Unless you've been living under a rock (and additionally not reading this blog), you should already know that the Boston Red Sox are the reigning World Series champions, even if they are playing like trash so far this season. What's more, the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl and are the current NFL champion.
No city has ever hosted the champions of all four major American sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) in one year. Detroit came the closest in 1935, when the Lions, Tigers, and Red Wings all won their leagues. But this year, after the Red Sox and Patriots victories, the Boston Bruins are tied at one game each in the second round of the NHL playoffs and the Boston Celtics lead their second round one game to none. It's not impossible for Boston to become the first city to ever win all four majors.
The Milwaukee Bucks were supposed to be the team to put an end to the Celtics' ambitions. After all, they have likely MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, the "Greek Freak" (but from Nigeria) playing for them. Well, in Sunday's Game 1, the Celtics blew out the Bucks by 22 points, leading at least one network commentator to say after the game that it's all over for the Bucks. We don't know if it will be that easy, and the road ahead will certainly be an uphill climb that eventually will likely have to go through Golden State, but you got to like the Celtics' workmanship and camaraderie going into these playoffs.
Even though they dropped the first game in their Second Round, we don't see any team challenging the Bruins for the Stanley Cup this year. But TBQH, we don't know shit about hockey, so take that into consideration.
Our point here is that Boston may very well become the first team to host four championships in one year, and even if they don't, they are still likely to get closer than any city has in any year during our lifetime.
The Celtics play Game 2 of their second series tonight in Milwaukee, and the Bruins have their Game 3 tonight in Columbus. Good luck, teams, and godspeed!
Last November, we saw the Athens, Georgia band of Montreal at Terminal West. Now, a mere five months later, they return to the TW, and we saw them again.
The band Yip Deceiver opened. YD consist of members of of Montreal (that sentence looks funny but it's grammatically correct); YD is basically 3/5 of of Montreal (gotta figure out how to stop doing that . . . ). Anyway, they played a fun set of 80s-sounding, new-wave synth pop and for one song, brought a guest keyboardist on stage so that they briefly were 4/5 of of Montreal (damn!), basically, the band without frontman Kevin Barnes.
We went to the show with B., our adult daughter. She's not a big fan of being packed in close with other members of an audience, so instead of our usual front-row spot, we watched this show from up above the dancing crowd in the TW balcony.
This year's of Montreal stage show was different than the shows of previous years. Gone were the video projections and light shows of years past, and frontman Kevin Barnes looked great, even though we wore neatly pressed jeans and a loose shirt instead of the usual drag of years past. We kept expecting him to trot off stage for a quick costume change, but he stayed in the same outfit the entire set. Frankly, it's the butchest we've ever seen him. Fortunately, though, the show still had the outrageously costumed dancers of before and as always, of Montreal's great, bouncy songs.
The band played songs off of their new LP, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood, as well as older favorites like Different for Girls and Let's Relate. Kevin Barnes' voice was in great shape and the rest of the band sounded tight.
As usual, the set ended with a calamitous assemblage of many costumed persons on the stage, crowd surfing, and general mayhem. Here's the closing moment:
So, in ways the show was a little less audacious than some prior of Montreal shows - no video and light show and no Kevin Barnes costume changes; no Susan Sarandon on stage to spank dudes dressed like pigs - but compared to most other shows, an audio/visual sensory overload and most certainly a fun way to spend a Saturday night.
Saturday, April 27, 2019
On Friday, the director of the FBI warned about Russia's continued meddling in American elections. He called the meddling a significant counterintelligence threat and said that Russia's influence on the 2018 election was merely a rehearsal for 2020's presidential race. Our so-called president has done nothing about Russia's interference; he's only repeated his refrain of "no collusion" on his part.
Before she resigned, the Secretary of Homeland Security tried to focus the White House on preparing for new and different forms of Russian interference in the 2020 election. She was told not to bring it up in front of our so-called president.
The redacted Mueller report demonstrates that our so-called president tried to wield the power of law enforcement to target a political rival, Hillary Clinton. No president since Richard Nixon is known to have done this. The report also lays out clear evidence that our so-called President had repeatedly tried to impede and obstruct the investigation against him. Our so-called president has declared the report a complete and total exoneration of him.
In short, our so-called president is abusing the power of his office to persecute his political rivals, and to obstruct investigations of his behavior. He is taking absolutely no actions to protect our democracy from the clear and present danger of continued Russian interference, and has even gone so far as to take the word of Russia's president over the advice of his own intelligence agencies. This is clearly dereliction of duty and obstruction of justice.
If congress were not to impeach him, it would send out a clear message that such behavior is acceptable and permitted, setting an extremely dangerous precedent for our democracy. If congress were to impeach him and he gets acquitted, it would imply that his actions are legal and appropriate, an equally dangerous outcome.
It's essential to the health and welfare of our republic that this man be impeached and that congress follows through and makes it stick. Failure is not an option.
Michael White was an American jazz violinist who was born on May 24, 1930 in Houston and grew up in Oakland. He took up the violin when he was six years old, and his initial career break occurred in 1965 when he played with the John Handy Quintet at their infamous Monterey Jazz Festival set.
During his long career, White has played alongside John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Wes Montgomery, Joe Henderson, and Richard Davis. His music influences and techniques incorporate Western, Middle, and Far Eastern classical music, as well as blues, R&B, and the jazz tradition. His signature sound was a sort of double stop produced by plucking a string on the neck of the violin while he was simultaneously bowing. White was among the first to play the violin in an avant-garde jazz setting and in the late 1960s he became one of the first jazz violinists to play jazz-rock fusion with his band The Fourth Way.
White's first album as a leader, 1971's Spirit Dance on Impulse! Records, contained the song John Coltrane Was Here, a tribute to the towering Impulse! figurehead. Somehow, that LP manifested in our record collection sometime around 1975, our first introduction to Michael White. In the mid 1990s, after a long period of obscurity, he performed in the reunited John Handy Quintet and in 1997, he recorded Motion Pictures, an album with guitarist Bill Frisell. The song Mechanical Man from his 2006 album Voices won the 6th Annual Independent Music Award for Best Jazz Song. White eventually settled in Los Angeles.
Michael White died on December 6, 2016. His creative musicianship and innovative approach to the violin essentially paved the way for other subsequent violinists such as Jean Luc Ponty, Michael Urbaniak, Sugarcane Harris, and Papa John Creach. His style and influence are still apparent today, in musicians as diverse as Taiwan's C Spencer Yeh.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
It's been over two months now since our car broke down on the interstate highway while driving home from work, leaving us stranded and vulnerable in the HOV lane, hoping that the next car coming down the road doesn't hit and kill us.
We still experience anxiety driving that stretch of highway. We don't look at that road the same way anymore. It was originally designed as a 5-lane highway, but several years ago, they added a sixth HOV lane by narrowing the other five lanes and taking up the shoulder on both sides of the road. Now, it's six-cars-wide of heavy traffic, spaced only about two car lengths back from one another, and all speeding along at well over 70 mph, except for a few who insist on going slower, causing the other cars to weave in and out of lanes trying to pass and get around them. It's a perfect situation for an accident and they occur frequently, and when it does happen, there's no room to pull over and everything then backs up for miles.
That was exactly what must have happened this morning, as the radio announced that an accident on I-85 had all lanes of traffic blocked, and it wasn't expected to reopen again until after 9:30 a.m. As a result, we worked from home this morning, and drove in during lunch after the road had cleared.
Driving home, we passed the spot where we had broken down last February, noting it grimly as we zipped by as we always do now whenever we pass that spot. A few miles later, we saw a lot of red tail lights lit up in front of us and as we slowed down and got closer, we saw the flashing lights of the same emergency response truck that had rescued us. Once again, just like it had for us, the truck was over in the HOV lane, stopping traffic so the poor driver/victim could get across to the right and to relative safety. Once that was done, the traffic moved once again, and as we passed, we took a sympathetic look at the vehicle to our right. "Dude, we've been there," we thought. While having to come to a stop on the drive home might once have annoyed us, now it's an exercise in empathy.
We're really lost confidence about driving that stretch of road. It now looks mean and unforgiving to us and we dread having to take it twice a day, but there's really no other practical route. All the more reason to look forward to retirement.
Today is the 23rd of April, 2019. It is the 403-year anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, who passed away on April 23, 1616.
But 23 plus 23 equals 46, and Shakespeare was 46 years old in the year 1611, the year that the King James translation of the Bible was published. Some hypothesize that Shakespeare may have helped with some of the writing, at least possibly the Book of Psalms.
He may even have left a subtle clue about his authorship in the book, a secret signature if you will. If the 46-year-old playwright translated any of the Psalms, it stands to reason that were he to leave a clue about his involvement, it would have been in the 46th Psalm, the Psalm of his age. If you look up The Book of Psalms, Chapter 46 (XLVI), the 46th word from the beginning is "shake," as in "though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof," and the 46th word from the ending is "spear," as in "he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder."
Coincidence? Maybe. But isn't it more likely that the 46th word in and the 46th word before the end were put into the 46th Psalm by a 46-year-old poet and playwright? Wouldn't it stand to reason that King James would ask the preeminent writer of his time, who just so happened to be under his command, to polish up the translation a little bit? It would be more shocking if the King hadn't asked the Bard of Avon to take a swing at it. And don't you think that the Bard, when told his involvement would have to be kept anonymous, thought to himself, "Well, then, I'll find a way to get my name in there somehow"?
The fun part is we'll never know. But Psalm 46 just became so much more interesting.
Also, speaking of mountains shaking and cutting spears asunder and all, Bran Stark is the Night King (maybe). And Arya's going to kill him with her new dragonglass spear (why not?).
It's Easter Sunday, and one thing we never understood here at the WDW desks is why a holiday of such significance and importance to Christians doesn't merit a day off from work. Sure, it's on a Sunday and Chick-Fil-A is closed, but why do we have to go to work on Monday? We mean, we get a day off for veterans and laborers, and we get two days off to celebrate a brief armistice between native Americans and European colonists, but no time off to celebrate the defining event of Christianity?
Which almost leads us to a segue about Notre Dame. As everyone knows, the cathedral in Paris was badly damaged by a fire last week, although the Sports Desk was excited at first because it had thought that the loathsome football program from South Bend, Indiana had burned down. But no, it wasn't the personification of NCAA privilege that had burned, but the national symbol of France (which we had thought was the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, but what do we know?, we're not French). Many people have charitably risen to the occasion and donated money to help meet President Macron's goal of restoring the cathedral in five years, including the French game developer Ubisoft, maker of the Far Cry and Assassin's Creed series. Not only did Ubisoft pledge 500,000 euros to the restoration, but they're also offering the 2014 game Assassin's Creed: Unityfor free for the next week. The game is set in Paris during the French Revolution, and apparently Notre Dame cathedral is prominently featured in the game.
Reportedly, the virtual rendition of Notre Dame in A.C.: Unity is so accurate that it may serve as an important piece of historical media for the rebuilding. Unity artist Caroline Miousse said in a 2014 interview that she spent two years recreating the cathedral from the inside out. "I made some other stuff in the game, but 80 percent of my time was spent on the Notre Dame," she said.
Ubisoft's admirable efforts aside, the outpouring of money to rebuild the cathedral brings up the question of why these donors weren't helping before with France's well-documented problems with income inequality, underemployment, and poverty?
By the way, "Jemen" and "Frankrijk" are "Yemen" and "France" in Dutch.
But anyway, that answers the question of what the Games Desk would be playing next. How could we pass up a free download ($29.99 value)? After Captain Spirit, we were expecting to be further reliving our childhood by playing Life Is Strange 2, but the cyberverse apparently had other plans, and while as consumers we normally wouldn't select yet another Assassin's Creed vehicle as our next game, well, it's free!
We started playing last evening. The mechanics and visuals of the 2014 game are a bit dated and certainly not at the same level as A.C. Origins and Odyssey (five years is a long time in game development), but it's certainly not as bad as our attempt at playing another recent free download, 2002's Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. We tried playing that one, but it was almost painful; after about an hour, we turned it off, deciding that whatever richness it could provide to The Elder Scrolls backstory wasn't worth the tedium of the antiquated mechanics of the game. No, Unity is still quite playable, even if Ubisoft has improved the game considerably in its recent editions.
Actually, though, the game was a bit confusing at first, as we've grown accustomed to the controls for the character in later Assassin's Creed games, and found it hard to get used to making the character work properly in this earlier version. Also, the game started with a scene about a Templar knight and then jumped five years forward to the burning of said Templar at the stake, and then jumped forward from there 300 more years to a young aristocrat in 18th Century Paris, and then leapt in time yet a third time to that aristocrat now as an adult, with at least one cutway to the present or near-future involving the Abstergo Corporation and the Animus device (if you've played any games in the A.C. series, you'll know what all that's about). After that, the game finally settles down a bit and your character, the aristocrat, starts what's obviously the path that will lead him to eventually becoming an Assassin. One of his tasks involved scaling one of the towers of Notre Dame, no easy feat (to get up, you have to actually scale the opposite tower and then leap from the scaffolding on one tower to the other). So we already got some up-close-and-personal exposure to the cathedral - you know, the reason the game was released for free?
Another adventure involves an escape from the Bastille, and it's only after some three hours into the game when you're forced to make a death-defying leap off the Bastille walls that the opening credits finally appear in cinematic fashion and the game proper finally begins. Everything up to that point was mere introductory exposition and training. Three hours! It looks like this might be another long game.
Anyway, as we noted above, it's Easter. The Boston Celtics have a potentially series-clinching playoff game against the Indiana Pacers this afternoon and Episode 2 of the final season of Game of Thrones airs tonight. Also, the long and heavy rains of the past week have finally stopped, and it's a perfect day for a Sunday stroll along the Beltline. So, without further ado, enjoy your day and in keeping with our recent tradition, here's XTC's Easter Theater:
After the 300-plus hour Odyssey that was Assassin's Creed, the Games Desk decided to change things up a little in their gameplay. So instead of another open-world epic, we took it real slow and simple with the short (you can play through the whole game in less than 2 hours) and nostalgic Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, a prequel, apparently to Life Is Strange 2. There are no weapons, no one gets killed, and there are no monsters - it's just a simple story of one boy on one Saturday morning somewhere in Oregon. Gameplay never ventures beyond the house and backyard.
On a deeper level, it's a poignant meditation on loss and loneliness, and coming to terms with death - as the story progresses, it's revealed that the mother died a few years prior in a hit-and-run. Both father and son are deeply affected by a profound sense of loss, and they both deal with it in markedly different ways. There are a few scenes that can literally bring tears to your eyes, and others that are quietly moving.
Best part - the game is free. Worst part - two hours later, we're wondering what we're going to play next.
We heard Aurora Nealand and Tim Berne play a mostly inscrutable set at Big Ears along with guitarists Bill Frisell and David Torn, but we find this composition recorded with New Orleans musicians Marcello Benetti (drums) and Will Thompson (keyboards) quite, um, scrutable. Think: Yoko Ono meets George Clinton, although they describe themselves as "the wild child between Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique."
Which is a long way of saying that this is a great track from what promises to be a great album. Give it a listen.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
We spent several hours today reading through the newly-released Mueller report. There's a lot to take in, but one of our favorite passages reads:
"when [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, 'Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked.' The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, 'How could you let this happen, Jeff?' The President said the position of Attorney General was his most important appointment and that Sessions had 'let [him] down,' contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the President said to him, 'you were supposed to protect me,' or words to that effect. The President returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, 'Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.'
The President then told Sessions he should resign as Attorney General. Sessions agreed to submit his resignation and left the Oval Office. [Communications advisor Hope] Hicks saw the President shortly after Sessions departed and described the President as being extremely upset by the Special Counsel's appointment. Hicks said that she had only seen the President like that one other time, when the Access Hollywood tape came out during the campaign."
Beyond just describing embarrassing anecdotes documenting the President's small-minded egomania and limited understanding of how government works, the report documents several episodes of Presidential behavior that the Special Counsel considers as potential obstructions of justice, including:
The President's efforts to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The President's firing of former FBI director James Comey.
The Presidents's efforts to assume oversight of the Mueller investigation.
The President’s order to the White House counsel to deny that the President had tried to fire Mueller.
The President’s conduct with regard to several associates who have pleaded guilty to crimes.
The Mueller report notes, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” They didn't so state, but the report does not recommend prosecution of the President by the Department of Justice, either. Instead, it notes that Congress might do so, stating, “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law."
So, far from being a "complete exoneration" of the President from any wrong-doing, the Mueller report is a challenge to Congress to live up to their vows and preserve and protect the Constitution.
Will Congress rise to the occasion?
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
As we said the other day, we human beings tend to react most forcibly when confronted by threats that are direct and personal. So while it's easy to maintain our stoic Zen composure when confronted by long hold times on the telephone or traffic delays, it's another thing when our boss decides for whatever reason that today would be a good day to start an argument, and when we resist getting pulled into whatever it was that he was not happy with today, he brings up his impression of some event from at least two years ago and throws that at us to see if that gets a rise out of us.
It did. But fortunately, before our sympathetic nervous system took over and we lashed back, we were saved by the bell - literally. Our cell phone went off, and the boss said, "Fine, go take that call," which we did, walking out of his office and the provocation that he left out there. It was a robo-sales call but we listened to it long enough to walk away from the situation and regather our composure before getting on with the rest of the day. The boss sulked in his office for the rest of the afternoon.
God, we can't wait until retirement, if for no other reason than to get out of this toxic environment.
All of our life, at least so far, at least since the early 1980s, we've worked for a living with little time left over to appreciate our presence here on this blue planet. In consulting, we've even managed to monetize our time - consulting is sometimes derogatorily referred to as "brains by the hour" - so from there it was only a short distance to the point where we were willing to pay others to do things that freed up our time and gave us more hours. Time was money, and there was an inverse relationship between income and free time. The more we worked, the more money we had, but the more money we had, the less time we had to enjoy it.
What's more, knowing that free time was our scarcest commodity, but that we were reasonably assured of a steady income and a lifetime flow of future paychecks, we had no problem with buying an airline ticket, non-stop please, instead of driving, with paying landscapers and house-cleaners to do our routine menial chores, and with buying or paying for anything that would save us some precious time.
In retirement, the situation is going to be the polar opposite. Our income will be fixed and we will have finite savings on which to survive. But we will have all day to do whatever needs getting done, all week, all month, all year if need be. What we're afraid of is having nothing to do, of boredom, and of falling into lethargy or depression. So it will be in our interest to do things that fill time and at the same time doing things that will save us money. Rake or blow our own leaves. Clean our own damn house. Drive instead of fly places. Instead of annoying us, things that will take up a lot of time will keep us from having nothing to do, and may keep us from squandering our savings.
Once we realized this, our mindset changed instantly. No, we're not young and we don't have an infinite number of years ahead of us, but we will have all the time in the world to do all the things that need to be done in this world. No need to rush. And this new way of looking at life doesn't need to wait until retirement but can start right now. This very moment. We have to go to work today? Good. That's something to do, and bonus points: we'll get some extra income for the effort. Traffic on the way home? No problem - we have nowhere else to be, might as well turn up the music and enjoy the leisurely pace of driving.
Yesterday, we had to call the U.S. Social Security Administration because the on-line Medicare enrollment locked us out when we couldn't identify a telephone number from 15 years ago. As we were warned, we were on hold for over an hour before we got through to someone, and then had to go back on hold again and again as that someone tried to resolve our issue. The long and the short of it is that we now have an appointment for a second telephone interview in mid-May - the first call turned out to be just a set-up for an interview with someone else to prove we really are who we say we are.
Before our time/money realization, this would have infuriated us. "What? We don't have time for this!" However, now we do have the time, in fact, it's something that will fill a few of those hours of some later day, so we should be thankful. What's more, our study of Stoicism shows us that we needn't worry about things that are outside of our control, and all that we can really control is our own reaction to things. It's our choice whether to be infuriated, outraged, and angry about the god-damned government and their incompetent bureaucracy, or to calmly accept that this is the path ahead of us and then calmly walk that path, without beating ourselves up over it and stressing out about things we can't change anyway. We were particularly calm and, well, Zen, during our pre-appointment telephone interview yesterday and the person on the other end of the phone (and we do need to remember that it is, in fact, a person on the other end, with their own life and problems, sorrows and disappointments, joys and achievements) even mentioned how much they appreciated our patience and understanding.
We're looking forward to retirement - it's already making us better persons.
Two shows in two nights (thankfully, it was on a weekend!). This evening, it wasn't the ever-reliable Earl but a show at the Atlanta alternative, D.I.Y. venue, The Bakery (where we saw Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore last year).
The show opened with an Atlanta outfit called Outside Voices, a clever name as they played "outsider" free jazz and also because they played loud, using their "outside voices." Normally a trio, the band expanded for this performance with an upright bassist, who added a lot to the set.
Theirs was an improv jam session with each musician playing their own thing, but unlike, say, the Aurora Nealand-Tim Berne-David Torn-Bill Frisell band Absînt, the sounds blended well together into one coherent whole, rather than just sounding like four people noodling along at the same time. There was dynamism to the set, louder at times, loud, but not quite as loud, at others. It was a fun set and a good way to start the show, and I'm glad that Atlanta has resident bands like this playing this kind of music.
Nels Cline is an incredible guitarist. In thinking about what makes a guitarist "incredible," we came up with another one of our crackpot theories (no, we're not going to bore you with veridical vs. sequential again, other than to say that this entire show was 100% sequential). Guitarists, we propose, can distinguish themselves in one of two ways. Some distinguish themselves by their lyricism, their ability to carry and create melody, and especially in jazz, to improvise and compose on the fly, basically creating a pleasing song as they go along. Think Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Jerry Garcia, even Frank Zappa. Other guitarists are more into the sound than the melody, and distinguish themselves by their inventiveness, playing the guitar in new and different ways, coaxing new sounds out of their equipment with novel or unusual methods. Think Arto Lindsey and Pete Cosey (Miles Davis' electric band), and Robert Fripp and Johnny Greenwood. The reason that Jimi Hendrix is so universally respected, even all these decades later, is that he was both lyrical (his guitar sang) and inventive (it sang in voices never heard before).
Nels Cline falls into the inventive category, and can arguably be called the most inventive guitarist playing today. The man truly belongs in the guitar god pantheon. His playing last night incorporated about every device imaginable - slides, pedals, repeaters, feedback, fretboard play, etc. He constantly was doing something new and something interesting, and it always sounded good and spot on for that moment. It was a Masters' dissertation on guitar inventiveness and on the ways his instrument can adapt to a free jazz format.
Saxophonist Larry Ochs brought the lyricism, and his playing was every bit as good in its way as Cline's was in its. Ochs is best knows as a member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and while he might look like Larry David if David dropped a lot of acid, he channeled Albert Ayler, Sonny Shepp, and even John Coltrane himself in his playing. Unfortunately, the nature of their compositions usually had Ochs' solos fading off into a Nels Cline passage, and Ochs didn't get nearly as much applause for his playing than did Cline, but Ochs more than held his own. It takes a certain selfless humility to end your solo by yielding to the other rather than grandstanding for effect, and it seems that what Ochs did much of the evening.
But this was a trio, and member Gerald Cleaver was no slouch on drums. There was no bass and most of the set was basically just an electric guitar over drums or a saxophone over drums with occasional full ensemble play, and Cleaver ably kept the beat going and provided percussive comments on both player's music. The cool thing was he made it look easy, even when both soloists ganged up on him with aggressive free playing at the same time. Cleaver just sat there, not missing a beat and effortlessly tied it all together with his drumming. On some of the quieter passages, he didn't "drum" so much as coax odd sounds out of his kit with rim shots, cymbal effects, and brush work. Cleaver may have taken a back seat, both literally and figuratively, to his bandmates, but he was every bit their equal musically. Listen to how he adapts his drumming to match the changes in Och's solo, giving Ochs some room to breathe as he tapped the keys on his sax:
So, yes, as you can tell, we enjoyed the show. It was a wonderful way to end the weekend, and we were even able to get home in time to catch the encore presentation of the season opener of Game of Thrones.
So, a quick word of explanation before anyone jumps to a wrong conclusion: last night, we went to see Tyler Ramsey and Strand of Oaks at The Earl, but once there realized we left our iPhone in the car. Pics or it didn't happen, as they say, but in this case it did happen but we just weren't able to get any pics. Which is a shame, because per usual, we were in the front row and, unusually, The Earl had the stage lit pretty brightly, so the pics would have come out great. So instead, we will randomly post pictures from something called the Equatorial Guinea Bodypainting Festival without any additional explanation.
Getting to it, then, there were only two bands on the bill and the opener was singer/songwriter Tyler Ramsey, best known as the frontman for Band of Horses.
Ramsey, as they say, is a tall drink of water and a commanding presence on stage. This worked to his advantage as he performed solo, just him and a few of his favorite guitars. This was a classic "folk" singer/songwriter set and relied on the audience to pay attention to his lyrics and guitar picking. His imposing presence on stage worked well for him in this regard, as he was hard to ignore (although as always at The Earl, a group of people back near the bar seemed oblivious that they were at a live music performance as they talked away loudly).
We're not big fans of this kind of singer/songwriter set, and even less so of folk singers performing songs with which we aren't familiar (most of Ramsey's set was from his new solo LP). We thought about it during his set, and before you roll your eyes at us going into another discussion of veridinal vs. sequential processing of music, hear us out: we enjoy folk singers (Damien Jurado comes to mind) when we're familiar with their music - that's when the veridinal system can kick in. But if we don't know the songs and don't experience that veridinal kick of endorphins when we recognize songs that we know, the folksy music of singer/songwriters is just too austere and simple, just the strumming and picking of guitar strings, for the sequential system to identify some theretofore unrecognized sequence of sounds and recognize it as music and release it's endorphins. So we're left there, sans serotonin. It's not that the music's bad or unpleasant, it's just that we don't get that "kick" that we go to music to experience.
Still, kudos to Tyler Ramsey - the songs were well written, he's a good guitarist, and he has a fine voice. Those paying attention and familiar with his LP seemed to really enjoy the set.
After a short intermission, Strand of Oaks took the stage.
Strand of Oaks is the long-time vehicle for Timothy Showalter's music. The "band," such as it is, was usually just Showalter with possibly a few other musicians recruited to add some textures and shading to his songs. But classic Strand of Oaks albums, like the cult classic Pope Killdragon, were basically folk-rock affairs, with an inclination toward the folk side.
But times change and musicians change, and musicians change with the times and the times change with musicians, and Timothy Showalter and Strand of Oaks are no exceptions. The newest Strand of Oaks album, Eraserland, features a full-on rock band performing full-fledged rock songs. It's a dramatic departure for Showalter, but he manages, at least on record, to maintain his Strand of Oaks identity and signature sound.
The live show is to the new record what the new record is to the older records. This was full-on southern rock, occasionally veering into blues-rock territory. Showalter was clearly having a great time, smiling throughout the whole set, even during what seemed like sad songs, and the enthusiastic audience loved it, dancing the whole time, fist-pumping and finger-pointing in the air. It was a great back-and-forth exchange of energy between audience and performer, each pushing the other onto greater heights. Pope Killdragon himself would have been proud to see where Showalter has taken his band of merry men.
We weren't familiar with the new songs (no veridinal endorphins) and the music, while orders of magnitude more dynamic than Tyler Ramey's, was still pretty straight-forward, anthemic, arena-sized rock, so while there were some sequential releases, the mind only released the endorphins in drips and drops, virtually titrating the serotonin to our neural receptors. To be honest, the best part of the show was the very enjoyable experience of watching Showalter work the sold-out crowd at The Earl into a frenzy, and to see the frenzy if the crowd in turn push Showalter into Springsteen territory (the distance between Eraserland and E Street is not as far as one might think).
Showalter sincerely thanked the audience for their support, attention and enthusiasm, high-fiving the crowd and even hugging some of the more enthusiastic patrons in the front row. He even thanked the City of Atlanta on Twitter for our support and enthusiasm, and posted the set list.
This was a fun way to spend a Saturday night, and even if the music wasn't completely to our taste it was still a good show and an interesting experience. Showalter seems destined to take his music into bigger clubs and venues than the little old Earl, and with the band and showmanship there's no reason not to imagine Strand of Oaks headlining festivals or filling arenas in the not-distant future.
Courtesy Giovanni Boccardi (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58155778)
There's a Zen koan that asks, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?" As most Buddhists know, certainly Mahayana Buddhists and even more specifically Chan and Zen Buddhists, the monk Bodhidharma traveled from India to China sometime around 500 A.D. and is credited with introducing the "authentic" teachings of the Buddha to the Far East.
But to ask "why" is to try and interpret motive or intention, which can only be known to the one taking an action, any action, including travelling from India to China. As we understand the koan, there is no "correct" answer and the monk passes the koan when he convinces the teacher that he understands that some things are unknowable and therefore not of value for further inquiry (we could be wrong, though). Some things are just the way they are.
Our favorite story concerning this koan involves Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and the other beat poets asking the question to various patrons of the bar in which they were hanging out. When they asked the dishwasher and he immediately retorted, "I don't care," they decided that was the best answer.
But regardless of his intention, legend has it that Bodhidharma travelled from India to China, and one small detail of the story, really not much more than a footnote, states that he travelled by sea, not the overland Silk Road route, and that the journey took him three years to complete.
We're not sure what the sea-speed velocity of Indian boats was in 500 A.D. (we don't even know what Indian boats looked like in 500 A.D.), but three years seems like a long time. Did they get lost? Were they shipwrecked? Kidnapped by pirates? Or did they just have fun adventures exploring the Southeast Asia shoreline and took their own sweet time travelling, with occasional forays onto islands and the mainline to hunt, obtain provisions, interact with natives, and so on. The legends don't tell us anything about the voyage, other than it was by sea and that it took three years.
We think there's a great, epic novel in there - The Adventures of Bodhidharma On the Indian Ocean or something. It's fun to think of it as a graphic novel, or an HBO mini-series. It could also make a great video game - Bodhidharma, in addition to bringing the dharma to China, is also credited with inventing kung fu during his stay at Shaolin Monastery, and the game could allow one to acquire different kung fu skills and levels of mastery by completing different tasks during the journey. You can also write it such that you can also develop a parallel set of spiritual skills, we'll call them the Six Paramitas, by doing good deeds and helping others and by refraining from violence at times. That could set up some interesting strategic choices for the player - do you kill the tiger and complete a kung fu level, or do you free it and finally master the Paramita of Not Killing?
But other than those broad-brushstroke ideas, we're really hampered on how to write the book (much less the other spin-offs) by our complete and utter lack of any idea of what sea travel was like in the Sixth Century. What were the boats like? How long could they be at sea before they'd have to land for provisions? Did they collect rain for drinking water? Would a single ship travel alone, or did they travel in convoys? We couldn't find many resources online to answer our questions.
So imagine our delight when yesterday we came across a rather obscure, 1896 manuscript titled Buddhist Practices In India. The manuscript is a scholarly translation of a Seventh Century manuscript written by a Chinese monk named I-tsing, who, enthused about the buddhadharma, decided to make a pilgrimage from China to India to visit the holy sites in person and experience the teachings from the source itself. Most of the book, as the title implies, contains I-tsing's notes on just how Buddhism was practiced in India (and therefore how it should be practiced in China), There are instructions on ceremonies and clothing, meals and the duties of officers, chants and mantras, and even a chapter on how to maintain personal hygiene and how to properly use the lavatory. In many regards, it resembles portions of Zen Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, and it's worth noting that in the 14th Century, like I-tsing, Dogen was also motivated to make a westward journey, this time from Japan to China, to learn about Buddhism from an "authentic" source.
But what really interests us in I-tsing's manuscript is that it includes a detailed description of his voyages, including details on the ship in which he traveled, the route, the number of days between stops, meetings with people in what is now called Sumatra and Malaysia, and encounters with aboriginal people on remote Indian Ocean islands (including the Insulae Nudorum, or Land of the Naked People) and with bandits on mainland India. It's hardly a swashbuckler, but it's not hard to imagine it as one. And even though I-tsing's journey was a century after Bodhidharma's and in the opposite direction (for the most part - I-tsing not only also describes his return voyage back home from India, but he apparently had to leave Sumatra in haste on his return and he describes a second voyage back to Sumatra to retrieve the manuscripts he had left behind), it seems reasonable to assume that Bodhidharma's voyage was probably very similar.
The account of the journey is a relatively short portion of the overall book, just a half-dozen or so pages in the introduction, but it's very detailed and precise. For example, to answer our earlier questions, we now know that the ship was a Persian merchant boat, it had two masts (either with five sails each or one sail per mast each stitched from five sheets), and over 100 fathoms of rope and rigging. Based on all that, it seems most likely that the ship was a baghlah (Arabic for "mule"), which were roughly 100 feet long and required a crew of 30 to 40 sailors to sail. That not only fills in a lot of the data gaps, but also can fuel a lot of speculative fiction right there.
We think we have enough to go on now to start a novel, if not The Adventures of Bodhidharma On the Indian Ocean, then Bodhidharma's Voyage From the West, or maybe simply just Bodhi. And with our retirement imminent, we actually for once, maybe for the first time in our adult life, have the time to actually write it.
Please don't steal our idea and publish the story before we can write it - we know we can trust everyone on the internet to keep quiet about this and keep it our little secret. Besides, we've already laid out the premise here, so this post would serve as evidence of plagiarism were someone to come along and try to beat us to the punch.
We need to get things moving in this Unpacking series - we're already up to Part VII and have only covered the first day and a half of Big Ears 2019. Considering that The Masters golf tournament is going on as we type, and considering that it's Friday, the day formerly set aside for our Dreaming of the Masters posts, it seems appropriate to cover all of the Masters that we saw and heard in Knoxville in one big post.
We established in our last post that while an exciting and creative performer, Shabaka Hutchings' music isn't jazz but a mixture of rock and EDM played on a saxophone. This brings up the question, though - what is jazz? - and the next band we saw after Hutchings' The Comet Is Coming was a new quartet that debuted at the festival, but not only did they not answer the question but they blurred the lines defining jazz even more.
ABSÎNT (Aurora Nealand, Bill Frisell, Tim Berne and David Torn)
Just like with the Japanese bands that we heard on Thursday, we had absolutely no idea what to expect from Absînt until they played the first notes of the first song of their set. This was a jazz supergroup of sorts - renowned and eclectic jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, avant outsider musicians David Torn (guitar) and Tim Berne (sax), and New Orleans provocateur Aurora Nealand. Each has their own style and as soon as they started, we realized that each was going to play in that own style of theirs, without regard for the others. In other words, the two guitarists were improvising away without any apparent attempt to sync with the other, Tim Berne was laying atonal sax screeches and skronk over, under, and around the two guitars, and Aurora Nealand was doing whatever it was that she was doing, which we couldn't tell because she sat on the floor for the entire performance and given that we arrived late and were at the back of the standing crowd, we couldn't see what it was that she was doing. With no drummer or bass to provide rhythm, the music just honked and beeped in seeming random time.
This was as free as "free jazz" gets, without any constraint by melody, rhythm, tone, mode, structure, or anything. Just four musicians, randomly playing random sounds, all independently of the others. This is nothing new to jazz - The Art Ensemble of Chicago has been doing this for decades. The entire set was one long improvisation - without structure or composition, there was no way for a "song" to start or stop, so the performers just kept jamming until the time ran out.
To be honest, it got tiring after a while. We've talked about the mind's sequential and the veridical modes of processing music before (the veridical enjoys hearing what's familiar and known, and the sequential likes finding the patterns in sound that makes it "music"). But there was nothing familiar played for the veridical to groove on, and the sequential got frustrated in trying to find anything that could be followed in the set. With neither system firing, the set became something to endure more than something to enjoy.
The initial audience was a full house - the place was packed - mostly by what we assume were Bill Frisell fans. Frisell played a lot of sets at this year's Big Ears with a lot of different ensembles, and unfortunately this is the only one we caught, but we were told the rooms were packed at every set he played. However, this kind of dissonant free jazz is not what Frisell is known for or what his audience expected to see, and many of them walked out throughout the set. At the beginning of the set, we were all the way in the back, but as the audience thinned out we were able to move our way up, and by the end of the set, we were like three rows of standing people back. Still couldn't see Aurora, though.
For what it's worth, Bill Frisell looked lost for much of the set, meekly strumming a single chord over and over while everyone else was improving all around him. It appeared like he was looking for a point to jump in and do something, anything, but couldn't find a seam in the wall of sound being produced by the others.
So, was this jazz? If we used the definition that we applied to Shabaka Hutchings - improvised music to a syncopated beat - it wasn't; there was no beat at all, much less syncopated (although there was mucho improv). Yet, we still consider this jazz, at least the outer fringes of free jazz, even though it doesn't meet our definition of the word "jazz," but we don't consider Shabaka Hutchings' music to be jazz. Why the double standard? Our only guess is that with some effort we can fit Shabaka's music into other categories, "rock" or "EDM," but we have nowhere else to put Absînt, so we might as well leave it under "jazz."
But who needs labels anyway?
Fire!
Later that day, after hearing the vocal chorale Roomful of Teeth and a couple of electronic artists (more about all of them in a later post), we saw Matts Gustafsson's band, Fire! Gustafsson's set at last year's Big Ears with the electronic musician Four Tet was not only the highlight of that festival, it was one of the best sets of live music we've ever experienced. There was no way we were going to miss this set, even if it did start at midnight at the end of a very long day of music.
We were not disappointed. Gustafsson's playing was just as energetic and just as exciting as last year's set, and while nothing may ever top that collab with Four Tet, this year's set with Fire! left one wanting nothing. For an idea of what it was like, imagine being sung a lullaby by a bull elephant that can periodically go into full must at random moments. Here, let us show you:
The set was an uplifting and almost spiritual experience, a cathartic release not unlike screaming into gale-force winds. At the end of the 60-minute set, the audience was all smiles and bro-hugs, all of us having experienced a communal release of pure endorphins.
Is it jazz or not? Who cares? At one point, Gustafsson referred to it on stage as "this Swedish bullshit music," so apparently he's not hung up on labels.
Wadada Leo Smith
Among his many other accomplishments, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith recorded an album in 1978 called Divine Love with one of the greatest trumpet triumvirates ever assembled - Kenny Wheeler, the Art Ensemble's Lester Bowie, and Wadada himself. Bowie and Wheeler have since passed, but at Big Ears, Wadada attempted to perform the album with surviving members Bobby Naughton on vibraphone and Dwight Andrews on woodwinds.
"Attempted." Something clearly went wrong with the performance. The trio started off playing some abstract but still accessible free jazz, but Wadada's single trumpet couldn't play all the parts for the three trumpets on the LP. At one point, it seemed he wanted to explain something to the audience, but none of the microphones on stage worked, so he just quit trying. A little later, a tape kicked on of the other two trumpeters dueting, but the trio on stage just stood there doing nothing while the tape played. We think (but we don't know) that the intended concept was for the trio to play on stage to the accompaniment of the session tapes of the other two trumpeters, but the tapes didn't come on when they were supposed to, and then later came on when no one on stage expected them. After about 20 minutes and with no explanation or even a "goodbye," the band simply walked off stage and the house lights came on. Show's over, folks. Have a good night.
We don't blame Wadada for the set. We think (but again we don't know) that some off-stage technician was supposed to switch on the tape at the appropriate point in the song, which would have been way cool - a live band of seasoned Masters playing on stage along with the taped performances of their departed brothers. But the tech was either unfamiliar with the music or simply didn't recognize the cue in the free jazz of the first set, and threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing. Wadada wanted to explain what was wrong but couldn't find a working mic, and finally the band left in frustration - the magic just wasn't happening for them that night. Bummer.
Here's what it could have/should have sounded like:
Well, we were planning of discussing three other Master's sets in this post, but this whole thing is rambling on longer than we anticipated and probably past your patience to read. We'll wrap it up here and talk about Masters old (Carla Bley), new (Makaya McCraven) and in between (Nik Bärtsch) in another post at another time.
There's nothing we can do about it - this is all going to take a while.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
We weren't upset this morning when we heard that Julian Assange has been arrested. He should be arrested - he stands accused of a crime, and he should be given a fair trial to determine if he's guilty or innocent of the charges, and if found guilty, a judge and jury should decide what - if any - degree of punishment he should receive.
It doesn't matter what the prevailing public opinion is on this matter, or what the press has to say. If Wikileaks has redeeming social value that justifies the crimes Mr. Assange stands accused of, the judge and jury should take that into consideration. He could be found innocent. He could be found guilty but given no or a very light sentence. He could be found guilty and have the book thrown at him and never see the outside of a prison cell again. But it's up to the judicial process to decide all that - not Op Ed writers, not the Gallup poll, not the word on the street. His treatment should be decided by a jury of his peers, by the governmental democratic justice system.
Meanwhile, our rare endorsement of the government is tempered by the bureaucratic frustration we experienced today. It's that time in our life when we have to apply for Medicare. We went on line today to enroll, guided by a professional insurance consultant to help us with our decisions. We entered our data to enroll - name, Social Security number, and address - selected a screen name and a password, and then were asked some personal questions to verify our identity. How much is our mortgage payment? What company holds that mortgage? And so on. But then came the gotcha question: "Which of the following is a former telephone number of yours?"
We've had the same cell phone number for at least the last 20 years, probably longer. We haven't had a landline since at least 2004, and don't remember what that number might have been. What's more, back in the days of dial-up modems, we had telephone numbers dedicated solely to our vintage computers, numbers assigned to us that were never even connected to a telephone. And we don't remember the number of any of them. The online form for Medicare enrollment listed three numbers, none of which rang a bell, and a fourth option, "None of the Above." Since we didn't recognize any of the numbers, we went with "None of the Above."
We immediately got booted out of the system, with a warning message saying that our account was locked down because we were unable to verify our identity.
The insurance consultant, our counselor, told us that we would have to enroll by mail, and that he would email us a form that we would have to submit by good old U.S. Mail. But then he called back a few minutes later and said that there was in fact no form for our situation, and that we would have to either enroll by phone ("be prepared to be on hold for long periods") or we'd have to go to the Social Security Administration office building and enroll in person ("best to set aside a whole day for the process").
Neither option sounds very appealing. What's frustrating is that we're going to have to go through the slow-boat bureaucratic process simply because we don't recognize an unused telephone number from 20 years ago or because the website designer didn't think of giving the user the option of saying "Don't know - ask another question."
But here's the thing - how come the government knows our telephone number from 20 years ago? And our mortgage payment? And our mortgage holder? Okay, they could get the mortgage holder from our income tax returns, but we never reported the actual monthly mortgage payments, just the annual interest paid. How do they know all that, and much more do they know about us? Our favorite of the "and so on" questions mentioned above (at this point, I think they were just showing off how much they knew about us) was, "Our records show that you paid off your current car in 2013. Which of the following companies had financed the loan?" Does the government know how many miles are on the car? Do they know about our blow-out flat tire from earlier this year? Do they know our cats names? The time of our last bowel movement?
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks, et al have a point - we do in fact live in a surveillance state. And the government doesn't always use that surveillance data discretely - today, they used it to deny us enrollment in Medicare.
