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|
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Rhapsody Streamnotes (November 2013)
Pick up text
here.
Daily Log
Greg Morton posted his Julieta Venegas review that I had omitted
from the Turkey Shoot.
Julieta Venegas: Los Momentos (Sony Music Latin)
Music in languages I don't understand presents a barrier only if the
music qua music is boring or if the performances are weak. Otherwise,
it's an enlightening window into a different way of life and
frequently an exciting testament to our common humanity by using a
universal language, cf., Mahlathini and the Queens, Orchestra Baobab,
and to the point, Julieta Venegas. Affirming as Mexican though born in
Long Beach, CA in 1970, singing only in Spanish on now six studio
albums, one live one, and one Greatest Hits, she became a
national success with the string of Bueninvento, Si',
Limon y Sal, MTV Unplugged and Otra Cosa that
covered the last decade. While Bueninvento feels transitional,
a teenager trying to fill out an adult's wardrobe, and the MTV album
peaks high but levels off, the two strongest, Si' and Limon
y Sal are chock full of pop enjoyment -- harmonies, hooks, humor,
love, dancing, even the occasional social commentary. Fun, fun, fun
with smarts and a heart, you might say. Like Smokey Robinson on a good
day. Otra Cosa was the insular version; as if recorded in a
hermetically enclosed studio with no air movement. Los Momentos
triples down on that tendency. Thin vocals that used to be exuberant,
tame or even nonexistent instrumental interplay, mild tempos,
dim/mechanical production, an overall sonic deadening. Quoted as
"inspired by the situation in Mexico and the difficult times the
country is experiencing"; in this case, I guess you do have to speak
the national language because the universal one has lost its charm.
B MINUS
Friday, November 29, 2013
Black Friday Special: 2013
Pick up text
here.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Turkey Shoot: 2013
Pick up text
here.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Music Week/Jazz Prospecting
Music: Current count 22445 [22396] rated (+49), 565 [559] unrated (+6).
Rated count continues high because I'm focusing more on Rhapsody
than on the physical jazz records covered here. November's Streamnotes
column is up to 72 entries at the moment, and will have more by the end
of the month when it finally runs. On the other hand, the jazz queue
has been shrinking. The 18 records in this week's unpacking would have
been an average week in years past but this is the first week with that
many since October 7, and the overwhelming majority of this week's
catch are 2014 releases.
I'm thinking about abandoning my practice of holding reviews until
release weeks. Not much difference this week, nor likely to be in the
near future, except that I do think it makes sense to hold back on
2014 releases until all the 2013 list-making madness ends. I have made
one format change this week. It's nice to have a picture or two at the
top of the post, but until now those have been reserved for A- (or
better) albums. I usually reformat and cache those cover scans, but
for last year's Turkey Shoot albums, and more recently for Tatum's
trash albums, I've started linking album covers at cdconnection.com
with my preferred size constraints. So it occured to me that I could
use the same trick to grab a high B+ record when I have nothing A-.
The source only has about half of the jazz albums I look for, and
they don't show new records until release date so that presents a
Monday/Tuesday problem. But at least I found my first choice today.
Big music review week coming up: Turkey Shoot on Thursday, November
28, followed by Black Friday Special on Friday and my wrap-up Rhapsody
Streamnotes column on Saturday. One reason the latter looms to large
is that I've benefited from the research of the dozen critics taking
part. Another is that as the year closes I've been tightening up the
metacritic file. Maybe the
week after we can do some handicapping on year-end lists. I haven't
seen any such lists yet this year, but they should start coming in
fast and furious. (UK mags, in particular, seem to like to run them
in December.) And Francis Davis is already bugging me for my Jazz
Critics Poll ballot (deadline December 8), so the season will soon
be upon us.
|
Dewa Budjana: Joged Kanyangan (2013, Moonjune):
Guitarist, b. 1963 in Indonesia, has been in the band Gigi since
1994; sixth solo album since 1997, although only two are listed at
AMG. Fusion-oriented band -- Larry Goldings (organ, piano), Bob
Mintzer (saxes, clarinets), Jimmy Johnson (bass guitar), Peter
Erskine (drums) -- although the rhythm picks up something I take
to be Indonesian. Janis Siegel sings one song, breaking the flow
and adding nothing.
B-
George Colligan: The Endless Mysteries (2012 [2013],
Origin): Pianist, has put together an impressive discography since 1996.
Front cover also names, in slightly smaller type, Larry Grenadier and
Jack DeJohnette -- a rhythm section you'd want to brag about too.
B+(**)
Foreign Motion: In Flight (2013, self-released): Sort
of a fusion band, with Cory Wong (guitar), Kevin Gastonguay (keyboards),
Yohannes Tona (bass), and Petar Janjic (drums) -- based in Minnesota,
I think, although Yona was born in Ethiopia and Janjic in Serbia (the
others were born in the US). Wong has a previous album and seems to be
the leader but all four contribute songs, and the grooves offer some
pleasant surprises.
B+(**)
Brian Gephart: Standing on Two Feet (2012 [2013],
Origin): Tenor saxophonist, based in Chicago, has a handful of
records with Bob Long as Gephart Long Quartet going back to 1992,
and at least one Brian Gephart Quartet album. Sextet here, with
trombone, guitar, piano, bass, and drums. Upbeat, hard boppish
stuff, nothing grabbed me but it's certainly listenable.
B
Aaron Germain: Chance (2013, Origin): Bassist, electric
and acoustic, leaning electric on his second album, with Nguyen Le on
guitar, Frank Martin (piano and, mostly, keyboards), and drums, plus
one-track guests on flute and dan t'rung.
B-
Harold López-Nussa: New Day (2013, Jazz Village):
Pianist, from Cuba, still lives in Havana, has at least three previous
albums. Mostly trio, favoring intense rhythm as opposed to the usual
Afro-Cuban start-stop time shifts. Some cuts add Mayquel González on
trumpet, dropping the piano back to a comping role.
B+(***)
Sue Maskaleris: Bring Nothing but Your Heart (2013,
Jazilian): Singer-songwriter, has at least one previous album; wrote
everything here but "Lush Life," with a couple songs in Portuguese.
Also plays piano/keyboards, violin, guitar, bass, and percussion,
and gets help from a long list of musicians.
B
Mumpbeak: Mumpbeak (2013, Rare Noise): Hype sheet
says "takes prog-rock to a new place," but bass-heavy groove music
with free frissons has been around a long time, not least in producer
Bill Laswell's archives. Group includes Roy Powell (Hohner clavinet,
FX pedals), Pat Mastelotto (acoustic and electronic drums, percussion),
and various electric bassists -- Laswell and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz
double up on most cuts, adding Tony Levin on one, replacing them with
Lorenzo Feliciati on another.
B+(*) [November 28]
Quartet San Francisco: Pacific Premieres: New Works by
California Composers (2013, Violin Jazz): Conventional string
quartet: Jeremy Cohen (violin), Matthew Szemele (violin), Chad Kaitinger
(viola), Kelley Maulbetsch (cello). Group has at least six previous
records since 2002 -- two playing works by Dave Brubeck. The California
composers here are Gordon Goodwin, Vince Mendoza, Patrick Williams, and
Cohen himself -- the first two are well-known big band composer-arrangers.
B+(*)
John Stowell & Dave Liebman: Blue Rose (2012
[2013], Origin): Duets. Stowell plays guitar, has about two dozen
albums since 1977, should be better known than he is -- AMG, for
instance, doesn't have a biography page on him, although they list
twice as many albums as his Wikipedia page. Liebman plays soprano
and tenor sax, a little piano and a bit of wooden flute. They've
recorded together before, but Liebman's recorded with damn near
everyone (I'm not up to counting, but it's conceivable he has more
album credits than any other active saxophonist, although he's
spotted Braxton and Brötzmann a decade and they're contenders).
This can be a bit skimpy, but Liebman's as engabed and enjoyable
here as he's been in years, probably because the guitarist is
always in the right place.
B+(**)
Craig Yaremko Organ Trio: CYO3 (2013, Origin):
Saxophonist -- credits here are soprano, alto, tenor, flute, alto
flute -- third album, with Matt King on organ, Jonathon Peretz on
drums, and adding Vic Juris' guitar on two tracks. Starts off
marvelously with "Jitterbug Waltz," and is generally most fun
when they give you something familiar, like "Bye-Ya" or "Isfahan";
less fun when the leader shows off his flutes.
B+(**)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Jane Ira Bloom: Sixteen Sunsets (Outline): January 7
- Barry Danielian: Metaphorically Speaking (Tariqah): December 10
- Annette Genovese: Dream With Me (self-released): November 26
- Brad Hoyt: Far Away From Everyday (Harp Guitar Music): December 3
- Mike Longo and the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble: Live From New York (CAP): December 10
- Earl McIntyre: Brass Carnival & Tribute (self-released): December 10
- The Ocular Concern: Sister Cities (PJCE): January 15
- Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra: Aphelion (Aerophonic): January 21
- The Rempis/Daisy Duo: Second Spring (Aerophonic): January 21
- Pete Robbins: Pyramid (Hate Laugh Music): January 28
- Brandon Ross/Stomu Takeishi: For Living Lovers: Revealing Essence (Sunnyside): January 21
- Anton Schwartz: Flash Mob (Anton Jazz): January 14
- Sarah Silverman: Sarah (self-released): November 26
- Edward Simon: Venezuelan Suite (Sunnyside): January 21
- E. Doctor Smith: Quantum (Edgetone)
- Soar Trio: Emergency Management Heist (Edgetone)
- Steve Treseler Group: Center Song (Creative Music Adventures): February 5
- Volcán (5Pasion): December 17
Miscellaneous notes:
- Ryan Maffei: Country Town (2013, Jamrag):
B+(***) [download]
- The Pozniaks: Pozniak Street (2013, Jamrag):
A- [download]
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Weekend Roundup
The big news this week is the deal Iran signed with the world's
"5+1" superpowers -- you know, the ones who actually have nuclear
weapons programs capable of destroying most life on earth, or in
the case of Germany, one that has mastered all of the so-called
"peaceful" technologies of nuclear power that Iran says it aspires
to without wasting extra effort into packaging that power in bomb
form. (Curious that Japan didn't make the cut, especially as they
have some painful experience with the blessings of nuclear power --
what Iran so much wants to experience itself.) If one goes by history,
an Iranian bomb might actually stabilize the Middle East inasmuch
as it would deter Israel and Saudi Arabia from starting another war
with Iran, but Iranian nuclear power plants could turn into a real
environmental hazard. Still, the agreement is good news, especially
in that it represents a step away from war.
War in Context has a good series of links on the agreement:
-
Iran, six world powers clinch breakthrough nuclear deal: cites
Michael R Gordon at New York Times.
-
How Iran and world powers finally got to yes on a nuclear deal:
cites
Barbara Slavin.
-
New US sanctions would spell 'end of deal' to limit nuclear program:
which is, of course, why Israel stooges like
Chuck Shumer and
Bob Corker are working to pass them.
-
With Iran deal sealed, don't expect Israel to send out the air force:
cites Amos Harel at Haaretz; also notes that Israel's stock market
responded favorably to the deal (unlike Israel's Prime Minister).
-
Geneva deal seals Netanyahu's legacy: An ineffectual leader:
cites Amir Oren at Haaretz. ("This morning, in Switzerland, Netanyahu
had his toy gun taken away. In Basel, Herzl founded the state of the
Jews, and in Geneva, Obama ended Netanyahu's era.") Actually, the deal
wouldn't have been made except for Netanyahu, because without his
relentless propagandizing for war no one would have seen the issue
as needing such a solution. And if, as I suspect, Netanyahu's real
purpose was merely to avoid talking about the Palestinians, he's
managed that rather successfully, if not very elegantly.
-
A path towards peace with Iran -- Netanyahu's worst nightmare:
with another link to Haaretz you can't read. Paul Woodward adds:
"Netanyahu's goal has never been for the nuclear issue to be resolved.
It's political value resides wholly in this remaining an unresolved
issue and in Israel's ability to cast Iran as a perpetual threat.
For Netanyahu, any deal is a bad deal because absent an
Iranian threat, Israel will find itself under increasing pressure
to address the Palestinian issue."
-
A nuclear deal to which no one can reasonably object: cites
Fred Kaplan in Slate: "It's everything Obama hoped to achieve in
Geneva."
-
Secret US-Iran talks set stage for nuke deal: cites AP and Haaretz.
-
After rapid release of hot air, Israeli leaders may soon run out of
cliches: cites
Jodi Rudoren at New York Times, and
Jeffrey Goldberg. Rudoren quotes Efraim Inbar: "At a time when
appeasing Iran seems to be in vogue, an Israeli strike could invigorate
elements in the international arena who are unwilling to accept an Iran
with a nuclear breakout capability. In addition, many people around the
world would be reminded that muscular reactions to evil regimes are
often truly necessary." Not a lot of self-awareness in that invitation.
Some scattered links this week:
Tom Engelhardt: Boo!: On our national psyche:
On August 1, 1966, a former Marine sniper took to the 28th floor of a
tower on the campus of the University of Texas with an M-1 carbine and
an automatic shotgun, killing 17, while wounding 32. It was an act that
staggered the American imagination, shook the media, led to a commission
being formed, and put those SWAT teams in our future. But no one then
could have guessed how, from Columbine high school (13 dead, 24 wounded)
and Virginia Tech university (32 dead, 17 wounded) to Sandy Hook Elementary
School (26 dead, 20 of them children), the unhinged of our heavily armed
nation would make slaughters, as well as random killings even by children,
all-too-common in schools, workplaces, movie theaters, supermarket parking
lots, airports, houses of worship, navy yards, and so on.
And don't even get me started on imprisonment, a category in which
we qualify as the world's leader with 2.2 million people behind bars, a
500% increase over the last three decades, or the rise of the punitive
spirit in this country. That would include the handcuffing of remarkably
young children at their schools for minor infractions and a fierce
government war on whistleblowers -- those, that is, who want to tell
us something about what's going on inside the increasingly secret state
that runs our American world and that, in 2011, considered 92 million of
the documents it generated so potentially dangerous to outside eyes that
it classified them.
Steve M: Sam Tanenhaus Doesn't Print the Legend, but Why Is That
the Legend? Cites Peggy Noonan claiming, "We all talk about
JFK's death because for the 18 years leading up to that point --
between the end of the war, as we used to say, and 1963 -- America
knew placidity": Kennedy's assassination brought that to an end,
revealing a bitterly (and violently) divided nation. Tanenhaus has
a variation on that theme. M. writes:
I was four years old when JFK was shot, so this isn't my nostalgia;
I have trouble looking back and understanding how people saw the era
as placid.
The fissures that became obvious in the post-assassination era
were evident in the very first presidential election after World
War II, when Henry Wallace ran to the left and Strom Thurmond ran
to the racist right. Beyond that, I could run through the whole "We
Didn't Start the Fire" litany: McCarthyism, China going communist,
Cuba going communist, integration of the military and baseball and
Little Rock and Ole Miss (and the backlashes), the Montgomery bus
boycott, the Freedom Rides, the fear of "juvenile delinquents" and
comic books and rock and roll, the Pill, Bircherism. . . . I wasn't
there, but did Joe and Jane America really feel that the era was
placid?
Maybe compared with the Depression and the war it was. Maybe a
fairly broad-based prosperity made it all go down easy -- maybe
that's all it takes.
Let me add a couple points here: First, before the civil rights
movement challenged Jim Crow and exposed the violence that it had
always been based on -- a violence which if anything was much more
ominous when it didn't have to appear. The civil rights movement
didn't divide America and didn't lead to more violence. Pre-civil
rights Jim Crow was already as divided and as violent as it could
get.
Second, isn't the word "placidity" a bit quaint? What Noonan
means was that most people accepted their place in the social and
class hierarchy, and that they seemed to conform to a set of common
beliefs about what it meant to be an American. This was at least
partly because coming out of the New Deal and the reinforced unity
of the World War those beliefs were overwhelmingly liberal. And it
had at least something to do with the sense that class differences
would melt into a common middle class -- the result of the leveling
measures of the New Deal (more union membership, higher taxes on
the rich) and the postwar boom. But that consensus was also based
on hypocrisy -- on ignoring the exceptions which became obvious as
young people in the 1960s discovered poverty and prejudice, and
how cold war ideology advanced the right-wing against workers here
and around the world. Only conservative shmoozes like Noonan look
back on those naïve years as a golden age of placidity.
Steven M. has another quoteworthy paragraph in
Republican Obstructionism: But Aren't Republicans the Real Victims?:
Actually, that's not true. Republicans are not "eager to show they have
not been stripped of all power." Republicans are never "eager to show
they have not been stripped of all power." Republicans are almost always
eager to convey the impression that they have no power, that power
is something they've been viciously cheated out of, but that they are
nonetheless plucky, determined underdogs who have God and the Constitution
on their side, which helps them fight for freedom despite the tyranny of
the Liberal Monolith. Even when Ronald Reagan could bend Democratic Blue
Dogs to his will, or George W. Bush and a Republican Congress ran the
country with impunity, the message was that they were under the bootheel
of Sam Donaldson or Dan Rather, or persecuted by left-wing college
professors, or by Michael Moore and the Dixie Chicks, who had all the
real power.
After all, if you thought the Republicans had power, you might think
the Republicans were responsible for the consequences of their actions --
which is kind of what happened in the 2006 and 2008 elections, before
Iraq and Afghanistan and the Great Recession and dozens of other disasters
suddenly became Obama's fault.
Steven refines this further here:
The GOP Is Not in the Business of Governing -- It's a Propaganda Operation
That Also Runs Candidates for Government Offices.
Also, a few links for further study:
Daily Log
Afternoon was chewed up with new refrigerator install. The squeeze into
the kitchen was tighter than the 1/4-inch the specs said we had, and the
deliverers were ready to give up for a minute. Got a few smudges on both
sides, but got it through. Loaded the new one up with contents from the
old refrigerator. Main complaint now (aside from that it will take some
time to get some fresh ice through) is that I'm not sure I like the shelf
arrangements.
I had to take a piece of baseboard off and it split in two, so I'll
have to repair that. Also took the edging off the refrigerator box. The
box itself is slightly skewed -- turns out that the left wall I built
it off of wasn't plumb. Need to see if there's some way I can jigger
the trim to make it look less skewed.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Daily Log
Looking through old JP/RS columns for reviews reusable for JP/BFS.
The following look like candidates:
Billy Martin's Wicked Knee: Heels Over Head (2012 [2013],
Amulet) Drummer, best known as the middleman in Medeski, Martin
& Wood; has released a large pile of specialist albums, but
nothing like this before. Here he's lined up a small brass band --
Steven Bernstein (trumpet, slide trumpet), Curtis Fowlkes (trombone),
Marcus Rojas (tuba) -- and gone back to New Orleans, at least for King
Oliver's "Sugarfoot Stomp" although they jump off with a Frank London
piece called "Chumba Zumba," and never settle into anything obvious or
derivative. Bernstein does most of the arranging, and Rojas takes most
of the leads. And lest you think that I think every vocal incursion is
a waste, check out Shelley Hirsch's song about hobbling through an
Occupy Wall Street march as one of the "99%." A
Barbara Morrison: A Sunday Kind of Love (2010-12 [2013],
Savant) Singer, b. 1952 in Michigan, got her start opposite Eddie
"Cleanhead" Vinson in 1974, toiled a couple decades in the Johnny Otis
Show, has a dozen records since 1995. I haven't heard any of them, but
would be real surprised if any hold a candle to this one. The secret
isn't a fine-but-who-are-they pianio trio -- Stuart Elster? Richard
Simon? Lee Spath? -- so it must be Houston Person, who is more than
just featured here. But it's the singer who hits one softball after
another out of the park: "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "The Green
Door," "A Sunday Kind of Love," "On the Sunny Side of the Street,"
"Let's Stay Together" -- only "I Cover the Waterfront" is out of her
zone. Exquisite: the medley of "Smile/Make Someone Happy." I dare
anyone not to. A
Lucian Ban: Elevation/Mystery (2010 [2013],
Sunnyside) Pianist, b. 1969 in Romania, based in New York. Seventh
or so album since 2002, most with baritone saxophonist Alex Harding,
and second one this year, following Transylvanian Concert with Mat
Maneri on ECM. That stretched out his folkloric/classical side, but
this one -- a quartet with Abraham Burton (tenor sax), John Hébert
(bass), and Eric McPherson (drums) -- recorded live at Cornelia Street
Cafe in NYC sets him in an avant context, especially when the
saxophonist works up a full head of steam. Nor is a quiet spot with
just the bassist any less interesting. By the way, the "Mystery" part
of the title is obscured -- how clever some graphic designers are! I
missed it on unpacking, and most likely others will too. A-
As I was looking at RS, I noticed this list of 2012 releases that
I complained about being unable to find on Rhapsody:
- Khaira Arby: Tchini Tchini (Clermont Music)
- Cooly G: Playin' Me (Hyperdub)
- Brian Eno: Lux (Warp)
- Four Tet: Pink (Text)
- Mats Gustafsson/Thurston Moore: Play Some Fucking Stooges (Quasi Pop/Dumpster Diving Lab)
- The Human Hearts: Another (Shrimper)
- Darius Jones Quartet: Book of Mae'bul (Another Kind of Surprise) (AUM Fidelity)
- Peter Karp/Sue Foley: Beyond the Crossroads (Blind Pig)
- LV: Sebenza (Hyperdub)
- Getatchew Merkuria & the Ex & Friends: Y'Anbessaw Tezeta (Terp)
- Joe Morris/William Parker/Gerald Cleaver: Altitude (AUM Fidelity)
- William Parker Orchestra: Essence of Ellington (AUM Fidelity)
- Royal Band de Thiés: Kadior Demb (Teranga Beat)
- Shackleton: Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs (Woe to the Septic Heart)
- Andy Stott: Luxury Problems (Modern Love)
- Trio M: The Guest House (Enja/Yellow Bird)
- Voices From the Lake: Voices From the Lake (Prologue)
- David S Ware/Planetary Unknown: Live at Jazzfestival Saalfelden 2011 (AUM Fidelity)
- Wreckless Eric/Amy Rigby: A Working Museum (Southern Domestic)
Albums I now see on Rhapsody:
- Don't Talk to the Cops: Let's Quit (Greedhead)
- Mary Halvorson Quintet: Bending Bridges (Firehouse 12)
- Rihanna: Unapologetic (Def Jam)
Albums I managed to hear in 2013:
- Actress: RIP (Honest Jon's) [***] **
- Allo Darlin': Europe (Slumberland) [A-] **
- M. Geddes Gengras/Sun Araw/The Congos: FRKWYS, Vol. 9: Icon Give Thank/Icon Eye (RVNG Intl.) [*] **
- Moreno and L'Orch First Moja-One: Sister Pili+2 (Sterns) [A-] **
- Public Enemy: The Evil Empire of Everything (Enemy) [A-]
- Public Enemy: Most of My Heroes Still Don't Appear on No Stamp (Enemy) [A-]
- Taylor Swift: Red (Big Machine) [***] **
Friday, November 22, 2013
Daily Log
Had to go out for yogurt today. Weather has been sub-freezing all
day, threatening to snow or break into some kind of ice storm, but
wound up just being gray and gloomy all day. Laura needed the newer
car, so I tried the '93 Nissan, but it wouldn't turn over. Need to
recharge the battery, but didn't feel like bothering with it today.
Jessica Linker nagged me about the new Thing album today, so I wrote
the following back:
I don't recall whether I downloaded this or not. I find it
maddening to try to keep track of what I have downloaded and whether
I've listened to it, and find my marginal interest is approaching the
music's marginal value (i.e., zero). ECM and Cuneiform have recently
switched me over to download-only status, and it's proving difficult
to deal with them. Since that looks like the wave of the future, the
future looks like it will be one without me writing about jazz.
I did, however, find Boot! on Rhapsody, and wrote up a
little thing on it for my November Streamnotes column -- I'll run it
on Nov. 30, holding it back until after the Turkey Shoot/Black Friday
Special Thanksgiving posts (lest someone think I'm trading on inside
info, not that it applies here).
Not bad but less interesting than the average Thing record, I'd
say, maybe because Flaten isn't as good on electric bass as on
acoustic, and because roughhousing Coltrane doesn't have the novelty
value of covering the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. You probably know this, but a
year or so ago I noticed that Flaten had collected virtually every
record he had played on and made them availale through his bandcamp
site, so I wrote about everything I hadn't heard previously. Since
then, the new Atomic came out but he only put two cuts up -- so that's
their first release I haven't written anything about. Wrote a lot
about jazz on the Polish label Not Two recently, but couldn't find any
of Gustafsson's Swedish Azz releases, so that's another gap in
my coverage.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Daily Log
Got up late. Took Laura to acupuncture -- first time in months. Went
to Bagatelle for lunch but the cupboard was bare, so went to N&J's.
Went to Lowe's after that, and ordered a new refrigerator: a Samsung
28.5-cu ft 3 French Door unit with dual icemaker (Model RFG298HDRS).
We were wanting to get the larger Samsung, 31.5 cu ft, but couldn't
figure out a way to maneuver it into the kitchen: it's at least an
inch deeper, and we only have about 1/4 inch clearance on the smaller
model. Delivery is Sunday afternoon.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
A Downloader's Diary (34): November 2013
Insert text from here.
This is the 34th installment, (almost) monthly since August 2010,
totalling 830 albums. All columns are indexed and archived
here. You can follow A Downloader's
Diary on
Facebook, and on
Twitter.
Comments are open (subject to moderation).
Daily Log
Fixed Sofrito for dinner, using Ottolenghi's Jerusalem recipe.
Chicken came out nice and moist, although as roast chicken goes I prefer
a little crispness around the edges. As it was, it was slightly browned
to start, then seasoned and steamed. The potatoes, down in the fat and
moisture, came out pretty well blackened, very tasty but a bit hard to
scrape off the bottom of the pan.
Updated some metacritic scores and I see an album by Ryan Hemsworth
called Guilt Trips, released 10-22 on Last Gang. Surprised to
find the album in my file only titled Quilt Tripe. More likely
my bad eyes than deterioration of my typing skills.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Music Week/Jazz Prospecting
Music: Current count 22396 [22346] rated (+53), 559 [563] unrated (-4).
Ratings glut is partly slop over from last Recycled Goods -- I ended
the previous week early because the rated count was already ridiculous --
and partly looking at new releases for Rhapsody Streamnotes. Jazz Prospecting
continues to lag, although both the review count and the incoming mail are
up a bit from last week. Very little in the queue by familiar names right
now, and one might note that the best records this week came from the best
known musicians -- I'll even add that Jon Hamar and Doug Webb, down in the
mid-B+ range, are names I know and look forward to.
I go back a long ways with Roswell Rudd, to two records of his I picked
up in the mid-1970s: Numatik Swing Band, recorded for JCOA and
impossible to find nowadays, and Flexible Flyer originally on
Freedom, picked up by Arista, and wound up in the Black Lion catalog
which has been kicked around several times but is easy enough to find
online these days. Those two albums introduced me to Sheila Jordan, my
favorite female vocalist ever since, but Rudd's combination of playing
avant and retro made a huge impression. Trombone for Lovers
may be his best record since then -- or maybe Regeneration in
1982 with Steve Lacy. I got my copy at least a month ago, played it
immediately, and gave it a lot of time since then. It took a while to
sink in -- I was thrown at first by the Bob Dorough vocal, and then
by the extended Joe Hill opus, but worked through them. In theory, if
I spent comparable time with other records they might grow on me in
the same way, but Rudd is really a unique character.
That reminds me that I still haven't cracked open Call It Art,
a fancy wood box with five vinyl LPs in it collecting a previously
unavailable sessions by the New York Art Quartet. I complain about
all the things I haven't gotten, yet I've been sitting on this (and
several other vinyl-only releases) for months (and in other cases
for years). (Also recall that Rudd's partner in that venture, the
late John Tchicai, led another vinyl-only outing this year, Tribal
Ghost, which I graded A- on the basis of a CD-R.)
Seems like I was offered a download of the New York Art Quartet
box, but lost track of that. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring
out how to handle downloads: in particular, I have at least half a
dozen items on my computer that I can't figure out how to play
more than a single track of -- some programs don't with with .wav
files, most can't handle .zip archives (which in the Windows file
manager look like they've been exploded even when they haven't).
I sent out a letter to a couple dozen friends and associates last
week begging them for info on how they cope with this mess. Got a
few answers back, but nothing especially helpful. I would also
like to move as much music as possible onto Linux if I can get
that to work, but haven't had much luck there either. If you have
any advice, please mail me.
A Downloader's Diary will run tomorrow. Turkey Shoot looks to be
in good shape, although I'm a little disappointed we didn't get more
proposals for the Black Friday Special -- not that we won't have some
surprises there. I'll run November's Rhapsody Streamnotes after the
Thanksgiving specials -- I think there's one more day left in the
month. I have close to 35 records in the draft file already, and
expect to have quite a few more -- especially if I can figure out
how to play those damn downloads.
Tarun Balani Collective: Sacred World (2012 [2013],
self-released): Drummer, from India, based in New Delhi; first album,
all original pieces by Balani, backed with piano, guitar, bass, and
sarangi (a bowed string instrument said to resemble a human voice,
although its player, Suhail Yusuf Khan, is also credited with vocals).
B+(*)
Laurent Coq: Dialogue (2012 [2013], Sunnyside):
French pianist, eighth album since 1998, also shared the headline
on Miguel Zenón's recent Rayuela. The dialogues are pretty
straightforward here, mostly with Ralph Lavital on guitar, and on
5 (of 11) tracks Nicolas Pelage sings.
B+(*)
Phill Fest: Projeto B.F.C. (2013, self-released):
Guitarist, b. in Minneapolis, based in Florida; father was Brazilian
keyboardist Manfredo Fest (1936-99), who recorded a number of albums
for Concord back in their heyday. Second album, previous one called
Smooth Edges. Front cover makes a point of "Introducing Robert
Prester" -- keyboard player, I gather (credits are hard to find as
most of the type is illegible, but I did notice a pic of harmonica
player Hendrik Meurkens.
B+(*)
Ricardo Grilli: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
(2012 [2013], Dark House): Guitarist, b. in São Paulo, Brazil;
studied at Berklee, now at NYU. First album, with sax (Gustavo
D'Amico), piano (Christian Li), bass (Jared Henderson), drums
(Lee Fish).
B+(**)
Jon Hamar: Idyl Wild (2012 [2013], Origin): Bassist,
based in Seattle, fourth album since 2005, quartet with two saxes
(Rich Perry on tenor and Todd DelGiudice, who wrote two pieces, on
alto) and drums. The saxophonists are aggressive enough to generate
an interesting postbop clash.
B+(**)
Clarence Johnson III: Watch Him Work (2013, Like
Father Like Son Music): Tenor saxophonist (soprano too), fourth
album, not smooth enough for smooth jazz, more like a throwback
to the honking r&b saxophonists of the 1950s but with all the
modern keyboard "sound design" doesn't quite reach there either.
Fun, at least, until he lays it on too thick -- definitely in the
closer.
B
Ray Marchica: A Different View (2013, Sons of Sound):
Drummer, second album, a group effort with Tim Ries (tenor/soprano sax),
Ted Kooshian (piano), and Rodney Jones (guitar) contributing ten songs
to the leader's one. Group adds a second sax (Morris Goldberg), bass,
and percussion. Mainstream leaning a bit toward swing, jaunty even.
B+(*) [November 19]
Roswell Rudd: Trombone for Lovers (2013, Sunnyside):
With the "Joe Hill" suite at the end, this could have been called
Trombone for the Masses: I don't mind the rapper there but
the NYC Labor Choir takes some getting used to even though I feel
like saluting the political point. Everything else is just superb:
the opening "Ghost Riders in the Sky" with Steven Bernstein's slide
trumpet, Bob Dorough on "Here, There & Everywhere," Fay Victor
on "Trouble in Mind," Michael Doucet's violin on "Autumn Leaves"
and "Tennessee Waltz," familiar songs that seem perfect when they
pop up: "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Struttin' With Some Barbecue,"
"Green Onions," "Unchained Melody," "September Song." As for "Joe
Hill," well, organize.
A [November 19]
Tim Warfield: Inspire Me! (2013, HHM): Mainstream
tenor saxophonist, has mostly recorded for Criss Cross -- I thought
his early records there were terrific (e.g., A Cool Blue and
Gentle Warrior) -- but the label tends to underwhelm, and
Warfield's releases have tailed off over the years. (Some Criss
Cross artists also show up on labels like Sharp Nine and Posi-Tone
that consistently get sharper, more vibrant sound.) Warfield returns
here with a warm and comforting sound, with Antoine Drye's trumpet
on five cuts, Kevin Hays on piano, plus bass and drums. Herb Harris
produced, and sings two pieces -- offhand and odd at first, now
just part of the flow.
B+(***)
Doug Webb: Another Scene (2013, Posi-Tone): Tenor
saxophonist, based in Los Angeles, did a lot of studio work early on
and only recently established himself as a lead artist. Quartet, with
Peter Zak (piano), Dwayne Burno (bass), and Rudy Royston (drums). I
figured him to be a mainstream guy but this is mostly fast stuff,
postbop with the emphasis on the bop.
B+(**)
Randy Weston/Billy Harper: The Roots of the Blues
(2013, Sunnyside): Piano and tenor sax duets, with each taking one
solo turn. Pianist is 85, one of the few still working who started
in the 1950s. Mostly his songs (10-to-1 over Harper -- the covers
touchstones like "Body and Soul," "How High the Moon," "Take the A
Train"), and most with allusions to Africa, at least in the title --
no American pianist has searched deeper or longer into the mother
continent, going back as far as Weston's 1955 album African
Sunrise. Harper is pushing 70 himself, still possessing that
rich, gospel-infused tone.
B+(***) [November 19]
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- George Colligan: The Endless Mysteries (Origin): November 19
- Brian Gephart: Standing on Two Feet (Origin): November 19
- Archie Shepp: Attica Blues Orchestra Live: I Hear the Sound (Archieball): January 14
- Suzanna Smith: Halfway Between Heaven and Love (Ink Pen): Novemer 19
- John Stowell & Dave Liebman: Blue Rose (Origin): November 19
- Craig Yaremko Organ Trio: CYO3 (Origin): November 19
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Weekend Roundup
Front page story in the Wichita Eagle today is titled "Obama struggles
to save his health law." Anyone able to recall back more than a week --
a group that evidently excludes most of the political media -- knows that
a month or so ago the Republicans in Congress forced a government shutdown
to try to extort the president into surrendering his signature health care
insurance reform. He didn't buckle then, so why should he "struggle" now.
All he has to do is to sit tight while his minions fix some buggy software
and let the crisis pass. As it is, he tripped himself up a bit on his
"promise" that people who like their current insurance policies can keep
them. In theory, the only insurance policies that are being canceled now
are ones that don't meet the new law's minimum standard. He might have
been better advised to simply point out that no one should be happy with
an insurance policy that doesn't protect you from financial ruin, noting
that a very large percentage of people who go bankrupt due to medical bills
do so despite having active, but deficient, health insurance policies. His
equivocations have in turn unnerved some Democrats, but he can stop any
damaging changes to the law, and hardly needs to "struggle" with whether
to do so.
The story, by the way, is
here, and doesn't support the headline hysteria, nor for that matter
the cheekiness of its longer web title ("Obama struggles to save his
cherished health law").
Some scattered links this week:
Dean Baker: No, Obama Didn't Lie to You About Your Health Care Plans:
This goes through the various cases of insurance plans that are being
cancelled -- in all cases because they are not up to ACA standards. This
even includes some plans that had been grandfathered until the insurance
companies jacked up the rates and/or deductibles beyond what the law
allows. Also, note this:
Finally, there will be many plans that insurers will stop offering in
large part because of the changed market conditions created by the ACA.
For example, last week the Washington Post highlighted a plan for the
"hardest to insure" that was being cancelled by Pathmark Blue Cross of
Pennsylvania.
This plan is likely being cancelled because it is unable to compete
with the insurance being offered through the exchanges. The exchanges
charge everyone the same rate regardless of their pre-existing health
conditions. A plan that is especially designed for people who have
serious health conditions would almost certainly charge a far higher
rate. If these high-priced plans no longer exist because they cannot
compete with the exchanges would this mean that President Obama had
broken his pledge?
I'll also note that many individual "high risk" plans were developed
without any chance of competition driving the prices down. A major
effect of the exchanges is to allow comparative shopping, and as such
to create a competitive market where none existed before.
Steven M: No, Because We Don't Lie to Ourselves: Responds to a
piece by "concern troll" Conor Friedersdorf titled
Will the Left Turn on President Obama Like the Tea Party Did on President
Bush. Makes several points, starting with the fact that the Tea Party
activists were never that unhappy with Bush, especially nowhere near
unhappy enough to defect to someone like Obama:
Teabaggers feel no authentic "chagrin at the ways he [Bush] had
transgressed against their values." The only "chagrin" they feel is
at the fact that he was their dreamboat and everything they cheered
him for doing failed, the result being humiliation for them and and
a national rejection of their holy conservative Cause. They can't
bear to hate themselves for this, or question the way they mooned
over Bush's codpiece for eight years (or at least six, until Democrats
won the '06 midterms), so they lie to themselves now and say they never
liked all those deficits and expenditures they didn't give a goddamn
about when Bush was riding high. They tell themselves that fiscal
prudence has always been their core principle, when in fact their
core principle is now what it has always been: liberalism and the
Democratic Party must be destroyed so that we can rule forever.
Wearing tricorn hats and putting the word "constitutional" into every
sentence they utter is just their latest scheme to achieve that end.
Ted Snider: Their Hardliners Are Right; Our Hardliners Are Wrong:
On the Iran negotiations:
That the American hardliners' ideology has infiltrated the Western
P5+1 negotiating team is suggested by reports coming out right after
this past weekend's disintegration of the promised preliminary agreement
that, at least publicly, the diplomats from the other five countries
were not angry with France for breaking ranks on the potential deal,
but for breaking protocol and announcing the failure prior to the
final press conference. It appears that the six countries may have
been in agreement about questioning Iran's "right" to enrich and
about questioning the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Though originally
presented as France's breaking ranks with the other five countries,
no one but Iran has publicly criticized France, and John Kerry has
said "The French signed off on it, we signed off on it" and that
"We're grateful to the French for the work we did together."
[ . . . ]
But while American hardliners are wrong about their claims, the
Iranian hardliners are historically justified in their claims that
the Americans will sabotage the talks and will never make a fair
deal with Iran. While talks progress more positively than they have
in a decade and a deal seems possible for the first time, American
hardliners continue to press for sanctions on Iran and continue to
raise the bar of what would constitute an acceptable deal.
Gareth Porter has more on the Iran talks:
Why Iran Nuclear Talks Failed and Why They Will Get Tougher.
Stephem M Walt: Why Do We Keep Insisting That Use of Force Be 'On the
Table'?
The more I think about it, however, the dumber that expression sounds.
Why? Because for the United States, the option of using military force
is always on the table, especially when we're dealing with weak states
like Iran. After all, since the end of the Cold War the United States
has used force over and over: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen,
Bosnia, Serbia, and a host of other places too. We've fired cruise
missiles, Hellfires, and other sophisticated chunks of ordnance at a
wide variety of targets, and you could add Special Forces operations
and computer viruses (e.g., Stuxnet) to the list.
Of course, people do not use this admonition to keep force "on the
table" in a serious or sophisticated fashion; it's just an easy way
for politicians and pundits to show they're tough-minded and not averse
to using the pointed end of the stick. In other words, it's a way to
maintain your inside-the-Beltway street cred. But it's really a
meaningless phrase, because countries like Iran (and others) are
well aware that the option of using force is right there and could
be used if U.S. leaders ever decided it would accomplish a genuine
positive purpose.
In fact, this constant insistence that force must be "on the table"
also reveals a pervasive blindness about how the United States looks
to others. People repeat this phrase because they seem to think that
other countries see the United States as a feckless wimp that will
never do anything to harm them and that our politicians need to rattle
sabers and bluster just to get other countries' attention. News
flash: That's not how the rest of the world sees Uncle Sam these
days. In reality, everybody knows the United States is still very
powerful -- the sequester notwithstanding -- and other countries are
well aware of the frequency with which we've been blowing things up
in different places for the past 20 years. Our politicians may be
trying to remind U.S. voters that they are willing to use force, but
the rest of the world hardly needs to be told at this point.
This great fondness for threatening force, and the propensity to
use it, strikes me as the institutionalization of Nixon's "madman
strategy." Back when Nixon was president and trying to figure out
some way to get the Russians to pressure Vietnam into capitulating
to the US in negotiations, he tried scramgling SAC bombers and
pointing them at Moscow in hopes of convincing the Russians that
he was crazy enough to start World War III. It never really worked,
mostly because the Russians didn't have that kind of control over
their Vietnamese allies. (But it did lead to the Russians to great
paranoia over Ronald Reagan, who unlike Nixon was certifiably loony
even if he was less personally inclined to incinerate the world.)
Washington is awash with clichés, and this is just one of them.
The bigger question is why anyone still thinks that such acts of
force actually work. After all, we have performed many experiments
over the years, bombing places and finding that no desired outcome
ensues. The bluster of Obama's planned punitive attacks on Syria
for using chemical weapons are a case in point. Maybe you can argue
that the threat of force was what caused Assad to surrender his
weapons, but you can be sure that it wouldn't have happened had
the US actually acted on its threats. Moreover, it is only through
agreement and inspection that the US could ever be assured that
Assad had indeed given up those arms. (Iraq, where the US refused
to allow inspectors to do their work, is the obvious comparative.)
Teddy Roosevelt's motto was "speak softly, but carry a big stick."
But now that US presidents do little but speak, they feel the need
to shout, then they get taunted to use the stick anyway lest their
rants no longer be taken seriously. Nixon's "madman" terminology is
really too kind.
Walt also has a useful post
How Not to Think About the Israel Lobby, especially given Israel's
prominence among those who want to scuttle any sort of diplomatic deal
between the US and Iran:
Finally, if you're not wearing blinders, it is impossible to miss the
fact that AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, the RJC, the ADL, and a host of other
hardline groups in the lobby are now the principal opponents to a
diplomatic deal with Iran. Just look at
this article from The Forward, or
this one from Ha'aretz, which make it clear that these are
the principal groups holding Obama's feet to the fire on this issue.
And of course it is many of these same groups or individuals who have
been insisting for years that the U.S. keep all options "on the table"
and use force against Iran if necessary. Absent pressure from these
groups, it would be much, much easier for the United States to come
to terms with Tehran.
Also, a few links for further study:
Ira Chernus: If Only Right-Wing Christians Knew Where Their Ideas Came
From: Looks back at 19th century evangelicals, who tended to be
progressive more than conservative, and find a resurgence in that same
radicalism today, positing it as an opportunity for the left. William
Jennings Bryan is one of Chernus' cases-in-point, but I must point out
that he's remembered today as much for his embarrassing role in the
Scopes "monkey trial" as for his "Cross of Gold" speech. Curiously,
Bryan's opposition to teaching about evolution was rooted at least as
much in his sense of social justice as in Biblical literalism. And
he's not remembered at all today for leaving the Wilson administration
as it marched off to war. Sometimes this is tricky, but if you believe
that the major political problems of our day are gaping inequality and
war, it is certainly true that you can find allies among evangelicals.
Reaching and keeping them is another problem.
Chernus also has a post on the Obamacare nonsense:
"End Times for Obama": A Dangerous Conservative Myth.
Jonathan Cook: Why Israel wanted Arafat dead: The recent autopsy of
Arafat shows traces of Polonium-210, which is not something you run across
in everyday life. You generally have to have a nuclear reactor to obtain
significant quantities of the toxic, radioactive isotope, which makes
Israel a candidate. You also have to be willing to engage in assassination,
which also makes Israel a candidate. Cooks lists more reasons.
Ann Jones: War Wounds: An excerpt from Jones' new book, They
Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The
Untold Story (Dispatch Books/Haymarket Books). Jones previously
wrote two books coming out of her experiences in Afghanistan:
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (2007),
and War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the
Ruins of War (2010).
David Kenner: Why Saudi Arabia Hates the Iran Deal: One thing that
will seem strange to American observers is how intensely Saudi Arabia
orients itself against Iran, so this at least helps a bit to illuminate
it. It could, of course, go further. One of the first things that Ayatollah
Kohmeini did on taking power in 1979 was to explicitly challenge Saudi
Arabia for leadership in the Moslem world. Before that the Saudis had
a long-time rivalry with Arab nationalists like Nasser, but that had
cooled off after the Arabs' disastrous showing in the 1967 Israel war.
However, after 1979 the Saudis started spending billions of dollars to
promote abroad their own quaint and antiquated form of Islam -- Wahabism,
which relates back to the older school of Salafism -- with its peculiar
emphasis on jihad as a political tool. US officials, in the naïve belief
that any conservative religion was preferable to Godless Communism,
approved, especially as the Saudis invested billions in Afghanistan.
And Saudi Arabia has continued its pro-Islamist interventionism to
this very day: they berate Iran for supporting political factions in
Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, precisely because those factions are rivals
to the factions Saudi Arabia supports. It is easy to say that Iran
is wrong to intervene in foreign countries, but Saudi Arabia is every
bit as guilty on that charge, and the results of its interventions
have been at least as damaging. The US has long backed Saudi Arabia
in its aggressive foreign policy but must be having second thoughts
now -- especially given the ease with which Saudi-backed militants
have gravitated toward Al Qaeda. (Saudi clerics are quick to condemn
Al Qaeda, but not very effective at dissuading them.) At this point,
the best thing for all concerned would be to mutually withdraw from
interfering in other countries.
John Quiggin: Wall Street Isn't Worth It: Argues that "society as a
whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and
received much smaller returns." I don't have any doubts about that.
Joseph Stiglitz: The Insanity of Our Food Policy: Much more on
the Republican cuts to the food stamp program than on farm subsidies,
although he points out that as originally implemented in the 1930s
farm "subsidies were an anti-poverty program." They've largely become
a subsidy to corporate agriculture since then, which still -- my
opinion here, since Stiglitz doesn't really address it -- doesn't
mean they're unnecessary (although could mean they're unjust as
currently implemented). For the most part, US agriculture policy
has been based on a grand bargain of rural and urban interests:
subsidies ensure that the food supply will not be disrupted by the
vagaries of the market, and those surpluses will be used to end
hunger. The Republicans have broken that deal. What Stiglitz is
describing is more immoral than insane, but if they manage to
return agriculture to laissez faire markets that will indeed be
insane.
Daily Log
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Cal Thomas: Why Agree When We Can Go to War?
It isn't exactly surprising that Israel should want to sabotage the
new round of talks between Iran, the U.S., and other major powers. Nor
that they would employ their vast lobbying networks in the U.S., nor
that this would bring out their most obsequious media flacks to the
forefront. Still, it is downright shocking the extremes to which Cal
Thomas went in his column
Iran agreement shouldn't stab Israel in the back. He starts with
a story about a 1994 promise North Korea made to ex-president Jimmy
Carter to "close a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in exchange for food
and humanitarian aid." He notes then that North Korea reopened the
reactor, concluding that "Tyrants lie" -- without mentioning that
the US failed to fulfill its end of the agreement, or that the US
maintained a blockade and crippling sanctions, or that Bush dubbed
North Korea a member of "the Axis of Evil."
Thomas goes on:
Unlike North Korea, an officially atheist state, Iranian mullahs
have repeatedly said they have a religious duty to annihilate Israel,
not to mention America. How do secular diplomats negotiate with people
who, in their minds, would be violating "Allah's will" by making deals
with the "great Satan"?
Thomas' argument here is not just a "big lie" -- it's based on a
total fabrication. No such fatwa has ever existed, nor is any such
"religious duty" consistent with any official Iranian position. Iran,
like most nations -- judging from UN resolution votes virtually every
nation except for the US and Micronesia -- disapproves of Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or Israel's refusal to allow
Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars to return to their
homes, and Israel's frequent aggression against neighboring countries.
But Iran has also taken the position that it is up to the Palestinians
to decide how to deal with Israel. Iran has gone beyond other nations
in that they provide substantial military aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon,
but thus far at least Hezbollah has only used Iranian rockets in
response to Israeli bombing of Lebanon. (Nor have those rockets been
very effective.) That is a far cry from a plan to "annihilate" Israel.
The revolutionary Islamic government in Iran has had many reasons
over the years to be critical of the US, starting with the CIA-directed
coup against Iran's democracy in 1953, the US alliance with the Shah
and US training of the Shah's secret police, the US harboring the Shah
after he was deposed, the US freeze of Iranian assets, the US role in
supporting Iraq in its 1981-88 war against Iran, as well as various
acts of American terrorism against Iran, such as shooting down a
civilian airliner and attacking an offshore oil platform. The Iranian
government hasn't always acted honorably, but since the Iraq war ended
and Ayatollah Khomeini, who came up with that "Great Satan" rhetoric,
died, it's been the US that has repeatedly rebuffed efforts by Iran
to put relations on a less confrontational level.
On the other hand, Israel has frequently threatened to attack Iran.
Israel supports the anti-Iranian terrorist group MEK. Israeli agents
have murdered Iranian scientists. Israel has used cyberwarfare against
Iran (evidently with US help). Israeli security experts openly talk
about their hopes for "regime change" in Iran. And since the early
1990s, Israel has lobbied the US heavily to isolate and undermine the
Iranian regime. The interesting thing about that last sentence is that
Israeli-Iranian enmity didn't start with the revolution in 1979, with
the ascension to power of Ayatollah Khomeini and his "Great Satan"
rhetoric. Throughout the 1980s, Israel maintained a close alliance
with Iran, shipping it arms, and actually intervening in the Iraq-Iran
war in 1982 when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor project site.
Perhaps Israel's interest in Iran was cynical -- the hope that by
supporting Iran they could weaken their closer enemy, Iraq.
However, after the US-led coalition defeated Iraq in the 1990
Gulf War Israel began to cast about for a new "existential" enemy --
a role that could no longer be plausibly imagined for any Arab state.
Iran fit the bill for several reasons: first, the US still harbored
resentment against Iran for holding its embassy staff hostage from
1980-82, so it was relatively easy to push American hot buttons;
second, Iran's government explicitly identified itself as Islamic,
which also raised some hot buttons with America's Christian right,
even when none of the latter had any clue about the differences
between sunni and shiite; and third, Iran had been fascinated with
nuclear power starting with the Shah before ther revolution, and
thanks to self-isolation and sanctions, they could only pursue
nuclear energy by developing their own capabilities so it was easy
to characterize Iran's program as intending to develop nuclear
weapons. And, of course, the prospect of a nuclear-armed nation
hostile or even merely opposed to the Israel -- populated by the
residual victims of genocide -- and/or the US excited all sorts of
paranoid fears. And recall that for the post-9/11 Bush administration,
those fears were very useful for advancing their ambitions against
Iraq, which was supposedly all about "weapons of mass destruction" --
e.g., Condoleezza Rice's taunt that "the smoking gun may be a mushroom
cloud."
Problem was, in order to convince people that their fears were
based on solid intelligence, Israel had to project a time frame for
Iran's "nuclear programme" to come to fruition. In the mid-1990s,
they cautiously projected that Iran was five years away from having
the bomb. At various points after that, they even projected shorter
time spans, but the fact is that 15 years after the Iranian bomb
was due, it still hasn't been built. And when the CIA assessed its
own intelligence, they concluded that Iran didn't have actual plans
to build a bomb. Which, coincidentally, is what Iran's leaders have
said all along.
Thomas' next ploy is to cite an anonymous item from "ynetnews.com" --
the website run by Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharanot. If he had a
non-Israeli source, don't you think he'd use it? Conservatives love
to quote the Wall Street Journal or New York Times not because they
revere those papers as because they realize their reports usually
look less fishy than "Rush Limbaugh says . . ." or "according to
an anonymous tip reported by Drudgenet . . ."
Thomas ends up with a dubious historical analogy, concluding,
"Roosevelt and Churchill were wrong about Stalin, and the Obama
administration is wrong about Iran." Given that Obama's "go to"
guy on Iran for most of his time in office has been Dennis Ross,
the Obama administration has usually been wrong about Iran. But
even if they're wrong now, you have to ask yourself what are they
trying to do, and how does that compare to all the alternatives.
If the goal is to keep Iranian maniacs from using nuclear weapons
against Israel and/or the United States (or any other enemy they
have, something Saudi Arabia is especially keen on being), then
first of all you have the time-tested standard approach: Israel
and the US have enough nuclear weapons to deter any Iranian plot
by making it suicidal. (That approach, after all, deterred the
Soviet Union, who as Thomas no doubt said dozens of times were
a bunch of godless fanatics convinced that capitalism must die
and that history was on their side.) It also wouldn't hurt if the
Iranian people were given a better stake in the future, which is
a reason for relaxing sanctions, normalizing relations, increasing
trade and investment, and so forth. It's worth noting that the only
communist nations that didn't democratize were the ones the US fought
hot wars against and have nurtured grudges against: China, North
Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Ill will only begets ill tidings.
Realistically, that should be enough, but given how wholeheartedly
Israeli and American officials have swallowed their own propaganda,
the concerned countries should work to establish greater transparency
and more open review of Iran's nuclear power efforts. Iran is a member
of the NPT, which commits them not to build nuclear weapons and not to
aid in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. (Israel, by the way, is
not, so if you want to look at renegade states bearing weapons of mass
destruction, start there.) Under the NPT, countries such as Iran are
still entitled to develop nuclear power, and some countries have done
just that without ever considering a weapons program -- most notably,
Germany and Japan. Iran is unusual in this regard solely because they
are so isolated -- especially due to UN-supported sanctions -- and
that produces unique dangers. One thing that we should worry about
is whether Iran has access to the latest methods and equipment needed
to make sure that their nuclear power plants are safe -- and that won't
happen if we keep Iran isolated and force it to be self-sufficient.
Again, the way forward here is through more openness and less hostility --
exactly the opposite of what Thomas is arguing for.
It is, therefore, easy to see that the path opened up in this
new round of negotiations with Iran can lead to allaying Israel's
(and America's) fears, and indeed of defusing one of the world's
most dangerous hostile fronts. On the other hand, you need to look
at Israel's approach -- which aside from sanctions, espionage, and
acts of terror within Iran, might add military strikes to destroy
Iran's physical plant -- and what its prospects really are. Bombs
may do some damage, but they're most likely to drive the nuclear
project ever deeper underground, into deeper security. Moreover,
they'll drive more Iranians into believing that nuclear weapons
are necessary to defend Iran against outside aggressors. Espionage
and terrorism will only make Iran's government more closed and
more paranoid, and they will invite Iran to do the same in turn.
And sanctions again will impoverish Iran, encourage autarky, and
a stubborn resolve to fight back.
It should be understood that Israel has its own reasons for making
and maintaining enemies: the idea of external threats helps politically
unite the Jewish population and keeps the military-industrial complex
humming along, and the security issue distracts from the fundamental
problems caused by the occupation and treatment of Palestinians. On
the other hand, as Americans we have to ask ourselves whether fondness
for Israel is really a good reason for the United States to let Israel
decide who our enemies are and how we should deal with them. Certain
elements of the US right-wing like the idea of letting Israel lead us
around by the nose because they wish us to have the same degree of
militarism and war-lust Israel has, but most people think that our
"enemies" selected us, not the other way around. And so when a nation
like Iran comes to us seeking peace and understanding, why should we
reject them?
If you believe everything Cal Thomas says here, and buy into all the
bogus historical analogies and suppositions, all he's really saying is
that we can't trust Iran, so we should go to war with them now instead
of waiting until they, like Hitler and Stalin, inevitably go to war
against us. (Ignoring the fact that Stalin and his successors never
did start that inevitable war.) Fortunately for us, Thomas is as wrong
on his facts as he is ghastly in terms of morality. An agreement with
Iran wouldn't "stab Israel in the back"; it would save Israel from
making the worst mistake a nation could make.
Daily Log
Oh the days come and go, too uneventful even to notice.
Jody Rosen generated a list of
60 Great Albums You Probably Haven't Heard. I've heard 15 (25%), noting
my grades below (A+:1, A:1, A-:5, B+:6, B:2).
- Joni James, 100 Strings and Joni (1959)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel Train (1956)
- Sanford Clark, The Fool (1956)
- Lou Donaldson, Blues Walk (1958)
- Moondog, More Moondog (1956)
- Elizabeth Cotten, Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes (1958)
- Machito, Kenya (1957)
- Les Baxter featuring Bas Sheva, The Passions (1954)
- The Browns, Sweet Sounds by the Browns (1959)
- Mel Tormé, Mel Tormé Sings Fred Astaire (1956)
- Joe Tex, Buying a Book (1969)
- Brigitte Fontaine, Comme à la Radio (1969) [***]
- Lefty Frizzell, Mom and Dad's Waltz and Other Great Country Hits (1966)
- Tex Williams and His String Band, Smoke Smoke Smoke (1960)
- Connie Smith, I Love Charley Brown (1968)
- Bettye Swann, Don't You Ever Get Tired of Hurting Me? (1969)
- La Lupe, Es La Reina (1969)
- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Volunteered Slavery (1969) [B]
- The Velvet Illusions, Acid Head (1967)
- Cymande, Cymande (1972) [B+]
- Shirley Brown, Woman to Woman (1975) [X:A-]
- Jorge Ben, Africa Brasil (1976)
- Keith Cross & Peter Ross, Bored Civilians (1972)
- Jane Birkin, Di Doo Dah (1973)
- The Congos, Heart of the Congos (1977) [X:***] [B+]
- Melanie, Stoneground Words (1972)
- The Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band (1972) [A-]
- Novos Baianos, Acabou Chorare (1972)
- Jobriath, Jobriath (1973)
- The Nails, Mood Swing (1984)
- Marshall Crenshaw, Downtown (1985) [X:A-] [A]
- Ten City, Foundation (1989) [X:B+]
- Baltimora, Living in the Background (1985)
- Fishbone, Truth and Soul (1988) [X:B]
- Ta Mara and the Seen, Blueberry Gossip (1988)
- Keith Whitley, I Wonder Do You Think of Me (1989) [X:A-] [A-]
- King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Juju Music (1982) [X:A-] [A-]
- Chill Rob G, Ride the Rhythm (1989)
- Holly & the Italians, The Right to Be Italian (1981)
- Ivy, Apartment Life (1997)
- O.C., Word . . . Life (1994)
- Ninjaman, Bounty Hunter (1991)
- Cornelius, Fantasma (1997)
- Youssou N'Dour, Set (1990) [B+]
- Latin Playboys, Latin Playboys (1994) [A-]
- Freedy Johnston, Can You Fly (1992) [A-]
- Iris DeMent, My Life (1993) [A+]
- DJ Quik, Quik Is the Name (1991)
- Andy Bey, Shades of Bey (1998) [B]
- Benji Hughes, A Love Extreme (2008)
- Akufen, My Way (2002)
- Julie Roberts, Men & Mascara (2006)
- Bobby Creekwater, Anthem to the Streets (2005)
- Hyphy Hitz (2007)
- The Pierces, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge (2007) [***]
- Fanfare Ciocarlia, Iag Bari (2001)
- Calle 13, Los de Atrás Vienen Conmigo (2008) [B+]
- Eric Church, Carolina (2009)
- Prinzhorn Dance School, Prinzhorn Dance School (2007)
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Daily Log
Music today (RS): Saâda Bonaire, Arcade Fire.
Comment in response to Stephen:
Stephen is right on "Shotgun": Somehow I had it stuck in my mind
that the Walker All Stars were Motown's MGs, then had to adjust when I
heard vocals on everything else, but didn't recheck "Shotgun" --
sloppy of me, conditioned, perhaps, by the fact that I've been
listening to an instrumental "Shotgun" on the new Roswell Rudd
record. I've rewritten that review. No typo on the Velvets' Verves --
that was the label, and groups them much as one talks about Charlie
Parker's Dials or Ornette Coleman's Atlantics. Nonetheless, rephrased
that. Who's Richard Ashcroft?
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Recycled Goods (114): November, 2013
New Recycled Goods: pick up text
here.
Total review count: 4035 (3591 + 444).
Monday, November 11, 2013
Music Week/Not Much Jazz Prospecting
Music: Current count 22346 [22292] rated (+54), 563 [566] unrated (-3).
Big rated count this week is due to working virtually non-stop on
Recycled Goods, which you will see later this week (probably later
rather than sooner).
Not much Jazz Prospecting below, but not much coming in either.
The input queue is probably the shorter now than it's been since I
started writing Jazz Consumer Guide, and very little of what's left
in it looks promising (aside from the new Roswell Rudd, next week).
Part of this problem is seasonal: most labels have shot their wad
on 2013 but don't have their new year's releases ready yet -- this
is, after all, still a season to sell in. On the other hand, the
trend of less service is real and likely to continue. Sometimes
this just means getting dropped. And sometimes I'm offered digital
downloads where I used to get CDs -- after a long silence, it now
looks like ECM's in that category. My rule has always been that
downloads don't go into Jazz Prospecting: if I have to listen to
something on the computer, it goes into Rhapsody Streamnotes. The
long-term trend, then, is that Jazz Prospecting will continue to
shrink, making it less worthwhile both for me and you readers.
So unless something changes -- e.g., someone comes forward with
a venue that is respectable enough to pay me something -- most
likely I'll give it up come January.
Some weeks ago I promised a piece on "Searching for Music After
Christgau" -- basically a rough spec for a cooperative webzine and
reference database. I started on that, got stuck, got distracted,
and am still floundering. I still expect to get to it sometime, and
I still plan on throwing together some software for at least a
limited subset of it. Francis Davis has arranged for a new sponsor
for his Jazz Critics Poll this year, and we've talked a bit about
building a permanent website for past and future ballots, so that's
where it's likely to happen first, but the basic schema applies
elsewhere.
Deadline has just passed for
Turkey Shoot/Black Friday Special proposals, which doesn't mean
it's too late for you to get involved, but it is pretty urgent that
you do so. I haven't tallied it all up yet -- I've been feeling bad
and not doing much for a week now -- but we should have a nice-sized
Turkey Shoot column, but we're still somewhat short for the Black
Friday Special.
Kevin Coelho: Turn It Up (2013, Chicken Coup/Summit):
Organ player, second album, trio with guitar and drums. Covers Jimmy
Smith, "Come Together," "The World Is a Ghetto," "When Johnny Comes
Marching Home," "Georgia on My Mind." Two originals, songs anyway.
Tacks on two radio edits as bonus cuts.
B
Eric DiVito: The Second Time Around (2013, Pioneer
Jazz Collection): Guitarist, originally from Long Island, based in
New York, second album: builds on a trio with bass (Corcoran Holt)
and drums (Alyssa Falk Verheyn), most notably with the alto sax of
Steve Wilson on three tracks -- a sweet counterpart to the leader's
guitar. Also two songs with singer Mavis Swan Poole.
B+(*) [November 12]
Ghost Train Orchestra: Book of Rhapsodies (2012-13
[2013], Accurate): I think the leader here is trumpet player Brian
Carpenter, whose previous album was also historically themed,
Hothouse Stomp: The Music of 1920s Chicago and Harlem. This
one explores the 1930s work of Alec Wilder, Raymond Scott, Reginald
Forsythe, and John Kirby's Sextet (including Charlie Shavers). The
music veers from jazz into classical, sometimes too much for my
taste (nor do I care for the choir), but the band is chock full
of interesting characters -- Andy Laster, Petr Cancura, Curtis
Hasselbring, Tanya Kalmanovitch -- and makes use of violin and
tuba.
B+(**)
Outer Bridge Ensemble: Determined (2013, self-released):
Quartet -- Mark DeJong (saxes), Steve Hudson (keyboards), Jerome Jennings
(drums), David Freeman (conga, djembe, percussion) -- plus various friends,
including James Zollar on trumpet. Website touts their "original sound
based in jazz, afro-beat, afro-cuban rhythm, and funk," but almost all
of what I hear is fairly inventive postbop.
B+(**)
Colin Stranahan/Glenn Zaleski/Rick Rosato: Limitless
(2012 [2013], Capri): Drummer-led piano trio -- Zaleski is the pianist.
Dedicates one song to Fred Hersch, and works mostly in that vein, a
bit on the quiet side.
B+(*)
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Dewa Budjana: Joged Kanyangan (Moonjune)
- Sonya Robinson: Whistle (FLV): November 19
Purchases:
- Arcade Fire: Reflektor (Merge, 2CD)
- Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (Aftermath)
- MIA: Matangi (Interscope)
Miscellaneous notes:
- Louis Armstrong: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium
Collection: The Best of Louis Armstrong (1949-67 [1999], MCA):
A [rhapsody]
- Joan Baez: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Joan Baez (1971-75 [1999], A&M):
C+ [rhapsody]
- Brook Benton: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Brook Benton (1959-70 [2000], Mercury):
A- [rhapsody]
- Bobby Bland: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Bobby Bland (195?-?? [2000], MCA):
A- [rhapsody]
- Pat Boone: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Pat Boone (1955-62 [2000], MCA):
B- [rhapsody]
- The Carpenters: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
Carpenters (1970-78 [2002], A&M):
C+ [rhapsody]
- Johnny Cash: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Johnny Cash Volume 2 (1985-90 [2007], Mercury):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- Cher: The Best of Cher (20th Century Masters: The Millennium
Collection) (1971-79 [2000], MCA):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- Cher: The Best of Cher Volume 2 (20th Century Masters: The
Millennium Collection) (1987-98 [2004], Hip-O):
B- [rhapsody]
- The Commodores: The Best of the Commodores (20th Century Masters:
The Millennium Collection) (1974-84 [1999], Motown):
B [rhapsody]
- Billy Ray Cyrus: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Billy Ray Cyrus (1992-98 [2003], Mercury Nashville):
B [rhapsody]
- Sammy Davis Jr.: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Sammy Davis Jr. (1972-74 (2001), Polydor):
B- [rhapsody]
- DeBarge: The Best of DeBarge (1982-86 [2000], Motown):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- The Del-Vikings: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Del Vikings (1956-58 [2004], Hip-O):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
- Freddy Fender: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Freddy Fender (1974-77 [2001], MCA Nashville):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Four Tops: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Four Tops (1964-73 [1999], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Four Tops: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Four Tops Volume 2 (1972-83 [2005], Hip-O):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- The Funk Brothers: 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Funk Brothers (1960-72 [2004], Motown):
B [rhapsody]
- Marvin Gaye: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Marvin Gaye Volume 1: The '60s (1962-69 [1999], Motown):
A [rhapsody]
- Marvin Gaye: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Marvin Gaye Volume 2: The '70s (1971-77 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell: 20th Century Masters - The
Millennium Collection: The Best of Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
(1967-69 [2000], Motown):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Marvin Gaye: Compact Command Performances (1964-74
[1984], Motown): Not the best single disc compilation possible, but
would do as an intro -- nothing before "How Sweet It Is," two duets
with Tammi Terrell and one with Diana Ross, the essential early-'70s
singles, and most important, the 11:54 album version of "Got to Give
It Up."
A-
- Tom T. Hall: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Tom T. Hall (1969-84 [2000], MCA Nashville):
B+(*) [R]
- Michael Jackson: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Michael Jackson (1971-75 [2000], Motown):
B- [rhapsody]
- The Jackson 5: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Jackson 5 (1969-73 [1999], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Tom Jones: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Tom Jones (196?-?? [2000], Polydor):
>B+(**) [rhapsody]
- Eddie Kendricks: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Eddie Kendricks (1973-85 [2000], Motown):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Gladys Knight & the Pips: 20th Century Masters - The
Millennium Collection: The Best of Gladys Knight and the Pips
(1967-73 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Patti Labelle: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Patti Labelle (1984-97 [1999], Geffen):
B [rhapsody]
- Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions: 20th Century Masters -
The Millennium Collection: The Best of Curtis Mayfield & the
Impressions (1961-72 [2000], Geffen/MCA):
A [rhapsody]
- Roger Miller: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Roger Miller (1964-66 [1999], MCA):
A [rhapsody]
- The Mills Brothers: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium
Collection: The Best of the Mills Brothers (1941-67 [2000],
MCA):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Patti Page: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Patti Page (1950-57 [2003], Mercury):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- The Platters: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Platters (1955-61 [1999], Mercury):
A- [rhapsody]
- Lloyd Price: 20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Lloyd Price (1956-60 [2002], MCA):
A- [rhapsody]
- Rare Earth: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Rare Earth (1969-73 [2013], Motown):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Martha Reeves & the Vandellas: 20th Century Masters -
The Millennium Collection: The Best of Martha Reeves & the
Vandellas (1963-67 [1999], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Martha Reeves & the Vandellas: The Definitive Collection
(1963-71 [2008], Motown):
A-
- Smokey Robinson: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Smokey Robinson (1973-87 [2000], Motown):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
- Smokey Robinson & the Miracles: 20th Century Masters -
The Millennium Collection: The Best of Smokey Robinson & the
Miracles (1960-87 [1999], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Diana Ross: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Diana Ross (1970-81 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Diana Ross & the Supremes: 20th Century Masters - The
Millennium Collection: The Best of Diana Ross & the Supremes
(1964-69 [1999], Motown):
A [rhapsody]
- Diana Ross & the Supremes: 20th Century Masters: The
Millennium Collection: The Best of Diana Ross & the Supremes
Volume 2 (1965-71 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- David Ruffin: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of David Ruffin (1969-85 [2000], Motown):
A- [R]
- The Shangri-Las: 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Shangri-Las (1964-67 [2002], Mercury):
B+(***) [rhapsody]
- Edwin Starr: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Edwin Starr (1965-78 [2001], Motown):
B [rhapsody]
- Barrett Strong: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of Barrett Strong (1959-61 [2003], Motown):
B+(*) [rhapsody]
- The Temptations: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection:
The Best of the Temptations Volume 2: The 1970s, 80s, and 90s
(1970-98 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Jr. Walker & the All Stars: 20th Century Masters - The
Millennium Collection: The Best of Jr. Walker & the All Stars
(1965-72 [2000], Motown):
A- [rhapsody]
- Dinah Washington: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium
Collection: The Best of Dinah Washington (1949-61 [2002],
Hip-O):
B+(**) [rhapsody]
Daily Log
Feeling real lousy. Back is killing me. Shows no sign of improvement.
Very awkward. Few positions are relatively pain-free. Managed in several
efforts to get Jazz Prospecting post together. Also wrote up two records
for it today, increasing the column size from two to five. Pathetic.
Hopeless.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Weekend Roundup
Nothing this week.
Daily Log
None of these in quite a while. Mostly playing stuff for Recycled
Goods. Still a lot of back pain, plus terrible allergies -- pretty
miserable all over. Watched The Good Wife and The Mentalist.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Daily Log
Saw the movie Gravity today, directed by Alfonso
Cuarón, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, and literally
no one else. Spectacular piece of filmmaking with its wide-angled
space shots of earth and all the zero gravity work, marred only
by the 3D treatment. The story line is a stretch, the obstacles
so insurmountable you won't believe it when she does, but at least
you will feel relief. Still, the closing scene of her crawling out
of the lagoon and trying to find her legs in a world with gravity
is finally credible, and powerful. B+
Watched NCIS and Revenge. The latter is beginning
to fly off the rails.
Music today (JP): Outer Bridge Ensemble; (RG) The Supremes,
Diana Ross/Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves, Jackson 5.
Monday, November 04, 2013
Music Week/Jazz Prospecting
Music: Current count 22292 [22254] rated (+38), 566 [569] unrated (-3).
A relatively short week: didn't have anything saved up, haven't been
getting much, and had several days that didn't pan out. Even today, when
I added two records, I spent most of my time working on Recycled Goods.
November's column is no longer near-empty, but it's still way short of
what I'd like to put out, so rather than rushing it out I'll hang on a
bit.
We still need proposals and contributions to the 2013 Turkey Shoot and
(especially) Black Friday Special. The rules are explained
here. When I checked this last week I found that the file had been
attacked by trackback spam. Since then I removed over 200 spam links
and hacked a bit on my blog code to make it impossible to add more
trackbacks. It wasn't much of a change, but felt good to dive in there
and solve a problem that has been bothering me for years.
Unpacking continues to be very light, with about half of this week's
loot lapping into 2014.
The George Bouchard Group: Listen to Your Dreams
(2013, self-released): Tenor saxophonist, born and raised in Buffalo,
NY; teaches at Nassau Community College. Has at least four albums,
and a textbook called Intermediate Jazz Improvisation. Group,
recorded "live at Mirelle's," includes a second tenor sax (Andrew
Grossbard), trumpet (Dave South), piano, bass, and drums, playing
a robustly upbeat postbop I couldn't get into.
B
Fabric Trio: Murmurs (2010 [2013], NoBusiness):
Sax trio, recorded in Berlin: Frank Paul Schubert (soprano/alto sax),
Mike Majkowski (bass), Yorgos Dimitriadis (drums). First album, a
limited edition (300 copy) vinyl LP, which seems to be a market
niche. Free jazz, joint improv, as the title suggests they tend
to keep their adventures toned down -- no screech, no bombast,
but also no clichés, nothing pat. I find them refreshing, but not
very distinct from dozens of other fine records. I'm also glad
I have a CD-R and don't have to flip the thing over (although the
second side runs on so quietly I might not bother).
B+(**) [advance]
Kidd Jordan/Hamid Drake: A Night in November: Live in New
Orleans (2011 [2013], Valid): Louisiana boys, the saxophonist
(alto and tenor) a lifelong resident of the Big Easy, the drummer a
childhood emigré to Chicago where he was mentored by Fred Anderson,
eventually recording several duo albums together. Jordan is a fair
substitute, a little squeakier, and Drake is masterful, as always.
B+(***)
Dana Lyn: Aqualude (2012 [2013], Ropeadope): Violinist,
b. 1974 in California, studied at Oberlin, based in Brooklyn, has spent
a good deal of time learning Irish folk fiddle; has a couple previous
albums, more side-credits including the Walkmen and Louodon Wainwright.
Quintet with Jonathan Goldberger (guitar), Clara Kennedy (cello), Mike
McGinniss (clarinets), Vinnie Sperrazza (drums). Soft instruments,
chamber music (I guess): doesn't swing, can't bop, and sure ain't
free.
C+ [advance]
Art Pepper: Unreleased Art Vol. VIII: Live at the Winery
September 6, 1976 (1976 [2013], Widow's Taste): Pepper got
out of jail in 1965 but played very little until 1975 when he kicked
off his final comeback with the brilliant album Living Legend.
Most of the previous seven Unreleased Art volumes focus on
live gigs from his last years, 1980-82, working with regular touring
bands. This catches him a few years earlier, at the Paul Masson Winery
in Saratoga with a no-name pickup band from the Bay Area. They aren't
bad -- pianist Smith Dobson acquits himself particularly well -- but
Pepper plays with exceptional verve, right out of the gate with a
fast "Caravan" up through the "Straight Life" encore. Most of these
songs are staples on his numerous live albums from the era, but he
rarely raced through this this fast and with this much vigor.
A- [November 5]
John Tchicai/Charlie Kohlhase/Garrison Fewell/Cecil McBee/Billy
Hart: Tribal Ghost (2007 [2013], NoBusiness): Tenor saxophonist,
b. 1936 in Copenhagen, Denmark; mother Danish, father Congolese; d. 2012.
This was recorded in 2007 at Birdland, Tchicai's trio with saxophonist
Kohlhase and guitarist Fewell rounded out with bass and drums. Four cuts,
one of those limited edition vinyl deals, no timings given but works out
to about 35 minutes. Fewell wrote three of the pieces, his guitar tying
them into neat little grooves, the saxes not clashing but embroidering.
A- [advance]
Fay Victor Ensemble: Absinthe & Vermouth (2013,
Greene Avenue Music): Vocalist, originally from Trinidad or Tobago,
raised on Long Island, studied at Syracuse and Brooklyn Conservatory
of Music; sixth album since 1999. Betty Carter is less an influence
than one of her few peers in jazz history: someone who makes art more
difficult and demanding than we're often comfortable with, a singer
who commands a band as disciplined and prickly as the star. Victor's
Ensemble includes Anders Nilsson, one of the most distinctive jazz
guitarists working today, and Ken Filiano, one of those bassists who
makes everyone sound better -- his presence is as reliable a stamp
of quality as casting Harry Dean Stanton in a movie.
B+(***) [November 5]
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
- Carolyn Lee Jones: The Performer (Cat'nround Sound): November 19
- Mark Lettieri: Future Fun (Markus Justinius Music): November 12
- Greg Lewis: Organ Monk: American Standard (self-released): January 7
- Mumpbreak (Rare Noise): advance, November 28
- Rich Rosenthal: Falling Up (Muse-Eek): January 7
- Sly 5th Ave: Sly 5th Ave Presents Akuma (self-released): February 14
- Lizzie Thomas: Easy to Love (self-released): November 19
- Tim Warfield: Inspire Me! (HHM)
Daily Log
Went to dinner at Cafe Maurice, one place that had been nominated
to cater the annual Peace Center dinner. Shared their meza platter,
I had the kafta kabab (with lentil soup and grilled veggies), Laura
the chicken au poivre. Generally favorable reactions, although Laura
tought the cabbage roll underdone, I wouldn't bother with the meat
or spinach pies again, and I'm not much of a hummus fan. Didn't care
much for the soup, but the kafta and veggies were fine, and Laura's
chicken seemed nicely done.
Music today (JP): Fay Victor, Fabric Trio; (RG): Smokey Robinson
& the Miracles, Four Tops.
Sunday, November 03, 2013
Weekend Roundup
Some scattered links this week:
Paul Krugman: Rentiers, Entitlement, and Monetary Policy: With
unemployment still way high and the economy further depressed by
political shenanigans, the rentiers keep pushing for tighter money
"in an economy that seems to need the opposite":
This kind of behavior -- ever-shifting rationales for an unchanging
policy (see: Bush tax cuts, invasion of Iraq, etc.) -- is a "tell."
It says that something else is really motivating the policy advocacy.
So what is going on here? When I read Gross and others, what I think
is lurking underneath is a belief that capitalists are entitled to
good returns on their capital, even if it's just parked in safe assets.
It's about defending the privileges of the rentiers, who are assumed
to be central to everything; the specific stories are just attempts
to rationalize the unchanging goal.
The thing to realize here, then, is that nothing about our current
situation says that rentiers are entitled to their rent. And it's a
perversion of alleged free-market thinking to suggest otherwise.
Bear in mind where we are, economically: we are still in a liquidity
trap, and we are very much in a paradox of thrift world, where hoarding --
not spending -- is a positive social evil.
What is the role of interest in this world? Interest, classically
(and I do mean classically, as in Mr. Keynes and the), is the reward
for waiting: there's supposedly a social function to interest because
it rewards people for saving rather than spending. But right now we're
awash in excess savings with nowhere to go, and the marginal social
value of a dollar of savings is negative. So real interest rates
should be negative too, if they're supposed to reflect social
payoffs.
This really isn't at all exotic -- but obviously it's a point
wealth-owners don't want to hear. Hence the constant agitation for
monetary tightening.
I'll add that economists have routinely campaigned for savings
(and policies that promote savings) for decades, or maybe forever,
so it's a bit unsurprising that they'd be caught flat-footed by a
glut. The glut, of course, turns out to have nothing to do with
the supposed virtue of delayed gratification. It occurred simply
because the rich were able to use their political clout to grab
so much more than they could spend, while pushing everyone else
down to where they're unable to spend enough to justify further
investment. And note that artificially tightening the money supply
would do nothing to fix this problem. If anything, it would make
it worse.
Also see
Award-winning Paragraphs, where Krugman quotes John Taylor saying
that the Congressional Budget Office has projected that federal debt
"will rise to more than 250% without a change in policy." Krugman
questions the time frame, and provides a chart showing that even 25
years out CBO is only projecting a debt/GDP ratio of 90% -- "a debt
level well within historical experience for advanced nations." In
response to Taylor's second paragraph, Krugman writes:
But what I really found noteworthy is Taylor's declaration that we
must not say that the GOP has been taken over by extremists, because
it prevents a serious discussion. Suppose we just posit the possibility
that the GOP really has been taken over by extremists; are supposed to
pretend otherwise, for the sake of discussion? When does it become OK
to acknowledge reality?
And of course the GOP really has been taken over by extremists.
Normal political parties don't shut down the government and threaten
to push us into default in an attempt to derail legislation that has
been duly enacted by Congress, and they lack the votes to repeal.
Sorry, but that's just not something one can pretend not to notice.
Charles Simic: Bleak House:
Just consider the effort of the Republicans in the House to overrule
the Affordable Care Act, a legislation ratified by the majority of
elected representative of the people and signed into law by the
president. Bettering the lives of anyone but the wealthy, as we
know, has ceased to be a concern of the Republican Party. But
millions of Americans are on the brink of buying affordable health
insurance and freeing themselves from a worry that makes their lives
utter misery; the concerted effort backed by some of the richest men
in this country to deprive them of that chance may be without precedent
for sheer malice. Indifference to the plight and suffering of human
beings of one class or another by some segment of the population is
a universal phenomenon, but spending millions of dollars to deepen
the misery of one's fellow citizens and enlisting members of one
political party to help you do so is downright vile. It must be
motivated as much by sadism as by the political calculation that if
these uninsured were to get insurance, they would give the Democratic
Party a governing majority simply out of gratitude for letting them
see a doctor.
Organized, by what The New York Times calls "a loose-knit coalition
of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III,"
the backers of the government shut-down are ensconced in organizations
like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, Club
for Growth, Generation Opportunity, and Young Americans for Liberty,
their names as fake as those of Communist front organizations in the
1930s and 1940s and as venal as their forerunners. These groups spent
more than $200 million last year to spread disinformation and delude
the gullible among the populace about the supposedly catastrophic harm
giving health care to the uninsured would do to the economy. Using them
as a model, Americans should look out only for themselves. We have
forgotten what this country once understood, that a society based on
nothing but selfishness and greed is not a society at all, but a state
of war of the strong against the weak.
Steve M: I Want to Belong to the Democratic Party That Exists Only in
Rush Limbaugh's Delusional Brain: Early in 2009 after Obama became
president, we hired a father-son team to come in and lay some tile.
They not only insisted on arriving too early but they also brought
their own radio in, and without any consideration of their customers
they tuned in Rush Limbaugh. Surprisingly, he cheered me up: until
then I had no idea that Obama was a socialist, or even that he had
progressive plans. Of course, I was eventually disappointed to find
no evidence of any such thing. And I couldn't exactly blame Limbaugh
for being wrong, because he's always wrong about everything. But
he's still at it, trying to cheer us up with his reverse psychology.
Here's how Steve M. paraphrases him (follow the link if you don't
believe me):
So I guess Obamacare was deliberately built to fail because, as everyone
knows, if it fails we're just instantly going to throw all the huge
private insurers and all their expensive lobbyists under the bus and
go socialist, because liberals rule, and we're Alinskying this just
the same way we Alinskied our way to the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall
and the restoration of Eisenhower-era 90+ percent top marginal tax rates,
when we weren't getting all those Wall Street bankers arrested and
getting Gitmo closed and stopping the drones and legalizing gay marriage
all the way from Montana to Mississippi. Remember how we pulled all that
off? Good times.
Too bad I can't remember any of that. Just think: if I were as
clueless as Limbaugh, I'd be a happy man.
Speaking of delusion, all see M's
Kathleen Sebelius, Gangsta Bitch, based on a Michelle Malkin rant:
You can question how Sebelius is doing her job, but I think you have to
be an insane wingnut with rage disorder to regard her as a combination
of Torquemada and Whitey Bulger.
Also, a few links for further study:
Amy Goldstein/Juliet Eilperlin: HealthCare.gov: How political fear was
pitted against technical needs: A fairly long article on how the
implementation of the federal insurance exchange under ACA was hampered
by a "poisonous" political atmosphere and some measure of bureaucratic
inefficiency or incompetence -- hard for me to tell. One problem was
that the law envisioned 50 state exchanges, but the more Republicans
were able to block those, the more weight got piled onto the underfunded
federal exchange. By the way, here's a profile of
CGI Federal, the Canadian company most responsible for implementing
the federal insurance exchange.
Paul Krugman: Gambling With Civilization: Review of economist
William D. Nordhaus's book: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty,
and Economics for a Warming World (Yale University Press):
"Markets alone will not solve this problem," declares Nordhaus. "There
is no genuine 'free-market solution' to global warming." This isn't a
radical statement, it's just Econ 101. Nonetheless, it's anathema to
free-market enthusiasts. If you like to imagine yourself as a character
in an Ayn Rand novel, and someone tells you that the world isn't like
that, that it requires government intervention -- no matter how
d market-friendly -- your response may well be to reject the news and
cling to your fantasies. And sad to say, a fair number of influential
figures in American public life do believe they're acting out Atlas
Shrugged.
Finally, there's a strong streak in modern American conservatism
that rejects not just climate science, but the scientific method in
general. Polling suggests, for example, that a large majority of
Republicans reject the theory of evolution. For people with this
mind-set, laying out the extent of scientific consensus on an issue
isn't persuasive -- gets their backs up, and feeds fantasies about
vast egghead conspiracies.
Nordhaus accepts the basic climate science findings, debunks
advocacy and alarmism that he thinks goes too far, attempts a
cost-benefit analysis of various possible solutions, calls for
some sort of carbon pricing/tax scheme to limit emissions, and
considers geoengineering a possible fallback to offset (but not
solve) excess emissions. Seems like a reasonable book, if only
we had reasonable political and business leaders.
Several more links having to do with Max Blumenthal's
new book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.
(I have a copy and hope to read soon, but I've been stuck for
a long time in a book on neoliberal economics and it's slow
going.) Found most of these by following links from
MJ Rosenberg, who is of two minds on the book (and for that
matter seems to be of two minds on many things lately):
Rosenberg also links to this Haaretz article:
The Shoah explained to our five-year-olds. I agree with him that
teaching the history of the Holocaust to kindergarten children, as
Israel's Education Minister is proposing, is "child abuse." As I understand it, Israel also has a program where teenagers
are sent to Auschwitz, and their military holds rituals at Masada.
Has there ever been any nation that works harder to traumatize its
own citizens? For a further illustration of this, see Tom Segev's
book 1967, where Israel's generals were shown to be totally
confident of swift victory, while the Israeli people were led to
expect utter doom (and therefore felt remarkable exhilaration at
the victory).
Yakov M Rabkin: Reform Judaism and the challenge of Zionism:
Book review of Jack Ross: Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American
Jewish Anti-Zionism (2011, Potomac Books). Berger was a notable
exception to the common pro-Zionist stance of American jews. Rabkin
also wrote what is most likely an interesting book: A Threat From
Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism.
Tom Simonite: The Decline of Wikipedia: Some interesting observations
here, especially regarding a slight reduction in the number of active
editors at Wikipedia -- I wouldn't go so far as to call that a decline,
but it means that progress in filling out weak spots may slow down. Also
notable are the growth of "personal, egocentric feeds" (Facebook and
Twitter) and the increasing use of lightweight computers (phones,
tablets) that aren't conducive to any actual work. Also makes sense
to me that as Wikipedia matures people will move on -- where to is as
yet unclear.
Also looks like there is a lot of news on Israel, and all bad as
far as I can see. In fact,
WarInContext has nothing but
bad news everywhere it looks. (Right now the top article is on
John Kerry.)
Daily Log
Music today (JP): Randy Weston/Billy Harper; (RG): Marvin Gaye,
Barrett Strong, Edwin Starr.
Wrote this parenthetical as part of the Israeli child abuse paragraph
above. Took it out because I thought it might overwhelm the point, but
it is a true feeling, something I may elaborate on later:
(For that matter, I believe that teaching religion to young children
is little better. Adults can believe whatever nonsense suits them, but
young children are especially defenseless against such trauma. I know
it took me many years to get free of my rearing, and I can recount the
scars.)
Saturday, November 02, 2013
Daily Log
Made maqluba -- a Palestinian rice pilaf with layers of tomato, eggplant,
cauliflower, and chicken, cooked then flipped upside down -- and some yogurt
for the Peace Center's pot luck dinner for Pamela Olson.
Music today (JP): Randy Weston; (RG): The Turtles.
Janice Bradley posted on facebook a link to Pamela Olson's
Mondoweiss article on the Lydda 1948 expulsion (also see my
post on the subject; both of us refer to Ari Savit's New Yorker
piece). She got a response from Stuart Elliott, a local labor
leader, DSA activist, and self-appointed commissioner for political
correctness in all things Israel, and passed it along:
Strange (or perhaps not) no mention of the Jewish Nakba. There were
two sets of refugees who emerged form the founding of Israel and the
Arab rejection of partition. Nearly one million Jews were expelled or
fled from the Arab world. More than half of the Israeli citizens are
those refugees and their descendants. Jews were a persecuted minority
in the Arab world. The[y] lived under a set of restrictive rules far
closer to apartheid than the Israeli treatment of
Palestinians. Restrictions included residency in segregated quarters,
obligation to wear distinctive clothing, public subservience to
Muslims, prohibitions against proselytizing and against marrying
Muslim women, and limited access to the legal system (the testimony of
a Jew did not count if contradicted by that of a Muslim).
I wrote a letter in response to Elliott, and sent it to the PSG
mail list. I think it's worth quoting here:
It is true that several hundred thousand Jews from predominantly
muslim countries immigrated to Israel after independence in 1948. It
is possible that some of them did so because they feared violence
against them in their native countries, but that was generally not the
case. No doubt many more considered the advantages of joining a Jewish
majority in Israel versus their previous minority status. How bad that
minority status was is subject to debate, which is unfortunately
clouded by "scholarship" on both sides that rarely rises above the
level of propaganda. Stuart's assertion, for instance, that Jews in
Arab lands (under European colonial control, under the Ottomans, or
under the older Arabic caliphates, which are three significantly
different regimes) "lived under a set of restrictive rules far closer
to apartheid than the Israeli treatment of Palestinians" is blatantly,
staggeringly untrue -- although it's worth noting that the bar there
is set very high. (The Israeli legal code is many times larger than
even the most bureaucratic Ottomans could imagine, and the
proportional coverage of Israeli soldiers enforcing that code, and
therefore the willingness of the government to use force, is far
greater than the Ottoman or British authorities were ever able to
muster.)
Israeli "scholars" have written a lot about the "dhimmi" -- the old
Islamic system for protecting (or managing, if you prefer) the
minority rights of Christians and Jews ("people of the book"). Much of
what Stuart refers to dates from that system, which is to say from the
700s. Any such system lends itself to abuses, but that it was
tolerable is suggested by the continued presence of large and often
prominent Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world. When Jews
were expelled from Spain in 1492 -- an event that really does rise to
the level of the Nakba -- most Spanish Jews moved to the Ottoman
Empire (and, by the way, not to Jerusalem, which was a free
option). As I understand it, the Ottomans evenually eliminated their
version of the "dhimmi" system, and the system was not retained by the
European colonial governments that replaced the Ottomans after WWI or
the puppet regimes they installed. (The Saudis, exceptionally,
excluded Jews altogether, so they fall apart from this
discussion.)
Nonetheless, it may be that Jews in predominantly Muslim lands felt
increasingly threatened. For one thing, there was a popular perception
that Jews were favored by European colonial governments. (This was
certainly the case in Algeria, and might have contributed to some of
the violence in Iraq, where anti-British riots during WWII turned
against Jews.) The Holocaust was certainly noted. And the embarrassing
showing of Arab forces in the 1948-49 war with Israel would have
stirred up resentments. In 1948 Israel started a concerted campaign to
get as many Arab Jews as possible to immigrate to Israel. They
organized the Mossad for just this purpose, and they sent their spies
out to facilitate and orchestrate this process. They certainly cut
deals with local Arab politicians to promote emigration -- Iraq and
Yemen are the best-reported cases. It has been charged that they also
orchestrated violence against Jews -- e.g., burning of synagogues --
to sow terror in the Jewish population. (I've looked for confirmation
of this in the Mossad literature -- they are an unusually boastful
group, after all -- and haven't found it, but Israel does have a
history of "false flag" operations, most notoriously the Lavon
Affair.) Some, of course, didn't need any persuasion: they were
attracted to the Zionist idea. On the other hand, the near-total
migration of the Yemeni Jewish community suggests the government did
some prodding as well.
As I noted in the Lydda piece, there have been cases where
expulsions only went one way -- such as ethnic Germans from
Czechoslovakia -- and others where there were two-way "population
exchanges" (Greece and Turkey after their 1920 war, India-Pakistan
after partition). Still, in most of these cases there was a country to
which immigrants were welcomed (not that Germany was particularly
consulted on the matter). Even if you buy the notion that Israel and
its Arab neighbors had a "population exchange" -- Jews moving to
Israel and non-Jews heading the other direction, and the ultimate
numbers wound up in similar range -- there are many reasons why this
was different: the Jews were welcomed into Israel with subsidies
aiding their relocation, while the Palestinians were not welcomed
(except by Jordan, which offered them citizenship, albeit under a
military-backed monarch); the Palestinians moved under much more
imminent threat of force, and the movement was confined to a period of
war, whereas the Jewish emigration from Arab lands largely followed
the 1947-49 war and is still a trickle today; the Palestinians were
recognized by the UN as refugees and tended to accordingly, whereas
that never happened with Arab Jews. The refugee problem has been made
worse by the unwillingness of Arab states like Egypt and Lebanon to
resettle and integrate Palestinian refugees, but they had various
reasons and no responsibilities to do so.
Some peace proposals such as the one from Michael Lerner have
included planks calling for reparations to Arab-Jewish as well as
Palestinian refugees, but there is little historical or moral basis
for doing so -- at least as long as Jews who went to Israel have the
right to return to their ancestral countries. The proposals that I
have presented have included a plank urging Arab nations (and all
others) to permit, on an expedited basis, Jewish (as well as
Palestinian) immigration -- partly to answer this sort of complaint,
and partly to undercut the notion that Jews need a national homeland
so they will always have a retreat should violent anti-semitism rise
again.
Of course, rather than going into this detail, one could just laugh
at Stuart's point.
Friday, November 01, 2013
Daily Log
Made two changes to the blog source code (server only), both in
serendipity.functions.inc.php:
- Hacked add_trackback() to always fail.
- Hacked serendipity_printEntries() to change the HTML code around
TRACKBACK_SPECIFIC to remove <a> tag and modify the
message by prepending "[" and appending " suppressed]".
The first prevents any new trackbacks from being added to the database.
The second suppresses the URI that is used to request new trackbacks, while
minimizing the formatting change. Any extant trackbacks are still printed
out, and are therefore still deletable. Not idea how much crud the database
contains. I should probably figure out how to do it using SQL.
Music today (JP): Roswell Rudd; (RG): Art Pepper.
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