"Why Can't I Be Different and Original . . . Like Everybody Else?" - Viv Stanshall
Friday, January 31, 2020
So much for trying to keep my conservative friends.
Sometimes (but not that often anymore) I can watch the news and think, "Well, different opinions, different views," or "different strokes for different folks." But other times, like today, I can barely contain my outrage.
The U.S. Senate has abdicated its responsibilities and instead of trying Donald Trump for the charges on which he was impeached, instead debated rules for several days and had a series of votes and motions on methods and procedures, and in the end decided to consider no evidence and chose not to hear any witnesses. They decided to not actually try the case at all, as the Constitution requires.
A lot of people are outraged and a lot of people are elsewhere expressing the implications of the Senate's actions much better than I can. I'll leave it to them. Meanwhile, my mind is going back to 2016 and the take on Trump's candidacy by rappers YG and the late Nipsey Hussle.
The language and emotions in this video are pretty raw, but this evening so are my feelings. The corrupt Trump-Pence regime has got to go!
Yes, despite my recent posts, I still do have some conservative friends. If you're a 60-something white male living in Georgia, you're going to be pretty lonely without at least a couple of conservative friends.
Yesterday, I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant with a friend who, among other things, is an evangelical Christian and a Trump Republican. We didn't talk about politics (or religion), but being friends, we fortunately had a lot of other things to talk about so it was fine.
Today, another conservative friend of mine posted this to her Facebook account:
Want to sell anything to an unsuspecting individual? It's not enough to tell them they have a problem. You must tell them they have a problem only you are able to solve.
You can't sell someone on grievances if they don't believe they exist. But sow the seed of victimhood first and watch your money tree grow.
#SadSociety #ConsumerLogic
Either my friend has changed her conservative views, or we may have finally found a place where conservatives and progressives can agree. While it's possible that she was just talking about consumer marketing, in 2016, Donald Trump rose from the bottom of the polls to become the Republican nominee and eventually the president by telling people that they were the victims of illegal immigrants and crooked politicians. Soon his followers were decrying a "War on Christmas," chanting "Build the wall," and complaining about so-called "reverse discrimination."
But after speeches that painted a surrealistically dark picture of Americans victimized by immigration, rampant crime, and class warfare, Trump then boldly and somewhat messianically declared that he and only he could fix the problems.
Did my conservative friend just make an about-face and was now ridiculing Trump, or did she not see the irony of her remarks? Or was she somehow commenting in a code I didn't recognize on one or another of the Democratic candidates now running for president?
I remember a similar exchange over lunch back in 2016 when a different conservative friend told me that President Obama was trying to divide the country using identity politics, "us versus them," for his own political gain. Dividing the country, he told me, was a dangerous strategy. But he refused to recognize that was exactly what candidate Trump was doing at the time by vilifying immigrants ("them") as the source of all of "our" problems. The lunch ended acrimoniously.
Or were her comments not even about politics at all but, in my own polarization, I cannot see her remarks as anything other than political? If my mental schema has relegated her to the role of "conservative friend," not recognizing her as the fully-formed, complex, and multivaried human being that she is, it follows that I'd perceive everything she says as somehow "political."
Wanting to avoid acrimony, I resisted an urge to post the Trump quote above as a comment on her original Facebook post.
I didn't post it because I knew that she wouldn't likely have agreed with my comparison, and since my response would have been on her Facebook page where all of her other friends, her conservative friends, would have seen it, she would have felt obligated to argue back. We'd soon be fighting, at least over this one issue, and while we probably would have emerged from that quarrel still friends, why create disharmony when it can be avoided?
So I didn't start something up that wasn't necessary. Instead, I got it out of my system by talking about it here, and didn't call her out on her own, personal public forum. I didn't create otherwise avoidable disharmony.
That's what it means to be a friend. Friends don't do that to each other.
The ROM has time on his hands. Enough time that he has watched all of the Democratic presidential candidate debates in their entirety, and all of the House hearings on the impeachment of Donald Trump.
However, the ROM can't get himself to watch the Senate trial - the 24 hours of testimony by both sides over six days. What little he has seen struck him as all very redundant - that sense of deja vu kicked in every time he turned on the proceedings. There's only so many hours in life - not enough to watch the senate trial in its entirety.
But then yesterday, when he tuned in briefly, he saw former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi talking for some reason about a completely different case - Hunter Biden's involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Bondi was trying to explain that the real scandal wasn't the issue that the impeachment was all about - the President's scheme to withhold aide to Ukraine until it did him a political favor. She argued that Biden's involvement with Burisma was the real scandal - that was where one could find actual corruption.
I'm going to have to give her argument some consideration, because if there's one thing Bondi should know about, it's corruption. She's as corrupt as they come. When she was the Florida Attorney General, her office received at least 22 fraud complaints about Trump University. In 2013, a spokesperson for Bondi announced that her office was considering joining a lawsuit initiated by New York's Attorney General against Trump regarding tax fraud. But four days later, And Justice for All, a PAC established by Bondi to support her re-election campaign, received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, after which Bondi decided not to join the lawsuit against Trump University after all.
Bondi also pressured two attorneys to resign who were investigating the technology giant Black Knight (then LPS) following a robosigning scandal as part of their work for Florida's Economic Crime Division, after she received large campaign contributions from LPS.
Bondi's association with Scientology and the multiple fundraisers that wealthy Scientologists have organized for Bondi's political campaigns over the years have also provoked controversy. Bondi has justified those contacts and her involvement with Scientologists by arguing that the group wished to help her crack down on human trafficking. However her public association with Scientology began in 2010, when it was already being investigated by the FBI for involvement in human trafficking and abusing its workers.
So, yeah, "Buy Me Bondi" knows a thing or two about corruption, because she's wallowed in it her whole career. It's just a little ironic that the republicans would call on that particular kettle to call the other one black.
Today, I finished the video game Hitman (2016). I call the game with the date on the end to differentiate it from the previous games of the Hitman series, i.e., 2000's Codename 47, 2002's Silent Assassin, 2004's Contracts, 2006's Blood Money, and 2012's Absolution (none of which I've played). Hitman (2016) was a reboot of the series, and was followed by a sequel, 2018's Hitman 2.
Hitman (2016) was part of the group of games I purchased last Thanksgiving at an extreme discount during a sale on the gaming web portal, Steam. The game was bundled together with Hitman 2 as a single item, so I basically got two games for the price of one discounted game. Good deal.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I played the first of the games from I got from that sale, Far Cry: New Dawn, before I started Hitman (2016) on December 29. According to the Steam statistics, it took me 68 hours of game time to complete the game, or about 2 1/4 hours per day over the past month. For what it's worth, I got up to Level 79 in the game with 472,495 experience points (XPs). I have no idea if that's good, bad, or about average.
But anyway, the game was mostly fun. Over the course of the game, you play "missions" in six different locales - a fashion show in Paris, a villa on the Italian coast, the Swedish embassy in Morocco, a luxury hotel in Bangkok, a terrorist training camp in Colorado, and a hospital/high-end spa high up in the mountains of Japan. Each locale is beautifully rendered and they're mostly (with the exception of the Colorado setting) the kind of ultra-wealthy, luxury settings you see in James Bond movies.
You're assigned a target or targets for assassination at each locale (you have four targets in Colorado), and you complete each mission multiple times, using different and often highly innovative techniques to eliminate the targets. My favorite was dropping a stuffed moose on the corrupt Swedish diplomat during a television interview. You can play and replay each assignment as many times as you want, and once a mission is completed, the game rates your performance on a five-star basis. I think I got perfect five-star ratings only about three or four times in the game.
The problem is that a mission usually takes about 45 to 90 minutes to complete, and once you're done and get your rating score, you don't feel compelled to immediately start the same mission over again. Your motivation to replay may to get a better, hopefully perfect score or to use a different technique to complete the assignment ("What would have happened if I had released the cable on that moose suspended from the ceiling?"). But unlike some role-paying games, the episodic nature of the missions doesn't compel you to play for hours on end, as after every hour or so the game basically suggests that you wrap it up for the day.
Hitman (2016) flows seamlessly right into Hitman 2 - once you complete the last of the mission of Hitman (2016), the game segues into the first mission of Hitman 2. But rather than play Hitman 2 for some 68 hours over the next month of so, I think I'm going to set the franchise aside for a while and play another game from my Thanksgiving bundle.
As noted above, I ended last year with the game Far Cry: New Dawn, a sequel to the 2018 game Far Cry 5. I've already played 2014's Far Cry 4 and I enjoy the Far Cry series, so for the next game from my Thanksgiving cornucopia, I'm going back to 2012 and Far Cry 3. It's not a new game, but it's new to me.
I might change my mind - who knows? - and play around with Hitman (2016) a little longer before moving on (part of me wants to replay some of the missions over again if only to revisit the settings, like that Italian coastal resort). Or I might decide to download something a little more contemporary instead. That's what's so nice about having that bundle - I still feel like a kid on Chrsitmas morning with so many presents yet to unwrap.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
In his book Lila, author Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) notes that if you make a list of all the things Europeans say about white Americans, you'll find that its the same thing that white Americans say about the people indigenous to the Americas.
Many Europeans think of white Americans as sloppy, untidy people. Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent in the way they do things.
In World War II, Europeans noted that American troops drank too much and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble. But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and admitted that they made good fighters.
To this day, Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as "like children," naive, immature, and tending toward violence because they don't know how to control themselves.
White Americans often say much the same things about the native Indians. It's almost as if the white American settlers took on the characteristics of the indigenous in the eyes of the Old World powers.
The reverse is also true - things the Indians said about the white American settlers and very similar to the things the white American settlers said about Europeans - too stuffy, insincere, decadent, and untrustworthy.
When traits and attitudes are borrowed from a hostile culture, that culture isn't given the credit. If you tell a white from Alabama that his Southern accent is derived from the speech of black slaves, he is likely to resent and deny it, although the geographic proximity of the Southern accent to areas with large black populations makes it pretty obvious.
If you tell a white from Montana living near a reservation that he resembles an Indian he may take it as an insult.
But even though the Indians were never given credit for their contribution to American frontier personality values, it's certain that those values couldn't have come from anywhere else. One often hears "frontier values" spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers, or the trees of the frontier, But trees, rocks and rivers do not instill values. They've got trees, rocks, and rivers in Europe, too.
It was the people living among those trees, rocks, and rivers who are the real source of the white American frontier values.
Judging by the number of cover songs that he performed, from Fletcher Henderson big band compositions to Disney show tunes, even Sun Ra didn't listen exclusively to Sun Ra music all the time. Let's move back to the rest of the jazz universe.
Peter Brötzmann is a 69-year-old German saxophonist and clarinetist. Originally a painter associated with the Fluxus movement, a concert by jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet made a lasting impression on him and he taught himself to play the clarinet and then later the sax. In addition to his own bands, Brötzmann has recorded or performed with Cecil Taylor, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, and his son, Caspar Brötzmann. In the 1980s, he flirted with heavy metal and noise rock, recording with Last Exit and the band's bass guitarist and producer Bill Laswell.
Brötzmann will play a rare solo set and a duet with his longtime colleague, the drummer Andrew Cyrille, in Knoxville, Tennessee at the 2020 Big Ears festival.
It's Friday and I don't feel like writing some long essay today and chances are you're not in the mood to read a long essay either. In light of the Trump Administration's proposal for scaling back the Clean Water Act to allow increased contamination of America's waterways (a headline in today's NY Times reads, "E.P.A. Is Letting Cities Dump More Raw Sewage Into Rivers for Years to Come") and the continued failure of the so-called War of Drugs,'ll just let some pictures do the talking.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
My mornings usually begin with a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin as I scroll trough my phone for news and the forecast and to catch up on email. Over my morning cup, I can plot out the day - should I go out for a walk, and if so, at what time? Or will the day be better spent indoors, reading and writing and listening to music? Is there something I want to watch on television, say, sports or a movie? Later in the morning, I might top off my breakfast with a second cup of coffee. That's my morning ritual, and it takes me longer than you might expect.
"We reflect on the efforts that brought us this food," according to an old Zen meal chant. "We reflect on our virtue and practice and whether we are worthy of this offering." I don't recite the chant in the morning, never had, even at lunch or dinner. I only recited it at group meals with other Zen practioners, but it's a good question - where does all this stuff come from?
The coffee is usually marketed as French or Italian roast, but the beans were probably grown in Columbia or Costa Rica or maybe Guatemala. The French roast isn't from France and the Italian roast isn't from Italy. Maybe the beans are Arabian or Ethiopian. Maybe they're Jamaican. The packaging states that Starbucks French Roast is "100% Arabica coffee" (I got curious and just went and checked), but does that mean it was grown on the Arabian peninsula, or could it mean its an Arabic strain of beans grown elsewhere?
Somebody, somewhere in the world, grew the coffee beans. Somebody, probably a team of somebodies, planted seeds, watered the soil, watched the plants grow, nurtured them, and in time harvested the beans. Somebody somewhere packaged the beans, I imagine into burlap bags, hefted them onto a truck, and took them to market. While I like to imagine the "market" as an open-air bazaar, where merchants and buyers haggle over the price alongside vendors of fruits, vegetables and other goods, the "market" might have simply have been a metal warehouse run by some international corporation that paid the farmers a flat but substandard price for their produce.
From the market or warehouse or whatever, the beans were then loaded onto ships. Dock workers, forklift operators, accountants, and sailors all participated to some extent or another in getting the beans onto the boat. Were those burlap bags full of coffee beans piled onto wooden pallets before they were brought on board, or were they packed into multi-modal shipping containers stacked up on a freighter? And at the port of entry, did another forklift operator carry the pallets from the ship's hold into waiting trucks,.or did crane operators hoist shipping containers from the ship onto big, waiting 18-wheel rigs?
Truck drivers transported the beans from port to a processing plant. The truckers must have stopped somewhere for gas (and probably coffee), maybe spent the night somewhere at a Day's Inn, and could have had breakfast at a Denny's, lunch at a Burger King, and dinner at a meat-and-three buffet at a truck stop. Those establishments employed housekeepers and cooks and waiters and dishwashers and managers and more, all for the goal of helping the truck driver get the beans from port to processing.
And the beans finally did get to processing, where the burlap bags were emptied and the beans were washed, roasted, ground, and repackaged. More workers, more managers, and more labor. I won't even get into the whole chain of activities from forestry through off-set printing that resulted in the packaging arriving at the processing plant. The little one-pound packages of roasted and ground beans were then placed into cardboard boxes (forestry, paper mills, and printing) and sent to distribution centers, which then sent the boxes to local supermarkets. More truck drivers, more gas stations, more Denny's waitresses. Someone at the supermarket helped unload the truck, unpacked the cartons (careful with the box openers - watch your fingers), and stocked the shelves.
It's only at this point that I got involved. Pushing a cart down the supermarket aisle, I selected the flavor and roast of coffee that I prefer, tossed one of those one-pound bags into my cart, and took it to a cashier to ring up. I then drove my purchase home in my personal automobile with the rest of my groceries (the last leg of the coffee's long odyssey) and once home removed the coffee from the reusable shopping bag to a cupboard where it waited until morning.
I drip-brew my coffee using a Krups-brand machine made of plastic, metal and glass and circuitry. It's even got its own digital clock for some reason, although it's been flashing "12:00" since at least 2008. I have no idea where the machine was manufactured or the history of all of its component parts and materials, but I can't imagine that it's not a far more complicated story than the history of my pound of coffee.
But, yes, finally, at long last, I place the coffee on a No 4 brown paper filter and the Krups-brand machine introduces the beans to hot water. There's a whole story about how water comes to be at my faucet when needed and that story involves municipal utilities, civic planning, and the entire hydrologic cycle of the planet Earth (we'll set electric power generation and distribution aside for now). The coffee brews and I take a sip, oblivious to the innumerable efforts that brought the drink to my lips.
Sometimes I don't even drink the second cup of the day and wind up pouring the excess coffee down the drain the next morning. All those efforts of all those people - farmers, truckers, ship captains, short-order cooks, and shelf-stockers, .layers and layers of management, highway maintenance, geopolitical trade agreements, and so on - and half that bounty never even gets consumed.
Now that I think about it, each person in the chain of activities, each cog in that vast machinery, doesn't just exist in that one moment for that one purpose of getting my morning coffee to me, but each has their own unique history and back story. Innumerable, virtually infinite, efforts govern the complex clockwork of activities that govern each of their lives, that take them from the instant of conception to their moment of involvement with my morning cup of coffee. Depending on how far we're willing to extend the sphere of influence, it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the entire effort of the entire world is distilled to some degree or another into that cup of coffee.
And it's no different for the blueberry muffin, either.
As in most all religions and cultures, Buddhism has its own set of rules, or precepts, by which it asks its members to abide. These include the usual prohibitions that govern conventional morality: do not kill, do not lie, do not steal, etc.
In Buddhism, the number and the wording of the precepts varies from tradition to tradition, from school to school, and there is no universally recognized wording or number to the precepts. Some schools of Buddhism have but five precepts and some have eight or more. Some have long lists of precepts for monks, some of which are just general rules for living in a specific monastery ("Always lock the kitchen door after 8:00 p.m."), and shorter lists for laypeople.
In most traditions, though, the First Precept prohibits killing and the Second, stealing. The Second Precept, though, is often interestingly worded. If it were to merely say "do not steal," would that prohibit someone from taking a found object of value, like a wrist watch left by a lake or a compass dropped along a hiking trail? Is taking something lost by others still stealing, even if the original owners long since gave up trying to find the object, and the object couldn't possibly ever be tracked back to the former owner?
Beyond objects not now or formerly the property of other persons, what about taking from nature? Is extracting coal from deep beneath the earth stealing? Is over-harvesting natural resources stealing?
Buddhism deals with these questions partially by the way it phrases the precept. Instead of simply saying, "Do not steal," the Second Precept is often stated, "Do not take that which is not freely given."
The forgotten wrist watch and lost compass were not freely given. They were not gifted to you by their former owners. Taking them may or may not constitute "stealing" in the eyes of the law, but it would violate the precept against taking that which is not freely given. Does the earth freely give up the mineral resources stored beneath its surface? If so, why is so much effort and industry required to extract them? Are the tuna that are over-fished to the point of ecosystem collapse freely given, or is the Second Precept being violated?
Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's fine book, Braiding Sweetgrass, I found it interesting to learn that native American people exercise a practice similar to the Second Precept. "Take only what is given, and treat it with respect," a village elder tells his audience. When it comes to nature, specifically hunting and agriculture, Kimmerer describes an "indigenous canon of principals and practices that govern the exchange of life for life," collectively known as the Honorable Harvest.
When in the woods searching for a certain plant for its medicinal or nutritional value, or while out hunting, the Honorable Harvest dictates not to take the first one you find, as it may be the only individual in that local population, and picking it would mean there would be no others in the future. And of course it goes without saying that you never take the last, leaving none behind. Not only is the Honorable Harvest ecologically sustainable, but it recognizes that somewhere between the first and the last is that which nature is giving freely. It represents a way of practicing the Second Precept with regard to nature.
Kimmerer's book abounds with indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and I fond it interesting to observe the parallels between native American traditions and Eastern teachings and thought, as well as the contrasts between those two traditions and Eurocentric Judeo-Christian practices. For example, Western settlers and missionaries thought the natives were "lazy" and "undisciplined" when harvesting corn, as they left half the plants in the field and only took home as much as they needed for that winter. But the natives knew that taking more would only go to waste, while the corn left in the field would assure seeds for next year's harvest. Similarly, when harvesting rice, the natives "carelessly" let half the bounty fall back into the water instead of carefully reaping all the grains. Again, the native practice was replenishing seed for the future instead of grabbing as much as possible.
The natives were taking that bounty which could be sustainably harvested, that which was freely given, rather than depleting stocks for short-term bounties in the manner of the European settlers.
In the end, the settlers took over the continent, and to this day we're paying the consequences of their and our overconsumption.
We're still 10 months away from the election, but already my Facebook feed is stuffed full of divisive memes, like the one above, of dubious origin. Where did this meme come from? A University of Chicago researcher? A Russian hack farm? A progressive think tank? An anarchist collective? A quick Google search indicates that a book titled World Literacy by the authors listed above does in fact exist, but I have no idea if the data listed above is factual or even from the book. Someone could have just made those numbers up for all I know.
The rub is that even if the stats are true, it doesn't explain the enthusiasm for Trump. In fact, Trumpists and MAGAs that I know cite the exact same kind of evidence to explain the existence of Bernie Bros and the Yang Gang. My conservative friends are convinced that if the electorate were just to receive some basic education in economics, they'd understand that it's impossible to get free health care and free college education without getting taxed to death. On top of that, they argue, candidate Andrew Yang is not only promising all of that "free stuff," but is even saying that in addition everyone will get monthly $1,000 checks from the government, and when asked how the nation will afford all that, he just says "Math" without explaining things any further.
Both sides of the political spectrum have made up their minds and, once decided, we find the facts and figures to support our views, not the other way around. The news and social media then provide us the anecdotes and peer support we need to reinforce our views.. Both sides are convinced that the other side is at best hopelessly naive and at worst willfully stupid.
But calling each other "stupid" and "uneducated" and "illiterate" won't bridge the divide separating us. How are we ever going to get together and realize any progress in this great country of ours if we alienate those who don't agree with us? Without civil discourse, we will either be governed though brute force by whichever party is in power, or we will dissolve into disunity and chaos.
But based on what I've seen so far, I don't expect us to take up civil discourse any time soon.
On another note (file this under "Decisions I Will Probably Come To Regret"), the music blog (Music Dissolves Water) is back up and running!
“It’s inevitable that we’ve got to bring out the question of the tragic mix-up in priorities. We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development… When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.” – Dr. Martin Luther King
Dr. King was born in 1929 and would have been 91 this year if not for his tragic assassination in 1968. Anne Frank was born five months later in Frankfurt, Germany.
I have some first-hand memories of Dr. King in the news while he was still alive (I was 14 years old when King was shot), but Frank always seemed consigned to the history books. To Gen X and Millennials, both persons must seem like vestiges of some distant past - historical figures taught in school and books but far removed from present-day life.
The still-living and very-much-active alto saxophonist Marshall Allen was already five years old when King and Frank were born, and I've previously posted videos here of Allen tearing it up with the Sun Ra Arkestra. They're scheduled to play a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts on the 31st and New York's Town Hall on March 4. He has a European tour scheduled for April and May, and to repeat, he was five years old when Dr. King and Anne Frank were born.
Barbara Walters was also born in 1929. So was actor Max von Sydow, who I just saw in the Scorsese film Shutter Island. So were actors Christopher Plummer, Bob Newhart and Ed Asner. Sure, they're all old, but hardly shadowy figures from the history books.
Which is all to say that Dr. King's words are more than just sage advise from an historical figure but still hold relevancy today. In his latter years, Dr. King increasingly spoke about the intersectionality of racism, economic inequality, and war, or as he put it, the "three evils" - the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war.
As Ibram X. Kendi (How To Be An Anti-Racist) describes it today, racist policies deny opportunities for economic self-sufficiency to certain groups, which results in an ample supply of volunteers for the armed forces to fight in our wars without the need for a draft. It should be noted that if a draft were necessary, there would likely be an energetic protest movement and possible disruption to the powers that be. So the powerful directly benefit from the racist policies that ultimately provide ready and willing soldiers, and the cycle perpetuates itself, just as Dr. King saw it in the 1960s.
Same thing, different century.
We are each of us significantly more likely to become homeless than to become billionaires, so we all, regardless of race, color, or creed, should develop a sense of class solidarity and stop glorifying our oppressors.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
After an unseasonably warm spell going back to last Christmas, the temperatures in Georgia have finally dropped to the more-typical 30s and 40s of January. While that warm spell lasted, I have:
Binged the 45 hours of all four seasons of USA Network's Mr. Robot and the 10 hours of Season 1 of Netflix' The Witcher.
Finished reading Ibram X. Kendi's How To Be An Anti-Racist and the first half of Robin Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
Played 47 hours of the 2016 video game Hitman.
Walked the section of the Beltline Trail near my house a total of 8 times (24 miles total).
Watched just about every college football bowl game and came in second in the family pool.
Watched a Democratic presidential candidate debate and the articles for the impeachment of Donald Trump getting delivered to the Senate.
Visited the dentist twice to get my chipped front tooth repaired.
Probably did some other stuff, too, but can't remember or find the documentation.
Part 3. Since I never really introduced this set properly, this is Sun Ra and his Arkestra at Estival Jazz in Lugano, Switzerland, on July 3, 1985.
Personnel on this date were Sun Ra (p, synth, voc), Ronnie Brown (tp), Tyrone Hill (tb, voc), Marshall Allen (as, fl, picc, perc), John Gilmore (ts, cl, timbales, voc), Ronald Wilson (ts, picc), Danny Ray Thompson (bars, fl, bgo), James Jacson (bassoon, fl, Infinity Drum), Eloe Omoe (bcl, as, perc), Bruce Edwards (g), Rollo Radford (eb), Avreeayl Amen Ra (dr), June Tyson (voc, dance tambourine); and unidentified dancers.
Here's a theory: Sometime back around the turn of the millennium, at the height of Napster and other file-sharing services, the bottom dropped out of the music industry. The public collectively decided that they were no longer willing to pay for music (why pay for something that could be obtained for free?) and the price of the commodity basically fell to zero. Record companies folded, A&R men lost their jobs, MTV started airing reality TV instead of music videos, and musicians found themselves without recording or other contracts.
To be sure, it was a hard time for many, and a lot of people suffered. That's truly unfortunate, but there was also a silver lining - with big mega-bucks no longer guaranteed to successful acts, a lot of the fakers, the copy-cats and con men, got out of the business. For a while there, the only people left making music were the true believers, the hard-core artists who made music because it was the only thing they knew how to do. It was in their blood, and they'd perform music for a group of friends at home or a small gathering at the local coffee shop just as readily as for a sold-out Madison Square Garden. No one expected to even turn a profit, much less get rich, so the only people left making music were the true musicians.
And the music they made was wonderful. Since no one expected anything to sell, the musicians were at last free to play anything they wanted, to play what they'd always wanted to play and not what the record companies wanted them to or what the execs told them. They didn't have to sound like whatever was the current No. 1-selling LP, and with their newfound freedom they played some truly beautiful and eclectic music, independent of the labels, the Billboard Top 100, or the demands of a now non-existent market. For once, creativity and innovation were valued over familiarity and conformity, and bands actively competed to break down old barriers and expand their horizons, rather than sell "product" to "the market."
This was the birth of indie rock, music that was independently distributed by individual musicians.
As noted in Part 1, I had been listening to rock music pretty much as long as it had existed - from the early Beatles of the 1960s up to late 90s alt rock. Taste is subjective and many people have their own opinions on what decade produced the best music. Boomers maintain that nothing good has been recorded since the 60s and 70s, while Gen X prefers the music of the 80s and 90s. I had the experience of having listened to music from all of those decades in real time, as it happened. The music of the 80s and 90s are as much a part of my life as the music of the 60s and 70s, so I'm not predisposed to liking only a single decade because that was the one during which I happened to have arrived.
Having said that, I'll state that I believe the the post-Y2K indie renaissance produced the best rock music ever, better than any previous decade. And not to put too fine a point on it, but as it took a couple of post-millennial years for that renaissance to fully flower, the best 10 years of music probably occurred between the years 2005 and 2015.
Every decade has produced some wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime music and albums. There's never been a year, much less a decade, when good music hadn't been created. But in that 10-year-span of 2005 to 2015, there was an exceptionally large number of outstanding records released, and the quality of the best of them probably surpassed anything else before. Think of a bell curve with its rounded peak at the year 2010, the mid-point of the 10-year-span, and tails stretching out to and beyond the years 2005 and 2015 at the two opposing ends. The y-axis is both the number of great recordings released in each of those years as well as the impossible-to-quantify quality of those recordings. It's subjective, I'll admit, which is why it's all "in my opinion."
But there you have it - the money dropped out of the music business, and musicians, liberated from the free-market demands of the industry, responded with innovative, creative and extraordinary music. After this movement peaked sometime around 2010, some people started figuring out ways to capitalize on the new sounds (streaming revenue, merchandising, the festival circuit, etc), and others dropped out of music altogether in order to get so-called "real" jobs to feed families and support their loved ones. This brought about a gradual decline, the back end of my bell-shaped curve, and now, while there's still some great new music being created - just like there always had been - that bubble has passed and the indie renaissance is over.
What I'm so thankful for, in addition to that renaissance even occurring in the first place, was that I was there to observe (actually, to hear) it.
As noted in Part 1, even before Y2K, the years were creeping up on me and I had stopped going out to hear live bands sometime in the mid 90s. At 45. I was just too old. What's more, my interest was increasingly in listening and re-listening to music with which I was familiar (the veridical), rather than the new (the sequential). But the chance encounter with that on-line Best of 2005 list, the soundtracks to Garden State and Stranger Than Fiction, and songs like Modern Slang and Young Folks, alerted me to the fact that there was something new going on, and I am so glad that I responded and didn't miss the gorgeous sounds within that bell-shaped curve.
Bonus points: rock music, having been around for some 50 or so years, now has its own traditions, idioms, modes, and language, and much of the music of the indie renaissance was post-modern in the sense that it quoted freely from and incorporated the sounds of the previous five decades. Unlike much of its younger audience, I was not only familiar with the sounds being sampled and quoted and extrapolated upon, but I had an emotional, time-and-place connection with much of the source materials.
But, as I said, it's all over and it's probably been all over for a full five years by now. Again, that's not to say that there isn't good music still being played (there is), it's just that we're now in the long tail of the bell-shaped curve and there's less of that good music being performed and the quality generally (although not never) doesn't reach the dizzying, stratospheric heights of the peak of the curve.
So now, in this science-fiction-sounding year 2020, I find myself, once again, listening nostalgically to music of 10, 15, and 20 years ago, ignoring the current scene and enjoying the repertory sounds of a nostalgic past. Live performances that interest me are far fewer and further in between than before, and most music festivals are now dominated by hip-hop, pop, and dance music. And let's face it - I'm now 15 years older than I was when I decided that, age be damned, I'm going to go back out and enjoy shows I want to see whether I fit in or not, and at some point, it's starting to get awkward. Last year, security was following me around at a show at the god-damned Masquerade because the bouncers couldn't figure out why an old man was there attending the show.
What does music mean to me? Not what it did 10 years ago, not what it did 5 years ago, not even what it did 2 years ago. I still enjoy music (I'm listening to the French post-rock band Natural Snow Buildings now as I write this) and I won't go so far as to say I've attended my last rock concert, but like the indie renaissance itself, I'm in the long tail of my bell-shaped curve.
So what does music mean to me now?
Damn if I know. I can't imagine life without some sort of soundtrack to it, and I'm still fascinated by observing the seemingly magical process of musicians conjuring sound on stage. I also suspect that even right now as I write, there's probably some new music scene emerging of which I am totally unaware but in a few years will be saying "Yeah, I was into that way back in 2020."
In the 2004 film Garden State, Natalie Portman passes Zach Braff a headset playing The Shins and says "You gotta hear this one song — it’ll change your life; I swear." The song is New Slang and it's a pretty good song although to be honest, it's probably not life changing (those are some pretty big shoes to fill). Or is it?
The Shins released New Slang in February 2001 as the lead single from their debut album, Oh, Inverted World. I didn't hear the record when it came out and hadn't yet heard of The Shins in 2004 when Garden State was released. To be honest, the reference went right over my head at the time.
James Mercer, the lead singer and songwriter for The Shins, told Spin Magazine that writing New Slang was “the most punk-rock fucking thing I could do,” precisely because the song wasn’t punk rock or even vaguely aggressive. As described by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker, "The track, played in gentle quarter-note time, doesn’t sound like it needs a whole band—a tambourine keeps the beat, and the acoustic-guitar strumming sounds more like Tracy Chapman than the Pixies."
"There’s a wordless, lovely melody before and after the verses that could be whistling," Frere-Jones notes. "Every verse is modest but confidently executed, and there’s an appealing lightness to the whole affair, as if Mercer has simply abandoned the need to rock and has let the desire to sing take over."
At the turn of the millennium, rock music was dominated by some of the most rambunctious and adventurous sounds around. New albums were routinely promoted as "brutal," "ferocious," and "feral." A review of one new album claimed "some people might not even recognize this as music." Most of the people playing and listening to this music appeared to be heavily tattooed, multiply pierced, festooned with body adornments and tribal jewelry, and wearing uncomfortable-looking Doc Martin boots.
I was a professional in my mid-40s at the time, bustling through airports in my shirtsleeves to meet with business clients, and the Y2K music scene appeared neither welcoming nor accommodating.
Music had always been important to me, though. I'm old, and can remember the shock of the new when I saw The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. I had an AM transistor radio back then and like my childhood friends listened to the Top 40 British invasion bands of the mid 60s. At some point, I started listening to FM - I recall that my transistor radio broke and can remember scrolling up and down the dial for something to listen to on my parents' FM radio. In between the classical music stations and the talk shows, the FM rock d.j.s were playing songs by the same British bands I had been listening to, the Beatles and the Stones, the Who and the Kinks, and so forth, but they were playing deep cuts off of the albums other than the Top 40 singles. They were also playing psychedelic San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver, and a whole slew of other bands that were new to me. I discovered Jimi Hendrix.
Like much of America, the late 60s were an age of discovery for me, and I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole listening to ever more exotic and obscure bands. I had developed a taste for eclecticism.
This fascination continued through the 70s and 80s, going from the age of glam rock (David Bowie, Roxy Music), to prog (Yes, Genesis, King Crimson), to punk and new wave (Devo, The Clash, Talking Heads), and on into the 90s with grunge (Nirvana and other, mostly Seattle bands) and alt-rock (Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, etc.). For a while, I made a major detour into jazz and so-called "modern classical" (oxymoron, anyone?). With the advent of the internet and MP3 files, I was able to collect massive amounts of new music, and began replacing all of those CDs that had replaced the cassette tapes that had replaced old vinyl records. At times, in the age of Napster and file-sharing sites, I was downloading and burning music faster than I could even listen to it.
But at some point, although I was still listening to new music (new to me at least), I had fallen out of touch with what was contemporary. I was listening to what had been recorded back then, and when I did come up for air from the stacks of CDs I was burning, I was turned off by the aggressive, angry, turn-of-the-century rock music. I followed the events of Woodstock 1999 on MTV and couldn't identify with all the nu metal and pop-punk music being performed, and as that festival descended into chaos and violence, I knew my 40-something ass was no longer a part of that scene.
I remained for the time in my own little world of collecting and cataloging obscure German electronica, African world beat, various Latinx performers, chill lounge, acid jazz, and the deep back catalogs of various American bands. By 2003, the only thing resembling "new" music I was listening to was Nora Jones' Come Away With Me and Josh Rouse's nostalgic 1972, both decidedly retro- sounding albums.
I probably would have blithely continued down that road, listening, as most people tend to do, only to music that was familiar and comfortable to me. But my own personal "You gotta hear this record - it’ll change your life" moment came when I saw a post on one of the file-sharing sites titled "Top Five Albums of 2005" and realized that I had never even heard of any of the bands listed, despite all my active collecting and cataloging. Curious as to what I might have been missing out on, I downloaded the albums, listened to them and liked them, some a lot, and realized that somehow, a whole new scene had developed outside of and beyond the realm of my perception.
For those curious, the five albums were Silent Alarm by Bloc Party, the eponymous first Black Mountain album, Gimme Fiction by Spoon, Live It Out by Metric, and Feels by Animal Collective.
And after that, it all started to come together. Spoon's music featured prominently in the soundtrack for the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction, which I watched over and over again more for the music than for the story, and then, also in 2006, the song Young Folks was recorded by the Swedish band Peter, Bjorn and John (with additional vocals by Victoria Bergsman).
For me, Young Folks was the match that finally dropped in the roomful of gasoline created by those Top 5 LPs of 2005. Here was music that fun to listen to but also non-threatening - it's hard to imagine a Peter, Bjorn and John audience rioting and burning down the stage after a performance. On the other hand, it was also musically sophisticated without being pretentious about it, and was hip and young - hell, the song is called Young Folks and the lyrics include the lines, "We don't care about the old folks talking 'bout the old style too."
Much like The Shins' New Slang, the Young Folks brand of post-millennium indie rock presented a refreshing alternative to the bruising, mosh-pit melodies of 90s alternative rock and the bland comforts of MOR pop and recycled 70s oldies. Here was music that was interesting to listen to without threatening your health with bodily harm. It wasn't "soft rock," but music that seemed to be accepting of all and anyone interested, even now 50-something music fans, but still had that fresh, new-car smell of youthful hipness. It was something . . . different.
It was something new.
I was hooked. I wanted in.
By the mid-90s, the 40-something me had decided that I had no interest in mosh pits and stage diving and had grown too old to go to ear-splitting rock concerts. After hearing Bloc Party and Spoon and Black Mountain and Metric, after Garden State and Stranger Than Fiction, after New Slang and Young Folks, well, fast forward to 2010 and the 50-something me is front stage for Animal Collective at Verizon Amphitheater.
But I can see that if I'm going to continue to try and describe all this accurately, it's going to take a long time. I still haven't got to the point I wanted to make when I started this post, so I'm going to call this "Part 1" and end it here for now, and hopefully pick this back up again in the very near future.
Last week, I said that man is not separate from nature and that man-made environments were no less "natural" than termite mounds or bee hives or beaver dams. But last weekend, while discussing the book Braiding Sweetgrass, I said that it gave me pause to reflect on how out of touch I've become with nature, "living as I do in an cybernetic world of music and movies and television and video games and sports."
Wasn't I contradicting myself, claiming that my cybernetic world was somehow separate from the natural world?
First of all, good catch and thanks for bringing this to my attention, and second of all, fuck you. Mind your own business, and you try blogging something every day for years on end.
But seriously, Saturday night, sitting alone by candlelight in my powerless house and wondering what tree had fallen this time to cut off my electricity, it dawned on me that the problem in our cybernetic world is not that it's separate from nature, but it's out of balance with the rest of nature.
In the Matrix movie, Mr. Smith famously compared the human race to a virus. "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment," Mr. Smith notes, "but you humans do not" (Mr. Smith is an AI computer program).
"You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
Whatever else we may say about a virus, few say they're not a part of nature. Human beings are also part of nature even if, like viruses, we aren't always good caretakers of the environment on which we rely for survival.
Commenting on the catastrophic wildfires still plaguing Australia, Aussie rocker Courtney Barnett recently told Rolling Stone, "our country, white Australia — we stole the land from indigenous people, and then we’ve ruined it over the last 200 years. And the government, our leadership, shows no empathy or care."
Similarly, before Americans feel too superior to Australians, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his book We Were Eight Years in Power called the United States "a plundered land built with plundered lives." And we're also plundering this great continent just like they're doing down under.
Short version: human beings and their built environment are not separate from nature but can, left to their own devices, become out of balance with the rest of nature, and therein lies the problem.
By the time the front reached Georgia, the storm had already killed 11 people in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama.
Everyone knew it was coming. All week, weather reports were providing dire warnings and the local news was warning people to plan on staying indoors on Saturday. Much of the state was under a tornado watch. With pin-point accuracy, the weather app on my phone said that the precipitation probability would jump from zero to 100% between 5 and 6 pm, and then fall back to zero after midnight.
The whole day leading up to the storm had been eerie - unnaturally warm for January and heavily overcast. Mid-afternoon looked like dusk and the cats were nervously following me around the house all day as if they sensed something was wrong.
I was eating supper when the rain started and when it did arrive, it was an immediate deluge. There was no mistaking it - the front arrived with a sudden wallop of hard rain and stiff winds. On top of the sound of raindrops, I could hear twigs, branches, and acorns hitting the roof. And then, at 5:37 pm,. the lights went out.
Faithful readers know that power losses occur frequently here when it rains. Sometimes they last only a few minutes and other times they can last days. There's no telling how long a blackout may occur. I didn't hear a tree fall in the neighborhood and when I tried to look outside to see if anything was down, I couldn't even see across the yard due to darkness and the dense rain. I stood out on the porch for a while and was impressed by the intensity of the storm. Rain was pouring down (according to NWS records, over an inch came down in about an hour), visibility was negligible, and silent bolts of lightning occasionally lit the night sky. I don't know why I couldn't hear the thunder.
I lit some candles and settled in for a wait of who knows how long. It was still early and I could have gone out to try and find a bar or restaurant with lights, but there was no way I was going to drive anywhere in that wind and rain, not to mention the chance of falling trees and flash floods. I didn't know how long the battery in my phone would have to last, so I didn't want to pass the time by scrolling through apps and updates. I was resigned to just sit alone with my thoughts until it was late enough to go to bed, and then see what the morning would bring.
At 7:00 pm, the cats reminded me it was their feeding time. They couldn't understand why I was just sitting at the kitchen counter in front of a couple of candles all evening. I put the tea kettle on, using a match to start the gas stove, and dished out a can of food for the cats.
And while I was doing just that, the lights suddenly came back on. I hadn't seen any power company trucks on the road and have no idea from where the power was restored. But after only about 90 minutes of darkness, I had power again, as well as cable and internet, and by 8:00 the storm had passed and the rain was reduced to a mere drizzle.
No falling trees had demolished my house, the roof and gutters held up to the storm, and the loss of power was relatively short. I felt like I had won something.
According to what I learned from the Nextdoor app, /r/Atlanta, and Facebook after the lights came back on, power outages were widespread across the metro area and many didn't get their power back on until many hours after I had. Storm damage had been extensive. Although not on my street, many trees were down including this one only a couple blocks from me:
Today was bright and sunny - not a cloud in the sky - although rain and thunderstorms are forecast for the whole of next week.
Relatively speaking, we didn't have it too bad here. In Australia, smoke plumes from the bush fires reach so high up into the stratosphere that it's creating its own weather system, and the lightening generated is starting new fires in turn. A volcano is erupting next to Manila in the Philippines, and storm-battered Puerto Rico is still racked by aftershocks from the devastating earthquake last week.
We can't blame the geologic hazards on climate change, and it would be incorrect to say that the storms that racked the South yesterday were caused by climate change. But it would be correct to say that the increased frequency of storms like yesterday's and the intensity of the storms is due, at the very least in part, to climate change.
All this talk about music and movies and television and video games and sports might lead you to conclude that I don't read books. What kind of philistine must I be if I don't read books?
Well, you'd be partially correct - I don't read nearly as much as I used to. I don't think anybody does since the rise of the internet. With all of those other distractions, who has time to read?
The answer is ROMs, among others.
Generally speaking, I prefer nonfiction to fiction, and for most of the first two decades of this new millennium, I read mostly Zen and Buddhist books, and manged to fill up almost three complete bookshelves with that subject matter. After a few years, I've come to appreciate anthologies of Zen koans (The Blue Cliff Record, The Gateless Gate, The Book of Equanimity) over modern books that try to "explain" Zen and Buddhism to modern readers, although I still believe that Shunryo Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970) is still the best Zen book originally written in the English language.
For the past couple of years, my interests have been more eclectic, and this year I completed The Righteous Mind by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Demonic Males by primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Both good books and recommended reading, by the way.
Right now, I'm working through two books simultaneously - a daytime book kept in the den and a bedside-table, evening book.
The daytime book is How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, a powerful exploration of the everyday, often subconscious, racism present in all of us, including the author, and how simply being "not a racist" is not enough. Kendi describes a set of ideas and policies that he calls "antiracist" that can dispel and replace entrenched racist policies and ideas and hopefully lead us out of the quagmire of inequality and divisiveness so prevalent in America today.
The nightime book was lent to me by my daughter, Britney. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a native American poet and botanist, and like its author, the book is a mixture of the poetic and the scientific. An often lyrical exploration of man's relationship to nature, especially plants, Sweetgrass has given me pause to reflect on how out of touch I've become with nature, living as I do in an cybernetic world of music and movies and television and video games and sports, hating trees for falling in the neighborhood even as I expend no effort in maintaining or cultivating them, or considering how my environment became so out of balance that even hearty trees can't be sustained.
Like my Zen books and like the books completed earlier this year, I endorse both of these and would recommend either of them to those who find the subject matter interesting.
On several Sunday nights back in October and November, I'd watch HBO's Watchmen followed immediately by the Season 4, the final season, of Mr. Robot on USA Network.
The back-to-back episodes were both exhilarating and exhausting to watch. Two excellent shows, two convoluted, complex, non-linear plot lines, and two different sets of interesting and compelling characters. It was a lot to keep up with.
Watchmen is now over and I'll get around to rewatching the 10 episodes sometime soon. The Witcher (Netflix) came and went, and I binge-watched the entire season in something like two sittings.
But it's Mr. Robot that in retrospective is the most compelling. Now that the show is over and the last episode has been aired, I've started re-watching all four seasons, well over 40 hours in total. One of the amazing things is how well it all holds together, how coherent the story is over the four seasons. Not to sound too pretentious or anything, but there is merit in conceptual continuity, and Mr. Robot has that in spades. The plot has more twists and turns than a country road, and it's interesting to see in retrospect how the writers knew all the way back in Season 1 the surprises that wouldn't be revealed until Season 4. There are subtle hints and innuendos that are dropped in earlier seasons about cataclysmic changes that lie ahead in later seasons, but they all went right over my head on the first watch through.
If you have access to Amazon Prime, I couldn't recommend Mr. Robot strongly enough. It's a brilliant piece of cinematic art, and it's well worth the time spent watching it.
It looks like once again we (narrowly) avoided World War III. For now.
It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that I'm anti-war. Any wars. All wars. So I'm glad that this young year's tensions between the United States and Iran apparently didn't escalate much further than a drone-enabled political assassination and a bloodless bombardment of two military bases.
(But a Kyiv-bound passenger plane blew up after take off from Tehran airport? What happened there? What was that about?)
I don't want to see more civilians and soldiers killed in this endless war in Iraq. I don't want to see the war extend into Iran. I don't want bombs to fall and I don't want terrorist violence and counter-terrorist repression. Here or abroad.
(But cybersecurity experts report recent malicious activity from pro-Iranian forces and are warning that Iran has the capacity to do real damage to American computer systems? What's up with that?).
Trump needlessly and recklessly initiated this latest crisis, and is trying to run a victory lap over the fact that the world didn't end due to his incompetence. This time.
Trying to end violence with violence has always had violent results ("These violent delights have violent ends").
