Late Trumpistan

We live in a world where eight people get killed in a terror attack and I think to myself, "Well, that's not so high."

— Antifa-boo-lus James (@wetcasements) October 31, 2017

Not Bad For A Tuesday

Indeed. For his compromise, Lincoln got shot in the head. https://t.co/OhjGnjHwjX

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 31, 2017

I'll take my tiny life achievements as they come. Getting retweeted by Ta-nehesi Coates is one of them for today.

Muellerween

And so, the first of what will hopefully be many indictments.

But if 2016 taught us anything, it's to never, ever have positive expectations of any kind.

America and the world will get a lot worse before it ever gets any better.

The problem remains a really simple one -- as long as Paris Hilton is getting another tax cut, Republicans simply don't care about little inconveniences like treason and foreign powers interfering in our elections.

"bad men who are unwilling to reckon with themselves"

I'm a big fan of Drew Magary's NFL preview piece, the Dick-Joke Jamboroo.  Irreverent!  Poop jokes!  Making fun of the self-serious morons who constitute most of American sports journalism!  And this week, shit gets real:

"We are all, as a country, being forced to reckon with bad men who are unwilling to reckon with themselves. There’s a bad man in charge, and bad men in the government running amok at his behest, and other bad men who are currently either indulging in their abuses or being exposed for them. There are too many men out there who think if they can’t be bad men, they can’t be men at all. You see this in the language of the alt-right. Liberal men are pussies. Losers. Cucks. Considering the feelings of others is for hippies and eunuchs.

But that’s a huge lie, maybe the worst lie. You can be a red-blooded, beer-drinking American man who is also not a fuckhead. Portnoy is merely profiting off the endemic laziness of the male internet: guys unwilling to do the not-terribly-arduous work required to try to get better, instead codifying their sexism and racism into a full-on identity in order to lionize their own inaction."

Things have to get better eventually, don't they?  Who the fuck knows.

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.