Streamnotes (December 2017)

Pick up text here.

Daily Log

Facing a deadline for Sergio Piccirilli's El Intruso jazz critics poll. Can pick up to three nominees in each category. I'm not feeling it, but will take a stab here:

• Musician of the Year: Satoko Fujii, Ivo Perelman, Ken Vandermark
• Newcomer Musician: no one I'm aware of
• Group of the Year: Mostly Other People Do the Killing, The Microscopic Septet, Free Radicals
• Newcomer Group: Buffalo Jazz Octet, Vector Families
• Album of the year: William Parker Quartets: Meditation/Resurrection (AUM Fidelity), Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo: Peace (Libra), Gonçalo Almeida/Rodrigo Amado/Marco Franco: The Attic (NoBusiness)
• Composer:
• Drums: Tom Rainey, Barry Altschul, Tomas Fujiwara
• Acoustic Bass: William Parker, Ken Filiano, Eric Revis
• Electric Bass: Stomu Takeishi
• Guitar: Samo Salamon, Joe Morris
• Piano: Satoko Fujii, Matthew Shipp, Kris Davis
• Keyboards/Synthesizer/Organ:
• Tenor Saxophone: David Murray, Ellery Eskelin, Rich Halley
• Alto Saxophone: François Carrier, Rocco John Iacovone, Rudresh Mahanthappa
• Baritone Saxophone: Brian Landrus
• Soprano Saxophone: Jane Ira Bloom
• Trumpet/Cornet: Wadada Leo Smith, Kirk Knuffke
• Clarinet/Bass Clarinet: Rudi Mahall, Jason Stein
• Trombone: Roswell Rudd, Steve Swell
• Flute: Nicole Mitchell
• Violin/Viola: Jason Kao Hwang
• Cello: Erik Friedlander, Tomeka Reid
• Vibraphone: Jason Adasiewicz
• Electronics: Kieran Hebden
• Others Instruments: Marcus Rojas (tuba)
• Female Vocals: Fay Victor, Catherine Russell
• Male Vocals: James Blood Ulmer
• Best Live Band:
• Record Label: Intakt, Pi, AUM Fidelity

Music Week

Music: Current count 29058 [29021] rated (+37), 388 [389] unrated (-1).

Extended the week a day, which helped make up for not playing any unrated music on Christmas Eve -- was busy cooking paella for what's left of the family here. Was pleased to see that Cam Patterson finally posted a picture of his legendary crawfish étouffée -- he contacted me many years ago, mentioning his ritual and urging me to write more about my cooking. You can find a picture of my paella here -- had to drag out the big pot for it.

Finally got into the latest batch of Ivo Perelman CDs, and while I choked on Philosopher's Stone (too shrill), the rest proved remarkable. Missing below is Live in Brussels, which I had previously graded B+(**) based on Napster, before I got the CDs. I will give it another shot later on, but seemed unnecessary at the moment. Since I closed off the week, I've discovered Art Pepper's West Coast Sessions on Omnivore. I need to replay to first two volumes, but there's a good chance that all six will wind up at A- -- as did the 5-CD box The Hollywood All-Star Sessions, where I first heard most of this marvelous music. I got into the Rolling Stones boots after Laura wanted to hear Beggars Banquet. I reconsidered Angles 9 after it showed up number two on Chris Monsen's list.

Spent several days last week cleaning up the album credits for the Jazz Critics Poll listings. I noted all the new records that got votes in my 2017 EOY List Aggregate, but the process was so slow and tedious I postponed work on reissues and the vocal-debut-Latin side-polls. I got far fewer complaints about errors this year than ever before, although I've found so many since the pages went up that I suspect fatigue or indifference as much as anything else. I saw a tweet from poll winner Vijay Iyer bemoaning the shortage of women critics, but that's only one of many identity groups that got shortchanged -- one I've complained about in the past was lack of European critics. I also got a letter from someone complaining about a shortage of jazz radio dj's (we got more of them than women or Europeans). He included a top-100 chart from Jazz Week, which I'll factor into my EOY Aggregate. He stressed that the JW list wasn't a "smooth jazz" list, which is true, but it isn't very adventurous or even interesting: for instance, I only count four records also on my 79 deep Jazz A-List (Jack DeJohnette's Hudson, Katie Thiroux's Off Beat, Yoko Miwa's Pathways, and Jimmy Greene's Flowers). Part of the problem is that it doesn't include a single album from the two labels Francis Davis singled out as "gatekeepers" to the polls (ECM and Pi) -- labels which scored 9 of the top 30 new jazz albums (6 and 3 respectively; note that Pi only released 5 albums last year, placing 60% of them in the top 17, the others landing at 60 and 94).

I could just as well complain about the lack of avant-oriented (or even -curious) voters. For instance, Free Jazz Collective just released their Free Jazz Blog's 2017 Top 10 Lists, collecting 21 writers, only three of whom submitted ballots to JCP. I've never been consulted on who gets invited, and especially have no idea who got invited but didn't vote. I do know that JCP typically gets about twice as many voters as JazzTimes for their annual poll, yet relatively speaking remains more open-minded.

I was thinking I'd write something about my EOY Aggregate this week, but I'm running out of time, and it's still in flux even if not changing very fast. But I will list out the current top 20 (my grades in brackets):

1. 205: Kendrick Lamar: Damn (Top Dawg) [A-]
2. 143: Lorde: Melodrama (Lava/Republic) [A-]
3. 134: SZA: Ctrl (Top Dawg/RCA) [**]
4. 131: LCD Soundsystem: American Dream (DFA/Columbia) [**]
5. 120: St Vincent: Masseduction (Loma Vista) [A-]
6. 91: Vince Staples: Big Fish Theory (Def Jam) [**]
7. 79: The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding (Atlantic) [B]
8. 78: The National: Sleep Well Beast (4AD) [***]
9. 77: Sampha: Process (Young Turks) [*]
10. 69: Slowdive (Dead Oceans) [*]
11. 67: Kelela: Take Me Apart (Warp) [**]
12. 66: Perfume Genius: No Shape (Matador) [B-]
13. 60: Father John Misty: Pure Comedy (Sub Pop) [B-]
14. 60: Thundercat: Drunk (Brainfeeder) [*]
15. 57: Jay-Z: 4:44 (Roc Nation/UMG) [**]
16. 57: Tyler the Creator: Flower Boy (Columbia) [B]
17. 48: King Krule: The OOZ (True Panther Sounds) [B]
18. 44: Big Thief: Capacity (Saddle Creek) [**]
19. 42: Fever Ray: Plunge (Rabid/Mute) [*]
20. 41: Migos: Culture (QC/YRN/300) [***]

All in all, a better bunch of records than I'm used to in EOY lists, although I always find at least one record I can't imagine why anyone would vote for -- this year it's Perfume Genius: I can't hear any reason why anyone would find it attractive, even though on balance it's not so much worse than Father John Misty or War on Drugs. I probably won't spend much more time on this, at least beyond next week. I clearly still have some things that need to be factored in, even if just for my own curiosity. I've currently collected 94 lists, which is a far cry from last year's 557 lists. Those lists have identified 1481 records so far this year, compared to 4978 in 2016. Pazz & Jop typically comes up with about 1500 records.

By the way, I didn't get an invite from the Village Voice to vote in Pazz & Jop this year. No idea why, other than that they've changed management in the last year, supposedly to a group less inclined to let things run on autopilot. My Year 2017 list is up to 1001 lines (16 pending, so rated count is 985), which doesn't strike me as bad for a critic. Granted, probably two-thirds of that is jazz -- the Non-Jazz A-List is currently a relatively anemic 51 titles long (compared to 79 jazz), so maybe it's just anti-jazz prejudice taking hold there. Still, feels like a nudge out the door.

I published a "quick and dirty" consumer guide to the recordings of the late trombonist Roswell Rudd: The Incredible Honk (one of his album titles). I was so short of time and uncertain of consciousness that I almost let it go, but it finally cleaned up easily enough. I became a Rudd fan in the late 1970s, when Arista reissued a series of album that originally came out in Paris on Freedom Records. They included two Rudd titles: one chunk of avant-squawk I hated, the other (a jaded swing quartet with Sheila Jordan singing) I absolutely loved. I then tracked down his JCOA album (another good one, also with Jordan), and a few years later I grabbed Regeneration, his Herbie Nichols/Thelonious Monk tribute. That was pretty much his last album for more than a decade, until Francis Davis wrote his 1993 profile (see link below). Rudd returned to the spotlight after that, especially after he hooked up with Verna Gillis -- evidently some kind of world music impressario, hence his albums with musicians from Mali to Mongolia to Puerto Rico. It's been a delight to follow him since I started writing JCG.

Some Rudd links:

• Francis Davis: White Anglo-Saxon Pythagorean: 1993 profile of Rudd, exscerpted from his out-of-print 1996 book, Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the End of the Century.
• Nate Chinen: Roswell Rudd, Trombonist of Agreeable Bluster and Far-Ranging Influence, Dies at 82
• Peter Hum: RIP, Roswell Rudd (Ottawa Citizen).
• Giovanni Russonello: Roswell Rudd, 82, Trombonist With a Wide-Open Approach, Is Dead (New York Times).
• Peter Stone: Roswell Rudd (Assoc. for Cultural Equity).
• Michael J West: Roswell Rudd Dies at 82 (JazzTimes)
• Ralph A Miriello: The Indefatigable Spirit of Roswell Rudd Rings through on "Embrace": Written before Rudd's death, a review of his possibly last album.

I've been toying with the idea of writing an essay on political strategy, tentatively titled A Letter to the Democrats. It would start with a survey of American political eras: one thing I'm struck by is that for 1800-1856 the Democrats only lost two elections (both to short-lived Whig generals); from 1860-1928 the Republicans were dominant with only two Democrats were elected president (two terms each for Cleveland and Wilson); from 1932-1976 only two Republicans won (two terms each for Eisenhower and Nixon); and from 1980-2016 only two Democrats (again two terms each for Clinton and Obama). Mark Lilla talks about "two dispensations" for the last two eras, but that seems like a quaint term. There are plenty of reasons to think that the poles may switch in 2020 -- not least that each era shift was preceded by an exceptionally unpopular one-term president (Buchanan, Hoover, and Carter), and it's hard to imagine that Trump is any different (indeed, he's probably the weakest of the four). On the other hand, the current Republican phase is anomalous in many respects: especially that it represents a shift to the right, whereas all previous era shifts moved toward more democratic/liberal foundations. But there's a lot more interesting stuff that flows from this framework. The main question is how should candidates position themselves to realize the transformation that is possible.

From a practical standpoint, I figure I'd have to knock this essay out in 4-6 weeks, hoping to get it published in March/April so that it might have some immediate effect on the 2018 elections. So it will have to be short, quick, and pointed. I won't be able to do a lot of research, but I thought I'd at least start to make a survey of books I should be aware of. One of the things I did today was to search Amazon for "democrats" -- which turned up nothing of interest. I then tried to refine the search and tried "democratic party prospects" and got what has to be the most useless Amazon results page ever:

1. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings
3. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg

I was expecting to find some more recent/less dated strategizing along the lines of E.J. Dionne: They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996) and John Judis/Ruy Teixeira: The Emerging Democratic Majority (2004), but I'm finding very little of that. Sure, Dionne does have a new book, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, as does Teixeira, The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think -- but I don't find their cheery optimism at all convincing. I did read Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal, which got me thinking along these lines, but mostly because of its defects. There must be something else worthwhile. Or maybe I've discovered a market gap? Regardless, I've procrastinated so long already that if I do decide to do something, I need to move fast.

New records rated this week:

• Yazz Ahmed: La Saboteuse (2017, Naim): [r]: B+(**)
• John Beasley: MONK'estra Vol. 2 (2017, Mack Avenue): [r]: B
• Sam Braysher With Michael Kanan: Golden Earrings (2016 [2017], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(***)
• Phoebe Bridgers: Stranger in the Alps (2017, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(*)
• Peter Brotzmann/Heather Leigh: Sex Tape (2016 [2017], Trost): [r]: B-
• John Butcher/Damon Smith/Weasel Walter: The Catastrophe of Minimalism (2008 [2017], Ballance Point Acoustics): [r]: B+(**)
• Collectif Spatule: Le Vanneau Huppé (2017, Aloya): [bc]: B+(**)
• Dial & Oatts/Rich DeRosa/WDR Big Band: Rediscovered Ellington: New Takes on Duke's Rare and Unheard Music (2017, Zoho): [r]: B+(*)
• Agustí Fernández/Rafal Mazur: Ziran (2016, Not Two): [r]: B+(*)
• Champian Fulton & Scott Hamilton: The Things We Did Last Summer (2017, Blau): [r]: B+(*)
• Frank Gratkowski/Simon Nabatov: Mirthful Myths (2015 [2017], Leo): [r]: B+(**)
• Charlie Halloran: Ce Biguine! (2017, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Lilly Hiatt: Trinity Lane (2017, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• The Jazz Passengers: Still Life With Trouble (2017, Thirsty Ear): [r]: B+(**)
• Lee Konitz: Frescalalto (2015 [2017], Impulse): [r]: B+(***)
• Alex Lahey: I Love You Like a Brother (2017, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(***)
• Christian McBride Big Band: Bringin' It (2017, Mack Avenue): [r]: B-
• Ron Miles: I Am a Man (2016 [2017], Yellowbird): [yt]: B+(***)
• Jason Moran and the Bandwagon: Thanksgiving at the Vanguard (2016 [2017], Yes): [dl]: B+(*)
• Zaid Nasser: The Stroller (2016 [2017], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Sam Newsome and Jean-Michel Pilc: Magic Circle (2017, Some New Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Dick Oatts: Use Your Imagination (2016 [2017], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Bobby Kapp: Heptagon (2017, Leo): [cd]: A-
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Nate Wooley: Philosopher's Stone (2017, Leo): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ivo Perelman/Nate Wooley/Brandon Lopez/Gerald Cleaver: Octagon (2017, Leo): [cd]: A-
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Joe Hertenstein: Scalene (2017, Leo): [cd]: A-
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Jeff Cosgrove: Live in Baltimore (2017, Leo): [cd]: B+(***)
• Red Planet/Bill Carrothers: Red Planet With Bill Carrothers (2017, Shifting Paradigm): [bc]: B+(**)
• Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: The Emancipation Procrastination (2016 [2017], Stretch Music/Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Shotgun Jazz Band: Steppin' on the Gas (2016 [2017], self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita: Transparent Water (2017, World Village): [r]: B+(*)

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

• The Rolling Stones: On Air (1963-65 [2017], Interscope): [r]: B+(**)
• The Rolling Stones: Live 1965: Music From Charlie Is My Darling (1965 [2014], ABKCO): [r]: B+(**)
• The Rolling Stones: Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones (1972 [2017], Eagle Rock): [r]: A-
• The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers Live at the Fonda Theater 2015 (2015 [2017], Eagle Rock): [r]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• Allen Lowe/Roswell Rudd: Woyzeck's Death (1994 [1995], Enja): [sp]: B+(*)
• The Rolling Stones: Singles 1968-1971 (1968-71 [2005], Abkco, 9CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Roswell Rudd: Everywhere (1966 [1967], Impulse): [r]: B+(***)
• Sex Mob: Dime Grind Palace (2003, Ropeadope): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [cd]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Justin Gray & Synthesis: New Horizons (self-released): January 5
• Peter Sommer: Happy-Go-Lucky Locals (self-released)

Weekend Roundup

A day late from the usual Sunday, but having missed last week, I figured the exercise would be worthwhile. Like our trash collection, we're running a day late this week.

Growing up we always had a special dinner on Christmas Eve, then gathered around the tree in the living room and opened presents. I gave up on shopping and presents after my parents died in 2000 -- partly, I suppose, because we moved to Wichita in 1999 to be closer to my family, but after doing serious shopping I got sick and missed that last Christmas. We tried to keep the tradition going, but it fizzled out when my brother and his family moved away. The only thing I kept was the Christmas Eve dinner, which I've ever since subjected my sister and her son to. I rustled up a bit pot of paella last night, with a lobster, some shrimp and scallops instead of the usual clams. I figured I'd do some tapas on the side, but didn't come up with much: potatoes with tuna and egg, a white bean salad, a pisto (onions, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, cooked down to a paste), sauteed mushrooms in garlic sauce, some olives, a loaf of "bake it yourself" garlic bread. Per a tradition that only started after we returned to Wichita, I made date pudding (topped with caramel sauce and whipped cream) for dessert. I was feeling pretty depressed, but the sensation vanished as soon as I started cooking. That's pretty much all I have to show for 2017, but it feels like I'm accomplishing something when I do it.

Biggest story from the last couple weeks were the Republican tax bill: a massive giveaway to corporations, proprietors who can take advantage of the "pass-through income" provisions, and to the growth and consolidation of aristocracy, and eventually a drain on the economy and an excuse for cutting back on actually useful services the government provides. But also very important are the end of FCC "net neutrality" rules and the latest round of sanctions against North Korea. Of course, the latter could instantly jump to the head of the list.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important political stories of the week [Dec. 22]: Congress passed a major tax cut; The government won't shut down for Christmas; Affordable Care Act signups remained robust; Republicans turned on Robert Mueller; and The 4 biggest policy stories of the week, explained [Dec. 15]: A Democrat won a Senate election in Alabama: Doug Jones; Republicans wrote their tax bill; Sexual harassment accusations kept rolling Congress; Net neutrality. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • The real cost of the Republican tax bill: Argues that the models showing revenues down by $1-1.5 trillion will likely be proven low, not least because IRS enforcement under Trump is likely to be slack. I would add that actual revenues in Kansas have consistently fallen short of expectations, because the Brownback cuts allowed unanticipated scams.

  • The tax cut expectations game.

  • What "affordable housing" really means.

  • We're witnessing the wholesale looting of America:

    Throughout the 2016 campaign, the political class talked a lot about "norms" and how Donald Trump was violating them all. He brushed off fact-checkers, assailed the media, went on Twitter tirades against his critics, and dabbled in racism. Since taking office, his norm busting has spread. Members of Congress who under other circumstances might be constrained by shame, custom, or the will of their constituents have learned from Trump's election that you can get away with more than we used to think.

    Norm erosion is real, and it matters. . . . These scholars are all considering deep, long-lasting differences in cultural norms, but we also know from experience that norms can sometimes shift dramatically in unusual circumstances. Sometimes a blackout or other disaster prompts a few people who would ordinarily be too cautious to break store windows in broad daylight to become more brazen. And the normal course of ordinary life flips into reverse, as those with some inclination toward bad acts recognize a moment of impunity and grab what they can, while those who would ordinarily be invested in upholding order are afraid and stay inside. The sheer quantity of bad acts makes it impossible for anyone to hold anyone accountable. Soon, a whole neighborhood can be in ruins.

    Or a whole country. . . .

    It takes a lot more than Donald Trump to orchestrate the kind of feeding frenzy that's currently playing out in Washington. Nothing about this would work if not for the fact that hundreds of Republican Party members of Congress wake up each morning and decide anew that they are indifferent to the myriad financial conflicts of interest in which Trump and his family are enmeshed. Moral and political responsibility for the looting ultimately rests on the shoulders of the GOP members of Congress who decided that the appropriate reaction to Trump's inauguration was to start smashing and grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their donors rather than uphold their constitutional obligations.

  • Why Trump's tax cuts won't be repealed.

  • Republicans are on tilt with their super-unpopular tax bill.

  • Collective ownership of the means of production.

• Dean Baker: Bubbles: Are They Back?

  Should we be concerned about a bubble now? Stock prices and housing prices are both high by historical standards. The ratio of stock prices-to-trend corporate earnings is more than 27-to-1; this compares to a long-term average of 15-to-1.

  House prices are also high by historic standards. Inflation-adjusted house prices are still well below their bubble peaks, but are about 40 percent above their long-term average.

  Baker also wrote: Diverting Class Warfare Into Generational Warfare: Round LVIII; e.g.:

  It is also important to understand that government action was at the center of this upward redistribution. Without government-granted patent monopolies for Windows and other Microsoft software, Bill Gates would probably still be working for a living.

  We spent over $450 billion on prescription drugs in 2017. Without government-granted patent monopolies we would probably have spent less than $80 billion. The difference of $370 billion is equal to an increase of a 5.0 percentage point increase in the Social Security payroll tax. But the generational warriors don't want anyone talking about how much money our children to pay drug companies with government-granted patent monopolies.

  Baker is a bit confused about Microsoft -- patents played at most a small role in building its monopoly -- the late 1990s antitrust case which Microsoft lost covered much of this -- but copyrights are essential for maintaining it.

• Zack Beauchamp: We are sleepwalking toward war with North Korea.

• Sean Illing: How the baby boomers -- not millennials -- screwed America: Interview with Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, which looks to be pretty awful. I don't doubt that various age cohorts grow up with different experiences, but there has always been more variation within a generation than change from one to the next. It's not that Gibney is unobservant -- he identifies Ronald Reagan's 1980 election as the turning point from which today's rot stemmed -- but he pairs his superficial groupings with clichéd analysis and bogus measures (especially the growth of debt). Gibney, like so many reactionaries from the 1950s on, blamed postwar affluence for breeding a generation of selfish ingrates who lack the social solidarity bred in their parents by depression and war. As Gibney puts it:

  I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.

  This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.

  Gibney's argument might be more interesting if he focused on things that were truly new and widespread, like that "boomers" were the first cohort to grow up with television and its mass consumer advertising, with news presented more in images than in words, with world travel reduced from months or weeks to hours, with science promising greater control of nature but also raising the spectre of extinction. Maybe some people responded to such sweeping change by becoming sociopaths, but (for a while, at least) the opposite seemed to be happening: in the late '60s and early '70s, the "boomers" were in the forefront of movements for the environment, sexual equality, for consumer rights, for civil rights and against war. You can argue that the new left was too individualistic and too nonchalant about power, and that those weaknesses made it easier for conservative reaction to seize power -- and beset the country with all the ills Gibney decries. But the fact that Bill Clinton, GW Bush, and Donald Trump were all born in 1946 doesn't make them representative of a generation. Indeed, they were clearly exceptional, carefully selected by unrepresentative powers.

  Nothing actual in this piece about "millennials" -- one's political hopes for them (e.g., Steven Olikara: Here's one reason to be optimistic about politics: Millennials in office) lie not in generational change but in the fact that thanks to the conservative reaction they've been so severely screwed. But that only changes if they recognize the real culprits.

• Ezra Klein: "An orgy of serious policy discussion" with Paul Krugman.

• Mike Konczal: "Neoliberalism" isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. Good explanation of the word, if you wind up stuck needing to use it.

• Kevin M Kruse: The Second Klan: Review of Linda Gordon's book, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition.

• German Lopez: The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment: Three charts here, mapping the tendencies of people "least satisfied" with economics, "most sexist," and "most denying of racism" to vote for Trump. The latter two are highly polarized, as well they should be: Trump was blatantly racist and sexist, especially compared to his opponent, and his campaign actively polarized people on those issues, so of course sexists and racists (not uncommonly the same people) voted for him overwhelmingly. Still, to say he won because he appealed to racism you have to quantify how large that voter share was. Given that racists were already highly aligned with the Republican Party it's hard to see a lot of movement on that score, not that were was none. "Economic dissatisfaction" is another story: that the "least satisfied" tilted toward Trump at all is the surprise -- really, a complete breakdown in the Democratic Party's messaging, all the more damning given how easy it should have been to depict Trump as the poster boy for exorbitant greed and privilege. The underlying facts have never been in doubt. That we keep rehashing them has more to do with politics. Sanders supporters were quick to identify the failed economic hopes of the white lower classes because that's one thing their program addressed and could convert into the additional votes necessary to beat Trump and the Republicans. Diehard Clinton supporters like the racism narrative, because it shifts blame from the candidate to the "deplorable" voters.

• Premilla Nadasen: Extreme poverty returns to America.

• Rebecca Solnit: Don't let the alt-right hijack #MeToo for their agenda.

• Matt Stoller: What is net neutrality? It protects us from corporate power.

• Matt Taibbi: Bob Corker Facing Ethics Questions? What a Surprise: "The Tennessee senator's financial success has been one of Washington's open questions for years." Corker flip-flopped on the tax bill, first voting against it because it would increase the deficit, then voting for it even though its impact on the deficit hasn't changed (but the joint committee added a break on real estate taxes that evidently saves Corker millions of dollars). More on Corker: Mary Papenfuss: #CorkerKickback Turns Up the Flame Under Senator for His Tax Vote Switch. Paul Krugman, in Passing Through to Corruption, also mentions Corker:

  Senator Bob Corker, citing concerns about the deficit, was the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill. Now, however, he says he will vote for a final version that is no better when it comes to fiscal probity. What changed?

  Well, one thing that changed was the insertion of a provision that wasn't in the Senate bill: Real estate companies were added to the list of "pass-through" businesses whose owners will get sharply lower tax rates. These pass-through provisions are arguably the worst feature of the bill. They will open the tax system to a huge amount of gaming, of exploiting legal loopholes to avoid tax.

  But one thing they will also do, thanks to that last-minute addition, is give huge tax breaks to elected officials who own a lot of income-producing real estate -- officials like Donald Trump and, yes, Bob Corker.

• Todd VanDerWerff: Disney acquiring Fox means big, scary things for film and TV: "Here are five reasons the deal is terrifying -- and only one of them is increased media consolidation."

The Incredible Honk

One of the great trombonists of all jazz history, Roswell Rudd, has just died, at 82, evidently of cancer. He was a major figure in the 1960s avant-garde, later refocusing his sense of the tradition into two especially great albums -- 1974's Flexible Flyer, which restarted Sheila Jordan's brilliant career, and 1982's Regeneration, which rekindled interest in the music of Herbie Nichols -- and after a dozen years away from the studio mounted a marvelously wide-ranging comeback. For all his range, he had a singular sound on trombone -- unflinching, a deep and dirty growl -- which made trombone one of my favorite horns, and set a standard: searching for his name in my writings, I've found myself repeatedly trying to measure up other trombonists to him.

I have no time to write anything that does justice to his music, but I figured the least I could do would be to pluck my various reviews of his work out of my Jazz Guides. In this task, I've been helped by Mindspring's discography, although it unaccountably ends around 2002. All I've managed to do is to make a quick pass to weed out some redundancies and asides. I've also added stubs for a few albums I haven't heard (but by no means all of the ones Rudd played on).

Eli's Chosen Six (1955, Columbia) Rudd started off in this Dixieland group. I've only heard one cut on a compilation, and they seem to be an amusing bunch -- not that I wouldn't rather hear more trombone and less vocals.

Eli's Chosen Six: Ivy League Jazz (1957, Columbia)

Cecil Taylor/Buell Neidlinger: New York City R&B (1961, Candid) Originally issued under the bassist's name, Taylor's name added later as the pianist is the draw, especially on the two shorter trio cuts with Billy Higgins; the other two cuts add horns: Archie Shepp (tenor sax) on both; Clark Terry (trumpet), Steve Lacy (soprano sax), Roswell Rudd (trombone), and Charles Davis (baritone sax) on the closer. [8]

Cecil Taylor/Buell Neidlinger: Jumpin Punkins' (1961, Candid) [+]

Cecil Taylor: Cell Walk for Celeste (1961, Candid) Outtakes from the New York City R&B and Jumpin' Punkins sessions that didn't appear in album form until 1988, most quartet with Shepp, Neidlinger, and Dennis Charles, but two tracks with the extra horn quartet, with Steve Lacy's soprano sax by far the most noteworthy. [7]

The Gil Evans Orchestra: Into the Hot (1961, Impulse -99) Evans' masterpiece was his 1960 Out of the Cool, so this title makes sense as the next step, but the album itself is schizo, with two dull orchestral tracks led by trumpeter John Carisi (they do seem to wake up for the third), and three slices of something else by Cecil Taylor's quintet (Archie Shepp, Jimmy Lyons, Henry Grimes, and Sunny Murray, adding Ted Curson and Roswell Rudd on the closer). [The Taylor tracks were later reissued along with a Rudd session as Mixed.] [5]

Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd: School Days (1963, Hat Art -94) Ken Vandermark named one of his best quartets after this album. [9]

Albert Ayler/Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Roswell Rudd/Gary Peacock/Sunny Murray: New York Eye and Ear Control (1964, ESP-Disk -08) Ayler's record, but all names are on the cover and all are notable, the four horns churning tumultuously, with Ayler's tenor sax reaching for the sacred, and Rudd's trombone plumbing the profane. [6]

Archie Shepp: Four for Trane (1964, Impulse -97) [9]

New York Art Quartet (1964, ESP-Disk -08) One-shot avant-garde group, at least until they reunited for a 35th Reunion record, but an important item in trombonist Roswell Rudd's discography -- he dominates the rough interplay with alto saxophonist John Tchicai, while percussionist Milford Graves is at least as sparkling; the sole artiness is the cut that frames a poem, but it too is a signpost of the times, "Black Dada Nihilismus," by Amiri Baraka. [9]

The Jazz Composers Orchestra: Communication (1964, Fontana) A pathbreaking large group assembled by Carla Bley and Michael Mantler to play their pieces and arrangements, which over the next few years rotated to feature other composers, including Rudd (see Numatik Swing Band, below).

New York Art Quartet: Mohawk (1965, Fontana)

New York Art Quartet: Old Stuff (1965, Cuneiform -10) Short-lived group, long remembered. Danish alto saxophonist John Tchicai teamed with trombonist Roswell Rudd to cut two 1964-65 albums, an eponymous one on ESP-Disk that has remained in print more often than not, and a second that soon vanished, leaving us with nothing more until the pair got together in 1999 and cut 35th Reunion. These radio shots add significantly to their legacy, another 70 minutes (compared to 43 on the first album). The bass and drums slots were variable: Finn von Eyben plays bass here, and Louis Moholo drums. Rudd was working out the logic of free jazz trombone, and Tchicai lets him run with it, filling in and edging around. [9]

New York Art Quartet: Call It Art (1964-65, Triple Point 5LP -13) Extravagant packaging, with the 5 LPs each in its own jacket, packed alongside a 156-page clothbound book, both enclosed in a very handsome plywood box. The group, with Roswell Rudd on trombone and John Tchicai on alto sax, was more at home in Copenhagen than in New York. They cut the one album they're known for on ESP-Disk, another for Fontana in England, but other recordings have leaked out over the years -- notably Old Stuff, released by Cuneiform in 2010, and now this stack of "previously uncirculated" vinyl. Hard for me to evaluate -- among other things I'm no longer accustomed to 15-20 minute chunks -- but everything I play has its fascinating points. [9]

Roswell Rudd (1965, Free America/Verve -05) The great trombonist trades lines with alto saxophonist John Tchicai, creating a bouncy polyphony that never quite slips into a groove; a radio shot tape, sound quality so-so. [+]

Archie Shepp: Live in San Francisco (1966, Impulse -98) [5]

Roswell Rudd: Everywhere (1966, Impulse -67) The trombonist's only name album for a major label in the 1960s, a session -- four cuts, 47:15 -- that has only been reissued as part of Mixed, co-headlined by Cecil Taylor (prepends three Taylor cuts, one with Rudd). With Giuseppi Logan (flute/bass clarinet), Robin Kenyatta (alto sax), Lewis Worrell/Charlie Haden (bass), and Beaver Harris (drums). [8]

Archie Shepp: Three for a Quarter/One for a Dime (1966, Impulse -69) [5]

Archie Shepp: Mama Too Tight (1966, Impulse -98) [5]

Cecil Taylor/Roswell Rudd: Mixed (1961-66, Impulse -08) [+]

The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (1968, JCOA)

Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra (1969, Impulse -96) [+]

Gato Barbieri: The Third World (1969, Flying Dutchman -70) Front cover just says "Gato" under the title. Album opens with flute, then a little vocal, before blossoming into one of the most identifiable tenor sax tones ever. Interesting line up here, with the first hints of his Latin/tango rhythm melded with Roswell Rudd's trombone growl. [8]

Carla Bley/Paul Haines: Escalator Over the Hill (1968-71, JCOA) [5]

Roswell Rudd and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra: Numatik Swing Band (1973, JCOA) Sheila Jordan sings. [9]

Roswell Rudd: Flexible Flyer (1974, Black Lion -95) One of my all-time favorite albums, with Sheila Jordan singing and Rudd's the only horn voice, remarkably tasteful piano by Hod O'Brien and a rhythm section that could swing free but doesn't. [10]

Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd/Kent Carter/Beaver Harris: Trickles (1976, Black Saint) [4]

Roswell Rudd: Blown Bone (1976, Phillips)

Roswell Rudd: Inside Job (1976, Arista/Freedom) [3]

Carla Bley: Dinner Music (1976, Watt)

The Carla Bley Band: European Tour 1977 (1977, Watt -78) [+]

Enrico Rava Quartet (1978, ECM) [9]

Laboratorio Della Quercia (1978, Horo)

The Carla Bley Band: Musique Mechanique (1978, Watt -79) The title piece here is broken into three movements, each marked by a striking mechanicalism in the movement: the rhythm lurches in small, sharp locksteps, while there is much huffing and puffing -- notably from the lower reaches of the bass section, especially Bob Stewart's tuba. Roswell Rudd sings during the middle movement, with a similar mechanical thrust. And Karen Mantler's glockenspiel adds something to the final movement. The two other pieces are less distinctive, and less obviously humorous, and for that matter less obviously interesting. [5]

The Definitive Roswell Rudd (1979, Horo)

Roswell Rudd/Steve Lacy/Misha Mengelberg/Kent Carter/Han Bennink: Regeneration (1982, Soul Note -83) [10]

That's the Way I Feel Now: A Tribute to Thelonious Monk (1984, A&M -85) [One track, credited to Terry Adams and Friends.] [+]

Allen Lowe/Roswell Rudd: Dark Was the Night -- Cold Was the Ground (1993, Music & Arts) [+]

Allen Lowe/Roswell Rudd: Woyzeck's Death (1994, Enja -95) The second collaboration, with Lowe (tenor sax) composing up to the title piece and the trombonist contributing the last two pieces. With Randy Sandke (trumpet) and Ben Goldberg (clarinets) backed by piano-bass-drums. A meditation on Georg Buchner's famous play (left unfinished at the playwright's death), a bit awkward and dramatic, but great to hear Rudd. [6]

Steve Swell Quartet: Out and About (1996, CIMP) Probably the best avant-trombonist to come along since Rudd starts his career by entertaining the master.

Elton Dean Quartet + Roswell Rudd: Rumours of an Incident (1996, Slam)

Elton Dean/Paul Dunmall/Tony Levin/Paul Rogers/Roswell Rudd/Keith Tippett: Bladik (1996, Cuneiform)

Roswell Rudd: The Unheard Herbie Nichols, Vol. 1 (1996, CIMP) [9]

Roswell Rudd: The Unheard Herbie Nichols, Vol. 2 (1996, CIMP) [5]

Elton Dean's Newsense (1997, Slam -98) The saxophonist in early 1970's prog-rock group Soft Machine, although that barely (and rather obliquely) hints at his jazz career (up to his death in 2006). It helps here to know that Dean led a 1976-81 nonet called Elton Dean's Ninesense (including South Africans Harry Miller, Louis Moholo, and Mongezi Feza, also Harry Beckett from Barbados), so the name here introduces a new nonet. The horns are dense and thick, but few stand out. [6]

Ab Baars Trio + Roswell Rudd: Four (1998, Data)

Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd: Monk's Dream (1999, Verve -00) [+]

Roswell Rudd: Broad Strokes (1999-2000, Knitting Factory) Eclectic, it sez here. Big groups, small groups, too many vocals (awful ones at that), some great trombone. A mishmash. [5]

Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd: Live in New York (2001, Verve) Ten or so years ago, Roswell Rudd was working in a Catskills hotel when Francis Davis tracked him down to write a "whatever happened to?" article about him. Since then he's come back big enough to share top billing in this reunion of Archie Shepp's '60s quintet, soon after sharing top billing with Steve Lacy on 2000's Monk's Dream. This is the better album, partly for the obvious reason that Shepp's run-of-the-mill blues vocals are infintely preferable to Aëbi's stilted operatics. But top-of-the-line billing is not just newfound recognition for the doyen of avant-garde trombonists, this record rides on Rudd's compositions, and resounds with trombone (abetted by second trombonist Grachan Moncur). [9]

Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet: Early and Late (1962-2002, Cuneiform 2CD -07) One thing that distinguished both Lacy and Rudd is that they vaulted directly from trad jazz to the avant-garde, pausing only to snatch up the songbooks of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Instrumentation had something to do with this: before Lacy, the only known soprano sax master was Sidney Bechet, while, pace J.J. Johnson, the trombone had long been a New Orleans staple for dirtying up the lead trumpet -- Louis Armstrong never went anywhere without a Kid Ory or Trummy Young or Jack Teagarden. The first Lacy-Rudd quartet only cut one album, School Days (1963), but it was landmark enough that Ken Vandermark named his trombone-powered pianoless quartet after it (and everything School Days released was golden). The four early cuts here are unreleased demos -- three takes on Monk and one on Cecil Taylor -- and they are major finds, keys to how to turn a song inside out and make something new of it. The group broke up with Lacy moving to France and Rudd teaming up with Archie Shepp and others before fading into obscurity. Finally, they regrouped for tours in 1999 and 2002, with a new album, Monk's Dream. The rest are live shots from the tours -- long pieces, mostly Lacy's improv frameworks, plus Monk and Nichols and a sprightly pseudo-African riff from Rudd. They don't blow you away so much as they resonate with the authoritative voices of two major careers bound together at their ends. [9]

Sex Mob: Dime Grind Palace (2003, Ropeadope) Group formed in 1998 -- Steven Bernstein (trumpet), Briggan Krauss (sax), Tony Scherr (bass), and Kenny Wollesen (drums -- with nine albums through 2016, this their fifth, joined here and there by various guests, notably Peter Apfelbaum, John Kruth, Scott Robinson, Marcus Rojas, and Roswell Rudd (the latter brings the grind to 10 of 16 cuts). [8]

Roswell Rudd's Malicool (2003, Sunnyside) The veteran avant-garde trombonist meets Toumani Diabate and friends for some rather atmospheric kora, balophone, ngone, djembe, guitar, bass and 'bone. Rudd sounds fine in this context, and Diabate sounds much like he always does, but you'd think the meeting ought to have generated a little more edge. Like maybe they could use a drummer? [+]

Roswell Rudd & the Mongolian Buryat Band: Blue Mongol (2005, Sunnyside) The great jazz trombonist engages a conservatory-trained Mongolian folk group; part of the interest is the similar harmonics between trombone and throat singing, but the highlight is when Rudd cops a Beach Boys line for "Buryat Boogie." [9]

Roswell Rudd/Mark Dresser: Airwalkers (2004, Clean Feed -06) Bass-trombone duo. Seems to me this is more Dresser's show: he does this sort of intimate abstraction quite often, it's always difficult to follow but sometimes interesting when you do. Always great to hear Rudd, and a rare treat to hear him this rough but still in control. But not a record that will convert anyone. [7]

Anita O'Day: Indestructible! (2004-05, Kayo Stereophonic -06) Well into her 80s, she doesn't swing as hard as she used to, and her voice is more gone than not, but she inspires a couple of near-faultless bands. Roswell Rudd rumbles on three tracks, including "Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer." Joe Wilder stands out on the other tracks. O'Day's post-prime recordings have always been a matter of taste and sentiment: you have to like her a lot to see past the decline, but that's easy to do. [7]

Roswell Rudd & Yomo Toro: El Espíritu Jíbaro (2002-06, Sunnyside -07) One of Rudd's world music match-ups, with Bobby Sanabria reinforcing Toro's Puerto Rican country beat, and Rudd just being the great trombonist he's always been. Better than his beatless Mali album; not as intriguing a mix as those Mongolian throat singers. [8]

Roswell Rudd Quartet: Keep Your Heart Right (2007, Sunnyside -08) New album of (mostly) old songs, the few the great trombonist managed to write lyrics for. They're set up for Sunny Kim, the first singer he's used since he rediscovered Sheila Jordan. Unfair for anyone to have to walk in Jordan's shoes, but I'm not sure I'd think much of Kim in any case. To her credit, she fares best on two songs Jordan sung on Flexible Flyer, ably negotiating the same tricky phrasing; elsewhere she ranges from competent to not. Piano and bass do little, and I still wonder what Rudd has against drums (or drummers). The trombone is glorious. [6]

Chuck Bernstein: Delta Berimbau Blues (2007-08, CMB) Minimalist gutbucket blues played on a Brazilian diddley bow, with Roswell Rudd for a choice cut. [8]

Roswell Rudd: Trombone Tribe (2008, Sunnyside -09) Several tribes, actually: the title group with three trombones and Bob Stewart on tuba; one called Bonerama with five plus a sousaphone; the Gangbe Brass Band of Benin; and Sex Mob, which qualifies when Rudd weighs in; also, scattered unnamed groups with everyone from Eddie Bert to Ray Anderson to Josh Roseman. And what do trombone tribes do? Duh, party! [9]

The Second Approach Trio With Roswell Rudd: The Light (2009, SoLyd) Passing through Moscow, the trombone great gets sucked into a maelstrom of flying scat and piano -- like he never left the '60s. [7]

Allen Lowe: Blues and the Empirical Truth (2009-11, Music & Arts 3CD) Probably better known for his books and compilations -- the 9-CD American Pop: An Audio History From Minstrel to Mojo and the 36-CD That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History plus their separately published books, with a new 36-CD blues series in the works -- than for his original music. I first discovered him when Francis Davis tabbed his first two self-released 1990-92 albums as Pick Hits in an earlier edition of Jazz Consumer Guide -- critical admiration that continues as Davis wrote liner notes for this release. Based in Maine, mostly cut with a local group occasionally spiced with outside star power -- Marc Ribot, Matthew Shipp, Roswell Rudd, Lewis Porter -- this digs deeper than I could have imagined into blues form, blues notes, and blues psyche, turning every aspect over and inside out. Lowe plays alto, C melody, and tenor sax, and guitar. While most of the guitar is played by Ray Suhy or Marc Ribot, Lowe especially stands out on "Williamsburg Blues" -- his guitar with Shipp's piano. Three discs means some sprawl, comparable I'd say to 69 Love Songs in that neither the theme nor the invention wears thin. (Well, maybe a bit in the middle disc.) [10]

Roswell Rudd: The Incredible Honk (2011, Sunnyside) An smorgasbord with Cuban, Cajun, Chinese, and Malian guests, topped by "Danny Boy" stripped down to a bare 'bone. [8]

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. [10]

Roswell Rudd & Heather Masse: August Love Song (2015, Red House -16) Masse is a singer from Maine, part of the folk group The Wailin' Jennys but also has a couple jazz albums. She wrote one-and-a-half songs here -- the half segues into "Old Devil Moon" -- and the trombonist wrote two songs, the rest from the standards repertoire. With Rolf Sturm on guitar and Mark Helias on bass, what I love is the trombone growl and rumble, but the others, not least the singer, do their part too. [9]

Bob Merrill: Cheerin' Up the Universe (2013, Accurate -15) Trumpet player, crooner, don't know if he's related to the famous songwriter of the same name (1921-98), but is clearly much younger and still living. Band includes John Medeski, Russ Gershon, Nicki Parrott, and George Schuller, and Harry Allen and Roswell Rudd drop in for a cut apiece. [7]

Roswell Rudd/Jamie Saft/Trevor Dunn/Balasz Pandi: Strength & Power (2015, Rare Noise -16) Free jazz quartet, everything joint-credited, presumably improvised on the spot. The trombonist has done things like this in the distant past, none recently, and never has he got the mix this right. Saft has emerged as an exceptional free jazz pianist, and the bassist and drummer know the game. [9]

Roswell Rudd/Fay Victor/Lafayette Harris/Ken Filiano: Embrace (2017, RareNoise) Trombone-piano-bass trio plus singer, one of the most distinctive ones working today if not always one of the easiest to listen to. In some ways this recalls Rudd's mid-1970s work with Sheila Jordan -- less swing, the pianist a bit more ornate. Victor is especially striking on songs that don't tempt her to scat or vocalese, like "Can't We Be Friends" and "House of the Rising Sun," but she's pretty impressive traipsing over Mingus and Monk. The trombone isn't exactly lovely, but so full of soul it can't be the work of anyone else. [9]

Daily Log

Chris Monsen mentioned that Roswell Rudd has died. I commented on Facebook:

I've often cited Roswell Rudd's "Flexible Flyer" as my all-time favorite jazz album (only real competition is "Mingus Ah Um" and Ellington's "Far East Suite"), and while Sheila Jordan is the star, Rudd's growl and sensibility, one that straddled trad and avant-garde, were critical. Nearly as good, and long out of print, is his "Numatik Swing Band." He actually has an extraordinary discography, ranging from "School Days" in 1962 and "New York Art Quartet" in 1964 through the genre's finest Herbie Nichols tributes through various excursions in "world music" up to two delightful but very different vocal albums in the last year-plus (Heather Masse, Fay Victor). An extraordinary career, yet he had a stretch in the middle where he had trouble making ends meet. As I recall, his comeback happened shortly after Francis Davis tracked him down in the Catskills and introduced him to Allen Lowe.

Music Week

Music: Current count 29021 [28995] rated (+26), 389 [388] unrated (+1).

Spent most of the week sorting out the Jazz Critics Poll ballots, but got slowed down the last few days. Every year we do a Hanukkah party: no religious significance, basically just an excuse to fry up some latkes for friends. Over the years I've added a few side dishes: I salt-cure a chunk of salmon, make some chopped liver, make my own applesauce (we still buy the sour cream). Last year I baked some rye bread to go with the chopped liver. This year I did honey rye rolls (from The Gefilte Manifesto), and whipped up a batch of their "everything bagel butter." I also had some sauerrubben (salted turnip) left over from a previous meal, and the citrus-carrot horseradish, so I made a terrine of gefilte fish (used dover sole) to go with that. I also fried up and pickled some frozen perch fillets I found in the freezer. The centerpiece were the potato pancakes: 3 lbs of russets, 3 onions, 3 eggs, fried in grapeseed oil in three skillets. I don't get to eat until the frying's done, by which time everyone else are pretty well sated.

For a light dessert, we had a bowl of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries with a wine-sugar syrup and a second bowl of vanilla cream. I recently bought a 12-cup food processor, which made quick work of the onions and potatoes, the chopped liver, and the other tasks I presented it with (although it wasn't great at mixing up or kneading the bread). Prep work was pretty relaxed. The frying caused problems, first tripping the smoke alarm, then the range hood shut down. Doesn't seem to be a permanent problem, but it's never been so fussy before.

I played golden oldies while cooking, hence the low rated count. Also lost more than a few hours to a carpentry project: a new pantry rack that'll attach to the basement door. Bought some more paint for that today. Should get it up in a couple of days.

One casualty of this work was no Weekend Roundup yesterday. You can, at least, check out Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest policy stories of the week, explained: A Democrat won a Senate election in Alabama; Republicans wrote their tax bill; Sexual harassment accusations kept roiling Congress; Net neutrality (i.e., the end of, so your ISP can start auctioning you off to the highest bidder). Given that a candidate as inept and disgusting as Roy Moore still managed to get 650,000 votes (48.4%), I doubt the good news about Alabama will last long. Everything else is more/less horrible. The takeaway is that Republicans don't care about doing vastly unpopular things as long as they advance their owners' agenda. Even if they blow up and cost them a couple elections, like 2006-08, they believe they can claw their way back to power. Yglesias' piece, a piece arguing Why Trump's tax cuts won't be repealed, reveals part of the reason: a profound lack of ambition from the Democrats.

Another thing I didn't have time for was working on the EOY Aggregate List. Picked up a couple lists, but nothing much changed. Much of what I did come up with was suggested by various jazz lists, but still lots of things not on Napster or Bandcamp. Finally wound up with Ron Miles' I Am a Man on YouTube, but that's hardly a fair medium for reviewing. Note three B+(***) records among the vault discoveries: Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Oscar Pettiford all did well in the Jazz Critics Poll, but one spin (especially for the 2CD items) wasn't enough to convince me. Indeed, I also had Call Super pegged at B+(***) before I chanced an extra spin this afternoon, and enjoyed it enough to nudge it over the line.

I was saddened, and given that he was only 61 years old, shocked to hear that Ralph Carney has died. He grew up in Ohio, played clarinet (saxophone, all sorts of other instruments) in the Akron-based new wave rock group Tin Huey -- kind of a big deal c. 1979, with Chris Butler going on to form the Waitresses -- and released a few albums from 1987 on. I'm especially fond of two of the jazzier ones: Carneyball Johnson (2006) and Ralph Carney's Serious Jass Project (2009); also fine, by the latter group, was Seriously (2011). I wrote him once for records, and he was uncommonly gracious and generous, leading me to his work on several fine "spoken word" albums: Ira Cohen's The Stauffenberg Cycle, Robert Creeley's Really!!, and David Greenberger's OH, PA. He was probably most widely known for his long association with Tom Waits, but he did much more than that.

Keely Smith (originally Dorothy Jacqueline Keely) also passed away last week. She got a job singing for bandleader Louis Prima in 1949, married him in 1953, divorced him in 1961. Prima did some good work as far back as 1934 and had some hits in the '40s, but their period together (along with saxophonist Sam Butera, aka "the wildest") made them stars, especially in Las Vegas. Especially notable is their 1958 Live From Las Vegas. She continued recording up to 1965, then made brief comebacks around 1985 and 2000. The only album I noticed came out in 2005, a thoroughly enjoyable recapitulation of her heyday called Vegas '58 -- Today.

New records rated this week:

• Fabian Almazan: Alcanza (2017, Biophilia): [r]: B-
• Denys Baptiste: The Late Trane (2017, Edition): [r]: B+(**)
• Ernaldo Bernocchi: Rosebud (2017, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Alan Broadbent With the London Metropolitan Orchestra: Developing Story (2017, Eden River): [r]: B+(*)
• Call Super: Arpo (2017, Houndstooth): [r]: A-
• Billy Childs: Rebirth (2017, Mack Avenue): [r]: B-
• Ben Goldberg School: Vol 1: The Humanities (2017, BAG): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark Guiliana Jazz Quartet: Jersey (2017, Motéma): [r]: B+(*)
• Keyon Harrold: The Mugician (2017, Legacy): [r]: B+(*)
• Jazzmeia Horn: A Social Call (2017, Prestige): [r]: B+(**)
• Sherman Irby & Momentum: Cerulean Canvas (2017, Black Warrior): [r]: B+(*)
• Irreversible Entanglements: Irreversible Entanglements (2015 [2017], International Anthem/Don Giovanni): [r]: A-
• Ingrid and Christine Jensen: Infinitude (2016, Whirlwind): [r]: B+(**)
• Liebman/Murley Quartet: Live at U of T (U of T Jazz): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nick Maclean Quartet: Rites of Ascension (2017, Browntasaurus): [cd]: B+(*)
• Makaya McCraven: Highly Rare (2016 [2017], International Anthem): [r]: B+(***)
• Zara McFarlane: Arise (2017, Brownswood): [r]: B+(*)
• Gary Meek: Originals (2017, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Uwe Oberg/Rudi Mahall/Michael Griener: Lacy Pool 2 (2017, Leo): [r]: B+(***)
• Emile Parisien/Vincent Peirani/Andreas Schaerer/Michael Wollny: Out of Land (2016 [2017], ACT): [r]: B
• Nicholas Payton: Afro-Caribbean Mixtape (2017, Paytone/Ropeadope): [r]: B+(*)
• Gary Peacock Trio: Tangents (2016 [2017], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Cécile McLorin Salvant: Dreams and Daggers (2017, Mack Avenue, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Jeremy Udden/John McNeil/Akyer Kobrinsky/Anthony Pinciotti: Hush Point III (2017, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(*)

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

• The Bill Evans Trio: On a Monday Evening (1976 [2017], Fantasy): [r]: B+(***)
• Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959, Sam, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Now That's What I Call Tailgate Anthems (1975-2016 [2017], Sony Music Entertainment): [r]: B+(*)
• Perseverance: The Music of Rick DeRosa at North Texas (2011-15 [2017], UNT): [cd]: B-
• Oscar Pettiford Nonet/Big Band/Sextet: New York City 1955-1958 (1955-58 [2017], Uptown, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• Uwe Oberg/Christof Thewes/Michael Griener: Lacy Pool (2006 [2009], Hatology): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Wali Ali: To Be (Mendicant)
• Vinny Golia Wind Quartet: Live at the Century City Playhouse: Los Angeles, 1979 (Dark Tree)

Music Week

Music: Current count 28995 [28950] rated (+45), 388 [390] unrated (-2).

First time I calculated the rated count I came up with 31, which looked way low. A closer look kicked it up to 37, and then I went back and rechecked everything in the rated list and found a bunch of records missing grades. I also recalled that I had played two Yaeji EPs, so fixed that. Final rated total winds up pretty close to the upper bounds of a good, solid week. Contributing were two things: one was that I was recuperating from the previous week's cooking madness, taking it easy with hardly any distractions; the other was that I used a good deal of my chill time aggregating EOY lists, which suggested a lot of records to check out. Can't say as they've generated a lot of finds thus far, although one list pointed me to the legendary Kenyan band, and their label's Bandcamp page led me to the Andina compilation. My tip for the '90s pop compilation came from Robert Christgau (at the time I couldn't find the other one he liked, Now That's What I Call Tailgate Anthems, but I've found it now, so next week).

I finally got the Jazz Critics Poll ballot data last night, so I'm swamped with work to do to check and format that data. Still not sure when NPR is going to run -- probably this week, quite possibly before I get my part done. Otherwise I'd write something about how the EOY list aggregate is shaping up, but I suppose you can see for yourself. As I initially suspected, Kendrick Lamar's Damn is well ahead, with the next four slots very close (83-78 by my count, compared to 114 for Lamar and 55 for 6th place Vince Staples: Lorde, LCD Soundsystem, SZA, and St. Vincent. I've compiled far fewer lists than I have in recent years, but I'll note that AOTY's 2017 Music Year End List Aggregate currently shows the same top six albums in the same order (although they have Lorde opening up a clear gap over a virtual tie between LCD Soundsystem and SZA). Their top ten rounds out with War on Drugs, Father John Misty, Sampha, and National, with Slowdive 11th. My top 11 has the same records, order slightly shuffled.

After that we disagree more, with Mount Eerie dropping from 12th on their list to 28th on mine; Tyler the Creator from 13th to 19th; the XX from 21st to 38th, Taylor Swift from 36th to 68th. There are fewer dramatic improvements on my list, although the early UK bias certainly helps Jane Weaver (from 40th to 16th). I'll know more, and be able to say more, next week. One thing I will note is that my list has picked up on so few jazz lists that it's completely useless for predicting the Jazz Critics Poll.

One final note: after reviewing it, I discovered that Octopus is actually scheduled for Jan. 28, 2018 release, so it doesn't appear in my 2017 Jazz List. I did find the FCT album after I cast my Jazz Critics Poll ballot, so as usual it took me just a few days to find an A- album I had missed.

New records rated this week:

• Bargou 08: Targ (2017, Glitterbeat): [r]: B+(**)
• Courtney Barnett/Kurt Vile: Lotta Sea Lice (2017, Matador): [r]: B+(*)
• Pan Daijing: Lack (2017, Pan): [r]: B-
• Kris Davis & Craig Taborn: Octopus (2016 [2018], Pyroclastic): [cd]: A-
• Angelo Divino: Love A to Z (2017, self-released): [cd]: B-
• Fabiano Do Nascimento: Tempo dos Mestres (2017, Now-Again): [r]: B+(**)
• FCT = Francesco Cusa Trio Meets Carlo Atti: From Sun Ra to Donald Trump (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: A-
• Nick Fraser: Is Life Long? (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• David Friesen: Structures (2017, Origin, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*)
• Aldous Harding: Party (2017, 4AD): [r]: B
• Ryan Keberle/Frank Woeste: Reverso: Suite Pavel (2017 [2018], Phonoart): [cd]: B+(**)
• King Krule: The OOZ (2017, True Panther Sounds): [r]: B
• LEF: Hypersomniac (2017, RareNoise): [cdr]: B-
• Joao Lencastre's Communion 3: Movements in Freedom (2017, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Van Morrison: Versatile (2017, Legacy): [r]: B+(*)
• New Order: NOMC15 (Pledge Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Gard Nilssen's Complete Unity: Live in Europe (2016 [2017], Clean Feed, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Orchestre Les Mangelepa: Last Band Standing (2017, Strut): [r]: A-
• Kelly Lee Owens: Kelly Lee Owens (2017, Smalltown Supersound): [r]: B
• Phil Parisot: Creekside (2017, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Princess Nokia: 1992 Deluxe (2017, Rough Trade): [r]: B
• Nadia Reid: Preservation (2017, Basin Rock): [r]: B+(*)
• Riddlore: Afro Mutations (2015 [2016], Nyege Nyege Tapes): [bc]: B+(**)
• Rina Sawayama: Rina (2017, The Vinyl Factory, EP): [r]: B-
• Sirius: Acoustic Main Suite Plus the Inner One (2017, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid (2017, Western Vinyl): [r]: B
• Chris Stapleton: From a Room: Volume 2 (2017, Mercury Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• John Stowell/Ulf Bandgren Quartet: Night Visitor (2016 [2017], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Taylor Swift: Reputation (2017, Big Machine): [r]: B+(**)
• Tune Recreation Committee: Voices of Our Vision (2017, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding (2017, Atlantic): [r]: B
• Jane Weaver: Modern Kosmology (2017, Fire): [r]: B+(*)
• Wolf Alice: Visions of a Life (2017, Dirty Hit): [r]: B+(*)
• Yaeji: Yaeji (2017, Godmode, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Yaeji: EP 2 (2017, Godmode, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Young/Terry Promane Octet: Vol. 2 (2017, Modica Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Neil Young + Promise of the Real: The Visitor (2017, Reprise): [r]: B
• Waclaw Zimpel/Jakub Ziolek: Zimpel/Ziolek (2017, Instant Classic): [r]: B+(**)

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

• Andina: The Sound of the Peruvian Andes 1968-1978 (1968-78 [2017], Tiger's Milk/Strut): [r]: A-
• Bro. Valentino: Stay Up Zimbabwe (1979-80 [2017], Analog Africa, EP): [bc]: B+(***)
• Oté Maloya: The Birth of Electric Maloya on Réunion Island 1975-1986 (1975-86 [2017], Strut): [bc]: B+(*)
• Now That's What I Call 90s Pop (1990s [2017], UMG/Sony): [r]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• Taylor Swift: 1989 (2014, Big Machine): [r]: B+(***)
• Waclaw Zimpel: Lines (2015 [2016], Instant Classic): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Bobby Kapp: Heptagon (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Jeff Cosgrove: Live in Baltimore (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Live in Brussels (Leo, 2CD)
• Ivo Perelman/Nate Wooley/Brandon Lopez/Gerald Cleaver: Octagon (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Nate Wooley: Philosopher's Stone (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Joe Hertenstein: Scalene (Leo)
• Takaaki: New Kid in Town (Troy)

Weekend Roundup

The Democrats in Congress, especially the leadership, have had a really bad week, and I fear they've inflicted grave wounds on themselves. John Conyers and Al Franken have resigned after enormous pressure from the party leadership, leaving the party with fewer votes, summarily ending two notable careers. I especially blame Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer. Back in 2016 Hillary Clinton like to posit a "Commander-in-Chief Test," figuring she'd compare favorably to Donald Trump by emphasizing her own fondness for military adventures -- I think her hawkishness was a big part of why she lost, but my point isn't to rehash her delusions. Rather, what we saw last week was a "Shop Steward" test, which Pelosi and Shumer utterly failed. They let a little media pressure blow them over. More importantly, they failed to insist on due process, on the most basic principles of traditional American justice, and in doing so they sacrificed political standing and insulted and demeaned the voters who had elected Conyers and Franken.

Supposedly, one thing the Democrats hope to achieve in sacking Conyers and Franken is "the moral high ground" -- demonstrating their superior sensitivity to and concern for victims of sexual misconduct (pretty broadly defined). In theory, this will pay off in defeating Roy Moore in next week's Alabama Senate race and/or in putting pressure on Donald Trump to resign. In fact, Trump was elected president after 19 women accused him of various shades of assault, and after he bragged about as much. While Moore is facing a closer election than Alabama Republicans are used to, he remains the favorite to win Tuesday. And while some Democrats imagine that if Moore wins the Senate will refuse to seat him, I can't imagine the Republicans sacrificing power like that. Nor, quite frankly, should they. (The only duly elected member I can recall either branch of Congress refusing to seat was Adam Clayton Powell, in a shameful travesty -- although, come to think of it, they did take months before allowing Al Franken to enter.)

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered in politics this week: The tax reform hit some snags ("Senate Republicans appear to have written a corporate AMT provision that they intended to raise a little bit of revenue in a sloppy way that actually raises a ton of revenue and alienates the businesses who were supposed to benefit from a big tax cut"); President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital; Al Franken announced he'll resign; The government will stay open for a couple of weeks. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • We have a trial date: March 19, "the beginning of the trial at which the Justice Department will seek to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner." There is no shortage of good reasons for blocking this merger, and indeed for untangling all of the past mergers between data transit and content companies, although it's surprising to see Trump's DOJ lifting a finger to prevent the further concentration of predatory corporate power.

  • Apple could get a staggering $47 billion windfall from the tax bill:

    What's particularly striking about this windfall is that though Apple has been a fierce advocate for corporate tax reform -- $47 billion is a lot of money after all -- Apple CEO Tim Cook has explained over and over again that shoveling billions into his corporate treasury won't boost his investment spending.

    He already has plenty of cash, but beyond that, when Cook wants Apple to invest more, he borrows the money.

  • Tomorrow's financial crisis today: Points out that less than ten years after the worst recession since the 1930s Trump's administration is working to undermine the Treasury's Office of Financial Research and "let banks take on more risky debt:

    The nature of a banking crisis is you probably won't have one in any given year, regardless of how shoddy your regulatory framework is. As long as asset prices are trending upward, it just doesn't matter. In fact, as long as asset prices are trending upward, a poorly regulated banking sector will be more profitable than a well-regulated one.

    It's all good. Unless things blow up. But if your bad policymaking takes us from a one-in-500 chance of a blow-up in any given year to a one-in-20 chance, you're still in a world where things will probably be fine across even an entire eight-year span in office. Probably.

    Trump has taken a lot of risky bets in his life. And though he's often lost, he's usually been insulated by his inherited wealth and by his very real skill at structuring deals so other people end up holding a lot of the downside. Any presidency inherently has that kind of structure with or without skill. Presidents suffer when they make mistakes, but other people suffer more.

    ?he key phrase here is "as long as asset prices are trending upward." The surest way to keep asset prices rising is to let rich people make and keep more money, which is what happened from the Bush tax cuts forward to 2007-08. What broke then turned out to be pretty simple: a big chunk of those assets were built on subprime mortgages, and the people who signed up for the mortgages weren't able to grow their incomes enough to cover their debts, so they defaulted; meanwhile, the banks had leveraged themselves so much they couldn't cover their losses, so they started to fail in a cascade that threatened to make the "domino theory" look like small potatoes. But the government, especially the Fed, stepped in and pumped several trillions of dollars into the banks to prop them up so they could unwind their losses more gracefully, while the government did very little to help the little people who suffered the brunt of the recession. (I was going to say "virtually nothing," but things like extended unemployment benefits did help keep the recession from matching the desolation caused by the Great Depression.) We're already seeing asset bubbles in things like the stock market. The whole point of Trump's tax cuts and deregulation is to feed this bubble, even though there is no clear way to sustain the trend or to appease the financier's appetite for ever greater profits. Coupled with a massive collapse of business ethics -- this has been growing since the "greed is good" Reagan era, but Trump is an even more shocking role model -- it's only a matter of time before the whole edifice collapses.

  • We need a healthier conversation about partisanship and sexual assault.

  • The tax bill is a tax cut, not a culture war: Pushes back against the idea that Republicans chose targets to "reform" by how much they would hurt "blue states" (the SALT deduction being the obvious example). Shows that the overriding reasoning behind the cuts/reforms is to favor the rich over the poor, regardless of where they may live or do business. Of course, the real cost to poor and working Americans won't appear in scoring the bill -- it will come later in the form of service cuts and the ever-widening chasm between "haves and have-nots."

  • Republicans need Roy Moore to pass their tax bill.

  • Groundbreaking empirical research shows where innovation really comes from.

  • Democrats need to get a grip about the budget deficit: "The tax bill is bad, the debt is fine." ARgues that "Bush's deficits were fine and Trump's will be too" and that "Obama's deficits were way too small."

  • Don't worry about the debt.

• Matthew Cole/Jeremy Scahill: Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter "Deep State" Enemies: Evidently one of Erik Prince's schemes, notably backed by Oliver North. One suspicious point is that the scheme would still report to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, figuring him more loyal to Trump than to the "Deep State" he nominally manages a big chunk of. Also see Aram Roston: Private War: Erik Prince Has H is Eye on Afghanistan's Rare Metals. Evidently the mercenary leader is trying to turn his private army into some sort of modern British East India Company colossus.

• Juliet Eilperin: Uranium firm urged Trump officials to shrink Bears Ears National Monument: Helps explain why Trump and Zinke radically shrunk the borders of the National Monument (see maps). The land still belongs to the federal government, but will now be managed by the Bureau of Land Management. For info on what that means, see Adam Federman: This Is How the Trump Administration Gives Big Oil the Keys to Public Lands.

• Tara Golsham: Rep. Trent Franks, who is resigning immediately, offered staffer $5 million to be his baby surrogate: One of the more bizarre stories of recent weeks: Arizona Republican, "a deeply conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the most pro-life members of Congress. Evidently he has that kind of money, and assumes it entitles him to run roughshod over others.

• Jim Kirby: Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69: An analysis of New York Times -- your newspaper or preferred media source may vary (with some never matching that 6-day email window), but for a supposedly sober and serious news source, that's pretty disgusting. One might argue that Hillary's email controversy speaks to her character, but no more so than hundreds or thousands of Donald Trump anecdotes. Even so, you'd think it sensible that news coverage of an election would focus more on likely policies and future scenarios than on past personal quirks. The only excuse I can think of is that today's campaigns are often as shallow as the media covering them -- or at least try to be.

• Rashid Khalidi: After Jerusalem, the US Can No Longer Pretend to Be an Honest Broker of Peace: Actually, that was clear even before Trump ordered the US embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Khalidi knows damn well -- he's even written a whole book about it: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. What I've yet to see anyone comment on is why the US didn't move the embassy earlier. The basic reason is respect for international law, which as this week's announcement shows has sunken to new lows in Washington. The 1947 UN resolution proposing partition of the British Mandate in Palestine -- a resolution that David Ben-Gurion lobbied fervently for -- called for dividing the Mandate into two states, but keeping Jerusalem separate as an international area. Immediately on declaring independence in 1948, Israel launched a military offensive aimed at expanding on the borders the UN prescribed. The main target of that offensive was Jerusalem, which wound up divided between Israeli and Jordanian forces. In 1967 Israel launched another war and drove Jordan from East Jerusalem and the West Bank -- territories that the UN ordered Israel to return, despite Israel's almost immediate annexation of Jerusalem and environs. Israel's de facto control of Jerusalem has never been squared away with the rulings of international law, so no country with respect for international law has conceded Israel's claim. "Until now," you might say, but the US has increasingly shown contempt for international law, and this is just one more example.

  By the way, a headline in the Wichita Eagle today: "After US decision on Jerusalem, Gaza protests turn deadly." First line of article explains how: "Two Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday after rocket fire from the enclave hit an Israeli town, as the death toll in violence linked to President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital rose to four." No damage was reported from the Gazan rockets. For info about the other two deaths, see: Peter Beaumont/Patrick Wintour: Two Palestinians shot dead and one critical in riots after Trump speech. Also: Raja Shehadeh: I have witnessed two intifadas. Trump's stance on Israel may ignite a third.

• Sarah Kliff: Obamacare sign-ups defy Trump's sabotage campaign.

• German Lopez: Roy Moore: America "was great at the time when families were united -- even though he had slavery." Anyone who thinks that the problem with Moore is his fondness for underaged girls clearly hasn't paid any attention to his politics or to his political legacy. More worrying is Moore's unwavering contempt for the law -- after all, Moore has been stripped of his position on the Alabama Supreme Court for failing to submit to federal law, specifically the First Amendment. When Donald Trump tries to tout Moore as the "law and order candidate" he does little more than expose his own flimsy and dicey relationship to the law. (Meanwhile, Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, has a distinguished record as a federal prosecutor, credentials that only someone as reality-challenged as Trump can readily dismiss.) I wish I could say that Moore's casual endorsement of slavery is even more shocking, but we've always known him to be a racist. After all, Alabama's given us George Wallace and Jeff Sessions, so how much worse can Moore be? Well, this statement is a pretty good example: "I think it [America] was great at the time when families were united -- even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction." The most obvious problem is that slavery was a system which denied family life and bonds, one that allowed slaveowners to prevent or break families by selling members. He could hardly be clearer that he doesn't regard blacks as people -- as Lopez notes, only one of many blind bigotries Moore espouses. Still, I detect another curious note in the quote: it's like he's trying to channel ideologues like George Fitzhugh who tried to defend slavery as anti-capitalist -- an alternative to the coarse materialism that Bible-thumpers like Moore so despise.

  More on Moore:

  • Jane Coaston: Inside the bubble: why Roy Moore has conservative media on his side.

  • Brian Resnick: Official Roy Moore campaign talking points "debunking" sex abuse allegations against him.

  • Campbell Robertson/Jonathan Martin: Alabama, Despite History of Unruly Politics, Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'.

  • Kenneth P Vogel: James O'Keefe, Practitioner of the Sting, Has an Ally in Trump: O'Keefe, who runs a Mercer-backed dirty tricks operation that recently tried to muddy the waters by staging a false accusation against Roy Moore. Thankfully, this one was exposed before it did any harm, but the more gullible Democrats and the liberal media are, the more "disrupters" like O'Keefe will take advantage of them.

• Andrew Prokop: Michael Flynn's involvement in a plan to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East is looking even shadier: More "Russia" scandal this past week, but one should recall that Russian schemes under Putin have nothing to do with fomenting world revolution or curtailing US imperial ambitions: they're founded on pure oligarchic greed, which isn't at all unlike the Trump approach to business. E.g., this piece summarizes a "whistleblower" report about a deal Flynn was working on:

  According to the whistleblower, [Alex] Copson flat-out said the following things:

  • That he "just got" a text message from Flynn saying the nuclear plant project was "good to go," and that his business colleagues should "put things in place"
  • That Flynn was making sure sanctions on Russia would be "ripped up," which would let the project go forward
  • That this was the "best day" of his life, and that the project would "make a lot of very wealthy people"
  • That the project would also provide a pretext for expanding a US military presence in the Middle East (the pretext of defending the nuclear plants)
  • That citizens of Middle Eastern countries would be better off "when we recolonize the Middle East"

• David Roberts: A moment of truth arrives for Rick Perry's widely hated coal bailout: Long article, really should be a much bigger scandal than anything having to do with "sexual misconduct" -- with billions of dollars of benefits going to five coal companies, paid for by rate hikes from millions of consumers, and championed by a moron like Rick Perry, it wouldn't even take much of a stretch from the media to blow this up, but evidently they're too lazy to care.

• Aja Romano: MSNBC won't cut ties to Sam Seder after all: succumbing to alt-right outrage was a "mistake": Another cautionary tale, showing you can't trust anything reported on right-wing media, and that the kneejerk "zero tolerance" reactions of "liberal" media combines are set up perfectly to be scammed. More: Ryan Grim: MSNBC Reverses Decision to Fire Contributor Sam Seder.

• Mark Joseph Stern: The Trump Administration Just Declared War on Public Sector Unions.

• Corey Williams/David Eggert: Conyers' Congressional Seat Won't Be Filled for Nearly a Year: So, Nancy Pelosi browbeat Conyers into resigning his seat, certain that a Democrat would replace him -- the current gerrymander of Michigan concedes that -- but evidently the Republican governor of Michigan can simply hold the seat open for a whole year?

Music Week

Music: Current count 28950 [28931] rated (+19), 390 [391] unrated (-1).

I spent most of last week planning, shopping, prepping, and cooking a massive dinner for the Wichita Peace Center's 25th Annual Dinner, with major (indispensable) help from Janice Bradley, Max Stewart, and Russ Pataki, with a few others pitching in on dinner days, notably including people I didn't know who hung around to help clean up. I fixed a range of Indian dishes: lamb and potatoes in a cream sauce (rogani gosht), tandoori chicken in a tomato-butter sauce (makhni), fish tikka, patiala pilaf (minus the fried onions), a sweet potato/chickpea curry, mattar paneer (peas with cheese), bharta (smoked eggplant), cabbage, kali dal, cucumber raita. We served appetizers at the tables, including a minted aloo chat (potato salad), coconut relish, pineapple sambal, a hot tomato chutney, paratha (flatbread), tapioca chips, a couple of store-bought chutneys (brinjal, lime pickle). Had spice cake and a Moroccan fruit salad for dessert. Best compliment I had was when one friend came up to me and cooed in my ear, "the food is divine." I had my quibbles with the fish and rice -- partly frustration as they were the last things done and both ran into unexpected problems.

Mark McCormick was the featured speaker (buy his new book here). He gave a nice speech, and was even better fielding questions, stressing how we've become disconnected and desensitized to the problems around us. Partial proof of that was evident in the disappointing turnout: a little over 40 people this year, compared to 60 last year. (Not getting an accurate RSVP count until too late, I prepared food for 60, so we had a lot left over.) I was pretty much a wreck by the time it was done. Doubt I'll be able to do it again, but afterwards Max was trying to figure out ways to spread the work out -- I've never been very good at delegating -- and I was wondering whether paella might scale up better. Don't need to decide for nearly a year.

I published the November roll-up of Streamnotes last week. on Tuesday. With everything else going on, I didn't expect I'd be able to find anything new to add to what I had noted last Music Week. But I found four of this week's five A- records in the day between Music Week and Streamnotes: the David S. Ware archival set (from 2010, so still new enough) wasn't unexpected, and the two Chicago tenor saxophonists (Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams, dba Made to Break and Boneshaker, respectively) were right up my alley. But Re-TROS, a tip from Chris Monsen's 2017-in-progress list, was totally unexpected: a Chinese alt-rock group, at times (but not all the time) sounding like a cross between Pulnoc and Konono No. 1 (on Bandcamp, by the way).

December 3 was the deadline for ballots for Francis Davis' Jazz Critics Poll. I resorted my top jazz picks and submitted the following:

New records:

1. William Parker Quartets: Meditation/Resurrection (AUM Fidelity, 2CD)
2. Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo: Peace (Libra)
3. Gonçalo Almeida/Rodrigo Amado/Marco Franco: The Attic (NoBusiness)
4. Aki Takase/David Murray: Cherry Shakura (Intakt)
5. Rich Halley/Carson Halley: The Wild (Pine Eagle)
6. Rocco John: Peace and Love (Unseen Rain)
7. Buffalo Jazz Octet: Live at Pausa Art House (Cadence Jazz)
8. François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: Freedom Is Space for the Spirit (FMR)
9. Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Loafer's Hollow (Hot Cup)
10. Barry Altschul's 3Dom Factor: Live in Krakow (Not Two)

Reissues or historical:

1. American Epic: The Collection (1916-36, Third Man/Columbia/Legacy, 5CD)
2. Paul Rutherford/Sabu Toyozumi: The Conscience (1999, NoBusiness)
3. The Three Sounds: Groovin' Hard: Live at the Penthouse 1964-1968 (Resonance)

Vocal album: Roswell Rudd/Fay Victor/Lafayette Harris/Ken Filiano: Embrace (RareNoise)

Debut album: Buffalo Jazz Octet: Live at Pausa Art House (Cadence Jazz) -- I allowed that if groups aren't eligible (leader Michael McNeill has several albums under his own name) the best individual pick is probably Kate Gentile: Mannequins (Skirl).

Latin Jazz album: Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet: Diablo en Brooklyn (Saponegro) -- I noted that Miguel Zenón: Típico (Miel Music) was actually higher on my list, but I thought Alegria's album was more Latin Jazzy.

My ranking is highly proximate. Parker is the only download, and I probably haven't played it enough, but the two contrasting quartets reminds me of Ornette Coleman's marvelous In All Languages, where he split a double-LP among two groups (more distinctive ones than Parker's). Each half is potentially great, but I still haven't moved it above the A- bin. I replayed maybe half of the top ten last week, but there's still not a lot of distance from top to bottom, or even throughout the A-list.

I was going to make a comment based on something Robert Christgau said in a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview, but I can't look up the quote due to an "ad blocker" snit fit I don't feel like indulging. As best I recall, he said something about most critics viewing EOY lists as personal branding exercises. My list can be viewed that way. To the extent that I have a brand, or a public persona, it's that of someone who listens far and wide, doesn't follow fashion, and doesn't want to get pigeonholed. On the other hand, this year's list is more avant than usual, and leans toward people I've repeatedly favored in the past -- something I've noticed a lot this past year (while suspecting as some kind of a rut, but not caring enough to break out of).

My Best Non-Jazz of 2017 list is even more problematical, not least because I've cared for it less. I haven't, for instance, played 2nd-ranked Run the Jewels or 3rd-ranked Sylvan Esso since I initially graded them, so early in the year that they were necessarily slotted high on the list. I don't have a Pazz & Jop invitation yet. When I do, I expect I'll do a lot of shuffling, if only to "fit my brand" as it's becoming increasingly impossible to believe that I'm sorting out anything objective.

But if I had to draw a single conclusion out of these lists, it's that nothing this year matters nearly as much to me as the records I've regularly put on top-ten lists in past years -- especially a decade or more back; e.g., in 2007:

1. Manu Chao: La Radiolina (Nacional/Because)
2. John Fogerty: Revival (Fantasy)
3. Powerhouse Sound: Oslo/Chicago Breaks (Atavistic, 2CD)
4. Gogol Bordello: Super Taranta! (Side One Dummy)
5. Jewels and Binoculars: Ships With Tattooed Sails (Upshot)
6. David Murray Black Saint Quartet: Sacred Ground (Justin Time)
7. Mavis Staples: We'll Never Turn Back (Anti-)
8. Youssou N'Dour: Rokku Mi Rokka (Nonesuch)
9. Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Shamokin!!! (Hot Cup)
10. ROVA: The Juke Box Suite (Not Two)

Or 1997, when the sample size was only 155 records:

1. Cornershop: When I Was Born for the Seventh Time (Warner Bros.)
2. Doc Cheatham and Nicholas Payton (Verve)
3. David Murray: Long Goodbye: A Tribute to Don Pullen (DIW)
4. Ani DiFranco: Living in Clip (Righteous Babe, 2CD)
5. Ray Anderson/Mark Helias/Gerry Hemingway: BassDrumBone (Hence the Reason) (Enja)
6. Bob Dylan: Time Out of Mind (Columbia)
7. Hamiet Bluiett: Makin' Whoopee: Tribute to the Nat King Cole Trio (Mapleshade)
8. Latryx: The Album (SoleSides)
9. Nils Petter Molvaer: Khmer (ECM, 2CD)
10. Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (Matador)

I don't have earlier lists I can readily tap into, but 1987 and 1977 would be even more memorable to me -- especially the latter, as it came right after I moved to New York City, during my first stretch writing rock crit for the Village Voice, a time when I really cared about my favorite records, and managed to put a lot of time into them. That doesn't happen any more, and while I suspect the variable is me, I can't totally eliminate the music. I mean, doesn't postmodernism start with ironic detachment? Then why shouldn't it end simply with indifference?

I'm not saying that music in 2017 sucks. This year is more/less as good as last year and the year before and so on -- the only long term trends worth noting are that there's more to listen to every year and less time to devote to it. But what is indubitable is that the world in 2017 sucks, so it's getting harder for music to overcome all that drudgery. And, sure, that's probably worse for someone my age, because pretty much everything gets worse as you get old.

By the way, I have started to aggregate EOY lists, using the same formats and methodology as last year. Thus far I have something like four early lists (Mojo and three British record shops, so all UK) plus three individual JJA top-tens, plus I'm counting my grades as I go along, so take this with several distinct grains of salt. The only thing I'm fairly sure of thus far is that LCD Soundsystem's American Dream is the only record with a decent chance of challenging the obvious favorite, Kendrick Lamar's Damn. Moreover, the three jazz lists I've thus far tallied don't offer a single clue how the Jazz Critics Poll is going to sort out (not a single record appears on more than one ballot so far (nor on mine). If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that Vijay Iyer's Far From Over wins, but it doesn't have a vote so far.

New records rated this week:

• Espen Aalberg/Jonas Kullhammar/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Susana Santos Silva: Basement Sessions Vol. 4 (The Bali Tapes) (2016 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Boneshaker: Thinking Out Loud (2017, Trost): [bc]: A-
• Eva Cortés: Crossing Borders (2016 [2017], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Satoko Fujii Orchestra New York: Fukushima (2016 [2017], Libra): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Giallorenzo Trio: Flow (2017, Delmark): [cd]: B+(**)
• Made to Break: Trebuchet (2017, Trost): [bc]: A-
• Joe McPhee/Pascal Niggenkemper/Ståle Liavik Solberg: Imaginary Numbers (2015 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Kjetil Møster/Jeff Parker/Joshua Abrams/John Herndon: Ran Do (2015 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Jeb Loy Nichols: Country Hustle (2017, Inkind): [r]: B-
• Penguin Cafe: The Imperfect Sea (2017, Erased Tapes): [r]: B+(**)
• Margo Price: All American Made (2017, Third Man): [r]: B+(**)
• Ada Rave Trio: The Sea, the Storm and the Full Moon (2015 [2017], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Re-TROS: Before the Applause (2017, Modern Sky Entertainment): [r]: A-
• Schnellertollermeier: Rights (2016 [2017], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(*)
• Brandon Seabrook: Die Trommel Fatale (2016 [2017], New Atlantis): [bc]: B+(**)
• David S. Ware Trio: Live in New York, 2010 (2010 [2017], AUM Fidelity, 2CD): [dl]: A-

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

• Hamad Kalkaba: Hamad Kalkaba and the Golden Sounds 1974-1975 (1974-75 [2017], Analog Africa): [bc]: A-
• Los Cameroes: Resurrection Los Vol. 1 (1976 [2017], Analog Africa): [bc]: B+(**)
• Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat of Cameroon 1976-1984 (1976-84 [2017], Analog Africa): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• Mars Williams/Paal Nilssen-Love/Kent Kessler: Bonecrusher (2012, Trost): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Liebman/Murley Quartet: Live at U of T (U of T Jazz): December 15
• New York Electric Piano: State of the Art (Fervor)

Weekend Roundup

I spent literally most of last week trying to cook for 60 at the Wichita Peace Center Annual Dinner on Friday, and I've been sore and tired ever since. Thought compiling this post might feel like a return to normalcy, but nothing's normal any more.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories of the week, explained: Senate Republicans are on track to pass their tax cut (as, indeed, they did); We found our about more sexual harassers (especially Matt Lauer); After Rexit (Rex Tillerson, rumored gone but hanging on); North Korea launched a long-range ICBM (one that could theoretically hit anywhere in the continental United States). Other Yglesias posts:

  • Republicans may regret this tax bill: This seems intuitively right. The biggest political issue in America today is increasing inequality and its various effects, including the binding of political power and personal security to private wealth. Moreover, this is an issue with a strict partisan divide: Republicans are doing everything they can to concentrate wealth and power in the donor class, and Democrats are more or less opposed to this and more or less in favor of a more equitable society (at least like the ones of the New Deal/Great Society era, but with less racism). To the extent people understand the tax bill, it is wildly unpopular, so it's something Democrats can and will run on. It also goes a long ways toward absolving the Democrats' own culpability for increasing inequality: that the Republicans would, strictly through a party-line vote, do something this brazen when inequality is already so severe (and so unpopular) -- and Trump's deregulation program and blatant surrender of the people's government to business interests -- should expose them for all to see. Yglesias cites Josh Barro: The Republican tax plan creates big long-term opportunities for Democrats. By the way, one thing Barro argues that I don't for a moment believe is: "a corporate tax cut should tend to cause wages to rise a little bit, because a lower corporate tax rate makes the US a more attractive location to employ people."

  • We're all in Kansas now: A reference to Gov. Sam Brownback's notorious tax cuts, the enormous fiscal damage they caused, the slower degradation of infrastructure and services, and their near-zero boost to the economy (possibly sub-zero compared to nationwide economic growth during the same period). The only real difference between what Brownback passed and what the Senate just passed is that the US government is able to float much more debt, and thereby soften the degradation. By the way, Brownback, anticipating confirmation as Trump's Ambassador at Large for Religious Liberty, recently gave a "farewell address," not to the public but to the Wichita Pachyderm Club, where the only advice he could offer to his successor is pray.

  • Trump's Treasury Department is lying about its own analysis of the tax bill

  • The tax bill's original sin: The idea that the corporate tax rate must be reduced from 35% all the way to 20%, a much steeper cut than anyone was even agitating for a few years ago (e.g., the Business Roundtable was proposing 25% as recently as 2015). One thing I don't understand is why no one is pushing a progressive tax on business profits: maybe 10% for the first $1M, 15% for $1-10M, 20% for $10-50M, 25% for $50-250M, 30% for $250M-$1B, 35% for $1-5B, 40% above $5B. Probably those rates should be a bit higher, and various loopholes should be filled -- I'd like to see the overall reform on corporate tax rates produce more (not less) revenue. But something like this would benefit most companies while only penalizing companies that use their sheer size and/or monopoly positions to reap huge profits. And slowing them down would be good for everyone.

  • Matt Lauer totally blew it on Trump's blatant lying about Iraq and Libya

  • The rules of "how Congress works" have changed: Points out that the Senate tax bill faced concerted opposition from many special interest lobby groups ("the National Association of Realtors, the National Association of Homebuilders, the AARP, police unions, hospital associations and the AMA, and the higher education lobby"), as well as polling poorly among the public, yet Republicans stuck to their partisan ideology and passed it anyway. That's not how interest group politics has generally worked in Washington. Yglesias doesn't say this, but it more generally fits the model of class warfare. He does note that the Democrats could have crafted a more viable ACA had they not catered to special interest groups, in the vain hope that selling out to lobbyists would rally Republican support for a bipartisan bill.

    Had Democrats gone down a different path and pushed a bill with a strong public option with payment rates linked to Medicare, we would have seen a very different health policy trajectory over the past few years.

    Premiums would have been lower, which would have meant federal subsidy outlays would have been lower, which would have made it affordable for Congress to make the subsidies more generous. Enrollment in ACA exchanges would have been higher; there would have been no issue with "bare counties"; and, because of lower premiums, the "just pay the fine" option would have been less attractive, leading to more stable risk pools.

  • A deficit trigger can't fix the GOP tax plan

  • Crisis at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Also on this, see Matt Taibbi: Trump's Consumer Victory Officially Makes a Joke of Financial Reform.

  • New dynamic score shows the Senate tax bill raises debt by more than advertised

  • The theory behind Trump's tax cuts is exactly what gave us the failed Bush economy: "An influx of foreign hot money isn't what we need." A lot of meat here, but one could dig deeper. Foreign money will drive up asset prices, which will be a windfall for business owners, but once they sell out those businesses will no longer be rooted in the owners' communities. Foreign ownership of American companies has been a mixed blessing: some have gone easier on depressing labor costs, but most wind up operating as American companies do -- as, indeed, whatever they can get away with here -- and they're ultimately as likely to export or automate jobs away as any other capitalists. As Yglesias notes, much of the influx will eventually be converted into bidding up real estate prices (he calls this "housing boom 2.0" but I'm more skeptical that the subprime boom is repeatable, and unless average Americans start making more money -- inconceivable under Republican rule -- we're all stuck in the subprime market). His other point is that the expected influx will strengthen the dollar, hurting exports and manufacturing jobs, so while the rich get richer, the workers get stiffed.

  • If the GOP tax plan is so good, why do they lie so much about it? Partly, I suspect, it's just force of habit, but they really don't have anything potentially popular to offer -- they're just scamming for the donor class, and they'll make the suckers pay for it.

• New York Times Editorial Board: A Historic Tax Heist:

  With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders' primary goal is to enrich the country's elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

  The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

  Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

  Other links on the tax bill:

  • Steven Greenhouse: America is in crisis. The Republican tax plan will make that worse.

  • Ezra Klein: "The hypocrisy is astounding": this tax bill shows the GOP's debt concerns were pure fraud: Didn't we already know that from the Bush years (Cheney: "deficits don't matter")? Or for that matter from the Reagan tax cuts, when US debt exploded faster than any time since WWII? Wasn't it clear that when McConnell railed about the debt and tried to cut spending programs that would help rebuild the economy that his real motive was to "make Obama a one-term president"? Klein isn't satisfied to call this hypocrisy; he chalks it up to nihilism, also noting:

    The nihilism extends to process too. Republicans complained bitterly during the Obama administration that Democrats weren't holding enough hearings, that they weren't leaving sufficient time to read final bill text, that they were passing important legislation on party-line votes, that they were using the budget reconciliation process improperly. Now they are passing sweeping tax reform through the budget reconciliation process with no hearings, no effort at bipartisan compromise, and bill text that was not made public until hours before the final vote. In a darkly comic twist, changes were handwritten into the legislation in the final hours:

  • Sarah Kliff: The tax bill is the start of Obamacare collapse: It repeals the "individual mandate," which requires individuals to buy some form of acceptably adequate health insurance or face a tax penalty. The mandate helps to make risk pools more equitably representative of the general population, but it also reduce the uninsured population, some of which wind up being treated at the expense of everyone else. Without the mandate, insurance policy rates will rise to cover the increased risk of adverse selection, and hospital charges will rise to cover emergency treatment of the uninsured (some 41 million people by current estimates).

  • Robert S McElvaine: I'm a Depression historian. The GOP tax bill is straight out of 1929.

  • Ella Nilsen: "Lots of outrageous things in the bill aren't getting the kind of attention they ought to"

  • Dylan Scott/Alvin Chang: The Republican tax bill will exacerbate income inequality in America: Of course, you know this, but here are more charts. Most striking, perhaps because least commonly understood, are the figures for "pass-through income" -- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI, or do I mean Koch?) withheld his vote until the bill cut this even more. The chart that shows how 69% of all "pass-through income" goes to the top 1% explains why. The main thing that's missing here is the effect of ending the estate tax on the concentration of wealth into an aristocracy of heirs. One can also note that the political right has largely been funded not by entrepreneurs but by heirs -- Richard Mellon Scaife is a prime example, although you can also count the Kochs and Trump.

  • Emily Stewart: GOP Senator says it's hard to fund $14 billion children's health care program -- then advocates for $1 trillion tax cut: after which it will be even harder, no doubt. Republicans can always think of excuses for not doing what they don't want to do; even more so, they can always come up with idiotic rationales to do what they always want to do, which is mostly to make rich people even richer.

  • Matt Taibbi: New Tax Plan Contains Even More Bad News for Student Borrowers.

• Gordon G Chang: Is Donald Trump Getting Ready to Attack North Korea? One theory floated here is that the US could disable North Korea by bombing the pipeline that delivers oil from China and/or their one oil refinery. Or, better still, the US could intimidate China into shutting down the pipeline. I don't see how North Korea's leadership does not take the former as an opening salvo in a war, one that forces them to retaliate. As for China, they probably understand that keeping their oil lifeline open is necessary to keeping the peace. And there are real limits to how much the US can push China around without hurting American investments in China (or much worse). At some point Trump's people need to decide whether North Korea having a deterrent against an American attack that no one in the US military wants to launch is really such a big problem. At present it mostly seems to be an affront to the egos of those who still believe the neocon sole-superpower promise of world domination. Sadly, most of the writers in this "War in Asia?" issue of The National Interest seem to buy into such delusions.

• Thomas B Edsall: The Self-Destruction of American Democracy: After raising the question of whether Putin backed Trump out of pure malice for the American people, and quoting Henry Aaron (Brookings senior fellow, presumably not the Hall of Famer) that "Trump is a political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy -- for its norms, for its morality, for sheer human decency," he has to admit that "we Americans created this mess." Then he starts worrying about America's declining influence and esteem in the world, offering a chart showing only two (of 37) other countries with higher approval numbers for Trump than for Obama: Israel (up to 56 from 49) and Russia (way up to 53 from 11). I think the biggest drop was in Sweden (93 to 10), followed by Germany (86 to 11), Netherlands (92 to 17, South Korea (88 to 17), and France (84 to 14). Britain and Canada dropped down to 23, from 79 and 83 respectively. Still, loss of approval hasn't yet done much damage to the empire (although Egypt's decision to allow Russian air bases is perhaps a harbinger). But this is more to the point:

  Add to Trump's list of lies his race baiting, his attacks on a free press, his charges of "fake news," his efforts to instigate new levels of voter suppression, his undermining of the legitimacy of the electoral process, his disregard for the independence of the judiciary, the hypocrisy of his personal posture on sexual harassment, the patent lack of concern for delivering results to voters who supported him, his contempt for and manipulation of his own loyalists, his "failure of character" -- and you have a lethal corruption of democratic leadership. . . .

  At the moment, Trump's co-partisans, House and Senate Republicans, have shown little willingness to confront him. The longer Trump stays in office, the greater the danger that he will inflict permanent damage on the institutions that must be essential tools in any serious attempt to confront him.

  Edsall's error is that he doesn't recognize that those Congressional Republicans are every bit as contemptuous of democracy as Trump. Indeed, he gives Trump too much credit, and Charles Koch and Paul Ryan not nearly enough.

• Jill Filipovic: The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election: I'm not so sure about the headline, but is there something more than coincidence going on here?

  Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official "commander-in-chief forum" for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer's with Mrs. Clinton -- talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton's 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.

  A pervasive theme of all of these men's coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn't that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status. . . .

  It's hard to look at these men's coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That's exactly how some commentary and news coverage treated Mrs. Clinton.

  Of course, it's possible that an individual's hostility to Hillary has more to do with her being a Clinton than a woman. There's no doubt that many in the media treated her unfairly. Still, I'm more struck by how gingerly they treated dozens of more damning scandals, especially Trump's own sexual abuse history. Filipovic also wrote: Matt Lauer is gone. He's left heartbreak in his wake.

• Susan Hennessey et al: The Flynn Plea: A Quick and Dirty Analysis. One recalls that from early on Flynn was offering testimony for immunity. One thing the guilty plea suggests is he does indeed have something to further Mueller's investigation as it closes in on Trump's inner circle. Also note that while investigations into foreign interference in American elections has always focused on Russia, the incident Flynn pleaded guilty to involved lobbying Russia for Israel: see Philip Weiss: Flynn's plea on Russia influence reveals . . . Israel's influence!; also Richard Silverstein: Flynn Pleads Guilty to Lying About Trump Sabotage of Security Council Resolution Against Israeli Settlements. Trump's reaction, of course, was to turn up the crazy: Dana Milbank: Get ready for Trump's fireworks:

  I tried to ignore the Trump shenanigans this week, instead writing about the drug industry executive Trump tapped to oversee drug pricing and about the administration lawyer who orchestrated Trump's takeover of the CFPB after serving as lawyer for a payday lender cited by the CFPB for abuses. But such pieces generate only a fraction of the clicks of pieces I and others write about Trump's pyrotechnics.

  Those pyrotechnics are going to increase now that Mueller has turned Flynn. Trump's distractions will be impossible to ignore. But we -- lawmakers, the media and the public -- need to keep our focus on the real damage Trump is doing.

• Shira A Scheindlin: Trump's new team of judges will radically change American society:

• Paul Woodward: Have we been lied to about the Kate Steinle case? Steinle was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, Garcia Zarate, who was acquitted of murder charges last week. Zarate had been deported five times, which "made him a very effective villain for Trump's border security campaign messages." The shooting was clearly an accident, and it's pretty unlikely the case would ever have been prosecuted had Zarate been a card-carrying NRA member. But Trump (aka "the xenophobic, racist, bigot, defiling the Oval Office") went ballistic over the verdict.

Nov 2017