In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

Something else happened last week that mattered quite a lot.  Given yesterday's post, this may seem anticlimactic, but this did matter.  Pay attention. The Federal Reserve Board matters.  More than anyone else in the government, they influence the direction of the economy.  Prior to the COVID-induced recession, the economy was chugging along beautifully, so of course, Trump wanted to take not only credit, but sole  credit for the economy, and presidents always try to take credit for a good economy while skirting blame for a bad economy.  Voters, after all, punish incumbents for a bad economy while rewarding them for a good one.  Yet, as I must often remind people, the economy is not a machine with the president sitting at a control board, pressing buttons and centrally planning it.  That'd be communism.  The whole point of capitalism is that the president doesn't  do that.  The whole point of capitalism is, as much as possible, to divorce the economy from governmental con

Funkadelic, "Funky Dollar Bill," from Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow .  My heterodox musical opinion for the day:  Funkadelic was better than Parliament.  Why?  Two words:  "Eddie," and, "Hazel."

Amid all of the ridiculous spectacle of last week's... whatever that was, something important happened. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, made an important statement about the 2020 election .  In normal times, the idea of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying anything  about the presidential election would be absurd, but these are far from normal times.  Milley stated that the military would not remove Trump from office if Trump loses and refuses to step down. Look, this is the argument being posed to me by my fellow academics :  yeah, Trump will refuse to step down, but... the military !  It hasn't just been a rhetorical point among politicians and commentators.  This is what my fellow academics say to me when I tell them to worry. Milley just poured cold water on that.  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  And it's time to stop counting how many times Trump has said that he won't recognize an election that he loses

Yeah, I've used this before, but I just need to post it again today.  Frank Zappa, "It Can't Happen Here," from Freak Out!

Paul Hanson, "Dark Soul," from Frolic In The Land Of Plenty .

OK, I can't resist.  There's an old line about the worst thing you can ever say.  It goes something like this:  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Donald Trump:  Think of your life, just prior to the plague. This is his campaign pitch.  Translation:  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, wasn't the play awesome?!

Subtlety. Tom Waits, "Low Side of the Road," from Mule Variations .

For some colleges and universities, the new school year is already under way.  For me, classes begin tomorrow. Well. I have already written my general thoughts on how Zoom-based education works, or does not work, and yet, when classes begin tomorrow, I will be walking into the classroom  my dining room, because my dining room happens to be where I have the best lighting for a laptop to act as my educational conduit. Do I like  teaching on-line?  As always, the question is, "compared to what?''  Compared to a safe classroom?  I'd take a safe classroom.  I have explained why.  That's just not an option.  When COVID hit, I ran the numbers for you.  Assume 1/3 contagion, with a 2% mortality rate for the worst case scenario, and that's before talking about all of the things we now know about what can happen even if you don't die, like cerebrovascular events.  With a population of 330,000,000, if you have 1/3 contagion and 2% mortality, you're looking a

I had hoped to find a Widespread Panic version of this as a tribute to Todd Nance, but no such luck.  Here's Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit, "Compared To What," from their self-titled debut.  Hampton was sort of the center of the jam band revival of the early 90s, and the HORDE festival.  Here, you get Jimmy Herring on guitar.  Herring eventually replaced Mikey Houser on guitar in Widespread Panic after Houser died.  Herring plays with everyone, though.  Oteil Burbridge on bass.  Oteil handled bass for the latter period of the Allmans, and works a lot with Derek & Susan, who run the show now.  Point being, this band is kind of the source, and while a lot of the jam band revival was pointless noodling and excess, Hampton and those around him were much more musically sophisticated.

Well, that was weird.  Much of the commentary on the abbreviated and Zoom-based Democratic Convention seems to be that it worked relatively well.  Since conventions don't generally have much political impact, I see any such assessments as rather silly, but some people feel compelled to make them anyway.  Nevertheless, it was weird.  It was visually weird, it was tonally weird, and all around, it was weird.  Some of the speeches were good, and made weird by the lack of a crowd.  All around, weird. Appropriately so.  2020. I generally avoid words like, "zeitgeist."  Imprecision is the bane of scholarship, and such a word is too imprecise for my scholarly tastes.  Soft and squishy.  Malleable.  Worse yet, it changes as soon as you look at it, and attacks when you look away, like the weeping angels from Doctor Who .  Yet, I find myself using it, not just in reference to the convention, but in reference to art lately. First stop, a book.  A Song For A New Day , by Sarah

Living Colour.  Here's a live version of the title track from Time's Up .

I dunno. Duck Baker, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," from The Art of Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar .

Every other commentator has noted the obvious about Michelle Obama's speech last night, but I have a few hopefully unusual observations.  One of the pieces of advice I give to my students about writing is as follows:  whenever you write something, read it aloud.  If you cannot read your paper aloud without disturbing a sleeping roommate-- we all know when college students really  write their papers-- imagine a speaker's voice in your head. Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism was that "the medium is the message," and while too simplistic to be literally true, the observation is important.  The written word is different from the spoken word.  What works in written text may not always be what works speaking to a small audience, and what works when speaking to a small audience may not be what works when speaking to a stadium.  And figuring out what works when speaking to a camera to be broadcast to a virtual convention?  Well, that's a whole different can o'

I don't have a lot to say here, because I don't know what there is to say.  Did you even realize that there is a convention sort-of happening?  What happens if you throw a convention and nobody is allowed to show up? I don't know.  Nobody does. Realistically, conventions are rarely all that important.  You can point to moments in past conventions that have been somewhat important.  Well, the 1968 Democratic Convention was very  important, but we changed the entire nominating process in response to it.  That's why we use primaries instead of just having party muckety-mucks pick the nominee.  You see, if party muckety-mucks pick the nominee, you take the power away from the people, and we want the people to be able to pick outsiders . Right? Yeah, so anyway, mostly conventions are just for show.  They stand out only when you get moments like Ted Kennedy snubbing Jimmy Carter in 1980.  Live theater! What happens when you have live theater without, you know, the l

I'm going to take a break from my ongoing series, and follow up from some thoughts from last Sunday.  Some thoughts I wasn't sure I had, or would have, or... something. Anyway, last Sunday, I wrote a fake-out post which, despite the title, was actually about the history of jazz, and how that history has been influenced by struggles to define a uniquely African-American art form as white musicians and consumers popularized whatever African-Americans were doing within a few years.  The cycle has been as identifiable in jazz as in everything else. I made a few comments, unformed, about the idea of "appropriation," but never really went anywhere with it.  I think I'll try.  Today will be more wide-ranging, and I'll address blues, and some books I've discussed before, but this is a slippery topic.  In order to introduce it, let's have a classic moment of cringe humor from a hipster indie movie.  Ghost World .  Here.  Watch Steve Buscemi be Steve Buscemi

This feels right.  Here's a Bassekou Kouyate concert.  Kouyate plays the ngoni, which is an African gourd instrument, and one of the precursors to the banjo.

You should know both of those names, but you probably know at least one of them.  Anyway... fine.  News of the week.  Besides, I did a very, very early veepstakes post here, and that brings me to the topic of prediction, which brings me to Tetlock. Last fall, I wrote a veepstakes post.  Long before Biden was the nominee, and long before he made a promise to select a woman or suggest an African-American woman, I predicted that no nominee would select a white male, and that the process would fall, to a significant extent, along demographic lines.  That was easy. Of course, I didn't get the name.  I got the process, but not the name.  Let's examine the process of prediction, because this presents some interesting lessons about the nature of wrongness. Hi!  I'm an expert  in wrongness. When I started musing about VP picks, Elizabeth Warren was leading the Democratic field.  So, I wrote about who Warren might pick, and who the other contenders might pick if Warren f

Honey Island Swamp Band, "Never Saw It Coming," from Cane Sugar .

The obvious choice.  Sonny Sharrock, the title track from Black Woman .  OK, "obvious" if you know how awesome Sonny Sharrock was.

I suppose I'm just going with more jazz this morning.  I debated Art Blakey or Horace Silver, but instead, what seems most appropriate is the title cut from Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Blacknuss .

I need a break from heavy stuff.  I'm writing about sci-fi today.  Who's gonna stop me? So, the world of science fiction & fantasy might tell itself that we're a bunch of outsider nerds who don't care about trends or "fashion" or anything like that, but... this is the point at which you know I'm going to call bullshit, right?  I am.  Last weekend, the Hugo Awards were announced, and yeah, trendiness.  There is a high likelihood that anyone who doesn't know what the Hugos are is skipping this post, but for the sake of completeness and my obsessive need to explain anything I write in an overly-pedantic manner, the Hugos are big awards in science fiction and fantasy.  There.  Is that enough of an explanation?  There are also the Nebula Awards, the Locus Awards, and others, but the Hugos are the biggies.  Moving on. First, novel of the year.  Of the six novels nominated, I've read three so far.  Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire , Tam