March 2025 Notebook

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

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

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Music Week

Daily Log

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

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

Friday, March 21, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Loose Tabs

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

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025

Music Week

Daily Log

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

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

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

Hobsbawm Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

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

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

Music Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS [03-12]: I was pleased to see that my number of Bluesky followers increased from 33 to 56 the day after I posted this. I haven't posted anything new there since the notice, but I figure if I add a postscript, I can post the notice again. I can also post a notice to my answer to a question about my embarrassingly paltry reading of fiction. Good question, and I'm likely to jump on anything that gives me a chance to write a bit of memoir -- which is arguably what I should be doing, instead of fretting about social media followers.

No new A- records yet this week, although I have a couple high B+ albums (Rodney Whitaker, Jim Snidero). While those albums don't quite do it for me, they are almost certain to strike a chord with some of my readers. Some of my favorite records from the 1970s were Christgau B+ grades: two in particular he sent me promos of, perhaps suspecting I would fall for them (Overcoats, by John Hiatt; Hirth From Earth, by Hirth Martinez; I wasn't quick enough to write about them in the Voice, but I did write about them in Terminal Zone, and I reviewed Martinez's second album in The Voice). My high B+ albums from 2024 include a bunch that topped other critics' lists, like: Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Doechii, MJ Lenderman, Adrian Lenker, and Tyler the Creator -- before rechecks and upgrades also: Charli XCX, Waxahatchee, Sabrina Carpenter, and Vampire Weekend. Among the top 20 in my EOY Aggregate, my only initial A- reviews were for Billie Eilish, Kim Gordon, and Patricia Brennan, followed down to 50 by Hurray for the Riff Raff, Beth Gibbons, Charles Lloyd, Jamie XX, Amyl and the Sniffers, and Kali Uchis.

One reason I haven't generated much news this week is that we went a couple friends' house for dinner after posting Monday, then I served a small dinner for another couple on Tuesday. Both led to long, fraught political discussions, as both couples are more activist-inclined than we are (especially me). I remain convinced that much of what Trump is doing is simple gaslighting, meant to drive his opponents crazy fighting against impractical, untenable proposal flares. However, with Trump it's hard to tell what is real and what is not, since both agendas are heavy on stupid and/or insane. It's going to be a long four years. And maybe not yet now, but November 2026 will be a key date to try to limit the damage by flipping Congress (and gaining more traction in state and local races). Until then it's important to expose what they are doing, and to highlight the bad faith, shoddy thinking, and blatant corruption they're operating with.

No pics on the Tuesday dinner, which was a pretty minimal effort, with no extra shopping. The main dish was leftover brisket, delicata squash, and sweet potatoes, which I had initially cooked Sunday. I had very little available to complement it, but made mustard slaw from a small head of cabbage, and sliced some carrots for tzimmes (braised in lemon juice -- recipe called for orange -- with extra spices and golden raisins. For dessert I made black & white cookies, and served them with ice cream. Aside from the slaw, those were all first-attempt dishes, and came out very nice. (Well, the brisket was a little weird: I bought one of those packages already prepared for making corned beef, without realizing how much salt was already in the marinade, so first pass came out like corned beef with a surreal amount of salt and spice -- not something my wife was inclined to complain about, but I'm usually pretty good at pushing the seasonings up to a level just shy of too much, and this time I overshot. I soaked and drained the leftovers, which brought the salt back within normal range.)

I might as well note here that Christgau's March Consumer Guide appeared today, and it's mostly stuff I wasn't aware of. The exceptions were three albums I played once (or maybe twice) and filed as various shades of B+: Marshall Allen's New Dawn, GloRilla's Glorious and Mdou Moctar's Funeral for Justice. I should circle back around, but will note that I've rated four previous Moctar albums at A-, whereas Christgau has only previously reviewed one Moctar album (at ***). Also I had GloRilla's other 2024 album (er, mixtape, Ehhthang Ehhthang) at B+(***), a notch above Glorious, but I couldn't swear either way.

As for Allen, my footnote is that he recorded two other albums shortly before his 100th birthday, and both of those made my 2024 A-list: Deep Space, by John Blum Quartet Featuring Marshall Allen, and Lights on a Satellite, by Sun Ra Arkestra [Under the Direction of Marshall Allen]. So I count myself as a fan, but I wasn't all that impressed by New Dawn. Still, I'm pleased he was.

I'll get to more of those records next week. I was aware that the Charly Bliss record existed, and thought about playing it on a couple occasions, but forgot how much I liked their second album. Towa Bird was on three EOY lists, but too low to catch my attention. Aside from Allen, the 2025 releases were all news to me. FACS seems to be related to a 2009-16 group I liked, Disappears -- check out Pre Language (2012).

Daily Log

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

Music Week

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

Daily Log

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, March 31, 2025

Music Week

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Just Thinking: About Democrats

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Daily Log

Monday, March 24, 2025

Music Week

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Daily Log

Saturday, March 22, 2025

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Friday, March 21, 2025

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Thursday, March 20, 2025

Loose Tabs

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025

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Monday, March 17, 2025

Music Week

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Sunday, March 16, 2025

Hobsbawm Again

Saturday, March 15, 2025

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Friday, March 14, 2025

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025

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Monday, March 10, 2025

Music Week

Sunday, March 09, 2025

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Saturday, March 08, 2025

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Friday, March 07, 2025

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Thursday, March 06, 2025

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Wednesday, March 05, 2025

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Monday, March 03, 2025

Music Week

Sunday, March 02, 2025

Daily Log

Saturday, March 01, 2025

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