The Retired Old Man, trying to read further lessons in the golden-years sunset of his life, threw the I Ching again today and this time drew Yu, Hexagram 16. Thunder above, earth below. It is generally the hexagram of delight or enthusiasm, an auspicious omen.

But he got the fifth line of the hexagram as his moving line. The text of that line, "Firm illness persists but there is still no death," sounds pretty ominous. Old men are not comforted by thinking about persistent illness and lingering death.  We don't delight at that prospect, although beyond a certain age we can no longer ignore its probability.

Thunder above, earth below.  I like the grounded imagery of "earth below," as long as it's not too far below the ground. Someday, I'll spend a lot of time six feet under, but until then I intend to keep the sun shining on my balding head.

Impermanence is swift, except when it isn't. I'm not afraid of dying - before I was born, I spent many, many years in non-existence and haven't suffered the least for it. I don't see a need to worry about future non-existence. But living with a lingering illness, on the death-bed surrounded by doctors, nurses, technicians, needles, scalpels, and tubes - that terrifies me. A quick, painless, and sudden death is the best that we could hope for.

Interpretations of the I Ching vary widely from one translation to the next. I've also found line five of Hexagram 16 written as, "Thorough self-diagnosis of his own affliction keeps him safely from the brink of fatal error." That sounds a lot more optimistic, and the "affliction" isn't necessarily a terminal illness - it could be egocentricism, or materialism, or insecurity. It could be anything and doesn't necessarily involve a prolonged stay in Sloan-Kettering. 

It sounds a lot more optimistic. "Self-diagnosis" could be taken as self-awareness, or knowledge of one's own nature. We go from "Firm illness persists but there is still no death" to "Know thyself to avoid fucking up."  No reason to worry the ROM further about the hospital bed.

Jonathan Richman

I saw Boston singer/songwriter Jonathan Richman at Terminal West in Atlanta last night.  No pictures, because I was right in front of the stage and I know Jonathan is famously anti-technology and would disapprove of the audience playing with their phones during his performance. Instead, I stayed in the moment and just enjoyed the performance in the here and now. And clapped along at times. And sometimes sang ("O-ooo-older girl!").

It was the first live show that wasn't part of Big Ears that I've been to since the covids. It wasn't lingering fear of covids that kept me away as much as the fact that music has changed between 2019 and 2021, and I'm not so interested in going out to hear pop, or EDM, or hip-hop. Plus, at 70 years, even I can acknowledge that perhaps I'm too old for the clubs.   

But anyway, last night I went out to see Jonathan (who's my age or even a couple years older).  Driving to Terminal West, though, I remembered another one of the reasons I don't go out anymore.  Everything's a big deal nowadays and nothing's easy, even driving the couple of miles to Terminal West. 

I was driving south on Northside Drive, planning to turn west on 17th Street. But 17th was closed for some reason - big concrete barriers across the road and a police car with blue lights flashing parked on the other side of the barriers. No problem, I figured, I'll just turn west on 14th Street. But 14th Street was closed off, too. Surely, I can turn on 10th Street, I thought, but as you've probably already guessed, 10th was blocked off, too.

8th Street was my last chance to turn west before I proceeded further south past Terminal West, but not only was 8th Street closed, but further access on Northside was blocked, too. I was forced to turn east when I wanted to drive west, and then faced a series of right- and left-turn detours that eventually got me lost and totally confused on how to get to my destination.

And the traffic!  I wasn't the only one lost in the maze of detours, and the confused drivers were all crawling along at a snail's pace trying to figure where to turn next. Long story short, I finally worked my way around town to Terminal West but hardly by the route I had wanted to take, and had no idea why half of midtown Atlanta was blocked off to traffic.

But besides that, the show was great.  A Jonathan Richman performance in 2023 looks and feels just like a Jonathan show from 2018, or 2017, or 2008 for that matter.  Sure, there's new material and his songwriting and style continue to evolve, especially the incorporation of flamenco and Italian flourishes in his guitar, but the same sense of joy, innocence, and young love remain. I'm glad I went.

The roads were all open again when I drove home, and I got back before 10:00 pm (the show started at 8:00). 

Jonathan will play in New Orleans later this week, followed by a couple of nights in Austin, Texas. Then it's Madrid, New Mexico (never heard of it before) and finally a bunch of California dates for the rest of the year (he mentioned on stage last night that he's living in Cali these days).  Catch him if you can!  

I'll say this much for AI image generators - they have no clue what Jonathan Richman actually looks like.

Fred and Ethel Take LSD

As previously reported, I've been learning how to use various AI applications to generate images and wondering what to do with this new knowledge and power. In addition to just doodling around and creating cool wallpapers for my computer, I've been generating sports memes to varying levels of fan approval and I've posted some interpretations of the I Ching. 

Last night, though, I finally started using AI to answer the important questions of our times, specifically, what if Fred and Ethel Mertz of I Love Lucy (1951-1957) took LSD?

The resulting pictures tell a story, not only of the adventures of Fred and Ethel, but of the spiritual aspects and transformative effects of the psychedelic experience in general. Allow me, if you please, to guide you through their trip.

A crane calls from the shade and her young answer. Line 2 of the 61st hexagram of the I Ching. 

The 61st hexagram, sometimes called Khung Fih, or Zhong Fu, or Kung Fu, translates to "confidence within." The wind above, the marsh below. 

With discipline and order, confidence is sure to ensue.

Did You See Who Was at the Celtics Game Last Night?

The Boston Celtics began their 2022-23 season last night with a 108-104 victory over the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden. Many celebrities were in the audience, but not the young lady above. She wasn't at the game because she doesn't exist. She's an image I created with the Midjourney AI generator.  

As you can probably tell from my posts of the last week or so, creating images with AI has become my latest hobby. It's fun and it's easy. The initial learning curve isn't too steep; this 70-something R.O.M. was able to figure it out in less than a day. 

And once you're started, it can become quite addictive. Our dopamine neurons are stimulated when a reward exceeds our expectations, and when we generate an image like that above in only a few seconds based on a creative prompt and a handful of setting selections, those neurons fire right up. Addiction is basically our attempt to keep those neurons stimulated, be it through drugs, gambling, sex, gaming, or AI image creation.  Time the Gaming Desk used to spend playing video games is now consumed by AI image creation.

I've been using several different AI models (Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, Firefly 2, etc.) through several different interfaces.  I'm fascinated by the differences in the images produced by the same prompts in the different formats, and I'm amused by the little "errors" that appear in the pictures - misspellings, glitches, extra or missing fingers, etc.  In fact, if you're ever wondering if a picture is real or AI, just look at the hands - it seems AIs have the most trouble rendering fingers accurately. Look closely at the hand resting on the woman's knee above - something's just not quite right there.     

The biggest problem, aside from obsessive/compulsive image manipulation, no social life, and hard-drive storage capacity, is that no one else really wants to see your creations.  We're like little kids drawing our first picture of a cow or something with crayons.  We want Mommy to look at the picture and tell us how good it is, to tape it to the refrigerator door, and then have Daddy lie to us about what talent we possess. In adult grown-up world, no one has time or interest in looking at our AI creations, and I'm not sure what to do with all that I've generated.  

I'm resisting the impulse to turn this blog into a showcase for AI images.  After one or two pictures posted to Facebook, friends routinely ignore what I share, and it's embarrassing to continue posting pictures to no reactions at all. And I've got rudely dissed on Reddit for posting them on there. I've had moderators take my pictures offline, and have even been threatened with bans if I post any more "garbage AI images."

Just because my neurons are fired up by the images doesn't mean that they stimulate others. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

There's also that fool-me-once-shame-on-you reaction. "Oh, you're doing AI now, are you?," people think skeptically, and then wonder if they can ever trust anything I show them again without double-checking and interrogation (pro tip: look at the fingers). And ultimately, what difference does it really make? A picture of a rice cake still isn't a rice cake, regardless of whether the picture was drawn by hand or produced by an AI.

I wonder if people had the same reaction when photography first emerged and people insisted that "proper" pictures were either drawn or painted.  

But bear with me. I might get through this phase in the next couple of days or so and things will return to normal.  Or I might find some other audience that cares or I might arrive at some other solution of how to ethically and honestly display these pictures.  

I made the mistake of "liking" an R.I.P. tribute to the recently departed jazz musician Carla Bley on Facebook, and now my feed is inundated with posts mourning her passing.  

Almost all of those Facebook posts refer to her as a "free jazz composer." But isn't "free jazz composer" something of an oxymoron?  Music is either free, that is improvised without constraint, or else it's composed. Some composers, including Bley at times early in her career, composed pieces with space for the performers to freely improvise, but the vast majority of her work was highly compositional. She has appeared on albums with noted free-jazz musicians and has performed in free-jazz settings, but even then her playing was the orderly glue that kept the performances together.  

I suspect that the authors of many of the tributes I see never heard her music and are just copy-pasting other tributes.  I suspect many of them are auto-generated by AI bots.  I suspect the activity of idiots.

The saxophonist Joe Lovano, who is a real flesh-and-blood, sentient human and not a bot, said her "simplistic, complex organization of tones, harmonies, compositions, and orchestrations were completely original and captured an American Sound all its own."  

Not free-jazz, folks. 

Also, full disclosure, that's not Carla Bley in the picture above. Doesn't even look like her, really, except for a superficial similarity of hair style.  No, that's a generated AI image based on the prompt "Carla Bley performing live in Copley Square." 

 Don't get distracted by the number of fingers.

A student asked Zen Master Ichu, "Please write something of great wisdom for me."

Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: "Attention."

The student said, "Is that all?," and the master wrote, "Attention. Attention."

The student became irritable. "That doesn't seem very profound or subtle to me." In response, Ichu simply wrote, "Attention. Attention. Attention."

In frustration, the student demanded, "What does this word 'attention' mean?"

Ichu replied, "Attention means attention."

From the National Affairs Desk

This blog is most decidedly NOT a news-reporting or current-events blog, but these are the times and this is the record of the times. To be quite honest, I'm glad I'm not a news reporter right now, because there's a LOT going on this week.

Although most news coverage has been on other matters lately, the war initiated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, and Ukraine has been making remarkable progress. The Ukrainian military launched a surprise attack on two Russian airfields in occupied Ukraine using a long-range missile system secretly supplied in the last few weeks by the United States. The strike damaged runways, destroyed nine Russian helicopters, and killed a number of Russian soldiers. In addition to the new missile system, M1 Abrams battle tanks promised by the U.S. have arrived in Ukraine. Although Putin had initially expected to overtake Ukraine in a matter of days, the Russian army has been largely unsuccessful and the Ukrainian goal of dividing the Russian invaders in two (much as the U.S. did to the Confederacy) has been partially achieved. At the same time, Ukrainian attacks have pushed Russia’s Black Sea fleet out of its main base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

You may not have heard much about Ukraine's success because news coverage has mostly focused on the Hamas terror attacks against Israel, and on Israel's response. It's all a tragic and complicated story, far too tragic and far too complicated to summarize here, but the big news is that following President Biden's trip this week to Israel and request to Congress for $105 billion in financial aid for both Ukraine and Israel, Hamas released two American hostages, a woman and her daughter, today. This is far, far, far from the end of this story, but the release of two hostages, any two hostages, American or not, is a positive development. I'm sure the story will get bloodier and more tragic as it progresses.

Congress may be unable to deliver on Biden's request for international aid for a while because the House is currently without a speaker.  Far-right MAGA ultra-conservative Jim Jordan, the 2020 election denier and former coach of the sex-scandal plagued Ohio State wrestling team, campaigned for the role but lost the congressional vote three times.  Eash time, fewer Republicans voted for him than the time before, and today a secret ballot among House Republicans reportedly decided to find some other candidate. Jordan was wildly inappropriate for the Speaker position, but after the wildly inappropriate "president" Trump, anything seemed possible. In the best possible interpretation of the Jordan defeat, the Republican Party may be starting to rethink its loyalty to Trump and MAGA extremism.

And speaking of the twice-impeached, multiply indicted former "president," a judge in one of the many criminal cases against him imposed a gag order on Trump this week to stop him from defaming the prosecution and members of the court. Today, the judge acted on the gag order, and fined Trump for leaving a social media post on his campaign website that libeled one of the judge's clerks.  The judge stopped short of holding Trump in contempt, but warned that he still could face harsher punishments, even jail time, if he ran afoul of the order again.

And in the separate RICO case against the president and his associates, one of his co-conspirators, the bat-shit crazy Sidney Powell, the lawyer who claimed that the long-ago-deceased Hugo Chavez somehow caused voting machines to report false results in 2020, pleaded guilty to the charges against her in exchange for future testimony. She had unparalleled access to Trump and his schemes prior to January 6, and it's widely assumed that her testimony will be extremely damaging to Trump's defense and to the other co-conspirators. Sure enough and right on schedule, today another defendant, the lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, pleaded guilty in the same case. The dominos will likely keep falling as each leaves the sinking ship after the others, all trying to avoid jail time in exchange for ratting out the others, until only the big cheese is left with no one left at whom to point a finger. Poor Donnie.

And the Michigan football team is under NCAA investigation for allegedly stealing signals from opposing teams.            

Water Dissolves Water

What happens when you feed the phrase "water dissolves water" into Bing's AI image generator, you ask?  Voila, the results above.

I like the symmetry, and I also appreciate that there's a somewhat Zen-like aspect to the image, consistent with my intentions in selecting the name all those years ago. 

I understand Bing uses the Dall-E 3 AI to generate its images. Last week, I was playing around with the earlier Dall-E 2 to generate pictures of reed player Anthony Braxton: I wanted to see what Dall-E 3 would give me with its better resolution and greater imagination, but any prompt I gave Bing that included the term "anthony braxton" got blocked and a message warned of "Unsafe Content."  

I have no idea what the problem is, unless they are concerned about someone creating deep fakes to slander a celebrity. I tested that theory by requesting images of Jim Jordan, and got similarly blocked. But when I went more generic, and prompted the AI with the words "speaker of the house concedes defeat," I got this vaguely subversive image:

So instead of asking specifically for Braxton, I asked Dall-E 3 to come up with an image by using the more-generic term "jazz musician" and my results included the following:

I find it interesting that none of the Bing Dall-E 3 results included African-American musicians. I wonder if the Braxton requests got blocked due to some perceived racial sensitivities, or if there's an inherent anti-black bias in the results for generic "jazz musicians"?

Carla Bley

In the summer of 1978 or '79, I took my little brother with me to Copley Square in Boston to see The Carla Bley Band. I was a student at Boston University at the time, living in the "student ghetto" of Alston-Brighton; he was a teenager from suburban Winchester, Massachusetts.  Bley and her band were playing as part of the city's Sunmmerfest series of free concerts in municipal places.

Although I was a big fan of the genre, I think it was my brother's first exposure to jazz music. It was certainly his first exposure to modern jazz in a live setting. He really liked the show, although it didn't noticeably change his taste in music. After the show, he went on listening mostly to the same stoner rock he and his friends had liked before. 

His tastes did mature with age, though.  A decade or so later, he took me to hear the band Birdsongs of the Mesozoic at an art gallery in Gloucester, Mass.  It was my first exposure to post-rock music, but that's a whole different story.

A year or so after the Copley Square show, The Carla Bley Band played the Paradise Theater in Boston, a rock-music venue. Their status at the time was such that it wasn't at all surprising to see them appear at the Paradise. The audience treated them like rock stars, calling out the names of performers and soloists as if they were members of The Who. My memory of the show is hazy like all my memories from the 1970s (like all my memories, period), but as I recall she had an all-star band that included Michael Mantler, Alan Braufman, Gary Windo, and Bob Stewart on various reeds and brass, and local hero D. Sharpe on the drums (Sharpe was the original drummer in Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers).

I somehow managed to go nearly 40 years without seeing Carla Bley perform live again after the Paradise show, but then I saw her trio with bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard at Big Ears in 2019. 

As you've probably heard, Carla Bley died yesterday at age 87. Impermanence is swift.

If you don't have any of her records, her music's available on Spotify and YouTube and other streaming services. There are better writers than I who've discussed her music elsewhere and I won't try to improve on what's already been said. Besides, words describing music are like fingers pointing at the moon and not the actual thing. You have to hear to understand.

But I will mention the amount of mischievous humor that surfaces in her music. She took her music seriously, but what she expressed with her music reflected the playfulness in her personality.  Her composition Musique Mecanique I opens with the band sounding like a wheezy and broken wind-up music box. Over the nearly 10 minutes of the piece, that creaky toy seems to grow into larger and larger versions of itself until by the climax it sounds like some extremely large, out-of-control, industrial monstrosity, which of course breaks down at the very end back to the little old music box of the beginning. 

Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs, true to its title, sounds like the American and other national anthems as seen through a kaleidoscope. Her take on gospel music is titled The Lord Is Listenin' To Ya, Hallelujah!. She has compositions titled Song Sung Long and Wrong Key Donkey. Her composition that appears at the end of the first side of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra is titled The Ending to the First Side.  And of course, Blues in 12 Bars is followed by Blues in 12 Other Bars.

If all this makes her music sound a little silly and frivolous, you've got the wrong impression.  She was a gifted and expressive composer, and her playing could equally express sorrow and sadness as well as mirth and mischief.  A world with Carla Bley no longer in it seems like a world a little less bright, a little less fun. 

Her age (83 at the time) showed at her 2019 set at Big Ears - not in her playing, which was as sharp and crisp as ever, but in her posture. She sat slumped over the piano, her head hanging down over the keys. She barely moved - that is, until she stood up between songs and walked over to a microphone to explain the dirty joke behind the title Sex with Birds.

R.I.P., Carla.

Representative Jim Jordan, the combative co-founder of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and a close ally of twice-impeached, multiply indicted former "president" Donald Trump, lost his first bid to be elected speaker on Tuesday by 17 votes, prolonging a two-week fight that has paralyzed Congress and shone a spotlight on deep Republican divisions. Apparently, after spending years to get chaos agents into Congress to combat the Democrats, Republicans are finding it difficult to control them because, well, because they're chaos agents.  

Congress will try again to elect a Speaker, possibly even today. Apparently, the plan is to keep voting and re-voting until the holdouts tire of the process and eventually capitulate to herd mentality and join the majority.

If elected Speaker of the House, second in the line of succession to the President, do you believe that Jordan wouldn't hinder prosecutors and law-enforcement agencies investigating the many indictments against Trump, when it's been suggested that he himself might be a co-conspirator?  

If elected Speaker of the House, second in the line of succession, do you think he would certify the results of any Presidential election that wasn't won by Donald Trump, when he has already strenuously denied the results of the 2020 election and tried to have the Electoral College votes rejected?

I have a modest proposal to offer the Republicans - nominate Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House. It know it sounds crazy, but hear me out:

1. With your support, he’ll get elected Speaker and end this whole embarrassing debacle.


2. You’ll still have the majority, so he won’t be able to pass any legislation if you’re worried about him enacting some sort of radical socialist agenda.


3. You can blame everything on him for the next two years and you won’t have to take any responsibility for anything.


4. It may sound like all this will end in some sort of paralyzing stalemate, but you were never interested in governing anyway. Isn’t paralysis your long-term goal?

Think about it. It’s just crazy enough to work!   

Seasons change, the days get shorter and the nights grow colder. But rather than despair, we start to anticipate the holidays and their spirit of gratefulness. Beyond just a response to life’s many blessings, gratefulness can also cultivate natural expressions of generosity, of love and joy. It can foster a sense of belonging and of community, and can nourish positive social and cultural change.

Gratefulness is good.

In addition to listening to the recent albums by Animal Collective and the late, great Jaimie Branch, and to the massive catalog of recordings on the Tzadik label recently released to streaming by composer John Zorn, and to the artists included in the lineup announcements for the 2024 Big Ears festival, I've still been listening to a lot of Brazilian music from the 1970s.  

Regarding the latter, it's not plagiarism and I'm not trying to claim that it is, but to me Jorge Ben Jorge's 1975 song Meus Filhos, Meu Tesouro ("My Children, My Treasure") is similar to Devendra Banhart's 2007 Carmenista. Slow, soulful start for the first 0:40 seconds or so, and then fast declaratory lyrics sung in a downward scale. Again, not plagarism, not even close, but I always like to hear parallels in music, especially across decades and generations.  

Of course, Jorge Ben Jorge is no stranger to being the victim of plagiarism.  See if you can hear any similarities between his 1972 song Taj Mahal and a 1978 disco hit popular in the US and the UK. 

Eight AI Portraits of Anthony Braxton

 

Beyond Quantum is a 2008 free-jazz recording by multi-reed player Anthony Braxton backed by the stellar rhythm section of William Parker (bass) and Milford Graves (drums).  

These images were generated after I played Beyond Quantum to an AI.

I suddenly have hope for the future under our new AI overlords.   

Friday the 13th

Hold two thoughts in your head at the same time:

1. What Hamas did in Israel is unspeakably evil, beyond barbaric. It is cruel, inhumane, and plain awful in every aspect. It should be condemned at every level of human society, and its perpetrators punished severely.

2. Israel's longstanding treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and elsewhere is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has classified the Gaza Strip as "unlivable" and an open-air prison. There is now a third generation of Palestinians who were born and raised in this place, whose grandparents were forcibly relocated there. A brutal war against them in retaliation for Hamas' actions is not going to make them more accepting of the Israeli occupation. 

Each of these two thoughts does not negate the other.  The first thought does not make the thinker Islamophobic, and the second thought does not make the thinker anti-Semitic.

I can't look at this situation with anything less than horror, and with extreme compassion for those suffering on both sides of the razor wire.  And while I cannot describe my feelings toward the Hamas terrorists as "compassionate," I do feel sorry for them, that their hearts and minds have become so twisted and sick with hatred that they've become the monsters they were last weekend. 

The song in the video above is called Asaph by the vocal trio Mycale, assembled by the composer John Zorn to perform songs from Volume 13 of his Book of Angels, the second series of his Masada compositions.  I've been listening to Masada this week to keep my mind and my heart open to the human suffering on the other side of the world. 

My Amazon Book Order Arrived Today!

It didn't take long (three days) but well worth the wait.  The books are: 

• A Power Stronger Than Itself, The AACM and American Experimental Music, by George E. Lewis (2008)
• Forces In Motion, Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music, by Gordon Lock (1988)
• As Serious As Your Life, Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, by Val Wilmer (1977)

I can't wait to start reading, so that's it for posting today!
 

Big Ears Preview (Part 3)

It's a great time to be a music fan and a great time to have a Spotify subscription.

The Baltimore band Animal Collective have recently released a new album, Isn't It Now?, and it's a good one. The release of a new AnCo LP is usually an occasion for repeat listenings, visits to their back catalog, even possibly one long retrospective playthrough of all their albums in chronological order.  Followed by more repeat listenings to their latest. One could expect several posts on this blog featuring one new track or another with breakdown, discussion, and exegesis.  

But who's got time for that? John Zorn just released several hundred albums from his Tzadik label to streaming services, and digesting all of that may take years, if not a lifetime. So yes, I've been listening to Isn't It Now?, but should my mind even so much as think about the Zorn catalog, I fall down that rabbit  hole for the rest of the day and forget all about those magicians from Baltimore.         

To make life even more interesting, back on September 12, the Big Ears festival announced its lineup for 2023. The lineup announcements have me thinking about some longtime favorites (Laurie Anderson, Herbie Hancock, Charles Lloyd, Marc Ribot, Mary Halvorson, Julian Lage, Henry Threadgill, Digable Planets, Bitchin Bajas, Dave Holland, James Brandon Lewis, Tomeka Reid, Roger Eno, JG Thirlwell) and provide me with an even longer list of new artists I'm not familiar with but anxious to learn about. I created a Spotify playlist of one album by each band or artist, and I was methodically working my way through the list, although at almost 1,200 tracks and over 81 hours long, that's no small undertaking, especially if the goal is to gain familiarity with the music, not just "Yup, played that track once."

Then came the release of Isn't It Now? and the massive Tzadik catalog.  I'm literally overwhelmed.

Today, Big Ears announced the addition of over a dozen additional artists to the 2024 lineup. Folks in some circles might get excited to see Jon Batiste added to the schedule, he's a little too mainstream and middle-of-the-road for my tastes.  I certainly don't dislike his music, it's just not interesting enough to me to get me to pack my bags and move my ass to Tennessee for a show.

But Medeski-Russo-Ribot and the Evan Lurie Quintet, on the other hand, are great additions.  

Guitarist Marc Ribot and keyboardist John Medeski have played together many times before and have been included in several of Zorn's larger ensembles. But I'm not aware of any recordings where they are the only two featured soloists. I'm not saying that recording doesn't exist - I'm just saying I'm not aware of it. Most of Zorn's smaller guitar-and-keys ensembles with Medeski have paired him with guitarist Matt Hollenberg (Cleric, Titan To Tachyons). The closest I can find is 2015's The True Discoveries of Witches and Demons, which adds Ribot and bassist Trevor Dunn to the metal-adjacent Simulacrum trio of Medeski, Hollenberg, and drummer Kenny Grohowski.  Here's Phantasms from Witches and Demons.  

Both John Medeski and Marc Ribot are versatile musicians who've played in a variety of settings in several different genres. The Medeski-Russo-Ribot trio may have the heavy feel of Simulacrum, but there's no telling what they'll sound like with the drumming of jam-band veteran Joe Russo (who's separate Selcouth Quartet is also a new addition to the lineup announced today).  But one can be assured that the set will be interesting and that it will be good.

Back in the early 1980s, Evan Lurie founded the band The Lounge Lizards along with his brother John Lurie (HBO's Painting with John), Arto Lindsay (DNA), and Anton Fier (The Golden Palominos), although most of his post-Lizards work has been in film scores (Tree's Lounge). The quintet Lurie brings to Big Ears will include Marc Ribot on guitar as well as a bandoneon, a kind of accordion featured in tango music.     

So all of this is exciting and now you know how I've been spending my days lately, hunched over the Spotify app on my computer.

Masada

There's war again in the Middle East. As you undoubtedly know from the news, Hamas fighters have broken out from the Gaza strip and have captured some Israeli towns and settlements and hundreds have already died on both sides of the battlelines. Men, women, and children have ben taken hostage and at least 260 bodies were found after an attack on an Israeli music festival site alone. This is terrible and the news is telling us this is likely going to be a long and bloody war, probably the last thing the world needs right now.    

In the days immediately after 9/11, I started listening to a lot of Arabic music as an antidote to all of the Islamophobic propaganda coming from the mainstream news. Traditional Arabic music, modern interpreters like the singer Natasha Atlas, even electronic music like the provocateur Muslimgauze.  With the outbreak of the latest violence, I'm looking to Jewish music to sooth my soul in these difficult times.   

  

The composer John Zorn named his most long-lasting ensemble "Masada" for a fortress built in Israel on a high rock plateau south of what is now the West Bank. The fortress was first built by Herod the Great around the year 35 BCE, and according to legend Roman troops laid siege to Masada in the year 73 CE at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War. After two or three months, the Romans finally breached the walls and entered the fortress, only to discovered that its defenders had set all the buildings afire and had committed mass suicide, 960 men, women, and children in total.

All this month, well before the most recent world events, I've been intensively exploring the vast collection of music recently released by Zorn to Spotify and other streaming services from his label, Tzadik. That catalog includes a large number of studio and live recordings by Masada and its various offshoots, including Electric Masada, the Masada String Quartet, etc.    

I first became aware of John Zorn in 1991 through his production of the first Mr. Bungle album. Around the same time, MTV aired a video of a song called Batman by Zorn's Naked City on their 120 Minutes showcase of alternative music. I only saw the video once, but knew right away that I had to go out and buy the CD immediately.  Batman was an audacious mashup of jazz, punk, thrash metal, surf rock, noise, and film score, at times all played at the same time and at others lurching spastically from one genre to the next, all within 1:58. It was not a cover of the theme from the Batman television show, yet the title somehow seemed perfect for the composition.

The Naked City album was an even wilder ride. Batman was the first track and it only got crazier from there. It was hard to listen all the way through the first time, but was interesting enough that I kept returning, digesting it in chunks as I was able. I became a Zorn fan, and bought his Big Gundown album, a collection of songs from Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and Spy Vs. Spy, punk-jazz covers of Ornette Coleman tunes. 

A few years later, I heard somewhere that Zorn's latest project was an ensemble called Masada and that they played original compositions based on klezmer and other forms of traditional Jewish music. Albums and song titles all had Hebrew names.

I can't recall how I even learned about Masada back in those dark, pre-internet days. Masada's music wasn't played on MTV, 120 Minutes or otherwise, and wasn't on the radio, even the edgier college stations as far as I could tell. I had no idea what the music sounded like, and while I knew klezmer could be fast-paced and raucous and could imagine how a musician like Zorn could adapt to the form, it didn't sound inviting enough for me to spend my money on a Masada CD, sound unheard. 

Masada released some 10 LPs between 1994 and 1997 on the Japanese DIW label. For whatever reason, those LPs have never surfaced on Spotify - at least not anywhere I can find. There is another band called "Masada" with a couple of albums on Spotify, but they seem to be an American metal band completely unrelated to John Zorn.        

Zorn formed the Tzadik label in 1995 and released a series of live Masada shows recorded between 1994 and 2003 on the new label, as well as new studio recordings by Electric Masada and the Masada String Quartet. Those LPs are among the many albums recently released for streaming, allowing those of us who missed the first generation of Masada studio recordings to finally catch up. I still haven't heard the original ten Masada albums, but now that I can finally stream those excellent live recordings, I'm starting to catch up.  The song posted above is from a Masada concert in Jerusalem in 1994.

To make things even more complicated, after 2003, Zorn started a new project, Masada Book 2: The Book of Angels. Musicians contributing to the Book of Angels series include the Cracow Klezmer Band, Medeski Martin & Wood, Marc Ribot, and Pat Metheny, among many others. And then came Masada Book 3: The Book of Beriah.  The total number of Masada compositions is now 613, the same as the number of mitsvah or commandments in the Torah.

I guess what I'm trying to say in so many words is that for some 30 years, all I heard of Zorn's alluring music was a small handful of CDs, the odd YouTube video of a live performance or two, and a few albums on Spotify and YouTube that were released on labels that Zorn didn't control. But now in the last two weeks, I'm overwhelmed trying to catch up on some 30 years of a notably prolific composer and bandleader.  And all that prodigious Masada output is but one of several Zorn projects, which also include his bands Painkiller and Simulacrum, and a huge number of recordings by other ensembles performing his other composition projects.

The local rabbi may not recognize Jewish traditions in the Masada songbooks, but they are having the desired effect on me and turning my sympathies to the plight and suffering of the Israelis in these difficult times.  If you're at all intrigued by what you've heard and read here, I created a Masada playlist on Spotify.  It's a work in progress and I'm still futzing around adding some LPs and subtracting some others, but I invite you to come and check it out.  

Georgia's (Still) No. 1 (Of Course)

After yesterday's dominating, 51-13 win over formerly undefeated Kentucky, Georgia continues to hold the No. 1 spot in today's AP Coach's Poll. With yesterday's loss by Missouri to LSU, there's now only one undefeated team left in the SEC and it's Georgia.  

The repeat National Champion Georgia Bulldogs have held the No. 1 spot in the poll since October 19, 2022. This is Georgia's 23nd consecutive win and Kirby Smart's 87th win as Georgia's Head Coach (87-15).

But what fun is winning if you can't gloat over the misfortunes of others? Texas lost to Oklahoma yesterday, 34-30, and dropped 6 spots in the poll, from No. 3 down to No. 9. The Sooners moved up 7 spots with the win, from No. 12 to No. 5. 

Setting aside their upset win over Alabama earlier this season, Texas is following their usual pattern: beating a few other insignificant Texas teams (Rice, Baylor), daydreaming about national championships and trash-talking the rest of the NCAA, and then promptly losing as soon as they cross the Red River and play an Oklahoma team (OSU or Okie State). It happens every year and it's as predictable as Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, and yet every year Longhorn fans start the Oklahoma game all looking like Matthew McConaughey and finish the game all looking like Willie Nelson. 

Also, and this can't be overstated enough, NOTRE DAME LOST! They were blown out, 33-20, by No. 25 Louisville in a surprise upset (the Irish were 6.5-point favorites). Notre Dame dropped 11 spots in the poll to an insignificant No. 21, and Louisville moved up 11 to No. 14.

Georgia will remain No. 1 for at least a while.  We have an easy road game next week against unranked Vanderbilt (2-5), then a bye week, and then our annual grudge match against Florida, only Florida is unranked and 4-2 this year.  After that, it's a home game against Missouri (5-1), who dropped out of the Top 25 after yesterday's loss to LSU.

The test will come in mid-November, when Georgia has back-to-back games against No. 13 Ole Miss and then No. 19 Tennessee. Our final regular season game is the annual match with unranked Georgia Tech, but unlike Miami yesterday, Georgia won't fumble the ball away in the last 30 seconds when we should just take a knee and end the game.    

Despite their loss to Texas earlier this year, Alabama is undefeated in SEC West play and will most likely play Georgia in the SEC title game. Alabama's always a tough match for the Bulldogs, but this year the Tide doesn't look quite like the powerhouse they've been in the past, although only a fool would underestimate them.  

Just remember the 2021 SEC title game against Alabama, the last time Georgia took a loss (673 days ago, but who's counting?).

From the Sports Desk

There are only three undefeated teams left in the SEC. After today, there may only be one, and it might not be Georgia.

At noon today, the surprising, No. 21 Missouri Tigers put their perfect, 5-0 record on the line when they host the No. 23 LSU Tigers (3-2). Yes, hot Tiger-on-Tiger SEC action. Missouri is ranked higher, has a better record, and is the home team, but LSU is a 5.5-point favorite. What actually happens is really anybody's guess. Go Tigers!

Hardcore SEC enthusiasts will hope for a Missouri victory so that the conference still has two undefeated teams. SEC traditionalists will cheer for LSU, a perennial conference powerhouse. It should also be noted that while Mizzou is SEC East, LSU is in the SEC West, so whoever wins will make their division look stronger.

Georgia plays Misery on Nov. 4 but doesn't have a scheduled game against LSU. We may face LSU again in the SEC Championship like we did last year if they win the West, but first LSU will have to pass both No. 11 Alabama (4-1) and unranked Texas A&M (4-1) in the standings.

Those two teams play each other at 3:30 when the Crimson Tide goes down to College Station today. LSU plays both teams later this season, and Tiger fans are probably cheering for an Aggies upset (Alabama's favored by 2.5), as the chances of LSU beating A&M in a home game are probably a lot better than of beating 'Bama on the road.

But the important, big-ass game today of course is Kentucky at Georgia. The No. 1-ranked, repeat National Champion Georgia Bulldogs are a 14.5-point favorite and haven't lost to Kentucky since 2009, back in the Mark Richt era. The Dawgs lead the all-time series against Kentucky, 62-12-2, and have a 31-4-2 record against the Wildcats in Athens.

To be frank, Kentucky has never been known as a college football powerhouse, at least in my lifetime, and the main responsibility of the Wildcat football team has been not to embarrass the basketball team too badly. Kentucky hasn't won the SEC Championship since 1950, when they were coached by Bear Bryant and went on to beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. Curiously, though, the only time the Wildcats held the Holy Moley Guacamole One True Belt (blessed be its name) wasn't during the Bear Bryant years but in 2010, when they won it away from South Carolina. They promptly then lost it to Georgia the very next weekend (Georgia lost it to Florida the weekend after that).

But Kentucky has quietly gone 5-0 this season and are currently the only other undefeated SEC team outside of Missouri and Georgia. They've watched as Georgia has struggled early in games against South Carolina and Auburn. Confident after beating Florida last weekend, Kentucky's thinking if they can put some points on the board early in the game, they could be the team that holds on and prevents Georgia from scoring a second-half win. And if the Auburn game wasn't the wake-up call the Bulldogs need, they might be right.

It will be an interesting game, far more interesting than Georgia-Kentucky matchups in the past.

Meanwhile, No. 3 Texas will finally lose its first game of the season today when they host the undefeated No. 12 Oklahoma Sooners. No surprise, Texas always folds to Oklahoma teams in big games. No. 4 Ohio State also plays an undefeated team today, unranked Maryland, but should make easy work of beating the Terrapins.

That's about it today. No. 2 Michigan has a laugher game against unranked Minnesota (3-2). If you want to jump back on the Coach Prime bandwagon, Colorado (3-2) should easily defeat a hapless Arizona State (1-4) team today. The Buffalos are 3.5-point favorites. Finally, both Bonix and Penix are resting up this week for their big showdown next weekend as Oregon and Washington both have byes.

Enjoy the games, y'all and GO DAWGS!

Gatos do Sul

One of the highlights of the 2023 Big Ears festival was the early Friday set of Gatos do Sul by pianist Brian Marsella and his ensemble. 

The music was quick-paced jazz with a Latin flair, witty, exciting, and inventive. The musicians looked like they were having fun onstage, and I can assure you those of us in the audience were having fun, too. It was my favorite set of that day, and possibly of the entire festival.

But when I returned home, I couldn't find anything online, neither to stream nor to buy, by the band. I found a few clips on YouTube of a performance in Brooklyn shot from the audience by fans, but that was about it.

What I didn't fully realize is that "Gatos do Sul" isn't the name of the band but the name of a 2020 album credited to Marsella.  Further, while in retrospective I should been able to connect the dots, the album is a release on John Zorn's Tzadik label (this year's festival was in part a celebration of Zorn's 70th birthday). More specifically, the Gatos do Sul LP is part of Tzadik's Spectrum Series of works by various artists from across the globe.    

And then this week, my world changed when the near entirety of the Tzadik label output was finally released to streaming.  All of those wonderful releases by Zorn and by all of the myriad ensembles and bands he assembled to perform his music were suddenly available.  After being initially overwhelmed and more than a little bewildered by the sheer immensity of music available, I was able to drill down a little bit and found Gatos do Sul on Spotify.   

Wonderful album.

What's more, the streaming release wasn't merely to Spotify alone. The Tzadik catalog is now also on YouTube.  I understand it's also on Apple Music and other platforms, too. I don't know why it's not yet on Bandcamp, where Zorn can actually make some money on CD and digital sales, but I imagine it's only a matter of time. 

But YouTube enables us to share the music online on sites like this, so here's the track Meu Doce de Abóbora ("My Pumpkin Compote") from Marsella's Gatos do Sul.  That lovely Brazilian percussion starting the track (and throughout the rest of the song) is by Cyro Baptista, seem in the white jacket on the right in the picture above. The other musicians are (l to r) Jorge Roeder, Itai Kriss, Ches Smith, Jon Irabagon, and then Baptista.

From the Gaming Desk

Last time we gave the Gaming Desk the podium, we had just completed the game Far Cry 4 and had embarked on Far Cry 5. 

Since then, in keeping with my plan to play all of the Far Cry games from 3 onwards in numerical order, after completing Far Cry 5, I embarked on its sequel Far Cry: New Dawn, and then Far Cry 6.  For the record, I've played all of these games before, but not back-to-back.

Right now, I'm playing through the Inside The Mind Far Cry 6 DLCs.  There are three volumes, and instead of being set in Far Cry 6's Yara (a fictional cross between Cuba and the Dominican Republic), each takes place in variations of the settings of Far Cry 3, 4, and 5.  But those "variations" are from inside the psyche of the games' respective villains, so it's a kind of surreal, phantasmagorical version of the original settings.  As of today, I'm still playing through the first of the DLCs as Vass, the bad guy from Far Cry 3 (played by the actor Michael Mando, best known as "Nacho" in the television series Better Call Saul). So far, it's been a diverting experience, quite different from the original game.

There's a lot of discussion on Reddit and other forums about which Far Cry game is the best and which is the worst, with little to no consensus.  Each game has its admirers, and each has its detractors.  All the games are different in terms of characters, plot, and gameplay mechanics, and my personal opinion is that each game has its own pluses and minuses. There are some things about each game I liked and some things about each I disliked. 

In my own personal and subjective opinion, I thought 3 had the most interesting characters, and the main protagonist had an actual character arc during the course of the story, from naive trust-fund brat to psychotic killer. I thought 4 had the most challenging gameplay and combat (I died a lot), and remember, I rage-quit the game in frustration back in 2017. I thought 5 had the best setting, a lovely Montana countryside, and sometimes it was fun to just roam around the mountains (the game even has a pretty good hunting and fishing simulator mini-game).   

On the other hand, although the game did have a lovely, tropical island setting, I found the combat in 6 a little too easy - I kept checking to make sure the gameplay setting hadn't somehow slipped to the "Easy" mode. I also found several of the NPCs to be just plain obnoxious (some of the more likeable characters are in the picture above). Outside of an intriguing conceptual setting, New Dawn, set in Far Cry 5's Montana after a nuclear Armageddon, has little to brag about.

So instead of ranking the games, I would follow a different internet convention and rank 3, 4, and 5 in the "Good" tier and put 6 and New Dawn in the "Meh" tier.

But anyway, it's all subjective and I had fun playing all of them, but with all the strong opinions out there, I wouldn't dare post my opinions online anywhere but here.

Yesterday, House Republicans made history of a sort by being the first party to throw out its own Speaker of the House. The following synopsis of events was edited from an online discussion by historian Heather Cox Richardson and from other sources.  

Ever since Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the extremists in his conference to win the speakership after Republicans took control of the House last January, he has catered to those extremists in an apparent bid to hold on to his position. He gave them key positions on committees, he permitted them to introduce extreme measures and load up bills with poison pills that meant the bills could never make it through Congress, and he recently allowed them to open unsubstantiated impeachment hearings against Joe Biden.

But the extremists were not appeased and continued to bully McCarthy, and they resented a deal he cut with Biden to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default. When their refusal to pass either appropriations bills or a continuing resolution to buy more time to pass those bills meant the U.S. was hours away from a government shutdown, McCarthy finally had to rely on the Democrats for help passing a continuing resolution. 

A shutdown would have hurt the country and, in so doing, would have benefited the criminally indicted, twice-impeached former president Trump, to whom the extremists are loyal.      

Yesterday, they challenged McCarthy’s leadership, apparently with the expectation that the Democrats would step in to save McCarthy’s job, although it is traditionally the majority party that determines its leader. McCarthy did reach out to Democrats for votes to support his speakership, but they pointed out McCarthy’s constant caving to the MAGA Republicans and said it's the Republicans own responsibility to end their Civil War. 

Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries told the Democratic caucus to vote "yes" on the Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair. In all, 216 members of Congress voted to remove McCarthy while 210 voted to keep him in the speaker’s chair. Eight Republicans voted with the Democrats to toss him aside, making him the first speaker ever removed from office. 

The result was a surprise to many Republicans, and they are turning their fury at their own debacle on the Democrats, blaming them for not stepping in to fix the Republicans’ mess. 

Speakers provide a list of people to become temporary speakers in case of emergency, and the gavel has passed to Patrick McHenry, who has power only to recess, adjourn, and hold votes for a new speaker. Yet one of McHenry’s first official acts was to order former speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her private Capitol office by tomorrow, announcing that he was having the room rekeyed. 

Her Capitol office is known as a "hideaway" because it is a second office. She has an office in the Cannon Office Building, as do other House members, across the street and connected to the Capitol via pedestrian tunnel. But it's a traditional courtesy for former speakers and some members of opposition leadership to be given office space near the House Chamber, especially if they are older, so they don't have to travel all the way to the Cannon during House sessions. Pelosi, the first female speaker in history, is 83. McHenry also evicted two-time former Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, age 84.

Pelosi was not even in D.C. for today’s votes. She's in California for the memorial services for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. 

Many see McCarthy's fingerprints all over this silly decision, revenge for the Democrats' refusal to save his speakership. But McHenry’s action is unlikely to make the Democrats more eager to work with the Republicans. Pelosi noted that this “sharp departure from tradition” seemed a surprising first move with "all the important decisions that the new Republican Leadership must address, which we are all eagerly awaiting….” 

The continuing resolution to fund the government runs out shortly before Thanksgiving, and funding for Ukraine has an even shorter time frame than that. The House cannot do business without a speaker, and each day this chaos continues is a victory for the extremists who are eager to stop a government that does anything other than their own bidding, even as it highlights the Republicans' inability to govern.

There is no apparent plan for moving forward, and the House has recessed for the rest of the week, putting off a new speaker fight, McCarthy says he will not run for speaker again, but Jim Jordan has declared his candidacy for speaker. 

Jordan gives Trump a run for his money on the sheer number of lies, mischaracterizations, exaggerations, and misinformation that he peddles daily. The number of times that CNN host Jake Tapper had to correct what he said was absurd and he's not been on that show since. Tapper is known for refusing to have on guests who lie, but maybe it's Jordan who's staying away because he resents being fact-checked and corrected. And then there's the Ohio State wrestling team abuse scandal, in which at least 14 former wrestlers say that when Jordan was an assistant coach with the program from 1987 to 1995, he was aware that the team doctor, Richard Strauss, was sexually abusing players but didn't report it. Jordan denies it, of course.  

This afternoon, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who had been lining up support and counting votes, also announced that he's running, while Kevin Hern of Oklahoma is mulling his options. Scalise supports continued aid for Ukraine while Jordan adamantly opposes it. Hern also supports it, but only if there is an exit plan attached to that aid. 

McHenry plans to hold a candidates' forum early next week.