Down

Trump was mocked ruthlessly by Obama et al. at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

He was corrupt for decades through the 80s and 90s and eventually grew into a dependency on money from Russian oligarchs. They laundered and he ameliorated debts he accrued from exceedingly poor business decisions and kiting loans and generally robbing Peter.

He joined the bloated collection of Republican contestants in the 2016 presidential election with gross absurdity: gliding down an escalator in a gauche-looking hotel lobby in front of a crowd paid for their attendance (to be repeated many times later). John Oliver notably and–regrettably–mocked him and his chances as did everyone. Craven and slightly un-craven presidential-hungry politicians were skewered by him with base taunts. The constituency groomed by Fox News and trash AM Limbaugh decades before in an attempt to destroy liberal policies arose to destroy the ugly conservatives that benefitted, until they didn’t. The golem ate its creators.

Hillary was too much of a policy wonk, too much of a Democrat, and too much of a Clinton.

The results were no less gauche and maybe we deserved it but no we really didn’t I don’t think or at least hope we didn’t. He started his iconoclastic retribution towards Obama childishly enough with a boast (eventually doubled- and tripled-down with cringe-inducing ferocity by his first-of-many press secretaries) that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s. More grave attacks on the previous president’s accomplishments followed. Obamacare, the Iran nuclear deal, the TPP, NAFTA, the Paris Climate Accord, and any number of greater or lesser thorns. For Trump, the bad became the enemy of the good.

Hungry for vengeance against immigrants, Trump attacked Muslims with the protracted attempt at an emergency, short-term travel ban (eventually implemented in part and months after the original request was to expire), a horrific caging of children at the southern border that only grows more horrific, and an attempt to strip citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This all started with a dream of a wall.

In Helsinki, he stated that he trusted Putin over the US intelligence agencies. In front of Putin. In front of a disbelieving world.

Alliances with Europe and Canada were destroyed as new ones were formed with North Korea and Russia.

During the Obama administration, Republicans petulantly held up a Supreme Court nomination, along and with equal importance, many federal judgeship positions. Under Trump the SC position and federal positions have been quickly filled; many of those federal positions filled by the grossly inexperienced. To extend for decades.

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy retired.

The fight for his replacement started from a list provided by the Federalist Society. Going off script, Trump chose a judge who would allow a president to pardon himself, who would eliminate separation of state-level prosecutions when federal pardons are granted, and who–after being investigated for sexual assault in college–declared that the investigation was a product of, though not exclusively, a Clinton conspiracy. His accuser acted with more judicial propriety than him.

The women fought against the nomination and were both inspiring and heart-breaking, echoing the bravery of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony.

via Bill Clark

I’m not sure where we go from here, but Sarah Kendzior has said from the start that it will get much, much worse. So probably further down.

The music things I got from Past Scott and am now enjoying

Updated 4 Oct 2018

I had two large shelves of CDs that were gathered beginning with the one My Brother gave me when I was in college before I even had (or maybe when I first got?) a CD player when they were rare-ish and my and others’ primary means of music w/r/t listening was The Turntable. It was Elvis Costello’s King of America.

First and last songs open with the same melody.

Fun fact: after the obtainment or maybe before, I went to a Costello concert following said album/CD’s release with bro and his then girlfriend at The Fox. It was neat. Also fun fact: I got into EC in HS when I dug through My Brother’s albums and decided to listen to Imperial Bedroom. It was a revelation.

CDs were kept; CDs were moved from college apts to post college apts to shared apt (hey Lisa!) to condo (hey Wife!!) and sat for years on shelves and were looked at like Ulysses the book we want to read but don’t. Still, they had memories. I resisted getting rid of them and appreciate that. Getting them in digital form was more than overdue. I still have everything that I’ve ever burned to digital on local, RAIDed, 4x2TB (~5 TB total) drives backed up to the cloud, but I see that as an old person habit that is irrelevant-ish. Google Play allows 50,000 songs and all purchases are download-able w/o copy-protection. Although I think copy protection may be an old person’s concept also.

So now those shelved CDs are less visible but more easily accessible. And the act of reviewing what got burned reëmphasizes what was valuable.

Stereolab

I got “into” them when I had a subscription to IIRC CMJ. They were a magazine I subscribed to that contained a CD of a dozen or so new artist that, Pitchfork-like, predicted possessed coolness. I discovered so much from them. And one was Stereolab. If I dug through the CD tracts I would remember the exact song but it doesn’t matter.

Years ago and years after the discovery I went to a concert with Wife and Robert and Shelby at Variety Playhouse. They don’t disappoint. I wonder if they still tour.

Sonic Youth

This is the one.

I discovered them one weekend during college when friends and I came in from Carrollton to L5P to dig through what Wax n’ Facts had to offer. I had heard of Sonic Youth, for how long I don’t know, and that, via Rolling Stone of-all-places, Daydream Nation was a masterpiece (same publication that called Imperial Bedroom a masterpiece). It was like discovering Dark Side of the Moon. The double album provided the right amount of prog framing with noise-rock experimentation. I had been informed by Glenn Branca et al. from high school and so I easily absorbed the rock band consisting of the musicians of Branca’s symphonies.

Played this for my college music theory teacher and he was… intrigued? Hey, Dr. Dan Bakos!
Found on the internet. Ah, memories.

This I had on cassette from … ROIR! (Google search). Obtained from mailings I would get with alt noise rock and no-wave. Sonic Youth’s first album was also offered in their catalogues but they were very Branca at the time and less Sonic Youth.

Shudder to Think

I had found these guys via an early internet radio station that was more like a pirate AM station than anything else. Two Austin (?) guys who just played the shit they liked and were as much talk as music but it was great. Besides StT I learned about math rock and the math rock bands Durian (which for no specific reason did not make the cut to be burned to MP3) and Faraquet (same, no reason?). StT I revisited as I re-listened and found that they were a bands’ band and of the Pearl Jam time milieu indie. Respected and influential.

Thingy

These guys were the weird ones in a field of weird. They are math rock via Sunny Day Real Estate (maybe?) via The Minutemen (short song, yet pop not punk). I cannot recommend them enough as forgotten missed potential. I really have no idea where I found them (see May 2004). There was random internet radio, RIOR, Wax n’ Facts, CMJ, a brother? Probably something else.

Now, the musicians from Thingy did as musical theatre a piece based on G. Stein’s poem (see Jul 2006) called The World is Round. I only had access to short clipes but goddammit I loved that music. A few videos were available the time, but research for this blog post brought up the rarity of a complete performance.

I had two large shelves of CDs

Updated 4 Oct 2018

Nice coincidence: Sonic Youth is celebrating the 30th anniversary (1988!) of Daydream Nation at an event in Portland, OR. Included will be documentaries of their performance from 2007 along with archival footage. Gordon Withers just released cello versions of two Sonic Youth songs including “Youth Against Fascism” which rails against Clarence Thomas (today I’ve been glued to the Kavanaugh news). Days after the Daydream Nation screenings, Steve Shelley will be performing a fundraiser for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Nice coincidence.

The void

I’ve had this idea of cultural memory w/r/t individuals and the longevity of the importance of their contribution to it, good or bad or whatever. There’s an infinite space with time progressing, say, left-to-right. A person of enduring importance would start as a dot then continue as a bright line that flares up, grows brighter or diminishes as their value to culture varies. The line may continue on, brightly, to a great length. Shakespeare. Bach; well-respected during his lifetime, less bright for a century or so, then “rediscovered” by Mendelssohn and increasing in brightness ever since. Some are bright and diminish as they are in and out of fashion. (I know music and art best so…) Sigismond Thalberg was a pianist and composer contemporaneous with Liszt, well-respected in his day but little-known now. Little-known but thought of passionately by some; the Wikipedia talk page for Thalberg is lousy with fights on who’s the better, Thalberg or Liszt. I had gotten involved in the talk page a decade or so ago and… let’s say his adherents had passions. I would not have known of him if I hadn’t dug into Liszt’s history.

So we see these lines, bright and less so, with some lasting effectively forever. And for the rest of us, even those famous in our lifetimes, we’re a dot. Maybe lasting a little longer a couple of generations but no more and ending with a precipitous drop. And then there is that blackness.

I wondered what that extra space in between was. I know it’s only a space created by my metaphor/simile yet that construct created this idea of The Void where none exist and nothing is remembered. And it seems important.

A similar-but-different idea is when I think about my impressions of art and generally many things these days. It’s not that I have great opinions or ideas, but it’s that I have an historical and reference-rich impression of each moment. Even something like a scene from a sit-com is overfull with references. Like the bright lines above, I think of it as a line of my going through time and encountering these dots of experiences. With each, a string hangs down and the longer ones represent those with more varied and complex references. I feel like there’re more and more of those long strings of complexity.

Or something like that.

Back again

Over the past few weeks I’ve started playing piano again.

A few years back I started getting weird deficiencies in my right hand. Descending arpeggios started becoming odd then difficult when my 3rd finger would cross over. Degeneration increased over several months, carpal tunnel surgery was performed and completely ineffective, physical therapy was attempted, but here we are. My PT therapist did fascinating research and came up with focal hand dystonia:

in focal hand dystonia, the fingers either curl into the palm or extend outward without control

That about sums it up.

It’s depressing if I think about it so I usually don’t. I’m pretty much unable to play any of the songs I’ve written except for the more basic ones, and I never got my last rock opera in my hands at all. That’s probably the most regretful.

I got itchy recently and so picked up Shostakovich’s Prelude #5 from opus 87. It’s a nice little piece in D major-ish and distributes the themes across both hands. I’m at speed now with not too many stumbles with my 3rd and 4th fingers. Working on memory. I just started Bach’s 7th fugue in E-flat from The Well-Tempered Clavier edition that I received after donating to the Musescore Kickstarter project. Difficult (for me) four note descending arpeggios that kind of tax a very weak fourth finger. Getting stronger though. I’m still surprised with the difference in competence between the two hands.

It feels very good to get back. I hate that I’m not composing and playing my own stuff but am still enjoying and hopeful.