Dr. Rat

Can you give us an example of an academic who is doing this? --eric

This thread reminds me of a couple of things we've discussed before, one is Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz, which suffered a lot from a (I perceived to be political) agenda to tout the almost exclusively african origins of jazz. Which is a pretty big claim consiodering that we are now questioning the exclusively african origin of blues! This thread also reminded me of a couple of earlier threads about Elijah Wald's book on the legacy of Robert Johnson, which among other thing tries to complicate the story of the blues' origins and early history. Wald post 1 Wald thread

I don't claim she always sounds affected, but I do think a couple of tracks do. (I'd give you the titles, but I don't have the disc in front of me right now.) --eric

Unlike a lotta folks I actually like a lot of what Frisell has done lately: the Danny Barnes album, the Mamadou Diabate album . . . This last one has its moments, but is a bit too . . . serial for my tastes. Song to song and even within songs it just seems like one damn thing after another sometimes. If there's cohesion in some of the bits, I guess I'm missing it. I'm not at all sure strings are the way to go for Frisell--they seem to bring out all the qualities in him I dislike. But it is not mailed in, we'll give him that. --eric

My own impression is that the Swing Era is a much better book, with less drive toward "proving" a thesis. I think the thesis laid out in Early Jazz was just a dumb, at the time politically correct move on the part of GS. The Swing ERa book seems to me to suffer much less from having to serve a thesis. --eric

Yeah, those notes are a hoot. Schuller is obviously taken aback by Southern lifestyle in general, and Southern African-Amerciacn lifestyle in particular. The essay reads more like an anthropological writing by some 19th century explorer "observing the natives" than it does liner notes to a jazz album. Not to dis him, he's a great writer in a lot of ways, but just as you can't take the country out of the boy, you can't put it in him either, and with jazz, that's not always a good thing... I was talking to somebody at his record label (GS was in the room with him at the time) some time back about Volume 3, and it seems he's done a lot of work on it but he's pretty much given up hope of turning it into a book. Just too, too much to cover from too many different angles I suppose. On Schuller's faults: Like everybody he's got them, and I think you guys identify some of them well here. What I think makes Schuller great, though, is that youcan more or less take his failings into account and then read with great profit, in spite of the fact that he has his own blind spots and prejudices, I think he helped me overcome a lot of mine. Not too many writers have done that for me. I was looking forward to Vol. III. Perhaps one day a good editor might be able to work what does exist into a series of essays or some such. --eric

There's a small Canadian Company called Axiom who make nice small speakers, I think. I have a set in my on-air studio, and they've held up for 2 years of being on 18-20 hours a day and still sound good. The speakers got a lot of good press from a wide variety of sources a couple of years ago. Axiom --eric

I always give Reeves performance in this movie as an example of how not to do Shakespeare. Everything he says sounds just like "This is what the teleprompter says." --eric

I, for one, am glad to hear it. I found the story to be rather depressing. --eric

There's probably plenty of Afrcians willing to give up a continent for a decent apartment in the US, let alone an island. --eric

Well in order for this to happen, there first would have to be a mutation giving certain folks the cd wrapper talon. Then there would have to be selective pressure which favored the wrapper talon equipped over the non-equipped. In other words the talon equipped would have to have more children on average than the non-talon equipped. So, in the best traditions of social biology and evolutionary psychology, we should start dreaming up scenarios where the talon would help you get lucky or fend off predetors that threaten to shorten your reproductive years. Just so stories, anyone? --eric

I wasn't familiar with her until this latest. I think she's pretty good--a lot of the material is "jazz," but I've really gotten to the point where I don't give a damn about generic distinctions any more. It works with jazz--it's sophisticated enough and swings. If this isn't jazz, neither is a lot of vocal music everybody considers to be jazz. But the Billie Holiday thing has gotten to really bother me. I think she'd sound like Billie one way or another, but I think she really takes it too far on a couple of tracks and it just sounds too affected. But I'm generally really happy with the disc and I'll be hunting down some of her earlier stuff. --eric

I was wondering if any folks here have recommendations for good rss feeds for jazz--something that'll let me know what's on, whose birthday it is, etc. etc. quickly and efficiently when I blearily collect morning show info at 5.30am each morning? Actually an RSS recs that will provide interesting little tidbits for an audience of curious music lovers would be most appreciated. We'd not be interested in political blogs or feeds, though. Right now we're hooked into a few local feeds, as well as Book reviews from NYT and the Guardian Arts & music news and reviews from NYT and the Guardian Science from National Geographic, Sci Am, Popular Science, BBC and NYT Interesting thing of the day Wilson's Almanac in Australia But I'd like to get a bit more on jazz and other music that may be of interest to an audience of 30+, college-educated/autodidact public radio listeners. --eric

That's very unfortunate. You are missing out on a genre of very fascinating music. how do I "miss out" on something I don't like? How about keeping an open mind? Well, personally I LOVE latin music, but I can imagine how someone wouldn't, maybe even for the same reasons I love it. It's all part of my having an open mind, I figure. I trust GregK doesn't walk around disliking Latin jazz on principle. Some day maybe--like a bolt from the blue--the clave will sound, something will click and he'll start dancing the mambo. --eric

Reading Fox, Harrison and Thacker in the Essential Jazz Recordings was really important for me early on. Do you know if any of the old fox BBC spots is available on the internet? I'd love to hear him on the radio. --eric

Well, it's easy enough to read: Against Interpretation I read it as not a condemnation of "excessive interpretation," but more or less an essay "against interpretation" as such. I suppose one may interpret Sontag as AllenLowe does, but I don't see why anyone would have gotten excited over an essay with a theme as innocuous as that. She seems to me to be trying to push quite a bit farther than condemning the sort of interpretation nearly everyone is ready to condemn. She's suggesting a sort of neo-romantic take on art as the hotline to truth, beauty, the zeitgeist and/or all that. --eric

Sontag's point of view is far from unassailable, and can easily be interpreted as a smokescreen for someone who wrote a self-consciously unreadable novel. But where is the erotics of art? What do we imagine this to be? Where is the erotics of sex? There is art, there is no erotics of art. There never will be an erotics of art, and if you asked me Sontag was being pretty silly in even suggesting the possibility. Unless of course she meant the sort of biological study of art proposed by EO Wilson in Consilliance. But I doubt that's what she meant. If you asked me, some jazz criticism is better than most jazz. And interpretation doesn't kill things--if art is so fragile for you that someone interpreting it is a ravishment, then I'd say your appreciation of art is rather weak. Sontag uses the over-interpretation of Kafka as an example of the heremenuetic ravishment of art, but what diference does it make? You are either affected by Kafka or you are not, regardless of whether someone say that the cockroach thing stems from early bedwetting experience. Anyhow, "against interpretation" I interpret as longing to be sheltered from interpretation, which to me is the artist asking to have her cake and eat it, too. Everyone should worship the art object because of its deep significance, but no one should ask what that significance might be. Art as religious mystery. I think we can do somewhat better than that. --eric

Now statistical correlations rarely are perfect. I wouldn't make it any stronger than, on average, bigger people tend to hit more home runs, and if you took an average of all 200+ fast guys and ran it against an average of all sub 175s, you would find the 200+ guys hit significantly more home runs. Leading us to believe that weight is one causal factor in the propensity to hit what are known as "dingers."

I think a statistical analysis would find home run hitting corresponds pretty significantly with the weight of professional ballplayers, and not just because of Babe Ruth, even if you correct for lack of speed One could argue that big players tend to be slow, so hitting home runs is the only thing they can do to justify their existence, therefore big ballplayers tend to hit more home runs. But I think even if you eliminated the big and slow--late Babe Ruth, Dave Kingman, Willie Stargell, etc.--you'd still find a pretty significant correspondence. The argument that steroids don't work to enhance players' performance is to defy the expert "testimony" of the leading experts--the players themselves. Clearly they think steroids help, and not to make them run faster. In the absence of any real counter evidence, I'll believe the players. --eric

Well, if what we want to see if "excellence," I don't see why we should object to athletes doing anything they want to their own bodies in order to achieve it. I look forward to genetically modified monsters playing sports. Because, after all, this is what professional sports is about: spectacle and excess. We all remeber the amateurism rules in the Olympics. Why did we have them? What was so dirty about professionalism? Our 19th-Century forbears thought that athleticism ought to be kept in its place: it ought to be a part of everybody's life. And some people, through genetics or insight or greater expenditure of effort would be better than the rest of us. Amateurism was meant to exclude those who neglected the rest of what would be a normal life--a job, familial obligations, service, whatever--in favor of sport. The logical outcome of professionalized sports is athletes who will sacrifice literally everything to gain the accolades and the money of other people who mostly choose athlete worship--a willingness to fork over large amounts of money and time to see athletes who are notionally "the best" (not that most people are any judges of athletic performance, anyway)--over doing anything athletic in their own lives. This isn't an athlete problem. This is a fan problem. Monster athletes are just the flip side of the whole monster sports coin. --eric

Well, I was referring to Krugman's analysis of the buying power figures, which is actually one that more or less defends conservatives against the impoevrishment arguments made by the likes of James Carville circa 1992. He says, yes, working-class incomes have stagnated, but in terms of the consumer goods they can buy, working class incomes have increased, because of places like Wal-Mart. Predicting economic trends is a game for fools like me. People like Krugman ought to stick to wise retrospective analysis! Walmart is swimming in cash, yes, but it isn't just a matter of sprucing up the stores, it's a matter of an image that they have branded on our brains over the course of the last 15 years. Not to mention the corporate culture they've built around their current market strategy. They'd have to establish a new store and a new brand, and if they did that they'd be sacrificing a lot of their built-in advantages. Not to say they couldn't do it. The idea that Walmart might become even stronger if the economy takes a dip is definitely a strong counter-possibility to my speculations. But my feeling is that the shit flying off fan will disproportionately hurt those nearer the bottom of the socio-economic scale, and that rather than having an overall turn toward bargain-seeking, we may see a further increase in economic stratification and even greater emphasis being placed on the sorts of prestige buys that make one's status plainly visable. I don't think the working and lower-service classes will die off. I just think they're going to have far less money to buy stuff at WalMart, no matter how cheap it is. Just one possibility, of course. --eric

Agreed, for the most part. But "jazz objectifies America" still doesn't mean anything. I think he meant to say "embodies." --eric

Just noticed Dan's reply, and just to clarify: Well, yes, Walmart started in the hinterlands and now have stores in all the major suburbs, BUT if you look at who shops there (if you look at their demos) it is highly skewed toward the (broadly defined) proletariat (service workers, manufacturing workers). Though some of these folks make pretty good money, most of those good-paying job sectors are in steep decline (manufacturing), and the outlook for service workers over the next couple of decades is a decline in real earnings as the collective shit starts hitting the collective fan on US trade and fiscal deficits. Though real earnings for American workers have stagnated, there are far more cheap goods on the market (Krugman has written on this a few times). Walmart has specialized in bringing these cheap goods at absolutely minimal overhead cost to the American prole and getting a huge share of proletarian disposible income. Now, if proletarian income goes down, Walmart gets hurt badly. Their hold on other market sectors--middle and upper-middle classes--is very weak. They are actually in much the same position as McDonald's was ten years ago, apparently dominant, but heading for problems. McDonald's simply couldn't thrive in a culture where parents increasingly thought of McDonalds food in the same way they thought about drugs--an addictive product that would harm their children. It doesn't matter one bit that Walmart has stores in the suburbs: just go to a Walmart and tell me about their strong appeal to the middle class. This, from American Demographics backs up what everyone's immediate impression of Walmart is when they go there: It's far from ludicrous (though certainly disputable) to predict that the real profits in retailing are going to be made from the higher end of this scale. It's far from ludicrous to suggest that Walmart's entire corporate identity are going to make it tough for them to compete there. The fact that Target was able to carve out its niche at all is a sign of serious softness in Walmart's appeal. "Thus"? Walmart leveraged their big boxes to apply the same concepts to food shopping. It had nothing to do with being "poorly positioned to get" the market share of the middle and upper middle classes. You make it sound as if they were in a weak position and just trying to find some new way to hang on. No, I'm saying they are looking ahead and moving into a market that has always been driven by price and has always worked on low margins. This is the kind of market where Walmart thrives. And, yes, I still say they are poorly positioned to get very much of the profit from the upscale, image- and service-driven market. Anybody who has been to Walmart would say the same, I think. Yeah, a company that's a bigger economy than a lot of countries is just going to be a grocery store chain. Well, Walmart's history proves one thing: change can happen very fast and very big in retail. In 1990 Walmart became America's biggest retailer. Where were they ten years earlier? That gives you a sense of how much things can change. Sears and K-Mart used to be pretty big players, too. Now they are bit players. I might be wrong in predicting that Walmart may be a big loser over the next ten years, but what is ludicrous is denying that such change can happen when it already has. You build your business around extracting a huge share of lower-class disposable income, you are hugely successful, but that very success makes it rather doubtful that you'll be able to adapt well when lower-class disposable income drops significantly. As the profit center of the market shifts upwards, Walmart is weaker. Pretty simple really. --eric

You might try lighter fluid. There are risks all roud, I suppose: try it on a disc you don't like first to make sure it doesn't do immediate damage--after glue is off a thorough rinse. --eric

I'm not so sure an Expos/royals combo wouldn't be pretty damn good. Anyhow, I think the writing is already on the wall for Walmart--decay. Aside from the serious image problems they've got, the next decade is probably going to be marked by a significant decline in the discretionary spending power of the American prole (even when measured in terms of stuff rather than in dollar terms). The gravy in this market is going to be with the middle & upper middle classes, and Walmart is very poorly positioned to get much market share there. Walmart/ Sears? Maybe. Thus the move to food markets. Walmart is really good at working small margins into bigger ones--just what you need in the grocery store market. I wouldn't be surprised if Walmart weren't essentially an enhanced grocery store chain in ten years, with other players dominating the "department store" market. I'm not a business analyst, either, btw, but I don't let that stop me! --eric