Paul Kesler – Bourdieu vs. Delong

Link to a review of James Delong’s review of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (1998) by Paul Kesler:

“Bourdieu vs. Delong”

A useful case study description of how neoliberals tends to de-politicize (normalize) their political position.

Bonus link: “Kesler vs. Delong vs. Bourdieu”

David Bowie – Scary Monsters… and Super Creeps

Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps

David Bowie – Scary Monsters… and Super Creeps RCA BOW LP 2 / PL 13647 (1980)

In some ways, this is a transitional effort: the close of Bowie’s late 1970s style and the beginning of his forays into 80s pop.  The eclectic eccentricities of Lodger are held in check, focused around a more steady pop sensibility.  This is still quirky art rock, but it flows together as an album better.  Even if it lacks any individual song as good as “Modern Love” from Let’s Dance or “D.J.” from Lodger, there is not a bad tune anywhere.  It would take Bowie a long, long time to make an album this good again — and it could be argued he never did.

Munro Leaf & Robert Lawson – The Story of Ferdinand

The STory of Ferdinand

Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson – The Story of Ferdinand (The Viking Press, 1936)

One of the great children’s books.  Robert Lawson’s black and white illustrations are exceptional in their detail and clarity, yet those qualities are focused on distinct characters and objects with much white space creating a sense of freedom.  The story by Munro Leaf is a kind of happier version of Herman Melville‘s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener.  Ferdinand is a bull in Spain who does not want to be a part of bullfights.  He wants to sit quietly under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers.  When stung by a bee and jumping about in pain, he confuses a group of men, who have come to select a bull for fights in Madrid, making them think that he is ferocious.  But when brought to a bullfighting ring (to his death), he merely sits down in the middle of the ring to smell the flowers in the hair of the ladies in the audience, and refuses to participate.  So Ferdinand is taken back to the country where he can smell the flowers.  And he was happy.  In this story, which describes the power of an individual to resist the violence of institutions, it is one of the most radical bestselling books in America (following the likes of Looking Backward).

Ornette Coleman – Skies of America

Skies of America

Ornette Coleman – Skies of America Columbia KC 31562 (1972)

Skies of America is one of the most perplexing — and frustrating — albums in the Ornette Coleman discography.  For one, it was recorded with significant technical and logistical restrictions: the performance would not fit on a single LP and had to be edited for release; it was recorded in the UK and local musicians union rules prohibited Ornette’s desired staging (which would have included his regular band alongside a full symphony orchestra); and rehearsal time for the symphony was limited to the point of inadequacy.

This album was an unmistakable signpost that Ornette was having what can only be described as delusions of grandeur.  The humility that was always one of the most attractive features of his music was receding.  In his early career he sought to find any avenues to pursue his music, first by finding musicians who would play with him, then to having paying gigs and some recognition by other musicians.  Those things seemed like enough for him for a while, though he was notoriously fickle about compensation and sought to sidestep the music industry through self-staged performances like the famous Town Hall 1962 concert.  Now he seemed to be seeking external validation and acceptance by the musical establishment, the general public, and the bourgeois.  These weren’t exactly humble goals.  By the end of the 1970s he seemed genuinely convinced (according to his mangers at the time) that he should achieve popular fame to equal that of any pop superstar, and also that he should earn millions of dollars (as he noted in interviews).  If these things don’t seem to bear directly on the music, a quick comparison of his recordings from a decade earlier reveal significant departures, and these are plausible explanations for them.

The music itself is what is typically called “third stream” music: a synthesis of jazz and classical music, usually in the form of completely notated, scored music that resembles the improvisations of jazz.  Ornette has mostly written music for a full symphony that sounds a bit like what his small jazz combos played, with him soloing in brief passages.  Yet a nagging issue with the score is the orchestration.  It makes scant use of the possibilities of a full orchestra.  Mostly the players play homophonically, with the entire orchestra moving in unison (for what it is worth, conductor John Giordano re-orchestrated the entire piece in the mid-1980s, with Ornette’s assistance, and that version was performed multiple times).  This brings up a number of contradictions.  Ornette often spoke about “unison” as a principle of his music, but in the jazz context that meant having independently improvising players choosing to work cooperatively, whereas in the symphonic context it meant merely a kind of dictatorial power over the score that the entirely symphony plays.  Also, using a full symphony seemed decadent, and the same results could seemingly be achieved using a smaller chamber group.  For instance, Ornette had composed other (and underappreciated) pieces for smaller chamber groups, like “Dedication to Poets and Writers” (on Town Hall, 1962) and “Forms and Sounds” (on The Music of Ornette Coleman).  In some ways, these things seemed less like musical achievements than social grandstanding, with Ornette putting a feather in his cap to say that he had commanded the sorts of resources necessary to have a full symphony perform a composition. Moreover, the insertion of Ornette playing jazz saxophone solos on a few songs seems to add little to the piece, other than to insert Ornette as a distinct and individual personality into proceedings that are otherwise dominated by the collective sound of the orchestra — though “The Men Who Live in the White House” does point to his light, airy later-career performance style.  The syncopation added by the symphonic percussionists at times also seems a bit clumsy.

In all, this is a problematic recording to say the least.  The underlying compositions do have merit, which does shine through.  However, the way it was realized and recorded leaves much to be desired.  In hindsight, this was a sign that the 1970s were going to be rocky when it came to Ornette Coleman recordings.

My own view of the album tends to vary widely depending on when I hear it.  I can listen to it and think that Ornette is a complete dilettante, and another time listen to it and think it is inspired if still hampered in how it was recorded.  My feelings are mixed.  I can say that I find a 1987 bootleg recording of a live Italian performance of a re-orchestrated version of the piece to be far superior to this one.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced

Are You Experienced

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced Reprise RS 6261 (1967)

The Jim Hendrix Experience’s debut album is a great one.  Released in significantly different forms in the UK and US — get one of the expanded versions from the CD era that include all the UK and US tracks, plus the complete early singles (with both A- and B-sides), resulting in more than what either the US or UK original stand-alone versions offered.  There is a strong influence from electric blues traditions, but what makes this album special is how it goes well beyond tradition.  In fact, the confident psychedelic edge throughout the album makes clear that Hendrix and his band are committed to the counterculture.  This album could really only have been made at the specific time that it was made.  It conveys a sense of inevitability, like the counterculture was poised to win and let all the freaks (and everybody else) be themselves, unhindered.  Hindsight shows that over the next fifty years the other side claimed almost all the victories, and from that perspective the hippie vision of the Jimi Hendrix Experience seems almost like a quaint relic.  But there is nothing frivolous about how the band plays these songs, which have that blues feeling but often a kind of macho swagger, curiously put to use in service of less macho notions, all done in a way that is quite earnest in is own way.  This represents the attitude that will almost be necessary if the tables are to turn and the countercultural vision rekindled.

“The Wind Cries Mary” has a dreamy romanticism not unlike Bob Dylan‘s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”  “Purple Haze” is the overtly druggy freakout.  “Fire” and “Fox[e]y Lady” are kind of libidinal rockers, and some of the better known album tracks (released together as a single later on).  Along with “Hey Joe,” these are some of the most recognizable rock songs of the period.  They have been played on the radio consistently even decades later.  Yet there is more to the album than just a few highlights.

“3rd Stone From the Sun” is a kind of swirling sonic odyssey, which tends to rob the social status quo of its power by invoking cosmic imagery that places human struggles on just one “stone” in an increasingly accessible solar system (this was the “space age” after all, and this song probably qualifies as afro-futurism).  The blues stuff like “Red House” (only on the UK version), plus “Manic Depression” and “I Don’t Live Today” convey a sense of struggle, and a lack of naivety, without succumbing to hopelessness or discouragement.  The perspective is of acceptance of struggle and hardship as part of achieving something beyond present circumstance.

It is the often thunderous — and sometimes sweetly tender or mystical — guitar riffs that separate this from a lot of psychedelic rock of the day.  This doesn’t sound like trifling stuff.  It is big, sweeping, decisive, dramatic.  It is also worth mentioning that it isn’t just Hendrix that makes this album great.  Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell make substantial contributions, be it Mitchell’s penchant for loose, supple, jazzy drumming that adds dynamism or Redding’s steady bass lines that complement without ever detracting from Hendrix’s leads.

I guess you could say I’m Hendrix-normative when it comes to rock guitar.  I listened to Hendrix albums extensively as a teenager, and came to accept him as a standard bearer for what it meant to be an excellent rock guitarist.  Looking back, it seems reasonable to take that approach.  There are other ways of playing guitar, inside or outside the rock idiom, but anyone who can play as well as Hendrix (not the same way, but as well) is indeed a talented player.  There is no shortage of opinions claiming Hendrix as literally the best electric guitar player.  But there is no reason to object to that!