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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (finished).

Tweet: Music Week: 26 albums, 0 A-list

Music: Current count 42729 [42703] rated (+26), 36 [23] unrated (+13).

My Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll threw me off the usual Sunday/Monday post schedule, although the sheer quantity of news I reaped for yesterday's Speaking of Which would have been excuse enough (249 links, 11258 words before today's additions).

ArtsFuse published my intro/overview essay, Diversity Brings Riches: A Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, on Friday, at which time I enabled the totals and ballots on my archival website:

There was a glitch early on where the points totals in the tables on ArtsFuse got mangled, so had to be fixed. I've received some feedback on the poll, but not very much. I sent a notice out to my "jazzpoll" mailing list, but as best I can figure, only about half of those messages get past the spam traps (gmail seems to be exceptionally harsh). I put out two announcements on X, but the first (link to essay) only has 164 views (1 retweet, 3 likes), and the second (link to updated Music Week) got 222 views (2 retweets, 5 likes). I also did two notices on Facebook, like this one, with 1 share and 5 likes.

A Google search reveals:

Also, a couple critics published their ballots (which are all available through the link above). Chris Monsen wrote up his extended mid-year list. I also suspect that I provoked All About Jazz into polling their writers for this all-star break edition list. (As I understand it, their call went out a week after my invites, but they were first to press.)

I've scarcely touched my metacritic file, but should get back to it if/when demands on my time lighten up. Its main value is as a prospecting tool, which I haven't much needed while I had so many jazz albums to search out. I'm pretty sure I'll return to it when the year-end lists start coming in, but between now and then it's likely to only be an occasional hobby. I'm also not sure I'll continue updating my Best Jazz Albums of 2024 file, although it's pretty comprehensive for now. An even more vexing question is whether I'll make a serious effort at the download links I've been accumulating. More pressing is that I've fallen behind the queue of promo CDs (although much of that mail I just opened today).

I did manage to wrap up the July Streamnotes file, and to open a new one for August. Rated count is light this week, as I've had several days where I didn't want to multitask while writing, or didn't feel up to it. I also found myself tiring of looking for unheard albums that got poll votes, especially as many proved inaccessible. Still 189 left in the tracking file, so maybe I just need a break. It's tempting to just take August off. I have a lot of stuff to do around the house. Also a couple of web projects that need attention. I need to rethink my writing ambitions. There are also some health questions.


I've just finished reading Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. It's a pretty good general history of Israel since the 1940s, with its long drift from left to right, fought mostly on the level of myth, where the intertwined alliance brings out the worst in both. That focus often ignores real political issues -- like the American preoccupation with the Cold War and the postcolonial order of petrostates, and how Israel could somehow deny Arabs (especially Palestinians) any real agency in their fate. They are always treated as an irreconcilable other, to be fought and subdued, and there is nothing they can do about it, so they cycle endlessly between violence and conciliation, only to find that neither stance makes any difference. This fixed gaze saves Kaplan from having to give them any consideration.

The section on Lebanon is pivotal, as Israel shifted direction from justifiable defense to unconscionable offense. Of course, we now know that the latter was always part of the game plan, which is part of the reason we forget how brutal the shift appeared at the time. There is a passage here describing the devastation of West Beirut that will make you think of Gaza today. By that point the right-wing had taken charge in Israel, with Begin as PM, and Sharon running the war. And as the left in America (and to some ultimately fruitless extent in Israel as well) started to have misgivings, the American right embraced the Israeli right ever more firmly. The book's coverage of Christian Zionism is the most detailed I've read, and is truly scary -- in large part because it's really hard to grasp that people can actually believe such nonsense. The book then moves on to neocon militarism, and to the war on terror (with Israel as its guiding light, and "start up" profiteer).

Along the way, the focus on myth offers in-depth discussions of such cultural artifacts as the books/movies from Exodus to Schindler's List to The Late Great Planet Earth to Homeland to World War Z.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Daymé Arocena: Alkemi (2024, Brownswood): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Carlos Bica: 11:11 (2024, Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene (2024, Belting Bronco/Warner): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Chick Corea & Béla Fleck: Remembrance (2024, Thirty Tigers): [sp]: B
  • Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project (2023 [2024], Musæum Clausum): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Divr: Is This Water (2022 [2024], We Jazz): [sp]: B+(*)
  • FUR [Hélène Duret/Benjamin Sauzereau/Maxime Rouayroux]: Bond (2023 [2024], Budapest Music Center): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Marshall Gilkes and WDR Big Band: Life Songs (2022 [2024], Alternate Side): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Ciara Grace: Write It Down (2024, self-released): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Gringo Pistoleros: The Rise and . . . Subsequent Fall of the Texas Alien (2024, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Christopher Hoffman: Vision Is the Identity (2024, Out of Your Head): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Johnny Blue Skies [Sturgill Simpson]: Passage Du Desir (2024, High Top Mountain): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Norah Jones: Visions (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Pat Metheny: MoonDial (2024, BMG): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra: Hereafter (2020 [2024], Sofa Music): [sp]: B+(*)
  • O.: WeirdOs (2024, Speedy Wunderground): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Revival Season: Golden Age of Self Snitching (2024, Heavenly): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Splitter Orchester: Splitter Musik (2024, Hyperdelia, 3CD): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Stemeseder Lillinger Quartet: Umbra II (2023 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kevin Sun: The Fate of the Tenor (2022 [2024], Endectomorph Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kenny Warren: Sweet World (2023 [2024], Out of Your Head): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Stian Westerhus & Maja S.K. Ratkje: All Losses Are Restored (2024, Crispin Glover): [sp]: B
  • Wimps: City Lights (2023, Youth Riot): [sp]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Fingers: The Complete Fingers Remember Mingus (1979-93 [2024], Jazz in Britain, 3CD): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Pat Smythe Quartet: New Dawn: Live 1973 (1973 [2024], British Progressive Jazz): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Mike Cooley/Patterson Hood/Jason Isbell: Live at the Shoals Theatre (Southeastern): [sp]: B+(***)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • John Alvey: Loft Glow (Jazz Music City) [08-25]
  • Charlie Apicella & Iron City Meet the Griots Speak: Call to Action/Call to Prayer (OA2) [08-16]
  • Welf Dorr/Elias Meister/Dmitry Ishenko/Kenny Wollesen: So Far So Good (self-released)
  • Morten Duun: Code Breaker (Cmntx) [07-19]
  • Russell Haight: Go Forth (OA2) [08-16]
  • Eric Jacobson: Heading Home (Origin) [08-16]
  • Omer Leshem: Play Space (Ubuntu Music) [09-27]
  • David Liebman & the CNY Jazz Orchestra: If a White Horse From Jerusalem . . . (CNY Jazz Arts Foundation) [08-10]
  • Rosemary Loar: Vagabond Heart/Curação Vagabundo (Atlor Music) [07-18]
  • Matt Mitchell: Zealous Angles (Pi) [08-16]
  • Planet D Nonet: Echoes of Harlem: A Salute to Duke Ellington Vol. 2 (Eastlawn) [07-19]
  • Dred Scott/Moses Patrou/Tom Beckham/Matt Pavolka: Cali Mambo (Ropeadope) [09-20]
  • Piet Verbist: Flamenco Jazz Summit: El Mar Empieza Aquí (Origin) [08-16]
  • Philip Weberndoerfer: Tides (Shifting Paradigm) [08-23]
  • Miguel Zenón: Golden City (Miel Music) [08-30]

Daily Log

Messenger note back from John Chacona. I need some better place to keep things like this:

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Opened this file on Friday, July 26, early evening. Thought I might wrap this up Monday evening, but I had a very stressful day, got bummed out, and accomplished little. Hence, this week's piece has lapsed into Tuesday, but coverage of [07-30] will be spotty, at best.

One thing I did accomplish on Monday was to write a bit of code that I'm using here, and should save me a lot of trouble in the future. As I've been writing these posts, I've often wondered how much I had written. It then occurred to me that I could measure the post using two Linux shell commands:

fgrep 'href' FILENAME | wc -l
wc -w FILENAME

The former counts links (assuming there is no more than one link per line). The latter counts words. I usually omitted the wc options, since it's easy to visually pick out the number I wanted: the default counts lines, words, and characters. My first thought was to wrap those two commands into a shell script, then run it and append the answer to the web page. Then it occurred to me that I'm already reading the file to find a few directive lines (mostly used for the title and date), so I could count links and words as I go, then add a directive to print them out at (or near) the end. (Which gives me a bit of flexible control, as opposed to just automatically appending the stats to every page -- something I still may decide to do.)

At present, the link counts match the program output, but the word counts vary somewhat. Obviously, word counts depend on how you delimit words (e.g., is a "hyphenated-word" 1 or 2 words?). I used wc just because it was easy and close enough for my purposes. The new code also takes the easy route, using the PHP str_word_count() function, which at least initially produced larger word counts (e.g., 11616 vs. 8674, so in this case +25.6%). But rather than try to tune the PHP code to better match the wc results, I thought maybe I should aim for more useful results. I knew that a lot of the text in these particular files appeared in HTML tags and comments, which never appears as words on the web page, so I tried removing them -- using a regular expression replace:

preg_replace('/<[^>]*>/', ' ', LINE)

I then called the word count function both on the edited line and on the original one -- I was curious what the effect was, and wound up printing out both totals. I also eliminated the directive lines from the word count, since like markup they do not appear in the page, and I was already separating those lines out. For the page cited above, the word counts wound up at 7996 (tags stripped) and 11616 (total). I can imagine refining this further. The most obvious thing is I'm not checking for HTML entities right now, which are few (so have little practical effect), and are rather complicated (so would require much more complex code).

I don't doubt that my programming skills have atrophied over the score-plus years since my last full-time job, but it's always a good feeling to see that I still have some.

One more new formatting tic this week. I thought I'd like to have some way to draw extra attention to articles that seem especially important. What seemed like the simplest, most intuitive way was to change the • bullet to something that would stand out more, like this -- a bright red star.

I've applied this in a few places, and probably should in a few more. (This was a very late addition to the file.) I figured I could do this with CSS, but ran across the problem that once an element was selected for the star, any child elements also inherited the star. (There's a Sarah Jones example below, which is actually pretty unusual.) I haven't found a way in CSS to prevent or stop such inheritance, so resorted to another hack to undo it.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Netanyahu wangled an invitation to speak to a joint session of Congress, first lining up his right-wing allies to float the invite, then giving the Democratic leadership little choice but to join in. He may be massively unpopular in Israel, but when he appears in Washington, he can preen like he owns the place, as he essentially does. And his exhibition of power over Washington helps maintain his perch in Israel, where regardless of his many faults, he is widely seen as the one guy who can force presidents to kowtow. The whole spectacle was deeply embarrassing for all concerned. So while he got the ovations he expected, his message just underscores how deeply out of touch Israel is with world opinion. Mustafa Barghouti was absolutely right: "a disgusting speech in a session of shame to the U.S. Congress."

Other stories in this nexus:

  • Michael Arria: [07-25] The Shift: Biden's legacy is genocide. Biden's withdrawal elicited "sentimental tributes," but not from those who focused on his defense and support of genocide by Israel.

  • Dexter Filkins: [07-22] Will Hezbollah and Israel go to war? That's really up to Netanyahu, who is fully able to push Hezbollah's buttons to get whatever level of back-and-forth he wants -- thus far, enough to provide cover for the real wars against Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank, and to keep the Americans in line with their depiction of Iran the puppet master on many fronts. As last week showed, escalating the bombing of Lebanon is easy within those parameters. Launching a real ground war isn't so easy, with little to gain and a fair amount to lose.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-25] What Kamala Harris really thinks about Israel and Gaza: "Biden's approach to the war in Gaza has been divisive. Would Haris chart a new path?" I have a whole section for Harris, where I'll slot pieces on every other aspect of her campaign and politics, but for now I'd rather compartmentalize and keep her Israel stuff here, as a subset of the Washington-based group-think that lets American politicians and their cronies avoid having to think or care about the issue. I don't think anyone really knows what she thinks here, because the position she's in doesn't allow thinking, or doing for that matter.

    Maybe when she is president, she will be in a position to do, and therefore will need to think. But right now, all she really has to do is to avoid the pitfalls being laid out for her. (Having to meet with Netanyahu is just one such pitfall.) I'm not unsympathetic to people who regard Israel (or at least Gaza) as the biggest political issue of the moment, but through the election, I think they/we should give her a pass. I'm pretty sure that she's no worse than Biden, and undoubtedly a lot better than Trump. You don't have to endorse her (at least for this). You can even rag on Genocide Joe if you want. But this is just speculation, and probably not helpful at all. Of course, once she's elected, the gloves can come off. My hope, and that's really all it is, is that she'll listen better than Biden, and act more decisively. The time to talk specifically to her is when she's ready to listen and act.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: {07-24] Peter Thiel: 'I defer to Israel': "Video surfaces showing the Palantir tech giant struggling to answer questions about client's use of AI-generated kill lists."

  • Brett Wilkins: [07-24] Ben-Gvir endorses Trump, says he's more likely to back war on Iran: "The Israeli security minister, who leads the far-right Jewish Power party, accused the Biden administration of thwarting Israel's victory against Hamas."

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

Trump:

Vance:

Trump's running mate, a Republican Senator from Ohio, one thing you can say for him is that he's gotten more press attention than any VP candidate since Sarah Palin, and probably more, since he's not just a turbocharged gaffe machine but has a more philosophical side that is also easy to chew over. I'm pretty sure that had Trump picked Doug Burgum or Elise Stefanik, this phase would be done by now.

  • Karyn Amira: [07-29] JD Vance's selection as Trump's running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism. Problem here is the author's definition of conservatism: "a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties." That's almost exactly wrong: conservatives believe in order defined by their preferred hierarchy, which is necessarily enforced by power in a state that they seek to control. That's precisely what Trump and Vance believe in.

    On the other hand, Amira's definition actually describes an obsolete version of liberalism, which has been cynically used by conservatives to oppose the modern democratic state. From the progressives in the early 1900s through the New Deal and Great Society, liberals came to realize that laissez-faire capitalism had ceased to expand "liberty and justice for all," and if left unchecked would revert to a new version of feudal aristocracy. So they came up with a very successful alternative, where the state, embodying the will of the popular majority, would organize and regulate countervailing institutions, their powers limited and regulated in the public interest.

    Needless to say, the would-be lords of neofeudal capitalism hated this, and fought to preserve and extend their superiority with every trick they could muster -- including adopting the time-tested rhetoric of classical liberalism, but redirected against the democratic state -- which they characterized not just as a revival of pharoahs and czars but as something more impersonal and nefarious, as totalitarianism -- and really against the people it represented.

    But while "small government" may have been useful rhetoric when the government was held by people conservatives reviled, have you ever seen conservatives once they control the state reduce its size and power? You might point to deregulation, but that's effectively a transfer of power from public to private hands. Similarly, tax cuts and credits are transfers of money from public to private hands. By debilitating public interest functions, conservatives seek to discredit the state as a means by which the people can help themselves. Conservatives may see the state, in the wrong hands, as a repressive force, but given power, they eagerly use that force for their own ends, especially against the people they see as enemies, which is most of us.

    Trump and Vance aren't the end of Republican conservatism. They're more like its apotheosis, grown powerful and arrogant enough they can quit pretending they're doing anyone any favors but themselves. Maybe they mark some kind of denouement for conservative naïveté, but few real world conservatives were ever so deluded.

  • Maureen Dowd: [07-27] JD Vance, purr-fectly dreadful.

  • Elizabeth Dwoskin/Cat Zakrzewski/Nitasha Tiku/Josh Dawsey: [07-28] Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance: "A small influential network of right-wing techies orchestrated Vance's rise in Silicon Valley -- and then the GOP. Now the industry stands to gain if he wins the White House." There hasn't been a VP pick this explicitly tied to donor choice since the Koch Network (uh, Mitt Romney) picked Paul Ryan in 2012. And while Republicans are more likely to brag about their corruption, what are the odds that Harris's VP pick will be traceable to another megadonor? (I mean, beyond the default conspiracist pick: George Soros?)

  • Paul Elie: [07-24] J.D. Vance's radical religion.

  • Rebecca Jennings: [07-25] J.D. Vance didn't have sex with a couch. But he's still extremely weird. "The rumors were easy to believe, especially when the potential VP has such terrible ideas about sex."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-26] Dear J.D. Vance, childless cat ladies are people too. Emphasis added:

    "Normal people" see this bleak prospect for what it is, and they have rejected it repeatedly in the voting booth. That probably won't change. Vance's comments are weird, cruel, and, yes, creepy. They don't reflect the way most people think or live, even if they do have biological children. By attacking childlessness, the right cheapens parenthood, too. The act of having children is no longer about joy but conquest. I can't imagine anything sadder, though I am but a childless cat lady. Vance's worldview is poisonous to parents and children, too: Babies should be loved and wanted for their own sake, not because they're future nationalists or tradwives. The right offers a small and selfish vision that is authoritarian to its core. Their America belongs only to the righteous few, but my America belongs to everyone. I may never give birth, but I too have a stake in this country. We're all responsible for creating a future worth living in. It will belong to somebody's children, if not to ours.

    By the way, Jones also wrote:

    • [07-23] A woman can win, which probably belongs with the Harris articles, but is more about how Hillary Clinton's didn't win, and the precedent that doesn't really set.

    • [07-30] American freak show. I've thought of myself as weird much of my life, so I've learned to flip the insult and see weirdness as a more interesting attribute. And that's just one of many pejoratives that I've been prodded into reconsidering based on my experiences with the people they are and are not applied to. For instance, people who call themselves "patriots" because they support wars and who call people who don't support those wars "traitors" not only have a very shabby vocabulary, they're also, in my mind at least, making "patriots" appear to be horrible people, and "traitors" to be fundamentally decent ones. So I was initially reluctant to jump on the bandwagon that labels Trump, Vance, et al. as "weird." (I see Tim Walz getting credit here, but Seth Myers has been leaning in to this line of attack for several years now.) It just feels to me like we need some qualification, like in the song: "well I hear he's bad/ hmm, he's good-bad, but he's not evil." Surely, lots of people are simply "good-weird," but Trump and Vance are venturing into real "weird-evil" territory.

      Any formerly weird child can attest to how difficult it is to shrug off this label. What are you going to do, put your fingers in your ears and chant "I'm not weird, you're weird" until somebody eventually believes you? I was a little awkward in my day, and I know that's not how things work. You can refute the attack only by not being weird -- an idea that seems to elude many conservatives. They've left themselves few options. To address the attack, the bizarre right would have to reconstitute an entire movement, and that will take time and political will. Both are in short supply. Go on, then, and call the right weird, as long as it's part of a bigger argument. Progress ought to be normal, and it's worth fighting for, too.

      But I'm starting to appreciate the advantages of flipping scripts like this. And when you think about it, there's a lot of not just weird but very bizarre thought going on with the far-right these days. I mean, I'm 73, and my thinking has evolved a lot over the years, but I can still remember things that I learned as norms and rules when I was a child, like the 10 Commandments, the 7 Deadly Sins, the Boy Scouts' 12 laws, the Golden Rule, the maxim that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and strategic bits of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and much more that I never really rejected even though I eventually disposed of most of the dross and cant they were wrapped up in. And because I can remember, and still largely respect, those norms and rules, it's really easy to see just how far many right-wingers have strayed from principles they claim as exclusively their own, and how ridiculous they look when they do. In some ways, calling them "weird" is the kindest way you can point that out. Their weirdness may even be their one saving grace. It certainly won't be in their Project 2025.

  • Ezra Klein: [07-17] The economic theory behind J.D. Vance's populism: Interview with Oren Cass, who was Mitt Romney's domestic policy director in 2012, who since "evolved" and founded American Compass, a think tank catering to "populist" Republicans.

  • Paul Krugman:

  • Bradley Onishi: [07-27] J.D. Vance will be a more extremist Christian VP than Mike Pence: "The vice presidential pick's Catholicism hasn't received a lot of attention, but it's the key to the populist radicalism he wants to impose on America."

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-25] J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025: "He wrote the forward for a new book by Project 2025's architect -- and has backed some of its most extreme ideas." The book is Kevin D Roberts: Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, coming out on Sept. 24.

  • Corey Robin: [07-26] Like a diary, only far more masculine: Reading J.D. Vance's, from his blog days.

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-29] J.D. Vance proves it: Trump hires the very worst people: Trump's new running mate will haunt him just like all of the fools and weasels from his first administration."

  • Alex Shephard: [07-26] Is J.D. Vance the worst vice presidential pick ever? Fair question, unless you know much about American history, in which case it's way too early to tell. It also depends on what you mean by "worst." John Tyler and Andrew Johnson probably helped their tickets win, but were really terrible presidents. Some others that didn't become president were also pretty notoriously bad, like Aaron Burr and John Calhoun (two terms, under two presidents who were polar opposites in every aspect except for their loathing of Calhoun). Then there was Spiro Agnew, the only VP ever forced to resign. And what about Dick Cheney? If memory serves, the only VP ever to finish his term with a single-digit approval index. Then there are the ones who never won anything. They tend to be easily forgotten, but tag reads "Palin Lite," in case you want a hint. So with competition like that, Vance hardly has a chance. But it's early days, and at least he's in the running.

  • Ed Simon: [07-17] J.D. Vance keeps selling his soul. He's got plenty of buyers.

    Mr. Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. "Hillbilly Elegy" owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Mr. Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia. "What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives," Mr. Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn't dreamed big enough.

    He points to whole books written about Vance's book, like:

  • Matt Stieb: [07-27] J.D. Vance can't stop saying the dumbest things imaginable.

And other Republicans:

  • Emily Bazelon: [07-27] The right-wing dream of 'self-deportation': "Some conservatives have a grim proposal to make undocumented immigrants leave: exclude their children from schools." I hadn't heard of "self-deportation" until Mitt Romney adopted it as his anti-immigration platform in 2012. It is quite the euphemism. It basically means systematically treating immigrants (and, to be sure, anyone who looks or sounds like an immigrant) so cruelly they resign themselves to leaving on their own. Or it could just as well drive them to turn to crime, which expedites the regular deportation process.

  • Jenny Brown: [07-27] Project 2025's anti-union game plan.

    From there, the plan is to bulldoze the protections US workers have built up over one hundred years of determination, sacrifice, and unity.

    It's ugly: abolish overtime pay laws, outlaw public sector unions entirely, get rid of health and safety protections, eliminate the federal minimum wage, make it harder to receive unemployment, and put children back to work like in the 1920s.

    Hitting building trades workers, they would get rid of requirements for prevailing wage pay and project labor agreements in federal projects.

    There's more. They want to get rid of the Department of Education. Ban teaching women's history and African American history in schools -- lest we get ideas about how to change things! Ban abortion nationwide. (The AFL-CIO details the whole alarming list here.)

  • Patrick T Brown: [07-19] Pro-lifers helped bring Trump to power. Why has he abandoned us? Because you're losers? You don't think he ever actually cared about you, did you?

  • Thomas B Edsall: [07-24] What the Trump-Vance alliance means for the Republican Party. One thing that occurs to me here is that the more Republicans like Vance talk about supporting American workers, the more ground that opens up for Democrats to appeal to same, only with more realistic programs and greater credibility. It encourages them to lean left, rather than crawl scared toward the right (like so many have been doing since Reagan).

  • Jack Herrera: [07-28] Trump says he wants to deport millions. He'll have a hard time removing more people than Biden has. "Even as Trump slams the president for open borders, the Biden-Harris administration has kicked out far more immigrants than Trump ever managed."

  • Hassan Alu Kanu: [07-29] DEI and the GOP: "Hey Republicans, your racism is showing."

  • Julius Krein: [07-23] Republican populists are responding to something real. One could argue that -- although Krein isn't very clear here -- but not that they're offering realistic responses to real problems.

  • Robert Kuttner: [07-30] The left's fragile foundations: "Could a weaponized Trump IRS wreck the progressive infrastructure by attacking the entire nonprofit ecosystem?" This is a big and important article. "Defund the left" has long been a major Republican goal. One small bit:

    These vulnerabilities remain in place today. It has long galled the right that Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of government funds; of its budget of over $2 billion, about $700 million comes from government health service reimbursements and grants. While the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding of abortion, 17 states allow Medicaid funding of abortion through their state contributions to the mixed federal-state program. In addition, Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of federal Title X family-planning support of its clinics. As right-wing groups keep complaining, money is fungible and federal family-planning funds free other money to pay for abortions. Under Trump, the government did bar Planned Parenthood from the Title X program in 2019, but this was restored by Biden in 2021.

    The battle to defund the left would be far more sophisticated under a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation's detailed blueprint, Project 2025, systematically targets the entire range of agencies, and one of its tactics is to undermine agencies that help progressive organizations such as the NLRB and numerous others. With a second Trump presidency, the right's war against Planned Parenthood will only intensify.

  • Michael Lind: [07-20] Trump's transformation of the Republican Party is complete.

  • Calder McHugh: [07-27] Republicans keep trying to copy Trump's humor -- and voters keep cringing. Perhaps the material never was funny in the first place -- just the buffoon delivering it?

  • Pamela Paul: [07-25] The Republican Party's elite conundrum: Let me condense this a bit (all her words, but with less wandering):

    Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. [But] Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don't like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it's not entirely dumb. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office, empowering more effective rage against 'the liberal elite' and 'the ruling class.' This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to say in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers. After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

    Of course, this is ultimately about Ron DeSantis (Yale, Harvard Law), Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), and now J.D. Vance (Ohio State, but finally Yale Law).

  • Charles P Pierce:

  • Tessa Stuart: [07-25] Trump allies sure are talking a lot about civil war: "The former president's supporters keep raising the idea there's violent conflict in America's future." When lies don't suffice, Republicans will try extortion: vote for us, or we'll [insert threat here, ranging from shut down the government to killing you].

Harris:

Biden:

  • Dean Baker:

    • [07-22] A tribute to President Biden.

    • [07-18] Adjusting the Washington Post's Biden-Trump scorecard.

    • [07-26] Bloomberg says things are almost as bad as 2019, when Trump was in the White House: "Seriously, they probably don't want readers to walk away with that impression, but that is the implication of the piece they did complaining about people working multiple jobs."

    • [07-29] The biggest success story the country doesn't know about: "Yes, inflation has been punishing. But there is a mountain of good news that media have barely reported. Here's the real record the Democrats can run on."

      Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seen the longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

      The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed's 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

      Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president's watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden's recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growth even as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

      One should also use every opportunity to stress that the CARES Act, at least everything that was good in it, was the result of leverage Democrats in Congress had. With the economy in free fall, Trump wanted something to save the stock market. That the act also helped unemployed workers, collapsing small businesses, and helped many stave off debt collection, was because Trump had to deal with Pelosi and Schumer. Without their help, Trump's own dismal record would have been that much worse.

  • Zachary D Carter: [07-24] You have no idea what Joe Biden for employment.

  • Elie Honig: [07-26] Let's knock off the 25th amendment talk.

  • Kerry Howley: [07-27] Exit ghost: "Watching Joe Biden say good-bye."

  • Umair Irfan: [07-23] Joe Biden's enormous, contradictory, and fragile climate legacy: "If elected, Trump could slow down Biden's progress, but the shift to clean energy is unstoppable."

  • Branko Marcetic:

    • [07-22] Joe Biden wanted this. This is a left view, but seems fair:

      There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of Biden's populism. This is, after all, a president who nickel-and-dimed Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned his promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually become law, when the reality is it died -- and did so in large part because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher priority.

      That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version of its political program. It did so not just through political pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for political power came to realize there was a popular constituency for a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically, crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an honest-to-God shot.

    • [07-25] How Joe Biden became a steadfast Israel defender.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-24] So what does Joe Biden do now? "In an Oval Office speech, Biden said his farewells. But his job isn't done yet."

  • Noah Rawlings: [07-29] Build no small things: "A sampling of innovative projects made possible by the Biden legislative wins."

And other Democrats:

  • Lee Drutman: [07-28] The Democratic Party is (still) broken: "The sudden ascendance of Kamala Harris doesn't change the fact that the party suffers from deep, possibly fatal problems." I'm not sure how useful this analysis is. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party has structural problems, tied mostly to the need to raise huge amounts of money from interest groups that want favors not solutions, and the double standards that blame Democrats for all problems while excusing Republicans. But the Democrats do have one big advantage: in a two-party system, they're the only ones who are sane and conscientious and actually care about people, which should give them some advantages, wouldn't you think? However, the author seems to be wedded to a fantasy idea, explained in his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracyh in America.

  • Lulu Garcia-Navarro: [07-27] The Interview: Pete Buttigieg thinks the Trump fever could break.

  • Michael Podhorzer: [07-24] Democrats are poised to win. But only if they make the election about Trump. As I've been saying, all along.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-25] The race the Democrats need to run now: "How the party can reshape this election so it isn't about Donald Trump's martyrdom." I dunno. I mean, there's something to be said for martyring Donald Trump. It's not that I don't think this has a place:

    That's all the more reason for Harris to make the race a contest between not only two people but two ideas of America, two extremely different visions of what the federal government can and will do to protect the rights of all Americans, especially vulnerable ones. That means talking about Trump's plans. But just as importantly, it means trying to make voters understand that the presidency is much larger than one person. It's an army of people with a set of beliefs who either will or will not protect abortion rights, defend workers' interests, insist upon the basic human dignity of migrants, fight for the human and civil rights of LGBTQ people, continue the fight against the effects of climate change, uphold civil liberties, and respect the principles of democracy.

    But anything that gets people to turn on Trump is fine with me.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

In some ways, just another mid-summer week, but one with four days topping all-time heat records, and 104 (at least that's one count) active wildfires in the US.

Economic matters:

  • Jake Johnson: [07-25] Global 1% captured $42 trillion in new wealth over past decade.

  • Jean Yi: [07-24] The great telemarketing scam behind pro-police PACs. Before we got a phone system that announces caller IDs, we were plagued with 2-5 phone calls per week trying to shake us down for donations to help out our poor police. We probably still are, but simply don't answer any calls we don't recognize and welcome. We always figured these calls as scams, but this article makes it all much more clear. If any politicians wanted to do something that would immediately better the lives of most Americans, they would come up with a legal framework to destroy the entire telemarketing industry (and hopefully take junk texts and emails with it -- for now at least, I'm ok with advertisers buying stamps, which at least helps fund the post office, even though most of our mail goes straight to recycle).

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:


Other stories:

Obituaries

Books

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Dean Baker: [07-30] [in response to: X has SUSPENDED the White Dudes for Harris account (@dudes4harris) after it raised more than $4M for Kamala Harris.] Musk is using his control of X to make in-kind contributions to Trump in lieu of his pledge to contribute $45 million a month to a Trump super Pac

  • Ramesh Ponnuru: [07-31] Trump policing who's really black and who's a good Jew in the same week.


Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Original count: 259 links, 11258 words (15482 total)

Current Count: 263 links, 11360 words (15648 total)

Saturday, July 27, 2024

Daily Log

We wanted to get the backyard lights working, at least so we could track the new dog better. I had bought a replacement for the corner yard light, probably 3-4 years ago, then didn't replace it when it the old one started working again, which didn't last. Another one, over the back door, gave out a few months back. I figured I should go and replace the one, and take a look at the other. After a very cursory look, I ordered a replacement. That came yesterday, so I got the ladder out and attempted to replace it. I failed, and I'm pretty disgusted as a result.

Turns out that the problem was probably just a loose wire connection, that could have been fixed with a mini-screwdriver. However, since I had the replacement, I took the plate off, and one of the spliced wires came apart. The wires were back behind a vinyl siding box, and I couldn't get to them, even just to splice another wire in. Also, the new unit had no space for its wires to fold in, so they would have to be pushed back into the hole. It also looked like two wires in the box were spliced together, and I couldn't figure out what was going on with them. (Probably runs down to the switch.) Hot. Up on a ladder. No space to work, and poor understanding. I guess that means it was over my head. Still pretty upset.

Friday, July 26, 2024

Daily Log

ArtsFuse published my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll essay today, so I opened up the website with all the totals and ballots. I'm updating Music Week to reflect that, and have posted a note on X:

ArtsFuse published my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, which collects the diligent research and expert listening skills of 90 of the world's most exacting jazz critics and fans. Essay includes top 50 new and top 20(+1) old music albums, with links to the rest.

I did a notice in a comment on Facebook, and later did a more proper Expert Witness notice:

We've finally posted the full results, ballots, etc., for the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, voted on by 90 distinguished writers and broadcasters. Start by looking at my introduction/overview essay at ArtsFuse, then move from there to my website, which has all of the details:

I expanded that a bit more in my Facebook friends post:

I've spent a big chunk of the last month working on this thing, and now it's out: we've finally posted the full results, ballots, etc., for the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, voted on by 90 distinguished writers and broadcasters. Start by looking at my introduction/overview essay at ArtsFuse, then move from there to my website, which has all of the details. Find some new jazz. Stimulate your mind, and bring some peace and beauty to the world:

William Marx, of Arts Fuse, also posted this on Facebook:

The Arts Fuse welcomes Tom Hull's first-ever mid-year Jazz Critics Poll. Any survey of new jazz will show the broad range of creation being produced by an extraordinary diversity of musicians. That's because jazz has spread all around the world, bringing us together in peace (and sometimes even harmony).

I wrote a letter to the Jazzpoll mailing list:

The essay and list tops are up at ArtsFuse:

link

Links from there to the website, which lists a total of 366 New Releases and 109 Rara Avis that received votes, plus presents all 90 ballots by participating critics. The ballots are available in chunks of 20, or individually (see the critics file for an index).

I added inline "footnotes" for cases where people voted for old music as new and vice versa, and added extra points to the right category (which helped Ron Miles, Tomasz Stanko, and Gush). I meant to add notes for albums that previously received 2023 votes (no carry over points, but still of interest), and also for records that hadn't yet been released (which I allowed votes for, figuring I was going to get some anyway). So I may add more notes later.

Please recheck your ballots. I've made minor changes from the ones you were returned as I've found minor errors and/or adjusted credits and titles. Let me know if I've screwed anything up. Unless you find something that's my fault, the totals and ballots are final.

If you publish your own mid-year list/essay (expanding beyond the ballot), please let me know, and I'll add the link to your ballot. I'd like to encourage you to write and publish on your own something about what you learn from the poll. I think this is an interesting and valuable exercise, one that is good for all of us, and good for jazz in general, so I'd like to see the word spread a bit. If you do so, or if you notice someone else doing so, please let me know. If I get enough notices to make it worthwhile, I'll add an index file to that effect.

I also welcome any questions for the FAQ. I need to go back through all of the support files, and figure out what's useful and what's not, and clean the site up. I really should do that for the rest of the website: figure out what's missing, chase it all down (hopefully, Francis will have it somewhere), and get it all properly organized.

I figure I'll write again in a week or so, to give you an update on whatever news I have, and to speculate a bit about the future. I will, as always, be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Thanks again for everyone who voted, and for those of you (a couple dozen, if memory serves) who couldn't or wouldn't but at least wrote in, most expressing their continued interest in the forthcoming 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll.

ArtsFuse allows comments, so I thought I should track them here:

  • Steve: Did the Norma Winstone/Jon Downes album come out too late to have a shot?
    I'm surprised there's only one International Anthem release, and that it placed fairly low.

  • Tom Hull: There was no release date window. I allowed any 2024 (or 2023) releases, including ones in advance of the polling deadline -- a couple dozen such albums received votes. Winstone/Downes came out on May 7, on ECM, the label of the winning album by Vijay Iyer, a label which placed two later releases in the upper charts (Oded Tzur, Tomasz Stanko). It's inevitable that most voters will have missed most albums in any given time frame, but an ECM release in May had a pretty decent chance of getting recognized.

    Four International Anthem albums received votes in the poll, but only one (SML) made it to the top 50. They aim for crossover albums and make an effort to promote their albums in the rock/pop press, which sometimes pays dividends, but this year's batch of artists are still pretty obscure. My favorite album on the label so far this year, by Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly, didn't receive any votes. Lots of albums didn't receive votes.

  • [Name lost]: I keep reviewing the text, and feel a bit dumb, but cannot make sense of the numbers listed for each entry. I understand the Hullworks list totals [points(vote count)] but not what's above. Help? E.g. Iyer is "51.5 (27)" in the Hullworks results, but above shows "5 (27)". Can you explain the latter? Sorry if I'm missing some explanatory text, I've tried several times.

  • Tom Hull: [My response is lost, but the gist was that the Hullworks vote totals were correct, but ArtsFuse had mangled them, and we needed to fix that. I then picked up the website HTML code, edited it by hand, then sent it to Bill Marx, who replaced the bad tables. Marx then deleted the comments, figuring the site was fixed, so why dwell on the problem? There was also some X discussion.]

  • Vincent Kargatis: [on X]: I asked too on the ArtsFuse page, but can you explain the numbers listed? e.g. Iyer showing "5 (27)" while at hullworks I understand the "51.5 (27)".

  • Tom Hull: [on X]: I saw your comment. The points number got mangled when ArtsFuse converted the files I gave them. I sent them new code, which fixed the points, but they've inserted
    tags, so the format is still screwed. Should be fixed soon. The Hullworks tables are correct.

  • Vincent Kargatis: [on X] Thx! I spent too many minutes trying to puzzle it out.😆 Thanks for your work! These are useful lists for listeners and artists (who benefit from the former's discovery) alike!

    Tangent: have you done an age distribution analysis of each year's top ten? That might be interesting.


I wrote a fairly long Facebook comment, in response to a grade dispute:

The June 2023 CG has "Big Sistahs" as an "A MINUS." As does the website copy of that CG, as does the CG database. So as far as I am concerned, not a typo. I usually grab the CG text a day or two after it's initially posted, which gives Christgau a chance to edit where he sees fit. After that, I depend on him to tell me of any changes, which almost never happens. When I later add the CGs to the database, I run the database output by him, which gives him a second chance to correct anything (as well as catch any errors I add -- I also run those things by Joe Yanosik, who has a good eye and memory for such things, and who has always been a big help to me). Unlike Joe, I've learned never to bug Bob about his grades. He doesn't like it, and usually just digs in harder. I'm sure he understands that opinions, even his, are in constant flux, but he doesn't feel any obligation to constantly alter the historical record to reflect those changes. I personally take a more flexible view on this, in part because I've never regarded my grades as definitive, but even I rarely change old grades, sometimes just because I don't feel up to doing the paperwork (but mostly because I never find time to get back to old music, even records I really liked).

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 35 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 42703 [42668] rated (+35), 23 [15] unrated (+8).

[07-26]: The Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll is public now. ArtsFuse has published my essay, Diversity Brings Riches: A Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, which includes the leader board (top 50 New Releases, top 20 Rara Avis). I've unlocked the complete results on my jazzpoll website:

ArtsFuse has a comment facility. Thus far I've seen one comment, and tried replying to it. I'm tracking these comments in my notebook. I'm hoping they'll give me some fodder for my FAQ file. You can also query or comment direct to me.

Later today I'll send out a notice to the Jazzpoll mailing list: the usual links, of course, but also an appeal for voters to do some publicity of their own, possibly writing pieces about what they've learned from poll. I'm also looking ahead to the end-of-year poll. This has been a valuable practice run for what could be a much more ambitious task.

One thing I would like to do between now and then is to redesign the website to make it into a better integrated whole. This might wind up with putting all of the data into a single multi-year database, so we can track voters, artists, etc., over multiple years. I'm also curious about more statistical analysis. But even before that, we have to identify the missing pieces, and the questions they raise. If you are interested and willing to do some work, you can figure out how to get in touch.

By the way, according to my tracking file, I have rated 633 albums so far this year, of which 427 (67.4%) are jazz. So I'm not doing a very good job of easing into retirement.


I'm slowly decompressing after deep burial in the work of running my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll. The website is up, but the results won't be public until ArtsFuse publishes my introductory essay -- which I turned in on Tuesday, so it shouldn't be much longer. After some initial panic, I finally counted 90 ballots, which is a bit more than half of the 159 ballots we received for the 2023 Poll. A couple dozen more invitees wrote back with apologies, mostly due to the very limited voting period I allowed and other demands on their time, but several just didn't like the idea (while expressing an interest in year-end voting -- I know of other critics who just don't like the idea of polls and lists in general, but they had taken themselves off my mailing list).

Voters were asked to vote for up to 10 "new releases" (first releases of new music recorded no earlier than 2014) and up to 5 "rara avis" (reissues or newly released music from 2013 or earlier). The 90 critics voted for 366 "new releases" and 109 "rara avis" albums. If memory serves, 3 albums got votes in both, and 3 more received one vote in the wrong time frame, so the total number of albums that received votes was 472, which is 5.24 per voter. I'd hazard a guess that about half of those records got 1 vote each. Also, at least half of them weren't in my tracking file before the poll, so were new to me. I've added them all now, and over the last 3-4 weeks I've listened to a lot of jazz I wasn't previously aware of (including all 5 A- records this week, and most of the high B+ records too).

As I've probably mentioned, I find lists most useful as a means for checking what I do and do not know. Donald Rumsfeld once made the distinction between "known-unknowns" and "unknown-unknowns." Well, I keep the former are on a list as such, leaving only the latter as still unaccounted-for unknowns. So, thanks to the last few weeks, I now know much more about what I don't know. When the results are published, so can you.

As part of this exercise, I went ahead and prematurely compiled a Best Jazz Albums of 2024 file. (I didn't bother compiling the companion Best Non-Jazz list, because I didn't need it, and didn't want to bite off the extra work, least of all in maintenance -- indeed, I may not maintain the Jazz file until the need arises come November.) The most notable thing here is that the A-list has already reached 60 albums, whereas for recent full years, it has never grown beyond 87 albums. I can imagine three possible explanations for this bounty: this is a really great year for new jazz; I'm much better informed this year than ever before; and/or I'm growing soft and addled in my old age. Still, I've retained enough wits to discriminate between these 60 A/A- albums and 108 with B+(***) grades, and another 193 with lower grades. (Let's see: in 2023, that split was 85 A/A-, 225 B+(***), 532 lower, so comparing this year so far to last gives us: 70.5%, 48.0%, 36.2%.) So, sure, that's skewed pretty significantly. But I can't think of anything to do about it. The grading scale was never conceived of as a curve, and it's too late to change much now.

While working on the essay, I slowly pieced together a Speaking of Which, which wound up straddling the Republican Convention, Biden's withdrawal, and Kamala Harris's clinching of the Democratic nomination. The domestic politics did at least take my mind away from the international situation, which as far as I can tell is still very much out there -- especially the atrocities in and around Israel. One story I avoided was Netanyahu's speech to Congress. I thought the most telling moment there was when Biden praised and gave thanks to Joe Biden, and Republicans stood and applauded. Of course, it wasn't Biden they were applauding. Nor were they really showing how supplicant they are to Netanyahu (although they clearly are). They mostly relished how Netanyahu's embrace disgraced Biden and his administration. As I've noted many times before, the only time Republicans are up for a "bipartisan" deal is when they see it as a wedge between the Democratic leaders and their base. All of Washington may be in thrall to Israel, but it's not a good look for the self-anointed leaders of the free world.

Of course, I didn't really finish with last week, so next week's Speaking of Which will start as soon as this Music Week posts. And as I'm unlikely to be done on Sunday, next Music Week should again be delayed -- perhaps enough to give me most of a week (as long as I wrap up before the end of July, I'll be happy.) After that, I hope to slow down a bit, and take stock. I have lots of projects to work on around the house. I have some doctor stuff on tap. I also have a new website to think about. And I need to rethink the whole writing life. Besides, August is usually pretty miserable here in Wichita.

Meanwhile, a couple mid-year lists to check out:


New records reviewed this week:

  • أحمد [Ahmed]: Giant Beauty (2022 [2024], Fönstret, 5CD): [bc]: A-
  • Alliance [Sharel Cassity/Colleen Clark]: Alliance (2024, Shifting Paradigm): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Beholder Quartet: Suspension of Disbelief (2024, Sachimay): [sp]: A-
  • Oddgeir Berg Trio: A Place Called Home (2024, Ozella): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few: The Almighty (2023 [2024], Division 81): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Nick Dunston: Colla Voce (2024, Out of Your Head): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Isabelle Duthoit & Franz Hautzinger: Dans le Morvan (2021 [2024], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Nick Finzer: Legacy: A Centennial Celebration of JJ Johnson (2024, Outside In Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gregory Groover Jr.: Lovabye (2023 [2024], Criss Cross): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Giovanni Guidi: A New Day (2023 [2024], ECM): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Jo Harrop: The Path of a Tear (2024, Lateralize): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Xaver Hellmeier: X-Man in New York (2022 [2023], Cellar Music): [sp]: A-/li>
  • اسم ISM [Pat Thomas/Joel Grip/Antonin Gerbal]: Maua (2022 [2024], 577): [dl]: A-
  • Tobias Klein/Frank Rosaly/Maria Warelis: Tendresse (2022 [2024], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Christian McBride/Edgar Meyer: But Who's Gonna Play the Melody? (2024, Mack Avenue): [sp]: B+(*)
  • The New Wonders: Steppin' Out (2024, Turtle Bay): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Carlos Niño & Friends: Placenta (2022-23 [2024], International Anthem): [sp]: B
  • Omawi [Marta Warelis/Onno Govaert/Wilbert De Joode]: Waive (2021 [2023], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Hery Paz: River Creatures (2023 [2024], Porta Jazz): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Frank Paul Schubert/Michel Pilz/Stefan Scheib/Klaus Kugel: Live at FreeJazz Saar 2019 (2019 [2024], Nemu): [cd]: B+(***)
  • SML: Small Medium Large (2022-23 [2024], International Anthem): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Space: Embrace the Space (2024, Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Natsuki Tamura/Satoko Fujii: Aloft (2023 [2024], Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Terton [Louie Belogenis/Trevor Dunn/Ryan Sawyer]: Outer, Inner, Secret (2023 [2024], Tzadik): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Marta Warelis/Andy Moor: Escape (2022 [2024], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Cannonball Adderley: Burnin' in Bordeaux: Live in France 1969 (1969 [2024], Elemental Music, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Cannonball Adderley: Poppin' in Paris: Live at L'Olympia 1972 (1972 [2024], Elemental Music): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Atrás del Cosmos: Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams (1980 [2024], Blank Forms Editions): [sp]: A-
  • Charlie Mariano: Boppin' in Boston 1947-1953 (1947-53 [2024], Fresh Sound): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Gerry Mulligan: Night Lights (1963 [2024], Philips): [sp]: B+(*)
  • The Oscar Pettiford Memorial Concert (1960 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(*)

Old music:

  • Beholder: Claim No Native Land (2017, Sachimay): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Beholder: The Cicada Sessions (2022, Sachimay): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Beholder Quartet: Omni Present (2023, Sachimay, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
  • اسم ISM [Pat Thomas/Joel Grip/Antonin Gerbal]: Nature in Its Inscrutability Strikes Back (2014 [2015], Café Oto): [sp]: B+(***)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Cannonball Adderley: Burnin' in Bordeaux: Live in France 1969 (Elemental Music) [04-26]
  • Cannonball Adderley: Poppin' in Paris: Live at L'Olympia 1972 (Elemental Music) [04-26]
  • Livia Almeida: The Brasilia Sessions (Zoho) [07-19]
  • Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band: Walk a Mile in My Shoe (Imani) * [08-12]
  • Richard Guba: Songs for Stuffed Animals (self-released) [06-06]
  • Joel Harrison & Alternative Guitar Summit: The Middle of Everywhere: Guitar Solos Vol. I (AGS) [07-24]
  • Jason Kao Hwang: Soliloquies: Unaccompanied Pizzicato Violin Improvisations (True Sound) (09-15]
  • Lux Quartet: Tomorrowland (Enja/Yellowbird) [08-09[
  • Rose Mallett: Dreams Realized (Carrie-On Productions) [09-01]
  • Shelly Manne & His Men: Jazz From the Pacific Northwest (1958-66, Reel to Real) [04-20]
  • Brother Jack McDuff: Ain't No Sunshine: Live in Seattle (1972, Reel to Real) [05-17]
  • Terence McManus: Music for Chamber Trio (Rowhouse Music) [09-24]
  • Jason Stein: Anchors (Tao Forms) [09-13]

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Originally scheduled for July 21, this kept getting pushed out as I worked on my mid-year jazz critics poll. Finally posted [07-24], with some later adds.


Big breaking news this week was the end of Joe Biden's campaign for a second term as president. This became public on Sunday, July 20. I started collecting bits for this post back on Thursday, July 18, and in the intervening days I collected a fair number of pieces on the arguments for Biden to withdraw. I've kept those pieces below (and may even add to them), while splitting the section on Biden, and adding one on Kamala Harris, who as Vice-President and as Biden's running mate is the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Biden won all of the primaries, so an overwhelming majority of DNC voters were selected and pledged to Biden (and implicitly to Harris). Biden has endorsed Harris. And most of the people who put pressure on Biden to withdraw did so realizing that Harris would be his most obvious replacement. Opposition to Biden was almost never rooted in rejection of his policies or legacy. (Critics of Biden's deaf, blind and dumb support for Netanyahu's genocide may beg to differ, but they had little if any clout within the party powers who turned on Biden. Nor do Israel's supporters have any real reason to fear that Harris will turn on them.)

I originally meant to start this post with a bit from a letter I wrote back on Thursday [07-18], which summed up my views on Biden's candidacy at the time:

For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:

  1. If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens. For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them. That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they kick in his most primitive instincts.

  2. Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most effective at making the election into a referendum on the other side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't fumble," you've lost.

  3. Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden, incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?

As of early Tuesday evening, I'm still preoccupied with trying to wrap up my jazz critics poll. I expect to mail that I will get that mailed in tonight, and hope that I may wrap this up as well, with the by-now-usual proviso that I may add more the next day, but certainly will have lots to return to next week.

As of late Wednesday evening, I figure I should call it a week. I still haven't gotten to everything, but I've deliberately skipped anything on the Netanyahu speech to Congress, and various other pieces of late-breaking news (including recent campaign rallies by Trump, which I overheard some of, and by Harris, which I gather was much more fun. If I do grab something more while working on Music Week, I'll flag it as usual. Otherwise, there's always next week.


One half-baked thought I will go ahead and throw out there is this: maybe this was the plan all along? I know it's hard to credit the Democratic Party insiders with devising much less executing such a clever plan. But if you wanted to get to where we are now, it's not that hard to imagine. If Biden hadn't run, Harris would have been his probable successor, but not without a bruising and potentially divisive primary fight. Biden's reelection campaign kept that from happening -- and to make extra sure, scotching the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary eliminated the two best opportunities potential opponents might gamble on. Biden wound up with an overwhelming majority of delegates locked in, and predisposed to Harris as his successor.

Biden's presumptive nomination also gave cover to Trump, who never had to face the age questions that dogged the slightly older Biden. Then Biden tanks the debate, which gives Trump a huge psychological boost, but drags out his withdrawal until after Trump's nomination becomes official. By the time he does announce, all the ducks are lined up for Harris, cemented by the record-breaking cash haul. No one will run against her, and all Democrats will unite behind her. It's not a very good example of democracy in action, but it's clean and final, and she enters the campaign against Trump with few wounds and very little baggage.

On the other hand, Trump, despite all the optimism he brought into the RNC just last week, has tons of debilitating baggage -- to which he's already added his "best people" VP pick, J.D. Vance. I've said all along that the winner will be the one who does the best job of making the election into an opportunity for the people to rid themselves of the other candidate. The odds of Trump being the one we most want to dispose of just went way up.

Make no mistake, there is something profoundly wrong with our democracy, and it goes way beyond gerrymanders and registration scheming. It mostly has to do with the obscene influence of money not just on who can run in elections and what they can campaign on, but also on what whoever manages to get elected can or cannot do with their post. This influence goes way back, and runs very deep, but it's pretty clear that it's gotten significantly worse over the last several decades, as income and wealth have become much more unequally distributed.

We are, of course, fortunate that not everyone with great sums of money wishes to harm most of us. It's mostly just Republicans who want to drive us to ruin, and who surely will if we allow them the power to do so. (The Supreme Court is one place where they already have that power, and it is already providing us with a steady stream of examples of how "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Rich Democrats may be every bit as self-interested and egocentric as rich Republicans, but at least they can see that government needs to work reasonably well for everyone, and not just for the rich at everyone else's expense. They understand things that Republicans have turned against: that life is not a zero-sum game (so you don't have to inflict losses in order to gain); that security is only possible if people sense that justice prevails; and that no matter how much wealth and power you gain, you still depend on other people who need to be able to trust you.

Perhaps you can and should trust rich Democrats in times of severe crisis, such as in this election. Today's Republican Party, with or without Trump, is threat enough. But know that those same rich Democrats don't trust you to make decisions they can support, which is why they hijacked the 2020 primaries to stop Sanders with Biden, and why they've micromanaged the 2024 process to give your nomination to Harris. And actually, I'm strangely OK with that.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [07-19] Politics on the verge of nervous breakdown. This starts with the most detailed and credible account of the Trump rally shooting I've bothered to read, ranges wide enough to include a picture of Mussolini with a nose bandage after a 1926 assassination attempt, then moves on to Biden (pre-withdrawal), compares his tenure to that of Stalin and Brezhnev, doubles back to J.D. Vance, and winds up with a potpourri of scattered points, like:

    • As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they're having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention . . .

    • Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota's law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.

    • While the Democrats -- for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats -- have "paused" fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting . . .

Republican National Convention:

Focus on the Convention here. Articles that focus on Trump and Vance, even at the convention, follow in their own sections.

Trump:

  • New York Times Opinion: Donald Trump's first term is a warning. This looks like they finally went back and reviewed their own reporting, and belatedly realized, oh my God, how could we just let all this happen?

    This week, Republicans have tried to rewrite the four years of Trump's presidency as a time of unparalleled peace, prosperity and tranquility: "the strongest economy in history," as Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it. The difference between Trump and Biden? "President Trump honored the Constitution," said Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia offered Mr. Trump's first term as an example of "common-sense conservative leadership."

    The record of what Mr. Trump actually did in office bears little resemblance to that description. Under his leadership, the country lurched from one crisis to the next, from the migrant families separated at the border to the sudden spike in prices caused by his trade war with China to the reckless mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. And he showed, over and over, how little respect he has for the Constitution and those who take an oath to defend it.

    For Americans who may have forgotten that time, or pushed it from memory, we offer this timeline of his presidency. Mr. Trump's first term was a warning about what he will do with the power of his office -- unless American voters reject him.

    The timeline is mostly told through pictures, which are often shocking, and tweets, which are mostly stupid. One thing I was especially struck by was the prominence given to Trump's catering to the whims and desires of the right-wing in Israel, while still neglecting to point out their direct bearing on increasing hostilities and the ongoing genocide. Also seems to me like there's too much focus on Trump's national security lapses, which caters to the worst instincts of the so-called Security Democrats, when the real problem with Trump is not lack of vigilance but a general disinterest and even contempt for peace and real democracy.

    I expect this timeline will be recut into campaign commercials, fast and furious, driving home the point that Trump is nothing but trouble.

  • Anna Betts: [07-25] FBI director questions whether Trump was hit by bullet or shrapnel in shooting.

  • Jonathan Blitzer: [07-15] Inside the Trump plan for 2025: "A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President's return to the White House."

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [07-17] Trump invites China to invade Taiwan if he returns to office. Given all the credible charges you could lay at Trump, why bother with this bullshit? Trump has this dangerously stupid idea that if he can scare Taiwan, they'll pony up for more US arms and bribes for security. China's just the bogeyman in this scam. Chait has his own dangerously stupid idea here, which is that American deterrence is the only thing keeping China out of Taiwan. I'm not saying that Taiwan has nothing to worry about, but they do have more control over their own predicament than the ridiculous whims of presidents and pundits.

    • [07-19] Donald Trump cannot even pretend to change who he is.

  • John Ganz: [06-05] The shadow of the mob: "Trump's gangster Gemeinschaft."

  • Jay Caspian Kang: [07-19] Are we already moving on from the assassination attempt on Trump? "When an act of violence doesn't lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it."

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-19] The old, ranting, rambling Trump was back at the Republican convention.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-19] The RNC clarified Trump's 2024 persona: Moderate authoritarian weirdo: "The Trump campaign is at once a savvy, disciplined operation and an illiberal narcissist's personality cult." Weirdo, sure, but considered in light of the whole package, weirdo loses all of its affectionate and amusing traits. "Moderate" is the word that hurts here, like a toenail cut into the quick. On some political policy scales, Trump may rate as more moderate than many other prominent Republicans (off the top of my head: Abbott, DeSantis, Cruz, Rubio, Cotton, Hawley, Vance, Gosar, Gaetz, Mike Lee, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney), but every bit of his persona screams extremism -- he sees himself as a real fighter, as one real bad dude, and that's how he wants you to see him. That's the act he puts on, and that's what most of his fans are lapping up. Once you see that, the weirdo stuff falls into place, and should be viewed much more harshly: he's showing you that he doesn't care what others think, that he can be as weird as he wants, and there's nothing they can do about it.

  • Chris Lewis: [07-15] The dangerous authoritarian gunning to serve as Trump's grand vizier: "Russell Vought is rumored to be under consideration for chief of staff in a second Trump administration. This would be a disaster."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-17] Why tech titans are turning toward Trump: "Silicon Valley isn't right-wing, but its Trump supporters are getting louder."

  • Tom Nichols: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell: "His bizarre diatribe at the RNC shows why the pro-democracy coalition is so worried about beating him."

  • Matt Stieb:

  • Robert Tait: [07-25] Trump monetizes assassination attempt by using photo as book cover.

  • Maureen Tkacik: [07-18] The assassin amid the undesirables: "On the abiding despair of the failed Trump assassin's post-COVID, private equity-looted nursing home."

  • Li Zhou: [07-16] The Trump shooting points to shocking Secret Service security lapses.

Vance:

Trump picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate and potential vice-president, confirmed by the RNC, so he's very much in the news, and for this week at least, elicited quite a bit of response: much more than I suspect any of his competition would have generated.

  • Alex Abad-Santos: [07-19] The damsel-ification of Usha Vance: "What people project onto the would-be second lady fits a pattern of benevolent sexism about GOP wives."

  • Michael Arria: [07-16] The Shift: J.D. Vance's anti-Palestine record: "J.D. Vance is a strong supporter of Israel, and, like many U.S. Zionists, he attributes the allegiance to his Christianity."

  • Aaron Blake: [07-24] Could Republicans get buyer's remorse with J.D. Vance? "New polls show him to be unusually unpopular for a new VP pick. Here's how that compares historically, and what it could mean."

  • Ben Burgis: [07-16] On stochastic terrorism and speech as violence: Responding to Vance's tweet blaming Biden for the attempted shooting of Trump:

    In effect, conservatives like Vance are appropriating the idea, long put forward by some liberals, that overheated political rhetoric is itself a form of violence. The theory of "stochastic terrorism" holds that over-the-top rhetoric about a targeted individual or group has the effect of encouraging "lone-wolf" political violence -- that is to say, political violence carried out by individuals on their own initiative rather than terrorist organizations -- and that this makes the purveyors of the rhetoric responsible for the violence.

    Actually, the right is far more likely to employ verbal threats and agitation toward violence than the left is, largely because they're much more into violence as a tool of political power. It's hard not to believe that the atmosphere of malice they create has no relationship to occasional violent outbursts, but causality or even responsibility is hard to pin down. Burgis concludes, "let's not go down that road." But Vance is so imbued with the culture of violence that his own charge can just as easily be taken as encouragement for his "2nd amendment people" to take a shot at Biden. When Democrats criticize Trump, their obvious even if just implcit remedy is the ballot. But when Trump rails against "vermin," just what is he imploring his followers to do? And given that a couple of his follows have actually committed acts of criminal violence against his designated enemies, shouldn't we be alarmed at such speech?

  • Kevin T Dugan: [07-18] Why J.D. Vance wants a weak dollar. Is that a good idea? I'm not so sure it isn't. I've been bothered by trade deficits since the 1970s, when they mostly started to cover up the drop in domestic oil production. Since then, they've mostly worked to increase inequality both here and abroad.

  • Gil Duran: Where J.D. Vance gets his weird, terrifying techo-authoritarian ideas: "Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator's benefactor. But they're both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society."

  • Thom Hartmann:

  • John Ganz: [07-16] The meaning of JD Vance: "The politics of national despair incarnate."

    Vance himself, of course, is a winner in the cultural sweepstakes: his Hillbilly Elegy became a massive success, explaining the failures of the white poor. He made it okay to look down on them. After all, one of them said it was okay. Conservatives who reviled Trump's base turned to Vance as well as liberals who condescendingly wanted to "understand" them. It was really the same old conservative nonsense about "cultural pathology" applied to whites now instead of blacks -- a way to blame the poor for being poor, to "racialize" the white poor as the blacks had been; to find in them intrinsic moral weaknesses rather than just a lack of money and resources.

    But Vance always wanted to run with hares and hunt with the hounds. He wants to hold fast to the his wounded Scots-Irish machismo while simultaneously rising to heights of both American capitalism and cultural success. He took his background to be both an advantage and a handicap, a counter-snobbery that served him well as he entered the halls of power and wealth. Look back at the famous American Conservative interview that turned him into a sensation: ". . . the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery. It's the great privilege of my life that I'm deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18." . . . Reverse snobbery, like all snobbery, comes from comparison, of a feeling of not living up, of wanting to best others. As Peter Thiel acolyte, he's familiar with René Girard's theories of envy and knows how that emotion gives rise to hate. Vance once said that Trump might be "America's Hitler" to a law school buddy. This is what that friend says now: "The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger . . . The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger . . ." To people like that, Hitler, so to speak, has a point.

  • Jacob Heilbrunn: [07-17] With Vance selection, Trump doubles down on America first. One can readily fault Vance for lots of things, but calling him an "isolationist" -- "the heir to Charles Lindbergh, Pat Buchanan, and other GOP isolationists" -- is pretty flimsy.

  • Sarah Jones: [07-16] The billionaire and the bootlicker.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-18] Who is J.D. Vance? His muddled RNC speech didn't tell us.

  • Paul Krugman: [07-18] J.D. Vance puts the con in conservatism. Well, it's always been there, but he takes it to especially extravagant lengths.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-17] J.D. Vance's GOP is for bosses, not workers: "Trump's 'populist' running mate won't change his party's class allegiances."

  • Nicholas Liu: [07-18] JD Vance wants to abandon Ukraine but bomb Mexico and Iran.

  • Ryan Mac/Theodore Schleifer: [07-17] How a network of tech billionaires helped J.D. Vance leap into power: "Mr. Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley's tech industry, but the connections he made with Peter Thiel and others became crucial to his political ascent."

  • Arwa Mahdawi: [07-20] Sorry, JD Vance, but being a 'childless cat lady' is actually not a bad thing.

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-17] J.D. Vance's radical plan to build a government of Trump loyalists: "Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people." Obviously, this isn't original with Vance. Republicans have been dreaming of this for years, and Trump did a fair amount of it during his first term -- especially in purging employees who think there might be something to fossil fuel-based climate change. It was part of Rick Scott's Senate plan, and is part of Project 2025.

  • Max Read: [2020-07-21] Peter Thiel's latest venture is the American government: This old article popped up, but should by now have spawned many updates. My view all along was that Trump was putting the VP slot up for bids -- in effect, he was shopping for the best dowry. Burgum made the short list because he has his own money. The rehabilitation of "Little Marco" also suggested that he brought some serious money into play -- every serious Republican candidate in 2016 had some kind of billionaire in the wings. (In 2012, Newt Gingrich griped that he couldn't compete, because he only had one billionaire, whereas Romney had four.) I don't know who was backing Rubio, but J.D. Vance was always a front for this guy, Peter Thiel.

  • Veronica Riccobene/Helen Santoro/Joel Warner: [07-16] J.D. Vance wants to crack down harder on abortion access.

  • Becca Rothfeld: [07-23] Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vance's art of having it both ways.

  • Martin Scotten: [07-22] JD Vance owes almost everything to Peter Thiel, a pro-Trump billionaire and "New Right" ideologue.

  • Ishaan Tharoor:

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [07-15] Why Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance for Vice-President: "The Ohio senator is an attack dog for the former President, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit."

  • Robert Wright: [07-19] J.D. Vance, the tech oligarch's populist.

  • Simon van Zuylen-Wood: [07-24] Democrats might want to take J.D. Vance seriously: But isn't it so much more fun to take him as a joke? Does he really deserve anything else?

And other Republicans:

  • Dean Baker: [07-17] Decision 2024: Would people be willing to pay higher taxes to make Elon Musk richer?

    That is a question that should occur to people who read through the Republican Party's platform. Not only does the platform promise to extend the 2017 tax cuts, which will potentially put tens of billions of dollars in Elon Musk's pocket over the next decade, it also promises to "modernize the military."

    "Republicans will ensure our Military is the most modern, lethal and powerful Force in the World. We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, support our Troops with higher pay, and get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible."

    This looks to be hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in additional spending over the next decade. Elon Musk, among others, is likely to be well-situated to get some of the contracts that will be involved in modernizing the military. . . .

    As far as how much Musk and other military contractors are likely to get out of an increase in spending, it is worth noting that excessive payments and outright fraud are already big problems with military contracting. However, the problem is likely to get considerably worse in a second Trump administration.

    There are a number of potential checks on fraud and abuse in place at present. These include the Defense Department's Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Justice Department, which can investigate allegations of fraud.

    Donald Trump has said that he wants to remove these sorts of checks on his presidential power. They would all fit into his category of the "deep state." These people are likely the "woke Leftwing Democrats" who the platform promises to fire as soon as possible.

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-19] It's Trump's party now. Mostly. "How the Trumpified GOP resembles Frankenstein's monster."

  • Tim Dickinson: [06-09] Meet Trump's new Christian kingpin: "Oil-rich Tim Dunn has changed Texas politics with fanatical zeal -- the national stage is next."

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [07-16] The crime wave is over but Republicans can't let go: "The GOP is still pretending that crime is spiraling out of control."

  • David Frum: This crew is totally beatable: "Democrats just need to believe they can do it."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-18] The GOP is still the party of the boss.

  • Christian Paz: [07-16] The clever politics of Republicans' anti-immigrant pitch: "The Republican National Convention featured plenty of angry rhetoric about immigration. It might find a receptive audience."

  • Nikki McCann Ramirez/Ryan Bort: [07-10] A guide to Project 2025, the right's terrifying plan to remake America.

Biden:

He announced he was withdrawing as the Democratic candidate for president in 2024 on Sunday, July 21, so the following links can be easily divided into before and after sections. More recent links first:

I had already collected a bunch of links before the withdrawal. While this should be a moot issue going forward, we shouldn't forget too readily what happened and why.

  • Intelligencer: [07-19] Pressure builds as more Democrats call on Biden to step aside: "Here are the latest developments on the efforts to get Joe to go." Following some earlier reports scattered about this section, he's getting the "live updates" treatment.

  • Russell Berman: 'I think it's happening': "The lone senator who has called on Biden to withdraw is growing confident that the president will leave the race."

  • Jonathan Chait: [07-18] The presidential nomination is becoming worthless for Joe Biden: "A devastating polling nugget shows what happens if he stays in."

  • David A Graham: [07-18] The end of Biden's candidacy approaches: "At the start of the day yesterday, it was conceivable that Joe Biden might manage to hold on to the Democratic nomination for president. But this morning, things seem to be slipping out of his grasp." He cites a number of reports of people who are close enough to Biden to have leverage but who still don't want to be seen with blood on their hands. There's also the all-important fear of "money drying up." The big selling point is fear of a Trump presidency, but if you're rich enough to splurge on politics, you don't have that much to fear. It's more a matter of hedging your bets.

  • Elie Honig: [07-19] The secret Biden tape that we shouldn't hear. That's special counsel Robert Hur's interview of Biden in conjunction with the "top secret" documents Biden found in his garage. At the time it was first disclosed, it was reported that the tape made Biden out like a doddering fool, so naturally Republicans in Congress set out to subpoena it.

  • Dhruv Khullar: [07-18] Doctors are increasingly worried about Biden: "Nine physicians weighed in on the President's health. Almost all were concerned that Biden's symptoms might go beyond a gradual, aging-related decline."

  • Eric Levitz: [07-18] Democrats are finally taking on Biden -- and giving the party a chance to win: "Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama have all signaled to Joe that it's time to go."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-18] Biden is betting on impossible promises to progressives: "Biden is trying to reinvigorate his candidacy by pushing progressive priorities." That might work better if the left had any real power in the Democratic Party, if Biden had the power to deliver, and if the promise didn't panic the corporate faction into dumping him.

  • Nia Prater: [07-18] The push to replace Biden is rapidly gaining momentum.

Harris:

  • Intelligencer Staff: [07-22] Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee: live updates: She cleared 2,579 delegates less than 36 hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed her.

  • Mariana Alfaro/Marianna Sotomayor: [07-24] House GOP leaders ask member to stop making racial attacks against Harris. Probably more where this came from:

  • Michael Arria: [07-22] Looking at Kamala Harris's record on Israel: "If elected president, many believe that Kamala Harris will continue Joe Biden's doomed policy in Gaza."

  • Karen Attiah: [07-24] The first clean-up job for Harris is Biden's horrible Gaza policy. I sympathize with the sentiment, but I don't see the political angle. The Biden administration needs to quietly shut the Gaza war down, with a stable ceasefire, with no Israeli troop presence in Gaza, and with some kind of international salvage/reconstruction effort, probably under the UN with some contingent of Arab volunteers. Harris should (and hopefully can) work behind the scenes to firm up the administration's resolve to do this, but also shouldn't be seen as getting her hands too dirty in the effort. She needs this, because if the war/genocide is still continuing in October, that's going to reflect very badly on Biden, and therefore (but probably somewhat less) on her. So yes, this is important. But advice like this -- Indigo Olivier: Kamala, denounce Netanyahu. Do it now. -- is neither likely to work on Israel, nor is it likely to gain her any voters.

  • Ryan Cooper: [07-23] What would President Harris do with Gaza?: "There are tentative signs that she would not indulge Israel's war as President Biden has done." This is pretty speculative. No one expects Harris to break with Israel, or even to rethink the fundamentals of the alliance, but it's possible to love Israel and still exercise some restraint to steer Israelis away from embarrassing themselves, as they have done ever since their defense against Hamas attacks turned into a campaign of genocide. Indeed, many Israelis -- not Netanyahu and his allies, who will take every atrocity they can get away with, but many of his wholeheartedly Zionist opponents -- expect the US to act as a brake on their own worst impulses. It is worth noting that when the Biden administration briefly held up supply of 2000 lb. bombs, Harris was disciplined enough to keep her messaging in line with the policy, while Biden waffled and gave up any pretense.

  • David Dayen: [07-23] Who is Kamala Harris? "The vice president has been a cautious political operator. Her vision for the future points in several directions."

  • Benjamin Hart: [07-24] Kamala Harris's biographer says she's always been underestimated. Interview with Dan Morain, author of Kamala's Way: An American Life.

  • Susan Milligan: [07-24] Sexism and racism only make Kamala Harris stronger.

  • Christian Paz: [07-18] Kamala Harris and the border: The myth and the facts.

  • Greg Sargent: [07-23] Fox News's awful new Kamala Harris smears hit nuclear levels of idiocy: "As right-wing media scramble for an effective attack on the vice president, a reporter who has closely examined Harris's career explains why her political identity is so hard to pin down."

  • Michael Scherer/Gerrit De Vynck/Maeve Reston: [07-23] Historic flood of cash pours into Harris campaign and allied groups: "Democrats reported raising more than $250 million since Biden announced he was leaving the presidential race and endorsed Harris."

  • Marc A Thiessen: [07-24] Harris is a gaffe-prone leftist. Why didn't anyone challenge her? "That would-be rivals are waiting for 2028 suggests they know our democracy will survive Trump." When I saw this title, I had to click on it, just to see who could be that dumb (although in retrospect I should have guessed). If you do bother to read this, you'll get a prevue of all the angles Republicans will use against Harris. If I knew nothing else, I'd take them as reason aplenty to vote for her. Still, I have to wonder whether the rest of the Republicans will even rise to Thiessen's level of sophistry. Consider this recent run of advice-giving columns:

  • Rebecca Traister: [07-24] The thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris: "The actual case for being unburdened by what has been." I think the author is really onto something here:

    None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes, to not feel panic but excitement. I felt excited about the future for the first time in years.

    More than that: I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don't know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.

    Our aversion to uncertainty is part of how we got to this precipice. Too unwilling to take risks -- on people, ideas, and platforms, on the next generation of leadership -- Democrats have remained chained to the past.

    In some ways, Harris is the safe choice right now, but after Biden and Clinton, she doesn't feel like such a stale, stodgy compromise. She feels like a candidate who can fight back, who won't spend the next four months backpedaling and disclaiming. And why can't she win? Who really believes racist, sexist, red-baiting Republicans theses days? Just cowards who take their clues from the fear and shame of those being maligned? Traister addresses this here:

    There are certainly terrible things in store: the racism and sexism Harris will face, the monstrous and vengeful resistance to her rise, in which she will be accused of incompetence and radicalism and being an affirmative-action token and a barren cat lady and a welfare queen who has slept her way to the top, all according to the right's overfamiliar playbooks for how to discredit people they would rather not participate fully in this democracy and helped by a media happy to engage in double standards. We know there will be bad polls and gaffes. And those who feel scared about what is on the line, including possibly me, will be tempted to say, "I told you this would happen!" because in our moments of direst discomfort we take slim consolation in certainty, even when the certainty is about how awful we knew everything was going to be.

    But if we permitted that dismal comfort to guide us, we would not have any space to be shocked and inspired by how good some things can be: the giddy memes emerging from an improbably enthused online left, the cheerily halved "BIDEN/HARRIS" yard signs now reading simply "HARRIS." The $81 million in donations raised in 24 hours. The 58,000 volunteers who stepped up in less than two days to work phones and knock doors. The Sunday-night zoom call hosted by Win With Black Women and Jotaka Eaddy, which was scheduled to accommodate 1,000 women, that eventually had to make room for 44,000 participants, all within hours of Harris becoming the unofficial candidate. The next night, a call organized by Win With Black Men drew 53,000 registrants, well above its capacity, of whom 21,000 were ultimately able to attend.

And other Democrats:

Included here are pieces about the upcoming procedure for replacing Biden as presidential nominee, any candidates beyond Harris, and the upcoming convention.

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

  • Blaise Malley: [07-19] Diplomacy Watch: Europe turns attention to GOP ticket: "Moscow, Kyiv, also react to eventuality of Trump returning to White House." This was written post-Vance, pre-Harris, so maybe the panic has subsided a bit. What hasn't changed is the war's stalemate, or more accurately, spiraling self-destruction.

America's empire and the world:

  • Wesley K Clark: [06-23] America is already great again: "Don't let doomsayers like Donald Trump fool you. On every meaningful metric of national strength, the United States under Joe Biden is a rising power -- and we have the economic means and necessary alliances to meet our gravest challenges." He's fighting bullshit with bullshit, which he wouldn't have to if he could just escape the "metric of national strength" Trump characterizes as greatness. I remember how Bill Moyers tried to convince LBJ to call his programs "the good society," but Johnson, ever the bullshit artist, insisted on "great" -- and got neither. Clark actually does a fair job of pointing out how the reforms Biden started, and further reforms that are broadly supported by the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, can make our lives better, can help the rest of the world, and put us in better alignment with peace and justice everywhere -- an analysis that could be much sharper with a bit less ego and arms hawking.

  • Tom Engelhardt: [07-18] Where did the American Century go? "The decline and fall of presidential America: are we now living in a defeat culture?"

  • Mike Lofgren: [06-23] Why can't America build enough weapons? That's really not the question we should be asking, but that anyone can bring it up should expose the hopeless trap we've locked ourselves into. "The debasement of the U.S. defense industrial base began, ironically, under Ronald Reagan, and won't be reversed until we abandon the free-market fundamentalism he introduced." This is a subject that merits a long screed, one I have no time or patience for now.


Other stories:

Adam Clark Estes: [07-11] Why I quit Spotify: Some things to think about, especially as "Spotify raised its prices in July for the second time in as many years." As I recall, in the announcement letter they touted all the extra podcast content the extra money will help them develop. (They develop things? I've never listened to a podcast there, so the all money they spent on Joe Rogan -- and on pissing off Neil Young and Joni Mitchell -- was wasted, as far as I'm concerned).

Bryan Walsh: [07-16] It's time to stop arguing over the population slowdown and start adapting to it: "The world population could peak in your lifetime."

Li Zhou: [07-19] The "largest IT outage in history," briefly explained: "Airlines, banks, and hospitals saw computer systems go down because of a CrowdStrike software glitch." Note that only Microsoft Windows users were affected ("Mac and Linux users were not affected").

Obituaries

John Otis: [07-24] Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper's magazine, dies at 89: "He turned Harper's into what he called a 'theater of ideas,' promoting emerging voices including David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens and Fareed Zakaria." I only occasionally read Harper's (and later Lapham's Quarterly), but I've read a couple of his books, and thought he was a superb political essayist: Theater of War: In Which the Republican Beocmes an Empire (2003), and Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2006). I should do a complete book rundown, but for now I just ordered a copy of his 2017 book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy.

Larry Rohter: [07-23] John Mayall, pioneer of British blues, is dead at 90: "He was best known not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted lead guitarist after another, starting with Eric Clapton."

Giovanni Russonello: [07-24] Toumain Diabaté, Malian master of the kora, is dead at 58: "He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society."

Alex Williams: [07-19] Happy Traum, mainstay of the folk music world, dies at 86: "A noted guitarist and banjo player, he emerged from the same Greenwich Village folk-revival scene as his friend and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan."

Books

Zack Beauchamp: [07-17] Why the far right is surging all over the world: "The 'reactionary spirit' and the roots of the US authoritarian moment." Excerpt from a book the author has been working on: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.

Doug Storm: [2022-09-16] A crash course in the works of H Bruce Franklin . . . with H Bruce Franklin. I just read the late cultural historian's memoir, Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War, which does a good job of recounting the path of post-WWII militarism from the red scare into Vietnam, as he discovered it in real time, and also recounted a much more militant anti-war movement than I was ever involved in. The book ends rather abruptly after Vietnam, making me wonder whether he planned a second one, or just figured his later life just wasn't that interesting. The interview covers the book, as well as other works, like

Music (and other arts?)

Ian Bogost: The mid-year best-of list is a travesty: "The worst idea of 2024 so far." And here I was thinking that the worst idea of 2024 was using AI to select bombing targets on Gaza. Or using drones for terror bombing around nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Or major political parties picking two doddering idiots to debate the very serious issues facing America and the world. The author seems to have reconciled himself to end-of-year lists: "These annual rundowns arrive during a period of reflection, when a full year's worth of human art and industry is about to recede into history." That's an odd turn of phrase: don't things turn into history the moment they happen? Whether they recede or not depends on whether they still have continuing import, or have (like most things) turned into passing fancies. Even so, one suspects that passing fancies are precisely what end-of-year lists are meant to recognize.

But it end-of-year lists are ok, what's so bad about mid-year lists? The time chunks are arbitrary. Smaller ones give us less material to cover, but you don't have to think back so far, and when it comes to music albums, it's not like we have a scarcity problem. My mid-year jazz critics poll (89 voters) identified 468 albums, vs. the full-year 2023 total of 760 (159 votes). It sounds like he's complaining about the novelty, but I've been tracking mid-year lists for a decade or more. They're still not nearly as common as end-of-year lists, but I've tracked about 35 so far this year, which includes a majority of the music publications that Album of the Year follows. As far as I know, nobody's taking the 6-month time chunk seriously enough to run a second-half list at end-of-year time, but I have seen movement toward shorter time periods, with quarterly and even monthly retrospectives.

Paul Schwartzman: [07-11] Who killed the Kennedys? The Rolling Stones won't tell you anymore. Songs evolve, sometimes as historical references slip from memory -- "On the Sunny Side of the Street" lives on, but increasingly likely to substitute for "rich as Rockefeller" -- and sometimes when casual terms fell out of fashion, as when Louis Armstrong changed "darkies" to "the folks."

Mid-year best-of lists:

Chatter

Zachary D Carter: [07-25][Response to Matt Stoller: "Democratic Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman gives $7 million to Harris, immediately demands she fire FTC Chair Lina Khan."]

  • Hoffman is a fool, these Silicon Valley gazillionaires don't actually believe in democracy.

  • The US economy is great, business is booming, the threat to growth is Jay Powel refusing to cut interest rates, not Lina Khan enforcing the law.

Nathan J Robinson: [07-25]

  • The core problem that Republicans have, and the reason they struggle to win the popular vote, is that they seem to despise the majority of people who live in this country.

  • We hate cat ladies, LGBTQ people, teachers, baristas, union members, immigrants, the underclass, "DEI," librarians, Hollywood, welfare moms, civil servants, professors, students, environmental activists, atheists, Muslims. Am I missing anyone from the list?

  • ok well your little cult should go form its own country where you don't have to live with anyone who doesn't share your theocratic morality

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]:

  • This video I made of a beautiful nature scene slowly defaced by the ugliest, most arrogant building this side of Pyongyang: I feel like it Says Something about Obama, and how history might judge him.

  • An arcadian fantasy, then the banal reality.

  • Terrible at building a bulwark against incipient fascism. That may become the salient metric, like for James Buchanan or Neville Chamberlain.

Tikun Olam: [07-25] [Responding to Ami Dar: "Former IDF Chiefs of Staff and Mossad directors (i.e. just a bunch of antisemitic leftist traitors) write the Congressional leadership: 'Netanyahu poses an existential threat to the State of Israel.'"]

  • It's amazing how generals and Shin Bet chiefs who performed horrible crimes during their careers, all of a sudden develop a moral conscience after they retire.

Actually, there's a movie about this phenomenon. It's called The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, came out in 2012, featuring interviews with six former Shin Bet heads. These people rise in the ranks based on their drive to dominate Palestinians, then when they retire, they realize they've accomplished nothing, leaving nothing but blown opportunities in their wake. But by then they've been replaced by younger men eager to proove they can be even more aggressive.

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]

  • Wow, the story the wily old pol who says "my opponent fucks goats" so the guy has to deny it has been one-upped by a twitter troll. Vance is just . . . a total loser.

This links to Jordan Liles: [07-23] No, JD Vance did not say he had sex with couch cushions: "A false online ruor about former U.S. President Donald Trump's running mate, a latex glove and couch cuishions spawned a number of jokes and memes." I must have heard of Snopes (a "fact-checking website," originally set up in 1994 as the Urban Legends Reference Pages) before, but can't ever recall consulting it. It is possibly useful for debunking false rumors, but it also does a nice job of propagating them, and possibly even turning them into an art form. I can see this as scurrilous, but it can also be kind of funny. For instance, this page links to six more stories on Vance:

  • JD Vance had middle-class upbringing in 4-bedroom house in suburban Ohio?
  • JD Vance said women should stay in violent marriages?
  • Trump mistakenly referred to JD Vance as 'JD Wentworth'?
  • JD Vance once called Trump 'America's Hitler'?
  • JD Vance's last name means 'bedbug' in Yiddish?
  • JD Vance says parents should have bigger say in democracy than non-parents.

The links are laid out in a grid, reminding me of those "prove you're not a robot" matrixes, challenging you to pick which ones are true and which are false. I'm not interested in playing, but will note that four sound somewhat familiar, and only one strikes me as implausible.

PS: I also stumbled across this: "When I get that feeling I want sectional healing . . ."


Initial count: 209 links, 10413 words. Updated count [07-25]: 228 links, 11635 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 44 albums, 9 A-list

Music: Current count 42668 [42624] rated (+44), 15 [20] unrated (-5).

I put out the call for a Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll back on June 30, offering a July 14 deadline for ballots, which would give me a few days to wrap things up before ArtsFuse returns from vacation on July 17. Sure, I expected a light turnout: mid-year lists, while increasingly common as click-bait, don't have the same gravitas as year-end wrap-ups, so fewer voters would be prepared let alone interested; there are vacations and other distractions; the voting period was much shorter than for the year-end poll; and I didn't want to work as hard at rounding up voters. (Last year's 159 voters took a lot of hustle on my part, but in taking the poll over from Francis Davis, I really wanted to prove that I could do it, and it was very wearing.) I didn't do any prospecting for new voters, and hoped that sending a single message to my Jazzpoll mailing list would do the trick.

It didn't: by last Wednesday, I had only about two dozen ballots counted, with another dozen promises to vote later, and a half-dozen polite declines, out of approx. 200 invitees. I had figured that 50% (let's say 80) ballots would still be a good showing, and would generate a lot of information. But 25% struck me as way too low. I had reason to suspect that a big part of the problem was that many messages from my server were being flagged and sequestered as "spam," especially by the gmail servers. So I rebooted, and sent a second round of invitations out to a subset of the list -- the ones I hadn't heard from, skipping a few who hadn't voted in recent years -- in MailMerge-customized letters from my regular email account (which has been dicey enough of late). That took many hours I had wanted to avoid, but got an almost immediate response. I streamlined the invitation a bit, and extended the deadline to July 17 (tonight, or effectively tomorrow morning). As of last night, I had 78 ballots counted, and as I'm writing this I have 2 more in my inbox, so I'm happy with my 50%. [PS: By posting time, the count increased to 86.]

I'll need to move on from this to write an essay (intro, overview, whatever), as well as footnotes on various oddities and discrepancies in the voting. I've struggled with the essay the last couple years, so fear I may again. On the other hand, the data is really extraordinary, so just dive into that. And every time I do this, I come away even more impressed with the extraordinary knowledge and exemplary judgment of the fine people who participate in this Poll. There's nothing we need more in this increasingly complex and scatter-brained world than smart people who develop and share their expertise so that we all may benefit. I'm proud to do my bit, and to help them do theirs.

I might as well start here and disclose my own ballot:

NEW RELEASES

  1. Fay Victor, Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms)
  2. Emmeluth's Amoeba, Nonsense (Moserobie)
  3. Luke Stewart Silt Trio, Unknown Rivers (Pi)
  4. Ballister, Smash and Grab (Aerophonic)
  5. Dave Douglas, Gifts (Greenleaf Music)
  6. The Core, Roots (Moserobie)
  7. James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Transfiguration (Intakt)
  8. Roby Glod-Christian Ramond-Klaus Kugel, No Toxic (Nemu)
  9. Ivo Perelman Quartet, Water Music (RogueArt)
  10. Mike Monford, The Cloth I'm Cut From (self-released)

RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)

  1. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance)
  2. Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy, The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (1995, Elemental Music)
  3. Alice Coltrane, The Carnegie Hall Concert (1971, Impulse!)
  4. Karen Borca Trio Quartet & Quintet, Good News Blues: Live at the Vision Festival 1998 & 2005 (NoBusiness)
  5. Mars Williams & Hamid Drake, I Know You Are but What Am I (1996, Corbett vs. Dempsey)

As lists go, this feels pretty haphazard and tentative. I keep an ongoing ranked list, but don't put much effort into maintaining it. What usually happens is that once I decide an album is A-, I scan the list from the top or bottom (depending on whether it's a real solid A- or a somewhat iffy one), find something that is roughly comparable, and insert the new record above or below that reference point. I fiddled with these a bit, but didn't do much rechecking. Fact is, I never do much rechecking.

This week's batch of reviews are mostly albums that popped up on ballots. I wasn't previously aware that the Kenny Barron, Ivanna Cuesta, Welf Dorr, and [Ahmed] albums existed. Tomeka Reid was one of those download links I've been sitting on -- I probably have nearly 100 stashed away, but I'm loathe to do the extra work when it's so easy to play a promo or stream something -- but it did well enough I felt obligated to listen to it. (Same for Braxton, with all 8 hours + 10:36, available on Bandcamp.) Beger, Borca, and Brötzmann were promo CDs, but they too can be found complete on Bandcamp. I learned about the Armstrong from hype mail the day it became available to stream.

I started to prepare a file with all of my 2024 jazz reviews, similar to my 2023 best jazz, but it isn't ready to be presented yet. I'll clean it up if I decide I want to mention it in my poll essay, or just discard it until end-of-year. (Once I've started it, it's just another thing to try to keep updated.) One thing I can note here is that when I divvied the 2024 file up into jazz and non-jazz sections, the split among new A/A- records was 52-to-25, with old music 12-to-5. That seems like a lot, given that I wound up with only 84 for all of 2023 (and 75 for 2022, 77 for 2021, 86 for 2020, 77 for 2019, 67 for 2018, 84 for 2017, 75 for 2016, 81 for 2015, 69 for 2014, 87 for 2014 -- that's as far as the file series goes back, and the record as far as I can easily tell. Makes me wonder if I'm going soft in my old age, but other explanations are possible, including that the Mid-Year Poll has made me aware of 237 albums I didn't previously have in my tracking file. Most I haven't played yet, but the dozens I have gotten to contributed to this skew.


Given all the extra work on the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, I didn't get around to Speaking of Which until Saturday, when I started with a long section on why Biden should withdraw from the Democratic presidential nomination. This all seems so obvious that it's hard to fathom the negligence and nonsense of whoever's conspiring to keep Biden in the race. On the other hand, much else that popped up in the week's news is hard to fathom. I certainly haven't had the time to figure it out.

The Trump shooting remains a story I know very little about, and have very little interest in pursuing, unless it turns out that my suspicion, as yet purely based on cynicism, that it was a staged PR ploy, turns out to be valid. (By the way, we've been watching the old Jane Marple mysteries. In one of them, the killer creates a blackout, kills someone else, then shoots herself, nicking the ear, so that when the lights come back on, she appears to have been the target (and very lucky). The ear was chosen because it bleeds readily but not seriously. It also emphasizes the luck involved, because it's generally very hard to shoot someone's ear without hitting their head. Of course, there are other ways to fake it, at little risk to Trump. The whole thing would take skill and timing, which seems beyond Trump and his cronies, the chances of such a scheme getting exposed are high, and it's hard to imagine that even Trump could lie his way out of it. On the other hand, how gullible is just about everyone involved so far? So it can't possibly be true, but they're playing it just like it was scripted. And everyone else seems to be falling for it.

Hardly any adds to Speaking of Which today: fixed a couple broken links, some typos. I'll open a file for next week after Music Week goes up. It'll be lower priority than the Poll, but good for the occasional break from thrashing on the Poll essay. I haven't been following the RNC, but I'm sure the people who have will be able to explain in its all its true horror.

There's also this story: Inae Oh: [07-16] The DNC's plan to force Biden's nomination is everything people hate about the DNC. If they go through with this, it won't have been the first time they gamed the rules to help Biden escape normal Democratic procedures: derailing the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, where Biden had performed poorly in 2016, while making South Carolina the first primary, eliminated the most likely path for someone more credible than Dean Phillips to challenge Biden, so no one risked it. This would be shabby in any case, but is especially galling from the people who sell themselves as the guardians of democracy.


New records reviewed this week:

  • أحمد [Ahmed]: Wood Blues (2022 [2024], Astral Spirits): [sp]: A-
  • Kenny Barron: Beyond This Place (2024, Artwork): [sp]: A-
  • BassDrumBone: Afternoon (2023 [2024], Auricle): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Jamie Baum Septet+: What Times Are These (2023 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Albert Beger/Ziv Taubenfeld/Shay Hazan/Hamid Drake: Cosmic Waves (2023 [2024], No Business): [cd]: A-
  • Anthony Braxton: 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 (2022 [2024], Braxton House): [bc]: B+(*)
  • George Cartwright & Bruce Golden: Dilate (2024, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Ivanna Cuesta: A Letter to the Earth (2023 [2024], Orenda): [sp]" A-
  • Jeremiah Cymerman: Body of Light (2022-23 [2024], 5049): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Welf Dorr/Elias Meister/Dmitry Ishenko/Kenny Wollesen: So Far So Good (2022 [2024], self-released): [bc]: A-
  • Edition Redux: Better a Rook Than a Pawn (2023, Audiographic): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Bill Frisell: Orchestras (2021-22 [2024], Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Paul Giallorenzo Trio: Play (2021 [2023, Delmark): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Erik Griswold/Chloe Kim/Helen Svoboda: Anatomical Heart (2023 [2024], Earshift Music): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Sarah Hanahan: Among Giants (2024, Blue Engine): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Simon Hanes: Tsons of Tsunami (2024, Tzadik): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Roger Kellaway: Live at Mezzrow (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Brian Landrus: Plays Ellington & Strayhorn (2023 [2024], Palmetto): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Nduduzo Makhathini: Unomkhubulwane (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel: The Room (2024, Real World): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Madeleine Peyroux: Let's Walk (2024, Just One Recording/Thirty Tigers): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Tomeka Reid Quartet: 3+3 (2023 [2024], Cuneiform): [dl]: A-
  • Michael Shrieve: Drums of Compassion (2024, 7D Media): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Harry Skoler: Red Brick Hill (2022 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Something Else! [Featuring Vincent Herring]: Soul Jazz (2024, Smoke Sessions): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Gregory Tardy: In His Timing (2023, WJ3): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Alan Walker: A Little Too Late (2024, Aunt Mimi's): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Louis Armstrong: Louis in London (1968 [2024], Verve): [sp]: A-
  • Derek Bailey/Sabu Toyozumi: Breath Awareness (1987 [2024], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Karen Borca Trio Quartet & Quintet: Good News Blues: Live at the Vision Festival 1998 & 2005 (1998-2005 [2024], No Business): [cd]: A-
  • Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Sabu Toyozumi: Complete Link (2016 [2024], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
  • Nat King Cole: Live at the Blue Note Chicago (1953 [2024], Iconic): [sp]: B+(**)
  • The Jazzanians: We Have Waited Too Long (1988 [2024], Ubuntu Music): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Charles Mingus: Incarnations (1960 [2024], Candid): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Louis Moholo-Moholo: Louis Moholo-Moholo's Viva-La-Black (1988 [2024], Ogun): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Septet Matchi-Oul: Terremoto (1971 [2024], Souffle Continu): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Sun Ra & His Arkestra: Pink Elephants on Parade (1985-90 [2024], Modern Harmonic): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The John Wright Trio: South Side Soul (1960 [2024], Craft): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

  • Albert Beger: The Primitive (1995, NMC): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Albert Beger: lThe Art of the Moment (2000, Third Ear Music): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Welf Dorr: Funk Monk 2002 (2002 [2020], self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Welf Dorr: Flowers for Albert (2005 [2020], self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Welf Dorr Unit: Blood (2014 [2018], Creative Sources): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Welf Dorr/Dmitry Ishenko/Joe Hertenstein: Pandemic House Sessions (2020 [2021], self-released): [sp]: B+(***)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Greg Copeland: Empire State (Franklin & Highland, EP) [09-06]
  • Ize Trio: The Global Suites (self-released) [08-02]
  • Frank Paul Schubert/Michel Pilz/Stefan Scheib/Klaus Kugel: Live at FreeJazz Saar 2019 (Nemu) [05-01]

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll ballot, new albums:

  1. Fay Victor: Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms, 2CD)
  2. Emmeluth's Amoeba: Nonsense (Moserobie)
  3. Luke Stewart Silt Trio: Unknown Rivers (Pi)
  4. Ballister: Smash and Grab (Aerophonic)
  5. Dave Douglas: Gifts (Greenleaf Music)
  6. The Core: Roots (Moserobie)
  7. James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Transfiguration (Intakt) **
  8. Romy Glod/Christian Ramond/Klaus Kugel: No ToXiC (Nemu)
  9. Ivo Perelman Quartet: Water Music (RogueArt) *
  10. Mike Monford: The Cloth I'm Cut From (self-released)

Old music:

  1. Sonny Rollins: Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance, 3CD)
  2. Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy: The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (1995, Elemental Music, 2CD)
  3. Karen Borca Trio Quartet & Quintet: Good News Blues: Live at the Vision Festival 1998 & 2005 (No Business)
  4. Mars Williams & Hamid Drake: I Know You Are but What Am I (1996, Corbett vs. Dempsey) **

Daily Log

I made a quick pass at a Best Jazz Albums of 2024, thinking that might help me construct a mid-year poll ballot. I didn't want to put the effort into doing a companion non-jazz file, but as a side effect, I wound up with the following list of A/A- non-jazz new releases:

  1. Heems & Lapgan: Lafandar (Veena Sounds)
  2. Fox Green: Light Over Darkness (self-released)
  3. Pet Shop Boys: Nonetheless (Parlophone)
  4. The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator (Bar/None)
  5. Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown (Domino)
  6. Kali Uchis: Orquídeas (Geffen)
  7. Dua Lipa: Radical Optimism (Warner)
  8. Bill Ryder-Jones: Iechyd Da (Domino)
  9. Thomas Anderson: Hello, I'm From the Future (Out There)
  10. Kim Gordon: The Collective (Matador)
  11. Tierra Whack: World Wide Whack (Interscope)
  12. Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department (Republic)
  13. Bob Vylan: Humble as the Sun (Ghost Theatre)
  14. Willie Nelson: The Border (Legacy)
  15. Kneecap: Fine Art (Heavenly)
  16. 1010benja: Ten Total (Three Six Zero)
  17. Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud (Hijinxx/Island)
  18. Maggie Rogers: Don't Forget Me (Capitol)
  19. Madi Diaz: Weird Faith (Anti-)
  20. Serengeti: KDIV (Othar)
  21. Kacey Musgraves: Deeper Well (MCA Nashville)
  22. Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat (Anti-)
  23. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Interscope)
  24. Hermanos Gutiérrez: Sonido Cósmico (Easy Eye Sound)
  25. Sprints: Letter to Self (City Slang)

Also non-jazz reissues/compilations/archival music:

  1. Franco & O.K. Jazz: Franco Luambo Makiadi Presents Les Editions Populaires (1968-1970) (Planet Ilunga)
  2. Mixmaster Morris/Jonah Sharp/Haruomi Hosono: Quiet Logic (1998, WRWTFWW)
  3. Rail Band: Buffet Hotel De La Gare, Bamako (1973, Mississippi)
  4. Merengue Típico, Nueva Generación! (1960s-70s, Bongo Joe)
  5. Austin Peralta: Endless Planets [Deluxe Edition] (2011, Brainfeeder)

Meanwhile, the jazz list looks like this:

  1. Fay Victor: Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms, 2CD)
  2. Emmeluth's Amoeba: Nonsense (Moserobie)
  3. Luke Stewart Silt Trio: Unknown Rivers (Pi)
  4. Ballister: Smash and Grab (Aerophonic)
  5. Dave Douglas: Gifts (Greenleaf Music)
  6. The Core: Roots (Moserobie)
  7. James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Transfiguration (Intakt) **
  8. Romy Glod/Christian Ramond/Klaus Kugel: No ToXiC (Nemu)
  9. Ivo Perelman Quartet: Water Music (RogueArt) *
  10. Mike Monford: The Cloth I'm Cut From (self-released)
  11. Matt Wilson: Matt Wilson's Good Trouble (Palmetto)
  12. Advancing on a Wild Pitch: Disasters, Vol. 2 (Hot Cup) **
  13. Dan Weiss: Even Odds (Cygnus)
  14. QOW Trio: The Hold Up (Ubuntu Music) **
  15. Ivo Perelman/Mark Helias/Tom Rainey: Truth Seeker (Fundacja Sluchaj) **>
  16. Queen Esther: Things Are Looking Up (EL)
  17. Dave Rempis/Pandelis Karayorgis/Jakob Heinemann/Bill Harris: Truss (Aerophonic/Drift)
  18. Julia Vari Feat. Negroni's Trio: Somos (Alternative Representa)
  19. Chris Potter/Brad Mehldau/John Patitucci/Brian Blade: Eagle's Point (Edition) **
  20. Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Open Me, a Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (Spiritmuse) **
  21. David Murray Quartet: Francesca (Intakt) **
  22. Matthew Shipp Trio: New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disk)
  23. Amanda Gardier: Auteur: Music Inspired by the Films of Wes Anderson (self-released)
  24. Four + Six: Four + Six (Jazz Hang)
  25. Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (Blue Note) **
  26. Ivanna Cuesta: A Letter to the Earth (Orenda) **
  27. Idit Shner & Mhondoro: Ngatibatanei [Let Us Unite!] (OA2)
  28. Jason Stein/Marilyn Crispell/Damon Smith/Adam Shead: Spi-raling Horn (Balance Point Acoustics) **
  29. Claudio Scolari Project: Intermission (Principal)
  30. Ivo Perelman/Barry Guy/Ramon Lopez: Interaction (Ibeji Music) **
  31. Charlie Kohlhase's Explorer's Club: A Second Life (Mandorla Music) **
  32. John Surman: Words Unspoken (ECM) **
  33. William Parker/Cooper-Moore/Hamid Drake: Heart Trio (AUM Fidelity)
  34. Joel Ross: Nublues (Blue Note) **
  35. Radam Schwartz: Saxophone Quartet Music (Arabesque)
  36. Tomeka Reid Quartet: 3+3 (Cuneiform) **
  37. Alfredo Colón: Blood Burden (Out of Your Head)
  38. Albert Beger/Ziv Taubenfeld/Shay Hazan/Hamid Drake: Cosmic Waves (No Business)
  39. Welf Dorr/Elias Meister/Dmitry Ishenko/Kenny Wollesen: So Far So Good (self-released) **
  40. Julieta Eugenio: Stay (Cristalyn)
  41. Layale Chaker & Sarafand: Radio Afloat (In a Circle)
  42. Samo Salamon/Vasil Hadzimanov/Ra-Kalam Bob Moses: Dances of Freedom (Samo)
  43. Nicole Glover: Plays (Savant) **
  44. Owen Broder: Hodges: Front and Center, Vol. Two (Outside In Music)
  45. Jason Robinson: Ancestral Numbers (Playscape)
  46. Beings: There Is a Garden (No Quarter) **
  47. Maria Faust Jazz Catastrophe: 3rd Mutation: Moth (Bush Flash) **
  48. Gilbert Holmström: Peak (Moserobie)
  49. Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet: Four Guitars Live (Palilalia) **
  50. Ernesto Rodrigues/Bruno Parinha/João Madeira: Into the Wood (Creative Sources)
  51. Mathias Højgaard Jensen: Is as Is (Fresh Sound New Talent)
  52. Mercer Hassy Orchestra: Duke's Place (Mercer Hassy)

And for reissues/compilations/archival music:

  1. Sonny Rollins: Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance, 3CD)
  2. Karen Borca Trio Quartet & Quintet: Good News Blues: Live at the Vision Festival 1998 & 2005 (No Business)
  3. Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy: The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (1995, Elemental Music, 2CD)
  4. Charles Gayle/Milford Graves/William Parker: WEBO (1991, Black Editions Archive) **
  5. Mars Williams & Hamid Drake: I Know You Are but What Am I (1996, Corbett vs. Dempsey) **
  6. Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert (1971, Impulse!) **
  7. Mal Waldron/Terumasa Hino: Reminscent Suite (1973, BBE) **
  8. Grupo Irakere: Grupo Irakere (1976, Mr. Bongo) **
  9. Louis Armstrong: Louis in London (1968, Verve) **
  10. Art Tatum: Jewels in the Treasure Box: The 1953 Chicago Blue Note Jazz Club Recordings (Resonance, 3CD)
  11. Christer Bothén Featuring Bolon Bata: Trancedance [40th Anniversary Edition] (1984, Black Truffle) **
  12. Roberto Magris: Love Is Passing Thru: Solo/Duo/Trio/Quartet (2004, JMood)

Monday, July 15, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Not actually posted until 16-July-2024.

I'm starting this introduction on Tuesday, already two days late, ignoring for now the new news pouring in, especially from the RNC. Due to my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll project, I wasn't able to start until Saturday, at which point I started with the long introduction to the Biden section. After that, I scrounged up a few quick links to seemingly important stories. The alleged Trump shooting -- I'm not denying it, but I'm not fully buying it either -- had just happened, so I had to spin off a section on that. Monday the Cannon ruling on the Trump documents case came down, so I had to note that. If I find out that Hamas and Netanyahu agreed to a cease fire deal -- I've heard that, but as I'm writing this I haven't seen any confirmation -- I'll note that too. (But thus far I've been smart to ignore past rumors of impending agreement.)

A couple days ago, still with Biden very much on my mind, I thought I'd begin this introduction with a spur-of-the-moment tweet I posted:

Unsolicited advice to the ruling class: can someone point out to Biden that being president and running are two different full-time jobs. He should pick one, like the one we need someone to focus on and do well, right now. He could set a model we should add to the Constitution.

Looking it up now, I see that it only has 97 views, with 0 replies, forwards, or likes. It seems like views have been steadily declining, although the number of followers (640) is about double from a long plateau about a year ago.

One thing that stimulated my thought was when I saw several folks pushing a constitutional amendment to impose a maximum age limit on presidents. (Search doesn't reveal a lot of examples, but here's one.) I have no time to argue this here, but I've often worried about the accumulation of arbitrary power in the presidency -- especially war-making power, but there are other issues here -- and with in the development of a political personality cult (Reagan is the obvious example, with Trump even more so, but they at least remained aligned with their party, while Clinton and Obama used their office to direct their party to their own personal fortunes, a shift that worked to the detriment of other Democrats).

Banning self-succession (second consecutive terms) wouldn't fix all of the problems with the presidency, but it would help, especially in terms of democracy. I won't go into details here, but there should also be limits on nepotism (spouses, children, possibly more), and major campaign finance reforms. Whether you keep the two-term total limit is optional -- eliminating it may get rid of the often stupid "lame duck" argument. But I also suspect that people will have little appetite for returning a non-incumbent ex-president.

One more point: if presidents can't run again, maybe they'll actually put their political instincts aside and settle into actually doing their jobs. Trump is the obvious worst-case example: the first thing he did after inauguration in 2017 was to file as a candidate for 2020, and he returned to holding campaign rallies a month or two later. Given how temperamental his judgment was, we are probably lucky that he turned out to be so oblivious to actually doing the job, but that's hardly something we can count on saving us again. Even more competent presidents were repeatedly distracted by political duties -- ones they were, as a requirement for selection, more interested in, if not necessarily better at.

At this point, the essential skill sets of campaigners and administrators have diverged so radically that it's almost inconceivable that you could find one person for both jobs. I could imagine a constitutional change where whoever wins the presidency has to appoint someone else (or maybe a troika) to run the executive government, while being personally limited to symbolic public service, like the King of England, or the President of Israel. But the amendment I proposed above should be a much easier sell, especially given the mess we're in now.

Fortunately, we don't actually need the amendment this year. All we need is for Biden to drop out. As I explain below, there are lots of good reasons for him to do so. This is one more, and if he grasped it, would be a principled one.


About 10 PM Tuesday, time to call it quits for this week. I may pick up a few adds while I'm working on the similarly delayed Music Week, but I expect to be extremely busy on deadline day for the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll (up to 78 ballots as I write this). No doubt I'll have to do a lot of cross-checking next week to keep from repeating stories. But the big ones, rest assured, will return, pretty much as they are here, so what's below should give you a leg up on everyone else.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: [07-12] We must understand Israel as a settler-colonial state: I'd go a bit deeper and say we can only understand Israel if we start from acknowledging that it is primarily a settler-colonial state. I'm not saying this because I think "settler-colonial state" means we should automatically condemn Israel, and especially not to argue that the only solution is expulsion ("go back where you came from" just won't do here). But identifying it as such puts Israel into a conceptual framework that really helps explain the options and choices that Israeli political leaders made -- many of which do indeed deserve approbation -- as well as providing a framework to see some way of ending the conflict on terms that most people can find agreeable. I would add that among settler-colonial states, Israel is exceptionally frustrated, which is why it has turned into such a cauldron of interminable violence.

  • Marcy Newman: [07-13] The reluctant memoirist exposes the academy: "At a time when Palestine activism and free expression at U.S. universities are under attack, Steven Salaita's new memoir disabuses us of the notion that these universities are anything other than hedge funds with a campus."

  • James North: [07-10] Israel's leading paper says its own army deliberately killed Israelis on October 7. But in the US media: silence: "Israel ordered the 'Hannibal Directive' on October 7 by ordering the killing of captive Israeli soldiers and civilians. But the U.S. media continues to hide the truth."

  • Alice Rothchild: [07-14] The destruction of healthcare in Gaza and the scientific assessment of settler colonial violence: "The Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council held a distinguished panel of experts that addressed the settler colonial determinants of health in light of the Gaza genocide." Following up on these documents:

  • Philip Weiss: [07-14] Weekly Briefing: The 'NYT' justifies Israeli slaughter of civilians as necessary tactic: "The New York Times says Israel has been 'forced' to massacre Palestinian civilians because Hamas militants hide in bedrooms. The U.S. used such justifications for massacres in Vietnam."

Trump:

Well, this happened:

  • [Vox]: [07-14] Who shot Trump? What we know about the assassination attempt. [PS: This piece has been updated after I wrote the following, as more information was released, such as the identities of the people shot, including the alleged shooter.] "This is what happened at the Butler rally, as we understand it right now." As I understand it, shots were fired during a Trump rally. Trump dropped to the ground. When he appeared again, there was blood on his face. Secret Service surrounded him, and moved him off the platform. The people around him jerked when he did, but afterwards mostly looked confused. He tweeted later that he had been shot, nicked in the ear. (From his head angle at the time of the shot, it must have come from the far side -- not from the crowd, or from the gallery behind him.) Reports are that two people wound up dead -- one the alleged shooter, and another person, still unidentified, and two more people were injured. It's not clear where those people, including the shooter, were, or what the timing of were. One report says the shots came from an "AR-type" gun.

    I'll link to more pieces as I collect them. But knowing only what is in here (and having watched the video provided), my first reaction is that a real assassination attempt like this would be very hard to pull off, but would be very easy to fake (assuming you could imagine that anyone involved would be willing to do so, which with this particular crew isn't inconceivable; still, the risk of faking it and then getting exposed seems like it should be pretty extreme). No need to jump to that conclusion, but I'm pretty sure the "grassy knoll" squad is going to jump all over this story. More Vox pieces are collected in: Donald Trump targeted in assassination attempt.

  • Zack Beauchamp:

  • Constance Grady: [07-15] The pure media savvy of Trump's first pump photo, explained by an expert: "It's his brand now." The interview goes into the making of other iconic photos, as well as Trump's history of seizing on moments like this.

  • Jeet Heer:

  • Murtza Hussain: Will this make Trump more popular? "Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record of boosting their popularity."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-15] God's strongman.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-15] Trump assassination attempt makes 2024 election more bonkers than ever: "But will it cinch a victory for him?" Evidently, "many Republicans are already saying the bullets that nearly killed Donald Trump have clinched his return to the White House."

  • Natasha Lennard: The only kind of "political violence" all U.S. politicians oppose.

  • Eric Levitz:

  • Stephen Prager: [07-16] 'Political violence' is all around us: "Condemning 'political violence' rings hollow coming from politicians who are highly selective in the violence they deplore. We should oppose it consistently."

  • Aja Romano: [07-15] The Trump assassination attempt was a window into America's fractured reality. I'm not sure whether the subhed is a conclusion or just a premise: "The shooting wasn't staged, but conspiratorial thinking has become widespread in our paranoid age." You know, the latter truism doesn't prove "the shooting wasn't staged." It just suggests that we shouldn't jump to that conclusion.

  • Helen Santoro/Lucy Dean Stockton/David Sirota/Joel Warner: Pennsylvania GOP fought a ban on the gun used in Trump shooting.

  • Timothy Messer-Kruse: [07-15] The myth of the magic bullet: He doesn't weigh in on the Trump shooting, but takes on the more general idea, that a single bullet can change history for the better. I rather doubt his assertion that "there would still be a MAGA movement" without Trump, because no matter how much fuel of "white resentment" had accumulated, it still took a spark to set it off, and it's hard to find a leader with Trump's particular mix of ego and ignorance. But he is right when he says, "Trump is not a threat to democracy as much as he is a symbol of its deepening absence."

On Monday, Trump announced his pick for vice president: JD Vance:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-15] What J.D. Vance really believes: "The dark worldview of Trump's choice for vice president, explained."

    Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump's scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week's assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats' rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.

    This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat" in the US government and "replace them with our people." If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.

    "You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it," he declares.

  • Aaron Blake: [07-15] The risk of J.D. Vance: "Trump went with the MAGA pick. But the 2022 election suggests that might not be the right electoral one."

  • Jonathan Chait: [07-15] J.D. Vance joins ticket with man he once called 'America's Hitler': "Apparently he meant it as a compliment."

  • Ben Jacobs: [07-15] J.D. Vance on his MAGA conversion: "Trump's man in Ohio once called him 'America's Hitler,' but there's an explanation."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-15] Hillbilly shapeshifter: "Re-reading J.D. Vance's memoir." This came out earlier this year, but gets an update for the moment.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-15] J.D. Vance as VP means Trump picks MAGA over 'unity'. What does "unity" even mean? Trump has complete control. He doesn't need to compromise with anyone. One might ask why he would pick a double-crossing weasel, but Trump probably figure he's on top of that game. Maybe Kilgore is just trying to plug the Intelligencer liveblog: So much for 'national unity': RNC live updates. Republicans don't need "unity": they believe they're the only ones who count, so they already are "unity" -- now if they can just get rid of everyone else, they'll be set (and America will be great again, like it was when the other people didn't count).

  • Daniel Larison: [07-15] What will Vance do for Trump's foreign policy? "The Ohio senator's ideology is hard to nail down as he has vacillated between restraint and interventionism."

  • Steve M: [07-15] J.D. Vance probably hates you more than Trump does: "It is clear that Vance is an angry, nasty person whose contempt for the people he doesn't like is bone deep." Also:

    Now that Trump has chosen Vance, I expect Democrats to focus on the mean tweets Vance posted about Trump before he became a Trump fan. I don't see the point -- politicians (and non-politicians) change their minds about people all the time. Kamala Harris said harsh things about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan's economic ideas in the 1980 campaign. I think it's more important for voters to know how much contempt Vance has for everyone who disagrees with him or does things he doesn't like. I have kids, so he hates me. Maybe he hates you too.

  • Veronica Riccobene/Helen Santoro/Joel Warner: J.D. Vance wants police to track people who have abortions.

  • Ross Rosenfeld: The scary message Trump sent by choosing J.D. Vance: "The Ohio senator is a sycophant who will never challenge or question his boss -- not even to defend American democracy."

Of course, the Trump news doesn't end there.

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-14] A brief history of Trump and violence: "But that can't be allowed to erase the long, ugly history of Trump's dalliance with violence."

  • David Atkins: [07-08] Pay attention to Trump's every cruel and crazy syllable: "All eyes are on President Biden's words, but Trump is getting meaner and increasingly bonkers each day."

    Let's look at just a few recent examples.

    1. Trump wants to make poor migrants fight each other for sport.
    2. Trump wants to ban electric cars because someone in an electric boat might get eaten by a shark.
    3. Donald Trump wants to ban all vaccine mandates in schools, which would include polio, measlesl, etc.
    4. Trump wants to end meaningful elections in the United States.
    5. Trump thinks the end of Roe v Wade was "amazing" and brags that he was "able to kill Roe v. Wade.
  • Elizabeth Austin: [07-13] Trump's Democrats-support-infanticide trope is an infuriating lie: "Republicans like the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee are mocking every woman who got that horrible call from the obstetrician and made the tragic decision to end a hopeless pregnancy."

  • Christopher Fettweis: [05-15] Trump's big idea: Deploy assassination teams to Mexico: "His plan to kill drug kingpins to solve the American opioid crisis will backfire dramatically."

  • Chris Lehman: [07 -11] Donald Trump's new strategy: act normal: "With the opposition in disarray, Trump and his campaign have begun exhibiting unusual restraint in hopes of expanding his support."

  • Clarence Lusane: [07-12] Who thinks Donald Trump is racist? "Other racists, that's who!"

  • Nicole Narea: [07-15] A right-wing judge just threw out a case against Trump in a brazen abuse of power: "The classified documents case against Trump hits another major setback before the 2024 election." Why?

    In her ruling, Cannon argued that because Smith had not been appointed a special counsel by the president and confirmed by the Senate, his appointment violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause. . . .

    Cannon's ruling, which relies on a stringent reading of the Constitution and represents a brazen break with precedent, has come under heavy criticism from legal scholars. Under her ruling, the appointment of prior special counsels would have also come into question, from Archibald Cox, who investigated the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation, to Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    I'm sure there will be more on this next week. Well, for now, this one is worth quoting at length:

    • Steve M.: [07-15] The death of America is steady rot:

      We think we'll lose democracy and the rule of law suddenly if Donald Trump becomes president again. We think the edifice will be destroyed like the Twin Towers on 9/11: the planes hit the buildings, and without hours they collapsed in on themselves.

      But our system is like a house that's rotting room by room. The foundation has cracks. There are termites. The roof leaks. One room after another has become uninhabitable.

      We've lost the federal courts. The would-be murderers of America already have the federal bench they need to sustain the horrible America they want. A second Trump presidency won't really worsen the federal bench -- it will only fix it in place in its current form for several more decades. I'm 65, and I'll never live to see a federal bench that isn't an extremist Republican legislature in robes.

      Through gerrymandering, we lost democracy in many state legislatures years ago. In states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, liberals and moderates add up to more than 45% of the electorate and have exactly none of the legislative power, because of gerrymandering. This happened long before Trump and there were no "Death of Democracy" front-page headlines.

      If Trump wins in November, he and the thugs of Project 2025 might take a wrecking ball to what's left of the house. But already several rooms are closed off. It's unsafe to live in them. And even if Trump loses, or wins and doesn't follow through with the worst ideas his backers have proposed, many rooms in the house will continue to rot.

      A lot of this rot can be traced back to Reagan in the 1980s, when a brief majority of Americans put sentiment and emotion over reason and practicality, and ceded power to the people Kurt Anderson called Evil Geniuses (subtitle: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History), and for that matter to the conspiracies -- to use a word we've systematically been trained to abjure -- of the 1970s that many others have written about (off the top of my head: Rick Perlstein, Jane Mayer, Max Blumenthal, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Kalman, Nancy McLean, Jeff Madrick). For sure, part of the blame lies with Democrats, like Carter and Clinton, who thought they could beat the Republicans at their own game, and some to with Democrats like Obama and Biden, who chose to play along rather than rouse the people to defend their rights against relentless Republican assault.

      M's point is absolutely right. Bad choices often take years, sometimes decades, to manifest themselves. To cite two examples where the elapsed time was too short to cloud causality, the distance from Reagan's deregulation of the S&L industry to its collapse was 6-8 years. The distance from Clinton's repeal of Carter-Glass and the deregulation of derivatives -- changes mostly championed by Republicans like Phil Gramm, but Clinton signed off on them -- was 8-10 years. Longer, more insidious time frames are even more common. I recall George Brockway tracing the financial madness circa 2000 back to an obscure banking law Republicans passed after their fluke congressional win in 1946 -- the same one that gave us Taft-Hartley, which had little effect on unionized auto, aircraft, steel, etc., workers through the 1960s but led to their collapse from the 1980s on. Similarly, there are blunders from the early Cold War that still haunt us (like the overthrow of Iran in 1953).

      We've been systematically starved of democracy for decades now: ever since campaigns became media circuses, increasingly in thrall to the sponsor class. Maybe now that the strangulation has become so obvious -- the only choice we've been allowed is between the two least popular, and quite arguably the two least competent, politicians in America -- we'll finally realize our need to struggle to breathe free. Or maybe we'll just fucking die. After all, we're about 90% buried already.

. . . And other Republicans:

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-02] Will Arizona be MAGA's last stand? "Trump needs the state's votes to win. But after its highest court revived an 1864 law that bans abortions, all bets are off."

  • Hassan Ali Kanu: [07-11] No, Trump and GOP have not 'softened' on abortion, women's rights: "The language change in their platforms is nakedly dishonest bait and switch."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-14] The authoritarian plot: "At the National Conservatism conference, Republicans mix with racists ranting about 'post-white America.'"

  • Steve M: I have a couple more of his posts elsewhere, but let's go to town here:

    • [07-13] First thoughts on the shooting (updated): Starts with his own prediction tweet: "Every rank-and-file Republican voter believes this was an assassination attempt ordered by President Biden. Trump will soon start pouring gasoline on the flames by stating this as if it's fact." Update shows it's happening even ahead of Trump's provocation. He does have them well trained.

    • [07-13] Project 2025: the gaslighting is well underway.

    • [07-13] Fear the all-powerful left! "The fever dreams of the propaganda-addled crazies at the Heritage Foundation are hilarious."

    • [07-12] Are Biden's poll numbers impervious to bad news, like Trump's? I think the upshot here is that while people may not know what (or whom) to believe, they've become so wary of being lied to that they reject any news, probably from any source, leaving them impervious to change. If you're a journalist/pundit, you may think it's your job to adjust to new facts, but if you're not, it's just fucking noise, almost all of which can be discounted.

    • [07-11] New York Times editorial: Trump is bad -- but the Republican Party is awesome! That editorial was titled Trump is not fit to lead.

      Not a single Democrat is cited in this editorial. I understand that that's the point -- the ed board members, if you asked them about this, would say, "We're making the point that even Trump's fellow Republicans know he's unfit" (though no Republican in good standing dares to say that). But this is also a sign that the Times ed board agrees with the Republican Party's decades-long campaign to "other" Democrats. Our political culture accepts the GOP's assertion that Democrats aren't really Americans.

    • [07-10] Dear Democrats: You know people can hear you, right? (updated):

      It's been thirteen days since the June 27 debate. On each of those thirteen days, the top news story in America -- not just in the monomaniacal New York Times, but everywhere -- has been "Christ, That Joe Biden Is Really, Really Old. He Can't Possibly Win. He Has to Step Aside. Has He Done It Yet?" Other stories, including stories that could have been very damaging to Donald Trump, were fully or partly buried. And still Democrats can't muscle Biden out, persuade him to leave the race, or stop talking about it and get behind him. . . .

      I think Democrats believe it's okay for this to play out in public for two weeks -- two weeks of bad headlines for the man who now seems certain to be the nominee -- because of a fundamental misunderstanding of politics that hurts them in other areas as well. They think this is fine because they think voters pay attention to politics only in the last couple of months before an election. That's the reason most Democrats don't bother with messaging unless it's election season, while Republicans engage in messaging every day of every year.

      I'm not personally super bothered by the protracted process, but clearly this has given Trump and the Republicans a whole month of big PR wins, from the June 27 debate all the way through the end of the RNC, especially as, in response to the shooting incident, Democrats have wisely decided to pull their ads, and keep their powder dry. But if the election was next week, this would have been a total disaster for the Democracy. (Maybe not for the small-d concept, but that's what they called the Party back in Jackson's day, and that's what Will Rogers meant when he said he wasn't a member of an organized political party: he was a democrat.) But at some point soon-ish, they really have to get the act together and turn this mess around. I don't see how they can do that without first jettisoning Biden, who is the indelible personification of a much greater crisis in democratic faith.

    • [07-09] The press doesn't have a "bias toward coherence" -- it has a bias toward Republicans.

  • Shawn Musgrave: Trump's camp says it has nothing to do with Project 2025 manifesto -- aside from writing it.

  • Timothy Noah: The GOP platform perfectly reflects the lunacy of Trump's party: "I read it so you don't have to: It's an unconditional surrender to the cult of Trump, and its plan to reduce inflation is laughable."

  • Rick Perlstein: [07-10] Project 2025 . . . and 1921, and 1973, and 1981: "Terrifying blueprints for the next Republican presidency are a quadrennial tradition." Perlstein points out that aside from all the truly evil stuff you've possibly read about elsewhere, there is also a lot of confusion and in-fighting going on. For example:

    The section about Russia in the State Department chapter -- the author is an old hand of the High Reaganite wing of the Republican foreign-policy guild; a "globalist," if you will -- emphasizes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict "starkly divides conservatives," with one faction arguing for the "presence of NATO and U.S. troops if necessary," while the other "denies that U.S. Ukrainian support is in the national security interest of America at all."

    This misunderstanding is important. The silence, so far, on those parts, indicts us. These are great, big, blinking red "LOOK AT ME" advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans at their most vulnerable joints, much as when Richard Nixon cynically expanded affirmative action requirements for federal building projects, in order to seed resentment between blue-collar building trades Democrats and Black Democrats.

    And yes, there is plenty of blunt insanity, too. But, bottom line, this is a complicated document. "Conservatives in Disarray" is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025. But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides.

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-13] Project 2025: The myths and the facts: "The sweeping conservative plan for Trump's second term is very real. Here's what it actually says."

  • Prem Thakker: GOP platform doesn't mention the word "climate" once -- even after hottest year on record.

Biden

Evidently Biden's age was already an issue in 2008, when Barack Obama picked him for Vice President. The thinking was that his age would balance off Obama's youth, that the position would cap off an already long and distinguished political career, and that he'd be too old to mount a serious run in 2016, leaving the field open for Hillary Clinton.

But when Clinton lost to Donald Trump -- let that sink in for a moment, folks -- Biden convinced himself that he could have done better, and set out to prove it in 2020. And he was a flop, his age dulling the charisma he never really had in the first place, but with Bernie Sanders a year older age wasn't so much an issue, and with Sanders winning, Biden became the only credible option to stop him, and the donor wing of the Democratic Party were desperate to do that.

After derailing Sanders, defeating Trump should have been the easy part, but somehow Biden managed to make even that look hard fraught. He won, but not decisively enough to lead Congress, or to squelch Trump's big lie about a rigged/stolen election. Trump has, if anything, loomed larger in American politics than Biden, even as president, could do. While that is testimony to several alarming tendencies in public opinion -- and media that both panders to and cashes in on controversy -- one cannot help but suspect that Biden's age is part of the problem.

At any rate, it's the part that people focus on once they realize that there is a problem that it could plausibly explain. They do that because it's tangible, something they have lots of experience with or at least observing. It's also something you can base expectations on, because it's inevitably progressive: if age seems to be a problem now, you can only expect it to get worse. Many Democrats, especially one who have closely bound their careers to Biden, have worked hard to hide evidence and deflect discussion of Biden's age -- even from Biden himself. But once you see it, as most people did in his June 27 debate with Trump, it's hard to revert to denialism. It's like the zit you never noticed, then found you can't avert your eyes from. Pretty soon you wind up with the Emperor's New Clothes.

As the following links will show, Democrats are divided: Biden and his closest allies still think that if they hold firm, he can ride the story cycle out, and by November refocus the campaign on beating back the immense threat of a Trump win; many others are skeptical and/or worried sick; a few actually see that replacing Biden with a younger, more dynamic, and hopefully much sharper candidate -- Harris seems to fill that bill, and is well-placed to step in, but there could be dozens of good options -- opens up an opportunity to not just eke out a win in November but deliver a crushing blow to Trump and his crony fascists.

As I've probably made clear over the last couple weeks, I'm skeptical, but also in the latter camp. I'm not really capable of the sort of despair that sees Biden, even as decrepit as he obviously is, losing to Trump -- despair in the future tense, as anticipation of a horrible turn of events, something very different from the sickening feeling when such events happen (as I remember all too well from November 2016). That part is just faith, still intact even if waiting to be shattered.

But my skepticism takes many forms. The one I'm most certain of is that if Biden remains in the race, he will commit a fair number of age-related gaffes and blunders, maybe including what wouldn't be his first fall, and that every time he does, his age will return as the paramount media obsession, shifting attention from the real and present threat of Trump. I don't know how many votes that will cost Biden, but it is a risk, and also a major opportunity cost. We need Democrats to win not just to stop Trump and shore up the somewhat liberal wing of the militarist oligarchy that Biden aligns with, but to actually address real problems, helping an overwhelming majority of Americans through very troubling times.

Another form of skepticism is suggested by my rather sour turn of phrase in that last line. I gravitated toward the new left in the late 1960s, and since then I've been as acutely critical of the Democratic Party as I've been of the Republicans, even as I've most often voted for Democrats, figuring them to be not just lesser evils but occasionally good for modest reforms. Either is reason enough to vote Democratic. (It's not like your vote is good for much else.) But if you're on the left (or anywhere else excluded from access to power), you might also consider voting a tactical choice: you're going to spend the next four years in opposition anyway, but which issues would you rather protest against? Biden, or any other Democrat with a chance, will leave you plenty to argue against.

One thing I can say about age is that it mellows you out. My critical analysis is as radical (in the sense I originally got from a 1966 book titled The New Radicals) as ever, but my appetite for conflict has really dimmed, and I'm willing to appreciate almost any tad of ameliorative reform. I chalk much of my personal change up to aging, and I suspect similar things happen to most people, including politicians like Biden. As I've noticed, Biden is the only president in my lifetime who turned out better than I expected (well, until Gaza, which is hard to excuse). Part of that is that he came in with really low expectations. Part of it may be that he's old enough to remember the pre-Carter, pre-Reagan, pre-Clinton Democrats -- even though he seemed totally simpatico with them, you know how old people lose recent memories before they lose formative ones? There's no one else like him in the Democratic Party these days. (Sanders is old enough, but never was that kind of Democrat. He was much better, which is why he remains so much sharper.) I do worry that whoever replaces Biden will be just another neoliberal shill. But even where Biden's heart is in the right place -- and, let's face it, it isn't always -- he's lost his ability to persuade, to lead, and to listen.

So my considered view is that we need to move him out, and start working on viable future. Even if Biden sticks and wins -- and I'll vote for him, despite thinking he really belongs in a Hague Court -- he's only going to get older, more decrepit, less credible, more embarrassing, and less effective as he struggles to hang on past his 86th birthday. And if he dies, resigns, or has to be removed, his replacement will enter with a much reduced mandate. Dump him now, elect his replacement, elect a Congress that's willing to do things, and the next four years will start looking up.


I guess that's more of an editorial than an introduction. I wrote it before collecting the following links:

  • Intelligencer: [07-09] Biden resistance appears to be waning in Congress: For a brief period, this publication seemed convinced that Biden is persevering in his fight to stay atop the Democratic Party ticket.

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-10] An open letter to the president of the United States: "There are worse things in life than a comfortable retirement."

  • Michael Arria: [07-09] Biden was already a vulnerable candidate because of the genocide: "Biden was already plummeting in the polls before his disastrous presidential debate with Trump. The reason was his ongoing complicity in the Gaza genocide and the Uncommitted movement."

  • David Atkins: [07-11] I'm a DNC member and a public opinion professional. It's highly unlikely Biden can win: "Only one person can build on the administration's accomplishments, have unfettered access to funds and ballot lines, and do so without wasting precious time. Her name is Kamala Harris." Another long-time, major Biden apologist breaks ranks.

  • Rachel Bade/Eugene Daniels/Ryan Lizza: [07-11] Playbook: What Obama and Pelosi are doing about Biden. Report here is that George Clooney showed his op-ed to Obama before he ran it, and did not receive any objection. "Obama's team declined to comment." Pelosi seems to be maneuvering behind the scenes, but "out of respect for Biden and national security writ large" thought he should hang on through the NATO summit. Now (my thinking here), with the shooting, it would make sense to wait until after the RNC shuts down.

  • Joseph Contreras: [07-06] What Joe Biden could learn from Nelson Mandela about knowing when to quit: "Unlike the beleaguered U.S. president, the South African leader did not want to be an 81-year-old head of state and served only one term."

  • Keren Landman: [07-11] The controversy over Biden and Parkin's disease, explained.

  • Eric Levitz:

  • Andrew Prokop:

    • [07-09] Is it undemocratic to replace Biden on the ticket? "Biden says the primary voters picked him. Is there more to democracy than that?" What kind of democracy was that? Practically nobody ran against Biden in 2024 because the campaign finance system lets donors pick who can run, and they didn't dare cross Biden -- especially after Democrats canceled Iowa and New Hampshire, which historically have been wide open and have a history of upsets, and which Biden lost badly in 2020, in favor of running South Carolina first, the sourc of Biden's breakthrough win in 2020.

    • [07-11] What Biden's news conference did, and didn't, clear up: "The presser went fine. But the Democratic defections continued."

    • [07-14] Will Trump's shooting change everything? Or surprisingly little? "Two theories on the political impact of the Trump assassination attempt." The Trump campaign will try to spin this in to a big deal, blaming it all on the left and championing Trump as a life-risking fighter for true Americans, who want nothing more than to make their beleaguered nation great again. But it doesn't change the issues, or stakes, one iota.

    • [07-15] Did Trump's shooting save Biden's nomination? "Democratic defections have slowed, but Biden isn't out of the woods yet." Perhaps I should re-read this more carefully, but on first scan, absolutely nothing in this piece makes any sense to me.

  • Kaleigh Rogers: [07-12] Americans were worried about Biden's age long before the debate. Background from the poll-watchers at 538, who also produced:

  • Luke Savage: [07-12] The Biden problem has been years in the making: "As concerns mount over Biden, the Democratic Party reminds us this isn't a democracy."

  • Bill Scher:

    • [07-05] I've defended Biden for years. Now, I'm asking him to withdraw: "After waiting too long to reassure the public of his mental fitness, the president is sinking in the polls with little hope for recovery. But he can resign with grace and make history." Scher has long struck me as the most diehard Biden apologist in the Washington punditocracy, and indeed he was one of the few to have reserved hope after the debate (see: A wasted opportunity for Biden (but still time for redemption)). So this appears as a significant retreat. And he's followed with:

    • [07-09] How Kamala can win (without mini-primary madness).

    • [07-12] Wilson didn't resign. The world suffered. Biden need not repeat that mistake: "Wilson hid an incapacitating stroke from the public and fatally compromised his mission to establish a functional League of Nations. Once again, global peace and democracy precariously rely on a president reluctant to face a personal health crisis." Well, that's another whole can of worms, and while it's always fun to argue about Wilson, his case is really not relevant here. I will say that Wilson was a very complex but tragically flawed character, often invoked in arguments that reduce him to caricature. My own argument is that his failure to sell Americans on the League of Nations -- which was evident before his stroke took him out of action -- had no real bearing on the coming of WWII, but his failures at Versailles did (as Britain and France cast aside his anti-imperialism and insisted on punitive reparations over his better sense).

  • Jeffrey St. Clair:

    • [07-12] Running on empty: Very good coverage on Hurricane Beryl here, but this is mostly on Biden, starting with a Chris Hayes quote: "Biden is a decent man who has done nothing wrong. He has not got caught in a scandal -- he's just aging." To which St. Clair responds: "The real scandal is that liberals don't see arming a genocide as a scandal." I'm inclined to compartmentalize and see opposing Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza and opposing Trump in America as both critically important but separable matters, and I'm even willing to cut Biden some slack, as he is a potential solution to both -- although in the latter he's mostly proven hapless, in the former, which is something he could do something about on his own, he's drifted into criminal negligence. But clearly Hayes misspoke, and he, at least, should have known better. We've seen many attempts to use flattery to tempt Biden to quit (e.g., George Clooney, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, David Remnick, Matthew Yglesias), but it hasn't worked, and it's hard to see why it would. This seems more like the time for brutal honesty. If you must, sugar-coat it as tough love, but save the huzzahs for after he does "the right thing."

    • [07-15] Big Boy Biden in his own words: He starts by quoting some of the praised heaped on Biden for his press conference performance, like Andrew Bates: "To answer the question on everyone's minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He's just that fucking good." That leaves St. Clair wondering:

      After hearing these encomia, I had to check myself. This is Joe Biden they're talking about, right? The same Joe Biden who voted for the Iraq War, the most disastrous foreign policy debacle in US history? The same Joe Biden who backed the overthrow of Qaddafi, turning Libya into an anarchic war zone dominated by slave trading gangs? The same Joe Biden who provoked and now refuses to seek an end to a bloody, stalemated war in Ukraine? The same Joe Biden who has continued Trump's Cuban embargo and tariffs on China? The same Biden who has spent the last 3.5 years pandering to the bone-sawing Saudi regime he called a "pariah" state during his 2020 campaign? The same Biden who refused to renegotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran? The same Biden who has armed a genocide in Gaza that may end up claiming over 200,000 Palestinian lives? The same Biden who could barely string together two complete sentences a couple of weeks ago?

      Adding, "An unlikely transformation, IMHO." So then he reads the White House transcript, and quotes it liberally, although his best line is in his introduction: "Biden's answers reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett's later works exploring the thought patterns of a decaying mind."

  • Alexander Stille: We learned everything we needed to know about Biden in 1988: "His stubborn refusal to heed wise advice, and bottomless belief in his own greatness, were on display in his first campaign for president."

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-12] Democrats: "He was better than the debate" is not remotely good enough: "In Trump world, they're thinking landslide. Democrats need to act and talk Biden into stepping aside, and soon."

  • p>Cenk Uygur: [07-11] Biden will not be the nominee: "The Young Turks host has long predicted Biden's campaign would implode. He explains why it wasn't obvious to everyone, and predicts what will happen next." Nathan J Robinson interviews him.

And other Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:


Other stories:

Zack Beauchamp: [07-10] What the world can learn from Indian liberalism: "The intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta explains how liberalism grew out of 3,000 years of Indian history."

Roger Kerson: [07-09] You think this year's presidential conventions will be crazy? 1924's fights over the Ku Klux Klan were wilder.

Katie Miles: [07-08] "She usually won." Remembering Jane McAlevey, 1964-2024. Also:


Initial count: 146 links, 9355 words. Updated count [07-16]: 193 links, 9436 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): Biden.

Friday, July 12, 2024

Daily Log

I've written about this in the blog, but decided to reduce it to a twitter point:

Unsolicited advice to the ruling class: can someone point out to Biden that being president and running are two different full-time jobs. He should pick one, like the one we need someone to focus on and do well, right now. He could set a model we should add to the Constitution.

Some interaction with Phil Overeem following my B review of Sun Ra's Excelsior Mill, which he had named in his mid-year jazz ballot:

Phil: Trust me and not Tom on Sun Ra's EXCELSIOR MILL. Just kidding, because it truly ain't for everyone, but it IS for some of you, I promise! Phantom of the Opera + Garth + Space Exploration + plus a crafty dude with over a half century of keyboard in his fingers.

Me: As Ronald Reagan liked to say, "trust, but verify."

Phil: Tom, subjective verification is tricky business, but to me that just means, TRY IT! Loving it, though, doesn't make me right and you wrong, obviously! That's all I am saying: put your ear to it. But concentrate and don't be playing with your phone

Me: I did try it, on your recommendation, and thanks for that. I gave it as much concentration as seemed necessary, which is just the way I work. I find more good albums that way than anyone needs, so I don't mind it much when I reject something someone else treasures. That happens all the time. Surely no one thinks that I think that they should think what I think. That would make this kind of work impossible. Nor am I dismissing the suggestion that more concentration might make a difference. I discovered that quite memorably long ago with a record called "Hirth From Earth" (too late to review it for Christgau, who usually focuses much better than I do but let it go with a B+; I did write about his second album). But it's impossible, at least for me, to sustain that degree of focus, so often I allow myself to be satisfied with fleeting impressions. I thought I heard enough to appreciate but not recommend it. But it's certainly plausible that there's more to it.

I was tempted to point out that I never play with my phone, but then I realized I do lots of other things on my computer while I'm listening to records I'm reviewing.

Tuesday, July 09, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 42 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 42624 [42580] rated (+42), 20 [29] unrated (-9).

Some updates, although at this point [07-12] I might as well start working on next week's posts. I added a fair amount to extras I already added to the latest Speaking of Which: most tweets on Biden's probable withdrawal, plus a couple similar pieces including the George Clooney op-ed. I also added links to the Michael Tatum and Robert Christgau Consumer Guides, which are probably of more interest here:

I have a bit more information on the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll, but that probably deserves a separate post, which I'm not up to at the moment. The most pressing matter is that response has been light, and I suspect that a bit part of that is due to email problems. As frequent readers may recall, I've been plagued by them for months and possibly years. I tried coming up with workaround strategies, one of which has been completely ineffective: which was to ask people to forward invites, and suggest a willingness to accept unsolicited invites. The only thing I got there was an offer by a long-time virtual friend, who is not really a credentialed critic but whose opinion I value highly, to submit a list.

In a moment of weakness (or possible insanity), I offered to publish his list, and more like it if anyone bothers to submit them. So if you can imagine drawing up a credible list of up to 10 2024 jazz albums and up to 5 2024 archival jazz albums, take a look at the Non-Critic Ballot Invitation, and follow instructions. Those ballots won't figure into official totals, and counting them isn't a priority for me, but I will eventually publish all I receive, and I wouldn't be surprised if, as lists go, your batch winds up being as credible as the ones submitted by the pros. I will be surprised if they wind up being representative of jazz fandom, because I'm doing virtually nothing to promote this, and if you can only read about it here, you're in a very small minority (and I'll be lucky to get ten ballots).

The links below to the Poll Website are still valid, and now point to somewhat more substantial information. On last update, I had 25 ballots. I'm resending the invitations -- a slow and painstaking process -- hoping to avoid spam traps and get some more responses. I will say that the data I have, though sparse, is really terrific stuff. It's a cliché in compiling these lists to say "this is a really great year," but when all is said and done, you'll see for yourself.

Delayed until Tuesday again, because Speaking of Which took all of Monday, itself being pushed out by the seemingly futile notion that I could add a few Afterthoughts to the previous week's massive Speaking of Which.

Seems like I could wind up delaying this post a second day, as it's already late as I'm writing this. Most of Tuesday got chewed up writing two long comments relating to the Biden nomination: one on a Matthew Yglesias post, the other an expansion of my Afterthoughts comment. None of this even mentions the seemingly important (if true) Ben Jacobs: [07-09] How the Democratic movement to dump Biden went bust. Or Nia Prater: [07-09] Why is the Squad backing Biden so forcefully? As Yglesias explained in his piece, the calculation for Democratic politicians is different than the one for journalists and pundits. New York Magazine, which published a number of pieces extremely critical of Biden (probably all op. cit. through my links above) has gotten so into circling the wagons, they've gone into live blog mode: Biden resistance appears to be waning in Congress. On the other hand, Eric Levitz: [07-09] is back with another piece: The arguments for Biden 2024 keep getting worse.

Definitely no Afterthoughts this week, and I'm going to be hard pressed to do a Speaking of Which by Sunday or Monday. Most pressing thing after getting this up will be to follow up on the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll. Deadline remains Sunday, July 14. I've received 18 ballots so far, referencing a total of 177 albums. About 50% of those albums were not previously in my tracking file, so I've been using them for prospecting (three of the five A- albums this week came from ballots; the other two are promos I received, with no votes so far).

Probably the most important thing I need to do is to compare the Jazzpoll mailing list, which is where I sent the invites, to the more authoritative list I made last year of people I actually sent invites to, especially the ones I voted. At some point I stopped automatically adding names to the Jazzpoll list, so chances are that a couple dozen people who should have been invited weren't. I'm also worried about invites being diverted into spam folders -- I know of at least two such cases, both with gmail. If I had the time and energy, I would follow up, but it's a lot of work. I also need to go back and review some couple emails I received after last year's poll -- a couple offers of help, at least one person who asked to be invited (and should be).

To make up for these shortcomings in the invitation process, I asked people to inform and possibly invite their colleagues. Thus far I haven't received any takers, or for that matter inquiries. The only evidence I have is that some spam has started getting caught there. Not a lot, and none of it's getting through, but it's one more thing to deal with.

At this moment, the website is a bit behind my local copy, but I will refresh it a couple times this week. I need to edit several documentation files, and change the methodology notes in the totals files. The main things of possible public interest are the invitation, the list of critics who have voted, and the list of new releases and rara avis that have received votes. The actual results won't be public until ArtsFuse publishes them.

I've had very little time for updating my metacritic file, but I have added the mid-year lists I've been noting in the Speaking of Which music section, so there's been a bit of movement. File still needs a lot of work. I did, by the way, start counting all of the metal magazines at AOTY (but I've yet to go back and fill in the ones I skipped earlier). I wish their coverage of jazz, hip-hop, electronica, and country was as deep as their interest in metal, but it isn't. I haven't gotten around to sources like All About Jazz, Saving Country Music, and Hip Hop Golden Age, which would help remedy those deficits. No time, and not much energy these days. Also, I can barely see, so if I don't post this right away, it won't make it tonight.

PS: Facebook blocked me, so I may give that a rest.


New records reviewed this week:

  • BbyMutha: Sleep Paralysis (2024, True Panther): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Beings: There Is a Garden (2024, No Quarter): [sp]: A-
  • Chris Byars: Boptics (2023 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Kim Cass: Levs (2023 [2024], Pi): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Ernesto Cervini's Turboprop: A Canadian Songbook (2022 [2024], Three Pines): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Coco Chatru Quartet: Future (2024, Trygger Music): [lp]: B+(***)
  • Alfredo Colón: Blood Burden (2023 [2024], Out of Your Head): [cd]: A-
  • GloRilla: Ehhthang Ehhthang (2024, CMG/Interscope): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Conrad Herwig: The Latin Side of McCoy Tyner (2023 [2024], Savant): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Janel & Anthony: New Moon in the Evil Age (2024, Cuneiform): [cdr]: B+(**)
  • Mathias Højgaard Jensen: Is as Is (2022 [2024], Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: A-
  • Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O: True Story (2020-21 [2024], New Soil/Mushroom Hour): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Alex Kautz: Where We Begin (2024, Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Cassie Kinoshi's SEED.: Gratitude (2023 [2024], International Anthem): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Charlie Kohlhase's Explorer's Club: A Second Life (2022 [2024], Mandorla Music): [sp]: A-
  • Janel Leppin: Ensemble Volcanic Ash: To March Is to Love (2023 [2024], Cuneiform): [cdr]: B+(***)
  • Frank London/The Elders: Spirit Stronger Than Blood (2023 [2024], ESP-Disk): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Megan Thee Stallion: Megan (2024, Hot Girl): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Che Noir: The Color Chocolate, Volume 1 (2024, Poetic Movement, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Clarence Penn: Behind the Voice (2024, Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Ken Peplowski: Unheard Bird (2024, Arbors): [sp]: B-
  • Ken Peplowski: Live at Mezzrow [Smalls Live Living Masters Series] (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Carla Santana/José Lencastre/Maria do Mar/Gonçalo Almeida: Defiant Ilussion (2023 [2024], A New Wave of Jazz): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Dirk Serries/Rodrigo Amado/Andrew Lisle: The Invisible (2021 [2024], Klanggalerie): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Matthew Shipp: The Data (2021 [2024], RogueArt): [cdr]: B+(***)
  • TV Smith: Handwriting (2024, JKP/Easy Action): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Anthony Stanco: Stanco's Time (2023 [2024], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
  • TiaCorine: Almost There (2024, South Scope/Interscope, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Ryan Truesdell: Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions (2022-23 [2024], ArtistShare, 3CD): [cdr]: B+(**)
  • Steve Turre: Sanyas (2023 [2024], Smoke Sessions): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Lisa Ullén: Heirloom (2023 [2024], Fönstret): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Jack Walrath: Live at Smalls (2023 [2024], Cellar Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Fu##in' Up (2023 [2024], Reprise): [r]: B+(***)
  • Denny Zeitlin: Panoply (2012-23 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Christer Bothén Featuring Bolon Bata: Trancedance [40th Anniversary Edition] (1984 [2024], Black Truffle): [bc] A-
  • Johnny Griffin Quartet: Live in Valencia 92 [The Jordi Suñol Archives 3] (1992 [2024], Storyville): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Shelly Manne & His Men: Jazz From the Pacific Northwest (1958-66 [2024], Reel to Real): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Brother Jack McDuff: Ain't No Sunshine: Live in Seattle (1972 [2024], Reel to Real): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre: Live From Studio Rivbea: July 12, 1975 [Rivbea Live! Series, Volume 1] (1975 [2024], No Business): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Sun Ra: Excelsior Mill (1984 [2024], Sundazed/Modern Harmonic): [sp]: B

Old music:

  • Christer Bothén Trio: Triolos (2003-04 [2006], LJ): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Ernesto Cervini: Joy (2021 [2022], Three Pines): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Maurice McIntyre: Humility in the Light of the Creator (1969, Delmark): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre: Forces and Feelings (1970 [1972], Delmark): [r]: B+(**)
  • Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre Quartet: Peace and Blessings (1979, Black Saint): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Jack Walrath Quintet: In Europe (1982 [1983], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(*)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Robby Ameen: Live at the Poster Museum (Origin) [07-26]
  • BassDrumBone: Afternoon (Auricle) [06-24]
  • Mai-Liis: Kaleidoscope (OA2) [07-26]

Daily Log

I wrote this in a letter to a musician who sent me a notice about some future albums. The notice included an offer to send CDs. Rather than a simply reply, I went into some detail about how I work. At the time, I thought I might include it in Music Week, but as the evening came to a close, I figured it might be best just to move it aside, perhaps to return to later.

Just a few notes on how I work: The lag time between when I write about something and when I post it is one week or less. I don't like reviewing things that aren't available yet, so I keep my promo CDs sorted by release date, and usually hold them until they're released. However, if I do accidentally play an album before its release date, I'll go ahead and publish the review. Everything I receive on CD gets some kind of review (which may just be a grade).

I keep the promo literature with the CDs until I review them, after which I throw it away. In any case, I look up some background on the internet. There are certain pieces of information I like to have, like recording dates (Penguin Guide prefers them over release dates; I track both).

I can play LPs, but CDs are easier for me to manage, so I prefer them.

As the number of promo CDs I receive, I've turned to streaming sources for most of the records I review. I subscribe to Napster and Spotify, and will use Bandcamp (and sometimes YouTube) where full albums are available. I've used a couple other platforms on occasion, but don't look for them. The main frustration there is finding background information, so it helps if that's readily available.

I get a fair number of download links from publicists. I almost never act on them immediately: many are advances, many are on labels that will eventually be available through streaming, and some I just don't care about. The ones I think I might eventually be interested in get moved into a "Downloads" directory. I may eventually go back there to look for things I wasn't able to review from CD or streaming but am still interested in. That doesn't happen often, and it may be well after release date. Downloads are a lot more work for me than streaming, so I treat them as a last resort (even knowing that they often have better sound; I put little emphasis on sound quality, but don't doubt that it has a subliminal effect).

So at present, it's safe to say that I act on fewer than 10% of the downloads I'm offered. I can imagine things I could do to make better use of this resource. I could, for starters, keep a log file of all of my download offers (searchable by artist, title, label, and date), so I could could more easily look them up, and quickly see what I do have available. I could also find (or less likely, write) a program to manage the things I have downloaded. I know that other people use things like iTunes for that, and I gather that some of them are happy enough with their choices that they actually prefer downloads (or so I hear from corner-cutting publicists), but I've never found one I liked. (Suggestions welcome. In principle, having a digital store of items I can't readily stream would be a nice thing to have.) I'll also note that I've never mastered the art of burning CDs from my download files, which would be an alternative way of storing them.

Monday, July 08, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Daily Log

I got the following message from FacebooK:

You're Temporarily Blocked

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You've been temporarily blocked from using it.

If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let usk now.

I clicked on "let us know" and sent a message to the effect that I don't have any idea what they're talking about. I looked up a Help Center page on "Why you may be blocked from using features on Facebook. It listed three possible reasons for "why you may be blocked." It's hard to see how any apply ("something you posted or shared seems suspicious or abusive"; "messages or friend requests you sent were marked unwelcome"; "you've done something that doesn't follow our Community Standards"). I think I've made two posts in the last week: one Music Week announcement to "Expert Witness," the other a food pic.

Upon reflection, the "going too fast" message might have been triggered because I rebooted and restarted Firefox, restoring my session with a half-dozen Facebook tabs open. Each would have to reload automatically, so it could seem like multiple new page requests occurring at robotic speeds (perhaps if most of the pages are stale, which can happen with Facebook; most of the time Firefox reloads pages from cache).

If I click OK on the blocked message, I can see the page. First time I tried that and tried reloading the page, I got another blocked message, but second time it worked, so maybe the block has been cleared.

Saturday, July 06, 2024

Speaking of Which: Afterthoughts

Blog link.

Wednesday, July 03, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 31 albums, 3 A-list

Music: Current count 42580 [42549] rated (+31), 29 [22] unrated (+7).

Nominally a day late (ok, two days), but last Music Week was two days late, so this is still a short week. I started off most days with old r&b in the CD player -- especially Scratchin': The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story, which combined a few minor hits with some major studio work, leading me to tweet up two singles (Bobby Lewis, Tossin' and Turnin', and Bobby Long, The Pleasure Is All Mine). Beyond that, what I got to was pretty haphazard, with a fair amount of old music left over from the William Parker research.

My piece was published by ArtsFuse, here: Celebrating bassist William Parker's lifetime of achievement. You can also find my 2003 CG, with its updated discography, and my notes file, which includes my full set of reviews of albums Parker. The former could still use some cleanup, especially to separate out the albums that Parker didn't play on -- the CG was originally focused on Matthew Shipp and the Thirsty Ear Blue Series he curated, until I started noticing how many more albums Parker played on and how central they were to the whole circle. The latter needs even more work, as most of it was cut-and-pasted from my book files (which are now several years out of date), with others copied with HTML markup (where they still have bold credits and letter grades). If I didn't fear getting sucked into a huge time sink, I'd go fix those, but for now I can only offer excuses.


Besides, I have a much more urgent website project to work on. I've decided to use my Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll contacts to run a Mid-Year straw poll. I explain this on the website (which still needs a good deal of work) and in the invite letter (which went out to approx. 200 critics on June 30). I'm asking for lists of up to 10 new releases (which can include newly discovered 2023 releases) and/or up to 5 "rara avis" (old music, recorded 10+ years ago, or reissues). Deadline is July 14, and ArtsFuse will publish the results, probably later that week.

The Poll is a quickie experiment. I've simplified the rules to make it easier on voters (and hopefully on he who counts), and I've saved myself a lot of work by only sending out one batch of invites without trying to vet new voters. The problem with the "one batch" approach is that I'm using a server and software that has been known to run afoul of some spam traps. I especially fear that people with gmail addresses may have their invites diverted or discarded. But it's impossible to test and verify these things. I made an effort to research this problem before, to little avail, and I will make another one soon, but in the meantime, please read the following, and follow up if anything seems to apply to you:

  1. If you've ever voted before, or for that matter received an invite before, and haven't received an invite, please check your spam filter. If you find one, take steps to get your mail provider to recognize that the mail isn't spam. If you can't find one, assume you're eligible and use this one. Follow the instructions, and vote. Let me know if you want to be added to my list (jazzpoll [at] hullworks.net). Not everyone who has voted is on the list (various reasons, including sloth on my part), but I can add you. The advantage of being on the list is that I'll send you updates and further requests.

  2. If you haven't received an invite, but think you should be qualified, look up the invite, follow instructions, and send me your lists. You need to have some real expertise in jazz (my first approximation would be listening to 200+ jazz records per year, but that's easy for me to say because I listen to 700+), have some verifiable credentials (you write about some of them, which can be on your own blog or mainstream or niche publications, and/or you broadcast about them, which obviously includes radio but I suppose could extend to podcasts), and construct lists that are focused on jazz (the occasional outlier or, as DownBeat likes to call them, "beyond"; by the way, "smooth jazz" is not jazz, at least for purposes of establishing credibility, although it may be acceptable as "beyond"). If this checks out, I will very likely accept your ballot, and you'll be on the inside track for future invites.

  3. Check with your friends: make sure they got their invites, and let people you think should be voting know that they can vote, and how. They can always hit me up with questions, but we don't have a lot of time, so it's best to move fast.

  4. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to publicize this wider, although bear in mind that I still see this as a forum of critics -- even though I recognize that there are lots of fans that have become pretty expert themselves, especially given how easy it's become to check out new music on streaming platforms.

Also, one key point to emphasize is that this isn't a big deal. I'm not asking you to exercise Solomonic (or Christgauvian) judgment over the jazz universe. Your list doesn't have to find the absolute best records (whatever that might mean). Nor does it have to be ranked. (Although blessed are the rankers, for they get slightly more points weighting for their efforts.) Nor does it even have to be a full list. Just jot down a few albums that you would like to recommend to other people. That's mostly how these lists will be used.

Given the late date, the short deadline, my various shortcuts, and the fact that we've never done this before, I'm not expecting much, but even if we just get 50 voters (as opposed to the 159 in 2023), I think the lists will be interesting and informative.

I started to track mid-year lists when they started appearing just before June 1 -- see my metacritic file, which is running behind at the moment, as the last couple weeks haven't allowed much opportunity to work on it -- and they both give me a broad sense of what's out there and a useful roster of prospects to check out. This also ties into my tracking file, which has a jazz selector (currently listing 400 jazz albums, of which I have 332; this list will expand as I receive your lists: from past experience, about 30% of the albums that show up in ballots are ones I hadn't previously tracked; there's also a no grade variant, for those who don't want to see my grades).

The website started off as a clone of last year's, with minor hacks. As I do more work to it this week, it should become a more useful source of information about the Poll and its progress. For instance, I need to revise things like the FAQ and the Admin Guide. I also hope to get some work done on the older parts of the website, especially to fill in information that predates my involvement (in administration; I've voted every year, from the founding).

I hope to make the website the best source for information about the Poll. But if you wish to follow, check my Music Week posts, and follow me on twitter (or "X" if you prefer; I haven't jumped ship yet, although at this point it's rare for one of my tweets to be viewed by as much as a third of my nominal followers, so the returns seem pretty slim).


New records reviewed this week:

  • Arooj Aftab: Night Reign (2024, Verve): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Alan Braufman: Infinite Love Infinite Tears (2024, Valley of Search): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Ani DiFranco: Unprecedented Sh!t (2024, Righteous Babe): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Dayramir González: V.I.D.A. [Verdad, Independencia, Diversidad Y Amor] (2024, self-released): [sp]: B
  • Morgan Guerin: Tales of the Facade (2024, Candid): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Goran Kajfeš Tropiques: Tell Us (2024, We Jazz): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Bill Laurance/The Untold Orchestra: Bloom (2022 [2024], ACT Music): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Les Savy Fav: Oui, LSF (2024, Frenchkiss): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Grégoire Maret/Romain Collin: Ennio (2024, ACT Music): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Zara McFarlane: Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (2024, Universal): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Ngwaka Son Système: Iboto Ngenge (2024, Eck Echo): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Normani: Dopamine (2024, RCA): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Carly Pearce: Hummingbird (2024, Big Machine): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Dave Rempis/Tashi Dorji Duo: Gnash (2024, Aerophonic): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Sisso & Maiko: Singeli Ya Maajabu (2024, Nyege Nyege Tapes): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Jason Stein/Marilyn Crispell/Damon Smith/Adam Shead: Spi-raling Horn (2023 [2024], Balance Point Acoustics): [sp]: A-
  • Thollem: Worlds in a Life, Two (2024, ESP-Disk): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Alan Braufman: Live in New York City: February 8, 1975 (1975 [2022], Valley of Search): [r]: B+(***)
  • DJ Notoya: Funk Tide: Tokyo Jazz-Funk From Electric Bird 1978-87 (1978-87 [2024], Wewantsounds/Electric Bird): [sp]: B-
  • Charles Gayle/Milford Graves/William Parker: WEBO (1991 [2024], Black Editions Archive): [sp]: A-
  • Ron Miles: Old Main Chapel (2011 [2024], Blue Note): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Collective 4tet: Orca (1996 [1997], Leo Lab): [r]: B+(***)
  • Collective 4tet: Live at Crescent (1997 [1998], Leo Lab): [r]: B+(**)
  • Collective 4tet: Moving Along (2002 [2005], Leo): [r]: B+(**)
  • Collective 4tet: In Transition (2008 [2009], Leo): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Marco Eneidi Quintet: Final Disconnect Notice (1994, Botticelli): [yt]: B+(***)
  • Marco Eneidi/Glenn Spearman: Creative Music Orchestra: American Jungle Suite (1995 [1997], Music & Arts): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Marco Eneidi: Cherry Box (1998 [2000], Eremite): [sp]: A-
  • Marco Eneidi/Vijay Anderson: Remnant Light (2004 [2018], Minus Zero): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Marco Eneidi Streamin' 4: Panta Rei (2013 [2015], ForTune): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Heinz Geisser/Shiro Onuma: Duo: Live at Yokohama Little John (2007 [2008], Leo): [sp]: B+(*)
  • The Ivo Perelman Quartet: Sound Hierarchy (1996 [1997], Music & Arts): [sp]: B+(*)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Derek Bailey/Sabu Toyozumi: Breath Awareness (1987, NoBusiness) [05-27]
  • Albert Beger/Ziv Taubenfeld/Shay Hazan/Hamid Drake: Cosmic Waves (No Business) [05-27]
  • Karen Borca Trio Quartet & Quintet: Good News Blues: Live at the Vision Festival 1998 & 2005 (No Business) [05-27]
  • Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Sabu Toyozumi: Complete Link (NoBusiness) [05-27]
  • Alfredo Colón: Blood Burden (Out of Your Head) [06-14]
  • Nick Dunston: Colla Voce (Out of Your Head) [04-26]
  • The Sofia Goodman Group: Receptive (Joyous) [07-26]
  • Monika Herzig's Sheroes: All in Good Time (Zoho) [07-22]
  • Hyeseon Hong Jazz Orchestra: Things Will Pass (Pacific Coast Jazz) [08-23]
  • Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre: Live From Studio Rivbea: July 12, 1975 [Rivbea Live! Series, Volume 1] (No Business) [05-27]

Monday, July 01, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

After missing last week, I knew I had a lot to catch up on here. I also got interrupted several times. It took longer than expected to wrap up my piece on bassist William Parker (see: Celebrating bassist William Parker's lifetime of achievement). I had two other internet projects that required significant amounts of attention (one was an update to Carola Dibbell's website, announcing a new printing of her novel, The Only Ones; the other was setting up a framework for a Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll, which still needs more work). We also had trips to the ER and various doctors (including a veterinarian). So no chance of getting done on Sunday night. I'm not really done on Monday, either, but I'm dead tired and more than a little disgusted, so this will have to do for now.

That will, in turn, push Music Week back until Tuesday, which is just as well.


Before I really got started, the debate happened -- I couldn't be bothered to watch, my wife got disgusted and switched to a Steve Martin movie -- and I haven't (yet, as of noon 06-28) read any reviews, but I wanted to grab these tweets before they vanish:

Rick Perlstein: The main argument on the left was that he was a bad president. That was incorrect.

Tim Price: The left is going to be in big trouble for being right too early again.

Another scrap picked up on the fly from fleeting social media:

Greg Magarian: [06-27] Democratic Party establishment, relentlessly, for eight months: "You stupid kids need to stop criticizing Biden! If we get four more years of Trump, it's all your fault!"

Democratic Party establishment, tomorrow morning, set your clock by it: "You stupid kids need to fix this! If we get four more years of Trump, it's all your fault!"

Because of course it's never their fault.

In a comment, Magarian added:

I don't know the best process for replacing Biden. There's no playbook for this. The biggest question is whether the party should essentially try to crown Harris, either by having Biden resign the presidency or by having him stay and endorse her. But this is kind of the point of my post: the onus here shouldn't be on Biden's critics. The party is supposed to exist to win elections. They're royally screwing this one up. I want to know what they're going to do.


Initial count: 290 links, 11720 words. Updated count [07-03]: 320 links, 16021 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): on music, Christgau.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

About last Thursday's debate:

When the Biden-Trump debates were announced, I jotted down the following:

Ed Kilgore: [05-24] Is Biden gambling everything on an early-debate bounce? My read is that the June debate is meant to show Democrats that he can still mount a credible campaign against Trump. If he can -- and a bounce would be nice but not necessary -- it will go a long way to quelling pressure to drop out and open the convention. If he can't, then sure, he'll have gambled and lost, and pressure will build. But at least it will give him a reference point that he has some actual control over -- unlike the polls, which still seem to have a lot of trouble taking him seriously.

I'm writing this before I go through the paces and collect whatever links I deem of interest, which will help me better understand the debate and its aftermath, but my first impression is that Biden failed to satisfy Democrats that he is really the candidate they need to fight off Trump in November. I'll also note that my expectation was to see a lot of confirmation bias in reactions. I'd expect people who dislike Biden and/or Trump, for any reason, to find faults that fortify their feelings, while people who are personally invested in their candidates will at least claim to be vindicated. Hence, the easy way to scan this section is to look for reactions that go against type.

Debate tweets:

  • Zachary D Carter: Donald Trump is delivering the second-worst presidential debate performance I've ever seen.

And more post-debate tweets:

  • Zachary D Carter: [06-30] If Biden refuses to step aside it will not be an act of high principal or strong character. He did not just have a bad night. He is not fit for the job and stayuing in the race would be the worst kind of vanity and betrayal.

  • Laura Tillem: [06-30] He did terrible in the debate because he gags when he has to pretend to support abortion rights or universal health care.

  • holly: [06-28] If you want to see Joe Biden in his prime, just go back and watch footage of him calling Anita Hill a liar and ensuring that we'd have to deal with Clarence Thomas forever.

  • Moshik Temkin: [06-28] Worth recalling that the only reason Biden is President now is because, after he finished 5th in NH Dem primary in 2020, Obama persuaded all the other candidates to drop out and endorse Biden in order to stop Bernie Sanders, who was in 1st place (and crushing Trump in the polls)

  • John Ganz: Dude they just gotta roll the dice with Harris.

Plus I scraped this from Facebook:

  • Allen Lowe [07-02]: Cold medicine my a##. On my worst day during chemo and radiation I made more sense than Biden did at that debate; coming out of the anaesthetic after a 12 hour surgery with half of my nose removed I could have debated Trump more coherently; after they pulled a tube out of of my arm at 4 in the morning after another (8 hour) surgery, causing me to scream in the worst pain of my life and curse like a sailor, I would have remembered more accurately what I last said and organized my thoughts more clearly. The night I was born and ripped from my mother's womb I was better prepared than Biden was (my first words were "Henry Wallace!").

    This guy must go. Go. Go.

    This whole thing has, honestly, made me lose all respect for Biden, as he continues to place his personal ego and "legacy" ahead of the country. As Carl Bernstein reports [on YouTube], aides have privately reported a Biden loss of coherence and noticeable cognitive slippage occurring "15 to 20 times" in the last year.

Election notes:

Trump:

And other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Jonathan Alter: [06-28] How the Democrats should replace Biden: This seems ok to me, aside from the snootiness of dismissing Sanders and Warren out of hand and seeking to ban "anyone from the Squad." That they've already limited the electorate to Biden's hand-picked supporters is rigged enough without having to rub it in.

  • Aaron Blake:

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [06-29] LBJ and Truman knew when to quit. Will Biden? "Some lessons from the two presidents who walked away."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [07-01] All the gossip on the Biden family's postdebate blame game.

  • David Klion: [06-19] The lifelong incoherence of Biden's Israel strategy: "The president's muddled policy course in the Middle East is angering voters across the political spectrum -- and it could usher Trump back into the White House."

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [06-19] Biden's ads haven't been working. Now, he's trying something new. Written before the debate: "President Joe Biden's odds of reelection may be worse than they look. And they don't look great."

    • [06-28] How Democrats got here: "Democrats really need to choose electable vice presidents." This might have gone deep into the sorry history of vice presidents and vice-presidential candidates, few of whom could be described as "electable" -- at least as Levitz defines it to exclude Biden and Harris, which is the point of his article.

      Unfortunately, the last two Democratic presidents did not prioritize political chops when selecting their veeps.

      Barack Obama didn't choose Joe Biden because he thought that the then-Delaware senator would make a great Democratic nominee in 2016. To the contrary, by most accounts, Obama thought that Biden would be a totally nonviable candidate by the time his own hypothetical presidency ended. And he reportedly selected Biden precisely for that reason. . . .

      Biden's choice of Kamala Harris in 2020 was even more misguided. When he made that choice in August 2020, there was little basis for believing that Harris was one of the most politically formidable Democrats in the country.

      There's a lot that could be said about this, most of which comes back to the poor conception of the office (both in the Constitution and when revised after the emergence of political parties led to the 1800 fiasco and the 12th Amendment). The VP has to do three things, which require three very different skill sets, especially since the presidency has grown into this ridiculous imperial perch: they have to add something to the campaign (e.g., "Tippecanoe and Tyler too"); once elected, they have to behave themselves innocuously, for which they are sometimes given busy work (LBJ's Space Race, Pence's Space Force, Gore's Reinventing Government) or sometimes just locked in a closet (remember John Nance Garner?); and if the president dies, they're thrust into a role they were rarely prepared for, with no real, personal political mandate (some, like Tyler and Andrew Johnson, were wretched; a few, like Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, thrived; but most were just mediocre, including the two others who went on to win full terms: Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman).

      I accept that Obama's pick of Biden was part of a deal to give the 2016 nomination to Hillary Clinton. The Clintons had turned the Democratic Party into a personality cult. Obama rode a popular backlash against that, but Obama was no revolutionary: he wanted to lead, but was willing to leave the Party to the Clintons. We now know that wasn't such a good idea, but after a very divisive primary, in the midst of economic and military disaster, it was at least understandable.

      The Harris nomination made at least as much sense in 2024. The "little basis" line is unfair and inaccurate. She won statewide elections in the most populous and most expensive state in the country. Her resume entering 2016 was similar to and every bit as strong as Obama's in 2008. She had enough financial backing to organize a top-tier presidential campaign. She floundered, because (unlike Obama) she was outflanked on the left (Sanders and Warren), while hemmed in on the right (Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Biden). But she wasn't incompetent (like Biden already was), and her position and standing made her the logical choice to unite the party. And sure, her affirmative action points may have helped a bit with the left -- at least she wasn't another Tim Kaine, or Al Gore -- without the tokenism raising any hackles with the donors.

      Sure, Harris polls poorly now, but that's largely because Biden never put her to good use: she could have taken a more prominent role in cajoling Congress, which would have given her opportunities to show her mettle fighting Republicans, and she could have spelled Biden on some of those high-profile foreign trips (especially confabs like G7 and NATO); instead, they stuck her with the tarbaby border issue. Having wasted those opportunities, I can see wanting to go with some other candidate, one with a bit more distance from Biden. But I'm not convinced that she would be a weak, let alone losing, candidate. And while I give her zero credit for those affirmative action tick boxes, I can't see holding them against her, either. And as for the people who would, well, they were going to vote for Trump anyway, so why appease them?

  • Nicole Narea:

  • Evan Osnos: [06-29] Biden gets up after his debate meltdown: Good. But are people talking about that, or the meltdown? Even if they could flip the message back to "Biden's really ok," that would still be a huge deficit. We need people talking about how awful Trump is. Even if you can't impress on many people how bad his policies are, he gives you lots of other things you can fixate on.

  • Christian Paz:

    • [06-26] We rewatched the 2020 Trump-Biden debates. There's so much we didn't see coming. "The five most telling moments and what they foreshadow ahead of this week's rematch."

      1. Trump calls the 2020 election rigged and doesn't commit to accepting the results
      2. Roe v. Wade is nearly forgotten
      3. Trump gets defensive on immigration
      4. No one is worried about inflation
      5. Everyone is worried about Russia, Ukraine, or China, but for the wrong reasons
    • [06-26] What about Kamala? "The vice president has taken on an expanded role in the last few months. Now Biden needs her more than ever."

  • Rick Perlstein: [07-03] Say it ain't so, Joe: "With democracy itself on the ballot, a statesman with charactger would know when to let go of power."

  • Andrew Prokop: [06-28] Will Biden be the nominee? 3 scenarios for what's next.

  • Bryan Walsh: [07-01] Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They're not acting like it. "If the stakes of the 2024 election are as great as the party says, there's no excuse for inaction."

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

  • Dean Baker:

    • [06-17] We can't have a new paradigm as long as people think the old one was free-market fundamentalism. He's on solid ground pointing out that most profits in our current economy are effectively rigged by monopolies (either government-minted, like patents, facilitated through favors, or just tolerated with lax enforcement), it's less clear to me what this is about:

      • Farah Stockman: [06-17] The queen bee of Bidenomics: On Jennifer Harris. Back when Trump started flirting with tariffs, I tried to make the point that tariffs only make sense if they are exercised in concert with a coherent economic development plan. Biden has, somewhat fitfully, moved in that direction, so that, for instance, tariffs and content rules can be seen as nurturing domestic production of EVs, helping the US develop them into world-class exports, as opposed to simply providing shelter for high prices (which was the net effect of Trump's corrupt favoritism). Whether this amounts to a paradigm shift is arguable, as government sponsorship of private industry has always been part of the neoliberal position (most obviously in arms and oil).

    • [06-20] NAFTA: The great success story: Compares Mexican-to-American GDP figures since 1980, showing that the gap has increased since NAFTA, putting Mexicans even more behind. What would be helpful here is another chart showing income inequality in both countries. It has certainly increased in the US since NAFTA, and probably in Mexico as well.

  • Kevin T Dugan: [06-18] Nvidia is worth as much as all real estate in NYC -- and 9 other wild comparisons.

  • Corey Robin: [06-29] Hayek, the accidental Freudian: "The economist was fixated on subconscious knowledge and dreamlike enchantment -- even if he denied their part in this relationships."

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:


Other stories:

Noam Chomsky: Briefly in the news after false reports that he had died at 95 -- see Brett Wilkins: [06-18] Manufacturing Obituaries: Media falsely reports Noam Chomsky's death -- which led to a quick burst of posts, including a couple of his own, still vibrant and still relevant:

William Hartung: [06-25] An AI Hell on Earth? Silicon Valley and the rush toward automated warfare.

Sean Illing: [06-23] What nuclear annihilation could look like: "The survivors would envy the dead." Interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario.

Joshua Keating: [06-16] The world is running out of soldiers: Good. Soldiering is a losing proposition, no matter what side you think you are on. I'm not sure that Keating is right that "wars are getting more common and militaries are building up." I'll grant that war business is booming, and that the costs -- both to wage and to suffer war -- are way up, but aren't costs supposed to be self-limiting? One cost, which is finding people dumb and/or desperate enough to enlist, certainly is, and that's a good thing. Somehow some related pieces popped up:

  • Jack Hunter: [06-18] Congress moves to make Selective Service automatic: "Raising the specter of the draft, this NDAA amendment seems ill-timed." Actually, no one's advocating to bring back the draft. All the amendment does is simplifying the paperwork by leaving it to the government to sign people up, giving people one less awful thing to do. Simpler still would be to eliminate registration, and the whole useless bureaucracy behind it.

  • Edward Hasbrouck: [06-29] A war draft today can't work. Let us count the ways.

Jacob Kushner: [06-23] The best plan to help refugees might also be the simplest: "More refugees live in cities. Could cash help them rebuild their lives?"

Dave Lindorff: [06-28] Assange is finally free as America, Britain, Sweden and Australia are shamed.

Also, some writing on music:

Robert Christgau: [06-26] Xgau Sez: June, 2024: Several things of possible interest here, but I wanted to comment on this interchange:

[Q] On October 18, you tweeted a defense of Israel citing a well written piece which postulated that the hospital bombing committed one week after 10/7 was actually not committed by Israel. You stated that prior to this evidence, you were "profoundly disturbed" that such a thing could happen. So now here we are, over half a year later, after tens of thousands of deaths and countless hospital bombings which have all undeniably been committed by Israel--and you haven't said a single word? It's one thing for you to have stayed quiet on the issue completely, but you only speak up when Israel can be protected? Bob, what is wrong with you? How are you not profoundly disturbed as the death toll of innocent civilians reaches nearly 40,000 with no clear end in sight? The last thing I ever expected from my decades of following your works was for you to be so spineless. I refuse to believe you only actively stand for something when the narrative suits your desires. -- Brandon Sparks, America

[A] Anyone but a genuine expert who writes about the appalling Gaza war risks being incomplete and probably wrong. I cited that hospital bombing story because that early there seemed some reason for hope that the war would resolve itself with a modicum of sanity. It wasn't yet clear just how appalling Netanyahu would prove to be--or, I will add with my hands shaking, Hamas either. The "lots" I know is too little and in public at least I intend to say as little as possible. I've long believed in a two-state solution and this war is easily the cruelest and most gruesome international conflict of my adulthood. But it hasn't yet turned me into a full-bore anti-Zionist, because as an American of German extraction with many dozens of Jewish friends, I've spent too much of my life taking anti-Semitism seriously to put it on any sort of back burner now.

Christgau has been a good friend for close to fifty years, and a friend of my wife's even longer (he introduced us), and we're generally pretty simpatico politically, drawing on similar class and cultural backgrounds and experiences -- although he's eight years older than I am, which is enough for him to look up to other people as mentors (especially Greil Marcus, whose view of Israel and Gaza I wrote about here, and probably the late Ellen Willis, who was left of Marcus but still a devoted Zionist) and to look down on me as a protégé (not that he doesn't respect what I have to say; he's often a very astute reader, but still doggedly fixed in his beliefs).

After what Marcus wrote, we gave him credit for publishing this letter, and not for simply shirking it off. But while his cautious and self-effacing tone evaded our worst expectations, nearly every line in his answer is wrong in some fundamental sense, just not in the manner of Marcus (ridiculous, hypocritical accusations cloaked in a storm of overwrought emotion and self-pity), but mostly by pleading ignorance and accepting it as bliss. To wit:

  1. "Anyone but a genuine expert . . . risks being incomplete and probably wrong." If you know any history at all, you must know that in 1948 Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians, driving many of them into Gaza (more than the previous population of Gaza), leaving them under Egyptian rule until Israel invaded and occupied Gaza in and ever since 1967, and that under Israeli rule, they were denied human rights and subject to multiple waves of violent repression, a dire situation that only got worse when Israel left Gaza to the circumscribed gang rule of Hamas. Under such circumstances, and having repeatedly failed to appeal to Israel's and the world's sense of justice, it was only a matter of time before Hamas resorted to its own violence, since nothing less could move Israel.

    If you don't know the history, you might not have understood the Hamas revolt on Oct. 7, but you would have observed that the revolt was limited and unsustainable, because Hamas had nothing resembling a real army, few modern arms, no arms industry, no safe haven, no allies. It may have come as a shock, but it was no threat. Israel killed or repelled the attackers within a couple days. After that, virtually all of the violence was committed by Israel, not just against people who had desperately fought back but against everyone in Gaza, against their homes, their farms, their utilities, their hospitals. Since Hamas was powerless to stop Israel, even to make Israel pay a further price for their war, the only decent choice Americans had was to inhibit Israel, to back them down from the genocide their leaders openly avowed. There was nothing subtle or complex about this.

  2. "There seemed some reason for hope that the war would resolve itself with a modicum of sanity": Really? Israel, following the example of the British before them, has always punished Palestinian violence with disproportionate collective punishment. The Zionist leadership embraced what is now commonly called "ethnic cleansing" in 1937, as they embraced the Peel Commission plan to forcibly "transfer" Palestinians from lands that Britain would offer for Israel. From that point on, genocide was woven into the DNA of Zionism. The only question was whether they could afford to discredit themselves to the world (which, by 2023, really just meant the US). When Biden vowed unlimited, uncritical support, Israel was free to do whatever they wanted, sane or not, with no fear of reprisal, isolation, and sanctions.

  3. "It wasn't yet clear just how appalling Netanyahu would prove to be": Granted, few Americans have any real appreciation for Israeli politics, especially given the extent to which most Israeli politicians misrepresent themselves to Americans. Still, you have to be awful naïve not to understand where Netanyahu came from (he was born royalty on the fascist right: his father was Jabotinsky's secretary) and where he would go any time he got the chance (ever farther to the right). Sure, he was more circumspect than his partners Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who were free to say what he actually wanted to do. Even before the Oct. 7 revolt, their coalition was curtailing Palestinian rights within Israel, and was encouraging and excusing a campaign of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank, while Gaza was being strangled, and the only relatively liberal courts were being neutered. Outrage over Oct. 7 was immediately turned into license to intensify operations that were already ongoing.

  4. "I've long believed in a two-state solution": "Two states" isn't a belief. It's just something people talk about to keep people separated into rival, hostile blocs. Give them equal power and they would be at each other's throats, but with unequal power you have one standing on the other's neck. "Two states" started out as a British idea, tried disastrously first in Ireland then in India. Israelis endorsed the idea in 1937 (Peel Commission) and in 1947 (UN Partition Plan), but when they had the chance to actually build a state, they went with one powerful state of their own, and prevented even a weak Palestinian state from emerging: Jordan and Egypt were given temporary control of chunks of Palestine, their population swelled with refugees from ethnic cleansing in Israel's captured territories, then even those chunks were regained in 1967, when Israel was finally strong enough to keep their people confined to impoverished stans.

    True, the "two state" idea recovered a bit in the 1990s, as bait to lure corrupt "nationalists" into policing their own people, but few Israelis took the idea seriously, and after Sharon in 2000, most stopped pretending -- only the Americans were gullible enough to keep up the charade. You can dice up territories arbitrary to provide multiple states with different ethnic mixes allowing multiple tyrannies, but that kind of injustice only leads to more conflict. The only decent solution is, as always, equal rights for everyone, however space is allocated. Imagining othewise only shows how little you know about human nature.

  5. "Easily the cruelest and most gruesome international conflict of my adulthood": The American wars in Indochina and Korea were worse by almost any metric. The oft-genocidal wars in and around India and the eastern Congo certainly killed more people. Even the CIA-backed "white terror" in Indonesia killed more people. Israel's wars are more protracted, because they feed into a self-perpetuating culture of militarism, but while the latest episode in Gaza is off the charts compared to any of these catastrophes, but averaged out over the century since British imperialism gave force to the Balfour Declaration, Israel's forever war has been fairly well regulated to minimize its inconvenience for Israelis. It persists only because Israelis like it that way, and could be ended easily if they had any desire to do so.

  6. "But it hasn't yet turned me into a full-bore anti-Zionist": You don't have to be an anti-Zionist to oppose genocide, or to oppose a caste system where given or denied rights because of their birth and parents. Admittedly, those behaviors are deeply embedded in the fabric of actually-existing Zionism, but there have been alternative concepts of Zionism that do not encourage them, and even actual Zionists have resisted the temptation to such barbarism more often than not. You can be Israeli, or you can love Israel and Israelis and wish nothing more than to keep them safe and respected and still oppose the racist and genocidal policies of the current regime. Indeed, if you are, you really must oppose those policies, because they do nothing but bring shame on the people you profess to love and cherish. And you can do this without ever describing yourself as pro-Palestinian, or in any way associating yourself with Palestinian nationalists -- who, quite frankly, have made a lot of missteps over the years, in the worst cases acting exactly like the Israelis they claim to oppose.

  7. "Because as an American of German extraction with many dozens of Jewish friends, I've spent too much of my life taking anti-Semitism seriously to put it on any sort of back burner now." Again, you can be Jewish, or you can love and respect Jews, and still oppose Israel's policies of racism and genocide. You can find ample reason within Judaism, or Christianity, or any other religion, or secular humanism, socialist solidarity, or simple human decency, to do so. And you can and should be clear that if the roles were reversed you would still oppose racism and genocide, and seek to protect and sustain victims of those policies.

    This is actually quite easy for people of the left to do, because the definition that identifies us on the left is that we believe that all people deserve equal political, economic, and human rights. It is harder for people on the right, who again by definition believe that some people are chosen to rule and that others are commanded to serve, or at least not annoy or inconvenience their betters by their presence. They are likely to be divided, depending on whether they identify with the people on top or on the bottom, and they are likely to be the worst offenders, because they also believe that the use of force is legitimate to promote their caste and to subdue all others.

    There is a form of gravity involved in this: if you're under or excluded from the dominant hierarchy, you tend to move left, because your self-interest is better served by universal rights and tolerance than by the slim odds that you can revolt and seize power. This is why almost all Jews in America lean left -- as do most members of most excluded and/or disparaged minorities, pretty much everywhere. Israel is different, because right-wing Jews did manage to seize power there, and as such have become a glaring example of why the right is wrong.

    Zionists have worked very hard to obscure the inevitable divide between rightist power in Israel and left leanings in the diaspora, and for a long time, especially in America, they've been remarkably successful. I'm not going to try to explain how and why, as the key point right now is that it's breaking down, as it is becoming obvious that Israel acts are contrary to the political and moral beliefs of most Jews in America -- that there is any significant support for Israel at all can only be attributed to denial, lies, and the rote repetition of carefully crafted talking points.

    One of those talking points is that opposition to Israel's wars and racism reflects and encourages anti-semitism, thus triggering deep-seated fears tied back to the very real history of racism and genocide targeting Jews -- fears that, while hard to totally dismiss, have been systematically cultivated to Israel's advantage by what Norman Finkelstein calls "the holocaust industry." Some people (and Marcus presents as an example) grew up so traumatized that they are completely unreachable (which is to say, disconnected from reality) on Israel. Others, like Christgau, are just enmeshed in sympathy and guilt -- although in his case, I don't see what other than his name binds him to German, much less Nazi, history and culture (for instance, the Christian church he often refers to was Presbyterian, not Lutheran, not that Lutheranism is all that Teutonic either; in music about all I can think of is that he likes Kraftwerk and Kurt Weill, but who among us doesn't?).

    That Zionists should be accusing leftists, including many Jews, of being anti-semitic is pretty ripe. Zionism was a minority response to the rising tide of anti-semitism in 19th century Europe, which insisted that anti-semitism was endemic and permanent -- something so ingrained in Euopean culture that could never be reformed by socialist political movements or tolerated by liberalism, a curse that could only be escaped from, by retreating to and fortifying an exclusively Jewish nation-state, isolated by an Iron Wall.

    But along the way, Zionists learned to play anti-semitism to their advantage. They pleaded with imperialists to give them land and to expel their unwanted Jews. They pointed Christians to the prophecy in Revelations that sees the return of Jews to the Holy Land as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. (David Lloyd George was one who bought that line. In America today, Postmillennial Dispensationalists are the staunchest supporters of Zionism, and every last one of them relishes the Final Solution that eluded Hitler.) They negotiated with Nazis. They lobbied to keep Jews from emigrating to America. They organized pogroms to stampede Arabic Jews to ascend to Israel. They stole the shameful legacy of the Holocaust and turned it into a propaganda industry, which plies guilt to obtain deferrence and support, even as Israel does unto others the same horrors that others had done to Jews.

    Opposition to anti-semitism is a core belief of liberals and the left in America. This is because such forms of prejudice and discrimination are inimical to our principles, but it's gained extra resonance because Jews tend to be active in liberal/left circles, so non-Jews (like Christgau and myself) know and treasure many of them. Nearly all of us are careful, sometimes to the point of tedium, to make clear that our criticisms of Israel are not to be generalized against Jews. In this, we are helped by the many Jews who share our criticisms, and often, like the group Jewish Voice for Peace, lead the way. But not everyone who criticizes Israel exercises such care, and not everyone does so from left principles, and those are the ones who are most likely to fall back on anti-semitic tropes and popularize them, increasing the chances of an anti-semitic resurgence. That would be bad, both politically and morally, but no form of opposition to tyranny justifies the tyranny. We need to understand that the offense is responsible for its opposition, and to seek its solution at the source: Israel's racist and genocidal behavior.

    So if you're really concerned that this war may make anti-semitism more common, the only solution is to stop the war: in practical terms, to demand a ceasefire, to halt arms deliveries to Israel, to insist that Israel give up its claims to Gaza (if anything is clear by now, it's that Israel is not competent to administer Gaza), to organize aid and relief, and to open a dialogue with Israel to come to some sort of agreeable solution where everyone can live in peace, security, and hopefully prosperity with full and equal rights. The main reason for doing this is that it's the right thing to do, for pretty much everyone, but if you're primarily concerned about anti-semitism, that is one more reason to sue for peace.

    In this age where kill ratios exceed 100-to-1, and the starvation ratio is infinite, I'm not going to pretend that the psychic trauma the war is causing for Israelis, for Jews, and for philo-semitic Americans somehow balances off against the pain and suffering that is being inflicted on Palestinians, but that traums is real, and needs to be addressed and relieved, and only peace can do that. And in this particular conflict, only Israel can grant peace. Until they choose to do so, all focus should be directed on those who are responsible for this war: for fighting it, for supporting it, for excusing it, and for letting them get away with it.

I guess that last point ran away from me a bit, while still leaving much more to be said. More succinctly: to whatever extent Israel is able to identify its war with Jews in general, and to equate opposition to its war with anti-semitism, the prevalence and threat of anti-semitism will grow. To stop this, stop the war. If anti-semitism is the issue you really care about, stopping the war is the only thing that will help you.

People on the left, by definition, are opposed to the war, and are opposed to anti-semitism, and see their opposition to both as part of the same fight. People on the right are often confused, crazy, and/or sick. You may or may not be able to help them, but know that they are much less dangerous in times of peace and good will than in times of war and turmoil, so again the imperative is to stop the war. And if you, like Christgau (and even Marcus) hate and fear Donald Trump (who's firmly on the right for all three reasons), same prescription: stop the war.

One last point: you don't have to specifically care about Jews on this matter. I'm addressing these points to people who do. While I think it would be more helpful to protest in ways that help gain support from people who are initially sympathetic to Israelis -- e.g., I think a lot of Palestinian flag waving isn't very helpful -- I understand that people can come to the right conclusion from all sorts of reasoning. What matters most is that we all demand a ceasefire, and an end to Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.

David A Graham: Doug Emhoff, first jazz fan: "The second gentleman gets the beauty and meaning of the genre."

Chris Monsen:

  • [06-19] Midweek pick, June 19th, 2024: Okka Disk: A reminder of Bruno Johnson's Milwaukee-based avant-jazz label, noting that "perhaps a deep dive into their output would be in order at a later date." For what little it's worth, I started working on Ken Vandermark & Friends: A Consumer Guide back around 2004, as it seemed like a good follow up to my A Consumer Guide to William Parker, Matthew Shipp, et al., but I didn't get very far. My database does contain 66 albums released by Okka Disk, 55 with grades, of which the following rated A- or higher:

    • Jim Baker/Steve Hunt/Brian Sandstrom/Mars Williams: Extraordinary Popular Delusions (2005 [2007])
    • Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Massimo Pupillo/Paal Nilssen-Love: Hairy Bones (2008 [2009])
    • Caffeine [Ken Vandermark]: Caffeine (1993 [1994])
    • FME [Vandermark]: Underground (2004)
    • FME: Cuts (2004 [2005])
    • Triage [Dave Rempis]: Twenty Minute Cliff (2003)
    • Triage: American Mythology (2004) [A]
    • School Days [Vandermark]: Crossing Division (2000)
    • School Days: In Our Times (2001 [2002])
    • Steelwool Trio [Vandermark]: International Front (1994 [1998])
    • Ken Vandermark/Kent Kessler/Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/Nate McBride/Wilbert De Joode: Collected Fiction (2008 [2009])
  • [06-26] Midweek pick, June 26th, 2024: Gayle, Graves and Parker's WEBO: What I'm listening to to calm my nerves while writing about Gaza and Biden.

Phil Overeem: June 2024: Halfway there + "old reggae albums I'd never heard before were my June salvation."

Robert Sullivan: [06-24] The Sun Ra Arkestra's maestro hits one hundred: "Marshall Allen, the musical collective's sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale."

Werner Trieschmann: [06-20] Fox Green score hat trick with excellent third album, Light Over Darkness.

Midyear Lists:


Jun 2024