Johnny Cash – Any Old Wind That Blows

Any Old Wind That Blows

Johnny Cash – Any Old Wind That Blows Columbia KC-32091 (1973)

Weak songs, and very bland delivery.  Producer Larry Bulter dresses much of this up with strings, and the hollow, slick sound just passes by without making an impression.  The only surprise is the vague hippie-rock influence on “If I Had a Hammer.”  A re-recording of “Country Trash” on American III: Solitary Man is much superior.  Cash scored a few minor hits from the album, but in hindsight this is one of the least memorable of his early 1970s LPs.

Good Social Science

A major contribution of (good) social science is to uncover and articulate implied meanings, as well as to refute false denials of meaning.  This is to say that human beings are often disingenuous in their explicit statements.  While that statement is hardly shocking (or original), it nonetheless stands in marked contrast to the work of a large swath of academic studies that rely on surveys and take all survey responses at face value, for instance.  More useful is an analysis — often statistical — that largely disregards (or diminishes) stated intents and rationales and instead draws out hidden motivations and benefits.  Take for instance accusations of discrimination, like racism.  Many racists deny that they are in fact racist (often because they rationally understand that such admissions are treated with derision and, sometimes, are prosecuted/redressed), frequently relying instead on a professed mantra of individual choice (or “states rights”, etc.).  These are often subtle attempts to re-frame the discussion away from the kinds of statistical analyses that would show how those purportedly benign personal choice in fact rely upon and support discriminatory “social constructs”.  In a broader sense, this ties in to reliance on a very binary analytical system of individual subjectivity vs. scientific/observable fact that is overly simplistic.  More pernicious are things like “implicit bias” theorizing, which is really a characteristically Liberal response to this issue, and which still accepts the basic individual choice framework (largely side-stepping analysis of “social constructs”) but admits to errors of isolated individuals in order to leave the pre-existing (and unexamined) “social constructs” in place.  Well, and the outright hostility to the very idea of “social constructs,” to wit Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip, “There is no such thing as society.”

Selected illustrative links: See “A Southern City With Northern Problems” and “Marx’s ‘Capital’ at 150: History in Capital, Capital in History”

Edward S. Herman – Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies

Link to an article by Edward S. Herman:

“Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017”

 

Bonus links: “The Fallacy of Post-Truth” and “Evidence of Google Blacklisting of Left and Progressive Sites Continues to Mount” and Inkywatch and New York Times eXaminer and Liberalism: A Counter-History and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and “How the ‘Fake News’ Scare Is Marginalizing the Left” and “Twitter Bans RT and Sputnik Ads, Who’s Next?” and “NYT Prints Government-Funded Propaganda About Government-Funded Propaganda” and “Who’s Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO?” and “The Rise of the New McCarthyism” and “Century of the National Security State: A New Subversives List?” and “A Left Critique of Russiagate” and “The Grammar of Russiagate” and “The Cult of Authority” and “Do U.S. Oligarchs Exist? Not in Mainstream Media” and “Folktales of Russiagate” and “Dictator: Media Code for ‘Government We Don’t Like’” and “The Third Red Scare: Neoliberal’s Effective Framing of 21st Century Populist and Progressive Movement” and “The Unanswered Questions in the Latest Russian ‘Meddling’ Allegations”

Jim Thorpe -All American

Jim Thorpe -All American

Jim Thorpe -All American (1951)

Warner Bros.

Director: Michael Curtiz

Main Cast: Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, Jim Thorpe

On the one hand, this film admirably portrays the life of a native american.  On the other hand, it is highly problematic.  There are some decent acting performances, but the score is tedious Hollywood pap.  The script is the biggest problem.  First of all, it is not very historically accurate, sacrificing facts to develop melodramatic plot points.  But the worst thing about it is that the story is designed to emphasize personal failings to diminish the nagging problem of racism.  Now, the film does address racism.  But it is brought up mainly as a “strawman” to be knocked down in favor of a formulaic personal struggle narrative arc.  It presents Thorpe’s life as one of him being too emotionally weak to succeed (in the face of racism, personal tragedies).  To draw an analogy, this is premised on the Louis Armstrong or Sammy Davis, Jr. model — a great individual can overcome all institutional and social obstacles (racism) just by being personally talented enough in ways that are non-threatening to social power structures.  This is essentially a parallel of the “Talented Tenth” theory of W.E.B. Du Bois (later disavowed) and the questionable advocacy of Booker T. Washington.  In other words, without any irony, Thorpe is merely expected to have a superhuman willpower and resolve to overcome discrimination.  The real-life Jim Thorpe was subject to a level of discrimination well beyond anything depicted in the film, and the film would have been much better if it addressed that (and had a better score).  For that matter, one would hardly realize from the film that its timeline runs through the Great Depression.  Anyway, fortunately in the coming years there were other, sounder ways of looking at these sorts of questions gaining traction (see Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, etc.).

Miles Davis – Nefertiti

Nefertiti

Miles Davis – Nefertiti Columbia CS 9594 (1968)

The title track here represents just about the peak of Miles’ second great quintet.  With Miles and Wayne Shorter playing a weary melody at a rather slow tempo, Tony Williams punctuates the song with sudden, quick fills and accents that seem to transform the entire song into a sketch of something great and elusive, beyond the ennui suggested by the horns.  Miles and Shorter mostly play the same melodic line over and over and over again, shifting registers and shifting harmonics in a way that tends toward the dissonant and existential.  Herbie Hancock‘s accompaniment is perfectly spare, appearing as if out of nowhere to play exactly and only the right notes.  Ron Carter on bass is active and unmoored from any sort of role as a mere timekeeper in the rhythm section.  There is a looseness to the performance, clearly influenced by the free jazz movement, but still bounded and organized.  Most significantly, the structure mediates the interactions of the players so that the lines between open (free) improvisation and pre-written composition blur, and all the players seem to have an equal — if still varied — role.  It’s a magnificent recording.  I have never completely warmed up to the album as a whole, mostly because of the songwriting featured in the latter part of the album, but I can’t deny this is a great offering.  To get a complete picture of Miles and his many groups, you’ll need investigate Nefertiti at some point, but Miles Smiles and E.S.P. should perhaps be investigated first.

Walter Scheidel – The Great Leveler

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Walter Scheidel – The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press 2017)

Ah, more liberal-conservative historical revisionist drivel.  Scheidel’s book follows in the ignoble footsteps of Steven Pinker‘s moronic The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff‘s discredited This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.  That is to say it sidesteps and obscures crucial philosophical and ideological (and moral) questions in favor of lots and lots of quantitative data, analyzed with dubious methodologies.

I didn’t actually read this book.  What I did do is a litmus test.  I looked up anything about the Bolshevik revolution in the index, and read those pages.  Scheidel cites Niall Ferguson (!!!!) primarily, and, in much the same way soviet history scholar Moshe Lewin has eloquently described regarding similar writings, engages in the lowest kind of anti-communist propaganda by singling out isolated incidents stripped of context and presenting them as representative.

Fortunately there is a book that already existed to (premptively) rebut Scheidel’s: War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, by Domenico Losurdo, which aimed to offer a “vigorous riposte” to “imperial revivalists”.  The aim of Scheidel and his ilk is to assert that “there is no alternative” to inequality, and anything that redresses inequality (i.e., revolution) cannot be contemplated.  But why can’t it be contemplated?  Scheidel does not engage this question in any serious way.  But that is his aim: to bracket that question out of consideration and normalize the “structural violence” of actually-existing inequality, by lamenting it from a distance but taking any pragmatic solutions to it off the table.  He is not concerned with the horrors of the status quo, only the alleged horrors that accompany any change of the status quo.  To put it more bluntly, The Great Leveler is nothing but an apology for the status quo.  As Robespierre put it long ago in response to odious fools much like Scheidel with their cynical “humanitarian” concerns, “A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”

Take the opportunity to make a hard pass on Scheidel’s book and perhaps instead look to something by Losurdo.

Казими́р Мале́вич [Kazimir Malevich] – Черный супрематический квадрат [Black Square]

Black Square
Казими́р Мале́вич [Kazimir Malevich] – Черный супрематический квадрат [Black Square] (1915)
Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10
Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (Dobychina Art Bureau at Marsovo Pole, Petrograd, Russia, December 19, 1915 to January 17, 1916)