, Zionism was an internal debate among Jews, where many Jews (both religious and on the left) opposed. After 1948, many diaspora Jews identified with and took a measure of pride in Israel, without feeling any need or desire to immigrate, and Israel took advantage of those feelings to equate Jewish and Israeli identity, and later used that identity -- most effectively among Western liberals -- to deflect criticism for its illiberal policies. In recent years, the word "Zionist" has fallen out of use among its adherents -- after the Russian immigration of the 1980-90s all of the diaspora Jews who wanted to resettle in Israel had done so, and the brief post-Zionist vogue among Israeli liberals petered out -- but the word has been revived by people in the west (mostly leftist, many Jewish) who wanted to distinguish between right-wing Israelis and the broader Jewish population. In other words, the current definition of "anti-Zionist" is someone who is not antisemitic, and insists on being clear on that point. So "always" is beyond ridiculous here.

    A better question would be: is Zionism ever not antisemitic? I can think of exceptions (Ahad Ha'am, Martin Buber) that tried to cast Zionism as a positive cultural movement, as opposed to the political drive for Jewish supremacy, but that's a side issue. One may question whether "Zionism" is the best term to use today for what is essentially Israel's nationalism cult, but one thing its use has done is lead to a reexamination of the political and cultural history of the Zionist movement, which turns out to be deeply imbued with racism, imperialism, and the reactionary manias of its time, such that today's policies seem to inexorably flow from past principles.

  • Edward Wong: [12-09] State Department bypasses Congress to approve Israel's order for tank ammuinition.

  • Dave Zirin: [12-05] How Zionism feeds antisemitism: This doesn't go much deeper than HR 894, because Zionism has from its very inception depended on a two-faced game of antisemitism: to the antisemites, it offered a way to get rid of the Jews ("give us a homeland of our own"), and to the Jews it offered a haven from antisemites -- on many occasions, they even stirred the antisemites up (or sometimes just false-flagged anti-Jewish terror) to usher Jews along to Israel.

Related tweets (h/t to Means testing is divisive, wasteful and punitive for many of these):

• Ryan Grim [refers to image on right]:
  Perfect distillation here: it might seem obvious but actually it's complicated and unclear

• Joshua Leifer:
  Two months into the war, Israel still has no plan--not now, now for the day afterward. Listening to interviews with former security officials, it's clear the strategy is one of gruesome improvisation: inflict maximum carnage, see what happens next. 1/

  It's the old Israel mindset--it'll work out--but with an unimaginable human toll. From their perspective, any number of scenarios might still occur: Humanitarian catastrophe and refugee crisis that spills into Egypt; loss of Hamas legitimacy that precipitates surrender 2/

  But that means it is unlikely Israeli defense officials will set a clearer goal other than the expressive "take down Hamas." 3/

  The untold civilian casualties, the horrific images of detainees stripped naked--these are intentional decisions by IDF, operating under the logic that through enough force and suffering and dehumanizing, Hamas will give up. 4/

  In some interviews, officials boast about this operational "flexibility," unlike the US operational culture where everything gets a PowerPoint 5/

• Doo B. Doo:
  Evidence on the ground indicate policies of extermination & forcible transfer. By making Gaza uninhabitable and imposing siege, Israel creates a "fact on the ground" that will put maximum pressure on int'l community to accommodate transfer. There is no shelter for Gazans.

• Yousef Munayyer [responding to Tony Blinken tweet celebrating "75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"]:
  If I had to sit down and try to formulate a strategy for spreading anti-Americanism around the globe, I don't think I could come up with something more effective than what the Biden administration has been doing for the last two months.

• Jeff Melnick:
  Probably unnecessary reminder: every college administrator issuing a statement that centers concerns around antisemitism on their campus is actively working to call your attention away from the genocide happening right in front of our eyes.
  Don't believe the hype--it's a sequel.

• Nathan J Robinson:
  Israel is operating on a quite simple theory. Make Gaza entirely unlivable, and then the choice facing the international community will be to either let Gazans all die or agree to "resettle" them elsewhere. This is said openly among Israeli officials ("second Nakba").

• Tony Karon:
  Israeli apartheid is rooted in the nationalist ideology of Zionism. Most of the world is appalled by Zionist violence vs Palestinians. To brand anti-Zionism anti-Semitism literally promotes anti-Semitism, because it holds Jews collectively responsible for Israel's outrages

• Jeff Melnick:
  If you want to understand the cooked-up "campus antisemitism" crisis, it's really simple: the Zionist project simply cannot exist without regular infusions of "antisemitism"--real or imagined. It is literally the lifeblood of this political, cultural, and military formation.

There's also this video of an Israeli soldier happily vandalizing a gift shop "after destroying the area and killing or expelling residents."

Trump, and other Republicans:

• Michelle Cottle: [12-07] Was it worth it, Kevin McCarthy? A requiem for the "young guns," who rose to power as fanatics, only to pass away for not being fanatic enough.

• Stephen F Eiseman: [12-08] Vermin: The more they try to explain what he meant when he said "vermin," the more fascist he/they sound.

• David French: [12-07] Why fundamentalists love Trump: Draws on Tim Alberta's book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

• Sarah Jones: [12-07] Nikki Haley's gender trap.

• Robert Kagan: [12-07] The Trump dictatorship: how to stop it. I noted (somewhat derisively) Kagan's warning last week -- A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending. -- so figured I should mention the sequel. You can do the scoffing this time: "The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now." His candidate is Nikki Haley, "not because she's pro-Ukraine," but because, well, she's the most dependable warmonger in the crowd. Related:

  • Ruth Marcus: [12-07] How an Ohio senator's stunt proves the Trump dictatorship theory, follows Kagan's lead.

  • Greg Sargent [12-05] Enough with all the fatalism about a Trump dictatorship.

  • Peter Baker: [12-10] Talk of a Trump dictatorship charges the American political debate. "Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions."

• Jonathan Martin: [12-08] Where are all the anti-Trump Republicans? Cue Louis Jordan.

• Kelly McClure: [12-09] Texas Supreme Court steps in the way of woman's fight for an emergency abortion.

• Tom Nichols: A military loyal to Trump: Something he dearly craves, and rather expects given his fascist fetish for force and military regalia, but unlikely to happen, and not just because Democrats have been so generous in their promotion of the military and its graft.

• Heather Digby Parton:

  • [12-06] Billionaires bet big on Nikki Haley: The stunning motive behind her sudden surge in wealthy donors.

  • [12-08] Donald Trump's dream team looks like an American nightmare.

• Paul Pringle/Adam Elmahrek: [12-07] Kevin McCarthy uses PAC to lavish cash on high-end resorts, private jets and fine dining.

• Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [12-08] Inside Trump's plot to corrupt the 2024 election with 'garbage' data.

• Alex Skopic: [12-07] The lessons of Vivek: "Some tips on how to bullshit your way through life from upstart, attention-hungry, deeply annoying presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy."

• Kirk Swearingen: [12-10] "Trump derangement syndrome" is real -- but it's not what they say it is: "In an epic case of projection, followers of an infamous deranged criminal accuse their foes of a mental disorder."

• Tatyana Tandanpolie: [12-07] Experts horrified by report revealing Trump's rumored "cabinet of losers": I wouldn't put any stock in this parlor game. Cabinets are never settled pre-election, but rather are the result of painful negotiations between an incoming president's top staff and the real, quasi-permanent powers in Washington (political powers and factotums, big donors, lobbies, and entrenched bureaucrats). In 2016, Trump left that tedium to Mike Pence and Reince Priebus, who saddled him with a posse distinguished only by their greed, graft, and general contempt for serving the public. However, since that early disaster, Trump's been keeping a list of who's been naughty or nice to him, and he can hardly wait to sit in judgment over them. Nor is that information closely held, as it's hard to suck up to Trump without being publicly exposed. Hence, these lists have less to do with predicting the future than with warning us about the threat Trump presents.

• Andrew Prokop: [12-06] 3 winners and 1 loser from the fourth Republican presidential debate: "Winner: The Haley-Christie alliance"; "Winner: Far-right conspiracy theorists" (pic: Ramaswamy); Loser: "Small-government conservatism" (pic: DeSantis); "Winner: Donald Trump."

  • Ed Kilgore: [12-08] GOP debaters barely even tried to take down Trump. On the day of the first debate, Trump's polling average was 55.2%. With the fourth debate, it's at 61.3%. The notion that these jerks are only campaigning for second place has only grown. Only Christie dares attack Trump, and is too marginal to gain anything from it, so no one else sees an opening.

  • Kelly McClure: [12-10] Trump calls DeSantis a "bobble head" and Christie a "sick puppy" in debate critique. Ok, that's better than "Meatball Ron." As for Christie, he should wear it as a compliment.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [12-07] GOP Debate: Ukraine inching toward the memory hole: "Zelensky should be very worried at this point."

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Jonathan Allen/Peter Nicholas/Megan Lebowitz: [12-10] She's with him: Hillary Clinton steps out as a key player in Biden's re-election effort. Note pic: foreground face blurred out to focus on her. Maybe not her fault, but she has that effect. Note that she also made an appearance in Hugh Hewitt: [12-05] In praise of Hillary Clinton's defense of Israel.

• David Dayen: [12-08] On drug prices, Biden opts for talk over action.

• Eric Levitz: [12-08] No, Democrats are not driving America's culture wars.

• Andrew Prokop: [12-08] Hunter Biden's new indictment, explained.

• Myah Ward: [12-02] Swing-state Muslim leaders launch campaign to 'abandon' Biden in 2024.

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [12-03] Billionaires had a surprisingly bad day in the Supreme Court today: "Even this very conservative Court appears reluctant to blow up the federal government's power to tax rich people."

  • [12-04] Two new Supreme Court cases ask if there is a right to medically necessary abortion.

Climate and environment:

• Nathan J Robinson: [12-08] A climate scientist on why the global climate summit is a disaster and a "sick joke": Interview with Peter Kalmus.

• Li Zhou: [12-04] An oil executive is leading the UN climate summit. It's going as well as you'd expect.

Economic matters:

• Kevin T Dugan: [12-04] Wall Street has decided it's time to get greedy again: Actually, they never decided not, but are hoping you're not paying attention this time.

• Paul Krugman: [12-07] The progressive case for Bidenomics: "Don't let the perfect get in the way of the coulda been worse." Basically the same line he used to convince me that Obamacare was the best we could do under the circumstances. Maybe this will be the Democratic Party's 2024 slogan: "Aim for imperfect, but settle for 'coulda been worse.'"

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [12-08] Diplomacy Watch: New Ukraine aid not likely this year: "Biden tried his hardest to make it a matter of war or peace this week."

• Benjamin Hart: [12-04] Why Russia could win the Ukraine War next November: Interview with war guru John Nagl. Next November is, of course, when Americans could decide to throw in the towel and return Donald Trump to office, screwing Ukraine. He admits that even if Ukrainians "are killing ten Russians for every one they lose," it's not decisive, or "even particularly important." But he continues to look on the bright side: "at some point, Putin is in fact going to die." After all, he's only ten years younger than Biden.

• Fred Kaplan: [12-08] Republicans are on the verge of delivering Putin a big Christmas gift.

• Fredrick Kunkle/Serhii Korolchuk: [12-08] Ukraine cracks down on draft-dodging as it struggles to find troops. I thought that one of the lessons of Vietnam was that you can't fight a modern war with slave labor (uh, drafted troops). Ukrainians fought brilliantly for the first six months of this war: they were highly motivated to defend their people, were relatively unencumbered by problems of logistics and advanced weaponry, and faced an invading army mostly composed of poorly motivated draftees. They even posted some gains in late 2022, but nothing but death and drudgery since then.

• Anatol Lieven: [11-29] Biden's role in Ukraine peace is clear now: "It's not enough for Washington to urge talks from behind the scenes, while insisting in public that only Kyiv can negotiate."

• Branko Marcetic: [12-04] Did the West deliberately prolong the Ukraine war?: "Mounting evidence proves that we cannot believe anything our officials say about the futility of negotiations."

• Washington Post: [12-04] Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine. Looking at the map here, I find myself thinking that ending the war there wouldn't be such a bad idea. They're still using the June 7 frontline because so little has changed since then -- latest I heard was that the much touted Ukrainian counteroffensive has netted minus-four square miles of territory, at which rate the reconquista will take . . . well, much longer than Ukraine, even if American support doesn't fade away, can afford. Most of the territory was ethnically Russian before 2014, and it's more so now. The rest of Ukraine would be free to join Europe, and start to rebuild, with virtually no sympathy for Russia. And Putin would still have to negotiate with the US and Europe over sanctions, so there would be plenty of leverage left.

Around the world (and America's crumbling empire):

• Connor Echols: [11-20] Why is Latin America so pro-Palestine?

• Julia Gledhill: [12-04] Pentagon can't account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets: "DOD regularly buys parts and equipment it doesn't need because it can't keep track of the parts and equipment it already owns."

• Daniel Larison: [12-05] When 'internationalism' became a dirty word: "Neocons and liberal interventionists have perverted the term to mean primacy and global power projection of the worst kind."

• Stavroula Pabst: [12-05] Do venture capitalists want forever war? "These shrewd billionaire investors are jumpstarting today's rising stars in defense. In a risky business, peace is against their bottom line."

• Nick Turse: [11-29] The US knows the War on Terror is a big fat failure in Africa: "Far from reducing violence, a militarized approach has led to a 75,000% uptick in terrorist attacks."

Other stories:

David Barnett: [12-10] Groundbreaking graphic novel on Gaza rushed back into print 20 years on: Joe Sacco's Palestine. You might also be interested in Harvey Pekar's Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (2012).

Rhoda Feng: [12-08] The work of black life: A conversation with Christina Sharpe: Author of the recent book, Ordinary Notes.

David Friedlander: [12-08] Why does no one trust No Labels? "The group says it doesn't want to elect Trump. The problem is everything else it says."

Masha Gessen: [12-09] In the shadow of the Holocaust.

Melvin Goodman: [12-07] The Washington Post gratuitously and wronglyh trashes Jimmy Carter: In favor of Henry Kissinger? There are lots of things I didn't like about Carter's foreign policy, but they were mostly Cold War stances extending from Nixon-Kissinger to Reagan. It is interesting that while Reagan slammed Carter for "giving away" the Panama Canal, he never made the slightest effort to reverse Carter's treaty (nor did Bush, when he actually invaded Panama for other reasons). One thing not mentioned here is how Carter backed Israel down from intervening in Lebanon in 1978. Four years later, Reagan turned Israel loose, starting a war that lasted 18 years (plus later flare-ups), which did more than anything pre-9/11 to turn Arabs against the US.

David C Hendrickson: [12-05] The morality of ending war short of 'total victory': "'Just and Unjust Wars' author Michael Walzer seems to believe there is a humane way to destroy Hamas in Gaza. That's not true." This may be meant to be part of the Israel/Palestine debate, but I thought we should give it a wide berth. Walzer is a philosopher who seeks the high ground on morality but more often than not winds up deeply complicit in mass murder. This is hard to read and parse because at this point I really don't care what Walzer thinks any more. What might help would be to realize, as many Israelis do, that Hamas is inextricable from the Palestinian people; that as long as Israel treats Palestinians as they do, some will be driven to fight back, and they will ally in groups like Hamas. As long as key Americans buy the notion that evil Hamas can be surgically excised from ordinary Palestinians, they compliantly support Israel's indiscriminate campaign, and as such as complicit in Israel's genocide. Which is exactly what so many Israelis wanted all along.

Nathan J Robinson: [11-26] The rise and fall of crypto lunacy: Interview with Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

Michael Slager: [12-07] The trouble with evil.

Paul Starr: [12-08] The life-and-death cost of conservative power: "New research shows widening gaps between red and blue states in life expectancy." The chart specifically contrasts Connecticut and Oklahoma.

Jeffrey St Clair: [12-08] Roaming Charges: Leave it to the men in charge.

Peter Taylor: [11-20] Brazil's Tropicália movement was the soundtrack to resistance to the military. I'll just note that my one big disappointment with Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World was the absence of a chapter on Brazil. This is why.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, December 4, 2023

December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 41321 [41262] rated (+59), 6 [2] unrated (+4).

Running late, so let's make this quick.

Massive Speaking of Which yesterday (7422 words, 173 links), mostly on the genocide Israel is committing, and not just in Gaza, but the death of Henry Kissinger occasioned many glances back into the many atrocities he helped along.

There is also a Q&A related to Hamas, to which I've added a postscript, where everyone doubles down. There's a music review question there, too.

The Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll is coming along nicely, with 48 ballots submitted and counted so far. Deadline is December 15, so a bit less than two weeks away. I meant to send out a reminder to the voters today, but got distracted by other work. Maybe tonight, for sure by tomorrow.

One piece of work is that I wrote up a script to list out the albums that have received votes so far. As the guy counting the ballots, I've been in the enviable position of seeing all this prospecting work, so I thought I should share it. Albums are sorted alphabetically by artist, so you can't tell standings from the lists, but you are certain to discover things you weren't aware of. (At least, I certainly have. All four of this week's A-list jazz albums were unknown to me before the Poll started -- although two of them were recent promos sent to me, that haven't yet received any votes. Two non-jazz albums first came to my attention on Phil Overeem's latest list, which I still have a lot of catching up on.)

I did create my EOY aggregate list file(s), to which I've added 35 lists so far. I usually wind up with more than 300 lists (last year 565), but there is no guarantee I'm going to go that crazy this year.

My own EOY lists for Jazz and Non-Jazz continue to grow (currently 69 and 47 new A/A- albums, respectively). I meant to firm up my Jazz ballot for today's post, but didn't make it on time. Still, the top dozen-plus have been pretty stable recently, with additions landing well down.

I'm probably missing some stuff, especially on indexing. I know I meant to do more maintenance work on the Poll website, yet I've done very little.

Almost done with Viet Tranh Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies, and I'm getting tired of it. I've long understood how memories of war are orchestrated to promote more wars, not least because I grew up with a counterexample: my father had no fond memories of his "service" in WWII, and while he had no quarrel with the mission, he was quite certain that his role in it was utterly superfluous (unlike the years before and after when he helped build the B-29s, B-47s, and B-52). Next up is the final chapter on "forgetting," which is long overdue.

Not sure what's next to read, but I'm checking Norman Finkelstein's Gaza for reference. I've read a vast amount of material on every aspect of the conflict, so lots of things are instantly clear to me that seem to hopelessly befuddle others. One thing I will say is that the recent books I've read on 1848 impressed on me that we're not very far removed from an age where revolutionary change was only possible through violence -- in large part because it was always resisted with violence. The latter is often still the case today, which is a big problem for the world.

New records reviewed this week:

Aesop Rock: Integrated Tech Solutions (2023, Rhymesayers Entertainment): Rapper Ian Bavitz, Wikipedia counts 10 albums since 2000, but collaborations come close to doubling that. Usually quick with the words, but slows down a bit here. B+(**) [sp]

André 3000: New Blue Sun (2023, Epic): First solo album by the OutKast partner, has gotten a lot of news as his flute album, but barely registers as such, having settled into pleasantly aimless ambiance. B [sp]

Artchipel Orchestra With Jonathan Coe: Suspended Moment: The Music of Jonathan Coe (2021 [2023], British Progressive Jazz): Coe is a well-known British novelist, with a long interest in music, but I'm not sure how much he has actually recorded -- minimally a 2014 solo album called Unnecessary Music. The Italian group takes five of Coe's pieces here for a live concert, with Coe playing keyboards. The first is most impressive as jazz, after which they get more theatrical. B+(**) [bc]

Assiko Golden Band de Grand Yoff: Magg Tekki (2023, Mississippi): Large (17 members) collective from Dakar, Senegal, mostly drums and vocals. B+(*) [sp]

Richard Baratta: Off the Charts (2023, Savant): Drummer, has a couple recent Jazz in Film discs. Quintet here with Jerry Bergonzi (tenor sax), David Kikoski (piano), John Patitucci (bass), and Paul Rossman (congas). B+(**) [sp]

Michael Bates: Metamorphoses: Variations on Lutoslawski (2022 [2023], Anaklasis): Canadian bassist, several album since 2003. Hard to parse the cover here, as credit could be for Michael Bates' Acrobat -- quintet with Marty Ehrlich (clarinet), Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), Fung Chern Hwei (violin), and Michael Sarin (drums) -- and Lutoslawski Quartet (a string quartet), with vocals (one track) by Anna Lobelian. B+(**) [sp]

Antonio Borghini: Banquet of Consequences (2023, We Insist!): Italian bassist, albums since 2002, leads a Berlin-based sextet of Tobias Delius, Anil Eraslan, Rieko Okuda, Steve Heather, and Pierre Borel. Playfully juxtaposes multiple styles and elements. B+(***) [r]

Bounaly: Dimanche à Bamako (2023, Sahel Sounds): Guitarist Ali Traore, from Niafounke in north Mali, recorded live at a wedding bash in Mali's capitol city, a haven for many refugees from the jihad in the north. With vocals, drums, and calabash, the recording a little crude but powerful. A- [sp]

Danny Brown: Quaranta (2023, Warp): Rapper, actual last name Sewell, sixth album since 2010 -- not counting his recent JPEGMafia duo, which continues to confound me. This rolls on so easily I gave it three plays before I decided all I had to do was tack on a grade. A- [sp]

VV Brown: Am I British Yet? (2023, YOY): British pop singer-songwriter, mother Jamaican, father Puerto Rican, 2009 debut was one of my favorite records that year, this only her 3rd since, and by far the most race-focused. There's probably a story there, quite possibly a grim one, that I feel bad for not taking the time to dig out. But I did catch: "the revolution will not be digitised." And: "this melanin is magical." B+(***) [sp]

Buck 65/Doseone/Jel: North American Adonis (2023, Handsmade): Mixtape with raps by the first two, production by the later. Starts off as nimbly as the former, but loses a bit when the latter aims for more punching power, but winds up just heavy. B+(***) [sp]

Butcher Brown: Solar Music (2023, Concord Jazz): Jazz-funk fusion group from Richmond, Virginia; ninth album since 2013. Many guests this time out. B [sp]

Chicago Edge Ensemble: The Individualists (2023, Lizard Breath): Chicago group, third album, guitarist Dan Phillips is the composer (except for one joint piece, called "Mutualism in Action"). Joined by Josh Berman (cornet), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Krzysztof Pabian (bass), and Hamid Drake (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Michael Dease: Swing Low (2023, Posi-Tone): Mainstream trombonist, has played tenor sax in the past, tries his hand at baritone sax here, with three originals and a bunch of covers, standards and jazz tunes, including a couple by fellow trombonists (Melba Liston, Julian Priester). With Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, trombone (Altin Sencalar 3 tracks), piano (Art Hirahara),' bass (Boris Kozlov), and drums (Rudy Royston). B+(**) [sp]

Hannah Diamond: Perfect Picture (2023, PC Music): British pop singer-songwriter, second album. B+(*) [sp]

Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite (2023, Mack Avenue): Pianist, several albums since 2013, tackles Mary Lou Williams' 1945 cycle of twelve pieces inspired by the stars. She was one of the major swing pianists of the era, but her bid for high-art respect always struck me as a bit forced. Here, however, Diehl pushes it over the top, with what is billed as "the first fully-fledged professional recording of this incredible arrangement." Even ends with a ridiculous high soprano aria. B- [sp]

Marcelo Dos Reis & Luís Vicente: (Un)prepared Pieces for Guitar and Trumpet (2022 [2023], Cipsela): Guitar and trumpet, electric guitar but feels densely acoustic. Seems marginal, but I find it captivating. A- [cd]

Marcelo Dos Reis: Flora (2023, JACC): Guitarist, trio with Miguel Falcão (bass) and Luis Filipe Silva (drums). B+(***) [cd]

Shuteen Erdenebaatar Quartet: Rising Sun (2021 [2023], Motéma Music): Pianist, from Mongolia, first album, has won a bunch of prizes since she landed in Munich. Quartet with Anton Mangold (alto/soprano sax, flute), bass, and drums. B+(***) [sp]

Diego Figueiredo: My World (2023, Arbors): Brazilian guitarist, couple dozen albums since 1999, with several recent ones on this swing-oriented label: the connection appears to be through Ken Peplowski, who co-headlined an album in 2019, and who plays clarinet and sax here, along with Nicholas Payton (trumpet), Helio Alves (piano), Nilson Matta (bass), and Duduka Da Fonseca (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Don Fiorino/Andy Haas: Accidentals (2023, Resonant Music): No hype sheet, can't even find mention of this on the web. Cover just has the title, so it's probably also meant as the group name, but I substituted the artists' names: a duo, the former playing electric fretless bass and guitar, the latter saxophones with effects. Haas has a longer discography, starting in a new wave rock group I liked in 1980, Martha & the Muffins. They do have one previous duo album, and several more as two-thirds of Radio I-Ching (Discogs lists one album, but I've listened to four, with 2009's No Wave Au Go Go the pick). The other third was Dee Pop, and I found a memorial for him (1956-2021). This wanders a bit, which can happens when you loose your drummer. But this is odd and interesting enough, and it delights me. Now if only I can find a cover scan. A- [cd]

Five-Way Split: All the Way (2023, Ubuntu Music): UK jazz quintet, with original material by Quentin Collins (trumpet), Vasillis Xenopoulos (tenor sax), and Rob Barron (piano), plus bass (Matyas Hofecker) and drums (Matt Home). B+(*) [sp]

Michael Formanek Elusion Quartet: As Things Do (2022 [2023], Intakt): Bassist, emerged as a strong leader in the 1990s, second album with this powerhouse group: Tony Malaby (tenor sax), Kris Davis (piano), and Ches Smith (drums). Strong out of the gate, aims for a soft landing. B+(***) [dl]

Sullivan Fortner: Solo Game (2023, Artwork, 2CD): Pianist, from New Orleans, played in Roy Hargrove's group 2010-17, has led a couple albums on Impulse! This is solo, 20 songs, 79 minutes, mixed up a bit with electric keyboards, percussion, and some vocalizing. B+(*) [sp]

Ghost Train Orchestra and Kronos Quartet: Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog (2023, Cantaloupe): Moondog was an alias for Louis Hardin (1916-99), a composer, performer, poet, and inventor of musical instruments, largely self-taught, although he drew on Native American music from his childhood in Wyoming, augmented by everything else he ran across, including Latin, jazz, classical, and the minimalists he worked with in New York. I should look deeper into his work, especially given how enticing this improbable collaboration is. Brian Carpenter's 13-piece orchestra is bottom-heavy (bass clarinet, baritone and bass saxophone, bassoon, trombone, and tuba), which keeps the string orchestra centered. And the guest vocalists are mostly from the rock world (or wherever you would slot Petra Haden and Karen Mantler), so they never fall into the usual jazz-classical traps. Dedicated to Hal Willner, who would really dig this. A- [sp]

Hamell on Trial: Bring the Kids (2023, Saustex): Ed Hamell, antifolk singer-songwriter from upstate New York, albums since 1989, some weird and many funny. This one seems exceptionally scattered, with some of the music sounding like he's found new toys, and some I simply don't quite get, but 37 seconds of Ruth Theodore on Tucker Carlson brought a chuckle, and there's probably more (including four more bits with her). B+(**) [sp]

Lafayette Harris, Jr.: Swingin' Up in Harlem (2023, Savant): Pianist, been around a while (at least since 1992), but has no Wikipedia page, and it's hard to construct a discography from Discogs. But he does have friends: Peter Washington (bass) and Lewis Nash (drums), with Houston Person producing (but not playing). B+(*) [sp]

Benjamin Herman: Nostalgia Blitz (2023, Dox): Dutch alto saxophonist, debut 1993, cites James Chance and John Lurie as early inspirations, as well as Parker, Hodges, and -- the one he both played with and covered brilliantly -- Misha Mengelberg. This is just freaky enough to cover all those bases. A- [sp]

Nitai Hershkovits: Call on the Old Wise (2022 [2023], ECM): Israeli pianist, first album was a 2012 duo with bassist Avishai Cohen; fifth album, solo, quietly contemplative. B+(*) [sp]

Anthony Hervey: Words From My Horn (2023, Outside In Music): Trumpet player, has appeared in Christian McBride's big band, this is his first album, produced by Ulysses Owens Jr., with alto sax (Sarah Hanahan), piano (Isaiah J. Thompson and Sean Mason), bass (Philip Norris, and drums (Miguel Russell). Impressive chops, mainstream ideas, so-so vocal. B+(**) [sp]

Jungle: Volcano (2023, Caiola/AWAL): British electropop project, led by producers John Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland, fourth album since 2014, lead vocalist Lydia Kitto. B+(*) [sp]

Sean Mason: The Southern Suite (2023, Blue Engine): Pianist, from North Carolina, based in New York, first album, with trumpet (Tony Glausi), tenor sax (Chris Lewis), bass (Felix Moseholm), and drums (Domo Branch). B+(*) [sp]

MIKE: Burning Desire (2023, 10K): Rapper Michael Bonema, alias choice made him hard to look up when he started c. 2017, but he's piled up six studio albums, five mixtapes, a dozen EPs. B+(*) [sp]

Lisa O'Neill: All of This Is Chance (2023, Rough Trade): Irish singer-songwriter, fifth album since 2009. Folkish, darkly. B+(**) [sp]

OMD [Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark]: Bauhaus Staircase (2023, 100%): One of the new wave bands of the early 1980s to find a synth-fueled dance groove, originally a duo of Andy McCluskey (vocals, bass guitar) and Paul Humphreys (keyboards, vocals), had a nice run until Humphreys split in 1989. McCluskey carried on until 1996, then reunited with Humphreys in 2006, finally releasing an album in 2010. Third album since, initials on the cover, what these days could be called "classic modernism." With music to match. B+(**) [sp]

Ryoko Ono/Satoko Fujii: Hakuro (2023, self-released): Japanese saxophone and piano duo. Ono has a number of albums since 2012, and Fujii has well over one hundred. B+(***) [bc]

PinkPantheress: Heaven Knows (2023, 300 Entertainment): British dance-pop singer Victoria Walker, first studio album after a breakout mini-mixtape and a well-regarded EP. Small voice, comfy in the soft beats. B+(***) [sp]

Tineke Postma: Aria (2022 [2023], Edition): Dutch saxophonist (alto/soprano), eighth album since 2005, with Ben Monder (guitar), Robert Landfermann (bass), and Tristan Renfrow (drums), playing original pieces. B+(**) [sp]

Mette Rasmussen/Paul Flaherty/Zach Rowden/Chris Corsano: Crying in Space (2019 [2023], Relative Pitch): Two saxophonists (both alto, but Flaherty also plays tenor), plus bass and drums, for a live set at Firehouse 12. B+(***) [sp]

Ernesto Rodrigues/Dirk Serries/João Madeira/José Oliveira: Dripping (2023, Creative Sources): Viola, archtop guitar, double bass, percussion. B+(*) [bc]

Aksel Røed's Other Aspects: Do You Dream in Colours? (2023, Is It Jazz?): Norwegian octet, the leader one of three saxophonists, with trumpet (another Røed, Lyder Øvreás), trombone, piano (Isach Skeidsvoll), bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Alex Sipiagin Quintet: Mel's Vision (2022 [2023], Criss Cross): Russian trumpet player, moved to US in 1990, has a substantial discography since 1998, a post-bop player with real chops. Quintet with Chris Potter (tenor sax), David Kikoski (piano), Matt Brewer (bass), and Johnathan Blake (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Guido Spannocchi: Live at Porgy & Bess Vienna (2022 [2023], Audioguido): Italian alto saxophonist, several albums since 2017, this with Danny Keane (piano), Ruth Goller (bass), and Pete Adam Hill (drums). Very strong showing. B+(***) [sp]

Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis: Calibrating Friction (2023, New Amsterdam): Canadian composer, based in New York, bills this as "a muscular, pyrotechnic blend of progressive metal and symphonic classical music." Somehow not quite that bad. B+(*) [sp]

Chris Stapleton: Higher (2023, Mercury Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, from Kentucky, fifth album since 2015. Strong voice, deep roots, simple ideas. B+(*) [sp]

Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist: Voir Dire (2023, ALC/Tan Cressida): LA rapper, Theba Kgositsile, one of the more successful to come out of the Odd Future collective. First with Alan Maman producing, a short one: 11 tracks, 26:37. B+(*) [sp]

Isaiah J. Thompson: The Power of the Spirit (2023, Blue Engine): Pianist, from New Jersey, second album, leads a quartet with tenor sax (Julian Lee), bass (Philip Norris), and drums (Damo Branch or TJ Reddick). B+(***) [sp]

Tyvek: Overground (2023, Ginkgo): "Garage lo-fi punk band" from Detroit, self-released debut 2006, eponymous album on a small but real label 2009, somewhere along the timeline added a saxophone (Emily Roll), adding some overtones to the guitar thrash. Kevin Boyer sings. Reminds me of the early Buzzcocks. A- [sp]

VHS Head: Phocus (2023, Skam): Blackpool electronica artist Ade Blacow, third album. Glitchy, but that's only a first approximation. B+(*) [sp]

J.D. Walter: The Last Muse (2023, Arkadia): Jazz singer, eight or so albums since 2000, second this year (but the one I landed on by accident). Mostly standards, title song and two other originals, unclear on credits (but reportedly "stellar"). Like many male jazz singers, he has considerable technical skills, but sounds tortured. B- [sp]

Jeppe Zeeberg: Occasionally, Good Things Do Happen (2023, self-released): Danish pianist, half-dozen albums since 2014. This is circus-y and/or cartoon-ish, or maybe just a stab at phantasmagorical, not that I care after a while. Near the end, a piano solo that finally puts weird to good use. B- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Geri Allen/Kurt Rosenwinkel: A Lovesome Thing (2012 [2023], Motéma Music): Piano and guitar duo, a live set from the Philharmonie de Paris. B+(**) [sp]

Axolotl: Abrasive (1981 [2023], Souffle Continu): French avant-jazz trio, recorded one more album after this debut, the group consisting of Etienne Brunet (alto sax/bass clarinet), Jacques Oger (tenor/baritone sax), and Marc Dulourd (guitar). B+(*) [bc]

Graham Collier Music: Smoke-Blackened Walls & Curlews (1970 [2023], British Progressive Jazz): British bassist, his sextet an important group of the era. Previously unissued tape, the music a bit on the brooding side, meant to frame John Carberry's narration, which is not without interest, just not a lot. B+(*) [bc]

Don Ellis: How Time Passes (1960 [2023], Candid): Trumpet player (1934-78), first recording as leader, a quartet with Jaki Byard (piano/alto sax), Ron Carter (bass), and Charlie Persip (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Jean-Marc Foussat: Abattage (1973-81 [2023], Fou): Deluxe reissue of the French sound artist's early work, where he plays guitar, piano, "voix, objets, radio," etc., etc., fascinated with whatever he conjures up. B+(***) [cd]

Ibrahim Hesnawi: The Father of Libyan Reggae ([2023], Habibi Funk): I don't see any recording dates, but reports are that Hesnawi (b. 1954) recorded more than 15 albums from the 1980s to 2000s, yielding nine tracks here, the riddims build up with electric keyboards, and vocals in English and Arabic. B+(*) [sp]

Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens (2006 [2023], Blue Engine): This promises "technically flawless performances . . . transposing the timeless music of the 1920s to the 21st century." Hard to know where to begin here, or whether to bother. No one will mistake Marsalis, Wycliffe Gordon, Victor Goines, or Jon Batiste for the originals, and the late-breaking vocals hardly try. B [sp]

Mike Osborne: Starting Fires: Live at the 100 Club 1970 (1970 [2023], British Progressive Jazz): British alto saxophonist, one of the first important ones on the avant-garde, paired here with tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore, backed by Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Pet Shop Boys: Smash: The Singles 1985-2020 (1985-2020 [2023], Parlophone, 3CD): Fifty-five songs, most from worthy albums -- even such recent ones as Super (2016) and Hotspot (2020) -- the first two discs largely recapitulating the 2003 2-CD compilation, PopArt: The Hits, plus an extra 68:37 from the later period. A- [r]

Todd Snider: Crank It, We're Doomed (2007 [2023], Aimless): Long-shelved album, recorded after The Devil You Know (perhaps his best studio album ever), "paradoxically [he] felt the album was both too much and too little, needing more but already too much." Some songs were salvaged for Peace Queer and The Excitement Plan, and several were re-recorded later, so much of this is semi-familiar. Perhaps reassuring to recall the doom we (mostly) survived, as opposed to the doom still to come. A- [sp]

Old music:

Don Fiorino/Andy Haas: American Nocturne (2018, Resonant Music): Radio I-Ching minus the drummer, saxophonist Andy Haas making do with a drum machine and electronics, while Don Fiorino plays guitar, glissentar, and lap steel guitar. B+(***) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Marcelo Dos Reis: Flora (JACC) [09-01]
• Marcelo Dos Reis & Luís Vicente: (Un)prepared Pieces for Guitar and Trumpet (Cispela) [10-01]
• Don Fiorino/Andy Haas: Accidentals (self-released)
• Jean-Marc Foussat: Abattage (1973-81, Fou)
• Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio: Jet Black (Libra) [01-24]
• Adam Schroeder/Mark Masters: CT! Adam Schroeder & Mark Masters Celebrate Clark Terry (Capri) [01-19]
• Josh Sinton: Couloir & Book of Practitioners Vol. 2 (Form Is Possibility, 2CD) [01-12]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 3, 2023

I spent some time today crafting a Q&A on "two fundamental flaws in your thinking" about Hamas, Palestine, and Israel. It draws on my comment to the De Luca/Cavazuti piece on Hamas, below. There is, of course, zero chance that Biden's going to tell Netanyahu: hey, maybe Hamas has a point after all, so let's talk about it a bit, before we get too carried away with this war thing.

Like I said, zero chance. Which leads me to ask an even deeper question: what's the use of having all this wealth and power if it just locks you into doing senseless things that are stupid and cruel? I can see where Hamas might use their power to do something so self-destructive, because they don't have enough power to get noticed otherwise. But Israel and the United States have so much wealth and power, they could actually put it to some good, and people would love it. Instead, they just blow things up and kill and starve people. And maybe they wonder a bit why so many people despise them, but not so much really, because no one else has the power (or the death wish) to stop them.

Top story threads:

Israel: The "pause" for exchanging prisoners (aka hostages) ended on Friday, with Israel immediately resuming its bombardment of Gaza. The number of Palestinians confirmed killed and the number of displaced passed the total levels of the 1948-50 war (aka Nakba) -- although the displaced are still locked in besieged Gaza, instead of scattered in the exile Israel is working so hard to promote. The euphemism "ethnic cleansing" has become a common term for the forced expulsion of people from their homes (in Gaza, many of which were already refugee encampments, set up as temporary during the 1948-50 war). But the more formal legal term is "genocide," which is still the most accurate description of the war Israel is waging, and of the professed intentions behind this war. The whole world should find this alarming, especially those in the democracies that have long given Israel their support, even in its project to turn a haven for oppressed Jews into a fortress of ethnic supremacy.

• Mondoweiss:

  • [11-27] Day 52: Palestinians in Gaza brace for resumption of Israeli attacks as truce reaches final day.

  • [11-28] Day 53: Hostage exchange continues, Israel, Hamas agree to extend truce.

  • [11-29] Day 54: Two children killed by Israeli forces in Jenin amid discussions of truce extension.

  • [11-30] Day 55: Palestinians in Gaza are once again counting down the hours until the bombing restarts.

  • [12-01] Day 56: Truce ends, Israel kills over 100 in Gaza.

  • [12-02] Day 57: 'Not an inch' of Gaza is spared by Israeli strikes after truce ends.

  • [12-03] Day 58: Israel kills 700 in Gaza over 24 hours as Palestinians get forced further south toward Egypt.

• Yuval Abraham: [11-30] 'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza: "Permissive airstrikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza."

• Aja Arnold: [12-01] The case against the Merrimack Three is an attack on the Palestine movement as a whole: "Three activists are facing possible decades in prison for taking non-violent direct action against an Israeli military company."

• Avishay Artsy:

  • [12-01] How Israel fractured the left and united the right. Transcript of a podcast interview with Washington reporter David Weigel, which means it's about Washington politics, not the real left. Democrats aren't fractured so much as stunned: torn between the blind love and loyalty they swore to AIPAC and the horrifying reality on their screens and in their feeds, something they simply lack the tools to process.

  • [12-03] Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, briefly explained.

• Jaclynn Ashly: [11-28] The grim reality of Israel's corpse politics: "Israel is the only country in the world that has a policy of confiscating and withholding human remains, which is a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law."

• James Bamford: [11-17] Israel's war on American student activists: "For years the Israel on Campus Coalition -- a little known organization with links to Israeli intelligence -- has used student informants to spy on pro-Palestinian campus groups."

• Ross Barken: [11-30] The pro-Palestinian left is booming: Not a term I'm happy with. Pro-Palestinian can mean several different things, and not all (or even most) of them align with the left. You can be on the left and not give a toss about any nationalist movement. On the other hand, some people on the left do identify as pro-Palestinian, primarily because they believe in solidarity with the oppressed, and hardly anyone is more oppressed than Palestinians these days. But no one on the left wants to pick sides in a war. We want peace, and with peace, equality and freedom. Describing that as pro-Palestinian, or even as anti-Israeli, really misses the point.

  Barkan continues his effort to muddy the waters with this: "The left is split over what it wants to see in the region: One or two states." That's a false dichotomy, imposed by powers with ulterior motives. What we on the left want is equal rights for all people in whatever nations exist. As for how this relates for forming viable electoral coalitions in America, it probably doesn't. Here, too, the left faces the problem of achieving more equitable rights.

• Daniel Brumberg: [11-30] How Hamas has made life harder for Iran and its allies: "The October 7 assault has shaken the assumptions of every player in the Middle East, including Tehran."

• Jessica Buxbaum: [11-30] 'Erase Gaza': How genocidal rhetoric became normalised in Israel.

• Samantha Chery: [12-02] Julianna Margulies apologizes for saying Black, LGBTQ people hate Jews: That's nice, and no doubt sincere, but it does rather prove the point, which is that when atrocities occur, not everyone has the presence of mind, let alone the tact, to say precisely and clearly the right things first. Actually, that's quite rare, which is why one should be generous enough not to try to hang people for their rash, out-of-context quotes. There is another example in this piece, a quote from Susan Sarandon that is bad on several counts, for which she, too, has sincerely apologized. I could point out a few differences, like that consequences (at least in America) seem to be more more severe for insensitivity and disrespect to Jews than to Palestinians, and that many of the people (not just Jews, and not only Jews) who are so quick to remind us of the evil of antisemitism have shown similar concern for Palestinians, despite (how shall we put this?) ample evidence on numerous occasions in the 75 years since the Nakba.

• Thalif Deen: [11-27] How the US made Israel's military what it is today: "Washington has provided over $130 billion in unrestricted aid and weapons to Tel Aviv, more than any other country, ever."

• Dan De Luca/Lisa Cavazuti: [10-25] Gaza is plagued by poverty, but Hamas has no shortage of cash. Where does it come from? "Hamas has an investment portfolio of real estate and other assets worth $500 million, say experts, and an annual military budget of as much as $350 million." I found this piece when I was looking for some backup reference for a reader's assertion that "at its core Hamas is essentially a criminal enterprise which made nearly a billion in the last few years. Pornography, drugs and human trafficking." (Also: "Hamas merely acts as a beard for Iran.") This piece provides some support for those assertions, but even here the headline gets trimmed down pretty fast: "Estimates for its annual military budget range from $100 million to $350 million, according to Israeli and Palestinian sources." (Article says $100 million, of which $40 million "goes to terror group's tunnel digging work." The "Palestinian sources do not include Hamas.)

  We're supposed to react to such numbers by thinking they're huge (and wasteful, and a shade demonic), but are they really? Israel's military budget is more than $23 billion (and they're spending at a much higher rate right now -- the $14 billion Biden requested gives you an idea how much), so even by these lavish estimates, Hamas is spending at most 1% as much as Israel, probably less than 0.5%. Moreover, while labor costs may be cheap in Gaza, the cost of goods must be very dear, as they have to be purchased illicitly, then smuggled into Gaza.

  As for all that cash, the article points out that Qatar is a major source, but all Qatari cash passes through Israel, with its safeguards against redirection to Hamas. The US and others have been sanctioning Hamas for years. While that never seems to work 100%, it does strain credibility to think that Hamas leaders are sitting on huge cash reserves in foreign resorts. And if they were living so high on the hog, why did they blow it all up by launching that Oct. 7 revolt?

• Connor Echols: [11-30] The myth of the 'surgical' war: Interview with Sam Moyn "about what international law really means."

• Rabea Eghbariah: [11-21] The Harvard Law Review refused to run this piece about genocide in Gaza.

• Thomas L Friedman: [12-01] I'm not going to try to argue the points, but this is basically similar to the Gaza separation proposal I've been pushing since the war started (and, effectively, for many years prior). Not exactly the same: it's meaner-spirited, and more petulant (renewing the post-Munich assassination teams). But he's got a good lede, quoting Confucius: "'Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves' -- one for your enemy and one for yourself." Israel has no solution for Gaza, nor even any help. Just ever-renewing problems, not least for itself.

• Melvin Goodman: [12-01] Mainstream media largely ignore Israel's duplicity and deceit: Examples go all the way back to 1948.

• Bassam Haddad/Sinan Antoon: [11-28] This open license must be revoked: The "license" refers to the charge of "antisemitism against any and all critics of Israel." Who granted it, and how it can be "revoked" aren't clear. But its use to defend Israel is at best confusing. (So, the people against genocide are the antisemites? And the people who support Israel's militarized apartheid state aren't antisemites? Even the ones who sound so much like antisemites of yore?) And in the long run, it's likely to backfire, either by making antisemitism seem like not such a bad thing, or turning it into a badge of honor.

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [11-30] 'They shot her son in her arms and forced her to throw his body': testimonies from the death march on Salah al-Din Street.

• Imad Abu Hawash: [11-22] 'If you don't leave, we'll kill you': Hundreds flee Israeli settler violence in Hebron area.

• Noah Hurowitz: [11-27] Not in Their Name: "Jewish Voice for Peace doesn't just oppose the war; it challenges the link between Jewish identity and support for Israel."

• Ellen Ioanes: [12-02] Israel moves into southern Gaza after a week-long truce -- and its goals are murkier than ever.

• Hebh Jamal: [11-30] How Israel's war is deliberately making Gaza uninhabitable.

• Nadim Khoury: [11-30] Israel-Palestine war: Why the West can't conceive of a Palestinian right to security.

• Menachem Klein: [11-28] Israeli arrogance thwarted a Palestinian political path. October 7 revealed the cost: Explains a 2021 Fatah-Hamas agreement, which "offered a different political horizon," but was quashed by Israel and the US, refusing to allow Palestinians to elect new leaders to represent them in talks with Israel.

• Ken Klippenstein: Joe Biden moves to lift nearly every restriction on Israel's access to U.S. weapons stockpile.

• Dan Lamothe/Alex Horton: [11-27] Thousands leave behind American lives to join Israel's war in Gaza.

• Zach Levitt/Amy Schoenfeld Walker: [12-02] What the scale of displacement in Gaza looks like.

• Eric Levitz: [11-28] In Bibi's Israel, Musk's brand of antisemitism is kosher. This article touches on a number of important points -- more than I feel up to unpacking at the moment: the decline and resurfacing (largely after Trump encouraged the crypto-nazis to pop up) of antisemitism in America; the historic pact of convenience between antisemites and Zionists, who before Israel were opposed by left and orthodox Jews, and ignored by the masses who preferred emigration to America; the hardening of Israel as a racist colonial project, with alliances to right-wing political movements around the world; the propaganda war that seeks to discredit opposition to Israel's apartheid and emergent genocide by branding critics as antisemitic. But for now, here's a paragraph to mull over:

  There is no inherent conflict between the interests of Jews in Israel and those who live everywhere else. Yet there is an inescapable contradiction between the values of Israel's far-right government and those that best serve the Jewish diaspora. As minority populations, diasporic Jewish communities have an interest in pluralism, egalitarianism, and inviolable human-rights protections. By contrast, as the vanguard of a Jewish supremacist project that aims to either ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the occupied territories or subject them to unending apartheid, the current Israeli government is hostile to all of those values. Therefore, its search for allies abroad inevitably leads it into the arms of parties and political figures who are bad for the (diaspora) Jews.

• Gideon Levy:

  • [11-12] Children are children, whether in Israel or Gaza. They never deserve to die: "In the fascist reality now sweeping Israel, even such a statement is considered treasonous and an expression of Israel hatred."

  • [11-29] "There is nothing cheaper than Palestinians' lives in Israel".

• Charisma Madarang: [11-30] Israel knew Hamas' attack plan a year before Oct. 7: Report. Draws on Ronen Bergman/Adam Goldman: [11-30] Israel knew Hamas's attack plan more than a year ago: "Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings."

• Joseph Massad: [11-30] Why Israeli claims have no credibility outside of the West.

• Nicole Narea: [11-22] The many, many times Israelis and Palestinians tried to make peace -- and failed. Useful checklist, but the reason all these "tries" fell through is almost always Israel refused or reneged. For another piece on the same subject, see Jon Schwarz: [11-28] All the times Israel has rejected peace with Palestinians.

• Jonathan Ofir: [12-01] Israel's Gaza onslaught is the next stage of the Dahiya Doctrine: "The Dahiya Doctrine was coined by current Minister Gadi Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command in 2008. The military doctrine, named after the Dahiya quarter of Beirut that Israel targeted and leveled during the 2006 war, outlines 'what will happen' to any enemy that dares attack Israel." In other words, it calls for massive collective punishment of any neighborhood where anyone defies Israel.

• Yumna Patel: [11-30] Israel has a long history of taking Palestinian children captive.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [12-02] Biden works to create plausible deniability as he backs Israel's assault on Gaza. With their leaked notes advising caution and prudence, it's almost as if they're seeding their defense brief for eventual trial in The Hague.

• Maria Rashed: [11-29] UK protests expose wide gulf between gov't and public on Palestine.

• Dan Sabbagh: [12-01] Israel's military strategy threatens to make a desperate situation utterly dire.

• Jeremy Scahill: Israel's insidious narrative about Palestinian prisoners.

• Areeba Shah: [11-24] "Powerful influence of wealthy lobbyists": Right-wing group pressures lawmakers on pro-Israel bills: "ALEC, the group behind a wave of bills to crack down on Israel boycotts, urges states to unconditionally back war."

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [11-30] Language, social media, and the Gaza information war: "Mainstream media no longer dominate battle for hearts and minds in Gaza war."

  • [11-30] IDF efforts to eliminate Hamas have failed: Much ado about body counts.

  • [12-01] Israeli claims of Hamas sexual assaults lay its credulity on the line. I usually find Silverstein to be pretty credible in his detailed pieces about how Israel operates, but will note here that Eric Levitz is now saying "there is no excuse for denial now," citing this article. While I'm sure any rapes were horrific, as indeed was the mere appearance of armed Palestinian intruders in any Israeli home, this strikes me as a small matter in the broad scheme of things. It is, however, the sort of detail that propagandists love to pounce on.

    [PS: In a later tweet, Levitz backs down a bit, admitting the article he cites is a bit fishy. In the meantime, I was reading the part in Viet Tanh Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies where he talks about the inevitability of rape in war, in much the same terms Levitz uses. As a general rule, sure, but do the rapes really start on the first day of a war (which for Hamas was the only day out of their cage, where they had potential victims, at a time when their position was so precarious that most were bound to die)? My impression is that war rapes mostly happen after the war has ground down, in secure but still alien territory, with the complicity of your fellow troops.]

    [PPS: Mondoweiss also has a piece debunking the rape reports.]

  • [12-01] Netanyahu plan to "thin out" Gaza population to "bare minimum": "Israel claims it is not ethnic cleansing, but a humanitarian gesture."

  • [12-03] As Israel plans Gaza ethnic cleansing, US says no.

  • [12-03] Israeli MKs, messianic evangelicals lobby Congress for ethnic cleansing.

• Margaret Sullivan: [11-28] The Israel-Hamas war is deadly for journalists. Lives are being lost, and truth: "At least 53 journalists have been killed since 7 October, the deadliest figure in the 30 years of keeping these dire statistics."

• Philip Weiss: [11-29] Biden became 'Genocide Joe' thanks to the Israel lobby.

• Sammy Westfall/Helier Cheung: [11-30] Here are the hostages released by Hamas and those remaining in Gaza.

• Jason Willick: [12-01] What Chuck Schumer gets wrong about antisemitism on the left: This piece has been bugging me, and it's probably not worth the trouble trying to figure out why. Obvious first point is that anyone who talks about antisemitism in the left doesn't know the most basic definitions. If you're on the left, you believe that all people deserve the same rights and respect, and there's no reconciling that belief with discrimination on race, ethnic group, religion, creed, sex, or any other arbitrary division. But also, and this is the part that right can't wrap their minds around, you also don't believe that people who have been oppressed should have the right to oppress others.

  Schumer and Willick are slightly at odds here, but Willick is reluctant to attack such a reliable mouthpiece for Israeli interests. His own views are more clear from his recent columns:

  • Biden's efforts to constrain Israel could backfire [10-26]
  • We can't ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields [11-14]
  • Benjamin Netanyahu, moderate [11-22]
  • Identity politics is a game Jews can't win [10-17]

  The latter is most relevant here, as it confuses the left with the Democratic Party, echoing a common (mostly from centrist elites) complaint about intersectional coalition building. Also note a better critique of Schumer's speech:

  • Dave Zirin: [11-29] Chuck Schumer is antisemitism's great enabler. In his speech, Schumer refers to Zirin's previous article: [11-15] The March for Israel was a hate rally: "What kind of gathering against antisemitism invites antisemites?"

Trump, and other Republicans:

• Zack Beauchamp: [11-29] Nikki Haley's "rise" and the Republican flight from reality: The Koch political arm, Americans for Prosperity Action, endorsed Haley. Given the current polls, Beauchamp thinks this utter folly. But there is still a non-trivial chance that Trump's candidacy could simply implode, leading to a desperate search for any kind of replacement. The current Republican field screams "none of the above" -- the obvious contenders from 2016 chose to sit this one out, leaving it to a few perishables and extreme longshots. But of the field, Haley is the one who's managed to get serious press support, and without compromising her stake on evil. So I'm not sure this is such a bad bet (except for America, of course). Speaking of Haley, here's some of the latest:

  • Jonathan Chait: [12-02] Nikki Haley's rocket ride to second place.

  • Paul Krugman: [11-27] Nikki Haley is coming for your retirement.

  • Harold Meyerson: [11-30] Nikki wins the Wall Street primary: "Unlike Trump, Haley's not crazy, merely far (far!) right." After recounting Haley's anti-union militancy, Meyerson notes: "South Carolina is one of the six states that has never enacted a minimum-wage law, and boasts the lowest rate of unionization (1.7 percent) of any state, in keeping with its history as the staunchest defender of slavery in antebellum America."

  • Catherine Rampell: [12-01] Supposed 'moderates' like Nikki Haley would blow up the government, too. As Steve M. explains, "This is why the Koch network endorsed Haley."

• Kyle Cheney/Josh Gerstein: [12-01] Trump may be sued over Jan. 6 incitement claims, appeals court panel rules.

• Chauncey DeVega: [12-01] The violence is Trump's goal: "It is both the means as well as the goal of Trump's fascist political project."

• Hailey Fuchs/Heidi Przybyla: [11-28] Leonard Leo firm received $21M from Leo-linked group.

• Margaret Hartmann:

  • [11-28] Melania Trump adds awkward touch to Rosalyn Carter funeral. What's awkward is the whole "presidential wives club" concept. And while it's easy to separate Melania as the odd duck out, isn't there a deeper divide between Democrats and Republicans: the Democratic wives feel more like partners (Clinton more in the spotlight, Carter less, but every bit as solid), whereas the Republicans have more constrained, specialist roles -- a feminist critic could have a field day deconstructing all that.

  • [11-30] Gag order can't derail Trump's tirade about judge's wife.

• Robert Kagan: [11-30] A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending. Long, serious piece, but yes, that Robert Kagan, so just noted in passing, without the scrutiny to root out its rotten core. Seriously, warmongers like Kagan make Trump look not so bad (but then he hires ones like McMaster, Pompeo, and Bolton, and screws up even worse).

• Ed Kilgore:

  • [11-28] Iowa kingmaker Vander Plaats thinks state will 'rise up' against Trump: Having picked Republican caucus winners in 2008, 2012, and 2016, he's coming out for DeSantis now.

  • [12-02] Trump plans to make civil service a MAGA spoils system.

• Paul Krugman: [11-30] Donald Trump still wants to kill Obamacare. Why? Probably just because people still call it Obamacare. He could just pass the same law again, maybe with a couple extra loopholes for graft, and call it Trumpcare, and he'd be peachy keen. (That's basically what happened when NAFTA became USMCA.) Also:

  • Catherine Rampell: [11-28] Efforts to kill Obamacare made it popular. Trump says he'll try again.

• Heather Digby Parton: [12-01] Newsom humiliates DeSantis on Fox News. Also:

  • Lloyd Green: [12-01] His debate with Gavin Newsom showed Ron DeSantis will never be president.

  • Ellie Qujinlan Houghtaling: All the things that went wrong for Ron DeSantis in his latest debate failure.

• Amanda Marcotte: [11-30] Students for Trump founder said guns made "women equal" -- before allegedly pistol-whipping a woman: "Ryan Fournier repeatedly said MAGA are women's true protectors -- he's under arrest for hitting his girlfriend."

• Donald P Moynihan: [11-27] Trump has a master plan for destroying the 'deep state': I.e., the "administrative state," the professional civil servants, who work to serve the public, according to the laws they are sworn to uphold, regardless of the political interests of the president.

• Timothy Noah: The GOP showed again how anti-worker it really is.

• Christian Paz: [12-01] Can the party of Trump really become a multiracial coalition? Patrick Ruffini is pushing that line, especially in his book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.

• Beth Reinhard/Manuel Roig-Franzia/Clara Ence Morse: [12-02] Trump pardoned them. Now they're helping him return to power.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Ryan Cosrtello: [12-01] House Dems sabotage Biden's Iran diplomacy: Israel über alles!

• Andrew Prokop: [11-27] Is Biden doomed in 2024? 3 theories about the president's bad polls. None very good, but they cover the range, and reveal the limits, of conventional wisdom.

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Gabrielle Gurley: [11-30] Abortion confusion in Texas: "State courts must now decide how to handle life-threatening pregnancy issues that state attorneys, lawmakers, and medical officials refuse to clear up."

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [11-28] Elon Musk's attempt to silence his critics will be heard by one of America's worst judges.

  • [11-28] The new Trump judge revolt against the Voting Rights Act, explained.

  • [11-29] The Supreme Court seeks a middle path between following the law and blowing up the government: SEC v. Jarkesy.

• Cristian Farias: [12-02] The Supreme Court Sandra Day O'Connor left behind is dead, too: "Her successors abandoned the principles of pragmatism and compromise she represented." She just died, at 93. Just think: if she hadn't resigned, we wouldn't have gotten Samuel Alito, and Biden would be able to appoint her successor. But she was a Republican partisan, a Reagan appointee, who proved her bona fides in throwing the 2000 election to GW Bush. Our friend Liz Fink was always a shrewd judge of Supreme Court justices -- she was the first I knew who suggested that David Souter might not turn out to be so bad -- had this take on O'Connor: that while she would allow states to hassle women seeking abortions, she would never rule against that right of well-to-do white women, like herself. She never did, but she did pave the way for her Party to take away your rights.

• Stephen I Vladeck: [11-28] The Fifth Circuit is making the Supreme Court look reasonable.

Climate and environment:

• COP 28 Climate Summit: Updates on the global warming talks.

  More on COP 28:

  • Elizabeth Kolbert: [11-25] The road to Dubai: "The latest round of international climate negotiations is being held in a petrostate. What could go wrong?"

  • Anatol Lieven: [12-01] COP28: Will there be an honest stocktaking on climate?

  • George Monbiot: [11-29] Here's a question Cop28 won't address: why are billionaires blocking action to save the planet?

• Kevin Crowe/Brady Dennis: [11-30] Extreme weather helped fuel surge in malaria cases last year.

• Scott Dance: [11-30] This year will be Earth's hottest in human history, report confirms.

• William B Davis/Judson Jones: [12-02] 2023 hurricane season ends, marked by storms that 'really rapidly intensified'. Somehow, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean got spared (aside from Idalia), despite record warm temperatures, with a lot of storms turning north far out in the Atlantic. But also there were a lot of storms in the eastern Pacific -- and, though not detailed there, in the western Pacific, and for that matter in the Indian Ocean.

• Oliver Milman: [11-27] US oil and gass production set to break record in 2023 despite UN climate goals: 12.9m barrels of crude oil. That's more than double since 2009, when Obama became president, after 8 years of declining production and soaring prices under GW Bush.

Economic matters:

• Eric Levitz: [11-30] You don't want 2020 prices back: Why deflation is usually not a good thing, with one counterexample to make a point.

• Emily Stewart: [11-28] Why Diet Coke got so expensive: "The economy, explained by Diet Coke, kind of."

Ukraine War:

• Connor Echols: [12-01] Diplomacy Watch: New revelations shed light on early talks.

• Jen Kirby: [11-30] There are now more land mines in Ukraine than almost anywhere else on the planet: "Ukraine is staring down a massive humanitarian challenge -- now and into the future."

Around the world:

• Aparna Gopalan: [11-28] Israel's brutality is stoking the imagination of India's far right: "As the genocide in Gaza continues, India's Prime Minister Narenda Modi is taking notes." The mutual affinity of the world's foremost racist/ethnocrats is striking: "In the past four decades, Hindu nationalism has become the dominant political ideology in India, and the country's support for Zionism has risen in tandem."

• Jeet Heer: [12-01] If Narenda Modi is running a global death squad, he'll be protected by the Kissinger doctrine: "Trying to murder American citizens on American soil is no big deal -- so long as the foreign policy elite likes you."

• Phillips Payson O'Brien: [12-02] The U.S. keeps thinking it's a greater power than it is.

• Hans Steketee: [12-01] The sensible Dutch take a sharp turn to the right: "Far-right anti-immigrant campaigner Geert Wilders emerged as the leader of the largest party in the new parliament."

Henry Kissinger: He died, a nice round 100 years old, elites sucking up to him to the very end. Which raises the question: who is the new worst person in the world? (Here's a reddit thread, which still needs some work -- although I'd keep Murdoch and Netanyahu for the short list, maybe Putin too. More fun is who Kissinger succeeded? If not his partner-in-crime, Nixon, I'd nominate Winston Churchill, who exceeded Kissinger not only in the amount of damage he caused, but also in the amount of praise -- if not necessarily money -- he collected along the way. One difference was that people kept forgetting Churchill's disasters, allowing him more chances, whereas Kissinger's crimes were studiously documented (as will be evident below), even though people in power never seemed to care.

• Dylan Matthews: [11-30] What Henry Kissinger wrought. The bullet points (subheds):

  • Henry Kissinger supported Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh
  • Henry Kissinger supported Indonesia's bloody invasion of East Timor
  • Henry Kissinger backed brutal bombing raids in Cambodia
  • Henry Kissinger sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam
  • Henry Kissinger supported military coups against democratic leaders in Chile and Argentina
  • Henry Kissinger's good deed: opening China

• Spencer Ackerman: [11-29] Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America's ruling class, finally dies.

• John Bartlett/Uki Goñi/Julian Borger: [11-30] Latin America remembers Kissinger's 'profound moral wretchedness'.

• Daniel Boguslaw: [11-30] Members of Israel's ruling Likud Party once planned to assassinate Henry Kissinger: This was in 1977, "according to a news report from the time." One should recall that in 1948 Lehi, led by future Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte.

• Greg Grandin:

  • [11-29] Henry Kissinger: To die at the right time.

  • [11-29] A people's obituary of Henry Kissinger: "For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward."

  Grandin previously (2015) wrote: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. He also wrote the introduction to a Jacobin book expected to ship later this month: The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger.

• Jonathan Guyer: [12-01] The 4 final acts of Henry Kissinger: "Accountability never came, only more birthday cake." Many good lines here, like: "He said a lot of words and told anecdotes that in the moment riveted the room, but there was no great substance about how to solve perennial problems that would explode again in less than 48 hours."

• Brian Karem: [12-01] My conversations with Henry Kissinger, a man I abhorred.

• David Klion: Henry Kissinger only cared about one thing: "All of the death and misery he left in his wake was a mere by-product of his single-minded pursuit of elite power."

• Charisma Madarang: [11-30] Media, conservatives team up to lionize war criminal Henry Kissinger.

• Joseph Massad: [11-30] The murderous legacy of Henry Kissinger.

• Tom McKenna: [11-30] Scathing obituaries of Henry Kissinger don't mince words about his bloody legacy.

• Ben Rhodes: [11-30] Henry Kissinger, the hypocrite.

• Jon Schwarz: On top of everything else, Henry Kissinger prevented peace in the Middle East.

• Choire Sicha: [11-29] Henry Kissinger, the devil at the dinner party: "His long final act -- after Harvard and D.C. and Cambodia -- was spent at New York's more rarefied tables."

• Norman Solomon: [11-30] Henry Kissinger was the definition of elite impunity.

• Tatyana Tandanpolie: [11-30] "Murderous scumbag": Anthony Bourdain's brutal takedown of "war criminal" Henry Kissinger goes viral.

• Nick Turse: [12-01] Ask brutalized Cambodians what they think of Kissinger.

• Travis Waldron/George Zornick: [11-29] Henry Kissinger, America's most notorious war criminal, dies at 100: "The titan of American foreign policy was complicit in millions of deaths -- and never showed remorse for his decisions."

• Politico Magazine: [11-30] 'My mother told me not to speak ill of the dead': Political experts on Henry Kissinger's legacy. They consulted ten "experts," and took the title from Rosa Brooks, who added, "which pretty much precludes me from saying anything at all about Henry Kissinger." Even the ones who try to say something nice have trouble conveying the notion.

• Responsible Statecraft: [12-01] Symposium: Peace or destruction -- what was Kissinger's impact?: "Wide range of experts and commentators weigh in on the conflicted legacy of an American statesman." George Beebe is one of the few to applaud Kissinger, in terms that Tom Blanton immediately punctures in the next entry:

  The declassified legacy of Henry Kissinger undermines the triumphant narrative he labored so hard to build, even for his successes. The opening to China, for example, turns out to be Mao's idea with Nixon's receptiveness, initially dissed by Kissinger. His shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East did reduce violence but it took Anwar Sadat and then Jimmy Carter to make the peace that Kissinger failed to accomplish. The 1973 Vietnam settlement was actually available in 1969, but Kissinger mistakenly believed he could do better by going through Moscow or Beijing. Meanwhile, Kissinger's callousness about the human cost runs through all the documents.

Other stories:

Tim Alberta: [12-01] The bogus historians who teach evangelicals they live in a theocracy: "A new book on the Christian right reveals how a series of unscrupulous leaders turned politics in to a powerful and lucrative gospel." That would be Alberta's own book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Jeremy Barr: [11-30] MSNBC draws backlash for canceling Mehdi Hasan show. Also:

• John Nichols: [12-01] American discourse needs more Mehdi Hasan, not less.

Ryan Cooper:

• [11-30] The Cybertruck is the dumbest thing I've ever seen: "Elon Musk enters his Caligula era."

• [11-21] Tesla faces off against Nordic labor solidarity.

Chas Danner/Nia Prater: [12-01] George Santos has been expelled from Congress: Live updates. The House vote was 311-114: Democrats voted 206-2 (2 present) to expel; Republicans 112-105 to not expel. The measure required a two-thirds supermajority (282 votes). Five Republicans (including Kevin McCarthy) and three Democrats (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) did not vote.

• Li Zhou: [12-01] George Santos's messy expulsion vote, briefly explained.

• Michelle Goldberg: [12-01] Farewell to George Santos, the perfect MAGA Republican.

• Lydia O'Connor: [12-01] 'George Santos is an ass': House colleagues share their true feelings after his ouster.

• Adam Serwer: [12-01] Expelling George Santos was a mistake.

• Matt Stieb/Margaret Hartmann: [12-01] Here's every single lie told by George Santos: This article has been kicking around ever since shortly after the 2022 election, with many updates. I've never bothered reporting it, but now seems like the time.

• Kara Voght/Ben Terris/Jesús Rodriguez: [12-01] The last days of George Santos, U.S. Congressman "Scenes from the final act of a Washington farce."

Silvia Foster-Frau/N Kirkpatrick/Arelia R Hernández: [11-16] Terror on Repeat: "A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings."

Penelope Green: [11-30] Larry Fink, whose photographs were 'political, not polemical,' dies at 82. I noted Larry's death last week, and complained that the New York Times didn't have an obituary up. (When his sister, Elizabeth Fink, died a few years back, her obituary appeared, at least briefly, above that of Yogi Berra.) Here it is, complete with a nice selection of his photographs ("the chilly anomie of Manhattan's haute monde, the strangeness of Hollywood royalty and the lively warmth of rural America").

Jeet Heer: [11-26] Garry Wills and the real Kennedy curse: Unfortunately, this is a 1:43:30 podcast with no transcript, so I can't imagine myself slogging through it, but I want to at least note that my interest was piqued by "our shared love for Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment, a revelatory book about not just the Kennedy family but also the nature of 'great man politics.'" I've read a number of Wills's books, starting (long ago) with Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, which at the time I saw as a brilliant dissection.

Anita Jain: [12-01] How Franklin Roosevelt tamed Wall Street: Review of Diana B Henriques: Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism. Over the course of American history, there have been few cases where presidential leadership actually meant something, but the most brilliant of all was Roosevelt's handling of the banking panic in the first weeks of his administration. He ordered a "banking holiday" to stop the withdrawals, and addressed the nation via radio, where he explained in authoritative detail how banking worked, why it was vulnerable to panics, and how they can be avoided with a little patience. When he reopened the banks, the panic had subsided, but he still moved quickly to pass a new law to make sure such panics wouldn't happen again (as they had regularly throughout American history). This law was the Carter-Glass Act, which worked brilliantly -- especially federal deposit insurance -- for 65 years, until Citibank got the Republican Congress and Clinton to repeal it, a mere ten years before the biggest banking crisis since 1933. This was the cornerstone of Roosevelt's famous "100 days," which remains the "gold standard" for what Democratic government can do with a large majority in Congress and business back on their heels. (And yes, one of the most important things they did was get rid of the gold standard, which had become a dead weight on the world economy.)

A good book to read on this is Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. As someone who was born in 1950, I grew up with little sense of what Roosevelt accomplished, even though it was all around me. Democrats were way too modest. This contrasts starkly with the Republicans' systematic efforts to memorialize Lincoln and Reagan.

Sarah Jones: [11-29] The infidel turned Christian: "When Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounced Islam for atheism, her conversion made her a global star." Now, she's reinventing herself.

Ezra Klein: [12-03] The books that explain where we are in 2023. A noble undertaking, but a hard one for anyone to read enough to undertake. None here that I've read, but half or so I've reported on. Still, isn't it a bit strange that when he looks for a book on Israel, all he comes up with is Ari Shavit's 10-year-old My Promised Land? I did read a substantial extract from that book, where he describes in considerable detail the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle -- we'd call that "ethnic cleansing" these days -- and rationalizes it as essential to the founding and glory of his beloved Israel.

I could complain that much more has been written on Israel/Palestine since then, but the book I still most recommend came out in 2004: Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions. The most enduring of those questions is why Israel keeps pushing the parameters of a peace settlement beyond what Palestinians are willing to accept. But he also has some insights as to why Palestinian leaders have proven so inept at negotiating with Israel.

More book lists/reviews:

• The New Yorker: [11-29] The best books of 2023.

Keren Landman: [11-29] US life expectancy no longer catastrophic, now merely bad.

Clay Risen: [11-30] Pablo Guzmán, Puerto Rican activist turned TV newsman, dies at 73: A name I recognize from back in the 1970s, involved with a group called the Young Lords.

Nathan J Robinson: [11-28] Why you should primarily focus on your own country's crimes: "Why don't U.S. activists focus on the crimes of the Chinese government? Because we're responsible for what is done in our name, and what we can most affect." Well, also because echoing a moral critique by Americans in power is taken to ratify and promote hostile foreign policies that often only make the problems worse, and in any case are beyond what the US should be doing abroad. And also because, regardless of how pure your intentions are, you're not likely to be heard beyond the din of American saber-rattling. As for other countries that are allied with America (like Israel and Saudi Arabia), you have no business interfering with them, but you can certainly question why the US helps them oppress their own people.

Aja Romano: [11-17] The Crown increasingly becomes a fantastical apologetic for the royal family.

Jeffrey St Clair: [12-01] Roaming Charges: The Dr. Caligari of American Empire: Title refers to Kissinger, the opening subject here, with much more to follow.

Washington Monthly: [11-28] Remembering Charlie Peters: A useful compendium of articles and other tributes occasioned by the death of Washington Monthly's founder and long-time editor. I cited James Fallows: Why Charlile Peters matters last week. No need to list them all here, since that's what this article is for, but let me point out:

• Robert Kuttner: [11-27] Charlie Peters and the odyssey of neoliberalism.

Clinton Williamson: [11-23] You have "the right to be lazy": "Paul Lafargue's anti-work manifesto is newly relevant in a time when the very idea of labor is changing." Lafargue (1842-1911) published his book in 1883.

Scattered tweets:

Ryan Grim:

The irony of conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism is that in the beginning, zionism's most essential backers, the British government, supported zionism because they were actively antisemitic and wanted to make sure Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms didn't come to Britain

Richard Yeselson:

Eye for an eye is now twenty eyes for one eye. And ever trending up. Gotta stop. Hamas' taking of the first eye was horrific. How much more horror will Israel and the US now inflict in response? Gaza is being vaporized. For what?

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, November 27, 2023

November archive (finished).

Music: Current count 41262 [41210] rated (+52), 2 [9] unrated (-7).

I posted another substantial Speaking of Which last night (5716 words, 106 links). The writing went late, and I had to cut it off with a lot of unfinished business. In particular, I was taken aback by opposition to my plan to end the war by splitting Gaza off from Israel. My intro starts to sketch out the distinction between left as teleology and as practical politics -- one that should be easy enough to keep clear, but again and again we see practical proposals that would actually do some good torpedoed by people who quite rightly want something better. I might get a better response pitching my plan as the only achievable "two-state solution" to the mainstream crowd who still entertains the possibility. (It is the only version that Israel could be persuaded to agree to, and as we should know by now, nothing is possible without Israel's consent.) But no one in that crowd reads me or cares what I think, so I find myself in this dark spiral, ever more convinced of the necessity of moving left, and of the impossibility of actual left politics.

That's already more than what I meant to say here. Other than to note that if I was serious about political writing, I'd be shopping around an essay right now on "Why I've Never Called Myself Pro-Palestinian, and Why It Doesn't Bother Me if You Do." The first part of that I've been considering for a while. The second part is a reaction to a recent conversation with a friend complaining about "the pro-Palestinian left." My core point is that the left is not your problem. Good people having occasional bad thoughts is not your problem. Your problem is quite simply on the right.

Meanwhile, we have quite a bit of business to deal with below.

I'm continuously updating my year-end lists for Jazz and Non-Jazz. Currently there are 65+1 A-list entries in jazz, 44+3 in Non-Jazz. The + numbers are albums in previous years' tracking files that I only got to this year. Other 2022 releases appear in the main lists if they weren't even in the tracking files (or were released on or after Dec. 1, 2022).

The split has increased in recent weeks, as I've focused on new jazz, and had little time to do any non-jazz prospecting.

I've made two promotions this week from A- to A (Irreversible Entanglements and Steve Lehman). These were not surprises, nor would the current number 4: James Brandon Johnson's For Mahalia, With Love.

One thing to note is that my entire 2022 demo queue has been reviewed. No new mail this past week, but I have two unopened packages today: one from Portugal, the other from France, so they are probably 2022 releases. I am sitting on a couple of 2024 releases, but I'm in no hurry for them (well, maybe for Ballister).

It's almost two weeks since the first batch of ballot invites for the 18th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll went out. I have 24 ballots counted, naming 264 albums. (Maximum is 16 per ballot: 10 new, 3 old, 1 each vocal, debut, latin.) As new records receive votes, I add them to my tracking file and to the unheard section of my 2024 jazz list. (Note to self: I should write a program to pull up all of the albums with jazz poll votes, sorted by artist so I don't give away the standings.)

Hopefully the ballots will start rolling in soon. Deadline is December 15. I still have a bunch of notes on possible voters. I'm not done sending out invites, but I haven't had much time to vet them yet. But this is probably your last chance to make a case, for you or someone else, to vote. My approximate guidelines are that you should have listed to more than 200 new jazz records in the last year, and that you should have written about ten or more. As for "broadcast journalists," I have no idea what the criteria should be. Francis Davis invited several dozen, and a few others nominated themselves or others. They've generally been a credit to the Poll, but as someone who literally never listens to jazz radio, I'm in no position to judge.

It's impossible to tell whether we'll wind up with more than last year's 151 voters, but it is very likely that we'll see an increase in ballots from outside the US.

One thing I haven't done yet is set up an EOY aggregator, like I've did for 2022, 2021, etc. It's easy enough to do, and it's probably the only way I'll ever get a handle on non-jazz prospects. But my first glance at the AOTY Aggregate is pretty dismal (top 20, w/my grades): Lankum [**], Sufjan Stevens [*], Young Fathers [***], Julie Byrne [**], Boygenius [B], Wednesday [*], Blur [*], Lana Del Rey [**], PJ Harvey [*], Grian Chatten [**], Caroline Polachek [*], Mitski [*], Paul Simon [B], Yo La Tengo [A-], Anohni [**], Nation of Language [?], JPEGMafia & Danny Brown [*], Kelela [*], Yussef Dayes [A- this week], Overmono [*]. A/A- down in the next 25: Billy Woods & Kenny Segal (28), Robert Forster (32), Joanna Sternberg (43), Olivia Rodrigo (45). That's only 6 of 44 non-jazz A/A- records I've already found this year.

Of course, the real value of the EOY lists isn't who gets the most mentions, but what are the interesting records deep down in isolated lists. I will note that so far 7 of the top 10 new releases in our Jazz Critics Poll are A/A- in my book. That's a freakishly high share, but evens out with just 2 in the second 10, and just 1 of the second 20. Also, after 27 you get into the single-vote albums, most of which won't get more than a couple more votes, if that.

November Streamnotes archive is closed, but not indexed yet.

New records reviewed this week:

Ambrose Akinmusire: Beauty Is Enough (2023, Origami Harvest): Trumpet player, from Oakland, became a star when Blue Note picked up his second album in 2010, and remained near the top of the polls with five albums through 2020. However, this self-released solo album appeared with little fanfare, and will remain an item of minor interest. B+(*) [sp]

Balimaya Project: When the Dust Settles (2023, New Soil): West African (Mandé) group, based in London, led by djembe player Yahael Camara Onono, second album. Vocals suggest afropop, but they're playing for a jazz crowd. B+(***) [sp]

Jerry Bergonzi: Extra Extra (2023, Savant): Tenor saxophonist, steady stream of albums since 1984, With Sheryl Bailey (guitar), Harvie S (bass), Luther Gray (drums), plus Phil Grenadier (trumpet) on 3 tracks. B+(*) [sp]

John Butcher/Pat Thomas/Dominic Lash/Steve Noble: Fathom (2021 [2023], 577): English avant-saxophonist, records started appearing around 1985, more frequently after 1998. Live set from Cafe Oto, with regulars on piano, bass, and drums. B+(*) [dl]

Gunhild Carling: Good Evening Cats (2022, Jazz Art): Swedish singer, multi-instrumentalist (trombone seems to be her first choice, but double bass, banjo, flute, bagpipes, and harp are barely half of the list), started out at 10 in her family's Hot Five band. Old-fashioned swing with a touch of cabaret, not all in English but that just adds to the charm. B+(***) [sp]

Daniel Carter/Leo Genovese/William Parker/Francisco Mela: Shine Hear Vol. 1 (2021 [2023], 577): Sax, piano, bass, drums, with Carter and Parker (who also plays gralla and shakuhachi) going way back. B+(**) [dl]

Joan Chamorro & Friends: Jazz House Sessions With Scott Hamilton (2023, Associació Sant Andreu Jazz Band): Spanish bassist, sometime saxophonist, has led several bands, principally the swing-oriented Sant Andreu Jazz Band (others worth noting include Barcelona Hot Seven and the Fu Manchu Jazz Servants). He has a dozen or so albums where he "presents" guests, starting with Scott Robinson in 2011. This one collects pieces from four sessions, going back to 2013 (but no specific credits). Hamilton sounds terrific with a hard-swinging band. I'm less taken by the vocals, which sound Brazilian. B+(**) [sp]

Yussef Dayes: Black Classical Music (2023, Brownswood/Nonesuch): British drummer, first solo album although he had a group called United Vibrations, and duos with Kamaal Williams and Tom Misch. Big album (19 songs, 73:54), a dozen guest spots, I wouldn't say it's jazz, much less classical, but crosses over into a rarefied atmosphere of groove and light, an ambience you can dance in. A- [sp]

Paul Dunmall Ensemble: It's a Matter of Fact (2022 [2023], Discus Music): British saxophonist (tenor/soprano here), very polific since 1986, ensemble here with Julie Tippetts (voice), Martin Archer (alto/baritone sax), trumpet, trombone, guitar, bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Paul Dunmall: Bright Light a Joyous Celebration (2022 [2023], Discus Music): The saxophonist leads a sextet here, with two more saxophonists (Soweto Kinch and Xhosa Cole), vibes (Corey Mwamba), bass (Dave Kane), and drums (Hamid Drake). The drummer goes without saying, but I'm really impressed by the vibes here, and the saxophones live up to the title. A- [bc]

Paul Dunmall New Quartet: World Without (2021 [2023], 577): Tenor/alto sax, backed by guitar (Steven Saunders), bass (Dave Kane), and drums (Mike Levin). Intense, for better or worse. B+(**) [dl]

Peter Evans [Being & Becoming]: Ars Memoria (2022-23 [2023], More Is More): Trumpet player, formerly of Mostly Other People Do the Killing, group name derived from a 2020 album, also with Joel Ross (vibes) and Nick Jozwlak (bass), but with a different drummer: this time it's Michael Shekwoaga Ode. B+(***) [bc]

Kate Gentile: Find Letter X (2021-23 [2023], Pi, 3CD): Drummer, based in New York, several albums since 2015, including a 6-CD 2021 box with pianist Matt Mitchell that was too much for me to handle. Mitchell returns here, with electronics as well, Kim Cass (acoustic and electric bass), and Jeremy Viner (tenor sax, clarinet, bass clarinet). Might be remarkable, but that there's so much of it makes it hard to tell (or care). B+(***) [dl]

Terry Gibbs Legacy Band: The Terry Gibbs Songbook (2022 [2023], Whaling City Sound): Vibraphonist, birth name Julius Gubenko, recorded for Savoy in 1951, kicking off a very long career, leading his Dream Band, up to a fine 2017 record called 92 Years Young. At 98, he's even credited with a bit of "2-fingered piano" here (also the amuising "vocals on track 4"). The sextet features singer Danny Bacher and tenor saxophonists Scott Hamilton and Harry Allen, with son Gerry Gibbs on drums. B+(***) [sp]

Frode Gjerstad With Matthew Shipp: We Speak (2022 [2023], Relative Pitch): Norwegian alto saxophonist, started in the early 1980s with Detail, then Circulasione Totale Orchestra. Also plays clarinet here, in duets with piano. Hard to think of anyone better in that role than Shipp. B+(**) [sp]

Rich Halley Quartet: Fire Within (2023, Pine Eagle): Tenor saxophonist from Portland, Oregon, has turned his retirement project into a remarkable career. (Checking myself, I find that he had a few albums as far back as 1986 before I first noticed him in 2005 with Mountains and Plains, and that he was only 58 then, but the model stuck in my head, partly because I have other examples, like Fred Anderson and Mort Weiss.) I can't say that he's getting better, but he's been remarkably inspired for two decades, aided here by his best rhythm section ever: Matthew Shipp (piano), Michael Bisio (bass), and Newman Taylor Baker (drums). A- [cd] [12-01]

Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View (2023, Gondwana): British trumpet player, 11th album since 2008, also plays keyboards and many percussion instruments, and is credited with several field recordings. He likens this to landscape painting, which gives you the idea. B+(**) [sp]

Scott Hamilton Quartet: At PizzaExpress Live: In London (2022 [2023], PX): Tenor saxophonist, has been "a good wind" blowing retro-swing since 1978, here with his long-running quartet of John Pearce (piano), Dave Green (bass), and Steve Brown (drums), playing standards with consummate ease and grace. B+(***) [sp]

Eirik Hegdal/Jeff Parker/Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/Øyvind Skarbø: Superless (2022 [2023], Øyvind Jazzforum): Norwegian saxophonist (here: C melody, sopranino, bass clarinet, synth), probably best known for his Team Hegdal, although he's played in the larger Angles configurations, in Gard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and else where. With guitar, bass, and drums, in an eponymous group album where he wrote five (of 8) compositions. B+(***) [sp]

Henry Hey: Trio: Ri-Metos (2023, self-released): Pianist, has another Trio album from 2003, but many side credits since 1994, including Rod Stewart and David Bowie, also the fusion band Forq. Drummer Jochen Rüeckert returns from his previous trio, with Joe Martin on bass. All contribute songs, plus a standard and two from Vince Mendoza. B+(***) [dl]

Homeboy Sandman: I Can't Sell These Either (2023, self-released): New York rapper Angelo del Villar II, has dropped short albums/long EPs several times a year since 2007, the best in recent years a compilation of stray tracks called I Can't Sell These, hence the title of this 20-track, 59:07 monster. I suspect the commercial lapses have more to do with uncleared samples than any weakness in the material, which certainly isn't obvious. A- [bc]

Jon-Erik Kellso and the EarRegulars: Live at the Ear Inn (2023, Arbors): Trad jazz trumpet player, from Detroit, based in New York, where he's led this band on Sunday nights since 2007. This draws on two dates, so there are some personnel shifts, but most tracks feature Scott Robinson (sax), John Allred (trombone), Matt Munisteri (guitar), and Neal Miner (bass). Catherine Russell sings the closer, "Back O' Town Blues." B+(***) [sp]

Snorre Kirk: Top Dog (2021 [2023], Stunt): Drummer, from Denmark, fifth album since 2012, playing original pieces that aim to swing like Ellington and Basie. Quintet, the saxophone divided between Stephen Riley and Michael Blicher, backed by piano, guitar, and bass. Very nice. B+(***) [sp]

Location Location Location [Michael Formanek/Anthony Pirog/Mike Pride]: Damaged Goods (2023, Cuneiform): Bass, guitar, drums, jointly credited, but still mostly the guitarist's record, which is to say fractured fusion. Group name derives from recording this piecemeal, from different places, then splicing it together. B+(*) [dl]

Harold López-Nussa: Timba a la Americana (2023, Blue Note): Cuban pianist, ten or so albums since 2007. Several albums since 2007, this one a quintet with Gregoire Maret plus lots of rhythm. B+(**) [sp]

John Paul McGee: A Gospejazzical Christmas (2023, Jazz Urbano): Pianist, from Baltimore, teaches at Berklee, coined "gospejazzical" in his dissertation on "A Sound for Distressed Souls" -- the "ical" is the tail end of "classical." Probably weighs out to a third of each, stealthily sneaking up on Xmas standards (with one original). B [cd]

Thandi Ntuli With Carlos Niño: Rainbow Revisited (2019 [2023], International Anthem): Pianist, from South Africa, also sings, title refers back to a song from her 2019 album. Duo with the percussionist, recorded on his turf in Los Angeles. B+(**) [sp]

Øyvindland Med Eirik Hegdal & Erik Johannessen: Nonett (2021 [2023], Øra Fonogram): Leader, and composer, here is Norwegian trumpet player Øyvind Frøberg Mathisen, who has one previous album under his own name. Featured guests play C melody sax/bass clarinet and trombone, and they're counted in the nonet, along with Karl Hjalmar Nyberg (clarinet/tenor sax), guitar, piano, bass, and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Engin Ozsahin: Conversations in Chaos (2023, self-released): Turkish pianist, studied at New England Conservatory but returned to Istanbul. Second album, sextet, not a lot of details, but sounds like very fancy postbop. B+(**) [sp]

Robert Prester & Adriana Samargia: Quenara (2023 [2024], Commonwealth Ave. Productions): Piano and voice, normally the singer would get top billing. He has, uh, a previous album from 2013, on this same label. She doesn't, but has a very distinctive voice and delivery on standards as well worn as "You Go to My Head," "Lover Man," "Body and Soul," and "Sophisticated Lady." Not one I especially like, but one she deserves credit for. He wrote the title song, which I've already forgotten. B+(*) [cd] [01-19]

Quartet San Francisco/Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band/Take Six: Raymond Scott Reimagined (2023, ViolinJazz): String quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen, trained in classical but prefers "non-traditional and eclectic," a definition that could have been coined for Scott. This is clearly their project, with the other well-established artists, a big band and a vocal group, brought in for scale and depth. With interview snippets from Scott. B+(***) [sp]

Red Hot + Ra: Solar [Sun Ra in Brasil] (2023, Red Hot Org): New York-based 50(c)(3) non-profit, raises money for "organizations on the front lines of global health epidemics, epidemics, and health crises," notably by organizing star-studded benefit albums, starting with Red Hot + Blue in 1990, taking aim at AIDS. Twenty-some albums later, this is neither their first venture into Brazil nor their first to focus on Sun Ra. Eight tracks by as many groups, with Brazilian rhythms where you might expect swing, and some rap mixed in the vocals. B+(***) [sp]

Red Hot + Ra: Nuclear War: A Tribute to Sun Ra: Volume 1 (2023, Red Hot Org): Only four artists here, all very specifically in tune with Sun Ra: Georgia Anne Muldrow (3:39), Angel Bat David (30:25), Malcolm Jiyane Tree-o (12:09), and Irreversible Entanglements (18:22). B+(**) [sp]

Ernesto Rodrigues/João Madeira/Hernâni Faustino: No Strings Attached (2023, Creative Sources): Portuguese avant-string trio, Rodrigues plays violin, the other two double bass, at least for the 8-part "Expecting String Expression" (30:56). This is followed by a 32:00 live set, with Rodrigues on viola. B+(**) [bc]

Sam Ross: Live at the Mira Room, Vol. II (2023, self-released): Pianist, also plays rhodes here (mostly), in a trio with Simba Distis (upright and electric bass) and Dr. Mimi Murid (drums), following up on a similar 2021 album. Also credit the crowd, which is boisterous enough to deserve a credit, and maybe even steal the show. Short: 5 tracks, 29:51. B+(**) [cd]

Andreas Røysum Ensemble: Mysterier (2022 [2023], Motvind): Norwegian clarinetist, third group album, twelve-piece group of considerable power, plus vocals that don't help much. B+(**) [sp]

John Scofield: Uncle John's Band (2022 [2023], ECM, 2CD): Guitarist, trio with Vicente Archer (bass) and Bill Stewart (drums). Fourteen songs (86:41), half originals, closes with the Grateful Dead song, opens with "Mr. Tambourine Man." B+(**) [sp]

Elijah Shiffer: Star Jelly (2021 [2023], self-released): Alto saxophonist, based in New York, describes this as a "sax-heavy version of a Nwe Orleans-style 'brass' band" -- three or four saxes (the extra is bass sax on 5 of 8 tracks), trumpet, trombone, a revolving cast of stringed instruments, and drums. The trad jazz angle is a sweet spot for me, but the arrangements are very slippery, leaving me with wonder whether what seems exceedingly clever at first will hold up for the long haul. A- [bc]

Elijah Shiffer: City of Birds: Volume 1 (2023, self-released): Ten songs, each named for a bird sighted in New York City. Third album, alto sax, plus Kevin Sun on tenor sax, Dmitry Ishenko (bass), and Colin Hinton (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Apostolos Sideris: Past-Presented (2023, Parallel): Bassist, from Greece, seems to be in Paris now, after Istanbul and New York, with a previous album on a Spanish label. Sextet, with piano (Leo Genovese), ney, violin, bass, drums, extra percussion, with some background vocals. B+(*) [bc]

Speakers Corner Quartet: Further Out Than the Edge (2023, OTIH): Originally the house band for "the infamous hip-hop/spoken-word open-mic night Speakers' Corner in Brixton, London." Slotted as jazz, but sounds more like trip-hop, with different guests for each song, names (but not voices) I mostly recognize. B+(**) [sp]

Jason Stein/Damon Smith/Adam Shead: Hum (2022 [2023], Irritable Mystic): Bass clarinetist, has a number of albums since 2007, some quite impressive; backed here by bass and drums, for two 21-minute improv pieces. B+(**) [bc]

Elias Stemeseder/Christian Lillinger: Penumbra (2021 [2022], Plaist): Austrian pianist, German drummer, both with sides in synthesizers and other electronics. Agreeably choppy. B+(**) [sp]

Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 17: Lonnie Liston Smith (2023, Jazz Is Dead): Funk-fusion keyboard player, led the Cosmic Echoes 1973-85, first new record since 1998. B+(*) [sp]

Dhafer Youssef: Street of Minarets (2023, Back Beat Edition): Tunisian singer-songwriter, plays oud, has lived in Europe since 1990, mostly playing with jazz musicians: here including Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (keybs), Nguyên Lê (guitar), Dave Holland or Marcus Miller (bass), Vinnie Colaiuta (drums), Rakesh Chaurasia (bansuri), and Adriano Dos Santos (percussion). B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Chantal Acda & Bill Frisell: Live at Jazz Middelheim (2017 [2023], self-released): Dutch/Belgian singer-songwriter, has records going back to 1999, backed here by the famed guitarist. Originally released by Glitterhouse in 2018. B+(*) [sp]

Johnny Griffin: Live at Ronnie Scott's (1964 [2023], Gearbox): Tenor saxophonist, an unabashed be-bopper, first records 1956, including a particularly notable appearance with Thelonious Monk. Quartet here, with a local band: Stan Tracey (piano), Malcolm Cecil (bass), and Jackie Dougan (drums), on three side-long pieces (53:54). Not to be confused with a 2008 same-title (In+Out). B+(***) [sp]

Alon Nechushtan: For Those Who Cross the Seas (2006 [2023], ESP-Disk, 2CD): Israeli pianist, based in New York, has a half-dozen albums, mostly 2011-14. Two live sets here, the first disc called "Astral Voyages," the second "Cosmic Canticles." Band names also appear on front cover, offset just enough to spare me listing them all on the slugline, but worth mentioning here: Roy Campbell (flute/trumpet), Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen (saxophones/clarinet), William Parker (bass), and Federico Ughi (drums). A- [cd]

Old music:

Peter Evans/Joel Ross/Nick Jozwlak/Savannah Harris: Being & Becoming (2019 [2020], More Is More): Billed as a new group, but since the names are on the cover, handy to just credit them: trumpet, vibes, bass, drums. Ross has gotten a lot of praise for his Blue Notes, but this is much trickier, and he's really superb. [was: U++] A- [bc]

Elijah Shiffer and the Robber Crabs: Unhinged (2017 [2018], self-released): Alto saxophonist, first album, group with Andrew Shillito (guitars and banjo), electric bass, and drums, with Jay Rattman on two cuts (bass saxophone and slide whistle). He has a unique sound, drawing on trad jazz but with impossibly funky rhythms. A- [bc]

Limited Sampling: Records I played parts of, but not enough to grade: -- means no interest, - not bad but not a prospect, + some chance, ++ likely prospect.

Kate Gentile/International Contemporary Ensemble: B i o m e i.i (2022 [2023], Obliquity): + [yt]

Grade (or other) changes:

Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (2023, Impulse!): [was: A-] A

Steve Lehman/Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (2023, Pi): [was: A-] A

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

None.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, November 25, 2023

I started collecting this on Tuesday, mostly because I didn't want to let the Stevenson piece go without comment. The Mishra, which could still use some work, was also found in the Wichita Eagle that day. I had much more to write about the Ryu Spaeth piece, only some of which got tacked onto the footer section. Two points would have fit only awkwardly, but let me take a brief stab at them here:

1. Most leftists are informed and defined by a core philosophical principle -- that all people are fundamentally equal, and justice demands that they be respected as such -- but the left isn't some sort of religion or cult; it is a political tendency, effectively a party, aiming to incrementally improving justice by recognizing our fundamental equality. People who embrace this core principle will join the left, but you don't have to adopt the right thinking to align with the left. All you need is to find that your interests would be better served by the advance of the left. That happens a lot, especially with oppressed minorities. A bunch of things follow from this (which I'd rather not have to spell out at the moment -- one of which is that Jews in America, where there is risk of oppression, gravitate left, whereas in Israel, where they have attained the power to oppress others, they trend to the right).

2. Most leftists in America have come to embrace nonviolence, partly because we have come to realize that violence corrodes the spirit and compounds the difficulties of furthering justice, but also because it's more promising in our political system, which in principle allows for popular reform -- even though the system is heavily stacked against it. It is therefore tempting to raise nonviolence as a moral absolute, to condemn all exceptions, and to purge the left political movement of those who fall short of our ideals. I am pretty close to being an absolute pacifist, but even I have to admit that this would be self-defeating.

   Several reasons: violence, especially in self-defense, is a universal human instinct, one we may disapprove of and often regret, but cannot totally deny, because in some circumstances it seems like the only option for saving our humanity; throughout most history, at least since the left became a distinct political force, the only way change toward greater equality and justice could be achieved was through violence (e.g., the great revolutions from 1776 to 1917); even where reforms have been achieved, they were often conceded to hold back the threat of revolutionary violence. Of course, we now more fully realize that our violence has a dark side. But aren't there still situations where nonviolent change is so completely closed off that only through violence can people assert their humanity?

I don't think that we, in neurotic but still fundamentally liberal America, can with certainty assert that people barely surviving in Gaza have any real, viable options. Sure, one may still hope that nonviolent means, like BDS, might persuade Israel to lessen its stifling grip over its Palestinian subjects, but it may be that all the nonviolent protest has achieved -- and it has been tried at least as often as violence -- has been to reaffirm the faith of right-wing Israelis that overwhelming force will always prevail. Even before the rise of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, but accelerating at an alarming rate after they joined the Netanyahu government, West Bank settlers had moved beyond their initial goal of staking claim to land to terrorizing Palestinians, hoping to drive them into exile. Israel's support for Azerbaijan's "ethnic cleansing" of Nagorno-Karabakh sure looked like a dress rehearsal for Israel driving Palestinians out of the West Bank.

While I personally believed that the revolt of Oct. 7 was ill-considered, politically reckless, and morally hazardous, their political and moral struggle was not mine to dictate or to judge. So I saw no point in condemning what appeared to be an act of desperation. Certainly not to make myself feel more righteous in comparison. Even less so as it would lend comfort to those who would take this act of violence and use as excuse to strike back even harder. And that part took no imagination on my part, as by the time I had heard the news, many Israelis were already clamoring for massive revenge -- as could have been expected, given that Israel's whole system of governing is based on their capacity for inflicting overwhelming violence.

Similarly, I can hardly condemn Israelis for defending themselves once the revolt broke out of Gaza. I would only point out that the defense was complete, and should have ended, once the attackers were rebuffed, and the border secured -- which happened within 24 hours of the initial attacks. The war since then, including some 40,000 tons of bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza, cannot be considered self-defense. This bombardment is no less than an act of systematic destruction and slaughter, an act that can only be summed up in the word "genocide."

Israelis have disputed that word, but with independence in 1948 they established a formal caste system with distinct legal status for Jews and Arabs, driving some 700,000 of the latter into exile, expropriating their property, and forbidding their return. They've also, building on the British model, regularly practiced collective punishment, including indiscriminate killing. Those are two of the three essential constituents of genocide. The third is the loss of inhibition against killing, which has been happening continuously since the 2000 Intifada and the 2006 loss of Gaza to Hamas, such that the Oct. 7 revolt merely tipped the impulse into action, with public statements to match. It is still possible that Israel's leaders will come to second thoughts and rein their killing in, but until they do, shying away from the term only encourages them to proceed.

Much more I could write on this, but time to post on schedule is running out.

Top story threads:

Israel: If you are at all unclear on how we got to the revolt on Oct. 7 and the subsequent intensification of the Israeli war against Gaza, start with this timeline: Countdown to genocide: the year before October 7.

• Mondoweiss:

  • [11-20] Day 45: Israeli military besieges the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.

  • [11-21] Day 46: Israeli tanks besiege Indonesian Hospital as bombardment of Gaza continues.

  • [11-22] Day 47: Israel and Hamas agree to a temporary truce, release captives and prisoners.

  • [11-23] Day 48: Ahead of temporary ceasefire, Israeli forces continue to terrorize hospitals.

  • [11-24] Day 49: Four-day truce begins in Gaza after a night of heavy bombardment.

  • [11-25] Day 50: First Israeli and Palestinian hostages released as Gaza takes stock of devastation.

  • [11-26] Day 51: Israel fires at Palestinians attempting to return to northern Gaza amid shaky truce. The latter point is especially significant, as well as "Israeli forces prevent any scenes of celebration of the released prisoners in Jerusalem." Israel's leaders were not just very reluctant to agree to any sort of "pause," they are embarrassed that they did, and horrified that anyone might treat their compromise as any sign of weakness.

• Ghada Ageel: [11-25] While the world has abandoned Gaza, its doctors have done the opposite. They are our heroes.

• Michael Arria: [11-26] Three Palestinian students shot in Vermont in apparent hate crime.

• Erin Banco/Nahal Toosi: [11-21] US has sent Israel data on aid group locations to try to prevent strikes: Which didn't exactly work, or did it?

• Zack Beauchamp: [11-22] The Israel-Hamas deal is not a real ceasefire.

• Roger Cohen: [11-20] Between Israelis and Palestinians, a lethal psychological chasm grows: This "chasm" is real, but its symmetry is forced. One side has immensely more power than the other to punish and/or to forgive, and as such has responsibility for perpetuating the hostility.

• Dave DeCamp: [11-22] Biden admin worries the pause in Gaza will give journalists more access to expose Israeli atrocities.

• Richard Falk: [11-24] When is 'a humanitarian pause' genocidal?

• Abdallah Fayyad: [11-22] Why Israel imprisons so many Palestinians: "150 Palestinian prisoners are being released as part of Israel and Hamas's recent hostage deal. But thousands more remain behind bars."

• Joshua Frank: [11-19] The dangers only multiply: "Could Israel's war on Gaza go nuclear?" No surprise that at least one of Israel's more sociopathic politicians suggested that it should, but common sense argues that it won't: mostly because the target is too close to risk the nuclear fallout. On the other hand, it's sobering to read this line: "Indeed, well over 25,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza by early November, the equivalent of two Hiroshima-style nukes (without the radiation)." One thing that's not stopping Israel is scruples about genocide.

• Sophia Goodfriend: [11-24] Israel's 'thought police' law ramps up dangers for Palestinian social media users. The amendment was first drafted a year-and-a-half ago, but only passed in the current panic.

• Jonathan Guyer: [11-22] The Israel-Hamas hostage deal, explained: "This is a deal that has essentially been on the table for about a month," i.e., well before Israel's ground offensive.

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [11-25] A 'temporary ceasefire' means realizing how much we've lost.

• Sam Hamad: [11-18] Understanding Hasbara: Israel's propaganda machine.

• Benjamin Hart: [11-22] How long could the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last? Interview with Gershon Baskin ("an Israeli peace activist who played a key role in the freeing of Gilad Shalit" in 2006), who plainly states: "There is no scenario where the war ends with Hamas in control of Gaza."

• Ellen Ioanes: [11-24] The controversial phrase "from the river to the sea," explained.

• Amira Jarmakani: [11-20] The ADL is leading the attack against free speech on Palestine.

• Caitlin Johnstone: [11-13] Israelis keep hurting their own PR interests by talking.

• Fred Kaplan: [11-22] One factor behind the Gaza cease-fire deal: A massive shift in the US relationship with Israel.

• Kathy Kelly: [11-24] Tunnels for safety and tunnels for death.

• Jen Kirby: [11-22] How Qatar became a key broker in the Israel-Hamas deal.

• Daniel Larison: [11-22] The warfare of starvation: "The siege will kill Palestinian civilians and by doing nothing, the US is supporting it."

• Lauren Leatherby: [11-25] Gaza civilians, under Israeli barrage, are being killed at historic pace: "In less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after two years of war." Also see the Corey Robin tweets, below.

• John Mueller: [11-21] What if Israel didn't set out to 'destroy Hamas'? "The case for a limited response after the October 7 attacks."

• Orly Noy: [11-23] What Israelis won't be asking about the Palestinians released for hostages: "The list of Palestinians slated to be exchanged for Israelis should provoke reflection over the role of mass imprisonment in the occupation."

• Taha Ozhan: [11-25] The West will pay a heavy price for expending its credibility on Israel.

• Matthew Petti: [11-20] Media amplified US, Israeli narrative on Palestinian deaths: "Following senior officials' lead, many prominent Western news outlets started linking Hamas to hospitals in Gaza."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [11-24] Israel wants to pull the U.S. into a regional confrontation, but Biden remains reluctant.

• Mouin Rabbani: Two pieces that Norman Finkelstein published: [11-26] Thoughts on the truce; and Israel has lost the plot: This provides a cogent explanation of why "the elimination of Hamas is unattainable" -- not exactly the one I was thinking of, but good enough for all practical purposes. Given that the root-and-branch elimination of Hamas is doomed to failure, serious thought should be given to how to turn Hamas into a force for reform: basically, how to domesticate it. Israel has long complained about not having a "partner for peace," but Israel never wanted one (else they would have made an effort). Also see this [11-07] discussion between Rabbani and Finkelstein: Gaza one month later.

• Mohannad Sabry: [11-22] Israel's killing of journalists and denial can't hide the horrific toll in Gaza.

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [11-20] Former IDF commander calls for Gaza genocide: "Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland argues inflicting disease and starvation will hasten Gaza's surrender."

  • [11-21] Friendly-fire incidents killed 10 IDF officers, wounded dozens of others, killed many civilians: "Israeli drones and helicopters killed Israeli hostages as Hannibal Directive was invoked."

  • [11-24] Amalek: 'Erasing' Gaza.

• Tom Suarez: [11-26] The masterful propaganda of 'deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust': "Israel and its supporters are engaging in Holocaust revisionism to justify its genocidal attack on Gaza."

• Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [11-25] Complete and utter carnage: "The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a genocidal war." Too bad this is paywalled, leaving free riders with another St Clair reprint (see Rebirth of a Nation: US history according to DW Griffith).

  • [11-18] Enter the moral abyss: The previous week's entry in "The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a genocidal war."

• Struan Stevenson: [11-20] Iran's 'axis of resistance' to Israel begins to crack. Author is a former member of the European Parliament (from Scotland), and a former chairman of a group called Friends of a Free Iran. This piece, like his previous [10-17] Iran's tyrannical mullahs created the Hamas monster, is vivid and vitriolic propaganda aimed at pinning the Oct. 7 Gaza revolt on Iran, for reasons known only to the diabolical mullahs. Much of what Stevenson writes is patently false, and much more is simply hard to believe. Iran didn't invent Hamas, and had essentially no interest in the Palestinian struggle until the 1990s, when Israel turned on Iran, figuring that Iraq could no longer be painted as an existential threat, and that Iran would play better with the Americans, who still nursed a grudge over the 1980 hostage thing. Even so, there's no credible accounting of how much support Iran has ever provided to Hamas. Stevenson's claim that "the mullahs have provided hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Hamas" is especially mind-boggling. (That's more like the levels of arms the US supplies to Ukraine and Israel.) Even if Iran is using its "proxies" just to stir up trouble, it would be much easier and cheaper to negotiate some kind of détente, or better still a normalization of relations, which would allow them (and others) the opportunity to enjoy peace, instead of just beating them with sticks like like Mojahedin-e Khalq (the Israel-supported terrorist group Stevenson is allied with).

• Philip Weiss: [11-26] Weekly Briefing: The Israeli perspective -- on genocide -- dominates our airwaves.

• Oren Ziv/Yotam Ronen: [11-22] Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace: That the families of hostages have been the loudest and most visible opponents of the war against Gaza reflects, I think, two deeper truths. One is that sympathy gives them a forum to speak publicly where most Israelis (and all Palestinians) are intimidated into silence. The other is that they realize that Israel will gain nothing by prosecuting the war, while they stand to lose their families for no good reason.

Trump, and other Republicans:

• Thomas B Edsall: [11-22] The roots of Trump's rage.

• Margaret Hartmann:

  • [11-20] Trump is still obsessed with the 'golden showers' rumor.

  • [11-22] Trump posted 19 videos in a row on Truth Social in a cry for help.

• Eric Levitz: [11-24] Trump as a plan for massively increasing inflation. Clever to note that while Republicans hammer away at Biden for inflation -- when he wasn't threatening to beat up Teamsters, Markwayne Mullin was lying about diesel prices (see [11-22] GOP Senator swiftly fact-checked after whining about gas prices for his massive truck) -- aren't solutions, and in many ways only make the problem worse. Still I'm not convinced that Trump's 10% across-the-board tariff idea is such a bad one: true it will raise consumer prices, and it may not stimulate much new domestic production, but it should reduce the trade deficit (which I've long taken to be a bad thing, although economists tend to argue otherwise). I also doubt that another round of Trump tax cuts will have much effect on consumer price inflation -- although it will undoubtedly lead to inflated asset values (something economists refuse to count as inflation). On the other hand, no mention here of antitrust (which Trump will presumably cripple, unless he can use it vindictively to attack his political enemies), which if enforced should push prices down, and if neglected will allow companies to become more predatory. Or of more deregulation, which helps unscrupulous companies increas profits both through higher prices and by passing costs on to the public (pollution, which includes the effects of global warming, is the most famous of these externalities). Still, Republicans do have one effective tool to quell inflation: recession. That's cure much worse than the disease it claims to treat. It's also the end-state of the last three Republican presidencies. Whereas this and the last two Democratic presidents (but not Carter) ended up with sustained economic growth, and (more modest) wage growth. Maybe a little inflation isn't such a bad thing.

• Zachary Petrizzo: [11-16] Trumpworld is already at war over staffing a new Trump White House.

• Roger Sollenberger:

  • [11-24] The secret megadonor behind the MAGA movement's 'nerve center': About Mark Rydin.

  • [11-22] Conservative group accidentally reveals its secret donors. Some of them are liberal orgs. The group is American Compass. The two orgs with a "liberal history" are Omidyar Network and the Hewlett Foundation, both founded by tech moguls.

• Peter Wade: [11-26] Christie blames Trump for increasing antisemitism and Islamophobia: To quote him: "Intolerance toward anyone encourages intolerance toward everyone."

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Branko Marcetic: [11-22] Voters are leaving Joe Biden in droves over his support for Israel.

• Harold Meyerson: [11-20] Can Biden and the Democrats survive their divisions on Israel-Palestine? He offers some suggestions, mostly referring back to the 1968 rift over the Vietnam war, which isn't terribly relevant. Johnson's big liability in 1968 was that he and his administration had repeatedly lied about the war, falling way short of their promises, inspiring no confidence in their future, in a war that had enormous personal impact on millions of Americans. Consequently, Johnson/Humphrey were opposed by prominent Democrats. On the other hand, no major Democrat is going to stand up against Biden, especially not for showing excessive fealty to Israel. Maybe there's an enthusiasm slump as the gap between the Democratic Party leadership and base expands, but party regulars are almost certain to rally against Trump. The volatile center, on the other hand, may not be able to articulate the problem with Biden's wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and (heaven forbid) Taiwan, but the bad vibes could sink him.

• Steven Shepard: [11-25] The polls keep getting worse for Biden.

Tweet from Daniel Denvir on points above:

If Democrats are suddenly worried that Biden will lose to Trump -- as they should be -- the rational thing to do would be to 1) make another, more popular Dem the nominee and 2) move the party away from its pro-genocide position. Blaming the left for saying genocide is bad won't work

Also from Nathan J Robinson:

I'm interested in the theory of how Biden is supposed to turn his numbers around, given that:
(1) The main issue is his age and he gets older every day, and
(2) Humanitarian crisis in Gaza will worsen as disease and starvation set in, and it is causing young Dems to hate him

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Ian Millhiser: [11-21] A Supreme Court case about stocks could help make Trump's authoritarian dreams reality: "The 'unitary executive' is back, and it could supercharge Trump's plans to fill the government with his own loyalists."

Economic matters:

• David Dayen: [11-20] How Larry Summers's bad predictions hurt the planet.

• Emily Stewart: [11-20] Wages are rising. Jobs are plentiful. Nobody's happy. "It's a good time to be a worker and a bad time to be a consumer -- the problem is most people are both."

Ukraine War:

• Sophia Ampgkarian: [11-23] Why US-led sanctions on Russia are a failure: "After nearly two years of the tightest embargoes ever, Moscow's economy and war effort are doing far better than anticipated."

• Robert English: [11-24] Bad history makes for bad policy on Ukraine.

• Edward Hunt: [11-21] The Ukraine war has been a 'great bargain' for US in the Black Sea.

Around the world:

• Victor Grossman: [11-24] Split on the left in Germany.

• Eldar Mamedov: [11-22] On foreign policy, Argentina's Milei leans neocon, not libertarian: Notably, he's a "staunch supporter of Ukraine," has a "fervid embrace of Israel," is opposed to Argentina joining BRICS.

• Muhammad Sahimi: [11-24] Iran's political factions aren't united on Hamas, or the Middle East: "But most favor a policy of restraint in reaction to the Gaza war."

• Helmer Stoel: [11-24] Far-right Geert Wilders won the Dutch election because the establishment indulged him.

Other stories:

Ryan Cooper:

• [10-11] The cooperative that could: "How S Group became Finland's most dominant retailer." Pull quotes include: "S Group's business model depends in part on the perception that being a member benefits broader society."

• [11-20] Nefarious corporate overlord accidentally kick-starts media company: "Gamurs Group fired the editor in chief of The Escapist. Most of the publication joined him to start something new, a worker cooperative called Second Wind."

Eileen Crist/Judith Lipton/David Barash: [11-24] End the insanity: For nuclear disarmament and global demilitarization.

Tom Engelhardt: [11-26] A slow-motion Gaza: But isn't it a little soon to turn "Gaza" into a metaphor for the "hell on Earth" that global warming is inching towards?

James Fallows: [11-23] Why Charlie Peters matters: The founder and editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly for 30 years (1969-2000) has died, at 96. I subscribed to the journal for several years early on, possibly from its inception, and found it to be seriously informative and generally sensible about policy workings in Washington. I was rather dismayed later on to find that Peters had coined the "neoliberal" term, though there may be an argument that what Peters had in mind differed significantly from the disparaging use of the term lately -- see Paul Glastris: [01-08] Need a new economic vision? Gotcha covered. Last thing I recall reading by Peters was a sad lament about his home state of West Virginia flipping Republican.

Eric Levitz: [11-22] OpenAI was never going to save us from the robot apocalypse.

Robert Lipsyte: [11-21] Farewell to the New York Times sports department: "Or should it be good riddance?"

Pankaj Mishra: [11-18] The west never had a chance at winning over the world: Talks about the phrase "the global south," and how it's come to the fore since Russia's invasion of Ukraine tightened the bond between the US and Europe, while estranging both from the rest of the world (now known as, the Global South). It surely can't be a surprise that the renewed and militant union of Europe and the US (aka, the West) would be viewed suspiciously by the Global South? Mishra notes that "the Biden administration failed to enlist any major country of the Global South in its cause," i.e., economic war against Russia, ostensibly to defend Ukraine. He adds: "Even worse, the conflict in Gaza may now have mortally damaged Western power and credibility in the Global South."

Olivia Nuzzi: [11-22] The mind-bending politics of RFK Jr.'s spoiler campaign. He's having a moment as a free agent presidential candidate, partly because he might appeal to scattered, disaffected groups that otherwise are stuck in the two-party straitjacket; possibly also on the 60th anniversary of the assassination that turned his family into a cult memory project. Most of his appeal will probably blow over, because the one group he has no appeal for is moderate-tempered centrists. That leaves extremists who hate both parties, and who don't care who wins. How many of them are there really?

However, note that a recent a recent Harvard/Harris Poll, which shows Trump over Biden by 6% in a two-way matchup, gives Kennedy 21% of the vote in a three-way, increasing Biden's deficit to 8%. In a five-way with West (3%) and Stein (2%), Trump loses 1%, Biden loses 2%, Kennedy 3%. St Clair (link above) comments: "If your Lesser Evil countenances the bombing of hospitals and the slaughter of nearly 6000 children in a few weeks, don't you know that you can count me out."

Andrew O'Hehir: [11-26] My mother, the debutante Communist: An American family story of love, loss and J. Edgar Hoover.

Nathan J Robinson: [11-21] Can the left reclaim "security"? A review of Astra Taylor's new book, The Age of Insecurity.

Douglas Rushkoff: [11-25] 'We will coup whoever we want!': The unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros. Reviews some books, starting with Walter Isaacson's Musk.

Anya Schiffrin: [10-13] Fixing disinformation online: "What will it take to regulate the abuses of Big Tech without undermining free speech?"

Katharine Q Seelye: [11-19] Rosalyn Carter, first lady and a political partner, dies at 96: I don't really have anything to say about her, good or bad, but thought I should note her passing in the plainest way possible. While trawling through the NY Times obituaries, I also noticed:

• George Brown, drummer with Kool & the Gang
• A.S. Byatt, scholar who found literary fame with fiction
• Bob Contant, bohemian booksetter [a founder of St Mark's Bookshop]
• Herbert Gold, postwar novelist of love and marriage
• Joan Jara, who found justice for husband slain after coup
• Evelyn Fox Keller, who turned a feminist lens on science
• Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who looked at history from the bottom up
• Charles Peters, Founder of The Washington Monthly

I was surprised not to find an obituary there for the late photographer Larry Fink (82, Mar. 11, 1941-Nov. 25). For some images, start here.

Ryu Spaeth: [11-20] Israel, Gaza, and the fracturing of the intellectual left. Title makes this seem like a big deal, but it's really just comes down to a couple pieces in Dissent between Joshua Leifer and Gabriel Winant, with side glances to a couple more journals (n+1, Jewish Currents). This sort of thing happens every now and then, usually when someone who has long identified with the left freaks out and turns on his former comrades. Back in 1967, I used to read a journal called The Minority of One, which was very strongly opposed to the American war in Vietnam . . . until June 1967, when the editor flipped to support Israel in its Six-Day War, and forgot about everything else. Something similar happened with Paul Berman after 9/11. There have been other cases of leftists turning hard right, but these two (presumably Leifer, too) insisted that they were being consistent, and others in the left had gone haywire. They created some noise, but had little if any impact on the left, which always recovered with a principled examination of the facts.

This article quotes Arielle Angel (Jewish Currents): "What we are watching is a full reactionary moment among many Jews, even some left-wing Jews, because they feel there was no space on the left for their grief." That doesn't seem like too much to ask. The left is fueled by indignity over injustice, and injustice is often first experienced as grief. But few on the left would grant anyone, even Jews (whose suffering has left an indelible mark on most Euroamerican leftists), an exclusive right to grieve, let alone a license to channel that grief into a force that strikes out at and inflicts grief on others.

Most of us realized immediately that's exactly what Israel's leaders had in mind. They saw the Oct. 7 revolt not as a tragic human loss but as an affront to their power, and they immediately moved to reassert their power, with scarcely any regard for more human losses (even on their own side). Over six weeks later, as threats of genocide were turned into practice, we need hardly debate that point.

Glenn Thrush/Serge F Kovaleski: [11-25] Stabbing of Derek Chauvin raises questions about inmate safety. Weren't there already questions? If not, why do police interrogators brag about how treacherous life in prison will be?

Jen Wieczner: [11-22] Behold the utter destruction of crypto's biggest names.

Here are a series of tweets from Corey Robin (I'm copying them down because the original format is so annoying; the chart matches the Leatherby piece above, so that is probably the uncited source here):

1/ "Israel's assault is different. Experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza show that the pace of death during Israel's campaign has few precedents in this century.

2/ "Conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza -- most of them women and children -- and how rapidly. It is not just the unrelenting scale of the strikes . . . It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.

3/"'It's beyond anything that I've seen in my career,' said Marc Garlasco, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may 'have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.'

4/ "Modern international laws of war were developed largely in response to the atrocities of World War II."

The comments range from stupid to facetious ("It is morally appalling that Hamas decided to start a war with a country that can mount such a powerful air assault, . . . All those tunnels & not one bomb shelter").

Corey also offered a tweet on the Ryu Spaeth article I wrote too much (but not enough) about above:

Everyone's pissed about this piece but I think it has two virtues. 1) It gives a fair, full hearing to the anti-Zionist side. 2) It reveals, inadvertently, the extent to which Zionist progressives depend on debates from 100 years ago. I'll take the win.

One more point I might as well make here, as I didn't consider it appropriate above, is that this article is only of interest to those on the left who are in close proximity to people with a deep psychic identity connection to the very old Zionist left (the romance of the kibbutzim) and/or the trauma of the Holocaust. The Oct. 7 attack hit these people so hard that they suspended their critical facilities, losing track of the context, and therefore unable to foresee the consequences.

Most of us immediately recognized the context that led to the revolt, and understood that the response of Israel's leaders would be genocidal. Hence, no matter how much we may or may not have grieved for the immediate victims of the revolt, we understood that their deaths would soon be dwarfed by Israel's vindictive reassertion of their overwhelming power.

It's worth noting that while such reactions are unusual on the American left, they are very common in Israel. The best example is the long-running Peace Now bloc, which formed after the 1982 war on Lebanon went sour. Ever since then, they have never failed to support initial Israeli military outbursts (e.g., 2006 in Gaza and Lebanon, and the many subsequent Operations in Gaza), although they've almost always come to regret those wars. Israelis, even ones with liberal and/or socialist temperaments, are conditioned to rally under crisis to support the state's warriors, and the national security state pulls their triggers whenever they want to strike out. It's practically an involuntary reflex, even among people who must know better.

It's great credit to Jewish Voice for Peace that they didn't fall for this triggering.

Regarding Larry Fink, I posted the following comment on Facebook:

I met Larry several times. Longest talk we had was mostly about jazz, in the car on the way to a memorial "meeting" for his mother. He took a lot of notable photographs of jazz musicians. Liz had one framed, of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald sitting together in a table in a club somewhere. On 9/11, he called Liz, and told her he was thinking about rounding up some fowl for a "chickens come home to roost" photo, echoing the famous Malcolm X quote. He was living on a farm in PA at the time, but I don't recall whether he had his own chickens, or whether he ever took that photo. But of the myriad reactions to 9/11, his was one of the smartest. (Or maybe I thought so because I was already thinking about the same quote.)

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