Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I thought I'd write a little bit about my mother. She died in June 2000, still a void in my life that I suspect never will fill. She was born on this day in 1913, the last of eight siblings, not counting two who died as infants. She grew up on a farm in the Arkansas Ozarks, a few miles east of what is now Lake Norfolk, a few more miles east of Mountain Home. Her father's family came to Arkansas from Ohio after the Civil War, which I guess made them carpetbaggers, although like most Americans heading west in the 19th century, they were mostly just looking for open land. The farm was handed down to the eldest son, my Uncle Ted, who had set up his own farm next door. We visited Ted often when I was a child, and I've been to the now abandoned farm as recently as two years ago. One of Ted's daughters still lives in the area, but the rest of the family scattered to points west. Even within my lifetime the area has lost much of the density it once had.

My mother was named Bessie, a name she always hated. Later she insisted on going as Bea, but she was never able to retrain her family. I don't know much about her life before she married. I never was much good at asking questions, and there were questions she never much wanted to answer. I know that she took sick with some fever (typhoid, I think) and was confined to her bed for a year, missing school. She never came close to graduating high school. She could read some, and wrote in a nice hand, but her spelling was atrocious. I don't know that any of her siblings finished high school -- one reportedly took to moonshining over fourth grade, and never learned to read at all. But my mother had a stubborn, independent streak. She worked, saved, travelled. She used to have a box of picture postcards from the east, with occasional references to someone named Riley, never explained. But she did talk about seeing Tommy Dorsey in Atlantic City. And a cousin remembers her showing up in Idaho with an astonishing wardrobe. But most of the time she probably spent in Oklahoma, where two of her sisters had farms and her mother moved after her father died in 1936. And in the '40s she moved to Augusta KS, where her other sister lived. During the war they both got jobs at Beech Aircraft in Wichita.

Later, she met my father, marrying him in 1948, when she was 35 and he 25. I was born two years later, followed by a brother and a sister. Mom quit her job before having me, and obsessively pursued the stereotypical role of '50s housewife. My father also grew up on a farm, had little more education, and worked all his adult life in the Boeing factory. We had a small tract house on the south side of Wichita. My parents worked hard, saved, paid off their mortgage within five years, and built extra rooms on the back. It was the only house they ever had -- my brother lives there now. Aside from that first mortgage, they never had any debt or credit. (None of their three children have mortgages either.) Regardless of education, both of my parents had exceptional practical skills, and much of what I'm able to do comes from watching them.

When I was a child, my mother had incredible energy. She dominated the marriage and the family. She was a perfectionist, and demanded as much, especially from me. She expected much of me because I was quite smart, and after some rocky episodes she kept faith in me even when she had no clue what I was saying or doing. (My teenage years were very rough, but that's some other story.) She was righteous. She had a deep sense of right and wrong, which she developed independently from what preachers told her, and she was extraordinarily stubborn in her convictions. The example she talked most about was card playing, one of her great loves. She insisted that card playing is fine as long as you never cross the line into gambling. She never did, and for that matter neither have I. She was rigorously honest, and she could not abide crookedness. Like most yankees from her narrow part of the Arkansas hills, she grew up Republican, but she turned on Nixon and never looked back. She believed in God, and revelled in the music, but didn't care much for preachers or churches, who were far more fallible than her own judgment. She was devoted to family, and managed to keep remarkably close tabs on her by then far flung family.

She had some faults which we needn't belabor now, but one was that she was very deferential to authority, which caused us a lot of trouble. I spent my adolescent and young adult years trying to escape her grip, which ultimately proved impossible and mostly undesirable. In the end, I reverted to my childhood, hoping that my life might please her, and in the end she was magnanimous enough that it did. She was able to live with contradictions where I could not, so I wound up jettisoning her lesser beliefs, like God and country, in order to carry on her greater beliefs. I got my sense of ethics from her, and my sense of purpose. Can't say as it's always served me well, but can't imagine life without it either.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Sometimes even I am shocked at how depraved public discourse has become in America. For instance, here are a couple of paragraphs from today's Cursor Media Patrol (minus the links):

As a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll finds that '57% back a hit on Iran if defiance persists,' Fox News 'twists its own polling data to advocate war against Iran,' with Newt Gingrich, who says President Bush's top priority should be regime change in Iran, claiming that the public is "already overwhelmingly in favor of military strikes."

A former head of Israel's Shin Bet "said on Sunday Israel should hunt down wanted Hamas leaders even if they become ministers in a newly elected Palestinian government," . . .

Why is it that so many Americans (and Israelis) think that all they have to do to solve their problems is go out and kill people? And it's not just Republicans and Likudniks: I saw Howard Dean on TV the other day applauding the botched missile attack on Pakistan. (Sure, they were aiming at Zawahiri, but the missile hit Pakistan, killing Pakistanis.) The prevalence of support for such acts only starts with the 57% ready to bomb Iran -- no telling how many of the other 43% would also support strikes if they didn't think that the threat wasn't serious enough, the strikes might not work, or the blowback would be unmanageable.

I don't know why Americans are so bloodthirsty, and I doubt that they know either. No doubt much of it is that we've become habituated: when Clinton, say, bombs Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or Yugoslovia, it's just something presidents do, presumably for our benefit. When nothing particularly bad happens to us as a result, we discount all other consequences. We know little about others, and not just others beyond our borders. We think we know the world through our media, but the false familiarity we see and hear and read disconnects us. It all becomes us vs. them, which makes us easy prey for propagandists -- all they have to do is show us how evil they are, and reassure us they're working hard to protect us. So Americans may not really be bloodthirsty, they sure are gullible. And in the end it may not make much difference.

Further evidence comes from recent polls indicating that Americans are ever more disgusted with the war in Iraq. Someone should point out that the propaganda drumbeats for Bush's invasion of Iraq started back in the '90s when people like Gingrich were first calling for a regime change policy in Iraq. The regime change policy, implemented by funding crooks like Ahmed Chalabi and terrorists like Iyad Allawi, meant that the US would never accept inspection findings that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and that the US would never accept any attempt to reform and liberalize the Iraqi government. Iran would be just the same: adopting a regime change policy tells Iran to prepare for inevitable war.

The mistake Americans (and Israelis) make is their inability to imagine how their acts affect others, and how they look to others. Other people have that problem too, especially when they feel picked on, but no one else is so armed and so inured to the effects of their violence. Take Israel's (and America's, at least as represented by the likes of Condoleezza Rice) knee jerk reaction to Hamas for example. Israel has time and again promoted terrorists -- people responsible for killing hundreds of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, Qibya, Sabra and Shatila, and elsewhere -- to high political office, but dealing with the elected representatives of the Palestinians would be bowing to terrorism?

As these polls indicate, if the US doesn't go to war in Iran, it won't be because the warmongers couldn't swing the propaganda case. It will be because cooler heads in the military-security establishment recoil from biting off another disaster like Iraq. But that won't stop wannabes like Gingrich and Sam Brownback from trying to ply war fever to their advantage -- or Dean and Kerry for their own preferred war. After all, they realize, like Bush (or Rove, at least) realizes, that the only war results that really matter are elections here. And to do that you just have to fool enough of the people enough of the time.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Music: Current count 11494 [11473] rated (+21), 862 [861] unrated (+1). Week started out slow with major distractions, then when I started to write a bit I spent most of it blogging. Got news that Jazz CG has been postponed two more weeks, which is good considering where I'm at on it. But then I figured I should get Recycled Goods out of the way first, which is what I'm doing. Net result is that it's not a ratings disaster -- didn't take me too many spins to deal with all those Love Songs, but it took a whole day to slog through the New Orleans box. I'm still avoiding some box sets: Tommy Dorsey, Donovan, Billy Joel, King Crimson, Windham Hill, and now (e-gad) Alabama. Got a big pile of ESP-Disk reissues too, so the unrateds are keeping apace.

• The Essential Harry Belafonte (1952-77 [2005], RCA/Legacy, 2CD): Years could be shorter, as the three songs with 1977 release dates don't have recording dates. The latest given recording date is 1970. Born in Harlem, raised in Jamaica, proclaimed the "king of calypso" before anything we now recognize as Jamaican music had even been recorded -- and any real calypso was readily available -- Belafonte was unique among folk artists in his '50s heyday, and unclassifiable today -- except perhaps as the world's first world music star. He combined Leadbelly's penchant for crowd pleasing with the political rigor of the Lomaxes, could croon a ballad to suit the Cole-Mathis fans, and enjoyed something of an acting career. All this made him a success, but as an outsider his folk songs were meant to break down barriers. If some like "Cotton Fields," "Danny Boy," and "Hava Nageela" seem too obvious today, that's because they worked. And if "Abraham, Martin & John" seems sappy, remember that he was on the lines with MLK. I use the past tense here because his musical form is dépassé, but he's still here, in the news recently making political comments easily flagged as outrageous, but give him a fair listen and he makes more sense than most. A-
• Regina Belle: Love Songs (1989-95 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): An old fashioned soul singer, with the usual church roots and big voice, but she doesn't have much of a groove, and her duets -- Johnny Mathis, Peabo Bryson, Barry White, J.T. Taylor -- are a little scattered. B-
• Miles Davis: Love Songs (1957-64 [1999], Columbia/Legacy): One of the first items in this series, a rather predictable collection of early Miles ballads, with two restrained Gil Evans big band arrangements and various quintets; although saxophonists are present, the focus is squarely on Miles' trumpet, which has rarely sounded dryer. B+(**)
• John Denver: Love Songs (1969-95 [2006], RCA/Legacy): Sweet voiced, soft brained, club footed folksinger, slips in a couple of hooks and some warm sentiments, but if the strings don't spoil the mood, that's probably because you weren't listening in the first place. C-
• Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens: The Big Ol' Box of New Orleans (1927-2003 [2004], Shout! Factory, 4CD): Despite a few old songs -- 4 jazz classics predate 1950, 12 mostly r&b classics come from the '50s, 12 more from the '60s and '70s -- this box is severely skewed toward the tourist-trade revivalism that has been an essential part of the city's business since 1980, with 35 songs from 1995 or later. So the first point is that this is not in any sense a primer to New Orleans' notable musical history. Also, there's no effort at subdivision: the four discs are effectively random shuffles, with the old hits senselessly slipped in between the remakes, revisions, and odd wrinkles. The 80-page color booklet is equally unstructured, other than that it follows the disc order. On the other hand, the song-to-song flow on the discs is pretty effective, with all the genre distinctions blurring into a warm, hazy good time vibe where all are welcome. This is not how I would have done it -- stick with the classics and vintage oddities, of which there are more than possibly fit, mixing in more old-timey jazz -- but I find this useful. They find more worthwhile revivals than I would have thought possible. And now that the Big Easy is defunct, even its last decade may eventually evoke nostalgia. B+(***)
• Heart: Love Songs (1977-2005 [2006], Epic/Legacy): Love songs are stock fodder for rock groups, but until now Sony's Valentine's Day series focused on r&b, country, jazz, crooners, and Ray Conniff, with Toto the exception that proves the rule; the leading theory for this hard rock breakthrough is that the group is fronted by two women; an alternate theory is that, like Toto, they're not much good; the songlist is greatest hits, many redone live to emphasize the emptiness of their arena sound, and skewed toward the slow ones. C+
• Phyllis Hyman: Love Songs (1978-91 [2006], Arista/Legacy): The early cuts are straight disco, while the later ones gravitate towards quiet storm; the latter are less annoying -- the producers are better, and the schlock penalty is less. C
• Etta James: Love Songs (1960-2001 [2006], RCA Victor/Legacy): Aside from one Chess cut, this starts in 1994 with her Billie Holiday tribute, compiling her jazz standards plus a couple of Otis Redding ballads; she doesn't have the fine touch that distinguishes most great jazz singers, but songs like "Body and Soul" and "The Man I Love" are as solid as she needs, and Red Holloway provides major support. B+(**)
• Our New Orleans 2005 (2005, Nonesuch): The only post-Katrina benefit album I've heard that's worth anything more than the charitable impulse, because it squarely catches the moment's anguish and won't let go; water themes abound, old rote standards like "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "Do You Know What It Is to Miss New Orleans" find new fragility, Donald Harison turns "What a Wonderful World" upside down in sad shock, and the orchestra behind Randy Newman is as ineluctable as the flood; even "Yes We Can Can" harbors doubts. A-
• Dolly Parton: Love Songs (1974-85 [2006], RCA/Legacy): This concentrates on her oft-maligned -- not least by me -- pop period, where there are more strings than guitar, and two Kenny Rogers duets to one Porter Wagoner, and only 5 of 14 songs are her own; nonetheless, it does well by the period, if only because it taps into a fat vein. B+(**)
• Run-D.M.C. (1983-84 [2005], Arista/Legacy): If this pioneering slab of hip-hop seems dated today, consider that the twenty year generation cycle from when it dropped to now is the same distance from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker, and from Elvis Presley to Johnny Rotten. But it doesn't sound that dated, perhaps because the lessons of Parker and Rotten had already sunk in. The hard beats, crude scratches, and clearly enunciated boasts told us that this was a group that broked no bullshit. The only concession to popular taste or for that matter melody was the monster bass riff on "Rock Box" -- the only thing here I got into at the time, but over the years and two undeniable Greatest Hits other hits like "It's Like That" and "Sucker M.C.'s" beat down my resistance, and now even filler like the minimalist "Wake Up" makese sense. A
• Run-D.M.C.: King of Rock (1985 [2005], Arista/Legacy): The rhymes are sloppier, especially on the less than introspective "You Talk Too Much," but otherwise they do what most sudden stars try to do: recapitulate their breakthrough, right down to the token monster riff piece, and lest you think they aren't developing, they throw in a track with a reggae beat. A-

Another week, with distractions and a scheduling postponement -- as it turns out, a reprieve of two weeks. I still find myself being indecisive more often than not. Once February Recycled Goods is done I'll get back to finishing off the Jazz CG. The undecideds at this point are almost guaranteed to be held off until the next cycle.

John Bishop: Nothing If Not Something (2004 [2006], Origin): This is a trio with Rick Mandyck on alto sax, Jeff Johnson on bass, and Bishop on drums. Aside from one group credit, Mandyck has four songs, Johnson two, and Bishop zero. But Bishop owns the label, which counts for something. Origin was founded in Seattle in 1997 to give Bishop's home town jazz scene an outlet, and now has something like 85 records, plus more on their co-op OA2 label. Until they started mailing to me, I doubt that I've heard of as many as five artists on their roster. Obviously, as jazz scenes go, New York is in a class by itself. The second tier definitely includes Chicago, maybe a couple more (Philadelphia? Detroit? San Francisco-Oakland? Boston?), and aside from New Orleans, where jazz had become a tourist business, that's about where national consciousness stops. Beyond that there are probably a dozen cities comparable to Seattle, virtually unknown to anyone who doesn't live there. Portland and Vancouver are two I know a bit about. Seattle is new to me, but this is a good start. Mandyck has a clear, cutting tone, and interesting postbop ideas. Johnson and Bishop are solid supporters, and their solos hold up. I doubt that any of them would blow folks away in New York, but they more than hold their own here. B+(**)

Brent Jensen: Trios (2006, Origin): No record date. Two sets, one with guitar-bass, the other with bass-drums. Songs are standard jazz fare, so much so that one can imagine this as the orals for a jazz degree program: "Beautiful Love," "Bemsha Swing," "How Deep Is the Ocean," "Giant Steps," "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise," "East of the Sun," "Well You Needn't." I've been reading Stuart Nicholson's Is Jazz Dead?, where he complains much about jazz that points backwards, showing off its competency while hiding its disinterest in innovation. Still, Jensen, an alto saxist, aces everything he touches, and while this breaks no new ground, it succeeds at a more fundamental level: it entertains and delights. B+(***)

Cyrus Chestnut: Genuine Chestnut (2005 [2006], Telarc): Piano trio, plus Russell Malone (guitar) on three cuts, Steven Kroon (extra percussion) on more. Chestnut describes his influences as "jazz, gospel, classical, R&B, etc." and his intentions that they work as "a collective," "not work separately." That sounds to me like a recipe for mud, but they actually do separate out somewhat, and Kroon tosses in a little Latin tinge for good measure. While this strikes me as more likable than the last couple of albums I've heard from Chestnut, little else strikes me any way at all: the fast ones line up, Malone helps a bit, the slow ones disconnect, the gospel at the end barely gets its amen out. B

Upper Left Trio: Sell Your Soul Side (2005 [2006], Origin): Piano trio, probably from Seattle, with Clay Giberson in the hot seat, Jeff Leonard on bass and Charlie Doggett on drums. Don't know any of them, but the album is sharply reasoned and deftly executed. Picture on the back cover reminds me of E.S.T. -- young white guys against a bleak background. Music is similar too, but no electronics. B+(**)

Fred Hersch: In Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis (2003 [2006], Palmetto): One of the best mainstream pianists working, but this one is solo, live, not all that interesting. I should go back to his Maybeck session for comparison -- it's been on the unrated shelf for a long time, still unheard -- but distinctions are likely to be marginal. And I should develop a finer sense of what does and does not work with solo piano. But three plays of this pretty decent one has only convinced me that this isn't the place to start. B

Gutbucket: Sludge Test (2005 [2006], Cantaloupe): Saxophonist Ken Thompson seems to be the main guy in this quartet, filled out by guitarist Ty Citerman, bassist Eric Rockwin, and drummer Paul Chuffo. The music's built from hard, straight electric bass lines, which guitar and (especially) sax vamp over rockishly. I liked the basic idea from the start, but it's taken me a while to get into their implementation, and I haven't hit bottom yet. [B+(**)]

Joe Morris: Beautiful Existence (2004 [2006], Clean Feed): This is a quartet, with bass, drums, and alto saxist Jim Hobbs mixing it up with the leader's guitar. Morris rarely records with horns -- a quick check shows an album I don't care for much with Ken Vandermark and two I don't know with Rob Brown -- but this match with Hobbs brings out a more aggressive and more varied strain in his playing. I haven't noticed Hobbs before: like Morris, he comes from Boston; did a couple of records for Silkheart in 1993 but nothing since under his own name; has a dozen or so sideman credits since 1993. He's plays well in the avant vein, with fast choppy runs that poke at the edge of noise while retaining their musicality. Found an article where Morris is quoted saying that Hobbs is "as good as anyone who's ever played that instrument." I wouldn't go that far, but he sure is a good match for Morris -- the hot pepper that spices up Morris' lyricism. Will have to play this again to be sure, but thus far I like this quite a bit. [A-]

Jeff Arnal, Seth Misterka, Reuben Radding, Nate Wooley: Transit (2001 [2006], Clean Feed): Actually, as best I can figure, group name is Transit too. Misterka plays alto sax, Wooley trumpet, Radding bass, Arnal percussion. Free improv. Played it a couple of times. Sounds sporadically interesting, generally unexceptional. Could be wrong. I'll keep it in the queue, and maybe find some reason to revisit it later. [B]

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around.

Hiromi: Spiral (2005 [2006], Telarc): I like her straight acoustic piano trio work, and I like her electronics, although the Kung-Fu remix goes a bit over the top. But I don't have any real insights into why I like it, or why I don't rate it even higher. Made the last one an Honorable Mention, and this is pretty close to it, but the curve is probably steeper these days. And the time to figure it out is getting scarcer. B+(**)

Arild Andersen Group: Electra (2002-03 [2005], ECM): Two nicks against this one. One is the extensive use of voices, even if they're mostly used for texture. The other is that the electronics often get used for cliché effects -- wind, thunder, like that, or at least that's what they suggest. That's not to say that they never work out, but they're where the weak spots reside. Aside from these effects, the music, built around programmed drums, percussion, guitar and bass, with Arve Henriksen's hollow-sounding trumpet for window dressing, is dense and powerful, inscrutably dramatized, often hypnotic. Andersen's Masqualero bandmate Nils Petter Molvaer helped out on the programming. B+(**)

Positive Knowledge: First Ones (2005, Charles Lester Music): The squeak, skronk, and flat-out noise finally spoiled this pan-African avantism for me -- a surprise, since I initially suspected Ijeoma Thomas' "poetic vocals." She's a taste you may not care to acquire, but she's not full of shit, and she somehow keeps the clash of the two horns -- husband Oluyemi Thomas, who plays everything but favors the bass clarinet, and tenor saxist Ike Levin -- within safe limits, at least when she's present. Interesting conceptually, and promising, but too tough to sled. B

John McNeil: East Coast Cool (2004 [2006], Omnitone): Updates the Mulligan-Baker pianoless quartet frame with east coast panache, but still feels like a small idea, even if nicely executed. B+(*)

Ernie Andrews: How About Me (2005 [2006], High Note): Veteran blues-based crooner, goes down easy, especially with producer Houston Person joining in on tenor sax. Slow ones drag a bit. B+(**)

Joel Futterman/Alvin Fielder/Ike Levin Trio: Resolving Doors (2004, Charles Lester Music): Futterman plays piano, similar to Cecil Taylor as far as one can go with that. Which doesn't mean that he doesn't have his own distinct style, but this is the only of his two dozen albums I've heard thus far, and it isn't easy to focus on him with Ike Levin in the room. Levin plays tenor sax and bass clarinet -- tough, fearless, rough around the edges, but he gets a sweet tone on the one ballad stretch here. He has connections to Fred Anderson and Kidd Jordan, but reminds me as much of Charles Brackeen. Fielder, the drummer, is an AACM founder, with a long resume starting from Sun Ra. All have Chicago ties, although Futterman moved to Virginia in 1973 -- no doubt part of the reason he's remained so obscure. If you imagine this as a piano-sax brawl, which it sometimes sounds like, it's the drummer who keeps both sides swinging. Of course, there's more to it than that. B+(***)

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Don't Be Afraid . . . The Music of Charles Mingus (2003 [2005], Palmetto): This became inevitable once flacks tried to draw an orchestral line from Ellington to Mingus to Marsalis -- otherwise, wouldn't Mingus be a bit too outré for the upscale crowd? Mingus has yet to develop into a repertory staple, at least outside of the official tribute bands, filled with old Mingus hands, that Sue Mingus rides herd on, and even there recent albums like I Am Three (Sunnyside) suggest they're running on fumes. (The rule of thumb is that the older albums are the better ones, but I haven't rechecked to see whether they're just less redundant, or the memory is fresher, or what.) What's missing from all the remakes is Mingus himself -- the virtuoso bassist, of course, but more importantly the leader who drove small bands to play huge. Here fifteen musicians play small. At the end of the tricky title piece about the clown, they even laugh small. B-

Saturday, January 28, 2006

News: Can't cover it all, or even much of it, here are a few little things:

• The Hamas electoral victory in the occupied territories of Palestine is the biggest non-story of late. Most elections, like the recent ones in Canada and Chile, result in effective shifts of power, but what the Palestinians think or want or hope for has little effect. The dominant power in the occupied territories is still the Likud, and it makes little difference to them whether they trample on Hamas or Fatah. Sure, the Israeli right will play up Hamas ties with armed resistance (or "terrorism" as they call it), much as they've done with Fatah and the PLO since the '60s. But actually there's little difference at the rank and file level between Hamas and Fatah over using violence against Israel: both sides are powerfully tempted, especially to prove which side is the most stalwart defender of Palestinian rights, but for now both sides favor prudence, and the people as a whole are weary of the war. Hamas, which has effectively observed a truce over the past year, has less reason than ever to rock the boat. Sore losers in Fatah, which has long been less disciplined and now has had their leadership repudiated, are more likely to provide Israel with the provocation they so relish. The worst possible scenario is that if Fatah splinter groups attack Israelis, Israel will "retaliate" against Hamas to pressure the latter into war against Fatah, undermining Palestinian solidarity. (And I expect that there are people in Shin Bet right now working on bringing this about, recalling how they used Hamas attacks to marginalize Yasser Arafat during the second intifada.) The real difference between Hamas and Fatah at this point is the leadership. Fatah lost because their long history of collaboration and appeasement going back to Oslo hasn't delivered anything to the people, and they managed to look corrupt and stupid along the way. Hamas is a fresh start for Palestine. Whether their leadership can be any more effective is an open question, and without changes in Israel and the US one is doubtful, but at least they aren't tainted by the failed compromises of the past. (And Israel may have done Hamas a favor in liquidating Sheikh Yassin and the whole top leadership tier, thereby isolating the new leadership from the legacy of past terrorism, which was such an effective propaganda tool against Arafat.)

  There has been a lot of fretting in the US press lately about what this means for "the peace process," but really it means nothing, because there is no such thing. If Israel wanted peace, they could have made Oslo work. They don't, and they didn't. Only the Americans feel any need to pretend anyone is working toward peace. One lesson from the election is that Mahmoud Abbas' participation in the Road Map charade fooled no one and got him nothing. The most immediate change is that Hamas will be much less eager, and may just flatly refuse, to learn their assigned dance steps. As far as peace with Israel is concerned, Hamas may be content to do what Palestinians have had to do since 1948: wait until the world changes. In the meantime, Hamas does have to prove their integrity and competency within the limits of their practical power. If they do that they will do well, because nothing serves colonialism more effectively than corruption.

  The other theme in the US press is that the election is a setback for Bush -- that his efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East are advancing and legitimizing Islamism. Juan Cole argues: "Bush pushes for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seems blind to the dangers of right-wing populism." Well, if Bush doesn't understand the latter, he can always call Turd Blossom into his office for a quick briefing from a world class expert -- about the only subject Bush has any real in house expertise on. As far as I can tell, Bush's real confusion on the subject is that he thinks that democracy is a magic word to evoke, and it is riskless because elections can always be bought and rigged. And most likely he has a post-mortem team at work now trying to figure out whether the $2 million that the US spent campaigning for Fatah was not enough or just not effectively used.

  The real story will be Israel's elections -- or it would be if a fundamental change in Israel's stance was electorally possible. Hope springs eternal that Labor might become a voice of reason, but Labor was in power when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied, when Jerusalem was annexed, when most of the outposts were built, when Oslo was negotiated, and when the settlement promised in Oslo was taken off the table. The fact remains that this conflict can be easily solved, more easily now than at any point in history, if only Israel, the US, and/or the world community were to put the necessary pressure behind the obvious solution. (For more on the latter, see my plan.)

• Elections in Canada gave the Conservatives a plurality, displacing the ruling Liberal party. This is mostly attributed to reaction against Liberal party corruption. I like Canada, but I have to wonder: if I can remember why they threw the Conservatives out of power a few years back in the most complete political rout in Canadian history, why can't the Canadians?

  The general trend in recent elections seems to be that the right is gaining in rich countries and the left (or the Islamists) are gaining in the poor countries. The Islamists, of course, are not on the left as we normally think of the term, but their recent gains come from the same source as the left's gains in Latin America (cf. Chile; are there any countries left for the US to lose in the lower continent, aside from Colombia where the US has a major military investment?): the Islamists offer righteous opposition against the west's imperialism. This is a trend that promises more conflict, mostly because the right in the north not only isn't part of the solution -- it's a big part of the problem.

• Iraq has had elections but has no new government. The results couldn't have been engineered to make it more difficult to form an effective government. The two-thirds supermajority required to form a government takes a difficult problem and makes it intractable. Having to form such a broad coalition makes it impossible to get any real leadership. While such a scheme might have its advantages in a stable country -- e.g., a two-thirds requirement here would keep public menaces like Scalito off the Supreme Court, and would make it impossible to put the likes of Bush in the presidency -- it renders any possible Iraqi government helpless. This, as it was no doubt designed to do, works in favor of the 800 lb. gorilla in the back of the room: the US military. Meanwhile, the civil war continues, abetted by the US which has no recourse except to use one set of Iraqis to fight against other Iraqis. For gory details, see Gareth Porter's important TomDispatch piece.

• Rumor has it that Bush will tackle health care in his State of the Disunion speech. That will no doubt come as a shock to those of us who figured the current system couldn't get screwed up worse. If we're lucky, this will turn out to be little more than Health Savings Accounts -- never leave behind any gimmick to transfer savings to the rich. Beyond that I don't know what they're up to. The recently implemented Medicare drug benefit is losing on all sides -- the latest announcements are of drug companies cancelling "humanitarian" (i.e., tax write-off) programs to give some drugs free to the super-needy.

• West Virginia rushed to pass a "mine safety" bill following the recent string of coal mine disasters, but it doesn't have a thing to do with making mines less accident prone. Nope, all it requires mines to store extra oxygen tanks and provide transmitters to make it easier to find trapped miners. While it's not a bad idea, there's a moral hazzard issue here: if fewer miners die in these disasters, there's less incentive to avoid accidents. I fear that sooner or later the solution to these mining accidents will be to outlaw underground mining and just srip mine everything. In West Virginia, that raises the question of where to put the mountains they strip off to get to the coal. It's only a matter of time before someone proposes that they sluice it all down the Mississippi and scoop it up for New Orleans landfill. Maybe by the time that happens Bush will have disposed of environmental impact statements and reality-based cost estimates. Or maybe he already has.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

The Nation has a piece (beware, subscriber only, why?) called "A 'Top Ten' List of Bold Ideas" by Gar Alperovitz and Thad Williamson. I have nothing against bold thinking, even when most of the left is perpetually distracted doing damage control. But the prerequisite for bold thinking is better thinking, which for starters means thinking grounded in a better understanding of real problems and cognizant of what does and doesn't work. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to throw in a few practical steps along the way. I'm going to go through this top ten one by one, summarize as succinctly as possible, and hang my thoughts on at the end.

1. Real National Security. Three ideas: get serious about nuclear antiproliferation; spend more on homeland protection; eliminate energy dependence on the Middle East. The latter is one of those things that people say without thinking. The Middle East has nothing in particular to do with how much energy we use. That's a function of our economy, and the only brake on our use is cost. We increase that cost when we wreck the Middle East, but we also increase that cost when we boycott the Middle East. But in the long run the cost is going up anyway because the world's oil resource is being pumped dry. We might temporarily suppress prices by reducing demand -- by conserving or by finding other sources -- but not in the long run. And as long as the Middle East does have significant oil fields, we only hurt ourselves by hurting them. Of course, one big way we hurt ourselves is by driving people in the Middle East to attack us. If we could somehow figure out how not to do that most of these "real national security" costs would go away, and since they produce nothing much of value, that would be a plus for us as well as them.

And why should we care about a plus for them? Well, at bottom that's our real problem: we don't, and they know we don't, so when they suffer they have to figure that those of us who are not part of the solution must be part of the problem. Maybe that's unfair in principle -- our wealth is ultimately built more on our own hard work than on anything we ripped them off for -- but when you look back at history, even as recent as today's newspapers, you'll find a lot of bad things that we've done to them. And you'll find that our dominant ideologies of the pursuit of self-interest just fuel our misdeeds. We don't need to change that deep down, but we do need to recognize that policy can compensate for our sins -- indeed, one of the main reasons we need political institutions (both government and NGOs) is to do necessary things that business and markets can't do. Perhaps we can rationalize this change if we realize that it's in our self-interest not to appear to the world as a conceited, solitary, ill-tempered glutton surrounded by a sea of poverty and pent-up fury. After all, the only path to peace is in being a good neighbor. To do this, we need to build institutions that work, which means institutions that do the right things -- not a repeat of the post-WWII institutions that turned out just to be fronts for US control.

Horrible as nuclear weapons are, proliferation is only a small part of the problem, and would quickly become manageable in a world where conflict is reduced and fairly arbitrated -- i.e., in a world with viable international institutions working under broadly accepted guidelines regarding human rights, national rights, environmental standards, fair trade, development aid, etc. But at the same time nations such as the US need to dismantle or convert their unilateral and allied forces that cast a pall over less powerful countries. For instance, it is well known that the key to nuclear nonproliferation is nuclear disarmament by the great powers. The political challenges here are huge, as the US has refused to participate in such obvious treaties as the elimination of chemical and biological weapons -- a constraint we hypocritically insist others follow -- and even mines. Moreover -- well, the catalog where the US is a major obstacle to world peace and justice is astonishingly large.

One reason why the US is in this position is our paranoid obsession with security. Given this, the big problem with A&W here is that they propose to increase our appetite for security, not reduce it. The plain fact is that even if the US had no military beyond the minimal self-defense forces that Japan, for instance, has, no nation would have the slightest interest in attacking us -- domestically, anyhow. And such a reduced international footprint would cause us far less trouble abroad. Perhaps there would be economic costs to American (multinational, really) businesses abroad, but even there nearly all nations are eager to attract foreign investment, and those that aren't tend to be extremely marginal.

2. Single-Payer Universal Healthcare. Well, duh! The market has failed massively here, and the insurance companies are the most obvious of the problems, but the problem goes far beyond this, and the solutions aren't always so obvious. The core idea is that equal, universal access to quality health care should be a publicly-supported right. But it's not clear what's the best way to split the system between the private and public sectors. And it seems quite unlikely that the "incredible 15 percent of our GDP" we currently spend on health care can or will be much reduced. (We are accustomed to spending that much, and savings can always be reinvested in higher quality, which is likely to be desirable.) And there's always the question of how to move from the current system to anything better. One sensible proposal is to build on the current medicare system to progressively expand coverage of the uninsured, and to expand the VA system (which will probably be necessary anyway given the fiasco in Iraq) to increase supply and limit prices. The pharmaceutical industry can rather easily be limiting patents, and any shortfall in research and development can be financed publically, with the added benefit that data be public.

3. Real Social Security. "A good place to start is with a proposal put forward by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that would produce the equivalent of a million-dollar annuity for every citizen -- enough to guarantee $50,000 or more a year for everyone in retirement." I don't understand this, but it sounds like snake oil. Honest social security would be to revert to a pay-as-you-go system, instead of the current system of overtaxing workers to subsidize deficits the Republicans plan to default on eventually. Saving for the future assumes that assets retain enough value to cover future costs. While this is often true for individuals, it becomes very risky for everyone-at-once, especially given that we can already see debilitating future costs implied by present systems, especially energy and health care costs. Putting the taxes necessary to fund social security off until needed may seem imprudent, but what it does is put the burden squarely where it belongs. Are we willing to assume responsibility as a civilized nation for supporting our old and infirm? If the answer ever becomes no we will have more serious problems than a mere accounting shortfall.

4. Universal Daycare. Presumably A&wmp;W mean public daycare to compensate for any shortfalls in private daycare. This is something that could be extended from the current public education system. I don't know how important or valuable it might be. One thing I'd worry about is how it might turn into a system for subsidizing low-pay jobs.

5. A Rebuilt Educational System. Free college tuition; reduced K-12 class sizes; more Head Start. One thing nobody talks about is the need for non-credentialed adult education. We live under the illusion that education is needed to train children and to certify adult workers, but that's all. But we actually live in a world that is constantly changing, that becomes more complicated, that has to deal with new technology and science and bureaucracy and such that people are increasingly estranged from. We need some easy way for people just to keep up, and we need remedial education for people who didn't get it the first time. Moreover, as our education systems have become ever more obsessed with credentials, we come to devalue learning, knowledge, and the arts in their own right. And by seeing credentials as personal assets, we withdraw public funding and expect the students to make up the difference. One effect of this is that the price of education has consistently risen faster than inflation, which has many effects, including closing the door of opportunity on the poor -- something that adds to their sense of injustice. Consequently, we lose sight of the notion that a well educated citizenry is a national asset, a fundamental source of wealth. Needless to say, one consequence of this lack of interest in real learning and knowledge is we become more ignorant and confused and likely to fall for really dumb and dangerous ideas and politicians. (Q.E.D.)

Also note that education isn't just a matter of schools. It has to do with knowledge, understanding, analytical skills, behavior, all sorts of things, many of which are conveyed in rather ad hoc ways through the media. Ergo, the many problems that we have with our privately owned (increasingly privately interested) media are tied to our problems with education. Also note that these problems are compounded by systems of misinformation and disinformation -- think of them as countereducation, deliberate attempts to sabotage our obtaining an accurate understanding of the world. Who would do such a thing? Well: advertisers, PR flacks, spinmeisters, lobbyists, politicos, preachers, anyone with a private agenda.

6. A Thirty-Hour Week. Sounds nice, and many people would find it attractive (but not as attractive as a 20-hour week). But historically we've never been satisfied with the amount of work we do, so as we become more productive at present tasks we're more likely to add new tasks than to cash in our savings for leisure. For example, we've reduced the percentage of the work force needed for agriculture -- a basic need, but limited by satiety -- from 90 to 3, yet we've found something else for all those people to do. The new jobs are mostly service jobs -- health care and education are two areas that are certain to absorb more people as manufacturing and other resource-dependent jobs decline. There are, of course, many opportunities for eliminating unnecessary jobs, and at least some of those can be converted to leisure time. But it's also likely that more and more leisure time will be converted into unpaid work, like volunteer service. After all, in the end our wealth and welfare depend primarily on how much useful work we do. Until we're satisfied with our wealth and welfare we'll keep working.

7. A Fair Tax System. The proposal here is in the soak-the-rich category, intended to pay for all the other proposals. Given recent changes in taxes and other economic trends that massively favor the rich, there is plenty of reason to nudge the tax burden in a more progressive direction. But taxes are a more complicated issue, and we need to think it through instead of just fiddling ad hoc. One principle is that there needs to be a balance of taxes and spending: you want more spending, you get more taxes, and vice versa. Another is that taxes are fundamentally bad: anything taxed is discouraged because it becomes more expensive. Another is that taxes, especially prohibitive ones, encourage avoidance or evasion: sin taxes may discourage sin but they don't prohibit it because at some point sinners resort to evasion which is often worse than the sin was in the first place (classic example is bootlegging leading to organized crime leading to further criminal activity). Another is that it's easier to raise taxes on transactions (they already involve the transfer of money, so the tax merely increases the price) than on assessments (which force one to find the money elsewhere). Another is that the tax distribution reflects the nation's basic sense of justice, or at least the distribution of power. (Tax cuts for the rich reflect the ascending power of the rich over the rest of us.)

I have a bunch of ideas on what would be a fair and sensible distribution of taxes. I'll sketch this out briefly, but I won't throw any numbers out, mostly because the numbers depend on the level of government spending, which is subject to further debate. But here goes: Most taxes should be based on sales of consumables (as opposed to services or payroll or profits) and should be flat (i.e., everyone pays the same rate for the same product). These are relatively painless in that they merely add to the cost of consumption. They don't disincentivize labor or savings. The tax rates can be varied by product: for most products we don't want to do this because variances are more complicated, but there are some products that have externalities -- long-term costs to the nation that are not factored into manufacturing costs -- and these should be taxed at higher rates reflecting the long-term costs. One example is a product which has an exceptionally high disposal cost -- in these cases the externality tax pays for subsidizing future disposal or recycling. Another example is gasoline, which when burned produces pollution, which has various long-term costs.

Two sets of taxes would cover income. I'd make a distinction between earned income, such as wages or small business profits, and unearned income, such as interest, dividends, capital gains, inheritance, and gifts. Earned income would be taxed over an annual period using a progressive tax scale, much like current income taxes, except lower (because more taxes will be raised on consumption) and, at least relative to the lower tax brackets, more progressive. Unearned income would also be taxed progressively, but its brackets would range by cumulative lifetime income. This practice would mean that the first few hundred thousand dollars of unearned income would be taxed very lightly (if at all), encouraging everyone to build up savings, but income above higher thresholds (up in the million dollar range) would be taxed substantially. Progressive taxation encourages poor people to build assets and become richer. One might argue that it discourages the rich from becoming richer, but in practice all it does is slow down their accumulation of further riches. In a nation that values equal opportunity, that's a pretty fair deal.

We would also have estate taxes, and these would be very progressive. One core idea here is that the distribution of wealth in a nation can only be just if the wealth is obtained as the result of one's efforts (earnings plus savings). Inheritance is not similarly deserved, and leads to favoritism and aristocracy. For small estates this matters little -- in those cases the inheritance would be taxed as unearned income above, as would gifts, an obvious way to avoid estate taxes.

All of the above taxes involve transactions, so they can be paid (or in the case of income withheld) at that time. Some other transactions may be taxed, such as changing money or transferring stocks. On the other hand, property taxes are assessments. The money to pay them must be obtained from elsewhere, in the worst case by liquidating the assessed property. I would discourage, and if possible eliminate, property taxes, except for corporations. Part of the rationale here is that the long-term concentration of property for individuals is eliminated by death and the progressive estate tax. But corporations don't necessarily die, so exempting them from any sort of property tax would let property accumulate indefinitely in corporate hands. There are other corporate tax issues I can't go into at this point. I would be inclined to tax corporate profits after dividends have been paid out, and to use a progressive tax scale. This comes from a preference for small corporations, which are likely to be more competitive.

This is only a broad outline. Many other wrinkles are possible, depending on how you wish to fine tune the system, what sort of behaviors you want to incentivize or disincentivize, etc. There are other issues, especially caused by multiple independent tax authorities such as we have in the US. Multinationals also present problems, such that it may be advisable to develop a system for consistent taxation across national borders. (Such taxes might go directly to international organizations.) Also note that taxing the rich more means they'll have less money to invest, so it may become more important to provide public funding for investments that are currently handled by the private sector. This needn't be a bad thing.

8. Worker-Owned (and Community-Owned) Means of Production. This is A's pet issue -- he's written a book on the subject, which I have but haven't gotten around to -- and he's on to something here. Employee-ownership solves many of the interest conflicts that threaten to tear up companies. For starters, there's no need for a union or union busting when both sides are the same. Once both labor and management understand that the only way to make money is to compete more effectively in the market -- as opposed to picking each other's pockets -- they can actually work together, and the added effectiveness is surprising. The games between owners and management also vanish, starting with the 400X CEO salaries -- a CEO may be able to scam a board, but not the employees. I worked for a start-up with a substantial employee interest, then saw it sold out to another company, and the difference in productivity and morale and before long profitability was astonishing.

9. Planned New Communities. A&W assert that the US population will grow to 400 million by mid-century and 1 billion by 2100, so they urge planning to combat sprawl. My first sanity check would be to look at what can be done to lower those population figures. No other rich country is growing like that, and developing countries with half a shot at actually developing are aiming at much lower growth rates. My second sanity check is that some factors are real likely to start limiting sprawl, like rising gas prices, and the need to keep enough farmland to feed all those people. Some fairly simple changes in tax laws would turn things around real fast, too. Planned communities have a checkered past -- I can think of some that work, many more that don't. Denser cities, which would be a more productive way of accommodating population growth, are hard, if indeed possible, to plan. (Nothing has convinced me that Jane Jacobs is wrong on how cities grow.)

A Twenty-First-Century Regional America. Argues that the US should break up into regional super-states. I don't see the value, but then I don't live in a blue state trying to secede from red state hell. If there is any merit to the idea, maybe Canada will try it first and work some of the bugs out. (Canada is actually a lot more regionally unhomogeneous than the US is, despite all the red-blue nonsense.)

A&W admit this isn't an exhaustive list. They also mention public investment, fair trade, a living wage, raising CAFE standards, civil liberties and civil rights, eliminating world poverty. They don't go for anything as mundane as making it illegal to bribe politicians, or as far out as decriminalizing recreational drugs. The next week's issue of The Nation followed up with several members of Congress making more concrete proposals -- more measured and practical ones, but not crippled by compromise.

I have an outline for a book on politics, and one of the main sections -- after several on history and and blundering goosesteppers on the American right -- will attempt to put some flesh onto an old Rush Limbaugh title, "The Way Things Ought to Be." Bold ideas such as I discussed here figure large in this section -- this is a big part of why I've written all this -- but it starts from thinking about small ideas: the first one is trust, or maybe it's respect. I think you have to work your way out from these basics, and if you don't, you're likely to get lost. Despite a flirtation with AuH2O in 1964, my background is mostly on the left, but I find reflexive leftism to be as useless and dangerous as much of what comes out of the right (idea-wise; if we have to have hate speech, I'll still side with my tribe). But I'm inclined to view the political agenda that we need as one of centering, and in this I don't mean splitting the difference between left and right. I mean centering oneself on the real problems and on viable solutions. This means that you start with small changes that nudge us in the right directions. It means that you don't fight with nature; you try to get it to work for you. I don't have much of this figured out, but I have come up with some things that make sense, and I think I'm moving in the right direction. That's the method. We'll see how it works.

For one example of this, see my peace plan for the Israeli conflict, where I argue that Israel and the Palestinians are incapable of resolving their conflict on their own, and that the continuation of the conflict is so damaging (not just to them but to all of us) that the world needs to make a concerted effort to bring this to a satisfactory conclusion. If any conclusion from Hamas' election victory is obvious is that my argument is right and my plan is the only way out. Thus far I've seen essentially no interest in the plan or anything like it. And that's very disappointing, but I don't know what else to do. I suspect that Jane Jacobs is right: that dark ages are not just coming, they're already here. All I can do is keep my little candle burning, in hopes that someone else might glimpse it. It may be that that's all any of us can do.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

I haven't done a news roundup in quite a while, and won't be doing one today. Last Christmas a dear friend (my mentor, really), who took a serious interest in politics back in the '50s (a decade before me), got a degree in political science, and has taught ever since, said she had never seen such a mess. Those words have only grown more true. Just as a trivial for instance, a series of local stories: cops practicing taser guns on each other; cop stops car from Texas and sniffs out $2.5 million in cocaine; cops call for more drug-sniffing dogs; Segdwick county jail is so full that every week they pick out 6-8 prisoners and truck them to other jails in rural Kansas; meanwhile various politicos are trying to outdo one another in their various schemes to corral "sexual predators," some of which are teenagers and some are old enough to draw social security. None of these stories is terribly interesting or important in their own right, but together they add up to an absurdity: that we'll never be safe until we get everyone else locked up. Somehow it never dawns on people that when everyone is locked up they're likely to be locked up too, only now surrounded by nothing but deranged criminals -- and cops who get their kicks firing tasers.

Still, when you get to the national/world news you get into even more absurd stories. Take Iran. (Please!) Last week the NY Times' Week in Review section started with "Why Not A Strike On Iran?" The answer, of course, is that to do so would be the dumbest of a long string of superdumb things that the US has done to Iran over the last sixty years, but the article mostly spends its space boo-hooing that such a simple solution wouldn't work. Then, as if that article was too rooted in reality, you can flip to the last page of the section to read Niall Ferguson's prophetic "The Origins of the Great War of 2007 -- and How It Could Have Been Prevented":

From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet [Iran's president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons program was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia. . . .

So history repeated itself. As in the 1930's, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Now Tehran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Tehran.

The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. But it was not to be. . . .

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shiite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Tehran.

Ferguson, who wrote that silly book about how British imperialism was good for the world because it wasn't as bad as German imperialism would have been, blames this tragic turn of events on -- drum roll, please -- Condoleezza Rice, who foolishly convinced Bush to rely on diplomacy when what was clearly called for was pre-emptive war (i.e., the Bush Doctrine). Needless to say, in doing so, he ignores all the other contingencies that supposedly will lead to the war, like a nuclear-armed Israel ruled by that nutcase Netanyahu and all those American bases in still-occupied Iraq.

Then after having so advanced our thinking about the unthinkable, in Tuesday the Times published a column by Flynt Leverett called "The Gulf Between Us," which solved all those pesky diplomatic problems in a sudden flash of genius. The idea here is that it really doesn't matter that Israel or the US or anyone else has nuclear weapons; all we need is to reassure Iran that it would be safe in a "nuclear-weapons-free Gulf":

While Prince Saud blamed Israel for starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, his implication that a nuclear-weapons-free Gulf might precede a regionwide nuclear-weapons-free zone is a nuanced departure from longstanding Arab insistence that regional arms control cannot begin without Israel's denuclearization. The United States and its partners should build on this idea and support the creation of a Gulf Security Council that would include Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states in the Gulf, as well as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

The Gulf Security Council would not replace American alliances with traditional security partners, but it would operate alongside them, much as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has operated alongside NATO. The council would not use force to change Iran's borders or form of government, provided that Iran committed itself to regionally defined and monitored norms for nonproliferation (including a nuclear weapons ban), counterterrorism and human rights. States concerned about Iran's nuclear activities would then have new leverage to ensure Iranian compliance with these commitments. . . .

Such a framework would leapfrog over proposals for establishing a "contact group" of Iraq's neighbors and offer all parts of the Iranian political spectrum -- even the hard-liners around Mr. Ahmadinejad -- something they want: recognition of Iran's leading role. Besides rejuvenating efforts to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, it would provide essential support for stabilization in Iraq, as the inclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia would bring together the two states that could be most useful in brokering compromises between Shiite and Sunni communities there.

Now, the guy who figured all this out worked in the National Security Council up to 2003 and is currently employed by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, so presumably he knows something about Iran and the Middle East, but he seems to be remarkably blind about the United States and what it's done around the Persian Gulf in the last 50-60 years. Why, for instance, should Iran trust the US to protect it from Israel? Is this because the US has shown remarkable courage in standing up to Israel when the latter has invaded its neighbors, bombed more distant countries like Iraq and Tunisia, and sent teams of assassins all around Europe? Is it because the US has shown such a sincere interest in the rights and welfare of the Iranian people? Like when the US CIA orchestrated the coup that deposed a popular, democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 in order to reverse Iran's nationalization of its own oil. Or how when Iraq invaded Iran the US shipped arms, including chemical weapons, to Iraq, prolonging a war that left a million Iranians dead. Or little things, like that Iranian airliner the US shot down, or how Bush so generously named Iran part of the Axis of Evil. But even if Iran were inclined to accept America's good intentions, there are still some open questions on how effective and benevolent US protection really is -- cf. Iraq for some rather troubling examples. And then there's those other little gotchas: inspections, human rights, help against terrorist groups (presumably including Hezbollah, even though Israel is conveniently excluded from the no nukes zone).

And if Iran doesn't buy this deal, what then? Seems like we're back to the first article about that military strike -- estimates are that it would take 1,000 sorties -- where the first article concluded that "the cost is so high it's not called an option." So that leaves Bush's knickers in quite a bind: his choices are to do something that won't work (the strike) or to try to do something that can't be done (the diplomacy). What makes this all the more ridiculous is that the unsolvable problem is one that he hallucinated in the first place, based on premises that he mostly created in the first place (along with his bed-ridden buddy, the "man of peace" in Jerusalem). Had he pushed through Saudi Prince (now King) Abdullah's simple, Arab League-backed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Israel would be accepted by all of its neighbors and Israel's nuclear arsenal would just be an atavism, not a threat. Had he followed up that diplomatic solution with a sensible international approach to Iraq, including coalition-building with Iran and Syria, he might have brokered a deal to ease Saddam Hussein out of power and turn Iraq into a democracy without the taint of occupation. And had he ripped up David Frum's Axis of Evil speech he would have benefitted from a rock-solid coalition from Morocco to Pakistan to clean up the last of the Al-Qaeda diehards. And with all this strife fueled by heavy-handed, might-makes-right botch of the War on Terrorism that Bush and Sharon convinced themselves would work, Iran's assertion that all they want to do is have a peaceful nuclear power resource to fall back on when the oil runs out would be perfectly credible.

So here we are with this unsolvable problem that needn't have existed in the first place. Worse still, even given the total botch, it's hardly a real problem. Lots of countries have nuclear weapons, but nobody can use them. Sure, they make the risks of war dramatically worse, but there's always a simple solution to that: don't start the war. With all the bad will in the world, the US and the Soviet Union avoided escalating their cold war to anything approaching nuclear levels. Nor has anyone else followed suit. Even Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad, nutcases that they both are, are extremely unlikely to be so careless. The only thing that happens once Iran can pose a nuclear threat is that people think twice before they give Axis of Evil speeches. I don't like the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons -- each such weapons, ours included, adds a tiny element of risk for all of us. But I won't lose any sleep over it either. It's just one of those things that bullies drive nations to -- the only thing to really worry about is that the US won't back off once it's too late. But you don't hear much about pre-emptive strikes on North Korea since they seem to have developed nuclear bombs, so even Bush can backpeddle a bit when there's no other course. The risk with Iran is that Bush may still think he can risk it. Too bad the NY Times isn't a voice of reason on this issue. But that's just part of the mess we're in.

Monday, January 23, 2006

A couple of movies. Guess I don't have to wait until I get too many.

Movie: Rumor Has It. I haven't checked everywhere, but Rob Reiner's comic takeoff on The Graduate seems to be universally loathed . . . except by yours truly. I doubt that the reason is that I'm the only one who's never seen The Graduate, although that's sure to be one correlation. A more promising correlation is that I've never watched that TV series Jennifer Aniston was in for decades, so I'm one of the few people who think of her as primarily a movie actress, instead of as whatshername. Perhaps her role here is too much the same? Don't know. Although she's fine as the star, she's not the reason to tune in. More to the point is that Shirley MacLaine and Kevin Costner delight in parodies of themselves. And that the setup gets turned into Ionesco, but still manages to score points on Pasadena sociology -- "this is what you get when you give people everything they want and then leave them alone with it" -- and high tech biz-wiz -- cf. Costner's use of Che Guevara. And that Richard Jenkins is so solid as the father. Don't care for the ending, where Mark Ruffalo substitutes dense for solid. B+

Movie: Brokeback Mountain. I read so little fiction that it's very rare I see a movie based on something I've previously read, but this is an exception. I picked up E. Annie Proulx's set of Wyoming stories because I opened it up in a bookstore to a page that was so matter of fact about the cattle industry that it appealed to my nonfiction preferences. But then as I read it I was constantly amazed by her turns of phrase -- "tangled legs" is a verb that says what "made love" barely aludes to. Since this particular story is so short, after seeing the movie I read it again. This got me thinking about two things: one is the relationship between prose and movies; the other is the relationship between stories and movies. When I first heard about how long the movie is compared to how short the story is, I figured the screenwriters must have added a lot of shit. But it turns out that they added very little -- arguably, all they did was unpack it. Lureen (Jack Twist's wife) may have gotten more added than anyone, but little more than is encoded in Jack's offhand commentary. The ratio of prose to movie time is greater than usual because Proulx's prose is so dense, and the expansion is easier than usual because Proulx sketched out so much time in so few episodes, but the rule of thumb should be that storywise movies are never much larger than short stories, if only writers could figure out how to keep their stories short. This confirms something I've noticed with John Sayles: when he has an idea too large to fit into a movie (and he's been known to pack a lot into a movie) he skips the movie and just writes a novel (and I don't recall that he's ever filmed one of his novels). The other aspect of the prose-movie relationship is that while the screenwriters kept the dialogue intact, they didn't keep any of the connecting prose; indeed Proulx's voice vanishes from the movie. And while I love that prose, the movie works much better without it. Narration is a necessary part of novels because it frames the point of view and provides the connections, but in movies your eyes do the work. In bigger stories, especially when adapting from novels, narration compresses, helping to cover more ground -- also tempting because it conserves some of the author's best words. But in this movie, getting rid of the narration is what lets the story unfold on its own terms. I can't recall another movie where the screenwriting adaption works so well. (But then I don't have many examples where I know both ends.) As for the story matter, the Sayles equation is again relevant. This story could have been developed expressly for the movies, in that it's the right size, but it couldn't have been, because nobody who conceives of movies seems to be able to think of stories like this. I'll leave that as a naked assertion. But one thing I'll add is that a big part of the reason this movie works so well is that it's so solid as a story. It's not about love, or masculinity, or injustice, nor is it about gay cowboys, although that works nicely as a marketing angle, as does the scenery and all that. A

At this point I'd slot Brokeback Mountain into #2 on my list, after A History of Violence. The latter has somewhat more visceral impact, but the former is probably the better story.

CT scan indicates an enlarged (40.2 mm) ascending aorta with some, perhaps a lot, of hypertensive vascular damage -- arteries appear to have been stretched by excess pressure. Blood pressure has generally been held within standard limits by medication, but in view of this damage I need to lower it further. Would be a good time to eat less, exercise more, lose weight, etc. Imagine that. (No, I don't really eat my jambalaya every night. In fact, I get tired of the leftovers real fast, but have other vices.) So serious problems may be a few years in my future, or maybe quite a few years, but not right now. This has been a pretty arduous week for me. While in some ways I'm duly impressed by our medical skills, I'm all the more terrified by the ridiculous system we've blundered into for managing them. I've run into one screw up after another, various misinformations, or the lack of even that -- a vacuum that sucks in even worse. Scary.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Music: Current count 11473 [11457] rated (+16), 861 [851] unrated (+10). Still listening to new jazz. Still having trouble making up my mind.

• Brokeback Mountain (2005, Verve Forecast): This is Gustavo Santaolalla's soundtrack to what's reportedly the movie of the year. (Haven't seen it yet -- it's showing here, but at one theatre only, and times have been awkward.) The original music is nothing, really, but the songs (Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Teddy Thompson, Rufus Wainwright, Steve Earle, Mary McBride, Jackie Green, Linda, the Gas Band) have some charm. Well, some of them, anyway. I don't need Rufus to sing "King of the Road," and it's too easy to have Ronstadt sing "It's So Easy." Probably got this because the label mostly does jazz, more or less, but this is just a soundtrack. Not interesting. Not bad. Certainly not bad enough to spoil the movie. B
• Casey Casem Presents America's Top 10 Through the Years: The 60s (1962-68 [2001], Top Sail/Warner Special Products): Given the parameters it would be hard to put a bad comp together, the few instances of crud from the last great singles era blessedly blotted out of memory. But even if we skip past the obvious licensing hurdles -- no Beatles, no Stones, no Phil Spector, no Dylan or James Brown or, well, the list is long -- no two compilers would pick the same gems. Casem was MOR before there ever was such a thing, and he compounds that by sticking to the middle of the decade -- one 1962 hit, one 1963, one 1968, everything else sandwiched between. Only three British invaders (Yardbirds, Troggs, Hollies). Motown and Stax also score three each, the latter perhaps benefitting from hindsight. A pleasant surprise among the others is "Groovin'" -- a song by the Racals I hadn't thought of in ages. Not sure how useful this really is, but every song here belongs, and brings back memories. A-
• Casey Casem Presents America's Top 10 Through the Years: The 70s (1970-79 [2001], Top Sail/Warner Special Products): There are five of these volumes, one for each decade from the '50s through the '90s. Only found two of them, creating a rather brutal contrast between the '60s and '70s. The dividing line coincided with the emergence of FM radio, with its shift in to albums from singles. One consequence of this was that the singles charts got blacker, but Casem seems to have missed that. His '60s comp had six black acts -- three Motown and three Stax -- but his pick of the '70s just has three: Rufus, War, and the Spinners. In other words, no: Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Wilson Pickett -- for that matter, no one from Philadelphia, Detroit or Memphis -- no Earth Wind & Fire, no Barry White, no Ohio Players, no Donna Summer. But that's only one dimension of things missing here. But rather than continue to carp, we could just view this as a semi-useful compilation of the decade's white bread novelties. B
• Franz Ferdinand: You Could Have It So Much Better (2005, Domino): Second album by a Scottish rock group, popular, also well regarded by critics. I'm mildly amused and moderately impressed. B+(**)
• Glasscuts (Philip Glass Remixed) (2005, Orange Mountain Music): Not sure where Glass ends and the baker's dozen of remixers pick up, but the general answer is the obvious one: they jack up the beats. Which is OK with me. B+(*)
• Hot Hot Heat: Elevator (2004 [2005], Sire): Alt band from Vancouver, a little on the heavy side, with pop hooks and a serviceable singer. B+(*)
• Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Ballads, Banjo Tunes and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina (1928-49 [1996], Smithsonian/Folkways): Five cuts date from 1928. The rest were recorded by Smithsonian as part of Lunsford's extensive "memory collection" -- some 350 songs that he had collected over many years. Not sure this is exceptionally important music, but it has a simple honesty to it that's becoming, and has historical merit. B+(*)
• The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara (1998-2004 [2005], World Music Network): Rumor has it that Christgau has ranked this #2 on his Pazz & Jop poll. I have a long simmering grudge against this label, or at least its publicist, so only bought it belatedly, and haven't taken the time to try to reconstruct the who, what, when and where that the label never bothers to tell you about. (That their main business is writing reference guides just makes their sloppiness all the worse, but frankly their reference guides don't bother with such details either.) The plus, which all things considered irritates me as well, is that they do have good ears, and you have to respect someone who can assemble a good-maybe-better compilation from folks I've never heard of. (Tinariwen is the only name I recognize here, and I haven't heard any of their albums yet.) I'm not nearly as smitten with this as Christgau is, but I like it enough I'd like to know more. A-
• Ted Weems: Greatest Hits (1923-33 [2000], Collectors' Choice Music): A popular crooner/bandleader from the '20s, best known for the novelty "Piccolo Pete" -- but most of these songs were greater or lesser pop hits, including two at #1: "Somebody Stole My Gal," and "Heartaches," a reprise cut ten years later. Charming stuff, often delightful. B+
• Gretchen Wilson: All Jacked Up (2005, Epic): As inconsistent as the first one, and not quite as fresh. Her take on "California Girls" is suitably uppity, although I question her aesthetic judgments. Good to have a party girl for the trailer trash set, but you have to wonder how much fun she'll be once she has to sober up. B+(**)

Another week's jazz prospecting. I should have moved into finish mode, rating previously unrateds and writing up previously rateds. Some personal distractions have made that hard, plus I understand that there are scheduling problems at the Voice -- but mostly the Voice people are locked down in Pazz & Jop mode, so haven't paid me much attention. So the usual second section is bare this week, and the first is mostly indecisive. New 2006 releases have started to come in, and some of these are advances, a way off from release.

Michel Camilo: Rhapsody in Blue (2005 [2006], Telarc): George Gershwin is enough of a staple in the world of jazz that one tends to forget about his contributions to classical music. But this record, with Camilo playing with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, is pure Gershwin classicism. I never liked classical music, and this repeatedly reminds me why. I do have a high opinion of Camilo's pianoship, but this doesn't remind me why. C-

Duduka Da Fonseca: Samba Jazz in Black and White (2005 [2006], Zoho): A Brazilian drummer, Da Fonseca has worked steadily since the late '80s, with two albums under his own name and a couple more as Trio da Paz. This is basic samba, the beat light, with a soft melodic edge from a good quintet including reedist Anat Cohen. A very pleasant record. B+(**)

Robert Stillman's Horses (2004 [2006], Mill Pond): Described as "seven instrumental pieces," this is jazz mostly by being instrumental and led by a saxophonist, but with its gentle, relatively uniform beat and atmospheric milieu it isn't all that far removed from sountrack territory, or even new age. Clarinet, piano or organ, bass, some guitar, various drums. Rather slight, but nice. B+(*)

Ran Blake: All That Is Tied (2006, Tompkins Square): Solo piano has never held much appeal for me, especially when we're talking pianists without any boogie-woogie up their sleeves. I have Blake's previous Painted Rhythm (1985) volumes on the shelf somewhere, one a B, the other still unrated. Both are 4-star in the Penguin Guide, which has a special soft spot for solo piano. This one is slow and deliberate, and I didn't follow it well, but enough of this caught my ear to keep it in play. [B+(*)]

Charles Gayle: Time Zones (2006, Tompkins Square): This, too, is solo piano, all originals. Gayle is legendary for his tenor sax, raw and ferocious, an unreconstructed follower of Ayler. But as his '90s albums started to grow repetitive and tedious, he started working on other instruments, including piano and violin, sometimes with startling results. This winds up having more dynamic range than the Ran Blake solo, and more finnesse than you'd figure. Usual caveats and confusions. One thing I like about Gayle on piano is that he can't overblow, so his music doesn't get swallowed up in his distortion. But it's surprising how serene this can get. [B+(**)]

Matthew Shipp: One (2005 [2006], Thirsty Ear): Yet another solo piano album. Strikes me as less exploratory than his early ones, when he frequently worked either solo or in duos. That leads me to think he's more into touching base than charting new territory, but that makes sense given how far he's moved since he started directing Thirsty Ear's Blue Series. But like the other solo piano albums here, I'm torn between disinterest and lack of understanding. Solo piano albums are often justified as freeing the pianist from constraints imposed by other group members, but isn't freedom supposed to be freer than this? [B+(*)]

Nick Colionne: Keepin' It Cool (2005 [2006], Narada Jazz): Smooth guitarist, "his Wes Montgomery-inspired style style accented with blues, rock, and R&B." But then who isn't inspired by Montgomery? Colionne is actually better than Montgomery, at least in the latter's pop-pimp phase (which is the germane one), and the funk filler never crowds out the guitar. One vocal piece, a rather nice "Rainy Night in Georgia," in case the radio folks gotta have a vocal. Smooth jazzers never miss a trick. B

Jason Miles: What's Going On? Songs of Marvin Gaye (2006, Narada Jazz): I'm of two minds on this. One is that it's a rather slinky groove album. The other is that any time I want to hear Marvin Gaye songs I can always play Marvin Gaye. Working of an advance, so I don't know who does what. I'm going to hold this back until I can look up what Herb Alpert, Chiara Civello, Bobby Caldwell, and Marcus Miller are responsible for. Then maybe I'll have a clear idea just how upset I am. But don't wait up. [B-]

Eric Darius: Just Getting Started (2006, Narada Jazz): Irrepressibly upbeat, pure sax disco. Cute hype: "Eric's awesome talent and unjaded enthusiasm have made him the undusiputed darling of the genre." Wasn't paying enough attention to sort out some fine points, but then this isn't the sort of jazz you have to pay attention to. [B+(*)]

Gianluca Petrella: Indigo 4 (2006, Blue Note): This is an advance, release due Feb. 21. I know nothing about the leader, except that he plays trombone. Know nothing about who else is on the album, except that there is a saxophonist I want to find out more about. Good solid postbop, harmonically complex but not overbaked. Looking forward to learning more. [B+(***)]

Cuong Vu: It's Mostly Residual (2005, ArtistShare): This showed up on some year-end lists before I tracked it down. Vu is a trumpeter who shows up in some interesting contexts -- Dave Douglas, Chris Speed, Assif Tsahar, Satoko Fujii, Andy Laster, Myra Melford, Pat Metheny, Laurie Anderson. I'm having trouble getting a handle on this rather densely layered music, but in prospecting indecision itself is (somewhat) noteworthy. It's interesting, in play, could develop. We'll see. [B+(**)]

The Omer Avital Group: Asking No Permission (1996 [2006], Smalls): Subtitled "The Smalls Years: Volume One." Avital is an Israeli bassist who played regularly at Smalls -- Thursdays, according to the notes here, this is one of those Thursdays. His group here includes drummer Ali Jackson and four saxophonists -- Mark Turner, Greg Tardy, Myron Walden, Charles Owens -- working out their bebop moves. B+(*)

Odyssey the Band: Back in Time (2005 [2006], Pi): James "Blood" Ulmer's records on Hyena have hewed ever closer to straight blues -- so much so that as much as I like Birthright I couldn't bring myself to give it JCG space. Despite two vocals, this is still definitely a jazz group: a trio with violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow, which refers back to Ulmer's 1983 violin-drenched Odyssey and Odyssey the Band's 1998 Reunion. Not sure how this will sort out, but its immediate appeal is obvious and certain. [B+(***)]

Mike Tucker: Collage (2005 [2006], www.tuckerjazz.com): Young (26, presumably that means b. 1979; how hard would it be to just say that?) Boston saxophonist (doesn't specify, but all I see and hear is tenor) on first album, leading a quartet with Leo Genovese more on Fender Rhodes than piano, plus bass and drums I've never heard of. The notes cite Michael Brecker as an influence, but being from Boston he's also played with George Garzone. Strikes me as somewhere between the two, definitely on the Sonny side of the great Rollins-Coltrane divide. First half of the album is upbeat, ebullient even, with Fender Rhodes, nothing special but quite a bit of fun. Then he throws us a curve with a slow one called, of all things, "Bird Lives" -- Genovese switches to piano there. Then things get more complicated with "Double Mambo" and "Space Suite" -- latter shows off his education, as opposed to his talent. He's got chops; may go somewhere with them, but it's probably too early to tell. [B+(**)]

David "Fathead" Newman: Cityscape (2005 [2006], High Note): I never got a chance to say so before, but Newman's I Remember Brother Ray was the best of a spate of Ray Charles tributes that came out following the movie, the hit duets album, and all that. Not a great record, of course, so that's sort of a backhanded complement, but to the best of my knowledge, Newman's never made a great record, at least under his ownname, in the first half-century of his recording plenty of good ones -- this is touted as "the beginning of David Newman's second half-century," if you're wondering about the wording. With three more horns for coloring (two brass and Howard Johnson's bari sax), a little flute from the leader, and songs ranging from "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing" to "Goldfinger," this one is something of a mess -- but occasionally a beautiful mess. Highlights include a big solo on "Here Comes Sonny Man" and a lovely, heartfelt "It Was a Very Good Year." No doubt. B+(**)

Larry Willis Trio: The Big Push (2004 [2005], High Note): The accompanying hype claims that Willis has played on over 300 records, which for a pianist, and one who's not all that old (b. 1940), strikes me as an awful lot. (I can think of a handful of bassists and drummers in that range, but aside from Oscar Peterson I wouldn't bet on any other pianists, and I'm not sure about him.) But then Willis has always been a guy who just blends in and does the job. But he's been far less prolific as a leader: AMG lists 18 albums for him. This is a bright, cheery piano trio, a little more mainstream than usual. I don't have the measure of this one yet, but I know that one thing I like in a piano trio is a rhythm section that carries their weight, and he's got one here in Buster Williams and Al Foster. Wouldn't be surprised if they've appeared on 300 records too. [B+(**)]

Ernie Andrews: How About Me (2005 [2006], High Note): I don't know whether Andrews ever sang for Count Basie, but he fits the type -- an easy-going blues crooner, somewhere between Joe Williams on the slick side and Al Hibbler on the weird side. He's closing in on 80 now, with a career stretching back to the '50s, but his best regarded albums came out much later, on Muse, which means with his producer and guest here, Houston Person. [B+(*)]

Larry Goldings: Quartet (2006, Palmetto): He's one of the better regarded organists to emerge in the '90s, so the first surprise here is to hear him take the first two songs on piano. He also plays various other keyboard instruments, plus "glock" to add to the toy instrument sound. Ben Allison and Matt Wilson are solid as usual. The fourth corner of the quartet is trumpeter John Sneider, providing a thin, shrill complement to the organ, but since mostly this isn't an organ record, it often sounds thin and shrill. The music wanders all over the map, adding to the inconsistency. It's mostly slow, dulling the invention. Madeleine Peyroux joins for a rendition of "Hesitation Blues" that is so hesitant it's almost a parody, with Sneider sounding especially anemic. The against-type abstraction might be considered a brave experiment, but discoveries are scarce. B-

Thursday, January 20, 2005

John Brown has a piece at TomDispatch on the War on Terror as an Indian War. He cites ten reasons for viewing it that way, starting with the obsessions of Robert D. Kaplan and Max Boot. As Kaplan has pointed out several times, the US military still goes to school on America's Indian Wars, so the notion is constantly on their minds, even as Bush tries to dodge the cowboy metaphors. The points Brown makes are generally valid, but he doesn't get to a few more.

First, there is a pretty major book waiting to be written on how the idea of America's subjugation of the Indians has been adopted as a model or ideal for colonial conquests in the 20th century. The two main examples of this are Nazi Germany and Israel. I've seen passing references in both cases, but have yet to see anyone dig very deeply into the subject. To do so won't tell us much about the actual Indian wars, but would give us an inkling of how such ideas travel, and how they fit into other colonialist mindsets.

Second, we need to look at why the America-Indian model doesn't, and can't, translate well to the old world. There are two aspects of this. One is that the American subjugation of the Indians was incidentally but cumulatively genocidal, at least to the point that it resulted in an overwhelming (like 100-to-1) demographic advantage for the settlers. The word "incidental" is also significant, in that this degree of genocide was achieved without (for the most part -- exceptions are easy to find) a conscious plan to do so. This matters because it's politically difficult to embark on a genocidal program -- the main examples of such programs were decided in secret during the chaos of war. The second aspect is that in the end the US granted full citizenship to all surviving Indians in 1924, and this, rather than the exhaustion of the 1890s, is what has kept American Indians from resuming armed struggle in the 20th century.

This just goes to show that the Injun Country metaphors are not a workable model for the War on Terror. The dilemma is especially striking for Israel, which despite extraordinary efforts cannot muster a demographic majority such that it can integrate the native Palestinian population in a permanently marginal role. The same is true on a global scale for the US and the many people that the Bush warriors seem intent on uniting against us.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Grace Murray Hopper used to say that it's better to try something and apologize later if it fails than to do nothing until you can get permission. Even though she was an admiral in the US Navy, presumably she was talking about relatively benign acts, not starting wars. She was a computing pioneer -- most famously, she invented the bug, or maybe one should say she discovered it; at least she named it. Her principle has been handed down by generations of hackers throttled by lethargic, risk-adverse bureaucrats. It normal everyday business it has some merit, but there are areas where the risks are so large, unfathomable even, that caution is the only sane choice. One of those cases was when someone at US CENTCOM operating a Predator drone over Pakistan fired a Hellfire missile at a house suspected of sheltering Al Qaeda ideologue Zayman Al-Zawahiri, killing seventeen but not its target.

Many questions remain unanswered, including the "solid intelligence" that was cited in justification and, indeed, the whole chain of command responsible for the incident. Most likely this was not just a whim on the part of the operator, but you never know. One of the stock Neocon arguments is that the US had become far too cautious about flexing its military power. A particular target was the Powell Doctrine, which in its insistence on overwhelming military force, popular support, and a clear exit strategy was seen as pure bureaucratic obstruction. Max Boot's book about America's "small wars" not only took aim at Powell. Boot went further in insisting that good things happen when the US goes to war even without a clear plan or strategy. One result of the Neocon rush to power has been that we hardly give a second thought to taking pot shots at terrorists, and Zawahiri is as prime as prime targets get. So had they nailed him, no one in power in America would demand an apology.

On the other hand, at first blush this looks like an act of war against Pakistan. So I have to wonder just what the deal is between the US and Pakistani strong man Pervez Musharaf. This isn't likely to be something Musharaf would go out of his way to publicize, given what the choices are: either this was an unprovoked attack on Pakistani soil (showing that Musharaf is unable to defend Pakistan), or Musharaf approved the attack (killing Pakistani citizens), either specifically or by some form of blank check. Any way you slice it, this looks bad for Musharaf, and more generally for the US alliance with Pakistan. Sure, it may blow over -- thousands in Pakistan protested, but had the government felt pressured, we might have seen millions protesting. But the fact itself overcomes plausible deniability: unless Musharaf protests, he's conceding that the US can kill Pakistanis any time some American decides to shoot first and ask questions later.

But there's more at risk here than that we might tick off a nation of 160 million muslims and a few dozen atomic bombs. The lesson goes far beyond Pakistan, and not just to the world of Islam, but to the entire world, who are reminded that we don't care how many of "them" we kill to achieve our own politically convenient goals. (Only Israel practices unilateral attacks like this -- indeed, that's one of the reasons Neocons are so smitten with Israel.) But it also reinforces the tendency of America's security forces to act without controls or scruples. Many Americans have come to accept the notion that we can win this "war on terrorism" by simply killing a few evil people. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Left unchecked and unchallenged, we just dig deeper holes for ourselves.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Music: Current count 11457 [11445] rated (+12), 851 [810] unrated (-41). Mostly did jazz prospecting this week, and mostly didn't make up my mind, so there's little to show here. Nothing, in fact.

Jazz prospecting heats up this week. Mostly new stuff, a good portion of which are 2006 records, some advances of records not out yet. It's been a week with a lot of distractions, which may explain why there are so many unfinalized grades (in brackets). Next week there should be fewer first passes and more finals as I start to wrap up.

Luis Mario Ochoa & Friends: Cimarrón (2005, Cuban Music Productions): Small print on front cover describes this as "Cuban Jazz Fusion." One problem I have with latin jazz is figuring out whether "jazz" in that context means anything useful to me. Ochoa plays guitar, arranges, and sings on half of the tracks. The band includes a strong horn section, piano, electric bass, and several helpings of percussion, with some shuffling of personnel and guests -- Paquito D'Rivera gets a mention on the cover, but only appears on one song. The guitar is worth listening for. The vocals less so, although Ochoa's "spanglish" on "Old Devil Moon" caught my ear. But the obvious jazz spots are rare. B+(*)

Hiromi: Spiral (2005 [2006], Telarc): This strikes me much like her previous record Brain did. Both are piano trios on the left edge of mainstream, carefully thought out, sharply recorded. On both she dabbles with electronics and makes it work. Other than respectful admiration, I don't have much more to say at this point. Brain made my Honorable Mention list back when I wasn't so backlogged. This one probably won't given the increased competition, but it's every bit as solid. [B+(*)]

Andrew Hill: Time Lines (2006, Blue Note): This is Hill's second return to Blue Note, following his one-shot 1989 album Eternal Spirit. During his first stretch with Blue Note, Hill established himself as one of the most important pianists to emerge in the '60s, but then he slipped into obscurity with the eclipse of jazz in the '70s, staging a comeback over the last decade. This is a quintet with Charles Tolliver on trumpet and Greg Tardy on reeds, a typical line-up for Hill in the '60s, as it lets him broaden his compositional palette while still keeping the piano central. Still working on this. No rush, since release date is 02-21. [B+(***)]

Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (1970 [2005], Columbia/Legacy, 6CD): Virtually every jazz critic who compiled a top ten list for 2005 picked one or more records by guys long dead: Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane, At Carnegie Hall; Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker, Town Hall; John Coltrane, Live at the Half Note. These items continue a well established pattern, which is that we view jazz as a music of the past, played by legends who with few exceptions are no longer with us. (Sonny Rollins also got votes for an unearthed 2001 concert.) But Miles Davis is the reigning champion of past legends, probably the best-selling widely respected jazz man of the past 10, 20, 30 years. Sony/Legacy has been mining Davis tapes assiduously for quite a while now, releasing two 6-CD boxes just this year. The reason Davis didn't make the year-end lists is that these are large boxes expanded from a core of previously released music, whereas the above-listed are one- or two-disc sets with no previously released music (the Coltrane has been bootlegged). But he fits the pattern. However, I have a different theory how this works. For one thing, all of these musicians come from the 1945-60 period, the bebop era if you like, where there is much consensus about who's great. (Anyone who hated bebop fled the club when Bird got on stage, leaving those who stayed free to define what jazz means.) Those greats are the revered founders, and their devotees have an apparently insatiable desire to study them. On the other hand, no such consensus exists for anything that came after 1960 -- new thing, fusion, even Marsalis-style conservatism. Even Davis catches flack once you get past his late-'60s quintet, although his early fusion period (1969-74) has been explored at considerable length, with five 2-CD live sets, box-length expansions of In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, and now this box, which provides for raw context for the first of the live sets to be released, the heavily edited Live-Evil. A little more than half of Live-Evil was selected from the fourth of four nights Davis played at DC's Cellar Door shortly before Christmas 1970. The fourth night was notable as the one night with John McLaughlin in the band. A-

Bob Rockwell Quartet: Bob's Ben: A Salute to Ben Webster (2004 [2005], Stunt): A simple idea, with Rockwell's original "Prelude for Ben" followed by the usual standards done in the usual style. Rockwell doesn't aim for Webster's trademark vibrato, but otherwise he's dead on. Not hard, perhaps, given that everything is down tempo, but for such a simple idea I'm not aware of anyone else trying it. And a rich, mellifluous album of ballads is always welcome in these parts. Grade not final because I don't want to get suckered, but also because I want to play it again. [A-]

Michael Blake: Blake Tartare (2002 [2005], Stunt): This album by the ex-Lounge Lizards saxophonist starts and ends surprisingly soft. In between three cuts with guest guitarist Teddy Kumpel pick up a groove, and covers from Sun Ra and Charles Mingus show some daring and muscle -- especially the latter. Haven't found whatever thread ties it all together yet -- assuming there is one -- but it's an interesting and enjoyable jumble. [B+(**)]

Jens Winther European Quintet: Concord (2005, Stunt): Same gestalt as Scott Anderson's Nia Quintet: trumpet-led, sax, piano, bass, drums; not quite as shiny, or conventional as the case may be. One plus here is that bassist Palle Danielsson has more drive, and that's what skids everyone else around the curves. Another strong point here is pianist Antonio Farao, who carries the slower pieces. [B+(*)]

Sam Rivers/Ben Street/Kresten Osgood: Violet Violets (2004 [2005], Stunt): Billed as the second part of a 2-CD set, so I'm annoyed that I didn't get the first part too. Also no details on who plays what where. Bassist Street and drummer Osgood are givens, but Rivers sounds like he's playing a clarinet on the first cut, then returns to tenor sax for most of the rest. He has a very distinctive sound, both rhythm and phrasing, and it works especially well in this small group. Very nice. [B+(***)]

The Thing: Live at Blå (2003 [2005], Smalltown Superjazz): Two long pieces, each a medley of three parts, with credits ranging from Joe McPhee to the White Stripes. The Thing is a free jazz trio that makes a lot of noise, with Atomic's bassist and drummer, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love and reed man Mats Gustafsson, mostly on baritone sax. All three should be well known by now for their various collaborations with Ken Vandermark. I have a lot more trouble with Gustafsson than Vandermark, possibly for the reasons the latter spelled out in his liner notes to the former's Blues -- that Americans play out of the blues, whereas Europeans play with the blues -- although I'm more inclined to think of it as being that Gustafsson swings a heavier axe and makes much more of a mess. Still, at his best his mess can move you mightily. B+(**)

Free Fall: Amsterdam Funk (2004 [2005], Smalltown Superjazz): This is Ken Vandermark's clone of the Jimmy Giuffre Trio (named for Giuffre's most famous album), so the lineup is clarinet, piano (Håvard Wiik for Paul Bley) and bass (Ingebrigt Håker Flaten for Steve Swallow). I've played this several times but haven't made much sense out of it -- possibly because the mappings are off, and possibly because I've never gotten much out of Guiffre's trio. This has spots of interest -- mostly when they pick up the pace and Wiik pounds out some rhythm. It also has quiet spots which develop into austere atmospherics. B+(*)

Quinsin Nachoff: Magic Numbers (2004 [2005], Songlines): This is a saxophone trio, with Nachoff playing tenor and soprano along with Mark Helias and Jim Black, plus a string quartet. But this isn't one of those sax-with-string albums: the strings carry the load of the complex, quirky music, with the sax melting into the background. I don't find the heavy strings very appealing, but I suspect there's more here than I can work through. B

Chris Gestrin/Ben Monder/Dylan van der Schyff: The Distance (2004 [2006], Songlines): A cute trick here is that the front cover, back cover, and spine list the artists in different orders. I've gone with the front cover -- piano-guitar-drums is the more conventional order, and Gestrin has a slight composition edge over van der Schyff. There's a sort of abstract modernism to the work, short melodic runs with odd blips, but the recording level is so low I'm having a lot of trouble following it. Will give it another shot later. [B-]

Bill Bruford/Tim Garland: Earthworks Underground Orchestra (2005 [2006], Summerfold): I decided to pan this, but wasn't quite ready, so I hit replay and now I'm confused. Garland plays saxes, bass clarinet and flute, all with considerable chops, but no clear style -- not that I'm familiar enough with him to say that with certainty. Bruford was England's premier prog rock drummer until he moved over into jazz. His groups have had various sounds over the years, depending on who he has up front. This group is significantly expanded from the last Earthworks group. Where Garland was the only horn, now he's joined by two trumpets, one or two trombones, baritone sax, and alto or soprano sax -- two of which also play flute. Also piano and electric or acoustic bass. All together they get an extravagantly lush sound with fluid dynamics. I can't pigeonhole it, other than to say that they're moving into rather advanced big band territory. I should be more impressed, but at this stage I'm more confused. [B+(*)]

Paul Motian Band: Garden of Eden (2004 [2006], ECM): This would be the further evolution of Motian's Electric Bebop Band, with electric bass, three guitars, and two saxophones. Starts with two Mingus tunes -- if "Pithecanthropus Erectus" doesn't get you, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" sure will -- and ends with Monk and Bird, with mostly originals in between. Still, all this firepower -- the saxophonists are Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby -- wind up put to work on texture, with Motian slippery as ever, at least until he takes a surprising drum solo toward the end. I've played this several times, and still I'm not sure what I think of it. But then that's pretty much true of everything I've heard by Motian to date -- ten albums plus a compilation, all more or less where I'm guessing this one will end up. [B+(**)]

Manu Katché: Neighbourhood (2004 [2005], ECM): Don't really know anything about him, other than that he plays drums, wrote all of the songs here, and leveraged his label to put together a marvelous group here. Actually, he didn't have to pull too many strings, since one got him three-fourths of Tomasz Stanko's quartet (didn't need the drummer), and another got him Jan Garbarek. Will have to do some research before I finalize this, and will have to convince myself that an album this simply artful and, for lack of a better word, beautiful makes the grade on that alone. Could be. [A-]

Ben Goldberg Quintet: The Door, the Hat, the Chair, the Fact (2006, Cryptogramophone). Don't know when this was recorded -- I'm working off one of those cheap, stupid "for promotional use only" advances, although given how annoying this label's regular packaging has become, that may not be a total step backwards. So I need to get some more info, but for now I understand that this is meant as a tribute to Steve Lacy, and that Goldberg and violinist Carla Kihlstedt are also members of Tin Hat (evidently no longer a trio, something else to check up on). The quintet also includes Rob Sudduth (tenor sax), Devin Hoff (bass), and Ches Smith (drums). Don't know the latter, but the first striking thing here is the rhythm, which plods along sure-footedly, opening up space for the front-line instruments, which complement each other nicely. Need more research, but this is a very solid album. [A-]

Erik Friedlander: Prowl (2006, Cryptogramophone): Ditto the label comments on Ben Goldberg. This one's a quartet, with Friedlander on cello, Andy Laster on alto sax or clarinet, and Stomu and Satoshi Takeishi on electric bass and drums. The latter are hard to overpraise -- I've noticed both separately, but never together before. Laster is also an apposite choice, deepening and developing Friedlander's music in many intriguing ways. Cello is turning into a fascinating jazz instrument. It's not just a higher-pitched bass; cellists have started to model their instrument on roles guitarists have developed over the last two decades. Choice cut is "A Closer Walk With Thee," which starts fractured and slowly assembles itself, building volume until it becomes powerfully moving. A-

Paul Bollenback: Brightness of Being (2005 [2006], Elefant Dreams): Too clever by half, or maybe more. Bollenback's guitar is a sweet and lyrical constant, but his wide range of pop songs and classical pieces, his use of three saxophonists with no common ground (Gary Thomas, Tim Garland, Fathead Newman), and the occasional breathy intrusions of vocalist Christ McNulty make this a major exercise in kitchen sinkism. Choice cut: "You Don't Know Me." B+(*)

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back the first time around.

Kenny Barron Trio: The Perfect Set: Live at Bradley's II (1996 [2005], Sunnyside): With Ray Drummond and Ben Riley, as perfect a modern jazz trio as you can find. Haven't heard the previously released first set, but my inside source tells me this is the better of the two. As befits Riley, this closes with two Monk tunes, and one of Barron's originals is decidedly Monkish. Just what you'd expect, which is to say it merits the faint complaint of "no surprises." B+(**)

Scott Anderson/Nia Quintet: End of Time (2004 [2005], BluJazz): Skillfully executed postbop in the classic quintet format with Daniel Nicholson's saxophones and Tom Vaitsas' piano complementing the leader's trumpet. Mostly upbeat, sometimes soaring, with a nice ballad to close. Those with mainstream tastes will find much to enjoy here. Those looking for some edge will doubt it, but such albums are rarer than you'd think. B+(**)

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Got our new car today. 2006 Toyota Corolla XRS. Very compact outside. Pretty roomy inside. Some get-up-and-go, too. Started shopping for a car a year ago. Old car is a Nissan Sentra SER, which I bought because it looked bland enough to park on the street but drove well. Most of the time I spen