Posts

Posted on

Beyond Our Scope

“Reality,” says Haruki Murakami in a novel, “is just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life.”

Indeed, you don’t have to be a total pessimist to agree with that judgment. The world is presently so full of ominous prophecies that we’re simply incapable of taking action in critical areas. The greatest conundrums and quandaries of our time—Artificial Intelligence and how to handle it, climate change, politics, governance—offer us no widely acceptable or adaptable solutions.

Our quandaries grow out of the “ominous prophecies” from scientists, politicians, nut cases and media gurus, none of whom have viable answers, or even good partial answers. Humanity is stuck with qualified, fractional or crazed proposals that get us nowhere. Evaluating such stuff, much less acting on it, seems beyond our power. Our biggest predicaments are paralyzing us.

Geoffrey Hinton, so-called godfather to AI, recently quit Google to announce to the world the prodigious dangers of the new technology. He thinks these may be more urgent even than climate change, which is “a huge risk too.” Hinton believes “that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.”

The Biden administration just convened a meeting about AI’s risks. Given how the GOP works, who can be sanguine about the outcome? My friend Bill Davidow, a digital pioneer who has written much about AI, is also very worried about what he calls the rising dominance of virtual homo sapiens, “automatons that cannot put down their smart devices and spend endless hours perusing social networks and watching YouTube videos.”

He recently wrote me: “In general, I feel that the new technologies are in the process of creating purposeless unhappy people with severe mental problems. AI is a new tool for powering the process. We are maladapted to the virtual world.” Two Google scientists recently committed suicide in New York. What does that mean?

We all must hope that the AI horse is not out of the barn, but I fear that it is. Hinton worries that failure to control AI may even displace our failure to deal with climate change. Three years ago I wrote here about how unlikely it was that the world could achieve its 1.5-C degree warming limit. That is even less likely now.

Scientists and the United Nations keep issuing powerful warnings. China and other states keep relying on coal, and generate other pollutants. We keep reading headlines like this—Eleven Chemical Plants in China and One in the U.S. Emit a Climate Super-Pollutant Called Nitrous Oxide That’s 273 Times More Potent Than Carbon Dioxide—and wonder why nothing is being done.

Globally, a few countries are beginning to take action on climate, among them Denmark, Sweden and Chile. The big polluters face immense problems, of course. But, as MIT reported, “The US is by far the largest historical emitter, responsible for over 20% of all emissions, and the EU is close behind.” Right now, China is far outpacing the US.

How to deal with climate change is the messiest, most convoluted and critical problem that human civilization has ever had to confront. With political cooperation within and between countries at a new low, the outlook remains grim. I was just blessed with a new grandchild and fear for the world he and his brothers are going to inhabit.

Posted on

Foul Language Ascendant

According to several reports, Tucker Carlson got fired for using the “c-word” in reference to one of his bosses. And the Fox newsroom apparently was awash in unwholesome epithets, often sexual in nature. Such is the state of far-right conservatism. But heavy-duty expletives, once stigmatized by politicians and the media, now prevail everywhere.

You surely have noticed this. Films and pop music seem to glory in their ever more funky language. The staid New York Times now grudgingly accepts profanity. So does NBC News and many major media outlets. It seems to be coin of the realm to spice up stories with otherwise little merit.

Readers of this blog know that I’m not a prude about language. I counted eight stories with the word “bullshit” in them, but I like to avoid the stronger stuff unless it’s in a quote. Hot words lose their punch quickly, particularly with overuse. And the purpose is not blasphemy anymore; it’s putting on an act of being streetwise and hip.

When I was much younger I used foul language a lot. Sometimes it was just a lazy way to make a point or impress a listener, and sometimes that was worth doing. You have to develop a kind of good taste in when and how you swear. That’s lacking in so much of what we hear and see in the media today.

Though this linguistic indulgence began before him, Trump is largely responsible for how such language (and behavior) has flourished. His language is key to how his followers respond to him. Does it help the rest of us understand him? I don’t know. If I called him a coarse motherfucking pussy-grabber, does that clarify anything?

Bless E. Jean Carroll for pursuing her case and telling her story. The Post’s Ruth Marcus says that we need to hear these repellent stories over and again “to remind ourselves of how far Trump has dragged us down into the gutter with him, reduced to his level of tawdry entitlement.”

“Tawdry entitlement.” That really says it all, doesn’t it? Language, as someone said, is the window to the soul.

Posted on

Ahmad: Dying into Life

When great jazz musicians die, those of us who loved their music mourn their loss by remembering their sound. We don’t rehearse and recast their lives; that’s for the obit writers to do. When I wrote about Wayne Shorter’s passing a couple of months ago, I complained that jazz’s “great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived.”

That is certainly true with the recent death of Ahmad Jamal whom the unwashed would accuse of playing cocktail music and tinkle-tinkle piano. Now at least some writers have recognized that he created a wholly new sound for jazz—not only with his rhythmic displacements (which Miles Davis often acknowledged) but with his left-hand vamping approach.

That, as pianist Benny Green noted, “laid the template for the essential approach that’s been universally applied by influential pioneers such as Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea.” Add to that roster Keith Jarrett.

Ahmad also made marvelous resurrections of old sentimental yet rich pop and show tunes, a practice Bill Evans and others took up. His 1958 hit, “Poinciana,” made him popular and well-off. About that time I was studying graduate English at the University of Chicago, and friends and I would venture to the Pershing Hotel frequently to meet the man and hear his novel music.

The Pershing was just west of Hyde Park and the University, at 64th and Cottage Grove Avenue, a solid black middle-class neighborhood. The hotel’s lounge hosted many jazz greats. Ahmad was young, approachable, and played piano like no one else. I have a number of his albums from those days when he played with the great Israel Crosby (bass) and Vernel Fournier (drums).

Another 1958 success was his version and subsequent album “But Not for Me.”

After his “Poinciana” triumph Jamal went on to greater acceptance though recently, I think, was somewhat passed over as a member of the jazz pantheon. His music changed but was always strong and involving. Here’s what he did some years ago (1970) with Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.”

Ahmad left us at age 92. For me there seems something magical and strange about dying at that age. My two good jazz friends, Sue Mingus and Sy Johnson, both died last year, also at 92. I keep wondering how and if I’ll catch up with them—and now with Ahmad Jamal.

Posted on

Good Places Gone Bad

Condos next door, Puerto Escondido

In my life I’ve been very lucky to spend time and live in some desirable places: venues like Greenwich Village, Martha’s Vineyard, Little Compton Rhode Island, Chesapeake Bay, the coast of Maine. I took vacations to rare places like Tortola, the Leeward Islands and, years ago, Cozumel.

Now we learn that Cozumel, home to great scuba diving and laid-back Mexican charm, has been totally taken over by giant cruise ships. They disgorged some “1.2 million cruise ship passengers aboard 390 ocean liners in the first three months of 2023.” The place is now like St. Thomas and much of the Caribbean, host to hordes of vacationers seeking a charm that has vanished.

New York, the Vineyard—where we owned a small house—and even the fisherman’s backwater of Little Compton have been taken over by the rich and infamous who have transformed what was charming and unique into vacation spots for the masses with condos, hotels, Airbnbs, and freaks on mopeds.

You’re probably aware of how the process works. The word gets out from savvy travelers who tell their friends and cohorts about their wonderful discoveries. As in politics, word of mouth is a powerful change agent. Then come the speculators, sensing big profits, and the developers who build on models of what they know will sell.

The glowing reviews in respected travel publications just fan the flames and bring more vacationers who want a piece of the action. I wrote a blog last year about how some of us in Oaxaca respond to this.

Every new Travel+Leisure piece or New York Times article just brings in more of these vagrant deadbeats. They descend on us like the locusts. So we, or some of us, find a perverse joy in taking their money and making fun of them.

In smaller communities like Puerto Escondido, where I spend a good deal of time, demand can outrun supply, so prices go up and services go down. The infrastructure (water, health services, electric, internet, etc.) cannot keep pace. When my partner built a house here twelve years ago on a quiet street away from downtown there now loom five-story condos that are often in violation of the building codes. Trucks and construction noise abound. Real estate values skyrocket. Some old-timers want to move out.

One likely reason people are constantly searching for the perfect getaway is to escape from American culture. This is part of what drove me to Mexico some fourteen years ago. Today it’s the advent of Trump, the continuing tolerance of gun violence, the collapse of a working polity, the coarseness of American life, climate change—any or all can drive one to search for a better land.

And yet we know the transformation of good places into tourist havens has been going on for many years. It might be that laissez-faire economics also has something to do with this. People are encouraged to do whatever they want in the name of freedom, and desirable communities enforce few regulations. And many such places seem happy to sell out charm and uniqueness for the tourist dollar.

Posted on

Laughing All the Way to the Bench

Kudos to ProPublica, which finally pursued and broke open the story about Harlan Crow’s longstanding gifts to Clarence the Logroller. I wonder, is this just another tale of MAGA mania to be ignored or suppressed by a burnt-out public? Since it’s so difficult to impose any kind of ethics test (even though there is one) on the Supremes, will anything come of this? Will the story have any legs?

It just might if John Roberts has balls—or if the Democrats can keep some pressure on. Impeaching Thomas is just not possible since the Dems don’t have the votes. The whole Dark Money thing, with billions in unacknowledged contributions, owes its life to Citizens United (“money is speech”), one of the worst-ever decisions by the Court.

There is a federal law against these sorts of contributions but does it, will it, have any teeth? Thomas and his wife have enjoyed Harlan’s “opulent getaways” for decades—from a guy who is in bed with Leonard Leo and the whole crew of Dark Money funders. Harlan Crow also seems to be an equal-opportunity giver: he has contributed lesser funds to Manchin and Sinema, Gottheimer and Cuellar, who have frustrated the Biden administration forever.

The case against Thomas was well put by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate:

For years we have been hearing from the justices that it’s not their fault so many parties with business before the court are also their best friends. We’ve heard that it’s not on them to stop generous pals from lavishing gifts upon them. We have been given to understand—as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in justifying his own travels with parties litigating before him—that justices need to hang out with fabulous and wealthy movers and shakers because who else is there to hang out with. Oh, and for years we have swallowed the pablum that these trips are so intrinsically fun and interesting that Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, and a megadonor can sit around for hours chatting about sports, and not talking about any past, present, or future matter that may come before the court.

And, according to Michael Tomasky, whose reporting I respect, Ginny Thomas’s “hard-right activism” is every bit as worrisome as her husband’s. “She’s a hard-right zealot who is active on just about every hot-button cultural issue in American politics.” You can’t fail to have noticed this, including her husband’s default failure to recuse himself from cases in which she would have an interest.

One must ask again why gross derelictions like the Thomas’s are so continually ignored or swept under the rug. One reason, as I suggested earlier, is that the public is burnt out or simply turned off by constantly hearing about such stuff. Or maybe they realize that given our broken polity there’s no apparent way to bring justice to the justices.

Posted on

Don’t Bet against Bragg

A couple of points seem to get lost in the furor over the New York State Trump investigation. Republicans continue to regurgitate that it’s an evil political witch hunt. To which Ankush Khardori, a former DOJ prosecutor, says, “So what?”

Even if it’s not just a “legal vendetta,” Khardori suggests, “the reality is that this particular criminal case probably never would have been brought for anyone but Trump.” One of the early investigators, Mark Pomerantz, believed that “Trump is a uniquely dangerous political figure who has done tremendous damage to the country.” In other words, get him any way you can.

The case of course depends on what the charges, the indictment counts, will reveal. But the politicization issue is a tricky one, as Andrew Prokop documents. He reminds us of the totally politicized Whitewater charges against Bill Clinton, of the Trump administration’s attempts to lock up its enemies, and of Bill Barr’s forays against the Mueller investigation.

Now you’ve got the ridiculous Stormy Daniels business, though that may not be the entire basis for Bragg’s coming charges. Khardori again: “There is also no indication at the moment that the case against Trump has any real precedent in New York or elsewhere.”

If he is convicted, imagine the pressure on the judge who will sentence him! Still, Trump is likely to get off, even as John Edwards did a few years ago. Jonathan Chait tracks us through the various screw-ups of the investigation under Mark Pomerantz and Cy Vance. Now, perhaps we could anticipate a different outcome. Errol Louis says it would be foolish not to bet on Bragg:

So Trump is in serious legal jeopardy, not least because his adversary, Bragg, is a dogged and meticulous litigator who has proved he can build complex white-collar cases. . . . More recently, as district attorney, Bragg won a criminal conviction for tax fraud against the Trump Organization, resulting in the payment of a $1.6 million fine and the jailing of its CFO, Allen Weisselberg. It’s likely that Bragg’s office acquired enough records, documents, testimony, and insight about Trump’s business dealings to build out a new false-records case.

The one thing that might really lose it for the Republicans is Trump’s big mouth. He continues to say terrible things about Bragg, using racist and antisemitic tropes. And if he keeps up his tirades in front of Judge Juan Merchan tomorrow, he might end up with a gag order or worse.

P.S. Don’t be discouraged. See this:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/donald-trump-alvin-bragg-indictment-charges.html

Posted on

Headlines We’d Like to See

In the spirit of fake news, we offer the following. The photo above, however, came from an actual story, French Drink Wine as Protests Rage. Here are a few more headlines I’ve wished for.

Drone Strike Destroys Mar-a-Lago

Biden Backs Off Artic Oil Project

VP Harris Resigns

AMLO Resigns

Sinema and Santos win Medal of Freedom

CNN Finally Fires Anderson Cooper

 Republicans Nominate Kim Jong-un

If you come up with any more, please leave them in a comment.

Posted on

Aging and Eating

Poem written for a friend on his seventy-fifth birthday.

Staying alive past seventy-five
Requires some thought to avoid the blood clot.
Here’s my advice to avert your last rites.

Eat lots of red meat and pickled pigs feet.
Fried food is OK; don’t get carried away.
Drink wine, always dry and never sweet.

Coffee and booze you should never refuse.
Ditto with salt, or beer high in malt.
There’s no substance abuse in a chocolate mousse.

Exercise is splendid though too much recommended.
Walking is dumb; you could fall on your bum.
Watching TV beats climbing a tree.

Music is best for those who are stressed.
It’s the only panacea for bad diarrhea.
And whatever ails you—when all else fails you.

Posted on

You gonna be woke? Have another toke.

There has been so much written about “woke” that I hesitate to add to the glut. And so I will. It’s probably gotten to the point where most black people would just as soon avoid the term. When language gets so loaded that it incites cultural warfare it’s time to unload it. But since woke effectively serves the purposes of denial and deception for others, you can bet that’s not going to happen.

A new survey shows that “Americans generally view the term woke in a favorable light.” The poll also seems to show that “People don’t want to be shamed or canceled by the woke mob—but they also don’t want to be told by the heavy hand of the government how to behave.” Gov. DeSantis might just end up abusing his powers. We may hope so.

DeSantis famously declared: “We can never, ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.” For more on the governor’s agenda, look at this. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says.

The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund gives us a welcome history of the term and how it became transformed from a positive warning to a highly negative threat. The word has become demonized.

Woke started out as black slang, apparently a long time ago, but has taken on all kinds of meanings today. White folks often distort meanings of vernacular black cultural talk. Some years ago I did a humorous take on how people misunderstand “hip.”

See, jazz people use ‘hip’ differently from the common herd. They use it to mean something exclusive to an inside group, some kind of knowledge thing valued by that group that puts them one up on the rest of the ofay world. Hip is survival for black people but with a humorous touch.

Anyhow, woke originally meant being “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination,” but these days the right tends to use it for a much broader range of social inequalities like sexuality, sexism, gender, socio-demographics, book banning, etc. It’s now become a ubiquitously negative code word for a wide variety of social movements, including LGBTQ issues, feminism, immigration, climate change and marginalized communities.

When a concept gets this puffed up it loses its meaning, and so most folks don’t really understand it. And people don’t like to be preached to about their behavior. They dislike being given standards of conduct by self-appointed “police” who prosecute and judge them. They may see this as arrogance, self-righteousness. Which, of course, may not stop tin-pot dictators like DeSantis from using the term.

Woke also can imply that everyone who disagrees with you is “asleep.” As others have noted, it’s a form of gaslighting. “I am right, and if you disagree with me, it’s because you’re ‘asleep,’ which just proves that I am right.”

Its widespread usage just furthers the GOP’s constant negativism—which is their policy on everything. And it’s’ not just the GOP. We could go on, for instance about the liberals’ seeming endorsement of gender-free pronouns and dubious constructions like “latinx”—but that’s another story.

Posted on

Wayne Shorter, Alive Still

A funny thing about jazz, at least lately, is that its great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived. That’s certainly true about Charles Mingus who passed in 1979 and whose 100th birthday was celebrated last year to much acclaim.

Wayne Shorter, another jazz great, died last Thursday at age 89. His large recorded output survives him, of course, and now the critics (like me) grab the opportunity to speak out about his greatness, uniqueness, and transformative powers.

Shorter was one of jazz’s strong composers besides being a reed player who could shape the conventional forms of the music into something truly new. So I don’t want to hear encomiums about him; I want to know how he did this. The praise will soon fade; the music won’t.

The typical obits gave the facts, as they should. But some writers went beyond that. As jazz critics will do, they offered up spiritual, even flamboyant versions of what they heard in Shorter’s music. Richard Brody of The New Yorker knows his jazz but spoke a different language in trying to express what for him was the essence of Wayne’s music:

Unlike such spiritual seekers of the avant-garde as Coltrane and Albert Ayler, Shorter, even during his most vehement solos, wasn’t heaven-storming but heaven-gazing and heaven-longing, looking rapturously upward—again, in effect, in two places at once.

Jazz people don’t talk like this. Neither should their critics. The people who really understood how to write about Shorter were other musicians, like Ethan Iverson who wrote five years ago about Shorter’s seminal recordings in the 1960s:

The compositions on “Speak No Evil” occupy a rarified plane. They aren’t quite hard bop, they aren’t quite modal. Elements of everything are just there, hanging out in a new and inspired way. The musicians at large loved it, then and now. Every song on “Speak No Evil” has been learned by each new generation of jazz students. Every solo by Shorter, Hubbard, and Hancock has been transcribed and assimilated.

Jazz lovers want to understand how the music they love was created, appreciated (or not), and produced. Let the jazz audience, not the critics, be the spiritual and rhetorical interpreters of what they are hearing. My feelings about a piece of music may or may not be yours.

And, one hopes, the critic can positively influence the public reception and understanding of a music—and do this in a timely way. My book, Mingus Speaks, finally got published almost 40 years after I had finished the interviews with Charles. The unconscionable delay was owing to some troubling and difficult times for me. You know, “life happens when you’re making other plans.”

Anyhow, the last time I saw Mingus was after a set at the Village Vanguard in 1973, I think. He fixed me with the Mingus glare and said, “I guess you’ll finally do the book after I’m dead.” And that’s what happened.

Wayne said it best: “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure.”

The folks who make their living off jazz and love it and write about it should speak up when it counts. What you have to say about the music can make all the difference to the people who play it. Wayne Shorter’s music was just too singular and important to be treated with fawning praise.