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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Every year dozens of books are published about a topic that only a handful of Americans care about: specifically, those with cushy "think tank" jobs, plus a few military officers and State department bureaucrats who aspire to those jobs. Most assume that the US has a rightful role running the World Order, with some fretting that China or some other nation is going to butt in and offering sage advice on how the US can secure its rightful role. Against these stalwart hegemonists, now and then someone will argue that a "multipolar" isn't such a calamity, but they are in the minority, and are still so obsessed with dominance they needn't fear about losing their status as Very Serious Thinkers.

The books, of course, are nonsense, predicated on unexamined ideas: that chaos and war are the natural state of the world, that order is so valuable you have to accept it from whoever can impose it, that inequality is the best we can do given man's venal nature. That is, of course, the way conservatives think about everything. Unfortunately, it is also the way liberals usually think about the foreign world, given how readily they have sucked up the prejudices of the West's imperial past. In 2003 Jonathan Schell published an antidote to that kind of thinking, a book called The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. It was published just as the neocon ideology had become fashionable and powerful enough to "create new reality" in Iraq, and predicted failure for such hubris. Ten years later the results should be clear, but still the foreign policy elite natters on, too absorbed in their own prejudiced thoughts to have noticed their failures.

Case in point: a new book called World Order by America's most venerable war criminal, Henry Kissinger. Fortunately, we don't have to actually read the book: we can skim through the New York Times' review by John Micklethwait -- editor-in-chief of The Economist, the kind of journalist who makes his living chronicling the rarefied world of conservative "think tanks." (Micklethwait's most famous book is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, which every 4-5 pages reiterated the mantra that conservatives are America's "idea people." He also wrote A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization [2001] and God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World [2009], extolling the wonders of free capital flows and fundamentalism, respectively. His latest is The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, about how the future belongs to oligarchies that are able to usurp the powers of the state.) Rarely has reviewer and subject been so perfectly matched to bring out the worst in a book.

However, before we dive into the review, I should point out that there is an alternative approach to international relations that is wholly absent in the thinking of Kissinger and Micklethwait: the idea that order can be obtained through the consent of equal nations with a common commitment to basic, inalienable human rights and a just body of international law. In the wake of two horrific world wars, and the advent of even more destructive nuclear weapons, that idea got so far as the founding documents of the United Nations -- before that body got turned into a cartel of superpowers -- and the basic ideas have reappeared occasionally since. I could elaborate more, but for now just keep the idea in mind.

The first quarter of Micklethwait's review is sheer flattery:

If you want to understand the point of Henry Kissinger, play this mind game: Imagine that the nonagenarian had run American foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, instead of two groups that had spent much of the previous quarter-century condemning him. First came the democracy-touting neoconservatives, who saw his realpolitik as appeasement, and now liberal Democrats, who insist nation-building must begin at home -- and therefore hate foreign entanglements, let alone grand strategies.

Might a little realism have been useful in Iraq, rather than the "stuff happens" amateurism of the Bush years? Would a statesman who read Winston Churchill on Afghanistan ("except at harvest time . . . the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war") have committed America to establishing a "gender sensitive . . . and fully representative" government in Kabul? Would Kissinger have issued a red-line warning to Syria and then allowed Assad to go unpunished when he used chemical weapons? Or let a power vacuum gradually develop on Vladimir Putin's borders? Or looked on as the South China Sea became a cockpit of regional rivalries? [ . . . ]

Yes, passion, for this is a cri de coeur from a famous skeptic, a warning to future generations from an old man steeped in the past. It comes with faults: It is contorted by the author's concerns about his legacy and by a needless craving not to upset the Lilliputian leaders he still seeks to influence. It also goes over some of the same ground as previous works. But it is a book that every member of Congress should be locked in a room with -- and forced to read before taking the oath of office.

It's not as if Kissinger didn't have the ear of the Bush Administration after 9/11. He was, after all, Bush's first pick to chair the commission that would report on the 9/11 attacks. (He turned the job down for fear of having to disclose who his consulting clients were.) If he had any reservations about Bush's approach to Iraq or anything, he was remarkably circumspect about voicing them. And since when has Churchill been an expert on anything? He always said he hadn't been elected to preside over the dismantling of the British Empire, but no one did more to wreck it, which he repeatedly did by insisting on substituting his prejudices for any understanding of or empathy for the empire's subjects. On the other hand, Kissinger's own record is nearly as bad. The suggestion that he would have handled Syria and Ukraine better than Obama has -- admittedly a low bar -- overlooks how much his own policies contributed to those conflicts today.

The premise is that we live in a world of disorder: [ . . . ] Hence the need to build an order -- one able to balance the competing desires of nations, both the established Western powers that wrote the existing international "rules" (principally the United States), and the emerging ones that do not accept them, principally China, but also Russia and the Islamic world.

This will be hard because there never has been a true world order. Instead, different civilizations have come up with their own versions. The Islamic and Chinese ones were almost entirely self-­centered: [ . . . ] America's version, though more recent and more nuanced, is also somewhat self-centered -- a moral order where everything will be fine once the world comes to its senses and thinks like America (which annoyingly it never quite does). So the best starting point remains Europe's "Westphalian" balance of power.

The Westphalia treaties ended the 30 Years War in 1648 with a set of agreements between nations/states/cities to respect each other's autonomy and work with each other in prescribed ways. This later led to an ever-adjusting set of alliances to maintain a balance of power -- which mostly worked to keep the peace in Europe (and to export war to the third world) until its colossal failure in 1914. Kissinger always thinks in the past, and far enough back as to ignore recent novelties like the European Union, so balance of power is the best he can do. Unlike the neocons, he recognizes that the US isn't the sole power in the world, one suspects this has less to do with realism than with the fact that it takes multiple powers to balance.

After all, while the neocons hate Kissinger, he has never really reciprocated. The reason, I think, is that both worship power. It's just that the neocons think they have so much power they can create their own reality, and Kissinger, well, he's never been to type to point out "the Emperor's new clothes" -- he's too much of a flatterer for that, too worshipful of power.

The review goes on and on iterating Kissinger's past examples, a litany of Richelieu, Metternich, Palmerston, Talleyrand -- curiously enough, courtiers like Kissinger and not the monarchs they served. Kissinger goes on to belittle the European Union:

. . . as Kissinger notes in one of his more withering asides, unifications in Europe have only been achieved with a forceful uniter, like Piedmont in Italy or Prussia in Germany.

For Kissinger, historical change not accomplished by force hardly counts. Then he explains Putin and Russia:

Kissinger also canters eloquently through Russia. Vladimir Putin's nationalism makes more sense once you understand the historical chip on his shoulder and his country's centuries-long, remorseless expansion: Russia added an average of 100,000 square kilometers a year to its territory from 1552 to 1917.

Again, nothing like a historical factoid to explain away current behavior or policy. This one is about as facile as trying to explain the Bush occupation of Iraq as the latest wrinkle on Manifest Destiny. It may indeed be that a nation capable of the former is predisposed to the latter, but that leaves a lot of intervening history unexamined in favor of a pat answer.

Still, the book stalls a bit with Islam. Religion used to be one of Kissinger's blind spots: The word does not appear in the index of Diplomacy. Now Kissinger seems to have swung too far the other way. Islam's failure to differentiate between mosque and state suddenly explains virtually everything (though not, presumably, the success of the largest Muslim-dominated state, Indonesia). Iran is perfidy personified. By contrast, Israel is a victim, "a Westphalian state" in a sea of unreason. He does not mention its unhelpful settlement-building or examine the Jewish state's own extremists (the man who killed the peacemaking Yitzhak Rabin is a "radical Israeli student"). It all feels like a rather belated olive branch to the Israeli right and its supporters in America's Congress.

I suppose this is where you notice that Micklethwait is British: he can't quite fall for the poor, tiny, beleaguered Israel line that is political orthodoxy in the US. Kissinger has been around the block enough to know better too, but to say so would take principles, or courage, neither a Kissinger staple. Propounding ignorance about Islam, on the other hand, takes neither. It's right up his alley.

The book recovers speed with Asia. Kissinger compares Britain's effect on India to Napoleon's on Germany: In both cases multiple states that had seen themselves only as a geographic entity discovered a national one.

Another remarkable example of Kissinger's ability to look at al the complexities of history and only see power relationships, then to take the narrowest thread and explicate it through some totally unrelated event in European history. Sure, Britain united India politically -- more Bismarck than Napoleon, I'd say, until they also split it into two warring halves -- but they also destroyed India economically. (One thing I wonder is whether Kissinger would have been so successful had stayed in Europe, where his audiences and patrons might actually know much of the history he revels in.)

There is some repetition here with his last book on China, but he moves quickly through the Middle Kingdom's self-absorbed history, where foreign policy was largely a matter of collecting tribute through the emperor's Ministry of Rituals and where soldiery was little valued ("Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers"). In 1893, even as Western forces were overrunning the country, the Qing dynasty diverted military funds to restore a marble boat in the Imperial Palace.

Middle Kingdom? Another example of forcing the present into the distant past so he can avoid having to understand what's happening there. I like the line -- "Good men do not become soldiers" -- but modern China does not lack for soldiers, or for nails. While modern China must in some sense continue to reflect and resonate ancient China, the nation's remarkable economic growth of the past 20-30 years is more due to forced modernization. This is a modern (perhaps even postmodern) phenomenon -- unexplainable through ancient history, but also non-analogous to the processes that created similar results in Europe and America. In particular, China (and most of East Asia, Japan a partial exception) achieved its wealth without building on imperialism, so is unlikely to look at the world the same way Europe and America do. Needless to say, that's a thought Kissinger is incapable of.

Is modern America capable of leading the world out of this? Kissinger never answers this question directly, but the chapters on his own country read like a carefully worded warning to a treasured but blinkered friend. America comes to the task with two deep character faults. The first, bound up with its geography, is a perception that foreign policy is "an optional activity." As late as 1890, its army was only the 14th largest in the world, smaller than Bulgaria's. This is a superpower that has withdrawn ignominiously from three of the last five wars it chose to fight -- in Vietnam, Iraq (the younger Bush version), Afghanistan. The second is that the same ideals that have built a great country often made it lousy at diplomacy, especially "the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary" -- the naïveté of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the neoconservatives' forays in the Islamic world. [ . . . ]

But the current disorder is more complex: chaos in the Middle East, the spread of nuclear weapons, the emergence of cyberspace as an unregulated military arena and the reordering of Asia. The challenge is "not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities," Kissinger writes. "It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation -- or even any order at all." [ . . . ]

How do America's current leaders shape up? Here the book is both irritatingly coy and implicitly devastating. There is no direct criticism of the Obama administration and even a slightly comic paragraph expressing Kissinger's deep personal admiration for George W. Bush -- in the midst of a section on the cluelessness of his foreign policy. But under the equivocation and the courtiership, the message is clear, even angry: The world is drifting, unattended, and America, an indispensable part of any new order, has yet to answer even basic questions, like "What do we seek to prevent?" and "What do we seek to achieve?"

One of my favorite rock lyrics is from the band Camper van Beethoven, and goes like this: "If you weren't living here in America/you'd probably be somewhere else." There are several problems with being self-centered. One is that you can't see yourself as others see you, and as such you have no clue when you do something wrong. Back when the US army was smaller than Bulgaria's it still did things that were wrong -- 1890, the very year Micklethwait cites, was the date of the Wounded Knee Massacre -- but those wrong things were much smaller in scope and more isolated from the rest of the world than they are today. I don't know why Kissinger/Micklethwait complained about the size of the 1890 army. Back then, the US was already the most prosperous nation in the world, without getting into the trap of managing overseas colonies (although it often treated Central America like one). Nor was the US isolated: with the possible exception of the UK, no nation traded more all around the world. What more do they want?

The notion of America as an "indispensable nation" dates from WWII, when latent industrial might turned the tables against the Axis -- although we conveniently forget that most of the actual fighting was carried out by the Soviet Union and China. Unfortunately, Americans had too good a time in that war -- a massive Keynesian stimulus, strict profit controls, and a sense of common purpose pushed a previously depressed economy into overdrive, while all of the war's destruction took place elsewhere. By the time the war was over, over half of the world's industrial capacity resided in the US, and America alone had the financial power to jumpstart the world economy. After some early gestures to build a peaceful world community, Truman got distracted and decided that the US should side with capital in the international class war, so efforts like the Marshall Plan were turned into political weapons against not just the Soviet Union but the whole working class. The "Cold War" somehow managed not to destroy the world, but the US repeatedly supported desperate attempts by colonial powers to recapture their empires, and corrupt dictators and oligarchs when independence was inevitable, while isolating nations that had the gall to turn toward communism. Ultimately, the big loser of the Cold War wasn't the Soviet Union, which gave up the game, but America's own middle class democracy.

Micklethwait, possibly echoing but at least distilling Kissinger, described the Cold War thusly:

In the Cold War, America's moral order worked: There was a clear adversary that could eventually just be outmuscled, there were compliant allies and there were set rules of engagement.

After the Soviet Union fell, America's foreign policy elites were beside themselves with triumphal glee -- proclaiming The End of History and looking forward to The Clash of Civilizations -- but their triumph was little more than a con. Had Reagan's rhetoric caused the Soviet Union to disintegrate, why did communist states the US confronted much more aggressively (like Cuba and North Korea) stay communist? If communism was a dead end, how was China able to post the world's strongest economic growth record over the last 25 years? Moreover, when you sift through the real rubble of the "Cold War" you find enormous chasms where the US took the wrong side of history and left enormous destruction in its wake: the "chaos in the Middle East" that Micklethwait bemoans is largely the result of America's Cold War embrace of Salafist jihadism -- a program, by the way, initiated in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger came up with the bright idea of propping the ultraconservative Saudi monarchy up as a US proxy in the Middle East (and soon thereafter Afghanistan). To say "America's moral order worked" is well beyond insane.

This isn't to say that the US should have no role in the world (although that would clearly be an improvement over the one the US has practiced for nearly seventy years now). Clearly there are useful and valuable things a large and rich nation can do in the world -- the $750 million Obama just proposed to fight the ebola epidemic is a nice gesture (although, as Nick Turse recently documented, the US has a terrible track record of running "humanitarian projects" in Africa). But what needs to be done is for the US to meet other countries in forums that give everyone a fair and equal shake, and for that to happen the US has to stop throwing its weight around, trying to bully everyone else into submission. More specifically, the US needs to develop a genuine commitment to peace and human rights, to equality and justice, to a sustainable stewardship of the earth. To do that, a good first step would be to stop listening to Henry Kissinger. In fact, a good step would be to extradite him to the Hague, to finally be tried as the war criminal he was (and is).

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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Music: Current count 23814 [23775] rated (+39), 528 [524] unrated (+4).

After posting Rhapsody Streamnotes last Tuesday, I kept diving into the old music, moving from Julius Hemphill to Henry Threadgill, then to Steve Lacy (still not done there). I was surprised to find that I liked the two early albums so much (both *** in Penguin Guide; I went back and replayed the 4-star all-Monk Explorations but left it at B+). And I was further surprised that none of the later albums rated that high -- though I am just filling in holes in a catalog I've previously heard much of. (Before this week I had 37 albums rated filed under Lacy's name; now 51; there are still 21 unheard albums in the database.) For the record, I previously had the following Lacy records rated A- or A (counting one filed under Roswell Rudd's name):

• School Days (w/Roswell Rudd, 1963)
• The Forest and the Zoo (1966)
• Esteem: Live in Paris (1975)
• Regeneration (w/Roswell Rudd and others, 1982)
• Morning Joy: Live at Sunset Paris (1986)
• Sempre Amore (w/Mal Waldron, 1986)
• One More Time (w/Joëlle Léandre, 2002)
• Early and Late (w/Roswell Rudd, 1962-2002)

A couple of those came out after his death in 2003. I suppose I should also note that Lacy has more low grades (B or below) than nearly any other jazz musician of his stature: I find a lot of his 1970s work to be very sloppy, and I have a lot of trouble any time he hands the mic to his wife, Irène Aëbi (although my horror has somewhat diminished with this latest batch of records). He also has a lot of solo albums that are intrinsically limited -- Only Monk (1985) is one of the B records, even though it seems like it should be better. Some more in the queue, and any time I find something more I'll give it a listen.

Not many new records: most of last week's haul came in today and barely got catalogued. Spent a lot of time with the two TUM records. It should be noted somewhere that they have the best documentation and packaging of any jazz label in the world. Also spent quite a bit of time with Lomax, whose 2010 album, The State of Black America, made that year's top-ten list. Saxophonist Edwin Bayard is key to both, one of the most powerful young players I've heard this decade.

I've kept the original tweet grade for Loudon Wainwright III below, but the database grade is somewhat more generous. Although I single out one extraordinarily bad song, it should be noted that nothing else on the album rises to the level of Older Than My Old Man Now (my top-ranked record of 2012). Also, my complaint about that "2nd Amendment Xmas anthem" isn't political (as I tweeted, "even if it's satirical and anti-gun"). Some brilliant ideas just don't work, nor do stupid ones, regardless of artistic license. (By the way, Matt Rice has a more judicious Wainwright review here.)

Recommended music links:

• Robert Christgau: Expert Witness: first installment of the new Consumer Guide focuses on alt-rap records: Atmosphere, The Roots, Homeboy Sandman, Open Mike Eagle; three A-, two HMs. More coming each Friday. There's also an interview with Christgau where he pegs Black Portland as his favorite album of the year. I thought Atmosphere and The Roots might have some upward potential when I reviewed them back when, but I didn't get anything promising out of Black Portland -- although Tatum, Rice, and others did.

New records rated this week:

• Ryan Adams: Ryan Adams (2014, Blue Note): singer-songwriter narrowly framed, both on cover and with guitar, as if we should pay more attention, but should we? [r]: B
• Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: From the Region (2013 [2014], Delmark): vibes-bass-drums trio with Flaten & Reed, doing much to let the leader roam/soar [cd]: B+(***)
• Kalle Kalima & K-18: Buñuel de Jour (2013 [2014], TUM): guitarist, quartet adds bass, accordion, and alto sax, all melting together, thick & juicy [cd]: B+(***)
• The Mark Lomax Trio: Isis & Osiris (2012 [2014], Inarhyme): drags early, but Edwin Bayard's sax is often mesmerizing, drummer pretty good too [cd]: A-
• Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites (2012 [2014], TUM, 2CD): another 2CD monster but spare, with Henry Threadgill jousting, Lindberg & DeJohnette [cd]: B+(***)
• Loudon Wainwright III: Haven't Got the Blues (Yet) (2014, 429): pretty good album, as usual, except for that 2nd Amendment Xmas anthem [r]: D-

Old records rated this week:

• John Wolf Brennan/Alex Cline/Daniele Patumi/Tscho Theissing/John Voirol: Shooting Stars and Traffic Lights (1993-97 [2006], Leo): [r]: B+(**)
• Julius Hemphill: Raw Materials and Residuals (1977 [1993], Black Saint): early sax trio with cello and percussion, explosive postbop, seductive melodies [r]: A-
• Julius Hemphill/Warren Smith: Chile New York (1980 [1998], Black Saint): sax-percussion duets, kind of sketchy as improv can sometimes be [r]: B+(**)
• The Julius Hemphill Sextet: At Dr. King's Table (1997, New World): ghost band, six-piece sax choir laying out some of his most storied harmonies [r]: B+(***)
• The Julius Hemphill Sextet: The Hard Blues: Live in LisbonB+(***)
• Jay Clayton & John Lindberg: As Tears Go By (1987 [2014], Jazzwerkstatt): half tortured voals, half String Trio of New York, some pretty great Marty Ehrlich [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Lacy: Soprano Sax (1957 [1991], Prestige/OJC): first album, shows his horn off on Monk & Ellington, with very engaging Wynton Kelly on piano [r]: A-
• Steve Lacy: The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy (1960 [1985], Candid): mostly trio as Lacy lays out his unique soprano sax style, covering Monk, Parker, and Taylor [r]: A-
• Steve Lacy with Don Cherry: Evidence (1961 [1990], New Jazz/OJC): two-horn quartet with bass/drums, indecisive squabbles over the usual fare (Ellington, Monk) [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lacy: Scratching the Seventies/Dreams (1969-77 [1997], Saravah, 3CD): box rolls up 5 albums as Lacy gets weird, often several ways at once [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Lacy/Andrea Centazzo: Clangs (1977 [2006], Ictus): soprano sax and percussion duets, a rickety contraption with whistles, bird calls, clanging [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy Quintet: Troubles (1979, Black Saint): tricky, slippery tunes with Steve Potts on second sax, Irene Aebi on violin or cello (or voice) [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lacy: The Flame (1982, Soul Note): trio with Bobby Few (piano) and Dennis Charles (drums), bits of genius and bouts of flailing [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: Live in Berlin (1984 [2007], Jazzwerkstatt): typical mix for frequent duet partners, can get dense, also somewhat fanciful [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy: More Monk (1989 [1991], Soul Note): solo soprano sax, all Monk tunes, played fairly straight but stripped to bare bones [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron: "Let's Call This . . . Esteem" (1993, Slam): duo, one of many they've done but too often they play past one another [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy Trio: The Rent (1997 [1999], Cavity Search, 2CD): trio, with Jean-Jacques Avenel and John Betsch, live before enthusiastic crowd, stretches into 2CD [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lacy Trio: The Holy La (1998 [2002], Freelance): same trio, cut in studio in France, lovely kalimba stretch, two Aebi vocals (not too bad) [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lacy: The Beat Suite (2001 [2003], Sunnyside): fine texts from famous beat poets, slippery and kinky music as only Lacy can, starchy vocals [r]: B
• Steve Lacy: November (2003 [2010], Intakt): solo soprano sax, probably his last, a nice summation of his art; one vocals shows he can't sing either [r]: B+(**)
• John Lindberg: Trilogy of Works for Eleven Instrumentalists (1984 [1985], Black Saint): belabored title and scores but somehow comes together impressively [r]: B+(***)
• John Lindberg: Quartet Afterstorm (1994, Black Saint): bassist-led, but trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and pianist Eric Watson star in taut ensemble [r]: A-
• John Lindberg Ensemble: A Tree Frog Tonality (2000, Between the Lines): quartet with Wadada Leo Smith and Larry Ochs bursting out, Andrew Cyrille superb [r]: B+(***)
• Pago Libre: Stepping Out (2004 [2005], Leo): pianist John Wolf Brennan's avant-chamber group, violin dominating alphorn/flugelhorn, no drums [r]: B+(***)
• Henry Threadgill Sextett: You Know the Number (1986 [1987], Jive/Novus): three horns, cello, bass, two percussionists, a boisterous avant-garde circus [r]: A-
• Henry Threadgill Sextett: Easily Slip Into Another World (1987 [1988], Jive/Novus): picks up where predecessor left off, more or less inspired, vocal ok [r]: B+(***)
• Henry Threadgill: Song Out of My Trees (1993 [1994], Black Saint): five pieces all over the map, like a grieving vocal over accordion/harpsichord/cellos [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rashied Al Akbar/Muhammad Ali/Earl Cross/Idris Ackamoor: Ascent of the Nether Creatures (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
• Daniel Blacksburg Trio: Perilous Architecture (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
• Gianni Lenoci/Kent Carter/Bill Elgart: Plaything (NoBusiness): CDR [LP only]
• Jack Cooper: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra (Planet Arts)
• William Hooker & Liudas Mockunas: Live at the Vilnius Jazz Festival (NoBusiness)
• Peripheral Vision: Sheer Tyranny of the Will (self-released)
• RED Trio & Mattias Ståhl: North and the Red Stream (NoBusiness)
• Ken Thomson and Slow/Fast: Settle (2014, NCM East)
• Rosenna Vitro: Clarity: Music of Clare Fischer (Random Act): September 30

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

On September 10, getting a jump on the unlucky 13th anniversary of Al-Qaida's planes attacks, President Obama laid out his plans for the fourth US invasion and assault on Iraq:

Barack Obama became the fourth consecutive American president to deliver a prime time speech to the nation about Iraq on Wednesday, vowing to wage "a steady, relentless effort" to wipe out ISIS, the Sunni militant group in Iraq and Syria which recently beheaded two American journalists.

"Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy," Obama said.

The president was quick to emphasize that this won't be a war like Iraq or Afghanistan, instead likening it to U.S. engagement in Yemen and Somalia. He said it "will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil," and will instead involve "using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground" to attack ISIS (also called ISIL).

"If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region -- including to the United States," Obama said. He stressed that the strategy will be conducted with global allies, saying the four elements of his plan are air strikes, support for rebel forces on the ground, counter-terrorism and intelligence and humanitarian assistance to civilians.

[Some quick notes: the second invasion of Iraq was under Clinton, when US forces drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of the Kurdish enclave; that was done without a military engagement, although Clinton also conducted a sporadic air war against Iraq over much of his two terms, a practice Bush continued upon taking office in 2001. US troops first entered Somalia in 1992, so how is that working? The first person Obama ordered killed was a Somali pirate in 2009. The US killed a leader of Al-Shabab there as recently as Sept. 2. The US started using drones over Yemen to assassinate alleged terrorists in 2002, so that, too, is at best a slowly evolving "success" story.]

As usual, Obama managed to offend everyone with his position -- the hawks for not acting sooner and more recklessly; the rest of us for throwing us back into another pointless, hopeless war. For a guy who claims his first principle of foreign policy is "don't do stupid shit," Obama just blew it. As near as I can tell, he did this for three reasons:

1. When US troops finally left Iraq, due to the Iraqi government's refusal to sign a "status of forces agreement" that would give US troops immunity to commit crimes against Iraqis (as they had been doing since 2003), Obama chose to celebrate the occasion as a great American success story, and as such he became party to a war that he had campaigned against. So when the success story unraveled and Iraq sank back into a civil war that the US had started by turning Shiite death squads against Sunnis, Obama felt obligated to repair the damage, even where Bush and 160,000 US troops had failed. (Obama made a similar gaffe when he touted a false recovery from the Bush recession, leading people to think he was responsible for the whole crash.) The net effect is that Obama is willing to destroy his own reputation in order to salvage Bush's. That sure isn't the "change" millions of people voted for Obama to bring about.

2. Obama is a pushover, and he let himself get snowed here. A lot of people have been pushing for war against ISIS lately, and they've painted the group as unspeakably evil, pulling out every cliché and playing on every prejudice that has ever been used to sell Americans on a war in the Middle East. Granted, most of the people who've been agitating for war against ISIS were already trying to push the US into war in Syria against ISIS' primary enemy, the Assad regime. Many of them belong to the "real men go to Tehran" faction that wanted to extend the 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria. But all the publicity of ISIS' beheadings and massacres has gripped people initially inclined against escalating a war, even, some would say, the Pope (but see this for a more nuanced reading). For someone like Obama, who periodically feels the need to prove he's no pacifist, the chance to vanquish a foe as abhorent as ISIS was irresistible.

3. Finally, Obama has outsmarted himself, thinking his peculiar combination of aggression (bombing, special forces) and restraint (no regular combat troops) will work magic while avoiding the risks, the abuse and blowback that inevitably follows American troops all around the world. The fact remains that no matter how light or heavy you go in, bombing will inevitably kill the wrong people, intelligence will inevitably be incomplete or faulty, and the proxy forces that the plan so relies on will have their own agendas, ones that will become more rigid with the commitment of American support.

Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's speech and the policies he previously put into place is the open-ended commitment he's made to the very same Iraqi political leaders whose misbehavior made ISIS appear to many Iraqis (Sunnis, anyway) to be the lesser evil. Now they know that when they fuck up again the Americans will have to stick with them, because the US can never afford to lose face. (On the other hand, maybe they should review the story of Ngo Dinh Diem.) But nearly every aspect of the speech/plan is flawed. ISIS came into existence in the crucible of Syria's civil war, and some group like it will inevitably reappear as long as the civil war goes on, so it will prove impossible to stop ISIS without also ending Syria's civil war. Chances of that are thin as Obama has sided with the rebels against Assad, not realizing that the most prominent rebel group is ISIS, and that the US-favored "moderates" are firmly aligned with ISIS. The situation in Iraq is no simpler, with the US fighting in favor of the central government against ISIS but also siding with Kurdish separatists against the central government. The desire to work through proxies adds complexity, but perhaps not quite the mess of a full-blown invasion and its inevitably messy occupation. Plus you have the problem of managing domestic expectations. Obama came out with a clever limited intervention plan in the much simpler context of Libya and, well, look at how that blew up. Obama put a lot of emphasis on the counterinsurgency doctrine Gen. McChrystall tried to implement in Afghanistan, and failed totally at. American soldiers are peculiarly inept at fighting Muslims, yet the are held on such high pedestals by politicians like Obama that their repeated failures are overlooked. Similarly, the diplomatic alliances the US will surely need are often unapproachable due to other conflicts -- Iran and Russia are the major cases, but the traditional wink-and-nod green light for Saudia Arabia to finance groups like ISIS also comes into play.

And one should probe deeper, although there is little chance that Obama will. Nothing is so opaque to those who believe that "America is a light unto the nations" as the actual past behavior of the US. Since the 1970s the US has financed Jihadis, and has encouraged the Saudis and others to actively proselytize their fundamentalist brand of Islam, even as it has turned back against us. Similarly, America's Cold War ideology, still very much institutionalized, keeps us from working in any meaningful way to with liberal, socialist, or any kind of progressive movements in the Middle East.

The US government is similarly ignorant about ISIS, as are the American people -- even more so as they only enter the equation as targets for propaganda, where ISIS is made to look at evil as possible while the good intentions and great deeds of the US are never subject to scrutiny. We are, after all, the leader of the free world, as such obliged to act to defend civilization, something no one else has the resources or moral character to do. And so on, blah, blah, blah. To be sure, part of the problem here is that ISIS hasn't been running the sort of media relations program that, say, the Israelis mount when they go on a five-week killing binge like they did this summer in Gaza. Rather, ISIS has contemptuously killed journalists who might have helped them get their story out. They must, after all, have stories: even the Taliban, who weren't much better at PR, could go around the room and recount the lost limbs and eyes that scarred nearly every one of their commanders. Like the Taliban, ISIS sprung from the killing fields of despotic regimes and foreign occupiers.

I'm not aware of any journalist who has gotten close enough to ISIS to present their side of the story, although Nir Rosen's In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006) and Dahr Jamail's Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007) got relatively close to earlier generations of anti-US resistance fighters in Iraq. The journalist who has written the most about ISIS is Patrick Cockburn, who wrote The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006), and who has a new book on ISIS: The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. For a sampling of his recent writings on ISIS, see:

• Saudi Complicity in the Rise of ISIS [July 15]
• ISIS: the Birth of a Terrifying New State [Aug. 12]
• ISIS Consolidates [Aug. 21]
• How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate, an excerpt from the book [Aug. 21]
• Syria and Iraq: Why US policy is fraught with danger [Sept. 9]
• The Impossible War [Sept. 11]
• Also see: Alexander Reed Kelly: Truthdigger of the Week, a review of the book [Aug. 30]

Some quotes from Cockburn's Sept. 9 piece:

The US and its allies face a huge dilemma which is largely of their own making. Since 2011 Washington's policy, closely followed by the UK, has been to replace President Bashar al-Assad, but among his opponents Isis is now dominant. Actions by the US and its regional Sunni allies led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey, which were aimed at weakening Mr Assad, have in practice helped Isis. [ . . . ]

So far it looks as if Mr Obama will dodge the main problem facing his campaign against Isis. He will not want to carry out a U-turn in US policy by allying himself with President Assad, though the Damascus government is the main armed opposition to Isis in Syria. He will instead step up a pretense that there is a potent "moderate" armed opposition in Syria, capable of fighting both Isis and the Syrian government at once. Unfortunately, this force scarcely exists in any strength and the most important rebel movements opposed to Isis are themselves jihadis such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic Front. Their violent sectarianism is not very different to that of Isis.

Lacking a moderate military opposition to support as an alternative to Isis and the Assad government, the US has moved to raise such a force under its own control. The Free Syrian Army (FSA), once lauded in Western capitals as the likely military victors over Mr Assad, largely collapsed at the end of 2013. The FSA military leader, General Abdul-Ilah al Bashir, who defected from the Syrian government side in 2012, said in an interview with the McClatchy news agency last week that the CIA had taken over direction of this new moderate force. He said that "the leadership of the FSA is American," adding that since last December US supplies of equipment have bypassed the FSA leadership in Turkey and been sent directly to up to 14 commanders in northern Syria and 60 smaller groups in the south of the country. Gen Bashir said that all these FSA groups reported directly to the CIA. Other FSA commanders confirmed that the US is equipping them with training and weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles.

It appears that, if the US does launch air strikes in Syria, they will be nominally in support of the FSA which is firmly under US control. The US is probably nervous of allowing weapons to be supplied to supposed moderates by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies which end up in the hands of Isis. The London-based small arms research organisation Conflict Armament Research said in a report this week that anti-tank rockets used by Isis in Syria were "identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the Free Syrian Army umbrella in 2013."

In Syria and in Iraq Mr Obama is finding that his policy of operating through local partners, whose real aims may differ markedly from his own, is full of perils.

Some more links on Iraq, Syria, and ISIS:

• Tony Karon: Obama promises a long and limited war on Islamic State:

  The IS thrives as a result of the alienation of Sunni citizenry by Syrian and Iraqi regimes and the breakdown of the central state in both countries. The Islamic State has taken advantage of the enduring hostility to U.S. intervention in the region -- and also of Washington's subsequent retreat and passivity. It trades off Iran's sectarian support for allied Shia militias, Gulf Arab support for equally sectarian Sunni militias and Turkish hostility to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which translates into an open border for thousands of international volunteers to cross and join the IS. The gradual collapse of the nation-state itself in Syria and Iraq has allowed the IS to break away from the transnational conspiracy strategy of its Al-Qaeda precursor to raise its black flag in a growing power vacuum that covers huge swathes of territory.

• Phyllis Bennis: The Speech on Diplomacy That Obama Should Have Given Last Night:

  What's missing is a real focus, a real explanation to people in this country and to people and governments in the Middle East and around the world, on just what a political solution to the ISIS crisis would really require and what kind of diplomacy will be needed to get there.

  President Obama should have spent his fifteen minutes of prime time tonight talking about diplomacy. Instead of a four-part mostly military plan, he should have outlined four key diplomatic moves.

  First, recognize what it will take to change the political dynamics of sectarianism in Iraq. [ . . . ]

  Second, instead of a Coalition of the Killing, President Obama should have announced a new broad coalition with a political and diplomatic, not military, mandate. It should aim to use diplomatic power and financial pressures, not military strikes, to undermine ISIS power. [ . . . ]

  Third, the Obama administration should, perhaps this month while Washington holds the presidency of the UN Security Council, push to restart serious international negotiations on ending the complex set of multi-faceted wars in Syria. [ . . . ]

  Finally, an arms embargo on all sides should be on the long-term agenda.

  Without political agreement, there is no solution. All you can do with military power is try to shift the power relationships between the sides -- in the hope of getting a more favorable agreement. But if all you have are military goals, they are pointless. And the value of shifting those power relationships goes down if you're willing to consider an equitable agreement. No side can legitimately ask for more.

• Paul Woodward: Is ISIS a terminal disease?:

  President Obama might have been slow to come up with a strategy for defeating ISIS but he seems to have been much more resolute in his choice of metaphor for describing the enemy.

  After James Foley was murdered, Obama said, "there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread." A few days later he said: "Rooting out a cancer like [ISIS] won't be easy and it won't be quick." Again, last night he said: "it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL."

  Woodward offers three reasons why he thinks Obama like the cancer metaphor, concluding:

  Obama's political goal appears to be to secure support for an open-ended relatively low-key military operation that will be of such little concern to most Americans that it can continue for years without any real accountability.

  I'm less impressed by his "reasons" -- what struck me more from the quotes is (1) the assumption that it is his (or "our") body that has been struck by the cancer, and that therefore the US is entitled to treat it; and (2) how reducing the acts of people to the level of a disease sanitizes our process of killing those people.

• John Cassidy: Obama's Strange Bedfellows: The Right Liked His Speech: Quotes from Rush Limbaugh, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Larry Kudlow applauding Obama's speech. (Podhoretz called it "the most Republican speech Barack Obama has ever given.") However, afterwards, the right started looking for high ground further to the right:

  If a vote takes place in Congress -- and, at this stage, it's unclear whether that will happen -- most G.O.P. members will likely express support for unleashing the U.S. military on the jihadis. (Opposing the President "would be a huge mistake," Kudlow warned.) The pressure from the right will be aimed at expanding Obama's war, not stopping it. More bombing; more U.S. service members involved; more everything. That will be the line.

  It's already being laid down, in fact. "Air strikes alone will not accomplish what we're trying to accomplish," House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday. "Somebody's boots have to be on the ground." Some of Boehner's foot soldiers went further -- quite a bit further. "This is a stalemate strategy," said John Fleming, a Louisiana congressman who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. "I think that we would want to see an all-out war, shock and awe. We put troops on the ground, we put all of our assets there after properly prepping the battlefield, and in a matter of a few weeks we take these guys out."

  Of course, when you're the greatest power the world has ever known, all it should take is a few weeks.

• Andrew J Bacevich: Obama is picking his targets in Iraq and Syria while missing the point: Starts off by trying to out-think David Brooks, offering that "the core problem" of the era is "a global conflict pitting tradition against modernity." That conflict exists, of course, but Jihadists aren't militant defenders of tradition. They belong to a more specific reaction, one in response to imperialist exploitation working through the corrupt elites of many Muslim countries, not against modernity's individualistic ethos. Still, the following point is well taken:

  Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won't create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won't restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won't dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won't pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won't end the Syrian civil war. It won't bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won't persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won't end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won't resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  All the military power in the world won't solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary -- mostly because he and his advisers don't know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration's default option.

  Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.

• Fred Hof: We Can't Destroy ISIS Without Destroying Bashar al Assad First: Hof worked for the Obama administration 2009-12 and has not rotated to a Middle East policy think tank, so I count him as untrustworthy, but his main point strikes me as true:

  The Islamic State -- just like its parent, Al Qaeda in Iraq -- cannot be killed unless the causes of state failure in Syria and Iraq are addressed and rectified. Although such a task cannot be the exclusive or even principal responsibility of the American taxpayer, the president's strategy, its implementation, and its outcome will be incomplete if it remains solely one of counter-terrorism.

  The essential problem that has permitted the Islamic State to roam freely in parts of Iraq and Syria amounting in size to New England is state failure in both places. Redressing this failure is far beyond the unilateral capacity of the United States, as occupation in Iraq and ongoing operations in Afghanistan demonstrate. Still the fact remains that until Syria and Iraq move from state failure to political legitimacy -- to systems reflecting public consensus about the rules of the political game -- the Islamic State will remain undead no matter how many of its kings, queens, bishops, rooks, and pawns are swept from the table. And yet a strategy that does not address how America and its partners can influence the endgame -- keeping the Islamic State in its grave -- is simply incomplete.

  Hof refuses to consider the possibility that in order to kill ISIS the US could change sides and support Assad, possibly under some face-saving deal that would cut the "moderate" rebels some slack, maybe promising some democratic reforms to isolate ISIS. He basically wants to run the entire US Army through Damascus ("Airstrikes will not suffice . . . A ground element is essential, as it has been in Iraq.") What he doesn't explain is how, once Assad has been swept away, the US establishes a government in Syria that is broadly accepted by the bitterly-divided Syrian people as legitimate -- one cannot, for instance, point to US efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia as providing any comfort or confidence.

• US Pins Hope on Syrian Rebels With Loyalties All Over the Map:

  After more than three years of civil war, there are hundreds of militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad -- and one another. Among them, even the more secular forces have turned to Islamists for support and weapons over the years, and the remaining moderate rebels often fight alongside extremists like the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.

  "You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because they don't exist," said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It is a very dirty war and you have to deal with what is on offer." [ . . . ]

  The Obama administration's plans to arm Syrian rebels have been troubled by false starts since April 2013, when Mr. Obama first authorized the C.I.A. to begin a secret training mission in Jordan.

  Months after the authorization, the White House still had not delivered details to Congress about the C.I.A.'s plans, and it was not until September 2013 that the first American-trained rebels returned to Syria from Jordan.

  To date, the C.I.A. mission in Jordan has trained 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian rebels, according to American and Arab officials.

  To expand the training, Mr. Obama announced a plan in June to spend up to $500 million for scores of American Special Forces troops to train up to 3,000 rebels over the next year. But the proposal languished on Capitol Hill as lawmakers complained that the plans lacked specific details. A revised plan now calls for as many as twice that number of fighters, analysts said.

  Even if Congress approves the Pentagon plan, as now appears likely after Mr. Obama's speech on Wednesday, military planners said it would be months before the fighters, to be trained at a base in Saudi Arabia, would be battle-ready.

  Fatigue from three years of war has left most of those forces exhausted and short of resources. Since pushing ISIS from parts of northern Syria early this year, Syria's rebels have few military advances to point to and in many areas have lost ground, to Mr. Assad's forces and to ISIS. But in many places they remain busy fighting Mr. Assad and are not eager to redirect their energies to ISIS -- even while many say they hate the group.

• Rami G Khouri: Why Obama Has Picked the Worst Allies for His War on ISIS: Khouri thinks that the Arab states that Obama is trying to line up for the war against ISIS may be effective in the short-term but will only make Jihadism more prevalent in the future.

  The combination of foreign-led military power and local Arab government partners that must anchor a successful attack to vanquish the Islamic State is the precise combination of forces that originally midwifed the birth of Al-Qaeda in the 1980s and later spawned its derivative -- the Islamic State -- today. [ . . . ]

  The jails of Sunni-majority Arab regimes represent an important aspect of the mistreatment and humiliation that many prisoners experienced, especially those jailed for their political views rather than crimes. Their jail experiences ultimately convinced them to fight to topple their regimes as part of Al-Qaeda's aim to purify Islamic lands from apostate and corrupt leaderships.

  The fact that tens of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and other Arabs are in jail today on often questionable charges -- including many in Gulf Cooperation Council states who are jailed simply for tweeting critical remarks about their governments -- suggests that Arab autocracy continues to define and plague the region as a driver of homegrown Arab radicalism and terrorism.

• Moon of Alabama: The Caliphate's Anti-Imperial/Imperial Dualism: Asserts: "The Caliphate is based on original Wahhabi ideas which were in their essence also anti-colonial and at first directed against the Ottoman rulers." Those anti-imperial ideas also work against the US, but the juicier target is the Saudi royal family, which made the original pact with Abd al-Wahhab and, in their general subverience to the UK and US may be seen as not holding up their end of the deal. Much of this has to do with the way the Saudis distribute dividends on their oil. A small fraction of the money goes through the state to build a social welfare network which keeps the peace by making Saudi citizens wards of the state and elevating them above migrant workers who do the real work and are kept on very short leashes. But most of the money goes to the numerous princes of the royal family, who are much like the pampered scions of rich estates all over the world: spoiled, sheltered, conceited, given to flights of grandeur and folly. American bankers love these Saudi princes -- some are serious, but most are easy marks. The princes themselves are schizo: blessed with wealth they never earned, some turn into notorious playboys, some turn pious and shameful. The latter, plus some wealthy scions of non-royal families like Osama Bin Laden and their cohort in the Persian Gulf monarchies, are the ones who finance jihadists, who hire poor, disaffected Muslims to die for God, to expiate the sins of the Saudis. Of course, when the Americans come calling, the top Saudis are quick to condemn the traitors in their ranks, but they are less eager to cut them out because deep down they are trapped in their piety. The caliphate is a deep idea dating back to Muhammad himself -- indeed, the Turks wouldn't have made a mockery of it had it not worked -- so it's no surprise that its first appearance of reality should be so dramatic.

  The new Caliphate followers are copies of the original Wahhabis who do not recognize nation states as those were dictated by the colonial "western" overlords after the end of the Ottoman empire. They do not recognize rulers that deviate, like the Saudi kings do, from the original ideas and subordinate themselves to "western" empires. It is their aim to replace them. As there are many people in Saudi Arabia educated in Wahhabi theology and not particular pleased with their current rulers the possibility of a Caliphate rush to conquer Saudi Arabia and to overthrow the Ibn Saud family is real.

  In that aspect the Caliphate is anti-colonial and anti-imperial. That is part of what attracts its followers. At the same time the Caliphate project is also imperial in that it wants to conquer more land and wants to convert more people to its flavor of faith.

  Both of these aspects make it a competitor and a danger to imperial U.S. rule-by-proxy in the Middle East. That is, I believe, why the U.S. finally decided to fight it. To lose Saudi Arabia to the Caliphate, which seems to be a real possibility, would be a devastating defeat.

  The author cites two pieces by Alastair Crooke that are worth checking out: You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia. A lot of interesting material in those two pieces. (One thing I didn't realize was that King Abdullah has made a number of reforms liberalizing Islamic law in Saudi Arabia: recognizing legal doctrines other than the Salafist, and Shiites to consult their own legal scholars. All this, of course, exacerbates the split with hardcore Wahhabists.)

  He also cites a "twitter story": Billmon on Doublethink in U.S. Foreign Policy. Punch line:

  Whether U.S. diplos still believe their liberal international bullshit isn't a particularly important question but it is interesting. I tend to think that they do: Both as classic Orwellian doublethink, a product of social conditioning, and on time-honored principle that a salesman has to believe in his/her product, no matter how fantastical. "Goes with the territory."

• Richard Phillips/Stephan Richter: The dumbest US foreign policy question asked this century: Who "lost" Syria?

  And this begs the question: What are U.S. politicians saying when they say they want to save Syria?

  The answer to this can only be found in American hubris. Syria is not America's to save. The reality is that only Syrians can save Syria -- just as it is only Iraqis who can save Iraq and only Afghans who can save Afghanistan.

  Seeking an answer to the question "Who lost Syria?" is a foolhardy quest on the part of U.S. politicians. Rather than a serious question, it is just another manifestation of Washington's favorite political sport -- blamesmanship.

• Davis Merritt: Americans not ready for the truth about ISIS: Former Wichita Eagle editor, usually a level-headed thinker, gets all wrapped up in the futility of wars in the Middle East:

  The religious extremism that defines the Middle East has been going on for more than a thousand years. The West has been involved for more than 900 of those years. From Pope Urban's first crusade in 1095 to President George W. Bush's ignorantly declared "crusade" amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, extremists on both sides have periodically fanned the flames.

  No American president can erase that history nor diminish its allure to radical Islamists who want to write the next chapter in our blood. Anyone who believes a few months of bombing can eradicate this latest iteration of religious intolerance is living a fantasy.

  Our 21st-century mindset doesn't tolerate lengthy wars; the half-life of our resolve is about 18 months. So the president best avoid the word "war," which implies beginning and ending points.

  Unfortunately, neither can he say the truth: This is going to be life in our world; learn to live with it.

  A year ago Americans so overwhelmingly rejected Obama's proposal to bomb Syria for using chemical weapons, recognizing that it wouldn't solve anything and wouldn't even make a dent given all the other acts of war. Indeed, it seemed probable that Congress (for once listening to the American people) would have voted authorization for bombing down. Now, supposedly an air war against ISIS enjoys popular support, with Congress gung ho not only to authorize strikes but to appropriate billions of dollars to train American proxies to fight the ground war. This turnaround depends on being able to identify ISIS as uniquely evil and dangerous, and while flashy stories of beheadings and mass killings help, I suspect the main cause is deep-seated islamophobia triggered by the prospect of resurrecting the caliphate. Last year Syria was viewed as just another internecine sectarian conflict between people we don't know or care about thousands of miles away. The caliphate, on the other hand, would be a symbol of growing Islamic power, an alarming shift in the world order, and that's what starts dredging up reassuring memories of Pope Urban -- even though most people who know the history of the Crusades regard them as an embarrassing blight on European civilization. Merritt accepts such wars because, regarding "religious extremism" as timeless, as if the fight today is about an ancient character trait, and not about anything more tangible -- like oil, or the ability of US bankers to fleece Saudi princes, or the international market for arms, or the constant jockeying of regional powers and their never-very-dependable proxy groups. Those are all things that, pace Merritt, we really shouldn't have to live with.

• Paul Woodward: Most Americans support war against ISIS but lack confidence it will achieve its goal: A NBC News poll says that "62 percent of voters say they support Obama's decision to take action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while 22 percent oppose it." But also that "a combined 68 percent of Americans say they have 'very little' or 'just some' confidence that Obama's goals of degrading and eliminating the threat posed by ISIS will be achieved." Woodward dissects these numbers. Among other points:

  4. "Do you think President Obama presented a credible strategy for destroying ISIS?" If the answer's "no" and this is why you lack confidence in this war, then I'd take that as a fairly good indication that you are following this story reasonably closely.

  5. Of course the most obvious reason why Americans would be skeptical about the chances of success for a war against ISIS is the fact that after sinking trillions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terrorism, al Qaeda still exists.

     As has happened so many times before, Obama formulates his policies in reaction to banal, superficial, political imperatives whose primary purpose is to fend off critics.

     On Thursday he presented his strategy for destroying ISIS because only days before he got slammed for admitting he didn't have a strategy.

     After he made various comments suggesting that he only aimed to contain ISIS and was thus criticized for underestimating the threat it poses and for being too timid in his response, he answered critics by saying that his aim was to destroy ISIS.

     After it was pointed out that fighting ISIS in Iraq would accomplish little if it could continue to consolidate its strength in Syria, Obama said the fight would be taken to Syria.

     Each of his steps is reactive and political -- as though the primary task at hand was to deflect criticism.

Probably more stuff to write about, but that's enough for now. I'd be happy to return to writing about inequality, which is really the big chronic issue of our era. Or maybe that old standby, the stupidity of conservative Republicans (here's a Ted Cruz example; and here's Steve Fraser: The Return of the Titans, on the Kochs and their ilk). Or global warming even, but the last couple months have been overwhelmed by war news, and the one person who could do something sensible and constructive to defuse conflicts and resolve problems has repeatedly, almost obsessively managed to make them worse. That person is US President Barack W. Obama. Yes, he's finally sunk that low.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

It's been 18-19 days since the last one, but I've kept my nose to the grindstone and come up with 101 records here. That matches 101 last time, and only trails two (of 13) columns this year -- the biggest one was back on March 19, when I cruised through the Johnny Cash catalog.

A brief reminder here: the main reason I can cram so many records in is that I don't spend much time with any of them. (That isn't totally true: I must have played Richard Galliano six times before I bumped it to A-, and I think the Margots got four spins each. But it's certainly the rule: to get a second play a record has to convince me it has some potential to rise on the grading scale. Most A- records got at least two plays (Caffeine is one exception I recall), as do many (but probably not a majority) of high B+ records.

About one-quarter of the records below are CDs that were sent to me (or, very rarely, things I bought). Almost all of those are jazz, and I still generally play everything I get no matter how awful it looks (see Ricky Kej and Novox below). The other three-quarters I play on the computer, most often from streaming sources like Rhapsody and Bandcamp (where the latter presents full albums). I also get a fair number of download links in the mail, but lately have done very little to follow them -- some recent technical problems have added to my customary disdain for such work. The streamed records are at a slight disadvantage: I'm slightly less likely to give them a second spin, my computer speakers aren't as good as the stereo speakers, nor do the MP3 sources match up in sound quality. But all of the streamed records start with some sort of rep, even if (cf. Dirty Loops) it proves unfounded or downright ridiculous. And, of course, I'm more likely to credit genres and labels of past interest -- dance pop, Americana, underground rap are things I tend to follow -- and I don't bother with stuff I generally dislike -- metal is the obvious example. As my jazz mail declines, I've tried to compensate with Rhapsody, but that only goes so far.

One thing that helps me figure out what to look for is my tracking file, which I recently expanded to retain my grade info. It includes a lot of stuff I'll never bother with but it's useful to know it exists. Not nearly as much information as past metacritic files, and as a result of not doing that work I'm not nearly so much aware of what other people are thinking. But that's just one more reason to ignore "alt/indie rock" I've never much cared for -- New Pornographers is always a good example of that.

Three sections below: new new records, new old records, and old oldies. The middle section is always the short one, but it's the sort of thing I previously covered in Recycled Goods (and would today if it wasn't totally impossible to get the goods). The old music section is a crate dig, and what shows up there varies much by my mood. Most of what's there this time are older records from Ken Vandermark's Catalytic-Sound Bandcamp stash (also shared by Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, and Paal Nilssen-Love, but I've focused on Vandermark), and most of the rest come from my attempt to find Penguin Guide 4-star (and more often these days 3.5-star) jazz records -- although at present I'm just sort of poking around there (no special reason why John Lindberg and Jeff Palmer should be the main focus other than that I've missed them in the past). The odd record out, The Best of Joy Division, was suggested by Michael Tatum. I try to catch up when I can.

I've also included a two lists of Catalytic-Sound records that I didn't review this time: one (much the longer) I previously rated, and another I haven't gotten to. Note that one reason some records stuck on the latter -- notably the second Audio One -- is that the site doesn't provide the full album. Can't review what you can't hear (although sometimes it's tempting).

Good chance I'll get another one of these posted by the end of September. Beyond that, who knows?

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on August 21. Past reviews and more information are available here (5302 records).

New Releases (More or Less)

Audio One: An International Report (2014, Audiographic): One of Ken Vandermark's many recent big band projects: ten pieces (four reeds, cornet, trombone, viola, bass, vibes, drums) -- much of the power in the saxes where either Vandermark or Dave Rempis is having a terrific day (I'm not betting on Mars Williams or new altoist Nick Mazzarella, although I'm sure they help beef up the roaring ensemble sound). [One reason I initially hedged here is that the same group also recorded The Midwest School starting the night before. Only one track available, not enough to review, but has more of that underlying r&b romp I so like.] A- [bc]

The Bad Plus: Inevitable Western (2014, Okeh): Piano super-trio: Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson, Dave King, all three contribute songs here and do considerable work elsewhere. Heavy on the melodrama, perhaps, but such muscular chops, the sort of physical prowess you expect in a western. B+(***)

Bahamas: Bahamas Is Afie (2014, Brushfire/Island): Singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen, from Toronto, has a winning way with the confessional ballad, and can fancy it up a bit on occasion, not that he always feels the need. B+(**)

Cory Branan: The No-Hit Wonder (2014, Bloodshot): A singer-songwriter from Mississippi who went to Memphis instead of Nashville. Still, only when he pulls out all the country tricks do the songs come alive ("Daddy Was a Skywriter," "The Highway Home"). B+(*)

The Bug: Angels & Devils (2014, Ninja Tune): Kevin Martin, produced a lot of records 1990-2003 (when I finally noticed Pressure), but they've thinned out since, this the first in six years (during which he's been involved with Black Chow and King Midas Sound). Best when he goes upbeat, possibly Jamaican, but slow can be dull, and sometimes he seems to be more interested in horror soundtracks. B+(*)

The Cellar and Point: Ambit (2011-13 [2014], Cuneiform): Self-described as a "garage chamber" outfit. The "chamber" part is earned by the preponderance of strings -- violin (Christopher Otto), cello (Kevin McFarland), guitar (Terrence McManus and Christopher Botta, with latter doubling on banjo), and electric bass (Rufus Philpot) -- and percussion (Joe Bergen on vibes and Joseph Branciforte on drums). The latter keep this moving, but the strings all melt together. B [cdr]

Common: Nobody's Smiling (2014, Def Jam): Chicago rapper, tenth album since 1994, a major label affair though only about half of the guest spots ring a bell. Conceptually, about his hometown, not a happy place these days. Fully half of the songs are above the line, quotable even if not that notable. Dragging my feet on the other half. B+(***)

Eliana Cuevas: Espejo (2014, ALMA): Originally from Venezuela, now billed as "Canada's Latin Music Queen," has a handful of albums since 2003, writes and sings in Spanish so I'm not catching much here, but musically seems pretty generic. B [cd]

The Delines: Colfax (2014, El Cortez): Low-keyed countryish rock group from Portland though the title song suggests Denver, singer is Amy Boone although Willy Vlautin -- a novelist Christgau has written about and the leader of Richmond Fontaine -- seems to be the songwriter. Stories about working on oil rigs and wandering the streets in a PTSD fog are realer than usual. And the music reminds me of a group called the Vulgar Boatmen -- slow and cautiously lovely. A-

Dirty Loops: Loopified (2014, Verve): Swedish group, three male faces on the cover, touted as "ambitious jazz, prog rock, R&B, and electronic dance-inflected pop music" -- not sure I hear any of that, but I suppose if you jammed all that into a blender and turned it to goop you might get something like this: synth fireworks with histrionic vocals. C+

Brian Eno/Karl Hyde: Someday World (2014, Warp): Hyde is the singer from Underworld, with a dozen or so albums 1988-2010 and a solo since. He takes the songs a little faster and harder than Eno usually does, B+(*)

Simone Felice: Strangers (2014, Dualtone): Singer-songwriter, formerly of the Felice Brothers which made quietly tuneful countryish-rock albums from 2006 and continue without him. With a little more harmony, this could be another of them. B+(*)

The Felice Brothers: Favorite Waitress (2014, Dualtone): More harmony than brother Simone's album, of course, also more mayhem as "Cherry Licorice" demonstrates. B+(***)

5 Seconds of Summer: 5 Seconds of Summer (2014, Capitol): Australian group: AMG argues they're the logical intersection of Green Day and One Direction, although I don't know (or appreciate) the former well enough to hear it. But you do get "boy group" harmonies with an upbeat beach-rock vibe. Problem is it's as white as the antipodes, and sooner or later orchestrated cheer wears thin. B

Four Year Strong: Go Down in History (2014, Pure Noise, EP): After four 2007-11 albums, a five track, 16:36, EP. Very upbeat, with everyone trying to shout over guitar trying to drown everyone out -- a death spiral I see little value in. B-

Roddy Frame: Seven Dials (2014, AED): Scottish singer-songwriter, first appeared in Aztec Camera with a near-perfect 1983 debut album (High Land, Hard Rain), about as lush and catchy as pop albums get. The band folded in 1995 and he's been knocking out solo albums since 1998, but this is the first I've noticed. Still has a knack for pop melodies, but perfect is no longer an option. B+(*)

Larry Fuller: Larry Fuller (2013-14 [2014], Capri): Mainstream pianist, started out working with singer Ernestine Anderson, has also appeared in Jeff Hamilton Trio and with John Pizzarelli. Second trio album, all standards -- "Both Sides Now" counts, but it's "C Jam Blues" and "That Old Devil Moon" that always get my attention. B+(***) [cd]

Richard Galliano: Sentimentale (2014, Resonance): French accordion player, has recorded a lot since 1990, building on the folk roots of his instrument, delving into tango and film scores, always working in the jazz tradition -- draws on Ellington and Coltrane here, Horace Silver too. With Tamir Hendelman's piano and Anthony Wilson's guitar this risks becoming overly lush, but that's sentimentalism for you. A- [cd]

Ben Goldberg/Adam Levy/Smith Dobson: Worry Later (2014, BAG Productions): Clarinet-guitar-drums trio plays ten Monk tunes. B+(**)

Ariana Grande: My Everything (2014, Island/Republic): No longer a teen star, AMG says when this dropped she "was poised to be the reigning pop diva of the mid-decade," citing her superior vocal chops -- as if her rival is Adele and her archetype is Mariah Carey. I always figured conceptual audacity was more important, but I've spent much more time listening to Madonna and Gaga (and Lily Allen and Nicki Minaj). But at least Grande has the studio budget, and gets the expected results, more or less. But one play didn't reveal the smash that will keep drawing the masses back so the rest can sink in -- unless it's "Bang Bang" (with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj) but I see that's only on the sucker-priced "deluxe edition." B+(**)

Eric Harland's Voyager: Vipassana (2014, GSI Studios): Drummer, second album but he was well established before his 2010 Voyager album, winning polls based on over 100 side credits since 1997. Don't have a detailed credits list, but hype sheet mentions Walter Smith, Julian Lage, Taylor Eigsti, Nir Felder, a couple others. The instrumental passages behind Smith's tenor sax are lush and grooveful. On the other hand, several cuts have vocals, often just as window dressing, and they're awful. B- [cdr]

Phil Haynes: No Fast Food: In Concert (2012 [2014], Corner Store Jazz, 2CD): Drummer, coming off a very good duo record with trumpeter Paul Smoker, collects a couple of trio concerts with David Liebman (more tenor than soprano sax) and Drew Gress (bass). B+(***) [cd]

Joe Henry: Invisible Hour (2014, Work Song): Singer-songwriter with a "plain Joe" persona and a natural touch for everyday life serves up another helping. B+(*)

Horse Meat Disco: Volume IV (2014, Strut): A collective of four London DJs, remixing tracks that more/less date to the golden age of disco -- where it all comes from isn't clear at this vantage point, but the only track I immediately recogmized was "Getting to Know You," credited as "Getting to Know MC (Funked Over Mix) to Shahid Mustlaf MC, but ultimately one of my favorite ever Parliament songs. [The CD version has two discs, the second with "unmixed" versions of 12 (of 16) songs. The digital release matches CD1. The 2-LP only includes 11 (of 16) songs. Rhapsody only has 14 tracks (omitting "Got to Work (Hot Toddy Mix)" and "I Love Your Beat").] B+(**)

Ikebe Shakedown: Stone by Stone (2014, Ubiquity): Seven-piece Afrobeat band from Brooklyn, second album, section horns but no solos, no vocals either -- none of which is a big deal one way or the other. B

Jason Jackson: Inspiration (2012 [2014], Jack & Hill Music/Planet Arts): Trombonist, has a couple previous albums, this one cut in three sessions with big bands and string orchestras -- credits list is a sore sight for tired eyes, but the names you know are mainstreamers -- Roy Hargrove, Slide Hampton, Steve Wilson, Terell Stafford, Rufus Reid. Some talented postbop there, but the strings are a huge drag. B [cd]

Ricky Kej/Wouter Kellerman: Winds of Samsara (2014, Listen 2 Africa): Indian keyboardist and South African flautist, a shared connection in Mahatma Gandhi and interest in Nelson Mandela, various voices and what not, undercutting its modest exotica with "Greensleeves." C [cd]

Wiz Khalifa: Blacc Hollywood (2014, Atlantic): Puff of smoke on the cover, follow up to Rolling Papers. Enjoyed two plays and don't have a thing to say, and no, I wasn't smoking along. Mostly thinking about something else, which the music suited fine. B+(**)

Nils Landgren Funk Unit: Teamwork (2013, ACT): Swedish trombonist, started as a mainstream player until he got on the funk bandwagon, even singing some. Nothing George Clinton needs to worry about, but more enjoyable than you'd expect. [I started listening to this year's digital-only Extended Version, then clipped it back to last year's CD -- not actually much of a trim.] B+(*)

Matt Lavelle/John Pietaro: Harmolodic Monk (2014, Unseen Rain): Monk songs, done up with tricks from Ornette Coleman as if the originals weren't kinky enough. Lavelle plays cornet, flugelhorn, and bass clarinet (like no one else). Pietaro plays vibes, bodhrán, congas, and percussion, a thin counterpart to Lavelle's brave soloing. B+(**)

Dave Liebman Big Band: A Tribute to Wayne Shorter (2014, Summit): Seven Wayne Shorter tunes, arranged by Mats Holmquist, and featuring Liebman probably because he handles both soprano and tenor sax parts much like the model, whom he famously replaced (don't recall right now how directly) in Miles Davis' band. On the other hand, Liebman's always looked back to an earlier Davis saxophonist: John Coltrane. B+(*) [cd]

The Magic Words: Junk Train (2006 [2014], Shake It, EP): Lisa Walker (of Wussy) solo project, released in a run of 100 at the time, plus 25 more with handmade covers. Only runs 8 cuts, 28:15, so lo-fi I'm not really sure of much I've heard, but two plays suggests there's something there. B+(**) [bc]

Dean Magraw & Eric Kamau Gravatt: Fire on the Nile (2014, Red House): Guitar and drums, respectively, a duo. AMG credits Magraw with eight albums since 1994, classifying him as folk and new age, probably because one of the albums was called Celtic Hymns. The label is basically a blues outfit, but this is on the jazz side of grooveful. Gravatt (b. 1938) is older, and keeps it honest. B+(**) [cd]

The Margots: Pescado (2013, Okka Disk): Milwaukee singer-lyricist Adrienne Pierluissi got help from guitarist John Dereszynski and saxophone colossus Ken Vandermark to flesh out songs for her lyrics. The latter's horns turn out to be notably tasteful, as is the guitar, nicely setting up the deadpan tilt of the voice. I doubt the lyrics rise far enough above the music, but when she switches to Spanish I know better than to wonder. B+(***) [bc]

The Margots: Soplé (2014, Okka Disk): More of the same, but more songs rock and a few slow way down, and more are in Spanish (at least I assume that's what it is -- the Bandcamp page is tagged "brazilian jazz" and "tropicalia" but also "european free jazz" and really this sounds like none of the above). Vandermark's sax is less prominent but still tasty, and Adrienne Pierluissi is one cool chanteuse. B+(***) [bc]

J Mascis: Tied to a Star (2014, Sub Pop): Dinosaur Jr. frontman, has recorded own albums since 1996 despite the occasional band reunion. His last one, Several Shades of Why, surprised me. This was more like what I was expecting: unassuming and less than prepossessing, guitar that can get your attention, and a voice that can lose it. B+(*)

John McLaughlin & 4th Dimension: The Boston Record (2013 [2014], Abstract Logix): Interesting that as he passes into his 70s the original fusion guitarist seems more focused on the here and now than on the transcendental goals he sought long ago. Live record, concluding a US tour with Gary Husband on keybs and drums, Etienne Mbappe on bass, and Ranjit Barot on drums. Hard edged, compressed, more than a little clunky. B

The Muffs: Whoop Dee Doo (2014, Cherry Red): Pop-punk band from LA led by singer Kim Shattuck, around since the early 1990s, back with first album since 2004, on an oldies label no less. Choppy, cheeky, cheezy even. B+(***)

Novox: Over the Honeymoon (2014, Label Z Production): French band, from Lyon, leader-guitarist Pierre Alexandre Gauthier cites George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix as chief influences, but he finds it easier to fake the funk than play like Hendrix. Two horns, synths, a turntablist, no singers but some vocal clutter. Probably more accurate to call this "post-rock" -- but not everything that's unclassifiable is interesting. C+ [cd]

Brad Paisley: Moonshine in the Trunk (2014, Arista): Bit off more than he could chew last time, ending up with his first record that didn't go gold, so this time he borrows a page from Luke Bryan and starts off with three party anthems in the first five (make that four of seven: "when life gives you limes/make margaritas") -- albeit parties I want no part of. On the backstretch, he tries to return to the sincere liberalism that won him Yankee admirers -- a JFK snippet, a song bragging about that "American Flag on the Moon," an inclusive "Country Nation," another about "Going Green," then finally he taps Tom T. Hall for the obligatory Jesus song. Still, even at his best he's awfully shallow: after all, "if you want to know who we are/it's on the logos of our caps." More and more I'm making him out as a "crunchy con." B-

Pattern Is Movement: Pattern Is Movement (2014, Hometapes): First notes here sounded like a new wave throwback, but this gets considerably softer, drippier, and drearier than that. B-

Ivo Perelman/Karl Berger: Reverie (2014, Leo): Berger plays piano here, his original instrument although he is better known for vibes, in a long career that puts him well into his 70s now. He does a lovely job of setting up -- interviewing is the word that comes to mind -- the Brazilian avant-saxophonist, who pours emotion into his leads. A- [cd]

Anthony Pirog: Palo Colorado Dream (2014, Cuneiform): Guitarist, first album, trio with Michael Formanek and Ches Smith, doesn't have much flow or groove but that's the idea, something less predictable than Montgomery or McLaughlin. Does get more interesting toward the end when he works some feedback in. B+(*) [cdr]

Jeff Richman & Wayne Johnson: The Distance (2014, ITI Music): Guitar duets, a couple with extra percussion. Richman has more than a dozen albums since 1986. Johnson has a somewhat shorter list going back to 1980. Pleasant picking, strikes me as "new age" but is a cut above what gets classified there. B+(*) [cd]

Ritmos Unidos: Ritmos Unidos (2014, Patois): Latin jazz octet from Indiana, second album, drummer Mike Mixtacki seems to be the central figure, also playing timbales and bata drums and taking the vocal leads, but the most distinctive aspect of their sound is the wash of steel pans. B+(**) [cd]

Bruce Robison/Kelly Willis: Our Year (2014, Premium): Second album for husband-wife team, both with substantial solo careers behind them. Reading credits left-to-right, I filed their first under Willis. Alternating vocals plays to their strengths, wears neither singer out. B+(***)

Jason Roebke: Combination (2014, self-released): Chicago bassist, works in avant circles, leads a quartet here with Greg Ward (alto sax), Brian Labycz (modular synth), and Frank Rosely (drums). A little thin and warbly. B+(*) [bc]

Jamie Saft/Steve Swallow/Bobby Previte: The New Standard (2014, Rare Noise): Piano trio, although Saft plays some organ too (good chance he's played more organ than piano over the years). All original material, with 4 (of 10) songs jointly credited, so the notion that any of these pieces will emerge as standards is far fetched. B+(*) [cdr]

Akira Sakata/Johan Berthling/Paal Nilssen-Love: Arashi (2014, Trost): Japanese alto saxophonist, born early 1945 in Kure (a naval base town near Hiroshima), so in his first six months he survived numerous conventional bombings as well as the first atomic bomb. Has a substantial discography, especially since 2000 as he's played more with free jazz figures around the world. He's on a tear here, sharply accented by a drummer who's played often with Peter Brötzmann and/or Ken Vandermark -- he most closely resembles the former, but even faster on alto, and he adds a dimension with his vocals, as harsh as his horn. B+(***)

Akira Sakata/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Ketil Gutvik/Paal Nilssen-Love: The Cliff of Time (2013 [2014], PNL): Alto sax/clarinet, cello/electronics, electric guitar, drums. The sax is as frenzied as in Sakata's Arashi, but the sound is more muddled -- may have something to do with production or reproduction although the extra instruments are suspect as well. Terrific drummer. B+(*) [bc]

Masahiko Satoh/Paal Nilssen-Love: Spring Snow (2013 [2014], PNL): Piano-drums duo, the pianist's name is often transliterated as Sato. He was born in 1941, and has a substantial discography since 1970, although it takes some digging to find it. Seems like a talent, in this company flashing some avant moves on two long cuts. B+(**) [bc]

Carl Saunders: America (2013 [2014], Summit): Trumpet player, broke in as a teenager in 1960 under Stan Kenton and worked in many surviving big bands of the 1960s, including Buddy Rich and Maynard Ferguson, as well as in his uncle Dave Pell's octet. Has close to a dozen albums under his own name since 1995. The small group (piano, bass, drums, percussion) sets his trumpet off nicely. Seven originals, five covers -- "America the Beautiful," Chopin, Jobim, "I Can't Get Started," "How Deep Is the Ocean" -- a bit corny. B+(*) [cd]

Billy Joe Shaver: Long in the Tooth (2014, Lightning Rod): A fairly legendary songwriter, noted for songs that were often funny and catchy and corny at the same time, early on he was regularly outsung by his clients but the margins have narrowed so his biggest problem these days are songs that don't get past their titles ("The Git Go" and "Long in the Tooth"); well, that and the chances you've heard a few before -- like "Last Call for Alcohol" or "Hard to Be an Outlaw" (on Willie Nelson's latest, reprised here complete). B+(**)

Side A: In the Abstract (2013 [2014], Not Two): Ken Vandermark sax trio, with piano (Håvard Wiik) and drums (Chad Taylor). Second album, after 2011's impressive debut, A New Margin. This is more mixed, perhaps because the slower, more abstract pieces close in on the territory of that other Vandermark-Wiik trio, Free Fall (named after the Jimmy Giuffre album) -- I prefer the harder-edged pieces where Vandermark plays baritone sax. B+(**) [bc]

Tim Sparks: Chasin' the Boogie (2013 [2014], Tonewood): Guitar player, I file him under klezmer since many of his early albums focused on Jewish folk music -- Little Princess: Tim Sparks Plays Naftule Brandwein (2009) is one I'm particularly fond of -- but he starts out closer to the fingerpicking style of John Fahey. Doesn't chase the boogie very hard here, but everything here is very pleasant as background and intricate enough to engage you. The closing "Blue Bayou" is especially lovely. B+(***) [cd]

Spider Bags: Frozen Letter (2014, Merge): Garage-punk outfit, based in Brooklyn, singer Dan McGee has a talkie voice and a bit of a drawl. First four songs go fast (3:30 max), the other four stretch out (5:11-6:32) as they kick up the drone. B+(*)

Statik Selektah: What Goes Around (2014, Duck Down Music): DJ, so even though he gets lots of shout outs he depends on his fairly illustrious guest rappers -- slightly more than half names I recognize -- to get the messages across, or to make them up on the fly. And they aim for more gold than their underground reps should make them accustomed to. A-

Ed Stone: King of Hearts (2014, Sapphire Music): M.D. and sometime smooth jazz guitarist, third album, anesthetized grooves with a couple of nondescript vocals for those radio slots. C+ [cd]

Street Priest: More Nasty (2012 [2014], Humbler): Guitar-bass-drums trio (Kristian Aspelin, Matt Chandler, Jacob Felix Heule), "fragmenting free funk into textural noise"; 4 cuts, 35:29, available as a download or a limited run cassette (250 copies). B+(**) [cdr]

Randy Travis: Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am (2012 [2014], Warner Brothers): Presumably the leftovers from the session that produced Vol. 1, so I suspect my more favorable response must be a change in me. Covers, country classics with a few lapping into the 1970s (including two Kristoffersons, too many). But also, Travis doesn't sound as broken or weary as I recall. And while no one improves on Lefty Frizzell, Travis mostly holds his own. B+(**)

Ken Vandermark's Topology Nonet: Impressions of Po Music (2013, Okka Disk): Featuring Joe McPhee, whose 1981 album Topology was the first of a handful of albums credited to "Joe McPhee Po Music" -- at the time a group varying between 7-9 players. (Later Po Music groups dropped down as far as four members.) Vandermark's group includes three saxes (McPhee, Dave Rempis, Vandermark doubling on clarinet), cornet, trombone, cello, vibes, bass, drums, but the "impressions" -- based on McPhee titles -- are pretty hit-and-miss. B+(**) [bc]

The Bill Warfield Big Band: Trumpet Story (2013-14 [2014], Planet Arts): Trumpet player, although he's spent most of his career teaching, arranging and conducting the occasional big band album since 1988. For the trumpet theme here he leaves the big solos to Randy Brecker, but the trumpet story itself isn't all that clear or pronounced -- at least it's less clear than Vic Juris' guitar, which stands out over two pianists and the usual clatter of horns. B+(*) [cd]

Wussy: Duo (2013, Shakt It, EP): Out-of-print limited release for Record Store Day 2013, hadn't noticed it as streamable until now. Runs 7 tracks, 24:07, reportedly demos but with full band sound, and the songs are substantial enough. Just not much to it, not that their fans won't be lining up "to be the first to squeal." B+(**)

Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Cables to the Ace (2014, Communicating Vessels): Label compilation -- having entered through the Green Seed I expected more hip-hop but got only two cuts, the best ones here. The balance is some kind of alt-rock, nothing memorable nor particularly annoying. Chances are some (maybe even most) of these groups could turn in a decent B+ album, but the mix doesn't help. B

Jay Clayton & John Lindberg: As Tears Go By (1987 [2014], Jazzwerkstatt): I've seen two different reissue covers (as well as the 1988 original on ITM) and the differ, one adding & More Songs to the title, the other & Some More Songs, the latter also dropping the ampersand from the credit and slipping String Trio of New York in between. [Rhapsody has the former, but attributes the record to Various Artists.] Unable to sort this out, I reverted to the original credit/title. Lindberg appears on all tracks. His String Trio of New York colleagues James Emery and Charles Burnham join on 4 (of 8), with Marty Ehrlich on reeds (mainly clarinet) on three others. Discogs credits Clayton as singing on four, but didn't notice her on the title track. Aside from the title track and "Drifting" (Jimi Hendrix), the rest of the songs come from band members (3 Lindberg; 1 each Burnham, Ehrlich, Emery). In other words, this is something of a mess, basically a sketch for as many as three separate albums. The one I want to hear more of is the one starring Ehrlich. B+(*)

Hyperdub 10.1 (2006-14 [2014], Hyperdub, 2CD): Ten year label anniversary sampler, specializing in a variant of electronica called dubstep. Drums have a certain hollow log feel, pretty consistent for a comp and nice when the music is loose, but there are spots when it gets tedious. The label is planning two more anniversary sets. Not sure when/if I'll get to them. B+(**)

Charles Lloyd: Manhattan Stories (1965 [2014], Resonance, 2CD): Early, these two previously unreleased sets came on the heels of Lloyd's auspicious debut, Of Course, Of Course, retaining guitarist Gabor Szabo (also just breaking in) and bassist Ron Carter, replacing Tony Williams with Pete La Roca, and before Lloyd's more popular albums on Atlantic. Interesting parallels here both to Rollins and Coltrane, although Lloyd had a softer tone and integrates better with his group -- Szabo is terrific throughout. Both sets include a stretch on flute, very much in character. A- [cd]

Pete Magadini: Bones Blues (1977 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): Drummer, led two albums 1976-77, two since then. This a sax quartet with Don Menza on tenor, Wray Downes on piano, and Dave Young on bass -- all strangers to me, but a mainstream blowing sessions like the old Prestiges, a strong sax man, gets off on the right foot with "Old Devil Moon." B+(**) [cd]

Don Pullen: Richard's Tune (1975 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): The pianist's first name album, a solo cut on the road in Canada and originally released as Solo Piano Album, now named for its first song, one dedicated to Muhal Richard Abrams -- a good hint if you want to locate him, but he already has more rhythmic muscle even if his fully developed style was still a few years away. B+(***) [cd]

Suburban Base: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum 'n' Bass: 1991-1997 (1991-97 [2014], New State, 3CD): Label comp, the label in question a side venture of a suburban London record store called Boogie Times. I haven't developed any sense of how to tell the numerous taxonomies of electronic dance music apart, and this doesn't help -- very little doc here, no names I recognize, little reason to differentiate even by disc. Still, functional, and something of a bargain. B+(***) [cd]

Old Music

AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: Hidden in the Stomach (1996 [1997], Silkheart): The first of five records where Ken Vandermark sat in with Mats Gustafsson's sax trio (Peter Janson on bass, Kjell Nordeson on drums). Two covers help pin this down: Charlie Haden's "Song for Che" and Albert Ayler's "Ghosts/Spirits." B+(**) [bc]

AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: I Wonder If I Was Screaming (2000, Crazy Wisdom): The last of five albums with Vandermark sitting in with Mats Gustafsson's late-1990s trio, soon to be replaced by The Thing. The perennial problem with Vandermark-Gustafsson groups is to keep the friction from melting them down. Here the trick appears to be tighter songwriting. B+(**) [bc]

Artifact iTi: Live in St. Johann (2008 [2010], Okka Disk): Ken Vandermark (reeds) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) pick up a couple local musicians for Austria's Festival ArtActs 2008: Johannes Bauer (trombone) and Thomas Lehn (synthesizer). One long piece (36:18), two short ones (total another 11:00), highlights exciting, a few of those quiet stretches that may force a live audience to focus but on record tend to blank out. B+(***) [bc]

Billy Bang Quintet: Invitation (1982, Soul Note): With Charles Tyler (alto/baritone sax), Curtis Clark (piano), Wilber Morris (bass), and Dennis Charles (drums), a solid (but less than spectacular) outing for the violinist. B+(**)

John Wolf Brennan/Alex Cline/Daniele Patumi/Tscho Theissing/John Voirol: Shooting Stars and Traffic Lights (1993-97 [2006], Leo): Piano, drums, bass, violin, soprano/tenor sax -- a group which later recorded (generally without drums) as Pago Libre. Effectively an avant-chamber setup, the violin more prominent than the sax. B+(**)

Caffeine: Caffeine (1993 [1994], Okka Disk): Ken Vandermark (reeds), Jim Baker (piano), and Steve Hunt (percussion): group played together as late as 2005 but this is their only album. Not many examples of Vandermark with piano, which is surprising considering how well he plays off Baker's frenzied block chord ruckus. A- [bc]

The John Carter Octet: Dauwhe (1982, Black Saint): Clarinet player, appeared on landmark Horace Tapscott albums like The Dark Tree earlier and had a long-running quartet with cornetist Bobby Bradford, doubled in size here but not in sound -- additions include James Newton on flute, Red Callender on tuba, and Charles Owens on soprano sax, oboe, and clarinet. African references abound, but the record doesn't quite go there. B+(**)

Cinghiale [Mars Williams/Ken Vandermark]: Hoofbeats of the Snorting Swine (1995 [1996], Eighth Day): Title sounds like the sort of noise rout both are capable of (especially in one another's company), but what we get instead are fairly balanced sax/clarinet duets exploring a wide range of possible interactions. B+(***) [bc]

DK3: Neutrons (1997 [1998], Quarterstick): Ken Vandermark trio with a pair of rock musicians: guitarist Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard) and drummer James Kimball (Laughing Hyenas, although he also wound up with Jesus Lizard). Beats tend to be regular, and Vandermark prefers riffing along to breaking loose, so this approaches a post-rock ambience he never returned to. B+(***) [bc]

The Frame Quartet: 35mm (2009, Okka Disk): What's most distinctive here is the admixture of electronics by bassist Nate McBride and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Otherwise, this is Ken Vandermark on tenor sax and clarinet plus Tim Daisy on drums powering their way through Vandermark 5 pieces, a little less edge without the second saxophonist, and because the electronics aren't ultimately that helpful. B+(***) [bc]

Joy Division: The Best of Joy Division (1979-80 [2008], Rhino): I've long felt that the two albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, stand up well enough on their own, and rated both above the Substance 1977-1980 and Permanent: Joy Division 1995 compilations, with their marginal trivia. Of course, we now know that after deep-voiced Ian Curtis hung himself the band took a turn for the better as New Order, the prototype here more tangible than the dead end. A-

John Lindberg: Trilogy of Works for Eleven Instrumentalists (1984 [1985], Black Saint): The bassist composed the three pieces, but the most conspicuous credit alongside many genuine names is "conductor" Anthony Braxton. Four brass (including Vincent Chancey on French horn), three reeds (including Marty Ehrlich doubling on flute), piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Seems a little clunky at first but eventually coheres into something surprising. B+(***)

John Lindberg: Luminosity: Homage to David Izenzon (1992-06 [1996], Music & Arts): Solo bass, with a couple vocal asides. Izenson was noted for his arco bass work with Ornette Coleman. B+(**)

John Lindberg: Quartet Afterstorm (1994, Black Saint): With Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone), Eric Watson (piano), and Ed Thigpen (drums), a rather freewheeling album with juicy solo spots (not least for the bassist) and taut ensemble work. A-

John Lindberg Ensemble: Bounce (1997, Black Saint): Bassist-led quartet, the tunes do favor a sort of bounciness, closer to pogoing than swing or bop, scratched out schematically by Dave Douglas on trumpet, with Larry Ochs less conspicuous on saxophones. B+(***)

John Lindberg Ensemble: A Tree Frog Tonality (2000, Between the Lines): Two-horn quartet, with Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet and Larry Ochs on soprano/tenor sax, players who are willing to stray well outside the lines, and a superb Andrew Cyrille on drums. B+(***)

John Lindberg: Ruminations Upon Ives and Gottschalk (2001 [2003], Between the Lines): I don't know the work of Charles Ives or Louis Gottschalk well enough to connect the dots, but the credit sheet shows all original material by the bassist. The group: Baikida Carroll (trumpet), Steve Korn (reeds, bansuri), Susie Ibarra (drums, percussion). B+(***)

Paul Motian Quintet: Misterioso (1986 [1987], Soul Note): With trio mates Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, plus a second saxophonist (Jim Pepper) and a bassist (Ed Schuller). Two Monk tunes, frequent targets for drummer Motian. The rest fractured originals. B+(**)

Paul Motian Trio: One Time Out (1987 [1989], Soul Note): With Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, starts a bit wobbly but ends with a powerhouse piece ("Circle Dance"). B+(***)

The Kevin Norton Ensemble: Knots (1997, Music & Arts): Drummer-vibraphonist, backed with cello and bass, with Bob DeBellis on clarinet, alto sax, and bass clarinet -- looks like David Bindman and David Krakauer also play clarinet on three tracks each. B+(***)

NRG Ensemble: Bejazzo Gets a Facelift (1997, Atavistic): Saxophonist Mars Williams joined Hal Russell's band in 1979, and after Russell died in 1992 Williams kept the band going, recruiting Ken Vandermark as the other saxophonist. They cut three albums as NRG Ensemble, this last one cut after Vandermark formed the Vandermark 5, with Williams as the other saxophonist. Specialty here is the racing saxes, and like most dirt track racing there are plenty of crashes and spills, some funny, some not so. B+(***)

Pago Libre: Stepping Out (2004 [2005], Leo): Name reportedly formed from bits of member names, although at this point that's far from obvious -- "bre" is pianist John Wolf Brennan, the one constant, here joined by Arkady Shilkloper (alphorn, flugelhorn), Tscho Theissing (violin), and Georg Breinschmid (bass). Avant-chamber jazz, with violin prominent and no drums, although this one swings more readily than their earlier efforts. B+(***)

Jeff Palmer/John Abercrombie/Arthur Blythe/Victor Lewis: Ease On (1992 [2013], Sledgehammer Blues): Organ player, has a handful of albums with an especially notable band here -- alto saxophonist Blythe is a good deal more avant than your average soul jazz players but can work some blues licks in easily enough, while Lewis is a mainstream drummer who can touch up anything. B+(***)

Jeff Palmer/Arthur Blythe/John Abercrombie/Rashied Ali: Island Universe (1994, Soul Note): Swapping drummers (Ali replaces Victor Lewis) pushes alto saxophonist Blythe back into the avant-garde, moving this from organ-based soul jazz to something well beyond. The guitarist has always been one to go with the flow, even when it gets choppy as it does here. A-

Sten Sandell Trio: Face of Tokyo (2008 [2009], PNL): Avant-piano trio, with Johan Berthling on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. Recorded live in Tokyo in two half-hour chunks. B+(**) [bc]

Alan Skidmore: After the Rain (1998, Miles Music): Tenor/soprano saxophonist, an important figure in the British avant-garde but you'd never guess that from this collection of ballads, backed by Colin Towns' lush but undistinguished strings. Quite lovely, just a bit shy of sublime. B+(***)

Territory Band-4: Company Switch (2004 [2005], Okka Disk, 2CD): Ken Vandermark's big band, honoring (if not really following) the old blues-based territory bands from Kansas City and points south and west. The bands were numbered, this particular edition numbering eleven musicians: two brass (Axel Dörner, Jeb Bishop); three reeds (Vandermark, Fredrik Ljungkvist, Dave Rempis), piano (Jim Baker), cello (Fred Lonberg-Holm), bass (Kent Kessler), two drummers (Paal Nilssen-Love and Paul Lytton), and Lasse Marhaug (electronics). This was the first Territory Band set to slop over to a second disc, in large part because they spread the options out more, moving beyond raw spontaneity to follow up a more deliberate plan -- if only it were more clear. B+(**) [bc]

The Thing: Action Jazz (2006, Smalltown Superjazz): Mats Gustafsson's long-running sax trio, with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. They made their first splash featuring very hoary free jazz riffs on alt-rock hits, hooked to a barely recognizable refrain. But by this point they've diversified, covering Lars Gullin, Ornette Coleman, Yosuke Yamashita, Lightning Bolt, and others plus an original named "Strayhorn." B+(**) [bc]

Vandermark Quartet: Solid Action (1994, Platypus): Second Quartet album, two years before the Vandermark 5's first record, from a time when he was just out of NRG Ensemble and still playing with avant-rock groups like the Flying Luttenbachers. This has frequent collaborators Kent Kessler on bass and Michael Zerang on drums, plus Daniel Scanlan playing violin/guitar/cornet -- as the counterpoint to Vandermark's tenor sax/clarinet/bass clarinet. Lots of interesting, surprising moves; also a tendency to get tied up. B+(***) [bc]

Ken Vandermark: Standards (1994 [1995], Quinnah): I don't see any song credits, and don't recognize any song titles, so consider the title a joke. Vandermark plays three tracks each with four "improvising trios": Kent Kessler (bass)/Hamid Drake (drums); Mars Williams (sax)/Michael Zerang (drums); Jim Baker (piano/synth)/Daniel Scanlan (guitar/violin; and Kevin Drumm (guitar)/Steve Hunt (drums). Trying on different looks, but the final session with Drumm starts off explosively. B+(**)

Ken Vandermark: Strade d'Acqua/Roads of Water (2008 [2010], Multi Kulti): A soundtrack to a film by Augusto Contento. Band contains many Chicago regulars including Jeff Parker (guitar) and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) but no extra reeds so no jousting, just soundtrack-ish colors and moderate background pacing. B+(*) [bc]

Additional Consumer News:

Records at Catalytic-Sound I still haven't heard:

• AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: Live at the Glenn Miller Café (1999, Wobbly Rail): 0/4 tracks
• Nils Henrik Asheim/Paal Nilssen-Love: Late Play (2006 [2007], PNL)
• Audio One: The Midwest School (2014, Audiographic): 1/5 tracks
• Peter Brötzmann: Wels Concert (1996, Okka Disk)
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: At Molde 2007 (10 Years 10tet) (2007 [2008], Okka Disk)
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: Walk, Love, Sleep (2011 [2012], Smalltown Supersound, 2CD)
• Peter Brötzmann/Shoji Hano: Funny Rat (1991 [1992], EGG)
• Peter Brötzmann/Kent Kessler/Hamid Drake: Live at the Empty Bottle (1998, Okka Disk)
• Peter Brötzmann/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Paal Nilssen-Love: Ada (2011, self-released)
• Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love/Mats Gustafsson: The Fat Is Gone ()
• Peter Brötzmann/Massimo Pupillo/Paal Nilssen-Love: Roma (2008 [2009], self-released)
• DKV Trio: Past Present (2008-11 [2012], Not Two, 7CD)
• Terrie Ex/Paal Nilssen-Love: Hurgu! (2011, PNL)
• Full Blast & Friends: Sketches and Ballads ()
• Mats Gustafsson: Parrot Fish Eye (1994, Okka Disk)
• Mats Gustafsson: Slide ()
• Hairy Bones: At Fresnes (2009 [2010], self-released)
• Lasse Marhaug/Paal Nilssen-Love: Stalk (2004 [2007], PNL)
• The Joe McPhee Trio: First Date: Live at the Third Annual Vision Festival (1998-2004 [2012], CJR): 1 (of 2) tracks/li>
• Joe McPhee/Raymond Boni/Dominic Duval/Michael Bisio: Port of Saints (2000 [2006], CJR)
• Vandermark 5: Live @ the Empty Bottle 1997 (1997, Savage Sound Syndicate): 0 tracks
• Vandermark 5: Thinking on One's Feet (1999, Savage Sound Syndicate): 0/7 tracks (Seth Tisue refers to album as Vandermark 5 vs. Santo)
• Vandermark Quartet: Big Head Eddie (1993, Platypus): 0/10 tracks
• Ken Vandermark/Paal Nilssen-Love: Letter to a Stranger (2011 [2012], Smalltown Superjazz): 1/10 tracks
• Witches & Devils: Live at the Empty Bottle (): 1/4 tracks

Records at Catalytic-Sound I have previously heard and rated:

• AALY Trio/DKV Trio: Double or Nothing (1999 [2000], Okka Disk) [*]
• AALY Trio/Ken Vandermark: Stumble (1998, Wobbly Rail) [B-]
• Fred Anderson/DKV Trio: DKV Trio With Fred Anderson (1996 [1997], Okka Disk) [*]
• Atomic/School Days: Nuclear Assembly Hall (2003 [2004], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Atomic/School Days: Distil (2006 [2008], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Ab Baars Trio & Ken Vandermark: Goofy June Bug (2007 [2008], Wig) [**]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: Stone/Water (1999 [2000], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet Plus Two: Broken English (2000 [2002], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet Plus Two: Short Visit to Nowhere (2000 [2002], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: Images (2002 [2004], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: Signs (2002 [2004], Okka Disk) [B]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: Be Music, Night (2005, Okka Disk) [**]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: American Landscapes 1 (2006 [2007], Okka Disk) [***]
• Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet: American Landscapes 2 (2006 [2007], Okka Disk) [**]
• Peter Brötzmann/Hamid Drake: The Dried Rat-Dog (1994 [1995], Okka Disk) [B]
• Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Massimo Pupillo/Paal Nilssen-Love: Hairy Bones (2008 [2009], Okka Disk) [A-]
• Peter Brötzmann/Peter Friis Nielsen/Peeter Uuskyla: Medicina (2004, Atavistic) [A-]
• Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love: Sweet Sweat (2006 [2008], Smalltown Supersound) [**]
• Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love: Woodcuts (2008 [2010], Smalltown Superjazz) [**]
• Peter Brötzmann/Marino Pliakas/Michael Wertmüller: Full Blast/Black Hole (2008 [2009], Atavistic) [***]
• Peter Brötzmann/Peter Uuskyla: Born Broke (2006 [2008], Atavistic) [***]
• Cato Salsa Experience and the Thing with Joe McPhee: Sounds Like a Sandwich (2004 [2005], Smalltown Supersound) [**]
• DKV Trio: Baraka (1997, Okka Disk) [*]
• DKV Trio: Live in Wels and Chicago (1998 [1999], Okka Disk) [***]
• DKV Trio: Trigonometry (2001 [2002], Okka Disk) [***]
• FJF: Blow Horn (1995 [1997], Okka Disk) [*]
• FME: Underground (2004, Okka Disk) [A-]
• FME: Cuts (2004 [2005], Okka Disk) [A-]
• Free Fall: Amsterdam Funk (2004 [2005], Smalltown Superjazz) [*]
• Fire Room: Broken Music (2005 [2009], Avatistic) [B]
• Gold Sparkle Trio/Ken Vandermark: Brooklyn Cantos (2002 [2004], Squealer) [**]
• Mats Gustafsson/Barry Guy/Paul Lovens: Mouth Eating Trees and Related Activities (1992, Okka Disk) [B]
• Adam Lane/Ken Vandermark/Magnus Broo/Paal Nilssen-Love: 4 Corners (2006 [2007], Clean Feed) [A-]
• Lean Left: The Ex Guitars Meet Nilssen-Love/Vandermark Duo, Volume 1 (2008 [2010], Smalltown Superjazz) [A-]
• Lean Left: Live at Café Oto (2011 [2012], Unsounds) [**]
• Made to Break: Provoke (2013, Clean Feed) [***]
• Joe McPhee: Sonic Elements: For Pocket Trumpet and Alto Saxophone (2013, Clean Feed) [*]
• Joe McPhee/Peter Brötzmann/Kent Kessler/Michael Zerang: The Damage Is Done (2008 [2009], Not Two) [**]
• Joe McPhee/Peter Brötzmann/Kent Kessler/Michael Zerang: Guts (2005 [2007], Okka Disk) [***]
• Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love: Tomorrow Came Today (2007 [2008], Smalltown Superjazz) [A-]
• Joe Morris/DKV Trio: Deep Telling (1998 [1999], Okka Disk) [**]
• Joe Morris/Ken Vandermark/Luther Gray: Rebus (2006 [2007], Clean Feed) [A-]
• Joe Morris/Ken Vandermark/Hans Poppel: Like Rays (1996 [1998], Knitting Factory) [B-]
• Paal Nilssen-Love/Ken Vandermark: Dual Pleasure 2 (2003 [2004], Smalltown Supersound) [B+]
• NRG Ensemble: Calling All Mothers (1993, Quinnah) [B+]
• Powerhouse Sound: Oslo/Chicago Breaks (2005-06 [2007], Atavistic, 2CD) [A]
• Resonance Ensemble: Kafka in Flight (2011, Not Two) [A-]
• Resonance Ensemble: What Country Is This? (2012, Not Two) [A-]
• School Days: Crossing Division (2000, Okka Disk) [A-]
• School Days: In Our Times (2001 [2002], Okka Disk) [A-]
• Side A: A New Margin (2011, Clean Feed) [A-]
• Sonore: No One Ever Works Alone (2003 [2004], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Sonore: Call Before You Dig: Loft/Köln (2008 [2009], Okka Disk) [*]
• Spaceways Incorporated: Thirteen Cosmic Standards (2000, Atavistic) [A-]
• Spaceways Inc.: Version Soul (2002, Atavistic) [A]
• Steelwool Trio: International Front (1994 [1998], Okka Disk) [A-]
• Territory Band-1: Transatlantic Bridge (2000 [2001], Okka Disk) [B+]
• Territory Band-2: Atlas (2001 [2002], Okka Disk) [**]
• Territory Band-3: Map Theory (2004, Okka Disk) [B]
• Territory Band-5: New Horse for the White House (2005 [2006], Okka Disk) [*]
• Territory Band-6 with Fred Anderson: Collide (2006 [2007], Okka Disk) [***]
• The Thing/Ken Vandermark: The Immediate Sound (2007, Smalltown Superjazz) [*]
• Trespass Trio + Joe McPhee: Human Encore (2012 [2013], Clean Feed) [**]
• Tripleplay: Expansion Slang (1998 [2000], Boxholder) [A-]
• Ken Vandermark: Furniture Music (2003, Okka Disk) [B+]
• Ken Vandermark: C.O.D.E.: Play the Music of Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy (2008, Cracked Anegg) [***]
• Ken Vandermark: Mark in the Water (2010 [2011], Not Two) [*]
• The Vandermark 5: Burn the Incline (2000, Atavistic) [B+]
• The Vandermark 5: Free Jazz Classics Vols. 1 & 2 (2000-01 [2002], Atavistic, 2CD) [A-]
• The Vandermark 5: Airports for Light (2002 [2003], Atavistic) [A-]
• The Vandermark 5: The Color of Memory (2004 [2005], Atavistic) [A-]
• The Vandermark 5: Alchemia (2004 [2005], Not Two, 12CD) [A-]
• The Vandermark 5: A Discontinuous Line (2005 [2006], Atavistic) [A-]
• Vandermark 5: Beat Reader (2006 [2008], Atavistic) [A-]
• Ken Vandermark Barrage Double Trio: Utility Hitter (1995, Quinnah) [A-]
• Ken Vandermark/Brian Dibble: Duets (2002 [2003], Future Reference) [B+]
• Ken Vandermark's Joe Harriott Project: Straight Lines (1998 [1999], Atavistic) [A-]
• Ken Vandermark/Pandelis Karayorgis: Foreground Music (2006 [2007], Okka Disk) [**]
• Ken Vandermark/The Resonance Ensemble: Head Above Water, Feet Out of the Fire (2012-13 [2013], Not Two, 2CD) [A-]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 8, 2014

Music: Current count 23775 [23744] rated (+31), 524 [523] unrated (+1).

Barely topped 30 records for an uneven week -- a couple days I did nothing, while others found me zipping through Bandcamp (mostly, but not only, Catalytic Sound) and Rhapsody. There is, after all, very little in the 2014 unrated queue -- at one point it dropped under 10 records, but two came in on Saturday and four more today so I'm up to 13. The good news, I suppose, is that what's left is relatively good: I reviewed eight actual CDs and came up with two A-, three B+(***), two B+(**), and one B+(*) -- well above the usual curve.

Rhapsody/Bandcamp also yielded two A- and eight B+(***), so I reckon this a pretty good week. At this point the Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file is overstuffed, so I'll try to get it ready to post tomorrow. Should be close to 100 records.

Recommended music links:

• Michael Tatum: The Pause Button
• Jason Gubbels: So Long

I started this section after Tatum moved "A Downloader's Diary" from my website to Odyshape, figuring it was all I could do to maintain a measure of continuity. Gubbels moved his "Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief" from his Tumbler blog over to Odyshape at the same time, and partly because he's more into obscure funk and jazz than Tatum, he became my favorite advance scout. A very large percentage of the better records I've found this year have come from Gubbels and Tatum, and I don't know how (or if) I'll be able to compensate for their loss.

Of course, they're not really gone. Gubbels has a paying job at Rhapsody and has been freelancing in Spin, and will be able to make more income out of his time, so he's basically moving up in the world. Tatum wants to focus more on the novel he's been working on for a while now, although he's also mentioned the possibility of continuing his "Hall of Records" project when the spirit moves him, and I could well imagine that reaching book length.

I don't know where that leaves Cam and Nicky at Odyshape, other than back to square one. A couple years back Tatum was trying to organize a group of writers to do some sort of webzine. We formed a mailing list and hashed over the name -- I have the domain name for Terminal Zone, after my 1977 venture with Don Malcolm, so that was the default -- but somehow the moment slipped by without issue. I had been posting Tatum's column, and posted some material from Cam Patterson, but it wasn't a good time when Cam offered more, so he wound up turning to Nicky and founding Odyshape. That wasn't my zine, but I took a certain pride in it even though my main contribution was negligence. It's a hard thing to do successfully, and evidently it's been hard for them to balance an aggressive publishing schedule off against all the other demands of modern life -- not least, maintaining an income that the zine couldn't possibly provide.

I wonder whether Odyshape might be looking up rather than down had Christgau gone through with his plan to publish Consumer Guide reviews there. That plan got shelved when Medium came through with an offer he couldn't refuse. (It's Twitter-like, so you'll need to use that link to "follow him" -- I think the accounts are separate but I don't recall just how they relate.) His debut there has been pushed back a couple times -- latest word I have is September 10 for an intro and reviews every Friday thereafter (so figure September 12). He's got about ten months to catch up on, so I don't expect many surprises for a while, but it will be good to hear from him again.

New records rated this week:

• 5 Seconds of Summer: 5 Seconds of Summer (2014, Capitol): Australian group, combines boy group harmonies with beach party pomp, still orchestrated cheer wears thin [r]: B
• The Bad Plus: Inevitable Western (2014, Okeh): having missed their Stravinsky, I wonder whether these mood-pushers are meta-outtakes [r]: B+(***)
• The Cellar and Point: Ambit (2011-13 [2014], Cuneiform): strings-and-percussion group aim for ethereal chamber music with steady propulsion, but why? [cdr]: B
• The Delines: Colfax (2014, El Cortez): novelist Willy Vlautin feeds story lines to Amy Boone, who intones them over a slow country simmer [r]: A-
• Ben Goldberg/Adam Levy/Smith Dobson: Worry Later (2014, BAG Productions): clarinet-guitar-drums trio plays ten Monk tunes [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Henry: Invisible Hour (2014, Work Song): singer-songwriter with a common touch for everyday life, like John Mellencamp with fewer hooks [r]: B+(*)
• Ikebe Shakedown: Stone by Stone (2014, Ubiquity): Afrobeat band from Brooklyn, section horns, no vocals, no big deal one way of the other [bc]: B
• Nils Landgren Funk Unit: Teamwork (2013, ACT): Swedish trombonist, nothing George Clinton needs to worry about but more fun than you'd expect [r]: B+(*)
• Matt Lavelle/John Pietaro: Harmolodic Monk (2014, Unseen Rain): stark duets on Monk tune a l'Ornette as if not kinky enough in the first place [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Liebman Big Band: A Tribute to Wayne Shorter (2014, Summit): arranger Mats Holmquist probably deserves more credit, as Liebman doesn't [cd]: B+(*)
• Dean Magraw & Eric Kamau Gravatt: Fire on the Nile (2014, Red House): guitar-drums duo, they manage a steady groove but keep it honest and real [cd]: B+(**)
• The Margots: Pescado (2013, Okka Disk): singer has a deadpan tilt, a bit arty over impeccable guitar and horns -- Ken Vandermark, of all people [bc]: B+(***)
• The Margots: Soplé (2014, Okka Disk): more uptempo pieces, more ballads, Adrienne Pierluissi stays cool, the jazz band stays in character [bc]: B+(***)
• The Muffs: Whoop Dee Doo (2014, Cherry Red): Kim Shattuck pop-punk outfit returns after a decade on oldies label, choppy, cheeky, cheezy even [r]: B+(***)
• Pattern Is Movement: Pattern Is Movement (2014, Hometapes): hints of vintage new wave turn considerably softer, drippier, drearie r[r]: B-
• Ivo Perelman/Karl Berger: Reverie (2014, Leo): sax-piano duets, the latter savvy enough to know that all he has to do is set the sax up [cd]: A-
• Bruce Robison/Kelly Willis: Our Year (2014, Premium): [semi-]stars in their own right, married but play more as a team than a couple, and that works [r]: B+(***)
• Jason Roebke: Combination (2014, self-released): Chicago avant-bassist sets one up for Greg Ward (alto sax), who comes off a bit thin and warbly [bc]: B+(*)
• Akira Sakata/Johan Berthling/Paal Nilssen-Love: Arashi (2014, Trost): alto saxophonist, survived Hiroshima to create his own fury, fast & raw [r]: B+(***)
• Akira Sakata/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Ketil Gutvik/Paal Nilssen-Love: The Cliff of Time (2013 [2014], PNL): add strings/electronics in the middle to take the edge off [bc]: B+(*)
• Masahiko Satoh/Paal Nilssen-Love: Spring Snow (2013 [2014], PNL): piano-drums duo, another Japanese legend enterng the avant new world [bc]: B+(**)
• Billy Joe Shaver: Long in the Tooth (2014, Lightning Rod): you may have heard some of these, but a good enough singer when he doesn't punt the verse [r]: B+(**)
• Tim Sparks: Chasin' the Boogie (2014, Tonewood): doesn't chase it very hard, but his intricate fingerpicking is very engaging, e.g. "Blue Bayou" [cd]: B+(***)
• Statik Selektah: What Goes Around (2014, Duck Down Music): DJ fattens the beats for guest rappers as the underground goes for the gold, often gets it [r]: A-
• Wussy: Duo (2013, Shake It, EP): 7-track EP, solid songs and spirited performance but still feels slight, a Record Store Day throwaway [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Pete Magadini: Bones Blues (1977 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): drummer-led mainstream sax quartet, Don Menza strong on tenor in one of those basic blowing sessions [cd]: B+(**)
• Hyperdub 10.1 (2006-14 [2014], Hyperdub, 2CD): 2CD label comp, appealing spacious sound at first but can get tedious in spots, unlike label's best albums [r]: B+(**)
• Charles Lloyd: Manhattan Stories (1965 [2014], Resonance, 2CD): two early quartet sets with a striking Gabor Szabo on guitar, sax/flute searching open space [cd]: A-
• The Magic Words: Junk Train (2006 [2014], Shake It, EP): Lisa Walker EP, of interest if you know who she is and can handle the lowest lo-fi in years [bc]: B+(**)
• Don Pullen: Richard's Tune (1975 [2014], Sackville/Delmark): reissue of debut album, then called "Solo Piano Record" -- give credit to Muhal, wher he starts [cd]: B+(***)
• Suburban Base Records: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum 'n' Bass: 1991-1997 (1991-97 [2014], New State, 3CD): cheapo 3CD hardcore, jungle, drum-n-bass comp, could use more doc, also differentiation but nice deal [cd]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

• Artifact iTi: Live in St. Johann (2008 [2010], Okka Disk): Vandermark and Nilssen-Love go to Austria, find great trombone and not-so-cheezy synth [bc]: B+(***)
• Sten Sandell Trio: Face of Tokyo (2008 [2009], PNL): Norwegian avant-pianist gets to show off in a brash and brusque trio setting [bc]: B+(**)
• Alan Skidmore: After the Rain (1998, Miles Music): Brit avant saxophonist goes straight, playing ballads backed by lush strings, really lovely [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dee Daniels: Intimate Conversations (Origin): September 16
• Chris Dundas: Oslo Odyssey (BLM, 2CD): September 16
• Hal Galper Trio: O's Time (Origin): September 16
• Gerry Gibbs Thrasher Dream Trio: We're Back (Whaling City Sound)
• Jerry Heldman: Revelation(s) (Origin, 2CD): September 16
• The Mark Lomax Trio: Isis & Osiris (Inarhyme)
• Alexander McCabe/Paul Odeh: This Is Not a Pipe (Wamco)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Wichita Eagle op-ed page featured Trudy Rubin' Decision Time on ISIS today, three days after the column originally appeared. Having clamored for more war for years, she must be happy now that Obama has vowed to "destroy and degrade ISIS" and hopscotched around the world lining up a new "coalition of the willing" to share the dirt and blame for another foreign intervention in Iraq and Syria (the last one having been such fun). Rubin, meanwhile, has gone on seeking further dragons to slay: If Putin's actions in Ukraine aren't an invasion, then what is? Obama's been busy working on locking the US into a war there too. (See David Frum: Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe, something Frum is ecstatic about.) This series of events has reduced my opinion of Obama to its lowest point ever. Some of this I explain in my comment on the Peter Beinart piece below, yet even now I doubt that I've pushed that argument far enough. Perhaps one reason I'm so appalled is that there doesn't seem to be much uproar over what has to be judged the most significant American pivot towards war since Bush invaded Iraq. As Beinart puts it, "[Obama's] fierce minimalism fits the national mood. President Obama's Mideast strategy is not grand. It's not inspiring. It's not idealistic. But it's what the American people want and what their government knows how to do." Really?

That so few rank-and-file Democrats feel up to holding Obama responsible for his repeated belligerence probably has more to do with the perception that the Republicans have become a full-fledged threat to civilization. This is in stark contrast to the 1960s, when we had no trouble turning on Lyndon Johnson -- and when the Democratic Party essentially short-circuited the accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society out of a blind commitment to an insane war in Vietnam. Like Johnson, Obama seems bent on sacrificing whatever good he's accomplished on the altar of war. Little comfort that he hasn't accomplished much to squander.

Some scattered links this week:

• Peter Beinart: Actually, Obama Does Have a Strategy in the Middle East: Argues that Obama is neither dove nor hawk, but "a fierce minimalist" -- which is to say he's a hawk who prefers small game taken with little risk or long-term commitment. Of course, that doesn't explain his "Afghanistan surge" -- in retrospect, that looks like a time-limited concession to the military, a way of saying "put up or shut up." Beinart goes further than the facts suggest:

  On the other hand, he's proven ferocious about using military force to kill suspected terrorists. [ . . . ] By contrast, Obama's strategy -- whether you like it or not -- is more clearly defined. Hundreds of thousands can die in Syria; the Taliban can menace and destabilize Afghanistan; Iran can move closer to getting a bomb. No matter. With rare exceptions, Obama only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians.

  It's not that simple: Libya never was a threat to American civilians (at least not until he intervened there). And he's actually broken new ground in using drones to kill American citizens. So I think the focus on "terrorist" targets has more to do with scale and risk. He's come to realize that the US military isn't very effective (and often is down right counterproductive) when deployed en masse, so he's avoided that. He also seems to recognize that the US military isn't very effective as an occupying force: they inevitably embarrass themselves, breeding resentment and rebellion. On the other hand, give him the opportunity to kill some "terrorist" and he's happy to pull the trigger. Republicans taunt him as weak, so he's anxious to prove he's a natural born killer. One could do worse than minimizing risk and damage, but "minimalism" is a trap Obama walked into, either because he has no principles or because he has no willpower to defend them against his security bureaucracy.

  Also see Kathy Gilsinan: To Kill a Terrorist, about one of Obama's minimalist "success stories": the killing of Somali "terrorist" leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. The most likely result there is that Al-Shabab replaces Godane with another even-more-embittered leader and nothing more changes. And I might as well point out Beinart's more recent post, Pursuing ISIS to the Gates of Hell. Obama's vow "to destroy and degrade ISIS" remains a bit muddled (why put the weaker verb second?), and framing it with a "Jacksonian" revenge drama doesn't help.

• Andrew O'Hehir: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The darkness we conjured up:

  I think it's worthwhile to revisit the examples of Stockhausen and Baudrillard, and their ideas too, in considering a new outrage that is both literal and symbolic: the ISIS beheading videos. The criminal acts depicted in those videos are on an entirely different scale from 9/11, and it's important not to lose sight of that fact amid the understandable shock and revulsion they have engendered. But the intended effect is strikingly similar, and the ISIS videos are conceptually and historically related to 9/11 as tools of provocation and propaganda. They are designed to make a ragtag band of apocalyptic rebels look like a symmetrical adversary to the world's greatest military power; to incite an exaggerated response from that power, driven by panic and hysteria; and to attract rootless millennials, both from the West and the Muslim world, to their incoherent cause. So far it seems to be working.

  I'm far less certain that the intent behind the beheading videos is to provoke the insane response that Obama and nearly everyone on his hawkish right have committed to, but that's the effect. Rather, they show a profound inability to step outside of their own skin and see themselves as others will see them -- a trait that Obama et al. sadly share with them. If they were smart, they'd court journalists and get them to at least cast reasonable doubts about their fanaticism. Of course, if they were smart, they'd recall Islam's past tolerance for other religions, a principle ("no compulsion in matters of faith") which had allowed Christians and Yazidis (and Jews) to persevere through more than a millenia of past caliphates. And they'd play up the fact that they're seeking freedom from despotic police states in Damascus and Baghdad. But no side is playing this smart: they each tailor their propaganda to suit their own prejudices, confirming their greatest fears and enabling their most vicious and violent cadres to commit acts that will only exacerbate the initial problem.

• Nick Turse: American Monuments to Failure in Africa? Until the US military created the US Africa Command in 2007, you heard very little about American military operations in Africa, because there really weren't many. Now the US military is all over the continent, shooting people and blowing shit up but also spreading their budget around on "feel good" projects, much like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  As with Petraeus's career, which imploded amidst scandal, the efforts he fostered similarly went down in flames. In Iraq, the chicken processing plant proved a Potemkin operation and the much ballyhooed Baghdad water park quickly fell into ruin. The country soon followed. Less than three years after the U.S. withdrawal, Iraq teeters on the brink of catastrophe as most of Petraeus's Sunni mercenaries stood aside while the brutal Islamic State carved a portion of its caliphate from the country, and others, aggrieved with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad, sided with them. In Afghanistan, the results have been similarly dismal as America's hearts-and-minds monies yielded roads to nowhere (where they haven't already deteriorated into death traps), crumbling buildings, over-crowded, underfunded, and teacher-less schools, and billions poured down the drain in one boondoggle after another.

• More Israel links:

  • Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary, Elizabeth Warren, and Israel: "I'm now glad to report [ . . . ] that Elizabeth Warren has confirmed for us that, on questions related to Israel, Clinton has nothing to fear from her, at least."
  • Ofer Neiman: Israeli officer tosses Palestinian shepherds from their land so settlers don't have to hear Arabic: Not only is the occupation brutal, it can also be petty. Note that Arabic is an officially recognized language in Israel. That anyone could think otherwise is testimony to the prevalence of segregation in Israel and the occupied territories.
  • Avi Shlaim: For Israel, the beginning of wisdom is to admit its mistakes: Not that he offers any indication that anyone in Israel is ready to do so -- least of all Netanyahu, whose "popularity plummeted from 85% at the beginning of the operation to 38%."
  • Richard Silverstein: Mossad-Affiliated Israeli NGO: Khaled Meshal to the Hague: Of course, "Israel hasn't signed the ICC protocol, in an attempt to keep its own generals and spymasters out of the Hague defendant's chair." Yet one of Israel's front groups wants the Hamas leader charged. Curiously enough it's not for those "rocket attacks" Israel provokes then whines about. It's because Hamas executed a number of Palestinians believed to have collaborated with Israel during their latest round of war against Gaza. I'm not fond of the death penalty, and it's hard to be sure of due process in such a short timespan, but it probably isn't hard to link up collaborator reports with specific bombings and deaths. Hillel Cohen has written two books on Israel's use of Palestinian collaborators, one from 1917-48, the other from 1948-67, and obviously the practice hasn't changed much over 47 years of occupation. For another twist on recent war crimes, see Silverstein's Hannibal Directive Focus of War Crimes Inquiry. Max Blumenthal also writes about The Hannibal Directive.
  • Philip Weiss: British pol is beaten by man in Israeli army t-shirt, and the chattering classes are silent: Isn't this the great fear, that the violence in the Middle East will be furthered by terrorists in the West?
  • Kate: As world watched Gaza, Israel announced 1472 new settlements in West Bank: And many other stories, like house demolitions in Jerusalem, an orchard chopped down by settlers near Hebron, the Gaza death toll continuing to grow even after ceasefire (including a 7th Israeli civilian). For a view of some of the destruction in Gaza, follow this link.
  • Assaf Sharon: Failure in Gaza.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Kathleen Geier: Can we talk? The unruly life and legacy of Joan Rivers: Seems about right, though I'm less of a fan.

  Some critics claim to discern a humanistic project behind Rivers' comedy of cruelty. For example, Mitchell Fain argued that River "says things out loud what we're all thinking, in our worst moments," and that by doing so, "the monster gets smaller." What seems far likelier is that the monster gets socially sanctioned. For decades, a staple of Rivers' act have been nasty jokes about female celebrities who are fat, stupid, or slutty, and male celebrities who are allegedly gay. If she ever talked smack about straight male celebrities, I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples.

  That brings us to Joan Rivers' politics, which mostly were horrible. On the plus side, she was pro-choice, an early supporter of gay rights, and an Obama supporter. On the negative side, there is pretty much everything else. Rivers was a lifelong Republican, and made many comments over the years that left little doubt about her right-wing views. She hated the movie Precious, not for aesthetic reasons, but for frankly political ones ("I thought, Oh, get a job! Stand up and get a job!"). Just last month, she voiced strong support for Israel's military actions actions in Gaza and said that the Palestinians "deserve to be dead." She adored Ronald Reagan and shamelessly fawned over the British royal family. When writers on her show Fashion Police, who were working full-time and only making $500 a week, went on strike, she refused to support them. At times, her humor was outright racist.

• John Mearsheimer: Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: A useful corrective to a lot of prevailing assumptions. Clearly, the US (neocon) effort to extend NATO to the borders of Russia has been deliberately and unnecessarily provocative, although one could also argue that deep-seated fears that Russia might revert its past patterns, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, of trying to control what it thought of as its satellites had more to do with NATO's expansion. Moreover, while US-backed "democracy projects" were effectively an attempt at foreign subversion, it would seem that Russia has been organizing support in Ukraine as well. In America we reflexively assume we're acting with the best intentions, but with Cold War blinkers we make little distinction between democracy and neoliberal economic policies that lead to inequality and corruption -- something the post-Soviet bloc has had bitter experience with. There is much to be said in favor of UN-based programs promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world, provided such programs focus on need -- Saudi Arabia is always a good place to start -- rather than the neocon checklist of governments they dislike.

  More dissenting pieces on Ukraine:

  • Robert Parry: The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis
  • The State Department Says Russia Is Invading Ukraine -- Should We Believe It?
  • Stephen F Cohen: Patriotic Heresy vs. the New Cold War
  • Mike Whitney: Did Putin Just Bring Peace to Ukraine?

• Jim Newell: GOP's Kansas nightmare: How a red state is on verge of unthinkable upsets: I'd caution against counting these chickens before they hatch, but so far the evidence does suggest that the Democrats greatly improve their prospects at the polls when they bother to run candidates. The Senate contest this year represents a different twist on that, with Democrat Chad Taylor dropping out to let independent Greg Orman run unfettered. I'm not sure that was such a good idea, but Orman has a lot more money to work with, and he might woo more Republicans -- they're pretty regimented on the far right at the moment, but in doing so they've pissed a lot of their own off. Also see Nate Silver. As for the governor, Brownback is widely regarded as a complete fuck up -- I look forward to campaign commercials showing him and Rick Perry praying for rain. But oddly enough he's not only doubled down on the lie that his tax cuts are "working" -- I think that's a euphemism for rich-getting-richer; the new joke is that the only thing flatter than Kansas is the Kansas economy -- but instead of moving center to pick up votes he's been moving right for more money. To be specific, the Kochs have been trying to kill wind power subsidies, which many Republicans (including Brownback until his flip) favor because it means manufacturing and service jobs plus big royalties to farmers. The Kochs regard wind power as heresy against free markets, but if you want to dig a bit deeper, see Lee Fang: Charles Koch founded anti-environment group to protect big oil industry handouts.

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Monday, September 1, 2014

Music: Current count 23744 [23701] rated (+43), 523 [530] unrated (-7).

Main thing that happened this week was that I stumbled across the Catalytic-Sound website on Bandcamp. Ken Vandermark set this up, and it currently showcases 137 albums by Vandermark and several of his closely aligned friends: Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, and Paal Nilssen-Love. (Bassist Ingebrigt Háker Flaten has a comparable website with a good deal of overlap.) Shortly after I wrote my first Village Voice piece on Vandermark, he sent me a big box of his recordings -- I was thinking of doing something similar to my Parker-Shipp CG but never seemed to have the time -- so many of these are familiar. In fact, next RS column has a list of 80 Catalytic-Sound records I've previously reviewed/rated. Still, the site fills in some gaps, so I spent a good deal of last week picking off the Vandermark releases (I'll get back to Brötzmann et al. in due course). One problem is that not every album can be streamed completely, but the exceptions are (at present, anyway) few. Still, several omissions particularly disappointed me: the early Vandermark Quartet album Big Head Eddie (1993), and the brand new Audio One: The Midwest School (2014) -- its companion, An International Report, was the week's top find (I also gave an A- to the early Caffeine). One I have yet to get to is the 7-CD DKV Trio: Past Present box.

I suppose you could make arguments both ways as to whether omitting tracks maximizes cash returns -- the idea behind making all this music available is to sell it -- but for someone who tries to cover as wide a swath as possible and who has little time to double back, these sites are a terrific convenience and help. I wish there were more of them, and hope they stay as open as possible.

I haven't been able to update the blog this past week, although I occasionally do still receive mail about nonsense comments, so it must be sort of working some of the time. I haven't made any real progress toward moving on, and hardly know where to begin.

Recommended music links:

• Jason Gubbels: Notable Jazz Recordings of the 1980s (Pt. 3): Julius Hemphill [A-], George Russell [B+], John Carter [B+], Pat Metheny [B], Ran Blake [A-], Detail, Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy [A-], Anthony Braxton [A-], Billy Bang [A-], Either/Orchestra

New records rated this week:

• Audio One: An International Report (2014, Audiographic): yet another Vandermark large band, live at Green Mill, expect action, don't be too picky [bc]: A-
• Cory Branan: The No-Hit Wonder (2014, Bloodshot): singer-songwriter from Mississippi, went to rock in Memphis but country songs are fresher [r]: B+(*)
• The Bug: Angels & Devils (2014, Ninja Tune): best when he goes upbeat with that dub thing, but also has a penchant for horror soundtrack poses [r]: B+(*)
• Common: Nobody's Smiling (2014, Def Jam): Chicago rapper explores and deplores his home town, not that it isn't tough everywhere else [r]: B+(***)
• Eliana Cuevas: Espejo (2014, ALMA): originally from Venezuela, now "Canada's Latin Music Queen" -- a small fish in a barren pond [cd]: B
• Dirty Loops: Loopified (2014, Verve): three Swedish gents: synth fireworks and histrionic vocals driven by a frantic post-disco beat [r]: C+
• Four Year Strong: Go Down in History (2014, Pure Noise, EP): 5-song EP by punkish group so irrepressibly loud and catchy they're extra annoying [r]: B-
• Larry Fuller: Larry Fuller (2013-14 [2014], Capri): mainstream pianist, came up working with singers and plays juicy standards in this trio, "C Jam Blues" a fave [cd]: B+(***)
• Richard Galliano: Sentimentale (2014, Resonance): French accordion player works the jazz tradition for sentimental moods, played up to the hilt [cd]: A-
• Ariana Grande: My Everything (2014, Island/Republic): no doubt she has what it takes to be a pop star; the question is whether she can make us care [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Harland's Voyager: Vipassana (2014, GSI Studios): mainstream drummer's second album, assembles a fancy band then wastes it with vocal dressing [cdr]: B-
• Horse Meat Disco: Volume IV (2014, Strut): old disco obscurities remixed to sound like old disco obscurities, plus "Gettin' to Know You" [r]: B+(**)
• Ricky Kej/Wouter Kellerman: Winds of Samsara (2014, Listen 2 Africa): Indian keyboard player meets South African flautist for synth-not-so-exotica [cd]: C
• Wiz Khalifa: Blacc Hollywood (2014, Atlantic): after two plays, all I can confirm is that this stoned rapper makes agreeable background music [r]: B+(**)
• J Mascis: Tied to a Star (2014, Sub Pop): Dinosaur Jr. frontman returns to form, his voice cracking and hiding behind some pretty decent guitar [r]: B+(*)
• Brad Paisley: Moonshine in the Trunk (2014, Arista): first half party anthems and livid fantasies; on the backstretch turns into a crunchy con [r]: B-
• Jamie Saft/Steve Swallow/Bobby Previte: The New Standard (2014, Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Carl Saunders: America (2013 [2014], Summit): spent most of his life in big bands but sounds great as the sole horn here, even when the covers turn corny [cd]: B+(*)
• Side A: In the Abstract (2013 [2014], Not Two): Ken Vandermark reeds trio with Havard Wiik and Chad Taylor, more varied than Free Fall but lands there [bc]: B+(**)
• Spider Bags: Frozen Letter (2014, Merge): garage-punk with a talkie-voiced singer who seems worth listening to, plus they can stretch a riff [r]: B+(*)
• Ed Stone: King of Hearts (2014, Sapphire Music): guitarist-singer, touted as "the new George Benson," he isn't even that, much less the old one [cd]: C+
• Street Priest: More Nasty (2012 [2014], Humbler): guitar-bass-drums trio, can't (or won't) fake the funk so they bust it into shards and stray noise [cdr]: B+(**)
• Randy Travis: Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am (2012 [2014], Warner Brothers): covers from the classics to Kristofferson, leftovers from Vol. 1 but ring truer [r]: B+(**)
• Ken Vandermark's Topology Nonet: Impressions of Po Music (2013, Okka Disk): Joe McPhee plays McPhee a generation removed, scaled up, not so po [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Cables to the Ace (2014, Communicating Vessels): [cd]: B

Old records rated this week:

• AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: Hidden in the Stomach (1996 [1997], Silkheart): Ken Vandermark joins Mats Gustafsson's rowdy trio, highlight Haden and Ayler covers [r]: B+(**)
• AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark: I Wonder If I Was Screaming (2000, Crazy Wisdom): tighter songwriting limits meltdown by combustible sax men [bc]: B+(**)
• Billy Bang Quintet: Invitation (1982, Soul Note): scrounging, found one I hadn't heard and didn't find it especially remarkable, relatively [r]: B+(**)
• Caffeine: Caffeine (1993 [1994], Okka Disk): Ken Vandermark, Jim Baker (piano), Steve Hunt (drums): I've never heard Baker play so explosively -- sure lights V up [r]: A-
• The John Carter Octet: Dauwhe (1982, Black Saint): adds decorative flute, oboe, tuba, African references to more visceral quartet with Bobby Bradford [r]: B+(**)
• Cinghiale [Mars Williams/Ken Vandermark]: Hoofbeats of the Snorting Swine (1995 [1996], Eighth Day): Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams play sax/clarinet duets, w/surprising interactions [bc]: B+(***)
• DK3: Neutrons (1997 [1998], Quarterstick): Ken Vandermark trio with guitar-drums from Jesus Lizard, one of those post-rock experiments he no longer does [bc]: B+(***)
• The Frame Quartet: 35mm (2009, Okka Disk): Vandermark 4, scratches second sax for an admixture of electronics, interesting but not quite the same [bc]: B+(***)
• The Kevin Norton Ensemble: Knots (1997, Music & Arts): drummer-vibraphonist, toys with Monk and swaps in various clarinets, a mix converging on same [r]: B+(***)
• NRG Ensemble: Bejazzo Gets a Facelift (1997, Atavistic): post-Hal Russell group with Mars Williams and Ken Vandermark racing, crashing, flips [bc]: B+(***)
• Territory Band-4: Company Switch (2004 [2005], Okka Disk, 2CD): Vandermark 11-piece big band, for once does more than just thrash and raise hell [bc]: B+(**)
• The Thing: Action Jazz (2006, Smalltown Superjazz): Mats Gustafsson's power sax trio diversifies, not the worst thing that can happen to them [bc]: B+(**)
• Vandermark Quartet: Solid Action (1994, Platypus): a blast from the past, when V was straddling avant rock and jazz, making trouble for both [bc]: B+(***)
• Ken Vandermark: Standards (1994 [1995], Quinnah): four "improvising trios," nothing standard, just a first taste of DKV, more Mars, some guitar thrash [bc]: B+(**)
• Ken Vandermark: Strade d'Acqua/Roads of Water (2008 [2010], Multi Kulti): soundtrack, hushed tones, moderate tempos, a little color, everyone makes nice [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jason Adasiewicz's Sun Rooms: From the Region (Delmark)
• Charles Lloyd: Manhattan Stories (1965, Resonance, 2CD): September 16
• Pete Magadini: Bones Blues (1977, Sackville/Delmark)
• Dean Magraw & Eric Kamau Gravatt: Fire on the Nile (Red House): October 14
• Parker Abbott Trio: The Wayfinders (self-released): October 23
• Don Pullen: Richard's Tune (1975, Sackville/Delmark)

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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Having a lot of trouble focusing these days. Partly the number of things broken and need of (often expensive, sometimes just time consuming) repairs has been mind-boggling. And with the blog on the blink, I've fallen into a two-day week rut, compiling "Music Week" on Mondays then trying to catch up with the world on "Weekend Roundup" on Sundays. Several of the bits below could have been broken out into separate posts -- indeed, I wonder if they shouldn't all be.

I'm thinking especially of the Michelle Goldberg "Two-State" comment as something I could have written much more on. I don't know if I made the point clearly enough below, so let me try to sum it up once more: there are several distinct but tightly interlocked problems with Two-State: (1) the natural constituency for Two-State (at least among pro-Israelis) is the "liberal Zionists" -- an ideology based on an unsustainable contradiction, and therefore a diminishing force -- and without supporters Two-State is doomed to languish; (2) when liberals break from Zionism (which is inevitable if they have both principles and perception) they must do so by committing to universal rights, which means they must at least accept One-State as a desirable solution (Goldberg, by the way, fails this test); (3) as long as [illiberal] Zionists refuse to implement Two-State (and they have a lot of practice at staving it off), liberals (anyone with a desire for peace and justice) should regroup and insist on universal rights (e.g., One-State); (4) under pressure, I think that Zionists will wind up accepting some version of Two-State rather than risking the ethnic dilution of One-State. People like Goldberg would be better off getting ahead of this curve rather than trying to nitpick it. Someone like Netanyahu has thousands of excuses for postponing agreement on a viable Two-State solution. On the other hand, he has no legitimate defense against charges that Israel is treading on the basic human rights of millions of Palestinians under occupation. That's where you want to focus the political debate. And that shouldn't be hard given Israel's recent demonstration of its abuse of power.

The march to war against ISIS is another subject worthy of its own post. There are many examples, but the one I was most struck by this week was a letter to the Wichita Eagle, which reads:

The threat of ISIS appears similar to the threat of the Nazis before World War II. The Europeans ignored Adolf Hitler's rising power because they were tired of war.

As ISIS spreads through the Middle East at will, our nation's leaders are assessing how to counter this threat. ISIS is well-equipped, having seized abandoned equipment the United States gave the Iraqi army, and it is growing in strength, numbers and brutality.

What is the U.S. to do? That decision is in the hands of our nation's leaders. However, with the future leader of ISIS having said in 2009 to U.S. soldiers who had held him prisoner, "I'll see you in New York," trying to avoid conflict because we're tired of war should not be the determining factor.

Much of Europe succumbed to Hitler because Europeans were "tired of war."

Similar? Germany had the second largest economy in the world in the 1930s, one that was reinvigorated by massive state spending on munitions at a time when the rest of the world was languishing in depression. Even so, Hitler's appetite far exceeded his grasp. Germany was able to score some quick "blitzkrieg" victories over France, Norway, and Poland, and occupy those countries through fronts offered by local fascists -- the Vichy government in France, Quisling in Norway, etc. But even given how large and strong Germany was, it was unable to sustain an assault on the British Isles, and its invasion of Russia stalled well short of the Urals. And, of course, provoking the US into entering the war hastened Germany's loss, but that loss was very likely anyway. It turns out that the world is not such an easy place to conquer, and authoritarian regimes breed resistance everywhere they tread.

In contrast, ISIS is a very limited backwater rebellion. Its extremist Sunni salafism limits it to about one-quarter of Iraq and maybe one-half of Syria, and it was only able to flourish in those areas because they have been severely war-torn for many years. They lack any sort of advanced manufacturing base. Their land is mostly desert, so very marginal for agriculture. Their "war machine" is built on confiscated weapons caches, which will quickly wear out or be exhausted. They do have some oil, but lack refineries and chemical plants. Moreover, their identity is so narrow they will be unable to extend their rule beyond war-torn Sunni regions, where they're often viewed as more benign (or at leas less malign) than the Assad and Maliki regimes.

So it's hard to imagine any scenario where ISIS might expand beyond its current remote base: comparing it to Germany under Hitler is laughable. The one thing they do have in common is an enthusiasm for war, developed out of a desire to avenge past wars. You might say that that the West after WWI was "tired of war" but that seems more like a sober assessment of how much was lost and how little gained even in winning that war -- after Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans are similarly dismayed at how much they've lost and how little they've gained after more than a decade of war. Many Germans, on the other hand, were willing to entertain the delusion that they only lost due to treachery, and that a rematch would solve all their problems. It's easy in retrospect to see this asymmetry in war lust as a "cause" of the war, but jumping from that insight to a conclusion that the West could have prevented WWII by standing up to Hitler sooner is pure fantasy. To prevent WWII you'd have to go back to Versailles and settle the first phase of what Arno Mayer later dubbed "the thirty-years war of the 20th century" on more equitable terms -- as effectively (albeit not all that consciously) happened after WWII.

As with post-WWI Germans, ISIS' enthusiasm for war is rooted in many years of scars -- scrapes with the French and British colonialists, with Israel, with brutal Baathist dictators, with the US invasion of Iraq and American support for Kurdish and Shiite militias. Most ISIS soldiers grew up with war and know little else -- in this the people they most closely resemble are not the Nazis but the Taliban, a group which resisted long Russian and American occupations, separated by a bloody civil war and a short-lived, brutal but ineffective period in power. On the other hand the idea that the US should shrug off their "war weariness" and plunge into another decade-plus struggle with another Taliban knock-off isn't very inspiring. Isn't repeating the same steps hoping for different results the very definition of insanity?

Still, the war drums keep beating. The Wichita Eagle has had three such op-eds in the last week on ISIS: from Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, and Trudy Rubin -- each with the sort of screeching hysteria and ignorance of ecology I associate with finding roaches under the bathroom lavoratory. Clearly, what gets their goat more than anything is the very idea of an Islamic State: it looms for these people as some sort of existential threat that must be exterminated at any cost -- a reaction that is itself every bit as arbitrary, absolutist, and vicious as what they think they oppose. But in fact it's merely the logical response to the past wars that this same trio have urged us into. It's worth recalling that there was a day when small minds like these were equally convinced that the Germans and Japanese were all but genetically disposed to hatred and war. (Robert Morgenthau, for instance, wanted to spoil German farms with salt so they wouldn't be able to feed enough people to field an army -- that was 1945?) Europe broke a cycle of war that had lasted for centuries, not by learning to be more vigilant at crushing little Hitlers but by joining together to build a prosperous and equitable economy. The Middle East -- long ravaged by colonialism, corruption, and war -- hasn't been so lucky, but if it is to turn around it will be more due to "war weariness" than to advances in drone technology. The first step forward will be for the war merchants to back away -- or get thrown out, for those who insist on learning their lessons the hard way.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Michelle Goldberg: Liberal Zionism Is Dying. The Two-State Solution Shouldn't Go With It. This starts off with a point (a major concession, really) that bears repeating:

  In 1948, Hannah Arendt published an essay in the magazine Commentary -- at the time still a liberal magazine -- titled "To Save the Jewish Homeland." She lamented the increasingly militaristic, chauvinistic direction of Zionism, the virtual unanimity among Jews in both the United States and Palestine that "Arab and Jewish claims are irreconcilable and only a military decision can settle the issue; the Arabs, all Arabs, are our enemies and we accept this fact; only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines believe in justice, and only shlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to propaganda and machine guns . . . and we will consider anybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back."

  This nationalist strain of Zionism, she predicted, might succeed in establishing a state, but it would be a modern-day Sparta, "absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities." It would negate the very humanistic Jewish values that originally fed the Zionist dream. "Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people," she writes. "Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland."

  It's difficult to avoid the conclusion, sixty-six years later, that she was right.

  Goldberg then cites Antony Lerman's recent The End of Liberal Zionism:

  The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals -- and I was one, once -- subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right -- this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink. [ . . . ]

  The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.

  "Liberal Zionist" is a contradiction that cannot survive. Indeed, in Israel it is all but dead. The key tenet of liberalism is belief in equal rights for all. In Israel it is virtually impossible to find any political party -- even "far left" Meretz -- willing to advance equal rights for the "Palestinian citizens of Israel" much less for those Palestinians under occupation. On the other hand, the debate as to whether Zionism is inherently racist has been proven not just in theory but empirically. As Max Blumenthal shows in Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, everywhere you look in Israel you see growing evidence of racism.

  In America, it's long been possible for many people (not just Jews) to combine domestic liberalism with an unthinking, uncritical allegiance to Israel. Of course it's getting harder to sustain the ignorance that allows one to think of Israel as a just nation. (The so-called Christian Zionists -- or as Chris Hedges puts it, "American fascists" -- require fewer illusions, since they are likely to be racist and militarist at home as well as abroad.) It sounds like Goldberg -- an early J-Street supporter -- has started to make the break, but she's still not willing to go full-liberal and endorse full and equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians -- the so-called One-State Solution. She wants to salvage the so-called Two-State Solution, with Israel returning (for the most part) to its 1967 borders and an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank (with or without Jerusalem as its capitol).

  The Two-State Solution was originally proposed by the UN in 1947, but the Zionist leadership weren't satisfied with the proposed borders, and the Palestinian leadership objected to the whole thing, preferring a unified democracy (with a 2-to-1 Arab majority) where nobody would have to move. After the 1949-50 armistice lines were drawn, Israel greatly expanded its borders and had expelled over 700,000 Arabs from its territory, ensuring Jewish demographic dominance. Those borders, which held until 1967, have long been accepted as permanent by most Palestinian groups and by all neighboring Arab countries: a deal that could have been made by Israel any time since the mid-1990s, but which wasn't, because no ruling party in Israel would accept such a deal, nor would the US or the so-called Quartet (which had endorsed the deal) apply significant pressure on Israel to settle. There are lots of reasons why Israel has taken such an intransigent stand. One is that the demise of liberalism leaves Israel with no effective "peace block" -- the price of occupation has become so low, and the political liabilities of peace so high, that Israel currently has no desire to change the status quo.

  This is, of course, a huge problem for anyone who believes in equal rights and/or who puts a positive value on peace in the Middle East. Such people -- by which I mean pretty much all of us (except for a few warmongers and apocalypse-hungry Christians) -- can only make progress toward a settlement by putting pressure on Israel, which is to say by increasing the costs to Israel of its present occupation policies. One way is to counter Israeli propaganda, to expose the facts of occupation and to delegitimize Israel's position. Another step is BDS, with the prospect of growing ever more extensive and restrictive. Another is to adjust the list of acceptable outcomes: that may mean giving precedence to the inclusive, equal rights One-State Solution over the unsuccessful Two-State scheme.

  The fact is that Two-State was a bad idea in 1947 and remains a bad idea today: it is only slightly less bad now because the "ethnic cleansing" that could have been avoided in 1947 is ancient history now; it is also slightly worse because it leaves us with a lot of refugees who will still be unable to return to Israel, and who still have to be compensated and patriated elsewhere. The dirty secret of the Two-State Solution is that it leaves Israel unaltered (except for the relatively trivial loss of some settlements) -- free to remain the racist, militarist Sparta it has become ever since 1948. That's why Israel will choose Two-State over One-State: Two-State guarantees that their Jewish state will remain demographically supreme, whereas One-State risks dilution of their ethnic solidarity. But even if the West's game plan is Two-State all along, you're not going to get there without playing the One-State card. If a US administration finally decides we need to settle this conflict, it won't start (as Obama did) by demanding a settlement freeze; it will start by demanding equal rights for all within whatever jurisdictions exist, and complete freedom from Israel for any jurisdictions that do not offer full and equal Israeli citizenship. Only then will progress be made. The problem with Goldberg's plea is that she's still willing to sacrifice her principles for Israel's identity.

• Ezra Klein: The DNC'a braidead attack on Rand Paul: Paul's been reading Hillary Clinton's neocon ravings, and responded: "We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS." The DNC's response: "It's disappointing that Rand Paul, as a Senator and a potential presidential candidate, blames America for all the problems in the world, while offering reckless ideas that would only alienate us from the global community. [ . .  ] That type of 'blame America' rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a conference of isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing in the world. In fact, Paul's proposals would make America less safe and less secure." Klein adds:

  This is the brain-dead patriotism-baiting that Democrats used to loathe. Now they're turning it on Paul.

  There are a few things worth noting here. The first is the ferocity with which the DNC responded to an attack that was, in truth, aimed more at Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The second is the degree to which a Rand Paul-Hillary Clinton race would scramble the politics of national security, with Democrats running against Paul in much the way Bush ran against Kerry. And the third is that it's still the case in foreign policy, the real divide isn't left vs. right, but interventionists vs. non-interventionists.

  Actually, the "real" political divide is between status quo cons like Obama and Clinton on the "left" side and various flavors of crackpots (including Rand) on the "right." But in foreign policy, the latter have come to include a growing number of non-interventionists, not so much because they believe in peace and justice as because they've come to realize that imperial wars bind us closer to the dark-skinned aliens we claim to be helping, and because some of them begin to grasp that the security apparatus of the state they so loathe (mostly because it's democratic, or pretends to be) could just as easily turn on them. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton have managed to hire virtually every known "liberal interventionist" as part of their efforts to toady up to the military-security complex, even though virtually none of their real-world supporters buy into that crap. Someone smarter than Rand Paul could turn this into a wedge issue, but he'll tie it to something stupid like preventing the Fed from counteracting recessions.

  Also see Paul Rosenberg: Don't do it, Hillary! Joining forces with neocons could doom Democrats: One thing on his mind is LBJ and Vietnam (who like Hillary was willing to do "dumb stuff" to not appear cowardly), but there's also this:

  Here's the dirtiest of dirty little secrets -- and it's not really a secret, it's just something no one ever talks about: The entire jihadi mess we're facing now all descends from the brilliant idea of "giving the Soviets their own Vietnam" in Afghanistan. How's that for learning a lesson from Vietnam? Well, that's the lesson that Jimmy Carter's crew learned -- and Ronald Reagan's gang was only too happy to double down on.

• Richard Silverstein: The Jingoism of Anti-Jihadism: Starts with a Netanyahu quote from September 11, 2001, that's worth being reminded of (from New York Times):

  Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror."

  I remember watching him on TV at the time, as well as a similarly gloating Shimon Peres, and a slightly more somber John Major offering to share with the US Britain's vast experience in cultivating terrorists. You couldn't ask for better examples of how to react badly and make a problem worse. Silverstein then quotes from Hillary Clinton's Atlantic interview ("They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank -- and we are all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat."):

  Here you have a perfect example of the sickness I outlined above. In the 1950s communism was the bugaboo. Today, it's jihadism. Clinton's conception of the latter uses almost exactly the same terms as those of the Red Scare: words like expansionist, angry, violent, intolerant, brutal, anti-democratic. There's even a touch of Reaganism in Clinton's portrayal of the fall of communism. There's the notion that through all of our machinations against the Soviet Union -- the assassinations, the coups, the propping up of dictators -- all of it helped in some unspecified way to topple Communism. She further bizarrely characterizes our anti-Communist strategy as an "overarching framework," when it was little more than knee-jerk oppositionalism to the Red Menace.

  What is most pathetic about this political stance is that it offers no sense of our own identity, of what we stand for. Instead, it offers a vague, incohate enemy against whom we can unite. We are nothing without such enemies.

  Next up is David Brooks, if you care. Richard Ben Cramer, in How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (by the way, probably the best single book about Israel in the last twenty years) hypothesizes that the reason Israel is so determined not to negotiate an end to the conflict is that its leaders fear losing the shared identity of having a common enemy in the Palestinians. Take the conflict away and the various Jewish subgroups -- the Ashkenazi, Sephardim, Mizrachi, Russians, Americans -- will splinter and turn on each other, fighting over diminishing spoils in a suddenly ordinary state.

  For more on Netanyahu, see Remi Brulin: Israel's decades-long effort to turn the word 'terrorism' into an ideological weapon.

• More Israel links:

  • Richard Silvestein: Meet the New Gaza Ceasefire, Same as the Old Ceasefire.
  • Rana Alshami: The End of 'Operation Protective Edge': "After the long sufferng inflicted upon us by Israel, Gaza was celebrating the victory. [ . . . ] At this moment, the bombing from East and West has completely stopped."
  • Jeff Halper: The Palestinian message to Israel: Deal with us justly. Or disappear: "At least Abbas seems to have gotten the message. He now discards further pointless negotiations with Israel as brokered by the US, preferring to have the UN set a target date for Israeli withdrawal, and perhaps going to the International Criminal Court."
  • Richard Silverstein: IDF Killed Three of Its Own Soldiers After Declaring Hannibal Directive.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Dean Baker: Subverting the Inversions: More Thoughts on Ending the Corporate Income Tax: Baker is arguing that the inefficiencies caused by the Corporate Tax Avoidance Industry are so great that we might be better off eliminating the tax altogether: if there were no tax, there'd be no need for corporations to pay lobbyists and accountants to hide their income, and we'd also eliminate scourges like private equity companies. First obvious problem here is that leaves a $350 billion revenue shortfall, which Baker proposes recovering with higher dividend and capital gains tax rates. (Of course, we should do that anyway.) One long-term problem is that federal taxes have radically shifted from being collected from businesses to individuals, which makes the tax burden more acutely felt by the public. A VAT would help shift this back, but so would anything that tightened up loopholes and reduced corporate tax evasion. Another advantage of having a corporate income tax is that it could be made progressive, which would take an extra bite out of especially large and/or profitable companies -- the former mostly benefitting from weak antitrust enforcement, the latter from monopoly rents -- which would both raise more revenue and take it from companies that are relatively safe from competition. I'm not strictly opposed to what Baker is proposing, but I'd like to see it worked out in a broader context that includes many other tax reforms that tackle inequality, lack of competition, globalization, and patents more systematically. I suspect Baker would prefer this too.

  Also see Baker's Patent Monopolies: The Reason Drug Companies Pushed Synthetic Opioids.

• Andrew Hartman: Hegel Meets Reagan: A review of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

• Medium's CSS is actually pretty f***ing good. [Warning: very nerdy.] CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. The visual design properties of web pages can generally be controlled by attaching CSS code to the "generic markup code" in a web page (something called HTML). Having worked with pre-Web GMLs (Generic Markup Languages, especially the standardized one, SGML), I've always been very "old school" about coding web pages, which means I've never embraced CSS as a programming paradigm. So my reaction here was first one of shock that so much work went into this. (Looks like four programmers for a couple years, although it's unlikely that they only wrote CSS.) I was also at a loss for much of the terminology (LESS? SASS? mixin?), not that I can't guess what "z-index" implies. It's not that I haven't learned anything in the 15 years since I started building web sites, and it's certainly not necessarily the case that what's changed has changed for the better, but if I'm going to get over the hump of embracing this change I need good examples of making it worthwhile. And this, I suspect, is one.

• Anya Schiffrin: The Rise and Fall of Investigative Journalism: An international compendium, spun off from her new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World. This, by the way, is one of the few things I've read this week that make me feel more hopeful.

• Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me: Reprints the title essay, or at least an early draft of it, to Solnit's new book. Of course, I've had clueless men explain things to me, too. (A few clueless women as well, but singling out men is within reasonable statistical norms.) And in groups I have a relatively sensitive CSMA/CD switch, so I'm easily interrupted and loathe to reclaim the floor, so the larger the group the more likely I am to be regaled with unrefuted (not irrefutable) nonsense. Much of my consciousness of such dynamics comes from reading early feminist texts long ago, revelatory even in cases where women are reacting not so much to gender as to implicit power relationships -- something gender was (and not uncommonly still is) inextricably bound up in, but something that didn't end with gender. So Solnit's stories speak to me, even when the precise terminology is slightly off. [One of my favorite tech acronyms, CSMA/CD stands for "carrier sense multiple access with collision detection" -- an algorithm for efficiently deciding when a computer can send data over a common bus network. The same would work for deciding who speaks when in an open room, but actual results are often distorted by volume and ego.]

• A few more links on Michael B. Katz:

  • Robert Greene II: In Memoriam: Michael Katz, 1939-2014: from the blog of the Society for US Intellectual History.
  • Thomas Sugrue: In Memorian: Michael B. Katz

One more little thing. I put aside the August 19, 2014 issue of the Wichita Eagle because I was struck by the following small items on page 3A:

Man sentenced to more than 7 years in prison . . . Scott Reinke, 43, was given 86 months in prison for a series of crimes including burglary, theft, possession of stolen property, making false information and fleeing or attempting to elude law enforcement. . . . In tacking on the additional time last Friday, [Judge Warren] Wilhelm noted Reineke had a criminal history of more than 50 felony convictions.

Kechi man gets nearly 10 years for child porn . . . Jaime Menchaca, 34, of Kechi pleaded guilty to one count of distributing child pornography and was sentenced to 110 months in prison. . . . In his plea, Menchaca admitted that on Sept. 13 he sent an e-mail containing child pornography to a Missouri man.

There's also another piece on page 5A:

Sex offender pleads guilty to child porn . . . Dewey had a 1999 conviction in Pueblo, Colorado, for attempted sexual assault of a child. He admitted in court Monday that he was found last September with images and videos of child pornography that he obtained via the Internet.

Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a 20-year prison term when Dewey is sentenced on Nov. 4.

This struck me as an example of something profoundly skewed in our criminal justice system. I won't argue that child pornography is a victimless crime (although what constitutes pornography can be very subjective), but possession of a single image strikes me as a much more marginal offense than repeated instances of property theft. (I don't think I even noticed the last case until I went back to look for the first two; it's harder to judge.) Glad the burglar/thief is going to jail, but wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for the child porn defendant to spend some time with a shrink, and maybe pay a nominal fine.

Also on the front page of the Eagle is an article called "Kan. GOP lawmakers vow to look out for oil interests": Senator Roberts, Reps. Huelskamp, Pompeo, and Jenkins prostate themselves at a Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association confab. They all agreed they wanted lower taxes and less regulation. Nobody said much about the recent tenfold increase in earthquakes.

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Monday, August 25, 2014

Music: Current count 23701 [23658] rated (+43), 530 [536] unrated (-6).

Was surprised to see rated count over 40, then looked closer and the subtraction result turned out to be an impossible 143. Looks like I slipped a digit two weeks ago. That was about when I had an editing accident and lost several hundred grades, sending me into a panic trying to figure out how to fix the breach. This seems to be the summer of things breaking -- I still figure that's better than the summers of mysterious lung diseases a few years back. Thinking about it, the 43 count means I've been listening to more Rhapsody, which I'll explain by last week's oversized Streamnotes plus the fact that my pending queue is nearly dry (18 new 2014 records, or 10 not counting this week's unpacking). I can remember days when I had more than 100 unrated in the queue. I still have some items from previous years I haven't gotten to (although only 1 of those was from 2013, a piece of vinyl I should look for), so we're talking real low priority stuff. No wonder my eye is wandering.

This year I decided not to do my all-consuming metacritic file (link is to 2013), but needing some kind of aide de memoire I've kept a running list of albums considered noteworthy and assigned priorities to them to give me something to work with. Recently, it looked like this, but since I was weeding out albums once I had heard them, it was pretty much useless for anyone else. So it occurred to me that it would be better to keep those records in, and for that matter to add my grades (where available). The combined file now looks like this. I've added some options to select based on priority levels, so you can get the old format like this if you have any reason to do so. There's also an option to get an even bigger file with all the "priority 0" records I've noted -- everything mentioned in AMG's weekly featured releases gets noted in the data file, even if I consider it to be of no interest whatsoever. Currently the data file lists 1644 records. Since last year's metacritic files ran to (7868+1100) records, I haven't been looking very hard. But as my queue drains I'll work on that some more. (I especially want to beef up the jazz listings.)

I fell behind on Twitter, wound up having to knock out nine tweets to wrap this up. Even so, I skipped a few of the "old music" albums -- they'll show up next Rhapsody Streamnotes, although you can check out Michael Tatum for Joy Division, below. Wrote one tweet for Jeff Palmer -- an organ player in my database I had no other consciousness of -- but played two albums, both good, but when you trade in Victor Lewis (a drummer I revere) for Rashied Ali you get an extra spark.

Speaking of Twitter, I retwitted one from Mike Konczal last night:

Sad that Michael Katz has passed away. A remarkable scholar, very important to me. Read Tom Sugrue's moving tribute: [link]

I added my own two cents:

Let me add that Michael Katz's history of the early school reform movement as class thought control/socialization was a key insight to me.

Katz wrote a lot of books, but the only ones I read were The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (1968; reissued 2001), and Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (1971; expanded 1975). He found that the early proponents of universal education like Horace Mann -- a name we knew because Wichita named a school for him -- were less concerned with offerng opportunities to Irish immigrants than with socializing them in proper New England ways, and conversely that the Irish resisted such efforts to brainwash them. I read these books when I was a high school dropout with my own intense distrust of an educational system that seemed geared to turn us into regimented factory workers (if we survived the army and Vietnam).

Katz later moved on to write about America's welfare system, in books like In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986; expanded 1996), The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1990), and Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History (1995), and more recently has published on immigration. Most recently, he wrote Why Don't American Cities Burn? (2011), about a murder in Philadelphia and all the attendant baggage of race and class. I hadn't thought much about Katz until The Undeserving Poor showed up in one of my recent book trawls. Interesting how his career developed. For more, see this In Memoriam by Thomas Sugrue (whose own books include The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (2005), Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race).

One more Twitter note, or at least semi-related. Medium is either a spinoff or an independent venture funded with Twitter money -- I don't pretend to understand how it works, but I have heard that they have some money to hire writers, and have hired Robert Christgau to write some Expert Witness/Consumer Guide posts. He has an account now that you can follow. He'll explain it all in an introductory post on September 2, followed by the first actual CG reviews on September 5.

Recommended music links:

• Robert Christgau on 'Get On Up': Putting James Brown's Music First
• Jason Gubbels: Ferguson Goddam: 31 Riffs on a Theme: actually, best thing I've read on Ferguson, totally appropriate.
• Michael Tatum: The Best of Joy Division: I gave this record a spin and a very solid A- myself.

New records rated this week:

• Auction Project: Slink (2014, self-released): violinist Heather Martin Bixler outshines the leaders, offering shape and substance to the usual postbop [cd]: B+(*)
• Henry Butler/Steven Bernstein: Viper's Drag (2014, Impulse): band named Hot 9 after Armstrong-Hines, comparisons neither can live up to [r]: B+(***)
• Calle 13: MultiViral (2014, El Abismo/Sony Music Latin): Puerto Rican rappers with a political agenda, unintelligible to folks like me, but at least I feel it [r]: B+(***)
• Brian Eno/Karl Hyde: Someday World (2014, Warp): Eno teams up with an inferior singer, so he tries to compensate by writing better songs [r]: B+(*)
• Dave "Knife" Fabris: Lettuce Prey (2010 [2014], Musea): guitarist into fusion and classical but also makes room for Ran Blake to do his thing [cd]: B-
• Simone Felice: Strangers (2014, Dualtone): one of the Felice Brothers tries his hand solo, forsaking those nice harmonies [r]: B+(*)
• The Felice Brothers: Favorite Waitress (2014, Dualtone): minus Simone, turns out they have more fun and edge, even a taste for mayhem [r]: B+(***)
• FKA Twigs: LP1 (2014, Young Turks): the sort of singer Tricky uses, OK as long as she comes up with music on that level, which isn't often [r]: B
• Hercules & Love Affair: The Feast of the Broken Heart (2014, Moshi Moshi): EDM, a bit slow, cartoonish even, but that's their shtick, isn't it? [r]: B
• Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas: Secret Evil (2014, Instant): Detroit group, straight rock & roll with a slight vocal skew, distinctive I'd say [r]: B+(***)
• Darius Jones/Matthew Shipp: Cosmic Lieder: The Darkseid Recital (2011-13 [2014], AUM Fidelity): dense piano chords slow the saxman down, for better or worse [r]: B+(*)
• Dr. John: Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch (2013 [2014], Concord): a Louis Armstrong tribute that misses its mark on so many levels I never conceived possible before [r]: C
• Roddy Frame: Seven Dials (2014, AED): singer-songwriter from Aztec Camera, 15 years into a solo career has pop charms but no more dazzle [r]: B+(*)
• Phil Haynes: No Fast Food: In Concert (2012 [2014], Corner Store Jazz, 2CD): drummer-led trio with Dave Liebman and Drew Gress, all sharp edges for two live discs [cd]: B+(***)
• Wayne Horvitz: 55: Music and Dance in Concrete (2012 [2014], Cuneiform): i.e., immobile: no swing, no bop, no hop, no strut, just fairly rich chamber jazz [cdr]: B
• Rebecca Kilgore with the Harry Allen Quartet: I Like Men (2013 [2014], Arbors): title concept could use sharper songs, saxophonist could use more space [r]: B+(*)
• Ricardo Lemvo/Makina Loca: La Rumba Soyo (2014, Cumbancha): Congolese star draws big beats and brass from salsa, supercharged with soukous guitar [r]: A-
• John McLaughlin & 4th Dimension: The Boston Record (2013 [2014], Abstract Logix): as the fusion guitarist ages, he eschews transcendence for hard and clunky [r]: B
• Hafez Modirzadeh: In Convergence Liberation (2011 [2014], Pi): George Russell student, explores high concepts with approaches I rarely care for [cd]: B+(**)
• Myriad 3: The Where (2014, ALMA): Canadian piano trio, hits a semi-popular niche like EST even if they aren't the influence [cd]: B+(**)
• Novox: Over the Honeymoon (2014, Label Z Production): French septet with fake funk horns, synths, turntablist, guitarist leader, vocal clutter [cd]: C+
• Picastro: You (2014, Sonic Clang): intriguing little group, basically slowcore with falsetto vocals, fractured and crazed around the edges [r]: B+(*)
• Pink Martini & the Von Trapps: Dream a Little Dream (2013 [2014], Heinz): the extra voices add a somber air, belying camp eclecticism from Brahms to ABBA [r]: B+(*)
• Anthony Pirog: Palo Colorado Dream (2014, Cuneiform): guitar trio with Michael Formanek and Ches Smith, not much flow or groove, feedback helps [cdr]: B+(*)
• Jeff Richman & Wayne Johnson: The Distance (2014, ITI Music): guitar duets, fancier picking than new age but fills that pleasantry niche [cd]: B+(*)
• Ritmos Unidos: Ritmos Unidos (2014, Patois): Latin jazz octet from Indiana, Afro-Cuban bata drums, timbales, the distinctive splash of steel pans [cd]: B+(**)
• Jonah Tolchin: Clover Lane (2014, Yep Roc): NJ singer-songwriter with warm voice and such fine country-folk form he could be new T-Bone Burnett [r]: A-
• Seth Walker: Sky Still Blue (2014, The Royal Potato Family): blues singer-songwriter, hits paydirt with "Jesus (Make My Bed)" but everything else is a bit tepid [r]: B
• The Bill Warfield Big Band: Trumpet Story (2013-14 [2014], Planet Arts): Randy Brecker solos, but the trumpet theme is underdeveloped; Vic Juris shines [r]: B+(*)
• Anna Webber: Simple (2013 [2014], Skirl): sax/flute trio with Matt Mitchell and John Hollenbeck stretching and skewing, best when all three thrash [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Smoke Dawson: Fiddle (1971 [2014], Tompkins Square):old-fashioned Appalachian solo fiddle, obscure reissue of a legend if playing with Peter Stampfel counts [r]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

• Joy Division: The Best of Joy Division (1979-80 [2008], Rhino): [r]: A-
• John Lindberg: Luminosity: Homage to David Izenzon (1992-96 [1996], Music & Arts): [r]: B+(**)
• John Lindberg: Ruminations Upon Ives and Gottschalk (2001 [2003], Between the Lines): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Quintet: Misterioso (1986 [1987], Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian Trio: One Time Out (1987 [1989], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Palmer/John Abercrombie/Arthur Blythe/Victor Lewis: Ease On (1992 [2013], Sledgehammer Blues): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Palmer/Arthur Blythe/John Abercrombie/Rashied Ali: Island Universe (1994, Soul Note): organ player goes avant with Rashied Ali/Arthur Blythe, and John Abercrombie follows suit [r]: A-
• Ted Rosenthal: My Funny Valentine (2007 [2008], Tokuma): piano trio nicely balanced for playing 11 juicy standards associated with Helen Merrill [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Richard Galliano: Sentimentale (Resonance): September 30
• Jason Jackson: Inspiration (Jack & Hill Music): October 14
• Kalle Kalima & K-18: Buñuel de Jour (TUM): September 16
• Dave Liebman Big Band: A Tribute to Wayne Shorter (Summit)
• Ivo Perelman/Karl Berger: Reverie (Leo)
• Carl Saunders: America (Summit)
• Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites (TUM, 2CD): September 16
• Tim Sparks: Chasin' the Boogie (Tonewood)

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Sunday, August 24, 2014

The first thing to note here is that the Four Wars of 2014 -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza -- are still going strong, and the conflicting interests super- and not-so-super-powers have in them offer excuses enough to frustrate any efforts at mediation. There have also been reports of shelling along the India-Pakistan border in Jammu, and the US is upset about China challenging a US "reconnaissance plane" near the Chinese border.

The least-reported of these conflicts is in the Ukraine, where various "pro-West" or "pro-Europe" forces staged a coup against Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovich in February. As Ukraine shifted to the West, various revolts broke out in heavily Russian southwest Ukraine. Crimea declared independence and asked to be annexed by Russia, which Putin readily agreed to. Other separatist militias seized power elsewhere in southeastern Ukraine, and the "pro-West" Kiev government has been trying to suppress the revolt the old-fashioned way, with bombing and strafing. It's unclear to what extent Russia has been actively promoting and supporting the separatists: NATO and Kiev have asserted various instances, and Putin has steadfastly denied them.

The result so far is that the civil war in Donbass (around Dontesk) has resulted in about 4,000 deaths -- I don't think that includes the Malaysian airliner that was shot down, surely an accident but part of the war's "collateral damage." The US has clearly sided with the "pro-Western" government in Kiev and taken a leading roll in attempting to punish Russia with sanctions. No one thinks Russia is totally innocent here, but the US position is the result of a long neocon campaign to advance NATO to Russia's borders, to corner and cower Russia to prevent the emergence of any non-US military or economic power center. And the failure to cover this war is largely due to blithe assumptions of US benevolence and Russian malevolence going back to Cold War dogma, as well as an abiding belief that force is an effective solution to the world's problems.

If the US was not so entangled in its faith in military force, you would see a concerted effort to mediate the four wars. Rather, Obama has embraced force as America's fundamental strategy in all four arenas. (Syria is only slightly murky here: the US dislikes both sides but can't see any option other than searching for a third side to arm.) The US is most directly involved in Iraq, where we've taken a sudden interest in protecting small minorities like Yazidis and Turkmen who have the most propaganda value. Then there is Gaza, where the ceasefire has been repeatedly broken by Israel, still refusing to open Gaza's borders to allow a semblance of normal everyday life. As I've written before, the "truce" terms Hamas offered at the beginning of the recent military hostilities were completely fair and reasonable. Netanyahu's continued rejection of the terms should make you reconsider just who "the terrorists" are in this conflict. The Gaza death count has continued to climb over 2100. Another Israeli civilian was killed in recent days, bringing the total to 4, in one of the most one-sided massacres of recent times.

While it is possible that ISIS is indeed a terrorist group one cannot negotiate with -- at least that's what the hawks want us to believe -- Hamas has practically been begging for a deal since they entered Palestinian electoral politics in 2006. Israel has not only rejected their every overture, Israel repeatedly drags them back into armed conflict. The US is schizophrenic about this: on the one hand we spend a lot of money trying to support the "good Palestinians" over in the West Bank in the vain belief that if we can improve their economic well-being that will help us move toward peace. On the other hand, any time Israel decides to trash whatever good we've done, we applaud and make sure to replenish their arms. I want to quote a section from Josh Ruebner's Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (p. 190):

Promoting "economic growth" for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, while simultaneously flooding Israel with the weapons and providing it with the diplomatic protection it needs to entrench this military occupation, is a nonsensical proposition. At best, these policies reveal that the United States is working at cross-purposes; at worst, they signal that it is trying to reconcile Palestinians to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly more palatable. What USAID fails to understand publicly is that Israel's military occupation is specifically designed to de-develop the Palestinian economy, not to encourage Palestinian economic growth.

Israel's eviscertation of teh Palestinian economy is integrally woven into the very fabric of its military occupation in innumerable ways. The hundreds of roadblocks, checkpoints and other barriers to movement that Israel maintains in the West Bank and East Jerusalem inhibit the transportation of people and goods, which forces the ever-increasing localization of the economy. Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has reduced its population to penury and almost total reliance on international charity for survival. Even before, Israel's formal imposition of the blockade on Gaza in 2007, Israel's earlier destruction of the Gaza Strip's only airport and its prevention of the building of a seaport there had greatly constricted Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from engaging in international trade. Similarly, Israel's wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its control of the West Bank's border corssings with Jordan, greatly reduce trade opportunities as well. Finally, Israel's widespread razing of Palestinian agricultural land and fruit-bearing trees, along with the expropriation of Palestinian land and water resources for its illegal settlements, have devastated the Palestinian agricultural sector.

The US at least nominally wants peace in Palestine, just not enough to stand up to Israel, which at most wants quiet but is willing to settle for hatred as long as Palestinians remain powerless -- which is one effect of mired in a hopeless economy. In one telling note, it's worth noting that the power plant in Gaza that Israel blows up every few years is insured by the US: Israel breaks it, we pay to fix it, then we pay Israel to break it again. It's a perfect example of government waste, but Americans don't seem able to see that, in large part because we think our interests extend everywhere, we think we have to choose sides everywhere, and we choose those sides on the basis of ignorance and identity.

Some scattered links this week:

• Ed Kilgore: Jeffords and the GOP's March to the Right: Vermont's last Republican Senator, James Jeffords, has died. He's best remembered for switching parties in 2001, denying Cheney's stranglehold on the Senate. Kilgore drew up a list of "moderate" Republican senators from 1976, just 25 years back, on the even of the Reagan juggernaut, and found 17 (of 38) qualified (not including the likes of Bob Dole and Howard Baker Jr.), adding VP Nelson Rockefeller and (more of a stretch) President Gerald Ford. Since then the Republican Party has been purged as rigorously as Stalin's CP -- the only division today seems to be between those who are categorically insane and those who are merely deranged.

• Philip Weiss: Hillary Clinton just lost the White House in Gaza -- same way she lost it in Iraq the last time: Some wishful thinking here, but it's worth noting that Clinton has strayed outside the bounds of partisan propriety, notably in attacking Obama's stated intent -- I'm hesitant to call it a policy without more evidence that he's actually trying to follow it -- of "not doing stupid shit."

  Hillary's done it again. Her pro-war comments in that famous interview two weeks ago have painted her into a right wing neoconservative corner. In 2016, a Democratic candidate will again emerge to run to her left and win the party base, again because of pro-war positioning on the Middle East that Hillary has undertaken in order to please neoconservatives.

  The last time it was Iraq, this time it was Gaza. Hillary Clinton had nothing but praise for Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, and echoed him in saying that Hamas just wanted to pile up dead civilians for the cameras. She was "hepped up" to take on the jihadists, she said that Obama's policy of "not doing stupid shit" was not a good policy. She undermined Obama for talking to Iran and for criticizing Israel over the number of civilian casualties in Gaza. She laid all the fault for the massacre at Hamas's door.

  And once again, Hillary Clinton will pay for this belligerency; she won't tenant the White House.

  Weiss knows he's "going out on a limb" so he cites some polling that's worth noting:

  Consider: Gallup says that Israel's actions in Gaza were unjustified in the eyes of the young, people of color, women, and Democrats, and overwhelmingly in some of those categories 51-25% disapproval among the young. 47-35 percent among Democrats, 44-33 among women, 49-25 among nonwhites.

  The problem, of course, is that while the majority of Democrats may have broken from AIPAC over Gaza, how many Democrats in Congress have? Not Elizabeth Warren. Not even Bernie Sanders. Certainly some hypothetical Democrat could score points against Clinton in primaries by painting her as a warmonger and pointing out how her obeissance to AIPAC only serves to prolong conflict in the Middle East, but it's impossible to identify a real Democrat who could effectively make those points. (Dennis Kucinich, for instance, tried twice, failed abysmally, and doesn't even have his House seat to stand on now. Howard Dean pretty much permanently discredited himself when he became a lobbyist for the Iranian terrorist group MEK.)

  The main thing that bothers me about Clinton isn't policy -- not that there aren't many points to disagree on -- so much as the stench of dynasty. More and more the Democratic Party resembles the so-called progressive parties of Pakistan and India, cynically ruled by corrupt families and cliques that needn't offer their supporters anything more than a small measure of protection from the viciousness of their opponents. You'd think that 238 years after the declaration of democracy in America we would have become more sophisticated than that -- indeed, we probably were, but have recently devolved into the present kleptocracy. Obama at least offered a symbolic break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties, but in the end that was only symbolic: his administration was rife with Clinton partisans, and he sealed the party's fate by breaking up the grassroots organization that had elected two Democratic Congresses -- foolishly or cynically preferring to "deal" with lobbyists and Republicans rather than risk democracy within his own party.

• More Israel Links:

  • Kate: Soldiers fire on Palestinian protesters in Nablus, including 14-year old boy: compendium of many news reports. One reports a poll where: "over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason"; "over 75 percent of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews"; "sixty percent of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home"; 40 percent said "Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked"; 55 percent said "Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites." Hard to see how anyone could look at these figures and not recognize that Israel has become profoundly racist and segregationist.
  • Gershom Gorenberg: It's Time to Stop 'Managing' the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Just End It: "The demands raised in the failed Cairo negotiations are exactly what Israel and the Palestinian unity government should have sat down to discuss in early June."
  • Annie Robbins: 'Common Dreams' website traps Hasbara troll spewing anti-Semitism: An example of false flag propaganda, meant to poison serious discussion of Israel.
  • Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: The constant presence of death in the lives of Palestinian children.
  • Philip Weiss: 'NYT' op-ed calls on Jews to abandon liberal Zionism and push for equal rights: In a nutshell, "equal rights" is the common denominator argument for all occasions, but especially for beleaguered minorities wherever they may be. It's intuitively right, and it's the one settlement that can appeal to all sides. It is, therefore, a position frequently advanced by Diaspora Jews. On the other hand, Israel is an ethnocracy, a place where one "chosen people" controls the state and uses it to oppress others -- a distinction that is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Cites the piece, Antony Lerman: The End of Liberal Zionism, which says: "I still understand its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I judged it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe."

Also, a few links for further study:

• Patrick Cockburn: How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate: Excerpt from Cockburn's forthcoming [January 6?] book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. There is a shortage of reliable info about ISIS, as well as a lot of propaganda. (The most laughable was Trudy Rubin claiming to know "The Truth About ISIS.") Not sure this helps a lot either, although the key point that the jihadists derive from the US disruption of Iraq is well taken. More detailed and less inflamatory is The leader of ISIS is 'a classic maneuver warrior', although the tactical comparisons to Genghis Khan strike me as bullshit.

• Thomas Frank: "Wanted Coltrane, Got Kenny G": Interview with Cornell West, reference is to Obama. "It's not pessimistic, brother, because this is the blues. We are blues people. The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark. That's different."

• Rahawa Haile: Should Musicians Play Tel Aviv? This kicks around the various reasons foreign musicians shouldn't play in Israel, with some asides on other related cases -- apartheid-era South Africa, obviously, but Haile also mentions concerts in "unsavory" dictatorships like Libya (under Gaddafi) and Turkmenistan, plus Stevie Wonder's decision to not bother with Florida after the Zimmerman verdict. Oddly, Haile spends much more time on Israel's often rabid reaction to African refugees -- mostly from Sudan, where Israel tried to score anti-Arab propaganda points -- than with Israel's second- or third-class treatment of Palestinians (actually, those in Gaza are probably more like fourth). (Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel has quite a bit on Israeli racism against African refugees, but that is just one instance of the more general loathing right-wing Israelis hold for nearly all goyim.) Neil Tennant is quoted: "in Israel anyone who buys a ticket can attend a concert." That, of course, depends on what you mean by "in Israel": if you live in Ramallah, 15 miles away, you can't buy tickets to see the Pet Shop Boys in Tel Aviv, nor can you if you live in Gaza, more like 40 miles away. Tennant is not only wrong, he is wrong in a particularly misleading way: his experience of Israel is of a normal, relatively peaceful and prosperous society, which is true enough for the "Tel Aviv bubble" but completely false for much of the territory subject to Israeli state terror. One thing that perpetuates Israeli state terror is the sense that its preferred citizens enjoy of never having to pay a price for their consent to living in such a state. When an international artists boycotts Israel, that at least sends a message that there is some cost to running such a state, even if it's not likely to have any real effect. The fact is that Israel cannot be forced into changing its ways: the only way change will come about is if Israelis become conscious of how far their nation has strayed from international norms of peace and human rights. For that reason I welcome all such boycotts. On the other hand, I don't keep track of who played Israel when or why. (One of the few I recall is Madonna, who made a documentary about a non-concert trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories, which if I recall correctly was very effective in exposing at least part of the brutality of the regime.) Nor do I discriminate against Israeli jazz musicians -- I must have written about close to 100 and I'd be surprised if the grade curve strays from any other national group. They are individuals, and while many may support their political leaders, many do not -- in fact a very large percentage of them are expatriates, living in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere -- and in any case, as an American I know as well as anyone that there is very little individuals can do about their governments.

• D.R. Tucker: The Powell Doctrine: Some notes on Lewis Powell, including his notorious US Chamber of Commerce memo that largely laid out the platform for right-wing business' takeover of American politics, and other things, including a defense of Roe. vs. Wade.

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