Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Daniel Zamora:
“The Case Against a Basic Income”
This article does make some incorrect statements about taxes and budgets regarding governments that utilize fiat money, from the standpoint of Modern Monetary Theory, but the rest of the article stands despite that.
Link to an article by Bruce Lesnick:
The only error in this article is this statement: “Real unemployment in the U.S. today hovers around 8.3%, afflicting more than 17 million people.” If calculated in the manner it used to be, the “real” current unemployment rate is about 22%.
Link to an article by Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank:
“Go Ask Alice: The Curious Case of ‘Alice Donovan'”
Bonus links: “Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine” and “The New Hysteria on Kremlin Trolls” and “James Risen, the New York Times and the Sliming of Wen Ho Lee”
Ornette Coleman – Tomorrow Is the Question! The New Music of Ornette Coleman! Contemporary M 3569 (1959)
There is an old saying, “To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” This adage goes a long way to explain Ornette’s earliest studio recordings. In hindsight at least, it is fairly clear that he had his musical vision already worked out in the mid-1950s. His problem — well, one of his problems — was bringing together musicians sympathetic to his radically new ideas and then getting them up to speed performing based on those new ideas rather than being “hammers” banging on nails like they usually did in conventional jazz combos. He was practicing regularly, in private, with a core handful of players like Don Cherry. The thing was, while living in Los Angeles, he secured his first recording contract as an offshoot of selling some compositions to Contemporary Records (run by Lester Koenig, who was blacklisted from Hollywood films during the McCarthy witchhunt era). He began recording with groups that included some mediocre players and some bigger name players brought in just to play recording sessions. For the most part, Ornette had already met and played with the musicians who would make up arguably his greatest combo, which would record extensively for Atlantic Records, but for whatever reason Cherry and Billy Higgins (Higgins being absent here) were the only ones to appear on Ornette’s recordings for Contemporary. For instance, Ornette had asked drummer Ed Blackwell to play on his debut album Something Else!!!! but Blackwell turned down the offer. Blackwell later joined Ornette’s band in New York City after fleeing discriminatory miscegenation charges in New Orleans.
Shelly Manne on drums sounds just fine here. Ignore the detractors! Manne was always one of the most forward-thinking West Coast players. He has a more open and spare style than Billy Higgins. Given more time to play with Ornette, I imagine Manne would have gone even further out — though that wasn’t to be, because Ornette moved to the East Coast. Manne nonethless credited his time playing with Ornette as being significant to his later work.
Percy Heath and Red Mitchell, great bassists in their own rights, just go on playing in a progressive yet still conventional style that isn’t always enough for what Ornette’s music calls for. Heath and Mitchell are the “hammers” in this band. Sessions with Mitchell took place first. Mitchell is out of his element, and Ornette felt Mitchell thought he was a bit looney. Though Mitchell was a noted bop player in Los Angeles at the time, and was responsible for putting Ornette in touch with Contemporary Records in the first place, he clearly isn’t interested in Ornette’s pioneering musical ideas. Ornette actually recruited Heath, the bassist for the renown Modern Jazz Quartet, for a third recording session after two with Mitchell were fairly unproductive. Ornette’s recruiting efforts also put him in touch with The MJQ’s pianist John Lewis, who was immediately impressed by Ornette’s music, and who would end up being the single most decisive factor in Ornette’s critical success down the road. It is not an overstatement to say that Ornette would have been forgotten to history and his best music never recorded if not for Lewis.
Anyway, by ditching a piano, Tomorrow Is the Question! sounds worlds better than the debut (this album was Ornette’s second to be recorded, but was released third). Sure, things got better from here, but this is still a good one. The opening title track is a really great composition, highly indicative of Ornette’s off-kilter yet oddly endearing nursery rhyme melodies. It starts the album off on a high note. And the rest of the album is good too. Actually, it’s better than just good, thanks to a lot of great compositions, more confident playing from Cherry (though he would play even more strongly in the future), and, of course, unique and inventive soloing from Ornette himself on pretty much every song. The recording is crisp enough that even when Mitchell plays just a plain vanilla walk it leave space to hear Ornette’s microtonal explorations on his (plastic) horn. So, Tomorrow Is the Question! pales only in comparison to what Ornette had in store next, but is quite rewarding in its own right.
Link to an article by Doug Henwood:
Link to an article by D. Casey Flaherty:
“Law Departments and the Foundation of Law Firm Marketing Bullshit”
The title of this article is misleading. The foundation of law firm marketing, and all marketing, is capitalism. All marketing is misleading. The entire article is confused because it makes vague references to things like improvement, efficiency, or whatever, without really explaining who benefits or in what way. Anyway, the parts about the “lawyer theory of value” are useful, as a specific illustration of the old saying “to a hammer every problem looks like a nail.” But that doesn’t really explain much. The labor leader Tony Mazzocchi once said that the construction trades would “pave over the Atlantic Ocean, if given the chance.” It is no different with lawyers and lawyering. A rather useful frame to apply to these questions is what Paul Kivel discussed in his article “Social Service or Social Change.” A better framework is public benefit, and a (materialist) distinction between public and private benefit. Laywers, as part of what Kivel terms the “managerial class”, tend to look like self-interested collaborators with society’s bad actors (the exploitative “power elite”). The Flaherty article at most sees the problem as one of degree, not of kind. But corporate benefit — as in increased profits for shareholders of a particular company — is a stupid metric, one that presupposes capitalism and an unfair social structure. Yet, it is also true that lawyers can do good. Take, for instance, something that Moshe Lewin discussed in The Soviet Century, about how the Khrushchev administration dismantled the Stalinist gulag system in the former USSR and unwound the brutal system of arbitrary arrest by the NKVD through…increased use of lawyering! This latter example (drawn from a different country and historical period) illustrates a public benefit. After all, confronting institutions known for arbitrary persecutions leading to executions, torture and imprisonment in slave labor camps was fraught with potential peril and hardly a simple matter of self-aggrandizement. Flaherty stops well short of concern for public benefit, discussing only private concerns within the realm of corporate law — and, it should be mentioned, the private self-interest of legal consultants like Flaherty. But if Flaherty did raise concerns about public benefit, it would probably mean eliminating corporations and corporate law departments entirely, and likewise eliminating the need for consultants like him. The cynicism of this article reflects what Peter Sloterdijk called “enlightened false consciousness”. Or, perhaps, this can be explained by Upton Sinclair, who long ago said it is hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
Ornette Coleman – Sound Grammar Sound Grammar SG 11593 (2006)
Ornette’s last solo album before his death, and first in a decade (after releasing three albums in 1996), found surprising success. This is a live recording with Ornette’s working band. He seems to have learned that it takes two bassists to replace Charlie Haden. On the whole, this album is nostalgic and kind of presents a summary of Ornette’s entire career. “Sleep Talk” sounds good in this reading. There isn’t a whole lot else here that stands out, but this is consistent top to bottom. The reasons this became so popular probably have more to do with timing (Ornette’s stature plus the gap since his last albums) and, especially, promotion (Ornette granted an uncommon number of interviews) than purely the merits of the performance.
Link to an article by Branko Marcetic:
“America’s Authoritarians Next Door”
Bonus link: “Hannah Arendt’s Challenge to Adolf Eichmann”
Thelonious Monk – Criss-Cross Columbia CS 8838 (1963)
A solid one from the Columbia years. Not quite a match for the superb Monk’s Dream released the same year, though, because this is weighted down by an unconvincing rendition of “Tea for Two” and occasionally lackdaisical performances by Monk himself.
Link to an article by Megan Erickson:
Bonus link: “100 Years Since Formation of Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy”