The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Following up on yesterday's attempt to examine the role (or lack thereof) of the United States in the current tensions between the European Union and Russia, it would appear that we shall have to contend with some Americans who are not about to take passing unnoticed sitting down. Indeed, according to a report for Reuters filed this morning by Tabassum Zakaria, one of them has decided to pass on the Republican Convention (not to mention the lightning that may strike New Orleans a second time) and board a plane that will take him to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Ukraine, all of which he happens to be visiting for the first time. The happy wanderer (warrior?) in question, for those who have not already guessed, is Dick Cheney. I have to wonder if his absence from the Convention was planned. After all one purpose of these conventions is to build up a good image for the media; and, when it comes to media relations, Cheney has built a reputation for being the Republicans' greatest weapon of mass destruction. However, since that reputation extends to policy (both domestic and foreign), as well as media relations, one has to wonder just what the motives behind this trip are. I am reminded of a physics teacher who taught me that, in order to get the rapid timing right for detonating the first hydrogen bomb, it was necessary to get everything in place to achieve critical mass through four synchronized atom-bomb explosions. Cheney may only be visiting three countries along the "line of tension" with Russia; and, unless his diabolical powers are greater than previously assumed, he will not be able to visit them simultaneously. Nevertheless, this feels a lot like an attempt to create a critical mass that will not only revive the spirit of the Cold War but also raise it to a red-hot temperature.

I have already reviewed Tom Hayden's arguments regarding the validity of this motive as a "double whammy" that, with one blow, can deal a crippling blow the to Democratic Presidential campaign while, at the same time, resurrecting The Project for the New American Century, whose obituaries were written almost two years ago. That motive would then extend to getting NATO "back in the game" at a time when its very relevance is under review, particularly when the European side of the game is being played quite well by both the European Union and the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe). Furthermore, it is clear from remarks by Gordon Brown reported this morning on the BBC NEWS Web site that European leaders do not pose a threat of "pacification" (to invoke the current Republican rhetoric of choice) but are quite capable of standing up for their own principles while trying to ease the current tensions at the same time.

There is little we can do about this. The Vice President is an official a representative of our Executive Branch as the Secretary of State is; and, as far as I can tell, he has not yet committed any impeachable offense in planning this trip. The most comfort I can take is from a story that Howard Fast once wrote, entitled "Cato the Martian" (which I first read in Groff Conklin's 17 X Infinity collection, which also happened to be the first place I read "The Machine Stops"). Fast was an author of both conscience and courage who understood the value of science fiction in setting a cautionary tale. Here is a slightly oversimplified summary I found on the Web:

Martians use broadcasts to study Earth. The protagonist, named after his Roman counterpart, is a specialist in Latin who begins and ends every speech, "Earth must be destroyed." Fearing a nuclear attack from Earth, he persuades the normally peaceful Martians to fire atomic weapons at the planet to precipitate a suicidal war between East and West. Instead, Earth attacks Mars.

Like the fictitious representations of NATO and the Soviet Union in Fast's tale, it would not make much deliberation for the European Union to arrive at the conclusion that there is more to gain from working with Russia in opposing the United States than in breathing life back into NATO and letting the Americans call the shots (perhaps literally, rather than metaphorically) one more time. If the Europeans are not that well read in American science fiction, they probably have a better appreciation for the history of Ancient Rome and Carthage, which would be all that would be required for events to play out along the lines of Fast's plot!

Who is Passing Unnoticed Now?

As I wrote yesterday, quoting the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed ….

This is as true of nations as it is of political candidates, and it may be that no nation understands this better than Russia in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Whatever we may say about Vladimir Putin, it would be fair to say that he was not a man to tolerate being passed unnoticed; and it may well be that his conviction in this matter is what has given him his strength in the game of Russian politics, whatever the rules may be at any time. Furthermore, if Bourdieu's principle is one of Putin's mottos, then his understanding of retribution for passing unnoticed can probably be captured by another more familiar motto:

What goes around, comes around.

Could it be that this motto is beginning to bear fruit for Russia, not just in Israel, where I last cited it, but in the West as a whole and, more specifically, the United States?

Consider the current state of play over Georgia as reported on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Russia has taken a series of diplomatic steps in an apparent effort to ease tensions with the West over this month's conflict in Georgia.

President Dmitry Medvedev told UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown Moscow wanted more monitors from Europe's security body in Georgia, the Kremlin said.

Separately, Russian and German foreign ministers agreed to seek to calm tensions over the crisis, Moscow said.

The issue is set to dominate the agenda of an EU meeting on Monday.

As of August 8 Russia no longer had to worry about passing unnoticed, and now it will be the center of attention at Monday's European Union meeting. Having received that attention, Russia can now exhibit that understanding of statecraft which I recently attributed to Putin. The BBC reported the following quoted material from the Medvedev-Brown conversation:

During Saturday's telephone conversation with Mr Brown, President Medvedev said Russia was "in favour of the deployment of additional OSCE [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] monitors in the security zone" in Georgia, the Kremlin statement said.

It said observers in the security zone would provide "impartial monitoring" of Tbilisi's actions.

However, there is more to this story than the prevailing of cooler heads in both Russia and the European Union. There is also, in a bizarre twist on Arthur Conan Doyle, the dog that would not stop barking in the night that everyone else finally decided to ignore: the United States. While our Administration has been invoking the same rhetoric of sanctions that always seems to stir up trouble in the Middle East, the European Union seems to have decided that, while the United States may continue to dominate any decisions made by NATO, it can only speak to "security and co-operation in Europe" when invited to do so; and it would appear that the current makeup of EU leadership is not particularly interested in extending this invitation, perhaps, as Gabor Steingart has suggested, because it would act at cross purposes to goals such as overall security.

During the Vietnam War, one of my favorite protest slogans was:

What if they declared a war, and nobody came?

This raises an analogous question for today's situation:

What if you were the undisputed superpower, and nobody noticed?

For the first time since the Second Word War, Europe, in all of its current collectivity, seems to have decided that it does not have to notice the United States for every decision it makes, even those concerned with security. My guess is that the White House either does not or will not consider this proposition, but there is every reason to believe that Putin is well aware of it. Someone on our President's team ought to get to work figuring out how "What goes around comes around" translates into Russian!

Beyond Entertainment

If there was little to be gained from the AT&T Yahoo! excuse for a "ratings poll" for Barack Obama's speech on Thursday night, Brian Stelter and Jim Rutenberg, writing for The New York Times, have tapped into a far more interesting set of number, that old standby metric of quality (or whatever), the television ratings:

At least 40 million Americans watched Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president Thursday night, a record for convention viewership that exceeded even the expectations of his aides.

The historic speech by the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party reached 38.4 million viewers on 10 broadcast and cable networks, Nielsen Media Research said Friday. PBS estimated that an additional 3.5 million had watched its prime-time coverage.

The ratings dwarfed the audience for the Summer Olympics and the season finale of “American Idol” in May, and added to what was already a sense of buoyancy within the Obama campaign that the night had gone better than planned.

As I see it, these numbers are far more than an affirmation of Obama's "celebrity status" (as Truthdig seems to have implied). Rather, it is evidence that, given the opportunity, the American electorate can and will use their television sets for more than the usual diet of trivia. After all, given what television has become, it is not as if these viewers had no choice. As we read the details in the Stelter-Rutenberg report, we see that over 15 million of them were watching cable channels and therefore had any number of ways to avoid anything connected with the Convention. No, people were watching Obama because they wanted to hear what he had to say; and "by the numbers" hearing what he had to say was more important than the entertainment value of either the Summer Olympics or (shudder!) American Idol. Here is another item from the Stelter-Rutenberg analysis from that entertainment value perspective:

Mr. Obama’s speech drew an especially high number of African-American viewers. Excluding sporting events, Nielsen said, the speech ranked second in black viewership among all programs over the last decade. Only a Michael Jackson special in 2001 did better.

Personally, I would have liked to see the numbers without excluding those sporting events. They may have been less impressive; but, taken in the proper context, they probably would have been just as significant!

The primary lesson here may well be that, whatever Internet evangelists choose to preach, television is still America's "window on the world." The question overlooked, however, is how often how many Americans actually want to look through that window. My own opinion is that they currently want to look through the window because they know how bad things are and they are really looking for someone who is going to do something other than try to sell them yet another bill of shoddy goods. They are all in the same boat as the bubeleh in Hester Street who finally talks back to the fast-talker and says, "You can't piss up my back and tell me its rain!" For that matter they don't even want to hear Bill Clinton talking about sharing their pain. Rather, they are an audience that has discovered that, after eight years (if not more) of pap, they are finally caving in under malnutrition, which is why the first adjective that came to mind in my own analysis of Obama's speech was "solid."

Obama connected with 40 million American television viewers. That is approximately one-third of the number of people who voted in the 2004 presidential election; but it would not surprise me if not all of those viewers actually voted in 2004. Perhaps a torch really is being passed. We have known that television matters since the days of John Kennedy's campaign; but in the 21st century television (along with most other media) has been used primarily for negative influence by Karl Rove and his disciples. Now we have a candidate who has demonstrated the value of using it positively; and I, for one, will be watching to see if the strength of that demonstration can be maintained until Election Day.

Party-Spoiling Chutzpah

Google is no stranger to the concept of chutzpah; and Eric Schmidt is one of the earliest Chutzpah of the Week award winners, going back to 2007 when he seemed to be spending much of his time telling Washington what to do. In more recent times the case has not been one of Google transcending chutzpah as much as the competition getting much tougher. So there is something to be said for winning the award at the site of the Democratic National Convention, since political conventions tend to be times when chutzpah runs wild in the streets. However, at a time when the priority seemed to be to let unity run wild in the streets, Google, as reported by Stephanie Condon for CNET News.com, made a bold move in the name of exclusivity:

Yes we can? Sure, unless you're talking about getting into the Google/Vanity Fair party on Thursday night.

Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president Thursday, in front of thunderous crowd of nearly 80,000 in Invesco Field, evoked inclusivity and unity--two qualities that don't necessarily make for a cool party.

Google managed to build the buzz for its party all week in Denver--limiting tickets, dis-inviting people, and making well-known Washingtonians--gasp!--wait in line. Not helping was that recipients forwarded around the e-mail invitation, resulting in an avalanche of RSVPs.

Also lending an aura of exclusivity was the location at the Exdo Event Center, a nondescript building in an almost-shady part of town, where a red carpet was rolled out and folks hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity or two hung around outside. (For the record, Google is planning another similar event for the Republican convention next week.)

Somehow this all seems like nose-thumbing directed at last night's speech by Barack Obama (not to mention the previous night's speech by Joe Biden); and, at the very least, it leads me to think back on just what Schmidt thought he would be able to teach such folks in Washington. (They certainly do not need lessons in throwing parties.) Well, between the sushi and the Krispy Kreme doughnuts (again, as reported by Condon), the party was too intense for me to get the award through the door; so it will be waiting back in the Board Room in Mountain View!

That's Entertainment!

Having made the conscious (conscientious?) decision to avoid approaching Barack Obama's speech last night as a "media event," I feel it fair to cite one source that, for all intents and purposes, addressed it only as a media event. That source is, as one might guess, Variety, whose business is to report on entertainment, not on the basis of any aesthetic foundations of quality, but on the business foundations of how marketable a given commodity is. Lest there be any confusion about the reviewers intentions, they are stated clearly in the final paragraph of the review:

Setting politics aside, graded on his delivery, Obama met high expectations and made the sale, to the extent he can. But like so much in the media today, the distribution channel through which one consumed the speech doubtless forecasts how it will be received more than anything the candidate said or didn’t.

Given my emphasis on a "sense of reality" in my own account, I think it is important to recognize that the "Variety reality" is one that we cannot ignore; and there is every reason to expect that we shall see it in play as early as next week's Republican Convention.

However, while the "commoditizing of a candidate" was clearly the primary concern of this review, I found it interesting that the current state of those "distribution channels" should also be addressed:

Channel surfing through the four days of convention coverage, by the way, only reinforced that the best place to watch was PBS or C-SPAN. Commercial broadcast networks again mostly sat out the convention, while the ever-present cable nets preferred the blather of their insufferable in-house pundits to what the speakers were saying. Desperate to kill time, they preempted Obama’s speech with exhaustive analysis based on advance excerpts — in hindsight an especially silly exercise that ranged from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on one end of the political spectrum to Fox News’ pugnacious Dick Morris on the other.

While these channels will doubtless extend Republicans the same discourtesy when they assemble in Minnesota, this approach underscores that CNN, Fox News and MSNBC (whose talent spent the week indulging in silly intramural on-air squabbles) are far more concerned with branding and self-aggrandizement than news.

Indeed, before Obama appeared, cable networks spent almost as much time examining the venue of the speech as its content — the perfect metaphor for a medium that invariably exalts style over substance.

There is thus much to be gained from examining our political process through the eyes of Variety, however incongruous that proposition may seem!

Obama Numbers from AT&T Yahoo!

By way of disclaimer, I should begin by stating that I participated in the AT&T Yahoo! "poll" (scare quotes because any results from this exercise cannot seriously be taken as representative of anything) on the basis of having read the text of Barack Obama's speech, rather than viewing it on television or on my computer. As should be clear by now, I feel very strongly that text matters; so I really wanted to review this speech on the basis of its text, rather than Obama's performance or, for that matter, the performance of everyone else at Invesco Field reacting to Obama's performance. For the record my own vote in the poll was "excellent," although the adjective I preferred in talking to my wife after my reading was "solid." I was reminded of the other time I found myself paying close attention to Obama's words and the ways in which he could use his rhetoric to deliver substance rather than just to promote his personality. That other time, of course, was when he went on television to talk directly about the "race question." More specifically, I remember Jon Stewart's reaction to that speech, which became a point of departure for my own post:

Jon Stewart got it right last week. The most salient feature of Barack Obama's speech was his decision to address the American public as if they were adults.

In last night's speech this "adult approach" came down to a straightforward exposition of what needed to be done, concluding with one of the most important injunctions from the Reverend Martin Luther King, "We cannot walk alone." By concluding on a note of joint commitment and participation, Obama was able to convince me that, at least for now, he was not going to try to win the White House by playing up to that sense of Secular Messianism that had infected so many of his supporters, if not the "American way of life" in general. Having endured eight years of watching reality get trumped by faith at every move coming from our Executive Branch, I felt as if this was a candidate who recognized that any "recovery" of the "American promise," as he put it, must begin with a recovery of our sense of reality.

Of course, when Jon Stewart made his joke about Obama treating the American public as adults, the point of the joke was how different Obama was from everyone else, whether in politics or in the media covering politics. It is hard to act like an adult in a playground full of bullies, but differentiation may be what the electorate needs right now. The last two elections were close because too many voters could not see the difference between the two candidates and, as a result, did not particularly care which way they voted. There may be strength in Obama playing the differentiation card. It may mean that the people who vote for him actually know whom they are selecting and why they are selecting him. This value of differentiation takes me back to considering the AT&T Yahoo! poll.

If nothing else, I hope that all of my words have demonstrated the folly of trying to rate Obama's speech on a five-point scale. Nevertheless, one thing interested me about this snapshot that I took immediately after I bumped the sample space up to 13033 votes. Small as this sample space is, there is the suggestion of a bimodal distribution. Put another way, over three-quarters of the respondents felt strongly about Obama one way or the other; and I am hoping that this is a good sign. As Pierre Bourdieu put it in his Outline of a Theory of Practice:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed ….

Without worrying about how many votes were positive and how many negative, there is at least an indication that, whatever feelings about Obama may be, he is not passing unnoticed; and I am hoping that this will constitute a change from the malaise of the last two elections in which it often felt as if neither candidate was being noticed very much. The question now is whether Obama will be noticed for walking alone or whether a critical mass of those who notice him will choose to walk with him.

Hillary Trumps Bill

There is a good chance that more eyes were on Bill Clinton last night than were on his wife the previous night. On Tuesday night there seemed to be general agreement that Hillary had "gotten on board" the Obama campaign; the only question that remained was whether her rhetoric could stir her loyal followers to get on board with her. On that same Tuesday, however, Bill was still the loose cannon, playing semantic games with unnamed hypothetical candidates almost as smoothly as he had played them over the semantics of "is" during the Lewinsky Affair. I had to wonder whether Obama had come to the Pepsi Center not so much for a "surprise" follow-up to Joe Biden's speech as to be ready for damage control if Bill launched another one of his volleys.

Fortunately, as Al Jazeera English reported, Democrats could all rest easy that this dog did not bark in the night:

Bill Clinton, the former US president, has offered his backing to Barack Obama's presidential bid, hours after the Illinois senator clinched the Democratic nomination.

"Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world," Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, in his most robust endorsement yet of Obama.

Clinton told the convention on Wednesday night that Obama "has a remarkable ability to inspire people".

The former president's speech had been eagerly awaited by Democrats in view of his own past criticism of Obama and his ambivalence about the Illinois senator.

Clinton said that Obama had "hit one out of the ballpark" when he chose Joseph Biden, the Delware senator who was set to speak at the convention later on Wednesday, as his running mate.

Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds in Denver said the speech showed the Clinton's had gone out of their way to endorse Obama.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said that Clinton could have seen Obama as continuing his political legacy if wasn't for the bitter primary electioon battle with Hillary Clinton, his wife and the New York senator.

Nevertheless, things are rarely (never?) what they seem in politics. If Hillary's speech provided any number of reasons for the analysts to start scratching their heads and picking apart her words with a fine tooth comb, then there was no shortage of reasons for doing the same for Bill's contribution.

One way to begin this analysis would involve one of my favorite techniques, the sorting out of subjects and objects (particularly in the context of the efforts to call attention to the neglect of Katrina at this week's Convention). This had a lot to do with the morning-after analyses of Hillary's endorsement speech. Borrowing from one of her earlier texts, we were all still left wondering, "What does Hillary want?" Much of our perplexity can be traced back to the number of sentences in Hillary's speech where she, as opposed to Obama, was the subject. However, while some may see this as a coded "objectification" of Obama, I see it as a rhetorical move meant to reinforce the sincerity of not only those sentences but also the entire speech. Hillary is best when she is talking about Hillary. We all know that, but that does not mean we have to take it as a liability. Rather, in this case by "talking about Hillary" she personalized her endorsement in the strategic move to get the most resentful of her followers (the ones talking out loud about going over to John McCain) to follow her one more time, even if it was not to her ultimate leadership.

I would argue that we can examine the text of Bill's speech through the same lenses. Bill is also his own favorite subject; and, to go back to the Lewinsky Affair again, we know how much rhetorical punch he can put in a direct first-person declarative sentence (even when that sentence is false). In a somewhat creepy way Bill is not that different from George W. Bush: He attaches more importance to connecting with us over what he believes than he does to whether there is, as Plato put it, "justified truth" to that belief. I believe that both Clinton and Bush managed to get into the White House on the strength of that rhetorical strategy, but applying that strategy on behalf of someone else is a neat trick for even the best of orators. Hillary pulled it off (even if it was "just a trick"); but, when we back down from the rhetoric and look at the grammar, Bill did not.

This is not to say that Bill avoided those first-person declarative sentences entirely; there just were not enough of them. In this case Obama was the subject of Bill's sentences far more than Bill was (and far more than Obama was in Hillary's speech). The result came close to a reading of Obama's resume; and, even if the tone of the reading was dramatically stirring, the text was not, in part because it has become so familiar. One result of this "over-subjectification" of Obama is that we are more likely to remember the baseball metaphor for the selection of Biden than we are to remember anything else from the speech; and this had more to do with setting the crowd up for Biden's speech that with rallying them behind Obama.

Consider now those last quoted paragraphs of Al Jazeera analysis. I definitely agree with Reynolds that Hillary put a lot of effort into her speech. As Kevin Connolly put it in his analysis for BBC News, she needed to come across as "a lifelong Democratic Party worker;" and this may have been her most important goal in the face of supporters threatening to leave the fold. Bill, on the other hand, is the one who, as Reynolds put it, went "out of his way," because that "way" was not really aligning with the "way" of "a lifelong Democratic Party worker" (and perhaps it never really did). As a result, Hillary's endorsement came "from the heart" (even if it was "faked sincerity," in the spirit of George Burns), while Bill's just came from his going "out of his way."

In that respect I would probably also take issue with Bishara. Perhaps the rift between Bill and Obama had to do with the recognition that Obama was not particularly interested in continuing Bill's "political legacy." It may have been the legacy of economic prosperity, but much of that prosperity burst in an economic bubble with global reverberations. Then there was the ill-managed effort at health care reform and the crisis in the Balkans, which was just as poorly managed. Obama had good reason to ground his own campaign rhetoric in the need for "change we can believe in"—not just change from the messes made by the Bush Administration but also from much of that Clinton "legacy" that involved more ill will than most Democrats would care to remember.

Finally, compare Bill's performance with that of Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy could invoke his late brother's rhetoric and stir his audience with the audacity to hope that, once again, the torch would be passed. Bill just does not want to let go of the torch, and he is not getting the message from either the electorate or his party leadership. In retrospect this may have made him a liability to Hillary's campaign; will we have to worry that he will now be a liability to Obama's?

Amy Goodman's Inconvenient Truth

Last November I introduced one of my Chutzpah of the Week presentations with the following sentence:

In the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle's dog that did not bark in the night, chutzpah can sometimes be a matter of a failure to act, rather than a specific action.

In the baroque lexicon of Catholicism, such a failure of act may constitute a "sin of omission;" and in her column this week for Truthdig, Amy Goodman may have hit on the primary sin of omission to come out of the Democratic National Convention. The omission can be distilled down to a single word: poverty. Here is how Goodman introduced her case:

Former Sen. John Edwards was supposed to speak in Denver at the Democratic National Convention. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was to speak also. Poverty was their focus. But they are not here because John Edwards had an affair. Will the Democrats now forget about poverty?

The question that Goodman does not address, however, is why the word "poverty" seems to have been dropped from the "national dialog" that the Democrats claim they want to have. To answer that question we have to get beyond sins of omission and finally recognize that this is all about a dead moose on the table. That dead moose is what Lewis Lapham has come to call the "American Ruling Class." Never mind the White House: Anyone who makes it as far as the Senate has most likely been "tapped on the shoulder" by the American Ruling Class, if not with outright membership then at least with permission to speak at the table. (Where is the table? Lapham actually collaborated with John Kirby on a film that nicely illustrates the transition from figurative to literal language where such matters are concerned.) Thus, all three of the "players" in the Presidential election are beholden to the American Ruling Class in one way or another (and this will almost certainly be true of the fourth "player").

This raises the obvious question: Is anyone out there talking sense who is not beholden to the American Ruling Class? Examples about whom I have written include Walter Mosley and Tavis Smiley; and, for those who want a Caucasian example, we have the real dead moose on the table, the would-be candidate whose very name strikes terror into the political establishment, Ralph Nader. You want to know why poverty is not the focus? It is because the American Ruling Class does not want it to be the focus! Doing something about poverty might undermine the authority behind their rule! To draw upon the language of Goodman's title ("Poverty Is the Real Scandal"), the vice-like grip of the American Ruling Class is the real scandal; and it involves far more than Edwards being out of the picture (and may invite conspiracy theorists to speculate on how he was so conveniently removed from the picture)!

Stone Age Mentality in a Space Age Setting

This is not, strictly speaking, "news;" but it was good to see it reported on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS [International Space Station] in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.

Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this item is how unsurprising it is. We have become too used to reading about such NASA bungles. The real irritant, however, comes further down in the BBC text:

The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.

This seems to imply that just about every business and school takes care of its computers (or at least the ones that get shot up to the ISS) better than NASA does! The BBC report concluded with the following "response" from NASA:

Nasa told Wired News that viruses had infected laptops taken to the ISS on several occasions but the outbreaks always only been a "nuisance".

I suppose E. M. Forster is not required reading over at NASA. After all, in his cautionary tale, "The Machine Stops," the machine in question comes to a halt due to an increasing number of "nuisances" and a decreasing number of people capable of fixing the problems!

Haunted by his Own Punch-Line

Last January, when it felt as if all of the media were watching (and analyzing to death) what they had decided to label the first serious confrontation between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Nevada primary, Obama made a bold decision for his final move. Addressing voters in Las Vegas, he adopted a genre very familiar to Las Vegas audiences of all stripes, what Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press called "a biting political standup routine." With my own passion for text analysis, I decided that one way to learn about Obama would be to deconstruct his jokes; but it had not occurred to me that one of those jokes might come back to haunt him. This is Pickler's account of the joke I had in mind:

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork _ something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, `What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, `Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

"Folks, they don't tell you what they mean!" he said.

That punch-line kept echoing in my mind as I worked my way, paragraph by paragraph, through Kevin Connolly's analysis for BBC News of Clinton's speech last night to the Democratic National Convention. Ultimately, the analysis was about how difficult it was to figure out the meaning behind the words of that speech. Much of what Connolly wrote had to do with Clinton's history of saying what has to be said while phrasing her text in such a way as to indicate the presence of a subtext, without necessarily helping others identify just what that subtext is. She is very good at this sort of thing, and it is a talent that can be very good in negotiations. Writing about it in the business world back in 1984, Eric Eisenberg called it "strategic ambiguity."

One way of reading Obama's joke is as ridicule of strategic ambiguity. Playing to a crowd of "jes' plain folks" in Las Vegas (if that is not an oxymoron), he as much as said, "This whole idea of 'strategic ambiguity' is not for folks like you; and it is not for me." Whether or not it helped his final vote count is moot; but it seemed to have escaped most of the media flacks that this kind of man-of-the-people posturing was basically the same rhetorical strategy that was serving George W. Bush so well. Now my guess is that Obama knows and understands strategic ambiguity very well. He probably even knows how to use it, although it may well be that his skill in exercising it has not been stress-tested the way Clinton's skill has.

Thus, Obama may very well be choking on a punch-line that had originally been invoked to win a few votes. If he was not choking on it while Clinton was delivering her speech, then it would have taken little more than a few paragraphs at the end of Connolly's account to bring it back into his craw:

There is nothing she [Clinton] could have said that would have persuaded either Republicans, or Democrats who don't like her, that she was delivering a straightforward appeal on behalf of Obama without a subtext that suited her own agenda.

It somehow sums her up that she now finds herself in a position where, however hard she works for Mr Obama and however many speeches she makes, people will automatically note that if he wins this election and holds the White House for eight years, her presidential ambitions will be finished.

If he loses, she will start the next campaign as favourite to win the Democratic nomination, just as she did this time around.

It doesn't mean she wants a Republican win of course - she is a lifelong Democratic Party worker - it just means that once again everything that's written about Hillary Clinton will be complex and ambiguous.

Very few people know what Mrs Clinton really thinks, and they never say.

The only thing more ironic than this state of affairs is the point that Eisenberg originally tried to make about strategic ambiguity, that it is a powerful tool for defusing the most contentious disagreements. The contest for the Democratic nomination will be remembered as such a "contentious disagreement;" but Clinton could not ply her strategic ambiguity skill to turn the situation in her favor. Perhaps that tells her something about her style: If she could not make the tool work for her to win enough delegate support, could she have made it work in winning support for health care reform or resolving a crisis situation like the one that just erupted over Georgia?

The Anxiety of Disintermediation

Reading today's post to Andrew Keen's Great Seduction blog, "The Children's Crusade," reminds me of how much I hate the word "disintermediation" and the cult formed around it by Internet evangelists. Regular readers of this blog should know by now that I see a lot of value in intermediation, and I feel most strongly about the need for an intermediate party that stands between a writer and a reader. For those who find that language too elusive, the intermediate party I have in mind is a talented editor; and, as I previously asserted, this refers specifically to the job of the editor to identify the author's voice and make sure it is speaking clearly to the reader base.

Where communication is concerned, the Age of Disintermediation is the world of the direct channel from the writer to the reader; and the fallacy behind drinking too much Web 2.0 Kool-Aid is a simple one. If one writer has even a moderately large number of readers (whether or not they are out on some "long tail"), then, for all intents and purposes, that "direct channel" is one-way. There is no doubting that communicating through face-to-face conversation can be very informative; but, as Erving Goffman pointed out in Forms of Talk, the "unit of dialog" is not a "semantic unit of text" but a "move," whose content is both linguistic and paralinguistic. The more people are participating in that "dialog" (whose etymology implies only two participants), the harder it becomes to communicate through such moves and the more likely it is that the whole encounter will end in confusion, rather than understanding.

So it is that the writer benefits from the skilled editor. That editor may not understand the writer's area of expertise, but the editor does understand that the text will be distributed to a population of readers and must therefore communicate through means other than the moves of dialog. The editor draws upon knowledge of that population of readers to work with the writer to yield a text, which, while not a simulacrum of face-to-face conversation, will communicate to the reader with the effectiveness of personal dialog. This is no easy matter, but the best editors are the ones who know something about the nature of the reader base and can advise the writer productively on the basis of that knowledge. This is intermediation at its most effective; and, hopefully, it illustrates why I get so aggravated by those who would do away with it.

Now, as my father used to say, "one is not a statistic." Is editing an exceptional case of intermediation, or is it a representative one? Keen's post has offered, perhaps unwittingly, another example on a slightly more elevated plane. He began with the following quote from David Edgerton, the founding director of Imperial College's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine:

Thinking about the use of things, rather than of technology, connects us directly with the world we know rather than the strange world in which "technology" lives. We speak of "our" technology meaning the technology of an age or a whole society. By contrast, "things" fit into no such totality, and do not evoke what is often taken as an independent historical force. We discuss the world of things as grown-ups, but technology as children.

Keen takes this as a point of departure to serve up his own take on disintermediation; but, while his approach was somewhat in the vein of my argument about the one-way nature of the direct channel, I found an another example of the need for intermediation in Edgerton's text.

As I read this passage, thinking about the use of technology is a matter of thinking about the use of abstract concepts, rather than concrete things. Computation is such an abstract concept, as is communication; and, for most domains of thought and discourse, most of us are not particularly comfortable reasoning with those abstract concepts but have no problem using many of the "things" derived from those concepts. Consider an example from mathematics: "Triangle" is an abstract concept; but any triangle I draw on a sheet of paper is a "thing." I can do things with the "thing," such as measure the lengths of the sides and the sizes of the angles, whereas the "triangle" concept can only tell me about certain "rules" that those sides and angles must "obey." However, if I want to talk to you about the "triangle" concept and you are not a mathematician, chances are that what I say to you will be easiest for you to understand if you can relate to a picture that I draw. That "thing-picture" intermediates between my talking about the "triangle" concept and your understanding what I am trying to tell you; and, as we shall see shortly, it intermediates by giving you something to perceive.

By analogy, then, we tend to discuss the world of technology by using products of that technology (perceivable things) as intermediaries. Saying that we discuss technology "as children" may be a bit overly pejorative; but it is one way to capture the idea that we really do not deeply understand technological concepts. I would prefer to say that we understand it as naïfs, which is to say that our understanding is simplistic but, like naïve physics, can still be functional.

As I see it, the implication of this example may throw light on a connection between disintermediation and the argument that Nicholas Carr was trying to make in his "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article. As Gerald Edelman has demonstrated in his Neural Darwinism research, our very capacity for understanding is grounded in our ability to form perceptual categories, which means that our understanding of concepts is grounded in those things (which we happen to perceive) that are instances of the concepts we come to understand. Thus, in a context far broader than mathematics, the very workings of the "wet brain" depend on the concrete to intermediate between the mind and any abstraction than needs to be understood. When Carr is complaining that he can no longer read War and Peace, part of that complaint has to do with the extent to which reading provides a surrogate for experiences through which perceptual categories are formed, while the more "efficient" artifacts delivered by Google search results do not serve in such a surrogate capacity (nor were they intended to do so). Thus, by gradually insinuating its role as our "window on the world," Google is (probably unintentionally) subverting our brain's hardware for forming perceptual categories through either the "directly perceived world" or the "world perceived indirectly through text." If Google is making us stupid, it is doing so by allowing the brain functions that "make us smart" to atrophy by not giving them opportunities to "do their thing." (This is at least partially analogous to some of the arguments about why watching too much television makes us poorer readers.) Furthermore, when it comes down to exercising the capacity for perceptual categorization, it may be not only Google that is making us stupid but also a whole set of behavior patterns grounded in disintermediation! No wonder the word aggravates me so much!

"Let's not kid ourselves."

Today's extended analysis at SPIEGEL ONLINE, written by Ullrich Fichtner, Maik Grossekathöfer, and Detlef Hacke in German and translated into English by Christopher Sultan, is the sort of retrospective view of the Beijing Olympics that I had been hoping to see (and was pretty sure that I would not find in any American source). The mood of the piece was best captured by its subtitle, "Olympics-Sized Delusions," which made for an appropriate introduction to the first interview subject in the article. That subject was Thomas Bach, an International Olympic Committee (IOC) vice president (the Committee has four), described by the authors as "a potential candidate to succeed Jacques Rogge as the organization's president." Here is the first Bach quote from the article:

There are two grand delusions in sports. The one delusion is that sport has nothing to do with money. And the other one is that it has nothing to do with politics. Both lead to unnecessary and sometimes disastrous debates.

It is unclear whether this statement was an attempt to clean up the egg on Rogge's face or to attribute that egg to the fact that Rogge should have known better in deliberating over some of the decisions he made. The SPIEGEL authors gave a nice capsule description of Bach:

Bach is the sort of person who, when asked difficult questions, begins by saying: Let's not kid ourselves.

We see this personality in Bach's own words, but that does not necessarily inform us of his motives. Is he trying to restore confidence through clarity, or is he just trying to exude a thicker smoke screen? Like a certain Republican Presidential candidate, he wishes to give the impression of embracing "straight talk;" but, when we (including the SPIEGEL authors) start digging into the words of his text, we find them so twisted as too accommodate whatever motives our fantasies might assign to him. Perhaps we should just accept that this is "business as usual" at the IOC and that, without such "business as usual," there would be no Olympics. In considering that proposition, we would do well to address what the SPIEGEL authors had to say about this year's audiences:

In Beijing, it became clear that audiences had begun splitting into new groups. There are still those who naively believe in the goodness, the beauty and the purity of sports, even if it goes against their better judgment. On the other end of the spectrum are those who have given into despair and turned away from sports entirely because they no longer trust it. A third group blindly worships the winners, no matter how their victories came about -- perhaps even admiring them for their clever, underhanded methods.

From the IOC's point of view, only the second group is "bad for business;" and the best strategy is probably to pitch to the third group, since the first group is already hooked. Let's not kid ourselves.

Ironically, of all the people interviewed by SPIEGEL, the one who seemed best at not kidding himself was the Chinese artist, Ai WeiWei, "who played a decisive role in the design of the Bird's Nest stadium." Here is the account of that interview:

He lives and works in an enormous stone house, an oasis of levelheaded style in the colorful, post-urban cacophony of Beijing. Cats stroll through the garden and employees walk silently so as not to disturb the master of the house, talking in whispers and serving green tea in beautiful glasses.

Ai WeiWei calls the Bird's Nest a "showcase of propaganda." It is a good building, he said, but one that was utilized by the wrong people. In the West, said Ai WeiWei, everyone was excited about the opening ceremony and China in general, and yet every second of these games was poisoned by ideology, and by hidden messages to the Chinese that foreigners were unable to decipher.

"On the day after the opening ceremony, it said in the paper here that good Chinese watch the games on television," said Ai WeiWei. "It was an unconcealed warning not to go out into the streets."

He said that he didn't really watch the opening ceremony. He was in a café with a friend on that evening and happened to see a few images from the event on a wall-mounted TV. But those images, he said, were nothing but the empty productions of an anxious, extremely nervous government. "The state has no vision of what China should be," said Ai WeiWei, "and the games only helped postpone the problems that are now coming."

He contradicted himself several times in the course of a half-hour conversation. He spoke of hidden messages to the Chinese people, but he also said that the games were not meant for the domestic public at all. He argued that China wanted to demonstrate its strength to the rest of the world, but then he claimed that the Beijing leadership couldn't care less about what the world thought of it.

My own reading of this text is that those contradictions had less to do with whether or not Ai was trying (and failing) to kid himself and more to do with that lack of "vision of what China should be." In other words those contradictions were a symptom of his personal anxiety, which, in turn, could probably be attributed, at least in part, to anxiety at the national level.

Of course we (whether individuals or nations) do not like to have attention called to our anxieties. That only makes us more anxious. So we kid ourselves about them, not because we are averse to "straight talk" but because we can only live with those anxieties by cloaking them in delusion. This is the key theme of Eugene O'Neill's play, The Iceman Cometh, whose protagonist tries to tear off all of those cloaks, only to reveal an anxiety of his own that drove him to kill his wife. Of course China has anxieties. So does Great Britain. Perhaps the best cause the United States has for changing "We're Number One!" would be in the extent of its anxieties (if not the abundance of its delusional cloaks, one of which happens to be charging ahead in full force this week)!

Let's not kid ourselves about Bach, then. Every time he says, "Let's not kid ourselves," it's just one of his rhetorical moves to kid us. Do we really want it any other way? Let's not kid ourselves!

Strife as Economic Incentive

Once again I find myself turning to SPIEGEL ONLINE for a timely extended discussion of a complex global problem. The problem in this case (given that there are so many these days) is the current standoff between Georgia and Russia and the question of whether or not the Cold War is "heating up" again, "a proposition devoutly to be wished" by many strident American (Republican?) voices. However, I am less interested in the skillful analytical work that Ralf Beste, Susanne Koelbl and Dirk Kurbjuweit have applied to all of this complexity. Rather, I want to call attention to one paragraph, which is actually highly incidental to their analysis, that calls attention to a piece of context that probably should not be ignored:

Currently, the entire world is sending its emissaries to the Caucasus, transforming Tbilisi into the global capital of international politics. Over the past two weeks, prices at the five-star hotels of Tbilisi have soared, and yet these luxury establishments are still nearly fully booked.

At a time when it seems as if the entire world is suffering an economic crisis (much of which, unfortunately, can be traced back to greed-based poor decisions originating in the United States), here is an (albeit small) economic sector that is doing well: the hotel sector of the travel business (and probably at least one small set of airline routes). This has less to do with whether or not the beneficiary is in the luxury sector than it has to do with the role of crisis as economic stimulus. I am a product of history teachers who believed that it was the Second World War, rather than the New Deal, that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, basically because the War created an unprecedented demand for manufacturing that revived our key industrial operations in a way that the New Deal never could. However, are we to conclude that war (or at least the threat of war, which is, for all intents and purposes, what the Cold War was) is the only effective way to stimulate a deeply depressed economy?

One answer may be to consider an economic system as if it were a metabolic system, somewhat in the spirit of the approach that James Grier Miller took in his book, Living Systems. (Miller actually viewed "The Society" as a living system in Chapter 11 of his book and addressed economics in terms of regulating production within that system.) Thus, if stress "is an unavoidable effect of living" (as is stated in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia) to which the body responds "with a combination of psychic and physiological defenses," then economic systems, if they are to survive, must have their own "defenses," which have more to do with (not necessarily rational) agent behavior than with psychology or physiology. Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death! Thus, it is the forces that "stress" an economy (such as social crisis) that ultimately keep the economy "alive" and functioning in the best interests of all, rather than languishing in a condition of depression, which, while not strictly static, is not particularly dynamic.

Berlin's arguments against stasis grew out of his critical analysis of utopianism and his conclusion that any utopia must necessarily be static. Thus, if stress keeps the body going (as long as it is at a level that can be managed by the body's copying skills), then social crisis may, indeed, be the most effective economic stimulus. The only problem with this theory is that, in the wrong hands, it may be applied as an excuse for inducing crisis as an economic solution. Sadly, this may explain the motives behind Tom Hayden's analysis of the current Georgian crisis as a product of neoconservative thinking trying, once again, to gain the upper hand. Having bankrupted the American economy with excessive an ineffective spending in the name of the "War on Terror," the agents responsible for this folly would now attempt damage control by seeking economic incentives through a revival of the Cold War. Once again we seem to be experiencing an attempt to repeat history without, as I have previously called it, "any Marxian overtones of farce" (unless one has a really sick sense of farce)!

A Major Base Camp on Mount Beethoven

My systematic traversal of the Brilliant Classics Gesamtwerk collection of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven has now taken me to the string quartets (in recordings by the Guarneri Quartet at a time when listening to them was still exciting). In many ways the complete cycle of these quartets, like the complete cycle of the piano sonatas, provides a map of the development of Beethoven's approach to composition. (Yes, as a matter of personal opinion, I do not feel that such a map can be found strictly through orchestral writing. Instead, the ways in which we listen to the symphonies and concertos is more likely to be informed by our experiences in listening to the piano sonatas and string quartets.) Chronologically, the piano sonatas get an earlier start: The work on Opus 2 began in 1794 after Beethoven had moved to Vienna; and, as I have previously suggested, his studies with Joseph Haydn are acknowledged by far more than Haydn's name on the dedication page. On the other hand Beethoven began work on the Opus 18 quartets in 1798, by which time he was already building up a healthy portfolio of accomplishments, although the influence of Haydn can still be felt in this first collection of six quartets. At the other end of the scale, however, the piano sonata cycle ends much earlier than the quartet cycle. Work on the final sonatas, Opera 109, 110, and 111, took place in 1821, while the quartet cycle was completed in 1825 with Opera 132 and 135. There is a tendency to attach more importance to Beethoven's envelope-pushing in his late quartets; but this would distract from his equally important experiments, particularly with fugue and highly extended variation, that form the core of the final piano sonatas. The fact is that neither of the two cycles can be ignored by anyone seriously interested in listening to Beethoven; and it probably would have made for an interesting experience had the promoters of András Schiff's performance of the full cycle of sonatas arranged for a string quartet to cover their respective cycle in a parallel series of recitals. This would have been far more than an academic exercise. It would have been an opportunity to experience the rich connectedness of the music listening experience in ways that mere words could never convey.

Profile in Cowardice

Last month I wrote a post suggesting Senator Edward Kennedy as a latter-day example of a politician worthy of the title of his late brother's book, Profiles in Courage. Today the Associated Press provided us with a fascinating report about the other side of that coin:

The city manager of Golden, Colo., has decided to withdraw his invitation to let the Al-Jazeera news network broadcast from a barbecue in his backyard on the final night of the Democratic National Convention.

City manager Mike Bestor has apologized for any divisiveness he caused in the city of about 18,000, about 15 miles west of Denver.

Bestor made his decision after a City Council meeting Thursday at which residents complained the event with the English-language service of the Middle East news network would be disrespectful to veterans and active U.S. soldiers.

The first question that comes to mind is: "Was Bestor familiar with the content of Al Jazeera English-language news broadcasts?" Put another way, did he have at least a vague idea of whom he had invited beyond a generic sense of non-American-television-views-American-behavior? If Bestor had no idea at all, then it would be safe to call him stupid and reckless; and, as the old saying goes, I wouldn't vote for him for dog catcher, let alone city manager. If he was familiar with Al Jazeera, then why didn't he ask any of those complaining residents if they had ever watched an Al Jazeera news broadcast?

I have now watched several of them. I have to do it through my computer, since Comcast still refuses to allocate a channel for them; and the connection through their Web site is not always the best. Nevertheless, unless one of my Public Television channels decides to run a BBC World Service News feed, it is far better than any other televised news that I can get in San Francisco on a Saturday. Most important is that Al Jazeera tends to be much better at objectivity than any of our network news puppets (and, for that matter, many BBC reporters). So I can state categorically that I have never heard anything on Al Jazeera that "would be disrespectful to veterans and active U. S. soldiers;" and I am confident that anyone else who has watched this source can make the same claim.

Therefore, if Bestor knew about Al Jazeera's standard for television news, why did he not stick up for them? Was he too much of a coward in the face of hostile voters, or did he just not have the data to defend Al Jazeera? Either way, he seems to be representing the worst qualities of those who voted for him, rather than the ideals to which they know they can aspire. In other words he is the model of all those dangers in our political system over which the Federalists agonized so long and hard.

Joseph Biden According to the Associated Press

The Associated Press account of Barack Obama's selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate is likely to raise more eyebrows over the handling of the story than over the selection itself. It was written by Liz Sidoti and Nedra Pickler; and it reminded me of the hint of irony I always seem to get when I see that the Associated Press prefers the term "writers" to "reporters." There always seems to be the suggestion that creative writing counts for more than reporting; but, given what passes in this country for news these days, why single out the Associated Press? After all, considering some of the things that spring up as their text progresses, Sidoti and Pickler should at least be awarded points for getting the most out of their lead sentence:

Barack Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate early Saturday, balancing his ticket with a seasoned congressional veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Two paragraphs later, however, things get a bit more interesting:

Biden, 65, has twice sought the White House, and is a Catholic with blue-collar roots, a generally liberal voting record and a reputation as a long-winded orator.

This is how Sidoti and Pickler decided to introduce Biden's Senatorial career (with more objective details to follow)—with a sentence that pushes almost as many buttons as it has words, even if it is unclear whether or not there is a pattern to the buttons. The button they missed, however, was the one about Obama and Biden being two of the Senatorial "Gang of Four" (the other two being Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd), all of whom, often to the distress of their party's leadership, had decided that it was better to spend time on the campaign trail than to spend it doing the people's business in the Congress. Given the way things are going, there could be any number of confrontations between the Executive and Legislative branches of the government between now and Election Day; and the last thing we need in such times are AWOL Senators when debate and vote are likely to really matter.

Far more interesting, however, is the way in which Sidoti and Pickler mangled the most critical point of friction between Obama and Biden:

He had stumbled on his first day in the race, apologizing for having described Obama as "clean." Months later, Obama spoke up on Biden's defense, praising him during a campaign debate for having worked for racial equality.

This was not an episode to be reduced to one word. Since I wrote a post about the aftermath of Biden's "stumble," I can use it to reconstruct the entire phrase, which described Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." As anyone who followed the backlash to this remark recalls, the inflammatory word from this phrase was not "clean" but "articulate." Writing in the Sunday "Week in Review" section of The New York Times, Lynette Clemetson declared that the use of this word "calls out for a national chat, perhaps a national therapy session." The two sentences that Sidoti and Pickler chose were thus misrepresentative and dismissive.

There are a lot of things that we as voters are going to want to know about Biden. Most of these things will arise from quality reporting (as opposed to writing). Shall we assume that we should not expect to find them from the Associated Press?

What Goes Around Comes Around

When I was teaching in Israel, one of the most offensive jokes I heard was actually attributed to former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion: The way you make a desert is to take perfectly fertile land and give it to the Arabs for a thousand years. Far be it from me to invoke a concept like "divine retribution;" but there is a certain degree of poetic justice in a story that Tobias Buck filed from Jerusalem for the Financial Times today about Israel's water supply:

This summer both the water level and the mood of the people living by the Sea of Galilee are plunging to record lows. The country has suffered four successive seasons of drought, with rainfall no more than half the annual average.

At the same time, Israel’s thirst for fresh water means the country continues to pump vast amounts of water from the lake to meet the needs of farmers, gardeners and ordinary citizens as far away as the Negev desert in the south.

The result is visible everywhere on the lake, which is falling by between one and two centimetres a day. On many beaches the sea has retreated by as much as 150 metres, forcing swimmers to pick their way across an ever-expanding stretch of pebbles.

The small port at Kibbutz Ein Gev has the unhealthy appearance of a pit, with the boats nestling four metres below the boarding planks. In about four weeks, says Mr Onn, the port will have become so shallow that boats will not be able to enter at all.

Apparently, even the "Miracle in the Desert" has not been particularly judicious in planning the consumption of its natural resources.

Perhaps this is a good time to revisit a passage I wrote almost two years ago in a post about "reckless minds" on my previous blog:

Ultimately, one cannot be reckless in a vacuum. One can only be reckless if one has followers. The recklessness then reveals the arrogance that comes with rejecting having become a role model. The Old Testament Prophets railed against recklessness grounded in arrogance. As Ahad Ha'am tried to remind them, the Jews were not chosen to receive the bounty of the One God they worshiped; they were chosen to be role models for all those other cultures that had rejected their One God. When they brought the Ark of the Covenant into battle with them with the arrogance of the confidence that their One God would protect them and lead them to victory, they were sorely punished for being such a truly awful role model. I guess no one reads Ahad Ha'am any more.

I recommend the words of Ahad Ha'am to any Arab who took personal offence from Ben-Gurion's excuse for a joke.

Simplicity Trumps Complexity (again)

The more we learn about what happened in Georgia, not just this month but in the events leading up to this month, the more we need to be reminded (once again) of the wisdom of H. L. Mencken:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Unfortunately, in this country it seems to be the business of the media to traffic in clarity, even when that clarity is simplistic to the point of being specious. However, this is a Presidential election year; and that happens to be a time when simplicity rules with a vengeance. Most of the electorate (probably even those who do not show up at the polls) value the ability to make a choice (whether or not they exercise it); but they really dislike making decisions that involve a multiplicity of interrelated factors, none of which they understand particularly well. This is why so many voters make a selection of the basis of a single issue, whether it is abortion, gun control, or war. In many ways the last two Presidential elections provided reductio ad absurdum instances of this principle through a candidate who put so much emphasis on faith that selection amounted to choosing good over evil.

Where Georgia is concerned, Europeans are probably more sensitive to the dangers of faulty simplistic reasoning. The consequences of an unwise decision are always too close for comfort. Thus, we see columnists like Gabor Steingart at SPIEGEL ONLINE who try to wean us away from the reflex dismissal of Vladimir Putin as an "agent of evil," best compared with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. On this side of the pond, Tom Hayden has now followed suit with an extensive well-reasoned account for The Nation of who is likely to benefit the most from recent events; and, from a rhetorical point of view, it is worth noting that Hayden uses the word "evil" only once. That instance is actually embraced in scare quotes as follows:

The Republicans and neoconservatives should be asked this puzzling question: whatever happened to your triumphal claim that Ronald Reagan won the cold war by destroying the "evil empire"?

In other words the word only comes up in an example of Republican rhetoric!

There is nothing complex about Hayden's thesis:

Barack Obama and the Democrats are heading towards trouble in November because of a new cold war with the Russians triggered largely by a top John McCain adviser and the same neoconservative clique who fabricated evidence to lobby for the Iraq war.

This thesis rests on the support of what Hayden calls "short-term essentials" of evidence:

• After border skirmishes similar to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf affair, on August 8, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili invaded the autonomous breakaway region of South Ossetia with his US-trained army. The Russians responded with massive force, quickly routing Saakashvili's forces.
• McCain has traveled to Georgia, nominated his close friend Saakashlivi for a Nobel Prize in 2005, and was the first American leader to blast Russia last April, when Vladimir Putin issued a sharp warning against NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine, supported by the United States.
• The Bush Administration was divided along familiar lines, with the foreign policy "realists" around Condoleezza Rice opposite the pro-Georgia hawks centered in Dick Cheney's office and allied with McCain--enthusiasts for spreading "democracy" from Iraq to the Russian border.
• Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy adviser, was a registered foreign agent for Saakashlivi's government from at least 2004, when Saakashvili came to power, until May 15, 2008, when he technically severed his ties to Orion Strategies, his lobbying firm. At that point, Orion had earned at least $800,000 in lobbying fees from Georgia.
• Saakashvili, with Scheuneman advising him, campaigned on a platform of taking back South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
• Schuenemann was Georgia's lobbyist when Saakashvili sent troops to retake two separatist enclaves, Ajaria in 2004 and the upper Kodori Gorge in Abhkazia in 2006, over strong Russian objections.
• Saakashvili tarnished his democratic credentials by sending club-wielding riot police against unarmed demonstrators protesting his abrupt purging of the police, civil servants and universities in 2007, a replay of Paul Bremer's decision to privatize Iraq in 2003.

This should lead us to start asking serious questions about just what agents have been involved in this whole affair, what actions did they take, and what were their motives behind those actions; but, without trying to sound too pejorative, any list with that many bullets is too long for the consumption of most voters. (Hell, I know from personal experience that it is too long for just about any CEO!) Hayden's argumentative technique does not blunt the impact of his thesis; but his rhetoric may leave many wringing their hands in despair, figuring that, once again they will be screwed no matter what selection they make on Election Day (if they bother to show up to make a selection at all). He is a bit like an overly-earnest lawyer, who has become so preoccupied with presenting "the truth" that he has totally forgotten to present it in a way that will sway the jury in his favor.

The good news is that, where rhetoric alone is concerned, Obama seems to have a good pool for resources for standing up to McCain. We are beginning to see the methods behind his use of those resources, and there is a good chance that they will serve him well. However, the idea of a Republican cadre intent in reviving the Cold War goes far beyond silly issues like the number of houses McCain owns. For better or worse, someone on the Obama team needs to start harvesting the talking points (and, dare I say it, sound bytes) that will turn heads and then let those heads know that the Republican party is, once again, trying to play them for suckers. (Recall, for example, when Obama took his last shot at winning Nevada primary voters with what amounted to a standup routine in Las Vegas.) Choosing one candidate because you have discovered that the other one is making a fool out of you is not necessarily the best strategy; but, if you have to cut the corners of complexity, it may be the most effective strategy!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Will someone (as my title may suggest, I think Aretha Franklin would be a good candidate) please tell Jacques Rogge to shut up before he adds to the damage he has already done? This is the man who led the International Olympic Committee down a garden path of unfulfilled promises by the Chinese government, never raising a fuss in the name of "silent diplomacy." So when he does decide to raise a fuss, his target is not the People's Republic of China (say, for the hazardous conditions under which all Olympic athletes have had to perform); rather, it is Usain Bolt for his exuberant expressions of victory. Furthermore, Rogge has decided to attack Bolt not for that exuberance being "irrational" (to borrow an adjective from Alan Greenspan) but for being disrespectful. Fortunately, Associated Press reporter Karolos Grohmann managed to come up with a quote from Rogge that gives us some sense of the workings of Rogge's mind:

Bolt must be considered now the same way like Jesse Owens should have been in the ’30s.

The operative word here is "should." I am not suggesting that Bolt decided to strut his stuff to get even with Adolf Hitler's treatment (or non-treatment, if you prefer) of Jesse Owens during the Berlin Olympics. I merely wish to point out that the International Olympic Committee has a long-standing history of condoning bad behavior against the athletes, speaking out only when the behavior is by the athletes.

One of the reasons I do not watch any sports any more is that I have grown very weary of watching adults who should know better than to outdo each other with childish behavior. However, I have never suggested that everyone else should avoid such spectacles, just because I have no taste for them. I can even understand why the athletes do what they do: Many of them have achieved something that they have been dreaming of since they were kids. So it almost makes sense that, when they finally get there, they should react the way they would have done when the dream was first conceived.

So perhaps someone ought to tell Bolt that it is time to think about growing up a bit; but Rogge is not the right person to do that (even if he is a former Olympian himself). When the BBC ran a story about Rogge's reaction this morning, they cited Muhammad Ali as the ne plus ultra example of shameless self-promotion in victory; and they pointed out that, in terms of character, Ali is well remembered today. If his capacity for speech has not been totally debilitated, I could see Ali sitting down with Bolt and saying, "Look, son, I know how you feel. You have every right to feel good right now, but you have become someone special. As a special person, you need to start thinking about what folks will think of you a few months from now, when televisions are no longer showing what a great runner you are." He would probably leave it at that; and, if Bolt was too giddy to pay attention when he said it, chances are his memory would refresh him in the due course of time!

On the Dialectical Synthesis of Bach and Zappa

Regular readers know that SPIEGEL ONLINE is one of my favorite sources for news on a global scale, primarily where topics such as the economy, foreign affairs, and politics are concerned. However, when it comes to music, my major sources seems to be London (the Telegraph and the Financial Times) and New York (mostly Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review). Nevertheless, I had to turn to Sebastian Knauer for a thorough account of a legal battle between the Zappa Family Trust (run by Frank Zappa's widow Gail) and the Arf-Society, which organizes the Zappanale in the north-eastern German town of Bad Doberan. There is no reason to question the Zappanale's seriousness when it comes to maintaining performances of Zappa's music. As Knauer reported, "18 bands took to the stage in the 19th annual Zappanale last weekend."

However, I am less interested in how the legal dispute will ultimately be resolved and more interested in the innovative approaches that the Arf-Society is taking to musical performance. As Knauer reported, their activities are now extending beyond an annual gig in Bad Doberan:

Last week, Zappanale organizers put on a show at St. Katharinen church in Hamburg called "Zappa Plays for Bach." Some 600 guests showed up for a performance of variations on the famous Goldberg Variations. Indeed, improvisation is one quality Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) shares with his colleague Frank Zappa (1940-1993).

All proceeds from the concert went to the Hamburg foundation Stiftung Johann Sebastian, which is trying to raise money to recondition a Barock organ on which Bach played in 1720. And it was a fantastic show -- with nine musicians from the Florida group Bogus Pomp playing together with the former Zappa saxophone player Napoleon Murphy Brock putting on pieces ranging from "Absolutely Free Medley" to "Chunga's Revenge" to "Idiot Bastard Son."

Personally, I can think of few things more stimulating than an opportunity to listen to Bach in the context of Zappa and Zappa in the context of Bach, all in a single concert. When Zappa receives any attention in a concert setting, it always seems to be in conjunction with his work with the Ensemble InterContemporain with support from Pierre Boulez. Having seen these two men together on a stage at UCLA, I have to say that Zappa is the only person I have ever encountered who managed to get a smile out of Boulez; but, as far as the rest of the world has been concerned, there seemed to be a need to intellectualize Zappa's extremism as a prerequisite to enjoying it. Only Václav Havel seemed happy to enjoy Zappa's work for its own sake, although, as I wrote at the end of last season, there are some signs that the composer Magnus Lindberg is comfortable enough with Zappa's logic, grammar, and rhetoric to pick up where he left off and proceed beyond the "specialist confines" of the Ensemble InterContemporain to more conventional settings, such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

Thus, I shall close with a question: If our listening of Lindberg is well informed by past experience of listening to Zappa, when will the San Francisco Symphony program one of Zappa's works on its subscription series?

The Chutzpah of Speaking Truth to Power

Once again I was pleased to find an act of chutzpah with a positive connotation worthy of a Chutzpah of the Week award. I found it in, of all places, Swaziland, described by the BBC report as "Africa's last absolute monarchy;" and, as this post's title implies, the act of chutzpah involves the recognition of truth no matter how absolute the power may be. Here is the substance of that BBC report, which elaborates on the grounds for the award:

Hundreds of Swazi women have marched through the streets of the capital to protest about a shopping trip taken by nine of the king's 13 wives.

They chartered a plane last week to go to Europe and the Middle East.

The BBC's Thulani Mthethwa says the protesters handed in a petition to the finance ministry saying the money could have been better spent.

"We can't afford a shopping trip when a quarter of the nation lives on food aid," they chanted.

Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, is one of the poorest countries in the world and more than 40% of the population is believed to be infected with HIV.

In the words of our own Declaration of Independence, even government by an absolute monarch requires consent of the governed; but it must have taken considerable courage for these women to withhold their consent in such a public way. The march was apparently organized by the non-governmental organization Positive Living, which addresses the needs of women with AIDS; so it is probably proper to present the award to this organization on behalf of the women who rose to the call to protest.

A Peek into Beethoven's "Engine Room"

Some reader's may recall Peter Grunberg talking almost a year ago about poking around in Johannes Brahms' "engine room" in preparing for a performance of the Opus 25 piano quartet in G minor. Where Ludwig van Beethoven is concerned, the primary path into his "engine room" is through his sketchbooks; but, thanks to the Brilliant Classics Gesamtwerk collection, I am discovering that there are also paths provided by earlier works, some of which were not published until after the composer's death. I recently encountered an interesting example in Beethoven's only three piano quartets (listed as WoO 36), whose manuscript is dated 1785. As Thayer observed, there is an interesting discrepancy in that Beethoven refers to himself as "Luis van Beethoven, agé 13 ans" (the number apparently having been changed from "14"), since Beethoven was born (as we know from Peanuts) on December 16, 1770; so we may just want to say that this was a product of his teen years. More interesting (the "engine room" part) is that these piano quartets use motives that would later surface in his Opus 2 piano sonatas, composed in 1794 and 1795 after he had gone to Vienna and began picking up the wisdom and influence of Joseph Haydn. One wonders if Beethoven may have showed the piano quartets to Haydn, who basically made it known that Beethoven could do much better things with those motives if he set his mind to it. This could explain both why Beethoven never published the piano quartets and why the Opus 2 piano sonatas (in which he did "much better things") were dedicated to Haydn! This is, of course, unabashed speculation; but such speculation often provides a useful anchor for listening practices, even if the conjecture is not as true as we would like it to be!

An Answer to the NATO Question from Germany

Gabor Steingart's introduction to this week's West Wing column on SPIEGEL ONLINE is, to say the least, provocative:

These days Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is often compared -- unfairly -- with Stalin and Hitler. In truth, Putin is a Russian Kennedy. And Putin's Cuba is called Georgia.

The crux of Steingart's argument seems to be that Putin's move on Georgia bears a strong family resemblance to the Bay of Pigs invasion, except that Putin was far more successful, perhaps because he is as good at learning from history as he is from reading texts on statecraft. There are a number of ways in which one can poke logical holes in this argument. However, I was more interested in how Steingart used the situation in Georgia to address my "Why NATO?" question:

Europe's task is to prevent the current situation from escalating. At the present time, NATO expansion into Russia's front yard does not increase security -- it merely serves to heighten tensions in Europe.

In light of my analysis yesterday, I would suggest that the phrase "NATO expansion into Russia's front yard" is a euphemism for "American expansion into Russia's front yard," which is why I used Lord Ismay's "goal statement" as a point of departure for my own argument. Steingart is right: Keeping the Georgia crisis from escalating is Europe's task; but is that task furthered by keeping "the Americans in?" Europe has had plenty of evidence with which to assess the impact of American saber-rattling in the Middle East; do they really want the same loose cannons (with apologies for mixing metaphors) installed along the eastern borders pointed at Russia?

Beethoven's Deceptive Opus Numbers

One lesson that comes from "ascending" the Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven involves just how deceptive his opus numbers can be. Thus, the four works on the first Music for Wind Ensemble CD all (most likely) date from 1792 Bonn. However, they are listed as follows:

• Octet for 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and 2 horns in E flat major Op. 103
• Rondino for 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and 2 horns in E flat major WoO 25
• Sextet for 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and 2 horns in E flat major Op. 71
• Three Duos for clarinet and bassoon, WoO 27

Thayer does not provide a date for the last of these entries but lists it between entries labeled "1790-92" and those labeled "1792;" so, presumably, he figured that 1792 would be an educated guess for when those duos were composed. These are all relatively lightweight works, but there is still ample opportunity for Beethoven to exercise his wit. Indeed, the wit of the Opus 10 piano sonatas does not begin to surface until 1796; and the Opus 2 sonatas have more to do with Joseph Haydn's lightness of touch than with the sort of wit that is more evident in Opus 10. So it may have been the combination of agility and sound color that prompted Beethoven to "play" with his sense of wit in these earlier works, meaning that they may be his earliest experiments with wit.

I also realize that I have not really written about all-wind ensembles, the closest approximation being the recent performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 361 serenade in B flat Major, which includes a solo string bass. When, in the past, I have written about a sextet, it has either been one of operatic voices or strings. It is almost as if there is a cultural bias that wind soloists need to be reinforced by more "legitimate" instruments (even if just a keyboard), the most notable exception being the unaccompanied flute, which has a repertoire that ranges from Johann Sebastian Bach to the twentieth century (if not beyond); but even a solo flute is not a wind ensemble. I know from my experiences with hearing the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet that there is certainly an abundant repertoire; why does it not surface in the San Francisco concert scene?

Why NATO?

Paul Reynolds, world affairs correspondent for the BBC News Web site, has filed an interesting analysis piece with the arresting headline:

Nato wonders what to do about Russia

This is the elaborated with the following summary sentence:

On the eve of a special meeting of their foreign ministers to discuss the conflict in Georgia, Nato governments are divided on what to do about Russia.

While Reynolds has done an admirable job is filling us in on the current state of play, I would suggest that a bit of historical background on the origins of NATO might serve as useful prerequisite reading. This is one of those situations in which Wikipedia is likely to be as good a resource as any. Here are the first two paragraphs from their entry on NATO:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); French: Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord (OTAN); (also called the North Atlantic Alliance, the Atlantic Alliance, or the Western Alliance) is a military alliance established by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium,^[3] the organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party.

For its first few years, NATO was not much more than a political association. However, the Korean War galvanized the member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two U.S. supreme commanders. The first NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay, famously stated the organization's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down".^[4] Throughout the Cold War doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasion - doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of the French from NATO's military structure from 1966.

Quaint as Lord Ismay's language may seem, it is unclear that there has ever been a revision of the organization's goal in such explicit language since the end of the Cold War; and it is hard to read the "original version" without a strong sense of irony. Taken in reverse order:

• Not only have the Germans "come up," they have developed a robust democratic governance structure and an economy that is as sound as any other in the current global conditions (along with a generally conscientious attitude towards addressing economic difficulties).
• On the other hand, as a result of the success of the current Administration in lowering the value of the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world, the idea of keeping "the Americans in" (particularly in terms of the presence of American military facilities on European soil) does not seem like the good idea it was 60 years ago.
• Finally, the extent to which Russia has pulled itself together enough to become a major supplier of oil to its Western neighbors has led those neighbors to question the desirability of keeping "the Russians out."

If the goals of NATO have not been revised de jure, then the de facto situation seems to indicate that the goal of NATO is to supplement American defense resources for whatever objectives the United States government may have in mind. How many of the current NATO members (or, for that matter, countries trying to join NATO) would accept that de facto goal (considered, again, in the wake of the "achievements," so to speak, of the Bush Administration during the President's term in office)? My guess is that every one of those countries, at some time or another, has experienced an American attitude that goes all the way back to the original "Red scare:" "There's no one left but thee and me, and I'm not sure of thee!" Combine that with the Administration's overt disdain for the United Nations; and any non-American NATO member country must be wondering when it will become the next target for such disdain. If the only purpose of NATO is to provide the United States with more toys to play with, isn't it about time that someone with a strong sense of responsible parenting take away the toys?

Transcending the Trivial

Were it not for cable television (particularly the HBO offering of Generation Kill but with honorable mentions to Showtime for another round of Weeds and AMC for Mad Men), it would be easy to write off this summer as one triviality after another, not only where the paucity of "live" performance is concerned but also in the paucity of texts worthy of that activity that may legitimately be called "reading." Perhaps this is precisely the point that Nicholas Carr was trying to make in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," not to mention Andrew Keen's thesis that the Internet (and, in the subtitle of the paperback edition of his book, The Cult of the Amateur, a whole lot more) is "killing our culture." However, I suspect that what Keen's version of amateurism has in common with Carr's critique of "bite-sized content" is the extent to which Gresham's Law may be as applicable to content (whether in the form of a text we read or a performance we attend) as it is to currency: the "artificial" (paper fiat money in Gresham's case) drives out "specie" (taken either literally or metaphorically).

In this bleak time I was thus happy to see that the San Francisco Chronicle chose to give pride of place (even if most of the space was occupied by a photograph) on the first page of their "Books" section (which, unfortunately, is now "embedded" within the "Insight" section, as good a demonstration of "artificiality" as you are likely to find) to How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of recent essays by Daniel Mendelsohn. Regular readers of this blog know that I am already familiar with Mendelsohn's writing, particularly where it involves opera and music. What might not be evident is that I have been drawn to Mendelsohn by his canny perceptions that always seem to give equal attention to questions of text and questions of performance, those two "fronts" currently being so brutally assailed by trivialities. Reviewer Martin Rubin hit on what appeals to me most, even if he saved his observation for his concluding remarks:

Unlike so many critics whose writing seems designed to draw attention to themselves and the impressiveness of their mental processes and theoretical underpinnings, Mendelsohn is rightly content to let his [scholarly] methodology speak for itself.

Rubin explains that Mendelsohn's title comes from a stage direction in Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, whose overall plot line can well be read as a reflection on the intimate relationship between beauty and fragility. However, Rubin supports his own concluding remarks by citing an extended passage in which Mendelsohn offers his reason for choosing the title:

I suppose that one reason that this haunting line struck me with such force when I first came across it is that it acknowledges, with perfect simplicity, the inevitable entwining of beauty and tragedy that is the hallmark of the Greek theater, and is a consistent element in the works that have always moved me the most, from the plays of Euripides to the 'History' of Thucydides, from the light comedies of Noël Coward to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. As the Greeks knew well, it's the potential for being broken – which boils down to the knowledge that we all must die – that gives resonance and meaning to the small part of the universe that is our life.

That last sentence captures, for me, why it is that I shall always prefer "live" performance to recordings, no matter how great the quality of reproduction may be. The "live" performance always has that "potential for being broken" and thus demands far more substantiality (the fundamental quality of "specie") from the performers than is required for recording studio work. Indeed, that potential also says a lot about texts that, were it not for Mendelsohn's intervention, I might well have been content to dismiss as trivial, the most recent example being the score and libretto for Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

However, this sentence also captures the prevailing malady that has made this summer so disconcerting. Critical thinking should not be reduced to rooting out trivialities and calling attention to what makes them trivial. Ultimately, such thinking is about that quest for, in Mendelsohn's words, "resonance and meaning;" and, if this summer has given cause for regret, then that regret concerns the extent to which, as a culture (perhaps the very culture that both Keen and Carr have put so much effort into analyzing) we seem to have given up on the quest altogether. Returning to my analysis of how Vladimir Putin may currently be viewing the United States, it may well be our national resignation to giving up such a question that indicates that our fruit has gone rotten.

Returning to Mount Beethoven

The replacement for my defective Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven has finally arrived, after a long wait, apparently due to the failure of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to process properly the material that Collectors' Choice had provided under their exchange agreement. If I had to make an educated guess (where, in this case, "educated" would honor John Dewey's definition as "informed by experience"), it would be that the package to be returned never made it out of San Francisco. This is, after all, a postal system that managed to lose my property tax bill one year, which is why I now have an Outlook reminder to check the City Web site by a certain date if the bill has not yet shown up in the mail. I gather from my wife that the Postal Service is offering more and more "do it yourself" services (like weighing packages and then allowing you to purchase the required postage, all at a single "work station"); but it is still the case that human hands are required to get an object from here to there. Given that we are obliged to take that word "service" seriously, this is a case of "service pathology" that is far more serious than the situation at my favorite target, the San Francisco Public Library, or my more recent complaints about the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Presumably the "quality of service" of the USPS falls under the jurisdiction of the Postal Regulatory Committee (PRC); but, if the PRC is paying as much attention to the USPS as they are to maintaining their Web site with timely and useful information, then anyone depending on the USPS for even part of the job of getting anything "from here to there" is likely to be in very deep yogurt! So much for ranting over an inordinately long wait!

Since the entire Beethoven collection had to be replaced due to a single defective disc (due to the decision of Brilliant Classics to avoid direct communication with a customer when this problem arises), I am now faced with the prospect of listening to all of the discs in the replacement package. Needless to say, I do not regard this as a hardship, particularly when this second attempt to ascend "Mount Beethoven" begins with recordings of the nine symphonies by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of Kurt Masur. I have a history of listing to "live" Masur performances that probably covers about 25 years and actually began with his leading the San Francisco Symphony in a truly "ear-opening" performance of Beethoven's Opus 60 fourth symphony. These recordings have given me the opportunity to experience the ways in which he can tease subtleties out of all nine of these familiar works and are therefore as important to my learning to listen as are my two collections of these symphonies performed by Wilhelm Furtwängler (along with a variety of individual recordings). I have not always been entirely satisfied with Masur, as was the case a few years ago when he came to San Francisco to conduct Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem;" but my disappointments have been heavily outweighed by performances that have been as informative as they were exciting, such as his performance of the second cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke. Thus, I continue to be more than satisfied that Masur was chosen to "represent the Beethoven symphonies" in this particular collection and have no problems with making another pass through this particular cycle.

The "Wisdom of Crowds" Meets the Madness of Brute Force

Eugene Robinson's latest column for the Washington Post, "The Original Swift-Boater is Back," is now available through Truthdig. The subject of that title is Jerome Corsi:

Corsi would be known as just another visitor from the outer fringe if he had not been the co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book that slimed Kerry’s exemplary record as a Swift boat commander in Vietnam. The allegations in that book were discredited, but not before they had been amplified by the right-wing echo chamber to the point where they raised questions in some voters’ minds—perhaps enough to swing the election.

The substance of the new column, as we all can guess, is that Corsi is at it again:

Now Corsi, in what he acknowledges is an attempt “to keep Obama from getting elected,” has come out with a book that similarly tries to turn one of Obama’s strengths—his compelling life story—into a liability.

Corsi’s new volume of vitriol, “The Obama Nation,” seeks to smear Obama as a “leftist” and add fuel to the false and discredited rumor that he is secretly a radical Muslim, or at least has “extensive connections to Islam.” The liberal Web site Media Matters has already demonstrated that the book is riddled with factual errors—for example, Corsi repeats the charge, thoroughly disproved, that Obama was in church for one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s most incendiary sermons. But the point isn’t to tell the truth. The point is to repeat the lie and thus give it new life.

Corsi’s dirty work is more difficult this time because Obama has already written his life story in the autobiographical “Dreams From My Father.” Since he can’t reveal anything about Obama’s past, Corsi is reduced to reinterpretation—or, at times, invention.

None of this should be particularly surprising. However, in the interest of continuing my own argument concerning the dialectical tension between the "wisdom of crowds" philosophy of Wikipedia and the WWE Friday Night Smackdown! conduct of Wikipedia contributors, I found Robinson's following paragraph particularly interesting:

It sounds like the kind of book that should quickly be consigned to the remainder bin, but—unsurprisingly—it is already a best-seller. The Washington Post and other news organizations have noted that this and similar anti-Obama books win the imprimatur of best-seller status by being “pushed by conservative book clubs that buy in bulk to drive up sales.”

This was then followed by a tidbit from "troublesum" in a Truthdig comment on Robinson's column:

Walmart has Corsi’s book promenently displayed in their book sections as well as another book entitled, “The Truth about Obama” which should be called, “Lies about Obama.” On the other hand you have to search to find the two books written by Obama - they are usually on the bottom shelves.

Thus, through the "wisdom of crowds," the systematic distribution of noise about Barack Obama is doing an excellent job of trumping the signal, regardless of the efforts of the Obama camp to raise the amplitude of the signal. Perhaps the real difference between the "wisdom of crowds" and the "madness of crowds" involves not just the level of signal over noise but also a subjective preference of signal over noise. My guess is that Corsi's strategy is based on this premise; and it is, at the least, ironic that he is doing such a good job of turning a "Web 2.0 meme" to his malicious advantage by doing such a good job of playing to the preference of noise over signal.

Geriatric Chutzpah

In a week of so much bad news involving negative-connotation chutzpah by all the usual suspects for all the usual reasons, I felt it would be psychologically beneficial to seek out an nice health positive-connotation example. I am therefore announcing that this week's Chutzpah of the Week award winner is the 91-year-old actor Ernest Borgnine. For those not yet aware of my reason, Borgnine was flogging his memoirs on Fox and Friends and had to deal with the usual question about his personal secret for a long and healthy life. Demonstrating that, as an actor, he is still master of the stage-whisper technique, he delivered the answer, "I masturbate a lot," thus providing a wonderful object lesson in having fun at the expense of a "news" network that assigns such a high value to faith and morality. For those wishing to see this "performance," the video is now on YouTube. In the spirit of this chutzpah, the Truthdig account reinforced (so to speak) Borgnine's advice with supporting evidence reported by the BBC.

Dangerous Knowledge

It is now a little more than a year since Book TV ran a broadcast of Dennis Ross talking about his book Statecraft. Since then I have posted periodically on the many ways in which our current Administration has, almost systematically, gone against the grain of the rather straightforward lessons of this book. Whether these have been actions of defiance or ignorance is left as an exercise for the reader; but I was amused to note that my most recent post, "Getting into the Iran Mess," was written exactly one year after I first cited Ross' work.

My thoughts turned to Ross again this morning while reading Joe Conason's latest column, "A Cut-and-Paste Foreign Policy," on Truthdig. This time, however, I was less concerned with whether or not the present occupant of the White House and his would-be successor John McCain were disregarding Ross' fundamental principles of statecraft out of defiance or ignorance. Rather, I began to realize the extent to which Vladimir Putin seems to not only understand but also embrace those principles. Consider Conason's final observation:

There can be no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses a challenge to the West, and to the next administration. It can be argued that Russian ambitions must be checked now to discourage Moscow’s bullying imperialism. It can also be argued that bringing the former Soviet republics into NATO only provokes the Russians into resisting encirclement by their Cold War enemies, and that we must engage Russia to cope with existential threats like nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism. What can no longer be sanely argued is that reflexive ideology and confrontational bluster will secure our future.

It all comes down to how accurately we understand "Russian ambitions" and what actions we can take (based, of course, on our "capital resources," both material and social) towards our own interests. When it comes to resources, our relation to Russia is no longer one of "My pop's bigger than your pop," based on the size of nuclear arsenals. We now face crises of shortages of both food and energy, which may ultimately lead to the recognition that the best government (whether on a national or global scale) is the one most likely to sustain life on this planet that involves more than living from hand to mouth. Putin is less a blustering militarist and more a cold-blooded chief executive determined to set achievable goals that can be brought about through well-executed plans. Put another way, he knows how to frame what he wants in terms of what he has; and he does it well enough to run up a good record of getting what he wants. Surprisingly enough, the execution of his plans often involves playing the game of statecraft by Ross' rules, just because he is in a position to play the game better than the others.

Meanwhile, in our hemisphere we cannot even agree on what we want our goals to be; so we fall back on the empty rhetoric of our political ideology, which may well be at least a predisposing cause of both the current food and energy problems. Without a better sense of goals, our actions cannot be planned, which is why we jump from one "campaign" (Iraq) to the next (Iran) without giving much thought to any of them, particularly when it comes to why they matter (the question we hear least about where the current crisis in Georgia is concerned). We are thus reduced to the pathological loser at a poker table in Las Vegas, so inept that our attempts at bluffing are transparent to all the other players.

I am reminded of a story about the Soviet Union and Iran. As I recall the story, Nikita Khrushchev once asked the Shah of Iran why there was such a strong American presence in his country; and the Shah replied that Iran needed protection against a possible Soviet invasion. Khrushchev replied, "The Soviet Union does not need to invade Iran. Iran is a rotten fruit. The Soviet Union can wait for it to drop from the tree." Does Putin see the United States as such a "rotten fruit?"

Are You What you Listen To?

As if there were a shortage on inane criteria for comparing our presumptive Presidential nominees, the Entertainment desk for the BBC NEWS Web site has released this news flash:

Frank Sinatra is the only artist to feature among the top 10 favourite songs of both US presidential candidates, it has been revealed.

Democrat Barack Obama included You'd Be So Easy To Love and John McCain I've Got You Under My Skin in the lists compiled by US magazine Blender.

Abba are favoured by Republican Mr McCain with Dancing Queen at number one and Take a Chance On Me at three.

Obama's favourite song, meanwhile, is Fugees' 1996 hit Ready Or Not.

The rest of Obama's top five features older tracks with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at number two and Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire at number three.

His top five is made up by Gimme Shelter by Rolling Stones and Nina Simone's Sinnerman.

Pro-Obama song

Mr McCain's second favourite song after Dancing Queen is Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison.

His fourth favourite track is 1973 country hit If We Make It Through December, by Merle Haggard, followed by As Time Goes, recorded in 1942 by Dooley Wilson.

The top 10 of 71-year-old Mr McCain is made up exclusively of older tracks.

But the choices of 46-year-old Mr Obama include rapper Kanye West's 2006 hit Touch the Sky at number six and Yes We Can by Will.i.am at number 10.

For the record, out of all of these selections, the only one I listen to with the slightest regularity is "Sinnerman;" and I know the words well enough to ask whether Obama has ever paid much attention to them! (So, if Obama were not running for the office of President of the United States and already counting his electoral votes, would "Sinnerman" have been displaced from his list by "Mississippi Goddam?" Enquiring minds want to know! Those are the words that still demand attention!) What interests me more is the dog-that-did-not-bark-in-the-night phenomenon: Note that "My Way" was not on either candidate's list! What does that say?

Back to Bach

When it comes to learning to be a better listener to musical performances, August tends to be a pretty quiet month in San Francisco. Last year the high point of the month was a special "Bon Voyage" concert by the San Francisco Symphony, which provided a representative sample of the music they would be playing on their European tour. This year their travels do not appear to be taking them further than opening night at Carnegie Hall, which will take place after the opening night gala at Davies Symphony Hall. For my part this means that this is a time when I can work on honing my listening skills through some of the more interesting recordings I have in my collection. Having addressed this issue with respect to the jazz compositions of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, I have recently turned my attention to the more "classical" side of music experiences.

I used scare quotes in the preceding sentence because the current focus of my listening is Johann Sebastian Bach. However, while I now have the advantage of the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition and the Teldec Bach 2000 collection, both of which have made serious efforts to honor "authenticity" in the performance of this music, I have to confess that I have great interest in the recordings that Jascha Heifetz made in October of 1952 of the solo sonatas and partitas (BWV 1001 through 1006). This was a time when "authenticity" was not in the working vocabulary of very many (any?) working musicians, which means it was not on the radar of the emerging crop of students. When we think of Heifetz, we think of the nineteenth-century traditions of virtuosity; and we tend to listen to him as the pioneer who used recording technology to preserve those traditions for posterity. We also tend to think of the nineteenth-century as a time when the pure abstractions of Bach were trumped by the flamboyance of such virtuosity.

This is, at least, a partial distortion; and the best counterexample was Johannes Brahms. Brahms was an avid subscriber to the first serious effort to publish Bach's complete works, avid enough that he would eagerly devour each volume as it appeared and them anxiously await the next one. It would be unfair to say that Brahms was the first to recognize that there was more to Bach than abstraction; but he remains a prime example, since most (if not all) of his compositions deal with the need to strike the optimal balance between the intricate structures of form and the rhetorical impact of virtuosity. The same may be said of the Heifetz performances of the solo violin works. As I previously wrote, "Heifetz was a master of that refined stillness from which the most dynamic musical gestures could ensue;" and it was the dynamism of his virtuosity that draw so many to hear (if not listen to) him with anything along the gamut between satisfaction and awe. Yet through "that refined stillness" he also had the ability to let Bach be Bach, particularly when it came to sorting all those notes out into a simultaneity of two or more contrapuntal voices. In other words Bach was not a platform for showing off his talents. Rather the "Bach text" was of a voice that deserved serious listening; and Heifetz recognized that his role, as a performer, was to assist us in that often challenging transition from hearing to listening. Thus, in terms of what deserved to be preserved for posterity, those 1952 Bach sessions are just as important as the recorded documents we now have of performances from the flashier nineteenth-century traditions.

The Excitement Factor

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

The Museum Versus the Artist

I write this in the spirit of some of my past posts (such "Branagh Versus Shakespeare" and "The Competition versus the Music"), in which I have tried to examine the opposition of forces that, by all rights, should be pulling in the same direction. In this case the artist is Dale Chihuly; and the museum is the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, currently providing (at a charge beyond normal admission) the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young." A negative review in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kenneth Baker "polarized reader response as nothing else I have written for The Chronicle ever has," as Baker put it. Baker's "response to the response," so to speak, give a fair account of what provoked this polarization:

Quite a few people found the tone of my review ugly. I agree, which is why I reserve that tone for occasions, such as this one, when I see fraudulence or some other real public disservice afoot. As a practical matter, nothing I or any other critic can say will slow the juggernaut of Chihuly's success. In all likelihood, as experience suggests, such a damning review will bring more people, not fewer, to the exhibition.

In my own opinion Baker's "defense" of his position rests of sound principles, not unlike those I try to bring to my own writing about the performance of music:

In today's culture, people need not merely critics to tell them what art is, but also artists, curators, art historians, art dealers, collectors - and the viewers' own education and sensibility.

In the consensus as to the art status of a piece or a body of work, each such participant has something to contribute, and each type of contribution has to be valued differently.

The critic owes his readers not reassurance or even judgment, but a point of view, and thus, an example of how a point of view forms.

Hence, my practice of comparing one artist's works with those made by others. Art is made of connections - connections available to any informed observer - not just of materials and good intentions.

Personally, I rather enjoy what Chihuly does. I was delighted with an exhibition of his work that I saw in San Jose about ten years ago; and I have equally fond memories of a documentary about him that I saw on the (now defunct) Ovation channel. On the other hand, having now seen "Chihuly at the de Young," I rather wish that Baker had directed at least some of his ugly tone for the museum, rather than focusing entirely on the artist. As I see it, the real problem with this exhibit is that "the juggernaut of Chihuly's success," due at least in part to the promotional efforts of the de Young, have pretty much annihilated any chance of a visitor forming a point of view, whether or not that visitor has been informed (or misinformed) by any art critic.

Ultimately, the greatest damage done to the artist in this case is the inability of the museum to deal with its success in attracting a high volume of visitors. Visitors are herded like cattle into a confined space on the basis of assigned half-hour intervals. One barely has room to observe, let alone reflect on one's observations. Can anyone really expect a visitor to form a point of view in such a setting? Furthermore, since Chihuly's setting is glass, often in very large forms that still appear highly fragile, one is haunted by the possibility that one will become a bull in a china shop, a further inhibition to forming a point of view.

In fairness, however, I would probably argue that this particular exhibit is more symptom than disease, the real disease being the tendency of "institutions of culture" to alienate those who come with genuine curiosity. Such institutions are founded to offer a service; but, as I have, from time to time, observed about the "customer-facing" activities of the San Francisco Public Library, alienation rises when the "service business" goes pathological. There is something pathological about the way the de Young handles its visitors, particularly when they come in large numbers, which is, of course, the time when attitude towards their presence should be least alienating. Perhaps I am overly sensitive to this matter because it always seems as if the San Francisco Symphony has set a high standard for making the prospect of one of their concerts a highly inviting one. If they can do this sort of thing for a commitment to sit still for a couple of hours, why can't a major art museum be just as inviting?

The Audacity of Opposing Obama

Yesterday's post to The Beat, John Nichols' blog for The Nation began with some pretty depressing words:

The Democratic Party's draft platform offers little in the way of a serious promise of health-care reform.

The document reads as if it was written by the insurance industry rather than advocates for people who need health care.

My immediate reaction was to recall a question I had raised last May about whether Barack Obama's "personal 'platform of issues'" might run into conflict with the document produced by the Platform Committee for the Democratic Party. Today's post, however, revealed that yesterday's depressing condition could well be attributed to Obama himself:

Obama's camp, which dominates but does not entirely control the platform-writing process, wanted to avoid talk of guarantees. It also wanted language that was friendlier to the insurance industry. Progressive Democrats for America, working in conjunction with a number of Pennsylvania organizations and Democratic leaders that support single-payer health care, pushed for a deeper commitment to health-care reform.

Thus, once again we see that there is less to Obama's progressivism than meets the eye and that, once again in that dialectical opposition of elevated goals and base political machinery, his roots in the latter have trumped his "audacity of hope."

The good news (as Nichols observed) is that, at least as far as health care, the Progressive Democrats for America are doing all they can to make sure that this particular elevated goal does not get trumped:

PDA collected signatures from almost 500 convention delegates – including backers of Obama and his chief rival for the nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton – urging the platform committee to commit the party to:

* "Guarantee accessible health care for all."

* "Create a single standard of high quality, comprehensive, and preventive health care for all."

* "Allow freedom of choice of physician, hospital, and other health care providers."

* "Eliminate financial barriers that prevent families and individuals from obtaining the medically necessary care they need."

* "Allow physicians, nurses and other licenced health care providers to make health care decisions based on what is best for the health of the patient."

PDA brought a key Obama backer, House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, D-Michigan, along with Donna Smith, a "star" of the Michael Moore documentary "SiCKO," to Pittsburgh to appear with Pennsylvania single-payer activists in Pittsburgh to promote the package.

Bob Remer, a Clinton delegate from Chicago who is a member of the platform committee, introduced the PDA language as a proposed amendment Saturday.

The activists did not get all the language they wanted, and they certainly did not get the commitment to single-payer that Democrats should be campaigning on six decades after Harry Truman ran and won on a promise to develop a national health-care program. But PDA and its allies did force the Obama camp into negotiations that resulted in the addition of stronger language to the official document.

Also added, at the behest of Clinton backers, was a statement that, "There are different approaches within the Democratic Party about how best to achieve the commitment of universal coverage."

Conyers, the sponsor of HR 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act, called the language shift "huge."

Tim Carpenter, the national director of PDA, said, "We were happy to discover the level of support among committee members for guaranteed health care and are pleased that a compromise was reached, but we won't be satisfied until HR 676 is passed by Congress."

Both Conyers and Carpenter are right.

The real work within the Democratic party and in Congress remains unfinished.

But the strengthening of the platform language is significant. It shows that the Obama campaign, which is often too rigid for its own good, is willing to listen to the left – and even to bend a bit. That's the good news from the fight over a platform that is, by and large, a tepid document.

Thus, because of the PDA and in spite of Obama, there will be at least one plank in the platform that makes serious note of an issue that continues to plague most of our country's electorate!

Valery Gergiev in the Mahler Wars

Almost a year ago I wrote about Valery Gergiev's decision, as principle conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), to conduct the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during the 2007–2008 season. I wrote this under the title "The Coming Mahler Wars?," since San Francisco takes considerable pride in the performances of Mahler that Michael Tilson Thomas has brought to Davies Symphony Hall (and perhaps a bit more pride in his leading the San Francisco Symphony in the seventh of these symphonies as part of the 2007 Proms series). Thomas is also "Permanent Guest Conductor" of the LSO, which has a long-standing reputation for delivering excellent Mahler performances under a rather substantial number of batons. As a result I drew heavily upon my RSS feeds from the arts pages of the London press to find out what sort of reception Gergiev's project would receive as it evolved.

Still, reading is a poor substitute for listening; and, since the "carfare" to the Barbican (and St. Paul's for the eighth symphony) was more than I could manage, I was glad to see that a recording project was also involved with this particular cycle. The recordings seem to be coming out in the same order in which the symphonies were performed, beginning with the release of the sixth on April 8. Through the good graces of one of my neighbors, I have now had a chance to listen to this recording; and, at the very least, it made me regret not being there for the performance itself. As I am reminded every time I hear Mahler in Davies, there are just too many things happening on any page of a Mahler score to be rendered with any sense of fidelity by current (or future?) recording technology. Listening to a recording of Mahler can prospectively help you hone your listening skills before attending an actual performance, and a recording like this one might retrospectively awaken the memories of those who were actually there for Gergiev's Barbican performance. However, I have to wonder whether or not the recording has done justice to any of the performances, particularly in light of the "truth in advertising" question around the series of recordings being called "LSO Live" raised by David Bryson's review on the Amazon.com page for this CD.

This symphony is a real stake in the ground for conductor and orchestra alike. It pulls out all the stops that regulate heart-on-sleeve emotion and was probably the primary reason why Harold Schonberg could never get beyond dismissing Mahler as one "whose neuroses made Tchaikovsky's neuroses look healthy." If that kind of emotionality is going to work at all, it has to work at a visceral level; and, while Georg Solti was often criticized for relying too much on the skills of recording technicians and editors, he recognized that, in the synthetic environment of a recording, that visceral level sometimes demanded technical assistance. When he made the move from recording Mahler with the LSO to recording with the Chicago Symphony, the sixth was one of his first projects, recorded at the Krannert Centre of the University of Illinois in March and April of 1970, right after the recording sessions for the fifth. I cannot remember which recording was actually released first, but I do remember seeing the sixth on the shelves first and buying it. I had already been hooked on Mahler, had been medium-cool about Solti's London recordings, and became a devoted follower of Solti in Chicago by virtue of the recording of the sixth. If my change of heart was a result of technical tinkering, I cannot dismiss that tinkering because of the way it refined my ability to listen to "real performances" of Mahler.

This takes us back to Gergiev. As one can tell from the Amazon.com reviews, there are a variety of favorable adjectives that different listeners have applied to his recording of the sixth; but "visceral" is not one of them. The problem is that I have no way of knowing whether this lack comes from his actual performance (as was suggested by some of the reviewers present at the Barbican) or from a lack of that "technical tinkering," which, when properly applied, can provide at least some compensation for not actually "being there." Either way the recording is a disappointment, which has not left me particularly curious about the subsequent releases of the first (June 10) and the seventh (due for release on August 12). On the other hand much of that disappointment may have to do with the fact that, living so close to Davies Symphony Hall, I now take those "real performances" for granted and use recordings more for "background knowledge" and less for "serious listening." Thus, I am more interested in how the recordings I have will prepare me for listing to Thomas conduct Mahler's eighth symphony for a second time at Davies this coming November than I am in documents of a season that has passed in a city I was unable to visit!

Riz Khan is Still on the Ball!

Back when I was living in Singapore, I was a great fan of Riz Kahn anchoring the news for CNN International. Indeed, now that CNN Headline News seems to offer everything but a good account of headline news (remember "Give us twenty minutes, and we'll give you the world?"), I am glad to see that Riz has his own show on Al Jazeera English and continue to hope for the day when Comcast decides to recognize this as a legitimate channel. I was even more delighted to see that Riz decided not only to follow up on Dave Zirin's piece yesterday about Team Darfur but also to take it in the same direction that I took my own post on the matter. I refer specifically to the following from Zirin's post for today:

Yesterday, I appeared on al-Jazeera English's Riz Khan show along with Cheek and 1968 medalist Dr. John Carlos, who along with Tommie Smith raised a black gloved fist to protest injustice during the Olympics forty years ago in Mexico City.

Riz is clearly among "Those of us with a sense of history" whom I addressed in my closing paragraph! Zirin's elaboration over all the connections was also interesting:

One of the most striking things Cheek said was that in 2006, he gave his prize money for winning the speed skating gold to children's charities in Africa and everyone cheered. Now that he is speaking out on why the children of Darfur need help, he is branded as a menace. It was hard to not think of the famous Oscar Romero quote, "When I fed the poor, I was a saint.," said the slain El Salvadoran priest. "When I asked why they were poor, I was a communist." It was also hard to not notice the contrast between Cheek and Dr. Carlos. Joey Cheek wanted to go to China to raise awareness about China's shortcomings on the question of human rights. Dr. Carlos didn't go to Mexico City to speak out about Mexico, but the United States' inability to live up to its ideals.

Out of fairness I should point out that today's Zirin post was met with a comment from "HonestLiberal" citing chapter and verse:

'No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or areas' -- Olympic Charter -- Rule 51.3

This leads me to ask whether or not that rule was in effect in 1968. If so, why was is not invoked to strip Carlos and Tommie Smith (and, for that matter, Peter Norman) of their medals; did the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regard it as a rule to be invoked for convenience rather than principle? On the other hand, if the rule was not in effect in 1968, was it a reaction to Carlos and Smith and their decision to demonstrate that a sound body could, indeed, support a sound (not to mention reflective) mind; and, if it was such a reaction, is "Mens sana in corpora sano" still an Olympic motto? Perhaps the legacy of chutzpah behind the IOC decision to side with China and against its own past medal winners goes back further than I originally thought!

Diachronic Miles

Yesterday, I wrote that we do not necessarily have to take a diachronic approach to listening to John Coltrane to acquire a "working familiarity" with the language of both his improvised solos and his original compositions but that the music of Miles Davis is more challenging because of its "polyglot" nature. From this point of view, I would supplement my recommendation of the compilation of his "second quintet" sessions as an "absolute 'must'" with an equally strong recommendation for the compilation by the British label Prosper Records called Young Miles. These are the earliest known recordings of Miles, initially as a sideman for Charlie Parker in November of 1945 and later as the leader of his own group in September 1948. The May 8, 1947 Parker session includes Miles' first recorded composition, "Donna Lee" (mistakenly attributed to Parker); so this is the best opportunity for exposure to the development of his first (of what would be many) languages for his own improvisations and compositions. The diachronic arrangement of the sessions also allows us to compare Parker's influence with that of other leaders for whom Miles played, including Billy Eckstine, Illinois Jacquet, Coleman Hawkins, and Tadd Dameron. Chronologically, the collection runs from November 26, 1945 through June 30, 1950, thus covering much of the creative spirit that was surveyed so well in Ira Gitler's Jazz Masters of the 40's. It also covers his work for Capitol but stops before the beginning of his long and fruitful relationship with Prestige. This was an exciting time to be listening to jazz; and Young Miles provides a necessary context for listening to Miles when he would later begin exploring other "linguistic perspectives."

Chutzpah Redux

Last week I chose to give the International Olympic Committee (IOC) the benefit of the doubt for being victimized over the question of China's intention to reserve the right to block access to certain Internet sites. Under the naive assumption that we can learn from even the most unpleasant experiences, I have decided that this week the IOC can take sole possession of the Chutzpah of the Week award when the reputations of their own medal-winning athletes are at stake. By way of support, let me reproduce the entirety of Dave Zirin's latest post to The Notion on the Web site for The Nation:

Joey Cheek is someone who actually believes in the Olympic ideal, the quaint notion that sports could be used as a force for good, to raise awareness, understanding and even bring people closer together. The 2006 speed skating gold medalist will now not get the chance to test his theories. Cheek, the president of Team Darfur, a coalition of as many as 200 athletes aimed at raising awareness about the suffering in the Sudanese region, had his visa revoked the evening before he was to fly to Beijing.

"I didn't see it coming," Cheek said. "I figured once they gave me a visa, I wouldn't imagine they wouldn't allow me to come in later. That was a big shock. I wasn't expecting to get a call the evening before I was leaving for Beijing."

Cheek wasn't alone. Team Darfur member Kendra Zanotto, a US bronze medalist in synchronized swimming at the Athens Games in 2004, was also denied entry even though she was attending in an official capacity, as a reporter for the Olympic News Service.

The fact that China acted so abruptly, stating that they were "not required to give a reason" for these actions is no surprise. The craven response by the International and US Olympic Committee is actually bracing. No support for their own medalists when the stakes are having a games "without controversy." The irony is that Cheek and Team Darfur are a moderate force in this protest drama. They never called for an Olympic boycott and always saw the games as a place to advance dialogue more than struggle. China and the IOC might pay a price for denying this kind of presence. Already Western protesters have broken onto fields of play to unfurl Tibetan flags. This kind of high profile disruption infuriates China and the IOC. But it is also effectively harmless for China's rulers who have been adept at stoking nationalism when "western" protesters raise concerns. More problematic has been the efforts of two Beijing women Zhang Wei and Ma Xiulan--two of the 1.5 million people displaced to make way for the games. They have been public figures speaking out about the human cost of the $40 billion games. Late Wednesday, they were taken from their homes by police, trying to clamp down on dissent. We will see if this kind of local action--and reaction --causes a greater headache for China than anything said or done by Joey Cheek.

Team Darfur is doing neither more nor less than invoking the spirit of the Olympic Games to "advance dialogue," as Zirin put it; and the IOC has decided to assign that spirit a back seat behind China's determination for the Games to proceed "without controversy," thus acting in a manner that fully merits Zirin's invocation of the adjective "craven."

Those of us with a sense of history remember that in 1968 Australian Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge to show his support for Tommie Smith and John Carlos, when they raised their fists in a "Black Power salute" during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" when the medals for the 200-meter race were awarded in Mexico City. This year the question will be one of who chooses to show solidarity with those who seek little more than quiet and reasoned dialogue in the face of the repressive acts of a government desperate not to lose face in the eyes of the rest of the world (particularly the Western countries). Since the IOC has now made clear it choice with respect to such dialogue, it seems only fair that they should take full responsibility for the Chutzpah of the Week award.

More on Miles' "Second Quintet"

After having spent most of yesterday's post ranting about Columbia's "user hostile" production values, particularly where their vast library of recordings of Miles Davis is concerned, I feel a need to explain why, however unpleasant the Columbia product may be, the compilation of sessions of Miles' "second quintet" with Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), is what I called an "absolute 'must'" when it comes to learning to listen to jazz. It is not just the abundance of creative approaches that all five of these musicians take in their solos. It is also that, while Miles may be the leader (and probably would not have wanted to be regarded as anything other), when it came to the compositions and charts that were actually performed for these sessions, the regime was refreshingly democratic. In the six discs in the collection, all five of the quintet members get several substantial opportunities to assume the responsibility of composer. Thus, we find diversity not only in solo work (which is where we usually expect it in jazz) but also in the very logic, grammar, and rhetoric of the charts that provide the frameworks for those solos. In other words this was not a "standards" quintet or a "Miles" quintet; rather, it was a "polyglot" quintet, equally fluent in five compositional languages because of the intense intimacy that bound together these five musicians. This makes a marked contrast to John Coltrane's "Classic Quartet," whose language is "pure" Coltrane, applied to both standards and Coltrane originals.

This distinction may also address my concluding point yesterday about why Trane seems to get better radio coverage than Miles. As we build up our listening acquaintance with Trane, even if we do not do it diachronically, we "acquire his language," particularly in the rich diversity of his solos, which always see to have one more thought to add to the perspective. With Miles the "language acquisition problem" is far more challenging. One might say that his language kept changing faster than we can keep up with it, due in no small part to his decision to work in what I just called "polyglot" settings. Thus, it does not lend itself to casual radio listening, where a single performance will get included in a "set" with whatever the announcer seems to think makes for a suitable context. (Don't get me started on "shuffling!") There are, of course, certain "classics" that can hold up under such treatment, two of which, for better or worse, happen to be Columbia products: Sketches of Spain, which I cited yesterday (and, as I just discovered, even figured into an episode of Mad Men), and Kind of Blue. Radio broadcasters have no problems with these albums; but, when we get into those "second quintet" sessions, we are confronted head-on with the distinction that Igor Stravinsky liked to make between listening and hearing. This takes us far beyond the scope of what radio can do for us into a domain where all we have is our own ability to learn to listen to our own recordings (since we can no longer hear actual performances by that quintet). However, if we are serious about wanting to be better listeners, then we should not shirk from the challenge of venturing into that domain!

Columbia: The Necessary Evil for Jazz Collectors

Having recently written about a relatively intensive period of listening to recordings of John Coltrane in a variety of settings and on a variety of labels, it seemed appropriate that my listening should then move over to Miles Davis. Reviewing my past activity, I see that I have only written about Miles in conjunction with his association with Coltrane. This is a bit ironic, since the first album that made me realize the extent to which jazz could shatter expectations based on "classic" performances of the past was Sketches of Spain; and now I suppose this album has acquired its own "classic" status. It was certainly one of the earliest Columbia jazz recordings to make the transition from vinyl to CD; so there is a second layer of irony in the fact that my recent listening is prompting me to write more about the Columbia institution than about Miles.

I suspect it would be fair to say that Columbia was good to Miles. He built up a massive library with them; and my guess is that, between up-front "salary" and residuals, such as royalties, the experience was far more rewarding for his bank book than his previous engagement with Prestige (now in a box that covers the period between 1951 and 1956, which includes the formation of the quintet with Coltrane and rhythm provided by Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums). On the other hand the production work for Prestige involved some of the best minds of those years, including Bob Weinstock, Ira Gitler, and, of course, Rudy Van Gelder (and the CD box was produced by Orrin Keepnews); and Columbia just never had people of that caliber in their shop. One way of putting it might be that Prestige was a family of people dedicated to bringing the best in jazz to those who could only hear it on recordings, while Columbia seemed more interested in making jazz "intellectually respectable" to those who would not be inclined to listen (rather in the way that Joseph Papp would provide a "reasonable facsimile" of "experimental theater" for those who wanted to claim experience with the experiments without getting dirty from them).

While Keepnews always seemed to be busy with one project or another in building up a CD library that could cultivate a new generation of jazz listeners, the Columbia label (whoever its owner happened to be at the time) took more than its own sweet time in rolling their Miles resources out of the vaults. To make matters worse, not only were they tardy; but also they were more than a little arbitrary. Thus, they did not take long to release The Columbia Years 1955 - 1985; but this was little more than a tease that only vaguely hinted at all the stuff still hiding in the vault. More thorough collections would eventually trickle out, many of which, like the compilation of sessions with the "second quintet" of Wayne Shorter (sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), are absolute "musts" for learning to listen; but, even when the content was as valuable as that of this particular collection, the packaging was rarely better than dreadful. Where labels more serious about jazz would provide well-organized accounts of the recording sessions, not to mention specific notes on who took which solo and observations about what they were up to at the time, Columbia would come out with these inconvenient hard-bound "books," which could never open flat and would therefore not sit on a table while you were listening, offering poor organization of the content that mattered the most and an excess of hagiography.

Needless to say, none of this made much difference to those of us who were serious listeners. We just wanted to hear the tracks, and any of the others factors rarely mattered that much. On the other hand I have to wonder how any potential new listeners would react. Just what was the production team for these concoctions thinking when they dreamed up these packages?

This brings me to a final observation, which concerns what I hear on the radio when I want to listen to jazz, either on XM Channel 70 or the local public station, KCSM. The bottom line is that I hear a lot more Trane than I hear of Miles. Now one reason for this is that neither of these stations seems to want to have much to do with all the electric stuff that occupied Miles for about his last fifteen years. To be fair, I do not hear that much of Coltrane at his most experimental on the radio; but experimental Coltrane still has higher currency than "Electric Miles." My question, however, is whether or not I hear so much less of Miles' "second quintet" because radio stations are as annoyed with the packaging as I am. (Mind you, some of the impulse! packages are not much better!) I have no idea what the answer is, but I still cannot help but wish that the Columbia producers had shown a bit more respect to the listeners most interested in their product.

The History Dunces

Reading the increased traffic on Andrew Keen's Great Seduction blog has reminded me of how little awareness our electorate seems to have of history. This should be no surprise in light of how much of that electorate continues to believe specious propositions, such as the one about Barack Obama being Muslim; but I have to wonder whether our national ignorance of history is as "induced" by media noise as has been our ignorance of how Obama professes his faith. For example, if our voters have a warped view of Harry Truman, it may well be that the distortion can be traced back to current New York Times columnists. Now, however, I have to contend with Keen's embrace of a British critic arguing the superiority of British historians over American historians:

As the London Times' Juliet Gardiner suggests, Britain's greatest export to America are the country's historians. Imported British historians like Peter Brown, Simon Schama, Linda Colley and Mark Mazower are unmatched in an America which is rich in futurists, but whose historians are generally either overly academic or saccarine. Even the best historians of America are British -- the general narratives by Paul Johnson (A History of the American People) and Hugh Brogan (The Penguin History of the USA) being much more readable and worldly than anything that the natives have written.

This left me wondering just how many American historians Gardiner had taken the trouble to read, until I realized how moot this point was. Given how little Americans read at all (and, for that matter, is the current British public any better read?), it hardly matters whether or not their perception of their own country's history has been better rendered by Brits or Americans. Come to think of it, how many people, British or American, actually took the time to read Gardiner's article? Perhaps what our two cultures have in common these days is excessive reliance of "received wisdom," which, as at least some of us know, is little more than a euphemism for "received ignorance."

Editorial Quality Killed by Henbane

A recent report on the BBC NEWS Web site has provided further fuel for my rants over the deterioration of quality editing practices, particularly where news is involved. Here is the basic story:

In a magazine interview about watercress and other wild foods, Mr Worrall Thompson said the weed henbane was "great in salads".

Healthy & Organic Living magazine's website has now issued an urgent warning that "henbane is a very toxic plant and should never be eaten".

The chef had meant to recommend fat hen, which is a wild herb.

Mr Worrall Thompson, currently on holiday in Spain, told the BBC the mix-up was "embarrassing - but one of those genuine mistakes".

Henbane - Hyoscyamus niger - has sticky serrated leaves, yellow, funnel-shaped flowers and a stale scent.

Its name has Anglo-Saxon origins - meaning killer of hens - and it can cause hallucinations, drowsiness and disorientation in humans.

Larger quantities can cause a loss of consciousness, seizures, trembling of the limbs and, in extreme cases, death.

From Worrall Thompson's side this can probably be viewed as an honest mistake, the sort of slip of the tongue that surfaces in casual speech. On the other hand the same cannot be said where the responsibility for editing Healthy & Organic Living is concerned:

Healthy & Organic Living magazine's editor Kate Collyns has written to subscribers to apologise.

Her publication's website gives this advice: "As always, check with an expert when foraging or collecting wild plants."

So Collyns has taken appropriate damage control steps on her Web site and for her subscribers. Did it occur to her to send out inserts to magazine stands, or would this be too much to ask of the shopkeepers? More importantly, however, is the question of how seriously Collyns takes her job of actually editing. Does she believe that, where an interview is concerned, whatever the subject says is immune from fact-checking? Is her knowledge of English so impoverished that the suffix "bane" did not raise a red flag when she saw it (giving her the benefit of the doubt that she actually did see it)?

I continue to hammer away at my primary point: You cannot have quality content without quality editing. Editing is a professional skill that needs to be treated as such in both work practices and compensation. It requires levels of both judgment and synthesis that can never been handed off to "the crowd." It is a personal responsibility, which is why responsible parties are named on a periodical's masthead. Ironically, in light of Nicholas Carr's recent "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" essay, Collyns might have done a better job if she had thought to use her Google search tool. I just typed in "henbane;" and my first hit was the Wikipedia entry. Whatever we may think about the reliability of Wikipedia, the content of this page should have at least raised a red flag!

Raining on China's Parade

In the latest issue of The New York Review, Orville Schell offers an interesting historical perspective on why the Olympics are so important to China:

A particularly important element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with China's defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century and the shameful treatment of Chinese in America. The process reached an understandable high point with Japan's successful industrialization and subsequent invasion and occupation of China during World War II, which was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions, because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, while China had failed.

In the early twentieth century, a new literature, with a new historical narrative to match, arose around the idea of bainian guochi, "100 years of national humiliation." By taking up its own victimization as a theme and making it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity, China ensured that certain traits would express themselves again and again as it responded under stress to the outside world. Highlighting their country's history as a victim of foreign aggression led Chinese leaders to rely on what [Peter Hays] Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." Indeed, China's suffering at the hands of foreigners became a badge of distinction, especially during the period in the 1960s in which non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most incipiently revolutionary.

From this point of view, the Olympics have provided China with a means to establish an identity no longer contaminated by the humiliation of foreigners and thus no longer viewed as an inferior in the global institutions of the world community (such as it is). Ironically, the most recent benefit to Chinese identity may have come with their combination of quick response and openness in the wake of the recent earthquake, particularly as a contrast to the disconcerting repressiveness of the Burmese response to its own catastrophe. This is not to apologize for all those factors (including my own Chutzpah of the Week award) that would tarnish China's reputation as the opening of the Olympics grows closer but simply to observe the role that national identity has played in the recent development of the country.

However, if what is ultimately at stake is a question of identity, then the perceptions of China's own population may count for more than the perception of the rest of the world; and, as Jamil Anderlini reported this morning for the Financial Times, those "internal" perceptions may be in jeopardy where world opinion had been most positive, among those earthquake victims. Here are the opening paragraphs of Anderlini's account:

Six weeks after China’s devastating earthquake in May, a group of volunteer social workers arrived in the rubble of Fuxin Number Two Primary School and started meeting parents of children killed when the school collapsed in the tremor.

At first they seemed like any of the other 1.3m Chinese citizens who rushed to the quake zone in the immediate aftermath in an unprecedented outpouring of civic involvement.

But some parents quickly decided something was wrong with this latest group of “volunteers”.

“We asked to see their identification, but they wouldn’t show it to us and although they were quite nice they kept telling us not to make trouble,” said one parent, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. He said the five volunteers repeatedly urged parents to stop demanding an investigation into why the school was so poorly built and why it collapsed in the May 12 quake when most of the buildings around it remained standing.

Many other parents were also suspicious of the opinionated social workers.

“They were definitely sent by the government to keep an eye on us and identify the troublemakers,” said one parent, who also asked not to be named.

This problem with "troublemakers" (which bears a strong resemblance to American concerns for "homeland security" in its "war against terror") may well have been yet another instance of covering up possible sources of "humiliation:"

The photograph of a government official kneeling before the angry, protesting parents from Fuxin Primary was published in Chinese media and quickly became a potent symbol of growing outrage over the 7,000 classrooms that collapsed.

Soon after the photo was published, security services broke up protests and the government banned reporting on the issue.

The crackdown contrasted sharply with the period following the tremor when citizens from all over the country travelled to the epicentre to offer their services.

They were spurred on by 24-hour television coverage as state-run media reported on a natural disaster for the first time in China’s history.

But while propaganda officials directed the media to hail the selfless spirit of the volunteers – with its echoes of the idealistic early years of Chinese communism – the government quietly closed off the opportunities for volunteer participation.

Partly for logistics reasons and partly out of an ingrained reflex to control all facets of public life the government quickly required all volunteers to register with the authorities and operate through an approved organisation. Soon it became clear that some types of volunteers were unwelcome.

One of these was a human rights campaigner, Huang Qi, who was arrested one month after the quake, for “possession of state secrets” after he made more than 10 trips to the quake zone carrying food, water and medicine to survivors.

During those trips he advised grieving parents, including those from Fuxin Primary, on how to pursue a legal campaign against the government and wrote about their grievances on www.64tianwang.com, his website.

Unfortunately for the Chinese government, this particular cat is now out of the bag. These aggrieved parents understand that questions of accountability should not be trumped by questions of national identity. It is not a question of whether or not one can take pride in a paternalistic approach to government; it is a question of whether or not that system honors the values of its citizens, particularly when those citizens are trying to exercise that "selfless spirit" that is so important to the nation's ideology. Converting the humiliation of a nation to the humiliation of the International Olympic Committee is one thing; trying to pull a fast one on those devastated by a natural catastrophe and then treating it as "business as usual," particularly at a time when the eyes of the entire world are directed at China, can hardly further the effort to recover from "100 years of humiliation."

"That Must be the Answer"

My Coltrane listening seems to be progressing backwards in time, moving from the Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings of the "Classic Quartet" of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones back to the Heavyweight Champion anthology of all of the recordings he made for Atlantic. Many things happened over this relatively short period of sessions, the first of which was on January 15, 1959 and the last on October 24, 1960, a span of less than two years. I have already written about the "Coltrane-Flanagan connection," which was established during this period and flourished in May of 1959, particularly in the recording the tracks for Giant Steps. However, another connection began to emerge later that year when, on November 28, 1959, Town Hall (in Manhattan) offered what may have been the most intriguing program in the history of jazz performance. Here, according to Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, are the groups that assembled for this event:

1. A quartet led by Coltrane
2. A group led by Ornette Coleman
3. A group led by Cecil Taylor
4. A group led by Thelonious Monk
5. A quartet led by Count Basie with Elvin Jones on drums
6. The Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet with McCoy Tyner on piano

If ever there were an event to prepare the rest of the world (or at least New York) for the changes that were emerging in jazz, this was it!

Porter does not give the specifics regarding who played what. We might get some clues by checking discographies; but I am more interested in the impact that Coleman had on Coltrane, since this is almost two years before Atlantic released Coleman's Free Jazz recording, which probably planted at least some of the seeds that would later blossom in Coltrane's "Ascension" recording session. In this respect it is interesting to read Porter's citation of an interview Coltrane gave to Benoit Quersin, in which he said of Coleman:

I'm following his lead. He's done a lot to open my eyes to what can be done.

Porter's citation continues:

I feel indebted to him, myself. Because, actually, when he came along, I was so far in this thing [“Giant Steps” chords], I didn’t know where I was going to go next. And I don’t know if I would have thought about just abandoning the chord system or not. I probably wouldn’t have thought of that at all. And he came along doing it, and I heard it, I said, "Well, that must be the answer."

If we view the history of music in terms of which paths are taken and how those paths cultivate our ability to listen, then the individual histories of composers, whether in the settings of "serious music" or jazz, seem to be oriented around the question as Coltrane formulated it: Where do I go next? Some decide to cultivate further the "turf" they have already occupied; and I would not wish to imply that their work is of lesser value for their "lack of motion." However, those that choose to "go" often make choices that astonish and/or discourage us. Think of Igor Stravinsky. His move from Russian nationalism to neoclassicism won him much acclaim, while his decision to experiment with serial music elicited little more than groping perplexity (and some bitterness from the strongest acolytes of Arnold Schoenberg).

Coltrane never seemed to worry if others were perplexed by his choices of where to go next. There is certainly no questioning the sincerity of his interest in what Coleman was doing and the extent to which Coltrane saw an "answer" in Coleman's work. Within six months of the Town Hall evening, he had arranged two recording sessions at Atlantic in which he worked with Coleman associates Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell to record three of Coleman's compositions, along with one of Cherry's and a performance of Monk's "Bemsha Swing" for good measure. Atlantic released the resulting album as The Avant-Garde: John Coltrane & Don Cherry, but not until April of 1966, which is to say after their release of Coleman's Free Jazz and impulse!'s release of Ascension! Indeed, it almost seems as if it was only after the idea of a jazz avant-garde had been established by Free Jazz and Ascension that Atlantic worked up the courage to release material they had recorded almost six years earlier; but, for all of their good intentions, Atlantic was never in the business of making music but only in the business of making money from distributing it! Nevertheless, those business decisions are now part of an ancient history that most have forgotten. What endures is the music, and it is as alive as it was when things were first coming to a boil at Town Hall in 1959.

From Brahms to Coltrane

Having completed my "ascent of Mount Brahms" by way of the Brilliant Classics' collection of the complete works of Johannes Brahms, I find that my listening habits have now led me to the Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings of the "Classic Quartet" of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. I do not find this shift in gears to be either eccentric or idiosyncratic. I have already written about the extent to which Coltrane's capacity for improvisation reflects all the way back to the talents of Johann Sebastian Bach; and, in the context of those who continue to look for the "progressive" in Brahms, I continue to write about the ways in which one may identify a relationship between Ives and Brahms. Certainly Ives was more inclined to melt the wax in your ears than Brahms ever was; and that alone enabled him to prepare us to listen to Coltrane, even if Coltrane himself seems to have had no exposure to Ives' music. Ultimately, however, the real lesson is how the very concept of "progressive" must, itself, "progress" with the passing of time; and, if the progressivism of Bach, Brahms, and Ives has informed our ability to listen to Coltrane, that ability now informs our listening to the extended explorations of the likes of Cecil Taylor.

In the midst of all that progressivism, however, I was reminded that one of the movements of Coltrane's Meditations was entitled "Consequences," one of the most heavily used labels on this blog. As we know from Lewis Porter's biography, there was no shortage of demons that Coltrane had to confront during his life; and most of those confrontations led to consequences. When Coltrane found that a personal sense of faith could inform his own approach to composition as much as it had informed Bach's, the music itself became more personal. Thus, the movements of Meditations are very much personal spiritual reflections on their "topics," such as love, compassion, joy, and consequences. Whether or not listening to Coltrane can help us to be more mindful of the consequences of our own actions is highly debatable, but I do not think that Coltrane wanted to be perceived as a teacher in such matters. Rather, he chose to bare his soul to us, allowing us to "meditate" on its many facets; and, in so doing, each listener might then be in a better position to so meditate on his own soul. Thus, since I continue to argue that this is a time when we should all be thinking more about consequences, we all might get something out of listening to more Coltrane!

NOSTALGIA ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

The use of capitals in my title reflects an direct appropriation of the title of the English translation of the memoirs of Simone Signoret, Nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était. It was provoked by the title of Andrew Keen's post today for his Great Seduction blog, "Trumanostalgia." The basic point of this post was to call attention to a few recent incidents of Truman worship coming from the right wing and to balance them with Keen's own left-wing perspective. The first of those incidents was a recent David Brooks column in The New York Times:

Where have you gone Harry Truman, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Or, at least, the right eye of the nation -- that internationalist conservative eye which occasionally peers out, rather nervously, from the op-ed pages of the New York Times. In today's Times, resident right eyed nostalgist David Brooks, confessing to "Truman-envy", waxes nostalgically about an American dominated post WW2 world in which guys like George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman and, of course, Harry Truman ran the global show.

Keen responded to Brooks' nostalgia as follows:

So what would Brooks see if he opened his left eye? He'd get to see an international system in which all participants -- and not just the US -- have the power to shape events. Brooks' "de-centered world" is really just a place in which Americans aren't running the show. After all, in Harry Truman's world, all it took is a few well-placed Kansan interests to bring a vast global process tumbling down.

This was enough to start me clearing my throat (even if Keen had no way of hearing me). However, in fairness I should first cite his second example:

Meanwhile,the right eyed Edward Luttwak, writing in this month's Prospect magazine, is also nostalgic for Truman. Unlike Brooks, however, Luttwak finds a contemporary Truman and his name is George W. Bush. In "A Truman For His Times", Luttwak argues that Bush 's foreign policy, like Truman's, is massively unpopular and yet will, in retrospect, be seen as successful. For Truman's Korea war, Luttwak suggests, read Bush's Iraq war. For Truman's confrontation of global communism, read Bush's pushing back of the global Jihadist threat.

If Luttwak opened both eyes he would, of course, see an American loathed in the world and still mired in failed wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. However, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and I can't help thinking that both Brooks and Luttwak make more sense of America's role in the world than the myopic, self-satisfied pacificism of most American leftists.

The purpose of Keen's exercise was to provide a reflection on the prospects (pun intended) for the future occupant of the Oval Office:

And what about in November -- will we get Harry Truman as an early Christmas present? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to me that neither McCain nor Obama much resemble Truman. One gets us an underbaked JFK, the other delivers a schlerotic Teddy Roosevelt. So a rerun of the Truman Show looks unlikely. History, I'm afraid, will have to wait to repeat itself.

This makes for a clever enough writing exercise; but a closer reading of the text reveals a variety of points far beyond the scope of what Keen, Brooks, or Luttwak could (or, for that matter, actually did) say. Yes, many of us look at current conditions and feel a sense of loss; and, indeed, much of what Keen writes ultimately seems to be about such loss, which, perhaps, he regards as the ultimate consequence of that "great seduction" of technology. The roots of nostalgia lie in recognizing such loss and longing for the time before "it" (whatever "it" may be) was lost; and this is where Keen misses his mark. The real target of our nostalgia (which Keen actually touched on in a recent analysis of the impact of the Internet of journalism) should be for those twentieth-century writers (both left and right) who could keep knee-jerk ideology from interfering with both clarity of analysis and accessible literary style. Thus, I, for one, devote very little of my time to Keen's precious New York Times (my own particular time being spent almost entirely on the arts pages) and his equally precious Prospect, it is because of the impoverished level of both ideas and writing I find in each of those sources. To make my case, let me invoke the words of a failed Presidential candidate, "Let's look at the record."

For all of his foibles, Truman understood a few key principles that rarely appear in the foreground of today's political discourse. Most importantly, he took his Oath of Office literally, particularly that part about preserving and protecting the Constitution. If you examine his career in the Oval Office, you will see that this guided much of his actions and interactions in both domestic and global matters. He also attached great value to the advisers he enlisted (as at the bottom of Keen's opening paragraph); but he took responsibility for his own actions (as in where the buck stops). If Eisenhower had chosen better advisers, we would probably wax as nostalgic for him as for Truman.

Regarding our current prospects, the thing about Theodore Roosevelt is how mixed his bag was. Yes, he played a very active role in the Spanish-American War (which, as I recall, The Nation dubbed "year one of the empire"). On the other hand he was an equally ardent enemy of the legacy of the Gilded Age (one of the better models of our current conditions). Thus, we need to remember him as an energetic reformer on the domestic front, even if he was "that damned cowboy" in foreign affairs. Can anyone say with a straight face that they anticipate McCain reforming anything?

As to Obama, it is too easy to forget that JFK did not have that all much "baking" when he entered the Oval Office. It is even less clear how much JFK acquired from being "baked." Consider the efforts of Jawaharlal Nehru to inform JFK, the young congressman, on what was really going on with the French presence in Vietnam. LBJ was stuck holding the Vietnam bag; but, had JFK paid more attention to those, like Nehru, who emphasized proceeding with caution rather than playing with dominoes, he could have dispensed with that bag (and might have done so, had he not been assassinated). (I would even go so far as to suggest that RFK's decision to oppose JFK had a lot to do with the fact that he had accompanied his older brother on the fact-finding mission at which that meeting with Nehru took place. Unless I am mistaken, Arthur Schlesinger made a similar suggestion in his RFK biography.)

In the long view of history, Obama's approximation to JFK may be better than Keen has suggested. JFK understood the necessary dialectical opposition of elevated goals (which inspire the electorate) and base political machinery (which gets things done). During his brief time in office, it looks like he was on the road to finding the right synthesis of these opposing interests; but we shall never know if he would have ultimately caved into the machine side. Our hope for Obama is that his actions will be informed by the need for such synthesis, which is far more than we can even dream of for McCain!

Chutzpah Challenged

California has been taking quite a beating from the chutzpah of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Stephen L. Johnson, a beating, which, as we saw last May, did not go unrecognized by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Fortunately, whatever actions (or lack thereof) may be taken at the Federal level, the State has an Attorney General who does not suffer the chutzpah of others willingly. As Al Jazeera English reported from their wire services last night, the EPA is now well beyond the limits of his tolerance:

California has said it plans to sue the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft as well as construction and agricultural equipment.

In the latest legal threat from the state against the EPA, Jerry Brown, California's attorney-general, said on Thursday that the body was "wantonly ignoring" its duty to set pollution standards.

California is already suing the EPA over the agency's failure to approve the state's proposed standards for vehicle emissions.

"Ships, aircraft and industrial equipment burn huge quantities of fossil fuel and cause massive greenhouse gas pollution yet [George] Bush [the US president] stalls with one bureaucratic dodge after another," Brown said in a statement.

"Because Bush's Environmental Protection Agency continues to wantonly ignore its duty to regulate pollution, California is forced to seek judicial action."

Brown also said that under federal law the EPA was authorised to regulate greenhouse gases on ocean-going vessels and aircraft, as well as agricultural, construction and industrial equipment.

If the act of a State official telling the Federal Government what to do is, itself, chutzpah, then it is a well-needed administration of positive-connotation chutzpah to offset the destructive negative connotations being imposed by an EPA that has been reduced to a servile creature of the White House. I just hope that Brown uses his legal weapons with enough precision to make sure that the EPA staffers who have been trying against all odds to do their jobs do not end up as victims and that the real targets need to be both Johnson and those found to be directly responsible for pulling Johnson's strings.