This week's contribution to Sun Ra Saturday isn't by Sun Ra at all but instead a cover of Nuclear War by the fine Hoboken indie rock band Yo La Tengo. The song is stripped down to a throbbing bass loop and some urgent drumming by Georgia Hubley, but this cover is most notable for a group of children providing the response to Ira Kaplan's call (we wonder if Yo La Tengo had to get notes from the kids' parents to allow them to sing on this).
Yo La Tengo released Version 2 in a 2002 four-song EP of covers of Nuclear War. In a Pitchfork review of the record, Kyle Reiter wrote:
Upon first listen, the children create a lighter atmosphere (and a hilarious ploy when saying "motherfucker" over and over), but as the song plays on, the kids don't seem quite so funny anymore. The naïveté involved in an actual nuclear assault sets in, and with every response from the children comes an increasingly unsettling feeling. The song conveys the realization that everyone's in the hot seat, not just the adults. It's this twisted sense of structure that ultimately owes itself to Ra.
So, okay, cool, you're probably thinking, but does video exist of Yo La Tengo performing the song live with surviving members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, preferably shot on a Hanukkah night? Of course there is.
Our favorite part of the video is at the 1:45 mark, when 94-year-old Marshall Allen seemingly decides there's somewhere else he needs to be rather than on the Hoboken stage.
Tell 'em about it, Georgia!
Friday, August 30, 2019
Back on Friday, August 16, I finally completed Far Cry 5. It was fun, although the ending was darker than I had expected. To be honest, the dark ending was kind of unsatisfying after all of the hours I put into the game and that epic boss fight at the end. The ending might have made a good plot twist for a Shirley Jackson-type short story or an episode of The Twilight Zone (I know, I'm showing my age) but you play video games for the endorphin release of winning a challenge, not for realizing that despite all of your efforts, you're still existentially doomed. I'm tying real hard not to reveal any spoilers here, so let's suffice it to say that the game was actually pretty good, but marred by the depressing last two minutes.
After completing the game, I briefly went back to playing Metal Gear Solid V. Still can't complete Mission 16, although I got closer than in any of my previous attempts, killing three of the four supernatural beings guarding a truck I'm supposed to jack. But like before, the fourth one killed me first so I died while in mission for like the umpteenth time, so I shut the game down like before and went looking for something new to play.
I wanted something fun and something that I knew I would be good at, so I went back to Assassin's Creed Odyssey and played through the First Blade DLC. At this point, I have Cassandra fully upgraded and capable, and after re-learning how to use the commands for the game (which button do you use for breaking shields again?), at Level 73 she's pretty much unstoppable. I was able to power her through the three episodes of the DLC in under two weeks.
Which means I'm back to wondering again what game to play next. Meanwhile, Ubisoft, the publisher of the Far Cry and Assassin's Creed games, must have noticed that I've purchased a lot of their titles over the past year or so, as they've started sending me promos for discounted games, some even for free. I've downloaded the game For Honor, even though that fighting game doesn't look like my kind of thing - but for free, I'll give it a chance. But before wading into that, Ubisoft also gave away the first episode of the second Assassin's Creed Odyssey DLC, The Fate of Atlantis. That's an easy, no-brainer transition after finishing the First Blade DLC, so as soon as I'm done posting this, it's back to Ancient Greece and AC Odyssey for the Atlantis expansion.
I knew retirement would be fun as long as my hardware remains up to spec for the current games and my high-speed internet connection stays on line.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Posting to Twitter about our so-called "president" proposing to open Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging and to scale back EPA rules on methane emissions, Vermont Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wrote:
The Amazon is being destroyed. So Trump opens America's largest rainforest, Tongass National Forest, to logging and mining.
Methane emissions surge worldwide. Trump's EPA will make them grow faster.
The president and his billionaire friends are a threat to our entire planet.
What the good senator forgot to include is that the Amazon is being destroyed because of the trade war with China that our "president" started. Tariffs on American soybeans are not only hurting American farmers, but China is turning to the world's second-largest soybean grower, Brazil, to meet it's demand for produce. Brazil, in response, is increasing soybean production, resulting in slash-and-burn clearing of Amazonian rain forest to create more farmland for soybean growing.
Pop quiz: what's the difference between a soybean and a chickpea?
Answer: The "president" never had a soybean on his face.
With so much going on to talk about, from the sudden decision by Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) to step down from the Senate at the end of the year, to new allegations of releases of ethylene oxide from the Sterigenics plant in Smyrna, to forest fires in the Amazon and the Congo (fun fact: did you know that at one point in geologic time, the Amazon and the Congo were once one river?), to man's genetic predisposition toward male violence, what should we choose to discuss today?
Obviously, the fact that the band YACHT are back from a three-year absence! And with AI!
For their forthcoming album, Chain Tripping, YACHT employed Artificial Intelligence in their songwriting process. According to their Bandcamp page:
In order to compose Chain Tripping, YACHT invented their own AI songwriting process, a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82 songs using machine learning tools. Eventually they created their own working method, painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated music and lyrics, themselves emerging from custom models created with the help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI.
YACHT used the NSynth, a neural synthesizer that utilizes latent space interpolation to imagine new sounds in between traditional instrumentation. YACHT's Claire Evans said, “This record is a product of a technological moment that is rapidly evolving. It taught us everything we wanted to know about ourselves: how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into. We didn’t set out to produce algorithmically-generated music that could ‘pass’ as human. We set out to make something meaningful. Something entirely our own.”
That, plus you can dance to it. What's not to love?
Meanwhile, in Berlin, the artist Holly Herndon has gone even deeper into AI, using it not only to compose, but to also perform alongside human musicians. Her new album PROTO, consists of modern choral music. You can't dance to it (well, I suppose you can dance to anything, but still); however, in addition to several other talented singers, her vocal ensemble includes Spawn, a “nascent machine intelligence.” Spawn runs on a modified gaming computer and uses neural networks to riff on the music it hears; Herndon considers Spawn not as an instrument or a tool but as an ensemble member.
Due to the anatomy of the throat, the human voice cannot go from one note to another without expressing the transitory notes in between; muscles need to tighten or relax, passageways need to adjust the way air moves through them. The resulting glissando is what makes singing sound natural and organic, as opposed to the sound of electronic instruments.
The harmonies in PROTO are provided by Herndon and a chorus of human and artificial voices, digitally processed and compressed by Spawn. The natural glissando of the human voice disappears; there is one note and then there is another, with no transition between them, yet the music does not sound unnatural. The distinction between human and digital sound becomes blurred, or as Sasha Geffen notes in Pitchfork, "it sounds like a new kind of human vocalizing, augmented by machine, not reduced by it." The video for the song Eternal provides insight into the creative process that Herndon employs.
"Then in a certain moment I lose control and, at last, I am part of the machinery," Brian Eno sang in the 1978 song The Belldog, which seems to neatly encapsulate Herndon's ambitions. In the same song he also anticipates folks like YACHT using AI to generate lyrics and sifting through the reams of output to select the words they like most (even the album title, Chain Tripping, was picked from seemingly endless suggestions provided by the AI). "Most of the day," he sang, "we were at the machinery, in the dark sheds that the seasons ignored. I held the levers that guided the signals to the radio, but the words I received, random code, broken fragments from before."
Here's The Belldog, my favorite track from After The Heat. The song is now 41 years old, but it still sounds like the future to me.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
On Friday, June 28, I left the office on my last day of work with a more-or-less full tank of gas. Since that time, I have run the usual errands (grocery shopping, occasional meals out, etc.), been to several music shows at Little Five Points, East Atlanta Village and the Westside, and even had my car towed to the repair shop one day after the battery died.
Fun retirement fact: I didn't refill my gas tank or otherwise buy any fuel until last Friday, August 23, and even then I still had an eighth of a tank left to go. When I was commuting to and from the office, I was filling her up at least once a week, sometimes more.
Also, I need to correct something I said yesterday. Discussing the behavior of chimpanzees, I said that the lower-level male wants to be dominant, with the mating privileges and other benefits that entails, which implies that a chimp understands the reasons for its instinctual behavior. According to authors Wrangham and Peterson, "The motivation of a male chimpanzee who challenges another's rank is not that he foresees more matings or better food or a longer life. Those rewards explain why sexual selection has favored the desire for power, but the immediate reason he vies for status is simpler, deeper, and less subject to the vagaries of context. It is simply to dominate his peers."
That's even more depressing, as it implies that our human DNA is hardwired for males to seek dominance. Wrangham and Peterson go on, stating, "In the same way, the motivation of male chimpanzees on a border patrol is not to gain land or win females. The temperamental goal is to intimidate the opposition, to beat them to a pulp, to erode their ability to challenge. Winning has become an end in itself."
"It looks the same with men," they conclude.
Monday, August 26, 2019
I love it when different books by different authors on different topics come to a similar point - the different lines of evidence and the varying methods of arriving at that conclusion are compelling demonstrations of the validity of the point being made.
One of my fundamental disagreements with classic Stoic philosophy is what I perceive as an over-reliance on logic. The Roman philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus felt that the impulse of pure emotion and instinct could be overcome by applying the faculty of logic. We humans have a unique ability to use our advanced intelligence, they argue, and apply logic to a situation. While our first animal instinct may be to lash out at someone we feel has wronged us, we can apply logic to our situation and consider the consequences of our action, what we may have done to cause the other person to have committed their offense against us, and what alternative action might produce better results in the long run.
Logic, the Stoics argue, is that divine gift that humans possess that makes us superior to the brute animals of nature, and we can utilize this gift of logic to arrive at an intelligent and productive solution to any situation we encounter. All we have to do is be always willing to ruthlessly examine ourselves and our actions, and be ready to apply logic to any situation in which we find ourselves.
That sounds great, but it doesn't really hold up in modern times. Behavioral psychologist and neurologists have confirmed what the Buddhists have been saying for millennia - that our subconscious mind makes most of our decisions for us without our even knowing it, and our conscious mind merely creates rationales and justifications for the actions we intended on doing anyway.
For example, if Epictetus felt an urge to slap a centurion who had just rudely pushed him aside, he would stop, use logic to consider the outcome of his urge (the centurion would draw his sword and eviscerate him), consider how his own actions may have caused the boorish behavior (Epicteus hadn't moved aside when the centurion announced he was coming through, and thus did not acknowledge his authority), and then come up with a logical alternative to lashing out (e.g., simply decide not to take offense or to not consider it an affront to his pride, and move on as if nothing had ever happened).
But the real truth of the matter may have been that Epictetus was simply a coward, and that although his ego was hurt at being treated rudely by the centurion, he was afraid to take revenge. His subconscious mind wished that nothing had ever happened in the first place, so he utilized his "logic" to devise a noble alibi for not avenging the centurion's action. He felt he was using his superb and divine logic to select a reasonable course of action, but in reality, he was using his conscious mind to rationalize what his subconscious had already decided.
So anyway, that's my opinion on that aspect of Stoicism, and it's rooted in classic Buddhist philosophy, and the concept of mental models (samskara) and our capacity for self-delusion. So I found it very refreshing to read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind and his idea that the human mind is like a monkey riding an elephant. The monkey (our conscious mind) thinks that it is steering the elephant (our subconscious mind) and telling it where to go, but in reality, the elephant goes wherever it damn well wants, and our conscious monkey is just hanging on for dear life and trying to come up with rationales and excuses for the actions of the elephant. The specific point of the book is that some people are just naturally conservative and others are progressive by nature, and trying to use logic and argument to win a person over to the other side is like addressing the monkey instead of the elephant - no amount of logic, exposition, or argument is going to change anything, because the monkey's not really the one in charge.
This is why it's considered rude to discuss politics or religion, and ultimately so frustrating - no matter how well informed, well intentioned, and erudite your arguments are, the other person's elephant is charging off in its own desired direction and you're just making the monkey mad by revealing its powerlessness over the situation.
So that's Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind validating what I've believed for some years now. Oh boy! Right again! More recently, I've been reading a book by zoologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson called Demonic Males. Their basic premise is that the propensity toward violent action specific to males of the human species, as opposed to the generally more cooperative and less violent female, is shared by males of our closest relatives in the evolutionary tree - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and even the beatific bonobos - but generally not by males of other species. They examine the frankly depressing possibility that the human male's tendency toward domestic abuse, mass shootings, gang activity, and other violence is somehow hardwired into our DNA, and not a symptom as some have argued of an unhealthy, paternalistic society. They consider if it's in our nature and not due to our nuture.
The authors are highly qualified field zoologists who, among other things, have participated in Jane Goodall's observations of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and are thus intimately familiar with chimpanzee behavior. They've watched chimps behave cooperatively within well-defined troop societies, with recognized alpha-male leaders and complex but clear-cut hierarchies of succession and dominance. Chimps attempting to rise in dominance within the troop display highly intelligent behavior of well-timed strategic actions - it's not enough to merely challenge the alpha male and it's not enough how you challenge him, it must be done at the right time and with the right audience, and male chimpanzees obviously put a lot of thought and effort into orchestrating these right conditions in order to succeed. Right action, right time, right place.
As Wrangham and Peterson tell it, chimps have to envision the outcome of their actions, and then reason that Action A will result in Outcome 1 and Action B will result in Outcome 2, and then envision both outcomes and decide which is preferable. Therefore, the authors assert, in highly intelligent apes, including but not limited to humans, emotion sits in the driver's seat, and reason (or calculation) paves the road. The chimpanzee wants to be dominant, with the mating privileges and other benefits that entails, so its emotional elephant carries it in that direction. Its "monkey" (the ape's conscious rider) is reduced to merely figuring out how to make it happen. To be sure, humans can reason better, but we're also more capable of rationalization and self delusion. We tell ourselves that our conscious monkeys are in control, whereas in chimpanzees and gorillas the monkey mind is more obviously subservient to the elephant.
So that's the second validation of our skepticism of logic. This time, zoologists observing the behavior of apes state that it's emotion, not logic, that's in the driver's seat, and that reason just facilitates what emotion desires. This is very similar to Haidt's elephant-and-monkey metaphor, and not dissimilar to the Buddha's teachings to not mistake our mental models (samskara) with the reality they purport to represent. Or as novelist John Barth would say, the story of our life is not our life, it is our story.
And to think I had thought that I could have explained this all in only three or four paragraphs, and I'm still not sure that I've explained myself clearly.
Blink and you miss it - earlier this month, Tuesday the 13th to be precise, marked the 15th anniversary of moving into this house, this pile of bricks on a hill I've called home ever since.
It's by far the longest I've ever lived in any one place as a child or an adult.
I doubt I'll ever move again. Not only is the hard work of moving physically exhausting, but I've really no motivation or reason to leave. This pile of bricks shall be the last place I ever lived.
While on the subject on anniversaries, today, August 25, is apparently the 400th anniversary of the pirate ship The White Lion arriving in what was to be the United States, carrying the first slaves brought here directly from Africa. There was already a thriving slavery business between Africa and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America and the Caribbean, and some of those slaves or descendants of those slaves were reportedly brought from those locations to Spanish colonies in St. Augustine, Florida and the Gulf Coast, but those shipments were not documented and The White Lion brought the first slaves directly from Africa to the North American continent.
As W.E.B. Du Bois put it, those "20 and odd" slaves brought with them three gifts:
"a gift of story and song — soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit."
Today is also the anniversary of the founding of America's National Park System (1916). Entrance to all of the parks is free today, if you're so inclined, including Atlanta's own M.L King, Jr, National Historic Site. Considering the alignment of the National Parks and White Lion anniversaries, it would be appropriate to visit the King site today, but we were there a couple years ago after the so-called "election" of 2016.
Lest we forget, this was the reaction in the Deep South to the "election" of 2016:
There was an urgency we heard during the 1984 performance of Nuclear War at Atlanta's Moonshadow Tavern that's belied by the ironically laid-back studio version. That urgency can be heard in this live version from Paris in 1983.
Interestingly, Sun Ra and the Arkestra achieve a high level of intensity in this live recording without using the profane expletive ("it's a motherfucker, don't you know?") that characterizes the studio version. They definitely used it during the Atlanta performance at the Moonshadow a year later.
Friday, August 23, 2019
Finally, after eight long, empty months, college football resumes tomorrow.
Nothing else matter; everything else is irrelevant. Sure, there's only one game, and both teams are from the state of Florida, but from tomorrow until sometime in early January, there won't be any more Saturdays without college football.
The long national nightmare is finally over. Let the games begin.
As if it didn't already have enough problems, it turns out that the Unsellable Condo in Vinings is on the edge of a zone impacted by airborne releases of a carcinogenic chemical.
Back in 2016, the U.S. EPA determined that the pollutant ethylene oxide (EtO) is more dangerous than they had previously assumed and moved it from the list of probable human carcinogens to the list of known human carcinogens, noting that it was 30 times more likely to cause certain cancers than previous assessments indicated.
Last year, EPA used that new risk information in a periodic report that assesses health risks from releases of airborne toxins in the U.S. The National Air Toxics Assessment identified 109 census tracts across the country where cancer risks were elevated because of exposure to airborne toxins. Most of the risks were driven by just one chemical: EtO.
Three of the affected tracts are here in Georgia, and one, the Sterigenics plant in Smyrna, is about 1.5 miles from the Vinings condo. Emissions of EtO from the Smyrna plant could potentially cause 114 additional cases of cancer for every million people exposed over their lifetime.
For some reason, EPA decided not to issue a press release about their findings at that time, and state regulators have not release one either. As a result, few people who live in the impacted area were aware of the threat until they started reading about it online at WebMD and Georgia Health News. The story is just now starting to make the news, and a public hearing was held on Monday night.
Sterigenics uses EtO to sterilize medical equipment. Fugitive emissions from the sterilization process are emitted from wall fans, and the facility is proposing to collect the fugitive emissions and send them to two stacks up on the roof.
Headquartered in Willowbrook, Illinois, Sterigenics, with the American Chemistry Council, had been lobbying the EPA for several years to not classify EtO as a known carcinogen. Peter Roskam, the Republican congressman for the Sixth District of Illinois, where Sterigenics is headquartered, had received campaign contributions from the American Chemistry Council and had supported legislation to put industry representatives on the EPA boards that make determinations on carcinogenicity to humans. The State of Illinois closed the Willowbrook plant after testing showed high levels of airborne EtO and a follow-up study by the Illinois Department of Public Health found higher rates of cancer among women and girls in surrounding neighborhoods. Roskam, a six-term incumbent, was defeated last year by Democratic challenger Sean Casten, a former cancer researcher with degrees in molecular biology, biochemistry and biochemical engineering.
In any event, the condo in Vinings is located right of the very edge of the area that the state's models indicate may be impacted by the Sterigenics facility (the boundary line literally runs right through the building). However, the condo is located northwest of the facility and the dominant wind direction in this part of the country is to the east (although ground-level breezes may differ). And in any event, I haven't lived in the condo since 2004.
Hope everyone else is okay, though.
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
This week's Pumpernickel outrages: Saying Jews would be "disloyal" if they vote for the Democratic party; acting like a peevish child when told he can't buy a sovereign nation like it was some distressed Atlantic City real estate; announcing the government won't provide flu shots to the refugee children in his concentration camps, and then proposing that he can keep refugees imprisoned "indefinitely;" requesting that Russia be allowed back into the G7 group of nations (formerly the G8 until Russia invaded Crimea); reversing his stand on background checks for guns after a telephone conversation with the NRA.
One of the best things about retirement is you can go out to a show on a Monday night, one where the doors don't even open until 9:00 p.m., and not have to worry about getting up the next morning. The Music Desk took advantage of that last night and went down to Aisle 5 in Little Five Points, Atlanta, to see Mutual Benefit.
The doors were not yet open when we arrived, but there was no line outside and when the doors finally did open we had that surreal experience for a few moments of being the only ones (one) there. Which gave us a nice moment or two to go over to the merch table and have a pleasant one-on-one conversation with Jordan Lee of Mutual Benefit. We talked about their new cover LP of Vashti Bunyan's 1970 Just Another Diamond Day and the scooter situation in Atlanta before the others arrived.
The show started at 9:30 with a set by The Spookfish, which consists of one solo musician. The first song was a fairly outre electronic piece and, having set our expectations in one direction, he then pulled the rug out from under us by next performing a quiet song on acoustic guitar. Interestingly, he performed the rest of the set that way, alternating on each song between his d.j./producer set-up and his acoustic guitar, and only for his closing piece did he mix the two, producing n electronic drone to accompany some acoustic finger picking.
So that was cool and next up was Atlanta's Book Club. Fronted by guitarist, singer and songwriter Robbie Horlick, Book Club play country-inflected folk rock with intricate harmonies and interesting instrumentation (violin, cello, keys and two guitars - no drums).
Between the two opening bands and the 9:00 p.m. doors, Mutual Benefit didn't take the stage until nearly 11:00 p.m. But it was well worth the wait - as always, they played a simply lovely set of gentle, slightly baroque folk rock, fronted by the soft voice of frontman Jordan Lee and backed by keys, violin, guitars and bass (once again, no drums).
Part of the beauty of Mutual Benefit is their ability to almost perfectly match live the sounds they produce in the studio, no small feat for music as textured and subtle as theirs. They mostly played songs from their latest album, 2018's Thunder Follow the Light, as well as a medley of songs from their Just Another Diamond Day cover LP and several of our favorite songs from previous albums. We got sort of swept up by the beauty of the music and weren't keeping track of things, but we're pretty sure we heard 2013's Advanced Falconry somewhere in the set.
This is our third or fourth time seeing Mutual Benefit. We missed them at The Earl in February 2014, but caught them in May of that year at Shaky Knees, and then saw them again when they opened for Quilt at The Earl in 2016. We may have seen them on some other dates as well, but honestly can't recall when.
As mentioned here earlier, slavery in the Americas supposedly began 400 years ago this month. As The New York Times tells it, in August 1619, a ship arrived at the British colony in Jamestown, Virginia carrying a strange cargo: more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. "This is referred to as the country’s original sin," the Times writes, "but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin."
But that's an oversimplification of the history of slavery in the Americas. As Howard Zinn shows us, by 1619, some one million black men and women had already been brought from Africa to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America and the Caribbean to work as slaves. In Central America, the Spanish conquistadors had made slaves of captured Aztecs and Mayans, and Columbus brought Arawaks from the Bahamas back to Portugal as slaves in the 1490s. Slavery was already thriving in the New World by the time the slave ship had arrived in Jamestown in 1619.
Last night, I was reading an article in The New Yorker about Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at American University in Washington. Prof. Kendi traces the history of racism back to the fifteenth century and Infante D. Henrique of Portugal, the Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator.
I did not know anything about Prince Henry; like many Americans, I was taught that the era of European exploration basically began with Columbus in 1492, and was all about The New World (my education has many peculiar gaps and omissions). I did some research today and learned that Henry the Explorer was a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and is regarded as the main initiator of what would come to be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry was responsible for a systematic series of expeditions along the Western Africa coast and the islands of the Atlantic.
Ceuta, a Muslim port on the North African coast across from the Straits of Gibraltar, had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave trade. Prince Henry encouraged his father, the Portuguese king John I, to conquer Ceuta and following this success, he learned of the opportunities offered by the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general. Henry began to explore the west coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His objectives included finding the source of the African gold trade and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast.
Anxious to find new trade routes to bypass the Muslim caravans in the Sahara, Henry sponsored a series of nautical voyages typically made in very small ships, mostly the caravel, a light and maneuverable vessel. The caravel used a lateen sail, the prevailing rig in Mediterranean navigation since late antiquity. Most of the voyages sent out by Henry consisted of one or two ships that navigated by following the coast, stopping at night to tie up along some shore.
Until Henry's time, Cape Bojador, a headland on the northern coast of Western Sahara, remained the most southerly point known to Europeans on the coast of Africa. Superstitious seafarers held that beyond the cape lay sea monsters and the edge of the world. In 1434, one of Henry's expeditions was the first to finally pass Bojador.
Using the new ship type, the expeditions then pushed onwards. By 1441, expeditions reached Cape Blanco, a headland near the southern border of Western Sahara. In 1443, the Portuguese sighted the Bay of Arguin in Mauritania. Subsequent expeditions soon came across the Senegal River and rounded the Cape Verde Peninsula at Dakar, the westernmost point on the African continent.
By this stage, the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the Sahara Desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara, and gold began pouring into Portugal. This rerouting of trade devastated the Muslim trading posts at Algiers and Tunis, but made Portugal rich. From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Portugal on Henry's behalf, and the first private mercantile expeditions began.
But in addition to gold, the expeditions also came across another lucrative commodity: African slaves. A slave trade emerged between western Africa and the European nations, but with the discovery and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century, the market exploded.
If historians have to put a pin on the exact date that racism as we know it today began, it would be 1444, when Henry the Explorer's expeditions first started treating African slaves as a commodity. Interestingly, although there was significant trade and cultural exchange between Muslims and North Africans in the Middle East, and between West Africans and India, the interactions were not as centered around slavery as the East African/European trade was, and the racist attitudes and derision that marks European and American racism did not emerge from these other exchanges. The racist ideologies only emerged in order to justify the dehumanizing aspects of the slave trade.
Prof. Kendi points out that racism, then, is not even 600 hundred years old. It only emerged in the 1440s with Henry the Explorer's exploitation of the slave market, yet still persists like a cancer to this day. But "it's a cancer that we've caught early," Prof. Kendi explains, and just as ideologies of racial difference emerged after the slave trade in order to justify it, anti-racist ideologies will emerge once we're bold enough to enact an anti-racist agenda. Criminal justice reform, more money for black schools and black teachers, and a program to fight residential segregation can be like a high tide that floats all boats, black and white.
"Once they clearly benefit," Prof. Kendi writes, "most Americans will support and become the defenders of the anti-racist policies they once feared." This awakening will be what Dr. Eddie Glaude referred to as white folks finally leaving behind a toxic history and "maybe, maybe," embracing a history that will finally set them free from "being white."
These are inspiring, optimistic ideas, and although they may sound threatening to a certain demographic of whites accustomed to their privilege and fearful of losing it, the current system is clearly unraveling and will not sustain itself for much longer.
Something has to change and when it's finally seen that anti-racism is mutually beneficial, racism may finally become a symptom of the past.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
As the more civic-minded readers may recall, someone once said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
All men, as in mankind, as in all men and women, regardless of race, color or creed. And not just American citizens either, but also refugees, immigrants, the indigenous and the alien. It is self-evident that they are all equal and all have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Pro-nationalists, white supremacists, and MAGA supporters (MAGgots?) often act as if these rights apply only to them and those like them. But this nation was founded on the assumption that the rights apply to all people regardless of skin color or religion, of nationality or immigration status. Everyone.
White supremacist ideology, which denies these rights for non-whites and non-natives, originally evolved in the Americas to justify the barbaric but enormously profitable practice of slavery. It became easier to buy and sell enslaved African and African-American people like cattle when the white settlers stopped thinking of them as human, when they were converted to mere property in the white imagination. Their value and worth could then be calculated according to age, sex and productivity. It could be believed that they were unable to feel pain and that they could be separated from their families.
When one's profits depended on slavery, it was easy, if not necessary, to rationalize a belief in the slave's biological inferiority. It allowed the slave owners to reconcile the inherent contradiction of the dehumanizing institution of slavery with the declaration of equal rights promised in the country’s founding documents. It allowed slave-owners like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington to write a document like the Declaration of Independence without understanding their own inconsistencies.
America's economic success was largely made possible by the forced labor provided by slavery. The labor of enslaved people reaped the cotton that fed the New England textile mills that launched the Industrial Revolution and built a sprawling rail network, propelling the country’s enormous economic growth in the nineteenth century. Slavery helped fuel the growth of Wall Street, the insurance industry, and shipping fortunes. The wealth created by slavery attracted millions of European immigrants to the nation’s shores well into the 1920s.
When slavery was outlawed, society built systems that would keep African Americans in as close a condition to slavery as possible. White supremacist ideology rationalized lynchings, convict leasing, Jim Crow segregation, federal housing loan discrimination, the destruction of black neighborhoods for “urban renewal,” environmental injustice, wealth inequality, voter disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, and police brutality.
The illness of white supremacist ideology still infects the country, as evidenced by the racial violence, hate crimes and mass shootings we see today. It created a reality in which the economic vitality of the country became entangled with predatory capitalism and racial subjugation. Today, those racist systems and policies rooted in the institutions of slavery and white supremacy continue to marginalize communities of color and people of all ethnicities living in poverty.
This weekend, far-right pro-nationalists and white supremacists marched in Portland, Oregon and were met by anti-fascist, Antifa, counter-protesters. It was a tense confrontation with the potential for explosive violence, which fortunately did not occur. However, the leaders of the Proud Boys, which organized the far-right protests, have threatened to return to Portland every month. But the so-called "president" of the United States, instead of forcibly denouncing the hurtful and destructive ideology of white supremacy and pro-nationalism, instead said he's considering classifying the counter-protesters, Antifa, as a terrorist organization. While that's legally impossible (there are no laws on the books for classifying any domestic organization as "terrorist," only for identifying foreign terrorist organizations), by singling out the counter-protesters and not also denouncing groups like the Proud Boys, he clearly signals his sympathy with the white supremacist ideology.
If this nation is to become united, for America to become great, we need to overcome the current rampant economic inequality. As long as we continue to divide ourselves along racial and ethnic lines, as long as we scapegoat refugees and immigrants as the source of our problems, we will remain unequal and divided, and things will only get worse.
If you listened to last week's A Fireside Chat With Lucifer all the way through, and then let the Bandcamp gadget continue to play, it would have gone back to Track 1 of the LP, Nuclear War, which over the years has become one of Sun Ra's most famous songs despite its decidedly salty language.
In his 2014 book, The Execution of Sun Ra, Thomas Stanley observes, "Throughout his life [Sun Ra] was consistent in his opposition to war and his art reflected this, perhaps most sharply in the space chant Nuclear War." Over a deceptively sparkly chromatic piano line, played at a steady walking rhythm, Sun Ra and trombonist Tyrone Hill, joined by June Tyson, sing, "It's a motherfucker, don't you know?" Stanley writes, "It is worth noting that this spicy chunk of language is the only use of profanity that this author is aware of in Sonny's vast recorded song repertory."
This 1982 recording also appears on the Sun Ra album Celestial Love and an EP titled Nuclear War. A listener unaware that Nuclear War was a Sun Ra composition could be forgiven for thinking it was a parody of a punk rock anthem. Nuclear War is punk jazz.
We were fortunate enough to have seen Sun Ra perform many times during the '70s and '80s and even into the early 90s. The first and only time we heard him perform Nuclear War was during a memorable 1984 performance at the former Moonshadow Tavern in Atlanta, an erstwhile rock club in an unassuming strip mall. A fine-art print of a photo from that session, titled The Sun At the Moon, can be purchased at pixels.com.
The Moon Shadow Tavern today. It was no less glamorous in 1984.
Many, many years, literally decades, passed between hearing Nuclear War live in 1984 and finally hearing a recorded version of the song. While we were shocked to hear Sun Ra singing "motherfucker" live on stage, in the artistic context of the performance and its protest of nuclear war, it wasn't inappropriate. But in our memory, that most fallible of faculties, we distinctly remembered him calling out "those motherfuckers" to a repeated response, a direct challenge to the nuclear powers, rather than the less personal confrontational "it's a motherfucker." We also recall Sun Ra improvising on the lyrics, saying at one point something to the effect that you'd be upset if someone pointed a gun at you, so why aren't you upset that they have nuclear bombs aimed at you?
Tell 'em about it, Tyrone!
Friday, August 16, 2019
Photo posted to Reddit by miikememe
A recent article in the New York Times, part of the paper's admirable 1619 Project about the 400-year anniversary of the advent of slavery in the Americas, explains how traffic congestion in Atlanta is due to segregation. By and large, they got it correct.
The most obvious example is the east-west Interstate I-20, which effectively separates predominantly black south Atlanta from the white neighborhoods to the north. It's one thing to cross a railroad line if you live on "the wrong side of the tracks," but it's a lot harder to cross five lanes of east-bound, limited-access highway, a concrete Jersey-barrier divider, and then five more lanes of west-bound, limited-access highway, all with multi-ton, glass-and-steel vehicles whizzing by at high velocity. The few bridges crossing the gulch weren't designed with pedestrians in mind. To be sure, I-20 wasn't invented to segregate the city, but it was an easy decision to run it along the course of railroad tracks and roads that were already effectively doing just that.
The north-south highways that served to assist the "white flight" from downtown in the 60s and 70s today provide the only practical means of transportation from the predominantly white suburbs to the downtown jobs and offices. Use increases every year and more lanes are added in an attempt to meet demand; when my car broke down last February in the high-speed HOV lane, I couldn't get to safety without crossing eight lanes of traffic. To meet the demand for more lanes (and a government-required HOV lane for continued eligibility for federal DOT funds), every foot of the corridor has been devoted to traffic, and there was no break-down lane, shoulder, or any other safe spot to pull over.
The lack of a public transit alternative, other than the very rudimentary MARTA system, is largely due to the NIMBY resistance in the white suburbs to allowing non-vehicular access to their communities. The fear is that light-rail access will bring with it hordes of criminal minorities, drug addicts and muggers, as if the felons don't already know where the rich live and how to get there. Besides, I challenge anyone to ride MARTA now and find criminals carrying flat-screen TVs and microwave ovens. Criminals prefer vans and pickup trucks to riding public transportation, and the highways provide them the means for a quick getaway.
So the layout of the highway system has it origins in segregation, the volume of traffic is based on white self-deportation from the city, and the lack of public transit is due to racist stereotypes of who would use the system. But before you "tsk, tsk" Atlanta, take a good hard look at your own community and you might see similar patterns.
Plus, things are getting better. Times change and people change, even in the Deep South. South of I-20 is no longer considered "all-black," and vibrant, diverse communities have sprung up in East Atlanta Village, Grant Park, and East Point, all south of I-20 and among the hippest addresses in the city. Due to low rents and cheap real estate, the arts community is increasingly moving into abandoned or underutilized warehouses and industrial space on the south side. Plus to the north, a combination of black prosperity, more relaxed views on race, and anti-discrimination laws and statues have made the top side more diverse. Meanwhile, many immigrant and ethnic communities are forming in the once all-white suburbs due to the high cost of in-town living.
We still have a long way to go, and I for one would love to see more and better public transit, as almost anyone who's lived in a city with a functioning transit system would tell you. But part of the progress that's needed is contingent upon recognizing the problem for what it is and getting to the roots of the current situation. A prescription for change is not possible without a proper diagnosis of the problem.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
I've been enjoying Far Cry 5 and don't want the game to end, but I'm at the inevitable climactic scene.
Ever since my birthday back on July 25 when I bought the game as a present to myself, I've played the game for some 99 hours. It's been fun, and a lot less frustrating than some of the more tedious missions in it's predecessor, Far Cry 4. But 5 is even more open-world than 4, and allows the player as much exploring time and adventuring as one wants - there's even some pretty good hunting and fishing simulators in there. It's set in the fictional Hope County, Montana, and the game captures well the joys of being outdoors in the Rocky Mountain summertime.
But try as I might, I couldn't avoid getting pulled into some of the story missions, and one thing leads to another and before I know it, I've eliminated all of the lower henchmen and adversaries and have come to the final confrontation with the main villain.
I know how this ends - it's no secret and I've seen the YouTube videos showing the three possible outcomes. They're all dark, and after the final confrontation, no matter which of the outcomes, there's going to be no more exploring or hunting or fishing in Hope County for me.
So my character is supposed to respond to a challenge by finally meeting the villain face to face for the final confrontation. I'm sure that he's waiting there at the appointed spot, well armed and with an army of supporters, but knowing that arriving there marks a point of no return, I've instead been wandering all over the game map, looking for any possible adventures and missions I may have missed, and not surprisingly, I've found quite a few.
Look, Joseph Seed (that's the villain), we'll meet soon enough. Guns will be fired, trucks will be driven off of roads, and the fires of Armageddon will come raining down from the skies. Meanwhile, just let me bag one more pronghorn and see if I can't finally reel in The Admiral, the monster sturgeon that's eluded all the other fishermen in Hope County.
The game will be over before the end of this weekend and I don't know what I'll play next. Please don't make me go back to Metal Gear Solid 5.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
As you've probably noticed, we're not big fans of our so-called "president" here. Among many other things, he seems to thrive on chaos and appears to any rational observer to be in an out-of-control, twitter-fueled, free fall. We says one thing on Monday, denies saying it Wednesday, and then says the opposite on Friday. Rinse and repeat. There's no underlying policy or doctrine - he just says whatever it is he thinks will get him the most attention for the next news cycle and the biggest applause at the next rally as he continues to gas-light the nation.
But it's not as random as it seems. Not to give him too much credit, but his madness benefits the extremely wealthy, the 1-percenters of the country. Useful idiocy, I suppose.
I'll give you an example. A couple weeks ago, he announced a new round of tariffs against China. Broad, extensive tariffs on a large number of imports. The market freaked out, knowing that the move will have a chilling effect on trade and sales and profits will fall. As a result, stock prices plummeted.
But those who had the available cash (see "1-percenters," above) were able to grab up lots of stocks on the cheap, getting otherwise blue-chip assets at rock-bottom, yard-sale prices. Then Trump reversed himself, as is his want, saying he won't impose the tariffs after all, and the stock market went back to normal. All those stocks bought cheaply by the ultra-wealthy the week before were now back at their full, normal value.
Don't you see what this is? It's a redistribution of America's wealth, with the so-called "president" assisting, either knowingly or not, in the transfer to the wealthy of capital from working-class trust funds and retirement programs and pension plans. It's taking what little wealth remains in the hands of the people and giving it to the elites, the kleptocracy. It's robbing the poor to feed the rich.
When the so-called "president" says something particularly stupid, my IRA drops in value, and Koch brothers and Mellons and DeVoses and Bezoses get more stock shares. By the end of the week, I have less money and the rich have more.
Whether you know it or not, the same thing is happening to you.
Today's headlines say that the market suffered huge losses today due to the residual effects of America's isolationism and trade wars. Financial reports showed the German economy heading toward a recession, and factory output in China growing at its slowest pace in 17 years. The "good news" is that the so-called "president" may not be able to undo this catastrophe of his own making with a tweet or a denial, and an American recession may be just the event needed to limit him to one term.
We'll all lose money, but it will be money well spent if it removes his fat ass from the Oval Office.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Just how desperate is Dumbledorf Pumpernickel these days? After video surfaced of him and disgraced whatever-it-was-he-was Jeffrey Epstein at a party together, commenting on the women in the room and laughing as they whispered asides to one another, he's now trying to make it sound like they never had anything in common, just happened to live in the same area code, and it's the Clintons, not him, who have close ties to Epstein.
He's even gone so far (and so low) as to retweet conspiracy theories that the Clintons were somehow complicit in Epstein's death, so as to focus public attention on an association between Epstein and them, and away from Epstein and him.
We're not falling for it. This is President "Grab Them By the Pussy," and the two of them together (Epstein and Pumpernickel) looked like two giggling frat boys plotting their next date rape.
When the evidence is made public and the dockets are finally unsealed, this will be Pumpernickel's undoing.
Musician, poet, and cartoonist David Berman died August 7 at age 52. An anonymous law enforcement official told the New York Times that Berman was found Wednesday in an apartment in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and pronounced dead at the scene. A spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner confirmed Berman’s cause of death as suicide.
Man, there have been so many deaths lately. I can't say that Berman's death is any more tragic than any of the victims in El Paso, Dayton, or Gilroy, or Parkland, Sandy Hook, or even Columbine for that matter, but it saddens me greatly. I didn't know him, but due to the confessional nature of his songs, it felt like I did.
Berman was best known for his band Silver Jews. Formed in 1989, he disbanded Silver Jews in 2009 and for a decade was absent from music altogether. But just this year, he announced a new band, Purple Mountains, and released one fine album that sounded as if Silver Jews had never disbanded. A North American tour to support the album was to have begun three days after his death.
There's no getting around it: he wrote sad songs, often full of self-deprecating but at the same time wryly humorous lyrics. As Mark Richardson wrote in Pitchfork,
To be a fan of his work was to worry about him. He’d had serious problems with dangerous drugs and he’d attempted suicide, and in 2009, when he ended Silver Jews, he wrote an open letter in which he revealed, with shame, that his father was Richard Berman, a lobbyist who David said 'led campaigns against animal rights, trade unions, and even opposed anti-drunk-driving groups.' In interviews, he talked about how he often had little money. More recently, he described himself as someone suffering from 'treatment-resistant depression,' and he mentioned that he and his wife Cassie no longer lived together. It was a lot for anyone to handle. Even if we didn’t know him personally, we worried.
The short disclaimer for the video Darkness and Cold states that the characters are fictitious and any resemblance etc., but give that he had just separated from his wife, you have to wonder how many nights he did sit home alone, thinking "The light of my life is going out tonight with someone she just met," as the lyric goes. And then, before it gets too depressing or maudlin, he injects the video with his characteristic quirky humor, and it momentarily feels like everything's really okay. How depressed can he really be if he's using a shower head for a microphone?
But the eponymous Purple Mountains LP includes song titles like All My Happiness is Gone, That's Just the Way That I Feel, Snow is Falling in Manhattan, and She's Making Friends, I'm Turning Stranger. You have to wonder if the songs were all part of an elaborate suicide note.
And you have to wonder if the humor, which seems to say, no, really, I'm okay, ha ha, was the saddest part of all - his depression was so deep that he didn't feel he deserved our sympathy or our concern.
Impermanence is swift; life-and-death is the great matter. We don't need faith, philosophy, or art to recognize what we can clearly see before us: that which was here today is gone tomorrow.
There is really no other band quite like Godspeed You! Black Emperor in terms of both their post-rock music and their radical mystique. They are a large, collective ensemble that generates a truly orchestral sound, and due to their anti-capitalist politics, they avoid many of the conventions of the touring rock-music band, such as interviews and promotional appearances. They don't even address the audience during performances - they simply walk on stage, play their music, and leave. They're an all-instrumental band without vocals, so they have no front-person vocalist milking attention from the audience or trying to gin up enthusiasm. Most of the musicians perform seated on stage, with the only light provided by an amazing backdrop of film-loop and video projections behind them. Their shows are about the music, not the egos or personalities of the performers.
That attitude only increases the aura of mystery and intrigue about the band, which in turn heightens the interest in them. That interest was heightened still more this week by internet chatter indicating that Godspeed was performing some new, apparently as yet unrecorded music on this tour, presumably from their next, so far unannounced album. Last night's Variety Playhouse show in Atlanta was only the third night of the tour, and therefore only the third time these fresh, new pieces of music were performed publicly.
Before all that, though, an improvisational North Carolina guitar-and-drums duo, Manas, opened.
As per custom, Godspeed opened their set with the ominous, electronic hum of amplifiers on an empty stage and the individual members of the band casually walking onstage and contributing to the drone as the film-loop projections began and the single work "hope" flickered on the backdrop behind them.
For the most part, the band performed as an octet, with three guitars, two basses, two drummers, and one violin. For the middle part of their set (Fam/Famine and Undoing a Luciferian Towers), they had a guest musician on stage with them on tenor sax. As per the band's custom, he was not introduced, but looked to be the same person who joined them on stage last year in Knoxville at Big Ears. However, while on stage he played with his back to the audience, so it was hard to identify who he was.
The film-loop and video projections behind the band are more than a mere gimmick. Although not a musical artist, the projectionist is usually credited as a visual-art member of the band. The projections utilize a split screen, and the repetition of the loops can create a mesmerizing, near hypnotic, effect, such as a long sequence in which a smoking jet fighter falling from the sky is tracked for a seemingly endless descent down toward the earth. Other imagery included brutalist architecture, stock-market boards, violent crowds at political rallies, and dystopian, scorched-earth landscapes. While being projected, the film stock is sometimes manually manipulated, run backward through the projector or at other times stopped in the projector so the heat of the bulb starts melting the individual frames and the image warps and distorts before white light breaks through. It's all fascinating to watch, and a great visual counterpart to Godspeed's music.
Godspeed's set was nearly two hours long, with the first hour or so dominated by music from 2017's Luciferian Towers. Although titled as different songs, the Luciferian Towers pieces are really just separate movements of a larger, overall suite with the same main theme, so the entire first hour was really one, extended performance of one epic composition, interspersed by Glacier, a new piece:
Set List
Hope Drone
Bosses Hang (from LT)
Glacier (new song)
Fam/Famine (from LT)
Undoing a Luciferian Towers (from LT)
Cliff (new song)
Blaise Bailey Finnegan III (from 1998's Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada)
Certain parts of the internet are quite excited that Godspeed is previewing new music. The titles of the new songs, Glacier and Cliff, are from a set list that someone got from the video projectionist at Thursday night's show in Nashville (the first night of the current tour), and someone recorded both pieces at Friday night's show in Asheville. Someone else remastered the bootlegs and then posted them to YouTube. Here's Glacier:
If that 15-minute taste isn't enough to slake your thirst, someone posted a terrific, high-fidelity recording of the entire performance here.
Like every Godspeed show, it was an epic set by a unique and awesome band. The new songs, while clearly still unfinished, sound promising and make us anticipate the next Godspeed album, when ever it's recorded and released, all the more.
