Blueberry Hill

Fats Domino and Jimmy Smith live, 1962

R.I.P. Fats.

Let's Do This

My usual World Series protocol goes something like this:

1)  If Orioles involved (LOL), GO FUCKING ORIOLES!  (Protocol last engaged in 1983.)

2)  If Cubs involved, root for Cubs.

3)  If not Cubs, root for A.L. squad involved.

4)  If A.L. squad involved is Yankees, FUCK THE MOTHERFUCKING YANKEES and root for N.L. squad.

So technically I guess I'm bound to root for The Astros this time around.  But I'm not.  Thing is, I really like Puig.  The Dodgers also have a Korean pitcher, Ryu Hyun-jin but he's out with injuries.  So I'll happily, if somewhat lukewarmly, break protocol and root for L.A. because in the back of my little pea-brain Houston is and always will be a N.L. squad.  A fun one, though.

Dodgers in six.

Rape Culture

Sexual harassment and abuse are not partisan issues.  Men in positions of power have, for decades at Fox News or Miramax, in the White House or in a chic restaurant, felt like they could abuse women and, due to their power and money, not suffer any consequences.  Quite the opposite, actually -- it was the women who suffered when they wouldn't go along, missing significant career opportunities or simply being frozen out of journalism or acting or cooking or what have you.

So the appropriate response is, of course, for men to first shut the hell up and finally start listening to women, and taking them seriously at all times when they talk about their experiences ranging from rape to more subtle, but still terrible and demeaning, forms of harassment.

Next, let's acknowledge that rape culture is a thing that's bigger than party affiliation.

That's a bridge too far for some though.  There's a genuine glee among Republicans that hey, big-shot Dems like Weinstein are creepy rapists too!  (I'll spare you the many easy to find hot takes out there, amounting to if Weinstein does what Trump has done, somehow it's all no big deal because, and I swear this will be engraved on the figurative tomb of American Democracy, Both Sides Do It!)

And while I'm happy to blame Trump and Trump voters for a hell of a lot of things these days, this isn't on them.  This is on all of us, especially men like me, who have ever for a second thought that rape and sexual harassment were something women needed to handle on their own, or who have ever for a second decided to doubt before listen.

If there's one thing deeper than the racially charged and aggrieved motivations of Trump voters (there can't be many!), it's that misogyny might be an even stronger or insidious part of our cultural fabric than racism is.  At the very least, it's something we haven't been able to talk about in a full and open way, and our national reckoning with rape culture has started decades later than it should have.

I can do better.  We can all do better.  And I welcome -- I absolutely relish -- the naming and shaming and casting out of powerful men in the coming days, months, and years, regardless of political affiliation.  The idea that somehow I wasn't happy to see Weinstein go down, or Cosby (who should be in jail but isn't, even though his career is over), or any other supposedly "liberal" power player is crazy.

Bring it on.  Bring them down.  Bring them all tumbling down.

Honestly, that's the easy part.  For men like me, it will only be the beginning of the hard work we need to do -- radical adjustments in our behavior and our attitudes and our capacity for solidarity -- always and from now on.

Rockers Defeat Mods

Daegu is far from the supposed fashion Mecca of Seoul, and I'm pretty much the antithesis of fashionable myself.  But if my students' autumnal fashion choices  are to be believed, black leather jackets and skinny rolled-up jeans are "it" for the end of this year.

"I want to be high when I die"

Art Pepper, "Arthur's Blues" live

From Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper:

"We were put into a cubicle in the emergency area.  Art jumped up on the examining table and told me he was starving.  He asked me to buy him a candy bar.  I left, found one for him, and returned to find him sniffing a line of coke.  He said, jokingly, 'I want to be high when I die.'  I took the coke away from him.  Suddenly he cried out.  He said he couldn't see out of his left eye and he couldn't move his left side."

I've been on a definite musician biography / band documentary kick over the past few years.  From the expectedly and unexpectedly good (Bob Mould and Moby's biographies), to a truly outstanding and authoritative work on The Replacements, to a mostly good series of essays on L.A. punk, Pepper's biography was a bit of a left turn for me into jazz, the 40's and 50's, and drug, drink, and sexual abuse that is disturbingly unapologetic.  There's a bit of a redemptive arc here, but it's purely musical.  He's high out of his mind until the very end, literally.  And that's strangely refreshing -- while O.D.s are nothing to laugh about, I couldn't care less about musicians who get sober and then, supposedly, start making their best music ever.  (Hint: post-sobriety music is never the best work a musician will ever make.)

Anyone who's read the book (at a rather hefty 500 pages) knows that the word "jokingly" in the quoted passage is far from it.  The book begins and ends with Pepper pretty much saying that he is, above all else, a junkie first and a musician second.  (Sexual deviant third!)  He died at 57 but, true to form, still played masterfully on the alto sax up until the end.  The Youtube link here is merely one year before his death.  (I think you'd have to be really charitable to say that Miles was making significant music in 1990.)  During the final tours, he "held it together" with daily binges of alcohol and cocaine, and probably less frequently heroin and / or methadone.  He lived on candy bars and take-out.  If there's a music cliche I do approve of, it's that he found his final musical redemption by touring Japan and discovering, much to his own surprise, that he was something of a living legend there.

While many music bios will incorporate recorded interviews, an interesting thing about Straight Life is that the whole thing was done as an audio recording by his wife, Laurie, who me he met in one of his many stints in rehab.  (She admits that she was still using herself at the time of his death, in pretty much the Platonic ideal of a co-dependent relationship.)  She had majored in sociology, and while the writing comes off as very smooth and straightforward it's easy to forget that these hundreds of pages were dictated rather than composed by the subject, and that the whole thing is a borderline ethnography of sorts.  It also incorporates interviews with other musicians, family members, and junkies, and those passages are much more hit-and-miss.

The passages where he simply talks about music, and specifically what makes for great music and musicianship, are sublime.  No doubt one appeal of the book is that the transitions between utterly depraved drug abuse and sexual perversity glide seamlessly into meditations on what makes for great art.

Not an easy read by any means, but definitely worth the effort.

Uber Warning

My boss just got back from a business trip to Hanoi. He was taking an Uber to the airport to return home and got into an accident. The driver was going way too fast and playing with his phone, even after my boss (a pretty polite person overall) asked him many times to watch the road. They rammed into a truck that had the right of way, and if my boss was in the passenger seat instead of the back seat, he would have been severely injured. (The pictures he took were really scary.)

As it stands, he flew home to Korea with a sprained wrist and was very shaken up about the the whole thing. The Uber driver literally refused to call for the police or an ambulance for fear of getting arrested, and as mentioned, if this had been a more dangerous accident, my boss would have bled to death by the side of the road.

I'll admit, I've opposed Uber from the beginning because of their unfair labor practices. They are the definition of "Vulture Capitalism," not building something new, but just exploiting inefficiencies to make a buck and then move on. But I'd also suggest that in underdeveloped countries you are taking your life into your own hands in an Uber. Sure, a regular cab driver might behave the same way, but at least you could contact a cab company. Hopefully, you'd have a more experienced driver to start with as well.

As it is, Uber drivers are basically internet-contracted Gypsy Cabs, and I would never take a Gypsy Cab in New York or anywhere else.

Groovy Tunes

Blade Runner 2049 Soundtrack, Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch

We're living in a pre-apocalyptic nightmare the only solution to which might be global nuclear annihilation and letting the cockroaches finally take over, but at least there's a good soundtrack available for us to listen to.

Love And Theft

It's a national stereotype that Western nations produce intellectual property, while China merely copies it.  In the case of South Korean T.V. (shows of which are popular throughout Asia), it just might be true:

"When Chinese television network Hunan TV announced late August on its official Weibo account its lineup for the upcoming television season, it was met with criticism over possible plagiarism by not only Koreans but also Chinese audiences, who wrote comments saying, 'It’s gone too far. Stop plagiarizing.' and 'I feel so embarrassed.' 

The description of one of the shows, 'The Inn,' sounded quite similar to JTBC’s 'Hyori’s Homestay' that wrapped late last month. The Korean show follows Korean pop diva Lee Hyori and her husband, guitarist Lee Sang-soon, offering accommodations at their home in Jeju Island to travelers. Similarly, 'The Inn' is a reality program centering on two famous celebrity couples offering accommodations to visitors. 

Amid the backlash, its first episode aired on Saturday. The show took a famous married couple, actress Liu Tao and businessman Wang Ke, to a remote area near Lugu Lake in Yunnan, where homes set against the beautiful landscape were prepared for the stars to take in guests. The first episode did not reveal much, as it showcased the celebrities getting ready for their guests by setting up equipment and purchasing ingredients to prepare meals. How much it will parallel 'Hyori’s Homestay' will be seen in the upcoming episodes."

I've actually never warmed up to the charms of Korean dramas.  Even K-Pop is occasionally good for a laugh or an ear-worm of a chorus, but when my Korean friends discuss the merits of the their favorite shows I, ahem, tune out.

Note:  Advanced Conversation posts are based on articles I've discussed with my adult conversation students.

"you are part of the problem"

Lindsey Adler pulls no punches as to why Weinstein and Cosby and Trump are a male problem, first and foremost:

"If you are a man who truly didn’t know—who has now heard something on this line from a woman you are close to and who is finally opening up with her story to you about a mutual friend, or family member, or colleague—ask yourself why it took so long. Ask why it took yet another run through the cycle for her to trust you. Ask yourself why the women you know haven’t shared the massive accumulation of information they have stored on their mental hard drives by their 20s if not before with the men who are good, who know better than to treat women as objects.

If you leave this issue to women, if you refuse to make your friends or yourself be better—whether by intervention or by consequence—you are part of the problem, no matter what you make of yourself. If you are closing yourself off from the information that has been out there for too long to be worth considering about gender, power, and violence, or the cyclical flows of personal anecdotes about them, you are not excused. It has been too long, too obvious, and presented too many ways for anyone to claim ignorance."

This is why "rape culture" is still such an effective term to describe what's going on these days.  Most men go through life never raping anybody (congratulations, I guess?).  All men do, to some extent, contribute actively or passively to constructing environments where women can be, in fact, raped, or at least harassed, cat-called, stared at, or made to feel creeped out.

Adler is pessimistic that things will change after Weinstein, but she's spitting fire here against the passive, enabling "not all men" perspective.

Deep Political Thought of the Day

We get daily reminders that President Pussygrabber in a gigantic asshole. But worth remembering this is _exactly why people voted for him_.

— Antifa-boo-lus James (@wetcasements) October 18, 2017

Eleven Thoughts On Bladerunner 2049 (Spoilers!)

1)  The soundtrack is dope.

2)  The female lead performances (Luv, Joi) are incredible.

3)  In fact, I found myself wanting to go deeper into the relationship between K and Joi.  That really felt like the center of the film to me.

4)  The virtual threesome was rad, and it felt like one of the few times these days that CGI is done right, to produce a unique and interesting effect, not just to vomit pixels all over the screen.

5)  Harrison Ford was O.K., but a script that didn't use him might have been even better.  He didn't really need to be in this other than for fan service purposes.

6)  At this stage of advanced late capitalism I have very mixed feelings about Jared Leto, but he was a commanding presence.  At the same time, he felt under-used.  Why no backstory?

7)  I liked the ending but no, K didn't die.  He's just taking a nap and catching snow flakes on his tongue.

8)  The biggest problem of the whole film is the relationship between Wallace and the cops.  Like, Luv just straight-up murders the forensic team dude to steal Rachel's DNA and nobody seems to care much about it.  Then she murders the goddamn police chief and it all seems like no big deal to anybody.  I get that Philip K. Dick (and William Gibson after him) is all about how corporations have complete power in the future, even above governments and nation-states, but this seemed really under-cooked and confusing to me.

9)  K kills off Luv and the Wallace stooges and Wallace doesn't respond?  Doesn't do anything to retaliate, even though he's super-powerful rich scientist man?  He's all-rich and all-powerful except when he isn't?

10)  The final fight scene is kind of cool except when the camera cuts to Ford and he literally has no idea what to do with his body or hands since he's tied to a chair.  Really kills the tension.  (Have I mentioned he really didn't need to be in this film?)

11)  Also problematically under-cooked -- the whole replicant underground resistance plot.  It seems like they should have been done more than provide a hooker for the threesome and to tell K he's not really the chosen one.

11)