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Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Wichita Eagle op-ed page featured Trudy Rubin' Decision Time on ISIS today, three days after the column originally appeared. Having clamored for more war for years, she must be happy now that Obama has vowed to "destroy and degrade ISIS" and hopscotched around the world lining up a new "coalition of the willing" to share the dirt and blame for another foreign intervention in Iraq and Syria (the last one having been such fun). Rubin, meanwhile, has gone on seeking further dragons to slay: If Putin's actions in Ukraine aren't an invasion, then what is? Obama's been busy working on locking the US into a war there too. (See David Frum: Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe, something Frum is ecstatic about.) This series of events has reduced my opinion of Obama to its lowest point ever. Some of this I explain in my comment on the Peter Beinart piece below, yet even now I doubt that I've pushed that argument far enough. Perhaps one reason I'm so appalled is that there doesn't seem to be much uproar over what has to be judged the most significant American pivot towards war since Bush invaded Iraq. As Beinart puts it, "[Obama's] fierce minimalism fits the national mood. President Obama's Mideast strategy is not grand. It's not inspiring. It's not idealistic. But it's what the American people want and what their government knows how to do." Really?

That so few rank-and-file Democrats feel up to holding Obama responsible for his repeated belligerence probably has more to do with the perception that the Republicans have become a full-fledged threat to civilization. This is in stark contrast to the 1960s, when we had no trouble turning on Lyndon Johnson -- and when the Democratic Party essentially short-circuited the accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society out of a blind commitment to an insane war in Vietnam. Like Johnson, Obama seems bent on sacrificing whatever good he's accomplished on the altar of war. Little comfort that he hasn't accomplished much to squander.

Some scattered links this week:

• Peter Beinart: Actually, Obama Does Have a Strategy in the Middle East: Argues that Obama is neither dove nor hawk, but "a fierce minimalist" -- which is to say he's a hawk who prefers small game taken with little risk or long-term commitment. Of course, that doesn't explain his "Afghanistan surge" -- in retrospect, that looks like a time-limited concession to the military, a way of saying "put up or shut up." Beinart goes further than the facts suggest:

  On the other hand, he's proven ferocious about using military force to kill suspected terrorists. [ . . . ] By contrast, Obama's strategy -- whether you like it or not -- is more clearly defined. Hundreds of thousands can die in Syria; the Taliban can menace and destabilize Afghanistan; Iran can move closer to getting a bomb. No matter. With rare exceptions, Obama only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians.

  It's not that simple: Libya never was a threat to American civilians (at least not until he intervened there). And he's actually broken new ground in using drones to kill American citizens. So I think the focus on "terrorist" targets has more to do with scale and risk. He's come to realize that the US military isn't very effective (and often is down right counterproductive) when deployed en masse, so he's avoided that. He also seems to recognize that the US military isn't very effective as an occupying force: they inevitably embarrass themselves, breeding resentment and rebellion. On the other hand, give him the opportunity to kill some "terrorist" and he's happy to pull the trigger. Republicans taunt him as weak, so he's anxious to prove he's a natural born killer. One could do worse than minimizing risk and damage, but "minimalism" is a trap Obama walked into, either because he has no principles or because he has no willpower to defend them against his security bureaucracy.

  Also see Kathy Gilsinan: To Kill a Terrorist, about one of Obama's minimalist "success stories": the killing of Somali "terrorist" leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. The most likely result there is that Al-Shabab replaces Godane with another even-more-embittered leader and nothing more changes. And I might as well point out Beinart's more recent post, Pursuing ISIS to the Gates of Hell. Obama's vow "to destroy and degrade ISIS" remains a bit muddled (why put the weaker verb second?), and framing it with a "Jacksonian" revenge drama doesn't help.

• Andrew O'Hehir: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The darkness we conjured up:

  I think it's worthwhile to revisit the examples of Stockhausen and Baudrillard, and their ideas too, in considering a new outrage that is both literal and symbolic: the ISIS beheading videos. The criminal acts depicted in those videos are on an entirely different scale from 9/11, and it's important not to lose sight of that fact amid the understandable shock and revulsion they have engendered. But the intended effect is strikingly similar, and the ISIS videos are conceptually and historically related to 9/11 as tools of provocation and propaganda. They are designed to make a ragtag band of apocalyptic rebels look like a symmetrical adversary to the world's greatest military power; to incite an exaggerated response from that power, driven by panic and hysteria; and to attract rootless millennials, both from the West and the Muslim world, to their incoherent cause. So far it seems to be working.

  I'm far less certain that the intent behind the beheading videos is to provoke the insane response that Obama and nearly everyone on his hawkish right have committed to, but that's the effect. Rather, they show a profound inability to step outside of their own skin and see themselves as others will see them -- a trait that Obama et al. sadly share with them. If they were smart, they'd court journalists and get them to at least cast reasonable doubts about their fanaticism. Of course, if they were smart, they'd recall Islam's past tolerance for other religions, a principle ("no compulsion in matters of faith") which had allowed Christians and Yazidis (and Jews) to persevere through more than a millenia of past caliphates. And they'd play up the fact that they're seeking freedom from despotic police states in Damascus and Baghdad. But no side is playing this smart: they each tailor their propaganda to suit their own prejudices, confirming their greatest fears and enabling their most vicious and violent cadres to commit acts that will only exacerbate the initial problem.

• Nick Turse: American Monuments to Failure in Africa? Until the US military created the US Africa Command in 2007, you heard very little about American military operations in Africa, because there really weren't many. Now the US military is all over the continent, shooting people and blowing shit up but also spreading their budget around on "feel good" projects, much like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  As with Petraeus's career, which imploded amidst scandal, the efforts he fostered similarly went down in flames. In Iraq, the chicken processing plant proved a Potemkin operation and the much ballyhooed Baghdad water park quickly fell into ruin. The country soon followed. Less than three years after the U.S. withdrawal, Iraq teeters on the brink of catastrophe as most of Petraeus's Sunni mercenaries stood aside while the brutal Islamic State carved a portion of its caliphate from the country, and others, aggrieved with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad, sided with them. In Afghanistan, the results have been similarly dismal as America's hearts-and-minds monies yielded roads to nowhere (where they haven't already deteriorated into death traps), crumbling buildings, over-crowded, underfunded, and teacher-less schools, and billions poured down the drain in one boondoggle after another.

• More Israel links:

  • Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary, Elizabeth Warren, and Israel: "I'm now glad to report [ . . . ] that Elizabeth Warren has confirmed for us that, on questions related to Israel, Clinton has nothing to fear from her, at least."
  • Ofer Neiman: Israeli officer tosses Palestinian shepherds from their land so settlers don't have to hear Arabic: Not only is the occupation brutal, it can also be petty. Note that Arabic is an officially recognized language in Israel. That anyone could think otherwise is testimony to the prevalence of segregation in Israel and the occupied territories.
  • Avi Shlaim: For Israel, the beginning of wisdom is to admit its mistakes: Not that he offers any indication that anyone in Israel is ready to do so -- least of all Netanyahu, whose "popularity plummeted from 85% at the beginning of the operation to 38%."
  • Richard Silverstein: Mossad-Affiliated Israeli NGO: Khaled Meshal to the Hague: Of course, "Israel hasn't signed the ICC protocol, in an attempt to keep its own generals and spymasters out of the Hague defendant's chair." Yet one of Israel's front groups wants the Hamas leader charged. Curiously enough it's not for those "rocket attacks" Israel provokes then whines about. It's because Hamas executed a number of Palestinians believed to have collaborated with Israel during their latest round of war against Gaza. I'm not fond of the death penalty, and it's hard to be sure of due process in such a short timespan, but it probably isn't hard to link up collaborator reports with specific bombings and deaths. Hillel Cohen has written two books on Israel's use of Palestinian collaborators, one from 1917-48, the other from 1948-67, and obviously the practice hasn't changed much over 47 years of occupation. For another twist on recent war crimes, see Silverstein's Hannibal Directive Focus of War Crimes Inquiry. Max Blumenthal also writes about The Hannibal Directive.
  • Philip Weiss: British pol is beaten by man in Israeli army t-shirt, and the chattering classes are silent: Isn't this the great fear, that the violence in the Middle East will be furthered by terrorists in the West?
  • Kate: As world watched Gaza, Israel announced 1472 new settlements in West Bank: And many other stories, like house demolitions in Jerusalem, an orchard chopped down by settlers near Hebron, the Gaza death toll continuing to grow even after ceasefire (including a 7th Israeli civilian). For a view of some of the destruction in Gaza, follow this link.
  • Assaf Sharon: Failure in Gaza.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Kathleen Geier: Can we talk? The unruly life and legacy of Joan Rivers: Seems about right, though I'm less of a fan.

  Some critics claim to discern a humanistic project behind Rivers' comedy of cruelty. For example, Mitchell Fain argued that River "says things out loud what we're all thinking, in our worst moments," and that by doing so, "the monster gets smaller." What seems far likelier is that the monster gets socially sanctioned. For decades, a staple of Rivers' act have been nasty jokes about female celebrities who are fat, stupid, or slutty, and male celebrities who are allegedly gay. If she ever talked smack about straight male celebrities, I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples.

  That brings us to Joan Rivers' politics, which mostly were horrible. On the plus side, she was pro-choice, an early supporter of gay rights, and an Obama supporter. On the negative side, there is pretty much everything else. Rivers was a lifelong Republican, and made many comments over the years that left little doubt about her right-wing views. She hated the movie Precious, not for aesthetic reasons, but for frankly political ones ("I thought, Oh, get a job! Stand up and get a job!"). Just last month, she voiced strong support for Israel's military actions actions in Gaza and said that the Palestinians "deserve to be dead." She adored Ronald Reagan and shamelessly fawned over the British royal family. When writers on her show Fashion Police, who were working full-time and only making $500 a week, went on strike, she refused to support them. At times, her humor was outright racist.

• John Mearsheimer: Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: A useful corrective to a lot of prevailing assumptions. Clearly, the US (neocon) effort to extend NATO to the borders of Russia has been deliberately and unnecessarily provocative, although one could also argue that deep-seated fears that Russia might revert its past patterns, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, of trying to control what it thought of as its satellites had more to do with NATO's expansion. Moreover, while US-backed "democracy projects" were effectively an attempt at foreign subversion, it would seem that Russia has been organizing support in Ukraine as well. In America we reflexively assume we're acting with the best intentions, but with Cold War blinkers we make little distinction between democracy and neoliberal economic policies that lead to inequality and corruption -- something the post-Soviet bloc has had bitter experience with. There is much to be said in favor of UN-based programs promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world, provided such programs focus on need -- Saudi Arabia is always a good place to start -- rather than the neocon checklist of governments they dislike.

  More dissenting pieces on Ukraine:

  • Robert Parry: The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis
  • The State Department Says Russia Is Invading Ukraine -- Should We Believe It?
  • Stephen F Cohen: Patriotic Heresy vs. the New Cold War
  • Mike Whitney: Did Putin Just Bring Peace to Ukraine?

• Jim Newell: GOP's Kansas nightmare: How a red state is on verge of unthinkable upsets: I'd caution against counting these chickens before they hatch, but so far the evidence does suggest that the Democrats greatly improve their prospects at the polls when they bother to run candidates. The Senate contest this year represents a different twist on that, with Democrat Chad Taylor dropping out to let independent Greg Orman run unfettered. I'm not sure that was such a good idea, but Orman has a lot more money to work with, and he might woo more Republicans -- they're pretty regimented on the far right at the moment, but in doing so they've pissed a lot of their own off. Also see Nate Silver. As for the governor, Brownback is widely regarded as a complete fuck up -- I look forward to campaign commercials showing him and Rick Perry praying for rain. But oddly enough he's not only doubled down on the lie that his tax cuts are "working" -- I think that's a euphemism for rich-getting-richer; the new joke is that the only thing flatter than Kansas is the Kansas economy -- but instead of moving center to pick up votes he's been moving right for more money. To be specific, the Kochs have been trying to kill wind power subsidies, which many Republicans (including Brownback until his flip) favor because it means manufacturing and service jobs plus big royalties to farmers. The Kochs regard wind power as heresy against free markets, but if you want to dig a bit deeper, see Lee Fang: Charles Koch founded anti-environment group to protect big oil industry handouts.

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Monday, September 1, 2014

Music: Current count 23744 [23701] rated (+43), 523 [530] unrated (-7).

Main thing that happened this week was that I stumbled across the Catalytic-Sound website on Bandcamp. Ken Vandermark set this up, and it currently showcases 137 albums by Vandermark and several of his closely aligned friends: Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, and Paal Nilssen-Love. (Bassist Ingebrigt Háker Flaten has a comparable website with a good deal of overlap.) Shortly after I wrote my first Village Voice piece on Vandermark, he sent me a big box of his recordings -- I was thinking of doing something similar to my Parker-Shipp CG but never seemed to have the time -- so many of these are familiar. In fact, next RS column has a list of 80 Catalytic-Sound records I've previously reviewed/rated. Still, the site fills in some gaps, so I spent a good deal of last week picking off the Vandermark releases (I'll get back to Brötzmann et al. in due course). One problem is that not every album can be streamed completely, but the exceptions are (at present, anyway) few. Still, several omissions particularly disappointed me: the early Vandermark Quartet album Big Head Eddie (1993), and the brand new Audio One: The Midwest School (2014) -- its companion, An International Report, was the week's top find (I also gave an A- to the early Caffeine). One I have yet to get to is the 7-CD DKV Trio: Past Present box.

I suppose you could make arguments both ways as to whether omitting tracks maximizes cash returns -- the idea behind making all this music available is to sell it -- but for someone who tries to cover as wide a swath as possible and who has little time to double back, these sites are a terrific convenience and help. I wish there were more of them, and hope they stay as open as possible.

I haven't been able to update the blog this past week, although I occasionally do still receive mail about nonsense comments, so it must be sort of working some of the time. I haven't made any real progress toward moving on, and hardly know where to begin.

Recommended music links:

• Jason Gubbels: Notable Jazz Recordings of the 1980s (Pt. 3): Julius Hemphill [A-], George Russell [B+], John Carter [B+], Pat Metheny [B], Ran Blake [A-], Detail, Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy [A-], Anthony Braxton [A-], Billy Bang [A-], Either/Orchestra

New records rated this week:

• Audio One: An International Report (2014, Audiographic): yet another Vandermark large band, live at Green Mill, expect action, don't be too picky [bc]: A-
• Cory Branan: The No-Hit Wonder (2014, Bloodshot): singer-songwriter from Mississippi, went to rock in Memphis but country songs are fresher [r]: B+(*)
• The Bug: Angels & Devils (2014, Ninja Tune): best when he goes upbeat with that dub thing, but also has a penchant for horror soundtrack poses [r]: B+(*)
• Common: Nobody's Smiling (2014, Def Jam): Chicago rapper explores and deplores his home town, not that it isn't tough everywhere else [r]: B+(***)
• Eliana Cuevas: Espejo (2014, ALMA): originally from Venezuela, now "Canada's Latin Music Queen" -- a small fish in a barren pond [cd]: B
• Dirty Loops: Loopified (2014, Verve): three Swedish gents: synth fireworks and histrionic vocals driven by a frantic post-disco beat [r]: C+
• Four Year Strong: Go Down in History (2014, Pure Noise, EP): 5-song EP by punkish group so irrepressibly loud and catchy they're extra annoying [r]: B-
• Larry Fuller: Larry Fuller (2013-14 [2014], Capri): mainstream pianist, came up working with singers and plays juicy standards in this trio, "C Jam Blues" a fave [cd]: B+(***)
• Richard Galliano: Sentimentale (2014, Resonance): French accordion player works the jazz tradition for sentimental moods, played up to the hilt [cd]: A-
• Ariana Grande: My Everything (2014, Island/Republic): no doubt she has what it takes to be a pop star; the question is whether she can make us care [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Harland's Voyager: Vipassana (2014, GSI Studios): mainstream drummer's second album, assembles a fancy band then wastes it with vocal dressing [cdr]: B-
• Horse Meat Disco: Volume IV (2014, Strut): old disco obscurities remixed to sound like old disco obscurities, plus "Gettin' to Know You" [r]: B+(**)
• Ricky Kej/Wouter Kellerman: Winds of Samsara (2014, Listen 2 Africa): Indian keyboard player meets South African flautist for synth-not-so-exotica [cd]: C
• Wiz Khalifa: Blacc Hollywood (2014, Atlantic): after two plays, all I can confirm is that this stoned rapper makes agreeable background music [r]: B+(**)
• J Mascis: Tied to a Star (2014, Sub Pop): Dinosaur Jr. frontman returns to form, his voice cracking and hiding behind some pretty decent guitar [r]: B+(*)
• Brad Paisley: Moonshine in the Trunk (2014, Arista): first half party anthems and livid fantasies; on the backstretch turns into a crunchy con [r]: B-
• Jamie Saft/Steve Swallow/Bobby Previte: The New Standard (2014, Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Carl Saunders: America (2013 [2014], Summit): spent most of his life in big bands but sounds great as the sole horn here, even when the covers turn corny [cd]: B+(*)
• Side A: In the Abstract (2013 [2014], Not Two): Ken Vandermark reeds trio with Havard Wiik and Chad Taylor, more varied than Free Fall but lands there [bc]: B+(**)
• Spider Bags: Frozen Letter (2014, Merge): garage-punk with a talkie-voiced singer who seems worth listening to, plus they can stretch a riff [r]: B+(*)
• Ed Stone: King of Hearts (2014, Sapphire Music): guitarist-singer, touted as "the new George Benson," he isn't even that, much less the old one [cd]: C+
• Street Priest: More Nasty (2012 [2014], Humbler): guitar-bass-drums trio, can't (or won't) fake the funk so they bust it into shards and stray noise [cdr]: B+(**)
• Randy Travis: Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am (2012 [2014], Warner Brothers): covers from the classics to Kristofferson, leftovers from Vol. 1 but ring truer [r]: B+(**)
• Ken Vandermark's Topology Nonet: Impressions of Po Music (2013, Okka Disk): Joe McPhee plays McPhee a generation removed, scaled up, not so po [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Cables to the Ace (2014, Communicating Vessels): [cd]: B

Old records rated this week:

• AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: Hidden in the Stomach (1996 [1997], Silkheart): Ken Vandermark joins Mats Gustafsson's rowdy trio, highlight Haden and Ayler covers [r]: B+(**)
• AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: I Wonder If I Was Screaming (2000, Crazy Wisdom): tighter songwriting limits meltdown by combustible sax men [bc]: B+(**)
• Billy Bang Quintet: Invitation (1982, Soul Note): scrounging, found one I hadn't heard and didn't find it especially remarkable, relatively [r]: B+(**)
• Caffeine: Caffeine (1993 [1994], Okka Disk): Ken Vandermark, Jim Baker (piano), Steve Hunt (drums): I've never heard Baker play so explosively -- sure lights V up [r]: A-
• The John Carter Octet: Dauwhe (1982, Black Saint): adds decorative flute, oboe, tuba, African references to more visceral quartet with Bobby Bradford [r]: B+(**)
• Cinghiale [Mars Williams/Ken Vandermark]: Hoofbeats of the Snorting Swine (1995 [1996], Eighth Day): Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams play sax/clarinet duets, w/surprising interactions [bc]: B+(***)
• DK3: Neutrons (1997 [1998], Quarterstick): Ken Vandermark trio with guitar-drums from Jesus Lizard, one of those post-rock experiments he no longer does [bc]: B+(***)
• The Frame Quartet: 35mm (2009, Okka Disk): Vandermark 4, scratches second sax for an admixture of electronics, interesting but not quite the same [bc]: B+(***)
• The Kevin Norton Ensemble: Knots (1997, Music & Arts): drummer-vibraphonist, toys with Monk and swaps in various clarinets, a mix converging on same [r]: B+(***)
• NRG Ensemble: Bejazzo Gets a Facelift (1997, Atavistic): post-Hal Russell group with Mars Williams and Ken Vandermark racing, crashing, flips [bc]: B+(***)
• Territory Band-4: Company Switch (2004 [2005], Okka Disk, 2CD): Vandermark 11-piece big band, for once does more than just thrash and raise hell [bc]: B+(**)
• The Thing: Action Jazz (2006, Smalltown Superjazz): Mats Gustafsson's power sax trio diversifies, not the worst thing that can happen to them [bc]: B+(**)
• Vandermark Quartet: Solid Action (1994, Platypus): a blast from the past, when V was straddling avant rock and jazz, making trouble for both [bc]: B+(***)
• Ken Vandermark: Standards (1994 [1995], Quinnah): four "improvising trios," nothing standard, just a first taste of DKV, more Mars, some guitar thrash [bc]: B+(**)
• Ken Vandermark: Strade d'Acqua/Roads of Water (2008 [2010], Multi Kulti): soundtrack, hushed tones, moderate tempos, a little color, everyone makes nice [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: From the Region (Delmark)
• Charles Lloyd: Manhattan Stories (1965, Resonance, 2CD): September 16
• Pete Magadini: Bones Blues (1977, Sackville/Delmark)
• Dean Magraw & Eric Kamau Gravatt: Fire on the Nile (Red House): October 14
• Parker Abbott Trio: The Wayfinders (self-released): October 23
• Don Pullen: Richard's Tune (1975, Sackville/Delmark)

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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Having a lot of trouble focusing these days. Partly the number of things broken and need of (often expensive, sometimes just time consuming) repairs has been mind-boggling. And with the blog on the blink, I've fallen into a two-day week rut, compiling "Music Week" on Mondays then trying to catch up with the world on "Weekend Roundup" on Sundays. Several of the bits below could have been broken out into separate posts -- indeed, I wonder if they shouldn't all be.

I'm thinking especially of the Michelle Goldberg "Two-State" comment as something I could have written much more on. I don't know if I made the point clearly enough below, so let me try to sum it up once more: there are several distinct but tightly interlocked problems with Two-State: (1) the natural constituency for Two-State (at least among pro-Israelis) is the "liberal Zionists" -- an ideology based on an unsustainable contradiction, and therefore a diminishing force -- and without supporters Two-State is doomed to languish; (2) when liberals break from Zionism (which is inevitable if they have both principles and perception) they must do so by committing to universal rights, which means they must at least accept One-State as a desirable solution (Goldberg, by the way, fails this test); (3) as long as [illiberal] Zionists refuse to implement Two-State (and they have a lot of practice at staving it off), liberals (anyone with a desire for peace and justice) should regroup and insist on universal rights (e.g., One-State); (4) under pressure, I think that Zionists will wind up accepting some version of Two-State rather than risking the ethnic dilution of One-State. People like Goldberg would be better off getting ahead of this curve rather than trying to nitpick it. Someone like Netanyahu has thousands of excuses for postponing agreement on a viable Two-State solution. On the other hand, he has no legitimate defense against charges that Israel is treading on the basic human rights of millions of Palestinians under occupation. That's where you want to focus the political debate. And that shouldn't be hard given Israel's recent demonstration of its abuse of power.

The march to war against ISIS is another subject worthy of its own post. There are many examples, but the one I was most struck by this week was a letter to the Wichita Eagle, which reads:

The threat of ISIS appears similar to the threat of the Nazis before World War II. The Europeans ignored Adolf Hitler's rising power because they were tired of war.

As ISIS spreads through the Middle East at will, our nation's leaders are assessing how to counter this threat. ISIS is well-equipped, having seized abandoned equipment the United States gave the Iraqi army, and it is growing in strength, numbers and brutality.

What is the U.S. to do? That decision is in the hands of our nation's leaders. However, with the future leader of ISIS having said in 2009 to U.S. soldiers who had held him prisoner, "I'll see you in New York," trying to avoid conflict because we're tired of war should not be the determining factor.

Much of Europe succumbed to Hitler because Europeans were "tired of war."

Similar? Germany had the second largest economy in the world in the 1930s, one that was reinvigorated by massive state spending on munitions at a time when the rest of the world was languishing in depression. Even so, Hitler's appetite far exceeded his grasp. Germany was able to score some quick "blitzkrieg" victories over France, Norway, and Poland, and occupy those countries through fronts offered by local fascists -- the Vichy government in France, Quisling in Norway, etc. But even given how large and strong Germany was, it was unable to sustain an assault on the British Isles, and its invasion of Russia stalled well short of the Urals. And, of course, provoking the US into entering the war hastened Germany's loss, but that loss was very likely anyway. It turns out that the world is not such an easy place to conquer, and authoritarian regimes breed resistance everywhere they tread.

In contrast, ISIS is a very limited backwater rebellion. Its extremist Sunni salafism limits it to about one-quarter of Iraq and maybe one-half of Syria, and it was only able to flourish in those areas because they have been severely war-torn for many years. They lack any sort of advanced manufacturing base. Their land is mostly desert, so very marginal for agriculture. Their "war machine" is built on confiscated weapons caches, which will quickly wear out or be exhausted. They do have some oil, but lack refineries and chemical plants. Moreover, their identity is so narrow they will be unable to extend their rule beyond war-torn Sunni regions, where they're often viewed as more benign (or at leas less malign) than the Assad and Maliki regimes.

So it's hard to imagine any scenario where ISIS might expand beyond its current remote base: comparing it to Germany under Hitler is laughable. The one thing they do have in common is an enthusiasm for war, developed out of a desire to avenge past wars. You might say that that the West after WWI was "tired of war" but that seems more like a sober assessment of how much was lost and how little gained even in winning that war -- after Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans are similarly dismayed at how much they've lost and how little they've gained after more than a decade of war. Many Germans, on the other hand, were willing to entertain the delusion that they only lost due to treachery, and that a rematch would solve all their problems. It's easy in retrospect to see this asymmetry in war lust as a "cause" of the war, but jumping from that insight to a conclusion that the West could have prevented WWII by standing up to Hitler sooner is pure fantasy. To prevent WWII you'd have to go back to Versailles and settle the first phase of what Arno Mayer later dubbed "the thirty-years war of the 20th century" on more equitable terms -- as effectively (albeit not all that consciously) happened after WWII.

As with post-WWI Germans, ISIS' enthusiasm for war is rooted in many years of scars -- scrapes with the French and British colonialists, with Israel, with brutal Baathist dictators, with the US invasion of Iraq and American support for Kurdish and Shiite militias. Most ISIS soldiers grew up with war and know little else -- in this the people they most closely resemble are not the Nazis but the Taliban, a group which resisted long Russian and American occupations, separated by a bloody civil war and a short-lived, brutal but ineffective period in power. On the other hand the idea that the US should shrug off their "war weariness" and plunge into another decade-plus struggle with another Taliban knock-off isn't very inspiring. Isn't repeating the same steps hoping for different results the very definition of insanity?

Still, the war drums keep beating. The Wichita Eagle has had three such op-eds in the last week on ISIS: from Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, and Trudy Rubin -- each with the sort of screeching hysteria and ignorance of ecology I associate with finding roaches under the bathroom lavoratory. Clearly, what gets their goat more than anything is the very idea of an Islamic State: it looms for these people as some sort of existential threat that must be exterminated at any cost -- a reaction that is itself every bit as arbitrary, absolutist, and vicious as what they think they oppose. But in fact it's merely the logical response to the past wars that this same trio have urged us into. It's worth recalling that there was a day when small minds like these were equally convinced that the Germans and Japanese were all but genetically disposed to hatred and war. (Robert Morgenthau, for instance, wanted to spoil German farms with salt so they wouldn't be able to feed enough people to field an army -- that was 1945?) Europe broke a cycle of war that had lasted for centuries, not by learning to be more vigilant at crushing little Hitlers but by joining together to build a prosperous and equitable economy. The Middle East -- long ravaged by colonialism, corruption, and war -- hasn't been so lucky, but if it is to turn around it will be more due to "war weariness" than to advances in drone technology. The first step forward will be for the war merchants to back away -- or get thrown out, for those who insist on learning their lessons the hard way.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Michelle Goldberg: Liberal Zionism Is Dying. The Two-State Solution Shouldn't Go With It. This starts off with a point (a major concession, really) that bears repeating:

  In 1948, Hannah Arendt published an essay in the magazine Commentary -- at the time still a liberal magazine -- titled "To Save the Jewish Homeland." She lamented the increasingly militaristic, chauvinistic direction of Zionism, the virtual unanimity among Jews in both the United States and Palestine that "Arab and Jewish claims are irreconcilable and only a military decision can settle the issue; the Arabs, all Arabs, are our enemies and we accept this fact; only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines believe in justice, and only shlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to propaganda and machine guns . . . and we will consider anybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back."

  This nationalist strain of Zionism, she predicted, might succeed in establishing a state, but it would be a modern-day Sparta, "absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities." It would negate the very humanistic Jewish values that originally fed the Zionist dream. "Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people," she writes. "Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland."

  It's difficult to avoid the conclusion, sixty-six years later, that she was right.

  Goldberg then cites Antony Lerman's recent The End of Liberal Zionism:

  The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals -- and I was one, once -- subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right -- this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink. [ . . . ]

  The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.

  "Liberal Zionist" is a contradiction that cannot survive. Indeed, in Israel it is all but dead. The key tenet of liberalism is belief in equal rights for all. In Israel it is virtually impossible to find any political party -- even "far left" Meretz -- willing to advance equal rights for the "Palestinian citizens of Israel" much less for those Palestinians under occupation. On the other hand, the debate as to whether Zionism is inherently racist has been proven not just in theory but empirically. As Max Blumenthal shows in Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, everywhere you look in Israel you see growing evidence of racism.

  In America, it's long been possible for many people (not just Jews) to combine domestic liberalism with an unthinking, uncritical allegiance to Israel. Of course it's getting harder to sustain the ignorance that allows one to think of Israel as a just nation. (The so-called Christian Zionists -- or as Chris Hedges puts it, "American fascists" -- require fewer illusions, since they are likely to be racist and militarist at home as well as abroad.) It sounds like Goldberg -- an early J-Street supporter -- has started to make the break, but she's still not willing to go full-liberal and endorse full and equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians -- the so-called One-State Solution. She wants to salvage the so-called Two-State Solution, with Israel returning (for the most part) to its 1967 borders and an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank (with or without Jerusalem as its capitol).

  The Two-State Solution was originally proposed by the UN in 1947, but the Zionist leadership weren't satisfied with the proposed borders, and the Palestinian leadership objected to the whole thing, preferring a unified democracy (with a 2-to-1 Arab majority) where nobody would have to move. After the 1949-50 armistice lines were drawn, Israel greatly expanded its borders and had expelled over 700,000 Arabs from its territory, ensuring Jewish demographic dominance. Those borders, which held until 1967, have long been accepted as permanent by most Palestinian groups and by all neighboring Arab countries: a deal that could have been made by Israel any time since the mid-1990s, but which wasn't, because no ruling party in Israel would accept such a deal, nor would the US or the so-called Quartet (which had endorsed the deal) apply significant pressure on Israel to settle. There are lots of reasons why Israel has taken such an intransigent stand. One is that the demise of liberalism leaves Israel with no effective "peace block" -- the price of occupation has become so low, and the political liabilities of peace so high, that Israel currently has no desire to change the status quo.

  This is, of course, a huge problem for anyone who believes in equal rights and/or who puts a positive value on peace in the Middle East. Such people -- by which I mean pretty much all of us (except for a few warmongers and apocalypse-hungry Christians) -- can only make progress toward a settlement by putting pressure on Israel, which is to say by increasing the costs to Israel of its present occupation policies. One way is to counter Israeli propaganda, to expose the facts of occupation and to delegitimize Israel's position. Another step is BDS, with the prospect of growing ever more extensive and restrictive. Another is to adjust the list of acceptable outcomes: that may mean giving precedence to the inclusive, equal rights One-State Solution over the unsuccessful Two-State scheme.

  The fact is that Two-State was a bad idea in 1947 and remains a bad idea today: it is only slightly less bad now because the "ethnic cleansing" that could have been avoided in 1947 is ancient history now; it is also slightly worse because it leaves us with a lot of refugees who will still be unable to return to Israel, and who still have to be compensated and patriated elsewhere. The dirty secret of the Two-State Solution is that it leaves Israel unaltered (except for the relatively trivial loss of some settlements) -- free to remain the racist, militarist Sparta it has become ever since 1948. That's why Israel will choose Two-State over One-State: Two-State guarantees that their Jewish state will remain demographically supreme, whereas One-State risks dilution of their ethnic solidarity. But even if the West's game plan is Two-State all along, you're not going to get there without playing the One-State card. If a US administration finally decides we need to settle this conflict, it won't start (as Obama did) by demanding a settlement freeze; it will start by demanding equal rights for all within whatever jurisdictions exist, and complete freedom from Israel for any jurisdictions that do not offer full and equal Israeli citizenship. Only then will progress be made. The problem with Goldberg's plea is that she's still willing to sacrifice her principles for Israel's identity.

• Ezra Klein: The DNC'a braidead attack on Rand Paul: Paul's been reading Hillary Clinton's neocon ravings, and responded: "We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS." The DNC's response: "It's disappointing that Rand Paul, as a Senator and a potential presidential candidate, blames America for all the problems in the world, while offering reckless ideas that would only alienate us from the global community. [ . .  ] That type of 'blame America' rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a conference of isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing in the world. In fact, Paul's proposals would make America less safe and less secure." Klein adds:

  This is the brain-dead patriotism-baiting that Democrats used to loathe. Now they're turning it on Paul.

  There are a few things worth noting here. The first is the ferocity with which the DNC responded to an attack that was, in truth, aimed more at Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The second is the degree to which a Rand Paul-Hillary Clinton race would scramble the politics of national security, with Democrats running against Paul in much the way Bush ran against Kerry. And the third is that it's still the case in foreign policy, the real divide isn't left vs. right, but interventionists vs. non-interventionists.

  Actually, the "real" political divide is between status quo cons like Obama and Clinton on the "left" side and various flavors of crackpots (including Rand) on the "right." But in foreign policy, the latter have come to include a growing number of non-interventionists, not so much because they believe in peace and justice as because they've come to realize that imperial wars bind us closer to the dark-skinned aliens we claim to be helping, and because some of them begin to grasp that the security apparatus of the state they so loathe (mostly because it's democratic, or pretends to be) could just as easily turn on them. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton have managed to hire virtually every known "liberal interventionist" as part of their efforts to toady up to the military-security complex, even though virtually none of their real-world supporters buy into that crap. Someone smarter than Rand Paul could turn this into a wedge issue, but he'll tie it to something stupid like preventing the Fed from counteracting recessions.

  Also see Paul Rosenberg: Don't do it, Hillary! Joining forces with neocons could doom Democrats: One thing on his mind is LBJ and Vietnam (who like Hillary was willing to do "dumb stuff" to not appear cowardly), but there's also this:

  Here's the dirtiest of dirty little secrets -- and it's not really a secret, it's just something no one ever talks about: The entire jihadi mess we're facing now all descends from the brilliant idea of "giving the Soviets their own Vietnam" in Afghanistan. How's that for learning a lesson from Vietnam? Well, that's the lesson that Jimmy Carter's crew learned -- and Ronald Reagan's gang was only too happy to double down on.

• Richard Silverstein: The Jingoism of Anti-Jihadism: Starts with a Netanyahu quote from September 11, 2001, that's worth being reminded of (from New York Times):

  Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror."

  I remember watching him on TV at the time, as well as a similarly gloating Shimon Peres, and a slightly more somber John Major offering to share with the US Britain's vast experience in cultivating terrorists. You couldn't ask for better examples of how to react badly and make a problem worse. Silverstein then quotes from Hillary Clinton's Atlantic interview ("They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank -- and we are all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat."):

  Here you have a perfect example of the sickness I outlined above. In the 1950s communism was the bugaboo. Today, it's jihadism. Clinton's conception of the latter uses almost exactly the same terms as those of the Red Scare: words like expansionist, angry, violent, intolerant, brutal, anti-democratic. There's even a touch of Reaganism in Clinton's portrayal of the fall of communism. There's the notion that through all of our machinations against the Soviet Union -- the assassinations, the coups, the propping up of dictators -- all of it helped in some unspecified way to topple Communism. She further bizarrely characterizes our anti-Communist strategy as an "overarching framework," when it was little more than knee-jerk oppositionalism to the Red Menace.

  What is most pathetic about this political stance is that it offers no sense of our own identity, of what we stand for. Instead, it offers a vague, incohate enemy against whom we can unite. We are nothing without such enemies.

  Next up is David Brooks, if you care. Richard Ben Cramer, in How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (by the way, probably the best single book about Israel in the last twenty years) hypothesizes that the reason Israel is so determined not to negotiate an end to the conflict is that its leaders fear losing the shared identity of having a common enemy in the Palestinians. Take the conflict away and the various Jewish subgroups -- the Ashkenazi, Sephardim, Mizrachi, Russians, Americans -- will splinter and turn on each other, fighting over diminishing spoils in a suddenly ordinary state.

  For more on Netanyahu, see Remi Brulin: Israel's decades-long effort to turn the word 'terrorism' into an ideological weapon.

• More Israel links:

  • Richard Silvestein: Meet the New Gaza Ceasefire, Same as the Old Ceasefire.
  • Rana Alshami: The End of 'Operation Protective Edge': "After the long sufferng inflicted upon us by Israel, Gaza was celebrating the victory. [ . . . ] At this moment, the bombing from East and West has completely stopped."
  • Jeff Halper: The Palestinian message to Israel: Deal with us justly. Or disappear: "At least Abbas seems to have gotten the message. He now discards further pointless negotiations with Israel as brokered by the US, preferring to have the UN set a target date for Israeli withdrawal, and perhaps going to the International Criminal Court."
  • Richard Silverstein: IDF Killed Three of Its Own Soldiers After Declaring Hannibal Directive.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Dean Baker: Subverting the Inversions: More Thoughts on Ending the Corporate Income Tax: Baker is arguing that the inefficiencies caused by the Corporate Tax Avoidance Industry are so great that we might be better off eliminating the tax altogether: if there were no tax, there'd be no need for corporations to pay lobbyists and accountants to hide their income, and we'd also eliminate scourges like private equity companies. First obvious problem here is that leaves a $350 billion revenue shortfall, which Baker proposes recovering with higher dividend and capital gains tax rates. (Of course, we should do that anyway.) One long-term problem is that federal taxes have radically shifted from being collected from businesses to individuals, which makes the tax burden more acutely felt by the public. A VAT would help shift this back, but so would anything that tightened up loopholes and reduced corporate tax evasion. Another advantage of having a corporate income tax is that it could be made progressive, which would take an extra bite out of especially large and/or profitable companies -- the former mostly benefitting from weak antitrust enforcement, the latter from monopoly rents -- which would both raise more revenue and take it from companies that are relatively safe from competition. I'm not strictly opposed to what Baker is proposing, but I'd like to see it worked out in a broader context that includes many other tax reforms that tackle inequality, lack of competition, globalization, and patents more systematically. I suspect Baker would prefer this too.

  Also see Baker's Patent Monopolies: The Reason Drug Companies Pushed Synthetic Opioids.

• Andrew Hartman: Hegel Meets Reagan: A review of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

• Medium's CSS is actually pretty f***ing good. [Warning: very nerdy.] CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. The visual design properties of web pages can generally be controlled by attaching CSS code to the "generic markup code" in a web page (something called HTML). Having worked with pre-Web GMLs (Generic Markup Languages, especially the standardized one, SGML), I've always been very "old school" about coding web pages, which means I've never embraced CSS as a programming paradigm. So my reaction here was first one of shock that so much work went into this. (Looks like four programmers for a couple years, although it's unlikely that they only wrote CSS.) I was also at a loss for much of the terminology (LESS? SASS? mixin?), not that I can't guess what "z-index" implies. It's not that I haven't learned anything in the 15 years since I started building web sites, and it's certainly not necessarily the case that what's changed has changed for the better, but if I'm going to get over the hump of embracing this change I need good examples of making it worthwhile. And this, I suspect, is one.

• Anya Schiffrin: The Rise and Fall of Investigative Journalism: An international compendium, spun off from her new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World. This, by the way, is one of the few things I've read this week that make me feel more hopeful.

• Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me: Reprints the title essay, or at least an early draft of it, to Solnit's new book. Of course, I've had clueless men explain things to me, too. (A few clueless women as well, but singling out men is within reasonable statistical norms.) And in groups I have a relatively sensitive CSMA/CD switch, so I'm easily interrupted and loathe to reclaim the floor, so the larger the group the more likely I am to be regaled with unrefuted (not irrefutable) nonsense. Much of my consciousness of such dynamics comes from reading early feminist texts long ago, revelatory even in cases where women are reacting not so much to gender as to implicit power relationships -- something gender was (and not uncommonly still is) inextricably bound up in, but something that didn't end with gender. So Solnit's stories speak to me, even when the precise terminology is slightly off. [One of my favorite tech acronyms, CSMA/CD stands for "carrier sense multiple access with collision detection" -- an algorithm for efficiently deciding when a computer can send data over a common bus network. The same would work for deciding who speaks when in an open room, but actual results are often distorted by volume and ego.]

• A few more links on Michael B. Katz:

  • Robert Greene II: In Memoriam: Michael Katz, 1939-2014: from the blog of the Society for US Intellectual History.
  • Thomas Sugrue: In Memorian: Michael B. Katz

One more little thing. I put aside the August 19, 2014 issue of the Wichita Eagle because I was struck by the following small items on page 3A:

Man sentenced to more than 7 years in prison . . . Scott Reinke, 43, was given 86 months in prison for a series of crimes including burglary, theft, possession of stolen property, making false information and fleeing or attempting to elude law enforcement. . . . In tacking on the additional time last Friday, [Judge Warren] Wilhelm noted Reineke had a criminal history of more than 50 felony convictions.

Kechi man gets nearly 10 years for child porn . . . Jaime Menchaca, 34, of Kechi pleaded guilty to one count of distributing child pornography and was sentenced to 110 months in prison. . . . In his plea, Menchaca admitted that on Sept. 13 he sent an e-mail containing child pornography to a Missouri man.

There's also another piece on page 5A:

Sex offender pleads guilty to child porn . . . Dewey had a 1999 conviction in Pueblo, Colorado, for attempted sexual assault of a child. He admitted in court Monday that he was found last September with images and videos of child pornography that he obtained via the Internet.

Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a 20-year prison term when Dewey is sentenced on Nov. 4.

This struck me as an example of something profoundly skewed in our criminal justice system. I won't argue that child pornography is a victimless crime (although what constitutes pornography can be very subjective), but possession of a single image strikes me as a much more marginal offense than repeated instances of property theft. (I don't think I even noticed the last case until I went back to look for the first two; it's harder to judge.) Glad the burglar/thief is going to jail, but wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for the child porn defendant to spend some time with a shrink, and maybe pay a nominal fine.

Also on the front page of the Eagle is an article called "Kan. GOP lawmakers vow to look out for oil interests": Senator Roberts, Reps. Huelskamp, Pompeo, and Jenkins prostate themselves at a Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association confab. They all agreed they wanted lower taxes and less regulation. Nobody said much about the recent tenfold increase in earthquakes.

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Monday, August 25, 2014

Music: Current count 23701 [23658] rated (+43), 530 [536] unrated (-6).

Was surprised to see rated count over 40, then looked closer and the subtraction result turned out to be an impossible 143. Looks like I slipped a digit two weeks ago. That was about when I had an editing accident and lost several hundred grades, sending me into a panic trying to figure out how to fix the breach. This seems to be the summer of things breaking -- I still figure that's better than the summers of mysterious lung diseases a few years back. Thinking about it, the 43 count means I've been listening to more Rhapsody, which I'll explain by last week's oversized Streamnotes plus the fact that my pending queue is nearly dry (18 new 2014 records, or 10 not counting this week's unpacking). I can remember days when I had more than 100 unrated in the queue. I still have some items from previous years I haven't gotten to (although only 1 of those was from 2013, a piece of vinyl I should look for), so we're talking real low priority stuff. No wonder my eye is wandering.

This year I decided not to do my all-consuming metacritic file (link is to 2013), but needing some kind of aide de memoire I've kept a running list of albums considered noteworthy and assigned priorities to them to give me something to work with. Recently, it looked like this, but since I was weeding out albums once I had heard them, it was pretty much useless for anyone else. So it occurred to me that it would be better to keep those records in, and for that matter to add my grades (where available). The combined file now looks like this. I've added some options to select based on priority levels, so you can get the old format like this if you have any reason to do so. There's also an option to get an even bigger file with all the "priority 0" records I've noted -- everything mentioned in AMG's weekly featured releases gets noted in the data file, even if I consider it to be of no interest whatsoever. Currently the data file lists 1644 records. Since last year's metacritic files ran to (7868+1100) records, I haven't been looking very hard. But as my queue drains I'll work on that some more. (I especially want to beef up the jazz listings.)

I fell behind on Twitter, wound up having to knock out nine tweets to wrap this up. Even so, I skipped a few of the "old music" albums -- they'll show up next Rhapsody Streamnotes, although you can check out Michael Tatum for Joy Division, below. Wrote one tweet for Jeff Palmer -- an organ player in my database I had no other consciousness of -- but played two albums, both good, but when you trade in Victor Lewis (a drummer I revere) for Rashied Ali you get an extra spark.

Speaking of Twitter, I retwitted one from Mike Konczal last night:

Sad that Michael Katz has passed away. A remarkable scholar, very important to me. Read Tom Sugrue's moving tribute: [link]

I added my own two cents:

Let me add that Michael Katz's history of the early school reform movement as class thought control/socialization was a key insight to me.

Katz wrote a lot of books, but the only ones I read were The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (1968; reissued 2001), and Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (1971; expanded 1975). He found that the early proponents of universal education like Horace Mann -- a name we knew because Wichita named a school for him -- were less concerned with offerng opportunities to Irish immigrants than with socializing them in proper New England ways, and conversely that the Irish resisted such efforts to brainwash them. I read these books when I was a high school dropout with my own intense distrust of an educational system that seemed geared to turn us into regimented factory workers (if we survived the army and Vietnam).

Katz later moved on to write about America's welfare system, in books like In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986; expanded 1996), The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1990), and Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History (1995), and more recently has published on immigration. Most recently, he wrote Why Don't American Cities Burn? (2011), about a murder in Philadelphia and all the attendant baggage of race and class. I hadn't thought much about Katz until The Undeserving Poor showed up in one of my recent book trawls. Interesting how his career developed. For more, see this In Memoriam by Thomas Sugrue (whose own books include The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (2005), Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race).

One more Twitter note, or at least semi-related. Medium is either a spinoff or an independent venture funded with Twitter money -- I don't pretend to understand how it works, but I have heard that they have some money to hire writers, and have hired Robert Christgau to write some Expert Witness/Consumer Guide posts. He has an account now that you can follow. He'll explain it all in an introductory post on September 2, followed by the first actual CG reviews on September 5.

Recommended music links:

• Robert Christgau on 'Get On Up': Putting James Brown's Music First
• Jason Gubbels: Ferguson Goddam: 31 Riffs on a Theme: actually, best thing I've read on Ferguson, totally appropriate.
• Michael Tatum: The Best of Joy Division: I gave this record a spin and a very solid A- myself.

New records rated this week:

• Auction Project: Slink (2014, self-released): violinist Heather Martin Bixler outshines the leaders, offering shape and substance to the usual postbop [cd]: B+(*)
• Henry Butler/Steven Bernstein: Viper's Drag (2014, Impulse): band named Hot 9 after Armstrong-Hines, comparisons neither can live up to [r]: B+(***)
• Calle 13: MultiViral (2014, El Abismo/Sony Music Latin): Puerto Rican rappers with a political agenda, unintelligible to folks like me, but at least I feel it [r]: B+(***)
• Brian Eno/Karl Hyde: Someday World (2014, Warp): Eno teams up with an inferior singer, so he tries to compensate by writing better songs [r]: B+(*)
• Dave "Knife" Fabris: Lettuce Prey (2010 [2014], Musea): guitarist into fusion and classical but also makes room for Ran Blake to do his thing [cd]: B-
• Simone Felice: Strangers (2014, Dualtone): one of the Felice Brothers tries his hand solo, forsaking those nice harmonies [r]: B+(*)
• The Felice Brothers: Favorite Waitress (2014, Dualtone): minus Simone, turns out they have more fun and edge, even a taste for mayhem [r]: B+(***)
• FKA Twigs: LP1 (2014, Young Turks): the sort of singer Tricky uses, OK as long as she comes up with music on that level, which isn't often [r]: B
• Hercules & Love Affair: The Feast of the Broken Heart (2014, Moshi Moshi): EDM, a bit slow, cartoonish even, but that's their shtick, isn't it? [r]: B
• Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas: Secret Evil (2014, Instant): Detroit group, straight rock & roll with a slight vocal skew, distinctive I'd say [r]: B+(***)
• Darius Jones/Matthew Shipp: Cosmic Lieder: The Darkseid Recital (2011-13 [2014], AUM Fidelity): dense piano chords slow the saxman down, for better or worse [r]: B+(*)
• Dr. John: Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch (2013 [2014], Concord): a Louis Armstrong tribute that misses its mark on so many levels I never conceived possible before [r]: C
• Roddy Frame: Seven Dials (2014, AED): singer-songwriter from Aztec Camera, 15 years into a solo career has pop charms but no more dazzle [r]: B+(*)
• Phil Haynes: No Fast Food: In Concert (2012 [2014], Corner Store Jazz, 2CD): drummer-led trio with Dave Liebman and Drew Gress, all sharp edges for two live discs [cd]: B+(***)
• Wayne Horvitz: 55: Music and Dance in Concrete (2012 [2014], Cuneiform): i.e., immobile: no swing, no bop, no hop, no strut, just fairly rich chamber jazz [cdr]: B
• Rebecca Kilgore with the Harry Allen Quartet: I Like Men (2013 [2014], Arbors): title concept could use sharper songs, saxophonist could use more space [r]: B+(*)
• Ricardo Lemvo/Makina Loca: La Rumba Soyo (2014, Cumbancha): Congolese star draws big beats and brass from salsa, supercharged with soukous guitar [r]: A-
• John McLaughlin & 4th Dimension: The Boston Record (2013 [2014], Abstract Logix): as the fusion guitarist ages, he eschews transcendence for hard and clunky [r]: B
• Hafez Modirzadeh: In Convergence Liberation (2011 [2014], Pi): George Russell student, explores high concepts with approaches I rarely care for [cd]: B+(**)
• Myriad 3: The Where (2014, ALMA): Canadian piano trio, hits a semi-popular niche like EST even if they aren't the influence [cd]: B+(**)
• Novox: Over the Honeymoon (2014, Label Z Production): French septet with fake funk horns, synths, turntablist, guitarist leader, vocal clutter [cd]: C+
• Picastro: You (2014, Sonic Clang): intriguing little group, basically slowcore with falsetto vocals, fractured and crazed around the edges [r]: B+(*)
• Pink Martini & the Von Trapps: Dream a Little Dream (2013 [2014], Heinz): the extra voices add a somber air, belying camp eclecticism from Brahms to ABBA [r]: B+(*)
• Anthony Pirog: Palo Colorado Dream (2014, Cuneiform): guitar trio with Michael Formanek and Ches Smith, not much flow or groove, feedback helps [cdr]: B+(*)
• Jeff Richman & Wayne Johnson: The Distance (2014, ITI Music): guitar duets, fancier picking than new age but fills that pleasantry niche [cd]: B+(*)
• Ritmos Unidos: Ritmos Unidos (2014, Patois): Latin jazz octet from Indiana, Afro-Cuban bata drums, timbales, the distinctive splash of steel pans [cd]: B+(**)
• Jonah Tolchin: Clover Lane (2014, Yep Roc): NJ singer-songwriter with warm voice and such fine country-folk form he could be new T-Bone Burnett [r]: A-
• Seth Walker: Sky Still Blue (2014, The Royal Potato Family): blues singer-songwriter, hits paydirt with "Jesus (Make My Bed)" but everything else is a bit tepid [r]: B
• The Bill Warfield Big Band: Trumpet Story (2013-14 [2014], Planet Arts): Randy Brecker solos, but the trumpet theme is underdeveloped; Vic Juris shines [r]: B+(*)
• Anna Webber: Simple (2013 [2014], Skirl): sax/flute trio with Matt Mitchell and John Hollenbeck stretching and skewing, best when all three thrash [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Smoke Dawson: Fiddle (1971 [2014], Tompkins Square):old-fashioned Appalachian solo fiddle, obscure reissue of a legend if playing with Peter Stampfel counts [r]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

• Joy Division: The Best of Joy Division (1979-80 [2008], Rhino): [r]: A-
• John Lindberg: Luminosity: Homage to David Izenzon (1992-96 [1996], Music & Arts): [r]: B+(**)
• John Lindberg: Ruminations Upon Ives and Gottschalk (2001 [2003], Between the Lines): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Quintet: Misterioso (1986 [1987], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian Trio: One Time Out (1987 [1989], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Palmer/John Abercrombie/Arthur Blythe/Victor Lewis: Ease On (1992 [2013], Sledgehammer Blues): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Palmer/Arthur Blythe/John Abercrombie/Rashied Ali: Island Universe (1994, Soul Note): organ player goes avant with Rashied Ali/Arthur Blythe, and John Abercrombie follows suit [r]: A-
• Ted Rosenthal: My Funny Valentine (2007 [2008], Tokuma): piano trio nicely balanced for playing 11 juicy standards associated with Helen Merrill [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Richard Galliano: Sentimentale (Resonance): September 30
• Jason Jackson: Inspiration (Jack & Hill Music): October 14
• Kalle Kalima & K-18: Buñuel de Jour (TUM): September 16
• Dave Liebman Big Band: A Tribute to Wayne Shorter (Summit)
• Ivo Perelman/Karl Berger: Reverie (Leo)
• Carl Saunders: America (Summit)
• Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites (TUM, 2CD): September 16
• Tim Sparks: Chasin' the Boogie (Tonewood)

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Sunday, August 24, 2014

The first thing to note here is that the Four Wars of 2014 -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza -- are still going strong, and the conflicting interests super- and not-so-super-powers have in them offer excuses enough to frustrate any efforts at mediation. There have also been reports of shelling along the India-Pakistan border in Jammu, and the US is upset about China challenging a US "reconnaissance plane" near the Chinese border.

The least-reported of these conflicts is in the Ukraine, where various "pro-West" or "pro-Europe" forces staged a coup against Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovich in February. As Ukraine shifted to the West, various revolts broke out in heavily Russian southwest Ukraine. Crimea declared independence and asked to be annexed by Russia, which Putin readily agreed to. Other separatist militias seized power elsewhere in southeastern Ukraine, and the "pro-West" Kiev government has been trying to suppress the revolt the old-fashioned way, with bombing and strafing. It's unclear to what extent Russia has been actively promoting and supporting the separatists: NATO and Kiev have asserted various instances, and Putin has steadfastly denied them.

The result so far is that the civil war in Donbass (around Dontesk) has resulted in about 4,000 deaths -- I don't think that includes the Malaysian airliner that was shot down, surely an accident but part of the war's "collateral damage." The US has clearly sided with the "pro-Western" government in Kiev and taken a leading roll in attempting to punish Russia with sanctions. No one thinks Russia is totally innocent here, but the US position is the result of a long neocon campaign to advance NATO to Russia's borders, to corner and cower Russia to prevent the emergence of any non-US military or economic power center. And the failure to cover this war is largely due to blithe assumptions of US benevolence and Russian malevolence going back to Cold War dogma, as well as an abiding belief that force is an effective solution to the world's problems.

If the US was not so entangled in its faith in military force, you would see a concerted effort to mediate the four wars. Rather, Obama has embraced force as America's fundamental strategy in all four arenas. (Syria is only slightly murky here: the US dislikes both sides but can't see any option other than searching for a third side to arm.) The US is most directly involved in Iraq, where we've taken a sudden interest in protecting small minorities like Yazidis and Turkmen who have the most propaganda value. Then there is Gaza, where the ceasefire has been repeatedly broken by Israel, still refusing to open Gaza's borders to allow a semblance of normal everyday life. As I've written before, the "truce" terms Hamas offered at the beginning of the recent military hostilities were completely fair and reasonable. Netanyahu's continued rejection of the terms should make you reconsider just who "the terrorists" are in this conflict. The Gaza death count has continued to climb over 2100. Another Israeli civilian was killed in recent days, bringing the total to 4, in one of the most one-sided massacres of recent times.

While it is possible that ISIS is indeed a terrorist group one cannot negotiate with -- at least that's what the hawks want us to believe -- Hamas has practically been begging for a deal since they entered Palestinian electoral politics in 2006. Israel has not only rejected their every overture, Israel repeatedly drags them back into armed conflict. The US is schizophrenic about this: on the one hand we spend a lot of money trying to support the "good Palestinians" over in the West Bank in the vain belief that if we can improve their economic well-being that will help us move toward peace. On the other hand, any time Israel decides to trash whatever good we've done, we applaud and make sure to replenish their arms. I want to quote a section from Josh Ruebner's Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (p. 190):

Promoting "economic growth" for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, while simultaneously flooding Israel with the weapons and providing it with the diplomatic protection it needs to entrench this military occupation, is a nonsensical proposition. At best, these policies reveal that the United States is working at cross-purposes; at worst, they signal that it is trying to reconcile Palestinians to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly more palatable. What USAID fails to understand publicly is that Israel's military occupation is specifically designed to de-develop the Palestinian economy, not to encourage Palestinian economic growth.

Israel's eviscertation of teh Palestinian economy is integrally woven into the very fabric of its military occupation in innumerable ways. The hundreds of roadblocks, checkpoints and other barriers to movement that Israel maintains in the West Bank and East Jerusalem inhibit the transportation of people and goods, which forces the ever-increasing localization of the economy. Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has reduced its population to penury and almost total reliance on international charity for survival. Even before, Israel's formal imposition of the blockade on Gaza in 2007, Israel's earlier destruction of the Gaza Strip's only airport and its prevention of the building of a seaport there had greatly constricted Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from engaging in international trade. Similarly, Israel's wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its control of the West Bank's border corssings with Jordan, greatly reduce trade opportunities as well. Finally, Israel's widespread razing of Palestinian agricultural land and fruit-bearing trees, along with the expropriation of Palestinian land and water resources for its illegal settlements, have devastated the Palestinian agricultural sector.

The US at least nominally wants peace in Palestine, just not enough to stand up to Israel, which at most wants quiet but is willing to settle for hatred as long as Palestinians remain powerless -- which is one effect of mired in a hopeless economy. In one telling note, it's worth noting that the power plant in Gaza that Israel blows up every few years is insured by the US: Israel breaks it, we pay to fix it, then we pay Israel to break it again. It's a perfect example of government waste, but Americans don't seem able to see that, in large part because we think our interests extend everywhere, we think we have to choose sides everywhere, and we choose those sides on the basis of ignorance and identity.

Some scattered links this week:

• Ed Kilgore: Jeffords and the GOP's March to the Right: Vermont's last Republican Senator, James Jeffords, has died. He's best remembered for switching parties in 2001, denying Cheney's stranglehold on the Senate. Kilgore drew up a list of "moderate" Republican senators from 1976, just 25 years back, on the even of the Reagan juggernaut, and found 17 (of 38) qualified (not including the likes of Bob Dole and Howard Baker Jr.), adding VP Nelson Rockefeller and (more of a stretch) President Gerald Ford. Since then the Republican Party has been purged as rigorously as Stalin's CP -- the only division today seems to be between those who are categorically insane and those who are merely deranged.

• Philip Weiss: Hillary Clinton just lost the White House in Gaza -- same way she lost it in Iraq the last time: Some wishful thinking here, but it's worth noting that Clinton has strayed outside the bounds of partisan propriety, notably in attacking Obama's stated intent -- I'm hesitant to call it a policy without more evidence that he's actually trying to follow it -- of "not doing stupid shit."

  Hillary's done it again. Her pro-war comments in that famous interview two weeks ago have painted her into a right wing neoconservative corner. In 2016, a Democratic candidate will again emerge to run to her left and win the party base, again because of pro-war positioning on the Middle East that Hillary has undertaken in order to please neoconservatives.

  The last time it was Iraq, this time it was Gaza. Hillary Clinton had nothing but praise for Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, and echoed him in saying that Hamas just wanted to pile up dead civilians for the cameras. She was "hepped up" to take on the jihadists, she said that Obama's policy of "not doing stupid shit" was not a good policy. She undermined Obama for talking to Iran and for criticizing Israel over the number of civilian casualties in Gaza. She laid all the fault for the massacre at Hamas's door.

  And once again, Hillary Clinton will pay for this belligerency; she won't tenant the White House.

  Weiss knows he's "going out on a limb" so he cites some polling that's worth noting:

  Consider: Gallup says that Israel's actions in Gaza were unjustified in the eyes of the young, people of color, women, and Democrats, and overwhelmingly in some of those categories 51-25% disapproval among the young. 47-35 percent among Democrats, 44-33 among women, 49-25 among nonwhites.

  The problem, of course, is that while the majority of Democrats may have broken from AIPAC over Gaza, how many Democrats in Congress have? Not Elizabeth Warren. Not even Bernie Sanders. Certainly some hypothetical Democrat could score points against Clinton in primaries by painting her as a warmonger and pointing out how her obeissance to AIPAC only serves to prolong conflict in the Middle East, but it's impossible to identify a real Democrat who could effectively make those points. (Dennis Kucinich, for instance, tried twice, failed abysmally, and doesn't even have his House seat to stand on now. Howard Dean pretty much permanently discredited himself when he became a lobbyist for the Iranian terrorist group MEK.)

  The main thing that bothers me about Clinton isn't policy -- not that there aren't many points to disagree on -- so much as the stench of dynasty. More and more the Democratic Party resembles the so-called progressive parties of Pakistan and India, cynically ruled by corrupt families and cliques that needn't offer their supporters anything more than a small measure of protection from the viciousness of their opponents. You'd think that 238 years after the declaration of democracy in America we would have become more sophisticated than that -- indeed, we probably were, but have recently devolved into the present kleptocracy. Obama at least offered a symbolic break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties, but in the end that was only symbolic: his administration was rife with Clinton partisans, and he sealed the party's fate by breaking up the grassroots organization that had elected two Democratic Congresses -- foolishly or cynically preferring to "deal" with lobbyists and Republicans rather than risk democracy within his own party.

• More Israel Links:

  • Kate: Soldiers fire on Palestinian protesters in Nablus, including 14-year old boy: compendium of many news reports. One reports a poll where: "over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason"; "over 75 percent of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews"; "sixty percent of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home"; 40 percent said "Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked"; 55 percent said "Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites." Hard to see how anyone could look at these figures and not recognize that Israel has become profoundly racist and segregationist.
  • Gershom Gorenberg: It's Time to Stop 'Managing' the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Just End It: "The demands raised in the failed Cairo negotiations are exactly what Israel and the Palestinian unity government should have sat down to discuss in early June."
  • Annie Robbins: 'Common Dreams' website traps Hasbara troll spewing anti-Semitism: An example of false flag propaganda, meant to poison serious discussion of Israel.
  • Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: The constant presence of death in the lives of Palestinian children.
  • Philip Weiss: 'NYT' op-ed calls on Jews to abandon liberal Zionism and push for equal rights: In a nutshell, "equal rights" is the common denominator argument for all occasions, but especially for beleaguered minorities wherever they may be. It's intuitively right, and it's the one settlement that can appeal to all sides. It is, therefore, a position frequently advanced by Diaspora Jews. On the other hand, Israel is an ethnocracy, a place where one "chosen people" controls the state and uses it to oppress others -- a distinction that is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Cites the piece, Antony Lerman: The End of Liberal Zionism, which says: "I still understand its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I judged it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe."

Also, a few links for further study:

• Patrick Cockburn: How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate: Excerpt from Cockburn's forthcoming [January 6?] book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. There is a shortage of reliable info about ISIS, as well as a lot of propaganda. (The most laughable was Trudy Rubin claiming to know "The Truth About ISIS.") Not sure this helps a lot either, although the key point that the jihadists derive from the US disruption of Iraq is well taken. More detailed and less inflamatory is The leader of ISIS is 'a classic maneuver warrior', although the tactical comparisons to Genghis Khan strike me as bullshit.

• Thomas Frank: "Wanted Coltrane, Got Kenny G": Interview with Cornell West, reference is to Obama. "It's not pessimistic, brother, because this is the blues. We are blues people. The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark. That's different."

• Rahawa Haile: Should Musicians Play Tel Aviv? This kicks around the various reasons foreign musicians shouldn't play in Israel, with some asides on other related cases -- apartheid-era South Africa, obviously, but Haile also mentions concerts in "unsavory" dictatorships like Libya (under Gaddafi) and Turkmenistan, plus Stevie Wonder's decision to not bother with Florida after the Zimmerman verdict. Oddly, Haile spends much more time on Israel's often rabid reaction to African refugees -- mostly from Sudan, where Israel tried to score anti-Arab propaganda points -- than with Israel's second- or third-class treatment of Palestinians (actually, those in Gaza are probably more like fourth). (Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel has quite a bit on Israeli racism against African refugees, but that is just one instance of the more general loathing right-wing Israelis hold for nearly all goyim.) Neil Tennant is quoted: "in Israel anyone who buys a ticket can attend a concert." That, of course, depends on what you mean by "in Israel": if you live in Ramallah, 15 miles away, you can't buy tickets to see the Pet Shop Boys in Tel Aviv, nor can you if you live in Gaza, more like 40 miles away. Tennant is not only wrong, he is wrong in a particularly misleading way: his experience of Israel is of a normal, relatively peaceful and prosperous society, which is true enough for the "Tel Aviv bubble" but completely false for much of the territory subject to Israeli state terror. One thing that perpetuates Israeli state terror is the sense that its preferred citizens enjoy of never having to pay a price for their consent to living in such a state. When an international artists boycotts Israel, that at least sends a message that there is some cost to running such a state, even if it's not likely to have any real effect. The fact is that Israel cannot be forced into changing its ways: the only way change will come about is if Israelis become conscious of how far their nation has strayed from international norms of peace and human rights. For that reason I welcome all such boycotts. On the other hand, I don't keep track of who played Israel when or why. (One of the few I recall is Madonna, who made a documentary about a non-concert trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories, which if I recall correctly was very effective in exposing at least part of the brutality of the regime.) Nor do I discriminate against Israeli jazz musicians -- I must have written about close to 100 and I'd be surprised if the grade curve strays from any other national group. They are individuals, and while many may support their political leaders, many do not -- in fact a very large percentage of them are expatriates, living in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere -- and in any case, as an American I know as well as anyone that there is very little individuals can do about their governments.

• D.R. Tucker: The Powell Doctrine: Some notes on Lewis Powell, including his notorious US Chamber of Commerce memo that largely laid out the platform for right-wing business' takeover of American politics, and other things, including a defense of Roe. vs. Wade.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Three-and-a-half weeks since last time, this one snuck up on me: with the summer doldrums I'm as surprised as anyone to count 101 squib-reviews below. New jazz slowed to a trickle more than a month ago, with occasional advances for September-October releases. I've scratched the bottom of my barrel, and consulted most of the usual authorities. Still, unless you've been following my Twitter feed, you're unlikely to have run across more than two of nine A- new records this month. (Golem's Tanz and Spoon's They Want My Soul -- also the Calypso set further down -- appeared in Michael Tatum's A Downloader's Diary; The Green Seed got a passing mention in one of those Expert Witness messages via Facebook.) Clean Feed and Intakt are labels I key on (although cf. Hassler and Laubrock below). I saw mention of Ricardo Lemvo and Jonah Tolchin (and Jessica Hernandez) in PopMatters -- not my idea of a reliable review source, but one has to look somewhere. Aside from a couple jazz records that dropped straight into my mailbox, everything I bother with has some critical rep behind it somewhere. I don't have a real metacritic file this year -- just a crib sheet of little use to me and probably none to you.

In the old music section, I've been following my Penguin Guide 4-star search list less than my nose: recent records on Intakt (Michael Griener, Aki Takase, Trio 3) led me down several rabbit holes, and reminded me that I had never finished those Nobu Stowe records the artist sent in many years ago. The Punk 45 compilations were recommended by Jason Gubbels (a third one is not yet on Rhapsody). Soul Jazz (and subsidiary Universal Sound) is another label I'd like to key on -- hence the Sergio Mendes one-shot. Unfortunately, looks like a lot of their catalog isn't available, especially the Studio One compilations.

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on July 30. Past reviews and more information are available here (5201 records).

New Releases (More or Less)

Laurie Antonioli: Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: The Music of Joni Mitchell (2013 [2014], Origin): Bay Area jazz singer, several albums since Soul Eyes in 1985, this a collection of Joni Mitchell songs, done much like Mitchell did them -- similar voice, keybs, guitar, only slightly burnished by Sheldon Brown's reeds. B [cd]

Clarice Assad: Imaginarium (2014, Adventure Music): Brazilian singer, daughter of guitarist Sergio Assad, straddles pop, jazz, and classical, but in "A Morte Da Flor" falls off the deep end of the latter. B-

Auction Project: Slink (2014, self-released): Quintet, name comes from a 2010 album credited to alto saxophonist David Bixler and pianist Arturo O'Farrill, with violinist Heather Martin Bixler unnamed but on cover, and bass and drums. This one adds featured guest guitarist Mike Stern on two cuts and uillean pipes on one. B+(*) [cd]

Baloni: Belleke (2012 [2014], Clean Feed): String trio, no violin but viola (Frantz Loriot), cello (Joachim Badenhorst), and bass (Pascal Niggenkemper), touted as "slow boiling, chamber jazz-like, surrealistic soundscapes" -- I'd scratch the "chamber" clause, which implies a degree of politesse not evident here. Rather, you get a scratchy search for a profound sound that generally eludes them. B+(**) [cd]

Benyoro: Benyoro (2014, self-released): New York-based group playing West African pop music, led by vocalist Yacouba Sissoko-Kora, from Mali. One of the percussionists also hails from Mali, the bass player from Martinique, the Djembe player from New Rochelle, but authenticity isn't a problem here -- it just doesn't soar quite as high as you'd like. B+(***)

Bolt: Shuffle (2013 [2014], Driff): Avant quartet -- Jorrit Dijkstra (alto sax, lyricon, analog electronics), Eric Hofbauer (guitar), Junko Fujiwara (cello), Eric Rosenthal (drums, percussion) -- offers scratchy little miniatures -- 19 that they recommend you shuffle -- too impolite and eccentric for chamber jazz, uprooting expectations. B+(***) [cd]

Anthony Branker & Word Play: The Forward (Towards Equality) Suite (2014, Origin): Composer and director of a septet plus singer Alison Crockett, with guest spoken word from schoolchildren who have some serious wishes for a better world (none of which involve cutting taxes on the rich). Mainstream with soul flair, the horns -- David Binney (alto sax), Ralph Bowen (tenor/soprano sax, flute), and Conrad Herwig (trombone) especially striking. B+(***) [cd]

Bobby Broom: My Shining Hour (2014, Origin): Guitarist, started out in soul jazz with Charles Earland, has close to a dozen albums on his own as well as side credits in groups like Deep Blue Organ Trio. This is a trio with bass and drums, all standards, no breakthroughs but very listenable, especially songs with a little zip like "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Jitterbug Waltz." B+(**) [cd]

Henry Butler/Steven Bernstein: Viper's Drag (2014, Impulse): Bernstein is a trumpet player who started avant with an interest in the tradition and became arranger for Robert Altman's Kansas City project, which in turn led to his Millennial Territory Orchestra. Butler is a New Orleans pianist/singer who first worked with Bernstein on Kansas City and has bumped into him a couple times since -- not clear if this was recorded at their 2012 Jazz Standard sets or that was merely the point when this concept came together. They call their nine-piece band the Hot 9 after Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, and there's the rub: Bernstein isn't Armstrong, nor is Butler Earl Hines (nor as a singer can he carry Jimmy Rushing's tune), and the band is full of talented musicians who can play classic jazz but none are specialists who live it. That isn't a crippling complaint -- the record is great fun and I'd love to see the band live -- but it is a bit more than a nitpick. B+(***)

Calle 13: MultiViral (2014, El Abismo/Sony Music Latin): Puerto Rican rap group, with a reggaeton streak although that's hardly the only genre they can jump, and the few bits I can understand show some political smarts (as does a guest list that includes Silvio Rodriguez, Tom Morello, John Leguizamo, and Eduardo Galeano). Even in purely musical terms, I like the hard raps best. B+(***)

Mario Castro Quintet/Strings: Estrella de Mar/Promotional Edition (2014, Interrobang): Young tenor saxophonist, from Puerto Rico, graduated Berklee, sounds like a slightly scruffier David Sanchez, promising enough, but the quintet is cluttered, the strings are crappy, and the singer, well, unnecessary. "Promotional Edition" is printed prominently on the cover in what otherwise is fancier packaging than most commercial releases see, so I decided to honor the fact rather than puzzle over it. Of course, it puts an unfathomable distance between what I heard and what you might be able to buy. B- [cd]

Collier & Dean: Sleek Buick (2013-14 [2014], Origin): Tom Collier plays vibes, marimba, xylophone, and keyboards. Don Dean bass, percussion, keyboards, ukelele, classical guitar. Backup varies, with appearances by Don Grusin (piano) and Ernie Watts (tenor sax), and drums split between Ted Poor and Alex Acuña. Bubbly, frothy groove music. B [cd]

Wayne Coniglio/Scott Whitfield: Fast Friends (2012 [2014], Summit): Two mainstream trombonists, looks like Coniglio's first album but Whitfield has close to a dozen since 1997. Three originals (one Coniglio, two Whitfield), "I'm Confessin'" a gem among the not-very-standard covers. B+(**) [cd]

Cortex: Live! (2014, Clean Feed): Norwegian avant jazz quartet patterned on Ornette Coleman's classic, two previous albums but no one I've heard of: Thomas Johansson (cornet), Kristoffer Alberts (reeds), Ola Høyer (bass), Gard Nilssen (drums). I have a nagging doubt that anyone so inspired could do this: rather than breaking rules and blazing new paths the sax-cornet interplay just seems so right, although it wouldn't without a lot of innovation that now seems so normal. A- [cd]

Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman Quartet: Birdies for Lulu (2013 [2014], Intakt): Piano and violin for the leaders, bass (Scott Colley) and drums (Billy Mintz) fill the group out. He paints curtains of ice, she breaks them. B+(**)

Jorrit Dijkstra: Music for Reeds and Electronics: Oakland (2013 [2014], Driff): Five reed players -- Dijkstra, Phillip Greenlief, Kyle Bruckmann, Frank Gratkowski, Jon Raskin -- including clarinet, oboe, and English horn as well as various saxes, three players also credited with electronics. Can get ugly in the lower reaches, or squeaky in the upper. B+(*) [cd]

Diva: A Swingin' Life (2001-12 [2014], MCG Jazz): Drummer Sherry Maricle's long-running all-female big band, two cuts featuring Nancy Wilson recorded at MCG in 2001, the rest with quite a bit of turnover from an engagement in Lincoln Center eleven years later, with Marlena Shaw singing on two pieces, including a Basie "Blues Medley" they were born to swing. A lot of pop in the brass section. B+(**) [cd]

Dr. John: Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch (2013 [2014], Concord): Starts with "What a Wonderful World" from the wrong end of Louis Armstrong's songbook, then segues into the worst version of "Mack the Knife" I've ever heard -- a judgment I rendered even before Mike Ladd's rap. Hard to blame the trumpet players (Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard, Arturo Sandoval), but the rest of the band cuts the wrong rug, and the good Dr.'s slurred vocals slide all over the place -- a sharp contrast to Armstrong, who always had his unwieldy voice under perfect control. Of course, a tribute doesn't have to sound like its target -- if it did, what would be the point? But nothing here comes close, except Bonnie Raitt's cameo, and "When You're Smiling." C

Jorge Drexler: Bailar en la Cueva (2014, Warner Music Latina): Singer/songwriter from Uruguay, based in Spain, has a dozen (or so) albums since 1992. Strikes me as closer to MPB than to salsa -- for a guy who can't tell Spanish from Portuguese he reminds me mostly of Caetano Veloso, with a slightly more eccentric beat. B+(**)

John Ellis & Andy Bragen: Mobro (2011 [2014], Parade Light): Saxophonist, has an interestingly eclectic catalog which takes an odd turn here, providing the music for a play by Bragen, the combined effect way more operatic than I can handle. B-

Dave "Knife" Fabris: Lettuce Prey (2010 [2014], Musea): Guitarist, has appeared on several albums with pianist Ran Blake (who gets "featuring" credit here), but this seems to be his first album. It's a "kitchen sink" conglomeration with a wild mix of fusion and classical -- a Ginastera string quartet, some Prokofiev, "Sabre Dance," one of those horrible operatic sopranos -- and some smaller pieces, including a nice bit of "Mood Indigo" at the end. B- [cd]

FKA Twigs: LP1 (2014, Young Turks): "Half-Jamaican" UK native singer-songwriter, Tahilah Barnet, nicknamed Twigs, has two EPs, now an LP, backed with trip-hoppy electronics. Her thin, warbly voice is something Tricky led us to expect, and as long as this can pass for Tricky pop it holds up OK, but doesn't have anywhere else to go. B

Danny Fox Trio: Wide Eyed (2012 [2014], Hot Cup): Pianist, second album, trio with Chris Van Voorst Van Beest on bass and Max Goldman on drums. Played this several times and have very little to say about it -- a nice mix of Evans-esque melodic sense with a more Jarrett-like rhythmic push, I guess. B+(***) [cd]

Golem: Tanz (2014, Discos Corason): Punk-klezmer group led by accordionist-singer Annette Ezekiel Kogan, with Aaron Diskin as a second singer, the band anchored by violinist Jeremy Brown and noted jazz trombonist Curtis Hasslebring. Several albums, this the first on a Mexican label, produced by Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu). A-

Grand Fatilla: Global Shuffle (2014, self-released): Boston group, a spinoff from world-jazz eclectics Club D'Elf, pared down to a quartet: Robert Cassan (accordion), Matt Glover (electric mandolin), Mike Rivard (double bass, sintir), and Fabio Pirozzolo (percussion, voice): Argentine tangos, Italian Tarantellas, Turkish sacred Sufi songs, Irish reels, Moroccan trance, Bulgarian dance, all erudite and enjoyable, but nothing that shakes the rafters. B+(*) [cd]

The Green Seed: Drapetomania (2014, Communicating Vessels): Two rappers, two DJs, all the vinyl scratch sounds like a throwback to the '80s but the samples are more fluid, and the underground message is conscious, even when conflicted on matters of the heart. Matters of state, those are more obvious. A-

Michael Griener/Rudi Mahall/Jan Roder/Christof Thewes: Squakk: Willisau & Berlin (2012-13 [2014], Intakt): Some parsing options here: Griener (drums), Roder (bass), and Thewes (trombone) previously recorded an album called Squakk, effectively the group name here, but Griener is listed above Squakk, the others, including newcomer Mahall (bass clarinet, clarinet, baritone sax), below. Mahall not only adds a useful change of pace, he refocuses the group. A-

Haitian Rail: Solarists (2014, New Atlantis): Rough avant-jazz group, plenty of thrash especially between the guitar (Nick Millevoi) and trombone (Daniel Blacksberg). Bassist Edward Ricart also contributes a song -- the only band member who doesn't is drummer Kevin Shea, already famous for MOPDTK, less famous for Talibam and other marginal noise projects. B+(**)

Hans Hassler: Hassler (2011 [2013], Intakt): Folk background, "the true Swiss king of accordion," leads a quartet with two jazz clarinetists (Jürgen Kupke, Gebhard Ullmann on bass), plus percussion. Feels rushed and cramped. B

Hercules & Love Affair: The Feast of the Broken Heart (2014, Moshi Moshi): Disco group, fifth album including a DJ-Kicks. I figure cartoonishness is a bit of their shtick, but sometimes they overdo it, and more often they cut short the beats. B

Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas: Secret Evil (2014, Instant): Detroit group, has a straightforward, almost trad rock and roll form, the singer-songwriter's voice slightly off in a way that ultimately distinguishes her. First album after a couple EPs, one titled Weird Looking Women in Too Many Clothes. B+(***)

Wayne Horvitz: 55: Music and Dance in Concrete (2012 [2014], Cuneiform): Pianist, although he only composed and mixed these pieces, collaborating with Yukio Suzuki (choreography and dance), Yohei Saito (video artist) and Tucker Martine (producer/engineer). They were recorded at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, WA (out on the Olympic Peninsula), using the concrete bunkers and cistern for resonance. The group includes five horns (trumpet, trombone, clarinet/bass clarinet, alto and soprano sax) plus strings and voice (Maria Mannisto), for a quasi-classical effect. B [cdr]

Ibibio Sound Machine: Ibibio Sound Machine (2014, Soundway): British group with roots in Nigeria, led by singer Eno Williams with musicians from Ghana and Brazil. Framed by bits of gospel, deeper beats in the middle. B+(*)

Darius Jones/Matthew Shipp: Cosmic Lieder: The Darkseid Recital (2011-13 [2014], AUM Fidelity): Alto sax-piano duets, performed live at various spots following the 2011 studio album Cosmic Lieder. Jones is an intense player, sometimes extraordinary (cf. Man'ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing)) and sometimes just a pain in the ears (his Little Women albums, especially Lung). Shipp's dense clustering mostly slows him down, precluding either extreme. B+(*)

Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet: Afterimage (2014, Driff): Boston-based pianist with a mostly local live in Chicago group -- Dave Rempis (alto, tenor, baritone saxes), Keefe Jacckson (tenor sax, bass clarinet), Nate McBride (bass), and Frank Rosaly (drums). It's almost too much to work with, as the patches where the horns drop out reveal. B+(***) [cd]

Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: Zone (2014, Greenleaf Music): Trombonist, second album with his quartet Catharsis -- Mike Rodriguez on trumpet, also bass and drums -- adding guests Scott Robinson (tenor sax) and Camila Meza (voice). The vocals offer an intriguing tangent, but wind up too much. B+(*) [cd]

Rebecca Kilgore with the Harry Allen Quartet: I Like Men (2013 [2014], Arbors): Standards singer collects a list of songs about men: "The Man I Love," of course, also "The Gentleman Is a Dope," "He's a Tramp," "He's My Guy," "Marry the Man Today," "The Man That Got Away," and so forth -- the biggest turnoff for me was "Goldfinger." Saxophonist Allen should be a big help here, but he doesn't add much. B+(*)

Jonas Kullhammar/Jørgen Mathisen/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Espen Aalberg: Basement Sessions Vol. 3: The Ljubljana Tapes (2013 [2014], Clean Feed): Two tenor saxophonists (the former also credited with soprillo sax and flute), bass, and drums. The two previous volumes were trios without Mathisen, and Vol. 2 was most impressive. This live successor has its hot spots, but also tends to slip on by. B+(**) [cd]

Lake Street Dive: Bad Self Portraits (2014, Signature Sounds): Singer Rachel Price reminds me of Elvin Bishop recycling blues clichés, but Bishop was slighter and had more fun. B+(*)

Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra: Live in Ljubljana (2012 [2014], Clean Feed): An octet, with two trumpets (Nate Wooley, Susana Santos Silva), trombone (Reut Regev), three saxes (David Bindman, Avram Fefer, Mat Bauder), drums (Igal Foni), and the leader's bass mixed up so it's always audible, the heartbeat of a growing, growling organism -- the most Mingus-like of bassists, both for his compositions that sum up all worthwhile jazz history and as a bandleader who can whip a group up into something larger than itself. A- [cd]

Ingrid Laubrock Octet: Zürich Concert (2011 [2014], Intakt): German avant saxophonist, her octet limited to two horns (Tom Arthurs' trumpet is the other), with guitar-cello-bass strings, accordion in addition to piano, and drummer Tom Rainey doubling on xylophone. Intricate layering without much solo punch, but that seems to be the idea. B+(*)

Azar Lawrence: The Seeker (2011 [2014], Sunnyside): Tenor saxophonist, cut his first album in 1974 and doesn't have many since, but he's such a powerful presence if you've ever heard him pop up anywhere, even on the side, you're likely to remember the name. Quintet with Nicholas Payton (trumpet), Benito Gonzalez (piano), Essiet Okon Essiet (bass), and Jeff "Tain" Watts (drums). Big, dramatic sound, overwhelming all else. B+(**)

Gordon Lee with the Mel Brown Septet: Tuesday Night (2014, Origin): Lee is a pianist-composer, wrote everything here (lifting a bit from Rachmaninoff), and is counted in drummer Brown's septet (two saxes, trumpet, trombone, piano, bass, drums). Feels cluttered and rushed, the solos indistinct. B- [cd]

Ricardo Lemvo/Makina Loca: La Rumba Soyo (2014, Cumbancha): The most Cuban-sounding of Congolese stars, this has outsided salsa rhythms with soukous guitar supercharge, for an unrelenting up, up, up. Crazy machine, indeed. A-

Vincent Lyn: Live in New York City (2013 [2014], Budo): Pianist and kung-fu master, several albums, I don't doubt his proficiency but the charm here is tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana. B+(*) [cd]

Bob Mamet: London House Blues (2014, Blujazz): Pianist, from Chicago, brother of playwright David Mamet, half dozen or so albums since 1994, evidently spent some time in smooth/crossover jazz although this is an exemplary mainstream trio, two originals, familiar standards, bright, sparkling even. B+(**) [cd]

Jessica Lea Mayfield: Make My Head Sing . . . (2014, ATO): Singer-songwriter with two previous albums produced by Dan Auerbach (Black Keys). This one done with husband Jesse Newport (mostly bass) and a drummer, is distinguished first of all by the crunchy guitar, supposedly a tribute to '90s grunge. B+(**)

Medeski Martin & Wood + Nels Cline: Woodstock Sessions Vol. 2 (2013 [2014], Indirecto): Last heard with John Scofield, as natural a fit for the organ-drums-bass trio as one could imagine, I have to say they've traded up. Cline is a guitarist more inclined to cut against the grain than go with the flow, which makes this a much rougher-edged combination. M & M (if not necessarily W) have been moving in more avant circles since their early success, and that, too, pays dividends here. B+(***)

Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble: Intergalactic Beings (2010 [2014], FPE): She plays flute, a minor part of the sound and action here, mostly roiling around the dirty bass end with David Boykin's tenor sax/bass clarinet, Jeff Parker's guitar, Joshua Abrams' bass, and (especially) Avreeayl Ra's often stunning percussion. You also get strings (violin/cello), trumpet, and Mankwe Ndosi's voice in the messy mix. B+(***)

Hafez Modirzadeh: In Convergence Liberation (2011 [2014], Pi): Tenor saxophonist, born in North Carolina, has a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, probably started with his father, Jamal Modir, a Persian percussionist, but he's been all over, studying Persian, South Indian, West African, and Japanese music (among others), but most importantly he is a George Russell protégé -- his first album was called In Chromodal Discourse (1992), and the one prior to this one was Post-Chromodal Out! (2012). This one comes with equations and sketches resembling particle physics. The music itself I find even more daunting, with strings everywhere (ETHEL, a quartet), those quasi-classical vocals I hate so much, and lots of santur, plus a bit of Amir ElSaffar trumpet. B+(**) [cd]

Joe Morris Quartet: Balance (2014, Clean Feed): Guitarist, with Mat Maneri (viola), Chris Lightcap (bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums) in a strings thing, with Maneri doing the main job of shaping the scratchy, abstruse sounds. B+(**) [cd]

Sam Most: New Jazz Standards (2013 [2014], Summit): Jazz flautist, cut his first records in 1953, this one sixty years later -- a month before his death, in many ways this sums up his whole career: the high bebop lines, a side of baritone sax, a goofed up scat vocal. B+(**)

Myriad 3: The Where (2014, ALMA): Canadian piano trio -- Chris Donnelly (piano), Dan Fortin (bass), Ernesto Cervini (drums, winds) -- dabbling sometimes in electronic synths. Second album, all three write (but mostly Donnelly), postbop but suggests a bit of EST niche if not influence. B+(**) [cd]

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Hypnotic Eye (2014, Reprise): A personable young retro-rocker in the late 1970s when he introduced his lightweight "classic rock" formula, he remains personable and listenable 35 years later, and doesn't seem all that much older. B+(*)

Picastro: You (2014, Static Clang): Intriguing little group, basically slowcore with falsetto vocals, occasional fracturing or crazing around the edges. B+(*)

Pink Martini & the Von Trapps: Dream a Little Dream (2013 [2014], Heinz): With the last surviving member of the Trapp Family Singers, Maria von Trapp, passing at age 99, the legacy vocal group is mostly filled with great-grandchildren, doing August von Trapp originals, Rodgers and Hammerstein (you know, The Sound of Music), a tango, pieces from Africa and China, and bits of schmaltz from Brahms and ABBA. Such postmodern eclecticism is a Pink Martini trademark and this is very much their album, the extra voices adding an excessively somber air. B+(*)

Greg Reitan: Post No Bills (2014, Sunnyside): Pianist, fourth album since 2009, a trio with Jack Daro and Dean Koba. Three originals, seven covers, two of those standards ("Stella by Starlight," "I Loves You, Porgy"), the others by fellow pianists (Jarrett, Sample, Silver, Corea, Zeitlin). B+(*)

Dylan Ryan/Sand: Circa (2014, Cuneiform): Drummer, group includes Timothy Young (guitar) and Devin Hoff (bass). Second album, jazz-rock fusion pushing hard on the guitar. B+(*) [cdr]

Irène Schweizer/Pierre Favre: Live in Zürich (2013, Intakt): The great Swiss pianist cut a series of duo albums from 1986 on with various drummers, and Favre's entry was possibly the best -- the closest competitor was Han Bennink. This rematch gives you a sense of the dynamics, plus an unexpected boogie-blues at the end. A-

75 Dollar Bill: Olives in the Ears (2014, self-released): Lo-fi guitar-drum project, guitarist Che Chen credits a teacher from Mauritania for his mix of Arabic modes and Saharan blues, plus drummer Rick Brown, and some others chip in here and there. Available on cassette tape as well as digital download. B+(***) [bc]

Rotem Sivan Trio: For Emotional Use Only (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): Guitarist, originally from Israel, now based in New York, second album, backed with bass and drums. B+(**) [cd]

Sohn: Tremors (2014, 4AD): Toph Taylor, from London, first album, singer-songwriter with electronics. Moby-ish if not quite Moby-like. B+(*)

Spoon: They Want My Soul (2014, Anti-): Texas rockers with a long history of corraling pop hooks unveil an edgier sound without losing their knack -- if anything, they've upped their game. A-

Steve Swallow/Ohad Talmor/Adam Nussbaum: Singular Curves (2012 [2014], Auand): Electric bass, tenor sax, drums, respectively. Talmor, b. 1970 in France, is best known for his collaborations with Lee Konitz, but those feature his string arrangements, where he it is a delight to hear his mellow saxophone -- e.g., the closing "You Go to My Head," which more than once convinced me to give this another spin. B+(***) [cdr]

Aki Takase/La Planète: Flying Soul (2012 [2014], Intakt): Starts like chamber jazz with violin (Dominique Pifarély), cello (Vincent Courtois), clarinet (Louis Sclavis) and piano/celesta (Takase), but no one -- least of all Pifarély -- wants to leave it at that, yielding a rather bracing diceyness as it develops. B+(***)

Jonah Tolchin: Clover Lane (2014, Yep Roc): First album for a young singer-songwriter from New Jersey with a vintage country/folk feel, a knack for smartly structured, sensitive and sensible songs -- if anything, reminds me most of T-Bone Burnett. A-

Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer: Wiring (2013 [2014], Intakt): Fifth album for Oliver Lake's sax trio supergroup -- Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille -- formed in 2001, plus superstar pianist Iyer for his second ride. Remarkable talents all around, the pianist especially, but Lake doesn't grab me like he can. Cyrille's closing "Tribute to Bu" is hard to top. B+(***)

Matt Ulery: In the Ivory (2013-14 [2014], Greenleaf Music, 2CD): Chicago bassist, has a habit of thinking big, as this sprawling opera indicates. "Contemporary classical music" always seemed like an nomenclature, but then it's never been clear what else to call new works in the Euroclassical tradition -- I, for one, am reluctant to call them jazz although as jazz gains an ever deeper toehold in the academy jazz musicians are increasingly inclined and prepared to veer that way. This sounded awful to me at first, but then the piano reps, and then the strings -- Zack Brock is the featured violinist -- started to cohere. In the end even the singers (Grazyna Auguscik and Sarah Marie Young) aren't that bad. Not that I wouldn't rather hear something that swings or bops or honks or skronks or blasts out in some new direction. B+(*) [cd]

Harvey Wainapel: Amigos Brasileiros Vol. 2 (2013 [2014], Jazzmission): Bay Area Sax/clarinet player, follows up his 2007 Amigos Brasileiros with another volume, this with nine songs encountering nine groups of "great Brazilian musicians" for some lush lounge music. B [cd]

Seth Walker: Sky Still Blue (2014, The Royal Potato Family): Blues singer-songwriter with a handful of albums, both guitar and voice strike me as rather tepid (presumably that's not just white). Only song that hits paydirt is "Jesus (Make My Bed)." B

Reggie Watkins: One for Miles, One for Maynard (2014, Corona Music): Trombonist from West Virginia, second album, plays one Davis song, one Ferguson, one from McCoy Tyner, two from his tenor saxophonist Matt Parker (who has a postmodern feel for older jazz), three of his own. Swings hard throughout, and piles on the horns for the Ferguson piece. B+(**) [cd]

Anna Webber: Simple (2013 [2014], Skirl): Canadian flutist, mostly plays tenor sax here, second album, trio with Matt Mitchell (piano) and John Hollenbeck (drums) doing much to stretch and skew the album. Best when all three thrash, but has a few spots when nothing much seems to be happening. B+(***) [cd]

The Whammies: Play the Music of Steve Lacy Vol. 3: Live (2014, Driff): Six-piece group dedicated to exploring Steve Lacy's slippery music take their act to Italy after two superb studio albums. All recognizable names: Jorrit Dijkstra (alto sax, lyricon), Pandelis Karayorgis (piano), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Mary Oliver (violin, viola), Jason Roebke (bass), and Han Bennink (drums). Slips a bit here and there, but many strong passages. B+(***) [cd]

Walter White: Most Triumphant (2013 [2014], Summit): Trumpet player, from and likely still based in Michigan, refers to a "30 year career" but only a couple albums as leader. This is a quartet with piano-bass-drums, half originals, half covers ranging from Chopin to "Bye Bye Blackbird" -- easy to fall for the latter. Gets a bright, sharp tone, and while the band isn't exceptional they do move things along smartly. B+(*) [cd]

Steve Wilson/Lewis Nash Duo: Duologue (2013 [2014], MCG Jazz): Sax-drums duets, not sure if Wilson plays anything but alto but it's mostly in that range. Three Wilson originals, two Ellingtons, Fats Waller, two Monk medleys, Gillespie, Ornette Coleman, "Freedom Jazz Dance." Wilson is fine, but this is an even better showcase for Nash, probably the best mainstream drummer since, well, ever. B+(***)

Tom Wolfe: Solerovescent (2014, Summit): Guitarist, probably his second record although with gray hair and such a common name I may not be looking hard enough. Bright postbop, with Ken Watters on trumpet, both electric and acoustic bass, and drums. B+(*) [cd]

Wooden Wand: Farmer's Corner (2013 [2014], Fire): Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter James Jackson Toth, has something like sixteen albums since 2004. Mostly guitar, providing a nice, shambling, country-ish air. B+(**)

J.J. Wright: Inward Looking Outward (2013 [2014], Ropeadope): Pianist, leading a trio with Ike Sturm and Nate Wood, manages to stake out a rumbling beat and ride it a long ways. B+(**) [cd]

Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-1969 (1955-69 [2014], Soul Jazz): Probably too many songs about reincarnation, a common trope for wits with doubts about the human condition. These wordslingers, after all, are all wits -- I'm particularly amused by the one who'd rather talk to Khrushchev than Bulganin -- and the lightweight beatwise music is always a delight. A-

Smoke Dawson: Fiddle (1971 [2014], Tompkins Square): Folk musician born in Brooklyn in 1935, played banjo alongside Peter Stampfel's fiddle in MacGrundy's Old-Timey Wool Thumpers in 1960 -- no album, but a group name worth repeating. His only album was this 1971 solo violin effort, a cult item limited to 750 copies. Only for aficionados of the old-time music, but fine for that. B+(***)

Arto Lindsay: Encyclopedia of Arto (1996-2012 [2014], Northern Spy, 2CD): First appeared in the late-1970s New York No Wave band DNA, rooting him in avant-noise, but as he moved on into the 1980s he revealed a second side rooted in Brazil, where he spent time growing up. First disc here collects studio tracks from 1996-2004 (O Corpo Sutil, Mundo Civilizado, up through Invoke and Salt). Second disc is taken from 2011-12 live shots and is rather dicier, more primitive, sometimes abstract, sometimes wrapped in noise, often remarkable. A-

Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66: Stillness (1971 [2014], Universal Sound): Roughly the end of pianist Mendes' hit period which began with the bossa nova in the year he named the band. Lani Hall is the singer, quick to cover L.A. stalwarts like Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell. B+(*)

Punk 45: Underground Punk in the United States of America, Vol. 1: Kill the Hippies! Kill Yourself! The American Nation Destroys Its Young (1973-80 [2013], Soul Jazz): Only two songs here I know well ("The Modern Age" and "Chinese Rocks"), the remaining groups more unknown than not -- the best known, the Flamin' Groovies, shows up with a single from 1973, harder-edged than their 1969-71 albums let alone anything in their lame post-1976 pop period. While there are songs called "Kill the Hippies" (Deadbeats) and "Kill Yourself" (Lewd), they are barely proto-hardcore, way short of the Reagan-era Let Them Eat Jellybeans hardcore comp, so without seeing the booklet -- always a strong suit with this label -- it's hard to credit their "American nation destroys its young" thematic. Doesn't sound like that; just art going into a postmodern primitivist phase with more product than usual falling through the cracks. B+(***)

Punk 45: Underground Punk and Post-Punk in the UK 1977-81, Vol. 2: There Is No Such Thing as Society: Get a Job, Get a Car, Get a Bed, Get Drunk! (1977-81 (2014), Soul Jazz): More obscurities -- e.g., none of these bands showed up on Rhino's 1993 DIY: UK Punk I: Anarchy in the UK, only three I recall (Television Personalities, Swell Maps, very early Mekons). Nothing here strikes me as especially great, but they're nowhere near scraping the bottom of the barrel, as the clatter and clank flow surprisingly well. B+(***)

Old Music

The Best Punk Album in the World . . . Ever! (1975-84 [1995], Virgin, 2CD): After listening to the first two Punk 45 compilations and noting their obscure provenance, I recalled this UK set (graded A by Christgau), and while it's long out-of-print, I had little trouble finding the songs and lining them up in Rhapsody's mixer (the only one missing is Adam and the Ants' "Deutscher Girls," perhaps for the better). Each disc starts with the Sex Pistols and never hits that level of punk fury again -- no Clash or Vibrators, the US picks rarely get out of New York (Jonathan Richman, Devo, and the Tubes are exceptions) -- so they encroach upon new wave for hits, picking out relatively crunchy tunes even from Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson. Not as tight thematically as Rhino's 1993 two DIY: UK Punk volumes, but no one I knew in New York in the late 1970s listened to just punk or new wave: we jumped back and forth, like the compilers here. A-

Michael Griener/Jan Roder/Christof Thewes: Squakk (2008 [2009], Jazzwerkstatt): Avant-trombone trio, the drummer and bassist listed first, perhaps alphabetically. Unfamiliar with Thewes but this seems like par for the course as far as German trombonists go -- a course including Albert Mangelsdorff and Conrad Bauer. B+(**)

Richard Hell: Spurts: The Richard Hell Story (1973-92 [2005], Rhino): Bassist Hell doesn't seem to have played on all of these cuts, but those he missed he (co-)wrote and/or remixed -- Neon Boys, Television, Heartbreakers, Dim Stars, bands he played with at some point or other -- and tracks 4-13 recapitulate his 1977-82 heyday with the Voidoids. Discogs credits the liner notes to Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell, but they're not (yet) on the website. I stumbled upon this by sheer accident. Nice best-of plus brilliant trivia, at least until they get to the dimly remembered Steve Shelley-Thurston Moore Dim Stars. B+(**)

Oliver Lake: Heavy Spirits (1975 [1995], Black Lion): Second album for the alto saxophonist, pasted together from two sessions -- a quintet with Olu Dara (trumpet) and Donald Smith (piano), followed by three tracks with two violinists, a solo track, then one with trombonist Joseph Bowie plus drums. Shows promise but packs too many different looks. B+(*)

The Oliver Lake String Project: Movement, Turns & Switches (1996, Passin' Thru): Lake tries to burnish his bona fides as a composer by building this around a string quartet, some piano (Donal Fox), even laying out on a cut. Not that it doesn't work, but not really what one turns to him for. B

Oliver Lake Quintet: Talkin' Stick (1997 [2000], Passin' Thru): A typical album for the alto saxophonist, the quintet including Geri Allen on piano and Jay Hoggard on vibes instead of a second horn. B+(**)

Oliver Lake Steel Quartet: Dat Love (2003 [2004], Passin' Thru): Lyndon Achee's steel pan drums provide the group name and add a measure of mellow to what otherwise is a typical Lake sax trio, extended blowing on a high level, although also a bit more mellow than usual. B+(***)

Ted Rosenthal: My Funny Valentine (2007 [2008], Tokuma): Piano trio, playing "11 standards from the vast repertoire of vocalist Helen Merrill," which is to say eleven of the juiciest standards around, from "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" to "'S Wonderful." B+(***)

Nobu Stowe & Alan Munshower with Badal Roy: An die Musik (2006 [2008], Soul Note): Japanese pianist, based in Baltimore, with drums and tabla, not exactly a piano trio but the rich, repetitive mid-to-uptempo piano riffs limit the need for a bassist and the extra complexity to the percussion is a plus. Stowe sent me a pile of discs quite some time ago, and if this isn't the best, it's at least the easiest to get into. A- [cdr]

Nobu Stowe: L'Albero Delle Meduse (2009 [2010], self-released): Scant evidence of this ever being released -- I'm working off an advance and assume pianist Stowe is the leader only because he sent it to me. The pieces are joint improvs (except for the closer, Jim Pepper's "Witchi-Tai-To"), and Achille Succi (alto sax, bass clarinet) is listed ahead of Stowe, the rest: Daniel Barbiero (bass), Alan Munshower (drums), Lee Pembleton (sound). B+(***) [cdr]

Nobu Stowe-Lee Pembleton Project: Hommage an Klaus Kinski (2006 [2007], Soul Note): Pembleton's credit here is "sound" -- whatever that means. Better known are the clarinetists, Perry Robinson and Blaise Siwula, the latter doubling on tenor sax. Veers a bit toward soundtrack territory -- presumably Pembleton's responsible for the bird and bug sounds -- which also gives the pianist an excuse to get melodramatic, something his richly textured style is built for. B+(**) [cdr]

Aki Takase/Alex von Schlippenbach/DJ Illvibe: Lok 03 (2004 [2005], Leo): Two avant pianists who have duetted in the past but not like this, mediated as it is by Illvibe's turntables and kitchen sink-ism, amplifying the noise level of musicians who can really bring it. A-

Aki Takase/Silke Eberhard: Ornette Coleman Anthology (2006 [2007], Intakt, 2CD): Eberhard plays alto sax, clarinet, and bass clarinet, in duos with the pianist on a long list of Ornette Coleman tunes (plus one Takase original). Hot stuff, the piano jumping all over the tunes, the sax/clarinet providing just enough color contrast. A-

Aki Takase/Louis Sclavis: Yokohama (2009, Intakt): Sclavis plays clarinet, bass clarinet, and soprano sax, a lighter tone and calmer demeanor than Eberhard had on those Coleman tunes, and the pianist adjusts accordingly. Thoughtful, often lovely. B+(***)

Aki Takase/Han Bennink: Two for Two (2011, Intakt): A piano-drums duo, again a marvelous outing for the drummer, especially when the moment calls for a bit of swing although he's fine with any or no time, and he's equally adept at setting the pianist up or just amusing himself while she surprises us. A-

Tama: Rolled Up (2009, Jazzwerkstatt): Avant piano trio -- Aki Takase (piano), Jan Roder (bass), Oliver Steidle (drums) -- hits hard for the most part, block-chorded fury, not that it isn't tightly controlled. B+(***)

Leroy Vinnegar Sextet: Leroy Walks! (1957 [1989], Contemporary/OJC): Bassist, nicknamed "The Walker" for his walking bass lines, a theme integrated into most of his handful of album titles (from his first album here to 1992's Walkin' the Basses). Cut in Los Angeles with a light, almost frothy West Coast group -- Gerald Wilson (trumpet), Teddy Edwards (tenor sax), Carl Perkins (piano), Victor Feldman (vibes), Tony Bazley (drums). B+(**)

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Monday, August 18, 2014

Music: Current count 23658 [23534] rated (+24), 536 [546] unrated (-10).

Not sure why the rated count slipped this past week -- maybe just the drag of the server problems, not to mention the drag of all sorts of everyday hassles. The server problem is that more often than not the database connections used by the serendipity blog software have failed (either not established or dropped), resulting in various cryptic error messages or plain old indefinite hangs. The ISP (addr.com) has been even more unresponsive, but through all this time (3-4 weeks now) the server has been up, it's been serving static pages (i.e., everything on the website below ocston), although it's hard for people to tell that when the root index is inaccessible. Moving the whole blog to another database on another server is a huge and daunting task -- one that I don't doubt will be necessary, but still a ways away.

So it occurred to me that a short-term kluge around the database problem would be to write up a bit of PHP code to manage the most recent part of the blog with static files. I have that code sort of working now, so I'll install it and replace the root index page with something that will explain the problem and offer either the "real blog" or the "fake blog" options. In the future, I will initially install new posts using the "fake blog" system, then try the "real blog." I may add some bells and whistles to the "fake blog," but most likely it will just be a temporary bridging system until I can get something stable working.

Trouble finding new A-list albums this week, although three (of four) releases on Driff sorely tempted me -- I had given A- grades to the first two Whammies albums, a Pandelis Karayorgis album (Mi3: Free Advice) was a Jazz CG Pick Hit back in 2007, and Eric Hofbauer's The Blueprint Project was an A- in 2003. But some combination of bad attitude and excessive nitpicking held me back on all three -- as, by the way, it did on the two Punk 45 compilations Jason Gubbels praised last week (couldn't find the third on Rhapsody), and for that matter the first two records after played after I closed this week's tally: Steven Bernstein's Viper's Drag and Anna Webber's Simple. The only new record to top A- was the Calypso comp Michael Tatum wrote about last week -- I'm always a sucker for that beat and wordplay. The other A- doesn't exist on Rhapsody, but I pieced together a mixer list from other resources and came up with 47 (of 48) songs, close enough. Still, I'm of two minds about the record. I can't knock so many great songs, but I'm not sure how useful the compilation really is, or whether I'd even want a copy. And I am sure that if I was the sort of person who liked to put playlists together, I could easily top The Best Punk Album in the World . . . Ever -- so much for the title.

Reviews on all these records are accumulating, and should trigger a Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week -- assuming nothing else awful happens in the meantime, these days pretty wishful thinking.

One aside: Publicist Matt Merewitz wrote today to nudge me on the Lee Konitz First Meeting: Live in London Volume 1 album out in June. I wrote back, and thought I might as well share this as it bears repeating:

Got it, filed it as a high B+ (***), same as Enfants Terribles from 2012, slightly better than Standards Live: At the Village Gate (**) on Enja also this year. Could be he records too much and too casually to get anyone excited -- I haven't graded anything by him A- since 1999's Sound of Surprise (although I've missed a lot of albums in that stretch). He continues to play at a very high level at a time when he could just coast on his laurels -- his first really great album, Subconscious-Lee, came out in 1950. I'm not a huge fan, but given how much he's done for how long, I've voted for him for Downbeat's HOF ballot four years straight -- really ridiculous that he hasn't been voted in.

Recommended music links:

• Michael Tatum: A Downloader's Diary #40

New records rated this week:

• Laurie Antonioli: Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light: The Music of Joni Mitchell (2013 [2014], Origin): jazz singer plays the Joni Mitchell songbook straight, just a bit of sax [cd]: B
• Bolt: Shuffle (2013 [2014], Driff): avant quartet -- Jorrit Dijkstra (alto sax), Eric Hofbauer (guitar), cello and drums -- play scratchy, eccentric [cd]: B+(***)
• Mario Castro Quintet/Strings: Estrella de Mar/Promotional Edition (2014, Interrobang): tough young tenor saxophonist, but quintet cluttered, strings icky, singer? [cd]: B-
• Collier & Dean: Sleek Buick (2013-14 [2014], Origin): vibes and bass plus friends, makes for bubbly, frothy groove music; sleek? sure; gaudy even [cd]: B
• Wayne Coniglio/Scott Whitfield: Fast Friends (2012 [2014], Summit): mainstream trombonists play not-quite-standards in a celebration of the horn [cd]: B+(**)
• Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman Quartet: Birdies for Lulu (2013 [2014], Intakt): piano and violin, he paints curtains of ice, she breaks them [r]: B+(**)
• Jorrit Dijkstra: Music for Reeds and Electronics: Oakland (2013 [2014], Driff): sax choir (including oboe/cor anglais) with schmear of electronics [cd]: B+(*)
• Jorge Drexler: Bailar en la Cueva (2014, Warner Music Latina): singer-songwriter from Uruguay, sounds like Caetano Veloso with a slightly more eccentric beat [r]: B+(**)
• Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet: Afterimage (2014, Driff): Dave Rempis/Keefe Jackson saxes soar and rumble, almost obscuring the superb pianist [cd]: B+(***)
• Azar Lawrence: The Seeker (2011 [2014], Sunnyside): huge sounding tenor sax man, wearing his Coltrane influences on his sleeve [r]: B+(**)
• Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Hypnotic Eye (2014, Reprise): 35-years on, he's still personable, still lightweight, still catchy (a bit) [r]: B+(*)
• Rotem Sivan Trio: For Emotional Use Only (2013 [2014], Fresh Sound New Talent): guitar-bass-drums, doesn't fit easily into known schools but doesn't break far either [cd]: B+(**)
• Sohn: Tremors (2014, 4AD): Brit singer-songwriter with electronics, Moby-ish if not quite Moby-like [r]: B+(*)
• Matt Ulery: In the Ivory (2013-14 [2014], Greenleaf Music, 2CD): classical (symphonic/operatic) music from a jazz bassist, so well crafted I can't say I can't stand it [cd]: B+(*)
• Harvey Wainapel: Amigos Brasileiros Vol. 2 (2013 [2014], Jazzmission): Bay Area sax player rounds up nine groups of Brazilians for some lush lounge music [cd]: B
• The Whammies: Play the Music of Steve Lacy Vol. 3: Live (2014, Driff): avant tribute sextet hits the road, lands in Italy, roughs it up [cd]: B+(***)
• Walter White: Most Triumphant (2013 [2014], Summit): trumpet player from Michigan; bright, sharp tone, band moves things along smartly [cd]: B+(*)
• Tom Wolfe: Solerovescent (2014, Summit): guitarist plays bright, grooveful postbop, with Ken Watters on trumpet, both electric & acoustic bass [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-1969 (1955-69 [2014], Soul Jazz): the wordslingers are all wits even if the tropes are cliched =k and the riddims help [r]: A-
• Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66: Stillness (1971 [2014], Universal Sound): a classic according to reprint label, best I can figure title derives from Stephen Stills [r]: B+(*)
• Punk 45: Underground Punk in the United States of America, Vol. 1: Kill the Hippies! Kill Yourself! The American Nation Destroys Its Young (1973-80 [2014], Soul Jazz): pre-Reagan US punk obscurities, not nearly as destructive or incendiary as the compilers would like to think [r]: B+(***)
• Punk 45: Underground Punk and Post-Punk in the UK 1977-81, Vol. 2: There Is No Such Thing as Society: Get a Job, Get a Car, Get a Bed, Get Drunk! (1977-81 [2014], Soul Jazz): UK punk obscurities, surprisingly catchy in their neoprimitive ways, their social doom and gloom more earned [r]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

• The Best Punk Album in the World . . . Ever! (1975-84 [1995], Virgin, 2CD): Sex Pistols, no Clash, but lots of famous songs, more new wave than punk [r]: A-
• Richard Hell: Spurts: The Richard Hell Story (1973-92 [2005], Rhino): Voidoids mini-best-of, freshly shined up juvenilia, dimly remembered Dim Stars [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ritmos Unidos (Patois)
• Salsa de la Bahia: A Collection of SF Area Salsa and Latin Jazz: Vol. 2, Hoy Y Ayer (Patois, 2CD)

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Sunday, August 17, 2014

It's been a very distracting week, what with the blog sometimes working and more often not. I've been working on a "pseudo-blog" system that should prove more robust -- throughout the troubles of the last few weeks we've always been able to serve static pages -- and I should unveil that soon. Meanwhile, a few scattered links this week:

• Matthew Harwood: One Nation Under SWAT:

  When the concept of SWAT arose out of the Philadelphia and Los Angeles Police Departments, it was quickly picked up by big city police officials nationwide. Initially, however, it was an elite force reserved for uniquely dangerous incidents, such as active shooters, hostage situations, or large-scale disturbances.

  Nearly a half-century later, that's no longer true.

  In 1984, according to Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop, about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it's still rising, though SWAT statistics are notoriously hard to come by.

  As the number of SWAT teams has grown nationwide, so have the raids. Every year now, there are approximately 50,000 SWAT raids in the United States, according to Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University's School of Justice Studies. In other words, roughly 137 times a day a SWAT team assaults a home and plunges its inhabitants and the surrounding community into terror.

  In a recently released report, "War Comes Home," the American Civil Liberties Union (my employer) discovered that nearly 80% of all SWAT raids it reviewed between 2011 and 2012 were deployed to execute a search warrant.

  You can draw a couple short lines from the US counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to militarized policing: one is that surplus military equipment is often dumped no charge onto police departments (Tom Engelhardt starts with a story about the Bergen County Police Dept. obtaining MRAPs -- armored personnel carriers designed to survive IED attacks.) Another is the relatively high percentage of ex-soldiers in police departments. Another is lack of accountability: with the cult of the troops, it's virtually impossible for the US military to hold any of its personnel accountable for unnecessary or excessive force, and as the police become militarized that ethic (or lack thereof) carries over. (Israel, which used to pride itself on discipline, has lately become as bad or worse.) Then there's the increasing proliferation of guns (and "stand your ground" laws) in the general population. Harwood starts with a story of a Florida man who heard through social media that he was going to be "burned." When the man called the police with the threat, he was told to get a gun and defend himself. The threat arrived in the form of a SWAT team sent to serve a search warrant: seeing the gun, they killed the man. Harwood titles one section, "Being the police means never having to say you're sorry."

  Also see: Sarah Stillman: The Economics of Police Militarism.

• Elias Isquith: Reagan is still killing us: How his dangerous "American exceptionalism" haunts us today: Always good to read a bad word about "the Gipper," but this piece is more about Hillary Clinton and her recent neocon unveiling in the Atlantic. She's always been eager to show how bellicose she can be, and it certainly doesn't hurt to put some distance between herself and Obama, especially as long as she takes positions that don't get tested in practice. But before going into her, and back to Reagan, I'm reminded of how Gordon Goldstein, in Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, quoted Bundy on the contrast between JFK and LBJ: "Kennedy didn't want to be dumb, Johnson didn't want to be a coward." In this, it's tempting to map Obama onto Kennedy, and Clinton onto Johnson. Except that Obama doesn't want to be seen as a coward either, so time and again he backs down and goes with dumb. Clinton is only promising to get to dumb faster.

  Weirdly, Clinton's decision to speak about the U.S.'s role in global politics as if she, in contrast to Obama, was an unapologetic, "old-fashioned" believer in American exceptionalism made her sound like no one so much as Ronald Reagan, the last president who told a humbled America to buck up and forget its recent mistakes. [ . . . ]

  So here's a prediction about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 presidential race. At one point or another, there will be a television ad in which Hillary Clinton will speak of bringing back the former glory of the United States. She'll say it's time to mark an end to nearly 20 years of terrorism, depression, war and defeat. It's time to feel good again about being the leader of the free world. It's morning in America; and everything is great.

  Actually, that sounds like a good idea, especially if she could combine it with a policy shift that gets away from the losing struggles of the last twenty years. One of the interesting things about Reagan is that with a few minor exceptions -- wasting a lot of money on the military and helping turn Afghanistan and Central America into the hellholes they are today -- Reagan was satisfied with "talking the talk" and rarely pushed it too far. For instance, he spent all of 1980 campaigning against Carter's Panama Canal Zone treaty, but once he was elected he didn't lift a finger to change it. On the other hand, Clinton won't be given a pass on her toughness. She'll have to earn it. How successful she may be will depend on how accurately she identifies the malevolent forces that have been dragging America down: namely, the Republicans, and their pandering to the rich and crazy.

• Saree Makdisi: The catastrophe inflicted on Gaza -- and the costs to Israel's standing:

  Israel's repeated claim that it targets only rocket launchers or tunnels is belied by the scale and nature of the weapons it unloaded on Gaza. Its 2000-pound aerial bombs take down entire buildings along with everyone in them (almost a thousand buildings have been severely damaged or destroyed in such air strikes). Its 155mm howitzer shells have a margin of error of 300 yards and a lethal radius of up to 150 yards from the point of impact. Each of the 120mm flechette shells its tank crews fire burst into a 100 by 300 yard shower of 5,000 metal darts carefully designed to shred human flesh.

  Having sealed Gaza off from the outside world and blanketed almost half of the territory with warnings telling people to flee for their lives (to where?!), Israel has been indiscriminately firing all of these munitions into one of the most densely-inhabited parts of our planet. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled; entire families have been entombed in the ruins of their homes. The catastrophic result of Israel's bombardment is no surprise.

  No surprise -- but also not exactly thought through either; more a matter of casual disregard. For it's not as though Israel has carried out this violence in pursuit of a strategic master plan (its endless prevarications over its objectives in Gaza are the clearest indicator of this). Such gratuitous outbursts of violence (this episode is the third in six years) are, rather, what Israel falls back on in place of the strategic vision of which it is bereft. It can indulge in these outbursts partly because, in the short run at least -- endlessly coddled by the United States, where venal politicians are quick to parrot its self-justifications -- it does not pay a significant price for doing so.

• Sandy Tolan: Going Wild in the Gaza War: "Going wild" was Tzipi Livni's description of how Israel reacts to any Palestinian provocation they bother to react to. The idea is to overreact so viciously and indiscriminately that the Palestinians will learn to fear offending Israel in any way, settling meekly into their role as "an utterly defeated people." The 2014 edition of "going wild" -- by no means finished yet -- has left over 1,900 Palestinians dead, over 12,000 injured, some 100,000 homeless, many more displaced, pretty much all of 1.8 million people without power or many of the other amenities of civilization, like the ability to shop in the globalized marketplace, or to take a holiday more than 20 miles from home. Those 1.8 million people have certainly been reminded of Israel's carelessness and cruelty. It's hard to see that as a lesson that bodes well for the future. Tolan's first point is that this war could easily have been avoided had Israel and/or the US recognized and worked with Hamas, and he steps through a series of initiatives and "truce" offers that were summarily rejected by Israel and the US -- to this day they insist that "once a terrorist, always a terrorist" (to which Tolan can't help but point out that the leaders responsible "for a horrific massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people" subsequently became Prime Ministers of Israel). Tolan regards Israel as "a deeply traumatized society whose profound anxieties are based in part on genuine acts of horror perpetrated by countless terrorist attacks over decades, and partly on an unspeakable past history of Europe."

  Tragically, Israeli fears have created a national justification for a kind of "never again" mentality gone mad, in which leaders find it remarkably easy to justify ever more brutal acts against ever more dehumanized enemies. At the funeral for the three slain teens, Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "May God avenge their blood." An Israeli Facebook page, "The People of Israel Demand Revenge," quickly garnered 35,000 likes. A member of the Knesset from a party in the nation's ruling coalition posted an article by Netanyahu's late former chief of staff that called for the killing of "the mothers of [Palestinian] martyrs" and the demolition of their homes: "Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

  On NPR, Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., decried the "culture of terrorism" in Palestinian society, adding: "You're talking about savage actions . . . In the case of Israel, we take legitimate actions of self-defense, and sometimes, unintentionally, Palestinian civilians are harmed." That day, the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Khdeir was abducted and burned alive, and soon afterward, Israel began bombing Gaza.

  Within Israel, the act of dehumanization has become institutionalized. These days, Israeli newspapers generally don't even bother to print the names, when known, or the stories of the children being killed in Gaza. When B'tselem, the respected Israeli human rights organization, attempted to take out an advertisement on Israeli radio naming names, the request was denied. The content of the ad, censors declared, was "politically controversial."

  Actually, Israel is more schizophrenic than Tolan admits. One thing you notice over history is the extreme contrast between the confidence (to the point of arrogance) of Israel's top security officials (both in the military and in organizations like Shin Bet) and the dread held by large segments of public. No doubt that scaring the people lets the elites do what they want, but that's as much due to the one thing that both agree on, which is that Israeli Jews are different and infinitely more valuable than anyone else. Their specialness, after all, is the whole point of "the Jewish State." Once you believe that, there is no limit to the dehumanization of others.

• More Israel links:

  • Dan Glazebrook: Israel's Real Target is Not Hamas: It's any possibility of Palestinian statehood.
  • Sarah Lazare: Only Mideast Democracy? In Midst of War, Israel Clamps Down on Dissent.
  • Dylan Scott: For All the Hype, Does Israel's Iron Dome Even Work?: "The essence of his analysis is this: Iron Dome's missiles almost never approached Hamas's rockets at the right trajectory to destroy the incoming rocket's warhead. . . . And if the warhead is not destroyed, but merely knocked off course, the warhead will likely still explode when it lands, putting lives and property in danger." The underlying fact is that Hamas' rockets almost never do any substantial damage whether they are intercepted or not, and since they are unguided, deflecting them has no appreciable effect on their accuracy (or lack thereof). One question I still haven't seen any reports on is what happens when the shrapnel from Iron Dome rockets lands. As I recall, in 1991 Israel's US-provided Patriot anti-missile system did about as much damage as the Iraqi Scuds they were trying to defend against. That was a heavier system, but another difference was that Israel's censors had less interest in suppressing reports of Patriot failures and blowback. Part of the significance of Iron Dome is that it exemplifies Israel's unilateralist strategy -- Ben Gurion's dictum that "it only matters what the Jews do" -- so any failure is not just a technical problem but a flaw in the strategy. Even if Iron Dome were 85% effective, that would still be a lower success rate than could be achieved by a truce. Also see: Or Amit: Checking under Israel's Iron Dome.
  • Tascha Shahriari-Parsa: Is Israel's Operation Protective Edge Really About Natural Gas? Turns out there's a natural gas field off the Gaza coast, estimated in 2000 to be worth $4 billion, so that may be another angle on Israel's "security demands" to keep the Gaza coast closed, to keep Gaza under occupation and deny any sort of independent Palestinian state.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Jenn Rolnick Borchetta: One nation under siege: Law enforcement's shameful campaign against black America: not on Ferguson -- you don't think that's the only such case, do you?

• Stephen Franklin: Lawyer: 'We Should Stay on the Parapets and Keep Fighting': The lawyer interviewed here is Thomas Geoghegan, argues both that the labor movement is essential ("People who talk about maintaining the welfare state without a labor movement behind it are kidding themselves. You will not be able to have a full-employment economy without a labor movement") as is working through the courts ("We don't have majority-rule here. We have a lot of gridlock, and lots of checks and balances. Over the years, to break gridlock, you do rely upon the courts to come in from the outside").

• Paul Krugman: Secular Stagnation: The Book: Funny name for the condition where economies don't bounce back from recessions but drag on with higher unemployment rates and negligible growth for many years -- Japan in the 1990s now looks like merely an early example of a more general trend. There's a new VoxEU ebook with essays on this, something the US is very much affected by at the moment. Krugman explains more here:

And let me simply point out that liquidity-trap analysis has been overwhelmingly successful in its predictions: massive deficits didn't drive up interest rates, enormous increases in the monetary base didn't cause inflation, and fiscal austerity was associated with large declines in output and employment.

What secular stagnation adds to the mix is the strong possibility that this Alice-through-the-looking-glass world is the new normal, or at least is going to be the way the world looks a lot of the time. As I say in my own contribution to the VoxEU book, this raises problems even for advocates of unconventional policies, who all too often predicate their ideas on the notion that normality will return in the not-too-distant future. It raises even bigger problems with people and institutions that are eager to "normalize" fiscal and monetary policy, slashing deficits and raising rates; normalizing policy in a world where normal isn't what it used to be is a recipe for disaster.

• Martin Longman: On Rick Perry's Indictments: I just wanted to take note of the occasion. It's rare that sitting governors get indicted for anything, and I don't expect much is going to come out of this. Perry's supporters are not only likely to see them as politically motivated, they're likely to take that a proof that Perry's their kind of politician -- one not above getting his hands dirty.

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Monday, August 11, 2014

Music: Current count 23634 [23599] rated (+35), 546 [554] unrated (-8).

I've been struggling with MySQL database performance problems at my ISP (ADDR.COM), and got a frightful scare this morning when I realized they not only aren't responding to trouble reports, their "live chat" and "callback" service options are broken, and worst of all I got a message that they're not accepting phone calls. The static pages on the website continue to be served. I can login, update my files, and sometimes even login to the MySQL server. I week or so ago I was able to get an almost complete mysqldump of the blog database, but in three files as I went through the grind table-by-table, and in the end one table was hopelessly lost. Looking at the code that accesses that table, I decided that there's nothing important there, and tried hacking the code to avoid the table. Then I dropped and rebuilt the table, which didn't seem to help but is certainly cleaner. I also tried thinning out the very large "exits" table, which again isn't really useful -- unless one gets obsessive about user use patterns, and I'm not sure even then.

But late today the blog seemed to be working OK, so I posted yesterday's Weekend Update and if luck holds I'll follow up with this post. I'm not under any illusions that this will continue to work, or that I want to continue to do business with ADDR.COM. So I'm working on a couple of things to replant the site. The static pages are no problem, since I have a complete clone of them on a local machine. The blog is a problem in that it's updated on the server and not replicated elsewhere. I use a piece of free software called "serendipity" for it, and it has evolved quite a bit since I last updated the server. So for it I need to download a new copy, then figure out how the database dumps fit in with the new code. I also need to decide whether I want to continue using that code -- I've started using the competing "wordpress" code for other blog projects, mostly because it looks to be easier to train other people to use, and also because it seems to be simpler to keep up to date. And I need to decide whether to move the website to my "hullworks" server -- which has had its own problems lately -- or to go with another virtual server deal.

As a transition strategy, I'm working on a very simple version of blog software, one that uses the file system for storage and a small amount of PHP code to grease the wheels. I have some of it working now, will get more of it tonight, and if need be -- e.g., if I can't post this tonight -- I should be able to put it into use (with a limited data set and no comments or RSS feeds) tomorrow. Right now the main problem is figuring out how to use Apache URI rewrite rules, but that's only necessary to view single posts with more/less compatible pathnames. The bigger problem will be how much old data to collect under what should be temporary riggings.

But enough about my problems. Just finished a pretty productive music week, bringing the Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file up to 56 records (41+1+14). The two A- new jazz records were finds on the outstanding Swiss Intakt label -- one I hadn't noticed from 2013. Intakt also provided two A- old jazz records by Japanese-German pianist Aki Takase (the third A- Takase is on Leo, again accessible to me only through Rhapsody). The Nobu Stowe records had fallen through the cracks from a couple years back. (He's not even listed in Penguin Guide -- their loss.) I'm not normally such a piano fan, so this week is something of a fluke.

New records rated this week:

• Clarice Assad: Imaginarium (2014, Adventure Music): distinguished Brazilian jazz diva tangos a bit, then trips and falls into the full-fledged operatic [r]: B-
• Benyoro: Benyoro (2014, self-released): Malian music from New York, mostly yanks but the authenticity is assured at vocals and percussion [r]: B+(***)
• Bobby Broom: My Shining Hour (2014, Origin): guitarist with soul jazz cred, bass & drums, makes a better album by picking better songs [cd]: B+(**)
• Diva: A Swingin' Life (2001-12 [2014], MCG Jazz): two editions of drummer Sherry Maricle's hard swinging, brass busting all-female big band [r]: B+(**)
• Golem: Tanz (2014, Discos Corason): punk-klezmer group led by accordionist-singer Annette Ezekiel Kogan, backed with violin and trombone, goes red hot [r]: A-
• Michael Griener/Rudi Mahall/Jan Roder/Christof Thewes: Squakk: Willisau & Berlin (2012-13 [2014], Intakt): Rudi Mahall adds more than an option to trombone trio, more than a dimension too [r]: A-
• Hans Hassler: Hassler (2011 [2013], Intakt): "the true Swiss king of accordion" with two jazz clarinetists and percussion, feels rushed and cramped [r]: B
• Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: Zone (2014, Greenleaf Music): trombonist, quartet with Mike Rodriguez (trumpet), dense postbop until the lady sings, and sings [cd]: B+(*)
• Gordon Lee with the Mel Brown Septet: Tuesday Night (2014, Origin): four horns, pianist Lee, bass, drummer Brown, play Lee's tunes, dull, indistinct [cd]: B-
• Vincent Lyn: Live in New York City (2013 [2014], Budo): pianist and kung-fu master, no doubting his chops but Melissa Aldana (tenor sax) helps a lot [cd]: B+(*)
• Bob Mamet: London House Blues (2014, Blujazz): Chicago pianist, smooth/crossover rep but this is a sparkling, standards-heavy mainstream trio [cd]: B+(**)
• Medeski Martin & Wood + Nels Cline: Woodstock Sessions Vol. 2 (2013 [2014], Indirecto): where Scofield sweetened the groove, Cline stomps all over it [r]: B+(***)
• Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble: Intergalactic Beings (2010 [2014], FPE): mostly roiling around the dirty bass end, so don't fear the flute [r]: B+(***)
• Sam Most: New Jazz Standards (2013 [2014], Summit): the grand old man of jazz flute cuts a record a month before death, and sums up his whole life [cd]: B+(**)
• Greg Reitan: Post No Bills (2014, Sunnyside): mild-mannered piano trio, mostly covernig fellow (but hipper) mild-mannered pianists [cd]: B+(*)
• Dylan Ryan/Sand: Circa (2014, Cuneiform): drummer-led guitar trio, pushing hard for the proverbial jazz-rock fusion crown, maybe too hard [cdr]: B+(*)
• Irène Schweizer/Pierre Favre: Live in Zürich (2013, Intakt): Swiss piano great specializes in piano-drums duos, most reliably with Favre [r]: A-
• Spoon: They Want My Soul (2014, Anti-): Texas rockers with pop hooks go for edgier sound without losing their knack, upping their game [r]: A-
• Steve Swallow/Ohad Talmor/Adam Nussbaum: Singular Curves (2012 [2014], Auand): first sense I've had of what a seductive tenor saxophonist Talmor is [cdr]: B+(***)
• Aki Takase/La Planète: Flying Soul (2012 [2014], Intakt): piano-clarinet-violin-cello, a recipe for chamber jazz, but Pifarely won't leave it there [r]: B+(***)
• Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer: Wiring (2013 [2014], Intakt): Oliver Lake's sax supertrio (Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille) plus guest, huge talent, some lapses [r]: B+(***)
• Reggie Watkins: One for Miles, One for Maynard (2014, Corona Music): trombonist, also plays two from Matt Parker (tenor sax), postmodern retro swing [cd]: B+(**)
• Steve Wilson/Lewis Nash Duo: Duologue (2013 [2014], MCG Jazz): sax-drums duets in the tradition from Ellington to Coleman, further proof of a great drummer [cd]: B+(***)
• Wooden Wand: Farmer's Corner (2013 [2014], Fire): prolific Brooklyn singer-songwriter, mostly guitar, nice, shambling country-ish air [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Arto Lindsay: Encyclopedia of Arto (1996-2012 [2014], Northern Spy, 2CD): a best-of from his middling years, more recent (and weirder/noisier) live shots [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Michael Griener/Jan Roder/Christof Thewes: Squakk (2008 [2009], Jazzwerkstatt): German avant-trombone trio (Thewes has the horn), after Mangelsdorff/Bauer [r]: B+(**)
• Oliver Lake: Heavy Spirits (1975 [1995], Black Lion): early album pasted from fragments: solo, w/2 violins, w/trombone-percussion, standard quartet [r]: B+(*)
• The Oliver Lake String Project: Movement, Turns & Switches (1996, Passin' Thru): composes for string quartet, sometimes piano, plays along, or not [r]: B
• Oliver Lake Quintet: Talkin' Stick (1997 [2000], Passin' Thru): alto saxophonist in fine form with Geri Allen sharp on piano and Jay Hoggard on vibes [r]: B+(**)
• Oliver Lake Steel Quartet: Dat Love (2003 [2004], Passin' Thru): alto sax trio plus Lyndon Achee's steel pan drums kinda mellowing everyone out [r]: B+(***)
• Nobu Stowe-Lee Pemberton Project: Hommage an Klaus Kinski (2006 [2007], Soul Note): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Nobu Stowe & Alan Munshower with Badal Roy: An die Musik (2006 [2008], Soul Note): piano-drums-tabla trio, Stowe's uptempo riffing sets up percussionists [cdr]: A-
• Nobu Stowe: L'Albero Delle Meduse (2009 [2010], self-released): mystery album of free improvs, Achille Succi's sax probing, scratchy, pianist fills in [cdr]: B+(***)
• Aki Takase/Alex von Schlippenbach/DJ Illvibe: Lok 03 (2004 [2005], Leo): hip-hop turntablism mediates as crashing avant pianists bring the noize [r]: A-
• Aki Takase/Silke Eberhard: Ornette Coleman Anthology (2006 [2007], Intakt, 2CD): bang up piano/alto sax (or clarinet) duets on the big songbook [r]: A-
• Aki Takase/Louis Sclavis: Yokohama (2009, Intakt): piano-clarinet duets, Sclavis stays true to his ECM cool, Takase tones down, plays it safe [r]: B+(***)
• Aki Takase/Han Bennink: Two for Two (2011, Intakt): avant piano-drums, the drummer making it easy to swing, to hop, to crash and burn and fly [r]: A-
• Tama: Rolled Up (2009, Jazzwerkstatt): Aki Takase avant piano trio, block-chorded fury with a little moderation to show who's in control [r]: B+(***)
• Leroy Vinnegar Sextet: Leroy Walks! (1957 [1989], Contemporary/OJC): trademark walking bass lines buoying a light, almost frothy West Coast group [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Cables to the Ace (Communicating Vessels)
• Larry Fuller (Capri)
• The Green Seed: Drapetomania (Communicating Vessels)
• Phil Haynes: No Fast Food (Corner Store Jazz, 2CD)
• Hafez Modirzadeh: In Convergence Liberation (Pi)
• Ed Stone: King of Hearts (Sapphire Music)
• Rotem Sivan Trio: For Emotional Use Only (Fresh Sound New Talent)
• Ed Stone: King of Hearts (Sapphire Music)

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Sunday, August 10, 2014

Some scattered links this week:

• Phyllis Bennis: Obama's Iraq airstrikes could actually help the Islamic State, not weaken it: Could be -- at any rate they will more clearly align the US as the enemy of Islam, a meme that's already in fairly broad circulation both there and here (although thus far only Osama bin Laden bothered to construct the "far enemy" theory to strike at the US -- most Jihadists prefer to fight their local devils). For example, TPM reports: Graham Urges Obama Act in Iraq, Syria to Prevent Terrorist Attack in US -- he actually means "to produce terrorist attack in US" since no one in Iraq or Syria would be sufficiently motivated to attack the US unless the US was acting in their own countries. Of course, the idea that the only way to prevent something is to motivate it is a peculiar affliction of the fascist mindset, rooted not in logic but in the taste for blood. (Speaking of warmongers, TPM also reports, Clinton Knocks Obama's 'Don't Do Stupid Stuff' Foreign Policy Approach on Syria -- lest anyone think that if given the chance she would flinch from doing "stupid stuff." In another TPM report, Shock and Awe, Josh Marshall quotes an anonymous long-time Iraq war consultant on ISIS tactics -- similar to Taliban tactics right down to the shiny new Toyota pickups -- and suggests that Obama will see some initial successes against ISIS frontal attacks, at least until they adjust. I've noted before his the first flush of US airpower and advanced weapons creates a false sense of invincibility, "the feel-good days of the war," which soon ends as "the enemy" adjusts tactics and as the US blunders from atrocity to atrocity. So, pace Bennis, the short-run game is likely to look good to the hawks, and being hawks they're unlikely to ever look at something that produces perpetual war as having a downside. No, the problem with Bennis' piece is that she want to argue US policy in Iraq on the basis of what it means to Iraqis, instead of the affect intervening in Iraq will have in the US. Foreign wars are catnip for the right because they propagate hate and violence and they show the government doing nothing to make American lives better (even the ruse that they create jobs has worn thin).

  And, of course, there's always the oil angle: see, Steve Coll: Oil and Erbil. So far, Obama has been more active in defending Kurdish autonomy than backing Iraq's central government. Coincidentally, ExxonMobil and Chevron have made major deals with the Kurds, bypassing the central government. Favorite line here: "ExxonMobil declined to comment."

  Erbil's rulers never quite saw the point of a final compromise with Baghdad's Shiite politicians -- as each year passed, the Kurds got richer on their own terms, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like they led a de-facto state. The Obama Administration has done nothing to reverse that trend.

  And so, in Erbil, in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened Iraq's seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist quixotically in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront ISIS.

  Obama's defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal -- as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example -- are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company, as Al Swearengen [a reference back to HBO's series, Deadwood] would well understand. Life, Swearengen once pointed out, is often made up of "one vile task after another." So is American policy in Iraq.

• Elias Isquith: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on his growing unpopularity: It's Obama's fault! Brownback won the Republican Party nomination last week, with a 63-37 margin over Jennifer Winn. Winn had no political experience, and no money. Her campaign was managed by a libertarian who came out not of the Tea Party but the Occupy movement. Winn's primary motivation for running was the experience and sense of injustice she felt when her son was arrested for drugs. A big part of her platform was calling for legalization of marijuana. She was not, in other words, a natural fit with any identifiable fragment of the Republican Party in Kansas, and still Brownback -- a sitting governor, two-term Senator, former Congressman, rich, pious, with a postcard family, someone who's never faced a closely contested election in his life -- still couldn't run up a two-to-one margin among his own people. So, yeah, he should take the result as a wake-up call. Instead, he explained:

  "I think a big part of it is Barack Obama," Brownback said, referring to his only securing two-thirds of the primary vote. "[A] lot of people are so irritated at what the president is doing, they want somebody to throw a brick."

  Brownback continued: "I think it's a lot of deep irritation with the way the president has taken the country, so much so that people are so angry about it they're just trying to express it somehow."

  Why Kansas voters would be so irrational as to punish Brownback, who in many ways represents everything Obama does not, for the president's sins, the governor did not say.

  Having just suffered through a big-money Republican primary, it's obvious that Republicans in Kansas are totally convinced that everyone in the country (well, except, you know, for them) utterly can't stand Obama or anything associated with him (especially "Obamacare"), so they've concluded that the sure path to election is to go as far over the top in denouncing Obama as possible. But just working yourself up into ever greater levels of hysteria doesn't make that claim any more credible. On the other hand, Brownback has nearly wrecked the state government he was entrusted with nearly four years ago, and he can hardly blame what he did on anyone else.

  John Cassidy: Memo to Obama's Critics: He's Not Callow Anymore has an explanation why Republicans have turned up the vitriol against Obama, what with the Republican House suing the president while many among them talk of impeachment: "But it isn't his inexperience and glibness that's infuriating them. It's the fact that he's learned to play the Washington power game, and, perhaps, found a way to go around them." What Obama's done with all that executive power hasn't been very impressive -- except in Israel-Iraq-Syria-Ukraine foreign policy, where every step he's taken has been wrong, something Cassidy doesn't appreciate -- but Republicans were so used to pushing Obama around that any attempt to call their bluff is seen as a calamity. (I am, by the way, not very happy with Cassidy's recent posts on the four ISIU wars, nor his defense of Obama in them. Nor are the Republicans much concerned there, except inasmuch as they can paint Obama as weak. Too bad: when they impeached Clinton way back when, I wrote that I would have cast a guilty vote, not on the basis of the charges but due to his mishandling of Iraq. Obama is little if any better now.)

• Ed Kilgore: The Tea Party Is Losing Battles but Winning the War: Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, so well ensconced in Washington he no longer bothers to own or rent any residency in the state he represents, defeated a rather weird Tea Party challenger named Milton Wolf by a 48-41 margin: Wolf's sound bite description of Roberts was "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas." Roberts had never been accused of being a RINO, but fearing Wolf's challenge he became noticeably more dilligent about his conservative bona fides over the last year (before that he was mostly known for routing federal money to agribusiness interests). So Kilgore chalks this up as yet another case of the Tea Party moving the Republican Party to the right even when they fail to get their crackpots nominated. (Wolf, an orthopedist, reportedly had a nasty habit of posting his patients' X-rays on Facebook along with denigrating "humorous" comments.)

• Ed Kilgore: The "New" Rick Perry: "New" as in he's distancing himself from the "old" Perry who self-destructed in the 2012 presidential race, presumably to run again in 2016.

  As for Perry's famous message of presenting Texas as an economic template for the country, I think it's a mistake to view this as easy, non-controversial mainline GOP rap that the rest of us can live with. What Perry exemplifies is the ancient southern approach to economic development based on systematic abasement of public policy in order to make life as profitable and easy as possible for "job-creators," at any cost. If it sort of "works" (if you don't care about poverty and low wage rates and inadequate health care and deliberately starved public resources) in Texas thanks in no small part to the state's fossil fuel wealth and low housing costs (though as Philip Longman demonstrated in the April/May issue of WaMo, even that level of success is debatable), it sure hasn't ever "worked" in similarly inclined but less blessed places like Mississippi and Alabama, where the local aristocracy has been preaching the same gospel for many decades.

• Mike Konczal/Bryce Covert: The Real Solution to Wealth Inequality: In The Nation, this appeared as "Tiny Capitalists":

  Democrats and Republicans advocate different solutions to inequality, but both seek to shift financial risk from the state to the individual. Republicans promote the "ownership society," in which privatizing social insurance, removing investor protections and expanding home ownership align the interests of workers with the anti-regulatory interests of the wealthy. Democrats focus on education and on helping the poor build wealth through savings programs. These approaches demand greater personal responsibility for market risks and failures, further discrediting the state's role in regulating markets and providing public social insurance.

  Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be taking basic needs off the market altogether.

  Consider Social Security, a wildly popular program that doesn't count toward individual wealth. If Social Security were replaced with a private savings account, individuals would have more "wealth" (because they would have their own financial account) but less actual security. The elderly would have to spin the financial-markets roulette wheel and suffer destitution if they were unlucky. This is why social-wealth programs like Social Security combat inequality more powerfully than any privatized, individualized wealth-building "solution."

  Public programs like universal healthcare and free education function the same way, providing social wealth directly instead of hoping to boost people's savings enough to allow them to afford either. Rather than requiring people to struggle with a byzantine system of private health insurance, universal healthcare would be available to cover the costs of genuine health needs. Similarly, broadly accessible higher education would allow people to thrive without taking on massive student loans and hoping that their "human capital" investment helps them hit the jackpot.

  Emphasis added to the key point. Aside from moving basic needs off market, we would also be moving them into the realm of society-guaranteed rights. Also, from optional (something enjoyed by an elite) to mandatory (something securely available to all). Conversely, the political agenda of trying to impose greater market discipline over any area of life is meant to increase inequality, and to make its consequences more acute.

• Paul Krugman: Libertarian Fantasies: I've always had sympathies for libertarian thinking: the lessons of the "don't tread on me" American Revolution were imprinted early, and the notion that the state was out to keep me from enjoying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was backed by clear evidence from my teens, most perniciously through the draft and the drug war. However, I eventually realized that while self-interested public menaces like J. Edgar Hoover occasionally worked in the public sector they tended to be the exception, in corporations they were the rule, so ubiquitous that their corruption lapped over and gnawed at the very idea of public service. But things like the continuing drug war show that their is a need for libertarian types. Unfortunately, they rarely stop at defending freedom from real threats. Many become obsessed with false threats, and have no clue how to go from critique to policy, mostly because their anti-government bias blinds them from the possibility of using government for increasing freedom. (For instance, I'd say that the FDA increases my freedom as a consumer by saving me time worrying about contaminated food. You might say that the FDA limits the freedom of food producers to cut costs and poison people, but there are a lot more of us than them, and regulation is a fairly efficient scheme to even out minimal quality costs and avoid a disastrous "race to the bottom.") Krugman has his own examples, concluding:

  In other words, libertarianism is a crusade against problems we don't have, or at least not to the extent the libertarians want to imagine. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of monetary policy, where many libertarians are determined to stop the Fed from irresponsible money-printing -- which is not, in fact, something it's doing.

  And what all this means in turn is that libertarianism does not offer a workable policy agenda. I don't mean that I dislike the agenda, which is a separate issue; I mean that if we should somehow end up with libertarian government, it would quickly find itself unable to fulfill any of its promises.

  I read a lot of Murray Rothbard way back when, and he actually spent a lot of time coming up with private sector solutions to functions like justice that are invariably performed by government. I easily understand why a public justice system may become corrupt and repressive -- traits ours exhibits way too often -- but I couldn't see how Rothbard's scheme could every work, even badly. Rothbard's cases for private firefighters and other services were more workable, but everything he came up was vastly more inefficient than what we already have.

• Gideon Levy: Go to Gaza, see for yourself: An Israeli journalist, recently named by a right-wing Israeli commentator as someone Israel should lock up in a concentration camp:

  Let's talk about Gaza. The Gaza strip is not a nest of murderers; it's not even a nest of wasps. It is not home to incessant rampage and murder. Most of its children were not born to kill, nor do most of its mothers raise martyrs -- what they want for their children is exactly what most Israeli mothers want for their own children. Its leaders are not so different from Israel's, not in the extent of their corruption, their penchant for "luxury hotels" nor even in their allocating most of the budget to defense.

  Gaza is a stricken enclave, a permanent disaster zone, from 1948 to 2014, and most of its inhabitants are third- and fourth-time refugees. Most of the people who revile and who destroy the Gaza Strip have never been there, certainly not as civilians. For eight years I have been prevented from going there; during the preceding 20 years I visited often. I liked the Gaza Strip, as much as one can like an afflicted region. I liked its people, if I may be permitted to make a generalization. There was a spirit of almost unimaginable determination, along with an admirable resignation to its woes.

  In recent years Gaza has become a cage, a roofless prison surrounded by fences. Before that it was also bisected. Whether or not they are responsible for their situation, these are ill-fated people, a great many people and a great deal of misery. [ . . . ]

  But in Hebrew, "Gaza," pronounced 'Aza, is short for Azazel, which is associated with hell. Of the multitude of curses hurled at me these days from every street corner, "Go to hell/Gaza" is among the gentler ones. Sometimes I want to say in response, "I wish I could go to Gaza, in order to fulfill my journalistic mission." And sometimes I even want to say: "I wish you could all go to Gaza. If only you knew what Gaza is, and what is really there."

• Andrew O'Hehir: Is Obama haunted by Bush's ghost -- or possessed by him? Lots of things have bothered me about Obama, but his disinterest to put any real distance between his administration and the Bush one on issues of war, peace, and security is foremost -- all the more so because by the time Bush left office those policies had been shown to be utterly bankrupt, and because Obama was elected with a clear mandate for change.

  As we were reminded earlier this week, Obama's efforts to separate his own management of intelligence and spycraft from the notorious torture policies of Bush's "war on terror" now look exceedingly murky, if not downright mendacious. Throughout his campaigns and presidential years, Obama has relied on shadow-men like former CIA director George Tenet, former counterterrorism chief and current CIA director John Brennan and director of national intelligence (and spinner of lies to Congress) James Clapper, all of whom are implicated to the eyeballs in "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the other excesses of the Bush regime. [ . . . ] Despite all the things he said to get elected, and beneath all the stylistic and symbolic elements of his presidency, Obama has chosen to continue the most fundamental policies of the Bush administration. In some areas, including drone warfare, government secrecy and the persecution of whistle-blowers, and the outsourcing of detainee interrogation to third-party nations, Obama has expanded Bush's policies.

• Stephen M Walt: Do No (More) Harm: Subtitle: "Every time the U.S. touches the Middle East, it makes things worse. It's time to walk away and not look back." Good argument, but could use a better article. Walt's list of all the things that have gone wrong is detailed and long enough, but when he tries to apply his "realist" paradigm he doesn't come with any clear sense of the American interests in the region that he assumes must exist. (Closest he comes is the desire to keep any [other] nation from controlling the Persian Gulf oil belt, which at the moment is so fragmented it hardly calls for any US action at all. He misses what strike me as the two obvious ones: peace and a sense of equality and justice throughout the region, which would in turn undercut past/current trends toward militant and repressive Islam.) He rejects isolationism, but that may well be the best solution one can hope for given how pathological US intervention has been. (After all, alcoholics are advised to quit, rather than just scale back to the occasional drink non-alcoholics can handle without harm.) He does suggest that the US give up on trying to guide any sort of "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, he goes to far as to say that we shouldn't bother with Israel's imperious fantasies if that's what they want to do -- evidently being a "realist" means you never have to think in terms of principles. On the other hand, isn't such a total lack of scruples a big part of how the US became the Middle East plague it so clearly is?

• Israel/Palestine links:

  • Kate: Three Palestinian men killed in separate West Bank protests, one outside a Jewish settlement: a long, depth-ful compendium of links and stories all around the conflict. Regarding the title incidents, I recall that the second ("Al-Aqsa") intifada started in response to Israel killing a dozen or so Palestinian demonstrators. I always thought that should have been called the "Shaul Moffaz Intifada," in honor of the murderer-in-chief (then-IDF chief-of-staff). One article notes: "More than 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel were arrested by Israeli police during Operation Protective Edge, according to a lawyer representing a number of the detainees. While some were arrested for protesting the Israeli military incursion into Gaza, dozens were held without charge." Another article called for "the establishment of camps modeled after the internment camps the United States established in World War II" for anti-war "agitators" (names included Gideon Levy, Haneen Zoabi, and Amira Haas). Also, an earlier compendium by Kate: After destroying 10,000 homes, Israel says Gaza can rebuild if it disarms.
  • Michael Lerner: Israel has broken my heart: I'm a rabbi in mourning for a Judaism being murdered by Israel: A powerful testament on the disconnect between Israel and Jews elsewhere who as part of their identity take injustice seriously.
  • Falguni Sheth: The West' selective amnesia: Gaza, the war on terror and the paradox of human rights: Starts by citing the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document from a period when the world was exhausted by war and prescient enough to understand that the key to peace is treating people right. Those aspirations have fallen by the wayside, both as various nations came to view their interests as depending on trodding on human rights -- a reassertion of the imperialist mindset that led to two world wars -- and the self-defense doctrine, which holds that one's own self-defense is so critical that it allows one to act against other nations and peoples with impunity. (Sheth's term for this is FLOP, an acronym for Fuck the Lives of Other People.) Israel is the paradigm for that doctrine, although it has been invoked by other countries when they thought they could get away with it -- the US reaction to 9/11 is a prime example.
  • Richard Silverstein: Col. Ofer Winter: Poster Boy for IDF's New Dirty 200, Ceasefire Dies (Again); and IDF Col. Ofer Winter's Holy War Against Latter-Day Philistines: These two pieces single out one Israeli commander who has repeatedly distinguished himself for war crimes.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Richard S Grossman: Greed destroyed us all: George W. Bush and the real story of the Great Recession: An excerpt from Grossman's new book, Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them.

• Rick Perlstein: 40 Years Ago: How Nixon's Resignation Paved the Way for Ronald Reagan: A long excerpt from Perlstein's new and very long book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

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