I couldn’t help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions
Never had that conversation. We talked about family stuff, or the heirloom fruit trees he had planted in his yard, or odd old songs he had discovered somewhere. And we played games.
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins?
I'm in touch with my cousing Peter - the Apache - on Facebook. After Charlie retired from FDNY he painted houses, and Peter basically apprenticed with him and continues to work as a house painter and general handyman. He had some bumpy times, but is all good now. Peter has the best family pictures and has become kind of the family archivist.
My cousin Tara - the Hopi - grew away from the family a bit at some point, although she and her daughter Kateri are still in touch with Charlie's kids.
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people.
They were a pretty remarkable crew.
FWIW, the younger guy on the left, sitting in front of my grandfather (older Archie Bunker looking guy in the white shirt) was Eddie Gonzales. Not a brother by birth, but basically unofficially adopted into the family.
Eddie's father abandoned him, and his mother was an alcoholic. Eddie himself was gay, which nobody ever talked about but everyone knew, and nobody really cared about one way or the other. He was good friends with the brothers, so he came and lived with them and my grandfolks raised him along with the rest of the gang.
Eddie was at every family gathering and was just part of the family, full stop. Just a part of the larger Richmond Hill crew.
So yes, this weird dilemma of people who are personally beautiful - kind and outgoing and generous - but aligned with social and political movements that are... not.
I think a part of all of this for my mom's folks was coming up through the Depression, and then WWII. The brothers were too young to serve in the war, but my father (guy in front of the Christmas tree holding the baby - you can only see the top of his head) did, and they all dealt with rationing etc.
They were basically poor - not desperately, but poor enough to have to watch every nickel and do without a lot of things. Like everyone around them was. Tucky - the brother in the middle with the big smile - was offered a full basketball scholarship to Columbia, and wasn't able to go, because the family needed him to work and bring money into the house.
My sense is that all of those experiences - the anxiety of having just barely enough, the sacrifices around wartime - gave them an ethic that you pull together and help out whoever needs help.
But lots of folks came through all of that and were not quite as open-hearted.
This crew and their kids were my people, really - my father's family were all in Georgia, and I did not see them as often, many of them I never even met. They were a joy to know, and I miss them.
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
The “rugged individualist” myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
And Grok cites Locke to support the claim that it's a "core American value".
You can persuade me that Locke argues for fundamental human rights, belonging to each individual.
I am... less than persuaded that Locke argued for "rugged individualism". If anything, Locke argued for a social contract, where we all agree to surrender some personal liberties in order to live in society, as opposed to in a state of nature.
Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
The US has consistently swung back and forth between more or less open door immigration policies, to highly restrictive ones. And we tend to swing back to restrictive policies when the number of immigrants in the US reaches about 15% of the overall population.
See here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
So, for example, in the later 19th C. we wanted folks to come because we wanted their labor. That's how my Italian great-grandparents come - great-grandpa was recruited to come dig holes for the NYC subway system.
Beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, folks began freaking out about it all, and by the 20's that resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically said no more immigrants from Asia at all, and far fewer from Eastern and Southern Europe. No more slant-eyes or swarthy garlic-eating weirdos. Right? Sound familiar?
So now we're back at around 15% and everybody is freaking out, like we always do. And Trump et al are riding that train.
Next, a question.
What "American culture" do we expect people to "assimilate" into? There are probably a couple dozen "American cultures" in play. I won't try to enumerate them, because we don't have all day here, but suffice it to say that there are *very many* places in this country where people speak different languages, practice different religions or no religion at all, listen to different kinds of music, eat different food, have different family structures.
It would appear from Vance's speech that what he would like is for everyone to speak primarily or exclusively English, be Christian (and preferably Catholic or evangelical Christian), and belong to a two-parent nuclear family with a male and female parent. I guess this is based on the idea that "English language", "Christian", and the "Leave it to Beaver" nuclear family are somehow "more American".
About 1 in 5 people in this country speak a language other than English at home. Are they "unassimilated"?
About 62% of people here identify as "Christian", but only about 3 in 10 people here attend church once a week or most weeks. About 28% of us identify as "religiously unaffiliated". The remaining 10% or so encompass all of the other faiths.
Are just that 3 in 10 "assimilated"?
Almost a quarter of American children live in single-parent households. Which is very high when compared to the rest of the world, but is not function of our rate of immigration. Are all of those families "assimilated"?
What is this "American culture" Vance et al are on about? What does it mean to be "assimilated" into that culture, whatever it is? Which of the variety of cultures that exist here get to be officially sanctions "American" ones?
The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy.
I wish I shared your optimism here, but unfortunately I do not.
The problem I see is that all the people who are more than fine with what's going on now are still gonna be here. They might not be an absolute majority, but there are a lot of them, and the non-democratic aspects of our polity - the Senate, the Electoral College - give them political clout beyond what their numbers would merit.
And a lot of the people who Trump and the conservative movement in general have brought into government are still gonna be there. Especially in the judiciary, not to exclude the SCOTUS. Roberts, Alito, Thomas are all 70 or older, but Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett all have decades of time ahead of them.
To add to that, I think the Trump years are gonna make the professional civil service - the people who actually do the governmenty stuff - a much less attractive option for people who might otherwise be interested in basic public service.
If every four years you're gonna have to worry about having to explain to some 20-something techbro asshole why what you do - monitoring economic and labor data, tracking the weather, medical research, etc. - is important enough to justify your continued employment is gonna make a lot of people look elsewhere.
Some folks who have been RIF'd would probably go back, a lot will not. And I can't blame them.
"it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it"
this ^^^
I'm sure it's obvious from my comments here over the years that I'm fine with an active government.
But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.
We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of "turn that around" manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.
So it's important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.
The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren't we probably wish were.
Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.
For the last week or two I've been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.
It's a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.
All done! All better! It's actually been kind of therapeutic.
Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I've been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.
Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.
It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.
I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it's actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.
There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn't mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don't let it run you over.
You're doing all good things, wonkie. It's an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.
Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
I spent the entire time my we watched "Downton Abbey" annoying my wife by yelling at the Crawley's to learn how to put on their own damned clothes. So I'm probably not the person most likely to have a positive opinion of the royal family.
All of that said, from this side of the pond the UK royals seem to have this weird dichotomony between the ones who are actually king or queen (or in line to be), and who seem to take the responsibilities of their office seriously, and the rest of the family, who end up having too much money and privilege and not enough to do so they end up behaving badly.
Over here, we've had Billy Beer, the wild and crazy Bush twins, Hunter Biden, and Uday and Qusay Trump. So I'm not sure we're in a position to point fingers.
If it's working for you all, carry on. Seems expensive, though. And they should all learn to put on their own clothes.
The comment in the podcast that most connected with me was Bouelle's statement about it not just being about the South as a geographic area, specifically. I live in blue part of blue MA, and the whole giant American and/or Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup with Eric Church or similar blasting is all over the place here.
Head out into Worcester or Franklin county, even more so.
Cross the border into southern NH, even more so.
What thinking lately about the whole moment we're in, and have been in since probably Reagan, is that this country has never successfully come to terms with the negative or darker side of our history. There is a lot that is negative in our history - violent, genocidal, explicitly and thoroughly racist. And we've never really found a way to come to terms with it.
So we end up with these weird overcompensating mythologies about American exceptionalism - how special and wonderful and indispensable we are.
And the people who do try to call it out are accused of "hating America". And some of them seem caught up in our darker corners, like they themselves can't let go of it or move past it.
And a lot of the really toxic shit has never really gone away. One of the remarkable things to me about the last 40 years or so is the degree to which it's become OK again to be an unapologetic racist. Or at least a "scientifically based" racist, see also the Bell Curve crap.
Or an unapologetic misogynist, or at least a proponent of the idea that men are somehow supposed to be the bosses. See also Charlie Kirk. Andrew Tate, who is clearly one sick bastard, has over 10 million followers.
I think this ends up - as Cottem points out - being "shunted off" onto the South because that region has the most overt history of, specifically, chattel slavery. The Confederacy was an explicit attempt to establish a state based on the doctrine of white supremacy and the legitimacy of black slavery. It's an obvious vector for the worst in our history. And, that is an obvious source for resentment on the part of the folks who live there.
But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism - to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think - right Helmut?) - by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.
And I think the way Trump fits into this is that his own personal pathology mirrors that of the nation perfectly.
Personal charisma is great, recognizing that nobody watches TV anymore so stop spending all your money there is great, understanding how to leverage social media is great.
Recruit the charismatic people, do all those things.
However.
My main criticism of the (D)'s over the last, say, 40 years is that they've neglected the areas that aren't what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.
When I say that, people often reply "how can you say that, their policies are much better for those folks". And in general I think that's true. But I'm not talking about *policy*. I'm talking about physical presence and local identity.
There are 50 states, 435 Congressional districts, and something north of 3,000 counties or county equivalents in the US. I don't know how many cities and towns, but a lot of those, too.
There should be a (D) candidate for every public office, in every one of those political units, in every cycle. There is not. My scientific wild-ass guess is that they're lucky if they field candidates in half of them.
There should be some kind of (D) field office in each of those political units, and the DNC and similar (D)-aligned organizations should be supporting all of them with money and people. They should *not* be telling them how to run their local organization, because the people who live in an area almost certainly know the area better than anybody in the DNC. But they should be supported with money, assistance in recruiting local candidates and volunteers, and with boots on the ground (as they say) during election cycles.
Way back when, Howard Dean developed a 50 state strategy to basically do the above. It worked well. Obama continued it at least for his first run, but since then it's kind of been abandoned.
There *is* interest in all of those places. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been holding town halls in very red places and thousands of people show up. So at least a basic level of interest is there.
My sense, or belief, is that the (D)'s as an institution have focused on the stuff they sort of know how to do - basically the easy stuff. Solicit big money from rich people in large cities, focus-group their messages to try to polish them up into something that will resonate with "regular people", lean heavily on the most reliable demographics that they are (more or less) sure to win.
It's a very top-down, center-of-power-centric approach.
They need to stop spending billions of dollars on consultants and start spending billions of dollars to establish and support *local (D) organizations* in every freaking political unit in the country. And let those organizations take the lead in identifying and understanding the issues that are significant to the people *in those places* and in explaining to those people how they benifit more from (D) policies than from (R) ones. Which, in general, they do. And also let those local folks take the lead in understanding how (D) policies do NOT benefit folks there, so they can evolve policy to address those needs.
Folks in all the places I'm talking about don't really care all that much what Chuck Schumer says. They might not even care all that much what Trump says other than to find it somewhere between annoying and entertaining.
But they will have a much harder time tuning out what their neighbor says.
The 50 state strategy, but really make it a 50 state, 435 district, 3,000 plus county, every town and city strategy. Support (D) candidates for mayor, town clerk, school board, county sheriff, tax assessor, dog catcher. State senate and house.
And, of course, federal House and Senate. But work from the bottom up.
Do that for 3 or 4 or 5 election cycles. They'll lose a lot, and spend a lot of money on doing so. And they'll win some. And over time, they'll win more.
Patience, persistence, and quit relying on the easy wins.
At vrious points in my brilliant code monkey career I contemplated offering bribes to the machines, but I could never figure out what they would take as currency.
Threats usually resulted in some technological version of "Oh yeah, well watch *this*!".
This first article on this page might be of interest for folks wanting more
Ai, rumba!! Allow me to digress.
Rumba in its various forms is / are kind of folkloric root and base of Cuban music. This right here is guaguanco, one of the three traditional rumba styles, and the one most commonly still performed, played here in pretty much it's traditional form.
Another guaguanco, with the great Orlando "Puntilla" Rios, grand old man of the Cuban / New York rumbero community. The clave is easier to hear here, it's more even eighth notes, where the more traditional players tend to elide the difference between a duple and triple time feel. This is *rumba* clave, a little different to the "Bo Diddley" "shave and a haircut" clave - called *son* clave - shown in the reggaeton in two minutes clip.
This is one of my favorite videos in the world. When they break into the call-and-response thing at about 4:30 and the dancers get up the joy of it all is palpable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnBN_AXfkvk
Salsa is more of a popular, dance club style, mostly based out of New York. Here is the great Ruben Blades performing "Pedro Navaja", which is basically the Spanish version of "Mack the Knife". This has son clave, which you can hear pretty clearly at the beginning of the tune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCC-zWQfdI
Clave is the key (literally) to a really broad range of musical styles and traditions of the Spanish-speaking African diaspora. It's one of many similar rhythmic patterns found in Africa, all of which turn out to be Euclidean rhythms, which I will not get into because we'll be here all night.
MAGAs do not want to share the world with anyone else. Not sharing is the point of the movement
They are in for a big disappointment, because the rest of the world isn't going away. And it's true, they're trying to make the US their own private homogenous playground, but there are too many other kinds of people here already. A lot of us were born here.
A lot of the brown Spanish speaking people were here before this country was.
I don't know what it's gonna take for these fuckers to get it through their heads that white skin and blue eyes just ain't that big of a deal.
There’s also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with.
I can affirm this.
A former minister of mine was at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" calamity - she lived there at the time and was present as a peaceful protestor. Her own account of the day gives a lot of credit to antifa (by whatever label) for providing a buffer between the quite violent right wing folks and the folks there to protest peacefully.
In my own direct expeience, I've seen "antifa" folks present at demonstrations who were there to provide medical or trauma help if that was needed (thankfully it was not). Carrying a simple trauma first aid kit, and they were clearly marked with red crosses on their kit and on armbands.
My comment was really toward the folks who come deliberately to fight, specifically. I more or less understand the impulse - I think most of us feel anger at the stuff that goes on - but I'm not sure it accomplishes anything useful. It just gives the Andy Ngo and "Based Stick Man" types of the world something to look forward to.
Hey, that's actually a really good breakdown of reggaeton. Clear and succint and accurate.
I am completely ignorant of Bad Bunny's work because (a) rap leaves me behind because I have a hearing impairment that makes it basically impossible for me to make out lyrics in recorded music, and (b) reggaeton drives me nuts - it's not just that it's repetitive, the repeating cell is so small that there is no (to my ear) breathing room.
Plus I live near a couple of large Latin communities and the way I hear reggaeton is typically being cranked from some guy's car at a volume level that makes the doors of my car vibrate from the massive bass. I want to take those guys aside and say "You're gonna be stone deaf by the time you're 40" but I'm more than sure they wouldn't care. They're having fun now, 40 is a long way off.
I miss salsa. At least that gives you both sides of the clave.
All of that said, BB seems like a very interest artist and social and cultural persona. I'm not a sports guy and will likely not watch the Super Bowl, but I'm both amused and delighted that he was the NFL's pick for the half time show.
In my wildest dreams I would never have predicted the NFL as a socially forward-looking organization. I suspect they know who their viewing audience is.
MAGAs just gonna have to learn to share the world with everybody else.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “People and poliltics”
I couldn’t help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions
Never had that conversation. We talked about family stuff, or the heirloom fruit trees he had planted in his yard, or odd old songs he had discovered somewhere. And we played games.
"
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins?
I'm in touch with my cousing Peter - the Apache - on Facebook. After Charlie retired from FDNY he painted houses, and Peter basically apprenticed with him and continues to work as a house painter and general handyman. He had some bumpy times, but is all good now. Peter has the best family pictures and has become kind of the family archivist.
My cousin Tara - the Hopi - grew away from the family a bit at some point, although she and her daughter Kateri are still in touch with Charlie's kids.
"
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people.
They were a pretty remarkable crew.
FWIW, the younger guy on the left, sitting in front of my grandfather (older Archie Bunker looking guy in the white shirt) was Eddie Gonzales. Not a brother by birth, but basically unofficially adopted into the family.
Eddie's father abandoned him, and his mother was an alcoholic. Eddie himself was gay, which nobody ever talked about but everyone knew, and nobody really cared about one way or the other. He was good friends with the brothers, so he came and lived with them and my grandfolks raised him along with the rest of the gang.
Eddie was at every family gathering and was just part of the family, full stop. Just a part of the larger Richmond Hill crew.
So yes, this weird dilemma of people who are personally beautiful - kind and outgoing and generous - but aligned with social and political movements that are... not.
I think a part of all of this for my mom's folks was coming up through the Depression, and then WWII. The brothers were too young to serve in the war, but my father (guy in front of the Christmas tree holding the baby - you can only see the top of his head) did, and they all dealt with rationing etc.
They were basically poor - not desperately, but poor enough to have to watch every nickel and do without a lot of things. Like everyone around them was. Tucky - the brother in the middle with the big smile - was offered a full basketball scholarship to Columbia, and wasn't able to go, because the family needed him to work and bring money into the house.
My sense is that all of those experiences - the anxiety of having just barely enough, the sacrifices around wartime - gave them an ethic that you pull together and help out whoever needs help.
But lots of folks came through all of that and were not quite as open-hearted.
This crew and their kids were my people, really - my father's family were all in Georgia, and I did not see them as often, many of them I never even met. They were a joy to know, and I miss them.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
On “Horrifying stuff”
Also, as a comment on the "work ethic" thing:
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
Just saying.
"
Core Tenets of American Culture
The “rugged individualist” myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
And Grok cites Locke to support the claim that it's a "core American value".
You can persuade me that Locke argues for fundamental human rights, belonging to each individual.
I am... less than persuaded that Locke argued for "rugged individualism". If anything, Locke argued for a social contract, where we all agree to surrender some personal liberties in order to live in society, as opposed to in a state of nature.
Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
"
So, first, an observation.
The US has consistently swung back and forth between more or less open door immigration policies, to highly restrictive ones. And we tend to swing back to restrictive policies when the number of immigrants in the US reaches about 15% of the overall population.
See here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
So, for example, in the later 19th C. we wanted folks to come because we wanted their labor. That's how my Italian great-grandparents come - great-grandpa was recruited to come dig holes for the NYC subway system.
Beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, folks began freaking out about it all, and by the 20's that resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically said no more immigrants from Asia at all, and far fewer from Eastern and Southern Europe. No more slant-eyes or swarthy garlic-eating weirdos. Right? Sound familiar?
So now we're back at around 15% and everybody is freaking out, like we always do. And Trump et al are riding that train.
Next, a question.
What "American culture" do we expect people to "assimilate" into? There are probably a couple dozen "American cultures" in play. I won't try to enumerate them, because we don't have all day here, but suffice it to say that there are *very many* places in this country where people speak different languages, practice different religions or no religion at all, listen to different kinds of music, eat different food, have different family structures.
It would appear from Vance's speech that what he would like is for everyone to speak primarily or exclusively English, be Christian (and preferably Catholic or evangelical Christian), and belong to a two-parent nuclear family with a male and female parent. I guess this is based on the idea that "English language", "Christian", and the "Leave it to Beaver" nuclear family are somehow "more American".
About 1 in 5 people in this country speak a language other than English at home. Are they "unassimilated"?
About 62% of people here identify as "Christian", but only about 3 in 10 people here attend church once a week or most weeks. About 28% of us identify as "religiously unaffiliated". The remaining 10% or so encompass all of the other faiths.
Are just that 3 in 10 "assimilated"?
Almost a quarter of American children live in single-parent households. Which is very high when compared to the rest of the world, but is not function of our rate of immigration. Are all of those families "assimilated"?
What is this "American culture" Vance et al are on about? What does it mean to be "assimilated" into that culture, whatever it is? Which of the variety of cultures that exist here get to be officially sanctions "American" ones?
What is "American culture"? Who gets to decide?
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy.
I wish I shared your optimism here, but unfortunately I do not.
The problem I see is that all the people who are more than fine with what's going on now are still gonna be here. They might not be an absolute majority, but there are a lot of them, and the non-democratic aspects of our polity - the Senate, the Electoral College - give them political clout beyond what their numbers would merit.
And a lot of the people who Trump and the conservative movement in general have brought into government are still gonna be there. Especially in the judiciary, not to exclude the SCOTUS. Roberts, Alito, Thomas are all 70 or older, but Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett all have decades of time ahead of them.
To add to that, I think the Trump years are gonna make the professional civil service - the people who actually do the governmenty stuff - a much less attractive option for people who might otherwise be interested in basic public service.
If every four years you're gonna have to worry about having to explain to some 20-something techbro asshole why what you do - monitoring economic and labor data, tracking the weather, medical research, etc. - is important enough to justify your continued employment is gonna make a lot of people look elsewhere.
Some folks who have been RIF'd would probably go back, a lot will not. And I can't blame them.
"
"it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it"
this ^^^
I'm sure it's obvious from my comments here over the years that I'm fine with an active government.
But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.
We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of "turn that around" manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.
So it's important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.
The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren't we probably wish were.
Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.
That's how we get through.
"
For the last week or two I've been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.
It's a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.
All done! All better! It's actually been kind of therapeutic.
Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I've been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.
Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.
It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.
I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it's actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.
There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn't mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don't let it run you over.
You're doing all good things, wonkie. It's an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
OK, now I gotta check Opeth!
Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
Here's Jerry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G0qZsW481g
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
"
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
On “Something Different”
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
And so, I am sad. :(
Thank you!
"
Other people must be doing interesting and/or useful things beyond politics.
I've been cleaning black mold out of the basement. Big fun!!
:(
Also, went to a two-day reiki class over the weekend, which was actually kind of profound. And fun. Profound fun.
Looking forward to getting the basement wrapped up so I can get back to the vibes.
On “Monarchy in the UK”
Well, not always by a long shot.
I stand corrected!
"
I spent the entire time my we watched "Downton Abbey" annoying my wife by yelling at the Crawley's to learn how to put on their own damned clothes. So I'm probably not the person most likely to have a positive opinion of the royal family.
All of that said, from this side of the pond the UK royals seem to have this weird dichotomony between the ones who are actually king or queen (or in line to be), and who seem to take the responsibilities of their office seriously, and the rest of the family, who end up having too much money and privilege and not enough to do so they end up behaving badly.
Over here, we've had Billy Beer, the wild and crazy Bush twins, Hunter Biden, and Uday and Qusay Trump. So I'm not sure we're in a position to point fingers.
If it's working for you all, carry on. Seems expensive, though. And they should all learn to put on their own clothes.
On “The South shall writhe again”
The comment in the podcast that most connected with me was Bouelle's statement about it not just being about the South as a geographic area, specifically. I live in blue part of blue MA, and the whole giant American and/or Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup with Eric Church or similar blasting is all over the place here.
Head out into Worcester or Franklin county, even more so.
Cross the border into southern NH, even more so.
What thinking lately about the whole moment we're in, and have been in since probably Reagan, is that this country has never successfully come to terms with the negative or darker side of our history. There is a lot that is negative in our history - violent, genocidal, explicitly and thoroughly racist. And we've never really found a way to come to terms with it.
So we end up with these weird overcompensating mythologies about American exceptionalism - how special and wonderful and indispensable we are.
And the people who do try to call it out are accused of "hating America". And some of them seem caught up in our darker corners, like they themselves can't let go of it or move past it.
And a lot of the really toxic shit has never really gone away. One of the remarkable things to me about the last 40 years or so is the degree to which it's become OK again to be an unapologetic racist. Or at least a "scientifically based" racist, see also the Bell Curve crap.
Or an unapologetic misogynist, or at least a proponent of the idea that men are somehow supposed to be the bosses. See also Charlie Kirk. Andrew Tate, who is clearly one sick bastard, has over 10 million followers.
I think this ends up - as Cottem points out - being "shunted off" onto the South because that region has the most overt history of, specifically, chattel slavery. The Confederacy was an explicit attempt to establish a state based on the doctrine of white supremacy and the legitimacy of black slavery. It's an obvious vector for the worst in our history. And, that is an obvious source for resentment on the part of the folks who live there.
But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism - to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think - right Helmut?) - by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.
And I think the way Trump fits into this is that his own personal pathology mirrors that of the nation perfectly.
On “Politics thread”
Personal charisma is great, recognizing that nobody watches TV anymore so stop spending all your money there is great, understanding how to leverage social media is great.
Recruit the charismatic people, do all those things.
However.
My main criticism of the (D)'s over the last, say, 40 years is that they've neglected the areas that aren't what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.
When I say that, people often reply "how can you say that, their policies are much better for those folks". And in general I think that's true. But I'm not talking about *policy*. I'm talking about physical presence and local identity.
There are 50 states, 435 Congressional districts, and something north of 3,000 counties or county equivalents in the US. I don't know how many cities and towns, but a lot of those, too.
There should be a (D) candidate for every public office, in every one of those political units, in every cycle. There is not. My scientific wild-ass guess is that they're lucky if they field candidates in half of them.
There should be some kind of (D) field office in each of those political units, and the DNC and similar (D)-aligned organizations should be supporting all of them with money and people. They should *not* be telling them how to run their local organization, because the people who live in an area almost certainly know the area better than anybody in the DNC. But they should be supported with money, assistance in recruiting local candidates and volunteers, and with boots on the ground (as they say) during election cycles.
Way back when, Howard Dean developed a 50 state strategy to basically do the above. It worked well. Obama continued it at least for his first run, but since then it's kind of been abandoned.
There *is* interest in all of those places. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been holding town halls in very red places and thousands of people show up. So at least a basic level of interest is there.
My sense, or belief, is that the (D)'s as an institution have focused on the stuff they sort of know how to do - basically the easy stuff. Solicit big money from rich people in large cities, focus-group their messages to try to polish them up into something that will resonate with "regular people", lean heavily on the most reliable demographics that they are (more or less) sure to win.
It's a very top-down, center-of-power-centric approach.
They need to stop spending billions of dollars on consultants and start spending billions of dollars to establish and support *local (D) organizations* in every freaking political unit in the country. And let those organizations take the lead in identifying and understanding the issues that are significant to the people *in those places* and in explaining to those people how they benifit more from (D) policies than from (R) ones. Which, in general, they do. And also let those local folks take the lead in understanding how (D) policies do NOT benefit folks there, so they can evolve policy to address those needs.
Folks in all the places I'm talking about don't really care all that much what Chuck Schumer says. They might not even care all that much what Trump says other than to find it somewhere between annoying and entertaining.
But they will have a much harder time tuning out what their neighbor says.
The 50 state strategy, but really make it a 50 state, 435 district, 3,000 plus county, every town and city strategy. Support (D) candidates for mayor, town clerk, school board, county sheriff, tax assessor, dog catcher. State senate and house.
And, of course, federal House and Senate. But work from the bottom up.
Do that for 3 or 4 or 5 election cycles. They'll lose a lot, and spend a lot of money on doing so. And they'll win some. And over time, they'll win more.
Patience, persistence, and quit relying on the easy wins.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
They're saying almost 7 million at No Kings today.
that's a lot of people
On “The Return of the Boat Hook”
At vrious points in my brilliant code monkey career I contemplated offering bribes to the machines, but I could never figure out what they would take as currency.
Threats usually resulted in some technological version of "Oh yeah, well watch *this*!".
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
Absolutely
"
This first article on this page might be of interest for folks wanting more
Ai, rumba!! Allow me to digress.
Rumba in its various forms is / are kind of folkloric root and base of Cuban music. This right here is guaguanco, one of the three traditional rumba styles, and the one most commonly still performed, played here in pretty much it's traditional form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOQvzI1A2P0
Another guaguanco, with the great Orlando "Puntilla" Rios, grand old man of the Cuban / New York rumbero community. The clave is easier to hear here, it's more even eighth notes, where the more traditional players tend to elide the difference between a duple and triple time feel. This is *rumba* clave, a little different to the "Bo Diddley" "shave and a haircut" clave - called *son* clave - shown in the reggaeton in two minutes clip.
This is one of my favorite videos in the world. When they break into the call-and-response thing at about 4:30 and the dancers get up the joy of it all is palpable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnBN_AXfkvk
Salsa is more of a popular, dance club style, mostly based out of New York. Here is the great Ruben Blades performing "Pedro Navaja", which is basically the Spanish version of "Mack the Knife". This has son clave, which you can hear pretty clearly at the beginning of the tune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCC-zWQfdI
Clave is the key (literally) to a really broad range of musical styles and traditions of the Spanish-speaking African diaspora. It's one of many similar rhythmic patterns found in Africa, all of which turn out to be Euclidean rhythms, which I will not get into because we'll be here all night.
I pretty much love Latin music.
"
MAGAs do not want to share the world with anyone else. Not sharing is the point of the movement
They are in for a big disappointment, because the rest of the world isn't going away. And it's true, they're trying to make the US their own private homogenous playground, but there are too many other kinds of people here already. A lot of us were born here.
A lot of the brown Spanish speaking people were here before this country was.
I don't know what it's gonna take for these fuckers to get it through their heads that white skin and blue eyes just ain't that big of a deal.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
There’s also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with.
I can affirm this.
A former minister of mine was at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" calamity - she lived there at the time and was present as a peaceful protestor. Her own account of the day gives a lot of credit to antifa (by whatever label) for providing a buffer between the quite violent right wing folks and the folks there to protest peacefully.
In my own direct expeience, I've seen "antifa" folks present at demonstrations who were there to provide medical or trauma help if that was needed (thankfully it was not). Carrying a simple trauma first aid kit, and they were clearly marked with red crosses on their kit and on armbands.
My comment was really toward the folks who come deliberately to fight, specifically. I more or less understand the impulse - I think most of us feel anger at the stuff that goes on - but I'm not sure it accomplishes anything useful. It just gives the Andy Ngo and "Based Stick Man" types of the world something to look forward to.
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
Hey, that's actually a really good breakdown of reggaeton. Clear and succint and accurate.
I am completely ignorant of Bad Bunny's work because (a) rap leaves me behind because I have a hearing impairment that makes it basically impossible for me to make out lyrics in recorded music, and (b) reggaeton drives me nuts - it's not just that it's repetitive, the repeating cell is so small that there is no (to my ear) breathing room.
Plus I live near a couple of large Latin communities and the way I hear reggaeton is typically being cranked from some guy's car at a volume level that makes the doors of my car vibrate from the massive bass. I want to take those guys aside and say "You're gonna be stone deaf by the time you're 40" but I'm more than sure they wouldn't care. They're having fun now, 40 is a long way off.
I miss salsa. At least that gives you both sides of the clave.
All of that said, BB seems like a very interest artist and social and cultural persona. I'm not a sports guy and will likely not watch the Super Bowl, but I'm both amused and delighted that he was the NFL's pick for the half time show.
In my wildest dreams I would never have predicted the NFL as a socially forward-looking organization. I suspect they know who their viewing audience is.
MAGAs just gonna have to learn to share the world with everybody else.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.