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Monday, September 15, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44857 [44818] rated (+39), 21 [21] unrated (-0).

A few weeks back, before starting my long, slow read of John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, I quickly thumbed through Bernie Sanders' post-2020 campaign memoir, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, and got enough out of it to write up a review, which I sent out to subscribers of my Notes on Everyday Life newsletter, and posted as Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty (also archived). I quickly realized I had more to say, but dragged my feet until I finally posted More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism last week (also archived). I put a lot of thought into those pieces, not that they shouldn't be crafted to make sharper points. But they do raise an important question that hardly anyone has raised: if Americans really want a revolution, and there is some evidence for this, why were they only offered a chance to vote for Trump but not for Sanders? There's a lot to unpack there, and I can imagine it taking book-length, but the key ideas can be found in these two pieces.

In the meantime, I collected notes for Loose Tabs. As soon as I mailed the Sanders piece out, I decided to finish Loose Tabs off before posting this Music Week. I started with a PS to last week's Music Week, with an update on my everyday life, a plug for the Sanders piece, a note on Robert Christgau's latest Consumer Guide (my reviews below, with Young a late upgrade), and a bit on my not-yet-ready Loose Tabs. I worked on it well into Sunday evening, then decided to post what I had, so I can get on with my life. All I've done on it so far today was to fix the ellapsed days counter (28), and add a couple tweets. Even so, I didn't get around to doing the cutoff until 6PM, and it's close to 9PM as I'm writing this.

What I am considering is going back over the Loose Tabs and writing up some sort of executive summary/further reflections I can send out as the next newsletter. But I also have a couple more ideas in the works, ones that come closer to everyday life. And really I could use some detox from politics.

Big push this week will be house stuff. It's time to finally build that recycling kiosk. The scrap wood is pretty much organized. Main problem is likely to be rain, but it should be cooler in a day or two, and only Wednesday seems likely to rain much. Also need to work on the Jazz Critics Poll website, but I'm running out of things in the way, and the actual setup is pretty simple. (Designing a new website would be harder, and may not happen any time soon.) Setting up my own writing framework is also on the todo list.

Lot of records this week from the HHGA list. There's probably another dozen I haven't heard yet. I also picked up tips from Phil Overeem's September list. Not a lot of jazz this week. Fair number of things in the new jazz queue, but very few have been released yet. I also have a folder of download offers that I haven't touched.

On first play, Big Thief's Double Infinity is already an A-, and not a low one.

I'm thoroughly enjoying Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and should wrap it up this week. I'm up to John Stiglitz, which I think only leaves Thomas Piketty. (Stiglitz is not listed on the book cover, but is in the chapter on Samir Amin, along with Dani Rodrik. I have another half-dozen recently purchased books in the wings (and more older ones), but suddenly I'm tempted to look for Quinn Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, which complements the critics of capitalism with critics of the capitalist world whose preferred cure is even more extreme capitalism. The individuals listed, like Murray Rothbard and Charles Murray, don't especially interest me, but the pseudo-revolutionary ardor of the far right is very much among us. I've also just learned that the title is a play on Joan Robinson's characterization of Keynes' Bastards (Samuelson, Solow, and the other neo-Keynesians who dominated American economics until they lost ground to Friedman and his "school").

New records reviewed this week:

Africa Express: Africa Express Presents . . . Bahidorá (2025, World Circuit): British nonprofit founded in 2006 by Damon Albarn and Ian Birrell to promote African musicians, although their roster through five albums includes many others. Rather scattered, with some nice stuff, especially near the end. B+(*) [sp]

Amaarae: Black Star (2025, Interscope): Ama Serwah Genfi, born in the Bronx, parents from Ghana, third album. Nice beats, dense, generously sprinkled with sex. A- [sp]

Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream (2025, Lex): Rapper Frank Walton, close to a dozen albums since 2016. B+(*) [sp]

Blood Orange: Essex Honey (2025, RCA/Domino): British singer-songwriter Devonté Hynes, previously recorded as Lightspeed Champion (2008-10), fifth album since 2011. B+(*) [sp]

Blueprint: Vessel (2025, Weightless): Underground rapper Albert Shepard, from Columbus, Ohio, a dozen-plus albums since 2003, some very good, most real steady. This is both. A- [sp]

Chance the Rapper: Star Line (2025, self-released): Chicago rapper Chancelor Bennett, has mixtapes since 2012, but this is only counted as his second (or third) studio album (some dispute whether the title is one word or two). Much of interest here, some amusing, some making me uncomfortable, impressing on me that the impact of racism is still very palpable (e.g., the 4th of 4 "black commandments": "if they wanna we go to war"), not that the solution isn't clear ("my problem is your problem; your problem is my problem"). A- [sp]

Charley Crockett: Dollar a Day (2025, Lone Star Rider/Island): Country singer-songwriter, has been kicking out 2-3 albums per year since 2015, making this his 16th. All are good. None are great (although I gave his Live From the Ryman Auditorium an A-). B+(***) [sp]

Orhan Demir/Neil Swainson: Wicked Demon (2024-25 [2025], Hittite): Turkish guitarist, acoustic, based in Canada since 1977, has a 1990 album and several more recent, nice duo with bass. B+(**) [cd]

Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force: Khadim (2025, Ndagga): German DJ, side credits back to 1993, released his first Afro-centric ndagga albums in 2013. This particular group is fairly minimal: Bada Seck (bougarabou, thiol, mbeung mbeung bal, tungune), Serigne Manoune Seck (bougarabou, khine, mbeung mbeung, tungune), and Mbene Diatta Seck (vocals). B+(**) [sp]

Evidence: Unlearning Vol. 2 (2025, Rhymesayers Entertainment): Rapper/producer Michael Perretta, former member of the jazz-inflected Dilated Peoples (5 albums, 2000-14), has a half-dozen solo albums since 2007, including Unlearning Vol. 1 (2021). B+(*) [sp]

Fatboi Sharif & Driveby: Let Me Out (2025, Deathbomb Arc): Rapper from New Jersey, several albums since 2021, with various producers (Steel Tipped Dove twice), first with fellow NJ producer. Somewhat ghoulish. B+(*) [sp]

Ingebrigt Häker Flaten/(Exit) Knarr: Live at Artfacts '22 (2022 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): Norwegian bassist, Discogs credits him with 58 albums since 2000, performance credits go back to 1994 and number 274, he's anchored such major groups as Atomic and the Thing, as well as numerous Ken Vandermark projects. Septet here named for a 2021 album, here with Mette Rasmussen (alto sax), Atle Nymo (tenor sax/clarinets), Erik Kimestad (trumpet), guitar, piano, and drums. B+(*) [sp]

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/(Exit) Knarr: Drops (2024 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): Same band concept, although the cast has shifted, with Amalie Dahl on alto sax (except for one track with Mette Rasmussen), Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor, no trumpet, Marta Warelis taking over at piano (with electronics), Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, and an extra drummer for one track ("a bold, extended lineup"). B+(**) [sp]

From the Dirt: Colored Edge of Memory (2025, self-released): Americana band from Frederick, Maryland, with Dan Kenny as singer-songwriter, filed them under folk although there is also a bluegrass influence. Seems nice enough, but I doubt that much will stick. B+(***) [sp]

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist: Alfredo 2 (2025, ESGN/ALC): Rapper Fredrick Tipton, many albums since 2004, several with producer Alan Maman since 2018, including their previous Alfredo (2020). B+(*) [sp]

The High & Mighty: Sound of Market (2025, Eastern Conference): Hip-hop duo, Eric Meltzer (Mr. Eon) and Milo Berger (DJ Mighty Mi), recorded an album in 1999 on Rawkus that got some notice, three more through 2005, now one more. B+(***) [sp]

Kaytranada: Ain't No Damn Way! (2025, RCA): Haitian DJ/producer based in Canada, fourth album since 2016, not counting many mixtapes, a few collaborations, and lots of production work. Fairly basic beat-centric album, exactly what I expect. B+(***) [sp]

Knowledge the Pirate: The Round Table (2025, Pimpire/Trouble Chest Entertainment): Rapper Richard Iverson, half-dozen albums since 2018, this one sometimes co-credited to executive producer Roc Marciano, who also gets a featuring listing on one song. B+(**) [sp]

Lex Korten: Canopy (2024 [2025], Sounderscore): Pianist, also plays Rhodes, couple previous albums, scattered side credits (recently: Simon Moullier, Alfredo Colón, Sasha Berliner, Zoh Amba). Most tracks here feature voice (Claire Dickson), alto sax (David Léon), guitar (Tal Yahalom), drums (Stephen Boegeheld). I'm not much into the vocals. B [cd] [09-19]

Rocío Giménez López/Franco Di Renzo/Luciano Ruggieri: La Palabra Repetida (2025, Blue Art): Argentinian pianist, has a couple albums since 2017, trio with bass and drums, their second together, standards, mostly from jazz (Davis, Ellington, Parker, Shorter, Coltrane). B+(**) [bc]

Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya: Come Back (2025, Umsakazo): South African vocal trio, best known for backing Mahlathini (1937-99), but they have a fair number of albums on their own, starting in 1966, with this new album their first since 2007. Classic township jive, can't miss. A- [sp]

Lili Maljic: The Nearness of You: In Loving Memory of Jim Rotondi (2024 [2025], Pacific Coast Jazz): Standards singer, sticks to A-list songs, handles them well enough, the dedication to the trumpet player, who died two months after helping out here, is a nice touch. B+(**) [cd]

MindsOne: Stages (2025, Fort Lowell): Hip-hop group (Kon Sci, Tronic, various DJs but mostly DJ Noumenon), fifth album since 2007. Old school scratches, and (per HHGA) "precision, moving between introspection and sharp observations about life, ambition, and purpose." A- [sp]

Nils Petter Molvær: Khmer Live in Bergen (2023 [2025], Edition): Norwegian trumpet player, developed a distinctive strain of jazztronica in the 1990s -- which, by the way, started with Masqualero with Arild Andersen, which once again brings us back to George Russell and his Electronic Sonata -- especially on the ECM albums Khmer (1998) and Solid Ether (2000). This draws songs from both albums, bringing back the original band from the latter, plus long-time collaborator Jan Bang (live sampling). A- [sp]

Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones (2025, XL): Alt-r&b singer-songwriter Marcus Brown, second album. B [sp]

Nova Twins: Parasites & Butterflies (2025, Marshall): British duo, Amy Love (vocals/guitar) and Georgia South (bass/vocals), third album, funk beats, metallic clang hilights, can rap some. I've been a fan so far, and some of this is really extraordinary, but it's rather hit-and-miss, taking four songs to get to "Soprano," and more to get to what sounds like supercharged Queen. B+(**) [sp]

Panic Shack: Panic Shack (2025, Brace Yourself): Welsh post-punk band, Sarah Harvey the singer, first album after a couple EPs, 11 songs, 34:16. Some of the themes I'm not into, but they have so much fun with them I can't complain. Reminds me of some '70s new wave, only not male. A- [sp]

Preservation & Gabe 'Nandez: Sortilège (2025, Backwoodz Studioz): Former has a 25-year history as an underground DJ without revealing so much as a name (unless it's Jean Daval? "half-French," from New York); 'Nandez (or Nadez) is younger, "half-Malian," both with some connection to Billy Woods. B+(***) [sp]

Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (2025, Loma Vista): Country singer-songwriter, fifth studio album since 2016 (plus a live Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman). Strong upbeat pieces, loses a bit on the ballads. B+(***) [sp]

ShrapKnel & Mike Ladd: Saisir Le Feu (2025, Fused Arrow): Hip-hop duo, Curly Castro and PremRock (Mark Debuque), from Philadelphia's Wrecking Crew, fourth album since 2020, couple more since, this one produced by Ladd, who has a rep as a spoken word artist including collaborations with jazz musicians, especially Vijay Iyer. B+(**) [sp]

Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love (2025, Tan Cressida/Warner): Rapper originally from Chicago, father a South African poet and political activist, mother a law professor noted as a "critical race theorist," started with Odd Future in Los Angeles, 6th studio album since 2013 (counting an Alchemist collab), but short at 24:08 (11 tracks). B+(*) [sp]

Zach Top: Ain't in It for My Health (2025, Leo33): Country singer-songwriter, grew up on a rance in Washington, second album. B+(**) [sp]

UFO Fev & Body Bag Ben: Thousand Yard Stare (2025, 1332): Rapper and beats, I've seen cover scans with the credits flipped but will go with Discogs (especially since they have a scan to prove it). B+(**) [sp]

Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (2025, Reconstruction): Countryish singer-songwriter, never heard of him through 6-7 albums since 2004, son of Steve Young (1942-2016), another one I've barely heard of (just enough to have him redundantly listed in my country and folk files, neither of which actually graded an album). Christgau recommended this one, and it's interesting enough, and more than a little amusing. Not yet enough to send me back to the catalogs, but I wouldn't rule that out. I sat on the fence here a while, but finally decided not to give a fuck. A- [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Bar-B-Q Killers: Part 1: The Last Shit (1986 [2025], Chunklet Industries, EP): Athens, GA garage band, three songs, 8:24. Title per cover, but Discogs lists as Chester Drawers, after the first song on what is basically a single. Group went on to release an album, Comely, in 1987. B [bc]

Marshall Crenshaw: From "The Hellhole" (2012-16 [2025], Yep Roc): Retro rocker in the early 1980s, seemed major for several striking albums, still sounds much the same, although this collection of remastered stray tracks stikes me as pretty useless. B- [sp]

Woody Guthrie: Woody at Home: Vol 1 + 2 (1951-52 [2025], Shamus): Famous folksinger (1912-67), from Oklahoma, wrote hundreds of songs, with most of his recordings in 1944-49. These previously unreleased tapes -- 22, with 13 songs that hadn't been previously released -- were recorded shortly before he was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease, which ended his career early. This is fairly minor, but interesting. B+(*) [sp]

Old music:

Body Type: Expired Candy (2023, Poison City): Australian garage rock group, four women, second album after two EPs. Pretty good, but ran on well past my peak interest. B+(***) [sp]

The High & Mighty: Home Field Advantage (1999, Rawkus): Philadelphia hip-hop duo, rapper Mr. Eon (Erik Meltzer) and producer DJ Mighty Mi (Milo Berger), first album, draws some notable guest spot artists, like Eminem. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Tom Cohen: Embraceable Brazil (Versa) [10-10]
  • Juan Pastor's Chinchano: Memorias (Calligram) [10-03]
  • Natsuki Tamura/Satoko Fujii: Ki (Libra) [09-19]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

I moved an already long draft file into the blog queue on Friday, after posting my Notes on Everyday Life piece, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. In doing so, I set an implicit deadline for posting this before Monday, when I normally expect to post a Music Week. I could spend an infinite amount of time wrapping this up, trying to make sense of it all, so the budget was hopeful self-discipline. But at 3AM Sunday night/Monday morning, I'm sick and tired of working on this, with no good answer, so I'm opting for the short one, which is to post what I have. If I look at it Monday, I may add a few more similar things, edits some of what I have, write extra notes, or maybe just shrug and move on. There is certainly no shortage of material here. Whether it does any good is another question I can't begin to contemplate, much less answer.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on August 17.

I'm trying a new experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: I'm ready to retire this one, but Trump keeps squirming, so his most opportunistic opponents still hope to reel him in. Since last time: the appearance of Ghislaine Maxwell as Trump's character witness ("a perfect gentleman").

Israel:

Russia/Ukraine: Last time I posted was just after the Alaska summit, but before Zelensky and his European allies descended on Washington to derail whatever impression Putin had made and return Trump to his usual path of fickle incompetence.

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for the Führer, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal views -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious threats from fanciful ones.

  • Zachary Small:

  • Margaret Hartmann: Basically a gossip columnist who's made "tremendous content" out of Trump's follies. (She also covers the British royals, Michelle Obama, and some Epstein matters I filed [or ignored] elsewhere.) After the newer pieces, some older ones for your amusement.

  • Ed Kilgore [08-24] Trump sees whitewashed US past and dystopian present: Well, as Mort Sahl once said about Charlton Heston, if he were more preceptive, he'd be a happy man. But Trump doesn't want to be happy. His stock in trade is being angry, which gives him a mission in life, and a readymade excuse for everything. This starts off with the Trump tweet I cite below. It's impossible to rank all of the ways Trump offends me, but his insistence on recasting history to suit his prejudices is fundamental to all his other lies.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [08-27] Why does the MAGA elite love conspicuous cosmetic surgery? Picture of Kristi Noem.

  • Ashlie D Stevens [08-28] Don't buy the Cracker Barrel fallacy: "Online petitions and viral outrage give the illusion of influence — but real power lies elsewhere."

    • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-09] What was the Cracker Barrel skirmish really about? "Trump is repaying rural voters' loyalty by shafting them." Sure, but the thing to understand is that the right is really just a rage machine. Any sort of change can kick them into high gear.

  • Brian Karem [08-29] As America implodes, Trump can do anything he wants.

  • Laura Beers [09-02] The Orwellian echoes in Trump's push for 'Americanism' at the Smithsonian.

  • Elie Mystal [09-05] Donald Trump really is the biggest loser. For starters:

    The Trump administration repeatedly lost in court this week. A federal judge in California ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act when he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Trump violated the law when he attempted to cut off federal funding to Harvard. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump's tariffs are illegal. And a panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the most conservative and reactionary appellate court in the country — ruled that Trump's targeting of Venezuelans was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act.

    One reason for not celebrating is that the Supreme Court can still reverse most of these rulings. But they all reflect Trump actions, so (a) they've already had impact, and (b) frustrating them reinforced the idea that Trump needs even more support and power to overcome the forces against him and those he represents. This is a column which rounds up a lot of miscellany: notably this:

    In her new book, Amy Coney Barrett positions herself as a helpless cog in a legal machine that gives her no choice but to rule the way she does, even if she doesn't like it. As Joe Patrice explains over at Above the Law, her entire act is risible. But it's an act we've seen from every first-year, fascist-curious law student who wants to make a career as a Federalist Society judge.

    Mystal also references:

    • Elie Mystal [09-04] The military has officially entered the deportation business: "The administration's decision to deploy military lawyers as immigration judges is terrible and illegal, but when has that ever stopped Trump?"

    • Steve Vladeck [09-02] 176. Illinois v. Texas: "A quick look at President Trump's (apparent) plan to send uninvited and unfederalized Texas National Guard troops into Illinois — and how it could (and maybe should) quickly end up in the Supreme Court."

  • Amanda Marcotte [09-03] Trump's long weekend of humiliation: "The harder he tries to be a dictator, the more he's mocked by both Americans and foreign leaders." Same theme as Mystal's piece, but less obviously written by a lawyer:

    Alas, Trump is still alive, but there is a consolation prize for those who were holding vigil: He and the White House reacted with over-the-top defensiveness, removing all doubt that the infamous narcissist was feeling deeply embarrassed by the gleeful speculation of his demise.

    While it may be impossible to dissuade the faithful, it certainly isn't hard to get under il Duce's paper-thin skin. [Original draft had der Führer, but upon reflection I opted for the diminutive form. I also changed "thin" to "paper-thin" per Marcotte.]

  • Richard Luscombe [09-04] Trump's second presidency is 'most dangerous period' since second world war, Mitch McConnell says: "Former Senate leader likens administration's fixation with tariffs to isolationist policies of the US in the 1930s." As I'm not alone in pointing out, McConnell blew his chance to get rid of Trump during the second impeachment vote: had he and a handful of other Republicans voted to convict, Trump could have been disqualified under the 14th amendment from running again, which would have kept him off the ballot in 2024. At the time, it would have cost Republicans nothing, as Trump was already out of office.

  • Daniel Warner [09-05] Donald Trump's media domination. Pardon me while I scream: Why anyone has even the slightest interest in this flaming asshole is one of the few things about the world I find utterly incomprehensible. But Warner has a theory (or two):

    Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It's exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." . . .

    This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump's relation to the media:

    "Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was — still is — the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods."

    The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can't get enough of him.

    This points to:

    • Stef W Kight [2017-09-22] The insane news cycle of Trump's presidency in 1 chart. While the topic labels are cryptic, and the events 8 years old, I remember literally every one of them, even though most are trivial and stupid, and those that aren't trivial (e.g., Putin, North Korea, repealing Obamacare) were handled as stupidly as possible.

  • David Friedlander [09-06] Trump bump: "The president has jumped into the mayor race. But is her helping Cuomo or Mamdani?" He probably sees this as win-win: if Cuomo does win, he can claim credit; if not, he gets an enemy he can hate from a distance -- actually two: Mamdani and New York City -- and he knows how to play that with his base.

  • Andrew Lawrence [09-08] Trump's strongman image got boos at the US Open, and perhaps that was the point: "It was just the authoritarian image Donald Trump hoped to project at the US Open: the president himself, looming from Arthur Ashe Stadium's giant screens like Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Gate, as he stood at attention for the national anthem." Also this:

    • Bryan Armen Graham [09-07] The USTA's censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American: "By asking broadcasters not to show any protest against Donald Trump at Sunday's final, the governing body has caved to fear while contradicting its own history of spectacle." Doesn't this article just feed into his cult? Trump thrives on being hated more than any president since FDR (or probably ever). And is anything more American than hypocrisy? (I could riff on cowardice as well, but probably would wind up defending it.)

  • Radley Balko [09-08] Roundup: One month of authoritarianism. "Here's what happened in just one month of the Trump administration's dizzying push toward autocracy." This is a very long bullet list. It's likely he has more in the archives.

  • Moira Donegan [09-09] Trump apparently thinks domestic violence is not a crime.

  • John Ganz [09-09] Trump's petty-tyrant brand of fascism: "The GOP president is both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss."

  • Kojo Koram [09-09] From Washington to Westminster, the populist right needs to erase history to succeed. It's up to us to resist: Trump you know about. Farage is also pushing his own "patriotic curriculum."

  • Jeremy Varon [09-11] Trump is already at war:

    Trump's current penchant for military aggression has odd roots in his professed disdain for the "stupid wars" of recent decades. His "peace" persona is skin deep. Trump supported the Iraq War before it began, turning against it only when it bogged down.

    One gets little sense that he grew to question dodgy interventions based on judicious assessments of what conflicts are, for reasons of principle or national interest, worthy of military sacrifice. "Stupid wars" are for him simply ones that America can't decisively win. And winning is the ultimate measure of strength, or virtue, or sound policy.

    Trump's fondness for this view has long been clear. Recall his claim that Senator John McCain, for the sin of being captured, was "not a war hero." Or his disparaging the U.S. dead in a French World War Two cemetery as "losers" and "suckers" because "there was nothing in it for them." Even winners can be losers, when the victory is not a life-sparing blowout. True to form, Trump praises the "Department of War" moniker for sending "a message of victory."

    Military victory, most simply, means overwhelming one's foe, with minimal loss of American life. So Trump punches down, attacking those with little capacity or will to fight back. Hapless, alleged drug smugglers on the high seas are no match for U.S. missiles. Neither is the Venezuelan army, should President Maduro be baited into a response that triggers a full-bore U.S. assault. Nor can undocumented immigrants — vulnerable, frightened, often poor — physically resist ICE agents with big guns. Americans outraged at the assault on their communities and neighbors are stymied as well. The homeland, for Trump, is a soft target, with a near-guarantee of zero losses. Winning indeed.

    Actually, the Bushes aimed to "punch down" as well. The younger just underestimated the consequences, as bullies are wont to do. The author has a book: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror.

Democrats:

  • Jamelle Bouie [2024-12-18]: Now is not the time for surrender: Reminded of this because he quoted a chunk of it on Bluesky:

    This is a grave mistake. Trump's hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He'll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition -- to impose a form of autarky on the United States -- is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated h im to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won't reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

    Obviously, the big miss here was that Congressional Republicans have been totally aligned with and subservient to Trump, so their thin majorities have held, even to the extent of bypassing their own filibuster rules in the Senate. Moreover, corporate America, including big media companies, have jumped at the opportunity to debase themselves to please Trump. (And they've kept very quiet whatever reservations they may have felt to his tariffs and other economic policies.) Much of this is unsurprising, given the way the election spun in its last couple months -- although I admit I resisted recognizing it at the time. But the last line is spot on, and you can prove it by noting that while Trump's popularity has steadily dropped since January, the Democrats not only haven't picked up his losses, they've actually lost approval alongside him.

  • Matthew Sheffield [2024-12-09] Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally: "Author Erik Loomis discusses how labor unions and liberal religious organizations preserve institutional memories and explain progressive viewpoints." Interview with Loomis, who has written books like A History of America in Ten Strikes, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice, and Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe. First thing I was struck by here was the section "Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years." I would have followed that immediately with "but they talk to their donors all the time." The donors are their patrons, their constant companions, their friends, and ultimately their eyes and ears. And politician, like fishers, naturally value, and tend to obsess over, landing the big donor over the little voter. In the short term, that's seen as the key to success. Over the longer term, it's their ticket to the revolving door. The next section is "The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party." Everything else here is useful, ending with "Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win."

    I mean, that's the lesson Democrats need to take care of, right? You, having a candidate who could articulate a policy is not going to win. Nobody cares. Having a candidate that can articulate your hopes, your dreams, your fears, or your hatreds, that's a win. That's a much more winning approach, right?

    And they'd better learn that, right? Some, I don't know, like. The conditions in 2028 are likely to be different, right? So maybe a Josh Shapiro Gretchen Whitmer, some of these people on a fairly deep Democratic bench could win, but if they are going up against somebody, presumably not Donald Trump, but who can continue to channel the kind of Trumpian resentment.

    There's a very good chance that while we may think that these people are clowns, that they are in fact incredibly strong candidates because the everyday low information voter sees them as articulating their again, hopes, dreams, fears, and or hatreds. And if Democrats don't learn that. Then it's going to be very difficult for them to tap into what is a very clear desire for a populist politics in this country.

    And populism could go either way, right? Populism can be incredibly reactionary as in Trumpian populism, or it can be channeled for a progressive, for progressive aims as it was in the 1930s. Democrats have to figure out how to manage that. And if they don't, then people that we might think are idiots and clowns, like anybody who's been appointed into the Trump administration, like one of them is probably going to be the candidate in 2028, whether it's a Vance, or another candidate, or Laura Trump, I mean, or Dana White, the head of UFC, like maybe a perfect Republican candidate.

  • Harold Meyerson [08-28] The idiocy (both moral and strategic) of the Democratic National Committee: "At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on US provision of offensive weapons to Israel." The article stops there, but unfortunately the idiocy doesn't. This title can be recycled regularly.

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-03] What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom's Trump mockery. I don't see Newsom as a viable presidential candidate, and I suspect his trolling will only reinforce that view, but I don't mind him having a little fun at Trump's expense, and given his target, it's hard to imagine that he could escalate into excess -- that may be a fundamental flaw in his strategy. But his example reminds us that Democrats are looking for someone who can and will fight back, and he understands that much, and is auditioning for the role.

  • Anthony Barnett [09-03] Stephen Miller calls Democrats a "domestic extremist organization": "Congressional Democrats should demand that he retract his grotesque claims or resign." No, they shouldn't. They should reply in kind, or just shrug him off, as in why should anyone care what a fascist troll thinks? He's so clearly obnoxious that you could use him as the public face of the Trump regime. Demanding an apology just grants him power he doesn't deserve.

  • Chris Lehmann [09-03] What makes Democrats so afraid of Zohran Mamdani? More on Mamdani:

  • Jeet Heer [09-05] Old, wealthy Democrats are sabotaging their won party: "The problem of gerontocracy includes the donor class." More like the problem of the donor class includes some old-timers.

  • Ross Barkan:

    • [09-05]: Imagining an imperial Democratic president: Sure, dream on. I expect the courts to spin on a dime, pretty much like they did when Trump took charge. The only things that might limit them are overwhelming popular support, and fresh legislation that explicitly allows a Democratic president to do what Trump can only do with executive orders. And if the courts still obstruct, you can impeach some miscreants, and create new court positions which can be filled with more reasonable jurists. But Biden and Obama wound up making extensive use of executive orders, especially after Congress was lost, and both took heat from Democrats for not going farther. Trump has demolished many of the inhibitions they felt, and many Democrats will push their next president to do much more, especially how important it has become to revise his rules and replace many of his personnel.

    • [08-31]: Democrats will have to shift on Israel. But when? That, of course, is a theme of his recent book on the 2024 election. More generally, Democrats have to decide whether they're for or against war, for or against racism, for or against universal rights, or they want to spend their remaining days trying to convince voters that Israel deserves to be exempted from the standards of justice and decency they expect everyone else to adhere to. The main reason Democrats lose elections isn't that people disagree with the ideals they like to tout. It's that they don't find Democrats to be credible advocates because, well, they're conflicted and incompetent.

    • [2021-03-28]: The three factions of the American left: "Understanding what it means when we talk about 'the left' in America." This is an old (2021) piece that popped up in some discussion somewhere. Seemed like it might be useful, although I'm having trouble following it. I think he's saying the three factions are: (1) The Socialist Left (specifically, the DSA, but he sees Sanders are the leader); (2) The Liberal Left (here Warren is a leader; but under them he also mentions "The Alphabet Left," of which WFP is the only example given; and (3) The Moderate Left, which needs some more explanation:

      The moderate voter is not more fiscally conservative, in a classic sense, than even the socialist voter, but the moderate retreats from certain left signifiers. Unlike the socialist, the moderate is proudly pro-capitalist. Unlike the liberal, the moderate does not treat patriotism or religion as an embarrassing or ironic vestige of a lost world. Many moderates earnestly embrace nationalism and American iconography. They go to church on Sundays and, if they live in small towns, might organize their lives around religious institutions. Secularism is the default in both the socialist and liberal left; moderates are far more likely to turn to religion to give meaning to their lives.

      There is good news for those who want Americans to embrace incredibly progressive or even socialistic economic policy: moderates are in full support, as long as it's packaged appropriately.

      He then goes on to say that "unlike 20 or 30 years ago, there is no moderate faction of the Democratic Party complaining about deficit spending or the growth of welfare. RIP the Atari Democrat. RIP neoliberalism." The "Atari Democrat" article is dated 2016. I've heard the term, but needed a refresher, so we're basically talking about Clinton + Silicon Valley. "Neoliberal" I know all too well, both as Charles Peters and Milton Friedman. I wouldn't dismiss the existence of either of them within the Democratic Party. What progress may have been made under Biden is that some of them may now agree that some things should be done to actually help labor and the poor, instead of just assuming that everyone who loses their job to globalization and financialization will land on some kind of ritzy "symbolic manipulator" job (per Robert Reich). But lots of Democrats like that are still around, still chasing money, even if they've loosened up a bit.

  • Isaac Chotiner [09-08] Texas's gerrymander may not be the worst threat to Democrats in 2026: An interview with Nate Cohn, "the New York Times' chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters."

  • Eric Levitz [09-10] Democrats can't save democracy by shutting down the government: "The party should only force a shutdown for its own political gain."

  • Gabrielle Gurley [09-12] Virginia special election shaves GOP House margin: "Democrat James Walkinshaw triumphs in a ginormous victory." This was one of the seats elderly Democrats won in 2024 then lost through death, so this isn't really a pickup. Another one, in Arizona, is up for a vote on Sept. 23.

  • Andrew Prokop [09-12] Democrats are on the verge of a dangerous mistake: "There's one big guardrail left on Trump's ambitions." He means the Senate filibuster. Republicans have used long used it to keep Democrats from passing much-needed reforms, or at least to dilute them to ineffectiveness. But if Democrats use the filibuster to block some Republican outrage? Republicans could just change the rules to get rid of the filibuster — as, indeed, they've already done to keep Democrats from blocking their extremist judicial nominations. Unexplained is what good a rule is if you can't use it, but they're free to use it against you? Not much, as far as I can see.

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Current Affairs:

Ezra Klein [01-17] Democrats are losing the war for attention. Badly. Actually, just an interview with Chris Hayes, relating to his book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, with a title cleverly chosen to grab your attention. Why was Trump able to win with lies while Democrats struggle to make anyone aware of their accomplishments? Attention is one obvious metric which is skewed ridiculously in favor of Republicans and especially Trump. I've read Hayes' book, and he makes a lot of interesting points. But he also engages in hyperbole, because he knows the surest way to get attention is to stick your neck out, become conspicuous, and flaunt it as far as you can get away with it. And he wants attention as much as his subjects do. It is, as he admits, his business. So it's not surprising that he overrates it, especially its fungibility -- which in his business may translate directly into advertising revenues, but for most people the profit motive is less obvious. Still, it's useful as a prism, not least because it renders part of the scheme opaque.

  • Derek Thompson [02-28] The end of reading: Only an excerpt of a transcript from a podcast, probably got here from a link in the Klein/Hayes interview. One stat: "50 years ago, about 40 percent of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year compared to about 12 percent who hadn't read any. And now those percentages have flipped."

George Salis [06-30] Borne back ceasefully: a rare interview with Tom Carson: He was one of the rock critics Christgau cultivated in the late 1970s. I first heard about him when he wrote a review of Brian Eno's Another Green World that was good enough it almost bumped my assigned piece. I met him once in New York, uneventfully, and read him as regularly as I could, though not as often as my wife read his Esquire reviews (usually on the newsstand). He was one of two critics Christgau tapped to fill in while he was off doing the CG-70s book -- the other one I remember better, probably because he didn't do as good a job. So I had something of a bond with him, with mixed feelings, but he wrote a brilliant piece on 1945, especially the observation that winning WWII was the worst thing that happened to America. Shortly after that, he published a novel called Gilligan's Wake, and I felt like he could have written it just for me. (I knew the TV show intimately, and most of the literary and historical references -- not that I ever made any headway through Joyce, but that seemed unnecessary. The only choice he made that I strongly differed with was saying nice things about Bob Dole.) I still frequently refer back to a couple of key concepts from the novel: the notion of America's perpetual innocence illustrated by Mary-Ann's self-healing virginity; the argument that America exists only for a certain group of people: the true Americans. I became reacquainted with him when he edited my essay in the Christgau Festschrift Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: A Rock & Roll Critic Is Something to Be.

Robert Kuttner [07-30] Tom Lehrer and Mort Mintz, RIP: "Both challenged American smugness, one with satire and the other with great journalism."

Daniel Felsenthal [08-01] A book called Fascism or Genocide that's reluctant to discuss either: A review of Ross Barkan's "engrossing, literary analysis of the 2024 election disappoints with its blinkered vision of US politics." The book is Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. The title comes from a Palestinian activist's view of the Trump or Harris choice, although the review tells us Barkan was reluctant to go deeper into either topic (but especially Gaza). This sounds like a version of the book I've been contemplating on the 2024 election, perhaps one where the focus is on the cognitive dissonance that allowed voters for both candidates to ignore much of what each stood for (which in the case of Harris included democracy, at least as we knew it, and some semblance of justice under law and economic opportunity for many, if not really all). Instead, people voted on phantom fixations and whims, which tilted to the macabre, bequeathing us a suddenly real dystopia.

Nick Turse: National security fellow for The Intercept, has been covering the Trump military everywhere, with a unique specialty in Africa. I've touched on many of these stories above, and could have distributed them accordingly, but for now, let's keep them together to see the pattern:

David Dayen:

Sarah Jones [08-20] The manifest destiny of J.D. Vance. I can't say as the analogy occurred to me, but not since McKinley has there been an American president so ebullient about expanding American territory, from Greenland down into Mexico (or perhaps Venezuela is next?). One snag may be that land comes with people already on it, but Israel has some ideas about that (updating Hitler's use of America's own Manifest Destiny idea).

It's not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants who it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending," as DHS wrote in its post of Gast's work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.

Harold Meyerson [08-25] A federal appellate court finds the NLRB to be unconstitutional: "And just like that, it frees Elon Musk -- and any fellow employers -- to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed." This reverses 88 years of rulings upholding the act's constitutionality. It's like they're daring us to revolution.

The New Republic: David W. Blight edited a special issue on Trump Against History, asking "how is Trump changing our sense of who we are?" Titles here:

  • Johann Neem: Trump is the enemy of the American Revolution: "He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it's our responsibility to uphold the Founders' legacy."

  • Molly Worthen: What besieged universities can learn from the Christian resurgence: "Educators can fight back against Trump's attacks by re-embracing 'old-fashioned' disciplines and ideas."

  • William Sturkey: Trump's white nationalist vision for the future of history: "The administration is using the tools of the state to influence — even poison — how America's racial history will be taught in our public forums and schools."

  • Edward L Ayers: Trump's reckless assault on remembrance: "The attempts of his administration to control the ways Americans engage with our nation's history threaten to weaken patriotism, not strengthen it."

  • Michael Kazin: The two faces of American greatness: "It is the task of historians to grapple with Trump's favorite concept — and to redefine it."

  • Jen Manion: Learning history is a righteous form of resistance: "It's a way to combat Trump's attempts at remaking the past to justify erasing protections for the most vulnerable."

  • James Grossman: "Indoctrination"? We call it "education." "It's not 'divisive' to teach about division. It's divisive to bury it."

  • Geraldo Cadava: The diversity bell that Trump can't un-ring: "The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed."

  • Amna Khalid: Authoritarianism is made — and it can be unmade: ""Autocrats do not merely fade away; they have to be countered and stopped."

  • David W Blight: What if history died by sanctioned ignorance? "We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion." Includes a useful summary of the Nazi ascent in 1930s Germany (I edited this to use a numbered list):

    In Richard J. Evans's trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:

    1. the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
    2. widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
    3. the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
    4. the Nazis' ritualistic "dynamism," charisma, and propaganda machinery;
    5. the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy
    6. the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes
    7. they knew whom and what they viscerally hated — communists and Jews — and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
    8. vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.

    All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

    In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

  • Leslie M Harris: The high price of barring international students: "Global collaboration is necessary for success, if not survival, in our hyper-connected world."

Trevor Jackson [08-25] The myth of clean energy: "Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion?" Review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Part of the argument here is that new energy technologies don't directly replace old ones, and often require more use of the old ones, at least in the short term (e.g., a lot of oil and gas, and still some coal, goes into making the turbines that generate electricity from wind). That isn't news, and certainly doesn't discredit the shift from fossil to renewable energy sources. Fressoz is co-author of an earlier book, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, which I've ordered.

Henry Giroux [08-29] Domestic terrorism and spectacularized violence in Trump's warfare state: I don't often read, much less cite, his pieces, because the language and hyperbole don't strike me as all that useful (e.g., Resisting the deadly language of American fascism; Against the erasure machine; Trump's reign of cruelty; Trump's theater of cruelty; Childicide in the age of fascist theocracies; Neoliberal fascism, cruel violence, and the politics of disposability; The nazification of American society and the source of violence). But we've entered a stage where reality is rising to meet its most fevered denunciation, so maybe we need to invoke the specter of nazi/fascism not to scare the naive but to grasp the full enormity of what is happening.

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media's complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home. . . .

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich's insight into the fascist "perversion of pleasure" is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno's warnings about the authoritarian personality come into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

Besides, this piece led me to others, like:

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [09-01]: Defender of the backwoods: the good life of Andy Mahler.

  • [09-05]: Roaming Charges: Multiple megalomaniacs. Starts with the US attack on a boat near Venezuela. When I asked google for "us sinks boat near venezuela," AI replied:

    There are no recent or documented incidents of the United States sinking a boat near Venezuela, although there have been historical concerns about Venezuelan narcotics trafficking and tensions between the two nations regarding foreign involvement.

    However, further down the same page, we find:

    The Wikipedia entry notes:

    James Stavridis, a former US Navy admiral, characterized the strike and other US military activity around the same time as gunboat diplomacy intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of Venezuelan oil rigs and materiel. He wrote that drug interdiction was likely not the sole reason for the increased US military activity. On September 5th Trump ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighters, to conduct combat air patrols in the region and support the Southern Caribbean fleet, amid growing tensions. Following the flyover of the USS Jason Dunham, Trump gave permission to shoot down Venezuelan planes if they presented a danger to U.S. ships.

    In an exchange on X in which writer Brian Krassenstein said "killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime", Vice President JD Vance responded "I don't give a shit what you call it."

    Much more here, of course. Notable quote from Benjamin Balthasar: "It's funny how the Right likens everything to slavery, except slavery, much the way everything is antisemitism, except actual antisemitism."

  • [09-12] Roaming Charges: The broken jaws of our lost kingdom: Starts with a personal story about being shot at while protesting the Iraq war in 2003, then notes: "The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets." He also notes that Trump said nothing about the recent assassination of Democrats in Minnesota, or the "173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month," although he added that Trump's quiet "was probably welcome, given what he might have said." He then lists some of the right-wing incitements to further violence I noted below. He digs up more, of course, including a 2023 Kirk quote: "I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational." It's not often you see a right-winger put their body where their mouth has gone. St Clair also notes, "After these kinds of traumatic episodes, Fox News invariably tries to coax Trump into saying something humane, but time after time, he shows that he just can't do it."

    On other fronts, note:

    • The 400 richest people in the US are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.

    St Clair also cited a tweet from Sen. Elissa Slotkin:

    We are in an AI Race with China right now. The last ti me we were in such a race - with Russia on nuclear technology - we won because we set up the Manhattan Project. We need that level of ambition again, for the modern age.

    I've often sympathized with Slotkin when she was critiqued from the left, but this is wrong on more levels than seemed possible in just three sentences. She assumes: that AI and nukes are comparable; that both are worth pursuing; that there is a race with a definite goal; that the "race winner" gets some kind of advantage; that the "race loser" is a failure; that "ambition" is measured by such a race. She also gets basic history wrong: the Manhattan Project was set up out of the misplaced fear that Germany was developing such weapons; Russia's nuclear program was a response to the US using nuclear weapons, and threatening Russia in what became known as the Cold War only after both sides had but respected and refrained from using nuclear weapons (although most vocal threats came from US warriors, from 1940s calls for preëmptive attack before Russia could respond in kind up through Nixon's "madman" theory). Also note that Slotkin is falling back on one of our dumbest tropes, the notion that declaring war proves we are serious -- although in examples like the "war on poverty" and "war on drugs," that seriousness quickly dissipated after the PR campaign, not so much for lack of serious effort as because war didn't work on abstract targets.

Harold Meyerson [09-01] Trump celebrates Labor Day as the most anti-union president ever: "His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy." More on labor:

[09-09] Five technological achievements! (That we won't see any time soon.) "I seem to have become CT's resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things we're not going to see between now and 2050."

  1. Nobody is going to Mars.
  2. Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining.
  3. Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power.
  4. There will be no superconductor revolution.
  5. There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives. We're not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes.
  6. Airships.

Matthew Duss [09-09] Encase in amber: "Biden's wars and the unmaking of liberal foreign policy." The subtitle suggests a ringing and much deserved indictment, but the article itself is just a review of Bob Woodward's latest insider blabfest, succinctly titled War. While Woodward has no opinions of whatever he writes about -- or perhaps I should say, conveys from his insider sources -- Duss is fairly admiring of Biden's "restraint" regarding Ukraine. While as I'm sure I've made clear by now, I mostly blame Putin, we still haven't seen a clear history on what Biden did or did not do between taking power and Putin's invasion. After all, it took Putin 8 years between the 2014 coup and secession and the 2022 invasion, so what spooked him? Where the record is clearer is how little Biden did after the invasion, and especially after the war stalemated, to negotiate a peace. That's been bad for Ukraine, bad for Russia, and bad for the world, including the US. But if Ukraine suggests that Biden and his crew didn't feel like peace was worth their effort, Gaza not only proved it, it showed that they had no regard for human rights, they had no clue how to talk about war, and they had no willpower to back up what few humanitarian sentiments they could muster. As Duss notes, not only did Biden's wars cost them the election, they still have no comprehension of their failures.

Jill Lepore [09-10] How Originalism killed the Constitution: "A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution."

David Dayen [09-10] Political violence and the reality distortion field: "Sadly, we've always had violence in America; what's different today is the aftermath, and the battle to define political opposition amid violence." The occasion for this article was the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed today. Dayen starts by decrying and condemning all political violence, and offers very little information about Kirk -- probably for the best, given that it's hard to say anything about Kirk that couldn't be misconstrued, especially by trigger-happy right-wingers, as suggesting that he had it coming. Dayen does place the shooting among the "47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year" (by the time of writing, Kirk's wasn't even the most recent). But his bigger point was how the right sought to exploit this shooting not just for political advantage but to direct violence against the left:

My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I've seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn't really matter when there's an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

"The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization," said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. "Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination," said writer Tim Urban. "The Left is the party of murder," said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

I'm not interested in collecting opinions about Charlie Kirk, but for an example for the first quoted paragraph, consider this from Barack Obama:

We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie's family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

As a non-believer, "praying" always triggers my bullshit detector, but then I start wondering what Obama's selection algorithm is for who he prays for -- I doubt that he has time to qualify thousands of Gazans (or Africans, or hundreds of ordinary American citizens) for personal attention (like knowing spouse names and counting children). And if he's so selective, why single Kirk out, except perhaps that he's semi-famous? Surely he's not a fan? I also don't care for the motivation clause, which suggests that condemning some murders turns on motivations. But then, as someone who's ordered and rationalized murders, that may be the way his brain works.

Along these same lines, Eric Levitz tweeted:

We do not yet have any confirmation of the shooter's political ideology or motivation.

In recent years, political violence has emanated from both the left and the right.

The way to honor the memory of a "free speech" proponent is not to crack down on progressive speech.

The casual "both sides do it" tone is completely baseless, as is claiming Kirk as a free speech proponent. And scoring shooters by incidental ideological attachments is just a pointless game, unless you can show that the ideology promotes violence (which, come to think of it, right-wingers often do, including implicitly in their opposition to regulating guns). In his usual too-little, too-late mode, Levitz qualified his "both sides" assertion with statistics, a chart show 444 total deaths from "Domestic Extremist-Related Killings in the U.S. by Perpetrator Affiliation," where right-wingers were responsible for 75%, Islamists for 20%, and "left-wing extremism (including anarchists & Black nationalists)" 4%, with 1% unaccounted for.

As for the second quoted paragraph, the first example I ran across was a tweet from someone named Matt Forney:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

I don't know who this guy is -- but his X handle is @realmattforney, so he must think he's somebody special, and the image showed 687K views by 3:09PM, so less than 3 hours after the shooting -- but you have to not just reel in disgust but actually marvel at some pundit whose first thought after a news event was "what would Hitler do?" Similar, minus only the explicit Nazi appeal, reaction from Laura Loomer (who I have heard of):

It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.

If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain.

We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all.

The Left is a national security threat.

Trump himself took up this same line of argument, here:

For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges and law enforcement officials.

And while right-wingers are lambasting Bluesky for "cheering the assassin," the closest thing to an off-color comment I've seen there was from "Kim," who wrote:

Remember while they are chastising you for not mourning a dead Nazi, these are the same cunts who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse and gave him a television contract.

Calling Kirk a Nazi may be rude, and may even be technically inaccurate (not something I'm expert enough, or interested enough, to argue one way or the other), but its relationship to terrorism isn't real, not even in some hazy stochastic correlation. Trump just fixates on it because it hits close to home. But the use of violent hate speech is hundreds or maybe thousands of times more prevalent on the right than on the left. It's so common it rarely gets noticed. But the incredible whining on the rare occasion the tables get turned is pretty disgusting.

By the way, everyone dies in vain. That may not be right, but it's just the way the world works. That's just a rhetorical device that sounds sensible until you give it any thought. Someone should write up a full guidebook to how to make bogus right-wing arguments, not because the right needs one, but to simplify deciphering -- much like Gramsci argued that Machiavelli wrote The Prince not for actual princes, who grew up learning those tricks, but for the rest of us, to understand what they were doing.

More background on Kirk and/or reaction to his shooting:

  • A Mighty Girl [09-10] Three months, two political killings: the poison in our politics. The other assassination featured here was Emerita Melissa Hortman, a Democratic leader of the Minnesota House, although her husband, also killed, was mentioned only in passing (see 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators.

  • James H Williams [10-10] New York Yankees hold moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.

  • Rev. Graylan Scott Haglar [09-11] The killing of Charles James Kirk: Violent speech leads to violence.

  • Susan B Glasser [09-11] Did Trump just declare war on the American left? "After Charlie Kirk's tragic killing, the President speaks not of ending political violence but of seeking political vengeance." Well, that's what he said. Granted, he's sometimes unclear on what he can and cannot do, and on when and if what he says will be taken seriously by his staff, his fans, and everyone else. But what he says does give you some insight into what he's thinking and what he wants to see happen, which is mostly evil.

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [09-11]: What Charlie Kirk meant to young conservatives: "The late Talking Points USA [sic] leader built a movement that will outlive him."

  • Ben Burgis/Meagan Day [09-11]: Charlie Kirk's murder is a tragedy and a disaster: This joins "most on the Left [who] have rightly condemned his murder," but focuses more on the threat of right-wing vengeance for martyrdom, which they worry may be facilitated by failing to show due remorse and contrition. No doubt the treat is real. But why should we set ourselves up for a moral test, and blame ourselves for offenses they've long wanted to do, that Kirk himself was at the center of. It's not like Kirk ever felt the slightest twinge of guilt over the genocide in Gaza, or all sorts of other offenses. He lived to amass power to inflict terror, and his followers have no interest in anything but exploiting his death to further those same goals. I don't know how to stop them, except by making clear how horrible what they want to do really is. But blaming anyone other than the one who killed him won't help. Nor does offering sympathy when all it will do is inflate his importance and be used to hurt others.

  • Eric Levitz [09-11]: The right's vicious, ironic response to Charlie Kirk's death: "They're calling him a martyr for free speech as they demand a violent crackdown on progressive dissent." Even here, and even though he clearly knows better, he can't help but kick at some phantom leftists to burnish his both-sidesism.

  • Joan Walsh [09-11]: Let's not forget who Charlie Kirk really was: "The right-wing influencer did not deserve to die, and we shouldn't forget the many despicable things he said and did."

  • Ian Ward [09-12]: Why Charlie Kirk had no counterpart on the left: "Over the past decade, Kirk built an entirely new infrastructure for the GOP." This seems quite plausible, not that I've ever had any interest in understanding how this sort of politics works.

  • Chris Hedges [09-12]: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk: He calls the killing "a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration."

    His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

    Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

    "We have to have steely resolve," said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show "War Room," adding, "Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are." . . .

    The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk's killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.

    The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the "radical left."

    It seems significant that Bannon called his program "War Room" long before the killing, to show us that he had already resolved to wage war, long before Kirk gave him excuse and rationalization. It's worth noting that while Democrats seek to marginalize the left, reducing us to a harmless minority, right-wingers insist on obliterating us. This suggests that they fear something more fundamental, like exposure. They want a public that follows them uncritically, unaware that there is any other alternative.

  • Alain Stephens [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination is part of a trend: spiking gun violence in red states: "It's not Washington or Chicago but Republican-run, reliably right-wing states that lead the nation in gun violence rates."

  • Elizabeth Spiers [09-12] Charlie Kirk's legacy deserves no mourning: "The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division."

  • Elie Mystal [09-12]: How to canonize a white supremacist: "On the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, the certain blowback, and this country's raging gun problem." One piece Mystal spend some time critiquing is Ezra Klein [09-11]: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

  • Zach Beauchamp

    • [09-12]: Let's be honest about Charlie Kirk's life — and death: "We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time." Sure, but oddly enough the right can't: to them it's only how can this help us and/or hurt them (which in their zero-sum world amount to the same)? People who can hold two thoughts can be conflicted. They can feel ambivalent. They can act confused. Carried too far, felt too intensely, we're schizophrenic: floundering, acting in ways that contradict ourselves, or lapsing into catatonia. The right have it so much easier. They're wrong, but at least they're sure of themselves. They can act, boldly, decisively, Too bad they're sociopaths.

      Sure, I'm just riffing on the line. The article sticks to its subject. He says, "I want you to think about two sentences," but when I do I'm not sure the distinction they make is significant, let alone that he's deciphering them right. Doesn't inflection, which isn't clear written down, mean more than order? He cites a lot of pieces (some cited elsewhere in this section, some I'm not bothering with), then attempts to draw a set of "red lines" around what one can and cannot say, blotting out every other possible reaction, and every person who colors beyond his self-righteous lines.

    • [09-11]: Our country is not prepared for this: "On the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk — and the threat to democracy it created."

  • Christian Paz [09-12]: How Charlie Kirk remade Gen Z: "Three reasons his message resonated so strongly with young conservatives." The third is the most interesting: "He tapped into a nascent oppositional culture on campuses, and among youth." I don't really get how or why, or even how much, but this doesn't seem right, and certainly not necessarily so.

  • Jamelle Bouie [09-13]: Charlie Kirk didn't shy away from who he was. We shouldn't either.

    It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn't seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

    But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk's influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

    Also notable by Bouie:

    • [09-10]: They don't want to live in Lincoln's America: A "response, of sorts, to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, whose speech for 'national conservatives' was a direct rebuke of the creedal nationalism of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg." I'm not surprised that right-wingers should hate iconic credos of American liberalism like "all men are created equal" and "government of, by, and for the people" -- I save my own ire for the avowed liberals who are so quick to sell their fellow citizens out. But it's rare, and perhaps a sign of the times, to see "conservatives" like Schmitt come out so explicitly against the original aspirations of American patriotism.

    • [08-27] We are not 'property of Donald Trump'. "The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It is the property of the United States -- of the American people." "The Smithsonian Institution does belong to Donald Trump, either." Yet Trump feels entitled to remake both in his own image, with no consult or consideration of anyone else.

  • John Ganz [09-13] Reflections on violence: "Two reasons for Kirk's murder." The 2nd amendment, and the 1st. I don't particularly agree with either explanation, or with the first section below: I think it's possible to objectively distinguish hate speech, and that it should also be protected as free speech, although one should also be free to reply, even in kind. The real variable is power (as the 2nd section below notes), and that is not symmetrical either in fact or in theory: it is almost invariably the right that feels entitled to suppress the speech of others, or to require that their own favored speech be propagated, because their notion of order requires power to establish and maintain, and cannot withstand scrutiny. (I'm not denying that there are people who identify with the left who are tempted to take up the tools of the right, especially when they have been victimized, and that such people become more and more dangerous as they gain power, but it is not their leftness that drives them to abuse power — it is power itself.)

    It's long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It's actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. . . .

    Norms of civility are also impossible to enforce without abrogating someone's freedom of expression. For instance, some believe that at this time one should refrain from criticizing Kirk and his ilk. That's an exercise of power. Calls to decorum exist to circumscribe what can be said. . . .

    I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse. But I also won't engage in the dirty rhetorical trick that slyly suggests that a speaker created the unruly conditions for his own murder, as that late lamented beau idéal of civility, William F. Buckley, once did about Martin Luther King Jr. I opposed both the substance and form of Kirk's politics and still do. That's my opinion, and I feel it's a reasonable opinion shared by many — by millions in fact — although there are now efforts to drown it out as being unacceptable and disrespectful to the dead. I consider such talk tantamount to intimidation and blackmail, and I resent it. It's the same kind of droning idiocy and enforced conformity that led us from 9/11 to the destruction of civil liberties and to disaster in Iraq.

  • Media Matters [09-10] Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: "Just kill them": Brian Kilmeade. Given the people Trump has pardoned, and the ones he wants to prosecute, it's hard to give him or any other Republican any credit for anything they say about "law and order."

  • Intelligencer Staff [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination and the manhunt for his killer: What happened: "A running account of the shooting and its aftermath." This is the first piece on the shooter I've seen, and as one of the subtitles puts it, "Misinformation about the suspect is all over the place." As I tried to point out before, I don't really care what his motivations and/or identities are. But one tweet by Zachary D Carter seems fairly plausible:

    I see no point in searching for left/right valence in Tyler Robinson. He fits the school shooter archetype: young, disaffected, ideologically amorphous, extremely online and raised in gun culture. The theater of such violence is just expanding to include political assassination.

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Donald J Trump:

    • The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of "WOKE." The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE is BROKE. We have the "HOTTEST" Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

    • Here's another one, which seems to be Trump reminiscing about his days as a Democrat:

      The confused and badly failing Democrat Party did nothing about Jeffrey Epstein while he was alive except befriedn him, socialize with him, travel to his island, and take his money! They knew everything there was to know about Epstein, but now, years after his death, they, out of nowhere, are seeming to show such love and heartfelt concern for his victims. Does anyone really believe' that? Where were they during his very public trials, and for all of those years before his death? The answer is, "nowhere to be found." The now dying (after the DOJ gave thousands of pages of documents in full compliance with a very comprehensive and exacting Subpoena from Congress!) Epstein case was only brought back to life by the Radical Left Democrats because they are doing so poorly, with the lowest poll numbers in the history of the Party (16%), while the Republicans are doing so well, among the highest approval numbers the Party has ever had! The Dems don't care about the victims, as proven by the fact that they never did before. This is merely another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of the others, in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President, and the record setting failure of the previous administration, and the Democrat Party. The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them, it's time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax, and give the Republicans credit for the great, even legendary, job that they are doing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

  • I've seen several this several times, without a source:

    Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

    I would have left out the "draft dodger" bit, which I consider a mark of real courage (although not really in Trump's case).

  • cassius marcellus clay [08-23]: [PS: sorry, lost the link]

    in 10 yrs dem voters asks have gone from "please improve something" to "please stop trump/fix what is being broken" to "you dont even need to accomplish anything just pretend to have the same contempt for the GOP that you do for your voters" and the answer has been "no, send us $3" every time

  • Doris Ravenfeather Gent [08-17]: Meme with picture of Putin and caption: "we did not get Trump elected because we like Trump. We hate America, and he is weak and stu pid, and that is good for us." Gent comments:

    No doubt this is Putin's thought process . . . it may not be an actual quote, but definitely believable . . . Because Trump is weak and Stupid and very manipulative! . . . Annnd, Agent Krasnov is and has been an asset for Putin all along.

    I seriously doubt this, on many counts (not Trump being weak and stupid; while that clearly hurts America, how, or whether, that helps Russia is a different; but first you have to figure out what Putin wants, rather than just assuming he started with hating America, and deriving everything from that, projecting your own global ambitions onto a country with limited means for attaining them). I am saddened to say that the meme was forwarded by a local leftist friend, who isn't normally affiliated with the warmongering Democratic cabal, which just goes to show how poorly the world is understood by even our friends, and how much work it's going to take

  • Nate Silver: not a direct link to something that evidently appeared on X (where it looks like an attempt to flatter the algorithm). Normally "more" is followed by "than" (not "that"), but that incoherency is easily lost in trying to imagine what the fuck "Blueskyism" might possibly mean, especially if you assume that it must fit somewhere in the remaining tangle of nebulous concepts.

    Electorally speaking it's more important for Democrats to avoid Blueskyism that leftism. Not that Bluesky is important but it embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people. If you could subtract those the left would win more often.

    Kim draws more conclusions from this than I would, including, "he's a miserable being choosing a miserable life when choosing the be less miserable requires so little action from him." I'm more of the view that he's a spreader of misery than a victim.

  • Dave Roberts [09-01]: Tweet and additional comments, something that could have been said more succinctly and calmly in 2 or 3 paragraphs, but for the record, let's unravel it here:

    To me, the lesson of the pandemic is a very familiar one, although as far as I can tell, no one is talking about it or learning it (which is also familiar). It's about the contrast between America's two political parties.

    When Covid popped up, the parties' reactions were extremely on brand.

    Dems, America's A students, scrambled to do the responsible thing. Strained, sweated to do the responsible thing, to be seen doing the responsible thing, to get the gold star from the (imaginary) teacher.

    Now, of course there were lots of decisions made by Dems in the heat of crisis, with insufficient information, facing no-win trade-offs, that one could go back and second guess. (Indeed, that is US pundits' favorite indoor sport!) Perhaps you would have made the trade-offs differently.

    But the entire Dem professional establishment was desperately trying to do the right thing & be responsible.

    Contrast: immediately upon the arrival of the virus, the right started spreading insane conspiracy theories, attacking public health officials, & refusing to act in solidarity.

    At every single second, they worked their hardest to destroy trust, to foment doubt & anger & resentment, to prevent solidarity.

    And those lies mattered. The vaccine skepticism deliberately spread by the right led to 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths. Again: they caused mass death.

    And then afterward -- this is the part that makes me feel crazy -- all the retrospective analysis & discussion shit on Democrats. They've been on the defense ever since, criticized from all quarters for this or that decision. Much of that criticism is fact-free bullshit, but . . .

    . . . even if you buy it all, surely the party that worked desperately to save lives & end the pandemic deserves more credit, a higher grade, than the party that worked desperately to spread lies & get people killed! Surely they're not the ones that should be apologizing!

    But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them.

    Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.

    Somehow our diseased information environment has produced the net outcome that the pandemic is considered a political problem for Dems, not the party that lied about it & got people killed at every juncture. The party that tried, but not perfectly, to save lives, is being forced to apologize.

    I've written a million threads on this theme, it's pointless, I know. But it's insane. Dems have to try, to be responsible, to please everyone. Republicans just have to jump around like fucking gibbons, throwing shit at the wall, and if they occasionally, accidentally hit something . . .

    . . . it's their targets who must apologize. They're never held responsible for the lies. Never held responsible for getting so many people killed. Never held responsible for anything. It's just the people who care, who try, that we hold responsible, that we shit on & demonize. Never the gibbons.

    Think about it. "Dems were too zealous in trying to prevent the spread of the virus" is, in US politics, a greater disadvantage, a bigger problem, than "Republican lies got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for no reason."

    Just a pathetic fucking country. Pathetic.

    Adding one thing: this whole dynamic is neatly replicated around the issue of climate change. Dems take shit constantly: they're acting too fast, too slow, doing the wrong things, focusing on the wrong tech, bad Dems!

    GOP gibbons just throw shit & lies & block all policy & that's fine I guess.

    Dems care, and try, and for that are punished.

    GOP lies, hurts people, doesn't give a shit, and is rewarded.

    Various comments, including this from Ben Weinberg:

    The way this pathetic state of affairs is such a mass scale self-inflicted regression feels unique to our history. While people went thru far worse for the good of the country, this is the most unsympathetic populace we've ever had.

    My belief is that big tech decided technofascism was preferable to regulation and tried to align algorithms to that in late 2021-22. The idea of a shift absent that just doesn't hold up.

    I don't put a huge amount of stock in the notion that Democrats care where Republicans don't. Another way of looking at this is to go back to Karl Rove's argument that Democrats are bound to study reality, while Republicans are free and bold enough to act and, thereby, create their own better reality. Democrats responded to this by embracing the "reality-based community," but it also locked them into an orbit of conventional thinking where it became impossible to do anything that wasn't underwritten by their corporate sponsors. In effect, they substituted their own phony reality, which constrained them as apologists for the status quo. Democrats sometimes remind me of the "shoot and cry" Israelis, who could never see a way to avoid a war they were bound to regret. And while they could point to their crying as proof that they're living, caring humans, they're effectively no different from the shameless right-wingers they hope to guilt-trip. It's a losing proposition, because if you're going to shoot anyway, it makes sense to go with the side that's really into shooting.

  • Bari Weiss [09-12]: Matthew Yglesias responded to this, adding that "the core of free speech and a liberal society is precisely that I don't need to agree with the hagiographic accounts of Kirk's life and work to find his murder unacceptable and chilling."

    Someone in the newsroom said that this shattering event feels like the aftermath of another Charlie: Charlie Hebdo. It was a decade ago that Islamists burst into the offices of the satirical Paris newspaper and murdered 12 people who worked there.

    One similarity was that the killings were condemned by people all across the left-right political spectrum, as opposed to the killings that are only condemned by the left. Another similarity is that in both these cases, the right jumped on their victimhood as an excuse to foment violence against their supposed enemies. One might contrast this with, say, the bombing of Gaza, where several US Senators skipped the "hopes and prayers" and jumped straight into cheers and jeers, like "finish the job!"

  • Keith Edwards [09-12]: asks "Why did Laura Loomer delete this [tweet from 7/13/25]?"

    I don't ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I'd say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.

    Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.

    Here's another (or possibly just longer) Loomer tweet attacking Kirk. Evidently Kirk's treason against Trump was in criticizing Trump's Israel-directed bombing of Iran.

  • erictastic:

    He was killed on camera. No one's family deserves to have to witness that. It's unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that "I don't care that he's dead." "He's not a hero." "He's a scumbag." "He shouldn't be celebrated."

    I'm talking about George Floyd. You thought I was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

    Further down my Facebook feed, I ran across this, which quoted California D governor Gavin Newsom:

    I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.

    The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.

    I shouldn't complain about safe pablum coming from politicians, who know better than most that anything else will get them crucified. I also don't mind the occasional ironic twist that presents a foe as an unwitting ally, as long as it is remotely credible and/or amusing. But this is more than a bit excessive, and it makes you wonder who Newsom knows, and why.

Current count: 289 links, 18934 words (23786 total)

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44818 [44780] rated (+38), 21 [22] unrated (-1).

After another week of massive thrashing, I finally decided to delay this until after I finished my next Substack Notes on Everyday Life piece. It is called More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. As it goes out in email, I want to give it a night to rest, then reread and edit it tomorrow. (The link above will get you to my first rough draft, in what I regard as the definitive archive for such pieces. I made an edit to the previous column, Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty, which was so minor I didn't bother with updating the copy on Substack.) I wrote the section on Sanders' political program on Monday, while it was raining all day. I wrote the preceding "thumbnail history" today.

The extra day (or may be two, since I only did the cutover around 9 PM on Tuesday) let me push the rated count over 30. I was surprised to see the A-list grow to 10. Not a record, and not much more than last week's 8, but I figured I'd resist my temptation to downgrade the non-jazz releases I rarely spend much time with, especially as Haim, CMAT, and Sabrina Carpenter held up for 3-5 plays each. Still didn't get anything serious written about the latter, but it's not like I haven't been writing about anything.

I should also mention that I have a fair amount of Loose Tabs drafted. Pretty good chance I'll post one of those before next Music Week. It's pretty ugly so far, but I also opened up a book file for the latest political concept. Mostly just gross outline cribbed from a letter which goes back to June 1. As my plan going way back before that has always been to spend a month writing off the top of my head, the fact that I've already procrastinated more than three months bodes ill, but it's a step. A big chunk of tomorrow's post fits in with the thinking.

So it's not like I'm getting nothing done, but the pace remains extremely slow. I did manage to finally get Laura's new computer up and running. Only thing left is to configure the mailer. I had a long-running problem with a light upstairs, which I finally got working (at least with the original halogen bulb; the replacement dimmable LED bulbs come on but never dim, and worse still never turn off -- wonder what could explain that?). I have some padding ready to put up in the carport, to keep from banging the new car doors on the brick. I started to put it up on Sunday, but ran out of light; they it rained, then I wrote, and tomorrow I have a gruesome dentist thing, but it shouldn't take long once I get it started. I got far enough on the woodpile project to take some pictures. Then I noticed that the first round of pictures on it were dated June 19.

I spent some time today shopping for hooks to hang moulding on. I don't urgently need to add it, but I have lots of pieces in the basement. Next step will be to build the recycling kiosk. The idea there is to cobble it together using up some of the most useless pieces of scrap wood. It will sit in the foyer, and collect stuff to give away. I'm looking forward to doing some decluttering after that. Also need to do some plumbing: upstairs sink is probably something I can do, but I'll need some help for the basement floor drain.

That should be enough for the week -- especially Loose Tabs can chew up endless time. Also need to do some work getting Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll set up. We don't need to send invites out until November, but I don't want to put things off to the last minute, per usual. I'm slowly working my way through John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and finding it very useful. I've ordered a bunch more books in the last week, with no idea when/how I'll get to them. The way things are going, it's doubtful I will.

PS [Sept. 13]: Thought I'd do a brief update on how the week is going. Dentist was no worse than expected (real pain was paying for it). I picked up my new glasses. The computer ones help. The distance ones not enough to get much use (so far), although the short focus bifocals will probably be an improvement. Still haven't dealt with the mailer on Laura's computer. I did get the carport bumper guards up, and still need to caulk around them. Putting off the plumbing work until next week. I also hope to get the kiosk built next week.

I finally sent out my 4th Notes on Everyday Life newsletter, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism Friday night. If you are one of 62 subscribers, you should have it by now. If not, follow the link, or you can read it onsite here. Not much feedback so far: 2 likes, 0 comments, 0 new subscribers. I'm pretty much resigned to this never being much of a thing -- same for Bluesky, where I have 193 posts but followers seem stuck at 124. Much of the Sanders posts can be cut-and-pasted into my new book file (still too cryptic to bother linking to), at which point I can add footnotes and other elaborations.

Robert Christgau published his September Consumer Guide a day after I posted this Music Week. In the interim I had graded Amaarae's Blackstar first at B+(***), then upgraded to A- (he gave it *). I already liked the Haim album, and Mahotella Queens was an automatic A-, but the rest of his A- albums fell short for me (Stampfel and the Oxys don't seem to be available yet), while two lesser-graded albums hit my A-list (Chance the Rapper, Panic Shack). The Whitmore album was a 2018 released, previously reviewed (* by him, ** by me). I gave the Crenshaw album, which is actually remixed odds and sods from 2012-16, a B-. I had S.G. Goodman at B+(**), and haven't revisited yet.

Main reason for doing a mid-week update is to update the NOEL post file, before moving my Loose Tabs draft into a blog post file (3344) to wrap it up: hopefully Sunday, otherwise I'll postpone Music Week until I do. If you're curious, you can get a head start with the draft file. Some good stuff already there. I just added a couple paragraphs to my initial Charlie Kirk take, which is based on a David Dayen piece. No doubt I'll be adding more links today, including some on what an ogre Kirk was, and more on how the right seeks to exploit his killing to increase the level of political violence in America. Maybe I'll even find someone wondering cui bono?

New records reviewed this week:

Baths: Gut (2025, Basement's Basement): American electropop producer Will Wiesenfeld, fourth studio album since 2010 (also has two "B-Sides" compilations), has scattered moments but doesn't sustain them. B [sp]

Marilina Bertoldi: Para Quien Trabajas Vol. 1 (2025, Sony Music Argentina): Argentinian singer-songwriter, considered rock, has a couple previous albums, sort of a new wave sound, in Spanish, impressive until it slips a bit toward the end (10 songs, 29:27). B+(**) [sp]

The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie (2025, Anti-): Indie rock band from New Zealand, singer-songwriter Elizabeth Stokes the singer-songwriter, Jonathan Pearce is lead guitarist/producer, fourth studio album since 2018. B+(***) [sp]

Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend (2025, Island): Pop singer-songwriter, started with Disney as a teen, so this is counted as her 7th album, but just 3rd in my book. This follows up on her breakthrough hit. A- [sp]

Chicago Jazz Orchestra: More Amor: A Tribute to Wes Montgomery (2024 [2025], Chicago Jazz Orchestra): Trombonist Jeff Lindberg is artistic director, with several group albums starting with a Porgy & Bess in 2004. Bobby Broom is featured here on guitar, playing both Montgomery's classics and the chintzier fare of his later years, with no shortage of strings. B+(*) [sp]

Chicago Underground Duo: Hyperglyph (2024 [2025], International Anthem): Rob Mazurek (trumpets, electronics, voice, flutes, bells) and Chad Taylor (percussion, including mbira and kalimba). B+(***) [sp]

CMAT: Euro-Country (2025, CMATBaby/AWAL): Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, third album, all effusively admired, and not without reason, although the big production can be as much work to listen to as they were to concoct. "Ready" is way over the top, enough so that the more modest fare comes as a relief. I'm not very good at parsing her texts, but accept on faith that she's very smart, means well, and is having a remarkably good time with her newfound fame. A- [sp]

George Coleman: George Coleman With Strings (2022 [2025], Savant): Tenor saxophonist, now 90, perhaps best known for his brief term in the Miles Davis Quintet, but he's recorded some outstanding albums on his own: My Horns of Plenty (1991) is a favorite, Eastern Rebellion (1975) is another classic, and A Master Speaks (2016) kicked off one of history's finest octogenarian revivals. Seems like everyone wants to do a strings album sooner or later, even though very few have panned out. Stan Getz, in Focus, is perhaps the only one where the strings are as interesting as the sax; Art Pepper's Winter Moon is one where the strings are as gorgeous as one might hope for, and the sax even more splendid. But early efforts, like Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster, were nothing more than signature saxophone over mediocre backdrops, and that's been par for the course. Bill Dobbins handles the strings here, and gives them a tolerable air of 1940s soundtrack melodrama. Also helping is a fine mainstream rhythm section: David Hazeltine (piano), John Webber (bass), Joe Farnsworth (drums), and Café Da Silva (percussion). A- [sp]

Hannah Delynn: Trust Fall (2025, self-released): Nashville-based folkie singer-songwriter, first album after a couple of EPs, very slow, rather an accident that I gave this sufficient play to warm to some of its details. B+(**) [cd] [09-09]

Dijon: Baby (2025, R&R/Warner): R&B singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas, American but born in Germany to a military family stationed there. Second album, got some rave reviews but I have trouble getting past the glitchiness. B+(*) [sp]

Joe Ely: Love & Freedom (2025, Rack 'Em): Legendary Lubbock singer-songwriter, started in the Flatlanders, his 1978 Honky Tonk Masquerade is an all-time favorite, and he's had lots of good ones since then, most recently 2024's Driven to Drive -- but that one was reconstructed from older demos. This was also based on home studio demos, but no info on how old they are. (One song talks about being 30 but feeling 45. Ely's 78 now.) Still sounds pretty good. B+(***) [sp]

Fieldwork: Thereupon (2024 [2025], Pi): Fourth album under this name, the first in 2002 with pianist Vijay Iyer and sax (Aaron Stewart) and drums (Elliot Humberto Kavee). The second substituted Steve Lehman on sax (2005), and the third brought in Tyshawn Sorey on drums (2008) -- a supergroup, even then, with Sorey contributing 6 songs to 3 for Iyer and 2 for Lehman. All three are superb, as is this new one, from the free rhythmic extravaganza to open to the soft landing to close. Song credits split 5-4-0, but "all tracks collectively developed." A- [cd]

Folk Bitch Trio: Now Would Be a Good Time (2025, Jagjaguwar): Indie folk-rock trio from Melbourne, Australia; first album, after singles going back to 2020. B [sp]

Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2 (2025, Mass Appeal): Wu-Tang rapper Dennis Coles, went solo in 1996, followed by Supreme Clientele in 2000. Regarded at the time as the most gangsta of the Clan, I wasn't a fan at the time, although later albums like Fishscale impressed me. B+(*) [sp]

GoGo Penguin: Necessary Fictions (2025, XXIM): English fusion band, 7th album since 2012, a piano-bass-drums trio but with synths and extra strings. B+(**) [sp]

Omer Govreen Quartet: All Things Equal (2024 [2025], J.M.I.): Israeli-born, Amsterdam-based bassist, has side-credits with Michael Moore and Ziv Taubenfeld, probably his first album as leader, original compositions, played with Aleksander Sever (vibes), Floris Kappeyne (piano), and Wouter Kühne (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Haim: I Quit (2025, Columbia): Three sisters, all sing, play guitar-bass-drums-plus, with producer Rostam Batmanglij (mostly keyboards but also guitar, mandolin, and sitar) co-credited on all songs. I was reluctant at first, but this is pretty catchy. A- [sp]

Ill Considered: Balm (2025, New Soil): London-based group, ten numbered albums plus a few more starting with their eponymous debut in 2017, specialize in free improv built on top of deep grooves, although this one short-changes the groove in favor of solemn ambience. Group is reduced to: Idris Rahman (tenor sax/bass clarinet/flute), Liran Donin (bass/taishogoto), and Emre Ramazanoglu (percussion). Unusual business plan calls for an LP run limited to 300, each with "a unique hand-painted cover by Vincent De Boer [where] each one forms part of a larger 300-piece canvas" (on Bandcamp for £50, limit 1 per customer). B+(**) [sp]

Ill Considered: Live at Eye Film Museum (2024, New Soil): A full live show in Amsterdam, in one 89:28 chunk (although there are obvious gaps between pieces). B+(**) [bc]

Ill Considered & Rob Lewis: Emergence (2024, New Soil): I've tried to follow this group fairly closely, but several recent albums escaped my attention. As best I can figure out, Lewis is a London-based cellist-composer who mostly does soundtrack work. Some of that comes through, only sometimes as overwrought drama. B+(**) [bc]

Ill Considered: UnEvensong (2024, New Soil): Fourth album in as many months, rushed out in early December as a Christmas album, but while titles like "Come All Ye Faithful" and "Frosty the Snowman" are familiar, they don't weigh heavy on the music, which soars (ah, there's a wee bit of "Auld Lang Syne"). B+(***) [sp]

Larry Keel/Jon Stickley: Larry Keel & Jon Stickley (2025, self-released, EP): Two flat-picking guitarist singer-songwriters, filed this under bluegrass, which seems to be where they've been working since 2004 or so. Five songs, 17:09. B [cd]

KRS-One: Temple of Hip Hop Global Awareness (2025, R.A.M.P. Ent Agency): Another old-timer, just turned 60, still able to summon up the anger and the sound ("boom bap back to the basics") of his prime, which like Public Enemy and Wu-Tang sounds especially great right now. Of course, he's even more self-conscious and ever more didactic than his peers, but that's always been his thing. A- [sp]

Laufey: A Matter of Time (2025, AWAL): Icelandic singer-songwriter, last name Jónsdóttir, mother a Chinese classical violinist, has studied in Scotland and at Berklee, lived in DC and Los Angeles, has a twin sister who's a violinist and has a degree in international relations. Third album since 2022, gets some attention from jazz critics, but also hits the pop charts. Whatever this is, it is pretty accomplished. B+(**) [sp]

Billy Lester Trio: High Standards (2017 [2025], Ultra Sound): Pianist, described by Howard Mandel in 1998 as "a late-bloomer on that reticent branch of the jazz tree, the school of Lennie Trisano." His Discogs credits start in 2002 (aside from a composition credit for a song Anthony Braxton recorded first in 1997 as part of his Tristano Project). Trio here with Marcello Testa (bass) and Nicola Stranieri (drums), same as his Italy 2016 album, playing standards plus a closing 9:29 "Free Improvisation." B+(**) [cd] [09-12]

Christian McBride Big Band: Without Further Ado, Vol. 1 (2025, Mack Avenue): Mainstream bassist, emerged as a band leader in the 1990s and has retained his standing as a poll winner. He's had many ventures, with this his fourth big band album. Key here is that he's lined up a long list of big name singers, starting least conventionally with Sting and Andy Summers. B+(**) [sp]

Ashley Monroe: Tennessee Lightning (2025, Mountainrose Sparrow): Pistol Annies singer-songwriter decided to go big on her 7th album (since 2009): 17 songs, 61 minutes. So far hardly anyone has noticed (80/1 at AOTY after nearly a month). I can't say as I noticed much either, at least until the closing "Jesus Hold My Hand." B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg: Looms & Legends (2024-25 [2025], Pyroclastic): Alto sax/clarinet player, tends to work the gentler side of free jazz, and has since 1981. Solo here, includes some shakuhachi, a very attractive album, one that doesn't sound like practice, as most solo reeds albums do. Holds up to multiple replays. A- [cd]

Superchunk: Songs in the Key of Yikes (2025, Merge): Indie rock band from North Carolina, 13th studio album since 1990 (with a 2001-10 gap), Mac McCaughan the singer-songwriter. Got a reputation for political songs recently, but I'm mostly just hearing soaring guitars. B+(**) [sp]

Sunny Sweeney: Rhinestone Requiem (2025, Aunt Daddy): Country singer-songwriter, sixth studio album since 2006. Terrific sound, songs include anthems, as timeless as the clichés they're built on. A- [sp]

Teyana Taylor: Escape Room (2025, Taylormade/Def Jam): R&B singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2014, two gold records so far, also has a fairly substantial acting career. Talks through a lot of this. B [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippett/Louis Moholo-Moholo: Live in Foggia (1985 [2025], Ogun): British saxophonist, b. 1949, not a lot under his own name but side credits start up in 1971, joining the pianist in 1978, and the drummer by 1982, while also working in groups led by Chris McGregor, John Stevens, Tony Oxley, and Barry Guy. This same trio recorded Tern in 1982. Two long pieces here (45:34 and 27:11). In fast company here, he rises to the occasion. A- [sp]

Old music:

Hannah Delynn: The Naked Room Demos (2021, self-released, EP): "Stripped down and straight forward," 5 songs, 18:57. B [bc]

Hannah Delynn: Making Friends (2023, self-released, EP): Five well-crafted, nicely produced songs, 16:58. Leans toward pop, but doesn't deliver much. B [bc]

Evan Parker/Ned Rothenberg: The Monkey Puzzle (1997, Leo): Duo, another one followed in 2007, former plays soprano and tenor sax, latter bass clarinet and alto sax. Parker has a lot of this sort of thing, both solo and duo. Rothenberg adds a nice balance. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg Double Band: Overlays (1991, Moers): Two alto saxophonists (with Thomas Chapin), two electric bassists (Jerome Harris, also on guitar, and Kermit Driscoll), two drummers (Adam Rudolph, credited percussion, and Billy Martin). The basses set up a funk current that the saxes tease at and play with like Ornette Coleman. A- [bc]

Ned Rothenberg: The Crux: Selected Solo Wind Works (1989-1992) (1989-92 [1993], Leo): Seven pieces (54:45), on alto sax (4), bass clarinet (2), and shakuhachi (1). He fills his space with wonder and fascination. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg Double Band: Parting (1996 [2004], Moers Music): The last of three Double Band albums, released after second saxophonist Thomas Chapin's death, with Jerome Harris back on electric guitar and bass, Tony Scherr on electric and acoustic bass, and drummers Michael Sarin and Samm Bennett. Wile some of this is impressive, it can also be overwrought. B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg: Ghost Stories (1999-2000 [2000], Tzadik): Four tracks recorded in three sessions, a 6:30 shakuhachi solo, and three longer: duos with Riley Lee (shakuhachi) and Satoshi Takeishi (percussion), and the 19:41 title piece with cello (Erik Friedlander), pipa (Min Xiao-Fen), and percussion (Takeishi again). B+(*) [sp]

Ned Rothenberg Sync: Harbinger (2001-03 [2004], Animul): Plays clarinet, bass clarinet, alto sax, and shakuhachi, backed by Jerome Harris (acoustic bass, string guitar, acoustic bass guitar) and Samir Chatterjee (tabla). This is very nice. B+(***) [bc]

Ned Rothenberg/Satoh Masahiko: Decisive Action (2003-04 [2004], BAJ): Duo with piano, two sessions, Rothenberg playing clarinet, bass clarinet, alto/soprano sax, shakuhachi. B+(**) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Mike Clark: Itai Doshin (Wide Hive) [10-03]
  • Orhan Demir/Neil Swainson: Wicked Demon (Hittite) [07-14]
  • Wadada Leo Smith/Sylvie Courvoisier: Angel Falls (Intakt) [10-03]
  • Mark Turner: Reflections On: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Giant Step Arts) [10-10]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 1, 2025

Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44780 [44745] rated (+35), 22 [24] unrated (-2).

August is done and dusted. Having learned as a child that summer is the school break from June through August (or Memorial Day through Labor Day), I'd say summer is done too. Were I to look back at my notebooks and planning documents from May, I'm sure I'd be deeply depressed at how little I have to show for this summer -- especially as I recall looking forward to post-operation eyesight, some fairly ambitious home projects, a new car which could make travel possible again, and a newly restructured view of my writing projects. Truth is, I've made some progress on all of those fronts, but they're all unsettled, while time is marching on, or maybe even running out.

I've offered lists of things to do the last couple weeks. Little point in repeating them here. Perhaps I'll have more to show next week. I will note that while I predicted the rated count would fall this week, it's held up pretty well (35 albums), but more notable is the quantity and quality of the A-list albums (8, with 2 at full A grades), and mostly surprises (only 2-3 I had expectations for: Zenón is always good; Cat & the Hounds was Joe Bebco's mid-year top pick and right up my alley; I expected Hooker to be good, but more like 2024's high-B+ The Charcot Sessions). Two albums came from Saving Country Music's mid-year list, two more from Hip-Hop Golden Age's evolving list, and several HM from both sources. I had seen a fair amount of hype for the Jaleel Shaw album, but was in no rush to seek it out, until a copy showed up in the mail (along with the Hancock album I had requested, and the nearly as good Rubalcaba). One thing is that many of the reviews offer very little beyond a slugline and a grade.

Nothing more on Jazz Critics Poll to report. I'm still planning on running it this year, but it's unlikely I'm going to find time to do much more than that. I also made no progress on writing my next Notes on Everyday Life post, after outlining it last week. I did think about a new intro, on why the donor class is willing to indulge Trump's revolutionary fantasies but is terrified of Sanders and other democratic leftists. My guess is that once I start, the piece will come together quickly. But getting to it is a problem. I'm also thinking about using Substack's Notes outlet, less to promote my longer pieces than because much of what I'm thinking about can be written up in a single paragraph, although fitting the character count limits in X and Bluesky can be a pain.

Beyond that, I'm thinking about doing a couple of actual "everyday life" posts: one on the computer I've been building -- which is ready for its smoke test, although I'd still like to tidy up some of the strangling wires (which are too many and often too long); another is a post on the recycling kiosk, which I expect to cobble together as soon as the woodpile project is completed (again, just some tidying up to do before working on the kiosk). Both have been humbling experiences, although I'm sure they'll be remembered more kindly once they're working. Meanwhile, I'm taking the Cassidy book at a leisurely pace, just finishing the chapter on John Hobson's critique of imperialism, which still hasn't sunk in very deep in Washington.

I do have a few Loose Tabs, but they're very hit-and-miss, the longest section the one on Trump administration corruption. I recommended an article, In Trump's D.C., the swamp runneth over, on Bluesky. I got a question today, from Canada, which reads in part:

I know you're astonished with how many people actually voted for an obviously deranged loon, but do you think his voters will ever see through or even care about the grift he's carrying out. Will ordinary joes raise their voices, or will that result in blood in the streets?

With these military deployments, do you think there could be a backlash within the ranks to stop the madness? A little extreme, I know, but things are getting a lot out of hand.

I'm not a good person to be asking this to, partly because I see much more of what's going on than most people do, and partly because I tend to err on the side of optimism (which was much more fashionable when I was a child than it's since become). But since you asked, I think this comes down to a few key questions:

  1. Is Trump going to be popular enough in 2026 (and 2028) for Republicans to win? I don't think he is now, and I don't think there is any chance that his acts are going to help him out. On the other hand, Democrats are also very unpopular right now, but as they are out of power, they're more likely to benefit from Trump's unpopularity than be hurt by their own. Republicans were very unpopular in 2008 and 2020, but for reasons that were largely forgotten about two years later. On the other hand, they do seem to benefit from a double standard.
  2. If Trump sees not being able to win, and if his options to cheat are insufficient, will he try to derail the elections? I don't see how he could do this, but I don't doubt that he would try if he could. Short of this, he does have lots of options to influence the election, and these could (and probably will) get really ugly.
  3. If the elections are held and Republicans lose, could he prevent the winners from taking office? Aside from litigating a few close races, this would amount to staging a coup. While the military is likely to support many normally illegal Trump orders, this would be a very big ask.

The US is a pretty complex political system, with lots of independent power distributed among many institutions. Since inauguration, Trump has made an unprecedented attempt to grab more power than any previous president. And I think he's been more successful than anyone would have predicted, in large part because many institutions -- including big law firms, universities, newly anti-woke businesses, and much of the media -- have knuckled over without a fight. Businesses and financiers are still pretty confident they can buy what they need. And the Republican-packed courts have repeatedly bowed to their "unitary executive." So right now, we don't have a good sense of where everyone's red lines lie. The big player here is the media, which while nowhere near as formidable as in the past can still emerge as as a public conscience to save democracy. Democrats had little success in 2024 painting Trump as a threat to democracy, because most people, led by most of the media, didn't buy the menace. Canceling elections, stealing them, and/or staging a coup could tip the balance, and turn resistance from a seemingly irrational obsession of "premature antifascists" to something mainstream patriots can get behind.

On the other hand, note that even if Democrats win big in 2026, Trump will still be president for two more years, and can still do a lot more damage -- especially if the Supreme Court effectively blesses his dictatorial impulses. And it's going to take decades and/or unprecedented radical democratic majorities to undo the consequences of a monumentally foolish electorate in 2024. As for the Democrats, that's another can of worms.

PS: I should perhaps revise this to note that not everyone is rolling over for Trump. There has been a lot of resistance (and much more grumbling), and I expect that to continue and to grow. Many of the early rollovers came from organizations that wanted to roll over, and they've mostly just embarrassed themselves. (The Washington Post comes to mind, but I've hardly even looked at it since January.) I haven't paid a lot of attention to this growing opposition, as it's had very little effect so far, other than to make people more aware of the problems. But no matter how loudly activists exhort you to march and petition and agitate, the next chance the public will have to make their views felt will be the 2026 elections, still long off. So it's not a bad idea to pace yourself.

As for the Democrats, I've said all along that the old leadership is discredited -- there may be lots of explanations for losing to Trump, but there really are no excuses -- and that whatever new leadership emerges will be measured by how effectively they oppose Trump. Sanders' anti-oligarchy tour was a start, and the response has been heatening. Otherwise, I haven't been much impressed by any Democrats, but they're cautiously testing the waters, pacing themselves. As for the congressional leadership, I figure they're basically playing a "rope-a-dope" game, and I can see where that makes sense at the moment: they don't have the votes, and it does them little good to come off as martyrs. I'm skeptical about this as a strategy, but the longer Trump thinks he can get away with his power grab legally, the less time he'll have to engineer a coup.

When we bought the car, I considered the possibility of driving to Arkansas for the annual Brown Family Reunion. I did see a post today from a distant relative I could have met there, referring back to his "8th great-grandfather, Jeremiah Brown Sr. (1687-1767)," and providing a link to Jeremiah Brown House and Mill Site," a National Register Historic Place in Maryland originally built in 1757 by Brown. I've never seriously looked into my genealogy, but figure it might be an interesting sideline to the memoir project. I do know a bit about my ancestors back to the Civil War, after which Abraham Hull moved from Pennsylvania to western Kansas, and Matthew Brown moved from Ohio to northern Arkansas. I know that Abraham had a grandfather who immigrated in 1798, a refugee from the failed revolution in Ireland. So it looks like the Browns go back even further, but still count as refugees. Good chance John Brown is another distant relative (or so I've been told). None of this has any obvious bearing on how I turned out.

New records reviewed this week:

Gino Amato: Latin Crossroads 2 (2025, Ovation): Pianist, sequel to his 2024 album, arranged a set of standards for latin big band and singers, like "Moonlight in Vermont" and "I Love Paris" and "Windmills of Your Mind" and "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard." B+(*) [cd]

Oren Ambarchi & Eric Thielemans: Kind Regards (2023 [2025], AD 93): Australian guitarist, lots of records since 1998, duo here with a Belgian drummer, ducking and weaving through two sides, 47:12. B+(**) [sp]

Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werlin: Ghosted III (2024 [2025], Drag City): Guitar/bass/drums trio, the latter two Swedish, third album together. B+(***) [sp]

Apollo Brown & Bronze Nazareth: Funeral for a Dream (2025, Escapism): Detroit hip-hop producer Erik Stephens, many albums since 2009, with rapper Justin Cross, less famous but has a lot of credits since 2002. A- [sp]

Rodney Crowell: Airline Highway (2025, New West): Quality country singer-songwriter since 1978, another fine batch of songs. B+(***) [sp]

Jesse Daniel: Son of the San Lorenzo (2025, Lightning Rod): Country singer-songwriter, fifth (or 6th?) album since 2018. B+(**) [sp]

Matt Daniel: The Poet (2025, self-released): Country singer-songwriter from Texas, seems to have a previous album. Don't know from poet, but he's a pretty classic-sounding songster. B+(***) [sp]

Joe Ely: Love & Freedom (2025, Rack 'Em): Legendary Lubbock singer-songwriter, started in the Flatlanders, his 1978 Honky Tonk Masquerade is an all-time favorite, and he's had lots of good ones since then, most recently 2024's Driven to Drive -- but that one was reconstructed from older demos. This was also based on home studio demos, but no info on how old they are. (One song talks about being 30 but feeling 45. Ely's 78 now.) Still sounds pretty good. B+(***) [sp]

Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds Featuring Catherine Russell: Cat & the Hounds (2024 [2025], Turtle Bay): "A 1920s Jazz and Blues Centennial," arranged and produced by Hancock, who plays cornet and C-melody sax. Seems to be his first album, but he scored a coup in getting the singer. Only band member I recognize is Evan Christopher (clarinet/alto sax), but Vince Giordano (bass sax) guests. Terrific songs from the real jazz era. A- [cd]

The Hives: The Hives Forever Forever the Hives (2025, PIAS): Swedish post-punk group, five albums 1997-2012, a hiatus from the departure of their bassist ("Dr. Matt Destruction") and ended in 2023 with The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons (an alias credited with their songwriting). Title song suggests they've found the secret to endurance, which is keeping it simple, but also fast and loud. B+(***) [sp]

Cody Jinks: In My Blood (2025, Late August): Country singer-songwriter, from Texas, styled outlaw, started in a thrash metal band, 11th album since 2006, has got the voice and knows a few licks. B+(*) [sp]

Olivia Ellen Lloyd: Do It Myself (2025, self-released): Country singer-songwriter, originally from West Virginia, now based in Brooklyn, has a previous album from 2021 (Loose Cannon). B+(***) [sp]

Tony Logue: Dark Horse (2025, Jenny Ridge Productions): Country singer-songwriter, has a couple previous albums. Hard worker, Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. "The road I'm on is dark and dirty/ It's that crazy that keeps me sane." B+(***) [sp]

Roberto Magris: Lovely Day(s) (2024 [2025], JMood): Italian pianist, couple dozen albums since 1990. This one is solo, starts with an original, then hits the usual bases (doubling up on Monk and Andrew Hill), in fine fashion. B+(***) [cd]

Juliet McConkey: Southern Front (2025, Soggy Anvil): Country singer-songwriter, out of Austin, second album. B+(*) [sp]

Brad Mehldau: Ride Into the Sun (2025, Nonesuch): Pianist, got his start on Fresh Sound in 1993 before landing on a major label in 1995 and soon moving through his remarkable The Art of the Trio series. Since then he's diversified, with everything from Bach to Beatles and solos to big bands. This is about half orchestra, with some vocals and flutes and such, most playing Elliot Smith songs. Some nice piano spots, but not much else I find interesting. B [sp]

Nerves Baddington: Driving Off Cliffs (2025, Apt. B Productions): Birmingham, AL duo, Inkline the rapper and Kilgore Doubt the producer, have a couple previous albums I've liked. B+(**) [sp]

Cam Pierce: A Thousand Lonely Horses (2025, self-released): Country singer-songwriter from Oregon, based in Nashville, leans toward the western end of c&w, seems to have a couple previous albums but I'm finding almost nothing on the internet: just one SCM review, and a streaming widget. Songs are solid-plus, voice good, pace assured. A- [os]

Ken Pomeroy: Cruel Joke (2025, Rounder): Country singer-songwriter, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, third album. B+(***) [sp]

Queen Herawin: Awaken the Sleeping Giant (2025, Matic): New York rapper, sophomore album. Dense and powerful. Done prematurely at 32:22, but no regrets. A- [sp]

Ravita Jazz: Alice Blue (2025, Ravita Music): Bassist Phil Ravita, from Baltimore, has a previous album co-led by Skip Grasso, wrote most of the originals, plus a couple from pianist Greg Small, while covering "I Can't Stand the Rain" and a medley of Led Zeppelin and "Sunny Side of the Street." Features saxophonist Paul Carr. B [cd]

Steve Rosenbloom Big Band: San Francisco 1948 (2024 [2025], Glory): Alto saxophonist, has a side-credit from 1983 and a quintet album from 1997, but not a lot more, as his main gig seems to have been in psychiatry. Original pieces, conventional big band. It's possible my CD is defective, as it sounds awfully murky, but crystal clarity wouldn't help much either. [PS: If it was meant to sound like this, drop the grade to D.] C [cd]

Gonzalo Rubalcaba/Chris Potter/Eric Harland/Larry Grenadier: First Meeting: Live at Dizzy's Club (2022 [2025], 5Passion, 2CD): Cover just lists their first names, which is sufficiently unique for the pianist, probably first guess for the saxophonist, and probably surmisable for the others (at least if you assume drums and bass). This is about as good as you'd expect: Potter steals the show, as he often does, and hearing him expound at length is always a pleasure, as is the pianist when he inserts one of his distinctive solos. B+(***) [cd]

Jaleel Shaw: Painter of the Invisible (2022 [2025], Changu): Alto saxophonist, originally from Philadelphia, half-dozen albums since 2005, Discogs lists 57 performance credits, has some range and isn't real consistent but finds a nice post-Coltrane vibe here and expands on it at length (11 tracks, 71:13). Mostly quartet with Lawrence Fields (fender rhodes), Ben Street (bass), and Joe Dyson (drums), with spots for Lage Lund (guitar) and Sasha Berliner (vibes), one track on piano. A- [cd]

Sam Stoane: Tales of the Dark West (2025, Cloverdale): Cowgirl from rural California, first album, originals plus covers of Gene Autry ("Back in the Saddle Again") and Rodney Crowell ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"). A- [sp]

Turnpike Troubadours: The Price of Admission (2025, Bossier City): Honky tonk band from Oklahoma, 7th album since 2007, a favorite of Saving Country Music, I've never been much impressed. B+(*) [sp]

Molly Tuttle: So Long Little Miss Sunshine (2025, Nonesuch): Singer-songwriter, fifth album since 2019, last two topped the bluegrass charts, but Saving Country Music reviewed but refused to grade this "sad development that the Millennial Queen of Bluegrass has gone pop" and adds that producer Jay Joyce "deserves to get chlamydia from the Tyler Childers koala." I'd have to look that one up, but offhand seems dumb and mean. I had to look Joyce up too: produced albums since 1998, mostly starting with Nashville artists like Eric Church and Patty Griffin (and more recently Ashley McBryde and Lainey Wilson) and making them slightly more pop, although it doesn't seem like he's made anyone into something alien (at least not Brandy Clark or Miranda Lambert). Here she wrote the songs here (most with fiddler Ketch Secor; two more leaned on Kevin Griffin; then there's the Charli XCX cover). They're fine (a couple better than that). B+(**) [sp]

Vega7 the Ronin/Machacha: The Ghost Orchid (2025, Copenhagen Crates): Rapper from Queens, eighth album since 2022, with Danish producer Mattæus Overgaard Jensen, prolific since 2016, second album together. B+(***) [sp]

Hayley Williams: Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (2025, Post Atlantic): Singer-songwriter, started 2005 fronting the group Paramore (6 albums through 2023; she's the only continuous member) before releasing a solo album in 2020, this her third. So well hooked only indifference holds me back. B+(**) [sp]

Miguel Zenón Quartet: Vanguardia Subterranea: Live at the Village Vanguard (2024 [2025], Miel Music): Alto saxophonist, from Puerto Rico, long-running quartet with Luis Perdomo (piano), Hans Glawischnig (bass), and Henry Cole (drums), celebrates their 20th anniversary with their first-ever live album, drawn from a six-day stand. They've been producing superb studio albums all along, taking Latin idioms and distilling them (and Coleman and Coltrane) into conventional quartet form all along, so it's no surprise that this is also superb. Some day I expect the whole series to get boxed up, as with Art Pepper. A [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

John Lee Hooker: The Standard School Broadcast Recordings (1973 [2025], BMG): Major bluesman, born (1912?) to sharecroppers in Mississippi, left home for Memphis, wound up in Detroit in the 1940s, recording his first hits in 1948-49, and plying his trade up to his death in 2001, recording duets and guest spots with anyone who would have him, which by then was pretty much everyone (cf. The Best of Friends). While fans came and went, he managed to sound ancient and primeval in the 1950s, and even more so in the 1990s. This is a previously unreleased studio session, recorded in San Francisco, with piano-bass-drums backup (notable is his 20-year-old son, Robert Hooker, on piano), playing long, relaxed versions of 8 songs (58:17), some reworked classics and some jams. It was commissioned for "a groundbreaking educational program sponsored by Standard Oil (later Exxon)," only three of which were broadcast. Less intense, but as satisfying as anything he ever recorded. A [sp]

Steve Tintweiss and the Purple Why: Live in Tompkins Square Park 1967 (1967 [2025], Inky Dot Media): Cover also notes: "NYC Free Jazz," and lists names across the top banner: Jacques Coursil (trumpet), Perry Robinson (clarinet), Joel Peskin (tenor sax/bass clarinet), Randy Kaye (drums./piano), Laurence Cook (drums), Steve Tintweiss (bass/vocals/percussion/composer/leader), James DuBoise (guest trumpet). Tintweiss played on some ESP-Disk and related albums (1966-70), and appeared on some Amy Sheffer albums in the 1980s, but had nothing under his own name until he started rifling through old tapes in 2019. Not extraordinary nor outrageous, but I take a little nostalgic joy in this primitive squelchiness. B+(**) [cd]

Zulu Guitar Blues: Cowboys, Troubadours and Jilted Lovers 1950-1965 (1950-65 [2025], Matsuli Music): Early, almost primeval roots of township jive. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Brad Mehldau: Après Fauré (2023 [2024], Nonesuch): Established himself in the late 1990s as a major jazz pianist, so I've followed him pretty regularly, balking only when he seemed to stray too far into classical and/or soundtrack music, so I skipped this (and several other albums; working backwards here as long as I can stand it). Solo piano exercise, with five pieces by Gabriel Fauré (four nocturnes and an excerpt from "Piano Quartet No. 2") along with "Fauré-like" originals. Nice enough. B [sp]

Brad Mehldau: After Bach II (2017-23 [2024], Nonesuch): Solo, picks up some scraps from the session that produced his 2018 After Bach, and adds some extra material, again mixing in a few originals modeled on. I don't hate much of it, but my patience is wearing thin. B- [sp]

Brad Mehldau/Ian Bostridge: The Folly of Desire (2022 [2023], Pentatone): Piano and voice duo, the former composing in his archest classical mode, the latter a British tenor with a long list of recordings (since 1995), and evidently some reputation among lieder aficionados. I expected to hate this, and often I do, but Bostridge does have a remarkable voice, and after he's slogged through the 11 title songs, he finally puts it to good use, with an exceptional version of "These Foolish Things." Four more songs, including two by Cole Porter (and one by Schubert) are less striking, but they could make a decent standards album. B- [sp]

Perico Sambeat: Ademuz (1995 [1998], Fresh Sound New Talent): Spanish alto saxophonist, also plays flute, albums since 1990, appeared on Brad Mehldau's New York-Barcelona Crossing albums, takes the lead here, with Mehldau (piano) and Mark Turner (tenor sax) prominent on the cover, along with trumpet (Michael Leonhart), guitar (Kurt Rosenwikel), bass, drums, percussion, and voice (Enrique Morente). B+(**) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Armen Donelian: Stargazer (Sunnyside) [10-03]
  • Phil Haynes & Free Country: Liberty Now! (Corner Store Jazz) [10-17]
  • Rubén Reinaldo: Fusión Olivica (Free Code Jazz) [06-04]
  • Jovino Santos Neto Quartet: Mais Que Tudo: Live at Kerry Hall 1995 (Origin) [09-19]
  • Craig Taborn/Nels Cline/Marcus Gilmore: Trio of Bloom (Pyroclastic) [09-26]
  • Milan Verbist Trio: Time Change (Origin) [09-19]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Music Week

August archive (final).

Music: Current count 44745 [44701] rated (+44), 24 [30] unrated (-6).

Calendar has today as the last Monday in August, so I should be wrapping up the monthly archive and starting a new one for September. But I'm finding it hard to move ahead, maybe because I feel like I've accomplished so little this summer. Made very modest progress on some of my projects, but too little to mention. Did come up with a healthy set of reviews this week, most of which surprised me.

I did publish a third Notes on Everyday Life column on Saturday, Bernie Sanders Finds It's OK to Talk Like an Old Lefty. This was occasioned by reading his post-2020 campaign book. I'm thinking about follow it up this week with a "More Thoughts" piece, as I find myself with some:

  1. I might start with the section on policies (pp. 265-275), which offer various combinations of impossible, unreliable, insufficient, and vague, not that they don't dance around real problems. I doubt I can (or should) posit an alternate list, at least until we sort through some other considerations.
  2. I have a short point on the the "failure" of his 2020 campaign -- quotes because I'm not sure he wanted to win, although losing to Biden wasn't really optimal either.
  3. Another short point on how he was first out of the gate with his anti-oligarchy tour against Trump, even though he has no real chance for a 2028 run.
  4. Some thoughts about how to focus the "anger about capitalism" he recognizes into a way of talking and formulating policies. People are pretty heavily armored against his old left critique, and my new left critique hasn't fared much better, but misgivings about capitalism are much more broad-based than we credit, and that suggests approaches we haven't really explored.

The last point will have to be very schematic: I haven't really figured it out yet, and doubt I could explain it briefly if I had. One idea is to try to formulate each postulate as a end (telos) and a set of initial paths toward it. For example, if your end is a full right to quality health care, what are the practical steps that move you in that direction? Bernie's Medicare-for-All is a pretty big step, but one that's hard to sell whole (and does it still work if it's cut up into an ACA-style compromise?). I have some thoughts, but no time to go into them here.

There's also a section on media, another subject worth looking into, but while Sanders has valid complaints, but they're not all that useful. There's little that can be done with policies -- not that a number of past policy decisions haven't made the situation worse. Given that there's no practical way to make media trustworthy, the only real alternative is to get viewers and readers to be more wary, and more critical. Neil Postman argued that the highest goal of education is to equip us with finely-tuned bullshit detectors. That the media fails so often in this regard cannot be chalked up to a shortage of bullshit to detect.

One need hardly add that the point of Trump's assault on education is to dull critical senses, or to obliterate them altogether. Why not turn this around on them, pointing out not just what they're trying to get away with, but how them are doing it. It's not as if the public isn't already skeptical of the Fake News Lamestream Media. One thing I've found in life is that it's virtually impossible to restore shattered faiths (e.g., my own early and quite fervent belief in religion, patriotism, and free enterprise). You'd have a better chance of building on what they already find credible, which is that the whole system is rotten. Then show how Trump is part of that rot, and not a fix. His desire to turn American history into some sort of catechism isn't just dogmatic. It's some kind of lobotomy.

One reason I'm having trouble facing September is that I had this schedule in my mind about the 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: we'd make some key website design decisions in August, then start qualifying voters in September, so when November came around the website and mailing lists would be ready, and the poll would deploy like clockwork. Thus far none of that's happened. I'll try to get some messages out in the next week or two, to get the ball rolling. I run an "admin" email list for people who would like to help out, or just act as a sounding board for my ruminations, so if you're interested in joining that, let me know. If you know of anyone who should be voting but isn't, let me know -- or better still, get them to contact me. I'll post more info when I have some.

PS: I posted this a day late, basically because I ran out of energy Monday night, and still wanted to mention the jazz poll. Spent most of the day working on the garage wood pile. I didn't make a lot of progress, but I did make a little. Should be done this week (although rain could spoil tomorrow). I thought about pulling Monday's records forward here, but I figure I won't have much next week -- I'm finally optimistic about my home projects, which will cut down on my listening/writing time. Besides, plenty already below. (Although I might as well sneak in cover pics for two surprise A- records next week.) I still haven't done the monthly cutoff, but will probably treat the rest of the week as the first of September.

New records reviewed this week:

Eric Alexander & Vincent Herring: Split Decision (2025, Smoke Sessions): Tenor and alto sax, mainstream, both came up in the 1990s (late 1980s for Herring), third album styled as a joust (after 2005's The Battle and 2012's Friendly Fire), backed by Mike LeDonne (piano), John Webber (bass), and Lewis Nash (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Barry Can't Swim: Loner (2025, Ninja Tune): Scottish electronica producer Joshua Mainnie, second album. B+(***) [sp]

Alain Bédard Auguste Quartet: Particules Sonores (2024, Effendi): French Canadian bassist, side credits back to 1985, second Auguste Quartet album, with Mario Allard (saxes), Marie-Fatima Rudolf (piano), and Michel Lambert (drums). B+(**) [sp]

Hayes Carll: We're Only Human (2025, Hwy 87): Country singer-songwriter, albums since 2002, most real good and some brilliant. More of the former here, some of the latter. A- [sp]

Sharel Cassity: Gratitude (2023 [2025], Sunnyside): Alto saxophonist, half-dozen albums since 2008, star-studded rhythm section here -- Cyrus Chestnut (piano), Christian McBride (bass), Lewis Nash (drums) -- with guest trumpet (Terell Stafford) and/or trombone (Michael Dease) on a couple tracks. B+(***) [sp]

Monique Chao Jazz Orchestra: Time Chamber (2023 [2024], Da Vinci Jazz): Pianist, born in Taipei, based in Milan, released a quartet album in 2021, a Subconscious Trio album in 2022, and now this big band album: sounds exceptional out of the gate, but runs on a bit past my interest. B+(**) [sp]

Bootsy Collins: Album of the Year #1 Funkateer (2025, Bootzilla/Roc Nation): Prime-time bassist for James Brown and George Clinton, recorded classic funk albums in the 1970s with his Rubber Band, mixed results since then, finds the old magic for the title track, and hints at it further on. Of the later developments, most of the rap just doubles down on the funk, but it runs long and spreads a bit too far. B+(***) [sp]

Adegoke Steve Colson & Iqua Colson With Andrew Cyrille/Mark Helias: Glow: Music for Trio . . . and Voice (2025, Silver Sphinx): Pianist, originally from New Jersey but associated with AACM, backed by bass and drums, with his wife on most songs -- she's accompanied him as far back as 1980's Colson Unity Troup. B+(***) [cd]

Deafheaven: Lonely People With Power (2025, Roadrunner): Black metal band, sixth album since 2011, easily the highest-rated album I hadn't heard this year (20 on my metacritic list, next one down was Heartworms at 57; 83/19 at AOTY), by definition useless to me, but tolerable at low volume (I know, not the point), but they do seem to have something special -- manic frenzy that comes through anyway. I'm not sure I wouldn't like them even more at even lower volume, but might miss the quiet bits that definitely help. B+(*) [sp]

DJ Koze: Music Can Hear Us (2025, Pampa): German electronica producer Stefan Kozalla, 7th studio album since 2000, lots more DJ mixes, singles, etc. B+(**) [sp]

Wayne Escoffery: Alone (2024, Smoke Sessions): Tenor saxophonist, born in London, based in New York, albums since 2001, impressive chops and tone but albums have been erratic. Title suggests solo, but he's backed by Gerald Clayton (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Carl Allen (drums), so must just be his mood. B+(**) [sp]

Joe Farnsworth: The Big Room (2025, Smoke Sessions): Mainstream drummer, albums since 1998, Discogs counts 234 side-credits since 1992 (most often with Eric Alexander). Sextet with Jeremy Pelt (trumpet), Sarah Hanahan (alto sax). Joel Ross (vibes), Emmet Cohen (piano), and Yasushi Nakamura (bass), with all but the bassist bringing songs (one cover is "I Fall in Love Too Easily"). Flashy up front, but interest tails off. B+(*) [sp]

Steven Feifke: The Role of the Rhythm Section Vol. II (2023 [2024], La Reserve): Pianist, has several blbums since 2015, including a previous volume in 2022. He also has a septet and a big band, but this is just a trio, with Dan Chmielinski (bass) and Bryan Carter(drums). Mostly standards, with a serious focus on the rhythm. B+(**) [sp]

Béla Fleck/Edmar Castañeda/Antonio Sanchez: BEATrio (2025, Thirty Tigers): Banjo, harp, and drums trio. Fleck was born in New York, was inspired by Earl Scruggs to start in bluegrass, called his group the Flecktones, which recorded ten studio albums 1990-2011, but he has branched out in jazz and world music, here with the Colombian harpist and Mexican drummer (first initials BEA). B+(*) [sp]

Garbage: Let All That We Imagine Be the Light (2025, Infectious Music/Stunvolume/BMG): Rock band from Wisconsin, eighth album since 1995, singer Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig already had a reputation as a producer (Nirvana). Starts nice enough, but sharpens up considerably. Eventually you get to: "They hate your women/ They rob your children and they love their guns/ They're all liars, they're all users." A- [sp]

Jacob Garchik: Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time (2023 [2025], Yestereve): Trombonist, from San Francisco, based in New York, dozen or so albums since 2005, one called Ye Olde in 2015. Avant-fusion group then featured the multi-guitar attack of Brandon Seabrook, Mary Halvorson, and Jonathan Goldberger, with Vinnie Sperrazza on drums. This time Ava Mendoza replaces Seabrook, aside from two tracks with others (Miles Okazaki and Sean Moran on guitar, Josh Dion on drums). This got distributed early enough to show up on some mid-year ballots (I had my copy at the time; Discogs says this was "already being sold at concerts as early as July 11). Not much to my taste, but impressive enough I'm cutting it some slack B+(**) [cd] [08-29]

Bruce Gertz Quintet: Octopus Dreams (2024 [2025], Open Mind Jazz): Bassist, composer here, hype sheet says he's led "over 20 albums," Discogs lists his credits as starting in 1979, with "featuring" spots under Jerry Bergonzi and Mick Goodrick. Quintet here with trumpet (Phil Grenadier), tenor sax (Rick DiMuzio), piano, and drums. B+(*) [cd]

Roger Glenn: My Latin Heart (2025, Patois): Flute player, also vibes/marimba, alto sax, and vocals here, cover proclaims "a jazz legend revealed": the legend has one previous album, from 1976, plus 60+ side credits starting in 1970 with Mary Lou Williams, Mongo Santamaria, and Donald Byrd, later with Cal Tjader, and while he's slowed down since 2006, there are no real gaps. B+(**) [cd]

S.G. Goodman: Planting by the Signs (2025, Slough Water/Thirty Tigers): Folk singer-songwriter, from Kentucky, third album since 2020. B+(**) [sp]

Kelly Green: Corner of My Dreams (2024 [2025], La Reserve): Jazz singer-songwriter, plays piano, based in New York, several albums since 2017. Arrangements lean toward strings. B+(*) [cd]

Andy Haas/Brian g Skol: The Honeybee Twist (2024 [2025], Resonant Music): Duo, sax with live effects and drums. The saxophonist has a long list of interesting albums, from Martha & the Muffins through Radio I-Ching to recent works. This seems marginal, an experiment in moving through space and time, but interesting nonetheless. B+(***) [cd]

James Holden & Waclaw Zimpel: The Universe Will Take Care of You (2025, Border Community): Cover just offers surnames. Holden is a well-established (since 2006) electronica producer, with titles like The Idiots Are Winning and Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities. Zimpel is a Polish clarinetist, albums since 2008, that first with Chicago-based free jazzers (Dave Rempis, Tim Daisy), but also has a couple albums with Schackleton, so he's been down this road before. This starts off shimmering, goes beyond glitzy, and winds up somewhere in the stars. A- [sp]

Aruán Ortiz: Créole Renaissance (2024 [2025], Intakt): Cuban pianist, in US since 2002, based in New York, dozen-plus albums since 2012, this is his second solo, the first with a title that played off "Cuban" and "Cubism" (Cub(an)ism). This one again references art (e.g., surrealism), especially as used by modernist intellectuals of the African diaspora -- the centerpiece here namechecks many such movements. B+(***) [cd] [08-29]

Greentea Peng: Tell Dem It's Sunny (2025, AWAL): British neo-soul singer-songwriter Aria Wells, second studio album (first in 2021), closer to trip-hop here, but the singer is the focus, not just atmosphere. A- [sp]

PlainsPeak: Someone to Someone (2024 [2025], Irabbagast): New quartet led by Jon Irabagon (alto sax), all his pieces, with Russ Johnson (trumpet), Clark Sommers (bass), and Dana Hall (drums), the group name a nod to Chicago, where the skyscrapers are supposed to tower higher than any of the surrounding plains -- which is probably true as far as one can see from there, but the plains I know go higher (if not steeper). Still, a good example of freewheeling two-horn quartets. A- [cd]

Playboi Carti: [I Am] Music (2025, AWGE/Interscope): Atlanta rapper Jordan Terrell Carter, fourth album since 2017, most sources credit title as simply Music, but cover reads I Am Music (all caps, twice). For further confusion, the 30-track (76-minute) album cane out on 3/14, followed by similar 30-track V1, V2, and V3 releases through 3/20, and in April a 34-track variant called Sorry 4 Da Wait. (Discogs also lists "variants" 1-8.) B+(**) [sp]

Mike Pope: The Parts You Keep (2022 [2025], Origin): Bassist, has previous albums from 2002, 2012, and 2021. This is an ambitious work, with originals studded with Parker and Coltrane pieces, "That Old Feeling," and ending with a bit of classical music featuring his 85-year-old pianist mother. Otherwise, the pianist is Geoffrey Keezer, with Nat Smith on drums, and spots for trumpet (Randy Brecker), sax (Roxy Coss), guitar (Amaury Cabral), and strings (two tracks). B+(**) [cd]

PUP: Who Will Look After the Dogs? (2025, Rise): Canadian post-punk album, acronym stands for Pathetic Use of Potential, fifth album since 2013. B+(*) [sp]

Julius Rodriguez: Evergreen (2024, Verve): Originally a drummer, leaves that part to others here while he plays keyboards (including piano and organ), guitar, and electric bass, and does some programming. Gets occasional help on horns and elsewhere, including a Georgia Anne Muldrow vocal. B+(***) [sp]

Marc Seales With Ernie Watts: People & Places (2022-23 [2025], Origin): Pianist, side-credits from the 1980s but not much as leader until he landed on this label, first with Don Lanphere in 1996, on his own since 2004. Good to hear so much tenor sax. B+(***) [cd]

Kae Tempest: Self Titled (2025, Island): English poet/rapper, has published poetry collections since 2012, four plays, a novel, and studio album since 2014 (or 2011?). Music is very strong here, and so are the words. A- [sp]

Emma-Jean Thackray: Weirdo (2025, Brownswood/Parlophone): English singer-songwriter, started in jazz playing trumpet, second album, vocals are up front, synthesizers are her main instrument, and she's played everything else, aside from two guest spots. B [sp]

These New Puritans: Crooked Wing (2025, Domino): English band, fifth studio album since 2008. Caroline Polachek guests. B+(*) [sp]

Ben Thomas Tango Project: The Hat With the Grin and the Chuckle (2025, Origin): Vibraphone/bandoneon player, second group album (I missed the title when I originally logged this). Band includes two violins, clarinet, piano, and bass, with Thomas also credited for percussion. B+(**) [cd]

Water From Your Eyes: It's a Beautiful Place (2025, Matador): Chicago band, principally Rachel Brown (vocals) and Nate Amos (guitar/production), started with self-released albums in 2017, breakthrough was 2023's Everyone's Crushed. I was slow on that one, and I'm slow on this one, but it's distinctive and interesting enough that I keep coming back to it, even though I'm not sure what it's delivering. A- [sp]

Carlos "Zingaro"/João Madeira: Arcada Pendular (2023 [2025], 4DaRecord): Portuguese violin and bass duo, the former with many albums since 1988, many more side credits since 1969, but still no explanation for the quote marks (last name evidently Alves; use sometimes suggests a nickname, but quotes are as often omitted). I'm beginning to feel compromised here, as I would normally never give a violin-bass duo stream more than a cursory single pass, with some flavor of B+ depending on how it hit me, but Madeira keeps sending me CDs, and after 4-5 plays I start to love them. (Needless to say, there's no guarantee that I'll give your CD commensurate attention. But it happens on occasion, and with Madeira it's happened a lot.) A- [cd]

Zurhub [Mattan Klein/Ezequiel Hezi Joit]: Countryside Motorways (2024 [2025], Origin): Flute and guitar, backed by keyboards (Itay Simhovich), bass (Assaf Hakimi), and Dani Benedikt (drums). B [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Church of Kidane Mehret (1963-72 [2025], Mississippi): Ethiopian pianist (1923-2023), also plays organ and harmonium here, also happened to be an Ethiopian Orthodox nun, a selection of her 1963-96 solo recordings was a highlight of the Éthiopiques series. This is a 1972 album with two earlier cuts added. She's done some remarkable work, but too much organ here. B [bc]

Kinloch Nelson: Waiting: More Recordings, 1968-1976 (1968-76 [2025], Tompkins Square): Guitarist, in the American primitive vein, from Rochester, studied classical and jazz guitar (the latter with Gene Bertoncini, the former Stanley Watson), has been playing since 1967 ("performing since 1969"). This follows a 2019 Tompkins Square compilation, Partly On Time: Recordings 1968-1970, with several other self-released albums. B+(**) [sp]

Alick Nkhata: Radio Lusaka ([2025], Mississippi): Singer-songwriter from Zambia (1922-78), formed a quartet in the 1940s, which later became the Lusaka Radio Band, and later still the Big Gold Six, having some hits in the 1950s, and possibly after independence in 1964 (he had worked as a field recording engineer during WWII, and with the Central African Broadcasting Service until 1974). I don't see any dates, but Discogs lists his singles (where dated) between 1950-59. This sounds naively crude at first, but picks up midway (perhaps with a bit of calypso?). B+(***) [bc]

Old music:

The Colson Unity Troupe: No Reservation (1980, Black Saint): AACM pianist Adegoke Steve Colson and vocalist Iqua Colson, still together with a new 2025 album, released two albums under this name, this one with Wallace LaRoy McMilan (a saxophonist from St. Louis who also worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, and Wadada Leo Smith 1975-82, but not much since), Reggie Willis (bass), and Dushun Mosley (percussion). The music is quite adventurous here, but the changes sorely try the vocalist, who winds up sounding operatic. B+(**) [sp]

Roger Glenn: Reachin' (1976, Fantasy): Flute player, also vibes, started in Latin jazz with Mongo Santamaria and in fusion with Donald Byrd, combines them on his first own album (and only album until 2025). Electric keyboards by Mark Soskin and Larry Mizell, electric bass (Paul Jackson) and guitar (Ray Obiedo), lots of percussion (bata, congas, shekere). Good funk as long as they keep it up. B+(*) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Gino Amato: Latin Crossroads 2 (Ovation) [08-13]
  • Earscratcher: Otoliths (Aerophonic) [10-10]
  • Fieldwork: Thereupon (Pi) [09-05]
  • Champian Fulton & Klas Lindquist: At Home (Turtle Bay) [05-02]
  • Zack Lober: So We Could Live (Zennez) [10-03]
  • Ravita Jazz: Alice Blue (Ravita Jazz) [08-15]
  • Steve Rosenbloom Big Band: San Francisco 1948 (Glory) [09-01]
  • Gonzalo Rubalcaba/Chris Potter/Eric Harland/Larry Grenadier: First Meeting: Live at Dizzy's Club (5Passion) [07-11]
  • Jaleel Shaw: Painter of the Invisible (Changu) [07-11]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, August 18, 2025

Music Week

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44701 [44663] rated (+38), 30 [36] unrated (-6).

I ended last week's post with long list of projects I hoped to get done last week. The only ones I've accomplished are "another newsletter" -- the piece there is titled Sheila Jordan (1928-2025) -- and a Loose Tabs (which ran to 277 links, 20669 words). Which is to say that once again I spent pretty much the whole week at the computer, hacking out long strings of words. Meanwhile, the house projects languished, and the "dinner for some very old friends" fell through. I don't think we even used the new car except for one grocery store trip.

I should do better this week. I did the first tiny bit of "setting up the website framework for the broader Notes on Everyday Life project": the website archive of the newsletters is here. It's currently hand-collated, but I can maintain that until some further inspiration comes along. The second part, which I've referred to as "the pile," will still take some design work, but I have a rough idea what I want to do there: each file will have a set of embedded markup, which can be used both by the PHP code that presents the file and by external programs, which can build up indexes and feed search tools. This doesn't have to be very fancy, but I have to think about index terms and trade-offs between simplified markup and extra work in output. I'm expecting at this point that I'll wind up using this software for several piles. It might even make sense to treat it as an open source software project, but right now I'm thinking that's Version 2, as making software reusable is a much bigger job than just getting something to work. (You'd think that this sort of thing must already exist somewhere, and it probably does, albeit with more complexity and more trouble than I need: one such example is Mediawiki, which was actually my original idea for such a tool.)

It only now occurs to me that the easiest pile to prepare data for might be music reviews. I've long been stymied by the idea of adapting an album-review database, like I used for Christgau, to my data, which has a slightly different granularity. (Apologies for not trying to explain what I mean by that.) But for practical purposes, it might suffice to just offer artist pages, each with an intro and all the relevant albums. As I already have most of the reviews sorted by artist, it wouldn't be hard to move them into the pile. The notebooks, on the other hand, will be more work, as they'll need to be sorted topically. (Perhaps AI could help there?)

Still, I hope to spend more time on the house projects this week. Those will pull me away from the computer, and result in fewer new records rated, but this is a slow season anyway. I'm surprised to find August half gone already. I need to start thinking about some preliminary jazz poll organization. I had hoped to use this time to restructure the website, but haven't come close to working on it. While the quality of what I do still seems satisfactory, the quantity has sunk considerably.

One thing I did take the time to do today was to vote in the DownBeat Readers Poll. I typically have zero effect there, and they don't publish ballots, so unless I publish mine, no one will notice or care who I vote for. I do, however, keep notes, so you can look them over. Main value to me comes from the album lists, as they serve as a checklist for my own listening. In this case, I've noted that I haven't heard 24 new jazz albums (18.8% of 128), 11 historic jazz albums (28.3% of 32), 36 blues albums (75.0% of 48), and 12 "beyond" albums (21.7% of 58). I'll work on whittling that down, but should also note that they didn't nominate tons of really good albums, and they nominated even more not-so-great ones.

I'm generally pleased with the newsletter response so far. I'm just starting to figure it out, and I'm trying to ease into it. I wasn't expecting to do a post on music, at least this early, but it suddenly seemed like the thing to do. Not sure what the next one will be, but I need to go back and re-read Loose Tabs and this one and see what comes to mind.

New records reviewed this week:

Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet: El Muki (2025, Saponegro): Peruvian trumpet player, established his group in 2005, composed all the pieces. B+(***) [cd]

David Bailis: Running Through My Mind (2025, Create or Destroy): Guitarist, leads a quintet, some nice work by Caroline Davis (alto sax). B+(**) [cd]

Miki Berenyi Trio: Tripla (2025, Bella Union): British singer-songwriter, born in London, father Hungarian, mother Japanese, singer-guitarist in Lush (1987-96), reunited briefly 2015-16, had another short-lived band Piroshka, first album under her own name here, with Oliver Cherer (bass), Moose (guitar), and a drum machine. B+(***) [sp]

Ron Blake: Scratch Band (2021 [2023], 7Ten33 Productions): Saxophonist (tenor/baritone/soprano here), had three albums on Mack Avenue 2003-08, only a couple since (but many more side credits, including 1990s work with Roy Hargrove). Trio with Reuben Rogers (bass) and John Hadfield (drums). I remember the 1990s as a great decade for mainstream tenor saxophonists, full of warmth with a bit of gruff. I wouldn't call this a great example, but it fills the role and fits the need. B+(***) [cd]

Rory Block: Heavy on the Blues (2025, M.C.): Blues singer-guitarist, debut album 1975, 75 now, 37th album, writes some but recent albums have been covers/tributes -- this appears to be a mix. [PS: Christgau notes a "detailed booklet," which I haven't seen, but could motivate extra spins that might put this over. On the other hand, I moved on to Maria Muldaur, which sounded solid A on first play.] B+(***) [bc]

Erika de Casier: Lifetime (2025, Independent Jeep Music): Singer-songwriter, born in Portugal, parents from Belgium and Cape Verde, based in Copenhagen, fourth album since 2019, trip-hop (more or less). B+(**) [sp]

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: New Threats From the Soul (2025, Sophomore Lounge/Tough Love): Indiana band, second album, singer-songwriter plays guitar/keys/more, has worked his way through several previous bands (State Champion, Tropical Trash, Electric Drywall Band, Equipment Pointed Ankh). Stretches 7 songs to 57:06. [PS: I bump this up after my wife raved about it.] B+(***) [bc]

Mike Freeman Zona Vibe: Circles in a Yellow Room (2019 [2025], VOF): Vibes/marimba player, originally from Omaha, based in New York, seems to have a 1991 debut, another in 2000, third Zona Vibe album since 2011. Sparkling, with trumpet (Guido Gonzalez), tenor sax/bass clarinet (Jim Gailloreto), and a lot of Latin tinge. B+(***) [cd]

Dylan Hicks & Small Screens: Avian Field Recordings (2025, Soft Launch): Singer-songwriter, based in Minneapolis, interesting as such since his 1996 debut, has lately turned toward jazz, or "ambient and meditative instrumentals" as he describes the six interludes separating seven real songs here. I'm not that much into ambient/meditative, and the songs tend to slip past me -- I think I hear a bit of Randy Newman here and there, but not the sarcasm. Or maybe Dave Alvin? Still, working while this is on is a pleasure, and what little attention I do pay is amply rewarded. A- [cd]

Bonnie J Jensen: Rise (2024-25 [2025[, MGM Metropolitan Groove Merchants): Jazz singer-songwriter from Australia, fifth album. B+(*) [cd]

Sheila Jordan With Roni Ben-Hur & Harvie S: Portrait Now (2023 [2025], Dot Time): Jazz singer, got her start chasing Charlie Parker when he played Detroit, and after 1951 in New York, where she married his pianist, Duke Jordan, studied with Lennie Tristano and Charles Mingus. She always sung, but remained a well-kept secret, even after George Russell gave her a feature on his 1962 album, which led to a single Blue Note album, Portrait of Sheila (1963), and well into the 1970s she made her living doing secretarial work. I encountered her on Roswell Rudd's 1974 album Flexible Flyer (or maybe it was Rudd's 1973 Numatik Swing Band -- in either case it must have been 1978 when I caught up), and she's been my favorite jazz singer ever since. (One of the first things that attracted me to Francis Davis was how much he appreciated Jordan.) She cut a second album in 1975, when she was 47, and never again paused. In 1977 she hit on the idea of recording only backed with a bass -- Arild Andersen (one of Russell's now-famous students from his Scandinavian exile days) on Sheila -- a format she's often returned to, notably with Cameron Brown and Harvie S (né Swartz). Harvie returns here, along with guitarist Roni Ben-Hur. Title refers back to her first album, but to make a point of how far she's come. She's not quite in perfect voice, but her ability to accentuate just the right syllables, salvaging standards like "Willow Weep for Me," and still maneuver around a piece as tricky as "Relaxing at the Camarillo" -- and turn it into a riveting story, not just a piece of scat gymnastics -- is uncanny. Regrets after deaths are common. Mine is that she never had a producer who could just let the tape run as they fed her with songs, like Norman Granz with Ella Fitzgerald, or Rick Rubin with Johnny Cash. I imagine it would be like lobbing softballs at Ted Williams. A- [sp]

Maria Muldaur: One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey (2025, Nola Blue): She started in Jim Kweskin's Jug Band back in the 1960s, went solo with a hit song and album in 1973, leaned increasingly to blues in the 1990s, and found her calling with her 2001 Memphis Minnie tribute (Richland Woman Blues), which brought her to Blue Lu Barker (2018) and now to Spivey, whose 1926-36 singles provide the juiciest of these 12 songs, many salacious but ending with the grim "T.B. Blues." Spivey made a comeback in the early 1960s, so there's a personal connection. Also worth noting that Spivey spent a lot of time fronting real jazz bands, so the fit here with backup by Jim Dapogny and Tuba Skinny is natural. Elvin Bishop and Taj Mahal are duet partners. A [sp]

Jesika von Rabbit: Bunnywood Babylon (2025, Dionysus): Singer-songwriter Jessica Leischow, from Wisconsin, second album, formerly fronted the band Gram Rabbit (5 albums, 2006-12). B+(**) [sp]

Jonathan Richman: Only Frozen Sky Anyway (2025, Blue Arrow): Singer-songwriter from Massachusetts, founded the Modern Lovers, their John Cale-produced debut album was recorded in 1972 but didn't appear until the punk/new wave explosion in 1976. I loved that album, and also his 1983 Jonathan Sings!, but not much more, and haven't his later albums, of which there are 20 or more. This is not bad, but unlikely to stick with me. B+(*) [sp]

Ross Thorn: Ross Thorn Tries Fitting In (2025, Casa De Copas): Folkie singer-songwriter from Duluth, has a couple previous albums on Bandcamp but none in Discogs, no credits given but cover pic shows him with a banjo and there's a fair amount of guitar and fiddle in the background. B+(***) [bc]

Chris Wabich: 1978 (Steep) (2024 [2025], ADW): Drummer, albums since 2007, "featuring" names on the cover: Josh Nelson (piano), Dan Lutz (bass). Presumably his pieces. Very nice. B+(***) [cd]

Morgan Wade: The Party Is Over (Recovered) (2025, Ladylike/Sony): Country singer-songwriter, fifth album since 2018, all aces (though I'm having a little trouble focusing here). B+(***) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Lonnie Johnson With Elmer Snowden: Blues & Ballads (1960 [2025], Craft): Bluesman, famed as a guitarist, recorded from 1925 on, landed on Prestige's blues label as the folk blues revival was kicking up. He sings and plays electric here, with Snowden on acoustic guitar. (Snowden is better known as a banjo player and as a jazz bandleader, including of the Washingtonians before Duke Ellington took over.) Also with Wendell Marshall on bass. The blues, including a surprising "St. Louis Blules," are fine. I'm less sure of the ballads. B+(*) [sp]

Edna Martinez Presents Picó: Sound System Culture From the Colombian Caribbean (1950s-70s [2025], Strut): Colombian DJ, based in Berlin, curated these dance tracks -- I hear there's a "detailed booklet," but haven't seen it, leaving me with no more than impressions that the music dates from the 1950s to 1970s, and while played by Colombian sound systems called "picós," the music is more likely African (especially Congolese) than local. (One review also notes Jamaican soca, Ghanaian highlife, Arab disco, and various Caribbean forms, like jibaro, descarga, rhumba, mambo, and gwo ka, as well as salsa, cumbia, and champeta). A- [sp]

Old music:

Alberta Hunter/Lucille Hegamin/Victoria Spivey: Songs We Taught Your Mother (1961 [1962], Bluesville): Three blues singers from the 1920s, rediscovered during the big folk blues revival c. 1960. The trio had their early work compiled by Document into 4-5 CDs each. Hunter (1895-1984) recorded one more album in 1961, then staged a fairly major comeback in 1980 with Amtrak Blues. Hegamin (1894-1970) only appeared on one more album (A Basket Full of Blues, with Spivey and Buddy Tate). Spivey was a decade younger (1906-76), and more active at least through 1965. They take turns, reviving their old hits, backed by a mix of old jazz hands, including Willie "The Lion" Smith (piano), J.C. Higginbotham (trombone), and Zutty Singleton (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Peter Ind: Looking Out (1958-61 [1962], Wave): English bassist (1928-2021), first album, mostly with guitar (Al Schackman or Joe Puma), piano (Ronnie Ball or Sal Mosca), a couple cuts with drums (Dick Scott), one with vocalist Sheila Jordan -- probably her first recording, already distinctive. The rest is equally engaging, with the bass mixed prominently (turns out some of it was overdubbed). B+(**) [sp]

Peter Ind: Jazz Bass Baroque (1987 [1988], Wave): First side continues his bass overdub experiments, ranging from "Bach" to "Lush Life." Second side is a live set with Daryl Anger (violin) and Martin Taylor (guitar). B+(**) [sp]

Peter Ind: Looking Out/Jazz Bass Baroque (1958-87 [1999], Wave): Two (or effectively three) albums crammed together, each interesting, together adds up to a nice overview. B+(**) [sp]

Lonnie Johnson With Victoria Spivey: Idle Hours (1961, Bluesville): Major blues singer-guitarist (1899-1970), made 130 recordings for Okeh 1925-32, still regarded as classics (see Steppin' on the Blues, 58 on Robert Santelli's blues albums list), including some duets with Spivey. He continued to work steady, including some time in dixieland bands, but by 1960 he was recording for Prestige's blues subsidiary. Her early string ended in 1936, but came back for this reunion. B+(**) [sp]

Sheila Jordan/Mark Murphy: One for Junior (1991 [1993], Muse): Two bebop singers, distinctive voices, fast dynamics, quick to sling the scat. I've always adored her, but I've never cared for what little I've heard by him. Title refers to the late painter Helen Mayer (aka Junior Morrow). Backed by Kenny Barron (piano), Harvie S (bass), and Ben Riley (drums), with Bill Mays (piano/synth) on two tracks. She's terrific, of course. He's, well, pretty decent. B+(**) [yt]

Sheila Jordan/Jose Carra/Bori Albero: En La Fundación Valparaiso (2018 [2024], Clasijazz): Part of a Spanish tour just shy of her 90th birthday, from three sets in Mojácar, a small town on the Mediterranean coast east of Granada, backed by local piano and bass (although she cites Cameron Brown as her bassist in "Sheila's Blues"). B+(***) [sp]

Stephan Kramer: Thank You Sheila (2018, House Master): German guitarist, seems to be his only album, cover adds: "with Chris Lachotta and Alexander Hoetzinger feat. Sheila Jordan." Recorded live in Munich, no date given, with Jordan entering on the second cut, and it's her record from then on out. Choice cut: "Lady Be Good" (on Ella Fitzgerald). Ends with a very nice guitar piece. B+(***) [sp]

Steve Kuhn & Toshiko Akiyoshi: Country and Western Sound of Jazz Pianos (1963, Dauntless): Two pianists, Kuhn's first album, Akiyoshi has credits back to 1954, most of the c&w standards ("Trouble in Mind," "Down in the Valley," "Along the Navajo Trail," etc.) not sounding all that country, with sparkling pianos backed by guitar (Barry Galbraith), bass (Dave Izenson/John Neves), and drums (Pete LaRoca). B+(*) [sp]

Steve Kuhn/Gary McFarland: The October Suite (1966 [1967], Impulse): Pianist, and composer/conductor, with Ron Carter (bass) and Marty Morell (drums), plus strings on the first side, woodwinds on the second. McFarland (1933-71) played vibraphone early on, led and/or produced/arranged albums from 1961 on, many with titles like Soft Samba and Big Band Bossa Nova (for Stan Getz). B+(*) [sp]

Steve Kuhn Quartet: Last Year's Waltz (1981 [1982], ECM): Piano trio with Harvie S (bass) and Bob Moses (drums), plus singer Sheila Jordan, a group listed on their previous (1980) album as Steve Kuhn/Sheila Jordan Band. Live at Fat Tuesday's. Starts with three Kuhn originals, which while exciting enough don't give Jordan much to work with. Then we get an 8:19 "I Remember You" which is just extraordinary. Second side starts with a jaunty piece by the bassist, and two more by Kuhn, before Jordan again gets to feast on covers (although don't miss Kuhn's detonation of Monk). A- [sp]

Roswell Rudd/Steve Lacy/Sheila Jordan: Blown Bone (1967-76 [1979], Philips): Trombonist, one stray track from a 1967 session, the rest from two sets in 1976 with Lacy (soprano sax), bass (Wilbur Little), drums (Paul Motian), The first of those 1976 sets adds Enrico Rava (trumpet), plus singer Jordan on two tracks. The other adds electric piano (Patti Brown), clarinet/soprano sax (Kenny Davern), and tenor sax (Tyrone Washington), with Louisiana Red singing a blues. B+(***) [yt]

Victoria Spivey: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order: Volume 1 (11 May 1926 to 31 October 1927) (1926-27 [1995], Document): One of the classic female blues singer from the 1920s, recorded singles for Okeh 1926-28 (23 tracks here, plus more on Volume 2), with other labels up to 1937 (4 CDs today in this series). As is often the case for this label, lots of surface noise from the source 78s. But a cleaned up selection could be worth it. B+(**) [sp]

Victoria Spivey: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order: Volume 2 (31 October 1927 to 24 September 1929) (1927-29 [1995], Document): Probably the rest of her Okeh singles -- the Victors start later in 1929 -- including duos with Lonnie Johnson and some tracks with jazz groups led by Clarence Williams and Henry Allen. Sound still dubious, but where it clears up some terrific music ensues -- especially with Allen's band riffing. B+(***) [sp]

Victoria Spivey: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order: Volume 3 (1 October 1929 to 7 July 1936) (1929-36 [1995], Document): She recorded for Victor in 1930, and Brunswick in 1931. Not sure what else there is before some 1936 Decca sides (this ends with "T.B.'s Got Me Blues"), but this works in pieces with a few other leaders. Sound's better, especially on the closing jazz band sides. A- [sp]

Victoria Spivey: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order: Volume 4 (30 August 1936 to 21 July 1937) (1936-37 [1995], Document): This seems to be the end of her early recordings, on Vocalion (some as Jane Lucas), stretched to 22 tracks with 5 extra takes. She continued performing up to 1951, often in music films and stage shows, but I'm not seeing any recordings until 1961, when Bluesville brought her back for several albums. She's become a remarkably poised singer, as songs you don't need her for like "Trouble in Mind" prove, and the bands swing. She clearly deserves a proper compilation. B+(***) [sp]

Victoria Spivey With Lonnie Johnson: Woman Blues! (1962, Bluesville): She gets the leads this time, and plays piano, while he plays guitar, and sings some, mostly seeming superfluous. B+(**) [sp]

Christian Stock Trio & Sheila Jordan & Adrian Mears: Straight Ahead (2000, YVP): German bassist, side-credits back to 1982 but not a lot of them, found himself leading a trio here with Karel Růžička (piano) and Walter Bittner (drums). Twelve tracks, with the singer in on four ("Autumn in New York," "Badbados," "Sail Away," and "Song of Joy"), the trombonist on three others. Nice pieces, limited interest. B+(*) [sp]

Aki Takase: ABC (1982, Union Jazz): Japanese pianist, started playing in US in 1978, moved to Berlin in 1988, where she married another notable pianist, Alexander von Schlippenbach. She recorded this early album in New York, with Cecil McBee (bass), Bob Moses (drums). Sheila Jordan sings to open, but after that the only voice is a bit of shading, if that. B+(**) [yt]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Maria Muldaur: One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey (Nola Blue) [07-21]
  • Aruán Ortiz: Créole Renaissance (Intakt) [08-29]
  • Carlos "Zingaro"/João Madeira: Arcada Pendular (4DaRecord) [07-11]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on July 20.

This file came together in several widely separated spurts, between which it slowly accreted. The time spread is such that I no longer have any real sense of structure or coverage. It's not clear to me what I looked at, and what I'm missing. Several pieces led to long digressions, some of which I may go back to and refine into distinct posts in my new Notes on Everyday Life newsletter. While whatever I write there will eventually show up on my website, I promise that it will be more focused there, as well as delivered direct to you via email, than the piles of scattered notes I've been assembling here. So please consider subscribing.

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: As far as I'm concerned, the Epstein-Trump story is a complete waste of time. The facts have been around for a long time now, and hardly anyone outside of the news media and the kiddie pool of the DNC care. The only thing that keeps the story going is how Trump keeps finding novel ways to deny it. All he has to do to shut up, and it will be gone within a couple news cycles. That he keeps it going suggests that there are other things he doesn't want us to talk about. Indeed, there is a lot, as the Walsh article below utterly fails to disclose.

  • David Dayen [07-15] Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue: "It's about elite immunity, the defining issue in America for more than two decades." No, the defining issue is increasing inequality. Warping the (in)justice system is an inevitable side-effect, but Epstein isn't exactly proof for "elite immunity": no doubt he got favorable treatments, but he wound up dying in jail. Maybe Trump is proof, but under pretty extraordinary circumstances. (That Trump's exception will make the system even worse is extremely likely.) Also, I think the both-sidesism here is way out of bounds. I agree that Democrats suck up to the rich more than they should, but virtually all of them accept that there are rules that everyone (even presidents) have to live by. Trump sees power as purely partisan. Even if he only supports "elite immunity" for elites on his side.

  • Ryan Cooper [07-18] Epstein Signals the End of Donald Trump's Crackerjack Crisis Management Style: "For a decade, his chump fan base automatically believed his lies — until now."

  • Eric Schliesser [07-21] On the Epstein Files; and Corruption. "It is a curious fact that in our public culture hypocrisy is treated as a worse sin than many actual crimes."

  • James D Zirin [07-24] Epstein and Trump: Why We're Unlikely to See the Files: "Judges will probably keep the Epstein files sealed, Bondi seems unlikely to release anything, and the Supreme Court's version of blanket presidential immunity will thwart any criminal case against Trump."

  • Allison Gill [08-01] Someone Waived Ghislaine Maxwell's Sex Offender Status to Move Her to a Minimum Security Camp in Texas.

  • Maureen Tkacik [08-01] Making America Epstein Again: "Trump's transactional ethics are making the US a refuge for criminals. This mirrors something Israel has done for years." I'm a bit surprised by the Israel angle here, not that I have any reason to doubt it. More can be found here:

    • Mouin Rabbani [07-25] Israel: Safe Haven for Pedophiles? "An examination of Darryl Cooper's claim that Israel functions as a safe haven for criminals and pedophiles escaping justice."

  • Peter Rothpletz [08-02] The simple way Democrats should talk about Trump and Epstein: "The scandal has haunted the president in part because of a truth voters already feel: Republicans protect elites."

  • Rebecca Solnit [08-03] The problem is far bigger than Jeffrey Epstein: "Treating the scandal as an aberration misunderstands the global epidemic of violence against women." My first reaction was that this is an instance of claiming a story for one's other crusade, much like how every fire or hurricane gets turned into a lecture on global warming, or every case of fraud can be turned into an indictment of capitalism. That works, of course, because there is truth in the larger stories, but it can also cover up peculiarities that are interesting on their own. In this case, while Epstein may share in the bad habits of many other men, what's distinctive about his case is the extraordinary wealth he held, and was able to use to get his way. (I have no idea whether violence was involved or implied, as in most other cases of rape — a possible weak link in Solnit's argument — but power is almost always backed up with the threat of force.) Still, while I wouldn't have approached this story in this way, I agree with Solnit's conclusion:

    The piecemeal stories — "here is this one bad man we need to do something about" — don't address the reality that the problem is systemic and the solution isn't police and prison. It's social change, and societies will have changed enough when violence against women ceases to be a pandemic that stretches across continents and centuries. Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I'm all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.

    I'd just shift the focus to Epstein's wealth, and the great power we concede to people with such wealth. I'm not saying that every billionaire is inherently evil, but those who have impulses in that direction are empowered by their wealth to pursue them. Epstein is an example of that, and he's far from the only one.

  • Judith Butler [08-05] Trumpists against Trump: St Clair quoted this bit, while noting that "in the latest Pew Survey, Trump's popularity among his own voters has fallen by 10%." I'm skeptical. (The 10% certainly seems credible, as well more than that was based on gross misunderstanding of who they were voting for, but of this being the specific issue that moved them.)

    Trump insists that the whole Epstein affair is a "hoax" and that his own followers are "stupid" and "weaklings." Their reaction has been intense and swift, since Trump now sounds like the elitists who disparage them — elitists like Hillary Clinton, who called them "a basket of deplorables." Trump scoffs at their complaints, noting that his supporters have nowhere else to go. They feel not only deceived by their hero but demeaned, insulted and outraged, the way they felt when Democrats were in power.

    Still, Butler's point that Trump's a whiny bitch is on the mark, and more of his voters are likely to come around to that view, even if they can't find anyone else to vote for.

  • Bryan Walsh [07-26] Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files [PS: This entry was the basis for Notes on Everyday Life: Four Stories]: This piece should have been an easy lay up. Instead, Walsh has done the impossible, and come up with four stories even more inane and useless than the Epstein Files:

    1. America's dangerous debt spiral: maybe if he was talking about personal debt, but he means the old federal debt sawhorse, which Trump is pumping up (but lying about, because deficits only matter when Democrats might spend them on people).
    2. A global hunger crisis: he's talking about places like Nigeria, with just one side mention of Gaza, even more casual than "surges in food prices driven by extreme weather"; while climate change could be a major story, the most immediate food crises in the world today are caused by war.
    3. A real population bomb: the complaint that American women aren't having enough babies.[*]
    4. A generational security challenge: here he's complaining about America not being able to produce enough ships and missiles, with the usual China fearmongering, but no regrets about squandering stockpiles on Ukraine and Israel.

    The title works as clickbait, as I imagine there are lots of people out there thinking there must be more important matters than Epsteinmania. And I could imagine this as an AI exercise: gimme four topics that sound big and important but aren't widely covered, except for scolding mentions by fatuous frauds. Still, as usual, natural stupidity is the more plausible explanation — at least the one my life experience has trained my neurons to recognize.

    To some extent, the Epstein-Trump scandal recapitulates the conspiracy-mongering after Vincent Foster's death. I don't care about either enough to sort out the sordid details. But this got me wondering about a 1990s edition of "Four stories that are more important than Vincent Foster's death." I'm not going to hurt my brain by trying to imagine what Walsh might come up with, but these strike me as the big stories of Clinton's first half-term:

    1. Clinton's surrender of his "it's the economy, stupid" platform, which he campaigned and won on, to Alan Greenspan and "the fucking bond market," effectively embracing Reagan's "greed is good" policies and "the era of big government is over."
    2. Clinton's surrender to Colin Powell of his promise to end discrimination against gays in the military, which was not only a setback for LGBT rights but the end of any prospect of a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, as Clinton never challenged the military again; they in turn were able to dictate much of his foreign policy, laying the groundwork for the "global war on terror," the expansion of NATO, the "pivot to Asia," and other horrors still developing.
    3. Clinton's prioritization of NAFTA, which (as predicted) demolished America's manufacturing base, and (less publicized at the time) undermined the political influence of unions and triggered the mass influx of "illegal immigrants" — factors that Republicans have taken advantage of, not least because they could fairly blame worker hardships on Democrats.
    4. Clinton's health care fiasco, a bill so badly designed and ineptly campaigned for that it set the right to health care back by decades (while ACA was better, it still contained the corrupt compromises of the Clinton program, and still failed to provide universal coverage).

    It took several years to clarify just how important those stories actually were (or would become). It's taken even longer to appreciate a fifth story, which is arguably even greater and graver than these four: the commercialization of the internet. At the time, this was regarded as a major policy success, but one may have second thoughts by now. The Clinton economy was largely built on a bubble of speculation on e-businesses. While some of that bubble burst in 2000-01, much of it continues to inflate today, and its effect on our world is enormous.

    But in 1992-93, Republicans were so disgusted as losing the presidency to a hayseed Democrat like Clinton — especially one who claimed to be able to do their pro-business thing better than they could — that they latched on to petty scandal. They flipped the House in 1994, largely on the basis of checking account scandal. Bringing down Clinton was a bit harder, but started with flogging the Foster story. It grew more important over time, despite everyone agreeing that there was nothing to it, because it ensconced Kenneth Starr as Clinton's permanent prosecutor, uncovering the Lewinsky affair, leading to the sham impeachment, and more significantly, his circling of the wagons, which turned the DNC into his personal political machine, eventually securing Hillary Clinton's doomed nomination, and Trump's rise to power.

    I'm not really sure yet which four stories I'd pick if I had to write this article — mostly because there are so many to choose from, and they overlap and are replicated and reflected in various guises everywhere the Trump administration has influence. While the wars trouble me the most, and gestapo tactics initially directed at immigrants are especially flagrant, one also cannot ignore the gutting (and extreme politicization) of the civil service, the use of extortion to dominate various previously independent institutions (universities, law firms, media companies), the carte blanche given to fraud and corruption (with crypto an especially flagrant example of both), and the utter debasement of the "rule of law."

    There are also a whole raft of economic issues, which only start with fraud and corruption, but mostly stem from a shift of effective power toward corporations and their financier owners, increasing inequality and further entrenching oligarchy. The emerging Trump economy is not less efficient and less productive, it is increasingly unfair and unjust, and much fuller of precarity, which will sooner or later cause resentment and provoke resistance, sabotage, and possibly even revolution. Inequality is not just unfair. It is an acid which dissolves trust, faith, and good will, leaving only force as a means of preserving order. Sure, Trump seems cool with that, as well as the Hobbesian hell of "war of all against all," figuring his side has a big edge in guns, and maybe God on his side. But nearly everything we do in the world depends on trust that other people are going to be respectful, civil, orderly. It's hard to imagine coping in a world where our ability to trust the government, other institutions, and other people has decayed, stranding us in a savage jungle of predators.

    You might be wondering why I haven't mentioned climate change yet. I've long described failure to act on it as an opportunity cost — a choice due to political decisions to prioritize other things (like war), but so many opportunities have been squandered that one suspects more malign (or at least ignorant) interests. Although one cannot doubt human responsibility, it is effectively a force of nature now, beyond political agendas, so the more urgent concern is how does government copes with inevitable disasters. With Trump, no surprise that the answer is badly — even worse than under Biden — and not just in response but in preparation, even to the ability to recognize a disaster when one occurs.

    Climate change may well be the factor that destroys Trump: he can't keep it from happening, he has no empathy for victims when it does, he lacks the ways and means to respond adequately, and having denied it at every step along the way, he has no credibility when his incompetence and/or malice is exposed. It undermines his very concept of government, which crudely stated is as a protection racket, as the people who normally pay him for favors will soon find they are anything but protected. Sure, lots of poor people will be hurt by climate change, but the rich can take little comfort in that, because they own the property that will be devalued and in some cases destroyed — and even if it doesn't hit them directly, the insurance spikes will do the trick. Businesses and lenders will go under because they can't bear the risks, and no amount of blame-shifting Fox propaganda is going to cover that up.

    I could say similar things about AI, automation, and other technological advancements, but the issues there are more complex. Suffice it to say that Trump's let-the-market-and/or-China-decide stance (depending on who chips in the most) won't work. There is much more I could mention. Civil rights enforcement is dead. Does that mean old-fashioned racism will rebound? Antitrust enforcement is dead (provided you bribe the right people, as Paramount just did). Federal grants for arts and sciences are pretty much dead. So is any chance of student loan relief. There is very little but your own scruples to keep you from cheating on your taxes, and who has those these days? Want to talk about pollution? Measles? We're not even very far down the list.

    And the kicker is, instead of having all this ridiculous stuff to complain about, we're really in a position to do some extraordinarily good things for practically everyone on the planet. What's holding us back is a lot of really bad thinking. And it's not just Trump and his toady Republicans and their rabid fanbase, although they're easily the worst. I spend a lot of time reading Democrats on strategy, agenda, media, etc., and they still fall way short of what is needed, due to lack of understanding and/or will power. I'd like to think that they at least are capable of empathy, understand the concepts of civil rights and a government that serves all people, and are at least open to reason, but all too often they leave you in doubt.

    By the way, only later did I notice that none of Walsh's stories implicate Trump. He gets a glancing mention in the debt story, as Gaza does with hunger, but he's effectively saying that everything else involving Trump is even less important than Epstein. I limited my alternate to Clinton stories, because they were easier to weigh against Foster. There were other big stories of Clinton's first half-term, like the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the founding of the European Union, the Oslo Accords, and even the Hubble Telescope, but I tried to keep my head in the game. Walsh seems to be hoping for another game entirely: one where we can pretend Trump doesn't matter.

    [*] There are lots of ways to debunk this. See John Quiggin [07-22] The Arguments for More (or Fewer) People, including many valid comments. One of this cites a book — Adam Becker: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity — as "required reading for understanding where these people are coming from and why they are all completely insane."

Israel/Palestine: The atrocities hardly need me keeping track. What interests me more is how and when people see them, and realize that something else has to be done.

  • David Wallace-Wells [06-25] The Judgment of History Won't Save Gaza. No, but denying where Gaza fits in the long history of mass killing won't excuse Israel either. That the notion that "being on the right side of history" should be a motivation for good behavior may seem quaint in a culture that celebrates Breaking Bad, but in most times, most people have preferred to think of themselves as decent and virtuous. That such sentiments are scorned in today's Israel and America is not something to brag about. But even in a basically apologetic piece, here's a quote on what Israel has actually done:

    Reporting from the United Nations shows that today, nearly every hospital in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed, as have most schools and mosques. According to the United Nations Satellite Center, in less than two years, nearly 70 percent of all structures in Gaza have been possibly, moderately or severely damaged — or destroyed. As of January, U.N. figures showed nine in 10 homes were damaged or destroyed. About 90 percent of the population has been displaced, with many Gazans multiple times. A study published in January by The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, suggested that nearly 65,000 Palestinians had been killed by traumatic injury in the first nine months of the war — a figure 40 percent higher even than the estimates suggested by the Gaza Ministry of Health. The study also estimated that more than half of the dead were women and children; some estimates of the share of civilian casualties run higher. More than 175 Palestinian journalists have been killed.

    Those figures have been disputed, by Israel and many of its supporters, as has the degree to which this war has killed proportionally more civilians than many of the most gruesome military offensives of recent memory (Falluja, Mosul). But as you read about the recent targeted strikes on Iran, which according to the Israeli military killed a number of senior military and nuclear leaders, it's worth reflecting on reporting by +972 magazine, from earlier in the Gaza conflict, that for every low-level combatant that Israel's military A.I. targeted, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians in a strike — and that, in at least several instances, for higher-ranking figures, as many as 100 or more civilian deaths were tolerated. (Last April, I wrote about +972's reporting, much of which was later corroborated by The Times.)

    In recent weeks, the most horrifying news from Gaza has been about the attacks on those lining up for desperately needed humanitarian aid. Earlier in the conflict, it was especially striking to watch Cindy McCain — the head of the World Food Program and the widow of Senator John McCain, so much a stalwart supporter of Israel that his laughing face has been used in memes about the recent strikes in Iran — raise the alarm about the critical levels of hunger throughout Gaza. In May, she warned of famine — as she had been, on and off, for about a year. After that alarm-raising, a new food-distribution system was soon established. According to the U.N. human rights office, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since then, while waiting for food.

  • Peter Beinart [06-30] A New Playbook for Democratic Critics of Israel: "Zohran Mamdani's primary victory shows pro-Palestine candidates how to win without abandoning their values."

  • Muhannad Ayyash [07-13] Calling for world to account for the Gaza genocide: Review of Haidar Eid: Banging on the Walls of the Tank, which "reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible."

  • Bret Stephens [07-22] No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza: While the New York Times is legendary for their supplicant bias towards Israel, none of their columnists have more militantly cheered on the complete and utter devastation of Gaza than Stephens has. The only surprise here is that he doesn't come right out and embrace the genocide charge, but evidently whoever pulls his strings urged him to be a bit more circumspect. (Although his main argument that Israel isn't committing genocide is his brag that if Israel wanted to do so, they would have killed a lot more than 60,000 Palestinians.) Obviously, there's no point arguing with someone like him. Henceforth, we should just make sure to identify him always as "Holocaust Denier Bret Stephens."

  • Alice Speri [07-22] Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication.

  • Jason Ditz:

  • Aaron Maté [07-27] As Gaza starves, Trump tells Israel to 'finish the job': "The Trump administration abandons ceasefire talks just as aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza, and Israeli officials admit to yet another murderous lie."

  • James North:

  • Aaron Boxerman [07-28] In a First, Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Gaza Genocide: Notably, B'Tselem finally opens its eyes.

  • Malak Hijazi [07-29] Don't stop talking about the famine in Gaza: "Israel wants you to believe that airdrops and symbolic aid trucks will solve the famine in Gaza. Don't believe them. These measures are not meant to end hunger, only to quell growing global outrage as the genocide continues unchecked."

  • Branko Marcetic [07-29]: How much is shoddy, pro-Israel journalism worth? Ask Bari Weiss. "As her Free Press is poised to seal a $200 million deal with the mainstream news giant CBS, let us reflect on why."

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [07-29] A New Report Exposes How Major American Corporations Have Been All Too Eager to Aid Israel's Atrocities in Gaza: "It also reveals our nation's now undeniable complicity in what has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century."

  • Qassam Muaddi

    • [07-31]: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal. Really? Just a day before, Muaddi wrote US pulls out of Gaza ceasefire talks, and nothing here really contradicts that. We should be clear here that while it's possible for Israel to negotiate with Hamas for release of the few hostages who have managed to survive the bombardment (and Israel's own Hannibal Directive), a ceasefire is something Israel can (and should) implement unilaterally. If Trump wanted a ceasefire, all he has to do is convince Netanyahu to stop the shooting and bombing. And if he has any trouble, he can halt Israel's supply of bullets and bombs. That he hasn't done this so far strongly suggests that he doesn't want to, possibly because he's a monster, or because he has no will in the matter. Once you have a ceasefire, there are other things that need to be negotiated. My preference would be for Israel to renounce its claim to Gaza and kick it back to the UN, which would have to then deal with the Palestinians, with aid donors, the US, etc. My guess is that once Israel is out of the picture, the UN would have no problem getting Hamas to release the hostages and to disband and disarm. Israel could claim their victory, and would be left with defensible borders. (This would, of course, leave Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory, and in external refugee camps, with their own serious issues, but they're less pressing than ending the slaughter and starvation in Gaza.)

    • [08-13]: Starvation chronicles in Gaza: "I'm mostly tired of expecting the world to end this. I need to sleep. I have to wake up early to go look for food."

    • [08-14]: Israel swings between plans to occupy Gaza and resuming ceasefire talks: "As the Israeli army announced it was preparing plans for the occupation of Gaza City, initial reports indicate the ceasefire negotiations may resume, leaving open the question of whether Netanyahu's occupation plan is a negotiating tactic." Or (more likely) the negotiation rumors just another feint?

  • Michael Arria:

  • Philip Weiss [08-01]: Israel's international isolation has begun: "US and global politics surrounding Israel are shifting rapidly as the world recoils in horror at Israel's starvation of Gaza."

  • Jack Hunter [08-01]: How MTG became MAGA's moral compass on Gaza: "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has bucked her president, called for yanking aid to Israel, and was the first Republican to call what is happening 'a genocide'." By the way, I'm getting the impression that Responsible Statecraft is increasingly betraying its Koch roots and leaning right. Hunter is merely the writer most desperate to tout MAGA Republicans (including Trump) as peace icons.

  • Stavroula Pabst [08-01] Admin asked if US approves Gaza annex plan, says go ask Israel: More evidence of who's calling the shots for Trump foreign policy.

  • Mitchell Plithnick [08-01] Interview with Prof. Joel Beinin: No transcript, but I listened to all 1:09:31 of this. One side comment here was Beinin's note that the Jewish population had collapsed following the destruction of the 2nd temple (AD 70), with only a small minority adopting the new Rabbinic Judaism, which defined Judaism up to now. The implication is that as Jews turn against Israel, most will simply cease to identify as Jewish, while some will attempt to come up with a redefinition of Judaism that frees itself from Israel. I haven't found anything he's written on this, except complaints from some Zionist sources about his interpretation of Jewish history.

  • Francesca Fiorentini [08-01]: The 7 Worst Plans for Gaza: Don't bother. The article is a joke piece, and not a funny one. Besides, we already know the worst plan, which is for Israel to continue doing what it's done for 650+ days now, until they finally admit that all the Palestinians have died, just to spite Israel, who tried so hard to keep a few alive for decades, because war was the only way of life Israelis ever knew.

  • Aaron Boxerman/Samuel Granados/Bora Erden/Elena Shao [08-01] How Did Hunger Get So Much Worse in Gaza? Maybe because the aid trucks are used as bait for snipers? But that's just worse compared to what? Way before 2023, Israelis were restricting food imports to Gaza — their euphemism was "putting Gazans on a diet."

  • Mehdi Hasan [08-02]: The US is complicit in genocide. Let's stop pretending otherwise. I'm skeptical that "the US government, enabled by the media, is an active participant in Israel's atrocities in Gaza." Complicit? For sure. One could probably go further and argue that Israel could not, and therefore would not, be able to commit genocide, at least in this manner, without US material and diplomatic support, which under both Biden and Trump has been uncritical and unflinching, sometimes even beyond what was asked for. I also think the US has a deeper responsibility for Israel's turn toward genocide, even if much of the ideological underpinnings was imported from Israel, starting with the neocon embrace of Israel's far-right anti-Oslo opposition in the 1990s. (The Project for a New American Century started with a position paper on Israel's "defense of the realm.") But it's hard to be a participant in a reality you're so dedicated to pretending isn't real. I think it's probable that most Americans who still side with Israel are merely misinformed and/or deluded, and not fully in line with genocide. However, such negligence is hard to excuse for people who have a public responsibility to know what Israel is doing, and to implement US policy according to our own best interests. Hasan isn't wrong to include them among the "participants," even though their actual role is often passive and banal — words that have previous uses in describing people who not just tolerated but facilitated holocausts.

  • Aviva Chomsky [08-03] On Creating a Cover for Genocide: "Preventing criticism of Israel by defining it as antisemitic."

  • Julie Hollar [08-04]: Mainstream media largely sidelined starvation story, until it couldn't: "A deep dive into coverage shows a shocking lack of interest until now, and even then the reporting is skewed away from culpability."

  • Richard Silverstein:

  • Nathan J Robinson [08-05]: Why Won't US Politicians Say "Genocide"? Starts with a long list (with links) of organizations that have.

  • Max Boot [08-05] I still love Israel. But what I'm seeing is wrong. "It's still possible to love the country and condemn this war. But it's getting difficult." Original title (per Jeffrey St Clair, who added "imagine what it takes to finally turn Max Boot's war-mongering stomach") was "I hate the war in Gaza. But I still love Israel." I don't mind when people say they love Israel, as long as they understand that ending the war is the only way Israel can save itself.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj [08-07] Israel claims it's allowing aid into Gaza, but its 'engineering of chaos' ensures the aid doesn't reach starving Palestinians: "As limited aid trickles into Gaza, Israel's strategy of 'engineering chaos' by shooting at aid-seekers and permitting looters to steal aid ensures that food doesn't get to starving Palestinians."

  • Qassam Muaddi [08-07] Leaked Cabinet transcript reveals Israel chose to starve Gaza as a strategy of war: "Netanyahu chose to blow up the ceasefire and starve Gaza's population in order to force a surrender from Hamas, while top military and security officials favored moving to the second phase of a ceasefire, leaked cabinet meeting minutes reveal."

  • Abdaljawad Omar [08-08] The war without end in Gaza: "Israel's latest plan to occupy Gaza City reveals that the assault on Gaza is more than just a war over territory. It is a war to extend, and dictate the tempo of killing and destruction — to exhaust Gaza into submission." My main quibble here is that "submission" implies survival. Israel wants Gaza to be depopulated, either by death or by exile, and they don't care which (although as Deir Yassin in 1948 showed, they've long understood that mass murder is effective at driving exile).

  • Jonathan Ofir [08-08] 4 out of 5 Jewish Israelis are not troubled by the famine in Gaza: 79%.

  • Asaf Yakir [08-13] How War Became Israel's New Normal: "It is a mistake to think that Benjamin Netanyahu is solely responsible for Israel's genocide or that removing him would bring it to an end. To win support for war, he has mobilized large swathes of Israeli society, from liberals to the far right."

  • Ali Ghanim [08-12] Anas al-Sharif Was My Friend. Here's Why Israel Feared Him So Much. "On Monday, Anas, 28, was targeted, along with three other Al Jazeera journalists, in an Israeli strike on a tent complex around Al-Shifa Hospital."

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [08-14] Why Egypt can't criticize Israel for at least another two decades: "A record gas deal exposes a strategic vulnerability as Cairo trades political autonomy for energy security."

  • Martin Shaw [08-16]: When Genocide Denial Is the Norm: "Genocide scholar Martin Shaw argues that ending Israel's genocide in Gaza and isolating Israel on the international stage must become the cause of every country that claims to represent human values."

  • Angel Leonardo Peña [08-16] How Zionism is leading the reactionary wave worldwide: "Zionism is no longer hiding in the shadows, as it once did, supporting global reactionaries with training and support. It has now taken center stage as the vanguard of the global right, and all reactionaries are following." Back in the 1930s, one thing nearly all fascists had in common was anti-semitism. Today the nearly universal common thread is their embrace of Israel, especially as genocide becomes more obvious. The argument that criticism of Israel is proof of antisemitism is not just wrong; the opposite is much closer to the truth.

  • Tony Karon [08-17]: Anti-Semitism, Zionism and "the Americanization of the Holocaust: Much to recommend here, including this quote from Hagai El-Ad:

    We're approaching the moment, and perhaps it's already here, when the memory of the Holocaust won't stop the world from seeing Israel as it is. The moment when the historic crimes committed against our people will stop serving as our Iron Dome, protecting us from being held to account for crimes we are committing in the present against the nation with which we share the historical homeland.

Russia/Ukraine: During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to end this war "in a day." Of course, he had neither the diplomatic skills nor the inclination to actually do that — and he spent his day on other priorities, like pardoning his insurrectionists and organizing his gestapo — but even observers as skeptical as me of his peace credentials and foreign policy aims thought he'd be more likely to end the war than Biden's neocons, who saw the war as nothing more or less than an opportunity to bleed a hated foe dry. Granted, the terms would be less than ideal, but at this point ending the war on any terms is preferable to slogging on "to the last dead Ukrainian" (which seemed to be the Biden/Zelensky policy). I've never bought the line that Trump is Putin's stooge. Still, Putin holds most of the cards here, and it's been clear for some time that the war would only be settled on his terms. That Trump couldn't move faster was partly due to his own incompetence, but also because Putin decided to press his advantages: to gain more ground, while Trump made plain his disinterest in supporting Ukraine (not that he had reservations about allowing Europe to buy American arms to fight Russia).

The first stories below, from Aug. 1, reflect the moment Trump turned hawkish on Ukraine. Less than two weeks later, there seems to be a deal float, starting with a face-to-face meeting. There is not a lot of reason to expect this to pan out. (The meetings with Kim Jong-Un went nowhere, but mostly because Trump's security cabal was run by deep state saboteurs like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. No doubt similar people are still around, but buried deeper in the bureaucracy.) Whether this one does is almost totally up to Putin. If he can get most of Russian-speaking Ukraine and relief from most sanctions, he should be happy to let the rest of Ukraine go their own way. It's hard to see what more he could demand with any chance of agreement, and the downside is he pushes most of Europe into being even more aggressively anti-Russian than the US has been under Biden. Plus he gets a chance to make Trump look good — not something Trump can readily do on his own.

The last stories immediately follow the Trump-Putin summit on August 16, during which nothing was concluded, as the next step will be for Trump to meet with Zelensky.

  • Eli Stokols/Paul McLeary [08-01] Trump, escalating war of words with Russia's Medvedev, mobilizes two nuclear submarines.

  • Anatol Lieven [08-01] Trump vs. Medvedev: When talking tough is plain turkey: "Exchanging nuclear threats like this is pure theater and we should not be applauding." The war of words started over Trump's threats to impose sanctions if Russia doesn't comply with a ceasefire in 10 days." This led to Trump publicly positioning nuclear submarines to illustrate his threat to Russia, in a rare attempt at nuclear blackmail. Lieven argues that "Medvedev and Trump are both trying to look tough for domestic audiences." I doubt that either people much cares, but the leaders' personal machismo is on the line. What is truly disturbing about the Trump position is that the one thing Putin is least likely to accept is an ultimatum that would expose him as weak. On the other hand, rejection would make Trump look weak, so he's walked into his own trap.

  • Tyler Pager/David E Sanger [08-08]: Trump Says He Will Meet With Putin in Alaska Next Week: "Trump also suggested that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine would include 'some swapping of territories,' signaling that the US may join Russia in trying to compel Ukraine to cede land."

  • Stavroula Pabst:

  • Anatol Lieven [08-09] Trump's terms for Russia-Ukraine on the right course for peace: "A meeting in Alaska, while putting land concessions on the table, is an essential first step." I've separated this from his earlier piece, because events intervened. Holding out any degree of hope viz. Trump strikes me as foolish, which is why I say it all comes down to Putin. But if Putin really did want to make Trump look good, why wait until now?

  • Norman Solomon [08-09] Democrats should give peace a chance in Ukraine: Democrats need to align with peace and social justice movements everywhere, pushing diplomatic solutions to conflicts that also recognize and advance human rights, regardless of power politics, narrow economic concerns, and the arms lobbies. But they need to prioritize peace, which is something the Biden administration failed to recognize — and which tragically cost them the 2024 election. The one advantage they have over Republicans is that they lean, at least in principle, toward social justice. Unfortunately, US foreign policy, under Democrats as well as Republicans, has reduced such views to hypocrisy, which has done immense damage to their reputation — both around the world and among their own voters.

  • Michael Corbin [08-12] Trouble in Russian economy means Putin really needs Alaska talks too: "Mixed indicators signal wartime growth has plateaued." I haven't really sorted this out. I don't think that economic considerations is going to dictate Putin's policy, but they must be somewhere in the back of his mind.

  • Harrison Berger [08-14] Stephen Cohen's legacy: Warnings unheeded, a war without end: "At his own peril, the late historian used his considerable influence to challenge rather than echo establishment narratives about Russia and Ukraine."

  • Zachary Paikin [08-14]: On Ukraine war, Euro leaders begin to make concessions — to reality: "The spirit going into Alaska will continue to be cautiously optimistic, as long as the parties with most at risk don't get in their own way."

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [08-15]: Deal or no deal? Alaska summit ends with vague hints at something: "There was no ceasefire, but none of the new sanctions Trump threatened, either. Whether this was a 'win' or 'loss' depends on who you ask." Why ask us? We're only "experts"! A lot of people were quick to pick on Trump for failing to bring home a peace deal, but that assumes he has a lot more power than he actually has. The main power that the US has is to underwrite the indefinite extension of the war, as Biden did from 2022 on. One side can get a war going and keep it going. But making peace requires some agreement from both sides, where one side is unambiguously Putin. So all Trump could hope for was for Putin to give him something he could take back to his side, which minimally includes Zelensky, NATO, and the EU. Whether what he brought back works depends on how good an offer Putin made, but that he brought it back signals that he's abandoned Biden's "fight to the last dead Ukrainian" plot. Now we have to see whether the "allies" were just going along with Washington, or have red lines of their own.

  • Adam Pasick [08-17]: What to Know About Russia-US-Ukraine Peace Talks: Actually, there doesn't seem to be much to know here. Trump got his marching orders from Putin in Alaska. He now has to face Zelensky and other European leaders (including NATO and EU's über-hawk Von Der Leyen) in Washington. If they buckle, and given the loss of US support bankrolling the forever war they might, then presumably there will in short course be an agreement that will cede the Russian-speaking Ukrainian territories (Crimea, Luhansk, and Donbas) to Russia, and leave the Ukrainian-speaking parts of Ukraine free and independent, with both sides agreeing not to fight any further. That's basically what could have happened in 2014, when a pro-western faction seized control of the Kiev government, and Crimea and Donbas revolted and declared their independence. Something like that happened peacefully with the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It's never been clear why something along those lines didn't happen in Ukraine, but many nationalists — including, obviously, some Russian ones, but they are far from alone — are attached to their territorial ambitions, plus there was the underlying geostrategic interest of the US in advancing NATO at Russia's expense.

    The 2014-22 war was basically one waged by Ukraine to reconquer lost territory, even though there is little reason to think that the people living there preferred Kiev over Moscow. Putin sought to reverse that war by invading in 2022, which allowed Russia to gain some extra territory in the south, establishing a land bridge between Donbas and Crimea, mostly because Ukrainian forces were preoccupied with defending Kiev and Kharkhiv in the north. Ukraine reversed some of their losses late in 2022, but their 2023 counteroffensive failed, and the war has largely been stalemated ever since, with some minor Russian gains in Donetsk recently.

    Since the Russian offensive failed in 2022, it's been clear that Russia would not be able to overturn the Kiev government, let alone occupy western Ukraine. It's also been clear that Ukraine would not be able to dislodge Russian forces from territory that favors Russia, and that Russia has much greater depth which would allow it to wage the war much longer than Ukraine could. That Ukraine has been able to fight on as long and hard as it has is largely due to American and European support, which is waning. It is also clear that the impact of sanctions against Russia has not dimmed their will to continue the war. The idea that Russians would turn against Putin also appears fanciful. However much one may dislike the idea of allowing any nation to conquer part of any other, there is no practical alternative to a peace which largely vindicates Putin's decision to invade. The US under Biden refused to consider any concessions, which allowed (encouraged?) Zelensky to take a maximalist stand. Trump, on the other hand, seems inclined to respect Putin's needs. His problem is squaring them away with the minimal needs of Ukraine and their European partners.

    Whether he can, I suspect, will depend more on how reasonable a deal Putin is willing to offer than on Trump's hitherto clueless "art of the deal." However much Russia resented NATO, the fact that America was always in charge used to moderate the risk NATO posed to Russia. If Putin doesn't offer something Ukraine/Europe can live with, they're liable to break with Trump and continue the fight on their own. A Europe provoked to break with the US could become much more of a threat to Russia than NATO ever was (not an existential threat, in that Europe will never conquer and occupy Russia, but it could be more effective at isolating and shunning Russia).

    I'm not bothered by Putin's insistence on no ceasefire. While my approach would be to start with a ceasefire, Putin is wary that offering one first would allow Ukraine to drag out future negotiations (much like the US has never come to terms with North Korea, 72 years after that ceasefire). While any killing that occurs between now and whenever is unnecessary and probably meaningless, it is more important to get to a proper peace deal sooner rather than later. And while Putin is an intensely malign political figure, it is better for all concerned to establish some sort of civil relationship with Russia post-bellum — as opposed to America's usual grudge-holding (again, see North Korea, also Iran, and for that matter Afghanistan).

    Personally, I would have liked to see this worked out better, but no one involved cares what I think. They're going to operate according to their own craven impulses. But I wouldn't worry too much about the details, as long as we get to some kind of peace. Justice is a much taller order, but better to pursue it in peace than in war.

    The NY Times has more on Ukraine here, where the latest title is "Trump Backs Plan to Cede Land for Peace in Ukraine."

  • Anatol Lieven [08-17]: Why Trump gets it right on Ukraine peace: "In Alaska he found reality: he is now embracing an agreement without demanding a ceasefire first, which would have never worked anyway." I wrote the above before getting to this piece. Nothing here changes my mind on anything. Lieven is right to point out that "Trump is engaged in a form of shuttle diplomacy." He needs to get both sides to agree, but he only has leverage over one side, so he only gets the deal that Putin will allow, and that only if Putin allows a deal that Zelensky can accept. He's gambling that both are agreeable, in which case he hopes to snag a Nobel Peace Prize before he blunders into WWIII. That at least is a motivation one can imagine him considering. Anything else is laughable: e.g., Lieven's line that "We should at least give [Trump] credit for moral courage." Also hilarious is "Putin is hardly the 'global pariah' of Western political and media rhetoric." It's almost like Lieven thinks he's such a big shot pundit he imagines that his flattery might sway Putin and Trump to do the right thing. Rest assured that even if they do, it won't be for the right reasons. And neither will admit that it was someone else's idea.

Trump administration: Practically every day, certainly several times every week, I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump administration. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything.

Current Affairs:

  • [08-06] Our 200th News Briefing! I signed up for the free peak at this when it originally came out, but they soon moved it off Substack, and it doesn't normally seem to be available on their website, so I lost track of it. (I'm still signed up for something on Substack, which mostly seems to be funding appeals.) Still, as a tribute to round numbers, this sample is available. Some interesting stuff here, but nothing I'd pay money for.

  • Andrew Ancheta [05-21] Why You Should Fix Your Own Stuff: "Companies like Apple and Microsoft don't want you to repair your own tech, because they make a fortune from planned obsolescence. But learning to do it yourself brings empowerment." Few things bother me more than business schemes to make their products independently repairable. The right-to-repair bills mentioned here would help, but we need to go further, and make all software and hardware open source and interoperable. And while I can personally attest that being able to repair your own stuff feels good, there is so much stuff that's so complicated that no one can understand how to repair it all. I'd like to start thinking about repair cooperatives, and publicly funding them.

  • Nathan J Robinson

    • [07-24] Rise of the Idiot Interviewer: "Podcast bros are interviewing presidents and power players without doing basic research beforehand. The result is a propagandistic catastrophe."

    • [07-30] Living in Omelas: "When we face the suffering that our civilization is built on, what are our obligations?" Starts with a Ursula Le Guin story, but eventually circles back to Gaza.

    • [2024-10-01] Surely AI Safety Legislation Is A No-Brainer: "Radical Silicon Valley libertarianism is forcing us all to take on unnecessary risks, and the new technology is badly in need of regulation." Not a new piece, but new to me. I've done essentially nothing with AI so far, but probably should start working with it. I'm already finding Google's searches to be significantly improved with it (and not just because the web page links are almost exclusively commercial crap). But I have no idea how you go about regulating it to ensure any degree of safety. What I am fairly sure of is that the profit motive ensures that it will be used for purposes ranging dubious to nefarious, so one was to reduce risk would be to cut back on profit motives.[*] However, it is very hard to regulate industries without their cooperation — indeed, the main force for license requirements is the desire to limit competition — because our political system is designed so that special interests compete, while the general interest has no lobby.[**] So I wouldn't be surprised to find most of the push to regulate coming from the companies themselves, not so much to protect users as to validate their own business models.

      [*] One simple way to do this would be to declare and nothing developed with AI can be patented or copyrighted. You could go a step further and declare that nothing that can be reverse-engineered with AI is eligible. The arguments for doing this are pretty obvious. Needless to say, we're not going to see a lot of lobbying to limit patents and copyrights, although the AI companies will probably lobby for laws to limit their exposure for whatever harm AI may cause. We'll hear that without limitation of liability, the industry will be stifled, which means they won't be able to make as much money, or be as careless in making it.

      • [**] By the way, I have a solution for this: tax lobbying expenses at 100%, so that in order to spend $1 on lobbying, you also have to donate $1 to a public fund for counter-lobbying. That way every side of every issue gets equal weighting, so winners will be determined on their merits. Same thing can apply to political donations. It would take some work to set up a fair and effective distribution system, but I have a bunch of ideas for that, too.

  • Grady Martin [07-29] The "Careless People" Who Make Up Elite Institutions: "Sarah Wynn-Williams' bestseller is a disturbing exposé about the inner workings of Facebook. But Wynn-Williams herself is complicit in the harms she criticizes, and so is her entire class of elite strivers."

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Laura Snapes [2024-09-30] Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms. Some time after I bought my 1986 Audi, I replaced the radio with a CD player. Same with my 1994 Nissan, unless it came with one (I'm a bit unsure, but if it did, it was gone within a week). The 2006 Toyota had one by default, but we opted for the 6-CD changer. I don't think I ever loaded more than one CD at a time, but it came with extra speakers, and made a statement. When I started contemplating a new car just before 2020 happened, I was dismayed to find virtually nothing offering CD players, or even radios that could be ripped out and easily replaced. When we finally gave in and bought our new Toyota, all we could get was a 10.5-inch media/info console with bluetooth, wi-fi, one usb port, and a bunch of trial subscriptions. I spent our first week driving in silence, except when the wife insisted on NPR, which was painful.

Thomas Frank [2024-11-09] The Elites Had It Coming: Just stumbled across this, not recalling it but thinking, of course, this is what he would say the day after the election debacle. Turns out I did cite this piece in my post-election Speaking of Which, even pulling out a quote indicting Democrats as "their most brilliant minds couldn't figure [Trump] out." In rereading the piece, I'm more struck by the two paragraphs above the one I quoted:

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. "Trump will fix it," declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which "it" you had in mind.

Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump's persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. He was an "American Bad Ass," in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of grievance, as though discontent itself were the product of a diseased mind.

Elie Mystal [07-02] Democrats Should Become the Pro-Porn Party. I was surprised to see this, and welcome it, but don't hold out much hope. Democrats have long sought to portray themselves as exemplars of probity, even to the point of allowing themselves to be caricatured as elitist scolds, with the suggestion that they are really just virtue signalling hypocrites. Perhaps they're still reeling from the Cleveland-era charges of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion"? (Not far removed from their preference for blue over red, which can be linked back to McCarthyite-era red scares, something they felt vulnerable to because, like communists, they tended to at least pay lip service to the notions of equal rights and social justice. The purpose of red-baiting was not just to attack and isolate communists but also to tar the liberals, who when they ran scared discredited themselves, isolating themselves from their most principled and committed allies.)

Prohibition was at the heart of those charges, and so it remains: the belief that "improper" personal behavior can and should be repressed by those in power. While people with good intentions can be tempted by prohibitionism — the temperance movement being a prime example — its real constituency is on the right, because they are the ones who believe in power, which in hard and/or soft form is the only way they can maintain their unjust social and economic hierarchy. While they happily invent their own morality to suit their interests, it's even easier to ride on old religious prejudices, especially as they have a ready constituency, led by their own authoritarians. Moreover, labeling some people as deviants seems to make the others feel superior, and that is the definition of social hierarchies.

Democrats could oppose these right-wing schemes by defending every targeted group, but that lets the right set the framework for the debate, taints you, divides you, and dissipates energy with many isolated defenses. Much better to articulate a general principle, and show how prohibition and other prejudices spread to harm others, ultimately including the people who initially approved. To some extent Mystal does this, seeing porn as a free speech issue, and personal access to it as a question of privacy. Democrats mostly agree as far as law — Mystal cites a Kagan dissent against Alito & Thomas — but muddle their defense by trying to show their disapproval of acts, speech, and thoughts they would stop short of prohibiting. This fails on all counts: it reinforces the right-wing view that they're right and you're evil; it makes you look and sound guilty; it offers the targets of their hatred little reassurance that you'll defend their rights, or that you even care much about them. You'd be much better off making a strong defense of key rights, including free speech and privacy, then making it clear that their defense extends to things like porn, regardless of whether one personally approves or not.

Some Democrats have made some effort here (in terms of not just defending but showing some respect for targets of attack), at least on issues like abortion and even the T in LGBTQ, but drugs (beyond marijuana) and sex work still seem to be taboo. (Whether there's a political constituency to be gained there is hinted at but not much discussed. A lot of people enjoy porn, even if few will champion it in public.) A big problem here is that anti-porn forces try to shift the question to the question of children — conventionally under 18, which is several years past the point where people start taking an interest in sex and really should understand. I'd go further than Mystal and argue that all age restrictions on viewing porn should be abolished. (I could see where acting in porn might be a different concern, but there are lots of areas where I doubt the value of being so overly protective and controlling of adolescents — the matter of younger children is certainly less clear cut.) Still, porn seems to me like a relatively low-priority issue, unlikely to gain much traction, although more clearly articulated views of free speech and privacy might help, especially to counter the rampant bigotry of the right.

  • Elie Mystal [07-30] The Rule of Law Is Dead in the US: "The rule of law presupposes that there are rules that provide a consistent, repeatable, and knowable set of outcomes. That's no longer the case.".

Kevin Munger [07-14] Attention is All You Need: On the collapse of "literary culture," and social media as "secondary orality," followed by a primer on how AI works. Title collides with Chris Hayes' recent book on attention, so Munger recommends "best experienced through the medium of an Ezra Klein podcast, then also mentions "Derek Thompson's report on the end of reading, which leads to a joke about their recent book, Abundance.

Nate Chinen [07-15] The Times, A-Changin': Reports on a leaked "internal memo" of a shake-up in the New York Times arts coverage, where "veteran critics" Jon Pareles (pop music), Margaret Lyons (TV), Jesse Green (theater), and Zachary Woolfe (classical music) "will soon be taking on unspecified 'new roles,' while the paper searches for replacements on their beats." I was pointed to this by Piotr Orlov, who concluded "The whole episode simply reaffirms a basic Dada Strain [his blog] tenet: the need to organize and build our own institutions. (And maybe stop chasing the ever-more poisoned chalice.)" I've believed that much since the early 1970s, as soon as I ran into the notion of controlling the "means of production"; which is to say, even before I first encountered, and developed an immediate distaste for, the New York Times. Chinen's reaction is milder, perhaps a lingering effect of having tasted that poisoned chalice, tempered by personal familiarity. And, for now at least, the four still have jobs, and may come to find opportunities in writing less routine coverage, as well as behind-the-scenes influence. But the more disturbing aspect of Chinen's piece is the broader shift of media megacorps, which is really what the Times has become (the newspaper itself just a facade from an earlier era), to monetizing novel forms of attention grabbing, which increasingly substitute for critical thinking. As a non-reader (or a hostile one when I do glimpse something), I've long regarded the New York Times as some kind of black hole, where good writers cash in and become irrelevant, rarely if ever to be seen or heard again. Jon Pareles has long been a prime example: I remember him fondly from his 1970s reviews in Crawdaddy, notably for introducing me to musicians I had never heard of, like George Crumb and Dudu Pukwana. Many more have followed, willing cogs in their machine. Jon Caramanica, for instance: Chinen reports that he's given up "the word," finding a new calling making "popcast" videos. Sounds like a waste to me, but I guess they've figured out how to make money out of it, and for them, what else matters?

Bob Boilen [07-16] The end of public radio music?

Ryan Cooper [07-17] How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? "The malfunctioning xAI chatbot provides some insights into how large language models work." For starters, it appears they haven't overcome the oldest maxim in computer science: "garbage in, garbage out."

Paul Krugman [07-22] Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money? "And will it ever come to America?" I'm not familiar with this concept, but it's long been obvious to me that we could save a huge amount of money if we set up a public non-profit utility to handle payments.

Last week the House passed the GENIUS Act, which will boost the growth of stablecoins, thereby paving the way for future scams and financial crises. On Thursday the House also passed a bill that would bar the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or even studying the idea.

Why are Republicans so terrified by the idea of a CBDC that they're literally ordering the Fed to stop even thinking about it?

I'd go much farther and wipe out much of the existing banking industry, which is predatory and counterproductive. It's unclear to me that there is anything worthwhile that banks can do more efficiently and/or productively than a public service utility. Given that government can borrow less expensively than private banks — especially if you overlook the favorable terms banks receive from government — this can extend to most routine loans. Everyone could be provided not just a free checking and savings account, but a credit card. (Note that many other forms of loans, like mortgages and student loans, are already backed by government, so would cost less to administer directly.)

As Krugman notes, the finance industry has a lot of lobbying clout in America, and this is directed at preventing consideration of alternatives. (Same for the better known but actually smaller health care and oil industries.) So we are, at least for now, screwed, repeatedly. Inequality is effectively a measure of the political power that elites have to concentrate surplus value in their own hands. Other nations, like Brazil, don't have to get sucked into this trap, and as such, especially as the rot of the so-called Washington Consensus becomes more obvious, can offer us laboratories for alternative approaches.

I've read Krugman regularly for many years, but I didn't follow his move to Substack. Looking at the website, these are a few posts that caught my eye (although some are cut short, so there's some kind of shakedown involved):

  • [04-03]: Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? "Trump's tariffs are a disaster. His policy is worse." The basic analysis is solid. The suggestion that the methodology could have been cooked up by AI is amusing. The top comment by George Santangelo is worth quoting:

    Tariffs aren't imposed by Trump for economic reasons. Trump has found the ultimate grift. Put tariffs on everything and wait for the requests to remove them, industry by industry, company by company. In return, Trump or his family or his pals receive money, business, information and any other advantage for the removals. Who will know whether a real estate development by Jared Kushner for the Saudis results in an advantageous price for the land and development fees for the Trump organization? It's the perfect corrupt plot. Any and all United States monies are subject to theft by the ultimate thief.

    I chopped off the "BTW" bit, relating to Trump's convictions and impeachment. The latter is an impossible reach, so it might be better to just admit that Trump — with his packing of the courts and personal takeover of the DOJ — is above and beyond the law, and make voters face the consequences of that. Along the way, just try to document the many ways (criminal or not) Trump and his cronies line their pockets from his administration's arbitrary and often irrational actions.

  • [07-16]: Trump's parade flopped. No Kings Day was a hit. "Right now, images largely determine the outcome."

  • [07-29]: I Coulda Made a Better Deal: "What, exactly, did Trump get from Europe?" His "better deal" was none at all.

  • [07-30]: Fossil Fool: "How Europe took Trump for a ride."

  • [07-31]: The Media Can't Handle the Absence of Truth: "And their diffidence empowers pathological liars." More on the gullibility of the media. Their assumption is that both sides have slightly tinted views of reality, allowing them to interpolate. But that breaks down when one side goes bonkers, and they lack the critical faculties to determine which. (Of course, they fare even worse when both sides are grossly wrong, as on Israel.)

  • [08-01]: Trump/Brazil: Delusions of Grandeur Go South: "Trump thinks he can rule the world, but he doesn't have the juice."

  • [08-03]: The Economics of Smoot-Hawley 2.0, Part I: "Tariffs will be very high as far as the eye can see. What does that mean?"

  • [08-05]: The Paranoid Style in American Economics: "Remember, every accusation is a confession." The subtitle is a truism that should be pointed out more often. The main thing I learned in my high school psych class was the concept of projection: how we ascribe to others our own sick motives and ambitions. Thus the US thinks China wants to rule the world. Thus Bush thought Saddam Hussein would nuke New York if we didn't prevent him from developing any form of nuclear deterrence. Thus a bunch of white idiots think that any loosening civil rights would turn blacks into slave masters. Most often when you accuse someone else of nefarious motives, you're admitting to your own.

  • Greg Sargent [07-30] Krugman Wrecks Trump's Europe Deal: "Scam on His Voters: An interview with Paul Krugman, who "explains at length why [Trump's trade agreement with Europe is] actually a big loss for our country — and especially for his MAGA base."

  • Krugman also has a series of papers on "Understanding Inequality" published by Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality:

    1. Why Did the Rich Pull Away From the Rest?
    2. The Importance of Worker Power
    3. A Trumpian Diversion
    4. Oligarchs and the Rise of Mega-Fortunes
    5. Predatory Financialization
    6. Crypto: This one is still paywalled, and despite the "Part VII" in the title may not be part of the series, but he offers it has a case study, "seen as a sort of hyper-powered example of predatory finance, influence-buying and corruption." Points listed: 1. The strange economics of cryptocurrency; 2. Crypto as a form of predatory finance; 3. How crypto drives inequality; 4. How the crypto industry has corrupted our politics.

Catherine Rampell [07-23] 11 tips for becoming a columnist: Washington Post opinion columnist, now ex, started writing about business for the New York Times, has done TV punditry at CNN and MSNBC. I've cited her 10 times in Speaking of Which, but my recall is vague.[*] This seems like generally wise advice, so I thought I'd check up on what else she's written in her last days:

  • [07-17] Democrats risk taking the wrong lessons from Trumpism: "Replicating Trump's populism is not the answer." Lead picture, and much of the article, is Zohran Mamdani, but she also mentions Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and "new convert" Chris Murphy, while exempting "more pragmatist, technocrat-driven" Democrats like Obama. But consider her definition:

    After all, that is the unifying theme of populism: Promise voters they would have a better life and nicer things if not for [insert scapegoats here]. Identifying a cabal to blame can help win elections, but it is not a great strategy for governing. . . . But the rhetoric from the populist left and right has some similarities: You would have nice things if not for the corrupt elites keeping them from you. . . . The common tendency to respond to complicated social problems with scapegoats, slogans and simple solutions explains why a populist everyman such as Joe Rogan can seemlessly transition from Feeling the Bern to jumping on the Trump Train.

    Several (well, many) things come to mind here. Identifying enemies is common to all effective politics. This is because most people need to personify the forces affecting them, rather than just blame abstractions (isms, groups, secret cabals, etc.). This only seems unusual because mainstream Democrats, desiring to be all things to all people, shy away from opposing anyone (or limit themselves to safe targets among the powerless — scapegoats, as you say). Left and right (and for that matter middle, in their own muddled way) share the trait of identifying enemies and promising benefits to others. But the differences in who they blame and what they promise are considerable, so why ignore that? Once you look, there are obvious differences between left and right. For starters, the left blames people who actually exercise substantial power, whereas the right blames phantoms and ascribes them with mythical power. (Ok, some of their targets are real, like unions, public interest groups, and honest Democrats, but few wield substantial power.) And the left tries to offer real solutions. The right may try to appeal to the same people and issues as the left, but they blame false villains, and offer ineffective solutions. So sure, they may be able to confuse some folk like Rogan, but note that Rogan only switched to Trump after Democrats excluded Sanders — although in Rogan's case, that Trump appeared on his program but Harris refused may have mattered more.

    One more point here: Rampell, like many recent left-adverse liberals, uses "populism" derisively, as a crude attempt to smear sincere leftists by associating them with right-wing demagogues. There are many problems with this[**], but the one I want to note here is that it betrays a distrust in the ability of most people to understand their own best interests and to govern themselves. The implication here is that we know better, and you should defer to our superior understanding — which is conditioned by their own economic interests and cultural values. It shouldn't be hard to understand why the anti-elitist impulses that most people hold might kick in here, especially given the track record of "pragmatic Democrats" like Clinton and Obama. There are lots of things one can say about Trump's demagoguery and how it exploits the worst impulses of popular opinion, but to call it "populist" implies that the fault lies in the people, and not in their manipulators. After all, what are anti-populist liberals but higher-minded manipulators?

    One more quote, which offers a good example of how cynically centrist-liberals distort leftist programs to arrive at nothing but a defense of the status quo:

    Rich people and corporations can definitely afford to pay higher taxes, as I have argued many times. But the reason we don't have Medicare-for-all (as designed by Sanders) is that Americans don't have the stomach for the middle-class taxes such a huge expansion of the safety net would require.

    Even if you seized the entire wealth of every billionaire in the country — i.e., impose a 100 percent wealth tax — that would pay for Medicare-for-all for just over a year. Forget free college or other Scandinavian-style welfare-state expansions that the fabled billionaire money tree is also earmarked for. But anyone who points out math problems like this, or suggests some less ambitious alternative, is tarred and feathered as a corporate shill or handmaiden to the oligarchs.

    I count about five major fallacies here, but we could split hairs and double that. One actually tilts in favor of her argument: a lot of the wealth counted by rich people is illusory, based on inflated values for assets, bid up by other rich people desperate for assets. So there are practical limits to how much wealth one can tax away. On the other hand, destroying all that imaginary value wouldn't be a bad thing. Moreover, whatever real value there is, is redistributed, mostly to people who can put it to better use. Moreover, even if you can't satisfy desired spending by only taxing the rich, that doesn't mean you shouldn't tax the rich. They're the obvious place to start, because they have most of the money, and they can afford it.

    New welfare services don't have to be fully funded out of new revenues. In many cases — health care being an obvious one — they directly replace current expenses. There's much more along these lines. For what it's worth, I think Democrats are hurting themselves in proposing to only raise taxes on the rich. There is certainly a lot of room to do so, and doing so would have some positive benefits beyond raising revenues that can be put to better ends, but to fix the worst problems of inequality, we also need to work on the rules and policies that create so much inequality. As that is done, the rich will have less money to tax away, so the mix of revenues, like the mix of wealth, should spread out. As long as income and estate taxes are strongly progressive, it shouldn't be a problem to set the overall tax level according to desired expenses and make up the funding with consumption taxes. Any service that can be done better and/or cheaper by a public utility is a good candidate for public funding, especially if metering it would be harmful. Those cases should be net savings for the whole nation, even if they appear as tax increases. We already do this in many cases, but it's easy to think of more that can be done better (e.g., banking).

    [*] Sample titles, which despite some both-sidesism suggests why an increasingly Trump-friendly WP might be disposed to get rid of her:

    • It's almost like the House GOP never care about deficits after all
    • A year after Dobbs, House GOP proposes taking food from hungry babies
    • Supposed 'moderates' like Nikki Haley would blow up the government
    • Efforts to kill Obamacare made it popular. Trump says he'll try again.
    • Trump can't find anyone to spot him $464 billion. Would you?
    • Two myths about Trump's civil fraud trial
    • The internet was supposed to make humanity smarter. It's failing
    • Those who would trade democracy for economic gain would get neither
    • Hot tip: Both parties should stop bribing voters with tax cuts [on exempting tip income]
    • Voters prefer Harris's agenda to Trump's — they just don't realize it. Take our quiz.

    [**] As a Kansan, I associate populism with the 1892-96 People's Party, a left-democratic movement that emerged in response to the ultra-conservative Grover Cleveland and the oligarchic takeover of the Republican Party. They were especially successful in Kansas, so I tend to view them as part of my political heritage (as does Thomas Frank; see especially his book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism; some reviews are still interesting, such as Aaron Lake Smith [Jacobin], and James Traub [NY Times], which also covers a Gene Sperling book that looks better than expected).

Will Hermes [07-23] Nick Drake, Long a Folk Mystery, Is (Partly) Revealed: "A 42-track collection built around two found recordings helps illuminate the creative process of the revered but elusive icon, who died in 1974."

Moira Donegan [07-26]: Columbia's capitulation to Trump begins a dark new era for US education: "The university's agreement reveals its willingness to bend to the administration's will and undermines an American myth." The agreement includes paying "a $220 million fine," and more:

The deal that resulted gives the Trump administration everything it wants. A Trump-approved monitor will now have the right to review Columbia's admissions records, with the express intent of enforcing a supreme court ban on affirmative action — in other words, ensuring that the university does not admit what the Trump administration deems to be too many non-white students. The Middle Eastern studies department is subject to monitoring, as well, after an agreement in March.

The agreement is not a broad-level, generally applicable regulatory endeavor that applies to other universities — although given the scope of the administration's ambitions at Columbia, it is hard to say whether such a regulatory regime would be legal. Instead, it is an individual, backroom deal, one that disregards the institution's first amendment rights and the congressionally mandated protections for its grants in order to proceed with a shakedown. "The agreement," writes the Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, "gives legal form to an extortion scheme." The process was something akin to a mob boss demanding protection money from a local business. "Nice research university you have here," the Trump administration seemed to say to Columbia. "Would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

That Columbia folded, and sacrificed its integrity, reputation and the freedom of its students and faculty for the federal money, speaks to both the astounding lack of foresight and principle by the university leadership as well as the Trump movement's successful foreclosure of institutions' options for resistance

Ben Schwartz [07-30] Jay Leno's Phony Case for Balanced Comedy: "The former Tonight Show host thinks a dose of bothsidesism will punch up the late-night scene."

David A Graham [07-31] The Warped Idealism of Trump's Trade Policy: "The president once promised he'd prioritize Americans' bottom line above all else. He's abandoned that pledge."

Paul Starr [07-31]: The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform: "American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal." But has the need for reform ever been so acute? Or so fraught with obstacles based on entrenched pockets of power? He offers three "levels": The post-Watergate model; Changing the Supreme Court; Amending the Constitution.

Pankaj Mishra [08]: Speaking Reassurance to Power: Basically a long rant about the fickleness of the American intelligentsia, so eager to celebrate any note of freedom tolerable to the ruling class, and so reticent to break ranks when that same ruling class turns tyrannical and bloody.

Why 'King of the Hill' Is the Most Significant Work of Texas Culture of the Past Thirty Years. Cartoon series, ran from 1997-2009, gets a reboot, after Hank and Peggy spend their last years working in Saudi Arabia, and return to Texas retirement, finding their old world changed in oh so many ways — one being that their son, Bobby, has become a German-Japanese fusion chef. We've seen 4-5 episodes so far, and they bounce off in interesting directions. (My wife has probably seen the entire original run. I've only seen enough to get the general idea.)

Steve Kopack/Monica Alba/Laura Strickler [08-01] Trump fires labor statistics boss hours after the release of weak jobs report: "Without evidence, Trump called the data 'rigged' and implied that BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer manipulated the numbers 'for political purposes.'" Fake data is something that only Trump is entitled to, and everyone else must line up behind his lead. I rarely do this, but here's the actual Trump "truth":

Last week's Job's Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That's why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!

  • Haley Brown [08-08] They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?

  • Edward Helmore [08-02] Republicans slam Trump's firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chief.

  • Chris Lehman [08-14] The Case Against EJ Antoni: Meet Trump's pick to destroy the BLS. Actually, he needs no introduction, as he's one of the few right-wing hacks so awful I recognized the name immediately. As Lehman puts it:

    But killing the messenger who brandishes bad economic news is only half the battle for the ambitious MAGA fateful; to really get things rolling, you need to promote a practiced bootlicker into the new policy void. And this is where central casting appears to have unearthed Antoni, who is basically the economics version of Chris Rufo—a mendacious talking head who will do virtually anything to distort the basic terms of inquiry in order to arrive at an ideologically predetermined outcome.

    Lehman digs up damning testimonials, even from conservative economists (Kyle Pomerleau at AEI: "He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he's showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them"). Lehman also notes that BLS doesn't just send out press releases. Its statistics feed directly into the economic policy machinery, affecting millions of Americans through things like the COLA (cost of living adjustment) used to calculate Social Security benefits.

Dean Baker [08-01] Bringing Back Stagflation, Lower Growth, and Higher Prices: "When Trump talks of turning the economy around, he speaks the truth — he just gets the direction of change wrong." This does us the favor of sorting out and summing up the economic reports on Trump's first six months, and looks ahead, expecting growth to continue slowing and prices to continue rising, even though those factors are supposed to cancel each other out. Further deterioration in the trade balance was not supposed to be the result of tariffs, but here you go. (Tourists spending money in the US count as imports, and Trump's gestapo tactics are warning people away.) All this was before Trump's latest move to make the numbers more "politically correct." Whether future numbers can be believed is impossible to know, but many voters had no problem disbelieving Biden's relatively decent numbers. By the way, Baker's blog is always worth reading:

Ryan Cooper [08-01] COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden: "Trying to 'let it rip' in early 2020 was a disaster."

David Daley [08-01] How the GOP Hopes to Gerrymander Its Way to a Midterms Victory: "In a series of mid-decade redistricting gambits, state legislatures are looking to rig next year's congressional balloting in advance." We're basically in a race where Republicans are trying to lock down centers of power to make it near impossible for Democrats to regain power by merely winning elections. Daley has especially focused on the gerrymandering issue — his first book on the subject was Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016), and his latest is Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections — but they've done much more, all stemming from their belief that government "of, by, and for the people" is an intolerable risk to their special interests.

Jeffrey St Clair, plus some more from Counterpunch:

  • [08-01] Roaming Charges: Something's Gone Wrong Again: First half on Israel, and does as good a job of summarizing the atrocities and factoring in American complicity as anything in that section. A brief section on famines around the world reminds me not to make light of Walsh's 2nd story, but that's because he doesn't sacrifice credibility by softballing Gaza, where "the risk of famine is total." He also notes a New York Times example I don't recall from North's articles (St Clair's highlight in bold):

    While Israel allows some food into Gaza, it has drastically reduced the number of places from which food is distributed, forcing Palestinians to receive food aid from a handful of sites that are hard to access. In a crude form of crowd control, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly shot and killed scores of Palestinians along routes leading to the new food distribution sites, forcing civilians to choose between the risk of gunfire and the risk of starvation.

    Isn't this not just the textbook definition of terrorism but an extraordinary, hitherto unexampled instance of it? While killing is an obvious metric of the war, pegging the number at 60,000 — about 3% of Gaza's population — risks underestimating the psychological impact. (Israel lost about 1% of its Jewish population in the 1947-49 War of Independence, which is generally remembered as a time of extraordinary trauma — by the way, about two-thirds of those were soldiers, so the civilian impact was much less, although still horrifying, I'm sure.) But death is just one of many metrics for Gaza: the most obvious being the 90% displaced, and at least that many malnourished. Figures like that are driving up the death rate — which I suspect is increasingly uncounted — but the much more widespread effect is psychological. We don't have a word for one army systematically trying to drive a whole country insane, because no one has ever done anything like that before, but that's a big part of what Israel is doing right now. And the chances that they don't fully comprehend what they're doing are almost inconceivably slim.

    As for the people who've just realized that Israel is committing genocide, St Clair cites an article by Raz Segal in Jewish Currents dated October 13, 2023: "A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel has been explicit about what it's carrying out in Gaza. Why isn't the world listening?" That, by the way, was about the same date when I realized that Israel was not going to stop with a particularly draconian revenge tantrum but fully intended to, as more than a few of their fans put it at the time, "finish the job."

    Much more, as usual, seguing to ICE, the heat dome, fire season, pollution, and much more. This item is worth noting:

    Under Jair Bolsonaro, the proportion of Brazil's population suffering from food insecurity reached 23%. Today, 19 months into the 3rd Lula administration, the UN has announced this proportion has dropped below 2.5%. Brazil has been removed from the FAO UN World Hunger Map.

    Trump, by the way, is threatening Brazil with high tariffs unless they drop the prosecution of Bolsonaro and regulation of US social media companies.

  • [08-08] Roaming Charges: Empire of the Downpresser Man: Starts with the latest batch of ICE atrocities. Cites (but doesn't link to) a piece by Max Boot: "I hate the war in Gaza. But I still love Israel." In a similar vein of bad people having second thoughts about their evil commitments, St Clair quotes Alexander Dugin: "I come to very sad conclusion: Donald Trump is totally mad. It is the shame. We loved him."

  • [08-15] Roaming Charges: From Police State to Military State: Starts with the question of crime in DC. Then ICE and/or Israel. Among the tidbits is this Newsweek headline: "Intersectional Communist Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats Can't Quit Obamaism." This is like the answer to the question of after all the garbage up front, what's the dumbest word you can possibly end this headline with? Another amusing bit: in Gallup's latest "most popular political figures" poll, the richest man in the world came in dead last, 5 points behind Netanyahu, 12 behind Trump.

  • Danbert Nobacon [08-08] Economic Terror and the Turbochuggf*ck in Texas: I'm not sure the neologisms help, like "capitrickalist free malarketry" and even "entrapocracy" (which turns out to come from a song title), but the rant about "toxic business activism" and the "Kochtopus" isn't wrong.

  • Nafis Hasan [08-08] War and the Cancer-Industrial Compex: An excerpt from a new book: Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care.

  • Thomas Knapp [08-08] Attack of the Bubble Boys: On Trump and Vance, "isolated and coddled lest contact with regular human beings harm them."

  • Michael Zoosman [08-08] Bearing the Mark of Cain for Naming the Gaza Genocide. A founder of L'chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty regrets that he waited until July 2025 to use the word "genocide" re Israel, and bears witness to the level of "vitriol and recrimination" he's since received.

Adam Gabbatt [08-03] 'He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity. I expect I'll be able to find an article like this every week for the remainder of his term. These stories are easy sells because we're so used to associating age with dementia that we think to note exceptions. And of course, some are retribution for the political savaging of Joe Biden's never-all-that-astute mental acuity. Biden had been muddled and gaffe-prone for so long that it was hard to discern actual age-related deterioration from his norm. Trump benefits even more from the camouflage provided by having been crazed and inane for decades now. He himself has claimed that his incoherent rapid-fire hopping among disconnected topics is really just proof of his genius, and the world is starkly divided between those who never believe a word he says and those who celebrate every morsel of "genius" (not caring whether they believe it or not — they're fine with anything that hazes the normies, and Trump is the world champion at that). Same dynamic appeared in his first term, but pre-Biden, the focus was more on Trump's psychopathology, another fertile field for speculation and confirmation bias. While anything that discredits Trump is welcome, we should always bear in mind that the real problem with Trump is his politics, and that having won the 2024 election his administration has little further need of him, so his debilitation is unlikely to offer much comfort.

Adam Bonica [08-03] The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine: "How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns."

Rhonda Ramiro/Sarah Raymundo [08-06] How US imperialism blackmails the world with nuclear weapons, from Hiroshima to today: "Since the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, US imperialism has driven nuclear proliferation worldwide. Current nuclear flashpoints, such as Iran, show how the US continues to use nuclear blackmail to reinforce its dominance." There are two theories behind nuclear weapons: deterrence and blackmail. Neither involves using them, unless one tragically miscalculates and has to do so for credibility. But sane people see no possible value in nuclear war, or in war for almost any other purpose, so they have no desire to test deterrence. Roughly speaking, from 1953 through 1993, the US accepted the deterrence theory, and sought a "detente" with the Soviet Union, rather than pushing its luck with blackmail stratagems (like Nixon's "madman theory"). Since 1993, the US has become more aggressive, but is still cautious when faced with nuclear-armed "foes" like Russia and China (or even North Korea), while growing very aggressive with its conventional weapons. Israel conceived their nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against larger Arab enemies, but that threat evaporated with the 1979 treaty with Egypt, and even more so with the 1991 defeat of Iraq. Since then, their nuclear threat has allowed them to bomb Syria and Lebanon with impunity, as neither nation has any ability to retaliate against Israel. Since the 1990s, Israel has recognized that Iran is capable of producing a nuclear weapons, which could undermine Israel's blackmail threat. So Israel mounted a propaganda campaign to play up the Iranian threat, mostly to hold the US alliance firm (Americans have still not moved beyond the 1979-80 hostage crisis), However, as Israel has turned genocidal, they've found that their credibility depends on showing that they can and will strike Iran, and that they can and will use US forces to reinforce theirs. If Iran's leaders actually believed in the logic of deterrence and/or blackmail, they will proceed directly to developing and deploying their own weapons. There is no evidence yet that this is happening, but either way we should understand that the fault lies in the original adoption by the US and Israel of the nuclear arms race.

More nukes (turns out that FDR jumped the gun: the day that has really stood out "in infamy" is August 6):

  • Tony Karon [08-07]: A Hiroshima-Gaza connection? "Curiously enough, it's Israel's leader that claims the US nuclear massacre of 200,000 mostly civilians in Japan in 1945 legitimizes the genocide for which he's wanted at The Hague."

  • Peter Dodge [08-08]: 80 Years at the Brink, Time to Change the Narrative.

  • Eric Ross [10-12]: Hiroshima Remains an Open Wound in Our Imperiled World.

    Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when "mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery." Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans "on the same moral plane" as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.

    American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as "moral monsters," legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. "In principle," he wrote, "the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over six million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo," laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . .

    In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, "The Final Solution to the Human Problem," [Carl] Sagan argued that Hitler "haunts our century . . . [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness." In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, "the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy . . . Adolf Hitler lives on."

    This reminds me of the argument that Hitler succeeded in his campaign to destroy Judaism, not so much by killing so many Jews as in turning the survivors into Nazis.

James K Galbraith [08-07] The Trump Economy? Some Reagan Parallels: "In contrast with the now sober-seeming Reaganites, Trump has taken credit for the economy from day one." Well, not every day, especially with the recent flurry of "fake news."

Melvin Goodman [08-08] Trump's Policies Will Make China Great Again: Well, "great" is greatly overrated, but it's so much a part of Trump's mentality it's tempting to taunt him with for failing on his own terms. In economic terms, China doesn't need America any more. One questions whether they ever did: whether it was just western conceit to see the rest of the world as developing in our footsteps, repeating our same mistakes. For instance, their recent shift from coal to solar has turned them from followers to leaders. Trump, on the other hand, is trying to smash us into reverse.

David D Kirkpatrick [08-11] The Number: "How much is Trump pocketing off the Presidency?" Plenty of detail here, but the bottom line is $3.4 billion.

Bhaskar Sunkara [08-11] Democrats Keep Misreading the Working Class: "Many in the party see workers as drifting rightward. But new data show they're more progressive than ever on economic issues — if Democrats are willing to meet them there." Related:

  • David Kusnet [07-17] How the Left Lost the Working Class — and How to Win Them Back: "To avoid becoming the foil for Right Populism, Left Populists need to respect working-class values of work, family, community, patriotism, and the aspiration for stability and security." I think he's confusing the Left with Democrats here. If you look at the polling for Bernie Sanders, who actually speaks "working class" (as opposed to Elizabeth Warren, who prefers "middle class" although she has a similar meaning and equivalent policies — what's missing is the sense that she's one of us), the Left polls pretty well, as do nearly every Left economic issues. Sure, the "cultural" stuff is more mixed, but Sanders' very liberal views on those matters isn't much of a deal breaker. Center Democrats lost the working class with their trickle-down rationalizations for their pandering to neoliberal businesses (mostly tech and finance) that turn out to be as predatory as the old robber barons. Republicans won a few votes with lies, demagoguery, and salt-of-the-earth flattery, but to call such rhetoric — and that's literally all it is — Populist just betrays your own insecurity with working class folk. [PS: I just wrote that reacting to the headline. Turns out this is a review of Joan C Williams: Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. I liked her previous book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America [2017], so I figure she's mostly on solid ground, and that her use of "Left" instead of "Democrats" targets her prospective readers. Kusnet, by the way, is a former Clinton speechwriter, but from 1992-94, when he was still looking for working class votes, and not just foundation donors.]

Ian Bremmer [08-11] Can Democracy Survive AI? Two better questions are: Can democracy survive capitalism? And can capitalism survive AI? I'm not saying that AI is some kind of value-neutral technology that could equally be put to good or evil purposes. It potentially changes a lot of things. But it is a power tool, and the politico-economic system decides who gets power and how they can use it, and right now all this power is in the hands of a few megalomaniacal capitalists. Regulation may take some of the edge off, and allow for some breathing room, but unless it changes who owns AI and what they can do with it, the threats not only remain but multiply. And note that my first question predates AI. Capitalists, operating under their own logic, have already destroyed much of what passes for democracy in the US. AI is only going to make this worse, at least in the short term. As for the long term, that's harder to speculate on. As Marx was not even the first to realize, capitalism is inherently unstable. AI could make it even more unstable — and if it's any kind of intelligence at all, it probably will.

Sheila Jordan, jazz singer extraordinaire, died on August 11, age 96. [PS: See Notes on Everyday Life for my piece on her.] I read about her failing health a few weeks ago — like so many Americans, she was struggling with the costs of home hospice care, as if agreeing to die wasn't sacrifice enough — but I hadn't noticed that she released an evidently new album this January. [Portrait Now, with Roni Ben-Hur (guitar) and Harvie S (bass), recorded in 2023, and released in time for her last tour date, in Chicago.] Here are some pieces, starting off with obits, plus a few older pieces:

Nicholas Liu [08-13] The Case Against Business Schools: I don't doubt that they teach a few useful practical skills, and sure, you can call them "finishing schools for capitalism's managerial aristocracy," but their real reason for being is to counteract any ethical impulses their students may have, to make them more ruthless and efficient economic predators. Any reference to "social responsibility" is just camouflage, following the Churchill-Rumsfeld quote that "the truth is so precious it must be surrounded by an armada of lies." This refers to a book by Martin Parker: Shut Down the Business School: What's Wrong With Management Education (2018).

Aaron Regunberg [08-13] Establishment Democrats Are Going to Torpedo the 2026 Midterms: "Having failed to learn the key lesson from last year's defeat, party leaders are promoting moderate candidates to run against populist progressives in next year's elections." Steve M called this "the most disheartening thing I read yesterday."

Ian Millhiser [08-14]: Justice Kavanaugh just revealed an unfortunate truth about the Supreme Court: "The Court has a special set of rules for Trump." A couple more pieces by Millhiser, plus some related pieces:

Zach Beauchamp [08-14] The "weirdos" shaping Trump's second term: "A liberal writer explains her journey through intellectual MAGAland." The writer in question is Laura K Field, who has a new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which is about how a few "intellectuals" are using Trump to advance their own peculiar thinking -- the book page mentions Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, but the interview focuses more on Michael Anton, and mentions Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari. First, can we stop with calling them "weirdos"? That doesn't clarify anything, and may make them seem cuter than they merit. Second, while MAGA is useful to these "thinkers," MAGA doesn't need them, because whatever MAGA is, they aren't ideologically driven. At most, they pick up ideas to support gut instincts, with Trump the most obvious case of all. So understanding their "thinking" doesn't help us much, either with their political appeal or with their consequences.

Eric Foner [08-14] The Education of a Historian: "Freedom is neither a fixed idea, nor the story of progress toward a predetermined goal." One of America's preeminent historians reminisces, starting with his star-studded leftist family. Excerpt from his new book, Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays.

Adam Shatz [08-16] 'Like a Hymn': "The jazz pianist Amina Claudine Myers has spent her career weaving jazz, blues, gospel, and classical music into a distinctively personal idiom."

Tweets:

  • Daniel Gilmore [08-01]:

    Increasingly firm in my belief that if Trump had gotten into office and basically just fucked off—golfed, took some bribes, traveled a bunch—he'd be at like 50-55% approvals. Every single day of the ~6.5 months he's been back in power thus far has been an exercise in bleeding himself out.

    To which jamelle added:

    oh absolutely. the issue is that trump is too vindictive to have just let sleeping dogs lie. he wanted to get revenge on everyone that aggrieved him in his first term. i am 100% certain, in fact, that the project 2025 stuff was sold to him as a tool for getting that revenge.

  • Joshua Ehrlich [08-17]: Response to "what's your take on the moment we're living through in 50 words or less":

    we are living in a time of profound suffering and profound opportunity. restoring the post-war status quo is not a solution, and the real roadblock to fixing our country is that nearly all of the will to be innovative is on the side of the fascists.

    I doubt I'd call it "innovation," but they are willing to break convention with little or no concern for consequences, which makes them appear to be dynamic -- something people who don't know any better are easily impressed by.

Current count: 277 links, 20674 words (25025 total)

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Monday, August 11, 2025

Music Week

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44663 [44630] rated (+33), 36 [25] unrated (+11).

Some time after I bought my 1986 Audi, I replaced the radio with a CD player. Same with my 1994 Nissan, unless it came with one (I'm a bit unsure, but if it did, it was gone within a week). The 2006 Toyota had one by default, but we opted for the 6-CD changer. I don't think I ever loaded more than one CD at a time, but it came with extra speakers, and made a statement. When I started contemplating a new car just before 2020 happened, I was dismayed to find virtually nothing offering CD players, or even radios that could be ripped out and easily replaced. When we finally gave in and bought our new Toyota, all we could get was a 10.5-inch media/info console with bluetooth, wi-fi, one usb port, and a bunch of trial subscriptions. I spent our first week driving in silence, except when my wife insisted on NPR, which was painful. Exposing oneself to too much news and opinion isn't healthy.

I asked google "why did car companies stop offering cd players," and AI responded:

Car companies stopped offering CD players as standard features due to a shift in consumer preferences towards digital music and the convenience of streaming services. The rise of smartphones, Bluetooth, and USB connectivity has made it easier and more appealing to access music through these devices rather than through physical CDs. Additionally, CD players are more expensive to manufacture and install than other audio components, and their removal helps manufacturers cut costs.

This mostly sounds like bullshit to me. I don't doubt that this is what they say and want you to believe, but that's all it is. AI is only as good as its training data. It hasn't overcome the maxim of "garbage in, garbage out." The costs are trivial in a $30,000 car (nor do you find them appearing in more expensive models), and "consumer preferences" are largely dictated by marketing schemes, meant to steer people to corporate preferences. I doubt convenience too. I use streaming a lot at home, but the user interfaces are awful, and I only get by because I'm constantly on the keyboard. I'm trying not to go too crazy here. I'm often slow adopting new tech. (I certainly dragged my feet when CDs came out -- you know, back when they had superior sound and lasted forever.) So I'll try to give it a go. But this week has been pretty miserable for me and my music.

My big goal last week was to finally publish my first Substack post. I've written quite a bit of Loose Tabs draft material, and I figured one long comment on an especially inane Vox piece would kick things off nicely, as it does a fairly succinct job of summing up the current political situation, with relevant notes on the ineptness of the opposition and the cluelessness of a way-too-indulgent media, while introducing my general themes. All I needed to do was write a bit of header and footer, but I tore up three or four of the former by Friday before I got something I could stand. As expected, I did a fair amount of editing on the core piece, and sent it out to a couple people Saturday evening. Sunday I added a couple more paragraphs, then finally sent it out, under the title Four Stories. Please check it out, and subscribe to get it delivered regularly by email. There is no charge, no advertising, and no nagging (if I can help it). You do not have to have a Substack account to subscribe. If you have questions or problems, let me know.

I posted notices on X, Bluesky, and Facebook. Subscribers are up to 41, which looks like more than a third of the views on any of those mass social media platforms. (The X tweet has 93 views, almost double the 51 of last week's Music Week notice.) But I've been enjoying the stream of mail from Substack, especially sign-up notices from old friends, and I'm saving the marketing tips in case I ever get around to thinking about promotion. Right now this is mostly a pivot in how I'm approaching writing. More on that when I have something to show.

As noted in the letter, I only had 17 records rated through Friday. I didn't try to explain why. The distractions were major, but also every now and then I just have trouble figuring out what to play next. So I settled on the dumbest (but easiest) algorithm of all: I started playing the highest-rated non-genre (rock/pop, but not metal) albums on my metacritic list: Pulp, Turnstile, Caroline, Rich Dawson, Jasmine.4.T, Swans, Steven Wilson, Divorce, Doves, Lorde, etc. These are all albums I hadn't been in any hurry to play, and in many cases might never have bothered with. By the end of the week, I was down to Sparks (110), and up over 30 albums rated. Most vindicated my previous neglect, with the few pleasant surprises -- Bob Mould, Self Esteem, Horrors -- not quite rising past B+(***). That leaves us way short of A-list albums this week. Aside from those three, the best prospect is Antony Szmierek, followed by the other Vibrational Therapy albums.

After the cutoff, I decided to tweak the algorithm to allow me to pick one-in-three albums. I went with Miki Berenyi over Youth Lagoon and BC Camplight, and got another B+(***). The top unheard albums now are all metal (Deafheaven, Heartworms, Spiritbox). I sample a few metal albums every year, although only one so far this year (Mean Mistreater). Updates to the lists have been very sporadic of late, which is one reason I've struggled to find things to listen to. I've also let the jazz queue languish, but most of what's pending hasn't been released yet.

Goals for next week include: finally building Laura's new computer; shopping for eye glasses; building one more rack for the woodpile project; building my recycling kiosk; posting Loose Tabs; another newsletter; cooking dinner for some very old friends. The probably won't get to section also includes: sorting out my electrician tools and parts; setting up the website framework for the broader Notes on Everyday Life project; analyzing the DownBeat polls. Probably some more stuff I'm forgetting right now, given that I've done next to nothing on my planning documents, but most of what's left falls into definitely-won't-get-around-to territory. Loose Tabs could swallow everything else, so I'll focus on cutting that one short.

PS: A while back I was trying to track down a broken link to rockcritics.com. I finally found the answer, which is that the old domain name is defunct, but the website is still available here. This came up with reference to a 2002 interview with Robert Christgau, but it also concerns a 2014 interview with me, where I talk a little about my intellectual evolution, how I got into writing rock and jazz criticism, and how I built Robert Christgau's website (as well as a few things about my website). This interview turned out to be the basis for most of what is in my Wikipedia page, so it's rather important to me -- albeit something I hadn't looked at in years. It may be worth a revisit and some second thoughts.

New records reviewed this week:

Addison Rae: Addison (2025, As Long as I'm Dancing/Columbia): Pop singer-songwriter, last name Easterling, first album, but evidently famous since 2019 as a TikTok content creator ("amassing over 88 million followers, making her the fifth most-followed individual on the platform, as of 2025"). B+(*) [sp]

Brandi Carlile & Elton John: Who Believes in Angels? (2025, Mercury): Novelty star pairing, 8th studio album since 2005 for the American singer-songwriter, 33rd for Reg (or Sir Elton!), who I haven't checked out since 2010, and haven't graded an A- (or for that matter B+) album since 1975's Rock of the Westies. Aside from a Laura Nyro cover, all songs are co-credited to the stars, but also to Bernie Taupin and producer-guitarist Andrew Watt. Most favor Carlile, arena-scaled, with the closer pure John-Taupin. B- [sp]

Caroline: Caroline 2 (2025, Rough Trade): English "post-rock" band, second album. Floundered awhile, then finally seemed like it might be developing into something sonic, then was over. B [sp]

Circuit Des Yeux: Halo on the Inside (2025, Matador): Singer-songwriter Haley Fohr, born in Indiana, based in Chicago, 7th studio album since 2008 (plus 2 released as Jackie Lynn). Some kind of baroque pop, grandiose and overwrought, but not devoid of sonic interest. B [sp]

Edwyn Collins: Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation (2025, AED): Scottish singer-songwriter, started in new wave/jangle pop group Orange Juice (three albums 1982-84, some live albums and compilations since, including a 6-CD box of everything), 10 solo studio albums from 1989. He has a voice that shouldn't work, but sometimes does. B+(**) [sp]

Rich Dawson: End of the Middle (2025, Weird World/Domino): English singer-songwriter, ninth album since 2007 starting with Richard Dawson Sings Songs and Plays Guitar, which is about par for the course. Cover appears to have "ard" scratched out, while spine credits this to "(Just Rich)" with label/number "WEIRD166CD." Awkward fit offers little appeal, but there's something to be said for weird. B [sp]

Divorce: Drive to Goldenhammer (2025, Gravity/Capitol): British alt-country band, first album after a couple of EPs, singers Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, with guitarist Adam Peter-Smith and drummer Kasper Sandstrom, have described themselves as "Wilco meets ABBA." B+(*) [sp]

Djo: The Crux (2025, AWAL): Singer-songwriter Joe Keery, from Massachusetts, started in a psych band, has a fairly substantial career as an actor, but this is his third album as Djo -- name sounds African to me, but not the music, which can be entertaining once you lose any preconceptions. B+(*) [sp]

Doves: Constellations for the Lonely (2024, EMI North): English alt-rock trio, sixth album since 2000 (big gap between 2009-20), big in UK, not so much in US. B+(*) [sp]

Franz Ferdinand: The Human Fear (2025, Domino): Scottish band, first album (2004) was a huge hit, as was its 2005 follow up, but later albums have been spread out (4, 4, 5, and now 7 years between). Not a bad band, knows how to craft a catchy song, and bring some energy. B(*) [sp]

The Horrors: Night Life (2025, Fiction/Universal): English rock band, first album 2007, originally garage or gothic or post-punk or shoegaze or neo-psychedelia, sixth album, first I've heard since 2011 and first released since 2017, Faris Badwan the singer, at this point has an understated vibe I'm enjoying. Sixth album since 2007 (previous 2017). B+(**) [sp]

Jasmine.4.T: You Are the Morning (2025, Saddest Factory/Dead Oceans): British singer-songwriter Jasmine Cruikshank with band, first album after a 2019 EP and some singles. B [sp]

Kronos Quartet and the Hard Rain Collective: Hard Rain (2025, Red Hot Org, EP): Postclassical string quartet, started with the moderns but has wandered eclectically ever since, here backing two long takes of the Dylan song, the words taken up by a queue of 15 (or more?) singers, starting with Allison Russell and Iggy Pop, and ending with Willie Nelson. Third piece is by Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto, some kind of dirge as best I can tell. Conceptually an EP, but adds up to 29:54. B+(**) [bc]

Jim Legxacy: Black British Music (2025, XL): British rapper, James Olaloye, Nigerian descent, second mixtape after three EPs (since 2019). B+(*) [sp]

Nicolas Leirtrø: Cherry Blossom (2024 [2025], Sonic Transmission): Norwegian bassist, first album, solo, has side credits (notably with Amalie Dahl and Mats Gustafsson) back to 2016. B+(*) [bc]

Lorde: Virgin (2025, Republic): Pop singer-songwriter from New Zealand, fourth album since 2013, all big international hits. I'm surprised at how flat and featureless this one sounds. B [sp]

M(h)aol: Something Soft (2025, Merge): Irish postpunk band, second album, 11 tracks, 29:58, some songs, some just rattle the air. B+(***) [sp]

Bob Mould: Here We Go Crazy (2025, Granary Music): Ex-Hüsker Dü (1983-87) -- which I got a welcome refresher on with new releases of old live albums -- with 15 solo albums since 1989 (plus several as Sugar), very consistent sound throughout, although my own level of interest has waxed and waned considerably. (I also thought that while Mould was primarily responsible for Hüsker Dü's sound, it was Grant Hart who wrote their best songs, despite their sound. So I never expected Mould alone to match the group highs -- although Hart alone couldn't do that either). Still, this one sounds better than any I recall, so maybe "crazy" helps. Not consistent enough to overwhelm my general reluctance, but close. B+(***) [sp]

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales (2025, Warp): Electronic musician, born in England but based in Australia, Discogs credits him with 4 albums and 18 singles/EPs since 2007, but many more credits going back to 1991. The Radiohead frontman wrote and sang the lyrics here. Jonathan Zawanda created artwork for the music, developed that into an accompanying film, and published "a limited amount of Tall Tales zines." B+(**) [sp]

Pulp: More (2025, Rough Trade): British band, principally Jarvis Cocker, released 7 albums 1983-2001, the big one was Different Class (aka "Common People") in 1995 (NME put it number 6 in a 2013 list of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time"), regrouped briefly in 2011 and again in 2022, but this is their first new album (after a half-dozen solo albums). It does have occasional moments of grandeur, or as one review put it, "Pulp remains resolutely Pulpy." B+(*) [sp]

Self Esteem: A Complicated Woman (2025, Polydor): English singer-songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor, third album since 2019, some interesting songs. Makes extensive use of choir and string arrangements, not something I normally take to. B+(***) [sp]

Big A Sherrod: Torchbearer of the Clarksdale Sound [Listener's Circle Vol. 72] (2025, Music Maker, EP): Blues guitarist-singer, "A" for Anthony, has a couple albums from 2014 and 2022, this one runs 5 songs, 28:28. B+(**) [bc]

Slick Rick: Victory (2025, Mass Appeal): Rapper Ricky Walters, born in England to Jamaican parents, moved to New York at 11, recorded four albums 1988-99, so this one's taken until he's turned 60. B+(***) [sp]

Sparks: MAD! (2025, Transgressive): Brothers Ron and Russell Mael, unflappably cranking out records more than 50 years after their brilliantly titled but horribly executed debut (A Wolfer in Tweeter's Clothing). They've always been a bit clever, and they've occasionally been able to find a hook. That sufficed for a while, but what's sustained them over the long haul was hack professionalism, which sustains indifference, if not disgust. B- [sp]

Swans: Birthing (2025, Young God/Mute): Heavy rock band ("experimental") founded 1981 and fronted by Michael Gira, 17th studio album since 1983 (not counting 10 live albums, and miscellany), many like this one running long (115:35, their 6th straight 2-CD). Long obscure, but they nicked the US charts in 2012, rose to 37 in 2014, and extended internationally in 2016. Sounded just oppressive at first, with its first interesting pattern emerging maybe a half hour in. Eventually settled into a dank ambient groove that was tolerable enough to allow me to think about other things. B [sp]

Antony Szmierek: Service Station at the End of the Universe (2025, Mushroom Music): British rapper, or "spoken word artist," first album, after an EP in 2023, but the first single from this appeared in 2022. Music is closer to house than to hip-hop, but I can see it either way. B+(***) [sp]

Turnstile: Never Enough (2025, Roadrunner): Band from Baltimore, fourth album since 2015 (EPs back to 2011), "hardcore punk" per Wikipedia. I don't know about that, but they combine an agreeable degree of noise, crunch, and melody. B+(*) [sp]

William Tyler: Time Indefinite (2025, Psychic Hotline): Guitarist, based in Nashville, started out of the folk tradition on Tompkins Square (2010), but has played in rock groups (Lambchop, Silver Jews), and has an album called Modern Country. This one has some of the glistening tones I associate with synths and ambient music. B+(*) [sp]

Akira Umeda & Metal Preyers: Clube Da Mariposa Mórbida (2025, Nyege Nyege Tapes): Brazilian visual and sound artist, many albums (tapes?) since 1997, on a label that's turned Kampala into a world center for offbeat electronica. Metal Preyers is a loose group with members from London and Chicago that has appeared on several of the label's projects. B+(*) [sp]

Vibration Black Finger: Everybody Cryin' Mercy (2024 [2025], Enid): Group/alias for British DJ/producer Lascelle Gordon (aka Lascelles, or Lascelle Lascelles), also associated with Nat Birchall, Beth Orton, Heliocentric, and Brand New Heavies. Third album, following a 2016 EP. Good enough to send me back to their earlier albums, which more clearly fit as jazz (or maybe I just mean more horns/fewer voices). B+(***) [bc]

Steven Wilson: The Overview (2025, Fiction): English singer-songwriter, plays guitar and keyboards, draws on 1970s prog rock with airs of Pink Floyd, started in Porcupine Tree (1992-2009), eighth solo studio album since 2008, two long pieces totaling 41:44, with an extra 60:26 of "The Alterview" in the deluxe edition. The proper role of a bonus disc is to add something extra for those who already enjoy the product, which is a fair description of this one. With my already limited interest, I could have done without it, but let it run anyway. It's a bit less buttoned-down than the first disc, which may have helped to clarify what is probably the better presentation. B+(*) [sp]

Wretch 32: Home? (2025, AWAL): British rapper Jermaine Sinclair, Jamaican family, 7th studio album since 2008, another half dozen mixtpes. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Roots Rocking Zimbabwe: The Modern Sound of Harare Townships 1975-1980 (1975-80 [2025], Analog Africa): White settlers under Ian Smith declared Southern Rhodesia independent in 1965. The African majority fought back and prevailed in 1980, although that was hardly the end of the troubles. This collects 25 songs from the last third of the 15-year civil war. The best known bands are Green Arrows and Blacks Unlimited (with Thomas Mapfumo, who also leads off with an early track). B+(***) [sp]

Old music:

New Tutankhamen: I Wish You Were Mine (1979 [2019], Nyami Nyami): Late 1970s group from the territory renamed Zimbabwe in 1980, prominent on Analog Africa's recent comp, so I figured it was worth checking out. Draws more on American soul/disco than on South African models. B+(*) [bc]

Vibration Black Finger: Blackism (2008 [2017], Enid): British jazz-funk group, produced by Lascelle [Gordon], who got his start with "acid jazz" group Brand New Heavies (1991). Curious delay between recording this and release, with two albums and several EPs since. Inspired here by 1970s electric Miles, with Andy Knight (trumpet), James Arben (sax), two drummers, and possibly others on a back cover scan I can't decipher (a vocal bit by Maggie Nichols?). A- [sp]

Vibration Black Finger: Can You See What I'm Trying to Say (2020, Jazzman): Second album, no credits that I can see, although there are vocalists, and glancing references to Musical friends," but this is mostly down to Lascelle Gordon, conjuring up a mixed bag of tricks. B+(***) [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Bruce Gertz Quintet: Octopus Dreams (Open Mind Jazz) [08-15]
  • Larry Keel/Jon Stickley: Larry Keel & Jon Stickley (self-released, EP) [09-05]
  • Roberto Magris: Lovely Day(s) (JMood) [09-01]
  • Mike Pope: The Parts You Keep (Origin) [08-22]
  • Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (self-released) [10-17]
  • Marc Seales With Ernie Watts: People & Places (Origin) [08-22]
  • Ben Thomas: Tango Project (Origin) [08-22]
  • Chris Wabich: 1978 (Steep) (ADW) [08-01]
  • Yoko Yates: Eternal Moments (Banka) [09-19]
  • Zurhub [Mattan Klein/Ezequiel Hezi Joit]: Countryside Motorways (Origin) [08-22]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, August 4, 2025

Music Week

August archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 44630 [44592] rated (+38), 25 [18] unrated (+7).

Major personal news is that we bought a new car. I've been wanting to for several years, but we've traveled so rarely since 2020 that there's been little need. Still, over the last year the clutch has been so dicey I've been afraid of driving out of town, even for the day trips we like to offer our occasional visitors, or for checking in on the few friends and relatives within easy reasonable distance. By the time I got the car into the shop, it was barely drivable and deteriorating fast.

I like to do a thorough job of shopping for big purchases like cars, and had done a fair amount of research, but when the time came, we panicked and bought what I initially identified as the safe default choice. The good news is that it's done now, moving a fairly large project from pending to done. (Well, mostly done: we still have tags, taxes, insurance, not sure what else as there's a lot of new technology I don't fully understand; e.g., they're pushing some kind of AT&T "powerful Wi-Fi hotspot" subscription with a 2-day window for a 20% discount.) The bad news is that I'm still unhappy with the way it all unfolded.

Still, we drive so little we shouldn't let minor quibbles get the better of us. Laura is unhappy that the passenger seat is so low (and unadjustable for height, unlike the driver seat; why not offer that?). And I hate that I won't be able to play CDs in the car. I'm trying not to panic on that score. I have a lot to learn about the new media console system. For that matter, there is a lot I never learned about my fairly ancient cell phone, but may have to as the phone seems to be the nerve center of the car's media package. I've only now downloaded my streaming apps, but haven't tested them out yet.

While numerous trips to car dealers kept me away from other projects around the house, between closing on the car on Friday and picking it up today I managed to listen to a few albums (38 below), and write a fair chunk of the next Loose Tabs. In particular, I haven't done anything on the Substack-based Notes on Everyday Life I announced a couple weeks ago (other than my edit of their "Coming Soon" page, retitled Hello World, which offers an idea of what I had in mind. I'm pleased to note that despite no output, I have 29 free subscribers waiting. I expect to send them something in the coming week.

Whether that first message fits my plan or not isn't clear yet. My latest thinking is that while everything will land somewhere on the website, the timing will vary: some things will show up first in the newsletter, others on the website, with each referring to the other. Redundancy should encourage me to edit more, and possibly expand on items I rushed out. (I missed last night's deadline in posting this. Looking at it again this morning I've already made a dozen edits in the previous paragraphs.) While I have enough Loose Tabs to publish now -- and probably too much for most folk to digest -- I still have a lot of open tabs to get to. I'll probably hold that post back until I finish my rounds (in a week or so), then put it up on the website. I could then write a shorter digest for the newsletter, with links to featured pieces, with the whole post as context. On the other hand, a couple items are already big and/or important enough to extract, polish up a bit, and turn into newsletter items, so they may appear ahead of the Loose Tabs blog post.

I'm not sure where music might fit into this scheme of things. I'm conscious that most of my current subscribers come for the music tips, but my ability to write reviews is already stretched pretty thin. Still, I might come up with a framework to tack on some timely listening notes at the end, perhaps like Jeffrey St. Clair does in his "Sound Grammar" section. He also does one on books, which I could handle -- perhaps not just on what little I manage to read, but by advancing some items that would later appear in a Book Roundup?

My main source for records this week has been Phil Overeem's August 1 list, which I'm still working my way through, plus a few items from Chris Monsen's mid-year list. The main exception is probably the sampling of Holger Czukay. I found (and have since lost) a Chinese website that seemed to suggest a recent reissue of Der Osten Ist Rot, which got me started, although I didn't go very deep. But when I looked up what Christgau had to say about Czukay (very little), I was reminded that I never managed to find a copy of David Toop's Oceans of Sound 2-CD compilation (graded A). A quick check at Amazon shows the book still in print, but no evidence of the CDs.

I finished Chris Hayes' book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I found it useful, generating a lot of interesting thoughts about technology, media culture, and capitalism. Like his previous two books -- Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) and A Colony in a Nation (2017) -- he took a novel approach to framing a big problem, although this one is a bit more tenuous, making me think that attention may not be the best way of framing the problem. I was especially impressed by the depth of research. While he is clearly smarter than your average TV talking head, what finally came clear in the acknowledgments section was that he has some genuinely brilliant research assistance. I certainly didn't expect to see mention, let alone a learned discussion, of Alexandre Kojève. His discussion of Marx's early writings on alienation is also so spot on that he felt the need to insert a parenthetical "I am not a Marxist" disclaimer.

I've moved on to a book called How AI Works, figuring it's about time I get some fairly unbiased insight into such a superhyped technology. I knew a fair amount about AI back in the 1980s, but haven't followed it, so it wasn't clear how useful my past understanding was. I'll write more about this in the future. One notable thing is that this has gotten me thinking about more mundane matters of technology, like website development. I just ordered a book from the same publisher called The Modern Web, because it seems to cover a lot of details that I've never been able to quite grasp (e.g., the chapters on device-responsive CSS and flexbox layouts). On the other hand, I'm surprised to be ordering a book on web technology originally published over a decade ago (2013). But looking around, I'm not seeing anything newer that looks genuinely useful. Given that most of my web development was learned in 2001-03, maybe the best I can hope for is to advance in decade-sized chunks.

Or maybe I'm just thrashing, as everything we seem to try, or at least hope to try, is failing. Or maybe failing isn't the right word: just slipping further and further away.

New records reviewed this week:

Ilia Belorukov & Marina Džukljev: Everything Changes, Nothing Disappears (2022-23 [2024], Acheulian Handaxe): Russian alto saxophonist, based in Serbia, long list of albums since 2007, here in a duo with the Serbian pianist. B+(***) [sp]

Gina Birch: Trouble (2025, Third Man): British singer-songwriter, second solo album, but side credits go back to 1977, when she was a founder of the Raincoats. B+(**) [sp]

Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (2025, RCA): Country singer-songwriter, from Kentucky, self-released a good album in 2011, didn't follow it up until 2017 and has been superb ever since. A- [sp]

Doseone & Height Keech: Wood Teeth (2025, Hands Made, EP): Rapper/producer/poet/artist Adam Drucker, from Idaho, based in Santa Fe, first album 1998, long associated with Anticon, Wikipedia has a long list of musicians he's recorded with but omits the one that brought him to my attention: Buck 65. Baltimore rapper Dan Keech, aka Height, has a similar career and is also well into his 40s. Six "blistering" songs (12:13), "written and recorded in protest": "May all kind hearts feel seen in these songs. May all fascists, bigots and closed minded individuals feel stared at." Scratchy voice signified metal until the words became clearer. B+(***) [sp]

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: Shapes and Forms (2025, Cool Death, EP): Australian alt-rock group, five albums 2006-09, one more in 2019, and now this skinny EP (3 songs, one a Camper Van Beethoven cover, 6:55). B+(*) [bc]

Ex_libris: Ex_libris - 001 (2025, Ex_libris, EP): Electronica producer Dave Huismans, Discogs says based in Berlin but Bandcamp has Utrecht, Netherlands. New alias, but he started in 2006 with A Made Up Sound, alternating with 2562. Two EPs, this one 3 tracks (24:32). Ambient with a little extra. B+(**) [sp]

Ex_libris: Ex_libris - 002 (2025, Ex_libris, EP): Same day sequel, 3 more tracks (23:57). B+(**) [sp]

Fines Double: Espejismo (2025, self-released): Portland-based hip-hop producer/dj, second album, uses a long list of featured rappers (names I recognize: AJ Suede, Curly Castro, PremRock, Billy Woods). The words tend to scatter, but the music is intricate and sinuous, a nice flow with interesting quirks. B+(***) [sp]

Ben Lamar Gay: Yowzers (2023-24 [2025], International Anthem): Cornet player, sings, several albums since 2018, also plays synth, diddley bow, and percussion, with a diverse group that signifies exotica (flute, tuba, guitar, ngoni, percussion, several voices), in combinations that sometimes dazzle or beguile or just bewilder. B+(*) [sp]

Andreas Haddeland Trio: Estuar (2025, Tare): Norwegian guitarist, at least eight albums since 2003, with Lars Tormod Jenset (double bass) and Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Heat On: Heat On (2024 [2025], Cuneiform): Chicago group, two saxophonists -- Edward Wilkerson Jr. (tenor, best known for 8 Bold Souls) and Fred Jackson Jr. (alto) -- with bass (Nick Macri) and drums (Lily Finnegan), playing 8 tracks composed by the drummer. Finnegan started out in hard core punk band Deodorant, but also plays in Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux, and has a duo album with Gabby Fluke-Mogul. None of that background suggests how meticulously, or remarkably, this plays out. A- [dl]

Gilad Hekselman: Downhill From Here (2023 [2025], La Reserve/Diggers Factory): Israeli guitarist, moved to New York in 2004, dozen-plus albums since 2006, this a trio with Larry Grenadier (bass) and Marcus Gilmore (drums). B+(*) [sp]

Kjetil Husebø: Piano Transformed - Interspace (2024 [2025], Optical Substance): Norwegian pianist, twelve albums since 2010. This is solo, sometimes adding sampling and live electronics, spread over 2-CD (18 songs, 92:29). B+(*) [bc]

Mikko Innanen & Ingebrigt Håker Flaten: Live in Espoo (2025, Fiasko/Sonic Transmissions): Finnish saxophonist, alto is probably his first choice but also plays baritone, sopranino, tenor, and oboe here, fair number of albums since 2006, including some dandies. Duo here with the prolific Norwegian bassist, who gets a fair share of the mix and makes the most of it. A- [sp]

Karol G: Tropicoqueta (2025, Bichota/Interscope): Colombian singer-songwriter Carolina Giraldo Navarro, fifth album since 2017, all high on the US Latin charts. Technically a mix of styles, proudly "Latina Foreva," but those details, like the language, are lost on me. The beats break through first, but much more follows. The guest track for Manu Chao stands out, but by them I'm already sold. A- [sp]

Eric McPherson: Double Bass Quartet (2022 [2025], Giant Step Arts): Drummer, leads a group with Cuban pianist David Virelles and two bassists: John Hébert and Ben Street. One original each from three members, plus six covers, two from Andrew Hill. B+(**) [cd]

Memphis Metaphysics: Memphis Metaphysics (2023 [2025], Sonic Transmissions): Swiss pianist Margaux Oswald and Norwegian guitarist Hein Westgaard recorded this in Memphis with three Americans: Art Edmaiston (tenor sax), Ra Kalam Bob Moses (drums), and Kevin Cheli (percussion). The Europeans were thinking Memphis as in Egypt, the songs named after ancient spirits, with artwork to match. B+(**) [sp]

Pasquale Mirra/Hamid Drake: Lhasa (2022 [2025], Parco Della Musica): Italian vibraphonist, several albums since 2014, many more side-credits, in a duo with the drummer -- pictured on the cover with one of his frame drums. B+(*) [sp]

PAL: Under Your Radar (2025, self-released, EP): Cleveland group, Maureen Joyce (keys) and Jake Schott (guitar) the singers, tag line mentions "punk" five times, "skronk" three, "art" two, perhaps most acutely "angular," which they fit more than any band since Devo. Seven songs, 10:25. B+(***) [bc]

Alex Sipiagin: Daydream (2024 [2025], SkyDeck Muisic): Russian trumpet/flugelhorn player, moved to US in 1990, has a couple dozen albums since 2003, this one recorded in Italy with singers Giuditta Franco and Marta Frigo, guitar and piano, bass and drums. B [sp]

Alex Sipiagin: Reverberations (2024 [2025], Criss Cross Jazz): Trumpet/flugelhorn leader, with alto sax (Will Vinson), piano (John Escreet), bass, and drums, kicking off with three originals before breaking out the Mingus, Ellington, Tyner, and Strayhorn. Aubrey Johnson contributes a vocal I could do without. B+(*) [sp]

Sultan Stevenson: El Roi (2025, Edition): British pianist, second album, mostly trio with bass (Jacob Gryn) and drums (Joel Waters), three (of 8) tracks adding trumpet/flugelhorn (Josh Short) and tenor sax (Soweto Kinch). B+(*) [sp]

Bill Stewart: Live at the Village Vanguard (2023 [2025], Criss Cross Jazz): Drummer, a dozen-plus albums as leader since 1990, hundreds of side credits. Trio with Larry Grenadier (bass) and Walter Smith III (tenor sax), from a week-long stand. B+(**) [sp]

Three-Layer Cake: Sounds the Color of Grounds (2025, Otherly Love): Trio of Mike Pride (drums/marimba), Brandon Seabrook (guitar/banjo/mandolin), and Mike Watt (bass, some spoken word vocals). Second album. B+(**) [sp]

Premik Russell Tubbs/Margee Minier-Tubbs: Oneness-World (2025, Margetoile): Both compose and produce, Margee at the executive level, also claiming all the lyrics, vocals, and some percussion. Premik plays sax, flutes, and EWI. Others help out: the only name I recognize is Zack Brock (violin). I could pass on the music, but the spoken word was more than a little interesting, including a disquisition on fashion that didn't neglect the costs, both tragic and mundane. B+(*) [cd]

Meryl Zimmerman: Easy to Love (2024, Tuxedo Cat): Standards singer from New Orleans, only other credit I can find is a 2007 appearance in the St. Louis a cappella group Mosaic Whispers. "Selections from the Great American Songbook," backed by Kris Tokarski (piano), Nobu Ozaki (bass), and Hal Smith (drums). B [bc]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Master Wilburn Burchette: Master Wilburn Burchette's Psychic Meditation Music (1974 [2025], Numero Group): California-based mystic (1939-2023), "transfixed by the parapsychological, spending as much time reading books on Tibetan mysticism fundamentals as he did practicing guitar," he released seven albums 1971-77, "before abruptly burning and discarding everything related to his musical explorations." This was his fourth album, two LP-side pieces called "Yin" and "Yang," done on some kind of synth (unspecified). B+(*) [bc]

Electric Satie: Gymnopédie '99 (1998 [2025], In Sheep's Clothing): One-shot group, led by Mitsuto Suzuki, who arranged the French composer's pieces (adding one of his own) mostly for Moog. First track is a misdirection, with Ryoji Oba arranging and Silvio Anastacio guitar and vocal. B+(***) [sp]

Brian Eno/Holger Czukay/J. Peter Schwalm: Sushi. Roti. Reibekuchen (1998 [2024], Grönland): Live set from Bonn "at the opening reception of Eno's Future Light-Lounge Proposal Multimedia Installation." Title is from a menu, where the latter are German potato pancakes. The principles seem to be playing various electronics, but the first track (in particular) gains from live drums and bass. B+(**) [sp]

Hüsker Dü: Jan. 30, First Ave Pt. 1 (1985 [2025], Numero Group, EP): Minneapolis group, hardcore with just enough melodic sense to break through my resistance (actually, but me it was their 1983 EP Metal Circus, which I initially hated but eventually came around on), coming off their 2-LP magnum opus, Zen Arcade, and just before New Day Rising. This has been described as "their legendary homecoming concert," recorded to 24-track tape at the time for a possible live album, but shelved with new studio albums coming fast and furious. Thought lost in a 2011 fire, but now "restored completely." First sample: 5 songs (10:58), no idea how much more is left. I doubt I've played any of their records in this century, but a couple songs are so indelible I'm pleased to be reminded ("Books About UFOs," "Makes No Sense at All"). B+(**) [sp]

Hüsker Dü: Nov. 3, Salt Lake City (1985 [2025], Numero Group, EP): Another sample from the live audio archive, recorded November 3, five songs (17:45) that later appeared on Candy Apple Grey (1986) -- my second favorite of their albums, explaining why most of the songs sound familiar, but a bit muted. B+(*) [sp]

Old music:

Holger Czukay: Der Osten Ist Rot (1984, Virgin): Krautrock pioneer (1938-2017), born in Danzig (now Gdansk), Czukay was his Polish family name, but they went by Schüring, calculated to sound more Aryan, which got them expelled to Germany in 1945. He grew up in Duisburg, played bass, studied under Stockhausen, and was a founder of Can in 1968 (leaving after 1977), playing bass and adding samples and electronics, especially radio sounds. He recorded a solo album in 1969, and more from 1979 on, of which this is one of the more famous, with Jaki Liebzeit co-writing several songs (also playing drums, trumpet, piano, organ). A few interesting pieces here, but the effect is rather widely scattered. B+(*) [sp]

Holger Czukay: Rome Remains Rome (1987, Virgin): As scattered as its predecessor, but longer pieces sustain the interesting bits, while inflicting less whiplash. This was running a notch up until the 10:33 "Perfect World" swept me away, with its hints of Afrika Bambaataa and Kid Creole and anticipation of DJ Shadow -- albeit, sure, in a rather plastic way, but this could anchor a solid A album. That sent me back to recheck the Jah Wobble-powered funk pieces ("Hey Baba Reebop," "Hit Hit Flop Flop" and "Sudetenland"), the Pope-sampled "Blessed Easter," and the truly atmospheric "Music in the Air." A- [sp]

Fines Double: Flotar (2021, Filthy Broke): First album, only a few featured rappers (mostly Defcee and AJ Suede), so more emphasis on the rhythm tracks, which are pretty distinctive. B+(**) [bc]

Blaze Foley: Blaze Foley [The Lost Muscle Shoals Recordings] (1984 [2017], Lost Art): Alt-country singer-songwriter, actual name Michael Fuller, took his stage name from Red Foley and Blaze Starr, shot dead at 39 in 1989 with just this one album to his credit: original title, Blaze Foley, but "lost" due to "some trouble with the law" (most of 500 copies were confiscated in a DEA drug bust). A decade later he was mostly famous as the subject of songs by Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams, with Gurf Morlix releasing a tribute album in 2011 (Blaze Foley's 113th Wet Dream, probably Morlix's best). Since then, various live scraps have appeared, which rarely live up to the legend. B+(*) [bc]

Hüsker Dü: Extra Circus (1983 [2017], Numero Group): Five extra tracks from the session(s) that produced their breakthrough 7-song, 18:57 Metal Circus EP. Total: 7:33 -- three tracks less than 1 minute each, the only one over 2 minutes is "Standing by the Sea," which you may know from Zen Arcade, so nothing revelatory, but pretty good while it lasts. B [sp]

PAL: PALS (2023, self-released, EP): First record, a 7-song EP (11:05), just a trio at this point, so singer-songwriter Maureen Joyce plays drums as well as keys. B+(**) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Nicole Glover: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Savant)
  • Luigi Grasso: La Dimora Dell'atrove (LP345) [09-26]
  • Andy Haas/Brian G Skol: The Honeybee Twist (Resonant Music) [08-01]
  • Dylan Hicks & Small Screens: Avian Field Recordings (Soft Launch) [08-12]
  • Lex Korten: Canopy (Sounderscore) [09-19]
  • Linda May Han Oh: Strange Heavens (Biophilia) [08-22]: packaging only, no music (is this a joke?)
  • Webber/Morris Big Band: Unseparate (Out of Your Head) [09-26]
  • Simón Willson: Feel Love (Endectomorph Music) [09-25]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 28, 2025

Music Week

July archive (finished).

Music: Current count 44592 [44557] rated (+35), 18 [16] unrated (+2).

I've had a disturbing week, leaving me all but paralyzed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- "FUD" if you're inclined to laugh at it, but right now I'm not. I suppose it started with a routine out-patient test at a local hospital, which has raised no alarms (although messages to visit the "patient portal" for reports have revealed nothing), but disrupted my day, setting off a series of bad choices: a stop at a new restaurant that disappointed, a bit of custard afterwards that I didn't need (while denying myself the "butter pecan concrete" I would have relished), some pricey and esoteric grocery shopping at Whole Foods, where I bought some skinny trout filets that forced me to fix an unplanned dinner (a sub-stellar trout almondine with sides of zucchini and oven fries). While objectively I've muddled through, I've remained out of sorts all week.

The low point came on the day when I spent a couple hours awkwardly leaning into the front porch door trying to reconnect a broken power wire to a doorbell camera. It's been broken for months, and for most of that time just too small and obscure to see how it could go back together. I finally got the wire in, only to have it pop out again when I tried to reconnect the clip. After that, it was impossible. I finally concluded I'd have to get someone out to if not fix it then suggest a different camera setup. Seems like I've been failing at a lot of these maintenance tasks lately. It's very discouraging. [PS: I did some further research moments ago, which suggests I misunderstood some things. Still probably not salvageable, but replacing the entire clip may be straightforward to someone with the right parts and equipment.]

I also spent a bunch of time this week doing research on buying a new car. I have a big table of models, but I'm still a long ways from figuring it all out. Meanwhile, the old car is on its last legs, or seems to be, and I need to get someone to look at it, because I no longer seem to understand how cars work. There was a day when my highest ambition was to become a mechanic (ok, a race car designer). Dreams like that die hard. (Although I had two cousins who did just that. One was already building and racing go-karts as a teen. Later he spent most of his life teaching mechanics, but wound up doing tricky plastics repairs in a body shop by then managed by the other.) Still, made some progress after months of spinning my wheels. Should be a major focus next week.

Many more projects on hold. The one most relevant here is the Substack newsletter, Notes on Everyday Life. I haven't sent anything out yet, but I've started to get some free subscribers, and I edited their original "Coming Soon" page as Hello World, the title taken from the original demo program in The C Programming Language. The edited text serves as a brief (6 paragraph) mission statement. I'll try to publish an initial post sometime in the coming week. No idea yet what will be in there. I do have one possibly serious problem with Substack so far: with Firefox, the dashboard controls are dead in the water. Thus far I've only been able to work on it through Chrome, which I almost never use. The problem also applies to other supposedly public web pages, like this one (from Chris Monsen's Listening Booth, a mid-year list that is probably very useful).

Probably more I should write about here, but it's gotten too late, so I might as well go ahead and post. One last thing I do need to mention is that I wrote up three answers today.

New records reviewed this week:

Arcade Fire: Pink Elephant (2025, Columbia): Canadian rock band, seventh album since 2004, the first several were huge critical as well as commercial hits, most I liked well enough but little remember now. So I had little enthusiasm for this when it came out, but must admit they remain a good band, and this album has some genuine appeal. B+(*) [sp]

Beach Bunny: Tunnel Vision (2025, AWAL): Indie pop band, Lili Trifilio the singer-guitarist, third album, "jam-packed bubblegum hooks and angsty riffs." B+(**) [sp]

Yaya Bey: Do It Afraid (2025, Drink Sum Wtr): R&B singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, raps some, several albums since 2016. B+(*) [sp]

Brian Charette: Borderless (2024 [2025], SteepleChase): Organ player, working solo, evidently his third such -- starting with Borderline in 2013, then Beyond Borderline in 2019 -- which puts him in mind of church music, but when his own pieces run out, he drops in some Jobim, Booker T, Huey Lewis, "Willow Weep for Me," "Tadd's Delight," "Moody's Mood for Love." With a couple vocals. B [sp]

Brian Charette: Working Out With Big G (2024 [2025], SteepleChase): The attraction here is tenor saxophonist George Coleman, 89 at the time, but the typography on cover and spine tells me to credit this solely to the organ player, while noting support from Paul Bollenback (guitar) and George Coleman Jr. (drums) -- a sequel to their 2017 album. All standards, starting with Charlie Parker and ending with Irving Berlin. Coleman still sounds fine, but he seems pretty relaxed. B+(***) [sp]

Eric Church: Evangeline vs. the Machine (2025, UMG Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, debut 2006, went multi-platinum with 2011's Chief. Seems to be moving beyond his arena rock phase. B+(*) [sp]

Clipse: Let God Sort Them Out (2025, Roc Nation): Hip-hop duo from Virginia Beach, brothers Gene and Terrence Thornton, aka No Malice and Pusha T, big album in 2002 (Lord Willin'), but this is their first since 2009 (both released solo albums in 2013, with Pusha T adding three more through 2022). More drug trade than I'd like, but they steer away from gangsta by treating it more as a calling, a prism for a world view, interesting on its own terms. A- [sp]

Chick Corea/Christian McBride/Brian Blade: Trilogy 3 (2020 [2025], Candid): Piano/bass/drums trio, their initial 2014 3-CD album documented 2010-12 tours, a second 2-CD from 2018 picked up scraps and added a 2016 tour. This one, from a 2020 tour -- the pianist died in 2021 -- fits on a single CD, although the 2-LP is probably the point. B+(*) [sp]

Paquito D'Rivera & Madrid-New York Connection Band: La Fleure De Cayenne (2025, Sunnyside): Cuban clarinet and alto sax player, debut 1975, moved to US in 1981, many albums, group here mostly Cubans based in Madrid (piano/bass/drums/percussion) with a vibraphonist (Sebastian Laverde) from Colombia. B+(*) [sp]

Dawn Patrol Jazz Band: A Tribute to Benny Strickler and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band (2024-25 [2025], self-released): Band led by drummer Hal Smith, who's been a major figure in the trad jazz world since 1979, so no direct connection to the Yuerba Buena Jazz Band (1940-59). Strickler (1917-46) was a trumpet player who briefly played with them c. 1942 (although none of the 6 sides they recorded together are reprised here). Group here with Rick Holzgrafe (cornet), Steve Drivon (trombone), two clarinets, piano, banjo, and tuba. B+(**) [bc]

McKinley Dixon: Magic, Alive! (2025, City Slang): Rapper, from Maryland, based in Chicago, fifth album since 2016 (first two self-released). B+(**) [sp]

DJ Haram: Beside Myself (Hyperdub): DJ/producer based in Philadelphia, Zubeyda Muzeyyen, part of duo 700 Bliss with Moor Mother, first album after a mixtape, several guest rappers including Bbymutha, Moor Mother, and Armand Hammer. B+(**) [sp]

Open Mike Eagle: Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (2025, Auto Reverse): Underground rapper, from Chicago, debut 2008, more than a dozen albums, this one sneakier than most. A- [sp]

The Haas Company Featuring Jerry Goodman: Thirteen (2025, Psychiatric): Fusion group led by drummer Steve Haas, each volume featuring a guest, here playing electric violin. B [cd] [08-01]

Jasper Høiby: Fellow Creatures: We Must Fight (2025, Edition): Danish bassist, started in Phronesis in 2007, other groups include Planet B, Three Elements, and Fellow Creatures -- a 2016 title recycled here but with a different group: Alex Hitchcock (sax), Ketija Ringa Karahona (flute), Saled Silbak (oud), Luca Caruso (drums), Xavi Torres (piano). B+(**) [sp]

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals: A City Drowned in God's Black Tears (2025, Phantom Limb): Music by the former, aka Tariq Ravelomanana, from Tanzania but moved in childhood through several African countries before settling "as a junior high student" in Baltimore. Has a couple albums on his own, as does lyricist Ennals, before teaming up for their third album here. Some sharp politics, but also some fuzzy music. B+(**) [sp]

Rico Jones: Bloodlines (2024 [2025], Giant Step Arts): Tenor saxophonist, from Colorado, based in Harlem, "a rising star and one of the most accomplished saxophonists of his generation," which judging from his biography (which doesn't give a birthdate or age, but is pretty details "from the age of 13") would put him in the 24-28 range, here with his first album. Not many in his cohort I could contrast him with, but Zoh Amba (b. 2000) has 7 + 4 albums in my database. No one else really pops to mind, as it's unusual for jazz musicians to lead albums before they turn 30. Hyperbole aside, this is pretty impressive: original pieces, starting with a 30:21 suite, plus four more pieces that add up to another 31:15. Quartet with guitar (Max Light), bass (Joe Martin), and drums (Nasheet Waits). B+(***) [cdr] [07-25]

Kokoroko: Tuff Times Never Last (2025, Brownswood): British septet, led by Sheila Maurice-Grey and Onome Edgeworth, slotted as jazz but strikes me as too soft-edged even for Afrobeat. B [sp]

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI (2025, Young Money/Republic): New Orleans rapper Dwayne Carter, Wikipedia counts 14 studio albums and 29 mixtapes since 1999, most of the former, especially his Tha Carter series, big hits. Considerable craft here, but little I actually care about; e.g., "I'm alone in the studio with my gun." B+(*) [sp]

Niontay: Fada<3of$ (2025, 10k): Rapper, last name Hicks, born in Milwaukee, grew up in Florida, now in Brooklyn, second album. Some esoteric groove music. B+(*) [sp]

Pink Siifu: Black'!Antique (2025, Dynamite Hill): Rapper Livingston Matthews, albums since 2019, this one hews close to the underground for an excessive 77 minutes. B+(*) [sp]

Altin Sencalar: Unleashed (2024 [2025], Posi-Tone): Trombonist, "California-born, Texas-raised, New York-based," "drawing on his Mexican and Turkish heritage," second album, with Greg Tardy (tenor sax/clarinet), Behn Gillece (vibes), Boris Kozlov (bass), and EJ Strickland (drums), plus on three tracks Bruce Williams (alto/soprano sax/flute). B+(*) [sp]

Slikback: Attrition (2025, Planet Mu): "UK bass" or "deconstructed club" or something along those lines, by Freddy M Njau, from Nairobi, Kenya, who seems to have done a lot of this sort of thing since 2019. B+(*) [sp]

Hal Smith's San Francisco Jazz All-Stars: Live at the International Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival '24 Sedalia, MO [Vol. 1] (2024, self-released): Trad jazz drummer, many albums since 1979, cover print here includes a "featuring:" of song titles, and a full list of "all-star" names: Tom Bartlett (trombone/vocals), John Otto (clarinet), Brian Holland (piano), John Gill (banjo/vocals), Dan Anderson (tuba). Gill is by far the most famous in my book, and (along with Bartlett and Smith) provides a link to Turk Murphy, who following Lu Watters put San Francisco on the trad jazz map in the 1940s. [bc]

Junior Smith and His Remote Rangers: Junior Smith's Remote Round Up (2025, self-released): Trad jazz drummer Hal Smith, with much of his usual crew, playing western swing, inspired by Bob Wills' Tiffany Transcriptions, featuring vocalists Alice Spencer and Katie Shore (who also plays fiddle). B+(*) [bc]

Snowpoet: Heartstrings (2025, Edition): British duo, Lauren Kinsella (vocals) and Chris Hyson (keyboards), fourth album since 2016, plus bass, drums, and some saxophone, on a jazz label but their "depth, sonic richness, and lyrical honesty" is very niche-specific. B+(*) [sp]

Laura Stevenson: Late Great (2025, Really): Singer-songwriter from Long Island, started playing keyboards in a group called Bomb the Music Industry, first solo album 2008, this makes seven. B+(*) [sp]

Kelsey Waldon: Every Ghost (2025, Oh Boy): Country singer-songwriter from Kentucky, tenth album since 2010. The Gold Mine (2014) was the first I heard, and I was very taken with the voice, the songs, the deep country vibe. Everything she's done since then has been very good, and this is no exception, even if it seems like my enthusiasm is waning. B+(***) [sp]

Wet Leg: Moisturizer (2025, Domino): British rock duo, actually from Isle of Wight, second album, first was one of 2022's top-regarded albums, I never quite got the excitement then, even less now. B+(**) [sp]

Jessica Winter: My First Album (2025, Lucky Number): Pop singer-songwriter, don't know much about her, but it mostly works. B+(**) [sp]

Wu-Tang X Mathematics: Black Samson, the Bastard Swordsman (2025, 36 Chambers/DNA Music): Latter is DJ/producer Ronald Bean, a Discogs entry under Allah Mathematics, with a dozen variants, and ten releases since 2003, and 101 production credits since 1994, with many Wu-Tang affiliates starting with Method Man in 1998, and the whole Clan in 2000. So soundwise, he is them, and vice versa. "Clan" was dropped on their 2017 The Saga Continues, but that seems to have less to do with attrition -- ODB died in 2004; all nine others are still on board here -- than with consolidating their brand: a business strategy, which is probably all the "Final Chamber" tour is, or the "Las Vegas Residency," or the album they recorded for a private auction, or the "cooperative action RPG." In this case, note that I'm playing the 12-cut stream, as opposed to the 11-track LP or the 13-track digital or the 26-track "deluxe" or whatever's on the CD or 2xCD, let alone the instrumental version, or the 2x12" 45RPM Record Store Day special. A- [sp]

Brandee Younger: Gadabout Season (2025, Impulse!): Harp player, albums since 2011, third major label deal on Impulse. Lot of guest spots, including some prominent names, but ultimately they don't add much. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Sly & the Family Stone: The First Family: Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 (1967 [2025], High Moon): Very early, only one original piece ("I Ain't Got Nobody"), but it clearly points toward their debut album, A Whole New Thing later that same year. After that it's all covers: Otis Redding and Motown, "St. James Infirmary" and "Funky Broadway." Probably fun to witness at the time, but nothing to write home about. B [sp]

Sly & the Family Stone: Sly Lives! (Aka the Burden of Black Genius) [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (1967-73 [2025], Sony/Legacy): Tie-in to Questlove's documentary, baited with "seven rare and previously unreleased mixes and alternate versions, along with three new edits," dates not given but begins with two songs from A Whole New Thing and ends with "Que Sera" from Fresh. I'm not finding this very useful, but if if you're starting from scratch, this could be a good introduction. There certainly are moments of genius. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

Joe Sanders: Introducing Joe Sanders (2011 [2012], Criss Cross Jazz): Bassist, American but based in Paris, first of three albums, many more side credits (Discogs counts 68 since 2000). He wrote 5 (of 10) songs here, including a vocal shared with Gretchen Parlato. With Will Vinson (alto sax), Luis Perdomo (keyboards), and Rodney Green (drums). Nice variety, worth noticing the bass. B+(**) [sp]

Grade (or other) changes:

New York Dolls: In Too Much, Too Soon (1974, Mercury): I always favored their second album, perhaps because I got to it first, but possibly not for a year or two after the fact, by which point the CBGB scene was exploding, with all sorts of new wonders. When I went back over the A+ lists, this was one that gave me a pause. When I finally got around to replaying, it easily satisfied my criteria: every cut bursting with ideas, flowing inexorably into a complete album, capped by the magnificent "Human Being." [was: A] A+ [cd]

Rechecked with no grade change:

New York Dolls: New York Dolls (1973, Mercury): Also replayed their first album, New York Dolls, several times, and left it at A. Several really great songs, especially "Subway Train," but doesn't quite have the complete flow of the second album. One thing I was struck by was how much the ballad ("Vietnamese Baby"?) anticipated the Go-Betweens -- another recent replay -- but A+ albums shouldn't have odd songs out (at least ones that aren't sui generis). A [cd]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet: El Muki (Saponegro) [08-15]
  • Adegoke Steve Colson & Iqua Colson With Andrew Cyrille/Mark Helias: Glow: Music for Trio . . . and Voice (Silver Sphinx) [08-22]
  • Eric McPherson: Double Bass Quartet (Giant Step Arts) [07-25]
  • PlainsPeak: Someone to Someone (Irabbagast) [08-15]
  • Ned Rothenberg: Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic) [09-05]
  • Charlie Rouse: Cinnamon Flower: The Expanded Edition (1977, Resonance) [09-19]
  • Miguel Zenón Quartet: Vanguardia Subterranea: Live at the Village Vanguard (Miel Music) [08-29]

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