Dreaming of the Masters

Last week, we initiated the Sun Ra posts of our DOTM series with an extended live version of Rocket Number Nine that eventually evolved into a gospel-like chant of "You gotta face the music" amid other improvisations.  

Here's another recording of Rocket Number Nine, this time from the seminal 1973 LP Space Is The Place.  We believe this is the earliest studio version of the song, although it may also appear on earlier bootlegs of live shows.  Whatever the case, several of the elements that appeared in subsequent versions can be heard here, including the rapid-fire, bebop opening lines (the rest before the word and the way they sing "Venus" makes us think of Dizzy's Salt Peanuts). The urgent opening quickly morphs into some ensemble singing in the round, and then gradually evolves into free jazz.  But before that gets too tiring or disorienting, the piece moves onto various outer-space sound effects and then concludes with some space organ from Sun Ra himself.  Good stuff.  Also, the images for the  "North American Solar System" remind us of some of the landscapes in the video game No Man's Sky.

Rocket Number Nine is somewhat unique to the Sun Ra discography as of all his compositions, it's probably the closest he's written to a pop song, emphasizing vocals over instrumentation as it does and clocking in under a mere three minutes.  Of course, no one's exactly going to mistake it for Lady Gaga, either.

This is incredibly reckless and irresponsible: so-called "president" Dumbeldorf Pumpernickel and his band of merry appointees are preparing a new assault on the environmental policies of his predecessors.  They have already spent years rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations, pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushing aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, turning the phrase “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis, and generally doing just about  everything they could to try and unravel America's protections against pollution and its health risks.

But just last November, the National Climate Assessment projected that the atmosphere could warm as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, leading to higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, and severe health consequences. However, since the release of the assessment report, the administration has pushed to alter the results of other government science reports. 

Specifically, the EPA has said that the worst-case projections won’t be included in some government reports, including the next National Climate Assessment, which is scheduled to be released in 2021 or 2022.   A spokesman said,  “The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future.” 

The administration wants to create a new climate review panel, led by a 79-year-old Princeton physicist, William Happer, who has attacked the science of man-made climate change and defended the virtues of carbon dioxide, sometimes to an awkward degree.  “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” he told CNBC in a 2014 interview.

Worse, in the next few months, the White House will expand its efforts to impose its hard-line views on other nations. Building on its retreat from the Paris accord, it recently refused to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change. 

Future generations will be ashamed of these actions, which compromise the health and safety of the very planet just to increase the short-term wealth of a select few.

The film industry's boycott of the State of Georgia due to the new forced pregnancy law continues, with the first major studio now announcing it's considering pulling out of the state.

Netflix says it will continue to film in Georgia amid controversy surrounding the state’s passage of an abortion law forbidding termination of a pregnancy after an indication of a heartbeat. 

But the company said it would rethink its investment in Georgia should the bill go into effect. The statement comes as some in the film and TV industry have said they will boycott working in the state because of the law. 

“We have many women working on productions in Georgia, whose rights, along with millions of others, will be severely restricted by this law,” Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said in a statement sent to CNBC on Tuesday. “It’s why we will work with the ACLU and others to fight it in court. Given the legislation has not yet been implemented, we’ll continue to film there — while also supporting partners and artists who choose not to. Should it ever come into effect, we’d rethink our entire investment in Georgia.” 

Last week, CNBC reported the state’s up to 30% tax credits attracted more than 450 film and television projects last fiscal year, driving more than $4.5 billion in wages and having an economic impact of greater than $9.5 billion, citing Georgia’s governor’s office. Projects included Disney’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, AMC’s The Walking Dead and Netflix’s Ozark. Netflix has also shot shows including Queer Eye and The Haunting of Hill House in Georgia in recent years.  Actors including Mark Duplass have pledged to boycott filming in Georgia “until they reverse this backwards legislation,” Duplass tweeted earlier this month.  Ozark star Jason Bateman has also said he’d no longer work in Georgia if the legislation “makes it through the court system.”

Meanwhile, some in the production community argue that taking work from locals doesn’t do much in the way of fighting state laws, instead hurting local workers.  Actor and comedian Ilana Glazer (Broad City) said that she chose not to film an upcoming project in Georgia due to the forced pregnancy law, but "It sucks because the people of Atlanta are stoked and hustling, and the city is just groovin' on making so much stuff." 

Before Georgia's abortion law was voted on by the state senate, Glazer said she was warned by the movie's director that they should move their filming location: "Before I saw it in the news, she sent me this thing, 'We should move our movie from Atlanta to New Orleans or just in New York.'

"I was like, 'I don't want to shoot there,'" she continued. "Film and TV is such an advertisement for the city and for the state that it's in and I just don't want to be there and support it, but it sucks because there are people there — 75 percent of the people are down for this. ... So it sucks to punish those people, but I guess you have to make a move to make a statement."

Cheatin' Brian Kemp - bad for women, bad for Georgia, bad for business.

Meanwhile, in Alabama:

We Quit Our Job Today

Alternate working title for this blog post was Synchronicity and the Art of Retirement, as well as I'm  Free!, but we'll let Mr. Daltry sing I'm Free and how often do you get the chance to title a post We Quit Our Job Today?

So as you've undoubtedly gathered by now, as we've been saying we were going to, we told our boss today that we're going to retire and we turned in our resignation, effective the end of June.  Thirty-day notice seems appropriate to terminate a 35-year career.

As we suspected, the news wasn't well received, undoubtedly in part (and here comes the synchronicity part) because our work colleague had also turned in his resignation today, just a few minutes before us.  To give you an idea of the momentousness of the twin resignations, we were the last two working employees left.  

We work (worked) for a small company.  There were only eight employees at the beginning of the year, the boss, an administrative assistant, a receptionist, and a manger, and four of what we called "professional employees" (i.e, the actual workers).  Not a sustainable model, we know - half the company is overhead management, supported by the other half who actually work and bring in the revenue.  But half of the four working employees resigned back in March, and the last two, my colleague and I, resigned today. There's no one left. The consulting company has no more consultants left on its staff.

But you could argue that the twin resignations are coincidence, not synchronicity.  But here's the thing: we still weren't 100% sure we were financially ready to retire and like almost everyone else in our shoes, we had some understandable self-doubt about whether or not it would all actually come together.  But the toxic work environment had become intolerable to us, and we much preferred the financial uncertainties of a possibly underfunded retirement to continuing to work where we were. But when we got home today, we found not one but four separate letters from Social Security in our mailbox, each of which informed us we were due annuities from four separate previous employers. Three of the four are for lump-sum payouts totalling a not inconsiderable sum (think enough for a new car, and a nice one at that) and the fourth is for a monthly stipend of very nearly $1,000 a month.   

We hadn't considered these annuities in our financial planning and it was a surprise to us, and it nicely completes the picture of our future income. So we'll counter-argue that it's not mere coincidence, but feels more like the cosmos reassuring us today that we had made the correct decision.  It feels like synchronicity, and like validation.

Of course, we are rational, science-based people, and it is coincidence, both the twin resignations and the timing of the annuity notices, but it's just more fun to call it "synchronicity."

But anyway, we're free!

Fun And Games

We are legion, and the part of us we call The Gaming Desk hasn't been on a very good run as of late.

The Gaming Desk started the year playing the problematic and ultimately boring game Fallout 76.  After we got good and sick of that, we spent a long, long time on the highly enjoyable Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.  That was good, but it was also as good as it got so far this year.

We did dabble for a day or two with the Life Is Strange franchise, playing The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, a sort-of prequel to Life Is Strange 2, but before we got to the main game, Notre Dame cathedral burned down in Paris and in response Ubisoft made AC: Unity, set in Paris during the French Revolution, available for free.

Maybe it was too many AC games back to back (before Odyssey, we played the equally enjoyable Origins last year).  Maybe we're too spoiled by the 2019 state of video games to enjoy a 2014 game.  But the game seemed tedious almost from the beginning, we couldn't identify with or become interested in any of the characters, and the game mechanics were frustratingly inconsistent.  Sometimes, when our character was trying to scale a wall, he would get stuck midway - couldn't proceed any further up and couldn't back down either - and would just hang there mid-wall like an idiot until the guards came along and shot him dead.  Other times, while running down the crowded streets of Paris, if he got too close to a wall, the game mechanics would automatically have him start climbing, with maybe a 50-50 chance of getting stuck.  On top of all that, our so-called "comrades" in the game weren't very friendly, constantly barking orders at us and calling us "piss pot" all the time.  Hey, if we wanted to be treated like that, we'd go to the office!

We hadn't formally decided to quit Unity but found that we were constantly making excuses not to play. Finally, after a week or so of procrastination, we decided that it was time to move on.  We didn't pay anything for the game, so no great loss.

Sometime after that we saw as online forum on Reddit answering someone's question about what game they should play next.  The inquiry sounded much like something we would ask: what's a good open-world role-playing game for a single player?  The person mentioned that, like us, he/she enjoyed the "good" AC games and the Elder Scrolls games.  In response, everyone seemed to agree that Metal Gears Solid V was a really fun game, a blast, a great experience from start to finish. It got a unanimous thumbs-up.

We hadn't played any of the MGS games and hadn't really heard too much about them, but we figured what did we have to lose?  At only $19.99, it wasn't a big investment, and the other on-line reviews were all equally positive.  So we purchased MGS V: The Phantom Pain, downloaded the game, and jumped in.

We immediately realized we had no idea what we were doing.  The makers of the MGS V apparently assume you've played MGS I through IV and didn't offer much in the way of a tutorial or explanation of the back story.  However, the start of the game is pretty grim, with your character awakening in a hospital bed from a 9-year coma.  It gets worse - you've apparently lost your left arm, and you are suffering catastrophic organ failure.  Oh, and a bunch of bad guys are storming the wing of your hospital trying to kill you, and one of them is apparently some sort of fire demon that for some reason can fly and is impervious to bullets.    

As you try to get up to defend yourself, you discover your legs aren't working after nine years in a coma, and you can only crawl around.  And it's one of those games where just as soon as you've completed some little accomplishment, say, crawling on your belly beneath an operating table to hide from the baddies, something worse immediately happens, like more baddies with bigger guns suddenly show up, or a tank plows through the wall, and did we mention the fire demon?  All this without even understanding the basic functions of the game, like how to fire your gun, how to crawl (we guess we'll learn to walk later), and just where in the hell you're supposed to be going.

We imagine it might be a pretty exciting start to a game for someone well experienced in MGS lore and gameplay, but it was a pretty frustrating and disorienting start for us newbies.

Eventually, we had to go on line and find a walk-through guide to help.  One tidbit of advice that we received was that if you're new to the game like us, it's recommended to at least play MGS V: Ground Zeroes, a sort of prequel to The Phantom Pain, first.   That made sense - Phantom Pain was pretty perplexing and confusing to us - so we plunked down another $19.99 and bought Ground Zeroes.  

It was a bit more accessible than its successor, and at least didn't start with a sequential series of life-or-death challenges.  But the game was pretty obviously designed for the Playstation platform, and it's apparently assumed that if you are playing on PC, you're using a game controller (we play with just the keyboard).  Sure, if you dig down deep enough into the documentation, you'll find the instructions on which key does what, but the on-screen suggestions during gameplay are all for game controllers, and unhelpfully advise you to, say, use the right paddle or the  + button or some such thing.  Annoying, but not anything we can't overcome.

And the back story!  There's a series of a dozen of so screens that attempt to catch you up on the events of MGS I through IV, but good god is it ever convoluted!   You're character is known as "Snake," but sometimes is called "Boss." However, it seems like at least half of the other characters were named "Snake" or "Naked Snake" or "Snake Killer," or were called "The Boss" or "Big Boss" or some such appellation.   And the outfit you fight for is called "FOX," but your opponents are called "XOF."  And we lost count of how many times over the course of the previous four games FOX rose to power, and then were defeated, and then rose back to power, only to be defeated again.

Whatever.  We don't care.  Our first mission in Ground Zeroes is to rescue somebody named "Chico" (at least it's not "Snake" or "Boss") held captive in Guantanamo Bay, and it doesn't matter how we know him or who he is.  Just explain the mission and give us some recon intel and we'll get the job done.  We don't need a whole biography here; it's not like we're writing Chico's Wikipedia page. Running like that through the missions of Ground Zeroes, we did learn the basic functions of the game and developed at least a modicum of confidence, and eventually we rejoined The Phantom  Pain where we left off, apparently in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1980 (oh, the MGS games are loosely based on 20th Century geopolitics).

What we like about the game is even though it's basically about paramilitary guerillas, it's a stealth game and the goal is to complete each mission undetected.  Your score at the end of each mission actually deducts points if you fire a gun and deducts a whole lot of points if you actually kill someone, so that's cool.  This isn't Gears of War or Grand Theft Auto, folks.  But because you have to complete assigned missions and each mission needs to be completed quickly (say, before the sun rises and you lose the cover of darkness, or before the person you're trying to rescue dies in interrogation), there's little time to wander around and explore, so it hardly seems like an "open-world" game.  

And without consulting an on-line walkthrough, you only discover the hazards of your mission through trial-and-error - you wander into the "wrong" room of the HQ you're infiltrating only to discover it's full of KGB agents who immediately shoot you dead, and then you have to replay the mission from the start, but this time avoiding that room. You cross the grounds between your position and an enemy watch tower only to find out it's a minefield, so you start the mission over yet again, this time avoiding that room and also walking around rather than through the minefield.  In other words, you wind up doing the same thing over and over and over again, until you finally figure out how to do it right.  

We've completed two missions so far (technically three if we include a quick tutorial session on what tools and weapons were newly created for MGS V that weren't available in IV).  The missions have been pretty grim and joyless - they're usually at night, sometimes in the rain, and you spend almost as much  time hiding in a corner waiting for a guard to pass as you actually do, well, anything other than cowering in the corner.  We'll still give it a go, but we hope the gameplay  improves - not to second guess the good people at Reddit, but so far, the game hasn't exactly been "fun" or a "real blast" to play.    

We're ranting, we know.  Sorry.  Our point is that outside of AC Odyssey, which was "a blast" and "fun to play,"  we haven't been enjoying our video game experience all that much.  Perhaps MGS will live up to its hype and become more fun in later missions.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will come out this year, or Red Dead Redemption 2 will become available on PC.  In any event, we'll keep playing, at least for now, and see where it all goes.

The Calm Before the Storm Before the Calm, as Interpreted by the I Ching

Two signs that we are unarguably old: our Medicare card arrived in the mail on Friday and we finally succeeded in setting up our Social Security account online.  No matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, all evidence proves that we're old.

So the stage is now set and on Tuesday (Monday's a holiday) we're going to tell our employer that we will be retiring effective July 1.  One month notice seems more than fair. Frankly, our announcement shouldn't be a surprise to them - we haven't been secretive about our Social Security and Medicare enrollment efforts - but we still don't expect the news to go over very well. Management is narcissistic and will likely look at our decision not as a personal milestone for us, but as a betrayal and attack against them.  We expect hostility and we don't anticipate being treated very kindly for the next month.

So we've been chilling out and enjoying a mellow, meditative three-day weekend to prepare ourselves for the anticipated tempest.  As part of that meditative preparation, we consulted the I Ching today for some oracular advice on how to proceed.

Before getting to that, though, let us remind you that we are rational, scientific-thinking people here, and we don't believe that there's anything "magical" about the I Ching, or that some divine force or other agency guides the I Ching to provide the "right" advice to the seeker.  Rather, we feel that the I Ching is a good and wise compendium of ancient wisdom and thinking, and that any one of the 64 hexagrams will provide useful advice at any time if one's mind is open.  There's nothing supernatural or mystical about the text or the various methods used to select a hexagram, from yarrow sticks to tossing coins (we prefer to use online random-line generators to select the hexagram), but allowing a random process to select one out of the 64 available hexagrams encourages one to concentrate on that one specific bit of wisdom. To us, the "magic" of the I Ching is not in the text or in the action of selecting a hexagram, but actually occurs when one applies the advice of any given hexagram to one's own situation.  In other words, the "sage" is not the text or the ancient author of the text - you are the sage when you apply the ancient wisdom to your modern life.

So no spooky magic here.  We simply used the line-by-line hexagram generator at Eclectic Energies to draw our hexagram, and the first three lines of the lower trigram were all open, the trigram for Earth, fitting for us geologists.  The upper three lines were open, closed, and open - the trigram for Water.  Water above, Earth below - the hexagram Bĭ, variously translated as "seeking union," "joining," and "unity."

Well, that hardly seems appropriate, as we're looking to end a union and dissolve an association, not enlist or join anything.  But that's why we like using random selection methods to derive a hexagram - if we were scouring the book for advice, our mind would certainly have skipped past Bĭ and we would not have considered its advice.

The texts on Bĭ talk about how water pools together over the earth and therefore how joining together and uniting in an effort should be a natural goal for a society and its people.  But there are warnings - the two lower lines of our hexagram are moving lines, the yin becoming yang.  The first (bottom) line urges the seeker to associate with those who can be trusted, and our experience has taught us that our employer is not a person who can be trusted to keep our best interests in mind.  The second line goes so far as to suggest associating with one's own inner self.  We've talked about ourselves in the first-person plural for awhile now and consider ourselves to be a number of different people depending on the situation and from whose perspective we are being perceived (we are legion).  And our move toward retirement is nothing if not depending upon ourselves for our own care and wellbeing.

But the topmost sixth line is also a moving line and carries the strongest warning of all - associating with someone out of confusion doesn't go well.  If a person cannot be relied upon to stay until things are finished, one cannot expect good things from the relationship.  Joining without a leader results in misfortune, and one text goes so far as to saying that seeking union and attachment without trust will lead to evil.  

Life is always changing and conditions are always transitory. This is as true of the I Ching's  hexagrams as of anything else.  All those moving lines indicate that Bĭ is in the process of changing, and by substituting the moving open lines to closed lines produces a new hexagram, Zhōng Fú, sincerity, or inner trust in oneself.  The hexagram indicates that with self-confidence things will go well, and that this is a good moment for big undertakings. It advises us to keep going on.

So basically, our interpretation of the I Ching's advice is that we should transition away from a mistaken association with those that we do cannot trust, and that this is an auspicious time for a move toward self-determination and self-reliance.  Further, considering Bĭ's imagery of pooling water as an analogue for cooperation and enjoining, by leaving the dog-eat-dog rat race of competitive corporate employment, where it's every man (or woman) for him (her) self, and relying instead on our own savings and what passes for the social safety net in American life, we will be joining the pool of other retirees and Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries.     

In the movie The Matrix, Neo is told that what The Oracle tells you is not necessarily true or not, but is exactly what you need to hear at that moment to do what is necessary.  Similarly, whether our interpretation of the I Ching, Bĭ and Zhōng Fú are "correct" or not is irrelevant - it is what we need to tell ourselves to prepare us for the next transition in our life.

Despite the fact that this is one of the hottest Memorial Day weekends in memory, perhaps the hottest ever (temperatures neared 100 degrees F this afternoon), a large crowd (counts vary from high hundreds to thousands) showed up at the Georgia capitol today to protest the state's forced pregnancy law.

We didn't go, although our sympathies were totally with the protestors.  Some combination of the heat, laziness, and a deep desire to lay low this holiday weekend kept us from protesting, but we're glad to see a good turnout of impassioned Georgians speaking out against this reprehensible bill.

We don't need to get on a soapbox and rant about why this law is bad.  You already know it's wrong, you already know it's bad, and if you don't feel that way, you probably wouldn't be reading this blog to start with.  If you think this law is just, nothing we could say would likely change your mind.

A woman's right to choose whether or not she's going to bear a child has been the law of the land for some 45 years now.  It's disgusting and frankly a little bit embarrassing that we have to have this fight over again, just because some self-righteous religious men want to impose their faith on the rest of the population and, feeling empowered by the recent travesties in Washington , think that now is their time.  

It isn't their time and you can't stop the tide of progressive change.  This isn't the last we're going to hear about this issue.

All these pictures appeared publicly on our Facebook feed and we don't own any rights.  If you feel a picture is your copyright or just don't want it posted here, please contact us and we will take it down.  

Dreaming of the Masters

WTF?  How could this be?  We've been doing Dreaming of the Masters for how long now? How many years? And we still haven't gotten around to Sun Ra yet?  Inconceivable!

We need to rectify this.  From here on in, this series will only feature Sun Ra, and even that wouldn't fully make amends for our colossal oversight.  We could make this blog about nothing but Sun Ra, 100% posts about him and his music, but we're not going to do that.  

Sun Ra released a staggering number of recordings from 1956 until his passing/transcendence in 1993, and recordings, from major-label reissues to bootleg live sets to the most limited of private pressings, are still surfacing.  And his Arkestra is still going strong today even without him and with many of its featured soloists now well into their 80s and 90s.  It's a deep, deep dive, and we're going to be swimming in the waters for a while folks, so let's strap in and take off.

The psychedelic-folk band Olden Yolk performed last night at Atlanta's 529 club.  We didn't go.  

529 set times, even on weeknights (especially on weeknights), are just too damn late for our old bones.  Doors don't open until 9:00 p.m., and the first band doesn't start playing until about 10:00.  With two openers on the schedule, one would be lucky if the headliner started before 11:30.  We wouldn't get home until about 1:00 or 1:30,  and we have to go to work the next morning (yes, we're still working - we're planning on announcing our retirement right after Labor Day).

We like Olden Yolk.  It's essentially a side project of Shane Butler of the band Quilt, another of our favorites, and Olden Yolk sounds just like them.  

Yes, we missed seeing a band we like, but here's the good news:  this October, when we should be retired and gainfully unemployed, the band Luna are coming to Atlanta for an intimate two-night stand at the beloved Earl.  We've got tickets for both nights, and here's the best part: Olden Yolk announced today that they will be opening for Luna on at least one of those two nights (Tuesday, October 8)!

So we didn't get to see a band that we like, but we weren't dragging butt all day at work today (at least no more than usual) and we'll get to see them in five months anyway, with another of our favorite bands and when we won't have to worry anymore about getting up early the next morning.

 . . . and so it starts.  Kristen Wiig confirmed that her new comedy, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, has pulled out of filming in Georgia in light of the state's new forced pregnancy law.  Meanwhile, executive producers for The Power, an Amazon show, have decided not to scout for filming locations in Georgia because of the bill.  Christine Vachon said her film company, responsible for the Oscar-winning film Still Alice and the Oscar-nominated Carol, will no longer shoot in Georgia.   And David Simon (HBO's The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce) previously announced said he will no longer consider the state as a shooting location. 

J.J. Abrams and Jordan Peele will begin shooting their new HBO show Lovecraft Country here, but they vowed to donate 100% of their episode fees to the ACLU of Georgia and Fair Fight Georgia, an election reform organization.  Given the disruptive and expensive nature of moving a production already in progress, other producers are choosing to stay put for now but donate money to similar organizations fighting the law.  In addition to Abrams and Peele, others taking that stance include Ron Howard (the Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy)  and  Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping (the Fear Street film trilogy, and the Starz’  drama series P-Valley). 

Beyond the high-visibility actors and directors, each of these productions employs hundreds of technicians, laborers, drivers, electricians, carpenters, caterers, and more.  Most governors of most states like to pride themselves with the jobs they create, but Cheating Brian Kemp's signature achievement is not only endangering women but is causing jobs to leave the state. 

Unpacking Big Ears, Part VIII: Another Master

Anyway, back to Big Ears.  As we recall, we were unpacking some of the Masters that we saw perform there before we got distracted with some stuff or another.

Last week, as part of our Dreaming of the Masters series, we posted a very aggressive piece of music fronted by the prodigious Pharoah Sanders, and somewhere deep in the background was a 32-year-old Carla Bley.  At Big Ears last March, we saw an 82-year-old Bley, still composing, still performing, and still provoking (she announced that the title of one of the pieces was Sex With Birds).

It was a quiet and reflective set, beautifully set in Knoxville's lovely Tennessee Theater. The set mostly focused on the near-telepathic rapport Bley has with with the band, particularly long-time musical partner and now husband Steve Swallow.  Here she is in Jerusalem last October with the same trio she performed with in Knoxville, a pretty representative video of how she sounded at Big Ears.

In case you want to see and hear a younger Carla, here she is in 1970 with John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce.

And here she is in 1989 in a duet with Steve Swallow.

Carla has quite the remarkable story.  Born in Oakland, she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met and later married the pianist Paul Bley, for whom she wrote some of his best songs.  In the 60s, she was involved in some of the most politically active of the New York avant garde, such as the Jazz Composers Orchestra (last week's raucous post), and she recorded the 1971 cult classic Escalator Over The Hill, a jazz opera released as a "chronotransduction" with words by drummer Paul Haines and music by Bley.  Side note: Haines daughter, Emily, is now the frontwoman for the band Metric.

In the 70s, she was received almost like a rock star, and we saw her perform a free set in Boston's Copley Square and a nightclub show at the Paradise Theater, where the audience called out the name of her sidemen ("Windo!") like they do guitar heroes in rock bands.  In addition to John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce, she's performed with Robert Wyatt and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason.  Mason's solo album, Fictitious Sports, was entirely written by Bley and performed by her regular band with Mason as a guest, making it in effect a Carla Bley album in all but name. She even performed with the Golden Palominos on their 1985 album, Visions of Excess.

And now, all these decades later, she's a highly respected elder stateswoman for improvisational music in general and jazz in particular.  She still has a great sense of humor and she can still spellbind a packed audience with the sheer beauty of her music. A feminist icon and a musical pioneer, and at Big Ears we got to see her again nearly 40 years after those Boston sets of the 1970s.  Sweet.

Spoiler: Jon Stabs Dany

As you undoubtedly know, last night was the series finale of HBO's Game of Thrones. Unsurprisingly, considering the increasingly abysmal quality of the writing over the last few seasons, it was as unsatisfyingly dumb as the last couple episodes.

We'd warn about spoilers, but we don't care anymore.  The writers ruined the show by phoning in this last season, and we have no respect left for the show or its so-called "secrets" anymore and feel no compunction to protect against spoilers.  If anything, we'd probably be doing you a favor.

So, anyway, in the last episode Jon Snow kills his Queen and lover (and, apparently, aunt) Dany - or as she liked to be called, Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons.  To make it even more dramatic, he unexpectedly stabs her to death while in the middle of a lover's embrace.   That doesn't surprise or bother us - we thought Arya would be the assassin, not Jon, but whatever - because we knew Dany had to die.

What does bother us is that not five minutes before that, Jon was defending her as his Queen and commander, not to be questioned or second-guessed, however extreme her decision-making might seem.  But then, after a short exchange with Tyrion Lannister ("But she's an evil person"), he apparently forgets all his convictions, not to mention his heart, and goes out and kills her in cold blood.  Now, an interesting show, a well-written show, would have showed us the moral and psychological metamorphosis of his character's arc, but that would have been hard to write and the GoT writers are not good writers.  Besides, they only had so many minutes left to wrap everything up in their self-imposed six-episode final season, so who's got time for character development and drama when what people will be talking about the next day is who stabbed whom? (But they did have time later to show Tyrion rearranging chairs around a table for several minutes.)

But wait!  It gets stupider!  After Dany dies, her dragon shows up, pitches a fire fit over the death of its mistress but doesn't kill Jon (perhaps it sensed the Targaryen blood in his veins), and then lifts up Dany's body and flies off with her corpse.  The perfect murder!  No victim, no witnesses, no evidence except a pool of blood and a melted Iron Throne.  Jon could say the dragon did it and leave it at that.  He could say they rode off together to fight the next war somewhere else, and make up any excuse about the pool of blood (there's always a puddle of blood around somewhere in GoT).  He could simply slip out of there unseen and claim he has no idea where she and her dragon went either, or who's blood is on the floor.

But, no, none of that.  Instead the show fades to black and when it comes back, Jon is in prison for Dany's murder and the heads of the remaining families in Westeros are assembled to decide his fate.

Now, this is so stupid on so many levels.  First of all, notwithstanding that it would be just like Jon to admit to the murder (if you've watched the show, you know what we mean), if he had, he would almost assuredly have been killed on the spot, not taken prisoner.  And if he was a prisoner, his captor, the vengeful Gray Worm, would almost assuredly have had him executed at the first possible opportunity.  Jon and Gray Worm had been challenging each other and giving each other the stink eye all throughout the episode, and Gray Worm was earlier happily executing the few surviving soldiers from last week's battle just because they had fought against his Queen, so there's no reason to suspect that he wouldn't have taken justice into his own hands right then and there for the Queen's actual murder.

Which brings us to the other stupid thing.  If there's any lesson we learned after eight seasons of GoT it's that power corrupts, so why didn't Gray Worm, who had just been appointed the leader of the entire military, not immediately seize power in the absence of his Queen, declare the medieval equivalent of martial law, and proclaim himself the new ruler of the Seven Kingdoms?  Who would have/could have stopped him?  No one.

But, no, instead, he apparently called a council of the remaining heads of the Seven Kingdom he had just conquered, including Jon Snow's friends and family, and asks them for advice on what to do with his prisoner.  But we say "apparently" because the show doesn't tell us how or why the council got together (lazy script-writing and too little time), just suddenly, "poof," there they all are, even the entire remaining Stark family.

Now, the fact that the entire remaining Stark family was there was so dumb on so many levels, such as a) it was, at least for the first several seasons, a long and arduous journey from Winterfell to King's Landing (even though in later seasons characters like Jamie Lannister made the trip seemingly overnight), so why would they bring the wheelchair-bound cripple Bran with them on the long overland journey?, and b) there was a maxim in earlier episodes that at least one Stark had to always remain in Winterfell, even during battle, but there was the entire clan, even Bran who would have been the obvious choice to leave behind.

What's more, c) a MAJOR THEME in the show (damn, we're so worked up now they've got us shouting) is that little good comes to Starks when they head south - Ned Stark gets beheaded, Robb Stark gets murdered at the Red Wedding, Sansa Stark suffers a horrific series of degradations at the hands of a number of psychopaths and sadists - and the last thing the now wise and wiley Sansa would have agreed to would be to head down to King's Landing for  a confab with an army of the Unsullied and a horde of half-crazed Dothraki.

Which brings up WHERE WERE THE DOTHRAKI?  In earlier seasons, they were a wild, feral band of marauding rapists and plunderers who only respected raw power and were loyal to Dany only because she had burned all their chiefs alive and then walked out of the fire unscathed (well, that and her three ENORMOUS DRAGONS).  But with Dany gone, why were they just sitting around waiting to see what happens?  Why weren't they off raping and pillaging what was left of Westeros like the bad-ass Dothraki of Seasons 1 and 2 would have?  There might be good reasons, but the show doesn't tell us, because of poor writing and the self-imposed limit on the number of episodes.

But anyway, whatever, back to the council meeting.  Grey Worm presents to the assembled heads of state not the prisoner they're there to see - Jon Snow - but his other prisoner, Tyrion Lannister, and is all macho and authoritarian about who he presents to the council and when.  When Tyrion tries to plead his case, Gray Worm basically tells him to STFU, but instead Tyrion launches into perhaps the longest monologue of the episode, and, uninterrrupted, convinces everyone to elect the cripple Bran (of all people) as the new King, and everyone, including the vengeful Gray Worm, who has all the power and is holding all the cards, eventually goes along with it.  Gray Worm basically goes from "The captors will present whichever prisoner it pleases us to present" and "STFU," to "Okay, I guess you guys voted all fair and square for me to let my arch enemy free, so I'll go with that" in the course of less than five minutes.  Why?  BECAUSE LAZY STORY-TELLING, LOW-QUALITY SCRIPT-WRITING, AND NOT ENOUGH TIME, THAT'S WHY!

We would go on and on, but we think you get the picture.  The reason this makes us so mad is because the first five or six seasons were SO GOOD, and the last two seasons, and particularly the last two episodes, were SO BAD, that it just ruined a thing that we had loved.

The picture at the top of this post is not GoT but a still from the video game The Witcher 3.  Say what you want about the mindless violence and cartoonish characters in video games, but both Witcher and another medieval-themed game, Skyrim, do a better job of story-telling (especially Witcher, although Skyrim is more adept in its use of dragons) than GoT, and there's little possibility of some Hollywood hacks on a deadline phoning in the end of the games and ruining if all for everybody.

Spoiler Alert: Season 8 of Game of Thrones sucks!

Lady Lamb at Aisle 5, May 18, 2019, Atlanta

As the title says, last night Lady Lamb performed at Aisle 5 in Atlanta.  It was a great show from the top of the bill to the bottom - both the performers and the audience were primed - and it deserves a detailed breakdown.

The opener was Wisconsin's Alex Schaaf, who fronted a band called Yellow Ostrich from 2009 to 2014.  We really liked Yellow Ostrich and saw them a couple of times in 2011, once opening for The Antlers at the godforsaken old Masquerade and once opening for Ra Ra Riot at the ever-dependable Earl.  

Alex Schaaf with Yellow Ostrich at The Earl, October 2011

Yellow Ostrich consisted of Schaaf, a drummer, and a bassist-slash-brass player.  Their music involved intricate and complex over-layering of live samples of their performance, such that Schaaf could create an entire choir out of his own voice, and his bassist a full horn section by layering short samples of his trumpet, flugelhorn, and baritone sax.

Yellow Ostrich stage setup at The Masquerade, September 2011

After Yellow Ostrich disbanded, Schaaf toured as a backup player for both Tei Shi and The Tallest Man On Earth.  But in late 2016, after a particularly painful breakup, he moved from Brooklyn back home to Minneapolis to form the band Human Heat. We had looked forward to hearing Human Heat but they never came through Atlanta - at least as far as we know.  They released one album, again AFAWK, which included the songs Your Flaws and I Need My Space, both of which Schaaf performed last night.  

Last August, he released an album Waves under his own name, and most of his short opening set last night consisted of songs from that album, as well as his recent single Drive On.

So that was cool.  Schaaf sounded great, and performed all his songs alone on  stage, accompanied only by his own guitar.

The middle set was provided by Katie Von Schleicher, who was accompanied by a full band (drums, bass and guitar).  

We don't really know much about Von Schleicher, and after her set, we only know a little bit more than we did before.  We liked her, we know that much.  She plays highly enjoyable indie rock and has album titles like Bleaksploitation and Shitty Hits, so that's cool.  Also, she's apparently the tour manager or something for Lady Lamb.  We wish we had more to say about Von Schleicher, but she remains something of an enigma to us. We heard a full set, and yet she retains her mystery.

Headliner Lady Lamb (formerly Lady Lamb The Beekeeper) is Aly Spaltro, who first began writing music in 2007 while working at a video rental store in her hometown of Brunswick, Maine.  While the name evokes images of too-precious folk music and 90s Lilith Fair performers, she's a rocker (her Twitter handle is @ladylambjams).  Here's probably her most widely known song, Billions of Eyes, which closed out her encore, and is about racing to make the train only to discover that all of the passengers were rooting for her to succeed all along.

Her set last night was excellent. The sound was perfect and expertly balanced, allowing her great voice to be clearly heard over the music.  Her backup band included Alex Schaaf on guitars, keys and vocals, but she also performed a few songs solo, once in the middle of the audience.

So her set pretty much covered rock, pop, folk, and even, toward the middle of her set, punk with the snarling last minute of the song Bird Balloons ("I'm a ghost, and you all know it, I'm singing songs and I ain't stopping, My hair grew long so I fucking cut it and when you looked away, I snuck those trimmings in your locket. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!").

Here's her set list for those who care about such things:

And here's a morning-after, post-show photo she posted to social media for some reason of her eating a poptart in her Atlanta hotel:

Best of all, none of the performers mentioned or made us feel bad about Georgia's abysmal forced-pregnancy law or held us responsible in any way for the reprehensible politics of this state.

Dreaming of the Masters

This song probably best expresses our reaction to the news of this week, from white, male Republican lawmakers turning the clock on women's rights back to 1964; to the discovery that half of the species extant when we was born are now extinct; to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching 415 ppm; to provocations and rumblings of a new mid-east war, this time against Iran; to North Korea once again testing new missiles; to more lies, insults and filth spewing forth from the White House; to continued police brutality, economic inequality, voter suppression, and racial injustice across the land; and finally to the deaths this past week of Doris Day, Peggy Lipton, and Tim Conway.

Preview, from 1968, by the Jazz Composer's Orchestra featuring a very animated Pharoah Sanders and, although she's not credited in the lineup above, Carla Bley.  

"This [Alabama] law would force children - 12 year olds - to carry a pregnancy by their rapist. This law would force people w/ mental disabilities to carry pregnancy by rape to term. This law forces people to be pregnant against their own consent. It’s horrifying." - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Meanwhile, here in Georgia, David Simon, the creator behind HBO's The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce, tweeted, “I can’t ask any female member of any film production with which I am involved to so marginalize themselves or compromise their inalienable authority over their own bodies. I must undertake production where the rights of all citizens remain intact.” 

In another tweet, Simon added, “Can only speak for my production company. Our comparative assessments of locations for upcoming development will pull Georgia off the list until we can be assured the health options and civil liberties of our female colleagues are unimpaired.”

While many Georgians don't care what some Hollywood producer thinks about them, film and television production in Georgia supports more than 92,000 jobs and brings significant economic benefits to communities and families.  Over 400 productions were filmed in Georgia last year, resulting in an estimated $2.7 billion in direct spending the state. Major TV shows and movies film in the state including AMC’s The Walking Dead, Netflix’s Ozark and Stranger Things, and Marvel’s blockbusters Black Panther and Avengers: Endgame.

The forced pregnancy laws in Georgia and Alabama are unjust and inhumane, and indicate a mindset that a woman's body is nothing more than a breeding machine.  It's religious fanaticism run amok, and these laws must be aborted, preferably within six weeks like they require for women.

Abortion opponents only begrudgingly grant exceptions in the case of rape, incest, or health risk to the mother.  Most anti-choice legislation ignores one or the other of those three tragedies, and others try to put various limitations on what constitutes "rape," "incest," or "health risk."

Pregnancy by rape has always been particularly vexing to the anti-choice crowd.  On the one hand, why should a rapist get to father a child, but on the other, what's to keep every woman who wants an abortion from claiming "rape"?  It would be much simpler if we could just accept the fallacy that rape can't result in pregnancy.

Which is exactly what some legislators were trying to claim a few years ago, stating that in the case of rape, a woman's body had some mysterious means of just "shutting the whole thing down."  If you believe that fallacy, then it's easy to believe that any woman who's pregnant couldn't possibly have been raped, a belief which lead to repugnant statements about how to identify a "legitimate rape."

That discussion lead comedian W. Kamau Bell, a person of color, to ask, "If women can't get pregnant from rape, then how come there are so many light-skinned black people walking around Alabama?"

Anyway, ignorance about basic biology, and especially women's reproductive biology, lead to some pretty horrific public policy, including a softening on the stance against rape and restrictions on the right to abortion.

Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse recently wrote a piece titled "What we don't know about how a uterus works is going to hurt us all."  We heard her on NPR this afternoon, and she pointed out that as ludicrous as it sounds, there are some men who suggested that women shouldn't need sanitary supplies - why can't they just hold it in until they get home, like men can do with urine?  That kind of thinking, on top of demonstrating flabbergasting ignorance and suggesting those men have never even talked about these things with a woman, can lead to a conclusion that since a woman can't control herself, there's something lazy, something undisciplined about her.  Hesse says that while it's so ludicrous as to almost be funny, it's just a short step from there to deciding that tampons and sanitary napkins shouldn't be available in the workplace - you'd just be enabling women's laziness and lack of discipline.

Another example of biological ignorance is Georgia's terrible forced pregnancy law, banning all abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.  The logic behind that must be that a woman should know whether or not she's pregnant the day after intercourse, or certainly within the next week or so.  It shouldn't take six weeks to figure it out, they imagine.  If a woman doesn't know she's pregnant within six weeks, she must be scatter-brained, simple-minded, distracted, or not very attentive to her own body.  It's something wrong with her, not the result of some 200 million years of mammal evolution.

So let us connect the dots for you, in case you haven't already - fundamentalists don't want sex education taught in the schools, a generation then grows up ignorant about basic reproductive biology, and finally as adults that generation passes terrible legislation based on misconceptions and fallacies that basically punishes women.  And the fundamentalist wives and mothers go along with it, because, well, Jesus.

If that's not enough to make you want to vote them out of office, I don't know what else to tell you.

Carbon dioxide levels just hit 415 ppm for the first time in some three million years.  Humans have never lived on this or any planet with CO2 levels that high.

According to the U.N. Advisory on Greenhouse Gasses, temperature increases beyond one degree Celsius may cause rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses to the climate that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.

Two degrees of temperature increase exponentially increases the likelihood of ice-free summers, and the Head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group says the blue ocean event frequency and timeline have been grossly underestimated.

Anyone who tells you how or when we experience the effects of 415 ppm is either speculating or lying.  But we've written some pretty big checks and there's no reason to believe that Mother Nature's not going to cash them, and probably soon.

The Earth will be fine, ultimately.  It's we human beings that have reason to worry.

It's been a good run H. sapiens.  Hope evolution comes up with a more intelligent lifeform on the next iteration.

The Game of Thrones

A few years ago (actually 2014 - 2017), HBO aired an original series titled The Leftovers.  The basic premise was that in a rapture-like global cataclysm known as The Sudden Departure, 140 million people instantly vanished off the face of the Earth without a trace.  But rather than be about those 140 million people, the show instead considered those who remained, the leftovers, focusing in on one particular family, the Garveys, of a small town in upstate New York.  

We liked the show and considered it one of the best things on television at the time.  The scripts were highly inventive and unusual and the show seemed to pride itself on the unexpected twists and turns the plot would take.  It was one of the most imaginative series we'd ever seen.  And it was so well written that after three seasons, we felt like we actually knew the characters, in particular Kevin Garvey, his new romantic partner Nora, his daughter Jill, and others.  

But as good and as interesting as the show was, the writers completely destroyed it in the last few episodes of the final Season Three.  For reasons unexplained, the writers had the characters all turn bitter toward one another and act in egocentric and self-destructive ways, and after we grew to like and to care for these characters, it was quite distressing to see them be so rude and so nasty to one another, to themselves, and ultimately to the audience.  It felt like we, the audience, cared for these characters more than they cared about themselves and certainly more than the show cared about anything.  It felt like audience abuse, like we were being bullied by cynical and mean-spirited writers. "You care about Kevin and Nora, do you? Well, listen as they say the awfullest things to each other in these final episodes, and then watch them self-destruct in the most uncharacteristically suicidal of ways."  

Yes, it pulled the rug out from under our expectations - the show was always about being unpredictable - but it did so in the most unpleasant way possible.  After the penultimate Episode 7, our honest reaction was, "We really wish we hadn't just seen that," and then watching the final episode the next week literally felt like a chore, an obligation.  There was no joy in anticipating where things were going to go after the events of Episode 7, and Episode 8 made us feel even worse for having watched it.

So, there.  A good show ruined by the writer's decisions for the last episodes of the last season.

The reason we bring this up is because right now Game of Thrones is kind of doing the same thing, albeit in a different manner.  Tonight will be the penultimate episode of the last and final Season 8, and the writing, the plotting, and the storyline so far this season has been so poor as to almost be insulting.  Yes, Episode 3 did have a massive battle, allegedly the longest battle sequence ever filmed for television or cinema, but there were so many gaping plot holes and unexplained actions that after our pulse finally calmed down and all the excitement of the big battle faded, we were left thinking, "Yeah, but what was that?  And how did that happen? And where did she just suddenly appear from and why did no one seem to think that charging ahead into total darkness against an unseen enemy wasn't a good idea?"  It made us feel manipulated.  It was an insult to our intelligence, but the writers and showrunners knew they'd get away with it and that we'd be back the next week (we were) because it's the final freaking episodes and after eight seasons over 10 years, there's no way anyone's going to drop the show now.

Last week's episode, the one after the big, epic battle, was even stupider, and just like The Leftovers, bordered on audience abuse.  "Watch us have a beloved character killed off for no apparent reason.  It doesn't advance the plot any and there's no dramatic reason to have her killed - and so cruelly - but we guess people expect that this show will have unexpected deaths, so here's a random one just to get everybody talking around the coffee maker at work tomorrow."  It's lazy scriptwriting and it's a disservice to the legacy of the show.

The problem here is that we had once enjoyed the show, we liked the characters and the endless speculation and theorizing on how it will all play out at the end, but in this final season, the writers are just phoning in a hackneyed storyline and after all these years we're now starting not to care about the ultimate outcome.  We'll watch - we'll invest two more hours of our lives in this long-running program - but when it's all said and done and the show is finally over, we're probably not going to admit to having been fans.

This season is really just that bad.

Mothers & Karaoke at The Bakery, Atlanta

Last night, the Athens band Mothers graced us with a performance at Atlanta's The Bakery.  It was a late-night set - doors were at 9:00 and the headliners didn't even start until 11:30 - and we almost didn't go.  We were more surprised than we imagine just about anyone else when we pulled ourselves away from the t.v. at 8:30 and actually got our butts out the door and into our car.

Graffiti at The Bakery

We're glad that we did, as it was a great night of music and our first exposure to the band Karaoke.

Karaoke are a sort of Gen 2 Atlanta band, made up of members of some of our favorite former Atlanta bands.  Singer/guitarist Grace Wayne used to front the band Del Venicci.  Stand-up drummer Adrian Benedykt Switon also plays in Shepherds, and it was quite entertaining watching his inventive performance.  Guitarist Tymb Gratz was a founding member of Mood Rings, and bassist Chris Yonker also once fronted Hello Ocho and is a co-founder of The Mammal Gallery. In any event, the wealth of experience really shows and they performed a great set with a lot of variety and changing textures.  It was never boring - a neurologically sequential experience all the way through - and we look forward to hearing more from them.  Here's a video that's as notable for its Atlanta locations as for the song itself.

Not that their set took anything away from headliners Mothers.  Mothers is basically the vehicle for Athens, Georgia singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Kristine Leschper.  She even performed the first song of the set solo with just her electric guitar before the rest of the band joined her.

We find it difficult to describe Mothers' music - they're very unique, and at the same time kind of all over the place.  "Singer/songwriter" might be the best catch-all category if one had to categorize them, but their set last night ranged from indie folk to dream pop to folk rock, with splashes of new wave and punk thrown in for good measure.  They sound like no one else, but at the same time evoked bands as diverse as Lower Dens and Daughter and Y La Bomba, without being derivative of any of them.  Here's a typically untypical sample, the rhythmically driving Pink which they used to close out their set.

So, even though we didn't get home until near 1 a.m., we're still glad we went.  It's certainly not a complaint -  more like an observation - but even though it's only early May, it got pretty warm in the non-air-conditioned and poorly ventilated performance space at The Bakery.  We're going to have to think twice before going back for a show there in, say, August.